I find that most people nowadays already hibernate. Could be because I show people once that "you only need to reboot when you see a problem, otherwise look at this much faster way to shut down your machine which actually saves all your progress".

They never want to go back. And besides, the "faster boot time" on eight is absolutely marginal compared to 7, and slower than XP on comparable hardware once you count time until machine is usable rather than the artificial "time until you can sign in" that windows shills pass as a benchmark.

There are phones with resistive screens for people like you. Those work fine with any object that can exert pressure on the screen, gloves or not.

You just have to look out for one.

Full disclosure: I still use an old Nokia with resistive screen myself, one of the reasons being that I like being able to use it outside in winter without having my fingers freeze from taking off gloves and without having to use special gloves with capacitive coating on fingertips. Other being that like most older Nokias, it's a fucking tank that still work well, about 5 years after purchase date.

Except that laptops are hibernated, not shut down in most usage scenarios.

But well shilled.

How nice.

Except that right now, this very second, net metering policies mean that average non-solar customers are seeing their bills increase.

I'm now convinced that you're "electricity comes from the socket" kind of a person, that genuinely neither appreciates, nor is willing to listen to people that ensure that electricity does in fact come from the socket when needed.

After all, if it works now, why wouldn't it work in the future? Who cares if this new technology is utterly incompatible with what we have? They managed to make it work so far, so surely, they'll keep making it work, no matter how much the strain increases.

And of course, my payment for their services should not increase. They are making due with the current one, surely they'll do with it in the future.

No. They use extremely complex algorithms developed specifically for the task of predicting spikes based on detailed historic usage.

Back in the day before this, they used to do this by hand. Back then, it was indeed something of a cross of engineering skill, technology and black magic with tarot cards.

That's one of the main reasons why blackouts were far more common back in the day.

In the end, you seem to assume that "well, it seems they're doing okay so far, so everything is fine". That is exactly what a person driving on worn out tyres says. Until the next time it rains and he hydroplanes into the nearest tree.

Of course. Just like when fusion power starts hitting the market, French companies will be throwing fat stacks buying them up.

You'll be shocked even more when you understand that you don't. Companies pay yearly license to microsoft largely regardless of upgrade status.

Because the older plants are not designed for this, and such a design adds significant level of complexity to the system.

Older plants essentially use the same path for both flow directions, which provides significant cost savings in building and maintenance and is completely sufficient for what they were designed for - selling night time produced electricity during the day.

Right, because as you claimed in another part of this thread, "wind power generation is reduced at peak times to compensate" when your ridiculous claims were hit by hard numbers and you tried to deny them. So there's no need for "instant direction change" mechanisms like batteries and supercapacitors to back up wind and solar, and all that research into it is just ignorant and misplaced.

In case you already "forgot":
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

It was yet another hilarious example of your utter ignorance of the subject.

They do actually. For all those things. That's why there are so few shorts that take out more than a single circuit in first world countries, and why in many cases, if car hits a major transmission line and severs it, they can usually reroute power through another route very quickly.

I'm addressing your points. There's no "strawman" here. You are making l those points, and I'm pointing out flaws in YOUR points. Not in some random invented ones.

1. As in relation to solar power, as of writing this, none that I know of that would provide the necessary cushioning.

2. You still ignore the fact that grid is essentially a single circuit, which means that AC that isn't perfectly in sync with on/off cycle across the neighbourhood (random switching you talk about) isn't going to stress it much. It's the "all at once" that does, like solar power. Similar switching on of the AC across working spaces for example, is typically preplanned by grid maintenance people based on historic references. Yes, you actually need to plan ahead on those things, and not planning ahead causes brown and even blackouts.

3. As pointed, the problem comes from the fact that solar in concentrated in certain wealthy neighbourhoods, which are experiencing massively increased stress due to net metering. At the same time, those who don't use solar are effectively paying for extra hardware and manpower needed to keep that particular circuit and its connection to transit network stable it in most cases.

They are not "your elected representatives". They are "representatives of the elite pre-selected for you to choose from".

There is a huge difference.

I strongly suspect it kills quite a bit more than that mainly because of mercury bio-accumulation in sea life and prevalence of basic coal power plants in developing countries.

But these problems are avoidable through high tech coal plants like the newer ones that manage burning process carefully and filter exhaust extensively. CO2 emissions on the other hand are an unavoidable part of coal burning, and in the long run, they will be a major problem.

But it's highly unlikely we're going to have wars over coal any time soon. Last I read, Europe alone has enough coal to last it at least two to three hundred years. And Europe has been aggressively mining coal and survived two world wars where coal was of paramount importance as fuel for power plants and heating needed for metal refining. And one has to remember that "real cost" of almost anything is usually more than financial cost, and typically very difficult to accurately measure.

You once again completely fail to account for a fact that conditioner on-off cycle is temperature based. People running the grids have their own thermostats in the area and supply more power to the grid which is determined to be in the area automatically when most people have theirs turn on.

You also completely fail to account for the fact that it's much easier to compensate for one way flow than two way flow.