The Wall Street Journal used to be a very good newspaper with a moderately conservative viewpoint and an extreme (some would say nutty) Radical Right editorial page. Now it just exists to provide a veneer of respectability to whatever scheme the hard Radical Right has cooked up to demonize a new Other (or resurrect the demonization of a previous Other) and hoover more money out of the pockets of the median Citizen.

Good point!

Darl McBride used to refer to the "spiffy agent technology" that was going to find the allegedly infringing code, so that particular grift is nothing new.

I am old and my sight grows dim, but I am pretty sure this all happened before the first 0.01 version of Linux was released.

"If you must write a check, he said, try to deliver it in person or take it inside a post office to mail rather than relying on your own mailbox or public drop boxes. "

That was the neighborhood advice going around our area 1-2 years ago. I myself was skeptical that mail theft was going on as I had dealt with the Postal Police when managing an e-commerce site and I knew they are very good at finding things like this. Unfortunately it turned out (1) I was wrong: there was mail theft going on in our neighborhood but (2) everyone else was wrong too: the mail wasn't being stolen from blue boxes; it was being lifted from the bins behind the slot in our postal service center. The perps were eventually caught but it took far longer than I would have thought.

I knew several people in ruraltania who bought into the 3rd generation of raising Vietnamese potbellied pigs. First and second generations made a fair amount of money selling into a rising novelty market; the second generation also made money selling to third generation hopefuls. Third generation breeders lost their shirts of course. Before that it was small farmers in central Ontario who discovered that ginseng grows very well in that climate and soil and that was large, nay HUGE, demand for that root in the PRC. This is perhaps even more germane to the tech example because it takes the first crop of ginseng 7 years to mature, so many many Lake Erie-area farmers saw their early-in neighbors harvesting the crop and the cash - only to see the market flooded and prices crash the year before they were due to harvest.

I dunno, I felt like the IIe was peak Apple 2.

Someone funny in a dark way that this story is posted right above the FEC's attempt to control mass surveillance via hardware. This kind of thing makes it absolute clear that one of the core goals of these self-described "AI" systems it to finalize the capture of all PII on everyone and transmit it to centralized storehouses controlled by... who exactly?

"Way to go outing yourself as someone who lives locally to Cupertino. For anyone else who actually used it was fucking terrible."

Way to make assumptions. I lived in the US Midwest then; I have never lived in California much less the bay area.

Personally I haven't used a single mapping app, whether MapQuest, Garmin, Google Maps, Apple Maps, Open Street Map, or other that hasn't had some errors. There are how many mappable points and curves on the Earth? 1 trillion? 10 trillion? 100 trillion? No one has them all. And all the commercial services give bad directions from time to time; my spouse had to flag down a Forest Service ranger and send them after a couple that was blindly following Google Maps down a road they weren't going to make even in their big honkin pickup truck.

I never got the hate for Apple Maps, even in the first year or two after release. Apple clearly could not let themselves become captive to Google/Google Maps to a degree they would never be able to overcome, so they had to move forward with something. And even outside SoCal it was OK if not great in the US (I understand international maps took a long time to catch up, but that was true of Google Maps too). I think I used it 2/3 of the time after the first year of stabilization and it worked well enough.

Now one can criticize Apple for not using a tiny bit of their store of cash to speed up the process of expanding their own geomapping database, and I so criticized them at the time. But that didn't mean the product was some sort of failure because it wasn't.

Wow - that page reads like a step-by-step guide on how to violate the Robinson-Patman Act. Too bad we haven't had any real consumer protection enforcement in the US since the 1970s.

We're talking about different things. I'm talking about load shifting, you're talking about base load and frequency maintenance. You're not wrong, but that's not what I was talking about.

The point of load shifting is that if I have a task I need to do today that consumes power, I can do it when the sun is shining or when it's not. If the power company lets me do it for free because the sun is shining and there is excess power, that helps them to keep the grid balanced during the day, which is good, and that's what you're talking about.

What I'm talking about is that if you have a task that you were always going to do, and you would have done it at, say, 7pm, when renewables generation is low and load is high, and I incentivize you to do it at 4pm, when demand is high and renewables generation is higher, then you aren't going to do that task at 7pm, which means the total load on the grid at 7pm will be less. If I can shift enough of the load away from 7pm, then I don't have to turn on a coal plant in anticipation of base load need at 7pm. That can bring my cost per mwh down from £500/kwh to £40 per mwh. Load is high at that time, so that can save millions of pounds over the course of an hour.

It's really not nonsensical, actually. Base load can be incredibly expensive. If they can avoid firing up the most expensive plant, they make more money. It's really that simple. Even though it seems "free" to you, what's really going on is that you have become part of the supply side of the equation by using power when it's there, and then _not_ using it when an expensive plant would have to be turned on. This is really a case where everybody wins.

"Why did they make him CEO if they know so clearly that he can't be trusted?"

'I never expected the leopard to eat my face! [just the faces of those marks and chumps]'

No, it's really inefficient. In order to be useful for power generation, the three square mile circle it illuminates would have to be completely full of solar panels in order to capture all the energy being reflected. And it it's as bright as the moon, that's about one half millionth as bright as the sun. So those solar panels, assuming no cloud cover, will be operating at one millionth the efficiency of daytime.

Meanwhile, battery technology, particularly for terrestrial power storage, keeps getting better and better. This has zero potential to offset CO2. Which is deeply sad for the science fiction geek in us all, but honestly, right now solar generation technology is starting to feel pretty science-fictiony, so maybe that's okay.