It obviously can be done, the question is whether it makes financial sense. It seems that, if it were cost-efficient to store electricity in LiIon batteries then the biggest buyers of them would be power companies, so maybe there's some market inefficiency that you can exploit by doing it in customers houses, but it even with that it sounds like it will have a very long ROI. I pay about £400/year for electricity (about $600). A $13K battery storage array would cost me the same as almost 22 years of electricity. Even if it reduced my electricity bills to zero, it would take 22 years for it to pay for itself. I think the overnight rate, if I switch to a tariff that has one, is about half of the normal rate, so it would actually take 44 years. Probably a bit less as electricity prices are likely to go up over the next few decades, but even with a 20 year ROI there are far better uses of my money.

Apparently a lot of the USA uses electricity for heating (and cooling). If you're using gas or oil for heating, then comparing your electricity usage to their energy usage is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

It depends on whether you're using electricity for heating. In the last quarter, we used about 7kWh/day of electricity, but about 23kWh/day of gas. If you're on electric heating (and live somewhere larger than me), then 48kWh doesn't sound too excessive.

Lawsuits don't have to be expensive, it depends on how much you're asking. If you claim, say, the cost of one year of Internet subscription then you're in the lowest bracket for small claims court filings (plus your time, which may be a lot more depending on how flexible your working hours are). The cost for the ISP to send someone is more than they're likely to lose, so you're very likely to get a default judgement against them. For added irony, you might ask for the ISP to be required to pay for you to transfer your subscription to A&A and pay the difference in the cost of Internet access for the next two years...

Google has a UI team now?

If you think architecture doesn't change much over time, then you haven't been paying attention to architecture. Lots of data structures from 10-15 years ago suck on modern hardware because of changes in the relative costs of cache and branch predictor misses, and that's just on a single machine. When you get into distributed systems then the relative speeds of networks and local storage have changed dramatically.

There's one more reason, which is that there are sometimes good reasons for writing your own sort routine. Specifically, if you have data that has a known distribution that lets you beat a comparison sort. One of the questions I was asked in a Google interview was along these lines. The point was not to see how well I could write code on a whiteboard or reproduce an algorithm from a textbook, it was to see if I could understand that the problem wasn't the same as 'sort arbitrary data', see if I could extract what properties of the problem made it amenable to optimisation, and see what tools I had for approaching that kind of optimisation.

And sometimes it's not about knowing if you can reproduce an algorithm, but about knowing whether you understand the limitations of a particular approach. Do you understand when that off-the-shelf quicksort library would do a terrible job on certain input data? In one interview, I discovered that my interviewer didn't know about hopscotch hash tables, but did know about cuckoo hashing, so we ended up with a discussion about what the overheads of the two approaches are and when either would be better.

If you have a mechanism for identifying, up front, who is best for a job requiring creativity and technical skill and is not subject to subconscious biases by interviewers then please let the rest of us know. I know a lot of companies that would be able to save huge amounts of money by replacing their hiring mechanisms with such a technique.

Banning running my own mail server for personal use? No. Banning a company running their own mail server? No. A company banning using my private email for company business? Sure, I'd be happy with that. The government banning government employees from using their personal email (or any third-party email provider) for government business? Absolutely!

Two things. First, Mach 1.6 is not that fast relative to the speed of air-to-air missiles. Sidewinders (from 1956) travel at Mach 2.5, modern AAMs exceed Mach 4. Second, RADAR is not the only way of targeting missiles. Modern anti-aircraft weapons use a combination of RADAR, IR, and acoustic targeting. The kinds of jet engines that can get you to Mach 1.6 basically paint an enormous IR arrow in the sky with the tip at your aircraft. This was old tech a decade ago.

No, they're going to be made obsolete by cheap semi-autonomous drones that can be launched en mass from aircraft carriers and can handle 20G turns for evasion, which gives them a massive advantage against missiles, which have very limited turning abilities.

I think you are confusing Afghanistan with Saudi Arabia.

Especially as studies of deception, phishing, online fraud, and so on are often conducted by social scientists in computer science departments with funding that is nominally directed towards computer science. Anyone who is actually working on these areas is likely to be either in a computer science department or in an interdisciplinary team working with computer scientists, so will not have a problem getting funding.

The US political funding rules allow any organisation to buy 'issue' adverts that aren't specifically pushing a single candidate, with no limits. Why not use this in the next election to run prime-time ads listing exactly which corporate interests each candidate has taken bribes from and their amounts, and the legislation that it bought. If taking money from certain organisations starts costing more votes than it buys, then politicians will be a bit less eager to take it...

He is wanted in the UK for violating bail. Judges should only interact with criminals in the court where everything said is a matter of public record (and subject to strict accounting). Allowing judges to talk to criminals in other settings sounds like a good recipe for legalised bribery.

I am aware of that. I'm also aware of the ThunderX box that we have on the FreeBSD test lab network, but I don't remember exactly how long it's been there.