I don't mean that as a rhetorical question, but I don't remember them doing so any time in the last couple of decades.
Sometimes rocks actually repel tigers. In this case a terrorist makes a dry run and determines that he won't be able to smuggle anything dangerous. So he directs his efforts elsewhere.
Similarly, if the border wall is 100 feet tall, painted, and has no scratches on it, it doesn't mean that the wall serves no purpose. One doesn't need to try to climb such a wall to understand that it's impossible for 99.99% of the population.
I don't mind the start screen in itself, it would indeed be nice if it just showed as an overlay with a dimmed/blurred background, I guess similar to what Ubuntu Unity does when you make the dash open full-screen.
Also, make that overlay a bit smaller, into a menu-like group of items on the lower-left side of the desktop. Then you don't even need to dim the rest of the desktop:-)
Keep in mind: newcomers probably won't know what a project box is, nevermind a single-pole/single-throw switch; they are unlikely to have sliced and spliced cables together; and may be at a loss on how to keep things neat and secure.
I'm afraid you are targeting people with so little knowledge of electronics that they are not very likely to ever embark on such a project. They would be better off building a battery-operated flashlight first, or learning how to hold a soldering iron. Besides, what makes you think that a housewife who never built a computer from ready made parts will have any sudden desire to build this thing? With hot glue? That is ridiculous; I don't even *have* hot glue here, it's worse than duct tape. If you cannot manufacture the cutout with 10 mil accuracy, buy a box that is made for you. Don't fill 100 mil of gap with hot glue. It's an example of how NOT to do things.
Things like how you properly construct the cable, from getting the pins right to how you solder the wires together and deal with heat-shrink;
The linked article does not have this information. It says that the VGA cable is directly soldered to the R-Pi board, but doesn't show where and how. It is entirely useless because there are no schematics, drawings, or anything of engineering nature whatsoever. All you see in the photos are multi-conductor cables that go somewhere and do something. How would this be of any use to anyone??? Well, if I need a R-Pi in such setup I can benefit from knowing that I can buy a cheap LCD at Amazon, but that's hardly news for anyone who cares to search. The box is not something I would advise a newcomer to do (how many have a milling machine at home? Milling plastic is not easy.) Better to just buy a box that is made for R-Pi.
I would also argue that projects like this are far from trivial. To someone like ourselves it seems trivial because we've been able to do stuff like this for ages. For the novice, it'll probably end up in hours of frustration, faulty connections, and blown components.
Sure. That's why you need to publish the schematics, not just photos of the board running Quake. Anyone can load Quake on R-Pi, there are instructions. But your specific interface to this LCD and that battery and that power switch deserves a drawing. Otherwise the article is no help.
yeah, you're clearly better off watching American Idol/The Voice/Killer Karaoke/the latest pop-star drama etc etc than getting educated about the world around you and how it really works.
You say that in jest, but as matter of fact every individual, within a limited time period, is better off pleasuring himself rather than doing hard work for betterment of the society. That's how Roman Empire fell, and many other empires, before and after. This is what the USA is doing currently, gorging on credits that will never be paid back. Sticking the children with the bill is the way to go today, as it seems.
It certainly doesn't help that MSM provides only those opinions that they want you to have. If you want to become educated about how the world works, you have to read subversive literature, such as Federalist Papers and the US Constitution. Then you should read far more to understand what's the difference between "then" and "now." Exposure to foreign cultures and political processes is highly desired, otherwise the chickens will be eagerly voting for Colonel Sanders. (This process can be easily demonstrated by stepping on a garden rake, repeatedly.)
Please check your math, it's an order of magnitude off. Often whole houses don't draw 327 kWh/mo.
Per my calculations, R-Pi will cost 30 cents/mo, and an E6850 will be $5.70/mo. However if you close the lid of the notebook it draws much less, about 23-25W, and then the costs drop down to about $2.50/mo. Nobody worries about such a piddly expense.
There's no technical reason why we all can't get more democratic now.
True democracy, the one that you describe, requires educated population that votes according to knowledge, not by emotions, or fears, or empty promises.
Greek democracies were small in scope (such as a single city.) It was easier to keep the demos informed. Today, on scale of the USA or a similarly sized country, it is all but impossible to educate every voter on every small issue. Just consider the waste of time! Instead of a hundred hired administrators we have to have a hundred million! Voting on most issues would become nearly automatic, and most people would defer to the position of their party - who does the thinking for them and tells them how to vote. How would that be different from what we have today, modulo the dumb button-pushing?
The complexity of governing is well illustrated by about any law that is adopted today. Obamacare stands out, of course - even the elected congressmen haven't read it. How would anyone be able to keep up with changes that are checked in by tens of teams? When Pelosi said "âoeWe have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it" she meant that only the final law can be meaningfully studied. It also highlighted the absurdity of the lawmaking process, that is so much out of control that were it C code, the tree would never compile. You can always ask millions of voters what they think about the law that changes as they are reading it, but you won't be able to print the answers. The legalese would fly over the heads of at least 100% of the population. (Those who can parse it are the rounding error.)
Most of that weight and space are occupied by the monitor and the keyboard. However you minimize the motherboard, the setup cannot be smaller than these devices. A notebook also does a good job on protecting them in transport position.
But that's what "democratic means" means. Wikipedia is talking about methods of ruling, not about methods of getting elected. Otherwise many famous dictators appear to be democrats. But arbitrary killing of people just because the ruler wants them dead is usually called tyranny.
Besides, the word "democracy" these days is more than just a term for ancient Greek democracy. It includes rule of law, fair treatment of minorities, rules of conduct, and so on.
First, you have zoning. City fathers decreed that you must work in one zone, buy your groceries in another, and sleep in third. You can easily see these zones in Google Earth. Some are small and navigable on a bike, other are large.
Second, you have areas of the town that are residential but bad for your health. Want to live near an industrial zone? No problem. But it will be surrounded by freeways that deliver noise, dust and pollution right into your house 24/7. These or other areas have high crime.
Third, you can have nice residential areas of the town that are still within reach of your office. But these areas are built up with condos or apartment buildings. Not everyone is excited about such living conditions.
Fourth, you can have nice residential areas where you can buy a detached house. However you cannot afford that, period. You are not the only one who is smart enough to want a nice house in a nice area *and* close to everything else.
Fifth, and finally, you end up with a house that is 20-30 miles away, in a different town. There is plenty of land there, and it's cheaper. You will be living next to farms, and you will be seeing cows and horses every day. You can buy fresh produce there; you will know your neighbors, but they will be far enough to not intrude upon you. You can have a larger house, you can have dogs, you can enjoy life. In exchange for all that you have to drive to work for 30-40 minutes one way, and there might be traffic.
There is yet another catch. Once you buy the house and start the family there, you may need to change jobs. This may happen without you ever asking for it. Business is volatile, and whole businesses are closing down. The laws are not stable either; Obamacare is driving reduction of worked hours now. If you are lucky you may find another job, but how close or how far will that be from your home? It costs a lot of money to sell one house and buy another. Many people cannot afford it. Moving every few years is a disaster from every point of view.
This means that a bicycle is a viable vehicle for a young person who lives in an apartment, works nearby, and has no family to support. (Just the groceries alone will bend your bike into a letter W.) Rear seats in my car are folded down for years, and I always carry something in that extended cargo space.
A very short trip (3 miles) is bad for efficiency because of the warm-up time. If you noticed, the engine has to run continuously for first three minutes or so to bring itself up to the temperature. (There is a thermos bottle for the coolant, and that helps, but still ICE operation is required to warm up the catalytic converter.) These 3 minutes yield usually not more than 25 mpg. Your mileage was improved by longer weekend trips.
In this aspect, an EV is superior if you only need to go a few miles. But this has other issues. If you live that close to work, you probably are renting an apartment. Parking at such places has no chargers, and you get one car per apartment. If your weekly commute is short, you aren't burning much gas in the first place, so your savings on fuel are tiny.
This is actually another EV dilemma. If you drive only around the town, with 5-10 miles round trip, you won't save much fuel this way. To realize savings you need to drive a lot. But EVs are not ideal for long distance driving, and that would wear their batteries faster (I guess.) So an EV is not cost-effective if you live in an apartment in the city. The same EV is not time-efficient if you are a farmer who drives 30 miles to the grocery store. EVs have to target suburban families who can own a charger, who can have more than one car, and who have to drive a certain and well predictable distance every day. For Leaf, that distance cannot be more than 30 miles (Leaf's range drops down to 50 miles after a year of use. Even new cars are not that great, per reports of owners.) For Tesla S it could be 100-150 miles. Driving less than that just pushes the break even date into farther future. If the battery dies from old age (10+ years?) then you never break even.
You basically described how Volt, a series hybrid, is built. But Volt can also be a parallel hybrid sometimes, so it's convoluted.
Diesel can be used only in pure series hybrids because it is very costly to start. In a Prius the ICE is spun by MGs, and it starts instantly and without shudder. But that's possible only because ICE is permanently plugged into the transmission. A series hybrid would need a starter for the diesel. I think Volt bypasses that problem by having a separate clutch that can connect the ICE when necessary. A diesel there would require certain (slow) RPM and a lot of torque to effect the high compression; you would also need the high pressure fuel pump and injectors - which is probably too much hardware for a small engine. I think Volt uses a 3rd party, COTS engine that GM found somewhere and fitted into the vehicle. It runs on premium gas, which is quite undesirable, IMO.
Take organic foods. People think they're healthier, better for the environment, tastier, and are harder to grow, therefore people pay a premium.
I made once a mistake of buying organic bread and milk because I was near Whole Foods. I was back at home within one hour. The bread was hard enough for high speed cutting of diamonds. The milk was unbelievably bitter. I mixed them together, let it sit for a while, ate the result, and promised to myself to never do such a foolish thing again.
With regard to CFLs, I have many of them. I also have a few LED light bulbs. CFLs are pretty bad, actually, because they need to warm up before they become bright. But an all-night CFL at the outfoor fixture works great, and I will not even consider using anything else there. Right tool for the job, as they say. In the same vein, use LED or incandescent light bulbs in high traffic areas, and connect them to motion sensors. There is no silver bullet, and you will go broke with LEDs just because they run all day and all night when you only need them on for three minutes per week.
This is not correct. Prius uses electronic throttle control. This means that the gas pedal is only used to signal your intention. Do not attempt to finely control the engine - it won't work at least because the ICE is not directly connected to that pedal.
If I want to quickly merge onto a road I can press the gas pedal all the way to the floor. It only commands full power. The tires may lose traction momentarily as you do that, on a clean and dry road surface and with new Michelin tires (and certainly they will squeal if you use stock Goodyear tires.) This is quite sufficient for the intended use of the car. If you want to smoke tires all the time, get yourself a car that is designed for that.
For best fuel economy it is recommended to accelerate briskly - apparently as you do. This is because the ICE operates optimally in that mode. After the acceleration is completed the car needs very little power to maintain speed, and then you release the throttle. The efficiency bar jumps to about 50 mpg at that time. If the speed is under 42 mph the ICE may shut down completely and you will proceed in pseudo-EV mode.
At the very least, you can choose to pay higher electric rates by choosing to buy renewable energy (most markets allow for this option).
I'm sure the utility is overwhelmed with customers who are all demanding to pay more for the same product.
I have a PV system as well (6 kW design, 6,105W peak power, as measured by the inverter.) I do have some excess, like you, but the excess is not excessive. It's something that I can always use for heating, cooking, laundry, lighting, or computers. I want to have some excess power, so that I don't need to pay the utility. But large excess is too cheap to sell back to the grid because utilities bought a law that says that excess has to be sold at generator rates.
There is not enough power left to charge an EV. If Tesla's battery is about 80 kWh, and the efficiency of charging is somewhere close to 80-90% then you need 100 kWh to fully charge the battery. During the day a 6 kW setup will give you perhaps 30-40 kWh (or much less, if the sky is cloudy, like most of the winter.) Your house will consume about 20 kWh per 24-hour period. My refrigerator alone is 600W continuous (avg.) load - about 12 kWh per day. (It's large, but it's part of the furniture.) If you want an EV that is charged from the star you need to plan for it ahead of time, and a larger PV system will cost more than the Tesla S itself.
Perhaps this determination should be left to owners of Priuses, like myself? A Prius is not a sports car, of course, but it outperforms many family sedans with a slushbox.
Keep in mind that ACH transactions take upwards of 4 days to clear while your money is in limbo
Yes, it would be foolish to say that banks don't have a way to extract their pound of flesh.
wire transaction fees are exorbitant (generally $50 or more)
That money probably covers background checks on the sender and the recipient, and copies of the transaction sent to all TLA, in triplicate. After all, would anyone please think of terrorists?
Fortunately, most people don't see the former problem and rarely encounter the second problem. What they do encounter every day is a myriad of small purchases that they execute easily and quickly with their credit cards. When BTC approaches that level of convenience (a BTC reader in every gas pump) then we can compare USD and BTC. Until then they are not even in the same Universe.
I view BTC as less flawed than Zimbabwe dollars or US dollars because it's not a fiat currency and thus not open to hyperinflation.
BTC is fiat money because it meets the criteria of "money without intrinsic value." Per Wikipedia:
While gold- or silver-backed representative money entails the legal requirement that the bank of issue redeem it in fixed weights of gold or silver, fiat money's value is unrelated to the value of any physical quantity. Even a coin containing valuable metal may be considered fiat currency if its face value is higher than its market value as metal.
BTC is not just "open", it is doomed to hyper-deflation. As more people are born and as efficiency of labor increases, more and more tokens for exchange are needed to match the mass of available goods. (A society that has 1000 coins can bake 100 loaves of bread for 1 coin each. But if one day 100,000 loaves of bread are needed and baked, there is no way to pay for them with only 1000 coins if each loaf is still 1 coin.) The supply of BTC is fixed. Therefore, each BTC will become more and more expensive. Spending becomes a fool's errand. All BTCs will be kept, and a different currency will be used instead for day to day purchases.
But bitcoin isn't American and most of the interesting legal stuff you can buy with it, isn't American and it will outlive the collapse of the USSA.
You are imagining a very fancy collapse of USSA, where everyone comfortably sits at their homes, run their computers on reliable and free electric energy, and calculates hashes of transactions that keep coming over fast and cheap Internet connection. I want that "collapse" right now, pretty please!
In reality, if the USA collapses, it will be closer to Yugoslavia. If you remember the wars there at the threshold of the century, it was not a comfortable place where you'd leisurely run servers. BTC would be dead in such a country. The only money in use would be foreign (CAD) and natural (barter.) Internet will not be available.
Oh yes, BTC is a legitimate currency. It is, at least, just as legitimate as any other. All currencies are just an agreement to use this here little thing as an exchange token because it's more convenient. BTC is as valid as shark's teeth or US Dollars.
This doesn't mean that a valid currency cannot be a flawed currency. BTC has its flaws, and so does the Zimbabwe dollar. Both are valid, and both are not ideal.
Does BTC make the governments scared? Absolutely. Governments take their privilege to mint coins for granted. They want no competition. BTC is a weak competitor, but the governments take no chances. They imprisoned the Liberty Dollar inventor:
On March 18, 2011, Von NotHaus was convicted of "making, possessing and selling his own coins", after a jury in Statesville, North Carolina deliberated for less than two hours.
How is BTC different? Not much, IMO. It will be taken down, one way or another. The government can always make you a criminal. For example, today you are required to disclose assets in foreign banks. Where is your BTC stored? Can you say "entirely within the USA?" No? Then report it, and don't forget to list all your accounts. Fail to do that, and you can be arrested and quickly convicted. The US prison industry can always accomodate another convict.
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I don't mean that as a rhetorical question, but I don't remember them doing so any time in the last couple of decades.
Sometimes rocks actually repel tigers. In this case a terrorist makes a dry run and determines that he won't be able to smuggle anything dangerous. So he directs his efforts elsewhere.
Similarly, if the border wall is 100 feet tall, painted, and has no scratches on it, it doesn't mean that the wall serves no purpose. One doesn't need to try to climb such a wall to understand that it's impossible for 99.99% of the population.
I don't mind the start screen in itself, it would indeed be nice if it just showed as an overlay with a dimmed/blurred background, I guess similar to what Ubuntu Unity does when you make the dash open full-screen.
Also, make that overlay a bit smaller, into a menu-like group of items on the lower-left side of the desktop. Then you don't even need to dim the rest of the desktop :-)
There is no evidence that they ever stopped playing.
Keep in mind: newcomers probably won't know what a project box is, nevermind a single-pole/single-throw switch; they are unlikely to have sliced and spliced cables together; and may be at a loss on how to keep things neat and secure.
I'm afraid you are targeting people with so little knowledge of electronics that they are not very likely to ever embark on such a project. They would be better off building a battery-operated flashlight first, or learning how to hold a soldering iron. Besides, what makes you think that a housewife who never built a computer from ready made parts will have any sudden desire to build this thing? With hot glue? That is ridiculous; I don't even *have* hot glue here, it's worse than duct tape. If you cannot manufacture the cutout with 10 mil accuracy, buy a box that is made for you. Don't fill 100 mil of gap with hot glue. It's an example of how NOT to do things.
Things like how you properly construct the cable, from getting the pins right to how you solder the wires together and deal with heat-shrink;
The linked article does not have this information. It says that the VGA cable is directly soldered to the R-Pi board, but doesn't show where and how. It is entirely useless because there are no schematics, drawings, or anything of engineering nature whatsoever. All you see in the photos are multi-conductor cables that go somewhere and do something. How would this be of any use to anyone??? Well, if I need a R-Pi in such setup I can benefit from knowing that I can buy a cheap LCD at Amazon, but that's hardly news for anyone who cares to search. The box is not something I would advise a newcomer to do (how many have a milling machine at home? Milling plastic is not easy.) Better to just buy a box that is made for R-Pi.
I would also argue that projects like this are far from trivial. To someone like ourselves it seems trivial because we've been able to do stuff like this for ages. For the novice, it'll probably end up in hours of frustration, faulty connections, and blown components.
Sure. That's why you need to publish the schematics, not just photos of the board running Quake. Anyone can load Quake on R-Pi, there are instructions. But your specific interface to this LCD and that battery and that power switch deserves a drawing. Otherwise the article is no help.
yeah, you're clearly better off watching American Idol/The Voice/Killer Karaoke/the latest pop-star drama etc etc than getting educated about the world around you and how it really works.
You say that in jest, but as matter of fact every individual, within a limited time period, is better off pleasuring himself rather than doing hard work for betterment of the society. That's how Roman Empire fell, and many other empires, before and after. This is what the USA is doing currently, gorging on credits that will never be paid back. Sticking the children with the bill is the way to go today, as it seems.
It certainly doesn't help that MSM provides only those opinions that they want you to have. If you want to become educated about how the world works, you have to read subversive literature, such as Federalist Papers and the US Constitution. Then you should read far more to understand what's the difference between "then" and "now." Exposure to foreign cultures and political processes is highly desired, otherwise the chickens will be eagerly voting for Colonel Sanders. (This process can be easily demonstrated by stepping on a garden rake, repeatedly.)
Please check your math, it's an order of magnitude off. Often whole houses don't draw 327 kWh/mo.
Per my calculations, R-Pi will cost 30 cents/mo, and an E6850 will be $5.70/mo. However if you close the lid of the notebook it draws much less, about 23-25W, and then the costs drop down to about $2.50/mo. Nobody worries about such a piddly expense.
For example: 3.5W * 24 hrs/day * 30.5 days/mo = 2.562 kWh (30.744 cents/mo.)
There's no technical reason why we all can't get more democratic now.
True democracy, the one that you describe, requires educated population that votes according to knowledge, not by emotions, or fears, or empty promises.
Greek democracies were small in scope (such as a single city.) It was easier to keep the demos informed. Today, on scale of the USA or a similarly sized country, it is all but impossible to educate every voter on every small issue. Just consider the waste of time! Instead of a hundred hired administrators we have to have a hundred million! Voting on most issues would become nearly automatic, and most people would defer to the position of their party - who does the thinking for them and tells them how to vote. How would that be different from what we have today, modulo the dumb button-pushing?
The complexity of governing is well illustrated by about any law that is adopted today. Obamacare stands out, of course - even the elected congressmen haven't read it. How would anyone be able to keep up with changes that are checked in by tens of teams? When Pelosi said "âoeWe have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it" she meant that only the final law can be meaningfully studied. It also highlighted the absurdity of the lawmaking process, that is so much out of control that were it C code, the tree would never compile. You can always ask millions of voters what they think about the law that changes as they are reading it, but you won't be able to print the answers. The legalese would fly over the heads of at least 100% of the population. (Those who can parse it are the rounding error.)
Most of that weight and space are occupied by the monitor and the keyboard. However you minimize the motherboard, the setup cannot be smaller than these devices. A notebook also does a good job on protecting them in transport position.
That is NOT what "democratic" means.
But that's what "democratic means" means. Wikipedia is talking about methods of ruling, not about methods of getting elected. Otherwise many famous dictators appear to be democrats. But arbitrary killing of people just because the ruler wants them dead is usually called tyranny.
Besides, the word "democracy" these days is more than just a term for ancient Greek democracy. It includes rule of law, fair treatment of minorities, rules of conduct, and so on.
He's not a dictator in any sense. A majority of Turks are very clearly supportive of him.
Popular support is orthogonal to being a dictator. Wikipedia defines a dictator in different terms:
A dictator is a ruler who does not rule through democratic means.
This means that if a ruler, who is loved by 99.9% of the population, kills the remaining 0.1% without trial, he is a dictator.
First, you have zoning. City fathers decreed that you must work in one zone, buy your groceries in another, and sleep in third. You can easily see these zones in Google Earth. Some are small and navigable on a bike, other are large.
Second, you have areas of the town that are residential but bad for your health. Want to live near an industrial zone? No problem. But it will be surrounded by freeways that deliver noise, dust and pollution right into your house 24/7. These or other areas have high crime.
Third, you can have nice residential areas of the town that are still within reach of your office. But these areas are built up with condos or apartment buildings. Not everyone is excited about such living conditions.
Fourth, you can have nice residential areas where you can buy a detached house. However you cannot afford that, period. You are not the only one who is smart enough to want a nice house in a nice area *and* close to everything else.
Fifth, and finally, you end up with a house that is 20-30 miles away, in a different town. There is plenty of land there, and it's cheaper. You will be living next to farms, and you will be seeing cows and horses every day. You can buy fresh produce there; you will know your neighbors, but they will be far enough to not intrude upon you. You can have a larger house, you can have dogs, you can enjoy life. In exchange for all that you have to drive to work for 30-40 minutes one way, and there might be traffic.
There is yet another catch. Once you buy the house and start the family there, you may need to change jobs. This may happen without you ever asking for it. Business is volatile, and whole businesses are closing down. The laws are not stable either; Obamacare is driving reduction of worked hours now. If you are lucky you may find another job, but how close or how far will that be from your home? It costs a lot of money to sell one house and buy another. Many people cannot afford it. Moving every few years is a disaster from every point of view.
This means that a bicycle is a viable vehicle for a young person who lives in an apartment, works nearby, and has no family to support. (Just the groceries alone will bend your bike into a letter W.) Rear seats in my car are folded down for years, and I always carry something in that extended cargo space.
A very short trip (3 miles) is bad for efficiency because of the warm-up time. If you noticed, the engine has to run continuously for first three minutes or so to bring itself up to the temperature. (There is a thermos bottle for the coolant, and that helps, but still ICE operation is required to warm up the catalytic converter.) These 3 minutes yield usually not more than 25 mpg. Your mileage was improved by longer weekend trips.
In this aspect, an EV is superior if you only need to go a few miles. But this has other issues. If you live that close to work, you probably are renting an apartment. Parking at such places has no chargers, and you get one car per apartment. If your weekly commute is short, you aren't burning much gas in the first place, so your savings on fuel are tiny.
This is actually another EV dilemma. If you drive only around the town, with 5-10 miles round trip, you won't save much fuel this way. To realize savings you need to drive a lot. But EVs are not ideal for long distance driving, and that would wear their batteries faster (I guess.) So an EV is not cost-effective if you live in an apartment in the city. The same EV is not time-efficient if you are a farmer who drives 30 miles to the grocery store. EVs have to target suburban families who can own a charger, who can have more than one car, and who have to drive a certain and well predictable distance every day. For Leaf, that distance cannot be more than 30 miles (Leaf's range drops down to 50 miles after a year of use. Even new cars are not that great, per reports of owners.) For Tesla S it could be 100-150 miles. Driving less than that just pushes the break even date into farther future. If the battery dies from old age (10+ years?) then you never break even.
http://www.belaz-mining.com/eng/belaz/130t.html
It seems like you misparented your comment.
You basically described how Volt, a series hybrid, is built. But Volt can also be a parallel hybrid sometimes, so it's convoluted.
Diesel can be used only in pure series hybrids because it is very costly to start. In a Prius the ICE is spun by MGs, and it starts instantly and without shudder. But that's possible only because ICE is permanently plugged into the transmission. A series hybrid would need a starter for the diesel. I think Volt bypasses that problem by having a separate clutch that can connect the ICE when necessary. A diesel there would require certain (slow) RPM and a lot of torque to effect the high compression; you would also need the high pressure fuel pump and injectors - which is probably too much hardware for a small engine. I think Volt uses a 3rd party, COTS engine that GM found somewhere and fitted into the vehicle. It runs on premium gas, which is quite undesirable, IMO.
Take organic foods. People think they're healthier, better for the environment, tastier, and are harder to grow, therefore people pay a premium.
I made once a mistake of buying organic bread and milk because I was near Whole Foods. I was back at home within one hour. The bread was hard enough for high speed cutting of diamonds. The milk was unbelievably bitter. I mixed them together, let it sit for a while, ate the result, and promised to myself to never do such a foolish thing again.
With regard to CFLs, I have many of them. I also have a few LED light bulbs. CFLs are pretty bad, actually, because they need to warm up before they become bright. But an all-night CFL at the outfoor fixture works great, and I will not even consider using anything else there. Right tool for the job, as they say. In the same vein, use LED or incandescent light bulbs in high traffic areas, and connect them to motion sensors. There is no silver bullet, and you will go broke with LEDs just because they run all day and all night when you only need them on for three minutes per week.
This is not correct. Prius uses electronic throttle control. This means that the gas pedal is only used to signal your intention. Do not attempt to finely control the engine - it won't work at least because the ICE is not directly connected to that pedal.
If I want to quickly merge onto a road I can press the gas pedal all the way to the floor. It only commands full power. The tires may lose traction momentarily as you do that, on a clean and dry road surface and with new Michelin tires (and certainly they will squeal if you use stock Goodyear tires.) This is quite sufficient for the intended use of the car. If you want to smoke tires all the time, get yourself a car that is designed for that.
For best fuel economy it is recommended to accelerate briskly - apparently as you do. This is because the ICE operates optimally in that mode. After the acceleration is completed the car needs very little power to maintain speed, and then you release the throttle. The efficiency bar jumps to about 50 mpg at that time. If the speed is under 42 mph the ICE may shut down completely and you will proceed in pseudo-EV mode.
As a UKian, I would like to play devils advocate: if it stops one single delusional nutter from murdering upwards of 200 people
It appears to be the mainstream opinion in the UK, judging by the fact that the Prime Minister still has the office.
I wonder, is there anything that the UK population will not submit to, if submission saves the life of one abstract child?
At the very least, you can choose to pay higher electric rates by choosing to buy renewable energy (most markets allow for this option).
I'm sure the utility is overwhelmed with customers who are all demanding to pay more for the same product.
I have a PV system as well (6 kW design, 6,105W peak power, as measured by the inverter.) I do have some excess, like you, but the excess is not excessive. It's something that I can always use for heating, cooking, laundry, lighting, or computers. I want to have some excess power, so that I don't need to pay the utility. But large excess is too cheap to sell back to the grid because utilities bought a law that says that excess has to be sold at generator rates.
There is not enough power left to charge an EV. If Tesla's battery is about 80 kWh, and the efficiency of charging is somewhere close to 80-90% then you need 100 kWh to fully charge the battery. During the day a 6 kW setup will give you perhaps 30-40 kWh (or much less, if the sky is cloudy, like most of the winter.) Your house will consume about 20 kWh per 24-hour period. My refrigerator alone is 600W continuous (avg.) load - about 12 kWh per day. (It's large, but it's part of the furniture.) If you want an EV that is charged from the star you need to plan for it ahead of time, and a larger PV system will cost more than the Tesla S itself.
Perhaps this determination should be left to owners of Priuses, like myself? A Prius is not a sports car, of course, but it outperforms many family sedans with a slushbox.
This also adds wear to the fans that the computer has running.
Keep in mind that ACH transactions take upwards of 4 days to clear while your money is in limbo
Yes, it would be foolish to say that banks don't have a way to extract their pound of flesh.
wire transaction fees are exorbitant (generally $50 or more)
That money probably covers background checks on the sender and the recipient, and copies of the transaction sent to all TLA, in triplicate. After all, would anyone please think of terrorists?
Fortunately, most people don't see the former problem and rarely encounter the second problem. What they do encounter every day is a myriad of small purchases that they execute easily and quickly with their credit cards. When BTC approaches that level of convenience (a BTC reader in every gas pump) then we can compare USD and BTC. Until then they are not even in the same Universe.
I view BTC as less flawed than Zimbabwe dollars or US dollars because it's not a fiat currency and thus not open to hyperinflation.
BTC is fiat money because it meets the criteria of "money without intrinsic value." Per Wikipedia:
While gold- or silver-backed representative money entails the legal requirement that the bank of issue redeem it in fixed weights of gold or silver, fiat money's value is unrelated to the value of any physical quantity. Even a coin containing valuable metal may be considered fiat currency if its face value is higher than its market value as metal.
BTC is not just "open", it is doomed to hyper-deflation. As more people are born and as efficiency of labor increases, more and more tokens for exchange are needed to match the mass of available goods. (A society that has 1000 coins can bake 100 loaves of bread for 1 coin each. But if one day 100,000 loaves of bread are needed and baked, there is no way to pay for them with only 1000 coins if each loaf is still 1 coin.) The supply of BTC is fixed. Therefore, each BTC will become more and more expensive. Spending becomes a fool's errand. All BTCs will be kept, and a different currency will be used instead for day to day purchases.
But bitcoin isn't American and most of the interesting legal stuff you can buy with it, isn't American and it will outlive the collapse of the USSA.
You are imagining a very fancy collapse of USSA, where everyone comfortably sits at their homes, run their computers on reliable and free electric energy, and calculates hashes of transactions that keep coming over fast and cheap Internet connection. I want that "collapse" right now, pretty please!
In reality, if the USA collapses, it will be closer to Yugoslavia. If you remember the wars there at the threshold of the century, it was not a comfortable place where you'd leisurely run servers. BTC would be dead in such a country. The only money in use would be foreign (CAD) and natural (barter.) Internet will not be available.
Oh yes, BTC is a legitimate currency. It is, at least, just as legitimate as any other. All currencies are just an agreement to use this here little thing as an exchange token because it's more convenient. BTC is as valid as shark's teeth or US Dollars.
This doesn't mean that a valid currency cannot be a flawed currency. BTC has its flaws, and so does the Zimbabwe dollar. Both are valid, and both are not ideal.
Does BTC make the governments scared? Absolutely. Governments take their privilege to mint coins for granted. They want no competition. BTC is a weak competitor, but the governments take no chances. They imprisoned the Liberty Dollar inventor:
On March 18, 2011, Von NotHaus was convicted of "making, possessing and selling his own coins", after a jury in Statesville, North Carolina deliberated for less than two hours.
How is BTC different? Not much, IMO. It will be taken down, one way or another. The government can always make you a criminal. For example, today you are required to disclose assets in foreign banks. Where is your BTC stored? Can you say "entirely within the USA?" No? Then report it, and don't forget to list all your accounts. Fail to do that, and you can be arrested and quickly convicted. The US prison industry can always accomodate another convict.
Can you tell us more?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses
what you characterize as unfair seems more like a reward for hard work
I respect your desire to reward BTC inventors and early miners with your own money. But I have no plans to join you :-)