In California you can use cheaper panels because they don't have to be rated to withstand hurricane force winds.
I did a quick search comparing the two cities. In 2014, Victorville had stronger winds, across the board than Tampa:
Victorville, CA:
The highest sustained wind speed was 38 mph, occurring on February 28; the highest daily mean wind speed was 22 mph (April 26); and the highest wind gust speed was 52 mph (February 28). http://weatherspark.com/histor...
Tampa, FL:
The highest sustained wind speed was 28 mph, occurring on September 15; the highest daily mean wind speed was 17 mph (April 17); and the highest wind gust speed was 48 mph (June 13). http://weatherspark.com/histor...
With houses in Florida not able to resist hurricane force winds, I don't see why you think solar panels will have to be built like stone tablets...
so that's another reason to have school all year round; it will save money for parents who don't want to have to pay for summer camps and things like that.
No. Year-round schools still have the same number of days (180), they're just distributed differently. One lump sum, or spread-out?
Ethanol can store a lot of energy in a relatively compact space in a fairly stable form
It can, but we can only convert a fraction of it into usable energy.
Methanol is better, just because we have working methanol fuel cells (often in forklifts) right now.
Grid level storage is still a big problem that is still not completely solved...
1) Nope. We've got many megawatts of pumped-hydro storage installed. Existing dams can be retrofitted with pumps pretty easily, IF it was needed. 2) Solar panels are extremely predictable, and track pretty close to peak electrical demand. 3) Solar thermal offers free thermal storage with molten sodium. 4) Solar/wind does NOT need storage to work on the grid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Maybe so, but high density and high power demands could alternatively make sun-tracking and/or higher efficiency concentrated-sunlight PV systems practical.
My solution - solar generation near the equator used to create synthetic ethanol on a large scale. - Then ship it out the countries that need it.
The conversion losses in that would be absolutely astronomical, and wouldn't hope to compare with local solar/wind power charging batteries, pumped-hydro storage, or just regular grid balancing between different power sources.
My roof is the floor of the people upstairs. I can't install solar!
You can't do it on your own, (except for a few in the windows or on the balcony) but you certainly could get together with other renters and the landlord, and get a shared PV system installed on the building's roof.
People who rent can't do anything to their property.
Until the government says you can... They can preempt the owner's wishes. One law voted-in saying owners MUST allow renters to install solar panels (or wind), and suddenly a huge portion of the population has the ability to do so.
At some point (probably quite easy to graph) the combination of cheaper solar, cheaper durable deep cycle power storage, and braindead easy inverter and other power management technologies will make it feasible to switch to fully off grid with very little pain.
The efficiency of charging/discharging batteries, will never be as good as the efficiency of the grid, just drawing power from a different baseload source without the storage losses.
Combine that with the up-front cost of those batteries, and you really won't ever be saving money on the infrastructure, either, unless you're in a rather rural area with a long run of lines just serving your house.
Factories will move closer to power generation sites or will move the power generation sites closer to the factories.
That won't work out too well for grocery stores and all the other major industrial power users who have to sell directly to the general public.
have containers with massive batteries that are charged at a power generation site and then trucked to the building. This might sound bonkers but it could end up being cheaper than paying for the unwieldy infrastructure of a power grid.
That's sure to be vastly more expensive and ridiculously inefficient.
And it's not One truck with batteries vs. The power grid... It's One truck with batteries vs. The one set of wires from the power plant to the building. A wire doesn't cost much...
Right now it is stupid to have any incandescent bulbs in your house. Yet most people still do.
"any" is a stretch. I don't see non-incandescent replacements for oven lights being economical. And for very-rarely used lights (eg. attics) the payoff time for the up-front price of more efficient lights is on the order of decades...
Where LEDs have the most overwhelming benefits, like in refrigerators, the market doesn't seem to be getting the word out, or making products that are sure to fit the form factor, and the public is utterly clueless that there is even a problem or an option.
People will look at the 150W 55" TV and instead and opt for the 120W 55" TV
Not a chance. Because:
* You can't even get that information. * 30W is a tiny difference, completely overwhelmed by the up-front price if there is a difference. * You can't get the features you want in a TV, in a power envelope you demand. The two are intertwined, and nobody will sacrifice the features they're going to want to use, for a few watts of power. * If they cared about efficiency, they just wouldn't be getting a 55" TV in the first place, when a 40" would do the job just as well... Just a few years ago, almost nobody bought a TV larger than 32", even though they were available. Nothing has changed to make huge TVs *necessary* today.
Why are they spending all this money speeding up their network when it's wasted on their customers. It's crazy.
If customers are stupid enough to pay more money for the faster speeds that they aren't allowed to use, then Verizon would be stupid not to take their money...
It's a bit hard to say that GM's cars are as good as Ford's or anyone else's based on sales, because of the explicit government manipulation of the auto market
If that's your stumbling block, just back just a few years before the bailout, and what I said still holds true.
Certainly in my anecdotal experience GM cars have been slightly but perceptibly lower quality,
I'd say the reverse.
and I think a lot of people who are currently getting new ignition switches would agree with me.
That's just the fad scare story of the day. A couple years ago, Toyota was the most horrible car company in the world... A few years before that, it was somebody else...
You realize 'Detroit' still uses brushed DC motors to run windows up and down.
Power windows is a pretty ideal usage for brushed motors, as are starters. Power tools similarly just about always use brushed motors for the same reasons.
Maybe not Detroit, but definitely not in Northern California - it's way too expensive to do business there
It's only insanely expensive near the major cities. Go two hours out, stay away from the coast, and cost of living isn't too much worse than Bumfuck, Texas. Certainly low enough to keep lots of people happy with minimum wage, and still be close enough to the pool of highly skilled people who want to live in someplace that's nothing like Michigan...
California has tons of huge warehouse facilities that are competitive with anywhere else. The huge pool of available labor means they aren't importing people and paying relocation and other premiums.
Unlike GM and Chrysler, Ford didn't need a bailout. It was out-competing Japanese auto companie on quality, reliability, safety, and price-performance.
Bull. Ford happened to have a few months more of a cash reserve than GM. That's it. GM's cars are every bit as good as Ford's.
Ford has about HALF the output of GM, VW and Toyota, so claiming Ford is better all-around, is also matter of denying that capitalism works AT ALL.
I actually had a guy complain how his children "hadn't had TV in TWO WEEKS!" (the very thick south Georgia accent made it sound very funny)
I struggled to stifle my laugh because he said in all seriousness. And I bit my tongue from saying, "Maybe it is a GOOD thing and maybe your kids should pick up a book. They have them for FREE at your library!"
The idea that reading books is somehow better, is a lot of ageist, self-loathing and massively wrong-headed dogma.
TV is a great and edifying device. Leave your TV tuned to PBS all day, and you'll have the smarted kids around... Many hours each day of pre-kindergarten educational shows, and shows which edify even the most well-read adults:
Nova American Experience Secrets of the Dead Charlie Rose History Detectives Nature Wild! This Old House Hometime NOW Scientific American Frontiers National Geographic POV Independent Lens Masterpiece / Mystery! BBC World News
so basically, they are subsidizing a new generation of kids to grow up addicted to watching 'teen-wolf' on MTV-tube.
Maybe... but like radio, TV and telephones before it, not having internet access is cutting you off from a huge world of invaluable information, even if you only spend 0.1% of your overall time accessing it. It's not as if they're being charged by the hour of by the MByte, so wasting lots of time doesn't cost anything, and doesn't preclude the valuable uses.
when left to their own devices they used their internet access for NOT educational rich-poor-divide-shrinking stuff, but rather typical time-wasting stuff
And the same is true of rich people who pay for their own internet access... So what's the problem? Do you have some crazy puritanical streak that says poor kids should spend every waking hour working their asses off, like their lives depend on it? People spend more time on entertainment than education, but the former doesn't preclude the later. How many people here can say that they spend no time on mindless entertainment?
Automated software to detect it? How the fuck do they even do that?
You're kidding, right? Ever heard of Google Image Search or TinEye? You give it a URL, or upload a photo, and it'll give you a list of identical and highly-similar images...
From there, it's a no-brainer to feed the system with URLs of known pedo sites... either ones Google employees have identified, or those they've gotten law-enforcement requests to take-down.
And even without the TinEye type system, it's still a no-brainer to checksum/hash all those images, and see if an exactly identical one shows up on your servers, somewhere, somehow.
the billions of dollars that companies pay for spectrum aren't paid out of "free money", it's paid by consumers.
This tired old canary again?
Companies can't just raise their prices and make more money. There is such a thing as supply and demand. If companies aren't already pricing their services as the highest they can get, they're leaving money on the table. So they simply can't make any more money by raising prices on consumers.
That means any added expenses taken on by the company, must either result in better services that consumers are willing and able to pay MORE for, or it must come out of the company's profits.
That's why things like tax breaks, subsidies, etc., given to companies, just result in higher profits for shareholders, rather than price reductions, more jobs, etc., etc.
100 miles is a pretty long way to be commuting to work every workday. That's more than 2 hours per day commuting assuming it's mostly interstate at 80 mph. Why would anyone do that to themselves?
Because working a second-job for that 2-hours every day, wouldn't ever hope to pay for the difference between a $100,000 house with a long commute, and a (smaller) $1mil house with only a short commute.
So living 90 miles away from work is the norm in California?
It is quite common, yes.
Anything more than 20 miles from city center is considered hillbilly territory
Nonsense. The most desirable areas shift every decade or so. And you clearly have no idea just how sprawling California cities are.
Anywhere along the coast is high-rent. In SoCal, you could live in nice and expensive parts of San Diego, and commute to Burbank, without ever even driving through an area where condos cost less than half a mil.
In NorCal, going between the coast and Sacramento is common. 'cisco to San Jose is about 60 miles of high-rent areas, and you can't get a cheap house anywhere along the route.
The average vehicle is only driven 12,000 miles/yr, the average commute vehicle about 15,000 miles/yr. If your gas cost is accurate, your use case is just so far outside the norm that your anecdote is probably only applicable to about 0.01% of the population.
Nobody drives an "average" vehicle. Either you pay a ton of money (often over 1mil) for housing in high-demand areas and barely need to drive, or you drive yourself a hell of a long way from your nice cheap home with a big yard, to work and back again, every day.
42,000 miles/year is just a medium commute here in California, and complaining about it will bring ridicule down on you, from those who do (or have) commute much further.
There's no way it can be cheaper than driving your own car
Sure it could... All those car payments, maintenance, license, insurance, parking, etc., can be effectively pooled by one driver, spreading the maintenance costs across dozens of people. In addition, the Uber driver could have a 50MPG Prius, instead of a 14MPG SUV, dropping the fuel costs by a factor of 3.5X, and pocketing some of the cash.
GP is probably playing very fast and loose with the numbers, but there's definitely a savings to be had by pooling/sharing resources such as vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
Comcast needed IPv6 internally, so they have rolled it out, even if you can't get it. Others have replied saying they've got IPv6 from them, as well.
Verizon offers LTE service, which is ALL IPv6. They've got 6to4, of course, but you can natively access any IPv6 services via your LTE phone.
I did a quick search comparing the two cities. In 2014, Victorville had stronger winds, across the board than Tampa:
Victorville, CA:
Tampa, FL:
With houses in Florida not able to resist hurricane force winds, I don't see why you think solar panels will have to be built like stone tablets...
No. Year-round schools still have the same number of days (180), they're just distributed differently. One lump sum, or spread-out?
It can, but we can only convert a fraction of it into usable energy.
Methanol is better, just because we have working methanol fuel cells (often in forklifts) right now.
1) Nope. We've got many megawatts of pumped-hydro storage installed. Existing dams can be retrofitted with pumps pretty easily, IF it was needed.
2) Solar panels are extremely predictable, and track pretty close to peak electrical demand.
3) Solar thermal offers free thermal storage with molten sodium.
4) Solar/wind does NOT need storage to work on the grid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Did you try disabling anything and everything (drivers) in the kernel? Or perhaps just blacklisting most/all the modules?
OpenBSD makes this easier with UKC and "config -e".
Projection screens, much lighter than CRTs, have been available for a long time.
Maybe so, but high density and high power demands could alternatively make sun-tracking and/or higher efficiency concentrated-sunlight PV systems practical.
The conversion losses in that would be absolutely astronomical, and wouldn't hope to compare with local solar/wind power charging batteries, pumped-hydro storage, or just regular grid balancing between different power sources.
Meanwhile, you can easily power your electric car with the solar panels on the roof of your HOUSE, where there's much more surface area.
You can't do it on your own, (except for a few in the windows or on the balcony) but you certainly could get together with other renters and the landlord, and get a shared PV system installed on the building's roof.
Until the government says you can... They can preempt the owner's wishes. One law voted-in saying owners MUST allow renters to install solar panels (or wind), and suddenly a huge portion of the population has the ability to do so.
The efficiency of charging/discharging batteries, will never be as good as the efficiency of the grid, just drawing power from a different baseload source without the storage losses.
Combine that with the up-front cost of those batteries, and you really won't ever be saving money on the infrastructure, either, unless you're in a rather rural area with a long run of lines just serving your house.
That won't work out too well for grocery stores and all the other major industrial power users who have to sell directly to the general public.
That's sure to be vastly more expensive and ridiculously inefficient.
And it's not One truck with batteries vs. The power grid... It's One truck with batteries vs. The one set of wires from the power plant to the building. A wire doesn't cost much...
"any" is a stretch. I don't see non-incandescent replacements for oven lights being economical. And for very-rarely used lights (eg. attics) the payoff time for the up-front price of more efficient lights is on the order of decades...
Where LEDs have the most overwhelming benefits, like in refrigerators, the market doesn't seem to be getting the word out, or making products that are sure to fit the form factor, and the public is utterly clueless that there is even a problem or an option.
Not a chance. Because:
* You can't even get that information.
* 30W is a tiny difference, completely overwhelmed by the up-front price if there is a difference.
* You can't get the features you want in a TV, in a power envelope you demand. The two are intertwined, and nobody will sacrifice the features they're going to want to use, for a few watts of power.
* If they cared about efficiency, they just wouldn't be getting a 55" TV in the first place, when a 40" would do the job just as well... Just a few years ago, almost nobody bought a TV larger than 32", even though they were available. Nothing has changed to make huge TVs *necessary* today.
If customers are stupid enough to pay more money for the faster speeds that they aren't allowed to use, then Verizon would be stupid not to take their money...
If that's your stumbling block, just back just a few years before the bailout, and what I said still holds true.
I'd say the reverse.
That's just the fad scare story of the day. A couple years ago, Toyota was the most horrible car company in the world... A few years before that, it was somebody else...
Power windows is a pretty ideal usage for brushed motors, as are starters. Power tools similarly just about always use brushed motors for the same reasons.
It's only insanely expensive near the major cities. Go two hours out, stay away from the coast, and cost of living isn't too much worse than Bumfuck, Texas. Certainly low enough to keep lots of people happy with minimum wage, and still be close enough to the pool of highly skilled people who want to live in someplace that's nothing like Michigan...
California has tons of huge warehouse facilities that are competitive with anywhere else. The huge pool of available labor means they aren't importing people and paying relocation and other premiums.
Bull. Ford happened to have a few months more of a cash reserve than GM. That's it. GM's cars are every bit as good as Ford's.
Ford has about HALF the output of GM, VW and Toyota, so claiming Ford is better all-around, is also matter of denying that capitalism works AT ALL.
The idea that reading books is somehow better, is a lot of ageist, self-loathing and massively wrong-headed dogma.
TV is a great and edifying device. Leave your TV tuned to PBS all day, and you'll have the smarted kids around... Many hours each day of pre-kindergarten educational shows, and shows which edify even the most well-read adults:
Nova
American Experience
Secrets of the Dead
Charlie Rose
History Detectives
Nature
Wild!
This Old House
Hometime
NOW
Scientific American Frontiers
National Geographic
POV
Independent Lens
Masterpiece / Mystery!
BBC World News
And quite a few more good region-specific shows, like Huell Howser and California Connected (née Life and Times) here on the west coast.
That's a reasonable week worth of TV viewing. I challenge anyone to assimilate that some information, week after week, reading books from the library.
Maybe... but like radio, TV and telephones before it, not having internet access is cutting you off from a huge world of invaluable information, even if you only spend 0.1% of your overall time accessing it. It's not as if they're being charged by the hour of by the MByte, so wasting lots of time doesn't cost anything, and doesn't preclude the valuable uses.
And the same is true of rich people who pay for their own internet access... So what's the problem? Do you have some crazy puritanical streak that says poor kids should spend every waking hour working their asses off, like their lives depend on it? People spend more time on entertainment than education, but the former doesn't preclude the later. How many people here can say that they spend no time on mindless entertainment?
You're kidding, right? Ever heard of Google Image Search or TinEye? You give it a URL, or upload a photo, and it'll give you a list of identical and highly-similar images...
From there, it's a no-brainer to feed the system with URLs of known pedo sites... either ones Google employees have identified, or those they've gotten law-enforcement requests to take-down.
And even without the TinEye type system, it's still a no-brainer to checksum/hash all those images, and see if an exactly identical one shows up on your servers, somewhere, somehow.
This tired old canary again?
Companies can't just raise their prices and make more money. There is such a thing as supply and demand. If companies aren't already pricing their services as the highest they can get, they're leaving money on the table. So they simply can't make any more money by raising prices on consumers.
That means any added expenses taken on by the company, must either result in better services that consumers are willing and able to pay MORE for, or it must come out of the company's profits.
That's why things like tax breaks, subsidies, etc., given to companies, just result in higher profits for shareholders, rather than price reductions, more jobs, etc., etc.
Because working a second-job for that 2-hours every day, wouldn't ever hope to pay for the difference between a $100,000 house with a long commute, and a (smaller) $1mil house with only a short commute.
It is quite common, yes.
Nonsense. The most desirable areas shift every decade or so. And you clearly have no idea just how sprawling California cities are.
Anywhere along the coast is high-rent. In SoCal, you could live in nice and expensive parts of San Diego, and commute to Burbank, without ever even driving through an area where condos cost less than half a mil.
In NorCal, going between the coast and Sacramento is common. 'cisco to San Jose is about 60 miles of high-rent areas, and you can't get a cheap house anywhere along the route.
Nobody drives an "average" vehicle. Either you pay a ton of money (often over 1mil) for housing in high-demand areas and barely need to drive, or you drive yourself a hell of a long way from your nice cheap home with a big yard, to work and back again, every day.
42,000 miles/year is just a medium commute here in California, and complaining about it will bring ridicule down on you, from those who do (or have) commute much further.
Sure it could... All those car payments, maintenance, license, insurance, parking, etc., can be effectively pooled by one driver, spreading the maintenance costs across dozens of people. In addition, the Uber driver could have a 50MPG Prius, instead of a 14MPG SUV, dropping the fuel costs by a factor of 3.5X, and pocketing some of the cash.
GP is probably playing very fast and loose with the numbers, but there's definitely a savings to be had by pooling/sharing resources such as vehicles.
Smarter or not, they won't fall for the same scam again.