So I guess Torvalds won when Microsoft became a Linux kernel developer?

More like tests keep showing that it IS working, and nobody is sure why. Either the problem is with the test, or there's something else happening that we don't understand, but either way, nobody is sure yet what's going on.

I think it's likely that the test is faulty, but they need to figure out why or how the test is faulty.

The round trip power loss in the batteries is 8%. The charging efficiency isn't relevant, because solar during the day would be wasted/lost anyhow. If we assume the discharge loss is half that at 4%, then instead of getting 7 kWh per day, you're getting 6.72 kWh per day. It would still take around 6 years to pay off. Just 6.1 years instead of 5.9 years.

A far bigger impact would be loss in capacity over time.

It depends on how much you pay for power. Say you pay $3000 (it'd be more after the installation costs and markup, but let's just pick that). That lets you move 7 kWh of power from off-peak (when you're not using it) to peak (when you need it). You're therefore saving 7 kWh per day that would otherwise be pulled from the grid. Say you're paying $0.20 per kWh. You would save $511 per year, so the battery pack would pay for itself after roughly 6 years. The remaining four years, it's actual savings.

Of course, the cost would be more than $3k, and who knows what your power company charges. Mine charges way less than $0.20, but I've got one of the lowest power costs in the world, so it's not really a good comparison to a place like California.

A single unit does't need to power the entire home. You've got the grid for the rest. If you want to go off-grid, they're stackable up to nine units.

No, you turn them all on at the same time and you draw the extra power from the grid. You're not going off the grid on a single 7 kWh battery pack. If you want to do that, they're stackable, up to nine of them.

Haskell is really far from fringe, and it's what's commonly used to teach functional programming in schools.

That said, it's terrible and I hate it.

Yes, but if something goes wrong in-flight, and you lose the approach plate, it's not something that is necessarily dangerous because the controller can provide the same information. However, if your emergency handbook is on the tablet and you lose it, then you're in a real bind.

They still carry a paper copy of their emergency handbook, the one with all the emergency procedures in it. The iPads failing in the air wouldn't be a safety issue so long as the radio didn't fail, since I don't think there's any information in the iPad that the controller can't talk the aircraft through.

Return to gate to get on wifi to fix it vs return to gate to get backup paper documents. Either way they'd have been in the same boat.

And how many of those phones have been sold? Making sapphire screens is not impossible, it's just very hard to do in large quantities. When you sell as many phones as Apple does, you can't afford to let one component bottleneck production.

For varying values of "easy", sure. It's still not easy enough to be practical for use as a mass market smartphone screen. Possible, but not practical.

Just like how AT&T eventually succeeded in buying T-Mobile, right?

Wheeler is 69 years old. I would imagine his next post will be retirement. That may play a factor in his willingness to rock the boat.

Sort of, but I'm pretty sure you can't switch between networks mid-call. Certainly not in Canada, because none of the carriers here support call handoffs while roaming. Calls drop when you switch networks.

Google's phone seems to be very much a data-only cloud solution where everything runs through Google Hangouts. I believe the idea is to be completely network-independent by doing everything over IP, such that they can do stuff like seamless handoffs without needing support from the carrier.