It's nonsense. The inverters used to feed energy back into the grid are heavily regulated and must be certified before being connected by an electrician.

Seems like a high gain directional antenna would be much easier, cheaper and controllable.

Cats are the most contrary animals on the planet. They figure out what you want them to do, and then do the opposite.

No CEO wants a dam to collapse, they just don't give a shit if one does as long as they keep making money in the short term. Rather than paying to fix it they would prefer to just hope it doesn't happen this quarter before their bonus is calculated, and maybe spend a little money protecting themselves from being blamed or on a worthless insurance policy that will never pay out.

The CEOs and anyone else in charge has already made sure that can never happen to them. They employ a variety of tricks to avoid being blamed for anything.

For example, they might hire a consultancy firm to tell them if what they are doing is safe. The job of the consultancy firm is to tell the people paying them what they want to hear, and maybe make a few easy low-cost recommendations so that the company can show how hard it is trying. Their contract explicitly states that they don't stand by any of it, and if the worst happens it definitely isn't the consultancy company's fault. The CEOs can say that they took the "best" advice available to them, because obviously they are clueless morons who know nothing about engineering so just take on what people tell them at face value. Suddenly there is no-one to blame, at least from a legal stand point. I mean, you could try, if you had millions of dollars and a couple of decades to fight it out with them, but you would probably lose.

At best you could try to pass a law that holds the company responsible, but getting those who were really to blame though greed and disregard for safety is nigh on impossible. They spend a great deal of time and money making sure of that.

The reason it costs so much more in the UK is that we require the land to be returned to its original state, ready for re-use. In most other countries, including the US, they just leave the reactors in place and encase them in concrete. The idea is to let them sit there for at least a few hundred years too cool before doing anything with them.

A government planning to do something a few hundred years in the future is something that has never happened before, so it's not clear how that is going to work out.

It's about 5x as much as they make on a CD sale, maybe 20x as much as on a download.

If you can use the heat directly it makes sense, although in that case solar heating would be more efficient. Still, if your solar PV can run the fridge/freezer a few degrees cooler during the day and then allow it to warm back up over night that is a fairly efficient way to use the available energy.

It's basically the conversion back to electricity you want to avoid.

In the long run solar thermal will be a very useful option because it is much cleaner than coal, gas and nuclear. As those tail off a few solar thermal plants will be useful in certain parts of the world.

It's not always just about the bottom line.

The US government should just do the same. Offer subsidy when buying US made panels. It would both support US companies and allow individuals to afford the panels for themselves.

It could easily pay for itself with a loan scheme. Loan the home owner the cost of the panels and have it paid back with a proportion of what the panels generate. That way they still make money, or at least reduce their bills, with the panels and the government eventually gets its money back. The main barrier to entry (the high initial outlay) is removed.

That is essentially what some EU countries do, except that they often force the energy company to loan the money. That might be a step too far for the US though.

Before someone complains that the scheme is unfair, consider that every watt of solar power is a watt less coal or gas or nuclear that needs to be generated. It improves everyone's health and reduces their tax burden, so even if you don't have panels yourself they still help you.

That's an oversimplification of what is happening.

Take a TV series that I decide to download instead of watching on TV. If it was on TV I would have DVRed it anyway and skipped the ads. Is not watching the adverts unethical or immoral? Few people pay close attention to them.

I download Game of Thrones. To watch it on TV I'd have to buy an expensive cable/satellite TV package for one show, so sorry but it isn't worth that much to me. HBO isn't available in my country so even though I had paid an excessive amount I'd still have to skip the adverts on the crappy channel that shows it here. I could wait and get the BluRay, but I don't rent media on principal and the option to buy isn't available as all formats it is released on are licences with DRM. So, either they get exactly nothing from me, or I pirate the show and spend some money on merchandise and the physical books. My interest spurs others to become interested too. There is also the added benefit to society in general that I watch GoT related stuff on YouTube, thus creating gainful employment for the people who make them.

I'd also point out that there is actually a need, just a small one, for me to see GoT. They rely a lot on viral marketing and creating a buzz. A lot of my friends and work colleagues like to talk about it on a Friday at lunch time when we go to the pub. If I want to participate I need to be watching it. I used to have this problem at school a lot - we only had basic over-the-air TV so all the other kids were watching music channels I had no access to, and I felt excluded because I couldn't be part of the conversation. If your aim is mass market appeal and social/viral advertising, you bare some responsibility for making your work available at a reasonable price.

I recently bought Daft Punk's Random Access Memories on CD. Didn't rush out and buy it at full price. Is it unethical to wait for the price to fall? What about buying it second hand? Lending it to a friend? What if the friend then buys their own copy?

The issue is complex and it isn't a simple matter of right or wrong. There is fault on both sides.

It's not a good idea for the under 30 crowd because often at that age their eyes are still changing and if they get surgery it may well need re-doing a decade later. It's only worth it once your vision has settled down, typically around the mid 30s to mid 40s.

It is illegal to use such data in the EU. They can store it on the user's behalf (cloud service), but to use it themselves they need permission of the subject of the data which clearly they don't have. Building "shadow profiles" is illegal here.

Indeed, and in fact what F-Secure found is that the phone sense the IMSI and SIM's phone number to a server via a HTTP request. The lack of encryption is rather poor but in terms of what data it sent it is actually far less than what Apple was caught doing.