Electric Utilities are heavily regulated. I am not sure about Oklahoma, but in many states the rate that utilities can charge is tied back to the cost of electric production
Sure, and the battles over the rates that utilities pay for customer-generated electricity are raging right now.

Since electric production tends to be capital intensive
But in this case the utility customers are putting up the money!! I blew $19,000 on solar panels, my utility got a new source of electrons for no money down! I'm taking on the risk for them!

Feeding electricity back into the grid is not a free lunch for the utilities – there are costs involved.
Well the utilities say that, but it's mostly fear-mongering. The wires they built to send electricity to my house will happily carry electricity in the other direction. And again, compared to building a new fossil fuel plant buying my excess instead of fueling a plant is easy money for the utilities.

(and I am sure that electric utilities will whine loudly in an exaggerated fashion as they fight a rearguard action.)
That's what this is all about. Most states have net metering: if the utility sells to me at 15/kWh , I can sell my excess to them at the same rate. It's currently a win for the utilities because they're getting electrons in the hot summer with minimal capital cost, but they're throwing up roadblocks and raising rates now in fear of a future where a significant percentage of their customers are selling to them. In a fair system they would pay me what they would pay to run a plant at that moment, less a transmission fee and plus a bonus that my electrons are low CO2. this month's Sierra Magazine lists state-by-state efforts to fight net metering, refuse to hook up new solar installations, etc. South Carolina sounds worse than Oklahoma, there "initial determination that rooftop-solar leases should be banned as unfair competition to the utility industry."

In a sane approach to limiting global warming, there would be taxes on fossil-generated electricity or (less ideally) carbon emissions trading, and the utilities would be trying to figure out how to decrease those costs. Well hey look, our customers are putting up their own capital to solve the problem for us!

It's a similar situation with V2G (Vehicle 2 Grid) to cope with demand spikes and brown-outs. Electrical vehicle owners could be a huge instantaneous reserve of electrons to avoid, without the capital and operational costs of having dirty peaker plants on standby. There have been dozens of studies of this, but again the electric utilities are allergic to the idea of paying their customers. Most owners would be willing to let the utility drain 20% of their battery, but not if they get nothing in return.

I naively hoped that the electric utilities would be happy about distributed renewable power generation and would evolve to work with customers who are also suppliers to their mutual benefit. But it turns out they're wedded to the idea of burning fossil fuels to make electricity to sell to us, and many are in bed with the fucking Koch brothers. But soon they'll need electrons more than people with renewables need them: "SolarCity is partnering with electric car company Tesla ... to store solar energy in battery packs for use at night, with a connection to the grid solely for backup."

  * Marissa Mayer (2012–)
  * Ross Levinsohn _Interim_ (2012)
  * Scott Thompson (2012)
  * Tim Morse _Interim_ (2011–2012)
  * Carol Bartz (2009–2011)
  * Jerry Yang (2007–2009)

after a string of recent short-tenured CEOs at Mozilla's helm.
Kovacs became CEO in 2010, and announced his departure in 2013, I think 7-year veteran Jay Sullivan has been acting CEO since then. Before that John Lilly was CEO for 2 years, taking over from Mitchell Baker who remains as Chairman. Two short-term CEOs in a row makes a pair, not a string.

People who don't like Firefox's six-week release cadence can quit bitching and run the Firefox Extended Support Release.

All the comments about H2 efficiency and explosive risk completely miss the point. Hydrogen fuel cell vehicles have been feasible for years, there have been a few Honda Clarity and Mercedes B-Class FCVs driving round Southern California (which has the ONLY public refueling stations in the entire USA) for several years.

The problem is demand. If you care about the environment you plug in for your regular commute. You can can already buy a plug-in hybrid for half the price and lower running costs than these 2015 cars. As Volt owners gleefully report, most drivers travel for hundreds of miles recharging at home, but for long trips the car has the quick refueling of gasoline that's available everywhere.

There's a market of people who don't want any tailpipe emissions and can't plug in and regularly drive long distances and live near the handful of H2 stations and are willing to spend a lot of money on a new technology, but it's vanishingly small!

Eventually fossil fuels could be so expensive or restricted that H2 will be the range-extender we use for our plug-in vehicles, if ethanol from biomass doesn't work out. But that's a long way away. Meanwhile Toyota and Hyundai are very cagey about whether you can plug in their HFCVs; it seems the answer is No. Their cars have a battery and motor so plugging in is the cheapest way to drive the first few miles, and I think soon consumers will reject a motor-driven car that you can't plug in. The comparative reviews of the first HFCVs against 2015's plug-in hybrid cars will be brutal, and there will be dozens of "gotcha" pieces, wherein the brave reporter drives out of Southern California and gets stranded.

The hydrogen combustion car is dead, dead. It combines the chicken-and-egg problems of hydrogen fuel distribution with all the inefficiency of blowing stuff up to make heat and a little forward motion. At least fuel cells are efficient.

The BMW 7 series and Mazda rotary hydrogen ICE demo cars came out years ago. Nothing serious since. Periodically some lame manufacturer without access to fuel cells or batteries converts an engine to burn hydrogen, but it's a stunt that goes nowhere.

The summary seems to imply that Gibson made the Matrix. No it doesn't, there's an "or" in there.

However, William Gibson never envisioned mind control in Virtual Reality either. You jacked in to cyberspace, a consensual hallucination of a graphic representation of data (which never took off, there's no "representation" of the net at all when you jump from Slashdot to YouTube), but Gibson explicitly had his hackers typing commands while jacked in: "distant fingers caressing the deck", "whip moves on those keyboards faster than you could follow", etc.

Gibson's Neuromancer follow-up Count Zero is stuffed with profoundly prescient ideas like fully-immersive telepresence and one of the first descriptions of hanging out with people's avatars in cyberspace, but the closest he comes to a "brain-computer interface" is slotting in a piece of microsoft behind your ear which gives you the knowledge to fly a real plane in physical reality. Similarly, in Spads & Fokkers (his short story with Michael Swanwick) players use a brain interface to control a holographic plane in a videogame: "He fitted the Batang behind his ear after coating the inductor surface with paste, jacked its fiberoptic ribbon into the programmer, ... when it was done, a sky-blue Spad darted restlessly through the air a few inches from his face. It almost glowed, it was so real. It had the strange inner life that fanatically detailed museum-grade models often have, but it took all of his concentration to keep it in existence. If his attention wavered at all, it lost focus, fuzzing into a pathetic blur."

In another comment undefinedreference says You could play a video game or work in a virtual environment while your body is essentially at the gym. Gibson foresaw that too, but “The street finds its own uses for things,” and so Rikki in Burning Chrome is "working three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of conditioned reflexes took care of business. The customers never got to complain that she was faking it, because those were real orgasms. But she felt them, if she felt them at all, as faint silver flares somewhere out on the edge of sleep."

Gibson's ideas are masterful poetic riffs on the future, but they aren't its operating manual.

Oh STFU. If you come out with a neat piece of software that runs in a browser, you can post a link to it (like this one) and millions of people can run it in a single click because it's so damn easy. If your software is written in anything else but JavaScript, people have to screw around downloading runtimes and saving and executing binaries, and at best 5% as many people will bother trying it. Sure, an app store simplifies that, but now you have to build multiple app versions, iOS, Android, and whatever the hell Windows uses, and you've still left millions of potential users out.

It's the universal availability of JavaScript and zero-install that you get by running it in a web browser that drives the innovation and interest in it, and there's no sign of it stopping. Go build an OpenRISC emulator in C that's far better in every way than this, post a link to the installer, and watch your effort get ignored.

GCHQ designed by Gensler is 1.1M square feet for 4,600 staff. Apple is 2.8M square feet for 14,200.

Foster and Partners are a fantastic firm, their buildings are reliably masterpieces of design and engineering, and Sir Norman is arguably the greatest living architect, but they don't come cheap. The insanely great HSBC building was the most expensive building in the world in 1985.

As Anonymous Coward points out elsewhere, sharing a powertrain is NOT a rebadge. The ELR looks nothing like the Volt, therefore it is not a rebadge.

Well, what should happen when you lift off the accelerator? In a conventional car, the engine brakes the car, and engine braking increases in lower gears. So GM has reused the concept to adjust the amount of brake regen when you lift off. Other electrified cars coast, or apply a set amount of regen. I don't know what VW's new plug-in hybrids, with a conventional dual-clutch transmission, do.

Tesla hooks brake regen up to the accelerator pedal, so as you lift off more more brake regen increases, turning it into an accelerator/decelerator control. One-footed driving sounds like a blast.

You made sense until your last word. Ultra-capacitors aren't happening. As batteries steadily get cheaper, you can use a bigger battery. A bigger battery can handle more power, so it can cope with more braking regen and recharge faster (and deliver more horsepower); and it's not cycled as much as a smaller battery, so it lasts longer. That reduces the fast-charge and longevity benefits of ultracaps, which are still far more expensive and heavier than a lithium-ion battery of the energy. Ionova claims 10 Wh/kg for their ultracaps while li-on is over 100 Wh/kg. In theory you can recharge an ultracap in seconds, but the future fast charger to recharge a Model S battery in a minute has to deliver 7000 amps at 500V instead of ~240 amps, so it's going to cost a fortune.

Ultracaps still have a chance in hybrids, the Prius only has a 1.3 kWh battery. Only price keeps ultracaps from replacing that battery. But again, as batteries get cheaper, more people will expect to be able to plug in.

Others have commented how this will lead to dumbed-down movies with videogame features and Mario/Angry Birds franchise tie-ins, such as

But this would actually be fantastic if if the movie watcher got to control the remix. There are cut-scenes in Red Dead Redemption that are rival anything in a movie (Marston's last encounter with Bonnie, so polite, so suffused with longing!) and then you can enter the world as one of the characters. Why limit your favorite characters to one setting, legal threats from George Lucas notwithstanding?

In a marvelous talk 10 years ago to the Director's Guild of America (read it!), William Gibson explores the long past of movie-making as storytelling, and predicts the future of it.

Any linear narrative film, for instance, can serve as the armature for what we would think of as a virtual reality, but which Johnny X, eight-year-old end-point consumer, up the line, thinks of as how he looks at stuff. If he discovers, say, Steve McQueen in The Great Escape, he might idly pause to allow his avatar a freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest with the German guards in the prison camp. Just because he can. Because he’s always been able to. He doesn’t think about these things. He probably doesn’t fully understand that that hasn’t always been possible. He doesn’t know that you weren’t always able to explore the sets virtually, see them from any angle, or that you couldn’t open doors and enter rooms that never actually appeared in the original film.

Or maybe, if his attention span wavers, he’ll opt to experience the film as if shot from the POV of that baseball that McQueen keeps tossing.

Somewhere in the countless preferences in Johnny’s system there’s one that puts high-rez, highly expressive dog-heads on all of the characters. He doesn’t know that this setting is based on a once-popular Edwardian folk-motif of poker-playing dogs, but that’s okay; he’s not a history professor, and if he needed to know, the system would tell him. You get complete breed-selection, too, with the dog-head setting, but that was all something he enjoyed more when he was still a little kid.

But later in the afternoon he’s run across something called The Hours, and he’s not much into it at all, but then he wonders how these women would look if he put the dog-heads on them. And actually it’s pretty good, then, with the dog-heads on, so then he opts for the freestyle Hong Kong kick-fest ...

Because I see Johnny falling asleep now in his darkened bedroom, and atop the heirloom Ikea bureau, the one that belonged to his grandmother, which his mother has recently had restored, there is a freshly-extruded resin action-figure, another instantaneous product of Johnny’s entertainment system.

It is a woman, posed balletically, as if in flight on John Wu wires.

It is Meryl Streep, as she appears in The Hours.

She has the head of a chihuahua.

What you said, definitely. DVD extras (the best part of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) show preproduction steadily evolving. Nearly all movies are story-boarded before production, and animation houses have always made animatics showing the key frames and shifts of the camera. Nowadays effects-heavy movie scenes are pre-visualized on a computer: someone builds a 3-D world for the scene, puts some 3-D character models in it, animates the models, and then moves a virtual camera around to create a computer animation of the sequence of shots. The result is a clunky computer videogame cut-scene version of the sequence.

Which raises the interesting prospect that as computer graphics continue to improve, film makers will stop at the pre-visualization and declare victory. Why make a movie at all when it already exists? Five years ago after watching the "making of" featurette for the effects-heavy movie Hancock I wrote

You see Charlize Theron watching the pre-viz on a Mac notebook, watching her 3-D character to learn what she's supposed to do in the shot! ... The cameramen, the actors, even the director, all watch a movie that already exists that dictates what they need to do.

So record the actors at the table reading of the script, lip-sync the existing character models with their voices, and you have the movie. Perhaps if the real-world actors can do a better job emoting than the pre-viz animators (a big "if" for some actors!), film them and composite into the existing movie.

Bloody university PR departments presenting every research project as if it's some Eureka moment.

"For over a decade, cookstove experts and enthusiasts have gathered at Aprovecho [Research Center]". In 2009 The New Yorker had a long article about stove enthusiasts designing better stoves, what's changed since then? The Chinese are already cranking out Rocket stoves in volume; other commenters have linked to www.cleancookstoves.org, Biolite, etc.. The problem isn't engineering, it's economics and cultural.

Meanwhile, any stove still requires spending hours collecting firewood, contributing to deforestation and CO2 emissions. As an adjunct people can put food in a black pot in an insulated container heated by a cheap solar reflector. But now you've got two $20 purchases per family, one of which only works part of the time. Meanwhile the U.N. spends millions trucking fuel into refugee camps. Again, the problems are NOT engineering ones.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/09/13/review_zte_open_firefox_os_phone/ [theregister.co.uk]

Ouch. I wonder what the experience is like when you build and install Firefox OS on a decent Android 4.x smartphone.