That really depends on what your states PUC rules are. Some states use net metering which amounts to the meter running "backwards" in that you get full credit for all the power you put in against what you have to get out of the grid at night/on cloudy days. If you provide more power than you consume then it varies by state if you get wholesale credit or something else.

Compare this to being "off the grid". In that case any excess generation is simply lost, not to mention the capital cost of a battery bank. Of course, with net metering you are still vulnerable to power failures.

I dunno, any horse manages to keep a copy in the nucleus of each of its cells.

That's my main bitch about eBooks. You lose the ability to sell or lend your copy, and yet you pay nearly as much as a dead-tree copy for something with nearly zero reproduction costs.

IMO an eBook should cost about 1/3 of a physical copy to make up for these losses.

Fat chance of that happening.

Exactly. If only they had a halfway affordable price. The newest Sony Reader also has a touch screen but even it clocks in at $400 which is way too rich for my blood.

They're probably hoping to dry up the used textbook market.

It seems to me that this would be where eBooks would shine. Add a stylus to the reader and now all of your annotations, bookmarks, etc can be indexed and easily searchable. Add to this the obvious weight advantage and eBook texts start looking pretty good.

You actually bring up a good use case for a process-limited starter edition. When I fire up an XP VM on my linux box it is generally because I want to use some specific application.

If MSFT sold a starter edition to the general public cheap enough I'd probably bite. Not much danger of that happening, though.

Got one right here, Webster's Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language Copyright 1989 (More or less contemporaneous with BTTF) page 597 has gigacycle, gigahertz, gigaelecron volt and gigameter (But no gigawatt). All starting jig- with alternate pronunciations for a long or short "i" sound.

Now get off my lawn!

Gigawatt is correctly pronounced jiggawatt. And it's 10^9 watts, not 2^20.

Damn kids.

You're required to accept cash as payment for an existing debt, but there's nothing to stop you from walking away from a potential buyer if you don't want him to pay in cash.

Curse you, stomv!

I couldn't resist clicking the little stars.

The shiny, candy-like stars...

After a lot of searching I found a photoelectric controller rated to work with CFLs. It also had a "feature" that if you turned the power off and on right away it would enter a flashing "911" mode which was supposed to conjure up cops or the marines or something.

I came home one night and a new CFL that I had just put in it was burned out. Turns out that there was a momentary power fluctuation an hour or so earlier (I had to reset some digital clocks, so I checked my UPS log). No sign of any cops or marines showing up though.

I have found that heat will shorten a CFL's life. The ones I have in recessed or fully enclosed fixtures don't last nearly as long as ones in table lamps, for example.

This could be mitigated by using banks of capacitors. When fully charged, the banks would be run in parallel. After discharging to half voltage half of the capacitors would be placed in series with the other half, returning to the original voltage. Repeat until all of the capacitors are in series.

Each new configuration would drop to half-voltage in half of the time as the previous configuration, so you'd hit a point of diminishing returns pretty quickly, but you'd still do better than the 30% capacity loss from your example.

As an aside, because a cap's voltage is proportional to charge a 'fuel gauge' would be a lot more accurate than the battery indicators we are used to on our portable devices.