Re: the cost of running diesel I think you are confusing the cost of grid power with the cost of accessing grid power. Getting a connection can be very expensive. Quotes vary wildly, but it's up to you to put in the poles/trench to connect your location to the grid. I've seen values from $2k/pole to $60k/km. If your homestead is 10km from a node, and tough terrain (perched on a mountain or mesa, say), $600k buys a shitload of diesel. Which nobody does, they put in PV, bunch o batteries. With a gennie hanging off the side. Where this may have some merit, a sheep station may only shear for a few weeks a year. The farm population trebled, huge spike in power use. Shearers, jackaroos, hands. Shearing n processing equipment. Cooking, cleaning, refrigeration. What a 10kw solar setup could handle in the off season (these farms are usually small villages) suddenly jumps to 100kw. Perfect for a rental gennie. But even in the 90's pure diesel was the norm. As a lad spent a Christmas holiday out in the sticks with some distant cousins. The gennie ran from 6am-9am for breakfast, 11-1 for lunch, then 6-10 for the eavning. 10pm, lights out. No AC for 50km in any direction. Sooooo Quiet. Also, the bush grid isnt a grid, it's a branch/leaf topology. Competitively fragile. If it breaks, probably won't be fixed for a week. Your freezer has 6 months of food in it. You have 10,000l of farm diesel on site. Having a gennie is a cheap bit of backup. Tl;dr: running diesel can be more economical than going on grid, if you factor connection to the grid in.

"In California, and likely also in Australia, there are regulations and laws that prevent utilities from clearing away trees from power lines" That's some real dumb laws. Nothing like that in Aus, the exact opposite. All overhead lines have exclusion distances set by the line voltage, if your vegetation gets to close, you get a little note telling you what needs doing. If you dont do the work, either yourself or your own contractor, the utility company gets their contractor to do it n simply charges you (at their arbitrary rate). Americans would probably get all frothy at that level of government control. Its only used for public saftey kinda things, but isn't uncommon, think chemical spills, noxious species, powerlines. The law clearly states its your problem, your responsibility, and it *will* be resolved. You have a clear option to comply, but it'll happen (and hurt) if you dont. I think its a decent system, even if it does get tied up in the courts, the heavy metal is no longer leeching into the water table, the abandoned orchard isnt reinfecting every other orchard within 20km every year. How does the US deal with this? Your tree falls, sets a blaze, kills 5 people. Are you guilty of negligent manslaughter? Is the power company? Is that why they just opt to kill that line, no power for you? In Aus, as the utility is obliged to maintain the lines to a clear standard, and has the power to enforce that standard. Poweline faults more often cars or insulators going bad.

With all that beef behind them, i sure hope they will follow Nvidia (i actually have no doubt that they will) in offloading physics to the GPU. http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=303 &pgno=0

it would be nice not having to purchase a top-notch CPU, GPU, and PPU (Physics Processing Unit) in the future, rolling the PPU and GPU together