Well since you asked; my kid has a couple of horses, we live on a farm, my kid works and trains at our horse trainer's barn, my kid is involved in several equestrian activities / events / teams, we had a sleep over for a couple of horse team members this weekend at our farm, my kid plans to go Friday to the Lexington Kentucky Horse Park ... There are affordable equine options available for city dwellers and suburban folks, you don't need to live on a farm, or own a horse, you don't need to be wealthy. We have volunteered at some equine based therapy centers, they use horses to help all sorts of people in need, it's really rewarding. "There is nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse" Winston Churchill

Just for thought, consider the case of Bernie Madoff. He was a con man running a ponzi scheme. There were a lot of folks who had money to invest. These folks wanted to get a large return on their investment. These folks willingly gave this investment money to Madoff. Most of these people ended up losing their investment, because it was a ponzi scheme. Madoff was arrested and has lost everything and is in jail for the rest of his life. People wanted Madoff to get the death penalty. Madoff did not rape anyone. Madoff did not commit a violent crime. The hackers also committed a non violent crime. And will spend more time in jail than most rapists. It's just not right.

Beekeeping catalogs offer quite a selection of feeders. Some companies sell high fructose corn syrup by the 55 gallon container. Most commercial beekeepers feed their bees. They also install frames in their hives with starter wax foundation. This saves the bees from having to draw out as much comb and will result in increased honey production.

I have a few beehives. Each hive gets two 10 frame deep supers. During the spring nectar flow I add shallow honey supers to each hive as required. In June/July I harvest honey and comb from the shallow honey supers. I then leave the hives alone and they have the summer and fall to prepare for winter. I don't feed my bees.

You can have a hive where you don't feed your bees and you don't provide any wax foundation. This will result in the best possible honey and comb (and possibly a healthier hive) however you won't be able to harvest very much.

Place your bottle of crystallized honey in a warm water bath and it will be like it was when freshly bottled, without the crystallization.

There already is a built in tax. Buy the less efficient bulb, pay more for energy costs. Some people prefer incandescent bulbs, do you want to take away their freedom to choose? Let the market decide the issue, keep government out of it.

What would you recommend for a real time low cost small size light weight position/speed sensor that could be used for the sport of racing homing pigeons? I'm not talking about a data logger, but a practical device that can transmit information to allow for remote real time information delivery.

The solution is obvious, move to smaller distributed power plants. The limit as x goes to infinity would of course be no power grid, everyone has their own power generating capacity.

I remember a few years ago hearing that there were plans to incorporate NX technology into X, what's the status for that? I run NX sessions over a slow internet connection to a remote machine and it works well, standard remote X is unusable for me.

Properly managed rotational cattle grazing systems that mimic wild herds actually sequesters huge amounts of carbon.

I frequently use NX and have just now performed a side by side test which at least shows for my situation that NX is better than VNC. I've got two identical PC's on a local network, each running ubuntu 10.04 updated. Local machine has two flat screen displays, I've got an NX full screen connection on the right display, and a VNC full screen connection on the left. The remote machine is used to access some graphical waveform control screens. Output of top shows VNC (vinagre) is using 8% of CPU compared to 4% of CPU for NX (nxssh). Both are using same amount of memory at 0.6%. Just moving the mouse around in the window shows the difference between the two, the mouse pointer movement is smooth on the NX display and jumpy on VNC. Windows open immediately on the NX display and are slow to display on VNC. I tried VNC with and without JPEG compression option and it made no apparent difference.

Actually, it's a dielectric insulating material such as teflon, not a semiconductor. I've got a three phase 500 kV TVA overhead power transmission line that goes across my property, I would be very happy indeed if they could come up with a way to safely bury that thing. It's ugly, it restricts what I can do with my property, it makes hissing and buzzing noises, and it will charge up nearby materials that can zap you.

My wife and I homeschool our kids in Tennessee. We love it and so far it is working great for our family. As required by state law we are registered, we have an appropriate curriculum, and we maintain records. Every year we pay to have our children take the national standardized tests, and our kids test well above the local and national averages.

In our local home-school group we have two families that have a parent who is a public school teacher. We know some families that do a fantastic job home-schooling, and unfortunately we also know some that do a less than stellar job. The same thing applies with public schools, some are good, others not so great.

We know the people involved in the home-school political asylum court case. In Germany, the government has taken kids away from parents who home-schooled. The family fled Germany to avoid that fate. I'm very glad to hear that this family has won in the courts and will be allowed to stay in the US and home-school their children.

Absolutely correct. Lawn seed mixes used to contain clover. Now people consider clover to be a weed and are quick to apply herbicides to kill it. People seem to think that a proper lawn is a sterile monoculture of KY31 fescue. Au contraire. On my East Tennessee farm I seed red and white clover into my cool season perennial grass pastures in the spring. Clover is a legume plant that is very nutritious and much desired by horses, cows, deer, turkey, etc. Clover will grow in the heat of summer when grass production slows. Clover fixes nitrogen into the soil so one does not need to apply nitrogen fertilizer in the spring. This practice prevents nitrogen fertilizer runoff from getting into the waterways. Also as OP pointed out, bees love clover.

If solar technology and price were close to being competitive with conventional energy (coal in my case) then you would see many small solar deployments by consumers as well as large solar deployments by businesses and even power utilities themselves.

Absolutely correct, mod this up! It's all about choices and sacrifices. My wife and I chose to live on a single income and home-school our children. It's working out great for our family.