I think you missed a few points in your theoretical calculation. Let's look at an actual pumped storage reservoir, one conveniently linked from the Wikipedia page you linked to. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

The upper reservoir has a capacity of 27 billion gallons, and peak output requires 33 million gallons per minute, so it can run for 13 hours with 1872 MW output. (To be more than fair, I'm ignoring the fact that you can't REALLY drain the lake completely dry each day, and that power is reduced as the level goes down. Actual power capacity may be half of what I'm charitably calculating). Giving pumped storage the benefit of the doubt, we'll say Ludington could do 1872 MW X 13 hours = 23,765 MWh.
That's 8 * 10^10 BTU

So we need 120 * 10^15 BTU and we've got 8 * 10^10 BTU. Hmm, 15 facilities the size of Ludington would be 120 * 10^10.
But we need 10^15, not 10^10, so we need 1,500,000 facilities the size of Ludington.

The upper reservoir of Ludington is 2.5 square miles. 2.5 miles X 1,500,000 facilities = 3,750,000 square miles. The continental US is 3,119,884 square miles. So, looking at actual performance of actual pumped storage, covering the entire US with pumped storage reservoirs still wouldn't be enough - even for the UPPER reservoir. Typically, the lower reservoir is quite a bit larger than the upper.

Thanks for the reminder. I've only seen that 150,000 times in someone's signature here.

>I think that getting Ogg support into the browser and other open codecs will help us transition away from the Flash over time,

Also, Flash Cc, the authoring tool, can now output HTML5 rather than SWF, so all the existing Flash projects can be recompiled to no longer require the plugin. Support isn't 100% yet, but that's the direction Adobe is going. The programming language within Flash has always been a dialect of JavaScript/Emacscript, so it is pretty simple for Adobe to start using the browser's JavaScript engine instead of one provided by Flash. Other than a cross-browser JavaScript engine, the other thing provided by the plugin is a graphics API. Now that the canvas element, there's no need for the plugin.

Virtually all of the popular file formats for video are essentially containers that have mpeg4 video inside. Therefore, essentially any player can play mpeg4. The difference is which package files they can open, so just use a plain .mpg file rather than a proprietary package like .wmv.

If you want to embed the video that's fine, but also provide a link to the mpeg file itself. A plain link to a mpg file is like a plain link to an html page - it will work for anyone.

I wish I got that ad you keep getting. It sounds like it might be worth a look. If by "plastic" you mean Valplast, that's a very good value.

WIkipedia has a list of a dozen open-source phones with operating systems such as OpenMoko and Firefox OS, which includes parts of Android:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Nokia makes Android phones without the Google apps, and Google gives away the base operating system that allows them to do so.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/...

Cyanogenmod lets you run Android with no Google apps, some Google apps, or all Google apps - whatever you want.
http://www.cyanogenmod.org/

Ubuntu Touch may appeal to you:
http://www.ubuntu.com/phone

> When Google has your data, Google's business partners have it too (part or parcel),

All evidence I've seen, and common sense, indicates that the data is very valuable to Google and they don't want anyone else to have it. They'll sell ads to other companies, which Google displays based on the data, but they don't sell the data. That would be giving the other company the goose that lays the golden eggs. Google prefers to sell the eggs, over and over again. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please cite it.

Of course the NSA illegally acquires data from most all email providers, ISPs, etc. Even the services that are explicitly based in privacy get NSLs, so to avoid that I could avoid using the internet at all. I'm going to use the internet, so the NSA will be able to snoop until that problem is handled using the three boxes - soap box, ballot box, and if absolutely necessary ammo box.

Technology nerds, especially those who frequent sites like Slashdot where discussions of privacy are frequent and nary a day passes without mention of Snowden, know the trade-off of Google services*. I wonder how well non-technical people understand it. Google Now kind if shoves it in your face, making it very clear that Google knows when you're at work, when you're at home, what TV shows you like, etc. I wonder what percent of average people who don't use Google Now really understand what the cost of Google services is. It would be interesting to see a survey.

* I make no value judgement about the privacy cost. Some customers are okay with the privacy cost of using these excellent free services, other people choose not to. Personally, I choose to make that trade only with Google. One company has my profile, and in exchange I get many services.

One of the more important words used in law is "reasonable". The phrases "reasonable man" and "reasonable care" are used particularly often. I'd bet the concept applies in about half of all civil suits. If a court rules that a product should be reasonably efficient (and reasonably durable, reasonably effective, etc) that it no way means that it has to be perfectly optimized.

Consider if a product, perhaps a car, tended to fall apart after just a few months of use. You'd expect lawsuits, and the plaintiffs would have a valid claim because a car should be reasonably durable. That doesn't mean all cars need to be built like a Sherman tank. This is well established law, applied in many contexts. In fact, the only area I can think of where we've gotten away from a reasonableness standard is medical malpractice. By statute, that's supposed to be a similar standard, but juries have moved toward expecting medical professionals to be perfect, not just act reasonably.

For your primary servers, power is a very important cost consideration of course.
On the other hand, I buy Raritan 16 port IP KVMs that are BETTER than their new models at 90% lower cost. I use them a few times power year. Their better than the new ones because they have a perfectly good web interface I can use from my phone to take care of a server that it down, rather than having to drive to office to use their proprietary control software for the new ones.

Similarly, I use some very popular 16-bay storage boxes that I get for around $100 used. It's nothing more than a metal box with a SAS expander in it. There's darn little that can go wrong with what is essentially just a case and sleds, so why would I want to pay $X000 each for them?

The people talking about tax depreciation obviously haven't thought it through. You pay lower taxes by having lower profits. Sure, spending $20,000 on equipment means you can (slowly) deduct $20,000 from your taxable profit, thereby reducing your tax by $4,000. You just spent $20,000 to "save" $4,000. That's not exactly a brilliant move, especially since that $4,000 is depreciated over at least five years. You want to spend $20,000 now to get $4,000 back five years from now? I see why you're a computer geek and not an accountant (or manager).

A few friends who are electrical engineering majors certainly might achieve this. After all, it was a small group of college kids who created Google, Microsoft, and Facebook. On the other hand, 10 Google employees sitting in meetings to discuss the requirements document costs over $2,000 / hour once you factor in taxes and such. A million dollars is enough to motivate some ramen-eating college kids, and small enough that it's not much more than the cost of paperwork and approvals for many projects at large companies.

Let me guess, you want to store the energy of the midday sun, maybe by pumping water uphill from 10:00-2:00, then running it back down through turbines the rest of the day. Sounds great, right?

Hoover dam provides 0.1% of US energy needs. So we need 1,000 reservoirs the size of Hoover Dam / Lake Meade, with dams across 1,0000 large canyons. The dam is powered by the 248 square mile reservoir pushing against it, the 248 square miles it flooded up the canyon. So 1,000 of those is 248,000 square miles. You need depth of course - you're not going to get any power sending water down a 12 inch incline. To get an idea of what we need, we're working with Lake Meade-sized reservoirs, so 582 feet deep. Do you think we're going to be able to flood 248,000 square miles 582 feet deep? Really? That's what pumped storage requires in order to make solar a primary energy source.

Of course, you can't really build a 600 foot high dam all the way around the states you decide to flood. Leaks would be guaranteed, and it would cost quadrillons of dollars. What you'd actually have would be shallower reservoirs that were larger. If you could find 1,000 appropriate places to dam where the water could be 100 feet deep, you'd only need the surface area to be 248,000 X 6 = 1.49 million square miles. That's cool, that's just half of the continental US that has to completely covered in nothing but reservoirs.

Got another theory you want to try, and we can do the math to see how it actually works?

That's an assumption made by all solar-electric systems, though, that the sun is directly overhead when you need power. The other 21 hours a day, you use another source of power.

I can't comment on the applicability of that particular model, but I did note that estimates using various models ranged from a few hundred to around five thousand. To a person wanting to reach useful conclusions, from unbiased information to the extent possible, the 1,000 estimate is therefore a reasonable estimate to reason from. To compare nuclear to coal, hydroelectric, etc. we really only need an "order of magnitude" estimate and a survey of all available models indicates that 1,000 is the right order of magnitude.

If your purpose is advocacy, you can of course choose the highest or lowest estimate, whichever suits your agenda. However, doing that carries significant risk. Cherry-picking your data and models can put you in the same position that environmentalists were in during the 1970s - vigorously advocating for a policy that is detrimental to your goals. In the seventies and eighties, environmentalists chose the numbers they liked to suggest that nuclear is "bad". By doing so, they insured that the US would be powered primarily by burning fossil fuels for the forty years since. Had they tried to be objective in their analysis, they probably would have become supporters of nuclear as an alternative to fossil fuels forty years sooner, and we might not have any coal-fired plants today.

I believe that's one of many names for the same company.