Your four-sentence comment has five glaring errors that make it obvious that you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about. You very much remind me of the job applicant who told me he has experience in C, C+, and C++.

That would be:
Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow ... the fix will be obvious to someone.

      Eric S Raymond

Although ESR called it " Linus' Law", it's ESR's writing, from CATB. Linus has a completely different concept that he calls "Linus' Law". Linus talks about motivations for what we do.

> (and to the GP, you threw away that 100/mo TV subscription, that is only $1200 - where does the 5k come from?)

Starbucks. Making a pot of coffee at home instead of buying Starbucks is another $1,200 / year. The point is ditch the stuff, LIKE THE $100 / MONTH TV, that is less important than a comfortable retirement.

Just be sure to hide the money you're saving by giving up the deluxe cable package and the Starbucks. In a few years, you'll have enough money to pay your bills for 25 years of retirement. At that point, there will be millions of people who spent their money on crap screaming "he's a greedy millionaire! Tax that away from him and give it to me, because I don't have squat!"

Money invested grows. First, the money you put in grows, then the growth grows.
Then that "free" money you got from growth itself grows some more money.
This is the magic of compounding. With average returns, $500 per month for 32 years will grow to $1 million.

> Sun + focusing device + black metal + thermoelectric = cheap electricity.

With a four foot diameter focusing lens, you could almost power an iPod.
With a lens a mile across, you could power a house. Of course the lens would cost $XX million. Rather than "cheap electricity", this would be "outrageously expensive electricity".

> Why not use this in place of expensive solar panels?

Indeed, why not. The idea has a lot in common with typical c-Si solar panels: extremely expensive, and provides power for several hours per day, but only on sunny days. I bet you can get the government to give you half a billion dollars to start thinking about maybe someday producing them.

> of course you conveniently ignored that manufacturers do not even want a liability with an upper bound at the sale price.

Of course they WANT no liability. They WANT Jessica Biel, wearing nothing but whipped cream, too. Neither of those is reality, so I don't know how that's relevant.

Yrs, under current law in India, anyone providing any products or services to a can be held liable. Anyone includesanyone who sells them batteries for their smoke detector. If something scary were to happen, the lawyers may well sue everyone and see what sticks. It's clear you don't run a business. The most worrisome thing isn't that you actually screw up and ARE liable. Most if the cost is that someone sues you and you have to spend millions s prove that you aren't liable, then hope that the jury doesn't decide "someone needs to pay".

> no company is ready to undertake that including the risk even at twice market rates, this is a serious argument against it being ridiculously easy to not cause accident, right?

Twice market rates would be $200 ($120 profit). Is is smart to risk $200 million in order to make $120? No.

And, they do need to buy batteries from somewhere, and right now it would be stupid for anyone to sell batteries to them.

The article you linked to isn't as clear as it should be, but it does indicate the problem with the law in India. If I manufacture AA batteries, or example, and I sell $300 of batteries that end up at a nuclear power station, I'd be liable for $300,000,000 in case of an accident. Why would anyone take on a $300,000,000 liability to make a $300 sale? It would be kind of dumb to provide any of the odds and ends needed for a nuclear reactor in India, until their law is "tweaked". Suppose you have the contract to mow the grass at the power station. That contract pays $100 / week. If one of your guys bumps into the wrong thing with the mower, you're liable for a nuclear accident. It's not worth it, so nobody would take the lawn contract at a an Indian power plant.

We're talking about two different things. You're talking about what IS happening. My comment was about what CAN happen, what's POSSIBLE by the laws of physics.

If 10 million windmills magically appeared tomorrow, that wouldn't provide for most of our energy needs, because most of the time, the wind isn't blowing at the right speed.

Similarly, there is a certain amount of water in the rivers. Those rivers start at a certain altitude. The weight of the water multiplied by the distance it falls is the potential energy. To capture the energy in the water, you have to build dams. To capture more energy, you build bigger dams, holding bigger reservoirs (more tons of water). In order to have enough energy to meet our needs, the reservoirs would need to cover 1/3rd of the United States. It simply isn't possible.

I'm not saying it's unlikely, or that it's not politically viable, I'm talking about what's physically possible. The physics is such that there are two/three sources that have enough energy. Nuclear can, mathematically, provide enough. Old fashioned fossil fuels DO provide the majority. Clean fossil (natural gas and clean coal) can, at least for awhile. Wind cannot. It doesn't matter how many windmills you have, because at the moment it's not windy out.

Fukushima was nasty. It killed about two people. Hydroelectric killed 160,000 when Banqiao failed. When the original Niagra Falls dam failed, it wiped out a couple of towns. I don't know the inflation-adjusted cost off hand, but it wasn't minor. Coal mining accidents have killed thousands. There's liability risk for any workable option. For some reason , the safest option (by several orders of magnitude) is the one the government wants billions in liability reserve for.

Have you ever heard of a hydroelectric operator being required to deposit billions of dollars in case they have an accident? No, which is interesting since hydro has FAR more accidents.

In the last two years, natural gas has provided cheap, stable power. That's not why for decades new nuclear plants weren't built. The problem with nuclear is political, and yes those political hurdles create costs, but when the federal government IGNORES nuclear paperwork for years at a time, that's not that nuclear isn't competitive, that's the federal government choosing not to do its job.

Wind power is good. It does not compete with nuclear. Wind provides clean, safe power about half the time, and no power half the time. Wind allows you to throttle down your nuclear, gas, or coal plant sometimes. It doesn't replace the stable, reliable power supply of nuclear or older technologies. In the best case, solar is the same - it provides power for several hours per day. The other 18 hours, you can choose nuclear, natural gas, or coal. Unfortunately, solar now has a lot of worst case, since it's the industry chosen as a front for graft and corruption at the moment.

It doesn't matter how regulated nuclear is, or the capital required. The physics is such that it's one of two options that can provide the majority of our power. Unless you plan to flood 1/3rd of the United States, hydro can't do it. Unless the sun starts shining at night, and there are no more cloudy days, solar can't do it. These things aren't politically bad, they are physically incapable of providing more than 4%-6% of the need.

"No, removing power from the democracy ..."
Did you just call the US federal government "the democracy"? Wow. Just wow. Obama's pen would like to have a word with you.

At the local level, I can vote for certain laws in my city. So locally, we have some democracy. There is a reason that the Constitution says all powers other than those listed powers specifically delegated to the federal government are reserved to the states and the people.

You're right, only fossil fuels or nuclear have the capacity to provide the majority of our energy needs. Nuclear is historically the safest energy source as well - hydro has had quite a few disasters, for example. ALSO, we should acknowledge that the greenies have a good idea - use wind power when the wind happens to be blowing at the proper speed. If you happen to live on a fault line, geothermal is pretty good. For the 80% of of our energy needs that can't met by "alternatives" sources, we can choose nuclear or fossil fuels. That doesn't mean we should be anti-hydro, we should acknowledge that hydro is great. We just don't have any more 200 mile stretches of wilderness to flood, so we can't increase our hydro by much .

(I put solar in a separate category because the 95% of the solar industry that are scammers give the 5% who are honest a bad name.)

Solar / wind / geo / hydro INSTEAD OF nuclear is a "people who can't do arithmetic" thing. Together, they can reasonably provide about 20% of our energy needs. The founder of Greenpeace agrees - the other 80% can come from fossil fuels, or from nuclear. Those are the two options that can provide the majority of our power. We need power at night, we need power when the wind isn't blowing, and when it's blowing too strong and windmills have to be "turned off". If you'd like , I can point you to a paper that gives all the detailed facts in 10 pages.