Walmart is putting panels on some stores that they say will provide 5%-10% of their power. So as you say, they aren't saving that,much money- skylights might well save more money. However, the money paying for the solar panels is mostly YOUR money, not theirs. They don't care so much about saving YOU money. The taxpayers pay most of the cost od building the solar panel factory, pay the company tax credits for running the factory, and pay Walmart credits for buying the panels. When you put $1 trillion of taxpayer money in to be spent based on politics rather than arithmetic, you end up with silly decisions.

Solar electric is also good PR, of course. The hot water in the Walmart bathroom sink could be 100% solar heated with $30 worth of black ABS pipe, but that wouldn't get them PR headlines.

If sales and buyback rates were based on time of day , noontime power would be priced low going both directions. Agreed, that alleviates a lot of the problem I described. By more accurately representing actual costs, it also makes solar much less attractive- you'd no longer be able to sell the company 1Kwh of cheap noon power and use that money to buy 1Kwh of more expensive evening power. You'd need 15Kw of noon solar to pay for 1Kw of evening power, because that's the actual production cost. That could work, we'd just need solar systems 80% less expensive in order for it to do a lot of good.

I don't actually assume that the peak solar is greater than the demand at that time, though I am talking about a scenario where solar produces significant power. "Enough to meet 100% of noon demand " is just the simplest, most obvious point on the graph. The problem exists for any amount of net metering. It's at the point if zero net cost to consumers that it becomes OBVIOUS that the power company would definitely go out of business immediately.

The power company spends quite a bit of it's revenue on customer service and on infrastructure. Someone has to handle the billing, collect late payments, hook up new connections, etc. They have to maintain lines, transformers, generators, etc. IT staff buils and maintain all of the big systems for billing, dispatch, etc as well as desktops. People are paid to handle payroll, HR, legal and regulatory, etc. So let's guess that 50% of the cost is actually generating the electricity itself and 50% is running the organization. That number might be wrong, but we're just talking about the concept. At the generating station, you have a set of $XX million generators that need to be paid for and maintained, whether they are in use that hour or not. Even if the generator is turned off for an hour, the people who loaned the $XX million still want the power company to make their payments on time. The staff at the power station still needs to be paid, inspections still need to be done and certifications renewed. So figure at least 30% of the costs at the power station itself continue even if no power is sold from one of the generators for a couple of hours. In total, we can say that maybe 40% of the cost is fuel, and 60% is everything else. The exact numbers don't matter.

So let's say solar covers 50% of the power needs at noon. That reduces the company's FUEL cost by 50%, but most of their costs are unaffected- they still have to pay their IT guy the same amount. Actually, they have to hire another IT gal to build and manage the net metering system. Their total costs for the hour drop by 20% due to reduced fuel usage, while their revenue drops by half.

That bears repeating - if solar provides 50% of the power, their revenue drops by 50% while their costs drop by only 20%. Where do you think that 30% is going to be made up? They could fire all of the customer service staff (and go,outbof business when the phones go unanswered) or increase rates by 30%. Something major would have to change.

"the company scaling up to build ... they claim"

For fifty years people have been claiming their company is just about to start making some magical new energy stuff. My uncle claims he's Napoleon. Call me when it happens. Fyi, if it costs $20,000 to make something, and the government (taxpayers) pays $15,000 of that through subsidies, that's still a cost of $20,000. We all can't subsidize ourselves for thousands of dollars per month.

I said most of the power is in a four-hour period. Your numbers match that, you just pointed your panels into the afternoon sun. You'd get more power, earlier in the day, by pointing them more upward. You might prefer less power later. Of course what time that is also shifts by an hour based on daylight savings time.

You can (and probably do) also buy a system that is incapable of converting all of the peak power. In that case, your power generation will flatline not because the amount of sunlight remained steady, but because your system was incapable of converting. all of the brightest sun - you get only got 3PM power out of 1:00PM light, even though the 1:00PM light was much brighter.

That's a heck of an idea. Many places already have smart meters, or will soon.
It could certainly work like you said- noontime power would be very inexpensive if a lot of people had solar. Of course, that means the economics of buying solar panels would change significantly since the buyback would reflect actual costs. You'd choose between buying your noon electricity cheaply from the power company (from your neighbors, indirectly) or selling noon power at a low rate. Solar electric systems would probably have to get a lot less expensive before it would make sense for many people to buy them.

Using a piece of black pipe to heat most of your water for free - that already makes sense for many people.
It annoys me that most of the talk about solar energy ignores the inexpensive, effective type (solar heating) and focuses on the expensive, impractical type (solar electric) .

Electric companies don't like being forced to pay far above their normal cost for something they have to throw away by shunting it to ground. That's net metering, when done on a large scale. The light outside might LOOK ten times brighter than the lighting inside Walmart, but it's actually 10,000 times brighter. Your eyes are very good at seeing in a wide range of light - from candlelight to full sun, a million times brighter. They do so by using a logarithmic, rather than linear, scale for brightness. For the same reason, although the noon sun may APPEAR to be only twice as bright as the sun at 9:00 AM, it's actually much, much brighter. Virtually all of the solar electric is generated when the sun is bright, from about 10:00-2:00.

What that means is that if most people had solar panels, from 10:00-2:00 they could generate as much power as they use the rest of the day. Their electric bill under net metering would be zero. However, the power company still has to provide power to them the other 20 hours per day - for free. See how that could be a problem for the utility, having to provide power for everyone, but nobody has to pay for it?

The utility can't give them back the power generated ten hours earlier, because there is no effective way to store power at utility scale. I know someone who heard a stock tip about some cool new company with magic storage will want to argue with me on that, but I've looked into all of the options and nome of them work at scale. You can try to argue with me, but I'll make you look very, very foolish when I apply some arithmetic to your idea.

Net metering is survivable if only 1% of people do it, because their neighbors can use their noon power. If everyone is doing net metering, you need a magic free energy source the other 20 hours per day. If you decide that solar electric implies net metering, you only end up proving solar electric to be impractical, because net metering absolutely, positively cannot ever possibly work for more than a small fraction of the population.

On a related note, if your argument for solar power assumes that solar means solar electric, you're probably shooting yourself in the foot too. There are several varieties of solar power that work well. Solar water heaters are a no-brainer. Solar electric is probably the silliest approach that anyone seriously suggests, as shown by the trillions of dollars we've wasted on utter fail so far.

-- because the user ultimately has the choice, and oems have never been prevented by microsoft from installing a 3rd party browser or media player, nor have users

That is a difference, only Microsoft set IE (the only browser shipped oem) to refuse to download Netscape. Android will download Opera and Firefox just fine, you're right.

Oh, were you under the impression that it was Google who got caught inserting the "don't download Netscape " code in their browser?

> and some jurisdictions consider rooting a mobile device to be illegally breaking its drm

Citation? When I got this phone I'm using right now, I went to the website of the manufacturer (HTC) to look at their instructions for how to unlock the bootloader. You're saying it is illegal to use the phone in accordance with the manufacturer's instructions? Previously, I've visited Google's code site where I downloaded the SOURCE CODE for Android, and Google provides instructions for how to compile your own custom build if you wish, along with a license allowing you to do so. I don't think it's illegal to use Google's code according to Google's license- in any jurisdiction, except perhaps North Korea. I think you're confusing Android with Windows Phone. Microsoft does have DRM in their operating system.

The article had logic approximately like this:

Doing it for a long time doesn't always make you an expert.
Therefore, it's genetics that make you an expert.

All around me, I see my co-workers doing it _wrong_ for a long time. I just discovered that one guy who has been in the same job for over ten years was completely unaware of some of the most basic concepts anyone starting in the field should know. This is a database administrator and developer who didn't understand that there is a difference between the number zero, the empty string, and null. He just had never heard of null, it seems. After I explained the idea of null to him, he said our database system (DB2) doesn't support nulls. DB2 has supported nulls since it's first release in 1983. This is a guy who has spent 10-20 years as a professional DB2 developer.

He's had lots of practice, but apparently never opened a book, including the manual. So he's been practicing it wrong for 10-20 years. Surprise, he's not an expert!

Microsoft was busted for abusing their monopoly power to engage in unlawful, anti-competitive practices.

For example, in Microsoft internal emails, executives discussed the fact that they understood they were hurting their own company, in order to hurt the competitor more. It's okay to try to make your product better than the other guy - that's competition. Intentionally making your product worse, in order to cause compatibility problems for the other guy, is not okay.

99.99% of the time that's self-regulating - most companies can't go around intentionally harming their own company and products or they'll go out of business. A monopoly is a special case. In 1996 Microsoft had 99% share of the desktop market. Therefore they could intentionally damage the computer industry, costing themselves $4 billion, if by doing so they'd cost Netscape $3 billion and put Netscape out of business. Any ordinary company purposely costing themselves $3 billion would be committing suicide, but for a monopolist losing $4 billion in order to make your much smaller competitor go out of business is a "smart" move. That kind of thing is why there are laws about what a monopoly power can do and not do.

Android has 51% of the market. They aren't a monopoly. If Google purposely creates a problem that makes Android worse, in order to also cause a problem for iOS, Microsoft would be jumping for joy. Microsoft only has 3.5% of the market, but they also have $380 billion to spend taking advantage of anything stupid Google might do.

So Google isn't a monopoly, and their actions are competitive, not anti-competitive (in the legal sense).

Do you also wonder about the difference between what Hans Rieser did and what Miley Cyrus did at the MTV awards?

TFA says the contracts include "as many as" 20 Google apps. I'm familiar with that weasel - "as many as", "up to". We all know "up to 30 Mbps" means "3 Mbps, most of the time". So "as many as 20" might well mean "2", most of the time.

One carrier has a contract that mentions they might install up to 20. And?

Unless you choose to root, the /system partition is read-only, so it can't be changed, accidentally or on purpose. That means you can always go back to a stock, working, bootable system. Bugs, hacks, and accidents can't make the phone unusable because the main functionality is unchangeable, unless you root and explicitly mount it read-write. This is one reason that it's safe to pull the battery out of your running phone, while it's not safe to pull power cord from a running computer.

Mac OS 1-8, and to some extent 9, kept remote hackers away. Largely due to missing functionality, it was considered the most secure platform at the time.

TFS quotes the lead author as saying:

        "... do not trust scientists pushing persuasive agendas. Instead, the public leans toward impartiality. ...
        But this gap can be filled by showing concern for humanity and the environment."

"Showing concern for the environment", in a scientific paper, generally means at least the appearance of pushing a "green" agenda. The first sentence applies to me, I do not trust people trying to persuade me to their agenda, I want impartiality. That means her proposed solution is precisely the opposite of what would work with me - I want the facts, the numbers, and the numbers don't have care and concern, for humanity or the environment. The facts are what they are. Give me the facts and let me decide what I most care about about, which concern takes priority.

One of my favorite papers* goes through each potential national energy source and gives the benefits and drawbacks of each. It says "geothermal produces X kwh, in these locations, at this cost". It doesn't try to promote any of the options, but just lays out the facts about each. The closest it comes to advocacy is calculating approximately what percentage of energy needs COULD possibly be provided by each source, based on hard facts.

* My opinion of this particular paper is highly subjective - I wrote it. :)

> Four liters of donated blood will get your child one extra point; 6 liters adds two points; and 8 liters, three.

That's significant if the scores go to 36, like the ACT test. If the max score is 2400, like the SAT, an extra point or three hardly matters.

I said centripital when I meant centrifugal I guess and started a long subthread / argument basically about nothing. I understand gravity is the centripital force in an orbit. The balancing, opposite force is what I was calling centripital.