> Just throwing solar panels up on a roof without batteries seems to be a rare thing these days.

That is probably for the best, honestly. Energy storage capacity on the grid is something it's pretty hard to have too much of.

While desalination is a great use of excess power, this is not an easy thing to do because the places where the water is needed are inland. Obviously it doesn't make sense to pump desalinated water 180 miles uphill from the Gulf of California to Phoenix, what you really want to do is to use desalinated water at the places nearer the coast so they can stop relying on the river water that comes from the mountain west, so the southwest can use more of it (and so the mountain west can keep more of it for our own use). But while you could get some benefit from getting the coastal cities using desalinated water, their use actually isn't that significant. The bulk of the water goes to California farmlands, and those are in a belt 70-100 miles from the coasts, and there are mountains in between. Not terribly tall ones, but enough to make pumping the water challenging.

None of this means what you say isn't a good idea, but it does mean that a lot of infrastructure has to be built to make it work. Big coastal desalination plants, big pipelines from those plants, fed by big pumps, and either additional reservoirs or perhaps large tanks in the mountains to buffer the water supply -- though only after peak supply rises to the point that it exceeds demand. Heh. That's exactly the same situation as with intermittent, renewable power, just shifted to water. Water is a lot easier to store, of course, but you still have to build the infrastructure to store it.

So, this is a good idea, but it's an idea that will take years, probably a decade, to realize... and we have excess power now. Of course, starting by tackling the easier problem of using desalinated water in the coastal cities while the infrastructure is built out and scaled up makes sense.

There is one thing which will stop Linux in its tracks. NFS issues. A glitch with NFS, even if a server is mounted with an interruptible hard mount or (ugh) a soft mount can cause a kernel to completely hang and require a hard power cycle.

I think it is interesting, using the hypervisor as a watchdog timer. This is a useful idea in a lot more applications. For example, ATMs, digital signage, or other items which should just run without interruption.

They don't - something like this needs an Act or Congress.

SCOTUS made up some BS "Chevron Deference" in the 80's which has been abused like this since.

The current /Maine Fisheries/ case should dissolve Chevron deference.

We may like the FTC proposal on this one but with that kind of power and no representation it's only counting the days until they do something we absolutely detest. And then there's no effective recourse.

There were plenty of hospitals in Dresden and other German cities, too. But unlike us during WW2, Israelis don't do eradication of whole cities.

So please give me any reasonable metric (ie, not "has more letters in its name"), by which:
* Islam wouldn't be worse that national socialism (# of kills, hateful lines per page of their holy book, delta of world's science, etc)
* Israel wouldn't be better than our handling of nazis during WW2

Both are a pox on the face of this planet that needs to be eradicated (so are christianity and communism -- together they're the big four, there's no other ideology that achieved even 5M kills, Leopold's actions in Congo being the next contender).

I'm a Microsoft evangelist, I think in C#, and define my life using .NET analogies. I knew this was going to happen Extend, Embrace, Extinguish; But I'm really hoping that Microsoft does not extinguish OpenAI now that Microsoft has succesfully extended it's functionality, embraced open source AI, and depending on your view it is also preparing to extinguish open source development. Crazy thought. What if monopoly was allowed but the compromise is that the company is now owned in part by the public, similar to many utilities in local areas now?

> No, they really are producing too much.

Yes, but with qualifications. It's not too much in any absolute sense. It's too much for the current grid infrastructure, and in particular, the amount of energy storage capacity that is available on the grid.

In other words, as usual, they got the cart before the horse and did things in the wrong order.

The core problem is EV chargers are cheap and hydrogen stations are more expensive by magnitudes. You can build one hydrogen station to fuel 4 cars or for the same cost you could probably build:
- About a thousands of level 2 chargers in long term car parks.
- Over a hundred moderately fast 50 to 100kW chargers.
- About 20 to 50 superchargers that can charge a BEV is a similar time to hydrogen fueling.

The next problem is where to put them. EV chargers take little space and people are used to idea of living near electricity since they have it at home. Wait until the NIMBYs hear you want to put a huge explosion risk near them.

This meant Tesla could afford deploy many superchargers and they could be built and profitable in a short time. Toyota on the other hand needed mass market acceptance and purchases of HFCVs before they could cover the cost and delays of build hydrogen stations.

For many of us it was clear that hydrogen was a non-starter many years ago and are surprised it has take so long for other to see this.

Everyone who has been using reddit since 2013 has seen how the platform has co pletely gone to shit... It started out as a link sharing site, and these days you can't even do that freely... On a positive note, alternatives are starting to come along...a bunch of other old redditors and I are building one for stocks called fnchart.

I'm explaining that why it doesn't work, because if it did, there are easy ways to turn it into a practical magic perpetual energy machine.

more larfs! Red Hat is garbage... I hope I didn't spell that wrong...
Definitely the worst distro. It's IBM.
They drowned Linux in a bathtub.

Apparently so. Good catch.

It's important to understand that statistics are statistics. Individual cases vary, widely.

My high school English teacher eventually (end of senior year) confided to me that he had been in the habit of grading my papers last, so he could have at least one good paper to look forward to and finish on a positive note. (He liked my writing style; not everyone does, but he did. My papers always got good grades from him.) My surname starts with E, FWIW.

My point is, your grade isn't mostly determined by your position in the alphabet. It's mostly determined by other factors. Position in the alphabet has a statistically significant effect (and yes, the nature and extent of that effect almost certainly varies from teacher to teacher), but it's a secondary effect; other factors have a bigger impact. I expect it's not especially relevant at either the top or bottom end of the grading curve, but in the middle of the curve, where there are a ton of average students who produce just about equally mediocre work, it could be a bigger deal. Sometimes. Up to a point. The first paper the teacher graded that was a comparison/contrast between Barbie and Ken, two weeks after that movie hit theatres, probably got a better grade than the thirtieth such paper, especially if all thirty of them made basically the same points. But the student who didn't see the movie and turned in a comparison/contrast between the Illiad and Beowulf probably got an A, and the student who spent five minutes right before class hastily scrawling a short incoherent paragraph about smoking weed, got the low grade it deserved. Probably.

If there's a take-home point, it's probably this: software that collects student assignments and then presents them to the teacher (or TA or whatever) for grading, should probably present them in a randomized order each time. Well, pseudorandomized. No point making it cryptographically sound; if you're going to go to that much trouble, skip the randomness and rig it so that each student's position in the order is as close as possible to an even distribution over time.