Go where the sharks ARENT!

I've got a Vostro 1500 right here, you've gotta take the whole lid off the bottom before you can get to the fan. But yeah, that's better than most laptops. On the other hand, there's a Fujitsu T900 in the house and it has a little plastic panel you remove, then you can blow air through the system as well as out of the intake. That's better than any of this other jazz by far.

Unless they are Sony, and invent a new protocol to control Blu-Ray players even though they don't need any buttons you don't get on a typical modern DVD remote.

Only a fool "trusts the Internet" - especially Wikipedia.

It's funny, the other day, I was hanging out with a group that included several pretty top-level IT and networking folks, including some leading CS academics. Not one of us uses internet banking, or allows access of any kind to any of our financial accounts over the net. On the rare occasions that companies force the use of the Internet, the general response is to enable access only long enough to do the job, then destroy the Inet access account (best), disable net access (2nd best), or set the password to random gibberish that even we don't know or keep a record of. This forces a long, manual process to "reenable" the acccount that cannot as easily be done by an impostor. None of us "trust" the Internet, I guess.

That was a real eye-opener for some of the younger "Internet-savvy" group, who all of a sudden realized that maybe they were opening themselves up far more than they realized, especially in a world where every WiFi network, even with WPA2, is now as open as the one at Starbucks...

Writing off a loss generally doesn't do much for you. It might save you 30% of the charge or so.

Insurance companies have a better deal because their business often involves re-insurance, that is off-loading their liabilities to pools.

The best of all is credit cards. They charge fees to merchants to cover the losses. The merchants then bake the fees into the retail price which people pay regardless of whether or not they use the card.

So no, T-Mobile isn't quite in the same league as insurance and credit cards.

Actually, there's probably more money and effort focused on trying to build grid storage than there ought to be, given that there's really no technology known that's capable of doing the job in a generally viable way. There's a name for that: WOMBAT - Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time.

(Not saying we shouldn't be looking at all, but realistically, grid-scale storage requires technologies we simply don't have, and largely, can't yet even envision or propose. We're a smart society with a few centuries of intense technology and engineering development under our belts, and there is no known viable solution to this problem. If there was, then billions, or even trillions, of dollars would be flowing into it. This isn't like most hard problems, which can be solved by throwing enough effort and money at them - we really just don't know how to do this!

For all its faults, Hydrogen may be the best of the bad options - but the most (only?) economically viable source of hydrogen at large scales today is natural gas. Both environmentally and from an energy loss point of view, you're better off just burning the natural gas (our cleanest fuel in the first place) than taking the hit converting it to H2. Any effort to split water will result in H2 that is *much* more expensive than making it from natural gas, especially given the benefits of the fracking revolution - water is an *extremely* stable molecule...

Yeah, sounds simple, right? Just store it! First, even the best solar systems today are not economically viable without huge government subsidies unless you live on an island and have to ship your fuel in, so really, you're upside down before you've spent a dime on storage.

Secondly, with any known and viable technology storage is *really*, *REALLY* expensive on a grid scale. For all practical purposes, it's fair to say that there is NO known way to do it in most locations. (The dangers of gas-pressurized reservoirs may well be orders of magnitude higher than fracking at its worst, and very few places have geography that allow pumped hydro to be even marginally cost-effective.) Batteries, supercaps, and the like still need another couple of orders of magnitude price/performance improvement to be viable.

Do the math, and you'll see that storage isn't even an option - the solar plant is barely viable even with subsidies (here in Texas, with cheap and readily available natural gas, solar costs 4-5 times as much per KWH, according to EIA's LCOE figures). Add in any kind of grid-scale storage at all, and the costs soar through the stratosphere, especially since most storage technologies have relatively short economic lives.

So yes, paying someone to take the power is actually the cheapest thing to do - not only in Germany, but many nights here in the US with wind power, too. There's just more capacity than demand, and since it costs the power companies to deal with that, they justifiably want to get paid to offset the costs and inefficiencies of having to shut down and spin up their conventional plants.

Something cookbooks harp on: most ovens do very poor temperature regulation. Baking books in particular recommend getting a separate themometer, and adding thermal ballast (such as stones) to your oven to get it to keep an even temperature.

That's not just for ultra-high-end stuff; that's for just making good bread. Bread is fairly sensitive to temperature, because you're trying to orchestrate a complex set of reactions including yeast production, internal steam, setting the internal protein structure, and browning the crust. Swings of 25F are enough to throw off that balance, yielding loaves that are too high or too low or too brown or other problems.

Most home ovens do it very badly. It seems to me that's a much more fixable problem without spending a fortune on the ultimate oven.

I could imagine, say, pastry chefs, who are already famous for being control freaks. Producing truly great pastry, reliably, is an extraordinary feat of both science and art. I could imagine them wanting this for a high-end patisserie.

But beyond that, it seems to be a solution looking for a problem. This is Myhrvold, who already wants to see you a $600 book containing a recipe for a hamburger requiring several thousand dollars worth of tools you don't already have in your kitchen (including a dewar of liquid nitrogen). To make a hamburger. I'm sure it's a very, very, very good hamburger... but in the end, it's a hamburger, and I do a pretty fine burger with a cast-iron skillet.

I don't have any mod points, and have posted on this thread anyway, but LISTEN TO THIS GUY (brambus).

Unlike most of the armchair experts here, brambus is explaining *exactly* why the German grid is broken and why it will eventually fail - at this point, I think the only questions are "When?", and, "How bad?" The tariffs that led to all this investment in solar et al are completely unsustainable over the long haul, and everyone has known that all along, but like the actual climate record, it didn't fit with the narrative and had to be ignored.

If Germany is really lucky, they'll get by with some scary but not-totally-grid-meltdown failures that might finally kick some sense into the Greens and others who think they can legislate reality based on wishcraft...

It's sad, but they're going to have to learn what I taught my kids: You are free to choose your actions, but you are NOT free to choose the consequences of your actions...

For the same reason I usually hate LEO with a passion. They don't write the laws, nor make laws convoluted. That's the job of the legislative branch (local, state, or federal). They just are power trippy and decide to interpret and enforce the law however they see fit ultimately letting a court decide your fate...after a long, expensive, drawn out process that is suppose to be innocent-until-proven-guilty but often is more the opposite.

Please, people have enough of a time merely DRIVING their car, you can't expect them to recompile it as they hurtle down the highway at 75mph.

And 30 years is best-case. In the real world, the output of quality solar panels at around 25 years will only be about 20% of their nameplate rating. That last 5 years is really just trying to eke out enough additional energy production to get positive over the entire life of the array.

Although tight, the economics are workable with good quality panels. Unfortunately, the crappy Chinese panels that now dominate the market are starting to show significant failures (backing delamination, which results in water ingress, destruction of the panel, and leaching of heavy metals into the environment) even BEFORE 10 YEARS. If that happens, you will NEVER, EVER break even on your solar plant.

The only problem with your rant is the fact that an entity that looks like a conventional looking company can in-fact be a non-profit enterprise. Hospitals notably fall into this category and they hardly give stuff away for free. They are some of the most notorious high way robbers on the planet.

This is a situation where the "quacks like a duck" legal principle doesn't quite work out.

Nobody mandated solar, people just decided it would work and be profitable. Germany got a lot of wind power built as well, but apparently solar also works well enough to be worth the investment.

Germany's problems are entirely of its own making - the government wrote laws that required the power companies to pay solar generators at rates that are often over 3X the going rate for electricity. Not surprisingly, a LOT of people took them up on that deal. This works sort-of-OK until a big squall line blows over and you lose a hundred megawatts in a few minutes (it's worse than that really, since sites that were exporting power to the grid now need to become consumers, so demand increases simultaneously even faster than the loss of supply!)

Germany is now the global poster child for grid instability, and I suspect they'll get bitten hard before too long - you can't keep up that balancing act forever, especially with declining spinning reserves, and no incentives for power companies to keep them at the ready. In the very near future, if Russia pulls the plug on natural gas at the same time as a major storm front, all of Germany will go black...