"There's zero chance it can fail," said the young engineer.

Right, so it's just a matter of building a river, a dam, and a hydro plant next to my solar plant in the desert. That'll work. Some ideas have been tried like pumping water uphill, or molten salt for thermal storage, but are overly lossy. I'm a big fan of the idea of hydrogen-based energy storage (storing hydrogen as a palladium hydride is quite dense and safe), and that can work at small scale so individual home systems can use it, but again that's not yet practical, just another "looks great on paper" idea.

An abrupt 40% increase in power cost (totally do-able with solar thermal) would destroy the economy. It's a non-starter. Over 20 years, though, maybe. Of course, that's plenty of time for better solar panels to happen (today the good ones simply can't be made in the needed quantity, but technology marches on).

I don't share your religious beliefs, and object to your suggestion that they be imposed by force. Maybe you can persuade one of the governments that will actually matter though - China and India. China might be an easy sell there since imposing crazy economic ideas by force is the norm. Pushing down coal use in the US, though, that seems to have some popular support. Natural gas is so cheap, and vastly better in terms of genuine pollution.

Maybe it's you? I'm 45 and recruiters bother me more than ever. I keep my tech skills current, and carefully manage my career so as not to get stuck looking like an expert only on old things. Senior engineers are golden right now - I find it a great place to be. If what I do could be done by a kid anywhere, well, I'd be a terrible engineer after 20+ years.

True enough, but it doesn't matter. Other than during the dot-bust, it's never taken me long to get a series of interviews whenever I wanted/needed a new job. This is not a career where staying for a long time at any company is usually rewarded, this is a job where technical success stories on your resume from many years of companies are rewarded.

Any job that sounds fun like that will be exploitive and pay less. There's likely no worse corner of this industry than the large game companies. Find something to work on that puts your friends to sleep when you describe it, but people in the industry know is important.

Even in the west, the grid is woefully behind (Texas is doing the best, but it's not great). Our 3 big power grids have been running on capacity that was originally intended as redundant for years now, and we've about exhausted that. It's a real and serious problem that no one is fixing. With most state governments going broke, it's not going to catch the interest of voters as a priority until the worst happens. And since that level of infrastructure buildout takes 20 years, it will be bad for some time once it goes bad.

Large scale blackouts due to cascading failures that take hours or days to recover from is the next step. "Off the grid" won't be optional, unless we change our ways and build infrastructure, or people can generate their own, thus taking load off the grid. "Off the grid" solutions are already somewhat popular in places where electrical power is unreliable - which increasingly will be "most places".

I hope we never have to "political will" to impose some guy's idea of what's best on everyone else. It's too expensive and awkward to store power today. There's not really a good, cost-effective solution for using solar as base load generation. The panels that are cost-effective are too tied to rare materials to be more than a nice product. We could make solar thermal work if we had to, at industrial scale, but since we don't have to, we won't. However, with better energy storage and panel technology, it all becomes practical.

Solar power will happen on its own when it's cheap and practical, no dictatorial imposition required. And it seems like that's getting close, just a couple of breakthroughs away. But not today.

Yes, almost surely IBM won't alow AIX to run on those boards.
Linux can run on any old x86 cheapie - there's nothing useful to do with a Power 8 CPU running Linux:

- Are you able to learn something that can be applied to big-iron Enterprise IBM hardare ? No.
- Are you able to run any 3rd party commercial software on that Power8 Linux box ? No - most 3rd party Linux commercial software only provides x86 binaries. Sometimes ARM.
- Are you able to do the exactly same Linuxy things with a cheaper x86 machine ? Yes.

Yes, it's a new and exciting CPU, some hobyists will buy this - but for most of them, after a couple of months, the Tyan power 8 machine will remain unused or will be downgraded to a "seldom used server in the corner" as it's less usefull than a Raspberry Pi.

Peak energy usage in the home is highest when people are in the home. That's not contentious, right?

So rooftop solar panels on people's own roofs aren't going to generate power where and when it's needed. People buy them, however, because the directly see the savings as money in their pocket. Rooftop solar is growing in popularity. Building public infrastructure is falling in popularity, and as local governments go broke (especially in Cali) it just won't happen, except where cities see the same immediate money-in-pocket rewards. We're going to have an infrastructure crunch regardless of power generation method. And obviously, a pure solar generation strategy can't work today.

All of that gets vastly better with safe dense power storage. With that, home solar doesn't mean dumping power into the grid a 2, then pulling it back at 8- and people will buy it. With that, industrial solar power generation can become base load.

It that a more clear statement? Power storage (together with solar panels that are easier to make) will let mankind move to solar to meet our power needs for quite some time to come, perhaps long enough for fusion power to finally become real. But those are significant technical obstacles.

Latest Power workstation had Power 5 CPUs. The should make a new workstation.

No workstations => No small computer labs => Weak interest for the OS/Hardware from sudents & hobyists => Future decline of sales in servers.

Look at HP & all the other commercial Unix vendors - decline in server sales is almost directly related with workstation unavailability in the past ~5 years.

The Butler case is not exactly what you claim. First of all, the scientist in question called in the FBI in a panic because he couldn't account for 30 missing vials of plague vaccine and assumed they were stolen. The FBI found no evidence of a break in and then Butler officially signed a document stating that he was in error and he destroyed the vials himself and he claimed they were missing to cover it up. That got him arrested. Then he said that he doesn't know what happened, whether he destroyed the vials or not. He claims that the FBI pressured him into signing the document admitting he destroyed them and he was probably led to believe that if he signed it they would close the case when it fact it was used against him as "proof" that he caused an FBI investigation for nothing. Let's not kid ourselves here - this is not at all a case as you suggest where the FBI came fishing out of nowhere. Had Butler not contacted them to begin with in a panic, they would not have bothered him at all. He was probably tricked into "confessing" and not told he'd be prosecuted for doing so and that's a valid complaint against the FBI, but they certainly didn't come to him out of the blue and invent a reason for going after him.

Really? They now put severed heads back on?

It may be your favorite charity, but frankly speaking, if you are looking for organisations that are opposing ISIS, the Iranian Army is a closer call than the Red Cross.

Hah, turns out feminists are saying this nail polish actually promotes rape culture. From ThinkProgress: "Now, remembering to put on anti-rape nail polish and discretely slip a finger into each drink might be added to that ever-growing checklist - something that actually reinforces a pervasive rape culture in our society."

Bet you didn't see that coming. It's not merely everything a man ever does that promotes rape culture in this new world, you see, it's also every step a woman might take to reduce the likelihood of rape.

Solar doesn't really "peak during peak energy usage" for homes. Most people aren't even home during early afternoon on most days. Peak home use is in the evening (later in places where heating is the dominant energy use, but they tend to suck for solar anyhow).

Americans won't vote to build infrastructure, but they will buy it themselves if it gives advantage. A magic battery that could (safely!) store a day's home power would is necessary for solar to be practical. Also necessary: solar panels that don't require rare materials to build.

Solar is the only thing that will scale to eventual human energy needs. To get 11 billion humans consuming at current US rates, only solar works (unless the fusion pipedream somehow happens). But significant technical obstacles remain, starting IMO with viable home power storage.

< /some/file/somewgere grep something

Well ...
As long as you can push a SIM-App to that Phone's SIM card, that program can periodically send updates with the current location (Network ID, Cell ID, power) to another network-connected device without the owner ever knowing. It's invisible even to the phone OS, as everything happens inside the SIM and radio module)

And all newer SIM cards (all that have a SIM Application menu, 2001 or newer) can do this, and your network operator (or anyone having the proper network access) can push something OTA to your SIM. You will just see your phone losing it's mobile network for a couple of seconds and reconnecting - that was the SIM's CPU rebooting with the updated firmware.

Systemd's strenghts are:
- Fast startup & shutdown (compared to sysVinit);
- Better on-demand loading and stopping services and processes and changing network settings.

Compared with all the problem it brings:

- That is useful on a tablet or phone - where you never have to modify the factory configuration;
- A bit useful on a laptop - if you only use GUI tools that can do a limited ammount of config editing for you;
- Not very usefullon a desktop - unless you are prepared to get your hands dirty with systemD's smelly and poorly-documented guts;
- Useless on a server - where you only reboot 4 times a year or so and never have to hot-plug anything or change wireless networks.

For a server situation, the BSDrc style startup is even better than sysVinit.

As long as xterm & the web browser are running on Wayland, nobody will complain.
X.org has became such a mess itself (compared to the old XFree86) so anything smaller, simpler, faster and 100% compatible is welcome.

OTOH systemD is not smaller, simpler and 100% compatible with the systemV init and BSD rc - so it requires everybody relearning a lot of concepts for scratch just to gain 4-5 seconds at boot time - unsually on a server that you reboot only a couple of times a year.

If the AI already absorbed highly-rated YouTube knowledge on how do do basic stuff ... well ... i really don't waht a house robot with that knowledge:

https://www.youtube.com/user/H...