"Surely, we'll get some crackheads that at least want a $1/hour."

This doesn't work because many people will cease to shop where crackheads are running the store... thus actually reducing profits. Hiring good labor at the right price is key to bringing in money.

Or _three_ (so one is in the center). Three 30" monitors is ideal.

I use three 30" (2560x1600) Dell Monitors hooked up to my Mac Pro workstation (it has an ATi graphics card that can drive 3 natively so it's smooth as butter).

In this configuration I can stretch an Emacs window across the left two and split it into 6 vertical segments (with one horizontal split along the bottom for utility functions). On the right monitor I keep a tabbed Terminal taking up half and a tabbed browser taking up half each of those generally has 6+ tabs open at any one time (make sure your Terminal tabs get named by the directory they're in!).

I've been working with three monitors like this for about a year and half now... and I highly effective with it.

The trick to using 6 panes of source code at once? Organization. I have set guidelines about what files get opened where (I work left to right from lowest level library to highest level application)... this lets me always know where to look.

I don't know if I could go back to "just" two 30"ers....

"close or equal to"?

really. wow, that's amazing. I would love to hear more about how the pollution involved with manufacturing solar panels, which will then generate many times their energy of manufacturing over the lifetime of the panels, is somehow "close to, if not equal to" that of, say, burning oil for home heating oil, or as gas in cars, or coal for electricity, including THEIR extraction and refining externialities.

be sure to show your work, cause that's quite a doozy of a statement. It reeks of complete bullshit, actually. How many people per year die of solar panel manufacturing related pollution and manufacturing, vs oil production AND POLLUTION AND USE? do the words "orders of magnitude apart" mean anything? check out "smog related deaths" sometime. it's illuminating. and those are generally just talking about people who actually die from the immediate consequences of smog inhalation. now consider the impact on lung disease as a whole. very small doses of critical thinking are all you need.

markets cannot adjust for externialities in any truly meaningful way without very heavy educational loads, especially for complex questions. it is why a slavish devotion to free market principles is childish and shortsighted. it's a frightfully flawed model if actual human welfare is of concern.

but external costs are paid via mechanisms that are NOT included in the cost of the fuel.

the medical and pollution aspects of fossil fuel use... to say nothing of the global warming costs and, up until recently, our geopolitical control costs (military)... are all costs associated with oil that we pay for via taxes, insurance premiums, and other mechanisms that don't dissuade oil usage per se.

until those externialities are captured in the cost of a barrel of oil, the playing field against clean alternatives is not level. thus the need for subsidies on clean alternatives. because the free market simply cannot handle external costs in a legitimate way.

if you're in maine, half of your power is renewables and hydro and the other half is mostly natural gas. so... kind of depends where you live.

actually, in maine the democrats have realized IRV is important. strong independents just keep running and they finally got it. last time in state committee it was a party line vote to go to an IRV system.

what it will take to get the republicans on board, I'm not sure. it's cost them elections too. but here I think they assume the math favors them without IRV.

so now we're just waiting for a democratic majority again. if it's soon, we may even pass it next time.

the basic rule that a lower ranked vote for a candidate should never hurt your higher ranked choices makes it preferable, to me, than approval or a "true" condorcet method.

IRV is break-able... all electoral systems are. but it's much, much less breakable than 1 person 1 vote. and it allows a voter to express an actual preference.

a place to read up on this stuff is here: http://www.fairvote.org/

that's a pretty small pantry. the square footage difference isn't that large. but sure, in some cases that's a bigger deal, namely in very expensive metropolitan areas where square footage is very expensive, fair enough.

ceramic bricks are not a better storage material than water. especially not if you need water as an end result. you might be able to achieve higher densities with ceramics by jacking the temperature up higher, but you'll never achieve the level of cost effectiveness with ceramics that you can with water and insulation.

you can question my on demand assertion, but for anyone with regular DHW usage it's pretty easy math. the efficiency gain never even comes close to balancing out the increased first and maintenance costs. as your DHW increases, the efficiency differential decreases as well as jacket loss becomes a smaller and smaller percentage of the total load.

storing hot water for domestic use is a trivial engineering problem. your 25% is wrong... it's more like 10% for a standard tank... and slightly better insulation would fix even that. there are tanks now with 3" of insulation that lose very little heat. also bear in mind that 10% number is only as big as it is because the amount of energy most people use for Domestic hot water is very small, like 40-50 gallons a day. it's not objectively very much energy in any case.

on demands don't make any sense for anyone right now.

we can greatly upsize tanks and store heat for space heat too. make ice for cooling. lots of ways to store useful thermal energy exist. between those and electric cars we have the capability to increase grid storage rather massively in a relatively short period of time with technology that exists today.

Violence against people because of their choice of a phone?

Wow. Just. Wow.

It is one thing to champion a free OS... or talk about the upsides of an open ecosystem... but you are truly unbalanced to suggest open hostility towards people who don't share your views.

Also... what exactly is it that makes you like Samsung so much? They are every bit as much of an "evil corporation" as Apple... and depending on which report you're reading at the moment could be considered much worse...

I keep seeing this but I don't understand. How is it a "loss" that people can't just make copycat products?

Wouldn't that be a "win" because we want each individual company to try out innovate each other instead of just giving us "low rent" knockoffs?

I just don't get...

"the solution should be to fix the law-making process"

If only that were possible. It's simply not. Humans and human activities are too diverse to be able to make "perfect laws". The idea of a jury is to interpret the best laws we can make for the particular circumstance in the case.

If you think you can get 9 people to agree to "reverse vigilantism" then we have bigger problems in this country anyway...

Why do you want to go to "personal comments"? I don't think I said anything too inflammatory... I merely suggested that I consent to the rule of law and the right of juries to interpret that law. I don't like the idea that Americans would automatically want to overturn the will of a capable jury. Juries are the things saving us from our own laws and lawmakers...

I never said that they are perfection... and, in fact, that is the whole point of a trial "by your peers". Jury's are there to inject
reality into our legal system. Laws are drawn up in a fairly closed off environment by people typically thousands of miles away... a jury is there to interpret that law _for the people_ at the most local level possible: on a case by case basis.

We should really only question a few things about a jury. Did they properly represent "peers". Are they of sane mind. Were they tampered with?

If the answers to these questions come back ok... then the will of the jury can be said to represent the puclic's interpretation of the law in this case. And that is what matters.

This was, from my reading, a damn fine jury... it consisted of several people who work in the tech industry and a few who don't. It consisted of people with some knowledge in this area and some who don't. The fact that 9 people with this mix of backgrounds could agree that Samsung infringed... and did so _willfully_ speaks volumes.

Juries are not perfect... but neither is the law. That's why we have juries to interpret the law and apply it to each case independently.

If you have a problem with the verdict then you really have a problem with the law. Normal Americans were given facts and asked to interpret the law and this is the outcome. If you want to change the outcome in the future... then change the law.

But for now, all procedures were followed and Samsung was found to owe Apple some cash according to the current laws.