Nobody who advocates the gold standard (of whom I'm not one, just playing a bit of devil's advocate) believes we should be running around with pockets full of gold doubloons. The gold standard doesn't mean the currency is gold, it means the currency is backed by gold - that is, whoever has issued the currency holds enough gold in reserve to exchange your dollars for bullion.

The reason isn't usually "gold, yay!"; it's proposed as a means of controlling inflation by tying money to something governments cannot manipulate (e.g. scarce physical matter). Bitcoins are usually appreciated by the same crowd, for the same reason, because governments cannot manipulate maths either.

Both can be true. If the price of energy goes up, people are going to start looking at alternative ways of spending less, that may not have been economical in the past. As power costs ramp up, the time it takes for the cost of insulation to pay for itself drops, making it more attractive.

The production figures in this article are all given as percentages of demand - not the actual amount generated. There's two reasons Germany could suddenly be producing an excess of energy: supply has increased, or demand has dropped. A quick Google shows German production has dropped 6% in the period 2004-12 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E... ).

So the reason isn't that Germany's renewable plants are producing an abundance of power - it's that people are demanding less power; presumably because they cannot afford prices that are among the most expensive in the world ( http://www.contactenergy.co.nz... )

A phone that can get to the dialler to make a phone call would be "working". So you're not willing to acknowledge something as "almost working" until it's actually fully functional?

And apparently, Anonymous Cowards have succumbed to ignorance.

Cloud != Desktop Remote Access.

None of the fission plants in Fukushima ever went boom.

This is exactly the sort of response the OP's post is pre-empting. Germany hasn't suddenly changed their energy production to solar. For the vast majority of the year, they've changed it to coal. On occasion, they generate 50% of their power from solar. On average, they generate a tiny fraction of that (5% was bandied around upthread; have no idea from where that number was sourced though), with coal picking up the load.

The OPs point is that people like you shouldn't point to single instances of non-representative power generation, and then claim it's a revolution in solar power.

Oh, and the price of that power is triple that of energy in the US.

Your definition of "significant" seems to be pretty low-bar, especially when talking about the human species as a whole - as opposed to, say, a small community in one of the least populated states of a single country.

We are? Name one.

It's a good thing that the prisoners rights were respected, regardless of the problem being an IT one at root.
It's a bad thing that an IT problem is causing cops to be unable to file paperwork that would result in proper processing of prisoners

Web browser maker decides to create a disqus competitor, instead of working on their web browser.

Speaking as someone in a country that *does* offer equal parental leave - it doesn't. Men are less likely to take advantage of parental leave than women, even if it is available. Sure, a week or two around the birth (like I did when my daughter was born), but many women take much longer.

I'm not sure they can do that. I think subpoenas need to have a "target" - you can subpoena Fred Smith for any emails he sent; you can subpoena John Doe for any emails sent, and fill in the correct name when you've been able to determine who it is, but you can't subpoena "anyone who sent emails to this address", because you have no way to serve such a subpoena.

Google had better reject this order, or it's all downhill from here.

Germany orders Google to remove all mentions of Nazis. Saudi Arabia orders Google to remove all mentions of alcohol and extra-marital sex. The US orders Google to remove all mentions of the leaks published by Snowden/Manning/Assange.

How long until nothing is left, when every country in the world can expunge whatever they don't like?

Unicode is supposed to be universal, and it has more than enough codepoints to spare - why is there a problem adding it? I'm sure having it in a standard encoding would prove useful to anyone who is trying to translate Linear A, or to archeologists/historians looking to digitize fragments we do have, etc.