Don't look on eBay for old LaserJet 4's -- the shipping cost will kill you. But if you live in or near a major city (or even a medium one), chances are there's a regularly-scheduled computer show, where the mom-and-pop shops and the used-gear dealers all show up.
I picked up a LaserJet 4M plus a newly-refurbished toner cartridge at a MarketPro computer show for $150 about a year and a half ago. Probably the last time I'll ever buy a printer.
My 15 minutes of Internet fame ran out several years ago because of something like this.
My then-wife needed the exact distance from our house to BWI Airport (about 20 miles) for an expense report. Mapquest wasn't cooperating that day for some reason, so we tried Expedia. The route it gave us sent us on a 9-day trip through Nova Scotia. I had the presence of mind to grab a copy of the generated route and submit it to RHF, as I couldn't duplicate the problem.
However, though I couldn't duplicate it, I did get a few emails in the weeks following the post from people who had had similar problems, including one guy who was sent from Minnesota to Tennessee by way of the same town in Nova Scotia.
If your institution's idea of a paperless statement is one that is emailed to you, then I'd think twice about doing ANY business with them, since paying lip service to preventing identity theft is worse than not doing anything about it at all (IMHO). A proper paperless statement is simply a notice of availability emailed to you, and then you still have to log onto the website and authenticate properly (and securely) to read it.
The Earth and its moon already do rotate about a common point -- the center-of-mass of the combined system. It's just that given the relative masses of the two bodies, the center of mass is pretty darn close to the center of mass of the Earth.
If you hadn't gotten Mark Hamill to play Blair, would the final mission still have had the player flying down a canyon to drop a world-destroying bomb on a small target?
So which receipt would I give? The one for the motherboard + case? I ordered it without a hard drive or CD-ROM because I had those from my old computer, and without a video card because I found one cheaper elsewhere. I didn't buy a PC, I bought some PC components.
And those hard drives are more than 2 years old. Would that invalidate the whole computer?
Anyone who's savvy enough to put a PC together from components understands their own needs, and wouldn't switch to a Mac. If they had needed a Mac, they would have bought one. For those others, they'd need more incentive than a mere $200, unless that $200 were more than 1/3 of the original price.
(Where's the equivalent of the Kelley Blue Book for computer hardware, anyhow?)
There's a reason why taxes aren't flat, and it's because lower incomes are proportionately worse off, even if the same percentage is taken out.
Say that the flat tax rate were 20%. For someone making $200,000, they'd be paying $40,000 in taxes, leaving them with $160,000. That would provide quite a comfortable lifestyle for most of the/. crowd. But drop that base salary by an order of magnitude to $20,000 -- lower middle class, far above minimum wage -- and when you take out the $4,000 in taxes, you're left with $16,000. You've gone from a barely-livable gross wage to a nonlivable net wage, all for the sake of "equality". But it's the same percentage.
Check up on the meanings of progressive vs. regressive taxes.
Re:Don't ticket me - control my car's max speed
on
Road Marker Marks You
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The idea of engine governors (in any form) is great until someone gets involved in a side-impact collision that could have been avoided if they'd only been able to stomp on the gas and make the oncoming vehicle (which, engine governor or no, was still moving at more than zero speed) miss. Braking isn't always an option, nor is maneuvering...sometimes the only way to avoid a collision is to go faster.
The problem isn't light itself so much as light leakage. The fact that you can see so many lights on the ground from space (to the degree where those "before" and "after" shots were so dramatic) shows that those lights are radiating upward. What's the sense in that? The whole point of illuminated cities is to light up the streets, not the sky.
It's that light that goes upward that washes out the view of the stars, much more so than the fact that you're standing in a lit place trying to look into the dark. Try going out at night into a rural area, but still close enough to a city that you can see its glow on the horizon. Even if you're in an unlit area, you're still not going to see much in the sky in the direction of the city.
From the previews I've seen of the game, when you seize a stash, you can either play good-cop and turn the stuff in, or play bad-cop and sell it right back to the dealer on the next corner over for a quick buck. Play Bad Cop too often and your performance rating goes down, which will eventually keep you from progressing through the game. Short-term benefit, long-term repercussions.
What will be the issue, the drug trade itself, or the potential of portraying the police negatively?
Best exchange I had between two players when running one of many one-off Paranoia sessions (which my gaming buddies back in the day would do about twice a month when we were taking everything else too seriously):
Player A has an experimental weapon which is clearly misbehaving and about to do something grievously bad. She grabs Player B, the equipment officer (who got chosen for the job because he was the dumbest character and the others thought he'd be easy to dump blame for everything on)...
A: My experimental weapon seems to be malfunctioning. You're responsible for making sure all of our gear works properly, so get to it! (hands weapon over)
B: (stares dully at weapon for a few seconds while it starts to shake and rattle) Uhh...operator error. (hands it back to A and ducks for cover)
A: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!! ***foom***
One-offs seemed to be the best way to play. Life was cheap, and if you didn't expect to get attached to your character, you didn't care much about the GM's seeming arbitrariness. I definitely fell into the "if you're working too hard to survive, you're not having fun, and not having fun is treason" school of play...
My girlfriend and I recently spent a week and a half at WDW -- my first time in almost 15 years, and most nights, we spent at least a couple of hours at DisneyQuest. We had a pretty long discussion about whether or not they could run one of those in another city (or if not them, then some other company using the same concept). The conclusion we came up with was "probably not".
You could work around problems of operational costs and the like with a suitable pricing scheme. (The annual pass is a steal -- at less than $100, it pays for itself beyond 3 trips.) But the overall atmosphere and -- dare I say it -- "Disney Magic" just couldn't be recreated. I'm talking about the fact that anti-social behavior that is depressingly common in other urban environments is relatively uncommon down at Rat World. Not that crime is unknown down there (or else they wouldn't need a security force the size of a medium police department), but the atmosphere is relaxed enough that it's less of a concern.
Case in point: my checkbook fell out of my pocket while we were doing the VR whitewater rafting. (Pretty good upper-body workout -- not nearly as harsh as the real thing, but not for complete wimps either.) I noticed it missing when we got back to the hotel that night, and we picked it up at lost+found the next morning. If it had happened up here in DC, I would've been on the phone first thing in the morning with my bank to take precautions against ID theft and fraud. Instead, my stress-out lasted maybe 10 minutes, and while I'm still keeping an eye on the bank account, I'm not amazingly worried. Yes, it's hard to commit ID theft with just the information on someone's checks, but a sufficiently creative criminal could think of ways to take advantage of the situation. But at WDW, people usually turn in things like wallets and purses without rifling them first. Not that people don't do so elsewhere, but it's definitely more of a concern.
I'd love to see someone try, and I'd certainly plunk down the cash if the experience were truly worth it. Give me the Pirates game, and the VR swordfighting and flying carpets, something that I couldn't duplicate at home without needing to win the Powerball first.
...or, rather, it's a II on the outside, but I swiped the D0 and D8 PROMs out of a II+ to upgrade it. (Not exactly overclocking or case-modding, but not bad for a 12-year-old.) Serial number 23099. I bet it would still work if I found an appropriate cable to hook it to my TV, too.
I've also got the Red Book that came with the early II's, the one with a complete source listing of the operating system. Don't tell Darl.
Wouldn't happen. The only reason that it was possible with Intelsat 603 was that that bird had a solid-fuel kick motor, much easier to deal with than the liquid-fueled main thrusters on more recent satellites. (STS-49 actually went and replaced the whole thruster there, once they managed to get a hold of it -- karma whore solicitation, supply appropriate links.)
That, and it was NASA's fault anyhow that that one got into the trouble of being unable to separate from the upper stage of its rocket, so it was necessary PR on their part to go after it, particularly since 603 needed to be in position to help broadcast the Olympics in '92.
I work for a major satellite operator, and meteor showers are something that has to be dealt with every year, several times a year. And we (and the other satellite operators in the world) deal with it fairly handily.
The odds of a collision are fairly small to begin with, and it's possible to hedge that a bit. The main body of most large satellites (speaking only for the geostationary variety) is less than 2.5 meters on a side. The solar arrays are much larger, but that's solved by rotating them so that they're edge-on to the approach path of the meteors.
It would be much more troublesome for the ISS or something else big. But something big also has mass on its side, and most of the particles involved in a meteor shower are really, really small.
I think that the most troubling thing coming into the first anniversary of the attack is some of the stuff purportedly being done in the names of those who died, and (just as importantly) what isn't being done.
All the legislation passed supposedly to further the cause of the "war on terror", with the amount of true freedom that was taken away with it (or has the potential to be taken away)...the sheer audacity of our leaders sometimes reminds me of kids loose in a candy store (my best friend compares it to Lord of the Flies)...
How soon we all went back to our divisive bickering over our differences, be the difference ethnicity or religion or income level...
The outcry over attempts to educate our younger generation about the Muslim world...while I agree that such teachings should not be mandated without equal consideration being given to all sides (so, for example, a required reading assignment of a history of Muslim culture should be accompanied by texts on Christian-Muslim, Jewish-Muslim, and Christian-Jewish relations through history), the mere idea that this is pushing some sort of agenda is a telling indicator that many of us still don't have a clue...
I will be respectful, I will honor the dead, but I won't do anything stupidly symbolic.
I work for a major telecom company based in Washington. As I'm about to submit this, at this time last year, we were about 15 minutes away from evacuating our headquarters and moving our critical 24/7 operations to our backup facility. My biggest regret was not calling the one I loved most and telling her that I was okay, even if it was just a voice mail message -- she didn't hear from me for hours. For all she knew, I was hopelessly trapped in traffic or spun out in a ditch somewhere in my attempt to flee the District
and get to the backup site.
I sincerely honor the dead. It's too much to ask, but I wish the rest of us would do the same.
I remember seeing some time ago the text of a graduation address made by Guy Kawasaki that (in part) addressed this very issue. (Karma whore solicitation: go find this speech -- I'm feeling too lazy at the moment to hit Google myself.)
In his speech, he analyzed the home refrigeration industry, going back to ice harvesting for ice boxes. Some bright person invented ice makers, but instead of adopting ice makers, the ice harvesters struggled to compete with the manufacturers of ice makers. Down they went. Then someone invented the refrigerator, and the same thing happened to the ice maker manufacturers. They saw themselves as purveyors of ice, not of food preservation systems.
And that's what we've got today with the entertainment industry. The MPAA/RIAA are so fixated on selling CDs and DVDs and movie tickets that they've completely lost sight of the fact that what they're selling is entertainment (if you can call it that), not the distribution media.
I've had an 8GB Maxtor in my home machine for about a year now, and I just replaced my wife's teeny drive with a 15GB one (purchased for the same price that I got my 8GB unit for last year -- thank you, Moore's Law). The 15GB unit is too new to tell, but the 8GB one hasn't given me a whit of grief.
Thing is, we hardly do anything resembling beating on these drives. Our home machines spend 95% of their time playing games and doing recreational web browsing. (My wife found it a bit disturbing that, while watching MaxBlast copy her old drive to the new one, about two-thirds of the disk was devoted to games...)
Our home boxes are for play. Our work boxes are for work. And while I can't speak for my wife's IT department, I know that I (as Head Geek in Residence) wouldn't buy a Maxtor for real work. Losing a 14th level amazon to a HD crash really doesn't matter as much as losing client usage statistics.
Of course, it probably helps that (at the time) the Maxtors that I've bought for myself were the low-end ones, which were the high-end ones a year previous, and thus they've had time to get the kinks out of them.
One of my dorm-mates once used his dot-matrix printer to get back at some rudeness on his roomie's part. Said roomie had stayed on the phone till about 2 AM arguing with his girlfriend, and my friend was trying to get some sleep before an 8 AM exam. Didn't work out too well.
So my friend waits till a night when the roomie comes home drunk. He lets the roomie sleep for about an hour, then sends a half-megabyte text file to the printer.
All bolded.
With the printer set to half-speed mode.
That was the last time the roomie kept my friend needlessly awake.
The problem with most energy storage systems is that they don't scale well. A bank of batteries is fine for a single dwelling for a week or two, but try obtaining enough batteries to run your home's essential systems for a month or two -- or an office's for a week. You'd need batteries comparable to a diesel submarine's loadout.
Flywheels are great, until you get a mechanical failure. Then you pray that you haven't placed anything remotely valuable in the plane of rotation. You can't imagine just how much kinetic energy is stored in a massive rotating object until you see a chunk fly off and pierce everything in its path.
And a large capacitor, as suggested further up in this thread? Think of a large chemical battery without the stability.
Slashdot Mirror
Don't look on eBay for old LaserJet 4's -- the shipping cost will kill you. But if you live in or near a major city (or even a medium one), chances are there's a regularly-scheduled computer show, where the mom-and-pop shops and the used-gear dealers all show up.
I picked up a LaserJet 4M plus a newly-refurbished toner cartridge at a MarketPro computer show for $150 about a year and a half ago. Probably the last time I'll ever buy a printer.
My 15 minutes of Internet fame ran out several years ago because of something like this.
My then-wife needed the exact distance from our house to BWI Airport (about 20 miles) for an expense report. Mapquest wasn't cooperating that day for some reason, so we tried Expedia. The route it gave us sent us on a 9-day trip through Nova Scotia. I had the presence of mind to grab a copy of the generated route and submit it to RHF, as I couldn't duplicate the problem.
However, though I couldn't duplicate it, I did get a few emails in the weeks following the post from people who had had similar problems, including one guy who was sent from Minnesota to Tennessee by way of the same town in Nova Scotia.
If your institution's idea of a paperless statement is one that is emailed to you, then I'd think twice about doing ANY business with them, since paying lip service to preventing identity theft is worse than not doing anything about it at all (IMHO). A proper paperless statement is simply a notice of availability emailed to you, and then you still have to log onto the website and authenticate properly (and securely) to read it.
The Earth and its moon already do rotate about a common point -- the center-of-mass of the combined system. It's just that given the relative masses of the two bodies, the center of mass is pretty darn close to the center of mass of the Earth.
If you hadn't gotten Mark Hamill to play Blair, would the final mission still have had the player flying down a canyon to drop a world-destroying bomb on a small target?
James Cameron still holds the record for Most Evil Ending Ever for Titanic. 3+ hours of movie, and the whole second half was full of rushing water!
You must be the guy in the audience of the gameplay movie (released last year) that asked "will it run on my 486?"
If you could whack off a couple of the top guys ...
No thanks. I want no part of giving sexual satisfaction to spammers.
Oh wait...you want to whack them, or knock them off...go for it, then!
Okay, I can see it...a SpongeBob computer would have a softwood case and run OSX. So the question would be...
"Who lives in a pine Apple under the C?"
So which receipt would I give? The one for the motherboard + case? I ordered it without a hard drive or CD-ROM because I had those from my old computer, and without a video card because I found one cheaper elsewhere. I didn't buy a PC, I bought some PC components.
And those hard drives are more than 2 years old. Would that invalidate the whole computer?
Anyone who's savvy enough to put a PC together from components understands their own needs, and wouldn't switch to a Mac. If they had needed a Mac, they would have bought one. For those others, they'd need more incentive than a mere $200, unless that $200 were more than 1/3 of the original price.
(Where's the equivalent of the Kelley Blue Book for computer hardware, anyhow?)
It could have been worse...remember, Titanic was 3 hours long, and the last hour and a half was full of rushing water...
There's a reason why taxes aren't flat, and it's because lower incomes are proportionately worse off, even if the same percentage is taken out.
/. crowd. But drop that base salary by an order of magnitude to $20,000 -- lower middle class, far above minimum wage -- and when you take out the $4,000 in taxes, you're left with $16,000. You've gone from a barely-livable gross wage to a nonlivable net wage, all for the sake of "equality". But it's the same percentage.
Say that the flat tax rate were 20%. For someone making $200,000, they'd be paying $40,000 in taxes, leaving them with $160,000. That would provide quite a comfortable lifestyle for most of the
Check up on the meanings of progressive vs. regressive taxes.
The idea of engine governors (in any form) is great until someone gets involved in a side-impact collision that could have been avoided if they'd only been able to stomp on the gas and make the oncoming vehicle (which, engine governor or no, was still moving at more than zero speed) miss. Braking isn't always an option, nor is maneuvering...sometimes the only way to avoid a collision is to go faster.
The problem isn't light itself so much as light leakage. The fact that you can see so many lights on the ground from space (to the degree where those "before" and "after" shots were so dramatic) shows that those lights are radiating upward. What's the sense in that? The whole point of illuminated cities is to light up the streets, not the sky.
It's that light that goes upward that washes out the view of the stars, much more so than the fact that you're standing in a lit place trying to look into the dark. Try going out at night into a rural area, but still close enough to a city that you can see its glow on the horizon. Even if you're in an unlit area, you're still not going to see much in the sky in the direction of the city.
From the previews I've seen of the game, when you seize a stash, you can either play good-cop and turn the stuff in, or play bad-cop and sell it right back to the dealer on the next corner over for a quick buck. Play Bad Cop too often and your performance rating goes down, which will eventually keep you from progressing through the game. Short-term benefit, long-term repercussions.
What will be the issue, the drug trade itself, or the potential of portraying the police negatively?
Best exchange I had between two players when running one of many one-off Paranoia sessions (which my gaming buddies back in the day would do about twice a month when we were taking everything else too seriously):
Player A has an experimental weapon which is clearly misbehaving and about to do something grievously bad. She grabs Player B, the equipment officer (who got chosen for the job because he was the dumbest character and the others thought he'd be easy to dump blame for everything on)...
A: My experimental weapon seems to be malfunctioning. You're responsible for making sure all of our gear works properly, so get to it! (hands weapon over)
B: (stares dully at weapon for a few seconds while it starts to shake and rattle) Uhh...operator error. (hands it back to A and ducks for cover)
A: AAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!! ***foom***
One-offs seemed to be the best way to play. Life was cheap, and if you didn't expect to get attached to your character, you didn't care much about the GM's seeming arbitrariness. I definitely fell into the "if you're working too hard to survive, you're not having fun, and not having fun is treason" school of play...
My girlfriend and I recently spent a week and a half at WDW -- my first time in almost 15 years, and most nights, we spent at least a couple of hours at DisneyQuest. We had a pretty long discussion about whether or not they could run one of those in another city (or if not them, then some other company using the same concept). The conclusion we came up with was "probably not".
You could work around problems of operational costs and the like with a suitable pricing scheme. (The annual pass is a steal -- at less than $100, it pays for itself beyond 3 trips.) But the overall atmosphere and -- dare I say it -- "Disney Magic" just couldn't be recreated. I'm talking about the fact that anti-social behavior that is depressingly common in other urban environments is relatively uncommon down at Rat World. Not that crime is unknown down there (or else they wouldn't need a security force the size of a medium police department), but the atmosphere is relaxed enough that it's less of a concern.
Case in point: my checkbook fell out of my pocket while we were doing the VR whitewater rafting. (Pretty good upper-body workout -- not nearly as harsh as the real thing, but not for complete wimps either.) I noticed it missing when we got back to the hotel that night, and we picked it up at lost+found the next morning. If it had happened up here in DC, I would've been on the phone first thing in the morning with my bank to take precautions against ID theft and fraud. Instead, my stress-out lasted maybe 10 minutes, and while I'm still keeping an eye on the bank account, I'm not amazingly worried. Yes, it's hard to commit ID theft with just the information on someone's checks, but a sufficiently creative criminal could think of ways to take advantage of the situation. But at WDW, people usually turn in things like wallets and purses without rifling them first. Not that people don't do so elsewhere, but it's definitely more of a concern.
I'd love to see someone try, and I'd certainly plunk down the cash if the experience were truly worth it. Give me the Pirates game, and the VR swordfighting and flying carpets, something that I couldn't duplicate at home without needing to win the Powerball first.
...or, rather, it's a II on the outside, but I swiped the D0 and D8 PROMs out of a II+ to upgrade it. (Not exactly overclocking or case-modding, but not bad for a 12-year-old.) Serial number 23099. I bet it would still work if I found an appropriate cable to hook it to my TV, too.
I've also got the Red Book that came with the early II's, the one with a complete source listing of the operating system. Don't tell Darl.
Wouldn't happen. The only reason that it was possible with Intelsat 603 was that that bird had a solid-fuel kick motor, much easier to deal with than the liquid-fueled main thrusters on more recent satellites. (STS-49 actually went and replaced the whole thruster there, once they managed to get a hold of it -- karma whore solicitation, supply appropriate links.)
That, and it was NASA's fault anyhow that that one got into the trouble of being unable to separate from the upper stage of its rocket, so it was necessary PR on their part to go after it, particularly since 603 needed to be in position to help broadcast the Olympics in '92.
I work for a major satellite operator, and meteor showers are something that has to be dealt with every year, several times a year. And we (and the other satellite operators in the world) deal with it fairly handily.
The odds of a collision are fairly small to begin with, and it's possible to hedge that a bit. The main body of most large satellites (speaking only for the geostationary variety) is less than 2.5 meters on a side. The solar arrays are much larger, but that's solved by rotating them so that they're edge-on to the approach path of the meteors.
It would be much more troublesome for the ISS or something else big. But something big also has mass on its side, and most of the particles involved in a meteor shower are really, really small.
I think that the most troubling thing coming into the first anniversary of the attack is some of the stuff purportedly being done in the names of those who died, and (just as importantly) what isn't being done.
All the legislation passed supposedly to further the cause of the "war on terror", with the amount of true freedom that was taken away with it (or has the potential to be taken away)...the sheer audacity of our leaders sometimes reminds me of kids loose in a candy store (my best friend compares it to Lord of the Flies)...
How soon we all went back to our divisive bickering over our differences, be the difference ethnicity or religion or income level...
The outcry over attempts to educate our younger generation about the Muslim world...while I agree that such teachings should not be mandated without equal consideration being given to all sides (so, for example, a required reading assignment of a history of Muslim culture should be accompanied by texts on Christian-Muslim, Jewish-Muslim, and Christian-Jewish relations through history), the mere idea that this is pushing some sort of agenda is a telling indicator that many of us still don't have a clue...
I will be respectful, I will honor the dead, but I won't do anything stupidly symbolic.
I work for a major telecom company based in Washington. As I'm about to submit this, at this time last year, we were about 15 minutes away from evacuating our headquarters and moving our critical 24/7 operations to our backup facility. My biggest regret was not calling the one I loved most and telling her that I was okay, even if it was just a voice mail message -- she didn't hear from me for hours. For all she knew, I was hopelessly trapped in traffic or spun out in a ditch somewhere in my attempt to flee the District and get to the backup site.
I sincerely honor the dead. It's too much to ask, but I wish the rest of us would do the same.
I remember seeing some time ago the text of a graduation address made by Guy Kawasaki that (in part) addressed this very issue. (Karma whore solicitation: go find this speech -- I'm feeling too lazy at the moment to hit Google myself.)
In his speech, he analyzed the home refrigeration industry, going back to ice harvesting for ice boxes. Some bright person invented ice makers, but instead of adopting ice makers, the ice harvesters struggled to compete with the manufacturers of ice makers. Down they went. Then someone invented the refrigerator, and the same thing happened to the ice maker manufacturers. They saw themselves as purveyors of ice, not of food preservation systems.
And that's what we've got today with the entertainment industry. The MPAA/RIAA are so fixated on selling CDs and DVDs and movie tickets that they've completely lost sight of the fact that what they're selling is entertainment (if you can call it that), not the distribution media.
I've had an 8GB Maxtor in my home machine for about a year now, and I just replaced my wife's teeny drive with a 15GB one (purchased for the same price that I got my 8GB unit for last year -- thank you, Moore's Law). The 15GB unit is too new to tell, but the 8GB one hasn't given me a whit of grief.
Thing is, we hardly do anything resembling beating on these drives. Our home machines spend 95% of their time playing games and doing recreational web browsing. (My wife found it a bit disturbing that, while watching MaxBlast copy her old drive to the new one, about two-thirds of the disk was devoted to games...)
Our home boxes are for play. Our work boxes are for work. And while I can't speak for my wife's IT department, I know that I (as Head Geek in Residence) wouldn't buy a Maxtor for real work. Losing a 14th level amazon to a HD crash really doesn't matter as much as losing client usage statistics.
Of course, it probably helps that (at the time) the Maxtors that I've bought for myself were the low-end ones, which were the high-end ones a year previous, and thus they've had time to get the kinks out of them.
Aero
One of my dorm-mates once used his dot-matrix printer to get back at some rudeness on his roomie's part. Said roomie had stayed on the phone till about 2 AM arguing with his girlfriend, and my friend was trying to get some sleep before an 8 AM exam. Didn't work out too well.
So my friend waits till a night when the roomie comes home drunk. He lets the roomie sleep for about an hour, then sends a half-megabyte text file to the printer.
All bolded.
With the printer set to half-speed mode.
That was the last time the roomie kept my friend needlessly awake.
Aero
The problem with most energy storage systems is that they don't scale well. A bank of batteries is fine for a single dwelling for a week or two, but try obtaining enough batteries to run your home's essential systems for a month or two -- or an office's for a week. You'd need batteries comparable to a diesel submarine's loadout.
Flywheels are great, until you get a mechanical failure. Then you pray that you haven't placed anything remotely valuable in the plane of rotation. You can't imagine just how much kinetic energy is stored in a massive rotating object until you see a chunk fly off and pierce everything in its path.
And a large capacitor, as suggested further up in this thread? Think of a large chemical battery without the stability.
Aero