> 5% of the total energy use is still

The 5% neither of total energy, nor of use.

It's 5% of electricity generated within the state.
Most of the energy isn't electricity, and a large percentage of the electricity they use is generated in Arizona, where regulation has allowed new power plants that generate reliable electricity to be built.

In other words, it's really just how many new electric plants were built in California (only solar ones) as a percentage of the plants that California already had prior to them shutting down development and forcing any new plants capable of providing reliable electricity to be built across the state line in Arizona.

Given that the population of California has increased by 10% in the last 15 years, the fact that their electric capacity hasn't kept up, that they've become more dependent on power from Arizona, isn't actually a good thing.

I'll mention to the IT department that they could save $30 by buying a generic stick from a random Chinese guy rather than buying a popular product form the third-largest company in the world.

If you're a hobbiest playing around, seeing what you can do with your new toy, you might want to save that $30. If you're a business spending $100 / hour to employ someone to set it up and maintain it, that Chinese stick is much more expensive. It's much less expensive to get something well documented and supported by the world's third-largest company than to choose something with instructions that read "Push of button the power electric to on".

Also, the headline is wrong, to put it mildly. As they normally do, the solar-electric propagandists came up with that 5% number by doing math that makes no sense - using POWER USED for the numerator and ELECTRICITY GENERATED for the denominator. Most power isn't electricity, so the number is bogus. Also, California uses a lot more power (and electricity) than they generate, so it's double bogus.

I say the number is "wrong", but MOST solar-electric stories on Slashdot make the exact same "mistake". When someone making an argument consistently screws up the math in the same way, after the error has been pointed out the them many times, that could be called "lying".

The useful number is "how much of the power we use can be generated from ________?" In the case of solar-electric in California, it's less than 2%. That's good in the sense that it's about the correct amount to generate in terms of resources used vs power generated. More would wasteful and hurt people's standard of living. For example:
It would be silly to use the sun to heat water, in order to drive a turbine, in order to generate electricity, in order heat a coil, in order to heat water for your shower. If you want hot water for a shower and you have bright sun, just pipe the water for the shower through a large black pipe and heat it directly. That's much more efficient than the Rube Goldberg approach of adding turbines, generators, etc. to it. If you want hot water and have hot water, just use the hot water - it's wasteful to convert it into electricity and back again. Under that kind of analysis, solar electric SHOULD be about 2%. Other sources are better for most of the needs of most of the people in most places, for most of the year.

Microsoft does "me too". Apple did well with the ipod, Microsoft called up China and ordered a cheap copy. Nintendo and the other companies had good game consoles, Microsoft stuck their name on one, apparently without having much of a clue about the market they were entering. They then lose a billion dollars or so on each, stubbornly refusing to admit failure.

Google checks out the market, then releases something that's best-in-class, or often fairly unique, being the first major offering of it's type. They spend a ten or twenty million trying it out. If it only breaks even, they move on to the next idea. They don't keep at a losing strategy, losing a billion dollars on something. Instead, they move on to the next idea until they find which one will make them a billion dollars.

At the end of the day, that's the difference- Microsoft's big initiatives that they really push for years lose a billion dollars, Google's big projects that they really push make a billion dollars.

* Google tried "me too" once, with Google+. Fortunately for them, they can well afford one big error because they are winning big in a dozen other areas.

It's more convenient to plug in a dongle and be done than to plug in a dongle, connect a smartphone, and then hope your application works with the Chromecast. A real hdmi connection will outperform the Chromecast screencasting by a couple orders of magnitude. Since it's Chromebook-like hardware, it'll run Ubuntu or other Linux - the same OS running on everything from desktops and radios to super computers. Programs can be written in any language. It has full remote management capability (ssh etc.) so you can set it up and everything from your desktop, using the same methods you use to manage servers over a network, unlike a smartphone.

I have one use-case right away. We want to hang a monitor or TV on the wall as a kind of digital bulletin board that has constant updates. This device would be perfect. We COULD use a smartphone and a dongle, but just a dongle (no smartphone needed) makes it simpler, and running Linux on the dongle means it's more powerful and flexible- I can program it in Perl, C, Ruby, or PHP rather than being forced to write an Android app in Java.

The government web site doesn't work with any operating system. It doesn't work with any version of the #1 most popular desktop operating system, Windows. It doesn't work with IE, Spartan, Chrome, or Firefox. The government web site plain refuses to work. And by the way, it's a web form a friggin form tag. Many eight-year-olds can build that and make it work.

You equate that with the private company's HARDWARE which works just fine with the predominant operating system, and also works just fine with some versions of minor operating systems. It just has an issue on one version of an OS that few people use. I use OS X, so it might bug me, but that's quite different from "doesn't work at all, under any OS.

Based on the technical women I've worked with, I have to agree with one thing you said:

Women comprise over 50% of population and any ... that can tap that ... suddenly has a tremendous advantantage

Kidding, of course. Seriously, what you said is true not only of countries, but of COMPANIES. Companies who hire and promote people who do well have a tremendous, almost insurmountable advantage. A company who wasted half of their good people and good candidates would quickly be beat by the competition. Therefore, tremendous successful companies like Google MUST be promoting people who are both technically and with "people skills", employees who work well with others. If Google systematically ignored half the available talent, Apple or Microsoft would wipe the floor with them. They'd never had gotten this big because Yahoo would have had twice as many really good people. Therefore natural forces are such that companies that identify and nurture effective people (effective technically and as a team member) will grow and will win.

Based on the headline, you've decided the governor is stupid. Presumably, you'd vote against stupid politicians, or at least wouldn't vote for him.

The article expalins that the governor once accidentally sent a completely blank email from his Blackberry - he sat on the button or whatever. A guy whose only email was a blank'one sent accidentally is a guy who doesn't use email. Exactly as the governor said, after he was elected he quit using email, to avoid a Hilary situation. He's exactly right - sitting on your phone once doesn't suddenly turn you into someone who uses email for their work.

Yet, with no interest in the facts, you decided based on a clickbait HEADLINE whether or not you'd support the guy. Whatever headline you saw first decided your position, and you end up voting for dumb politicians. Fyi, there is a connection.

I CAN tell you why PHP 3.x and 4.x were used in a lot of projects with security problems. I've made many posts here going into detail. The biggest thing was probably autoglobals. That was insane for a WEB language, even one then intended to be easy. It might make sense for local macros (vbscript) that are supposed to be written by non-programmers.

If you combined few of PHP 4.x blind spots with stupid Plesk running the script via suexec, you either found out you quickly got owned, or more often got owned and didn't even know it.

PHP really sucked in terms of security and there were several very clear reasons for that. Some will say even old PHP could be used to write secure software. Nope, not with the default PHP.INI configuration. Even a blank, empty PHP script contained a significant security risk.

Things are MUCH improved. People who actually know something about language design have gotten involved. Rasmus has said publicly that he doesn't know anything about language design and early versions of PHP proved that. Of course, he wasn't originally creating a programming language, PHP was a CMS, written in Perl. It was ABused as a general purpose programming language, and it didn't do a good job in that role, because it wasn't designed for that role. The newer versions ARE designed as a general purpose web programming language, and they are much better suited to the task.

Let's have a look at molten salt. In order to be more than fair to molten salt proponents, let's take a salt company's marketing numbers and pretend they are actual numbers reliably achievable in the real world.

Torresol claims that in the summer, their molten-salt plant, Gemasolar, can provide power for 24 hours (barring any clouds or rain), so that's what "works just fine" as far as molten salt. They say they are hoping to get it up to 110 GWh/year., and it covers 185 hectares (0.7 square miles), and it cost $419M to build.

The US uses about 2,300,000 GWh/year of energy. Dividing by 110 GWh per power plant, we'd need about 21,000 plants the size of Gemasolar. That would cover 14,600 square miles and cost $9 trillion. That's more than the country spends on food in a decade, just to build it. That doesn't include distribution costs to get it from wherever you can find huge tracks of open, flat land to build the plant and off to the cities.

If you do all this, you've covered a 24-hour period in the summer. As long as you don't have a large weather pass over the country, you're fine. Large storm systems only come every three weeks or so, so your $9 trillion and 14,600 square miles of land does cover our energy needs for a couple of weeks.

> which has a handy graph showing 6 solar farms in desert areas that would work

From 1:00 PM to 3:00 PM, modulo Loster's utter BS. If we believe his silliness, than solar covers us for a few hours, on sunny days. How about the other 21-22 hours per day? I know, you'll just do pumped storage, right? Pump a bunch of water into reservoirs and use it to power hydro plants. Brilliant idea. How big do these reservoirs need to be? Well, see GP. No matter if you fill the reservoirs with rivers or with pumps, you still need a few billion gallons of water, all sitting 30 at least 30 meters above the turbines.

> Yes but we are talking about infants here, how do they even know that cars means speed and power?

Technically, we're not talking about infants, but rather toddlers and above - those able to say "car! To quote you, for example, "A kindergarten ..". My littlest doesn't yet pronounce any words, she's working hard on "no", but it comes out "nyam". She sees that cars are big a little bit scary. So yes, by the time they can say "car" and certainly by the time they can ride a bike ("a kindergarten") , tey know that cars are big and fast and powerful enough to carry the whole family around.

My baby, who again cannot yet speak, also knows that the cat is soft and fluffy and she likes to press her face into the cat's fur. Soft and fluffy is comfy, she wants to be close to that. Big, loud and fast is a bit scary. Surprise, she's a girl!

>. So why do I not see an article where it says that Houston and it Suburbs are 100% green over a 3 month period.

Houston doesn't happen to be located beneath a mountain range, where it would get a nice flow of water coming in during the rainy season. Houston also chooses to have affordable electricity available year round. Steady, affordable energy is directly related to all the jobs which Californians are moving to Houston for.

Houston also doesn't happen to have the volcanic fault line that Costa Rica uses for geothermal - less than 1% of locations on earth have that. California does have geothermal potential, the rest of the US does not.

You're spot on about the combination. The US has a couple of places suitable for geothermal, a couple for hydro, etc. If you do the research and the arithmetic, you find that renewables can make a significant impact - 11% to 13% of our total energy needs. That's significant. For the rest, we have the choice of natural gas and other petroleum, or nuclear. At least until we develop some Star Trek quantum generator.

You said "look at Hoover Dam". Okay, I'm looking. I see it's situated in a nice canyon, flooded 100 square miles, and provides less than 1/10,000th of our energy needs. If you go find another 10,000 nice deep canyons, we can flood 1,000,000 miles of land and be okay, until there's a drought.

Since we don't actually have 10,000 canyons, you end up needing to flood basically the entire area between the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians - I've done the math.

Costa Rica has a population of a few million - think Houston and it's suburbs. They have a couple of dams, which is great when they get heavy rains. Their experience might be interesting to one or two American cities (the ones nearest Niagara Falls, specifically) ; it's nothing like powering the entire United States.