According to the EIA's "Direct Federal Financial Interventions and Subsidies in Energy in Fiscal Year 2013" page XV, in the US in 2013 oil and petroleum got $2.346 billion in subsidies while all renewables got $15.043 billion (mostly wind and solar). Keep in mind that in 2013 (page XVII) oil and petroleum provided 15,342 trillion BTUs (tBTUs), natural gas 28,353 tBTUs, coal 20,209 tBTUs, and nuclear 8,117 tBTUs, while solar only provided 286 tBTUs and wind 1,549 tBTUs. As a result, per energy output wind and solar subsidies are much, much higher.

The Atlantic article this slashdot article is based on is dated Feb 27, 2014. It's old news. Why is this a slashdot story today?

There are plans that have no minimum long distance service, local service only. If you do dial a long distance number, you get charged a huge per minute fee. Even a dollar a minute isn't out of line for these kinds of plans.

It's not just the overall system you have to worry about, but all the stages in between as well. You might have a massive dump centrally located somewhere to take up the global excess, but if a particular neighborhood has a lot of solar and blows out local transformers sending power upstream, it's not a solution for that neighborhood. The problem of solar is going to require changes at all levels of production and consumption. That's going to take a lot of money and planning.

Nonsense. In the first place, half the state's ground water flows to the sea and is never tapped for various reasons (e.g., recreational and environmental). Agriculture does take 80% of what's left, which means it only uses 40% of the state's water. You have to treat the recreational and environmental uses of water as part of the overall issue. They reflect choices by the state's population, just as having a green lawn does. The environment won't collapse if the delta smelt gets trapped in irrigation pumps, preserving it instead is a choice made by others.

While this has been the worst drought on record, in the past agriculture and the state's urban areas have always managed to get by during previous droughts. What's seldom mentioned, for example, is that California's population has grown since the last major drought, and there have been more mandated environmental diversions. But of course, nobody ever considers these as part of the problem.

If you want food, it takes plenty of land, plenty of sunshine, and plenty of water. It happens that California has some of the best land and sunshine in the world for growing crops. Water was always an issue. But to say that agriculture "wastes" water is nonsense. Even when it's subsidized, it's still a major cost to any Californian farmer. There have always been incentives to reduce its use. I grew up on a California farm from the '60s to the '80s, and saw the advent of drip irrigation, sophisticated monitoring, and other advances. The state even metered the wells in our area in the '80s and eventually started charging for water.

It's easy for people who have never been on a farm to point fingers. But how many of them run the faucets while they shave or brush their teeth, never turn off the shower while they soap up, and over-water their lawns? This is just the tyranny of the majority over a minority -- one which provides a product essential to life.

If agriculture uses 60% of the water, then how is the greywater produced by the other 40% supposed to supply agriculture's needs? And how would you get it to the agricultural areas from the distant urban areas where it's produced? This also overlooks the fact that many cities in California already recycle their own greywater, and aren't about to give it up. Agricultural water use wasn't an issue until all the people came to California decades later. So why is agriculture the problem? Why should America and the rest of the world give up all the unique crops produced in California because a lot of people just wanted to spend their days by the beach? While this drought is record breaking, a lot of the issues can be traced to California's population growth since the last major drought.

True, but SSD manufacturers say the drive should hold its data for at least 10 years after the drive has reached its recommended lifetime (these drives were well past that).

This study is interesting in light of the fact that a recent NOAA study found that the current California drought is not caused by climate change. In fact, under climate change California winters are supposed to get wetter, if also hotter. See http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/s... .

That's true of course. But the level of expertise at major drive vendors like WD and Seagate is so high that there's no need to steal the code from a competitor. If it comes down to it for a critical piece of technology, you just steal the employee instead. It's cheaper and more legal. On top of that, employees move back and forth on their own so over time knowledge is shared.

Besides, the hardware designs and technology of the manufacturers are different enough that the code can't be shared directly. You'd have to spend lots of money reverse-engineering it and then adapting it to your hardware. For the engineers at these companies -- who are the world-class experts at drive engineering -- it's quicker and cheaper just to design and write your own.

You'd think, but it turns out that isn't so. Have a look at https://spritesmods.com/?art=h... where Jeroen Domburg hacked into a WD 2TB Green drive using the JTAG port. He was able to modify the firmware and store it in the external flash chip holding the firmware.

Drive manufacturers still seem to be relying on "security by obscurity"

It depends. Some manufacturers have a simple bootloader hardcoded into their SOC.

To say there is no market for antibiotics because they are used for only a short time is only part of the problem. It wouldn't matter if a lot of people were continually getting infected.

Sulfa and penicillin went into mass production because of WWII. The huge number of battlefield wounds and the resulting infections created a large demand and there was a crash program to manufacture these antibiotics.

After the war, mass production continued and in many countries antibiotics could be purchased over the counter. While this eventually contributed to bacterial resistance, there's no doubt there was a huge market for antibiotics and it prompted the development of many different antibiotic families.

So the question must be asked why aren't the same economic factors still causing the development of new antibiotics? While it costs more to develop a new antibiotic today, there's a lot more people in the world to justify it. The answer is that while certain diseases have become resistant, for the most part the old antibiotics still work and there just isn't enough people needing new antibiotics to justify the development expenses.

I agree with you that the real reason for RT was that Intel wasn't delivering low-cost, low-power chips that could compete with ARM (I have a friend who works at Microsoft who says the same thing).

But the point of RT wasn't that Intel wouldn't produce a chip for mobile, it's that they couldn't. Intel has always recognized the huge growing market for mobile, and they always wanted to produce procecessors for it.

But the x86 architecture has a lot of stuff in it (compatibility modes, security protections, etc.) that just aren't needed in mobile devices but it's hard to strip them out. It also needed a lot of power management stuff added on. As a result, for any given fab process an ARM chip would be cheaper and use less energy than a x86 chip. Intel's answer was to use their superior cutting edge fab technology that wasn't available to competitors to produce a competitive chip. However, their latest fab technology was delayed until just a few months ago, and their previous fab technology didn't give them enough of an edge.

As it is, ARM chips manufactured by Samsung and TSMC are only only one step behind Intel today in fab technology. Given how hard it is now to reduce the size (as evidenced by the unexpected year-long delay for Intel to get its latest fab technology ready), it's not clear that in the future Intel will be able to maintain its lead before everybody else catches up sooner or later.

Yup, during the digging of the Erie Canal in the early 19th century there were around 1000 deaths from malaria.

Some types of insurance such as home insurance still have a need for agents because when disaster strikes it's very helpful to have someone there to get you immediate aid and help you through the long process of rebuilding.

Other insurance such as auto insurance don't need local agents. While there are companies that do employ agents, there are plenty of low-cost auto insurance companies that don't and Google would be nothing new.

Some insurance such as life insurance takes sales people to use high pressure tactics. Most people would never buy life insurance on their own because nobody wants to think about dying. Google might make some headway here because all the data they collect would help them better figure out the risks for a particular person. But the life insurance industry is no slouch when it comes to data collection and analysis. And a lot of profits in life insurance come from investing the premiums, something Google would have no advantage in.