It's worth noting that after Groupon spurned Google's $6 billion offer, Google put together their own discount program. And after a few years they shut it down. So even Google couldn't make it work.
The part that nerds might be interested in is how the wind shifts as to the ways people connect and do business.
Interesting to the nerds who weren't around during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Those of us who were around back then have seen this all before.
Are people looking to get deals in real-time? What's the turnaround time on a web-only deal to get the best possible value? Can you get a group of random strangers (rather than a group of friends) to all hop on a deal at once? Can you look at the data to see where this strategy works best, and where it works worst?
Whether you believe in Groupon or not, someone had to try it to establish once and for all whether or not the idea works. It was an interesting experiment on adding liquidity to the customer-business relationship. And I'll admit despite initially being dismissively skeptical, I've actually started frequenting some businesses after being introduced to them via Groupon (hey, just because I don't believe in them doesn't mean I'm going to pass up a coupon for 50% off of something I was going to buy anyway). I still don't think their business model is sustainable, but I do admit there is something to it - some pent-up demand that maybe could be tapped with a different model. Maybe a low-overhead site which allows businesses and groups of customers to negotiate a group price directly.
The proper way to measure the risk of an activity is to calculate a death rate relative to exposure rate. Shark attacks are relatively rare (more people are killed by deer) because the time people spend exposed to sharks is relatively short. Although millions of people visit the beach every day, the aggregate time they spend in the water and thus expose themselves to possible shark attacks is comparatively short. That's why a disproportionate number of shark attacks are on surfers and body boarders - they represent a smaller population than swimmers, but they spend a lot more time in the water each year than the average beach swimmer.
On the other hand, any time you're driving a car in an area where deer are free-roaming exposes you to a potential collision with a deer. The population and time you're exposed to the risk is huge. Consequently, you are safer from being killed by a deer than by a shark, even though deer kill more people annually than sharks. The same goes for selfies - the size of the population and the aggregate amount of time they spend taking selfies is huge compared to the aggregate exposure time to potential shark attack. So even if the risk of the two were identical, you'd expect more deaths from the former.
I'm alarmed at the growing tendency for people to jump to conclusions on topics/conspiracy theories with popular support. Coke making donations to and providing grants for medical research companies, or even directly funding research into sugared beverages and obesity is not in and of itself evidence that they're trying to manipulate the research. If it is, you put Coke in an impossible damned if you do, damned if you don't position. If they do make the donations, you criticize them for trying to manipulate research results in their favor. If they don't make the donations, you criticize them for being greedy corporate bastards who won't even donate to scientific research relevant to their product.
The donations themselves are not evidence that Coke has been trying to manipulate research results. If you want to support that hypothesis, you need to come up with specific incidents where Coke made the donations conditional on withholding or changing research results unfavorable to their product.
Just because a majority of people want to believe this theory doesn't free you from the logical and ethical obligation to actually prove the claim. The person advocating the hypothesis always has the burden of proof.
Yeah, I don't think "malicious intruder" is the right way to cast this. I've been worried about precisely this problem for a different reason. One of my network cables goes to the roof to a parabolic antenna shooting wifi to another building. It occurred to me that a lightning strike hitting that antenna could ride up the continuous copper provided by the ethernet cables and switches and do a lot of damage to a lot of equipment. What's the best way to isolate the antenna from the rest of the network? Air-gap it with a wireless transmitter and receiver in the same box? Won't they have to be plugged into the same power outlet so there's still a direct copper pathway? Do those ethernet filters in surge protectors provide sufficient protection against lightning strikes?
A smartphone is just a small computer with dialing capability. In fact that's the biggest mistake Microsoft in the mobile space. Back in the day, everyone knew that PDAs and phones were going to converge (well, everyone except Microsoft it seems). We just didn't know if PDAs would gain dialing capability, or if phones would gain PDA capability. All Microsoft had to do was add native dialing and cellular chipset support to WinCE, and the PDAs with dialing capability added on would've morphed into smartphones. HP actually tried to do that with one of their WinCE devices, but without native support it was horribly buggy and went nowhere. So Microsoft missed the boat, and phones with PDA capability grafted on went on to become smartphones, effectively blowing a huge hole in Windows' near-monopoly as a software platform OS that persists to this day in the mobile sector.
Apple knows a lot about computers. They didn't know phones, but by the time the iPhone rolled out the phone chipsets had become standardized enough that you could easily incorporate it into a computing device (hence why we've got tablets and laptops with cellular data capability).
A car OTOH is nothing like anything Apple has built before.
bout all that's "reminiscent" of WWII designs is that is has a prop
It's a turboprop. Basically an unducted version of a turbofan jet engine like you see on the 777/A380. Those enclose the bypass fans in a duct, and the fan blades are designed appropriately. A turboprop doesn't use a duct, and its fan blades are designed appropriately. It has nothing in common with WWII piston-driven aircraft aside from the fan blades looking like a propeller because the physics of aerodynamics doesn't change with the passage of time.
The GM fine was for a design defect which the company refused to acknowledge. The Toyota fine was due to loose (defective) floor mats which happened to coincide with overblown hype about unintended acceleration (it is physically impossible for the engine to overpower the brakes, and the most famous incident was fabricated by someone trying to make money off it).
This VW diesel thing is about deliberately cheating on emissions tests, not some unforeseen defect. I'd be very surprised if the fine was less than what GM and Toyota had to pay. And I expect we'll see criminal charges at some point since this was deliberate.
The diesel models in question don't use a urea (Ad-Blue) injection system to reduce NOx emissions. Faced with the potential liability of nearly half a million diesel VW owners wanting to return their cars, I think VW best choice will turn out to be doing the right (if financially painful) thing. Come up with a way to retrofit all those cars with a urea-injection system, issue a recall which installs the system for free, give free urea refills (about $40/10,000 miles), and maybe a small cash compensation for the slight decrease in trunk space.
That'll let you keep the 42 MPG while complying with EPA emissions standards. And I suspect it'll be a lot cheaper for VW than the potential payout for owner lawsuits.
I suspect Google is trying to avoid delisting based on geographical IP because when we eventually move to IPv6, maintaining a geo-IP database would mean tracking and looking up IPs against a database 10^38 bits in size.
The fundamental problem here is the French court wants to apply physical geographical boundaries to something happening in virtual non-geographical space. While Google can, with enough work, sort of kind of make that virtual space map to geographical boundaries today, there's no guarantee they or anyone else can do so in the future. And Google doesn't want to set a precedent where they willingly accept responsibility for doing such a thing now and in the future. They will do so if forced, but they if/when technology changes and makes such a task impossible, they want to be able to come back and say, "well we did it before because you forced us to, but now it's impossible for us to do it anymore."
They don't need to leave France. They just need to detect if a French IP is trying to access Google sites other than google.fr, and redirect you to a page that says per French court decision, you are prohibited from using non-France Google services. Sucks for the tourists who are visiting France and want to do Google searches in any language other than French, but that's what VPNs are for.
If France then wishes to prohibit VPNs, they'll raise the ire of both freedom-loving liberals who use VPNs for anonymity and will begin to compare France to Communist China, and conservative corporatists who use VPNs for security. I'm almost hoping that'll happen just so I can watch the fallout in the elections.
For those of you who weren't around 30 years ago...
Flying into LAX, you used to descended into a brown layer of smog during final approach. From anywhere along I-10 West of L.A. or CA-60 East of L.A., except for early morning you could only see the mountains to the north a few weeks out of the year. If you lived out near Riverside or San Bernardino, the day would start off with clear air, and about noon to 2pm, a thick grey-brown layer of smog would move in and drop visibility to 5-10 miles.
I'm conservative when it comes to business, and occasionally I think AQMD errs a bit too far on the safe side. But I fully support clean air legislation.
If storage has even an 50% loss rate, then daily price variation should be limited to 50% because otherwise storage batteries would make a profit.
No, that in itself isn't enough for storage batteries to be profitable. Take lead-acid batteries for example. They're a century-old technology whose primary drawback (weight) isn't a factor for storage applications. A deep-cycle lead-acid battery will cost you about $1 per Ah. At 12 V, that's $1 per 12 Watt-hours of capacity, or $83.33 per kWh of capacity.
The average residential price (the more expensive) of electricity in the U.S. is $0.12/kWh. If the price swing between day and night is $0.12/kWh ($0.18 at peak, $0.06 at night), then it will take you $83.33/$0.12 = 694 cycles to recoup the cost of the batteries and actually start to make money.
"Great! So you'll start making money after 2 years!" No, these batteries typically only last 150-300 cycles. Deep cycling is very stressful to the chemistry, and the cells rapidly begin to lose capacity beyond that many cycles. So it'll die long before you reach your break-even point. If you figure it lasts 300 cycles, the daily price differential in electricity price between day and night needs to be $0.278 per kWh before the battery becomes economical. If it only lasts 150 cycles, the price differential needs to be $0.556 per kWh. And I haven't even factored in charge/discharge efficiency.
This is why batteries are used almost exclusively for mobile applications - where it's impractical to draw power straight from the grid. Essentially you're paying dozens of dollars to carry around a few cents worth of electricity. Trying to turn that around and use batteries to release electricity back to the grid is adding a huge expense for very little benefit. It's almost always more practical to just scale electricity production up or down to meet demand, than try to time-shift it with batteries.
If you RTFA, the negative price is a consequence of a demand constraint (only ERCOT can buy the power) and a federal subsidy for wind generation. Normally when supply exceeds demand, the market price drops to below the cost to make some of that supply. It becomes not worth it to keep operating generators which are more expensive to run, and supply decreases to match demand.
In this case though, there's a $23 per MWh federal subsidy for wind power. I dunno why the summary left that out since that's the most important piece to this puzzle. So even though wind producers are having to pay others $8.52 per MWh to take the electricity off their hands, they're still being paid $23 per MWh to produce it, for a net income of $14.48 per MWH. So they're still running their wind turbines at full even though the price is negative, because to them the price is still positive.
The subsidy is the main reason the price went negative. The other reasons you cite contributed. The lack of power exchanges with other states meant the excess electricity couldn't be sent to other places where demand still outstripped supply. And the incentive to keep nuclear and coal operating (oil and gas can ramp up and down almost as easily as hydro) meant wind could push the price negative even though it was providing just 30% of the power. But the subsidy was the main culprit. If there were no subsidy, the wind turbine operators would've simply feathered their turbines and ceased production before the price went negative.
Well if you're in Salesforce, when you are working with a sales person, they open what is called an "Opportunity". It's a document used to track the progress of a potential sale through the pipeline.
And this is reason #7 why people dislike marketing. "Opportunity" = 5 syllables. "Potential sale" = 4 syllables. Just use the shorter and more descriptive term. As a bonus it'll save you from ever having to type sentences like "It's a document used to track the progress of a potential sale through the pipeline." because it'll be obvious from the shorter name.
A tree is less than 1% efficient. A solar panel is about 20% efficient.
Conversion efficiency is not the end-all of measurements. A tree grows for free. A solar panel costs money. So a tree is infinitely more efficient than solar panels in $ per Watt-hour. The only time conversion efficiency is relevant to solar is when you're space-constrained (or in the case of PV panels, constrained by construction costs per square meter of panels). A solar panel makes sense when you're limited to a small area, like a calculator or sailboat. But last time I looked, we had tons of space in which to grow trees.
Trees need a lot of water, solar panels do not.
Which is why trees produce oxygen and solar panels do not.
Solar panels can put placed in a desert, on roof tops, or over parking lots.
The latter two only cover about 1% of the earth's land area. The first one covers about 30%, but if you can get the cost of energy down enough ($ per Watt-hour again - that metric by which trees completely obliterate solar panels), then desalinating water becomes feasible and you can convert desert into arable land.
Growing trees for fuel displaces agriculture or wilderness.
You've never visited a forest, have you? Trees grow by themselves. No human intervention or displacement required.
Making fuels from sun and air sounds like a tree huggers dream but as long as we can find something cheaper it will be useless.
We already have a cheaper way to convert sunlight and air into fuel. We don't even have to manufacture them - they self-assemble themselves. They're called plants.
If the subsidies for biofuels weren't being diverted by the horribly inefficient corn lobby, we might actually be making some progress converting generic cellulose into alcohol fuels on an industrial scale. Once you figure out, there's no more need to build expensive solar panels. Just let plants do their stuff and grow, capture sunlight, and combine it with CO2 and H2O to form cellulose (and oxygen). Then all you have to do is occasional harvest the plants and convert their cellulose into alcohol fuel.
All of those were products originally available exclusively under the brand name before knockoffs became available. The company making the brand name item then had to fight and advertise to get people to use the generic name for the product, lest they lose their trademark protection (as happened to aspirin, escalator, thermos, etc). That is, the brand name came first, the generic name came later.
It's mostly an American thing because the products were originally introduced in the U.S. By the time they were introduced in other countries, the knockoffs were already available, and thus the strong association between the brand name and the type of product never developed. The opposite happened with Hoover. While the company was American, knockoffs quickly became available in the U.S. but not in the U.K. So the British tend to refer to vacuum cleaning as "hoovering" while Americans use the generic "vacuuming".
Realtor - real estate agent
This one has a similar history as the above, except it wasn't an invention. It was an overly successful attempt by a group to create a new licensed profession (like doctors and lawyers are licensed).
Rollerblades - roller skates
The generic term for Rollerblades is in-line skates. To distinguish them from roller skates which used 4 wheels in a rectangular configuration like a car.
I remember a post similar to this in the early 1990s, claiming we won the first Gulf War because we had Cruise missiles while Iraq had Scud missiles. Would Tom Cruise's career be where it is today if he had been named Tom Scud?
This. Trademarks are a lot tougher to enforce than patents and copyrights. (1) You have to actually be using it yourself or it's considered abandoned, and (2) it only applies to a certain product. So unless the person who registered the trademark is running a university which is actively using all the trademarked names he registered, he's going to be laughed out of court if he tries to prevent a university from using just one.
Of course that's hard to do since most house lights are nowhere near bright enough to match sunlight levels,
Skylights. If your ceiling is too far from the roof, use a light tube. I'm opposed to widespread adoption of PV solar because its levelized cost is still several times higher than other electricity sources. But skylights are obvious. It makes no sense to deliberately create shade with a roof, then use artificial lighting to get rid of the shade.
and if you're indoors it's hard to keep your eyes focused far away for extended periods.
Some arcade games (Battlezone and some sub hunt game are the ones I remember) used a lens in front of the screen to give the illusion of objects on the screen being very far away. I've often wondered why a lens like that never became standard desktop computing equipment. Seems like it would help reduce eyestrain as well.
Bitcoin's problem is that they artificially limited the maximum number of bitcoins to 21 million. That breaks one of the fundamental requirements for a true currency. The entire reason countries have moved off the gold standard is because for a currency to function, it has to grow at roughly the same rate as your economy. Gold didn't, and every time economic growth outstripped the rate new gold was mined, the currency deflated (gold became worth more). The economy subsequently went into recession as it became more cost-effective to stuff your money under the mattress and wait for its value to increase, than to go spend that money in ways which brought in more money via economic activity. In other words, it was a feedback loop halting economic growth every time it passed the rate at which new gold was being mined.
Bitcoin has the exact same problem. Its rapid appreciation in value is not the sign of a healthy currency or due to it increasing in popularity. It's a hallmark of a currency whose supply has not been keeping up with economic growth, making it completely unsuitable as a currency. Just like gold. Everyone who runs the banks realizes this, so don't want to touch bitcoin. But they do see merit in the blockchains for accounting and authentication purposes.
You see, the concept of "money" is simply as a tangible representation of productivity. You do something productive, it's worth money - you can trade it to someone else for money, then trade the money to someone else for some of their productivity. Why not just barter productivity for productivity? Because that's not always possible. You make milk but you want eggs. Barter only works if (1) someone who makes eggs wants milk, and (2) you two happen to meet. If you can't find such an egg-maker, you have to find someone else - a middleman who wants milk, but makes something the egg-maker wants. Money acts as the universal middleman, making all barter transactions possible without having to find a real middleman. You sell your milk for money to the first person you meet who wants milk. You buy eggs with money from the first person you meet who's selling eggs. That's the only reason money exists.
When there's too much inflation, "money" isn't working properly because the money you got for your productivity is decreasing in value too much before you can spend it - you're better off bypassing the money and simply bartering your productivity for someone else's productivity. Thus defeating money's reason for existing.
When there's deflation, "money" isn't working properly because people who are hoarding it (people with large gold or bitcoin reserves) are getting richer even though they aren't doing anything productive. Money is no longer a representation of productivity, again defeating its reason for existing.
The best case is when the amount of "money" grows at exactly the same rate at which the economy (the sum total of everyone's productivity) grows, thus preventing inflation and deflation. You can't do that with gold. You can't do that with bitcoins. You can do it with a fiat currency (that's managed responsibly).
(As for "fixing" Bitcoin's problem in a new decentralized virtual currency, that's a lot harder if not impossible. The whole reason a fiat currency is centralized is because someone has to release more currency into the supply pool to keep up with the rate of economic growth, and they have to do so responsibly. Too much and you get hyperinflation; too little and you get deflation, and you're no better off than you were with gold. Government usually fills this role, thus making it a centralized currency. With a decentralized currency, there is no one to fill this role. Which is why they artificially capped bitcoins at 21 million - to prevent bitcoins from flooding the market effectively causing bitcoin inflation and making them worthless. But for the economy, the opposite - deflation - is just as bad a trait for a currency. Bitcoin has no protection against deflation, and in fact its supply cap of 21 million guarantees it )
The ultimate fault here is that when Google holds my email, it should be *my* email not theirs, so they should not have the legal power to give it out without my consent.
You don't have to use Google or Facebook. You can still set up your own email server or web server to post your daily activities. You choose to use Google and Facebook for the convenience, and that convenience comes with the lessened personal protections. Those companies have no duty to protect your rights, or more precisely, you have no right to force those companies to protect your rights. The ultimate fault here is with people who've chosen convenience over standing up for their rights.
Disclaimer: I use Gmail, though I do have a personal domain and email server if I were ever concerned about the content of said message being on Gmail. But I also know that any email is sent over the net unencrypted, and anyone logging traffic passing through one of the major Internet hubs could read it. So I probably wouldn't be sending any such message over email in the first place.
That is how the post office worked. They are actually not allowed to intercept mail without a warrant: it isn't theirs to give out.
The Post Office (1) delivers mail. They don't provide reading and writing facilities for composing and reading mail which is really the only reason people use Gmail instead of Eudora. And (2) they require you to pay for their mail services via stamps. You don't pay for Google and Facebook. Advertisers do. So using the Post Office as an analogy is really only arguing that Google and Facebook should protect their advertisers' rights.
Immediately followed by governments, corporations, celebrities, and anyone paranoid of surveillance illegally using these "Go Away!" transmitters in places where drones are legally allowed to fly, but where they don't want them flying for selfish reasons.
Immediately followed by drone users disabling the "Go Away!" receivers because it's become impossible to use a drone with that receiver active.
Bullshit. If the Army has a commander-in-chief justification for going through your papers it can do so.
The Army oath of enlistment has you swearing to defend the Constitution. Obeying the President's orders is secondary. The Army makes a pretty big deal about this when you're enlisting since it's a common question among potential recruits. You are only obligated to obey Constitutional orders. If a conflict arises between the Constitution and the President's (or your superior's) orders, the Constitution wins.
So a Presidential order for you to go through someone's papers doesn't have to be obeyed (and in fact shouldn't be obeyed) if there's good reason to believe it's an unconstitutional order.
This is why they can read your papers at the border
They can read your papers at the border because the Constitution only applies to U.S. soil (which incidentally is why Bush chose Guantanamo Bay to hold terrorists - it's not U.S. soil, it's Cuban). The definition of U.S. soil got stretched a bit to account for air travel - people who've landed on planes in the U.S. but haven't yet been processed by Customs and Immigration are not considered to be on U.S. soil yet. That exclusion was famously abused by three letter agencies claiming anyone living within a hundred miles of an international airport no longer had Constitutional protection.
Slashdot Mirror
It's worth noting that after Groupon spurned Google's $6 billion offer, Google put together their own discount program. And after a few years they shut it down. So even Google couldn't make it work.
Interesting to the nerds who weren't around during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. Those of us who were around back then have seen this all before.
Whether you believe in Groupon or not, someone had to try it to establish once and for all whether or not the idea works. It was an interesting experiment on adding liquidity to the customer-business relationship. And I'll admit despite initially being dismissively skeptical, I've actually started frequenting some businesses after being introduced to them via Groupon (hey, just because I don't believe in them doesn't mean I'm going to pass up a coupon for 50% off of something I was going to buy anyway). I still don't think their business model is sustainable, but I do admit there is something to it - some pent-up demand that maybe could be tapped with a different model. Maybe a low-overhead site which allows businesses and groups of customers to negotiate a group price directly.
The proper way to measure the risk of an activity is to calculate a death rate relative to exposure rate. Shark attacks are relatively rare (more people are killed by deer) because the time people spend exposed to sharks is relatively short. Although millions of people visit the beach every day, the aggregate time they spend in the water and thus expose themselves to possible shark attacks is comparatively short. That's why a disproportionate number of shark attacks are on surfers and body boarders - they represent a smaller population than swimmers, but they spend a lot more time in the water each year than the average beach swimmer.
On the other hand, any time you're driving a car in an area where deer are free-roaming exposes you to a potential collision with a deer. The population and time you're exposed to the risk is huge. Consequently, you are safer from being killed by a deer than by a shark, even though deer kill more people annually than sharks. The same goes for selfies - the size of the population and the aggregate amount of time they spend taking selfies is huge compared to the aggregate exposure time to potential shark attack. So even if the risk of the two were identical, you'd expect more deaths from the former.
I'm alarmed at the growing tendency for people to jump to conclusions on topics/conspiracy theories with popular support. Coke making donations to and providing grants for medical research companies, or even directly funding research into sugared beverages and obesity is not in and of itself evidence that they're trying to manipulate the research. If it is, you put Coke in an impossible damned if you do, damned if you don't position. If they do make the donations, you criticize them for trying to manipulate research results in their favor. If they don't make the donations, you criticize them for being greedy corporate bastards who won't even donate to scientific research relevant to their product.
The donations themselves are not evidence that Coke has been trying to manipulate research results. If you want to support that hypothesis, you need to come up with specific incidents where Coke made the donations conditional on withholding or changing research results unfavorable to their product.
Just because a majority of people want to believe this theory doesn't free you from the logical and ethical obligation to actually prove the claim. The person advocating the hypothesis always has the burden of proof.
Yeah, I don't think "malicious intruder" is the right way to cast this. I've been worried about precisely this problem for a different reason. One of my network cables goes to the roof to a parabolic antenna shooting wifi to another building. It occurred to me that a lightning strike hitting that antenna could ride up the continuous copper provided by the ethernet cables and switches and do a lot of damage to a lot of equipment. What's the best way to isolate the antenna from the rest of the network? Air-gap it with a wireless transmitter and receiver in the same box? Won't they have to be plugged into the same power outlet so there's still a direct copper pathway? Do those ethernet filters in surge protectors provide sufficient protection against lightning strikes?
A smartphone is just a small computer with dialing capability. In fact that's the biggest mistake Microsoft in the mobile space. Back in the day, everyone knew that PDAs and phones were going to converge (well, everyone except Microsoft it seems). We just didn't know if PDAs would gain dialing capability, or if phones would gain PDA capability. All Microsoft had to do was add native dialing and cellular chipset support to WinCE, and the PDAs with dialing capability added on would've morphed into smartphones. HP actually tried to do that with one of their WinCE devices, but without native support it was horribly buggy and went nowhere. So Microsoft missed the boat, and phones with PDA capability grafted on went on to become smartphones, effectively blowing a huge hole in Windows' near-monopoly as a software platform OS that persists to this day in the mobile sector.
Apple knows a lot about computers. They didn't know phones, but by the time the iPhone rolled out the phone chipsets had become standardized enough that you could easily incorporate it into a computing device (hence why we've got tablets and laptops with cellular data capability).
A car OTOH is nothing like anything Apple has built before.
It's a turboprop. Basically an unducted version of a turbofan jet engine like you see on the 777/A380. Those enclose the bypass fans in a duct, and the fan blades are designed appropriately. A turboprop doesn't use a duct, and its fan blades are designed appropriately. It has nothing in common with WWII piston-driven aircraft aside from the fan blades looking like a propeller because the physics of aerodynamics doesn't change with the passage of time.
The GM fine was for a design defect which the company refused to acknowledge. The Toyota fine was due to loose (defective) floor mats which happened to coincide with overblown hype about unintended acceleration (it is physically impossible for the engine to overpower the brakes, and the most famous incident was fabricated by someone trying to make money off it).
This VW diesel thing is about deliberately cheating on emissions tests, not some unforeseen defect. I'd be very surprised if the fine was less than what GM and Toyota had to pay. And I expect we'll see criminal charges at some point since this was deliberate.
The diesel models in question don't use a urea (Ad-Blue) injection system to reduce NOx emissions. Faced with the potential liability of nearly half a million diesel VW owners wanting to return their cars, I think VW best choice will turn out to be doing the right (if financially painful) thing. Come up with a way to retrofit all those cars with a urea-injection system, issue a recall which installs the system for free, give free urea refills (about $40/10,000 miles), and maybe a small cash compensation for the slight decrease in trunk space.
That'll let you keep the 42 MPG while complying with EPA emissions standards. And I suspect it'll be a lot cheaper for VW than the potential payout for owner lawsuits.
I suspect Google is trying to avoid delisting based on geographical IP because when we eventually move to IPv6, maintaining a geo-IP database would mean tracking and looking up IPs against a database 10^38 bits in size.
The fundamental problem here is the French court wants to apply physical geographical boundaries to something happening in virtual non-geographical space. While Google can, with enough work, sort of kind of make that virtual space map to geographical boundaries today, there's no guarantee they or anyone else can do so in the future. And Google doesn't want to set a precedent where they willingly accept responsibility for doing such a thing now and in the future. They will do so if forced, but they if/when technology changes and makes such a task impossible, they want to be able to come back and say, "well we did it before because you forced us to, but now it's impossible for us to do it anymore."
They don't need to leave France. They just need to detect if a French IP is trying to access Google sites other than google.fr, and redirect you to a page that says per French court decision, you are prohibited from using non-France Google services. Sucks for the tourists who are visiting France and want to do Google searches in any language other than French, but that's what VPNs are for.
If France then wishes to prohibit VPNs, they'll raise the ire of both freedom-loving liberals who use VPNs for anonymity and will begin to compare France to Communist China, and conservative corporatists who use VPNs for security. I'm almost hoping that'll happen just so I can watch the fallout in the elections.
For those of you who weren't around 30 years ago...
Flying into LAX, you used to descended into a brown layer of smog during final approach. From anywhere along I-10 West of L.A. or CA-60 East of L.A., except for early morning you could only see the mountains to the north a few weeks out of the year. If you lived out near Riverside or San Bernardino, the day would start off with clear air, and about noon to 2pm, a thick grey-brown layer of smog would move in and drop visibility to 5-10 miles.
I'm conservative when it comes to business, and occasionally I think AQMD errs a bit too far on the safe side. But I fully support clean air legislation.
No, that in itself isn't enough for storage batteries to be profitable. Take lead-acid batteries for example. They're a century-old technology whose primary drawback (weight) isn't a factor for storage applications. A deep-cycle lead-acid battery will cost you about $1 per Ah. At 12 V, that's $1 per 12 Watt-hours of capacity, or $83.33 per kWh of capacity.
The average residential price (the more expensive) of electricity in the U.S. is $0.12/kWh. If the price swing between day and night is $0.12/kWh ($0.18 at peak, $0.06 at night), then it will take you $83.33/$0.12 = 694 cycles to recoup the cost of the batteries and actually start to make money.
"Great! So you'll start making money after 2 years!" No, these batteries typically only last 150-300 cycles. Deep cycling is very stressful to the chemistry, and the cells rapidly begin to lose capacity beyond that many cycles. So it'll die long before you reach your break-even point. If you figure it lasts 300 cycles, the daily price differential in electricity price between day and night needs to be $0.278 per kWh before the battery becomes economical. If it only lasts 150 cycles, the price differential needs to be $0.556 per kWh. And I haven't even factored in charge/discharge efficiency.
This is why batteries are used almost exclusively for mobile applications - where it's impractical to draw power straight from the grid. Essentially you're paying dozens of dollars to carry around a few cents worth of electricity. Trying to turn that around and use batteries to release electricity back to the grid is adding a huge expense for very little benefit. It's almost always more practical to just scale electricity production up or down to meet demand, than try to time-shift it with batteries.
If you RTFA, the negative price is a consequence of a demand constraint (only ERCOT can buy the power) and a federal subsidy for wind generation. Normally when supply exceeds demand, the market price drops to below the cost to make some of that supply. It becomes not worth it to keep operating generators which are more expensive to run, and supply decreases to match demand.
In this case though, there's a $23 per MWh federal subsidy for wind power. I dunno why the summary left that out since that's the most important piece to this puzzle. So even though wind producers are having to pay others $8.52 per MWh to take the electricity off their hands, they're still being paid $23 per MWh to produce it, for a net income of $14.48 per MWH. So they're still running their wind turbines at full even though the price is negative, because to them the price is still positive.
The subsidy is the main reason the price went negative. The other reasons you cite contributed. The lack of power exchanges with other states meant the excess electricity couldn't be sent to other places where demand still outstripped supply. And the incentive to keep nuclear and coal operating (oil and gas can ramp up and down almost as easily as hydro) meant wind could push the price negative even though it was providing just 30% of the power. But the subsidy was the main culprit. If there were no subsidy, the wind turbine operators would've simply feathered their turbines and ceased production before the price went negative.
And this is reason #7 why people dislike marketing. "Opportunity" = 5 syllables. "Potential sale" = 4 syllables. Just use the shorter and more descriptive term. As a bonus it'll save you from ever having to type sentences like "It's a document used to track the progress of a potential sale through the pipeline." because it'll be obvious from the shorter name.
Conversion efficiency is not the end-all of measurements. A tree grows for free. A solar panel costs money. So a tree is infinitely more efficient than solar panels in $ per Watt-hour. The only time conversion efficiency is relevant to solar is when you're space-constrained (or in the case of PV panels, constrained by construction costs per square meter of panels). A solar panel makes sense when you're limited to a small area, like a calculator or sailboat. But last time I looked, we had tons of space in which to grow trees.
Which is why trees produce oxygen and solar panels do not.
The latter two only cover about 1% of the earth's land area. The first one covers about 30%, but if you can get the cost of energy down enough ($ per Watt-hour again - that metric by which trees completely obliterate solar panels), then desalinating water becomes feasible and you can convert desert into arable land.
You've never visited a forest, have you? Trees grow by themselves. No human intervention or displacement required.
We already have a cheaper way to convert sunlight and air into fuel. We don't even have to manufacture them - they self-assemble themselves. They're called plants.
If the subsidies for biofuels weren't being diverted by the horribly inefficient corn lobby, we might actually be making some progress converting generic cellulose into alcohol fuels on an industrial scale. Once you figure out, there's no more need to build expensive solar panels. Just let plants do their stuff and grow, capture sunlight, and combine it with CO2 and H2O to form cellulose (and oxygen). Then all you have to do is occasional harvest the plants and convert their cellulose into alcohol fuel.
All of those were products originally available exclusively under the brand name before knockoffs became available. The company making the brand name item then had to fight and advertise to get people to use the generic name for the product, lest they lose their trademark protection (as happened to aspirin, escalator, thermos, etc). That is, the brand name came first, the generic name came later.
It's mostly an American thing because the products were originally introduced in the U.S. By the time they were introduced in other countries, the knockoffs were already available, and thus the strong association between the brand name and the type of product never developed. The opposite happened with Hoover. While the company was American, knockoffs quickly became available in the U.S. but not in the U.K. So the British tend to refer to vacuum cleaning as "hoovering" while Americans use the generic "vacuuming".
This one has a similar history as the above, except it wasn't an invention. It was an overly successful attempt by a group to create a new licensed profession (like doctors and lawyers are licensed).
The generic term for Rollerblades is in-line skates. To distinguish them from roller skates which used 4 wheels in a rectangular configuration like a car.
I remember a post similar to this in the early 1990s, claiming we won the first Gulf War because we had Cruise missiles while Iraq had Scud missiles. Would Tom Cruise's career be where it is today if he had been named Tom Scud?
This. Trademarks are a lot tougher to enforce than patents and copyrights. (1) You have to actually be using it yourself or it's considered abandoned, and (2) it only applies to a certain product. So unless the person who registered the trademark is running a university which is actively using all the trademarked names he registered, he's going to be laughed out of court if he tries to prevent a university from using just one.
Skylights. If your ceiling is too far from the roof, use a light tube. I'm opposed to widespread adoption of PV solar because its levelized cost is still several times higher than other electricity sources. But skylights are obvious. It makes no sense to deliberately create shade with a roof, then use artificial lighting to get rid of the shade.
Some arcade games (Battlezone and some sub hunt game are the ones I remember) used a lens in front of the screen to give the illusion of objects on the screen being very far away. I've often wondered why a lens like that never became standard desktop computing equipment. Seems like it would help reduce eyestrain as well.
Bitcoin's problem is that they artificially limited the maximum number of bitcoins to 21 million. That breaks one of the fundamental requirements for a true currency. The entire reason countries have moved off the gold standard is because for a currency to function, it has to grow at roughly the same rate as your economy. Gold didn't, and every time economic growth outstripped the rate new gold was mined, the currency deflated (gold became worth more). The economy subsequently went into recession as it became more cost-effective to stuff your money under the mattress and wait for its value to increase, than to go spend that money in ways which brought in more money via economic activity. In other words, it was a feedback loop halting economic growth every time it passed the rate at which new gold was being mined.
Bitcoin has the exact same problem. Its rapid appreciation in value is not the sign of a healthy currency or due to it increasing in popularity. It's a hallmark of a currency whose supply has not been keeping up with economic growth, making it completely unsuitable as a currency. Just like gold. Everyone who runs the banks realizes this, so don't want to touch bitcoin. But they do see merit in the blockchains for accounting and authentication purposes.
You see, the concept of "money" is simply as a tangible representation of productivity. You do something productive, it's worth money - you can trade it to someone else for money, then trade the money to someone else for some of their productivity. Why not just barter productivity for productivity? Because that's not always possible. You make milk but you want eggs. Barter only works if (1) someone who makes eggs wants milk, and (2) you two happen to meet. If you can't find such an egg-maker, you have to find someone else - a middleman who wants milk, but makes something the egg-maker wants. Money acts as the universal middleman, making all barter transactions possible without having to find a real middleman. You sell your milk for money to the first person you meet who wants milk. You buy eggs with money from the first person you meet who's selling eggs. That's the only reason money exists.
When there's too much inflation, "money" isn't working properly because the money you got for your productivity is decreasing in value too much before you can spend it - you're better off bypassing the money and simply bartering your productivity for someone else's productivity. Thus defeating money's reason for existing.
When there's deflation, "money" isn't working properly because people who are hoarding it (people with large gold or bitcoin reserves) are getting richer even though they aren't doing anything productive. Money is no longer a representation of productivity, again defeating its reason for existing.
The best case is when the amount of "money" grows at exactly the same rate at which the economy (the sum total of everyone's productivity) grows, thus preventing inflation and deflation. You can't do that with gold. You can't do that with bitcoins. You can do it with a fiat currency (that's managed responsibly).
(As for "fixing" Bitcoin's problem in a new decentralized virtual currency, that's a lot harder if not impossible. The whole reason a fiat currency is centralized is because someone has to release more currency into the supply pool to keep up with the rate of economic growth, and they have to do so responsibly. Too much and you get hyperinflation; too little and you get deflation, and you're no better off than you were with gold. Government usually fills this role, thus making it a centralized currency. With a decentralized currency, there is no one to fill this role. Which is why they artificially capped bitcoins at 21 million - to prevent bitcoins from flooding the market effectively causing bitcoin inflation and making them worthless. But for the economy, the opposite - deflation - is just as bad a trait for a currency. Bitcoin has no protection against deflation, and in fact its supply cap of 21 million guarantees it )
You don't have to use Google or Facebook. You can still set up your own email server or web server to post your daily activities. You choose to use Google and Facebook for the convenience, and that convenience comes with the lessened personal protections. Those companies have no duty to protect your rights, or more precisely, you have no right to force those companies to protect your rights. The ultimate fault here is with people who've chosen convenience over standing up for their rights.
Disclaimer: I use Gmail, though I do have a personal domain and email server if I were ever concerned about the content of said message being on Gmail. But I also know that any email is sent over the net unencrypted, and anyone logging traffic passing through one of the major Internet hubs could read it. So I probably wouldn't be sending any such message over email in the first place.
The Post Office (1) delivers mail. They don't provide reading and writing facilities for composing and reading mail which is really the only reason people use Gmail instead of Eudora. And (2) they require you to pay for their mail services via stamps. You don't pay for Google and Facebook. Advertisers do. So using the Post Office as an analogy is really only arguing that Google and Facebook should protect their advertisers' rights.
Immediately followed by governments, corporations, celebrities, and anyone paranoid of surveillance illegally using these "Go Away!" transmitters in places where drones are legally allowed to fly, but where they don't want them flying for selfish reasons.
Immediately followed by drone users disabling the "Go Away!" receivers because it's become impossible to use a drone with that receiver active.
The Army oath of enlistment has you swearing to defend the Constitution. Obeying the President's orders is secondary. The Army makes a pretty big deal about this when you're enlisting since it's a common question among potential recruits. You are only obligated to obey Constitutional orders. If a conflict arises between the Constitution and the President's (or your superior's) orders, the Constitution wins.
So a Presidential order for you to go through someone's papers doesn't have to be obeyed (and in fact shouldn't be obeyed) if there's good reason to believe it's an unconstitutional order.
They can read your papers at the border because the Constitution only applies to U.S. soil (which incidentally is why Bush chose Guantanamo Bay to hold terrorists - it's not U.S. soil, it's Cuban). The definition of U.S. soil got stretched a bit to account for air travel - people who've landed on planes in the U.S. but haven't yet been processed by Customs and Immigration are not considered to be on U.S. soil yet. That exclusion was famously abused by three letter agencies claiming anyone living within a hundred miles of an international airport no longer had Constitutional protection.