This is just errant bigotry against Texas. If you actually knew anything about he state that's creating 75% of the new jobs in the entire US, you'd realize that there is a *very* competitive labor market here.

I definitely have to pay more for talented or skilled software people here (especially in Austin) than in other parts of the country. Hell, if you've got a CDL and can pass a drug test, you can make $100K+ driving an oilfield truck - all due to the economic miracle called fracking - no thanks to the US Government, which has tried its best to kill the strongest economic engine still running in the US... That said, there are a LOT of programmers who aren't worth what they're getting paid, and when the next bubble burst in the mobile/social software space, there are going to be many people out of work and with suddenly unmarketable skills.

BTW, it's not like the laws here are hurting Tesla any - Here in Austin, you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one of the things. I know one thing - I'd sure hate to own a Mercedes or BMW dealership, since that demographic has made the Tesla the currently trendy car for show-off poseurs.

Don't be silly, they'd talk about One point twenty one jiggawatts. Then there would be a flamewar on the correct pronunciation of "giga" and whether a lightning strike can deliver 1.21Gw.

Actually, you could quite easily bring custom operators to Objective-C by adopting the Smalltalk approach. Simply allow symbols to be messages e.g.

        [@"foo" stringByAppendingString: @"bar];

could be written as

        [@"foo" +: @"bar];

Smalltalk allows you to drop the colon with binary operators so you could even have

      [@"foo" + @"bar];

Oh nonsense.

to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

Back here in the real world, this is how this sounds:

"Ben decided that someone was making changes to the codebase that had no technical purpose, which served solely to push someone's weird social agenda and desperation to modify the language to suit them, as well as to refer to anything which went otherwise as sexist. Since this is pointless, and since Ben has been in communities where this created unnecessary shitstorms, Ben rejected the PR in the hope of preventing a bunch of drama-driven developers from wasting a year complaining about unimportant things. When Isaac decided to merge the PR, Ben felt slighted: he had been given the authority to make these decisions, and Isaac decided to make a social point that Ben would get trampled no matter what."

That's all fine and good. One developer is being a neckbeard about not wanting to hear a cry of oppression in something that has nothing to do with social justice. The other developer is being a neckbeard about being all inclusive no matter the tone.

Then you get to the point that adults are angry about.

and if he had been, he wouldn't be as of this morning: to reject a pull request that eliminates a gendered pronoun on the principle that pronouns should in fact be gendered would constitute a fireable offense for me and for Joyent.

That says "we value Ben so little that our disagreement over the nature of an unimportant, purely social justice related, non-technical PR would have caused us to fire him on the spot, instead of to have a discussion."

That's *ridiculous*. Employers have an obligation to their employees to create safety and stability. There is no legitimate cause on God's green earth for that to be a fireable offense. Joyent's management are PR-oriented children, and that you're standing up for them is an embarrassment to the 'movement' you're trying to rationalize.

I am a gay and trans ally.

But nobody should get anything sterner over something like that than a stern talking to. That's *obscene*.

Target and K-Mart understand consumers far better than you ever will. Target's the company that knows people are pregnant before they do themselves.

Despite that you disagree with this, your extremely superficial read is probably self serving.

It is very likely that protestor revenue loss simply outweighs game loss after the high sales launch. I expect that they know exactly what they're doing.

The worst thing I can think of in The Bible is the Great Flood.

If you think that's ten times worse than anything that happens in video games, I think you might need to play some more video games. That doesn't even cover Final Fantasy materia.

Sephiroth will straight up destroy Saturn like five separate times per fight while trying to kill you.

I agree, pretending that a company choosing to not sell an item in its stores is a form of censorship is likely to get you karma on Slashdot, despite being critically incorrect.

Hopefully nobody notices that they still sell Lifetime specials and so forth in their TV section.

Maybe Romper Stomper and Mad Max got through on local cultural relevance.

Money going into my account? No, never noticed any... ... what's that you say? Yes, it is a nice new car. We're off to the Seychelles next week too. It's paid for by a bequest from Aunt Mildred's goldfish.

This is wishcraft. Hell, solar has a very hard time ever reaching break-even *without* the cost of trackers. (Many plants will NEVER reach breakeven, but then they're not supposed to -they're really just there as a means of acquiring government subsidy money.)

In my experience in building the world's top utility-scale PV array management system, trackers haven't got a prayer of paying off. They break often, and when they do (unless they happen to break pointing straight up), they keep the panels they're attached to from making much power at all until they're fixed. If you have even a little bit of extra space, you're way better off just throwing more fixed panels out there and avoiding the maintenance and power loss headaches.

The capacity factor for solar is abysmal anyway - trying to optimize it much is a fool's errand. Unless you live someplace exceptionally sunny or cloudy, or at extreme latitudes, You'll be within a percent or two by figuring the nominal power output of your array for an average of FIVE (yep, only 5) hours a day.

Since I've seen and analyzed the actual measured data from literally hundreds to thousands of solar installations, I can tell you this number holds up pretty darn well as a rule of thumb. (That's assuming you're using quality PV panels from a Western or 1st tier Chinese supplier. Panels from the cheaper (and thus pretty popular) Chinese panel suppliers never even approach their spec sheet outputs, and many are delaminating after only seven or eight years, leaching toxic heavy metals into the environment. (Disposal/recycling of panels is rarely factored into solar lifecycle cost analyses, though it should be...))

See my comment above. Trackers don't make economic sense, especially with today's natural gas prices, which make even the cheapest solar far too expensive to be economically viable without HUGE subsidies. They're usually a maintenance nightmare, too. (Remember that every "truck roll" costs an average of $1000! That's the fully burdened cost of two crew, equipment, supplies, etc. The exact figure varies a bit, but all the utility scale solar operators I've worked with use a figure that's in that ballpark...)

And obviously, this has been tried.

Seriously, there are lots of both single and dual-axis trackers. Note that single-axis trackers still have this issue, and that skewing them westward can make a difference in late afternoon power production. (BTW, this isn't a huge difference, and of course, it's not free - you're just trading off power in the morning for power in the late afternoon, which is itself offset somewhat by the fact that the panels are considerably more efficient in the cooler ambient air of the morning. (To a first-order approximation, the voltage output of PV panels is almost entirely an inverse function of temperature, and output current is almost entirely a function of irradiance (incoming sunlight) - so the best solar power days are cold and clear. Heat absolutely slays PV power production. This is one of the most important "physics things" to understand about solar PV.)

Unless you're someplace where real estate is really expensive, trackers don't even pay for themselves. Given the increasing efficiencies of the panels themselves over the past few years, you're far better off just throwing in more panels and avoiding the maintenance headaches associated with the trackers. (As they are mechanical devices and need to be built as cheaply as possible since no one makes any money in solar without subsidies, trackers are BY FAR the most and trouble-prone and expensive part of an array from a maintenance perspective.)

As the guy who led the development of the most advanced utility-scale solar array monitoring system on the market, I can tell you that pretty much every site that has trackers wishes they'd either added more panels or just settled for less output. The exceptions are usually sites where economics are not a factor - "green cred" showplaces and the like - and there are a lot more of those than you might think...

In reality, the optimum angle to face the panels is driven by several competing concerns, including relative time-of-day pricing, which of course can vary after you build the array, so it's not entirely safe to use as a design criterion. In MOST cases, the optimum is around 20 degrees West of South. If you need to optimize for peak power, just do that (or something close to it) and call it a day. Anything else is over-analyzing and probably not really beneficial.

Also, keep in mind that you're already losing a fair amount of power by having the panels at the wrong (usually too shallow) elevation - almost all real-world solar installations tilt the panels at only 15-20 degrees off horizontal, which means that in latitudes higher than those numbers, you're losing power since the panels aren't pointing directly at the sun anyway (Here in Austin, for instance, that means you're at least 10 degrees off optimum all day, every day.) This is a very deliberate and conscious design decision made simply because the cost and strength required (and weight, if roof-mounted) to survive likely wind loading at higher angles is generally prohibitive.

BTW, acting as though this is some great discovery is as bogus as hell - Common array design practice is to orient due South, which is clearly suboptimal, but one of only dozens of really stupid conventional design practices in solar - tha most idiotic probably being grounding the negative leg of the DC side, thus turning all your wiring into a sacrificial anode. It's not like the telco guys didn't figure this out well over a century ago - there's a reason your phone line is at -48 Volts! I've seen lots of arrays only a few years old that are headed for having the panels connected by hollow straws. Having to replace any sizeable fraction of that wiring (esp. at the current price of copper) will ensure that the entire solar plant can NEVER break even. Break-even usually takes over 20 years best-case, and the panels only last 25-30 years, if they're not the cheap Chnese junk everyone's using now. Most solar PV plants being put in now could well be both dollar and energy negative over their entire life. (Do a Google search for Wassermann and EROEI for some of the latest and best figures).

This has to be one of the dumbest arguments of all time and I can't imagine anyone who actually has money ever actually operates this way or they're headed for ruin rather quickly.

Of course you take the job; 75% of the extra income goes into your pocket. A business that decides not to sell more widgets at a 75% profit margin because they'd have to spend 25% to sell the widgets (taxes, overhead, etc) is a business headed for bankruptcy.

The only programs in the USA that lead to less overall income when you get a raise are ones for poor people like Medicaid where making one extra dollar can cut off your benefits.

There are a number of people on this thread who are saying "I don't contribute because I don't have time". Well, why don't you contribute money instead then? If a piece of software has value to you, either because it helps you do your job, entertains you or saves you some time, then it surely has monetary value.

The advantage of contributing money apart from it taking only about five minutes is that you don't have to deal with the arrogant arseholes that all successful open source projects are staffed by (if many of the anecdotes above are correct).

Full disclosure: I am in this group of people, unless you count the very occasional bug report.