Nope, it's the thought process being taught that's rotten. It's like a degree in applied demolition engineering for companies. The better you are at it, the worse the company will be in 5 years.
Depends. Aside from the undergrad - many years, much bullshit for the older student (I say this having done an electrical engineering degree starting at 33) the masters is (at least in the US) going to usually pay for itself in under 5 years (my masters was also in electrical engineering.) The MBA in this situation might not just increase your salary, it might also open opportunities that simply would not otherwise be there. It might. OTOH, I also know people with MBAs for whom the degree did nothing at all, because they could not look like convincing business people.
This is true, but you better be willing and able to play a much more political game inside your organization. A lot of tech people can't or won't for a variety of reasons. If you haven't been developing those people/networking skills by the time you're in your 40's, making use of where that IT MBA could allow you to go is going to be difficult.
That might be true, but at a lot of companies the resumes also need to travel the HR GI tract and you can't get there without paper credentials. I was in exactly this situation in 2003... I was 33 (so I'm about the same age as the poster). I had a well paid job doing sizing, db installation, network troubleshooting, tech docs, etc. When I started thinking about migrating to another company, I realized no one who hadn't had direct experience working with me was going to hire me, because just like the poster I'd start doing database stuff in the mid-90's when the only qualification was that you could figure it out on your own.
At the time a lot of companies were hosting all of their own stuff for HR, time keeping, accruals, etc... I figured at some point that would wind up in India or elsewhere. I had decent skills on Oracle and SQL, some on DB2, figured they were worth nothing down the line... and I'd never been a coder. So I went back to school. But I decided any more technical path I went down, I'd be competing with off-shoring... the path for people my age in the US seemed to be mostly managing projects that were largely made overseas. So finally I decided to become an electrical engineer, and do power engineering, particularly renewables... and I'm much happier, and feel that my technical skills are rock solid now in a career that can never be off-shored (and I've got 12 years of tech project management which does translate). Basically, if you've made the decision to go back to school, you've made the decision to probably switch careers in some way. You might as well consider whether you might want to wind up in a totally different place.
I think you're incorrect about the source of the "other side" here. It's astroturfed. It's like the cigarette companies throwing up FUD on cancer research, buying a media outlet, making it "news" about the "controversy" and then taking the deluded people who believed the propaganda as a grass roots groundswell against the cigarette/cancer hoax. Al Gore had little to do with it, he was just the straw man for the oil/gas/coal industry's campaign.
Your defending the FUD campaign - brought to us more or less by the folks who also drummed up Iraqi nukes for another little initiative of theirs - in the name of academic and scientific honesty is hopefully just naive.
What's dangerous is not being able to use science to make policy decisions because the media thinks that both sides of anything need to be looked at fairly.
This is also true in (rural) upstate NY. I'm less than 45 minutes out of Albany and Kingston. The satellite companies - Wild Blue, for example - also cap you at a few gigs no matter what you pay... something you find out when your dad is visiting and leaves webstreaming for his favorite city radio station going 24/7 for a week.
I ended up with local RF (something like the old breezenet) through a company that specializes in line of sight internet. I can see the last drop for the cable company but the 1/2 mile of poles I'd need would run $5000. Now a tree or something has grown up through my line of sight up the mountain... so I might go back to dial up.
As an extra bonus, my job is at a power plant and we've got NERC regulations on connecting devices and all sorts of filtering. I figure I waste less time on line this way. But yet I'm still here now.
It's true those are uncommon, but it's also true that temporary psychosis has been long associated with Lariam. I was traveling in quinine resistant areas of the Amazon and decided to chance it (I was riding a motorcycle, decided the slight chance of temporary psychosis while riding wasn't worth the also slight chance of getting resistant malaria.) I got a lot of warnings about Lariam in 2002. This has been a known possible side effect since the first Gulf War, and the reactions that were mentioned when I researched it then were often from soldiers.
There was an event in the 1920's (less than the 1859 event) and another in the 1990's (less than the 1920's event but it took down pieces of the Quebec grid). Doesn't do anything to help measure the frequency of the 1859 level events. Also, it kind of doesn't matter, since power facilities like the one I work at are required to prepare for things like the "maximum possible flood" not a "500 year flood". If your sample set has at least one of these, and we can't quantify it to be say less than a 1 in 10000 - and we certainly can't - then we should be working on this problem. Not as if the sky is falling, but we've been working on changing out some stuff in my plant for a decade, so we definitely should get on it, since remediation is going to take a long time, and the consequences would be very bad.
Current practice is no guarrantee of future behavior. I think my realization is that for the privacy I want, I'll really need to keep my own email... this isn't necessarily the only reason, just the tipping point. I may also need to do other things with my phone. But as others have noted, this area is just too lucrative for Google to keep this data anonymous forever - some time there will be a management change that will want to do this to make money. I understand Google isn't there now, but the longer I stay with them for Gmail the more inconvenient the eventual switch will be when I have to do it.
Hmm. I'd already thought about switching to Bing for search for just this reason when I heard about this. I already moved to Diaspora for networking and general time wasting. My Gmail account is much stickier - since I've got lots of stuff coming there - than my search engine, so effectively if I want to get away from this I have to switch to Bing. And I doubt I'm more valuable as a Gmail customer than as a search customer. I'm sure this will only have a marginal effect on them - FB seems to still be doing fine and they're much worse on privacy, so clearly most people don't really care - but this could hurt their search business.
I just moved my bank account to a small bank, and I started to think about what I'd need to do to move away from Yahoo mail and Gmail, and that's actually much more painful, since I've had the Yahoo account, for example, since 1996... I guess they are going to make me figure this out. What a PITA.
I agree with you in general... land use is not a major obstacle. It is in urban areas, though.
I used to install solar in NYC, and I've just started racking my own panels in upstate NY. I also work for the NY Power Auth. I also know someone on the GIS team that made that map. There is absolutely no way that half of NYC's power could come from roof mounted solar PV. I did a study on my friend's brownstone in Crown Heights, and with a 2 story building his roof could supply power to one of two floors, if we covered the whole roof. Rule of thumb is, if it is taller than 2 stories solar is not going to be feasible within the roof footprint to power that building... there are exceptions, and this still means that we could power all of the big box stores in the country with their roofs plus possibly their parking lots, but there are a surprising number of sites (my friend's high pitch roof Victorian in a tree lined neighborhood in Nyack, for example) where for a variety of reasons that are site specific this isn't going to work. In Manhattan this often takes the form of shading from other nearby, taller buildings, which was an issue in a solar thermal install we did in midtown Manhattan.
This is one of the biggest frustrations of solar - the people most enthusiastic to get it done, and with plenty of money to do so, are often concentrated in areas that it isn't ideal for. OTOH, we've successfully steered a lot of people from solar PV to solar thermal, for the reason that if you only have roof space for one or the other it makes sense to get rid of the boiler and furnace of the building, which are local pollution sources, are small and generally less efficient anyway... Con Ed can afford stack scrubbers. BTU's are BTU's, and we actually get more usable energy this way.
No one is going to attempt an installation that large with PV. Something like that would use one of many different solar tower concepts, which generally concentrate a large area of insolation into a smaller area for efficiency in generation. Types of these that have been in use for decades include fields of mirrors that heat a tower with a liquid salt sterling engine, and I've seen a recent design about to be built in the southwest that uses hot air run through a very tall column. These have been viable in deserts for decades.
Not sure what you're talking about on the water issue... solar has no more of a problem with cooling water than any other form of generation... heat is heat. If there is still extractable heat there's just going to be another generation cycle. The remainding heat can be dumped in a ground loop, in a cooling tower, or many other ways. There is no reason the heat rejection part of the cycle has to use fresh water every time... that's a design choice.
Sodium sulphur has a much higher running temperature (300C) and has fewer charge cycles (2-3000). NYPA (my organization, but a different branch of it) installed a 6 Mwh sodium sulfide battery in Long Island for about $8m all in (engineering, electronics, integration, seismic, etc.) The raw cost is around $.50/w stored I think, but that info might be a few years old. Generally it's more suitable for larger installations.
Japan is developing these for wind storage (NGK Insulator). Many companies in the US are working on various LiIon chemistries, and I've worked with one in NY State that is trying to put together a 2 Mwh system, similar to what AEP did in California. Cost is still pretty high, at say $.80/wh. With the electric car industry ramping up it's assumed this should be at $.50/wh inside of 3 years, and quite likely at $.25/wh or less by the end of the decade. They key thing tho, is the number of charge cycles, which for A123 type LiFeSO4 is claimed to be about 6-7000 cycles... if true (and this is really hard to test quickly) this means that the LIFETIME cost of storage for LiIon would be.000114 cents where the same figure for lead acid is currently.000250 and NaS is.00017 (in other words for long applications LiIon is already more cost effective.)
Actually, my batteries are pretty useless to go off-grid... I've got 8kwh, but they're sealed lead acid marine batteries with say 500 deep discharge cycles, so right now they just get float charged and my power mostly is net metered and what I don't use instantaneously flows into the grid. I did this because I want to be able to switch to LiIon in a few years, and also I wanted a power backup system (my local utility went down for 5 days in an ice storm in 2009).
If this was a typical house install it would run about $15k for the panels, racking and inverter. That would have no ability to seasonally adjust the angle tho. With labor that job is about $27k... we used to quote about $8/w installed. It's probably a little cheaper now, but the price is going down mainly because the panel cost went from $5/w retail to $2.50 retail from 2007.
In my area the typical residential install (5kw) is currently about $30k to install. The solar cost retail is $2.50/w (installers get it at probably about $2/w wholesale). The inverter is around $3500. So our install costs are already less than 50% panels, and I think some larger installs have gotten that to 40%.
On my own install I got 3440 w for ~$10k. My racks, poles, inverter, batteries and chargers, plus panel upgrade, brought that to ~$20k.
No. The panel has nothing to do with consumption. It is protective equipment. According the the gov't, the average US home uses 900kwh/month, up from 850 ten years ago, and that is roughly 30 kwh/day. A typical install is about 5-6kw, and produces about 17-25 kwh/day average over a year (ranges depend on install location). Note also that the first step in a residential solar PV install is usually efficiency, so the typical solarized house has a base load lower than 900 kwh... and this is mainly from changing out the fridge, changes to bulbs, etc. A 5kw install is typical for suburban US homes. My farm gets 85% of its load from a 3.44 kw array.
Also, I work at a pump hydro facility (Blenheim Gilboa) as an electrical engineer. We're about 93% efficient end to end. We make our money on day/night differentials. I'm working on LiIon battery systems that are 95% end to end efficient.
Finally in terms of storage your numbers should all relate to watt hours, not watts.
Evac tube hot water heaters actually get to around 90 C when working properly; they have different cycles to either retain or dump heat from both the panels and the storage tank to stay below a critical temp in the panel where the circulating fluid (usually glycol) separates. In other words, they get pretty hot, and actually keeping them from getting too hot can be a challenge in the summer. They do produce 140 F for hot water distribution; if sized properly they might want an inline boost (gas or electric) in the winter, but the energy consumption is tiny compared to any other form of hot water.
Bingo. One word: Parents.
Think it's ridiculous to take the worst computer users and give them Ubuntu? Consider a 75 year old dad who seems to want to click on every pr0n site or anything else that loads up windows with massive amounts of malware. I didn't make him root, didn't give him java, and I'm sure it's not airtight... but he hasn't been able to break it. It's about as fast as it ever was years later. But he complained in the difference that it looked different... so with this... why, he'd just never know.
Uh... Player stage includes the drivers for Roomba sonar and motion control. Once you write the platform specific motion driver for you machine's geometry and other characteristics, it is actually something that is standardizable. Our motion control was a rewritten driver for another robot that wasn't the same size or characteristics, but had similar wheel placement for the drive wheels. It's dependent on how good the environmental modeling is, and how completely you create a model of your robot within it... but the whole thing is oddly like physics modeling in a video game engine. I would imagine something like a future packbot would also have drivers - they'd be vastly more complex than a wheeled vehicle, but an abstraction layer (to separate motion control from say vision and path planning) is going to work the same way.
Once the problems are broken down, the motion and decision making algorithms are easily separated from the platform - laser obstacle avoid was totally platform independent. There are CV algorithms that are dependent to some degree on hardware, but not that much... Player is modular based on which sensors you have (and which ones you want online to test a particular behavior.) You change a config file and include or exclude laser, sonar, gps, etc...
We didn't have articulators but the process would be the same. Like the sonar, there's a config for them that specifies the origin of the sensor (compared with the platform's center of gravity/motion)... if you need to consider the impact on stability this could be more of an issue, but in terms of motion and decision making this isn't a hard problem.
I built a robot for my school (City College of New York) for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle competition, and we used an open source programming environment called player/stage from Carnegie Mellon, which already has a huge number of libraries, and has a standardized driver format for sensors and other devices. It gives stuff like abstraction of motion - in other words, you draw a map, and have your navigation algorithm try to go around the map and it gives you back simulated data from your sonar, scanning laser, GPS, etc...
It did save us a huge amount of time... instead of figuring out how to construct the data flow for sonar sensors we could just drop their packets in a queue... which let us move on to openCV - again, another existing open source project that already is well developed and gets you 75% of the way there. We used it for the drive system, and the position control had all sorts of generic modes for tank mode vs car mode, etc. It even starts you with some algorithms like "laser obstacle avoid", i.e., use the scanning laser and try to get around a maze.
Drivers are typically in C, other stuff was in C++.
And yes, it runs on Linux;).
Yeah, well the recyclers aren't going to know which paper was printed with soy ink, so unless all regular toner is phased out soy ink paper isn't going to help here... unless we create a totally separate waste stream is created for offices that are 100% soy.
They never said Hera was the only common ancestor... she couldn't reproduce asexually. Only that she had some common DNA that all future humans share. It might have made more sense to put her back only 40 or 50k years tho, and explain the cro-magnon/neanderthal thing.
Of course that does imply that all of the happy survivors who landed in Australia and North and South America are basically screwed in the long run. Oh yeah, and this puts them down in the middle of an ice age. Ooops. Could be why all of the other mini-colonies don't make it...
Actually, that was the point - they did. Hera is a combination of human and cylon, she's the DNA common point of all of us (interestingly also implying that the rest of the other survivor colonies died out). Lee says something about hearts getting left behind as technology races ahead, and I think the point was there was a maturity needed that only a 150,000 more years of evolution could bring about... very Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon). Both Humans and Cylons (on Earth I) had self destructed through their technology.
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Nope, it's the thought process being taught that's rotten. It's like a degree in applied demolition engineering for companies. The better you are at it, the worse the company will be in 5 years.
Depends. Aside from the undergrad - many years, much bullshit for the older student (I say this having done an electrical engineering degree starting at 33) the masters is (at least in the US) going to usually pay for itself in under 5 years (my masters was also in electrical engineering.) The MBA in this situation might not just increase your salary, it might also open opportunities that simply would not otherwise be there. It might. OTOH, I also know people with MBAs for whom the degree did nothing at all, because they could not look like convincing business people.
This is true, but you better be willing and able to play a much more political game inside your organization. A lot of tech people can't or won't for a variety of reasons. If you haven't been developing those people/networking skills by the time you're in your 40's, making use of where that IT MBA could allow you to go is going to be difficult.
That might be true, but at a lot of companies the resumes also need to travel the HR GI tract and you can't get there without paper credentials. I was in exactly this situation in 2003... I was 33 (so I'm about the same age as the poster). I had a well paid job doing sizing, db installation, network troubleshooting, tech docs, etc. When I started thinking about migrating to another company, I realized no one who hadn't had direct experience working with me was going to hire me, because just like the poster I'd start doing database stuff in the mid-90's when the only qualification was that you could figure it out on your own.
At the time a lot of companies were hosting all of their own stuff for HR, time keeping, accruals, etc... I figured at some point that would wind up in India or elsewhere. I had decent skills on Oracle and SQL, some on DB2, figured they were worth nothing down the line... and I'd never been a coder. So I went back to school. But I decided any more technical path I went down, I'd be competing with off-shoring... the path for people my age in the US seemed to be mostly managing projects that were largely made overseas. So finally I decided to become an electrical engineer, and do power engineering, particularly renewables... and I'm much happier, and feel that my technical skills are rock solid now in a career that can never be off-shored (and I've got 12 years of tech project management which does translate). Basically, if you've made the decision to go back to school, you've made the decision to probably switch careers in some way. You might as well consider whether you might want to wind up in a totally different place.
I think you're incorrect about the source of the "other side" here. It's astroturfed. It's like the cigarette companies throwing up FUD on cancer research, buying a media outlet, making it "news" about the "controversy" and then taking the deluded people who believed the propaganda as a grass roots groundswell against the cigarette/cancer hoax. Al Gore had little to do with it, he was just the straw man for the oil/gas/coal industry's campaign.
Your defending the FUD campaign - brought to us more or less by the folks who also drummed up Iraqi nukes for another little initiative of theirs - in the name of academic and scientific honesty is hopefully just naive.
What's dangerous is not being able to use science to make policy decisions because the media thinks that both sides of anything need to be looked at fairly.
This is also true in (rural) upstate NY. I'm less than 45 minutes out of Albany and Kingston. The satellite companies - Wild Blue, for example - also cap you at a few gigs no matter what you pay... something you find out when your dad is visiting and leaves webstreaming for his favorite city radio station going 24/7 for a week.
I ended up with local RF (something like the old breezenet) through a company that specializes in line of sight internet. I can see the last drop for the cable company but the 1/2 mile of poles I'd need would run $5000. Now a tree or something has grown up through my line of sight up the mountain... so I might go back to dial up.
As an extra bonus, my job is at a power plant and we've got NERC regulations on connecting devices and all sorts of filtering. I figure I waste less time on line this way. But yet I'm still here now.
It's true those are uncommon, but it's also true that temporary psychosis has been long associated with Lariam. I was traveling in quinine resistant areas of the Amazon and decided to chance it (I was riding a motorcycle, decided the slight chance of temporary psychosis while riding wasn't worth the also slight chance of getting resistant malaria.) I got a lot of warnings about Lariam in 2002. This has been a known possible side effect since the first Gulf War, and the reactions that were mentioned when I researched it then were often from soldiers.
Sadly, some of our engineers would want to talk about that seriously.
There was an event in the 1920's (less than the 1859 event) and another in the 1990's (less than the 1920's event but it took down pieces of the Quebec grid). Doesn't do anything to help measure the frequency of the 1859 level events. Also, it kind of doesn't matter, since power facilities like the one I work at are required to prepare for things like the "maximum possible flood" not a "500 year flood". If your sample set has at least one of these, and we can't quantify it to be say less than a 1 in 10000 - and we certainly can't - then we should be working on this problem. Not as if the sky is falling, but we've been working on changing out some stuff in my plant for a decade, so we definitely should get on it, since remediation is going to take a long time, and the consequences would be very bad.
Current practice is no guarrantee of future behavior. I think my realization is that for the privacy I want, I'll really need to keep my own email... this isn't necessarily the only reason, just the tipping point. I may also need to do other things with my phone. But as others have noted, this area is just too lucrative for Google to keep this data anonymous forever - some time there will be a management change that will want to do this to make money. I understand Google isn't there now, but the longer I stay with them for Gmail the more inconvenient the eventual switch will be when I have to do it.
Hmm. I'd already thought about switching to Bing for search for just this reason when I heard about this. I already moved to Diaspora for networking and general time wasting. My Gmail account is much stickier - since I've got lots of stuff coming there - than my search engine, so effectively if I want to get away from this I have to switch to Bing. And I doubt I'm more valuable as a Gmail customer than as a search customer. I'm sure this will only have a marginal effect on them - FB seems to still be doing fine and they're much worse on privacy, so clearly most people don't really care - but this could hurt their search business.
I just moved my bank account to a small bank, and I started to think about what I'd need to do to move away from Yahoo mail and Gmail, and that's actually much more painful, since I've had the Yahoo account, for example, since 1996... I guess they are going to make me figure this out. What a PITA.
I agree with you in general... land use is not a major obstacle. It is in urban areas, though.
I used to install solar in NYC, and I've just started racking my own panels in upstate NY. I also work for the NY Power Auth. I also know someone on the GIS team that made that map. There is absolutely no way that half of NYC's power could come from roof mounted solar PV. I did a study on my friend's brownstone in Crown Heights, and with a 2 story building his roof could supply power to one of two floors, if we covered the whole roof. Rule of thumb is, if it is taller than 2 stories solar is not going to be feasible within the roof footprint to power that building... there are exceptions, and this still means that we could power all of the big box stores in the country with their roofs plus possibly their parking lots, but there are a surprising number of sites (my friend's high pitch roof Victorian in a tree lined neighborhood in Nyack, for example) where for a variety of reasons that are site specific this isn't going to work. In Manhattan this often takes the form of shading from other nearby, taller buildings, which was an issue in a solar thermal install we did in midtown Manhattan.
This is one of the biggest frustrations of solar - the people most enthusiastic to get it done, and with plenty of money to do so, are often concentrated in areas that it isn't ideal for. OTOH, we've successfully steered a lot of people from solar PV to solar thermal, for the reason that if you only have roof space for one or the other it makes sense to get rid of the boiler and furnace of the building, which are local pollution sources, are small and generally less efficient anyway... Con Ed can afford stack scrubbers. BTU's are BTU's, and we actually get more usable energy this way.
No one is going to attempt an installation that large with PV. Something like that would use one of many different solar tower concepts, which generally concentrate a large area of insolation into a smaller area for efficiency in generation. Types of these that have been in use for decades include fields of mirrors that heat a tower with a liquid salt sterling engine, and I've seen a recent design about to be built in the southwest that uses hot air run through a very tall column. These have been viable in deserts for decades.
Not sure what you're talking about on the water issue... solar has no more of a problem with cooling water than any other form of generation... heat is heat. If there is still extractable heat there's just going to be another generation cycle. The remainding heat can be dumped in a ground loop, in a cooling tower, or many other ways. There is no reason the heat rejection part of the cycle has to use fresh water every time... that's a design choice.
Sodium sulphur has a much higher running temperature (300C) and has fewer charge cycles (2-3000). NYPA (my organization, but a different branch of it) installed a 6 Mwh sodium sulfide battery in Long Island for about $8m all in (engineering, electronics, integration, seismic, etc.) The raw cost is around $.50/w stored I think, but that info might be a few years old. Generally it's more suitable for larger installations.
Japan is developing these for wind storage (NGK Insulator). Many companies in the US are working on various LiIon chemistries, and I've worked with one in NY State that is trying to put together a 2 Mwh system, similar to what AEP did in California. Cost is still pretty high, at say $.80/wh. With the electric car industry ramping up it's assumed this should be at $.50/wh inside of 3 years, and quite likely at $.25/wh or less by the end of the decade. They key thing tho, is the number of charge cycles, which for A123 type LiFeSO4 is claimed to be about 6-7000 cycles... if true (and this is really hard to test quickly) this means that the LIFETIME cost of storage for LiIon would be .000114 cents where the same figure for lead acid is currently .000250 and NaS is .00017 (in other words for long applications LiIon is already more cost effective.)
Actually, my batteries are pretty useless to go off-grid... I've got 8kwh, but they're sealed lead acid marine batteries with say 500 deep discharge cycles, so right now they just get float charged and my power mostly is net metered and what I don't use instantaneously flows into the grid. I did this because I want to be able to switch to LiIon in a few years, and also I wanted a power backup system (my local utility went down for 5 days in an ice storm in 2009).
If this was a typical house install it would run about $15k for the panels, racking and inverter. That would have no ability to seasonally adjust the angle tho. With labor that job is about $27k... we used to quote about $8/w installed. It's probably a little cheaper now, but the price is going down mainly because the panel cost went from $5/w retail to $2.50 retail from 2007.
In my area the typical residential install (5kw) is currently about $30k to install. The solar cost retail is $2.50/w (installers get it at probably about $2/w wholesale). The inverter is around $3500. So our install costs are already less than 50% panels, and I think some larger installs have gotten that to 40%.
On my own install I got 3440 w for ~$10k. My racks, poles, inverter, batteries and chargers, plus panel upgrade, brought that to ~$20k.
No. The panel has nothing to do with consumption. It is protective equipment. According the the gov't, the average US home uses 900kwh/month, up from 850 ten years ago, and that is roughly 30 kwh/day. A typical install is about 5-6kw, and produces about 17-25 kwh/day average over a year (ranges depend on install location). Note also that the first step in a residential solar PV install is usually efficiency, so the typical solarized house has a base load lower than 900 kwh... and this is mainly from changing out the fridge, changes to bulbs, etc. A 5kw install is typical for suburban US homes. My farm gets 85% of its load from a 3.44 kw array.
Also, I work at a pump hydro facility (Blenheim Gilboa) as an electrical engineer. We're about 93% efficient end to end. We make our money on day/night differentials. I'm working on LiIon battery systems that are 95% end to end efficient.
Finally in terms of storage your numbers should all relate to watt hours, not watts.
Evac tube hot water heaters actually get to around 90 C when working properly; they have different cycles to either retain or dump heat from both the panels and the storage tank to stay below a critical temp in the panel where the circulating fluid (usually glycol) separates. In other words, they get pretty hot, and actually keeping them from getting too hot can be a challenge in the summer. They do produce 140 F for hot water distribution; if sized properly they might want an inline boost (gas or electric) in the winter, but the energy consumption is tiny compared to any other form of hot water.
Bingo. One word: Parents. Think it's ridiculous to take the worst computer users and give them Ubuntu? Consider a 75 year old dad who seems to want to click on every pr0n site or anything else that loads up windows with massive amounts of malware. I didn't make him root, didn't give him java, and I'm sure it's not airtight... but he hasn't been able to break it. It's about as fast as it ever was years later. But he complained in the difference that it looked different... so with this... why, he'd just never know.
Once the problems are broken down, the motion and decision making algorithms are easily separated from the platform - laser obstacle avoid was totally platform independent. There are CV algorithms that are dependent to some degree on hardware, but not that much... Player is modular based on which sensors you have (and which ones you want online to test a particular behavior.) You change a config file and include or exclude laser, sonar, gps, etc...
We didn't have articulators but the process would be the same. Like the sonar, there's a config for them that specifies the origin of the sensor (compared with the platform's center of gravity/motion)... if you need to consider the impact on stability this could be more of an issue, but in terms of motion and decision making this isn't a hard problem.
I built a robot for my school (City College of New York) for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle competition, and we used an open source programming environment called player/stage from Carnegie Mellon, which already has a huge number of libraries, and has a standardized driver format for sensors and other devices. It gives stuff like abstraction of motion - in other words, you draw a map, and have your navigation algorithm try to go around the map and it gives you back simulated data from your sonar, scanning laser, GPS, etc... It did save us a huge amount of time... instead of figuring out how to construct the data flow for sonar sensors we could just drop their packets in a queue... which let us move on to openCV - again, another existing open source project that already is well developed and gets you 75% of the way there. We used it for the drive system, and the position control had all sorts of generic modes for tank mode vs car mode, etc. It even starts you with some algorithms like "laser obstacle avoid", i.e., use the scanning laser and try to get around a maze. Drivers are typically in C, other stuff was in C++. And yes, it runs on Linux ;).
Yeah... I think they invented those already - florescent tubes.
Yeah, well the recyclers aren't going to know which paper was printed with soy ink, so unless all regular toner is phased out soy ink paper isn't going to help here... unless we create a totally separate waste stream is created for offices that are 100% soy.
They never said Hera was the only common ancestor... she couldn't reproduce asexually. Only that she had some common DNA that all future humans share. It might have made more sense to put her back only 40 or 50k years tho, and explain the cro-magnon/neanderthal thing. Of course that does imply that all of the happy survivors who landed in Australia and North and South America are basically screwed in the long run. Oh yeah, and this puts them down in the middle of an ice age. Ooops. Could be why all of the other mini-colonies don't make it...
Actually, that was the point - they did. Hera is a combination of human and cylon, she's the DNA common point of all of us (interestingly also implying that the rest of the other survivor colonies died out). Lee says something about hearts getting left behind as technology races ahead, and I think the point was there was a maturity needed that only a 150,000 more years of evolution could bring about... very Last and First Men (Olaf Stapledon). Both Humans and Cylons (on Earth I) had self destructed through their technology.