Seems to me that any ISP that redirects browser HTTP requests becomes liable to suit from the customers - for substantially more than $20.

Microsoft now likes to act like they are an open source company that believes in open standards.

But they DO. It's step one - embrace:

1) Embrace
2) Extend
3) Extinguish
4) Profit.

Well, they cannot become martyrs by just dropping dead. At least they have to kill some unbelievers as well...

Actualy, they CAN become martyrs by dropping dead - after deliberately NOT leaving the area of a plague and thus avoiding the spreading it, at the cost of their own lives.

Martyrdom doen't just come from being killed in a religious war.

Another way to become a martyr, for instance, is to die in childbirth.

Yet another is to die while defending your home and/or family from robbers or other attackers (as my wife pointed out to a crook who was trying to extort "taxes" for a local gang.)

According to a report I saw (following a link from the Drudge Report yesterday):

1)The early symptoms of Ebola are very similar to those of Malaria, to the point that people with malaria are being thrown into the ebola quarantine camps. (Also: Many of the people who HAVE ebola, or their support network, may THINK thay have malaria.)
2) The camp ran out of gloves and other protective gear - leaving the staff and patients unable to clean up after and avoid contagin from the body fluid spillages of the actual ebola patients. Come in with SUSPECTED ebola and you soon have ebola for sure.

That, alone, would make it rational for someone not yet sick or mildly sick, incarcerated in the camp, to break out and hide out.

3) Stories are circulating in the area that ebola is a myth and the oppressive government factions/first worlders/take your pick of enemies are using this story, plus the odd malaria case here and there, to create death camps and commit genocide in a way that gives them plausible deniability.

That idea, of course, can lead to mass action by some of the local population to "rescue" their fellows and sabotage the camps.

The whole think is a real-world example of the cautionary tale "The Boy who Cried 'Wolf'". When the officials lie to the people for their own benefit, repeatedly, until the people come to expect it, the people won't believe them when they are telling the truth about a real threat - and all suffer.

Ebola is one mutation away from being airborne transmissable. It already happened with Ebola Reston -- fortunately for us all, that turned out to be transmissable to monkeys but not humans.

I've heard reports that it may have happened with this one, too.

It doesn't have to be as GOOD at doing airborne transmission as, say, the common cold, to be a BIG problem.

A single home isn't a very good proxy for a regional or even national scale grid.

With your house example, the only options are solar and generator. In reality you would have more than these two options. For example, add wind to the mix. You can argue that it's not 100% but it will cover a lot of run time at night, saving you battery capacity and reducing the required over-sizing of your PV system. Perhaps instead of 400% oversizing on PV, you only need 200% PV+Wind oversize.

Now add in something else... biogas perhaps. That covers you a little bit more and you can again reduce your oversizing.

Now add geothermal, hydro, solar-thermal (which works at night), and you start to easily fill in the gaps.

The US had 1,153 billion watts of generating capacity as of 2011 (Nameplate ratings, spreadsheet) and used ~3,797 billion kilowatthours that year. Naively we can say that if all our powerplants ran at 100% nameplate capacity, we could generate an entire year's worth of electrical energy in just about 3300 hours, or about 4 months... giving us a roughly 300% oversize on our electrical generating capacity *now*.

The key, of course, is that none of those plants are operating 24/7/365, and rarely are any of them operating at peak capacity.
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Doesn't make sense: Coal power has actually decreased since 2000 when it was first decided that Germany should ween themselves off of Nuclear power, and the slight increase in coal power in the past two years is only a fraction of retired nuclear capacity, both in total and as a percent of total generation.

Germany's renewable energy push is what's filling that gap. If it wasn't for the nuclear phase-out, they'd probably have lost a third of their coal plants instead.
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"A short distance" often being across national boarders.

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Except that you are. My bad for not scrolling down a bit more:

"My point is that hydro is essentially distributed solar power"

You are adding nothing but smart-ass pedantry to this topic. Fuck off.
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That one project comes nowhere near the total scope of the upgrades planned an in progress. Despite the delays, work is in fact continuing even per your own article.

For a glimpse at the larger picture, consider:

http://energy.gov/oe/downloads...

Google search indeed, Mr. Coward.
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Germany is actually a net exporter - Their total gross production (Bruttoerzeugung insgesamt) for 2013 was 629.0 TWh, while their total consumption (Brutto-Inlandsstromverbrauch) was 596.0 TWh for that same year... resulting in a net import of -33 TWh, aka an export. Of course, these are year averages and they almost certainly import during some times of the year, and when they do most of it comes from France, Denmark, Sweden and Czech Republic.

I also do think it's somewhat unfair to use numbers all the way back to 1990. If we are interested in the impact of renewables, then it would be more appropriate to go back to 2001 at the earliest, when the Renewables Energy Act went into effect. That's when they started getting serious about it.

We can instead consider 1990-2000 as a baseline decade to compare the 2001-2013 decade to, in terms of growth by fuel type.

In the 1990-2000 decade, coal decreased and was supplanted by nuclear and natural gas. In the 2001-2013 numbers, total coal decreases slightly overall but nuclear drops considerably post-Fukushima. Natural gas ramped up to nearly double mid-decade but dropped back down to about 20% higher than it was in 2001. The resulting gaps between these decreased outputs and increased demand is filled entirely by renewables which nearly quadrupled in capacity to become the second largest energy source in the country, just a hair's width (15 TWh) behind soft coal.
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Are you going to be one of those assholes who claims all energy is nuclear energy, because the sun uses nuclear reactions?

If so, please remove yourself from the conversation.
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I don't get that impression at all. He makes a point about being able to predict loads and generation, which strongly suggests that the strategy is to plan well in advance where the power comes from and where it goes to.

Rather, transmission corridors are strategically located to link power plants to the grid. Power plants are built where they have the resources and infrastructure to support them - near waterways, for example, or close to their source of fuel.

Not entirely true. Utilities (who are resellers) prioritize the lowest cost power sources first, and only buy more expensive power if necessary.

Here's a quick example, which I chose because it's germane to the overall topic of renewable integration.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Nope. A good portion of my electricity comes from a coal plant upstate, but there are gas turbine power stations just a few miles from here... they only turn on those turbines for peak shaving, because they cost more per KWh to run. You can tell if they're running or not because you can see the cooling towers steaming up from the highway.

Power comes from the cheapest available source, not the closest. Not all power plants operate equally, or even all the time.
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http://www.ag-energiebilanzen....

It's in German, of course. The key things you're looking for are the second and third rows (Braunkohle and Steinkohle) which are Lignite and Anthracite, respectively. Upport portion of the table is in TWh (Billion KWh) and lower table is percent of total generation by fuel type.
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First, please realize that right now we as a country are in the process of rebuilding the entire power transmission system. That's happening no matter what, and it needs to happen no matter what.

In terms of the HVAC thing, which was just an example but one that seems to have stuck with you disproportionally so whatever... you would need to reduce the duty cycle to reduce power consumption, agreed? You would not have to turn it off for hours at a time - the entire concept here is that you could spread that reduction across a large population so that no single group bears the entire burden. We could, in theory, reduce electrical loads from AC units by 33% by disabling one in three units each for twenty minutes per hour.

As for "getting that power to flow the way he describes" - what is it you're imagining is happening NOW? You have power plants dotted all over the place, each with varying output, and power flows in any particular direction at any time. Nobody is proposing we instantaneously divert megawatts halfway across the country on a moment's notice - such a thing would be entirely unnecessary. However, diverting megawatts - even gigawatts - between substations and across counties and states is something that happens routinely right now, planned and unplanned. Nothing that can't be handled.
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