100 miles is inadequate for long distance travel. It's gotta be 200 miles -- which is about the distance you can go on a tank of gas in most cars -- or you can forget about road trips. And no, an airplane is not a decent substitute.
200 miles is useless for road trips. A 600-mile range, minimum, plus the ability to recharge overnight would be required. Basically, a pure EV would only work if it's a pure commuter, or unless we had some battery-swapping infrastructure deployed all over. So what I want is a good hybrid. I love the Aptera series hybrid (40-mile electric range, plus 500-600 miles on a five-gallon gas tank), but it looks like it won't hit the streets for a decade, if ever.
Well, maybe a decade will be okay. A two-seater wouldn't work for my road trips right now anyway. Right now, I generally need six seats, but 10 years from now the kids will (should!) be gone.
In terms of going with what's there, start with a community college. It's a total waste to piss away more money on the basics in the first two years of college. After a couple of years, go to a state college with a good co-op/intern program. Use the co-op program, do not simply take the classes and get out, get some professional experience on your resume and subsidize the extra cost of state college with your pay.
Exactly. College is so often a poor investment simply because kids pour too much money into it. It's like whining that you lose money on your real estate investments when you pay 10 times what the property is worth.
Going to an inexpensive school and working your way through school, paying the bills as you go in stead of racking up huge loans, will leave you not only with a degree and little or no debt, but it will also give you some valuable life experience and skills that your debt-ridden colleagues will miss.
I have considered it, but as of yet I can't find any CFLs that fit in the cans. I know they're really inefficient. They do light up the room really nicely, but the energy!
First thing I learned after installing mine: the clothes dryer uses the most electricity by far, and leaving my computers on 24/7 doesn't use as much energy as I thought it did.
I learned the same things. The clothes dryer, stove/oven and dishwasher dominate my power consumption. A microwave is an extremely efficient way to heat food. Computers are small users, even my dual-processor Opteron file server with eight hard drives only draws about 120W. The cool "multi-can" lighting systems in my kitchen, living and family room suck a lot of juice -- each room is about 800W with the lights on. My swamp cooler uses more juice than I thought it did.
One thing I discovered the first day I installed the device was a "phantom" 400W draw that was pretty much always on. By shutting off all the circuit breakers one by one and watching the draw I was able to narrow it down and eventually discover that it was a large vent fan in my attic on a thermostat. It may have been necessary originally, but about five years ago I installed those spinning "hurricane" vents so my attic has good passive cooling -- but with that fan's thermostat set to turn the fan on at about 100 degrees, it was on nearly full-time during the summer. I turned the thermostat up to 120 and I don't think the fan has come on since. Turning it up hasn't appreciably affected the amount of time my swamp cooler runs.
So far, I think I'm saving about $20 per month since installing the TED. It should pay for itself quite handily in a year's time.
It's a little more expensive that what you want -- $200 rather than $150 -- but other than that, I think it's exactly what you're looking for. The gateway device itself stores sufficient data to allow you to look at short-term detailed usage and long-term trends via its web interface, but if you want more than that, you can set up something to periodically poll the device, downloading detailed, per-second, usage in an XML format. You can then store that data however you like, and mine it however you want.
There may be other solutions out there, and I'm interested to see what others suggest, but I have a TED unit and I couldn't be happier with it. It also uploads to Google PowerMeter.
It could be done over the span of a few generations, but certainly not quickly.
Three generations at most. Looking just at retirement, here's how I'd handle it.
People under 40 should be told that there will be no government-funded retirement for them. They'll have to continue paying into the system to fund the retirement of those who already depend on it. In actuality, this wouldn't be so much a change of policy as an admission of reality.
People between 40 and 60 should be told that their retirement benefits are going to be reduced on a sliding scale based on how far they are from retirement age. In addition, those who have done a good job of putting money away for their own retirement should have their expected benefits further curtailed or even eliminated.
People over 60 should continue to receive benefits per the current system, though individuals with sufficient personal wealth or retirement savings should have their benefits curtailed or eliminated.
Yes, politically this would be darned near impossible, because everyone under 60 would be screaming "unfair". The problem is that the system was NEVER fair, or sustainable, and at some point in the next couple of decades that fact is going to hit us squarely between the eyes. Better to recognize it and accept it now.
If we mostly shut down the DOD, the funds freed up would allow us to soften the blow. And I think we could mostly shut down the DOD. I won't go into that here, though.
Even then you still need some sort of safety net in place, otherwise you're going to see costs go up in the form of crime, law enforcement, incarceration, judicial expenses, etc.
Why does the safety net have to be government-provided? And even if it does, why does it have to be federal? This is something that can and should be handled at the state level, for many reasons, where it can't be effectively addressed by private charitable organizations.
As for your assertion of increased criminal costs, you should compare the portion of our GDP that is spent on such things today with how much we spent before we created the "safety net".
You have to cut entitlements back gradually, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't harm those have believed that it would be there to help them and now don't have any way to provide for themselves. But it can be done.
I'd love to see ANY politician go on national television and watch them say "We're cutting Defense, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security." They'd be pilloried so fast, you'd hear sonic booms.
Unfortunately true. I'd vote for them, though, and have a big grin on my face while doing it.
Today, all the perspectives have been carefully quarantined, with only those "facts" which support a particular point of view being presented to those that hold said point of view.
The sources I get my facts from deny this so-called "fact".
All the posts complaining about this surprised me, mainly because I'm surprised that anyone uses the google search page. Don't pretty much all browsers have a search field? I type my search in there, hit enter, and see the results.
For me, "http://google.com" is a connectivity diagnostic tool, not a search tool.
Original sin is the very foundation of Christianity.
No, Christ is the very foundation of Christianity.
The Wikipedia article on original sin covers the various viewpoints quite well, if you're interested. The article on infant baptism also provides a pretty good list of the Christian faiths that believe in original sin vs those who don't, because those who accept original sin practice infant baptism to redeem the newborn from sin in case it should die while young, while those that reject original sin generally delay baptism until the person is a believer.
I did perhaps overstate things when I said that "most" non-Catholic Christians reject original sin. Nearly all reformation protestants do, and the eastern churches do (including the Eastern Catholic). I don't know if that adds up to "most" or not.
Do most non-Catholic Christians choose to ignore Paul?
Of course not. Paul said that sin and death entered the world through Adam, and that death came to all men through him, but that doesn't necessarily imply that his sin also fell upon all. Consider Ezekiel 18:20.
Keep in mind that most non-Catholic Christians don't accept the notion that original sin taints all of us. Still, since this article is about a Catholic astronomer, your points are interesting ones.
Valid points, given very large volumes of ciphertext. VERY large volumes for ciphers with 128-bit block sizes. Large enough that the attacks are impractical, though theoretically possible.
DES is considered too weak for many uses due to its small key size.
Nonetheless, if you can find a way to reliably distinguish DES output from random bits, without knowledge of the key and with remotely-practical efficiency, you can publish a paper that will gain you substantial name recognition among the world's cryptographic elite.
Well, the Trieste did it, so there's at least one workable design already. And Steve Fossett had already commissioned a submarine that was designed, built and ready to begin sea trials. It was designed using kevlar and carbon fiber, rather than the five inch thick steel sphere of the Trieste, but I would think that we know enough about those materials that the designer had a high degree of confidence that the design could take the pressure (plus a solid safety margin) before bothering to build it.
Yes, this is an engineering challenge, but one that has already been solved once, and probably twice. I have little doubt that the submarine will be built and will function as designed.
There are two separate issues, physical and electronic compromises. Compromising the database is a much bigger problem and more likely scenario than compromising the actual physical feature.
Given that we tend to leave copies of our fingerprints everywhere we go, compromise of those physical features isn't just likely, it's a given.
I guess we could all take to wearing gloves all the time.
The types of problems emerging between Western capitalist governments and Middle-Eastern extremists cannot be solved with rigid, mathematical, 'perfect' solutions because (no matter how many engineers wish it) humans are not the cold, logical, computational Vulcans exalted by socially-inept engies.
Of course not. But engineers often oversimplify and misunderstand social issues.
The irony about your post is, if it were not for terrorism and state-sponsored threats against our allies, we wouldn't be in the Middle East in the first place.
Maybe. Our history there is long, starting with some very sad chapters during the Cold War. We've been meddling there since before we really became dependent on their oil.
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100 miles is inadequate for long distance travel. It's gotta be 200 miles -- which is about the distance you can go on a tank of gas in most cars -- or you can forget about road trips. And no, an airplane is not a decent substitute.
200 miles is useless for road trips. A 600-mile range, minimum, plus the ability to recharge overnight would be required. Basically, a pure EV would only work if it's a pure commuter, or unless we had some battery-swapping infrastructure deployed all over. So what I want is a good hybrid. I love the Aptera series hybrid (40-mile electric range, plus 500-600 miles on a five-gallon gas tank), but it looks like it won't hit the streets for a decade, if ever.
Well, maybe a decade will be okay. A two-seater wouldn't work for my road trips right now anyway. Right now, I generally need six seats, but 10 years from now the kids will (should!) be gone.
Thanks! I'll look into that. How expensive were they?
In terms of going with what's there, start with a community college. It's a total waste to piss away more money on the basics in the first two years of college. After a couple of years, go to a state college with a good co-op/intern program. Use the co-op program, do not simply take the classes and get out, get some professional experience on your resume and subsidize the extra cost of state college with your pay.
Exactly. College is so often a poor investment simply because kids pour too much money into it. It's like whining that you lose money on your real estate investments when you pay 10 times what the property is worth.
Going to an inexpensive school and working your way through school, paying the bills as you go in stead of racking up huge loans, will leave you not only with a degree and little or no debt, but it will also give you some valuable life experience and skills that your debt-ridden colleagues will miss.
I have considered it, but as of yet I can't find any CFLs that fit in the cans. I know they're really inefficient. They do light up the room really nicely, but the energy!
I've tried to convince my wife to do that... but with no luck :-/
First thing I learned after installing mine: the clothes dryer uses the most electricity by far, and leaving my computers on 24/7 doesn't use as much energy as I thought it did.
I learned the same things. The clothes dryer, stove/oven and dishwasher dominate my power consumption. A microwave is an extremely efficient way to heat food. Computers are small users, even my dual-processor Opteron file server with eight hard drives only draws about 120W. The cool "multi-can" lighting systems in my kitchen, living and family room suck a lot of juice -- each room is about 800W with the lights on. My swamp cooler uses more juice than I thought it did.
One thing I discovered the first day I installed the device was a "phantom" 400W draw that was pretty much always on. By shutting off all the circuit breakers one by one and watching the draw I was able to narrow it down and eventually discover that it was a large vent fan in my attic on a thermostat. It may have been necessary originally, but about five years ago I installed those spinning "hurricane" vents so my attic has good passive cooling -- but with that fan's thermostat set to turn the fan on at about 100 degrees, it was on nearly full-time during the summer. I turned the thermostat up to 120 and I don't think the fan has come on since. Turning it up hasn't appreciably affected the amount of time my swamp cooler runs.
So far, I think I'm saving about $20 per month since installing the TED. It should pay for itself quite handily in a year's time.
It's a little more expensive that what you want -- $200 rather than $150 -- but other than that, I think it's exactly what you're looking for. The gateway device itself stores sufficient data to allow you to look at short-term detailed usage and long-term trends via its web interface, but if you want more than that, you can set up something to periodically poll the device, downloading detailed, per-second, usage in an XML format. You can then store that data however you like, and mine it however you want.
There may be other solutions out there, and I'm interested to see what others suggest, but I have a TED unit and I couldn't be happier with it. It also uploads to Google PowerMeter.
http://www.theenergydetective.com
I'd love to buy some e-books, but I don't want any of the DRM restrictions they come with.
Check out the e-books from the publisher Baen. No DRM, multiple formats, reasonable prices. http://webscription.net/
Note that I have no relationship with Baen other than as a very satisfied customer.
You should look into Baen's e-books. No DRM, reasonable prices, multiple formats. http://webscription.net./
It could be done over the span of a few generations, but certainly not quickly.
Three generations at most. Looking just at retirement, here's how I'd handle it.
People under 40 should be told that there will be no government-funded retirement for them. They'll have to continue paying into the system to fund the retirement of those who already depend on it. In actuality, this wouldn't be so much a change of policy as an admission of reality.
People between 40 and 60 should be told that their retirement benefits are going to be reduced on a sliding scale based on how far they are from retirement age. In addition, those who have done a good job of putting money away for their own retirement should have their expected benefits further curtailed or even eliminated.
People over 60 should continue to receive benefits per the current system, though individuals with sufficient personal wealth or retirement savings should have their benefits curtailed or eliminated.
Yes, politically this would be darned near impossible, because everyone under 60 would be screaming "unfair". The problem is that the system was NEVER fair, or sustainable, and at some point in the next couple of decades that fact is going to hit us squarely between the eyes. Better to recognize it and accept it now.
If we mostly shut down the DOD, the funds freed up would allow us to soften the blow. And I think we could mostly shut down the DOD. I won't go into that here, though.
Even then you still need some sort of safety net in place, otherwise you're going to see costs go up in the form of crime, law enforcement, incarceration, judicial expenses, etc.
Why does the safety net have to be government-provided? And even if it does, why does it have to be federal? This is something that can and should be handled at the state level, for many reasons, where it can't be effectively addressed by private charitable organizations.
As for your assertion of increased criminal costs, you should compare the portion of our GDP that is spent on such things today with how much we spent before we created the "safety net".
You have to cut entitlements back gradually, and you have to do it in a way that doesn't harm those have believed that it would be there to help them and now don't have any way to provide for themselves. But it can be done.
How could anyone not believe that bears are the #1 threat facing the United States?? Stupid liberals.
I'd love to see ANY politician go on national television and watch them say "We're cutting Defense, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security." They'd be pilloried so fast, you'd hear sonic booms.
Unfortunately true. I'd vote for them, though, and have a big grin on my face while doing it.
Today, all the perspectives have been carefully quarantined, with only those "facts" which support a particular point of view being presented to those that hold said point of view.
The sources I get my facts from deny this so-called "fact".
All the posts complaining about this surprised me, mainly because I'm surprised that anyone uses the google search page. Don't pretty much all browsers have a search field? I type my search in there, hit enter, and see the results.
For me, "http://google.com" is a connectivity diagnostic tool, not a search tool.
Original sin is the very foundation of Christianity.
No, Christ is the very foundation of Christianity.
The Wikipedia article on original sin covers the various viewpoints quite well, if you're interested. The article on infant baptism also provides a pretty good list of the Christian faiths that believe in original sin vs those who don't, because those who accept original sin practice infant baptism to redeem the newborn from sin in case it should die while young, while those that reject original sin generally delay baptism until the person is a believer.
I did perhaps overstate things when I said that "most" non-Catholic Christians reject original sin. Nearly all reformation protestants do, and the eastern churches do (including the Eastern Catholic). I don't know if that adds up to "most" or not.
Do most non-Catholic Christians choose to ignore Paul?
Of course not. Paul said that sin and death entered the world through Adam, and that death came to all men through him, but that doesn't necessarily imply that his sin also fell upon all. Consider Ezekiel 18:20.
Keep in mind that most non-Catholic Christians don't accept the notion that original sin taints all of us. Still, since this article is about a Catholic astronomer, your points are interesting ones.
Valid points, given very large volumes of ciphertext. VERY large volumes for ciphers with 128-bit block sizes. Large enough that the attacks are impractical, though theoretically possible.
DES is nowadays considered a weaker algorithm
DES is considered too weak for many uses due to its small key size.
Nonetheless, if you can find a way to reliably distinguish DES output from random bits, without knowledge of the key and with remotely-practical efficiency, you can publish a paper that will gain you substantial name recognition among the world's cryptographic elite.
What about Fossett's submarine?
Well, the Trieste did it, so there's at least one workable design already. And Steve Fossett had already commissioned a submarine that was designed, built and ready to begin sea trials. It was designed using kevlar and carbon fiber, rather than the five inch thick steel sphere of the Trieste, but I would think that we know enough about those materials that the designer had a high degree of confidence that the design could take the pressure (plus a solid safety margin) before bothering to build it.
Yes, this is an engineering challenge, but one that has already been solved once, and probably twice. I have little doubt that the submarine will be built and will function as designed.
There are two separate issues, physical and electronic compromises. Compromising the database is a much bigger problem and more likely scenario than compromising the actual physical feature.
Given that we tend to leave copies of our fingerprints everywhere we go, compromise of those physical features isn't just likely, it's a given.
I guess we could all take to wearing gloves all the time.
I agree that that is over, but we've never STOPPED interfering, so they have no reason to believe that it is, or that we'll ever stop.
The types of problems emerging between Western capitalist governments and Middle-Eastern extremists cannot be solved with rigid, mathematical, 'perfect' solutions because (no matter how many engineers wish it) humans are not the cold, logical, computational Vulcans exalted by socially-inept engies.
Of course not. But engineers often oversimplify and misunderstand social issues.
Your comments support my point.
The irony about your post is, if it were not for terrorism and state-sponsored threats against our allies, we wouldn't be in the Middle East in the first place.
Maybe. Our history there is long, starting with some very sad chapters during the Cold War. We've been meddling there since before we really became dependent on their oil.