The US government applied tariffs to Chinese solar panels because the Chinese were dumping them in the US market.
In other words, they were selling them more cheaply than the local manufacturers could, and the government moved to protect local industry at the cost of the consumer. I'm not sure why you think that's a valid defence.
Gaming also apparently interfered with your ability to use linebreaks. What, enter was never hot-keyed in any of those games?
Hardly new. Slashdot frequently runs doom-is-nigh, overblown, click-baity summaries for the purposes of drawing in viewers (and thus, revenue). All those stupid social sites use vague headlines ending with "...you won't believe what happens next!" to try and intrigue viewers for the same reason. Calling it "mind control" is setting the bar pretty low.
One must ask, what good is news that filters?
All news is filtered. You wouldn't have time to digest every single piece of information generated every day. The question is, what is your news filtered by? I don't see how "upbeat" is any worse than "political", "tech", "sport", or "local".
I'm in trouble then. In the last couple of weeks, I've performed a number of human experiments on the website I manage, including:
* Do they push green buttons more than red buttons?
* Do they fill in forms more reliably if it's one big form, or split across multiple pages?
* Do people finish reading a page more often if the text is in large font rather than a small?
Nobody who advocates the gold standard (of whom I'm not one, just playing a bit of devil's advocate) believes we should be running around with pockets full of gold doubloons. The gold standard doesn't mean the currency is gold, it means the currency is backed by gold - that is, whoever has issued the currency holds enough gold in reserve to exchange your dollars for bullion.
The reason isn't usually "gold, yay!"; it's proposed as a means of controlling inflation by tying money to something governments cannot manipulate (e.g. scarce physical matter). Bitcoins are usually appreciated by the same crowd, for the same reason, because governments cannot manipulate maths either.
Both can be true. If the price of energy goes up, people are going to start looking at alternative ways of spending less, that may not have been economical in the past. As power costs ramp up, the time it takes for the cost of insulation to pay for itself drops, making it more attractive.
The production figures in this article are all given as percentages of demand - not the actual amount generated. There's two reasons Germany could suddenly be producing an excess of energy: supply has increased, or demand has dropped. A quick Google shows German production has dropped 6% in the period 2004-12 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... ).
So the reason isn't that Germany's renewable plants are producing an abundance of power - it's that people are demanding less power; presumably because they cannot afford prices that are among the most expensive in the world ( http://www.contactenergy.co.nz... )
Maybe it's just me, but if a phone can't even get to the dialer to make a phone call, that's a little further from "actually working" than "almost."
A phone that can get to the dialler to make a phone call would be "working". So you're not willing to acknowledge something as "almost working" until it's actually fully functional?
And apparently, Anonymous Cowards have succumbed to ignorance.
Cloud != Desktop Remote Access.
None of the fission plants in Fukushima ever went boom.
It's about how rapidly a changeover in energy production to sustainable can occur. Germany was one of the world's biggest nuclear energy producers(France being the leader of that pack), and they've gone from that to one of the biggest solar producers in only a year or so. With a really large economy, without losing much GDP. The point that's being demonstrated is that a power infrastructure changeover can be done without sacrificing being a first world nation along the way.
This is exactly the sort of response the OP's post is pre-empting. Germany hasn't suddenly changed their energy production to solar. For the vast majority of the year, they've changed it to coal. On occasion, they generate 50% of their power from solar. On average, they generate a tiny fraction of that (5% was bandied around upthread; have no idea from where that number was sourced though), with coal picking up the load.
The OPs point is that people like you shouldn't point to single instances of non-representative power generation, and then claim it's a revolution in solar power.
Oh, and the price of that power is triple that of energy in the US.
Your definition of "significant" seems to be pretty low-bar, especially when talking about the human species as a whole - as opposed to, say, a small community in one of the least populated states of a single country.
We, the most adaptable species the earth has ever produced (if measured by how fast we can move into previously inhospitable environments) are still feeling significant effects from global climate change.
We are? Name one.
It's a good thing that the prisoners rights were respected, regardless of the problem being an IT one at root.
It's a bad thing that an IT problem is causing cops to be unable to file paperwork that would result in proper processing of prisoners
We are not a loved organization, but we are a respected one. -- John Fisher
