There's a much easier solution, already in operation - pumped hydro power plants. They're hydro electric power stations, but when there's a surplus of supply, they pump water up into their reservoir. When peaks of power production are needed, they generate. They can be turned on at a moments notice (all it takes is opening a sluice, and dropping the water), and can store vast amounts of energy.

The ownership is relevant because Banks are much more strictly regulated. The better security is a direct outcome of VISA being owned by a bank.

I believe you're assuming that the flash used on a rover that went to mars, and encounters all kinds of crazy radiation, is in some way similar to the crappy OCZ thing you stuck in your PC 10 years ago.

Who says they didn't?

It's really simple. The russians have nukes, and the missiles to get them to us.

Actually, the metric unit of time is the second ;)

It's almost like, if you don't regulate taxis, then they do all kinds of nasty stuff you wouldn't want them doing!

Uhhhhh... no. That's not how driverless cars work.

No, no it's not security through obscurity. It's security through something you know - a perfectly valid method of securing something. Of course, it would be nice if in this case, you could change the thing you're supposed to know to be different to the device's serial number.

Because it's easier to extract money from people continuously if you can deny them their crack^Wgame at will.

Except that's actually false. Unixen really don't share common interfaces. Mac OS uses launchd, FreeBSD uses init.d, many Linuxes use systemd.

On Linux you'll find devices named /dev/hda(n) and sda(n), while on OS X you'll find /dev/disk(n)s(m), and on solaris you'll find /dev/dsk/c(n)t(m)d(l)s(o).

All unixes differ. Trying to claim that the way it happens to have been done in Linux for a while is the "one true unix way" is frankly bullshit.

You absolutely can feel the strength of the shaking at your location. For reference though, the USGS says it was around a magnitude 4 in oakland (and 6 at the epicentre)

Oh come on. one power line down, and other than that basically no damage. It pretty much has gone unnoticed.

Depends what you want to get out of these stats. If you want to find out in which group you're more likely to find a gamer, if you have a same sized sample, then sure, you're right, you need to normalise it. If you want to find out who you should target when you're designing a game you want to sell to people, then no, no you don't want to normalise it.