There is no difference between Winelib and Wine applications. This is a myth. It's about as much of a difference as linking a program statically versus using dynamic libraries. It's not noticeable from the end-user point of view. A winelib app can have just as many bugs and will be just as fast (or slow) as the wine version.
Wine doesn't do conversions at runtime. It's not an emulator. Wine is a set of DLLs and a loader for PE files (necessary because Linux uses ELF). The reason nobody uses winelib is because it's completely pointless. Using DLLs is just as fast and tends to save a lot of space on your hard drive over static linking.
I REALLY doubt the postal service is doing that. First, machines don't tear up envelopes. It would be obvious if an envelope was opened. Second, they can get in a SHITLOAD of trouble if they do that (as in, major jail time in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison). If anyone is stealing the discs, it's Blockbuster/Netflix employees in the receiving department.
That's great and everything, but you have to consider long-term support. What happens if the linux box starts crapping out? If the IT team does not have Linux-trained staff already, who is going to maintain it? Hiring another employee would have cost a lot more than $25,000.
I'm still confused about how something that I can hold in my hand is an idea, not a physical object.
You can hold a CD in your hand. Does that make software a physical object?
Algorithms, being nonphysical, are able to be copied much more quickly and at much lower cost than mechanical gadgets. This has led to a computer software industry that is racing forward at incredible speed.
I fail to see why algorithms are necessarily easier or faster to copy than mechanical gadgets. The process of designing a piece of software and designing anything else is largely the same. Even if that is indeed true, I fail to see why it necessarily accelerates progress. I would also disagree that the rate of progress in the world of software is greater than that in other industries. Many industries have a high rate of innovation.
Software patents limit this forward progress to the patentholder, slowing everyone else and hurting the economy.
Well, you can always pony up the cash and license the patent. The theory is that it accelerates progress, because innovation is rewarded. Why is this untrue for software and true for other industries?
No extra promotion of progress is needed in the world of software; companies and individuals are busy racing forward as quickly as they can.
This is true of many industries. Competition from overseas is another major driver. In general, there is plenty of motivation besides patents.
It's difficult to write a nontrivial program without infringing on some patent somewhere
Only because the patent quality is very low. It would not be true if the USPTO did its job properly. However, this is also true of most other industries. There is always the possibility of infringing someone's patent. The theory is, you would negotiate a deal with the patentholder.
Being in the business of algorithms myself, I see their bad effects more than I see the bad effects of patents on mechanical gadgets.
This seems to be by far the biggest issue. People oppose software patents because they are in the software business. However, software patents really aren't significantly different from other patents. They cause the same problems in the electronics industry, and probably in the mechanical industries as well. The real problem is the horrible job the USPTO does approving patents, not patents themselves.
Re:this could be a dangerous IPO
on
Vonage IPO
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· Score: 1
I don't think it's even possible for Vonage to be anything more than a short-lived player in the industry. The thing that drives them now is the high rates the phone companies set for long distance, due to lack of meaningful competition. As soon as cable companies enter the picture, everything will change, and Vonage will be about as relevant as AOL dialup is today. Internet traffic doesn't support QoS, so Vonage's traffic always gets low priority. Right now, it sort of works because the pipes are pretty wide. However, it's not guaranteed by any means, it's largely determined by the internet provider, and VoIP does not really do anything for the underlying problem -- the high prices. The cable companies can guarantee excellent call quality and better uptime on their own networks, for the same price. This will drive Vonage out of business very quickly.
OK, I might not have been too clear. Let's say you design a new type of amplifier that has better performance than an existing one. It's certainly patentable, and it's just an idea. Just because you might implement it with transistors instead of bits doesn't mean it's substantially different.
For a variety of reasons, patents on algorithms impede progress and economic growth; they do not produce a net benefit to society, so they should not be granted.
You have not presented a shred of evidence to support your assertion. If patents on algorithms do not benefit society, how do patents on mechanical gadgets benefit society? There isn't some kind of magical dividing line. It takes just as much ingenuity to come up with a novel algorithm as it does to invent anything else.
Wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. Laws about ownership are for things. Patents always protect ideas. For instance, an electronic circuit is not a thing, it's an idea, just like an algorithm. Circuits have always been patentable. I really fail to see why algorithms should not be patentable, so long as they are novel and nonobvious. Can you explain why it should be possible to patent an idea for a better monkey wrench, but not an idea for a better algorithm?
No, businesses historically and businesses in many parts of the world. What we've got now is an historical aberration.
Name one large high-tech company which does not hold any patents.
In other words an arms race where everybody loses except the patent mafia. Great ethical basis that.
Yeah. But guess what, a business has two options: participate in the arms race, or go out of business. Which one do you think they will choose?
Nope, the simple reality of a broken legal system that people are ignoring wholesale. The Prohibition all over again.
Not sure what the hell this has to do with the Prohibition. The problem is, the legal system is damn hard to change.
Unfortunately, the founding fathers were unable to anticipate and deal with the parasitism in the legal profession.
They didn't intend to deal with it. They were lawyers themselves. In case you haven't noticed, the US legal system is primarily designed to create lots of work for lawyers. I'm sure that was the intent.
You might be able to get the SR60s slightly cheaper if you buy from a local dealer instead of a store. The prices are all the same, and you have to purchase from an authorized dealer if you want to keep the warranty. Your local hi-fi shop should stock them. I own a pair and have been very happy with them.
How about you learn how cars actually work before you start spewing bullshit? There is no "vaccuum pump" in a car, the vaccuum is provided by the engine. Just in case you don't know, engines have available vaccuum only when you let go of the throttle. The brake booster stores vaccuum so your brakes don't cut out when you accelerate. Killing the engine will not immediately kill power brakes, there will be plenty of power to stop. Power steering will die, but it doesn't take much power to steer a moving car.
The vast majority of businesses have no patents and get along just fine.
Yeah, businesses like restaurants. Any company that develops anything usually has lots of patents. They are necessary to protect against being sued by your competitors for infringing _their_ patents. Not to mention, if you don't patent something, someone else will patent it and sue you for infringement. Unless you want to spend hundreds of millions of bucks proving prior art, you will have to pay licensing fees. This happens on a daily basis -- for example, Creative patented the iPod interface (that they stole from Apple in the first place) and now wants money from Apple. That's the simple reality of how it works.
If you want patent reform, get the laws changed. Trying to bury your head in the sand is stupid.
Unless you want to avoid giving even more money to lawyer-parasites.
Grow up. Sure, lawyers are parasites. Until you need one to protect your interests.
Don't be silly. Protesting patents by quitting your job just makes you look like an idiot. Like them or not, patents are a required business tool and your company would be stupid not to use them. You can't just avoid getting patents, unless you want to be out of business.
About the only thing required to get a degree these days is the ability to obtain a loan. Even if your school is one of the top ones, a degree only means you know the basics of the profession. Real expertise comes from experience, and a real engineer knows that and does not spew nonsense on topics he knows nothing about. Unless you are are an expert on the foam they are using, you still don't know what you're talking about. Even if you had a Ph.D in aerospace engineering, you would still need some sort of direct involvement with the subject matter at hand in order to judge it.
What the hell is the point of putting Linux on a PS2? The thing has barely any RAM (certainly not enough to do anything useful) and its processor isn't very fast. A linksys router has half the RAM of the PS2 (16MB), and a 200MHz MIPS CPU. The PS2 isn't significantly faster (with the exception of the graphics hardware).
It would take an awfully large capacitor to provide a reasonable standby time. The Sharp converters draw 100mA when transmitting, the 0.1mA figure is for the "shutdown mode". This makes sense, since an ordinary LED requires about 5mA to be visible and an IR LED needs to be very high-intensity.
Even assuming a power draw of 0.5mA (unrealistically low, in my opinion), capacitors would not provide enough runtime with simple circuitry. Let's say you put in a 1F supercap, and let's suppose the standby circuitry can run in a range from 5V to 2V. You have a 3V window where stuff works. The dv/dt for a 1F cap discharged at a constant 500uA is 500uV/s (I = C dv/dt, so dv/dt = I/C). This means you are in the 3V window for 6000 seconds, or less than 2 hours. Even if you use a switching converter, you will still get maybe 4 hours of standby. Using a higher voltage is not an option, since inexpensive supercaps don't come in anything more than 5V or so.
Also, it's impossible to turn on a relay with a capacitor the way you describe. Relays are far too slow for a capacitor of a reasonable size to energize one for the necessary length of time to connect the contacts and allow the main power supply to start up. A solid state device like a triac would be required.
I still call bullshit. You mean to tell me that since 1969 we have learned nothing about rockets, material science, or space flight? I would bet that the extra 13+ years of salaries of all of the NASA engineers costs more than the materials to just do it today with what we know.
You don't get it, do you? A space mission is not about the materials or the technologies available. It's about ensuring everything works perfectly, ensuring there are contingency plans and backups for everything, and so on. That's what the engineers really do. And guess what: more engineers = more money = less time to develop stuff. Less money = more time. And there haven't even been too many advances made since 1969, since most of the research was discontinued soon thereafter.
You know, I'm sure the NASA engineers know a lot more about the foam than some armchair Discovery Channel-watching Anonymous Coward. I'm sure you are not convinced, but I'm also pretty sure that you don't know what you're talking about.
Actually, I don't think most modern TVs keep the tube warmed up. My TV takes the same time to turn on whether it's in standby mode or not. Nobody uses separate IR decoder chips, it's usually merged into the main ASIC and it's actually a microcontroller. If it's carefully optimized, it will draw about 0.3mA in sleep mode and a few milliamps when it runs. The real problem is the IR receiver (the ones I looked at draw 1-2mA), and more importantly the large relay which is supposed to switch on the main supply. It might be possible to solve this problem with something exotic, like a photo-triac, but it's definitely not simply a matter of putting in one capacitor.
Actually, that's already how it's done, and that's exactly why a lot of power is wasted. A small, cheap transformer is usually a lot less efficient than a large one. A large transformer has thicker wire for the windings, so less resistive losses. It also has a higher-quality core, so there are fewer core losses. Of course, this is largely irrelevant, since the last time large transformers were used in consumer electronics was in the '70s. These days, almost all power supplies are switching types, whose efficiency is determined by their design and the quality of parts used. Since nobody really tries to optimize their efficiency, they can be extremely inefficient, and often very poorly designed. Most of them are made by Chinese companies who usually copy other companies' designs without even understanding how they work.
I think a law to mandate maximum standby power consumption (or, even better, incentives to minimize it as much as possible) can do quite a bit. Right now, it is simply not a factor in the design of equipment.
First, learn to write. Your comment is written extremely poorly, and almost not worth responding to.
don't go spouting figures for saving power when most people don't buy a new tv every year they keep the same one for a long time
So THAT's why millions of TVs are purchased per year. I don't know anyone whose TV is older than 10 years. They generally break long before that.
including the environmental cost of the batteries used to power an alternative idea
Did I say anything about batteries? There are lots of ways to make an efficient power supply.
I agree that power waste is problem, but the fact is that most people can't afford the cost of electronics to fix this and yes people don't care.
Exactly, this is why it is necessary to legally mandate that all new electronics follow energy use standards. There are already lots of similar laws. For example, all showerheads and faucets sold or used in new construction must have a flow rate of 2.5gpm or below.
The loss in resources is great, but hell look at any light in your house and leaving it on (which many people do) will cover for a lot if not all of the standby power you are using, and that is if that is a flourescent bulb.
So what, if you are already wasting lots of energy, it's OK to waste even more? Some bulletproof logic here.
There are problems with power waste, but start with the things that waste more than the things that are horrible in terms of wastage.
I'm not sure what the hell this sentence is supposed to mean, it's rather incoherent. We should really start with the things that are easy to fix, such as standby power use.
It's a fallacy to point out the total energy used by such TVs.
It's not a fallacy. There isn't just one of those TVs, there are hundreds of millions of them. They all use energy. Legislative mandates for more efficient electronics would go a long way. Right now, efficiency is simply not a criterion the manufacturer even attempts to optimize when developing a power supply; cost is a much, much bigger factor. This obviously needs to change.
Are you basing that on anything but intuition?
Don't be childish. If you take money out of your bank account at an exponentially growing rate and never put any in, it will run out in only a few decades. Regardless of how much is in there initially. Considering that energy use is growing exponentially, 50 years would be the upper bound for a shortage. I'm willing to bet on 10-20 before energy prices go up a LOT. Not like going to $2.20 per gallon for gas instead of $1.20, more like $20.00 per gallon. If this is to be avoided, the exponential growth has to be stopped.
There is a good reason why Java never became particularly popular, and this is it. It has an absolutely idiotic security model, in that it prohibits you from doing "dangerous" or "nonportable" things. Where "dangerous" or "nonportable" actually means "useful".
With the appropriate privileges, Perl (or any other native application) can send any type of packets, layer 2 or above (possibly even layer 1). A programming language is NOT the place to impose security constraints. That's what the operating system is for.
The standby circuitry in most devices could probably run for days on the charge in a $1.50 capacitor.
I'm an electrical engineer, and no, it can't. That's why there is a transformer. The real solution would be to get off your lazy ass and hit the power switch when you are done watching instead of turning the TV off with the remote. The other solution is to put in a very high-efficiency switching power supply, but those are very expensive.
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There is no difference between Winelib and Wine applications. This is a myth. It's about as much of a difference as linking a program statically versus using dynamic libraries. It's not noticeable from the end-user point of view. A winelib app can have just as many bugs and will be just as fast (or slow) as the wine version.
Wine doesn't do conversions at runtime. It's not an emulator. Wine is a set of DLLs and a loader for PE files (necessary because Linux uses ELF). The reason nobody uses winelib is because it's completely pointless. Using DLLs is just as fast and tends to save a lot of space on your hard drive over static linking.
I REALLY doubt the postal service is doing that. First, machines don't tear up envelopes. It would be obvious if an envelope was opened. Second, they can get in a SHITLOAD of trouble if they do that (as in, major jail time in federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison). If anyone is stealing the discs, it's Blockbuster/Netflix employees in the receiving department.
That's great and everything, but you have to consider long-term support. What happens if the linux box starts crapping out? If the IT team does not have Linux-trained staff already, who is going to maintain it? Hiring another employee would have cost a lot more than $25,000.
I'm still confused about how something that I can hold in my hand is an idea, not a physical object.
You can hold a CD in your hand. Does that make software a physical object?
Algorithms, being nonphysical, are able to be copied much more quickly and at much lower cost than mechanical gadgets. This has led to a computer software industry that is racing forward at incredible speed.
I fail to see why algorithms are necessarily easier or faster to copy than mechanical gadgets. The process of designing a piece of software and designing anything else is largely the same. Even if that is indeed true, I fail to see why it necessarily accelerates progress. I would also disagree that the rate of progress in the world of software is greater than that in other industries. Many industries have a high rate of innovation.
Software patents limit this forward progress to the patentholder, slowing everyone else and hurting the economy.
Well, you can always pony up the cash and license the patent. The theory is that it accelerates progress, because innovation is rewarded. Why is this untrue for software and true for other industries?
No extra promotion of progress is needed in the world of software; companies and individuals are busy racing forward as quickly as they can.
This is true of many industries. Competition from overseas is another major driver. In general, there is plenty of motivation besides patents.
It's difficult to write a nontrivial program without infringing on some patent somewhere
Only because the patent quality is very low. It would not be true if the USPTO did its job properly. However, this is also true of most other industries. There is always the possibility of infringing someone's patent. The theory is, you would negotiate a deal with the patentholder.
Being in the business of algorithms myself, I see their bad effects more than I see the bad effects of patents on mechanical gadgets.
This seems to be by far the biggest issue. People oppose software patents because they are in the software business. However, software patents really aren't significantly different from other patents. They cause the same problems in the electronics industry, and probably in the mechanical industries as well. The real problem is the horrible job the USPTO does approving patents, not patents themselves.
I don't think it's even possible for Vonage to be anything more than a short-lived player in the industry. The thing that drives them now is the high rates the phone companies set for long distance, due to lack of meaningful competition. As soon as cable companies enter the picture, everything will change, and Vonage will be about as relevant as AOL dialup is today. Internet traffic doesn't support QoS, so Vonage's traffic always gets low priority. Right now, it sort of works because the pipes are pretty wide. However, it's not guaranteed by any means, it's largely determined by the internet provider, and VoIP does not really do anything for the underlying problem -- the high prices. The cable companies can guarantee excellent call quality and better uptime on their own networks, for the same price. This will drive Vonage out of business very quickly.
Care to explain?
OK, I might not have been too clear. Let's say you design a new type of amplifier that has better performance than an existing one. It's certainly patentable, and it's just an idea. Just because you might implement it with transistors instead of bits doesn't mean it's substantially different.
For a variety of reasons, patents on algorithms impede progress and economic growth; they do not produce a net benefit to society, so they should not be granted.
You have not presented a shred of evidence to support your assertion. If patents on algorithms do not benefit society, how do patents on mechanical gadgets benefit society? There isn't some kind of magical dividing line. It takes just as much ingenuity to come up with a novel algorithm as it does to invent anything else.
Patents are not ideas, they are for things.
Wrong. Completely and utterly wrong. Laws about ownership are for things. Patents always protect ideas. For instance, an electronic circuit is not a thing, it's an idea, just like an algorithm. Circuits have always been patentable. I really fail to see why algorithms should not be patentable, so long as they are novel and nonobvious. Can you explain why it should be possible to patent an idea for a better monkey wrench, but not an idea for a better algorithm?
No, businesses historically and businesses in many parts of the world. What we've got now is an historical aberration.
Name one large high-tech company which does not hold any patents.
In other words an arms race where everybody loses except the patent mafia. Great ethical basis that.
Yeah. But guess what, a business has two options: participate in the arms race, or go out of business. Which one do you think they will choose?
Nope, the simple reality of a broken legal system that people are ignoring wholesale. The Prohibition all over again.
Not sure what the hell this has to do with the Prohibition. The problem is, the legal system is damn hard to change.
Unfortunately, the founding fathers were unable to anticipate and deal with the parasitism in the legal profession.
They didn't intend to deal with it. They were lawyers themselves. In case you haven't noticed, the US legal system is primarily designed to create lots of work for lawyers. I'm sure that was the intent.
You might be able to get the SR60s slightly cheaper if you buy from a local dealer instead of a store. The prices are all the same, and you have to purchase from an authorized dealer if you want to keep the warranty. Your local hi-fi shop should stock them. I own a pair and have been very happy with them.
How about you learn how cars actually work before you start spewing bullshit? There is no "vaccuum pump" in a car, the vaccuum is provided by the engine. Just in case you don't know, engines have available vaccuum only when you let go of the throttle. The brake booster stores vaccuum so your brakes don't cut out when you accelerate. Killing the engine will not immediately kill power brakes, there will be plenty of power to stop. Power steering will die, but it doesn't take much power to steer a moving car.
The vast majority of businesses have no patents and get along just fine.
Yeah, businesses like restaurants. Any company that develops anything usually has lots of patents. They are necessary to protect against being sued by your competitors for infringing _their_ patents. Not to mention, if you don't patent something, someone else will patent it and sue you for infringement. Unless you want to spend hundreds of millions of bucks proving prior art, you will have to pay licensing fees. This happens on a daily basis -- for example, Creative patented the iPod interface (that they stole from Apple in the first place) and now wants money from Apple. That's the simple reality of how it works.
If you want patent reform, get the laws changed. Trying to bury your head in the sand is stupid.
Unless you want to avoid giving even more money to lawyer-parasites.
Grow up. Sure, lawyers are parasites. Until you need one to protect your interests.
Don't be silly. Protesting patents by quitting your job just makes you look like an idiot. Like them or not, patents are a required business tool and your company would be stupid not to use them. You can't just avoid getting patents, unless you want to be out of business.
About the only thing required to get a degree these days is the ability to obtain a loan. Even if your school is one of the top ones, a degree only means you know the basics of the profession. Real expertise comes from experience, and a real engineer knows that and does not spew nonsense on topics he knows nothing about. Unless you are are an expert on the foam they are using, you still don't know what you're talking about. Even if you had a Ph.D in aerospace engineering, you would still need some sort of direct involvement with the subject matter at hand in order to judge it.
What the hell is the point of putting Linux on a PS2? The thing has barely any RAM (certainly not enough to do anything useful) and its processor isn't very fast. A linksys router has half the RAM of the PS2 (16MB), and a 200MHz MIPS CPU. The PS2 isn't significantly faster (with the exception of the graphics hardware).
It would take an awfully large capacitor to provide a reasonable standby time. The Sharp converters draw 100mA when transmitting, the 0.1mA figure is for the "shutdown mode". This makes sense, since an ordinary LED requires about 5mA to be visible and an IR LED needs to be very high-intensity.
Even assuming a power draw of 0.5mA (unrealistically low, in my opinion), capacitors would not provide enough runtime with simple circuitry. Let's say you put in a 1F supercap, and let's suppose the standby circuitry can run in a range from 5V to 2V. You have a 3V window where stuff works. The dv/dt for a 1F cap discharged at a constant 500uA is 500uV/s (I = C dv/dt, so dv/dt = I/C). This means you are in the 3V window for 6000 seconds, or less than 2 hours. Even if you use a switching converter, you will still get maybe 4 hours of standby. Using a higher voltage is not an option, since inexpensive supercaps don't come in anything more than 5V or so.
Also, it's impossible to turn on a relay with a capacitor the way you describe. Relays are far too slow for a capacitor of a reasonable size to energize one for the necessary length of time to connect the contacts and allow the main power supply to start up. A solid state device like a triac would be required.
I still call bullshit. You mean to tell me that since 1969 we have learned nothing about rockets, material science, or space flight? I would bet that the extra 13+ years of salaries of all of the NASA engineers costs more than the materials to just do it today with what we know.
You don't get it, do you? A space mission is not about the materials or the technologies available. It's about ensuring everything works perfectly, ensuring there are contingency plans and backups for everything, and so on. That's what the engineers really do. And guess what: more engineers = more money = less time to develop stuff. Less money = more time. And there haven't even been too many advances made since 1969, since most of the research was discontinued soon thereafter.
You know, I'm sure the NASA engineers know a lot more about the foam than some armchair Discovery Channel-watching Anonymous Coward. I'm sure you are not convinced, but I'm also pretty sure that you don't know what you're talking about.
Actually, I don't think most modern TVs keep the tube warmed up. My TV takes the same time to turn on whether it's in standby mode or not. Nobody uses separate IR decoder chips, it's usually merged into the main ASIC and it's actually a microcontroller. If it's carefully optimized, it will draw about 0.3mA in sleep mode and a few milliamps when it runs. The real problem is the IR receiver (the ones I looked at draw 1-2mA), and more importantly the large relay which is supposed to switch on the main supply. It might be possible to solve this problem with something exotic, like a photo-triac, but it's definitely not simply a matter of putting in one capacitor.
Actually, that's already how it's done, and that's exactly why a lot of power is wasted. A small, cheap transformer is usually a lot less efficient than a large one. A large transformer has thicker wire for the windings, so less resistive losses. It also has a higher-quality core, so there are fewer core losses. Of course, this is largely irrelevant, since the last time large transformers were used in consumer electronics was in the '70s. These days, almost all power supplies are switching types, whose efficiency is determined by their design and the quality of parts used. Since nobody really tries to optimize their efficiency, they can be extremely inefficient, and often very poorly designed. Most of them are made by Chinese companies who usually copy other companies' designs without even understanding how they work.
I think a law to mandate maximum standby power consumption (or, even better, incentives to minimize it as much as possible) can do quite a bit. Right now, it is simply not a factor in the design of equipment.
First, learn to write. Your comment is written extremely poorly, and almost not worth responding to.
don't go spouting figures for saving power when most people don't buy a new tv every year they keep the same one for a long time
So THAT's why millions of TVs are purchased per year. I don't know anyone whose TV is older than 10 years. They generally break long before that.
including the environmental cost of the batteries used to power an alternative idea
Did I say anything about batteries? There are lots of ways to make an efficient power supply.
I agree that power waste is problem, but the fact is that most people can't afford the cost of electronics to fix this and yes people don't care.
Exactly, this is why it is necessary to legally mandate that all new electronics follow energy use standards. There are already lots of similar laws. For example, all showerheads and faucets sold or used in new construction must have a flow rate of 2.5gpm or below.
The loss in resources is great, but hell look at any light in your house and leaving it on (which many people do) will cover for a lot if not all of the standby power you are using, and that is if that is a flourescent bulb.
So what, if you are already wasting lots of energy, it's OK to waste even more? Some bulletproof logic here.
There are problems with power waste, but start with the things that waste more than the things that are horrible in terms of wastage.
I'm not sure what the hell this sentence is supposed to mean, it's rather incoherent. We should really start with the things that are easy to fix, such as standby power use.
ummm, it's a software problem
In that case, why does it not show up with other chips? Why do they need to hide it?
It makes you look arrogant and condescending.
That's precisely the point.
It's a fallacy to point out the total energy used by such TVs.
It's not a fallacy. There isn't just one of those TVs, there are hundreds of millions of them. They all use energy. Legislative mandates for more efficient electronics would go a long way. Right now, efficiency is simply not a criterion the manufacturer even attempts to optimize when developing a power supply; cost is a much, much bigger factor. This obviously needs to change.
Are you basing that on anything but intuition?
Don't be childish. If you take money out of your bank account at an exponentially growing rate and never put any in, it will run out in only a few decades. Regardless of how much is in there initially. Considering that energy use is growing exponentially, 50 years would be the upper bound for a shortage. I'm willing to bet on 10-20 before energy prices go up a LOT. Not like going to $2.20 per gallon for gas instead of $1.20, more like $20.00 per gallon. If this is to be avoided, the exponential growth has to be stopped.
There is a good reason why Java never became particularly popular, and this is it. It has an absolutely idiotic security model, in that it prohibits you from doing "dangerous" or "nonportable" things. Where "dangerous" or "nonportable" actually means "useful".
With the appropriate privileges, Perl (or any other native application) can send any type of packets, layer 2 or above (possibly even layer 1). A programming language is NOT the place to impose security constraints. That's what the operating system is for.
The standby circuitry in most devices could probably run for days on the charge in a $1.50 capacitor.
I'm an electrical engineer, and no, it can't. That's why there is a transformer. The real solution would be to get off your lazy ass and hit the power switch when you are done watching instead of turning the TV off with the remote. The other solution is to put in a very high-efficiency switching power supply, but those are very expensive.