They had (maybe still have) an ARGUS-IS unit puttering around in the vicinity of Quantico, VA for a while, for, um, demonstration purposes only, I'm sure. Now, I suspect that an ARGUS-IS deployment has a price tag that would make the folks at Persistent Surveillance Systems look like a hobby aircraft; but the performance is... impressive.

I suspect that, aside from basic technological advance, it really doesn't help that the Iraq and Afghanistan markets are winding down a bit, so assorted stuff for hunting foreigners we don't care about is now being rebadged and flogged as public safety gear.

I know that there has been some (largely speculative/small scale test) work on a pneumatic equivalent to pumped hydro, using oil and gas wells that have already been emptied of hydrocarbons but are suspected of being geologically sound enough to store compressed air; but I haven't heard of any commercial-scale deployments. Not sure if that one hit the rocks in some fairly fundamental way, or if it's just winding its way through R&D. That one would be handy if it did work, especially since a lot of the US petro production includes areas that don't have much in the way of hydro potential (even if you were given a free hand against environmental objections, hydro means some serious construction if you don't already have a reasonably appropriate site).

I know less about batteries; but I'd love to see something less obnoxious than lead acid become viable even at the smallish datacenter scale.

Given that unpretentious vodka is pretty much food-grade ethanol and water, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, and powdered alcohol would be food grade ethanol, some sort of dextrin, plus packaging, distribution, and sin tax, they'd have to be saving a lot of money on the reduced bulk and weight of the omitted water to do any better.

Given that, and given the obvious utility in alcohol concealment and infiltration scenarios, I suspect that they aren't even going for price parity with either the Not Too Much Methanol(tm) brand vodkas or the Tastes Like Piss And Turns to Piss!(tm) economy beer sector.

My religion? I was preemptively dismissing all but the most absurdly optimistic assumptions, verging on cheap-magic-teleporters, as irrelevant to the finitude of economic activity. My personal suspicion is much closer to anything extrasolar being forever a spectator sport, and much of what's within it being something you do purely for reasons of scientific curiosity.

I'm not surprised that there is a backdoor ('Hey guys! Should we add a remote management feature that will automagically Just Work with ISPs 'setup disks' and/or remote troubleshooting systems even if the clueless user has forgotten their password, or would that be too scary?' is not a difficult question, especially given how many of these things are sold to ISPs in bulk and not to end users, especially the lousy combined router/modem devices), I am a trifle surprised that it's so slapped-together looking.

It's not exactly a secret that ISPs and providers of combination internet/TV/voice services tend to view customer-controlled equipment as something between a painful support headache and the blasphemous spawn of an unnatural coupling between internet piracy and absolute evil. Hence their enthusiasm for pushing their pet 'home gateway'/'set top box'/etc. with greater or lesser force, and the existence of standards like TR-069 ('CPE WAN Management Protocol') and organizations like the 'Home Gateway Initiative' that seek to standardize a nice, tame, appliance that can be used to sell services to consumers without confusing their little brains or letting them meddle.

That's what surprises me about seeing a comparatively dodgy-looking; but vendor/OEM provided, back door not only present but deliberately preserved even after being discovered, and sufficiently badly as to be rediscovered. There are remote management systems that, by design, are not under the control of the user, present for the convenience of the operator; but those are in the 'bydesign, wontfix' bucket. There are also malicious backdoors; but if this is one the party inserting it was far too arrogant for their own good. There are probably also legacy backdoors, used by some specific ISPs or the like; but those would presumably show up in their hardware, since Sercomm doesn't control enough of the market to assure that all customer-supplied devices will have the backdoor; but they do control enough that a single ISP's backdoor would be splashed all over the place.

Who is the expected user here, and what did they gain by trying to hold on to an existing backdoor so shoddily as to have it detected again?

Did you miss this bit?

"“The system was kind of kept confidential from everybody in the public,”[The supervisor of the project at the sheriff's department Sgt. Douglas] Iketani said. “A lot of people do have a problem with the eye in the sky, the Big Brother, so in order to mitigate any of those kinds of complaints, we basically kept it pretty hush-hush.”

That is...not exactly... the sort of attitude you want somebody with access to legalized violence to operate under. 'Yeah, we knew people wouldn't like the idea, so we just did it secretly instead. Listening to complaints is a total pain in the ass.' That alone strikes me as reason enough to clean house of everyone who gave it their approval, regardless of whether I thought the project was a good idea or not.

You can use bigger numbers until you run out of memory; you'll still be representing the same pitiful little pile of stuff at the bottom of our gravity well.

If your space-travel-fu is good, maybe some of the nearby ones as well(though shipping costs are likely to be high, and only superluminal travel could overcome the truly massive time discounting effects that would otherwise leave even the most impressive human expansion scenarios as a scattering of mostly disconnected 'islands' between which essentially no economically meaningful interaction is likely).

Hopefully, everyone involved with the Sheriff's department will be punished as hard as legally possible and possibly harder; but that seems unlikely to change the fact that 'power we could use' turns into 'power we just did use' with unpleasant regularity, and it's only reasonable to suspect that the cost of this sort of sensors-and-analysis package is only going to continue plummeting.

I'm sure that the insufferable 'if, hypothetically speaking, this level of surveillance would be legal if carried out by a magical force of zero-cost police officers with perfect memories and no need for sleep, it must be legal if carried out by any means whatsoever!' brigade will be by shortly; but their argument is ahistorical nonsense that ignores the real issue: most of your protection has always been logistical rather than legal. Now we are substantially reducing the logistical barriers and can reasonably expect to further reduce them in the near future. Any protections that you think would be a good idea will soon need to be explicitly legal; because the logistics will be increasingly trivial(possibly even self-financing, if you can sell ads somehow...)

Given the numbers in TFA, though, which had solar-generating customers as barely a rounding error, this particular incident seemed to be a straightforward rate fight caused by grid costs being rolled into assumptions about typical energy use by customers.

I agree that the behavior of an electrical system where wind and solar make up a substantial portion of generation assets would be a great deal hairier, though. Like base load units, both have capital and maintenance costs, sometimes substantial; but cost comparatively little to run at full capacity rather than to idle. Given the fixed costs, and the extremely low variable costs, the floor price for electricity from such is likely to be near zero(since you aren't paying for fuel, nor can you store those photons or that wind for the future, like the hydro units can with water, nearly anything more than nothing will at least cause you to lose money on your fixed costs more slowly); but the operator can do nothing about situations where they are constrained by supplies of sun or wind, no price is high enough to increase output under those conditions.

It...remains to be seen... if our less than promising history of managing risks in financial markets is up to the task(be sure your backup generator is in good repair, kids!)

At present, more or less all the options for electricity storage pretty much suck. Some of the more advanced purpose-built ones (fancy batteries, supercapacitors, that sort of thing) might actually be reasonably efficient; but the cost enough that it hardly matters. The ones you get 'for free', like pumped hydro, are not particularly efficient and only work if you have certain conditions in place.

Size? Potential size?

This seems like the sort of problem that could be much more logically and less painfully solved by breaking out the (more or less constant, at least within a given size class and geographic area) grid hookup cost and the per-KW/h price for electricity as separate items on the bill.

Infrastructure doesn't build and maintain itself, so if you want to maintain your connection, it's only logical that you'll pay something for that. If you try to bundle the distribution costs into the energy cost, though, you just get a bit of a mess since the amount a given person is paying for infrastructure can vary wildly and you end up having to field requests like this. Even here, they make a somewhat arbitrary distinction between users who do feed to the grid and those who don't (who presumably also use less power but just aren't easy to identify). Just break out the two items and call it a day.

Yep, pretty much this. Students should learn to get by the same way adults do. Make a damn budget and stick to it (granted, this is getting rare among adults too). But do that math and get creative stretching your bucks.

Found a handful of dependable roommates and rented rickety 100-year old houses with them, which were a lot cheaper than apartments and university housing. We took turns cooking for everyone. We ate well. We'd do a grocery run once a week and shop carefully... fresh or frozen meat that was under $3/lb., lots of pasta, rice, veggies, etc.. Drank tap water, mixed with that frozen juice from concentrate when we wanted something fancier. I pretty much stuck to ~$40 a week for groceries (in 2000 money), and maybe augmented that once or twice a week with trips to one of those heaping Chinese "any two or three" stir fry takeout places for $3-$5 per meal. Plus, I would volunteer to staff the ASME coffee shop in the morning while doing homework, which was good for a bagel or two per sitting. And of course stake out the extracurricular activities that had free pizza.

Aside from the technical difficulties (which are certainly real; but probably surmountable with time and funding), I would be concerned about the political side of the project(politics being...somewhat less of a solved problem... than space and blowing things up).

The technology sufficient to divert an asteroid, especially with limited warning(which precludes some of the subtler 'attach an ion drive or give it a slow shove with a laser' type schemes), is probably pretty punchy, possibly 'basically an ICBM but better at escaping earth's gravity well' punchy. It would be an unfortunate irony if, in the attempt to mitigate the city-destroying-asteroid threat, we ended up with some sort of proliferation problem or another round of delightful nuclear brinksmanship.

In an ideal world, you'd hope that people could put "Stopping asteroid apocalypse" in the category of 'things more important than your petty nation-states and dumb ethnic and religious squabbles'; but I wouldn't exactly be shocked if people largely can't and every stage of an anti-asteroid project ends up being a bunch of delicate diplomacy and jingoistic dickwaving between the assorted nuclear powers, along with a lot of hand-wringing about anti-satellite capabilities, and generally a gigantic mess.