My friend who returned to Bangalore and built a half a million dollar home (at exchange rate, not the PPP rate) has eight, count them, eight truck batteries in his garage, saying that stupid lead-acid crap is more reliable and maintainable than installing a Honda gasoline generator or Cummins diesel generator. In India you would find air conditioners that could run off "inverter".
The quality of AC out of the inverter is so poor most motors would burn. They are designing A/C to take that shit. There is this huge market out there. The free market will serve them.
Installing enough batteries to go off the grid is not cost effective
Cost reductions would eventually usher in utility-scale solar. But to get residential and distributed solar, public awareness and education is needed. But there are places in the world where the grid is very unreliable or non existent. Those places also have very rich individuals and groups. Collectively rich folks in third world without reliable grid have as much purchasing power as all of the middle class of developed countries. They will fund and underwrite the cost of R&D, and deployment and financing of residential/distributed solar. So there is some chance that technology will break the barriers and enter developed countries. There was a time when my Indian relatives all had better cell phones than my circle in USA. Because Indian land lines sucked and US mobile phones had to outdo the landlines. Same thing could happen to the grid.
The high fidelity way to steal content was to write an audio/video driver that installs itself between the code and the device forming a T. Then silently record the stream before delivering it to the audio/video cards. So they went ahead and created the "protected audio/video path" concepts, signed drivers, accepted possible incompatibility with all the existing devices as the price to pay. ??AA did not like Apple's dominance and being forced sell tracks dollar a pop with Apple getting 30 cents commission. iTunes was allowing people who bought songs to make CDs (yes, CDs were quite dominant at that time) etc. So the logic of Microsoft was quite sound, and it makes sense among the suits.
But they forgot the crucial "IF" that formed the foundation of the logic. Can anyone thwart the alleged pirates? Even if the protected signed drivers stopped this method, there was always the analog hole. One can record with reasonable fidelity audio out. Similarly, with more difficulty, the video out too.
The entire concept of Vista was to take command of the living room entertainment center the way MS-Office took command of the corporate desktops. They could not deliver ??AA what they wanted and were promised: a piracy-proof entertainment platform. But it complicated the OS to such an extent it was very unstable. This on top the par-for-the-course bungling of MS suits. Certifying under powered machines as vista capable to play favorites with intel over AMD, that sort of thing.
The damage lingers on to this day. There is a service that runs on all Windows platform that watches all the code crashes and pop up the dialog "I saw something crash? Do you want to try it in WinXP compatibility mode?" That service collects data all day and phones home at night. Our company consolidated three locations into one new building. Some 1500 computers phoned home using the same gateway at the same time. Random crashes on machines that used to run for weeks without rebooting. Traced it to this damned thing. Somehow 500 phone-homes per gateway was ok, at 1500 it crashed randomly. There are hundreds of such things buried deep inside OS due to Vista fiasco.
Similarly if you laid in a bath of alcohol for long enough, you could get drunk by the body absorbing alcohol through your skin.
Come on. Stop giving the college kids fresh ideas on how to get drunk. Enough already.
If I have seen farther than others, it is because I was standing on the shoulders of giants. -- Isaac Newton