You're not wrong, which is why I mentioned it in my second post. While I was making my first one, I quite honestly forgot that my situation was unusual. I live a bit of a sheltered life. =P

And, while it is relevant, I don't think it ultimately matters too much -- scaling of solar installations is rather straightforward.

I should have been more specific, here, because we're splitting hairs. In full moonlight, my charge controller will register enough current coming from the panel to activate its charge mode. It will not, however, charge my battery bank to any significant degree. I mentioned this to support my point that direct sunlight is not necessarily required for a solar panel to generate power.

I think my panel is 65W, actually. You're not wrong about its capabilities, but it meets my needs and then some. Four lamps with 6W CF bulbs, a small 12V water pump, a modest computer, and a 15W guitar amplifier are the entirety of the appliances in my house, though. Were I to ever need more appliances, I would simply add panels and batteries, or even upgrade my inverter (currently an older 10A Trace) as necessary. I won't pretend that my needs are average, though.

It sounds like your solar panels work well in the aggregate on cloudy days based on your own statistics. While clouds can cut power generation by 80% of their optimal output, in practice, you have averaged 52% of optimal output over a period of 7 days, or 74% of your estimated normal average. I have noticed roughly similar performance with my system, and I think it is very reasonable. Not that there is a scientific definition for the phrase "quite well", either. :)

P.S. Thanks for posting the stats about your system, btw -- you have added real, valuable data to the discussion. Cheers!

I live in the Northeast, and I have powered my house with a solar panel for almost ten years (there is no municipal electrical service where I live). A sunny day isn't required for the panels to work; they work better in full sunlight, but work quite well with cloud cover. Mine will even charge my batteries slowly on a clear night when the moon is full. They actually work better in the winter -- even though the days are shorter, reflected light from snow cover results in greater ambient light and by extension, better charging. Does it snow much in DC?

My solar panel is 18" x 48", IIRC, and I just have the one. It's an older model, and not as efficient as the new ones, but it meets all of my admittedly modest electrical needs and then some. This will work fine, assuming it's properly engineered.

I believe that in a Toyota, the brakes are still largely a mechanical system. The ABS/brake assist system can interact with that system, and normally works by reading wheel-speed sensors and closing one or more (some systems have a valve for each wheel, so that different braking patterns can be applied to different wheels simultaneously) mechanical valve between the master cylinder and the brakes.

For your theory to be correct, the engine control unit would have to fail in such a way that the throttle is held open and stops responding to input while fuel injection, airflow, and everything else work normally (all of these functions are controlled by the same system), and, simultaneously, the anti-lock braking system (these are independent systems) would have to fail in such a way as to hold all of the brake valves closed.

To the best of my knowledge, this sort of interference should be quite unlikely to occur. The car's computers are contained in grounded metal enclosures, so any induced interference should be grounded away from the computers. Additionally, digital devices, unless they operate at a very low voltage (probably less than 500 mV) are not extraordinarily susceptible to electronic interference. That said, very unlikely doesn't equal impossible.

In a typical car (disclaimer: I don't know whether Toyota builds theirs this way) the engine control unit will control many engine parameters beside the throttle; fuel injection, fuel-air ratio, RPMs, etc. If the ECU were to crash, the engine would just stall (not that this couldn't happen, of course; however, "My car stalled, but it started again a minute later. I took it to my mechanic, and he couldn't find anything wrong." doesn't make for high-visibility recalls.)

For the unintended acceleration problem to have an electronic or software-related cause, several largely independent systems in the car would have to fail in fairly specific ways at once, which is a one-in-a-million occurrence. Of course, there are how many millions of Toyotas on the road?

I tend to think that Toyota's mistake in all of this initially was to work backward from the assumption that every instance of unintended acceleration has an identical cause. It's also pretty obvious that they initially had no idea of a possible cause. Compounding this is that the condition is quite rare (there are, what, a few dozen confirmed reports?) We know that there are at least two causes already: Floor mat interference with the accelerator, and a mechanical flaw in the accelerator assembly. I suspect operator error could be a possibility in some cases, as well.

I think this is a bit paranoid. I don't think Toyota has had significantly more complaints of unintended acceleration than any other manufacturer, once you adjust for market share, but the raw number is much higher, so they are subjected to increased scrutiny. If it is some sort of conspiracy, I don't think it will work out all that well, though; I read that the overwhelming majority of Toyota owners would still purchase another one in the future. Toyota does have a lot of brand loyalty and good will, though they are undoubtedly spending some of that now.

Yes, you get a downloaded installer. It doesn't phone home or need anything from the site to do the install, so you can reinstall the game as many times as you want, even if GOG goes out of business. Their license even allows multiple installs.

I don't have net access at home, as I live too far out of the way for municipal services. I used to purchase my games in the store, then after getting burned a few times by single-player games that required a net connection to validate the CD key on install, and not being able to return them, I stopped buying. Later, I discovered GOG, and now my gaming dollar goes there (and it goes a long way, too). I go to the library, buy a game or three, download them to my flash drive, and they just work. The latest patch is already installed, no stepping through the executable with a debugger and fixing it with a hex editor so it doesn't have to check the CD when it starts up, just install and play. Their new offering, Arcanum, is downloading as I type this.

I live in an area that isn't serviced by an electric company, so I have a small solar array. My power is always a perfectly clean 117 volts at the wall (at least until my inverter fails, I guess). I still have all of the CF bulbs I bought 15 years ago at $30 each. A friend who has normal electrical service bought some of the same ones at the same time, and none of them lasted more than three years. So, yeah, electrical quality is important.

This makes sense with high powered amps. A 1000W amplifier operating into a 4 or 8 ohm load will result in 10 to 15 amps on the wire (assuming you were running it full up, anyway). Anything lighter than 12 AWG or so will add impedance at these power levels, reducing power. I generally use 14 or 12 AWG cord for speaker connections. In the case of my earlier anecdote, booster cables can obviously handle the current; they are designed to carry hundreds of amps. I have no idea what the current capacity of barbed wire is. =p

In my misspent youth, I was in a band. I remember a show we played, at an outdoor venue, we were asked to put a speaker near a concession stand. We had a speaker and an amplifier to drive it, but the concession stand was about a hundred feet from the stage, and we didn't have a long enough cable. So, we used two sets of booster cables and a rusty barbed-wire fence that happened to be in the right place. I couldn't detect any sonic difference, and I haven't used anything but cheap lamp cords for speaker wire since. YMMV.

I once spent several hours helping someone to modify a guitar amplifier to sound "warmer". We achieved what he wanted eventually, and I came to the conclusion that "warmth" is a combination of a smooth, peakless frequency response in the range of 150-1500 Hz, a little attenuation of the frequencies above 2 kHz, and a slight attenuation of odd-order harmonics in the signal. At least in the case of this particular amplifier. Of course, a sample size of one amplifier doesn't make a scientific study, and this may not be a very good comparison, anyway, as one can't exactly change coupling capacitors in a violin to make it sound better. My point is more that I think "warmth" can easily be measured, I just don't think we're particularly good at quantifying the attributes of a sound that we hear as warm and pleasing.

A lot of 5V rectifier diodes are that way because they were evolved from a 4-pin type 80 (a 5Y3 is actually pretty much a type 80 with an octal base), which had a 2.5V/10-watt heater. 4 amps was probably too much for an octal base, so the voltage was doubled. The 6.3V standard was developed initially for automotive applications; cars had 6V batteries at the time. I suspect that you're right; that since a directly-heated rectifer required a separate transformer winding anyway, nobody worried too much about having 5V and 6V secondaries, rather than two 6V secondaries. It wouldn't really change the manufacturing cost of a power transformer either way.

Great post! The article is sorely lacking in interesting details like these about the old computers pictured.

I can imagine the power and cooling requirements for a computer like this; older octal-base dual-triode voltage amplifier tubes need a fair amount of heater current, as the heaters run at 6 volts. Those tubes also tend to be noisy and susceptible to mechanical interference (the newer 9-pin 12**7 dual-triodes are really much better, the more fragile connecting pins aside); I wonder if you could cause a processing error by tapping on the tubes with a pencil eraser? Maybe not, discrete components of digital computers operate in on/off states, so they handle external interference pretty well.

Not to mention, worrying about the mercury in your thimerosol causing autism is like worrying about being poisoned by the chlorine in your table salt, or the flammability of the hydrogen in your tap water. Component elements of compounds undergo a chemical reaction when they combine, and don't retain their original properties.

Does anyone remember an article that was posted here several years ago about higher autism rates in areas with a lot of high-tech companies? It's been a while, but I seem to remember that the rates were higher among children of two parents with autistic tendencies themselves, suggesting that the possibility of a genetic link exists.

That's funny, I do the same thing when your wife wants to spice things up in the bedroom.

(Sorry, I couldn't resist =P)