(Continuing after brushing the touchpad posted it for me. B-b) ... equipment at that voltage. (Small systems are often 12V due to the availability of 12V appliances.)

But back to inverters:

Current inverter and switching regulator (they're pretty much the same stuff) technology is SO efficient that large PC boards in computing and networking equipment may run the power through as many as THREE DC-DC converters, because you lose less power to heat as losses in the inverters than you would to resistance running it a few inches through a printed circuit board power plane.

So the '"20-40% loss" number seems to me to be utterly bogus.

(Consider this: A Tesla automobile IS AC motors driven by inverters from batteries. A horsepower is almost exactly 750 watts. If they had 20-40% losses in the inverters, how do you keep the car from being on fire after a jackrabbit start? Let alone recover enough power on braking to reuse on acceleration to make a substantial difference?) If ANYBODY knows how to handle inverters it's Tesla. B-) )

This is strange. "20 to 40% power loss" seems to be an awfully poor inverter; existing inverters are 4-8 % loss.

Rather than rewire every house in America, wouldn't it make more sense to just design better inverters?

Or just run at 120V DC, as renewable energy systems did (and occasionally still do) before so many appliances were AC-only that it made sense to use an inverter.

Dropping voltage means you have to replace the copper wiring with MUCH HEAVIER wiring - by a square law - to carry a given amount of power with the same loss - and thus wiring heating inside the walls, where it can set the house of fire.

Switching to 120V just means using DC-capable appliances and replacing the breakers (DC is harder to interrupt) and must-be-GFCI outlets (normal GFCI devices use a transformer to sense unbalanced load).

The 48V standard was about having a voltage that was low enough that touching it was typically survivable, so working on or near it is (relatively) safe. The boundary between the hard part and the easy, "low-voltage", part of the electrical code is 50V (BECAUSE of phone companies B-) ). Medium power (>1KW) home Renewable Energy systems tend to be at 48V so much of the wiring falls under the easier part of the code, and because of the availability of

I design homes as a hobby - how would I build my own? Most of my designs - except for the most "modernly practical" use DC power for at minimum lighting.

The one thing I need to work out - exactly how do we make a Lava Lamp work efficiently on DC power....

If this works, the monied and in-power will make this as illegal as LSD and heroin.

Not necessarily.

If the anti-aging drug(s) make people healthier, reducing the drain on the government pensions and enabling the government to push the retirement age out over the horizon, so the people will be working and taxed, they might prefer to have the drugs put into use.

Heck, they'd probably add them to the water.

Let's see...the two articles are Ars Technica (US-owned, UK edition) and The Guardian (UK-owned, US edition). I think that's a fair span of opinions!

Exactly, and well said, AC.

It's shocking to me how people can buy--hook, line, and sinker--any rotten story that politicians tell, particularly if the story is "blame someone else!"

Did you even read the _summary_?

Thanks for the reply, that makes total sense to me, and I think we're in agreement. The issue is definitely not the vulnerability of individual systems or an increasing "hackability" of software, rather, as you say, the greater accessibility that makes things more risky.

Yes, aggressive lobbying form 'Merican companies like Bayer AG (oddly headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany) and the largest chemical producer in the world, BASF (again, oddly headquartered in Ludwigshafen, Germany).

It's really nice that the political class of the EU can rely on the old "blame the US" trick to convince Europeans to ignore their own indebtedness to European corporate interests. Always shocking to me to see propaganda work so well and so easily.

I would quip that you should RTFA, but the relevant part is even quoted in the summary!

Dupont -- American
Bayer AG -- German
BASF -- German

Yes, American corporations pressured American politicians to pressure EU politicians. EU corporations were also pressuring EU politicians directly. EU politicians wussed out. This story is sensationalist because, of course, the EU politicians want to blame the US for their lack of spine and total subservience to corporations. Pot, meet kettle.

I disagree strongly with this. Let's think about the case of industrial or governmental espionage. 50 years ago, saboteurs had to physically remove documents (or whatever they wanted) from the target. There were quite genius inventions--small (for the time) cameras, hidden canisters of films, briefcases with hidden compartments, etc., but ultimately there was a very physical component. Today it's possible to remotely infiltrate an organization and exfiltrate more "documents" than could previously have been removed in a lifetime, all with perfect fidelity.

A slightly more immediate example might be identity theft or credit card theft (as in your Target example). 30 years ago, did any company of any size have to worry about losing 50 million credit card numbers (or any similarly sized data set, for that matter!) in a data breach? 20 years ago? This is a new concern.

And NASA?

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum

What I'm curious to see: do they have any actual ice sheet data? You know, from this half of the past decade?

Because, yeah, we know this shit already, up until around 2009, it got warm and ice melted. Then it started cooling again. And now, we're passed the 'benchmark lots-of-ice' from the 1970s (the one that's been used for alarmist claims since then about ice sheet levels), according to NASA. There's now markedly more ice in the arctic than ever before*!

http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/antarctic-sea-ice-reaches-new-record-maximum

* or, at least, since it started to all melt in the 1970s.

Even in California where we're paying $0.15 - $0.20 per kWh of electricity, electric vehicles save so much gas that they almost pay for themselves.

Only because you're getting ass-raped on gasoline as well. When I topped off the gas tank here in Vegas before driving down to LA last weekend to visit my nieces, I paid $3.04. I pulled over in Baker for a snack. The gas station next to the jerky place wanted somewhere around $4.50! Granted, Baker's never been the cheapest, but gas in Barstow was still around $3.70. I think it was $4.something around LA, and by the time I was running on fumes Sunday morning (driving down to San Diego to make everything worse), I ended up paying right at $4 per gallon ($3.999, if you want to be pedantic) for a full tank in Carlsbad.

Gasoline is sent to Las Vegas from California by pipeline, so how is it we're paying considerably less for the same fuel after it's been pumped through ~300 miles of pipe?

You are generally safe with Nexus devices, since you have the best chance of upgrading to the latest OS.

A device with an unlocked bootloader is also more likely to be more future-proof. I have a newer version of KitKat running on my Galaxy Tab 2 7.0 (4.4.4) than on my considerably newer Moto X (4.4). The tablet's running Cyanogenmod...have no idea if Samsung ever got around to spinning a KitKat build for it, and don't particularly care at this point as the only thing that doesn't work under Cyanogenmod is the IR blaster. My phone, OTOH? Motorola has pushed newer versions (maybe even Lollipop now), but the bootloader is locked and you can't even root newer firmware versions (rooting 4.4.4 requires an unlocked bootloader first).

That new phone that Asus introduced earlier this week sounds interesting, and there's already an unlock for it. The only downside is the ginormous, almost tablet-sized screen. The Moto X is barely larger than the iPhone 4 it replaced, but it seems hardly anybody wants to build a full-powered phone that'll still fit in your pocket anymore.