While we're talking about Samsung, cheaters still find ways to cheat benchmarks.. I wonder if Nvidia could sue over stealing their benchmark cheating methods too...

Good thing there are more than two phone manufacturers, eh?

Why does this have to be Samsung OR Apple?

... Mac OS X 10.9.5 -> Mac OS X 10.10.0?

Your "well established fact" is only one because you didn't put a timetable in place. Yes, the sun will turn into a red giant and cook the planet into a cinder in a few billion years. That also gives us a couple hundred million years to figure it out before it really becomes a thing.

Were you referring to some other factor, because your blanket statement of nonsense didn't get specific...

Yeah, because Slashdot hasn't been a libertarian hangout for the last 15 years or anything.

There's ways to mitigate it. I'm not familiar with Azure, but I do work in Amazon EC2 all day - we spread our virtual private cloud across 3 availability zones in one datacenter, and use a VPN tunnel connected to another virtual private cloud in another datacenter on the other side of the continent. Because everything for standing up instances is automated, we can rebuild our whole platform in about 30 minutes including data and applications on the other side of the country.

Yes, there is still points of failure, but we're not running anything in AWS that absolutely has to be up for 99.999%. If something vomits, we can take a day or two to get it back. We're far more worried about security than we are about system availability.

The grid providers can, and do, charge connection fees.

If the fee they are charging is not sufficient to maintain the grid, they should probably be talking to their local PUC about that.

And what do you do about the 14 hours of no sun that the northern hemisphere is experiencing right now?

Solar panels don't do jack shit when the sun is on the other side of the planet. There will either need to be a massive increase in energy storage, or you'll always need some type of auxiliary generation.

Or I guess we can all stop having light, heat, and electricity after the sun goes down, which should be especially pleasant in Michigan and New Hampshire in January.

Gas taxes are usage fees that pay for road maintenance. Or, at least, they were before expensive mass transit projects started getting construction capital from fuel tax revenues.

Electric vehicles do just as much damage to the roadways as they use them as the non-electric cars. However, there's no convenient way to assess a usage fee that people will accept - mileage taxes have been roundly rejected every time they've been proposed.

Are you saying that our roads should deteriorate even more than they already are if mass adoption of EVs was to take place? The Interstate Highway Trust Fund is already experiencing solvency issues as it is, due to being raided for billion dollar rail projects that do little to ease congestion.

People that buy an EV are going to buy an EV regardless of if there is a road use tax applied. Nobody says "Oh, I was going to buy that $50,000 electric car, but that extra $2,000 tax added on just priced it out of my range." You either have the money or credit to buy it, or you don't; and that extra bit of tax isn't going to make even one person change their mind, considering how much fuel they won't be buying over the life of the vehicle.

Good thing most power bills have both a generation, delivery, and connection charges then? It conveniently takes care of your argument if you are doing any type of on-site generation and using the grid for backup. You pay for what you use, as well as kick in for the maintenance of the grid connection.

Step back from the pitcher of Kool Aid, please.

Who builds the robots? Who installs the robots? You think that current IC-powered cars aren't built by robots? Who makes the parts that the robots use in assembly?

Mechanical things break, and you need someone to fix it. Just because it's a car powered by a battery and electric motors doesn't mean that all of a sudden wheel bearings don't degrade and need replacement, and steering knuckles don't need to be lubricated. And, of course, we all know that the batteries will last forever and never be changed out. Oh, and tires last forever regardless of the source of energy causing them to turn. And brake pads? They don't wear AT ALL if you are using an electric motor rather than a petroleum engine.

Is Tesla changing the game a bit? Sure, just like every disruptive technology that came before them. Is Tesla going to put every car stealership and mechanic out of work? No, that's fucking ridiculous. And you know that, which is why you posted as an anonymous coward.

Last point - you're on the Internet and it would literally take seconds to look up Chernobyl to spell it properly. If you're going to demagogue something, please at least get the basic spelling right.

Here's one that isn't as large as some, because of the convenient river that runs directly from coal country to their furnaces, and it's STILL HUGE. You can see this thing from miles away.

Oh, and this isn't an eyesore at all, especially not all that crap blowing out of the foreground exhaust stack...

Not to defend something I'm too lazy to scroll up to read, but coal is the incumbent energy generation technology. One needs not mention coal in a discussion of electrical generation, because it's what's being replaced by *anything else* being discussed.

Yeah, I'm so glad that this is upwind of the city I live in. At least it's downriver, so if that dike between the settling pond on the left and the Ohio River bursts, the drinking water... well, MY city's drinking water... won't be poisoned. Sorry, Louisville, you're fucked!

What, you're saying that this is an eyesore?