I haven't seen any mention of adding a short term thermal storage unit to act as a buffer between the outside air heat pump and the inside heat exchanger. The system can then heat the thermal storage medium when it is most efficient to do so, and the inside heat exchanger can draw on that stored heat more continuously.

This thermal storage would be similar to a very short term geothermal system, with only a day or a week of storage, depending on the capacity.
This should be enough to reduce the need to resort to a backup heat system such as resistance heating.

The cost savings can be significant by smoothing the load and possibly taking advantage of times when electric power is cheaper.

There are not many thermal storage manufacturers, however.

"Simple example: You have four people in a room. Three have IQs of 120, one has an IQ of 60."

And how likely is that ever to happen? What is the distribution of IQs really like? How close is the average IQ to the median?

Many people seem to still believe what they were taught 30 years ago about the population explosion. What was true then is no longer true - the world is changing rapidly, and one of the many ways it is changing is *reducing* our population growth.

Hans Rosling's videos are excellent, as well as engaging. I reference a couple others, and explore the issue of world population quite a bit more in this blog: http://globalconsensus.wordpress.com/2009/08/29/world-population-is-stabilizing/

Ah, I meant to post as myself, but checked the checkbox next to my name, which actually means "Post Anonymously". Someone should fix that.

2) the losing party in an election (not just president, but any of the offices and referenda being voted on) will point to provisional ballots that have a) been rejected and b) support the loser's cause to say that "These people were denied the right to vote!" and imply that either the registration system lost their registrations or is just plain crooked

If there is no proof that a person was in fact registered, then that person has no case for claiming their provisional vote should count, and I would be very surprised if any court supported such a claim.