I have fluorescent lights that use pretty much exactly the same amount of power to output 100W equivalent of light. And those bulbs cost not much more than a buck a piece. What exactly does these provide to me for $30?
Instant on. Some CFLs (especially the par bulbs I buy) take forever to turn on. When that's the case, people tend not to turn off the lights negating the savings benefits.
Still, I will wait some time for the price to go down.
CFLs and LEDs don't live any longer than incandescents because of many factors. Simply put: The electronics are sensitive to heat, electric spikes, or frequent on/off cycles by the users. These factors lead to early death. In my experience CFLs don't live any longer than incandescents... and in some annoying cases, actually die sooner (within days). Therefore assuming equal lifespans across all these bulbs
I run a business. For whatever reasons, 2 of our big connected buildings don't have fluorescent lights but regular bulb fixtures (the building is from the 1890s). When CFLs came out, I jumped at them. I have over 150 CFL in regular use, about 12 outdoors and the rest indoors. All see regular use and on and off. I estimate I change about 5-8 bulbs a year. The outdoor bulbs contribute probably about 3-4 of that - they enclosed but some run dusk to dawn. We have had bad runs by some manufactures, where that number spiked in the past, but so far Feit Electric and Sylvania Micro Minis perform admirably.
I do have some Fluorescent tubes in another seperate building and had ballasts (t8 and t12 iirc, in any case, digital and magnetic go bad, in one case all 12 units within a year within 3 years of installation).
What I'm saying is that I do believe your data fits you, but there is variability, probably due to the quality of the grid you happen to be connected to- fluctuations, brown outs, and what not.
My best performing CFLs are 3 hall lights that get turned off and on constantly and never stay on for long. Haven't changed them out since 2002. OTOH, I had par bulb CFLs die within days although that was early in the manufacturer's run/offering of them.
In my experience, I change bulbs far less often than with regular incandescents.
1. Economics: There are more people in Pakistan than Japan or Germany but wanna guess which ones America trades more with? Germany and Japan of course with trade volumes many times greater than American trade with Pakistan. The wealth of those two countries has created enormous new markets for American products. Yes trade involves job losses but the point is that the opportunities created outstrip the losses.
Of course Japan and Germany trade more with us, they're developed! They were both highly developed nations before they ever got a dollar of aid from us. China was somewhat in the 1930s before Japan went in.
There is no way to develop Pakistan, they'd have to want to do it themselves.
2. Security: Poor undeveloped countries cause security problems. Look at Somalia. If you can it's better to spend some money helping them develop rather than having to continuously deal with the security problems that you otherwise get.
Somalia is not a security problem. Not a significant one anyway. For some private shipping, but the US Navy can blow anything they have with their lowest tech gear out of the water. The threat is nothing compared to the cost of developing it.
3. Security 2: Aid is the act of buying allies. If the West isn't going to buy then others (China, Russia, Iran) might just step in.
Just like that $10B or so a year bought Pakistan's loyalty when our chopper crashed.... and oh, wait, they gave China a look at it.
Mutually Beneficial Trades makes more effective, profitable and longterm alliances than indiscriminant handouts ever will. France and Germany defended Iraq up to the US invasion, trying to stop it, because of the trade they did with Saddam.
>Bring your receipt or packing slip and a valid photo ID.
I find it interesting it says "valid photo id". What exactly is valid? Surely, it's not law to have a driver's license, I know enough people who don't drive and never drove.
So, I imagine a nonscannable passport, school ID, work ID, etc. should work. In fact, this system should be easy to get around.
Plus, in certain states, it may be against the law to require conditions such as these to return items, because of the onus it places on the consumer.
What if the people at the store don't understand the customer's complaint about the item?
I once returned a CD/MP3 player (back when people still used such things instead of digital MP3 players) to Fry's because resuming an MP3 at greater than 256 seconds would resume it at (time mod 256). Anyone with even the slightest bit of computer training should have been able to figure out that the firmware was saving only one byte of resume data and that therefore every one of that model on the shelf would have the same problem. The customer service droids did not comprehend this and made me exchange it with another one anyway, which I had to then return (I did get a refund then).
You explain to them, in English: "This item doesn't seem to work correctly. When I pause any song a little longer than 4 minutes and start it back up again, it starts at a seemingly random place." Then demonstrate it to them.
If they insist on an exchange, insist that the new unit doesn't have this flaw as it's unacceptable. If need be, try it in the store and most of them will realize it's better to give back the money than to keep opening new packages. Never go into geek speak with muggles if you want them to understand you.
I don't get 3D TV. I just don't. I've seen some 3D movies and I liked them, but that's only when they're epic movies. They're more immersive when well done. Would I want everything 3D? Probably not, it's just too overwhelming and sensory overload. There is no reason I want anything jumping out on me for daily programming or the common movie.
Do they even manufacturer 3D displays for computers? Now that might be more interesting, but only on a "touch" screen type device where I could interact with the objects on the screen with my hand - like rolling dice or moving around cards in a game. I suppose that's far off.
Not even my nephews are really screaming for Nintendo 3DS for their birthdays or anything, so it seems 3D is in that kinda PDA before smartphones state, something that is kinda cool in the abstract and seems useful and once it's in your hands, it just lays there without a killer reason/app/interface/what_not to use it.
Maybe the next generation of game consoles will make use of it, it might be kinda cool for a driving game.... for 10 minutes.
As someone who has a digital spedometer and gas gauge, I'll say you're wrong. I spend less time looking at them because I get exact information rather than have to estimate a precise number at a wobbly needle in front of a a background of small numbers.
Growing up, I remember the bad old days where my dad was trying read a map at the same time as driving, when I was to young to act as navigator. Or a couple of near hits on his part while navigating a foreign city looking for a specific street sign and not really watching the road.
He now uses GPS and is probably safer than most of my generation, because he doesn't know texting and isn't addicted to a smart phone, but that's another story.
It's not that absolute. I used to live in a place where no one could give a fuck if your lawn was all mud or weeds growing 3 foot high. Then another place where the township called a 3rd party mower if your lawn was 3 inches above ideal cut and send you a $400 bill for it too.
I travel quite a bit. The old ones were easier to see in case you put in on a flat surface while changing it out and you could put it in your wallet in a credit card slot while being reasonably sure it wouldn't fall out.
Everybody comes up with stupid ideas once in a while, the true geniuses in entertainment just know not to publish them as a finished product and preferably that they never see the light of day at all. Although the more I read about Lucas, the more I know he wasn't the force behind the series. Idk if I can lump in with Shamalamadingdong, but as these guys grow older, like Michael Bay here, they kinda have fizzled out and then take existing products and try to add a "cool" or "exciting" twist to them, usually "for the kids". Kinda like 101 flavors ice cream, at the end of the day you're still eating just ice cream no matter how you dress it up or how many artificial flavors you douse it with... it won't be a pizza or something different.
But I think that's the problem when we grow older. Human interactions, what movies always focus on even when it's animated, can be terribly limiting (at least to my mind) and I get the sense that we "seen it all" already and grow very cynical because we have, we recognize the ultimately small variations of the same thing time and again. That's kinda why I grow more interested in reading about science every year and the technicals because those "stories" doesn't have the oft-repeated constraints or patterns humans have.
See, it turns into a race between increasing absolute numbers and decreasing margin. That is where market share really counts, simple.
I have to ask: why is only Apple fanbots who profess not to care about market share? I am sure Apple does, as does everyone in business.
Er, not really. Many japanese companies tried the whole marketshare-at-all-costs thing at a loss with no real gain, selling products at a loss trying to achieve this fleeting Holy Grail. When Steve Jobs went back into Apple in 1997, he cut nearly all things that didn't make money for Apple (they had an extensive, confusing line up that blended together into a myriad of choices instead of differentiating themselves quickly and easily, which too many companies still have today), and ceded the PC wars to Microsoft for the time being. Enough that they worked with Microsoft at least.
Michael Dell of Dell Computers, back in 1997 Job's return, asked what he would do with Apple, said he's basically just sell off the assets and scrap the company. Dell is a very marketshare oriented driven company and their stock price is lower today than it was during the dotcom days.
At the end of the 90s and beginning of the 00s, they had hardly any marketshare in computers and yet still made themselves profitable by not chasing elusive dragons.
iPhone and iPad don't have to outsell everyone else, they just need to make a profit and have a large enough and affluent audience to get developers. Both products have features (outside of technical specs) that customers want, like quality of construction materials, that competitors often don't touch and also the iOS ecosystem which Android really isn't competing in terms of $ turnover and ease of getting Apps out there & simple testing (multiple models from a variety of manufacturers every generation vs 1 product from Apple per generation) that is enticing developers to switch and only use android, while there are enough apps that are iOS only.
There are plenty in the public who do not support these things. The fact is only a tiny fraction of the population actually votes. And this has more to do with votes not really counting for anything more than who the candidates are or what they support. Until they get rid of the electoral college and you get 1 vote for 1 person, and make it easier for people to vote either by having a national holiday on election day or online voting, our "democratic" system is really just smoke and mirrors with 2 parties that support the same political policies.
I'm going to disagree here about the electoral college. It's not really working the way it was designed (us electing representatives that somewhat independently decide who'll the best president will be, hasn't been that way since the 2nd president where they gave him a VP of the opposite party) but it's still protecting us from voter fraud. You see, the US census every 10 years determines how many electors each state gets to send - more population, more electors. Well, anybody who has ever covered US elections probably knows we probably have one of the most in the 1st world on the local and state levels with massive hijinx every election. Just look up the Republican primaries this time around and read about all the irregularities. BUT, the electoral college at least acts as a firewall; no state can send more electors than it has no matter what so the problem is a bit more contained. In a straight up popular vote, really big states who have 1,000,000 dead voters going to the polls will change the outcome much more often than in the electoral game and they'll be extra incentive to do so.
Adding more democracy has been always a time honored cry to make things better but has it? In 1913, the 17th amendment got adopted. It also added more democracy, it was the mandatory direct election of Senators by the people of their states rather than the states making their own rules, including often appointment by the state congress or governor. In effect, we got two houses of representatives rather than 1 and a house representing state's interests.
Perpetual wars and massive debt to gdp. Now, I'm not saying the 17th is responsible for all that, 1913 has indeed landed a host of changes to make things more "democratic" like income tax promised to only be applied to the top 0.01% super rich since tariffs were reportedly burdening the common man as well as the Federal Reserve.
But what I'm definitely saying is that tweak the systems as much as you want, when you have, in the words of George Carlin "If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public."
Go look at other countries, practically the whole western world and all 1st world countries are as deep in debt as us. Europe and Japan with their multi party Parliaments and whatever, tweaks, tweaks, tweaks didn't do a damn thing. We're just human and that's the problem with the assumptions. Collectively we just suck no matter what we tell ourselves about it being the fault of our systems instead. The only thing a system can do is minimize it for a (relatively) short time until it's bypassed one way or another.
I'm asking because I disassembled my magnetic resistance excercise bike recently and seen that they use a flywheel along with magnets that come move closer or farther to vary the resistance, and just wondered if that is how they generate the electricity from an industrial level flywheel these days or if a generator is mechanically attached.
4. Doubtful. No company sells at a loss. Bayer would just avoid India completely, and not release their patented drugs until 10-20 years later (after they recover their initial R&D investment).
Wouldn't India just smuggle the drug from a country that has it and reverse engineer it?
Slashdot Mirror
Instant on. Some CFLs (especially the par bulbs I buy) take forever to turn on. When that's the case, people tend not to turn off the lights negating the savings benefits.
Still, I will wait some time for the price to go down.
I run a business. For whatever reasons, 2 of our big connected buildings don't have fluorescent lights but regular bulb fixtures (the building is from the 1890s). When CFLs came out, I jumped at them. I have over 150 CFL in regular use, about 12 outdoors and the rest indoors. All see regular use and on and off. I estimate I change about 5-8 bulbs a year. The outdoor bulbs contribute probably about 3-4 of that - they enclosed but some run dusk to dawn. We have had bad runs by some manufactures, where that number spiked in the past, but so far Feit Electric and Sylvania Micro Minis perform admirably.
I do have some Fluorescent tubes in another seperate building and had ballasts (t8 and t12 iirc, in any case, digital and magnetic go bad, in one case all 12 units within a year within 3 years of installation).
What I'm saying is that I do believe your data fits you, but there is variability, probably due to the quality of the grid you happen to be connected to- fluctuations, brown outs, and what not.
My best performing CFLs are 3 hall lights that get turned off and on constantly and never stay on for long. Haven't changed them out since 2002. OTOH, I had par bulb CFLs die within days although that was early in the manufacturer's run/offering of them.
In my experience, I change bulbs far less often than with regular incandescents.
Of course Japan and Germany trade more with us, they're developed! They were both highly developed nations before they ever got a dollar of aid from us. China was somewhat in the 1930s before Japan went in.
There is no way to develop Pakistan, they'd have to want to do it themselves.
Somalia is not a security problem. Not a significant one anyway. For some private shipping, but the US Navy can blow anything they have with their lowest tech gear out of the water. The threat is nothing compared to the cost of developing it.
Just like that $10B or so a year bought Pakistan's loyalty when our chopper crashed.... and oh, wait, they gave China a look at it.
Mutually Beneficial Trades makes more effective, profitable and longterm alliances than indiscriminant handouts ever will. France and Germany defended Iraq up to the US invasion, trying to stop it, because of the trade they did with Saddam.
exclusivity contract with Apple for the iPad/iPhone.
Get some nice margins in before it becomes just another commodity component on the electronic marketplace.
The vast majority of stop signs are stupid and should be replaced with yield signs.
I guess my humor was missed. I was hoping capitalizing "He" instead of inserting one of those dreary sarcasm tags would have been clue enough.
Hey, I agree, I would never worship a non-living multinational-corporation.
Apple has been going downhill ever since Jobs died. While He was around, He would never have allowed this to happen.
So if I put my phone number on my business card... the phone company could sue me for copyright infringement, in theory?
You'd think it should. New iPad has 2048x1536 iirc, and that's just a lowly 9.7" screen.
Too much politics here creeping on this site.
>Bring your receipt or packing slip and a valid photo ID.
I find it interesting it says "valid photo id". What exactly is valid? Surely, it's not law to have a driver's license, I know enough people who don't drive and never drove.
So, I imagine a nonscannable passport, school ID, work ID, etc. should work. In fact, this system should be easy to get around.
Plus, in certain states, it may be against the law to require conditions such as these to return items, because of the onus it places on the consumer.
You explain to them, in English: "This item doesn't seem to work correctly. When I pause any song a little longer than 4 minutes and start it back up again, it starts at a seemingly random place." Then demonstrate it to them.
If they insist on an exchange, insist that the new unit doesn't have this flaw as it's unacceptable. If need be, try it in the store and most of them will realize it's better to give back the money than to keep opening new packages. Never go into geek speak with muggles if you want them to understand you.
I don't get 3D TV. I just don't. I've seen some 3D movies and I liked them, but that's only when they're epic movies. They're more immersive when well done. Would I want everything 3D? Probably not, it's just too overwhelming and sensory overload. There is no reason I want anything jumping out on me for daily programming or the common movie.
Do they even manufacturer 3D displays for computers? Now that might be more interesting, but only on a "touch" screen type device where I could interact with the objects on the screen with my hand - like rolling dice or moving around cards in a game. I suppose that's far off.
Not even my nephews are really screaming for Nintendo 3DS for their birthdays or anything, so it seems 3D is in that kinda PDA before smartphones state, something that is kinda cool in the abstract and seems useful and once it's in your hands, it just lays there without a killer reason/app/interface/what_not to use it.
Maybe the next generation of game consoles will make use of it, it might be kinda cool for a driving game.... for 10 minutes.
As someone who has a digital spedometer and gas gauge, I'll say you're wrong. I spend less time looking at them because I get exact information rather than have to estimate a precise number at a wobbly needle in front of a a background of small numbers.
I have a digital spedometer in my Civic and it works just fine:
http://automobiles.honda.com/images/2008/civic-sedan/interior-gallery/gal_lg6.jpg
I thought I would hate it too, but I find that I don't have to estimate my speed anymore to the close 5mph and spend less time on it.
Growing up, I remember the bad old days where my dad was trying read a map at the same time as driving, when I was to young to act as navigator. Or a couple of near hits on his part while navigating a foreign city looking for a specific street sign and not really watching the road.
He now uses GPS and is probably safer than most of my generation, because he doesn't know texting and isn't addicted to a smart phone, but that's another story.
It's not that absolute. I used to live in a place where no one could give a fuck if your lawn was all mud or weeds growing 3 foot high. Then another place where the township called a 3rd party mower if your lawn was 3 inches above ideal cut and send you a $400 bill for it too.
Lawns are primarily an American tick with English roots:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawn#18th_and_19th_Century
And one that will go out of fashion in more places and more I predict once oil gets too high (end of this decade).
I travel quite a bit. The old ones were easier to see in case you put in on a flat surface while changing it out and you could put it in your wallet in a credit card slot while being reasonably sure it wouldn't fall out.
Everybody comes up with stupid ideas once in a while, the true geniuses in entertainment just know not to publish them as a finished product and preferably that they never see the light of day at all. Although the more I read about Lucas, the more I know he wasn't the force behind the series. Idk if I can lump in with Shamalamadingdong, but as these guys grow older, like Michael Bay here, they kinda have fizzled out and then take existing products and try to add a "cool" or "exciting" twist to them, usually "for the kids". Kinda like 101 flavors ice cream, at the end of the day you're still eating just ice cream no matter how you dress it up or how many artificial flavors you douse it with... it won't be a pizza or something different.
But I think that's the problem when we grow older. Human interactions, what movies always focus on even when it's animated, can be terribly limiting (at least to my mind) and I get the sense that we "seen it all" already and grow very cynical because we have, we recognize the ultimately small variations of the same thing time and again. That's kinda why I grow more interested in reading about science every year and the technicals because those "stories" doesn't have the oft-repeated constraints or patterns humans have.
Er, not really. Many japanese companies tried the whole marketshare-at-all-costs thing at a loss with no real gain, selling products at a loss trying to achieve this fleeting Holy Grail. When Steve Jobs went back into Apple in 1997, he cut nearly all things that didn't make money for Apple (they had an extensive, confusing line up that blended together into a myriad of choices instead of differentiating themselves quickly and easily, which too many companies still have today), and ceded the PC wars to Microsoft for the time being. Enough that they worked with Microsoft at least.
Michael Dell of Dell Computers, back in 1997 Job's return, asked what he would do with Apple, said he's basically just sell off the assets and scrap the company. Dell is a very marketshare oriented driven company and their stock price is lower today than it was during the dotcom days.
At the end of the 90s and beginning of the 00s, they had hardly any marketshare in computers and yet still made themselves profitable by not chasing elusive dragons.
iPhone and iPad don't have to outsell everyone else, they just need to make a profit and have a large enough and affluent audience to get developers. Both products have features (outside of technical specs) that customers want, like quality of construction materials, that competitors often don't touch and also the iOS ecosystem which Android really isn't competing in terms of $ turnover and ease of getting Apps out there & simple testing (multiple models from a variety of manufacturers every generation vs 1 product from Apple per generation) that is enticing developers to switch and only use android, while there are enough apps that are iOS only.
I'm going to disagree here about the electoral college. It's not really working the way it was designed (us electing representatives that somewhat independently decide who'll the best president will be, hasn't been that way since the 2nd president where they gave him a VP of the opposite party) but it's still protecting us from voter fraud. You see, the US census every 10 years determines how many electors each state gets to send - more population, more electors. Well, anybody who has ever covered US elections probably knows we probably have one of the most in the 1st world on the local and state levels with massive hijinx every election. Just look up the Republican primaries this time around and read about all the irregularities. BUT, the electoral college at least acts as a firewall; no state can send more electors than it has no matter what so the problem is a bit more contained. In a straight up popular vote, really big states who have 1,000,000 dead voters going to the polls will change the outcome much more often than in the electoral game and they'll be extra incentive to do so.
Adding more democracy has been always a time honored cry to make things better but has it? In 1913, the 17th amendment got adopted. It also added more democracy, it was the mandatory direct election of Senators by the people of their states rather than the states making their own rules, including often appointment by the state congress or governor. In effect, we got two houses of representatives rather than 1 and a house representing state's interests.
And what has this change landed us?
http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/debt_deficit_brief.php
Perpetual wars and massive debt to gdp. Now, I'm not saying the 17th is responsible for all that, 1913 has indeed landed a host of changes to make things more "democratic" like income tax promised to only be applied to the top 0.01% super rich since tariffs were reportedly burdening the common man as well as the Federal Reserve.
But what I'm definitely saying is that tweak the systems as much as you want, when you have, in the words of George Carlin "If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here... like, the public."
Go look at other countries, practically the whole western world and all 1st world countries are as deep in debt as us. Europe and Japan with their multi party Parliaments and whatever, tweaks, tweaks, tweaks didn't do a damn thing. We're just human and that's the problem with the assumptions. Collectively we just suck no matter what we tell ourselves about it being the fault of our systems instead. The only thing a system can do is minimize it for a (relatively) short time until it's bypassed one way or another.
I'm asking because I disassembled my magnetic resistance excercise bike recently and seen that they use a flywheel along with magnets that come move closer or farther to vary the resistance, and just wondered if that is how they generate the electricity from an industrial level flywheel these days or if a generator is mechanically attached.
Do they use magnets to get the energy back out of flywheels these days somehow or mechanical linkages?
I yearn for the days of the Dr. Jonas Salks of the world.
Wouldn't India just smuggle the drug from a country that has it and reverse engineer it?
I don't that strategy is viable.