Bob Morris @ Jun 28th 2008 18:18 - Category: Unfiled ;
The Telegraph UK quotes a “senior Democrat” who said Bill Clinton told friends Obama could “kiss my ass” for support.
Someone once said about an exceptionally bad movie that Norman Mailer made that, I have no idea if Norman was drunk when he made this movie, just that I certainly hope he was.
Bob Morris @ Jun 28th 2008 18:04 - Category: Unfiled Tags: Los Angeles Times;
The home page for the L.A. Times is mostly fluff now. However, if you click the link for Print Edition, then you get the hard news.
Bob Morris @ Jun 28th 2008 13:15 - Category: Unfiled Tags: electrical grid;
Former CIA director James Woolsey turned “green hawk” cleantech venture capitalist asks a panel at a Google/Brookings conference what is being done to prevent our aging electrical grid from being hacked, with potentially serious damage resulting. He cites two major blackouts he believes were caused by “Chinese paragovernmental hackers.”
While some panelists thought he might have overstated the case, “the grid now is too inefficient to be taken out” completely (golly, how reassuring) but the “capacity to destroy hardware” through attacks exists now and there is a “very real security threat from doing nothing.”
Interestingly, a primary way to prevent attacks is by decentralizing the grid, which is precisely what we need to do anyway as we create additional sources of renewable energy and make the grid smarter and more resilient.
Earth2Tech has more.
Bob Morris @ Jun 28th 2008 08:26 - Category: Renewable energy Tags: net metering;
Germany has the world’s largest photovoltaic market. They did this with an innovative program that encourages homeowners to install solar. Rather than take the net metering approach (common in the US) in which excess energy is sent into the grid with the homeowner generally getting paid for it,they instead install the solar outside the meter and send all the energy into the grid. The homeowner pays the regular bill BUT is compensated at three times the going rate for energy generated. While a rate like that would probably have to be subsidized here in the US (and lots of energy already is subsidized), the program has had spectacular results.
The tariffs have been around since 2000 in Germany and, in that time, the proportion of energy derived from renewable sources has doubled. Germany actually reached their goal of 12.5% green energy three years early and increased its target to 27% green energy production by 2020.
Bob Morris @ Jun 28th 2008 03:09 - Category: Unfiled ;
Would you PLEASE not autoplay video with the sound on when I arrive on your home page? And most especially not when they are advertisements. Thanks so much.
TheStreet.com did this for a few days this week with a series on totally dumb video ads from Microsoft that autoplayed with audio *every* time you arrived on or went back to the homepage. Sometimes the video was at the bottom of the page so you had to scroll down to turn it off. Were they trying to drive people away? (They were even doing it on RealMoney, one of their pay sites, but are no more, probably because everyone including me complained.)
The Microsoft ad apparently is part of their new $300 million ad campaign designed to make them cool again. Ah, no. An ad where someone emerges out of a mud bath you are lounging in to give you money for using Microsoft Live Search is many things (ludicrous? stupid? bribery?) but cool is most definitely not one of them.
Websites: if you must autoplay video, do so with the audio off. And don’t replay it every time I return to the home page from another page on your site.
Subscribe
