By scattering I am thinking physically, as in how you would draw people who can't go personal solar if you were colouring these people on the grid then as opposed to how you would colour people still on the grid now. Now the grid would be pretty much a solid colour of those who are on the grid. But post off grid it would be the city center and some patches in industrial areas outside the city core. That is a whole lot of grid (not much smaller than today's) to be supported by far fewer customers.

I will make a prediction. Before 10 years some North American utility will attempt to create a law that all occupied houses must maintain a minimum connection to the grid. This minimum would of course come with a fairly steep minimum charge. They will really fear even a small group of upper middle class people just snipping the wires because the cost to actually produce the electricity to a house is fairly negligible compared to the overall cost of the entire grid. Thus the loss of even 5% of the customers could result in the utility approaching zero profits. The worst part is that these customer would typically be reliable bill payers, and above average consumers. This will scare the shit out of the utilities.

Absolutely. I am looking more at the graph of battery and solar performance combined with appliance efficiency. It won't be that many years before a typical bungalow could be roofed entirely with a fairly high efficiency pile of electrics and there will at least be a small surplus. The graph will then continue to favour off grid living.

But there will be a grey area where people will have to spend more on an off grid system than it is worth but will do it for a variety of reasons ranging from green thinking to screwing the utility companies.

But as those first few go off the system I suspect they will be fairly rich people who are then permanently off the grid. They will pave the way for better systems, bigger markets, larger volumes, and thus more people down the economic scale to also go off grid. This is a one way street unless the utilities suddenly figure out a way to deliver at a much lower cost (fusion, cheap high temperature super-conductors, etc)

So right now going off grid in an urban environment would be costly, a huge pain in the ass, and full of compromises. 10 years from now, probably something that people could take or leave. 20 years people will look at people still on the grid as a bit foolish; sort of like how people now with netflix look at people still with cable. The cable people still make up the majority but we consider them a bit stupid.

If they had even just put goggles on the characters then it might fool people who watch the whole thing. The characters' skin was a bit dead carp as well but the eyes were completely devoid of life like every game so far. Some day some genius will crack how to do eyes in a real time rendering but so far, no joy.

But on that note, I may very well have to buy a PS just to get this game.

If really good batteries were available a great option would be to use them as a buffer between the grid and the solar. This way a person would dump their solar into the batteries and generally use the batteries for day to day use. Then if and when the solar couldn't keep up with the demands the grid could be tapped to charge the batteries.

But as both solar and the batteries get better this would then become a natural migration to where people would go completely off grid and have some sort of crappy generator (that is cheap but possibly not efficient) to top them off on the occasion that they don't have enough.

Great batteries could even keep the utility relevant for a while by giving them a more reliable source that they could tap when they wanted to from people's homes.

So right now the utilities are having growing pains as this small but growing source of energy is introduced it is that moment that people actually start going off grid that they have a serious problem. As then they will have to risk raising rates that could drive people off the grid which... then the power company will be left with a scattering of customers who simply can't generate their own power using the space they have. This could be apartments, unlucky houses, hotels, and energy intensive industries. That would be a large grid to maintain for far fewer customers.

Personally I have found my local power company to act like total scumbags. While this will provide an extra sense of satisfaction when I go off grid it also will harm any "greater good" arguments they might try to make in the future to get subsidies to maintain the grid. Quite simply people won't buy the arguments and assume that they are trying to keep their obscene bonuses and monopoly returns that the shareholders demand.

It is only the fact that have been too busy to rip the radio out of my car. I have a screen/computer to put into it that will then play lectures, audio books, podcasts, etc. Also I have it ready to replace my dashcam with a series of cameras that not only can record but also upload via a dataplan if needed.

At no point in my buying did I even look for an FM or even AM option to add on. And certainly I never looked for a satellite radio technology (those things just piss me off in rentals).

To me even satellite radio is so 20th century. DAB is also just a bandaid to try to keep the radio station media companies relevant.

But the reality is that this isn't a technology issue. For the last portion of the 20th century a variety of media conglomerates bought up all the radio stations and turned them into MBA masturbatory dreams. All profit with no content. About the last time I listened to radio was just before a DJ that I know told me that his new format was to go into work, record all his blurps between songs in one long scripted 1.5 hour session including interviews, and then go home. The songs and his blurps were all run automatically by the computer.

The few things that come off NPR, BBC, or the CBC that I care about "Art of persuasion, quirks, this american life, etc" I download. But even the CBC is just on a march further and further to the PC left and I can't stomach having one great feature cut short so they can give massive amounts of time to someone with some extreme view on some stupid social issue and listen to them grind their axe endlessly.

So the best of radio on today is worse than silence. But my own playlist is awesome and the technology is sitting in a drawer so that I don't have to use my stupid FM transmitter to get crap off my iPhone.

So like my car not coming with an ashtray, I want my next car to not come with a radio, DAB or not.

First I want a toggle that I can never ever ever ever ever see that domain in my search results. So ask.com answers.com experts-exchange.com huffpo and especially Quora you fucking turd pile of shot Quora; I never want to see Quora again in my life.

When I want a little pizza joint or some place that hasn't hired an "SEO" guy all I get are page after page of directories derived from some government database or some crap like that. Their actual page is bottom ranked. I don't want review sites. I don't want anything that was assembled by a machine.

So a simple rule of thumb is de-list any page that offers to "upgrade" someone's listing. Full stop. Also I want a toggle that will remove listings that have any version of "upgrade to our pro service" Literally they could cure cancer but offer to cure it 1 minute faster for 99 cents and I don't want to see that page.

To me right now nearly the entire search results are like going to a dating site and only finding hookers. Some people would argue that they "need" to make money but they don't. There are lots of pages that exist for a specific reason and many of those pages are commercial, as in they offer a specific service such as a pizza places where the page is about their pizza place. Short of the recipes the page is 100% free. But I don't want some shit "Just Eat" website. Maybe they can link to the other page but I really don't want to see it ever again. For instance I loved allrecipes.com. But now it is just upgrade upgrade upgrade upgrade. Some will argue that they should be allowed to make money but quite simply the site existed before some MBA took over and "monetized" the site that's fine, I no longer want it to turn up in my search results. Don't ban it from the entire search engine, just ban it from the search engine when you tick the "No upgrade sites" option.

The other thing that I would kill for is a negative feature option. So any site that uses discus would vanish from my search results. Those scumbags need to burn in hell and I would love any search engine that sent them there.

To me there is a huge opportunity for some new search engine to do to Google what they did to all the others 17 years ago; completely make them irrelevant by brutally ignoring the wishes of the larger websites and completely focusing on the needs of the average user.

Seeing that they can use secret courts I would suspect that they will order Twitter employees to just hand the data or access over anyway. Then when they balk it can be handled in a secret court where nobody knows the results. Even better I could see a situation where they identify an employee or two and order them to hand the data over and not even allow them to tell twitter about the court order (if they can't tell some people then why can't these orders be restricted to their boss as well?)

Lastly they could just get an overqualified NSA employee to get a job there and just inject the needed back doors. Don't think of this as a lone hacker attack but a single guy who has a massive support team thus someone who could do off the scale things like swap out someone's desktop/laptop (spaghetti stains and all) with a compromised machine. Let the "cleaners" in so that they can wire their own fibreoptic cables right into the server room, swap out pretty much anything cisco with compromised machines with matching serial numbers, etc.

Also by moving the servers offshore it actually frees up the NSA to attack with even fewer legal restrictions. So full on sabotage may even be a perfectly valid procedure.

So short of eliminating all American employees and doing exhaustive background checks the only way to stop this stuff from being done to them is to convince legislators to curtail what the NSA can actually do.

I recently discovered that my old arcnet card has a vulnerability that allows me to hack the planet Mars. I plan on crashing it into the planet Vulcan. (Damn those pointy eared freaks).

I also plan on hacking the Atlantic Ocean and renaming it to the Great Eastern Ocean. This hack is so powerful that even paper maps will spontaneously change to reflect the update.

Check out how Valve assigns its bonuses and you will find that there is more than one monkey zoo out there. The key reasoning here was to eliminate the concept of professional managers. If there are people who are able to control paycheques then they are managers. While this company had a few managers it was more of a supreme court for resolving disputes than someone who said, sit here, do this, you're late. The basic idea was that the inmates ran the asylum and those who couldn't contribute to this or caused trouble were soon voted off the island.

A perfect example of this working was this one guy who used up his training budget becoming a "SCRUM Master" he then went around like some born again fool telling everyone how to do everything. His bonus about 2 months later was exactly zero and he basically rage quit.

One of the big problems with salary negotiations is that inevitably everyone knows everyone else's paycheque. So if you find out that the guy sitting beside you doing the same job is earning way more then you just look at your paycheque as a biweekly insult.

I worked for one company that paid its programmers a perfectly round number and everyone went up at the same time. But bonuses were far more complicated with a huge factor being voting among the employees. The company literally had a rule that if anyone discussed who they were voting for then it was an instant firing. This way the outstanding employees got massive bonuses.

What was interesting was that when some people came to the end of their interviews they would begin negotiating their salary after being repeatedly told that it was not negotiable. The ones who pushed this harder and harder tended to be douchebags and this pretty much always resulted in no job offer or a withdrawn offer. They genuinely seemed pissed.

One douche summed it up as "When I heard that everyone was earning X, I just had to earn X+1 so that I could prove I was better." This was even after he was told how the bonuses worked.

The cool benefit of bonuses was that it really weeded out the crappy programmers. Bonus time would come along. The results would be published and a few guys had literally zero votes and usually they were gone in a month or less. The only programmer ever fired for talking about bonuses went around with a sob story how he needed the bonus. Literally the next day he no longer worked for the company. This is the same company that didn't fire people after one threw a laptop through a window with the intent of hitting another worker. (they worked out their issues).

People blah blah about these companies not paying their fair share which depends upon your views on taxation. But the key word is fair. The real problem is that while these companies are able to pretty much magically avoid taxes in countries outside the US the potential competitors in countries like Germany, UK, France, Australia, etc are paying these taxes.

This pretty much makes it impossible for a homegrown company in any of these countries to compete. Nobody can compete with a company that is has all that extra tax free profit to use in acquisitions, research, marketing, or just making their product higher quality.

What baffles me is that nearly all the countries being screwed out of those taxes aren't even more angry that they are also potentially being screwed out of viable competitors. If a country such as the UK had the next Google or Apple it could literally change the face of that country's economy as companies of that size don't just hire lots of people and pay lots of taxes but also create a nexus of similar companies. You can't build a Silicon valley out of a few government IT contractors and a handful of Best Buy warehouses. On the otherhand you can build one based upon a Google or two.

To me this is a very simple tax problem. All they need to do is say if you make a profit in our country you pay the same taxes on that profit that a company in this country would pay. But the key is that the profit is calculated by estimated real costs, not the costs presented on paper. Thus Apple could no longer claim that each iPhone cost $699 to build and sell it for $700.

But the real win would be if these countries were able to mostly ignore R&D costs that happen outside their own boarders. If this was no longer easily deductible it would become an instant R&D win biasing in favour of their own country. The simple reality is that as the future comes closer and closer countries that train and use the brains in their countries will do well, while those that outsource their IP development will falter. This tax exploitation by these companies provides an opportunity for various western countries to swing the pendulum unfairly in their own favour as a punishment for past exploitation.

I have watched a bunch of Stanford lectures and they are a guy at the back of the class with a camera. I have taken a coursera course on finance, cryptograpy, astronomy, mathematical thinking, and gamification and they were all basically a good webcam with no camera operator.

The great courses company does seem to have some pretty good production where they have a camera man, and at least one animator. The lighting is pretty good and I suspect that there is lots of editing. But those might be some of the highest production quality courses out there. MathTutorDVD which is pretty good is a guy with a whiteboard.

I suspect that $100,000 is a BS number that comes either from extreme government waste or it is to generate funding that will allow for extreme government waste.

If I were a kid in around grade 9 I would presently be MOOCing until I turned blue. My goal would be to basically bypass High School. At this point what are the various certificates good for? I don't think that anyone yet really knows. But I suspect that they will be worth more and more and definitely will be worth more than most half assed high schools. I can certainly say without hesitation that I have seen some online courses MOOC, the great courses, plus others that blow my old HS teachers clean out of the water and certainly blow most of my daughters' teachers clean out of the water. (and yes many online things suck too)

But if a grade 9 student has 10 or 20 MIT / Stanford courses under their belt and does well on the SATs then what university can honestly reject that student?

Right now it is all a little hazy but I suspect that a point will be crossed where quite simply the high schools will begin to lose the best and the brightest. Not the majority just the cream. This will leave the high schools with the mediocre and the crap students. Then the pressure will be on the better of the mediocre students to follow online as well leaving a pretty poor lineup of students. This will then start to whittle away at the better teachers who just can't keep going without at least the occasional success in their class.

The percentage of students who will no longer attend highschool still won't amount to a huge number but what will remain of the high school system will be pretty depressingly bad. Plus I just know that the officials will dumb down the standards to keep up with the ever lowering bar. I foresee the first sign of my prediction coming true when the school systems try to put pressure on the universities to not accept students on MOOCs alone or to try to make it so that you can't write the SATs without being registered with a bricks and mortar high school.

But in the very long term when the various online educational systems have been somewhat perfected I do see a day when many people are faced with the choice (or option) to go to their local po-dunk collage or take course from something with a kickass name. I don't doubt that a major part of higher education happens outside of the classroom but the simple reality is that many people are questing for that piece of paper to further their job opportunities and have various obsicals in their way such as money. Online education won't wipe out the universities or anything so silly but it could see some of the lesser universities lose a serious chunk of their students.

Also I see a demographic who will simply say, "OK I will do year one online and then the other three getting the campus experience, OK I will do the last two years getting the campus experience, OK the last year will definitely be the campus year. Look I have a degree, I wish I had done at least one year on campus." But I also see another demographic much like the one that avoided high school not able to go to the kick ass named universities and not willing to slum it in their local school, and thus doing the online thing even more.

But that all said, I think that where it will be most interesting is that right now it is very very very hard to get into a top tier school. But what if you have been taking MOOCs from a top tier school and have been kicking ass and taking names. Does that qualify you for a top tier school more than someone with a top tier SAT?

Then employers are going to be a whole other thing. Which would they rather see, a top tier certificate or a local podunk degree?

Great engineering or science is art. If you look at the evolution of bridges they have become more and more beautiful as newer technologies have been developed and applied. Where bridges tend to be ugly is when the engineering is old school and workman like.

Also it tends to be the muddy thinking of the humanities that can drive horrible disasters of thinking. Things like trickle down economics had pretty much zero real math behind it. Plus many of the worst dictators in history had humanities and/or arts educations along with many of their worst henchmen. Things like the scientific method are critical to great political policy making, not law degrees where rhetoric and finding a misplaced comma in a written law lets your serial killer client skate on the charges.

Often when horrible things happen and science gets blamed it is actually an artistic interpretation of science at the source. Eugenics would be a perfect example of simpletons applying their interpretation of science.

A great example of this sort of crap would be how religious people are trying to drive intelligent design into the education system through a terrible interpretation of how science works.

I have zero problem with having someone with a hard core arts degree have some input on the building of a bridge in things like choosing he colours or picking from a group of equal designs, but I really really don't want them designing he whole thing and then having the engineers find a kludge that might keep it from falling down.

But where this guy really falls down along with many STEM pushing policy makers is that while it would be nice for the average school kid to have a better grasp of the physical world around them what is sorely lacking is a place for kids who can excel at science to thrive. A great example would be my daughter's high school. They have science requirements to graduate; fine. But in a 1,200 kid school there is no science fair this year; yet the school budgeted $50,000 for a football team that generates zero revenue.

What it boils down to are two things. Take all the art out of your life and see how you are living. Now take all the technology out of your life and see how that goes. One interesting factoid is that most people access their art through technology anyway and the art is often massively reliant upon technology for its generation.

STEM is not an either or with art. But art is largely a not without STEM. STEM is the difference between the third world and the first. I think that much of the anti STEM sentiment comes from those jealous that in most cases the arts alone leave you in the economic dust either as a person and especially as a country.

How the hell is it costing $100,000 per course? Most coursera courses are just some guy talking to a webcam or a fixed camera. Most of the stanford courses(many very good) are just a guy working a camera from the back of the class with the instructor miked up. So unless the check boxes on the quizzes cost $200 each something is fishy with this number.