Your facts look like you got them from talk radio urban legends. If your assertion that CFLs total lifecycle energy requirements exceeds that of incandescents were true, then each CFL would require 1/2 ton of coal more to produce than the energy required to make 5 or more incandescent bulbs.
However, coal currently costs over $100 per ton, so CFLs would have to cost at least $50 just for the energy to produce them. But you can buy them for a couple of bucks, so you're wrong. They can't possibly need that much energy. (In fact, they probably only use a small fraction of that couple of bucks for the energy required to make them.)
Some people are going to be brain-damaged and otherwise disabled by the policy of requiring people to purchase a product they otherwise would not use
WTF are you talking about? Mercury? It's already been established that using CFLs results in less mercury being released into the environment than incandescents. People who use incandescents are the ones poisoning the most babies and puppies.
What is the cost, in MJ, of the recycling of the CFL bulbs vs simple disposal of the incandescent bulbs?
I'll bet it's less than the cost of making half a dozen new incandescent bulbs that would have burned out in the mean time, especially since the raw materials get reused instead of refined from scratch.
But try to use a little common sense before you ask strawman questions. Do you really think that it takes a 1000 lb pile of coal to recycle 3 ounces of material?
What is the environmental cost of the increased mercury being added to our landfills (for those who don't properly recycle)?
Less than the environmental cost of the larger amount of mercury in the coal would have released freely into the atmosphere.
Ok, the CFL save some energy, but they sure add more pollutants
Nonsense. I put a CFL light over my front porch stairs 8 years ago, and it still works fine despite being exposed outdoor temperature extremes. It's been on an average of 6 hours per day, saving 45W over the equivalent incandescent bulb. That adds up to a savings of 790kWh (2800MJ). Since it typically takes about 3 joules of thermal energy in a coal plant to deliver 1 joule of electricity to the consumer, that corresponds to 8500MJ, or almost 1000 pounds of coal saved by this single light bulb.
What would you rather have: a few grams of plastic and chemicals sealed in a landfill, or 1/2 ton of CO2, sulfur and other pollutants in the air you breath?
Until the pilot has a heart attack and dies, which happens periodically.
The solution to that scenario is simple: Install a hatch on top of each cockpit. Then if the pilot dies, just put Charlton Heston in a harness and lower him down into the plane from a helicopter.
But I'm still a little concerned about how they accurately weigh this stuff.
I'm doubt that those in the helium industry need to actually weigh it. They've got pressure gauges, and they know that pV=nRT, and the math from there is trivial.
Once we get fusion reactors perfected, won't there be an abundant supply of helium?
A quick Google search says the current annual consumption of He is 30000 tons (3e10g).
D-T fusion produces about 17MeV per molecule of He output, or 4.24e11 J/g of helium.
World energy consumption is currently around 5e20 J per year. If all power were generated by fusion, that would be 1.17e9 g of helium produced, which is only about 4% of current helium usage.
Back in the 1970s my dad had a magnetic pickup with a suction cup that we could stick on our hefty Bell System phone. When plugged into our Radio Shack portable cassette recorder, we could touch upon these exact same legal issues, almost 40 years before this iPhone app!
But I guess that due to the reality distortion field, none of that really ever happened. None of this was logically possible before the iPhone App Store. Thanks to the iPhone, my childhood has vanished; it never existed at all. Now I feel like a lost character in a Twilight Zone episode.
And how about Economics, Politics, Aeronautics, and Quantum Mechanics?
Let me recall the short colloquial forms of those subjects from my college days: Econ 101, PolySci 201, Aero 314, QM 411. Well, I don't see a single shortened plural here, so "Math 207" seems consistent to me.
Then add anti virus, infusion detection, anti spyware and the costs balloon
I have to agree that infusion detection is absolutely essential. If someone tries soak my machine in a bucket of olive oil, I want to know about it ASAP.
Until then, Intel enjoys a monopoly, and it's not fair to let them set arbitrary prices on their physical chips, because nobody else can make them without Intel's blessing.
Intel's physical property exists only because of government meddling. Until that's changed, it's just as well that the government further meddle to mitigate the damage they've already done.
Any "property rights" Intel has in CPUs are a fiction created by the government patent office. Likewise, antitrust laws are a fiction created by the government. It's all the same thing, but it defines how the system currently works.
The current laws on the books do not conform to your Randian property utopia. If you don't like the rules, lobby to get them changed.
That would be fine, because then Intel would no longer be obstructing other vendors from entering the market.
The point of antitrust laws is to keep a monopoly from leveraging their advantaged position to keep others from ever challenging the monopoly. Obviously, exiting the market altogether is not a tactic that would exclude other players. There might be a temporary price spike, but that would just draw more 3rd parties into the CPU market, and the prices would then return to normal.
So you're saying Intel, being the owner of the merchandise, cannot rightfully decide for how much and under what terms they're sold?
That's right. If you have a monopoly in a market, your right to set pricing terms are significantly restricted by the law.
The very prospect of this tactic being effective pretty much proves they have a monopoly. In any actual "free market", a threat to raise prices would result in the customer switching vendors. In the x86 market, there is no other vendor that can guarantee enough supply for big OEMs, so the threat is viable.
Or is this a whole different level of radiation and thus incomparable?
WWII A-bombs released a few kg of fission products at high altitude. Chernobyl had tons of the stuff at ground level. A more direct comparison would be the ground level thermonuclear tests the US did on Pacific Ocean atolls. These also released fission products measurable in tons. (Most fusion bombs use the fusion mainly as a neutron generator and actually get the majority of their yield from fission of cheap U238.) Parts of those atolls are still uninhabitable.
Considering that Python 3 scripts are being written, I see no reason to doubt that Perl 6 scripts will be written too.
Well, Python 3 is pretty much just the same old Python with some nifty new features added and a couple of long-deprecated "mistakes" removed. Perl6, OTOH, is almost a completely different language from Perl5. People are going to have a bit of a learning curve if they're planning on transitioning to this new version.
I guess my point is, if I'm going to build a product I'll charge whatever I want, put whatever rules on it I want and for those who don't like it can go buy something else
You can try to put any rule on it you want. But unless you can get the government to ultimately back you up with enforcement, people can and will simply ignore your rules.
In this case, the government just said that they aren't backing you up. Too bad for you. Try a different plan.
You also don't have a god-given right to use government resources to enforce any unrealistic business model you want.
Unless, of course, you know, they're lying and it's like 5 megawatts peak capacity
Ok, we'll say that all power plants must be rated by their average annual power output. That means that if the utility installs a peaking unit run by a 5000hp diesel locomotive engine, but on average it runs only 1% of the time, then they will be required to always refer to it as a "30 kilowatt" facility (certainly not 3 megawatts!). Otherwise, they're lying.
Are you aware that rational choice / homo economicus is one of the basic assumptions economists use to build their models and theories because it makes it mathematically tractable?
Yes, and somehow free-market infatuated economists come to the exact opposite conclusion that I pointed out. They claim that the free market finds the optimal solutions when it obviously can't.
What's worse, they assume that the results of adding up a bunch of individual decisions can be modeled with simple linear mathematics and can be used to fine tune policy. Then when their models are driven into a nonlinear or chaotic zone and spectacularly blow up every few years, they just shrug it off and keep doing the same thing. But incredibly, people keep buying the snake oil peddled by these cargo cult "scientists".
There are no serious economists advocating protectionism any more
That's because the entire field called "economics" is a giant stinking crock of bullshit. So-called "economists" are driving this once great nation straight down the shit tubes with their pseudo-theories. There are no serious economists.
Trotting out the "broken window fallacy" to support any point is one particularly idiotic habit of economists.
The next time a WalMart shopper complains about job outsourcing, offer to show them the cause of the problem and hand them a mirror.
The problem is that the "global free market" is a multi-player version of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. It's been proven that in absence of communication between the players, the rational choice in this game is to always "defect". In this case, it means buying cheap imported crap at Wal Mart. If you don't defect, most others continue to do so, and you just end up being a sucker.
Complaining about individuals' choices is going to accomplish nothing, because they're all making the most rational individual decisions. The only way to change the situation is to include the external costs of cheap offshore production into the retail price, which alters the individual's most rational choice. The most obvious way to do that is slap a tariff on the goods.
I suppose Apple had no issue recompiling with the flag turned on.
IIRC, the Freetype FAQ suggested that for commercial use, you could talk to Apple and get a license so that you can legally recompile with the flags on. I assume Apple sent an email to 127.0.0.1 to request such permission.
The statement above makes me worried because it suggests that the Open Source Community could not find their way around these patents for two decades! Think about it....20 years!
They "found their way around" the patents long ago, using what is actually a more advanced automatic hinting method than the patented method. Early on it sucked, but over time the differences seemed to become almost unnoticeable in many cases.
At any rate, top font designers go to a lot of effort to hint the fonts by hand. That's the bit that was patented. Freetype might as well go ahead and fully utilize the efforts of the font designers now that they can.
I find it interesting that the airlines have unbundled services so that they can "lower air fares", yet they still can't seem to make profits the way they used to.
I remember reading an article maybe 10 years ago that pointed out that the sum total of all major US airlines' profits minus losses over the previous 50 years added up to only a couple of $billion (Which I can believe given that at any given time, half of the airlines seem to be in bankruptcy). In other words, investors in airlines may have made close to zero net return over a half century. IIRC, the author of the article opined that the people at the top of the airline industry aren't actually in it for the money, but rather for the prestige, causing them to make less than optimal business decisions.
Slashdot Mirror
Your facts look like you got them from talk radio urban legends. If your assertion that CFLs total lifecycle energy requirements exceeds that of incandescents were true, then each CFL would require 1/2 ton of coal more to produce than the energy required to make 5 or more incandescent bulbs.
However, coal currently costs over $100 per ton, so CFLs would have to cost at least $50 just for the energy to produce them. But you can buy them for a couple of bucks, so you're wrong. They can't possibly need that much energy. (In fact, they probably only use a small fraction of that couple of bucks for the energy required to make them.)
And once that changes, the whole equation changes very much in favor of incandescent bulbs made in the US rather than Chinese-made CFL bulbs.
True, but irrelevant unless and until it happens. I wouldn't hold my breath.
Some people are going to be brain-damaged and otherwise disabled by the policy of requiring people to purchase a product they otherwise would not use
WTF are you talking about? Mercury? It's already been established that using CFLs results in less mercury being released into the environment than incandescents. People who use incandescents are the ones poisoning the most babies and puppies.
What is the cost, in MJ, of the recycling of the CFL bulbs vs simple disposal of the incandescent bulbs?
I'll bet it's less than the cost of making half a dozen new incandescent bulbs that would have burned out in the mean time, especially since the raw materials get reused instead of refined from scratch.
But try to use a little common sense before you ask strawman questions. Do you really think that it takes a 1000 lb pile of coal to recycle 3 ounces of material?
What is the environmental cost of the increased mercury being added to our landfills (for those who don't properly recycle)?
Less than the environmental cost of the larger amount of mercury in the coal would have released freely into the atmosphere.
Ok, the CFL save some energy, but they sure add more pollutants
Nonsense. I put a CFL light over my front porch stairs 8 years ago, and it still works fine despite being exposed outdoor temperature extremes. It's been on an average of 6 hours per day, saving 45W over the equivalent incandescent bulb. That adds up to a savings of 790kWh (2800MJ). Since it typically takes about 3 joules of thermal energy in a coal plant to deliver 1 joule of electricity to the consumer, that corresponds to 8500MJ, or almost 1000 pounds of coal saved by this single light bulb.
What would you rather have: a few grams of plastic and chemicals sealed in a landfill, or 1/2 ton of CO2, sulfur and other pollutants in the air you breath?
Until the pilot has a heart attack and dies, which happens periodically.
The solution to that scenario is simple: Install a hatch on top of each cockpit. Then if the pilot dies, just put Charlton Heston in a harness and lower him down into the plane from a helicopter.
But I'm still a little concerned about how they accurately weigh this stuff.
I'm doubt that those in the helium industry need to actually weigh it. They've got pressure gauges, and they know that pV=nRT, and the math from there is trivial.
Once we get fusion reactors perfected, won't there be an abundant supply of helium?
A quick Google search says the current annual consumption of He is 30000 tons (3e10g).
D-T fusion produces about 17MeV per molecule of He output, or 4.24e11 J/g of helium.
World energy consumption is currently around 5e20 J per year. If all power were generated by fusion, that would be 1.17e9 g of helium produced, which is only about 4% of current helium usage.
Back in the 1970s my dad had a magnetic pickup with a suction cup that we could stick on our hefty Bell System phone. When plugged into our Radio Shack portable cassette recorder, we could touch upon these exact same legal issues, almost 40 years before this iPhone app!
But I guess that due to the reality distortion field, none of that really ever happened. None of this was logically possible before the iPhone App Store. Thanks to the iPhone, my childhood has vanished; it never existed at all. Now I feel like a lost character in a Twilight Zone episode.
And how about Economics, Politics, Aeronautics, and Quantum Mechanics?
Let me recall the short colloquial forms of those subjects from my college days: Econ 101, PolySci 201, Aero 314, QM 411. Well, I don't see a single shortened plural here, so "Math 207" seems consistent to me.
Then add anti virus, infusion detection, anti spyware and the costs balloon
I have to agree that infusion detection is absolutely essential. If someone tries soak my machine in a bucket of olive oil, I want to know about it ASAP.
If you eliminated patents, you'd have a point.
Until then, Intel enjoys a monopoly, and it's not fair to let them set arbitrary prices on their physical chips, because nobody else can make them without Intel's blessing.
Intel's physical property exists only because of government meddling. Until that's changed, it's just as well that the government further meddle to mitigate the damage they've already done.
Any "property rights" Intel has in CPUs are a fiction created by the government patent office. Likewise, antitrust laws are a fiction created by the government. It's all the same thing, but it defines how the system currently works.
The current laws on the books do not conform to your Randian property utopia. If you don't like the rules, lobby to get them changed.
That would be fine, because then Intel would no longer be obstructing other vendors from entering the market.
The point of antitrust laws is to keep a monopoly from leveraging their advantaged position to keep others from ever challenging the monopoly. Obviously, exiting the market altogether is not a tactic that would exclude other players. There might be a temporary price spike, but that would just draw more 3rd parties into the CPU market, and the prices would then return to normal.
So you're saying Intel, being the owner of the merchandise, cannot rightfully decide for how much and under what terms they're sold?
That's right. If you have a monopoly in a market, your right to set pricing terms are significantly restricted by the law.
The very prospect of this tactic being effective pretty much proves they have a monopoly. In any actual "free market", a threat to raise prices would result in the customer switching vendors. In the x86 market, there is no other vendor that can guarantee enough supply for big OEMs, so the threat is viable.
Or is this a whole different level of radiation and thus incomparable?
WWII A-bombs released a few kg of fission products at high altitude. Chernobyl had tons of the stuff at ground level. A more direct comparison would be the ground level thermonuclear tests the US did on Pacific Ocean atolls. These also released fission products measurable in tons. (Most fusion bombs use the fusion mainly as a neutron generator and actually get the majority of their yield from fission of cheap U238.) Parts of those atolls are still uninhabitable.
Considering that Python 3 scripts are being written, I see no reason to doubt that Perl 6 scripts will be written too.
Well, Python 3 is pretty much just the same old Python with some nifty new features added and a couple of long-deprecated "mistakes" removed. Perl6, OTOH, is almost a completely different language from Perl5. People are going to have a bit of a learning curve if they're planning on transitioning to this new version.
I guess my point is, if I'm going to build a product I'll charge whatever I want, put whatever rules on it I want and for those who don't like it can go buy something else
You can try to put any rule on it you want. But unless you can get the government to ultimately back you up with enforcement, people can and will simply ignore your rules.
In this case, the government just said that they aren't backing you up. Too bad for you. Try a different plan.
You also don't have a god-given right to use government resources to enforce any unrealistic business model you want.
Unless, of course, you know, they're lying and it's like 5 megawatts peak capacity
Ok, we'll say that all power plants must be rated by their average annual power output. That means that if the utility installs a peaking unit run by a 5000hp diesel locomotive engine, but on average it runs only 1% of the time, then they will be required to always refer to it as a "30 kilowatt" facility (certainly not 3 megawatts!). Otherwise, they're lying.
Are you aware that rational choice / homo economicus is one of the basic assumptions economists use to build their models and theories because it makes it mathematically tractable?
Yes, and somehow free-market infatuated economists come to the exact opposite conclusion that I pointed out. They claim that the free market finds the optimal solutions when it obviously can't.
What's worse, they assume that the results of adding up a bunch of individual decisions can be modeled with simple linear mathematics and can be used to fine tune policy. Then when their models are driven into a nonlinear or chaotic zone and spectacularly blow up every few years, they just shrug it off and keep doing the same thing. But incredibly, people keep buying the snake oil peddled by these cargo cult "scientists".
There are no serious economists advocating protectionism any more
That's because the entire field called "economics" is a giant stinking crock of bullshit. So-called "economists" are driving this once great nation straight down the shit tubes with their pseudo-theories. There are no serious economists.
Trotting out the "broken window fallacy" to support any point is one particularly idiotic habit of economists.
The next time a WalMart shopper complains about job outsourcing, offer to show them the cause of the problem and hand them a mirror.
The problem is that the "global free market" is a multi-player version of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. It's been proven that in absence of communication between the players, the rational choice in this game is to always "defect". In this case, it means buying cheap imported crap at Wal Mart. If you don't defect, most others continue to do so, and you just end up being a sucker.
Complaining about individuals' choices is going to accomplish nothing, because they're all making the most rational individual decisions. The only way to change the situation is to include the external costs of cheap offshore production into the retail price, which alters the individual's most rational choice. The most obvious way to do that is slap a tariff on the goods.
I suppose Apple had no issue recompiling with the flag turned on.
IIRC, the Freetype FAQ suggested that for commercial use, you could talk to Apple and get a license so that you can legally recompile with the flags on. I assume Apple sent an email to 127.0.0.1 to request such permission.
The statement above makes me worried because it suggests that the Open Source Community could not find their way around these patents for two decades! Think about it....20 years!
They "found their way around" the patents long ago, using what is actually a more advanced automatic hinting method than the patented method. Early on it sucked, but over time the differences seemed to become almost unnoticeable in many cases.
At any rate, top font designers go to a lot of effort to hint the fonts by hand. That's the bit that was patented. Freetype might as well go ahead and fully utilize the efforts of the font designers now that they can.
I find it interesting that the airlines have unbundled services so that they can "lower air fares", yet they still can't seem to make profits the way they used to.
I remember reading an article maybe 10 years ago that pointed out that the sum total of all major US airlines' profits minus losses over the previous 50 years added up to only a couple of $billion (Which I can believe given that at any given time, half of the airlines seem to be in bankruptcy). In other words, investors in airlines may have made close to zero net return over a half century. IIRC, the author of the article opined that the people at the top of the airline industry aren't actually in it for the money, but rather for the prestige, causing them to make less than optimal business decisions.