From TFA:

I don't think they're trying to upload data through your phone without your knowledge, I believe the "cell phone charging" and "connects to the cell network" are unrelated, aside from the fact that both are supposedly powered via the solar panels.

According to the WSJ's coverage http://online.wsj.com/articles... ,

So although conventional wisdom might say that seeing positive things makes you happier, here there have been accusations to the contrary -- positive things about other people makes you feel lousy about yourself. This study ostensibly looked at that (and I think it found something along the lines of conventional wisdom: happy posts make you post happy stuff, a [dubious!] proxy for your own happines...).

If Facebook knew (and how would they?) that X makes you depressed, then yes...there might be some moral issues with that. But it seems that Facebook asked a legitimate question -- especially so given that it was published in PNAS.

That said, yeah...it feels a little shady. But then, when I log onto Facebook, I am certainly not expecting any aspect of the website to be designed with my best interests in mind!

Obviously, if you're concerned about privacy, you should avoid apps which require location, etc., information. However, it would be neat if you could get PrivOS to spoof things like location (and possibly calls, contact lists, etc.).

Location information could still be very useful for apps that need it, if you have a sane spoofing policy (either manual or automatic). If you, say, travel to another city for a week, you could have the OS spoof a single location in that city for the duration of the trip. The privacy implications of, "Bob is in San Francisco" are somewhat different than, "Bob is at 14th and Valencia."

Of course, I didn't RTFA, so I have no idea if something like this is implemented/in the works/impossible...

But surely users are allowed to be put in an A/B test used for *commercial/advertisement* purposes, right? Is doing something for academic purposes somehow worse than for business purposes? Personally, I would rather my online behavior be used for a purpose which nominally increases our knowledge than for a purpose which increases someone's bottom line.

That said, I do find this whole thing to be a little shady...but I'm not sure it's a particularly rational reaction, given that I rarely care about A/B testing when it's being used to shamelessly make money off of me...

I think that's a pretty low number, perhaps typical of older designs. Newer designs can have efficiencies upwards of 80%: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
http://people.duke.edu/~cy42/P...
http://www.colorado.edu/engine...

I believe nuclear tends to be quite bad at load following: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Of course, it is excellent for always-on power, but not ideal for surges or lulls. In certain cases -- L.A. in the summer, for instance -- solar power, although intermittent on the whole, is intermittent in the most useful way: on a nice clear hot day, there's the biggest demand for A/C and the best solar power production.

Well...staunch proponents with an ax to grind may not include such costs, but then, staunch proponents of coal with an ax to grind will ignore any externalities related to airborne toxins. Any legitimate study of renewable energy should really include storage costs.

With all that said, I really think Germany did the wrong thing with the whole anti-nuclear energy thing. To paraphrase that quote about democracy, nuclear is the most dangerous form of energy generation, except for all those other sources we've tried ( http://physics.kenyon.edu/peop... ).

> echo you need to use an escape sequence > \*
> cat \*
you need to use an escape sequence
> rm -i \*
rm: remove regular file ‘*’? y
> echo $SHELL
/usr/bin/zsh
>

It is neither physically nor mathematically impossible to power the world with solar power -- it's just financially difficult.

The amount of sunlight falling on the Earth per year is around 3,850,000 EJ and the amount of energy used by humans per year is around 600 EJ -- covering 0.05% of the Earth with solar panels that are less than 5% efficient would yield more than enough energy. The Sahara desert makes up almost 2% of the Earth's surface area, and solar panels can easily exceed 5%. (And surface area / distribution gets to be less of a problem if you add in parts of the US's southwest deserts, some of Australia, etc.)

Yes, storage and distribution are Big Problems, but there are ways of solving these problems (hydro storage, molten salt storage, electrolysis of water to hydrogen, etc.). Storage (or conversion to hydrogen, etc.) comes at a loss, but there is so much solar energy hitting our planet that, if properly managed, we could have enough juice to spare.

In the short term though, yes -- I completely agree that we need to ramp up nuclear energy use, and "prudent" use of fossil fuels seems sadly to be required, until we start investing serious money in alternative (or even conventional nuclear) energy.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

Nice to see some numbers =)

While I agree that capacity factor is important, there are some cases -- probably not so much in Germany -- where it sort of goes in the right direction. Take Los Angeles in the summer, for instance; on a clear day you'd get near peak production, and with all the A/C being used in the city, you'd also be getting near your peak usage. Clearly this is not the whole picture, but there are some cases where solar's output is sort of matched to power usage.

Yes, and in another movie from the 1970's, I seem to recall hyperdrives, lightsabers and a death star...

I'm not trying to make a political comment one way or the other, but implementing -- and the extent to which this actually is the case remains to be seen -- an idea from an older movie doesn't mean it's not innovative, from an engineering standpoint.

I think that's where others will disagree -- heating/cooling costs in the colder/hotter cities (in the US, at least) can be well into the hundreds of dollars per month. (And that doesn't include any environmental aspect, which it sounds like you don't care about either.) For some, a) saving money and b) running at a lower energy footprint is worth having an internet-connected thermostat.

Plus, there could be small advantages to it, as well -- driving back from the airport on a winter night, you could turn on the heat so it's nice and toasty when you get back. Sure, if this thing ends up being a security nightmare, I agree -- not worth it. But everyone's assuming this thing will be hacked instantly and cause nothing but trouble when, AFAIK, that's just speculation.

Seconded! I did a similar thing with a little ARM board, it was a really fun project.

I can control (on/off) household electronics via a keypad, Jabber/XMPP, shell-script, or SMS (via Google Voice's SMS email forwarding feature). Security measures are very weak (checking calling number/XMPP handle, etc. against authorized users), but hey...if someone really wants to turn on my lamp in the middle of the night, I'll just write something better =)

No, you pay for the privilege of in-flight wifi / "economy plus" / business / first class / any ticket that's not the cheapest. My way of purchasing tickets (grad student...) is to buy the cheapest ticket that gets me from A to B.

Clearly e-beam has some serious issues (throughput, to name one...), but progress is being made on that front. For instance, http://www.mapperlithography.c... ( http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/M... -- though it appears there's only a Dutch entry...).

...am glad I'm not a fish.

I think parent was merely pointing out that this seems like a legitimately cool product, as opposed to, "here's our existing product with a new name!"