incomethax

So I work in the energy sector, and you are correct. The method we use for pricing power at a grid level is "local marginal pricing" - this is a price that is based on the location, the demand for power, and the ability for us to get the power across constraints (that is across a power gradient). It is often uneconomical to transmit power great distances, and loss factors are not insignificant. Not sure about Bhutan's grid, or who they can interchange to, but there are frequently wind farms in TX that have to take a loss to generate power simply because they are forced to generate power, and there is no demand for power in the region, and the buses (power lines) are congested. Also stranded hydropower is common the world over - it's easy to generate that power but difficult to build grid and interconnects to transmit that power - the line losses would be too high. For other types of generators - typically nuclear, often times ramp times for them are in the months, so turning up and turning down power is often difficult which is why an application that is passive, droppable, and can withstand latency is ideal to consume such power.

Sort-of. Transmission for HTHV lines (745kV single circuit cost $2.5-4M/mile with ~1% line loss; 345kV single circuit will cost ~$1.5-2M/mile with 5% line loss). For 1MW solar capacity you typically need about 4 acres. 100GW of solar would require 400k acres of land - and come at a cost of about $3 billion for the panels, not to mention the price of land or entitlements. Add in cost of substations and transmission you’re realistically looking at a $10+ Billion project. Which while doable would not profitability compete with other grid solutions. If panels drop by another 30% and power densities improve the grid will naturally tend towards that direction.

This could be a really BIG deal for healthcare if you do it well. I would love to have a completely encrypted db that I could setup dynamic failover and replication. Also an amazing additional feature would be if it contained built-in access logging.

If you were to do that, HIPAA becomes MUCH easier for other healthcare IT startups using your db.

Can you handle apps with background tasks? In my experience, the backend systems basically end up being a large repository of jobs that need to get backgrounded, and handed off to other systems.

I would be even more excited if you could find some way to create and manage those effectively.

I think the issue isn't that the media is getting worse at it - rather they're just as good as they used to be (not very) but it's a lot easier to catch them when they're bad at it, so they just don't do it as much anymore.

What about gravity waves in spacetime? Now you're getting into star trek technology.

I live not too far away myself. Anyone taking @syedkarim up on his offer, I would love to help out!

I agree. I wouldn't however mind a successor series in spirit. Something with an entirely new cast in the same universe as Firefly/Serenity. It would be especially cool if done with tie-ins to the events we're familiar with.

The idea of sharing computation cycles certainly did, however, converting those computation cycles into currency so it can fuel other "real" work is most definitely a by-product of bitcoin.

This could be an interesting model to do out in the open. Rather than covertly mine cryptocurrency, say that the app is free if you contribute hashes to a pool, or you can buy the premium version that doesn't.

Almost like the "slow" version vs the "fast" version of an app.

This is basically supplemental insurance (think Aflac) - the caveat with those insurance companies is that their incentive is to not pay anything out unless a very specific set of circumstances is met.

What struck me from the article:

>For example, successful copyright plaintiffs usually win attorneys' fees if they have a registered copyright.

That means that the MAFIAA gets their legal fees back if they sue the 9-yr old down the street and win?

IMO that's pretty messed up.

How are you planning to handle network security configurations on AWS? I.e. If I wanted to run an iptables config on my servers?

I was thinking the same thing. What I found more annoying than even that, was by the time I read the blurb, other stories had taken over my back button, and I had to click four of five times to navigate back to the frontpage.

Please, let's keep to a minimum of not breaking my back button.

With the frequency that this comes up, I'm a little surprised that no one has tried to build a start-up around this. I'm sure there's enough latent demand for customer service for Google that you could probably charge a fee for it - not sure how much it would be but still something.

Also you've probably got a willing acquirer in Google, providing you can prove out the model.

Only thing is you would need to have plenty of connections into the inner workings of Google to actually be able to serve your customers.