Tubgirl. Goatse.cx.
We'll not see their like again...

My kids even know Rick-Roll and Lime Cat. Hell, I saw Lime Cat in the 90's.

It's a non-issue. The republicans simply don't have a viable candidate, or they would concentrate on that instead. Their obstructionist tactics over the last few years hasn't earned them many friends.

Well, there is Bruce Jenner coming out of the closet as a Republican and a regular church-goer ... so that must be confusing to all those people who were saying his story is an example of "left-leaning socialist democrat atheist moral depravity."

I'm poised to install a $4K backup generator in the next few months. I don't live in a region where I can force my neighbors to pay for my tech goodies, and the $9K difference doesn't get paid for on any kind of time horizon that outpaces even a basic interest rate.

The generator also has a near-infinite runtime, in the case of a bad storm. However, it needs more maintenance, so if there were price-parity I might opt for the battery.

Give it another five years and that just might be feasible - good for Musk for getting this ball rolling, and kudos to the early adopters who take it in the pocket to promote the technology.

You're a bit behind the times. Both Linux and OS X are now more vulnerable operating systems than Windows.

I guess you've forgotten about this. Or you can search for ShellShock or Heartbleed. And then there are the kernel bugs that cause race conditions last December, or last May's bug that allows users to get privileged access or do a DoS, not too good in a shared hosting / shared server environment. This bug has nothing to do with a "poorly configured system". It's a flaw.

Here's the security vulnerability list for the linux kernel for 2014, with 133 bugs.

Some of these bugs made the evening news, so I don't know how you missed them all,

Like anyone else, I will buy the panels which provide the most output for my dollar, and which fit in the space available. But if the world would institute some laws which would penalize countries for slave labor and environmental abuse, then it would cease to make sense to buy a lot of that crap. I sit here surrounded by similar crap, but the point remains.

That's certainly cost-effective, but it won't help as much in an outage.

Yes, scumbags are always the problem. Obviously it wouldn't make sense for you to add a lot of battery on the basis of selling power back at shifted times.

If slashcode had ever evolved beyond 2001, we'd be selecting comments like this to replace the summary.

And you just made a meaningless statement which advances the conversation in no way whatsoever, since it could equally be applied to anything anyone said ever. If you want to provide some sort of meaningful information, you can do that. Or can you?

Then the whole world changes, whole corporations go out of business overnight while others swell, and there is widespread financial chaos.

That's because you don't understand the solar industry even a little bit. When new, more efficient panels come out, not only is their price per watt higher but the price per watt on the old panels comes down. The primary benefit is not reduction of cost, at least not at first, but in reduction of panel area needed. That reduces the size of an installation which can reduce its cost — but in the case of a residential solar system, that is rarely the case. Since they're usually fixed and roof-mounted, the amount of materials used to mount them is fairly small and there are no property cost considerations whatsoever. The homeowner doesn't care if they have three or six panels on their roof, because they're on their roof and they're not taking up any space they were using before.

The truth is that improvements in batteries and solar panels do not come in 100% increments. They come in small increments delivered over long periods of time, just like the savings on energy costs delivered by a solar installation. Not installing solar now because you're worried that solar is going to get better is just depriving yourself of the benefits that you enjoy by doing it sooner. Meanwhile, your system can be upgraded piecemeal, so you can replace your batteries in 15 years and your panels in 30, maybe add some more batteries then. You can mix and match different kinds of panels to a certain extent; sure, you need different charge controllers for old and new style panels, but you can have both kinds of charge controllers right next to one another, connected to the same battery bank. So really, there is no basis whatsoever for your concern that a 100% efficiency improvement will come along tomorrow and eliminate the value of your investment. And frankly, if such a leap in efficiency were realized in a commercial product, then some government would probably buy up 100% of it and you wouldn't be able to get any anyway. Kind of like what happened with nanosolar, which was then driven out of existence by the chinese dumping panels on our market so none of us got to buy any of it. That stuff had the potential to be disruptive, but now we have to wait for someone to conceive of the idea again with some new and even cheaper technology because we're okay with goods produced with slave labor so long as it doesn't happen within our borders.

I bet you don't downshift your car because you think it's going to hurt your engine, too.

Yes, that was what the GP was talking about. Good news! You get at least a "D" on your reading comprehension test!

You have no idea what you're on about. Increasing homeowner battery capacity is how we're going to implement grid balancing, and when the homeowner's battery bank balances the grid, their meter is going to run backwards and they're going to get paid. But unlike a grid-tied system without batteries, they'll be able to release the power when they want to, and as such, they will get paid as much as possible while simultaneously also providing the maximum grid balancing value — by providing power when it is most needed. It is not a coincidence that power costs the most when there is the least power available.

What is needed is net metering. The infrastructure cost and connection fee should be completely divorced from the cost of power, and the users of the power should effectively pay the providers with just a small cut taken off the top for whoever is managing the tracking and billing — which need not be the same as the infrastructure provider. Indeed, recent events regarding PG&E's inability to maintain neighborhood power distribution infrastructure provide some evidence that tying the two together is disastrous.

Who told you that?

False.

To the corporation. for the rest of us, it equals increased seismicity and water contamination. As well, the "fracking fluids" are just refinery wastes. they have no business injecting that into the ground anywhere.

I take it back, perhaps there is a conspiracy.

The USPS gets a tax break and preferential treatment, like a monopoly on your mailbox and increased penalties for harassment of their agents vs. a slightly more private carrier like UPS or FedEx, but they are not themselves "the feds". They're just a business with protected status which is dressed up to look patriotic, and they're hardly the only one. I know that when I was a kid, I thought Federal Express was affiliated with the postal service. Given what I see around me on a regular basis, it's probable that many adults still believe that. And like any large corporation, FedEx has to some extent grafted itself onto the federal government, e.g. (FTFL) "In 2001, FedEx sealed a $9 billion deal with the USPS to transport all of the post office's overnight and express deliveries".