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Comment Re: Each of those days (Score 1) 72

That's an oversimplification. The grid does need to be balanced to avoid overloading, but CAISO allows selling power at negative rates due to the subsidies and other contractual considerations for solar providers. There is no technical reason why they would be forced to sell to other states at negative rates, unlike coal plants which have a high cost to restart if they're forced to suspend.

Also, CAISO's biggest trading partners are the cities of Los Angeles and Sacramento, so much of the "exports" are internal to California.

Not to say there aren't huge problems figuring out how to actually use/transmit all the power instead of having solar farms sit idle, but overloading the grid is not the main one.

Comment Re: Each of those days (Score 1) 72

Negative prices exist because of the way renewable energy credits are set up to encourage solar production. Solar farms can shut down instantly, unlike nuclear (and to a lesser degree, coal) which can't throttle in real-time. So the extent to which solar is being sold for negative prices is due to it being subsidized and not because it would overload the grid.

Now yes having to import power after the sun sets is a real problem that we'll need to solve.

Comment Re:Well Shite (Score 1) 107

On top of what others have said, in most states companies can legally fire people for any reason or no reason at all, outside of a limited number of protected classes (race, gender, age, religion, stuff like that). They can fire you because they don't like the color of your pants.

Aside from that, the other protected category would be to protect people from retaliation for reporting illegal behavior (whistle blowing), reporting harassment, union organizing, reporting safety concerns, discussing workplace conditions. But that's when the *company* does illegal behavior, not when you/your husband committed a crime.

Comment Re:Ummm, no! (Score 2) 45

Someone can still patent one of those designs, and all they have to show is they were the first one to file the patent in order to use it against them.

The public disclosures on the website constitute prior art, which would make patents filed by other parties based on those ideas (designs) invalid.

In some countries, there's a grace period (6-12 months) that would also allow the original author to file a patent after the initial disclosure, although that's more legally precarious than just filing a patent immediately. But in either case, it would prevent anyone *else* from filing a patent on that specific design.

(IANAL)

Comment Re:Chinese study about the Sars-Cov-2 (Score 2) 49

HIV and Herpes are highly persistent because they write themselves into your DNA so they never really go away, or go dormant to avoid detection. That's not the case for SARS-CoV-2, although MHC-I blocking does make things nastier to deal with.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fen.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2F...

Disclaimer: I'm not a medical scientist either.

Comment Re:He expects Starship's first flight tests to orb (Score 1) 81

The only thing wrong has been the timelines. A lot of them are 5-10 years behind schedule but will happen sooner or later.

If I were to pick some claims that are closer to the "won't happen in the next 50 years" mark, I'd go with 1) having a million people on Mars / terraforming Mars, 2) replaying memories using Neuralink

Comment Re:I hate how poorly people are informed on this.. (Score 4, Informative) 89

SARS-CoV-2 is a newer form of SARS-CoV, but there's obviously some big differences in terms of lethality and asymptomatic spread.

We did take SARS seriously. It died out. Nobody is being infected with the original SARS. The problem is that we never prepared for "SARS 2" or for that matter, any sort of pandemic caused by a novel virus (novel influenza, Ebola-2, etc). I'm definitely splitting hairs a bit here, but we broadly need investment in infectious disease research and pandemic preparedness, not just for SARS-CoV-like viruses specifically.

Comment Re:No streaming from the cloud? (Score 1) 40

The rule appears to be https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fdeveloper.apple.com%2Fap... which applies to "mirror of specific software or services rather than a generic mirror of the host device". It would not apply to streaming video.

(a) The app must only connect to a user-owned host device that is a personal computer or dedicated game console owned by the user, and both the host device and client must be connected on a local and LAN-based network.

So that rules out the major cloud gaming services, although it might allow for services like Shadow where you rent a full Windows VM.

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