For example, I read a study a while back that pointing solar panels West of due South resulted in a much better match between electricity use and demand

That's an interesting point. From a pure kWh point of view facing them a bit to the east gets you better numbers since the crisp morning air is clearer than the late afternoon haze.

If you have batteries it becomes a balance between storage losses in the morning versus irradiation losses in the afternoon.

GP completely ignores the daily demand curve, especially in areas like southern California with a million A/C units humming away at noon, which lays the rest of his arguement to waste.

And total fail? 100-200% growth year on year certainly doesn't sound like fail to me.

stop blaming this thing on Greenpeace. clue-bat: they aren't the ones blocking renewable energy in this country.

I wonder if Debian's default /bin/sh being dash instead of bash reduces the attack surface somewhat.

Nope. I just tested dash on a Debian system which hadn't been upgraded yet. Dash is vulnerable too.

On an upgraded Debian dash is not vulnerable.

> If you're going to peg your renewable hopes on solar or wind,
> you're going to have a bad time.

Er, so you're saying Australia suffers from lack of sunshine and bushfire-loving winds?

you've fallen into a fallacious trap -- what makes you think the sets overlap?

are you really saying that everyone without a background in electro-magnetics is evil and should be punished, because you knew a dumb jerk in grade school?

or are you just beating up the next weakest kid after you to make yourself feel better about yourself? (and so become the bully)

I dropped my iphone 5 from 2 meters (i leave it to the Americans to make out how many badger's kidneys it is) to a hard, stone floor. Glass intact.

Says the guy who still lives in a castle.

the commas just clutter up the natural spaces.

I happen to live near one of the main weather stations which was caught up in that FOX News brouhaha and happen to know about the local history. tl;dr as usual, the whole story was all a load of vaporous bullshit. And apparently it worked since you took the bait.

One hundred years ago the local weather station was established outside the harbor master's office down by the docks (and the water). The city grew up and forty years ago or so the weather station was moved 500 feet up a hill to outside the local observatory, which is surrounded by forest.

Moving a temperature sensor away from a large body of water, out of a "heat island" of now-paved urban roads, out of a canyon of concrete and glass buildings, and to a higher elevation will all change the readings of the sensor. If you want to keep a continuous record before and after moving, before and after various construction projects and re-roofing nearby, and before and after population changes, you're going to have to figure out and apply a correction factor for each of these things.

There is nothing particularly unusual about our local weather station's story which hasn't been repeated in most cities around the world. So it is not surprising that noisy long term time series need to be cleaned up before being fed into sensitive predictive models. It would be dishonest not to if you know there was a change in the sampling history which required it.

Phil Zimmermann has already done all this. It's called ZRTP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's really not that hard at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-the-Record_Messaging#Authentication

and it comes with a very good implementation and pedigree,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZRTP

Here's a video demo of ZRTP in use:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=udBBDHT-_UA

So as far as the user is concerned, there's not reason it can't be dead simple.

Don't buy a telescope. Instead, get a good pair of 10x50
binoculars and an intro astronomy book with pictures.

Specifically, buy them The Stars: A New Way to See Them by Hans A. Rey, the creator of Curious George.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Star...

The reviews on the back cover are worth the trouble of reading, if you can make them out in the Amazon image. Hell, just the names of the authors of the reviews on the back cover are worth the trouble of reading.

It is quite simply the best popular book on observational astronomy ever written.

One politician said it failed... all other reports of the project
(even very recently) have said it's been a success. The actual article
says they are convening a panel of experts to consider whether to go
back to Microsoft, so despite the misleading summary here, nothing has
been decided.

When has there ever been a "panel of experts" assembled by a politician
which was not stacked with "experts" guaranteed to deliver a predetermined
result? They're the consultants of the public service world.

Hell, one of the famous Microsoft Halloween Documents even discusses this
exact scenario: stack the speakers in a public panel with ones known to
favor your side and to the public the discussion and conclusion looks "fair
and balanced".

Ah yes the metric system. The premier international system of internet trolling, quantified.

too bad /. doesn't have a +1 'Excellent Rant' mod option

Alsa support is now dropped too. You have to use PulseAudio. ew yuck.