Dr. Peter Venkman: This city is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Mayor: What do you mean, "biblical"?
Dr Ray Stantz: What he means is Old Testament, Mr. Mayor, real wrath of God type stuff.
Dr. Peter Venkman: Exactly.
Dr Ray Stantz: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
Dr. Egon Spengler: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
Winston Zeddemore: The dead rising from the grave!
Dr. Peter Venkman: Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!

And... the Internet shall descend into Anarchy! With a capital Anarchy!

Naturally. They're waiting for some crisis that has all the news in a foaming slather, so they can quietly drop it into a Friday night Take out the Trash Day and hope the news organizations will ignore it.

Like, say, a shooting war between the US and Russia.

So this plus an Oculus Rift connected to a wearable computer == 3rd person POV for your own life?

As long as the batteries hold out, anyway. So, 20 seconds or so.

Some of those people walking around with their heads down having a social life through their phone do, in fact, fall further out on the autism spectrum than most people. The phone enables them to function significantly more than they otherwise would be able to.

I'm quite certain autism is over-diagnosed today, but there are plenty of genuine sufferers and the percentage of the population who is autistic only has to stay steady for the number of autistic people to rise. Population is still going up, albeit more slowly than it used to. If the phone lets them navigate society on their own, so much the better.

The GP sounds just like the last generation, yelling at their kids to "get off the phone, you're tying up the line!" Which obviously had no detrimental affect on the continuance of the species, or there wouldn't be this new generation to yell at.

It was a reference to this story where Italy put 7 people, including 6 scientists, in prison for manslaughter for failing to predict an earthquake. There is no law forcing scientists to predict earthquakes or volcanic eruptions in Japan, but there is in Italy.

It was covered here on Slashdot. Try to keep up.

But Tesla CAN'T sell cars in Iowa. There is no one from Tesla in Iowa who will take your money. So by definition Tesla test drives are not selling cars. There's guaranteed never to be a sale in Iowa.

Tesla's lawyer will no doubt dig up case law to that effect, but I don't see the need. It's black letter law. No Teslas are sold in Iowa, therefore Tesla's activities are not selling cars, therefore those activities are legal. Yes it's a loophole, but it's a legitimate loophole. You can promote whatever you like. It's just speech. Which is free. As long as no sale occurs in Iowa, the law isn't broken.

Oh, and the two quoted reasons? They're not a dealer and manufacturers can't sell cars.

They're not selling cars.

So who cares what some random bureaucrat thinks. The law doesn't say what the bureaucrat thinks it says. The law is quoted elsewhere in the thread. It does not forbid test drives. It's actually very simple language.

The Iowa Department of Transportation is not a judge. And they tend not to listen to their lawyers. We'll likely see what an actual judge thinks, before it's all over.

It covers the ongoing maintenance of those lines. Installation of those lines was paid for by a bond issue, many years ago, and I don't actually recall if servicing that debt was included in the infrastructure fee or rolled into the usage payment.

What are you on about? Test drives are not illegal. Selling cars without being a dealer in Iowa is illegal. Tesla wasn't holding a sales event. They were offering test drives.

Let me explain it to you in small words, since you seem to have difficulty with the concept.

You get in the car. You drive it around. You drive it back to where you got it. You get out of the car. You give the keys back to the company representative^W^W guy from the company. You walk away. You do not get to keep the car.

See, was that so hard?

I know of no part of the US market that requires that. At worst (for the power company), the law requires paying retail price. In many states, the law only requires paying the wholesale price. The utility is not required to pay the retail price to a homeowner in those states. And in quite a few states, there is no law requiring the utility to pay at all. Net metering does not exist and any excess power generated by a homeowner is a dead loss. The power company takes it without even a thank you.

The US is not the monolithic energy market you seem to believe. States vary, and requirements vary even within states, and there is no national law on the subject at all. Your belief about the mandated rates is flat out wrong. There is no such requirement.

It's not installing solar on their own property that's forbidden. It's installing sufficient solar and battery backup to power the house and then disconnecting from the grid that's forbidden.

Many parts of the country have what's called an occupancy permit. You may not live in a building that hasn't been issued that permit. The conditions for getting that permit are pretty simple, but they were written a little too specifically. For most of them, the building is required to have running water plumbed indoors, corresponding sewage plumbed out (and that sewer line must terminate in a septic tank, anaerobic digester, or sewage system, not an open holding pond), and finally, the building must be connected to the electrical grid. That's the way many of them are worded. They do not say "must have electrical power available". They specify the grid. So you can install all the solar panels and batteries you want, but if you disconnect from the grid, your occupancy permit can be revoked.

One hopes the various levels of government that have the excessively specific wording will fix it, but for the time being, it's a real thing, and a problem.

They were fine with allowing those subsidies to be passed when they knew no one would be using them. Now that solar cell production has radically ramped up and is finally enjoying actual economies of scale and people are actually using the subsidy, they're howling and crying to have it removed.

Because in the face of profit, policy dies.

Speak for yourself. My electric co-op charges me an explicit infrastructure charge, itemized separately from my usage-based power consumption bill. It's a flat rate. It's 50 cents per day. And before you fluff up and fume and fuss, that is a sustainable price. It has not changed in over a decade. It is also the correct price. It's a co-op. I'm a part owner. I attend the annual meetings when I can, and always read the financial statements they publish every year. I know every detail of the financial workings of the co-op. I can go to their home office and read the contracts, if it suits me. I'm an owner.

50 cents per meter per day is sufficient to keep an award-winning grid in good repair. And this is a rural grid too, with a relatively low density of meters per mile of wire. State law forbids co-ops to operate inside of incorporated city limits, one of the finer examples of crony capitalism to be found. Only the for-profit corporations are allowed to serve cities, with their much higher density of meters per mile of wire. So not only is my co-op sustainably servicing my house for 50 cents per day, they're doing it while lugging power across mostly empty rural counties. If they were allowed to serve all of the residents, that fee would go down, since the average number of meters per mile would go up.

No, the government does not need to take them over. The customers do. They simply won't be profitable anymore. Power will still be delivered, the lights will still stay on, average outage frequency and duration will go down (I have numbers to prove it), and fat cats will no longer get fatter at the expense of the poor and middle class. Oh what a crying shame.

No, it's not a free lunch. But it is lunch money.

And they're perfectly aware of it and are moving to solve it by investing in development of home battery storage. A story that was covered on Slashdot in 2013.

Yes it's a real problem. There's a known solution. Not a high tech solution, either. Battery storage on that scale is extremely well understood. Business has been using battery backup systems designed to serve whole buildings for decades. The buildings are called data centers. Practically every data center in the world has what you'd call "utility scale" battery backup, good for at least several minutes for the whole building, to give local generators time to spin up. Expanding the capacity enough to eliminate the generator part for a house and shrinking the size enough to reasonably install in a house is what the German initiative is all about, and that's just engineering. Something Germans are exceedingly good at.

It is an acknowledged problem with a solution that has been under development for nearly a year already. It will be solved, and solved fairly soon. It will be deployed over the course of the next several years, and at the end of that time, much if not most of that spinning reserve will be shut down. Possibly permanently. It's conceivable that within my lifetime, there will be no operating fossil fuel electrical generation plants in Germany at all. Germans will enjoy individual energy independence. Their personal generation + storage systems will pay for themselves, a personal capital investment outcome that is exceedingly unusual, and then go on generating literally free power for years after the investment is paid off.