Sure, email is not 100% reliable. Got it. It sounds as though this particular link is nearly 0% reliable. If the mail room at your credit card company loses one payment, that's not cause for a complaint. If they lose nearly every payment sent from a given state, you can bet that would be cause for a complaint.
After all, I could type at a reasonable clip as a four-year-old. (When I occasionally deal with children, I have to remember that my hyperlexic reading-at-two was the abnormal situation).
Thanks for sharing, but I'm pretty sure the poster wants the experiences of normal humans, not hyperlexic supragenius freaks like yourself. I mean, he isn't posting this question at MENSA, but on Slashdot.
I said "largely enlightenment-type theists". I didn't say or imply that all of them were one thing or another. I was trying to establish that the framers were not Christian fundamentalists, as the previous poster had stated.
Well documented by the framers themselves, in a set of documents known as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Really intriguing reading. All sorts of stuff about an Almighty Creator, non-endorsement by the state of any particular religion, etc., etc. Not so much about the Ten Commandments or Our Savior. Sounds pretty non-sectarian to me. Each of them may personally have believed in the Christian mythology, but as a group, they were "generally non-sectarian". I didn't say they were Deists, but that they were theists, by which I meant that they believed in an Almighty Creator. I hope they did, because that's what they wrote. Are you suggesting that the "revisionism" was perpetrated by the framers themselves?
We're on the same page, for the most part. However, I'm pretty sure that the modern Republicans and Democrats would be equally repugnant to the framers, considering the anti-establishment and anti-militaristic feelings that were so strong among the framers. Modern conservatives seem to be pretty much in favor of the rich getting richer and in favor of invading other countries if it serves our economic interests.
Anyway, I don't think modern day leftists have it right. I think that, as compared to their contemporaries, the framers were closer to being radical left-wing freaks than they were to being conservative fundamentalist Christians.
The "reindeer" thing is actually pretty important. The point behind the requirement for "enough reindeer" is to ensure that religious symbols are shown in a context as one influence, rather than alone as THE influence. I'm perfectly happy to see the Ten Commandments as part of a display, perhaps with a representation of the law code of Hammurabi or the Magna Carta, because you can see that it is one part of a larger picture. It's hard not to see a gigantic sculpture of the Ten Commandments as anything other than an endorsement of Judeo-Christian values over other values.
Ask yourself this, would those insisting on the Ten Commandments displays be OK with a gigantic Buddhist wheel right next to the Ten Commandments sculpture?
Ah yes, but it isn't so because I wish it were, it is so because it is so. The generally non-sectarian beliefs of the framers are well documented, and they were certainly left-wing by the standards of their day. Of course, what was left-wing back then is probably closer to Libertarianism than anything else you can find these days. To paraphrase Nietzsche, if the framers were alive today, they would never stop puking.
Get the terminology right yourself. "Deitist" is a pretty new coinage, not found in Webster's or wikipedia, and poorly represented in a Google search.
From m-w.com:
Deism: a movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe.
Theism: belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically : belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of man and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world.
The term I wanted and stand by is "theist", which, as you can see, has a general meaning (coincidentally, nearly identical to your definition of "deitism"), as well as a more specific meaning, which itself appears to be a bit more general than the term "deist". I didn't want to make a more specific representation because I honestly don't know how many of them shared Jefferson's personal views, which were certainly deist.
Who is denying the connections to Christian teachings, or their influence on the framers of the Constitution? Could it not be the principle of mercy, taught them through "the Christian teachings", that led them to see the wisdom of a clear separation between church and state? Or perhaps it was the oppression of minority-sect Christians in Anglican England that led them to that conclusion. You see, there is no such thing as THE "Christian teachings", only many different "teachings" that all claim to be inspired by Jesus of Nazareth. At times, adherents of different brands of Christianity have disagreed strongly enough over the precise nature of "the Christian teachings" to go to war with one another over the issue.
In its turn, Christianity was certainly not founded on Hellenistic religion itself, but to deny the connections between the myth of the virgin birth of Jesus and the myth of the virgin birth of Mithras is to rewrite history in a rather bold way. (Of course, that particular rewriting was pretty much complete by the time of the Emperor Constantine.) Should we have statues of Mithras slaying the bull in our courthouses?
Where does it say in that piece by the universally respected and unbiased historian of early America George F. Will that the services in question were fundamentalist in tone?
Remember that in those days, much closer to everyone in the United States identified as Christian than do today. A non-sectarian Christian service would have been acceptable to more than 95% of the people in the colonies. In that environment, simply being non-sectarian Christian would have been enough to avoid state endorsement of a sect in almost all Americans' eyes. Today, with a wider variety of people living here, non-sectarian Christian services or displays do constitute state endorsement of a sect in many Americans' eyes.
Now, whether the framers would have felt comfortable with all of the swarthy, non-Christian types being here in the first place is a different question. Remember, many of them felt that slavery was OK, and I'm sure all of them would have been appalled at the thought that women might be given the right to vote.
I'd being willing to bet that if you and I and the "Founding Fathers" were to get together, they wouldn't agree with either one of us about everything. Heck, they didn't agree with each other about much. Maybe that's why they tried so hard to establish mechanisms to prevent tyranny of the majority. And don't get on about the majority of Americans oppressing the Christian minority, it is no one's right to have their religious symbols displayed at the courthouse or to have their clergy blessing the proceedings of the government. No one is trying to prevent fundamentalists from holding their services or displaying their symbols, provided they do so on their own time and property.
The creators of the Bill of Rights were largely enlightenment-types that didn't adhere to any organized religion. Many of them were "theists" who believed in an almighty creator but little to none of Christian mythology. Some of them may even have been atheists. To use your terms, the nutbars who led the Revolution were definitely the "hippies" of their day as compared to the "fundie" royalists. Just because you wish the framers were conservative Christians doesn't make it so; they were, as compared to their contemporaries, closer to being radical left-wing freaks.
So, if the interference is less in the UK than in the US, why should the FCC have assumed that what was unacceptable in the UK would be acceptable in the US?
Except that the law is entirely on Hasbro's side. No amount of money spent on this cause will change the outcome.
Would it be OK with you if Microsoft changed the name of Longhorn to MS Linux? Linus maintains a trademark on Linux so that people know what they're getting when they get something that calls itself "Linux". If you side with Jared, you believe that Linus does not have the right to protect the name Linux from this sort of dilution.
Really, I can understand people being upset with the over-the-top demands made by the lawyers, but Jared brought this on himself by knowingly infringing the Scrabble trademark. As so many have pointed out, if Hasbro doesn't defend their trademark against any infringement they are aware of, they will lose it forever.
Give *me* a break. Changing something as basic as the file manager so radically is a bigger deal than, well, just about anything else, from an end-user's perspective. I haven't heard that the Finder in OSX was in no way similar to the Finder from OS9, and Windows Explorer has been pretty much the same since Windows 95.
Actually, I do mean usability experts. The big thing going around during the whole spatial Nautilus debacle was that it was a well-known fact among usability experts that users are more efficient if things stay in the same place. As applied by the gnomers to Nautilus this meant that if you open a folder today, it is shown at this size at this location on the screen, with its contents displayed in these locations; when you open it tomorrow, everything will be right where you left it.
So, this is representative of the BS gnome devs and fanboys were spouting at the time. Now, I don't know if the usability experts would have blessed the implementation of spatial Nautilus, or whether the usability experts ever said anything remotely similar to what the gnomers were attributing to them. Either way, the fact is the gnomers were saying it wasn't their fault, it was the usability experts' fault and that the gnomers were just following the divine commandments of the usability experts. Those who disliked spatial Nautilus were therefore blasphemers against the gods of usability and to be excommunicated, unless they posted their views on the Internet, in which case they were to be burned at the stake.
Don't misunderstand me, I think GNOME is a good project and disagree with the overall characterization of the GNOME devs as willfully ignorant of their users' wants and needs, but the spatial Nautilus thing was a gigantic mistake and very poorly handled. Not to mention being pretty humorous from the outside.
gnome dev/fanboy: It's spatial Nautilus! It's easier to use; 9 out of 10 eggheaded usability experts say it's miles better than the old way.
lowly user: I hate it. Take it away. Put it back the way it was before.
gnome dev/fanboy: But you haven't given it a chance! See, re-organize everything on your hard drive and change the way you perform your everyday tasks, and spatial Nautilus will save you 0.5 milliseconds on some operations.
lowly user: I just want it to work the way I'm used to.
gnome dev/fanboy: Well, you're wrong for wanting that.
lowly user: Put it back right now! I'm going insane from all the extra windows!
gnome dev/fanboy: Well, just learn this new shortcut key to close them all when you're done.
lowly user: I don't want them to open in the first place. This sucks. I hate it. Put it back.
gnome dev/fanboy: Man, you are just like the other 10,000 lowly users I've talked to this week. What is wrong with you people? I can't imagine how you Luddites will react to the next version, when we make Dvorak (which is 2% more efficient than QWERTY) the default keyboard layout and force you to crawl over broken glass to change it back!
lowly user: Guess I need to look into purchasing that Windows license after all...
You're right, we do have to assume that everyone with an economic reason to lie will lie. Which would you rather be lied to about, broken/missing smokestack scrubbers on a coal-fired plant, or the release of radioactive gasses/water from a nuclear plant? I suppose you don't care, but most people would prefer to be lied to about coal-fired plants than nuclear ones.
Evolution *is* an indisputable theory. Evolutionary processes have been directly observed in organisms with short enough generations to allow evolutionary change to be observed. You have apparently been hoodwinked by some fundamentalist pharisee who exploited your misunderstanding of the term "theory" as used in science. If you don't believe in evolution, you are a total idiot, in the sense that you are unaware of what is going on around you. Gravity is not a fact, it is a theory. Our current cosmology that has the earth as part of a solar system, which is part of a galaxy, that also is a theory. Saying that "intelligent design" or any other religiously inspired BS is a viable alternative to the "theory" of evolution is as laughably misguided as saying that the sun revolves around the earth.
Religion and science are entirely separate fields of enquiry; neither of them has anything useful to say about the other. While I suppose there may be idiotically anti-religion biased scientists out there who want to meddle in religion by saying things like they have scientific proof that God doesn't exist, the simple fact is that idiotic bias is overwhelmingly found among flat-earthers like yourself trying to mess with science. Until you can find deep enough faith to believe in your God without having to close your eyes to the world around you, you and anyone else who would have science education watered down with "evolution is not a fact" stickers and discussions of mumbo-jumbo fairytales like "intelligent design" will be rightly accused of idiotic anti-science bias.
A real indisputable fact is that "fundamentalist religious forces are demanding the weakening of science and math education in schools". Any participation in the establishment of science and math curricula should be undertaken from the assumption that scientists know more about science than ministers do. Otherwise, why teach science at all? Arguing that evolution is not a sufficiently agreed-upon theory to be taught as the only viable explanation of genetic diversity requires weakening this assumption; no reputable scientist has stepped forward to challenge the basic premises of evolutionary theory. And don't get on about some wacko who says he has proofs against evolutionary theory; that person is not a reputable scientist as defined by the peer review process. The peer review process may not come to the conclusions that you like, and it may have flaws, but the peer review system is what governs science and if we are to throw out the peer review process, we may as well not teach science, because all of science's conclusions have been established through this process.
I absolutely will. My PS2 has gotten a fair amount of abuse (daughter is now four and half) and is having more trouble every day with opening and closing the disc tray. DVD playback is not as smooth as it used to be, either.
I'm sure the problems are all relatively simple mechanical problems, but the time spent ripping it apart and trying to fix it isn't worth the money. Not to mention, if I buy a new one, I can take my time modding the old one without the wife and child complaining about no DVD playback in the living room.
I think solar may be preferred because it requires zero infrastructure beyond shipping, installation, maintenance, and disposal. Also, sunlight is (so far) not something that can be bought and sold, so the intended users won't wind up beholden to someone selling fuel. Lastly, little to no day-to-day effort goes in to consuming solar power, so the user won't have to find time to do anything new other than use the electricity.
I think what's most exciting about this sort of thing is the distribution of decentralized power generation technology based on renewable energy sources. I'm sure if a situation arises where compost gas or wind power or micro-hydroelectric power is a better fit, this kind of project could adapt to use an energy source other than solar.
This sort of thing has happened to me, too. Now, if they don't get the hint, I just pull over and let them drive by. I'd rather be 30 seconds later to whereever I'm going than have to deal with that kind of wacko.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, email is not 100% reliable. Got it. It sounds as though this particular link is nearly 0% reliable. If the mail room at your credit card company loses one payment, that's not cause for a complaint. If they lose nearly every payment sent from a given state, you can bet that would be cause for a complaint.
Umm... how will the users struggle with my program if I never check in my code?
Ummm.... Where I come from, "5%" and "1 out of 20" mean exactly the same thing. Did I miss something?
I mean, I'm all for hiring the handicapped, but requiring that all return counter personnel be autistic savants seems like pushing it to me.
I said "largely enlightenment-type theists". I didn't say or imply that all of them were one thing or another. I was trying to establish that the framers were not Christian fundamentalists, as the previous poster had stated.
Well documented by the framers themselves, in a set of documents known as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Really intriguing reading. All sorts of stuff about an Almighty Creator, non-endorsement by the state of any particular religion, etc., etc. Not so much about the Ten Commandments or Our Savior. Sounds pretty non-sectarian to me. Each of them may personally have believed in the Christian mythology, but as a group, they were "generally non-sectarian". I didn't say they were Deists, but that they were theists, by which I meant that they believed in an Almighty Creator. I hope they did, because that's what they wrote. Are you suggesting that the "revisionism" was perpetrated by the framers themselves?
We're on the same page, for the most part. However, I'm pretty sure that the modern Republicans and Democrats would be equally repugnant to the framers, considering the anti-establishment and anti-militaristic feelings that were so strong among the framers. Modern conservatives seem to be pretty much in favor of the rich getting richer and in favor of invading other countries if it serves our economic interests.
Anyway, I don't think modern day leftists have it right. I think that, as compared to their contemporaries, the framers were closer to being radical left-wing freaks than they were to being conservative fundamentalist Christians.
The "reindeer" thing is actually pretty important. The point behind the requirement for "enough reindeer" is to ensure that religious symbols are shown in a context as one influence, rather than alone as THE influence. I'm perfectly happy to see the Ten Commandments as part of a display, perhaps with a representation of the law code of Hammurabi or the Magna Carta, because you can see that it is one part of a larger picture. It's hard not to see a gigantic sculpture of the Ten Commandments as anything other than an endorsement of Judeo-Christian values over other values.
Ask yourself this, would those insisting on the Ten Commandments displays be OK with a gigantic Buddhist wheel right next to the Ten Commandments sculpture?
Ah yes, but it isn't so because I wish it were, it is so because it is so. The generally non-sectarian beliefs of the framers are well documented, and they were certainly left-wing by the standards of their day. Of course, what was left-wing back then is probably closer to Libertarianism than anything else you can find these days. To paraphrase Nietzsche, if the framers were alive today, they would never stop puking.
Get the terminology right yourself. "Deitist" is a pretty new coinage, not found in Webster's or wikipedia, and poorly represented in a Google search.
From m-w.com:
Deism: a movement or system of thought advocating natural religion, emphasizing morality, and in the 18th century denying the interference of the Creator with the laws of the universe.
Theism: belief in the existence of a god or gods; specifically : belief in the existence of one God viewed as the creative source of man and the world who transcends yet is immanent in the world.
The term I wanted and stand by is "theist", which, as you can see, has a general meaning (coincidentally, nearly identical to your definition of "deitism"), as well as a more specific meaning, which itself appears to be a bit more general than the term "deist". I didn't want to make a more specific representation because I honestly don't know how many of them shared Jefferson's personal views, which were certainly deist.
Who is denying the connections to Christian teachings, or their influence on the framers of the Constitution? Could it not be the principle of mercy, taught them through "the Christian teachings", that led them to see the wisdom of a clear separation between church and state? Or perhaps it was the oppression of minority-sect Christians in Anglican England that led them to that conclusion. You see, there is no such thing as THE "Christian teachings", only many different "teachings" that all claim to be inspired by Jesus of Nazareth. At times, adherents of different brands of Christianity have disagreed strongly enough over the precise nature of "the Christian teachings" to go to war with one another over the issue.
In its turn, Christianity was certainly not founded on Hellenistic religion itself, but to deny the connections between the myth of the virgin birth of Jesus and the myth of the virgin birth of Mithras is to rewrite history in a rather bold way. (Of course, that particular rewriting was pretty much complete by the time of the Emperor Constantine.) Should we have statues of Mithras slaying the bull in our courthouses?
Where does it say in that piece by the universally respected and unbiased historian of early America George F. Will that the services in question were fundamentalist in tone?
Remember that in those days, much closer to everyone in the United States identified as Christian than do today. A non-sectarian Christian service would have been acceptable to more than 95% of the people in the colonies. In that environment, simply being non-sectarian Christian would have been enough to avoid state endorsement of a sect in almost all Americans' eyes. Today, with a wider variety of people living here, non-sectarian Christian services or displays do constitute state endorsement of a sect in many Americans' eyes.
Now, whether the framers would have felt comfortable with all of the swarthy, non-Christian types being here in the first place is a different question. Remember, many of them felt that slavery was OK, and I'm sure all of them would have been appalled at the thought that women might be given the right to vote.
I'd being willing to bet that if you and I and the "Founding Fathers" were to get together, they wouldn't agree with either one of us about everything. Heck, they didn't agree with each other about much. Maybe that's why they tried so hard to establish mechanisms to prevent tyranny of the majority. And don't get on about the majority of Americans oppressing the Christian minority, it is no one's right to have their religious symbols displayed at the courthouse or to have their clergy blessing the proceedings of the government. No one is trying to prevent fundamentalists from holding their services or displaying their symbols, provided they do so on their own time and property.
Oh no, the Founding Fathers were not just like me. That would have made them incredibly cynical formerly Communist software engineers.
The creators of the Bill of Rights were largely enlightenment-types that didn't adhere to any organized religion. Many of them were "theists" who believed in an almighty creator but little to none of Christian mythology. Some of them may even have been atheists. To use your terms, the nutbars who led the Revolution were definitely the "hippies" of their day as compared to the "fundie" royalists. Just because you wish the framers were conservative Christians doesn't make it so; they were, as compared to their contemporaries, closer to being radical left-wing freaks.
Sorry, but you can't trademark a number. Pretty sure that covers hex numbers as well.
So, if the interference is less in the UK than in the US, why should the FCC have assumed that what was unacceptable in the UK would be acceptable in the US?
Except that the law is entirely on Hasbro's side. No amount of money spent on this cause will change the outcome.
Would it be OK with you if Microsoft changed the name of Longhorn to MS Linux? Linus maintains a trademark on Linux so that people know what they're getting when they get something that calls itself "Linux". If you side with Jared, you believe that Linus does not have the right to protect the name Linux from this sort of dilution.
Really, I can understand people being upset with the over-the-top demands made by the lawyers, but Jared brought this on himself by knowingly infringing the Scrabble trademark. As so many have pointed out, if Hasbro doesn't defend their trademark against any infringement they are aware of, they will lose it forever.
Give *me* a break. Changing something as basic as the file manager so radically is a bigger deal than, well, just about anything else, from an end-user's perspective. I haven't heard that the Finder in OSX was in no way similar to the Finder from OS9, and Windows Explorer has been pretty much the same since Windows 95.
Actually, I do mean usability experts. The big thing going around during the whole spatial Nautilus debacle was that it was a well-known fact among usability experts that users are more efficient if things stay in the same place. As applied by the gnomers to Nautilus this meant that if you open a folder today, it is shown at this size at this location on the screen, with its contents displayed in these locations; when you open it tomorrow, everything will be right where you left it.
So, this is representative of the BS gnome devs and fanboys were spouting at the time. Now, I don't know if the usability experts would have blessed the implementation of spatial Nautilus, or whether the usability experts ever said anything remotely similar to what the gnomers were attributing to them. Either way, the fact is the gnomers were saying it wasn't their fault, it was the usability experts' fault and that the gnomers were just following the divine commandments of the usability experts. Those who disliked spatial Nautilus were therefore blasphemers against the gods of usability and to be excommunicated, unless they posted their views on the Internet, in which case they were to be burned at the stake.
Don't misunderstand me, I think GNOME is a good project and disagree with the overall characterization of the GNOME devs as willfully ignorant of their users' wants and needs, but the spatial Nautilus thing was a gigantic mistake and very poorly handled. Not to mention being pretty humorous from the outside.
lowly user: What is this pus?
gnome dev/fanboy: It's spatial Nautilus! It's easier to use; 9 out of 10 eggheaded usability experts say it's miles better than the old way.
lowly user: I hate it. Take it away. Put it back the way it was before.
gnome dev/fanboy: But you haven't given it a chance! See, re-organize everything on your hard drive and change the way you perform your everyday tasks, and spatial Nautilus will save you 0.5 milliseconds on some operations.
lowly user: I just want it to work the way I'm used to.
gnome dev/fanboy: Well, you're wrong for wanting that.
lowly user: Put it back right now! I'm going insane from all the extra windows!
gnome dev/fanboy: Well, just learn this new shortcut key to close them all when you're done.
lowly user: I don't want them to open in the first place. This sucks. I hate it. Put it back.
gnome dev/fanboy: Man, you are just like the other 10,000 lowly users I've talked to this week. What is wrong with you people? I can't imagine how you Luddites will react to the next version, when we make Dvorak (which is 2% more efficient than QWERTY) the default keyboard layout and force you to crawl over broken glass to change it back!
lowly user: Guess I need to look into purchasing that Windows license after all...
You're right, we do have to assume that everyone with an economic reason to lie will lie. Which would you rather be lied to about, broken/missing smokestack scrubbers on a coal-fired plant, or the release of radioactive gasses/water from a nuclear plant? I suppose you don't care, but most people would prefer to be lied to about coal-fired plants than nuclear ones.
Evolution *is* an indisputable theory. Evolutionary processes have been directly observed in organisms with short enough generations to allow evolutionary change to be observed. You have apparently been hoodwinked by some fundamentalist pharisee who exploited your misunderstanding of the term "theory" as used in science. If you don't believe in evolution, you are a total idiot, in the sense that you are unaware of what is going on around you. Gravity is not a fact, it is a theory. Our current cosmology that has the earth as part of a solar system, which is part of a galaxy, that also is a theory. Saying that "intelligent design" or any other religiously inspired BS is a viable alternative to the "theory" of evolution is as laughably misguided as saying that the sun revolves around the earth.
Religion and science are entirely separate fields of enquiry; neither of them has anything useful to say about the other. While I suppose there may be idiotically anti-religion biased scientists out there who want to meddle in religion by saying things like they have scientific proof that God doesn't exist, the simple fact is that idiotic bias is overwhelmingly found among flat-earthers like yourself trying to mess with science. Until you can find deep enough faith to believe in your God without having to close your eyes to the world around you, you and anyone else who would have science education watered down with "evolution is not a fact" stickers and discussions of mumbo-jumbo fairytales like "intelligent design" will be rightly accused of idiotic anti-science bias.
A real indisputable fact is that "fundamentalist religious forces are demanding the weakening of science and math education in schools". Any participation in the establishment of science and math curricula should be undertaken from the assumption that scientists know more about science than ministers do. Otherwise, why teach science at all? Arguing that evolution is not a sufficiently agreed-upon theory to be taught as the only viable explanation of genetic diversity requires weakening this assumption; no reputable scientist has stepped forward to challenge the basic premises of evolutionary theory. And don't get on about some wacko who says he has proofs against evolutionary theory; that person is not a reputable scientist as defined by the peer review process. The peer review process may not come to the conclusions that you like, and it may have flaws, but the peer review system is what governs science and if we are to throw out the peer review process, we may as well not teach science, because all of science's conclusions have been established through this process.
I absolutely will. My PS2 has gotten a fair amount of abuse (daughter is now four and half) and is having more trouble every day with opening and closing the disc tray. DVD playback is not as smooth as it used to be, either.
I'm sure the problems are all relatively simple mechanical problems, but the time spent ripping it apart and trying to fix it isn't worth the money. Not to mention, if I buy a new one, I can take my time modding the old one without the wife and child complaining about no DVD playback in the living room.
I think solar may be preferred because it requires zero infrastructure beyond shipping, installation, maintenance, and disposal. Also, sunlight is (so far) not something that can be bought and sold, so the intended users won't wind up beholden to someone selling fuel. Lastly, little to no day-to-day effort goes in to consuming solar power, so the user won't have to find time to do anything new other than use the electricity.
I think what's most exciting about this sort of thing is the distribution of decentralized power generation technology based on renewable energy sources. I'm sure if a situation arises where compost gas or wind power or micro-hydroelectric power is a better fit, this kind of project could adapt to use an energy source other than solar.
This sort of thing has happened to me, too. Now, if they don't get the hint, I just pull over and let them drive by. I'd rather be 30 seconds later to whereever I'm going than have to deal with that kind of wacko.