If stuff is really sensitive, cameras should have been kept out long before. Lock up the USB ports but allow camera? People will just print and snap.
Didn't anyone learn anything from watching old James Bond Movies? http://www.mwbrooks.com/submini/flicks/ Those old Minox camera even had the lanyard marked to let you know the proper focus distance for shooting a document.
Can't keep it simple since the problem isn't simple.
If you bill the salesman for NY taxes for every mile he drives, NY will love it. But if he drives in CT, VT,NH and RI as well he'll probably be paying road use taxes on the gas he buys there also. Go on a cross-country trip, pay more to your home state in taxes.
Congested area fees as in downtown areas like London and Singapore also need to be addressed in other ways. The same for toll roads, bridges. These aren't covered with a mileage only scheme. The current RFID passes for tolls are very privacy-intollerant, logging the date, time and direction of travel for every bridge crossing where a toll was collected. A scheme where the car just reports: Taxes owed: $22.00 wouldn't differentiate between a few bridge trips or a long trip in the country.
Sticker for the car, fine. Do you charge the same for the grandma who only drives to church on Sundays as the salesman with the 5-state region he drives?
A GPS receiver in the car does not equal a tracking device, that's what most people are ignorant about. My car navigation system tells me where I am, it doesn't tell anyone else where I am.
The speedometer in cars now will tell you how fast you're going. The clock tells you what time. But when you look at the odometer at the end of the month all you see is miles traveled. Even though there was information in the car that knew what time you left the house, how long you drove, how fast, average speed, number of trips per day, longest trip, shortest trip, time spent idling... all anyone looking at the dash later will see is miles traveled. It shouldn't be so hard to imagine the device for determining road taxes owed doing the same thing, using lots of information to determine the tax, but only outputting the final value.
The initial impetus for this was alternate fuel vehicles. An electric car you plug in at home now pays no road taxes like a car at the pump. The same goes for propane or natural gas vehicles you fill at home. As vehicles go away from filling at a gas pump that collects taxes per gallon another model is needed.
Coming up with the mechanism for billing by gallon, watt, therm, amp, whatever and separating what you use in your car vs what you use in the oven isn't practical. So to assign the taxes based on use mileage ( or even "hours on the road" ) needs to be figured out. It's got to happen.
Even with an odometer, a mechanism taxing for mileage by state would be needed. Especially with the smaller states in the northeast where people live in one, work in one and transit a third to get to work each day. As long as you're figuring out which state you might as well figure out things like toll roads, bridges and time of day congestion usage.
It's going to be GPS. Anything else requires a more elaborate infrastructure.
What it doesn't have to be is privacy-hostile. Rather than uploading your entire driving history, the "road tax road map" could be uploaded into the unit in the vehicle. With the schedule of tariffs for your particular vehicle onboard, all you really need to reveal is the taxes owed. No need to reveal whether you went 1000 miles in a high-congestion area or 10,000 miles of night time interstate driving, just that you owe $5.95 in taxes. ( Expect this to be used as a by-use insurance tool as well)
There has to be a way to have drivers pay for use of the roads. Ideally we won't be limited to gasoline engines, so charging $ per gallon won't always work. An alternative is needed. Arguing about privacy impacts of a GPS receiver in the car is fine, and appropriate. But better would be to come up with a viable alternative to bill users for road use that is independent from fuel delivery.
Like political ads, you need to watch who's speaking, not just the words.
With Ala Carte pricing the average cable bill with go DOWN. How do I know this? The cable companies are fighting it. With all the grief they get for $2 monthly rate increases they'd be all over something that would raise revenues and not have the blame fall on them.
It's possible that if this kicked in on a per channel basis that we'd have only 7 Discovery Channels instead of 8, or that ESPN would have to woo viewers based on price. Not a horrible thing.
Buy a magazine on the rack and it's $4. Get a subscription and it's $1, and they deliver it to your house. The reason is that ad revenue is tied to subscribers. If a 2nd tier channel charges $2 and no one wants to pay then their ads aren't going to sell. If it's "free" their potential subscribers increase in number. If it's "free" and the subscribers consciously select it from a list, now they have "confirmed subscribers" and another boost to what they sell their ads for.
Just follow the money. Think of a reason the cable operators would resist a mandatory move that would increase revenue. If people paid more for less channels they'd not only have more income but would free up bandwidth from "niche" channels for more profitable ones. Does that sound like a scenario they'd fight against? No way.
The whole indecency thing isn't my issue, but I can understand it. The lame cable company response is to just use your set-top box to block those channels, completely disregarding the fact that people are blocking channels they were "forced" to pay for to get what they wanted.
I don't mind the reason ala carte is being promoted, as long as it kicks in. I wasn't worried about dying of cancer when people smoked in restaurants at the table next to me, I just didn't like my food tasting like shit because of it. If cancer was the reason they made it stop, I'm good with that.
If that happens, it's exactly as it should be. If MTV, Fox News, etc are subsidising your watching of DYI then someone's getting screwed. If you, and the other viewers, aren't willing to foot the bill for your channels don't expect someone else to.
ESPN is the main reason I want ala carte. They demand that cable operators include them with basic or "expanded basic" and not charge extra. So I'm paying for it now whether I like it or not. Drop ESPN and give my back my $2.50.
Ala Carte would cause a shakeup in pricing. Channels that show ads will have to live on their ads. If the carrier pays.20 for DYI there's no way it will be $2 with ala carte. People won't pay it so they'd dry up and blow away at that price. The channels themselves will have to adjust their pricing based on what people will pay and can't hide in a bundle. Some channels that are pure commercials, like the shopping channels would likely have to pay the carriers to include them.
I'd expect to pay for channels like Fox Movies and Turner Classics since they aren't loaded with ads, but I'd save by not paying for Disney, Nick, ESPN and others.
Many, Many people have cordless phones *only*, and when the power goes out, so does their phone. Some cordless phones have built-in batteries in the base so they will work with a power outage, but these are in the minority.
So regardless of VOIP, cable connections, what have you, a large number of people will lose 911 access from their phones in a power outage.
Me, I have my cable modem, VOIP router AND cordless base on a UPS. While construction was going on in my neighborhood recently I was able to use the phone and my laptop for over 2 hours with no interruption. Only problem was the nagging beep from the UPS trying to tell me the power was out.
Some people aren't experienced or bright enough to figure out that things plugged into a wall outlet don't usually work if the wall outlet is dead. Those people should get old fashioned POTS service and pay 2x as much for local only. If they want to save money with VOIP, they better read up on it first.
Yes, they should be fined/sued/criminally charged as anyone should be who knowingly inhibited a 911 call from being completed properly. Except, those same companies are the ones who paid off the politicians who are pushing this. It's the entrenched companies losing out to lower priced VOIP providers who are behind the push.
Yes, the VOIP providers should provide equivalent service if that's how they are selling it. But the phone providers upstream who are getting in the way of their competition need to be slapped around a bit. And the ISPs who block VOIP traffic should also be penalized as if every call they block is a 911 call.
It's a no brainer as far as NY is concerned. They can enact a law the people who live outside of NY will owe taxes on all income that oringinates from within NY.
The companies don't get hurt, it's the employess ( even though there might be some additional burden for local vs. remote employees). Since the companies are in NY, they are compelled to withold taxes.
The out of state employees might not like it, but there isn't squat they can do about it. As long as they reside out of state, they can't vote on any measure or representative that is screwing them. Best they can hope for is organize and send $$ to buy off someone in NY.
This the same as how lots of new public-funded stadiums get built. A popular place to suck exta taxes is from rental car fees. Locals usually vote on it since it means they get a stadium and others have to pay.
Getting votes for taxes that that the voters don't have to pay is pretty easy.
Complaints from the copyright holders are understandable. If they could find an effective way to charge you each time you read a book you'd already bought or prevent people from selling used books, they would.
My guess on the librarian complaint has to do with research. Someone commented here the other day that "Researchers" have become "Googlers". In some cases this might be true. It also means that someone sitting in their living room using Google ( or other search engine ) and the 'Net can gain access to information from such a wide array of sources that not long ago required a professional researcher to do.
I can't help but be reminded of "The Desk Set" with Hepburn and Tracy. The research dept of a TV network was getting a massive computer. The researchers thought it was intended to replace them and the stacks of books they used for reference. I think the complaints from libraries on Google's scanning of "everything" is it allows access to the information by everyone. Librarians are the keeper of the keys, guardians of the rare books, masters of the Dewey Decimal System. Letting just anyone access to the stacks erodes the requirements for their services.
If a 10,000 book library had all the books scanned and indexed and available via a simple Google search then the librarians are relagatd to a position not too far removed from the Blockbuster store clerk putting videos back on the shelf. There'd be a position for someone to decide what subset of books to keep on hand, but less positions overall.
I'd love it if Google indexed everything in print. I have 100 or so cookbooks. If I could do a search, limited to my "library" for recipes for paella, I could walk over and pull just those books off the shelf to see which I wanted to use. I don't care if I can't read the whole recipe via Google, I'll just use it to refer me to the dead tree version I have on the shelf.
Other than the copyright holders who are just wanting money from anything based on what they've published ( reasonably so ), the others are either luddites who don't understand or people trying to protect their livelyhood.
Newspapers can still be around, they just need to evolve. They've got the reporters and researchers, so they're in a good position for reporting detailed stories with more depth than TV can do in a 30 second blurb. Seeing a story in the conext of previous weeks or months of background articles is also easier with text than dozens of clips of newspeople reading short snippets on-air.
It's the dead tree versions that don't make as much sense. Lots of people don't want yesterday's news. But no reason that a well written newspaper can't write a web version just as well.
And the thick Sunday version with the sale ads and magazines are still popular. So they don't need to retire the presses. But basing your entire business model around delivering paper to porches, yeah, that'd dead.
What a moron. What the hell does he mean by people using his "pipes" for free? I pay every month for my access. And I'm not paying for wires strung to my house, I'm paying for bandwidth, for the ability to get packets in and out of my router. Nothing free here, I paid for it.
Yes, there's someone on the other end making money on this and the greedy bastard thinks he should get "his share". Does he want that to apply to every transaction?
I called and ordered a pizza for delivery last night. Do they get a cut? I checked my bank balance and paid a couple bills this weekend. Do they get a transaction fee? I do work from home some days. Do I need to give them a portion of my pay when I do that?
It's value as a bomb shelter went away when slow flying bombers were no longer the weapon delivery mechanism. As the article says, once the warning time dropped to 4 minutes, evacuating to the shelter became impossible.
I do understand, and I can read. It would be idiotic to suggest that the world start distrubuting DC, so I mentioned that AC is appropriate for that. Nor did I suggest a house running entirely on DC. Feel free to read my post again.
To repeat, and I'll type slowly this time, a large number of devices in a house today run on low voltage DC. If you don't count the light bulbs then I'd venture a guess that most of the electrical devices in a house today are low voltage DC. Since the orginal article suggested LED lighting, which is generally low voltage DC, then the majority of devices in a house then would be low voltage DC.
Since traditional houses are currently wired for higher voltage AC, this means many, many small transformers and rectifiers at each item: PCs, VCRs, Clocks, radios, cell phone chargers.. Most of these use different voltages and have different current requirements. While a large house wired for DC might have greater losses in-house than AC, the inefficiency of dozens of transformers and rectifiers aren't terribly efficient. The comparison I made about lossed in the many transformers was when comparing them to a single, or fewer, DC sources in a house. While the original LED discussion spun many posts about heat, every brick and wall-wart that's running hot is also generating heat that is not part of an efficient energy transfer. A standard low voltage, low current, DC distribution in a house could have greater efficiencies. Running a DC clothes drier on on wires 100ft long would not be an example of a low voltage, low current application. But a cell phone charger or clock radio, or any of dozens of LED lamps would be.
AC equipment in the US is expected to work on 120v 60hz. Because that's available, that's what's built. If 5, 12, or 40 VDC was what was available in any house, that's what these low power devices would connect to. If there's a common source and connector, hardware will pop up to use it. The hundreds of stupid things that plug into USB jacks are an example. They aren't communicating with the computers they connect to, but just taking advantage of a common low power DC source with a common connector.
As for a whole house transformer, another approach might be for a couple transformers, but not dozens. And similar to how a UPS works, it might not be a bad idea for some of these DC networks to be battery backed up. A DC source, the battery, and DC lighting would make for easier lighting in a power outage. Depending on the efficiency of the battery charging, it might even be worthwhile to charge the battery during off-peak times and run the lighting off of the battery during peak times.
Back to the orginal posting about LEDs. If you were to have all the ceiling fixtures in a house be LEDs, and you knew this before building the house, I'd suggest that running 120v AC to all those fixtures and building in transformers and rectifiers in each socket would not necessarily be the best approach.
AC has it's advantages, especially for long distance transmission. But in a house, it's gradually losing out. If you don't count lightbulbs, I'd say I have more DC things plugged in than AC. So many of the outlets are connected to "bricks" or "wall warts" to change the high voltage AC to low voltage DC. Things that don't have an exterior brick, like the DVD player or TiVo just do the conversion internally. While the higher voltage AC might have some benefits of lower loss in the wires, I'd think that umpteen separate transformers and rectifiers are negating a large percentage of that benefit.
If lighting were go to DC, then a re-think of the home wiring would really be in order. If there were a "standard" DC voltage and current available to lower power devices, we might not have wall transformers with anything from 3v-12v hanging off our surge supressors.
So in-house DC makes lots of sense. Send the AC to things like ovens and clothes dryers, and DC to most everything else.
I used the older version of Goldwave to de-DRM one of Audible's books a while back when my only portable MP3 player was a CD-MP3 one. It took a while and you ended up with either less audible quality or a much bigger file.
You *can* burn CDs from the books, but for some full length novels that would take 15-20 CDs. Re-ripping them, renaming, all takes time.
I now have a variety of devices that will play Audible's files, so no need for myself to convert. For loaning an audio book to someone I just load it up on a cheap 256MB Creative Muvo and loan them that with the book pre-loaded. Just like returning a borrowed book, they return the player when they're done.
Now my only incentive to re-encode the DRM'd books is I have almost 900 hours of book content. For personal archiving reasons I'd prefer they were in something non-proprietary so I'll be sure to always be able to revisit them in the future.
Slashdot Mirror
Insightful? I was making a joke!
Next thing you know the government will use these things to tax our dogs. Take it outside your backyard, pay a walk tax.
If stuff is really sensitive, cameras should have been kept out long before. Lock up the USB ports but allow camera? People will just print and snap.
Didn't anyone learn anything from watching old James Bond Movies? http://www.mwbrooks.com/submini/flicks/ Those old Minox camera even had the lanyard marked to let you know the proper focus distance for shooting a document.
Can't keep it simple since the problem isn't simple.
If you bill the salesman for NY taxes for every mile he drives, NY will love it. But if he drives in CT, VT,NH and RI as well he'll probably be paying road use taxes on the gas he buys there also. Go on a cross-country trip, pay more to your home state in taxes.
Congested area fees as in downtown areas like London and Singapore also need to be addressed in other ways. The same for toll roads, bridges. These aren't covered with a mileage only scheme. The current RFID passes for tolls are very privacy-intollerant, logging the date, time and direction of travel for every bridge crossing where a toll was collected. A scheme where the car just reports: Taxes owed: $22.00 wouldn't differentiate between a few bridge trips or a long trip in the country.
The problem is that peope don't understand.
Sticker for the car, fine. Do you charge the same for the grandma who only drives to church on Sundays as the salesman with the 5-state region he drives?
A GPS receiver in the car does not equal a tracking device, that's what most people are ignorant about. My car navigation system tells me where I am, it doesn't tell anyone else where I am.
The speedometer in cars now will tell you how fast you're going. The clock tells you what time. But when you look at the odometer at the end of the month all you see is miles traveled. Even though there was information in the car that knew what time you left the house, how long you drove, how fast, average speed, number of trips per day, longest trip, shortest trip, time spent idling... all anyone looking at the dash later will see is miles traveled. It shouldn't be so hard to imagine the device for determining road taxes owed doing the same thing, using lots of information to determine the tax, but only outputting the final value.
The initial impetus for this was alternate fuel vehicles. An electric car you plug in at home now pays no road taxes like a car at the pump. The same goes for propane or natural gas vehicles you fill at home. As vehicles go away from filling at a gas pump that collects taxes per gallon another model is needed.
Coming up with the mechanism for billing by gallon, watt, therm, amp, whatever and separating what you use in your car vs what you use in the oven isn't practical. So to assign the taxes based on use mileage ( or even "hours on the road" ) needs to be figured out. It's got to happen.
Even with an odometer, a mechanism taxing for mileage by state would be needed. Especially with the smaller states in the northeast where people live in one, work in one and transit a third to get to work each day. As long as you're figuring out which state you might as well figure out things like toll roads, bridges and time of day congestion usage.
It's going to be GPS. Anything else requires a more elaborate infrastructure.
What it doesn't have to be is privacy-hostile. Rather than uploading your entire driving history, the "road tax road map" could be uploaded into the unit in the vehicle. With the schedule of tariffs for your particular vehicle onboard, all you really need to reveal is the taxes owed. No need to reveal whether you went 1000 miles in a high-congestion area or 10,000 miles of night time interstate driving, just that you owe $5.95 in taxes. ( Expect this to be used as a by-use insurance tool as well)
There has to be a way to have drivers pay for use of the roads. Ideally we won't be limited to gasoline engines, so charging $ per gallon won't always work. An alternative is needed. Arguing about privacy impacts of a GPS receiver in the car is fine, and appropriate. But better would be to come up with a viable alternative to bill users for road use that is independent from fuel delivery.
Getting a story past Zonk is a pretty low bar to make it over.
Like political ads, you need to watch who's speaking, not just the words.
With Ala Carte pricing the average cable bill with go DOWN. How do I know this? The cable companies are fighting it. With all the grief they get for $2 monthly rate increases they'd be all over something that would raise revenues and not have the blame fall on them.
It's possible that if this kicked in on a per channel basis that we'd have only 7 Discovery Channels instead of 8, or that ESPN would have to woo viewers based on price. Not a horrible thing.
Buy a magazine on the rack and it's $4. Get a subscription and it's $1, and they deliver it to your house. The reason is that ad revenue is tied to subscribers. If a 2nd tier channel charges $2 and no one wants to pay then their ads aren't going to sell. If it's "free" their potential subscribers increase in number. If it's "free" and the subscribers consciously select it from a list, now they have "confirmed subscribers" and another boost to what they sell their ads for.
Just follow the money. Think of a reason the cable operators would resist a mandatory move that would increase revenue. If people paid more for less channels they'd not only have more income but would free up bandwidth from "niche" channels for more profitable ones. Does that sound like a scenario they'd fight against? No way.
The whole indecency thing isn't my issue, but I can understand it. The lame cable company response is to just use your set-top box to block those channels, completely disregarding the fact that people are blocking channels they were "forced" to pay for to get what they wanted.
I don't mind the reason ala carte is being promoted, as long as it kicks in. I wasn't worried about dying of cancer when people smoked in restaurants at the table next to me, I just didn't like my food tasting like shit because of it. If cancer was the reason they made it stop, I'm good with that.
If that happens, it's exactly as it should be. If MTV, Fox News, etc are subsidising your watching of DYI then someone's getting screwed. If you, and the other viewers, aren't willing to foot the bill for your channels don't expect someone else to.
ESPN is the main reason I want ala carte. They demand that cable operators include them with basic or "expanded basic" and not charge extra. So I'm paying for it now whether I like it or not. Drop ESPN and give my back my $2.50.
.20 for DYI there's no way it will be $2 with ala carte. People won't pay it so they'd dry up and blow away at that price. The channels themselves will have to adjust their pricing based on what people will pay and can't hide in a bundle. Some channels that are pure commercials, like the shopping channels would likely have to pay the carriers to include them.
Ala Carte would cause a shakeup in pricing. Channels that show ads will have to live on their ads. If the carrier pays
I'd expect to pay for channels like Fox Movies and Turner Classics since they aren't loaded with ads, but I'd save by not paying for Disney, Nick, ESPN and others.
Good advice, it should be in bold letters on every cordless phone's box.
Many, Many people have cordless phones *only*, and when the power goes out, so does their phone. Some cordless phones have built-in batteries in the base so they will work with a power outage, but these are in the minority.
So regardless of VOIP, cable connections, what have you, a large number of people will lose 911 access from their phones in a power outage.
Me, I have my cable modem, VOIP router AND cordless base on a UPS. While construction was going on in my neighborhood recently I was able to use the phone and my laptop for over 2 hours with no interruption. Only problem was the nagging beep from the UPS trying to tell me the power was out.
Some people aren't experienced or bright enough to figure out that things plugged into a wall outlet don't usually work if the wall outlet is dead. Those people should get old fashioned POTS service and pay 2x as much for local only. If they want to save money with VOIP, they better read up on it first.
Yes, they should be fined/sued/criminally charged as anyone should be who knowingly inhibited a 911 call from being completed properly.
Except, those same companies are the ones who paid off the politicians who are pushing this. It's the entrenched companies losing out to lower priced VOIP providers who are behind the push.
Yes, the VOIP providers should provide equivalent service if that's how they are selling it. But the phone providers upstream who are getting in the way of their competition need to be slapped around a bit. And the ISPs who block VOIP traffic should also be penalized as if every call they block is a 911 call.
I'll take this all seriously in a minute.
A story about urinals that contains the line "... plumbers and water conservationists taking aim at one another." is just too funny for now.
The crash test dummy's name is Buster.
It's a no brainer as far as NY is concerned. They can enact a law the people who live outside of NY will owe taxes on all income that oringinates from within NY.
The companies don't get hurt, it's the employess ( even though there might be some additional burden for local vs. remote employees). Since the companies are in NY, they are compelled to withold taxes.
The out of state employees might not like it, but there isn't squat they can do about it. As long as they reside out of state, they can't vote on any measure or representative that is screwing them. Best they can hope for is organize and send $$ to buy off someone in NY.
This the same as how lots of new public-funded stadiums get built. A popular place to suck exta taxes is from rental car fees. Locals usually vote on it since it means they get a stadium and others have to pay.
Getting votes for taxes that that the voters don't have to pay is pretty easy.
Complaints from the copyright holders are understandable. If they could find an effective way to charge you each time you read a book you'd already bought or prevent people from selling used books, they would.
My guess on the librarian complaint has to do with research. Someone commented here the other day that "Researchers" have become "Googlers". In some cases this might be true. It also means that someone sitting in their living room using Google ( or other search engine ) and the 'Net can gain access to information from such a wide array of sources that not long ago required a professional researcher to do.
I can't help but be reminded of "The Desk Set" with Hepburn and Tracy. The research dept of a TV network was getting a massive computer. The researchers thought it was intended to replace them and the stacks of books they used for reference. I think the complaints from libraries on Google's scanning of "everything" is it allows access to the information by everyone. Librarians are the keeper of the keys, guardians of the rare books, masters of the Dewey Decimal System. Letting just anyone access to the stacks erodes the requirements for their services.
If a 10,000 book library had all the books scanned and indexed and available via a simple Google search then the librarians are relagatd to a position not too far removed from the Blockbuster store clerk putting videos back on the shelf. There'd be a position for someone to decide what subset of books to keep on hand, but less positions overall.
I'd love it if Google indexed everything in print. I have 100 or so cookbooks. If I could do a search, limited to my "library" for recipes for paella, I could walk over and pull just those books off the shelf to see which I wanted to use. I don't care if I can't read the whole recipe via Google, I'll just use it to refer me to the dead tree version I have on the shelf.
Other than the copyright holders who are just wanting money from anything based on what they've published ( reasonably so ), the others are either luddites who don't understand or people trying to protect their livelyhood.
Newspapers can still be around, they just need to evolve. They've got the reporters and researchers, so they're in a good position for reporting detailed stories with more depth than TV can do in a 30 second blurb. Seeing a story in the conext of previous weeks or months of background articles is also easier with text than dozens of clips of newspeople reading short snippets on-air.
It's the dead tree versions that don't make as much sense. Lots of people don't want yesterday's news. But no reason that a well written newspaper can't write a web version just as well.
And the thick Sunday version with the sale ads and magazines are still popular. So they don't need to retire the presses. But basing your entire business model around delivering paper to porches, yeah, that'd dead.
What a moron.
What the hell does he mean by people using his "pipes" for free? I pay every month for my access. And I'm not paying for wires strung to my house, I'm paying for bandwidth, for the ability to get packets in and out of my router. Nothing free here, I paid for it.
Yes, there's someone on the other end making money on this and the greedy bastard thinks he should get "his share". Does he want that to apply to every transaction?
I called and ordered a pizza for delivery last night. Do they get a cut?
I checked my bank balance and paid a couple bills this weekend. Do they get a transaction fee?
I do work from home some days. Do I need to give them a portion of my pay when I do that?
It's value as a bomb shelter went away when slow flying bombers were no longer the weapon delivery mechanism. As the article says, once the warning time dropped to 4 minutes, evacuating to the shelter became impossible.
It looked like a dupe to me too, and both posted by Zonk even.
But, the first posting was about the end of the "Summer of Code". This posting was a link to Google and the results of the program.
I do understand, and I can read. It would be idiotic to suggest that the world start distrubuting DC, so I mentioned that AC is appropriate for that. Nor did I suggest a house running entirely on DC. Feel free to read my post again.
To repeat, and I'll type slowly this time, a large number of devices in a house today run on low voltage DC. If you don't count the light bulbs then I'd venture a guess that most of the electrical devices in a house today are low voltage DC. Since the orginal article suggested LED lighting, which is generally low voltage DC, then the majority of devices in a house then would be low voltage DC.
Since traditional houses are currently wired for higher voltage AC, this means many, many small transformers and rectifiers at each item: PCs, VCRs, Clocks, radios, cell phone chargers.. Most of these use different voltages and have different current requirements. While a large house wired for DC might have greater losses in-house than AC, the inefficiency of dozens of transformers and rectifiers aren't terribly efficient. The comparison I made about lossed in the many transformers was when comparing them to a single, or fewer, DC sources in a house.
While the original LED discussion spun many posts about heat, every brick and wall-wart that's running hot is also generating heat that is not part of an efficient energy transfer. A standard low voltage, low current, DC distribution in a house could have greater efficiencies. Running a DC clothes drier on on wires 100ft long would not be an example of a low voltage, low current application. But a cell phone charger or clock radio, or any of dozens of LED lamps would be.
AC equipment in the US is expected to work on 120v 60hz. Because that's available, that's what's built. If 5, 12, or 40 VDC was what was available in any house, that's what these low power devices would connect to. If there's a common source and connector, hardware will pop up to use it. The hundreds of stupid things that plug into USB jacks are an example. They aren't communicating with the computers they connect to, but just taking advantage of a common low power DC source with a common connector.
As for a whole house transformer, another approach might be for a couple transformers, but not dozens. And similar to how a UPS works, it might not be a bad idea for some of these DC networks to be battery backed up. A DC source, the battery, and DC lighting would make for easier lighting in a power outage. Depending on the efficiency of the battery charging, it might even be worthwhile to charge the battery during off-peak times and run the lighting off of the battery during peak times.
Back to the orginal posting about LEDs. If you were to have all the ceiling fixtures in a house be LEDs, and you knew this before building the house, I'd suggest that running 120v AC to all those fixtures and building in transformers and rectifiers in each socket would not necessarily be the best approach.
AC has it's advantages, especially for long distance transmission. But in a house, it's gradually losing out. If you don't count lightbulbs, I'd say I have more DC things plugged in than AC. So many of the outlets are connected to "bricks" or "wall warts" to change the high voltage AC to low voltage DC. Things that don't have an exterior brick, like the DVD player or TiVo just do the conversion internally. While the higher voltage AC might have some benefits of lower loss in the wires, I'd think that umpteen separate transformers and rectifiers are negating a large percentage of that benefit.
If lighting were go to DC, then a re-think of the home wiring would really be in order. If there were a "standard" DC voltage and current available to lower power devices, we might not have wall transformers with anything from 3v-12v hanging off our surge supressors.
So in-house DC makes lots of sense. Send the AC to things like ovens and clothes dryers, and DC to most everything else.
I used the older version of Goldwave to de-DRM one of Audible's books a while back when my only portable MP3 player was a CD-MP3 one. It took a while and you ended up with either less audible quality or a much bigger file.
You *can* burn CDs from the books, but for some full length novels that would take 15-20 CDs. Re-ripping them, renaming, all takes time.
I now have a variety of devices that will play Audible's files, so no need for myself to convert. For loaning an audio book to someone I just load it up on a cheap 256MB Creative Muvo and loan them that with the book pre-loaded. Just like returning a borrowed book, they return the player when they're done.
Now my only incentive to re-encode the DRM'd books is I have almost 900 hours of book content. For personal archiving reasons I'd prefer they were in something non-proprietary so I'll be sure to always be able to revisit them in the future.