They should have to provide a justification for why they are removing them. Many of those episodes are with some of my favorite comics such as Bill Burr. Why did they remove them?
A heat pump can be air source or geothermal and you can use them to create hot water for a hydronic system or forced air (ducted or non-ducted). So not all of those will create the same noise levels. As they can be virtually any size and now work well at very low temps, I don’t see how they can be inadequate for heating. I’d have to hear of an example.
Up in the Northeast U.S. they are still putting oil fired boilers in new homes since gas isn’t super common outside of larger cities. I’d like to see more new homes have solar, heat pumps and possibly even stationary batteries in the future. These are going to be essential if we want to get off fossil fuels.
I wish more municipalities would mandate tighter homes with good ventilation. Recently when searching for a new home it was so dishearting to see brand new developments where the homes had standard insulation, bad orientation for things like solar and passive heating and giant fossil fuel based heating systems instead of heat pumps. I decided to instead go the oppostie direction and buy a 1960’s split level that I am modernizing.
It’s been quite a challenge to retrofit, we really need to be building to a higher standard for new stock. While renewable energy is all the rage this rarely gets a mention.
Adding on to this the energy usage of my multi-head heat pump system has been quite surprising when it drops below freezing. I have a Mitsubishi unit which is rated down to something like -15F however below 32F it uses enough energy to get pretty close with fossil fuels on price. It looks like I will have to add on to my 11.85kW solar system to be able to get the projected energy use throughout the year. Winter time will have a significant deficit and summer overproduction will make some of it back but not all. I am also investing in air sealing and additional insulation.
Not really. I buy youtube tv because I still want certain channels but I like the strraming aspects like not using a standard aweful cable box, watching from anywhere and from any device and the unlimited cloud dvr (which makes commercials a moot point except for the rare live show I watch). Losing ESPN is a big deal for me as I am a sports junky.
This is pretty much my experience. A lot of people testing it are in city centers with lots of complex things going on. For the most part in suburbs or smaller cities the driving is a lot more straightforward and it is already quite good there.
Correct me if I am wrong but the approach used by most in the DARPA challenge was lidar using pre-mapped routes and heavy use of localization. If the route changed significantly I think those cars would have trouble.
I belive Teslas approach might currently feel behind but has much more “headroom”. As Elon states the team have gone down many paths that lead to a local maximum which is short of the actual end goal. They firmly belive that an end-to-end system has to be based on vision and has to be able to drive in any situation the very first time without localizing itself to a preset path.
Many studies have shown (and basic physics suggests) that the survivabity of accidents goes way up with vehicle weight all other things being mostly equal.
There are several tangible benefits if you drive near a lot of Teslas on autopilot in a highway setting. Besides the advantages of adaptive cruise control (constant speed and set follow distance) it is adding safe lane changes where it always has visbility into blind spots and always activates the blinkers.
This beta adds the same benefits and more on city streets.
Its not clear to me that a general purpose autonomous car can be developed in a vaccum as you mention. Tesla has all the resources in the world to test with their own drivers on closed loops and using simulations however they choose to go this route and open themselves up to significant liability. Given the pace of development of other autonomous cars I think this may be the only viable approach.
It does work quite well already and each release is getting better. I’ve done several city drives with zero interventions. As long as you are attentive it is very safe.
You will have basic autopilot which can also phantom brake. It is not as bad as it seems and was possibly worse when they used radar. As long as you are attentive to the system it is not a big deal.
It is not possible in the current state so the point is moot. Seeing how it works first hand I am a firm believer in the vision only approach. I do think one day this will be possible with Vision (cameras) only.
Running a large media server can actually be pretty costly on power bills these days.