When electricity is cheap, it is because the marginal cost of producing it is low. The marginal cost is low because it does not take very much extra fuel to produce it. In other words, when electricity is cheap, its production is also less environmentally harmful. (This only holds as long as the power stations are unchanged of course.)

The Economist regularly gets this wrong by saying that electric cars are polluting more if they charge at night rather than during the day. They base this on the average pollution per kWh being higher at night. However, the average pollution does not matter. It is the marginal pollution which matters, and that is very low at night. This is really the kind of thing that economists should be specializing in getting right; I do not understand how you can be an economist and get it wrong.

Another problem is that if they do accept your CA certificate, you can issue a certificate for irs.gov and they will believe that.

The trust system in TLS is really lousy.

Deorbit is what happened... If you mean actually escape from Mercury gravity, that would have shortened the mission due to the need to save fuel for a last burn. What would be the point?

Coal plants are certainly capable of throttling their output and using less coal. But if what you say was true, my point would only be reinforced: Marginal CO2 emissions by using an extra kWh at night would be zero, because the grid would otherwise have to stabilize by dumping electricity in resistors.

DSB (Danish Railways) has a table on http://www.dsb.dk/om-dsb/dsbs-... saying that their long-distance trains do 33g CO2 per person km. Regional trains are considerably worse. Modern cars should hopefully do better than 133g per km.

Urban trains do better because people are standing up, which significantly lowers the train weight per person.

Now, Denmark is admittedly a bit of a developing country when it comes to trains. Obviously a pure electrified system running on hydro power would do a lot better. DSB's long distance trains use 0.12kWh per person km. A Tesla uses about 0.35kWh per km, which comes to 0.09kWh per person km with 4 people.

That would be pointless because practically no one uses oil to produce electricity. Electric cars tend to charge at night where the coal plants are running at very low power and low efficiency. An idling coal plant has a very high average pollution per kWh produced but a very low marginal pollution per extra kWh.

Of course if it is a windy night the coal plants might just give up and shut down overnight, and then you really get your zero emissions.

Most other forms of transport have no chance against a decent modern passenger car with 4+ passengers. Most passenger cars are comparatively light, well below 500kg per passenger, which is very hard to beat. They do that because there is hardly any wasted space. A bus needs a walkway and it has to be tall enough to stand in, and trains are just horrendously heavy. While rubber-on-tarmac is a bit wasteful compared to metal-on-metal, it is not that bad, and the lower weight helps a lot.

Electric trains can sometimes play in that efficiency range, but it is tempting to make them faster and then the savings mostly evaporate. Cars are useful despite their lower speeds because of the time saved by almost going door-to-door.

24kWh/day = 24kWh/24h = 1kW. Which is a completely ridiculous amount of electricity.

If you are using 48kWh a day on heating, a heat pump is going to pay itself back in months or even weeks.

A home server can easily get by on 20W instead of 200W. My house uses around 4kWh a day on everything, and that includes among other things a server running 24x7.

Infinitely fast SSD's would be almost useless for RAM. You would need to make your cache lines 8kiB or more (they are rarely larger than 128 bytes today), and a spinlock would burn out a flash cell in less than a second -- probably less than a millisecond.

How exactly does handing a binary blob to the Nouveau developers reveal any trade secrets? The binary blob is handed out in the driver anyway, it is just a pain to extract now.

This is just an attempt at killing Nouveau. It will most likely succeed.

The patent indemnification only covers you if you are using the code for a .NET runtime or a .NET application. Too bad if you find some of the code useful in an unrelated project and fall for the MIT license.

It would be unusual if Rust was marketed as a functional language, because AFAIK no functional language exists without garbage collection today.

When it is merely cold, like -20C, electric cars are great. You arrive to a preheated and defrosted car and there are no problems starting the engine. 3kW of heating is quite sufficient when it includes heated seats and heated steering wheel, and that takes 3 hours to use 10% of the capacity of a Tesla 85kWh car. At slightly higher temperatures you can get a lot of benefit from the heat pump instead.

Now, lots of electric cars do not have suitably designed heating systems or batteries to handle -20C reliably. This is true of some petrol cars as well.