Fiber breaks fairly easily - its a big problem. You might put it in there, and have it work fine for a long time, and then something breaks SOMEWHERE and you don't know where, but you do know that you've lost your connection. Copper is far more durable. If you put in the fiber and the CAT5, you could use the cable as a backup.
Having said that, 100Mb per second is pretty fast for games, X-clients/servers and harddrive reads and writes, unless you really want all the computers to act like one computer. Maybe that's what you want. I don't really care myself. If I want to work on another computer, I walk over to the other one and sit down. So even in the future, I'll probably always be happy with CAT5.
Hydrogen, being the lightest element, doesn't go liquid until close to absolute zero at standard pressure. Even if you make the pressure dangerously high, the refrigeration will still keep it from being worth it to force it into the liquid state. An oxygen molecule is 16 times the size, but it still takes some work to make liquid oxygen, and the pressure would once again be dangerous.
How do they not take up too much space, as you said? Fuel cells are extremely efficient because rather than producing pneumatic energy from combustion which is then converted to electrical energy, they essentially make a battery out of them that fuses hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. But they still don't usually store hydrogen or oxygen.
Fuel cells usually have a liquid forms - these are produced by dissolving or chemically combining hydrogen with less electropositive and negative elements (making an acid and a base), and then removing the hydrogen from this right before it is needed. Typically, the hydrogen is removed from an alcohol. Oxygen is just taken straight out of the air.
Here is a good summary of fuel cells, if you want to know more.
Don't worry if you miss this one.
on
Geminid Meteor Shower
·
· Score: 5, Informative
The Ursids are next.
They max out on December 22-23.
Is there something particularly interesting about something that happens pretty much every year? Why didn't Slashdot report them last year? And why only these last two?
Apparently not a lot of history buffs (and by that I mean people who remember taking it at all) among the moderators, judging by the fact that my previous post has been labeled an offtopic troll. The Standard Oil Company, led by the Rockefellers, was pictured exactly as this because they kept buying up companies that had roughly anything to do with oil to become a verticle AND horizontal monopoly. In fact, it was known by its opposition as "The Octopus."
This seems to be happening again...and again...and again in the software industry. Different kinds of software are being bought, and big companies are growing both vertically and horizontally. The example shown of Earthlink IS such an example.
Moderation system, don't fail me now! This is as real a comment as the last!
Sorry, I made a mistake. Soundcards sampling capabilities makes them only capable of detecting frequencies above and below the range of human hearing. And actually, most soundcards can do variable sampling rates, but not between samples.
I say this not because they can sample better; for the purpose of having an oscilliscope an oscilliscope is better. But an oscilliscope can't do all the things to a signal that a PC can do. This is the beauty of the acquisition card.
An oscilliscope just samples input voltages and displays their amplitude. That's REAL tough computations (NOT!). And a frequency analyzer (often used for a similar purpose) just takes a fourier transform of the signal (this is a mere O(n log(n)) complexity problem). The software is trivial!
The main problem is the sampling rate of the hardware. Soundcards are made with a sampling rate that is only slightly above and below the range of human hearing, which means that for many circuit frequencies, they are unacceptable. If this will work for you, the coding is rather simple since its the well known I/O operations that have been used in PCs forever. Just learn a little bit about SOME sound API and output the wave output from the soundcard in real time. I'm sure others have done this before, too. Its a 4 hour job.
If you need better accuracy than that, you need to buy a data acquisition card, but it will cost you a pretty penny for them. Here is a list of some of these cards.
There are some up sides of having a card such as this that can capture high quantities of data, the biggest being that if you know C, and you get specs on ANY kind of input signal, you can often write a driver for it - NTSC signals, radio signals, digital video signals...pretty much anything.
If you really want to do this quickly, get something like the matlab and use the data acquisition toolbox.
In my opinion, a data acquisition device on the computer beats the pants off of an oscilliscope any day.
Are they going to make a scaled down, slightly less bloated version of their kernel that they sell for less and that we can use for all the latest stuff?
That's exactly what I use Windows 95 for.
I put a copy on my Dad's old P-133 laptop so that he could do word processing for his job (he's not quite Linux ready, and neither is the laptop). It runs. And so do the programs I installed on it.
I know what you might be thinking: "that's old stuff, and old stuff is as supported as it gets on 95." Well...
there are still a lot of products out there that use simple Pentium chips and small memories that keep coming out that could use a good Windows API every now and then.
So what is our recourse for "Lite" systems, if not older versions of the software if Windows is required?
I suppose if we wait a few more years, the Windows clone will be ready, and that could replace it...
A battery whose half-life is guaranteed for over 3000 years.
A battery that is not environmentally safe or even a good idea to carry around.
A battery that doubles as a flamethrower and ghost-catching device.
I WANT A PROTON PACK!
Seriously...I don't mind toting a batterey that weighs 20 pounds and is approximately half the size of my laptop/portable device. Then maybe I'd get a good 10 hours of use out of it. Am I alone? I think that would solve a lot of the battery problems.
...everytime I hear something from New Scientist I can't help thinking about this article. Its often interesting to read, but the results are not from an accountable source - always from some scientists somewhere that have questionable results...
All of the big breakthroughs that are real seem to be reported by actual news institutions.
Its just another straw on the coffin (another nail in the camel's back).
30 years ago, science fiction was kid's stuff - only children wanted to watch it, only children liked it, etc.
30 years have passed, and the children have grown up. Now Sci-fi is a complex medium intended for the use of adults - it grew up with its fans.
15 years ago video games started getting to be more than just 'Pong,' and the children started to play them. Now games are complex, and getting more so. Today, games are still for the young - but not just for kids.
A mere 10 years ago the net started to become a popular means of [everything the wired article talks about]. It has powerfully transformed the world BEFORE a generation has come to power. That is truly amazing, but you can't expect all of the changes that are on the way to happen overnight.
In 20 years, after the internet has had as much time as Sci-Fi to become commonplace, we will be an internet generation. Then all the people who are using this as their media outlet will have it, and just like the stock market, it will become a chaotic tyranny of the majority's decisions swayed by the charisma of those who write well.
Bring it on. The written word has always been my favorite medium of information exchange.
On the side: I don't care if this issue is last year's news, or last century's. Its relevant today, and there are more things that cna be said about it now than could be said last year!
No its not. At least not under the current model. Its been proven that since gravity is not strong enough to keep the universe from expanding NOW its not going to be strong enough to keep it expanding later due to the conservation of mass (since there is roughly the same amount of mass in the universe always, there is a roughly a constant amount of gravitons, while the necessary force to stop the universe from moving keeps increasing).
Of course, with our microscopic view our theories don't hold a lot of water. If we could visit a couple million planets and get viewpoints from all of those, I expect that a lot of our theories about the Universe would change.
Perhaps the Universe isn't even expanding now, and space is simply a closed hyperparaboloid.
It seems that perhaps the moderator who posted my comment as "offtopic" has a little difficulty with the whole "reading" thing. Those examples that I gave were to illustrate the point, not to just spout stuff.
Let me explain my message. I gave some examples of reviews that weren't worth making, specifically picking things that don't have very many features. For example, a shoe, for the most part, is a shoe. There isn't a lot to say about it - its only features are comfort, durability and style. Also, there are LOTS of shoes.
So...my point was that when the only features are harddrive size, PC interface, and cost, what's the point of making a review? Its about the same as reviewing shoes, or hamburgers, or laptops brands (not actually the laptops themselves).
Sony has a laptop they call the "Vaio." It uses currently available technology in order to create a laptop. Its better than other ones, but more expensive.
Nike makes shoes. They're better than others, but more expensive.
McDonalds makes hamburgers. They taste good, but the ones from Steak & Shake taste better. However, they are more expensive.
In a thriving industry with hundreds of products which have only a few distinguishing features, why is it worth mentioning one more?
Perhaps this breaks some ground that I'm not aware of. If anyone has any insight, enlighten me.
I think that's what the previous poster meant about getting the design of the Weirding modules right. Not having them would make them right.
For that matter, I hope that they get the Eyes of Ibad right. I sort of always thought that "deep blue whites and pupils" meant something other than "light blue pupils."
The characters would look a LOT different if you couldn't see their pupils. It would do more to convince everyone that all of the Fremen are addicts of a very dangerous drug.
The sites you put up as examples are sites where the user interest is nonexistant. I don't care about a "cute lil' cat" or "cute lil'" anythings, for that matter. I don't think I'm alone among netizens for that. And I don't think that "Magick" has a huge following either.
However, if you want a media system and a belief system that are popular, Star Wars and Christianity are both doing fine.
And sites become popular overnight! Need I remind you of the dancing hamsters and "All your base" phenomena that took the nation by storm inexplicably with only wierdness to pull them along?
There's a huge coorelation between them - people who commit crimes as youngsters are more likely to do so as adults than those who do not commit crimes at a young age.
You don't consider that evidence? SOMETIMES you can argue that evidence is not causal. But the data is separated by TIME. So I'd have to say that your statement is incorrect, at least for the instance of actual crime. Now, mind you, you could be talking strictly about noncriminal behavior, then you're right.
When dealing with vehicles of any kind, the primary problem is that the energy source has to be portable. Therefore, you need a source with a high energy density. In other words, something that you can get a lot of energy from while it takes a small amount of space. Even more importantly, you want the energy in a form that you're going to use it in, or as close as possible to such a form, because conversion of energy causes a loss of energy.
To date, combustion based systems have the highest energy density of any portable energy source (barring fission reactions). Therefore, there will always be a use for it.
Perhaps automobiles won't necessarily need them - we can afford to carry additional weight - the fuel/weight ratio for automobiles is evidence of this - you can carry a LOT with a small amount of fuel for a car - and you can then drive for a long time.
But what about flying vehicles? Fuel/weight ratio is EXTREMELY important. The more efficiency that we can get the better. The best part about this is that it might remove the need for an alternator, which drains the power and adds weight to any flying device (which is significant for the small vehicles, such as the automonous surveyor helicopters used by the U.S. military). Improvements in fuel usage can mean a big deal for the aircraft industry.
Of course that's not the only industry that will benefit. Heat-differential technology is used as a power source for some areas...have you heard of geothermal and solar power plants? Know how those work? What if they could double their output? That would be significant.
I don't know about the rest of the metamoderators, but I consider any post that has their arguments qualified reasonably to be valid, despite the opinion.
Consider the following two comments, which lets say I found listed as "Flamebait":
Comment #1
Linux is no good. Microsoft is much better.
-That would be flamebait because it has no qualification - it is just to make people angry.
Comment #2
Linux is no good because there are no browsers that do as much as IE. Microsoft is much better.
-That would be valid - I would metamoderate a flamebait rating as "unfair."
Hopefully, I'm not alone in using criteria other than my opinion to moderate and metamoderate. But you know...I've been moderated down before despite adhering to my "make a qualification" policy.
Offtopic for a moment: perhaps others had trouble logging in so couldn't post, as I couldn't about ten minutes ago, and thats the problem.
Back on track:
I've heard it said that love makes the world go round.
After countless hours of research sitting in front of the TV, I've learned that CARTOONS MAKE THE WORLD GO ROUND. I know because I once saw a cartoon where a bunch of them where actually pushing the earth along its axis. Can you believe it? Love makes the world go round, and so do cartoons. Cartoons must be love. I suppose that means if I behave like a cartoon, I'm showing the love.
'Scuze me. I'm going to go spread the love, Bender style. Has anyone seen my liquor and my mallet?
This, like many innovations, is just another step. Handsprings are slightly more modular than other forms of PDAs, while still having the minimal power consumption associated with palm pilots.
Many people, including myself, believe that the next frontier of technology is small, portable devices that communicate with each other wirelessly, though each device has a specialized function.
In order to make that happen, we need to start with devices such as handhelds - which CAN be easily specialized through software, and which have readily available wireless capability.
Its true that its "Just another handheld," similar to all of the other handhelds, but its more functional. Its not like another model car, which is exactly like the previous model, except that its "new and improved" (i.e. new and the current fashion); this is another piece of the puzzle.
And IT DOES MATTER that its slightly more functional. The advent of the 386 chipset allowed a whole new class of problems to be solvable that where previously too slow to do research - I know that this is the case for my field, which is computer vision. As time progresses, even more problems are being researched.
I'm looking forward to using technology such as this -perhaps even this model - in the near future (when it becomes pretty inexpensive - perhaps two or three years from now) as a module for home automation - it would be just about perfect for the purpose.
Slashdot Mirror
Fiber breaks fairly easily - its a big problem. You might put it in there, and have it work fine for a long time, and then something breaks SOMEWHERE and you don't know where, but you do know that you've lost your connection. Copper is far more durable. If you put in the fiber and the CAT5, you could use the cable as a backup.
Having said that, 100Mb per second is pretty fast for games, X-clients/servers and harddrive reads and writes, unless you really want all the computers to act like one computer. Maybe that's what you want. I don't really care myself. If I want to work on another computer, I walk over to the other one and sit down. So even in the future, I'll probably always be happy with CAT5.
Hydrogen, being the lightest element, doesn't go liquid until close to absolute zero at standard pressure. Even if you make the pressure dangerously high, the refrigeration will still keep it from being worth it to force it into the liquid state. An oxygen molecule is 16 times the size, but it still takes some work to make liquid oxygen, and the pressure would once again be dangerous.
How do they not take up too much space, as you said? Fuel cells are extremely efficient because rather than producing pneumatic energy from combustion which is then converted to electrical energy, they essentially make a battery out of them that fuses hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity. But they still don't usually store hydrogen or oxygen.
Fuel cells usually have a liquid forms - these are produced by dissolving or chemically combining hydrogen with less electropositive and negative elements (making an acid and a base), and then removing the hydrogen from this right before it is needed. Typically, the hydrogen is removed from an alcohol. Oxygen is just taken straight out of the air.
Here is a good summary of fuel cells, if you want to know more.
The Ursids are next.
They max out on December 22-23.
Is there something particularly interesting about something that happens pretty much every year? Why didn't Slashdot report them last year? And why only these last two?
Here's the schedule, by the way.
Apparently not a lot of history buffs (and by that I mean people who remember taking it at all) among the moderators, judging by the fact that my previous post has been labeled an offtopic troll. The Standard Oil Company, led by the Rockefellers, was pictured exactly as this because they kept buying up companies that had roughly anything to do with oil to become a verticle AND horizontal monopoly. In fact, it was known by its opposition as "The Octopus."
This seems to be happening again...and again...and again in the software industry. Different kinds of software are being bought, and big companies are growing both vertically and horizontally. The example shown of Earthlink IS such an example.
Moderation system, don't fail me now! This is as real a comment as the last!
Why is it that I picture a giant octopus grabbing everything in sight and eating it?
The world is too full of octopi.
Sorry, I made a mistake. Soundcards sampling capabilities makes them only capable of detecting frequencies above and below the range of human hearing. And actually, most soundcards can do variable sampling rates, but not between samples.
I say this not because they can sample better; for the purpose of having an oscilliscope an oscilliscope is better. But an oscilliscope can't do all the things to a signal that a PC can do. This is the beauty of the acquisition card.
An oscilliscope just samples input voltages and displays their amplitude. That's REAL tough computations (NOT!). And a frequency analyzer (often used for a similar purpose) just takes a fourier transform of the signal (this is a mere O(n log(n)) complexity problem). The software is trivial!
The main problem is the sampling rate of the hardware. Soundcards are made with a sampling rate that is only slightly above and below the range of human hearing, which means that for many circuit frequencies, they are unacceptable. If this will work for you, the coding is rather simple since its the well known I/O operations that have been used in PCs forever. Just learn a little bit about SOME sound API and output the wave output from the soundcard in real time. I'm sure others have done this before, too. Its a 4 hour job.
If you need better accuracy than that, you need to buy a data acquisition card, but it will cost you a pretty penny for them. Here is a list of some of these cards.
There are some up sides of having a card such as this that can capture high quantities of data, the biggest being that if you know C, and you get specs on ANY kind of input signal, you can often write a driver for it - NTSC signals, radio signals, digital video signals...pretty much anything.
If you really want to do this quickly, get something like the matlab and use the data acquisition toolbox.
In my opinion, a data acquisition device on the computer beats the pants off of an oscilliscope any day.
Are they going to make a scaled down, slightly less bloated version of their kernel that they sell for less and that we can use for all the latest stuff?
That's exactly what I use Windows 95 for.
I put a copy on my Dad's old P-133 laptop so that he could do word processing for his job (he's not quite Linux ready, and neither is the laptop). It runs. And so do the programs I installed on it.
I know what you might be thinking: "that's old stuff, and old stuff is as supported as it gets on 95." Well...
there are still a lot of products out there that use simple Pentium chips and small memories that keep coming out that could use a good Windows API every now and then.
So what is our recourse for "Lite" systems, if not older versions of the software if Windows is required?
I suppose if we wait a few more years, the Windows clone will be ready, and that could replace it...
I want a battery I can carry on my back.
A battery whose half-life is guaranteed for over 3000 years.
A battery that is not environmentally safe or even a good idea to carry around.
A battery that doubles as a flamethrower and ghost-catching device.
I WANT A PROTON PACK!
Seriously...I don't mind toting a batterey that weighs 20 pounds and is approximately half the size of my laptop/portable device. Then maybe I'd get a good 10 hours of use out of it. Am I alone? I think that would solve a lot of the battery problems.
Let me clarify.
I was referring to Sci-fi in television.
...everytime I hear something from New Scientist I can't help thinking about this article. Its often interesting to read, but the results are not from an accountable source - always from some scientists somewhere that have questionable results...
All of the big breakthroughs that are real seem to be reported by actual news institutions.
Its just another straw on the coffin (another nail in the camel's back).
30 years ago, science fiction was kid's stuff - only children wanted to watch it, only children liked it, etc.
30 years have passed, and the children have grown up. Now Sci-fi is a complex medium intended for the use of adults - it grew up with its fans.
15 years ago video games started getting to be more than just 'Pong,' and the children started to play them. Now games are complex, and getting more so. Today, games are still for the young - but not just for kids.
A mere 10 years ago the net started to become a popular means of [everything the wired article talks about]. It has powerfully transformed the world BEFORE a generation has come to power. That is truly amazing, but you can't expect all of the changes that are on the way to happen overnight.
In 20 years, after the internet has had as much time as Sci-Fi to become commonplace, we will be an internet generation. Then all the people who are using this as their media outlet will have it, and just like the stock market, it will become a chaotic tyranny of the majority's decisions swayed by the charisma of those who write well.
Bring it on. The written word has always been my favorite medium of information exchange.
On the side: I don't care if this issue is last year's news, or last century's. Its relevant today, and there are more things that cna be said about it now than could be said last year!
No its not. At least not under the current model. Its been proven that since gravity is not strong enough to keep the universe from expanding NOW its not going to be strong enough to keep it expanding later due to the conservation of mass (since there is roughly the same amount of mass in the universe always, there is a roughly a constant amount of gravitons, while the necessary force to stop the universe from moving keeps increasing).
Of course, with our microscopic view our theories don't hold a lot of water. If we could visit a couple million planets and get viewpoints from all of those, I expect that a lot of our theories about the Universe would change.
Perhaps the Universe isn't even expanding now, and space is simply a closed hyperparaboloid.
It seems that perhaps the moderator who posted my comment as "offtopic" has a little difficulty with the whole "reading" thing. Those examples that I gave were to illustrate the point, not to just spout stuff.
Let me explain my message. I gave some examples of reviews that weren't worth making, specifically picking things that don't have very many features. For example, a shoe, for the most part, is a shoe. There isn't a lot to say about it - its only features are comfort, durability and style. Also, there are LOTS of shoes.
So...my point was that when the only features are harddrive size, PC interface, and cost, what's the point of making a review? Its about the same as reviewing shoes, or hamburgers, or laptops brands (not actually the laptops themselves).
Sony has a laptop they call the "Vaio." It uses currently available technology in order to create a laptop. Its better than other ones, but more expensive.
Nike makes shoes. They're better than others, but more expensive.
McDonalds makes hamburgers. They taste good, but the ones from Steak & Shake taste better. However, they are more expensive.
In a thriving industry with hundreds of products which have only a few distinguishing features, why is it worth mentioning one more?
Perhaps this breaks some ground that I'm not aware of. If anyone has any insight, enlighten me.
I think that's what the previous poster meant about getting the design of the Weirding modules right. Not having them would make them right.
For that matter, I hope that they get the Eyes of Ibad right. I sort of always thought that "deep blue whites and pupils" meant something other than "light blue pupils."
The characters would look a LOT different if you couldn't see their pupils. It would do more to convince everyone that all of the Fremen are addicts of a very dangerous drug.
Does anyone know any application of transistors? They seem about equally useless.
The sites you put up as examples are sites where the user interest is nonexistant. I don't care about a "cute lil' cat" or "cute lil'" anythings, for that matter. I don't think I'm alone among netizens for that. And I don't think that "Magick" has a huge following either.
However, if you want a media system and a belief system that are popular, Star Wars and Christianity are both doing fine.
And sites become popular overnight! Need I remind you of the dancing hamsters and "All your base" phenomena that took the nation by storm inexplicably with only wierdness to pull them along?
There's a huge coorelation between them - people who commit crimes as youngsters are more likely to do so as adults than those who do not commit crimes at a young age.
You don't consider that evidence? SOMETIMES you can argue that evidence is not causal. But the data is separated by TIME. So I'd have to say that your statement is incorrect, at least for the instance of actual crime. Now, mind you, you could be talking strictly about noncriminal behavior, then you're right.
When dealing with vehicles of any kind, the primary problem is that the energy source has to be portable. Therefore, you need a source with a high energy density. In other words, something that you can get a lot of energy from while it takes a small amount of space. Even more importantly, you want the energy in a form that you're going to use it in, or as close as possible to such a form, because conversion of energy causes a loss of energy.
To date, combustion based systems have the highest energy density of any portable energy source (barring fission reactions). Therefore, there will always be a use for it.
Perhaps automobiles won't necessarily need them - we can afford to carry additional weight - the fuel/weight ratio for automobiles is evidence of this - you can carry a LOT with a small amount of fuel for a car - and you can then drive for a long time.
But what about flying vehicles? Fuel/weight ratio is EXTREMELY important. The more efficiency that we can get the better. The best part about this is that it might remove the need for an alternator, which drains the power and adds weight to any flying device (which is significant for the small vehicles, such as the automonous surveyor helicopters used by the U.S. military). Improvements in fuel usage can mean a big deal for the aircraft industry.
Of course that's not the only industry that will benefit. Heat-differential technology is used as a power source for some areas...have you heard of geothermal and solar power plants? Know how those work? What if they could double their output? That would be significant.
I don't know about the rest of the metamoderators, but I consider any post that has their arguments qualified reasonably to be valid, despite the opinion.
Consider the following two comments, which lets say I found listed as "Flamebait":
Comment #1
Linux is no good. Microsoft is much better.
-That would be flamebait because it has no qualification - it is just to make people angry.
Comment #2
Linux is no good because there are no browsers that do as much as IE. Microsoft is much better.
-That would be valid - I would metamoderate a flamebait rating as "unfair."
Hopefully, I'm not alone in using criteria other than my opinion to moderate and metamoderate. But you know...I've been moderated down before despite adhering to my "make a qualification" policy.
MUUAADIIIBB!
And your body crumbles to ashes...
...before a LAN isn't a LAN?
Or does "Local Area" refer to bandwidth in some wierd way?
Offtopic for a moment: perhaps others had trouble logging in so couldn't post, as I couldn't about ten minutes ago, and thats the problem.
Back on track:
I've heard it said that love makes the world go round.
After countless hours of research sitting in front of the TV, I've learned that CARTOONS MAKE THE WORLD GO ROUND. I know because I once saw a cartoon where a bunch of them where actually pushing the earth along its axis. Can you believe it? Love makes the world go round, and so do cartoons. Cartoons must be love. I suppose that means if I behave like a cartoon, I'm showing the love.
'Scuze me. I'm going to go spread the love, Bender style. Has anyone seen my liquor and my mallet?
This, like many innovations, is just another step. Handsprings are slightly more modular than other forms of PDAs, while still having the minimal power consumption associated with palm pilots.
Many people, including myself, believe that the next frontier of technology is small, portable devices that communicate with each other wirelessly, though each device has a specialized function.
In order to make that happen, we need to start with devices such as handhelds - which CAN be easily specialized through software, and which have readily available wireless capability.
Its true that its "Just another handheld," similar to all of the other handhelds, but its more functional. Its not like another model car, which is exactly like the previous model, except that its "new and improved" (i.e. new and the current fashion); this is another piece of the puzzle.
And IT DOES MATTER that its slightly more functional. The advent of the 386 chipset allowed a whole new class of problems to be solvable that where previously too slow to do research - I know that this is the case for my field, which is computer vision. As time progresses, even more problems are being researched.
I'm looking forward to using technology such as this -perhaps even this model - in the near future (when it becomes pretty inexpensive - perhaps two or three years from now) as a module for home automation - it would be just about perfect for the purpose.