"Just the other day, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers said, 'If the cost of solar panels keeps coming down, installation costs come down and if they combine solar with battery technology and a power management system, then we have someone just using [the grid] for backup.' What happens if a whole bunch of customers start generating their own power and using the grid merely as backup? The EEI report warns of 'irreparable damages to revenues and growth prospects' of utilities."

Solar Panels Could Destroy U.S. Utilities

Today I managed to get another front page article. I had one a week ago as well. Strange, since it was over 3 years (possibly more) since I last had an submission accepted. FWIW they were both accepted by Soulskill, on Friday afternoons - 4:04pm today, 1:01pm last week.

I'm pretty sure this is not slashdot anymore, if I was able to get two articles up. I'm not complaining about the change, but I got used to getting rejected - and even more used to seeing my submissions accepted a day or more later when submitted by other people.

As I doubt I will get two stories on the front page in a month (several years passed between my most recent accepted story and the one before it), I will mention here as well that the genome of the coelocanth has been sequenced and described. 3 billion bases described in a non-paywalled Nature paper. Sequenced by an international team including scientists from Uppsala (Sweden), MIT, and Harvard.

I submitted a story this morning, and it is showing up "green" in the firehose. After having every single one of my submissions declined for years now - many of which were published a day or two later when submitted by someone else - I might finally get a story on the front page. That said, if it does make the front page it will be here on slashdot more than 6 hours after it was on google plus, but at least it will have made it.

Clearly, more guns will solve the problem:
Woman killed by 4-year-old in Tennessee cookout
Yes, you read that right. A woman was killed by a four year old boy who picked up a loaded handgun that some shit-for-brain left sitting around unattended, and shot and killed a woman. Being as the NRA wants us to believe that more guns somehow causes less death, it would stand to reason that they would also support having some random armed person then shoot and kill the 4 year old to prevent him from shooting anyone else.

Perhaps the most telling line though is towards the end

So some dumb fucker left his loaded gun sitting around and he has not faced any charges for the death that resulted from it. I would be shocked if he ever did, either.

And should the owner have really, really, really, known better? Hell yes. The owner of the gun is a sheriff's deputy. Somehow, this is supposed to make us feel better, I suppose?

Yes, I'm pissed off about this. I would have submitted it to the front page but since this is drudgedot and it makes the NRA look stupid it would never be accepted there. Hell, not that long ago when there was another case of a shithead leaving his gun out in the reach of a young child the kid shot themselves with it and this site called it "the wii suicide" (as if a toddler could harbor thoughts of suicide).

Today the NRA unveiled its new plan for school safety. For reasons not clear, it has received quite a bit of fanfare. In particular, it includes:

Yet of course it does not offer a plan to pay for any of this. They also don't seem to have a grasp on the actual numbers (of guards and guns) required to fulfill this plan. Consider a few things:

• How many doors were at the schools you attended as a child? I can't think of a single school I went to that had only one door. The high school I went to likely had at least 7 different entrances which even a really fast runner would need over a minute to get between; my middle school probably had at least 4 and my elementary I would guess had at least three. Do you put a guard at each entrance?
• How do you prepare the guards for armed attacks? We have heard recently that the Newtown shooter was wearing a bullet-proof vest; the Batman shooter was wearing armor as well.
• What do you do if the teachers and staff don't want to carry weapons on campus? Don't they have the right to refuse?
• What if the community is opposed to guns in the school? Do you force them to fire teachers to hire armed guards anyways?
• Does it really make sense to arm most teachers? The same tenure system that conservatives seldom pass at the opportunity to bash means that many of our teachers are older; do you want to rely on someone in their 50s or 60s who took a few evening gun classes to defend our children?

In other words, the NRA plan is epically short-sighted (and that is being kind). They want to solve the violence problem by bringing in more lethal force. They seem to live in a world very different from the country I reside in. They apparently are so afraid of violence that they feel firing teachers to hire security guards is somehow a good move.

Because of course, nobody would ever follow someone around with mod points to try to trash their karma or anything:

Certainly, their point of my comment in a discussion in my own journal entry being overrated must be accurate. And the fact that all four of these happened in a very short time is nothing but a coincidence. Nothing to see here...

Well, at least by her sense of "literally", she does.

As pointed out in the above-linked story:

Of course she is certainly not the first conservative nutjob to literally not give a shit about the English language when it gets in the way of her metaphorical quest to destroy the Obama white house.

From here:

I'll post my reply to it as a comment in here, which should hopefully be more useful / less painful than placing it here as the JE itself.

I'm no longer getting messages to tell me when someone has responded to my comments. Interesting that these new bugs seem to pop up on weekends now; they used to debut during the work week.

Smitty, your journal entry is no longer open for discussion. I had a busy couple weeks and when I checked on it again recently I realized I was too late to reply to your last comment to me. I'm going to try to get to it soon, I just wanted to let you know I wasn't brushing it off.

It's rather frustrating that JE discussions just simply time-bomb over time, regardless of how many comments are on them. You wrote that comment on Monday, and the discussion was closed and archived by Friday. I thank you for the discussion regardless, and hopefully we can pick it up here in a little while.

(I submitted this to the front page as well, but since I am 0 for 20 or so I don't expect it to get anywhere)

I have been asked to help modernize a network for a small business. Currently they have 3 PCs running various versions of Windows and of course they have no central authentication for their logins or credential-based file sharing between the systems. One task I want to accomplish then is to set up a single point of authentication for all the systems, partially to better manage file permissions and partially so that it will be easier to handle requests for new passwords if someone forgets their login.

Of the three existing PCs two run Windows 7 and one runs XP Pro. We plan to replace the XP Pro system with a PC running 7 or 8 in the very near future. I expect that regardless, I will be setting up another PC in their network to handle authentication. I understand the old Windows SFU has been replaced with SUA in newer versions; if the new PC is running *nix could I have SUA sync passwords with it and be done? I know that the newest version of SAMBA also can act as an AD server, which is an interesting option as well although I don't have experience with that and I won't have a lot of time to set this up.

It seems like the nuclear option would be to buy a system running windows server, which should "just work". Of course that would also be the most expensive and I haven't run a windows server since NT4 so that would be new territory for me as well.

I can't seem to pull up comment moderation numbers for a comment anymore. My cursor changes when I hover over the score, but when I click, nothing happens. It doesn't seem to matter who wrote the comment or what the score is, either.

A week or so ago there was a front page story here bragging about the "new" mobile site on slashdot. I was interested to see this as before they had pretty well abandoned development for mobile devices. I know of their abandonment based on a time when I wrote former site manager Rob Malda and he told me that they would not be developing for mobile devices.

In a moment of boredom I decided to try loading the new site on my blackberry (Curve 8520). Giving it four times as long as it takes to load a British newspaper page, my browser showed 0k (yes, zero) of 3k loaded. Eventually, I ended up with a blank page with only a title of slashdot.

Granted, the main page used to crash my phone completely. I guess this is an improvement in that aspect but not in any way better at actually showing information.

And yes, I know my phone is old, but there are plenty of relevant sites that it works just fine with.

I need to set up remote desktop access for someone to access their small business desktop PC from their home. If this was my own setup I would tunnel VNC through ssh and be happy. However that is not a reasonable solution in this case as they can't handle the unix side of ssh tunneling and any kind of wrapper for it (ie, cygwin) would be too much to ask of them. The setup needs to be simple, but secure. They were using windows remote desktop, which is not a program I am particularly familiar with - hence I'm not sure if it is adequately secure. Back in the day I used to use PC Anywhere though I'm not sure if that is a viable option as I don't know where development has gone with it.

Basically the priority is to be able to check in on processes that are running on windows PC A (in the business) from windows PC B (at home). Security is a must. File transfer would be great but there are always other ways to move files if need be.

Any advice on this would be appreciated. A cross-platform setup that would allow a Mac or Linux client to check in on Windows PC A would be great, too, but lack of it would not be a deal-breaker.