The Nanny state has run amok. I think even sadder is that the hacker crowd at Slashdot even a decade ago would have reacted with a collective, "Cool, let's give this a try and see how it works and how we can make it better", rather than with a zillion arguments about how an obviously versatile technology must be banned under the force of law.

We sure have a lot of totalitarians of fascist and other stripes here these days.

In almost all cases, technology is morally neutral - nukes, biotech, radio waves, and gunpowder can all be either murderous and evil or protective and supportive - it depends entirely on the *way* they're used. Laws attempting to force a particular outcome are generally doomed to fail, because people are smarter than their lawmakers and will do what makes sense in their particular situation, which they invariably recognize far better than their lawmakers. (Nobel winner Milton Friedman even went so far as to argue (quite persuasively, I might add) against intrusive government programs such as professional licensing, even for doctors. In today's world of frictionless information, there really is much less call for overly controlling laws.)

Wow, Slashdot sure is full of hand-wringing politically correct armchair lawyers these days!

Seriously guys, HUDs are not new and they are quite likely the least intrusive way to present information to driver (or even front seat passengers wanting to avoid motion sickness, for that matter).

Quite a few cars have had a HUD option from the factory - heck, some GM cars (Pontiacs mostly, but not exclusively) had factory HUD options more than 20 years ago.

Nearly 100 years ago, the same kinds of busybodies were trying to outlaw radios in cars, since that was "obviously" a distraction for the driver. News flash - the vast majority of the time, people (yep, even the ones that don't live in your hipster high-rise) are more than capable of enough multitasking to deal with both driving and another task. A good HUD would be far *safer* than today's method of navigating from a phone screen, since everyone has a phone and built-in GPS nav systems suck, add thousands to the cost of a car, and have a technology lifespan even shorter than a lawyer's lease term...

Seconding the Soekris approach. I have a couple of networks that have been running on the old net48xx series boxes for more than a decade. These things are flat bulletproof. Since I'm using them strictly as firewalls, and they still route at speeds much higher than the internet connections that feed them, even these older boxes are fine. (As recommended by others here, wireless is a separate router in bridge mode, since wireless standards change every few years and I don't rely on the wireless router's security other than for WPA2 itself - which is now pretty easy to bypass if you know the right things...)

Kris Sorensen builds some good stuff. Do yourself a favor and at least check out Soekris before you decide to buy anything else...

So, just wondering, does this mean we eliminate just the DEA, or the FDA, too? (The FDA is in actuality far worse in terms of arbitrarily restricting things for any reason or no reason.)

The most interesting questions aren't along the lines of "What happens when heroin, cocaine, etc. are legal?", but more along the lines of these:

What happens if Viagra and Cialis are now freely available? (Why on earth should they still require a Rx if heroin doesn't, for cryin' out loud? Can't the users see four hours on a clock?)

Does this mean that hemp can finally be cultivated in the US as a valuable natural fiber again? (Personally, I couldn't care less if dope is illegal, but making hemp illegal is just stupid - it's a killer natural fiber with amazing properties, grows like mad, and is dirt cheap.)

More importantly, will this finally allow the sale of unadulterated milk (raw milk and cheeses)? While poor sanitation can produce a risk of tuberculosis, any kind of reasonable cleanliness standards reduce that risk FAR below that of smoking marijauna, even assuming no one will ever drive, boat, or operate heavy equipment while stoned...

The world would indeed be upside-down if heroin is legal and raw milk isn't!

But these handouts are such a magnificently efficient means for graft through corrupt cronies that support your "environmental" policies!

This certainly appears to be the *only* thing our governments excel at anymore...

Only a fool "trusts the Internet" - especially Wikipedia.

It's funny, the other day, I was hanging out with a group that included several pretty top-level IT and networking folks, including some leading CS academics. Not one of us uses internet banking, or allows access of any kind to any of our financial accounts over the net. On the rare occasions that companies force the use of the Internet, the general response is to enable access only long enough to do the job, then destroy the Inet access account (best), disable net access (2nd best), or set the password to random gibberish that even we don't know or keep a record of. This forces a long, manual process to "reenable" the acccount that cannot as easily be done by an impostor. None of us "trust" the Internet, I guess.

That was a real eye-opener for some of the younger "Internet-savvy" group, who all of a sudden realized that maybe they were opening themselves up far more than they realized, especially in a world where every WiFi network, even with WPA2, is now as open as the one at Starbucks...

Actually, there's probably more money and effort focused on trying to build grid storage than there ought to be, given that there's really no technology known that's capable of doing the job in a generally viable way. There's a name for that: WOMBAT - Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.

(Not saying we shouldn't be looking at all, but realistically, grid-scale storage requires technologies we simply don't have, and largely, can't yet even envision or propose. We're a smart society with a few centuries of intense technology and engineering development under our belts, and there is no known viable solution to this problem. If there was, then billions, or even trillions, of dollars would be flowing into it. This isn't like most hard problems, which can be solved by throwing enough effort and money at them - we really just don't know how to do this!

For all its faults, Hydrogen may be the best of the bad options - but the most (only?) economically viable source of hydrogen at large scales today is natural gas. Both environmentally and from an energy loss point of view, you're better off just burning the natural gas (our cleanest fuel in the first place) than taking the hit converting it to H2. Any effort to split water will result in H2 that is *much* more expensive than making it from natural gas, especially given the benefits of the fracking revolution - water is an *extremely* stable molecule...

Yeah, sounds simple, right? Just store it! First, even the best solar systems today are not economically viable without huge government subsidies unless you live on an island and have to ship your fuel in, so really, you're upside down before you've spent a dime on storage.

Secondly, with any known and viable technology storage is *really*, *REALLY* expensive on a grid scale. For all practical purposes, it's fair to say that there is NO known way to do it in most locations. (The dangers of gas-pressurized reservoirs may well be orders of magnitude higher than fracking at its worst, and very few places have geography that allow pumped hydro to be even marginally cost-effective.) Batteries, supercaps, and the like still need another couple of orders of magnitude price/performance improvement to be viable.

Do the math, and you'll see that storage isn't even an option - the solar plant is barely viable even with subsidies (here in Texas, with cheap and readily available natural gas, solar costs 4-5 times as much per KWH, according to EIA's LCOE figures). Add in any kind of grid-scale storage at all, and the costs soar through the stratosphere, especially since most storage technologies have relatively short economic lives.

So yes, paying someone to take the power is actually the cheapest thing to do - not only in Germany, but many nights here in the US with wind power, too. There's just more capacity than demand, and since it costs the power companies to deal with that, they justifiably want to get paid to offset the costs and inefficiencies of having to shut down and spin up their conventional plants.

I don't have any mod points, and have posted on this thread anyway, but LISTEN TO THIS GUY (brambus).

Unlike most of the armchair experts here, brambus is explaining *exactly* why the German grid is broken and why it will eventually fail - at this point, I think the only questions are "When?", and, "How bad?" The tariffs that led to all this investment in solar et al are completely unsustainable over the long haul, and everyone has known that all along, but like the actual climate record, it didn't fit with the narrative and had to be ignored.

If Germany is really lucky, they'll get by with some scary but not-totally-grid-meltdown failures that might finally kick some sense into the Greens and others who think they can legislate reality based on wishcraft...

It's sad, but they're going to have to learn what I taught my kids: You are free to choose your actions, but you are NOT free to choose the consequences of your actions...

And 30 years is best-case. In the real world, the output of quality solar panels at around 25 years will only be about 20% of their nameplate rating. That last 5 years is really just trying to eke out enough additional energy production to get positive over the entire life of the array.

Although tight, the economics are workable with good quality panels. Unfortunately, the crappy Chinese panels that now dominate the market are starting to show significant failures (backing delamination, which results in water ingress, destruction of the panel, and leaching of heavy metals into the environment) even BEFORE 10 YEARS. If that happens, you will NEVER, EVER break even on your solar plant.

Nobody mandated solar, people just decided it would work and be profitable. Germany got a lot of wind power built as well, but apparently solar also works well enough to be worth the investment.

Germany's problems are entirely of its own making - the government wrote laws that required the power companies to pay solar generators at rates that are often over 3X the going rate for electricity. Not surprisingly, a LOT of people took them up on that deal. This works sort-of-OK until a big squall line blows over and you lose a hundred megawatts in a few minutes (it's worse than that really, since sites that were exporting power to the grid now need to become consumers, so demand increases simultaneously even faster than the loss of supply!)

Germany is now the global poster child for grid instability, and I suspect they'll get bitten hard before too long - you can't keep up that balancing act forever, especially with declining spinning reserves, and no incentives for power companies to keep them at the ready. In the very near future, if Russia pulls the plug on natural gas at the same time as a major storm front, all of Germany will go black...

Not really. I've been working in the solar industry the last five or six years, and the short answer is that solar only makes sense without subsidies in places where you simply can't get energy from other sources - mostly islands or other areas where there are no fossil fuel resources nearby.

Again, that's not really true - depending on whose numbers you use, solar and other renewables are subsidized at a rate that is at least 25 to 50 TIMES that of any other energy source (including nuclear) on a per unit energy basis (which is really the only sensible way to even attempt a subsidy comparison.)

From a WSJ editorial based on the US govt's EIA figures (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324432404579051123500813210):

The U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated in 2010 that fossil-fuel subsidies amounted to $4 billion a year. ... Renewable sources received more than triple that figure, roughly $14 billion. That doesn’t include $2.5 billion for nuclear energy.

Actual spending skews even more toward green energy than it seems. Since wind turbines and other renewable sources produce much less energy than fossil fuels, the U.S. is paying more for less. Coal-powered electricity is subsidized at about 5% of one cent for every kilowatt-hour produced, while wind power gets about a nickel per kwh. For solar power, it costs the taxpayer 77 cents per kwh. (Emphasis mine)

Don't get me wrong - I'm not opposed to solar, in fact, I favor it - but the fact is that solar and other renewables are not economically viable without subsidies. This is why the Original article is important - Germany has subsidized solar to the point that it's now a sizable portion of the German power grid. Unfortunately, renewables are NOT a replacement for power plants, since they literally only work at the whims of the weather. That means you still have to keep enough power plants in operation to meet peak demand. Therefore, letting the gluts determine prices is folly (this is why West Texas wind energy actually often has a *negative* price - you literally have to pay the grid to take it at night.)

And this distinguishes it from the US how?

Here in Austin, bicycle travel is subsidized to ridiculous degrees - new bicycle lanes are reducing 4-lane roads to two-lane all over town in a blatant and brazen attempt to botch traffic so badly that voters will finally approve the light rail boondoggle the city council has been drooling over for decades.

The ONLY thing mass transit does well is offer exceptional opportunities for graft, cronyism, and corruption.

Sorry, they are rarely if ever a public good - building roads is almost always far better and more efficient than another multibillion dollar mass transit boondoggle.

The only thing mass transit (especially "urban rail") excels at is creating the perfect environment for increasingly large-scale graft and corruption.

Although there may be one somewhere, I'm not aware of any mass transit system that breaks even on fares, nor am I aware of one whose cost even had the same number of zeroes promised when hoodwinking the voters into paying for it - Cost overruns of 10-100X are *ordinary* for mass transit projects, with powered train cars now costing more than F-16s!

Since mass transit systems never wind up being able to pay for themselves, mass transit is really just a taxpayer-funded subsidy for those who benefit from ridiculously dense, family-hostile, and outrageously expensive real estate and development.

Mass transit is one of the very best reasons to hate what most large cities have become. The cities without much in the way of mass transit are inevitably safer and more livable, and have much more positive and healthier mental attitudes. And yes, this is one of the few things that can destroy the dynamism even of cities like Austin...