A/C isn't critical but asking people to go days and days when humidity is 80+%, temps are in the 90s+, and they have small children or elderly in the home and you might change your tune. Those kinds of conditions are what people were dealing with after than storm - it was nasty! Everywhere you looked windows were open and everyone was panting.

Most generator installs designed for a home are going to be natural gas and for short-term outages far cheaper than a solar install that was built for off-grid usage. Batteries require maintenance and often watering too. They take up space and weigh a great deal, you have fumes to consider as well. Running a home for days on just batteries isn't going to happen, panels are going to be needed or a generator. In that area (VA) there's zero state incentives for solar purchase, only the pittance from the Fed is available. Cost to install grid-tie would likely hit $30K for a normal sized home and probably double that for the ability to be run off-grid. Power fails seldom and most don't have power bills North of $150. Figure out the ROI and you can see why no one is jumping on this in VA. I know someone in Texas though who got both Fed and State incentives, his install cost him about $8K grid-tie, and he's saving about $100 a month. Now THAT I would be willing to do but $20K++? Forget it. Panels may have become cheaper but total system cost doesn't appear to have moved much at all...

You ought to read some of the electrical requirements for installing panels, it's not as cut and dry as you make it sound and the rules are changing as more things are learned. Read Home Power magazine to see the updates as they come. Everything from wiring strategy, to grounding, to mounting, and everything in between is covered. This is no dish install to do it right and since the panels generate power it's something you want to do right to say the least!

While it's true that solar panels have dropped they are still expensive and in many states there are few to no incentives offered to help defray the costs. The permitting issues he raises are also valid. If it were easier and there were incentives I'd be happy to spend a pile but as it stands now lack of incentives means few installs in my state and thus even fewer installers.

Also, this guy is an idiot. The fact is that panels on every single home would NOT prevent power failures unless they all also had battery banks which drive costs through the roof. Grid-tie systems are what most people install, surprise grid-tie relies on those very same copper wires this guy is crying about being fragile. I'd REALLY like to know what he means by "wired so they provide power when the grid fails" because without batteries this simply isn't feasible unless he thinks everyone should seriously upsize whatever solar install they might have planned. If he thinks that everyone should backfeed the power system then he also doesn't understand how dangerous this is. When a generator is hooked to the system in a power failure homes are disconnected from the grid in order to avoid killing power workers and from frying the generator as it tries to power the whole block. Trying to do this with panels alone isn't likely to have a better result. Grid-tie homes lose power just like everyone else, few have arrays and inverters big enough to power the entire home - their meters spin backwards at low loads only. Certainly batteries are an option but they require maintenance, have replacement costs, weigh a ton - sometimes literally, and can triple the cost of an install which is already damned high. If you're in the boonies and the power company wants $30K to string you a wire they make sense otherwise no you stick to relying on a grid connection. Power a few circuits for lights, say via LED, or other small things sure but you're not going to be powering a whole home on just panels without some storage and more complexity. Most systems aren't sized big enough to power everything except at peak power output which is a small portion of the day. Off-grid systems marshall their inputs into batteries to allow for occasional peak usage, he doesn't seem to understand that.

I don't think this guy has really thought through what he wants. He sees solar and thinks it's magic pixie dust, it's not. When the infrastructure breaks this stuff doesn't magically solve the problem. I'm all for more solar and putting it on everyone's roofs is a great idea but it's not going to solve the basic infrastructure fragility issue and might actually make it worse.

My experience is that nearly everyone overestimates their PSU needs and it becomes a game of "who's is bigger?". This is a stupid way to pick hardware. My desktop runs a 650, my ESX server with 24+ bays runs an 850. If I had a way better video card in the desktop I might move to a 750 and I wouldn't run dual cards.

My HTPC with ion chipsets use 9-16 watts at the wall at 100% usage.

The design choices that manufacturers make in order to meet these levels of effeciency have other impacts. Active power management, cooling fans that only run when needed, and higher quality components are all good reasons to consider a higher effeciency rated PSU. My computers often run 24x7 for years on end so I tend to choose decent PSU.

Also, just as a data point, I have a 4U box running a Xeon, 32gig of RAM, many cooling fans, 3x SAS cards, an SSD, and at least 20x HDD. It has a gold rated PSU listed as 850watts. Oh yeah, integrated onboard video. Usage at the plug? With all drives spinning actively it uses right at 200watts! Less when unRAID spins drives down, none of the drives are "green". The number surprised me!

And are living with screwed up metadata too if that's the case. I start with CDDB and make corrections from there! I love it when disk one is labeled differently than Disk 2, or some other screwed up thing. Correcting metadata for one CD isn't hard, correcting it for 400+ after some asshat like you makes a mess sucks!

He's worried that his old drive, which has already seen a great deal of use, isn't going to survive long enough to finish. He might also be wanting to do this with more than one drive at once - I always do - which means he needs more drives...

If you have access to a Windows box check out MP3Tag from http://www.mp3tag.de/en/

It's by far the best tool I've found for fixing up metadata. Want to rename a folder full of music based on tags? No problem! Album art? Lots of sources to get it and many more added in his forums. This tool is awesome, sorry I don't think there's a version for Linux...

Yeah, except he, like me and others, has a collection of CDs that's over 400+. On top of that if you trust any completely automated process to choose metadata and artwork then you're as stupid as you are arrogant. He likely doesn't want this process to stretch out for ages and he wants to be able to feed his machine CDs at a fairly rapid pace with fast enough ripping that he's not twiddling thumbs in between waiting on it. I do this now with two drives in my system (one of which sucks for ripping) for friends with small collections. In the past when I ripped my collection I used two additional machines for a total of 6 drives just to speed things along. All I had to do was swap CDs like a monkey and check the album art and songs against the various album jackets. My office was a mess for maybe a week - not the 6 months you're silly process would take to rip a large volume of CDs like this.

Actually CDs do degrade. I've been buying them since they first came out and I can look at some of my CDs - stored in their cases inside a temp reasonable crate inside my home - and see the oxidation beginning. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disc_rot

CDs can also be very fragile depending upon the process that made them. Older CDs that have a very thing LABEL side are the worst. Drop one of those puppies and then shine it up the the light to see the pinpricks or light coming through the damaged areas. The label side is the most fragile side of a CD and some of them take very little effort to screw up.

Given a choice I prefer to keep my CDs around but also digitize them at very high bitrates. If nothing I can always source rips from someone else and use the physical media to prove ownership if it comes to it. I prefer my media online, not on fragile CDs.

As for ripping, I've still been using Lite On hardware without too much issue. I do find that BD drives SUCK for ripping but normal DVD writers work just fine. Lite On even used to have their hardware optimized for ripping but I believe they have begun to sell out and am all ears if there's another company out there making decent drives. Honestly I'd be surprised if there was with the kinds of crap most companies seem to make...

Honestly? I think this is a real shame! A month or so ago I took some friends tv shopping. After going through Costco and ogling the tvs we we t to a shop that was selling these Mistu sets, I'd been hoping to show them a good PJ honestly. I was stunned at how good these things looked and the cost of an 83inch unit was incredible compared to the 60 and 70 inch LCD we'd already looked at. They weren't all that thick and I was very surprised at how far to the side I could stand and still get a terrific picture! I specifically tested this having experienced problems with this with other DLP. In the end I was truly impressed but my friends just couldn't make up their mind and there was no sale made. Now that I'm hearing this I'm glad they waffled but I truly think that had others gotten a good look at these they would've sold better. Well that and less pushy sales guys, the one we had at The Big Screen Store was an ass...

Hrm, anyone using that service that can speak to it? Might be interesting as a secondary usenet service and I could probably gen up a single bitcoin a month easily enough :-) Mind you without indexing services like this one closing there might not be much point...

Hosting most likely....

Unless of course a stolen phone called YOU. Or perhaps the new owner of the phone didn't realize it was stolen. Lots of possibilities. I'll admit though that I'm also having a tough time finding a problem with this scenario...

In IE it doesn't clear anything but the cache that YOU can see. There are a number .DAT files (index.dat I think) that store your COMPLETE history. There are tools to recover this data and this is what this idiot used on her computer image. Firefox also has a database of browser history that I'm pretty sure is also NOT cleared just like IE. Chrome I'm least sure of but judging from the fact the other browsers may not clear history I wouldn't bet that it's any better - I'd be interested in hearing from someone that knows.

Also, the "secure" browsing that IE does? It caches things normally and then deletes them when you close the browser. It's far from "secure". In fact I'm not even sure it's a secure delete that's done. FireFox does this better, I assume Chrome does as well since of the three it handles security the best despite being based on WebKit.