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User: RobinH

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  1. Utilities will be the biggest users on Why Elon Musk's Batteries Frighten Electric Companies · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This will revolutionize the grid. I was reading that lithium ion batteries are around $500/kWh right now wholesale (and I've seen some you can buy from China that make me believe that's roughly true). Then there's a projected cost as low as $180/kWh in about 5 years after Tesla's factory ramps up (and no doubt others start to come online).

    Right now (in Ontario) I can buy peak electricity at about 13 cents per kWh and maybe 7 or 8 cents per kWh at night. Imagine a system of batteries where I buy power at night, store it, and then use that during the day. I worked the rough numbers and at today's battery prices I'd be hard pressed to get a return on my investment in 20 years, and that's only considering battery cost. However, if you use $180/kWh, suddenly you might see the payback period on a system like that drop below 10 years, and if I can do it at that price, what can a utility do with its economy of scale?

    The addition of economical grid-level storage will radically change the way the utilities run their business. You won't need so much idle generating capacity such as natural gas or coal sitting around to service peak loads because you can charge up your battery banks at night using nuclear and during the day with solar and consume them during the peak periods.

  2. Reverse discrimination on Google, National Parks Partner To Let Girls Program White House Xmas Tree Lights · · Score: 1

    I'm sure a lot of women think this is great because it's just doing to men what they perceive has been done to them, but I fail to see how this is fair when the victims of the discrimination are young boys, who haven't even had a chance to do anything wrong yet. This is punishing them for alleged wrongs that they could never have had any part in. It's going way too far.

  3. Useless on First Star War Episode 7 Trailer Released · · Score: 1

    You can't tell anything from a trailer other than how much they're willing to spend on special effects (and how much they're willing to ignore canon). The real test is whether or not the story is any good, and we'll just have to wait and see. Honestly I doubt it, but here's hoping. Also, friggin' shakey cam! Boo!

  4. Re:First post to mention RTG from ignorant positio on Philae May Have Grazed Crater Rim · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, now that they've read "The Martian" and played some Kerbal Space Program, they're now experts at interplanetary travel.

  5. Re:It boils down to energy storage costs on Two Google Engineers Say Renewables Can't Cure Climate Change · · Score: 1

    The GP means you could solve it with grid-level storage, which is on the order of a billion dollar problem, but solar satellites would be more expensive.

  6. Re:Was impressed until.. on What the US Can Learn From Canada's Internet Policy · · Score: 4, Informative

    At least in Canada I know what I'm buying then. I get X GB per month, and there is (at least in my area) 3 different ISPs (1 cable, one DSL, and one independent) that I can go to. I go to the one that gives me more bandwidth, higher caps at a lower price (duh). It's $48/month for 300 GB, and there's an unlimited package for about $60, but we just don't seem to ever break that cap. (We came close once but reduced it by lowering the bandwidth settings on my wife's Netflix profile :)

  7. Re:Sounds like what Sun did on Microsoft To Open Source .NET and Take It Cross-Platform · · Score: 1

    AFAIK, there was no $500 option after VS2010 Pro. That was the last version you could buy without having to buy a mandatory MSDN subscription, so the base price was up around $1200 after that.

  8. Not just cameras on Website Peeps Into 73,000 Unsecured Security Cameras Via Default Passwords · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Cameras are a problem, but it's not just cameras anymore. Nest thermostats, for instance, have occupancy sensors and they connect to the internet to work. So your thermostat tells a server on the internet if anyone's home (potentially). Smart meters have similar problems. We recently bought a temperature sensor (AVTECH brand) for our small server closet, and it automatically connected to GoToMyDevices.com as soon as I got it on the network, and started uploading sensor data. There was nowhere in the device's built-in web interface to enable or even disable this "feature". Nothing in the documentation. I looked online and found a forum where it explained that you had to telnet to the device, and at the main menu you had to select a hidden menu item, and then type a command to turn off this feature. It's that kind of absurdity that makes the whole "internet of things" just a house of cards waiting to collapse.

  9. Re:Just curious (ejection tech) on Virgin Galactic SpaceShipTwo Crashes · · Score: 1

    I thought this ship was suborbital. Re-entry isn't a big huge deal if you're not going multiple km/s sideways. The red bull space dive thing just had a guy in a spacesuit.

  10. Re:Crock o' beans on Statisticians Study Who Was Helped Most By Obamacare · · Score: 1

    I'm a Canadian who, for a time, worked in the US and had a US health insurance plan (early 2000's), before the ACA. I paid for that health care plan because it had a drug plan and the Ontario health coverage does not. A few times it was convenient to go see a doctor in the US because it was close to the office, and I clearly remember wondering what all those people were doing behind the desk of the doctor's office. In Canada you might see 1 or 2 people in the administrative side of the office, but in a US doctor's office, there seemed to be an army of clerks. I looked into it and it seems like it was all to do with handling all the paperwork due to everyone having a different insurance company. In Ontario there's only one health insurance... the government one, and they just pay for exactly what the doctor bills, there's no "is this covered, is this not", etc. The administrative overhead is much, much lower. The ACA can't possibly have fixed this problem, so you're still paying a lot more overhead for your health care in the US than we are in Canada. Remember, the only "service" an insurance company provides is dividing the costs of a group of people evenly over that entire group. A publicly run insurance scheme doesn't need to pay for advertising, salespeople, lawyers or lawsuits. It's very inexpensive to run, and a lot less hassle for the people who use it.

  11. Re:They tried to raise prices 20% unnanounced on Cutting the Cord? Time Warner Loses 184,000 TV Subscribers In One Quarter · · Score: 1

    Yes, we went to a Rogers HD DVR for a while after TiVo and couldn't believe how much the UI sucked. I never really learned how to use it well, and relied on my wife to do the various incantations to get it to record what we wanted. A lot of the menus made no sense, especially trying to get it to not record something, or to wait and not switch the channel when it wanted to record something. Then we got rid of cable and first tried Boxee, then finally broke down and just put a PC there. Best decision ever.

  12. Re:They tried to raise prices 20% unnanounced on Cutting the Cord? Time Warner Loses 184,000 TV Subscribers In One Quarter · · Score: 3, Interesting

    GP said they weren't in the US, so CableCard might not be an option. I am in Canada and nobody here offers CableCard, which is why we had to give up TiVo when it came time to get an HDTV. TiVo is CableCard only (and there's a good reason for it). The real reason they want to encrypt everything is to rent you the DVR.

  13. Re:They tried to raise prices 20% unnanounced on Cutting the Cord? Time Warner Loses 184,000 TV Subscribers In One Quarter · · Score: 1

    When I tell people we don't have cable TV, and just stream, they're always interested in it, but few of them want to compromise. When I tell them you can't easily get sports though, then they usually say, "that wouldn't work for me." Plus, I know a lot of people that have tried streaming on their own, and they definitely end up on the "wrong" site and end up with a malware infested nightmare on their PC. We just stick with Netflix and Hulu mostly, with the occasional "rented" streamed new release and we have no issues.

  14. Re:2600 cost me my job but taught me a lesson on 2600 Profiled: "A Print Magazine For Hackers" · · Score: 1

    I'm pretty sure you're talking about the article on how to get your video rental late fees removed from Blockbuster by impersonating a clerk from another store. FWIW, it's the only article I can remember reading from 2600 during that era, and it's a good lesson in how *not* to structure your corporate-wide system between all your stores. :) Sorry it cost you your job, but if that was you I appreciated the article.

  15. Re:Because studies show ... on Facebook and Apple Now Pay For Female Employees To Freeze Their Eggs · · Score: 1

    Obviously when I said the mother "refuses" I don't mean she legally keeps him from taking any, I just mean that she "discusses" the matter with him and explains why she'll be taking all or most of it. Sheesh.

  16. Re:Because studies show ... on Facebook and Apple Now Pay For Female Employees To Freeze Their Eggs · · Score: 2

    The 12 months includes the 6 weeks or whatever of pregnancy leave, as far as I recall. So the father can't take all 12 months, there is a minimum that the mother takes. However in almost all cases I've seen, the mother refuses to give up any of her 12 months. There are certainly lots of fathers taking some of the time, but it's still a minority. When I discussed with my (female) boss about taking 6 months of leave she looked literally horrified, and then proceeded to tell me a story about how she was back at work days after having her first kid. There's still a lot of pressure on professional men, in Canada, to avoid taking time off for this, unfortunately.

  17. Re:We're ignoring them... on Flight Attendants Want Stricter Gadget Rules Reinstated · · Score: 2

    I agree that most people have just seen the act before. However, your idea that it's all common sense isn't correct. No first-time traveler is going to assume the life vest is velcro'd under the seat, and the seat belts don't work the same as the ones in cars. Plus, have you ever read the safety features brochure? The instructions for opening a hatch and deploying the slide/raft is not 100% common sense either.

  18. Re:Scratches Head on Elon Musk: We Must Put a Million People On Mars To Safeguard Humanity · · Score: 1

    So who's going to reset the first circuit breaker that trips, huh? I kid, I kid... :)

  19. Could be improved on Miss a Payment? Your Car Stops Running · · Score: 3, Interesting

    There should be a visible counter. "Vehicle payment overdue. Ignition will be disabled in 72 hours 00 minutes..." That would solve most of these problems and make it fair.

  20. Re:"into harmony" on Physicist Claims Black Holes Mathematically Don't Exist · · Score: 2

    Ok, thanks for making me refresh my memory. I went and browsed this again. Take a look at page 10, and "The Feynman-Wheeler Interaction Theory". While physicists initially renormalized the mass to get rid of the infinity, what Feynman-Wheeler did was confirm that there is no self-interaction of an electron's charge on itself, and that the observed radiation resistance could be accounted for by the interaction of an electron and its' future self. Cool stuff. So anyway, that got rid of the scary infinity from QED.

  21. Re:"into harmony" on Physicist Claims Black Holes Mathematically Don't Exist · · Score: 1

    QED provides answers that are confirmed very accurately by experiment. Also, that infinity you're talking about was, I believe, gotten rid of by dividing both sides of an equation by an equal term, even if it was growing to infinity. That's not completely crazy. We haven't directly observed black holes. If we had much better observations, we might be able to confirm relativity, but the prediction of a real physical infinite density should make us a little skeptical.

  22. Re:"into harmony" on Physicist Claims Black Holes Mathematically Don't Exist · · Score: 4, Interesting

    We have two theories: quantum mechanics and relativity, and they disagree about what happens when really massive stars collapse (or relativity predicts a singularity and quantum mechanics doesn't have much to say about what happens at those energies). The relativity answer seems impossible because when you get infinity out of an answer in physics, your math is probably wrong. Quantum mechanics only covers the 3 other forces, not gravity. So really we know that we probably don't know what's going on with this phenomenon. The term "black hole" is a little bit like "dark matter". It's a placeholder for what we don't know. We have observed evidence that there are extremely heavy and dense objects affecting nearby stars, but we can't observe them directly. So, what we've observed is not necessarily exactly what relativity predicts is there. This paper is offering a different theory (which may or may not be more correct).

  23. Re:More importantly on Is the Tesla Model 3 Actually Going To Cost $50,000? · · Score: 1

    Hey I'm skeptical too, but batteries are recycled, not just thrown in the trash heap. Plus, given the expected lifetime of a car, you'd only expect to replace the batteries once. It's not that crazy. After that the other components will be wearing out too.

  24. Re:Why just guns? on Using Wearable Tech To Track Gun Use · · Score: 1

    I don't follow this logic: in countries that ban guns, violent offenders use knives? Doesn't that prove that it works? The total damage inflicted by a deranged lunatic with a knife has to be, on average, a lot less than a deranged lunatic with a firearm. That chinese guy who went berzerk with a sword on the same day as the elementary school shooting a little while back... didn't it end up that nobody actually died from that?

  25. Has too many problems on Text While Driving In Long Island and Have Your Phone Disabled · · Score: 2

    First of all, it can't determine if you're a driver or passenger, so it will then disable your phone if you're a passenger. Not a huge deal if this is just a punishment, I guess. However it's still easily defeated by getting another phone. The right solution is to take away their driver's license for a period of time (2 weeks to start, and increasing amounts after that). Use your phone all you want, but don't drive.