I don't think you are looking at the whole life cycle of the solar cells, but so be it.
Electrical energy is much cheaper here in the states, which makes the ROI much longer than 10 years (it's generally just one side or the other of the useful lifespan). When you consider total cost of ownership, here in the states, solar is usually not cost effective. Some have adopted it in the sunny south west, but with the fall in electric prices due to Natural Gas prices plummeting of late and nobody predicting a rise on the horizon this has all but stopped.
The *real* test here is when large companies like Wal-Mart or Home Depot start putting arrays on their huge roofs. Until they can see the business case for the investment at the small industrial level, there is no way it will make sense for the homeowner. And until the power generation companies can do this on an industrial scale and make money at it, the large retailers won't be trying it.
If you live in a rural location, you may have issues, but the whole grid remains stable, even if your little branch of it isn't.
I live in a major metropolitan area and in 10 years I have had my power go out twice. Once when lighting hit the feed line, shorting one phase to ground for the neighborhood out in front of the city's main Fire, Police and emergency station which houses our 911 service center, and once when they replaced the transformer in front of my home because it was leaking. I also monitor the voltages (though my UPS) and we've not had any sagging noted over the past year's worth of logs.
My point is, the grid in general is stable. That your electric delivery service provider chooses not to properly maintain their equipment does not negate that.
No, it's a grid nearly all the way to my home. Now, my neighborhood gets power from a power pole right next to the city's Police, Fire and Emergency Management Center, and is just down the road from the main phone switch center so I'm sure we benefit from a really strict SLAs and redundancy required for that.
There is a lot of redundancy engineered into the system on purpose and although having loops is a difficult engineering problem to manage, they can and do have them well into the local distribution system, especially in cities and metropolitan areas. You get out past the suburbs and it gets a bit less redundant, but that's because they don't have customers who are willing to pay enough for SLA's that require redundancy.
But my point is that the grid is far from fragile and far from being "outdated".
I forget what they call the award, but the ARRL offers some kind of certificate for people making verified contacts on very low power over very long distances. Sounds like you might qualify.
Add in the fact that distributing solar capacity is more efficient than centralizing it, then consider the carbon footprint of coal-fired plants, and solar plus batteries starts to look damned good.
One more comment... No, they DON'T look good. Solar cells require a LOT of energy (much of it electrical) to produce. Only recently have they managed to create a solar array that was able to produce more energy over it's useful life than it took to make it. This is why photovoltaic power generation is not, and will not soon be cost effective and why it doesn't contribute to a reduction in C02 emissions. That's just solar cells, now you want to add batteries to this mix? What kind? Lead Acid? Lithium-Ion? Both take energy to create and both are not even close to 100% efficient but waste electrical power. Batteries are NOT a solution that makes sense from an emissions perspective, they just end up costing you even more in an already loosing situation.
So solar power doesn't really make sense on any front when you look at the whole life cycle of the system. Environmentally it's a loss and adding batteries only adds to that loss. Economically it's a loss too, with batteries making it even worse. So the 100 year old power grid is actually your best bet...
This push for solar is stupid when you look at it. What you should be pushing is *conservation*. That is something that actually achieves your goals for the environment and can be cost effective in many cases.
You miss my point. We've been doing this for 100 years and have a pretty good idea how to make it work. As far as reliability goes, the entire grid is a marvel of engineering. Does it fail from time to time? Sure, and commercial aircraft crash too. But when you are dealing with the deliver of as much energy as the electrical grid in north America does, it's amazing that it does so well in the face of nature's wrath and the stupid things humans sometimes do to it. Now somebody wants to pitch it all into the trash and run on solar cells and batteries and use reliability as an argument to justify it? I think they are nuts.
Home generation through solar is good for everyone.
Not true. The sad fact here is that Photovoltaic power generation is not yet cost effective and only recently went "Power positive" (where over their useful life a cell can generate more power than it took to make it in the first place.) Then, when you start load shifting using batteries to store and release power for later, things get even worse. It's way too expensive for what you get.
The biggest problem here is that it doesn't make financial sense to go with photovoltaic. They still cost more per kilowatt hour than buying power from the power company. Why? Basically it is Fracking. Natural Gas is CHEAP and shows no sign of getting more expensive anytime soon. This is keeping the cost of electric power very low.
Unless of course you are one of those, carbon emissions are really bad and should be avoided at any cost folks who are all upset about global warming/climate change/climate disruption or what ever it's called today. In that case, there is nothing I can say that will make any difference to you..
Anything that reduces the average home owner's reliance on the grid is good in my book...especially as the infrastructure is so dated and fragile.
Dated and fragile? Where on earth do you get that impression?
The technology of power transmission hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years. Yea, there is some OLD equipment out there, but it is not like running electricity though wires somehow wears them out, so why would you replace it if it's still working just fine? The same for transformers, if they have enough capacity and are not leaking or arcing over someplace, why replace it? It's not like there is anything better, more reliable or more efficient out there.
The power grid is only fragile at times because we do not keep enough excess capacity in the system for efficiency reasons. But even then, Major blackouts are extremely RARE events and usually are caused by multiple faults and human error. The grid is actually a very tough system, designed to keep operating in the face of lots of unforeseen faults and failures. It routinely takes lighting strikes, component failures, human error and sabotage attempts in stride while it delivers huge amounts of power to almost every location you will find yourself.
What has changed in power distribution of late is the control systems and the efficiency of the power plants, but you are talking about the "grid" which implies the distribution system. Most of these control systems are for efficiency, monitoring and metering and don't really matter to the operation of the actual distribution system, which in most cases would be just fine without the control system watching.
Not really... They ALREADY used this "technology" for decades to power "passive" listening devices (i.e. devices that didn't require batteries or wires.)
Now they don't use WiFi frequencies to power these things, but they routinely used these "bugs" for listening in on things. You place the device in the location you want to listen to, then crank up a powerful RF transmitter as close as you can to get it charged up and working. Truth is that other frequencies are much more useful for thing kind of thing and a lot safer for the listener and listen to so they didn't use WiFi spectrum for it. It's great too, because the "bug" emits nothing until the RF power supply is cranked up, and then there is no hope of hearing it with that much RF flying around. (Not to mention it's impossible to tell when RF is around and when it's not without some kind of equipment.)
It got so bad that they started making foreign embassies into huge Faraday cages to keep all the RF out and disable all these devices. This all happened decades ago, back during the cold war.
Seems like every time someone says "not possible" here, someone eventually proves them wrong.
So, violating the laws of gravity is going to be possible someday? Something tells me that Newton's laws are safe... So I think your whole argument just came crashing down.... (Yea, Ok.. Not that funny but I tried...)
The means you would increase the power on your wifi to charge your devices.
It's inefficient, bot OTOH, no wires.
Not without running into the FCC part 15 limits which govern the field strengths of WiFi devices. And I'll warn you, for your own safety, please don't mess with WiFi amps and/or directional antennas. Apart from being illegal (in the USA anyway) they are DANGEROUS if you don't understand what's going on and how this kind of thing can harm animals (including humans).
Personally, I have a Ham radio license which gives me authorization to use 802.11g spectrum at much higher powers than Part 15 users, but to get that takes passing the test which includes a basic understanding of RF safety. If you insist on trying WiFi at higher powers, I strongly recommend you get the license and do it legally and the right way.
So anybody selling WiFi backscatter powering ANYTHING is selling you snake oil. Not that it's impossible, but that it's ILLEGAL and DANGEROUS. There will be no commercial products approved for sale in the USA (or any other developed nation for that matter) that does this. EVER....
Still the problem remains that WiFi is pretty much limited to really low field strengths compared to what your RFID tags required. WiFi operates on FCC Part 15 rules, which usually means 1/2 watt ERP into an isotropic radiator. There is a reason WiFi is not generally useful beyond about 100 yards, unless you have ideal (unobstructed line of sight) conditions. The power received is in the micro watts.
RF-ID tags take pretty high field strengths to charge up before they can interact with the near field. This means you have to get the reader within about 2 wavelengths of the transmitter and provide pretty high field strengths for the tag to work. There are tags that work a greater distances, but they too require high field strengths to "charge" or carry batteries. Either way RF-ID tags require field strengths that require tens of watts and directional antennas to produce, even over short distances.
Commercially available WiFi devices are extremely low power which means they are very low field strengths. There simply won't be enough power out there to do anything close to what the proponents claim is "possible". There is just not much you can accomplish with a few micro-watts.
Technically, the device would need to harvest power from 2.4GHz RF and then use that power to power its own transceiver and CPU. Sorry, but I don't see this happen. Harvested RF may be in the order of microwatts. How on earth is this going to power anything besides maybe, a very low dutycyle / long period beacon of some sort? It's just not plausible.
Clearly, you understand the physics involved here.... Be warned, there are those who don't and will argue with you. When they fail, they will then resort to "We really don't know what's possible in the future!" which is generally correct, but chances are this won't be possible without a wholesale overturning of our understanding of physics which will likely require a whole new kind of math to describe...Even with "Common Core" I don't think this will happen...
Didn't we just have this argument, like, a month ago?
Yes we did, but apparently the laws of physics got changed and this time it works..... (not!)
This whole, "Yea, we can just get free RF energy by collecting it and do xxx with it." idea suffers from being exposed to reality and the laws of physics. Now, I'm not saying that transferring energy using RF isn't possible, surely it is, only that at the RF field strengths available in your standard residence do not represent enough of an energy source to make any device that uses available back-scatter practical unless you make it REALLY big or you purposely provide high field strengths (i.e. transmit High intensity RF energy) for it to use. Unless your off the shelf WiFi transmitter is *really* close (like under a foot), the energy you can glean from it's signal is vanishingly small (basically fractions of a micro watt), which is not enough to run much more than the circuits needed to collect it.
You can in fact harvest enough energy to power a radio transmitter. You can't harvest enough energy to run a Bluetooth radio because it requires periodic beacons. If on the other hand you want to transmit a short 64-bit message at 1200 BAUD FSK once every hour, it's probably feasible.
If you have a purposely built RF emitter to charge up the device by supplying enough energy, you can do what ever you want. Some RF-ID tags work this way. Problem for ANY device that uses WiFi for this is that these devices run under Part 15 of the FCC's rules, which limits your transmit power to about 1/2 watt delivered into an ideal antenna (it's actually limited in field strength, not TX power.) This is simply NOT enough power to charge anything beyond a very short distance because the induced voltages are extremely low (micro volts) at these field strengths.
There are other RF sources out there that may have higher field strengths that you can use to glean power, but I dare say that WiFi signals are just not going to be enough, unless you up the power level quite a bit or keep the transmitter really close by.
In my mind, if you are discussing a programming interface, then personally I want the source code. In my experience, even paid for software has less than perfect documentation and If I'm coding to it, give me the code over the professionally written documentation that may or may not be right and complete.
If I'm just using the application as is, then I prefer the user documentation along with a program that gives understandable error messages.
Then don't use open source. In addition to missing documentation, there is often also bugs and unimplemented features. Unless you are actually working on a project which is built upon open source components, why would you use inferior software?
There is two kinds of freedom: freedom of the source code, and freedom of yourself getting cool stuff done productively.
Ever heard of Red Hat? They don't sell an operating system, they sell fully vetted, stable, documented and supported Open Source solutions that have been well tested. They keep knowledgeable staff and support the development of FOSS by paying them to contribute to various projects they find useful for their customers. You may not like Linux and have no need for Red Hat or companies like them, but I think you too easily discount the level of support available for the major parts of the FOSS universe.
Personally, I've used both Microsoft's and Red Hat's support services and Red Hat wins in my book hands down. I had tickets open for WEEKS with Microsoft that dragged into MONTHS and we didn't get any resolution from them beyond "Just reload the system from scratch and that will fix it". Where with Red Hat, I never had a ticket open for more than 2 weeks and usually had a coherent answer from them in a few days. Your mileage may vary, but IMHO FOSS isn't as big of a problem as you seem to think.
Except that IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc all have extensive documentation with examples. It's basically open source that sucks in this regard.
I don't agree with you on this. Microsoft and Apple have documentation, but I find the documentation pretty bad too, once you get past the "user" level stuff and "Quick Start" guides. I don't have much experience with IBM documentation but I cannot imagine it's all that much better. What I would say is that Microsoft, Apple (and I presume IBM) actually have customers who expect documentation at some level and are willing to pay for it. These same customers are usually willing to pay for phone support too, so you can bet the *real* scoop is saved for the money making phone calls.
So for FOSS, the same model applies, except there is NO profit in documentation, unless you write the definitive guide for something really popular like Wall did for Perl. There is nothing that says you cannot CHARGE for support of FOSS you know, which means if there is some project worth using for you, then offer to PAY for support. That's what Red Hat does for the most part. If the FOSS project is so short sighted that it provides no documentation and the development team won't help or just says "read the code" then it seems to me that there is a business opportunity here. You can figure it out on your own, write a document, either give it back to the project or publish it for profit and sell support services.
If you've ever spent any time with a head of cows, this would be pretty obvious.
They are countless examples of "pretty obvious" things that turned out not to be true.
Your experience, for example, could be down to confirmation bias, for all any outsider might know.
Which is why I suggest you question a number of people who are experienced with cattle and not take my word for it. If you are careful about how you ask your questions, I'm sure you can avoid any problems with confirmation bias...
Glass that is pretty CLEAN.. You need really fast frame rates (6Khz will get you phone quality audio) and pretty high optical resolution. I'm just guessing, but you are going to need 3-4 pixels for any kind of reasonable S/N ratio that's listenable, so if the object you are looking at only moves a few nanometers with the sound, that means you need a minimum of two pixels per nanometer. To do that kind of resolution at say 10 feet, is going to require some pretty good optics. The resolution of the video itself, doesn't matter all that much, but you are going to need some serious optics and some really fine focus.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think you are looking at the whole life cycle of the solar cells, but so be it.
Electrical energy is much cheaper here in the states, which makes the ROI much longer than 10 years (it's generally just one side or the other of the useful lifespan). When you consider total cost of ownership, here in the states, solar is usually not cost effective. Some have adopted it in the sunny south west, but with the fall in electric prices due to Natural Gas prices plummeting of late and nobody predicting a rise on the horizon this has all but stopped.
The *real* test here is when large companies like Wal-Mart or Home Depot start putting arrays on their huge roofs. Until they can see the business case for the investment at the small industrial level, there is no way it will make sense for the homeowner. And until the power generation companies can do this on an industrial scale and make money at it, the large retailers won't be trying it.
If you live in a rural location, you may have issues, but the whole grid remains stable, even if your little branch of it isn't.
I live in a major metropolitan area and in 10 years I have had my power go out twice. Once when lighting hit the feed line, shorting one phase to ground for the neighborhood out in front of the city's main Fire, Police and emergency station which houses our 911 service center, and once when they replaced the transformer in front of my home because it was leaking. I also monitor the voltages (though my UPS) and we've not had any sagging noted over the past year's worth of logs.
My point is, the grid in general is stable. That your electric delivery service provider chooses not to properly maintain their equipment does not negate that.
No, it's a grid nearly all the way to my home. Now, my neighborhood gets power from a power pole right next to the city's Police, Fire and Emergency Management Center, and is just down the road from the main phone switch center so I'm sure we benefit from a really strict SLAs and redundancy required for that.
There is a lot of redundancy engineered into the system on purpose and although having loops is a difficult engineering problem to manage, they can and do have them well into the local distribution system, especially in cities and metropolitan areas. You get out past the suburbs and it gets a bit less redundant, but that's because they don't have customers who are willing to pay enough for SLA's that require redundancy.
But my point is that the grid is far from fragile and far from being "outdated".
I forget what they call the award, but the ARRL offers some kind of certificate for people making verified contacts on very low power over very long distances. Sounds like you might qualify.
Add in the fact that distributing solar capacity is more efficient than centralizing it, then consider the carbon footprint of coal-fired plants, and solar plus batteries starts to look damned good.
One more comment... No, they DON'T look good. Solar cells require a LOT of energy (much of it electrical) to produce. Only recently have they managed to create a solar array that was able to produce more energy over it's useful life than it took to make it. This is why photovoltaic power generation is not, and will not soon be cost effective and why it doesn't contribute to a reduction in C02 emissions. That's just solar cells, now you want to add batteries to this mix? What kind? Lead Acid? Lithium-Ion? Both take energy to create and both are not even close to 100% efficient but waste electrical power. Batteries are NOT a solution that makes sense from an emissions perspective, they just end up costing you even more in an already loosing situation.
So solar power doesn't really make sense on any front when you look at the whole life cycle of the system. Environmentally it's a loss and adding batteries only adds to that loss. Economically it's a loss too, with batteries making it even worse. So the 100 year old power grid is actually your best bet...
This push for solar is stupid when you look at it. What you should be pushing is *conservation*. That is something that actually achieves your goals for the environment and can be cost effective in many cases.
You miss my point. We've been doing this for 100 years and have a pretty good idea how to make it work. As far as reliability goes, the entire grid is a marvel of engineering. Does it fail from time to time? Sure, and commercial aircraft crash too. But when you are dealing with the deliver of as much energy as the electrical grid in north America does, it's amazing that it does so well in the face of nature's wrath and the stupid things humans sometimes do to it. Now somebody wants to pitch it all into the trash and run on solar cells and batteries and use reliability as an argument to justify it? I think they are nuts.
Home generation through solar is good for everyone.
Not true. The sad fact here is that Photovoltaic power generation is not yet cost effective and only recently went "Power positive" (where over their useful life a cell can generate more power than it took to make it in the first place.) Then, when you start load shifting using batteries to store and release power for later, things get even worse. It's way too expensive for what you get.
The biggest problem here is that it doesn't make financial sense to go with photovoltaic. They still cost more per kilowatt hour than buying power from the power company. Why? Basically it is Fracking. Natural Gas is CHEAP and shows no sign of getting more expensive anytime soon. This is keeping the cost of electric power very low.
Unless of course you are one of those, carbon emissions are really bad and should be avoided at any cost folks who are all upset about global warming/climate change/climate disruption or what ever it's called today. In that case, there is nothing I can say that will make any difference to you..
I think they just purchased some call options in Tesla and they are not in the money.
Anything that reduces the average home owner's reliance on the grid is good in my book...especially as the infrastructure is so dated and fragile.
Dated and fragile? Where on earth do you get that impression?
The technology of power transmission hasn't fundamentally changed in 100 years. Yea, there is some OLD equipment out there, but it is not like running electricity though wires somehow wears them out, so why would you replace it if it's still working just fine? The same for transformers, if they have enough capacity and are not leaking or arcing over someplace, why replace it? It's not like there is anything better, more reliable or more efficient out there.
The power grid is only fragile at times because we do not keep enough excess capacity in the system for efficiency reasons. But even then, Major blackouts are extremely RARE events and usually are caused by multiple faults and human error. The grid is actually a very tough system, designed to keep operating in the face of lots of unforeseen faults and failures. It routinely takes lighting strikes, component failures, human error and sabotage attempts in stride while it delivers huge amounts of power to almost every location you will find yourself.
What has changed in power distribution of late is the control systems and the efficiency of the power plants, but you are talking about the "grid" which implies the distribution system. Most of these control systems are for efficiency, monitoring and metering and don't really matter to the operation of the actual distribution system, which in most cases would be just fine without the control system watching.
Not really... They ALREADY used this "technology" for decades to power "passive" listening devices (i.e. devices that didn't require batteries or wires.)
Now they don't use WiFi frequencies to power these things, but they routinely used these "bugs" for listening in on things. You place the device in the location you want to listen to, then crank up a powerful RF transmitter as close as you can to get it charged up and working. Truth is that other frequencies are much more useful for thing kind of thing and a lot safer for the listener and listen to so they didn't use WiFi spectrum for it. It's great too, because the "bug" emits nothing until the RF power supply is cranked up, and then there is no hope of hearing it with that much RF flying around. (Not to mention it's impossible to tell when RF is around and when it's not without some kind of equipment.)
It got so bad that they started making foreign embassies into huge Faraday cages to keep all the RF out and disable all these devices. This all happened decades ago, back during the cold war.
Seems like every time someone says "not possible" here, someone eventually proves them wrong.
So, violating the laws of gravity is going to be possible someday? Something tells me that Newton's laws are safe... So I think your whole argument just came crashing down.... (Yea, Ok.. Not that funny but I tried...)
That's how I read it as well. You failed to read my post as deadpan.
Sigh.... Ok, ok....
The means you would increase the power on your wifi to charge your devices. It's inefficient, bot OTOH, no wires.
Not without running into the FCC part 15 limits which govern the field strengths of WiFi devices. And I'll warn you, for your own safety, please don't mess with WiFi amps and/or directional antennas. Apart from being illegal (in the USA anyway) they are DANGEROUS if you don't understand what's going on and how this kind of thing can harm animals (including humans).
Personally, I have a Ham radio license which gives me authorization to use 802.11g spectrum at much higher powers than Part 15 users, but to get that takes passing the test which includes a basic understanding of RF safety. If you insist on trying WiFi at higher powers, I strongly recommend you get the license and do it legally and the right way.
So anybody selling WiFi backscatter powering ANYTHING is selling you snake oil. Not that it's impossible, but that it's ILLEGAL and DANGEROUS. There will be no commercial products approved for sale in the USA (or any other developed nation for that matter) that does this. EVER....
Still the problem remains that WiFi is pretty much limited to really low field strengths compared to what your RFID tags required. WiFi operates on FCC Part 15 rules, which usually means 1/2 watt ERP into an isotropic radiator. There is a reason WiFi is not generally useful beyond about 100 yards, unless you have ideal (unobstructed line of sight) conditions. The power received is in the micro watts.
RF-ID tags take pretty high field strengths to charge up before they can interact with the near field. This means you have to get the reader within about 2 wavelengths of the transmitter and provide pretty high field strengths for the tag to work. There are tags that work a greater distances, but they too require high field strengths to "charge" or carry batteries. Either way RF-ID tags require field strengths that require tens of watts and directional antennas to produce, even over short distances.
Commercially available WiFi devices are extremely low power which means they are very low field strengths. There simply won't be enough power out there to do anything close to what the proponents claim is "possible". There is just not much you can accomplish with a few micro-watts.
Technically, the device would need to harvest power from 2.4GHz RF and then use that power to power its own transceiver and CPU. Sorry, but I don't see this happen. Harvested RF may be in the order of microwatts. How on earth is this going to power anything besides maybe, a very low dutycyle / long period beacon of some sort? It's just not plausible.
Clearly, you understand the physics involved here.... Be warned, there are those who don't and will argue with you. When they fail, they will then resort to "We really don't know what's possible in the future!" which is generally correct, but chances are this won't be possible without a wholesale overturning of our understanding of physics which will likely require a whole new kind of math to describe...Even with "Common Core" I don't think this will happen...
It (hopefully) tends to be more energetic.
At least during the day, with no clouds or other shade producing things between you and the sun.
Didn't we just have this argument, like, a month ago?
Yes we did, but apparently the laws of physics got changed and this time it works..... (not!)
This whole, "Yea, we can just get free RF energy by collecting it and do xxx with it." idea suffers from being exposed to reality and the laws of physics. Now, I'm not saying that transferring energy using RF isn't possible, surely it is, only that at the RF field strengths available in your standard residence do not represent enough of an energy source to make any device that uses available back-scatter practical unless you make it REALLY big or you purposely provide high field strengths (i.e. transmit High intensity RF energy) for it to use. Unless your off the shelf WiFi transmitter is *really* close (like under a foot), the energy you can glean from it's signal is vanishingly small (basically fractions of a micro watt), which is not enough to run much more than the circuits needed to collect it.
You can in fact harvest enough energy to power a radio transmitter. You can't harvest enough energy to run a Bluetooth radio because it requires periodic beacons. If on the other hand you want to transmit a short 64-bit message at 1200 BAUD FSK once every hour, it's probably feasible.
If you have a purposely built RF emitter to charge up the device by supplying enough energy, you can do what ever you want. Some RF-ID tags work this way. Problem for ANY device that uses WiFi for this is that these devices run under Part 15 of the FCC's rules, which limits your transmit power to about 1/2 watt delivered into an ideal antenna (it's actually limited in field strength, not TX power.) This is simply NOT enough power to charge anything beyond a very short distance because the induced voltages are extremely low (micro volts) at these field strengths.
There are other RF sources out there that may have higher field strengths that you can use to glean power, but I dare say that WiFi signals are just not going to be enough, unless you up the power level quite a bit or keep the transmitter really close by.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Tesla say wireless charging like this was impossible?
You are wrong. In fact, Tesla said the opposite.
I read the original post to be sarcastic, basically saying Tesla already said this was possible....
In my mind, if you are discussing a programming interface, then personally I want the source code. In my experience, even paid for software has less than perfect documentation and If I'm coding to it, give me the code over the professionally written documentation that may or may not be right and complete.
If I'm just using the application as is, then I prefer the user documentation along with a program that gives understandable error messages.
Then don't use open source. In addition to missing documentation, there is often also bugs and unimplemented features. Unless you are actually working on a project which is built upon open source components, why would you use inferior software?
There is two kinds of freedom: freedom of the source code, and freedom of yourself getting cool stuff done productively.
Ever heard of Red Hat? They don't sell an operating system, they sell fully vetted, stable, documented and supported Open Source solutions that have been well tested. They keep knowledgeable staff and support the development of FOSS by paying them to contribute to various projects they find useful for their customers. You may not like Linux and have no need for Red Hat or companies like them, but I think you too easily discount the level of support available for the major parts of the FOSS universe.
Personally, I've used both Microsoft's and Red Hat's support services and Red Hat wins in my book hands down. I had tickets open for WEEKS with Microsoft that dragged into MONTHS and we didn't get any resolution from them beyond "Just reload the system from scratch and that will fix it". Where with Red Hat, I never had a ticket open for more than 2 weeks and usually had a coherent answer from them in a few days. Your mileage may vary, but IMHO FOSS isn't as big of a problem as you seem to think.
Except that IBM, Microsoft, Apple, etc all have extensive documentation with examples. It's basically open source that sucks in this regard.
I don't agree with you on this. Microsoft and Apple have documentation, but I find the documentation pretty bad too, once you get past the "user" level stuff and "Quick Start" guides. I don't have much experience with IBM documentation but I cannot imagine it's all that much better. What I would say is that Microsoft, Apple (and I presume IBM) actually have customers who expect documentation at some level and are willing to pay for it. These same customers are usually willing to pay for phone support too, so you can bet the *real* scoop is saved for the money making phone calls.
So for FOSS, the same model applies, except there is NO profit in documentation, unless you write the definitive guide for something really popular like Wall did for Perl. There is nothing that says you cannot CHARGE for support of FOSS you know, which means if there is some project worth using for you, then offer to PAY for support. That's what Red Hat does for the most part. If the FOSS project is so short sighted that it provides no documentation and the development team won't help or just says "read the code" then it seems to me that there is a business opportunity here. You can figure it out on your own, write a document, either give it back to the project or publish it for profit and sell support services.
If you've ever spent any time with a head of cows, this would be pretty obvious.
They are countless examples of "pretty obvious" things that turned out not to be true.
Your experience, for example, could be down to confirmation bias, for all any outsider might know.
Which is why I suggest you question a number of people who are experienced with cattle and not take my word for it. If you are careful about how you ask your questions, I'm sure you can avoid any problems with confirmation bias...
This seems to work through soundproof glass...
Glass that is pretty CLEAN.. You need really fast frame rates (6Khz will get you phone quality audio) and pretty high optical resolution. I'm just guessing, but you are going to need 3-4 pixels for any kind of reasonable S/N ratio that's listenable, so if the object you are looking at only moves a few nanometers with the sound, that means you need a minimum of two pixels per nanometer. To do that kind of resolution at say 10 feet, is going to require some pretty good optics. The resolution of the video itself, doesn't matter all that much, but you are going to need some serious optics and some really fine focus.