I wonder what happens if I glue a metal plate to the pavement above the sensor...

...now delivered with greater efficiency than ever before.

Given how things are going in America, the next time I leave I may just not bother with the return.

On the left of the results page hit search tools, then click "Verbatim". It does just what you think it does. It searches for exactly your terms with no modifications, substitutions, or customizations.

Words like "the", "and", & "a" are non-informational words and have effectively no search value. I propose we take the list of representatives and companies supporting SOPA and add them to the list of non-informational words. They'll instantly cease to exist online.

I said nothing that all six stalls were big, just that the bathroom was needlessly large. But we digress; size of the bathroom isn't the point. The point is that engineering everything to accommodate everyone is unrealistic. In a world of infinite variety, I can always come up with another edge case that will define another requirement. At some point it makes more sense to move the mobility solution closer to the person requiring the mobility, rather than bending infrastructure to fit around the edge case. If there's a worthwhile market, technology will grow to provide a solution.

You can use the same argument for parking spaces, and it seems we've decided as a society that it's important to penalize one behavior and not the other.

I propose cameras pointed in to toilet stalls with 24/7 monitoring to ensure that handicapped toilet stalls aren't abused by those able-bodied assholes. We'll also need to amend the building code to increase the total number of available stalls to ensure that the population is appropriately served.

I was on the building planning committee for a new building at Stanford. The bathrooms are comically large because of handicap access requirements. Despite consuming 800 square feet, there are only six total stalls. The same building also has two handicapped parking spots out front, out of four parking spots total.

Given that the population served is, on average, 22 years old and in excellent health, these measures seem inappropriate. Things would be completely different if this were a retirement home.

Precisely. Further, most LED shop lights have a narrow beam angle, about 20-30 degrees. That makes them dramatically less useful than the 180 degree ordinary shop light. I'm not claiming that every household should be illuminated with incandescent lights, but rather that it is the consumer and the market who should negotiate the choices in technology. There's no reason to force a technology choice when the same desired outcome (higher household electrical efficiency) can be had by simply making the resource (electricity) more expensive through simple means (taxes).

My goal is to show by counterexample why this type of legislation is not terribly bright. Trying to promote resource efficiency is most directly and efficiently accomplished by increasing the price of the resource. But our politicians are spineless and won't do anything so pragmatic, including work with one another.

The brightest shop light you linked to is 300 lumens. A 75-watt incandescent bulb produces 1200 lumens.

As for your arguments, (a) is false, (b) is debatable depending on how you define rugged and what failure modes you're considering, for this purpose I'll concede that you're right, and (c) isn't something I care about in most instances.

Notice that nowhere have I complained about the cost of alternatives, merely their performance characteristics. You're right, I can most certainly afford a $30 flashlight, but what I want is a shop light. My criteria for performance are volumetric density, total light output, ruggedness, consequences of failure, and probability of failure. Incandescent bulbs are an excellent fit for the application.

For what it's worth, the LED bulbs work just great in my kitchen.

I bought a ruggedized incandescent bulb for my shop light, but it consumes twice as much power as I wanted and makes my shop light extremely hot. I examined all of the options at the hardware store. Online options are great, but when you're working projects waiting for even overnight shipping is not an option. The good old fashioned 75-watt bulb is perfectly adequate.

The real way to make people save electricity is to tax the thing you want them to consume less of - electricity. I live in California, and per capita, the state uses less electricity than most other places in the country. I can't help but imagine that's partly due to our high utility rates.

My shop light (wire cage lamp on a stick) could be populated with LEDs or CFLs, but I it's a lamp that sees rough use. I drop it, hit it with two-by-fours, and drop my drill on it all the time. LED bulbs are too expensive to justify in a location where they'll get abused, and CFLs contain mercury so it seems irresponsible to put them in a place where I expect to regularly break bulbs.

Fuck you Congress, for thinking you're smarter than I am. For the record, all of my household bulbs are LED and I love them.