What's dangerous about slippery soap is that it leads to falls in showers.

http://tech.slashdot.org/story...

I don't know what's going on in Germany now. Thirty years ago, according to a German I knew, you had to pay for the power you didn't use if you generated your own.

But bringing up spinning reserve and dispatch issues is helpful. The research paper from LBL that spawned the Cmputer world article has the title "Financial Impacts of Net-Metered PV on Utilities and Ratepayers: A Scoping Study of Two Prototypical U.S. Utilities". The key is "Net-Metered". In the two locations that I know about, customers are paid at least the same price per kilowatt-hour for energy that they provide as they pay for energy that they consume regardless of time. Since the cost of energy in electrical power girds changes over time, such pricing is not appropriate. Also as Luckyo points out, there is a cost for providing "spinning reserve" which is the capability of providing additional power on a fraction of a second's notice. Such reserve is necessary in order to have reliable power delivered to variable loads.

I am shocked/amazed/disappointed that there is so much talk about war, but no serious consideration of Europe trying to get through the winter without Russian gas. War is incomparably worse than burning your furniture to keep warm. If Europe can't begin to figure out how to get by without Russian gas, I, as a US citizen, don't want my country participating in any kind of military activity to support them.

Because it is a natural monopoly. Other natural monopolies, like roads, water, sewer, electric power and gas are either public (in my town) or are regulated monopolies. Internet access is a uniquely profitable unregulated natural monopoly. I recommend buying stock in the operators.

Isn't this the same con perpetrated by the lie detector industry?

Reading TFA, that chain of reasoning occurred to me too. While I share some of TFA author's prejudices, I am persuaded by the comments here from folks claiming to be in Israel. I prefer judgement based on facts to facts based on values.

Right?
More interesting might be least common multiple or greatest common divisor.

You are right.

I use simple text files. I like them more than paper notebooks because:
1. I can edit them from anywhere that I can use ssh
2. They are easy to search
3. They are easy to back up

The comments (including the parent) that suggest simple text files and editors have all been modded down to 0. I don't understand why.

Perhaps it would be better to accumulate orders without making them public for intervals of say a second or a minute. Then at the end of each interval execute buy and sell orders with overlapping prices.

If people let enough methane escape to change the climate, it would be a short term disaster and teaching opportunity. It seems better than releasing enough CO2 to get the same change in temperature, because with CO2 the the effect would last so much longer.

that you can see everything from anywhere?

When Randal Schwartz probed security at Intel, they made him a convicted felon. See http://www.lightlink.com/spacenka/fors/

Morals:

1. Finding security holes is dangerous

2. You should buy AMD CPUs

It's the physical stuff on which one conveys or stores information. My physical stuff is mostly in my house.

Physical Review is published by the APS http://www.aps.org/about/ which "is a non-profit membership organization". I feel much better about such publishers than I feel about Elsevier.