Probably very good.

We don't make anything here anymore. And we have forgotten how.

--
BMO

This is all true, but people are more likely to go with what's available (generally meaning pre-made themes) or what developers work on most often (meaning the major platforms). Finding hosting that offers alternatives to PHP may also not be the easiest thing, especially if you don't know about PHP's history.

None of this is insurmountable with knowledge and/or research, but it's a larger hill than that of PHP, so the tendency will be for people to go the easier route.

I tinkered with Drupal, but the philosophy behind Joomla to abstract as much of the code as possible was appealing, and this was right after the SQL injection vulnerability discovered in October, so my trust of their code was lacking. Maybe Drupal would be better than Joomla on a daily basis, but at the time, it just had too much going against it.

Sure, but that's a necessary feature of any self-updating CMS. And if you're hosting it, you usually only have one username anyway, so the files can't be owned by another user.

Haven't tried Drupal eh? Damning with faint praise, but it's notably better than WordPress. The only PITA is dealing with database access, but so far I've been able to do that through other modules' code and haven't had to do it directly.

Ideal in what way? Certainly not in efficiency, or CO2 production.

Yes, and the former is horribly lossy while the latter has significant environmental impact, and as such is only suitable for limited sites. Established doesn't mean good, or shall we slap a slave collar around your neck and send you down a diamond mine?

According to you.

But you won't do that, even a little bit.

This is how I know you won't rethink it. Operating the means of production while power is highly available is the answer. We used to call this "making hay while the sun shines". Haven't heard that expression in about a decade though. Now we just want to make hay when we want hay, god damn it.

Which is why we're talking about adding power storage, so that the power can be used when it is needed.

See previous sentence.

That's why we want to integrate power storage into the grid. See, I can use buzzwords, too!

You will never have a "properly engineered solution" because progress. You can only have a system that works. Oddly, ours does, most of the time. However, it has some very nasty externalities. Right now we've got spent fuel sitting around on top of reactors just like at Fukushima, reactors which are in fact based on the same design as Fukushima. There is no evidence that we are responsible enough to deal with our nuclear waste, or the waste produced while coal is burned. If we ever reach that level of responsibility, then perhaps we can revisit this conversation.

Ah yes, the "if made compulsory" FUD. You really have put nothing of substance in this comment. When you have to resort to FUD, just accept you have lost.

Cars already do that, so why are you even bringing this up? Besides, anyone who knows anything about power distribution knows that this is the direction the power company is heading anyway. That's part of the "smart grid" initiative. However, it's going to be a long time before your laptop has to do anything, especially since their power budget tends to decrease over time. The industrial users' equipment is already sometimes throttled by the provider, especially HVAC where a delay of a few minutes won't hurt anything.

Ah yes, blame the problem on the people trying to fix things, not on the people who only want to get rich whether nuclear makes sense or not. We had so-called "alternative" energy sources like wind and hydro long before we had nuclear power, and they were always viable.

So stop buying goods from China, problem solved. They won't make it if we don't buy it.

Have you even imagined what permitting such a thing is like? You could only do it in the country, and only where the lay of the land permits it. You can't just put a water storage tank above your house and ignore the consequences. And you're still ignoring that the battery packs have already been constructed. They're going to use used ones. That means the cost of construction of the battery pack is $0, that's considerably cheaper than adding a water tank. All they'll need is a combination inverter and charge controller, as opposed to (for example) a shitload of pipe (the cost of this alone will exceed that of the inverter) as well as a pump, motor, turbine, generator, and finally the charge controller/inverter.

You are ignoring the efficiency of using used battery packs. Stop it.

Note that they don't tell you what the efficiency or capacity are. As you store more power, they lose more energy. Fairly worthless. It also incorporates a special and expensive engine. Fail, fail.

No, no it isn't. First, air-based storage is always horribly lossy due to loss of the thermal energy; your above example tries to solve this with technology and argon, but it is thus complex and runs at high pressures and will be prone to failure. Second, the bladders will have to be replaced regularly, because under deep water is not a comfortable environment for them.

The efficiency is not great, but it's a lot better than anything based on compressing gases.

Well, compressed air storage is still stupid, but flywheels are cool, and applicable ones have been around for at least a decade, see Beacon Power. So yay, we found the viable alternative to used batteries! That took a really long time.

The truth is that used batteries are an excellent way to add more storage capacity, since they're just lying around anyway.

Maybe you don't, but I do, when they don't depend on registry entries. I got tired of installing Civ and AlphaC on every build via the installer, then the official patches, then the unofficial patches, so I just 7z-exe'd the directories.

People go to the shiny sites. If they see older-looking sites, they're less likely to stick around, particularly if it doesn't have the nice features that the newer sites have.

For all the problems that PHP has, I don't see many nearly as many sites going up built on other platforms, in large part because they're playing catch-up and are still largely years behind. .NET is probably the closest, but when you look at the number of free or even inexpensive sites running Windows, it pales in comparison to the PHP-based sites.

Add to this that WordPress is by far the easiest of the major CMS platforms to manage, and it gets even worse. I manage a couple of WordPress sites and a Joomla site. WordPress largely Just Works(TM). Joomla works for basics, but every time I want to get beyond adding a menu item, it becomes a whole new learning process.

You know, I always hate how my grunt work for companies makes them 4 times the money they pay you. It's just greedy theft. We should start a movement where the means of production are owned by the workers rather than investors and management!

Not really. There's three official DLCs for Skyrim (not counting the high-res texpack, which is free) and game mods may require any number of them. Many of the most interesting mods require at least the two larger (and more expensive) expansions.