Well home A/C is one of those things where solar might make sense: you want the greatest amount of AC when the sun is shining most strongly, so the production of PV panels peaks just when your demand peaks.

The other reply mentioned the intermittent flowing water problem in these areas, the other problem is that the homes in a village aren't all densely packed like a Western city, but may be a couple of hundred meters apart. It's a lot cheaper to put a solar panel on each dwelling and not need much cable than have to run several miles of cable to wire up a dozen homes.

"Spinning reserve" is required whether you have zero renewable energy or 50% renewable energy. Those conventional plants that are in standby mode are required anyway, and adding renewables doesn't mean more are needed in standby mode. Additionally, modern gas stations can come online extremely quickly - basically, a modern gas station is the core of a Rolls Royce Trent jet engine, and it can throttle up in a power station just as rapidly as it can on a plane on its takeoff roll (in seconds. Of course the power turbine might take a bit longer, but it's measured in at most a few minutes).

In fact, from the point of view of the UK national grid, nuclear or coal power is seen as intermittent and wind power is seen as reliable. The reason is that Sizewell B (a very large nuclear power plant) can suddenly go offline without any warning at all, and suddenly the grid is short of 420MW. However, over a period of an hour, wind and solar are considered extremely reliable. We can easily predict what the wind is going to do over the next hour or so, it won't suddenly start or stop unforecast over a gigantic area. Also wind and solar plants are widely distributed and small. If a wind turbine suddenly goes offline you lose maybe 1MW out of 2GW of power production. So you actually need less spinning reserve for renewables than you do for a large nuclear or coal station because you don't risk suddenly losing all 420MW in an instant like you do with a large power station. Similarly, with solar, you can easily see where the storms are so you can easily predict how the generation is going to change over the next hour.

There isn't just spinning reserve either, high power users like electric furnaces have frequency cutoffs in them. On the UK national grid, when generating capacity is falling behind load, the frequency falls (and conversely, when the load is lighter than capacity, the frequency rises. IIRC they try to keep the frequency between something like 49.9Hz and 50.1Hz). Some industrial users who have equipment that takes days to get up to temperature aren't affected by having the power cut off for a half hour to this piece of equipment, so their contract with National Grid includes a piece of equipment that cuts the power to the equipment if the frequency falls below a certain threshold. This can be used for brief periods of load shedding.

So in summary, no, this is not an issue with solar and wind. The spinning reserve is required anyway, and from the point of view of the grid and the timescales for spinning reserve, wind and solar is actually seen as more reliable than a large coal or nuclear power station because of its distributed nature and the predictability of wind and solar over the short term.

On a point of pedantry, 1821 to now is just 1.9 centuries. Note the plural in the word "centuries".

Air running over cooling fins DOES work, otherwise we wouldn't use cooling fins. Your muffler does not have cooling fins.

An aircooled engine does, though. We have an air cooled piston engine in our light aircraft. If air moving over the fins didn't cool the engine, it would in short order turn into molten aluminium and fail - which evidently it doesn't because it can last several thousand hours.

You'll pay the bill, I assume? If it works, there is no need to upgrade. XP is just fine, and any competent admin can secure it so that it remains usable but is less risky. Installing an anti-virus is part of it. I usually recommend MSE because it's low-footprint and free. However, I expect MS to drop MSE support for XP in 2014.

You've obviously never worked with or known any Russians.

On the other hand, why not simply use subdomains of an actual domainname you own?

I do realize it's inconceivable, but some people do not own domain names. Well, I do, but they don't really match my internal naming scheme. So, my internal domain is something that wasn't valid until they came up with the stupid gTLD concept: shark species as hostname, domain "sharks" on my network and in a similar vein Kiplings Jungle Book characters as hostnames and "jungle" as domain for my parents network. This works fine, looks pretty and works.

Now of course, I could use jawtheshark.com for my internal network. As a direct consequence, I'd have to either slave my LAN DNS to a public DNS and expose my internal IP numbering to the world, or keep my LAN DNS manually synchronized with my global DNS. You see, all kind of problems I didn't have because my internal domain was completely not used on the Internet. For my parents network, I don't even have a domain name that would match the naming scheme. My dad has our surname.lu, but that hardly will match the jungle naming scheme. Well, I could just buy yet another domain name and use it only internally, but that's added cost I didn't use to have.

The gTLD stuff is just stupid. That's my opinion.

Pot smoking? I've never known pot make anyone violent. In fact I've only known it to make people extremely non-violent. Alcohol - yes, I've seen that make plenty of people violent. Never pot. If anything evidence of pot smoking would indicate someone less likely to be violent.

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and to enforce their use of seeds and chemicals those seeds need to prevent insects from ruining the crops. it is scary that bill gates is in on this and thinks poison food that makes people sick and destroys native wildlife as well is somehow 'good.' food allergies are on the rise mainly from gm crops and the poisons on the food and in the runoff. i live in a place where somehow we have avoided trashing the environment, where vast stretches of national and tribal forests all survive with few burn offs. and those few are needed to help the deer and other wildlife that bases it's foraging on natural tree to burn cycles. i guess i am lucky, cause the only thing that bothers me are all the incects that thrive in forrests and such here, and the pollen from trees that make me alergic.

The US is not a democrapcy. It's a Republic!

Oh wait... I thought you were joking!

The SHA1 of "badg3r5" really is "78a7ecf065324604540ad3c41c3bb8fe1d084c50".

http://www.sha1-lookup.com/index.php?q=78a7ecf065324604540ad3c41c3bb8fe1d084c50

HP used "badgers" in leet-speak for an NSA backdoor? Smells like they wanted people to know, to me. Maybe they didn't like what they were supposed to be doing, and stuck their tongue firmly in cheek at the implementation stage? "Screw the NSA - we'll give them a back door if they want it so much - and we'll make it so that researchers find it easily, so our business isn't damaged in the long term ("If we wanted you data so much, we'd have done a better job of hiding it - blame your government")

They should send him to Xerox to help it on the downward trajectory Ursula put it on.