By scattering I am thinking physically, as in how you would draw people who can't go personal solar if you were colouring these people on the grid then as opposed to how you would colour people still on the grid now. Now the grid would be pretty much a solid colour of those who are on the grid. But post off grid it would be the city center and some patches in industrial areas outside the city core. That is a whole lot of grid (not much smaller than today's) to be supported by far fewer customers.

I will make a prediction. Before 10 years some North American utility will attempt to create a law that all occupied houses must maintain a minimum connection to the grid. This minimum would of course come with a fairly steep minimum charge. They will really fear even a small group of upper middle class people just snipping the wires because the cost to actually produce the electricity to a house is fairly negligible compared to the overall cost of the entire grid. Thus the loss of even 5% of the customers could result in the utility approaching zero profits. The worst part is that these customer would typically be reliable bill payers, and above average consumers. This will scare the shit out of the utilities.

Absolutely. I am looking more at the graph of battery and solar performance combined with appliance efficiency. It won't be that many years before a typical bungalow could be roofed entirely with a fairly high efficiency pile of electrics and there will at least be a small surplus. The graph will then continue to favour off grid living.

But there will be a grey area where people will have to spend more on an off grid system than it is worth but will do it for a variety of reasons ranging from green thinking to screwing the utility companies.

But as those first few go off the system I suspect they will be fairly rich people who are then permanently off the grid. They will pave the way for better systems, bigger markets, larger volumes, and thus more people down the economic scale to also go off grid. This is a one way street unless the utilities suddenly figure out a way to deliver at a much lower cost (fusion, cheap high temperature super-conductors, etc)

So right now going off grid in an urban environment would be costly, a huge pain in the ass, and full of compromises. 10 years from now, probably something that people could take or leave. 20 years people will look at people still on the grid as a bit foolish; sort of like how people now with netflix look at people still with cable. The cable people still make up the majority but we consider them a bit stupid.

If they had even just put goggles on the characters then it might fool people who watch the whole thing. The characters' skin was a bit dead carp as well but the eyes were completely devoid of life like every game so far. Some day some genius will crack how to do eyes in a real time rendering but so far, no joy.

But on that note, I may very well have to buy a PS just to get this game.

On the other hand if there aren't any silly laws in place preventing your from selling your goods at 10X the normal price, maybe you will only keep aside what your family really needs and sell the rest, thus making important goods available to the public when they're really needed. But if that's illegal, yeah, might as well keep them for yourself. When things get back to normal you can continue selling whatever you didn't use at the normal price -- same as you were able to sell it for during the emergency, but without taking the risk of selling something you might need.

Restrictions on scarcity pricing are a bad idea and serve only to create even more scarcity.

Sure, but it's the partnership that justifies requiring the homeowner to install a smart meter. You're not generally obligated to do anything to help your competitors.

I don't think it's so much about the homeowner becoming a competitor, but about the homeowner asking to interoperate, becoming a partner rather than just a customer.

If really good batteries were available a great option would be to use them as a buffer between the grid and the solar. This way a person would dump their solar into the batteries and generally use the batteries for day to day use. Then if and when the solar couldn't keep up with the demands the grid could be tapped to charge the batteries.

But as both solar and the batteries get better this would then become a natural migration to where people would go completely off grid and have some sort of crappy generator (that is cheap but possibly not efficient) to top them off on the occasion that they don't have enough.

Great batteries could even keep the utility relevant for a while by giving them a more reliable source that they could tap when they wanted to from people's homes.

So right now the utilities are having growing pains as this small but growing source of energy is introduced it is that moment that people actually start going off grid that they have a serious problem. As then they will have to risk raising rates that could drive people off the grid which... then the power company will be left with a scattering of customers who simply can't generate their own power using the space they have. This could be apartments, unlucky houses, hotels, and energy intensive industries. That would be a large grid to maintain for far fewer customers.

Personally I have found my local power company to act like total scumbags. While this will provide an extra sense of satisfaction when I go off grid it also will harm any "greater good" arguments they might try to make in the future to get subsidies to maintain the grid. Quite simply people won't buy the arguments and assume that they are trying to keep their obscene bonuses and monopoly returns that the shareholders demand.

Assuming the copyright owner can be found, and is willing to sell.

The basis for Eldred v Ashcroft was that the celluloid of many old films is rapidly degrading but because the copyright ownership is muddled it's impossible to find anyone from which the right to republish the films can be purchased, so the films are being lost forever.

Interesting. I've studied the evolution of copyright law in some detail and never seen this claim. Cite?

For that matter, it seems perfectly reasonable to require the homeowner to install such a meter as part of a solar installation, as a condition of being able to sell power to the utility -- or even to push power into the grid at all.

Yeah, keep in mind Apple recently bought "Beats by Dre" which is a music streaming service (in addition to the headphones by the same name). Apple Radio (Apple's music streaming service) has been in the iPhone for a while. There's a very good reason Apple doesn't want their users to be able to listen to free radio on their iPhone.

I disagree. To me there's at least one really compelling reason: To push universal encryption. One of my favorite features of QUIC is that encryption is baked so deeply into it that it cannot really be removed. Google tried to eliminate unencrypted connections with SPDY, but the IETF insisted on allowing unencrypted operation for HTTP2. I don't think that will happen with QUIC.

But there are other reasons as well, quite well-described in the documentation. The most significant one is performance. QUIC achieves new connection setup with less than one round trip on average, and restart with none... just send data.

True, but TCP is very hard to change. Even with wholehearted support from all of the major OS vendors, we'd have lots of TCP stacks without the new features for a decade, at least. That would not only slow adoption, it would also mean a whole lot of additional design complexity forced by backward compatibility requirements. QUIC, on the other hand, will be rolled out in applications, and it doesn't have to be backward compatible with anything other than previous versions of itself. It will make its way into the OS stacks, but systems that don't have it built in will continue using it as an app library.

So improve and use those protocols. You may even want to look to QUIC's design for inspiration. Then you can figure out how to integrate your new ideas carefully into the old protocols without breaking compatibility, and then you can fight your way through the standards bodies, closely scrutinized by every player that has an existing TLS or TCP implementation. To make this possible, you'll need to keep your changes small and incremental, and well-justified at every increment. Oh, but they'll also have to be compelling enough to get implementers to bother. With hard work you can succeed at this, but your timescale will be measured in decades.

In the meantime, QUIC will be widely deployed, making your work irrelevant.

As for using TCP without encryption so you don't have to pay for something you don't need, I think you're both overestimating the cost of encryption and underestimating its value. A decision that a particular data stream doesn't have enough value to warrant encryption it is guaranteed to be wrong if your application/protocol is successful. Stuff always gets repurposed and sufficient re-evaluation of security requirements is rare (even assuming the initial evaluation wasn't just wrong).

Only for restarts. For new connections you still have all the TCP three-way handshake overhead, followed by all of the TLS session establishment. QUIC does it in one round trip, in the worst case, and zero in most cases.

There was much valid (IMO) criticism of SPDY, that it really only helped really well-optimized sites -- like Google's -- to perform significantly better. Typical sites aren't any slower with SPDY, but aren't much faster, either, because they are so inefficient in other areas that request bottlenecks aren't their problem, so fixing those bottlenecks doesn't help. But QUIC will generally cut between two and four RTTs out of every web browser connection. And, of course, it also includes all of the improvements SPDY brought, plus new congestion management mechanisms which are significantly better than what's in TCP (so I'm told, anyway; I haven't actually looked into that part).

I'm not saying the approach you prefer couldn't work. It probably could. In ten to twenty years. Meanwhile, a non-trivial percentage of all Internet traffic today is already using QUIC, and usage is likely to grow rapidly as other browsers and web servers incorporate it.

I think the naysayers here have forgotten the ethos that made the Internet what it is: Rough consensus and running code first, standardization after. In my admittedly biased opinion (some of my friends work on SPDY and QUIC), Google's actions with SPDY and QUIC aren't a violation of the norms of Internet protocol development, they're a return to those norms.

But the act in question here would be the writing of a dictionary, and even in the most totalitarian states, that is not a crime.

It is only the fact that have been too busy to rip the radio out of my car. I have a screen/computer to put into it that will then play lectures, audio books, podcasts, etc. Also I have it ready to replace my dashcam with a series of cameras that not only can record but also upload via a dataplan if needed.

At no point in my buying did I even look for an FM or even AM option to add on. And certainly I never looked for a satellite radio technology (those things just piss me off in rentals).

To me even satellite radio is so 20th century. DAB is also just a bandaid to try to keep the radio station media companies relevant.

But the reality is that this isn't a technology issue. For the last portion of the 20th century a variety of media conglomerates bought up all the radio stations and turned them into MBA masturbatory dreams. All profit with no content. About the last time I listened to radio was just before a DJ that I know told me that his new format was to go into work, record all his blurps between songs in one long scripted 1.5 hour session including interviews, and then go home. The songs and his blurps were all run automatically by the computer.

The few things that come off NPR, BBC, or the CBC that I care about "Art of persuasion, quirks, this american life, etc" I download. But even the CBC is just on a march further and further to the PC left and I can't stomach having one great feature cut short so they can give massive amounts of time to someone with some extreme view on some stupid social issue and listen to them grind their axe endlessly.

So the best of radio on today is worse than silence. But my own playlist is awesome and the technology is sitting in a drawer so that I don't have to use my stupid FM transmitter to get crap off my iPhone.

So like my car not coming with an ashtray, I want my next car to not come with a radio, DAB or not.

Not really.

I'd say there's a good argument that all of the information I give Google actually exceeds what a personal assistant would know about me. The real difference (thus far) lies in the assistant's ability to understand human context which Google's systems lack. But that's merely a problem to be solved.

Note, BTW, that I'm not saying everyone should want what I want, or be comfortable giving any search engine enough information to be such an ideal assistant. That's a personal decision. I'm comfortable with it... but I'm not yet getting the search results I want.