Not really.

A lease is nothing more than renting, which not only has to cover all the costs of the batteries, but also reasonable replacements over the life of the lease, plus people to manage the lease, plus some profit (usually).

Leasing doesn't make things more affordable (just the opposite). It just breaks it into monthly payments without needing a lump-sum, and takes the hassle off your hands. It's a big difference.

But a five-fold increase in cost would cost with that easily, wouldn't it? And you can do it piecemeal as they ACTUALLY stop holding a decent charge, etc.

Not saying it's unfathomable, but just don't see the advantage.

However much you hate it, the bottom-line finance number gives you an idea of the materials, work, availability, etc. involved.

A system that is not economically viable is taking MORE product out of the earth, and rarer products, that need more refinement and processing, etc. in order to create it in the first place than it is replacing other power-generation methods and their costs.

It's quite simple. The market price changes to reflect the difficult, cost, legislation, rarity, etc. of the materials and labour involved. If something is more expensive it's because it COSTS MORE to give it to you. If something can't pay that cost back (at least, in a reasonable time) you've taken out MORE from the earth including shipping the thing to yourself and paying for machines to modify it, and paying for the companies mass-production plans, etc. than you've stopped being taken out elsewhere.

It's not perfect. It's not entirely accurate. But the monetary cost of something is a pretty good indicator. This is why lithium batteries are more expensive than lead-acid equivalents, why oil products are being taxed, why discovery of shale gas can drop the gas price, etc.

Also, as you're moving the burden from government and entire countries to individual users here, cost matters more than most other things. You're asking ME to take the effort, research, purchase, maybe pay for planning and electrical works, etc. this product that you're SELLING in order for me to help the earth. There's a cost involved in that no matter what. Some of that cost is a "donation" because you want to live in a friendly way. Some of that cost is because of the convenience to you if the power blips for a moment. Some of that cost is for your peace of mind.

At the end of the day, cost is a pretty good measure of all kinds of things to do with a system. This is why energy companies are complaining about the "payback" electricity schemes from solar users... the costs they incur to put their pittance of electricity back into the grid far outweigh anything else. The government has to subsidise those costs, or the electricity companies have to raise their prices. And, suddenly, it's actually more expensive to run "off-grid" than you thought and you end up going back "on-grid" because the cost isn't worth the convenience any more.

I could UPS all my appliances today. I could just buy a tiny UPS, or save up towards a bigger one, each month and stick them on batteries that survive power outages for whatever length of time I choose to do it for. But I don't because it costs. And that cost does not compare to the cost of the power going off every now and then, or the electricity company raising its prices by 10% a year.

If an off-grid system does not return money for you, the money you pay would have been better off just buying a generator and some fuel for it for the rare occasions the power does go off, and forgetting about all these fancy gadgets that help you live off-grid. In which case, both the green-ness and the user suffer.

That's why governments are subsidising PV etc. installs. They have to bring the price down or people will just look and think "Sod it, I'll just buy a genny and keep a tank of petrol in the garage for if anything happens" rather than go off-grid.

Things have to be profitable, and everything has a cost.

My bank manager.

My old stove alone is rated at 18KW. It's not particular huge or anything, just a double-oven.

Although you can go "self-powered", you have to make just as many sacrifices on what you power as you do on how much you can physically generate anyway.

And some things need a lot more power than you might imagine - anything with a motor, e.g. refrigerator, washer, dryer, etc.

This is the problem at the moment. You either have gas for some things, or burn wood for some things, and forgo electric for them, or you don't and have to cut them out entirely or generate a LOT more power. Sure, you can do that. But neither option is saving the planet.

Reducing consumption is step 1. Then decide whether you have low enough consumption to justify self-powering. Unfortunately, it's just not sold that way.

It's about GBP30-40 for a 100Ah 12V car lead-acid battery on a random site. These are mass-produced, cheap and easily available. Granted that they are heavy and large, but... scaling up... that's 1.2KWh alone. We'd only need ten car batteries to match it. That's GBP300-400.

Why, then does it cost the equivalent of nearly $3,500 (GBP2200) for the same here?

Sure, we allow leeway for different voltages (necessary for high-current loads, etc.), different technologies, deep-cycle, etc. but... that's a five-to-seven-fold increase over what we're using now for quite basic solar, wind, etc. power storage and can be obtained from any garage. And 10 car batteries aren't prohibitively large, expensive, difficult to handle, etc.

With 10 year warranty and 2KW peaks? That's way within range of such a pack. Hell, stick a decent split charger / inverter on the end, one designed for home use, and it still comes nowhere near the price of this home battery.

Is my maths wrong? Have I missed something? Quite what are we trying to sell here apart from an overpriced battery and some electronics on either end of it?

Thanks!

Brian Webb isn't listing this on his Vandenberg AFB Launch Schedule yet. I think he's going to wait until someone official tells him a date.

With some optimism that might only be thousands of years rather than hundreds of Millions.

But it's only necessary for Earth to be uninhabitable for a short time to end the Human race. And that can happen due to man or nature, today. If people aren't somewhere else during that process, that's the end.

I've got a 'kind of bingo card that I use to keep track of languages. I place checkmarks for each language depending on how it's different from all the other languages.

Help me out. Does Haskell require or not require a block after an "if" statement? Is the block introduced by brace, bracket, "then" or something else?

Or... does it use some completely lateral way to specify an "if" statement?

I may have to update my bingo card to accommodate.

If he was twelve, XP was released before he was born.

In IT terms "before you were born" is old. Very old. Ancient. Dead. Buried. Gone.

I touched my last XP install two years ago when I migrated a school using it from XP to 8 (and all their servers a similar jump).

The prime argument? It was a school, and the OS they were using to teach ICT to the kids was OLDER than the kids. All of them. And, as such, they did not know how to operate it because they were all used to Vista, 7 and 8 at home. We were teaching them BACKWARDS skills to do things on OLDER software than the ICT skills they already had when they entered the school.

What percentage it's on is neither here nor there. Still WinZIP is on millions of computers. But it's old. And versions of WinZIP from the XP era are ancient. I bet I could find a ton of computers with Quicktime and Realplayer on them still. They're old. They're ancient.

And, like XP, they are obsolete.

Sorry, but what tosh.

Microsoft is a convicted monopolist in the EU. Your problems in the US are your problems.

And Windows XP is not "secure". It's like saying that a door you have laying in the shed is "secure" just because you're not using it so nobody would bother to break into it.

You have to consider local, internal attacks (especially if you're dealing with government, NHS, police, etc.) as well as anything from the outside. And you can't isolate XP enough to be secure and work in a networked fashion.

XP is dead. It's lifespan is over. Hardware support for it is dropping fast. I abandoned it in my last workplace because we had major difficulty getting drivers for things as simple as SATA controllers for it, not to mention wireless and network interfaces. Beyond that, 64-bit XP is niche and 32-bit XP prevents a lot of things working. Even for home use, a lot of games nowadays do not work on 32-bit-only systems. XP-64 also brings it's own share of driver problems as there are EVEN LESS XP-64 drivers than XP drivers.

Sure, you can virtualise it, but then you're not running XP at all, really. And still the problem is "It's on your network" if you want to do anything vaguely useful with it. And that provides an attack vector both to and from that machine if it's unsupported and compromisable.

Give it up. I held out until two years ago and that was FAR TOO LONG to hold out on XP for. The alternates really don't make users suffer at all after the initial acclimatisation.

Move on. It's not Windows - it's like someone running Slackware 7 in the modern day, on a 2.2 kernel. Sure, you can do it, but you're setting yourself up for a lot of hurt and hassle just because of the age of the tools and hardware you need to use.

If you have ANY significant number of XP machines, it's time to pay the pittance that an entirely new machine would cost (I'm getting business-class machines for GBP150 - $250? - with Windows 7/8 on them). If you have one or two machines, sure it's not particularly cost-effective but I guarantee you that it will hurt your wallet more when it goes wrong unexpectedly (virus, hardware replacement, data compromise, etc.).

And Windows 10 is expected to be free, for the most part.

If you have a "network", especially a business one, of any description, you are negligent in sticking on XP now. I would not want the most basic of business data processed on XP. I don't deal in multi-million dollar networks, I don't do high-end gear with clouds and servers coming out of my ears. I do small schools. But, for any business that includes a network or server of any size, I would be doing them a disservice to suggest that that DON'T move off XP. Not just failing to mention the possibility, but failing to actively DISCOURAGE further use of their network with XP clients.

You can't secure XP. You can isolate it, but you can't secure it. And there's no real thing as a limited user in XP because it's basically a cinch to demonstrate privilege escalation using any number of pieces of bog-standard software on XP (that you CAN'T patch or upgrade because the XP releases of that software are no longer updated!).

Give it up, really. And you don't even have to pay Microsoft a penny.

Actually I was thinking nuclear power rather than magic.

I agree with the other commenter, there will be lots of people living in space if they can only get there. Mars is a good start.

Obviously I am missing something, then. Please fill me in on your better information sources. Email to bruce at perens dot com if you don't want to put them on Slashdot.

It's time to start planning another trip to Lompoc. The Motel 6 was sort of yukky last time. Maybe I'll try something else. There was an official visitor observation site that I found and got into last time, but that was for the Delta, and it was on Pad 4 if I remember correctly. This one is all the way on the other side of the base on Pad 7 or 8, isn't it? There are some farm roads that might be good observation sites if they are open.

Apropos of nothing, I note that we are in a deflationary cycle right now, for the first quarter of 2015.

Surprisingly, this little tidbit made hardly a ripple in the mainstream news outlets.

So... is this the recession that causes the crash, or will that be after the next recession?