Unfortunately, lazy or newbie programmers will use autoboxing and varargs more than just sparingly and being the second generation coder on a project where these features are used liberally is a hell I would not wish on my worst enemy.
I'm curious as to what, in your opinion, would be an example of a justifiable use of autoboxing and what would be unjustifiable?
For everybody tossing around the phrase "syntactic sugar" just a reminder that everything besides 0 and 1 is syntactic sugar of one sort or another.
I think that is an interesting thing to think about, even if it turns out the paint doesn't stop your windows from functioning as windows.
The buzzword du jour in my city is "densification"... we keep hearing how the days of the single family (detached) home are over. We keep hearing about how we need to increase urban "densification" to make things more liveable (huh????) and reduce our environmental footprint. At the same time the city delivers more and more by-laws restricting individual behaviour, which become more and more necessary as we cram more and more people into the same space. Conformity stops being a choice and becomes necessity. Then I look up at the big residential and office towers. I keep getting this feeling we are being turned into insects.
These are serious concerns. A long time ago the Canadian government started "encouraging" university researchers to do more applied research instead of basic research. For example suddenly we had guys in the physics department looking at ways to improve industrial processes. That's not necessarily a bad thing but for basic research being left undone because of the relative ease of getting money for applied research. People go to school for a long time to become faculty members and if the choice they have is "do applied research and you'll get lots of money for facilities, support personnel etc." and "do basic research and maybe you'll get some money you can scrimp by on and if you're lucky get some research done under really trying and frustrating conditions" then human nature is going to lead to applied being chosen over basic more and more often. That's a huge mistake for society to make IMHO.
I have a lot of the same concerns. And frankly since I paid for the research through my taxes I think I should own it through the agency of my government. The research results should belong to either the appropriate level of government or the university that employs the researcher, or some mix of the two. The exact mix could depend on where the money for constructing and maintaining the university, providing grants etc. came from. Hopefully those entities make the results available to others at no charge.
The argument that is frequently made is that the best and brightest will go to industry if they don't get something extra. Fine, pay them industry level wages. Why not? The added perks of tenure, relative freedom etc. should be more than enough to tip the balance towards the academic life. But the results of that work should belong to all of us. Whether or not the results should be freely available to industry is debatable and I can see good arguments for either side of that debate.
It should also be remembered that different places have different ways of supporting university research. Some make it very competitive, with universities requiring researchers to pay for the facilities they use and government grants only going to the cream of the crop. Others tend to provide basic infrastructure as part of being hired while government research funding is spread around as much as possible so that most researchers get some funding for their work.
It's not a question of corporate dungeons etc. etc. I know people who were doing computer generated music 30 years ago when that idea was really new and you had to have access to a really serious machine (for its day) to do anything... problem is most people didn't really want to listen to it. Most people still don't want to listen to anything drastically different than what they were exposed to growing up. Take Sitar music or Gamelan... age old music, very popular from whence it came, but most North Americans wouldn't enjoy listening to it.
And a lot of the things people did when sound cards showed up cheap enough to be ubiquitous... well... it was just harsh.
I think the single thing most likely to encourage creativity and diversity is pirating. The economics are shifting and the profit will be gone which in turn means the days of "supergroups" and "superstars" is ending... the money just isn't there. That in turn will open things up to a lot of people. It's pretty much the case now that anyone with a few bucks will be able to make as much music, with as much complexity, as they want and be able to distribute it to as many people as want to listen to it. Music critics will become much more important. I think will live performances, something computer generated music tends to fall down on, will become much more common as well.
The same is true of movies and TV... the money is disappearing and soon it just won't be viable to have big production costs. Synthetic actors are getting better and better and processing power for special effects is getting cheaper and cheaper. Look at TV and how many reality (read: cheap to make) shows occupy the schedule. Soon enough the money won't be there to keep large interests in the game and then small independents will have more and more opportunity to obtain audience share.
I think we are witnessing the death of entertainment as we know it. Kids being born now will have difficulty relating to the idea of "network tv" and so on... it will be like describing the day before TV to today's kids. And the replacement will in many ways resemble entertainment from a century ago or more.
I agree, next English 101 assignment: relate Einstein's famous E=MC**2 to the concept of a positively curved space-time and discuss how the interaction of the two concepts could relate to common sub-texts of beat generation poetry... yeah, let them try and plagiarize with that! Heh heh heh....
Got it now - it was Brainstorm with Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher (if you want to see evil check her out in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest), Cliff Robertson and Natalie Wood.
There is a very interesting little book about this sort of thing called "The Tacit Dimension" written by Polanyi, a philosopher interested in epistemology.
The idea of sensory playback has been around in science fiction for at least several decades. There was also a movie exploring this (cannot remember the name, it starred Christopher Walken and Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) something like 15-20 years ago. In the movie there are various recordings, the obvious one, a sex tape which someone looped into continuous playback, and one of someone dying.
Synesthesia, perceiving one sensory input as another (e.g. sound is seen) has also long been a topic in science fiction, iirc The Stars My Destination had a character named Gully Foyle who experienced this.
The DEC PDP line from the 60's which were the first real lab computers and mini-computers.
The IMSAI 8080 from the 70's, the first "real" computer that people could buy and assemble, and which pre-dated the Apple by quite a bit.
CPM from the 70's, the first general OS (some may quibble at that description) for micro-computers and which formed the model for Seattle Computer DOS which in turn formed the model for MS-DOS.
The S100 bus also from the late 70's and early 80's, which became the first bus standard for micro computers thus creating an industry for third party after-market add on cards to microcomputers.
The IBM PC from the 80's, the machine which rocketed microcomputers into the conciousness of the public and business.
There are a lot of innovations missed in the article that were a lot more fundamental than some of those that did make the article.
Of the top of my head some other important computer related tech products which fundamentally changed the tech scene:
DECTape cheap (relatively) random access mass storage.
DEC bus architectures in the PDP-8/12 and PDP-11 lines.
CRT terminals as a replacement for hard copy terminals.
Storage tube crt's opening up the world of computer graphics (e.g. Tektronix)
Modems and acoustic couplers
Ethernet
Unix
IBM TSO which popularized time-sharing
Burroughs computers which introduced the idea of stack architecture computing.
IBM MFT/MVT which popularized multi-tasking OS's
and on and on and on... the problem with the article is that they seem to think (for the most part) that "of all time" is a period that begins more or less in the 1980's. It would be interesting to know the age of the authors.
Anyway, to close how about: the punched card which fundamentally altered the way information was recorded, stored and processed for most of a century?
Just because you use something that is free doesn't mean you can't give credit where credit is due. It also doesn't mean that you shouldn't give credit where it is due. I have no idea of the specifics behind the compiz/beryl case so this isn't a comment on that, but in general it's considered bad form to not give credit where it is due.
It seems to me that all the schools have to do is require the students to surrender their copyright rights - possibly just for this purpose alone - when they sign up for the course or perhaps when they enrol in the school.
It's been a while since I've looked at the patent process so you can take this with a bucket of salt... iirc if you patent something and do not reveal prior art, including not putting enough effort into looking for it in the first place, then if and when you are sued (regarding the patent) the penalties to which you are subject in court are tripled.
You're both right. It needs to be better and it can't be perfect.
Here's my take on the particular situation the OP brought up.
1. telling the user about the problem 1A. it can detect the problem well enough to tell the user what needs to be done... so why doesn't it just ask if it is ok to do that and then do it itself so the user doesn't have to figure out how to type in a command. 1B. if 1A is too much work then at least tell the user "you will need to type this in a window; you get the window by...."
2. telling the user about privilege 2A. It should, tell the user his account doesn't have the privilege necessary... 2B. It should tell the user in words a newbie is most likely to understand, not "you need to be superuser" or something similar but "you will need administrator privileges to do this; here is how you can get them for the purpose of running this command". Administrator is a plain English word whose plain English meaning is exactly right for this context.
I know, it is a PITA to explain every last thing to newbies, but if you aren't willing to put the effort in to do that then you will never win over new users... they will hit something like this, throw their hands up in the air and go back to something more familiar - whatever that is. That's human nature, it isn't going to change, you have two choices: get used to it and work around it or give up. That's all there is to it.
Anyone have a good idea of the technical requirements to feed energy back into the grid? I would assume it would have to be AC that is frequency and phase matched to the local power co line and some way of switching the house between the company line and the solar output. What kind of plant would it require and are there boxes already made to handle this part at a reasonable price?
I used to travel between Canada and the US on a frequent basis. I haven't for a few years now so things may have changed a bit but I always found it harder getting into Canada than getting into the US - and I'm Canadian. I'm always very polite to the people at both sides of the border but the last time this happened to me I was picking up some blank media and coming back and the customs agent apparently decided she didn't like me for some reason. The result was about 6 hours of my time wasted; I kept it polite but I knew that some of what they were telling me about their required procedures was wrong, i.e. they were deliberately making it harder by ignoring their own procedures, but I had no way to prove it at the time.
I tend to agree about committing "crimes" where they are not crimes. In this case the guy isn't even a resident of the country where the action is criminal. Hopefully there is more to this is it appears, otherwise it is truly twisted.
Canada now has laws that make it a crime for a Canadian to go to another country and engage in activities that are perfectly legal in that country but illegal if they were performed in Canada. It essentially makes you the property of the state since they have taken the right to control your behaviour even when you are not in the country. Unfortunately the crime they chose to start out on is sex with children - paedophiles going on sex vacations in third world countries - and nobody is going to be seen to do anything that might support that, so there is not going to be any public outcry against the law even though it makes citizens into chattel and will undoubtedly be expanded to other types of crimes... like copyright infringement.
There are at least a couple of things going on that would support the "undemocratic" idea, and before anyone asks, no I don't have cites handy so proceed to ignore this if it makes you uncomfortable.
Many years ago (25?) there were studies that showed men were better able than women to visually (mentally) rotate objects or, equivalently, recognize the equivalence between two objects seen at different rotations. The application to engineering, maths, chemistry and physics are obvious.
Second, and afaik, it is accepted that when measuring some traits the bell curve for men is flatter than the bell curve for women. In other words with men there are more outliers than with women. In intelligence this would mean that there are more extremely intelligent men than extremely intelligent women and more extremely unintelligent men than extremely unintelligent women. The result is that while average intelligence may be the same there will be differences in outcome in fields that require abilities at the edge of the envelope.
It is obvious that there are differences in the abilities of men and women. This is why so many sports are sex segregated. Why should "less physical" traits be any different?
Well then you probably won't like what London is doing to reduce emissions . I saw this in a news show last night but did not see the entire segment so caveat emptor.
If you live outside London you have to sign on and buy an entry permit before you can drive into the city. I believe it was the equivalent of $20 per entry (there's still parking etc. on top of that). They were claiming significant traffic reductions (on the order of 20% iirc) which of course was leading them to the idea of upping the fee - doubling it (again iirc). Of course it is also a huge cash cow so how long before politicians start using it for that?
For many cities this sort of thing will be easy to implement and a huge cash cow... easily millions of dollars a day. How would they be able to resist? Should you sell your place in the burbs and try to buy in the city while it's still possible? Maybe, but this may also have the effect of convincing people to find work elsewhere thus acting as a force to lower density... the opposite of what many believe is desirable from the standpoint of an environmental footprint.
But to bring it back to what you said... this in no way measures a person's total impact. Hit the city five times a week or once, each hit will cost the same. Drive 1,000Km for each hit and the cost is the same as if it was 10Km for each hit. I do think that eventually cities or larger entities will hit on the idea of reading odometers and charging for distance travelled per year... but of course that still doesn't say anything about how large an emission load your driving has produced. Now a gas tax would do that but... oh yeah, they already do that, so why these other schemes?
Sorry, accidentally hit submit instead of preview so I didn't see that I'd messed up the quote the first time I posted this.
the incandescent bulb -- which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light -- will be phased out.
All the energy used ends up being heat, whether the bulb is incandescent or fluorescent, except for the miniscule energy that escapes the planet and that still becomes heat somewhere else. The point is that fluorescent uses less energy per lumen than incandescent, not that the energy used for fluorescent doesn't end up being heat.
the incandescent bulb -- which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light -- will be phased out.
All the energy used ends up being heat, whether the bulb is incandescent or fluorescent, except for the miniscule energy that escapes the planet and that still becomes heat somewhere else. The point is that fluorescent uses less energy per lumen than incandescent, not that the energy used for fluorescent doesn't end up being heat.
It's going to be even trickier than that. What if the character with the fake tears also has her face airbrushed to perfection and through good product placement the character is known to use that Avon product you were talking about? Is still just fine tuning a dramatic scene or is it fraudulent advertising or perhaps both?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious as to what, in your opinion, would be an example of a justifiable use of autoboxing and what would be unjustifiable?
For everybody tossing around the phrase "syntactic sugar" just a reminder that everything besides 0 and 1 is syntactic sugar of one sort or another.
I think that is an interesting thing to think about, even if it turns out the paint doesn't stop your windows from functioning as windows.
The buzzword du jour in my city is "densification"... we keep hearing how the days of the single family (detached) home are over. We keep hearing about how we need to increase urban "densification" to make things more liveable (huh????) and reduce our environmental footprint. At the same time the city delivers more and more by-laws restricting individual behaviour, which become more and more necessary as we cram more and more people into the same space. Conformity stops being a choice and becomes necessity. Then I look up at the big residential and office towers. I keep getting this feeling we are being turned into insects.
The inventors of IEFBR14
It's been sooooo long but let me see if I can drag it out of memory... "Probable programmer error"?
These are serious concerns. A long time ago the Canadian government started "encouraging" university researchers to do more applied research instead of basic research. For example suddenly we had guys in the physics department looking at ways to improve industrial processes. That's not necessarily a bad thing but for basic research being left undone because of the relative ease of getting money for applied research. People go to school for a long time to become faculty members and if the choice they have is "do applied research and you'll get lots of money for facilities, support personnel etc." and "do basic research and maybe you'll get some money you can scrimp by on and if you're lucky get some research done under really trying and frustrating conditions" then human nature is going to lead to applied being chosen over basic more and more often. That's a huge mistake for society to make IMHO.
I have a lot of the same concerns. And frankly since I paid for the research through my taxes I think I should own it through the agency of my government. The research results should belong to either the appropriate level of government or the university that employs the researcher, or some mix of the two. The exact mix could depend on where the money for constructing and maintaining the university, providing grants etc. came from. Hopefully those entities make the results available to others at no charge.
The argument that is frequently made is that the best and brightest will go to industry if they don't get something extra. Fine, pay them industry level wages. Why not? The added perks of tenure, relative freedom etc. should be more than enough to tip the balance towards the academic life. But the results of that work should belong to all of us. Whether or not the results should be freely available to industry is debatable and I can see good arguments for either side of that debate.
It should also be remembered that different places have different ways of supporting university research. Some make it very competitive, with universities requiring researchers to pay for the facilities they use and government grants only going to the cream of the crop. Others tend to provide basic infrastructure as part of being hired while government research funding is spread around as much as possible so that most researchers get some funding for their work.
It's not a question of corporate dungeons etc. etc. I know people who were doing computer generated music 30 years ago when that idea was really new and you had to have access to a really serious machine (for its day) to do anything... problem is most people didn't really want to listen to it. Most people still don't want to listen to anything drastically different than what they were exposed to growing up. Take Sitar music or Gamelan... age old music, very popular from whence it came, but most North Americans wouldn't enjoy listening to it.
And a lot of the things people did when sound cards showed up cheap enough to be ubiquitous... well... it was just harsh.
I think the single thing most likely to encourage creativity and diversity is pirating. The economics are shifting and the profit will be gone which in turn means the days of "supergroups" and "superstars" is ending... the money just isn't there. That in turn will open things up to a lot of people. It's pretty much the case now that anyone with a few bucks will be able to make as much music, with as much complexity, as they want and be able to distribute it to as many people as want to listen to it. Music critics will become much more important. I think will live performances, something computer generated music tends to fall down on, will become much more common as well.
The same is true of movies and TV... the money is disappearing and soon it just won't be viable to have big production costs. Synthetic actors are getting better and better and processing power for special effects is getting cheaper and cheaper. Look at TV and how many reality (read: cheap to make) shows occupy the schedule. Soon enough the money won't be there to keep large interests in the game and then small independents will have more and more opportunity to obtain audience share.
I think we are witnessing the death of entertainment as we know it. Kids being born now will have difficulty relating to the idea of "network tv" and so on... it will be like describing the day before TV to today's kids. And the replacement will in many ways resemble entertainment from a century ago or more.
I agree, next English 101 assignment: relate Einstein's famous E=MC**2 to the concept of a positively curved space-time and discuss how the interaction of the two concepts could relate to common sub-texts of beat generation poetry... yeah, let them try and plagiarize with that! Heh heh heh....
With a substantial portion of the whole science fiction genre available to point to as prior art this ought to be fun in court.
Got it now - it was Brainstorm with Christopher Walken, Louise Fletcher (if you want to see evil check her out in One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest), Cliff Robertson and Natalie Wood.
There is a very interesting little book about this sort of thing called "The Tacit Dimension" written by Polanyi, a philosopher interested in epistemology.
The idea of sensory playback has been around in science fiction for at least several decades. There was also a movie exploring this (cannot remember the name, it starred Christopher Walken and Nurse Ratchet from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest) something like 15-20 years ago. In the movie there are various recordings, the obvious one, a sex tape which someone looped into continuous playback, and one of someone dying.
Synesthesia, perceiving one sensory input as another (e.g. sound is seen) has also long been a topic in science fiction, iirc The Stars My Destination had a character named Gully Foyle who experienced this.
(Did I miss anyone that mattered?)
The DEC PDP line from the 60's which were the first real lab computers and mini-computers.
The IMSAI 8080 from the 70's, the first "real" computer that people could buy and assemble, and which pre-dated the Apple by quite a bit.
CPM from the 70's, the first general OS (some may quibble at that description) for micro-computers and which formed the model for Seattle Computer DOS which in turn formed the model for MS-DOS.
The S100 bus also from the late 70's and early 80's, which became the first bus standard for micro computers thus creating an industry for third party after-market add on cards to microcomputers.
The IBM PC from the 80's, the machine which rocketed microcomputers into the conciousness of the public and business.
There are a lot of innovations missed in the article that were a lot more fundamental than some of those that did make the article.
Of the top of my head some other important computer related tech products which fundamentally changed the tech scene:
DECTape cheap (relatively) random access mass storage.
DEC bus architectures in the PDP-8/12 and PDP-11 lines.
CRT terminals as a replacement for hard copy terminals.
Storage tube crt's opening up the world of computer graphics (e.g. Tektronix)
Modems and acoustic couplers
Ethernet
Unix
IBM TSO which popularized time-sharing
Burroughs computers which introduced the idea of stack architecture computing.
IBM MFT/MVT which popularized multi-tasking OS's
and on and on and on... the problem with the article is that they seem to think (for the most part) that "of all time" is a period that begins more or less in the 1980's. It would be interesting to know the age of the authors.
Anyway, to close how about: the punched card which fundamentally altered the way information was recorded, stored and processed for most of a century?
Just because you use something that is free doesn't mean you can't give credit where credit is due. It also doesn't mean that you shouldn't give credit where it is due. I have no idea of the specifics behind the compiz/beryl case so this isn't a comment on that, but in general it's considered bad form to not give credit where it is due.
It seems to me that all the schools have to do is require the students to surrender their copyright rights - possibly just for this purpose alone - when they sign up for the course or perhaps when they enrol in the school.
It's been a while since I've looked at the patent process so you can take this with a bucket of salt... iirc if you patent something and do not reveal prior art, including not putting enough effort into looking for it in the first place, then if and when you are sued (regarding the patent) the penalties to which you are subject in court are tripled.
You're both right. It needs to be better and it can't be perfect.
Here's my take on the particular situation the OP brought up.
1. telling the user about the problem
1A. it can detect the problem well enough to tell the user what needs to be done... so why doesn't it just ask if it is ok to do that and then do it itself so the user doesn't have to figure out how to type in a command.
1B. if 1A is too much work then at least tell the user "you will need to type this in a window; you get the window by...."
2. telling the user about privilege
2A. It should, tell the user his account doesn't have the privilege necessary...
2B. It should tell the user in words a newbie is most likely to understand, not "you need to be superuser" or something similar but "you will need administrator privileges to do this; here is how you can get them for the purpose of running this command". Administrator is a plain English word whose plain English meaning is exactly right for this context.
I know, it is a PITA to explain every last thing to newbies, but if you aren't willing to put the effort in to do that then you will never win over new users... they will hit something like this, throw their hands up in the air and go back to something more familiar - whatever that is. That's human nature, it isn't going to change, you have two choices: get used to it and work around it or give up. That's all there is to it.
Anyone have a good idea of the technical requirements to feed energy back into the grid? I would assume it would have to be AC that is frequency and phase matched to the local power co line and some way of switching the house between the company line and the solar output. What kind of plant would it require and are there boxes already made to handle this part at a reasonable price?
I used to travel between Canada and the US on a frequent basis. I haven't for a few years now so things may have changed a bit but I always found it harder getting into Canada than getting into the US - and I'm Canadian. I'm always very polite to the people at both sides of the border but the last time this happened to me I was picking up some blank media and coming back and the customs agent apparently decided she didn't like me for some reason. The result was about 6 hours of my time wasted; I kept it polite but I knew that some of what they were telling me about their required procedures was wrong, i.e. they were deliberately making it harder by ignoring their own procedures, but I had no way to prove it at the time.
I tend to agree about committing "crimes" where they are not crimes. In this case the guy isn't even a resident of the country where the action is criminal. Hopefully there is more to this is it appears, otherwise it is truly twisted.
Canada now has laws that make it a crime for a Canadian to go to another country and engage in activities that are perfectly legal in that country but illegal if they were performed in Canada. It essentially makes you the property of the state since they have taken the right to control your behaviour even when you are not in the country. Unfortunately the crime they chose to start out on is sex with children - paedophiles going on sex vacations in third world countries - and nobody is going to be seen to do anything that might support that, so there is not going to be any public outcry against the law even though it makes citizens into chattel and will undoubtedly be expanded to other types of crimes... like copyright infringement.
There are at least a couple of things going on that would support the "undemocratic" idea, and before anyone asks, no I don't have cites handy so proceed to ignore this if it makes you uncomfortable.
Many years ago (25?) there were studies that showed men were better able than women to visually (mentally) rotate objects or, equivalently, recognize the equivalence between two objects seen at different rotations. The application to engineering, maths, chemistry and physics are obvious.
Second, and afaik, it is accepted that when measuring some traits the bell curve for men is flatter than the bell curve for women. In other words with men there are more outliers than with women. In intelligence this would mean that there are more extremely intelligent men than extremely intelligent women and more extremely unintelligent men than extremely unintelligent women. The result is that while average intelligence may be the same there will be differences in outcome in fields that require abilities at the edge of the envelope.
It is obvious that there are differences in the abilities of men and women. This is why so many sports are sex segregated. Why should "less physical" traits be any different?
was that a squeak from down south?
Well then you probably won't like what London is doing to reduce emissions . I saw this in a news show last night but did not see the entire segment so caveat emptor.
If you live outside London you have to sign on and buy an entry permit before you can drive into the city. I believe it was the equivalent of $20 per entry (there's still parking etc. on top of that). They were claiming significant traffic reductions (on the order of 20% iirc) which of course was leading them to the idea of upping the fee - doubling it (again iirc). Of course it is also a huge cash cow so how long before politicians start using it for that?
For many cities this sort of thing will be easy to implement and a huge cash cow... easily millions of dollars a day. How would they be able to resist? Should you sell your place in the burbs and try to buy in the city while it's still possible? Maybe, but this may also have the effect of convincing people to find work elsewhere thus acting as a force to lower density... the opposite of what many believe is desirable from the standpoint of an environmental footprint.
But to bring it back to what you said... this in no way measures a person's total impact. Hit the city five times a week or once, each hit will cost the same. Drive 1,000Km for each hit and the cost is the same as if it was 10Km for each hit. I do think that eventually cities or larger entities will hit on the idea of reading odometers and charging for distance travelled per year... but of course that still doesn't say anything about how large an emission load your driving has produced. Now a gas tax would do that but... oh yeah, they already do that, so why these other schemes?
Sorry, accidentally hit submit instead of preview so I didn't see that I'd messed up the quote the first time I posted this.
the incandescent bulb -- which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light -- will be phased out.
All the energy used ends up being heat, whether the bulb is incandescent or fluorescent, except for the miniscule energy that escapes the planet and that still becomes heat somewhere else. The point is that fluorescent uses less energy per lumen than incandescent, not that the energy used for fluorescent doesn't end up being heat.
the incandescent bulb -- which converts the majority of used energy to heat rather then light -- will be phased out.
All the energy used ends up being heat, whether the bulb is incandescent or fluorescent, except for the miniscule energy that escapes the planet and that still becomes heat somewhere else. The point is that fluorescent uses less energy per lumen than incandescent, not that the energy used for fluorescent doesn't end up being heat.
It's going to be even trickier than that. What if the character with the fake tears also has her face airbrushed to perfection and through good product placement the character is known to use that Avon product you were talking about? Is still just fine tuning a dramatic scene or is it fraudulent advertising or perhaps both?