Nice story. PG&E in California used to only give you credit for the fuel they calculated they didn't burn due to your feeding power to the grid, even though that was maybe 1/3 of everyone's electric bill. Obviously, we need to change this sort of BS behavior at utilities. PG&E, IIRC, has paid a proper rate for customer's power generation for at least a couple decades now. However, there's nothing wrong with utility scale solar in many places. There are inefficiencies of scale that they can make use of while you can't. Right now, here in NC, there seem to be enough tax credits for farmers to plant solar panels instead of food, and we're getting 10 acre solar farms all over. A friend of mine is installing solar panels on the new building he's constructing. The world-wide implosion of government sponsored solar installations has enabled the free market to finally deliver solar modules in the $1/watt range, making solar cost effective in many many cases.

Still, wind and solar aren't the entire answer to our power needs. It rains a lot here in NC, and wind is highly variable. Nuclear is good for "base" load, which means they run all the time at near full power, solar is good for those hot summer days when we need air conditioning, and natural gas generators are good for making up the gaps.

I wish we were funding Thorium development. It's not going to magically appear and start producing cheap safe clean nuclear power. To get there will take a massive investment and many years, but there's real promise there. I prefer the "all of the above" approach to energy.

I completely agree. I didn't want to say anything like "I got the last laugh" in my story. I love my brother like a brother, so there's no laughing. However, I working in a job I thoroughly enjoy where I make very decent money, and my family is wonderful. I wish things had worked out as well for my awesome little brother, but everyone is who they are in the end. I'm a big geek, and better off for it.

I have to tell a story... yeah... I'm old. My little bother was hot. He couldn't help it, girls just couldn't leave him alone. Someone convinced him to do modeling as a career for a while, but after missing shoots to enter skateboard contests, his modeling career was over. Still, Hallmark's "Hunk" calendar ran him as Mr April two years running.

Anyway, while he was screwing every girl who ever wanted a hot guy, I got my engineering degree. I dated the president of the math club, and spent a night in jail for hacking phone systems. One night during summer break, my brother had something to say to me. He said, "I respect what you're doing." I knew he meant he respects what I'm doing even though any reasonable person would not. I couldn't argue with the guy living every hormone driven teenager's dream, but I thought it was funny. I was preparing to make the world a better place, but I suppose being a girl's dream date counts.

We are geeks. There's something wrong in our minds that makes us happy spending time typing on a keyboard rather than chasing women. When I change the world in concrete measurable ways, the feeling is euphoric, and programming is the way I help change the world.

I guess I'll point out the obvious flaw in dork-tard's assertion that business should do the research and the government should stay out of it. Businesses may indeed fund research into things like climate change and even do a better job, but they wont *share* their results. Businesses are not in the business of improving our country or the world. If they pay for research, they almost always keep the results as a trade secret just in case it might give them a slight competitive advantage. It's not evil, it's simply business.

Is this a good place to say, "Ha ha!... you spent $15 to illegally influence an election and lost! And now you have to pay $16M in fines!"

Honestly, it's this secret crap that scares me the most, whether it's the Koch brothers or the NSA. If they're going to screw us over, they'd better damn well do it in the light of day.

I think it's dumb every time I hear we need to lower big business taxes to foster innovation and create jobs. Tech companies produce tons of high paying jobs, make investors rich, and often don't pay a dime in taxes, instead investing in growth, creating even more jobs.

As a public company, producing profits sucks to some extent. You have to pay taxes, investors ask for dividends or stock buy-backs, and you lose control over investing in growth as investors become addicted to taking your profits instead of letting you grow. Just look at Dell, for example. There are good reasons to take a company private. Among them is to gain the ability to spend your profits on improving the company rather than having investors leech off you.

I suspect this is how they caught the Silk Road guy. Tor is likely entirely transparent to the NSA, just from metadata. It kills me to see articles like this one recommending running a Tor node. I ran one for a while after hearing about it's use to avoid political oppression, but the traffic, from my reading of the meta-data, was dominated by video downloads. In theory, Tor is about freedom, but in reality, it's about porn.

It is 100% possible to provide the kind of freedom Tor in theory was created to provide. First, do exactly what you said, and eliminate the meta data leaks. So long as the network is used to provide freedom rather than illegal video, the bandwidth per volunteer node will be very low, even with the techniques you describe. Freedom is about basic communication like accessing email lists, not watching 2 hour videos for free.

The second part is insuring your bandwidth is used for goals you support, like freedom of expression, rather than the crap Tor is used for. This can be done with "secret identities", as in Super Man and Spider Man. Each user would have their actual identity protected as a secret, while their "public" identity would have their network behavior, such as which web sites they visit, documented in a public unencrypted P2P social network. This would allow individuals to safely collaborate on worthy goals, while keeping illegal video sharing goons from wasting our bandwidth.

The problem comes with some simple math. I can hire writers all day long for $25/article. $2,500 buys me 100 Wikipedia shills if they get paid the same as regular writers in America. Maybe they get paid more because it's specialty work. How about $100/article? That's still only $10,000 - not much money to buy yourself a wikipedia image.

Great post! When you try to post constructive criticism of Linux, there's a lot of push back on slashdot. I would add:

4.- The "code purist" problem. I can publish my latest hacked POS app on Android in no time at all. That's why there are millions of apps for Android and iOS. With Debian/RedHat derived distros, the process is harder than refinancing the mortgage on your house, and getting your package into the "stable" distro takes years. Hours vs years, and an hour or so of effort vs getting a home loan. It's killing Linux.

Kudos to Shuttleworth for trying to fix this problem, with his jailed app delivery system for Ubuntu Touch. I hope he succeeds in reviving Linux. I'll even try to help.

I guess my outrage has burned since the early 1980's, but it's been hard to stay outraged all that time. IMO, the NSA won. They did their job as they see it, and electronic security is now a total joke. It's not just the NSA that gets access, but the spammers, botnets, and phishers. We could have made the Inernet secure, but every time anyone tried to make any single piece of it more secure, the NSA-influenced peanut gallery went ape-shit, insuring nothing useful happened. The exceptions are cases when we agreed to centralized control, such as certificate authorities, where the NSA can use secret powers to force big companies to cooperate, while gagging their ability to inform their customers.

If I had anything I really needed kept secret, I know how to do that. However, I just don't have anything I care to keep secret, given the insane effort it requires now days. I give up. The NSA can have up close pics of my testicles. Whatever.

The algorithm compensates, and delivers bitcoins at a predicable rate, unlike the US government's payments. If miners drop out, those who remain split the spoils.

I sold all my coins and bought my wife a nice silicon-carbide necklace fashioned out of Cree's materials, for about $500. I don't feel good about the use bitcoins are being put to, even if I do support the freedom that untraceable electronic money represents.

Yes. The poster is asking if Google should do like so many previous evil companies and stop innovating, and instead focus on putting the pinch to their clients. Oracle falls squarely in this category. I'm hoping Google will instead decide to continue innovating. They've been pretty damned good at it.

So... you think science used to be better? Really?

Newton spent much of his energy in later years in a brutal smear campaign to smear mathematicians and scientists who in fact invented much of he took credit for, such as portions of Calculus. Edison is known to have mounted an equally brutal attack on his arguably more inventive peer, Tesla. Have you ever read Penis envy? Really? That guy was a world class crack-pot, IMO.

I've read many technical and scientific papers every year since about 1982, and I see zero degradation in professionalism. The truth is there was never much anyway. For ever paper that made me believe something I useful, there were a half dozen total crap papers that weren't even close to the mark. Science is just fine... just the same crap as always, but overall very effective crap. It's the freaking "news" networks that have turned into crap.

I'm optimistically hoping this means the guys manning the nuke near house below Jordan Lake in NC are doing a better job maintaining it than their peers in the West. On the other hand, it could just be lazy NRC regulators.

Cripes... I take a few years and don't read about the latest RC4 attacks, and someone finally figures out an attack that can make use of the super-low long-term biases found in RC4. I guess I'll have to switch to something else. I've been using message authentication MACs in P2P protocols when messages are not encrypted. The combination seems like a good idea for stream ciphers.