I actually wonder if anyone needs to be paid to handle this stuff. It's a useful service, and hence potentially profitable - why wouldn't the market deal with it? Once we start getting substantial excesses of power from residential solar, the energy companies would be seeking for places to dump it, and one can offer such a thing, for a fee. And then sell that power back to the company when they need it (peak of consumption) at a slightly higher rate. So long as this roundtrip is cheaper than the cheapest generated power, the energy companies would participate.

Natural gas is already paid separately for the connection and for the gas itself, so adopting such a model wouldn't be breaking any new ground.

Small problem with that is even benign changes to other components on a car (intake, exhaust, cams, etc.) usually require changes to the ECU, and this legislation effectively locks out tuner shops, who are qualified to make changes to the ECU.

If you are to go down the route of lowest common denominator of what people have the experience or knowledge to do, do we outlaw doing your own lawn care, since you might misuse the chemicals involved? Do we outlaw people canning their own foods, since most people are not trained to federal safety standards regarding? Or wiping your own butt, since people have not been trained in the transmission of E Coli. and Hep A?

Next will be telling me I can't change a lighting fixture since I'm not an electrician.

sata has overhead of the, well, sata and scsi layers.

the pci-e ssd stuff is going to be based on NVMe and that cuts thru all the old layers and goes more direct. its also network-able (some vendors).

this is really NOT for consumers, though. consumers are just fine with ssd on sata ports.

Sure. And a starving guy who can't find a job is not entitled to the contents of your wallet if he finds it on the street, but you'd have to be a sociopath or a retard to actually blame him for not returning it to you, even if that's a "right thing" to do. Or claiming that he's somehow a bad guy if he doesn't.

Those Mexican citizens aren't trying to solve the problems of Mexico as a whole. They're trying to solve the problems that they have as individuals.

And, of course, no-one asked them if they want to be citizens of Mexico when they were born, so Mexico is not entitled to having them solve its problems, either.

They don't have sovereignty, the Mexican state does. To what extent it actually represents the citizens in general, and these citizens in particular, is a question that you should ask before pursuing this line of argument any further.

Shipping Mexican citizens into the US won't fix the problems in Mexico.

Those Mexican citizens aren't trying to solve the problems of Mexico as a whole. They're trying to solve the problems that they have as individuals.

And, of course, no-one asked them if they want to be citizens of Mexico when they were born, so Mexico is not entitled to having them solve its problems, either.

They don't have sovereignty, the Mexican state does. To what extent it actually represents the citizens in general, and these citizens in particular, is a question that you should ask before pursuing this line of argument any further.

Saying that green card lottery is a viable way to legally immigrate is like saying that gambling is a viable way to legally earn money for a living. It's true in a very pedantic way, but practically meaningless.

I'm not saying anything of a kind. In fact, I didn't say a single word about what government should or shouldn't do, only about your attitude towards people who break that particular law. I don't know about you, but I know dozens of people who break the law - most of them smoke weed. I don't see why it should affect my opinion of them in any way, since it's obviously a bad and stupid law that I don't have to respect.

I am an H1B as well, so I can relate. But ...

Let me make this clear: you are being abused (the terms of H1 visas are effectively abusive for would-be immigrants due to the way they tie you to a specific employer with a very complicated switching process, and reset your green card application if you switch while it's still ongoing), and so you don't like it when other people - who don't get even the abusive option that you do - dodge that?

(And of course being in US as an illegal immigrant is still a very subpar experience to being legal ... hell, just try opening a bank account that way!)

The point is, people tout the illegal status of an immigrant as some kind of huge moral character flaw or failure, sufficient in and of itself to treat them as scum. I'm merely point out that it's not true in general, and specifically depends on how easy it is to immigrate legally for the same person, and how strong are the reasons that prompt them to immigrate. As I'm sure you know full well from your own experience, it's not a light decision to take in the first place, and US immigration system in particular is a mess of gigantic proportions with no coherent immigration policy whatsoever - just a confusing mish-mash of random decisions made over the last few decades.

Can you give an example of an immigration track for an average Mexican, then? What visa he should apply for first etc.

The only thing I can think of is the green card lottery. But it is just that, a lottery, it's not something you can actually rely on to get you there, no matter how long you wait.

you can rent apartments for 2500/mo and houses for about 3k/mo in the bay area (I live here and I do rent).

2000 is very bottom of rent price for anything livable. house rents start at 2500 (usually townhouses with shared walls).

yes, its insane. don't come here. and if you live here, move.

Suppose that everything was true, except that they were there illegally (because there is no way for them to immigrate legally, which is the case for most Mexicans). Would your opinion of them change?

Average voltage on an AC line is 0 volts. RMS is probably what you intended. But yes, Watt-hours are all basically the same for a given RMS voltage/frequency. We will ignore power factor, that would take a lot longer to discuss...

Just to be pedantic:
The electrons going through your appliances are almost entirely the ones that were in the wire of the appliance to start with. Some electrons may actually drift enough to have come from your house's wires. But for any significant number of electrons to physically be the same ones that were in the power plant is very low probability.

This may not seem obvious at first, but the reason is that the drift velocity of electrons is actually very slow relative to the currents typically used. In other words, a piece of wire has so many damn electrons that you don't really need to move a very large portion of them to get a large current. If we were all using DC mains, then eventually you would see electrons making a round trip. But with AC, as mentioned above, the average voltage is 0, so the electrons move back and forth, but not typically getting very far in either direction.

Also, a more direct thing to consider is that most electrical systems use isolated transformers. So literally, the electrons are not passing from the utility across that barrier (unless auto-transformers are used.) It is an energy conversion to/from a magnetic field.

There is a clever and very practical solution I've heard of in Germany that utilities are using to dump excess renewable electrical energy: hydrolyze to H2 and inject into the natural gas system. Infrastructure already exists, technology already exists, very low cost to implement. So you aren't exactly storing for the purpose of the electrical grid, but overall energy management is pretty good.

Similar things can be done with stored thermal systems in northern climates (you can heat water when energy is in excess and draw from it later.)

Too much of being even moderately bright is banging your head against convention and a society that doesn't cater to you, but the lowest common denominator. A lot of motivation is simply having the will to work out a better method and hoping others will adopt it. Mostly they don't, and remember these are the same people by whom you judge your success. As one of my instructors put it, it doesn't matter if you are the smartest person in the world if no one else glimpses the horizon you see.

Even the very brightest have their determination beat out of them simply because they realize how pointless it is. The best and brightest mostly don't rise to the top. They simply create defensive strategies to get by as best as possible on their own terms, and display their intellect in ways that doesn't get much reward or attention unless it is furthering the status quo.

Sure, but that's essentially it's current state, and everybody knows that. But some people do want to experiment with a microkernel still, and so here we are.