"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?"

well, your post was fairly good, except the part about 4 hours a day. from my link set the day to the 28th of September 2014, starting at 8:30 am decent thousands of megawatts, by 11:30am power is nearing it's peak for the day which levels off until about 2:30 pm and doesn't fall to the thousand megawatt until 5pm. and please realize this is solar generation in germany, a fairly far north country anything that works at germany's elevation is going to work even better in further south regions. so really you get 25% or better of power generation for six hours a day not four hours, and you get a trickle of power for 12-13 hours a day, if you call 100 megawatts 'trickle' 2.5% or better of peak capacity.

http://www.transparency.eex.com/en/Statutory%20Publication%20Requirements%20of%20the%20Transmission%20System%20Operators/Power%20generation/Actual%20solar%20power%20generation

proprietary software has been reinventing the wheel since people figured out you could build machines to count instead of people having to use math skills.

the rich get very rich off this planned obsolescence and reinvention process. those people rarely have morals or ethics.

case in point VR goggles. the idea of them is old, there are several ways to design and deploy these devices and yet the 'occulus rift' is just now coming out? i realize multi thousand dollar devices have been around, but most of them don't do what the rift will do, and none of them were able to use a ultra high def display device such as some cell phones are able to do.

secondly graphic processors which are on almost always 1-2 generations ahead of desktop processors. there is a gpu sitting in my desktop with 32 render output units. that is like a 32 core desktop chip and it has the speed and with gddr5 memory speeds to do what it needs to. it's not even the 64 ROPs of the top card. to even push my card to its limits requires 3 or more screens.

i realize graphics cards and desktop cpus are different markets, but the desktop chips always have some reason for scaling back performance while the gpus push a little. soon there may be an open hardware ASIC processor which at hash processing is way ahead of anything else on the market, and the little game the desktop and gpu makers are playing will all collapse as the chinese flood the market with open source asics the way they did with android tablets.

"Of course I would like to see what wind loading a 40 m dish would take, in terms of thunderstorms and the like."

since the device is made from concrete i would imagine it is nice and stable if properly installed. that is instead of glass in the mirrors which are just aluminum with a silvered surface... and yes that was from the fine article.

and virtually every city has 'clubs' where people do various things, and find inside connections to get jobs. kiwanis, the lions club and a zillion more on wikipedia if you look for them there.

servers aren't all unique, some need to provide the internet archive with 50 petabytes of storage(on 7 TB/disc spinning rust if they are using raid 1+0), some need to be secure against outside hacks and obvious indoor hacks, some need to host the 'cloud', some need to be able to route 3000 petabytes of data a day(route not store)....

the real reason republicans hate obama care is simple. it eliminates two very important metrics for keeping people poor.

first off it means buisnesses can't 'manipulate' cash strapped people to make artificial job growth or contraction simply by hiring more or less people for the same total work hours. this no longer works when you are required to provide heathcare then they have no choice but to give people the hours wages needed to live a good life, instead of making them work to boost or contract the economy.

prior to obama care the working poor had only quacks peddling fake insurance houses constantly shifting locations and doing many unscrupulus methods to keep the poor from being able to pay for care via insurance. if you were poor enough you could hit the jackpot of qualifying for medicare, for the rest it means payday loans to buy meds and such, and the unscrupulis con artists insurance is slowly beginning to fade away, because of the new law.

why don't you grep the source? the equasion for m and m2 should all be open source...

minor point but ISIS is a company looking for a new name...
ISIL is the actual terrorist group funded and trained by americans to make syria's leaders have a war with someone.

once released under public domain some hacker somewhere builds a website shows tons of content under public domain, links to youtube then claims ownership and DMCA takedowns original content and runs with as much cash as they can turn over from people who paid for access to what content they provided.

it's happened before... to http://theoatmeal.com/ and he didn't even release as public domain.

the best way to do this is to make a basic user account for normal mode, and an administrator account for accessing everything. all the settings for WM can be made so that admin can see everything wile basic user sees only a custom menubar and desktop and can't actually do anything. if their desktop icons are made immutable they won't be able to remove them, and if you find cheap hardware to run it all on they won't be a target anymore except to spammers/con artists.

http://linuxgizmos.com/fanless-x86-mini-pc-runs-debian-on-2-3-watts/

is a $100 device you could work with and just tell them it's their new pc. since it has a serial port many hardware modems will work, and need no drivers, usb modems may or may not work i don't know...

i don't know where to go with Linux recommendations but pppd on freebsd will allow dialup on demand, but if you don't want that a manual link can be put on the desktop. chflags run as root (chattr if you don't like bsd and insist on linux) can make files immutable then not even root can delete, or move without running the chflags program first. if you want parts of the os to be protected feel free to make immutable files anywhere you feel like it to 'harden' the system the freebsd handbook has a walkthrough on compiling the kernel which is highly recommended for removing features and making the system harder to hack. disable or remove everything you or they don't need to further harden the system, and use a customizable WM and edit it so that only the functions you or they need are present i don't know what the people use these days, though.
freebsd is easily configured to run on slow computers. keep in mind software modems may be a real pain to configure and there are usb modems that might work good, further research is required. i don't know what hardware you're running for them, but if you've got them on an arm board there are way more people working on linux based ARM support while FreeBSD warns they aren't end user ready... however a basic browser and email virtually anything x86 is usable for a modern browser which may not work right on dialup requires at least 256MB of ram with 1GB or better recommended by me.

the fancy ones are $8,000 instead of $80 is because IP laws protect monopolies. in an open ecosystem where everything is free as in libre, any person designing medical devices could interoperate with everyone else designing medical devices. ever call to every piece of hardware would be workable by anyone who wanted to. every program even one privately funded, would then be opened to the community so their competitors could learn what you did and how and be able to build on what you did.

and if that smells like lost profit to you, maybe it is, but it's better for everyone. there is no vendor lock in forcing you to use inferior or vulnerable platforms. there is no 'upgrade cycle' that hardware vendors crave, the free market is always releasing inferior hardware to generate new upgrade cycles.

the government is supposed to be fixing things which corporations do wrong and they just don't care it seems. planned obsolescence.... do i need to rant more here?

if you think of sick people only in dollars and cents then you are in need of some morality. if you think we need to reinvent every medical tool every 20-30 years to 'fund' the proprietary developers of hardware and software then think of all the things that could have been done with those people not doing BS work, in a civilization where people are more than the dollars they have in their wallets.

> "The world economy and middle-class lifestyle are built on theft, slavery, extortion and murder."

They have those things in many countries, yet they remain shitholes compared to America. There's more to the success of America than just criminality.

Putting forth such a blanket statement only makes you look absurd.

lets look here, cnn the ptb lap dog they are have a 'salary' calculator that caps at $400,000 a year. http://money.cnn.com/calculator/pf/income-rank/ yet america has 1565 billionaires according to forbes.com. http://www.forbes.com/sites/abrambrown/2014/03/03/forbes-billionaires-full-list-of-the-richest-americans/ so to correct you, the blanket statement that the middle class lifestyle is unsustainable or the cause of the problem is absurd. clearly a system that supports 1,500 billionaires yet no one can apparently get a salary over $400,000 is definitely a gamed system. it is the top 1% who are the problem and the middle class only supports a dream of the poor to not be poor, while doing so for little rewards while whole nations are bankrupted so an investment banker can get 50% growth of income for billionaires, and the 304,118 millionaires can keep growing their wealth http://www.forbes.com/sites/ashleaebeling/2014/02/14/where-the-304118-u-s-millionaire-earners-live/
one in one hundred people are millionaires. and the civilization that caused this is not going to sustain it forever. if the romans couldn't do it we sure as hell can't.

"Heads of finance are just giving the market what it wants, and their riches and status indicate how good they are at doing it. They're successful, not sick."

until the peasants start revolting the rich can do almost anything. the exception is access to heaven.

"They wouldn't be so successful if you the People (not you specifically, but as a whole) didn't create the demand, either directly or indirectly through the government you were supposed to keep in check."

the government hasn't created the mass of happy peasants that was corporation which took away the governments ability to keep in check the power of the rich, in the name of the peasants they serve.

"The leaders are just doing their jobs. It's the people who are sick."

no one is sick. you just haven't gotten it yet. the human consciousness is the parallel of many nodes. each node knows only what its node is working on. there is nothing not even light that can travel across the entire brain and provide every node with the same data. the visual cortex is exceptionally good at throwing away visual data and piping to other nodes the compressed lossy perhaps fractal data to nodes specializing in data storage. there are many nodes each about the size of a usa penny generally in a tube shaped form. each node can do its unique job and its frankly amazing how many nodes the human brain has. why do i bring this up? because your brain invents the reality you believe in for you and not even logic can fix that. it has nodes invented to do this. there are chemicals that impact your mind, including the six nodes that the sugar and cocaine target, that keeps the data flowing between nodes. as they do their respective jobs. and create the consciousness matrix that makes up your highly parallel mind that has been programed by most schools to be highly serial. even games are highly serial. i learned how to play with the best but it was a path of diminishing returns my other nodes either craved the data or rejected it. the ones that craved it got tired easily the ones that rejected it stopped trusting the rest of the nodes. there is no dd for the brain but the cycle i was in was as close to it as is possible. making every day the same at blinding speed while parts of my brain became exhausted and other dark. the true sickness is that there is none. we are all healthy and the chemicals just make one side win or the other in the terms of how the brain works. and depending on who you are and who your doctor is will determine if they try to slow down your nodes or speed them up. the rest is a moot point it is not a sickness but rather two roads to early failure of nodes or to lazy nodes doing little real work and staying dark.

and yet a $100 wifi dual band router is capable of transferring files wirelessly 8 bands of 40mhz that carries 1300Mbit/s of data and there is enough bands for a whole apartment building to each have a wifi router in every apartment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11
802.11ac
Main article: IEEE 802.11ac

IEEE 802.11ac-2013 is an amendment to IEEE 802.11, published in December 2013, that builds on 802.11n.[18] Changes compared to 802.11n include wider channels (80 or 160 MHz versus 40 MHz) in the 5 GHz band, more spatial streams (up to eight versus four), higher order modulation (up to 256-QAM vs. 64-QAM), and the addition of Multi-user MIMO (MU-MIMO). As of October 2013, high-end implementations support 80 MHz channels, three spatial streams, and 256-QAM, yielding a data rate of up to 433.3 Mbit/s per spatial stream, 1300 Mbit/s total, in 80 MHz channels in the 5 GHz band.[19] Vendors have announced plans to release so-called "Wave 2" devices with support for 160 MHz channels, four spatial streams, and MU-MIMO in 2014 and 2015.[20][21][22]