There used to be a whole army of people who walked around town every evening to light the streetlamps. Perhaps if they'd sued the Edison company, they'd still be employed.

Surely I can't be the only one who thinks "Raspberry Pies" would be a better pluralization than "Raspberry Pis".

Welcome to North America dude. The houses are all wired for 240V split into 2x 120V legs for residential service.

So they should spend $100K on proprietary software AND $100K on a replacement? Good luck getting that into your annual budget.

So your choices are A) spend $100K on working proprietary software that can be installed and used today, or; B) spend $100K funding development and hope that you get a suitable replacement in 6-12 months?

That happens when you only have 4 hours a day of fuel.

If you're buying 80,000 tons per month, you're not paying the $4.34/gallon retail price, idiot.

They way the article reads, they have the generating capacity now with the current diesel plants, they just can't afford the fuel to run them. Someday they'll have to invest in more generation, but it doesn't look like that's today.

Well, it's pretty easy. When you can only buy enough diesel to keep the lights on for 4 hours a day, there's no fund they can dip into to pay the up front cost of switching to solar. It may very well be cheaper to operate than the current system of diesel-fired generators, but the barrier to entry is high enough that it really doesn't matter if it's absolutely free to operate in the long run - there's no secret stash they can dip into to make the initial investment needed to make it a reality.

They can't afford diesel fuel, which is generally dirt cheap. What makes you think they can afford thousands of hectares of solar farms?

A great deal of Northern Virginia's power comes from the Lake Anna nuclear plant, which, while technically nonrenewable, isn't spewing gigatons of CO2 into the air either.

In Virginia, they put them in business parks in Prince William and Loudoun counties mostly, neither of which are third-world hellholes - Loudoun county has the highest median household income in the country, and Prince William is 15th on the same list according to the 2010 census. No, they don't employ many people, but they do pay property taxes on land that was previously sitting unused. If there are places that object so strenuously to datacenters, those two counties will likely be quite happy to host more.

I dunno. I still browse every so often, but the quality of the discussions seems lacking - there's precious little that I feel is worth the effort of contributing to.

According to FF, this is the first time I've actually logged in since August of 2013.

RIP Kuro5hin. I remember it, anyway.

Amateurs. Here in Virginia we have over 200 choices, not including the ability to have your own custom business logo on the plate if you have a large enough fleet. You can't tell me some of those don't get you a little special consideration when you get pulled over.

Difficulty: Being a part of the WTO has, on balance, been extremely beneficial to the US, even accounting for this ruling. Seriously - the US has been a party to more winning cases in front of the WTO than any other country, by far. Should we just poop all over every other industry in order to maintain some sort of neo-Puritan approach to gambling?