That depends on where you live. In Massachusetts, the incentives are such that you can install a system where you pay nothing up front. You can get a loan and pay for it with the savings. Or solar companies will set up a lease and power purchase agreement where they install the system for free, and you are guaranteed to be cashflow positive for the life of the system. (Those lease agreements often eat up two-thirds of the would-be savings over twenty years, so watch out for them.)

For many people, the limit on the size of their solar array is the size of their roof. If you want to offset your full usage, you may need higher-capacity panels than the standard 250W base panels. There are a number of higher-efficiency panels available, but the cost per Watt is higher. They probably don't cost much more to manufacture, so the more efficient panels have a higher profit margin.

Also, you have to keep improving your technology or you're out of the business when the cheap panels get to be as efficient than what you're producing.

So the solution is that the professional reviewers at places like C|Net or ArsTechnica need to have a policy of redoing their testing on older models when newer models are released. If they find that the older model no longer performs as they originally reviewed it, then they need to loudly warn that the manufacturer is known for reducing the quality of the product without announcing a change.

These reviews are nice, but they always focus on gaming. There's very little information for media playback.

How well do each of these drivers do with accelerated playback of MPEG2, MPEG4, and other formats? If given a 1080i source, can they produce a real 1080i stream to the display, or will the alternating fields get reversed? (I have an older CRT HDTV that is 1080i native. With newer displays, it's good to have the option of letting the display handle deinterlacing.)

If I want to build a low-power media player, what are my options for video hardware and drivers?

What, a car story with no reference to Tesla?

Tesla has a pretty good system. If they were interested in marketing it for other cars, they could probably have another solid business. Of course, they probably want to keep it for themselves to keep their cars more exclusive.

Or worse--they could sell advertising on the road to help fund it.

One economic test would be to compare the price of installing the solar roadway with the cost of building a cover over the roadway with solar panels on it.

The should do the simple tests first.

They claim that the glass cover panels can hold up to traffic and provide sufficient traction. Why not mount just the glass covers over a stretch of road and see how it behaves? Until they get the covers right, the rest is irrelevant.

Once they have the ability to make a glass roadway, then they can deal with the question of what to put under it. How about just LEDs for traffic marking? Will they work in the day time? Will they put out too much light pollution?

Once they have the traffic markings working, they can get the heating elements needed for installing where it might snow. I'm under the impression that they have to melt the snow because the panels won't stand up to snow plows. Maybe it will make more sense to run pipes with heated antifreeze solution instead of direct electric heat. Maybe it will make more sense to redesign the glass covers to stand up to snow plows.

Once those are solved, putting in solar panels is a no-brainer that helps the economics of the project work.

In the end, once all the technical issues are solved, it's a matter of economics. What is the cost of a road made with the panels over 50 years as opposed to a traditional asphalt or concrete road when all the maintenance is factored in for each road type?

Considering all the above, I'm convinced that it makes much more sense to put solar on rooftops.

It's simple. You use signed source code instead of signed binaries.

Then you use a compiler and linker that does some simple things like randomly ordering variables and functions in the executable and on the stack. That makes it impossible for an attacker to know where some key variable is and exploit it though an overflow (whether on the stack or elsewhere). The attacker is far more likely to crash your program than to exploit a bug, which is much easier to recover from.

Also, as pointed out elsewhere, while this may make debugging more complicated in some cases, it also makes it more likely that bugs where the compiler's choices matter will be found earlier in development, so you may not encounter them in the first place.

And in the case of a corporate IT department, you use the randomizing compiler to build the binary that you push out to your clients. It may be the same throughout your company, but it will be different from anything anyone outside would have access to, which is probably good enough.

Gentoo isn't about speed. It's about control and configurability.

All those packages with optional Gnome support? Turned on in every other distribution, but turned off for me.

Want to add patches to a package? Just put the patch file under /etc/portage/patches// and it gets included. I currently have 9 patches applied. I can upgrade the packages, and keep my patches as long as they continue to merge cleanly.

The whole concept assumes that there is no soul. An individual is simply what you get from a functioning brain. If you can create a duplicate of a functioning brain inside a functioning body with the nerves wired up correctly, then you have a person. You duplicated the individual (personality, emotions, memories, etc.) with a duplicate brain structure. If the body doesn't match the original body, you've essentially done a full-body transplant.

Yes, it's all science fiction for now, but there's no reason to assume that it always will be.

We're probably a lot closer to replacing our bodies with mechanical equivalents than we are to printing a complete person. The biggest challenge is the brain. If you replace everything surrounding the brain with prosthetics, then it may be much more practical to suspend the function of the brain for a long voyage than it would be for a whole body.

Or combine the ideas. Freeze a brain in a cyborg body. When you get a colony set up, print a uterus, implant frozen embryos, and then let the cyborg parent the first off-world generation.

You don't need to describe a human on the molecular level. For the most part, go with the organ level, and you're all set. Once we can print replacement organs, it's just a small step to putting it all together for a complete person. You'll need compatible DNA to match the cells that you're printing.

The only big deal is the brain, as you probably want to print a person with memory and skills, so you have to be able to scan a live person and then print a duplicate.

You don't really need to match the DNA to the brain structure. You also don't need to match the DNA to the body shape, though that's probably a good idea.

Yes, it is what the poll asked.

In a narrow definition, twm is not a desktop environment. But if you look at my system running it, it's hard to argue that it's not what defines the environment under which my desktop operates. Sure, it doesn't provide the features that have recently come to define the term "desktop environment." I don't want those features, which was the point of my post.

It's reasonable to expect any discourse to expand beyond the original question. This is especially true in a format such as Slashdot poll questions. To expect to not see answers that are related but marginally off-topic is just wrong. Such answers add value to the discussion, providing alternative viewpoints and answering the questions of people who are dealing with similar but slightly different issues.

And in this case, even with the strictest definition of "desktop environment," my answer was absolutely completely on-topic. The last options is "Other (list in comments)" which is what I chose. Whether you interpret my "other" as twm or as none is up to you, but either way it's exactly what the poll question asked.

I can accept that twm is ugly, but I really like how it works.

I can configure any mouse button to do whatever I want. The only icons I see are from windows that I have minimized. There's no always-present status bar or extra junk. (If I want a status bar, I'll find an application that provides one.)

A tiling window manager is too restrictive. I use overlapping windows all the time.

The source code for twm is very simple. I'm currently running with four different patches that I've written: dynamic config files, reprocessing the screen dimensions on xrandr events, avoid placing new windows partially off-screen, and allowing resize from hot keys.

My remaining complaints that I haven't patched yet are:
*) Proper handling of multiple screens with different dimensions
*) Using color icon images
*) Managing icons for applications that generate their own

I haven't seen twm consuming excessive CPU power. My current session has been running for over two months with less than a minute of CPU time consumed by the window manager.