This is just a wearable HUD, why is people so obsessed [...]
Because it isn't. It's also a camera that streams the data to the mothership. Nobody knows when that is happening, so people have to presume that it is done all the time.
First, nobody has the mobile bandwidth for a 24/7 stream. Nor the storage space. Nor the battery.
This generation of GG is a foothold for the new generation. It will be capable of all that and more, and it will fall onto prepared legal ground in a conditioned society.
Second, you aren't that interesting when you are outside.
Yes, we are not interesting to other people. We, however, are VERY INTERESTING to Google's (and NSA's) computers. It will be trivial to incentivize Glassholes for capturing more faces, or new faces, or being in new places, just by giving them worthless points or free bandwidth. This will happen.
Of all people the people of slashdot should know the limits of technology better
We do. We also see time when those limits will be lifted. This is why so many geeks are unhappy. GG treads upon certain freedoms that people are used to having, such as the freedom to be largely invisible in public.
And, no, my privacy when I am outside doesn't bother me at all. I look my BEST when I am outside, please record me like that. I am precisely ready to be seen.
No woman would make that statement without week-long, expensive preparations. Pictures taken are forever. Besides, even if you look your best, what stops a Glasshole from filming you from, say, less common viewpoint, that does not exactly strive to show your best looks as you understand them?
Maybe Google Glass isn't what is turning people off of Google Glass wearers. Maybe it is the wearers that are turning people off Google Glass.
It's both the capability for harm of the device itself, AND the low expectation of the judgement of wearers. That low expectation is already amply proven by GG owners who are entirely lost why others are suddenly wary of them. It will be further proven by millions of compromising photos taken by GG wearers, if only GG use becomes common.
Well, to be the devil's advocate, I thought the whole idea of GG was that you could continue being a participant, and then review for anything you actually want to keep later.
I'm afraid that's not how it works. A photographer at an event is not free to mingle with people of his choice and take whatever shots he likes. He has duties, such as to take pictures of everyone, then everyone with everyone, then of those groups, then in this setting, then in that setting... In the end the photographer is just an attachment to the camera, and his own plans have no bearing on what he has to do.
I guess one troubling thing though is that with GG, nobody knows when to pose, and keeping a smile plastered on your face whenever you look at a GG wearer would be rather painful.
That is exactly true. Human life is generally boring and not of any interest to anyone. Only certain events deserve being captured. Often they are staged to form the best impression in the future viewers. Nobody wants their faults to be preserved forever, for random people to look at and laugh. Humans forget rather quickly. Cameras forget nothing.
what I don't get about the Google Glass objections is that they are usually just objecting to stuff being recorded that absolutely anybody in the vicinity could see or hear anyways.
You are conveniently forgetting that human memory is short term, fallible, and cannot be mined by a computer. You can see me in company of others in a park, but you are very unlikely to recognize all of us, or to remember that you saw us at all. A machine has no such problems: everyone will be seen, recognized, geotagged, and all that will be stored for future use. Maybe not today, with primitive GG hardware and pathetic bandwidth. But tomorrow. Objections to GG are striving to prevent smooth, comfortable slide into the society of total surveillance.
If I'm doing something where I'd feel uncomfortable with somebody recording me, I'd be doing it in private
Imagine that you are married. One day you meet a girl who doesn't mind your company, and she asks you to take her to some public place. Do you want to be forced to tell her that you can't do that, in fear that your wife will run a Google search on your whereabouts and views something that was captured by some GG wearers? Do you want to be afraid of that? Oh, that's certainly good for your soul:-) but it's not good for your freedom. Many say that it's not even good for your relations with the wife.
I'm also using a dumb phone. I have no need to be permanently wired into the Internet. If someone has to contact me, they can call. Otherwise it will wait until it is convenient for me to review what the world wants from me.
I could have gotten a smartphone and turned off all those Twitbooks. But AT&T and Verizon (and probably others) charge money for a data plan as soon as you buy a smartphone. I have no desire to give them $500+ per year for a service that I do not plan to ever use. It's not even that I don't have the money. It's a matter of principle. You should be always able to say "no", in every deal, and you will do well if you say "no" often.
And a streamed video of the thief automatically uploaded and sent to the police with GPS coordinates.
One street-smart teenage thief is wiser than 100 geeks on Slashdot. He will run past you, from behind you, will grab the GG, and will be gone before you realize what just happened. That's how they grab purses, cameras, and other stuff. You never see their faces.
The GG, as a mechanism, will not be aware that it had been stolen. The Bluetooth link will be broken nearly instantly. Then the device is inert, open to a hacker who will reset it and sell to another rich $unwise_person. Perhaps the victim can file a complaint form at Google, but who is going to even look into this incident?
30 cents a kwh? Wow! Where are you? I don't even pay that and I have some of the most expensive electricity in the USA...
PG&E sells power in four tiers: (0-100%), (101-130%), (131-200%), (201+%). The lowest tier costs about 11 cents per kWh, and the highest tier costs about 31 cent per kWh. The baseline (100%) is carefully selected such that it is barely enough to run a small home with one occupant who is rarely in need of hot water. Per my bill, the baseline today is 11.70 kWh per day. However my refrigerator (which I cannot upgrade, it's built into the furniture) draws 600 watts, on average - and that is a good number, as it seems. I have one electric water heater (4500W.) A whole house (floor) fan draws about 1 kW. Water well pump is about 3 kW. Booster pump is 1 kW. I'm sitting here, all alone, in one room, with three computers running, and the power meter shows 850W into the house (it's dark outside.) That alone would push me above the baseline even if I don't do anything else. Most people have larger families, and they need more power. Pools are also popular. If you have one, you need to run a filter (pump) for about 5-6 hours per day. Air conditioning in summer is required if you have older people in the house. (I usually don't run A/C.) So it is *very typical* that a house ends up in tier 4 - and that is only twice the baseline! This is why solar setups are used here to drop the power consumption into a lower tier.
Here's a question: Let's say that you somehow come into possession of quite a bit of gasoline. Should the local store be required to buy it from you at their posted price?
The store is not required to buy anything. But you should be able to put a can with gas near the pump and sell it for the price that pleases you. In case of electric power, the utility has no ill effects from households who generate power. Transmission infrastructure is linear, so it does not care in what direction the currents flow. Since PV setups are synchronized to the grid, the injected power is seen at the grid as reduction of load. There is no danger to transformers or wires (and there isn't much else.) Meters are designed for bidirectional measurements.
There was an article yesterday about how Hawaii has hit the point where they're refusing additional grid-tie systems because they're getting 'irregularities' due to having so many of them. It's fixable, but that takes money. Should they raise their rates on me so you can make more profit? That's not very free market, now is it?
Haven't seen that one. No, you shouldn't be paying for someone else's profits. The Federal government does that for us already:-) But the utility should invest into development of the grid so that everyone benefits. For example, the new grid will allow me to sell you the power for half the price that the utility charges you. This would be fair, IMO.
You are aware of the concept of 'oversell', right? Just because every house has a 100/200A connection doesn't mean that EVERY house can pull that max, or even a substantial fraction of that max, simultaneously without popping something further up in the grid.
A well built grid will allow that. However even the existing grid will benefit. Without PV producers the segment will be overloaded by all the AC units in summer (for example) and "something" will disconnect the power. With PV producers - somewhere, but ideally mixed among consumers - there will be no overload. I cannot call that "bad."
The technical constraints of the grid are currently that not all points are fine with bidirectional power transfer.
The grid is highly linear. It does not care. It is governed by Ohm's law, and its extensions onto a graph. This is a well researched area, and I do not foresee much of technical difficulties even if so
Interesting battery. Submarines of World War II also used "open jar" type batteries, since they are infinitely serviceable. They were lead-acid, though.
I checked my power bill, and the fees for connection to the grid were $9.17, as of 11/29/2013. In previous month they were $8.50. I have two meters (it's a large property,) so each meter is about $4.50/mo, and most of that cost is minimal charge as set by CPUC. The "Distribution" part of it is $3.96/mo per meter.
In your area the cost of connection is higher, and it is understandable why that is so. However it is not important. These are fixed costs, and you pay those fees as long as you want to have electric power at your home. They do not affect how much power you want to buy, or to sell, or to trade. Up to a point, of course - if you want to produce more than your local transformer can support, the utility will have to spend money on a larger transformer. But we are not going that far. A minimum power panel for a house is 100A. At 120V this amounts to 12 kW per phase. A 200A panel will give you 24 kW per phase. Both of those numbers are high enough for any reasonably priced PV system (in other words, your PV system will not overload the grid - you'd run out of PV installation money first.)
This means that once you are connected, there ought to be no reason why you cannot buy and sell power for the same price. Moneychangers (banks) charge you for services when you exchange currencies; but that's their entire revenue - you do not pay them a monthly fee for the privilege of changing USD to CAD. Utilities do charge that fee; therefore they are not entitled to tell you in what direction to transfer the power, as long as it is within technical constraints of the grid.
Utilities buy power from generators in bulk, and usually with guaranteed delivery, and always from a high capacity plant (2 GW is typical for a coal- or gas-fired powerplant.) Economy of scale makes a huge difference there. Your energy will be more expensive, as you purchased your PV for retail prices, from a small time installer. If your energy is sold for more than the utility charges, nobody would buy, and then the point is moot. But if you can sell for the same cost as utility's own - or some %% less - then the society will benefit. There will be fewer losses, and less fuel will be burned at remote generating stations. The society, however, is not interested in developing locally produced power. Perhaps in AK this is not such a hot item, but CA has plenty of sun. Even today, around Christmas, the sky was perfectly clear. My weather station measures solar radiation and UV, so I checked. Unfortunately the RS485 cable to the PV inverter is not connected, so I can't tell you how many kWh my setup produced today.
Sell electricity at retail? Ever heard of 'net metering'? It's close to what you say, as long as you're only installing as many solar panels as what you use. Allowing them to sell excess at retail dings the power companies too much(in my opinion).
I have a PV setup at my house, and I have a net metering plan, and I have a nice DSP-based power meter that measures power in both directions. So this is not new to me.
But I don't understand why you want me to stop at N PV panels instead of more? I have space. I can install 10x as many. Don't you want power? I will sell you power, and you will receive it for the same price that the utility charges you. It will be just a trade between us, using the utility's power grid for which we pay $8/mo separately.
It's quite curious why would one say that we need more green power, and at the same time put up roadblocks for those who can generate that power? Selling PV energy at generator rates makes no sense: if I buy 1 kWh for 30 cents, why can't I sell it for 30 cents? Or, perhaps, for 29 cents? 3% is a good profit for the utility for doing nothing special. But the utility wants to buy my power for 10% of retail - and/automatically/ resell it for 100% to you. Nice racket they have here. Why would I want to sell my excess power? I'm burning it up on house heating instead.
Also, how would I, producing electric power in my backyard, "ding" the utility that is already suffering from blackouts and brownouts due to overload on hot, sunny days (when my PV panels are pushed to the limit by the blazing Sun.) Are they afraid that nobody will be buying their overpriced power, that they buy from a generator for 3 cents and resell for 30 cents? If so, they are the whip makers, and perhaps they should get what's coming their way. All they block is trading energy between those who live on the sunny side of the hill and those who live on the shadowy side. How would that be antisocial? Should we, the neighbors, create our own power grid for those purposes? The society will suffer from that, as it is suffering now. Today I am not selling excess power to you, and I'm not even investing into more PV panels to keep your house lit and warm, because - by executive fiat - this is a money drain. Make it even reasonably profitable, and I will invest. The choice is yours alone - I have my PV setup already.
It's true that we should always work toward improvements. What is not helpful, however, is to pick a problem at random and allocate some of the limited resources of the society to fight it. It is usually more helpful to carefully research the issue and pick the problem that is (a) most solvable and (b) most beneficial. The problem of redoing the power grid - as the GP explicitly named - is not solvable in any visible short term. It can be only solved over several decades of gradual improvements. However people cannot wait half a century to have light in their homes.
Banning incandescents is not necessarily a way to use less power, especially if fragile replacements are burning out whenever any of hundreds of local farmers power up their huge water pumps, or whenever any of thousands of city dwellers nearby power up their air conditioners in summer. All of those, and more, are causes of power spikes, brownouts, and everything in between.
As others indicated already in this discussion, lighting represents only 10% (sometimes less) of all electric power that is consumed by a typical home. The main consumers are water pump, water heater, house heaters, electric oven, dishwasher, electric clothes washer and dryer, electric vehicles, and other such major appliances. Most people have lights only in a few rooms at night - where they are, such as in the sitting room, in the kitchen, in the bedroom. Those lights are either already replaced with CFLs and LEDs, or will be because there are only a few of them. The rest of the lights in the house, such as in bathrooms, in closets, in hallways, at the porch, in the garage, are used so little that they do not matter. There is no reason to impose an economic burden on house owners by forcing them to use efficient light bulbs there. To make matters worse, many of those secondary rooms require light bulbs that activate and deliver 100% of the light right away. So CFLs are not an option there. LEDs are expensive for a hallway that needs light maybe for 10 minutes per year. The high cost of an LED light is, in part, in energy that was spent to manufacture it. Why then to waste more energy on LED lights if an old incandescent light bulb will be cheaper overall? If you go overboard with LEDs, you lose.
The backlash against mandating LED and CFL light bulbs is in part caused by this lack of common sense in the law. The lawmakers picked their target nearly at random, and fired up a crusade against it. But it is a pointless effort, though an expensive one. You can only save 10% of household power, at best. In reality it will be far less. Lights that run all night are already changed to CFL because CFL makes a lot of sense there. The warm-up time is not important, and the light bulb is switched on only once per day. So most of the savings are already realized. Chasing the remaining 5% is not practical. For example, right here and right now I have four lights on in the whole house. They are all CFL because they are in one room that I'm working in. All other lights are off, no matter what technology they are using. You cannot squeeze more blood out of this stone regardless of how hard you try.
What should be then done, if I say that light bulbs are not a big deal? Reduce the vampire load of PCs, TVs, and everything else. Promote and sponsor home automation, so that smart homes automatically activate lights where they are needed. Create water heaters that have Ethernet interface, so that when the house is not occupied they do not heat water. Same goes for thermostats. Promote efficient pool pumps and filters. Change the law so that owners of solar panels can sell their excess power not at generator rates but at retail rates (this will make PV setups more appealing.) There is plenty that can be done to *really* make an impact - but you should focus on major power consumers first, not on small fry - even if small fry is easier to deal with. Do not look for your lost keys under the street light only because it's more convenient; look for them where you lost them, even if it's harder.
If the local power delivery system is that crappy, what needs to be done is to fix it. But heaven forfend we actually try to improve anything about our country's infrastructure. That would be communism.
Most of the US power grid is strung up on wooden poles along the road. There is a lot of distributed inductance and capacitance in those wires. A tree falls, shorts something somewhere, and ringing propagates through the entire grid. Eventually the failed segment will be disconnected, but the harm is already done.
Do you propose that all power companies that supply power to rural USA just decide that they replace all those power poles and wires with underground cables? How many trillions of dollars will that cost? Who is going to pay? The fact is that residents are stuck with whatever infrastructure the country has; and nobody can afford improvements. If you can, please pay for those upgrades. I'm sure it would be a socially worthy investment. Perhaps someone will thank you for that, eventually. Or not.
Lacking such an investor, it is far more practical to use whatever works today. The country's population has been already bled dry by lack of jobs and high cost of essentials. Ecologically safe light bulbs don't even show up on people's radars.
If I see someone in GG I will stay far away. If everyone does that, the GG person would find himself in a vacuum. Nobody would talk to him. His GG will be banned at work. Eventually the GG wearer will realize that his behavior is not welcome. If not... eventually he *will* get his punch in the face, from someone.
Furthermore, whenever a healthy man passes a healthy, fertile woman without impregnating her, they both are killing a child (by choosing to not have one.)
If that corner case is not true, then all other cases are similar, up to a situation when people are electing to not have even a single child.
In reality, of course, the Universe does not care either way. Waste your time and your life in any way you want.
The poor however can watch as their mortgage increases with value alongside their wages rather than gradually getting smaller.
The debt + interest, in BTC, will be numerically fixed. However your salary will be shrinking as the value of BTC increases. You will not be able to ever pay that debt, probably.
If you wonder why the salary has to shrink: the business has to buy resources (such as raw materials and your labor,) and to sell the product. As BTC deflates, the price of the product decreases - and so the cost of production has to decrease too.
This is psychologically painful to go to a yearly performance review where the only question is how much your salary will be cut, while nobody is going to cut your debts. This effect has to result in rejection of BTC as money - at least because you cannot accept a debt that increases in value faster than you repay it. The lender will also see not much advantage in lending you his BTC and taking risk if, for half the interest, he can just keep them and watch their value grow.
The phrase "Ihre Papieren, bitte!" indeed originated elsewhere, but USSR of those years was a close match. It was mandatory to carry ID during Stalin's days. Patrols stopped everyone who was suspicious, and checked the ID. However from 1960's and until the end of USSR carrying of an ID was just a recommended practice. I was never stopped by the police, and nobody in the street wanted to know my name. The police was just catching criminals, lazily and in relaxed manner. Police brutality was unheard of - at least until USSR failed. From that point on OMON was created (SWAT in the USA,) and if those guys are sent after you, you may not emerge with all your b{one,all}s intact.
Of course, if you drive you have to have the driver's license - not to prove that you are you, but that you are licensed to operate the vehicle. Drivers were stopped for no reason quite often, and the practice continues - but that's only because the sellers of the striped stick want a bribe.
it's much easier to criticize an enemy than a friend, but which is the more moral action?
There is (or may be) more than one set of morals in the world. However if I use the most common rule book, the most moral action is one that results in most social benefit; personal danger to the actor (difficulty) is a separate brownie point.
It may be that your enemy threw an empty paper cup and missed the trash can; and it may be that your friend just killed all his family. Or the other way around. The danger is proportional to severity of the wrongdoing, and probably is unrelated to the perpetrator. If your friend just killed a bunch of people, he is not to be approached casually. But you can say your words to your enemy in cafeteria, and most likely nothing drastic will transpire.
In my opinion, the free market sucks hard at providing medicine and I'm confident the government could do it better but if I'm wrong, then nobody would go to the government doctor, they'd just keep paying to see their private doctor.
And that would be fine with me. However why haven't Obama done his healthcare reform this way? By setting up a government-owned doctor? I suspect it's because such a system would be very expensive; more expensive than private healthcare. It's easy to see why: nobody would be interested in working efficiently. Everyone would be working to earn maximum money while doing the minimum work. In private sector you have the patient who monitors your work by his wallet. In public sector the patient does not pay; and those who do pay are far, far away, and all that they ask for is mere paperwork. That is easy to provide without actually helping people. This is what happened in USSR. Doctors went through the motions of seeing patients. Not all of them cared; but those who saw more patients per day were rewarded. Those who saw fewer patients (and spent more time with each) were called "underperforming."
Socialized services tend to spread over time because they are inexpensive, high quality, and people like them. Imagine that.
That's not now things work. I was there. Were you? If you haven't seen firsthand how destructive socialism is, please ask those who were there. What you are saying is just a nice dream. Hint: nobody likes socialized services because they are always of low quality. A popular Soviet joke says: "You can use free healthcare, but only if the outcome does not matter." People used to bribe doctors to get a treatment that is just a little better than what is allocated to everyone else. There was no reward for doing a good job - the feedback loop was too long, and the salary matrix was cast in stone. It's not so when the customer pays you on the spot and then recommends you to his friends.
Your anecdote about USSR medicine really points to a lack of democracy not some problem with socialism.
What has democracy to do with socialized services? The UK is democratic, officially, but NHS is just as deadly as Minzdrav was in USSR. You can elect one representative or another, but if there is a fixed sum of money to treat everyone, everyone gets treated equally. Since there is never enough money in public coffers to treat everyone well, everyone is treated poorly. Usually the plank is set to just keep people alive and functional, for some period of time. Losing ten or twenty teeth is not an impediment - you still can sweep the street or work the machine.
It is truly sad how much societies love to step into the same pile of $hit, over and over again. Nobody cares about *actual* processes and causes that resulted in failure just a decade ago. First, everyone is saying "no, they haven't done it right, but we will." Then the history is forgotten, and old devils are reincarnated as saints. (Che Guevara was a psychotic killer, for example.) Now Socialism and Communism are in favor again; all the rivers of blood that were spilled due to them are conveniently forgotten, and people are $pleasing_themselves with ideas that were tried and found to be absurdly untrue. Eventually they get their wish... and then they will regret it. Again.
Does this mean that we cannot have a plentiful and free society? Of course not. But that society will not be Socialism. It was *a crime* to have a private business under Socialism. Do you want to be imprisoned for making a small profit on repairing computers for other people? That's what will happen. Socialism suppresses private enterprise because it cannot compete with it, other than by force of law. The end of socialism was written on the wall when Gorbachev allowed private enterprise. Government-owned sector could not compete, and did not want to. It died on its feet, standing still and not caring. Socialism is a non-free society by definition, and you cannot build anything good on that foundat
That's often hard to achieve. You are likely to receive a fixed set of features, without ability to customize. Like when you are selecting a spouse:-)
Socialized services tend to spread over time. The government can win over the private enterprise by several ways. In time of NEP in USSR this was done by excessive taxation of private businesses. The government can easily sell a product or a service below the cost, and that was done in USSR too. This distorted the market because no private enterprise could compete with arbitrary pricing schemes of the government - who wasn't responsible for financial results and reported to no one.
I wish we could get a little Socialized Medicine
Go find someone from the ex-USSR and ask them about their experience at the dentist. Do you know that in USSR most of the dental work was done without anesthetic, and using the cheap, belt-driven dental drills? That there was no assistant to the doctor? That there were no dental X-rays, let alone digital ones? This is what you get when medicine becomes socialized - you, from being a precious, valuable paying customer, are downgraded into one of those annoying patients that don't affect anyone's salary but just distract the staff from reading newspapers and discussing things. You get processed and sent out of the office as soon as possible, with minimum attention to your ills and your needs. Do you know what is the typical word said in such case? "There are many of you, but only one of me." That should be said with expression of hate toward the customers.
That is true only if you want to sell your excess electric energy. However it is not very profitable to sell it. PV panels cost a lot of money. They are kind of justified if you use the consumer rates (up to 31 cent per kWh.) However if you start selling (such as generating more than you consume, on average over the year) the utility buys your excess power for generator's rates - and they are on level of few cents per kWh, even if that. This means that your PV setup will never pay for itself in this mode. This also means that you should only plan it to cover your actual needs, and not overbuild in hope to deliver power to your neighbors. The government does not want you to do that because it doesn't pay you fair price for doing it.
By the way, the credit/debit is not calculated at the end of each month. It is calculated once per year, on the anniversary of your system being officially connected to the grid. This covers all seasons; you can draw a lot of power in winter if you want to, but later, in summer, you can return it all back into the grid.
You may believe me or not, but I am the one having these systems and paying for them, and I know what is good for my bank account. This setup is good. LP gas is just as expensive as gasoline, per gallon.
Electrons don't have personal names. If I generate 10 kWh during the day and send them into the grid, and then at night I draw 5 kWh from the grid, can you say that I'm not using solar power? The utility only counts the difference.
If you need an FPGA then check out the Spartan-6 LX9 MicroBoard. It is sold today for $89. You can synthesize MicroBlaze there, and you will have enough fabric left over to implement quite a few hardware blocks. It may be cheaper than stacking R-Pi or BBB and the add-on board. The kit comes with everything that you need to code for this thing (Xilinx ISE and EDK.)
Do you really install "typical" light bulbs into every socket in your home, no matter what it is used for? It's just as practical as calculating an average temperature of patients in a hospital.
I can understand a typical light in a sitting room, or a dining room, or a kitchen, because they have some semblance of common pattern between different households. But how would you define a pattern of the porch light, for example? Some people run it all night; other turn it on for a minute when they come home, just to see the lock. The same applies to bedrooms, vanity lights, closets, exterior lights... their duty cycle is all over the place.
Slashdot Mirror
This is just a wearable HUD, why is people so obsessed [...]
Because it isn't. It's also a camera that streams the data to the mothership. Nobody knows when that is happening, so people have to presume that it is done all the time.
First, nobody has the mobile bandwidth for a 24/7 stream. Nor the storage space. Nor the battery.
This generation of GG is a foothold for the new generation. It will be capable of all that and more, and it will fall onto prepared legal ground in a conditioned society.
Second, you aren't that interesting when you are outside.
Yes, we are not interesting to other people. We, however, are VERY INTERESTING to Google's (and NSA's) computers. It will be trivial to incentivize Glassholes for capturing more faces, or new faces, or being in new places, just by giving them worthless points or free bandwidth. This will happen.
Of all people the people of slashdot should know the limits of technology better
We do. We also see time when those limits will be lifted. This is why so many geeks are unhappy. GG treads upon certain freedoms that people are used to having, such as the freedom to be largely invisible in public.
And, no, my privacy when I am outside doesn't bother me at all. I look my BEST when I am outside, please record me like that. I am precisely ready to be seen.
No woman would make that statement without week-long, expensive preparations. Pictures taken are forever. Besides, even if you look your best, what stops a Glasshole from filming you from, say, less common viewpoint, that does not exactly strive to show your best looks as you understand them?
Maybe Google Glass isn't what is turning people off of Google Glass wearers. Maybe it is the wearers that are turning people off Google Glass.
It's both the capability for harm of the device itself, AND the low expectation of the judgement of wearers. That low expectation is already amply proven by GG owners who are entirely lost why others are suddenly wary of them. It will be further proven by millions of compromising photos taken by GG wearers, if only GG use becomes common.
Well, to be the devil's advocate, I thought the whole idea of GG was that you could continue being a participant, and then review for anything you actually want to keep later.
I'm afraid that's not how it works. A photographer at an event is not free to mingle with people of his choice and take whatever shots he likes. He has duties, such as to take pictures of everyone, then everyone with everyone, then of those groups, then in this setting, then in that setting... In the end the photographer is just an attachment to the camera, and his own plans have no bearing on what he has to do.
I guess one troubling thing though is that with GG, nobody knows when to pose, and keeping a smile plastered on your face whenever you look at a GG wearer would be rather painful.
That is exactly true. Human life is generally boring and not of any interest to anyone. Only certain events deserve being captured. Often they are staged to form the best impression in the future viewers. Nobody wants their faults to be preserved forever, for random people to look at and laugh. Humans forget rather quickly. Cameras forget nothing.
what I don't get about the Google Glass objections is that they are usually just objecting to stuff being recorded that absolutely anybody in the vicinity could see or hear anyways.
You are conveniently forgetting that human memory is short term, fallible, and cannot be mined by a computer. You can see me in company of others in a park, but you are very unlikely to recognize all of us, or to remember that you saw us at all. A machine has no such problems: everyone will be seen, recognized, geotagged, and all that will be stored for future use. Maybe not today, with primitive GG hardware and pathetic bandwidth. But tomorrow. Objections to GG are striving to prevent smooth, comfortable slide into the society of total surveillance.
If I'm doing something where I'd feel uncomfortable with somebody recording me, I'd be doing it in private
Imagine that you are married. One day you meet a girl who doesn't mind your company, and she asks you to take her to some public place. Do you want to be forced to tell her that you can't do that, in fear that your wife will run a Google search on your whereabouts and views something that was captured by some GG wearers? Do you want to be afraid of that? Oh, that's certainly good for your soul :-) but it's not good for your freedom. Many say that it's not even good for your relations with the wife.
I'm also using a dumb phone. I have no need to be permanently wired into the Internet. If someone has to contact me, they can call. Otherwise it will wait until it is convenient for me to review what the world wants from me.
I could have gotten a smartphone and turned off all those Twitbooks. But AT&T and Verizon (and probably others) charge money for a data plan as soon as you buy a smartphone. I have no desire to give them $500+ per year for a service that I do not plan to ever use. It's not even that I don't have the money. It's a matter of principle. You should be always able to say "no", in every deal, and you will do well if you say "no" often.
And a streamed video of the thief automatically uploaded and sent to the police with GPS coordinates.
One street-smart teenage thief is wiser than 100 geeks on Slashdot. He will run past you, from behind you, will grab the GG, and will be gone before you realize what just happened. That's how they grab purses, cameras, and other stuff. You never see their faces.
The GG, as a mechanism, will not be aware that it had been stolen. The Bluetooth link will be broken nearly instantly. Then the device is inert, open to a hacker who will reset it and sell to another rich $unwise_person. Perhaps the victim can file a complaint form at Google, but who is going to even look into this incident?
30 cents a kwh? Wow! Where are you? I don't even pay that and I have some of the most expensive electricity in the USA...
PG&E sells power in four tiers: (0-100%), (101-130%), (131-200%), (201+%). The lowest tier costs about 11 cents per kWh, and the highest tier costs about 31 cent per kWh. The baseline (100%) is carefully selected such that it is barely enough to run a small home with one occupant who is rarely in need of hot water. Per my bill, the baseline today is 11.70 kWh per day. However my refrigerator (which I cannot upgrade, it's built into the furniture) draws 600 watts, on average - and that is a good number, as it seems. I have one electric water heater (4500W.) A whole house (floor) fan draws about 1 kW. Water well pump is about 3 kW. Booster pump is 1 kW. I'm sitting here, all alone, in one room, with three computers running, and the power meter shows 850W into the house (it's dark outside.) That alone would push me above the baseline even if I don't do anything else. Most people have larger families, and they need more power. Pools are also popular. If you have one, you need to run a filter (pump) for about 5-6 hours per day. Air conditioning in summer is required if you have older people in the house. (I usually don't run A/C.) So it is *very typical* that a house ends up in tier 4 - and that is only twice the baseline! This is why solar setups are used here to drop the power consumption into a lower tier.
Here's a question: Let's say that you somehow come into possession of quite a bit of gasoline. Should the local store be required to buy it from you at their posted price?
The store is not required to buy anything. But you should be able to put a can with gas near the pump and sell it for the price that pleases you. In case of electric power, the utility has no ill effects from households who generate power. Transmission infrastructure is linear, so it does not care in what direction the currents flow. Since PV setups are synchronized to the grid, the injected power is seen at the grid as reduction of load. There is no danger to transformers or wires (and there isn't much else.) Meters are designed for bidirectional measurements.
There was an article yesterday about how Hawaii has hit the point where they're refusing additional grid-tie systems because they're getting 'irregularities' due to having so many of them. It's fixable, but that takes money. Should they raise their rates on me so you can make more profit? That's not very free market, now is it?
Haven't seen that one. No, you shouldn't be paying for someone else's profits. The Federal government does that for us already :-) But the utility should invest into development of the grid so that everyone benefits. For example, the new grid will allow me to sell you the power for half the price that the utility charges you. This would be fair, IMO.
You are aware of the concept of 'oversell', right? Just because every house has a 100/200A connection doesn't mean that EVERY house can pull that max, or even a substantial fraction of that max, simultaneously without popping something further up in the grid.
A well built grid will allow that. However even the existing grid will benefit. Without PV producers the segment will be overloaded by all the AC units in summer (for example) and "something" will disconnect the power. With PV producers - somewhere, but ideally mixed among consumers - there will be no overload. I cannot call that "bad."
The technical constraints of the grid are currently that not all points are fine with bidirectional power transfer.
The grid is highly linear. It does not care. It is governed by Ohm's law, and its extensions onto a graph. This is a well researched area, and I do not foresee much of technical difficulties even if so
Interesting battery. Submarines of World War II also used "open jar" type batteries, since they are infinitely serviceable. They were lead-acid, though.
I checked my power bill, and the fees for connection to the grid were $9.17, as of 11/29/2013. In previous month they were $8.50. I have two meters (it's a large property,) so each meter is about $4.50/mo, and most of that cost is minimal charge as set by CPUC. The "Distribution" part of it is $3.96/mo per meter.
In your area the cost of connection is higher, and it is understandable why that is so. However it is not important. These are fixed costs, and you pay those fees as long as you want to have electric power at your home. They do not affect how much power you want to buy, or to sell, or to trade. Up to a point, of course - if you want to produce more than your local transformer can support, the utility will have to spend money on a larger transformer. But we are not going that far. A minimum power panel for a house is 100A. At 120V this amounts to 12 kW per phase. A 200A panel will give you 24 kW per phase. Both of those numbers are high enough for any reasonably priced PV system (in other words, your PV system will not overload the grid - you'd run out of PV installation money first.)
This means that once you are connected, there ought to be no reason why you cannot buy and sell power for the same price. Moneychangers (banks) charge you for services when you exchange currencies; but that's their entire revenue - you do not pay them a monthly fee for the privilege of changing USD to CAD. Utilities do charge that fee; therefore they are not entitled to tell you in what direction to transfer the power, as long as it is within technical constraints of the grid.
Utilities buy power from generators in bulk, and usually with guaranteed delivery, and always from a high capacity plant (2 GW is typical for a coal- or gas-fired powerplant.) Economy of scale makes a huge difference there. Your energy will be more expensive, as you purchased your PV for retail prices, from a small time installer. If your energy is sold for more than the utility charges, nobody would buy, and then the point is moot. But if you can sell for the same cost as utility's own - or some %% less - then the society will benefit. There will be fewer losses, and less fuel will be burned at remote generating stations. The society, however, is not interested in developing locally produced power. Perhaps in AK this is not such a hot item, but CA has plenty of sun. Even today, around Christmas, the sky was perfectly clear. My weather station measures solar radiation and UV, so I checked. Unfortunately the RS485 cable to the PV inverter is not connected, so I can't tell you how many kWh my setup produced today.
Sell electricity at retail? Ever heard of 'net metering'? It's close to what you say, as long as you're only installing as many solar panels as what you use. Allowing them to sell excess at retail dings the power companies too much(in my opinion).
I have a PV setup at my house, and I have a net metering plan, and I have a nice DSP-based power meter that measures power in both directions. So this is not new to me.
But I don't understand why you want me to stop at N PV panels instead of more? I have space. I can install 10x as many. Don't you want power? I will sell you power, and you will receive it for the same price that the utility charges you. It will be just a trade between us, using the utility's power grid for which we pay $8/mo separately.
It's quite curious why would one say that we need more green power, and at the same time put up roadblocks for those who can generate that power? Selling PV energy at generator rates makes no sense: if I buy 1 kWh for 30 cents, why can't I sell it for 30 cents? Or, perhaps, for 29 cents? 3% is a good profit for the utility for doing nothing special. But the utility wants to buy my power for 10% of retail - and /automatically/ resell it for 100% to you. Nice racket they have here. Why would I want to sell my excess power? I'm burning it up on house heating instead.
Also, how would I, producing electric power in my backyard, "ding" the utility that is already suffering from blackouts and brownouts due to overload on hot, sunny days (when my PV panels are pushed to the limit by the blazing Sun.) Are they afraid that nobody will be buying their overpriced power, that they buy from a generator for 3 cents and resell for 30 cents? If so, they are the whip makers, and perhaps they should get what's coming their way. All they block is trading energy between those who live on the sunny side of the hill and those who live on the shadowy side. How would that be antisocial? Should we, the neighbors, create our own power grid for those purposes? The society will suffer from that, as it is suffering now. Today I am not selling excess power to you, and I'm not even investing into more PV panels to keep your house lit and warm, because - by executive fiat - this is a money drain. Make it even reasonably profitable, and I will invest. The choice is yours alone - I have my PV setup already.
It's true that we should always work toward improvements. What is not helpful, however, is to pick a problem at random and allocate some of the limited resources of the society to fight it. It is usually more helpful to carefully research the issue and pick the problem that is (a) most solvable and (b) most beneficial. The problem of redoing the power grid - as the GP explicitly named - is not solvable in any visible short term. It can be only solved over several decades of gradual improvements. However people cannot wait half a century to have light in their homes.
Banning incandescents is not necessarily a way to use less power, especially if fragile replacements are burning out whenever any of hundreds of local farmers power up their huge water pumps, or whenever any of thousands of city dwellers nearby power up their air conditioners in summer. All of those, and more, are causes of power spikes, brownouts, and everything in between.
As others indicated already in this discussion, lighting represents only 10% (sometimes less) of all electric power that is consumed by a typical home. The main consumers are water pump, water heater, house heaters, electric oven, dishwasher, electric clothes washer and dryer, electric vehicles, and other such major appliances. Most people have lights only in a few rooms at night - where they are, such as in the sitting room, in the kitchen, in the bedroom. Those lights are either already replaced with CFLs and LEDs, or will be because there are only a few of them. The rest of the lights in the house, such as in bathrooms, in closets, in hallways, at the porch, in the garage, are used so little that they do not matter. There is no reason to impose an economic burden on house owners by forcing them to use efficient light bulbs there. To make matters worse, many of those secondary rooms require light bulbs that activate and deliver 100% of the light right away. So CFLs are not an option there. LEDs are expensive for a hallway that needs light maybe for 10 minutes per year. The high cost of an LED light is, in part, in energy that was spent to manufacture it. Why then to waste more energy on LED lights if an old incandescent light bulb will be cheaper overall? If you go overboard with LEDs, you lose.
The backlash against mandating LED and CFL light bulbs is in part caused by this lack of common sense in the law. The lawmakers picked their target nearly at random, and fired up a crusade against it. But it is a pointless effort, though an expensive one. You can only save 10% of household power, at best. In reality it will be far less. Lights that run all night are already changed to CFL because CFL makes a lot of sense there. The warm-up time is not important, and the light bulb is switched on only once per day. So most of the savings are already realized. Chasing the remaining 5% is not practical. For example, right here and right now I have four lights on in the whole house. They are all CFL because they are in one room that I'm working in. All other lights are off, no matter what technology they are using. You cannot squeeze more blood out of this stone regardless of how hard you try.
What should be then done, if I say that light bulbs are not a big deal? Reduce the vampire load of PCs, TVs, and everything else. Promote and sponsor home automation, so that smart homes automatically activate lights where they are needed. Create water heaters that have Ethernet interface, so that when the house is not occupied they do not heat water. Same goes for thermostats. Promote efficient pool pumps and filters. Change the law so that owners of solar panels can sell their excess power not at generator rates but at retail rates (this will make PV setups more appealing.) There is plenty that can be done to *really* make an impact - but you should focus on major power consumers first, not on small fry - even if small fry is easier to deal with. Do not look for your lost keys under the street light only because it's more convenient; look for them where you lost them, even if it's harder.
If the local power delivery system is that crappy, what needs to be done is to fix it. But heaven forfend we actually try to improve anything about our country's infrastructure. That would be communism.
Most of the US power grid is strung up on wooden poles along the road. There is a lot of distributed inductance and capacitance in those wires. A tree falls, shorts something somewhere, and ringing propagates through the entire grid. Eventually the failed segment will be disconnected, but the harm is already done.
Do you propose that all power companies that supply power to rural USA just decide that they replace all those power poles and wires with underground cables? How many trillions of dollars will that cost? Who is going to pay? The fact is that residents are stuck with whatever infrastructure the country has; and nobody can afford improvements. If you can, please pay for those upgrades. I'm sure it would be a socially worthy investment. Perhaps someone will thank you for that, eventually. Or not.
Lacking such an investor, it is far more practical to use whatever works today. The country's population has been already bled dry by lack of jobs and high cost of essentials. Ecologically safe light bulbs don't even show up on people's radars.
If I see someone in GG I will stay far away. If everyone does that, the GG person would find himself in a vacuum. Nobody would talk to him. His GG will be banned at work. Eventually the GG wearer will realize that his behavior is not welcome. If not... eventually he *will* get his punch in the face, from someone.
Furthermore, whenever a healthy man passes a healthy, fertile woman without impregnating her, they both are killing a child (by choosing to not have one.)
If that corner case is not true, then all other cases are similar, up to a situation when people are electing to not have even a single child.
In reality, of course, the Universe does not care either way. Waste your time and your life in any way you want.
What do your children think of this viewpoint?
Nothing, if you don't have them in the first place.
The poor however can watch as their mortgage increases with value alongside their wages rather than gradually getting smaller.
The debt + interest, in BTC, will be numerically fixed. However your salary will be shrinking as the value of BTC increases. You will not be able to ever pay that debt, probably.
If you wonder why the salary has to shrink: the business has to buy resources (such as raw materials and your labor,) and to sell the product. As BTC deflates, the price of the product decreases - and so the cost of production has to decrease too.
This is psychologically painful to go to a yearly performance review where the only question is how much your salary will be cut, while nobody is going to cut your debts. This effect has to result in rejection of BTC as money - at least because you cannot accept a debt that increases in value faster than you repay it. The lender will also see not much advantage in lending you his BTC and taking risk if, for half the interest, he can just keep them and watch their value grow.
The phrase "Ihre Papieren, bitte!" indeed originated elsewhere, but USSR of those years was a close match. It was mandatory to carry ID during Stalin's days. Patrols stopped everyone who was suspicious, and checked the ID. However from 1960's and until the end of USSR carrying of an ID was just a recommended practice. I was never stopped by the police, and nobody in the street wanted to know my name. The police was just catching criminals, lazily and in relaxed manner. Police brutality was unheard of - at least until USSR failed. From that point on OMON was created (SWAT in the USA,) and if those guys are sent after you, you may not emerge with all your b{one,all}s intact.
Of course, if you drive you have to have the driver's license - not to prove that you are you, but that you are licensed to operate the vehicle. Drivers were stopped for no reason quite often, and the practice continues - but that's only because the sellers of the striped stick want a bribe.
it's much easier to criticize an enemy than a friend, but which is the more moral action?
There is (or may be) more than one set of morals in the world. However if I use the most common rule book, the most moral action is one that results in most social benefit; personal danger to the actor (difficulty) is a separate brownie point.
It may be that your enemy threw an empty paper cup and missed the trash can; and it may be that your friend just killed all his family. Or the other way around. The danger is proportional to severity of the wrongdoing, and probably is unrelated to the perpetrator. If your friend just killed a bunch of people, he is not to be approached casually. But you can say your words to your enemy in cafeteria, and most likely nothing drastic will transpire.
They will lie to you, as it is their default modus operandi. Nobody saw anything illegal, ever. What does that prove?
In my opinion, the free market sucks hard at providing medicine and I'm confident the government could do it better but if I'm wrong, then nobody would go to the government doctor, they'd just keep paying to see their private doctor.
And that would be fine with me. However why haven't Obama done his healthcare reform this way? By setting up a government-owned doctor? I suspect it's because such a system would be very expensive; more expensive than private healthcare. It's easy to see why: nobody would be interested in working efficiently. Everyone would be working to earn maximum money while doing the minimum work. In private sector you have the patient who monitors your work by his wallet. In public sector the patient does not pay; and those who do pay are far, far away, and all that they ask for is mere paperwork. That is easy to provide without actually helping people. This is what happened in USSR. Doctors went through the motions of seeing patients. Not all of them cared; but those who saw more patients per day were rewarded. Those who saw fewer patients (and spent more time with each) were called "underperforming."
Socialized services tend to spread over time because they are inexpensive, high quality, and people like them. Imagine that.
That's not now things work. I was there. Were you? If you haven't seen firsthand how destructive socialism is, please ask those who were there. What you are saying is just a nice dream. Hint: nobody likes socialized services because they are always of low quality. A popular Soviet joke says: "You can use free healthcare, but only if the outcome does not matter." People used to bribe doctors to get a treatment that is just a little better than what is allocated to everyone else. There was no reward for doing a good job - the feedback loop was too long, and the salary matrix was cast in stone. It's not so when the customer pays you on the spot and then recommends you to his friends.
Your anecdote about USSR medicine really points to a lack of democracy not some problem with socialism.
What has democracy to do with socialized services? The UK is democratic, officially, but NHS is just as deadly as Minzdrav was in USSR. You can elect one representative or another, but if there is a fixed sum of money to treat everyone, everyone gets treated equally. Since there is never enough money in public coffers to treat everyone well, everyone is treated poorly. Usually the plank is set to just keep people alive and functional, for some period of time. Losing ten or twenty teeth is not an impediment - you still can sweep the street or work the machine.
It is truly sad how much societies love to step into the same pile of $hit, over and over again. Nobody cares about *actual* processes and causes that resulted in failure just a decade ago. First, everyone is saying "no, they haven't done it right, but we will." Then the history is forgotten, and old devils are reincarnated as saints. (Che Guevara was a psychotic killer, for example.) Now Socialism and Communism are in favor again; all the rivers of blood that were spilled due to them are conveniently forgotten, and people are $pleasing_themselves with ideas that were tried and found to be absurdly untrue. Eventually they get their wish... and then they will regret it. Again.
Does this mean that we cannot have a plentiful and free society? Of course not. But that society will not be Socialism. It was *a crime* to have a private business under Socialism. Do you want to be imprisoned for making a small profit on repairing computers for other people? That's what will happen. Socialism suppresses private enterprise because it cannot compete with it, other than by force of law. The end of socialism was written on the wall when Gorbachev allowed private enterprise. Government-owned sector could not compete, and did not want to. It died on its feet, standing still and not caring. Socialism is a non-free society by definition, and you cannot build anything good on that foundat
It's sort of a case-by-case basis.
That's often hard to achieve. You are likely to receive a fixed set of features, without ability to customize. Like when you are selecting a spouse :-)
Socialized services tend to spread over time. The government can win over the private enterprise by several ways. In time of NEP in USSR this was done by excessive taxation of private businesses. The government can easily sell a product or a service below the cost, and that was done in USSR too. This distorted the market because no private enterprise could compete with arbitrary pricing schemes of the government - who wasn't responsible for financial results and reported to no one.
I wish we could get a little Socialized Medicine
Go find someone from the ex-USSR and ask them about their experience at the dentist. Do you know that in USSR most of the dental work was done without anesthetic, and using the cheap, belt-driven dental drills? That there was no assistant to the doctor? That there were no dental X-rays, let alone digital ones? This is what you get when medicine becomes socialized - you, from being a precious, valuable paying customer, are downgraded into one of those annoying patients that don't affect anyone's salary but just distract the staff from reading newspapers and discussing things. You get processed and sent out of the office as soon as possible, with minimum attention to your ills and your needs. Do you know what is the typical word said in such case? "There are many of you, but only one of me." That should be said with expression of hate toward the customers.
That is true only if you want to sell your excess electric energy. However it is not very profitable to sell it. PV panels cost a lot of money. They are kind of justified if you use the consumer rates (up to 31 cent per kWh.) However if you start selling (such as generating more than you consume, on average over the year) the utility buys your excess power for generator's rates - and they are on level of few cents per kWh, even if that. This means that your PV setup will never pay for itself in this mode. This also means that you should only plan it to cover your actual needs, and not overbuild in hope to deliver power to your neighbors. The government does not want you to do that because it doesn't pay you fair price for doing it.
By the way, the credit/debit is not calculated at the end of each month. It is calculated once per year, on the anniversary of your system being officially connected to the grid. This covers all seasons; you can draw a lot of power in winter if you want to, but later, in summer, you can return it all back into the grid.
You may believe me or not, but I am the one having these systems and paying for them, and I know what is good for my bank account. This setup is good. LP gas is just as expensive as gasoline, per gallon.
The grid is used a huge battery, that's all.
Electrons don't have personal names. If I generate 10 kWh during the day and send them into the grid, and then at night I draw 5 kWh from the grid, can you say that I'm not using solar power? The utility only counts the difference.
If you need an FPGA then check out the Spartan-6 LX9 MicroBoard. It is sold today for $89. You can synthesize MicroBlaze there, and you will have enough fabric left over to implement quite a few hardware blocks. It may be cheaper than stacking R-Pi or BBB and the add-on board. The kit comes with everything that you need to code for this thing (Xilinx ISE and EDK.)
IIRC, $1800 to fill the tank from 20% to 80%. Not exactly cheap. But sunlight *is* cheap.
Do you really install "typical" light bulbs into every socket in your home, no matter what it is used for? It's just as practical as calculating an average temperature of patients in a hospital.
I can understand a typical light in a sitting room, or a dining room, or a kitchen, because they have some semblance of common pattern between different households. But how would you define a pattern of the porch light, for example? Some people run it all night; other turn it on for a minute when they come home, just to see the lock. The same applies to bedrooms, vanity lights, closets, exterior lights... their duty cycle is all over the place.