And by "bad for everyone", you mean "bad for companies' bottom line and easy earnings". Consumers benefit. But consumers are rarely if ever part of that "everyone" when used by corporate shills.

That is why corporations are focusing and concentrating mass media first and foremost. Propaganda is the power of control of the masses. As long as critical mass isn't reached, no one important cares about fringe thinkers understanding the reality. Propaganda will just discredit the thinkers, hide the atrocities committed to them and tell everyone that they have the best place to live in the world.

So to answer your question: most likely never unless some major catastrophe happens that will massively upset the current power structure. The current trend is concentration of power in private hands with little to no oversight of any kind.

Opera Mini and Nokia Asha's browser are huge in countries with spotty/bad/expensive mobile coverage. They shrink pages to about 10% of their original size and then stream them from a local proxy. Speed increases are phenomenal.

On the downside it does mangle some pages pretty badly and you don't want to do any really sensitive stuff through it as it's a proxy browser (i.e. banking). Of course, in most of the developing countries at which these systems are aimed Opera and Nokia are trusted FAR more then local operators and in many cases even banks and for a good reason. Western companies tend to adapt Western principles and ethics to their business in large parts, while local culture may view swindling someone who's stupid as a "natural thing to do".

Actually this is posted on POLITICS.slashdot.org.

Which is a subforum for... you guessed it!

Solar cannot be profitable in Germany with current technology period. The only way to give it an illusion of making money is to massively subsidize it. We are already seeing massive amount of bankrupt solar companies in Europe after governments had to scale back subsidies for the sector due to bad economy.

What I was talking about is that most countries in Europe have interconnected electrical grids, even if grids themselves have different standards. Take a look at my home country of Finland for example (chart should be nearly real time or real time)

http://www.fingrid.fi/en/electricity-market/power-system/Pages/default.aspx

Typical winter usage scenario is that we import electricity from Russia and Estonia and ship it to Norway and Sweden. Also Ahvenanmaa/Åland ships electricity from Sweden.

These can however be reversed, for example last winter we had severe storms around new years taking a lot of household completely offline. As a result, we were shipping electricity to Estonia and were importing less then half of what we are currently importing from Russia. This doesn't mean that, like OP claims "Estonia is power hobbled" but that we simply happened to produce more then was usually needed at this point and we shipped it to Estonia.

Same thing is going on between France and Germany. Depending on time certain regions may need to import power across border. This is a completely NORMAL scenario. It has nothing to do with being "power hobbled" and everything to do with the fact that grid is designed so that there is enough power in the system even when certain plants go for down for maintenance by importing/exporting power as needed.

Let's spell it out:

Car has theoretical maximum range. This range assumes driving optimally (meaning within certain speeds) and assumes you start with full charge. For internal combustion engine, they have similar maximum range, that also includes certain driving speeds, which is usually FAR more constrained then on electric engine based vehicle due to severe torque penalty on ICE when running in non-optimal RPM range for that specific engine - if you wonder why, look up why internal combustion engines need multi-speed gear box while electric engine on tesla only needs one speed for optimal performance.

So the claim is that guy who was supposed to test theoretical max range:
1. Didn't top off the tank
2. Drove at speeds significantly higher then optimal for fuel consumption
3. Chose a longer route
4. Did a lot of stop-and-go during the trip

Do find me even one vehicle of any kind on the market that would manage to keep its theoretical maximum range with this kind of driving? Because internal combustion engine's energy consumption would actually increease from this kind of driving style far more then electric engine with regenerative breaking both due to no capture of energy on breaking (it's dissipated as heat on brake pads/drums) and due to engine working in non-optimal RPM ranges for much longer periods in case of ICE.

All in all, if Musk's claims hold, reporter was either very stupid (which could be true - he claimed that he thought that constant stop-and-go would not impact his range) or was intentionally trying to get advertisement for his story.

Either way, we'll find out when full logs are released.

You're not going to, and this is in large part because of attitude of people like you. You view government as a bigger threat to yourself then corporate interests. This in spite of the fact that governments across Western countries are far more regulated, far more people-oriented, have a legal and moral requirement (usually echoed by most of the government employees) to help their citizens.

"Well I see a hunter with a gun and an angry bear on my right and left sides. I'd better run to the bear for safety because I saw hunter being an angry drunk once". Reality is you have to choose, because to control corporations' destructive tendencies you'd have to have a power structure that controls them. Take a guess what the name of this power structure is?

Same AC with second lie of omission answering single post getting modded up. Sad.

The entire idea of decentralized power generation in the region that is thousands of kilometers away from areas that actually need said power is fairly idiotic in itself. You're going to lose a huge chunk power in transfer. That assuming that wind power in Baltic see is actually functional, which as Denmark and its hilarious electricity prices that completely drove all the remaining heavy industry out of the country demonstrated they are not, as they chose to levy the cost on everyone, unlike Germany that gives breaks to heavy industry at cost of private consumer.

Germany may dodge that pitfall, but result is the hilarity of electricity costs to households and small companies.

So far, every single investigative journalist piece has claimed exact opposite. My father also happens to work in building large scale (~200MW) coal power plants. Biggest coal building boom location in the world? Germany.

Sad that people mod your lie of omission "informative", as what you just claimed that natural interconnected power transfer is somehow "special".

That's because Germany went retarded with renewables and put a hilarious surcharge on all private customers to pay for it. You're paying about twice to thrice the cost of electricity compared to most of the European countries that have sane power generation policies.

Just looking at various PR photos from back then and now, this statement is easily proven false.

The problem with your line of thinking is that you're thinking it's a one way street when it's a two way one. Government is also massively limited by laws, at least in the Western democracy model (not Egypt for example). Private interests are far, FAR less limited, such as not having to honor free speech or transparency to anywhere near the levels of government.

As a result, governmental mistakes come to light far more often then private ones, in spite of the fact that most of the new legislation is driven by private rather then public interests. Essentially, you're focusing on the fly on the wall while ignoring the elephant in the room.

SOPA comes to mind as a good example. Thing is, it doesn't have to be legislative body to kill it. Citizen action, lobbying and so on are very effective to take legislative packages off the table because of fear of consequences.

In EU, same thing happened to patent directive for example.

Ah, another "government is this monolithic entity that is sooooooo scary" post. Massive upmods incoming.

Reality is, most of these bills in the West are drafted by interested parties. Most of which are no governmental but private in nature. And while many laws look (and are) quite terrible as they are drafted by people with massive vested interests in them, modern Western democracies have numerous checks and balances to thwart such legislation from becoming actual law. Which is what happened in this case.

The fact that you chose Egypt, a country that essentially survived beginning of a civil war and still hasn't worked itself through it and has never been a democracy befiore as an example of average Western government shows that you're quite pants on the head kind of special poster.