Deterrence is only motivating if the penal system is punitive. If the penal system is punative than it is providing a socially acceptable version of revenge, since revenge is essentially another word for punishment. Any penal system sufficiently punitive to provide deterrence will probably be a terrible place to provide rehabilitation.
Threat removal is probably the only penal purpose mostly unrelated to the others, but it doesn't do a very good job informing us as to the conditions provided by a seperate environment.
I think penal sentences should probably be complex:
1) Punitive phase -- maximum incarceration, near zero personal comforts. Beat and starve a 4 year old boy to death? You make this phase longer. The serves as a major part of the deterrence. I think ADX Florence is a model for this.
2) Rehabilitative phase -- once you serve your punitive sentence, you move here and gain job skills, social re-integration.
I think as others have pointed out, "conspiracy theories" is too loaded, I would prefer a broader category of something like "medical myths" or "unproven truisms". If you use that kind of idea as the definition of untrue/unproven information, I would bet the number would be fairly significant.
The older I get (I'm 47), the more staying up late affects me. And by staying up late, I mean anything past about 11:30. Staying up after midnight literally makes me feel ill the next day -- my joints ache and I generally feel unwell.
When I was in my 20s I had to make myself go to bed -- listening to the BBC at midnight was my usual routine, and getting up at 6-630 was no problem.
The least I'd expect from a consultant is that he knows more about a subject than I do. Else, well, why have him? Why should I pay him if he should rather consult me than me him?
IT consulting is just bluster, a kind of bluffing game. The idea that with a slightly greater variety of experience, the consultant knows more than the fixed-environment guy who only knows his own environment. IT consulting as a business plays on the notion that this is more true than not and that most of the time you will know more than the client does.
I think it's easy to fall into the trap that there is always somebody who knows more and has all the answers. It's why consultants get hired and why people pay for technical support contracts. Sometimes its true, but I think too often the idea that there is an "expert" who really does know (and isn't just better than average at deducing ad-hoc solutions to similar problems) is flawed.
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
Call me naive, but I would have thought by now that some of this known behavior by clients would have been worked into contract language that more or less "forces" clients to make decisions, accept the outcomes of scope increases, etc? The contactor can essentially stop work on the project if necessary, mandate that some scope increases will result in increased up-front fees and automatic schedule adjustments, etc.
For better or for worse, these problems exist at small-scale projects and large-scale projects. I do small SMB projects and we run into the same issues, except our owners are too greedy/timid to deal effectively with them.
But I would figure an outfit run by sharks like Oracle would have figured this out long ago and had the leverage and basic schmaltz to make client indecision, scope creep, etc difficult to get away with and very expensive.
Thankfully my wife is like this. She will post a photo with none of the faces tagged but tags the post with a dozen people, none of which are the people in the photo. Although this is probably of limited value since the whole point of this is probably to see through this unintentional misdirection and lack of face-tagging to internally "correct" these kinds of posts so they know who the people in the photo really are.
I have tagging in posts and photos disabled by default and the only picture of me I've ever used as a profile picture has my face very underexposed, wearing sunglasses and a large-brimmed hat. All my other profile pictures have been pictures of other people or non-faces.
A couple of years ago the local Walgreens had a large knock-off set for $20. I picked it up as a last-minute Christmas gift for my son but we were both kind of frustrated with it as the pieces wouldn't stick together.
I tried using a super glue gel we had around the house, but it didn't work very well. What glue works well?
So there was a switch to rootworm resistant corn, which I'd assume came with a declining use of pesticide. If the rootworms overcame resistance to the resistant corn, does this mean they may have lost some of their resistance to the pesticide?
Or are these resistances somehow retained or overlapping so that we have rootworms with high resistance to both?
Other than the nasty concept of pesticide use generally, it sounds like maybe this would allow for a switch back to pesticides which the rootworms may have lost resistance to.
Or will my cynicism be correct, that farmers will use both the resistant seed AND pesticide and develop a super-rootworm with strong resistance to both?
Could Titan serve as a "fuel cell" for a station?
on
Waves Spotted On Titan
·
· Score: 1
Titan sounds like a tough place to occupy on the ground, but could its methane supply ever be developed to serve as a fuel supply for a space station in Titan's orbit?
I read about it in Wikipedia, so I'm sure this sounds moronic, but it sounds like its really rich in methane and has a weak gravitational pull. Could you create a reusable vehicle that would harvest methane, using it for its own source of fuel, but being able to deliver a surplus to be used to keep a station fueled or even ultimately provide fuel for a return trip to Earth in some other vehicle?
Any kind of space activity is always fuel constrained, and that far out solar wouldn't cut it to power a manned station but having a way to harvest a fairly abundant fuel source might kind of change the equation on manned space travel.
With the way things stand now, tanks could be rolling through Poland and sitting at Germany's eastern border before people acknowledge the Russian threat.
They'd have to get the tanks to start and actually run for more than a few km before breaking down, wouldn't they?
IIRC, the invasion of Georgia a couple of years ago had more than a few moments where it bordered self-parody with a lot of mechanical breakdowns. Uncle Ivan's once mighty war machine hasn't fared well over the past decades .
While higher res photos of cats and six grinning girls in a bar someplace don't mean much, I think the higher resolution becomes important for image processing of various stripes, whether its trying to improve photo quality or using the added resolution for machine vision applications such as document scanning or augmented vision.
I also wonder whether the camera modules are purpose-built for just smartphone applications or whether they are more generic cameras applicable to all kinds of small-electronics purposes and the makers of these cameras are merely competing with each other to deliver improvements on what was available in the last revision.
Even though only 20% is recovered, the clearance rate for bank robberies is like 60%. This says to me that the amounts taken are so small that even if you ultimately get caught, the amount stolen is small enough that a lot of it gets spent quickly before the robbers are caught. It doesn't seem likely that most bank robbers are doing 20 year Federal prison sentences to recover a haul of $7500 when they get out.
I would expect that by the time there's any significant number of used electric car batteries there will also be a large demand for electric car batteries.
I'd wager that this increased demand will lead to new refurbishment techniques that make them more economically viable to re-use in electric cars or new designs that eliminate the "lightly used' category of battery from even existing.
1) A system of education designed to produce a graduate with a broad yet substantive grasp of human knowledge in art, literature, humanities and basic sciences?
2) A system of education designed to promote a commanding, in-depth knowledge of a specific discipline like engineering, law, medicine or physical science?
3) A vocational system designed to produce employment-ready workers with a sound working knowledge of a specific area of business or government?
4) A finishing system where young people learn the social skills and cultural knowledge necessary to aspire to the elite class of society? While it sounds free from anything like education, these things may require things we do consider education, like learning foreign languages to demonstrate worldliness, and where political history is personally embodied in the elites themselves (aristocracy and nobility), and where proper social manners may be barely distinguishable from what passes for politics and diplomacy.
I think it's mostly grown to be 3 and 4. You go to college to study an occupational field so you can get a job. It's different than 2 because you're not studying as nearly in depth. Accounting isn't mathematics. Before the 1960s you belonged to a fraternal organization to learn to participate in formal society as an adult. After the 1960s its where you go to experiment, find yourself and in practical terms learn to live on your own (pay rent, feed yourself, etc). In more expensive schools there is still a strong emphasis on the social component both from tradition and from aspirational goals of joining some of your fellow students' elite socioeconomic class.
I think for most of the past few hundred years its mainly been 1 & 4, with a strong emphasis on four. When we began indulging girls in education, college was a fine place to find a suitor of suitable class and ambition. But for all, a solid grounding in the liberal arts was socially useful, eliminated provincialism and promoted useful skills in basic mathematics and literacy.
The in-depth education of 2 probably started out ecclesiastically as the means to produce priests and preserve religious knowledge and church canon. Not until the enlightenment and the industrial revolution were most of these subjects studied with any rigor. Until mathematics was applied, engineering was just skilled trades like carpentry, stonemasons and blacksmiths.
As I said in my previous post, if it did exist both Apple and the carrier would tie any such functionality to an iPhone cellphone number.
For Apple, this would guarantee you would have to own an iPhone to get the functionality and prevent you from using an iPad/iPod as a phone without buying an iPhone.
The advantage to Apple would actually be more of an enticement to buy other iDevices since you would gain phone functionality on them you wouldn't get from other vendor products, plus they wouldn't need to offer a phablet since they could basically claim iPads were phablets for people that bought into the extended phone service.
I kind of expect Apple to do it in cooperation with the carriers so that devices like iPads and maybe even iPod Touches could use voices. Add the phone app functionality to non-phone devices or enable it in wifi-only scenarios on existing phones.
I'd see it as something carriers could charge some kind of extra fee for as well as call them cell "minutes" no matter how they are used. This allows them to monetize it. Possible opportunity to further monetize it by offering additional phone numbers or other phone features.
Voice functionality on a non-phone device would require an existing Apple iPhone on your plan -- this covers whatever risk Apple feels from people buying only an iPad mini (even with 4G data) and using it as a phablet without buying an iPhone.
Lets Apple enter the "phablet" market without actually having to create another iPhone device itself.
Creates unique, Apple-only feature of making and taking calls using your iPhone cell number on any enabled i-device. iPhone in another room? Don't get up, just answer the call from the couch on your iPad.
I think it's an interesting idea that has just enough value for everyone (carrier, Apple, consumer) that I'm sort of surprised they haven't implemented it.
Where is native VoIP support? That's the feature that would be most appealing, the ability to make and take calls to other 'real' phones from devices with only data access as a native feature.
I know there are other third party apps that can do this like Skype or Line2 and there are apparently back-door ways of doing with GoogleVoice (which according the the Google blog post quoted above aren't supported).
But I always expected this to be a Google Voice feature and it hasn't been.
While I'm sure there are contingency plans associated with being cut off from Air Force One and the need to travel to some rendezvous point to get choppered out, my guess is that the security protocol and planning is designed to prevent that very scenario.
The President doesn't just fly in solo on Air Force 1 -- often they send a second 747 as a backup along with a varying number of C-17s or C-5s with support vehicles and over a hundred Secret Service agents. On a Clinton trip to Africa, the air force ran 24 hour fighter missions overhead and the Navy kept a medical ship offshore.
I'm sure the goal is to both secure the plane, secure the route back to the plane and never leave the President cut off, up to the ability to conduct immediate air strikes to insure he can return to the plane.
There may be operational reliability or contingency issues which would limit an electric car overseas, but I think in DC it wouldn't be an unrealistic option.
Obama is raping and murdering and torturing thousands of his own citizens, committing acts of Genocide worse than any dictator ever before.
That's a pretty tall order. The Germans managed something like 6 million and Stalin something like 7 million. Pol Pot didn't reach those nominal figures but on a percentage of total population he probably outdid both, killing something like 1 in 3.
Are you really sure Obama has exceeded 6 million dead via outright acts of genocide, excluding combat against armed adversaries?
Too many games are sold for free and/or $0.99 yet to be playable require in app purchases to be at all playable.
I closely control what games my 9 year old can play and review them before we buy them and its impossible to tell which ones will be worth a damn without blowing another $10 in in-app purchases to make them playable. I reject games with what look like too-many in-app purchases, and he doesn't have the ability to make those purchases.
Too often I wind up with a very frustrated 9 year old who's upset that he can't win/progress because the game basically requires in-app purchases to be playable for any length of time.
I don't know if there's a very workable solution, but I think devs should be required to clear notification that "advancement or continued play in this game requires in app purchases; the total cost of this game exceeds its initial purchase price."
Unfortunately the app-store economics were built around the "99 cent" app and apparently its either not viable to make a decent title at that price point nor is it possible to get the sales volume for $5.99 games that actually offer playability when you're competing against a sea of nominal 99 cent games.
The problem with a "solution" here is there's no way to know how the data is organized.
I'd say any relatively hack-free solution will involve a commercial backup application and a storage array of sufficient size to handle at least one full backup and some chain of incrementals.
Ideally the backup array would be of sufficient size and disk count that you could gain some small protection by creating independent disk groups each capable of each holding an independent file system for a full plus backup chains. I say this having supported large backup arrays where monolithic file systems were created only to corrupt, causing the entire backup to be useless. It doesn't protect against failures caused by faulty array controllers or enclosure failure, but nothing does but multiple complete arrays.
Decent commercial backup software will make the job simpler with compression, deduplication, intelligent incremental management, cataloging, etc.
CDW says $9,000 will get you a Netgear ReadyNAS with 12x4TB disk. In RAID-10, you'd have 24TB to work with. Combined with decent backup software this would result in a fairly painless way to backup that much data and manage it.
If you had nothing but time on your hands, you could roll your own solution with rsync, de-duped ZFS, etc but the hardware piece is still not cheap and rolling your own is nearly as expensive with a lot more headache.
The problem with variability is that when you can generate it, you may not have a need for it. The conventional solution to this is fungible energy storage, some way of storing the energy generated so it can be reclaimed as energy -- batteries, pumped hydroelectric, compressed air, some way of capturing the energy as energy and then using the captured energy as means of generating energy to smooth out variable output to get a consistent production that can be used more as a base load generation.
Energy storage is highly imperfect -- batteries are expensive and limited, pumped storage requires the right geology, etc.
But what if we looked at a simple finished product -- like fresh water -- as basically a second order form of energy storage? Since fresh water from sea water has an energy value, what if instead of looking at energy storage in terms of creating electricity, what if we looked at in instead as a finished product?
So build desalination plants tied to the grid in a way that they can scale up production to continuously absorb the amount of power generated by the variable source -- basically create the grid demand to match the power input instead of trying to match the power output to grid demand. Modern desalination plants using Vacuum Vapor Compression could be built scalable so that they could turn individual units up/down to meet available input power.
Slashdot Mirror
"The answer will be something about putting together a quick Hack program to change values in a database"
I take it you don't get invited back to dinner very often.
Does this mean they will extend the ACA deadline?
Deterrence is only motivating if the penal system is punitive. If the penal system is punative than it is providing a socially acceptable version of revenge, since revenge is essentially another word for punishment. Any penal system sufficiently punitive to provide deterrence will probably be a terrible place to provide rehabilitation.
Threat removal is probably the only penal purpose mostly unrelated to the others, but it doesn't do a very good job informing us as to the conditions provided by a seperate environment.
I think penal sentences should probably be complex:
1) Punitive phase -- maximum incarceration, near zero personal comforts. Beat and starve a 4 year old boy to death? You make this phase longer. The serves as a major part of the deterrence. I think ADX Florence is a model for this.
2) Rehabilitative phase -- once you serve your punitive sentence, you move here and gain job skills, social re-integration.
I think as others have pointed out, "conspiracy theories" is too loaded, I would prefer a broader category of something like "medical myths" or "unproven truisms". If you use that kind of idea as the definition of untrue/unproven information, I would bet the number would be fairly significant.
The older I get (I'm 47), the more staying up late affects me. And by staying up late, I mean anything past about 11:30. Staying up after midnight literally makes me feel ill the next day -- my joints ache and I generally feel unwell.
When I was in my 20s I had to make myself go to bed -- listening to the BBC at midnight was my usual routine, and getting up at 6-630 was no problem.
The least I'd expect from a consultant is that he knows more about a subject than I do. Else, well, why have him? Why should I pay him if he should rather consult me than me him?
IT consulting is just bluster, a kind of bluffing game. The idea that with a slightly greater variety of experience, the consultant knows more than the fixed-environment guy who only knows his own environment. IT consulting as a business plays on the notion that this is more true than not and that most of the time you will know more than the client does.
I think it's easy to fall into the trap that there is always somebody who knows more and has all the answers. It's why consultants get hired and why people pay for technical support contracts. Sometimes its true, but I think too often the idea that there is an "expert" who really does know (and isn't just better than average at deducing ad-hoc solutions to similar problems) is flawed.
You can't force the client to actually do what is required, no matter how you'd like to.
Call me naive, but I would have thought by now that some of this known behavior by clients would have been worked into contract language that more or less "forces" clients to make decisions, accept the outcomes of scope increases, etc? The contactor can essentially stop work on the project if necessary, mandate that some scope increases will result in increased up-front fees and automatic schedule adjustments, etc.
For better or for worse, these problems exist at small-scale projects and large-scale projects. I do small SMB projects and we run into the same issues, except our owners are too greedy/timid to deal effectively with them.
But I would figure an outfit run by sharks like Oracle would have figured this out long ago and had the leverage and basic schmaltz to make client indecision, scope creep, etc difficult to get away with and very expensive.
Thankfully my wife is like this. She will post a photo with none of the faces tagged but tags the post with a dozen people, none of which are the people in the photo. Although this is probably of limited value since the whole point of this is probably to see through this unintentional misdirection and lack of face-tagging to internally "correct" these kinds of posts so they know who the people in the photo really are.
I have tagging in posts and photos disabled by default and the only picture of me I've ever used as a profile picture has my face very underexposed, wearing sunglasses and a large-brimmed hat. All my other profile pictures have been pictures of other people or non-faces.
What glue works well with Legos?
A couple of years ago the local Walgreens had a large knock-off set for $20. I picked it up as a last-minute Christmas gift for my son but we were both kind of frustrated with it as the pieces wouldn't stick together.
I tried using a super glue gel we had around the house, but it didn't work very well. What glue works well?
So there was a switch to rootworm resistant corn, which I'd assume came with a declining use of pesticide. If the rootworms overcame resistance to the resistant corn, does this mean they may have lost some of their resistance to the pesticide?
Or are these resistances somehow retained or overlapping so that we have rootworms with high resistance to both?
Other than the nasty concept of pesticide use generally, it sounds like maybe this would allow for a switch back to pesticides which the rootworms may have lost resistance to.
Or will my cynicism be correct, that farmers will use both the resistant seed AND pesticide and develop a super-rootworm with strong resistance to both?
Titan sounds like a tough place to occupy on the ground, but could its methane supply ever be developed to serve as a fuel supply for a space station in Titan's orbit?
I read about it in Wikipedia, so I'm sure this sounds moronic, but it sounds like its really rich in methane and has a weak gravitational pull. Could you create a reusable vehicle that would harvest methane, using it for its own source of fuel, but being able to deliver a surplus to be used to keep a station fueled or even ultimately provide fuel for a return trip to Earth in some other vehicle?
Any kind of space activity is always fuel constrained, and that far out solar wouldn't cut it to power a manned station but having a way to harvest a fairly abundant fuel source might kind of change the equation on manned space travel.
With the way things stand now, tanks could be rolling through Poland and sitting at Germany's eastern border before people acknowledge the Russian threat.
They'd have to get the tanks to start and actually run for more than a few km before breaking down, wouldn't they?
IIRC, the invasion of Georgia a couple of years ago had more than a few moments where it bordered self-parody with a lot of mechanical breakdowns. Uncle Ivan's once mighty war machine hasn't fared well over the past decades .
640k ought to be enough for anybody.
While higher res photos of cats and six grinning girls in a bar someplace don't mean much, I think the higher resolution becomes important for image processing of various stripes, whether its trying to improve photo quality or using the added resolution for machine vision applications such as document scanning or augmented vision.
I also wonder whether the camera modules are purpose-built for just smartphone applications or whether they are more generic cameras applicable to all kinds of small-electronics purposes and the makers of these cameras are merely competing with each other to deliver improvements on what was available in the last revision.
No, that's not right. Infamous implies being famous for negative reasons.
Queen Elizabeth is famous, but King Henry VIII is infamous.
Does this prove the grandparent's point, though?
The average take is only $7,539.02.
Even though only 20% is recovered, the clearance rate for bank robberies is like 60%. This says to me that the amounts taken are so small that even if you ultimately get caught, the amount stolen is small enough that a lot of it gets spent quickly before the robbers are caught. It doesn't seem likely that most bank robbers are doing 20 year Federal prison sentences to recover a haul of $7500 when they get out.
I would expect that by the time there's any significant number of used electric car batteries there will also be a large demand for electric car batteries.
I'd wager that this increased demand will lead to new refurbishment techniques that make them more economically viable to re-use in electric cars or new designs that eliminate the "lightly used' category of battery from even existing.
1) A system of education designed to produce a graduate with a broad yet substantive grasp of human knowledge in art, literature, humanities and basic sciences?
2) A system of education designed to promote a commanding, in-depth knowledge of a specific discipline like engineering, law, medicine or physical science?
3) A vocational system designed to produce employment-ready workers with a sound working knowledge of a specific area of business or government?
4) A finishing system where young people learn the social skills and cultural knowledge necessary to aspire to the elite class of society? While it sounds free from anything like education, these things may require things we do consider education, like learning foreign languages to demonstrate worldliness, and where political history is personally embodied in the elites themselves (aristocracy and nobility), and where proper social manners may be barely distinguishable from what passes for politics and diplomacy.
I think it's mostly grown to be 3 and 4. You go to college to study an occupational field so you can get a job. It's different than 2 because you're not studying as nearly in depth. Accounting isn't mathematics. Before the 1960s you belonged to a fraternal organization to learn to participate in formal society as an adult. After the 1960s its where you go to experiment, find yourself and in practical terms learn to live on your own (pay rent, feed yourself, etc). In more expensive schools there is still a strong emphasis on the social component both from tradition and from aspirational goals of joining some of your fellow students' elite socioeconomic class.
I think for most of the past few hundred years its mainly been 1 & 4, with a strong emphasis on four. When we began indulging girls in education, college was a fine place to find a suitor of suitable class and ambition. But for all, a solid grounding in the liberal arts was socially useful, eliminated provincialism and promoted useful skills in basic mathematics and literacy.
The in-depth education of 2 probably started out ecclesiastically as the means to produce priests and preserve religious knowledge and church canon. Not until the enlightenment and the industrial revolution were most of these subjects studied with any rigor. Until mathematics was applied, engineering was just skilled trades like carpentry, stonemasons and blacksmiths.
As I said in my previous post, if it did exist both Apple and the carrier would tie any such functionality to an iPhone cellphone number.
For Apple, this would guarantee you would have to own an iPhone to get the functionality and prevent you from using an iPad/iPod as a phone without buying an iPhone.
The advantage to Apple would actually be more of an enticement to buy other iDevices since you would gain phone functionality on them you wouldn't get from other vendor products, plus they wouldn't need to offer a phablet since they could basically claim iPads were phablets for people that bought into the extended phone service.
I kind of expect Apple to do it in cooperation with the carriers so that devices like iPads and maybe even iPod Touches could use voices. Add the phone app functionality to non-phone devices or enable it in wifi-only scenarios on existing phones.
I'd see it as something carriers could charge some kind of extra fee for as well as call them cell "minutes" no matter how they are used. This allows them to monetize it. Possible opportunity to further monetize it by offering additional phone numbers or other phone features.
Voice functionality on a non-phone device would require an existing Apple iPhone on your plan -- this covers whatever risk Apple feels from people buying only an iPad mini (even with 4G data) and using it as a phablet without buying an iPhone.
Lets Apple enter the "phablet" market without actually having to create another iPhone device itself.
Creates unique, Apple-only feature of making and taking calls using your iPhone cell number on any enabled i-device. iPhone in another room? Don't get up, just answer the call from the couch on your iPad.
I think it's an interesting idea that has just enough value for everyone (carrier, Apple, consumer) that I'm sort of surprised they haven't implemented it.
Where is native VoIP support? That's the feature that would be most appealing, the ability to make and take calls to other 'real' phones from devices with only data access as a native feature.
I know there are other third party apps that can do this like Skype or Line2 and there are apparently back-door ways of doing with GoogleVoice (which according the the Google blog post quoted above aren't supported).
But I always expected this to be a Google Voice feature and it hasn't been.
While I'm sure there are contingency plans associated with being cut off from Air Force One and the need to travel to some rendezvous point to get choppered out, my guess is that the security protocol and planning is designed to prevent that very scenario.
The President doesn't just fly in solo on Air Force 1 -- often they send a second 747 as a backup along with a varying number of C-17s or C-5s with support vehicles and over a hundred Secret Service agents. On a Clinton trip to Africa, the air force ran 24 hour fighter missions overhead and the Navy kept a medical ship offshore.
I'm sure the goal is to both secure the plane, secure the route back to the plane and never leave the President cut off, up to the ability to conduct immediate air strikes to insure he can return to the plane.
There may be operational reliability or contingency issues which would limit an electric car overseas, but I think in DC it wouldn't be an unrealistic option.
Obama is raping and murdering and torturing thousands of his own citizens, committing acts of Genocide worse than any dictator ever before.
That's a pretty tall order. The Germans managed something like 6 million and Stalin something like 7 million. Pol Pot didn't reach those nominal figures but on a percentage of total population he probably outdid both, killing something like 1 in 3.
Are you really sure Obama has exceeded 6 million dead via outright acts of genocide, excluding combat against armed adversaries?
Too many games are sold for free and/or $0.99 yet to be playable require in app purchases to be at all playable.
I closely control what games my 9 year old can play and review them before we buy them and its impossible to tell which ones will be worth a damn without blowing another $10 in in-app purchases to make them playable. I reject games with what look like too-many in-app purchases, and he doesn't have the ability to make those purchases.
Too often I wind up with a very frustrated 9 year old who's upset that he can't win/progress because the game basically requires in-app purchases to be playable for any length of time.
I don't know if there's a very workable solution, but I think devs should be required to clear notification that "advancement or continued play in this game requires in app purchases; the total cost of this game exceeds its initial purchase price."
Unfortunately the app-store economics were built around the "99 cent" app and apparently its either not viable to make a decent title at that price point nor is it possible to get the sales volume for $5.99 games that actually offer playability when you're competing against a sea of nominal 99 cent games.
The problem with a "solution" here is there's no way to know how the data is organized.
I'd say any relatively hack-free solution will involve a commercial backup application and a storage array of sufficient size to handle at least one full backup and some chain of incrementals.
Ideally the backup array would be of sufficient size and disk count that you could gain some small protection by creating independent disk groups each capable of each holding an independent file system for a full plus backup chains. I say this having supported large backup arrays where monolithic file systems were created only to corrupt, causing the entire backup to be useless. It doesn't protect against failures caused by faulty array controllers or enclosure failure, but nothing does but multiple complete arrays.
Decent commercial backup software will make the job simpler with compression, deduplication, intelligent incremental management, cataloging, etc.
CDW says $9,000 will get you a Netgear ReadyNAS with 12x4TB disk. In RAID-10, you'd have 24TB to work with. Combined with decent backup software this would result in a fairly painless way to backup that much data and manage it.
If you had nothing but time on your hands, you could roll your own solution with rsync, de-duped ZFS, etc but the hardware piece is still not cheap and rolling your own is nearly as expensive with a lot more headache.
The problem with variability is that when you can generate it, you may not have a need for it. The conventional solution to this is fungible energy storage, some way of storing the energy generated so it can be reclaimed as energy -- batteries, pumped hydroelectric, compressed air, some way of capturing the energy as energy and then using the captured energy as means of generating energy to smooth out variable output to get a consistent production that can be used more as a base load generation.
Energy storage is highly imperfect -- batteries are expensive and limited, pumped storage requires the right geology, etc.
But what if we looked at a simple finished product -- like fresh water -- as basically a second order form of energy storage? Since fresh water from sea water has an energy value, what if instead of looking at energy storage in terms of creating electricity, what if we looked at in instead as a finished product?
So build desalination plants tied to the grid in a way that they can scale up production to continuously absorb the amount of power generated by the variable source -- basically create the grid demand to match the power input instead of trying to match the power output to grid demand. Modern desalination plants using Vacuum Vapor Compression could be built scalable so that they could turn individual units up/down to meet available input power.