I think your advice is valid in both hemispheres.

Solar still works just fine in urban spaces too, it does not scale as well there due to population densities, obviously, but urban spaces take up a tiny proportion of available land. I will give you that solar does not work for the minority use case of nighttime industrial solar, but given the tiny portion of the energy market that represents I don't see it being a major issue. As solar power continues to drop, nighttime industrial may simply vanish as solar continues to drop in price. I don't see the point of arguing this, solar will be cheaper than coal by the end of the decade even without subsidies. You will need nighttime generation capacity but long term the writing is already on the wall, business will opt for the cheaper solution.

Solar can be installed locally per house for cheaper than the cost of grid power. General rule of thumb is you need 60% of your roof covered in Solar to meet 100% of your daytime residential needs. Solar doesn't need to be centrally located in giant farms, it can be distributed in urban areas with overlap on existing structures with no problem.

Nighttime power use is a lot lower than the 3pm-7pm peak daily usage block when residential and commercial is at it's highest. People are generally watching TV on their couch and commercial properties aren't being lit/climate controlled as much. This isn't a major , unsolvable problem.

Interesting use of TypeScript, an entire rougelike (i.e. Nethack, i.e. the '@' game) game authoring library written in TypeScript, from the author of libtcod:
 
Game: http://roguecentral.org/doryen/yendor.ts/game/index.html
60fps example:http://roguecentral.org/doryen/yendor.ts/bench/index.html

Library:https://github.com/jice-nospam/yendor.ts/releases/tag/v0.4.0
 
What's interesting is it does alpha shading, fluid mechanics, cloud mechanics, terrain generation etc all inside of a text based game, somewhat like Dwarf Fortress but a lot more flexible graphically.

I would be willing to pay for utorrent, it has a fantastic web interface, and now that I have it setup as a service and use the web interface instead. It also interfaces with the XBMC utorrent plug in. So for that I would buy it for maybe $30 one time purchase, instead it's on a subscription model, which is annoying. There's no one time payment option, and I have too much going on to manage a billion tiny subscriptions each month and review if I'm still getting X value out of them each month. I'm not going down that road.

It has a fantastic web front end and you can run it as a service in windows, I'm not sure how else you would accomplish this in the windows world.

...and Verizon chose to be salty.

Rob

I guess you're not familiar with XBMC (Now "Kodi")? Video over LAN is still a thing, people just want a file browser with a 20 ft GUI. VLC never really made it off the desktop which I guess is why XBMC was able to succeed in the HTPC market where VLC failed miserably and it's plugin system never really took off.

Smoking bans in restaurants and bars are still handled on a city by city basis in Texas. A lot of big cities have laws on the books but small and medium cities it can be a real crap shoot.

Telcom companies have a lot more money to fight a legal battle than the FCC does. See also: Why it took ~35 years to get smoking under control even though the FDA declared smoking a major hazard to your health in the 1980's. Private corporations simply have more money to fight those kinds of battles than governmental organizations.

I would buy the low yield argument if one of two conditions were met; 1) the technology was developed this century, and 2) fewer than a billion (that's with a 'B' for those if you following along at home) were produced every year. 1080p ought to be the minimum standard in 2011, it's 2015, time for manufacturers to get with the program.

It's a spec. Designed by intel's marketing group. Which is constantly in flux. Their long term goal is to push affordable yet quality laptop design, but at the same time I wouldn't all $700 "palatable" for an Ultrabook. $570-$640 is palatable for an ultrabook. $700 is just a regular laptop price.
 
And really, should we be praising laptop manufacturers for putting a 1080p screen in a $700 laptop? In 2015? How many pixels does your phone have? How much does it cost off contract. Extrapolate.

The NK-33 rockets are fully tested before they're flown, I don't want to sound like a Russian apologist, but NASA's preliminary report says that the Orbital flight is their own fault, finding evidence of dessicant and spare parts(!!!) in the fuel tank that were later ingested by the turbopump. If you stick metal action figures in the cylinders of your car how many miles do you expect the engine to last running at 80,000 rpm?

Russia charges NASA about $73 million per astronaut, that includes Soyuz training, russian lessons, splashdown survival training, and of course the actual launch. That's per astronaut. We typically rotate through six astronauts a year on a staggered schedule.
 
SpaceX is going to be capable of sending seven astronauts for under $100 million. That's about $15 million per seat or 20% of what the Russians are charging. It could potentially get as low as $60 million per launch which comes out to 8.5 million per launch which would be 12% what we're paying now.
 
If/when SpaceX could successfully land and reuse the booster cores for $20 million per launch, it gets down to $2.8 million per seat. That's 20+ years away perhaps.