You make a good point. In the future I can see them deliberately spacing dormers and such to balance usability and solar energy potential.
That being said, solar panels don't have to be restricted to the roof. I'm tempted to set up a 'solar car park'.
If you don't need house-level water resistance or insulation they're perfectly suitable as a roof surface.
As a bonus, if you write it up as the structural members are to keep it out of the way and from interfering with your car as opposed to being a car park with solar panels on top, the whole construction cost is deductible. Not that structural members to raise the panels 8-10' high are all that more expensive than ones that would only raise it 4'.
This snow clearing suggestion probably works, except for heavy snowfalls.
Just the opposite, actually. Remember, you don't have to melt all the snow. Just a very small layer that's touching the solar panel.
The heavier the snowfall, the less energy you need to spend on heat to make it fall off.
That being said, after doing the math, my answer for solar power in the winter once it snows is indeed 'fuck it', my simulations assume NO power generation for four months/year.
The real trick was doing it at the right time; when battery technology had made it affordable.
A lot of people forget or ignore the fact that this applies to Apple as well (and almost certainly to numerous other manufacturers). Apple didn't invent touch screens or radios, and the performance of CPUs and memory had been increasing along with the size and power consumption decreasing. Apple's major accomplishment was recognizing that all of the technology had advanced to the point that they could assemble a device that people wanted to buy at a price that people were willing to pay. If Apple hadn't done it when they did, someone else most likely would have done it, and not much later.
I can think of other applications for changing someone's dose without them being aware of it. In fact, you could slip them a custom printed pill that looks just like the rest of the pills in their bottle. Extra Credit: consider the implications of custom 3D printing Drug A in Drug B's clothing. (Pill for Drug A looks like it is a pill for Drug B.)
Your unstated assumption is that access to these printers is the only thing stopping people from doing illegal things like murdering a patient in a hospital. I am not convinced that your assumption is correct.
That's just it, it's NOT much different than conventional compounding, so what's the big attraction? It will have the same regulatory problems, the same liabilities, etc. But it WILL cost more and add complexity, so there's that in it's "favor".
The key question is the reliability and accuracy of this printing method. If there are fewer mistakes with this method than there are with current methods, the liability problem should decrease.
I think you're thinking of calculus not political science, the least scientific of all sciences.
Fixed it for you.
The real numbers:
If you figure out what the "just enough" solar panel count would be for your max power needs during the shortest day of the year in full sunlight at whatever angle(s) you'll be able to manage, you'll need five to seven times that many to make sure that on non-sunny days you're good to go.
This is because solar panels produce between 15% and 20% of rated capacity on non-sunny days. Non-sunny days are not "dark", they are only "dim." It is a very rare day indeed where it is so dark as to drive a solar panel below 15% output (major snowstorm which has the atmosphere nearly opaque, that kind of thing.) But dim days can come in very long strings, so that's the target to aim at.
For a reliable system that will never let you down, you do tend to need considerably more space than you would initially think. But it is possible, given that you have the space (lots) and the budget (also lots) required. Panel-wise, it's a quantity issue.
But there's a wolverine in the woodpile: Batteries. To be blunt, they suck, as in, expensive to replace and very short lifetimes compared to the rest of the system.
Until or unless ultracaps reach a point where they are on par with batteries for the service you need, reasonable full-on solar installations remain quite expensive.
Installations that use batteries are regarded highly by their owners only until the first battery replacement. Then their wallets straighten them right out.
I have a lowish-power setup, with an unfortunate number of ultracaps (because capacity is very low, about 1/10th that of a battery right now) as the energy storage medium. I did it both to give my ham gear a constant supply, and to explore what would actually work. It took a custom controller design -- ultracaps don't act even remotely like batteries -- and it took me quite some time to put it all together and make it work like I wanted it to. There are way more panels than you'd expect because of that 15% number (my panels are cheap ones), and there are way more ultracaps than I wanted to expend room for, but I did have the room, so I kept at it. It works great, and it isn't going to need service for decades unless there is an actual component failure or a severe weather event (large hail, for instance.)
Trying to do this for a full house load? A typical US house? Not yet, I'm afraid. There will be tons of compromises to make in appliances, lights, and lifestyle, and in the end, you're not likely to have the same lifestyle you had prior to your switchover.
The battery problem will probably be solved. One way or another. Eventually. I have no idea if solar panel efficiency will get up into a range where the costs and space will fall within the range needed to go truly off grid. That's a physics question in an area where I have nowhere near enough knowledge. But right now? No.
Which brings us to on-grid, grid power use mitigation. Now that is an interesting area, and we can leave batteries right out of it, as peak power also comes during peak power use (right now... electric cars may change that.) But it involves all kinds of compromises for the utilities if it is adopted in any kind of mass manner. They will need power storage, as I understand it at the moment.
Full-on solar is a great, great thing with huge potential (ha, a pun, hooray), but it's not a panacea by any means except in very rare sets of circumstances that involve very large amounts of money and large areas of space for the panels.
If you trust all that, and you believe it isn't vulnerable to the NSA and hackers, that's your call to make.
There is a justified assumption that any changes to the ACA being offered by republicans are obvious attempts to kill it.
Which is the only way to make it better. Right now, it's just a simple wealth transfer tax. It does exactly nothing to in any way reduce the cost of practicing medicine. The Democrats explicitly rejected any attempt to make the law even slightly about things like tort reform or the ability to operate across state lines in order to wildly reduce the unnecessary overhead.
If republicans actually decided to try to make it better, and Obama worked with them to make it happen, you'd probably call him a liar again for lying about vetoing any attempts to change the law.
What? He has explicitly said that he has no interest in anything that Republicans tried desperately to add to the mix while the law was being written, or anything they've said since. Why? Because anything that would lighten the load on the people who've suddenly had their rates quadrupled would reduce his party's ability to harp about how many people to whom they're redistributing the goodies.
Bullshit. You own the air up to 500 feet.
This is factually incorrect, pure and simple. You have no idea what you're talking about.
No, someone with a 3-pound quadcopter has no business operating at 1000' because that's federally regulated airspace, unless that person has a proper pilot's license and type rating for that aircraft.
Which is exactly why your entire premise about being over your own yard or over some other patch of dirt means exactly nothing in the context of your complaint.
What I'm saying is that someone who owns the property and also the drone shouldn't need a license to operate their drone, within their airspace (up to 500' AGL), as long as they stay within that box.
But you think they're going to somehow be smart enough, without a pilot's certificate, to stay under 500' above their own dirt, but can't be trusted to make exactly the same decision thirty feet to the right, above a different patch of grass? People who are going to break the law are going to break the law. Drivers licenses don't prevent tens of thousands of deaths every year, involving certified drivers on heavily regulated public roads. Meanwhile literally millions of RC aircraft of all shapes and sizes are flown. Give us a run-down of the ensuing blood bath, would you? Details, please.
Fast, cheap, good: pick two.