Ingress: 5 Times More Players, 10 Times More Portals

I believe the game has reached that point where it is ready for five times as many players. Niantic not long back sent out five invites to each agent. I believe it has also been approving more requests made directly to it through its site for membership.

When you have five times more players, you can not have the same number of portals. You can not even have five times more portals. You want 10 times more portals - at least 10 - for those five times as many players.

All that increases the velocity of the game. The game changes as you keep adding more and more people to it. Just like the Internet changed as more and more computers got connected to it.

There are agents today who feel like they pretty much know everyone who is playing. That will soon no longer be true. You ride the subway, but you don't know everyone who is on the train. You hardly know anyone who is on the train. Ingress has to reach for those scales.

I think Niantic should approve more portals faster. One should not have to wait two months to get a portal approved. The wait should be more like two weeks.

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Ugh, Finally

Hotmail Has Come A Long Way

I have been aware of Microsoft's overhaul of its email service, but I only today tried to log in and use it. (I am a comfortable, happy user of Gmail) And, gosh, it is so impressive. It is a cleaner experience than Gmail. Although I don't see me switching. I still have my hotmail address from the late 1990s before Microsoft bought it. And it still works fine.

Yahoo Mail, on the other hand, continues to be confounding. It still is so very loaded. It is like having at least three different televisions on in your living room, at least two of which were turned on by others. I logged in there as well this morning. After trying to delete 25 messages at a time for over 30 minutes I gave up. Can I please have the option to delete all 12,000 messages in my inbox at once? Please? Maybe the feature exists, but with three televisions on, it is hard to figure out. With Hotmail on the other hand I was able to delete all 180 messages in the inbox at once. Okay, that is a hint. Yahoo's spam filter is sub par.

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Conventional Crystalline Silicon

Solar is sexy.

What Tech Is Next for the Solar Industry?

conventional crystalline silicon ..... would bring the direct cost of solar power to six cents per kilowatt-hour, which is cheaper than the average cost expected for power from new natural gas power plants ..... screen-printing techniques can produce lines as thin as 30 micrometers .... the ability to make them on a flexible sheet of glass raises the possibility of continuous roll-to-roll manufacturing (like printing newspapers), which can reduce the cost per watt by increasing production. ... a two-sided solar cell that can absorb light from both the front and back. .... during some parts of the day, sunlight falls on the land between rows of solar panels in a solar power plant. That light reflects onto the back of the panels and could be harvested to increase the power output. ... Where a one-sided solar panel might generate 340 watts, a two-sided one might generate up to 400 watts. .... Such solar panels could be mounted vertically, like a fence, so that one side collects sunlight in the morning, and the other in the afternoon. That would make it possible to install the solar panels on very little land—they could serve as noise barriers along highways .... Adding one semiconductor could boost efficiencies from the 20 to 25 percent range to around 40 percent. Adding another could make efficiencies as high as 50 percent feasible, which would cut in half the number of solar panels needed for a given installation. The challenge is to produce good connections between these semiconductors, something made challenging by the arrangement of silicon atoms in crystalline silicon.

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