"Photovoltaic has still many recent discoveries for great efficiency improvements, and more are likely to come."

Except you can not exceed the solar power that hits the surface of the planet from the sun. Sorry kids but once again that damned law of physics get's tin the way.

Solar has a Maximum you can not exceed and that is if the sky is clear on a low humidity day and not pollution in the sun belt. Everywhere else is drops off drastically. Solar is awesome for a supplemental power source or to offset consumption. On homes that are grid tied and allowed to back-feed it can do a lot to offset Air conditioning power, but on cloudy days or in winter solar is worthless so you need other sources as your main power supply.

Yes you CAN go 100% solar, but that means oversize installations. 5X the solar needed to capture and store as much power as possible for the longest historical 10 year no sunlight stretch. in some places that is 2 months, so you also need battery storage to handle 2 months plus 15% and a solar installation that can charge up that 2 month supply within a few days.

So no, Photovoltaic will not be the answer, too low of energy density even if it was at 100% efficiency.

Anyone have video of the birds bursting into flames? Because there is less than a 200 foot radius from the tower where that can happen. Solar death ray in action setting birds on fire as they fly through the beam!

This sums up the core MS issue better than anything else I've ever read. MS has never been innovative, but worse: It has never been a company that likes change. Their world-view is static and stationary. While they acknowledge the world is changing (reality can be quite persuasive), they don't see movement, they see a succession of stationary status quos.

They will now throw everything at becoming the perfect company for the picture of the world they have. And in five years look out the window and see that the world has changed - again.

It's also the reason we all hate MS - due to their still existing stranglehold on computing, they keep much of the rest of the world static with them. The damage done by preventing innovation and progress is easily ten times MS net worth.

All because some people don't understand that life is dynamic.

There are the ethics of the money collected, but that can be fixed. I'm more concerned about the inequity of the penalty. If I had to pay a $300.00 fine for a red light violation, it would be slightly annoying. If my unemployed neighbor had to pay $300.00, he'd fall further behind on his rent, or possibly go hungry. Conversely, if I had to unexpectedly sit in jail for a day, my projects would suffer, my employer would have no sympathy, and my job might be at stake; while my neighbor would simply wait out his days with little else of consequence. So if I know the penalty is monetary, I can afford to run the occasional red light. If we know the penalty is to serve time, my neighbor might run a red light just to get three squares.

How to best create a fair penalty is a difficult proposition.

No, I think the desire here is for it to be Open Source. Current agricultural tools are proprietary, where you pay a ton of money for the special GPS receiver, arrays of sensors, a database of moisture, fertilizer, and yield readings, continuously variable spray systems, auto-steering systems, and everything else.

The current systems are brilliant: they can reduce fertilizer usage by 60% or more by applying the proper amount of fertilizer on the areas that need it. This reduces cost, excess chemicals, and greatly reduces polluting runoff. They also measure how much water the crops need, and adjust irrigation accordingly. And in a greenhouse, they can even measure and control the light.

But all of that is not all that difficult to solve, apart from the hardware. Makers are getting pretty good at producing open source hardware for a lot of smaller things; and there is a desire to get open source solutions in the hands of the developing nations.

So I think there's a lot of problem out there that this could yet solve.

Then I'm glad I live in a country that hasn't yet privatized law enforcement. Thanks for the data.

In fact... Here you go...

https://wiki.openoffice.org/wi...

So it scales to your 10,000 easily and readily and has around the world, Open Office has a lot of traction outside of the USA.

Some people always complain... the answer to those people is STFU unless they have a real compelling reason as in "you can not do X in Y and we need to do X to make/save/create money"

I dont like it or this is different is not a real complaint, but just whining.

Actually yes it could scale.

So you ask for more, I donated $100 to his cause and would have thrown in another $100, Also get other big hitter podcasters to spread the word. Adam is big, but not Leo Laporte and TWIT big. He could have reached out and really churned the media on this.

Honestly these patent trolls need to be met with a legal nuclear bomb. You dont end on a peace agreement, you turn their world into a nuclear wasteland.

Oddly an entire office of 30 here have no problems at all using Open Office... or more specifically Libre Office, the fork of Open Office. and yes we interact with customers and suppliers daily and do not have any problems.

This is not a business, it's government. and YES it does work that way.

Nope I believe that the right 2-3 people got bribed. you never bribe thousands of people, you bribe the very few who are the decision makers.

"Here, if you switch back to microsoft, we will give you lifetime free OS license as well as lifetime free Office. hell we will throw in all microsoft software products for free to sweeten the pot."

* Lifetime is defined as what Microsoft deems it to be

He should have pushed for court and had a judge rule then it would have murdered the whole thing and sent a clear message to all the other patent trolls.

Now the trolls have the ability to come back later, picking a poor podcaster that can not fight back.

TFA is factually wrong on many counts.

The main reason we don't get new reactors in most european countries are political, not economical. In fact, power companies are doing fine and nuclear power is highly subsidized, mostly indirectly. New plants are expensive only on paper.

But the political culture has moved many countries into a very strange corner. Because the public dislikes nuclear power and wants it gone, but politicians don't (bribery, lobbyism, desire for energy-independence or wisdom in planning the future carefully - make your pick), you cannot get permission to build a new plant in many countries, but you can keep your old one running and extend its lifetime.

The second reason is economic, but of a different kind: Since these plants were originally designed for 20-30 years, which are long past, their value in the financial statement is 1 Euro. Which gives them incredibly cute key figures - they look really good in financial analysis. Actually, in reality too, because due to stupid/bought laws, the government will pay for large parts of the waste disposal, and the amount companies need to pay into a fund to pay for deconstruction is, by many experts opinion, only a fraction of what is needed. But once they actually deconstruct most of the plants, the game is up. Like any good scam, you need to keep it going as long as possible.

So thanks to management-think in both politics and business, we have some of the oldest nuclear power plants in the world, right next to some very large cities.

And, btw., I like nuclear power. I wouldn't mind having the old plants replaced by modern ones. But I agree with the anti-nuclear-power people that right now, we have the worst possible solution.

No, it is not. A wheel clamp is attached by police, i.e. the executive branch of the government elected by the people. Like it or hate it, it's part of the democratic system and it is authorized to do this.