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Comment Re:Please name names (Score 1) 350

The correct answer is to say, While everyone is presumed innocent until found guilty, _if_ these allegations against Minsky are true then Minsky needs to answer to them. Until _we_ know all of the facts, _we_ will be limiting our interactions with Minsky.

FWIW, Minsky was dead by the time the accusation and Stallman's statements were made.

Comment Re:This will break all sorts of things (Score 4, Informative) 345

So wait a second. If my home dir is encrypted until login, but my SSH keys can't be read to login and decrypt my SSH keys... How does one remotely login?

Funny you should ask: Lennart's reply:

SSH mostly works fine already in the current codebase: the only restriction is that something has to unlock the homedir once so that ssh can work. Thus if you have a laptop you want to log into via ssh, just log in locally first, and maybe put the screen lock on. And then ssh just works, until you fully log out locally, again.

Comment Re:This will break all sorts of things (Score 1) 345

It also breaks SSH into a machine with a logged out user.

This was Lennart's reply:

lennart-poettering

SSH mostly works fine already in the current codebase: the only restriction is that something has to unlock the homedir once so that ssh can work. Thus if you have a laptop you want to log into via ssh, just log in locally first, and maybe put the screen lock on. And then ssh just works, until you fully log out locally, again.

.. wtf?
Earth

The End of Coal Could Be Closer Than It Looks (bloomberg.com) 397

Posted by BeauHD from the never-say-never dept.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report on Monday saying that the world's electrical utilities need to reduce coal consumption by at least 60 percent over the next two decades through 2030 to avoid the worst effects of climate change that could occur with more than 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. While that reduction seems out of reach, Bloomberg crunched some numbers and found that "it's possible to meet consumption-cut targets on the current path." From the report: The conventional wisdom is that this isn't possible, as rising demand from emerging economies, led by China and India, overwhelms the switch from fossil fuels in richer countries. That may underestimate the changing economics of energy generation, though. For one thing, it assumes that Asian countries will continue to build new coal-fired plants at a rapid rate, even though renewables are already the cheaper option in India and heading that way in China and Southeast Asia. For another, the falling cost and rising penetration of wind and solar is so recent that we're only just starting to see how they damage the business models of conventional generators. Thanks to the deflation of recent years, renewables already produce energy at a lower cost than thermal power plants. That causes the overall price of wholesale electricity to fall, reducing a conventional plant's revenue per megawatt-hour. When this drops below the generator's operating costs, the only away to avoid losing money is to switch off altogether. As a result, capacity factors -- the share of time when the plant is on and producing electricity -- decline as well, further undermining returns.

The shift from an always-on "baseload" demand profile to a peaks-and-troughs one like this carries its own problems. The act of ramping up and down consumes fuel and causes the physical plant to wear out faster. Absent expensive refurbishments, that could take a decade off the 40- to 50-year life of a coal plant -- and banks will get progressively less likely to fund long-term refurbs as wind and solar further damage the economics of fossil power. Researchers at the Australian National University this year modeled the effect of this sort of scenario on that country's generation mix. Assuming that the cost of renewables continues to evolve in line with current trends, they found the average retirement age of coal plants falls to 30 years from 50 years. As a result, coal-powered generation drops by about 70 percent between 2020 and 2030. "Let's assume the addition of net new generation stops in 2020; that plant life reduces to 30 years from 40 years; and that capacity factors gradually fall from the current 50 percent to 35 percent, still well above the levels of the U.K.'s coal generators in recent years," the report says in closing. "The effect of those operating changes alone reduces coal-fired electricity output in 2030 by about 40 percent relative to the higher scenario. [...] Factor in a price on carbon or other robust government intervention and the decline would be much faster."

Comment Re:Pre-installed garbage (Score 1) 284

by Xolotl (#57115216) Attached to: Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Unlocked Smartphone?

Removeable battery: = No

While I like the idea of a removable battery in principle, in practice I've found that (with modern batteries and charging technology) by the time the battery dies enough to be replaced, replacements are unavailable at all or are dubious 3rd-party clones which don't necessarily fit or work properly (looking at you LG ...). Which effectively means your removable battery isn't replaceable anyway.

So unless the use case is carrying around spare batteries rather than a powerbank or just charging as needed, then it seems to be a moot point. YMMV of course.

What would be nice is a standard form factor removable battery across manufacturers, but good luck with that ...

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