And, in my opinion, that's largely because of the Centrally Controlled Media in the United States. And if you think "Main Stream Media" doesn't include Faux[sp?] News, you're also a victim of this control.

... to the masses of sarcastic "I though Open Source was more secure!" crowd: in an Open Source forum, when vulnerabilities are found, they are patched. Since it's a public forum, the vulnerabilities are disclosed, and patches / updates made available. The poor, sorry state of the first cut gets rapidly and openly improved.

With closed source, the vulnerabilities merely stay hidden and undisclosed, and you have no ability to know about it, or fix it yourself. the poor, sorry state of the first cut never improves. Yes, there are some cultures that take security seriously. You have no way of knowing.

This, right here, is what "more secure" looks like: public notification of the vulnerabilities and patches to distribute.

I haven't worn a watch in well over a decade. Why should I start wearing one now?

I guess you haven't set up recent Linux distros? Using Fedora, I can have a workstation up and running, fully updated in 30 minutes. Compare with Windows with the update/reboot/install for a day. At the very least, let's talk about the current state of Linux, and not its state as of 2001, OK?

Happy MetroPCS customer here. Seriously, they rock. Coverage isn't fabulous but isn't bad either.

With today's 4-8 TB drives, it's easy to keep billions of of files on a single disk, so you could potentially keep data for many thousands of customers on a single disk. But if you do that, you quickly run into an entirely new type of constraint: IOPS.

The dirty secret of the HD industry is that while disks have become far bigger, they haven't really become any faster. 7200 RPM is still par for the course for a "high performance" desktop or NAS drive, and you can only queue up about 150 requests per second at 7200 RPM. Simple physics takes over.

Spinning disks are already a non-starter for many scenarios, and this is a trend that will only accelerate as HDDs basically become the modern equivalent of tape backup.

Have you considered starting a company around the OSS Project? It's typical for a project in your position to spawn a commercial support entity to satisfy support needs, the $$ for which is also used to develop/support the project.

Sadly, there just aren't enough places with lakes to store anything like the amount of power we'd need to store. You also have to deal with transmission loss between the solar site and the point of use. There was this proposal a while back to use massive, carved granite/stone blocks to store power but it doesn't seem to have achieved much mention beyond its initial proposal.

Never mind highway 505...

Up until about the year 2000, I ran a small hardware shop for customers. Gradually, it became clear to me that the value of computers isn't in the hardware, it's in the software and data that they hold.

In response, I reinvented myself and co-developed a company that hosts data for (now) hundreds of clients and tens of thousands of users. Comparing the total hardware value of all our servers to our annual revenue puts hardware expenses (roughly) in petty cash. Servers host a *lot* of data, it's the data and the software used to manage the data that's valuable.

I've had issues with the last several routers, so I recently bought the very first, 100% OSS router. My thinking is that if it's open source, it's probably high quality code, and it's more likely to get updated than proprietary firmware, where they are cash incentivized to just have you buy the new router rather than fix old bugs.

As far as hardware goes, it's mid-range router hardware, N300 Wifi with respectable antennas and a ho hum 100 Mbit hardware switch. The UI was a little odd, more complex and far more options than your typical Wifi router interface.

However, in the month or so that I've had it, it's been the least problematic Wifi I've had in a few years. I live in a densely populated area with quite a few other hotspots in sight, and I haven't noticed any issues where restarting the router made a difference.

I haven't had the chance yet to hack it, but even as just a router, this is a winner. Also, support products that are consumer friendly like this one. It's not even more expensive! (Currently just $52)

So my company presents at trade shows. Trade shows often have Internet service available at ridiculous prices, and frequently, performance is horrible. Often, rather than pay that ridiculous price, we have a laptop set up with the same configuration as our servers, and run with a recent backup copied onto the laptop. This lets us demonstrate our products with a "sandbox" - same as we use for development - without having to bother with the on site Internet.

Our mobile "server" is set up to wildcard DNS to a locally hosted copy of our website. Other vendors, of course, see our hot spot and figure they can use it to get Internet service on somebody else's dime. When they find that all they can get to is our website and product, it's typical for them to get upset - more than once we've been accused of hacking!

Now, set up the hot spot with an SSID like "NoInternetHere" as a way of discouraging trouble.

Raise your hand if you honestly think that Mickey Mouse as a trademark will enter the public domain in 2023. ....

Me neither.

The ability to network is a skill I've spent a significant amount of time to become adept at.

Nice to see *informed* input!

I would argue that the problem is the flat rate pricing of $/KWH. A KWH produced at 1 AM has far less value than one produced at 7:00 PM. Why are we charging them the same? Much of the issue you mention would largely vanish if electricity prices were negotiated more frequently. EG: hourly or 15 minute increments. If there really is a surplus of power between 10:00-2:00, as you state, then the price during that time of day would be low to accommodate. This would create an incentive to input power when there's matching demand, and let the utility company profit off the difference.

Yes, it's a significant cost to upgrade the power grid and contracts to work this way, but when has it been bad to connect buyers to sellers in a way that reflects an accurate use of resources?

For example, I read a study a while back that pointing solar panels West of due South resulted in a much better match between electricity use and demand