Even the "leasing" option appears to be a contract to purchase power at a set rate. Going by the blurbs *every* option they offer, other than direct purchase of the panels, is a contract to purchase power. (I suspect that's because that allows SolarCity to keep the tax credits for themselves.)

Did you actually read the page? Or just jump on the word "lease"?

Just a few more. Who's the eldest being in Middle Earth, Tom Bombadil or Treebeard? Is mithril "supple as linen", and if so why did Bilbo hurt himself when slapping Frodo's mithril coat? So Galadriel knows Sauron's thoughts that concern the elves, but didn't know of Saruman's betrayal, or never saw relevant to mention it to Gandalf? Why does Gandalf warn people against using devices "of an art deeper than we possess ourselves" when talking about the palantir and yet have no problem with with the fellowship using all sorts of magical items of arts deeper than they possess (glowing elvish swords, daggers from the barrow, the Phial of Galadriel, Galadriel's box of earth, etc)? Is "Sauron" (lit. "abominable") a name that he despises and does not permit his underlings to speak, and if so, why does he have his messenger refer to him as "Lord Sauron the Great" and a servant refer to himself as "the mouth of Sauron"? Are Thranduil's favorite gems emeralds, or white-colored gems? Did Sauron prohibit the Nazgûl to traverse west of the Anduin, and if so why did one fly over the Fellowship at Hollin? Etc.

Tolkien was human. Humans make mistakes and oversights.

Again, you're thinking about it totally wrong. It's about stopping the power from going out when you use both the microwave and an electric kettle at the same time, not about wanting to have 2,5kW of power consumption going 24/7.

We don't know what they're calling "peak" vs. "sustained", but even if their "peak" covers the sort of "microwave and kettle" use case, it's still way too low.

Given the price of these packs, you'd have trouble making the argument that lead would be a better fit.

Yep. Volt price dropped another $1200 just the other day. After tax credits it's now barely more expensive than a Prius.

i simply don't belive it. the same argument was used to justify subsidies for electric cars, yet they still don't make economic sense and are more of a novelty or rich person's toy.

Really? So the Model S costs the same as a Roadster?

Sorry if we can't please you with prices instantly dropping to 10% of their former value. I find it unfortunate that you have to be inconvenienced by the fact that these things don't instantly jump forth by orders of magnitude. But if you can't see the continual line of improvements in electric cars from the start of the California ZEV days up to the present day, then I can't help you there.

Metallic lithium is not used to produce li-ion batteries. The traded forms of lithium carbonate and lithium chloride are. And the 25kg figure would be a carbonate equivalent, not a metal equivalent.

Is this a joke? What makes you think lithium produced from the ocean is less "pure" than lithium produced from salt flats? Is the isotopic concentration wrong or something? ;)

Lithium carbonate is lithium carbonate, the world over.

I know - everyone is always hating on door nails. I myself would regard a coffin nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade.

Of course we're not talking about what the houses uses all the time. We're talking about the spikes that make up part of everyone's everyday lives. Using the stove. Using the microwave. Using an electric kettle. Using a hair drier. Using an electric washer or drier. Running the toaster. And on and on. These things all can use 1 1/2 kW on up just on their own. Anything that needs to make heat is going to gobble down the power.

2 kW sustained max is just way too low.

Burning natural gas, aka heat, is not a "higher grade" energy than electricity, it's a lower grade energy. Electricity can be converted losslessly into heat. Turning heat into electricity loses a large chunk of it.

I agree though that 2kW sustained / 3kW peak is too low for most people - even if they don't use an electric stove. Yes, one can arrange to not use multiple high consumption devices at the same time, but the goal needs to be to not make people's lives more complicated. It's so easy to forget what you have going, too... I always forget that I can't run my microwave and my electric kettle at the same time because they're both on the same circuit and combined it's too much power consumption.

Organise a "draw Jesus sodomizing Mary" contest in Texas and you'll get crazy

You'll get signs and yelling. You won't get assassins.

Stop trying to draw parallels where none exist.

Companies like SolarCity basically install solar systems for no money up front, and then lease them back to you for a period. For many houses, even with these fees, the SolarCity systems will save the homeowner quite a bit of money.

No, SolarCity doesn't lease the panels back to you - they sell the power from the panels to you. And they control the rate you pay and have the ability to raise it annually (up to 2.9% per annum).

I agree. Duh, the program is obviously not perfect and screws up sometimes. But I'm amazed by how good it actually is. Even being able to just ballpark it some of the time would be impressive, but the fact that it gets pretty reasonably close most of the time, I find that incredibly impressive.

Someone on my Facebook feed was complaining about how in a washed-out picture of three children the picture guessed only two of them right, but saw one (a young boy) as an adult woman. My response was to crop out just the washed out face, take it out of context, and point out, if you saw this face, not understanding anything about the context, could you guess it? I certainly couldn't have. But that's exactly what the software has to do.

I took a number of pictures of myself in different angles, making different faces, etc, and its range on age guesses was only 3 years. My brother-in-law managed to get a 20-year difference in guesses by making faces, but I couldn't manage it, and neither could most people I know who tried. Again, computationally, it's very impressive.

Yeah, it bites all of us (I can't write a thorn here). They only care about Americans so after countless redesigns there's still no proper unicode support.