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I think perhaps you've missed my intended point with regards to indoor gardening.
Of course hobby botanists will use a comparable or even greater quantity of electricity. From the perspective of the intended point, they are identical.
Consider the two contrived example households:
- Has CFLs installed throughout the house, has a 24" LED LCD TV, sleeps during the night and has gas cooking and heating
- Has incandescent/halogen lighting, has a 50" Plasma TV, sleeps for 8 hours during the day, has lights on the remainder of the time, has electric heating/cooking
Clearly their electrical energy consumptions will be very different.
If you were the sole resident of household 1, would you think it fair that you pay the same as the total that the 5 people in household 2 pay?
What if you both had power meters and you could irrefutably demonstrate the fact that your power use was 1/8 th of your neighbours.
Consider this more thoroughly worked example:
You are the sole resident of household 1 and are on a disabled pension.
Your usage has been measured and shown to be 25 kWh per week.
You then have neighbours that move in and proceed to use 3 of 5 rooms in the house for growing tomatoes. ('tomatoes' or tomatoes - doesn't matter) They use 1000w metal halide lights in each of their gardening rooms for (say) 16 hours per day.
The consumption of just the gardening lights next door is some 336 kWh per week.
Would you want to pay the same as them, considering their usage was at least 13 times yours?
Being allowed to charge different rates based on the purpose of the consumption is a separate and distinct matter. In my opinion, it's unfortunate &/or disingenuous to equate the two as being directly linked.
We have both metered internet here in Aus, and where I live, we also have smart electricity meters - meters that are able to take into account the time of day to alternate the rate between peak and off-peak. My usage is ~25kWh per week, for which I pay the 'princely' sum of about $13 a week ($7.77 supply + $5.33 for usage). Elephant that for a joke if I was then told to subsidise every other house in the neighbourhood. 
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enhzflep wrote: I think perhaps you've missed my intended point with regards to indoor gardening.
I understood it and then qualified it by specifically mentioning metering by "type".
enhzflep wrote: Being allowed to charge different rates based on the purpose of the consumption is a separate and distinct matter.
Not for ISPs. Far as I know there has been no plan proposed anywhere that did not allow them to charge by type. Which was my point.
Matter of fact far as I know all ISPs, or certainly most, already have the capability and willingness to disconnect when a user 'exceeds' some usage threshold (often an undisclosed threshold) in terms of volume.
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enhzflep wrote: Being allowed to charge different rates based on the purpose of the consumption is a separate and distinct matter. In my opinion, it's unfortunate &/or disingenuous to equate the two as being directly linked.
Clearly, it is not possible if there is no metering, but metering != differentiation of usage type. It's greedy businesspeople and laws without teeth that allow that kind of behaviour.
You gasoline is metered at the pump. Oh noes! Those elephanters are gonna charge me more for gas if I'm taking my wife out for the evening than if I was taking the kids to school. Yes, your argument appears that foolish to me.
As for cutting you off for the remainder of the month if you exceed some limit, what exactly is your point? Of course they know how much you're all using - they add em all together, divide by the number of subscribers to get the avg cost/subsciber. Add x% for profit and there's the monthly bill. At some point, for some users the ISP would be left out of pocket. Of course they should be cut off. If not, and everybody consumed this much then how long is the ISP going to last?
Hence my point before about the smallest users subsidising the largest users. I understand that this is how it works in apartment blocks that only have 1 meter, but the same is not true of ISPs, for whom metering each subscriber is an entirely trivial exercise. More meters could be installed but the utility co don't want the expense. We had to pay for the smart-meters that were installed, then (i think) the government 100% subsidised it. It ends up being more fair all-round.
Should the light users subsidise the heavy users, because the heavy users are paranoid that their usage patterns will cost them more in the future?
In the example in my last post, where 1 neighbour's consumption was 13 times that of the other - if their bills were combined then split, the light user will be paying 7 times the rate as the heavy user. Elephant that if individual usage is able to be measured!
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enhzflep wrote: You gasoline is metered at the pump. Oh noes! Those elephanters are gonna charge me more for gas if I'm taking my wife out for the evening than if I was taking the kids to school. Yes, your argument appears that foolish to me.
That analogy is no more apt than the other.
In both cases it is is not economically feasible or actually impossible to determine the actual usage.
On the other hands ISPs are more than capable of metering by type. Certain ISPs have made various restrictions related to this for years. And there are recent cases where users have been disconnected for their type of usage.
enhzflep wrote: As for cutting you off for the remainder of the month if you exceed some limit, what exactly is your point?
The point is that ISPs, at least some of them, ALREADY limit volume. So they certainly don't need a legal mandate to protect themselves from that.
enhzflep wrote: Should the light users subsidise the heavy users, because the heavy users are paranoid that their usage patterns will cost them more in the future?
Again, ALL of the proposals that I have seen that allowed for metering ALSO allowed for limitations based on the type (not volume) of usage. And that specifically allows a ISP to set up deals that either requires a customer to pay more for using a specific service (from someone other than the ISP) or to completely preclude access at all.
An analogy for that last case is the most recent dispute between DirectTV (cable) and Viacom dispute. Also note that this sort of dispute comes up every couple of years in the cable industry.
But I would support such agreements if ISPs allowed themselves to be regulated as a monopoly and as such rates, including increases, and any such limitations by type would need to be justified and approved by an outside committee. At least where I am that is how the electric company works.
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Actually, at my apartment complex, it is an all-you-can-use model for water. Individuals can use as much water as they like, and the bill gets spread evenly across each apartment (actually, I think the number of people in the apartment is a factor for how much you pay). It isn't a flat rate, though, so I suppose it's an in-between model.
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The idea of robots telling each other stories isn't as far fetched as it first appears. Think about a simple robot, like the e-puck. What does the story of its life consist of? Well, it is the complete history of all of the movements, including turns, etc, punctuated by interactions with its environment. Because the robot and its set of behaviours is simple, then those interactions are pretty simple too. It occurred to me that it is perfectly possible for a robot to remember everything that has ever happened to it. Now place a number of these robots together, in a simple 'society' of robots... To boot or not to boot, that is the prime directive.
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About three months ago, I decided that I need a replacement for TextMate 2. It was a nice upgrade but I felt uncomfortable using it. I tried Chocolat, another text editor with a very well done graphical user interaface. Unfortunately, it was worse than Text Mate 2. At the very last, I gave Sublime Text 2 a try. It looked like unappealing text editor at first. I didn’t like the default styling. As I used it more and more, it revelead its true value. I use it every day now. Text editor tips and tricks.
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Gordon Crovitz of the Wall Street Journal's editorial page reopens the ancient debate over who invented the Internet with a column Monday calling out the notion that it was the government as an "urban legend." And while I'm gratified in a sense that he cites my book about Xerox PARC, "Dealers of Lightning," to support his case, it's my duty to point out that he's wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project. So let's look at where Crovitz goes awry. Wait until Al Gore hears about this...
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Gordon Crovitz is a blithering idiot. but he knows how to say what the wingnuts want to hear!
modified 24-Jul-12 16:59pm.
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Decimal approximations to pi are an artifact of our ten-fingered anatomy. Fractional approximations to pi are more satisfying, and they promise to teach us something more universal about pi. why is this fraction so close to pi? The deeper you look, the more unique and unexplained 355/113 appears to be.
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The venture capitalist Vinod Khosla recently described Silicon Valley as a state of mind, rather than a geographical place. If that's the case, that state of mind can increasingly be found in San Francisco, as young tech companies flock to the city. [ITworld]
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EVEN the most sophisticated electronic security can be defeated by forcing someone to reveal a password. But what if sensitive information could be stored in your brain in such a way that you couldn't consciously disclose it, no matter how hard you tried?
If you ask, I can't remember my password to CodeProject, honestly... 
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The original short story by William Gibson was pretty good.
The movie had Keanu Reeves.
Enough said.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Your brain has something that has the ability to retain information long term, but it isn't permanent enough to store a password. You might be able to detect your brainwaves and use that as a password, but even with that, you'd eventually find yourself locked out of your account. It just isn't reliable enough to store a password.
I've had cases where 30 minutes after I set a new password, I couldn't recreate it. So I can already be unable to disclose it.
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Amazon is offering to cover 95 percent of the cost of vocational training courses to help its warehouse staff pursue jobs in other careers, including many that Amazon does not offer, the company said Monday in a letter posted on its home page. [ITworld]
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That's great to hear... but then again, companies always wait until they're on the spot light to do anything nice for their employees. It'd be great to see more people be proactive about things like this (versus reactive).
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Robin Sloan went looking for some summer programming reading, and ended up creating this interactive book review about Ellen Ullman's "Close to the Machine." Code along with the video in the interactive JavaScript console to find out about Ullman's book, JavaScript and more. I guess you could say this is a book review written... in JavaScript?
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I have been reading the wishlist at Web API Codeplex repository recently, and noticed that one of the most popular requested features, is to add support for BSON (Binary JSON) media type (6th on the list). Of course all it takes to include BSON into your Web API is to simply write a media type formatter for it, and since JSON.NET already has great BSON support, it is actually quite easy. Now, you might be asking a question, why to do it in the first place? Isn’t JSON enough?
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Many modern virtual machines include either a fast interpreter or a fast baseline compiler. A baseline compiler needs extra memory and is likely slower for code that is only executed once. An interpreter avoids this memory overhead and is very flexible. For example, it can quickly switch between execution modes (profiling, tracing, single-stepping, etc.). So what, then, is the state of the art of building fast interpreters? From assembly code to WebKit, the state of the art in interpreters.
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I've seen many struggle when they first meet Backbone.js. In this blog post I will gradually refactor a bit of code from how I used to write JavaScript before, into proper Backbone.js code using models, collections, views and events. Hopefully this process will give you a firm understanding of the core abstractions in Backbone.js. Reduce, reuse, refactor.
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I recently blogged about achieving 82.5% accuracy predicting winners and losers of matchups in the 2012 Men’s College Basketball season using machine learning. I’ve only used data acquired prior to the predicted match, resulting in a valid representation of how the algorithm would be able to to predict this coming season. In this post I am actively attempting to ignore the inner workings of the algorithms used and instead focus on them as “black box” components. I speak to their use and their usefulness but not a lot about their actual mechanism. My personal interest lies in producing interesting (useful?) effects via manipulation of these algorithms and my goal is to help explain at a high level how I approached the problem. Neural networks for predicting a game of basketball.
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I tend to keep track of data in Excel, and lately I've been using it as a CRM. I keep different sheets in order to answer different kinds of questions: Who asked about cell formatting? Who did I first talk to on our online chat? How many users do we have in Chicago? In theory, each sheet is synced with a master sheet containing all customer data. In practice, maintaining everything by hand was too time-consuming, and my data became scattered. Oh, by the way, this involves scripting Excel... with Python!
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The problem with so many portable devices... was that they required a stylus to work right. Often the stylus made touch into really more of a virtual-mouse. That’s just not the intuitive way to work. On an other level there’s something fundamentally wrong about this. Some tasks simply work better with a stylus and the limits of iOS make them annoyingly limited. The pen is mightier... than the finger?
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From high-end gaming rigs to light-weight, always-connected tablets, Windows 8 supports the broadest range of graphics hardware ever in a single operating system. We hope this post has helped explain some ways in which this work enables a whole new set of rich experiences. Hardware accelerate all the things!
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