Actually, it does matter. The power used by a CRT or a Plasma changes based on the how bright the overall image is. A dark CRT uses less energy than a bright CRT. LCD use about the same energy no matter what is being displayed on the screen (this is not entirely true today, many LCDs use adaptive back lighting.)
I have always wondered why LCDs use less energy than CRTs (I am not disputing that they do, but I have never understood why). CRTs only make the light they need, LCDs throw away the light they do not need. You would think that CRTs would be more efficient than LCDs.
At 10W / m^2 it would light up the sand! You don't need anywhere near that amount just to see a "light in the sky". You can see stars, they don't put out 10W/m^s.
That said, your basic ground-based siren is the way to go.
Medical costs really don't mean anything. There is no rational or justification for any of it. They are just made-up numbers. It would be difficult enough to make judgement calls on real numbers, but it is impossible with fake numbers.
It is also very reasonable to spend a lot of money fighting the condition that will/does kill you. Where else are you going to spend it?
You can't possible know this. How much does 16G of Flash cost? How much space does it take up? How many seconds of data would that record? If it is a closed black box, you have NO CLUE how much data it is storing.
Most cars use vacuum assist brakes. Guess what? At full throttle, there is NO vacuum! If you pump the brakes a couple of times under this condition you will deplete the vacuum reserve and that will pretty much be it for the brakes. Ever try to drive a large car without power brakes?
I have driven a car with a large V8 when the accelerator stuck. I had both feet on the brake as was pressing as hard as I could and I could barely control the car. And I am a big guy. I got the car to slow down to about 30 MPH (it was downshifting) and I finally turned off the key. I doubt I could have gotten the car to a complete stop otherwise. (And I know now that I should have put the car in neutral, but I did not know that at the time.)
I agree with everything you say except the part about personal computers programming being more complicated today than it was in 1982. You are not remembering what a PITA programing was back in 1982. In 1982, you either programmed a personal computer in BASIC or assembly language. You didn't do anything that needed to run very fast in BASIC, and writing a useful program in assembly with 48K or RAM (if you were lucky) was not trivial. Granted, expectations were much lower back then, and yes, back then I understood the machine down to the gate level. So while computers are much, much more complex today then they were 28 years ago, I actually find them much, MUCH easier to program due to the availability of very powerful programming tools.
Apple used to be one of the most geek friendly brands out there. My Apple ][ came with schematics! How cool was that? It is a little sad that Apple has turned away from this, much in the same way that it is sad that hp has gone from a premier instrument maker to a maker of commodity PCs and peripherals. Let us old guys lament a bit.
Avatar in 3D looked really jumpy to me, kind of like watching movement under a strobe light. I wish movies would move beyond 24FPS. The technology is there, but I am not holding my breath.
The mass of lithium in a Li ion battery is no where near 1/2. For example, a LiMn2O4 Cathode is only 1/20 lithium by mass. Also, the 'recoverable' reserves of Lithium are at least three time higher than that 11 Megatonnes estimate. See http://lithiumabundance.blogspot.com/.
The earth's crust is nearly 20 ppm lithium by mass, so lithium is faily abundant. However, there are very few economically recoverable sources of lithium. If prices rise, more sources become available. We simple cannot 'run out' of lithium.
World production of lithium is another matter, it is only about 40,000 tonnes a year.
Even barring reprocessing, breeders, and new reactor technology, waste disposal really isn't that big of a problem. Very little waste is actually produced -- on the order of kilotons a year, as opposed to gigatons for many other industrial processes. The waste is not placed into the atmosphere or dumped into ground water sources either. It is self contained. Disposing of waste simply takes time... many, many centuries. The solution really is to dig deep hole in a stable area and bury the stuff. It is not that difficult.
It is not that simple. I am 46, and I already have bifocals. I still have trouble with the computer screen. If the bifocal is strong enough to work well for reading and close-up work, it is a little too strong for the computer screen. If the distance section is good for infinity, it is also not right for the screen. A larger screen further away would work, I would be able to focus on it, and it would be large enough to see. I suppose I could try trifocals.
The question that many people fail to ask at this point is "WHY is it more expensive to have the surgery in the hospital?" Just about everything in the hospital is a fixed costs; there is very little incremental cost to the hospital to have the surgery there. The answer comes down to accounting. It costs more to have surgery done in the hospital because that is the way they do their accounting. In other words, they are using their surgery center to offset other costs. They have the exact same situation for the ER. Everyone knows that ER visits are expensive, but few people bother to ask WHY. Fixing this is even more of a mess, because believe it or not, the medical system as a whole CANNOT save money by reducing in-hospital surgeries or ER visits.
Forget insuring iPhones for the speech/hearing impaired. The devices are reasonably priced, find a more direct way to get them into the hands of those that need them and cannot afford them.
There is no need to lug 100's of pounds of batteries or tow the car if you get stranded. There is the quick charge option. A portable generator could charge the car roadside to 80% in half an hour if needed.
Tankless water heaters are almost useless when it comes to saving energy. The simple truth of the matter is that the standby losses of a modern foam insulated tank are actually quite small. Tankless water heaters also do the opposite of what needs to be done to reduce peak loading.
Water heaters are good candidates for smart appliances. Water heaters tend to run for an hour or so after hot water has been used, say for a shower or to clean a load of laundry. They come on after a morning shower and use energy during the peak period. A very simple way to reduce peak use for water heaters is to add a second water heater (it can be smaller) that feeds the primary water heater and set the primary water heater a few degrees cooler than the secondary heater. The secondary heater is set to run only during off-peak hours. The net result -- you will always have plenty of hot water, and you will greatly reduce peak loading.
I have turned off the AC in my car and reduced my speed in the hopes that I could get to a gas station before running out of gas. Isn't that about the same thing?
How about a car with an emergency reserve gas tank that is activated by a lever inside the car?
I suppose that running the batteries completely flat may harm them. Basically they are claiming a patent on overriding the shutdown feature designed to protect the batteries and using a low power mode. That does not seem original. Granted, coupling this with a 911 call is kind of clever.
In short, if there's a difference, it's not the sex, it's the sexism. Anyone who can't acknowledge this is a bigot and a twit.
I still have an open mind on the subject. Does that make me a bigot and a twit?
But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe.
I find the gender gap in mathematics interesting. While I would like to know why there is a gender gap, I really don't have any personal stake in the reason for the gender gap. Is it inate? Is it social? Is is a combination? All of those would be interesting results.
I have no desire to shut women out of lucritive jobs in science and engineering. However, I don't think that we are suffering from a shortage of scientists and engineers, and further more I think that these fields are wide open to anyone (man or woman) that is interested. And yet there is still a gender gap. Is this something that really needs fixing?
You miss the point about Tellurium. Tellurium is unbelievably rare, one of nine rarest metallic elements on Earth. It may be 4 times rarer than plantnium. Tellurium is fairly cheap right now because it has very few uses. It will not stay cheap if it is used in volume produciton of solar cells. And cheap solar cells is the whole point here.
They don't generate heat as such Yes they do. Powerful LEDs generate quite a bit of heat and require generous heat sinking. Just like everything else, the power that is not used to generate usable light is given off as heat.
AC->DC conversion does No it doesn't. AC->DC conversion can be done at 90%+ efficiency fairly cheaply if you have a known and constant power requirment.
index of refraction of the casing material presents a problem Not sure what you mean. It is far, far easier to take a directional point source of light and turn it into a flood than the other way around.
as well that leds don't generate white light by themselves (they use phosphor?) So do CFLs.
And none of that is really that important. Here is a much better question: How much of the light that we generating is actually doing something useful?
True, they have quite a few elements there and in quite a few colors. However, they nowhere near all the common elements listed, and there are no bulk purchases. Sure, you can by a 1x1 yellow plate for about 10 cents. That is a pretty good deal if you need a single plate. But if you need 500 or 1000 such plates it is still about 10 cents a plates. That is not such a good deal. Sadly, they used to have some bulk packs with reasonable per-element prices. Those have all gone away.
LEGO does not understand how to market to Americans.
I understand why having a tall, narrow 'hump' in electric demand is a bad thing... it means that lots of expensive generating equipment is used only briefly, making it hard to pay for. However, if the 'hump' is getting wider, that should be a good thing. The equipment gets more use, more electricity is sold, the equipment gets paid for. What am I missing here?
The reason they can't open the doors after a couple of minutes has to do with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). At least that is according to Norman Augustine in Augustine's Laws. By law the toilets must be accessible to handicapped persons. It can take a handicapped person a long time to get there business done.
The only thing they copied was the rules. How are the rules protected? Copyright? Why should you be able to copyright the rules to a game? That is similar to copyrighting the plot to a movie?
But what really makes me sad is that every 'official' software version of scrabble that I have played was terrible. I own an official Hasbro scrabble application for my PC. It is so resource intensive that I cannot play it on my laptop without as AC connection. It takes the whole screen. It takes forever to load. Not to mention that the disk had to be in the drive in order to play. I have also had an official handheld scrabble game. It was a small board, it had a weird dictionary, and too many 'Qs' and 'Zs'.
It is sad when the official owners of an IP cannot produce a usable implementation of that IP.
I agree. Move from coal to nuclear for base load, make synthetic gasoline from the coal. We have lots of coal, and since the coal is not burned directly many of the impurities (S, Hg, Th, U) are not released into the atmosphere during liquification. While this is not a solution that will be good for hundreds of years, it is an economically viable solution that is good for several decades.
Wind can be a part of the solution, but I am dubious about its costs ($5000/kW?), its environmental impact (turning large areas of the country into no-fly zones for birds), and its usefulness (what to do when it does not blow?)
I am also convinced that if the US is going to compete economically in the 21st century, we need to be able to produce cheap, abundant energy. Conservation mandates will not get us there, nor will most 'green' technologies (yet).
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Actually, it does matter. The power used by a CRT or a Plasma changes based on the how bright the overall image is. A dark CRT uses less energy than a bright CRT. LCD use about the same energy no matter what is being displayed on the screen (this is not entirely true today, many LCDs use adaptive back lighting.)
I have always wondered why LCDs use less energy than CRTs (I am not disputing that they do, but I have never understood why). CRTs only make the light they need, LCDs throw away the light they do not need. You would think that CRTs would be more efficient than LCDs.
At 10W / m^2 it would light up the sand! You don't need anywhere near that amount just to see a "light in the sky". You can see stars, they don't put out 10W/m^s.
That said, your basic ground-based siren is the way to go.
Medical costs really don't mean anything. There is no rational or justification for any of it. They are just made-up numbers. It would be difficult enough to make judgement calls on real numbers, but it is impossible with fake numbers.
It is also very reasonable to spend a lot of money fighting the condition that will/does kill you. Where else are you going to spend it?
You can't possible know this. How much does 16G of Flash cost? How much space does it take up? How many seconds of data would that record? If it is a closed black box, you have NO CLUE how much data it is storing.
The penalty for drinking untaxed alcohol is still death or blindness.
The real question is how will AI feel about other AI? Will existing AI fear the creation of even more advanced AI?
Most cars use vacuum assist brakes. Guess what? At full throttle, there is NO vacuum! If you pump the brakes a couple of times under this condition you will deplete the vacuum reserve and that will pretty much be it for the brakes. Ever try to drive a large car without power brakes?
I have driven a car with a large V8 when the accelerator stuck. I had both feet on the brake as was pressing as hard as I could and I could barely control the car. And I am a big guy. I got the car to slow down to about 30 MPH (it was downshifting) and I finally turned off the key. I doubt I could have gotten the car to a complete stop otherwise. (And I know now that I should have put the car in neutral, but I did not know that at the time.)
I agree with everything you say except the part about personal computers programming being more complicated today than it was in 1982. You are not remembering what a PITA programing was back in 1982. In 1982, you either programmed a personal computer in BASIC or assembly language. You didn't do anything that needed to run very fast in BASIC, and writing a useful program in assembly with 48K or RAM (if you were lucky) was not trivial. Granted, expectations were much lower back then, and yes, back then I understood the machine down to the gate level. So while computers are much, much more complex today then they were 28 years ago, I actually find them much, MUCH easier to program due to the availability of very powerful programming tools.
You are right, but you missed the point.
Apple used to be one of the most geek friendly brands out there. My Apple ][ came with schematics! How cool was that? It is a little sad that Apple has turned away from this, much in the same way that it is sad that hp has gone from a premier instrument maker to a maker of commodity PCs and peripherals. Let us old guys lament a bit.
Avatar in 3D looked really jumpy to me, kind of like watching movement under a strobe light. I wish movies would move beyond 24FPS. The technology is there, but I am not holding my breath.
The mass of lithium in a Li ion battery is no where near 1/2. For example, a LiMn2O4 Cathode is only 1/20 lithium by mass. Also, the 'recoverable' reserves of Lithium are at least three time higher than that 11 Megatonnes estimate. See http://lithiumabundance.blogspot.com/.
The earth's crust is nearly 20 ppm lithium by mass, so lithium is faily abundant. However, there are very few economically recoverable sources of lithium. If prices rise, more sources become available. We simple cannot 'run out' of lithium.
World production of lithium is another matter, it is only about 40,000 tonnes a year.
Even barring reprocessing, breeders, and new reactor technology, waste disposal really isn't that big of a problem. Very little waste is actually produced -- on the order of kilotons a year, as opposed to gigatons for many other industrial processes. The waste is not placed into the atmosphere or dumped into ground water sources either. It is self contained. Disposing of waste simply takes time... many, many centuries. The solution really is to dig deep hole in a stable area and bury the stuff. It is not that difficult.
It is not that simple. I am 46, and I already have bifocals. I still have trouble with the computer screen. If the bifocal is strong enough to work well for reading and close-up work, it is a little too strong for the computer screen. If the distance section is good for infinity, it is also not right for the screen. A larger screen further away would work, I would be able to focus on it, and it would be large enough to see. I suppose I could try trifocals.
The question that many people fail to ask at this point is "WHY is it more expensive to have the surgery in the hospital?" Just about everything in the hospital is a fixed costs; there is very little incremental cost to the hospital to have the surgery there. The answer comes down to accounting. It costs more to have surgery done in the hospital because that is the way they do their accounting. In other words, they are using their surgery center to offset other costs. They have the exact same situation for the ER. Everyone knows that ER visits are expensive, but few people bother to ask WHY. Fixing this is even more of a mess, because believe it or not, the medical system as a whole CANNOT save money by reducing in-hospital surgeries or ER visits.
Forget insuring iPhones for the speech/hearing impaired. The devices are reasonably priced, find a more direct way to get them into the hands of those that need them and cannot afford them.
There is no need to lug 100's of pounds of batteries or tow the car if you get stranded. There is the quick charge option. A portable generator could charge the car roadside to 80% in half an hour if needed.
Tankless water heaters are almost useless when it comes to saving energy. The simple truth of the matter is that the standby losses of a modern foam insulated tank are actually quite small. Tankless water heaters also do the opposite of what needs to be done to reduce peak loading.
Water heaters are good candidates for smart appliances. Water heaters tend to run for an hour or so after hot water has been used, say for a shower or to clean a load of laundry. They come on after a morning shower and use energy during the peak period. A very simple way to reduce peak use for water heaters is to add a second water heater (it can be smaller) that feeds the primary water heater and set the primary water heater a few degrees cooler than the secondary heater. The secondary heater is set to run only during off-peak hours. The net result -- you will always have plenty of hot water, and you will greatly reduce peak loading.
I have turned off the AC in my car and reduced my speed in the hopes that I could get to a gas station before running out of gas. Isn't that about the same thing?
How about a car with an emergency reserve gas tank that is activated by a lever inside the car?
I suppose that running the batteries completely flat may harm them. Basically they are claiming a patent on overriding the shutdown feature designed to protect the batteries and using a low power mode. That does not seem original. Granted, coupling this with a 911 call is kind of clever.
In short, if there's a difference, it's not the sex, it's the sexism. Anyone who can't acknowledge this is a bigot and a twit.
I still have an open mind on the subject. Does that make me a bigot and a twit?
But every time the issue is put to the test, we see that those differences are not nearly as signficant as the bigots desperately believe.
I find the gender gap in mathematics interesting. While I would like to know why there is a gender gap, I really don't have any personal stake in the reason for the gender gap. Is it inate? Is it social? Is is a combination? All of those would be interesting results.
I have no desire to shut women out of lucritive jobs in science and engineering. However, I don't think that we are suffering from a shortage of scientists and engineers, and further more I think that these fields are wide open to anyone (man or woman) that is interested. And yet there is still a gender gap. Is this something that really needs fixing?
You miss the point about Tellurium. Tellurium is unbelievably rare, one of nine rarest metallic elements on Earth. It may be 4 times rarer than plantnium. Tellurium is fairly cheap right now because it has very few uses. It will not stay cheap if it is used in volume produciton of solar cells. And cheap solar cells is the whole point here.
They don't generate heat as such
Yes they do. Powerful LEDs generate quite a bit of heat and require generous heat sinking. Just like everything else, the power that is not used to generate usable light is given off as heat.
AC->DC conversion does
No it doesn't. AC->DC conversion can be done at 90%+ efficiency fairly cheaply if you have a known and constant power requirment.
index of refraction of the casing material presents a problem
Not sure what you mean. It is far, far easier to take a directional point source of light and turn it into a flood than the other way around.
as well that leds don't generate white light by themselves (they use phosphor?)
So do CFLs.
And none of that is really that important. Here is a much better question: How much of the light that we generating is actually doing something useful?
True, they have quite a few elements there and in quite a few colors. However, they nowhere near all the common elements listed, and there are no bulk purchases. Sure, you can by a 1x1 yellow plate for about 10 cents. That is a pretty good deal if you need a single plate. But if you need 500 or 1000 such plates it is still about 10 cents a plates. That is not such a good deal. Sadly, they used to have some bulk packs with reasonable per-element prices. Those have all gone away.
LEGO does not understand how to market to Americans.
I understand why having a tall, narrow 'hump' in electric demand is a bad thing... it means that lots of expensive generating equipment is used only briefly, making it hard to pay for. However, if the 'hump' is getting wider, that should be a good thing. The equipment gets more use, more electricity is sold, the equipment gets paid for. What am I missing here?
The reason they can't open the doors after a couple of minutes has to do with ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act). At least that is according to Norman Augustine in Augustine's Laws. By law the toilets must be accessible to handicapped persons. It can take a handicapped person a long time to get there business done.
The only thing they copied was the rules. How are the rules protected? Copyright? Why should you be able to copyright the rules to a game? That is similar to copyrighting the plot to a movie?
But what really makes me sad is that every 'official' software version of scrabble that I have played was terrible. I own an official Hasbro scrabble application for my PC. It is so resource intensive that I cannot play it on my laptop without as AC connection. It takes the whole screen. It takes forever to load. Not to mention that the disk had to be in the drive in order to play. I have also had an official handheld scrabble game. It was a small board, it had a weird dictionary, and too many 'Qs' and 'Zs'.
It is sad when the official owners of an IP cannot produce a usable implementation of that IP.
I agree. Move from coal to nuclear for base load, make synthetic gasoline from the coal. We have lots of coal, and since the coal is not burned directly many of the impurities (S, Hg, Th, U) are not released into the atmosphere during liquification. While this is not a solution that will be good for hundreds of years, it is an economically viable solution that is good for several decades.
Wind can be a part of the solution, but I am dubious about its costs ($5000/kW?), its environmental impact (turning large areas of the country into no-fly zones for birds), and its usefulness (what to do when it does not blow?)
I am also convinced that if the US is going to compete economically in the 21st century, we need to be able to produce cheap, abundant energy. Conservation mandates will not get us there, nor will most 'green' technologies (yet).