I have been thinking for awhile about building a house out in the country and not bothering to have it connected to the grid. My first thought was to go with a whole lot of solar panels and a couple giant propane tanks with a gas generator. Still, that is a lacking setup, but these batteries just might make the difference. I would probably buy more than one of whatever the top of the line battery would be. Of course, I have already checked the availability of water in the areas I have been considering.

Throw in a couple substantially less hydrogen fuels cells to take over in the event I loose power and I might seriously go through with it.

I think the idea here is that we have only recently achieved the energy density needed from lithium ion batteries for this to be practical. This could not have been accomplished in 1999 - or at least it would have been a lot more heavy.

Why are they trying to drum up demand when they are obviously overwhelmed with demand,can't make nearly enough of the damned things after 6 months or more of round-the-clock production?

I think that's kind of the whole point. I mean we are here talking about it after all. I think there is an economic term for the practice, anyone care to enlighten?

To mod or comment..?

Comment.

If you are new around here and plan on coming back I suggest you spend quite awhile looking over stories and their comments from years past. This place has it's own... You'll figure it out.

Right now we have the multitudes running a conglomerate combination of Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows 8.1 - I imagine all of these operating system, and remember when we had a single MS OS shared among all people business and personal alike. Part of the appeal of XP was that you could depend on finding it anywhere and everywhere and nearly exclusively. Microsoft has too much out there - and this includes their server offerings - and I strongly suspect MS is working toward that lost, uniform ubiquity that they had with Windows XP.
Again, I'm a long time MS basher, but I think giving them a post-Ballmer chance is fully in order. I expect a lot of them over the next few short years, and that includes a single OS to rule them all..

Who knows. Maybe.

When business first encountered Windows 8\8.1 the resistance has been high with people falling back to Windows 7... Understandably. I've been using Windows 10 from the earliest builds. It was clear from early on: they wanted to appeal to business and consumers with a single, and long term, solution like they had with XP. When it was Windows XP, it was Windows XP for all. This is what Microsoft wants to return to. I am sure there are domain policies you can issue to configure what "start" does and does not do. I think Microsoft might hit their stride with Windows 10. This is signed a long time MS\Windows hater.

Or they simply transfer the data to the NSA for safe keeping after the two years are up. Perhaps a bit pessimistic, but at the same time it would not be a surprise.

I have an old Optiplex 280 and 270 running FreeBSD and Debian servers respectively. They are also stacked. When I turn them on, they quickly outpace any space heater. A couple of unusually cold winters ago, I used them just for that.

It was actually pretty good, but had nothing whatsoever to do with aliens. It was pretty much just a murder mystery.

Never say never. We are a notoriously persistent species. If we manage to survive our adolescence, living on Mars will be a cakewalk.

Form the first time on Slashdot it can be said, "You must be new around here." and actually meant. If civil discourse dominates your threads, you need to lower your threshold.

I was thinking more like intersolar trade. Water goes on giant ships to the moon every so often, and helium-three comes back. If it turns out to be to impractical to colonize distant worlds for a very long time, we must assume the colonization of the solar system works out barring we don't set ourselves back or completely annihilate ourselves, this could start to take shape in a century or so. Different places in the solar system have different resources, ships sharing resources would need to be in constant transit.

That's great but how about sustaining human life? These could be great jumping off places for solar system colonization.