Another option is large blocks of ice with coolant running through them to shift power consumption to the night and reduce the amount of energy required (cheaper to make ice at night)
Ice systems are used because of peak/off-peak metering only. The energy they consume ends up being more than just running the AC directly, when it is needed, due to the inefficiency of running AC at that low of a temperature, losses due to imperfect insulation, etc.
If that wasn't the case, nobody would ever need AC. They'd just put insulation around their pools, and do heat exchange inside the building during the day, and with the outside air at night. In other words, thermal mass.
Cats are programmed to attack short jerky motions, such as mice running, and anything which freezes has a good chance of being ignored.
When my cat sees a pidgin, holding perfectly still, she still goes crazy trying to get at it.
Many prey animals, particularly rabbits, have the instinct to hold perfectly still when frightened, yet they are very often killed by cats.
Cats will stalk and attack small prey, no matter how it acts. Only then might strange behavior cause a cat to act differently, but if the cat is hungry, it's still a dead animal, no matter how it acts.
It's sort of like the fear of spiders, snakes, bears, and large cats. There are very valid reasons for humans to be naturally afraid of things that can kill/harm and maybe eat us.
Only a very tiny fraction of snakes and spiders have the ability to seriously harm a human, yet fear of them isn't limited to the traits that would help to identify a venomous creature.
Oddly enough, we have no similar fear of coming into contact with other humans, getting bitten by mosquitoes, eating food off the floor, etc., etc. Yet those things have killed infinitely more people than snakes and spiders ever have.
The idea that we have evolved to fear spiders and snakes is merely a common assumption, that most certainly has no proof behind it. It is also pretty easy to come up with innumerable alternate theories. It could well be that human fear of snakes and spiders is borne out of our familiarity with 4-legged creatures, and merely have a fear of everything else. The fact that a few snakes and spiders can potentially kill humans could well be entirely coincidental. As evidence: Many people have a similar fear of many other non-venomous insects, which we very well know aren't at all dangerous to humans.
Bears and big cats are a no-brainer. It's a predator (eyes in front), and it's larger than you. It has claws and big pointy teeth.
I don't recall hearing many cases of people that are terrified by eg. bear cubs, even though the small animals are FAR larger than spiders or most snakes, and look nearly identical to full-grown bears. So instinctive caution about large predators is really, really not an in-born fear, on the same order as snakes and spiders.
Pure logical fallacy. The winning side (US) lost far less soldiers than the losing side (Japan). This is nothing new or unusual, and you're confusing the two numbers to try and prove a false point.
The facts are, conventional bombing of Japan killed more (Japanese) people than the atomic bomb eventually did. Conventional bombings of Japan, of course, did NOT kill many US soldiers.
Also note that the Russia had a policy of never striking first with Nuclear weapons unless we deployed them first, we (NATO) had no such policy.
The Soviets had the common decency to lie, while NATO did not. Treaties don't mean a damn, and everyone knows it.
Many, many, MANY other similar examples throughout the cold war. For a start, see the chemical/biological weapons treaties.
The rulers of the west had one thing in common with Hitler, they both despised the idea of Socialism in the form adopted by Russia.
And? Even Socialist China despised the Socialist USSR. Some countries hate other countries.
If we knew they had no chance of retaliating except with a conventional attack I could see us in the west having taken things a lot further.
The USA had that opportunity for several years, and did nothing. In fact, when the USSR performed their first atomic test, that would have been the ideal time to wipe them off the face of the earth, before they could retaliate, realizing that wouldn't be the situation for much longer... Yet, it didn't happen.
The researchers say the power to run the Stirling cooler, about 240 watts, would be provided by on-board plutonium batteries, which generate power from the heat of radioactive decay.
Excuse me while I go slam my head against a wall...
The helmet isn't "Predator-Style" in the slightest. No thermography vision at all. And more to the point, even if it had it, that certainly wouldn't allow you to "look through an airplane". Moron bloggers and the tabloids just saw a helmet that was ugly and thought of Predator.
It's really closest to a VR helmet, hooked up to cameras on the F-35 JSF to give pilots a 360 view.
However, they claim that (due to lack of funding and too much competition from financial firms for math PhDs) they aren't so far ahead any more.
You've got it wrong. They were decades ahead because nobody outside of the NSA was doing cryptography AT ALL. There was no real effort at all from the private sector.
DES was really the ONE cryptographic algorithm that existed, anywhere, and even that could only be found internal to IBM, which was by far the biggest digital equipment company anywhere at the time.
It isn't "too much competition" now, it's simply that, for the first time, they've got any competition at all.
Re:Meta to discussion: who is this "we" you speak
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
We shouldn't FORCE how other people use their money, no.
HOWEVER, it's absolutely fair to make your own moral judgment, and, eg. tell them they are spending their money foolishly.
Or would you have exactly the same opinion of two billionaires, one that donates all his money to charity, and the other that spends it all on frivolous indulgances?
It will generate more noise in the body of the inverter itself, but 60Hz noise will be easy to block with the most basic shielding (a Faraday cage made of big chain-link fencing would do it).
For the power lines, the square-wave RF will probably generate a bit more noise in the 1-59Hz range than 60Hz sine-wave AC would have, but you aren't going to pick up interference from those frequencies in any circuitry I'm aware of (unless you're in a submarine, using an ELF radio). Anything able to sufficiently reject sine-wave 60Hz RFI should have no more trouble with square-wave A/C.
They can, indeed, but you should expect a significantly shorter life due to electrolysis and cathodic effects. ie. the metal in the filament of a light bulb, space heater, toaster, etc. will actually migrate from the negative terminal, towards the positive terminal.
many switching power supplies (not all though by a long means) are happy
You've listed the reasons not to use D/C quite well. A large number of switching power supplies will certainly not work, and A/C transformers, as found in wall-warts, won't work at all.
certain kinds of d.c. to d.c. converters can be more efficient than square wave inverters.
If you can raise D/C up to 120V (with whatever efficient "converter" you have) the only added step needed is to switch the polarity 60X/sec to get square-wave D/C. That final step introduces practically no losses, a tiny fraction of a fraction of 1%. Certainly, modified-square-wave inverters will have some more losses, and pure sine-wave inverters a bit more loss still, but not square wave A/C.
So I'd say there's ample benefits to square-wave A/C over D/C, and really no drawbacks at all.
Cordless tools are VERY gutless. You could probably get at least 2X as much work done in the same time with an equivalent corded tool thanks to faster speeds and higher horsepower.
Everything but drills have ridiculously short run-times (cordless circular saws are worthless).
Most all batteries have high internal discharge, which means if you don't have a routine of recharging your batteries every week, they'll be dead when you need them, and you'll be waiting a few hours before you can do anything.
If you do use your tools regularly, the battery capacity quickly decreases, and you really need to replace the batteries every 6 months or more.
Every single manufacturer uses a completely different connector on the battery pack, so that they are incompatible, and they can charge exorbitant fees for replacement packs (often two batteries will cost in excess of buying a new set of cordless tools, that includes them).
It's horrendously expensive to buy the tools individually, and sets seem intentionally designed to include several useless tools, and exclude one or two important ones.
I know first hand exactly how very, very little hassle it is to use an extension cord.
No professional would be caught dead with cordless tools, with the exception of a drill for light work, and even there, they sure as hell also have a corded drill with them at all times, anyhow.
For areas without power, you'd need a laughable number of batteries to accomplish anything. However, you can quite easily buy a $200 generator, and one small tank of gas will keep your corded power tools running for several days. That's exactly how the pros do it.
Uhh, am I just missing something here? Is this article a joke?
No, it's not a joke. It's 100% serious. That's why it was posted under the category "It's funny. Laugh." and the first few words of the summary are "A tongue-in-cheek article".
That's the sign of a dead-serious story right there.
when I'm not using my laptop it is constantly drawing enough power to refresh the RAM and pulse its LED.
What's wrong with that? Suspending is far faster than hibernating, and draws a truly tiny amount of power.
Unless you plan to have your system hibernating for a week or more, you probably SAVE power with (S3) suspend, just due to not having to power the hard drive for several seconds while it writes the entire RAM to disk, and read it all on the next power-up, and keeping the rest of the hardware powered during that time.
Congratulations. You may well be the first non-idiot to post a reply to this story. It's been a painful read to see so much ignorance and stupidity getting points.
The key to this is the solar panels they mention, which keep the caps topped off against leakage current.
Indeed... Solar panels aren't cheap, though, and I thought of something else. A computer monitor has no point in turning on when there's no signal, so why not power the relay from the VGA/DVI cable? Just siphon off a little bit of power, enough to charge a tiny capacitor, throw the relay, and start-up the monitor.
The same trick wouldn't work for TV monitors, unfortunately.
I wonder what would happen if the electric company billed for the volt-amps consumed,
That happens for companies already, and I believe even homes in parts of Europe.
I also wonder what would be required to do whole-house power factor correction?
Some big-ass capacitors, just like the power companies do already to keep from being overwhelmed.
How much cost would it add if you were going to install a grid-tie solar system or something similar?
Funny you should mention it.
Over the past few months, I've been noticing that the vast majority of household devices have a power supply in some form. And even some that don't, like incandescent light bulbs and space heaters, don't need very clean power. It seems that if you're planning on running on batteries for some reason, for 75%+ of devices in your home, you'd be much better off getting an inverter that outputs a simple square wave. You can eliminate all the fancy circuitry and losses involved in generating a clean sine wave, reducing the cost of the inverter, and giving all your CF bulbs, PSUs, wall-warts, etc. a perfect 1.0 power factor.
You'll still want, say, 1 outlet in every room driven from a second (but can be much lower capacity) inverter that generates sine-wave A/C. Anything that has a motor that runs directly from A/C will have much, much less power if driven from a square wave. That means your vacuum, fans, (most) air conditioners, swamp coolers, (full-size) refrigerators, etc. Power tools are an open question, anything with brushes and/or variable-speed control will probably work fine, but there are certain to be some that will not... The (absolutely baffling) popularity of cordless tools makes this partially moot as well.
This doesn't help, of course, with any power you're drawing directly off the grid.
Re:Meta to discussion: who is this "we" you speak
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
"Should" expresses a moral judgement. When collectivists use it they are advocating, in the end, unlimited social violence against those who will not comply.
Making a moral judgment about how someone spends money is perfectly fine. We make moral judgments about government spending all the time.
Nobody here or anywhere else has advocated the use of force, or anything else, to STOP someone from doing so. If something is a horrible waste, publicly shaming them usually works just fine, and if not, oh well, move on to the next one.
This "Jihad" you speak of is entirely in your own head.
The introduction of surface-mount components and multi-function chipsets means that there are genuinely few "user serviceable" parts inside consumer goods.
There are "few" indeed, which makes it simpler to find the problem, and repair it, since failures are very rarely due to a chip that burned out.
Since the end of socket 7 motherboards, I haven't had one chipset fail on me. Now it's just a question of whether it's worth the effort to replace the bulging capacitor. The prices at Radioshack might make it futile, but saving cheap failed equipment for just a few years has given me better selection of parts, and nearly free. So for me, the answer is usually "yes" and I've repaired numerous failed motherboards, PSUs, etc.
And what's the main cause of failure in most electronic devices? In my experience, it's very, very often just a weak solder connection that gave-up. 1 minute to look around for damaged joints, and another minute to fix it, and save $100... No more blowing on your Nintendo cartridges, or sacrificing a lamb before plugging in your controller from a 45 degree angle, and hoping it works. No more pushing hard on a marginal volume control knob, or putting just the right amount of pressure on a headphone jack, just spend 5 minutes and fix the damn things, instead of buying a new one.
Unfortunately, lots of modern tech gear isn't designed to be fixed. It's designed to be cheap to produce.
Equipment was almost never designed to be fixed. These days, it may be a hassle, but a great many things can still be fixed. Stuff just doesn't fail nearly as often, and it's reasonably cheap, so it's not entirely an economic necessity to fix it, and most people just don't ever try to learn how.
That translates to mp3 players with shoddy connectors that pop of the circuit board, or DVD playback mechanisms with poor quality plastic drive gears.
Connectors can be re-soldered. I've never seen plastic gears destroyed. But you should really look at buying stuff that ISN'T crap.
In fact, the economics of computers has changed in interesting ways over the past few years. The "quality" components with nice long warranties are now (usually) just as cheap as the junk. When I need to replace some motherboard, I look at pricewatch and one of the cheapest 3 or so results is an MSI board. Looking for hard drives, often a Seagate is the cheapest, or very close to it. For optical drives, Samsung and Pioneer seem to always be the cheapest, yet they're the rock solid, much better than the rebranded Lite-On drives that most sell. It seems the industry is less of a free-for-all than it used-to be, and the handful of companies that can produce reliable equipment the cheapest are completely taking over.
things will change quickly if the economy continues to nosedive, for the simple reason that asian-made electronics will cost more to purchase and real incomes in the US will drop.
The US dollar is tightly coupled to the value of the Chinese Yuan. Until that changes, Chinese-made goods will stay exactly as relatively inexpensive, no matter how far the US economy nose-dives.
Name-brand manufacturers went all-out to convince the public that it's ONLY the cheap 3rd party rip-off batteries that burst into flames. It's bullshit though. There have been numerous reported cases where known-name-brand batteries have ignited, and stats say it's not uncommon at all. Most of the time, those cheaper "3rd party" batteries are the exact same batteries the manufacturer sells you, just without being rebranded.
The same is true for lots of other equipment. You can buy a nice shortwave radio from a US distributor for $140, or you can spend $60 to buy an identical unit with a different brand-name and manual from China (and $20 to ship it).
Slashdot Mirror
Ice systems are used because of peak/off-peak metering only. The energy they consume ends up being more than just running the AC directly, when it is needed, due to the inefficiency of running AC at that low of a temperature, losses due to imperfect insulation, etc.
If that wasn't the case, nobody would ever need AC. They'd just put insulation around their pools, and do heat exchange inside the building during the day, and with the outside air at night. In other words, thermal mass.
Dehumidifiers are generally regarded as requiring only 1/3rd as much power as air conditioners, and in some parts of the world, are quite popular.
When my cat sees a pidgin, holding perfectly still, she still goes crazy trying to get at it.
Many prey animals, particularly rabbits, have the instinct to hold perfectly still when frightened, yet they are very often killed by cats.
Cats will stalk and attack small prey, no matter how it acts. Only then might strange behavior cause a cat to act differently, but if the cat is hungry, it's still a dead animal, no matter how it acts.
Only a very tiny fraction of snakes and spiders have the ability to seriously harm a human, yet fear of them isn't limited to the traits that would help to identify a venomous creature.
Oddly enough, we have no similar fear of coming into contact with other humans, getting bitten by mosquitoes, eating food off the floor, etc., etc. Yet those things have killed infinitely more people than snakes and spiders ever have.
The idea that we have evolved to fear spiders and snakes is merely a common assumption, that most certainly has no proof behind it. It is also pretty easy to come up with innumerable alternate theories. It could well be that human fear of snakes and spiders is borne out of our familiarity with 4-legged creatures, and merely have a fear of everything else. The fact that a few snakes and spiders can potentially kill humans could well be entirely coincidental. As evidence: Many people have a similar fear of many other non-venomous insects, which we very well know aren't at all dangerous to humans.
Bears and big cats are a no-brainer. It's a predator (eyes in front), and it's larger than you. It has claws and big pointy teeth.
I don't recall hearing many cases of people that are terrified by eg. bear cubs, even though the small animals are FAR larger than spiders or most snakes, and look nearly identical to full-grown bears. So instinctive caution about large predators is really, really not an in-born fear, on the same order as snakes and spiders.
Pure logical fallacy. The winning side (US) lost far less soldiers than the losing side (Japan). This is nothing new or unusual, and you're confusing the two numbers to try and prove a false point.
The facts are, conventional bombing of Japan killed more (Japanese) people than the atomic bomb eventually did. Conventional bombings of Japan, of course, did NOT kill many US soldiers.
The Soviets had the common decency to lie, while NATO did not. Treaties don't mean a damn, and everyone knows it.
Many, many, MANY other similar examples throughout the cold war. For a start, see the chemical/biological weapons treaties.
And? Even Socialist China despised the Socialist USSR. Some countries hate other countries.
The USA had that opportunity for several years, and did nothing. In fact, when the USSR performed their first atomic test, that would have been the ideal time to wipe them off the face of the earth, before they could retaliate, realizing that wouldn't be the situation for much longer... Yet, it didn't happen.
Your arrogance is surpassed only by your ignorance...
Excuse me while I go slam my head against a wall...
The helmet isn't "Predator-Style" in the slightest. No thermography vision at all. And more to the point, even if it had it, that certainly wouldn't allow you to "look through an airplane". Moron bloggers and the tabloids just saw a helmet that was ugly and thought of Predator.
It's really closest to a VR helmet, hooked up to cameras on the F-35 JSF to give pilots a 360 view.
Yeah... And in the mean time, NASA will continue working on the Ares V, which can put 145.0 tons into LEO.
You've got it wrong. They were decades ahead because nobody outside of the NSA was doing cryptography AT ALL. There was no real effort at all from the private sector.
DES was really the ONE cryptographic algorithm that existed, anywhere, and even that could only be found internal to IBM, which was by far the biggest digital equipment company anywhere at the time.
It isn't "too much competition" now, it's simply that, for the first time, they've got any competition at all.
We shouldn't FORCE how other people use their money, no.
HOWEVER, it's absolutely fair to make your own moral judgment, and, eg. tell them they are spending their money foolishly.
Or would you have exactly the same opinion of two billionaires, one that donates all his money to charity, and the other that spends it all on frivolous indulgances?
It will generate more noise in the body of the inverter itself, but 60Hz noise will be easy to block with the most basic shielding (a Faraday cage made of big chain-link fencing would do it).
For the power lines, the square-wave RF will probably generate a bit more noise in the 1-59Hz range than 60Hz sine-wave AC would have, but you aren't going to pick up interference from those frequencies in any circuitry I'm aware of (unless you're in a submarine, using an ELF radio). Anything able to sufficiently reject sine-wave 60Hz RFI should have no more trouble with square-wave A/C.
They can, indeed, but you should expect a significantly shorter life due to electrolysis and cathodic effects. ie. the metal in the filament of a light bulb, space heater, toaster, etc. will actually migrate from the negative terminal, towards the positive terminal.
You've listed the reasons not to use D/C quite well. A large number of switching power supplies will certainly not work, and A/C transformers, as found in wall-warts, won't work at all.
If you can raise D/C up to 120V (with whatever efficient "converter" you have) the only added step needed is to switch the polarity 60X/sec to get square-wave D/C. That final step introduces practically no losses, a tiny fraction of a fraction of 1%. Certainly, modified-square-wave inverters will have some more losses, and pure sine-wave inverters a bit more loss still, but not square wave A/C.
So I'd say there's ample benefits to square-wave A/C over D/C, and really no drawbacks at all.
That's... odd. Why would the two be linked?
Cordless tools are VERY gutless. You could probably get at least 2X as much work done in the same time with an equivalent corded tool thanks to faster speeds and higher horsepower.
Everything but drills have ridiculously short run-times (cordless circular saws are worthless).
Most all batteries have high internal discharge, which means if you don't have a routine of recharging your batteries every week, they'll be dead when you need them, and you'll be waiting a few hours before you can do anything.
If you do use your tools regularly, the battery capacity quickly decreases, and you really need to replace the batteries every 6 months or more.
Every single manufacturer uses a completely different connector on the battery pack, so that they are incompatible, and they can charge exorbitant fees for replacement packs (often two batteries will cost in excess of buying a new set of cordless tools, that includes them).
It's horrendously expensive to buy the tools individually, and sets seem intentionally designed to include several useless tools, and exclude one or two important ones.
I know first hand exactly how very, very little hassle it is to use an extension cord.
No professional would be caught dead with cordless tools, with the exception of a drill for light work, and even there, they sure as hell also have a corded drill with them at all times, anyhow.
For areas without power, you'd need a laughable number of batteries to accomplish anything. However, you can quite easily buy a $200 generator, and one small tank of gas will keep your corded power tools running for several days. That's exactly how the pros do it.
Practically no oil is going towards generating electricity on the grid.
No, it's not a joke. It's 100% serious. That's why it was posted under the category "It's funny. Laugh." and the first few words of the summary are "A tongue-in-cheek article".
That's the sign of a dead-serious story right there.
What's wrong with that? Suspending is far faster than hibernating, and draws a truly tiny amount of power.
Unless you plan to have your system hibernating for a week or more, you probably SAVE power with (S3) suspend, just due to not having to power the hard drive for several seconds while it writes the entire RAM to disk, and read it all on the next power-up, and keeping the rest of the hardware powered during that time.
Congratulations. You may well be the first non-idiot to post a reply to this story. It's been a painful read to see so much ignorance and stupidity getting points.
Indeed... Solar panels aren't cheap, though, and I thought of something else. A computer monitor has no point in turning on when there's no signal, so why not power the relay from the VGA/DVI cable? Just siphon off a little bit of power, enough to charge a tiny capacitor, throw the relay, and start-up the monitor.
The same trick wouldn't work for TV monitors, unfortunately.
That happens for companies already, and I believe even homes in parts of Europe.
Some big-ass capacitors, just like the power companies do already to keep from being overwhelmed.
Funny you should mention it.
Over the past few months, I've been noticing that the vast majority of household devices have a power supply in some form. And even some that don't, like incandescent light bulbs and space heaters, don't need very clean power. It seems that if you're planning on running on batteries for some reason, for 75%+ of devices in your home, you'd be much better off getting an inverter that outputs a simple square wave. You can eliminate all the fancy circuitry and losses involved in generating a clean sine wave, reducing the cost of the inverter, and giving all your CF bulbs, PSUs, wall-warts, etc. a perfect 1.0 power factor.
You'll still want, say, 1 outlet in every room driven from a second (but can be much lower capacity) inverter that generates sine-wave A/C. Anything that has a motor that runs directly from A/C will have much, much less power if driven from a square wave. That means your vacuum, fans, (most) air conditioners, swamp coolers, (full-size) refrigerators, etc. Power tools are an open question, anything with brushes and/or variable-speed control will probably work fine, but there are certain to be some that will not... The (absolutely baffling) popularity of cordless tools makes this partially moot as well.
This doesn't help, of course, with any power you're drawing directly off the grid.
Making a moral judgment about how someone spends money is perfectly fine. We make moral judgments about government spending all the time.
Nobody here or anywhere else has advocated the use of force, or anything else, to STOP someone from doing so. If something is a horrible waste, publicly shaming them usually works just fine, and if not, oh well, move on to the next one.
This "Jihad" you speak of is entirely in your own head.
That's interesting. I've never seen a satellite TV before. Does it look like a normal TV, that just happens to be in orbit?
There are "few" indeed, which makes it simpler to find the problem, and repair it, since failures are very rarely due to a chip that burned out.
Since the end of socket 7 motherboards, I haven't had one chipset fail on me. Now it's just a question of whether it's worth the effort to replace the bulging capacitor. The prices at Radioshack might make it futile, but saving cheap failed equipment for just a few years has given me better selection of parts, and nearly free. So for me, the answer is usually "yes" and I've repaired numerous failed motherboards, PSUs, etc.
And what's the main cause of failure in most electronic devices? In my experience, it's very, very often just a weak solder connection that gave-up. 1 minute to look around for damaged joints, and another minute to fix it, and save $100... No more blowing on your Nintendo cartridges, or sacrificing a lamb before plugging in your controller from a 45 degree angle, and hoping it works. No more pushing hard on a marginal volume control knob, or putting just the right amount of pressure on a headphone jack, just spend 5 minutes and fix the damn things, instead of buying a new one.
Equipment was almost never designed to be fixed. These days, it may be a hassle, but a great many things can still be fixed. Stuff just doesn't fail nearly as often, and it's reasonably cheap, so it's not entirely an economic necessity to fix it, and most people just don't ever try to learn how.
Connectors can be re-soldered. I've never seen plastic gears destroyed. But you should really look at buying stuff that ISN'T crap.
In fact, the economics of computers has changed in interesting ways over the past few years. The "quality" components with nice long warranties are now (usually) just as cheap as the junk. When I need to replace some motherboard, I look at pricewatch and one of the cheapest 3 or so results is an MSI board. Looking for hard drives, often a Seagate is the cheapest, or very close to it. For optical drives, Samsung and Pioneer seem to always be the cheapest, yet they're the rock solid, much better than the rebranded Lite-On drives that most sell. It seems the industry is less of a free-for-all than it used-to be, and the handful of companies that can produce reliable equipment the cheapest are completely taking over.
The US dollar is tightly coupled to the value of the Chinese Yuan. Until that changes, Chinese-made goods will stay exactly as relatively inexpensive, no matter how far the US economy nose-dives.
Name-brand manufacturers went all-out to convince the public that it's ONLY the cheap 3rd party rip-off batteries that burst into flames. It's bullshit though. There have been numerous reported cases where known-name-brand batteries have ignited, and stats say it's not uncommon at all. Most of the time, those cheaper "3rd party" batteries are the exact same batteries the manufacturer sells you, just without being rebranded.
The same is true for lots of other equipment. You can buy a nice shortwave radio from a US distributor for $140, or you can spend $60 to buy an identical unit with a different brand-name and manual from China (and $20 to ship it).