First, 'faster than most parents can go' is pushing how fast I'd want a little tyke vehicle to go. I mean, are we equipping it with a proper seat, a seatbelt, roll cage, impact bumper, etc...?
Second, yeah, the faster the vehicle the more valuable a kill switch would be. Heck, get fancy with it and have it shut down if the tyke exceeds X distance from the control. IE if it starts getting far enough that the parent's control might not be able to reach it, turn off anyways, at least until the parent catches back up.
A faster EV might make sense if the kid is coming along for a bike ride or something.
How did that military service as the price for military issue gun ownership go?
1. That's your requirement, not mine. 2. Besides, 'everyone' is part of the militia(pretty much). 3. Finally, the amendment specifies the people's right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The militia clause more means that if the government felt the need it could call the appropriate people up(fit, not to old, etc...) for mandatory militia training, whether they owned a firearm or not. Matter of fact, in the early militia acts they could force you to purchase a suitable weapon once notified of your obligation in the militia.
You didn't do it?
Are you speaking in general or specifically to me? Didn't your parents ever teach you about making assumptions?
Oh so you've twisted that amendment so that it's a right without responsibility - what a clever little coward you are.
Have you attended your mandatory internet speech training citizen? No? You're not allowed to post to the internet until you've completed it. It involves working at the post office for 4 years.
It's pathetic that a sporting club full of cowards who cannot properly manage their sport have bought so much influence in Washington.
Meh. You're jealous that all your side has is a few rich donors like Bloomberg and can't muster proper grass-roots support like the NRA* and other organizations can.
*You think the NRA is biased? I'm a member of the Gun Owners of America (GOA), the gun rights organization that thinks that the NRA is too compromising.
How is having a kill switch or a remote control for your kid's little EV NOT being an involved parent? In order for the thing to be of any use you have to be watching.
Sure, it extends the leash a bit, but not even out of sight.
To these people, buying a car without these connections is like buying a car without tires on it.
Your analogy is perhaps more apt than you think, yet less difficult.
People buy cars without tires or with serious issues all the time. Tires are easy, you nip over to the tire store buy some and you're hooked up.
If the linkage is present, it's a call or two to the electric company, maybe a deposit, to get it turned on. You MIGHT want to have somebody qualified take a look at the house to make sure they didn't do anything crazy like convert some of the lines to DC or something.
If it's not hooked up, you're looking at more work, of course. That would be like your car sitting on the ground without rims.
Remember, an awful lot of foreclosed homes will have already had the utilities cut off, so no electricity anyways. A not insignificant number will have had the wiring ripped out of them.
Fear: Seeking to pass regulations that mandate that homes be connected to the grid, charge those who seek to install solar excessive connection costs by special fee(I've seen $100+/month), pay only wholesale and ban net metering, engineering review for every solar install, etc...
Adjustment: Seeking to bias their charge rates to bias more towards the connection fee than energy sold. IE rather than paying $20 connection fee and $0.10 per kWh (1k kWh = $100, total bill $120), you change it to $0.09 per kWh and a $30 connection charge. You make a reasonable standard for grid connections(no backfeeding when utility power isn't present), with a limit on capacity that's more to prevent somebody from trying to hook up a multi-acre solar farm to a residential connection.
It's quite normal for a house to be considered "condemned" if it does not have grid electricity, running water, or heating.
Grid electricity: Why does it have to be hooked up to the grid if you have enough solar panels and a battery bank of sufficient size to provide for your needs? In both cases nearly all that would have to happen is that the power company comes out and hooks the meter back up. There may be some paperwork concerns in the case where the woman was behind on payments. Running water: I have running water and no city water supply. I have a well, pump, and tank system(not to mention filters). I know people who live in 'dry cabins', they generally drive a truck with a big water tank in the back. They buy their water and pump it into a tank system in the cabin. You often can't do the well in cities, but as long as you have a water source - whether it be well, truck, rainwater collection, you can have running water. Heating: Certainly. Arizona requires cooling as well. But which would you rather have, somebody homeless(the Arizona lady ended up spending several weeks living in her car after being kicked out of her home), or at least in a permanent structure, so long as it's still structurally intact? I could 'camp' in my house a whole lot safer and more comfortable than I could in my truck.
If the power company is charging to much, just disconnect.
How does this help if the result is that the power company notices you're not paying anymore, notifies the city government, who comes out and condemns/threatens to condemn your house as unlivable unless you have electricity, then they tell you that a grid connection is the only legitimate way of having electricity, despite the roof full of solar panels in a southern state?
Please note: I'm not an extreme greenie. I'm more of a libertarian bent, so I'm rebelling against government regulation and dependence. I may think that you're weird for wanting to be that extremely off grid for 'ecological reasons', but as long as you have the resources to do so I will support your right in the name of FREEDOM!!!
to the contrary a solar charging station in the home would mitigate this.
There's a couple things I don't like about this.
1. You hook the solar up to your 'grid'. Even if it's a home level grid. No sense wasting electricity 2. Solar car charging stations would probably be more useful at work. I tend to picture 'solar car parks', where ostentatiously the solar panels are for charging the employee and maybe even customer cars, but it's actually hooked into the grid. It's just that having a car shade is a really nice under appreciated perk, and it doesn't cost that much more to make the solar panels act as a roof above the parking lot than it does to mount them free-standing or on a roof, but makes them double purpose. You don't even need an under-surface with most panels. Wouldn't be completely waterproof enough for a house, but for parking cars under it? No problem!
The batteries arn't magic and if you live in a part of the world that doesn't get much sun then you'll still be using mains power.
Most of the world lives where there's sufficient light to power the average household. Worst case, I'm looking at maybe installing a stirling engine between my oil tank and my hydraulic system instead of just the boiler. The idea is to have a nearly maintenance free system(no more than the boiler) that's around 20% efficient at producing electricity, and about 90% overall.
I could produce electricity for less than the power company that way, so long as my house needs the heat. Though using wood pellets is also an option. Using it as a backup generator would require some interesting logic and a radiator outside that is activated if the power is out and my house doesn't need the heat.
Well, I'd go with something like Florida, where they're mandating a hookup to electric and water for everybody. Even if the individual has spent the resources to have it provided through alternative means.
In Arizona, the woman even had water, though the level of solar provided might not be enough, given that she was getting some electricity from the neighbors.
The officials decided it was better for her to be homeless than to live in a house without air conditioning or heating. Well, they denied knowing that she'd end up sleeping in her car when they kicked her out. Probably ended up costing the state more money in shelters and what not.
So while Florida might be like the rules for waterless urinals - plumbing code still says you have to run water there, but all you need is a valve and a capped pipe in the wall - so if you ever decide to get rid of the waterless urinal and get a water using one(or put toilets in or something), it's easy. That's a static cost.
Or if you have to have a meter and pay a monthly connection charge, even if you consume 0 kwh. Like Arizona.
The important part is surely what do the regulations do to prevent negative experiences.
Indeed, regulations must be constantly examined to make sure they're still relevant and targeted at a real problem and are doing so in a cost-effective manner. By 'cost-effective' in this case I don't mean just direct costs - costs can be direct, indirect, imposed, compliance, etc... Even non-monetary in the form of violations to concepts like freedom and privacy.
Not completely fixed(depends on channel being recorded at the time), I would think, but yeah, a fixed rate that's substantially below a HD's write speed.
Remember that SSDs are relatively slow at writing compared to reading. HDs are generally equally fast in either direction, so given a sufficiently sequential write process I can see them actually being able to write faster than the SSD.
But I understand your rebuttal of somebody saying they've never heard of a ride gone bad with Uber. Personally, I think the important part would be rate at which things go wrong(and horribly wrong).
You need to check your timeline - I was born late '70s and I remember the transition, so sure as heck I was affected.
But you are correct - the drop in crime should be leveling off soon(if not already). Now we're into the tougher ways to further reduce crime. One thing that the massive jump in crime did was really exercise our law enforcement abilities.
Heck, I even remember my grandfather using an adapter so he could use the (cheaper) leaded gasoline in his unleaded car. I know now that it ruined the catalytic converter and really screwed with emissions, but hey, I was a pre-teen back then.
Still, the drop was precipitous enough that many state penal systems cancelled lots of planned prison construction, and prison overcrowding is now mostly over. Well, at least for states that didn't try to shove 3 times as many prisoners as their prisons were rated for into them(California).
And street crime went down since then with a very strong correlation to the timeframes of removing leaded fuel.
The correlation was actually much stronger than that. Crime rates jumped in response and proportion 18 years after the introduction of leaded gasoline and it's adoption/usage rate - the more used, the bigger the crime jump. It also tracked with it's removal. Areas that removed leaded gasoline two years later than others experienced the drop in crime two years later than the control areas.
Areas with little to no usage of leaded didn't experience the jump at all.
Furnace is going to run longer and use more fuel to heat your house more.
*snark* well, if I turn the temperature up(heat house more) of COURSE it's going to run longer and use more fuel!;)
Also, fuel usage will go up by the amount of electricity I'm generating(and no longer buying from the electric company). Trick is, with a properly sized system I can claim 90% efficiency* in using my oil overall, even if the electrical generation portion is only 20% efficient. I just use the other 70% of the energy derived from burning the oil as low grade heat(house thermostat is normally set to 65F, about 18C).
Because I'm 'effectively' using 90% of the energy in the extra oil I burn to create electricity under this scenario, so long as I'm not creating so much electricity that I'm producing more heat than what I need for heating needs. Obviously I wouldn't run this in summer unless there's a power outage. At which point it'd be hooked up to a heat exchanger OUTSIDE.
Remember, my measure of 'efficiency' amounts to 'what percent of the energy in this gallon of oil did I actually use for my intended purposes'. Burning it and recovering heat is a known high efficiency process.
Okay, example time: I use 100 units of oil a year right now. Because my boiler is 90% efficient, that means I need 90 units worth of heat. I put in an engine of some sort - it could be diesel(they can run on #2 heating oil), turbine, or stirling. The choice of which is engineering. Set up to have the heat scavenged for my house, it's 20% efficient.
So now I burn 100 units, I get 20 units of electricity, 70 units of heat. Since the goal is not overproduction of either resource(IE more than I consume), and I was previously buying the electricity directly(it was still ending up as waste heat in my house). I'm now short 20 units of heat. So I increase my burn to 129 units of oil. I produce 25.8 units of electricity(cutting my electric bill even more), and 90.3 units of heat(rounding...).
29 units of oil to produce 25.8 units of electricity = 89% efficient. Going by local electric prices and the cost of home heating oil, I can produce the electricity cheaper than the electric company, and that's without considering that the oil companies cut the price more the more you buy.
Remember, my limitation is the heat demand of my house - while 90% efficient use of the fuel is cheaper than the power company, a 30% efficient generator isn't. Also, the power company will stop paying retail if I exceed my net usage, though I checked, a cogeneration system DOES count the same as solar panels and wind turbines, so net metering applies. It's part of 'winter power is more expensive than summer' that goes on here.
It doesn't matter whether the electrical generator is 1% efficient or 50%, as long as I have the ability to scavenge most of the waste heat for a purpose I'd be burning the fuel for anyways. The only difference is the total amount of electricity I can generate - 1% wouldn't be much electricity displaced. 50% I might as well act as a generation source for the power company.
*Efficiency in this case is a combination of burn efficiency(99%+) and looking at exhaust temperature vs inlet temperature - 70F when you're drawing in 0F air is still energy lost, and while you could put a heat exchanger there to warm up the incoming air using the exhaust air, I don't think it would be worth the cost to do it safely.
Modern furnaces exhaust cool air. They condense water in the flue. There isn't actually waste heat because they're cooled to ambient temperatures: you can grab onto the metal flue and it will feel cool; the air exhausting from the external vent feels room-temperature.
I don't actually have a furnace, I have a boiler. Because I heat with oil(only real option in the area at the time, NG is supposed to come within 2 years), I can't use a condensing boiler due to the exhaust being highly acidic if you condense it. I'm considering doing something, but anything I do would have to be extremely corrosion resistant due to the sulfuric acid.
Also, you might not feel it, but most units still emit fairly warm air. There is a point of diminishing returns.
Higher temperatures transfer more energy more efficiently. If you pass 400F air through a heat exchanger to 70F ambient air flow, it'll transfer a greater proportion of the temperature difference than if you pass 200F air through. Something extremely hot will drop 50% of its temperature differential with ambient a lot faster than something that is slightly warm.
Again, you're trying to maximize 'efficiency' where it doesn't need to. While it matters less you you, remember that I'm a hydrolic system. I pump 400F water(well, steam), and I'll get 200F back and won't be able to dump the extra energy from burning into it, which means that it'll go up the flue.
I don't know why you're lecturing me on the operation of stirling engines. I'm the one who suggested it.
When you get down to near-ambient temperatures, there's so little energy and such low efficiency that you might charge a AAA battery in several months, if it doesn't bleed charge faster than you're charging it.
I'd be firing it with oil. Where are you getting 'near-ambient' temperatures from?
Here, I'll chart my theoretical system: 1. Oil comes into a burner and fires the hot side of the sterling engine. Besides exhaust, this would be insulated to help maximize heat. 500F (260C) would be a goal, hotter if I can get it. Utilize waste heat recovery so the exhaust is condensing, such as by heating the incoming air. 2. The 'cold' side of the stirling engine would be hooked to my hydrolic system, which would have a maximum of 180F(82C), which gives a carnot* efficiency of 33% 3. Hopefully everything could be cooler, of course. 120F/50C gets me to 40% max efficiency. 600F on the hot side gives me 45%, at which point the stirling might actually be at 30%
With an external-combustion engine like a sterling engine, the heat is lost.
Where? Into my house it's not lost. My house is water-heated, I toss a heat exchanger on the hot side and I'm using the 'waste heat', by dumping it into my 20C house. Sure, I'll lose some efficiency compared to dumping it outside, but the point is efficient combustion and capture as much of the waste heat as possible, not a stirling(or other engine) maximized for electrical generation efficiency.
$300 for the iPad $150 for insurance on said iPad $100 server licensing for things like blackboard $300 licensing for all the custom apps and control programs $200 per-unit cost of training the teachers and administrators on the things, including the back ends. $400 cost to license electronic versions of their text books etc...
Still, the sheer cost smacks of some corruption in the selection process.
There's an extra couple problems that he didn't state: 1. There's a lot more students than there are teachers and faculty. Probably around 20:1. Still, consider these two numbers: out of 15k students in the initial release, 'almost 200' bypassed the security(followed sources). That's under 2%. Of course, it'd still spread. That was the first week cracks. 2. The students have nearly 24/7 physical access to them. That's never a good recipe for continued security.
Of course, given the incidents of faculty spying on students in places to include their bedrooms using the built-in cameras on computers, I'd SUPPORT disabling functions like that.
What part of 'the math' did I screw up? I don't recall ever calling the presence of additional 'intelligent complex tool using species' in question. I stated that, assuming a random distribution, the lower the odds of such a species the further apart they will be, on average.
Then I said that that makes me sad. I forgot to mention that it makes me sad because the further apart we are, the more difficult finding and talking to each other are.
You also forgot a few steps. of the.1% with intelligent life,.1% have complex tool using intelligent life. That leaves us with 100 potential planets to talk to without actually going out and visiting them.
My sad is tpjunkie's point. There's a non-zero chance that the odds of intelligent life are low enough that there's a real probability that we ARE alone, at least in the galaxy. Them being tool users of sufficient complexity that we'd be able to find each other via something like radio waves is even less(though by how much, we don't know). The Universe is a different matter. But unless we really rewrite physics, traveling between galaxies ends up being as difficult a jump from a colonized galaxy as we would find expanding from a colonized Sol to the next star.
Not to mention, the infrastructure to gas up and go in just about any direction exists, but the ability to charge up in any given direction is fairly limited.
Not if you're a creative Model-S owner. Every RV park in the country has an outlet that can provide a full speed home charge. Not supercharger rate, but still around 8 times as fast as a cripple charge.
So what are people supposed to do? Buy an electric car and a gas car?
At least initially. You have to remember that 'most' families own at least 2 cars. Especially those buying new ones. If you're going to have two vehicles in the family, so to speak, you can really optimize - even if you need a truck every weekend, you can still use a compact for whichever parent works the furthest away.
95% = 18 days they need a different vehicle a year. At $50 to rent a more capable vehicle - that's $900. Though I misremembered, I should have said 98% instead - that's 8 days of getting a rental. That covers the thanksgiving/christmas trip*, the occasional home project, bringing home a sofa, etc... Though now that I think about it, many who take 2 weeks of vacation elsewhere a year fly and rent a car for ~12 days or so anyways.
*Why NOT save the mileage on your primary vehicle. While you're at it you can get a bigger vehicle capable of hauling your luggage.
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First, 'faster than most parents can go' is pushing how fast I'd want a little tyke vehicle to go. I mean, are we equipping it with a proper seat, a seatbelt, roll cage, impact bumper, etc...?
Second, yeah, the faster the vehicle the more valuable a kill switch would be. Heck, get fancy with it and have it shut down if the tyke exceeds X distance from the control. IE if it starts getting far enough that the parent's control might not be able to reach it, turn off anyways, at least until the parent catches back up.
A faster EV might make sense if the kid is coming along for a bike ride or something.
The AC got it right. I've never worn a police uniform in my life.
Upon review, I'm going to conclude that you're just hurt that I have a sense of humor and you don't.
Use a pun, go to prison.
*Snerk*
Thank's everyone. I had work to do so I couldn't go on a gun = pun sloganfest, thanks for taking up the slack!
"This is my rifle and this is my pun; this is for fighting and this is for fun!"
How did that military service as the price for military issue gun ownership go?
1. That's your requirement, not mine.
2. Besides, 'everyone' is part of the militia(pretty much).
3. Finally, the amendment specifies the people's right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. The militia clause more means that if the government felt the need it could call the appropriate people up(fit, not to old, etc...) for mandatory militia training, whether they owned a firearm or not. Matter of fact, in the early militia acts they could force you to purchase a suitable weapon once notified of your obligation in the militia.
You didn't do it?
Are you speaking in general or specifically to me? Didn't your parents ever teach you about making assumptions?
Oh so you've twisted that amendment so that it's a right without responsibility - what a clever little coward you are.
Have you attended your mandatory internet speech training citizen? No? You're not allowed to post to the internet until you've completed it. It involves working at the post office for 4 years.
It's pathetic that a sporting club full of cowards who cannot properly manage their sport have bought so much influence in Washington.
Meh. You're jealous that all your side has is a few rich donors like Bloomberg and can't muster proper grass-roots support like the NRA* and other organizations can.
*You think the NRA is biased? I'm a member of the Gun Owners of America (GOA), the gun rights organization that thinks that the NRA is too compromising.
"If you outlaw puns. Only criminals will have puns."
I'll admit, as a 2nd amendment proponent I laughed out loud at this one.
How is having a kill switch or a remote control for your kid's little EV NOT being an involved parent? In order for the thing to be of any use you have to be watching.
Sure, it extends the leash a bit, but not even out of sight.
To these people, buying a car without these connections is like buying a car without tires on it.
Your analogy is perhaps more apt than you think, yet less difficult.
People buy cars without tires or with serious issues all the time. Tires are easy, you nip over to the tire store buy some and you're hooked up.
If the linkage is present, it's a call or two to the electric company, maybe a deposit, to get it turned on. You MIGHT want to have somebody qualified take a look at the house to make sure they didn't do anything crazy like convert some of the lines to DC or something.
If it's not hooked up, you're looking at more work, of course. That would be like your car sitting on the ground without rims.
Remember, an awful lot of foreclosed homes will have already had the utilities cut off, so no electricity anyways. A not insignificant number will have had the wiring ripped out of them.
Fear: Seeking to pass regulations that mandate that homes be connected to the grid, charge those who seek to install solar excessive connection costs by special fee(I've seen $100+/month), pay only wholesale and ban net metering, engineering review for every solar install, etc...
Adjustment: Seeking to bias their charge rates to bias more towards the connection fee than energy sold. IE rather than paying $20 connection fee and $0.10 per kWh (1k kWh = $100, total bill $120), you change it to $0.09 per kWh and a $30 connection charge. You make a reasonable standard for grid connections(no backfeeding when utility power isn't present), with a limit on capacity that's more to prevent somebody from trying to hook up a multi-acre solar farm to a residential connection.
It's quite normal for a house to be considered "condemned" if it does not have grid electricity, running water, or heating.
Grid electricity: Why does it have to be hooked up to the grid if you have enough solar panels and a battery bank of sufficient size to provide for your needs? In both cases nearly all that would have to happen is that the power company comes out and hooks the meter back up. There may be some paperwork concerns in the case where the woman was behind on payments.
Running water: I have running water and no city water supply. I have a well, pump, and tank system(not to mention filters). I know people who live in 'dry cabins', they generally drive a truck with a big water tank in the back. They buy their water and pump it into a tank system in the cabin. You often can't do the well in cities, but as long as you have a water source - whether it be well, truck, rainwater collection, you can have running water.
Heating: Certainly. Arizona requires cooling as well. But which would you rather have, somebody homeless(the Arizona lady ended up spending several weeks living in her car after being kicked out of her home), or at least in a permanent structure, so long as it's still structurally intact? I could 'camp' in my house a whole lot safer and more comfortable than I could in my truck.
If the power company is charging to much, just disconnect.
How does this help if the result is that the power company notices you're not paying anymore, notifies the city government, who comes out and condemns/threatens to condemn your house as unlivable unless you have electricity, then they tell you that a grid connection is the only legitimate way of having electricity, despite the roof full of solar panels in a southern state?
Please note: I'm not an extreme greenie. I'm more of a libertarian bent, so I'm rebelling against government regulation and dependence. I may think that you're weird for wanting to be that extremely off grid for 'ecological reasons', but as long as you have the resources to do so I will support your right in the name of FREEDOM!!!
to the contrary a solar charging station in the home would mitigate this.
There's a couple things I don't like about this.
1. You hook the solar up to your 'grid'. Even if it's a home level grid. No sense wasting electricity
2. Solar car charging stations would probably be more useful at work. I tend to picture 'solar car parks', where ostentatiously the solar panels are for charging the employee and maybe even customer cars, but it's actually hooked into the grid. It's just that having a car shade is a really nice under appreciated perk, and it doesn't cost that much more to make the solar panels act as a roof above the parking lot than it does to mount them free-standing or on a roof, but makes them double purpose. You don't even need an under-surface with most panels. Wouldn't be completely waterproof enough for a house, but for parking cars under it? No problem!
The batteries arn't magic and if you live in a part of the world that doesn't get much sun then you'll still be using mains power.
Most of the world lives where there's sufficient light to power the average household. Worst case, I'm looking at maybe installing a stirling engine between my oil tank and my hydraulic system instead of just the boiler. The idea is to have a nearly maintenance free system(no more than the boiler) that's around 20% efficient at producing electricity, and about 90% overall.
I could produce electricity for less than the power company that way, so long as my house needs the heat. Though using wood pellets is also an option. Using it as a backup generator would require some interesting logic and a radiator outside that is activated if the power is out and my house doesn't need the heat.
Well, I'd go with something like Florida, where they're mandating a hookup to electric and water for everybody. Even if the individual has spent the resources to have it provided through alternative means.
In Arizona, the woman even had water, though the level of solar provided might not be enough, given that she was getting some electricity from the neighbors.
The officials decided it was better for her to be homeless than to live in a house without air conditioning or heating. Well, they denied knowing that she'd end up sleeping in her car when they kicked her out. Probably ended up costing the state more money in shelters and what not.
So while Florida might be like the rules for waterless urinals - plumbing code still says you have to run water there, but all you need is a valve and a capped pipe in the wall - so if you ever decide to get rid of the waterless urinal and get a water using one(or put toilets in or something), it's easy. That's a static cost.
Or if you have to have a meter and pay a monthly connection charge, even if you consume 0 kwh. Like Arizona.
The important part is surely what do the regulations do to prevent negative experiences.
Indeed, regulations must be constantly examined to make sure they're still relevant and targeted at a real problem and are doing so in a cost-effective manner. By 'cost-effective' in this case I don't mean just direct costs - costs can be direct, indirect, imposed, compliance, etc... Even non-monetary in the form of violations to concepts like freedom and privacy.
A constant datastream at a fixed rate
Not completely fixed(depends on channel being recorded at the time), I would think, but yeah, a fixed rate that's substantially below a HD's write speed.
Remember that SSDs are relatively slow at writing compared to reading. HDs are generally equally fast in either direction, so given a sufficiently sequential write process I can see them actually being able to write faster than the SSD.
Well, taxis have their own horror stories, including at least one serial killer.
Sexual assault is only a click away (googled "taxi driver assault" and skipped the advertisement)
Grabbing the breasts is only ONE of the things this taxi driver did...
kidnap and rape
But I understand your rebuttal of somebody saying they've never heard of a ride gone bad with Uber. Personally, I think the important part would be rate at which things go wrong(and horribly wrong).
You need to check your timeline - I was born late '70s and I remember the transition, so sure as heck I was affected.
But you are correct - the drop in crime should be leveling off soon(if not already). Now we're into the tougher ways to further reduce crime. One thing that the massive jump in crime did was really exercise our law enforcement abilities.
Heck, I even remember my grandfather using an adapter so he could use the (cheaper) leaded gasoline in his unleaded car. I know now that it ruined the catalytic converter and really screwed with emissions, but hey, I was a pre-teen back then.
Still, the drop was precipitous enough that many state penal systems cancelled lots of planned prison construction, and prison overcrowding is now mostly over. Well, at least for states that didn't try to shove 3 times as many prisoners as their prisons were rated for into them(California).
And street crime went down since then with a very strong correlation to the timeframes of removing leaded fuel.
The correlation was actually much stronger than that. Crime rates jumped in response and proportion 18 years after the introduction of leaded gasoline and it's adoption/usage rate - the more used, the bigger the crime jump. It also tracked with it's removal. Areas that removed leaded gasoline two years later than others experienced the drop in crime two years later than the control areas.
Areas with little to no usage of leaded didn't experience the jump at all.
It's hard to imagine a bigger red flag.
Furnace is going to run longer and use more fuel to heat your house more.
*snark* well, if I turn the temperature up(heat house more) of COURSE it's going to run longer and use more fuel! ;)
Also, fuel usage will go up by the amount of electricity I'm generating(and no longer buying from the electric company). Trick is, with a properly sized system I can claim 90% efficiency* in using my oil overall, even if the electrical generation portion is only 20% efficient. I just use the other 70% of the energy derived from burning the oil as low grade heat(house thermostat is normally set to 65F, about 18C).
Because I'm 'effectively' using 90% of the energy in the extra oil I burn to create electricity under this scenario, so long as I'm not creating so much electricity that I'm producing more heat than what I need for heating needs. Obviously I wouldn't run this in summer unless there's a power outage. At which point it'd be hooked up to a heat exchanger OUTSIDE.
Remember, my measure of 'efficiency' amounts to 'what percent of the energy in this gallon of oil did I actually use for my intended purposes'. Burning it and recovering heat is a known high efficiency process.
Okay, example time:
I use 100 units of oil a year right now. Because my boiler is 90% efficient, that means I need 90 units worth of heat.
I put in an engine of some sort - it could be diesel(they can run on #2 heating oil), turbine, or stirling. The choice of which is engineering. Set up to have the heat scavenged for my house, it's 20% efficient.
So now I burn 100 units, I get 20 units of electricity, 70 units of heat. Since the goal is not overproduction of either resource(IE more than I consume), and I was previously buying the electricity directly(it was still ending up as waste heat in my house). I'm now short 20 units of heat.
So I increase my burn to 129 units of oil. I produce 25.8 units of electricity(cutting my electric bill even more), and 90.3 units of heat(rounding...).
29 units of oil to produce 25.8 units of electricity = 89% efficient. Going by local electric prices and the cost of home heating oil, I can produce the electricity cheaper than the electric company, and that's without considering that the oil companies cut the price more the more you buy.
Remember, my limitation is the heat demand of my house - while 90% efficient use of the fuel is cheaper than the power company, a 30% efficient generator isn't. Also, the power company will stop paying retail if I exceed my net usage, though I checked, a cogeneration system DOES count the same as solar panels and wind turbines, so net metering applies. It's part of 'winter power is more expensive than summer' that goes on here.
It doesn't matter whether the electrical generator is 1% efficient or 50%, as long as I have the ability to scavenge most of the waste heat for a purpose I'd be burning the fuel for anyways. The only difference is the total amount of electricity I can generate - 1% wouldn't be much electricity displaced. 50% I might as well act as a generation source for the power company.
*Efficiency in this case is a combination of burn efficiency(99%+) and looking at exhaust temperature vs inlet temperature - 70F when you're drawing in 0F air is still energy lost, and while you could put a heat exchanger there to warm up the incoming air using the exhaust air, I don't think it would be worth the cost to do it safely.
Modern furnaces exhaust cool air. They condense water in the flue. There isn't actually waste heat because they're cooled to ambient temperatures: you can grab onto the metal flue and it will feel cool; the air exhausting from the external vent feels room-temperature.
I don't actually have a furnace, I have a boiler. Because I heat with oil(only real option in the area at the time, NG is supposed to come within 2 years), I can't use a condensing boiler due to the exhaust being highly acidic if you condense it. I'm considering doing something, but anything I do would have to be extremely corrosion resistant due to the sulfuric acid.
Also, you might not feel it, but most units still emit fairly warm air. There is a point of diminishing returns.
Higher temperatures transfer more energy more efficiently. If you pass 400F air through a heat exchanger to 70F ambient air flow, it'll transfer a greater proportion of the temperature difference than if you pass 200F air through. Something extremely hot will drop 50% of its temperature differential with ambient a lot faster than something that is slightly warm.
Again, you're trying to maximize 'efficiency' where it doesn't need to. While it matters less you you, remember that I'm a hydrolic system. I pump 400F water(well, steam), and I'll get 200F back and won't be able to dump the extra energy from burning into it, which means that it'll go up the flue.
I don't know why you're lecturing me on the operation of stirling engines. I'm the one who suggested it.
As for size and viability, how about this?
When you get down to near-ambient temperatures, there's so little energy and such low efficiency that you might charge a AAA battery in several months, if it doesn't bleed charge faster than you're charging it.
I'd be firing it with oil. Where are you getting 'near-ambient' temperatures from?
Here, I'll chart my theoretical system:
1. Oil comes into a burner and fires the hot side of the sterling engine. Besides exhaust, this would be insulated to help maximize heat. 500F (260C) would be a goal, hotter if I can get it. Utilize waste heat recovery so the exhaust is condensing, such as by heating the incoming air.
2. The 'cold' side of the stirling engine would be hooked to my hydrolic system, which would have a maximum of 180F(82C), which gives a carnot* efficiency of 33%
3. Hopefully everything could be cooler, of course. 120F/50C gets me to 40% max efficiency. 600F on the hot side gives me 45%, at which point the stirling might actually be at 30%
With an external-combustion engine like a sterling engine, the heat is lost.
Where? Into my house it's not lost. My house is water-heated, I toss a heat exchanger on the hot side and I'm using the 'waste heat', by dumping it into my 20C house. Sure, I'll lose some efficiency compared to dumping it outside, but the point is efficient combustion and capture as much of the waste heat as possible, not a stirling(or other engine) maximized for electrical generation efficiency.
*Which a stirling will never achieve, of course.
Ouch. I hope that includes textbook licensing.
$300 for the iPad
$150 for insurance on said iPad
$100 server licensing for things like blackboard
$300 licensing for all the custom apps and control programs
$200 per-unit cost of training the teachers and administrators on the things, including the back ends.
$400 cost to license electronic versions of their text books
etc...
Still, the sheer cost smacks of some corruption in the selection process.
There's an extra couple problems that he didn't state:
1. There's a lot more students than there are teachers and faculty. Probably around 20:1. Still, consider these two numbers: out of 15k students in the initial release, 'almost 200' bypassed the security(followed sources). That's under 2%. Of course, it'd still spread. That was the first week cracks.
2. The students have nearly 24/7 physical access to them. That's never a good recipe for continued security.
Of course, given the incidents of faculty spying on students in places to include their bedrooms using the built-in cameras on computers, I'd SUPPORT disabling functions like that.
Still go back and do the math.
What part of 'the math' did I screw up? I don't recall ever calling the presence of additional 'intelligent complex tool using species' in question. I stated that, assuming a random distribution, the lower the odds of such a species the further apart they will be, on average.
Then I said that that makes me sad. I forgot to mention that it makes me sad because the further apart we are, the more difficult finding and talking to each other are.
You also forgot a few steps. of the .1% with intelligent life, .1% have complex tool using intelligent life. That leaves us with 100 potential planets to talk to without actually going out and visiting them.
My sad is tpjunkie's point. There's a non-zero chance that the odds of intelligent life are low enough that there's a real probability that we ARE alone, at least in the galaxy. Them being tool users of sufficient complexity that we'd be able to find each other via something like radio waves is even less(though by how much, we don't know). The Universe is a different matter. But unless we really rewrite physics, traveling between galaxies ends up being as difficult a jump from a colonized galaxy as we would find expanding from a colonized Sol to the next star.
Not to mention, the infrastructure to gas up and go in just about any direction exists, but the ability to charge up in any given direction is fairly limited.
Not if you're a creative Model-S owner. Every RV park in the country has an outlet that can provide a full speed home charge. Not supercharger rate, but still around 8 times as fast as a cripple charge.
So what are people supposed to do? Buy an electric car and a gas car?
At least initially. You have to remember that 'most' families own at least 2 cars. Especially those buying new ones. If you're going to have two vehicles in the family, so to speak, you can really optimize - even if you need a truck every weekend, you can still use a compact for whichever parent works the furthest away.
95% = 18 days they need a different vehicle a year. At $50 to rent a more capable vehicle - that's $900. Though I misremembered, I should have said 98% instead - that's 8 days of getting a rental. That covers the thanksgiving/christmas trip*, the occasional home project, bringing home a sofa, etc... Though now that I think about it, many who take 2 weeks of vacation elsewhere a year fly and rent a car for ~12 days or so anyways.
*Why NOT save the mileage on your primary vehicle. While you're at it you can get a bigger vehicle capable of hauling your luggage.