In order to use the name UNIX, an operating system is required to pass a strict set of conformance tests. Therefore, Mac OS X is UNIX in far more than just a trademark sense.
Better advice: sue. The FCC is requiring cable providers to maintain analog cable until 2012 unless they provide converters for their customers. Unless I'm misunderstanding, charging their customers to rent the boxes was NOT one of their options.
You sound like an addict. You can't give-up texting even for 30 seconds during a redlight stop?
Actually, I've only sent a single-digit number of text messages in my entire life, none of which were while driving. Try again.
Again the AAA study shows otherwise.
Fine. You tell that to my family when I fall asleep behind the wheel.
They found even hand-free cellphone usage causes decreased reaction time (such as failing to stop when a kid runs out in front of you).
If a kid runs out in front of me on a wide open four-lane highway at 10:00 at night, we have bigger problems than me talking on a cell phone. A deer, maybe.
No achievable amount of 'reduction' of standby power is satisfactory, it is still a significant waste, when you multiply by the number of laptops in operation or forgotten on the charger.
It should take about the same amount of power whether you move the battery from 99% full to 100% full a dozen times or from 88% to 100% once, give or take (ignoring nonlinearity in the battery's charge curve, which I'm not familiar enough with to comment on). The device is going to drain power when it's off whether it is plugged in or not. So the only significant difference you make by unplugging should be whether the power use is spread out over a few weeks or all at once when the user plugs the computer back in.
So for most users, 1 to 1.5 years is actually how long it will be before the battery needs replacement anyways.
That may have been true for older Li ion batteries, but I have Li ion batteries that are about 3 years old that provide nearly the same run time that they did when they were new, and I still get acceptable run times out of batteries that are over 5 years old. AFAIK, lithium ion batteries lose capacity primarily due to charge cycles, not decay over time. Either way, 1.5 years is a gross underestimate, and getting farther removed from reality with every passing year as battery chemistry improves.
That's why there should be a mechanical disconnect for the battery as well, to mechanically switch off the battery and its onboard circuitry, so it stops leaking charge, and the user has to manually 'turn the battery back on'.
What you're asking for isn't practical. There's a charge circuit built into basically every lithium ion pack that drains the battery very slowly. The circuit is there to protect against overcharging, but drains power over time. You probably don't want to disconnect that from the battery because that device also stores information about the number of charge cycles on the battery and the power curve exhibited in previous discharge cycles---information that is crucial to avoid overcharging the batteries and to prevent your computer from suddenly shutting down without a low battery warning. I suppose someone could redesign that part to use flash instead of RAM, but doing so would greatly increase the complexity of the component, thus increasing the cost and the size, while decreasing the reliability. And every time you disconnected it, you'd be taking away its ability to monitor the discharge rate, which would diminish its ability to do its job. (Yes, the self-discharge rate for Li ion cells is small, but it is nonzero.)
If you were to limit that suggestion to just disconnecting it from the computer, that might be practical, but it would still be adding a failure-prone device into your power path. And because most laptops use the main battery with a capacitor instead of a clock battery, you'd have other problems, too.
Either way, it seems rather silly to complain about standby power from switching power supplies on laptops that draw a tiny fraction of the power of all those transformer-based wall warts for your USB hub, your cell phone, your flashlight charger, etc. You're focusing on a single grape on a high branch when there's a whole cluster hanging right at eye level.... We should ban non-switching power supplies in consumer goods first, *then* start looking at ways to squeeze that last tenth of a percent out of computer gear....
Statistically speaking, the most common situation that one texts in traffic is when one is *already* stopped, usually in the backup behind a wreck, to tell somebody that you're going to be late. It's safe to say that at least in those situations, anybody with half a brain can safely text and drive. The problem with these laws is that they don't take into account the circumstances and treat all driving as equal. It isn't. Sitting at a traffic light or stopped in traffic is never a risky driving environment no matter how distracted you are... unless you're in East St. Louis and have nice hubcaps....
You're against anti-texting laws? Why? The AAA performed studies showing that texting-while-driving causes 2-3 times slower reaction time than drinking-and-driving. If DUI should be banned because it's dangerous, then so too should DWT (driving while texting) because it's much much worse.
Those studies fail to take into account two critical things:
Stop lights
Duration of impairment
It's completely safe to text while stopped at a traffic light, but technically it's a violation of most of those laws. What possible rational reason, other than raising revenue, could someone have for writing a law in that fashion? How about while traffic is stopped dead on the freeway or moving at 2 MPH? There's provably no safety problem at all at such low speeds; your reaction time could be five or ten seconds and you still wouldn't hit the car in front of you. Yet it's still illegal then. And that's when people are most likely to text---to tell somebody they're going to be late.
Secondly, the period of impairment. Given that you're already taking the time to punch somebody's number in on your phone to either call them or text them, guess which is more likely to cause you to be hopelessly distracted long enough to have a wreck: typing "n trfc. b l8 2nite" or spending ten minutes on the phone as your s.o. keeps talking about his/her day?
Put another way, driving while intoxicated puts you at risk for a period of hours. You're impaired the entire time you're driving. Driving while texting? You're impaired for a few seconds. A minute tops. Odds of having a wreck during that period might be up, but averaged over the duration of the trip, the risk increase is negligible. Further, people are most likely to text in situations where they are not likely to have somebody stop in front of them. Assuming you leave a longer than usual stopping distance in front of you, you can afford the slower reaction time caused by such distractions. If you're moving at 3 MPH in bumper-to-bumper traffic, you can afford the slower reaction time. If you're stopped at a traffic light or stop sign, you can afford the slower reaction time. And so on.
I almost got hit by a woman who was talking-while-driving. She blasted right through the red light as if it wasn't there, almost clipping my front end (fortunately I was only going 5 mph and could slow down quickly). These people are stupid. They CAN'T multitask because they're brains aren't smart enough. They should not be allowed to anything else while driving. It should be banned.
I regularly drive home late at night. I talk on the phone to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel. My brain is smart enough to multitask, at least to the extent necessary to drive a mundane road that I've driven a million times while talking on the phone. When traffic gets heavy, I stop talking, stop listening, and thirty seconds later, I say, "Sorry, traffic. What was that again?" It's really not that hard, but it does take practice. This suggests a need for better driver education that incorporates talking on a phone while driving, not a ban on doing so.
The fact is, some people are incapable of listening to the radio while driving. They start singing, get distracted, and plough into buildings. Should we ban car radios? How about combs? Some people are incapable of listening to passengers without getting distracted. Should we make it illegal to manufacture cars with more than one seat? At what point do you draw the line? Is it really necessary to drastically reduce the quality of life for everyone just because some people occasionally make fatal errors because they can't handle the responsibility?
Here's one final thought: regardless of how many accidents are caused by texting or dialing, there's still one cause that tops them all. Approximately 97% of all accidents are caused by people. If we could get rid of the meatbag behind the wheel, we'd have almost two
First, Apple isn't nearly as consistent as you think. The newer Airport stuff uses a standard two or three prong cord, as does the new Mini, IIRC; the old Mini used a brick with an adapter that looked somewhat like a FireWire 400 connector, but with two rounded ends instead of one. The desktops use a normal power cord. The iPod/iPhone/iPad use a dock connector (that plugs into a USB port). The laptop models each have a separate model of power supply associated with them (45W, 60W, and 85W for the MacBook Air, MacBook, and MacBook Pro, respectively), though the biggest charger works for any of them (and the smaller chargers will work with the larger machines as long as you don't mind the battery not charging and possibly draining slowly while you use the machine).
Second, I've never heard of somebody replacing a $300 laptop because a power supply broke (except when the power supply connector broke off inside the machine or damaged the machine's connector in some way). Maybe replacing the whole machine makes sense for products that cost $20 (where the charger costs almost as much as the device). For more expensive stuff, people usually take it to their nearest dealer or Radio Shack or whatever and ask somebody to find them the right power supply. Or by the "whole thing", did you mean the power supply?
The lack of standards does, however, provide a slight benefit for some products in that instead of being able to buy anybody's power adapter, they usually end up buying one from the manufacturer, which means that there's no real competition in the cost of power supplies, and thus manufacturers can charge way more than they could otherwise get away with. With standardized power, the computer manufacturers' power supplies would be competing purely on price and reliability with cheaper power supplies from a dozen manufacturers, and nobody would buy the more expensive supplies from the computer manufacturers unless they conferred some significant advantage (low noise for audio work, for example). In the long term, that could lead to a race to the bottom, both in terms of cost and quality... or not, depending on how much the computer manufacturers care about the quality of the products they sell.
Finally, most computer power supplies already have some logic for controlling the power supplied, even if that just means disabling the output in the event of a short (to prevent fires) or disconnect (to reduce standby current). It should not be that hard to use a simple sense line trick with varying resistance values to indicate the desired supply voltage (with high resistance being low voltage to avoid equipment damage in the event of any sort of cable or connector problem) and then use that information to set the output voltage of a variable DC-DC converter. Could be done with just a handful of components. That's a heck of a lot simpler than adding a communication protocol over the wires. For that matter, you could make the cable have a larger connector on the end towards the power supply, then provide different cables for different machines, depending on their requirements, with different connectors on the other end, etc. Then, you wouldn't have to carry the sense pins through the cable at all.
Alternatively, if you standardize on a single supply voltage (say 18VDC to accommodate charging large batteries), it would not be at all difficult to do a DC-DC conversion in the device itself to step that down as needed. This seems like a more likely design for a universal brick anyway.
Or use rubber prong locks like Sony Ericsson phones. Or velcro.:-D There are alternatives to magnets. The most important things in a standard design, IMHO, are:
High efficiency with low standby current. Must be able to supply significantly multiple voltages upon request, depending on whether the computer is charging or not.
No penetration. All contacts should be surface (pressure) contacts. As soon as you have a prong going into a hole, there's the possibility of damaging the machine by yanking it at an angle. The design should be such that if anything gets damaged, it is the cord.
Low breakaway force. The force to detach from any angle should be less than the inertial mass of the computer plus friction against a potentially slick surface like a glass table. (Translation: the connector must not be recessed significantly into the side of the machine.)
Sufficiently large connector to grasp easily while the computer is sitting on a desk. You should not feel the need to pull the cable by the wire because the connector body is too short to grasp easily.
Replaceable cord. Replacing an eighty dollar power supply because a two dollar piece of wire breaks or frays is idiotic. Put a plug on both ends. Problem solved.
I disagree with your suggestion that the computer unplug itself when fully charged and turned off. Between the self discharge rate, the standby power fed to the logic board used for soft power, and the power used by the battery's management board, the battery drains slowly over time even when the machine is off. The exact rate varies. If you leave a battery for a year or two, it can get down to such a low voltage that the charge circuit will refuse to charge the cells, at which point your battery is a brick. (Been there, done that more than once.) The computer disables its own charge circuit when the battery is charged and reactivates it when the battery falls below a threshold level. There's no need to take away its ability to do so just to conserve a tiny amount of power.
Besides, that shouldn't save a significant amount of power anyway if the adapter is designed correctly. You're talking about the difference between an occasional short trickle charge initiated by the machine and a longer trickle charge when the person plugs it back in later to top up the last few percent on the battery. If you really want to reduce the power load, push for rules about how much standby power the machine can draw while plugged in, thus making that moot.
No, that's after factoring all that in, factoring in the extra costs of professional installation by a for-profit entity up on somebody's roof, and lots of other costs. And those numbers are still on the high side, probably because (I think) they're based on a survey of existing installations rather than the cost of a new installation going forward.
I ran the math on panels assuming somewhere around $3 per watt of output, and assuming 5 equivalent full sun hours (e.g. southern California), and the panel costs by themselves came out to somewhere around 4 cents per kWh averaged over the lifespan of the hardware. That's not the whole cost, of course---you still have the inverter, whatever meter changes are needed for grid tie, installation costs, and the interest you would have made on that money, but I'm finding it hard to believe that a newly installed setup based on the latest panel technology would be anywhere near 15 cents pre kWh, much less 30. And remember that inverter cost per watt tends to decrease as the size of the inverter increases, so large commercial installations would be even cheaper.
I'm not saying solar is profitable in places where power is cheap (TVA) and/or sunlight is scarce (Alaska), but for much of the U.S., they should be pretty good from an economic perspective at this point. Even the leased solar systems (where you pay per month) typically cost on the order of half what PG&E charges for power, or so I'm told. Now admittedly that's subsidized, but I doubt the state covers half the cost....
I intend to go fully solar (non-leased) when I build a house, as even a conservative estimate without a penny of subsidies would have it paying for itself in ten years, and the first few panels (knocking out the top tier of power usage) would pay for themselves in five. With subsidies, it would pay for itself even sooner. Your numbers may vary depending on how much you're getting ripped off for power, how much sun you get, and whether you know how to install the panels yourself.
Well, that happens in free, for-profit markets. What you are advocating is a non-profit entity to fund research.
Uh... no, I'm advocating the government creating a non-profit entity to buy a boatload of solar panel and/or solar tower rigs and set up dozens of large solar-based power generation plants. You must be confusing me with someone else.
That's about how long I'm expecting us to be able to stretch the aging nuclear plants before the first one shuts down due to noncompliance. Maybe sooner. We'll need a replacement for somewhere approaching a third of our power production within about a decade after that. Lack of availability of power + high demand = skyrocketing costs. Simple economics, really.
So if solar is 15 cents per Kwh and gas or coal is 5, it's 3 times as much when the sun is shining. If we triple that to account for when the sun doesn't shine or winter, we are looking at nine times the current costs of gas.
AFAIK, that 15 cents per Kwh is already an average. The difference between 15 and 30 is primarily the difference between different types of hardware installation and different amounts of sunlight in different areas of the country. And actually, that price is apparently based on production with storage. If you are doing grid tie solar, it's almost as cheap as coal power. My math, based on just the cost of panels (ignoring conversion losses, the initial purchase cost of the inverter, installation costs, etc.) is somewhere around 4-6 cents per kWh averaged over the design lifespan of modern panels. That's at retail costs for panels. Buying in bulk brings the cost down considerably, and a corporate entity with hired installers would probably spend considerably less per panel than a homeowner paying a commercial installer would.
All though the 90's and better part of the last century they have been working on solar for mass production to one degree or another. Any economics of scale has pretty much already been realized.
For small panels, yes. For large panels, there are still yield problems that need to be resolved, plus a general lack of manufacturing plants building the things. There are still places where economies of scale can play a part. And better manufacturing techniques are being developed---techniques that companies wouldn't bother developing if people weren't buying them. Money spent on buying panels means money getting rolled into R&D to bring the cost down, the efficiency up, etc. Economies of scale doesn't just apply to the manufacturing costs, you know.
The fact is that solar panel cost per watt has dropped by more than an order of magnitude since the 90s while life expectancy has increased substantially. There are still plenty of gains to be had in this space.
That alternative by the way involves using solar, it's just that the money at this point would be better spend making it more economical and offering those advances to whoever wants to use them in the US so when solar is cheaper then coal or gas or nuclear, it's the obvious choice to use.
And you can do that in two ways: by supporting the existing panel manufacturers through your purchases or by trying to do an end run around them. One of these leads to stronger industry, and it's not the latter. The idea of licensing patents to U.S. companies for free is a nice idea in theory, but in practice, Chinese manufacturers don't care about U.S. patents anyway, so all you're really doing is shifting the R&D burden from the companies building panels (where it belongs) to the government (where it will be done with the least efficiency humanly possible just like everything else the government does).
At least with the corporations holding the cards, if the Chinese manufacturers rip off their IP, they have a little bit of leverage (pulling all of their production and doing so in a very public way as a warning for future companies that might consider doing business with them). If that IP is held by the government, the U.S. government has no such cards to play. You mIght as well start the countdown to a bankrupt U.S. solar industry as soon as you start down that path unless you can also manage to convince solar manufacturing companies to build their products entirely in the U.S. (which isn't very likely).
Then why are states with no sales taxes currently having budget problems (Oregon)? Or those with income taxes not doing better than those with only sales taxes?
That's an easy one. Everybody's having problems. States that depend more heavily on sales tax, however, are feeling the biggest pinch.
Sales tax revenue is pretty predictable. The failure to plan is the problem, not the type of tax.
True to some degree.
After all, income taxes don't work very well if people are unemployed.
No, and neither does sales tax, for precisely the same reason. The difference is that sales tax also stops working for the employed because they're afraid that next week, they might not be, whereas income tax continues to be paid. Sales tax revenue invariably takes a *much* bigger hit than income tax revenue in tough economic times. It's simply unavoidable.
And California relies on income tax more than sales tax (about 2 to 1 in 2005/6). Oops.
It's not just sales tax, to be fair, but that's a big part of it. I don't have any numbers but I'd expect California's income tax to have decreased proportional to the increase in unemployment, so a mid-to-upper single-digit percent drop, give or take. By contrast, sales tax revenue in California is down by a whopping 19%, more than double what you'd expect due to increased unemployment alone.
The other big hit (even more than sales tax) came from property tax revenue taking a bath. This is what happens when you create imbalanced taxation that puts a substantially greater tax burden on new residents (Prop 13). It was completely predictable, and it was just a question of when.... That's what pushed California's budged shortfall up to a whopping 22% of its annual budget, approximately. That's just insane.
Yes, there was poor planning. Yes, they should have been saving instead of spending surplus revenue for the past few years. That still doesn't change the fact that California would have weathered it much more easily if they had dropped the sales tax altogether a few years ago and bumped up the income tax to compensate.
The income tax is inherently regressive too.
Most income taxes are progressive, deliberately charging a larger percentage of your income the more you make, not the other way around. The fact that you paid higher taxes in one state than in another because your particular state didn't exempt as much income as they should have doesn't change the fact that income taxes are usually progressive, and can be specifically shaped to be progressive, whereas sales taxes are inherently regressive, and cannot feasibly be made to not be for anyone not living hand-to-mouth.
Because you are ignoring the economic issues that don't magically disappear with good intentions.
The economic issues are a smoke screen. Besides, what I recommended was that the government create nonprofit orgs to produce solar power. By cutting out the profit at the generation level, solar power would likely be *cheaper* than nuclear, though coal would still be cheaper.
So the question becomes: do you like widespread pollution? That's what this really comes down to. If you want to have nearly unbreathable air like China does, we could have really, really cheap power. Just build a whole crapload of coal plants. That doesn't make it a good decision.
Secondarily, in the short term, solar is only moderately expensive, but in the long term, it is likely to be much cheaper than using natural gas, diesel, and eventually coal. We only have so much fossil fuel in the ground, and prices are already increasing. In ten years, those solar installations are going to look like a windfall compared with gas-powered peaker plants, and that's even if the cost of solar doesn't drop (which it will).
The bearings and crap on the generators and bicycles can be made to last about as long as the solar panels.
You're joking, right? The square footage alone would be absurd. The energy required to keep said people from dying of heat exhaustion would far exceed the power produced, so it would inherently be net energy negative! Further, a sizable percentage of the solar panels, assuming proper maintenance, will still be producing some power long after the *children* of the people riding the bicycles have all died of old age. Mechanical bearings lasting as long as solid-state parts just isn't within the realm of reality.
The interesting thing is that it's in existence today with the exact same drawbacks and is still more cost efficient and cheaper to the consumer then solar is.
Yes, it's *slightly* more cost efficient and cheaper. With no possibility for getting significantly cheaper with economies of scale. Solar, by contrast, is in its infancy, and government spending in a nascent industry invariably results in production increases, which results in better economies of scale, which brings down the cost for everyone over the long haul, and to an extent, even in the relatively short term. At the current rate, solar power will be significantly cheaper than coal within a decade *if* we continue the ramp-up.
To do otherwise is like telling the poor, you will be perfectly fine with paying $18 a loaf of bread, you will find all sorts of work when your electric bill is $400 a month and you have to pay $200 a week for bus and taxi fare. It's like saying, I don't care about the results, the costs, or who it effects, I'm too emotionally charged with getting this thing going so do it so I can feel good. And yes, that is completely wrong on many levels.
No, it's like telling the poor, "You'll have to pay an extra dollar for each loaf of bread right now so that in ten years you'll be paying $5 for a loaf of bread instead of $1,000." Food for thought.
In effect, you ignored my entire post. I did not shrug off the economics of it. I pointed out that it was starting to approach nuclear power in terms of operating cost. I figured that was enough by itself, but apparently not, so here's a quick review of economics 101 for you:
1. The cheapest solar installations are currently about on par with the most expensive nuclear power plants. This means the "non-economical" thing is just a load of bull, as I said in the post you replied to.
2. What's the #1 thing that brings down the cost of manufacturing? Economies of scale. Now you can't get economies of scale on nuclear plants. Each one has to be designed specifically for the location, at least to some degree. No two are alike. This doesn't lend itself to getting cheaper any time soon. Even if we started building cookie-cutter nuke plants, we'd still only be able to put them in certain places, which means economies of scale never kick in. And the fissionable material is only going to get more expensive as demand increases, so the long-term future of nuclear is not so bright.
Does solar lend itself to economies of scale? You bet. As we build more PV panels, we continue to find ways to make them for less money. We've seen major advances in non-PV solar systems, too, particularly in the area of nighttime power storage. What one thing is required for solar power to get cheaper? Lots and lots of people building large-scale solar power systems. Unlike nuclear plants, we can build tens of thousands of these things safely, so economies of scale can actually kick in and make the cost of each installation substantially cheaper. Subsidizing a few solar installations now is a great way of making new installations much more economical in the near future.
Besides, solar power is already cheap enough that it costs barely half what I'm paying for my highest tier of power from PG&E, so it's plenty economical already. The people who say solar is not economical are either misinformed or have an agenda. If it were not economical, PG&E would not be in the process of setting up a number of substantial solar power systems right now. In fact, at California's energy rates, even individual-sized PV systems (some of the most expensive per kWh) typically break even on cost after 5-10 years and are guaranteed to still be providing 85% of their original power output after 30. Sounds pretty economical to me.
Solar power is economical. Costs for solar are close to the costs for nuclear. We don't have more solar power is because coal is cheap, not because solar is expensive. At some point, you just have to bite the bullet.
You seem to think that we should not be spending money, but if not now, then when? We can't build solar capacity to take the burden off of other plants after plants start going offline for emergency repairs. We need that reserve capacity in place now. No, scratch that, we needed it in place a decade ago. And our power needs continue to increase, so we're going to need even more power plants. If we're going to build more generation capacity, why not build clean solar instead of something messier?
The fact is, our power production infrastructure is in sad shape. We get about one fifth of our nation's power from nuclear plants. Almost all of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. are operating near the end of their design lifetime or beyond it. It won't be more than a couple of decades before we're going to need *major* overhauls to *dozens* of nuclear reactors. If we don't have adequate power generation in place by the time that happens, our country is f***ed with a capital "F".
Further, solar power, unlike vegetarian Mexicans, is a resource that, once constructed, generally requires minimal maintenance to provide power for three decades or more. Compared with nuclear power, it is almost as cheap (and getting cheaper, unlike nuclear), produces no ongoing waste products to speak of, is far safer, and can be installed anywhere, not just far away from populated areas.
Subsidizing non-economical power generation is not money well spent.
No, subsidizing clean power generation is money well spent. Putting said hardware into the hands of greedy corporations so that they can turn a profit on it at our expense is not. The government *should* be spending money on solar, but it should be subsidizing it in the same way that it subsidized hydroelectric power a few decades back---by creating a nonprofit organization like TVA to be responsible for the production and delivery.
The purpose of sales tax is to pay the cost of police, fire, and other local services that a business requires. A business in another state does not have those requirements, gains no benefits from the taxes it pays to the city where I live, and thus should not pay those taxes.
Sales tax is inherently regressive. The poor spend a high percentage of their income on taxable goods. This is still true even if you eliminate taxes on food. The rich spend very little as a percentage of their income, and thus are impacted far less by sales tax. This is exactly the opposite of what a proper tax scheme should be.
The states need to be weened off of sales taxes anyway. Sales taxes are a notoriously unreliable way of bringing in revenue. When times get tough, people stop buying things, and sales tax revenue dries up. States that depend heavily on sales tax revenue (Tennessee and California come immediately to mind) end up with massive budget shortfalls. The only way to fix that is to continue to deny them the sales tax and force them to find a more robust way to bring in revenue.
Sales tax shouldn't be expanded. Sales tax should be reduced and possibly eliminated. It is pretty much the worst kind of tax you can create because it discourages spending that is necessary for a healthy economy, is hardest on the people who can least afford it, and has a tendency to drop off steeply when the states need the money the most. Pushing for expanding sales tax betrays a lack of even a basic understanding of economics. It's the sort of thing politicians like because it "closes loopholes" instead of "raising taxes", but in the long run, it will only harm the U.S. economy and drive sales tax revenue down.
I don't think it made a significant impact, IMHO. The vast majority of downloaders, when asked why the downloaded music illegally, replied that there was A. no way to try before you buy on most songs, and B. no store that sold tracks individually. Is it any wonder, then, that when such a store came along (and also provided better ease of use) that most of those people started using it? Who would have thought that maybe those people really were telling the truth when asked their reasons?
The people who didn't feel that way---the ones who were really just doing it to get free content---assuming they got scared by those commercials, would simply have moved to FreeNet, BitBlinder, Tor, or any number of other means of concealing your identity while continuing to obtain free content.
Those commercials might have had an impact, but the impact would primarily be in discouraging new people from joining the illegal download movement, not in scaring off people who were already doing it regularly.
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In order to use the name UNIX, an operating system is required to pass a strict set of conformance tests. Therefore, Mac OS X is UNIX in far more than just a trademark sense.
Law? Law? Ha! In No-Longer-Soviet Russia, law makes you!
That's what Ptolemy said. Food for thought.
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the answer is 0xFFFFFFFF....
2B | ~2B
Better advice: sue. The FCC is requiring cable providers to maintain analog cable until 2012 unless they provide converters for their customers. Unless I'm misunderstanding, charging their customers to rent the boxes was NOT one of their options.
Actually, I've only sent a single-digit number of text messages in my entire life, none of which were while driving. Try again.
Fine. You tell that to my family when I fall asleep behind the wheel.
If a kid runs out in front of me on a wide open four-lane highway at 10:00 at night, we have bigger problems than me talking on a cell phone. A deer, maybe.
It should take about the same amount of power whether you move the battery from 99% full to 100% full a dozen times or from 88% to 100% once, give or take (ignoring nonlinearity in the battery's charge curve, which I'm not familiar enough with to comment on). The device is going to drain power when it's off whether it is plugged in or not. So the only significant difference you make by unplugging should be whether the power use is spread out over a few weeks or all at once when the user plugs the computer back in.
That may have been true for older Li ion batteries, but I have Li ion batteries that are about 3 years old that provide nearly the same run time that they did when they were new, and I still get acceptable run times out of batteries that are over 5 years old. AFAIK, lithium ion batteries lose capacity primarily due to charge cycles, not decay over time. Either way, 1.5 years is a gross underestimate, and getting farther removed from reality with every passing year as battery chemistry improves.
What you're asking for isn't practical. There's a charge circuit built into basically every lithium ion pack that drains the battery very slowly. The circuit is there to protect against overcharging, but drains power over time. You probably don't want to disconnect that from the battery because that device also stores information about the number of charge cycles on the battery and the power curve exhibited in previous discharge cycles---information that is crucial to avoid overcharging the batteries and to prevent your computer from suddenly shutting down without a low battery warning. I suppose someone could redesign that part to use flash instead of RAM, but doing so would greatly increase the complexity of the component, thus increasing the cost and the size, while decreasing the reliability. And every time you disconnected it, you'd be taking away its ability to monitor the discharge rate, which would diminish its ability to do its job. (Yes, the self-discharge rate for Li ion cells is small, but it is nonzero.)
If you were to limit that suggestion to just disconnecting it from the computer, that might be practical, but it would still be adding a failure-prone device into your power path. And because most laptops use the main battery with a capacitor instead of a clock battery, you'd have other problems, too.
Either way, it seems rather silly to complain about standby power from switching power supplies on laptops that draw a tiny fraction of the power of all those transformer-based wall warts for your USB hub, your cell phone, your flashlight charger, etc. You're focusing on a single grape on a high branch when there's a whole cluster hanging right at eye level.... We should ban non-switching power supplies in consumer goods first, *then* start looking at ways to squeeze that last tenth of a percent out of computer gear....
Statistically speaking, the most common situation that one texts in traffic is when one is *already* stopped, usually in the backup behind a wreck, to tell somebody that you're going to be late. It's safe to say that at least in those situations, anybody with half a brain can safely text and drive. The problem with these laws is that they don't take into account the circumstances and treat all driving as equal. It isn't. Sitting at a traffic light or stopped in traffic is never a risky driving environment no matter how distracted you are... unless you're in East St. Louis and have nice hubcaps....
Those studies fail to take into account two critical things:
It's completely safe to text while stopped at a traffic light, but technically it's a violation of most of those laws. What possible rational reason, other than raising revenue, could someone have for writing a law in that fashion? How about while traffic is stopped dead on the freeway or moving at 2 MPH? There's provably no safety problem at all at such low speeds; your reaction time could be five or ten seconds and you still wouldn't hit the car in front of you. Yet it's still illegal then. And that's when people are most likely to text---to tell somebody they're going to be late.
Secondly, the period of impairment. Given that you're already taking the time to punch somebody's number in on your phone to either call them or text them, guess which is more likely to cause you to be hopelessly distracted long enough to have a wreck: typing "n trfc. b l8 2nite" or spending ten minutes on the phone as your s.o. keeps talking about his/her day?
Put another way, driving while intoxicated puts you at risk for a period of hours. You're impaired the entire time you're driving. Driving while texting? You're impaired for a few seconds. A minute tops. Odds of having a wreck during that period might be up, but averaged over the duration of the trip, the risk increase is negligible. Further, people are most likely to text in situations where they are not likely to have somebody stop in front of them. Assuming you leave a longer than usual stopping distance in front of you, you can afford the slower reaction time caused by such distractions. If you're moving at 3 MPH in bumper-to-bumper traffic, you can afford the slower reaction time. If you're stopped at a traffic light or stop sign, you can afford the slower reaction time. And so on.
I regularly drive home late at night. I talk on the phone to keep me from falling asleep at the wheel. My brain is smart enough to multitask, at least to the extent necessary to drive a mundane road that I've driven a million times while talking on the phone. When traffic gets heavy, I stop talking, stop listening, and thirty seconds later, I say, "Sorry, traffic. What was that again?" It's really not that hard, but it does take practice. This suggests a need for better driver education that incorporates talking on a phone while driving, not a ban on doing so.
The fact is, some people are incapable of listening to the radio while driving. They start singing, get distracted, and plough into buildings. Should we ban car radios? How about combs? Some people are incapable of listening to passengers without getting distracted. Should we make it illegal to manufacture cars with more than one seat? At what point do you draw the line? Is it really necessary to drastically reduce the quality of life for everyone just because some people occasionally make fatal errors because they can't handle the responsibility?
Here's one final thought: regardless of how many accidents are caused by texting or dialing, there's still one cause that tops them all. Approximately 97% of all accidents are caused by people. If we could get rid of the meatbag behind the wheel, we'd have almost two
Wait, are you sure he wasn't talking about Clinton?
First, Apple isn't nearly as consistent as you think. The newer Airport stuff uses a standard two or three prong cord, as does the new Mini, IIRC; the old Mini used a brick with an adapter that looked somewhat like a FireWire 400 connector, but with two rounded ends instead of one. The desktops use a normal power cord. The iPod/iPhone/iPad use a dock connector (that plugs into a USB port). The laptop models each have a separate model of power supply associated with them (45W, 60W, and 85W for the MacBook Air, MacBook, and MacBook Pro, respectively), though the biggest charger works for any of them (and the smaller chargers will work with the larger machines as long as you don't mind the battery not charging and possibly draining slowly while you use the machine).
Second, I've never heard of somebody replacing a $300 laptop because a power supply broke (except when the power supply connector broke off inside the machine or damaged the machine's connector in some way). Maybe replacing the whole machine makes sense for products that cost $20 (where the charger costs almost as much as the device). For more expensive stuff, people usually take it to their nearest dealer or Radio Shack or whatever and ask somebody to find them the right power supply. Or by the "whole thing", did you mean the power supply?
The lack of standards does, however, provide a slight benefit for some products in that instead of being able to buy anybody's power adapter, they usually end up buying one from the manufacturer, which means that there's no real competition in the cost of power supplies, and thus manufacturers can charge way more than they could otherwise get away with. With standardized power, the computer manufacturers' power supplies would be competing purely on price and reliability with cheaper power supplies from a dozen manufacturers, and nobody would buy the more expensive supplies from the computer manufacturers unless they conferred some significant advantage (low noise for audio work, for example). In the long term, that could lead to a race to the bottom, both in terms of cost and quality... or not, depending on how much the computer manufacturers care about the quality of the products they sell.
Finally, most computer power supplies already have some logic for controlling the power supplied, even if that just means disabling the output in the event of a short (to prevent fires) or disconnect (to reduce standby current). It should not be that hard to use a simple sense line trick with varying resistance values to indicate the desired supply voltage (with high resistance being low voltage to avoid equipment damage in the event of any sort of cable or connector problem) and then use that information to set the output voltage of a variable DC-DC converter. Could be done with just a handful of components. That's a heck of a lot simpler than adding a communication protocol over the wires. For that matter, you could make the cable have a larger connector on the end towards the power supply, then provide different cables for different machines, depending on their requirements, with different connectors on the other end, etc. Then, you wouldn't have to carry the sense pins through the cable at all.
Alternatively, if you standardize on a single supply voltage (say 18VDC to accommodate charging large batteries), it would not be at all difficult to do a DC-DC conversion in the device itself to step that down as needed. This seems like a more likely design for a universal brick anyway.
Or use rubber prong locks like Sony Ericsson phones. Or velcro. :-D There are alternatives to magnets. The most important things in a standard design, IMHO, are:
I disagree with your suggestion that the computer unplug itself when fully charged and turned off. Between the self discharge rate, the standby power fed to the logic board used for soft power, and the power used by the battery's management board, the battery drains slowly over time even when the machine is off. The exact rate varies. If you leave a battery for a year or two, it can get down to such a low voltage that the charge circuit will refuse to charge the cells, at which point your battery is a brick. (Been there, done that more than once.) The computer disables its own charge circuit when the battery is charged and reactivates it when the battery falls below a threshold level. There's no need to take away its ability to do so just to conserve a tiny amount of power.
Besides, that shouldn't save a significant amount of power anyway if the adapter is designed correctly. You're talking about the difference between an occasional short trickle charge initiated by the machine and a longer trickle charge when the person plugs it back in later to top up the last few percent on the battery. If you really want to reduce the power load, push for rules about how much standby power the machine can draw while plugged in, thus making that moot.
No, that's after factoring all that in, factoring in the extra costs of professional installation by a for-profit entity up on somebody's roof, and lots of other costs. And those numbers are still on the high side, probably because (I think) they're based on a survey of existing installations rather than the cost of a new installation going forward.
I ran the math on panels assuming somewhere around $3 per watt of output, and assuming 5 equivalent full sun hours (e.g. southern California), and the panel costs by themselves came out to somewhere around 4 cents per kWh averaged over the lifespan of the hardware. That's not the whole cost, of course---you still have the inverter, whatever meter changes are needed for grid tie, installation costs, and the interest you would have made on that money, but I'm finding it hard to believe that a newly installed setup based on the latest panel technology would be anywhere near 15 cents pre kWh, much less 30. And remember that inverter cost per watt tends to decrease as the size of the inverter increases, so large commercial installations would be even cheaper.
I'm not saying solar is profitable in places where power is cheap (TVA) and/or sunlight is scarce (Alaska), but for much of the U.S., they should be pretty good from an economic perspective at this point. Even the leased solar systems (where you pay per month) typically cost on the order of half what PG&E charges for power, or so I'm told. Now admittedly that's subsidized, but I doubt the state covers half the cost....
I intend to go fully solar (non-leased) when I build a house, as even a conservative estimate without a penny of subsidies would have it paying for itself in ten years, and the first few panels (knocking out the top tier of power usage) would pay for themselves in five. With subsidies, it would pay for itself even sooner. Your numbers may vary depending on how much you're getting ripped off for power, how much sun you get, and whether you know how to install the panels yourself.
Uh... no, I'm advocating the government creating a non-profit entity to buy a boatload of solar panel and/or solar tower rigs and set up dozens of large solar-based power generation plants. You must be confusing me with someone else.
That's about how long I'm expecting us to be able to stretch the aging nuclear plants before the first one shuts down due to noncompliance. Maybe sooner. We'll need a replacement for somewhere approaching a third of our power production within about a decade after that. Lack of availability of power + high demand = skyrocketing costs. Simple economics, really.
AFAIK, that 15 cents per Kwh is already an average. The difference between 15 and 30 is primarily the difference between different types of hardware installation and different amounts of sunlight in different areas of the country. And actually, that price is apparently based on production with storage. If you are doing grid tie solar, it's almost as cheap as coal power. My math, based on just the cost of panels (ignoring conversion losses, the initial purchase cost of the inverter, installation costs, etc.) is somewhere around 4-6 cents per kWh averaged over the design lifespan of modern panels. That's at retail costs for panels. Buying in bulk brings the cost down considerably, and a corporate entity with hired installers would probably spend considerably less per panel than a homeowner paying a commercial installer would.
For small panels, yes. For large panels, there are still yield problems that need to be resolved, plus a general lack of manufacturing plants building the things. There are still places where economies of scale can play a part. And better manufacturing techniques are being developed---techniques that companies wouldn't bother developing if people weren't buying them. Money spent on buying panels means money getting rolled into R&D to bring the cost down, the efficiency up, etc. Economies of scale doesn't just apply to the manufacturing costs, you know.
The fact is that solar panel cost per watt has dropped by more than an order of magnitude since the 90s while life expectancy has increased substantially. There are still plenty of gains to be had in this space.
And you can do that in two ways: by supporting the existing panel manufacturers through your purchases or by trying to do an end run around them. One of these leads to stronger industry, and it's not the latter. The idea of licensing patents to U.S. companies for free is a nice idea in theory, but in practice, Chinese manufacturers don't care about U.S. patents anyway, so all you're really doing is shifting the R&D burden from the companies building panels (where it belongs) to the government (where it will be done with the least efficiency humanly possible just like everything else the government does).
At least with the corporations holding the cards, if the Chinese manufacturers rip off their IP, they have a little bit of leverage (pulling all of their production and doing so in a very public way as a warning for future companies that might consider doing business with them). If that IP is held by the government, the U.S. government has no such cards to play. You mIght as well start the countdown to a bankrupt U.S. solar industry as soon as you start down that path unless you can also manage to convince solar manufacturing companies to build their products entirely in the U.S. (which isn't very likely).
That's an easy one. Everybody's having problems. States that depend more heavily on sales tax, however, are feeling the biggest pinch.
True to some degree.
No, and neither does sales tax, for precisely the same reason. The difference is that sales tax also stops working for the employed because they're afraid that next week, they might not be, whereas income tax continues to be paid. Sales tax revenue invariably takes a *much* bigger hit than income tax revenue in tough economic times. It's simply unavoidable.
It's not just sales tax, to be fair, but that's a big part of it. I don't have any numbers but I'd expect California's income tax to have decreased proportional to the increase in unemployment, so a mid-to-upper single-digit percent drop, give or take. By contrast, sales tax revenue in California is down by a whopping 19%, more than double what you'd expect due to increased unemployment alone.
The other big hit (even more than sales tax) came from property tax revenue taking a bath. This is what happens when you create imbalanced taxation that puts a substantially greater tax burden on new residents (Prop 13). It was completely predictable, and it was just a question of when.... That's what pushed California's budged shortfall up to a whopping 22% of its annual budget, approximately. That's just insane.
Yes, there was poor planning. Yes, they should have been saving instead of spending surplus revenue for the past few years. That still doesn't change the fact that California would have weathered it much more easily if they had dropped the sales tax altogether a few years ago and bumped up the income tax to compensate.
Most income taxes are progressive, deliberately charging a larger percentage of your income the more you make, not the other way around. The fact that you paid higher taxes in one state than in another because your particular state didn't exempt as much income as they should have doesn't change the fact that income taxes are usually progressive, and can be specifically shaped to be progressive, whereas sales taxes are inherently regressive, and cannot feasibly be made to not be for anyone not living hand-to-mouth.
The economic issues are a smoke screen. Besides, what I recommended was that the government create nonprofit orgs to produce solar power. By cutting out the profit at the generation level, solar power would likely be *cheaper* than nuclear, though coal would still be cheaper.
So the question becomes: do you like widespread pollution? That's what this really comes down to. If you want to have nearly unbreathable air like China does, we could have really, really cheap power. Just build a whole crapload of coal plants. That doesn't make it a good decision.
Secondarily, in the short term, solar is only moderately expensive, but in the long term, it is likely to be much cheaper than using natural gas, diesel, and eventually coal. We only have so much fossil fuel in the ground, and prices are already increasing. In ten years, those solar installations are going to look like a windfall compared with gas-powered peaker plants, and that's even if the cost of solar doesn't drop (which it will).
You're joking, right? The square footage alone would be absurd. The energy required to keep said people from dying of heat exhaustion would far exceed the power produced, so it would inherently be net energy negative! Further, a sizable percentage of the solar panels, assuming proper maintenance, will still be producing some power long after the *children* of the people riding the bicycles have all died of old age. Mechanical bearings lasting as long as solid-state parts just isn't within the realm of reality.
Yes, it's *slightly* more cost efficient and cheaper. With no possibility for getting significantly cheaper with economies of scale. Solar, by contrast, is in its infancy, and government spending in a nascent industry invariably results in production increases, which results in better economies of scale, which brings down the cost for everyone over the long haul, and to an extent, even in the relatively short term. At the current rate, solar power will be significantly cheaper than coal within a decade *if* we continue the ramp-up.
No, it's like telling the poor, "You'll have to pay an extra dollar for each loaf of bread right now so that in ten years you'll be paying $5 for a loaf of bread instead of $1,000." Food for thought.
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Cents_Per_Kilowatt-Hour
In effect, you ignored my entire post. I did not shrug off the economics of it. I pointed out that it was starting to approach nuclear power in terms of operating cost. I figured that was enough by itself, but apparently not, so here's a quick review of economics 101 for you:
1. The cheapest solar installations are currently about on par with the most expensive nuclear power plants. This means the "non-economical" thing is just a load of bull, as I said in the post you replied to.
2. What's the #1 thing that brings down the cost of manufacturing? Economies of scale. Now you can't get economies of scale on nuclear plants. Each one has to be designed specifically for the location, at least to some degree. No two are alike. This doesn't lend itself to getting cheaper any time soon. Even if we started building cookie-cutter nuke plants, we'd still only be able to put them in certain places, which means economies of scale never kick in. And the fissionable material is only going to get more expensive as demand increases, so the long-term future of nuclear is not so bright.
Does solar lend itself to economies of scale? You bet. As we build more PV panels, we continue to find ways to make them for less money. We've seen major advances in non-PV solar systems, too, particularly in the area of nighttime power storage. What one thing is required for solar power to get cheaper? Lots and lots of people building large-scale solar power systems. Unlike nuclear plants, we can build tens of thousands of these things safely, so economies of scale can actually kick in and make the cost of each installation substantially cheaper. Subsidizing a few solar installations now is a great way of making new installations much more economical in the near future.
Besides, solar power is already cheap enough that it costs barely half what I'm paying for my highest tier of power from PG&E, so it's plenty economical already. The people who say solar is not economical are either misinformed or have an agenda. If it were not economical, PG&E would not be in the process of setting up a number of substantial solar power systems right now. In fact, at California's energy rates, even individual-sized PV systems (some of the most expensive per kWh) typically break even on cost after 5-10 years and are guaranteed to still be providing 85% of their original power output after 30. Sounds pretty economical to me.
Solar power is economical. Costs for solar are close to the costs for nuclear. We don't have more solar power is because coal is cheap, not because solar is expensive. At some point, you just have to bite the bullet.
You seem to think that we should not be spending money, but if not now, then when? We can't build solar capacity to take the burden off of other plants after plants start going offline for emergency repairs. We need that reserve capacity in place now. No, scratch that, we needed it in place a decade ago. And our power needs continue to increase, so we're going to need even more power plants. If we're going to build more generation capacity, why not build clean solar instead of something messier?
The fact is, our power production infrastructure is in sad shape. We get about one fifth of our nation's power from nuclear plants. Almost all of the nuclear power plants in the U.S. are operating near the end of their design lifetime or beyond it. It won't be more than a couple of decades before we're going to need *major* overhauls to *dozens* of nuclear reactors. If we don't have adequate power generation in place by the time that happens, our country is f***ed with a capital "F".
Further, solar power, unlike vegetarian Mexicans, is a resource that, once constructed, generally requires minimal maintenance to provide power for three decades or more. Compared with nuclear power, it is almost as cheap (and getting cheaper, unlike nuclear), produces no ongoing waste products to speak of, is far safer, and can be installed anywhere, not just far away from populated areas.
Solar spending just makes sense.
No, subsidizing clean power generation is money well spent. Putting said hardware into the hands of greedy corporations so that they can turn a profit on it at our expense is not. The government *should* be spending money on solar, but it should be subsidizing it in the same way that it subsidized hydroelectric power a few decades back---by creating a nonprofit organization like TVA to be responsible for the production and delivery.
I mind it a lot for several reasons:
Sales tax shouldn't be expanded. Sales tax should be reduced and possibly eliminated. It is pretty much the worst kind of tax you can create because it discourages spending that is necessary for a healthy economy, is hardest on the people who can least afford it, and has a tendency to drop off steeply when the states need the money the most. Pushing for expanding sales tax betrays a lack of even a basic understanding of economics. It's the sort of thing politicians like because it "closes loopholes" instead of "raising taxes", but in the long run, it will only harm the U.S. economy and drive sales tax revenue down.
Yeah, but where's the fun in that? :-)
I don't think it made a significant impact, IMHO. The vast majority of downloaders, when asked why the downloaded music illegally, replied that there was A. no way to try before you buy on most songs, and B. no store that sold tracks individually. Is it any wonder, then, that when such a store came along (and also provided better ease of use) that most of those people started using it? Who would have thought that maybe those people really were telling the truth when asked their reasons?
The people who didn't feel that way---the ones who were really just doing it to get free content---assuming they got scared by those commercials, would simply have moved to FreeNet, BitBlinder, Tor, or any number of other means of concealing your identity while continuing to obtain free content.
Those commercials might have had an impact, but the impact would primarily be in discouraging new people from joining the illegal download movement, not in scaring off people who were already doing it regularly.