You got that right. That physics lab was a real snooze...

Actually, I kind of enjoyed the physics and chemistry labs, where we got to put all the fancy math they'd been teaching us to use in predicting stuff and measuring things like the speed of light. Even though the experiments had been done for centuries, the matching of the math to the physical world still seems a wonder to me and made me greatly respect the thinkers of old who figured all this stuff out, then invented the math to prove they where right..

No need of one... Eventually the Sun will run short of fuel... Then you will see some SERIOUS global warming as the Earth will be within the burning part of the Sun...

Obvious != proven

Proven != Obvious

You are correct, they are totally different.

Yucca mountain is a no go for political reasons, not scientific ones, so what else can we do?

The really sad thing is that there still is a lot of useable fuel in all that if we here allowed to reprocess it. Not to mention that reprocessing would greatly reduce the size of the high level waste. Carter really messed up with that decision...

So, for now, it's store in place and guard the stuff. But this is only really a problem until it cools enough to not require being under water anymore. After that guarding it isn't that hard or expensive. It can be packaged in such a way that getting into it would take hours and industrial equipment. Guarding it just means walking by every day or so and making sure nobody is messing with the containers.

No, that's not a reason for using Red Hat. The reason to pay Red Hat is for support. Lets say you have an issue that your "expert" is unable to resolve. If you have Red Hat license, you put in a ticket with them and access the stable of engineers they keep employed to get you an answer. Chances are they have seen the issue before and many times have the developer who wrote the stuff in house. If you actually find a bug, they work that for you too because they have open relationships with the development teams for the things they use (and again may actually have the developers on staff).

You buy Red Hat for support, nothing more. If you don't want support, run CentOS, don't pay Red Hat, unless you absolutely need support.

You do realize that SE-Linux was not originally a Red Hat thing right? That little nightmare came from the NSA. But it is now firmly part of the Linux Kernel so you can blame the Kernel team for keeping it around. SE Linux has it's place though, when you need really enhanced security, which just doesn't include most people running this stuff at home or in corporate environments. High Security = pain to setup, so you get what you pay for.

Systemd is also not something that originated with Red Hat. But it seems to me that initd, upstart and systemd all have their own corner of the world and unique issues. Systemd's problems are more about trying to be too many things to too many people making it a complex system to set up. Not that initd was intuitive or that upstart didn't have it's issues too.

Which brings me to my last point. Like Red Hat except for these two things? Fix it. Making your own distribution is not that hard..

First, you are so not thinking "production", system management and security. You are obviously a newbie Linux user/developer who has never deployed anything where security was important.

NEVER, and I mean NEVER, use "root" to do anything, at least not directly, you apparently do. If you want "ifconfig" to work for you, put it in your PATH, if you want it to run for everybody, put it in the skeleton account or modify the necessary files at the system level. Some folks don't want this kind of stuff to show up for the "normal" user anyway, because what on earth do they need 'ifconfig' for anyway?

Red Hat has a long list of problems, but the stuff you are wining about are not on the list (except for systed complaint), unless the "short between the monitor and the keyboard" counts as a Red Hat problem. The systemd thing really shouldn't be an issue for you though. Once you get it working and the system boots as you want, don't mess with the thing and you won't have an issue with it anymore. Better yet, stick with the Red Hat tools to configure everything and you shouldn't have an issue configuring it either.

If you want "up to date" then Red Hat is NOT for you. Their claim to fame is that they are far enough behind the bleeding edge to be stable. Fedora is for people who need the latest stuff and have blood to spare when the patches go awry.

MS isn't alone.. Everybody has issues with patching... Except perhaps for Sun, but they went out of business, I mean got purchased by Oracle who discontinued them..

Your argument is "Nobody is stupid enough to sell something at a loss!"

Consider this. Lets say you are thinking that gold is going to rise, so you buy $10,000 worth. You figure that it's going to double, so you buy your gold and pay the dealer $1,000 (10%) to store it for you. You own $9,000 in gold, but you paid $10,000. You also know that the dealer collects 10% on the sale too, so your $9,000 in gold is only going to net you $8,100. You hold on to your gold, but the price doesn't double as you expect, but starts to fall. What do you do? Eventually you sell at a loss so you loose less money.

That's where the wind farm guys are. They where expecting higher electric rates though increased demand and higher generation costs for fossil fuels. Problem is, the rate increase has not yet materialized. So what can they do but sell the power they can for whatever the wholesale market will pay? You got to make the debt payments, you have to pay your maintenance costs, you have to take the cash, even if you are loosing money in the long haul so you can try and stay in business. So YES, they sell power at a loss, it is what they can get for it.

So your logic is faulty. Yes, they are selling at a loss. $0.024 KW/h is not enough to cover their costs, despite not having to pay for fuel. They need about $60 MW/h to turn a profit, which is about 3x the wholesale baseload rate.

Yes, I know it's absurd, but it's the argument you are making, not me. I'm saying that your position logically leads to that. I'm just cutting to the chase and bypassing all the sideline arguments (like your last post).

Look, you can put on the rose colored glasses if you want, but until it makes financial sense enough to get places like China and India to start using this stuff because it's cheaper than the CO2 emitting stuff you are trying to replace, it's USELESS. If they don't follow suit, all your efforts are only going to cripple you, your people and your economy and weaken our position in the world, and not have any effect on the issue you are trying to solve. The Chinese will just burn more of the fuels that you only succeeded in making cheaper for them. The ONLY way this works is if the renewables you are pushing become CHEAPER, actually CHEAPER, not including subsidies. Until then, blather on, it's pointless.

So Solar will never be cost effective. It's 4-5 times more expensive now. Wind is close, but it's still more expensive by 2 times. Geothermal is a limited resource, but it's still 1.5 times natural gas. There is ZERO chance that solar will knock off 3/4ths of their costs in the next decade. Wind is not going to get 1/2 of their costs cut either, being it's a more mature technology now. The engineer in me says "NOT GOING TO HAPPEN" at least not without a huge jump in technology. So far I am unaware of any technology advances that could possibly lead to such cost reductions. Oh I see all the prognostications of the "save the world" advocates, I just don't see any technology on the horizon that is going to allow their ideas come true.

So, Yes, the case you are advocating is stupid and absurd, when pushed to it's logical conclusions. Either that, or it's already doomed to fail and a stupid thing to advocate. Take you pick...

Everybody expected Electric prices to be going though the roof about now. Wind farm operators chief among them. There are a lot of unprofitable generators who are going out of business, mainly because of the huge reductions in fuel costs for Natural Gas due to fracking, but also because of the extremely slow economic recovery since 2008.

Once you have spent the money to build a windmill, your incremental costs (what it costs you TODAY to generate power) is pretty low, at least if the thing doesn't need maintenance. So you will sell your power at what ever price you can, TODAY even if it means you are not able to make enough to service your debt, maintain your equipment and turn a profit. It's a case of loosing all your money or loosing some of it. Sure, I'll take a fraction of what it costs to generate this power so I don't loose as much money, but electric rates better go up or my creditors are going to end up holding debt for an operation that cannot pay it back..

But, all this also ignores the fairly large subsidies for wind power, which is about the only thing that makes it even close to possible to break even. However, even then, they are loosing money operations even where the wind conditions are the most favorable.

Everything up to this last statement makes sense. If you don't control India and China though, it doesn't matter what the rest of us do. Think about it. IF CO2 is going to kill us then everybody (not just the industrialized countries) needs to participate in fixing the problem. But, you can bet that they won't unless they are forced. We can cripple our economies willingly to limit our CO2 production, but in the end it doesn't matter if everybody is not participating in CO2 reduction. If China continues to burn fossil fuels when we stop, and if alternatives are more expensive who will suffer? It won't be China.

Like I said before, think though the obvious results of what you are suggesting. Yes, we can reduce our CO2 emissions unilaterally, but it is the moral equivalent of disarming unilaterally. If somebody doesn't follow your example and disarm too, you just sealed your fate, just as if you decided to take your own life. Think about it...

There is also the problem that in order to sustain our current population, even marginally, we will simply have to use fossil fuels and continue to produce CO2. It cannot be avoided without subjecting the world's population to some serious problems staying fed. People WILL die, and most likely it will be the poor disadvantaged people who are hit hardest by the ever increasing food costs that your ideas about CO2 emissions reductions bring. Or are you willing to live with the results of CO2 emissions?

So, I"m just logically cutting to the chase here. Who do you want to eliminate from the world so humanity can survive? Your side's "reduce CO2 emissions!" battle cry really just hastens the deaths of the poor and disadvantaged who cannot afford to pay more than they do now.

You are talking different prices. You are discussing what they get paid, I'm talking about the TOTAL burdened cost which includes all costs (setup, transmission, maintenance, fuel, decommissioning) over a 30 year plant life.

The difference is how much money they are loosing on those wind farms.