Peak demand on the PG&E grid in the Summer is 1200-1800 PDT, the time when a westerly-facing solar array would be generating maximum electricity.
Lowest demand is between 2130 and 0830, when there would be little or no solar generation.
If you give bonus incentives to line up solar arrays on the Western roof or at a slightly westerly angle, peak demand in the Summer in California would line up almost perfectly with peak generation.
During the winter, the demand shifts towards peaking in the evening (due to the increased need for lighting I would imagine) but it is so much lower than summer demand that it is not even an issue.
Unless you work in an environment handling classified material or sensitive experiments that does not allow access to a smart phone or internet-connected web-browser, I don't really see any particular advantage in memorizing simple data that can be quickly Googled.
People used to memorize arcane things, like the square roots and natural logarithms of single digit numbers, but that kind of thing has been fairly obsolete since pocket calculators were invented. Likewise, the idea of memorizing arcane information that is easily discovered by a web-search is antediluvian.
Even though I haven't had POTS since I moved out of my parents' house at 18, I still don't find mobile phones great for working from home or the office and I use a combination of Skype cordless handsets and a VOIP company that charges about 0.1 cents a minute with no monthly fee. .
Obitalk is a great little box I picked up. It allows you to wire your house for POTS for only a few dollars a year and it even lets you dock your cordless phone over blutooth.
I kind of consider my home phone system like my bound books, old-fashioned perhaps but something I will probably never get rid of even though I've moved to newer tech solutions long ago.
Any time you transform energy from one form to another, it is "lossy". Petrol engines lose about 75% of their energy (not counting all the energy it takes to extract it from the earth and get it into the car). By contrast, pumped-storage hydroelectricity results in only about 25% lost energy overall, making it incredibly efficient. [1]
Your claim that a 40% increase in power cost would "destroy the economy" represented an unsubstantiated opinion that flies in the face of empirical evidence. The economy, for instance, relies heavily on petrol and the real cost of a liter of petrol has doubled in the US over the past 20 years but the US GDP per capita has increased.
Meanwhile, the real cost of household electricity has been almost cut in half since 1960. It seems pretty unlikely that a less than 40% increase in electricity per watthour phased in over decades would "destroy the economy" when the real cost of electricity was nearly 100% more decades ago and the economy did just fine.
The economy adapts to fluctuations in the cost of goods and services.
[1]"Energy storage - Packing some power". The Economist. 3 March 2011.
I'm not sure about Texas, but California has zero concern with cascading failures. It has a modern power grid that is able to prevent that sort of thing by shifting supply to meet demand and, if necessary, instituting rolling blackouts to keep the grid from going down (which is something that has occurred several times on the East Coast).
It's not really expensive or awkward to store power. Hydroelectric plants store so much potential energy that it has measurably changed the length of the day. We have over a century of experience with that.
Also, the costs of solar are not particularly great. The Department of Energy estimates that new photovoltaics total levelized cost per watt is less than 40% more than coal. [1] That means the entire cost per watt to the power grid to replace a coal plant with photovoltaics is less than 40 cents more for every dollar you spend. That amount can easily be made up simply by mandating greater energy efficiency. The cost of photovoltaics is higher than gas or coal, but it is not prohibitively higher.
Considering the hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage that is slated to be caused by the continued burning of carbon-based fuels over the next few centuries, I would say that it is time to start dictating to the power companies how we are going to move away from fossil fuel burning as soon as possible. After all, they are not going to be the ones that have to pay to build seawalls or to relocate hundreds of millions of people displaced by rising ocean levels.
1. Car thefts have not decreased slower than the property crime rate, which supports my point that car alarms did not trigger an increase in car parts.
2. Selling cellular phone parts is not particularly easy for your average strong-arm robber. The most valuable part of the phone is usually the mainboard, and that will likely be disabled by the bricking feature with only the most technically savvy thieves able to override it (possibly by modding it physically), which may not be worth the effort.
Furthermore, most theives lack the technical expertise to properly disassemble a cell phone and sell the parts, and trying to sell bricked phones is going to arose suspicion and leave a paper trail that will lead to the robber or the middleman.
As it stands now, a robber can turn a stolen cell phone into hundreds of dollars cash without too many questions asked and with little to no technical expertise. Bricking the phone takes away that ability. An S4 screen, for instance, is only worth about $100 new and it takes technical expertise to remove and must be sold online whereas an S4 or iphone itself has a street value of several hundred dollars and can be easily and anonymously hard-reset and sold by the criminal himself for the full cash value.
1. A theory is simply a statement about the natural world (or in this case, in social science, the human world) that is corroborate and falsifiable. The shape of the earth is a theory. Gravity is a theory.
2. Claiming that there is no evidence to support this theory is an argument from personal incredulity logical fallacy. For instance, in Australia, since introducing phone blacklists, the reports of stolen phones has decreased substantially as it has in other places that have similar programs, so there is empirical evidence that making a stolen phone more difficult to use can have a substantial correlation with reduced cell phone thefts.
So there is both a priori and a posteriori evidence that bricking cell phones is a statistically significant deterrent to robberies in other countries, and unlike blacklists, actually bricking the phones make it more difficult to simply ship the phones overseas. It greatly increases the amount of technical expertise and labor involved in reselling a stolen phone.
Who is "we", because it most certainly does not include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the petrochemical corporations, or any of their shills and acolytes, and that is a pretty large segment of the population.
By that line of reasoning, there is no requirement in library funding bonds that the money not be spent adding hardcore pornography to the children's reading room, so we shouldn't fund libraries until we can deal with this imaginary potential problem.
If carriers want to give someone other than the user the ability to brick the phone, they already can, regardless of whether or not this bill passes. Laws should be simple and made to deal with a specific problem (e.g. cell phone robberies), not to deal with every possible contingency that someone can imagine.
Car alarms could have induced people to steal more unalarmed cars or to commit robberies instead of thefts, but we did not see that. Rather, the rate of car thefts decreased and there was no corresponding rise in robberies.
There is no evidence that bricking phones will increase robberies. More likely, they will decrease, as current robberies rely on the easy reselling and reactivation of phones. The bricking software will significantly decrease the value of the phone and make it difficult to resell to the market that the robbers usually target, which is simple consumer turnaround.
Whereas a robber may have been able to easily get $400-500 on the street for a stolen phone, a bricked phone will be difficult to move and those inclined to buy them will likely not pay very much. It lowers the incentive for someone to risk serious prison time.
Peak usage in the home is irrelevant, because homes (and their solar arrays) are generally connected to the power grid. It is only really an issue if you want to live off the grid.
Also, "pure solar energy strategy" can "work today". There's no technological barrier that prevents us from adopting such a strategy like there is with electric cars or fusion power. It's simply a matter of political will.
In fact, California and most of the west has already spent a ton of money upgrading the power grid. It requires further upgrades, but it is time the rest of the country catches up. It just is not politically sexy to spend $100 billion dollars on needed upgrades (especially the ability to send excess power from one part of the US to another), but we'll have to do it eventually, so we might as well start now.
The bill itself mandates only that the user be able to deactivate the device. It does not specify how it should be implemented technologically nor does it specify whether carriers and manufacturers should allow anyone else to deactivate the device but the user. It also mandates that the user be able to disable the deactivation function.
Phone locks are likely to do the exact same thing once they become ubiquitous. People will stop robbing smart-phone users because the devices are likely to have locks which disable the phone, just like newer cars are likely to have devices which disable the engine.
1) There is no mandate that the phones have a way for anyone but the user to kill them, so law enforcement and the carriers may not even have the ability to initiate a kill switch on many or even all models of phones with the feature equipped.
2) If the police know you have incriminating video and they are corrupt, it is much simpler for them to simply seize your phone as evidence and then delete the files or "lose" the device. Figuring out exactly who had the "incriminating photos" and getting the proper paperwork done (which carriers may very well demand a court order for) to wipe the phone would not be an effective way to eliminate evidence. You make it sound like the police will be issued remote phone-wiping guns.
3) Smart device robbery may account for something like 25-50% of violent crimes in many cities such as San Francisco and New York. You present no reasonable cost-benefit analysis that these so far entirely fictional scenarios you came up with "are far more dangerous" than the violent crimes associated with smart phone robbery.
Did you actually read the bill, because I see absolutely nothing in there to support your claim?
The bill mandates that the user be given the ability to activate the kill switch. While the bill does not PREVENT the carriers from implementing a solution that may allow someone else (such as the carriers or the government) from activating the switch, it does not MANDATE it either. It only mandates that the user be able to activate it and leaves it up to the manufacturers and carriers how it will be effected.
Can you please provide a direct quotation from the bill that supports your claim, " it mandates that carriers must make it technically possible for law enforcement to use the killswitch," because I see no evidence to support what you are writing.
There's no requirement for manufacturers to give anyone but the user the ability to lock the phone.
Also, it is not as if the police are going to get some special remote wiping gun they can aim at you. If some corrupt officers wanted to get rid of the data, they would just seize the phone as evidence and then delete the files or "lose" the phone.
It is not clear that there will be any method for anyone but the user to initiate a remote lockdown and even if there were, carriers are not going to do it without going through some tedious process. Carriers won't even usually locate your phone for you when you file a police report and get the authorities to ask them. Usually there is some ridiculously long process the police have to go through which is why most departments refuse.
The probability of thefts increasing due to this feature is incredibly low. Since anti-theft features were introduced to cars in the early 1990's, the rate of car thefts has decreased.
Cell phone robberies are usually crimes of opportunity. Robbers rely on the victim's inattention and the fact that most phones can be easily wiped and resold. Rather than keep banging their head against the wall by stealing useless phone after useless phone, robbers will probably try some other way to get easy money.
The rise in cell phone robberies in major cities is alarming. People rarely carry much cash and they rarely put their wallets out where it can be easily grabbed. This bill has a real chance of reducing one of the most common violent crimes in cities like New York and San Francisco.
According to PG&E, peak usage in California is between 1400 and 1800, the same time when the sun would be strongest on a westerly-mounted array.
I'm not sure what people "being home" has to do with peak energy usage. The most people are home between 2130 and 0830 but that is the lowest energy usage time.
You don't need local storage for solar. Solar peaks during peak energy usage and an upgrade to the power grid can send it where needed or even store the electricity for later.
The problem is, infrastructure is a big investment and it is not sexy. Congress will keep on kicking the can down the road because they lack vision and foresight and Americans want action today rather than investment in the future.
Actually, solar and wind provide a consistent output that is very predictable. The key is upgrading the grid to handle it properly.
Photovoltaics built on existing and new structures is something that most experts in the field strongly recommend, because it decentralizes power generation and can potentially provide enough power alone to exceed current consumption.
Energy efficiency is important, but we're not going to get rid of fossil fuels that way. Right now, the only thing that can replace them are nuclear and renewables, especially solar.
If they can't find anything but the moon with them, they have not learned how to align them properly (if it is a goto type scope) or how to read a sky map and aim the telescope at the object they want to see manually.
Any $1000+ scope with a halfway descent tracking mount can see a huge variety of things in a dark sky. I would suggest your friends take an observational astronomy lab (sometimes the professors might let you in even if you don't meet the physics and calc prerequisites) at the local university or junior college, or join an amateur astronomy club.
You can get a pretty good view of Saturn through a 12" scope when it is close to Earth. It's a lot blurrier than a NASA photograph, but it looks pretty good and you certainly don't have to spend $10,000.
Saturn's one of the easiest things to find in the sky when it is close so I don't know why it would take a lot of wasted time to get it into focus. It does take some time to learn to use your equipment properly, but there are plenty of things to look at all year long once you do.
. . . is to show that female gamers are a bigger MARKET than the under-18 male market that video games have historically been dominated by and for which so many AAA titles are developed.
Despite data showing for years that the average gamer was an adult in his mid to late 30's and just as likely to be female as male, there is still a popular idea in society that video gamers are primarily young males, and judging by the pandering common in AAA titles, most publishers seem to believe this as well.
Actually, I think it is more the teenage boy mentality that dismisses someone because they play a different kind of game than what they consider "cool".
It's like a teenage boy dismissing any musician who doesn't perform the kind of style of music they prefer.
Women are spending just as much money and time on video games as men. Only a sophomoric attitude would dismiss them because they tend to gravitate towards different types of games.
And, if the AAA market were not so saturated with games aimed toward the lowest common denominator of 9-20 year old males, you might find that more women would buy those types of games.
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According to PG&E, that is not accurate.
Peak demand on the PG&E grid in the Summer is 1200-1800 PDT, the time when a westerly-facing solar array would be generating maximum electricity.
Lowest demand is between 2130 and 0830, when there would be little or no solar generation.
If you give bonus incentives to line up solar arrays on the Western roof or at a slightly westerly angle, peak demand in the Summer in California would line up almost perfectly with peak generation.
During the winter, the demand shifts towards peaking in the evening (due to the increased need for lighting I would imagine) but it is so much lower than summer demand that it is not even an issue.
Unless you work in an environment handling classified material or sensitive experiments that does not allow access to a smart phone or internet-connected web-browser, I don't really see any particular advantage in memorizing simple data that can be quickly Googled.
People used to memorize arcane things, like the square roots and natural logarithms of single digit numbers, but that kind of thing has been fairly obsolete since pocket calculators were invented. Likewise, the idea of memorizing arcane information that is easily discovered by a web-search is antediluvian.
Even though I haven't had POTS since I moved out of my parents' house at 18, I still don't find mobile phones great for working from home or the office and I use a combination of Skype cordless handsets and a VOIP company that charges about 0.1 cents a minute with no monthly fee.
.
Obitalk is a great little box I picked up. It allows you to wire your house for POTS for only a few dollars a year and it even lets you dock your cordless phone over blutooth.
I kind of consider my home phone system like my bound books, old-fashioned perhaps but something I will probably never get rid of even though I've moved to newer tech solutions long ago.
Any time you transform energy from one form to another, it is "lossy". Petrol engines lose about 75% of their energy (not counting all the energy it takes to extract it from the earth and get it into the car). By contrast, pumped-storage hydroelectricity results in only about 25% lost energy overall, making it incredibly efficient. [1]
Your claim that a 40% increase in power cost would "destroy the economy" represented an unsubstantiated opinion that flies in the face of empirical evidence. The economy, for instance, relies heavily on petrol and the real cost of a liter of petrol has doubled in the US over the past 20 years but the US GDP per capita has increased.
Meanwhile, the real cost of household electricity has been almost cut in half since 1960. It seems pretty unlikely that a less than 40% increase in electricity per watthour phased in over decades would "destroy the economy" when the real cost of electricity was nearly 100% more decades ago and the economy did just fine.
The economy adapts to fluctuations in the cost of goods and services.
[1]"Energy storage - Packing some power". The Economist. 3 March 2011.
I'm not sure about Texas, but California has zero concern with cascading failures. It has a modern power grid that is able to prevent that sort of thing by shifting supply to meet demand and, if necessary, instituting rolling blackouts to keep the grid from going down (which is something that has occurred several times on the East Coast).
It's not really expensive or awkward to store power. Hydroelectric plants store so much potential energy that it has measurably changed the length of the day. We have over a century of experience with that.
Also, the costs of solar are not particularly great. The Department of Energy estimates that new photovoltaics total levelized cost per watt is less than 40% more than coal. [1] That means the entire cost per watt to the power grid to replace a coal plant with photovoltaics is less than 40 cents more for every dollar you spend. That amount can easily be made up simply by mandating greater energy efficiency. The cost of photovoltaics is higher than gas or coal, but it is not prohibitively higher.
Considering the hundreds of trillions of dollars in damage that is slated to be caused by the continued burning of carbon-based fuels over the next few centuries, I would say that it is time to start dictating to the power companies how we are going to move away from fossil fuel burning as soon as possible. After all, they are not going to be the ones that have to pay to build seawalls or to relocate hundreds of millions of people displaced by rising ocean levels.
[1]http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/aeo/electricity_generation.cfm
1. Car thefts have not decreased slower than the property crime rate, which supports my point that car alarms did not trigger an increase in car parts.
2. Selling cellular phone parts is not particularly easy for your average strong-arm robber. The most valuable part of the phone is usually the mainboard, and that will likely be disabled by the bricking feature with only the most technically savvy thieves able to override it (possibly by modding it physically), which may not be worth the effort.
Furthermore, most theives lack the technical expertise to properly disassemble a cell phone and sell the parts, and trying to sell bricked phones is going to arose suspicion and leave a paper trail that will lead to the robber or the middleman.
As it stands now, a robber can turn a stolen cell phone into hundreds of dollars cash without too many questions asked and with little to no technical expertise. Bricking the phone takes away that ability. An S4 screen, for instance, is only worth about $100 new and it takes technical expertise to remove and must be sold online whereas an S4 or iphone itself has a street value of several hundred dollars and can be easily and anonymously hard-reset and sold by the criminal himself for the full cash value.
1. A theory is simply a statement about the natural world (or in this case, in social science, the human world) that is corroborate and falsifiable. The shape of the earth is a theory. Gravity is a theory.
2. Claiming that there is no evidence to support this theory is an argument from personal incredulity logical fallacy. For instance, in Australia, since introducing phone blacklists, the reports of stolen phones has decreased substantially as it has in other places that have similar programs, so there is empirical evidence that making a stolen phone more difficult to use can have a substantial correlation with reduced cell phone thefts.
So there is both a priori and a posteriori evidence that bricking cell phones is a statistically significant deterrent to robberies in other countries, and unlike blacklists, actually bricking the phones make it more difficult to simply ship the phones overseas. It greatly increases the amount of technical expertise and labor involved in reselling a stolen phone.
Who is "we", because it most certainly does not include Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, the petrochemical corporations, or any of their shills and acolytes, and that is a pretty large segment of the population.
By that line of reasoning, there is no requirement in library funding bonds that the money not be spent adding hardcore pornography to the children's reading room, so we shouldn't fund libraries until we can deal with this imaginary potential problem.
If carriers want to give someone other than the user the ability to brick the phone, they already can, regardless of whether or not this bill passes. Laws should be simple and made to deal with a specific problem (e.g. cell phone robberies), not to deal with every possible contingency that someone can imagine.
Car alarms could have induced people to steal more unalarmed cars or to commit robberies instead of thefts, but we did not see that. Rather, the rate of car thefts decreased and there was no corresponding rise in robberies.
There is no evidence that bricking phones will increase robberies. More likely, they will decrease, as current robberies rely on the easy reselling and reactivation of phones. The bricking software will significantly decrease the value of the phone and make it difficult to resell to the market that the robbers usually target, which is simple consumer turnaround.
Whereas a robber may have been able to easily get $400-500 on the street for a stolen phone, a bricked phone will be difficult to move and those inclined to buy them will likely not pay very much. It lowers the incentive for someone to risk serious prison time.
Peak usage in the home is irrelevant, because homes (and their solar arrays) are generally connected to the power grid. It is only really an issue if you want to live off the grid.
Also, "pure solar energy strategy" can "work today". There's no technological barrier that prevents us from adopting such a strategy like there is with electric cars or fusion power. It's simply a matter of political will.
In fact, California and most of the west has already spent a ton of money upgrading the power grid. It requires further upgrades, but it is time the rest of the country catches up. It just is not politically sexy to spend $100 billion dollars on needed upgrades (especially the ability to send excess power from one part of the US to another), but we'll have to do it eventually, so we might as well start now.
That is a non sequitur.
The bill itself mandates only that the user be able to deactivate the device. It does not specify how it should be implemented technologically nor does it specify whether carriers and manufacturers should allow anyone else to deactivate the device but the user. It also mandates that the user be able to disable the deactivation function.
Phone locks are likely to do the exact same thing once they become ubiquitous. People will stop robbing smart-phone users because the devices are likely to have locks which disable the phone, just like newer cars are likely to have devices which disable the engine.
That is "thwarting the theft itself."
Um, it is not a "simple" matter.
1) There is no mandate that the phones have a way for anyone but the user to kill them, so law enforcement and the carriers may not even have the ability to initiate a kill switch on many or even all models of phones with the feature equipped.
2) If the police know you have incriminating video and they are corrupt, it is much simpler for them to simply seize your phone as evidence and then delete the files or "lose" the device. Figuring out exactly who had the "incriminating photos" and getting the proper paperwork done (which carriers may very well demand a court order for) to wipe the phone would not be an effective way to eliminate evidence. You make it sound like the police will be issued remote phone-wiping guns.
3) Smart device robbery may account for something like 25-50% of violent crimes in many cities such as San Francisco and New York. You present no reasonable cost-benefit analysis that these so far entirely fictional scenarios you came up with "are far more dangerous" than the violent crimes associated with smart phone robbery.
Did you actually read the bill, because I see absolutely nothing in there to support your claim?
The bill mandates that the user be given the ability to activate the kill switch. While the bill does not PREVENT the carriers from implementing a solution that may allow someone else (such as the carriers or the government) from activating the switch, it does not MANDATE it either. It only mandates that the user be able to activate it and leaves it up to the manufacturers and carriers how it will be effected.
Can you please provide a direct quotation from the bill that supports your claim, " it mandates that carriers must make it technically possible for law enforcement to use the killswitch," because I see no evidence to support what you are writing.
There's no requirement for manufacturers to give anyone but the user the ability to lock the phone.
Also, it is not as if the police are going to get some special remote wiping gun they can aim at you. If some corrupt officers wanted to get rid of the data, they would just seize the phone as evidence and then delete the files or "lose" the phone.
It is not clear that there will be any method for anyone but the user to initiate a remote lockdown and even if there were, carriers are not going to do it without going through some tedious process. Carriers won't even usually locate your phone for you when you file a police report and get the authorities to ask them. Usually there is some ridiculously long process the police have to go through which is why most departments refuse.
The probability of thefts increasing due to this feature is incredibly low. Since anti-theft features were introduced to cars in the early 1990's, the rate of car thefts has decreased.
Cell phone robberies are usually crimes of opportunity. Robbers rely on the victim's inattention and the fact that most phones can be easily wiped and resold. Rather than keep banging their head against the wall by stealing useless phone after useless phone, robbers will probably try some other way to get easy money.
The rise in cell phone robberies in major cities is alarming. People rarely carry much cash and they rarely put their wallets out where it can be easily grabbed. This bill has a real chance of reducing one of the most common violent crimes in cities like New York and San Francisco.
According to PG&E, peak usage in California is between 1400 and 1800, the same time when the sun would be strongest on a westerly-mounted array.
I'm not sure what people "being home" has to do with peak energy usage. The most people are home between 2130 and 0830 but that is the lowest energy usage time.
You don't need local storage for solar. Solar peaks during peak energy usage and an upgrade to the power grid can send it where needed or even store the electricity for later.
The problem is, infrastructure is a big investment and it is not sexy. Congress will keep on kicking the can down the road because they lack vision and foresight and Americans want action today rather than investment in the future.
Actually, solar and wind provide a consistent output that is very predictable. The key is upgrading the grid to handle it properly.
Photovoltaics built on existing and new structures is something that most experts in the field strongly recommend, because it decentralizes power generation and can potentially provide enough power alone to exceed current consumption.
Energy efficiency is important, but we're not going to get rid of fossil fuels that way. Right now, the only thing that can replace them are nuclear and renewables, especially solar.
If they can't find anything but the moon with them, they have not learned how to align them properly (if it is a goto type scope) or how to read a sky map and aim the telescope at the object they want to see manually.
Any $1000+ scope with a halfway descent tracking mount can see a huge variety of things in a dark sky. I would suggest your friends take an observational astronomy lab (sometimes the professors might let you in even if you don't meet the physics and calc prerequisites) at the local university or junior college, or join an amateur astronomy club.
You can get a pretty good view of Saturn through a 12" scope when it is close to Earth. It's a lot blurrier than a NASA photograph, but it looks pretty good and you certainly don't have to spend $10,000.
Saturn's one of the easiest things to find in the sky when it is close so I don't know why it would take a lot of wasted time to get it into focus. It does take some time to learn to use your equipment properly, but there are plenty of things to look at all year long once you do.
. . . is to show that female gamers are a bigger MARKET than the under-18 male market that video games have historically been dominated by and for which so many AAA titles are developed.
Despite data showing for years that the average gamer was an adult in his mid to late 30's and just as likely to be female as male, there is still a popular idea in society that video gamers are primarily young males, and judging by the pandering common in AAA titles, most publishers seem to believe this as well.
Actually, I think it is more the teenage boy mentality that dismisses someone because they play a different kind of game than what they consider "cool".
It's like a teenage boy dismissing any musician who doesn't perform the kind of style of music they prefer.
Women are spending just as much money and time on video games as men. Only a sophomoric attitude would dismiss them because they tend to gravitate towards different types of games.
And, if the AAA market were not so saturated with games aimed toward the lowest common denominator of 9-20 year old males, you might find that more women would buy those types of games.