Meanwhile even at current energy consumption levels US per-capita energy consumption is 308 million BTU per year, or 247 kWh per day. At 5kWh per square meter of solar panel per day (a conservative number achievable almost anywhere with low-to-mid-range solar panels) that's only 49.5 meters of panels per person, or 532 square feet. A little high, but not unachievable.

That's the panel's peak output - what it produces when it's oriented normal to incident sunlight on a cloudless day at noon. e.g. An average 16% efficient panel is rated at about 125 W/m^2 peak. Multiply that by 24 hours and you get 3 kWh/day for a square meter of panels. Unfortunately the sun doesn't stay directly overhead 24 hours/day.

To get average panel output, you need to multiply by PV solar's capacity factor. That takes into account night, movement of the sun, weather, etc. For the continental U.S., PV solar's capacity factor is about 0.145 (for northern Europe it's closer to 0.10). So averaged over a year, your 16% efficient panel is only going to generate 0.435 kWh/day.

Assuming your other energy figures are correct, this equates to 568 square meters of panels per person.

This is something that's bugged me about people (ab)using email. This sort of stuff doesn't even need to be "sent". Presumably anyone with a GS brokerage account has a login to some place on the GS website. The email should just be a notice that some new important information is available, and they need to login to their account and read it. (If they don't and they lose money because they didn't, then the fault is theirs.)

People seem to have long forgotten that email isn't secure. As we used to say in the 1980s, sending someone an email isn't like sending a letter in a sealed envelope. It's like sending a postcard - anyone along the route the email takes to the final recipient can read it.

In this particular case, if you've got the same information which needs to be read by multiple recipients, email is a stupid way to do it. Why make x copies and send it to the corners of the world via the Internet, when you can put just one copy on your company's website and only authorized people can view it after logging in? Multiple recipients for an identical large or important file should immediately equate to "not for email" in your mind.

Take your Prozac and walk away slowly from the keyboard...

No, but someone will anonymously release pictures from the changing room.

Yes, clearly I was unaware of this fact when I made this comment. Because, you know, it's an all-or-nothing world where people offering product features tell their users to do it their way or stick it.

If you cannot offer a helpful suggestion when someone questions something they aren't comfortable with, perhaps you should cut down the snark and just ignore the comment.

Indeed. That is a great idea. Thank you.

Really? Some of us really enjoy our books -- as someone who has a personal library with ~4,000 books, I would be appalled if I had to write on any of their pages with a pen.

Not because I am planning on selling any of them, but because to me, I just see it as damaging the book.

A good many of them are autographed or antiquarian books, and the last thing I'd ever want to do is sign them with a *pen*.

I find the whole deal oddly disturbing -- maybe it's just me as a bibliophile, but writing on a book sounds like a sacrilege.

In the case that started all this a man had been bankrupt. That's a fact, but one which credit rating agencies are not allowed to report after a certain period of time has passed. If any bank could see the newspaper reports about the bankruptcy simply by searching Google that would have been undermined - society decided that after time bankruptcy would be "forgotten" so people could move on with their lives.

So what does Google have to do with it? What's to stop a bank from using a different search engine to find past bankruptcies older than 7 years. Or running their searches on a VM hosted in a non-EU country.

The fundamental error in this ruling is the assumption that Google = History. All Google is is an algorithmic survey of which "historical facts" (things mentioned on websites) are more densely cross-linked. In programming terms, Google is a pointer, not the data itself. You delete the pointer, the data remains. You delete the data, the pointer is useless. If the EU were really serious about a right to be forgotten, they'd be encouraging Google to retain this stuff, and using Google to go after the sites which list the outdated information. For crying out loud, Google is doing a fantastic job telling you which sites with the most cross-links are hosting the outdated data. Way to shoot the messenger!

Going after Google reeks of a luddite misunderstanding of the difference between pointers and objects, thinking that eliminating the pointers will be a cheap and easy (for them) solution to the problem. Kinda like someone thinking that deleting all the shortcuts on his Windows desktop will free up disk space. Yeah it'll make you desktop look prettier, but it does nothing to solve the fundamental problem.

WHO recently halved its recommended sugar intake for adults, from 10 percent of total daily calories 5 percent. For an average adult, that's about 25g.

Your average (12 oz) can of coke contains 39g of sugar. Your 44 oz coke or Pepsi contain about 154g of sugar. That is not 150% of your recommended daily amount -- that's more than six days' recommended daily intake.

You owe me a coffee! :-)

I am going to offer a slightly different perspective.

I work for a management consulting firm, and we hire (arguably) some of the smartest people in the world who are usually good with both critical thinking and with the soft skills. It sounds like an easily accomplished task, but it really is not. Some of the most analytical and quantitative people in the world also come with personality quirks that makes them unsuitable for most client facing professions.

I have also had my fair share of experience interacting with CEOs, both big and small. And it has been my experience that among successful people (the way society values success today anyway), there are two key elements to being at the top.

One is strategic thinking. Not everyone is capable of it, no matter what people may think. Some people are great at focusing on one problem; others are capable of bringing in disparate problems together and finding holistic, long-term solutions. This is a non-trivial task, and one with incredibly devastating consequences in the event of failure (and people do focus on failure, which is understandable, but discounting the success of social, political, and economic progress is disingenuous and silly). A good doctor is great at one problem, but cannot bring to bear the breadth of their experience to handle a disease outbreak, which has much wider consequences.

The second is capital. Modern society runs on capital. You would be staggered at just how much day-to-day credit companies use to run. If the cogs in the wheel were to stop, they will close their doors in a week. Take away the access to capital and you will be stuck at status quo. And identifying which ideas and which cogs in the wheel deserve capital is also one of onerous responsibility.

And that is the real reason executives and people in financial services (capital) get paid as much as they do. It doesn't matter whether or not you are in private or public sector -- those jobs are incredibly demanding, not the least because the burden of responsibilities demands a far more diligent performance.

An entrepreneur can create new ideas, but to bring them to bear on market and to make a company successful requires a different kind of expertise. There's a reason even Google brought in Eric Schmidt as a CEO from the outside -- from having an IPO to exploring growth strategies, running a company is a rare and valuable expertise.

And I am pretty egalitarian (in that y'all muggles look the same), and yet, I would say that the value society places on strategic thinking and capital allocation is justified.

Now, is this sometimes done blindly, without regard to performance? Of course, and that is a structural problem (e.g. Wall Street). And are there other professions (e.g. scientists) who should get similar incentives, but do not? Of course, and that is a perception problem. But neither of those really discount the importance of the jobs many executives play.

And at the end of the day, there is certainly a trade-off. People in those jobs work with little sleep, work brutal hours, and find it difficult to make time for their family, let alone anything else. Most successful CEOs I know wakes up at brutally early hours (~4 am) and are stressed beyond repair. They trade a relatively structured, stress-free life for one that offers great risk with great rewards. And ultimately, that's what society rewards. No guts, no glory doc.

For every Associate at McKinsey or Goldman who burns through 80 hour weeks, there are others who settle for a 9-5 job with a cute barista girlfriend and play pool on the weekends. For every 20 year old who partied through college with debt, there are many, many others who scored perfect GPAs and had clearly defined goals in life. For every geek who started coding in middle school and dropped out and played Counter Strike, there is a kid who busted ass and made it in life. Intelligence only goes so far -- structure, planning, and hard work go a lot farther.

Whether or not you like it, success is cumulative -- and course correction is a lot harder later in life than it is earlier.

I haven't read through the ruling, but I suspect they just applied the "quacks like a duck" rule. Regardless of the technical nuances, Aereo operates like a rebroadcaster (takes services subscriptions, forwards broadcast transmissions to them). Therefore it must be a rebroadcaster.

I suspect the ruling may have been different if Aereo had required customers to buy their own antennas, and only charged an installation fee to host the antenna and monthly hardware insurance fee to replace broken ones. To draw from the analogy someone posted below, that'd be like you buying your own antenna and asking to place it on your neighbor's property because he sits on top of the hill blocking your house. Dynamically assigning a micro-antenna to a subscriber on-demand just blurs the line. (The fact that all this is technically stupid when you could just use a single antenna is simply a consequence of Copyright law creating artificial scarcity and giving content producers a monopoly on distribution.)

The units on gigawatts/hr works out to energy/time^2. I'm not even sure what that means. Rate of acceleration of energy use?

Assuming the Reuters reporter never took physics and the actual figure is 22 gigawatts, while it's an impressive amount, it's peak production. Solar has just about the worst capacity factor (ratio of average production to max peak production) of any energy source. If you look at Germany's solar statistics, they produced 31400 GWh in 2013. The average of their 2012 and 2013 installed (peak) generating capacity was (32.643+35.948) / 2 = 34.296 GW (averaged to take into account new plants coming online through the year).

34.3 GW * 8766 hours (1 year) = 1.08 * 10^18 joules
= 300673.8 GWh of potential solar production - i.e. how much the plants could have produced if they were operating at max capacity the entire year.

So their solar capacity factor is just 31400 / 300674 = 0.1044.

Compare to U.S. average capacity factors of
0.9 for nuclear
0.7 for geothermal
0.64 for coal
0.4 for hydro
0.35 for offshore wind
0.22 for onshre wind
0.145 for PV solar in the U.S. (not on chart)

So if Germany's peak solar production was equivalent to 20 nuclear plants, that means their entire installed base of solar plants has only eliminated the need for two nuclear plants. (There's some wriggle room here because they're comparing a peak load power source to a base load power source, but I'm just rolling with the comparison they made.) This is why you don't compare power production technologies based on peak production. It's like comparing the fuel efficiency of different cars only when they're going downhill - it unreasonably favors cars with low drag coefficients even if they may have inefficient engines. You should be comparing average production through the year (equivalent to peak production * capacity factor). Just like you should be comparing the average fuel efficiency of cars across all use cases.

So a whois.net domain name lookup on their site yielded nothing. And there are suspiciously no patents mentioning "wetag" or "ifind" and the names they listed (Dr. Paul McArthur) are in patents but for cold fusion BS in California.

Surely, though, they must have registered the "iFind" trademark? And if you search on TESS we find:

With an attorney listed as "Richard G. Eldredge" which corresponds to a local attorney. Before you deploy the door kickers to lynch somebody, that address is just somebody's $200,000 house and could possibly be a random address used by a jerk. Remember that it's entirely possible that this is all a front by some other actor and someone was paid western union/bitcoin to register this trademark through this attorney without realizing they were just being used by literally anyone in the world ... of course, kickstarter should have even better transaction details (hopefully).

Zero Motorcycles has a few electric versions, but they are pretty expensive (~$12k and upwards).