Wiring LEDS in series for use with a household voltage makes sense, (as long as you can precisely batch-match the LEDs.) Then you don't have to step down the voltage as much so you can use less expensive and failure-prone electronics and achieve higher efficiency.

That said, given the progress of increasing LED efficiency, it might not be such a bad thing if the early models didn't last so long, because they last so long that by the time they are replaced, they may have burned off more electricity relative to an earlier replacement than the cost of that replacement.

The connotation of "Dashboard" is that it may give you a trendline, but not necessarily be able to pull up trendlines for arbitrary time intervals.

There are of course dashboards that do so, but it is reasonable to argue that those are really dashboard/reporting hybrids.

It sounds like TFA is referring to a dashboard that is fully featured in that department. Few are, even these days.

In any case, if the product doesn't make autodefinition of intervals and side-by-side comparisons as easy for managers as pulling up two PDFs side-by-side from their email or (if they are old school) printouts, then there's a deficiency compared to the traditional reporting solution, despite any advantages in other areas. And, if a dashboard-oriented product cannot present a nice list of autopopulated intervals, then either you need to go the report route, or instead of making reports you'll find yourself logging in every morning to manually create those intervals for the front row.

Also depending on the nature of the data, reports can sometimes be used as supporting documents in legal/business procedings, and so must be presentable in a the form of a document.

Finally when your data gets large enough to become cumersom. the report model starts to make sense in that it schedules DB resources.

Not the only one (nor is systemd entirely desktop driven). Before systemd ate it, DBUS gave us the session bus, and many applications would only ever use the session bus, and could not be used without a login (usually X) session, even if they really didn't need it. In many cases one had to at least recompile and sometimes even hack the source to change it to use the system bus (or disable DBUS support entirely.)

Then there are the various attempts to unify configuration across large suites of applications, which usually devolved into a system that was XML or some such crap just on principle and hence tedious to manage from the CLI/text editor -- but the authors of those didn't care as log as they had a control-panel workalike GUI.

And there were lots of individual groupware oriented network services that seemed to think they had to be intrinsically tied to a desktop login to work.

As to TFA, I doubt there will be a convergence onto a single "thin" distro, since so many levels exists allready ranging from OpenWRT/busyboxish systems all the way up to "server" editions that are really quite bloated.

Yeah, well, outside of a corporate IT despotism there is nearly no such thing as a "consumer space" at all. You can usually convince management to kick off everything that simply won't do WPA enterprise to get rid of the hassle of AAA web portals, but excluding Androids is not going to happen, so you fire up wpa-enterprise and let the chips fall where they may and try not to worry that all the Androids can get themselves phished. So it's been a more than just a "pain" but an actual security threat to millions of educational sector users. For several years.

There is actually a sort of sad irony/schadenfreude to be had here, if I could just get myself to stop chronically sobbing in a quivering ball in the corner about the general state of IT security.

The biggest conceptual mistake people make about encryption is that it is only for protecting read access. It's also for protecting against write access. Specifically to your live sessions, so that you don't merrily think you are talking to your bank when you're actually talking to a thief.

From my perspective as a WiFi network administrator, for years you've been accepting any old certificate for WPA-Enterprise PEAP authentication and not allowing the users to configure certificate the subject_match option that have been available in the underlying wpa-supplicant software all this time. Nor is there any process for oboarding for using local PKIs for WPA-Enterprise. You don't even lock in the first encountered cert until the wifi profile is deleted as apple does. Despite persistently repeated independently filed starred bug reports about it. So I find that a bit hard to swallow.

A) Waves are from wind, not the moon.
B) Even with tidal energy you have no sense of proportion as to the scale of the energies involved.
C) The effect would have been opposite what you state.

The moon will slingshot away as is, were we to draw enough energy (impossible), this would keep it, but it would also slow the earth's rotation so then our days would be a month long and we'd be toast.

That fact won't stop the people who want to spew uninformed rhetoric, sadly.

There are a number of math problems here. First AC (Alternating Current not Air Conditioner :-) watts are not DC watts. They are DC
watts over (the square root of two.) So when converting from a DC value like BTU/hr you need to factor that in. Assuming a power
factor of 1, the actual equivalent DC watts of the air conditioner is about 2.5K (8500ish BTU), and will actually be less because the power factor will
be less than 1 for the type of motors used in an air conditioner.

Secondly Heat != electricity unless you are using a resistive device. You don't compare them kWH to kWH, there's a
COP involved though usually a SEER is used when talking HVAC. This COP will be well over 1, as you can move way more than 1kWH of heat with 1kWH of electricity; often several times more, but it depends on the temperatures involved. If you have a heat ballast like a ground source loop attached to a heat pump that boosts the COP dramatically.

The solar water heating vendors spent decades charging "what the market would bear" instead of competitively expanding/economizing. At this rate a heat pump and a solar panel may economically pass them up before they can.

Not so much. There are location-specific seasonal variations but it is more predictable and has a more reliable baseline.

Both wave and off-shore wind suffer greatly from the transmission problem, but with off-shore wind, they get to use technology that has already been developed because it also works on land. Wave doesn't get that leg up, and still has to deal with transmission expenses.

There are some actual advatantages to the "large HAWT" design and also some amount of technological lock-in in the market. Actually that's an illustrative example to those expecting wave power to bootstrap faster than it is.

Anyway the primary advantage to large turbines are the higher the altitude of the blade at the top, the stronger and more consistent the winds are up there.

Wave energy is actually known as one of the less intermittent renewable resources. There is seasonal variation, but at certain sites there are pretty much always waves and it can be used as a baseline power source. The only things more reliable are tidal and geothermal.

Doesn't actually have to be based on the mooring. Damper mechanisms may be deployed to reduce wave shock. Dampers dissipate energy. They are essentially generators that do something useless with the resulting energy, like convert it to heat. Which is why the MIT kids evaluated regenerative shocks for cars and nobody that knew their ass from their elbow accused them of trying to make a perpetual motion machine.