The problem though is that someone that is a hyper-miler in one car will be a guzzler in another car with the same behaviors.

What I actually care about is how many gallons of gas I need to put in the tank to go x miles. I don't buy a car every day (haven't in 20 years...), but I buy gas at least once a week.

People's needs vary.

A Swedish mile is 6.2 American Miles.

Actually, a number of analysis over the years have shown that you need to limit non-isolatable nodes in a system to a maximum of six, there is also a substantial body of evidence that N+1 redundancy only adds redundancy for less than 6 units total. It would seem their analysis also relies on the ability to limit the number of nodes post-repair.

The idea may not be new, but the expression is interesting.

I think largest would be The SuperNAP in Vegas in terms of power-- I think they are close to 80MW of UPS. No one facility in California compares to that. I would doubt Tokyo would have anything at that scale; it would be well outside the city.

The issue is that the energy and distribution costs are bundled, primarily for residential customers. Un-bundle the two, and have a specific demand charge (max kW power flow, either direction). The demand charge covers distribution, and you continue to net-meter energy.

The problem today is essentially that a residential user produces 4x their peak demand for a few hours a day, which forces the utility to have 4x the distribution capacity but they end up with zero revenue.

For the end user, if you aren't happy with it, go off-grid and provide a sufficient battery to make it work. As long as the utility is charging less than about $10/kW demand charge, it is cheaper to connect to the grid than provide your own batteries. The balance stops working when the peak PV component of production exceeds some magic number, but that should be over 40%.

The secret is that you have to open the door and detergent tray on the washer, and the heat exchanger and lint tray need to be removed on the dryer, also with the door open.

We had a nightmare with our washer when first installed due to bad controller boards, but it has been working reliably for several years now. Not sure if I would go Bosch again, but it does the job pretty well.

Wind loading... why not just put it on an axle and let it spin to make even more kW per day and possibly even more cubic liters of water!!

Forcing someone to train without paying them is illegal in most states. If someone like the OP wants to go to a conference for fun, professional development, networking, etc., that is all well and good; it is a shared benefit. Threats of being fired if you don't have certification X is unacceptable, but denial of future benefits is more fuzzy.

The real problem is some people want to be life long students and milk professional development funds, and policies need to protect employers from that.

Public and companies with government contracts are different than the private sector, and selling taxpayers on a conference in Las Vegas can be difficult.

In the private sector, companies should budget about 5% of annual salary for training. That includes time and expenses. Usually our approach is to make sure the employee has some skin in the game-- either pay part of the cost or take PTO to attend if it isn't after-hours.

As an employer, I am generally torn on the matter though; much of the benefit is to the employee rather than the employer; I care that you can do your job not that you have a piece of paper that says you can do your job. New technologies, keeping skills sharp, networking... all of those things have a split benefit.

I don't have any of the problems with sluggishness, but boy is iOS 8 buggy, especially on the iPad! I've had about 8 reboots since Thursday with light usage.

I really hate a lot of the changes they have made, especially Safari, and it doesn't feel like there is much substance to the new features.

Ironically, it is the licensing of openvpn (not that open) that makes the problem.

I love our work ASA5505, but it is a bear to configure properly unless you know what you are doing. High point with me is the ease of connecting on the client end.

Do you use OpenVPN from iPhone/iPads in your environment? Can't stand the client I have from OpenVPN.com.

One big reason is to avoid all the "cloudy" ways to allow remote access to things like cameras, storage, security. Another incentive might be to route all (say) netflix traffic to a VPN so that it doesn't get throttled by your ISP.