Your AC uses more energy when you leave it on during the day vs. letting the house heat up. There are 3 reasons:

When you run it all day, it cycles on and off multiple times. An air conditioner reaches peak efficiency after about 30 minutes of operation
Running during the day causes you to pull hot air from your attic ducts into your house. This increases the heating load. Running in the evening when the ducts are cooler will be more efficient.
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

I have collected about two years of temperature data on my AC and these are the results I've found. This graph shows that the longer the AC continuously runs, the colder the air output is:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/schramroyal/3735622175/

Also, the AC output temperature is warmer during the hottest part of the day (when you are probably at work) because it must pull the return air through hot duct work. The most efficient way to run an air conditioner is to leave it off during the day and then turn it on in the evening and have it run for a long time (at peak efficiency) to cool your house.

I think you missed the part about the government being involved

If you need guaranteed, fault tolerant, one-time message delivery you could use IBM's Websphere MQ. It is expensive bloaty, but it gets the job done and will tolerate intermittent connectivity problems. It runs on every platform and there are client API's for many languages.

Place an MQ server at each end, then have the client enqueue the message at one end and a listener dequeue at the other end. If the link or other host is down, the clients can still send messages which are stored and delivered when the comm. link comes back up. Transactions and rollback are supported, and large files are automatically segmented and reconstructed by the system.

You can configure it to send message receipts, prioritize messages, and report any failures to a dead letter queue.

There may be other brands of middleware that do this just as well for free. WMQ is just the one I'm most familiar with (I don't work for IBM).

I'd drink a lot less using Ada than C++. Ada has nice features aimed at keeping dumb asses from shooting themselves in the foot

C++ is a set of boots with land mines for soles

I hope they don't have the NSLU2 disadvantage of not powering on automatically after a power failure.

This annoyance makes the NSLU2 unsuitable for remote monitoring where the electricity supply is unreliable.

The NSLU2 software distributions are also crippled (stripped down versions of utilities that break things like CPAN). Hopefully this one is more standardized and less unique.

You could accomplish temperature monitoring using 1-wire temp/humidity sensors connected to the USB bus with this interface.

You can do this at McD's too:

fe:ed:de:ad:be:ef

The UN does play a role, historically. The US and other countries fought the war under UN Resolution 84. Among the often forgotten participants were UK, Canada, and Australia.

I don't care to take up for the iPhone, but they can do video. It requires jailbreaking (not the same as unlocking), which is fairly easy to do.

The fact that it is hardware capable of video but restricted by Apple will probably not win any fans, but just sayin', if you want to record video on the iPhone you can.

I use the free Violet UML editor to make decision tree drawings for support personnel. It runs without configuration on any platform and is simple.

I'm reminded of a coworker's story about documentation. He was asked for an SQL query by a QA engineer. Instead of sending the query in email (as usual), he IM'd it.

QA sent a reply stating that the query failed. They had pasted the entire IM entry as the query like so: "foo@bar says: select from ..."

Jailbreak apps are indeed signed, they are just not signed by Apple. A jailbroken phone does not eliminate the need to sign applications entirely.