Looks like the linked site is a pay wall or something. Renders the article in low res, throws a lot of pop ups. It seems to be a bad mash up of javascript running flash and pdf. Malware purveyors dream.

Wonder why the editors let such bad sites and auto playing videos to be posted.

Typically the grid operates at full load on sunny days in the afternoon when all the airconditioners are at full blast. The spot price for electricity fluctuates a lot. And most utilities buy and sell power in this spot market where they make most of their profits. The base load is just 40% of the peak load and there is so much of excess capacity electricity basically sold at cost or at a loss.

Enter, Solar.

It provides power exactly when the demand peaks. If solar meets the peak power demand, the spot price for electricity will fall. For brief period an Australian utility had to sell power at *negative* prices at the peak! There was so much solar power feeding into the grid, they had to pay people to take their power, lest their generators overheat and burn.

The amount of solar electricity created might be small in terms of energy produced. But when it comes to profits, this probably cuts deep into the profits of the utilities.

Eventually the utilities will reduce their peak capacity to create an artificial shortage and trade. The net metered roof top solar energy is bought back at wholesale prices by law. They typically get sold instantly in the spot market at peak prices. The utilities are making tons of money on the net metering, all their talk about roof top solar being free loading is just bull shit.

The whole concept of Intellectual Property is created by the government, and you need government to enforce it. When regular real estate is subject to eminent domain, why patents, copyrights etc should be above it? If some drug company develops a drug that can cure Hep-C and is profitable enough to sell it in third world countries for 20$ a dose, but insists on charging 160,000$ per dose for USA, I think the government should just step in, take over the patent based on eminent domain, pay the company something along the lines of what is suggested in the summary. Take a billion or two, and the entire cost of development, testing and regulatory approval too. But we can't let the drug companies game our government and treat us like a milch cow.

You know there is this well proven technology, that has been used for more than 200 years by the ranchers. Just punch a hole through the ear lobe and slip in a string and a token. We can modernize it by making the token RFID.

Why don't we ask the question, "Does putting RFID ear tags on the employees improve Business?

Looks like the Business will not rest till it turns every fiscal conservative who still believes in the free markets into foaming in the mouth rabid raving lunatic communist.

The abstract says:

The microbe lived in the damned rats for 400 years. The rats are responsible for black death. The article merely claims the microbe originated in Asia and was introduced to Europe via gerbils on the land route.

writing from memory, any errors mine, not the article's:

Original theory was that the microbes could not survive the cold climates and long distance travel of the silk road. But the direct sea route shortened the journey and provided a warmer passage. Thus the black death microbe traveled on rats on ships. This article moves the date of introduction of the microbe to 1347 CE, at least 130 years before Barthalomiyo (sp?) Diaz rounded cape of storms, and Vasco Da Gama reached India.

I installed a recent version of Firefox in Google Nexus 5 phone. I could not install NoScript. Says not supported. I desperately need an alternative to Chrome in my phone. All kinds of pop-ups. Does this version support NoScript?

There are tons of people from India, China and many other countries who do graduate studies in USA in student visa F1. Then they get to work for 12 months as "Practical Training" period. If they hold a STEM degree they get an additional 15 months. After that they get H1B and stay on it till they get their green cards. This group will get very competitive salaries and they are usually world class graduates demanding and getting world class salary.

Then there is a whole different set of H1Bs, fresh from India, no American degree or qualifications. The claimed Indian degree and qualifications are often unverifiable. Their quality of work is poor, their educating is poor, their English is poor. For them even a 45K a year is paying them too much.

Most slashdotters think the corporations lobby for H1B to depress wages for Americans. No, people. They don't care whatever pay you get. They are not paying for it out of their pocket. The real reason is corporate corruption. Many top executives of these American companies own shell companies through intermediaries. These shell companies get the contract to supply warm bodies to the corporations they manage. They sign both sides of the contract, one as the CIO of XYZ corporation and the other side as the owner of some shell company contracting with XYZ corporation. Indian companies like TCS, Infosys, Cognizant, Wipro get contracts from these shell companies. They knowingly supply substandard workers with fake resumes and fake work experience. They know it will not be scrutinized well. They know the H1-Bs will play along with the fake resume. Every step of the way the billing rate is padded up. It is them who actually spend tons of money to lobby the congress.

You must be living very frugally. Never got out of the spending habits formed during the grad student days, I suppose.

When I transitioned from being one of the PIGS[*] to a regular employee on a small not too fancy company with median starting salary, I earned more in that year than I did in the previous four years as a graduate student and as the root (of all evils) of the computer lab.

[*] PIGS = Poor Indian Graduate Student.

All the fortran programs I wrote as a grad student in Indian Institute of Science, back in 1980s live for ever in that 2400 feet of half-inch tape recorded at 6250 Bytes-per-inch lives digitally for ever. The only good thing about that was that I swiped the blank media from my former employer instead of paying half-a-month salary of a gazetted (civilian equivalent of commissioned) officer to buy the blank tape in the open market. Back in those days, in India, imported items were that expensive.

Then I also have Watfor compiler and ChiWriter in 5.5 inch floppy disks. I have my grad student work at UT in a unix mini tape. I also have some IOmega 100 MB disks. In my basement somewhere I have the backups of my WindowsNT machine in 3.5 inch floppy disks. All of them are digital. All of them are as dead as any corpse buried in a cemetery.

This is Microsoft we are talking about. I am seriously thinking of buying a new desktop because pretty soon I won't be able to buy a new Windows7 machine. Google will keep it in beta forever. Microsoft will slap a new version number of end of life it in 10 years.

... if Klingon and pig latin are supported.

Boston is a geometric paradise compare to Pittsburgh, That's where you go once you die, according to the noted urban planner Bill Waterson.

Almost all the migrator birds would be severely confused if they can not see the stars for extended periods of time. Many of them sense the Earth's magnetic field. But the species that have survived the periodical shifts in Earth's magnetic field and polarity reversals, they must be using celestial navigation. Losing the stars would leave them very confused.

The way the contracts are structured, these companies have so many escape clauses and poinson pills. "If the red light cameras were removed by a future government, the red light camera company should be paid xyz million dollars". It is an outrage officials elected in elections with tiny voter turn out and small margins sign contracts on behalf of the city or county stretching to millions of dollars over the coming decades

City of Chicago sold all its parking meters for a one time payment for the next 99 years. The clauses are so egregious, City can not create new parking spaces, no new parking garages by the city etc etc. And the enforcement is so bloody aggressive.

The city (or the state) nearly sold the Midway airport for peanuts. Luckily the buyer went bankrupt in the last financial crisis.

There is cost of storage, inventory management, liability insurance etc. You think it would cost them 57$ for that? Then there can be nothing that is priced lower than 57$ because the cost of the product is negligible. If some one can make rounds ahead of the garbage truck, pick discarded fridges, TV sets, VCRs and random stuff off the garbage pile, strip them for parts, classify, store and ship for 10$, why does it take Sears 57$?

I would have gladly paid 10$ for that part to Sears. If it manages to keep its storage and inventory management low it would amortize to less than 3$ per part. It could have made a 230% profit margin on that sale. No, it wants 1000% margin on that part. That is why I said cry me a river Sears.

I actually paid 57$ + S&H/. (Long story. Wife involved). I never forgave them for holding me to ransom like that. I am crazy like that.

You know the tiny contact switch that turns the light on in your fridge? Do you know its replacement cost? 57$. I am not joking, the tiny piece of plastic, strategically placed so that it would jostle as you put stuff in or take it out of the fridge, costs some 60$ + shipping and handling. At least for automobiles you can raid the junk yards looking for parts. But there is no fridge junkyard for me to raid.

That profit margin is sure to evaporate. People will scan and print replacement part for a fraction of the price. Sears might actually install a 3D printer in their own store with access to official CAD drawings and sell it. But they will not be able to maintain such high price for such small piece that probably costs 20cents to make for long. So yeah, 3D printing might erode some of these profit margins, and these guys will bitch, moan and yell, "IP fraud, they don't have license from us to replicate these parts". But, if you had not abused your monopoly on the replacement parts and acted nicely, may be I would have been kind. But now, I say, cry me a river Sears.