It's not that far off for city dwellers since batteries suck less with every passing year. In areas just off the grid the dream was real in the 1990s - some people I know were told it would be $100k to get a line in for them and their neighbours so they went solar plus mini-hydro.
use regulation to create captive markets and guaranteed profit. No capitalism in sight.
That's a good point - governments typically make a lot of money from special taxes on coal and oil which creates a major conflict of interest with electricity regulation. IMHO that's why we are seeing little photovoltaic panels in private hands on rooftops instead of big industrial scale solar thermal that could be vastly cheaper per MW. It could make economic sense for such a thing but it doesn't get a chance.
Rooftop solar flattens the daytime peak and cuts down on the maximum capacity needed to be produced and transmitted (along wires of course, but that's the word) from other places, so it does eventually pay for itself even when the money thrown at it is excessive. A bit of a problem is that throwing excessive amounts of money around builds political influence, but that's not a solar problem per se. Stop throwing money at it and they'll still be some takeup, especially in areas where utilities are indulging in excessive price gouging.
If you are going to use Australia as an example you should look at the "poles and wires" overpricing scandal to get some perspective on the issue. A utility can build unused equipment and charge that on to the customer at a profit (ie. the fee goes up for new equipment and that raise in fees not only covers the construction but increases the profit substantially) due to a local monopoly and regulation being little other than a barrier of entry to new players. There were a couple of court cases in N.S.W. about equipment built and not connected to the grid but local customers expected to pay extra for it, plus padding.
Prices were soaring long before solar panels were popular and the increasing take up is more a consequence of the price than a driver of it. Don't take my word for it, there's plenty of information out there if you actually take a look and you don't have to a be an ex power industry person like me to understand it.
This keeps on coming up, and I get the feeling that Luckyo is a repeat offender despite knowing better, however I ask him to correct me if I'm wrong and he doesn't actually know better.
The thing with wind, as any child who watches the TV weather knows, is that it is always blowing somewhere. It's never calm on the whole planet or even an entire country bigger than Monaco. Windmills are not just in one spot but spread around countries especially now that they've been adopted by electricity generators for a few years - thus there's always at least some wind power available when you want to bring a few more MW online. They may cost a shitload per MW but for when you just want a little bit more power that's a lot cheaper than warming up 500MW worth of coal, which comes in big packages or not at all.
I think what we are seeing here is pointless tilting at windmills by armchair knights who see the windmills as evil giants (or green commie democrat lesbians, pick your fantasy opponent) instead of just a tool of the modern world that even Republicans are making money from.
There may be some points of value in the rest of the post but such cretinism, either real or most likely feigned, makes the rest appear of no value due to proximity.
Funny how power utilities are all for free market capitalism until the consumers get to play. Increasing price gouging has driven fees up while the capitial costs for consumers to generate their own electricity has gone down, with obvious results at the crossover point.
Superman always finds a way, that's how he's written. Constantine is the one always in conflict about who to save, which at times makes him a complete and utter bastard. I don't think that would go down well with Superman.
Universal constructor robots named Trurl and Klapaucius
From some of the awesome SF/thinly disguised political satire by the Polish author Lem. He inspired things like Douglas Adams's "Infinite Improbability Drive" and "Deep Thought" with the Trurl and Klapaucius stories. His automatic poet (first simulate a universe and then...) shows the brilliance of both the writer and the person that translated the story into English. "Solaris" is probably his most unfilmable story yet was turned into two movies (probably as a bet) since most of the book is a listing of all the effort made over a century to try to understand an alien but with little progress.
In the 60's or 70's a spy novel had an aside about machine translation - "Hydraulic Ram" came out as "Water Sheep". Sadly it's not about simple substitution but getting a machine apply rules for context and determining those rules is the bloody hard bit that Moore's Law can't help us with.
SF stories are about pushing some main ideas instead of constructing a complex interdependent future world and explaining it. For example, even the very different setting of "Dune" deliberately had medieval and middle eastern elements to avoid losing the reader in the situation of "everything is just different". So if a story has a future where everything is exactly the same as today apart from one thing, that's not a flaw in prediction, it's an example of focus. One good recent example is the film "Predestination" which is from a Heinlein story - but it's setting is about predicting a different past with two major changes instead of a future which is today with a couple of changes. Heinlein's "Space Corps" is included nicely in the story mostly as a way of saying "this is not quite the world you know" - it's background scenery with a point instead of having much to do with the plot.
Also while there's so many plots that can be defused with one single mobile phone call (as done nicely in the Japanese "A Certain Magical Index" that does exactly that on a few occasions), or WWII technology that writers were not aware of (so many stories where signals were jammed stopping communication - but Heddy Lamar solved that and it's implemented in every mobile phone in the planet let alone other places), but sometimes it's best to just ignore the prop and listen to the ideas.
As an actual certified professional engineer that now happens to work in IT I'm constantly reminded that the term now applies to an intermediate technician skill level. Sorry I misunderstood that you seem to mean someone in more of a lead role. Anyway, I was trying to push the point that at least one person who at least has some grasp of programming should be in each group of sysadmins or able to be called in by them at short notice. Otherwise the sysadmin just becomes the guy that can follow a Standard Operating Procedure and calls phone support if something is not on the list. Why did we spend so much time learning about stuff if we're not going to be capable enough to write a new S.O.P. when things change?
Furthermore, even if you had one in your team, what makes you think he will be able make a patch for bash faster than to wait for one to be released?
I really mean being able to build from source including patches faster than a package comes out for the platform, which may be weeks or never if the platform is an old software distribution. That's the bar I'm setting for "software engineer". It may be a bit lower than what you mean.
A bit of scripting and the ability to apply a patch, configure and make is enough for some people to call themselves an "engineer" without being challenged. A little bit more and that's a skillset every group running a few servers should have.
I don't think it's all that frequent right now, at least not outside of Fortune 500 companies or so
Of course, as a sysadmin I should also be a software engineer.
At least one of them in charge of each group of systems should be that or an equivalent. Being good at Skyrim is not enough to effectively run systems over time.
I saw a lot of hagiography of libertarians that will never be able to show one way or another if they can stick to their word but nothing that addresses my point.
I have good news for you** the American Bureaucracy is pretty damn efficient and honest.
I see the petty bribery overseas and raise you a FEMA horse judge. American Bureaucracy is a global laughing stock and a classic example of why nepotism produces failure. See also the NSA's sprawling outsourcing that had the world going "Booz what? They really outsourced military intelligence?" after Snowden. Of course there are many places far worse and of course it wasn't such a joke a few years ago, but pretending it's good now is not the way to recover from such a sad state of affairs where, much of the world, even India I'm sure, can be shocked at things like the blatant corruption with Rapiscan and the TSA. "Washington connections" are the secret of many things, like Enron lasting so long, Trump escaping serial bankruptcies and a pile of other things that make you wonder if the Mafia just put on suits and moved to a different city.
I would say the world is going more lefty, with governments consolidating their power bases and censoring/silencing criticism. It's the left that wants to grow the size of government and have it spy on/manipulate as much of peoples' lives as it can.
Maybe we should encourage kids to read stuff written before 1950 when "left" and "socialist" were turned into meaningless curse words instead of a description of something:( The above bit appears to be "the world is moving toward badness" instead of any sort of meaningful comment on politics. What the fuck did we do to stop a generation from thinking for themselves and noticing what is going on in the world?
Everything has to go through well monitored choke points before it can get very far. Of course that means that every now and again a backhoe cuts off nearly all traffic to a major city.
I am from the US (I am sure you guessed by now). Here in the states, it is the left (democrat) that wants to grow the size of the state
Yet it was the right that actually grew the size of the state instead of just wanting to do so. I suppose education has been cut a massive amount since the early 1980s which explains to extent why advertising trumps reason.
and rightists prefer smaller governments and traditional values
"Traditional" - only as in pre-Magna Carta authoritarian Royalty if you don't keep an eye on them with a justice system that they cannot easily dismantle. It's not really traditional values, it's about ripping up the things that protect values of others that they do not like. People who call themselves "moderate" are far more conservative than the reactionaries that hide behind the title "Conservative". The most extreme utter bastards that want to implement a "Christian" version of Sharia law that would directly oppose the tolerant teachings of Christ call themselves "Conservative" whenever they open their mouths to shout.
A bit more perspective - a high enough alert for the outgoing head of an intelligence agency to make noise about it but not serious enough for him to say on for an extra week in times of trouble. Pure cooked up chest thumping security theatre.
Yet they did this more cheaply than Californians spent making some movies - give up on your "gotcha" game and stop pretending that nobody outside of your country is worth considering.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not that far off for city dwellers since batteries suck less with every passing year. In areas just off the grid the dream was real in the 1990s - some people I know were told it would be $100k to get a line in for them and their neighbours so they went solar plus mini-hydro.
That's a good point - governments typically make a lot of money from special taxes on coal and oil which creates a major conflict of interest with electricity regulation. IMHO that's why we are seeing little photovoltaic panels in private hands on rooftops instead of big industrial scale solar thermal that could be vastly cheaper per MW. It could make economic sense for such a thing but it doesn't get a chance.
Rooftop solar flattens the daytime peak and cuts down on the maximum capacity needed to be produced and transmitted (along wires of course, but that's the word) from other places, so it does eventually pay for itself even when the money thrown at it is excessive. A bit of a problem is that throwing excessive amounts of money around builds political influence, but that's not a solar problem per se. Stop throwing money at it and they'll still be some takeup, especially in areas where utilities are indulging in excessive price gouging.
It's energy and there are pockets to be filled in Washington - of course there are subsidies.
If you are going to use Australia as an example you should look at the "poles and wires" overpricing scandal to get some perspective on the issue. A utility can build unused equipment and charge that on to the customer at a profit (ie. the fee goes up for new equipment and that raise in fees not only covers the construction but increases the profit substantially) due to a local monopoly and regulation being little other than a barrier of entry to new players. There were a couple of court cases in N.S.W. about equipment built and not connected to the grid but local customers expected to pay extra for it, plus padding.
Prices were soaring long before solar panels were popular and the increasing take up is more a consequence of the price than a driver of it. Don't take my word for it, there's plenty of information out there if you actually take a look and you don't have to a be an ex power industry person like me to understand it.
This keeps on coming up, and I get the feeling that Luckyo is a repeat offender despite knowing better, however I ask him to correct me if I'm wrong and he doesn't actually know better.
The thing with wind, as any child who watches the TV weather knows, is that it is always blowing somewhere. It's never calm on the whole planet or even an entire country bigger than Monaco. Windmills are not just in one spot but spread around countries especially now that they've been adopted by electricity generators for a few years - thus there's always at least some wind power available when you want to bring a few more MW online. They may cost a shitload per MW but for when you just want a little bit more power that's a lot cheaper than warming up 500MW worth of coal, which comes in big packages or not at all.
I think what we are seeing here is pointless tilting at windmills by armchair knights who see the windmills as evil giants (or green commie democrat lesbians, pick your fantasy opponent) instead of just a tool of the modern world that even Republicans are making money from.
There may be some points of value in the rest of the post but such cretinism, either real or most likely feigned, makes the rest appear of no value due to proximity.
Funny how power utilities are all for free market capitalism until the consumers get to play.
Increasing price gouging has driven fees up while the capitial costs for consumers to generate their own electricity has gone down, with obvious results at the crossover point.
Superman always finds a way, that's how he's written. Constantine is the one always in conflict about who to save, which at times makes him a complete and utter bastard. I don't think that would go down well with Superman.
From some of the awesome SF/thinly disguised political satire by the Polish author Lem. He inspired things like Douglas Adams's "Infinite Improbability Drive" and "Deep Thought" with the Trurl and Klapaucius stories. His automatic poet (first simulate a universe and then ...) shows the brilliance of both the writer and the person that translated the story into English. "Solaris" is probably his most unfilmable story yet was turned into two movies (probably as a bet) since most of the book is a listing of all the effort made over a century to try to understand an alien but with little progress.
Which is pretty well what "Lost" should have been in hindsight. By the last season it just looked to me like "Ubik" done badly.
In the 60's or 70's a spy novel had an aside about machine translation - "Hydraulic Ram" came out as "Water Sheep".
Sadly it's not about simple substitution but getting a machine apply rules for context and determining those rules is the bloody hard bit that Moore's Law can't help us with.
SF stories are about pushing some main ideas instead of constructing a complex interdependent future world and explaining it. For example, even the very different setting of "Dune" deliberately had medieval and middle eastern elements to avoid losing the reader in the situation of "everything is just different". So if a story has a future where everything is exactly the same as today apart from one thing, that's not a flaw in prediction, it's an example of focus.
One good recent example is the film "Predestination" which is from a Heinlein story - but it's setting is about predicting a different past with two major changes instead of a future which is today with a couple of changes. Heinlein's "Space Corps" is included nicely in the story mostly as a way of saying "this is not quite the world you know" - it's background scenery with a point instead of having much to do with the plot.
Also while there's so many plots that can be defused with one single mobile phone call (as done nicely in the Japanese "A Certain Magical Index" that does exactly that on a few occasions), or WWII technology that writers were not aware of (so many stories where signals were jammed stopping communication - but Heddy Lamar solved that and it's implemented in every mobile phone in the planet let alone other places), but sometimes it's best to just ignore the prop and listen to the ideas.
As an actual certified professional engineer that now happens to work in IT I'm constantly reminded that the term now applies to an intermediate technician skill level. Sorry I misunderstood that you seem to mean someone in more of a lead role.
Anyway, I was trying to push the point that at least one person who at least has some grasp of programming should be in each group of sysadmins or able to be called in by them at short notice. Otherwise the sysadmin just becomes the guy that can follow a Standard Operating Procedure and calls phone support if something is not on the list. Why did we spend so much time learning about stuff if we're not going to be capable enough to write a new S.O.P. when things change?
I really mean being able to build from source including patches faster than a package comes out for the platform, which may be weeks or never if the platform is an old software distribution. That's the bar I'm setting for "software engineer". It may be a bit lower than what you mean.
Are you joking or trying to mislead?
At least one of them in charge of each group of systems should be that or an equivalent. Being good at Skyrim is not enough to effectively run systems over time.
I saw a lot of hagiography of libertarians that will never be able to show one way or another if they can stick to their word but nothing that addresses my point.
I see the petty bribery overseas and raise you a FEMA horse judge.
American Bureaucracy is a global laughing stock and a classic example of why nepotism produces failure. See also the NSA's sprawling outsourcing that had the world going "Booz what? They really outsourced military intelligence?" after Snowden. Of course there are many places far worse and of course it wasn't such a joke a few years ago, but pretending it's good now is not the way to recover from such a sad state of affairs where, much of the world, even India I'm sure, can be shocked at things like the blatant corruption with Rapiscan and the TSA. "Washington connections" are the secret of many things, like Enron lasting so long, Trump escaping serial bankruptcies and a pile of other things that make you wonder if the Mafia just put on suits and moved to a different city.
Maybe we should encourage kids to read stuff written before 1950 when "left" and "socialist" were turned into meaningless curse words instead of a description of something :(
The above bit appears to be "the world is moving toward badness" instead of any sort of meaningful comment on politics. What the fuck did we do to stop a generation from thinking for themselves and noticing what is going on in the world?
Everything has to go through well monitored choke points before it can get very far. Of course that means that every now and again a backhoe cuts off nearly all traffic to a major city.
Yet it was the right that actually grew the size of the state instead of just wanting to do so.
I suppose education has been cut a massive amount since the early 1980s which explains to extent why advertising trumps reason.
"Traditional" - only as in pre-Magna Carta authoritarian Royalty if you don't keep an eye on them with a justice system that they cannot easily dismantle. It's not really traditional values, it's about ripping up the things that protect values of others that they do not like. People who call themselves "moderate" are far more conservative than the reactionaries that hide behind the title "Conservative". The most extreme utter bastards that want to implement a "Christian" version of Sharia law that would directly oppose the tolerant teachings of Christ call themselves "Conservative" whenever they open their mouths to shout.
A bit more perspective - a high enough alert for the outgoing head of an intelligence agency to make noise about it but not serious enough for him to say on for an extra week in times of trouble.
Pure cooked up chest thumping security theatre.
Start grepping you mean.
Oh, finished already.
Yet they did this more cheaply than Californians spent making some movies - give up on your "gotcha" game and stop pretending that nobody outside of your country is worth considering.