Solar thermal with molten salts works fine, and those mid latitude locations all receive ~10-14 hours per day of sunshine, though obviously peak output would be during the noon to 4PM period.

California does have geothermal potential, the rest of the US does not.

Really? Because I could have sworn the largest geothermal upwelling on the planet is located in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

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.

Bullshit, wind and solar alone can potentially generate many, many times our current energy demands. To get an idea of just how little land would be needed to generate our current needss with even junk solar cells check out this page which has a handy graph showing 6 solar farms in desert areas that would work. Now granted, that's approximately twice the area that we currently occupy with road and parking structures, but it would be completely possible if we were to set it as a goal like we did with reaching the moon, put 5-10% of global GDP for the next few decades to work on converting to 100% renewables and we could get there easily. The problem is not the technology, or the availability, it is the will to do what we know must be done, because it is harder than the current path which we know leads to problems.

California does have geothermal potential, the rest of the US does not.

Really? Because I could have sworn the largest geothermal upwelling on the planet is located in Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho.

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.

Bullshit, wind and solar alone can potentially generate many, many times our current energy demands. To get an idea of just how little land would be needed to generate our current needss with even junk solar cells check out this page which has a handy graph showing 6 solar farms in desert areas that would work. Now granted, that's approximately twice the area that we currently occupy with road and parking structures, but it would be completely possible if we were to set it as a goal like we did with reaching the moon, put 5-10% of global GDP for the next few decades to work on converting to 100% renewables and we could get there easily. The problem is not the technology, or the availability, it is the will to do what we know must be done, because it is harder than the current path which we know leads to problems.

Nuclear has by far the lowest, but for the same reason that many environmentalists are still opposing the Keystone pipeline despite the reality of more incidents of environmental damage from the alternative (inefficient rail shipping with nearly 100x the rate of environmental exposure), it's all about emotion for many in the movement, not about what's truly, measurably better for the planet.

I wonder how much this opens the owner up to additional liability when there's an accident and the opposing council subpenas the records of the vehicle and shows a pattern of reckless driving?

As someone who's used many, many DBMS engines MySQL is by far my least favorite. Even engines that are completely different from ANSI SQL like Intersystems Cache make more sense to me than the half standards compliant, half brokenness that is MySQL.

I had the exact same thought when I went to the site. I went to Bach's childhood home and they have a number of his harpsichords including at least two in playable condition and I was lucky enough to be there on a day when they were actually playing one of them! It's a very different sound from a modern piano, though through stylized play the artist on this recording has made a modern piano sound as close as I've heard to the actual instrument that the piece was written for.

I think it is laughable, when viewed against the net of human history, to say that there is a problem with science. The world is increasingly wealthy overall. However, there is a problem in complexity. There is a misunderstanding even among scientists about the fundamental mathematical underpinnings of information. The butterfly effect and the P=NP problem essentially say that, as far as math goes, we don't know what initial dependency might have some severe effect downstream, and that, if there are too many variables, we can't do much anyway.

Yet, politicians of certain political stripes and some scientists themselves are enamored of the idea that we should have "science based" policy making. Policy making is about masses of people, and too many variables. Thus, even though science can say, "these people are less meat based upon and were be better off", science cannot say "everyone will be better off if we eat less meat so let's make it a law". Indeed, there's a baked in butterfly effect that says any public policy has winners and losers. When we make laws that say, 90% of the people will be better off, well, those 10% are going to be irritated. At some point, as a civilization wanders through its history, it accumulates more and more of those people that were screwed by the law. People being what they are, they don't care about how they might have benefited through being in the 90% groups, but how they were in the 10%. If new science proves that the people in the 10% were actually -right-, then, it only makes matters worse.

From a government perspective, we've actually picked the worst things to apply science to. In most people's lives, it is their diet that matters most and the science underpinning FDA recommendations and recommendations from other food authorities has been fabulously and publicly wrong. Many Americans have grown up hearing that first, butter was bad, then, butter was good, then, corn syrup was better than sugar, then sugar is better. First, its clogging of the arteries caused by cholesterol caused by diet, then, just as every middle aged american devours statins, we find out it is a combination of stress and lifestyle. It doesn't help that the public lumps doctors in with scientists - to them, scientists just means "smart people", and they see doctors screw up enough that every family has the story of the loved one that doctors wronged.

The mistrust of the medical establishment when it comes to diet is epidemic and bipartisan. There's plenty of both tree hugging liberals and gun toting conservatives reading about various health food supplement and other weird nonsense about diet and health and even medicine on the internet. The FDA and the food industry alike are seen as corrupt in the minds of both conservatives and liberals is telling. Granted, they filter that corruption into their own political worldview, but that they don't trust these institutions at all suggests a real problem.

From there, it is easy to see, that if the public doesn't believe any of the science about the thing most common in its life, and the institutions designed to protect that science, then, it is going to be a hard sell for the public to genuinely trust science in anything beyond the latest breakthrough to make their consumer products better.

Yup, or replace your phone due to water, my S5 with Qi charging is waterproof.

It's almost certainly the electrolytic cap causing the issue, and it's where people that claim LED's have a longer life than CFL's are wrong unless they're talking about a DC environment because the weak link in both LED and CFL construction is the enclosed electrolytic capacitors. If you tear down either type of bulb and look at the spec sheet for the cap and compare the rated life at the actual operating temperature you'll see that almost every manufacturer is lying about expected lifetime (often by a factor of 10 or more).

I suspect that we could persuade those caches to flush to RAM, simply by exhausting the number of possible lines for that address - if the cache is set-associative. Of course modern processors have multiple levels of cache, so that makes it harder.

I was about to pay the exact same thing, only Newfoundland and a few Caribbean islands are UTC -3. It was those canuckistani's I tell you.

Hi AC,

This is sort of self-contradictory, so I don't really need to respond to it directly. I just want to point one thing out. I can't afford to work for any company as less than a C-level employee. It would be a salary cut from my current business.

Not to mention that I'd not like it.

An AC talking about balls. Pathetic.

Right. I didn't even bother responding to the taunts.

Coward really means coward. I am sorry for the folks who are afraid that their employer will take a dislike of what they post, but for them we have handles.

I can't say I'm happy about what's happened to Debian. Having Ubuntu as a commercial derivative really has been the kiss of death for it, not that there were not other problems. It strikes me that the kernel team has done better for its lack of a constitution and elections, and Linus' ability to tell someone to screw off. I even got to tell him to screw off when he was dumping on 'Tridge over Bitkeeper. Somehow, that stuff works.

IMO, don't create a happy inclusive project team full of respect for each other. Hand-pick the geniuses and let them fight. You get better code in the end.

This actually has something to do with why so many people hate Systemd. It turns out that Systemd is professional-quality work done by competent salaried engineers. Our problem with it is that we're used to beautiful code made by geniuses. Going all of the way back to DMR.