"Finally, whether you leave it on all day or turn it on in the evening, it doesn't change the net amount of heat entering your home"
According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics heat moves from an area of high concentration to low concentration, and the rate it does so is relational to the size of the temperature difference. So if your house is cool during the day due to running the air conditioner, more heat from the outside will migrate into it.
A properly designed electric instant water heater is almost perfectly efficient. However that doesn't address the issue of peak electrical loading since they suck electricity through a fire hose when the water is running to keep up with the demand. When the are not operating they use virtually no electricity, compared to a standby electric water heater that has to occasionally turn on as heat leaks from the tank insulation. Gas instant water heaters are a little less efficient when operating, but they use virtually no gas and electricity when not operating. Energy factors in the 0.8 range are common. There aren't a lot of standby gas water heaters that can beat that.
"And I already have a programmable thermostat for the A/C and furnace, but I've never seen any real cost savings by setting it up to run less often during the day when nobody's home. "
I live in Dallas and have a setback thermostat. It goes to 99dF from 8am to 4pm. When I use it in July and August, I use about 1,000 kw a month. When I don't use the thermostat I use about 1,400 kw a month. That is over 25% savings.
"(Once the walls and floors and ceilings warm up (or cool down in the winter) to a certain point, then the A/C or furnace has to work a lot harder to move the temperature back to the comfort zone for your return home."
This is untrue. First most A/C units have one speed. So they don't work harder to cool the house down when it is very hot, they just run longer. Second, they don't run longer to move the temp back down when it is allowed to heat up than if the house was kept at a constant temperature. In fact in toto they run less, the time running is just deferred and compressed together. Otherwise the system would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Air conditioners are also more efficient with a large temperature delta (hot house) than they are with a small temperature delta (cool house).
On I-35 in Texas just before you cross into Oklahoma, there is a place that makes or stores wind turbines. There are just rows of huge blades laid next to each other visible from the freeway. Driving I-45 I regularly see blades moving from Houston towards Dallas. I figure those have arrived from Germany into the Houston Ship Channel. I wonder where they are usually going?
You can have your electricity and might not have to suffer at the view of "ugly giant rotating turbines". But trust me, someone will be looking at them... or a nukey plant, or a coal/gas plant, or an environmentally destructive dam and reservoir. Or your cost per kwh will be much higher to support beautification, or very long distance transmission. To think different is to delude yourself.
Odometers fail, they can lie, they can be defeated. Of course there are ways to prevent a GPS based system from working too. Don't know that there is an easy answer here.
You fell into one of the traps they claim caused this problem. A fuel tax is NOT proportional to mileage unless all cars get the same mileage. It is only proportional to the mileage you get in one car. And even then it is not if you are going around hotrodding it one day and pussyfooting it the next.
You can cheat by putting bigger tires on your car, or putting an underdrive gearbox on your odometer cable, or if it is digital replace the VR wheel with one with fewer teeth. Of course you could put a tin foil hat on the GPS antenna. While this tax plan seems the most fair and reasonable, implementation seems problematic.
Well let me tell you. You absolutely can not do it. When your airspeed indicator is faulty you have to set to a power setting in a table based upon configuration of the plane. You have no idea how fast it is going.
"If the pitot tubes were frozen and the computer thought the plane was going much slower than it actually was, could the computers have thought it was about to stall and automatically increased engine power to compensate?"
Regardless of whether the computer thought the plane was about to stall or not, if the pitot tubes were frozen and it couldn't recognize the fault, then the computer would speed the plane up to compensate for the low speed reading. Usually there will be enough of an anomaly for it to red flag the airspeed and disconnect the autopilot.
Actually anagama is right.
There are 2 ways to determine airspeed, pitot tubes or GPS. Depending on the avionics revision of the aircraft, GPS speed may not have been an optional parameter into the flight control computer. There are no reliable ways to determine speed by seat of the pants (especially when dark and high and over water) but you can be significantly wrong at daylight, low, and over land. The first thing you learn as a non-visual rules pilot is to trust the avionics over your A$$, and the 2nd thing you learn is how to recongize an avionics failure. If you lose airspeed indication, the emergency plan is to set to a power setting and trim configuration of the plane. I never learned to fly a high performance aircraft at high altitude, but given what can happen with coffin corner and mach tuck, I am sure dealing with a faulty airspeed indicator in those conditions is very scary.
"so how would a plane without computers have fared any better?"
In a plane without computers, the airspeed indicator would show lower than actual airspeed. Pilots are trained to recognize this happening. The failure would have been isolated. If fluctuating sensor readings were the trigger that crashed other computers and took pilot attention away from actually flying the aircraft, 447 would have arrived that fateful day. That doesn't mean computer controlled planes are bad though, because the computers also make a lot of the mundane tasks of flying infinitely easier.
"It's also complete bullshit to say that the pilots can't override the computers. In normal flight, the computers *aid* the pilots. "
I'm not saying which is better, because each has advantages, but in newer Airbuses this is demonstrably false. Airbuses use fly by wire. The plane controls have no direct connection to the control surfaces. The yoke is a digital encoder that sends data to the flight control computer, which moves actuators on the control surfaces. If the right computer goes down, you have absolutely no control of an Airbus aircraft.
"closer to the stall speed than a Boeing pilot would ever dare to go. Meanwhile, the pilot can look out the window instead of at an instrument panel!"
In a possible collision, pilots absolutely do not look at the instruments, they look out the window. The advantage to Boeing manual flight controls is in an emergency, pilots can make flight commands outside of the engineering specs of the plane. Frequently the plane will survive, and the extra maneuverability might prevent the collision. I am sure there is significant code in the Airbus that tries to recognize evasive maneuvers, and allow commands outside of the normal fight envelope.
"avoiding a collision is easier in an Airbus, because pilots can just pull the stick back hard and the computers will automatically give the best possible climb performance"
Theoretically this is true, but it doesn't always work that way. The Airbus in New Jersey allowed the rudder pedal movements of the First Officer to snap the vertical stabilizer off the plane.
"the aircraft didn't "let him" because even maximum performance wasn't enough and the plane would have dropped like a stone had it been a Boeing. The computers probably saved everyone who did walk away from that crash!" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296
The cause of the accident is disputed, but there is enough evidence to implicate the computers as the cause of the crash and not the savior of some of the people. The altimeter supposedly read 100 feet while the plane was at 30 feet. The plane also didn't respond to take off power, possibly because it was stuck in landing configuration. Additionally much evidence was destroyed or improperly handled.
"IF the computers actually malfunction, they will turn themselves off. If they don't, the pilots can turn them off manually."
They don't, they flag their output as suspect and disconnect from the flight control computer. The flight control computer in an Airbus can not turn off or you lose control of the aircraft.
The engineers who design these cars have competing goals. They need to make them compact, attractive, and operate at as high performance/efficiency as possible, and make them cheap to build. They have no incentive to make them serviceable other than knowing if they make it too hard and expensive to service, people might stop buying their products. But that line of causation and responsibility is tenuous.
In my experience the Japanese are a little better at this on average than American car companies. Japanese cars tend to be reliably a little hard to work on. American cars vary from really easy, to sometimes horrendously hard for something that shouldn't be. The Germans flat don't care because their parts are so expensive anyway, labor is such a small part of service.
There are some very good used dSLRs in the $200 range, and some decent new ones in the $600 range. I've been wanting one and was surprised how much new ones have come down, and how well really old but well regarded dSLRs retain their value. I was hoping to get a 6mp Nikon body only for about $100. They're not that cheap yet.
I did. We were discussing in the context of Opera Unite and other options. That clearly limits the scope to residential non-commercial offerings. DynDNS pro offering is $15 per YEAR. Yes DynDNS has other commercial grade high availability services where they probably earn their profit. But I doubt their non-commercial offerings are losing money.
I love Apache and Linux, but coming from someone who is trying to serve additional content from my MythTV box (preinstalled with apache), I can tell you installing Apache is easy, configuring it for something worthwhile is NOT.
The fact they can provide basic DNS services free, subsidized by the few who use their relatively low priced premium services, shows even $19/yr is much higher than it needs to be. DNS probably costs the registrars less than $5 for most home user's requirements.
I'm sure both are making lots of money and are at least marginally satisfied. The point is who has power in the relationship.
AT&T could tell Apple to screw off, in which case they would lose iPhone exclusivity. Plenty of other carriers would beat Apple's door down to get either future model exclusivity, or at least availabilty on their network.
That would substantially reduce AT&T profit because there are plenty of iPhone users ready to switch carriers, and plenty potential users who won't even consider AT&T but would consider an iPhone on T*mobile or others.
Apple could tell AT&T to screw off and you'd have the same result.
I hate AT&T and am pretty indifferent about Apple, but how do you figure AT&T has Apple by the balls? I figure Apple has AT&T by the balls. The only reason Apple doesn't twist them off, I figure, is 1) Apple thinks it will be easier to wring a bigger percentage of iPhone revenue from AT&T only, than from multiple carriers and 2) convenience of dealing with one vendor and one network to support.
Given current pilot training I think your initial proposal is unlikely.
If the plane were caught in a 100mph updraft, the updraft is providing lift dramatically lowering the stall speed at any AOA. The reaction should be to nose the plane down within structural and g limits to prevent dramatic altitude excursion. This will very quickly raise the speed well above stall.
There is a possibility of entering a downdraft shortly after the updraft (though this is much more likely near the ground). Therefore if you have headroom before hitting the max turbulent air penetration speed, you'd want to increase engine thrust and be ready to pull up.
I think it is much more likely as you allude to that a combination of pilot inputs and fast changing wind currents overstressed the aircraft and a control surface failed (much like AA 587).
About a year ago I had been searching aggressively for this exact device. They aren't easy to turn up on Google without a lot of trash to wade through. There were a couple manufacturers then (can't remember the names right now), but they were all in the $150-$250 range. This is cheap enough and seems to have good ratings that I will probably buy one in the next month.
Not ideally suited, but you won't find anything better for anywhere close to $25. If you plug it in when you think the power is dirty, it makes all the measurements. No logging and no automatic determination of AC quality thought. You have to do the watching and judging on your own
"Also check the quality of your power by monitoring Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor."
Slashdot Mirror
"Finally, whether you leave it on all day or turn it on in the evening, it doesn't change the net amount of heat entering your home"
According to the 2nd law of thermodynamics heat moves from an area of high concentration to low concentration, and the rate it does so is relational to the size of the temperature difference. So if your house is cool during the day due to running the air conditioner, more heat from the outside will migrate into it.
A properly designed electric instant water heater is almost perfectly efficient. However that doesn't address the issue of peak electrical loading since they suck electricity through a fire hose when the water is running to keep up with the demand. When the are not operating they use virtually no electricity, compared to a standby electric water heater that has to occasionally turn on as heat leaks from the tank insulation. Gas instant water heaters are a little less efficient when operating, but they use virtually no gas and electricity when not operating. Energy factors in the 0.8 range are common. There aren't a lot of standby gas water heaters that can beat that.
"And I already have a programmable thermostat for the A/C and furnace, but I've never seen any real cost savings by setting it up to run less often during the day when nobody's home. "
I live in Dallas and have a setback thermostat. It goes to 99dF from 8am to 4pm. When I use it in July and August, I use about 1,000 kw a month. When I don't use the thermostat I use about 1,400 kw a month. That is over 25% savings.
"(Once the walls and floors and ceilings warm up (or cool down in the winter) to a certain point, then the A/C or furnace has to work a lot harder to move the temperature back to the comfort zone for your return home."
This is untrue. First most A/C units have one speed. So they don't work harder to cool the house down when it is very hot, they just run longer. Second, they don't run longer to move the temp back down when it is allowed to heat up than if the house was kept at a constant temperature. In fact in toto they run less, the time running is just deferred and compressed together. Otherwise the system would violate the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Air conditioners are also more efficient with a large temperature delta (hot house) than they are with a small temperature delta (cool house).
"Having heard the quality of most "indie artists," all I can say is thank God for that."
And you are going to argue the mass-market artists broadcast by your 9 local Clear Channel affiliates are better?
On I-35 in Texas just before you cross into Oklahoma, there is a place that makes or stores wind turbines. There are just rows of huge blades laid next to each other visible from the freeway. Driving I-45 I regularly see blades moving from Houston towards Dallas. I figure those have arrived from Germany into the Houston Ship Channel. I wonder where they are usually going?
You can have your electricity and might not have to suffer at the view of "ugly giant rotating turbines". But trust me, someone will be looking at them... or a nukey plant, or a coal/gas plant, or an environmentally destructive dam and reservoir. Or your cost per kwh will be much higher to support beautification, or very long distance transmission. To think different is to delude yourself.
Odometers fail, they can lie, they can be defeated. Of course there are ways to prevent a GPS based system from working too. Don't know that there is an easy answer here.
"consumption is proportional to milage!"
You fell into one of the traps they claim caused this problem. A fuel tax is NOT proportional to mileage unless all cars get the same mileage. It is only proportional to the mileage you get in one car. And even then it is not if you are going around hotrodding it one day and pussyfooting it the next.
You can cheat by putting bigger tires on your car, or putting an underdrive gearbox on your odometer cable, or if it is digital replace the VR wheel with one with fewer teeth. Of course you could put a tin foil hat on the GPS antenna. While this tax plan seems the most fair and reasonable, implementation seems problematic.
Well let me tell you. You absolutely can not do it. When your airspeed indicator is faulty you have to set to a power setting in a table based upon configuration of the plane. You have no idea how fast it is going.
"If the pitot tubes were frozen and the computer thought the plane was going much slower than it actually was, could the computers have thought it was about to stall and automatically increased engine power to compensate?"
Regardless of whether the computer thought the plane was about to stall or not, if the pitot tubes were frozen and it couldn't recognize the fault, then the computer would speed the plane up to compensate for the low speed reading. Usually there will be enough of an anomaly for it to red flag the airspeed and disconnect the autopilot.
Actually anagama is right.
There are 2 ways to determine airspeed, pitot tubes or GPS. Depending on the avionics revision of the aircraft, GPS speed may not have been an optional parameter into the flight control computer. There are no reliable ways to determine speed by seat of the pants (especially when dark and high and over water) but you can be significantly wrong at daylight, low, and over land. The first thing you learn as a non-visual rules pilot is to trust the avionics over your A$$, and the 2nd thing you learn is how to recongize an avionics failure. If you lose airspeed indication, the emergency plan is to set to a power setting and trim configuration of the plane. I never learned to fly a high performance aircraft at high altitude, but given what can happen with coffin corner and mach tuck, I am sure dealing with a faulty airspeed indicator in those conditions is very scary.
"so how would a plane without computers have fared any better?"
In a plane without computers, the airspeed indicator would show lower than actual airspeed. Pilots are trained to recognize this happening. The failure would have been isolated. If fluctuating sensor readings were the trigger that crashed other computers and took pilot attention away from actually flying the aircraft, 447 would have arrived that fateful day. That doesn't mean computer controlled planes are bad though, because the computers also make a lot of the mundane tasks of flying infinitely easier.
"It's also complete bullshit to say that the pilots can't override the computers. In normal flight, the computers *aid* the pilots. "
I'm not saying which is better, because each has advantages, but in newer Airbuses this is demonstrably false. Airbuses use fly by wire. The plane controls have no direct connection to the control surfaces. The yoke is a digital encoder that sends data to the flight control computer, which moves actuators on the control surfaces. If the right computer goes down, you have absolutely no control of an Airbus aircraft.
"closer to the stall speed than a Boeing pilot would ever dare to go. Meanwhile, the pilot can look out the window instead of at an instrument panel!"
In a possible collision, pilots absolutely do not look at the instruments, they look out the window. The advantage to Boeing manual flight controls is in an emergency, pilots can make flight commands outside of the engineering specs of the plane. Frequently the plane will survive, and the extra maneuverability might prevent the collision. I am sure there is significant code in the Airbus that tries to recognize evasive maneuvers, and allow commands outside of the normal fight envelope.
"avoiding a collision is easier in an Airbus, because pilots can just pull the stick back hard and the computers will automatically give the best possible climb performance"
Theoretically this is true, but it doesn't always work that way. The Airbus in New Jersey allowed the rudder pedal movements of the First Officer to snap the vertical stabilizer off the plane.
"the aircraft didn't "let him" because even maximum performance wasn't enough and the plane would have dropped like a stone had it been a Boeing. The computers probably saved everyone who did walk away from that crash!"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_France_Flight_296
The cause of the accident is disputed, but there is enough evidence to implicate the computers as the cause of the crash and not the savior of some of the people. The altimeter supposedly read 100 feet while the plane was at 30 feet. The plane also didn't respond to take off power, possibly because it was stuck in landing configuration. Additionally much evidence was destroyed or improperly handled.
"IF the computers actually malfunction, they will turn themselves off. If they don't, the pilots can turn them off manually."
They don't, they flag their output as suspect and disconnect from the flight control computer. The flight control computer in an Airbus can not turn off or you lose control of the aircraft.
The engineers who design these cars have competing goals. They need to make them compact, attractive, and operate at as high performance/efficiency as possible, and make them cheap to build. They have no incentive to make them serviceable other than knowing if they make it too hard and expensive to service, people might stop buying their products. But that line of causation and responsibility is tenuous.
In my experience the Japanese are a little better at this on average than American car companies. Japanese cars tend to be reliably a little hard to work on. American cars vary from really easy, to sometimes horrendously hard for something that shouldn't be. The Germans flat don't care because their parts are so expensive anyway, labor is such a small part of service.
There are some very good used dSLRs in the $200 range, and some decent new ones in the $600 range. I've been wanting one and was surprised how much new ones have come down, and how well really old but well regarded dSLRs retain their value. I was hoping to get a 6mp Nikon body only for about $100. They're not that cheap yet.
I did. We were discussing in the context of Opera Unite and other options. That clearly limits the scope to residential non-commercial offerings. DynDNS pro offering is $15 per YEAR. Yes DynDNS has other commercial grade high availability services where they probably earn their profit. But I doubt their non-commercial offerings are losing money.
I love Apache and Linux, but coming from someone who is trying to serve additional content from my MythTV box (preinstalled with apache), I can tell you installing Apache is easy, configuring it for something worthwhile is NOT.
The fact they can provide basic DNS services free, subsidized by the few who use their relatively low priced premium services, shows even $19/yr is much higher than it needs to be. DNS probably costs the registrars less than $5 for most home user's requirements.
I'm sure both are making lots of money and are at least marginally satisfied. The point is who has power in the relationship.
AT&T could tell Apple to screw off, in which case they would lose iPhone exclusivity. Plenty of other carriers would beat Apple's door down to get either future model exclusivity, or at least availabilty on their network.
That would substantially reduce AT&T profit because there are plenty of iPhone users ready to switch carriers, and plenty potential users who won't even consider AT&T but would consider an iPhone on T*mobile or others.
Apple could tell AT&T to screw off and you'd have the same result.
Who has the power in this relationship?
I hate AT&T and am pretty indifferent about Apple, but how do you figure AT&T has Apple by the balls? I figure Apple has AT&T by the balls. The only reason Apple doesn't twist them off, I figure, is 1) Apple thinks it will be easier to wring a bigger percentage of iPhone revenue from AT&T only, than from multiple carriers and 2) convenience of dealing with one vendor and one network to support.
This is pretty much what happened to TWA flight 800. See "Zoom Climb Theory" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TWA_Flight_800#Accident_sequence
Given current pilot training I think your initial proposal is unlikely.
If the plane were caught in a 100mph updraft, the updraft is providing lift dramatically lowering the stall speed at any AOA. The reaction should be to nose the plane down within structural and g limits to prevent dramatic altitude excursion. This will very quickly raise the speed well above stall.
There is a possibility of entering a downdraft shortly after the updraft (though this is much more likely near the ground). Therefore if you have headroom before hitting the max turbulent air penetration speed, you'd want to increase engine thrust and be ready to pull up.
I think it is much more likely as you allude to that a combination of pilot inputs and fast changing wind currents overstressed the aircraft and a control surface failed (much like AA 587).
About a year ago I had been searching aggressively for this exact device. They aren't easy to turn up on Google without a lot of trash to wade through. There were a couple manufacturers then (can't remember the names right now), but they were all in the $150-$250 range. This is cheap enough and seems to have good ratings that I will probably buy one in the next month.
Not ideally suited, but you won't find anything better for anywhere close to $25. If you plug it in when you think the power is dirty, it makes all the measurements. No logging and no automatic determination of AC quality thought. You have to do the watching and judging on your own
"Also check the quality of your power by monitoring Voltage, Line Frequency, and Power Factor."
http://www.p3international.com/products/special/P4400/P4400-CE.html
Kill-a-watt baby!
Until Hulu releases a Linux version of their app, or Boxee releases a 64 bit Linux version with the Hulu hack, I don't care.