Going to this wholesale electricity pricing site (I'm assuming this entity is a volume buyer and could get close to that):

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pjm.com%2Fabout-pjm%2Flearning-center%2Fprice-ticker.aspx

If you did it in Philadelphia right now (PECO) you'd be paying $47 per MWh.

0.77 MWh * $47 per Mwh = $36.19 per ton.

So if we were willing to tax carbon at around 1/4th what Uruguay does it would be profitable in Philadelphia, assuming all this scales and the rest of their claims pan out.

I love this stuff too and I want people to have access to less expensive computers and be able to keep things working, but this just a practical way for a person who is strapped for resources to get a functional computer in 2022.

Everything they want to do is on the web, and more importantly, everything they *know how* and *need* to do is on the web. A computer that can't access the Department of Motor Vehicles website or log into gmail is not a practical device in 2022, it's a hobby device.

The best option for a person who lacks money, time and information (people forget you need all three) is an android "free phone" on a Cricket plan. I had one for a minute as a loaner two years ago and I was shocked by how capable a "bad" phone is at this point. That device can do just about everything you hafta-gotta do with a computer for the cost of signing up for one of the cheapest phone plans in the United States, which you also hafta-gotta do, if you're not rich enough to disappear.

If that person has just a little more money, time and information, adding an older- or base-model Chromebook and Comcast Internet Essentials ($9.95 per month) is probably worth it, but the phone is the gotta-have.

Nowhere in this user story is there space for an Amiga running NetBSD. That's a device for those of us who have time to play with it. It's very cool though.

Right, I truly understand the urge to just take them down, but isn't the country also swarming with talented drone pilots? I get that a night pursuit would not be easy but someone with a good torch and a long range drone would succeed... or wait, they would need a license for a drone like that. Maybe nobody wants to be arrested just to find out the DEA was doing something asinine but legal.

In theory you're right, nobody sells for zero. In practice, there's a point where it's not worth anybody's hassle to sell or even track a price - there is always overhead. Thus zero.

JavaScript doesn't work that way. JavaScript runs in a very restricted security environment. It can do math, it can interact with the user, it can communicate with the website it came from. It can't spam the world without sending it all through the server it came from, which would defeat the purpose.

"To reach the other goals of the device, and provide an answer to the question ‘is the stellarator the right concept for fusion energy?’, years of plasma physics research is needed. That task has just started."

This is a long, long way from "star in a jar works."

Patents last 17 years, not forever. You can't "suppress" something permanently by patenting it - quite the opposite really because the patent is now published and once it expires others can begin to use it. The point of patents is to let those who developed an invention have a chance to profit from them and be glad they shared the idea at all; in software that mostly doesn't work but I'm not convinced it's such a bad idea with expensive machine parts.

WPA-PSK is insufficiently secure... and it's Amazon's fault? Stupid. Did they crack https? No. So clearly there are sufficiently secure technologies. Use them. Don't prop up crap technologies by calling in the Feds. Honestly, invoking the law to resolve a problem that clearly doesn't require it is an actively dangerous habit of thought. And I'm hardly a libertarian. I just know a bad idea when I see one.

LiveJournal has always permitted one-way "friend" relationships, helpfully distinguishing the "mutual friends" for you. This patent is just silly.

A "first to file" system wouldn't be completely disastrous provided that evidence of prior art was still enough to scuttle the patent.

I had one of these too. You can still get similar kits from Radio Shack. For younger kids they have versions that just snap together from modules. My daughter enjoyed these. The newer kits do feature ICs, which is fine, but the snap-together sets came with disappointing instructions that seemed to give up on explaining how things work when they got to the ICs.

Okay, so what should we do with North Korea, exactly? They have nuclear weapons, complete control of the information available to their populace, a crumbling food production system and a huge army as well as hordes of mortars aimed at Seoul. Good luck...

I am a constant critic of my own country's policy but when it comes to North Korea I rarely point the finger because I really don't know what can be done.

(I made an exception when Bush actually taunted them without the slightest ability to back it up. THAT actually managed to make matters worse, which is an accomplishment.)