For heavy rush hour, mass transit can move more people -- though subways are surprisingly space inefficient if you think of how the track is only used for a score of seconds every 5 minutes.
However, the capacity of existing roads to handle more tightly packed, well behavied 4' wide single person vehicles is much larger than you might give credit for. Especially a large grid of roads. With vehicles that always perfectly synchronize with the traffic lights. While the technology is not far enough along to make a solid projection, I think there's several times today's capacity in the roads.
However, at rush hour, nothing precludes people zooming in mini robocars to train stations, taking well loaded trains, and then getting into different robocars at the other end. We already have the train tracks in place.
However, what does cause trouble is that during the rest of the day, nobody will want to do that, which hurts the economics of those trains.
There are many good things we can do. My focus is to find something people actually will do. They don't do things just because they _should_. They change behaviour when something is better or cheaper, or more to the point better and cheaper.
To save the planet, you must find solutions which people will embrace whether they are good for the planet or not.
Yes, there is a section on this in the article. A variety of ways are spelled out of this problem. The most likely may be that while the technology is pioneered in the USA, it is deployed first in a place like Singapore, China, Japan or India that also has high tech but not the same legal problems.
After there is success in those places, Americans, afraid of falling behind the rest of the world in robotics and transportation, will find a way through the legal concerns.
They are insured the way anything else is insured. Actuaries measure risks, and policies are written. If they are, as they should be, safer in the aggregate, then these policies will be much cheaper than today's.
How do you get people to convert? I don't see any problem there. Look at New York or Hong Kong or London. Few own a car already in such cities, they take taxis and transit everywhere. Offered a cheap, quick, comfortable ride directly from A to B on short notice, where you can read or watch a screen while you ride, will take no effort to get huge numbers of people to convert.
Vandalism? It's an issue, as it is with ordinary cars. When empty, there are no privacy issues associated with having them video record their environment and beam it back to the owner. When they have an occupant, it's no different from current transport.
Passengers don't care about the range of their taxi. They only care if it will get them where they are going -- you left out the important 2nd part.
Lightweight, single-passenger electric cars are 10 times more energy efficient than today's gasoline cars. The power doesn't come from anywhere, in fact the goal is to use less than we use today. Going all electric does require a bigger electric grid -- which is at least domestic in power origin -- but in many cases car batteries can be charged at night, when the power grid has spare capacity.
As is described in TFA, one possible arrangement is the taxi contains a camera which has a shield over it while you are in the vehicle (to assure you of privacy) but which opens and takes a picture of the interior before and after every ride. If there is a large difference, this can be examined by a taxi company employee, who will see if you left something behind (most likely) and phone you, or if you messed it up, redirect the vehicle to a cleaning depot.
And add the cleaning charge to your bill, sent along with the photographs.
This does not work for an anonymously used taxi, however.
We can reduce problems with better design of new developments, and we should, but this can at most dent the problem. Only something which changes transportation for everybody -- urban, suburbs, rural, old, new -- can really affect our energy usage. Robocars are one way this could happen. They aren't the only one, but they're the best one I can see, and the best project for geeks.
This is discussed in the article. There is nothing that requires there be a "traffic control" or that you tell it where you are going, but there will be people who want to build such a system, and we must create the technology with care to discourage such architectures.
I hope I don't gloss over this (read the roadblocks section.) There are many technical and political problems to solve.
As for energy, the goal is to use far less energy than we use today (whether it's cheap or clean is nice but orthogonal) and it's far from limitless.
The AI is not so powerful. Most animals can navigate in traffic of their own kind, even insects. But no, it's no tiny project -- but it's a tractable large project.
You don't need to solve traveling salesman! In fact, I believe centralized control is a bad idea. You can solve traveling salesman over small problem sets, it's only trying to solve it for large numbers that's explosively NP. You just have to do better than we do today.
Rebuilding cities would be great, but will take many decades, even centuries. The key to the robocar idea is it is an innovation that can be introduced, one buyer at a time, once it's legal. That's how innovation really happens. (Compare 802.11 vs most other radio applications.)
The key is to find a path to more efficient transportation the public will adopt quickly, once offered.
What's $70,000 today in quantity 10,000 is $50 in 2020 in quantity 1 billion, if it's electronics.
No need for RFIDs or transponders. You need a system that works without other cars or the roads doing anything to get a user adoption - and we can get that.
Go deeper into the article about the end of transit. Buses are actually quite inefficient, because while loaded at rush hour, on average they carry few passengers. In the USA, city buses use more fuel per passenger-mile than cars do -- on average. And none of the other forms are a great deal better, though some do beat cars. Lightweight electric vehicles are 10 times more efficient than buses. It's one of the key realizations about transit in the article.
Trademarks do not expire, nor is there a strong argument that they should, other than after a company stops selling the product.
The test in trademark law is "likelihood of confusion." Which is to say, if you went up to a man in the street, and said, "We have a game where you spell words using tiles on a crossword like board, and get points for the letters, and it's called Scrabulous" is there a reasonable chance a person might confuse that with Scrabble, the trademarked Hasbro game?
I have to say it sure sounds like yes. And if it's a yes (and depending on how good your lawyers are it doesn't have to be a very strong yes) then the case is pretty clear.
Trademarks don't expire because aside from protecting the company, they are viewed as also protecting the public from being tricked into buying counterfeit goods. Of course, sometimes the public is better off with counterfeit goods, but the law does not take that view.
No, if it really works, I want to know. (Just receiving awards says little, alas, because the people giving the awards often are just as unclear on what's going on.)
If you're not near the grid, then of course you must go off-grid and there are green ways to do that and non-green.
But if you're next to the grid, I am hard pressed to understand why it would be greener to be off the grid rather than connecting to it. Any solar or wind system will have times when it generates more power than is being used. This must be stored. It is usually stored in batteries (but there are some alternatives like pumping water uphill.) If it's batteries, they are normally not kept in permanent discharge, that's not good for them.
Ergo, there are times when you have extra power, but your batteries are too full to receive the extra power. That's when it's anti-green to not be tied to the grid, because you could be putting power into it and reducing the need for coal or gas. Plus you don't need that big bank of batteries with their own environmental issues.
If you're very far from the grid, off-grid designs can still be anti-green if they end up throwing away too much of the solar power they generate because batteries are not empty enough to take it. Then you must ask if living in the remote location is worth the anti-green power aspects of it. You can compensate by conservaton (though you could also do that on-grid.) While it seems counter-intuitive, it is possible to imagine situations where the green off-grid homestead should just pay to put solar panels on the grid somewhere, and use non-green but never wasted power at the remote location.
Of course "never wasted" is hard, since smaller diesel generators are not as efficient as grid ones, especially at low loads. But a system of fewer solar panels (not so much as you throw away power), a generator and batteries to keep the generator efficient, with the rest of the solar panels put on-grid, may be the greenest choice.
The grid would not suddenly go solar. But if there is solar that's cheaper than coal, nuke or gas to build, then power companies will build solar plans (pv or thermo) instead of new plants of other types. If solar gets cheaper than the fuel to run coal or gas plants, probably because of taxes on carbon since these plants are pretty cheap to run, then utilities would actually shut down coal/gas plants and put in solar plants.
If the difference is marginal, then this will happen slowly. If fossil fuel plants start costing twice as much as solar, it will happen pretty quickly.
Customers would also be switching, and sooner, because they don't have a direct cost for land, and don't have to suffer the 7% grid loss. The grid loss is overcome quickly, the land is a tougher issue, though the plans for thermosolar are in locations with very cheap land.
It does not have to be solar that beats the grid, of course. Wind, waves, geothermal, nukes -- any new technology cheaper than fossil grid will constrain the cost of that grid, especially if it's quick to build.
a) Solar panels will depreciate in value as solar tech improves. As soon as one of the many companies promising $1/watt solar delivers, your $5/watt panels depreciate almost entirely in resale value. They still put out electricity but they have lost their value and you still are making monthly payments on them. If nobody delivers on cheap solar, they keep more value.
b) Your panels will degrade, as will other parts. This is hard to predict, but it will happen. Some will fail. They may get damaged by rocks, trees or hail, which may be covered by insurance, but that has a cost.
c) Your principal in any other traditional investment that is paying you as much or more than the solar is a liquid investment, and does not reduce at all, and depending on the investment, has minimal risk. The S&P 500 does have risk, of course, though over decades it has always been good. PPDNGFR, however.
d) If they do develop $1/watt panels, not only will your $5 panels lose their value, but grid power will start moving to solar, making your monthly payment on the $5 panels greatly exceed the cost of grid power. Best to get some other sucker to own the panels, as some companies are offering to do. (But avoid citizenre)
Taking an on-grid house off the grid is just plain silly, and environmentally a poor choice. Off-grid solar systems tend to use large banks of batteries. To use them effectively, you don't want to fully discharage, so you find yourself often discarding all that solar power into batteries that are already mostly or fully charged. Since solar is not competitive with grid in most places, this hurts the economics seriously. And more to the point, if you were grid tied, you would be feeding that extra solar into the grid where it would be sure to be used (reducing demand for coal) rather than just throwing it away -- and having a large bank of batteries to recycle.
People who go off-grid when near the grid are not very green at all.
I think you're exactly wrong. You can't NOT do a time-cost-of-money analysis in any consideration of money flows in the future.
This does not say it isn't complex. To get the truth you must hedge grid rates, consider risk and a variety of other factors, but anything done on a linear basis will be very, very wrong.
I agree, you want to put in a smaller system. To get the best from solar in California, you must make sure you don't reduce your power bill below the baseline, because then you are only saving 11 cent/kwh power, not 30 cent/kwh power, and that's a money-loser. You don't want your electric bill to be zero. You want it to be your tier 1 baseline, which is around 250 kwh/month, it varies from place to place.
Up to 200% of baseline you pay 22.5 cents/kwh. That is about even with the cost of solar at 7% interest. So I can see debate as to whether you should keep your power bill at 200% of baseline rather than 100%, it's close to a wash in this zone. It does save money (with a very sizeable and possibly risky investment) for any consumption over 200% of baseline.
I agree that the S&P's return is a riskier portfolio, and hindsight is 20-20. However, to get a simpler approach, just compare it to your mortgage at say 7%. Now the decision to put the money into your mortgage vs. your rooftop is "safe as houses."
At this rate, solar can pay for itself against California's extreme incremental rates for tier 2 or 3. You should be careful not to reduce your bill below tier 2 or you will be losing money. He looks like he might be reducing it that much.
Look at my spreadsheet. At 7% interest, his solar system costs 23.7 cents/kwh. That is better than the California tier 2/3 rates, but much worse than the tier 1 rate or the rate in most places in the country.
Take away the rebate and it's 37 cents/kwh for his system, more expensive than any power anywhere.
The uncertainties are very low in the mortgage investment. Grid power could go up. Solar panels could and probably will go down. The solar panels are a large fixed investment that's hard to get out of.
Again, going green is good, and worth paying more for, but it is wrong to have the illusion it actually saves most people money. The people who can save a little money from it are:
a) Californians with lots of rebates and high tier 3 power costs, or others who pay or can get buyback at rates above 24 cents/kwh.
b) Corporations, especially in California, who can use the large federal write-off on top of the tax credit and rebates.
c) People who bet that grid power is going way up, and are correct.
It should be noted this is only for grid tie. Off-grid solar is neither economical compared to grid, nor is it particularly green since you throw away a lot of the available power into mostly charged batteries.
As noted, there are losses but not quite so high. Today good PC power supplies are 85% efficient.
You would still need a power supply to use DC. You can get them, they are made for automotive PCs etc. You need to regulate the unreliable power of the panels into the smooth 12v, 5v and other voltages the PCs need. The best way to do this is to invert it to high freq AC and bring it back.
Note that during the non-sunny parts of the day, which last longer than the sunny parts, you would then need to turn grid AC into DC to go into your DC power supply -- and that is even more wasteful.
Ideally you would want a special power supply, able to use DC in the range the panels put out, and also AC, as needed. Not hard to build, but will cost more as it is not made in quantity 1 million.
Note that most solar systems do not run at 12 volts, either, they often run at 36 or 48 or sometimes far more. So you need a PC power supply able to use that unusual voltage.
Today it's hard to make solar actually pay for itself. At California's high-tier rates, it is possible, but still takes a lot of work.
He says he put in $36,000 and will save $3,300 per year in payments to the power company. Now the historical annual rate of return of an S&P 500 index fund is 11.3% over the last century, so $36K put there would return over $4,000 -- enough to pay the $3,300 to the grid, have $700 left over and of course, still keeping the principal. Compared to that, the panels are losing money each year and will never pay for themselves -- unless grid power goes up a lot.
And grid power might go up, but only so far. Because eventually the grid power hits the solar price, and the grid itself starts putting in solar sources at that price -- because it's cheaper.
Most solar installations lose money hand over fist outside of California's high priced tiers. Today, solar comes in about 20 cents/kwh (at more like a 6% interest rate, not the 11.3% rate of the stock market.)
It is a mistake to think you can anonymize this data. Sure, you could strip everything out of the data, but then you would just have public information, since youtube will tell you how many views each video has already. So I presume the people who want to "anonymize" think they will, like the AOL logs, give pseudonyms to people.
I can think of many problems. For example, there are tons of videos on youtube that are never accessed except by the uploader and a few friends. Pretty easy to identify who the likely uploader is from the records, and thus identify a user. Or even if you never upload, a lot can be learned. For example, somebody looking for my records could first see what youtube videos have me in them. Most people have probably searched for their own name, and as such this is a clue as to which user is probably me.
And this is what I can think of in 2 minutes. With more time a lot of other things can leak.
Ok, you're going to hate me for saying this, because you feel they are collectors items, but really, they are just manufactured items made of bits.
So cut off the spines with an industrial paper cutter and put them through a sheetfed document scanner. Get over your attachment to paper.
If it's a special magazine that was signed by somebody or is rare, I could see keeping it. But otherwise it's a printout. The real value is in the information.
Now alas, these are probably copyrighted and can't be shared. If this were not the case this becomes a no brainer, because the "valuable" "original" would stay locked on your shelf, and the digital copy would provide value to many. It would be a strange devotion to the magazine to want to deprive so many of access to it in the name of preserving its "essence."
Scanners like the Internet Archive has are great, but they are expensive, and expensive to operate. As a result, fewer documents get scanned, and that's the tragedy, not the loss of the spine of a magazine.
You may not have, but many others do, and the generic words are highly priced and sell for 6 and 7 digit amounts. If there are only a small number of truly generic TLDs (and in reality, there is only one that people care about,.com) then if you own word.com you have gotten ownership rights in the word in the only meaningful naming system on the internet.
If there are lots of equivalent (truly equivalent) generic TLDs, then there would be no monopoly in such 2LDs.
But what some people want is far worse. They want a domain registrar to get a monopoly on a TLD like.mobi or.museum -- that's a much truer monopoly -- you can't have your domain end in ".museum" unless you obey the owners of that word.
Branded TLDs -- like.dunn or.yellowpages or.superdomains or similar made up terms -- would have no limit. Each would have a value only based on what it built for itself. It would not have the inherent value of ownership of a real word.
It's OK if the TLDs are brands (not generic like com, net or org) and there is some factor which limits them to resale use (otherwise we just punt the.com problem up a level.)
The big mistake was having generics in the first place. Trademark law figured out hundreds of years ago you don't grant people monopoly ownership rights in generic terms. To get ownership rights in a term it must be non-generic, not have meaning other than the meaning you created in it. Thus nobody owns the word "Apple" with regards to fruits, but you can own it with regard to computers, or records. Even better are made-up terms like Xerox and Kodak.
Anyway, we goofed by selling things like drugstore.com. We should fix that where we can, and not make it worse. If names are for resale only (you can't have your own sites in a TLD you own except for nic.TLD) and the names can't have any meaning for you to get a monopoly, then it can work.
Things like.xxx and.mobi and there rest are bad because they have a meaning, and grant a monopoly in internet naming to that meaning.
Slashdot Mirror
For heavy rush hour, mass transit can move more people -- though subways are surprisingly space inefficient if you think of how the track is only used for a score of seconds every 5 minutes.
However, the capacity of existing roads to handle more tightly packed, well behavied 4' wide single person vehicles is much larger than you might give credit for. Especially a large grid of roads. With vehicles that always perfectly synchronize with the traffic lights. While the technology is not far enough along to make a solid projection, I think there's several times today's capacity in the roads.
However, at rush hour, nothing precludes people zooming in mini robocars to train stations, taking well loaded trains, and then getting into different robocars at the other end. We already have the train tracks in place.
However, what does cause trouble is that during the rest of the day, nobody will want to do that, which hurts the economics of those trains.
There are many good things we can do. My focus is to find something people actually will do. They don't do things just because they _should_. They change behaviour when something is better or cheaper, or more to the point better and cheaper.
To save the planet, you must find solutions which people will embrace whether they are good for the planet or not.
Yes, there is a section on this in the article. A variety of ways are spelled out of this problem. The most likely may be that while the technology is pioneered in the USA, it is deployed first in a place like Singapore, China, Japan or India that also has high tech but not the same legal problems.
After there is success in those places, Americans, afraid of falling behind the rest of the world in robotics and transportation, will find a way through the legal concerns.
They are insured the way anything else is insured. Actuaries measure risks, and policies are written. If they are, as they should be, safer in the aggregate, then these policies will be much cheaper than today's.
How do you get people to convert? I don't see any problem there. Look at New York or Hong Kong or London. Few own a car already in such cities, they take taxis and transit everywhere. Offered a cheap, quick, comfortable ride directly from A to B on short notice, where you can read or watch a screen while you ride, will take no effort to get huge numbers of people to convert.
Vandalism? It's an issue, as it is with ordinary cars. When empty, there are no privacy issues associated with having them video record their environment and beam it back to the owner. When they have an occupant, it's no different from current transport.
Passengers don't care about the range of their taxi. They only care if it will get them where they are going -- you left out the important 2nd part.
Lightweight, single-passenger electric cars are 10 times more energy efficient than today's gasoline cars. The power doesn't come from anywhere, in fact the goal is to use less than we use today. Going all electric does require a bigger electric grid -- which is at least domestic in power origin -- but in many cases car batteries can be charged at night, when the power grid has spare capacity.
As is described in TFA, one possible arrangement is the taxi contains a camera which has a shield over it while you are in the vehicle (to assure you of privacy) but which opens and takes a picture of the interior before and after every ride. If there is a large difference, this can be examined by a taxi company employee, who will see if you left something behind (most likely) and phone you, or if you messed it up, redirect the vehicle to a cleaning depot.
And add the cleaning charge to your bill, sent along with the photographs.
This does not work for an anonymously used taxi, however.
We can reduce problems with better design of new developments, and we should, but this can at most dent the problem. Only something which changes transportation for everybody -- urban, suburbs, rural, old, new -- can really affect our energy usage. Robocars are one way this could happen. They aren't the only one, but they're the best one I can see, and the best project for geeks.
This is discussed in the article. There is nothing that requires there be a "traffic control" or that you tell it where you are going, but there will be people who want to build such a system, and we must create the technology with care to discourage such architectures.
I hope I don't gloss over this (read the roadblocks section.) There are many technical and political problems to solve.
As for energy, the goal is to use far less energy than we use today (whether it's cheap or clean is nice but orthogonal) and it's far from limitless.
The AI is not so powerful. Most animals can navigate in traffic of their own kind, even insects. But no, it's no tiny project -- but it's a tractable large project.
You don't need to solve traveling salesman! In fact, I believe centralized control is a bad idea. You can solve traveling salesman over small problem sets, it's only trying to solve it for large numbers that's explosively NP.
You just have to do better than we do today.
Rebuilding cities would be great, but will take many decades, even centuries. The key to the robocar idea is it is an innovation that can be introduced, one buyer at a time, once it's legal. That's how innovation really happens. (Compare 802.11 vs most other radio applications.)
The key is to find a path to more efficient transportation the public will adopt quickly, once offered.
What's $70,000 today in quantity 10,000 is $50 in 2020 in quantity 1 billion, if it's electronics.
No need for RFIDs or transponders. You need a system that works without other cars or the roads doing anything to get a user adoption - and we can get that.
Go deeper into the article about the end of transit. Buses are actually quite inefficient, because while loaded at rush hour, on average they carry few passengers. In the USA, city buses use more fuel per passenger-mile than cars do -- on average. And none of the other forms are a great deal better, though some do beat cars. Lightweight electric vehicles are 10 times more efficient than buses. It's one of the key realizations about transit in the article.
Trademarks do not expire, nor is there a strong argument that they should, other than after a company stops selling the product.
The test in trademark law is "likelihood of confusion." Which is to say, if you went up to a man in the street, and said, "We have a game where you spell words using tiles on a crossword like board, and get points for the letters, and it's called Scrabulous" is there a reasonable chance a person might confuse that with Scrabble, the trademarked Hasbro game?
I have to say it sure sounds like yes. And if it's a yes (and depending on how good your lawyers are it doesn't have to be a very strong yes) then the case is pretty clear.
Trademarks don't expire because aside from protecting the company, they are viewed as also protecting the public from being tricked into buying counterfeit goods. Of course, sometimes the public is better off with counterfeit goods, but the law does not take that view.
No, if it really works, I want to know. (Just receiving awards says little, alas, because the people giving the awards often are just as unclear on what's going on.)
If you're not near the grid, then of course you must go off-grid and there are green ways to do that and non-green.
But if you're next to the grid, I am hard pressed to understand why it would be greener to be off the grid rather than connecting to it. Any solar or wind system will have times when it generates more power than is being used. This must be stored. It is usually stored in batteries (but there are some alternatives like pumping water uphill.) If it's batteries, they are normally not kept in permanent discharge, that's not good for them.
Ergo, there are times when you have extra power, but your batteries are too full to receive the extra power. That's when it's anti-green to not be tied to the grid, because you could be putting power into it and reducing the need for coal or gas. Plus you don't need that big bank of batteries with their own environmental issues.
If you're very far from the grid, off-grid designs can still be anti-green if they end up throwing away too much of the solar power they generate because batteries are not empty enough to take it. Then you must ask if living in the remote location is worth the anti-green power aspects of it. You can compensate by conservaton (though you could also do that on-grid.) While it seems counter-intuitive, it is possible to imagine situations where the green off-grid homestead should just pay to put solar panels on the grid somewhere, and use non-green but never wasted power at the remote location.
Of course "never wasted" is hard, since smaller diesel generators are not as efficient as grid ones, especially at low loads. But a system of fewer solar panels (not so much as you throw away power), a generator and batteries to keep the generator efficient, with the rest of the solar panels put on-grid, may be the greenest choice.
The grid would not suddenly go solar. But if there is solar that's cheaper than coal, nuke or gas to build, then power companies will build solar plans (pv or thermo) instead of new plants of other types. If solar gets cheaper than the fuel to run coal or gas plants, probably because of taxes on carbon since these plants are pretty cheap to run, then utilities would actually shut down coal/gas plants and put in solar plants.
If the difference is marginal, then this will happen slowly. If fossil fuel plants start costing twice as much as solar, it will happen pretty quickly.
Customers would also be switching, and sooner, because they don't have a direct cost for land, and don't have to suffer the 7% grid loss. The grid loss is overcome quickly, the land is a tougher issue, though the plans for thermosolar are in locations with very cheap land.
It does not have to be solar that beats the grid, of course. Wind, waves, geothermal, nukes -- any new technology cheaper than fossil grid will constrain the cost of that grid, especially if it's quick to build.
I would disagree for several reasons:
a) Solar panels will depreciate in value as solar tech improves. As soon as one of the many companies promising $1/watt solar delivers, your $5/watt panels depreciate almost entirely in resale value. They still put out electricity but they have lost their value and you still are making monthly payments on them. If nobody delivers on cheap solar, they keep more value.
b) Your panels will degrade, as will other parts. This is hard to predict, but it will happen. Some will fail. They may get damaged by rocks, trees or hail, which may be covered by insurance, but that has a cost.
c) Your principal in any other traditional investment that is paying you as much or more than the solar is a liquid investment, and does not reduce at all, and depending on the investment, has minimal risk. The S&P 500 does have risk, of course, though over decades it has always been good. PPDNGFR, however.
d) If they do develop $1/watt panels, not only will your $5 panels lose their value, but grid power will start moving to solar, making your monthly payment on the $5 panels greatly exceed the cost of grid power. Best to get some other sucker to own the panels, as some companies are offering to do. (But avoid citizenre)
Taking an on-grid house off the grid is just plain silly, and environmentally a poor choice. Off-grid solar systems tend to use large banks of batteries. To use them effectively, you don't want to fully discharage, so you find yourself often discarding all that solar power into batteries that are already mostly or fully charged. Since solar is not competitive with grid in most places, this hurts the economics seriously. And more to the point, if you were grid tied, you would be feeding that extra solar into the grid where it would be sure to be used (reducing demand for coal) rather than just throwing it away -- and having a large bank of batteries to recycle.
People who go off-grid when near the grid are not very green at all.
I think you're exactly wrong. You can't NOT do a time-cost-of-money analysis in any consideration of money flows in the future.
This does not say it isn't complex. To get the truth you must hedge grid rates, consider risk and a variety of other factors, but anything done on a linear basis will be very, very wrong.
I agree, you want to put in a smaller system. To get the best from solar in California, you must make sure you don't reduce your power bill below the baseline, because then you are only saving 11 cent/kwh power, not 30 cent/kwh power, and that's a money-loser. You don't want your electric bill to be zero. You want it to be your tier 1 baseline, which is around 250 kwh/month, it varies from place to place.
Up to 200% of baseline you pay 22.5 cents/kwh. That is about even with the cost of solar at 7% interest. So I can see debate as to whether you should keep your power bill at 200% of baseline rather than 100%, it's close to a wash in this zone. It does save money (with a very sizeable and possibly risky investment) for any consumption over 200% of baseline.
I agree that the S&P's return is a riskier portfolio, and hindsight is 20-20. However, to get a simpler approach, just compare it to your mortgage at say 7%. Now the decision to put the money into your mortgage vs. your rooftop is "safe as houses."
At this rate, solar can pay for itself against California's extreme incremental rates for tier 2 or 3. You should be careful not to reduce your bill below tier 2 or you will be losing money. He looks like he might be reducing it that much.
Look at my spreadsheet. At 7% interest, his solar system costs 23.7 cents/kwh. That is better than the California tier 2/3 rates, but much worse than the tier 1 rate or the rate in most places in the country.
Take away the rebate and it's 37 cents/kwh for his system, more expensive than any power anywhere.
The uncertainties are very low in the mortgage investment. Grid power could go up. Solar panels could and probably will go down. The solar panels are a large fixed investment that's hard to get out of.
Again, going green is good, and worth paying more for, but it is wrong to have the illusion it actually saves most people money. The people who can save a little money from it are:
a) Californians with lots of rebates and high tier 3 power costs, or others who pay or can get buyback at rates above 24 cents/kwh.
b) Corporations, especially in California, who can use the large federal write-off on top of the tax credit and rebates.
c) People who bet that grid power is going way up, and are correct.
It should be noted this is only for grid tie. Off-grid solar is neither economical compared to grid, nor is it particularly green since you throw away a lot of the available power into mostly charged batteries.
As noted, there are losses but not quite so high. Today good PC power supplies are 85% efficient.
You would still need a power supply to use DC. You can get them, they are made for automotive PCs etc. You need to regulate the unreliable power of the panels into the smooth 12v, 5v and other voltages the PCs need. The best way to do this is to invert it to high freq AC and bring it back.
Note that during the non-sunny parts of the day, which last longer than the sunny parts, you would then need to turn grid AC into DC to go into your DC power supply -- and that is even more wasteful.
Ideally you would want a special power supply, able to use DC in the range the panels put out, and also AC, as needed. Not hard to build, but will cost more as it is not made in quantity 1 million.
Note that most solar systems do not run at 12 volts, either, they often run at 36 or 48 or sometimes far more. So you need a PC power supply able to use that unusual voltage.
Today it's hard to make solar actually pay for itself. At California's high-tier rates, it is possible, but still takes a lot of work.
He says he put in $36,000 and will save $3,300 per year in payments to the power company. Now the historical annual rate of return of an S&P 500 index fund is 11.3% over the last century, so $36K put there would return over $4,000 -- enough to pay the $3,300 to the grid, have $700 left over and of course, still keeping the principal. Compared to that, the panels are losing money each year and will never pay for themselves -- unless grid power goes up a lot.
And grid power might go up, but only so far. Because eventually the grid power hits the solar price, and the grid itself starts putting in solar sources at that price -- because it's cheaper.
Most solar installations lose money hand over fist outside of California's high priced tiers. Today, solar comes in about 20 cents/kwh (at more like a 6% interest rate, not the 11.3% rate of the stock market.)
Try this spreadsheet:
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pWKShknjJFBt7sOTCJre_SQ&hl=en
To work out the real cost.
It's worse if you consider that at the true cost of the system before rebates -- $48K if I read right, it really loses money.
Now, I'm not saying it's not good to put in solar to be greener, or that the government shouldn't be providing subsidies to make this happen.
I just don't want people to use the wrong math to think they are saving money, when in fact they are spending more (for a purpose.)
It is a mistake to think you can anonymize this data. Sure, you could strip everything out of the data, but then you would just have public information, since youtube will tell you how many views each video has already. So I presume the people who want to "anonymize" think they will, like the AOL logs, give pseudonyms to people.
I can think of many problems. For example, there are tons of videos on youtube that are never accessed except by the uploader and a few friends. Pretty easy to identify who the likely uploader is from the records, and thus identify a user. Or even if you never upload, a lot can be learned. For example, somebody looking for my records could first see what youtube videos have me in them. Most people have probably searched for their own name, and as such this is a clue as to which user is probably me.
And this is what I can think of in 2 minutes. With more time a lot of other things can leak.
Ok, you're going to hate me for saying this, because you feel they are collectors items, but really, they are just manufactured items made of bits.
So cut off the spines with an industrial paper cutter and put them through a sheetfed document scanner. Get over your attachment to paper.
If it's a special magazine that was signed by somebody or is rare, I could see keeping it. But otherwise it's a printout. The real value is in the information.
Now alas, these are probably copyrighted and can't be shared. If this were not the case this becomes a no brainer, because the "valuable" "original" would stay locked on your shelf, and the digital copy would provide value to many. It would be a strange devotion to the magazine to want to deprive so many of access to it in the name of preserving its "essence."
Scanners like the Internet Archive has are great, but they are expensive, and expensive to operate. As a result, fewer documents get scanned, and that's the tragedy, not the loss of the spine of a magazine.
You may not have, but many others do, and the generic words are highly priced and sell for 6 and 7 digit amounts. If there are only a small number of truly generic TLDs (and in reality, there is only one that people care about, .com) then if you own word.com you have gotten ownership rights in the word in the only meaningful naming system on the internet.
If there are lots of equivalent (truly equivalent) generic TLDs, then there would be no monopoly in such 2LDs.
But what some people want is far worse. They want a domain registrar to get a monopoly on a TLD like .mobi or .museum -- that's a much truer monopoly -- you can't have your domain end in ".museum" unless you obey the owners of that word.
Branded TLDs -- like .dunn or .yellowpages or .superdomains or similar made up terms -- would have no limit. Each would have a value only based on what it built for itself. It would not have the inherent value of ownership of a real word.
It's OK if the TLDs are brands (not generic like com, net or org) and there is some factor which limits them to resale use (otherwise we just punt the .com problem up a level.)
The big mistake was having generics in the first place. Trademark law figured out hundreds of years ago you don't grant people monopoly ownership rights in generic terms. To get ownership rights in a term it must be non-generic, not have meaning other than the meaning you created in it. Thus nobody owns the word "Apple" with regards to fruits, but you can own it with regard to computers, or records. Even better are made-up terms like Xerox and Kodak.
Anyway, we goofed by selling things like drugstore.com. We should fix that where we can, and not make it worse. If names are for resale only (you can't have your own sites in a TLD you own except for nic.TLD) and the names can't have any meaning for you to get a monopoly, then it can work.
Things like .xxx and .mobi and there rest are bad because they have a meaning, and grant a monopoly in internet naming to that meaning.
Full details are at http://www.templetons.com/brad/dns/