The government is not writing checks out of the general fund to pay people to drill for oil.

So, the trillions of taxpayer dollars we've spent on wars to protect energy interests just don't count? The hundreds of thousands of lives that were spent in these wars, counting the civilian casualities?

You might have an answer to that question if you weren't one of the "people who don't really understand this stuff".

And you're worried about 30% of the cost of solar panels. You're a special kind of person, you are.

Is there any other mainstream technology that repeatedly makes outlandish claims, and just shrugs it off as if it never happen when those claims don't deliver, and yet gets massive taxpayer-sponsored support?

Coal, hydraulic fracturing, the pharmaceutical industry. The defense industry.

Shall I go on?

I think it is the government subsidy part that upsets so many.

But every single form of energy is subsidized by the government. So why are we singling out solar again?

Do you feel the same way about nuclear?

I totally get that POV. I even somewhat agree with it. Sometimes, it's better to just have a character die (or at most become so minor later on that his appearance is little more than a cameo, or a wink/nod to fans.)

It would have been way, way better if Daneel was reduced to some glorified scribe who wrote down history or something minor, and not this 'power-behind-the-throne' thing.

That said, I don't really detest the series that much... Asimov did manage to pull it off IMHO (barely, but still).

A couple of them? Cool, funny, etc.

Posting them non-stop while you dredge every corner of sci-fi? It's like being rick-rolled, geek-style (shit... now /. is going to post one of those, I just know it...)

Seriously guys, this is becoming irritating.

Wait, no... wrong details, and it's not a good parallel to use.

The dude in question was the lead network engineer for the City of San Francisco. Long story short, he had no standing policy to do what he did: he changed the supe passwords on all the city's core routers, locked everyone else out of the the things, then refused to tell anyone what the new password was.

I agree that he shouldn't have gone to jail over it, but TBH it was a dick move on his part.

Damnit! You weren't supposed to tell anyone about the second one yet!

(Just great... now we gotta build a third one so that no one... shit! Okay, a four- dammit!)

heh

Yep...

Besides, don't those idiots know that you can skip the middleman and just ask Daneel?

(just keep an eye on that ugly big-headed freshman over there...)

Now, let's be fair here. Big Media need all the help I can get. I mean, how many movies we think of as blockbusters never actually make a profit?

Is there any other technology, besides renewable energy, that makes certain Slashdot readers so darn mad? It's like they would prefer that it just didn't exist.

If you say Apple has 13% of the personal computer market, they're popping corks and doing the peepee dance. If you say a newer technology, solar energy, has reached 5%, while facing enormous geo-political resistance and the enmity of the most powerful corporations in the world, it actually pisses you off for some reason.

I'm curious. What is it about solar energy that spurs such surprising anger among this segment of Slashdot readers? What did solar energy do to you?

Andddd...we just veered into tin-foil hat territory.

I was hoping someone would challenge my assertion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So, wait - who exactly in the First World does not know what Microsoft is and does by now?

This one I can sort of agree with, though most of their efforts in this space have flopped spectacularly: MSNTV, Kin, PocketPC, Zune... I think the XBox was the only Microsoft product to date that hadn't crashed and burned insofar as consumer electronics are concerned.

More than that... in 2012, I had once estimated that they blew $7bn on the enterprise, and though they're raking in something like $200m/yr (IIRC) in profits now
(mostly from dev house licensing), they have yet to fill that titanic money hole they dug with the thing.

Agreed. if it weren't for Halo and the subsequent lock-in to that console, I suspect the XBox wouldn't have really gotten anywhere.

Consider that the XBox was still a massive money-sink for years on end, and I daresay that it has still not yet reached its overall ROI, let alone a profit. If it were built/sold by any company other than Microsoft (or similar behemoth-sized), the company would have gone broke years ago from it. They may eventually reach ROI and turn a profit, but I think that's still a couple of years off at best, and after that, I have no idea what kind of profit margin it would have.

My best guess is that Microsoft wanted to (and is still desperately trying to) make the XBox into a home media center, to the exclusion of everything else (DVRs, dedicated DVD/Blu-Ray players, etc). They may still latch on a cablecard/sat receiver, and maybe some tie-in to "The Internet of Things" (or whatever buzzphrase is being used nowadays), so that it becomes the brain of the "smart home"(ditto), so as to lock-in a potential market. But then, people being what they are, they stubbornly go out and buy tablets, 3rd-party home alarm/HVAC controllers, decide to use Dish instead of DirecTV or Comcast, run out and buy a Sling/AppleTV/Roku box, etc. I think it's that diversity (and the entrenchment of the players in it) which has kept them from making that final drive. This in the end may well turn the whole XBox thing into a permanent anchor on Microsoft's profit margins unless costs are cut somewhere... which makes me wonder why the shareholders haven't demanded that the console be made profitable or else.