No, it was a tailored system using Renesolar panels installed by Westsun Solar.

I've just installed a 2.5 kW Solar system on my house in Western Australia, at a cost of just over $2500. Based on initial readings, output from the unit looks like being between 3,500 to 5,000 kWh/year. My electricity provider charges between 30 and 45c per kWh, and pays 8c per kWh for electricity fed back into the grid.

So my payback time for the initial investment is somwhere between 1 and three years if I consume mostly self-generated power. The panels and inverter I've installed have a 25 year warranty,

How does this not make sense?

And I'm not alone in this, Australia faces an unprecedented oversupply of energy, with no new energy generation needed for 10 years. Coal power stations are sutting down, and even new gas power stations are being mothballed as they are unable to compete.

http://www.aemo.com.au/Reports...

Thanks for the link. Yes exactly that sort of thing.

Not necessarily. The FBI could have supplied Google & Microsoft with a long list of md5 / sha1 hashcodes for abuse images which they obtained in raids or forums and these providers have programmed their system to raise a flag whenever they get a hit. Then a human might go in to confirm the match and from there its just a matter of informing the police. It may well be there are other ways of "fingerprinting" an image that are more resilient than a hash code and still useful enough for matching pictures against a known set of bad ones.

Perhaps it will come out in the trial how the file was identified.

Anyway it's more proof (if any were needed) why it's an incredibly bad idea to use a cloud service to store anything illegal. At least encrypt the data. Better yet don't put it up there at all.

I'm sorry but parents DO have a right to complain. Apple / Google / Microsoft are facilitators of a system which not only encourages but profits from games charging money for in-app purchases. It means that the controls are begrudging implemented and usually flipped to off position by default. And it is not hard to find games aimed at young kids where the game encourages the player to purchase $50-100 bundles of coins, skins or whatever. They don't want to tip the applecart so to speak.

And yeah parental responsibility does come into it but so does the power of the default. The default for kid rated games should be purchase restrictions. If the account holder wants to flip it the other way they can do so, but that should be the default. And in being the default it would change the landscape of these games for the better since they'd have to focus on engaging game play instead of skinner box random rewards for cash as they do now.

Thanks Ayn for completely understanding the problem.

Impose a maximum in-game purchase to the game's rating and impose a maximum spend per account per month. i.e. an E for everyone game may have a max spend of $5. If a user wants to override these settings then they can from the account settings. The power of the default mean the majority won't and thus people will be protected from nasty surprises. Oh and ban more than 1 in game currency that maps onto real world money and require them to show a dollar / euro / pound value against any purchase that uses it.

Aside from protecting users it deters games from being glorified skinner boxes with cow-clicker complexity and micropayments galore and encourages producers to start making actual games again.

BINGO!

Reading this thread, SOMEBODY had to mention this. I use the "use buffer (can be range) as stdin to command and replace with results" feature of vim EVERY SINGLE DAY. It is one of the most amazing and productive features I can't believe it isn't more well known.

And once you've started getting nice snippets of "buffer code", the power grows by typing <CTL-f> at the colon ":" prompt and finding recently used commands. Amazing and powerful stuff. (Set your remembered vim commands to >1000 for long term buffer-command goodness!)

I don't know of any other editors that do this

They do now. The Chinese Government released details of all 310 Microsoft patents used in Android licensing agreements last month. You can download the list here: http://images.mofcom.gov.cn/pe... (warning: docx)

That could be another reason why Samsung is now willing to contest the extortion. Very few of the patents are novel or non-obvious.

The Wii U is the filling in a shit sandwich. On one side it has the PS3 & 360 which are technically comparable yet cheaper and have a massive catalogue of games and industry support. On the other side they have the PS4 and XB1 which are technically superior, rapidly picking up steam and have industry support. They're in the middle with no industry support and few if any reasons to justify themselves to consumers over other choices.

The problem is fundamentally one of Nintendo's own making. They cynically set out to make the lowest spec console they could get away (basically parity with the PS3/360) and charged a premium for a gimmick. Consumers didn't buy it (probably remembering the Wii, remote, balance board + assorted shit gathering dust in the cupboard) and without the sales the 3rd parties slipped away.

A single title like MarioKart is a shot in the arm but it can't turn the ship around by itself. Nintendo will have to hope they can keep throwing out good titles for long enough that sales pick up and some 3rd parties come back. Personally I think they should be looking to emerging markets and price their console at those markets.

Because open & open source consoles have such a long and glorious history. And I include forcibly opened consoles in that list, those which have been cracked.

Opening the console up either voluntarily or involuntarily would be the final nail in the coffin for their platform.

You mean it's just like the market outside the app stores then?

And I'm fine with that, as long as the market remains a competitive Darwinian pool.

The nature of any rapidly expanding ecosystem is that there will be a multiplicity of variously capable denizens that'll be culled to the fittest survivors, particularly as resources become scarcer. Apple's app store is transitioning from that explosive expansion phase and is now hitting the resource ($) limits as iOS loses ground against their competitors. Other app stores will follow suit as they also reach saturation point, and that's - potentially - a good thing.

The only reason it could become a negative is if App store owner/managers promote products for their own reasons instead of letting competition cull the weakest.

The main problem with The Hobbit is (as Bilbo might say) it feels thin, like butter scraped over too much toast. There's too little story to work with to justify 3 3-hour movies.

Maybe Peter Jackson will release a limited abbreviated edition on Blu Ray to make up for this. Anyway the middle instalment was pretty good (thanks to Smaug) though both it and the first movie are guilty of some utterly pointless detours and WTF moments particularly any time Radaghast appeared on screen.

In practice Android has several reputable stores - Google & Amazon Appstore and there is a second tier of stores which some standard of validation / vetting Samsung Apps, GetJar, F-droid, Appslib, SlideME etc.

At the end of the day, android gives users the freedom to choose where they get apps from. But freedom implies the freedom to do stupid things. It won't stop a user installing warez if they want, but if they get owned it's their own damned fault. Not much different from what happens on a PC or Mac really.

That said I don't think Android does enough to protect users from malicious or rogue apps, e.g. allowing the device to deny a permission to the app even if it claims to need it. Cyanogenmod demonstrates it can be added, but Google haven't seen fit to provide that functionality in the stock android code.