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Yes, you could say "he associates with oil producers". That's ominous, but not very conclusive. Actually, it's quite useless.

If, instead, you look at it as the report writer is possibly getting information from a set of Energy Secretaries for oil producing countries who have not updated their reserve estimates in 30 years despite collectively pumping many, many billions of barrels of oil in those years. These are the same countries and secretaries who have an intrinsic financial interest in not accurately reporting their oil reserves (OPEC quotes are tied to estimated reserves, after all). Well, then, maybe, just maybe, there's a reason to consider the source material for the study to be dodgy.

- Tash

Meesa gonna miss Georgie. Reely!

- Tash

You may be thinking that this is some kind of contextual search, but you're wrong. It's a video processing system. It can identify politicians in a video clip and determine if their lips are moving. This is a great advance - hopefully they'll open-source it so that we can target people other than politicians. I've got video clips of my boss promising a raise. He seemed sincere, but you never know...

Yes, aside from the falling price of crude, the change from the more expensive 'summer' blends, and the large drop-off in consumption that follows Labor day, there's no apparent reason for the price to be falling.

- Tash

Just looking at my newly created Yahoo Mail (BETA!) inbox, I've got ads for a new mortgage, credit cards, university degrees, my credit score, internet stalking tools (find that e-mail!), and new telephone service. It's fricking spam before I even get any e-mail to get pissed off about. My Google inbox view has ads for ... none, nada, zip, zero, zilch. I wonder what happens when I actually get an e-mail - which they havn't delivered yet (sending or receiving).

The (Bayasian filter) score thus far:
Google = Ham, Yahoo = Spam

The problem with Silicon Valley is that there's no snow to walk up hill both ways in. Those dern engineers had it easy.

- Tash

They're Philips Marathon Dimmables. As for the generics, happy hunting.

- Tash

$5 - $15 a light? TFA has Walmart selling them at $3.19 - $2.50. Not low enough for you? How about less than $1.50 a light. (you'll need to play their website games to get to the price, but it's there, darn it!). Home Depot also has 6 packs for ~$9, but they don't put it on their website.

- Tash

Rebates are everywhere. Just look. From the first page:

• Columbus, OH
• Washington State
• Several New England Utilities
• California

In that list there's governments, utilities, and some organizations I'm not real sure about, but the point is that there's rebates all over the place. The one thing to note is that it's all handled locally instead of one big Federal government initiative. Just because the feds aren't doing it doesn't mean it's not getting done. Thank God for that.

- Tash

If you want to be a real financial hound about it all, it's not just saving the power for the lights - it's also knocking down the air conditioning to remove all the wasted heat from the air. I live in Texas - this is a major reason folks down here are making the move. They kinda get the more efficient light thing, but talk about air conditioning and they'll pay attention. It's what got my Uncle motivated, anyway.

Replacing a 60W bulb with a 15W CFL and you just removed 45W from the air. Well, what's that worth? Air conditioners today must have have SEER ratings of at least 10. Older ones go down to 6. SEER = BTU cooling / 1 w-H. 1 BTU ~= 0.29 w-H. That 10 SEER air conditioner will remove ~3 watts of heat for every watt from the electric company. I'm intentionally ignoring the part where SEER is an average over the summer, YMMV, etc

So, in the Texas summer, when you swap that light bulb, you're saving 45W from the lightbulb and 15W from cooling down the house from the lightbulb. It's almost like free light. Damn thermodynamics for not making it so.

- Tash

Not this again. Come on editors, really!

- Tash

He shouldn't of crossed Keyser Soze and sided with the Hungarians. The only reason he's still alive is that he didn't know he was crossing Keyser Soze, but Keyser Soze now thinks that Steve owes him. Should make for an interesting show.

- Tash

Darn right. I have enough problems with USB slowing down my typing and mousing. 12 mbit / sec is hardly enough, especially when I run out of ports and have to use a hub for my keyboard AND mouse. I wouldn't know what to do if I had to give up throughput just for the supposed convenience of a wireless mouse or keyboard.

- Tash

Ummm... How do you use a slide rule? There's no buttons and I can't figure out where to put in the batteries. My Mathematica teacher referred to them and several people laughed, but I didn't get the joke.

- Tash
Hybrids

P.S.: Behold, thy name is sarcasm.

Quick, check and see if Spock has a beard.

- Tash
Yippie! Hybrids!

I don't begrudge Redhat their money, but I do think their market is harder than it used to be. I knew CentOS was a thread to their cash flow when my company started adopting it instead of Redhat Enterprise for our engineering machines. There will always be high rollers who want the full support package, but for non-mission critical applications, CentOS works fine and handles RHEL certified apps without issue. Redhat also ceeded the desktop (as several posts note) and left Fedora Core to hold it's own. So, they're losing the desktop space, and there's a non-support-paying alternative for the small-end corporate space - it'll be harder to grow like a mad fiend when your being pushed into more exclusive product spaces. I wish them luck, they've done much for the FOSS community in their years.

- Tash
Vrooomm....

Do you think I'm suddenly going to freak out on VOIP because the US government might start listening in on my calls? I'm actually suprised that they're not already (they seem twitchy about that stuff right now), though this may be a political version of "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission". Fundamentally, I don't care how my voice gets from point A to point B, but I'm in favor of doing it as cheap as possible. I like the idea of a world where they run one cable (or no cables, woohoo) to my house and all the information flows over it. The tinfoil hat wearers can roll their own VOIP for talking to whomever they want to talk to and encrypt it out the wazoo. If they're paranoid enough, they can get multiple wired and wireless connections, split up the packets across them all, and have a grand time of it. As best I can tell, VOIP was never about avoiding the government, it was about talking on the cheap using resources already available.

Now, if they come for my encryption, they'll have to pry it from my cold, dead connection

- Tash
Vrrooommm...

I'm not so sure. I think there's more demand than you suspect
CPU 1: User
CPU 2: Windows Vista (Swap baby swap)
CPU 3: Outlook Anti-spam filter
CPU 4: Norton Anti-virus scanner
CPU 5: Web-security system
CPU 6: Sony "DRM Enabling" root-kit

Now, if you had said that average Linux user...
***Ducking And Covering***

- Tash
Yippie... Hybrids!

Just looking around their site, you can't do anything of substance (even find out how much the movies are) without IE 6.0 (or greater - yippie). Well, that isn't working too well for me. Be gentle, though - they seem excited about their new and shiny business model.

- Tash
Yippie - hybrids!

All those stamps in my passport were getting annoying. Maybe they can put one of these in my passport, maybe when they get those RFID things working, so that I can just download where I've traveled. It'd be handy and I can't see anything that could go wrong.

- Tash
Vrooommm...

As opposed to some other companies that are very loud about their attempts to fix their software

- Tash
Vrooommm...

That's right, the value of the tubes increases with the log. Just like pumbing.

- Tash
Vrooomm...

• Congress instructs those below the poverty line to consider getting higher paying jobs
• Congress recommends that children should consider looking both ways before crossing the street
• Congress highly recommends that you think hard about what you did last night - Congress knows you know who they're talking about

- Tash
Vrooomm...

2 GB USB Drive - $40
VMWare Player for Linux & Windows - $0
A good Linux distro - $0 (yes, you may flame away)
Google Browser Sync - $0
Blowing away anything that somehow made it onto your system - $priceless

-Tash
Vrooommm...

Shaw also threw cold water on the idea that neutering the fast-forward option would result in a consumer backlash. He suggested that consumers prefer DVRs for their ability to facilitate on-demand viewing and not ad-zapping--and consumers might warm to the idea that anytime viewing brings with it a tradeoff in the form of unavoidable commercial viewing.

TV advertisers and execs could be heard blubbing into their double tall skinny lattes all over Soho as a new survey revealed that around 90 percent of current users fast-forward through ads.

- Tash
Vroom...

I don't even think it'll take monitoring all the most popular profiles - look for sudden spikes in traffic to a profile or image. If it's a double-plus-ungood photo, it'll probably draw a crowd. It won't take long to rule out /. effect (heck, getting posted on slashdot may be a good indicator that its inappropriate) or a genuinely interesting/funny photo.

- Tash
Vrooom...

My experience is that, even after going through all that, it ain't right until you include the "I may break something else" fudge factor. It gets picked based on how much (seemingly unrelated) stuff needs a tweak to make the new feature work. I guess I've been lucky that I've had bosses who've accepted ranges of time (i.e. 5-7 days) instead of one number.

- Tash
Vrooom....