Four years is accurate for Australia. Almost one fourth of all homes in Australia have solar on them. The super fast payback period is why.

The payback period is so fast because Australia has the most expensive electricity in the developed world. Because of this, Australia also has the most developed residential solar installation industry in the world. The blokes in Australia can do a residential install for around a third of the price of a residential install in the USA.

The way Apple did it was to require games that sell loot boxes for money to post odds.

I've never seen a game do this. All games that I've seen sell in game currency and the loot boxes are purchased with that currency. IMHO, Apple introduced something to appear that they are doing something, while actually doing nothing.

And that makes sense. Apple gets 30% of all the sweet sweet revenue. So they want to appear to be doing something to calm enraged law makers, but actually do nothing to keep the money flowing.

They destroyed the utility of this monorail by designing it so that many of the stations are at the BACK of the hotels. This forces people to take extremely long walks through the casinos to get to and from the station.

The transportation services that people actually use are accessed from the hotel lobby.

Make stupid station choices, get stupidly low ridership.

To anyone who wants to learn more on the subject, there is a non-trivial amount of work on this idea out there. One could do worse than starting with William Tucker's book "Marriage and Civilization."

Yep, I very much agree with you.

US auto accident rate (serious enough to be reported to the police and involving any injury, death, or property damage) is roughly one every 350,000 miles. If Tesla autopilot had the same record as humans, we would be up to about 400 accidents now.

This happened to one of my machine.

  Windows 7 automatically started Windows 10 upgrade. On boot up, the machine shows the initial Windows 10 screen and then the screen blanks and the computer never comes back.

Thanks Microsoft.

SSD lives in an actual experiment are in this article:

http://techreport.com/review/2...

The drive that did the worst failed at the 728TB written mark. These were 250 GB drives, so I would expect 1 TB drives to be able to sustain approximately four times the write volume. The means we should expect failure at about the 3.5 Petabyte mark. Two video streams should pretty much never exceed 10GB/hour. 3.5 PB/10GB =350,000 hours. That's about 40 years.

  Yeah, I think SSDs are OK for DVRs.

It would be pretty stupid if it was not. About 20 years ago, most office buildings changed up the ballasts on their fluorescent lights from magnetic to active which gave huge electricity savings. It was pretty common to see deals like this back then. The company that I was consulting at did this. They had a company come in and replace the ballasts. The deal was ten years of half of the savings on the electricity and then the leasing company walked away. So from the POV of the customer, they had no up front cost, for 10 years the customer got half the electricity savings, and for the remainder of the life of the product the customer got 100% of the savings. If purchased outright, the ballasts would have paid for themselves in just a couple of years so it was a really sweet deal for the leasing company.

> If you're using somewhere near the inverter's peak output, then you can get as much as 90% efficiency

  These days inverters are much better than that. To use a random product that is currently shipping, an SMA Sunny Boy 5000 runs at 95.5-97% efficiency. Bigger inverters are even better with some commercial scale monsters at 98% efficiency.

  The original article is pure nonsense. There are already three port inverters on the market. Those ports are: your 120V AC, your solar array, your battery bank. If the energy is going from the solar array to the battery there is simply no intermediate conversion to AC. With a three port inverter, there is only ever a single conversion from DC to AC. And, as I previously mentioned, will only get hit with a 3-4.5% loss. There is simply no way the world is going to change how electricity is delivered to avoid that.

  Since the Tesla Power Wall is pretty much for sure going to be a high volume product, there are inverter manufacturers falling all over themselves to design and build three port inverters specifically optimized for the Tesla product.

EIA has been massively off on renewables for as long as I've been following them.

According to this paper: http://www.rff.org/rff/Documen...

renewables are one of the EIA's biggest trouble spots in predicting.

Note the paper is from a few years ago. EIA was screwing up forecasts of renewables way back then, and (IMHO) they still are.

I've been in meetings like that before. I suspect it was more along the lines of this.

Suit 1: So, we can block all the wifi hot-spots and make everyone pay us $10-$100 a day for access. Any downsides?

Suit 2: Yeah, it is illegal.

Suit 1: So, what happens if we are caught?

Suit 2: A fine, something like a million bucks tops.

Suit 1: LOL, and this thing could bring in five grand a day in revenue per hotel. No brainer, Approved!

IMHO, this is why the fine should have been much much bigger. I'd wager serious money that Marriott came out ahead on this. It has a taste to me of fining a bank robber 10% of what he stole and calling it a day.

Personal experience. My wife runs a solar energy web site and she routinely interviews people in the solar industry. That includes executives at electric utilities. I am the camera man. Since I am an electrical engineer, I always chat with the people before and after the on-camera interview.

The difference in attitudes towards solar PV before and after that report were nothing short of jaw-dropping. It was kind of amazing how patronizing many (most?) people in the utilities were towards solar. That report was like everyone in the industry had just watched a horror movie involving their own personal destruction. No one is dismissive or patronizing towards solar PV anymore.

BTW, possibly my favorite interview is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Karl Rabago is a great pro-solar guy who is also been utility guy who has also been a regulator. That gives him an amazingly well rounded perspective since he is one of a very small number of people in the industry who has been on both sides of the table.

The Edison Electric institute is a trade group for electric utilities. They published this report in January of 2013.

http://www.eei.org/ourissues/f...

That report changed the attitudes of a huge number of electric utility executives. Before this report, I would describe most electric utility executives as indifferent to solar PV. They viewed it as a marginal technology and that it would probably always be a bit-player. After that report, pretty much none of them feel this way. Many executives at electric utilities are terrified of solar and are spending significant amounts of money lobbying against it.

I agree it is cheaper to buy it from the power company today. That said, we might be a bit closer than most people think. LCOE (Levelized Cost of Energy) of new solar PV is around 10 cents per KwH. Right now, energy storage is in the ballpark of 30 cents per KwH. Get one third of your power without storage and the rest has to cycle through storage, and you are looking at an average cost of around 30 cents per KwH. About the only place that would save money right now is Hawaii.

  Going forward, Solar PV's price has been falling by around 8% a year for decades and I don't see that trend stopping any time soon. Battery costs have been falling even faster, but let's use 8% for those as well. By 2020, we will be looking at 20 cents a kwh. By 2025, it should be down to 13 cents, and by 2030 about 8.5 cents. Remember, that's for a system with solar PV and storage to take you through the night.

  That's assuming no big tech breakthroughs, just the incremental 8% a year we have been doing.

Agreed. I am astonished that this happened. I thought the router companies would have learned their lesson after the SNTP nonsense over a decade ago. Clearly I was mistaken. For those that do not know about that incident, here you go:

http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~plon...