You can't really make that work for solar. You won't be shipping power 20,000 km from dayside to nightside, regardless of how much you generate.

I think that there's a lot to be said for solar thermal + thermal power storage (at industrial scale), but it's more expensive than current sources so I wouldn't advocate rushing into it.

If you don't know who has your credit card data, at any given time, including your children, perhaps you should start there! Why yes I do take due diligence and confirm every charge on my credit cards, debit cards, and bank accounts. Do you not? If not, do you trust your children with that information?

Not a problem I have, really. I don't have kids, and the cats haven't learned how to use my plastic yet. But, hey, you just congratulate yourself for being so diligent. I'm sure it's relevant to the discussion somehow.

This a technological window kids are exploiting because their parents gave them sufficiently advanced technology. Sometimes parents should tell their kids no. Don't do that, or I'll take that smartphone away.

I think the issue is more that the payment system didn't allow enough feedback for the parents to determine that their credit cards remained authorised for in-game purchases. And While it's all very well to read the riot act to your teenage son for abusing your card, it's hard to do that to a six-yearold that didn't realise all that extra time on candy crush was costing his mother actual money.

I'm also not convinced that disclaiming purchases on a card is an adequate substitute for a payment system that allows you to manage access to cards securely.

As much as people want to lambast Google for this, and I'm sure they'll now change it to auth for every app install, the idea of controlling this problem starts in the home.

I don't know about lambasting them, and I agree that if they've got any sense they'll fix this asap. I just I don't think they're entirely without responsibility. And I certainly don't think you can dismiss the issue by saying "ho hum - all the parents fault" as the GP attempted to do.

Second recommendation for that -thanks. But I don't understand USB audio - am I going to be blocked by driver issues on say a old android tablet, or a Windows phone, or some other obscure platform?

If you don't mind spending a little (but not much) money, you can launder your mp3s through a service like iTunes Match or Amazon Prime.

Instead of storing duplicate copies of everybody's collection, they match as much of your collection as possible and just keep their own well-encoded copies. You can sign up for a month (or year or whatever), find matches for your music, and then redownload better copies. After that, there's no need to keep paying for their service (if you don't otherwise have any use for it).

Oh come on. The comment of "google spyware", combined with the fact that it does not make any sense to buy a chrome device if your intention is to put windows on it ( there are several availible at simular price points from a variety of sources), leads me to believe that they were trolling.

Wow, you have such admiration for the Emperor's clothes - very perceptive and loyal of you! How wise to ignore the fools who can't see his wonderful new clothes.

Oh, they all apply, but have a lesser effect on the larger federal government. There isn't nearly as much oversight in corruption of state representitives or state senators as there is in DC. In several states, including the one I live in, most people couldn't name or point out their state reps in a line up. There is little to no reporting on what is going on or why in the state capital.

Your reasons why comparisions are good, are the reason why I would allow them, but they'd need to be reviewed first to ensure they sound like good ideas and a good faith effort is being launched.

The variation in hearing, much like in the frequencies our eyes can see, is minimal before our ears get damaged by city living, because it naturally pushes the limits of the physics involved.

CD is good enough for someone with good hearing, which realistically is far about what anyone over 20, or anyone who has lived in a city, will ever need. (There's some arguments for 48 kHz vs 44, but almost everyone who thinks they can hear that difference is fooling themselves - the overlap between e.g., teenaged Bushmen who have never seen a city and audiophile buyers is probably 0).

Read the link. Seriously.

A good ADC will sample at a much higher frequency, do a very steep digital band pass filter, not limited by coils and capacitors, then compress.

Sure, you can't just naively sample at 44 kHz, which is why it's not done that way. But 16 x 44 kHz at the end of the process, after ADC and mastering and mixing, really is perfect.

Undertones doesn't mean what you want it to mean.

The bottom octave (20-40 Hz) is mostly felt, not heard, but high power subwoofers are cheap as high-end audio gear goes. It's really easy to be accurate within human discrimination for that octave, you just need a whacking great amp built into most of em) and neighbors who don't live close.

You really, really don't want subsonics reproduced. While the "brown note" may not be real, subsonics can do similarly messed-up stuff to you.

Unless we have the name of the person who owns that first telephone number it's still just a number.

"Hey, Sprint? Yeah, this is Agent Smith at the NSA. I see that the phone number 443-555-5555 is on your network. What's the billing address for that account? Uh-huh. Any other accounts at that address? I see. And is there a credit card on file? Can I get the name and card number? Ok. And what's the PIN on their voicemail? Right. And the MEID on the phone? Thanks."

Granted, matching a name to a phone number is trivially easy,

Especially when you're the frickin' NSA.

No, it whould be : create a different account for your child without access to your mails, facebook, [...] and credit card !

None of which would have made any difference in this case. The problem is not that the credit card authorisation is stored on the device. The problem is A) that once authorised, further transactions are accepted without the need for further authorisation for a 30 minute period, and B) that there doesn't seem to be any any way for a parent to determine that in advance, or to cancel the authorisation.

So they way to be responsible here comes down to "don't make in game purchases to your child". Which brings us back to the point that you might as well avoid Google devices and choose something that doesn't have this exposure.

Or, you know, they could say "whoops, our bad" and just fix it. That would work too.

Call he Ma'am. She likes that.

Seriously, read that link. This is engineering; you can learn it.

I'm not familiar with USB audio - I assume that means it won't work with my gear because there won't be a driver for the OS (because that's what I assume about everything). Is that a stupid assumption?