I'm always amused by how the same geek crowd that will rip a film-maker or author to shreds over re-hashing some common plot device will support to the death a software developer demonstrating the same lack of unoriginality.
Citation, please. I've seen nothing to indicate that this is the same geek.
And anyway, no one shuts down the big movie company when they make a re-hash movie.
It didn't last, because, among other things, people always found ways around it
The real reason it can't last is that it annoys paying customers more than freeloading pirates.
Okay, I'll bite. If DRM can't last, why is it still common more than 3 decades into the PC era?
Don't get me wrong -- I consider DRM obscene, but claiming it can't last is like claiming that economic sanctions against Cuba are going to work any day now.
"Hasn't been sued yet" is different from "patent-free".
Sure, because those are totally orthogonal dimensions. You can get sued for using any codec (and you might even be a juicier target with something like h.264). When you buy an h.264 license, you're only indemnified against the patents the consortium holds, and you're explicitly not covered against anything else that was infringed along the way.
If Microsoft could be sued for including a format then that is a good reason not too. The implication has been that Theora might infringe on some patents. It may, it may not. I don't know and likely nobody here does either.
The same thing applies to h.264 or any other codec, for that matter. The only thing the MPEG license buys you is indemnification from the patents that the consortium knows about, and they explicitly make no guarantee that other unlicensed patents weren't infringed along the way. You're on your own for that.
It sounds like you get this, but any argument that starts out this way is automatically and utterly fallacious. We're at 0.01% for solar, and under 1% for wind. The mere suggestion that we could get to 100% within many decades is ludicrous, nor would it make sense even if it were technically feasible to do so. We don't need (or even want) 100% solutions.
As you correctly conclude, there is no silver bullet for energy production, and there will always be a mix of generating technology. This is one of the huge benefits of electricity and our electric grid -- we can generate electricity from a great many sources (and more in the future) without changing the devices that consume the energy.
You're just making them warmer when it's hotter out. Not really a good solution.
It yields more efficient utilization of the grid without huge capital expenses, so from an economist's point of view, it's an outstanding solution.
Oh, you're not an economist, and want to optimize for convenience instead of cost? Well, there's a solution for you, too. It is staggeringly expensive to build additional generation that only gets used once or twice per year to meet peak loads. Electric utilities are slowly moving towards real-time (or at least time-of-use) energy pricing, so you won't be insulated from the market much longer. Still want to be an energy pig? No problem, but soon you will have to pay for that, not me, and be warned that it's very expensive out on the tails of those price curves.
Have you read the quotes from people actually participating in these programs? They're almost universally positive. In general, they see very little (if any) effect from the temperature control, and they benefit from rebates and/or lower rates.
Look, if I'm paying for power, in a government granted monopoly (as most power companies are) I'd better be able to use it how I wish, while paying for it with a reasonable fee based on what I use.
The disconnect, here, is that market energy rates fluctuate wildly according to the laws of supply and demand, but you as a residential customer, have been largely insulated from this, so your perception of "reasonable fee" is in for a surprise as market forces begin to play a bigger role in energy policy.
No one is going to take away your right to be an energy pig, but the energy markets are moving ever towards time-of-use and real-time pricing, so you're going to be at the mercy of the market if you want to be a pig, and it gets very expensive out there on the tails of the curve.
Sure, adding generation is one option, but it is fantastically expensive to build generating capacity that is only used to meet peak load one or two days per year. Smart management and scheduling of loads is orders of magnitude more cost effective, and those who participate will ultimately pay less for their energy than those who don't.
It's about it being cheaper to make customers uncomfortably hot than to provide adequate power.
Close, but not quite correct. It's that improving grid utilization and efficiency is cheaper than building new generating capacity that is only required one or two days per year.
No one is going to take away your right to be an energy pig, but the grid is moving ever closer to real-time pricing, so you're going be at the mercy of the market for that privilege, and it gets *very* expensive out on the tails of the curve.
If I give PGE control they will move it up or down but never as high as 82. I'd still be getting fucked.
Something doesn't jive, here. Either you haven't explained the situation clearly, or you don't understand how these programs work.
You already have your thermostat at 82F? PG&E is unlikely to ever turn your AC up that high, so there wouldn't be any downside for you at all. And since you'd get compensated (in the form of rebates and/or lower rates) just for participating, you'd win.
Most of July I was paying 48c per Kwh.
You have to be over 300% of your baseline to have a marginal kWh cost that high. What's using all that energy? If it's really your AC (at 82F) then you need to get it serviced or replaced.
Instead of trying to control individual ACs like this, they should be giving out massive credits to those who go to the expense of installing solar.
Actually, both of those are good approaches, and fortunately we don't have to limit ourselves to just one solution. As with many other things, there are no silver bullets for energy.
I would imagine that if you could get 10% of the homes in the nation (even if you were just to do that in So Cal and Arizona and other perpetually sunny places) the relief on the grid would be enormous.
It is fortunate that engineers rely on science (instead of your imagination) to build and operate the grid. Solar is moderately well correlated with grid loading in the summer, but it is not a complete solution. Wind is, in general, poorly correlated, and your other proposal (solar with hydrogen fuel storage) is hopelessly inefficient -- the round trip efficiency (from electricity to hydrogen and back) is about 25%. Buffering renewable energy is absolutely unnecessary anyway until such time as the renewables exceed real-time demand, which, sadly, is decades away under even the most optimistic assumptions.
The real problem is that the grid is ancient (relatively) and uses old, broken tech.
How did you miss the fact that TFA is precisely about applying new technology (automatic thermostats slaved to grid-regulating control loops) to improve efficiency and reliability of the grid?
And when the money stops, so does the improvement.
You must have stopped reading before the end of the article:
And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests at the end of the year -- and those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.
Re:A false choice, of course...
on
Health Care Reform
·
· Score: 2, Informative
One Major trouble with the health care bill they're trying to pass is...that it actually goes in and cut amounts people can load up HSA's and FSA's...this part of it sucks.
HSAs and FSAs are a poor substitute for what should simply be tax-deductible expenses in the first place. FSAs are needlessly complicated, and screw you by design if you spend more or less than anticipated, which is not surprising, because the rules were written by the very organizations that benefit when you lose.
Let's nuke HSAs and FSAs and make their eligible expenses tax deductible. There would be no downside whatsoever, except for the employers and account service providers -- overhead we don't need.
Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death?
Yes, because bicycling is not dangerous. See the following table from the BHSI web site, revealing that, per unit time spent, you're about twice as likely to die in your car as on a bicycle. (Per unit distance, it's roughly equal.) You'd be *far* better off wearing a helmet while driving. So why don't you?
# Fatalities per 1,000,000 exposure hours / Activity ---------------- 128.71 Skydiving
15.58 General Aviation
8.80 On-road Motorcycling
1.98 Scuba Diving
1.53 Living (all causes of death)
1.07 Swimming .88 Snowmobiling .47 Passenger cars .28 Water skiing .26 Bicycling .15 Flying (scheduled domestic airlines) .08 Hunting .035 Cosmic Radiation from transcontinental flights .027 Home Living (active) .022 Traveling in a School Bus .017 Passenger Car Post-collision fire .014 Home Living, active & passive (sleeping) .003 Residential Fire
I've never quite got my head around a tech site like Slashdot, where the demographic is almost certainly interested in new technology having such a negative response to technological advances in what our phones can do.
It's not that. New features are fine when added to a solid core feature set, but when bells and whistles come at *the expense* of basics like durability, call quality, ergonomics, and a whole host of human factors, then that's shitty.
The transition from land lines to mobiles marked a significant regression in both call reliability and call quality. Similarly, the "race to the bottom" for cheap mobile phones packed with bells and whistles has left quality behind. It's become acceptable to have telephones that lock up and reset periodically. My Western Electric model 2500 telephone was designed to last a lifetime (or several lifetimes), and to be *serviceable* in the unlikely event something broke. Almost all modern mobile phones are designed to take up space in the landfill two years after purchase.
The card provider is doing it as a free add-on. This shows how little the warranty really costs the provider.
First of all, it's not free. (The credit card vendor's margin comes off the seller's end, but in the end *everybody* pays for that inefficiency.) Most of all, however, the cost is low because very, very few people know about (much less collect on) the extended warranties provided by credit card vendors.
[...] minors have access to explicit content via online virtual worlds [...]
Minors have access to "explicit" content in the real world, too. How is this any different? Are these concerns merely puritanical in nature, or is there evidence that this is actually harmful?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm always amused by how the same geek crowd that will rip a film-maker or author to shreds over re-hashing some common plot device will support to the death a software developer demonstrating the same lack of unoriginality.
Citation, please. I've seen nothing to indicate that this is the same geek.
And anyway, no one shuts down the big movie company when they make a re-hash movie.
It didn't last, because, among other things, people always found ways around it
The real reason it can't last is that it annoys paying customers more than freeloading pirates.
Okay, I'll bite. If DRM can't last, why is it still common more than 3 decades into the PC era?
Don't get me wrong -- I consider DRM obscene, but claiming it can't last is like claiming that economic sanctions against Cuba are going to work any day now.
I see you ignored the parent posters factual response that HTML 5 is not VIDEO 5 as you seem to fixate on.
The HTML 5 comment was labeled (by the poster) as incidental, and it's also off topic, since the subject here is codecs.
"Hasn't been sued yet" is different from "patent-free".
Sure, because those are totally orthogonal dimensions. You can get sued for using any codec (and you might even be a juicier target with something like h.264). When you buy an h.264 license, you're only indemnified against the patents the consortium holds, and you're explicitly not covered against anything else that was infringed along the way.
If Microsoft could be sued for including a format then that is a good reason not too. The implication has been that Theora might infringe on some patents. It may, it may not. I don't know and likely nobody here does either.
The same thing applies to h.264 or any other codec, for that matter. The only thing the MPEG license buys you is indemnification from the patents that the consortium knows about, and they explicitly make no guarantee that other unlicensed patents weren't infringed along the way. You're on your own for that.
Sweden and Finland in high demand for datacenters (end technicians to staff them).
Why would you want to staff your datacenters with proctologists?
That was incredibly informative. You're already moderated accordingly, so I'll just say "thanks for posting".
If you immediately try to go renewable 100%,[...]
It sounds like you get this, but any argument that starts out this way is automatically and utterly fallacious. We're at 0.01% for solar, and under 1% for wind. The mere suggestion that we could get to 100% within many decades is ludicrous, nor would it make sense even if it were technically feasible to do so. We don't need (or even want) 100% solutions.
As you correctly conclude, there is no silver bullet for energy production, and there will always be a mix of generating technology. This is one of the huge benefits of electricity and our electric grid -- we can generate electricity from a great many sources (and more in the future) without changing the devices that consume the energy.
US Coal mining deaths per exajoule electricity produced: 4.5
To make a more comprehensive and useful comparison, you should include all the deaths from radioactive coal ash and mercury.
You're just making them warmer when it's hotter out. Not really a good solution.
It yields more efficient utilization of the grid without huge capital expenses, so from an economist's point of view, it's an outstanding solution.
Oh, you're not an economist, and want to optimize for convenience instead of cost? Well, there's a solution for you, too. It is staggeringly expensive to build additional generation that only gets used once or twice per year to meet peak loads. Electric utilities are slowly moving towards real-time (or at least time-of-use) energy pricing, so you won't be insulated from the market much longer. Still want to be an energy pig? No problem, but soon you will have to pay for that, not me, and be warned that it's very expensive out on the tails of those price curves.
Have you read the quotes from people actually participating in these programs? They're almost universally positive. In general, they see very little (if any) effect from the temperature control, and they benefit from rebates and/or lower rates.
Look, if I'm paying for power, in a government granted monopoly (as most power companies are) I'd better be able to use it how I wish, while paying for it with a reasonable fee based on what I use.
The disconnect, here, is that market energy rates fluctuate wildly according to the laws of supply and demand, but you as a residential customer, have been largely insulated from this, so your perception of "reasonable fee" is in for a surprise as market forces begin to play a bigger role in energy policy.
No one is going to take away your right to be an energy pig, but the energy markets are moving ever towards time-of-use and real-time pricing, so you're going to be at the mercy of the market if you want to be a pig, and it gets very expensive out there on the tails of the curve.
Sure, adding generation is one option, but it is fantastically expensive to build generating capacity that is only used to meet peak load one or two days per year. Smart management and scheduling of loads is orders of magnitude more cost effective, and those who participate will ultimately pay less for their energy than those who don't.
It's about it being cheaper to make customers uncomfortably hot than to provide adequate power.
Close, but not quite correct. It's that improving grid utilization and efficiency is cheaper than building new generating capacity that is only required one or two days per year.
No one is going to take away your right to be an energy pig, but the grid is moving ever closer to real-time pricing, so you're going be at the mercy of the market for that privilege, and it gets *very* expensive out on the tails of the curve.
If I give PGE control they will move it up or down but never as high as 82. I'd still be getting fucked.
Something doesn't jive, here. Either you haven't explained the situation clearly, or you don't understand how these programs work.
You already have your thermostat at 82F? PG&E is unlikely to ever turn your AC up that high, so there wouldn't be any downside for you at all. And since you'd get compensated (in the form of rebates and/or lower rates) just for participating, you'd win.
Most of July I was paying 48c per Kwh.
You have to be over 300% of your baseline to have a marginal kWh cost that high. What's using all that energy? If it's really your AC (at 82F) then you need to get it serviced or replaced.
Instead of trying to control individual ACs like this, they should be giving out massive credits to those who go to the expense of installing solar.
Actually, both of those are good approaches, and fortunately we don't have to limit ourselves to just one solution. As with many other things, there are no silver bullets for energy.
I would imagine that if you could get 10% of the homes in the nation (even if you were just to do that in So Cal and Arizona and other perpetually sunny places) the relief on the grid would be enormous.
It is fortunate that engineers rely on science (instead of your imagination) to build and operate the grid. Solar is moderately well correlated with grid loading in the summer, but it is not a complete solution. Wind is, in general, poorly correlated, and your other proposal (solar with hydrogen fuel storage) is hopelessly inefficient -- the round trip efficiency (from electricity to hydrogen and back) is about 25%. Buffering renewable energy is absolutely unnecessary anyway until such time as the renewables exceed real-time demand, which, sadly, is decades away under even the most optimistic assumptions.
The real problem is that the grid is ancient (relatively) and uses old, broken tech.
How did you miss the fact that TFA is precisely about applying new technology (automatic thermostats slaved to grid-regulating control loops) to improve efficiency and reliability of the grid?
And when the money stops, so does the improvement.
You must have stopped reading before the end of the article:
And in Dallas, the experiment produced the most dramatic gains of all. Paying second-graders to read books significantly boosted their reading-comprehension scores on standardized tests at the end of the year -- and those kids seemed to continue to do better the next year, even after the rewards stopped.
So which is the cause, and which is the effect?
One Major trouble with the health care bill they're trying to pass is...that it actually goes in and cut amounts people can load up HSA's and FSA's...this part of it sucks.
HSAs and FSAs are a poor substitute for what should simply be tax-deductible expenses in the first place. FSAs are needlessly complicated, and screw you by design if you spend more or less than anticipated, which is not surprising, because the rules were written by the very organizations that benefit when you lose.
Let's nuke HSAs and FSAs and make their eligible expenses tax deductible. There would be no downside whatsoever, except for the employers and account service providers -- overhead we don't need.
It's bad enough that partial nudity is starting to be considered porn.
The whole idea of "partial nudity" is silly anyway. Anyone who isn't covered from head to toe is "partially nude".
Do you honestly think the extremely minor inconvenience of wearing a helmet outweighs the significantly reduced chance of serious injury, brain damage and death?
Yes, because bicycling is not dangerous. See the following table from the BHSI web site, revealing that, per unit time spent, you're about twice as likely to die in your car as on a bicycle. (Per unit distance, it's roughly equal.) You'd be *far* better off wearing a helmet while driving. So why don't you?
I've never quite got my head around a tech site like Slashdot, where the demographic is almost certainly interested in new technology having such a negative response to technological advances in what our phones can do.
It's not that. New features are fine when added to a solid core feature set, but when bells and whistles come at *the expense* of basics like durability, call quality, ergonomics, and a whole host of human factors, then that's shitty.
The transition from land lines to mobiles marked a significant regression in both call reliability and call quality. Similarly, the "race to the bottom" for cheap mobile phones packed with bells and whistles has left quality behind. It's become acceptable to have telephones that lock up and reset periodically. My Western Electric model 2500 telephone was designed to last a lifetime (or several lifetimes), and to be *serviceable* in the unlikely event something broke. Almost all modern mobile phones are designed to take up space in the landfill two years after purchase.
sounds like the voice of the serial killer in Silence of the Lambs. "Put the fucking lotion in the basket!" You know, that guy.
The card provider is doing it as a free add-on. This shows how little the warranty really costs the provider.
First of all, it's not free. (The credit card vendor's margin comes off the seller's end, but in the end *everybody* pays for that inefficiency.) Most of all, however, the cost is low because very, very few people know about (much less collect on) the extended warranties provided by credit card vendors.
Are those record receipts adjusted for inflation, or is this bad, sensational reporting?
I've not yet heard of a portable music player that doesn't already have a volume control.
[...] minors have access to explicit content via online virtual worlds [...]
Minors have access to "explicit" content in the real world, too. How is this any different? Are these concerns merely puritanical in nature, or is there evidence that this is actually harmful?