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Comment Metal record on the wall (Score 0) 152

Music sales has never been the honey pot of the music industry. I'm pretty sure the last person who actually made any money from album sales was M.C. Hammer, and even then it was because they wanted him badly enough to negotiate. Of course, then he blew it all on his entourage, but that's another matter entirely. Musicians make their money on concerts, and if they're sharp enough, merchandising. If you rely on music sales alone, you can be the biggest star in the world and make the same money you'd make serving drinks... and the server job would be less stressful. All sales gets you is an average Joe paycheck, and an maybe a metal record on the wall.

Comment It makes sense, for residential installs (Score 0) 60

Residential power use is a drop in the bucket for Texas energy consumption. Energy companies will barely notice. Installing your own, "selfish solar" power makes perfect sense. Understand, "selfish solar" is not the same as grid-tie. The grid stays disconnected unless available local stores are used up. You're effectively using the grid as backup power. Grid-tie systems can't be used as backup sources in a power outage, as they are designed to turn off too (anti-islanding requirements). A "selfish solar" installation runs mostly, if not always, on your own solar / battery power. Yeah, you don't get credits for adding power to the grid, and you're charged for the connection and service regardless of your usage. But the security of generating your own power with the grid available as a backup can be worthwhile. ("Selfish solar" is a term coined by the late Jack Rickard of Boardwatch / EVTV fame.)

Comment Other studies (Score 0) 169

Other studies say the exact opposite. That it's because Texas relies on a large percentage of wind and solar energy, it opens the door to grid instability. Those sources place a high dependence on backup sources like natural gas, and when that fails too, so does the grid. Further, the reason the Texas regional grid is separate from the other national grids is that interconnections can result in a cascade nationwide grid failure. That kind of cascade failure was what ERCOT was trying to prevent during that storm, and the reason for the (mostly) rolling blackouts. A national interconnect would have compounded the problem, not solve it. And no, Texas had no grid issues during the storm this year. Supply was never a problem. A few power lines going down due to falling ice-laden trees is not the same as narrowly avoiding a total grid collapse.

Comment Lynch Made Dune (Score 0) 201

The book was ridiculous and long winded. Lynch managed to trim the fluff out, condense it into a 2 hour movie, and still present an incredible world and story to the masses. In 1984 no less. Sure, purists hate it, but I think their expectations are way too high. It would take a 12 part movie series, most of which would be a snooze fest, to stick to the book.

Comment Re:Twitter's First Amendment Rights? (Score 0) 383

Censorship is not protected by the 1st Amendment, speech is. How you fix Twitter, or any other company doing things you don't like, is to not use them. You vote with your dollars (or in this case, your time and data). Use a less restrictive service. They'll change, or lose to their competition.

Comment Ways Around That (Score 0) 306

There are hardware ways around that. Remember we lost some critical optimizations due to security issues not too long ago. We've also been adding on to outdated tech for decades. It's time to go back to RISC architectures, with multiple cores and strip out unused extensions. Then programmers need to step up their SMP game to actually take advantage of multi-core systems. We have a lot of room to improve yet.

Comment Where have you been? (Score 0) 165

Bitcoin has been dead for a while now, where have you been? It's a horrible cryptocurrency for actually sending money to someone. It's painfully slow, it costs too much, it's outdated. There are many better cryptocurrencies out there, who are actually innovating. The trouble is, the sheer dominance of Bitcoin in the market drags everyone down with it. Until people realize that Bitcoin isn't the be-all-end-all of cryptocurrencies, the purge will continue. Personally, I like Stellar Lumens. It's cheap, it's fast, it's very decentralized and it doesn't require a power plant to join the network.

Comment That's what you get... (Score 0) 399

...when you close down your nuclear power plants. The wind doesn't always blow, the sun doesn't always shine. You have to have base load energy sources. Without nuclear, you get natural gas and coal as your base load sources. Precisely the opposite of what you're trying to achieve with wind and solar. You're doing it all wrong. Stop screwing around and get to work on thorium fueled MSRs. It's the only way forward.

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