Not hard to vaccinate your army against smallpox. I'd be surprised if even North Korea doesn't do it. It's not exactly a high-tech vaccine these days.
In fact, if you're a country looking to get rid of some "surplus" population, not to mention keep your military's grip firm on the populace, a carefully engineered outbreak wouldn't be a bad way of doing it. You vaccinate the folks you want to keep around, and let God sort out the rest.
Of course, North Korea's government seems to do just fine using famine as it is, so I doubt they really need smallpox. Why bother, when you can just starve the peasants into submission?
Well in this case it's sort of a "duh" position to take. It doesn't matter if the appellant was Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, the SFLC couldn't possibly ignore this case. It's one of the only USSC cases currently in the system that get at the concept of software patents so directly.
Although Linux supporters sometimes see the software-patent issue as one part of the landscape affecting their favorite OS, I suspect to people working at the SFLC, the whole Linux/Windows conflict is just one very front (and at least at the moment, one on which there's not a whole lot of movement) in a much larger war.
here in the UK there's the offense of 'Driving without due care and attention'.
We have laws like that (in most places) here in the U.S. as well, but enforcing existing laws doesn't let the politicians demonstrate how freaking "in-touch" and "useful" they are. Thus, we get nonsense legislation every few years. Solving problems that don't really exist or that ought to be covered by existing laws already is a favorite.
The Windows Bluetooth drivers definitely do seem to be an absolute disaster, at least as far as the WIDCOMM ones are concerned. AFAIK, the problem arises because the WIDCOMM driver (which is made by someone other than the hardware manufacturer -- the HW mfrs. just toss it in as an alternative to rolling their own) use the hardware ID of the BT device as part of license enforcement. But a lot of cheap BT devices seem to have zeroed-out hardware IDs, plus the driver doesn't seem to be too good about realizing when you've moved the same BT dongle from one computer to the other, or replaced an old one with a new one, etc., and generally it causes no end of grief.
But the question that I immediately start wondering is: "why is everyone using these WIDCOMM drivers?" It seems like they suck royally. But Microsoft has a separate BT stack, I believe, and obviously Apple has one as well (since I have a dongle plugged into my G5 which works perfectly). And if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in Linux there must be a Bluetooth stack that's GPL. (Actually a quick Google seems to turn up three distinct Linux BT stacks.) So it seems pretty clear that the WIDCOMM stack is inferior. Why are people tolerating it? And why are the manufacturers paying WIDCOMM for something that's otherwise free? (Are the Linux BT stacks patent-encumbered a la LAME, and have to be built up from source or something?)
You'd think Microsoft would step in here and produce a software stack that doesn't suck, because from where I'm sitting, it looks like a major point to MacOS for "just working" again. (And possibly to Linux too, but I've never tried using Bluetooth there.) Allowing people to produce shoddy, cut-rate products makes the platform look bad, and Windows isn't so big as to be immune from the cumulative effects of a million crummy devices.
That's pretty much the nature of their objection, yeah.
When Persons of Quality are running the cameras it's A-OK, but when the peasants start recording things and posting it to the intarwab, why that's just dirty pool.
Have you ever seen one of those Ionic Breeze air filters from The Sharper Image? They use the same principles, except that one of the plates is rather large, in order to attract dust out of the air and adhere to it.
They move quite a bit of air; it's enough to blow a candle flame over 45 degrees. So it makes sense that you could use one as a "no moving parts" fan, if you wanted to.
Calling it a "corona discharge cooler" sounds cool, but really it's not much more sophisticated than an air filter. The miniaturization might be difficult, but I don't think the basic technology is anything that new or farfetched.
Oh, yeah, because I'd really rather get my Internet service from PEPCO instead of Comcast. No, thanks. First you subsidize the hell out of the service and grant it a monopoly, until it's the only game in town. Then you ratchet up the rates -- and why not? It's not like people are going to go somewhere else.
At least now I can maybe choose who I get screwed by: the phone company or the cable company; that's more of a choice than I have about my water or gas.
The solution to a dearth of competition is not to eliminate it altogether. It's the special monopoly status that municipalities gave away to cable and telcos that's the root cause of a variety of problems (plus the same companies' bald-faced interference in politics in order to maximize profits and reduce competition).
There is definitely a public interest in developing infrastructure, but just saying "it's a right" and attempting to force companies to roll it out isn't the way to make it happen. There might be some situations where it could be beneficial for a municipality to pay for the deployment of, and subsequently own, the 'last mile' fiber infrastructure, and then allow ISPs to use this to deliver services to customers. However even then, I'd be wary of whether the municipality would actually use its infrastructure as a level playing field that companies could compete on for customers, or whether it would just engage in exclusive sweetheart deals, serving up the now-captive customer base as a burnt offering to a buyer for the right price.
In short, I don't trust Comcast further than I can throw all of their collective corporate assets. But I trust my local municipal government to not fuck up my Internet even less.
I would thoroughly support a Constitutional amendment that did something like this for the Federal legislature; there's no reason those people need to be sitting in the same room together more than once about every five years or so. Maybe ten. At least then, by the time they got around to making laws, they'd have a nice thick stack of citizen complaints to work though and problems to solve. The real problems always seem to occur when you have politicians looking for things to do, to make themselves look useful.
It's ironic that although the Founders of this country realized the dangers that having a standing Army presented, they evidently never realized those posed by a sitting Legislature.
I have a Minolta SLR camera (film camera, not digital) which is capable of downloading shot-by-shot exposure data to a SmartMedia card via a special adapter. (The adapter itself is hard to find, it fits on in place of the lens, and uses the lens's auto-focus contacts for communication with the camera.) It won't take more than 16MB cards, I think. And due to SmartMedia's size (in particular, the thinness of the cards), you can't get adapters that fit more modern cards into their slots, like you can with CompactFlash and PCMCIA.
There are lots of old but still very serviceable devices that need old media to work. Those crusty 8MB cards might seem like junk to most people, but they might be worth their weight in gold to someone who has an older device that won't use anything else.
Well with tapes and floppies, I think you could use a bulk tape eraser and pretty much expunge anything from them. Assuming you use the eraser properly (which involves putting it close to the tape, turning it on, and then moving the tape far away from the coil while it's energized, before turning it off), I don't think any data could remain. Assuming the field was strong enough to penetrate into the media thoroughly when it was close, the act of moving the media further and further from the coil while it's alternating (since it's plugged into the wall) essentially creates "layers" of magnetic polarization. (Since as you move it further away, the field gets weaker and can't penetrate as far into the media.) I don't see how even the NSA could undo that.
Sometimes reel-to-reel tapes that were erased using the erase head on a recorder can be recovered, because the alignment of the tape might be such that the very edge of the tape doesn't get thoroughly erased, and someone with sensitive enough equipment could analyze it and find traces, but it's very hard. I read a few years ago (probably in Wired) that somebody was attempting to get the National Archives let them try a method like that on the Nixon Tapes, but the Archives folks weren't convinced enough that it would work to let 'em try.
Just thought I'd point this out: "DOD capability" is a bit of a misnomer, at least in that it indicates suitability for any type of very sensitive data. Only drives that have never been touched by sensitive data can be wiped using software. Drives that have contained classified information are classified forever, and no number of passes qualify as secure erasure. The only 'secure delete' for DOD classified data is an incinerator.
Just to clarify; I wasn't implying that PPP is dead, because certainly it's still around. Everyone who uses dialup uses PPP (except for those few chumps still using AOL, and maybe even they have switched off of their proprietary protocol). It's because of its universality that it has lost its identity. People don't think about "SLIP vs PPP" anymore, it's just "dialup internet." PPP as a technology became encapsulated in other technologies, and basically disappeared below the surface of what's hidden to most users.
Statistically speaking, decriminalization (not legalization) of recreational drugs is much more likely to decrease violent crime than any gun ban.
I think that I probably agree with you here, but I just question the difference between "decriminalization" and "legalization." It sounds a lot like the kind of hair-splitting a politician might engage in to avoid the word 'legalization.'
Either something is verboten or it's not. If it's illegal but the prohibition simply isn't enforced, then it's effectively legal (e.g. sodomy in many U.S. states). When many people talk of 'decriminalization' or 'toleration' of narcotics, what they're really describing is making it generally legal, except in specific circumstances which are at the discretion of the authorities to prosecute. This seems like a dangerous game to play, because it makes the difference between what is OK and what will get you punished hazy. (Not to mention the opportunities it creates for abuse: e.g., possession of a joint is ignored, but possession of a joint by a Black/gay/tattooed/longhaired person is a crime due to selective and arbitrary enforcement.) Intentionally creating a disconnect between the law that's written in the statues and the law that's enforced on the street doesn't seem like a great plan.
That said, I think it's time to admit that the War on Drugs has been an abject failure, and isn't doing anything but furthering a cycle of criminality that's far worse than the social plague (drug use by itself) that it was supposed to prevent. Rather than hair-splitting on 'decriminalization' versus 'legalization,' I'd rather go for 'regulation,' at least of soft (physically non-addicting) drugs, similar to tobacco, and avoid creating a legal gray area.
But my greater point was that if you think that banning narcotics was a failure, and created crime where it didn't exist before (particularly organized crime and street gangs), then banning firearms would almost certainly be just as bad or worse. Not only would you (as you mentioned) increase crime by removing the deterrent effect of legitimately-owned firearms, but the entire concept of a 'national ban' is inherently flawed and unworkable. When we tried to ban alcohol, the drinks still flowed freely; when we tried to ban drugs, you could still buy an 8-Ball on any urban streetcorner; if people try to ban handguns, they'll still be used to hold up gas stations. It's not even worth talking about, because it could never work. However, you'll never convince a die-hard gun banner of this; it's like arguing with a die-hard Marxist: every failure is due not to inherent flaws in the workability of the theory, but just due to people who lacked the willpower to see it through. E.g. if regional bans fail, then obviously a national ban is necessary; if a national ban fails, obviously a world ban is necessary; etc. (No idea what they'd do after the world ban fails -- I suspect it would involve increasingly oppressive attempts at 'enforcement.')
The problem with "gun crime" isn't the guns, it's the crime. As long as people allow politicians to take the easy and intellectually dishonest way out, and vilify guns, they're never going to go after the real problem.
Seems like a logical argument to me. There's no strictly rational reason why a person born without a functioning higher brain should have more rights than a German Shepherd; that they do is mostly a testament to our emotional attachment to members of our own species.
If you take on premise that there is nothing innately special about human beings (no soul, special resemblance to God, etc.), then the difference between humans and other species (particularly other higher primates) becomes one of degree rather than kind. I think it's a basically unavoidable conclusion, once you take being "anointed by God" out of the equation.
The non-hypocritical solutions, as I see it, are to either treat low-functioning homo sapiens as animals, or treat high-functioning animals (by which I mean certain species of marine mammals, chimpanzees, great apes; probably not really GSDs) as we would mentally-impaired humans.
new (AKA reinvented) things like blogs and AJAX notwithstanding.
Reinvented is right. The "blog" is nothing new; back in 1994 there were probably quite a few of them. Except that lacking the word 'blog,' people just called them 'home pages.' Lots of people used to update their home pages obsessively, just typing in updates to the static HTML from the top down, so older stuff got pushed to the bottom of the page. Eventually when it would get too long, you'd copy and paste it onto a separate page.
What happened, IMO, is that HTML became too complex for the average person to deal with. (This was a combination of the complexity of creating a 'good looking' page increasing, and the technical skill of the average internet user declining.) There was a period of time when personal home pages almost died out, but then blogging software came out and allowed non-technical users to create pages without knowing any HTML.
Similarly, whenever I (have the misfortune to) visit MySpace, it reminds me of the early days of GeoCities and its "free web site" predecessors. Lots of very bad HTML and aesthetically questionable color choices, mostly driven out of vanity.
I think it's pretty safe that no matter where the technology goes, people are always going to want to write about themselves and the stuff they experience on a day to day basis; the tools and technologies for doing that will change, but the drive is always there.
Well I thought this one was particularly prescient: Conflicts between local and global Internet jurisdictions will become more pronounced, especially over censorship issues. How will prosecutors in Tennessee go after posters from Denmark?
A very good question indeed. Pity he didn't pick prosecutors in New York going after posters from Russia... let's hope the question remains unanswered.
It was also interesting how many of the 'big questions' in 1994 are now forgotten. Like SLIP versus PPP -- now, most people couldn't even tell you what either of them are. It went from being a big question, to a decided fact, and then faded into irrelevance. Now there's just "the Internet," and most people don't think about how they connect to it with their modem, if they use a modem at all. I wonder if HD-DVD vs BluRay will look the same way, in 10 years of hindsight?
Agreed. Honestly, if it takes longer to download than it does to drive to Blockbuster and back, then it's probably not going to convince many people that it's worth the added complexity.
Just doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations here, if it takes me about half an hour to go to Blockbuster and back (ten minute drive there and back, another ten minutes to find the movie and rent it), it would require about a 28Mbit connection.
Not unreasonable, if you have FIOS or one of the superfast DSL variations, but pretty much out of the question for most households.
I think what's more likely to happen is that cable and telephone companies will begin offering PPV videos streamed over a much narrower pipe, giving you the impression of a huge library of movies, but storing them all at the head end. That allows them to concentrate and pool storage in large servers, and reduces the bandwidth requirements. It also allows them to keep tighter control over the content, since it could be encrypted to play back only on their STB.
Most people aren't going to watch internet-delivered movies (that cost money) when the receiver is their computer; it's when the receiver is their cable box that it'll become mainstream.
Surely the US generally didn't require its troops in WWII to use their own guns from home when serving in the military. So whether or not they had guns at home is largely irrelevant.
Actually untrue; it's quite relevant, just not in the way you're thinking. While it's been a while since the U.S. has told its soldiers to bring their own weapons, the skill of using those weapons is easily transferable from the civilian world to the military. You can't make someone a good marksman in just a few weeks, which is all the time you have to devote to the subject in basic training. At best you can make a mediocre marksman out of most people. Having a large pool of civilians skilled in the operation of firearms is a valuable military asset, and it's been so for a long time. Hence the U.S. Government's Civilian Marksmanship Program, and the original impetus for the National Rifle Association. (The NRA was originally founded by retired Army officers who were so disappointed by the deplorable shooting skills of their incoming troops that they wanted to do something about it.)
And think a bit more about the handgun ban in Philly: do you think it would have been more or less effective if such guns had been banned across the entire country?
I think it's ridiculous that as regional bans have proved to be complete and utter failures -- in some cases actually harmful -- and laws which permit lawful gun ownership successful, the anti-gunners want to go for a national ban? It's like Communism: if it fails, then obviously you didn't try hard enough. Better luck next time -- but don't you dare question the theory! Regional gun bans didn't work, and a national gun ban wouldn't either: the U.S. can't even stop the flow of people across it's borders, or inspect every cargo container coming in and out, and a handgun is a lot easier to smuggle than a person (who have to eat and breathe and can't be disassembled into small parts and put back together, etc.). I mean, we've banned most illegal drugs for the better part of a century, and yet they still seem to be around. A national gun ban would be just as ridiculous as the war on drugs; probably less successful, since it's a lot easier to manufacture a firearm in a machine shop than it is to grow a field of cocoa plants and refine cocaine here in the U.S. (Not to mention the tens of millions of guns already in circulation.)
If you really want to look at why the crime rate is higher here than it is in most of Europe, you have to look a lot of factors besides gun laws. Looking at the crime rate here, and the rate there, and attributing it to gun control is ridiculous; there's nothing that implies causation in that relationship. The root causes of crime are probably much more subtle, and have to do with things that no politician wants to deal with directly: issues like wealth distribution, education, job availability, single versus two-parent households, teen pregnancy, etc. But guns are a good bogeyman to haul out at campaign time, and are useful for taking attention away from the tough questions that nobody wants to answer. It's just sad that so many people fall for it so readily.
I've actually worked in a minilab (put myself through college, actually), and you're exactly right that people would blame the processor if they got green photos back. Nobody wants to hear about how fluorescent light is actually green, etc., etc. -- the photos people want are not what's accurate, but what they remember seeing. Thus everything is printed as if it were illuminated by 5000K light, and consumer films are hugely over-saturated: because that's how the human mind remembers things. But because of this, most people never realize that the light in their office is really green, nor that in their homes really yellow; it's only because of someone fudging the settings during the printing process that they all look the same. If they ever got back photos that accurately represented what the camera 'saw,' they would probably assume that something went wrong in the development process.
It's accepted practice to compensate for fluorescent light during the printing process by color balancing until the photo "looks right," which generally involves increasing the magenta and yellow a bit. (Magenta being the opposite of green, this removes the majority of the cast; then you just fiddle with it to get it right.) Most people don't realize how much of a subjective process photo-finishing is; two different printers (and I'm talking about "printer" as a person-who-does-printing, not a machine) could produce slightly different output depending on how they thought an image should look. This is particularly true since on older optical processing equipment, what the printer looks at when they're color balancing isn't the image as it will look when printed, but just the negative, illuminated by a well-calibrated source. You learn pretty quickly to 'read' a negative and tell the difference between a daylight scene and a fluorescent one (otherwise you end up redoing photos when they come out of the machine green, and nobody likes that).
I suspect (and I've been out of the commercial finishing business for a while now) that the newer digital equipment takes some of the guesswork out by automatically removing the film base color and showing you a positive image to balance, but ultimately it's still going to come down to a subjective decision of how to print the image.
On a digital camera you can tell the 'true color' of fluorescent light pretty easily; just lock your camera on it's 5000K white-balance setting (flash, or better yet white-balance to a piece of paper outdoors) and then photograph some white paper inside. It should be pretty immediately apparent, if the fluorescent bulbs are the 'cool white' variety, how green the light is.
I have a bunch of different ones, purchased at different times (and naturally now I can't remember which I put in which fixtures). I have some that I got at Home Depot a few years ago, I think they might have been a GE product, which aren't bad. I just remember buying whatever said it was 5000K and was least-expensive for the lumen output. At the time I didn't know much about CRI, but I can't complain too much; to my eye, they're pretty good. Several of them are in up-lighting fixtures that reflect the light off of a slightly off-white ceiling, which lowers the apparent temperature slightly.
What I also have, and really recommend if you aren't bothered by the aesthetics of it, are using linear fluorescents. Once you go from CFLs to T8s, you have a lot more choice in bulbs. In my basement workroom I have a number of inexpensive 4' shop-type fixtures set up with 5000K 95CRI tubes. I think they are made by Sylvania (now about $10 a piece, although I think I paid more when I bought mine a while back; I remember paying more in bulbs than I did for the fixture). I have been looking towards the Philips PLUS brand for the future, but I'll have to take a look at the Bluemax ones. It's unfortunate that linear fluorescents are associated in many people's minds with unflattering light and dated interior decorating styles, because they really are the best bang for the buck, and particularly in areas like kitchens, I think people would be really sold on them if they're loaded with the right tubes.
In general I've been hesitant to order bulbs off of the internet, although I suppose it's silly (I've ordered things more fragile than CFLs mail-order before), and most of my choices have been based on whatever was currently in stock at Home Depot or Lowes.
Also, as well as using 75% less electricity, they give around 50% less light. Don't believe me? Check with a good light meter. Just to put the icing on the cake, not only do they have a hideous colour cast, but their colour temperature changes over the first few minutes.
Erm, if you're using a light meter that's designed to be used with incandescent bulbs, it won't read properly when exposed to the light being produced by a fluorescent bulb. This is due to the design of the meter, not to the bulbs actually producing less light. Fluorescent bulbs produce their light in well-defined peaks across the visible spectra [1], while incandescents produce a continuous distribution (which actually peaks somewhere down in the infrared). A light meter designed to work with black-body radiators (e.g. sunlight, incandescent / tungsten lamps), which includes most of those with CdS or silicon cells, won't accurately measure the light output from a fluorescent bulb (or an LED, or neon tube, or Hg-vapor), because they make assumptions about the radiated spectra that simply aren't true, namely that it is continuous, and that a measurement at a particular wavelength can be extrapolated out to give an idea of the light's intensity. With a fluorescent, if you don't measure the particular wavelengths that it emits light at, you will get a very low reading. Thus in order to accurately assess one's output, you need to measure intensity continuously across the visible spectrum and then integrate.
This is done using a spectrophotometer, which is a significantly more complicated piece of equipment than a simple light meter. Luckily for us, the manufacturers of light bulbs (both fluorescent and regular) do this at the factory and print the light output on the packaging, measured in lumens. Granted it's probably under idealized conditions, but since the numbers printed on incandescent bulbs probably are as well, it's good for comparison purposes. It is trivial to see, based on power consumption and light output in lumens, that fluorescent bulbs are far more efficient at producing visible light than incandescents. (And looking at the spectra of each [2], it's pretty clear why this is.) In general, fluorescents can produce around 60 lumens/watt, while incandescents are around 15.
While you have a point about the power factor of fluorescents versus incandescents, it's not a particularly significant problem. There are lots of large-scale deployments of fluorescent lights which have lower power factors than incandescent bulbs, and still manage to be far more efficient. Utility companies have been dealing with power factors for decades, and it's not difficult to correct for it, when it becomes a problem. (Also, high power factor (HPF) ballasts can have a factor higher than 0.9.) That power factor issues would completely eat up the inherent energy efficiencies of fluorescent lights is ridiculous -- if they did, you wouldn't see them as often as you do. Lighting represents only 8.8% of residential power consumption in the U.S. [3], about half that of air conditioning (which is a low PF load), and with fluorescent bulbs it would be even smaller. The impact on overall apparent power consumption, if not negligible, is probably very small.
The people at WalMart are not stupid. Doubtless they have noticed this possible loss of revenue before embarking on this scheme.
I suspect that they expect to make up the loss of revenue by working both ends of the revenue chain: they'll squeeze the producers to manufacture them for less (since they'll be able to point to their commitment and say 'hey, we're going to be selling x percent of the U.S.'s CFL bulbs next year...do you want a piece of that or not?'), and because they're selling a product that people know costs more up-front, they'll be able to get away with a higher profit margin than they do on conventional bulbs.
Overall, I suspect that they'll figure out a way to make back the lost revenue. I doubt that conventional bulbs are really high-profit items for WalMart as-is. They could try to twist their suppliers' arms, but I suspect it's like squeezing blood from a stone at this point (they've had 100 years to perfect light bulb manfacturing, it's not going anywhere) -- and there's a lot of competition. Lots of places make, and more people sell, conventional light bulbs. It's hard to get a big piece of the market. At best, light bulbs are one of those products that get people in to WalMart, where they hopefully then go and buy some other things while they're at it.
With CFL bulbs, I think WalMart sees an opportunity to get in at the start of a market that still has some expansion to go. And it's when markets expand that the real opportunities for profit happen.
Actually with fuel prices so high, electric heat is break-even, possibly even cheaper, than gas or oil heat. I did the math last year (BTUs per KWh, BTUs per gal fuel, considering furnace efficiency, etc), and electric was slightly cheaper for me. Bummer that replacing my gas furnace is itself a major expense, so the cost benefit would take many years to balance out.
If this is really the case where you live, the immediate solution isn't to go ripping out your furnace, but just to supplement your gas heat with electric spot heat. You can go down to WalMart (or the socially responsible big-box retailer of your choice) and pick up a 1.5kW oil-filled electric radiator for about $50, last time I checked. Prices might be higher now that it's winter. Places like Job Lot often have them on sale for even less.
But if you take one of those and park it bedroom, or better yet get a few of them and place them strategically throughout the house, you can probably keep your gas furnace from running on all but the coldest days, and still be comfortable. Or heck, get one with a thermostat and set it higher than your gas furnace's setting, and you'll effectively have an electrically-heated home (probably requiring more than one, depending on the size of your place). The bottom line is: there's no need to have a single energy source for your heating needs. You can easily have electric rads with a gas furnace as backup, just like many people in northern New England use wood for heat, but still have an oil furnace as backup. Diversification is probably a good thing in any event, economics aside, and electric heat is one of the easiest things to add, because you already have the "fuel" coming into your house.
Back to the light bulb issue, using electric radiators is still probably preferable to heating using incandescent light bulbs, because the heater will sit closer to the floor (heating more evenly), and will be cheaper in the long run as heat-producing appliances -- a $50 heater that produces 1.5kW of heat and lasts for years is a lot cheaper per watt-hour than a $1 bulb that produces 100W and lasts for 1,000 or so hours. Plus, you're not contributing nearly as much waste, and all the externalities that it implies.
You may have to look a little harder to find them in the compact (screw-in) styles, but there are a lot of color temperatures available in fluorescent bulbs. The "cool white" (CW) that you are probably imagining is one of the most common ones, but it is by no means the only color available.
Typical CW fluorescents actually produce a slightly greenish light, not blue (and if you look at a spectrometer's output, you'll see a big spike around 550 nm, which is green), and have a correlated color temperature somewhere around 4000K. I say "somewhere around" because, since they are really producing a number of fairly distinct wavelenths rather than a continuous distribution, they don't have an exact black-body radiator equivalent. But the general consensus is that it's somewhere around 3400-4200K (depending on phosphor), with a greenish cast. It's this green cast that's the real killer, and makes CW fluorescent light so unflattering to most people's skin; the color temperature itself isn't the major issue.
If you want warmer (lower color temp) light, it is possible to buy "warm white" fluorescents. They have a correlated temperature of somewhere around 2950-3000K, or about the same as a 100W bulb. To most people, it looks a lot like an incandescent. They're still spectroscopically different (again, fluorescent produces peaks and valleys at various wavelengths, as will anything that's not actually heated to several thousand degrees), but they're designed so that the human eye perceives them as a warm 3000K source, rather than the usual green.
To be honest, I think "warm" lighting is vastly overrated. I agree that the CW fluorescents are obnoxious, but what I discovered is a far better option than trying to approximate the 3000K yellow glow of a bulb, was to jump up in color temperature, rather than trying to go down. Personally I've found that the high-temperature (5000K) "Daylight" fluorescents are the most pleasant. They don't have the green cast that the 3200K CW ones do, but they also don't have the false yellow tinge that the 'warm' ones do. They really are the closest thing to sunlight, if you get the right bulbs. (Some people also find them very handy for Seasonal Affective Disorder, in fact they're the key component of those pricey therapeutic lamps.)
Until I changed to 5000K lights, I never realized how yellow incandescents made everything appear. Walking from a room lit with the high-temp fluorescents to incandescent bulbs is like going from the outside into a cave; it's really striking. Rather than trying to produce crummy imitations of what are really a limitation of incandescent bulbs (their low color temperature), I think fluorescent light manufacturers should really be extolling their high-color-temperature, "full-spectrum" bulbs, because once you've lived with them, there's no going back. Unfortunately, it's going to take a while to rid people of the idea that 'high color temperature' means the cruddy, unflattering, green light they've grown accustomed to in office buildings and other institutional locations.
The cost per BTU of heat from your gas furnace is probably a lot less than the cost per BTU of heat coming from your incandescent light fixtures. (If it wasn't, you'd be better off ditching your gas furnace and just using electric baseboard heaters.) So by using more efficient light fixtures and running your furnace to make up the heat, you're still saving money. How much depends on the cost of gas and electricity where you live, but if you google around and find an electric-heat versus gas-heat calculator, it'd be pretty trivial to figure it out.
It's not quite as much money as you'd save in Florida, where in addition to the electricity that CFLs save, you also save the cooling cost of moving the heat they produce out of your home, but the savings is still there.
Also, unless you have a house with very strange lighting fixtures, I'm going to bet most of the light bulbs are probably at head-level or higher: that's not where you want your heat to be produced. At best, most of it is probably rising up to the ceiling where it's not a major contributor to the felt warmth in the room. I suspect a far greater percentage of the heat produced by incandescent bulbs is wasted, versus the heat produced by an appliance that's designed to warm the room, simply by virtue of their location.
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Not hard to vaccinate your army against smallpox. I'd be surprised if even North Korea doesn't do it. It's not exactly a high-tech vaccine these days.
In fact, if you're a country looking to get rid of some "surplus" population, not to mention keep your military's grip firm on the populace, a carefully engineered outbreak wouldn't be a bad way of doing it. You vaccinate the folks you want to keep around, and let God sort out the rest.
Of course, North Korea's government seems to do just fine using famine as it is, so I doubt they really need smallpox. Why bother, when you can just starve the peasants into submission?
Well in this case it's sort of a "duh" position to take. It doesn't matter if the appellant was Lucifer, Prince of Darkness, the SFLC couldn't possibly ignore this case. It's one of the only USSC cases currently in the system that get at the concept of software patents so directly.
Although Linux supporters sometimes see the software-patent issue as one part of the landscape affecting their favorite OS, I suspect to people working at the SFLC, the whole Linux/Windows conflict is just one very front (and at least at the moment, one on which there's not a whole lot of movement) in a much larger war.
here in the UK there's the offense of 'Driving without due care and attention'.
We have laws like that (in most places) here in the U.S. as well, but enforcing existing laws doesn't let the politicians demonstrate how freaking "in-touch" and "useful" they are. Thus, we get nonsense legislation every few years. Solving problems that don't really exist or that ought to be covered by existing laws already is a favorite.
The Windows Bluetooth drivers definitely do seem to be an absolute disaster, at least as far as the WIDCOMM ones are concerned. AFAIK, the problem arises because the WIDCOMM driver (which is made by someone other than the hardware manufacturer -- the HW mfrs. just toss it in as an alternative to rolling their own) use the hardware ID of the BT device as part of license enforcement. But a lot of cheap BT devices seem to have zeroed-out hardware IDs, plus the driver doesn't seem to be too good about realizing when you've moved the same BT dongle from one computer to the other, or replaced an old one with a new one, etc., and generally it causes no end of grief.
But the question that I immediately start wondering is: "why is everyone using these WIDCOMM drivers?" It seems like they suck royally. But Microsoft has a separate BT stack, I believe, and obviously Apple has one as well (since I have a dongle plugged into my G5 which works perfectly). And if I'm not mistaken, somewhere in Linux there must be a Bluetooth stack that's GPL. (Actually a quick Google seems to turn up three distinct Linux BT stacks.) So it seems pretty clear that the WIDCOMM stack is inferior. Why are people tolerating it? And why are the manufacturers paying WIDCOMM for something that's otherwise free? (Are the Linux BT stacks patent-encumbered a la LAME, and have to be built up from source or something?)
You'd think Microsoft would step in here and produce a software stack that doesn't suck, because from where I'm sitting, it looks like a major point to MacOS for "just working" again. (And possibly to Linux too, but I've never tried using Bluetooth there.) Allowing people to produce shoddy, cut-rate products makes the platform look bad, and Windows isn't so big as to be immune from the cumulative effects of a million crummy devices.
That's pretty much the nature of their objection, yeah.
When Persons of Quality are running the cameras it's A-OK, but when the peasants start recording things and posting it to the intarwab, why that's just dirty pool.
It's really not.
Have you ever seen one of those Ionic Breeze air filters from The Sharper Image? They use the same principles, except that one of the plates is rather large, in order to attract dust out of the air and adhere to it.
They move quite a bit of air; it's enough to blow a candle flame over 45 degrees. So it makes sense that you could use one as a "no moving parts" fan, if you wanted to.
Calling it a "corona discharge cooler" sounds cool, but really it's not much more sophisticated than an air filter. The miniaturization might be difficult, but I don't think the basic technology is anything that new or farfetched.
Oh, yeah, because I'd really rather get my Internet service from PEPCO instead of Comcast. No, thanks. First you subsidize the hell out of the service and grant it a monopoly, until it's the only game in town. Then you ratchet up the rates -- and why not? It's not like people are going to go somewhere else.
At least now I can maybe choose who I get screwed by: the phone company or the cable company; that's more of a choice than I have about my water or gas.
The solution to a dearth of competition is not to eliminate it altogether. It's the special monopoly status that municipalities gave away to cable and telcos that's the root cause of a variety of problems (plus the same companies' bald-faced interference in politics in order to maximize profits and reduce competition).
There is definitely a public interest in developing infrastructure, but just saying "it's a right" and attempting to force companies to roll it out isn't the way to make it happen. There might be some situations where it could be beneficial for a municipality to pay for the deployment of, and subsequently own, the 'last mile' fiber infrastructure, and then allow ISPs to use this to deliver services to customers. However even then, I'd be wary of whether the municipality would actually use its infrastructure as a level playing field that companies could compete on for customers, or whether it would just engage in exclusive sweetheart deals, serving up the now-captive customer base as a burnt offering to a buyer for the right price.
In short, I don't trust Comcast further than I can throw all of their collective corporate assets. But I trust my local municipal government to not fuck up my Internet even less.
I would thoroughly support a Constitutional amendment that did something like this for the Federal legislature; there's no reason those people need to be sitting in the same room together more than once about every five years or so. Maybe ten. At least then, by the time they got around to making laws, they'd have a nice thick stack of citizen complaints to work though and problems to solve. The real problems always seem to occur when you have politicians looking for things to do, to make themselves look useful.
It's ironic that although the Founders of this country realized the dangers that having a standing Army presented, they evidently never realized those posed by a sitting Legislature.
I have a Minolta SLR camera (film camera, not digital) which is capable of downloading shot-by-shot exposure data to a SmartMedia card via a special adapter. (The adapter itself is hard to find, it fits on in place of the lens, and uses the lens's auto-focus contacts for communication with the camera.) It won't take more than 16MB cards, I think. And due to SmartMedia's size (in particular, the thinness of the cards), you can't get adapters that fit more modern cards into their slots, like you can with CompactFlash and PCMCIA.
There are lots of old but still very serviceable devices that need old media to work. Those crusty 8MB cards might seem like junk to most people, but they might be worth their weight in gold to someone who has an older device that won't use anything else.
Well with tapes and floppies, I think you could use a bulk tape eraser and pretty much expunge anything from them. Assuming you use the eraser properly (which involves putting it close to the tape, turning it on, and then moving the tape far away from the coil while it's energized, before turning it off), I don't think any data could remain. Assuming the field was strong enough to penetrate into the media thoroughly when it was close, the act of moving the media further and further from the coil while it's alternating (since it's plugged into the wall) essentially creates "layers" of magnetic polarization. (Since as you move it further away, the field gets weaker and can't penetrate as far into the media.) I don't see how even the NSA could undo that.
Sometimes reel-to-reel tapes that were erased using the erase head on a recorder can be recovered, because the alignment of the tape might be such that the very edge of the tape doesn't get thoroughly erased, and someone with sensitive enough equipment could analyze it and find traces, but it's very hard. I read a few years ago (probably in Wired) that somebody was attempting to get the National Archives let them try a method like that on the Nixon Tapes, but the Archives folks weren't convinced enough that it would work to let 'em try.
Just thought I'd point this out: "DOD capability" is a bit of a misnomer, at least in that it indicates suitability for any type of very sensitive data. Only drives that have never been touched by sensitive data can be wiped using software. Drives that have contained classified information are classified forever, and no number of passes qualify as secure erasure. The only 'secure delete' for DOD classified data is an incinerator.
Just to clarify; I wasn't implying that PPP is dead, because certainly it's still around. Everyone who uses dialup uses PPP (except for those few chumps still using AOL, and maybe even they have switched off of their proprietary protocol). It's because of its universality that it has lost its identity. People don't think about "SLIP vs PPP" anymore, it's just "dialup internet." PPP as a technology became encapsulated in other technologies, and basically disappeared below the surface of what's hidden to most users.
Statistically speaking, decriminalization (not legalization) of recreational drugs is much more likely to decrease violent crime than any gun ban.
I think that I probably agree with you here, but I just question the difference between "decriminalization" and "legalization." It sounds a lot like the kind of hair-splitting a politician might engage in to avoid the word 'legalization.'
Either something is verboten or it's not. If it's illegal but the prohibition simply isn't enforced, then it's effectively legal (e.g. sodomy in many U.S. states). When many people talk of 'decriminalization' or 'toleration' of narcotics, what they're really describing is making it generally legal, except in specific circumstances which are at the discretion of the authorities to prosecute. This seems like a dangerous game to play, because it makes the difference between what is OK and what will get you punished hazy. (Not to mention the opportunities it creates for abuse: e.g., possession of a joint is ignored, but possession of a joint by a Black/gay/tattooed/longhaired person is a crime due to selective and arbitrary enforcement.) Intentionally creating a disconnect between the law that's written in the statues and the law that's enforced on the street doesn't seem like a great plan.
That said, I think it's time to admit that the War on Drugs has been an abject failure, and isn't doing anything but furthering a cycle of criminality that's far worse than the social plague (drug use by itself) that it was supposed to prevent. Rather than hair-splitting on 'decriminalization' versus 'legalization,' I'd rather go for 'regulation,' at least of soft (physically non-addicting) drugs, similar to tobacco, and avoid creating a legal gray area.
But my greater point was that if you think that banning narcotics was a failure, and created crime where it didn't exist before (particularly organized crime and street gangs), then banning firearms would almost certainly be just as bad or worse. Not only would you (as you mentioned) increase crime by removing the deterrent effect of legitimately-owned firearms, but the entire concept of a 'national ban' is inherently flawed and unworkable. When we tried to ban alcohol, the drinks still flowed freely; when we tried to ban drugs, you could still buy an 8-Ball on any urban streetcorner; if people try to ban handguns, they'll still be used to hold up gas stations. It's not even worth talking about, because it could never work. However, you'll never convince a die-hard gun banner of this; it's like arguing with a die-hard Marxist: every failure is due not to inherent flaws in the workability of the theory, but just due to people who lacked the willpower to see it through. E.g. if regional bans fail, then obviously a national ban is necessary; if a national ban fails, obviously a world ban is necessary; etc. (No idea what they'd do after the world ban fails -- I suspect it would involve increasingly oppressive attempts at 'enforcement.')
The problem with "gun crime" isn't the guns, it's the crime. As long as people allow politicians to take the easy and intellectually dishonest way out, and vilify guns, they're never going to go after the real problem.
Seems like a logical argument to me. There's no strictly rational reason why a person born without a functioning higher brain should have more rights than a German Shepherd; that they do is mostly a testament to our emotional attachment to members of our own species.
If you take on premise that there is nothing innately special about human beings (no soul, special resemblance to God, etc.), then the difference between humans and other species (particularly other higher primates) becomes one of degree rather than kind. I think it's a basically unavoidable conclusion, once you take being "anointed by God" out of the equation.
The non-hypocritical solutions, as I see it, are to either treat low-functioning homo sapiens as animals, or treat high-functioning animals (by which I mean certain species of marine mammals, chimpanzees, great apes; probably not really GSDs) as we would mentally-impaired humans.
new (AKA reinvented) things like blogs and AJAX notwithstanding.
Reinvented is right. The "blog" is nothing new; back in 1994 there were probably quite a few of them. Except that lacking the word 'blog,' people just called them 'home pages.' Lots of people used to update their home pages obsessively, just typing in updates to the static HTML from the top down, so older stuff got pushed to the bottom of the page. Eventually when it would get too long, you'd copy and paste it onto a separate page.
What happened, IMO, is that HTML became too complex for the average person to deal with. (This was a combination of the complexity of creating a 'good looking' page increasing, and the technical skill of the average internet user declining.) There was a period of time when personal home pages almost died out, but then blogging software came out and allowed non-technical users to create pages without knowing any HTML.
Similarly, whenever I (have the misfortune to) visit MySpace, it reminds me of the early days of GeoCities and its "free web site" predecessors. Lots of very bad HTML and aesthetically questionable color choices, mostly driven out of vanity.
I think it's pretty safe that no matter where the technology goes, people are always going to want to write about themselves and the stuff they experience on a day to day basis; the tools and technologies for doing that will change, but the drive is always there.
Well I thought this one was particularly prescient:
Conflicts between local and global Internet jurisdictions will become more pronounced, especially over censorship issues. How will prosecutors in Tennessee go after posters from Denmark?
A very good question indeed. Pity he didn't pick prosecutors in New York going after posters from Russia... let's hope the question remains unanswered.
It was also interesting how many of the 'big questions' in 1994 are now forgotten. Like SLIP versus PPP -- now, most people couldn't even tell you what either of them are. It went from being a big question, to a decided fact, and then faded into irrelevance. Now there's just "the Internet," and most people don't think about how they connect to it with their modem, if they use a modem at all. I wonder if HD-DVD vs BluRay will look the same way, in 10 years of hindsight?
Agreed. Honestly, if it takes longer to download than it does to drive to Blockbuster and back, then it's probably not going to convince many people that it's worth the added complexity.
Just doing some back-of-the-envelope calculations here, if it takes me about half an hour to go to Blockbuster and back (ten minute drive there and back, another ten minutes to find the movie and rent it), it would require about a 28Mbit connection.
( 6 GiB * (1024 MiB / GiB) * (1024 KiB / GiB) * (1024 B / KiB) * (8 b / B) ) / ( (30 min) * (60 sec / min) ) = 28633115.3 b/sec
Not unreasonable, if you have FIOS or one of the superfast DSL variations, but pretty much out of the question for most households.
I think what's more likely to happen is that cable and telephone companies will begin offering PPV videos streamed over a much narrower pipe, giving you the impression of a huge library of movies, but storing them all at the head end. That allows them to concentrate and pool storage in large servers, and reduces the bandwidth requirements. It also allows them to keep tighter control over the content, since it could be encrypted to play back only on their STB.
Most people aren't going to watch internet-delivered movies (that cost money) when the receiver is their computer; it's when the receiver is their cable box that it'll become mainstream.
Surely the US generally didn't require its troops in WWII to use their own guns from home when serving in the military. So whether or not they had guns at home is largely irrelevant.
Actually untrue; it's quite relevant, just not in the way you're thinking. While it's been a while since the U.S. has told its soldiers to bring their own weapons, the skill of using those weapons is easily transferable from the civilian world to the military. You can't make someone a good marksman in just a few weeks, which is all the time you have to devote to the subject in basic training. At best you can make a mediocre marksman out of most people. Having a large pool of civilians skilled in the operation of firearms is a valuable military asset, and it's been so for a long time. Hence the U.S. Government's Civilian Marksmanship Program, and the original impetus for the National Rifle Association. (The NRA was originally founded by retired Army officers who were so disappointed by the deplorable shooting skills of their incoming troops that they wanted to do something about it.)
And think a bit more about the handgun ban in Philly: do you think it would have been more or less effective if such guns had been banned across the entire country?
I think it's ridiculous that as regional bans have proved to be complete and utter failures -- in some cases actually harmful -- and laws which permit lawful gun ownership successful, the anti-gunners want to go for a national ban? It's like Communism: if it fails, then obviously you didn't try hard enough. Better luck next time -- but don't you dare question the theory! Regional gun bans didn't work, and a national gun ban wouldn't either: the U.S. can't even stop the flow of people across it's borders, or inspect every cargo container coming in and out, and a handgun is a lot easier to smuggle than a person (who have to eat and breathe and can't be disassembled into small parts and put back together, etc.). I mean, we've banned most illegal drugs for the better part of a century, and yet they still seem to be around. A national gun ban would be just as ridiculous as the war on drugs; probably less successful, since it's a lot easier to manufacture a firearm in a machine shop than it is to grow a field of cocoa plants and refine cocaine here in the U.S. (Not to mention the tens of millions of guns already in circulation.)
If you really want to look at why the crime rate is higher here than it is in most of Europe, you have to look a lot of factors besides gun laws. Looking at the crime rate here, and the rate there, and attributing it to gun control is ridiculous; there's nothing that implies causation in that relationship. The root causes of crime are probably much more subtle, and have to do with things that no politician wants to deal with directly: issues like wealth distribution, education, job availability, single versus two-parent households, teen pregnancy, etc. But guns are a good bogeyman to haul out at campaign time, and are useful for taking attention away from the tough questions that nobody wants to answer. It's just sad that so many people fall for it so readily.
I've actually worked in a minilab (put myself through college, actually), and you're exactly right that people would blame the processor if they got green photos back. Nobody wants to hear about how fluorescent light is actually green, etc., etc. -- the photos people want are not what's accurate, but what they remember seeing. Thus everything is printed as if it were illuminated by 5000K light, and consumer films are hugely over-saturated: because that's how the human mind remembers things. But because of this, most people never realize that the light in their office is really green, nor that in their homes really yellow; it's only because of someone fudging the settings during the printing process that they all look the same. If they ever got back photos that accurately represented what the camera 'saw,' they would probably assume that something went wrong in the development process.
It's accepted practice to compensate for fluorescent light during the printing process by color balancing until the photo "looks right," which generally involves increasing the magenta and yellow a bit. (Magenta being the opposite of green, this removes the majority of the cast; then you just fiddle with it to get it right.) Most people don't realize how much of a subjective process photo-finishing is; two different printers (and I'm talking about "printer" as a person-who-does-printing, not a machine) could produce slightly different output depending on how they thought an image should look. This is particularly true since on older optical processing equipment, what the printer looks at when they're color balancing isn't the image as it will look when printed, but just the negative, illuminated by a well-calibrated source. You learn pretty quickly to 'read' a negative and tell the difference between a daylight scene and a fluorescent one (otherwise you end up redoing photos when they come out of the machine green, and nobody likes that).
I suspect (and I've been out of the commercial finishing business for a while now) that the newer digital equipment takes some of the guesswork out by automatically removing the film base color and showing you a positive image to balance, but ultimately it's still going to come down to a subjective decision of how to print the image.
On a digital camera you can tell the 'true color' of fluorescent light pretty easily; just lock your camera on it's 5000K white-balance setting (flash, or better yet white-balance to a piece of paper outdoors) and then photograph some white paper inside. It should be pretty immediately apparent, if the fluorescent bulbs are the 'cool white' variety, how green the light is.
I have a bunch of different ones, purchased at different times (and naturally now I can't remember which I put in which fixtures). I have some that I got at Home Depot a few years ago, I think they might have been a GE product, which aren't bad. I just remember buying whatever said it was 5000K and was least-expensive for the lumen output. At the time I didn't know much about CRI, but I can't complain too much; to my eye, they're pretty good. Several of them are in up-lighting fixtures that reflect the light off of a slightly off-white ceiling, which lowers the apparent temperature slightly.
What I also have, and really recommend if you aren't bothered by the aesthetics of it, are using linear fluorescents. Once you go from CFLs to T8s, you have a lot more choice in bulbs. In my basement workroom I have a number of inexpensive 4' shop-type fixtures set up with 5000K 95CRI tubes. I think they are made by Sylvania (now about $10 a piece, although I think I paid more when I bought mine a while back; I remember paying more in bulbs than I did for the fixture). I have been looking towards the Philips PLUS brand for the future, but I'll have to take a look at the Bluemax ones. It's unfortunate that linear fluorescents are associated in many people's minds with unflattering light and dated interior decorating styles, because they really are the best bang for the buck, and particularly in areas like kitchens, I think people would be really sold on them if they're loaded with the right tubes.
In general I've been hesitant to order bulbs off of the internet, although I suppose it's silly (I've ordered things more fragile than CFLs mail-order before), and most of my choices have been based on whatever was currently in stock at Home Depot or Lowes.
Also, as well as using 75% less electricity, they give around 50% less light. Don't believe me? Check with a good light meter. Just to put the icing on the cake, not only do they have a hideous colour cast, but their colour temperature changes over the first few minutes.
g hting_spectrum_peaks_labelled.gife lectricity.html
Erm, if you're using a light meter that's designed to be used with incandescent bulbs, it won't read properly when exposed to the light being produced by a fluorescent bulb. This is due to the design of the meter, not to the bulbs actually producing less light. Fluorescent bulbs produce their light in well-defined peaks across the visible spectra [1], while incandescents produce a continuous distribution (which actually peaks somewhere down in the infrared). A light meter designed to work with black-body radiators (e.g. sunlight, incandescent / tungsten lamps), which includes most of those with CdS or silicon cells, won't accurately measure the light output from a fluorescent bulb (or an LED, or neon tube, or Hg-vapor), because they make assumptions about the radiated spectra that simply aren't true, namely that it is continuous, and that a measurement at a particular wavelength can be extrapolated out to give an idea of the light's intensity. With a fluorescent, if you don't measure the particular wavelengths that it emits light at, you will get a very low reading. Thus in order to accurately assess one's output, you need to measure intensity continuously across the visible spectrum and then integrate.
This is done using a spectrophotometer, which is a significantly more complicated piece of equipment than a simple light meter. Luckily for us, the manufacturers of light bulbs (both fluorescent and regular) do this at the factory and print the light output on the packaging, measured in lumens. Granted it's probably under idealized conditions, but since the numbers printed on incandescent bulbs probably are as well, it's good for comparison purposes. It is trivial to see, based on power consumption and light output in lumens, that fluorescent bulbs are far more efficient at producing visible light than incandescents. (And looking at the spectra of each [2], it's pretty clear why this is.) In general, fluorescents can produce around 60 lumens/watt, while incandescents are around 15.
While you have a point about the power factor of fluorescents versus incandescents, it's not a particularly significant problem. There are lots of large-scale deployments of fluorescent lights which have lower power factors than incandescent bulbs, and still manage to be far more efficient. Utility companies have been dealing with power factors for decades, and it's not difficult to correct for it, when it becomes a problem. (Also, high power factor (HPF) ballasts can have a factor higher than 0.9.) That power factor issues would completely eat up the inherent energy efficiencies of fluorescent lights is ridiculous -- if they did, you wouldn't see them as often as you do. Lighting represents only 8.8% of residential power consumption in the U.S. [3], about half that of air conditioning (which is a low PF load), and with fluorescent bulbs it would be even smaller. The impact on overall apparent power consumption, if not negligible, is probably very small.
[1] See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fluorescent_li
[2] Incandescent and 5000K fluorescent spectra compared: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:SPD.png
[3] http://www.eia.doe.gov/neic/brochure/electricity/
The people at WalMart are not stupid. Doubtless they have noticed this possible loss of revenue before embarking on this scheme.
I suspect that they expect to make up the loss of revenue by working both ends of the revenue chain: they'll squeeze the producers to manufacture them for less (since they'll be able to point to their commitment and say 'hey, we're going to be selling x percent of the U.S.'s CFL bulbs next year...do you want a piece of that or not?'), and because they're selling a product that people know costs more up-front, they'll be able to get away with a higher profit margin than they do on conventional bulbs.
Overall, I suspect that they'll figure out a way to make back the lost revenue. I doubt that conventional bulbs are really high-profit items for WalMart as-is. They could try to twist their suppliers' arms, but I suspect it's like squeezing blood from a stone at this point (they've had 100 years to perfect light bulb manfacturing, it's not going anywhere) -- and there's a lot of competition. Lots of places make, and more people sell, conventional light bulbs. It's hard to get a big piece of the market. At best, light bulbs are one of those products that get people in to WalMart, where they hopefully then go and buy some other things while they're at it.
With CFL bulbs, I think WalMart sees an opportunity to get in at the start of a market that still has some expansion to go. And it's when markets expand that the real opportunities for profit happen.
Actually with fuel prices so high, electric heat is break-even, possibly even cheaper, than gas or oil heat. I did the math last year (BTUs per KWh, BTUs per gal fuel, considering furnace efficiency, etc), and electric was slightly cheaper for me. Bummer that replacing my gas furnace is itself a major expense, so the cost benefit would take many years to balance out.
If this is really the case where you live, the immediate solution isn't to go ripping out your furnace, but just to supplement your gas heat with electric spot heat. You can go down to WalMart (or the socially responsible big-box retailer of your choice) and pick up a 1.5kW oil-filled electric radiator for about $50, last time I checked. Prices might be higher now that it's winter. Places like Job Lot often have them on sale for even less.
But if you take one of those and park it bedroom, or better yet get a few of them and place them strategically throughout the house, you can probably keep your gas furnace from running on all but the coldest days, and still be comfortable. Or heck, get one with a thermostat and set it higher than your gas furnace's setting, and you'll effectively have an electrically-heated home (probably requiring more than one, depending on the size of your place). The bottom line is: there's no need to have a single energy source for your heating needs. You can easily have electric rads with a gas furnace as backup, just like many people in northern New England use wood for heat, but still have an oil furnace as backup. Diversification is probably a good thing in any event, economics aside, and electric heat is one of the easiest things to add, because you already have the "fuel" coming into your house.
Back to the light bulb issue, using electric radiators is still probably preferable to heating using incandescent light bulbs, because the heater will sit closer to the floor (heating more evenly), and will be cheaper in the long run as heat-producing appliances -- a $50 heater that produces 1.5kW of heat and lasts for years is a lot cheaper per watt-hour than a $1 bulb that produces 100W and lasts for 1,000 or so hours. Plus, you're not contributing nearly as much waste, and all the externalities that it implies.
You may have to look a little harder to find them in the compact (screw-in) styles, but there are a lot of color temperatures available in fluorescent bulbs. The "cool white" (CW) that you are probably imagining is one of the most common ones, but it is by no means the only color available.
Typical CW fluorescents actually produce a slightly greenish light, not blue (and if you look at a spectrometer's output, you'll see a big spike around 550 nm, which is green), and have a correlated color temperature somewhere around 4000K. I say "somewhere around" because, since they are really producing a number of fairly distinct wavelenths rather than a continuous distribution, they don't have an exact black-body radiator equivalent. But the general consensus is that it's somewhere around 3400-4200K (depending on phosphor), with a greenish cast. It's this green cast that's the real killer, and makes CW fluorescent light so unflattering to most people's skin; the color temperature itself isn't the major issue.
If you want warmer (lower color temp) light, it is possible to buy "warm white" fluorescents. They have a correlated temperature of somewhere around 2950-3000K, or about the same as a 100W bulb. To most people, it looks a lot like an incandescent. They're still spectroscopically different (again, fluorescent produces peaks and valleys at various wavelengths, as will anything that's not actually heated to several thousand degrees), but they're designed so that the human eye perceives them as a warm 3000K source, rather than the usual green.
To be honest, I think "warm" lighting is vastly overrated. I agree that the CW fluorescents are obnoxious, but what I discovered is a far better option than trying to approximate the 3000K yellow glow of a bulb, was to jump up in color temperature, rather than trying to go down. Personally I've found that the high-temperature (5000K) "Daylight" fluorescents are the most pleasant. They don't have the green cast that the 3200K CW ones do, but they also don't have the false yellow tinge that the 'warm' ones do. They really are the closest thing to sunlight, if you get the right bulbs. (Some people also find them very handy for Seasonal Affective Disorder, in fact they're the key component of those pricey therapeutic lamps.)
Until I changed to 5000K lights, I never realized how yellow incandescents made everything appear. Walking from a room lit with the high-temp fluorescents to incandescent bulbs is like going from the outside into a cave; it's really striking. Rather than trying to produce crummy imitations of what are really a limitation of incandescent bulbs (their low color temperature), I think fluorescent light manufacturers should really be extolling their high-color-temperature, "full-spectrum" bulbs, because once you've lived with them, there's no going back. Unfortunately, it's going to take a while to rid people of the idea that 'high color temperature' means the cruddy, unflattering, green light they've grown accustomed to in office buildings and other institutional locations.
The cost per BTU of heat from your gas furnace is probably a lot less than the cost per BTU of heat coming from your incandescent light fixtures. (If it wasn't, you'd be better off ditching your gas furnace and just using electric baseboard heaters.) So by using more efficient light fixtures and running your furnace to make up the heat, you're still saving money. How much depends on the cost of gas and electricity where you live, but if you google around and find an electric-heat versus gas-heat calculator, it'd be pretty trivial to figure it out.
It's not quite as much money as you'd save in Florida, where in addition to the electricity that CFLs save, you also save the cooling cost of moving the heat they produce out of your home, but the savings is still there.
Also, unless you have a house with very strange lighting fixtures, I'm going to bet most of the light bulbs are probably at head-level or higher: that's not where you want your heat to be produced. At best, most of it is probably rising up to the ceiling where it's not a major contributor to the felt warmth in the room. I suspect a far greater percentage of the heat produced by incandescent bulbs is wasted, versus the heat produced by an appliance that's designed to warm the room, simply by virtue of their location.