Reducing peak demand doesn't mean using less electricity and reducing peak demand by 50MW can in fact eliminate the need for 50MW of generating capacity.
If you have a cafeteria that seats 100 and there are 200 employees who want to eat their lunch for 30 minutes at the cafeteria simply have half go at 11:45 and half at 12:15. It really isn't that big of a deal and it does save the cost of building a bigger cafeteria. If it makes you angry to eat at 11:45 instead of 12:15 then simply get someone to swap with you. I'm not sure you'll notice if your A/C runs from 11:45 to 12:15 instead of 12:15 to 12:45 but if the thought bothers you too much maybe they can have the system change the clocks in your house as well so you think it is running from 12:15 to 12:45 so you can be content.
I'd say that reducing peak demand is less expensive than building a solar power plant just as replacing an 80W light bulb with a 6W light bulb is cheaper than adding 74W of capacity to a power plant.
It really is just math, nothing to do with hipsters or eco logic.
I'm sure your hyperbolic "drastically change how they live" assertions can be safely ignored as untrue.
All the load controllers I'm familiar prevent short cycling your A/C unit.
I'm sure the units you used in the 90's were stupid, it's now 20+ years later and $5 microcontrollers are quite smart.
If you believe you won't be comfortable because your A/C turns on 10 minutes later than it would have turned on if your existing dumb thermostat was installed then you are mistaken. But I'm all in favor of letting you continue to have your dumb thermostat turn your A/C on and off whenever you want and for your to pay 4X as much for your power as me. No skin off my nose.
Personally I prefer saving a few hundred dollars a month in electric bills while remaining just as comfortable.
Pre-cooling a house absolutely does work because you aren't pre-cooling it "during the hottest part of the day", you are cooling it during the non-peak demand periods which are non-peak precisely because they are the cooler parts of the day/night. You specifically run your A/C less during the hottest times of the day.
You don't "lose your A/C during the hottest part of the day either", you completely misunderstand, you just try to use it less during the hottest part of the day.
A smart thermostat is able to pre-cool and then use the A/C just enough to keep the temperature rise down to the point that it doesn't exceed a desired max while using the A/C the least during peak periods.
Smart thermostats just regulate your home's temperature without any ability to reduce peak demand. They can reduce your total consumption but not peak demand. Timers also don't reduce peak demand, unless you simply set them to not run during peak hours.
Imagine a city with 100,000 A/C units. They run an average of 25% of the time during peak use times. If more than 25% of them are on at one particular time then they increase peak demand. By understanding demand needs of all the homes an intelligent algorithm can give each home all the A/C cooling they need while minimizing peak demand.
You can still have your home at 76 degrees while home if that is what you want. Your individual need for more cooling soon is in the noise, but in the aggregate all those units cooperating can substantially reduce peak loads. Particularly when coupled with other high load appliances that also don't need to run at specific times, such as hot water heaters.
Some people properly insulate their house,... and also drive a Prius.
That driving a Prius is pretty effortless isn't a bad thing, though some people seem to take a dislike to people who Do Something like driving a Prius, I'm not sure why.
It's real simple why you might want a load controller shutting off your A/C at times, the electric company is willing to sell you power for a substantial discount.
You don't have to be miserable, you just have to plan.
Pre-cool your house, don't run the electric dryer between noon and 9pm,...
Tesla/SolarCity will likely eventually announce an integrated system that uses a battery pack plus load controller to minimize your peak demand and allow you to save substantially on your power bill.
I'll let you know in 2116 how my backups are doing, oh wait, I won't care whether or not I can still restore my backup of my 2016 laptop.
I'm sure we'll do exactly what we've done in the past. Take our grandparents collection of photographs, slides and Super-8 movies and move them to new media. Maybe it was to floppies, then CDs, then DVDs, then flash drives, then cloud storage, but most people aren't looking for a single media that will last 100 years. The entirety of my grand-parent's large collection of photographs, slides and Super-8 movies all fits in a 2.5" USB drive after being digitized. I don't care if they didn't use archival photography paper that lasts 100 years, the cheap Osco Drug prints lasted long enough to make it to the next generation of media.
Perhaps Facebook can tell us what Better User Experience they can create by mining the phone number of private, encrypted text messages?
I've found that by replacing WhatsApp with Signal I have a far better user experience, namely my private communications remain private. I've already removed Facebook from my phone, I can use my laptop for the occasional checking up on what family and friends are doing
Facebook, like Google, asks people who delete their ads why they did so. The choices include irrelevant but don't include "I hate all ads" or "ads are disruptive".
So Facebook can proudly say they will make ads more relevant to help their customers when the reality is their customers don't like ads, of any type and certainly don't appreciate ads related to some comment they made to someone.
It's like talking to a friend at the coffee shop and after you mention how much you like horses someone comes over to your table and wants to talk to you about some horse supplies he has for sale. Go away, leave me alone, stop listening in to my private conversations
Not that reporting insecurities in Bluetooth implementations isn't important, but the reality is someone is far more likely to kick your door open or manipulate your mechanical lock than they are to go to the trouble of sniffing your short range BTLE traffic to find a way to electronically open your lock.
A simple thermostat certainly isn't complicated. But is it very expensive to have a simple thermostat in many areas of the country.
Add a tiny bit of smarts like changing the setpoints based on the time of day and day of the week and you can save thousands of dollars a year in areas of the country where time of day electric rates make off peak electricity 1/4th the cost of on peak electricity.
Even smarter thermostats let me tells my thermostat remotely at a vacation home that I'm coming for the weekend and to please switch from away mode to present mode.
Much smarter thermostats let utilities even out peak demand by keeping everyone's AC from running at the same time.
But you are always free to buy the $10 model at Home Depot if it meets your needs or build your own.
One day, your thermostat will get hacked by some cybercriminal
No, it won't: I'm not falling for the 'Internet of Things' troll/meme. You won't be hacking my thermostat, lightbulbs, dishwasher, microwave oven, clothes washer, clothes dryer, television, or any other household appliance because there's not a single damned good reason why these NEED to be connected to the Internet.
Unless the only things you have hooked to your TV are an antenna and a DVD player the chances are it already is connected to the Internet or whatever you are using to view videos is connected. There are great reasons to connect a TV to the internet, watching all the content you can get from the internet.
A smart dishwasher might be sending sensor information to the manufacturer where early signs of failure can be identified and you alerted prior to the dishwasher failing.
A microwave oven might have a voice interactive control system and the voice recognition is done in the cloud.
Your dryer might communicate with the power company who gives you a discounted rate if they are allowed to shut it off for short intervals to minimize peak power draw.
Your washing machine might get updated with new, better washing algorithms or send information about how well wash cycles are working back to the manufacturer so they can get your clothes cleaner or as clean in less time.
I suppose there isn't a single damn reason why you need to connect to Slashdot and leave comments. But you enjoy it so have at it. Other people might enjoy talking to their microwave while you want to turn a dial and press start. Different strokes for different folks.
8 smoke alarms, 1 smart thermostat, 4 smart locks, 48 smart lightbulbs and someone needs to go flip a switch on each of them every time a firmware update is needed? No thanks.
I would pay the $75 it costs to get a locksmith to come over and spend 5 minutes opening my lock. Plus the cost of the locksmith removing the smart locks and putting some locks that aren't going to cost me future calls to the locksmith.
After all, I'm going to have to have the locks replaced anyway so no sense paying a ransom AND paying a locksmith vs just paying the locksmith.
I can sit in my car with the heater running while I'm waiting in the cold weather for the locksmith to show up.
Or worst case, I'll bust a $100 pane of glass to get it and pay for a locksmith and the cost of repairing the window.
Pay me a ransom because you'll die if you don't get in your house and I'll just keep bleeding you for more payments until you either freeze to death or you run out of money or run out of stupid.
Most products on Amazon are actually coming from Amazon partners and often shipped by the Amazon partner direct to the consumer. Many commonly ordered items are delivered by the partners to Amazon to stock in an Amazon warehouse for faster delivery. Rarely is Amazon the actual entity that is the seller, Amazon has little interest in spending its own capital on stocking inventory.
Jet.com did originally attempt to build market share by advertising products that weren't even from Jet.com partners. When someone ordered the product Jet.com placed an order with the actual seller for delivery to Jet.com's customer, sometimes at a price lower than the price Jet.com paid for the product.
The cost to the IRS of tracking down and prosecuting some tax scofflaw may far exceed what they recover but the fear that prosecution produces in others can result in additional tax revenue that covers the cost.
They don't have to catch x people/yr to recover the cost, they need to put fear into enough people to recover the cost.
Experimental Defense for Website Traffic Fingerprinting
Website fingerprinting is the act of recognizing web traffic through surveillance despite the use of encryption or anonymizing software. The general idea is to leverage the fact that many web sites have specific fixed request patterns and response byte counts that are known beforehand. This information can be used to recognize your web traffic despite attempts at encryption or tunneling. Websites that have an abundance of static content and a fixed request structure tend to be vulnerable to this type of surveillance. Unfortunately, there is enough static content on most websites for this to be the case....
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Reducing peak demand doesn't mean using less electricity and reducing peak demand by 50MW can in fact eliminate the need for 50MW of generating capacity.
If you have a cafeteria that seats 100 and there are 200 employees who want to eat their lunch for 30 minutes at the cafeteria simply have half go at 11:45 and half at 12:15. It really isn't that big of a deal and it does save the cost of building a bigger cafeteria. If it makes you angry to eat at 11:45 instead of 12:15 then simply get someone to swap with you. I'm not sure you'll notice if your A/C runs from 11:45 to 12:15 instead of 12:15 to 12:45 but if the thought bothers you too much maybe they can have the system change the clocks in your house as well so you think it is running from 12:15 to 12:45 so you can be content.
I'd say that reducing peak demand is less expensive than building a solar power plant just as replacing an 80W light bulb with a 6W light bulb is cheaper than adding 74W of capacity to a power plant.
It really is just math, nothing to do with hipsters or eco logic.
I'm sure your hyperbolic "drastically change how they live" assertions can be safely ignored as untrue.
All the load controllers I'm familiar prevent short cycling your A/C unit.
I'm sure the units you used in the 90's were stupid, it's now 20+ years later and $5 microcontrollers are quite smart.
If you believe you won't be comfortable because your A/C turns on 10 minutes later than it would have turned on if your existing dumb thermostat was installed then you are mistaken. But I'm all in favor of letting you continue to have your dumb thermostat turn your A/C on and off whenever you want and for your to pay 4X as much for your power as me. No skin off my nose.
Personally I prefer saving a few hundred dollars a month in electric bills while remaining just as comfortable.
The devices do not deprive you of A/C during the hottest part of the day or indeed during any part of the day.
They merely reduce peak demand by leveling usage.
Pre-cooling a house absolutely does work because you aren't pre-cooling it "during the hottest part of the day", you are cooling it during the non-peak demand periods which are non-peak precisely because they are the cooler parts of the day/night. You specifically run your A/C less during the hottest times of the day.
You don't "lose your A/C during the hottest part of the day either", you completely misunderstand, you just try to use it less during the hottest part of the day.
A smart thermostat is able to pre-cool and then use the A/C just enough to keep the temperature rise down to the point that it doesn't exceed a desired max while using the A/C the least during peak periods.
Smart thermostats just regulate your home's temperature without any ability to reduce peak demand. They can reduce your total consumption but not peak demand. Timers also don't reduce peak demand, unless you simply set them to not run during peak hours.
Imagine a city with 100,000 A/C units. They run an average of 25% of the time during peak use times. If more than 25% of them are on at one particular time then they increase peak demand. By understanding demand needs of all the homes an intelligent algorithm can give each home all the A/C cooling they need while minimizing peak demand.
You can still have your home at 76 degrees while home if that is what you want. Your individual need for more cooling soon is in the noise, but in the aggregate all those units cooperating can substantially reduce peak loads. Particularly when coupled with other high load appliances that also don't need to run at specific times, such as hot water heaters.
No, I'm pretty sure it must be something else. I live in the land of the Prius and haven't seen any hypermiling in the left lane at 40mph.
It must be something else, maybe related to whatever causes people to engage in hyperbole.
Some people properly insulate their house, ... and also drive a Prius.
That driving a Prius is pretty effortless isn't a bad thing, though some people seem to take a dislike to people who Do Something like driving a Prius, I'm not sure why.
It's real simple why you might want a load controller shutting off your A/C at times, the electric company is willing to sell you power for a substantial discount.
You don't have to be miserable, you just have to plan.
Pre-cool your house, don't run the electric dryer between noon and 9pm, ...
Tesla/SolarCity will likely eventually announce an integrated system that uses a battery pack plus load controller to minimize your peak demand and allow you to save substantially on your power bill.
I'll let you know in 2116 how my backups are doing, oh wait, I won't care whether or not I can still restore my backup of my 2016 laptop.
I'm sure we'll do exactly what we've done in the past. Take our grandparents collection of photographs, slides and Super-8 movies and move them to new media. Maybe it was to floppies, then CDs, then DVDs, then flash drives, then cloud storage, but most people aren't looking for a single media that will last 100 years. The entirety of my grand-parent's large collection of photographs, slides and Super-8 movies all fits in a 2.5" USB drive after being digitized. I don't care if they didn't use archival photography paper that lasts 100 years, the cheap Osco Drug prints lasted long enough to make it to the next generation of media.
Perhaps Facebook can tell us what Better User Experience they can create by mining the phone number of private, encrypted text messages?
I've found that by replacing WhatsApp with Signal I have a far better user experience, namely my private communications remain private. I've already removed Facebook from my phone, I can use my laptop for the occasional checking up on what family and friends are doing
Facebook, like Google, asks people who delete their ads why they did so. The choices include irrelevant but don't include "I hate all ads" or "ads are disruptive".
So Facebook can proudly say they will make ads more relevant to help their customers when the reality is their customers don't like ads, of any type and certainly don't appreciate ads related to some comment they made to someone.
It's like talking to a friend at the coffee shop and after you mention how much you like horses someone comes over to your table and wants to talk to you about some horse supplies he has for sale. Go away, leave me alone, stop listening in to my private conversations
Your locksmith was incorrect.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
But his incorrect information did allow him to charge you for drilling out your old lock and sell you a new one.
Not that reporting insecurities in Bluetooth implementations isn't important, but the reality is someone is far more likely to kick your door open or manipulate your mechanical lock than they are to go to the trouble of sniffing your short range BTLE traffic to find a way to electronically open your lock.
A simple thermostat certainly isn't complicated. But is it very expensive to have a simple thermostat in many areas of the country.
Add a tiny bit of smarts like changing the setpoints based on the time of day and day of the week and you can save thousands of dollars a year in areas of the country where time of day electric rates make off peak electricity 1/4th the cost of on peak electricity.
Even smarter thermostats let me tells my thermostat remotely at a vacation home that I'm coming for the weekend and to please switch from away mode to present mode.
Much smarter thermostats let utilities even out peak demand by keeping everyone's AC from running at the same time.
But you are always free to buy the $10 model at Home Depot if it meets your needs or build your own.
One day, your thermostat will get hacked by some cybercriminal
No, it won't: I'm not falling for the 'Internet of Things' troll/meme. You won't be hacking my thermostat, lightbulbs, dishwasher, microwave oven, clothes washer, clothes dryer, television, or any other household appliance because there's not a single damned good reason why these NEED to be connected to the Internet.
Unless the only things you have hooked to your TV are an antenna and a DVD player the chances are it already is connected to the Internet or whatever you are using to view videos is connected. There are great reasons to connect a TV to the internet, watching all the content you can get from the internet.
A smart dishwasher might be sending sensor information to the manufacturer where early signs of failure can be identified and you alerted prior to the dishwasher failing.
A microwave oven might have a voice interactive control system and the voice recognition is done in the cloud.
Your dryer might communicate with the power company who gives you a discounted rate if they are allowed to shut it off for short intervals to minimize peak power draw.
Your washing machine might get updated with new, better washing algorithms or send information about how well wash cycles are working back to the manufacturer so they can get your clothes cleaner or as clean in less time.
I suppose there isn't a single damn reason why you need to connect to Slashdot and leave comments. But you enjoy it so have at it. Other people might enjoy talking to their microwave while you want to turn a dial and press start. Different strokes for different folks.
8 smoke alarms, 1 smart thermostat, 4 smart locks, 48 smart lightbulbs and someone needs to go flip a switch on each of them every time a firmware update is needed? No thanks.
I don't think DMZ means what you think it means.
You want it behind a firewall that tightly controls what can talk to it and what can talk to it.
I would pay the $75 it costs to get a locksmith to come over and spend 5 minutes opening my lock. Plus the cost of the locksmith removing the smart locks and putting some locks that aren't going to cost me future calls to the locksmith.
After all, I'm going to have to have the locks replaced anyway so no sense paying a ransom AND paying a locksmith vs just paying the locksmith.
I can sit in my car with the heater running while I'm waiting in the cold weather for the locksmith to show up.
Or worst case, I'll bust a $100 pane of glass to get it and pay for a locksmith and the cost of repairing the window.
Pay me a ransom because you'll die if you don't get in your house and I'll just keep bleeding you for more payments until you either freeze to death or you run out of money or run out of stupid.
Paying a ransom without fixing the vulnerability is not going to be cheaper.
So you pay to fix the problem and ignore the hacker's demands.
Anyone who responds would go on a hacker sucker list.
What's next, someone is going to hack a lightbulb and demand $100 or threaten to leave it on 24/7?
Jet.com does have warehouses.
Most products on Amazon are actually coming from Amazon partners and often shipped by the Amazon partner direct to the consumer. Many commonly ordered items are delivered by the partners to Amazon to stock in an Amazon warehouse for faster delivery. Rarely is Amazon the actual entity that is the seller, Amazon has little interest in spending its own capital on stocking inventory.
Jet.com did originally attempt to build market share by advertising products that weren't even from Jet.com partners. When someone ordered the product Jet.com placed an order with the actual seller for delivery to Jet.com's customer, sometimes at a price lower than the price Jet.com paid for the product.
Certainly, VPN to a location in the UK, make sure your DNS is set to a UK DNS server and enjoy.
The cost to the IRS of tracking down and prosecuting some tax scofflaw may far exceed what they recover but the fear that prosecution produces in others can result in additional tax revenue that covers the cost.
They don't have to catch x people/yr to recover the cost, they need to put fear into enough people to recover the cost.
A Tor Project article from 2011
https://blog.torproject.org/bl...
Experimental Defense for Website Traffic Fingerprinting
Website fingerprinting is the act of recognizing web traffic through surveillance despite the use of encryption or anonymizing software. The general idea is to leverage the fact that many web sites have specific fixed request patterns and response byte counts that are known beforehand. This information can be used to recognize your web traffic despite attempts at encryption or tunneling. Websites that have an abundance of static content and a fixed request structure tend to be vulnerable to this type of surveillance. Unfortunately, there is enough static content on most websites for this to be the case. ...