Renewables are "predictable and reliable"? This quote is all over the net in summaries of TFA, but it does not exist in TFA, nor even in Prof. Lombardo's original article.

It's great that Tesla is putting this effort in. Note that they have chosen a very special location - masses of sunshine, shallow and easily accessible geothermal, etc.. However, as usual - if the title of the article contains a question, the answer is in the negative - no, others cannot do this.

The expense is massive; Tesla is doing this primarily for political "green" points. It takes massive amounts of land. It requires a special location. Few other companies will be in a position to reproduce this.

And - to get back to my first point - renewables are neither predictable nor reliable. Tesla is not going off-grid, nor could they. There have been plenty of previous references on Slashdot to the actual (non-)reliability of wind farms and solar. Even geothermal has its limits, not only location, but for each location there is a hard limit as to how fast can you remove heat.

This is an excellent example of where a microscopic amount of critical thinking would go a long way.

CO2 dissolves in water, yes. Atmospheric levels used to be immensely higher, yes. Ocean life very similar to today's survived just fine, yes.

Hence: "should be scaring the pants off us", no.

It is this lack of critical thinking, this "oh noes, the world is ending" that I find totally irritating about the AGW folks. Is the earth warmer that it was 100 years ago? Sure it is, so what? It's a minor increase, climate is dominated by negative feedback loops (blindingly obvious). No need to panic, and anyway, warmer is historically better...

See my answer above. This is true only when doing very basic programming. As soon as you start working abstractly, creating code that works with arbitrary classes, life is no longer so simple.

Exactly. It's been a while, but I remember tracking down one bug in a framework that managed other classes. The developer had assumed that all objects were, in fact, different objects. However, with Strings, Java used its cute little cache. In the framework this meant that two objects that should have been different had the same reference (== was true), which led to problems. The details escape me - it's been a while - but tracking this down was not trivial.

It's all well-and-good to say that you should only ever look at the object values and not care about the memory references. However, anyone writing any sort of framework-level code will, in fact, be working with object references. With your own classes, of course, it's no problem. But Java's simple classes (Integer and String certainly, not sure about others) violate the semantics of object management. Worse, it is inconsistent, since it depends on the specific value of the objects (which the language itself should never look at).

As the parent post so aptly put it: this is "the bash-your-head-on-the-table level of stupid design".

Every time I teach a beginner's course, I am reminded of just how ugly Java really is. Here's a simple example:

- Comparing two "int" variables, you use ==
- Comparing two Integer variables, you probably want .equals()
- But it is possible to have two different Integer objects with the same value - this is when you wand ==
- But Java wants to save memory, so in fact == and equals yield the same result for values from -128 to +127

That's one example, but there are lots more. A more advanced example are the generics that disappear when the code is compiled. I understand the arguments for doing it this way, but I disagree with them - if you have generics, you ought to be able to query the types at run-time. There are lots and lots of highly questionable design decisions - basically, 20 years of backwards compatibility.

It's past time to clean house. Building a new language on top of the established JVM technology seems like a very good idea indeed. Perhaps Scala can fulfill this role...

You're off-topic, but absolutely right. It is much harder to create a good user experience on the web, as compared to desktop applications. Or even compared to web applications some years ago (when expectations were, granted, lower).

Just that - why California? One of the most business-hostile climates in the world, but people who live there can't imagine anything else?

This guy actually talked to the federal agents who came knocking on his door? Stupid, stupid...

Assuming these were probably FBI or Secret Service agents, my understanding is that the only record allowed of the interview consists of their handwritten notes. You are not allowed to make a recording. This means that, afterwards, they can put any spin on the interview that they want. If you disagree, they can and will throw you in jail for lying to a federal officer.

The only possible reply to these officers should be "I have nothing to say to you".

Project management method "X" methods work great, if you have a good technical project lead and a good team; otherwise it sucks.

You can replace "X" with Agile/Scrum, or you can replace it with any other damned thing - it doesn't matter. A good team with a good project manager will get good results. A bad team, or a teach with a lousy PM, will not. The current love affair with Scrum is driven by PHBs looking for a magic way to get good results out of bad teams. It's really that simple.

I'll buy your number for cats - there are hundreds of millions of them, and they love to hunt birds. A power plant that kills a few thousand is completely irrelevant in comparison, but these are clueless "progressive" types, they aren't expected to understand basic math.

I'll pass on the latest climate change panic...

Every kind of energy generation has a price. It's the price of civilization. Only in California could this come as a surprise...

Do Gartner reports actually have any use? I mean, they put a nice graphic to their "hype cycle", but this is surely stuff that any technical type over the age of 25 understands?

You can purchase their report on the Internet of Things for the low, low price of $1995. If it's like most Gartner reports that I have seen, it will contain nice references to certain companies - my suspicion is that these companies have recently given Gartner fat consulting contracts. If you watch the same report evolve year-to-year, recommended companies change randomly - from a technical perspective - so one presumes that the deciding factors are politics and/or money.

Anyone want to argue against my cynicism? Are Gartner reports actually useful to some people?

No one is ever stressed out, unless they are planning a terror attack. No job interviews, arguments with the spousal unit, kids run off, financial problems...

The only thing surprising is that this article isn't about something in the UK or the US. Probably that's where it will first be installed, so that more names can be added to the terrorist watch list.

Surely this is illegal? I know that the US has no privacy laws, but it is still theft. Both he and the individuals purchasing the stolen data should be prosecuted.

Of course, it won't happen because "War on Drugs", and anyway, anything the US government wants is ok.

I seriously do not understand what they mean by 50cm (or 25cm) resolution. On the current Google Maps picture of our house, you can clearly see the yellow garden hose snaking across the lawn. The garden hose is maybe 3cm thick. We have stepping stones in the lawn, averaging maybe 40cm by 60cm; each stone clearly occupies multiple pixels. I would guess that a single pixel represents about 10cm.

This is in Switzerland. Are photos in the USA fuzzier? I just zoomed in on a military base, and I can clearly see the lines painted between parking spaces. Those are, what, maybe 10cm? Each line occupies about 2 pixels on my screen.

So, serious question, what is meant by a 50cm satellite resolution?