While this is true, if the roof is steeply pitched and has an east-west roofline, that can have a significant effect on the solar energy captured. A 30 degree pitched roof gets a lot more radiation than a flat roof on that midwinter day in New York - 70% more. Naturally, that illumination is attenuated and shorter duration than it would be in the summer, but it's enough to have some effect.
True. Climate, roof style and orientation all play a role. New York might be at the northern edge of where just painting roofs white would have a net benefit when both heating and cooling are considered, and then mainly for flat roofs that get a lot more
Alumininized coatings are a different story. They are more reflective, but also have an insulating effect. The manufacturers claim this yields a net savings in residential applications as far north as Minneapolis, although the net savings in places like Chicago is still only 1/3 of what simple white paint would achieve in LA.
Roofs are black because bitumen (asphalt) is black, and they're the cheapest, most abundant waterproofing material there is.
To get a white roof you need to add white pigment to a roofing material or coating. It's well worth doing because the extreme heat generated by a black roof damages the roof, but it's a little more expensive up front if you're putting a roof on a house that you're planning on flipping.
You also have to figure in the increased lifespan of your roof. The elastomeric coating seals and prevents leaks, and keeping the tiles cool to touch keeps them from breaking down.
Look. Just because somebody thought of something you haven't doesn't make them dumb. People have been talking about this for years, and *yes* they've taken into account the fact that you'd like to get solar heating from your roof in the winter.
You don't get much solar heating in the winter at the latitude of New York because the days are short and the sunlight oblique. New York is at roughly 40 degrees of latitude, and midwinter the sun rises to less than 30 degrees of elevation off the horizon.
The argument might make sense for La Paz, Bolivia, but not New York.
There's a product for this. It's designed to go over asphalt shingle and they call it... wait for it... "roof coating". Here's a link to the manufacturers' trade group: http://www.roofcoatings.org/wcc.html.
How long before we here the politicians whining that Clinton's trying to outlaw roof shingles or make everyone replace their roof.
I think the problem is marketing. Marketing folks know darn well that two different logically equivalent statements can provoke radically different cognitive responses. You could just as logically say:
"If this system were used to screen every passenger passenger Chicago's O'Hare airport, it would spuriously flag over four innocent passengers every day as a terrorist."
Perhaps a better way is to specify the base rate of the thing being tested for that provides a 50/50 chance of being right:
"Assuming that one in ten thousand passengers is a terrorist, when the system flags a passenger there's precisely 50/50 chance that any passenger flagged by the system is a terrorist."
The difference between a Boston driver and a New York driver: The New York driver takes a right turn from the left lane at 45 mph honking and giving you the finger. The Boston driver does the same thing, but is also drinking coffee, reading the paper, and talking on his cell phone.
So a New York driver is a Boston driver with people skills.
Depends on the terms of service between Facebook and the developer. If mentioning a competitive social media service in an ad is a violation of the TOS, then they're within their rights. If it's NOT mentioned in the TOS, they can change the TOS, take the the "offending" ads and tell the developer not to post any more such ads. It's not clear for me that the ad in question violates Facebooks TOS, because he's trolling for a Google+ invite and that's not cross-promotion.
Here's the issue: Facebook solicits developers in order to add value to its service. As a developer, you invest your creativity and labor, and get access to eyeballs. It's not Facebook doing you a favor or vice versa. It's one hand washing the other. Now this guy managed to piss Facebook off while not technically breaking any rules, and they've decided to make an example of him.
Now I say you're a fool if you invest in a business relationship with an organization that treats developers that way.
I recently returned from a five hour bike ride. After taking my shower, I lay down for a few minutes, and got the first runner's high I'd ever gotten in my life. Man, that was some seriously good shit. For about half an hour I had extreme euphoria and really *intense* feelings of well-being; the only downside was a little light headedness.
If I had a formula for triggering that I'd do it every day.
The Kindle experience is great for novels. It is not so good for technical books or non-fiction books with illustrations and figures. As for math books -- forget it. A page with equations is either rendered as if it were put into an open blender and splattered across the wall, or as an unreadable image. Ironically, I *can* read those book on my iPod touch using the Amazon Reader. The rendering infrastructure must be better. Also on the touch I can zoom in and out of illustrations and photos, a capability for some reason not implemented in the Android reader software for Amazon of Barnes and Noble.
It depends on your bar for "innovation". If you mean "change" then sure. If you mean new value that would cause customers to adopt the upgrade, it's hard to argue conclusively one way or the other. The sense I have is that upgrades are largely driven by security concerns and keeping the number of versions managed by IT down when the old versions are taken off the market.
There's probably never been a change that somebody (often in the trade press) doesn't praise, or find intriguing. But the sense I get from most people is that the upgrade treadmill is something they live with, but don't look forward to. They'd be happy with the office suite they had ten years ago if non-feature related quality (stability, speed, rendering consistency etc.) were improved.
I'm not so sure that you can conclude it was the result of cost-cutting. What happened was a combination of two things:
(1) The null corrector (an optical instrument used to check the figuring of the mirror) was improperly assembled; it was but the matter of a moment to make this mistake; the laser spacing measurements are thrown of by 1.3mm because of a stray reflection from a worn spot on the assembly jig. That's about the thickness of a dime. A washer is inserted to obtained the correct reading.
(2) The contractor checked and double checked the figuring of the mirror, and actually detected the problem. However, since the checking device was less accurate than main null corrector was supposed to be, the engineers decided to believe the main, incorrectly assembled null corrector instead.
The misconfiguration is something that could happen to anyone, but the decision to ignore the faulty test was the serious mistake. Personally, I don't see how cost-cutting has anything to do with that mistake. It's obviously much cheaper to fix the null corrector and continue figuring the mirror. The only way I can imagine cost cutting coming into this is if the program might be canceled because of the delay in figuring the mirror.
Nothing surprising in that. Think of what the world would be like if nobody rationalized doing things they knew very well were a bad idea. A world in which smart people never did anything stupid.
I heard a quite interesting theory about the change in the business culture in the US during the 1980s. In the 50s and 60s, the business culture was influenced by people who had fought in WW2. Those men had a sense of solidarity with the people working for them and a duty towards them. They had sense that the guys on the front line were doing something important. The story even cited one such CEO in the 70s who turned down a raise because it would have been bad for employee morale. In adjusted dollars he was making less than a tenth of what an average CEO in his position would make today.
I have no idea whether that theory is valid; I suspect to the degree it is true, it is probably an oversimplification. But still, that is the kind of person you want in the CEO's chair if you are an employee or an investor planning to hold the stock for the long term.
OK, let's take your dig a hole in the ground routine and apply to a city like Dhaka, Bangladesh, with a population density of 118,000 per square mile. Let's stipulate that part of the job is keeping diseases like cholera from spreading. "Simple" only counts as a virtue if it gets the job done.
I'm just trying to figure out why he wants to violate the KISS methodology. You have few options for feces. Put it it into a treatment facility (flush, carry...) to be treated with bacteria that live on that sort of thing, use it for fertilizer or burn it.
That's only simple for you, the homeowner, because somebody has invested HUGE amounts of money and engineering into infrastructure that makes it possible. Think about it. You take water that has been purified to drinking water standards and moved tthrough a water distribution system, often hundreds of miles. You shit in that drinking water and send it through a separate water collection system, where the shit you put into it is removed and processed and the water treated AGAIN before being dumped in the environment.
That's what you call simple?
Let me tell what's simple: a composting toilet like a Clivus Multrum. My wife's beatnik (proto-hippie) architect uncle had one in his remodeled 17th C farmhouse. You put your waste (including food scraps) in the hole, along with an occasional handful of sawdust. Electric fans (sometimes solar powered) encourage non-smelly aerobic decomposition and prevent the collection of odors. The waste slides down an inclined plane where it emerges as rich, unsmelly compost a few months later. It's not much more mechanically complicated than the infrastructure you need in your house for a flush toilet. You don't even need running water. It's a *hell* of a lot simpler than the whole infrastructure you need to do it the first world way. And cheaper too. A sewage treatment plant for a major city costs *billions* to build, not including the water and sewer networks and installing plumbing in everyone's house.
we're simply talking about what would contaminate a lot of water beyond limit set by EPA. Break a CFL in a tank of water and drink it all, let us know how that works out for you.
What, drink all 5000 liters? I think it's safe to say that if I did this in anything less than six months, the water would do me more harm than the 3 mg of mercury.
Well, more like "while the Earth burns", but you've failed to grasp the brilliance of our corporate overlords' plan.
First, they'll liquidate all environmental capital, converting it to equity. *Their* equity. Then when the Earth has been transformed into a burning trash heap, they'll call in the engineers to devise a fix. Not just *any* fix; a *productizable* fix that will allow them to milk the suckers coming AND going. You'll have to pay for passage on a spaceship to one of those numerous planets that look like a California state park you see in Star Trek. Or perhaps they'll sell us a trip through a machine that projects us into the alternate dimension in which the overlords had never been born.
If that doesn't work out, our overlords have a backup plan. They'll threaten and abuse the engineers until the engineers deliver.
If *that* doesn't work, they've got a second back up. They'll fire the engineers' asses, cut off their unemployment, convert their pension fund into executive bonuses and shift the tax burden onto them. Actually, they were planning to do that anyway, but in this case they'll *blame* the engineers instead of impersonal market forces.
You just have to grasp the fundamental principle of fascism: if you're a big enough bastard, you can get anything you want.
Because neither the producer of the bulb nor the user of the bulb bear the entire cost of the bulb's inefficiency. Disposal of trash is publicly subsidized in most places. Energy use is subsidized by policies that make energy security a national defense priority. Pollution is a kind of subsidy, only it isn't born by the public at large. It's born by random people who happen to breath the emissions your marginal energy use caused.
Now another theoretically better way to handle this is to figure out the exact marginal cost of all those subsides over what the most efficient choice would be. You then add that marginal cost to the purchase price of your basic Fred Flintstone Argon-Tungsten incandescent bulb. After collecting this tax, you run around distributing proceeds to whomever paid a subsidy. The American taxapyer gets some for his policing of international waters through which petroleum is shipped. The people living near the power plant and breathing emissions get a check too.
The practical problem is that we'd never get the pricing right and we'd *certainly* never get the distribution of the proceeds right if we did this as a tax. But there is a way to get those things *perfectly* right, at least as far as the marginal costs are concerned.
You ban the argon-tungsten incandescent.
As for the admitted injustice done to the would-be purchasers of bang-the-rocks-together-guys dirt cheap argon tungsten bulbs, the closest plug-in replacement would be halogen incandescents. They cost a little more than Bedrock era incandescents, but last longer and are more efficient. Thus most users will actually benefit economically, especially as market forces drive the prices of halogen bulbs down in the post-Bedrock era.
The only people who *don't* benefit are those who have an especial reason to focus on the extreme near-term, say somebody trying to remodel and flip a condo. If he replaces all the old light bulbs with halogen, he may find himself out fifty dollars or so on a hundred thousand dollar transaction (and the buyer of course up by the same amount).
So you have three choices:
(1) Ignore the continuing subsidies of the marginal costs of primitive incandescents. (2) Attempt to tax the marginal costs of those subsidies away and devise a way to distribute the proceeds fairly. Or (3) Set efficiency standards in a way that everyone who buys the next better choice (halogen) for their own use won't bear any additional cost over the long term, and that the few who have reason to favor extremely short term perspective won't pay very much.
That's a misleading statement. The standards for mercury in water are not set at levels that are acutely "poisonous" to an animal on exposure. The concerns are long term exposure and, in the environment, bioaccumulation up the food chain.
At the bottom of the food chain, Hg levels in the critter's tissues are going to be negligible, but because Hg doesn't go away it will be higher than in the environment. At each step on the food chain Hg levels in tissues rise because of consumption of mercury tainted prey. At the very top of the food chain you have a critter, say the bird who eats the big fish who eats the little fish and so on, who has a major biological dysfunction from Hg, even though the Hg levels in its water would be perfectly safe for it to drink.
It's quite possible the problems you have with your CFLs have to do with your power supply. Is it high or low? Are there transients?
If you have lousy power, or if you have a fixture that is frequently turned on and off for brief periods of time, you can use a halogen bulb. There are now frosted, Edison socketed halogen bulbs that are plug-in replacements for your basic, stone-age tungsten filament argon purged incandescent bulb. These halogens cost slightly more, but that is easily offset by longer life and greater energy efficiency. That's not counting the superior light spectrum they provide. Halogen bulbs will still be available under the new regulations, in fact I think they were used as the baseline for the minimum efficiency standard.
In my case the power in my house is not bad. I haven't had a argon-tungsten incandescent in the house in over a decade, except in the dining room chandelier which is on a dimmer circuit. In the early years I did have some problems with CFLs giving up the ghost after a year or two, but those were early designs. In the past five or six years I can remember replacing exactly *one* CFL, which was broken when a floor lamp was knocked over. We swept up the pieces, put them in a sealed bag and took them to our town's toxic waste day, along with cans of old paint and other miscellaneous junk. It was no big deal.
I do regularly replace the incandescent candelabrum bulbs; they probably last about two or three years. The various halogens last twice that long, and I have no basis at all to estimate CFL lifespan, except that it is very, very long in my installation.
Can we finish locking the News of the World staff in their headquarters and burning it to the ground, along with anybody found to have aided or abetted them and get on to an important matter:
No, because you left out the really important part: taking a whiz on their freshly dug graves.
The thing about encryption is that it isn't so much a "safe", it's more analogous to a private citizen having their own moon on which to store valuables.
It is more akin to speaking and writing everything in your own private language, and forcing the police to determine how to translate that language.
Actually, it's like putting the evidence far away and making the police fetch it in your car, only they have to hotwire it because you don't give them the keys...
Yeah, I know it sucks, but at least I *tried* to put it automotive terms.
Slashdot Mirror
While this is true, if the roof is steeply pitched and has an east-west roofline, that can have a significant effect on the solar energy captured. A 30 degree pitched roof gets a lot more radiation than a flat roof on that midwinter day in New York - 70% more. Naturally, that illumination is attenuated and shorter duration than it would be in the summer, but it's enough to have some effect.
True. Climate, roof style and orientation all play a role. New York might be at the northern edge of where just painting roofs white would have a net benefit when both heating and cooling are considered, and then mainly for flat roofs that get a lot more
Alumininized coatings are a different story. They are more reflective, but also have an insulating effect. The manufacturers claim this yields a net savings in residential applications as far north as Minneapolis, although the net savings in places like Chicago is still only 1/3 of what simple white paint would achieve in LA.
Roofs are black because bitumen (asphalt) is black, and they're the cheapest, most abundant waterproofing material there is.
To get a white roof you need to add white pigment to a roofing material or coating. It's well worth doing because the extreme heat generated by a black roof damages the roof, but it's a little more expensive up front if you're putting a roof on a house that you're planning on flipping.
You also have to figure in the increased lifespan of your roof. The elastomeric coating seals and prevents leaks, and keeping the tiles cool to touch keeps them from breaking down.
Look. Just because somebody thought of something you haven't doesn't make them dumb. People have been talking about this for years, and *yes* they've taken into account the fact that you'd like to get solar heating from your roof in the winter.
You don't get much solar heating in the winter at the latitude of New York because the days are short and the sunlight oblique. New York is at roughly 40 degrees of latitude, and midwinter the sun rises to less than 30 degrees of elevation off the horizon.
The argument might make sense for La Paz, Bolivia, but not New York.
There's a product for this. It's designed to go over asphalt shingle and they call it ... wait for it ... "roof coating". Here's a link to the manufacturers' trade group: http://www.roofcoatings.org/wcc.html.
How long before we here the politicians whining that Clinton's trying to outlaw roof shingles or make everyone replace their roof.
Face it, white man. Even our short guys get more than you do.
I think the problem is marketing. Marketing folks know darn well that two different logically equivalent statements can provoke radically different cognitive responses. You could just as logically say:
"If this system were used to screen every passenger passenger Chicago's O'Hare airport, it would spuriously flag over four innocent passengers every day as a terrorist."
Perhaps a better way is to specify the base rate of the thing being tested for that provides a 50/50 chance of being right:
"Assuming that one in ten thousand passengers is a terrorist, when the system flags a passenger there's precisely 50/50 chance that any passenger flagged by the system is a terrorist."
The difference between a Boston driver and a New York driver: The New York driver takes a right turn from the left lane at 45 mph honking and giving you the finger. The Boston driver does the same thing, but is also drinking coffee, reading the paper, and talking on his cell phone.
So a New York driver is a Boston driver with people skills.
Depends on the terms of service between Facebook and the developer. If mentioning a competitive social media service in an ad is a violation of the TOS, then they're within their rights. If it's NOT mentioned in the TOS, they can change the TOS, take the the "offending" ads and tell the developer not to post any more such ads. It's not clear for me that the ad in question violates Facebooks TOS, because he's trolling for a Google+ invite and that's not cross-promotion.
Here's the issue: Facebook solicits developers in order to add value to its service. As a developer, you invest your creativity and labor, and get access to eyeballs. It's not Facebook doing you a favor or vice versa. It's one hand washing the other. Now this guy managed to piss Facebook off while not technically breaking any rules, and they've decided to make an example of him.
Now I say you're a fool if you invest in a business relationship with an organization that treats developers that way.
I recently returned from a five hour bike ride. After taking my shower, I lay down for a few minutes, and got the first runner's high I'd ever gotten in my life. Man, that was some seriously good shit. For about half an hour I had extreme euphoria and really *intense* feelings of well-being; the only downside was a little light headedness.
If I had a formula for triggering that I'd do it every day.
The Kindle experience is great for novels. It is not so good for technical books or non-fiction books with illustrations and figures. As for math books -- forget it. A page with equations is either rendered as if it were put into an open blender and splattered across the wall, or as an unreadable image. Ironically, I *can* read those book on my iPod touch using the Amazon Reader. The rendering infrastructure must be better. Also on the touch I can zoom in and out of illustrations and photos, a capability for some reason not implemented in the Android reader software for Amazon of Barnes and Noble.
It depends on your bar for "innovation". If you mean "change" then sure. If you mean new value that would cause customers to adopt the upgrade, it's hard to argue conclusively one way or the other. The sense I have is that upgrades are largely driven by security concerns and keeping the number of versions managed by IT down when the old versions are taken off the market.
There's probably never been a change that somebody (often in the trade press) doesn't praise, or find intriguing. But the sense I get from most people is that the upgrade treadmill is something they live with, but don't look forward to. They'd be happy with the office suite they had ten years ago if non-feature related quality (stability, speed, rendering consistency etc.) were improved.
I'm not so sure that you can conclude it was the result of cost-cutting. What happened was a combination of two things:
(1) The null corrector (an optical instrument used to check the figuring of the mirror) was improperly assembled; it was but the matter of a moment to make this mistake; the laser spacing measurements are thrown of by 1.3mm because of a stray reflection from a worn spot on the assembly jig. That's about the thickness of a dime. A washer is inserted to obtained the correct reading.
(2) The contractor checked and double checked the figuring of the mirror, and actually detected the problem. However, since the checking device was less accurate than main null corrector was supposed to be, the engineers decided to believe the main, incorrectly assembled null corrector instead.
The misconfiguration is something that could happen to anyone, but the decision to ignore the faulty test was the serious mistake. Personally, I don't see how cost-cutting has anything to do with that mistake. It's obviously much cheaper to fix the null corrector and continue figuring the mirror. The only way I can imagine cost cutting coming into this is if the program might be canceled because of the delay in figuring the mirror.
Nothing surprising in that. Think of what the world would be like if nobody rationalized doing things they knew very well were a bad idea. A world in which smart people never did anything stupid.
I heard a quite interesting theory about the change in the business culture in the US during the 1980s. In the 50s and 60s, the business culture was influenced by people who had fought in WW2. Those men had a sense of solidarity with the people working for them and a duty towards them. They had sense that the guys on the front line were doing something important. The story even cited one such CEO in the 70s who turned down a raise because it would have been bad for employee morale. In adjusted dollars he was making less than a tenth of what an average CEO in his position would make today.
I have no idea whether that theory is valid; I suspect to the degree it is true, it is probably an oversimplification. But still, that is the kind of person you want in the CEO's chair if you are an employee or an investor planning to hold the stock for the long term.
OK, let's take your dig a hole in the ground routine and apply to a city like Dhaka, Bangladesh, with a population density of 118,000 per square mile. Let's stipulate that part of the job is keeping diseases like cholera from spreading. "Simple" only counts as a virtue if it gets the job done.
I'm just trying to figure out why he wants to violate the KISS methodology. You have few options for feces. Put it it into a treatment facility (flush, carry...) to be treated with bacteria that live on that sort of thing, use it for fertilizer or burn it.
That's only simple for you, the homeowner, because somebody has invested HUGE amounts of money and engineering into infrastructure that makes it possible. Think about it. You take water that has been purified to drinking water standards and moved tthrough a water distribution system, often hundreds of miles. You shit in that drinking water and send it through a separate water collection system, where the shit you put into it is removed and processed and the water treated AGAIN before being dumped in the environment.
That's what you call simple?
Let me tell what's simple: a composting toilet like a Clivus Multrum. My wife's beatnik (proto-hippie) architect uncle had one in his remodeled 17th C farmhouse. You put your waste (including food scraps) in the hole, along with an occasional handful of sawdust. Electric fans (sometimes solar powered) encourage non-smelly aerobic decomposition and prevent the collection of odors. The waste slides down an inclined plane where it emerges as rich, unsmelly compost a few months later. It's not much more mechanically complicated than the infrastructure you need in your house for a flush toilet. You don't even need running water. It's a *hell* of a lot simpler than the whole infrastructure you need to do it the first world way. And cheaper too. A sewage treatment plant for a major city costs *billions* to build, not including the water and sewer networks and installing plumbing in everyone's house.
I look in the mirror.
Oh, wait. I thought you asked how I *fix* my geek nostalgia.
that's a lot of hot air.
Translation: sez you.
we're simply talking about what would contaminate a lot of water beyond limit set by EPA. Break a CFL in a tank of water and drink it all, let us know how that works out for you.
What, drink all 5000 liters? I think it's safe to say that if I did this in anything less than six months, the water would do me more harm than the 3 mg of mercury.
Well, more like "while the Earth burns", but you've failed to grasp the brilliance of our corporate overlords' plan.
First, they'll liquidate all environmental capital, converting it to equity. *Their* equity. Then when the Earth has been transformed into a burning trash heap, they'll call in the engineers to devise a fix. Not just *any* fix; a *productizable* fix that will allow them to milk the suckers coming AND going. You'll have to pay for passage on a spaceship to one of those numerous planets that look like a California state park you see in Star Trek. Or perhaps they'll sell us a trip through a machine that projects us into the alternate dimension in which the overlords had never been born.
If that doesn't work out, our overlords have a backup plan. They'll threaten and abuse the engineers until the engineers deliver.
If *that* doesn't work, they've got a second back up. They'll fire the engineers' asses, cut off their unemployment, convert their pension fund into executive bonuses and shift the tax burden onto them. Actually, they were planning to do that anyway, but in this case they'll *blame* the engineers instead of impersonal market forces.
You just have to grasp the fundamental principle of fascism: if you're a big enough bastard, you can get anything you want.
Because neither the producer of the bulb nor the user of the bulb bear the entire cost of the bulb's inefficiency. Disposal of trash is publicly subsidized in most places. Energy use is subsidized by policies that make energy security a national defense priority. Pollution is a kind of subsidy, only it isn't born by the public at large. It's born by random people who happen to breath the emissions your marginal energy use caused.
Now another theoretically better way to handle this is to figure out the exact marginal cost of all those subsides over what the most efficient choice would be. You then add that marginal cost to the purchase price of your basic Fred Flintstone Argon-Tungsten incandescent bulb. After collecting this tax, you run around distributing proceeds to whomever paid a subsidy. The American taxapyer gets some for his policing of international waters through which petroleum is shipped. The people living near the power plant and breathing emissions get a check too.
The practical problem is that we'd never get the pricing right and we'd *certainly* never get the distribution of the proceeds right if we did this as a tax. But there is a way to get those things *perfectly* right, at least as far as the marginal costs are concerned.
You ban the argon-tungsten incandescent.
As for the admitted injustice done to the would-be purchasers of bang-the-rocks-together-guys dirt cheap argon tungsten bulbs, the closest plug-in replacement would be halogen incandescents. They cost a little more than Bedrock era incandescents, but last longer and are more efficient. Thus most users will actually benefit economically, especially as market forces drive the prices of halogen bulbs down in the post-Bedrock era.
The only people who *don't* benefit are those who have an especial reason to focus on the extreme near-term, say somebody trying to remodel and flip a condo. If he replaces all the old light bulbs with halogen, he may find himself out fifty dollars or so on a hundred thousand dollar transaction (and the buyer of course up by the same amount).
So you have three choices:
(1) Ignore the continuing subsidies of the marginal costs of primitive incandescents.
(2) Attempt to tax the marginal costs of those subsidies away and devise a way to distribute the proceeds fairly. Or
(3) Set efficiency standards in a way that everyone who buys the next better choice (halogen) for their own use won't bear any additional cost over the long term, and that the few who have reason to favor extremely short term perspective won't pay very much.
That's a misleading statement. The standards for mercury in water are not set at levels that are acutely "poisonous" to an animal on exposure. The concerns are long term exposure and, in the environment, bioaccumulation up the food chain.
At the bottom of the food chain, Hg levels in the critter's tissues are going to be negligible, but because Hg doesn't go away it will be higher than in the environment. At each step on the food chain Hg levels in tissues rise because of consumption of mercury tainted prey. At the very top of the food chain you have a critter, say the bird who eats the big fish who eats the little fish and so on, who has a major biological dysfunction from Hg, even though the Hg levels in its water would be perfectly safe for it to drink.
It's quite possible the problems you have with your CFLs have to do with your power supply. Is it high or low? Are there transients?
If you have lousy power, or if you have a fixture that is frequently turned on and off for brief periods of time, you can use a halogen bulb. There are now frosted, Edison socketed halogen bulbs that are plug-in replacements for your basic, stone-age tungsten filament argon purged incandescent bulb. These halogens cost slightly more, but that is easily offset by longer life and greater energy efficiency. That's not counting the superior light spectrum they provide. Halogen bulbs will still be available under the new regulations, in fact I think they were used as the baseline for the minimum efficiency standard.
In my case the power in my house is not bad. I haven't had a argon-tungsten incandescent in the house in over a decade, except in the dining room chandelier which is on a dimmer circuit. In the early years I did have some problems with CFLs giving up the ghost after a year or two, but those were early designs. In the past five or six years I can remember replacing exactly *one* CFL, which was broken when a floor lamp was knocked over. We swept up the pieces, put them in a sealed bag and took them to our town's toxic waste day, along with cans of old paint and other miscellaneous junk. It was no big deal.
I do regularly replace the incandescent candelabrum bulbs; they probably last about two or three years. The various halogens last twice that long, and I have no basis at all to estimate CFL lifespan, except that it is very, very long in my installation.
Can we finish locking the News of the World staff in their headquarters and burning it to the ground, along with anybody found to have aided or abetted them and get on to an important matter:
No, because you left out the really important part: taking a whiz on their freshly dug graves.
The thing about encryption is that it isn't so much a "safe", it's more analogous to a private citizen having their own moon on which to store valuables.
It is more akin to speaking and writing everything in your own private language, and forcing the police to determine how to translate that language.
Actually, it's like putting the evidence far away and making the police fetch it in your car, only they have to hotwire it because you don't give them the keys...
Yeah, I know it sucks, but at least I *tried* to put it automotive terms.