Nuff said.

If I'm paying that much for a machine, regardless of who I buy it from I expect top flight service and at least a modicum of accountability on the end of the manufacturer.

Alienware will provide you with that. As long as they are the only ones handling your machine. Otherwise, they can't guarantee a "top flight service". Nerds are the worst kind of customers, as they're always trying to save pennies are extremely vocal and unpolite when in front of honest mistakes. Selling stuff to nerds is just not worth the trouble. This guy was denied a few parts and is now accusing the manufacturer of telling him that he is a thief. Would you do business with this kind?

Otherwise, they're basically encouraging people to go with third party hardware

If you want DIY repairs and cheap parts, you should not buy Alienware. That's a fact. Most people know that.

Where is Alienware accusing him of owning a stolen computer? There is only one quote at his blog:

The reason we are asking for the system's warranty number is to confirm that you purchased it through our Ebay Outlet Store at http://stores.ebay.com/Alienware-Corporation. Otherwise, we will not be able to provide you with replacements, upgrades, or support for this system.

Where is he being accused of having stolen stuff? Ans more: most manufacturers will not sell you important replacement parts without analysing the machine first and installing the part themselves. Otherwise you can just plug their brand new CPU onto a defective motherboard and ask for your money back when the system fails to work or even worse: when the motherboard fries the CPU.

Sure, that kind of policy does suck, but it has nothing to do with accusing people of stealing shit.

I crossed four lanes of traffic in as many seconds, screaming the entire way, so that I could get out of the hot pool of coffee puddled in my vinyl seat.

You drink hot cofee while driving? You should be banned from the streets.

Microsoft didn't need another addition to their roster of stuff they've co-opted, and IBM should be doing more development instead of acquisitions.

Microsoft could never buy Sun. Buying a Java and Unix vendor would only give them two options:

Keeping the products: I mean, no.
Phasing out the products: That would be a waste of money, as Java would simply find a new leader and Solaris is open-source now, just like Java. Big antitrust issues would arise too.

Rigged voting machines, lying government, involved in wars all over the globe under false pretense, constant and flagrant erosion of our rights yada yada yada thank god for america.

A black man from the DEMO-RATS got elected instead of a warmongering idiot who was in bed with most of corporate america. So yes, it is a freaking democracy. Is it perfect? Hell no. But it is a democracy.

Rigged voting machines? Diebold and others are the only ones actually offering voting machines at the manufacturing scale that's mandated by government bids. These companies are usually filled with stupid workers (mostly conservative idiots, with little actual knowledge of digital systems) and greedy executives willing to sell any kind of broken shit to the government. Unless we bring Stalin backfrom the dead, it would be pretty hard to control this kind of situation, as they're free to try this kind of shit. We're also free to bust their asses and shove them into prison as well.

Lying government? PEOPLE LIE TO COVER THEIR ASSES AND SAVE THEIR CAREERS. NEWS AT ELEVEN!!!!

Involved in wars all over the globe under false pretenses? Stop being such whiner! What do you want? Bending over to Islamic Facism? The world is not a good place. Without such power struggle, there would be nukes and genocide all over the planet. Do you see Sudan? That's what UN-Leftard-Like-policies can achieve. Do you see Pakistan bending over to Islamic terror at the border? At the expense of their own citizens? That's also UN's fault. Iran getting a nuke and missiles too? That's all part of "Talk shit until they get what they want" UN policy too. Sometimes we needs things to get messy and unfair to stop bad guys from doing whatever they want to do. It's better than nuking them out of existence, as that exactly what would do to us if they could. Ignoring this kind of threat has nothing to do with pacifism: allowing the other side to engage in war is just a different form of warmongering.

Constant and flagrant erosion of our rights? That's just part of the system. Some cities are already banning cameras to get their privacy righs back. It's a cycle of confort, freedom and protection.

That's simply the Sony Timer in action. The Japanese consumer is extremely lenient when it comes to faulty products. They won't mind if a product breaks after the warranty expires, as they're always buying new, updated stuff anyway.

Sony was never a synonym of quality. They used to be the usual kind of cheap rip-off oriental electronics company and all their products were cloned crap. The current Sony image was obtained by a marketing campaign from the late 80's - early 90's.

They started to sell a few premium devices by the end of the 80's, as part of that campaign. And now they're able to sell the same crap they used to sell before, while convincing you it's a premium product. The Bravia TV line, for an instance, is a line composed of crappy TVs with a high aesthetic appeal and a good marketing campaign to convince you it is the best TV line of the market. But when you really look at it, they use the worst kinds of panel available (but they configure the boards to saturate all colors, for a "woooww!!" effect at the TV store), along with the crappiest signal boards, filled with the same Taiwanese all-in-one chips used inside TVs costing nearly half as much.

1 WD Caviar 2TB internal hard drive: 0.389809 liters, or ~5TB/liter. A C5 Galaxy cargo hold is 1,042,304.22 liters ... aka 813 petabytes. The plane travels 518 MPH. That's NY to LA in 5.4 hours ... or about 2Pbits/sec. Now THAT'S bandwidth!

The bandwidth will never be larger than half the rated speed of a single drive * the number of drives being read in parallel. Why? Because you have to write TO the drives before departure and read FROM the drives after arrival.

while it is certainly not profitable or feasible with other, cheaper, unsustainable energy sources around, we will have to tackle this sort of technology at some point, like it or not. it is better not to wait until there is no other choice and it is too late.... such as, in the next worldwide boom cycle.

It's not profitable at all. It has nothing to do with coal or petroleum. If you compare the price of building a Wind farm and the price of building the needed storage plant, it is still not profitable. That's the equation. It has nothing to do with classic energy sources.

I think it utimately is in their best interests to develop a storage system, however complex.

It might be in OUR best interests (I doubt that, but...), but it's certainly not part of theirs. If it costs more, they won't build. Period.

About the rest of your message, I agree with it: It's time we stop doing things just to feel good about them. We need actual results and actual planning. Is not good to have stupid politicians approving stupid projects just because the concepts behind them are trendy.

If it is cheaper for them to waste the energy rather than store it, then perhaps energy hasn't gotten expensive enough yet.

Or maybe power storage plants are extremely expensive to build and maintain. If you compare the price of X wind mills with the price of the necessary power storage plant, you might find out that this is a technological problem, not something related to the price of coal.

Energy conversion (coal->electric, high-voltage electric->low-voltage, etc.) is cheap. Energy storage is expensive. Can you imagine the size of a thermal battery (less efficient than a car battery) for a city the size of NY? You would need hundreds of square kilometers worth of hot salt lakes. And to make things worse, the salt would probably get cold before its energy is actually needed. If you actually try to store the salt at insulated pressure vessels, you'll find yourself wasting billions of dollars on recipients used to save a few dozen million USD worth of energy.

That's why petrochemical plants never "store excess steam". They just simply open a valve and let it go to the open air. The boiler has a planned power setting for each time of the day while momentary excesses are simply thrown out. Why? Because the equipment needed to store the power is more expensive than the power itself.

I think you are missing the point that the other, non-sustainable measures must and will get more expensive, and so what is profitable will change. by the very definition, if it's not sustainable... it's not sustainable. right? so we need something else, that is sustainable, so we can.. you know... sustain it. long term.

I don't know what you're talking about.

I'm pretty sure you missed his point entirely. They aren't running "another business" but instead finding some temporary storage place for the excess electricity. That's why the GP said "over supply utilization system".

Actually you're the one who missed my point entirely. My whole point was: storing energy (by melting salt or using any other kind of mechanism) is a process that needs an expensive plant. Running this kind of operation is not part of the power company's best interests. What the hell, even thermoelectric plants (the ones that generate the power being sold) are avoided entirely by this kind of company, who prefer to "outsource" the ownership and operation of these processes to a more competent enterprise.

You can't expect a wind-power-distribution company to start building giant thermoelectric/hydroelectric storage plants just for the sake of not wasting precious mother nature energy sources. It's just a business to them: if wasting energy by heating the nearby river costs less to them, that's what they'll do.

Most people simple don't know how much a plant with the sufficient capacity costs to build and run. Their operation needs to follow hundreds of safety, environmental and union regulatons, and the maintenance itself of the kilometers of tubes, cables and support infrastructure will cost (after 10 years) more than the initial implementation itself. And these plants need to run 24/7 because stopping and starting most processes is an energy-expensive (and cash-expensive too, and also maintenance-expensive, as the plant will degrade itself a little bit at every start-up process) operation.

That's why most thermoelectric plants run 24/7, even at periods (0-5AM) where the power wasted to the environment (through the boiler/tubing walls) is higher than the power being sold (at extremely low prices) to the consumers. They just can't stop their giant machine.

People love to propose lab benchtop solutions to giant infrastructure issues. Unfortunately, things are not that simple in real life.

Melting salt sucks up power and then generates it when you use that trapped heat to make steam later. Running pumps lets you store power with gravity. Pump water up higher, it releases the potential energy when it comes back down. And there are many other methods.

That's only possible if the government dictates the use of this kind of mechanism. Otherwise, the power company will simply do whatever they want to do, meaning "whatever costs less". Not wasting power is the concern of an individual, not of a profitable company.

This year I'll insulate my home

What is the total energetic cost of the said insulation? Will it need more energy to be produced than what will be saved by it?

What are the raw materials needed for the insulation? What if everyone at the planet insulates their home? Will we have enough ore?

If you know you are going to have large amount of episodic oversupply there are all sorts of useful things you can do with it. Make ice. Melt salt. Run pumps.

The only thing the power company can do is sell that energy for a cheaper price. They are a power company, not a "salt melting company". Building a plant to perform these kinds of activities costs a lot of money and needs a very complicated business plan that depends heavily on logistics-related factors.

A salt-melting (or any other kind of process) plant would need to run 24/7 to be profitable, using valuable energy during most of the day. The only difference from a normal salt-melting company would be the cost of a single part of their operation, during specific times of the day.

Conclusion: They would be selling energy at a cheaper price. But to themselves, while needing to run a new (to them) and complicated business. It's better to simply sell the energy to anyone else.

And they already do that: they sell energy at a lower price during low usage times. And the part the can't be sold is simply wasted using giant "toasters". It's cheaper to simply burn the excess energy than powering off the thermoelectrical plant.

I've seen other people progress from junior to lead developer within 2 years because there were not enough properly experienced devs to fill all the lead positions.

When your social class allows this kind of progression, or after years of hard work to achieve this possibility... Most people aren't born with all these opportunities and actually need to spend lots of years of their childhood working real hard. You mentioned lack of skilled/experienced workers: that's a bad sign. It's a sign that people aren't being given the proper opportunities. It's a sign that people actually need competitions and other kinds of events/programs to enter this specific job market.

As for why the kids want to win competitions... I participated in some of the local/regional Russian ones myself at school, and it wasn't about getting job offers at all. It was because taking part in one was expected of all the bright students, and because winning one could help getting into a better university later on (they're free, even the better ones, but the exams are hard, and this could help).

So you actually joined the competition to achieve a better life status. It means that you needed it. You were living a situation were your future was not a certainty and you tried your best to improve this situation.

For your specific case, a direct job or scolarship offer wasn't an issue. But it is for a lot of kids.

For some kids, winning a competition like this is necessary so their parents can allow them to study hard and avoid serving as cheap child labour. It's like a desperate scream of "please, daddy, leave me alone". At least that's what people from Russia, raised on different conditions than you, tell me.

And yes, of course, merely the feeling of being the smartest kid on the block is worth a lot - but that's only if the culture you grew up in fosters that, which it does in Russia for some kids (not all of them, not by a long shot - but I think we still do better than USA with their overemphasis on physical sports in school).

The fact that Russian culture fosters that kind of thing is not a good sign, actually. It's a good charateristic, but it's a symptom of other not-so-good things.