Germany covers about 138,000 square miles, which makes it just a smidge larger in area than the state of New Mexico. Scaling a grid up from the size of a single state to the entire Continental US is likely to be a whole different kettle of fish.

OTOH, you could argue this extra geographic spread is a good thing, as it affords a US electric consumer the same variety of locale for wind generation that has proven adequate in Germany, within their one state alone. New Mexico is a lot poorer and less populated than Germany, but their electricity needs are relatively more modest as well.

So while I don't think it would be a simple matter to transport electricity generated offshore in the Atlantic to power Denver, it probably would be eminently feasible to transport it to Denver from Utah, Oklahoma, Arizona, and/or Nevada based on which sites currently are experiencing the most ideal wind.

They read to me like they were live one-on-one verbal interviews. Nobody speaks the same way they write, you know. (For instance, you can tell I'm writing here because no profanities were used).

Not according to the Republican mayor who pushed this law in the first place.

I have heard folks say that, or other such noise about it being "hypocritical", but frankly that attitude is beyond stupid.

Politics is like a game of Great Dalmudi. If you hate the current rules, you can change them, but you have to win a hand using those sucky rules first. Refusing to utilize a rule you don't like is not just counter-productive, but actively stupid.

They do change as a result. That was the entire point of my post. That's why you want to time increases to a point where the economy can absorb the blow from less goods moving around (/less people employed making the goods that get moved around, etc). During an incredibly anemic recovery after a horrible recession while gas prices are already rising due to Mideast instability does not seem like a optimal time to me.

So you say. But you have to realize that's also a hike in the transportation costs of anything shipped by truck in the USA (damn near everything). Gas tax hikes essentially cause a negative supply shock. This is a particularly evil kind of economic event where costs rise and and employment drops. This is why we haven't raised this particular tax in two decades.

If it really needs to rise (most likely it does), if it were me I'd wait until the next time gas prices drop for some reason, and raise it then to absorb the positive shock. Much less painful that way.

I'm missing something. In order for you to use that nice new account with the strong password, Amazon is going to have to connect your data servers back up with the internet, right? And the instant they do that, the hacker has all their access restored too, right? What's stopping them from immediately changing this new account's password to something they know? Or deleting it? Or doing all sorts of other nasty things before you discover each and every hidey-hole they made for themselves?

Really, I don't see how you can cleanup an attack in realtime with the network up without it turning into a game of corewars (which your side is not likely to win).

...unless you work at it, which you should if your employees are going to be designing products for a world that is decidedly >1$ black. There's not really any altruism here; its for the good of the company.

Wrong. It is most definitely Yahoo/Google's problem, and a huge one. Their potential customer base contains mostly people (women + male minorities) who the companies have very little understanding of in their creative development staff. There is no way this doesn't retard the service they give their users, which in the long run affects their own bottom-line.

That doesn't mean it isn't valuable to a company. In any good engineering company, all the best product ideas come from the engineers. That means the more your engineering workforce looks like your potential userbase, the better they are going to be able to serve their potential customers with their new products.

Probably the majority of the users of the hotter social media tools are female. Now I will freely admit at age 47 with a wife and two girls, I don't understand women at all. Perhaps some men are better at that than me, but I think its ridiculous to argue that your 85% male workforce is well in touch with the needs and desires of their 60ish% female userbase. This can't be anything but a problem.

Similarly, black people turn out to be huge users of Twitter. Clearly it provides something for them that other platforms don't. What is that? Well, I grew up in the majority black part of my hometown, so I probably understand them better than your average white guy, and I can tell you I don't understand them well enough to be an authority. You really need to ask your black employees. Note the plural. Several. One token person isn't enough to provide a good perspective.

So yes, there is value to a company in having female and black (and Hispanic, and Muslim, and ...) employees, over and above their basic tech chops. If white guys don't like to hear that, perhaps they should sit and wonder about the fairness of men not getting jobs waiting tables in deference to women, or ugly people not getting jobs as receptionists and actors. Sometimes your background or looks are actually an important part of your job. That's life.

Well, these are the same bunch of folks that decided to redefine a megabyte as 1,000 bytes to make their "xMB" drives look bigger than they really are.

Once we let them get away with that, can we really blame them for thinking that any marketing cheat they can dream up is fair game?

TEMPEST was one of a set of code-words that were themselves unclassified, but their exact meaning was classified. This allowed people like myself to put them on their resume without the resume becoming classified.

It looks like folks (or at least Wikipedia editors) may have pieced together a meaning for this particular one.

Being obese certainly is disabling. However, it seems kind of weird to define a "disability" something that can be easily (if temporarily) cured by a fairly simple operation. It might even be cheaper for society to pay for periodic liposuction for "sufferers" than it would be to start accommodating the obese with bigger doors, chairs, seats, lifts, etc. everywhere. It would be an interesting economic study for someone.

...and this particular pollster is known to be worse than most. For example, in the 2012 election they had Romney winning two states by more than 5 points which he actually lost.

538 did an analysis of this. However, the swing was so huge that you really can't put all the blame on the pollster. Being wrong by 10 points (as they often are) is a whole different kettle of fish from being wrong by 44. Other non-internals recently showed Cantor winning by 10. So clearly something happened.

I worked on a COMSEC job back in the '90s, and both our device and our building (particularly the windows) had countermeasures for this kind of attack.

Perhaps this is a new thing for garage hackers, but intelligence agencies have known about it for decades.