Either Republicans are stupid and incapable of strategic thinking (unlikely), doing anything to ensure consumers continue to waste energy to fill the coffers of energy companies (more likely), or are trying anything they can think of to get something passed they can hang their hat on in the next election (most likely). Amazingly, they just snuck in an amendment to the 2012 Energy and Water Appropriations Act (HR 2354) to extend the ban on 100W incandescent light bulbs…and it passed!

The amendment was delivered by legislator (and climate denier) Rep. Michael Burgess (R-Texas) who has said previously, “The federal government has no right to tell me or any other citizen what type of light bulb to use at home. It is our right to choose.” Could this mean he’s pro-choice? 

Then we have presidential hopeful Rep. Michele Bachmann and her Light Bulb Freedom of Choice Act trying to ”keep the government out of our houses.” Again, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that these two and their party would waste their time saving energy wasting light bulbs (especially since our country is so close to defaulting on our debt). 

For the last five years (see this post from 2006 and this one about Bachmann) I’ve been closely watching what’s going on in energy and, especially, the ONE, MOST WASTEFUL energy use WORLDWIDE: incandescent light bulbs. The US Department of Energy, the European Union energy ministers, and anyone with half-a-brain can do the 2nd grade arithmetic necessary to easily see the energy wasting nature of this lighting source.

Take a look at this chart:  [Read more...]

What the hell are you doing Google? Why are you opening up holes filled with God-knows-what-access-to-us in a browser (the rapidly growing Chrome) which more and more of us are embracing?

While delighted with GooglePlus in a way I’ve never been with Facebook, I’m stunned that Google’s Chrome Web Store is populated with extensions that give an extension developer unbelievable and unprecedented access to our stuff.

Since we don’t yet have a “condom for the internet” other than our own savvy choices on what we do online, most of us inherently trust vendors like Google, Apple, Facebook and others to be smarter than us about security and privacy holes. With the rapid acceleration in new services like GooglePlus—services that are new paradigms and require highly tech-savvy people to dig in and work hard to learn about them—even friends of mine who use Chrome are installing browser extensions like crazy in order to manage all of these services easily.

The kicker? The “verified authors” of these extensions (Extended Sharing; Fixed Top Bar; GPlus Notifications) are written by people/organizations that on the surface seem OK and legitimate…but I sure as hell wouldn’t just hand over the keys to my house, access to my webcam, my browsing history, access to cookie sessions of my active Facebook, LinkedIn and other signed-in-sites (like Schwab or my bank?) to them. Especially since I’m logged in to all of them simultaneously with my Chrome browser and they (or their “partners”) would have access to everything! I highly suggest you think twice about loading extensions if you’re a Chrome user.

But there’s more… [Read more...]