Sounds nice, but economics works the other way around. If the color of the bulb is a barrier to entry, then the manufacturers no longer have an incentive to eliminate that barrier. People will be forced to buy CFLs even if they don't like the color, so the incentive is gone.
Um, no, there is not one monopoly supplier of CFLs. The different producers will compete with each other to see who can produce the color that consumers like best.
Maybe there's something about your wiring (do you have dimmer switches) or the bulbs you're buying. There are no incandescent bulbs in my house (except the one in the fridge) and in the 4 years since I switched over I haven't had a single one go out. Previously I was changing those hateful little 25W incandescent bulbs in the chandeliers every few months. The 7W CFLs that took their place are a bit uglier but I adore them for sparing me any more trips up the stepladder.
I've been through a bunch of brands, now I only buy the Philips ones. They come on instantly (for me, indistinguishable from an incandescent), they have a comfortable light color, and since I put my first ones in about 4 years ago none of them have failed or started to dim.
Aside from a few piece-of-shit Osram CFLs - which take a half second to light up and several minutes to reach full brightness - our whole place is lit with the Philips bulbs now, and I couldn't be happier. Reading lamps, chandeliers, and everything. Total electric bill is normally below $7/month unless my girlfriend uses the AC.
I've noticed lately, that the contempt that you liberals have for your fellow man is far more blatant than it used to be, even a few years ago. Why is that?
My fellow man has not been making a terribly good showing for himself lately.
I think I'm missing something. Why would it be better for someone to buy the $3.50 pickles instead? That sounds like a reasonable decision to me.
Not all of the costs of pickle production are built into the $3 jar's supermarket scanner price. There may be human costs (slavery-like conditions in the pickle packer plant), environmental costs (putrid pickle powder pouring into a river), or political ones (the 2008 Peking Pickle Protocol granted low tariffs in exchange for the Chinese ambassador gaining veto rights in US Congress).
This is ever the problem with religious capitalists; like the religious fundamentalists who wave away any physical evidence about the universe that isn't covered in the Bible, religious capitalists wave away any factors that aren't captured in the price tag.
I still have yet to see CFLs and LEDs that throw off the slightly yellow spectrum of incandescents. A "good ole merkin" won't have the language for it but the light thrown off by these things is "a bit funny".
I genuinely don't know: Is there anything objectively superior about the colour of light produced by incandescents, or is it just that people are accustomed to it?
In these parts (Southeast Asia) it's very normal to light houses almost entirely with those long fluourescent tubes. To me the light seems very harsh and blue, but people here don't seem bothered at all. I see it in fairly upscale homes so I don't think it's about desperately trying to save money.
Just wondering, if where I live (in France) all the power I consume comes from a nuclear power plant, does it still matter if I do all of that?
Of course. Radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is very expensive and hazardous to dispose of. The less of it that's produced the better off you are.
Capitalism at least takes advantage of human nature to make a more efficient (not perfect) system. Throw in just enough of a safety net to keep people from starving when their down and a few rules to keep people from exploiting each other and it's a rather good system.
It isn't really so much of a system as an eventuality. Unless you work really hard to avoid it, you'll end up with capitalism.
The question, therefore, is how to best create a system that deals with capitalism's considerable shortcomings (externalities, increasing wealth disparities, etc.) without excessively stifling its creative force.
Given this assumption, there aren't a lot of options for different types of life. The chemistry just doesn't work. Biology is chemistry, chemistry is physics, and physics is mathematics. It basically puts in some ground rules for life.
I'm no rocket surgeon, but this seems to me like an incredibly narcissistic set of assumptions.
It took us thousands of years to get some basic grasp of how life on this planet works, and that's with a big head start - we have it right here to experiment with.
Isn't it a bit shortsighted to conclude that our efforts to understand life have been so thorough as to exclude any other fundamentally different basic approaches?
Sentient life - autonomous entities with motivation and self-awareness - could take forms radically different from those we've had the opportunity to study (namely, ourselves). Simplistically put, such entities could be larger, smaller, slower, or faster than we are mentally prepared for or perhaps even technologically capable of observing. For that matter, they could have been right here all along, and might not even know we're here either for the same reasons.
I may be guilty of the same limited thinking. Perhaps there are forms of awareness that I can't even conceive of. To us the resultant behaviours may seem deterministic and dull, while from their perspective we might appear the same.
I am so glad I left that ridiculous country. Every time I open up the paper they are making some new and practically irreversible change for the worse. Even the traditional mainstay arguments for living there (freedom, strong economy) have withered away. So what's left?
They did not inform or ask their members that they would be collecting this information.
Yes they did, in the user agreement. People just didn't read it.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable place to say that they will be collecting information. People say "but nobody reads those", but if you get vendors to start putting all those reminders somewhere else, then that new place will soon become thick with notifications and people will stop reading it too.
If you care enough to be upset about something like this, then I think you have a responsibility to read the vendor's disclosures before complaining that you weren't told.
The only alternative I could imagine is that you propose a uniform system - perhaps with little icons like Creative Commons uses - for vendors to tersely notify their customers about what sort of data is being collected. By all means go ahead, you would have my full support.
I pay 0$ for incoming calls, I pay 0$ in subscription fee, I payed 0$ in start-up fee and I pay 0$ for the first 142 minutes and 99 sms every month.
Well, either there are undisclosed costs or this is a marketing tactic based on the assumptuion that you are going to use a lot more than 142 minutes per month. Either way that's not telling us too much about the overall market.
What you need to look at is the total cost paid by all phone users for incoming and outgoing minutes.
Please tell me what is the "normal" rate in the US.
To get a sense of the variable component of calls from a carrier's perspective, have a look at some wholesale rates. In general, the less efficient (or aggressively regulated) the market, the higher the rates will be. In some cases (e.g., remote Pacific islands) the rates may simply be a reflection of actual transport costs rather than the factors at play in more typical markets.
The fact that termination rates for mobiles in the US are close to zero indicates that carriers have the latitude to bring their marginal usage charge close to zero as well, something that Norwegian carriers cannot do (as evidenced by your rates that - taken as a mean per-minute charge - go up rather than down as you use the phone more).
I bought a relative a nice GSM phone. After all the expense (including a two year contract where I purchased the phone), he did not end up using it. Why? Because AT&T refused to enable GPRS for his phone even when he called customer service.
So, yes, the network can use GSM, but do not get a phone with any features because AT&T will not let you use them.
I just got back from a week in the USA. I bought a Cingular/AT&T SIM card and stuck it in my Nokia E61i. GPRS worked straight out of the box, despite the fact that AT&T doesn't even sell that phone. So I am not sure I believe you. Maybe what they refused to do is provide you with phone-specific configuration instructions, perhaps because they didn't know the details about how your phone's interface works.
Considering the market segments that companies like Microsoft were involved with in the mid 1980's, it should not surprise anyone that they were not among the first to register for.com domains. It would not have made any sense for them to do so.
As compared to Apple, a massive old-school defense contractor that's only recently transitioned from nuclear guidance systems to MP3 players.
It's a PRIME Computer! The most sophisticated computer ever!
Ah, memories.
Step 1: A CMDNC0
Step 2: Replace any and all system commands with BASIC programs of your crafting.
They used to have these at colleges all over the place in the US. I'd show up with my high school for some regional Model UN or Junior Achievement conference, wander around looking for a terminal that some 1st year compsci student had left logged in, and have the whole mainframe subverted within minutes of arrival. What a pain in the ass I was back then.
Many organisations had domain names but no live internet connection. A typical case was the organisation that had email addresses, but received mail via periodic polling over dialup. I remember when we got our email 4 times a day, like having the postman coming down our street.
It was free for a long time. Then they started charging a one-time administration fee (the amount of which I've long since forgotten). And finally we came to the annual-fee arrangement in place now.
It's not like they went to the Yahoo! Small Business website and registered the domains on their credit cards for $7.99.
Whoever was maintaining the canonical copy of the hosts file had plenty of other stuff to do, this was just a minor chore for them. So it's reasonable to think that updates would get bunched up and made whenever he happened to have some free time.
When I am learning how to blow up the vehicle, I will fail many times and then finally succeed once.
If, in that time, the vehicle's operator doesn't learn anything, or only "learns" in the shallow ways that AI does, then my job will be far easier.
If, on the other hand, the vehicle's operator is as smart as I am, he can drag out the process and make it very expensive for me. I might even be detected and neutralised before I succeed.
It seems like it would be trivial to put together a small armored machine on treads with a machine gun and control it wirelessly from a secure location nearby. Since you could have such a device roll into situations that would be dangerous or suicidal to humans without hesitation, it seems like it would be pretty handy.
Until someone digs a pit in the road, and your machine falls into it. Then they disassemble and reprogram it and send it back to your "secure location".
It is far faster and cheaper to invent ways to destroy a machine, than it is to adapt that machine to survive a new threat.
The main cost for research into destroying the machines is the machines themselves, and that's funded by the researchers' enemies.
Slashdot Mirror
Um, no, there is not one monopoly supplier of CFLs. The different producers will compete with each other to see who can produce the color that consumers like best.
Maybe there's something about your wiring (do you have dimmer switches) or the bulbs you're buying. There are no incandescent bulbs in my house (except the one in the fridge) and in the 4 years since I switched over I haven't had a single one go out. Previously I was changing those hateful little 25W incandescent bulbs in the chandeliers every few months. The 7W CFLs that took their place are a bit uglier but I adore them for sparing me any more trips up the stepladder.
I've been through a bunch of brands, now I only buy the Philips ones. They come on instantly (for me, indistinguishable from an incandescent), they have a comfortable light color, and since I put my first ones in about 4 years ago none of them have failed or started to dim.
Aside from a few piece-of-shit Osram CFLs - which take a half second to light up and several minutes to reach full brightness - our whole place is lit with the Philips bulbs now, and I couldn't be happier. Reading lamps, chandeliers, and everything. Total electric bill is normally below $7/month unless my girlfriend uses the AC.
My fellow man has not been making a terribly good showing for himself lately.
Not all of the costs of pickle production are built into the $3 jar's supermarket scanner price. There may be human costs (slavery-like conditions in the pickle packer plant), environmental costs (putrid pickle powder pouring into a river), or political ones (the 2008 Peking Pickle Protocol granted low tariffs in exchange for the Chinese ambassador gaining veto rights in US Congress).
This is ever the problem with religious capitalists; like the religious fundamentalists who wave away any physical evidence about the universe that isn't covered in the Bible, religious capitalists wave away any factors that aren't captured in the price tag.
I'm not arguing against nuclear power, I'm simply saying that it's not some magic bullet that eliminates the need for conservation.
I genuinely don't know: Is there anything objectively superior about the colour of light produced by incandescents, or is it just that people are accustomed to it?
In these parts (Southeast Asia) it's very normal to light houses almost entirely with those long fluourescent tubes. To me the light seems very harsh and blue, but people here don't seem bothered at all. I see it in fairly upscale homes so I don't think it's about desperately trying to save money.
Of course. Radioactive waste from nuclear power plants is very expensive and hazardous to dispose of. The less of it that's produced the better off you are.
It isn't really so much of a system as an eventuality. Unless you work really hard to avoid it, you'll end up with capitalism.
The question, therefore, is how to best create a system that deals with capitalism's considerable shortcomings (externalities, increasing wealth disparities, etc.) without excessively stifling its creative force.
There's 200 countries out there, you've got plenty of choices.
I'm no rocket surgeon, but this seems to me like an incredibly narcissistic set of assumptions.
It took us thousands of years to get some basic grasp of how life on this planet works, and that's with a big head start - we have it right here to experiment with.
Isn't it a bit shortsighted to conclude that our efforts to understand life have been so thorough as to exclude any other fundamentally different basic approaches?
Sentient life - autonomous entities with motivation and self-awareness - could take forms radically different from those we've had the opportunity to study (namely, ourselves). Simplistically put, such entities could be larger, smaller, slower, or faster than we are mentally prepared for or perhaps even technologically capable of observing. For that matter, they could have been right here all along, and might not even know we're here either for the same reasons.
I may be guilty of the same limited thinking. Perhaps there are forms of awareness that I can't even conceive of. To us the resultant behaviours may seem deterministic and dull, while from their perspective we might appear the same.
I am so glad I left that ridiculous country. Every time I open up the paper they are making some new and practically irreversible change for the worse. Even the traditional mainstay arguments for living there (freedom, strong economy) have withered away. So what's left?
Yes they did, in the user agreement. People just didn't read it.
I think that's a perfectly reasonable place to say that they will be collecting information. People say "but nobody reads those", but if you get vendors to start putting all those reminders somewhere else, then that new place will soon become thick with notifications and people will stop reading it too.
If you care enough to be upset about something like this, then I think you have a responsibility to read the vendor's disclosures before complaining that you weren't told.
The only alternative I could imagine is that you propose a uniform system - perhaps with little icons like Creative Commons uses - for vendors to tersely notify their customers about what sort of data is being collected. By all means go ahead, you would have my full support.
Well, either there are undisclosed costs or this is a marketing tactic based on the assumptuion that you are going to use a lot more than 142 minutes per month. Either way that's not telling us too much about the overall market.
What you need to look at is the total cost paid by all phone users for incoming and outgoing minutes.
I don't know; I live in Malaysia. My outgoing rate to all US phones is US$0.05/minute, to Norwegian mobiles it's US$0.28/minute.
To get a sense of the variable component of calls from a carrier's perspective, have a look at some wholesale rates. In general, the less efficient (or aggressively regulated) the market, the higher the rates will be. In some cases (e.g., remote Pacific islands) the rates may simply be a reflection of actual transport costs rather than the factors at play in more typical markets.
The fact that termination rates for mobiles in the US are close to zero indicates that carriers have the latitude to bring their marginal usage charge close to zero as well, something that Norwegian carriers cannot do (as evidenced by your rates that - taken as a mean per-minute charge - go up rather than down as you use the phone more).
That's because you're too busy paying three times as much for your outgoing calls.
I just got back from a week in the USA. I bought a Cingular/AT&T SIM card and stuck it in my Nokia E61i. GPRS worked straight out of the box, despite the fact that AT&T doesn't even sell that phone. So I am not sure I believe you. Maybe what they refused to do is provide you with phone-specific configuration instructions, perhaps because they didn't know the details about how your phone's interface works.
Really? Out of necessity or just for nostalgic/inertia reasons?
I just see fetchmail these days - nobody seems to be more than one missing link away from the internet anymore.
As compared to Apple, a massive old-school defense contractor that's only recently transitioned from nuclear guidance systems to MP3 players.
Ah, memories.
Step 1: A CMDNC0
Step 2: Replace any and all system commands with BASIC programs of your crafting.
They used to have these at colleges all over the place in the US. I'd show up with my high school for some regional Model UN or Junior Achievement conference, wander around looking for a terminal that some 1st year compsci student had left logged in, and have the whole mainframe subverted within minutes of arrival. What a pain in the ass I was back then.
Not a surprise, I suppose, that they've vanished.
Many organisations had domain names but no live internet connection. A typical case was the organisation that had email addresses, but received mail via periodic polling over dialup. I remember when we got our email 4 times a day, like having the postman coming down our street.
It was free for a long time. Then they started charging a one-time administration fee (the amount of which I've long since forgotten). And finally we came to the annual-fee arrangement in place now.
It's not like they went to the Yahoo! Small Business website and registered the domains on their credit cards for $7.99.
Whoever was maintaining the canonical copy of the hosts file had plenty of other stuff to do, this was just a minor chore for them. So it's reasonable to think that updates would get bunched up and made whenever he happened to have some free time.
When I am learning how to blow up the vehicle, I will fail many times and then finally succeed once.
If, in that time, the vehicle's operator doesn't learn anything, or only "learns" in the shallow ways that AI does, then my job will be far easier.
If, on the other hand, the vehicle's operator is as smart as I am, he can drag out the process and make it very expensive for me. I might even be detected and neutralised before I succeed.
It would be considerably harder to repeatedly destroy manned vehicles, as their operators can learn quickly and are much better at thinking like I do.
Until someone digs a pit in the road, and your machine falls into it. Then they disassemble and reprogram it and send it back to your "secure location".
It is far faster and cheaper to invent ways to destroy a machine, than it is to adapt that machine to survive a new threat.
The main cost for research into destroying the machines is the machines themselves, and that's funded by the researchers' enemies.