In fairness, the collusion agreements generally aren't intended as much to suppress wages, but to maintain workforce stability. Reducing turnover dramatically reduces training costs and helps to improve efficiency.
That companies don't return some of the savings to their employees is a separate matter.
Insteon is power line plus wireless mesh. The protocol is pretty solid, but they have a very limited selection of devices and quality control is shabby. You can glue the parts together to make it work, but at a certain scale it doesn't make much sense.
To the OP's question, the right approach is to make everything a dedicated home run from a panel where you can have centralized or semi-decentralized control. It pisses the living shit out of me that this is the case, but you will have substantially greater flexibility to use a JACE or mini PLC if it works better for your application.
For my little condo, we will run speaker cable, switched power, and Ethernet to every location we are putting in a clock outlet for a Sonos. I wanted to use Cat-6 for everything-- low voltage lighting, security, window shades, 12VDC power distribution, etc, but it became completely impractical very quickly-- I would have needed 1-1/2" conduits rather than 1/2" or even 3/4", and the conduit bending radius and box size requirements just killed it.
There are problems with the public school system, especially in areas where the "upper middle class" simply place their kids in private schools and don't do anything to help fix it.
I grew up in St. Louis, and went to the school district whose actions were largely responsible for the "mandatory desegregation" program. The program was in its infancy while I was in school, and was tough on the kids that were "bussed in," but there were a number of success stories that would have otherwise been impossible.
Recently I had the opportunity to speak with a retired teacher about the program, and it is amazing to hear about its ongoing success. She was also talking about the horror of charter schools from a teacher (and administrator) perspective-- effectively gaming the system on all ends. Her insight was that ultimately you need to shut down the schools that cannot meet basic levels of achievement. There are systemic problems that take a long time to fix, and it isn't in the kids best interest to be part of the slow process. Transfer the kids to effective schools and give them the tools they need to succeed.
As to the general state of primary and secondary education in the US, there are some real good things going on, but there is also a lot more that needs to be done. The same goes for university based on what I see from new grads.
An air gap just limits the remote attack capability, and is fairly easy to defeat with local access. At every level you need to limit the attack surface.
The problem with making some of these systems inaccessible means they have almost no real functionality at that point. Using the tritium JACEs as an example, the whole point of them is the network, and to exchange information in higher level protocols.
In the old days we separated systems and interfaces between systems with relays and analog i/o. While it worked then, now we have 100x points (many diagnostic rather than control) and it just isn't practical. Today's practical solution would be the SCADA as primary, with a lot of hard-wired safety interlocks. The problem is there really is a shortage of people that can troubleshoot those things, so it is likely to be disabled within 5-10 years, or once needs change.
Proper security is hard, and when 80% of it is in a black box provided by a (adversarial) third party, this is what you get.
San Francisco is extremely difficult to buy into. The Tenancy In Common (TIC) helped a lot of people buy, but the majority of the housing stock is 5-15 unit buildings. It is also a fairly transient population-- I would wager less than 50% of the people living there any given year will still be there in 5 years, and substantially higher counting people from 20-30. It is therefore a market which naturally creates renters.
The complaint with the busses is ultimately if you work for a company in the peninsula, live down there. Leave the city for the people that work there and make it their community; there is no value to SF as a "bedroom community." Quite frankly, the techies do very little to make San Francisco a better place. It isn't just their fault, but it is this broader gentrification that kills the artistic, music, food, politics, transit, and even vistas that make San Francisco what it is. Sure, things change with time, but giving the developers free reign to build high rises where ever market demands is a dangerous pattern.
It isn't a question of if they can or cannot remember a 5-digit number, they simply can't be bothered to remember it. Security has to be easy/transparent in order to work; it is just that executives have a lower pain threshold. Same net effect as making everyone change unique, secure passwords every week. They WILL end up on a post-it.
I wanted to get the fancy schlage remote control lock for our vacation home to be able to give friends a limited access code. So, I figured I needed an alarm system as well to make sure it was working, maybe a camera too... Then I took apart the schlage lock. You could bypass it with a little knife and maybe a dremel if you wanted to go all wild and crazy.
The bottom line is that your security strategy needs to be proportionate to the risks. Reduce risk first, then make a solution that places your home at a competitive disadvantage compared to neighbors when someone is scouting the neighborhood.
Nothing is really secure, and you will go mad trying to make it better. One example-- friend's home broken into, thieves took the dvr for the security system. Cops said it was standard procedure... ADT suggested remote recording for an additional fee...
I would suggest you look at it from a broader economic perspective: how much do you spend per year in credit card transactions? Divide by 50. For you, how much do the credit card transaction fees (albeit paid by merchant) compare against the costs associated with cash?
For me, i spend well over $50k per year on credit cards, and would have to say that cash has about a 50% transaction cost advantage, although the merchant sees 75% of that unless I am able to bargain better.
With things like airfare though, it becomes harder to quantify... how much is a pat-down worth?
Look at the economics a little closer. You are spending $2-300 per month to avoid paying the utility company a connection charge.
The best way to use solar is by deep-cooling the freezer, heating your hot water tank, and pre-cooling your home, in that order. Charging batteries doesn't work well because they want to charge at a slower rate than discharge to maximize life. So, if you charge over 6 hours and discharge over 18 the battery bank really should be 3x the size minimum.
The best solution is mixed generation sources-- solar, wind, diesel, fuel cell, battery, etc. Look at what is cheapest and lowest risk.
Residential networks usually have a diversity factor of about 10-- the peak of any one house is 10x the average. With solar, peak generation is generally 5x average demand. Across 100 homes with no solar in the daytime you might see 200kW load. If all the homes have "net zero" solar then the power generated is likely going to be close to 1MW. Now the utility needs 5x the infrastructure, but generates no income.
It works much better in mixed developments where no energy is exported, but they want to protect themselves for the worst case.
...and require special dimmers. Finding trailing edge dimmers, or knowing the difference between the types is well beyond most people.
Incandescent bulbs work very well for some people. If your have few cooling degree days and no gas then the savings are much less. Hell, candles may be more (source) energy efficient for some people. I do some lighting design, and I try to make as efficient solutions as possible, but there are still plenty of applications where LED doesn't work at all, and CFL is no better. You might be able to use metal halide (CMH), but you will lose the dimming control.
But the incandescent ban isn't nearly as bad as California's new energy code. It adds about $10/square foot in lighting compliance costs, and the same neighborhood for HVAC. (A simple project may have had a $65/SF cost before and can easily hit $85 for the same standard.)
A USD$100 bill first issued in 1929 would be comparable to $1,300 today inflation adjusted. While things are certainly different, there are still plenty of legal things where cash is king and large bills make sense today.
Yeah... Pretty much. Using bitcoins for transactions is a lot like using gold. It adds conversion costs, and price stability is nill. Looking to gold, higher volume in trading and ownership does not really increase medium-term stability.
Living abroad, but getting your money in your home currency can be similarly frustrating. Another not-insignificant change since 97-02 is the Euro.
It really comes down to what problems is bitcoin designed to solve, what does it actually solve, and is the complexity worth the hassle? The transactional costs are substantially higher than credit card right now when you add in price hedging.
The problem with chip and pin is that it still isn't impervious to hacking, yet the customer is now responsible for preventing fraud. At least with the US system systemic fraud is a problem for the banks, even if transactional risk is placed on the merchant.
You have to establish where the endpoint of trust is for the user, and where that point is for the merchant. Everything in between is untrusted. One approach is escrow, and the other extreme is mutual authentication and authorization.
Boeing, despite having moved their head office, still makes planes in WA state where their head office used to be, because all the expertise and equipment is there.
...for now. They want to move the 777X, and they split production with South Carolina.
No, it mimics the sun well, but CRI (color rendering index) is more telling.
High efficiency lights aren't perfect, but it is silly not to always optimize efficiency.
Even when you need heat, there are more efficient ways to do it than run current through a resistor.
That said, there are a lot of shitty bulbs on the market, and it is a shame. Try to find bulbs you can look at without seeing the helix on fluorescent bulbs. LEDs are hard in most places, but it is getting better.
School shootings are much more of a suburban thing than an inner city thing. They are generally carried out by people who feel bullied. While the history of school shootings in the US dates back to its founding, there are also quite a few shootings elsewhere. Media attention has dramatically increased of course, but it isn't like they happen every day.
The answer to the problem is really anti-bullying training of students, and it happens now. There will always be something, but teachers carrying guns is likely about as effective as putting everybody in a bubble.
I'm pretty sure deployment time (including programming) for Kiva is much more than 24 hours.
While I am all for automation, Kiva is about as dehumanizing a system as I could imagine possible. It will be interesting when things like ABB's FRIDA dual-armed table-top robots become reality.
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Not to keep wages down, to prevent a salary war. Different issues.
In fairness, the collusion agreements generally aren't intended as much to suppress wages, but to maintain workforce stability. Reducing turnover dramatically reduces training costs and helps to improve efficiency.
That companies don't return some of the savings to their employees is a separate matter.
Insteon is power line plus wireless mesh. The protocol is pretty solid, but they have a very limited selection of devices and quality control is shabby. You can glue the parts together to make it work, but at a certain scale it doesn't make much sense.
To the OP's question, the right approach is to make everything a dedicated home run from a panel where you can have centralized or semi-decentralized control. It pisses the living shit out of me that this is the case, but you will have substantially greater flexibility to use a JACE or mini PLC if it works better for your application.
For my little condo, we will run speaker cable, switched power, and Ethernet to every location we are putting in a clock outlet for a Sonos. I wanted to use Cat-6 for everything-- low voltage lighting, security, window shades, 12VDC power distribution, etc, but it became completely impractical very quickly-- I would have needed 1-1/2" conduits rather than 1/2" or even 3/4", and the conduit bending radius and box size requirements just killed it.
There are problems with the public school system, especially in areas where the "upper middle class" simply place their kids in private schools and don't do anything to help fix it.
I grew up in St. Louis, and went to the school district whose actions were largely responsible for the "mandatory desegregation" program. The program was in its infancy while I was in school, and was tough on the kids that were "bussed in," but there were a number of success stories that would have otherwise been impossible.
Recently I had the opportunity to speak with a retired teacher about the program, and it is amazing to hear about its ongoing success. She was also talking about the horror of charter schools from a teacher (and administrator) perspective-- effectively gaming the system on all ends. Her insight was that ultimately you need to shut down the schools that cannot meet basic levels of achievement. There are systemic problems that take a long time to fix, and it isn't in the kids best interest to be part of the slow process. Transfer the kids to effective schools and give them the tools they need to succeed.
As to the general state of primary and secondary education in the US, there are some real good things going on, but there is also a lot more that needs to be done. The same goes for university based on what I see from new grads.
An air gap just limits the remote attack capability, and is fairly easy to defeat with local access. At every level you need to limit the attack surface.
The problem with making some of these systems inaccessible means they have almost no real functionality at that point. Using the tritium JACEs as an example, the whole point of them is the network, and to exchange information in higher level protocols.
In the old days we separated systems and interfaces between systems with relays and analog i/o. While it worked then, now we have 100x points (many diagnostic rather than control) and it just isn't practical. Today's practical solution would be the SCADA as primary, with a lot of hard-wired safety interlocks. The problem is there really is a shortage of people that can troubleshoot those things, so it is likely to be disabled within 5-10 years, or once needs change.
Proper security is hard, and when 80% of it is in a black box provided by a (adversarial) third party, this is what you get.
Wholesale vs retail.
Distribution charges add $0.07-0.12/kWh. I think that includes the markup on wholesale prices as well.
San Francisco is extremely difficult to buy into. The Tenancy In Common (TIC) helped a lot of people buy, but the majority of the housing stock is 5-15 unit buildings. It is also a fairly transient population-- I would wager less than 50% of the people living there any given year will still be there in 5 years, and substantially higher counting people from 20-30. It is therefore a market which naturally creates renters.
The complaint with the busses is ultimately if you work for a company in the peninsula, live down there. Leave the city for the people that work there and make it their community; there is no value to SF as a "bedroom community." Quite frankly, the techies do very little to make San Francisco a better place. It isn't just their fault, but it is this broader gentrification that kills the artistic, music, food, politics, transit, and even vistas that make San Francisco what it is. Sure, things change with time, but giving the developers free reign to build high rises where ever market demands is a dangerous pattern.
It isn't a question of if they can or cannot remember a 5-digit number, they simply can't be bothered to remember it. Security has to be easy/transparent in order to work; it is just that executives have a lower pain threshold. Same net effect as making everyone change unique, secure passwords every week. They WILL end up on a post-it.
I wanted to get the fancy schlage remote control lock for our vacation home to be able to give friends a limited access code. So, I figured I needed an alarm system as well to make sure it was working, maybe a camera too... Then I took apart the schlage lock. You could bypass it with a little knife and maybe a dremel if you wanted to go all wild and crazy.
The bottom line is that your security strategy needs to be proportionate to the risks. Reduce risk first, then make a solution that places your home at a competitive disadvantage compared to neighbors when someone is scouting the neighborhood.
Nothing is really secure, and you will go mad trying to make it better. One example-- friend's home broken into, thieves took the dvr for the security system. Cops said it was standard procedure... ADT suggested remote recording for an additional fee...
I would suggest you look at it from a broader economic perspective: how much do you spend per year in credit card transactions? Divide by 50. For you, how much do the credit card transaction fees (albeit paid by merchant) compare against the costs associated with cash?
For me, i spend well over $50k per year on credit cards, and would have to say that cash has about a 50% transaction cost advantage, although the merchant sees 75% of that unless I am able to bargain better.
With things like airfare though, it becomes harder to quantify... how much is a pat-down worth?
Big fan of the asus RT-65U. The third party firmware gives you great control via GUI, or full shell access.
That said, I don't know what to make of the trust matrix.
VPN.
Not much else you can do.
Read up on bar code hacking. There was a presentation at defcon 16, not sure how much improvements have been made since then.
Look at the economics a little closer. You are spending $2-300 per month to avoid paying the utility company a connection charge.
The best way to use solar is by deep-cooling the freezer, heating your hot water tank, and pre-cooling your home, in that order. Charging batteries doesn't work well because they want to charge at a slower rate than discharge to maximize life. So, if you charge over 6 hours and discharge over 18 the battery bank really should be 3x the size minimum.
The best solution is mixed generation sources-- solar, wind, diesel, fuel cell, battery, etc. Look at what is cheapest and lowest risk.
Residential networks usually have a diversity factor of about 10-- the peak of any one house is 10x the average. With solar, peak generation is generally 5x average demand. Across 100 homes with no solar in the daytime you might see 200kW load. If all the homes have "net zero" solar then the power generated is likely going to be close to 1MW. Now the utility needs 5x the infrastructure, but generates no income.
It works much better in mixed developments where no energy is exported, but they want to protect themselves for the worst case.
...and require special dimmers. Finding trailing edge dimmers, or knowing the difference between the types is well beyond most people.
Incandescent bulbs work very well for some people. If your have few cooling degree days and no gas then the savings are much less. Hell, candles may be more (source) energy efficient for some people. I do some lighting design, and I try to make as efficient solutions as possible, but there are still plenty of applications where LED doesn't work at all, and CFL is no better. You might be able to use metal halide (CMH), but you will lose the dimming control.
But the incandescent ban isn't nearly as bad as California's new energy code. It adds about $10/square foot in lighting compliance costs, and the same neighborhood for HVAC. (A simple project may have had a $65/SF cost before and can easily hit $85 for the same standard.)
A USD$100 bill first issued in 1929 would be comparable to $1,300 today inflation adjusted. While things are certainly different, there are still plenty of legal things where cash is king and large bills make sense today.
Yeah... Pretty much. Using bitcoins for transactions is a lot like using gold. It adds conversion costs, and price stability is nill. Looking to gold, higher volume in trading and ownership does not really increase medium-term stability.
Living abroad, but getting your money in your home currency can be similarly frustrating. Another not-insignificant change since 97-02 is the Euro.
It really comes down to what problems is bitcoin designed to solve, what does it actually solve, and is the complexity worth the hassle? The transactional costs are substantially higher than credit card right now when you add in price hedging.
The problem with chip and pin is that it still isn't impervious to hacking, yet the customer is now responsible for preventing fraud. At least with the US system systemic fraud is a problem for the banks, even if transactional risk is placed on the merchant.
You have to establish where the endpoint of trust is for the user, and where that point is for the merchant. Everything in between is untrusted. One approach is escrow, and the other extreme is mutual authentication and authorization.
No, it mimics the sun well, but CRI (color rendering index) is more telling.
High efficiency lights aren't perfect, but it is silly not to always optimize efficiency.
Even when you need heat, there are more efficient ways to do it than run current through a resistor.
That said, there are a lot of shitty bulbs on the market, and it is a shame. Try to find bulbs you can look at without seeing the helix on fluorescent bulbs. LEDs are hard in most places, but it is getting better.
School shootings are much more of a suburban thing than an inner city thing. They are generally carried out by people who feel bullied. While the history of school shootings in the US dates back to its founding, there are also quite a few shootings elsewhere. Media attention has dramatically increased of course, but it isn't like they happen every day.
The answer to the problem is really anti-bullying training of students, and it happens now. There will always be something, but teachers carrying guns is likely about as effective as putting everybody in a bubble.
Depends on the type of vpn. Plenty of systems that allow very granular access to specific applications or resources.
I'm pretty sure deployment time (including programming) for Kiva is much more than 24 hours.
While I am all for automation, Kiva is about as dehumanizing a system as I could imagine possible. It will be interesting when things like ABB's FRIDA dual-armed table-top robots become reality.