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".

Who the fuck are you, coward? You're only capable of bullshit.

Irrelevant. This is an idea already proven viable.

Irrelevant. Not the only technology.

More irrelevancy.

Already proven viable.

Not a conspiracy theory, this was a deliberate attempt on your part to paint me with that brush. Also, conspiracies are the norm, not the exception. If two people team up to defraud a third in a way that breaks the law, that's a criminal conspiracy.

Cognitive dissonance is not pop psychology, and you also don't get to suggest that I'm suffering from it while also insulting the concept.

Yes, very simple economics: The entrenched interests have lots of money, and have been using it to manipulate the situation so as to remain in a position of power, as our corporatist system is designed to enable. No spooky invisible hands are needed to explain what is happening.

because being so irresponsible is easier than being responsible enough to do the research to determine whether the products are safe. But don't fool yourself; this is still irresponsible behavior. Society encourages it by taking away your farm and throwing you into the street where it's illegal for you to live if you have a bad season or two, which is just another reason we need MGI. Then people can better afford scruples.

The glycol is the corrosion inhibitor. That's its job as much as anti-freezing. That's why we use it even in climates without freezes, and not just a smaller package of corrosion inhibitors. You have to substantially change the properties of the water to retard corrosion.

You wouldn't drink the water in your engine even if it didn't have anything added to it, because with or without a corrosion inhibitor you will still have corrosion, and you don't want to be drinking heavy metals. Iron is not too bad, but Aluminum is fairly horrible. Many engines are still made of both, and the ones that aren't are generally all-Al. Regardless, you can check coolant condition with a voltmeter. If your coolant is making more than about 0.1v, then it's doing damage through corrosion and you need to change it. If it's making more than 0.2v, then you're definitely suffering ongoing damage.

Of course there is. There's a way for data service to be free. It's called mesh networking, and all it takes is for enough of us to care at the same time to spend a few bucks (okay, maybe a couple hundred) on a fancy WAP and maybe build some decent antennas if we live in the sticks. Problem is, even here on Slashdot people will bitch and whine about how the uplink bandwidth has to come from somewhere and refuse to get involved. Well yes, no kidding. But we also have to start somewhere. Forget Internet2, we need Internet3. For me, since I do live in an area of low population density, there's no point in messing with it since I have no one to mesh network with, hence my endless campaigning.

The only thing that's ever going to solve this problem is open mesh networking. That brings a whole new set of problems, but we need to tackle them sooner rather than later because centralization is getting stronger rather than weaker.

Not really. This is a step closer to having a more useful grid. Right now, the grid isn't much of a grid, it's more like a loose net with lots of big holes in.

What would get more houses completely off the grid would be batteries that last forever and are relatively inexpensive. They don't need to be space-efficient, they just need to last effectively eternally, a human lifetime at least.

Ever enabling autorun was something they did wrong. And disabling it should have been a simple checkbox in the drive properties where it would make sense.

Probably, since the job they will be doing is easier. More sustained charge and discharge cycles, less start-and-stop.

There's no reason to believe it will last only 10 years. The 10 years number has to do with suitability for automotive use.

This isn't stupidity, exactly, it's obstinacy. And actually, it's cognitive dissonance. Typically, when you see someone passionately arguing against their own best interests, that is what at fault. In this case, one of the people ranting against solar and storage is arguing that if this were a good idea, it would have been done already, because they want to believe that they are more intelligent than Elon Musk, every PG&E employee, and the majority of slashdotters who have woken up and recognized that batteries have gotten immensely better within our lifetimes — and will likely improve just as much in the next thirty or forty years.

People want to believe that they are smart and moral, and therefore they justify their poor decisions and the FUD they've spread by continuing to attack ideas long after they have been proven viable.

You can't separate the social and legal deterrents.

As an adult, I find this stuff still rather hilarious, but I'm an adult now and can easily discern it's just for fun. A child? Influential. They don't know better yet.

Watched all that stuff as a kid. Don't recall ever thinking "Hey, it would be pretty cool to drop a safe on someone - not like it really hurts them past the commercial break, after all!"

No, kids aren't so stupid that they see talking mice running at near sonic speed (or small dinosaurs doing same) and think "oh, how realistic! Wow, the world is pretty cool, isn't it?"

Hell, most of us (speaking of the kids of my day, and get off my lawn!) never even believed that animals could talk, much less order shit from Acme....

How do you KNOW that? How do you know its important until you answer it?

And if you don't know, but expect it might be important, then you'll need to check. Checking your phone to see who is calling is just as obnoxious as checking your watch. Moreso probably because after checking your watch, you have even less time to answer it so your panic answer dance will be that much more urgent.

Its pretty easy. Certainly not difficult enough nor something that occurs frequently enough for being able to do it from my watch to to even register as a "layer" of value.

As I said, it works with cyanogenmod meaning the "single manufacturer" is less critical to its continued operation or functionality. Google could vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow and android would live on.

False.

Lol. Seeing as they are inextricably tied to itunes and ios, calling it non-apple functionality means what exactly?

The pebble has non-apple functionality, you can toss your iphone in a ditch buy and android and keep using your pebble.

Android wear at least works with android not-tied-to-google (cyanogenmod) and may work with other OSes such as sailfish etc.

The apple watch? Not so much.