I agree with the grandparent post. Actually I posted a similar reply elsewhere, then found this.
Ugh. No. Maybe it's just me, but my browsing experience slows way down waiting for all the various ad server domains to resolve.
Just do what Adblock does, and download all the content I care about, and display the page. While I'm reading, continue resolving domains and downloading content in the background.
bandwidth wasted on ads
Who cares? The user doesn't usually pay by the megabyte. The ad provider does, but fsck 'em.
once you make a well-known tool to automatically do this, the advertisers will find a way to detect and ignore such downloads
The only way to make sure that I actually saw your ad, that the pixels were actually displayed on my screen and the photons went into my eyeballs, is to make me click on it or interact with it in some way.
They work based on which ads get clicked on or generate sales.
In principle I can make my browser simulate a click on an ad too, if I want to.
I hold all the cards. The advertiser isn't sitting over my shoulder, they have no way to know whether they're interacting with a real human or a roboclient. They'd have to do a Turing test to figure out if I'm a real human, but they can't because real humans refuse to take Turing tests.
Though now that I think about it, "Punch the monkey to win a car!" is a pretty good Turing test which some humans will gladly take. Not me, though.
Adblock is a solution to the wrong problem, and this change is an annoying refinement on solving the wrong problem.
I like the sites I visit. I'm happy if they get paid. If I don't download ads, I'm screwing the people whose sites I enjoy.
I don't like the ads. I don't want to see them. But really, I don't care if my browser downloads them while I'm reading.
Solution: something exactly like Adblock, but which downloads the ads *without* displaying them. The advertiser can't tell whether I actually looked at their pixels with my eyeballs.
Everybody I care about wins. I don't have to look at ads. The site owner gets paid by the advertiser. The advertiser gets totally screwed: they pay for hosting, but get no advertising value. It's a win/win/fsckyou situation!
Can I just say how *great* it is to have this problem? Oh noes, the world is running out of weapons-grade plutonium!
As another poster pointed out, we can cannibalize deployed nuclear weapons if we need more for space exploration, but seriously, this is awesome. More plutonium in space = less plutonium down here.
is this the random musings of an architecture student focusing only on the architecture side, and ignoring the biology side?
I can't comment on the biology, but from a climate science perspective this is ridiculous. The designer has this vision of the Sahara as an endless sea of sand dunes, and thinks desertificaiton means the physical movement of these dunes to cover fertile areas. None of this is true.
This wall will do nothing to make it rain more in the Sahel, and it won't stop people from overgrazing or chopping down trees for firewood either.
Localization that requires source code is bad localization.
they censored some parts of the story for WoW
Censors don't need to see the source.
they sent chinese programmers to the usa to custom fit parts of the story to chinese audiences
Story design that requires source code is bad story design.
Every US corporation that isn't led by total idiots has figured out that if you make your widget in China, six months from now you're going to be competing against the factories you outsourced to. So if you don't want to be shot with your own pistol, you'd best keep your trade secrets out of China.
Either that, or make a product with a 6-month lifetime. Blizzard, as it happens, does both. Paranoid control over IP, *plus* new expansions which render stolen IP obsolete.
diluted the meaningfulness of the chart. (Ever see a hospital chart - maybe 10-20% of it has meaningful clinical data in it, the rest is full of useless legal/billing/redundant crap.)
This brings up the most important way in which electronic recordkeeping can and should be better than paper: different people with different interests can see different views of the data.
As a doctor, you don't give a damn about the patient's billing address, the data codes for various tests, etc. You might care about the price of a given test, or whether it's covered by insurance, but only *before* you order it. After the test is done,you care only about the result. Contrariwise, your billing office cares about the financials only: they shouldn't even be *allowed* to see the test results.
So it seems to me that any sane EMR ought to be able to show you a "doctor's view" of the patient's data, and the billing office a different view. And apparently, the world is full of insane EMRs.
Like all software, digital medical records can be done badly. But they can also be done right. Joe Bugajski's story is gripping, but I want to compare it with the story of my mother.
My mom was in her mid-50s when she became ill, apparently healthy but in fact hiding a serious alcoholism problem. I'll skip the details, but suffice to say that a lifetime of drinking can destroy your body's natural blood-clotting system, leading to internal bleeding. So don't drink, kiddies.
Anyway, once she was medevaced to Queen's Hospital in Honolulu, we never saw a single obvious piece of paper. Everything was recorded digitally. But the key difference between my Mom's story and Joe Bugajski's is that the data was *available* once entered. I got a chance to look over the doctor's shoulder as he reviewed her chart. He was able to look at blood tests, x-rays, up-to-the-minute vitals, every piece of data the hospital recorded, at his fingertips in seconds. And he drove the software like a pro.
In the end, my mother died, but it definitely wasn't because of bad recordkeeping software.
You're right that there's a slippery slope regarding official data, but my post isn't on it. There's a categorical difference between a citizen *requesting* privileged information from the officials, and the officials publishing that information *against* a citizen's wishes.
To continue your JFK analogy, absolutely the government should let citizens see the Zapruder film if they make a legitimate request for it. (See below re "legitimate".)
But that's not in the same category as the FBI renting out a billboard outside the Kennedy compound in Cape Cod and putting up a shot of Kennedy's head being blown off.
In one case, officials are responding to a public request for information. In the other, they're abusing their trust and acting on their own volition. There's no trouble distinguishing between the two.
What's a "legitimate request"? It should be determined by a judge, if necessary. The judge's charge should be to balance the needs of the investigator against the wishes of the subjects depicted or described by the data. It'll sometimes be a tricky judgment call, but that's why we have judges. But the *government*'s desire for secrecy should not have merit in his/her decision.
We give members of the police, fire department, IRS, etc. authority over us, and grant them special access to our personal affairs to allow them to do their jobs.
When these people abuse their authority, or misuse this special access, they're not just betraying their organization, they're betraying all of society. As such, this shouldn't be just an internal disciplinary matter: it should be a crime.
IANAL: is there in fact a criminal charge that can be laid on these guys, something specific to their role as public officials?
Umm, *why* are US military satellites allowing unrestricted access? Sure, the groundside hardware might be hard to obtain when they were originally launched in 1970, but did they really not care if the Soviets used their satellites?
"Dear Congress. We want $1 gajillion to launch communications satellites so we can talk to our ships. These satellites will let the Russkies talk to their ships too. Kthxbye, The Pentagon."
Presumably real naval signals were encrypted on board the ship and decrypted at their destination, but the satellites should have some sort of authentication and session key system to prevent unauthorized access.... or maybe they did, and the Pentagon has disabled it now that the satellites are no longer used, opening the satellites to the public deliberately.
Steering it is definitely a possibility. But the patent is jam-packed with pictures showing RF energy delivered into the eye of the storm, which makes it pretty clear that they don't have a clue about what they're doing.
No, no, no, no, no. Hurricanes are driven by the warm air released from condensation in their centers. This causes low pressure at that location, leading to swirling motions and inflow at low altitude.
Adding more heat at the center of the hurricane will make the hurricane *STRONGER*. It doesn't matter what altitude you add the heat.
Keep your orbital death ray away from my weather until you've taken a basic meteorology course, morons.
Yes, that's what I meant when I said "other common appliances act to counterbalance the effect" -- I was trying to keep the jargon to a minimum.
At the time I wrote this, I assumed that CFLs were inductive loads, like the ballasts in traditional fluorescents. But if they are indeed capacitative, then TFA is *totally* wrong: since power companies more often have problems with excess inductive load, CFLs actually make the power company's life *easier*.
I was wondering about this. I know a fair amount of E&M, but not so much about the details of CFLs. I tried to figure out whether CFLs were inductive vs capacitative loads, but couldn't find any information. Looking at circuit diagrams, there's a big obvious capacitor at the front of the circuit, but some inductive elements farther down the line.
Do you have a reference for the power factor of a CFL, including the sign (lead/lag)?
Your conclusion is correct, though your terminology isn't quite right. V-A isn't the same thing as power, and the CFL isn't "consuming" it. A 13-W lamp with a power factor of 0.5 can be thought of as drawing in 26 W of power, consuming 13 W, and returning 13 W back to the power company.
That 13 W returned isn't useless, and it isn't wasted, unless the power company folks are stupid. But it is a hassle for them to deal with.
This isn't about efficiency or conservation, its about the bottom line. Not only do CFLs use less power to begin with, some of what it does use isn't even billable.
You're right about the bottom line, but it's not just a billing error. A CF bulb sucks energy in, then spits some of it back out at the power company, 60 times a second. The billing is being done correctly, you're paying for what you actually use. But the electric company finds the "backwash" energy returned to the grid an annoyance.
You will probably find that in most jurisdictions there's rules about what you can and cannot connect to the grid, and power factor will be an issue here.
Yes, there may be rules. But more likely, there will be circuit breakers.
I may want to fill my house with low-power-factor fluorescent bulbs and electric motors, but the 100-amp breaker outside on the utility pole gets the final say in what I can and can't do.
I love that graph. But the vast majority of the "lost energy" from generation, transmission, and distribution is in *generation* specifically. The biggest factor is the unavoidable Carnot inefficiency of the boilers and turbines, but the efficiency of the electrical generators (around 80%) plays a role too.
Here's a diagram that breaks it down in more detail. Look carefully for "T&D losses" (transmission and distribution)... it's really hard to notice.
There are lots and lots of places to save energy by improving efficiency... but the power distribution network is not the place to start, it's the most efficient part of our entire energy infrastructure.
The fact that reactive loads cause additional heat-related losses is usually considered uncontroversial in the land of EEs, but apparently not on/.
No doubt there are additional losses, but since the power distribution grid is something like 90% efficient, these additional losses are very small compared to the energy savings gained by using a CFL instead of an incandescent.
As an entirely separate matter, a utility's costs are dominated by capital costs,
Yes, but the article seems to suggest that to handle this peak load, you need to build more power plants, which is not true. A pile of capacitors at a local substation will correct the power factor, at a cost much less than a new power plant.
Anyway, we agree that a cheap capacitor can solve everyone's problems. You want a capacitor on the device, which the consumer would consider cheap. I want a capacitor for the neighborhood, which the power company would consider cheap. Your way reduces peak loads throughout the circuit; my way can take advantage of random capacitance elsewhere in my house or neighborhood to cancel out the inductance.
And while my "hostility towards the power grid" was just for comic effect, I do think the economy of scale favors making the power company pay for the correction.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with the grandparent post. Actually I posted a similar reply elsewhere, then found this.
Ugh. No. Maybe it's just me, but my browsing experience slows way down waiting for all the various ad server domains to resolve.
Just do what Adblock does, and download all the content I care about, and display the page. While I'm reading, continue resolving domains and downloading content in the background.
bandwidth wasted on ads
Who cares? The user doesn't usually pay by the megabyte. The ad provider does, but fsck 'em.
once you make a well-known tool to automatically do this, the advertisers will find a way to detect and ignore such downloads
The only way to make sure that I actually saw your ad, that the pixels were actually displayed on my screen and the photons went into my eyeballs, is to make me click on it or interact with it in some way.
They work based on which ads get clicked on or generate sales.
In principle I can make my browser simulate a click on an ad too, if I want to.
I hold all the cards. The advertiser isn't sitting over my shoulder, they have no way to know whether they're interacting with a real human or a roboclient. They'd have to do a Turing test to figure out if I'm a real human, but they can't because real humans refuse to take Turing tests.
Though now that I think about it, "Punch the monkey to win a car!" is a pretty good Turing test which some humans will gladly take. Not me, though.
Adblock is a solution to the wrong problem, and this change is an annoying refinement on solving the wrong problem.
I like the sites I visit. I'm happy if they get paid. If I don't download ads, I'm screwing the people whose sites I enjoy.
I don't like the ads. I don't want to see them. But really, I don't care if my browser downloads them while I'm reading.
Solution: something exactly like Adblock, but which downloads the ads *without* displaying them. The advertiser can't tell whether I actually looked at their pixels with my eyeballs.
Everybody I care about wins. I don't have to look at ads. The site owner gets paid by the advertiser. The advertiser gets totally screwed: they pay for hosting, but get no advertising value. It's a win/win/fsckyou situation!
Can I just say how *great* it is to have this problem? Oh noes, the world is running out of weapons-grade plutonium!
As another poster pointed out, we can cannibalize deployed nuclear weapons if we need more for space exploration, but seriously, this is awesome. More plutonium in space = less plutonium down here.
is this the random musings of an architecture student focusing only on the architecture side, and ignoring the biology side?
I can't comment on the biology, but from a climate science perspective this is ridiculous. The designer has this vision of the Sahara as an endless sea of sand dunes, and thinks desertificaiton means the physical movement of these dunes to cover fertile areas. None of this is true.
This wall will do nothing to make it rain more in the Sahel, and it won't stop people from overgrazing or chopping down trees for firewood either.
they did chinese language localization for WoW
Localization that requires source code is bad localization.
they censored some parts of the story for WoW
Censors don't need to see the source.
they sent chinese programmers to the usa to custom fit parts of the story to chinese audiences
Story design that requires source code is bad story design.
Every US corporation that isn't led by total idiots has figured out that if you make your widget in China, six months from now you're going to be competing against the factories you outsourced to. So if you don't want to be shot with your own pistol, you'd best keep your trade secrets out of China.
Either that, or make a product with a 6-month lifetime. Blizzard, as it happens, does both. Paranoid control over IP, *plus* new expansions which render stolen IP obsolete.
diluted the meaningfulness of the chart. (Ever see a hospital chart - maybe 10-20% of it has meaningful clinical data in it, the rest is full of useless legal/billing/redundant crap.)
This brings up the most important way in which electronic recordkeeping can and should be better than paper: different people with different interests can see different views of the data.
As a doctor, you don't give a damn about the patient's billing address, the data codes for various tests, etc. You might care about the price of a given test, or whether it's covered by insurance, but only *before* you order it. After the test is done,you care only about the result. Contrariwise, your billing office cares about the financials only: they shouldn't even be *allowed* to see the test results.
So it seems to me that any sane EMR ought to be able to show you a "doctor's view" of the patient's data, and the billing office a different view. And apparently, the world is full of insane EMRs.
Like all software, digital medical records can be done badly. But they can also be done right. Joe Bugajski's story is gripping, but I want to compare it with the story of my mother.
My mom was in her mid-50s when she became ill, apparently healthy but in fact hiding a serious alcoholism problem. I'll skip the details, but suffice to say that a lifetime of drinking can destroy your body's natural blood-clotting system, leading to internal bleeding. So don't drink, kiddies.
Anyway, once she was medevaced to Queen's Hospital in Honolulu, we never saw a single obvious piece of paper. Everything was recorded digitally. But the key difference between my Mom's story and Joe Bugajski's is that the data was *available* once entered. I got a chance to look over the doctor's shoulder as he reviewed her chart. He was able to look at blood tests, x-rays, up-to-the-minute vitals, every piece of data the hospital recorded, at his fingertips in seconds. And he drove the software like a pro.
In the end, my mother died, but it definitely wasn't because of bad recordkeeping software.
You're right that there's a slippery slope regarding official data, but my post isn't on it. There's a categorical difference between a citizen *requesting* privileged information from the officials, and the officials publishing that information *against* a citizen's wishes.
To continue your JFK analogy, absolutely the government should let citizens see the Zapruder film if they make a legitimate request for it. (See below re "legitimate".)
But that's not in the same category as the FBI renting out a billboard outside the Kennedy compound in Cape Cod and putting up a shot of Kennedy's head being blown off.
In one case, officials are responding to a public request for information. In the other, they're abusing their trust and acting on their own volition. There's no trouble distinguishing between the two.
What's a "legitimate request"? It should be determined by a judge, if necessary. The judge's charge should be to balance the needs of the investigator against the wishes of the subjects depicted or described by the data. It'll sometimes be a tricky judgment call, but that's why we have judges. But the *government*'s desire for secrecy should not have merit in his/her decision.
We give members of the police, fire department, IRS, etc. authority over us, and grant them special access to our personal affairs to allow them to do their jobs.
When these people abuse their authority, or misuse this special access, they're not just betraying their organization, they're betraying all of society. As such, this shouldn't be just an internal disciplinary matter: it should be a crime.
IANAL: is there in fact a criminal charge that can be laid on these guys, something specific to their role as public officials?
My sympathies, but I don't really think you can blame Turnitin for that fiasco.
You might as well demand that chalkboard erasers be banned from classrooms because an irate professor once threw one at you.
Disclaimer: I am a college professor.
unfortunately it does make the system susceptible to illicit use and jamming.
Also, you're essentially providing your enemy with free satcomm service. How generous.
Umm, *why* are US military satellites allowing unrestricted access? Sure, the groundside hardware might be hard to obtain when they were originally launched in 1970, but did they really not care if the Soviets used their satellites?
"Dear Congress. We want $1 gajillion to launch communications satellites so we can talk to our ships. These satellites will let the Russkies talk to their ships too. Kthxbye, The Pentagon."
Presumably real naval signals were encrypted on board the ship and decrypted at their destination, but the satellites should have some sort of authentication and session key system to prevent unauthorized access. ... or maybe they did, and the Pentagon has disabled it now that the satellites are no longer used, opening the satellites to the public deliberately.
Now *this* is a plan I can stand behind.
Steering it is definitely a possibility. But the patent is jam-packed with pictures showing RF energy delivered into the eye of the storm, which makes it pretty clear that they don't have a clue about what they're doing.
No, no, no, no, no. Hurricanes are driven by the warm air released from condensation in their centers. This causes low pressure at that location, leading to swirling motions and inflow at low altitude.
Adding more heat at the center of the hurricane will make the hurricane *STRONGER*. It doesn't matter what altitude you add the heat.
Keep your orbital death ray away from my weather until you've taken a basic meteorology course, morons.
Booyah, car analogy, thread over.
Can I have an anti-theft system for my car, so that nobody can steal it but anybody who wants to can take it for an anonymous test-drive?
Yes, that's what I meant when I said "other common appliances act to counterbalance the effect" -- I was trying to keep the jargon to a minimum.
At the time I wrote this, I assumed that CFLs were inductive loads, like the ballasts in traditional fluorescents. But if they are indeed capacitative, then TFA is *totally* wrong: since power companies more often have problems with excess inductive load, CFLs actually make the power company's life *easier*.
I was wondering about this. I know a fair amount of E&M, but not so much about the details of CFLs. I tried to figure out whether CFLs were inductive vs capacitative loads, but couldn't find any information. Looking at circuit diagrams, there's a big obvious capacitor at the front of the circuit, but some inductive elements farther down the line.
Do you have a reference for the power factor of a CFL, including the sign (lead/lag)?
Your conclusion is correct, though your terminology isn't quite right. V-A isn't the same thing as power, and the CFL isn't "consuming" it. A 13-W lamp with a power factor of 0.5 can be thought of as drawing in 26 W of power, consuming 13 W, and returning 13 W back to the power company.
That 13 W returned isn't useless, and it isn't wasted, unless the power company folks are stupid. But it is a hassle for them to deal with.
This isn't about efficiency or conservation, its about the bottom line. Not only do CFLs use less power to begin with, some of what it does use isn't even billable.
You're right about the bottom line, but it's not just a billing error. A CF bulb sucks energy in, then spits some of it back out at the power company, 60 times a second. The billing is being done correctly, you're paying for what you actually use. But the electric company finds the "backwash" energy returned to the grid an annoyance.
You will probably find that in most jurisdictions there's rules about what you can and cannot connect to the grid, and power factor will be an issue here.
Yes, there may be rules. But more likely, there will be circuit breakers.
I may want to fill my house with low-power-factor fluorescent bulbs and electric motors, but the 100-amp breaker outside on the utility pole gets the final say in what I can and can't do.
In my defense, most of Boston's commuters are driving cars in to work every day. So it is an automotive analogy. Can I stay?
I love that graph. But the vast majority of the "lost energy" from generation, transmission, and distribution is in *generation* specifically. The biggest factor is the unavoidable Carnot inefficiency of the boilers and turbines, but the efficiency of the electrical generators (around 80%) plays a role too.
Here's a diagram that breaks it down in more detail. Look carefully for "T&D losses" (transmission and distribution)... it's really hard to notice.
There are lots and lots of places to save energy by improving efficiency... but the power distribution network is not the place to start, it's the most efficient part of our entire energy infrastructure.
The fact that reactive loads cause additional heat-related losses is usually considered uncontroversial in the land of EEs, but apparently not on /.
No doubt there are additional losses, but since the power distribution grid is something like 90% efficient, these additional losses are very small compared to the energy savings gained by using a CFL instead of an incandescent.
As an entirely separate matter, a utility's costs are dominated by capital costs,
Yes, but the article seems to suggest that to handle this peak load, you need to build more power plants, which is not true. A pile of capacitors at a local substation will correct the power factor, at a cost much less than a new power plant.
Anyway, we agree that a cheap capacitor can solve everyone's problems. You want a capacitor on the device, which the consumer would consider cheap. I want a capacitor for the neighborhood, which the power company would consider cheap. Your way reduces peak loads throughout the circuit; my way can take advantage of random capacitance elsewhere in my house or neighborhood to cancel out the inductance.
And while my "hostility towards the power grid" was just for comic effect, I do think the economy of scale favors making the power company pay for the correction.