Do you honestly expect us to believe you have any idea how electricity functions when you quote values of daily total energy transfer, and expect that has anything to do with instantaneous effects seen on the grid?

A solar power user's peak output is from 9am-3pm. By the time the utility's peak period hits, the solar users have already begun to dwindle in output, and many will be drawing off the grid. By the time the peak period ends, solar users aren't generating much at all, and will be pulling nearly all their power off the grid. That's completely ignoring the fact that you can have cloudy days where solar users do nothing. Installed solar capacity on the grid does not change the amount of peak capacity a utility must have available. Capital investment is a significant percentage of the cost of electricity, so the less you use installed capacity, the less you have to amortize the cost over, and the more expensive the energy it produces becomes.

Yes, the energy would need to be stored, which means a secondary storage system in your home. Batteries are expensive. If they weren't, utilities would be throwing them all over the place to absorb the power from base load plants and completely replace peak plants. Even if you're using gas turbines for base load, rotating machinery that never stops is much more reliable than rotating machinery that is frequently cycled.

Most of those plug-in cars are going to be driven to work, and off site for the entire useful duration of a home solar installation, unavailable to operate as that storage system.

They also have to bump up your power from 110/220V to residential transmission voltage, and then deal with the phase imbalance because you're only feeding single phase. They're also doing it in mid-day, when the motel is largely empty besides cleaning staff, and really has very little power consumption to speak of.

Of course we do. Stop making so much waste.

Of the fuel we use in reactors, roughly 3-4% is actually burned. Another few percent is transmuted into waste. There's still over 90% of perfectly good stuff left in the spent pellets. If we just use breeder reactors (which we've had since the dawn of the atomic age) and do nothing else, we're immediately looking at several times the amount of fuel burned, and thus several times less waste mass produced per unit energy.

Now of that waste mass, discounting the remaining U-238 that could be recycled as fuel, only a few percent is dangerous enough to need long term storage, and would still remain in any significant quantity after a few decades of decay. Only that few percent would have to be disposed of, either through geological storage, transmutation to something less hazardous, or discarding out of our gravity well. If the government needs to subsidize something, they can bring back their waste reprocessing subsidies that Carter banned, and Reagan never reinstated.

Does that mean if you don't have a facebook profile, you cannot get in?

Technically, Linux. It even says "ENCOM LINUX CONSOLE" in the top left corner, and there's random Python and C++ on the left side.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4585781&cid=45765969

Using pounds as a unit of mass is not sensible, as it is a scaled unit that must carry an arbitrary factor along with it if it is to be used in calculations.

And yet, no self respecting engineer would use the pound-mass measure, as it complicates any calculations in the system by requiring the addition of a unitless gravitational constant term.

This is a US based website. People in the US understand pounds of weight. They typically do not understand kilograms, and definitely do not understand slugs, of mass. Using pounds is the most sensible way to report it.

In reference to the Earth at that altitude, it weighs around 700lbs. Space is not a "weightless environment". You cannot make such statements without specifying first that you're operating off the local space station reference frame.

Pounds are a unit of weight, measured using a scale, not a balance. Slugs are a unit of mass. Pounds-mass is just retarded.

Actually, atmospheric drag will finish the job. The ISS needs to get regular boosts, around once per month, to maintain altitude. It uses around seven tons of propellant each year for orbit maintenance. Now granted, this pump will be considerably denser than the ISS as a whole, and thus would descend slower, but re-entry would occur in under a decade.

No it isn't. A pound is a unit of force only. Our archaic English unit system uses the slug as a unit of mass.

Either way, just anything other than those awful trackpads.

We get around that stuff by simply not having them. With no mutexes, you have no deadlocks, and the code is designed such that we don't care about race conditions. It's actually multi-process, rather than multi-threaded, due to a legacy holdover from older versions of QNX that didn't have a threading model. If one process gets to a data point before another process that edits it, we don't care, we'll just pick up the change in the next pass. If that data point changes twice before we get back to it, we don't care, as the transient nature meant the change wasn't important anyway. If the change was important, then we either run the process more frequently to catch those changes, or have a latching flag to indicate a change took place.