The idea of pushing for OLD homes to have solar added is a mistake. In addition, paying subsidies for it, is just plain wrong since it is causing solar companies to focus on just those locations.

Instead, at a US national level, we should put in place several regs and 1 new subsidy, while removing all of the other subsidies for Solar:
1) require that ALL utilities to buy up to 10% of a buildings excess electricity that is generated via on-site AE. IOW, if a building is expected to USE 1MW / month, then .1MW / month can be sold to the utility. In addition, it needs to be bought at the top that the utilitity pays for that time, to any other provider, including buying it from other providers.
2) require that ALL new buildings of 5 stories and less to have enough on-site AE to equal the HVAC energy needs (and require heating and cooling). Note that such a building with only enough on-site to equal the HVAC will likely not be selling much if any to the utility. However, if they decide to increase it, to the point that they equal 110% of their energy needs, then the utility must buy the extra 10%. Note that the smart developers will focus on lower energy costs buildings with better insulation and hopefully geo-thermal HVAC, since all forms of AE is actually expensive.
3) provide a TIME-LIMITED subsidy for energy storage. It should be in terms of max amount and must be able to hook up to the utility, company, or resident and provide the power. In particular, Utilities should be encouraged to move from 1 big grid, into small grids in which a storage is sitting there between the local grid and the big power grid.

With this approach, it will help utilities convert to storage, and lower their costs of energy production. In addition, it will stop new buildings from adding draw to the grid. Basically, it will help lower the real energy costs for all.

Seriously, these are removing competition, not improving it.
What is needed is to encourage companies to compete against each other, not just turn themselves into companies for takeovers so that the executives walk away with large golden parachutes.

WRT data comm, with comcast-TW merger, it will remove real competition. As such, if this is to be allowed to happen, we need to require that all laws that reward monopolies in data comm, to be removed. Cities should be allowed to put in their own network as long private can come in. Likewise, just because comcast-tw is in a place, does not mean that google should be prevented from coming in.

What if...

Instead of a stupid troll you were actually interested in the answers. Interested enough to either take some classes on the subject, or expend some effort educating yourself.

We live in an age where the vast majority of the world's information is available for little to no cost or effort, yet you actively choose to remain ignorant.

Step 1: Understand what science is. http://undsci.berkeley.edu/article/whatisscience_01
Step 2: Take a class or look it up. http://space.about.com/cs/astronomy101/a/astro101a.htm
Step 3: Keep digging

Well, keeping you out of the public eye is an appropriate punishment when you're convicted of a political crime. But we shouldn't recognize political crimes.

If people want to pay attention to what this guy has to say because he gyrocoptered in restricted airspace, that's their business. Even though it's a pretty stupid reason, it shouldn't be a judge's role to sit in judgment of that.

THere's an important flip side to freedom of speech that is often overlooked: freedom of listening. As a citizen you should be able to hear what the government doesn't want you to hear, unless the government has a compelling reason, and even then the restrictions should be narrowly tailored. "That guy just pulled a stupid stunt," is not a compelling reason to intervene in what people choose to listen to.

You can't fire a faculty member because outside the scope of his duties he expresses an opinion you don't like -- even if it's a clearly crackpot opinion. If you could, Stanford would have kicked Linus Pauling out when he became a Vitamin C crackpot.

The difference, though, is that Pauling was a sincere crackpot -- brilliant people are often susceptible to crackpottery because they're so used to being more right than their neighbors. Dr. Oz is a snake-oil salesman; when he's faced with people who are educated -- not necessarily scientists but critical thinkers -- in a forum he doesn't control, he speaks in a much more equivocal fashion. That shows he knows the language he uses on his show and in his magazine is irresponsible.

So selling snake-oil isn't crackpottery, it's misconduct. But somebody's got to find, chapter and verse, the specific institutional rules of conduct Dr. Oz's misconduct violates. There will have to be due process, particularly if he's a tenured professor, which will probably require lesser disciplinary measures than dismissal be tried first.

You fool.
When he spoke about the spying on Americans, he was doing the right thing.
When he spoke about the NSA spying on other nations and terrorists, he became a traitor.
The reason is that the NSA was set up to SPECIFICALLY to spy on other nations, terrorists, foreigners, etc.
And consider that just about every nation in this world attempts to do the SAME THING, and regards it as legal, means that it is legal for NSA TO DO THE SAME.

I would agree with you, except that you will blame the west only. Right now, far right wingers deny agw, but the far left ( which likely includes you ) deny that China and other nations are part of this.

LOL. Obviously, you are being sarcastic, and these companies deserve it.
I had been offered jobs from multiple Indian contracting houses. In each case, they offered me less than 1/2 (and once, less than 1/3) of what the job paid. And the Indians that got the jobs, with less experience, education, etc, were literally paid more than double what I was offered.

Tata and others are full of shit.

Not directly. Not as an individual. But diverting resources to quackery is bad for society; not so bad in this case that it's high on my list as "health supplements", but not totally benign either.

That's speculation. Feasibility is no guarantee of performance.

I read the attached article, and there were two specific complaints cited. The first was security, which is a non-functional requirement; that could well be a failure of the customer to do his homework on requirements but presumably a competent and honest vendor could have done a better job on security. It's often the vendor's job to anticipate customer needs, particularly in projects of the type customers don't necessarily have experience with.

The other complaint is that the curriculum wasn't completely implemented. If the vendor failed to deliver something it agreed to, that's purely the vendor's fault.

Sometimes bad vendors happen to good customers. Bad vendors happen more often to bad customers, but every project involves taking a calculated risk.

Well, until the details of how the contract was awarded and how the vendor failed have been thoroughly investigated, it's premature to fire anyone.

Don't get me wrong, I'm all for accountability and decisiveness, but picking someone plausible and throwing them under the bus isn't accountability. In fact that may actually shield whoever was responsible.

Open is nice, but the Cyanogen people need to pay the bills.

There's no point to CM if it's not secure. If they're installing Microsoft blobs by default, it's not secure. We know Microsoft openly cooperates with the NSA on eavesdropping technology - I even wonder if this is a subtle warrant canary.

Assuming the least-bad possbility, then if they want to offer an easy-to-use tool to install a tested Microsoft bundle from the CM servers, then fantastic - for people who want to make that trade-off.

Virginia is overwhelmingly Democratic at the state executive level, so it's not that surprising that they voted Democratic at the Federal level. Most of VA's population growth over the past decade has been in the urban and suburban NOVA and Tidewater areas as well, which are Democrat voting strongholds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

PA has been voting Democratic for decades, so it seems neither of us know WTF you're talking about.
http://www.270towin.com/states...

Not even. "This treatment has been approved in Europe under the name Duodopa since 2004."

"They were more interested in getting *their* solution jammed through for a personal victory than the greater good."

Please -- you just described at least half the population, and probably 90% of managers.