The bet is not just on arbitrage, but that within 10 years you will install solar power of some kind, because this battery makes solar collection far more useful to most people.

That seems like a good bet, especially for someone who buys the battery... and you ignore the utility of whole house power backup/conditioning.

That helps someone with solar panels, but more exciting is that it helps everyone - just just people with their own energy sources.

These shift load on the system - they don't just make solar energy viable, they smooth out load on the power network, and make alternative energy sources that may not be reliable much more viable.

Not to mention suddenly everyone is much less dependent on reliable power, so it can eventually bring the possibility of reducing the extreme availably requirements of power - you could get a note saying power would be shut down ro an hour over the weekend, so they could do infrastructure changes.

At $3k it is a no-brainer to buy one of these.

Thanks for totally ignoring the last point that actual speeds are a fraction of the rated speeds... the 2Gb connection may well be just a 100Mbps connection most of the time.

But your own post as it stands refutes your counter-argument. Waiting even four minutes for a demo is fairly long, which shows that higher speeds are in fact needed by average users today - even if they are not being used continuously. Having a high burst speed IS very useful to even the average person today.

When Bush left office, the Middle East was pretty safe, and had a functional democracy in Iraq.

The economy of the U.S. was on an upswing, and the U.S. had vastly less debt.

Now the middle east is blowing up all over, soon very literally when Iran achieves nuclear weapons. The economy is tanking again, the national debt is monstrously high, there are not infrequent waves of rioting and looting in many major cities. Race relations are at an all time low, in part because so many criticisms these days are countered with "you only disagree with me because I am black", an argument that trickles down to the population at large. It makes it impossible to talk about real instances of racism when so many things that are not, are labeled as such.

Civilians in other countries certainly don't feel much safer since instead of discriminating troops locking down an area or fighting other troops, we have vastly increased drone strikes that often harm innocents.

I'm not sure in what way you can possibly justify saying Obama is even a little better than Bush in terms of safety and hope, since there is now so much less of both than when Bush left office.

So much so, that a common sight now is posters of Bush smiling with the words "Miss me yet?" emblazoned underneath...

Well thank you Mr Gates for being so sure normal people couldn't use high speeds to advantage - what if two kids are watching YouTube in 1080p, another person is using Netflix, and then someone fires up a PS4? I just got one the other day and wanted to play two game demos - over *2GB* each thank you very much. I had to play the next day because *I* don't have 2GB fiber...

Plus we all know that 2GB is shared so it's almost always going to be a percentage of the rating speed. Might as well be a percentage of a much higher number.

I do have a number of neighbors around me I know pretty well, that I say hi to - when I see them.

But I don't see them every day. In winter you may not see them for some time because people stay inside mostly.

Even a close community around you is no replacement for someone that checks on you daily.

What do you think society is going to be like when so many of the people not having kids get older? It's going to look like this, where you hire services to check in on you regularly and make sure you are not dead or needing help...

Even as the population gets more dispersed, there's a need for things like this so family who lives far away can still make sure parents are OK.

All we have to do is nothing. The sanctions are working, it's greatly slowing progress they are making to obtaining nuclear weapons.

If we lift the sanctions, we CANNOT restore them (the Iranians have said repeatedly it's absurd to think we could). They will absolutely have a nuclear weapon inside a year, probably much sooner.

The real assholes are the people like you willing to put the world to the torch because of your imaginary fears of invading Iran, which no-one wants to do. It makes no sense because what do you invade? The people are generally friendly to the U.S., it's only the rulers that are not - and they will use the entire populace as a human shield (that is also incidentally why they rightfully think they can use nuclear weapons against enemies without similar reprisals).

If the sanctions are lifted and millions die I hope you have the decency to at least feel a tiny bit guilty.... but then people like you so often rationalize all repercussions of your mistakes away.

Diplomacy, old definition:

"The art of saying 'Nice Doggy' until you can find a rock". - Will Rodgers

New definition:

"The art of handing rocks over to the doggy until it can bury you, while hoping that it is nice".

For point (A), they story made it sound like they were replaced overnight. I'm just wondering how that happens for any IT job... there's always some knowledge transfer that needs to be done.

For point (B), I'm saying that you cannot trust the company period. Some are saying what Disney did may well be illegal - doesn't matter to the people who were fired, because they need something to live on now. Never assume a company will follow the law, or cares about you whatsoever. In some cases they might, mind you, it's just that you should never assume that.

Oh, you'll wake up when it works

Well, if it works well all it will mean Windows gets some of the exploding Mac app market, a breath of fresh air in the stagnating Windows application space (for everything but games that is).

Apple is sort of phasing out Macs anyways, aren't they

You must be thinking of the slumping PC market.

Apple doesn't talk about Macs much but they are the sleeper hit, they keep growing in sales (unlike Windows PC) and Apple spends a lot of effort developing new macs.

Retina 5k iMac, perhaps you've heard of it.

Some of these folks were literally flown in the day before to take over the exact same job I was doing,

A) What were you doing you could be replaced that easily?!

B) Companies can drop you any time, out of nowhere. Keep some savings, and keep skills up so that if you need another job, you can find one... it's really easy at larger companies to drift into something that lasts years, if not endlessly. Don't let such things trap you.

I actually meant sub-orbital, typo. I referred to that later but it was absolutely confusing. Sorry about that.

It looks like in fact Microsoft is providing some kind of middle layer which provides much of the iOS framework libraries, they are calling it "Islandwood". Couldn't find details beyond that though.

It doesn't mean much to me that a game was ported with minimal effort since that would mostly be using OpenGL and the like.

From past systems like this, I think it would mean that you can technically use Objective-C code, just not any of the system frameworks... but that would be a pretty huge limitation if so, and involve a ton of re-work for anything existing.

I don't know why companies get so exited around being able to re-use a subset of business logic, and nothing else.... get a rules engine people!