Comment Re:Logical Enough (Score 1) 292
Here in Texas, if the logo on the painted sheet metal matches the logo on the breaker, that would be 100% up to code. An interlock like that is the cheapest way to feed a house from a generator safely.
Here in Texas, if the logo on the painted sheet metal matches the logo on the breaker, that would be 100% up to code. An interlock like that is the cheapest way to feed a house from a generator safely.
They can easily change the agreement by updating the TOS and have a statement in said link that continued use of the site constitutes acceptance of the new terms. For a bankrupt company, that would be enough legal CYA to prevent any judge from ever piercing the corporate veil.
Even now, a Prius with an inverter on the traction battery bank can provide a decent amount of power. With a MEPS alternator, you can get 5kw+ from a truck or van, so even though it isn't electric the vehicle can double as a generator (and with the emissions controls on vehicles, that is a lot better for the environment.)
We are lurching slowly towards that, especially with motorhomes. For example, Roadtrek announced last week the addition of 200-1200 ampere-hour battery packs that charge from the engine. I worked on designing a Transit van conversion that would use a "hybrid" inverter so if plugged into a house (or a small vacation cabin), it would run the electricial system from the van's aux battery bank, then once the batteries hit 60% SoC, fire up a generator.
I wouldn't be surprised to see this technology filter into cars, be it plugging the vehicle in and using an alternator as a generator, or having the car's battery bank be used first.
This has been an issue with any Internet business, be it a cloud provider, dating service, or someone who services vend-a-goat machines. When they go bankrupt, no contracts are honored, and the data falls to the buyer of the company or the physical servers, and can be used, without restriction, by the new party. For example, if a cloud computing service goes bankrupt, the next owner of the physical servers can make a multi-terabyte torrent of the contents, there is nothing the former clients can do about the data legally.
The only real solution to this is having part of the bankruptcy law changed to mandate supervised destruction of all data as part of the handover of servers.
There are some battery types which have a very high amount of charging cycles. Supercaps and NiFe batteries come to mind. Neither is great at energy density, but both can (assuming proper care taken) last for a very long time.
A lot of people can't even maintain a home generator. For example, come a disaster, people hit the hardware stores and buy open frame construction generators that put out 4-10kw. However, they are obscenely noisy. After the disaster, they are shoved in the garage and forgotten about.
Well, come the next would be disaster, that generator is pulled out... and won't start. The E-10 gasoline in the tank has turned to varnish, the carb is clogged to uselessness, and in some climates, the windings on the armature are corroded, so it can't even get a current in the first place.
Good generators are expensive. Yes, one can buy a Harbor Freight special for ~$100, which is a clone of Yamaha's ET800 model, made in the 1970s... but it has no voltage regulation, and has very dirty power, where adding/removing a load may result in a 160 volt spike. A good Yamaha or Honda portable inverter generator costs five to ten times as much as the open framed models found at hardware stores... but are a thousand to ten thousand times as quiet, and have a lot better parts availability. To boot, power is extremely clean.
Or the generator gets maintained and oiled... and the person uses a "widow maker" cord to backfeed the house power, which is not a good thing for people working on the lines when power is out. Some pocos are so tired of this, they will pull an offending house's meter, and not reconnect power until the place puts in a up to code way of allowing for generator power (transfer switch [1], safety breaker interlock [1].)
In general, home generators are useful, but one can't expect them to realistically be used in a blackout situation.
[1]: Best of all worlds is a whole-house UPS with two power inputs. That way, the generator is independant of the mains power, and either or both (for a short time) cutting off would not affect power in the house.
With how beholden we are in the US to coal/oil, I am happy to see -any-... yes, -any- progress in the energy field.
I do agree -- nuclear is the way to go for the near and medium term. There is so much to be done with thorium reactors, and it would allow us to do things which would be cost-prohibitive now. Thermal depolymerization for example (which would render plastic trash into usable oil.) Desalination is another.
The ironic thing is that some technologies wind up being embraced by the far left and right. Both the guys with the bunkers, as well as the tree-hugger communes both agree on the use of solar, especially in an off-grid usage capacity.
I am just glad to see someone throwing money into energy R&D. As it stands now, yes, there are improvements in battery tech... but we need batteries at least within an order of magnitude of energy density as gasoline in order to have something effective for transportation across the board, tossing the IC engine completely and moving to electric motors across the board, from the moped to the 18-wheeler.
Battery capacity is the biggest limitation, but after that, it will be getting MPPT charge controllers cheaper and prevalent. As of now, I can buy a PWM charge controller for dirt cheap... but it uses a fraction of the energy that comes off of panels for battery charging compared to a decent MPPT model.
Yep, paying for TV, and finding ads to the show are almost a 1:1 ratio.
Only way to win is not to play.
I find that if I watch stuff, it winds up being YouTube videos, and unless I use an add-on, even there, ads are creeping up, becoming more common, and the "skip at five seconds" button has started disappearing.
It would be nice if YT offered a no ads subscription service... heard talk about it, but nothing seems to have manifested.
The pyramid boom and bust are over. Maybe Bitcoin is valued at what it should be as of now, since various interests have actual value in the currency.
However, I still consider BitCoin a currency for trading, although I'd exchange as quickly as I can. As a currency for storing value, that will take years. The US Dollar took 50 years and was running alongside the Mexican peso before it became a value standard.
I had a HTC Wizard, with its dual-core TI OMAP puttering along at 200 MHz. Doesn't sound like much, but it did well with calls, and could run a week without having to be charged. This was about a decade ago. Now, most of my smartphones won't persist beyond 24 hours unless I have them plugged into an external battery, or like my HTC One M8, enable the extreme battery saving mode, which replaces the Android Launcher default, disables Wi-Fi, and cellular communication, and only runs the absolute minimum of processes. This probably would make the phone's battery last a week, maybe more.
I sort of wish the philosophy behind apps wasn't "lets make these as fast as a gaming computer or console", but the old PalmOS philosophy of "do the job done right, and if it doesn't need CPU cycles, don't do it." Because of demand for ever faster CPUs and GPUs, phones have to get bigger and bigger for heat dissipation reasons. It would be nice for CPU speed to lag a bit to allow for a better battery life, perhaps adding deeper caches. Adding more RAM to a phone might help things as well. This way, phone shape can be dictated by what users want, not having to have ever larger surfaces for engineering reasons.
If you use JuiceDefender, you can prolong the life of almost any Android phone, just because you can schedule it to turn off all communications other than for a certain gap. This does help with some phones that have a short battery life.
Problem with lithium based batteries, in general, are two things:
1: Puncture them, they go boom unless engineering is done to prevent this.
2: If they are not discharged and charged correctly, they go boom.
One place where lithium batteries are starting to make an impact (namely LiFePO4 batteries) is RV-ing. However, Silverleaf controllers tend to be expensive, so if you want this and you like off-grid camping, expect to pay upwards of $120,000 just to play in this ballgame. More useful setups (800-1200 ampere-hours) are available (Advanced RV comes to mind as well as Roadtrek), but expect to pay dearly for those.
What really is needed is a charge/discharge controller that can take a bank of lithium cells and make it appear to existing chargers and electrical loads like the battery is a flooded lead-acid or AGM battery. This would allow retrofitting without having to do major re-engineering of the rest of the electrical system. However, in reality, it will take a re-engineering of charging and discharging eventually because of lithium's different charging/discharging curves.
The Bolt looks like a car that is made to compete against the Mitsubishi i-MiEV. This is a great commute vehicle for an urban setting where you spend most of your time sitting at 0 RPM at lights or in traffic. But for something that might attract Tesla owners? That is like asking Corvette owners to buy a Sentra SE-R, or a Type R Civic.
Here is my dumb question: What is wrong with the Chevy Volt that the Bolt even needs to exist in the first place?
The current Volt is a completely electric car. Plug it in at night, and all that. However, having the gasoline engine means no range anxiety, so while the Leaf and the Tesla owner are back at home switching cars, the Volt is on the highway for a long trip. This is definitely a decent compromise between having an EV for commutes, and a second IC based vehicle for long trips.
If we pull numbers off a high precision clock function like Linux's clock_gettime (which has a nanosecond precision rate), it matters less what exact key the user pressed, because the part that rapidly changes (interval between keys, or even the absolute time (year/month/day/hour/minute/second/billionths of a second) can be used by running the output through a hashing algorithm and tossed into the RNG pool.
One you get into microsecond and nanosecond resolution, that is a quite usable random number source, since someone might be able to tap a key (even repeatedly) on a tenth to hundredth of a second scale, but definitely not be able to give repetitive keystrokes on a nanosecond level.
What key they press might give around six bits of random data, but you can get significantly more bits (20-30) per keystroke just from the high precision timer.
Variables don't; constants aren't.