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Researchers Create New Cheap, Shatterproof, Plastic Light Bulbs
hattig writes "US researchers say they have developed a new type of lighting that could replace fluorescent bulbs. The new light source is called field-induced polymer electroluminescent (Fipel) technology. It is made from three layers of white-emitting polymer that contain a small volume of nanomaterials that glow when electric current is passed through them. The developer is promising cheap, hard-to-break, mercury-free, highly efficient bulbs from 2013."
A vison of the future is coming to me... I see... Angry old people...Muttering in the aisles at wal-mart...calling their congressman...bitching at dennys...about... what?...I can almost hear it... yes! They're complaining about the phasing out of of the CFL lightbulbs in favor of these new ones...
Everything is cyclical, I guess...
I'm sure dropping some darwin-award-eligable teenager from a flying dead cat drone on the light will cause it to break. Or at least I'll watch it at some point on YouTube.
The linked page to BBC doesnt work - has it been slashdotted?
I wonder what the lifespan of these bulbs is going to be ...
The Light Bulb Conspiracy
That is certainly some illuminating information right there! Looks like things are going to brighten up for the lightbulb consumer market.
/sorry for the bad pun.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
Wow, these must be cheap and simplistic if they ended the article with an actual intended release date! That's something you never, ever, ever see with solar panels, magical vehicle engines, and quantum computers. Definitely not....exceeding 90% likely to be vaporware lol.
Great, how what the hell am I supposed to break and jam into people's eye sockets during a fight? A beer bottle? Lame.
Capitalist: Noun
1) Some other guy that is making money, while I sit whining in my mother's basement.
Capitalism is the only reason *anything* is cheap. Capitalism is when then the market (read you & I) control the price, not a central groverening authority. A monopoly is what you are thinking of. As long as there is competition in the marketplace the prices wil alway be as low as they can be.
Just thought I would ask...
Another example of government regulation killing ^h^h^h^h^h^h driving innovation.
CFL's suck, they are only more efficient than an Incandescent lamp, which is a fairly easy mark to hit. LED's, though more pleasant to use, are marginally more efficient than CFL's, but not as efficient as a standard T8 florescent lamp (100 Lumens per Watt). Polymer based Electro Luminescence is not new; I am very interested in this efficiency they are talking about (which is painfully missing in the article, 5x more than what????)
I've heard a lot of concerns lobbed at capitalism from fellow nerds on here, but never that it didn't make things cheap. At the cost of human rights, the environment, natural resource depletion, sure... but cheap.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
As long as there is competition in the marketplace
ah yes, the competition-fairytale again.
In fact I'm still using kerosene lamps 'cause I didn't put no trust in that 'lectric light bulb. Now I can jump right past the incandescent era, the cfl era and even the led bulb and have my new house made of glowing plastic embedded with nano particles.
All kidding aside this opens up the possibilities of building this into products in new and innovative ways...
you and I are the market now? Narrow definition.
The market that controls the prices also includes the supply chain, and too often in capitalism, there's enough bottleneck-control (i.e. a monopoly) at some point in the supply chain, that the customer/consumer has very little to say in the price.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
A house that looks like a set from TRON will be within everyone's reach.
All CFL's that I find in the stores are "Made in China" if they are made in the US and are as they claim, I'll gladly try one out; and if they have no problems I might even replace all the bulbs in my house. For now I am stuck with CFL's which I'm afraid of. If you break a CFL it is very dangerious. If you are not suppose to vacum how do you get it out of the carpet?
Because I don't want a three-thin-lines spectrum piece of shit. It fucks up plant life, circadian rhythms and your skin.
Otherwise, EL light is nothing new, and forming a bulb out of it is pretty pointless, when you can already make it into any shape you want, and there are much better shapes than a simple bulb.
But generally, I approve of EL. The technology is nice. As long as they get rid of the annoying high-pitched sound of the transformers. (Even more annoying to dogs who can get really weird and cranky from the constant annoyance.)
An expensive conducting polymer loaded onto glass coated with ITO which "points the way" toward a usable device is nowhere near the vision articulated in the summary.
Must be really new tech. I still can't find a Wikipedia page for Fipel.
10 Steps To Destroying American Society
1. Rewrite the Constitution and break down its firewalls through Judicial and Bureaucratic fiat.
2. Concentrate all meaningful power in the Federal Government.
3. Suppress and Repress the Individual by attacking his Unalienable Rights through laws and constant torment.
4. Eliminate Private Property through Confiscatory Taxation and Regulation and wage constant war against Business Enterprises and Entrepreneurs.
5. Control Institutions of Education at all levels and turn them into Indoctrination Centers for the State.
6. Change the Citizenry by opening National Borders to virtually all comers and changing the qualifications for Citizenship to include mostly poor, uneducated illegal aliens.
7. Destroy the Private Financial Institutions that have funded the Greatest Production and Accumulation of Wealth for the Most People the World has ever known.
8. Destroy Capitalism and replace it with Redistributive Policies by Destroying the currency and Replacing it with a new currency or Revaluing the old currency.
9. Eliminate American Sovereignty through arrangements and agreements with Foreign Countries and International Bureaucracies.
10. Use American Foreign Policy not to improve American Economic and National Security, but to advance the Notion of One Government Globalism.
The coolest thing is that these things are from 2013; the developer reached into the future and brought some cool tech back in time.
D'oh, I really should read the post more carefully - I somehow missed the link to that article which was already present.
My apologies for the useless post (and this useless reply - which wouldn't be necessary if /. allowed me to delete my own comment.)
- Mike
This is no longer needed. Some countries are phasing out even CFLs in favor of LEDs, for example China by 2016 won't allow sale of units over 15w. LEDs are already "shatter proof" and they don't carry any gases inside ("solid state").
China will ban imports and sales of certain incandescent light bulbs starting October 2012 to encourage the use of alternative lighting sources such as light-emitting diodes (LEDs), with a 5-year plan of phasing-out incandescent light bulbs over 100 watts starting October 1, 2012, and gradually extend the ban to those over 15 watts on October 1, 2016. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/11/05/us-china-light-bulbs-idUSTRE7A40MV20111105
I have a couple of 10w (4x 2.5w pcs) LED flood lamps, they are too strong for direct lightning but pointing them up allows the light to reflect and diffuse back down nicely. They come up instantly and there is no flickering. Unfortunately they get a little too hot at the base because of the AC/DC transformer, thankfully i'm not enclosing them but overheating could be a problem for others. Perhaps we should adopt some form of DC power distribution inside the house to keep away this conversion from the lamps (and so many devices use DC anyway).
Have you seen white LED street lamps? I have, and they work perfectly. They are also instant (instead of minutes) and the light lets you see many more colors at night. They are about 80w to 100w, instead of the usual 250w, and happen to last 10x more.
Artix
Your Linux, your init.
Capitalism is the only reason *anything* is cheap. Capitalism is when then the market (read you & I) control the price, not a central groverening authority. A monopoly is what you are thinking of. As long as there is competition in the marketplace the prices wil alway be as low as they can be.
That explains why AT&T and Verizon are locked in a constant war of giving customers more services for less cost, right?
The problem with the "competition will fix everything" capitalist model is that it eschews reality in favor of wishful thinking.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Riiiight... You are talking about that soft-focused fairy tale of "capitalism" and "the free market"... In which you just as much love to believe, as in other fairy tales like "Jesus", Santa, the "American Dream" or the picture of the "evil Muslim (terrorist)" that is so fashionable right now.
Until you wake up to harsh reality, where in the US "market" 99% of the people are mere slaves with barely any rights at all, and big companies staying big because -- oh genius plan -- in the US you don’t vote people into office... you *buy* (aka "donate") them into office. No wonder you need all those delusions to keep going on. Otherwise you'd rampage in the streets and burn Wall Street and Washington down.
Luckily, we over here don't give a fuck anymore. You treated the whole planet like shit. And soon you will be begging, but nobody will listen anymore. So have fun going down the hard way. Booo-hooo.
What would the incentive to make such a device in a non-capitalistic economy?
I don't think you realize how much cheap stuff we have today in America?
If you look at prices today and that of 60 years ago and adjust of inflation we will see that a lot of the stuff of the past was more expensive then it is today. Heck we have a lot of things that would be excessively expensive back in the day. Our $200 cellphones would have cost millions of dollars for the same power. And they were paying a hefty price for the normal phones which we would be able to get for under $10.00.
It isn't that businesses are making things more expensive it is that we as a culture are demanding more things.
Back in the old days for your monthly bills
Mortgage, Car, Power, Telephone.
Today
Mortgage, Car, Power, Telephone, Internet, Cell Phone, Cable TV, Netflix...
Expected homes of the 1950 would be small 1000sq/ft homes. Once Car for the family, one Telephone and they will only call rarely,
For power they would power lights, heat, the refrigerator, washer and dryer, and a TV. All ran on AC power, and most when not in use were turned off.
If we were to live like we did during the 1950's we would have huge amounts of income stored up more then ever, because we would be living extremely modestly.
It isn't that things got more expensive they actually gotten cheaper, we just got more things.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It seems to me a light source that is inherently flat would be ideal for a display backlight. It probably won't make them much thinner than they already are, but it could make them less complex to produce and possibly more repairable (by replacing aged backlights).
Also, being able to attach these directly to walls and ceilings rather than mounting brackets or cutting holes for lamps would allow a wider placement of light sources than is currently practical. I'd probably have (at least) one on every wall plus some on the ceiling, to make sure that I could get an ideal spread of light sources for whatever work I might be doing.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Um, no, actually you have explained why having many competitors is a good thing. A duopoly or oligopoly is a limited form of competition where bargaining power is collected with the very few sellers. In cases like this, especially where there is a valuable resource being limited, government regulation is very much appropriate.
Capitalism, overall, is a very good thing and is responsible for our standard of living. It does not mean that it should be unchecked despite what our libertarian friends might think.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
You mean they actually came out with better light bulbs? I thought government regulation of light bulbs was going to destroy the industry and cause untold damage! You'd have thunk!
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
Yes, human rights, the environment, and natural resource depletion are sacred cows in communist countries.
Given that these things include ITO (indium-tin-oxide) and an Ir-based polymer, I'm curious as to how "cheap" these things are likely to be.
Not that the technology isn't interesting... or that they may be reformulated to use less exotic materials. But that's not mentioned anywhere.
CFL's suck, they are only more efficient than an Incandescent lamp, which is a fairly easy mark to hit. LED's, though more pleasant to use, are marginally more efficient than CFL's, but not as efficient as a standard T8 florescent lamp (100 Lumens per Watt).
Depends way too much on the LEDs and "standard" lamp to make a meaningful general comparison; both of them are phosphor-based devices, which gives you a tremendous amount of latitude in trading spectral quality for efficiency.
But I suspect you're talking about dirt-cheap LEDs made with years-old tech and poor QC to boot, or LEDs stuffed into a CFL-like bad compromise design to shoehorn them into an Edison socket, or even both.
100lm/W is not hard with current LEDs if you put them in a dedicated fixture, with lots of LEDs driven more gently and cooled adequately, instead of cramming everything in an incandescent form-factor. They're still kinda silly expensive to do right compared with T8 (thus really only applicable when fluorescents are ruled out for some reason -- for now...), but the main takeaway should be: cramming stuff into incandescent-bulb form-factor is stupid, do it right instead.
I too am looking forward to hard numbers on efficiency and spectral quality. (I'd really like spectrograms. CRI sucks as a metric, but it's better than nothing.)
Capitalism is when the market(read you & I) control the price. That is right because you & I do not care at what price that product is made. Nevermind total cost of ownership. Nevermind when the total amount of energy used in its lifetime would make the more expensive one cost far less. Nevermind when the product will break so quickly that the more expensive one would have been cheaper. Nevermind making our foods heathy because it is not our concern how much health care cost. Nevermind how many people we pay at wages far less than the true cost to them because we can not afford universal health care. Nevermind the polution that comes from making this product. Nevermind the cost of disposing the product when it becomes useless. Nevermind supporting the product in the near future so when a cheap part breaks we can sell them a new one instead of repairing the old one. Yes capitalism keeps prices cheap because everyone hopes that they can be treated fairly but at the expense of treating everyone else very poorly.
Only $500 each but guaranteed to last 500 years. Even tho in reality hold up for about 15 minutes. Here we go again.
Wuddooeyeno? IITYWYBMAD? Like nuts? eclecticallyincorrect.com
I'm very pro-capitalism in general, I was just repeating the usual criticisms levied against it around here.
Also, your logic is faulty. There are choices besides just communism and capitalism. In fact, the examples of the soviet union are probably a better example of socialism than communism, which IMHO is a theoretical system only.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
A "normal" A19 soft white bulb is about 14.5 Lumens per Watt.
A typical CFL is around 55 Lumens per Watt
A good LED bulb is around 90 Lumens per Watt (and they're getting better)
Fipel bulbs are "Highly Efficient".
Anyone have an idea what that is in Lumens per Watt?
I'm very pro-capitalism in general, I was just repeating the usual criticisms levied against it around here.
So you don't actually believe what you wrote? Were you karma whoring or just bloviating?
Also, your logic is faulty. There are choices besides just communism and capitalism. In fact, the examples of the soviet union are probably a better example of socialism than communism, which IMHO is a theoretical system only.
Pot, kettle, black.
If you look at prices today and that of 60 years ago and adjust of inflation we will see that a lot of the stuff of the past was more expensive then it is today.
Have you actually done this? I don't mean the kind of "I like the sound of it so it must be true" hand-waving you appear to be engaging in, I mean really done it: looking up actual numbers, finding a realistic baseline for comparison, and comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges (and being honest about things like relative technology levels)? 'Cause I have, and while you are absolutely correct that there is a lot more cheap stuff out there now, for the level of quality of goods which was considered normal half a century or more ago, most of what Americans buy has never been more expensive.
In fact, the average American's purchasing power is in the basement relative to what it used to be. We cover this up nicely by importing fairly inexpensive and very low-quality goods so that people can still feel like they've got lots of "stuff," and making it easy to incur a level of debt which was pretty much impossible until fairly recently, but the fact is that for most Americans, they are spending more and getting less for it than they ever have before.
Cheap? I'm old enough to remember the electric company giving out free lightbulbe in exchange for your burnt-out ones. It encouraged electricity use.
Then came the usual corporate-government ripoff partnership where business interests used a left-wing (think: Theodore Roosevelt, Republican) concept of anti-competitive behavior. Phillips sued and a judge, not Congress, decided it shall be illegal.
Most of you are confused by his post because you were trained in a meme-world based on a traditional left-right political axis, rather than a control-vs.-freedom axis, with anarch and dictatorship, facets of the same disease process, on one end, and a free yet secure state on the other, where neither thug nor government offical may seize yer stuff.
This has the additional property of good explanatory and predictive power.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Yea, in retrospect the government-sponsored duopoly of cellular carriers was probably not the most effective example to open with...
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
Heck we have a lot of things that would be excessively expensive back in the day.
A simple everyday example is food.
Most food has been reduced to near the cost of the transportation necessary to deliver it to your area. Evidence for this is the large fluctuations in food prices in lock step with fuel price fluctuations. Further evidence of this is that all food conglomerates are now also shipping conglomerates, and this is so because thats where the value creation actually happens with regards to food. The food is worth very little where it is grown and where it is processed because of the extreme efficiencies that we have achieved. It only attains value through shipping. Shipping is where the value creation happens with regards to most foods.
Yes there are "brand names" that carry a premium, but much like Apple they are essentially niche irrelevant.
More on topic, this is the historic price of light in terms of median US labor:
year - hours of work needed to purchase 1000 lumen hours of light
1800 - 5.387
1850 - 2.998
1900 - 0.2204
1950 - 0.00188
1992 - 0.00012
here is the citation for those numbers
"His name was James Damore."
11. Post Crazy Rantings as AC on a Computer Network that Never Would Have Been Created in the Private Sector.
Their house purchasing power has gone up: http://www.nahb.org/assets/docs/publication/fft2001_8142002101506AM.pdf
Even adjusting for inflation we see that we are better off than historically. http://www.davemanuel.com/median-household-income.php I'm just not sure what data you are using to back up your argument.
We don't have any more disposable income (adjusting for inflation) than in the past, but we have more luxeries and larger homes.
We would have had computer networks in the private sector... and we did. CompuServe, and The Source comes to mind. Places where you pay per month, you pay per minute logged on, per message sent, per E-mail. Content was predigested stuff from TV, and you didn't post... you requested that the message you were about to write to be posted, provided the company was OK with it.
Heck with that crap.
That is why the price of text messaging is so competitive, right? An incredibly cheap to provide service that is sold at wildly inflated prices with virtually no realistic price offered by any major carrier.
Capitalist: Noun
1) I ignore my advantages and some luck I've had and claim I earned it 100%.
There, fixed that for you.
All Hail Capatilism!
And ironically we are carrying more debt per person than ever before.
Environmental causes have long been seen as a very liberal thing ...
Not really. The National Park system was vastly expanded by a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt. The Environmental Protection Agency was established by a Republican, Richard Nixon. Hunting organizations, whose members tend to lean right, do far more land conservation than any other type of private organizations.
Certain environmental causes may seem liberal but that has more to do with a specific cause being politicized by liberals not because conservatives are inherently anti-environment. Regrettably both parties tend to automatically contest whatever the other party embraces, it does not matter if the other party embraces something worthwhile.
You're forgetting something - while your thesis that food costs are directly associated with fuel costs is correct, the reason that this is true is because fossil fuels comprise a large portion of the energy budget of food production.
From a CNN article:
Doing away with food imports could be seen as understandable if international transport played a dominant role in the food chain's greenhouse gas emissions.
But in the UK 's case -- where much of the research into the "food miles" concept has taken place -- that doesn't seem to be the case. A sturdy 85 percent of UK food transport-related emissions actually derive from domestic road deliveries according to the DFID. Road freight traffic in the UK grew by 67 percent between 1980 and 2001, with the average journey length also increasing by 40 percent.
By comparison, international freight contributes 11 percent of UK food transport-related emissions -- that's less than one-tenth of one percent of the UK 's overall emissions, the DFID says.
Transportation as a whole contributes 2.5 percent of the food chain's emissions, says FCRN. Food refrigeration, on the other hand, accounts for as much as 18 percent (and notably 3.5 percent of the UK 's entire greenhouse gas emissions).
The whole transport issue initially came to the fore after the "food miles" concept was coined in Europe to illustrate how fossil fuel-intensive the global food distribution network had become.
But the relative blame that the transport sector should be taking for this is debatable.
In the U.S., up to 20 percent of the country's fossil fuel consumption goes into the food chain, according to the UN's Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO), which points out that fossil fuel use by the food systems in the developed world "often rivals that of automobiles".
To feed an average family of four in the developed world uses up the equivalent of 930 gallons of gasoline a year -- just shy of the 1,070 gallons that same family would use up each year to power their cars.
The average developed world diet uses 1,600 liters of fossil fuels each year, according to the U.S. based Organic Consumers Association (OCA). Only 256 of those liters come from transporting the food, says OCA.
By contrast, a whopping 496 liters goes into the chemical fertilizers used during the food growing stage, representing well over one third of the food chain's entire fossil fuel consumption.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
It's true, for capitalism this is bad, one way t get round it is to destroy production, for instance through military spending. All that energy and steel locked up into fat lumps that sit around all day waiting for a war to kick of so they can break stuff. Hey, it supports the price of energy an steel don't it?
Brought on by artificially low interest rates that helped makes us believe everything was OK. If interest rates ever return to what is a historically normal range watch the carnage that results.
Capitalism is the only reason *anything* is cheap. Capitalism is when then the market (read you & I) control the price, not a central groverening authority. A monopoly is what you are thinking of. As long as there is competition in the marketplace the prices will always be as low as they can be.
Not so long as there are markets in which items and services are priced at what the market will bear, which produces the opposite pressure on price than competition. Many of these markets are not monopolies.
To me, the meaningful general comparison is what the great unwashed masses are most likely to buy at the value stores, because that's going to represent the largest installed base. And going by what you can buy in blister packs at the discount stores, original poster is demonstrably right on the money.
Arguably, better products can be purchased at higher prices, and geeks who understand the technology and have the disposable income will buy those. But -- let's be realistic for a second -- that's not what Joe Dirt and his family are going to buy.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
I would say that 2013 is dreamed too soon in this case. It is never too late to compete with LEDs, becasue they are overpriced at the moment. I bet that this guy is not going to sell his bulbs from 2013 on a massive scale, becasue he will need to sell his technology to many factories and then convince the vendors to stock up the bulbs. LEDs needed more than one year to do that and they were invented a while ago already.
~ Best man at your service.
So you don't actually believe what you wrote? Were you karma whoring or just bloviating?
No - probably just not communicating well. I was just astounded that he was claiming that capitalism would jack up the price... usually you hear people bitching about how it doesn't price in the true cost of things.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
Interest rates went up at the same time square footage went up from '63-'82. '82 the mortgage rates peaked at almost 15%. From 1963-2000 the rates went up and we still saw buying power and house size and amenities increase. What history are you using? The rates were even lower in 1950. We just recently reached as low as they have been, but all my data is during the time in which rates soared. Get your facts straight.
...the plastic uses iridium. That's expensive stuff, even if used in incredibly small quantities:
http://www.infomine.com/investment/metal-prices/iridium/
Currently over $1,000 an ounce.
Great warrior...hrmph! Wars not make one great.
From the photos, I'd say this is the holy grail of backlighting for arcade marquees! Cut to the dimensions of your marquee and you have even lighting across the whole image!
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Back in the old days for your monthly bills
Mortgage, Car, Power, Telephone.
Today
Mortgage, Car, Power, Telephone, Internet, Cell Phone, Cable TV, Netflix...
Interesting list, but for me:
no Mortgage, I'm renting
no telephone for decades
no Cable TV or Netflix
I'm considering (like others) to have Internet service through the cellphone only, and possibly going to 1 car for the family, leaving:
Renting, Car, Power, Internet/Cell Phone
Where are all these riches you mention?
Science & open-source build trust from peer review. Learn systems you can trust.
Imagine, the sort of panel lighting you see all the time in sci fi. If they can approximate black body spectrum of an incandescent, this would be amazing. I'd line the bottoms of shelves, and install panels on the ceilings and walls, under the edges of steps, under cupboards, even inside cupboards and closets and have light exactly where I need it. It seems that if this works, you can have light panels you can actually cut to size, which would allow for really creative, ultra-modern lighting installations. I would also install panels on the back of my televisions and monitors to provide ambient backlighting to increase the apparent contrast while watching movies.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
It seems like so many of these companies that pick up university R&D will simply take it to China who will then walk off with the tech, and put the American company in the ground. So, if this guy was smart, he will keep it local and choose to export bulbs, rather than import.
I guess we're assuming this someone has no dependents and has full medical, life, and funeral insurance?
What about longevity compared to LEDs? Light emitting diodes are supposed to last for 25 years or longer (although LED bulb makers provide warranties of only about 7 years). There seems to be no hard figure for the life expectancy of a Fipel, but Carroll says he’s had one working in his lab for about 10 years.
The reason is that there is next to no heat from it. As such, it should be about as efficient as LEDs, and last a similar time.
What is interesting is that this will be cheap to manufacture compared to LEDs.
He's actually correct. The problem is that we don't have meaningful competition in many sectors of our economy, we have industries tied up in regulatory capture (patents, copyrights, etc. overreaching, no-bid contracts, regulatory rules that benefit incumbents, etc.).
The other issue is that "true" capitalism requires complete, perfect information and zero transport costs for the consumer. I can choose from any supplier with no cost of switching, and I know the full differences between all of them. Given that that is impossible, it's impossible to have proper invisible hand capitalism here in the real world.
What we need to strive for is making sure the regulations are in place to protect the consumer against information "warfare" from the producers while simultaneously preventing corporations from abusing those regulations for their own benefit. Given the money that flows through government and corporations right now, I'm not holding out high hopes of that changing meaningfully any time soon...
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Imagine, the sort of panel lighting you see all the time in sci fi.
It's been available since the 1960s. Electroluminescent sheets have been around for over 40 years. They're on the expensive side and light output per unit area is low, but they work fine. Some versions last for decades. (Some don't, which is a big problem for permanent installation.) They make good night lights and somewhat dim display backlights.
Here's a A3 sized white electroluminescent sheet. About 12" x 17", costs $125.
So this is not a new thing. If the new version is a lot brighter or a lot cheaper, it might be useful. For now, it's another "nanotechnology" materials science article about an interesting lab phenomenon.
Regulated capitalism, yes.
Pure capitalism gives us the current miserable state of the airlines where a passenger is treated with as much respect as a prison snitch, except the guys meeting Bubba don't have to pay fees to do so.
Pure capitalism gave us the Gilded Age which worked until the banks failed, and nearly destroyed the country.
Pure capitalism has given us our beautiful state of telcos and ISPs...
Pure capitalism has given us our mess of electric problems still in California with brownouts... while companies like Enron made billions, then walked off, leaving their mess on the taxpayers.
Capitalism + wise government regulation, yes. Either of the extremes (pure capitalism or a command economy), and we have witnessed the failures of either.
It still is, and serves as one of the ways (some others: debt, marriage, marijuana) you can tell the difference between a conservative and a Republican.
BBC - 404 - Page Not Found
ScienceDirect - Sorry, your request can't be processed due to a system problem. Contact the Help Desk if the problem persists. [SD-008]
Why?
The antidote to dishonesty is not more dishonesty.
If you think that telecommunications is an unregulated market, you are a friggin' moron.
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
love it
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
that way I have no regrets with littering the globe with them. We don't need more petroleum based polymers polluting the globe.
Yes, unless you are such a coward you plan to live your life in a skinner box.
Every single time you cross the street you put yourself in far more danger than you will drinking raw milk. You do realize millions of people have drunk billions of gallons of it, don't you? You're in more danger from hot dog carts, by far (look it up, seriously).
Any idiot who thinks they are doing themselves a favor by decreasing their exposure to common bacteria is an anti-science corporate shill.
Not as much of a moron as someone who posts such a statement, 2 hours after I make that very point myself.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
The airlines were already in a miserable state due to the overregulation of the industry (they couldnt even drop unprofitable routes without approval, and frequently were denied that approval). the number of actors was already too small to truly function as a case of pure capitalism. even so, immediately after deregulation profit went up and the industry improved before the industry slid over to the other side of the scale, and became what we know today. and you're specific comment has more to do with the TSA and the magic word Terrorism than the airline industry as a whole. Verdict: Not pure capitalism
the Telcos and ISPs? Also wrong.
First telcos: There used to be one. AT&T. with a almost federally mandated monopoly for many years. then that went away but they were already big kahuna so it was too late. then they were broke up. into what were essentially regional monpolies with a few competing long distance providers. Notice, not pure capitalism. Eventually a congress forced all of them to allow competing carriers over their wires, resulting in the explosion of 10-10-220 type long distance companies. An explosion of competition and lower prices resulting from a state closer to "pure capitalism". Then enforcement of that fell off, and the baby bells began buying each other out until finally SWbell bought the others and AT&T itself out, so now there's just one AT&T again.
Next: ISPs....phone companies covered above. Cable companies? Locally mandated/allowed monopoies.
Result: also not a result of pure capitalism
California brownouts? power companies are locally mandated/controlled monopolies. Fraid you miss the mark there too.
The gilded age? Largely revolved around things related to railroads (another natural monopoly). Steel had just a few big actors. The railroads, same. Still not pure capitalism.
Overall, your definition of pure capitalism needs work.
Pure capitalism relies on having -many- actors acting in competition driven by self interest. The fewer actors, the less pure it is, and the more it tends and accelerates towards becoming a oligoploy, duopoly and finally monopoly. A well placed regulation or two can preserve the pure capialism state (see the bit about 10-10-220 long distance competition). A poorly placed regulation can cripple an industry (airlines forced to keep routes that lose money; good for the people served sure..but bad for the industry as they lose money).
Essentialyl you're thinking of it in terms of a single axis line, with pure capitalism on one side and pure regulation on the other, the two extremes being essentially exclusive. That's wrong. It should be viewed as a 2-axis plot, minimum wont cover 3rd and 4th dimension axis), with capitalism being one axis (pure to monopoly) and regulation being another (good to bad).
TL;DR: pure capitalism gave us none of those things. Your post is wrong except for the last line.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
See a good doctor. Lasik is not for everyone and as they say, your millage may vary.
I finally decided to see a doctor about it and ended up with intraocular lenses, because I was developing cataracts. Shitty eyes, near-sighted, astigmatism, far-sighted (from age) and then cataracts.
I have worn glasses for more than 40 years so I decided the knife was worth it, if I could regain some vision even if I had to still use glasses; now I can see far without trouble but still have to get the reading glasses on small print, but I CAN SEE
See a doctor, it is worth it. You can't imagine how beautiful it is to wake up, open your eyes and see!
Be very, very careful what you put into that head, because you will never, ever get it out. - Cardinal Wolsey
Did somebody mention innovation?
Time to resurrect all those expired light bulb patents by adding "from a light emitting plastic" to every claim!
Capitalist: Noun
1) Some other guy that is making money, while I sit whining in my mother's basement.
1a) re product sold by the guy making money: " I could have thought of that if I wanted to"
This is the end of pro wrestling as we know it! How can you have a light tube death match when they're shatterproof?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAyQ1PvBk2o
Theodore Roosevelt was a progressive, an anomaly in the Republican party. A bully and a warmonger, it's no wonder he started the National Park System. Nixon's regrettable start of the EPA came about in the following manner:
_Nixon ended the Vietnam War
_Leftists, now devoid of issues, thrashed around to find new wounds, and found environmentalism.
_Nixon undercut the leftists by forming the EPA
_The leftists temporarily dropped environmentalism like a hot potato because their most hated enemy, Nixon, supported it.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
yeah, the cheapest way to make ammonia (i.e. fix nitrogen) is to strip the hydrogens from methane and stick them to nitrogen, using the heat from burning the methane.
It would be super easy to turn farm vehicles into ammonia-burners. Belgian buses burned ammonia during WWII.
But where to get vast amounts of cheap ammonia? We would need lots and lots of heat and electricity.
Oh well, there's no way to use the strong force to get terajoules of energy out of kilograms of fuel. I guess we're stuck with fossil fuels and we'll have to change our lifestyle when we run out.
Will it generate radio interference?
It doesn't even mean that... shatter proof means it wont end up in a zillion razor sharp shards for you to step on. It could still be easy to break. Jello is shatter proof...
Depends on how hard you hit it. I hear Jello shatters just FINE if you hit it fast and hard enough.
Of course the sharp fragments don't STAY sharp in the timescales involved in stepping on one of them - or even getting to the floor from the "shattering" event.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way