>Power meters don't have to be designed to measure current both ways.

If you have solar, you will have a meter that spins both ways. That's sort of exactly the entire point of having a grid-tied solar system - to run the meter backwards during peak hours, to reduce your kwh consumption.

Most modern power companies will do even better. My system has a smart meter that reports power consumption/generation wirelessly to PG&E on a continuous basis. They know exactly how much I'm producing, and I know they know since I can access it from their web site.

> Just because someone makes something does not mean it's compatible with the grid. If someone hacks together some random garage equipment (and not some government certified power controller box) and plugs it into the grid, that grid is now touching everyone else's house nearby.

Which is why they inspect and approve only certain equipment that has been demonstrated to be compatible with their grid.

>What I am saying is it should be very clear what the requirements of the grid are

It is.

While your objections would be perfectly valid for a solar system going up in Somalia, these issues have actually been address for a long ass time around here.

PG&E already charges all solar customers a grid-tie fee. It's... reasonable, though since they still claim solar customers are "freeloaders", you can see their spin machine working hard to raise these fees to kill solar.

> As the amount of electricity you draw from their generators goes down, they're going to reach the point of needing to charge you a flat fee just for the connection to the power lines, plus the usual fees for actually using their electricity.

We already do. PG&E charges $10-$15 a month for a "grid maintenance fee" for solar users. So even if you are net-zero, you still pay them to keep the grid maintained.

Which is reasonable - if you look at their maintenance costs and divide by the number of users, it's in this ballpark.

The trouble is that PG&E is flat-out lying that solar customers are "free loading" on their grid, and want to raise these flat rates. An uncritical local newspaper ran their drek basically word for word without fact checking any of it. So I wrote (and got published) a correction, but it's still indicative of how shady the power companies are acting in this area.

More competition and plummeting ad revenue.

No, it looks just like any other PS4 game. That is... Not like a movie (yet).

The headline is just trying to grab clicks by lying.

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.

This *might* be an avenue alternative to ion engines for flights that don't stray too far from the Sun. LEO-Moon, Lagrangian Points, inner planets. And it could be combined with ion and rocket propulsion.

You can't store all the propellant at extreme pressures simply because the tank needed to contain these pressures would be extremely heavy. There's a fine balance between weight of the tank and savings on storing pressurized fuel (both energy stored as pressure and more fuel fitting in). We're at "state of art" here and can't push that much farther.

But we can afford a *tiny* extreme-pressure tank, and we have weightless unlimited solar energy at cost of fixed-size, fixed-weight solar panels.

Run the pump with solar power, gradually pressurizing the fuel to quite extreme pressures in the dedicated, tiny, very durable tank. Release it through a narrow nozzle at extreme speeds. Speed it up even more through combustion or electric field of ion propulsion. You're converting solar energy to extra delta-v with no extra fuel usage. You have just the fixed cost of the pump+buffer tank infrastructure and they can be kept really tiny, since we don't try to get a high throughput of the fuel (and have limited energy input anyway), just to increase the propellant stored energy by transforming electricity into pressure.

Buying an unlocked smartphone?

Or, they're trying to make a viable business out of operating mammoth server farms so you can get stuff you don't have to pay for.

That's odd, because Micron gives 1 year un-powered retention warranties on their TLC drives, even when worn.

Well duh... Did you really think that the SSD makers were targeting 1.4GB/s random read/write devices at making backups?

On the other hand, the smaller they make the nand, the more they can cram on a chip, and the more wear levelling they can do, so the more reliable it becomes.

Most blatant slashvertisment I've ever seen.

I don't believe you actually need a pilot's license to fly anything characterized as an "ultralight" aircraft, as these tape-and-balsawood gyrocopters appear to be. Doesn't mean the FAA can't fine your ass, of course, when you do dumb crap like flying a possibly deadly set of large rotors right past crowds of tourists at low altitudes in an urban area like DC.

OK, so you're ANOTHER person who hasn't read the summary or the article. OK, just another one.