That study says that going from one monitor to three gives a 35% productivity boost. If the cost of the programmer to the company is 100K a year (if you include all overhead, it is probably more than that), then the company will experience a loss of 25K worth of labor by cheaping out and not spending a few hundred bucks on a couple more monitors. Basically, the extra monitors pay for themselves in one week. What business wouldn't want to do this?
The lower row is what I'm currently working on. The upper row is where I put things that other people would minimize or let other applications cover them. Basically, I never minimize to the taskbar, and I almost never have windows covering other windows. I would say this setup has improved my productivity at least 50%, and made my work much less stressful.
When I first built an Octomon setup (that's what I call it), it cost about 12 grand. If I were building one today, I would probably go with four 30" monitors (even more pixels than my eight 24" monitors) or eight of the Apple 27" monitors. Either way would be significantly less than what it used to cost for a much better system. There are great video cards out these days that make building these systems a snap (my first one took about two days of fiddling and trying different video cards to make it work).
To do concentrated solar PV, you have to have a two axcis tracker. Compared to what non-concentrating panels require (no tracking, or single axcis tracking), that is lots of moving parts. The tracking has to be very precise or power output drops to almost nothing.
While this doesn't sound that hard to do, the reality of it has been that the concentrated solar folks have never been able to be cost competitive with the non-concentrated solar folks. These days there are something like 100 watts of non-concentrated solar built for every watt of concentrated solar. Even solar thermal plants (where the tracking does not have to be as precise, so it can be cheaper) are being canceled all over the place because simple non-concentrating PV panels are cheaper.
So these guys come along and say they can do tracking cheaply. Well, I've heard that people saying that for about 20 years now, and no one has been able to do it. It's not hard to make it work. It's hard to make it work cheaply.
What it probably means is they're scammers. Capital costs for coal and nuke run from $1.50 to $3.00 per watt installed. They're claiming $1 per watt. The problem is no matter how unconventional the heat source, no matter how magically free, the employee lunchroom costs $ per plant, the parking lot paving costs $ per plant, the pipes from the magic heat source to the turbines costs $ per watt, the turbine itself costs $ per watt, the water pumps and filters cost $ per watt...
PERHAPS they mean the capital cost of their magic heat source alone costs about $1 per watt. The problem is some recent historical nukes (not in the backwards USA, but civilized countries like France, etc) have come in at $1.50 per watt total plant cost delivered. So, on one side, their costs probably will decline as they are new vs the very mature nuke industry. On the other hand, can you build an entire thermal electric plant for well under 50 cents per watt? Then again, can a new tech be nearly as reliable as ancient technology nuke plant?
The proposed system is not a thermal system. It would use concentrated light shining on solar cells to produce electricity directly. So, to answer your points:
1) the employee lunchroom costs $ per plant
Since employees only have to guard the plant and fix things that break, the number of employees can potentially be lower, much lower. That depends on how reliable their devices are.
2) the parking lot paving costs $ per plant,
If there are fewer employees, there is a smaller parking lot.
3) the pipes from the magic heat source to the turbines costs $ per watt,
There are no pipes because it is not a thermal plant, cost zero.
4) the turbine itself costs $ per watt,
There are no turbines, cost zero.
5) the water pumps and filters cost $ per watt
There are no water pumps or filters. Indeed, the original article even includes the sentance "It uses no water"
Can they make it work? Sure. Will the costs be as low as they think? I doubt it very much, but not for your reasons. I think they will fail on cost because they have to build a giant structure with lots of moving parts. I wish them good luck with that. That is a very tough nut to crack.
100 years? May I see a source please? Everything I have read states 25 years TOPS. And that is for regular use. When you bombard them with 1000x more light I'm sure you don't improve their useful life, either. You can't cheat entropy that way. Not in this universe, anyway.
You've got that flipped, most panels have a warranty of 25-30 years. That's the minimum life, not maximum. Just look at this wikipedia page and search for the section "lifespan". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#cite_note-34
As far as maximum, since panels haven't been around for 100 years, it's really anybody's guess as to how long they will last. This page mentions some of the prevailing views. Again, search for longevity http://www.solar-facts-and-advice.com/monocrystalline.html.
The few data points I've seen on very old panels are extremely interesting. I personally know of some Solarworld panels that are over 35 years old that still are producing at over 100% of original rated spec. I've also read about a non-trivial size array that only had 10% decay on monocrystalline panels after 25 years. (can't find the link on that one, sorry) At that rate, you would still be getting 65% of original production at the 100 year mark.
Yes, you are right, we can't cheap entropy. But entropy can be very slow.
You wrote "1) Solar panels produce direct current, not alternating current. Direct current is almost impossible to transmit across any meaningful length of electric cable."
Solar panels typically will feed into an inverter which converts the power in AC. It is only at that point that power is transmitted any significant distance.
You wrote "3) At some point you are going to need to replace your solar panels - they only last 15-25 years."
It's more like 25-100 years, but yeah, they don't last forever.
You wrote "4) Energy companies do not buy electricity at the same price at which they sell it to you. Often there is a HUGE discrepancy. Ahh, monopolies. "
Yes, the $1/watt goal makes solar competitive at wholesale rates. Solar is already cheaper than retail rates in some places (sunny places with expensive power)
You wrote "5) The obvious one - the sun doesn't shine 8 hours a day so your 1MW system will probably deliver 300kW every hour on average. "
Yes, that's called capacity factor. Solar is generally worse than that (.15 to.25 depending on how much sun a place gets).
You wrote "6) To provide power at night you will need some means of storing energy. Batteries work, but they need maintenance and they do wear out over time. Less profit."
If you are getting a _huge_ chunk of your power from solar, that's true. In most places today, power demand is much higher when it is sunny that when it is not. We could probably produce 10-25% of our power from solar with not much storage. That's around 100 times as much solar as we have now. But, yes, you are right, this is a huge problem if we ever want to get a large percentage of our power from solar. It's already a huge problem for wind farms. The reason is that wind farms can produce at low demand periods, when no one needs the extra power.
Bottom line is if solar can get to $1 for every installed watt, you will be seeing solar installed everywhere, as it will simply blow everything else away, even with these problems.
My favorite quote from the article "If Cox is found to have practiced engineering without a license, Ritter said, the likely action would be a letter telling him not to do it again."
So, if Cox is found guilty, the punishment will be a letter!
Whew, good thing they didn't threaten to bring out the soft pillows! (Monty Python reference there)
You wrote "As someone with ridiculously large hands and fingers, I find using iOS a lot easier than some of the teensy keyboards found on other smart phones."
Indeed. I'm 6'4" and have hands bigger than probably 99% of the population. I was stunned at how well I can type on the Iphone and Ipad keyboards. With the Iphone, I've never had such a small input device work so well for me. I do not miss the physical keyboard at all. And I'm a guy that held off getting an Iphone for 2 years because I thought the lack of a keyboard was not acceptable.
And civilization is doomed if the news ever gets out that barbecued leprechaun tastes great when sprinkled generously with pixie dust...
Here is proof that humans preach genocide. You monsters, trying to incite the world into hunting us and EATING us as well? MONSTERS!
I am terribly sorry for the misunderstanding. I very much _don't_ want the word to get out about how tasty barbecued leprechaun is. After all, human civilization would collapse without your leprechaun gold!
You wrote "You're right. Taxes are evil and useless. Everyone knows that the infrastructure which enables modern civilization, like roads and plumbing, are paid for with leprechaun gold.
And the military to defend that civilization is created with pixie dust."
And civilization is doomed if the news ever gets out that barbecued leprechaun tastes great when sprinkled generously with pixie dust...
You wrote "how does it crash? HDD: Painfully and irrevocably. SSD: Read only"
I've now owned nine SSDs. Two of them have failed. Both failed without warning, and when they failed, they simply went from functioning fine to reporting there was no data at all on the drives. The drives actually still worked, but there were no files anymore!
So far, to date, my experience has been that SSDs are astoundingly less reliable than HDDs.
You wrote "...To the press? None. (If I had a legitimate case, that is..."
Well, I can agree to disagree. My experience has been that lawyers with legitimate cases love press coverage. The more potential jurors see how one-sided the case is, the easier it is at trial.
You also wrote "Only if the student is in the habit of leaving his laptop turned on with the camera pointed right at his face when he goes to sleep."
Well, I feel like I'm being Mr. Contrary, but no, that's not right at all. The student does not need to be in the habit of pointing the laptop at his bed. He only has to do it a single time during the period the school is watching (which apparently was weeks long).
You wrote ". Look carefully at the photograph (provided by the parents, I might add.) Who goes to sleep with their laptop turned on and the camera pointed right at their face, so that it's perfectly centered in the frame and just well lit enough to show it clearly?"
If you read this article you will discover that the judge has proposed that each student be shown the photos that were taken of them. There is no discussion that I've read of suggesting that the school ever publicly release the photos. Indeed, that makes sense, since the school never should have taken the photos in the first place.
So, the only photos you will ever see, are ones released by the kids and their parents. As far as a perfectly framed photo, it's simple. Take a randomly framed picture every fifteen minutes until you have hundreds of photos. Most of them won't be any good, but there will be a few gems in there.
Now, if you were the lawyer for the family and had all the photos taken of your client, which one would you release?
The author wrote near the end of his piece "It is probably only a matter of time before a software error results in injury or death, if it has not happened already (there are some who say it has)."
I thought this wasn't even remotely in question. The Therac 25 radiation overdose killed some people for sure (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)
However, I believe that crash actually helps make your point. Let's expand the time line from your article to the present. We now have about 130,000 people dead in the USA from car crashes and 50 from airline crashes. There were some smaller crashes (the global list of all crashes is here http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ but it doesn't change the point. The ratio is truly stunning.
They were trying to keep something a secret, and then someone sworn to keep that secret, leaked it. That is absolutely a cause for concern.
OK, that's an interesting point. I can't find anything in the memo that says anything about being secret. Indeed, from my reading of it, basically every aircraft operator and every person in security at every airport would have needed to read the memo to implement what was in it.
So, we have a document, not labeled secret in any way that I can find, that hundreds of thousands of people must read and understand. By what reasoning do you conclude that everyone looking at the memo was sworn to secrecy?
64% is extremely good, and frankly I don't believe it. Around 33% is the norm with 50% in ideal conditions.
>>>You claim the insight's sweet spot is 50mph. Have you tried 30 mph?
The 5th gear in the insight doesn't go that low. You'd have to shift to 4th gear which of course is not as efficient due to the lower engine-to-wheel ratio. For combustion engines the most efficient RPM is in the 1800-1900 range. (Aside - greenercars.org rates the insight as about 7 points cleaner than an EV1 (i.e. 58 v. 51). The Prius was rated equal to the EV1.)
Generally speaking, the reduction in wind resistance overwhelms the efficiency penalty of running the engine in a lower gear. Look here at the fourth post down for actual numbers on a real car.
You wrote "Consumer report test is misleading. All cars in America get rated for fuel efficiency at 55 so they are geared to perform best at that point. If they were tested at say 75 then I am sure they would be re-geared to get the best efficiency at 75."
I'm sorry, this is just wrong. I don't care how the car is geared. The formula for wind resistance is here
Please note that there is a v^2 in that equation. That means a car at 75 mph will experience wind resistance that is six and one quarter times greater than a car going 30 mph. No gearing changes will come close to overcoming that.
If you would like to see a real world graph, look at the fourth post down here:
You wrote "Good God people - think! I'm an electrical engineer who has been driving a gas-electric hybrid since 2002, and if regenerative breaking was able to recover even half the energy, I'd be amazed."
I've done it. I wrote a bunch of books on horse racing (and still sell selections). After that, I was offered (and accepted) a position at a top consumer information provider (one of the three companies that provide your credit reports).
The gambling past I had was a HUGE positive. My books were how they found me, and many people asked about my experiences in the gambling world. From a career point of view, getting involved in the gambling industry was nothing but a positive, wound up making me much more popular and well known in the little division where I worked, and landed me a higher paying job than I otherwise would have had.
That is why this kind of technology _saves_ power. Yes, the TV is better off with the power cord. But the Roomba, your TV remote, and anything else that uses a battery, would save enormously by using this.
Let's do the math on a Roomba.
The latest Roombas uses $90 NiMh battery packs that store 3 ampHours at 14.4 Volts. I just had to replace some of mine. I estimate I got about 250 charge cycles out of them.
3 Amphours * 14.4 Volts = 43.2 watt hours * 1KwH/1000 Watts/Hour = 0.0432 Kwh is stored each cycle
0.0432 KwH * 250 cycles in useful life = 10.8 KwH in useful life
$90 / 10.8 KwH = $8.33 / KwH
The battery is imposing an additional storage cost of $8.33 per Kilowatt hour of electricity.
Contrasting wired power versus battery stored power (where electricity costs 20 cents per Kilowatt, which is what I pay), we get:
In other words, the battery system is only 2.3% as cost efficient as the wired system. Or flip it around if you like, the battery system costs 42.65 times as much per KwH as the wired system.
Now comes along this wireless power system. It could lose 95% of the transmitted power, and it would still be twice as cost effective as the wired + battery system. For a Roomba, they do need to solve the 2 foot range, but they can give up a HUGE amount of efficiency and still destroy using a battery.
I neglected power cycle losses in the battery, because the wireless power is so stunningly better it doesn't really matter. If you included those losses, you would probably only need a 2% effective system to be cost effective with the battery.
The moral is that this is a great technology, but a TV is a lousy example. Anything that uses batteries is a great example.
But compact fluorescents cost $2, save almost as much power/year, and last about 10 years. They are the most cost effective.
Indeed, CFLs are the most cost effective, as long as you don't actually use any math.
However, I do like math, so I shall try using some.
First, let us look at the cost of the bulbs themselves. The Panasonic's cost $40 and are rated for 40,000 hours. A batch of 60 watt equivalent CFLs I have in my hand (Bright Effects brand that I purchased at Lowes) cost $12 or $2 per CFL. The CFLs are rated at 8000 hours. So I will need five CFLs instead of one LED bulb.
Now let us look at energy use. The CFLs use 13 watts each and the LED with the highest light output draws 6 watts. Over the life of the led bulb, that works out to 6 watts * 40,000 hours = 240,000 watt hours = 240 Kwh. The CFL will use, over the same time span, 13 watts * 40,000 hours = 520,000 watts = 520 Kwh.
The question now becomes, what do you pay for a kilowatt hour? Where I live in the Orlando area, we are paying about 15 cents/Kwh. The LED bulb would wind up costing $36 for power and the CFL would cost $78.
This analysis also assumes your time is worthless. If you put any value on your time, the numbers obviously get better for the LED. The quality of the light is also ignored here. LEDs come on instantly, while same CFLs can take a bit of time to reach full output.
Personally, reducing the number of bulbs I have to replace by a factor of five is quite valuable to me. My house has about 120 bulbs, and the ones that are very hard to reach or that are on all the time (about 20 of them) are already LED based. As the LEDs get cheaper, I'll replace the remainder.
Obviously, for people with cheap electricity, CFLs will still come out ahead (as long as little or no value is placed on the time for changing bulbs).
...and how do you come to the conslusion we could make solar/wind/wave able to provide a constant load?!?! is any amount of research going to make the sun shine and the wind blow on queue?!.... then consider modern reactors have passive saftey masures making a meltdown impossible...
I've quoted two of your points here, and in order:
1) Power storage is the answer to the intermittent nature of wind and solar. My WAG is that it would add 5 to 10 cents per KwH. To those who don't think that is a great deal, consider it is more than most wholesale electricity costs right now. That's why almost no one stores electric power on a large scale. It can be done, and it wouldn't end civilization, but it would be d**n expensive.
2) Not all modern designs make meltdown impossible. You are correct that some absolutely do. Canada's CANDU, pebble bed, and the Argonne breader (http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/logos20-1/passive01.htm) all are meltdown proof.
There are probably more. That's outside the scope of my knowledge so I plead ignorance. I do believe it would help in public acceptance of nuclear power if only meltdown proof designs were allowed.
I personally think the best long term answer to our energy needs is probably going to wind up being solar with battery storage. However, _enormous_ increases in cost effectiveness are needed in both solar and energy storage before it is ready to provide most of our power. In the meantime, safe nuclear seems, by far, to be the best answer to me.
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The developer can still develop fine with a single monitor. He will just be much slower. http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/02/18/234899/Multiple-monitors-boost-productivity-by-35.5.htm
That study says that going from one monitor to three gives a 35% productivity boost. If the cost of the programmer to the company is 100K a year (if you include all overhead, it is probably more than that), then the company will experience a loss of 25K worth of labor by cheaping out and not spending a few hundred bucks on a couple more monitors. Basically, the extra monitors pay for themselves in one week. What business wouldn't want to do this?
I personally believe so strongly that there is a huge productivity gain from extra screen real estate, that I've had an eight monitor set up for many years now. Here's my first http://www.realtimesoft.com/multimon/gallery_browse.asp?ID=636&date=desc&nummon=true&mon=desc
The lower row is what I'm currently working on. The upper row is where I put things that other people would minimize or let other applications cover them. Basically, I never minimize to the taskbar, and I almost never have windows covering other windows. I would say this setup has improved my productivity at least 50%, and made my work much less stressful.
When I first built an Octomon setup (that's what I call it), it cost about 12 grand. If I were building one today, I would probably go with four 30" monitors (even more pixels than my eight 24" monitors) or eight of the Apple 27" monitors. Either way would be significantly less than what it used to cost for a much better system. There are great video cards out these days that make building these systems a snap (my first one took about two days of fiddling and trying different video cards to make it work).
To do concentrated solar PV, you have to have a two axcis tracker. Compared to what non-concentrating panels require (no tracking, or single axcis tracking), that is lots of moving parts. The tracking has to be very precise or power output drops to almost nothing.
While this doesn't sound that hard to do, the reality of it has been that the concentrated solar folks have never been able to be cost competitive with the non-concentrated solar folks. These days there are something like 100 watts of non-concentrated solar built for every watt of concentrated solar. Even solar thermal plants (where the tracking does not have to be as precise, so it can be cheaper) are being canceled all over the place because simple non-concentrating PV panels are cheaper.
So these guys come along and say they can do tracking cheaply. Well, I've heard that people saying that for about 20 years now, and no one has been able to do it. It's not hard to make it work. It's hard to make it work cheaply.
What it probably means is they're scammers. Capital costs for coal and nuke run from $1.50 to $3.00 per watt installed. They're claiming $1 per watt. The problem is no matter how unconventional the heat source, no matter how magically free, the employee lunchroom costs $ per plant, the parking lot paving costs $ per plant, the pipes from the magic heat source to the turbines costs $ per watt, the turbine itself costs $ per watt, the water pumps and filters cost $ per watt...
PERHAPS they mean the capital cost of their magic heat source alone costs about $1 per watt. The problem is some recent historical nukes (not in the backwards USA, but civilized countries like France, etc) have come in at $1.50 per watt total plant cost delivered. So, on one side, their costs probably will decline as they are new vs the very mature nuke industry. On the other hand, can you build an entire thermal electric plant for well under 50 cents per watt? Then again, can a new tech be nearly as reliable as ancient technology nuke plant?
The proposed system is not a thermal system. It would use concentrated light shining on solar cells to produce electricity directly. So, to answer your points:
1) the employee lunchroom costs $ per plant
Since employees only have to guard the plant and fix things that break, the number of employees can potentially be lower, much lower. That depends on how reliable their devices are.
2) the parking lot paving costs $ per plant,
If there are fewer employees, there is a smaller parking lot.
3) the pipes from the magic heat source to the turbines costs $ per watt,
There are no pipes because it is not a thermal plant, cost zero.
4) the turbine itself costs $ per watt,
There are no turbines, cost zero.
5) the water pumps and filters cost $ per watt
There are no water pumps or filters. Indeed, the original article even includes the sentance "It uses no water"
Can they make it work? Sure. Will the costs be as low as they think? I doubt it very much, but not for your reasons. I think they will fail on cost because they have to build a giant structure with lots of moving parts. I wish them good luck with that. That is a very tough nut to crack.
100 years? May I see a source please? Everything I have read states 25 years TOPS. And that is for regular use. When you bombard them with 1000x more light I'm sure you don't improve their useful life, either. You can't cheat entropy that way. Not in this universe, anyway.
You've got that flipped, most panels have a warranty of 25-30 years. That's the minimum life, not maximum. Just look at this wikipedia page and search for the section "lifespan". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cell#cite_note-34
As far as maximum, since panels haven't been around for 100 years, it's really anybody's guess as to how long they will last. This page mentions some of the prevailing views. Again, search for longevity http://www.solar-facts-and-advice.com/monocrystalline.html.
The few data points I've seen on very old panels are extremely interesting. I personally know of some Solarworld panels that are over 35 years old that still are producing at over 100% of original rated spec. I've also read about a non-trivial size array that only had 10% decay on monocrystalline panels after 25 years. (can't find the link on that one, sorry) At that rate, you would still be getting 65% of original production at the 100 year mark.
Yes, you are right, we can't cheap entropy. But entropy can be very slow.
You wrote "1) Solar panels produce direct current, not alternating current. Direct current is almost impossible to transmit across any meaningful length of electric cable."
Solar panels typically will feed into an inverter which converts the power in AC. It is only at that point that power is transmitted any significant distance.
You wrote "3) At some point you are going to need to replace your solar panels - they only last 15-25 years."
It's more like 25-100 years, but yeah, they don't last forever.
You wrote "4) Energy companies do not buy electricity at the same price at which they sell it to you. Often there is a HUGE discrepancy. Ahh, monopolies. "
Yes, the $1/watt goal makes solar competitive at wholesale rates. Solar is already cheaper than retail rates in some places (sunny places with expensive power)
You wrote "5) The obvious one - the sun doesn't shine 8 hours a day so your 1MW system will probably deliver 300kW every hour on average. "
Yes, that's called capacity factor. Solar is generally worse than that (.15 to .25 depending on how much sun a place gets).
You wrote "6) To provide power at night you will need some means of storing energy. Batteries work, but they need maintenance and they do wear out over time. Less profit."
If you are getting a _huge_ chunk of your power from solar, that's true. In most places today, power demand is much higher when it is sunny that when it is not. We could probably produce 10-25% of our power from solar with not much storage. That's around 100 times as much solar as we have now. But, yes, you are right, this is a huge problem if we ever want to get a large percentage of our power from solar. It's already a huge problem for wind farms. The reason is that wind farms can produce at low demand periods, when no one needs the extra power.
Bottom line is if solar can get to $1 for every installed watt, you will be seeing solar installed everywhere, as it will simply blow everything else away, even with these problems.
My favorite quote from the article "If Cox is found to have practiced engineering without a license, Ritter said, the likely action would be a letter telling him not to do it again."
So, if Cox is found guilty, the punishment will be a letter!
Whew, good thing they didn't threaten to bring out the soft pillows! (Monty Python reference there)
You wrote "As someone with ridiculously large hands and fingers, I find using iOS a lot easier than some of the teensy keyboards found on other smart phones."
Indeed. I'm 6'4" and have hands bigger than probably 99% of the population. I was stunned at how well I can type on the Iphone and Ipad keyboards. With the Iphone, I've never had such a small input device work so well for me. I do not miss the physical keyboard at all. And I'm a guy that held off getting an Iphone for 2 years because I thought the lack of a keyboard was not acceptable.
And civilization is doomed if the news ever gets out that barbecued leprechaun tastes great when sprinkled generously with pixie dust...
Here is proof that humans preach genocide. You monsters, trying to incite the world into hunting us and EATING us as well? MONSTERS!
I am terribly sorry for the misunderstanding. I very much _don't_ want the word to get out about how tasty barbecued leprechaun is. After all, human civilization would collapse without your leprechaun gold!
You wrote "You're right. Taxes are evil and useless. Everyone knows that the infrastructure which enables modern civilization, like roads and plumbing, are paid for with leprechaun gold.
And the military to defend that civilization is created with pixie dust."
And civilization is doomed if the news ever gets out that barbecued leprechaun tastes great when sprinkled generously with pixie dust...
You wrote "how does it crash? HDD: Painfully and irrevocably. SSD: Read only"
I've now owned nine SSDs. Two of them have failed. Both failed without warning, and when they failed, they simply went from functioning fine to reporting there was no data at all on the drives. The drives actually still worked, but there were no files anymore!
So far, to date, my experience has been that SSDs are astoundingly less reliable than HDDs.
You wrote "...To the press? None. (If I had a legitimate case, that is..."
Well, I can agree to disagree. My experience has been that lawyers with legitimate cases love press coverage. The more potential jurors see how one-sided the case is, the easier it is at trial.
You also wrote "Only if the student is in the habit of leaving his laptop turned on with the camera pointed right at his face when he goes to sleep."
Well, I feel like I'm being Mr. Contrary, but no, that's not right at all. The student does not need to be in the habit of pointing the laptop at his bed. He only has to do it a single time during the period the school is watching (which apparently was weeks long).
You wrote ". Look carefully at the photograph (provided by the parents, I might add.) Who goes to sleep with their laptop turned on and the camera pointed right at their face, so that it's perfectly centered in the frame and just well lit enough to show it clearly?"
If you read this article you will discover that the judge has proposed that each student be shown the photos that were taken of them. There is no discussion that I've read of suggesting that the school ever publicly release the photos. Indeed, that makes sense, since the school never should have taken the photos in the first place.
So, the only photos you will ever see, are ones released by the kids and their parents. As far as a perfectly framed photo, it's simple. Take a randomly framed picture every fifteen minutes until you have hundreds of photos. Most of them won't be any good, but there will be a few gems in there.
Now, if you were the lawyer for the family and had all the photos taken of your client, which one would you release?
The school board released this statement today.
http://www.philly.com/philly/hp/news_update/91045839.html
I particularly appreciated this part "While we deeply regret the mistakes and misguided actions that have led us to this situation"
The board appears to me to finally realize that this was a horrible thing to do. The board's original position (that everything was fine) shocked me.
The author wrote near the end of his piece "It is probably only a matter of time before a software error results in injury or death, if it has not happened already (there are some who say it has)."
I thought this wasn't even remotely in question. The Therac 25 radiation overdose killed some people for sure (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therac-25)
- more importantly, none of the airplane deaths in the US in the past 9 years had anything to do with airplanes.
What about the Colgan crash last year? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407
In the last two years over 80,000 people died on US highways, but there wasn't even one death from flying in a commercial airliner.
You're more likely to die from falling down your basement stairs, and far more likely to die at the hands of your own family than a terrorist.
You linked to an old article. In the last two years, we had this crash http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407
However, I believe that crash actually helps make your point. Let's expand the time line from your article to the present. We now have about 130,000 people dead in the USA from car crashes and 50 from airline crashes. There were some smaller crashes (the global list of all crashes is here http://www.planecrashinfo.com/ but it doesn't change the point. The ratio is truly stunning.
You are missing the point.
They were trying to keep something a secret, and then someone sworn to keep that secret, leaked it. That is absolutely a cause for concern.
OK, that's an interesting point. I can't find anything in the memo that says anything about being secret. Indeed, from my reading of it, basically every aircraft operator and every person in security at every airport would have needed to read the memo to implement what was in it.
So, we have a document, not labeled secret in any way that I can find, that hundreds of thousands of people must read and understand. By what reasoning do you conclude that everyone looking at the memo was sworn to secrecy?
64% is extremely good, and frankly I don't believe it. Around 33% is the norm with 50% in ideal conditions.
>>>You claim the insight's sweet spot is 50mph. Have you tried 30 mph?
The 5th gear in the insight doesn't go that low. You'd have to shift to 4th gear which of course is not as efficient due to the lower engine-to-wheel ratio. For combustion engines the most efficient RPM is in the 1800-1900 range. (Aside - greenercars.org rates the insight as about 7 points cleaner than an EV1 (i.e. 58 v. 51). The Prius was rated equal to the EV1.)
Generally speaking, the reduction in wind resistance overwhelms the efficiency penalty of running the engine in a lower gear. Look here at the fourth post down for actual numbers on a real car.
http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/mpg-vs-speed-metro-graph-115-2.html
You wrote "Consumer report test is misleading. All cars in America get rated for fuel efficiency at 55 so they are geared to perform best at that point. If they were tested at say 75 then I am sure they would be re-geared to get the best efficiency at 75."
I'm sorry, this is just wrong. I don't care how the car is geared. The formula for wind resistance is here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drag_(physics)
Please note that there is a v^2 in that equation. That means a car at 75 mph will experience wind resistance that is six and one quarter times greater than a car going 30 mph. No gearing changes will come close to overcoming that.
If you would like to see a real world graph, look at the fourth post down here:
http://ecomodder.com/forum/showthread.php/mpg-vs-speed-metro-graph-115-2.html
You wrote "Good God people - think! I'm an electrical engineer who has been driving a gas-electric hybrid since 2002, and if regenerative breaking was able to recover even half the energy, I'd be amazed."
Prepare to be amazed.
http://www.teslamotors.com/blog4/?p=58
Tesla is saying their best case is in the 64% ballpark.
You claim the insight's sweet spot is 50mph. Have you tried 30 mph? That's where most cars get the best mileage (and how the Tesla went so far).
Consumer reports just did a piece on fuel efficiency (see http://blogs.consumerreports.org/cars/2009/09/tested-speed-vs-fuel-economy.html) and they didn't even test speeds below 55 mph. The MPG of every single car was increasing as speed went down.
I've done it. I wrote a bunch of books on horse racing (and still sell selections). After that, I was offered (and accepted) a position at a top consumer information provider (one of the three companies that provide your credit reports).
The gambling past I had was a HUGE positive. My books were how they found me, and many people asked about my experiences in the gambling world. From a career point of view, getting involved in the gambling industry was nothing but a positive, wound up making me much more popular and well known in the little division where I worked, and landed me a higher paying job than I otherwise would have had.
That is why this kind of technology _saves_ power. Yes, the TV is better off with the power cord. But the Roomba, your TV remote, and anything else that uses a battery, would save enormously by using this.
Let's do the math on a Roomba.
The latest Roombas uses $90 NiMh battery packs that store 3 ampHours at 14.4 Volts. I just had to replace some of mine. I estimate I got about 250 charge cycles out of them.
3 Amphours * 14.4 Volts = 43.2 watt hours * 1KwH/1000 Watts/Hour = 0.0432 Kwh is stored each cycle
0.0432 KwH * 250 cycles in useful life = 10.8 KwH in useful life
$90 / 10.8 KwH = $8.33 / KwH
The battery is imposing an additional storage cost of $8.33 per Kilowatt hour of electricity.
Contrasting wired power versus battery stored power (where electricity costs 20 cents per Kilowatt, which is what I pay), we get:
0.20 ($/KwH wired))/8.53($/KwH batery + electricity) = 0.023
In other words, the battery system is only 2.3% as cost efficient as the wired system. Or flip it around if you like, the battery system costs 42.65 times as much per KwH as the wired system.
Now comes along this wireless power system. It could lose 95% of the transmitted power, and it would still be twice as cost effective as the wired + battery system. For a Roomba, they do need to solve the 2 foot range, but they can give up a HUGE amount of efficiency and still destroy using a battery.
I neglected power cycle losses in the battery, because the wireless power is so stunningly better it doesn't really matter. If you included those losses, you would probably only need a 2% effective system to be cost effective with the battery.
The moral is that this is a great technology, but a TV is a lousy example. Anything that uses batteries is a great example.
But compact fluorescents cost $2, save almost as much power/year, and last about 10 years. They are the most cost effective.
Indeed, CFLs are the most cost effective, as long as you don't actually use any math.
However, I do like math, so I shall try using some.
First, let us look at the cost of the bulbs themselves. The Panasonic's cost $40 and are rated for 40,000 hours. A batch of 60 watt equivalent CFLs I have in my hand (Bright Effects brand that I purchased at Lowes) cost $12 or $2 per CFL. The CFLs are rated at 8000 hours. So I will need five CFLs instead of one LED bulb.
Now let us look at energy use. The CFLs use 13 watts each and the LED with the highest light output draws 6 watts. Over the life of the led bulb, that works out to 6 watts * 40,000 hours = 240,000 watt hours = 240 Kwh. The CFL will use, over the same time span, 13 watts * 40,000 hours = 520,000 watts = 520 Kwh.
The question now becomes, what do you pay for a kilowatt hour? Where I live in the Orlando area, we are paying about 15 cents/Kwh. The LED bulb would wind up costing $36 for power and the CFL would cost $78.
This gives us total costs of:
LED: $40 (the bulb) + $36 (energy) = $76 (total)
CFL: $10 (5 bulbs) + $78 (energy) = $88 (total)
This analysis also assumes your time is worthless. If you put any value on your time, the numbers obviously get better for the LED. The quality of the light is also ignored here. LEDs come on instantly, while same CFLs can take a bit of time to reach full output.
Personally, reducing the number of bulbs I have to replace by a factor of five is quite valuable to me. My house has about 120 bulbs, and the ones that are very hard to reach or that are on all the time (about 20 of them) are already LED based. As the LEDs get cheaper, I'll replace the remainder.
Obviously, for people with cheap electricity, CFLs will still come out ahead (as long as little or no value is placed on the time for changing bulbs).
...and how do you come to the conslusion we could make solar/wind/wave able to provide a constant load?!?! is any amount of research going to make the sun shine and the wind blow on queue?! ....
then consider modern reactors have passive saftey masures making a meltdown impossible...
I've quoted two of your points here, and in order:
1) Power storage is the answer to the intermittent nature of wind and solar. My WAG is that it would add 5 to 10 cents per KwH. To those who don't think that is a great deal, consider it is more than most wholesale electricity costs right now. That's why almost no one stores electric power on a large scale. It can be done, and it wouldn't end civilization, but it would be d**n expensive.
2) Not all modern designs make meltdown impossible. You are correct that some absolutely do. Canada's CANDU, pebble bed, and the Argonne breader (http://www.anl.gov/Media_Center/logos20-1/passive01.htm) all are meltdown proof.
There are probably more. That's outside the scope of my knowledge so I plead ignorance. I do believe it would help in public acceptance of nuclear power if only meltdown proof designs were allowed.
I personally think the best long term answer to our energy needs is probably going to wind up being solar with battery storage. However, _enormous_ increases in cost effectiveness are needed in both solar and energy storage before it is ready to provide most of our power. In the meantime, safe nuclear seems, by far, to be the best answer to me.
That 11 cents per KwH is to pay it off over the life of the plant.