The real numbers:

If you figure out what the "just enough" solar panel count would be for your max power needs during the shortest day of the year in full sunlight at whatever angle(s) you'll be able to manage, you'll need five to seven times that many to make sure that on non-sunny days you're good to go.

This is because solar panels produce between 15% and 20% of rated capacity on non-sunny days. Non-sunny days are not "dark", they are only "dim." It is a very rare day indeed where it is so dark as to drive a solar panel below 15% output (major snowstorm which has the atmosphere nearly opaque, that kind of thing.) But dim days can come in very long strings, so that's the target to aim at.

For a reliable system that will never let you down, you do tend to need considerably more space than you would initially think. But it is possible, given that you have the space (lots) and the budget (also lots) required. Panel-wise, it's a quantity issue.

But there's a wolverine in the woodpile: Batteries. To be blunt, they suck, as in, expensive to replace and very short lifetimes compared to the rest of the system.

Until or unless ultracaps reach a point where they are on par with batteries for the service you need, reasonable full-on solar installations remain quite expensive.

Installations that use batteries are regarded highly by their owners only until the first battery replacement. Then their wallets straighten them right out.

I have a lowish-power setup, with an unfortunate number of ultracaps (because capacity is very low, about 1/10th that of a battery right now) as the energy storage medium. I did it both to give my ham gear a constant supply, and to explore what would actually work. It took a custom controller design -- ultracaps don't act even remotely like batteries -- and it took me quite some time to put it all together and make it work like I wanted it to. There are way more panels than you'd expect because of that 15% number (my panels are cheap ones), and there are way more ultracaps than I wanted to expend room for, but I did have the room, so I kept at it. It works great, and it isn't going to need service for decades unless there is an actual component failure or a severe weather event (large hail, for instance.)

Trying to do this for a full house load? A typical US house? Not yet, I'm afraid. There will be tons of compromises to make in appliances, lights, and lifestyle, and in the end, you're not likely to have the same lifestyle you had prior to your switchover.

The battery problem will probably be solved. One way or another. Eventually. I have no idea if solar panel efficiency will get up into a range where the costs and space will fall within the range needed to go truly off grid. That's a physics question in an area where I have nowhere near enough knowledge. But right now? No.

Which brings us to on-grid, grid power use mitigation. Now that is an interesting area, and we can leave batteries right out of it, as peak power also comes during peak power use (right now... electric cars may change that.) But it involves all kinds of compromises for the utilities if it is adopted in any kind of mass manner. They will need power storage, as I understand it at the moment.

Full-on solar is a great, great thing with huge potential (ha, a pun, hooray), but it's not a panacea by any means except in very rare sets of circumstances that involve very large amounts of money and large areas of space for the panels.

If you trust all that, and you believe it isn't vulnerable to the NSA and hackers, that's your call to make.

Sometimes their "philanthropy" is self-serving. Paul Allen is currently in my country with his huge-arse luxury yacht with its two helicopters and two submarines, parked not at the harbour because his boat is too big, but just sitting out in the bay blocking the view. But because he explores shipwrecks and the like (something that he does for fun), it's called charity, and he gets welcome to park his floating palace at no cost.

What about when you need a huge bunch of CPUs to compute something? That's an aspect of "the cloud" that actually seems reasonable. As long as you don't put anything you want kept secure out there, of course.

the first responsability of the CEO is to protect the money of the shareholders and make it profitable

Exactly right. Add just a smidgen of shortsightedness and some pressure from the board, and you have the perfect storm of next-quarter-itis.

After a few quarters like that, the CEO takes off for the next company, as the company tries to put out the fires they left behind them -- fired experts, cheapened and crippled products, new hires that don't know much about the domain, insufficiently-tested but out-the-door-anyway products...

Yeah, responsibility to the shareholders. Which means: Short term thinking and cannibalistic profiteering. That's the US corporate mantra, right there.

Estrogen seems to make you cold. A menopausal secretary and I were discussing this once. I mentioned that the way she was experiencing most rooms as too hot was the way many men feel throughout life.

It's the socks.

The real sexism seems to be that some businesses still require males to wear one or two layers of wool over a layer or two of cotton and the entire body except hands and face to be covered with clothing, while the female uniform is somewhere along the lines of "whatever, so long as we can't see nipple, but preferably thinner fabric and more exposed skin." Evening that out would go a long way to making everyone more comfortable at a given temperature.

They help. I like to work on a notebook on my balcony. In the fall, fingerless gloves help.

Thing is, if a privateer attacked a neutral, the captain and crew were hanged as pirates.

He covered that with "stupid."

I doubt he hates the OPs god. He hates the things the followers of that god do in it's name.

These are silly questions. Humans learn their sense of right and wrong from their parents and community, as children. It's somewhat malleable in adulthood, also through their experiences of their environment.

We don't all share the same sense of right and wrong, and we certainly don't all share the Christian version of it, which is really pretty nasty by western standards.

Program crashing at startup? Okay, let's add debugging statements.

Can't get the debugging statements to execute? Okay, let's try removing code.

Doesn't fix the problem? Okay, let's keep removing more... and more...

A couple hours later, so much code was removed that the entire program had become nothing more than an empty main function that still crashed. This led to the following rule which I try to follow to this day: Make sure that you're actually compiling and executing the same copy of the code that you're modifying. ;)

Hey, I think I saw that in a movie once. It was called "Wanted." Angelina Jolie could curve bullets around obstacles.

That law is similar around the world. It has some interesting implications. I fly hang gliders and, since they're unpowered, we're effectively always "landing."