Private power companies don't work because they don't add value.

That is kind of a ridiculous statement. If nothing else they can add value simply by producing power cheaper than other companies, or provide power where public utilities will not.

There are private power companies in the U.S. you know... if they "do not work" how do they exist?

He may compel Hillary to take positions that will make it harder for her to win the general election.

That is really irrelevant since Hillary has already taken all possible positions - including no position.

There is literally nothing Hillary can say or do that will affect the election at this point.

Royalty has its privileges!

"We Need More Women in Computer Science".

"Well not THAT woman."

#YesThatWoman

Good. Now we've gone from "they're all scum" to "some of them (possibly including Rand Paul") are good and trying but the Repubican machine and its operators will block them."

At this point we're mostly on the same page.

Ron Paul is clearly one of those good guys. And the Neocons controlling the R party machine (one of the four major factions) steamrollered him and his supporters (sometimes violently), and changed the rules to make it even harder for a grass roots uprising to displace them.

Two debates are going on right now. One is between working through the R party (is it salvagable?) or coming in with a "third" party - either an existing one or a new one (is that doable or do the big two have too much of a lock?)

The other is whether Rand is a sellout to the Neocons or if he's just more savvy than his dad and trying to look non-threatening to them in order to get the nomination. Andrew Napolitano, who knows him personally, says he knows him to be a genuine liberty advocate, and I trust A. N. on this subject.

If nobody knows how it works, how did the guy invent it?

LOTS of stuff gets invented without the inventor knowing HOW it works, underlying physics wise. All that's necessary is to notice THAT it works, work out some details of "if you do this much of this you get that much of that", and engineer a practical gadget.

As they say, most fundamental discoveries don't go "Eureka!", they go "That's odd ..."

this gem ... hidden in the article:

"... whether it is possible for a spacecraft traveling at conventional speeds to achieve effective superluminal speed by contracting space in front of it and expanding space behind it. ..."

They've been playing at that for a while. It would allegedly work by creating a condition of cosmic expansion behind the craft and its converse in front of it, so the spacecraft is in a bubble where it's running slower than lightspeed (i.e. stopped) but the cosmic expansion and contraction regions behind and ahead of it each total to the opposite sides retreating or advancing faster than light (which is allowable).

I'm not holding my breath waiting for that to fall out of this - or anything. Effective superluminal translates to "Sending messaages into the past." and "Violating causality." if you pick your reference frames correctly. So I expect flies to appear in this ointment at some point: Like something broken about what happens at the sides, needing big-bang energy levels (and not being able to transfer them between the front and back so they're free), or not being able to set up the condition in front because the agency making it happen must involve actual superluminal signal propagation.

Nevertheless, an "electric motor" that works by pushing against virtual particle-antiparticle pairs (or the total mass of the matter in the universe, or of an inverse-square weighting-by-distance of it so it's mostly the local stuff, or dark matter, or the neutrino background, or whatever), instead of ejected exhaust, is just DANDY! Let's see if they can make it work for real at human-palpable, nontrivial, efficiencies and power levels.

The bet is not just on arbitrage, but that within 10 years you will install solar power of some kind, because this battery makes solar collection far more useful to most people.

That seems like a good bet, especially for someone who buys the battery... and you ignore the utility of whole house power backup/conditioning.

That helps someone with solar panels, but more exciting is that it helps everyone - just just people with their own energy sources.

These shift load on the system - they don't just make solar energy viable, they smooth out load on the power network, and make alternative energy sources that may not be reliable much more viable.

Not to mention suddenly everyone is much less dependent on reliable power, so it can eventually bring the possibility of reducing the extreme availably requirements of power - you could get a note saying power would be shut down ro an hour over the weekend, so they could do infrastructure changes.

At $3k it is a no-brainer to buy one of these.

In other words, your government is busy protecting the interests of your own country and considers the concerns that only benefit a foreign nation secondary?

Any chance that we could borrow them for a while? I wonder what it's like to have a government like that.

So if you want to protect something from your government, get your coworkers, your neighbors, your parents and every other "normal" person you might know to use it heavily.

Banning YouTube might not be easy. Normal people are using it.

The "what" is that the majority of those readers will end up on ebay. You're dealing with people who are SO deep in debt that you can't even see their hair tips anymore. Giving them something they can easily sell means that it's sold in "never removed from box, mint condition".

The real problem is the lack of social mobility. Poor people are lumped together in poor areas, have poorly funded and staffed schools where you may learn little more than what is necessary to serve your masters. Yes, every blue moon someone manages to claw his way out of it on his own... only to face the backlash of the whole "affirmative action" bullshit. Because after a wave of poorly trained people (due to poor education from understaffed, underfunded schools), everyone from the demographic will be seen as the "quota $disadvantaged_group" and treated accordingly. And self fulfilling prophecies are damn hard to beat.

People see what happens around them. They see how Mike from next door who has always been a really bright kid did some studying outside of school because he couldn't learn a thing in the overfilled classes and he wanted to "get big" and out of the ghetto, They see how he studied late at night and made projects in his spare time, how he took every stinkin' job to get through college somehow because his parents just could not support him at all, and how he now has some cheesy nondescript title that means jack and reports to Ron who has always been sharp as a sponge and twice as smart whose only redeeming feature and whose only justification to the job is that his parents were rich enough to buy him a degree from some more reputable college. The only thing Ron is really great at is taking credit for Mike's work, and since he's his subordinate nobody questions it. And of course Mike's chance to actually climb the ladder is nil because Ron of course knows that his position is dependent on keeping Mike, and keeping him down.

This in turn means that nobody wants to dream the American pipedream anymore. The whole "work hard, climb the ladder and you can be rich" bullshit, nobody believes it anymore! Yes, that did work a long while ago. It hasn't worked for quite a while now. The new American dream is winning the lottery. Or suing some rich guy who runs you over.

Solving this is a lot harder, of course. With the current system, a solution is near impossible. Europe's social structure is a lot more permeable due to a bigger role of public schools (that are pretty well funded, too). Admission to universities is tied to your academic success and progress rather than your parents' wallet, and tuition fees are very affordable (running in the three digits per semester, usually). That would maybe be a first step.

The noise you hear overhead is the sound a joke makes while traveling at high speed through a gaseous medium.