lizknope

What is average length of outage? If it is a few hours then the battery seems like a good idea. If it is days then the battery will probably run out.

> around 50% of the houses in its programme with home batteries also have solar panels

I'm assuming most of these outages are from snow storms. Do these people have to go up on the roof and clear the solar panels?

I loved the show Tour of Duty on CBS from 1987-90 about the Vietnam War. It used a lot of 1960's music including the Rolling Stones Paint It Black as the opening theme.

When it was released on DVD all the music was replaced with generic stuff. Then it was released on DVD in the UK with all the original music. The music licensing laws and prices are very different. It's region 2 and PAL but plays fine on a computer.

I watched it when it was originally on in the 90's. As the show got more serialized it was like a cliff hanger or huge event every few weeks. Then we got a great 10 episode arc to end the series.

I know almost nothing about law firms. But for some other industry if you have 1000 competitors making similar products then companies will compete on price. If you reduce your prices then you will probably get more customers.

If you want to buy a new PC would you rather just have IBM making PCs and setting the price to whatever they want or a thousand different clone companies all competing on price, features, support, etc?

So some new law firm may want to disrupt the industry with a new model

I don't live in California but the article mentioned Proposition 13 which capped property tax rates and the reassessment is only when the property changes ownership?

Is that right?

That seems unfair to people who recently moved compared to the people that stay in their house for decades.

Reading more it looks like California created alternative types of property taxes like Mello-Roos.

In my state we used to have property tax values reassessed every 8 years, then they changed it to every 4 years. But my bill goes up every year. I started off paying about $2000 25 years ago and now it is about $5000 but my property value has also increased about 3X

It seems like if you just taxed an ordinary house at a percentage and you taxed a billionaire's huge house at the same percentage that you would get more money from the billionaire without needing to create special laws and special taxes.

Same here. I've been in the chip design industry since 1997. Everything was Sun and I was right out of college and convinced my manager to let me use a Linux/x86 machine and I used the savings to buy a large 21" monitor that would run at 2048x1536 resolution and use it as an X terminal to the Suns. Everyone else loved it and did the same.

Around 2000 we started getting some EDA software released on Linux. I remember getting some Linux kernel patches and recompiling the kernel to change the user / kernel split from 2GB / 2GB to 3.5GB user / 0.5GB kernel. But we still needed the 64-bit Suns for some jobs that needed over 4GB RAM. Itanium was really expensive and slow and then AMD released the 64-bit Opteron in 2003. We bought them immediately and never bought another Sun.

My high school in 1992 got a bunch of old Sun3 and first gen Sun4 systems. I absolutely loved them. My dream then was to have my own Sun workstation but they were way too expensive. My other dream was to go to college and then get a job at Sun. I heard about Linux in 1993 and got my Unix system at home. I did work on some Sun UltraSPARC III companion chipsets but Sun couldn't compete on the price to performance ratio with Linux/x86

Idaho has a ton of incredible outdoor activities. You list some negatives but my biggest negative is all of the white supremacist groups. I felt uncomfortable just stopping for gas and going into a grocery store with everyone staring at me.

I was 16 when Magic Johnson announced he had AIDS. That was the first time it felt real to me. I remember a couple of friends crying because we all thought he would be dead in 1-2 years. And here he is and seems to be living a normal life.

I don't think this is a good idea but I do think colleges should be required to list the average salaries that people with those degrees have. Include the career and salary progression over the next 30 years.

I'm generally against banning things like smoking and gambling but I am absolutely for putting giant warning labels on those things.

Adults which means anyone over 18 should know the risks and what they are signing up for.

To replenish it. I know it was made by accident but agricultural runoff kept it from drying out. Now it is full of fertilizer and pesticide residue and the farms have gotten better at using water so less flows into the Salton Sea. As it dries up toxic dust clouds are blown over the cities nearby. California is trying to stop the dust. One idea is to fill it with sea water from the Gulf of California from Mexico.

I am not saying this is a good idea, only that it is an idea.

There have been some ideas to do this from the Salton Sea to the Gulf of California in Mexico but that is about 125 miles and would still cost billions.