It's fascinating to me that you only see this as worthwhile if you personally get an immediate short-term benefit and that you see it as a negative if a big corporation sees benefits of their own. Whether I see an effective income of $36, $28, or something else in that ballpark really isn't what determines if I want to participate. At best it's a small side benefit. Like I said: taco money (or "paid for Netflix for a month or two" money).

I see it as a distinct benefit to me personally that the utility grid doesn't overload with brownouts as a result. Even if I could actually cope with such an event better than most (Powerwalls FTW!).

SCE (and PG&E, I believe) are private corporations indeed, but they are regulated by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) which essentially determines what they can charge including what large expenses they can incur and subsequently push onto the ratepayers (i.e. me and everyone else in their service area). If one of the benefits of this type of setup is that they don't have to invest a ton of money in something else, then that works to everyone's advantage. It's not a zero-sum game. You can argue that SCE/PG&E/etc. see a bigger aggregate short-term benefit than individuals like me (they save millions, I get paid $36) and that's not wrong, but that ultimately benefits me and everyone else indirectly too.

I might agree with you if there was some large effort or ongoing investment of time/money/... required on my part. Except there's not. I've now spent far more time writing on Slashdot about this than I spent signing up for the program in the first place. After signing up, I don't have to do anything. It just happens. Is that worth it to me? Sure it is.

I was one of the 268 homeowners that participated in this event in the Southern California Edison (SCE) area. In total my 2 Powerwalls sent a total of around 18 kWh back to the grid from around 6.30 pm to 9 pm. My system sent that much power because I played with the settings ahead of time to lower my battery reserve percentage to try to maximize participation during what was the first type of event of this nature.

Do I need the $2/kWh? No. Will it help offset the cost of the system? Sure, a tiny little bit. I'll take the $36 or so that come from this.

Was there any negative impact to my house during this? Not in the slightest other than my family wondering why I was fiddling with the Tesla app throughout the evening.

I'll echo what several others have said: I see nothing but upside to this program. I voluntarily signed up via a 3-minute in-app process, helped stabilize the grid during an emergency event at virtually no cost or impact to myself, and I made some taco money along the way. The only possible downside I see to participating is 1) the marginal additional degradation of the Powerwall batteries as I let them drain to ~15% instead of the more usual 45-50% when they cover our electricity use during the high-cost time-of-use rate from 4 pm to 9 pm, 2) the tiny risk of a longer power outage during the night when my battery reserve was lower than usual. This could be mitigated by simply setting a higher backup percentage instead of what I did which was the opposite (lowering the minimum threshold in order to send more power back to the grid).

I really don't see the tiny amount of additional battery use as a reason to not participate. These types of events are still fairly rare. Maybe 5-10 days a year on the high side where the Powerwall is discharged a little more than normal. For someone to want to 'hoard' all their saved power on the off chance that there will be an outage? I'm sure some people are paranoid enough and will choose not to participate but I'd expect that to be a minority.

It's hard to say how much I reflect Powerwall owners in general as I'm obviously a tech geek and early adopter (I signed up for the VPP the day it was announced) but I suspect the main challenge Tesla will have in expanding participation is simply getting people's attention and getting enough people to care to go through the sign-up process.

Read up on herd immunity. A large part of the effectiveness of vaccines is that beyond the individual protection they confer on most recipients, they also protect the unvaccinated and the ones that the vaccine wasn't effective for if the overall rate of vaccination is high enough.

That's why the people who choose not to vaccinate their kids are also increasing the risk for the kids that did get the vaccine but for whom it wasn't effective for some reason, the kids that haven't been vaccinated yet because they're too young, and the kids that for some reason - e.g. compromised immune system - can't get the vaccine at all.

Look at appharbor.com. Their slogan is Azure done right: you get ASP.NET 4.0 hosting, a Git repository, continuous integration and unit testing upon deployment, SQL Server instances, etc.. Basically everything you're asking for. Their backend is 'the cloud': Amazon EC2.

Their rates start at 'free', so there is no cost while you're busy getting your millions of accounts and hits. When that happens move to one of their paid tiers and go nuts.

YMMV.. I have a pair of Panasonic powerline network adapters. I get about 45 mbps sustained (indeed these adapters are also "up to 200 mbps"), but the latency is quite decent at less than 5 ms extra latency compared to an ordinary wire.

I'm very happy with this solution since my apartment is bombarded with competing WiFi networks from the neighbors as well as the super-crappy old microwaves my apartment complex uses that completely kill anything at 2.4 GHz.

I very much disagree.

My wife got a new Lenovo IdeaPad S10 a couple of weeks ago. Despite its pink exterior, I've taken the liberty of playing around with it a bit. It came with the standard Windows XP Home that most netbooks come with, and I installed Ubuntu 7.10 and the public Windows 7 beta.

The Windows 7 beta performs far better than the pre-installed Windows XP Home - even after removing the factory installed junk - and the user interface is much better suited for the small form factor than XP is. My favorite example is how they made the task bar better suited to being placed at the side of the screen instead of the top or bottom. On a device with a resolution of 1024x600, this is the kind of minor visual tweak that makes the system much nicer to use.

I've already decided to shell out hard-earned cash for the Windows 7 once it's released, which will be the first time I've bought a boxed version of Windows. My wife dual-booted between Ubuntu and Windows 7 for a couple of days (she's not technical at all, so I'm as shocked as you are that she even accepted my suggestion of dual-booting) and ended up sticking with Windows 7, because "it's faster and easier to use than the other one.. besides it's pretty!".

No, I don't have any relation to Microsoft. I just think Windows 7 is really looking quite good so far.