Spratley islands is a long way from last communications-- the middle of the gulf of Thailand. The oil rig worker sighting makes me wonder if it really did go down there, but it doesn't make any sense either.

The biggest advantage in my book is simplifying inheritance issues. For taxes, it doesn't become an issue until you have more than $100k income per year; the paperwork is fairly easy to file up until you have (guessing) about $250k income. At that point, the offsets become important and you need to be more careful. Although it was 10 years ago, when I was last living abroad the forms only took an hour max to complete, due to actual tax liability in the US based on no local income taxes.

It all really depends on what the kids want to do. Having two passports is pretty nice for a wide variety of situations, if you like to travel or want to live in another country for a long time without proper paperwork...

You are doing it wrong. The idea (with Bruce Protocol) is that it should take you 10 minutes to get up to your maximum; if you go longer that is better, shorter is worse.

I really hate it when people don't use percentage as a decimal, but it still beets the IRS "Combine" algebraic operator.

I get 73 from a recent stress test. Who hoo, Still Alive! Wife still kicks my ass with a 130 though.

Fortunately, we don't compete in the same markets, but we are in the same broader market. It has been this way for nearly a decade,

If they want to give us a few hundred $k, he'll, I am happy to re-brand and give them the "better" domain... but it isn't really impacting either of us.

How is that worse than the existing condition? My company is -----.com, and another is ---.net. They advertise much more. Some of my employees think they work for them.

Basically all this really does is eliminate the value of the domain name altogether...

Or writing it down anywhere... or thinking about it.

Sure... Publish the software. What the hell, publish the firmware too. You could even publish the schematics for all the chips.

How would you as an end user validate that the nefarious bits aren't actually in the chips, transparently altering the firmware and bypassing protections in software.

Sadly we are in a post-trust mode now. Nothing can be trusted no matter the source or your due diligence. It starts to feel a lot like the secret police watching your every move.

Just to make things interesting, you are being watched by your own country's secret police, other countries' "spies," companies, and criminals.

This really has the potential to completely alter our society in short order, and I am not excited about the prospects.

While that is the only cost for solar, wind power does have other issues given the high peak/average generation values in most locations. There is also the complexity of dealing with unpredictable power flow directions and magnitudes, but that should ultimately be improved by better per-customer SCADA information.

Peaking power plants generate electricity at a cost of around $0.07/kWh. If you are getting paid anything more than that for solar power, you are getting a direct subsidy.

This is completely lost though once your two neighbors also put solar panels on their roofs. Moreover, it is lost when you try to generate 100% of the energy you use a year in a 4-hour average period, but your demand peaks after the sun goes down and lasts throughout the night.

Generally speaking the "customer charges" (at least for California utilities) are really billing and administrative, not infrastructure-based.

There are a couple other important sub-components to generation and distribution: Energy and Demand.

Generation systems are impacted by peak demand as well as time-of-day demand, while distribution is primarily impacted by peak demand. (Technically traditionally peak 8-hour average demand values.)

Exactly. It is a problem created by physics.

Right now, today, even with net metering on generation if you have a "large" commercial service with a substantial PV array the inevitable one-day of overcast haze where temperatures spike screws your demand charges up for the whole year.

Residential rates are traditionally not time-of-day based, just pure energy without any look at timing and demand factors. Of course Residential makes the most sense with net-metering to the customer!

You can pick how you want to be screwed; nobody is fighting that:

• Real Time Pricing: Pay 5x on a hot day and 10x when something else goes wrong. End up paying double if you can't just shut down when the outside temperature is over 80F.
• Time-of-Use: Pay through your nose on a hot overcast day.
• Net Energy with a Tie-In Surcharge: Pay a big tie-in surcharge to achieve the same as the other two above.
• Off-Grid: Pay for batteries to provide your off-hours backup, and have a small generator to cover the overcast winter week.

From the LCCAs I have done for work, they all come out in a similar place based on an 8760-hour analysis of BIN data. The only people who can actually save are the ones that can shut down any time without any substantial cost impact to their operations.

Ultimately, the best solution is to have a mix of the following (in order): demand-side management tools, on-site generation with planned net-energy objectives around 50% of anticipated peak demand, time-shifting options in the form of thermal storage, batteries capable of sustaining 50-80% of demand for up to 1 hour, time-shifting options including batteries to move generation to peak at 4-6PM.

If you pull off all of that, your electricity costs can be as low as practical with current energy mix in place. It can improve slightly with more hydro-electric power, but that isn't "environmentally friendly."

E-books should cost 20% of what the current charges are.

Was going to buy an electronic copy of a book I own (after seeing it mentioned on /.) for easier access, but $50 for a hardcover is absurd when there is a copy somewhere in one of my boxes somewhere, and no electronic versions were available.

My wife has no objections to re-buying some titles, but it is absurd.

Counter... Use Walkie Talkies.... Use wifi...

That said, it makes it substantially harder to use ubiquitous networks without some level of traceability. The easiest control is limiting the number of SIM cards registered to an individual.