Ok I am bad at html apparently, good luck - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
 
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Because most people's roommates don't speak mandarin,
 
link to explanation

Yeah 800w in that case is peak. If you're not home during the day and it's cloudy, that's still 200w going in to your batteries for use when you get home. If it's raining and you're home on a Saturday playing video games with the electric heater on at 9am, it's likely you're draining your batteries much faster than solar is feeding them. It really depends on your residential use scale. As a bachelor I don't have daytime power needs, but a stay at home mom or elderly retired may have a constraint drain.

Germany is cloudier than Seattle and yet they're the global leader in solar power. Go figure.
 
Have you looked at the price of Solar these days? In bulk it's down to less than $2/watt and that includes the inverter. You can install 800w of capacity for $1200 these days (plus batteries) so you're looking at $3000-4000 for 1KW professionally installed with lead acid battery backup. I pay about $1500-1800 a year for electricity in Texas and that would cover about 70% of my peak usage and would pay for itself after the third year. Solar is good for about 18-20 years and drops below 80% of it's nameplate rating after about 25 years. After year 5 you can just take your savings and roll it in to buying additional capacity/maintenance.

Anyone have a suggestion of a dropbox/owncloud replacement that is NOT written in PHP? PHP projects tend to be "babby's first project" and riddled with issues, security holes etc. Owncloud has been out for a few years but I'd like to avoid PHP if at all possible in the age of Ruby, Python, etc.

The motherboard is a one piece unit with soldered on eMMC, RAM, CPU etc, battery is glued in, etc. Basically you have a plastic clamshell around the display, and a plastic clamshell around the keyboard/motherboard, and battery glued to the clamshell.

They're drop shipped directly from the manufacturer to the school district. Same as how enterprise computer sales work. There is no big box "chromebooks for schools!" retail outlet that superintendents and CIOs drive to once a year with their SUV to stock up on the latest school technology, and then drive home with it to wrap it up in christmas paper.

Generally when I come across cursive I just look for the d, b, p, g, t, y, i and j's (the letters with limbs or dots) and then piece together the word from the visual pattern they create. I'm pretty sure that's how your brain parses printed text as well.

We were the last class in our elementary school to learn it... in 1989 or 1990. This was up in washington, we were still playing Reader Rabbit on an Apple II that the 2nd grade classes all shared. Outside of my Grandmother's letters I can't remember the last time I used cursive, reading or writing. The Constitution is some illegible form of cursive and my signature these days on credit card receipts is an "X" to save time.

The rocket motor on the Zvezda module has only fired twice, the second time happening 7 years after the first time. Resupply ships dock with the ISS and just before they leave, they boost the orbit until they have just enough fuel left to deorbit. Since the ISS' orbit degrades approx 1-2 km/month they boost it anywhere from 50-100km using resupply ships. The ATV has boosted the ISS numerous times.

What's it like, being a former Enron accountant

Space-procured Palladium and Platinum has the potential to make space-based mining possible. If you could put an asteroid in earth orbit containing a couple of tons of platinum group metals and extract them (that's the tricky part) you would own the global market for those materials.

That was true in 2004, however with redundant systems installed since then, the US portion is capable of running on it's own today.

It was designed with a 10 year service life, then re-rated for 20 years. Current plan is 2024 but after that is really stretching things and major modules need to be replaced due to stressed placed on them by boosting the orbit (the ISS is actually in the upper atmosphere and loses about 2km (1 mile) altitude per month due to atmospheric drag. It gets reboosted by Soyuz and Progress spacecraft periodically.
 
Yes you could keep it going indefintiely but eventually the safety factor drops below an acceptable point. Based on what's there right now, that safe point is 2024-2030.
 
A next generation space station could possibly exceed a 25 year design life, but really, 25 years is pretty damn good given this was the first try since Space Lab for the US. For the Russians this is old hat, their segment(s) are just repurposed MIR 2 parts.

It's not like we had hundreds of years of heritage in designing these things. We have yet to have a satellite collide with a human-populated space station. I'm sure we'll learn a lot about what to do/not not do with space stations in the years after that first event. Designing a space station module to survive multiple tens of thousands of MPH impacts with space debris, satellites, micrometeorites, etc for not just 10 years but 100 years is asking a bit much, don't you think?
 
We've only been building "semi-permanent" space station modules for 10-15 years. It's not like you can just ship 3 tons of bricks, some cement, mortar and trowels and tell the astronauts to build something "roughly airtight and space station-y looking" and hope for the best for 100+ years.