It is a publicity stunt, and a damn good one. @snowden has collected almost 500k followers in less than five hours. By the end of today, it is sure to exceed a million. Can you hear me now? You bet your sweet ass!

Everyone that bought one of the fraudulent cars gets a NEW CAR to replace the fraudulent car no matter how old the original is. This would be far better than having a huge fine go to the government, and it would cost VW a shitload of money. Plus it gets the fraudulent cars off the street. A win win win.

Yes. Electricity is bought and sold in long term contracts and short term spot markets with a full range of future markets and price hedging. The spot market for peak power on a hot summer day occasionally exceeds the retail price that fixed rate consumers pay. The prices vary yearly to hourly. Some contracts are for peak power for five minutes. Check this out for a primer in electricity markets.
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

OK, this is the politics thing I mentioned earlier. Your power rates shouldn't be the same 24/7 since the electric utility pays a vastly different rate for power depending on supply and demand. If they passed these changes on to you, there would be incentives for you to make choices that would be beneficial to the operation of the power grid so that it would require less peak generating capacity, i.e. fewer power plants. If you had variable power rates you could save money by doing laundry in the late evening. You could program your hot water heater to heat the water during the night when it could. You could charge your car in the pre-dawn hours. If you insisted on doing these things during the peak load period you would pay extra to help defray the cost of the extra generating capacity.

Not a massive "if" at all. Here is how it works. You buy an electric car and keep it plugged in. You charge it when energy costs are low, and SELL electricity back to the grid when rates are high. This is assuming you want to make some spare cash while your car is parked. Most cars will be out driving during at least part of the daylight hours when solar power is being generated. As the sun goes down the car can sell some of its leftover power while demand is still high but solar power is unavailable. The battery will be recharged later in the night when demand for power is down but power is still being generated by fixed output sources like coal, nuclear, and geothermal plants.

No one is forced to participate. If you want to make some cash you sign up for this. If you imagine even half of the electric cars participating in this program, you have a massive power storage grid. And there are more electric cars being built every day.

Second, the political barriers in the power grid involve power companies cooperating to maintain power availability. This isn't an insurmountable problem. This is really different from the political issues that surround the construction of nuclear plants.

A whole new power grid is probably where we are headed. Tesla is cranking up its battery business precisely for this reason. If every home had a car or two with a battery that could be tapped for grid supplementation, the grid can be very dependable. And don't forget at least part of the US has huge hydro plants that can be kicked in when needed to balance the grid to demand. The barriers here are only political. The timeline to make these changes makes the timeline for nuclear power seem positively glacial.

A new nuclear power plant takes decades to plan and construct. Wind and solar can be implemented in a few years, depending on the scale of the individual project. Why would we subsidize a nuclear plant that would take decades when we can have new wind or solar up and running in a few years?

Your item two is in serious conflict with item one. How can nuclear energy be part of our nations power supply if the industry is responsible for the total end costs. The article explains that at a cost of 19 cents/kwh no one will build any nuclear power plant since solar and wind can be built for much less. So, really, if nuclear isn't subsidized, it isn't going to happen.

Nuclear power has always depended on subsidies and it can't survive without those subsidies. It is just too expensive and it seems unlikely that there will be any serious change in the economic arena.

Anyone that runs for President is insane. It's sort of a job requirement. Certainly, being insane wouldn't disqualify anyone. So, yes, he is qualified to run for President on that criteria.

Maybe Murdoch will resurrect those kinds of articles in an effort to increase readership. Maybe that is what he thinks his followers like. He might be right.

I have read the WSJ since about 1960. And no, I didn't hear it from a college Professor. I'm offering my opinion, which is a little different than "stating that definitely". Determining bias is always a little subjective, but I suspect your college professors would agree.

How about you? Have you read it?

When the WSJ was sold the bias of the paper shifted not-so-subtly to the right. It may be a top-tier newspaper, but its bias clearly indicates it is a tool of the Murdoch empire.

Comparing the WSJ to the Washington Post probably is appropriate since the Washington Post shares the right wing bias.

The bottom line is that he owns way too many media outlets which tends to drown out other voices. The argument that any of his media outlets are truly independent is really a joke. They publish what he wants them to publish through direct, indirect, or implied influence. That is why the hate.

Great questions. I'm all for putting a microprocessor in a device if that makes it work better, but does my toaster really need to send me a text when my toast is toasted? Do I really need to be able to program my thermostat from The Bahamas? Most people don't even know how to program their thermostat at home, because it isn't all that important to them. You turn it up when you are cold, down if you are hot, and mostly it has to do with your activity level, not some kind of programmable schedule. And if you are in The Bahamas you don't even think of your furnace at home, in fact thinking about the furnace is the last thing you'd want to think about. Oh sure, you might like to know if the furnace died before your pipes froze, but how often does that actually happen?

It really is a solution in search of a problem. If we really try, we can imagine scenarios where you might want a text from your toaster, but who is going to spend the time to program a smart toaster? OK, I know this is slashdot, so that probably is a stupid question. Because you can.