Maybe your amazingly robust website is not 2-3 times better, but only 1.2 times better and you should only be making a few dollars more than the 20 yo grad.

In programming, experience is worth drastically more than the pay differential for the same. A seasoned coder can crank out in a few hours what a recent college grad would literally spend a few weeks on; and it will be far more stable and maintainable.

Yes, I am conservatively some 50x more productive than my junior peers. A big part of that comes from knowing what to ask the customer up front, knowing what won't work, and knowing when to just build the damned birdhouse the customer requested rather than a 400 unit Gehry-inspired avian housing complex "just in case" the customer wants to upgrade in the future.

OTOH you could always ask why they don't just push the electricity down the line they are using anyway to transmit the power to a point where they DO have a hill and build it on land where it's much cheaper to build and easier to maintain

Yeah, pretty much the first thing I thought of when half a dozen people all replied to me that ocean wind farms aren't near hills. :)

Storage doesn't need to have any geographic connection to generation; quite the opposite, it's far more efficient (all else equal) to store excess electricity near the point of use, because you're "discounting" the amount you need to store by all the line losses between the turbines and the end user.

In what ways is this better than simply pumping water uphill into a holding tank or artificial reservoir? It sounds a hell of a lot more complicated, so must have some offsetting feature that would shift the balance.

Yes, I can see the obvious answer that the increased pressure means a higher energy density, but *so* much higher as to make it worth doing?

The real question here, which shouldn't even need to be asked but does...

Which of these plans is the least-limited version of "unlimited"? I've already discovered that Verizon won't offer their plan for 4G access points (even though I can buy a five year old sacrificial phone and tether to it 24/7). AT&T apparently doesn't allow tethering at all (which I thought the FCC had previously spanked them for, but, no surprise they went for a "Hail Mary" pass after this past January).

So, which of these plans really will let you use it as close to unlimited as possible? I have no delusion any of them will actually give me the upper possible limit of a solid 42.8Mbps for 13TB/month, but will any even realistically let me use 3-5Mbps sustained for a few hours a day, with 50+GB/month total?

"I want a program that shows what our competitors' pricing will be tomorrow. Sort it so both name and price are always in ascending order. Email the output as plain text to the following 27 people, but only Joe and I should have the ability to edit it. Make the keyboard give a mild electric shock to managers in stores more than 10% more expensive than their regional competitors. And it should run exclusively in The Cloud, but not require internet access for any of its functionality."

I wish I was joking.

Which is why they want kids to "learn computers" in Kindergarten.

...And keep failing miserably.

No doubt, the earlier we expose kids to real programming (as opposed to the drag-and-drop programming equivalent of the old Radio Shack "hundred-in-one electronics projects" kits that Code.org keeps touting as some sort of mythical progress), the higher quality programmers we'll eventually turn out; but that doesn't mean you'll see a substantial increase in the number of people who can, and can stand to, code.

Early exposure might mean a few more people realize they have what it takes to code, but programming is hard, despite all the rose-scented farts Google, Microsoft et al keep encouraging us to sniff. The vast majority or people have neither the aptitude nor the patience to ever master the relevant skills.

How can he be absolutely correct that the figure is meaningless if you found a meaning to the figure?

Well, I know this is Slashdot, but some of us can read beyond the subject line... He said, "45 years spread over a bunch of drives without a failure doesn't mean that we can expect any individual drive to last 45 years". That statement is entirely true.

Going further, most people will, charitably, choose to infer a context that makes sense when reading something that could otherwise seem untrue. If you're in a theater that has "Cool Hand Luke" playing, and yell that title to your friend across the room at the ticket counter - Only a "special" few would choose to interpret that as complimenting the fingers of some guy named Luke.

You are absolutely correct. The trivial counterexample is a device that contains a semi-consumable substance, such bearings with an oil that slowly dries out; 100% might last a year, even if 0% will last two (not saying that is the case here, but just as a possibility).

These numbers do, however, suggest that you can expect a very low failure rate of those drives within the first year (less than 2.2%). And realistically, you'll probably get far more than that under similar conditions.

All fair points - But if the EU hadn't gone off in a huff about the UK leaving, all the things you describe could be tidily wrapped up into a single trade deal that says little more than "we'll comply with all applicable EU standards on goods and services"; and with the exception of some minor quibbles about trivialities such as who can make Feta, Cheddar, and Champagne, I think the UK would find that compromise entirely palatable (no pun intended).

That has nothing to do with taxes and nothing to do with immigration; and if the EU hadn't tried to force those issues on the UK, the UK almost certainly wouldn't have voted to take their ball and go home in the first place.

IMO, the UK made the right choice, and Ireland would do well to follow suit. Trade deals shouldn't affect their respective partners' self-sovereignty.

What do trade deals have to do with this?

Well, the quote to which I responded said "We're leaving the EU, but we still need you to give us free trade".

It would seem a bit odd to say "We're leaving the EU, but we still need you to give us free trade

I keep hearing variations on that line with regards to Brexit (though the same would apply for any EU country sick of the EU's games, Ireland included), and just don't "get" it...

The US has free trade agreements with plenty of countries, despite not having given those countries the slightest hint of power to dictate what US law can or cannot do domestically. Why would a (former) EU country not have the ability to negotiate similar trade deals, totally in isolation from the immigration bullshit the EU seems intent to ram down its members' unwilling throats?

Those "bullshit bitsy shekels" have a market cap over USD$15B, which would put it at roughly the 96th largest company listed on the NASDAQ if it were a company. So I'd have to say that yeah, a whole hell of a lot of people would seriously buy those bullshit bitsy shekels.

Slashdot has been screaming for exactly this for literally decades now. So, I fully expect this particular conversation to get ugly

That said - So far, Trump has done exactly what he said he would do. The first two or three days, okay, I'll admit it took us by surprise that a politician (new to it or not) didn't lie. At this point, anyone not expecting exactly this either wasn't paying attention during the election, or is just plain delusional.

"May you live in exciting times"...

I agree with you in spirit (quit taking control away from the user!), but...

We already won the cookie war via private browsing / incognito mode. Let sites set whatever the hell they want, because no one but the originating site will ever see it, and as soon as the browser closes, *poof*, all nice and clean.

He's not talking about the raw individual instrument/mic tracks, he's talking about the final digital mix that gets used to produce the record, which is an entirely different (and I would have to agree better) mix than goes to CD/MP3 and radio.

I have no love for vinyl, but its hard to argue that not every second of a song (aside from the intro and outro) should be equally loud as every other second.