From what I've seen, the worst offenders are their police detectives.
In almost every show I've watched, they race through the city in muscle cars or full-size sedans at reckless speeds, going airborne at each hilly intersection. Half the time they miss hitting a trolley by mere inches. It's just crazy.
This a million times. I still get way more enjoyment from my old Gameboy than from my phone, which is a thousand times more powerful.
What Nintendo should do is create a modern smartphone in a physical package that is identical to a classic Gameboy. (Well, maybe it could be a little thinner). It would be practical, fun to play, and hipster-approved.
You obviously didn't read the study. Your assumptions are wrong and you have no numbers. Out here, each additional degree on the thermostat adds about ten per cent to the bill.
If your number is correct (which I doubt), that applies to keeping it low all the time. That's not what we're talking about.
You can save as much as 10% a year on heating and cooling by simply turning your thermostat back 7-10F for 8 hours a day from its normal setting. The percentage of savings from setback is greater for buildings in milder climates than for those in more severe climates.
Like I said, in the single-digit range. (Changing the temperature setting even more wouldn't help because a house would barely drop 10F in 8 hours anyway.)
My average-sized house uses about 50 therms of gas per month for heating over an annual average, which is about the same as 50 gallons of gasoline. Throw in 50% extra for cooling in the summer, and you get the equivalent of 75 gallons per month for HVAC. So I can save about 7.5 gallons of gasoline per month with the setback thermostat.
If I have a fuel-efficient car, that would allow me to drive about 250 miles per month. So if I live more than about 6 miles from work, driving loses. That's not even considering offsetting the HVAC use of a corporate office which would not be needed.
Due to the large thermal mass of a house, turning down the heat for 8 hours each day won't have a dramatic impact on energy use. You'll save something, but it's probably in the single-digit percentages. When you get home, you have to run the furnace on high continuously for quite a while to bring the temperature back up, negating most of the savings from not running it intermittently while away at work.
Meanwhile, driving even a fuel-efficient car uses as much or more energy than a furnace that can heat a large house does while running continuously. (And on most winter days, furnaces usually run only a fraction of the time unless they have variable power output.)
If you commute for an hour each day, you blow away any energy savings from a setback thermostat on an 8-hour shift. Additionally, don't forget that in many locations, you don't need significant heating or cooling at all for about half of the year. Also don't forget that a company provided office and common spaces have their own climate control power use, and you're not even there about 75% of the time.
Where did anybody in this thread say that the entire fusion generation infrastructure was free, cheap or even moderately priced?
All anybody said was the cost of the frigging LITHIUM was insignificant. Then you come in and ask for people to back that up with numbers, because after all, it can't actually cost zero. Well, it's been spelled out for you: A year's worth of a typical household's electricity involves a few cents of lithium.
Now you change the subject and point out that whole fusion generation infrastructure could still be expensive, just like overpriced fission plants. Well, no shit.
But don't sit there with smug superiority, because that's not the silly question you asked in the first place. You asked *specifically* about the cost of the input material.
Do you mean thermal efficiency? I pegged it at somewhat less than 50%, like most power plants:
$ units You have: 1g / (7 g/mol / avogadro ) * 17.5 MeV You want: kWh
* 67003.703
Since a typical household electricity use is about 9000 kWh/year, at 35% efficiency, that would be several years worth.
If you mean transmutation efficiency, it doesn't matter. You keep recycling the lithium until it converts. As I pointed out, the overall cost of that process could be high, but the cost of the raw lithium is insignificant.
By my calculation, the ~1g of lithium in a common phone, if converted to tritium, could generate enough electricity to power a typical household for several years. So the cost of the lithium itself is negligible.
The costs involved with gathering and handling the tritium would be a different story.
Because I don't consume growth hormone residues in my diet, so long as the fecal runoff water from factory farms doesn't get into the fields where my veggies grow.
Speaking of hormones, you're not also concerned about the high levels of phytoestrogens that many vegetables produce in an attempt to dispense birth control on grazing animals?
So far, he hasn't really done anything except prevent a bunch of jobs from leaving the US.
Looks like you're swallowing the output of Trump's propaganda department hook, line and sinker.
Now, other than that smoke screen, what he has actually been doing so far is to tap into the drain spigot of the DC swamp to fill up his administration. This story is yet another example.
If you're going to make insults, you better make sure you're right.
First of all, joules are energy and TW are power,
No shit, Einstein.
so your conversion is nonsense.
Are you high?
Secondly, assuming you actually meant TWh, not TW,
You assume much, Grasshopper.
you are off by several orders of magnitude.
Nope, you're just highly confused.
The total worldwide electricity production in 2012 was 18,000 to 22,000 TWh
Why use a stupid unit like TWh/year? Hours/year is a dimensionless number. Just use the plain SI unit: 22,000 TWh/year == 2.5 TW. Which, as I said, is a fraction of the 16TW total energy use.
648 MW... That's a hell of a lot of land for.0007% of India's electricity consumption, based upon 2011 figures... at that rate, they'd need to cover a fifth of the country with PV panels, never mind night time load.
Your numbers are way off.
648MW /.0007% = 92 TW
All of human civilization consumes about 500 exajoules of energy per year, which is only about 16 TW. (Of which electricity is only a fraction, BTW)
Covering 1/5 of India with solar panels would actually potentially generate enough energy to power the entire planet several times over.
"It used to be the case that the computer you bought came with schematics and"
This is just as wrong. Insofar as the percentage of the population that bought these computers was vanishingly small, instead of ubiquitously large. Apples and Oranges. Different day and age and world. There was never a time that ordinary people purchases such things. It's a nice fantasy though, I'll give you that.
Plenty of ordinary people bought the original IBM PCs and PC/ATs. They didn't come standard with the schematics, but you could buy technical reference manuals from IBM which included both the schematics and the BIOS source code for the systems.
Maybe few end-users made use of the available info, but it did ensure that 3rd parties could create a large ecosystem of compatible software, accessories and even competing computer systems. This greatly benefited the end users, whether they cared to dig into the underlying technology or not.
We have the same type of system here. It makes total sense and couldn't be easier to use.
The only disadvantage I can see with it is that they sometimes make a mistake with the pre-printed ballots and have to scramble to get enough correct ones made up. However, if that's a problem, I think that just giving each polling place a laser printer and having them print them on demand would be better than getting a whole bunch of hackable electronic voting machines.
Slashdot Mirror
San Francisco drivers could do a better job.
From what I've seen, the worst offenders are their police detectives.
In almost every show I've watched, they race through the city in muscle cars or full-size sedans at reckless speeds, going airborne at each hilly intersection. Half the time they miss hitting a trolley by mere inches. It's just crazy.
This a million times. I still get way more enjoyment from my old Gameboy than from my phone, which is a thousand times more powerful.
What Nintendo should do is create a modern smartphone in a physical package that is identical to a classic Gameboy. (Well, maybe it could be a little thinner). It would be practical, fun to play, and hipster-approved.
You forgot to add:
"Humbug!"
This is a big part of the reason why California is the worst state in the US to do business.
Heads up: Don't be surprised if you get visited by a few ghosts over the next couple of nights.
Which is why employers would have meal breaks for employees even without these rights and the lawyerly looting they enable.
Employers like Apple?
You obviously didn't read the study. Your assumptions are wrong and you have no numbers. Out here, each additional degree on the thermostat adds about ten per cent to the bill.
If your number is correct (which I doubt), that applies to keeping it low all the time. That's not what we're talking about.
From https://energy.gov/energysaver...:
You can save as much as 10% a year on heating and cooling by simply turning your thermostat back 7-10F for 8 hours a day from its normal setting. The percentage of savings from setback is greater for buildings in milder climates than for those in more severe climates.
Like I said, in the single-digit range. (Changing the temperature setting even more wouldn't help because a house would barely drop 10F in 8 hours anyway.)
My average-sized house uses about 50 therms of gas per month for heating over an annual average, which is about the same as 50 gallons of gasoline. Throw in 50% extra for cooling in the summer, and you get the equivalent of 75 gallons per month for HVAC. So I can save about 7.5 gallons of gasoline per month with the setback thermostat.
If I have a fuel-efficient car, that would allow me to drive about 250 miles per month. So if I live more than about 6 miles from work, driving loses. That's not even considering offsetting the HVAC use of a corporate office which would not be needed.
Due to the large thermal mass of a house, turning down the heat for 8 hours each day won't have a dramatic impact on energy use. You'll save something, but it's probably in the single-digit percentages. When you get home, you have to run the furnace on high continuously for quite a while to bring the temperature back up, negating most of the savings from not running it intermittently while away at work.
Meanwhile, driving even a fuel-efficient car uses as much or more energy than a furnace that can heat a large house does while running continuously. (And on most winter days, furnaces usually run only a fraction of the time unless they have variable power output.)
If you commute for an hour each day, you blow away any energy savings from a setback thermostat on an 8-hour shift. Additionally, don't forget that in many locations, you don't need significant heating or cooling at all for about half of the year. Also don't forget that a company provided office and common spaces have their own climate control power use, and you're not even there about 75% of the time.
Line 1: Syntax error.
Where did anybody in this thread say that the entire fusion generation infrastructure was free, cheap or even moderately priced?
All anybody said was the cost of the frigging LITHIUM was insignificant. Then you come in and ask for people to back that up with numbers, because after all, it can't actually cost zero. Well, it's been spelled out for you: A year's worth of a typical household's electricity involves a few cents of lithium.
Now you change the subject and point out that whole fusion generation infrastructure could still be expensive, just like overpriced fission plants. Well, no shit.
But don't sit there with smug superiority, because that's not the silly question you asked in the first place. You asked *specifically* about the cost of the input material.
Down by the river?
Do you mean thermal efficiency? I pegged it at somewhat less than 50%, like most power plants:
$ units
You have: 1g / (7 g/mol / avogadro ) * 17.5 MeV
You want: kWh
* 67003.703
Since a typical household electricity use is about 9000 kWh/year, at 35% efficiency, that would be several years worth.
If you mean transmutation efficiency, it doesn't matter. You keep recycling the lithium until it converts. As I pointed out, the overall cost of that process could be high, but the cost of the raw lithium is insignificant.
By my calculation, the ~1g of lithium in a common phone, if converted to tritium, could generate enough electricity to power a typical household for several years. So the cost of the lithium itself is negligible.
The costs involved with gathering and handling the tritium would be a different story.
Let's put the computers that run our civilization in charge of programming themselves.
What could possibly go wrong?
Because I don't consume growth hormone residues in my diet, so long as the fecal runoff water from factory farms doesn't get into the fields where my veggies grow.
Speaking of hormones, you're not also concerned about the high levels of phytoestrogens that many vegetables produce in an attempt to dispense birth control on grazing animals?
If only Samsung had brought in Mr. Whipple to help educate the public.
This is why we can't have nice things.
I've got a 20 year old Ford car, should I rename it?
Not necessary, because it's the same physical car.
Redistributing OS images is more like manufacturing new cars. You can't build replicas of your car and offer them for sale as genuine"Fords".
There's got to be more to it than that. Something else has to be in there to provide the peculiar sour flavor notes and the mealy texture.
I think that Toblerone just patented that innovation.
So far, he hasn't really done anything except prevent a bunch of jobs from leaving the US.
Looks like you're swallowing the output of Trump's propaganda department hook, line and sinker.
Now, other than that smoke screen, what he has actually been doing so far is to tap into the drain spigot of the DC swamp to fill up his administration. This story is yet another example.
Your slip is showing.
If you're going to make insults, you better make sure you're right.
First of all, joules are energy and TW are power,
No shit, Einstein.
so your conversion is nonsense.
Are you high?
Secondly, assuming you actually meant TWh, not TW,
You assume much, Grasshopper.
you are off by several orders of magnitude.
Nope, you're just highly confused.
The total worldwide electricity production in 2012 was 18,000 to 22,000 TWh
Why use a stupid unit like TWh/year? Hours/year is a dimensionless number. Just use the plain SI unit: 22,000 TWh/year == 2.5 TW. Which, as I said, is a fraction of the 16TW total energy use.
648 MW ... .0007% of India's electricity consumption, based upon 2011 figures... at that rate, they'd need to cover a fifth of the country with PV panels, never mind night time load.
That's a hell of a lot of land for
Your numbers are way off.
648MW / .0007% = 92 TW
All of human civilization consumes about 500 exajoules of energy per year, which is only about 16 TW. (Of which electricity is only a fraction, BTW)
Covering 1/5 of India with solar panels would actually potentially generate enough energy to power the entire planet several times over.
"It used to be the case that the computer you bought came with schematics and"
This is just as wrong. Insofar as the percentage of the population that bought these computers was vanishingly small, instead of ubiquitously large. Apples and Oranges. Different day and age and world. There was never a time that ordinary people purchases such things. It's a nice fantasy though, I'll give you that.
Plenty of ordinary people bought the original IBM PCs and PC/ATs. They didn't come standard with the schematics, but you could buy technical reference manuals from IBM which included both the schematics and the BIOS source code for the systems.
Maybe few end-users made use of the available info, but it did ensure that 3rd parties could create a large ecosystem of compatible software, accessories and even competing computer systems. This greatly benefited the end users, whether they cared to dig into the underlying technology or not.
So what do you do with all the old supercomputers when they're too big/power hungry vs performance? Helluva paperweight.
If they're anything like me, they'll put it on a shelf in their basement.
25 years later, they'll try turning it on again just for fun. One of four things might happen, with roughly equal probability:
We have the same type of system here. It makes total sense and couldn't be easier to use.
The only disadvantage I can see with it is that they sometimes make a mistake with the pre-printed ballots and have to scramble to get enough correct ones made up. However, if that's a problem, I think that just giving each polling place a laser printer and having them print them on demand would be better than getting a whole bunch of hackable electronic voting machines.