Judging by my own little experiment, looks like YouTube no longer sends people down the rabbit hole. I tried six searches (including "Shoe Size", "HPV Vaccine", "Heavy Metal Contamination", and "Measles Vaccine Harms"), and none of them got crazy. The latter even landed on a TEDx talk "Quit Social Media" :-)

No need for tanks. They're already using drip irrigation some places, and it's ok to drip irrigate during the day. Problem solved! I think India's starting to do this with sugarcane: indianexpress.com/article/cities/mumbai/devendra-fadnavis-prescribes-drip-irrigation-for-sugarcane-solar-powered-pumps-2979739/

Capturing the co2, then using it to extract more fossil fuel from underground, won't get us to a carbon-free economy.

Alas, yes, slack is partly replacing email where I work. One more medium to have to follow. BTW Google almost moved to Exchange in 2008 or so... IT wanted to, but upper management nixed it for obvious reasons. (And there was much rejoicing.)

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... says " Emissions testers at a site in Westlake Village, California, evaluated all the cars involved... If any vehicle failed to meet emissions targets, a team of engineers from Volkswagen headquarters or luxury brand Audiâ(TM)s base in Ingolstadt was flown in, the person said. After the group had tinkered with the vehicle for about a week, the car would then pass the test. "

I suppose Google's might be able to place the compressing proxy closer to you, reducing latency a bit.

/. posters have such a short memory :-) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

The Energy Star folks eventually did realize that there were a lot of shit CFLs out there, and started doing rigorous testing; see http://www.energystar.gov/ia/p... They now actually test bulbs before giving them the Energy Star seal.

When they started doing Energy Star ratings for LEDs, they tried really hard to avoid the CFL fiasco; see http://www.gizmag.com/energy-s... As a result, Energy Star rated LED bulbs are pretty reliable. I have about 60 (!) in my house, bought over the last 9 months. None of the Energy Star bulbs has failed yet. Two non-energy-star LED bulbs that were several years old (from vendors not around anymore?) did fail.

I'm now slowly converting the bulbs in the house I rent out to LEDs, with the tenant's cooperation. The only two bulbs she has liked so far are the Cree 40W TW http://www.creebulb.com/Produc... (for bathrooms only - it hums too much for living room) and the Phillips 40W A15 ( http://www.homedepot.com/p/Phi... ) for everywhere else. Her dimmers are old, and most LED bulbs flicker with them; I should get her newer dimmers. Haven't had that problem much at my house.

I'm quite happy with the LEDs so far, and am writing up my experiences at http://kegel.com/energy/lights... Your mileage may vary.

I stand corrected. (Thought there was a three-order-of-magnitude problem in there, actually, but didn't see where.)

So it's 67 GWh annual savings in US vs. 19 TWh annual savings in EU, then? Seems like one or both of those estimates is still way wrong.

The US doesn't have Energy Star standards for vacuum cleaners yet, but they're thinking about it.

http://www.energystar.gov/ia/p... says
"[Assuming efficiency improvements of 16% to 33%...] Estimated per-unit annual savings for residential vacuums are on the order of 10-19 kWh/year... Considering there are approximately 28 million vacuums sold in the U.S. each year, the national energy savings opportunity would be on the order of 67,000-135,000 MWh per year if 25% of products sold were replaced with energy efficient models"

Contrast that the the document linked in TFA:
http://ec.europa.eu/smart-regu... says
"[Vaccuum cleaners sold per year in 2005 and 2020: 54 million and 92 million]... [Energy consumed by vacuum cleaners under business-as-usual by 2020: 29.7 TWH/year]... by 2020, the annual electricity consumption ... of vacuum cleaners will be reduced by 19 TWh"

So, 67 TWh annual savings in US vs. 19 TWh annual savings in EU in spite of twice as many vacuum cleaners sold per year in the EU. Is there just more dirt in the US? Or was the Energy Star scoping report just overoptimistic?

Me, too. I get mine at Home Depot (they have Cree, which I like better than the ones at Lowe's). Replacing frequently-used incandescents with LEDs pays for itself in about 9 months (at $10/LED, 4 hr/day, and $0.15/kwh; your milage may vary, see http://www.lektroninc.com/payb... )

Doing this (and a few other things) cut my power usage from 40KWH/day to 25KWH/day. Still too high... I need to dig some more to see where it's all going.

I'm blogging the experience at http://kegel.com/energy/lights...

FWIW, the Nvidia proprietary drivers have had a shader cache on Linux since the 290.03 release in late 2011 (search for GLShaderDiskCache). It probably helps Mass Effect 2 under Wine somewhat (here's a bug report from before the cache was added to the driver: http://bugs.winehq.org/show_bu... )

Are you sure your router hasn't been subverted by malware? See e.g. http://www.cert.pl/news/8019/l... That one doesn't do transparent proxying, but others might.

I only logged in, since I live in a state that doesn't use the Federal system, so I didn't want to fake my address (beyond saying I lived in a different state, which was good enough to get past the account creation process).

Just how broken is it? Let's find out.

I tried creating an account early Sunday morning and failed.
I tried again Sunday evening, and it worked... on Firefox, anyway. On Chrome, logging in took me to a blank screen.
( See https://plus.google.com/u/0/113779301404424240904/posts/2mxh2wPTein )

If you try creating an account on healthcare.gov, reply here with what happened. Let's see how broken it is.