Also, blue light is daytime light. Red light is the light you see closer to sunset. The sunset is red for a reason.
No, daytime light is yellowish. Blue light is that hazy look you get on overcast days. The sunset is red, but at night (which is defined as AFTER the sun sets), the light is not red. It is very much blue. Take a photograph with your camera and see what color the night sky is. I guarantee it will be blue.
And our bodies are specifically built around that. At night, the human eye produces rhodopsin, which makes our eyes more sensitive to blue light precisely because that's all that is left at night. Having too much blue light relative to other colors creates a similar effect.
That's that supposed to mean? Are you implying that other people in hundreds of years will pay the "price" because we're using up nonrenewable resources? Over a fourth of my power comes from renewable sources, and most of the rest comes from natural gas (which produces mostly water vapor when burned). As far as my electrical use goes, I'm not contributing much pollution at all. And by the time my grandkids are my age, I'd imagine our planet will be largely using solar power anyway. Arguing that we should limit our use of power because some of it is made with fossil fuels is absurd. What we should be limiting is the production of power with fossil fuels in the first place.
And as I've said elsewhere, limiting consumption won't help. The dirtiest source of power (coal) is the cheapest, so in the absence of either laws banning coal or financial incentives for power companies to move away from it, the only way conservation could truly get rid of dirty power would be if we conserved ALL OF IT. So sure, if you want to go back to nature and abandon all technology, go right ahead, but for the rest of us, conservation of electricity is not an effective means of "going green" any more than using a blow drier instead of paper towels in the bathroom is.
True, it's certainly complex. Of course, we've used up, over the course of a hundred years, a sizable percentage of the stored energy sequestered in plant matter over millions of years, so relative to that, it's hard to do much worse.:-)
Either way, I think it's significant that solar panels are unlikely to be in the same places that plants would otherwise have been, for the most part. Most solar systems are installed on rooftops, which are typically not covered in plants anyway (unless you count mold in some parts of the country). So most of the time, the question is whether more energy is converted to heat by solar panels or by a black shingled roof. My gut says it's probably not the solar panels; black surfaces do an amazing job of soaking up light and radiating it as heat. But that is just a guess.
Commercial installations are a different story; putting solar towers out in the desert is likely reducing reflection relative to sand. I'm not going to even try to guess which ends up turning more energy into heat in that case....
There is no good argument for wasting limited resources when we can instead conserve them.
In principle, I agree. However, power is not a limited resource. Well, it is, but only artificially so due to lack of building generators. More to the point, the portion of the cost of power attributed to the construction of power plants and transmission lines is unlikely to change significantly as demand increases. If anything, it costs less money per unit of power for larger generators. Thus, using less power drives prices up in the long term, not down, with the exception of the portion of power that we get from nonrenewable resources. For the most part, cost of production it is roughly linear with consumption.
Supply goes down even in non-regulated markets when the demand goes down.
Eventually, yes, but the difference is that the rates don't change significantly if demand for power drops. The rates are set by various public utilities commissions because you don't have a choice in who you buy power from. Thus, they're going to take every cent they're allowed by law to take. Also, another difference is that most industries are not producing product in an inherently zero-stock fashion. Grid power, for all practical purposes, cannot be stored if you produce too much. Thus, production tracks demand fairly precisely. It's not like shoes, for example, where if you produce too many, the cost drops to clear out the extra demand. It's more like photo printing where if demand falls off, the photo printer sits there unused. Ignoring the maintenance and infrastructure costs (and we should largely ignore this because the cost advantage of building more infrastructure than you need in a single burst instead of building it out a little at a time roughly balances out the cost of having unused infrastructure when demand is down), the cost of production is roughly linearly related to the amount of production, and the amount of production is always roughly equal to demand. Thus, supply and demand cannot realistically impact prices in any meaningful way, whether in the short term or in the long term.
As to it being doing much in the short-term, there's more to things than the short-term. If we hadn't run out of oil near the coast, we couldn't have drilled in deep water and had the Macondo blowout, at least not until later.
Who is talking about oil here? A negligible amount of oil is used in producing power. Maybe 5% of U.S. power comes from oil in total, and where I live, it's approximately zero. And the amount of oil used for power is on a steady decline, IIRC. Within a couple of decades, it will just be lumped into "other uses" in a pie chart. Either way, the problem is not that power is a nonrenewable resource. The problem is that nonrenewable resources are being used for power production. That's a very significant distinction.
Every nation will experience growing energy needs unless they have zero or negative population growth. It's inevitable.
This is also true.
Because all energy use, no matter the source, eventually becomes heat at a 100% conversion factor. Regardless of the original source of the energy. Eventually the global use of energy will have to be limited to the amount of energy that the Earth is capable of radiating into space. That amount might be a lot but with unfettered population growth we will reach that limit someday, if we haven't already.
On the other hand, solar energy is coming in whether we use it or not. So in the end, it becomes heat whether we use it or not. So as long as the average reflectivity of the panels is not less than the average reflectivity of the rest of the planet, it's net neutral. And if it is considerably less, we can make it net neutral by increasing reflectivity elsewhere.
Except that it doesn't. There's no free market in action. It's a highly regulated monopoly. Supply and demand don't exist for power production. When demand goes down, supply goes down, simple as that. And where do they cut? Where possible, they cut production from the most expensive sources first. That means nuclear gets cut first, followed by natural gas, followed by wind, followed by solar. What doesn't get cut? Coal. What needs to be cut? Coal. See why your argument falls flat?
At best, the only thing conservation can possibly do is stave off the need to add additional high tension lines to increase grid capacity, and maybe someday stave off the need for more power plants. In terms of short-term economic benefits, it's a no-op.
I'm sorry, this doesn't make any sense. Are you talking about reactive power here? Reactive power is important in grid control... but it is not energy.
I'm talking about the power factor, and yes, that is referring to reactive loads, but yes, it IS energy. It is momentary energy which is then followed by pushing energy back towards the grid (effectively), but when you look at the peak loading on the generator capacity, it must be able to handle the worst case combination of those reactive loads, not just the average case. Otherwise, you have a momentary brownout. The same holds true for every wire, every transformer, etc. along the path from the generators to your house.
Worse, because it is synchronized with the sine wave cycle, having a million of them means that a million are all drawing more current at once. It isn't randomized where one would be drawing more current while another draws less. You should not be so quick to dismiss the importance of the power factor of equipment that you put on the grid. Even though your power bill may look a lot lower, the actual impact on the grid and on generation capacity may or may not be lower to nearly the same degree.
Actually, the reason that fluorescent bulbs are more energy efficient is because their emission puts out more of its light in the parts of the spectrum that the human eye uses efficiently, not less
That's theoretically true, but the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference. In practice, no matter how bright you turn a blue lamp, you will always see it as being dark because blue reminds you of nighttime. Psychologically speaking, blue-tinted light is perceptually darker than reddish light even if it is of far greater brightness in terms of your actual ability to see and distinguish objects and color. And other things like skin tone are poorly perceived in fluorescent light as well, which contributes to that perception.
Incandescents are way too red-rich. (As should be obvious-- there's no way to get a thermal source to an emission temperature of 5800K, which is the sun's temperature.)
Color temperature isn't the entire story. The human eye was designed for a continuous spectrum with the peak somewhere in the neighborhood of 5600K or so. Fluorescent lights produce a discrete spectrum with very little coverage of the red end of the spectrum at all. Although the average color temperature matches more closely, the discontinuity of the spectrum produces holes in your color perception that the human eye wasn't really designed to handle. We tolerate it, but not so well.
Also, bear in mind that CFL efficiency isn't all that great. In the best case, you're talking about a 4x improvement in lumens per watt. In the worst case (a cheap CFL versus a halogen), it is barely a 3x improvement. If you discover, as I did, that it requires significantly more lights to provide the same perception of brightness in a particular room, a 3x difference in wattage can disappear like that. And if you have a power factor of 0.5 (not at all uncommon for CFLs), you are effectively only getting a 1.5x difference in wattage in terms of peak generator capacity.
Why should we be forced to use less energy if we can afford the cost, though? That's absurd. The only good reason for conservation is that we're still producing a lot of power from unclean sources of energy. So get rid of the damn coal and petrol-burning power plants already and quit trying to force artificial scarcity of power where none exists merely for the benefit of the power companies so that they won't have to improve their production.
Yeah, that's right. I said it. The green movement is a power company's best friend. It allows them to screw you with higher rates to promote lower energy usage to ostensibly make the planet greener, while continuing to use cheap, dirty sources of power because "Hey, we're encouraging people to use it less". That's insane.
It is when residences make up just a few percent of the country's energy usage. If you look at the whole energy picture, residential and commercial electricity put together are only about 10% of U.S. energy usage. So even if you could miraculously cut residential lighting to zero energy usage, you'd shave maybe one or two percent of our nation's energy usage.
Besides, energy conservation is NOT the answer. Residential energy usage is growing worldwide by over 1% annually, and in the U.S. by double-digit percentage points in some years, despite rather extreme conservation efforts. We're using more technology, and guess what, it all requires power. Our nation's energy needs, no matter how much we try to conserve, are going to continue to grow, and the rate of growth is likely to continue to grow as well. The ONLY effective way to combat global warming is at the SOURCE: by transitioning away from coal and fossil fuel as a means of power generation. Conservation is nothing more than a feel-good gesture in the grand scheme of things; if all our power were provided through clean sources, what possible rationale could anyone have for wanting people to conserve energy at that point?
Because the government isn't really mandating energy efficiency. When you get right down to it, CFLs are less efficient than incandescent bulbs. I sat down and did the math a couple of years ago and concluded that I would never break even.
First, you have the problem of power factor, which means that with fluorescent bulbs, you're often drawing a lot more power than you think, it just isn't getting metered that way. Second, you have the spectrum of light, which because it is balanced towards the blue end and because it isn't a continuous spectrum, isn't perceived as being of equal brightness. To get the same perceptual brightness, IIRC, you are drawing slightly more power with fluorescent bulbs than with modern incandescent (e.g. halogen) designs, and approaching that of plain jane incandescent bulbs.
LEDs are similarly useless. The amount of light output from the brightest ones I can buy are inadequate even for a small room.. Not to mention that they are LOUD if you use them in a dimmer circuit like the one in my bedside table lamp. I've just about concluded that all non-incandescent bulbs are unusable, and at best are a serious step down from incandescent bulbs.
And that's before you add in things like the increase in depression, suicides, and cancer linked with fluorescent lighting.
We're getting massively screwed.
BTW, the government isn't subsidizing energy significantly. Maybe a little, but certainly not a favor of two, much less five. All but my lowest tier of power costs more than it would cost me to use solar, without any subsidies or tax incentives factored in, assuming a grid-tie system (no storage costs). And that's buying PV cells at low-quantity prices. Nearly every other form of power production costs less than that. You're right that technically the government is holding down the cost of energy, but only by limiting the power of the monopolies that would otherwise gouge us for all we're worth. Energy is inherently not a free market and can never be a free market, making that argument moot.
I briefly hosted a subdomain on GoDaddy.com. I dumped them because:
Their servers were a train wreck, with 30 second maximum execution times for all processes. This meant that copying data to or from their servers required copying one file per connection, and if that RAW file was a little too slow, boom, you had to copy it a second time, or a third, or a fiftieth....
Their servers, despite being faster than dialup on average, randomly wedged and failed to respond to requests for minutes at a time. Somebody was obviously blocking Apache with a long-running PHP script (I was serving static content, so I can safely say that, as the only other possibility is a network outage on their end). They refused to look into it despite me giving them detailed, down-to-the-second logs of when it happened, proof of barely 90% effective uptime, etc. and they refused to move me to a different server, so I demanded a refund.
I applied for a 10-year SSL cert, which they sold me, then refused to issue claiming that their new policy was that they could only sell certs for a much lower number of years. I threatened to sue. They refunded my money, and it was shortly after that when I demanded the refund on the ISP service as well. I now have a free SSL cert that is just as good as theirs would have been (except for having to renew it once a year), and am happily serving my static images off of DreamHost.
If someone had told me how much of a disaster GoDaddy was beforehand, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have thought, "There's no way anybody could be THAT incompetent." Einstein put it best when he said, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."
Either way, the doctrine of first sale is solely a copyright issue and doesn't apply to non-copyrightable things like houses, making the entire argument moot.
Lots of retirement communities work that way. That's not the same thing as telling you that you can never sell the home and when you die, the house rots for all eternity. That's what these EULAs do.
Except the part where Apple's headquarters is a patch of dirt and some old Motorola buildings. Oh, I see they've fixed that now. Heck, maybe they fixed it back before it was called Bing. Either way, it was still pretty funny.
The Bay Area photos and maps from Google are still WAY more current. The Sunnyvale Target on Bing still appears as it did several years ago before they even tore down the parking garage in front of it. The Chevy's was torn down in the photo, so that puts it somewhere between June and August of 2005, give or take.
Since then, they've torn down that parking garage, torn down the mall, and completely gutted the Target, changing it from a two-story store into a much larger one-story store with a parking garage underneath.
The Google aerial pictures, by contrast, were taken in the middle of the Target remodel, so it's only about a year or a year and a half old. The street view pictures are earlier in the remodel, which puts them somewhere in early 2009.
And if I try to search for store names and things in Bing's maps, it just looks at me funny. It doesn't even take me to the city, much less to the place. Google? It does what I expect it to do.
So how are Bing's maps better again? They're a freaking train wreck from what I'm seeing. Very pretty, with minimal actual function.
Hertz is a valid surname, as are Mi, Head, and even Les. That doesn't mean naming your child Richard is a good idea if you have one of those surnames....
No, translation: most people who are close to the material are generally incapable of communicating it to people who are not. This is not a lack of education or intelligence on the part of the others, but rather a lack of distance on the part of the authors.
No human being alive is capable of specializing in every single area of every single field simultaneously. There is simply not enough time in a human's lifespan. Most people are either generalists who specialize in all aspects of a single field with limited depth or specialists who focus on a handful of specific areas of a field. For example, on top of a broad general CS background, I have specialized CS knowledge in storage systems, with somewhat less specialized knowledge of security, networking, and a few other areas. I also have a background in communications with an emphasis in production (radio/TV). Although I can understand papers written about other areas of computing, it will generally take a lot longer for me to figure out the meaning of a highly technical paper in the field of crypto research than in the field of storage systems. That doesn't reflect a lack of education so much as a fundamental inability to specialize in every possible area at once.
This is why technical communication is hard, and why good technical writers are so valuable. It takes a special skill set to be able to both understand a piece of complex information and still communicate it in a way that is readily understandable to someone who is not intimately familiar with the jargon of a particular area of specialization within a field. When it comes to being understood by a more general audience within a given field (but outside the area of specialization), academic papers are among the worst examples of technical communication out there, often eschewing all sense of context in order to limit the amount of time spent writing so that they can focus on research. This is why peer-reviewed journal articles are quite often rewritten in a more intelligible form for broader consumption.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that model---both the precise, jargon-filled, rapidly written journal articles and the parsed, compiled, and summarized versions serve valuable purposes---but sadly, mistakes are often made when technical writers interpret those initial journal articles and try to make them comprehensible to people outside that area of specialization. That's why there is a real need for a continuous feedback loop with the people who write the original articles. Unfortunately, quite often this feedback loop does not exist. And that is worth criticizing.
I will almost certainly be criticized for this post using too much jargon. I can already see it coming....
In aircraft that are equipped for CAT III, sure, though many are not. Either way, it still would make me really uncomfortable to know that one flight per year was being flown by someone who could not take over adequately if autoland kicks out for any reason.
Actually auto piolet can take off and land a plane, what it cannot do at this point is runway taxiing.
That's a dangerous overgeneralization to make. Some people might misunderstand that sentence and interpret that to mean that any autopilot-equipped aircraft is capable of doing this. That is not the case.
First, the avionics aboard many planes in service are not configured from the manufacturer for autoland (e.g. every 737 that American Airlines flies). These can only do "coupled" approaches.
Second, many smaller planes and older planes are not fully fly-by-wire, so they would require a serious retrofit to make them capable of full autoland.
Third, not all airports have the facilities to support autoland.
If you limit yourself only to fully fly-by-wire planes and limit yourself to major airports, that statement is true. However, the autopilot system in a sizable percentage of aircraft in the air today are NOT capable of autonomous landing.
And, of course, as you alluded to, in the event of an autoland glitch, the system kicks out and you're back under full manual control, which means you still NEED a pilot. So yeah, it's possible, but it's not a good idea.
Until the pilot has a heart attack and dies, which happens periodically. There was one such case just last June on Continental Airlines, and another in February of 2008.... So yeah, if you're willing to increase the number of large airplane crashes by almost one per year, go ahead and cut out the copilots.
The idea of training a flight attendant to perform a landing in the case of a pilot's death means that you would be trusting a minimally trained "pilot" to land a large jet with several hundred people aboard about once per year. That's absolute insanity. That's not cost cutting. It's homicide.
I know I would stop flying IMMEDIATELY on any airline that even CONSIDERED doing that (which means at this point, I'd base jump off the Empire State Building before I'd fly Ryanair, BTW). If your airline's management is stupid enough to consider that, you almost certainly are cutting corners dangerously in other areas, e.g. maintenance. After all, by that same standard, you don't *need* to inspect all those things with such regularity. Most of the time, the parts won't fail even after twice that time....
Now if he had said that they were considering putting in remote control systems so that a backup pilot on the ground could take over electronically in the event that the pilot became incapacitated, that might be palatable. There are ways for technology to reduce the need for a copilot in this day of fly-by-wire aircraft. However, what this guy is suggesting puts him beyond bonkers straight to psychopathic, homicidal maniac. Their CEO shouldn't be leading an airline. He should be locked up in a padded room somewhere so that he can't harm himself or others.
No: "going with the flow of traffic" is not a defense to a speeding ticket. Believe me: I've tried.
And if you ever needed more proof that speed limits have zero to do with safety and are entirely a revenue generation scheme, that should be plenty. Since it is provably safer to be going the same speed as the rest of the traffic, pulling over people who do so has a provably deleterious effect on safety, as you are punishing someone for showing good driving habits and are thus encouraging him/her to impede the flow of traffic and put everyone else at risk.
If I had the money, I'd contribute $25 times the number of people in that state just to have a "no limits" day just to see what happens.
but they do affect the outcome quite significantly
Ah, but they don't. A human getting run over at 65 MPH kills with about the same probability as at 45 MPH (almost always, that is). Anything above about 20 or 25 MPH and you're probably screwed. Thus, since car accidents are so frequently not fatal, it should be pretty obvious that the largest component of accident safety is not the m*v^2 term, but rather the ability of the car to absorb that impact and spread the reduction in velocity out over a period of time.
Even at a modest 45 MPH, the only thing standing between you, as a driver, and almost certain death is your car's ability to crumple and absorb the impact. Up to the point at which it is no longer able to do so, the m*v^2 term isn't important, and above that line, you've probably gotten impaled by some part of the car or ripped the seatbelt out anyway. It's more important, therefore, to understand where that line is and be sure not to cross it. Oh, and also to avoid rolling the car....:-)
Either way, given the current state of automotive safety systems, if you ignore pedestrian injuries, speed and the number of traffic deaths are not at all correlated.
And vehicle safety systems make a huge difference, too. People frequently walk away from wrecks these days that would have killed them with 100% certainty in a car built 30 years ago.
Also, dumb luck outweighs all of those things by orders of magnitude. While driving 65, if you hit the same bridge post at slightly different angles, you might veery off one way, veer off the other way, spin your car one way or the other, or stop rapidly over the course of about three feet. You can guess which of these is most likely to kill you instantly....
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No, daytime light is yellowish. Blue light is that hazy look you get on overcast days. The sunset is red, but at night (which is defined as AFTER the sun sets), the light is not red. It is very much blue. Take a photograph with your camera and see what color the night sky is. I guarantee it will be blue.
And our bodies are specifically built around that. At night, the human eye produces rhodopsin, which makes our eyes more sensitive to blue light precisely because that's all that is left at night. Having too much blue light relative to other colors creates a similar effect.
That's that supposed to mean? Are you implying that other people in hundreds of years will pay the "price" because we're using up nonrenewable resources? Over a fourth of my power comes from renewable sources, and most of the rest comes from natural gas (which produces mostly water vapor when burned). As far as my electrical use goes, I'm not contributing much pollution at all. And by the time my grandkids are my age, I'd imagine our planet will be largely using solar power anyway. Arguing that we should limit our use of power because some of it is made with fossil fuels is absurd. What we should be limiting is the production of power with fossil fuels in the first place.
And as I've said elsewhere, limiting consumption won't help. The dirtiest source of power (coal) is the cheapest, so in the absence of either laws banning coal or financial incentives for power companies to move away from it, the only way conservation could truly get rid of dirty power would be if we conserved ALL OF IT. So sure, if you want to go back to nature and abandon all technology, go right ahead, but for the rest of us, conservation of electricity is not an effective means of "going green" any more than using a blow drier instead of paper towels in the bathroom is.
True, it's certainly complex. Of course, we've used up, over the course of a hundred years, a sizable percentage of the stored energy sequestered in plant matter over millions of years, so relative to that, it's hard to do much worse. :-)
Either way, I think it's significant that solar panels are unlikely to be in the same places that plants would otherwise have been, for the most part. Most solar systems are installed on rooftops, which are typically not covered in plants anyway (unless you count mold in some parts of the country). So most of the time, the question is whether more energy is converted to heat by solar panels or by a black shingled roof. My gut says it's probably not the solar panels; black surfaces do an amazing job of soaking up light and radiating it as heat. But that is just a guess.
Commercial installations are a different story; putting solar towers out in the desert is likely reducing reflection relative to sand. I'm not going to even try to guess which ends up turning more energy into heat in that case....
In principle, I agree. However, power is not a limited resource. Well, it is, but only artificially so due to lack of building generators. More to the point, the portion of the cost of power attributed to the construction of power plants and transmission lines is unlikely to change significantly as demand increases. If anything, it costs less money per unit of power for larger generators. Thus, using less power drives prices up in the long term, not down, with the exception of the portion of power that we get from nonrenewable resources. For the most part, cost of production it is roughly linear with consumption.
Eventually, yes, but the difference is that the rates don't change significantly if demand for power drops. The rates are set by various public utilities commissions because you don't have a choice in who you buy power from. Thus, they're going to take every cent they're allowed by law to take. Also, another difference is that most industries are not producing product in an inherently zero-stock fashion. Grid power, for all practical purposes, cannot be stored if you produce too much. Thus, production tracks demand fairly precisely. It's not like shoes, for example, where if you produce too many, the cost drops to clear out the extra demand. It's more like photo printing where if demand falls off, the photo printer sits there unused. Ignoring the maintenance and infrastructure costs (and we should largely ignore this because the cost advantage of building more infrastructure than you need in a single burst instead of building it out a little at a time roughly balances out the cost of having unused infrastructure when demand is down), the cost of production is roughly linearly related to the amount of production, and the amount of production is always roughly equal to demand. Thus, supply and demand cannot realistically impact prices in any meaningful way, whether in the short term or in the long term.
Who is talking about oil here? A negligible amount of oil is used in producing power. Maybe 5% of U.S. power comes from oil in total, and where I live, it's approximately zero. And the amount of oil used for power is on a steady decline, IIRC. Within a couple of decades, it will just be lumped into "other uses" in a pie chart. Either way, the problem is not that power is a nonrenewable resource. The problem is that nonrenewable resources are being used for power production. That's a very significant distinction.
This is also true.
On the other hand, solar energy is coming in whether we use it or not. So in the end, it becomes heat whether we use it or not. So as long as the average reflectivity of the panels is not less than the average reflectivity of the rest of the planet, it's net neutral. And if it is considerably less, we can make it net neutral by increasing reflectivity elsewhere.
Except that it doesn't. There's no free market in action. It's a highly regulated monopoly. Supply and demand don't exist for power production. When demand goes down, supply goes down, simple as that. And where do they cut? Where possible, they cut production from the most expensive sources first. That means nuclear gets cut first, followed by natural gas, followed by wind, followed by solar. What doesn't get cut? Coal. What needs to be cut? Coal. See why your argument falls flat?
At best, the only thing conservation can possibly do is stave off the need to add additional high tension lines to increase grid capacity, and maybe someday stave off the need for more power plants. In terms of short-term economic benefits, it's a no-op.
I'm talking about the power factor, and yes, that is referring to reactive loads, but yes, it IS energy. It is momentary energy which is then followed by pushing energy back towards the grid (effectively), but when you look at the peak loading on the generator capacity, it must be able to handle the worst case combination of those reactive loads, not just the average case. Otherwise, you have a momentary brownout. The same holds true for every wire, every transformer, etc. along the path from the generators to your house.
Worse, because it is synchronized with the sine wave cycle, having a million of them means that a million are all drawing more current at once. It isn't randomized where one would be drawing more current while another draws less. You should not be so quick to dismiss the importance of the power factor of equipment that you put on the grid. Even though your power bill may look a lot lower, the actual impact on the grid and on generation capacity may or may not be lower to nearly the same degree.
That's theoretically true, but the difference between theory and practice is that in theory, there is no difference. In practice, no matter how bright you turn a blue lamp, you will always see it as being dark because blue reminds you of nighttime. Psychologically speaking, blue-tinted light is perceptually darker than reddish light even if it is of far greater brightness in terms of your actual ability to see and distinguish objects and color. And other things like skin tone are poorly perceived in fluorescent light as well, which contributes to that perception.
Color temperature isn't the entire story. The human eye was designed for a continuous spectrum with the peak somewhere in the neighborhood of 5600K or so. Fluorescent lights produce a discrete spectrum with very little coverage of the red end of the spectrum at all. Although the average color temperature matches more closely, the discontinuity of the spectrum produces holes in your color perception that the human eye wasn't really designed to handle. We tolerate it, but not so well.
Also, bear in mind that CFL efficiency isn't all that great. In the best case, you're talking about a 4x improvement in lumens per watt. In the worst case (a cheap CFL versus a halogen), it is barely a 3x improvement. If you discover, as I did, that it requires significantly more lights to provide the same perception of brightness in a particular room, a 3x difference in wattage can disappear like that. And if you have a power factor of 0.5 (not at all uncommon for CFLs), you are effectively only getting a 1.5x difference in wattage in terms of peak generator capacity.
Why should we be forced to use less energy if we can afford the cost, though? That's absurd. The only good reason for conservation is that we're still producing a lot of power from unclean sources of energy. So get rid of the damn coal and petrol-burning power plants already and quit trying to force artificial scarcity of power where none exists merely for the benefit of the power companies so that they won't have to improve their production.
Yeah, that's right. I said it. The green movement is a power company's best friend. It allows them to screw you with higher rates to promote lower energy usage to ostensibly make the planet greener, while continuing to use cheap, dirty sources of power because "Hey, we're encouraging people to use it less". That's insane.
It is when residences make up just a few percent of the country's energy usage. If you look at the whole energy picture, residential and commercial electricity put together are only about 10% of U.S. energy usage. So even if you could miraculously cut residential lighting to zero energy usage, you'd shave maybe one or two percent of our nation's energy usage.
Besides, energy conservation is NOT the answer. Residential energy usage is growing worldwide by over 1% annually, and in the U.S. by double-digit percentage points in some years, despite rather extreme conservation efforts. We're using more technology, and guess what, it all requires power. Our nation's energy needs, no matter how much we try to conserve, are going to continue to grow, and the rate of growth is likely to continue to grow as well. The ONLY effective way to combat global warming is at the SOURCE: by transitioning away from coal and fossil fuel as a means of power generation. Conservation is nothing more than a feel-good gesture in the grand scheme of things; if all our power were provided through clean sources, what possible rationale could anyone have for wanting people to conserve energy at that point?
Because the government isn't really mandating energy efficiency. When you get right down to it, CFLs are less efficient than incandescent bulbs. I sat down and did the math a couple of years ago and concluded that I would never break even.
First, you have the problem of power factor, which means that with fluorescent bulbs, you're often drawing a lot more power than you think, it just isn't getting metered that way. Second, you have the spectrum of light, which because it is balanced towards the blue end and because it isn't a continuous spectrum, isn't perceived as being of equal brightness. To get the same perceptual brightness, IIRC, you are drawing slightly more power with fluorescent bulbs than with modern incandescent (e.g. halogen) designs, and approaching that of plain jane incandescent bulbs.
LEDs are similarly useless. The amount of light output from the brightest ones I can buy are inadequate even for a small room.. Not to mention that they are LOUD if you use them in a dimmer circuit like the one in my bedside table lamp. I've just about concluded that all non-incandescent bulbs are unusable, and at best are a serious step down from incandescent bulbs.
And that's before you add in things like the increase in depression, suicides, and cancer linked with fluorescent lighting.
We're getting massively screwed.
BTW, the government isn't subsidizing energy significantly. Maybe a little, but certainly not a favor of two, much less five. All but my lowest tier of power costs more than it would cost me to use solar, without any subsidies or tax incentives factored in, assuming a grid-tie system (no storage costs). And that's buying PV cells at low-quantity prices. Nearly every other form of power production costs less than that. You're right that technically the government is holding down the cost of energy, but only by limiting the power of the monopolies that would otherwise gouge us for all we're worth. Energy is inherently not a free market and can never be a free market, making that argument moot.
I briefly hosted a subdomain on GoDaddy.com. I dumped them because:
If someone had told me how much of a disaster GoDaddy was beforehand, I wouldn't have believed it. I would have thought, "There's no way anybody could be THAT incompetent." Einstein put it best when he said, "Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the universe."
Maybe I should start the bidding at a dollar.
Either way, the doctrine of first sale is solely a copyright issue and doesn't apply to non-copyrightable things like houses, making the entire argument moot.
Lots of retirement communities work that way. That's not the same thing as telling you that you can never sell the home and when you die, the house rots for all eternity. That's what these EULAs do.
Alternatively, why do high temperature PCs need special drivers? Special solder, sure, but....
story about it
Except the part where Apple's headquarters is a patch of dirt and some old Motorola buildings. Oh, I see they've fixed that now. Heck, maybe they fixed it back before it was called Bing. Either way, it was still pretty funny.
The Bay Area photos and maps from Google are still WAY more current. The Sunnyvale Target on Bing still appears as it did several years ago before they even tore down the parking garage in front of it. The Chevy's was torn down in the photo, so that puts it somewhere between June and August of 2005, give or take.
Since then, they've torn down that parking garage, torn down the mall, and completely gutted the Target, changing it from a two-story store into a much larger one-story store with a parking garage underneath.
The Google aerial pictures, by contrast, were taken in the middle of the Target remodel, so it's only about a year or a year and a half old. The street view pictures are earlier in the remodel, which puts them somewhere in early 2009.
And if I try to search for store names and things in Bing's maps, it just looks at me funny. It doesn't even take me to the city, much less to the place. Google? It does what I expect it to do.
So how are Bing's maps better again? They're a freaking train wreck from what I'm seeing. Very pretty, with minimal actual function.
Hertz is a valid surname, as are Mi, Head, and even Les. That doesn't mean naming your child Richard is a good idea if you have one of those surnames....
No, translation: most people who are close to the material are generally incapable of communicating it to people who are not. This is not a lack of education or intelligence on the part of the others, but rather a lack of distance on the part of the authors.
No human being alive is capable of specializing in every single area of every single field simultaneously. There is simply not enough time in a human's lifespan. Most people are either generalists who specialize in all aspects of a single field with limited depth or specialists who focus on a handful of specific areas of a field. For example, on top of a broad general CS background, I have specialized CS knowledge in storage systems, with somewhat less specialized knowledge of security, networking, and a few other areas. I also have a background in communications with an emphasis in production (radio/TV). Although I can understand papers written about other areas of computing, it will generally take a lot longer for me to figure out the meaning of a highly technical paper in the field of crypto research than in the field of storage systems. That doesn't reflect a lack of education so much as a fundamental inability to specialize in every possible area at once.
This is why technical communication is hard, and why good technical writers are so valuable. It takes a special skill set to be able to both understand a piece of complex information and still communicate it in a way that is readily understandable to someone who is not intimately familiar with the jargon of a particular area of specialization within a field. When it comes to being understood by a more general audience within a given field (but outside the area of specialization), academic papers are among the worst examples of technical communication out there, often eschewing all sense of context in order to limit the amount of time spent writing so that they can focus on research. This is why peer-reviewed journal articles are quite often rewritten in a more intelligible form for broader consumption.
There's nothing inherently wrong with that model---both the precise, jargon-filled, rapidly written journal articles and the parsed, compiled, and summarized versions serve valuable purposes---but sadly, mistakes are often made when technical writers interpret those initial journal articles and try to make them comprehensible to people outside that area of specialization. That's why there is a real need for a continuous feedback loop with the people who write the original articles. Unfortunately, quite often this feedback loop does not exist. And that is worth criticizing.
I will almost certainly be criticized for this post using too much jargon. I can already see it coming....
In aircraft that are equipped for CAT III, sure, though many are not. Either way, it still would make me really uncomfortable to know that one flight per year was being flown by someone who could not take over adequately if autoland kicks out for any reason.
That's a dangerous overgeneralization to make. Some people might misunderstand that sentence and interpret that to mean that any autopilot-equipped aircraft is capable of doing this. That is not the case.
First, the avionics aboard many planes in service are not configured from the manufacturer for autoland (e.g. every 737 that American Airlines flies). These can only do "coupled" approaches.
Second, many smaller planes and older planes are not fully fly-by-wire, so they would require a serious retrofit to make them capable of full autoland.
Third, not all airports have the facilities to support autoland.
If you limit yourself only to fully fly-by-wire planes and limit yourself to major airports, that statement is true. However, the autopilot system in a sizable percentage of aircraft in the air today are NOT capable of autonomous landing.
And, of course, as you alluded to, in the event of an autoland glitch, the system kicks out and you're back under full manual control, which means you still NEED a pilot. So yeah, it's possible, but it's not a good idea.
Until the pilot has a heart attack and dies, which happens periodically. There was one such case just last June on Continental Airlines, and another in February of 2008.... So yeah, if you're willing to increase the number of large airplane crashes by almost one per year, go ahead and cut out the copilots.
The idea of training a flight attendant to perform a landing in the case of a pilot's death means that you would be trusting a minimally trained "pilot" to land a large jet with several hundred people aboard about once per year. That's absolute insanity. That's not cost cutting. It's homicide.
I know I would stop flying IMMEDIATELY on any airline that even CONSIDERED doing that (which means at this point, I'd base jump off the Empire State Building before I'd fly Ryanair, BTW). If your airline's management is stupid enough to consider that, you almost certainly are cutting corners dangerously in other areas, e.g. maintenance. After all, by that same standard, you don't *need* to inspect all those things with such regularity. Most of the time, the parts won't fail even after twice that time....
Now if he had said that they were considering putting in remote control systems so that a backup pilot on the ground could take over electronically in the event that the pilot became incapacitated, that might be palatable. There are ways for technology to reduce the need for a copilot in this day of fly-by-wire aircraft. However, what this guy is suggesting puts him beyond bonkers straight to psychopathic, homicidal maniac. Their CEO shouldn't be leading an airline. He should be locked up in a padded room somewhere so that he can't harm himself or others.
And if you ever needed more proof that speed limits have zero to do with safety and are entirely a revenue generation scheme, that should be plenty. Since it is provably safer to be going the same speed as the rest of the traffic, pulling over people who do so has a provably deleterious effect on safety, as you are punishing someone for showing good driving habits and are thus encouraging him/her to impede the flow of traffic and put everyone else at risk.
If I had the money, I'd contribute $25 times the number of people in that state just to have a "no limits" day just to see what happens.
Ah, but they don't. A human getting run over at 65 MPH kills with about the same probability as at 45 MPH (almost always, that is). Anything above about 20 or 25 MPH and you're probably screwed. Thus, since car accidents are so frequently not fatal, it should be pretty obvious that the largest component of accident safety is not the m*v^2 term, but rather the ability of the car to absorb that impact and spread the reduction in velocity out over a period of time.
Even at a modest 45 MPH, the only thing standing between you, as a driver, and almost certain death is your car's ability to crumple and absorb the impact. Up to the point at which it is no longer able to do so, the m*v^2 term isn't important, and above that line, you've probably gotten impaled by some part of the car or ripped the seatbelt out anyway. It's more important, therefore, to understand where that line is and be sure not to cross it. Oh, and also to avoid rolling the car.... :-)
Either way, given the current state of automotive safety systems, if you ignore pedestrian injuries, speed and the number of traffic deaths are not at all correlated.
And vehicle safety systems make a huge difference, too. People frequently walk away from wrecks these days that would have killed them with 100% certainty in a car built 30 years ago.
Also, dumb luck outweighs all of those things by orders of magnitude. While driving 65, if you hit the same bridge post at slightly different angles, you might veery off one way, veer off the other way, spin your car one way or the other, or stop rapidly over the course of about three feet. You can guess which of these is most likely to kill you instantly....
Translation: roads where the speed limit is too low.