Right, but for relatively short-term things (exponential-"ish"), it can be useful. Moore's law says that at some point in the future CPUs will have more transistors than electrons in the observable universe, but it's still useful.

You're right of course that something else (sigmoid -- logistic, erf, etc.?) might make more sense.

So all of these projects did/are doing "absolutely nothing for the environment"? (We've given them a few bucks related to the Paris Agreement.)

You're of course free to call it "politically-motivated bullshit," but when literally all but handful (two? three?) of countries *in the world* have signed it, the agreement -- for better or worse -- just doesn't seem that political to me...

Specifically which part? Do you dispute the current numbers (energy sources through today), the model(s) used for extrapolating, or...?

With non-renewable resources, on the one hand we have increasing technological ability, while on the other hand the difficulty for extraction goes up with time as the low-hanging fruit is preferentially depleted (there are of course special cases). Contrast this to renewable sources, where the former is true -- increasing technology drives prices down -- but the latter isn't really applicable (barring a scenario where we cover every inch of the globe with solar panels, which would produce way more power than we currently consume).

What do you mean by low %? Spain produced a plurality of their electricity with wind in the first few months of 2015 at >23%. For the year it looks like that number was >19%.

...except that basically every country in the world has signed the Paris Agreement, so it's not like this happened without climate accords. That is not to say that the climate accords had any effect -- good or bad -- but it's disingenuous to ignore them.

Yes, it would be somewhat moronic to draw a straightish line on this graph. Something exponential-ish (or logistic, or...) would be much more sensible.

And "nighttime solar" is already a thing (though they don't call it that). This plant generated electricity for 36 days straight, 24 hours/day.

All forms of energy have problems, it's just a matter of which problems you prioritize. Storage is an engineering (=money) problem, coal an environmental problem, etc.

There are also some cool designs using molten salt. This plant "...has achieved continuous production, operating 24 hours per day for 36 consecutive days, a result which no other solar plant has attained so far." Pretty neat! And one advantage of molten salt (and perhaps flow batteries, too?) is that unlike, say, lithium ion, the energy can't really come out all at once explosively -- you'd get essentially a lava flow rather than an explosion, AFAIK.

I think throttling this might make more of a difference...

Digital electronics are certainly doable without ICs (ENIAC, ABC, etc.), though of course you're right that it wasn't doable/practical in a small footprint.

There's not a whole lot fundamentally different between an IC, a discrete circuit with active silicon elements, and a discrete circuit with vacuum tubes. Sure, the size, power consumption, bandwidth, etc. can be phenomenally different, but digital is not inherent to ICs.

But that's just saying "illegal things are illegal," it's not really a statement about property tax.

Furthermore, the government does not, AFAIK, just bust into your home and inspect it. I'm pretty sure you could wire your home with clothes hangers at 10kV and no one would find out, so long as you don't burn down your house.

First off, compressors *are* used in refrigeration systems.

Second, OP was essentially saying, "regulation ruins things," and I provided a counter-example which, although specific to certain types of devices, maybe -- just maybe -- applies to other devices, too.

Do you think there's something magical about refrigeration systems that makes them the one thing in the universe that behaves backwards to the "regulation ruins things" concept?

No, it's not -- there are things in common, but it is not "exactly the same."

If I rent a house, take a sledgehammer to the wall and call my landlord, there will be consequences. If I own a house and do the same, the relevant tax authority likely won't care.

The money from rent goes to the owner. If the owner wants to invest it, spend it on blackjack, or light it on fire, that's really none of your concern. Tax money goes to the state, and it *is* your concern -- and the concern of every citizen -- what it gets spent on. If enough people aren't happy with how it's spent, then something will change (slowly, perhaps, but budgets do change depending on who's in office).

Well it's fine if the end-user (the one who presumably rooted the phone) wants to defeat some certificate checking. And if you're suggesting that a third party rooted the phone, well...you have bigger problems.

From the study linked in TFA, this number (80%) does not represent primary or preferred, but seems to mean "any news":

(TFS didn't claim that 80% preferred mobile, but I thought it was mildly ambiguous.)

So your argument is now, "guns are good, they save us from guns." And killing the "asshole shooter" is fine and all, if you assume he was working alone. Was he involved in some larger Antifa group (as the right might like)? Was he coerced by some some false-flag operation (as the conspiracy theorists on the left might like)? In all likelihood he was a severely troubled guy acting alone, but still -- killing without trial is not something that should (in a free society) be lauded, though it is of course necessary in certain circumstances.

And regarding the 2nd Amendment, my personal opinion is that we should apply some of the thinking that goes with the 1st Amendment: protect the right to the extent that it doesn't reasonably affect public safety. AFAIK bomb threats, death threats, etc., are not protected under the 1st Amendment, and we should place similar public safeguards on the 2nd Amendment. Perhaps everyone agrees on this, in which case we just disagree on where that distinction should be drawn.