What the heck? Don't get me wrong, I'm a huge fan of the UC concept. But you offered no evidence that UC capacity will ever be cheaper or smaller than batteries, but somehow we must accept that UCs are the future. If someone suggests otherwise they are a "troll", and we aren't allowed "specifically quantify the issue in any way"? I don't accept your terms.

First of all, what's the time frame on these cheaper-than-battery UCs? If they are more than a few years out, it's unreasonable talk about them as though they solve any current problems. Running low on electric capacity is a problem NOW so why should we focus on a hypothetical future of cheap ultracaps?

Secondly, even assuming they are someday cheaper than batteries, that doesn't mean they are cheaper than gas storage (since gas storage is inefficient, it was only proposed because it's cheaper). According to here, the cheapest kind of battery storage is Lead-acid at $170 per KWh. Assuming tp1024 is right that 100TWh is needed for 2 months of energy storage for Germany (= 69 GW, which admittedly feels like an overly high estimate to me), the needed batteries would cost $170 billion dollars, or about $2000 from every man, woman and child (in Germany). Even if UCs become half the price of the world's cheapest battery, $1000 per capita still seems like a huge extra cost (on top of the wind/solar plants themselves) that would be spent just to reduce storage losses and/or to avoid building nuclear plants (which wouldn't need any significant energy storage in the first place).

Plus, what reason is there to think UCs' energy density will get anywhere near that of compressed hydrogen?

Stomv didn't say "nuclear and fossil-fuel generated electricity costs more than photovoltaic" - he said the operating costs are higher, which is presumably added on top of the basic $14B price tag. Fossil fuel plants, of course, have the highest operating costs since their fuel costs more than water (hydro), uranium, sunlight, wind, etc.

Note: I realize you can't use solar power for base load. Still, if nuclear costs twice as much as solar, it's hard to believe it's the best use of funds. It seems plausible that you could afford to build a huge solar plant with huge energy-storage capacity (batteries, molten salt, whatever) for less than the price of this plant.

I actually like nuclear energy, especially newer safe designs that "can't" melt down, but to me the main attraction of nuclear is the potential cost savings over other possibilities. Am I missing something, or does this project not save any money compared to the alternatives?

(14G$ / 2.2GW) doesn't sound like a good price point to me, with the price of solar being at $3/watt and falling (assuming "AC Watts" have the same energy as "DC Watts"). Why so pricey?

What's wrong with your logical process is your assumptions. You assume that if you go back in time and change something, that it must affect the past you remember. You assume consistency between 1955's future and the 1985 you left from. But there are no known laws of physics governing time travel, since time travel has never been done. The universe it is what it is -- it may rule out time travel entirely, but if time travel is possible, it may or may not allow multiple timelines and inconsistencies. We can't say whether/which paradoxes are possible until we actually perform time travel and investigate it scientifically.

One possibility is that when you go back and change something, the universe splits. The universe you left continues to exist, and your changes create a parallel universe. Or, the changes propagate at some unknown speed toward the future, overwriting the old future. Or, perhaps time travel requires consistency between the future and past somehow (this is very hard for humans to imagine realistically; I read a novel based on this approach, and it was clearly unrealistic because it basically relied on "magic" to ensure you wouldn't kill your grandparents or save someone's life--not that physics would care about a person's life any more than a bug you might squash or a pebble you might displace while you're walking around in the past!)

What's not possible is for these three possibilities to mix unpredictably in nonsensical ways, which often happens in the movies according to the screenwriter's whim.

Politicians aren't interested in one data point, you.

The problem is this: rich guys who run for high office can now afford to analyze "location, demographics, political affiliations, social networks, behavior, and interests of citizens" and then tell voters in a specific area and demographic exactly what they want to hear. They can then give different messages to different people, and they can perhaps even risk playing different messages that contradict each other to different audiences.

Since most people have minimal political engagement, they will vote for the guy who is saying exactly what they want to hear, and the majority will fail to notice that the same guy is giving different messages to different groups of people. In contrast, candidates without enormous wealth cannot pull off this trick, and ethical candidates (who take a consistent position on an issue, regardless of their audience) wouldn't be willing to pull off this trick. Therefore, the risk we face here is that only unethical rich people will win important elections.

Man, who are the porn lovers modding this stuff up? I'm surprised how much traction is being granted to this hardline position of "porn equals speech, so it's okay to publicly display it, period."

Now, I actually believe non-sexual public nudity should be legal, but I still believe in basic courtesy, and surely minors should be protected from seeing porn as they walk by? I'm a nudist, but I wouldn't generally walk around on the street without clothes even if it were legal, except for special publicized events like the World Naked Bike Ride. Why? Because some people might be offended. If people look through a hole in the fence and see me sunbathing, fine: they don't have to keep looking, they can look away if they don't like it. I think a little nudity is good, to get people used to the human body, but out of courtesy we should avoid forcing it on people. When you're rude enough, you end up in the news, like this weirdo and the librarian.

And porn is a different story than simple nudity, since it can be quite addictive, especially to minors. I remember being a teenager, before I was a nudist. If I saw someone watching porn in public in the library, I would have been thinking about it for days afterward. I would have been itching to see some porn for myself. And my parents, thinking of me, would have rightly freaked out if they saw it in the library. We don't even have to bring the law into this; since it's sensational enough for a news story, I think that in the future, social norms will make this guy move to the computer in the corner.

You're asking "what if the porn computer in the corner is in constant use"? But it wasn't. The guy could have moved. When porn watching in the library becomes epidemic, let's talk about it then.

FTA: " 'And they can't be in the business of monitoring what their patrons are doing at any given computer.' However, in 2010 the Washington State Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 decision that libraries can do exactly that. The ruling came after the ACLU sued a rural library district that had attempted to filter porn from its computers. "

Citation needed. Googling for Matt Deatheridge "bonch" doesn't turn up any obvious connection.

Actually, some up-modded comments here are contradictory. Some suggest Foxconn working conditions are deplorable and cruel, others say that Foxconn workers are lucky and that conditions are wonderful compared to work in rural China. It would be nice to see some facts to back up these varying claims.

The explanation isn't even correct. When I wrote a Super Nintendo emulator in the 90s, various documents referred to its GPU as a, er, GPU. The SNES predates NVidia itself, so let's not call it a "term coined by chip giant NVidia".

GPUs are nowhere near new. What's relatively new is GPGPUs (General-Purpose computation on Graphics Processing Units).

It's odd that neither of the ZDNet articles (to which Slashdot has linked in recent days) tell us what information Facebook is said to be holding back. So what information are you withholding from us, ZDNet? Is the story not juicy enough if it is too specific?