Thursday, January 19, 2012

Libertarian Party

Just saw on the news that congress currently has an 11% approval rate... Which is far out of alignment with its political makeup. It seems that citizens are unhappy with both major parties because they spend too much, they pass many laws for the benefit of few people, they pass laws that they claim protect citizens without understanding how they are hurting the country.

The popular wisdom is that Republicans are financially and socially conservative and Democrats are financially and socially liberal. However, both are financially liberal - they just have different clients. Democrats are willing to forcefully take money from the rich (including the middle class) to take care of everyone else. Republicans are willing to take from everyone to feed their friends. Both parties disregard the constitution when it's convenient for them.

The Libertarian Party is the only constitutionally conservative party.

Every time you vote for a Democrat or Republican candidate, a little part of America dies. Vote Libertarian - its te only way to save America.

Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Smart Electric Meters

Benefits to using a "smart" electric meter that stores and transmits electricity usage wirelessly to the electric company:

Presently, electricity customers can monitor their usage by observing the analog meters outside their property. The procedure is to observe the amount shown on the meter, wait for some time (an hour for example), then observe the meter again. Subtract the earlier reading from the later reading to obtain the amount of electricity used during that period.

An advantage of "smart" meters touted by electric companies is that customers would be able to more easily monitor their usage by logging in to the electric company website.  However, this creates a risk that someone else can steal that information or take advantage of security flaws to observe the customer's usage and glean personal information such as if the customer is home or away, or what appliances the customer is running inside the home.

We can have the best of both worlds by installing our own smart meter that reports wirelessly to its master - the person who installed it. Customers could purchase an application that runs on a laptop or smartphone that communicates with their own smart meter and monitors the usage.  The smart meter could include 32 MB of data memory, which would be enough to store the reading every minute for an entire year, along with the cryptographic keys it needs to communicate securely with the master's application.  When the memory is full it the device would simply purge the oldest entries to make room for the newest ones. Clearly, the owner can be away for an extended period of time and still monitor usage that occurred during his or her absence.  The meter would need to transmit the same amount of data wirelessly continuously in order to prevent outsiders from gaining information about usage based on the length of the wireless transmissions alone. However, the transmission can be low power because it's for local use only and the smart meter could allow the owner to set the interval between transmissions (to be 1 minute, 5 minutes, 1 hour, etc.) in order to further cut power usage, or even make it "on demand" by pressing a button or issuing a command wirelessly.

The electric company is welcome to install its own smart meters as well in order to save the cost of sending someone to monitor them. However, it does not need to risk its customers privacy by making that information available online because customers can install their own smart meters if they want that capability. Risking everyone for a benefit that only some people want does not seem to be a good idea and government should not encourage it.

In addition, continuous communication between meters and the electric company can help to pinpoint power failures but those communications need not include personal information - they should be simple and anonymous such as "node 1234 receiving power from the grid" or "node 1234 not receiving power from the grid" and encrypted so only the electric company can interpret them.