Because the amount of mercury released over the lifetime of a CFL is still less than the amount of mercury released in order to power conventional light bulbs for the same length of time. Here's a study (pdf).
For the link-phobic, here's the abstract:
Abstract
This paper addresses the debate over compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and incandescents through
life-cycle analyses (LCA) conducted in the SimaPro1 life-cycle analysis program. It compares the
environmental impacts of providing a given amount of light (approximately 1,600 lumens) from
incandescents and CFLs for 10,000 hours. Special attention has been paid to recently raised
concerns regarding CFLs--specifically that their complex manufacturing process uses so much
energy that it outweighs the benefits of using CFLs, that turning CFLs on and off frequently
eliminates their energy-efficiency benefits, and that they contain a large amount of mercury. The
research shows that the efficiency benefits compensate for the added complexity in manufacturing,
that while rapid on-off cycling of the lamp does reduce the environmental (and payback) benefits of
CFLs they remain a net "win," and that the mercury emitted over a CFL's life--by power plants to
power the CFL and by leakage on disposal--is still less than the mercury that can be attributed to
powering the incandescent.
Proof? There is no absolute proof, except in mathematics. Try "proving" that what goes up must come down -- the best you'll be able to do is show that it's always happened in the past. What we have are strong correlations, and fairly easy extrapolations based on current data. But that's good enough, because there's no need to "go five steps backwards". That implies that the only way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions is to return to a pre-industrial level of technology. On the contrary, by advancing further forwards we have the chance to protect our way of life at a much more significant level than simply being able to continue burning fossil fuels. It's a choice between standing still and possibly being dragged back if we do nothing, or leaping forward and avoiding the possibility of our downfall.
Well, methane from cows (it actually comes from both ends) is still our fault, since we're the ones raising the cows. It's probably due to a combination of factors, though, not any one thing. But even if it's due to entirely natural processes (say increased solar output), that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about it -- having most of our cities underwater won't be much fun whether we caused it or not, and if we can reduce the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that's likely to help. And most of the things we can do to reduce the possible human causes of global warming will have other long term benefits, like cheaper energy and improved air quality.
But the main thing is that if we don't do something quickly, it may be too late. It's like Pascal's Wager -- there are really very few penalties for doing something and being wrong, but there are very harsh penalties for doing nothing and being wrong.
To be fair, that's the price he cited for international roaming. TFA cites prices "as low as 20 euros per month" for regular mobile broadband usage in some countries. That's a lot better, though I'm still not going to pay it until the coverage is better and the speeds are actually comparable to a hotspot.
If that's possible, then it's much more trivial for the accomplice to smuggle in a non-liquid explosive and hand that off. Seriously, the liquid explosives they're supposedly worried about are incredibly difficult to actually get to work. It's all scare tactics on the part of the government.
Well, it's great to know how people should be judged. Unfortunately, that's very rarely how they actually are judged... in part because the people doing the judging often don't even have the capability to assess the correct criteria. Knowing how to impress people with poor evaluative skills is still useful if you want to get somewhere in the real world. And those people aren't completely on crack, either -- they're doing something that we all do sometimes, using evidence from a known domain to give clues about the quality of an unknown domain. If you're buying a car, and you have a choice between one with a perfect exterior and one with a few rust holes in the body, you're probably going to pick the nice-looking one, even if they appear to run the same, because it's evidence that it was better treated, and the mechanical parts of the car are likely to last longer, too. Of course, you could be completely wrong, but you're still basing your decision on the evidence you have. For people, the reasoning is similar: someone who is careful in their appearance is also probably careful in their work.
Personally, I work for a nonprofit, mostly from home, so I don't have to worry about my appearance much. On the other hand, I also don't make much money; if I cared enough about money to work in industry, I certainly wouldn't ignore how I look.
Unfortunately, public libraries tend not to get much funding even in fairly wealthy areas. My local library in Cambridge, MA is only open five days a week, and most of those days it's not open in the evenings. (Though I'm sure that there that are branches with better hours.)
How do you get to that website when you don't have wireless access?
Seriously, free wifi is great, but unless you plan carefully in advance, it's not always easy to find. Starbucks, on the other hand, is everywhere, so I'm glad that on the rare occasions that I'm willing to pay for wireless it will be cheaper. ($4 for two hours is about on the upper end of what I'm willing to pay; I still want to see a micropayments model, where I can buy 15 minutes for 50 cents. At that point, it would be worth it just to quickly check my email and look something up online.)
Sure. But most of the galaxies we have observed seem to be made up of a mixture of dark matter and visible matter, given their gravitational characteristics. Finding a galaxy with no matter isn't any sort of physical impossibility, but it's surprising because it's not the norm. If most galaxies contain dark matter, then something unusual must have happened to this one for it not to contain dark matter, and that's interesting; beyond that, the fact that such a thing even could happen may give us insights into the nature of dark matter.
If that were true, I doubt the U.S. airlines would still be giving away free drinks (unless they think that it provides enough of an incentive for people to fly that it outweighs the cost of a toilet flush). And why should the TSA care whether it costs the airlines money?
Sort of: after the log entry was revealed, the owner of macrumors.com registered macbookair.com (and then said that he would be happy to transfer it to Apple gratis if they wanted it); this apparently triggered the registration of all the other macbookair domains by Apple, but the company that does their domain registrations offers a service of automatically registering potentially trademarked domains, so there was speculation that this was not a particular decision by Apple. And it should be noted that Apple doesn't normally bother to register domains named after their computer lines.
I agree with you, but I will point out that not all of the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution apply to private entities. In particular, the first amendment only says that freedom of speech, press, and religion shall not be abridged by Congress, which means that if you say something I don't like in my house, I have the perfect right to throw you out because of it, whereas the government cannot throw you out of the country for the same thing. So you can't really make analogies between different amendments to the Constitution, you have to look at each one individually.
Making the same decision about a year ago, we went with Yahoo, because we found their API much easier to integrate with our own AJAX than Google's. (We didn't consider Microsoft.) Of course, I don't know if the same reasons would still apply, but you should at least consider Yahoo as well. (And if you haven't checked out non-embedded Yahoo Maps lately, go do that -- it's easily on a level with Google, and with better imagery.)
Last I checked, "apes" were actually paraphyletic—that is, humans and chimpanzees actually forma a clade, and gorillas split off some time earlier (and orangutans before that, and gibbons even before that). So it should really say that the split between gorillas and Hominini (chimps and humans) was earlier than previously thought. The discovery gives no information at all about when humans and chimpanzees split.
RT is indeed extremely customizable, and with enough effort can be made to do just about anything (we have scripts that automatically update tickets based on the state of files in our CVS tree, for example). However, there are a lot of settings, and the documentation is extremely haphazard, so if you want to do something complex, and you don't happen to think like an RT developer, it can take a long time to figure out how.
And as for making really low level changes, the source can only be described as labyrinthine, and the database design isn't much to speak of either.
Keep in mind that as part of NASA R&D a lot of useful technology gets developed along the way. NASA is very into developing better solar panels and high-tech materials, for example. It's very difficult to measure how much is spent on things that wind up having applications here on Earth compared to those that don't, though.
The other thing, though, is that private industry is somewhat better at funding things with obvious applications than it is at funding things whose primary goal is pure science, because it's a lot easier to get investors to part with their money when there's a chance that they'll get it back some day. So it makes some amount of sense for government to be spending money on pure science, since that's research that simply wouldn't get done otherwise, especially for large things like space exploration which are just out of the reach of the universities that do other pure research.
Besides what's already been mentioned, Blogger doesn't do comment threading. This is a major hindrance to communication (imagine if Slashdot was just a flat list of comments). Admittedly, LiveJournal's comment threading is sort of half-assed, but at least it's there—it has the crucial feature of email notifications when someone replies to a comment, on your own or someone else's journal, not just to a post. (And if Blogger does have comment threading, then I apologize, but I haven't been able to find it.)
I'm also not sure that Blogger offers the fine-grained control of content-locking on a post-by-post basis that LiveJournal does; I know people who regularly use a large number of different filters, depending on whether they want a given post to be visible to the public, to all aquaintances, to close friends, to people they know in a certain geographic area, to non-coworkers, etc.
You are exactly correct. I would absolutely love it if someone would come up with such a system, though it should be noted that the authentication parts are crucial—the ability to selectively lock some content is the difference between addressing the entire internet and addressing one's friends (or only one's close friends, family, etc.).
Unfortunately, such a system does not yet exist, which is why I think many other posters are missing the point by suggesting that livejournalers just get their own domains and set up Wordpress. For now, LiveJournal and similar sites are the only ways to obtain the kind of networking and communication that they provide, so users are reluctant to abandon them. The public infrastructure doesn't yet exist, so we're stuck relying on the proprietary infrastructure.
And yes, I would help to create it, but I will freely admit that I have neither the drive nor the ability to lead such a project.
For anyone interested in knowing exactly what's been happening, what's been deleted, and also some useful information for livejournalers about things like how to make backups, one user has been keeping track of the news:
Slashdot Mirror
For the link-phobic, here's the abstract:
Abstract
This paper addresses the debate over compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and incandescents through life-cycle analyses (LCA) conducted in the SimaPro1 life-cycle analysis program. It compares the environmental impacts of providing a given amount of light (approximately 1,600 lumens) from incandescents and CFLs for 10,000 hours. Special attention has been paid to recently raised concerns regarding CFLs--specifically that their complex manufacturing process uses so much energy that it outweighs the benefits of using CFLs, that turning CFLs on and off frequently eliminates their energy-efficiency benefits, and that they contain a large amount of mercury. The research shows that the efficiency benefits compensate for the added complexity in manufacturing, that while rapid on-off cycling of the lamp does reduce the environmental (and payback) benefits of CFLs they remain a net "win," and that the mercury emitted over a CFL's life--by power plants to power the CFL and by leakage on disposal--is still less than the mercury that can be attributed to powering the incandescent.
Proof? There is no absolute proof, except in mathematics. Try "proving" that what goes up must come down -- the best you'll be able to do is show that it's always happened in the past. What we have are strong correlations, and fairly easy extrapolations based on current data. But that's good enough, because there's no need to "go five steps backwards". That implies that the only way to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions is to return to a pre-industrial level of technology. On the contrary, by advancing further forwards we have the chance to protect our way of life at a much more significant level than simply being able to continue burning fossil fuels. It's a choice between standing still and possibly being dragged back if we do nothing, or leaping forward and avoiding the possibility of our downfall.
Well, methane from cows (it actually comes from both ends) is still our fault, since we're the ones raising the cows. It's probably due to a combination of factors, though, not any one thing. But even if it's due to entirely natural processes (say increased solar output), that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to do something about it -- having most of our cities underwater won't be much fun whether we caused it or not, and if we can reduce the quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that's likely to help. And most of the things we can do to reduce the possible human causes of global warming will have other long term benefits, like cheaper energy and improved air quality.
But the main thing is that if we don't do something quickly, it may be too late. It's like Pascal's Wager -- there are really very few penalties for doing something and being wrong, but there are very harsh penalties for doing nothing and being wrong.
To be fair, that's the price he cited for international roaming. TFA cites prices "as low as 20 euros per month" for regular mobile broadband usage in some countries. That's a lot better, though I'm still not going to pay it until the coverage is better and the speeds are actually comparable to a hotspot.
If that's possible, then it's much more trivial for the accomplice to smuggle in a non-liquid explosive and hand that off. Seriously, the liquid explosives they're supposedly worried about are incredibly difficult to actually get to work. It's all scare tactics on the part of the government.
Have you ever had a vacuum cleaner nag, whine, or yell at you?
Wait, wait! You can still look at porn through the web browser! (I'm actually not clear on why anyone would need a specialized app for porn...)
Well, it's great to know how people should be judged. Unfortunately, that's very rarely how they actually are judged... in part because the people doing the judging often don't even have the capability to assess the correct criteria. Knowing how to impress people with poor evaluative skills is still useful if you want to get somewhere in the real world. And those people aren't completely on crack, either -- they're doing something that we all do sometimes, using evidence from a known domain to give clues about the quality of an unknown domain. If you're buying a car, and you have a choice between one with a perfect exterior and one with a few rust holes in the body, you're probably going to pick the nice-looking one, even if they appear to run the same, because it's evidence that it was better treated, and the mechanical parts of the car are likely to last longer, too. Of course, you could be completely wrong, but you're still basing your decision on the evidence you have. For people, the reasoning is similar: someone who is careful in their appearance is also probably careful in their work.
Personally, I work for a nonprofit, mostly from home, so I don't have to worry about my appearance much. On the other hand, I also don't make much money; if I cared enough about money to work in industry, I certainly wouldn't ignore how I look.
Seems kind of unnecessary. I already have an automated cat cleaner -- my cat.
Unfortunately, public libraries tend not to get much funding even in fairly wealthy areas. My local library in Cambridge, MA is only open five days a week, and most of those days it's not open in the evenings. (Though I'm sure that there that are branches with better hours.)
How do you get to that website when you don't have wireless access? Seriously, free wifi is great, but unless you plan carefully in advance, it's not always easy to find. Starbucks, on the other hand, is everywhere, so I'm glad that on the rare occasions that I'm willing to pay for wireless it will be cheaper. ($4 for two hours is about on the upper end of what I'm willing to pay; I still want to see a micropayments model, where I can buy 15 minutes for 50 cents. At that point, it would be worth it just to quickly check my email and look something up online.)
Sure. But most of the galaxies we have observed seem to be made up of a mixture of dark matter and visible matter, given their gravitational characteristics. Finding a galaxy with no matter isn't any sort of physical impossibility, but it's surprising because it's not the norm. If most galaxies contain dark matter, then something unusual must have happened to this one for it not to contain dark matter, and that's interesting; beyond that, the fact that such a thing even could happen may give us insights into the nature of dark matter.
The XO has an SD card slot. It's located under the edge of the screen.
Well, getting the credit card numbers probably did pretty well for them already.
If that were true, I doubt the U.S. airlines would still be giving away free drinks (unless they think that it provides enough of an incentive for people to fly that it outweighs the cost of a toilet flush). And why should the TSA care whether it costs the airlines money?
Sort of: after the log entry was revealed, the owner of macrumors.com registered macbookair.com (and then said that he would be happy to transfer it to Apple gratis if they wanted it); this apparently triggered the registration of all the other macbookair domains by Apple, but the company that does their domain registrations offers a service of automatically registering potentially trademarked domains, so there was speculation that this was not a particular decision by Apple. And it should be noted that Apple doesn't normally bother to register domains named after their computer lines.
I agree with you, but I will point out that not all of the freedoms guaranteed by the constitution apply to private entities. In particular, the first amendment only says that freedom of speech, press, and religion shall not be abridged by Congress, which means that if you say something I don't like in my house, I have the perfect right to throw you out because of it, whereas the government cannot throw you out of the country for the same thing. So you can't really make analogies between different amendments to the Constitution, you have to look at each one individually.
If anyone wants to know how to do this for themselves (well, assuming you can find all the components), here are some instructions.
Making the same decision about a year ago, we went with Yahoo, because we found their API much easier to integrate with our own AJAX than Google's. (We didn't consider Microsoft.) Of course, I don't know if the same reasons would still apply, but you should at least consider Yahoo as well. (And if you haven't checked out non-embedded Yahoo Maps lately, go do that -- it's easily on a level with Google, and with better imagery.)
Last I checked, "apes" were actually paraphyletic—that is, humans and chimpanzees actually forma a clade, and gorillas split off some time earlier (and orangutans before that, and gibbons even before that). So it should really say that the split between gorillas and Hominini (chimps and humans) was earlier than previously thought. The discovery gives no information at all about when humans and chimpanzees split.
RT is indeed extremely customizable, and with enough effort can be made to do just about anything (we have scripts that automatically update tickets based on the state of files in our CVS tree, for example). However, there are a lot of settings, and the documentation is extremely haphazard, so if you want to do something complex, and you don't happen to think like an RT developer, it can take a long time to figure out how.
And as for making really low level changes, the source can only be described as labyrinthine, and the database design isn't much to speak of either.
As a whole, it's powerful, but messy.
Keep in mind that as part of NASA R&D a lot of useful technology gets developed along the way. NASA is very into developing better solar panels and high-tech materials, for example. It's very difficult to measure how much is spent on things that wind up having applications here on Earth compared to those that don't, though.
The other thing, though, is that private industry is somewhat better at funding things with obvious applications than it is at funding things whose primary goal is pure science, because it's a lot easier to get investors to part with their money when there's a chance that they'll get it back some day. So it makes some amount of sense for government to be spending money on pure science, since that's research that simply wouldn't get done otherwise, especially for large things like space exploration which are just out of the reach of the universities that do other pure research.
Besides what's already been mentioned, Blogger doesn't do comment threading. This is a major hindrance to communication (imagine if Slashdot was just a flat list of comments). Admittedly, LiveJournal's comment threading is sort of half-assed, but at least it's there—it has the crucial feature of email notifications when someone replies to a comment, on your own or someone else's journal, not just to a post. (And if Blogger does have comment threading, then I apologize, but I haven't been able to find it.)
I'm also not sure that Blogger offers the fine-grained control of content-locking on a post-by-post basis that LiveJournal does; I know people who regularly use a large number of different filters, depending on whether they want a given post to be visible to the public, to all aquaintances, to close friends, to people they know in a certain geographic area, to non-coworkers, etc.
You are exactly correct. I would absolutely love it if someone would come up with such a system, though it should be noted that the authentication parts are crucial—the ability to selectively lock some content is the difference between addressing the entire internet and addressing one's friends (or only one's close friends, family, etc.).
Unfortunately, such a system does not yet exist, which is why I think many other posters are missing the point by suggesting that livejournalers just get their own domains and set up Wordpress. For now, LiveJournal and similar sites are the only ways to obtain the kind of networking and communication that they provide, so users are reluctant to abandon them. The public infrastructure doesn't yet exist, so we're stuck relying on the proprietary infrastructure.
And yes, I would help to create it, but I will freely admit that I have neither the drive nor the ability to lead such a project.
http://catrinella.livejournal.com/151812.html