How nice.

Except that right now, this very second, net metering policies mean that average non-solar customers are seeing their bills increase.

As much as I don't want to validate trolling by responding to it: many of Martin's kills are done specifically to play with expectations. We killed the presumptive protagonist (Ned Stark). Then the audience realizes this story is about the sone and his revenge. So we kill him. But at least we know who the villan is. So Joffrey dies.

I haven't watched or read the series beyond some individual scenes so I can't say if that's an accurate assesment of it, but if it is, then it's evidence for the granparent's position. "Playing with expectations" is a gimmick. It can work once or perhaps even twice, but if the entire work revolves around it, that strongly suggests the author relies on constant shocks because they have nothing else up their sleeve.

I'm sure your novels are better.

Just like everyone who complains about Obama/Bush/whatever better have a succesful term or two of US presidency behind them?

Launch three identical, reasonably sized chemically propulsed spacecrafts into 300km orbits in KSP. Launch them into orbital planes spaced 120 degrees apart. Your goal: dock all three together. Use mechjeb and dpai if you wish. It'll dispel any such myths in one evening.

That's precisely the mental model mistake that everyone makes. If all you've got is reaction mass and relatively low Isp thrusters, the requisite orbital momentum changes make any sort of extended maneouvering impossible. If your opponent is in an orbit perpendicular to yours, good luck. It'll be trivial for them to avoid you forever until you rotate your orbital plane. With chemical engines without on-orbit refueling, you can pull that trick off once or twice and that's it. And if you have multiple opponents and they happen to understand that they should have launched in multiple orbital planes, they'll be pretty much invulnerable to any sort of conventional (chemical) propulsion pursuit by a single craft.

Call me silly, but does Vimeo actually, you know, reliably work?. Every other time I get across a Vimeo link, there's something wrong either with the link itself, or the web player, etc. I don't know what Youtube does right that Vimeo doesn't, but for me, the bad UX just doesn't justify using Vimeo. And this has nothing to do with anything that Google has any influence over, BTW, I'm using neither Chrome nor Chromium, and I'm not following google search result links either.

They are - the updates, at least. The factory image is compressed and stored in a read-only partition. Deleting anything from it is equivalent to making your own "rom" (as that's what the system partition constitutes, in a large part).

Hangouts is a conferencing tool. It's most definitely not something that was designed for teens. It's a Google alternative to Skype. It's also not true that the crapware always runs. Sure, it's part of the factory image, but it never needs any additional space, and it's stored compressed on that image. Simply uninstall any updates to it and disable it. Done and gone.

Yes, it's the spec's fault, because it sets up the user for silent but catastrophic failure, doing something that is not in any obvious way related to the problem.

Even if it does, you're basically allowing the introduction of functions into the scope of your script with both names and bodies defined completely by untrusted input. It's insane.

You can disable pretty much all Google services and they won't occupy any RAM (System Memory) when you do so. I thought that was like Android 101. Just because those apps are stored on the Flash doesn't mean they have to be running. You also don't need to update them if you don't use them - go to Settings, Apps, go through all Google apps that you don't use and [Uninstall Updates] followed by [Disable] on each one of them. You need to disable automatic app updates as well, otherwise the apps will get updated and will occupy the Internal Memory (FLASH).

The thing is: Android makes crapware rather unintrusive, as far as I can tell. On said $100 tablet. If Windows crapware was so unintrusive, I doubt I'd care much about it. Yeah, I've got Nook, Google+, a couple others. Big deal. Those apps don't have to be updated, they can be disabled, and they won't consume any resources other than being present in the factory image that's on the device anyway.

I'm now convinced that you're "electricity comes from the socket" kind of a person, that genuinely neither appreciates, nor is willing to listen to people that ensure that electricity does in fact come from the socket when needed.

After all, if it works now, why wouldn't it work in the future? Who cares if this new technology is utterly incompatible with what we have? They managed to make it work so far, so surely, they'll keep making it work, no matter how much the strain increases.

And of course, my payment for their services should not increase. They are making due with the current one, surely they'll do with it in the future.

Yeah, but if you give away more free stuff than you ever get back in revenue you will be losing money. This is what Ireland did. They got less than a thousand jobs out of it, and would lose them in an instant if they ever tried to make Apple or Google pay for what they actually use of public resources. Selling for less than cost is BAD BUSINESS.

I think that the requirement to ship recent Android versions was long time coming and is sorely needed. The other applications aren't that much of a drain, I don't think, other than taking up some of the "native" storage. Low end devices (say a $100 tablet) that often only have 1G of built-in storage will be thus strained more. Yet storage prices keep falling, so I don't see it as that much of a problem. Cost-wise, soldered-on flash is anyway cheaper than a microSD card that has to have extra packaging and a separate controller chip.

No. They use extremely complex algorithms developed specifically for the task of predicting spikes based on detailed historic usage.

Back in the day before this, they used to do this by hand. Back then, it was indeed something of a cross of engineering skill, technology and black magic with tarot cards.

That's one of the main reasons why blackouts were far more common back in the day.

In the end, you seem to assume that "well, it seems they're doing okay so far, so everything is fine". That is exactly what a person driving on worn out tyres says. Until the next time it rains and he hydroplanes into the nearest tree.