Except that HAL was paranoid. That the astronauts had a conversation they tried to hide from HAL was more than enough. The actual content of the conversation was immaterial.
As I interpreted the scene: Though the audio pickups were off, HAL had a clear view. So he zoomed in on their faces, panned back-and-forth between speakers, and got a clear shot of their faces - lips, eyes, eyebrows, and other facial markings - as each spoke.
Which tells me he was lip-reading. (Also face-reading.) He knew every word they said and had the bulk of the visual side-channel emphasis as well.
If all he needed to know was that they WERE having a conversation, he could have gotten that from his view through the window, without the camera gyrations.
We, as the audience, got an alternation of the omniscient viewpoint - watching and hearing the conversation - with HAL's viewpoint - silence (except for camera pan and zoom actuators) and an alternating closeups of the two talking heads. Thus we could both follow what was said and observe that HAL was doing so as well - but visually - and was putting a lot of processing power and camera actuator activity into subverting the humans' attemp to keep him from knowing what was said.
Umm, in a study on altruism, there would have to be (at least) two separate groups, one which was paid, and one that donated their time...
Good point. And another group should be forced to participate at gunpoint.
Back when I attended the Big U, one of the requirements for completing any Psych classes was to have participated in at least one psych study. A humanities minor was required for graduation, and if you picked Psych you had to be a lab rat. Typically this occurred during the intro psych course - parallel with a heavy load of other classes. It was considered an onerous obligation.
Would that do for "forced to participate"?
(Interestingly, in my case this was during the Vietnam draft period, and if you were initially registered in a region with a high draft quota you'd be snapped up in a heartbeat if you ever had a semester where you didn't have (credits needed for graduation) * (semesters completed) / (nominal semesters required - typically eight) of passing credit. So if you didn't do your rat-race and thus didn't pass the psych class you'd be off to boot camp and the jungles for a couple years - and hunted down by armed feds if you didn't go willingly. Would that qualify for "at gunpoint"?
I recall someone claiming that they had *made money* based on stock spam. The strategy was really simple: they shortedwhatever stock that was being pushed by spam.
That works great UNTIL one of the stocks they're pumping keeps going up - perhaps because they lucked into one that was about to get big and didn't need pumping, perhaps because they started a bubble, or perhaps because the market was cornered (because somebody did a "naked short", selling without borrowing - or because the shares were "borrowed" from the spammer's hoard - both of which could even leave the spammers owning more shares than actually exist, and they demand any price they want).
Then you're on the hook for potentially unlimited amounts of payback. You can lose all you gained, plus all you have.
Since I don't have a fax, sometimes I get a scan of a document by email, as brokers, for instace, ask me to sign and send it back, to have a signed document on file. Yeah, easily faked, but that's what they do.
Which is why I HAVE a fax.
Also why I never sign the touchpad credit card transaction devices at checkouts - or sign with a dot or small slash if the cash register won't print a paper signature slip. (No point in having my credit card number, expiration date, and a digital version of my signature all in a single record on several chain stores databases when one or several of them are cracked.)
Of course if they go to a paperless workflow (where they digitize the signature and file it) there's not much I can do - except to demand the physical slip I allegedly signed be entered in evidence. B-)
The crime is independent of whether it actually resulted in vote fraud or was intended to cover up such fraud. There's plenty to put them in jail for a while, keep them out of future offices of trust, and make an example of them to deter future misconduct by others. So there is no reason to bring up possible vote fraud except to smear the defendants.
(Putting them away for a while will make another point, too: Being a member of the local party-in-power's political machine won't get you a pass on vote counting crimes.)
Meanwhile, bringing up vote-fraud allegations would involve proving them. That's difficult. Yet they've apparently already admitted to the crimes alleged, making the existing case a slam-dunk.
Also, it's hardly necessary: The people in the Ohio jury pool aren't any dumber, on the average, than the rest of the population: You KNOW they will have figured out for themselves that another likely motive for screwing around with the recount - in plain view - is to cover up vote fraud. (Especially since Ohio is a "purple state" - about evenly split - so about half the jury pool will likely be from the other party. B-) ) The prosecutor doesn't have to bring it up for it to be on juror's minds.
That's easy: Obtain two or more copies and compare them. The watermarks MUST be different, so the bits that are different tell you where they are.
Assuming the watermarks are statistically similar to a fixed number of random bit-flips, two copies identify half of them, three identify 3/4ths, four identify 7/8ths, etc.
Of course with a few samples you might be able to crack the system. If the watermark is a set of redundant copies of something you can identify, from then on it only takes two (the second being to be sure they haven't changed the system or added another.)
It was not possible to get a real break even versus standard energy sources "back then" in the 60's, nor is it possible to get to break even now today...
Depends on the location.
You can get past break-even NOW in some new rural construction, with wind, photovoltaic, or a combo (depending on location), due to the cost of running the line for the utility hookup. Even assuming unchanging electric rates you can end up with a system that costs less to install than a utility drop AND costs less in maintenance than a utility bill for the power it provides.
(By the way: Don't compare it to the system from TFA: That one is WAY oversized - to handle a car and to do annualized energy storage. In addition to the hydrogen storage it has FAR too big a battery bank, making battery maintenance and replacement, alone, too high.)
Also: You have to compare the energy cost of the panels, not to the energy delivered to the load, but to the energy cost needed for a utility to generate that power - including the carnot-cycle efficiency of generation, transmission losses, and the energy used to build your feed and the pro-rated slice of the system: Cutting trees, smelting metal to make transformers, generators, boilers, wire, insulators, and meters, gassing the vehicles of the workers who run the line to your house, etc.
All this is nicely reflected in the prices of the power. The crossover where it's financially better to use photovoltaic generation is roughly the same technology point where it's greener on an energy-and-pollution rating scale.
At least here in "The Solar Radiation State" of Arizona, Tucson in particular, I am not allowed to "make a buck" off the power company.
That's just for the simplified "net metering" system at retail. In most places there will also be a separate program in place where you can meter separately and sell them power at wholesale - generally getting credited with the retail rate for the power you both generate and use.
IMHO the logical thing for the regulators to do is require the power company to pay a wholesale rate for any monthly or annualized net-metering surplus. This would still be a good deal for the power companies, since solar and wind both tend to provide their power surpluses during peak hours, leveling the utility's load and reducing the amount of expensive peak-time power they must obtain elsewhere to feed flat-rate customers.
The cost is actually much higher, you should calculate what the value of that 100,000 dollars would be after it was in a solid investment for 25 years.
Only if you can also predict energy prices for the next 25 years, and calculate the value added to this home in future markets (real estate is an investment too).
Actually the way to calculate it (if you plan to live in the house for the life of the system) is:
The sum of the average monthly maintaince costs plus the mortgage payment, less tax refunds for mortgage interest, for a 25-year fixed-rate mortgage loan (life of the project) to finance the initial installation.
The grandparent poster's suggestion is close to that, but it's more appropriate for a commercial instalation. This takes into account the financial effect of being in the money market (and tax rules) for home investments rather than the one for commercial operations.
The parent poster's point about effect on home price is well taken: A rational home investor would make a computation similar to the one I proposed, then perhaps ding it down for potential unanticipated maintenance problems. But some buyers may put a premium on it for the "I'm so green." social/feel-good points.
I'd expect the premium (if any) to be biggest if you plan to sell it very soon. With time there will be competition from more such places on the market (many with more advanced and less expensive equipment), maintenance datapoints, and with horror stories in the home-buying press about R.E. system disasters and problems with getting parts for obsolescent systems. This will drive the market towards realism and devalue the "It's Green!" premium.
The point about future fuel prices is well taken. But this is about computing the R.E. cost side of the comparison.
That's what I'm doing. Subdivision in western Nevada. Five acres at the end of a high-desert valley. Lots of wind, lots of sunlight. Got the super-insulated house up and well in. Windmill is probably next, immediately after installation of the battery-backup for the flakey line power (which will be done with a Renewable Energy-designed grid-tie inverter and oversize batteries, so the cost of that part will just be the premium over an ordinary UPS.)
There actually were a few "restrictive covenants" with the property (mainly no mining or drilling for oil) - but they'd lapsed due to the disbanding of the associated homeowner's association (apparently due to lack of interest.) Not that it was a big deal: In NV the people are much more inclined to mind their own business - as long as it doesn't force its way into theirs. (One guy in this subdivision has a private airport, another has a rifle range, another raises miniature horses. B-) )
I can put up as many as three windmills with no hassle. (Fourth one makes me a "wind farm" for state tax purposes and starts some red tape.) Otherwise no issue other than electrical and building code compliance (mainly for insurance) unless I want a tax credit on the installation.
I don't get it... maybe these HOAs are something that don't exist in neighborhoods in Ohio. I've never encountered one or heard anyone talk about one.
HOAs = "Homeowners Associations".
They're generally put together by developers when constructing a new subdivision - especially a "walled community" - or converting an apartment building to condominiums.
Essentially they're a petty government for the neighborhood, focused on keeping up the neighborhood's appearance to maintain their property values and perform maintainence on the common areas (like the halls, roof, outside walls, and land of a condominium complex, or the park-like areas and private streets of a "walled community". They're organized as something like a corporation or cooperative, and you have to join as a condition of buying into the property.
They generally have authority over anything visible from outside - such as your vehicle(s) (if parked outside a closed garage), your house's paintjob, its landscaping, and the color of its curtains. Your neighbors get to vote on proposed changes of appearance, and/or set rules and vote on any requested exceptions. They can enforce the rules in court - as a civil action over violation of your contract with the association.
If you aren't living in one of the newer free-market-socialist havens (like those in may recent "upscale" urban-sprawl areas) you probably haven't run into them. In older subdivisions they may have agreed to disband - or (when they aren't needed for maintenance of common assets) disbanded by default due to lack of participation. Also: your state's laws may make forming them difficult or impossible.
The next time somebody argues that you can't live off-grid just on solar power, you can point to this guy. Then the argument comes down to cost-effectiveness, which depends on a lot of other factors.
It also shows that, for ordinary sites where line power is available, it's within about a factor of ten of financial breakeven using current technology. (It's already past it for powering new houses in remote areas where stringing last-ten-miles power is expensive. Cars are a bit farther out - though once plugin hybrids achieve economy of scale, RE-powered cars may also be above financial breakeven in some areas - mainly windy ones.) If Moore's law applied to all parts of the system you could expect crossover in about 5-6 years. B-)
There are some places that seldom get rain, some of which are heavy auto users... what would the impact be?
Essentially zero: Virtually all the energy in gasoline comes from burning its hydrogen into water. (The carbon adds a tad. But it's mainly there as a convenient way to keep the hydrogen compressed. B-) )
Switching to hydrogen fuel-cell cars burning hydrogen generated locally would not increase the local water content. In fact it would reduce it by eliminating the small amount emitted from automobiles, replacing it with local water "evaporated" in a somewhat more roundabout way than usual. (And the amount is literally a "drop in the bucket" compared to normal evaporation.) So it would return the local ecosystem's water budget to something closer to its pre-automobile status.
How much water is consumed in the hydrolysis process?
Exactly the amount that is released - extremely purified - when the hydrogen is consumed to power something. Even if you release the result as water vapor it comes back nearby as nice fresh rain or dew and joins the water table.
And that amount is quite small. Nearly all the power from hydrocarbon fuels, for instance, comes from burning the hydrogen in them into water. The carbon serves mainly as a convenient way to compress the hydrogen for storage, contributing a rather small amount of heat. A glass of water, electrolyzed, produces fuel storing an amount of energy in the same ballpark as that stored in a similar volume of oil or gasoline.
How much if everybody did this? Fresh water's a finite resource too (especially if you're splitting it into H and O), even though we seem to forget that in the US.
The amount of water you'd need to crack into hydrogen to store power for your home is far less than the amount you'd drink while living there during the period the storage tanks are filling. (You're burning your food into water, too, at about 75 watts when you're just sitting there calmly and much more when exercising. Yet that amount is small compared to your water requirements, which is why you need to drink liquids to avoid dehydration.) Then there's amount you use bathing, flushing, and watering your lawn... Borrowing a little from the cycle for energy storage is such a literal drop in the bucket that it's not an issue - unless you LITERALLY live in a tent in the Sahara or a comparable desert and don't bathe.
Meanwhile 3/4ths of the planet is under water - averaging thousands of feet deep - and purifying that (or collecting it after weather processes do so for you and drop it on you) is trivial compared to splitting it for hydrogen.
I pay an average of $150/month for electricity, $50/month for natural gas, and $200/month for gasoline. That's $4,800 per year in energy costs....
Electrolyzers wear out. Solar panels get broken by hail. Batteries degrade. I wonder what the annualized maintenance costs are?
The batteries alone cost $50,000, according to the article. Batteries may last about 10 years if well maintained. So battery replacement costs alone are greater than your current utility and motor fuel bill.
It wouldn't make economic sense for you if somebody gave you the whole thing for free.
Currently, home power generation systems only make financial sense for new construction in remote areas, where the capital cost of stringing line power is significantly greater than the cost of installing the system, and/or where the power is so unreliable that you need a battery backup system. (If you put in battery backup the capital cost of going full-blown Renewable Energy is reduced to the premium on the batteries/inverter to make it RE capable plus the generation plant - solar, wind, whatever.) Similarly, for small loads in more urban areas an RE supply may beat running line power. (Examples: Road signs, emergency phones, yard lights,...)
But as equipment prices come down and new technologies go into production (such as vanadium redox batteries and new photovoltaic designs), and line power / fuel costs rise, the breakeven point is reached in progressively more areas.
Meanwhile, solar HEAT (for room and/or water heating) is above breakeven in large fraction of residential areas (depending mainly on having adequate sunlight and enough unshaded area available to install a collector).
Synthetic-aperture radar reader technology should work fine with some of the current tatoo inks, too. This just optimizes the ink for maximum reflection to make the job easier and the range larger.
Anything that produces a discontinuity in the refractive index will interact with radio waves in detectable ways. It helps to be about a quarter-wavelength or larger in size, and sizes near a multiple of a half-wavelength can resonate - thus interacting very strongly. But any discontinuity will be detectable.
Synthetic aperture radar techniques would be able to image the pattern in two dimensions. These resolve distance by using a "chirp" - a swept-frequency pulse of significant duration - and can resolve another spatial dimension by coherently combining multiple receptions of a chirp from multiple positions along a line - or receptions of multiple chirps over time from a single antenna that is in different positions relative to the target. This can be accomplished by moving the antenna, moving the target, and/or rotating the target.
Walk by the chirping antenna and the strongly-reflecting "ink" beads cause their two-dimensional pattern to appear in the two-dimensional "unrolling strip" of processed "image" data - where tatooed barcodes can then be recognized by the same algorithms that would recognize a barcode on a box on a conveyor-belt moving past a line-scan camera.
Though in trying to shoot down a plane a.50-caliber machine gun would probably work better than an RPG.
Of course I'd hate to be minding my business on the ground in some urban area when a military aircraft, somewhere above, shoots down a hijacked commercial plane using.50s. B-(
The whole point of asymmetric warfare is to get maximum damage from minimum input. Terrorism is one tool:
The "terrorism" algorithm:
1) Make a (perhaps) small, scary, hit.
2) Let the target do lots of damage by its reaction.
3) When the reaction slows, stir it up again by making a credible threat. Go to 2).
4) When 3 stops working, stir it up again by making another hit. Go to 2).
See _Wasp_ by Eric Frank Russel for a fictionalized version - with explanations - of such a program. (It was written (but not deployed) for use against Japan by Britain in WW II, then recycled as a Science Fiction novel after the war. Russel and Ian Fleming were in the British "Department of Dirty Tricks".)
Being struck by a missile is certainly unpleasant, but I'd expect any modern airliner to be able to suffer catastrophic failure of a single engine and still be able to fly (long enough to get back down at least).
They survive an engine FAILURE (as in flame-out) very well.
But an engine EXPLOSION or detachment tends to rupture hydraulic lines, in ways that cause loss of hydraulic pressure throughout the system. Then you lose control of all the control surfaces, which usually means the plane augers in.
I was kind of hoping for a controlled experiment: you have a group of FedEx planes with the system and a control group of FedEx planes without the system. Then you hand out SAMs at the street corner and tell everyone to fire them with wild abandon at FedEx planes.
If you handed out paintball SAMs that would actually work. B-)
No they act with [*] the best interests of their prophet Mohamed.
Insert "their perception of" at the [*]
They want to turn every world government to the control of Islamic Courts that practice [*] Sharia law.
Insert "their version of" at the [*].
Before going after the West the Wahabis/Salafis had plenty of practice on Muslims of other segments of Islam. Ask the Sufis if you want some real horror stories.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that HAL was paranoid. That the astronauts had a conversation they tried to hide from HAL was more than enough. The actual content of the conversation was immaterial.
As I interpreted the scene: Though the audio pickups were off, HAL had a clear view. So he zoomed in on their faces, panned back-and-forth between speakers, and got a clear shot of their faces - lips, eyes, eyebrows, and other facial markings - as each spoke.
Which tells me he was lip-reading. (Also face-reading.) He knew every word they said and had the bulk of the visual side-channel emphasis as well.
If all he needed to know was that they WERE having a conversation, he could have gotten that from his view through the window, without the camera gyrations.
We, as the audience, got an alternation of the omniscient viewpoint - watching and hearing the conversation - with HAL's viewpoint - silence (except for camera pan and zoom actuators) and an alternating closeups of the two talking heads. Thus we could both follow what was said and observe that HAL was doing so as well - but visually - and was putting a lot of processing power and camera actuator activity into subverting the humans' attemp to keep him from knowing what was said.
On top of that, they are volunteers?
Umm, in a study on altruism, there would have to be (at least) two separate groups, one which was paid, and one that donated their time...
Good point. And another group should be forced to participate at gunpoint.
Back when I attended the Big U, one of the requirements for completing any Psych classes was to have participated in at least one psych study. A humanities minor was required for graduation, and if you picked Psych you had to be a lab rat. Typically this occurred during the intro psych course - parallel with a heavy load of other classes. It was considered an onerous obligation.
Would that do for "forced to participate"?
(Interestingly, in my case this was during the Vietnam draft period, and if you were initially registered in a region with a high draft quota you'd be snapped up in a heartbeat if you ever had a semester where you didn't have (credits needed for graduation) * (semesters completed) / (nominal semesters required - typically eight) of passing credit. So if you didn't do your rat-race and thus didn't pass the psych class you'd be off to boot camp and the jungles for a couple years - and hunted down by armed feds if you didn't go willingly. Would that qualify for "at gunpoint"?
I don't sign those, either. UPS can accept a hardcopy signature.
I recall someone claiming that they had *made money* based on stock spam. The strategy was really simple: they shortedwhatever stock that was being pushed by spam.
That works great UNTIL one of the stocks they're pumping keeps going up - perhaps because they lucked into one that was about to get big and didn't need pumping, perhaps because they started a bubble, or perhaps because the market was cornered (because somebody did a "naked short", selling without borrowing - or because the shares were "borrowed" from the spammer's hoard - both of which could even leave the spammers owning more shares than actually exist, and they demand any price they want).
Then you're on the hook for potentially unlimited amounts of payback. You can lose all you gained, plus all you have.
Since I don't have a fax, sometimes I get a scan of a document by email, as brokers, for instace, ask me to sign and send it back, to have a signed document on file. Yeah, easily faked, but that's what they do.
Which is why I HAVE a fax.
Also why I never sign the touchpad credit card transaction devices at checkouts - or sign with a dot or small slash if the cash register won't print a paper signature slip. (No point in having my credit card number, expiration date, and a digital version of my signature all in a single record on several chain stores databases when one or several of them are cracked.)
Of course if they go to a paperless workflow (where they digitize the signature and file it) there's not much I can do - except to demand the physical slip I allegedly signed be entered in evidence. B-)
The crime is independent of whether it actually resulted in vote fraud or was intended to cover up such fraud. There's plenty to put them in jail for a while, keep them out of future offices of trust, and make an example of them to deter future misconduct by others. So there is no reason to bring up possible vote fraud except to smear the defendants.
(Putting them away for a while will make another point, too: Being a member of the local party-in-power's political machine won't get you a pass on vote counting crimes.)
Meanwhile, bringing up vote-fraud allegations would involve proving them. That's difficult. Yet they've apparently already admitted to the crimes alleged, making the existing case a slam-dunk.
Also, it's hardly necessary: The people in the Ohio jury pool aren't any dumber, on the average, than the rest of the population: You KNOW they will have figured out for themselves that another likely motive for screwing around with the recount - in plain view - is to cover up vote fraud. (Especially since Ohio is a "purple state" - about evenly split - so about half the jury pool will likely be from the other party. B-) ) The prosecutor doesn't have to bring it up for it to be on juror's minds.
Sounds like RPI has made a bigger breakthrough than claimed.
First you have to know where to filter.
That's easy: Obtain two or more copies and compare them. The watermarks MUST be different, so the bits that are different tell you where they are.
Assuming the watermarks are statistically similar to a fixed number of random bit-flips, two copies identify half of them, three identify 3/4ths, four identify 7/8ths, etc.
Of course with a few samples you might be able to crack the system. If the watermark is a set of redundant copies of something you can identify, from then on it only takes two (the second being to be sure they haven't changed the system or added another.)
It was not possible to get a real break even versus standard energy sources "back then" in the 60's, nor is it possible to get to break even now today ...
Depends on the location.
You can get past break-even NOW in some new rural construction, with wind, photovoltaic, or a combo (depending on location), due to the cost of running the line for the utility hookup. Even assuming unchanging electric rates you can end up with a system that costs less to install than a utility drop AND costs less in maintenance than a utility bill for the power it provides.
(By the way: Don't compare it to the system from TFA: That one is WAY oversized - to handle a car and to do annualized energy storage. In addition to the hydrogen storage it has FAR too big a battery bank, making battery maintenance and replacement, alone, too high.)
Also: You have to compare the energy cost of the panels, not to the energy delivered to the load, but to the energy cost needed for a utility to generate that power - including the carnot-cycle efficiency of generation, transmission losses, and the energy used to build your feed and the pro-rated slice of the system: Cutting trees, smelting metal to make transformers, generators, boilers, wire, insulators, and meters, gassing the vehicles of the workers who run the line to your house, etc.
All this is nicely reflected in the prices of the power. The crossover where it's financially better to use photovoltaic generation is roughly the same technology point where it's greener on an energy-and-pollution rating scale.
At least here in "The Solar Radiation State" of Arizona, Tucson in particular, I am not allowed to "make a buck" off the power company.
That's just for the simplified "net metering" system at retail. In most places there will also be a separate program in place where you can meter separately and sell them power at wholesale - generally getting credited with the retail rate for the power you both generate and use.
IMHO the logical thing for the regulators to do is require the power company to pay a wholesale rate for any monthly or annualized net-metering surplus. This would still be a good deal for the power companies, since solar and wind both tend to provide their power surpluses during peak hours, leveling the utility's load and reducing the amount of expensive peak-time power they must obtain elsewhere to feed flat-rate customers.
The cost is actually much higher, you should calculate what the value of that 100,000 dollars would be after it was in a solid investment for 25 years.
Only if you can also predict energy prices for the next 25 years, and calculate the value added to this home in future markets (real estate is an investment too).
Actually the way to calculate it (if you plan to live in the house for the life of the system) is:
The sum of the average monthly maintaince costs plus the mortgage payment, less tax refunds for mortgage interest, for a 25-year fixed-rate mortgage loan (life of the project) to finance the initial installation.
The grandparent poster's suggestion is close to that, but it's more appropriate for a commercial instalation. This takes into account the financial effect of being in the money market (and tax rules) for home investments rather than the one for commercial operations.
The parent poster's point about effect on home price is well taken: A rational home investor would make a computation similar to the one I proposed, then perhaps ding it down for potential unanticipated maintenance problems. But some buyers may put a premium on it for the "I'm so green." social/feel-good points.
I'd expect the premium (if any) to be biggest if you plan to sell it very soon. With time there will be competition from more such places on the market (many with more advanced and less expensive equipment), maintenance datapoints, and with horror stories in the home-buying press about R.E. system disasters and problems with getting parts for obsolescent systems. This will drive the market towards realism and devalue the "It's Green!" premium.
The point about future fuel prices is well taken. But this is about computing the R.E. cost side of the comparison.
Move to a neighborhood without a draconian HOA.
That's what I'm doing. Subdivision in western Nevada. Five acres at the end of a high-desert valley. Lots of wind, lots of sunlight. Got the super-insulated house up and well in. Windmill is probably next, immediately after installation of the battery-backup for the flakey line power (which will be done with a Renewable Energy-designed grid-tie inverter and oversize batteries, so the cost of that part will just be the premium over an ordinary UPS.)
There actually were a few "restrictive covenants" with the property (mainly no mining or drilling for oil) - but they'd lapsed due to the disbanding of the associated homeowner's association (apparently due to lack of interest.) Not that it was a big deal: In NV the people are much more inclined to mind their own business - as long as it doesn't force its way into theirs. (One guy in this subdivision has a private airport, another has a rifle range, another raises miniature horses. B-) )
I can put up as many as three windmills with no hassle. (Fourth one makes me a "wind farm" for state tax purposes and starts some red tape.) Otherwise no issue other than electrical and building code compliance (mainly for insurance) unless I want a tax credit on the installation.
I don't get it... maybe these HOAs are something that don't exist in neighborhoods in Ohio. I've never encountered one or heard anyone talk about one.
HOAs = "Homeowners Associations".
They're generally put together by developers when constructing a new subdivision - especially a "walled community" - or converting an apartment building to condominiums.
Essentially they're a petty government for the neighborhood, focused on keeping up the neighborhood's appearance to maintain their property values and perform maintainence on the common areas (like the halls, roof, outside walls, and land of a condominium complex, or the park-like areas and private streets of a "walled community". They're organized as something like a corporation or cooperative, and you have to join as a condition of buying into the property.
They generally have authority over anything visible from outside - such as your vehicle(s) (if parked outside a closed garage), your house's paintjob, its landscaping, and the color of its curtains. Your neighbors get to vote on proposed changes of appearance, and/or set rules and vote on any requested exceptions. They can enforce the rules in court - as a civil action over violation of your contract with the association.
If you aren't living in one of the newer free-market-socialist havens (like those in may recent "upscale" urban-sprawl areas) you probably haven't run into them. In older subdivisions they may have agreed to disband - or (when they aren't needed for maintenance of common assets) disbanded by default due to lack of participation. Also: your state's laws may make forming them difficult or impossible.
The next time somebody argues that you can't live off-grid just on solar power, you can point to this guy. Then the argument comes down to cost-effectiveness, which depends on a lot of other factors.
It also shows that, for ordinary sites where line power is available, it's within about a factor of ten of financial breakeven using current technology. (It's already past it for powering new houses in remote areas where stringing last-ten-miles power is expensive. Cars are a bit farther out - though once plugin hybrids achieve economy of scale, RE-powered cars may also be above financial breakeven in some areas - mainly windy ones.) If Moore's law applied to all parts of the system you could expect crossover in about 5-6 years. B-)
There are some places that seldom get rain, some of which are heavy auto users... what would the impact be?
Essentially zero: Virtually all the energy in gasoline comes from burning its hydrogen into water. (The carbon adds a tad. But it's mainly there as a convenient way to keep the hydrogen compressed. B-) )
Switching to hydrogen fuel-cell cars burning hydrogen generated locally would not increase the local water content. In fact it would reduce it by eliminating the small amount emitted from automobiles, replacing it with local water "evaporated" in a somewhat more roundabout way than usual. (And the amount is literally a "drop in the bucket" compared to normal evaporation.) So it would return the local ecosystem's water budget to something closer to its pre-automobile status.
How much water is consumed in the hydrolysis process?
Exactly the amount that is released - extremely purified - when the hydrogen is consumed to power something. Even if you release the result as water vapor it comes back nearby as nice fresh rain or dew and joins the water table.
And that amount is quite small. Nearly all the power from hydrocarbon fuels, for instance, comes from burning the hydrogen in them into water. The carbon serves mainly as a convenient way to compress the hydrogen for storage, contributing a rather small amount of heat. A glass of water, electrolyzed, produces fuel storing an amount of energy in the same ballpark as that stored in a similar volume of oil or gasoline.
How much if everybody did this? Fresh water's a finite resource too (especially if you're splitting it into H and O), even though we seem to forget that in the US.
The amount of water you'd need to crack into hydrogen to store power for your home is far less than the amount you'd drink while living there during the period the storage tanks are filling. (You're burning your food into water, too, at about 75 watts when you're just sitting there calmly and much more when exercising. Yet that amount is small compared to your water requirements, which is why you need to drink liquids to avoid dehydration.) Then there's amount you use bathing, flushing, and watering your lawn... Borrowing a little from the cycle for energy storage is such a literal drop in the bucket that it's not an issue - unless you LITERALLY live in a tent in the Sahara or a comparable desert and don't bathe.
Meanwhile 3/4ths of the planet is under water - averaging thousands of feet deep - and purifying that (or collecting it after weather processes do so for you and drop it on you) is trivial compared to splitting it for hydrogen.
I pay an average of $150/month for electricity, $50/month for natural gas, and $200/month for gasoline. That's $4,800 per year in energy costs. ...
...)
Electrolyzers wear out. Solar panels get broken by hail. Batteries degrade. I wonder what the annualized maintenance costs are?
The batteries alone cost $50,000, according to the article. Batteries may last about 10 years if well maintained. So battery replacement costs alone are greater than your current utility and motor fuel bill.
It wouldn't make economic sense for you if somebody gave you the whole thing for free.
Currently, home power generation systems only make financial sense for new construction in remote areas, where the capital cost of stringing line power is significantly greater than the cost of installing the system, and/or where the power is so unreliable that you need a battery backup system. (If you put in battery backup the capital cost of going full-blown Renewable Energy is reduced to the premium on the batteries/inverter to make it RE capable plus the generation plant - solar, wind, whatever.) Similarly, for small loads in more urban areas an RE supply may beat running line power. (Examples: Road signs, emergency phones, yard lights,
But as equipment prices come down and new technologies go into production (such as vanadium redox batteries and new photovoltaic designs), and line power / fuel costs rise, the breakeven point is reached in progressively more areas.
Meanwhile, solar HEAT (for room and/or water heating) is above breakeven in large fraction of residential areas (depending mainly on having adequate sunlight and enough unshaded area available to install a collector).
Synthetic-aperture radar reader technology should work fine with some of the current tatoo inks, too. This just optimizes the ink for maximum reflection to make the job easier and the range larger.
Anything that produces a discontinuity in the refractive index will interact with radio waves in detectable ways. It helps to be about a quarter-wavelength or larger in size, and sizes near a multiple of a half-wavelength can resonate - thus interacting very strongly. But any discontinuity will be detectable.
Synthetic aperture radar techniques would be able to image the pattern in two dimensions. These resolve distance by using a "chirp" - a swept-frequency pulse of significant duration - and can resolve another spatial dimension by coherently combining multiple receptions of a chirp from multiple positions along a line - or receptions of multiple chirps over time from a single antenna that is in different positions relative to the target. This can be accomplished by moving the antenna, moving the target, and/or rotating the target.
Walk by the chirping antenna and the strongly-reflecting "ink" beads cause their two-dimensional pattern to appear in the two-dimensional "unrolling strip" of processed "image" data - where tatooed barcodes can then be recognized by the same algorithms that would recognize a barcode on a box on a conveyor-belt moving past a line-scan camera.
Though in trying to shoot down a plane a .50-caliber machine gun would probably work better than an RPG.
.50s. B-(
Of course I'd hate to be minding my business on the ground in some urban area when a military aircraft, somewhere above, shoots down a hijacked commercial plane using
The whole point of asymmetric warfare is to get maximum damage from minimum input. Terrorism is one tool:
The "terrorism" algorithm:
1) Make a (perhaps) small, scary, hit.
2) Let the target do lots of damage by its reaction.
3) When the reaction slows, stir it up again by making a credible threat. Go to 2).
4) When 3 stops working, stir it up again by making another hit. Go to 2).
See _Wasp_ by Eric Frank Russel for a fictionalized version - with explanations - of such a program. (It was written (but not deployed) for use against Japan by Britain in WW II, then recycled as a Science Fiction novel after the war. Russel and Ian Fleming were in the British "Department of Dirty Tricks".)
Being struck by a missile is certainly unpleasant, but I'd expect any modern airliner to be able to suffer catastrophic failure of a single engine and still be able to fly (long enough to get back down at least).
They survive an engine FAILURE (as in flame-out) very well.
But an engine EXPLOSION or detachment tends to rupture hydraulic lines, in ways that cause loss of hydraulic pressure throughout the system. Then you lose control of all the control surfaces, which usually means the plane augers in.
I was kind of hoping for a controlled experiment: you have a group of FedEx planes with the system and a control group of FedEx planes without the system. Then you hand out SAMs at the street corner and tell everyone to fire them with wild abandon at FedEx planes.
If you handed out paintball SAMs that would actually work. B-)
Agree except for two nits:
No they act with [*] the best interests of their prophet Mohamed.
Insert "their perception of" at the [*]
They want to turn every world government to the control of Islamic Courts that practice [*] Sharia law.
Insert "their version of" at the [*].
Before going after the West the Wahabis/Salafis had plenty of practice on Muslims of other segments of Islam. Ask the Sufis if you want some real horror stories.