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Take some time to decompress. The winding down period is stressful and it seems you're already feeling the effects.

As many have mentioned you've only enriched your resume with this experience. Use it to find yourself work, your incubator network should be full of people looking to hire.

I've gone through this and it's stressful as all hell but you'll make it through. With your nose right up against it the problems seem much more formidable than they are in reality. Employees come first in terms of settling debts. Deal with vendors after that.

One point I'd really stress is that you should talk to people about it. Feel free to reach out (p@trickod.com)


You could also sell back to the grid. I've known people to do this if they live near streams / rivers in WA


I want some on-site storage for 24x7 operation in a "grid is black" environment, though (I'd also like to get fiber, but also have some line of sight wireless and satcom shots). It's unlikely micro-hydro would make selling back to the grid economic.


In the UK and much of europe subsidised feed in tariffs make micro-hydro quite economic. We're building a 10kW scheme which should pay for itself within a few years and receive guaranteed 20p/kWh (about 30c) for the next 20 years.

Even if the feed in tarriff was signficantly less there's an economic case for schemes of that sort of size. The payoff period would be longer, but it would eventually start making money.

I suppose it depends what you define as "micro" though. The fixed costs are fairly similar whether it's 3 kW or 15 kW, so pay back time varies significantly.


I get that it's profitable, but is it really "economic" when the market price is guaranteed like that?

I'm curious how long out your firm's / colleagues' projections are for when small hydro like that will be competitive sans tariff, or if it only makes sense on the tariff?


It's a private project with quite different motivations than a commercial one would have. I doubt that a scheme that size would make sense commercially as the costs to build would be a lot higher (land acquisition and costs of project management are essentially zero on a private project).

There's various prices that power gets sold at, each with different economic cases. If the project simply replaced the power used in a house, then at ~10p/kWh it would still pay for itself within a reasonable timescale. If you could only get wholesale power prices then the case would be tenuous.

The case for micro hydro is made or broken by the site. If you've got good access, reliable flow and a fairly high head then it can be cheaper than any grid supply. The "low hanging fruit" larger hydro plants have been competitive with other baseline energy supplies for decades. The main issue with hydro is that in most of western Europe we've already developed all the really good sites.


Installed it and while it looks very nice it's been beachballing almost constantly with only 2 accounts connected (facebook and hangout)

Search is very slow and causes ~500ms input lag.

Needs a lot of polish still.


We're aware of performance issues with larger buddy lists (which tends to happen when Facebook accounts are connected) and an update will be submitted to the MAS soon that fixes this.


Does it fully integrate with Hangout? If you get a message and read it in the app, does your Hangout mobile app's notification badge disappear?


I'm unsure why you say there are no other alternatives. Surely the choice of database should preference your data and what you want to do with it over the language you'll use? There are node libraries for any database I've ever wanted to use (SQL and NoSQL alike)


I tried to say 'no NoSQL alternatives'. And I noticed that while there's node middleware for most libraries, the ease of use is different for each database.


That domain isn't active and is in the process of being auctioned. Typo perhaps?


You're right. I just fixed the URL.


Unsurprising to find that such a small percentage of applications were for musicians / singers. Is that not what the artist category in the O visa was designed for?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_visa


The O visa is only for people who can demonstrate "extraordinary" capability. This usually means published, well-known, etc. Not all artists and musicians qualify.


Is that the mechanism for the world's celebrities to live in LA?


It's also used for heart surgeons, Nobel prize winners, elite athletes and so on.


My father got the O visa after being on investor visa for some years. He said it was the fastest way to the green card but quite expensive in legal fees.

While he has a couple of patents, the crucial thing was the business notability for which lawyers recommended getting testimonials from upper management in publicly known companies such as Apple and Dell instead of lesser known industry specific companies.


I've loved using my Nexus 7 for the last year. Great device at a brilliant price point. Really looking forward to using 4.3 on this too.


I was thinking the same thing. I'm guessing though that it wouldn't be too hard to put OpenWRT on the box?


Or any other Linux firewall (IPCop, Smoothwall, Untangle...) for that matter.


NPR ran a story about 3-4 months ago where they interviewed this teenager in Florida while recounting the story. I couldn't believe my ears.

It sounded like textbook entrapment. Are the police in these areas so desperate for drug-related arrests that they'd use tactics like this? IIRC the case ended up being her word against his on the key points of his conviction. That too rubbed me entirely the wrong way. To first lure him in and then use only one person's testimony to clinch the conviction sounds totally unjust.

EDIT: Link to the This American Life story about Justin's case http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/457/w...


Not at all unlikely since the FBI has been in the practice of using surreptitious entry since at least the 1970 at the behest of the NSA and the CIA in a bid to recover cryptographic keys and other information instead of having to brute force them. Why spend all that money on computation when you can just break into someone's Embassy instead and steal it?

James Bamford discusses this at length in The Puzzle Palace - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Puzzle_Palace


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