Heck, I can't even read the article and I know more than that.
My proxy has the article blocked, so I'll have to read it later.
Hint: The people filing the lawsuit wants 100% HANDCOUNTS. IE no electronics involved in the process except maybe for providing the light. As I can't read the article at the moment, they might accept hand calculators.;)
Nah, if you read my other posts, you'll see that I'm very much in favor of a verifiable paper trail. I'd consider these people only a little more extreme than me. I'd allow electronic counting, backed up by human count if necessary.
The parent used the term 'extremist' like he considers these people extremists, and I ran with it.
I don't care how nutso they are - Whether they be scientologists, flat earthers, creationists, FSM devotees, greens, reds, etc... I'd much prefer them to be spending their time writing legal documents(however nutso), than making bombs, burning cars, rioting, etc...
The last time I voted the minature scanning machines on the box that did that tally. They obviously had them for your systems as well, as it'd reject spoiled ballots. There's not much of a step up from 'detect spoiled ballots' to 'go ahead and count the votes'. So you're still looking that the ballots are getting counted as they're cast.
I'm a big fan of 'trust but verify'. IE you trust the automatic box counter - but you run a random 10% of the boxes through a independent machine recount. Discrepencies are investigated. Then you hand count a different 1-10% of the boxes. Major discrepencies trigger bigger checks, up to and including a full recount by hand if necessary.
You still have the fun of making sure nobody's stuffing ballot boxes - an old tradition, but at least a tradition we have many safeguards against.
Of course, you independently add up the totals from all the boxes by several different methods, so it's difficult to impossible to jigger elections by not touching box counts - but district or even higher counts. The diebold system was bad this way - it reported it's overall tally from a seperate database than it did regional/box counts. Which would allow somebody to mess with the overall tally without changing any district's totals.
Oh yeah, and treat election fraud as it should be - a serious felony.
What I'm after is the best accuracy possible*, with the ability to audit at every level of the process.
* Machine counts, as long as the machine isn't defective or compromised are normally more accurate than hand counting.
These types of lawsuits don't result in monetary rewards, instead requiring states to 'fix' their processes. At most, court costs.
In many states they're not going to get beyond step 1, as the election standards are set by law and as long as the state is meeting them, the judge will kick it back as 'if you feel any adjustments are needed, you need to go to congress to get them'. Not all states have courts as willing to make up their own laws as there are on the federal level.
Personally, I think they're doing it to get attention.
For some people it's easier to fill out (think 2000 + hanging chads)
However, chads are a prime example of overcomplicating matters. To create chads you need a punch machine.
A pen and paper would have been easier for many, and resulted in ballots that were easier to determine.
Personally, after the 2006 election, I'd rather use pen&paper than that horribly crappy Diebold software..
Agreed.
Personally, I think that any 'touch screen' voting machines should be nothing more than gloriously overengineered printing stations for handicapped ballot casting. IE you insert your ballot into the printer, make your choices, it prints your choices, you verify your choices and cast your ballot into the same box everyone's depositing their pen marked ballots. If you screw something up that you find after printing, you get another ballot, and the printed one goes into the spoiled bin.
you have to find balance somewhere. If that $50k bomb stops the $5k truck bomb before it detonates and causes $500k of damage, killing 5 people(~$1 million each), it's worth it.
Sure, active operations are expensive, but the idea is that it's cheaper than the alternative.
I suggest you calm down a bit. Anybody can file a lawsuit like this, we'll have to wait and see if it's thrown out of court or not. Who knows, it might spur some legislation
Taking in my experiences in voting in the midwest, which have universally been 'scanotron' sheets, there are at least some states with a verifiable paper record that can be recounted by hand if determined necessary.
One problem with all this 'hand count' stuff is that even hand counting has an error rate - often a higher one than the scanotrons. At least as long as you make the voting rules for a valid ballot be one scannable by the machine*. Sure, a few will probably be kicked out - but it's much easier to deal with a couple hundred ballots to count by hand than a million or more.
On another tack, I'd much prefer the wacko extremists be filing lawsuits rather than the alternatives many wacko extremists select - such as building bombs.
*IE you place in the rules 'An X through the bubble doesn't count. A partially filled bubble doesn't count(showing a sample with maybe 1/3 the bubble filled in), a circled bubble doesn't count. A completely filled bubble counts.' Same rules as for ACT, SATS, and other such college tests.
A submarine can too capture one of these boats. All they have to do is get a crew on board, and not much at that. At least until they start putting armed guards on the tankers; but that's unlikely as it gives the submarine the excuse to blow the whole thing up. Depending on what they do, they might not even have to surface. They'd probably be best off working in pairs though.
Now, I believe in the old axiom 'Those who wish for peace; prepare for war'. IE As long as a country maintains enough military might to make anybody looking at using military force against it decide 'there's an easier way', it's to the better.
It's like using AIM54s to shoot down Pipers Cubs. You can do that, with ease. Problem is only that the rockets you use will probably cost more than the plane you shoot down.
That's assuming that the two parties involved have about the same resource base. Thing is, a $5k truck is more expensive to many of our enemies than a $50k smart bomb is for us, because we have more than 10x the resource base.
Just want to check, but I remember hearing about a number of fake windups hitting the market - inoperable generator hooked up to the handle and the light itself powered by alkalines. Are you sure yours is a good one?
How long does your 'few rotations of the handle' do you get light? How useful of a light is it? I've only seen figures of minutes. You'll generally get at least a dozen hours, up to hundreds for a battery powered LED light.
So you'll want a battery if you're going to be using it seriously; IE hours at a time.
The situation gets even worse if you're talking about a remote; where a pair of AA batteries(or 3 AAA) will last for years.
I would certainly welcome replacing the hassle of replacing batteries with a few rotations of the handle.
Would you really welcome spending 30 seconds a week or even daily cranking little tiny cranks to keep your remotes working; or replacing a couple batteries every 3-5 years?
A NiMH AAA has something like 800-1000 mAh of capacity. A AA has 2700-2800, or almost three times as much capacity. Even alkalines generally have better than double the capacity
AA 50.5mm long, 14mm in diameter. 7.78k mm^3 AAA 44.5mm long, 10.5mm diameter. 3.85k mm^3
A AAA only has 49% of the volume of a AA. It gets even worse if you go larger with batteries, as power is generally a function of volume. When I mentioned going larger than AA, I was meaning to power the standby requirements for the television. IE small access door you need a screwdriver to open to replace the battery to allow the remote to turn the tv on. A single C or D cell would probably last for a decade. At which point it's more hassle to try to mess with solar panels and such. With a non-rechargeable battery you're not wasting power keeping it topped off when the unit's on either.
I have a DVD player remote that runs off of a coin battery.
I do wonder if the batteries couldn't be replaced by either adding a solar panel (some novelty calculators did this) or by adding a storage capacitor that could be charged up using a small wheel or something similar.
It'd probably cost more than just using a battery - remember, remotes for home entertainment systems are frequently used in the dark. And do you really want to turn a crank to change the channel? At that point you might as well get up and change it from the TV.
Believe it or not, but alkaline batteries are actually quite a good solution to low power draw applications.
You have to remember that businesses generally get charged differently than home users for their electricity.
Off peak might be real cheap for them.
Heat pumps are becoming popular - I think some of the 'never turning off the lights' are older buildings where the owners/operators have just never thought about conserving electricity there.
If nothing else, even up north here during the summertime you'd be running the AC more to get rid of the heat the lights are generating, so it's still better to shut them off. Heat pumps are becoming popular, which exceeds the 100% efficiency of electric heating(100% of the energy ends up as heat!). So you'd be better off there.
With increased gas prices today, it's often a wash as to whether gas or electric is cheaper. Still, during the winter my marginal cost for any electric appliance is negligible. For example, I get work out of my computer at the same time it's helping to warm the house up.
Some businesses are energy efficient, but many aren't.
I'm a single male. However, I also own my own(older) house that I'm renovating. I drive a coupe.
I can fit some amazing things in there - but I'm shopping for a truck to allow me to do some of the heavier work. I want the truck to be 4WD, as the coupe, while it's handled winters so far, I've also been fairly lucky and had some close calls - mostly with getting stuck. Traction control just doesn't work well, and the car being built low doesn't help much. So I'm looking for a pickup - full length bed, 4WD, w/tow package(90% of the trucks here have it), and preferably diesel. I'd like to be able to use biodiesel, plus the engines last forever and get better milage, towpackage for these is pretty much 'assumed'.
I like my car, so I'm keeping it. Just paid it off this year to boot. So I'm shopping for an older but still reliable pickup for occasional use. As such, I'm looking for a relative monster - capable of handling most anything in the 'other' category. I drive the coupe for day to day tasks, but can pull out the truck for the big jobs. Like hauling home shingles for reroofing the house.
A difference you don't point out is that an Expedition can tow more than twice what the Honda vehicle can. - Also, the difference between starting MSRP for a midgrade Honda Odyssey is only a thousand less than the Expedition. When you're talking about $25-30k vehicles, that's less than 10% price difference. Yes, 'equivalently equiped' as quoted from Honda's site is about $10k difference, I always take that with a grain of salt - I don't use many of the features they boast, so honestly enough I'd rather not pay for them.
Finally, personally, I'd want to check the vehicles out in person. There might be some stinkers that I could find.
I Disagree... Hanging Chads... You way back in the year 2000... The cause of the E-Voting Craze...
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the parent talks about paper and optical scan, which don't have chads, much less hanging ones.
If I were to talk about the systems that produce chads, I'd talk about punchcard voting systems.
Paper Has the problems of increased Human Error. The machanical system that NY has now reduces the Human Error Involved, although the interface horible, it has been working for about 100 years now. Flip the switch and Pull the leaver, Crank Click Click Click Click.
They're aging and prone to mechanical defects. Replacing them with similar machines would probably be prohibitively expensive. Bubble sheets and scannotron readers are at this point a mature technology.
These things are made from heavy metal, hacking would require err umm hacking at it. Causing a lot of noise and making those people who sit right next to them kinda worried that there is a guy banging on the voting machiene. It would much easer with Paper Ballats to mess up the results.
Magnets, small drills, a sharp smack at the right spot, etc...
Get the voting Ticket. Palm it before you place it in the box. Go home with the ticket. Make duplicated a Scanner and a printer that can do heavy stock could do the trick. Punch Holes or Put marks on them. Come back or have someone else come back and drop a pack of 10 or 20 cards into the box. No one will know. 10 or 20 cards could be good enough for some local elections with around 2000 votes. That automatically changes the results 1%. Vs. a Guy Baning on a machanical machine. Kinda Getting pulled out before he could get threw the heavy steel.
Obviously, you've never voted using optical paper ballots.
1. It's rather difficult to palm a 11x17" sheet of paper printed on fairly heavy stock. 2. Watermarks and serial numbers are going to make duplicating it without being obvious extremely difficult. 3. The box is secured and watched. They're not going to let you feed 10 votes into it.
The way it works: You proceed to the polling place. You go to the sign in desk, and they verify your identity, address, citizenship and eligability per state law. You are issued a ballot(the SN of the ballet is not associated with you in any way, but the polling employee marks that he issued it). You proceed to a desk or something to vote. Pencils or pens are provided. Once complete, you proceed to the deposit area. They verify that you have a valid ballet, which you then feed through a scanner, the scanner rejects it if it sees a problem with the ballet(testing at least some of the hidden security features at the same time). If you have a spoiled ballet, you turn it in for a new one, the fact that that ballet was spoiled is noted.
Actually, there was an even earlier case involving a farmer by the name of Filburn who was fined for growing too much wheat(he grew 461 bushels, but was only allowed 222), the excess which he fed to his own cattle and family. It hit the supreme court in 1941.
The ruling was that because if he hadn't grown the wheat he would of had to buy it, therefore it was interstate commerce - even though the excess wheat never left the farm, much less the state.
I'll note that people went after my first line about SMT, but disregarded my second(and more important point) -
The biggest problem is that stuff off a manufacturing line is cheaper than one installed by hand -
Especially when the manufacturing labor is in China and the repair labor is in the USA.
Yes, repairing electronics can be done. Much like how many 'totaled' vehicles could be fixed. It's just that the fix cost exceeds the remaining value of the device.
The math changes when you're talking about expensive professional equipment, but I was generally refering to cheap stuff made in china. I at least hope that the expensive telecom equipment isn't made in China.
I remember reading how most SMT chips are such low failure that it would actually cost more money to make them easier to replace than it does to aborb the higher repair cost - or even just replace failures completely.
Take Device X with repair Y
The cost to make repair Y cost $100 instead of $200 is $1.
However, the failure rate that would require repair Y is.1% It would cost $1000 to save $100 in repair costs(you have to make the mod to every unit you sell, not just the ones that are going to fail).
I also assume that the average consumer has to take it to a professional repair place - they lack the knowledge or even basic tools for making repairs. That means professional equipment($$), professional labor($$$), taxes($), etc...
Jerry rigging repair equipment is the exception, not the rule.
Flourescent tube bulbs tend to be very energy efficient; but I'd have to agree with you that shutting off office lights when nobody's in them, heck, shut down the hallway lights when nobody is there, combined with street/parking lot lights, etc... This would probably save more energy than getting all all appliance standbys down to 0 watts.
For example, a single T8 flourescent uses between 15-50 watts. My personnal office area has eight of them. There's two every couple meters in the hallway. There can be hundreds on a single floor of office area.
Re:You forget the time scales involved
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Is SETI Worth It?
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· Score: 1
You're doing the usual SF failure: you forget the time scales involved, and assume that two meeting civilizations will be roughly at the same (or comparable) point on a technology scale.
Just disregarded it for the moment - even if we're very uneven, the more advanced society can 'invest' in getting our development level up, to the point we can aid them in the future. Then again, maybe we found some little wrinkle that they didn't know about.
Who knows, maybe they're so developed that they're actually interested in 'retro' technology, or are interested in our stuff for pure curiosity's sake, and are willing to send us information on advances in exchange.
So, yeah, "greed within the limits set by society." Why would that mean they have to give us stuff for free? We're not even the same species, much less the same society that set those restrictions. Even to members of the same species, those limits imposed by society mean it's ok to not give another group anything if they can't pay for it.
I said the reason why - helping us out costs essentially nothing, but may provide them assistance in the future.
A couple decent quality AA cells should be able to run a remote for a decade if the circuit is designed right.
Rechargables are actually a bad idea for extremely low drain devices like remotes and smoke detectors.
For standby needs - a AA or larger alkaline cell or two, semi-permanently installed* should work great. If you want to be really fancy, go lithium.
This would actually be more energy efficient because the power loss from rechargables(10-50% per month) would outweigh the loss of the non-rechargable(1% or so a year). In most cases, that actually outweighs the actual power usage. Especially if you power the remote sensor functions from line power, not using the battery, when the TV is on.
*IE you need a screwdriver to remove a small access panel to replace it.
This makes me wonder though - they quote the monitor as being able to wake itself up after five days with the assistance of the solar cell.
However, it doesn't make any mention of ambient light. I turn my lights off when I'm not in the room, generally, lights=on, computer=on. Lights=off, computer=off(well, unless I'm watching a movie or something). Where my computer is, the monitor doesn't get much light unless the lights are on.
Is it five days with lights on 24 hours/day? 12? 8? Will it be able to wake without physical intervention as long as it gets light 24/7?
Would it be possible, with a larger solar panel, to have the solar cells charge up enough from dead to 'able to start' from somebody turning the lights on? In about, oh, 30 seconds to a minute?
I'd argue that it's the fact that we have both that's led to the advancement of society. Too much greed and you never get out of the dirt because you're too busy protecting what little is 'yours'. Too much sharing and everybody stays lazy, there's never a surplus to improve.
Greed within the limits set by society - that works.
As for trading tech with the aliens - as long as we trade back, it's cheap research. It's like the prison scenario, except you have nothing real to lose by sending the data*. They have nothing to lose by sending the data, but both sides stand to gain from receiving the data. So, we transmit our stuff, they transmit their stuff. If we don't start receiving stuff in 20 years, we shut off the tap. They get a modest boost, we dont, but if they'd transmitted both sides would eventually have massive gains. Assuming that we have useful information to trade each other, of course. Don't forget lightspeed lag - I used 20 years, but it could easily be 80.
*We're assuming interstellar travel is impractical to the point of us not having to worry about them showing up.
Sure, there's compression, but there's also the carrior wave, which shouldn't be random. The receiving radio has to be able to tell signal from noise.
It's also looking for deliberate signals - an advanced alien race might be able to tell that Sol has a planet of the appropriate mass within the 'waterbelt' to support life. They would presumably try to make it easy for us to detect.
Matter of fact, deliberate signals are detectable starting around an order of magnitude further away than intercepting unintended transmissions like our AM/FM stations. This gives us a huge extra number of stars within potential range - such that many figure that we're more likely to get a directed broadcast than an accidental one.
What would be just typical would be if the aliens did the transmissions before the 1950s or so, and we just weren't capable of listening yet. Or they might be listening for us to say 'hello' first.
I remember seeing figures that, even given a lot of luck, we'd be lucky to detect the Earth at ~20 ly using just the earth's radio traffic.
Directed transmissions would increase that to ~100 ly, assuming a 50 meter 100kw extreme gain antenna.
At this point in time, the best negative SETI could give us is 'no earthlike civilizations in ~20ly' and 'nobody deliberately trying to contact us by radio within 100ly'.
Given that radio broadcasting by humans started only ~100 years ago(first in 1906 per wiki), how long it took for tool-using life to develop, before said life developed radio, current knowledge of stars and planets, it'd be very easy for me to believe that the average distance between advanced tool-using races/civilizations is greater than 100ly. This would still allow them to be very common.
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Heck, I can't even read the article and I know more than that.
;)
My proxy has the article blocked, so I'll have to read it later.
Hint: The people filing the lawsuit wants 100% HANDCOUNTS. IE no electronics involved in the process except maybe for providing the light. As I can't read the article at the moment, they might accept hand calculators.
Nah, if you read my other posts, you'll see that I'm very much in favor of a verifiable paper trail. I'd consider these people only a little more extreme than me. I'd allow electronic counting, backed up by human count if necessary.
The parent used the term 'extremist' like he considers these people extremists, and I ran with it.
I don't care how nutso they are - Whether they be scientologists, flat earthers, creationists, FSM devotees, greens, reds, etc... I'd much prefer them to be spending their time writing legal documents(however nutso), than making bombs, burning cars, rioting, etc...
The last time I voted the minature scanning machines on the box that did that tally. They obviously had them for your systems as well, as it'd reject spoiled ballots. There's not much of a step up from 'detect spoiled ballots' to 'go ahead and count the votes'. So you're still looking that the ballots are getting counted as they're cast.
I'm a big fan of 'trust but verify'. IE you trust the automatic box counter - but you run a random 10% of the boxes through a independent machine recount. Discrepencies are investigated. Then you hand count a different 1-10% of the boxes. Major discrepencies trigger bigger checks, up to and including a full recount by hand if necessary.
You still have the fun of making sure nobody's stuffing ballot boxes - an old tradition, but at least a tradition we have many safeguards against.
Of course, you independently add up the totals from all the boxes by several different methods, so it's difficult to impossible to jigger elections by not touching box counts - but district or even higher counts. The diebold system was bad this way - it reported it's overall tally from a seperate database than it did regional/box counts. Which would allow somebody to mess with the overall tally without changing any district's totals.
Oh yeah, and treat election fraud as it should be - a serious felony.
What I'm after is the best accuracy possible*, with the ability to audit at every level of the process.
* Machine counts, as long as the machine isn't defective or compromised are normally more accurate than hand counting.
These types of lawsuits don't result in monetary rewards, instead requiring states to 'fix' their processes. At most, court costs.
In many states they're not going to get beyond step 1, as the election standards are set by law and as long as the state is meeting them, the judge will kick it back as 'if you feel any adjustments are needed, you need to go to congress to get them'. Not all states have courts as willing to make up their own laws as there are on the federal level.
Personally, I think they're doing it to get attention.
For some people it's easier to fill out (think 2000 + hanging chads)
However, chads are a prime example of overcomplicating matters. To create chads you need a punch machine.
A pen and paper would have been easier for many, and resulted in ballots that were easier to determine.
Personally, after the 2006 election, I'd rather use pen&paper than that horribly crappy Diebold software..
Agreed.
Personally, I think that any 'touch screen' voting machines should be nothing more than gloriously overengineered printing stations for handicapped ballot casting. IE you insert your ballot into the printer, make your choices, it prints your choices, you verify your choices and cast your ballot into the same box everyone's depositing their pen marked ballots. If you screw something up that you find after printing, you get another ballot, and the printed one goes into the spoiled bin.
*shrug*
you have to find balance somewhere. If that $50k bomb stops the $5k truck bomb before it detonates and causes $500k of damage, killing 5 people(~$1 million each), it's worth it.
Sure, active operations are expensive, but the idea is that it's cheaper than the alternative.
I suggest you calm down a bit. Anybody can file a lawsuit like this, we'll have to wait and see if it's thrown out of court or not. Who knows, it might spur some legislation
Taking in my experiences in voting in the midwest, which have universally been 'scanotron' sheets, there are at least some states with a verifiable paper record that can be recounted by hand if determined necessary.
One problem with all this 'hand count' stuff is that even hand counting has an error rate - often a higher one than the scanotrons. At least as long as you make the voting rules for a valid ballot be one scannable by the machine*. Sure, a few will probably be kicked out - but it's much easier to deal with a couple hundred ballots to count by hand than a million or more.
On another tack, I'd much prefer the wacko extremists be filing lawsuits rather than the alternatives many wacko extremists select - such as building bombs.
*IE you place in the rules 'An X through the bubble doesn't count. A partially filled bubble doesn't count(showing a sample with maybe 1/3 the bubble filled in), a circled bubble doesn't count. A completely filled bubble counts.' Same rules as for ACT, SATS, and other such college tests.
They can't even get a pissy little fight in Afghanistan/Iraq/Vietnam sorted out, what hope would they have with a country like China??
Nukes. We could currently sustain a naval blockcade for quite a while.
I certainly wouldn't want to go into a country who's military is about as large as our country's population.
A submarine can too capture one of these boats. All they have to do is get a crew on board, and not much at that. At least until they start putting armed guards on the tankers; but that's unlikely as it gives the submarine the excuse to blow the whole thing up. Depending on what they do, they might not even have to surface. They'd probably be best off working in pairs though.
Now, I believe in the old axiom 'Those who wish for peace; prepare for war'. IE As long as a country maintains enough military might to make anybody looking at using military force against it decide 'there's an easier way', it's to the better.
It's like using AIM54s to shoot down Pipers Cubs. You can do that, with ease. Problem is only that the rockets you use will probably cost more than the plane you shoot down.
That's assuming that the two parties involved have about the same resource base. Thing is, a $5k truck is more expensive to many of our enemies than a $50k smart bomb is for us, because we have more than 10x the resource base.
They're a little short on shipping to do that though...
That's part of the reason for the USA to have a strong navy, to prevent any nation from being able to just ship a military over to attack.
The USAF would just be a bonus - taking out cargo ships laden with troops tends to be fairly easy.
Just want to check, but I remember hearing about a number of fake windups hitting the market - inoperable generator hooked up to the handle and the light itself powered by alkalines. Are you sure yours is a good one?
How long does your 'few rotations of the handle' do you get light? How useful of a light is it? I've only seen figures of minutes. You'll generally get at least a dozen hours, up to hundreds for a battery powered LED light.
So you'll want a battery if you're going to be using it seriously; IE hours at a time.
The situation gets even worse if you're talking about a remote; where a pair of AA batteries(or 3 AAA) will last for years.
I would certainly welcome replacing the hassle of replacing batteries with a few rotations of the handle.
Would you really welcome spending 30 seconds a week or even daily cranking little tiny cranks to keep your remotes working; or replacing a couple batteries every 3-5 years?
A NiMH AAA has something like 800-1000 mAh of capacity. A AA has 2700-2800, or almost three times as much capacity. Even alkalines generally have better than double the capacity
AA 50.5mm long, 14mm in diameter. 7.78k mm^3
AAA 44.5mm long, 10.5mm diameter. 3.85k mm^3
A AAA only has 49% of the volume of a AA. It gets even worse if you go larger with batteries, as power is generally a function of volume. When I mentioned going larger than AA, I was meaning to power the standby requirements for the television. IE small access door you need a screwdriver to open to replace the battery to allow the remote to turn the tv on. A single C or D cell would probably last for a decade. At which point it's more hassle to try to mess with solar panels and such. With a non-rechargeable battery you're not wasting power keeping it topped off when the unit's on either.
I have a DVD player remote that runs off of a coin battery.
I do wonder if the batteries couldn't be replaced by either adding a solar panel (some novelty calculators did this) or by adding a storage capacitor that could be charged up using a small wheel or something similar.
It'd probably cost more than just using a battery - remember, remotes for home entertainment systems are frequently used in the dark. And do you really want to turn a crank to change the channel? At that point you might as well get up and change it from the TV.
Believe it or not, but alkaline batteries are actually quite a good solution to low power draw applications.
You have to remember that businesses generally get charged differently than home users for their electricity.
Off peak might be real cheap for them.
Heat pumps are becoming popular - I think some of the 'never turning off the lights' are older buildings where the owners/operators have just never thought about conserving electricity there.
If nothing else, even up north here during the summertime you'd be running the AC more to get rid of the heat the lights are generating, so it's still better to shut them off. Heat pumps are becoming popular, which exceeds the 100% efficiency of electric heating(100% of the energy ends up as heat!). So you'd be better off there.
With increased gas prices today, it's often a wash as to whether gas or electric is cheaper. Still, during the winter my marginal cost for any electric appliance is negligible. For example, I get work out of my computer at the same time it's helping to warm the house up.
Some businesses are energy efficient, but many aren't.
I'm a single male. However, I also own my own(older) house that I'm renovating. I drive a coupe.
I can fit some amazing things in there - but I'm shopping for a truck to allow me to do some of the heavier work. I want the truck to be 4WD, as the coupe, while it's handled winters so far, I've also been fairly lucky and had some close calls - mostly with getting stuck. Traction control just doesn't work well, and the car being built low doesn't help much. So I'm looking for a pickup - full length bed, 4WD, w/tow package(90% of the trucks here have it), and preferably diesel. I'd like to be able to use biodiesel, plus the engines last forever and get better milage, towpackage for these is pretty much 'assumed'.
I like my car, so I'm keeping it. Just paid it off this year to boot. So I'm shopping for an older but still reliable pickup for occasional use. As such, I'm looking for a relative monster - capable of handling most anything in the 'other' category. I drive the coupe for day to day tasks, but can pull out the truck for the big jobs. Like hauling home shingles for reroofing the house.
A difference you don't point out is that an Expedition can tow more than twice what the Honda vehicle can. - Also, the difference between starting MSRP for a midgrade Honda Odyssey is only a thousand less than the Expedition. When you're talking about $25-30k vehicles, that's less than 10% price difference. Yes, 'equivalently equiped' as quoted from Honda's site is about $10k difference, I always take that with a grain of salt - I don't use many of the features they boast, so honestly enough I'd rather not pay for them.
Finally, personally, I'd want to check the vehicles out in person. There might be some stinkers that I could find.
If I were to talk about the systems that produce chads, I'd talk about punchcard voting systems.
Paper Has the problems of increased Human Error. The machanical system that NY has now reduces the Human Error Involved, although the interface horible, it has been working for about 100 years now. Flip the switch and Pull the leaver, Crank Click Click Click Click.
They're aging and prone to mechanical defects. Replacing them with similar machines would probably be prohibitively expensive. Bubble sheets and scannotron readers are at this point a mature technology.
These things are made from heavy metal, hacking would require err umm hacking at it. Causing a lot of noise and making those people who sit right next to them kinda worried that there is a guy banging on the voting machiene. It would much easer with Paper Ballats to mess up the results.
Magnets, small drills, a sharp smack at the right spot, etc...
Get the voting Ticket. Palm it before you place it in the box. Go home with the ticket. Make duplicated a Scanner and a printer that can do heavy stock could do the trick. Punch Holes or Put marks on them. Come back or have someone else come back and drop a pack of 10 or 20 cards into the box. No one will know. 10 or 20 cards could be good enough for some local elections with around 2000 votes. That automatically changes the results 1%. Vs. a Guy Baning on a machanical machine. Kinda Getting pulled out before he could get threw the heavy steel.
Obviously, you've never voted using optical paper ballots.
1. It's rather difficult to palm a 11x17" sheet of paper printed on fairly heavy stock.
2. Watermarks and serial numbers are going to make duplicating it without being obvious extremely difficult.
3. The box is secured and watched. They're not going to let you feed 10 votes into it.
The way it works: You proceed to the polling place. You go to the sign in desk, and they verify your identity, address, citizenship and eligability per state law. You are issued a ballot(the SN of the ballet is not associated with you in any way, but the polling employee marks that he issued it). You proceed to a desk or something to vote. Pencils or pens are provided. Once complete, you proceed to the deposit area. They verify that you have a valid ballet, which you then feed through a scanner, the scanner rejects it if it sees a problem with the ballet(testing at least some of the hidden security features at the same time). If you have a spoiled ballet, you turn it in for a new one, the fact that that ballet was spoiled is noted.
You are not allowed to leave with the ballet.
Actually, there was an even earlier case involving a farmer by the name of Filburn who was fined for growing too much wheat(he grew 461 bushels, but was only allowed 222), the excess which he fed to his own cattle and family. It hit the supreme court in 1941.
The ruling was that because if he hadn't grown the wheat he would of had to buy it, therefore it was interstate commerce - even though the excess wheat never left the farm, much less the state.
Yes, repairing electronics can be done. Much like how many 'totaled' vehicles could be fixed. It's just that the fix cost exceeds the remaining value of the device.
The math changes when you're talking about expensive professional equipment, but I was generally refering to cheap stuff made in china. I at least hope that the expensive telecom equipment isn't made in China.
I remember reading how most SMT chips are such low failure that it would actually cost more money to make them easier to replace than it does to aborb the higher repair cost - or even just replace failures completely.
Take Device X with repair Y
The cost to make repair Y cost $100 instead of $200 is $1.
However, the failure rate that would require repair Y is
I also assume that the average consumer has to take it to a professional repair place - they lack the knowledge or even basic tools for making repairs. That means professional equipment($$), professional labor($$$), taxes($), etc...
Jerry rigging repair equipment is the exception, not the rule.
Flourescent tube bulbs tend to be very energy efficient; but I'd have to agree with you that shutting off office lights when nobody's in them, heck, shut down the hallway lights when nobody is there, combined with street/parking lot lights, etc... This would probably save more energy than getting all all appliance standbys down to 0 watts.
For example, a single T8 flourescent uses between 15-50 watts. My personnal office area has eight of them. There's two every couple meters in the hallway. There can be hundreds on a single floor of office area.
You're doing the usual SF failure: you forget the time scales involved, and assume that two meeting civilizations will be roughly at the same (or comparable) point on a technology scale.
Just disregarded it for the moment - even if we're very uneven, the more advanced society can 'invest' in getting our development level up, to the point we can aid them in the future. Then again, maybe we found some little wrinkle that they didn't know about.
Who knows, maybe they're so developed that they're actually interested in 'retro' technology, or are interested in our stuff for pure curiosity's sake, and are willing to send us information on advances in exchange.
So, yeah, "greed within the limits set by society." Why would that mean they have to give us stuff for free? We're not even the same species, much less the same society that set those restrictions. Even to members of the same species, those limits imposed by society mean it's ok to not give another group anything if they can't pay for it.
I said the reason why - helping us out costs essentially nothing, but may provide them assistance in the future.
A couple decent quality AA cells should be able to run a remote for a decade if the circuit is designed right.
Rechargables are actually a bad idea for extremely low drain devices like remotes and smoke detectors.
For standby needs - a AA or larger alkaline cell or two, semi-permanently installed* should work great. If you want to be really fancy, go lithium.
This would actually be more energy efficient because the power loss from rechargables(10-50% per month) would outweigh the loss of the non-rechargable(1% or so a year). In most cases, that actually outweighs the actual power usage. Especially if you power the remote sensor functions from line power, not using the battery, when the TV is on.
*IE you need a screwdriver to remove a small access panel to replace it.
This makes me wonder though - they quote the monitor as being able to wake itself up after five days with the assistance of the solar cell.
However, it doesn't make any mention of ambient light. I turn my lights off when I'm not in the room, generally, lights=on, computer=on. Lights=off, computer=off(well, unless I'm watching a movie or something). Where my computer is, the monitor doesn't get much light unless the lights are on.
Is it five days with lights on 24 hours/day? 12? 8? Will it be able to wake without physical intervention as long as it gets light 24/7?
Would it be possible, with a larger solar panel, to have the solar cells charge up enough from dead to 'able to start' from somebody turning the lights on? In about, oh, 30 seconds to a minute?
You were probably looking at window units, while the parent was talking about house units, also known as central air.
Window units are exempt from the DOE requirement.
Requiring window units to meet the higher standard would be expensive, for perhaps not much gain.
I'd argue that it's the fact that we have both that's led to the advancement of society. Too much greed and you never get out of the dirt because you're too busy protecting what little is 'yours'. Too much sharing and everybody stays lazy, there's never a surplus to improve.
Greed within the limits set by society - that works.
As for trading tech with the aliens - as long as we trade back, it's cheap research. It's like the prison scenario, except you have nothing real to lose by sending the data*. They have nothing to lose by sending the data, but both sides stand to gain from receiving the data. So, we transmit our stuff, they transmit their stuff. If we don't start receiving stuff in 20 years, we shut off the tap. They get a modest boost, we dont, but if they'd transmitted both sides would eventually have massive gains. Assuming that we have useful information to trade each other, of course. Don't forget lightspeed lag - I used 20 years, but it could easily be 80.
*We're assuming interstellar travel is impractical to the point of us not having to worry about them showing up.
Sure, there's compression, but there's also the carrior wave, which shouldn't be random. The receiving radio has to be able to tell signal from noise.
It's also looking for deliberate signals - an advanced alien race might be able to tell that Sol has a planet of the appropriate mass within the 'waterbelt' to support life. They would presumably try to make it easy for us to detect.
Matter of fact, deliberate signals are detectable starting around an order of magnitude further away than intercepting unintended transmissions like our AM/FM stations. This gives us a huge extra number of stars within potential range - such that many figure that we're more likely to get a directed broadcast than an accidental one.
What would be just typical would be if the aliens did the transmissions before the 1950s or so, and we just weren't capable of listening yet. Or they might be listening for us to say 'hello' first.
I remember seeing figures that, even given a lot of luck, we'd be lucky to detect the Earth at ~20 ly using just the earth's radio traffic.
Directed transmissions would increase that to ~100 ly, assuming a 50 meter 100kw extreme gain antenna.
At this point in time, the best negative SETI could give us is 'no earthlike civilizations in ~20ly' and 'nobody deliberately trying to contact us by radio within 100ly'.
Given that radio broadcasting by humans started only ~100 years ago(first in 1906 per wiki), how long it took for tool-using life to develop, before said life developed radio, current knowledge of stars and planets, it'd be very easy for me to believe that the average distance between advanced tool-using races/civilizations is greater than 100ly. This would still allow them to be very common.