I've actually lied. The total amount of investment into PV and wind energy was close to $450bn. And for that Germany got about 100TWh/y of generating capacity. For that price it could have built about 15 modern 5GW nuclear power plants, producing about 500TWh/y of energy.

Yeah, paying 5 times more than nuclear is certainly an unqualified success.

Oh, and I really hope all those hippies get cancer from the new coal power plants that are being built.

Ok, sure, whatever. Let me restate my point: "Investment in photovoltaics and wind power so far has been an abject failure in Germany". Biomass-based renewables are OK, but they are already maxed out as they are limited by the availability of biomass to process.

Hydro received very little funding in the recent 10 years in Germany, almost all of the investments went into solar panels and wind generators. So it's only fair to compare them to nuclear.

All the current nuclear waste if properly reprocessed can be buried in a couple of Olympic swimming pools. We can then bury it in deep salt deposits or (my favorite) in ocean subduction trenches. Or we can just continue keeping it in temporary storage for the next couple of centuries. It's a NIMBY problem, not a fundamental one.

Classic hydro is not what people usually think when they talk about 'renewable'. It's also not without environment issues - flooded lands, CO2 emissions from rotting organics, etc. And all of the German investments into renewables (about $300bn so far) could have been _easily_ beaten by 6 modern nuclear power plants.

In short, renewable energy in Germany is a total failure. It provides only feel-good feelings to fucking eco-hippies and not much more.

The official result for 2012 is 21.6% of energy generated from 'renewable' sources. Except that 25% of that was from the classic hydro, and without hydro it's 15% as I've said. Look it up: http://www.ag-energiebilanzen.de/componenten/download.php?filedata=1357206124.pdf&filename=BRD_Stromerzeugung1990_2012.pdf&mimetype=application/pdf

And the goal for renewable energy use won't be met. It won't be even close. German government knows this just fine - so the official target for renewable electricity got lowered down to 35% by 2020. And it will be lowered down even more in future.

Do you see any protests from Greens? No? Yup, because these fucking hippies are the direct cause of this.

Don't issue H1-B visas at all. If you want the best and the brightest, then give them indefinite leave to remain. And reintroduce the faster immigration system you used to have for PhD graduates: don't spend years ensuring that someone is familiar with the state of the art in their field and educated in the methods of research and then send them to another country. We've just imported this particular idiocy into the UK because our government wants to be tough on immigration, but can't legally crack down on immigration from the EU where most of our unskilled immigrants come from.

Germany is NOT 40% renewable. It's about 15% renewable and falling rapidly, because of all that nice new shiny coal-burning powerplants.

Be honest: Have you EVER landed on a porn website "accidentally"? Really? One that would have been caught by a pornblocker and that was not on a hijacked page that nobody would have known about?

Yes, because see? We NEED a ban on porn. Without porn, her website would not have been violated. And won't someone please think of the children?

The problem is that the blind is leading the stupid. Or, in other words, the idiots voting her in ain't any smarter. Sadly, having a clue is neither a requirement for a political office nor one to vote in elections.

No matter how much I think it should be. For BOTH. Or at the very least the former. It's a kinda lopsided battle when dimwitted politicians are pitted against corporation negotiators hand picked for their swindling abilities. I can't help but it reminds me of the trades between the European settlers and the natives.

Seriously, animated films are getting better and better. Sure, they are mostly child stories or fairy-tales, but most non-animated films are no better these days. And at least with animated films studios don't have to fork over millions to get barely-capable-of-acting "superstars".

In today's open space cubicle driven offices it's usually trivial to use a computer of a coworker who's currently at lunch. And aside of VPN (which sadly 'til today is usually only secured by user/pass and less by IP or even device) there are quite a few other options that can make it trivial to hide your actual source.

Seriously, nothing's easier than mobbing a coworker by DoS. I've had to deal with it a few times so far (yes, such a problem is part of a CISOs job and yes, my solution was simply to NOT lock an account after 3 attempts but use a very different approach, not unlike the "delay by a minute" spiel detailed above, with some goodies tacked onto it to find that asshat that tries to mob a coworker. I have exactly zero tolerance for such crap and it cost more than one ass his comfy chair).

Not quite. If you can find a security hole in the Windows kernel that allows arbitrary code execution in privileged mode (not as easy as some Slashdot readers like to believe) then it's possible to bypass UEFI secure boot by making the Windows kernel into a chain bootloader.

HP's approach was monumentally stupid. WebOS was a really nice system (I still prefer the UI on my TouchPad to my TransformerPad Infinity StupidName), but it lacked developers. They were giving them away to developers at the end (which is how I got mine), but then they killed the platform so there was no incentive to write a single line of code for it. I ported Objective-C to work on it, but then gave up on the platform when it became clear that the TouchPad was the last device ever to use it.

If I am not mistaken, "full employment" today means "at least 20 hours unpaid overtime per week".