AC is one of those things where a custom solution is often better than just trying to throw more solar panels and batteries at it.

First, you start by designing the house for the region, not forcing it by 'simply' tossing a X ton AC system at it. This can dramatically reduce the heat load. Much better done when building the house, of course, rather than as a refit.

Second, consider your total cooling requirements, at the reduced level. Consider what resources you have. Options include adsorption, absorption, air & ground source heat pump, evaporative, etc... Let's say we're sticking with that our cooling energy MUST come from solar power. We can use solar photovoltiac or solar thermal. Thermal pulls more energy from the sun per square meter and be cheaper, but processes after it are less efficient.

Today you can buy high efficiency heat pumps that work directly off of DC.

Third - get creative with storage. Batteries are not the only option! Thermal mass is an option - you cool down some media - water, bricks, dirt, doesn't really matter. Then use that to keep blowing cool air through the night. In the case of a thermal system, you can dump heat into storage and keep using it to run the absorption chiller overnight. In the case of an Adsorption chiller, you can size the media to last through the night and regenerate it during the day.

I'm missing something here. Why not let the economic system adjust itself, just like in the real world? Establish a marketplace, let people bid on selling and buying prices, and automatically set the value based on accepted bids -- just like the stock market. Values automatically track up and down based on supply and demand... am I oversimplifying the problem, or is the original article overcomplicating it?

Made this comment myself. Wish I had mod points.

Perhaps, but that doesn't fit in with selling every other aspect of thier business. They don't even make machines anymore.... :/

The PC isn't dead... but the PC vendors brain is.

They do. He's assuming 16.5% efficient for the coal power plants, they're actually 40-60% for all but the worst of them. A coal plant does NOT immediately toss 67% of the power it produces immediately up the smoke stack or whatever. The steam turbine itself isn't 50% efficient, it's closer to 60%.

Basically, he took the total efficiency figure for an out of date coal plant then multiplied it by 0.5 for 'good measure'. 5% for transmission losses is pretty standard, so he's good there. Losing 50% to charge from AC to a cell phone requires some gymnastics in how you measure it. Even a cheap USB charger should be 80%, and you're going to be at around that for a DC-DC converter(which converts it to AC internally) to get the 12V of solar cells down to a regulated 5V for USB.

To reach 50% you have to consider the internal charge circuits for the cell phone(.9), energy lost charging the battery(~90% for LiIon), etc... Even then I still get ~65%. Most of which can't be avoided by switching to locally generated DC.

Become SCO!

Yep, it annoys me a bit when at the beginning of a game, it costs a gold coin to stay a night at the inn at the beginning of the game, but it costs 100 gold coins at the end of the game in the "end game" areas. Granted, these are not games that are attempting any sort of "serious" world-building like Witcher 3. It still seems lazy, though - they should use other means for removing money from the player.

I've also thought it somewhat lazy for developers to have a single coin type (typically "gold coins"). I've always thought that designers who resorted to that sort of currency never really understood how incredibly valuable a single gold coin actually is. Common goods are typically highly over-valued, and weapons and armor actually tend to be undervalued. It's ridiculous for a fish to cost 5 gold coins while a sword, even a basic starter sword, might only cost 100. Granted, I think most gamers don't really care about such things, but just once I'd like to see a videogame at least attempt to make a realistic stab at this.

MMOs (particularly "theme park" types) have a particular problem with their economies, in that goods are essentially created from nothing in limitless supplies, and the final products from crafting last an infinitely long time. As such, they need to figure out how to create viable viable "gold sinks", or ways of removing money from the economy in ways that doesn't irritate the players too much. I've always thought that, no matter the solution they came up with, it always ended up feeling rather artificial (or simply inadequate), and it often ended in a massively inflationary economy.

I'm still working my way through the first two Witcher games. As soon as I'm ready to play the third, I'll have to take some note of the general economy and see if it ended up as satisfying to play as one hopes.

I can't say much about your specific situation, but in general if you're far enough from the equator for snow, the ideal solar panel will have a fair bit of tilt to it. At which point you have some options for snow-clearing. One of the popular ones is to use a relatively small amount of electrical heating once the snow stops to make the panel 'too slick' for the snow, at which point it simply slides off. Then the panels make up that energy through the day. Keep in mind that they're considerably 'slicker' that way than an asphalt roof.

Also, if your roof is only worth 1/3rd your electrical use, that may be something that you want to examine, because you could save considerable money for cheaper than installing solar panels fixing whatever is taking so much.

I say this because I can satisfy my electrical needs using about 2/3rds of my south-facing roof, and I'm in Fairbanks, Alaska. Disclaimer: Annual average; I'd have to sell electricity in the summer and buy in the winter.

Who prints? I almost *never* print anything for my personal use. But if you're in business for yourself, you invariably have to print stuff. You'll need a scanner as well, incidentally. A lot of government agencies or banks still require you to send in paper documents of various kinds. Essentially, I find myself needing to print documents once or twice a year. I prefer not to outsource the printing of confidential documents like that.

And inevitably, I need to buy one or more new ink cartridges, because the old ones have dried out and no longer print. Sigh... Once in a while, I can manually clean the heads and coerce them into printing, but most of the time I have to buy a new set.

One of my most destructive bugs was because we were using a single variable to hold one value that was used to mean two different things. I was the lucky guy who wrote the line of code that modified the value to be correct for one use but not the other. When one is writing code that winds up in CNC machines, the results can be spectacular.

Prime sharing?

I came here thinking that this was a crypto problem.

When micro-optimizing the code, you need to know what's good and what isn't. Old advice can screw up optimizations on more modern compilers.

For much of my youth, I was told that unrolling loops was good for performance, and quite a few years ago I sped up a slow section by rolling the loops up as tight as I could. My best guess was that my version was much more cache-friendly, but what I did know was that my profiling showed a very large speedup.

It's not just parameter evaluation, it's execution of side effects. If you write something like 'int j = ++i;", then you are modifying the values of two variables, and the Standard has nothing to say about the order of operations except that everything's sorted out at the next sequence point.

That's a very standard case of undefined behavior, and anybody with any real knowledge of C or C++ would know that this doesn't work.

Theoretically, the reduced test case is where you hand the bug over to whoever makes the compiler. Of course, there was the time when the response was, "Yes, that's a bug." Even a clue as to how to work around it would have been more useful.