As I understand it, the US capacity factor has been improving over the years:

around 88% from 2006-2012, but only 70% averaged from 1970-2009 - http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C... and http://www.nei.org/Knowledge-C... from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

I think he's talking about nameplate capacity vs. capacity adjusted for capacity factor.

Nameplate capacity - The power the system generates at full rated capability.

Capacity factor - Actual production divided by nameplate capacity averaged over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Nuclear stations usually have 80-90% capacity factor as do most other "baseload" plants including coal

Natural gas plants often run intentionally at lower capacity factor since they're usually built specifically for peaking. In the US, that's around 42%

PV Solar is usually only 13-20% (13-15% in MA, 19% in Arizona)

Concentrated solar power often has a lot of "inertia" in the plant along with built-in storage, so apparently CSP in California achieves a 33% capacity factor

Wind is 20-40%

Hydro varies widely since many countries intentionally overbuild nameplate capacity in order to use a hydro dam for energy storage. (I believe Norway's hydro stations operate at a pretty low capacity factor, but this is partly because Norway acts as Denmark's "battery" and is the sole reason Denmark can achieve around 20% grid penetration of wind/solar.)

So if the installations of solar nameplate capacity matched new coal nameplate capacity installations, in terms of actual contribution to the grid, solar is only contributing 20-30% of what the new coal/nuke/whatever plants are contributing. Another way of thinking about it is that you need MUCH more solar nameplate capacity along with a vast improvement in energy storage in order to match a baseload plant such as a nuclear station.

Also note that this is new installations - most gas/coal plants have already been built, and when renovated/modernized they don't count as "new".

Every time this happens, the carriers blame the OEM and the OEM blames the carriers.

But when the device is 99% identical to updated devices from the same OEM on another carrier, it becomes very clear who is at fault.

No, they're not.

THEY HAVE NOT RELEASED LOLLIPOP BINARIES FOR THE DEVICE. Which means they are under NO obligation to provided Lollipop kernel source.

They have provided KitKat kernel source for their devices. So they're fully in compliance with the GPL here.

Outdated software - which they have released source for.

Their smartphones are usually pretty well built.

The problem is that software and hardware are so tightly integrated these days that if a company can't produce reliable embedded software, all of their hardware looks like shit.

That's why I never had issues with my Nexus 4 or Nexus 5 but, as stated before, will NEVER touch any non-Nexus LG phone.

Yeah, the Nexus devices often have their own software flaws (oops, considering they're supposed to be reference devices), but nothing nearly as bad as the shitfest that is LG's own software.

Yeah. So far, fracking has been primarily used in areas that are sparsely populated and/or don't have much surface water (e.g. dry with not much rainfall).

There are lots of examples of local contamination... Drinking water supplies in Dimock, PA have basically been destroyed by fracking.

The big controversy is the Marcellus Shale in NYS - It's a massive resource pretty much located over either the Susquehanna watershed, or worse, the NYC water supply - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...

NYC's water supply is the largest untreated or one of the least-treated drinking water supplies in the world, partly due to much stricter conservation easements of the water supply than in many other areas. Allowing fracking in that region could completely change the results of this report in terms of "widespread" contamination.

See, the problem is, no one has had issues with widespread systemic impacts.

They have issues with an ALARMINGLY high number of local impacts. Also, I wonder if this is just evaulating the actual fracturing process itself, or if it is including things such as companies dumping produced water 100 feet from a stream (It's happened multiple times - they're not allowed to do it, but underpaid truck drivers take shortcuts.)

Also, part of the reason we haven't had widespread impacts is because people who live in areas with large surface drinking water supplies (as opposed to primary drinking water being underground aquifers) have been fighting hard - New York City has one of the largest untreated water supplies in the world, and it is fed by a network of reservoirs and streams upstate. NYS has been good about keeping fracking AWAY from this infrastructure.

It's just a matter of time before those local impacts become systemic if fracking is allowed in more areas.

That's the disappointing thing - when a trusted name gets acquired by shady people, and those shady people milk the name for all it is worth.

I haven't been going to SF nearly as much lately, something just seemed "off" - now I'm glad I almost never go there.

It reminds me of what happened to a fairly popular hosting site for Android development projects, dev-host. d-h used to be a pretty good service, but sometime in the last year, they started replacing downloads with malware/adware.

Well, Windscale was never used for civilian power production. I think nearly all of the reactors designed for weapons production were far less safe than nearly any civilian design.

And yeah, the Magnox reactors weren't very safe either, although they're better IMO than the RBMK design.

CANDU are, to my knowledge, the only other civilian reactors in use to have a positive void coefficient, but at least in their case the moderator (heavy water) isn't flammable...

More likely it is the carriers and not LG.

This is why I refuse to buy carrier-branded phones nowadays.

I haven't heard too many issues about Sony LP... That said, right around when they deployed LP to the Z3 is when I finally unlocked the bootloader and started running Omni on it.

That said - 5.0 was in general a steaming pile of poo, which is why so many OEMs are just skipping to 5.1 now. 5.0 was such poo that Google changed the version number to get away from the stigma, in reality, 5.1 was more like a 5.0.3... But it was important in that it fixed the biggest issues with 5.0.x

You're not guaranteed regular updates with Cyngn phones either.

They burned their first hardware partner even more than they burned OnePlus with the MicroMax exclusivity mess - the Oppo N1 didn't get a KitKat update from Cyngn until November 2014.

Cyngn corporate is "just another OEM" - same BS.

Moto G is most definitely not water resistant. Any member of Sony's Xperia Z family - yes. Moto G - no.

I never had any issues with my Nexus 4 or Nexus 5. LG's hardware is pretty good, it's their software that is utterly atrocious (generally a common theme for Asian companies, partly because Asian markets seem to care more about how shiny and colorful their skin is than whether their phone is a bugridden POS running outdated software...), which is why I will never buy an LG device that is not a Nexus. (Same goes for Samsungs... I used to be a heavy Samsung user, but after the way they handled Superbrick... never again...)

If the difference is only in the radios, no need for Canadian kernel source.

Usually the international source for most devices is the least mangled.

Before anyone rants about GPL violations - they only have to release source if they released a binary. They haven't released a binary.