To be good, these things need experts in the field following good business and engineering practices. It's difficult, costly, and takes a lot of time, so only large international companies have much of a chance at being competitive. The forces of capitalism or government development seems to be the best ways currently to solve these kinds of massive undertakings. The internet has shown a lot of promise in allowing loosely-connected entities to collaborate, but once a project starts to look like it has value, somebody always takes the bone (or their part of the bone) and tries to personally benefit. Everybody needs to put food on the table at the end of the day.

If he is that famous, all you would have to do is associate him with drugs. In 2010, [Charlie] Sheen was the highest paid actor on television. Now nobody respects him or cares about anything he says. Charlie Sheen actually is/was an addict but faking such a controversy can't be that difficult.

This attitude is common across many industries. Maybe I was naive in my 20s but the idiots you went to high school with never smartened up. There is no miraculous supply of intelligent people who manage companies. The people who manage companies are usually the people who are best at overselling, overpromising, underdelivering, screwing people to make a buck, and don't think the rules apply to them.

To make this point even more clear- A URL is just an address. I can't copyright, for example, the address of the Court of Justice of the European Union. It just happens to be:

Palais de la Cour de Justice
Boulevard Konrad Adenauer
Kirchberg
L-2925 Luxembourg
Luxembourg

That's just a shorthand way of saying N 49.621036, E 6.143116 (which is actually posted on the Court's own website It's where you locate the copyrightable thing, and if an address is copyrightable, then giving directions is a crime. If you want to protect your copyright from public public view, you need to build a wall so people can't swing by the address and just look at it. People living in glass houses need to either put up curtains, or accept that people are going to look at them.

I have linked these addresses (both to their website and physical addresses) without permission. Calling that a crime is unworkable in both the physical and internet world.

The idiots you went to high school with didn't suddenly get smart. People are quite dumb, on average.

Anyone with a foot out the door of the company they are working for is in the same boat. Once I realized that the company needs me more than I need them, I was a lot more willing to stand up to management and forcefully push for needed changes. I just didn't care if I lost at that point since I wasn't planning on sticking around.

I have been assigned a lot more responsibility since then. Maybe that's what it takes to be in management- boldness on the edge of recklessness.

I agree, but under some current regulatory models, such shenanigans are treated similarly as an actual power plant. To the grid, adding 50MW of supply is the same as subtracting 50MW of demand (in most cases). There are several things about this that greatly concern me, especially the part about a tech company entering the energy market and extracting large amounts of money while providing very little benefit.

Despite the reforms after Enron, the energy market is not regulated very well, regulation varies by location within the US, and some of the tricks being pulled would make Wall Street blush. It's a complicated system that requires a lot of specialized experience to understand. I work in the energy industry and we have a saying- "Whenever there is confusion, someone will exploit it".

130 comments is a pretty good discussion on Slashdot. It may even be above average.

It's a kludge to try to solve the problem of income inequality. My kids are mixed-race and enjoy all the advantages of a family in a comfortable financial position. They got more attention when they were very young since one parent could afford to stay home. That means they heard a lot more language on a daily basis. They go to a good Pre-K program and will go to a decent school when the time is right. They also have college savings plans so they won't have to worry (so much) about paying for college and can potentially make a better choice.

Poorer families are at a big disadvantage. They can't afford to live in neighborhoods with great schools, they can't afford to stay home for the first couple years of life, and won't be able to save as much for college. Poor kids will always be on an uphill climb to get to my kids level since my kids have enjoyed advantages from the very beginning.

I don't see race as being relevant to the above, other than the fact that minorities are disproportionately poor and therefore more affected by these problems. The best way to solve these issues is with universal Pre-K, paid paternity/maternity leave, and making sure that the schools in poor neighborhoods are equivalent to those in better neighborhoods. Trying to solve these problems with incentives and preferential treatment at hiring time is way too late.

Material science and strength calculation complexity was a lot less advanced in the 1920s. You could build a better airship today if you wanted to, but it probably wouldn't make sense. Cargo airplanes are likely more cost efficient. Fuel-wise, the airship might be favorable, but the financial impact of an expensive asset taking 3 days to travel 6,000 miles vs 12 hours for a plane is a large consideration. The 747-ERF freighter can carry 248,600 lb (112,760 kg), nearly double the Graf Zepplin. And it can do 3 round trips of 6,000 miles in the time that it would take the Graf Zepplin to do a single 1-way trip. It's not easy to think of a market nowadays where airships would make sense.

Not always. According to this helium wholesaler, grade 4.5 (99.995%) gas is often used in the balloon industry. Granted, getting the "5th nine" is a lot more costlier than getting to 4 nines, but I would not use "highly impure" to describe that level of purity. Most industrial uses use 99.997%. Anything higher than that is research/military grade and probably relatively low-volume in comparison to the welding shops, cryogenic cooling systems, and manufacturing users using 99.997% or lower.

Several of the MVNO's using AT&T's own network have offered "unlimited" (usually capped 4G + unlimited 3G) for several years. Their network could obviously support the traffic. The only reason AT&T didn't until now was because they could get away with it. I guess the competition finally forced their hand.

I see this as a consequence of global supply chains, subcontracting, and little if any vertical integration. All the little details that used to be trade secrets of a vertically-integrated company are now quite transparent. You open up the device, see who made all the different components, and call them up and ask for a quote. We have come a long way from the days when a company manufactured most of their core products in-house. Just as one example, GE has been subcontracting out the manufacture of steam turbines, to their own competitors, since at least the 1970s. You could argue that they were simply divesting themselves of "mature" technology in order to focus on the more profitable cutting-edge stuff, but I would argue that steam turbine technology only became fully mature because they gave away (licensed) the technology to Hitachi, Toshiba, Doosan, and Ansaldo and let them run with it.

You could have made all the same points (minus the multicore discussion) in the 1990s/early 2000s about desktop PCs. Nowadays, the notion of upgrading or replacing a PC or laptop every 2-3 years seems somewhat archaic. Any powerful PC/laptop today generally remains so for 3-5 years now. The lack of major desktop/laptop processor advancements has been going on so long now that people don't even talk about it, because it is irrelevant for most people. SSDs were the last upgrade worth having, and those are very widespread now.

Phones will get to that point of maturity too, probably within 10-20 years. The only potential obstacle is the issue of software and software updates.

I have yet to go camping in state, but I have heard good things about Brazos Bend State Park. The Galveston area could be an option, although Galveston is a bit trashy in general. If you do camp near/on the gulf, take care about how far back from the water you are. The tidal range can be several hundred feet, especially in Galveston where the slope of the beach is so gradual.