It's just as ridiculous to claim that a study on chickens means the same thing happens in humans....

Does it mean it's worth looking into in primates? Sure... But it's not time to break out in unified song that such stuff happens in humans and all this vaccination stuff is BAD BAD BAD...

By the Way "Chicken Pox" is in no way related to chickens... Nobody really knows why the word "chicken" is in the name to start with. It didn't come from chickens nor does it infect chickens.... Some theories say it's named after "chickpeas" or perhaps is some mixture of old English words that got morphed into "chicken", but there is no connection to the barnyard animal.

The availability of solar and say a coal fired plant are totally different numbers. Coal fired plants have reliability numbers for available output which is darned near one hundred percent of scheduled. Yes, there are failures from time to time, but the availability of a coal plant is really good and when they are making power, chances are it's going to be 100% of scheduled.

Photovoltaic solar, on the other hand, has variability approaching 50% of scheduled capacity ALL THE TIME. Lets say you have a forecasted 100MW solar capacity on line, you can only count on a fraction of that to be available and you need to have reserves to cover the variable fraction, even if you get what you forecasted. Wind is similar only it's worse, usually having about 35% (65% variable) capacity. It's hard to know where the sun will shine and how fast the wind will blow over the next 10 min, and you simply must as a grid operator KNOW how much power you are generating and how much you are using and they must balance or really bad things happen to the grid (think blackouts and equipment damage..)

So this reserve capacity needs to be up and spinning, ready for energy production when you put photovoltaic solar and wind into the mix. More reserve capacity than you would need w/o the renewables and their unreliable energy sources....

No, you just repeated the claim, but didn't say what the subsidies you think Oil companies get actually ARE.

I'm asking you to detail what they ARE if it's so clear they exist to you, tell me what they are... Enlighten me with the details of these subsidies you'd end....

BTW, I don't think any exist even though you and others make this claim all the time.... So tell me what they are, I'm waiting....

Got to love a joker like you..

Only if you think Chickens and Humans share enough commonality in our immune systems and the viruses that infect us will act the same in a human host as in a chicken.

Of course the anti-vaxxers are accustom to threading together some pretty sketchy evidence to create their "science" to start with, so why not let them have this.... Most of them are still on the "vaccinations cause autism" band wagon, which has about as much evidence as Neil Armstrong not having been to the moon.... Why should this little study be left out?

Where the Oral polio vaccine does sometimes cause polio, it hasn't yet caused a new more virulent strain of polio to appear. What they say is that sometimes the attenuated Polio virus mutates back into the non-attenuated version and can infect the recipient. The injectable version of the vaccine never causes Polio. This vaccine has been in nearly constant use since it came out in the late 60's, so I think that for Polio at least, the vaccine hasn't had this affect of creating a SUPER POLIO virus, but it's done an excellent job of nearly eliminating Polio for the planet. One year in the US in 1964, 5,000 people DIED from Polio and many more where harmed for life. Last year, there where zero cases of Polio in the whole western hemisphere.

Between the two types of vaccine, we have successfully eradicated one of the three types of polio virus (Type 2 I believe) and are nearly to the point where "in the wild" infections of polio world wide are getting close to single digits per year. (I believe it as something like 55 total infections, with a significant number being from the oral vaccine.) I'll have to go check the WHO's numbers to be sure though.

Again, We are going to have to disagree on this one. I believe that mortgage lenders where coerced into making loans they knew where likely going to be bad by federal fair housing standards and equal opportunity laws where they started looking at things like race and sex and deciding which lenders where in compliance and which ones where too discriminating. HUD was big into this kind of thing for decades. What do you think Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac where all about and why do you think they got left holding most of the bag?

I realize that it's pretty indirect, but the fact remains that it was government relaxation of mortgage standards and the government accepting the risk for the sub-prime loans that got this ball rolling. If you had left banks to their own devices, skipped on Fannie and Freddie, you can bet 2008 would never have happened...

You want to just blame the evil banks for everything..... They had a PART in this, but it was government that really messed this thing up, both by pushing the lenders into making loans that NOBODY in the right mind would buy, and then soaking up this bad paper by funding Fannie and Freddie to take on the risk for it almost without bound. There should have been laws about this, but that would have killed the sacred cow of "affordable housing" congress was trying to keep alive. It was the S&L thing on steroids, which ALSO was a failure of government regulation with the S&L's being encouraged to do bad things in the process....

I have the same - an old account for my videos and I have tried to avoid the Google+ account as much as possible, so it's just good that it disappears. One headache less.

Now if Facebook could disappear too.

I don't have any problem with the account verification though - it's just a variant of the 2-factor authentication so don't complain too much, it may prevent you from getting your account hijacked.

Grid storage? PFFFT..

Don't make me laugh. Batteries may be getting cheaper but It's not happening *anytime* soon with any kind of capacity that can really make a difference for photovoltaic solar and wind power even with batteries that are free. It's absolutely NOT cost effective because the conversion and storage losses are huge and it makes it way too expensive.... And don't be fooled by the "sunshine is free" so we don't care how much we waste argument. Despite how hard Elion Musk tries to market his little home battery pack thing, it's simply NOT cost effective to charge a battery and use the power later.

The only real way one can do electric storage on an industrial scale is to pump water up hill into a large reservoir, then use it coming back down hill to generate power when you want it back. However, this technique only has a few places where it will work where the geography is suitable and enough water is available. Even then, the efficiency is abysmal and it's only really viable cost wise when you can buy the power for about 1/3rd what you sell it for at peek. Batteries are worse at efficiency, especially on the industrial scales required for what you are suggesting.

On top of what the AC said, which are all valid points, QI also enables waterproof design. No one has yet (as far as I have seen) removed the plug, but you could do so. You could also leave the phone in a waterproof case if it is thin enough and charge it right through the case. It is really nice to charge my cell phone by just dropping it into a stand, no need to hunt for wires, no need to figure which way the plug needs to be plugged in, no need to worry about damaged connectors or cables, just drop it and charge.

I looked at my own monitor and... realized none of the 5 monitors in my home office have stands, because they are wall-mounted. Also, all of the monitors I have purchased in the last 2 years have been WQHD (2560x1440) resolution, not 1080p.

Putting a charger in the stand might be useful for a certain percentage of their customers, but it is hardly earth-shaking and revolutionary, particularly when such a device could just as easily be decoupled from the monitor completely as its own device, thus eliminating the need to have your whole monitor serviced if that one doo-dad malfunctions.

Integrating an unrelated component into the monitor is really quite useless. Better would have been to make the stand less obtrusive so a charger could easily fit below the monitor. Likewise, I don't really need a USB hub or network switch build into my monitor.

About the only usb functionality that would be useful would be a built-in KVM switch, with enough ports for keyboard, mouse/trackball, audio, web cam and a headset.

Now... if the charger also somehow wirelessly allowed your phone to interface to the screen... you'd have something, but we won't see bluetooth-like connectivity to displays for a probably five or six years down the road, at least.

I know likely you are making a joke, but I highly doubt you would ever feel any kind of tingle around a QI charger. I have one a foot from my pillow, and have never had any issue.

I have a smart meter and my provider has yet to offer me the option of automatically shedding load automatically based on my instantaneous use. But this idea is NOT new. I've seen devices on AC units and electric water heaters designed to cycle the unit off to shed load and that was over a decade ago. The provider controlled these devices via radio signals and gave you some credit or better rate for the ability to turn off your devices when they wanted.

My provider does offer an incentive for shedding load on peek days with advanced warning. They send me an E-mail about 24 hours before the event, asking me to reduce use during projected peek loads. They pay $0.60 per KWH for any reduced load I manage to provide. Turn up your AC, turn off your lights and don't cook indoors during those hours for savings. Seems effective to me, they get to shed load, don't have to pay peak rates for the power I don't use and I get a credit on my bill. I'm guessing this saves them about $0.60 per KWH even after paying me a credit, depending on the spot electric market cost during peak. However, this is not an automatic thing for them.

My point is that it's not really "smart meters" that allow this automatic shedding of load, but increased communications capacity that "smart meters" bring to the table. Smart Meters do allow for "time of use" billing which allows providers like mine to pass on the costs (or in this case the reduced costs) more directly and encourage conservation during more critical times.

So the soldier who no longer needs to go into battle is better off.

What about the civilians in the country you just invaded because politicians are no longer worried about getting blamed for dead soldiers?

The US already has a big problem with wars, almost all the costs are externalized.

From the Iraq war slightly less than 10,000 non-Iraqi coalition forces died.

But over 100,000 Iraqis died, perhaps over 500,000 or even 1,000,000 and their country is shattered.

These are costs that are barely registered in the US other than the fact that they create entities such as ISIS, and even they barely warrant notice except when they're threatening Americans.

If you're going to start a war you need some skin in the game, soldiers dying is a horrible tragedy but it that restrains the US from perpetrating far grander tragedies on a whim.

In the alternative universe where you have effective killbots they're now roaming the landscape over Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan. But they're also probably in Libya, Lebanon, Iran, and Gaza (Israel gets them too). It probably saves a few Americans (minor a handful from escalated terrorist attacks), but at the cost of many times that.

http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

I'd say he is actively ignorant, or blatantly lying. But I think quite possibly he is just a huge troll.