What qualifications do you have that allow you to reliably discern the TRUTH from the lies?
Are you 100% sure you aren't drinking someone else's brand of koolaid?
What makes your sources of information more reliable than other peoples'?
Often when someone is pushing a story about a vast conspiracy, the conspiracy is fictional, or at least highly exaggerated, and the people pushing the conspiracy narrative have their own political reasons for pushing it.
There need be no vast conspiracy; only individuals in certain positions acting in enlightened self interest. The consequences of unrestrained capitalism and the increasing monetization of democracy are obvious in hind-sight and enough smart people have extrapolated the pattern from past experiences that we can be reasonably certain where this ride stops...
Its pretty awful. Its bad enough that even my untrained eye can detect it. It should be noted, however, that I have no real need for color accuracy. For everything else it is superb (once you get the settings on the display right: They are wrong by default, badly wrong...)
The Seiki TVs are absolutely horrible as computer monitors ESPECIALLY for photo work.
As someone who has one, about the only drawback they have is the imperfect color, but if you're not doing photo work, they are excellent. I find it an immense improvement over the 4 screen setup I had before. They are awesome for any kind of programming work, but they really shine for cad work. I can finally put an entire design on the screen at once without the bezels in the way. Being able to put an entire source file in one tall window, and still having 80% of my screen left for other things isn't too shabby either. I estimate that this has given me a 10% boost in productivity because I don't have to keep hunting for the application I want on the task bar.
On a side note, although the colors are wrong, the display is crystal clear, and even very small fonts can be read without difficulty. You do have to do some adjustment, as the display ships with the least useful settings by default, but if it doesn't look right, you have it set wrong.
I own a Miev, and cold weather (Upstate NY) barely affects my range. The effect on the batteries is basically nil. The only real difference is the need to use the heater, which does affect range a bit. (Maybe takes 5% off the range for any given trip).
The real problem is complete lack of quality marketing. Even the local Mitsubishi dealership complains that corporate does basically no advertising, and what little they do is centered around the "save the planet" thing. This is stupid. You're not going to get people to cough up an extra 10 - 15k in one lump sum in support of the environment. Their marketing should never even address environmental issues. The most effective marketing they could do would be a total cost of ownership comparison between themselves and a corolla, or civic. You might throw in a little bit about safety ratings, but not a peep about the environment.
Really...
So "human nature" has not changed, ever, in the history of our species? That's a remarkably grim (not to mention) view of humanity and it's potential. BTW, your metaphors don't work either. We are not sheep, or wolves, though I'll admit that the comparison are, at times, tempting. We have capabilities far beyond what those instinct driven animals possess. To suggest that we do not is just absurd.
Human nature can change as a function of evolution. Too bad we have pretty effectively suspended evolution as it applies to humans...
A bit off topic, but telling people they're part of the problem is counterproductive. You're not going to convince anyone they're wrong by slapping them in the face like that.
Quite true, but I had no intention, nor hope, of changing his mind. He made it up long ago. It was the moderators who were modding up his half baked (and in part, outright fraudulent) claims that I wished to reach. They were the truly intended audience. I was deliberately inflammatory to get attention and responses which ensure that many more people will read the exchange. The people I wanted to reach will see the many viewpoints and make up their own minds. If his ego took a beating, then so be it, he'll live.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world tells you that god exists, and you are going to tell the rest of us that they are wrong because of your own anecdotal experience?
Sorry, I just had to.:)
I made no such claim, nor will I, as I am not experienced enough to make any such claim. I have my suspicions, but they are as purely anecdotal as the OPs claims.
Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.
Ok, lets use the information from stack exchange. They quote the uranium limits from coal plants as being less than 10 parts per million. Lets use 10% of that as the baseline. 1 part per million. The annual coal emissions are on the order of 1.7 billion *tons* of CO2 per year. 1 part per million would be on the order of 1700 tons of uranium per year. By contrast, Chernobyl had about 180 tons of nuclear material, and blew up once... Fukushima had about 10 times that much at the facility, the vast majority of which never left the facility. Three mile island contained all but trace amounts of the core material.
So in the history of nuclear power, coal has released somewhere in the neighborhood of 85,000 tons of uranium into the atmosphere, and all of the nuclear accidents combined have released... wait for it... less than 300 tons.
How many square kilometers of land have been made completely uninhabitable for the next 200 years or so as a result of coal power?
That would be none. The wildlife is still quite happy living in and around every nuclear disaster site. It is just picky humans that refuse to live there. People are afraid that they will get cancer and die (some of the dumber people imagine mutating...). Fun fact: The cancer rates in and around coal mining towns are obscenely high, as are the increased frequency of various ailments related to air quality just about everywhere on the planet... If we applied the same paranoia to the statistical odds of illness from coal related diseases, half of Pennsylvania would be "uninhabitable", just to name one area. People have an irrational fear of nuclear power and radiation. They would be better served by being afraid to get behind the wheel of a car...
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
No, renewables can't meet the demand today, and possibly never will. You have made the classic mistake of assuming your experience is typical of everything everywhere. A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time. Even with neighborhood wind turbines, you will not cover 100% of the power needs. Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption. The overwhelming majority comes from industrial and commercial power use which has a much higher land density, and simply cannot be covered in any meaningful way with solar or wind power. Now you're back to needing industrial scale power generation which requires massive amounts of land for the scale required by industry and you're back to needing big again. If you covered the entire island of Manhattan (every square inch of exposed surface) with solar panels, you would only add up to about 1/4 of the total power demand. Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple. Also, how much deforestation are you willing to undertake to supply the energy needs of industrialized nations?
You are a very large part of the problem. Your arguments are bunk and fail to stand up to the realities of the world, and yet on the surface sound plausible enough to convince at least three moderators to mod you up on Slashdot (which I like to think has a smarter than average population). You and your ilk will have us so paralyzed following dead end projects that we'll all end up cooked thoroughly from global warming before any one of you will even be willing to concede that you're not half as smart as you think you are.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world tells you that renewables cannot be made sufficient to stop global warming, and you are going to tell the rest of us that they are wrong because of your own anecdotal experience? I think its high time we started calling your type out for the BS you're spewing.
What assumptions is Hansen making here? Of couse there will "enough" renewables if demand is scaled down by conservation and the price of fossil fuels is raised high enough. Global warming is an externalized envionmental cost of fossil fues. If those costs are internalized in the price of fossil energy, the free market will take care of the problem. Or we can just raise taxes on fossil energy and use the money to build renewables.
What Hansen is really saying is that there will not be enough renewables if we continue with business as usual, including subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear industires. That is true but it relies on the wrong assumtions.
The basic problem with conservation and demand being reduced by increased cost, is that countries will go to war over energy concerns. This means that if there is even the perception that a country will not have enough energy to meet its wants, then wars will break out as a result. Renewables cannot meet the need yet (if ever), and hydrocarbons are not acceptable for obvious reasons. That effectively leaves nuclear. If we rely on "conservation" to reduce demand, then we are setting ourselves up for failure, because there are far more people in the world who are set to increase their energy usage than there are who are set to decrease. The only way to stop these emerging economies from worsening the problem, is to give them non-hydrocarbon technology, or kill them. The latter is not really practical for a whole host of reasons, and the former is only practical with nuclear power.
Waiting for the "free market" to solve global warming is like waiting for the Chinese government to solve human rights abuses. It just aint gonna happen any more than Santa Claus is going to give us world peace for Christmas this year.
Don't take buying advice from this guy. Microsoft is not the Toyota of hardware, they have always made good PC hardware, not to mention that Toyota isn't really a low quality brand either, I'd bet you get more miles out of a Toyota sports car than a Ferrari. The pro costs 1000$ because its more useful than the ultrabooks in its spec. class and its more portable. A full desktop OS, keyboard, touchpad, waycom pen and touchscreen than you can carry around easily, there aren't many ultra books that offer that, if any.
They are like the Toyota of software though: mainstream, comfortable, but with some annoying quirks. The gear-heads want something faster, and are willing to tinker. Those with real money have something custom built to their satisfaction. For everyone else there's Toyota.
Why would anyone care so much about drugs though? It just does not make any sense.
It makes a tremendous amount of sense from a political standpoint. Incumbents involved in conflicts tend to get re-elected more frequently, so it is in every incumbents interests to be involved in some way with an external conflict. The war on drugs is relatively safe from a political standpoint because pretty much nobody identifies with the drug dealers, and the cartels can be made out to be some foreign criminal gang, and thus attacking either of them bolsters the image of the incumbent being tough on crime, while alienating almost no voters. Its the real reason drugs are not legal in this country, and why it is taking so long for basic legalization of pot in most states. Incumbents are loathe to give up their cash cow.
It has been my experience that often governments do things because of something specific when all along they wanted to do it anyways.
In other words, "bombs" probably is just a justification the public needs in order to allow this to happen. There are probably other reasons which wouldn't sound so acceptable if officially declared. Think about all the laws that get rammed through in the name of stopping terrorism but primarily end up being used to harass and prosecute drug users/dealers or something along other lines.
If you read between the lines, the real reason was spelled out in the summary. These things can be used to detect narcotics manufacturing as well as bomb making. The real reason is the wish to escalate the war on drugs, which has been the real guiding principle behind, and primary use of, all anti-terrorism laws.
It's hard to compensate you when you're dead, or one of your loved ones is crippled and you're going to need special care for them for the rest of their life.
No, but there are far better ways to spend the money. Free mammograms for every woman in America this year would cost about $5 Billion, and would save approximately 50,000 lives. This stupid thing would cost the same, and save 50 lives... Sounds to me like this thing is a criminal waste of money, as is most security theatre...
Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the Govt can design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center for the NSA but can't deploy a website to allow people to sign up for insurance?
That's because one was designed by a bunch of guys on a mission, with an exceptionally strong feeling of patriotism and righteousness with practically no oversight by congress. The other was done by the lowest bidders (largely not even American citizens), built on a framework that was made practically impossible to implement by a meddlesome and conflicted congress.
I did a quick Google to satisfy my curiosity and found a few things:
- While high pressure sodium gives off more lumens per watt, LED has better effective illumination (in part due to how our eyes can detect different wavelengths)
- LEDs are more directional, eliminating up to 40% of light loss due to reflectors
- In the end, an LED might only need to give off 20 or 30% as much light to still illuminate the same area effectively
The part you were missing is the ballast. an old fashioned (non electronic) ballast uses just as much power as the lamp and produces no light at all, cutting the actual light produced per watt in half. Modern electronic ballasts still consume around 1/3 of the power the lamp does, so you're still cutting down your efficiency by 25%.
Incandescent? Are we stuck in a time warp? What city has had the money to waste on incandescent streetlights since the 1960s? LEDs are less efficient than the orange sodium streetlights but probably more efficient than the more common high pressure sodium.
Any lamp that uses a ballast is going to be less efficient than an LED. The reason is that the ballast consumes 50% of the power at steady state. Even an electronic ballast is still going to draw around 25% of the power. LED power supplies by contrast run in the single digits.
LED bulbs require current limiting in the power supply as well or they will burn up- so functionally the have the same requirement as a HPS or fluorescent bulb.
LEDs function effectively as a diode in a system. When you apply forward voltage, they turn on. For any given voltage, the resistance (and the light output) is constant. Florescent and arc lamps by contrast have a wildly variable resistance at any given voltage, and as such, voltage control cannot be used to effectively protect these lamps from over current. Setting a fixed voltage is easy to do in an efficient manner, setting a fixed current is less simple to do efficiently. In any event, they are worlds and gone different behaviors, so thinking of both types of power supply as a "ballast" is inherently incorrect and potentially harmful.
It should also be noted that the power supply for an arc lamp, or a florescent, have to be capable of producing some pretty high voltages, making them marginally more dangerous. LED drivers by contrast produce the same very low voltage at all times.
I know that techies will scream at me for this, but usage-based billing isn't too bad. This way, granny pays very little, and the power users pay what they should.
And on average, everyone ends up paying 2x-3x more than they were before...
Everyone wins!*
*(except those pesky consumers, but to hell with them, what have they ever done for us?)
I could get behind a hybrid plan. Base cost for a base level of bandwidth. Base should cover the "long tail" of the usage curve, i.e. the least-consuming ~90% of users. Then charge per unit over that threshold. If this over comes to pass it should be paired with a requirement that providers treat all packets the same, regardless of source and destination.
Actually, the solution is even simpler. Cut all regulation altogether, and implement a national broadband rollout whose prices are set automatically as a function of cost. Any company that complains they cant compete against government should be laughed out, and the government option guarantees a backstop against the deliberate price gouging that exists now.
Good for the owner. If someone is unemployed and unemployable, then they are contributing nothing to society at that point. It is everyones responsibility to find someway to contribute. They get to set a price or their contributions, and if others agree on that price, they get paid. If you can't do anything that you can get paid for, what good are you to the rest of us?
There will come a time when the majority of people have nothing to contribute to society that has any value. Most of the people who I work with fall into that category. Many of them like myself believe that they could in fact contribute if given the chance, but I have no illusions about where I would stand in that world, and I fear I will live to see it. The owners of mention are not any more qualified or any more fit to survive, but they are lucky enough to fall into the position they are in, and be the ones with the assets. The rest of us will have to fight (literally) to survive.
Slashdot Mirror
What qualifications do you have that allow you to reliably discern the TRUTH from the lies?
Are you 100% sure you aren't drinking someone else's brand of koolaid?
What makes your sources of information more reliable than other peoples'?
Often when someone is pushing a story about a vast conspiracy, the conspiracy is fictional, or at least highly exaggerated, and the people pushing the conspiracy narrative have their own political reasons for pushing it.
There need be no vast conspiracy; only individuals in certain positions acting in enlightened self interest. The consequences of unrestrained capitalism and the increasing monetization of democracy are obvious in hind-sight and enough smart people have extrapolated the pattern from past experiences that we can be reasonably certain where this ride stops...
Even in academia, the labor supply far exceeds the demand. That does not bode well for any of us...
how's the color accuracy?
Its pretty awful. Its bad enough that even my untrained eye can detect it. It should be noted, however, that I have no real need for color accuracy. For everything else it is superb (once you get the settings on the display right: They are wrong by default, badly wrong...)
The Seiki TVs are absolutely horrible as computer monitors ESPECIALLY for photo work.
As someone who has one, about the only drawback they have is the imperfect color, but if you're not doing photo work, they are excellent. I find it an immense improvement over the 4 screen setup I had before. They are awesome for any kind of programming work, but they really shine for cad work. I can finally put an entire design on the screen at once without the bezels in the way. Being able to put an entire source file in one tall window, and still having 80% of my screen left for other things isn't too shabby either. I estimate that this has given me a 10% boost in productivity because I don't have to keep hunting for the application I want on the task bar.
On a side note, although the colors are wrong, the display is crystal clear, and even very small fonts can be read without difficulty. You do have to do some adjustment, as the display ships with the least useful settings by default, but if it doesn't look right, you have it set wrong.
You forgot cold weather.
I own a Miev, and cold weather (Upstate NY) barely affects my range. The effect on the batteries is basically nil. The only real difference is the need to use the heater, which does affect range a bit. (Maybe takes 5% off the range for any given trip).
The real problem is complete lack of quality marketing. Even the local Mitsubishi dealership complains that corporate does basically no advertising, and what little they do is centered around the "save the planet" thing. This is stupid. You're not going to get people to cough up an extra 10 - 15k in one lump sum in support of the environment. Their marketing should never even address environmental issues. The most effective marketing they could do would be a total cost of ownership comparison between themselves and a corolla, or civic. You might throw in a little bit about safety ratings, but not a peep about the environment.
Really... So "human nature" has not changed, ever, in the history of our species? That's a remarkably grim (not to mention) view of humanity and it's potential. BTW, your metaphors don't work either. We are not sheep, or wolves, though I'll admit that the comparison are, at times, tempting. We have capabilities far beyond what those instinct driven animals possess. To suggest that we do not is just absurd.
Human nature can change as a function of evolution. Too bad we have pretty effectively suspended evolution as it applies to humans...
A bit off topic, but telling people they're part of the problem is counterproductive. You're not going to convince anyone they're wrong by slapping them in the face like that.
Quite true, but I had no intention, nor hope, of changing his mind. He made it up long ago. It was the moderators who were modding up his half baked (and in part, outright fraudulent) claims that I wished to reach. They were the truly intended audience. I was deliberately inflammatory to get attention and responses which ensure that many more people will read the exchange. The people I wanted to reach will see the many viewpoints and make up their own minds. If his ego took a beating, then so be it, he'll live.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world tells you that god exists, and you are going to tell the rest of us that they are wrong because of your own anecdotal experience?
Sorry, I just had to. :)
I made no such claim, nor will I, as I am not experienced enough to make any such claim. I have my suspicions, but they are as purely anecdotal as the OPs claims.
The basic problem with conservation and demand being reduced by increased cost, is that THE USA will go to war over energy concerns.
There, fixed that for you.
Nice try, but the only real difference between the USA and any other nation in this regard is $1 Trillion USD in defense spending...
Er, no. Fukushima alone has put out about order of magnitude more radiation than every coal plant in the history of the world ever. This response completely debunks the article you linked to, and this chart shows how what was released from Chernobyl compares to all coal and nuclear emissions ever combined.
Ok, lets use the information from stack exchange. They quote the uranium limits from coal plants as being less than 10 parts per million. Lets use 10% of that as the baseline. 1 part per million. The annual coal emissions are on the order of 1.7 billion *tons* of CO2 per year. 1 part per million would be on the order of 1700 tons of uranium per year. By contrast, Chernobyl had about 180 tons of nuclear material, and blew up once... Fukushima had about 10 times that much at the facility, the vast majority of which never left the facility. Three mile island contained all but trace amounts of the core material.
So in the history of nuclear power, coal has released somewhere in the neighborhood of 85,000 tons of uranium into the atmosphere, and all of the nuclear accidents combined have released... wait for it... less than 300 tons.
Wow, just wow.
How many square kilometers of land have been made completely uninhabitable for the next 200 years or so as a result of coal power?
That would be none. The wildlife is still quite happy living in and around every nuclear disaster site. It is just picky humans that refuse to live there. People are afraid that they will get cancer and die (some of the dumber people imagine mutating...). Fun fact: The cancer rates in and around coal mining towns are obscenely high, as are the increased frequency of various ailments related to air quality just about everywhere on the planet... If we applied the same paranoia to the statistical odds of illness from coal related diseases, half of Pennsylvania would be "uninhabitable", just to name one area. People have an irrational fear of nuclear power and radiation. They would be better served by being afraid to get behind the wheel of a car...
Renewables absolutely have the capability to meet out energy needs. Solar alone has reached to point where a sub-$10k installation can power a reasonably efficient house, even in the Northern US; in places that get enough wind (a lot more places than you might expect), a single small turbine can power a house, or a modest sized tower can power an entire neighborhood.
No, renewables can't meet the demand today, and possibly never will. You have made the classic mistake of assuming your experience is typical of everything everywhere. A typical solar installation is capable only of meeting a normal households power needs part of the time. Even with neighborhood wind turbines, you will not cover 100% of the power needs. Now consider that household power only accounts for 21% of the U.S. energy consumption. The overwhelming majority comes from industrial and commercial power use which has a much higher land density, and simply cannot be covered in any meaningful way with solar or wind power. Now you're back to needing industrial scale power generation which requires massive amounts of land for the scale required by industry and you're back to needing big again. If you covered the entire island of Manhattan (every square inch of exposed surface) with solar panels, you would only add up to about 1/4 of the total power demand. Sure you have lots of open space in Arizona, but you have to get the power from Arizona to Manhattan and its just not that simple. Also, how much deforestation are you willing to undertake to supply the energy needs of industrialized nations?
You are a very large part of the problem. Your arguments are bunk and fail to stand up to the realities of the world, and yet on the surface sound plausible enough to convince at least three moderators to mod you up on Slashdot (which I like to think has a smarter than average population). You and your ilk will have us so paralyzed following dead end projects that we'll all end up cooked thoroughly from global warming before any one of you will even be willing to concede that you're not half as smart as you think you are.
A group of very intelligent individuals from some of the most highly recognized institutions of the world tells you that renewables cannot be made sufficient to stop global warming, and you are going to tell the rest of us that they are wrong because of your own anecdotal experience? I think its high time we started calling your type out for the BS you're spewing.
What assumptions is Hansen making here? Of couse there will "enough" renewables if demand is scaled down by conservation and the price of fossil fuels is raised high enough. Global warming is an externalized envionmental cost of fossil fues. If those costs are internalized in the price of fossil energy, the free market will take care of the problem. Or we can just raise taxes on fossil energy and use the money to build renewables.
What Hansen is really saying is that there will not be enough renewables if we continue with business as usual, including subsidies to the fossil fuel and nuclear industires. That is true but it relies on the wrong assumtions.
The basic problem with conservation and demand being reduced by increased cost, is that countries will go to war over energy concerns. This means that if there is even the perception that a country will not have enough energy to meet its wants, then wars will break out as a result. Renewables cannot meet the need yet (if ever), and hydrocarbons are not acceptable for obvious reasons. That effectively leaves nuclear. If we rely on "conservation" to reduce demand, then we are setting ourselves up for failure, because there are far more people in the world who are set to increase their energy usage than there are who are set to decrease. The only way to stop these emerging economies from worsening the problem, is to give them non-hydrocarbon technology, or kill them. The latter is not really practical for a whole host of reasons, and the former is only practical with nuclear power.
Waiting for the "free market" to solve global warming is like waiting for the Chinese government to solve human rights abuses. It just aint gonna happen any more than Santa Claus is going to give us world peace for Christmas this year.
Don't take buying advice from this guy. Microsoft is not the Toyota of hardware, they have always made good PC hardware, not to mention that Toyota isn't really a low quality brand either, I'd bet you get more miles out of a Toyota sports car than a Ferrari. The pro costs 1000$ because its more useful than the ultrabooks in its spec. class and its more portable. A full desktop OS, keyboard, touchpad, waycom pen and touchscreen than you can carry around easily, there aren't many ultra books that offer that, if any.
They are like the Toyota of software though: mainstream, comfortable, but with some annoying quirks. The gear-heads want something faster, and are willing to tinker. Those with real money have something custom built to their satisfaction. For everyone else there's Toyota.
Why would anyone care so much about drugs though? It just does not make any sense.
It makes a tremendous amount of sense from a political standpoint. Incumbents involved in conflicts tend to get re-elected more frequently, so it is in every incumbents interests to be involved in some way with an external conflict. The war on drugs is relatively safe from a political standpoint because pretty much nobody identifies with the drug dealers, and the cartels can be made out to be some foreign criminal gang, and thus attacking either of them bolsters the image of the incumbent being tough on crime, while alienating almost no voters. Its the real reason drugs are not legal in this country, and why it is taking so long for basic legalization of pot in most states. Incumbents are loathe to give up their cash cow.
It has been my experience that often governments do things because of something specific when all along they wanted to do it anyways.
In other words, "bombs" probably is just a justification the public needs in order to allow this to happen. There are probably other reasons which wouldn't sound so acceptable if officially declared. Think about all the laws that get rammed through in the name of stopping terrorism but primarily end up being used to harass and prosecute drug users/dealers or something along other lines.
If you read between the lines, the real reason was spelled out in the summary. These things can be used to detect narcotics manufacturing as well as bomb making. The real reason is the wish to escalate the war on drugs, which has been the real guiding principle behind, and primary use of, all anti-terrorism laws.
It's hard to compensate you when you're dead, or one of your loved ones is crippled and you're going to need special care for them for the rest of their life.
No, but there are far better ways to spend the money. Free mammograms for every woman in America this year would cost about $5 Billion, and would save approximately 50,000 lives. This stupid thing would cost the same, and save 50 lives... Sounds to me like this thing is a criminal waste of money, as is most security theatre...
Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the Govt can design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center for the NSA but can't deploy a website to allow people to sign up for insurance?
That's because one was designed by a bunch of guys on a mission, with an exceptionally strong feeling of patriotism and righteousness with practically no oversight by congress. The other was done by the lowest bidders (largely not even American citizens), built on a framework that was made practically impossible to implement by a meddlesome and conflicted congress.
I did a quick Google to satisfy my curiosity and found a few things: - While high pressure sodium gives off more lumens per watt, LED has better effective illumination (in part due to how our eyes can detect different wavelengths) - LEDs are more directional, eliminating up to 40% of light loss due to reflectors - In the end, an LED might only need to give off 20 or 30% as much light to still illuminate the same area effectively
The part you were missing is the ballast. an old fashioned (non electronic) ballast uses just as much power as the lamp and produces no light at all, cutting the actual light produced per watt in half. Modern electronic ballasts still consume around 1/3 of the power the lamp does, so you're still cutting down your efficiency by 25%.
Incandescent? Are we stuck in a time warp? What city has had the money to waste on incandescent streetlights since the 1960s? LEDs are less efficient than the orange sodium streetlights but probably more efficient than the more common high pressure sodium.
Any lamp that uses a ballast is going to be less efficient than an LED. The reason is that the ballast consumes 50% of the power at steady state. Even an electronic ballast is still going to draw around 25% of the power. LED power supplies by contrast run in the single digits.
LED bulbs require current limiting in the power supply as well or they will burn up- so functionally the have the same requirement as a HPS or fluorescent bulb.
LEDs function effectively as a diode in a system. When you apply forward voltage, they turn on. For any given voltage, the resistance (and the light output) is constant. Florescent and arc lamps by contrast have a wildly variable resistance at any given voltage, and as such, voltage control cannot be used to effectively protect these lamps from over current. Setting a fixed voltage is easy to do in an efficient manner, setting a fixed current is less simple to do efficiently. In any event, they are worlds and gone different behaviors, so thinking of both types of power supply as a "ballast" is inherently incorrect and potentially harmful.
It should also be noted that the power supply for an arc lamp, or a florescent, have to be capable of producing some pretty high voltages, making them marginally more dangerous. LED drivers by contrast produce the same very low voltage at all times.
I know that techies will scream at me for this, but usage-based billing isn't too bad. This way, granny pays very little, and the power users pay what they should.
And on average, everyone ends up paying 2x-3x more than they were before...
Everyone wins!*
*(except those pesky consumers, but to hell with them, what have they ever done for us?)
I could get behind a hybrid plan. Base cost for a base level of bandwidth. Base should cover the "long tail" of the usage curve, i.e. the least-consuming ~90% of users. Then charge per unit over that threshold. If this over comes to pass it should be paired with a requirement that providers treat all packets the same, regardless of source and destination.
Actually, the solution is even simpler. Cut all regulation altogether, and implement a national broadband rollout whose prices are set automatically as a function of cost. Any company that complains they cant compete against government should be laughed out, and the government option guarantees a backstop against the deliberate price gouging that exists now.
No law abiding person has any issues with spying on suspected individuals and organizations with just cause and court order.
Umm, I do, but my objections stem from the arbitrary and self-serving nature of the law-makers, lawyers and their laws.
Good for the owner. If someone is unemployed and unemployable, then they are contributing nothing to society at that point. It is everyones responsibility to find someway to contribute. They get to set a price or their contributions, and if others agree on that price, they get paid. If you can't do anything that you can get paid for, what good are you to the rest of us?
There will come a time when the majority of people have nothing to contribute to society that has any value. Most of the people who I work with fall into that category. Many of them like myself believe that they could in fact contribute if given the chance, but I have no illusions about where I would stand in that world, and I fear I will live to see it. The owners of mention are not any more qualified or any more fit to survive, but they are lucky enough to fall into the position they are in, and be the ones with the assets. The rest of us will have to fight (literally) to survive.