Minor correction - they were named after Roman emperors, not quite gods. Still not great role models, so point taken.
That's a matter of perspective: followers of the Roman Imperial cult would have considered them to be gods, followers of most other religions obviously wouldn't. Since their elevation to godhood would have been formalised by the senate, and since we have firm evidence that both individuals existed, you could argue that as deities go their claims are stronger than most.
(Granted I'm not sure which came first, month naming or apotheosis - quite possibly the former.)
My problem is that once you cross the line from a policy of keeping religion out of the calendar system to one of keeping Christianity out, you are entering questionable territory that I for one would be reluctant to endorse in any way. Even if you frame it as polytheism in, monotheism out, I think that destroys any case that CE/BCE should be adopted on the grounds of avoiding religious bias.
Besides, if it is acceptable to retcon the epoch to avoid disruption, surely it would be logical to retcon AD to mean something else so that you don't need to change anything?
AD = CE. CE expands as Common Era, and is generally more accepted in a global context, because it doesn't reference a god you may not believe in or adhere to. More than half the world's population does not follow an Abrahamic religion. The dates are exactly the same, just a different name.
You did know that AD means "Anno Domini", right? In English, that's "the year of our Lord". If you want to claim adherence to the Christain God, that's fine. You have that right. But don't expect me to pay lip service to a God that, to me, comes off as a petty, cliquish and vindictive sort, according to your own holy books.
Not my god either, but I see two objections to trying to replace AD with CE:
Firstly, it doesn't achieve your stated aim of avoiding reference to Christianity, because it continues to use what was (probably incorrectly) thought to be the year of Christ's birth as its epoch. Any pretence that the one is not derived from the other is frankly ridiculous.
Secondly, I can't comment about yourself, but most CE proponents are quite happy to use a calendar system that is replete with reference to other deities such as Thursday after Thor, January after Janus and so on. Both July and August are named after gods who we know from our history books were not exactly role models for ethical behaviour. In this context it is hard to believe that aversion to the term AD is driven by a purely secular motivation.
The irony is: The particles in the burning are what are keeping the effects of green house gasses at bay.
They do indeed, but that is not necessarily a good thing because the effects are short-term whereas CO2 accumulates over the long term. This pushes back the day of reckoning, which would be all well and good if we used that respite to do something about emissions, but the reality is that obscuring the short term effects makes it more difficult to convince people that there really is a long-term problem. When we eventually reach the point where the effects are obvious and we are forced to cut back, the consequences are likely to be significantly worse than they would have been otherwise.
Germany would have to store at least gigawatt-hours of power.
First of all, while Gigawatt-hours are indeed the right unit, that's a unit for Energy. With 41 Million households in Germany, and 4kWh of storage capacity planned for the average installation, Gigawatt hours are reached when less than 1% of the households run one of those home battery storage devices. Since there are already around 1 million photovoltaic installations connected to the public grid, I'd say that this a a goal that should be easy to achieve within 5-10 years.
1% sounds far too low, because when you average that across all households you have 1% of 4kWh which is only 40Wh. That would be respectable enough if renewables were only supplying 1% of the power, but at 40%+ it isn't very much. (To put this in perspective, the battery in an iPad 3 holds 42.5W.)
On a more positive note, they have at least identified that storage is a problem that needs to be solved if renewable capacity is to expand much more than it has done already in Germany, and are prepared to spend real money to do something about it. I am sceptical as to what can realistically be achieved, but it would be great if they were able to drive down the cost of energy storage even by a modest amount because that would expand the range of circumstances where renewables are viable. If they fail then at least we know what doesn't work, which will help to settle the question of whether or not other sources such as nuclear power are needed. (I'm not greatly bothered what the answer is, we just need to know for sure one way or the other.)
Somehow nobody noticed that temperatures have not gone up in 16 years while CO2 levels climbed. So much for this new pagan religion.
Some people understand the importance of not drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term measurements in the presence of noise, and avoid cherry-picking the start date for their trend lines.
For information, the Ratner Effect is named after Gerald Ratner, the former CEO of a British jewellery company, and has nothing to do with Brett Ratner.
(Apologies if you knew this and there is some subtle humour that I'm missing.)
Nokia's market share was already dropping rapidly when Stephen Elop was brought on board.
Dropping in terms of relative market share, yes, but still very healthy in terms of absolute sales and profitability. That was a long-term problem for Symbian, but not necessarily for Nokia because they were already starting to phase in its replacement (Maemo/Meego).
What Elop succeeded in doing was to turn a long-term problem into a short-term crisis. Specifically, rather than allowing Symbian to continue its slow, market-driven decline he forced it into a nosedive, while at the same time switching its dedicated successor from a product that was ready to ship to one that would not be ready for some time.
It is true that Nokia's development of Maemo/Meego had been proceeding far to slowly and inefficiently, and that at least cannot be blamed on Elop, but it is hard to imagine how Nokia could have done worse by sticking with Symbian and Meego compared to the spectacular decline that resulted from adopting Windows Phone.
let's make "Elop" a verb meaning to abandon a company's popular proven products in favor of an over-designed unusable system, which causes the company to lose sales
Look up the term 'Elop Effect', defined as what happens when you combine the Osborne Effect (making your current product appear obsolete by prematurely pre-announcing its successor) and the Ratner Effect (damaging sales by disparaging your own products).
Five nuclear power plants in the US have closed this year, due to a combination of competitive and operating issues. An industry analyst quoted in the article expects more plant closures to come.
... which shows that gas can undercut nuclear at current prices (and subject to current environmental regulations). So, yes, if you think it is OK to carry on burning fossil fuels, then nuclear power does not make economic sense at the moment. The same goes for wind and solar power in most circumstances.
The case for switching to nuclear and/or renewable power rests on the premise that continued fossil fuel use is not sustainable. Cheap gas prices reflect increased availability of the fuel, but not increased capacity to deal with the resulting CO2 emissions.
GNU/Linux would be helped if they would allow some commercialization IMHO without any ability to make revenue, who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work?
GNU/Linux already allows proprietary userspace programs. To avoid any doubt on this point, the licence file for the kernel explicitly states that a program does not become a derived work merely by using normal system calls. Neither GCC nor Glibc prevent proprietary programs from being compiled and executed.
Kernel drivers are supposed to be GPL, but manufacturers are already making money on the hardware, and even on fully-closed platforms would not usually make any extra money from the drivers. In most cases I can see no good reason why the driver needs to be protected with a propietary licence, but even if it did then there are ways of achieving that which have historically been tolerated and (in some cases at least) are arguably legal.
True, but I strongly suspect the comment I replied to was referring to Linux rather than LynxOS.
(Not that the vendors of LynxOS appear to have anything against military use. It is mostly non-OSD-compliant freeware that tends to have field-of-use restrictions, as opposed to software that is fully propietary or fully Open Source.)
Hey, when you signed on to open source you agreed you had no control over what it ended up being used for.
Indeed, and for good reason. There are almost limitless ways in which a software author might want to discriminate against fields of use, and no prospect of achieving global consensus on what should or should not be allowed. One of the key benefits of Open Source is that you don't have to read the licence of every single package you install to find out whether it is safe to use. The most practicable way to achieve this is to prohibit restrictions on what you can use the software for.
Absolutely it is. It just happens to be safer than the current alternatives, and a lot safer than going back to the stone age and doing without power.
Anyone who really cares about safety (or indeed the environment) should be focussed on one thing only: eliminating coal as a source of energy. Until that happens, all of this scaremongering is just a distraction.
Better would be to use it in a fast neutron reactor, at which point the so-called waste becomes fuel.
(Current reactors only used about 1% of the available energy. We can certainly improve on the current storage arrangements, but burying it permanently would be very wasteful.)
Take a look at the last paragraph of that article:
Its cash reserves at the end of the quarter stood at 3.6 billion euros.
Also that was in December 2012 at the peak of their losses, when they had reason to start worrying about how long the money would last. Up to the point where Nokia signed up with Microsoft in early 2011 they had been making a fairly healthy profit, so had no urgent need for the cash they were sitting on and certainly weren't desperate for more.
They might have been blinded by the billions of dollars Microsoft gave them, right when Nokia was in serious trouble and desperate for cash...
They weren't desperate for cash. They still have a fair amount in the bank now, despite some eye-watering losses in the last couple of years.
(Prior to the 'burning platform' memo they were concerned about a gradual long-term decline in smartphone market share. Quite why their CEO would choose to turn that into a steep short-term decline I don't know, but market share was the issue they were trying to address. The payments from Microsoft may look large as a subsidy per phone, but that is only because Nokia smartphone sales have shrunk to a small fraction of what they previously were. If WP had been a success then the platform support payments would not be nearly as significant.)
In the sense that few people want to buy their phones that's certainly true, but it isn't through lack of trying: Nokia has spent a huge amount on marketing to little effect.
Nokia Lumia's are actually really great phones and the OS is good, but iPhone has made such a huge name of itself that it is really hard to compete with it.
Apple have never had more than about 20% market share, and don't forget that Microsoft was in the smartphone business five years before Apple and seven years before Google. They once had a fairly respectable market share themselves, and their control of the PC market to use as leverage, so I really don't think that Microsoft's failure in the smartphone market has anything to do with lack of opportunity.
But we should all be happy that they are trying to compete, because competition is good for customers.
Dubious if the platform is incompatible, locks you into Microsoft, and brings down Nokia as it implodes leaving most of the hardware market in the hands of two manufacturers (Samsung and Apple).
Besides, dominance by Android isn't necessarily bad for competition, because it provides compatibility without being fully controlled by one company (not even by Google - it's too easy to fork). It would be better for consumers if Nokia released some Android phones in order to provide real competition to Samsung. Unfortunately they seem more interested in promoting the interests of Microsoft than ensuring their own survival.
I don't think there is a low dose minimum. Sure we have background radiation. So this plus whatever folks received from the leakage from the Fukushima plants is considered low? What BS. [...] But looking at the basic physics and the effects of radioactive molecules on nearby cells, we can with a certain amount of certainty say that radiation in any amount will have not so good effects on the human body.
If you follow that line of reasoning then you are left with a choice between declaring large parts of the world uninhabitable due to background radiation (and banning air travel), or treating natural and artificial exposure differently even when both are elective.
Japan, as it happens, has a relatively low natural background level under normal circumstances. Doubling it sounds pretty bad but is actually no worse than the average for the USA. Cornwall in England is about five times higher: should we evacuate, or is it OK because it is natural?
There is a strip of land that was downwind of the reactors at the time of the accident with levels that few if any places on Earth would match from natural sources. Avoiding long-term exposure at those levels is sensible; panicking about a fractional increase over the background level is not.
The problem with your argumentation is that you simply don't know how power grids work.
Read what I actually said in my post, then consider the fact that whereas 5-10% wind or solar PV can be equated to taking a handful of coal/gas/nuclear plants offline for maintenance, 50-100% is an entirely different proposition.
Yes you can use gas for backup, if you don't mind using fossil fuels and having a very large amount of spare generating capacity.
No you can't solve the problem with hydroelectric power (except for a few highly-favourable locations like Norway) due to lack of suitable sites.
I really hope that we solve these problems someday, but fear it is wishful thinking to imagine that we can do so now.
You should be responsible for what happens on your internet connection and online accounts...
The Internet wouldn't be economically viable if you applied that rule equally to everyone, because no company could risk the liability of providing any form of large-scale transit service.
You could set some arbitrary dividing line somewhere on the scale from 'householder' to 'multinational telecoms corporation', but why should they have greater protection under the law when they provide a service to me, than I have providing a service to my family?
(Not counting the obvious answer that they have more money to pay lobbyists...)
Coal has the same optimization problems meeting the demand curve as renewables, but all that existing complexity is hidden when you plug the TV into the wall and it demonstrably 'just works'.
You have the same basic issue of keeping supply and demand in balance, true, but that doesn't mean that the problems are comparably serious or equally tractable.
The two big problems with wind and solar PV are that (a) you have no control over when you can generate electricity and (b) the variations are correlated over large geographic areas. To work round that you either need a very large amount of storage capacity (infeasibly large in most locations using current technology), or backup from a dispatchable generating technology (probably gas - not as bad as coal, but still not sustainable).
Solve the storage problem then wind and PV become much more interesting. Otherwise they may still make sense as a small percentage of the mix but they cannot be considered scalable.
Solar thermal goes some way towards solving the diurnal problem, but not the seasonal problem. Hydro is great because you can use it for storage, but most of the viable sites are already in use. Geothermal power is good for baseload, but has geographical constraints and isn't as green as you might think. That leaves nuclear power, or if that is considered unacceptable for political reasons, fossil fuels (as we are currently seeing in Germany).
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Both July and August are named after gods
Minor correction - they were named after Roman emperors, not quite gods. Still not great role models, so point taken.
That's a matter of perspective: followers of the Roman Imperial cult would have considered them to be gods, followers of most other religions obviously wouldn't. Since their elevation to godhood would have been formalised by the senate, and since we have firm evidence that both individuals existed, you could argue that as deities go their claims are stronger than most.
(Granted I'm not sure which came first, month naming or apotheosis - quite possibly the former.)
My problem is that once you cross the line from a policy of keeping religion out of the calendar system to one of keeping Christianity out, you are entering questionable territory that I for one would be reluctant to endorse in any way. Even if you frame it as polytheism in, monotheism out, I think that destroys any case that CE/BCE should be adopted on the grounds of avoiding religious bias.
Besides, if it is acceptable to retcon the epoch to avoid disruption, surely it would be logical to retcon AD to mean something else so that you don't need to change anything?
AD = CE. CE expands as Common Era, and is generally more accepted in a global context, because it doesn't reference a god you may not believe in or adhere to. More than half the world's population does not follow an Abrahamic religion. The dates are exactly the same, just a different name.
You did know that AD means "Anno Domini", right? In English, that's "the year of our Lord". If you want to claim adherence to the Christain God, that's fine. You have that right. But don't expect me to pay lip service to a God that, to me, comes off as a petty, cliquish and vindictive sort, according to your own holy books.
Not my god either, but I see two objections to trying to replace AD with CE:
Firstly, it doesn't achieve your stated aim of avoiding reference to Christianity, because it continues to use what was (probably incorrectly) thought to be the year of Christ's birth as its epoch. Any pretence that the one is not derived from the other is frankly ridiculous.
Secondly, I can't comment about yourself, but most CE proponents are quite happy to use a calendar system that is replete with reference to other deities such as Thursday after Thor, January after Janus and so on. Both July and August are named after gods who we know from our history books were not exactly role models for ethical behaviour. In this context it is hard to believe that aversion to the term AD is driven by a purely secular motivation.
The irony is: The particles in the burning are what are keeping the effects of green house gasses at bay.
They do indeed, but that is not necessarily a good thing because the effects are short-term whereas CO2 accumulates over the long term. This pushes back the day of reckoning, which would be all well and good if we used that respite to do something about emissions, but the reality is that obscuring the short term effects makes it more difficult to convince people that there really is a long-term problem. When we eventually reach the point where the effects are obvious and we are forced to cut back, the consequences are likely to be significantly worse than they would have been otherwise.
Oops - make that 42.5Wh rather than 42.5W.
Germany would have to store at least gigawatt-hours of power.
First of all, while Gigawatt-hours are indeed the right unit, that's a unit for Energy. With 41 Million households in Germany, and 4kWh of storage capacity planned for the average installation, Gigawatt hours are reached when less than 1% of the households run one of those home battery storage devices. Since there are already around 1 million photovoltaic installations connected to the public grid, I'd say that this a a goal that should be easy to achieve within 5-10 years.
1% sounds far too low, because when you average that across all households you have 1% of 4kWh which is only 40Wh. That would be respectable enough if renewables were only supplying 1% of the power, but at 40%+ it isn't very much. (To put this in perspective, the battery in an iPad 3 holds 42.5W.)
On a more positive note, they have at least identified that storage is a problem that needs to be solved if renewable capacity is to expand much more than it has done already in Germany, and are prepared to spend real money to do something about it. I am sceptical as to what can realistically be achieved, but it would be great if they were able to drive down the cost of energy storage even by a modest amount because that would expand the range of circumstances where renewables are viable. If they fail then at least we know what doesn't work, which will help to settle the question of whether or not other sources such as nuclear power are needed. (I'm not greatly bothered what the answer is, we just need to know for sure one way or the other.)
Somehow nobody noticed that temperatures have not gone up in 16 years while CO2 levels climbed. So much for this new pagan religion.
Some people understand the importance of not drawing conclusions about long-term trends from short-term measurements in the presence of noise, and avoid cherry-picking the start date for their trend lines.
For information, the Ratner Effect is named after Gerald Ratner, the former CEO of a British jewellery company, and has nothing to do with Brett Ratner.
(Apologies if you knew this and there is some subtle humour that I'm missing.)
Nokia's market share was already dropping rapidly when Stephen Elop was brought on board.
Dropping in terms of relative market share, yes, but still very healthy in terms of absolute sales and profitability. That was a long-term problem for Symbian, but not necessarily for Nokia because they were already starting to phase in its replacement (Maemo/Meego).
What Elop succeeded in doing was to turn a long-term problem into a short-term crisis. Specifically, rather than allowing Symbian to continue its slow, market-driven decline he forced it into a nosedive, while at the same time switching its dedicated successor from a product that was ready to ship to one that would not be ready for some time.
It is true that Nokia's development of Maemo/Meego had been proceeding far to slowly and inefficiently, and that at least cannot be blamed on Elop, but it is hard to imagine how Nokia could have done worse by sticking with Symbian and Meego compared to the spectacular decline that resulted from adopting Windows Phone.
let's make "Elop" a verb meaning to abandon a company's popular proven products in favor of an over-designed unusable system, which causes the company to lose sales
Look up the term 'Elop Effect', defined as what happens when you combine the Osborne Effect (making your current product appear obsolete by prematurely pre-announcing its successor) and the Ratner Effect (damaging sales by disparaging your own products).
Five nuclear power plants in the US have closed this year, due to a combination of competitive and operating issues. An industry analyst quoted in the article expects more plant closures to come.
... which shows that gas can undercut nuclear at current prices (and subject to current environmental regulations). So, yes, if you think it is OK to carry on burning fossil fuels, then nuclear power does not make economic sense at the moment. The same goes for wind and solar power in most circumstances.
The case for switching to nuclear and/or renewable power rests on the premise that continued fossil fuel use is not sustainable. Cheap gas prices reflect increased availability of the fuel, but not increased capacity to deal with the resulting CO2 emissions.
GNU/Linux would be helped if they would allow some commercialization IMHO without any ability to make revenue, who can afford to maintain/update applications which more often then not require a serious amount of time and hard work?
GNU/Linux already allows proprietary userspace programs. To avoid any doubt on this point, the licence file for the kernel explicitly states that a program does not become a derived work merely by using normal system calls. Neither GCC nor Glibc prevent proprietary programs from being compiled and executed.
Kernel drivers are supposed to be GPL, but manufacturers are already making money on the hardware, and even on fully-closed platforms would not usually make any extra money from the drivers. In most cases I can see no good reason why the driver needs to be protected with a propietary licence, but even if it did then there are ways of achieving that which have historically been tolerated and (in some cases at least) are arguably legal.
LynxOS is not open source.
True, but I strongly suspect the comment I replied to was referring to Linux rather than LynxOS.
(Not that the vendors of LynxOS appear to have anything against military use. It is mostly non-OSD-compliant freeware that tends to have field-of-use restrictions, as opposed to software that is fully propietary or fully Open Source.)
Hey, when you signed on to open source you agreed you had no control over what it ended up being used for.
Indeed, and for good reason. There are almost limitless ways in which a software author might want to discriminate against fields of use, and no prospect of achieving global consensus on what should or should not be allowed. One of the key benefits of Open Source is that you don't have to read the licence of every single package you install to find out whether it is safe to use. The most practicable way to achieve this is to prohibit restrictions on what you can use the software for.
Isn't there a provision in the license stating the software cannot be used for weapons purposes or something of the like?
No, and if there were then it would not be considered Open Source (clause 6 of the OSD, 'No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor').
Nuclear power is unsafe!
Absolutely it is. It just happens to be safer than the current alternatives, and a lot safer than going back to the stone age and doing without power.
Anyone who really cares about safety (or indeed the environment) should be focussed on one thing only: eliminating coal as a source of energy. Until that happens, all of this scaremongering is just a distraction.
Better would be to use it in a fast neutron reactor, at which point the so-called waste becomes fuel.
(Current reactors only used about 1% of the available energy. We can certainly improve on the current storage arrangements, but burying it permanently would be very wasteful.)
I don't buy it. They're making some very strange decisions for a company that supposedly ISN'T desperate for cash:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-57556961-94/nokia-sells-finnish-headquarters-amid-financial-troubles/
Take a look at the last paragraph of that article:
Its cash reserves at the end of the quarter stood at 3.6 billion euros.
Also that was in December 2012 at the peak of their losses, when they had reason to start worrying about how long the money would last. Up to the point where Nokia signed up with Microsoft in early 2011 they had been making a fairly healthy profit, so had no urgent need for the cash they were sitting on and certainly weren't desperate for more.
They weren't desperate for cash. They still have a fair amount in the bank now, despite some eye-watering losses in the last couple of years.
(Prior to the 'burning platform' memo they were concerned about a gradual long-term decline in smartphone market share. Quite why their CEO would choose to turn that into a steep short-term decline I don't know, but market share was the issue they were trying to address. The payments from Microsoft may look large as a subsidy per phone, but that is only because Nokia smartphone sales have shrunk to a small fraction of what they previously were. If WP had been a success then the platform support payments would not be nearly as significant.)
Microsoft (and Nokia) have a marketing problem.
In the sense that few people want to buy their phones that's certainly true, but it isn't through lack of trying: Nokia has spent a huge amount on marketing to little effect.
Nokia Lumia's are actually really great phones and the OS is good, but iPhone has made such a huge name of itself that it is really hard to compete with it.
Apple have never had more than about 20% market share, and don't forget that Microsoft was in the smartphone business five years before Apple and seven years before Google. They once had a fairly respectable market share themselves, and their control of the PC market to use as leverage, so I really don't think that Microsoft's failure in the smartphone market has anything to do with lack of opportunity.
But we should all be happy that they are trying to compete, because competition is good for customers.
Dubious if the platform is incompatible, locks you into Microsoft, and brings down Nokia as it implodes leaving most of the hardware market in the hands of two manufacturers (Samsung and Apple).
Besides, dominance by Android isn't necessarily bad for competition, because it provides compatibility without being fully controlled by one company (not even by Google - it's too easy to fork). It would be better for consumers if Nokia released some Android phones in order to provide real competition to Samsung. Unfortunately they seem more interested in promoting the interests of Microsoft than ensuring their own survival.
I don't think there is a low dose minimum. Sure we have background radiation. So this plus whatever folks received from the leakage from the Fukushima plants is considered low? What BS. [...] But looking at the basic physics and the effects of radioactive molecules on nearby cells, we can with a certain amount of certainty say that radiation in any amount will have not so good effects on the human body.
If you follow that line of reasoning then you are left with a choice between declaring large parts of the world uninhabitable due to background radiation (and banning air travel), or treating natural and artificial exposure differently even when both are elective.
Japan, as it happens, has a relatively low natural background level under normal circumstances. Doubling it sounds pretty bad but is actually no worse than the average for the USA. Cornwall in England is about five times higher: should we evacuate, or is it OK because it is natural?
There is a strip of land that was downwind of the reactors at the time of the accident with levels that few if any places on Earth would match from natural sources. Avoiding long-term exposure at those levels is sensible; panicking about a fractional increase over the background level is not.
The problem with your argumentation is that you simply don't know how power grids work.
Read what I actually said in my post, then consider the fact that whereas 5-10% wind or solar PV can be equated to taking a handful of coal/gas/nuclear plants offline for maintenance, 50-100% is an entirely different proposition.
Yes you can use gas for backup, if you don't mind using fossil fuels and having a very large amount of spare generating capacity.
No you can't solve the problem with hydroelectric power (except for a few highly-favourable locations like Norway) due to lack of suitable sites.
I really hope that we solve these problems someday, but fear it is wishful thinking to imagine that we can do so now.
You should be responsible for what happens on your internet connection and online accounts...
The Internet wouldn't be economically viable if you applied that rule equally to everyone, because no company could risk the liability of providing any form of large-scale transit service.
You could set some arbitrary dividing line somewhere on the scale from 'householder' to 'multinational telecoms corporation', but why should they have greater protection under the law when they provide a service to me, than I have providing a service to my family?
(Not counting the obvious answer that they have more money to pay lobbyists ...)
Coal has the same optimization problems meeting the demand curve as renewables, but all that existing complexity is hidden when you plug the TV into the wall and it demonstrably 'just works'.
You have the same basic issue of keeping supply and demand in balance, true, but that doesn't mean that the problems are comparably serious or equally tractable.
The two big problems with wind and solar PV are that (a) you have no control over when you can generate electricity and (b) the variations are correlated over large geographic areas. To work round that you either need a very large amount of storage capacity (infeasibly large in most locations using current technology), or backup from a dispatchable generating technology (probably gas - not as bad as coal, but still not sustainable).
Solve the storage problem then wind and PV become much more interesting. Otherwise they may still make sense as a small percentage of the mix but they cannot be considered scalable.
Solar thermal goes some way towards solving the diurnal problem, but not the seasonal problem. Hydro is great because you can use it for storage, but most of the viable sites are already in use. Geothermal power is good for baseload, but has geographical constraints and isn't as green as you might think. That leaves nuclear power, or if that is considered unacceptable for political reasons, fossil fuels (as we are currently seeing in Germany).
At least those who describe food as 'organic' are usually correct, which is more than can be said for misapplication of the term 'organic salt'.