Think about going through international customs at any major airport. You go through US customs after you've already landed. The point is to control smuggling of goods into the US, not to protect airplanes.
I agree, but that reasoning only works for physical goods. If I'm trying to smuggle cocaine into the U.S., then yeah searching me at the border could stop me. But we're talking about data - ones and zeros. If I'm trying to smuggle it into the U.S., I don't need to carry it on my laptop, I could just email it to someone already in the U.S. Or leave it on a server outside the U.S., enter the U.S., open an SSH tunnel to the server, and ftp the files over.
I was pretty young, but I don't remember there being nearly as much "public" information about the stealth fighter until it was used in action. It seems there is alot more details about the F-22 before it was in service. Is that because there is more communication with the taxpayers nowadays, or because they don't want you to ask whats in the left hand?
Back in the 1980s, the Air Force began a new procurement system where two competitors would not just bid on a contract, they'd design and build the actual planes and let the Air Force pick which one got the contract. So Lockheed built the YF-22, Northrop/MD built the YF-23. The YF-23 lost, and the YF-22 became the F-22.
I think this was a cost-cutting measure for the government - the competition creates a large incentive for the manufacturers to keep costs under control and to stick to the production schedule. Previous Pentagon contracts had come under criticism that Defense contractors were using cost overruns and schedule slips to milk money (the $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers). With so much money and so many jobs at stake in the competition, there was probably no way to keep development secret even if they had wanted to. Of course while it saved the government money, the losing companies ended up losing a lot of money, and it's part of the reason McDonnell Douglas eventually went bankrupt and was bought by Boeing.
The same selection process has been used with the JSF (X-32 vs. X-35).
Amd has supposed to have been dead and written off how many times in the past years? Ati as well?
Its nice to know that they still maintain an edge, even though they have no where near the capitol on hand that nVidia and Intel do.
Heck, 10 years ago the press had anointed 3dfx as king while nVidia was a barely-mentioned also-ran indistinguishable from the half-dozen other 3D chipset manufacturers. These companies stumbling on one major release is no big deal. If they stumble on two sequential releases like 3dfx did, then maybe there's something to write about.
Or answer this: If Comcast really is willing to cooperate, why are they so terrified of government regulation? Why is a legally mandated "Bill of Rights" worse for them than what they are proposing?
The obvious answer is, if it was a law, they couldn't simply violate it.
In this particular instance I agree with you. But in the general case, laws tend to be immutable in the short-term (and sometimes the long-term - just look at the Blue Laws still in many States' books), whereas self-regulation can quickly be overhauled if it becomes clear that something isn't working. On a more ideological level, laws are rules made by a committee (who often knows little about the industry), self-regulation is rules made by market forces. Both have their advantages and disadvantages.
The baffling thing to me about this whole thing is that Comcast could solve it really easily - just stop advertising "unlimited" bandwidth and publish the monthly transfer quotas. If they want they can even charge more for higher quotas. Then customers can make an informed decision how much they're willing to pay and self-police their own downloading. Instead for some bizarre reason Comcast (and most ISPs) seem to think the word "unlimited" is some holy marketing term which Shall Not Be Touched, and will go to enormous technically challenging and legally dubious methods to protect it.
He wants to continue getting blank cheques to continue a war that has a true cost for the current 5-year span estimated (once you count extra long-term healthcare costs for injured soldiers and replacement costs for equipment worn-out due to heavier war use) at 3 trillion dollars. And he's willing to continue it for up to 100 years if that's what it takes. That money's got to come from somewhere, and right now it's mainly being borrowed from the Chinese instead of being paid for by USA citizens. Even the Democrats can't waste money at anything close to that rate if they stop the war.
You do realize Social Security and Medicare are headed for $30+ trillion deficits in the same time used to arrive at that $3 trillion figure, right?
You do not want to centralize this. You want it distributed, possibly within each community or even each household. That way you eliminate a large chunk of the power distribution problem, and its less susceptible to localized incidents (a wildfire in AZ casting a huge cloud over the 92x92 mi array in NM plunging the rest of the U.S. into electrical darkness would be very bad).
The 92x92 mi (8464 square miles) quote is for illustrative purposes. For comparison, the Interstate Highway system spans 46,837 miles. If you figure it averages 2.5 lanes per side at 12 feet per lane with 10 foot shoulders, that's 100 feet wide, covering a total of 887 square miles. So 8464 square miles of solar collectors is a massive, massive centralized undertaking. OTOH, there's a total of 4 million miles of roadway in the U.S. covering tens of thousands of square miles, most of it built relatively easily in a distributed fashion.
People think this is a matte vs. glossy debate. In reality, it's a matte vs. cheap glossy vs. expensive glossy debate. The better glossy screens have better anti-reflective coatings on them. Go to an Office Depot and look at the glossy laptop screens. Some of them will look like mirrors. Others will hardly show any reflection. The higher end Sonys in particular seem to be very good at reducing reflections on their glossy screens. My first glossy screen was my Sony S360P and it was wonderful - I hardly ever noticed any reflections. My next glossy screen was almost like a mirror, and I had to change to dark shirts to use the thing comfortably.
I did an experiment a while back and used the exposure meter on my DSLR to measure the difference in contrast between a normal picture and a "black" on a glossy screen. I got a contrast ratio of 80:1
FWIW, I calibrate my screens with a colorimeter for graphics work. One step of the process is to measure the black and white points. The last screen I measured (Toshiba M400 tablet) had a contrast ratio of about 300:1 (0.48 lumens black, 147 lumens white). My Dell 2405FPW standalone LCD display had a contrast ratio over 900:1 IIRC (advertised as 1000:1).
I suspect the difference here is ambient lighting. When you pointed the camera at the screen, the screen was reflecting stray room light. So your black showed up as a "real life use" black. When manufacturers measure these things for the specs, they do what my colorimeter does - sit on top of the screen blocking out any stray light, and measure the brightness.
So don't blame the specs, my measurements say they are pretty accurate for what they represent. Take them to mean the best contrast ratio you can expect under ideal (completely dark) conditions. If it bothers you that the contrast ratio in your room sucks, then turn off the lights.
In a neutral network, each content provider has to negotiate only one contract with their connectivity provider. So if there are N content providers, there are N contracts.
If you ditch net neutrality, each content provider has to negotiate contracts with every connectivity provider. So if there are N content providers and M ISPs, the system needs up to M*N contracts to function. That's a huge market inefficiency. Since ditching net neutrality doesn't magically create more bandwidth (it only prioritizes it), the system as a whole has gained zero additional capability at the cost of an enormous amount of extra paperwork. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, where each individual acting in their own best interests will result in the worst possible outcome for the system as a whole.
Also, the ISPs have yet to realized that this is a two-way street. If they start charging unaffiliated content providers extra money, the natural response is going to be content providers "unionizing" to increase their negotiating clout. Suddenly they'll be demanding lower network connectivity prices than they were initially charged. "You ISPs are getting money from other content providers, but haven't dropped your prices! We demand the prices you charge us reflect your new cost of operation."
The end result of all this will be a lot of running around to arrive at exactly where we started. It's stupid, wasteful, and inefficient. That's why net neutrality makes sense. If there's a bandwidth problem, the solution is to add more bandwidth; none of this stealing from the right hand to pay the left silliness.
Not to mention the serious decline in the number of open takeoff and landing spots at many airports. The rise in air travel combined with the trend towards smaller aircraft has helped choke many of them.
Airlines are being faced with the situation of not having the ability to add more and more flights to their schedules from certain locations. So it's not even necessarily a choice between fuel cost X and fuel cost Y. More like "We've got Z number of landing spots, and we can free up three of them with one plane. We can serve other markets with the two open spots the A380 gives us."
There are plenty of open slots. It's just the major hub airports which are having capacity problems. Both the A380 and 787 were designed as solutions to this problem. The A380 tries to solve it by increasing capacity per plane when flying hub to hub. The 787 tries to solve it by eliminating the hub and flying point to point.
The main rationale for using a hub is fuel efficiency by reducing the overall number of flights. A fuel efficient small plane can tip the balance the other way and make point to point routes economically viable again, as well as allowing less-used airports become hubs (since the number of passengers per plane is lower, you don't need to as many passengers to justify a hub flight). Based on the number of pre-orders the 787 has gotten, it would appear that the airlines all did the math and it came out in favor of the point to point routes.
Our eyes can differentiate shades and hues of green better than any other colours -- this is an inherited survival trait from when it was important to see predators and distinguish ripe from almost-ripe
Not quite. Our eyes are most sensitive to green simply because that's the frequency at which sunlight is strongest. Red is next most sensitive, while blue is least sensitive. Which matches exactly with the spectra strength of sunlight. (Actually, the red cones are most sensitive around yellow/orange, and the color red is extrapolated by your brain from a lack of response from the rods and green cones.)
I once plugged my studio monitors (aka really nice headphones) into my computer while gaming. You can tell the difference between good and bad audio if you have good speakers or monitors. Unfortunately, the audio became so clear that it was obvious the sound was synthesized or using looped samples. It actually detracted from my enjoyment of the game, so I went back to the $20 no-name speakers.
It's kinda like how the switch from CRTs to LCDs made text razor-sharp, but it exaggerated the "jaggies" in graphics to the point that anti-aliasing became a mainstream feature in video cards.
I was discussing this at lunch yesterday with some coworkers, and most of us thought it was an incredible waste of money. How many people do you know that when they want something, they open up their browser and just type what they want plus.com right into the address bar? Only complete fools do that and I'm honestly sure that population subset is very small and made up of old people.
It's actually a huge market worth hundreds of millions if not billions annually. I couldn't believe it when I first heard about it either, but it turns out a rather significant number of people do search for stuff by just typing search terms into the URL field, and they buy stuff based on where it leads them. If you think about it, it's the exact same business model as Google except whereas Google returns search results for typing in words into their search field, these domains return "search results" for typing in words into the URL field. So if Google can make gobs of money from people who know they're searching, these sites can make gobs of money from people who don't know the difference between IE and "the Internet" (i.e. don't know the difference between the URL field and a Google or Yahoo or MSN search field).
This is pretty ridiculous. If the professor wants to protect his copyright, then he shouldn't be putting the material up on the blackboard for everyone to freely see.
Last time I checked, the point of going to class is to get notes and learn new material. If you are forbidden to take notes, why go?
You're thinking of trade secrets. The whole point of copyright is to allow the copyright holder to disseminate his work in whatever manner he sees fit. If the professor wishes to share his lecture with students in a class but not with a company wanting to distribute it as an ebook, that is his prerogative. In other words, just because the professor consented to students copying his work for their own use, that does not mean he also granted the students (or the ebook company) the right to redistribute it.
What's the difference with the *IAA? As far as I know, only the most extreme elements of the anti-*IAA movement believe copyright should be abolished. Most believe copyright is useful, but the pendulum has swung too far in favor of copyright holders. For the professor's actions to parallel the *IAA, he would have to be filing lawsuits against random students and ebook distributors in a fishing expedition. Instead, he's doing exactly what everyone here has been asking of the *IAA - track down through legal means exactly who is doing the infringing, and file suit against them.
Contemporary projectors require ungodly amounts of light because they're horribly inefficient. They're generating a broad-spectrum light (basically light at all visible wavelengths plus some) from an incandescent light source. That's already converting probably 90% of the energy into heat. Then they're running it through (for DLP) three color filters in sequence, so convert on average 67% more of the light energy into heat. Then each filter removes everything except a narrow band of red, green, or blue, so throw away maybe another 80% or so. Finally, the optics don't have perfect transmission, and will scatter some light sideways (the reason why the projector lens looks bright when viewed from the side), so throw away another 5% or so. So if my math is right 10% * 33% * 20% * 95% = ~0.6% of the energy that goes into producing the light actually gets displayed on the screen, the rest becomes heat.
By using something like diode lasers as your light source, you can produce only the narrow band of red, green, or blue you need, only when you need it, and only where you need it. Thus no waste light which gets converted into heat.
Dithering won't help; it puts noise into a nice, smooth gradient.
You're thinking of spatial dithering. LCD panels can use both spatial dithering and temporal dithering. With temporal dithering on a 6-bit panel, the sub-pixel can only be 64 possible states*, but you flip it rapidly between two states to approximate something in between. This is generally invisible to most people. If you can see older fluorescent lights flicker like I can, you may be able to notice it; but for most people for all intents and purposes it is indistinguishable from having 256 states. I can see it when I scan rapidly across my screen, but for static photo processing work it hasn't been a problem. Would I prefer a true 8-bit panel? Of course, but the difference is nowhere near the "98% fewer" or "dithered banding" people are complaining about.
*This in-betweening process is what knocks down the available number of colors on 6-bit displays to 16.2 million instead of 16.7 million.
That patents developed from government-sponsored research should belong to the public (i.e. the government), and not to the companies doing the research?
I find this sadly typical of the kind of defective fiscal NASA-think that emerged when the engineers running things were replaced by professional administrators (and the political thinking that made that happen). The rovers are the single most successful high profile mission since the Apollo 13 rescue. The good PR generated is worth the budget. Witness the persistence of positive media reports about the success in excess of the intended mission, and compare with the other long term, ongoing mission ISS and the positive reactions of those who see those reports.
Maybe that's why the rover program is the one being cut? If a low-profile program had its budget cut, it'd have almost zero chance of being reinstated. But cut the budget for their highest profile program, and the PR should generate enormous public sentiment and pressure on Congress to provide additional funding. It worked for Hubble, didn't it?
I realized one of the things I hated so much about it was how "strict" engineering is. In the sense that, if you're given a problem to solve, there's only one correct answer, and only one (or maybe 2) correct ways to arrive at that answer.
It's an engineering class. The point is to get you to learn all the different ways to arrive at the answer. As such, the problems you're assigned are specifically designed to have only one or two ways to solve it. They force you to solve it that way so you'll have that experience under your belt to draw upon in the future. If they let you graduate after solving everything the one way you happened to like solving things, then you'd be a one-trick pony and the first time you ran into a real world problem which couldn't be solved the way you liked to solve them, you'd be dead in the water. Once you're out of school and dealing with real-world engineering problems, you have more freedom than you could ever imagine in how you go about solving them. If you've learned all the different ways to solve them, then you can rely on your judgment and experience to decide which method would work best for this particular problem.
Like art, the engineering courses I took encouraged thinking outside the box (in fact that's one of the reasons I noticed math and hard sciences people often didn't like engineering - the open-ended nature of applying the math and sciences). But unlike art, engineering is also about efficiency. You don't have the luxury of being able to go with whichever in-box or out-of-box solution happens to strike your fancy. In addition to thinking outside the box, you also have to know everything about thinking inside the box because maybe (in fact often) the best solution resides inside the box entirely. The following apocryphal story was immensely popular with all the engineering students at my schools, and demonstrates this point clearly:
The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the University of Copenhagen:
"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."
One student replied:
"You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."
This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.
The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.
For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:
"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer."
"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper."
"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground leve
Interestingly, AFAIK that abortion clinic bombing is the only one I've been able to find which caused a fatality in the U.S. The perpetrator was Eric Rudolph, aka the Atlanta Olympics bomber, so I think it's safe to say he's unrepresentative of any group except murderers who kill randomly. It would seem that if there's an organized group conducting abortion clinic bombings, they're going out of their way to avoid human casualties.
i cannot understand why ANYBODY would want to vote for the party that has done more to destroy the USA in the last 7 years than any other party in my memory
So, people who vote for a straight party ticket are a tool of the Demo-Repub duocracy in control of the government. But people who vote for an individual candidate regardless of party affiliation are contributing to that party's corruption of the government. Which is it?
The truth is the wider one casts one's net, the more trash you'll collect. When defending a candidate, people will use as small a net as possible, attributing responsibility only for the candidate's direct actions. When attacking a candidate, people will use as wide a net as possible, attributing responsibility for the party's (and for those outside the U.S., the country's) actions to the candidate.
For consistency's sake, pick one size net and use it for all cases. If you feel party affiliation should disqualify a candidate from your vote, then you should be voting a straight party (or anti-party) ticket all the time. If you feel individual candidates should be appraised on their individual actions (with party affiliation being only a small factor), then never vote for or against someone just because they're a member of a certain party. And there is no right answer here. Just because you feel everyone should vote along party lines doesn't mean those who vote otherwise are without merit. They've just chosen to vote for or against people instead of parties.
Here in Washington state we don't burn much coal so all those CFLs do not save us from mercury pollution.
All of North America's electricity is connected into one big grid. If Washington doesn't use all the power it generates, the excess gets fed (and sold) to other states. Hydro and nuclear run pretty much full power all the time, wind when available. The power generator that gets turned on any time there's a shortfall is coal.
So yes your CFLs in Washington prevent coal plants from burning in Indiana. If you were using regular bulbs instead of CFLs, a little bit more of the hydro power in Washington would be used to keep your bulbs lit. That means a little less excess power would be available for Idaho, meaning a little less for Montana, meaning a little less for the Dakotas, etc. When the shortage finally reaches Indiana, they fire up a coal plant to make up the difference.
even though America's military budget is already larger than the military budgets of every other country in the world, combined.
Reference please? Everything I've seen puts it between 25%-33% the world's military spending; which is not that far off from being 27% of the world's GDP.
But where did Americans learn such a distorted premise from originally?
From their childhood.
As children we are told, over and over, that there are "bad people" and "good people". Bad people do bad things, and good people do good things. If you're good you can't do bad things, and if you're bad you can't do good things. It's all very simple. It's also quite obviously completely wrong.
The trouble is, secretly in their heads, a lot of people never, ever, get over this viewpoint. Ever.
I don't think that's quite it. In effect you're doing the same thing you're accusing other people of doing. You're dividing the world into "good people" (folks like you who got over this good people / bad people thing) and "bad people" (folks who never unlearned the good people / bad people thing). Then you're placing blame for the problem squarely at the foot of the "bad people".
IMHO the problem is more fundamental. Unhindered surveillance only has negative consequences for discrete groups. On a concrete level, a group conducting legal activities but in political disfavor would be negatively impacted by domestic spying. But unless you're a member of that group, it's not your problem. On an abstract level of course, the fact that you could belong to one of those groups should be enough rationale to get people worried about domestic spying. But people tend to think on a more concrete level so they often fail to consider the abstraction of "what if it were me?". The quote about the authorities coming for the Jews, communists, etc. and nobody being left to protest when they come for you sums up the problem best I think.
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I think this was a cost-cutting measure for the government - the competition creates a large incentive for the manufacturers to keep costs under control and to stick to the production schedule. Previous Pentagon contracts had come under criticism that Defense contractors were using cost overruns and schedule slips to milk money (the $600 toilet seats and $400 hammers). With so much money and so many jobs at stake in the competition, there was probably no way to keep development secret even if they had wanted to. Of course while it saved the government money, the losing companies ended up losing a lot of money, and it's part of the reason McDonnell Douglas eventually went bankrupt and was bought by Boeing.
The same selection process has been used with the JSF (X-32 vs. X-35).
The baffling thing to me about this whole thing is that Comcast could solve it really easily - just stop advertising "unlimited" bandwidth and publish the monthly transfer quotas. If they want they can even charge more for higher quotas. Then customers can make an informed decision how much they're willing to pay and self-police their own downloading. Instead for some bizarre reason Comcast (and most ISPs) seem to think the word "unlimited" is some holy marketing term which Shall Not Be Touched, and will go to enormous technically challenging and legally dubious methods to protect it.
The 92x92 mi (8464 square miles) quote is for illustrative purposes. For comparison, the Interstate Highway system spans 46,837 miles. If you figure it averages 2.5 lanes per side at 12 feet per lane with 10 foot shoulders, that's 100 feet wide, covering a total of 887 square miles. So 8464 square miles of solar collectors is a massive, massive centralized undertaking. OTOH, there's a total of 4 million miles of roadway in the U.S. covering tens of thousands of square miles, most of it built relatively easily in a distributed fashion.
People think this is a matte vs. glossy debate. In reality, it's a matte vs. cheap glossy vs. expensive glossy debate. The better glossy screens have better anti-reflective coatings on them. Go to an Office Depot and look at the glossy laptop screens. Some of them will look like mirrors. Others will hardly show any reflection. The higher end Sonys in particular seem to be very good at reducing reflections on their glossy screens. My first glossy screen was my Sony S360P and it was wonderful - I hardly ever noticed any reflections. My next glossy screen was almost like a mirror, and I had to change to dark shirts to use the thing comfortably.
I suspect the difference here is ambient lighting. When you pointed the camera at the screen, the screen was reflecting stray room light. So your black showed up as a "real life use" black. When manufacturers measure these things for the specs, they do what my colorimeter does - sit on top of the screen blocking out any stray light, and measure the brightness.
So don't blame the specs, my measurements say they are pretty accurate for what they represent. Take them to mean the best contrast ratio you can expect under ideal (completely dark) conditions. If it bothers you that the contrast ratio in your room sucks, then turn off the lights.
If you ditch net neutrality, each content provider has to negotiate contracts with every connectivity provider. So if there are N content providers and M ISPs, the system needs up to M*N contracts to function. That's a huge market inefficiency. Since ditching net neutrality doesn't magically create more bandwidth (it only prioritizes it), the system as a whole has gained zero additional capability at the cost of an enormous amount of extra paperwork. It's a classic tragedy of the commons, where each individual acting in their own best interests will result in the worst possible outcome for the system as a whole.
Also, the ISPs have yet to realized that this is a two-way street. If they start charging unaffiliated content providers extra money, the natural response is going to be content providers "unionizing" to increase their negotiating clout. Suddenly they'll be demanding lower network connectivity prices than they were initially charged. "You ISPs are getting money from other content providers, but haven't dropped your prices! We demand the prices you charge us reflect your new cost of operation."
The end result of all this will be a lot of running around to arrive at exactly where we started. It's stupid, wasteful, and inefficient. That's why net neutrality makes sense. If there's a bandwidth problem, the solution is to add more bandwidth; none of this stealing from the right hand to pay the left silliness.
The main rationale for using a hub is fuel efficiency by reducing the overall number of flights. A fuel efficient small plane can tip the balance the other way and make point to point routes economically viable again, as well as allowing less-used airports become hubs (since the number of passengers per plane is lower, you don't need to as many passengers to justify a hub flight). Based on the number of pre-orders the 787 has gotten, it would appear that the airlines all did the math and it came out in favor of the point to point routes.
It's kinda like how the switch from CRTs to LCDs made text razor-sharp, but it exaggerated the "jaggies" in graphics to the point that anti-aliasing became a mainstream feature in video cards.
What's the difference with the *IAA? As far as I know, only the most extreme elements of the anti-*IAA movement believe copyright should be abolished. Most believe copyright is useful, but the pendulum has swung too far in favor of copyright holders. For the professor's actions to parallel the *IAA, he would have to be filing lawsuits against random students and ebook distributors in a fishing expedition. Instead, he's doing exactly what everyone here has been asking of the *IAA - track down through legal means exactly who is doing the infringing, and file suit against them.
By using something like diode lasers as your light source, you can produce only the narrow band of red, green, or blue you need, only when you need it, and only where you need it. Thus no waste light which gets converted into heat.
*This in-betweening process is what knocks down the available number of colors on 6-bit displays to 16.2 million instead of 16.7 million.
That patents developed from government-sponsored research should belong to the public (i.e. the government), and not to the companies doing the research?
It's an engineering class. The point is to get you to learn all the different ways to arrive at the answer. As such, the problems you're assigned are specifically designed to have only one or two ways to solve it. They force you to solve it that way so you'll have that experience under your belt to draw upon in the future. If they let you graduate after solving everything the one way you happened to like solving things, then you'd be a one-trick pony and the first time you ran into a real world problem which couldn't be solved the way you liked to solve them, you'd be dead in the water. Once you're out of school and dealing with real-world engineering problems, you have more freedom than you could ever imagine in how you go about solving them. If you've learned all the different ways to solve them, then you can rely on your judgment and experience to decide which method would work best for this particular problem.
Like art, the engineering courses I took encouraged thinking outside the box (in fact that's one of the reasons I noticed math and hard sciences people often didn't like engineering - the open-ended nature of applying the math and sciences). But unlike art, engineering is also about efficiency. You don't have the luxury of being able to go with whichever in-box or out-of-box solution happens to strike your fancy. In addition to thinking outside the box, you also have to know everything about thinking inside the box because maybe (in fact often) the best solution resides inside the box entirely. The following apocryphal story was immensely popular with all the engineering students at my schools, and demonstrates this point clearly:
Interestingly, AFAIK that abortion clinic bombing is the only one I've been able to find which caused a fatality in the U.S. The perpetrator was Eric Rudolph, aka the Atlanta Olympics bomber, so I think it's safe to say he's unrepresentative of any group except murderers who kill randomly. It would seem that if there's an organized group conducting abortion clinic bombings, they're going out of their way to avoid human casualties.
The truth is the wider one casts one's net, the more trash you'll collect. When defending a candidate, people will use as small a net as possible, attributing responsibility only for the candidate's direct actions. When attacking a candidate, people will use as wide a net as possible, attributing responsibility for the party's (and for those outside the U.S., the country's) actions to the candidate.
For consistency's sake, pick one size net and use it for all cases. If you feel party affiliation should disqualify a candidate from your vote, then you should be voting a straight party (or anti-party) ticket all the time. If you feel individual candidates should be appraised on their individual actions (with party affiliation being only a small factor), then never vote for or against someone just because they're a member of a certain party. And there is no right answer here. Just because you feel everyone should vote along party lines doesn't mean those who vote otherwise are without merit. They've just chosen to vote for or against people instead of parties.
So yes your CFLs in Washington prevent coal plants from burning in Indiana. If you were using regular bulbs instead of CFLs, a little bit more of the hydro power in Washington would be used to keep your bulbs lit. That means a little less excess power would be available for Idaho, meaning a little less for Montana, meaning a little less for the Dakotas, etc. When the shortage finally reaches Indiana, they fire up a coal plant to make up the difference.
IMHO the problem is more fundamental. Unhindered surveillance only has negative consequences for discrete groups. On a concrete level, a group conducting legal activities but in political disfavor would be negatively impacted by domestic spying. But unless you're a member of that group, it's not your problem. On an abstract level of course, the fact that you could belong to one of those groups should be enough rationale to get people worried about domestic spying. But people tend to think on a more concrete level so they often fail to consider the abstraction of "what if it were me?". The quote about the authorities coming for the Jews, communists, etc. and nobody being left to protest when they come for you sums up the problem best I think.