"Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal,"

Nixon, 1977.

People riding on buses are not also driving cars at the same time. I am not making that up.

The lowest projected cost of CHSR is $58 BILLION dollars. No one believes that number, and even the most fervent CHSR advocates have now admitted it was a lowball estimate. But for the sake of argument, lets use it. The plan is to run 100 trains with a capacity of 1000 passengers each. $58B/100,000 = $580,000 per seat.

Which is plenty for a server and expensive on Tier 0 SSD's

Microsoft's guidance on this is pretty clear last I checked; 32 gigabytes is the absolute minimum disk size for installing 64-bit versions of Windows server, and they wind up recommending a minimum of 80gb storage for most deployments, and their docs go on to state, you need to take into account the roles that will be installed, lifetime of the server and constant growth of the boot drive an additional 20gb per year due to updates. You do not need to install your C:\ drive on a SSD; there is no document recommending or stating that it is cost-effective and worth placing your boot disk on size limited high cost devices.

My recommendation would be that on servers you use the enterprise SSD devices for additional caching purposes or storing small files, such as SQL server tempdb, or your system paging file.

My personal "aha moment" came when I was talking to a policeman that I knew in a social setting. I mentioned an article that the local paper had published. In the article, the reporters described their experience of going around local police stations asking for information that the police were required to provide under state law. In a few cases, the reporters were given the information, but mostly the responses ranged from "no" to opening an investigation on the reporters.

To get to the point -- the response of the policeman, of whom I had no knowledge if he was personally involved in failing to provide the information, was to go from pleasant conversation to *very* frosty. Why? Once can speculate, but perhaps most likely is simply that he considered solidarity with his colleagues more important than the fact that the police were routinely breaking state law.

You are wrong by a factor of ten. Buses are standard products sold in competitive markets. Passenger trains are custom designed and sold to governments where cost is not an important consideration.

No. Because the highways ALREADY EXIST, and the buses displace cars, so no additional capacity is needed.

Even if you accept the lowest of the projected costs for California high speed rail project, the cost is over $500,000 PER SEAT. Show me a bus that costs that much.

I had some HP printer drivers that I couldn't get rid of on a Windows 7 machine, no matter what I did (well, I didn't boot into recovery console and delete the files that way, but that's dangerous territory), so yes, there are ill-behaved applications that can still leave their rotting remnants around the system.

Pointing out that a notable point has an intuitive representation is not the same as arguing that the unit of measure is intuitive, just to state the obvious.

I'll most certainly grant that having freezing at one end of the 0-100 spectrum is super-convenient, since knowing when it's freezing outside is actually of use to us and placing it at 0 makes a great deal of sense. In comparison, having it at 32 feels downright arbitrary. But what about the other end? Setting aside grade school, when was the last time that you actually checked the temperature of boiling water, rather than simply applying heat until you brought it to a boil? If you forgot that 100C corresponded to when water boiled, would it actually make any difference at all, or are the degrees beyond about 40C ones that you really don't need to know at all for everyday life? Which is to say, I was discussing the entirety of the 0-100 scale in each system and their relative benefits.

Consider the sorts of human-level descriptions we'd typically apply to ranges of temperatures. Terms like, "freezing", "cold", "chilly", "cool", "pleasant", "warm", and "hot" can each correspond to incrementing ranges of 10 in the Fahrenheit system: 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, respectively. But due to the lower level of granularity in Celsius (each Celsius degree is 9/5 the size of a Fahrenheit degree) and differences in points of origin for the units, we end up with more arbitrary cutoffs for those sorts of human-level descriptors. It may just be my ignorance due to having not grown up in and around Celsius, but how would you describe, say, the 20s? The 10s? To me, they seem to span too wide a range to fit neatly into a descriptor like the ones I used above, and any attempt at defining a range in which those sorts of descriptors would apply would necessarily involve picking seemingly arbitrary points.

Continuing, in Fahrenheit, we know that at the bottom of the scale is one extreme of what humans can reasonably endure, and at the other end is the other extreme. Granted, it wasn't designed that way, but it does roughly work out that way, and as such it's simple to make use of in daily life.

Again, I don't think that these sorts of niceties/minor benefits in favor of Fahrenheit outweigh the overall benefits that come with switching everything to metric, including temperature, but denying that any benefits at all exist is, as I said, a pet peeve of mine.

I remember in the transition between INI files and the registry (how I miss the days when applications had their own discrete text-based configuration files... oh wait, *nix still does!), and Microsoft sent out countless missives all but ordering developers to move to the registry. The registry was the approved place to store configurations, likely, I'm sure, because sticking all user settings in a single hive that could be passed around from workstation to workstation for roaming profiles.

Of course, the down side has always been that the registry just becomes cluttered with crap, particularly on a system that sees a lot of software installed, updated, reinstalled and uninstalled. Throw in there nearly two decades' worth of COM objects being incremented and decremented unsuccessfully, and a computer that's been running for five or six years, and fragmentation of the file system, and it can lead to just awful response times.

This means that a WinSxS folder that is 6GB costs around .90 Cents, and uses slightly more than 1 Percent of the drive.

I think you just don't understand what WinSxS is, how it works, and what the problem is that it is designed to address, suggest you start reading a bit more.

The reason the old Sxs assemblies need to be kept, is that installed software may require the usage of an old assembly.

Just because an update has superceded a certain library version, does not mean that all applications that still rely on it should be broken.

The SxS assembly backups have a vital role, and they don't actually use as much disk space as you think, due to hard linking --- Windows Explorer gives you an impression that more disk space is consumed by this folder than actually is.

The reason is... various installed files throughout the system will be hardlinked here, causing an appearance that a lot of space is in use here, but in reality --- these hard links are just a second Zero-usage copy of files that are installed elsewhere.

Only a couple gigabytes worth of files that have been updated and no longer have other hard links here, should actually be considered usage of the SxS system.

I guess I'll take "just-smart-enough-but-not-quite to not think deeply enough about the issues" over "can't even wade into the kiddy pool".

ok, ok, ok, let me try to help you out with this:
1) The definition of "criminal" is one who breaks the law.
2) There are so many laws on the books (and specifically, laws which are vague and/or reference other materials you have to comply with) that you most likely break a number of federal laws without knowing it.
3) Ergo, most people are criminals. Include, most likely, you and me.

I mean, jesus christ dude, I don't know how simpler I can make this: MLK was a criminal, but not someone you had to fear.

Sigh, how about you switch the name-tag on your boogeyman from "criminal" to "convicted felon of a violent crime"? That'll work a little better.

But seriously, if you're not even going to try to follow the conversation, everyone would appreciate it if you withheld your comments. You're not helping.

> If you were correct that every kilowatt-hour sold by a solar facility has to be "thrown away," or discharged into the ground, then you would also be correct that that's not a sustainable business model

Very good, let's start from the point where we agree. I think you'd also agree that if they are forced to give something that has a cost of production (evening energy) in exchange for any significant amount of worthless trash, that's not sustainable. In other words, it doesn't matter if it's ALL of the solar energy being thrown away, or some significant percentage. Any energy in excess of what's being sold is worthless, and being forced to pay for something that is worthless is stupid. Agreed? Please let me know if we're on the same point up until this point.

We can also probably agree that at noon, a solar installation can make a significant amount of power, say around 4kW.
We can also agree that most people aren't using 4kW at home from 11AM-2PM, when they aren't even at home, they're at work.
So the solar will be capturing significantly more energy than they are using during those hours. Agreed so far? Please let me know.

In fact, I'd say that at noon, with nobody home, they are probably using less than 1kW, while producing 4kW, so they are producing four times as much as they use. Sound about right?

So if most people's solar electric systems were capturing more energy than they are using at the time, that means the same is true in aggregate, correct?
Most people generating more than they use at noon means that the neighborhood is generating more than it uses at noon. That means that in total, solar would be generating more at noon than is being used at noon. Therefore, some of it needs to be thrown away at noon. Since the system generates 4kW while usage is less than 1 kW, that means that if one 25% of houses have solar, we'd being throwing away electricity, agreed? And the utilities would be forced to pay for electricity that they then have to pay to throw away.

on GoSolarCalifornia.ca.gov, the California Public Utilities Commission says:
      Most smaller electric customers have simple bidirectional meters-capable of spinning backwards to record energy flowing from their system ...
      the customer has to pay only for the net amount of electricity used from the utility over-and-above the amount of electricity generated by their solar system

That's a very important point. It's net METERING, not net billing. It's based on the net amount of electricity from a meter that spins backwards, NOT the net amount of dollars. If they produce 40 kWh (at noon) and use 40 kWh (at night), they are billed zero. You might want to re-read those two sentences explaining how the California system works, because that's important.

You said:
> If they are selling power at, say, a wholesale rate of $0.02 per kilowatt-hour, and buying power at a retail rate of $0.12 per kilowatt-hour

That would make sense, so that's why the utilities are asking for it to be done that way. That's not how it's done in California, though. As quoted from the California regulators, if your solar system produces 1 kW at noon and you use 1 kW at 6:00 PM, you pay zero.

If we've gotten to this point, we've agreed that if 25% of houses have solar, they will produce more energy than is being used, so some will be thrown away. The value of noon energy will be close to zero, or even negative since it costs money to run the heavier infrastructure to carry more power to a place that it can be safely burned off without running afoul of California's environmental controls. (Huge electrical arcs produce ozone, noise, and all kinds of other things that scare hippies).

So once 25% of people participate, the noon energy is practically worthless, but per Ca PUC, utilities have to trade it 1 for 1 for evening electricity, and it costs them money to generate and distribute electricity in the evening. Agreed?

Of course, RIGHT NOW, 25% of houses don't have solar. I've said repeatedly that it's not a significant problem right now, but would become a real problem if most houses were doing net metering.

Well, with a good pitch, you could probably send a baseball significantly further than the practical range of a pistol.... but that itself is impractical. And the impractical range of pistols is well beyond what you can reach with a baseball bat.

At one meter though, typical swinging range, no, that's fucking bullshit, a baseball bat is not going to be more deadly than a pistol. What the fuck are you smoking? Pistols are plenty deadly at one meter (and zero meters). Considering the time it takes to pull back and swing a bat, as opposed to pulling a trigger? Even considering the time it takes to draw a pistol? Ok, ok, if the guy has a baseball bat at the ready, and you literally have to unlock the case and load the pistol, then SURE, the bat wins. Unless the bat is wielded by batman himself, I'm going to have to bet on the pistol.

It DOES depend on the pistol. I mean, something that fires a .22BB is made for shooting galleries. You know, for kids. Meanwhile my crazy father-in-law loads his own .500 magnums. It's pretty ridiculous.

And then you have to consider the range of the athleticism of the bat-holder. Are we comparing Babe Ruth to my grandmother? How about my 2-year old nephew?

Which makes the debate about the deadliness of baseball bats vs pistols a bit of a clusterfuck. How about we go with an average person with a typical bat vs an average person with the most common pistol, at one meter, with both having to pick up their weapon from the ground in front of them. Does this highly specific use-case scenario make for a good test? DOUBLE MONEY ON THE PISTOL!

The government subsidizes it.

Not true at all. It is the government keeping Amtrak afloat. Support for Amtrak is surprising broad. Democrats support it because they like big government, and especially like trains. Republicans support it because service to sparsely populated red states would be the first thing cut if the subsidies were reduced.

It seems to me that they would have been developed even sooner if we had spent more on scientific research and less on rocket fuel. Instead of spending X dollars on Y to get Z as a side effect, why not spend a lot less than X dollars directly on Z?