If you look at TFA - yup, this happens multiple times per year. Half the articles on that site are so-and-so flew an Open Skies flight over other so-and-so.

Interestingly, Norway is the reason Denmark is one of the few countries to achieve more than 20-25% grid penetration for wind/solar - Denmark's neighbor to the north has EXCELLENT energy storage facilities due to their geography.

(When the wind is blowing/sun shining, Denmark sells surplus power to Norway. When it isn't, they buy it back. Note that they're usually paying far more than what they sold it for due to supply/demand economics.)

Yup. FYI the hydro facility's output is throttled based on time of day to make the falls look pretty at peak tourism times.

I've seen claims that from 50-75% of the river's flow is diverted to hydro depending on time of day and season (more diversion is allowed in winter when there are fewer tourists) - There is not as much need for a dam thanks to consistent flow and the fact that there's a pretty hefty height difference, although there are dams downstream for large pumped-storage facilities (which provide an alternative to damming the river as far as storage goes) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

Huh? You're not making any sense.

"Because of the Hoover dam image" - what the heck do you mean here?

Yes, hydro is not talked about, and yes, the Hoover Dam (along with the various other hydroelectric dams in this country) is a major reason why - Because it has ALREADY BEEN BUILT AND DEPLOYED FOR DECADES AND IT ISN'T MEETING OUR NEEDS.

We simply don't have enough rivers to dam that we haven't ALREADY dammed. The USA's hydro resources are tapped out - and many of them are encountering severe problems due to lack of rainfall lately. Lake Mead, for example, reached its lowest level since the Hoover Dam was built last year.

That was the thing - it had a healthier third-party developer community than anything else that was out there at the time.

Android pretty much stole all of the legacy WM5/6 usersbase I think - very few WM5/6 people I know went to WP7.

In fact quite a few people I knew (including myself) used crazy hacks such as XDAndroid - my first Android device was an AT&T/HTC Tilt 2 (aka Touch Pro 2) - I still have fond memories of that device. :)

Yup. It was a piece of shit of a great magnitude, but it was the least shitty thing out there.

Yeah. Lots of people rave about spec e-peen, but the truth is, even older chips are MORE than powerful enough to provide a good experience except for the niche things like hardcore gaming.

Interestingly, for hardcore gaming, NVidia gave up on the phone form factor. The SHIELD Portable's form factor allowed it to have active cooling for the Tegra4, and the SHIELD Tablet has a phase change heat spreader (aka heatpipe) over its CPU - a predecessor to this stuff Fujitsu is working on.

For nearly all smartphone users, more basic chips (like the Snapdragon 400) are more than enough, the problem has been that until the Moto G, low-end chips got match with piss-poor software quality. Moto is the first company to release low-end phones with software that didn't suck.

They DO have space restrictions, just not as severe as those in a smartphone.

Interestingly, heatpipes in a laptop are a way to deal with the space restrictions - they allow a laptop to dissipate MUCH more heat in a smaller space.

With smartphones, they simply had to "dissipate less heat".

Although I question how much of a benefit this will really be. As it is, even without heatpipes, smartphone thermal throttles are usually set WELL below the CPU's junction temperature limit - the reason is that it's to prevent other components from getting too hot (like the battery). I remember talking to some Sony engineers, and IIRC, the CPU thermal throttle in most Xperia Z family units is not set to protect any of the internal components, but to protect the user's hand. Fujitsu's tricks might actually reduce the junction temperature at which a CPU can operate without burning the user.

Maybe the stations are already active but not advertised, and the OTA is for a database of them?

"but since CSI Miami more or less gave up any pretense that it was meant to be and instead was 45 minutes of Horatio being awesome, saving women and children and shooting very heavily armed but remarkably inaccurare bad guys it was actually far more entertaining." - or, why I actually LIKE watching Scorpion. :) It's so bad, it's good!

I am currently an avid Android user.

I used to be an avid Windows Mobile user. WM5/6 were actually, when they existed, the MOST power-user/business-friendly mobile OSes out there. They were more geek-friendly than any of the horrifically locked-down "Linux-based" mobile OSes.

Then Microsoft dropped WP7 on the world - an OS which was unusable for nearly 100% of the core WM5/WM6 user base. At the same time, Android was coming onto the scene, which had everything that WM5/WM6's core user base wanted. MS never recovered, they utterly screwed up. NEVER alienate the majority of your core user base, even if it's trying to reach a "new" audience - especially when the "new" audience you're targeting is already drooling over a competitor (Apple).

YAY!

It would be nice to post my vacation Photospheres without all of the Google+ overhead.

(I'm a pretty avid G+ user, but it's an utterly shit platform for sharing photos with friends that aren't G+ users. I wish I could just put Photospheres on SmugMug.)

He's old based on his UID???

Many of VeriFone's units now implement contactless EMV with a reader that is below the screen... So you tap your payment device to the screen itself, and it is also frequently NOT obvious that the unit is contactless-capable. When Wegmans first deployed them I was really disappointed they eliminated contactless, until I noticed the contactless payment logo appear briefly at the end of the checkout process.

I've seen these VeriFone units at:
Wegmans
Firehouse Subs
Target (contactless is currently disabled though due to the CurrentC mess)
Hershey's Chocolate World (these units were lower-end/smaller than the three above, but still had contactless-under-the-screen support)

Unfortunately, it seems like VeriFone gives retailers a LOT of flexibility as to the UI/UX of these new readers, and every single one of them has an utterly shitty workflow for contactless.
For example, Wegmans allows you to scan a barcode for their loyalty card or swipe the card via magstripe. If you swipe via magstripe, it will prompt you for desired payment method. If you scan the barcode, there's a beep and no other indication that anything happened. The contactless reader is not activated until you select "Credit" after a Shopper's Club magstripe swipe... So you can't use contactless payment without mag-swiping your loyalty card!

"EMV is going to render a lot of crappy, insecure technologies obsolete (things like Coin, LoopPay, NFC, and many of the smartphone based "wallet" apps.)"
WAT? Yes, LoopPay and maybe Coin will be rendered obsolete, since I know LoopPay is magstripe based and hence it's going obsolete in October.

But for the rest, "EMV is going to render itself obsolete" - makes NO sense whatsoever. Apple Pay, Google Wallet, and all other known NFC payment methods ARE EMV!!!! In fact many of them are more secure than the "plastic card" based EMV since both Apple Pay and Google Wallet use time-limited/geographically-limited or one-time-use transaction tokens, wherease "plastic card" EMV can fundamentally not be limited in time to anything other than the expiration date and can't be geographically limited.

In the case of Wallet, IIRC the method used since Google Wallet moved to HCE with KitKat is to generate a time/geography limited credential when you unlock Wallet with your PIN (which is why HCE-based Wallet needs a network connection for unlock, while the previous SE-based Wallet did not).