That Russian politician was part of the Yeltsin administration that Putin had promised immunity to when he took control. This killing is very scary politically for what it means.

They had hot baths because otherwise they didn't bathe.

China might have supported Vietnam during the US war but Vietnam and China have gone to war and not just once and if you go far enough back in history you will find China and Vietnam have been enemies far longer than they've been friends. IIRC China has actually invaded and occupied vietnam several times.

You appear to be unaware of how power is priced. I suggest you research the matter before you make comments such as the one you did.

Here's just a few things to think about.

Power prices fluctuate all day long. Residential prices are regulated at the average price the utility pays for power. This is frequently well above the price they pay for the power in all but the one or two hours a day where there is peak use.

Solar power generates the bulk of it's use when commercial power rates are the highest. So the utility is paying the customer 12 cents a kilowatt but then selling it to the business down the road for 32 cents.

Power is purchased in two ways. There are long term contracts where pricing is very low but the utility is required to take all the power. And then their is peaking power where payment is made on a supply-demand model. For example, the utility purchases their base load at somewhere around 4-5 cents a kwh, but peaking prices could reach 20+ cents.

Double Irish with a Dutch Sandwich to be precise.

Instead you need to compare the costs and benefits of legalized dope

The only comparison that should be made is, does the guy smoking/drinking "X" impede on your personal rights. If the answer is no there shouldn't even be a law on the subject. Alcohol and drug prohibition do not work because they are trying to protect people from themselves. Prohibition actually makes the problem far worse by not only increasing the desire to do them, but putting crime networks behind the highly lucrative trade and sale.

Prohibition has failed twice now, it doesn't work and you'd do well to acknowledge that fact. You'd also do well to get off the Nanny state bandwagon.

Budda also abandoned his wife and children to find "enlightenment".

In the US the maximum fraud liability for any fraud reported within 24 hours of discovering the card is lost (not from when it was lost) is $50.

This is federal law, they try to stick you with anything more than $50 and they would be up for some serious penalties and as a result they won't. Most just wave the transactions because alienating a customer for $50 isn't worth it.

It doesn't matter what the technology or fraud prevention is because they simply can't charge the customer if the customer reports the fraud when it's discovered.

Geez you could at least READ the summary. I know its the basic assumption that people didn't read the article but you would think you'd do more than the editors of slashdot and actually read the summary.

eDP v1.4a will be able to support 8K displays, thanks to a segmented panel architecture known as Multi-SST Operation (MSO).

Right there in the summary exactly what you repeated like it wasn't in there.

Version 1 Neatreciepts scanner. It's a rebranded common brand with a changed USB ID. Linux recognizes it fine but on windows it's a nightmare to get it working. I have lots of examples like this where I can use it on linux but not on a new version of windows.

The FBI provides a grant for the local police department to buy these because it's a legal grey area. The department purchases and runs them at the request of the FBI who reimburse the expenses. The FBI gets a copy of the data. The FBI is likely required by law to get a warrant to use these, where the locals aren't. So the FBI gets the locals to run the stuff then collects the data from the locals in normal legal data sharing agreements. (this is where the FOI requests fall flat, they should be requesting the financial agreement data between the FBI and locals to show that the FBI not only purchased the stingrays but pays the locals to run them).

This end runs around the FBI's restriction. The FOI requests are a serious threat to the program by exposing the FBI deliberately breaking the law so the FBI declares national security and covers it up even though the vast majority (and likely all) of the times these are used is against drug crime, not terrorism.

Declaring national security to avoid disclosing information is an end run around open government and allows people in government to break the law and violate peoples rights without the fear of disclosure. Every time embarrassing information or evidence of crime lays in data that should be public someone in government will declare it secret on national security grounds.

Back track all you want, the only that fits the items 1-6 that you listed as applying to all electrical storage is batteries.

Apparently you believe the only "good" method is one where there is no cost and 100% recovery. You must also be under the assumption that power generation itself is 100% efficient and free of all negatives.

For storage to work it must only be able to displace power from base load pricing to peak pricing at a margin that exceeds costs. Regardless of how "poor" you think that method is the fact is there are hundreds of technologies that can not only do this profitably but with very little operating costs. The hydro pumping method has been in active use for over 50 years at a particular location in the US.

But go ahead and be a negative nancy for all I care, just don't deny your list and your assumption was batteries because no one looking at that list is going to believe otherwise. Don't you wish slashdot would allow you to go back and edit that list so you can put in all the things you learned about when you actually googled energy storage technology and learned about some of the proposed methods? That way you could cover up the fact that you ranted off about something you knew nothing about.

Who said the only energy storage is the batteries you are talking about?

They've been storing power in various areas for 50+ years. The most common is to pump water up to a reservoir then use hydro power to draw out the stored potential energy when needed.

Storage isn't a difficult problem, it is just something we've never tried because carbon based power has always been so cheap. Once we put our minds to it I have no doubt storage will become easy to satisfy. In fact they're already doing it in Germany with thousands of good and inventive ways to store power. Ultimately I don't believe storing energy is going to be any more difficult than generating it currently. Once we build the market for stored energy there will be all kinds of methods put into practice whether that's as simple as storing potential energy in the form of water at elevation or some other method such as fly wheels or even chemical batteries.

You shouldn't assume that the only possible energy storage is 50 year old technology.

Solar's production curve does not match the peak user curve of electrical power.

That is a complete fabrication. Every single time someone pulls out those numbers they are talking about RESIDENTIAL power consumption, not overall total power consumption. This fits the power company agenda because they don't care at all about residential power, they make very little money on it. What they care about is commercial power where companies pay based on demand and that demand pricing is where the power companies make serious money.

Total demand does peak when solar does. That scares the power companies to death because if the peak is carved off due to low price solar energy providing a cheap excess base load during daytime then the power companies lose all their peak pricing. It could end up shifting the power demand curve such that peak power pricing is at night when there is almost no commercial or industrial load. That's what keeps the electric company directors and CEO's up at night and why they are trying desperately to discourage residential solar installations. When there are enough residential solar installations the power curve shifts rather dramatically, power during the day in Germany is sometimes negative during sunny summer days because there is so much feed in power from solar. I don't like how they've structured the subsidies in Germany but even without them we're seeing something similar in Hawaii. Solar carves off peak daytime pricing. America's industrial base would be significantly more competitive if power was free during the day.

Microsoft needs SaaS for their profit to keep going up. They switched businesses to essentially the same thing a long time ago with the site license.

I really don't think it will be successful with consumers unless it's free. There are alternatives these days. I'll never forget Balmer laughing at the Chromebooks, now microsoft is so afraid of them they are trying to produce similar products that basically bring back the netbook (which is NOT what a chromebook is). The Microsoft ship can't turn this quickly, especially with what it will do to revenue. I expect whatever they do will fail abysmally with everyone but businesses.