> Now, take it to the next level. Have these camera gun's all get wifi and can do video (not just freeze frame pictures), and all connect to a central server. Then as "shots" occur, the server has them time stamped, and can do inspection on the images to see where the shot would have landed, and if it would have counted as a kill shot.
> Manufacturing cheapness aside*, if properly built and used CFLs can last 50X as long as a traditional bulb, that's quite a differential.
My contention is that they demonstrably *did* last that much longer when they first became available, but they don't anymore. I have three CFLs that are still running 16 years later, and that exceeded my expectations and was money well spent. It appears (again from my experience, grain of salt, etc) that CFLs have since been "value engineered" to something that is not as expensive as they used to be, but still more expensive than incandescents, and don't provide any longevity advantage. The cheap "blister pack" CFLs, which I maintain is what Fred and Ethyl Mertz is going to buy, have terrible lifespan.
> A quick search puts a random CFL at 82 grams. In order to extract the same transport penalty, the Incandescents would have to weigh only 1.6 grams.
That assumes 50X lifespan. See above.
> You're also going to want to break them,
You've seen a garbage truck operate, right? If they didn't crush the garbage, they'd exceed volume capacity long before they exceeded weight capacity. And it's, like, a lightbulb. They're not terribly robust.
> *We need to give CFL warranties teeth, if we want to see improved manufacturing and non-fraudulent life claims on the part of cheap CFL makers.
Wholeheartedly agree. We should also look to the source of the CFLs, and verify that we aren't being very careful with mercury in the environment here, only to have mercury being released in the environment in significant quantities at the manufacturing source. I know it's "over there", but we're all on the same planet.
How about a stamp like the UL tag, which would signify that the product has met certain standards of longevity? Then I could buy those and avoid the crappy ones.
We also need curbside recycling of CFLs. This is absolutely imperative if we're serious about protecting the environment, not just trying to make ourselves feel better. The trick to make a majority of regular people do the right thing is to make it easy and natural to do. Even people who don't care about recycling are motivated to do so because it saves room in the trash can. In my area, you pay by the size of your trash can, and I can get the smallest and cheapest trash can because the recycle bin is huge and I don't get charged for it. (Your mileage may vary.) Tell someone they have to drive several miles to a recycling station [1], and they're really likely to toss it in the trash. Who's to know? But tell them they can put it in on the curb in a recycling container, and they're more likely to do that.
[1] It annoys me a little that the recycling station here is in an industrial district with no mass transit access. So, if you're trying to live simpler so other can simply live, you still need a car to get rid of your damned lightbulbs. Someone is really not thinking this through.
EVs have the *potential* of being holistically cleaner, but that depends on a number of factors that your average consumer doesn't think much about. It's very much like CFLs -- it all depends on the implementation. Zero point emission is not the whole story.
You don't need the average consumer to think about or care about the wider ramifications: we know they won't, that's why we have regulation. Minimal impact to them, huge collective benefit for civilization.
And of course, regulation is *never* put in place to benefit a particular campaign donor , or to do impractical things that sound good to the public.
Well, maybe this one will work better. My house used 100 watt recessed floods in the hallways and several rooms, (Extravagant, I know, but I didn't build it and would not have chosen that) and I stocked up on them when I realized that (a) Incandescents were going away, and (b) the current (at the time) generation CFL would not screw into the receptacle. (The base was too fat.) Last summer I ran out of stock and had to buy "100 watt" CFL floods (actually something like 26 watts). Fortunately by that time slim line CFLs were available that would screw into the existing fixtures. Also fortunately, only one of the lights is on a dimmer, and that incandescent hasn't burned out yet. (And CFLs that work on dimmers are becoming more common.)
Well, it hasn't been a lot of fun. I had one that was dead out of the box, and of the first three deployed, two burned out after less than six months. Moreover, although the current generation gets up to full output faster, it's still an annoyance to go to the hall closet, flick the switch, and then wait for the bulb to become bright enough for you to see where the pillow cases are. I've also had a problem with early death with the little 60 watt helical bulbs available at Costco. (I don't buy them there anymore, but a lot of people do.)
Moreover, the burnt out CFLs clutter up my garage until I get a big enough load for the recycling center. You can't yet put them out for curb recycling in my area, and I strongly suspect that most people just drop them in the trash.
So, I'm not a fan, and I'm interested in what the next big improvement is going to be.
> As opposed to...the energy needed to ship incandescents from China, then drive them in garbage trucks to a landfill site?
To be fair at least some incandescents were made in America, and the garbage truck was going to the landfill anyway, and used lightbulbs don't add appreciably to the payload. Moreover, the garbage truck represents big centralized collection and transport, which I think is arguably more efficient than hundreds of thousands of consumers jumping into their Accord to drive burnt-out CFLs to the recycling center (along with their old paint, oil, and other things you're not supposed to throw away.)
An issue I've been worried about for awhile is that the Joe Consumers out there, the people who buy a sack of potatoes and have it put in another sack, don't really have a cerebral or emotional connection to recycling CFLs properly, and will just throw them in the trash. I know, there are people who will drive them to recycling centers, but I suspect that if we counted CFLs sold, and CFLs recycled, we'd see a huge gap. Regular people just don't care. "The trash can is right here, and I don't even *know* where the recycling center is".
This is made worse by the fact that the 12 count "blister pack" CFLs seem to have a terribly high infant mortality and a much shorter lifespan than the more expensive "boutique" CFLs that are sold separately. I was an early adopter of the consumer integrated CFLs, and of the four bulbs I bought in 1995 or thereabouts, three are still working. I then made the mistake of buying a big box of CFLs at Costco, and *those* aren't giving me any better lifespan than incandescents. (And I will never do that again.) My concern is that significantly more of the cheap CFLs are made, and purchased, most likely by the very people who are least likely to dispose of them properly. It'll be interesting to see what the mercury content in our landfills looks like in a couple decades.
>> It would be similar to how the ACEEE's study showed EVs are no cleaner than a 45mpg gasoline vehicle (and less clean than a natural gas Civic or 88mpg Lupo TDI).
> Which completely ignores the fact that electricity is independent of it's energy source, whereas natural gas, diesel and petrol are all fossil fuels which can't be easily substituted.
EVs have the *potential* of being holistically cleaner, but that depends on a number of factors that your average consumer doesn't think much about. It's very much like CFLs -- it all depends on the implementation. Zero point emission is not the whole story.
Dunno about you, but I don't ever clean my keyboard or mouse. Other than turning the keyboard upside down occasionally and bumping it to get the crumbs out.
Besides, in this day of commodity computer parts, new keyboards are about $15, new mice are about $9, and new touchscreens... still pretty pricey.
Yes. The plot points were there. You could see them going in that direction. But they didn't. Because they couldn't without looking like copycats.
After the end of the first film, I fully expected Neo or someone to wake up in the next level at some point. But then I saw The Thirteenth Floor and realized the Wachowskis probably had to abandon that direction. Which is too bad because the sequels may not have sucked quite so much.
But ok mister serious-pants, we have self-cleaning items now -- digital camera sensors, for instance -- but even assuming that, the debris must go somewhere. Self-cleaning is usually accompanied by making the materials non-sticky to the materials with which they're likely to come in contact, and inducing a periodic vibration to shake off the particles that do adhere. I bet it doesn't work with peanut butter.
Seems to me this is an unexplored source of plot points. "Arming photon... ah crap, who's been eating at the weapons console?"
"Mister Chekhov, could you please tell us why we exited Spacedock at Warp 5?"
"Um, captain, I sneezed on the console, and um, tried to wipe it off. Sir."
Windows 4, 5, and 5.1 (XP) were not bad releases. It is only recently when MS tried to reinvent the wheel that things went bad.
It sounds like I need to buy another Windows 7 machine while they are still available, so I can skip over the Win8 debacle (same way I skipped over vista).
Buy a copy of the OS now, build the machine later as needed, when they're faster and cheaper.
Parenthetically, why don't you ever see in Star Trek someone cleaning the fingerprints and accumulated grunge off all those touch screen displays? There must be a janitorial service just to do that.
Oh, because it's fiction, that's why.
Now that I think of it, that might make the basis of a story. A janitor forgets to lock out the navigation console, juices up his rag, and sends the ship Where No One Wants To Go.
Not a single damn actor in that movie did well. After watching the prequels I had to go peruse some of Natalie Portman's other films. Because I had thought she was a good actor, but was starting to doubt it. Turns out that yes, indeed, she has acting chops. But there's only so much an actor can do with a terrible script, nothing but a green screen to act against, and a director who isn't happy until the actor does exactly what he wants and what he wants is retarded.
Same with Ewan McGregor. To a lesser extent Liam Neeson, Samuel Jackson, and Christopher Lee, but that's because they had less screentime to erase memories of other things they've done.
So, I don't recall seeing Hayden Christiansen in anything else, but my default assumption is that he can probably act but looked horrible in those movies just like everyone else did.
You're right, in general everyone did badly. I have seen examples of good acting against a green screen, so I don't think that's the reason. (Or at least, the whole reason.) I think "what the director wants is retarded" is closer to the mark.
I saw Hayden in "Jumper", a movie that didn't totally suck, and he was a bit stiff in that, but not nearly as bad as he was in the SW movies. This could be because he had a better director.
A good director can drag good performances out of a bad actor. (Example, Barry Lyndon (1975)) A bad director can drag bad performance out of nearly anyone.
Disagree. The plot was fundamentally broken from the second movie on. My personal theory is that The 13th Floor stole their ending and they had to wing it.
Why would they have to do the experiment in a sterile lab environment?
You can minimize the chances of a bad trip by conducting the test in a more comfortable environment and have a counselor guide the patient through the experience. It will probably be much more positive and effective treatment than giving a guy a lot of acid and locking him in the room for 12 hours.
Being in IT, it's not unusual to work 50 to 70 hours a week and only allowed to put 40 hours on our timecard. A lot of our time is dead time, waiting for processes to finish or for outsourced resources to get to work (at 7:00 PM local time). A few minutes in Slashdot come out of the minutes I'd be with my family if I went home at a decent hour.
Of course, if you did nothing else but post here, that'd be different.
You can work at least until 2020 when the support for Windows 7 is scheduled to end.
Cool. That works for me. Maybe something good will come out by then. By "good" I don't mean snazzy or revolutionary, I mean stable, fast and compatible.
Slashdot Mirror
So, processing farm grown meat is *not* defenseless slaughter? What, do they give the cows a fighting chance in your country?
> Now, take it to the next level. Have these camera gun's all get wifi and can do video (not just freeze frame pictures), and all connect to a central server. Then as "shots" occur, the server has them time stamped, and can do inspection on the images to see where the shot would have landed, and if it would have counted as a kill shot.
I think I saw that ride at Disneyland.
> Manufacturing cheapness aside*, if properly built and used CFLs can last 50X as long as a traditional bulb, that's quite a differential.
My contention is that they demonstrably *did* last that much longer when they first became available, but they don't anymore. I have three CFLs that are still running 16 years later, and that exceeded my expectations and was money well spent. It appears (again from my experience, grain of salt, etc) that CFLs have since been "value engineered" to something that is not as expensive as they used to be, but still more expensive than incandescents, and don't provide any longevity advantage. The cheap "blister pack" CFLs, which I maintain is what Fred and Ethyl Mertz is going to buy, have terrible lifespan.
> A quick search puts a random CFL at 82 grams. In order to extract the same transport penalty, the Incandescents would have to weigh only 1.6 grams.
That assumes 50X lifespan. See above.
> You're also going to want to break them,
You've seen a garbage truck operate, right? If they didn't crush the garbage, they'd exceed volume capacity long before they exceeded weight capacity. And it's, like, a lightbulb. They're not terribly robust.
> *We need to give CFL warranties teeth, if we want to see improved manufacturing and non-fraudulent life claims on the part of cheap CFL makers.
Wholeheartedly agree. We should also look to the source of the CFLs, and verify that we aren't being very careful with mercury in the environment here, only to have mercury being released in the environment in significant quantities at the manufacturing source. I know it's "over there", but we're all on the same planet.
How about a stamp like the UL tag, which would signify that the product has met certain standards of longevity? Then I could buy those and avoid the crappy ones.
We also need curbside recycling of CFLs. This is absolutely imperative if we're serious about protecting the environment, not just trying to make ourselves feel better. The trick to make a majority of regular people do the right thing is to make it easy and natural to do. Even people who don't care about recycling are motivated to do so because it saves room in the trash can. In my area, you pay by the size of your trash can, and I can get the smallest and cheapest trash can because the recycle bin is huge and I don't get charged for it. (Your mileage may vary.) Tell someone they have to drive several miles to a recycling station [1], and they're really likely to toss it in the trash. Who's to know? But tell them they can put it in on the curb in a recycling container, and they're more likely to do that.
[1] It annoys me a little that the recycling station here is in an industrial district with no mass transit access. So, if you're trying to live simpler so other can simply live, you still need a car to get rid of your damned lightbulbs. Someone is really not thinking this through.
EVs have the *potential* of being holistically cleaner, but that depends on a number of factors that your average consumer doesn't think much about. It's very much like CFLs -- it all depends on the implementation. Zero point emission is not the whole story.
You don't need the average consumer to think about or care about the wider ramifications: we know they won't, that's why we have regulation. Minimal impact to them, huge collective benefit for civilization.
And of course, regulation is *never* put in place to benefit a particular campaign donor , or to do impractical things that sound good to the public.
Also price.
Well, maybe this one will work better. My house used 100 watt recessed floods in the hallways and several rooms, (Extravagant, I know, but I didn't build it and would not have chosen that) and I stocked up on them when I realized that (a) Incandescents were going away, and (b) the current (at the time) generation CFL would not screw into the receptacle. (The base was too fat.) Last summer I ran out of stock and had to buy "100 watt" CFL floods (actually something like 26 watts). Fortunately by that time slim line CFLs were available that would screw into the existing fixtures. Also fortunately, only one of the lights is on a dimmer, and that incandescent hasn't burned out yet. (And CFLs that work on dimmers are becoming more common.)
Well, it hasn't been a lot of fun. I had one that was dead out of the box, and of the first three deployed, two burned out after less than six months. Moreover, although the current generation gets up to full output faster, it's still an annoyance to go to the hall closet, flick the switch, and then wait for the bulb to become bright enough for you to see where the pillow cases are. I've also had a problem with early death with the little 60 watt helical bulbs available at Costco. (I don't buy them there anymore, but a lot of people do.)
Moreover, the burnt out CFLs clutter up my garage until I get a big enough load for the recycling center. You can't yet put them out for curb recycling in my area, and I strongly suspect that most people just drop them in the trash.
So, I'm not a fan, and I'm interested in what the next big improvement is going to be.
> As opposed to...the energy needed to ship incandescents from China, then drive them in garbage trucks to a landfill site?
To be fair at least some incandescents were made in America, and the garbage truck was going to the landfill anyway, and used lightbulbs don't add appreciably to the payload. Moreover, the garbage truck represents big centralized collection and transport, which I think is arguably more efficient than hundreds of thousands of consumers jumping into their Accord to drive burnt-out CFLs to the recycling center (along with their old paint, oil, and other things you're not supposed to throw away.)
An issue I've been worried about for awhile is that the Joe Consumers out there, the people who buy a sack of potatoes and have it put in another sack, don't really have a cerebral or emotional connection to recycling CFLs properly, and will just throw them in the trash. I know, there are people who will drive them to recycling centers, but I suspect that if we counted CFLs sold, and CFLs recycled, we'd see a huge gap. Regular people just don't care. "The trash can is right here, and I don't even *know* where the recycling center is".
This is made worse by the fact that the 12 count "blister pack" CFLs seem to have a terribly high infant mortality and a much shorter lifespan than the more expensive "boutique" CFLs that are sold separately. I was an early adopter of the consumer integrated CFLs, and of the four bulbs I bought in 1995 or thereabouts, three are still working. I then made the mistake of buying a big box of CFLs at Costco, and *those* aren't giving me any better lifespan than incandescents. (And I will never do that again.) My concern is that significantly more of the cheap CFLs are made, and purchased, most likely by the very people who are least likely to dispose of them properly. It'll be interesting to see what the mercury content in our landfills looks like in a couple decades.
>> It would be similar to how the ACEEE's study showed EVs are no cleaner than a 45mpg gasoline vehicle (and less clean than a natural gas Civic or 88mpg Lupo TDI).
> Which completely ignores the fact that electricity is independent of it's energy source, whereas natural gas, diesel and petrol are all fossil fuels which can't be easily substituted.
EVs have the *potential* of being holistically cleaner, but that depends on a number of factors that your average consumer doesn't think much about. It's very much like CFLs -- it all depends on the implementation. Zero point emission is not the whole story.
Someone left their sense of humor in their other pants.
Dunno about you, but I don't ever clean my keyboard or mouse. Other than turning the keyboard upside down occasionally and bumping it to get the crumbs out.
Besides, in this day of commodity computer parts, new keyboards are about $15, new mice are about $9, and new touchscreens... still pretty pricey.
Yes. The plot points were there. You could see them going in that direction. But they didn't. Because they couldn't without looking like copycats.
After the end of the first film, I fully expected Neo or someone to wake up in the next level at some point. But then I saw The Thirteenth Floor and realized the Wachowskis probably had to abandon that direction. Which is too bad because the sequels may not have sucked quite so much.
But ok mister serious-pants, we have self-cleaning items now -- digital camera sensors, for instance -- but even assuming that, the debris must go somewhere. Self-cleaning is usually accompanied by making the materials non-sticky to the materials with which they're likely to come in contact, and inducing a periodic vibration to shake off the particles that do adhere. I bet it doesn't work with peanut butter.
Seems to me this is an unexplored source of plot points. "Arming photon... ah crap, who's been eating at the weapons console?"
"Mister Chekhov, could you please tell us why we exited Spacedock at Warp 5?"
"Um, captain, I sneezed on the console, and um, tried to wipe it off. Sir."
Windows 4, 5, and 5.1 (XP) were not bad releases. It is only recently when MS tried to reinvent the wheel that things went bad.
It sounds like I need to buy another Windows 7 machine while they are still available, so I can skip over the Win8 debacle (same way I skipped over vista).
Buy a copy of the OS now, build the machine later as needed, when they're faster and cheaper.
Parenthetically, why don't you ever see in Star Trek someone cleaning the fingerprints and accumulated grunge off all those touch screen displays? There must be a janitorial service just to do that.
Oh, because it's fiction, that's why.
Now that I think of it, that might make the basis of a story. A janitor forgets to lock out the navigation console, juices up his rag, and sends the ship Where No One Wants To Go.
Not a single damn actor in that movie did well. After watching the prequels I had to go peruse some of Natalie Portman's other films. Because I had thought she was a good actor, but was starting to doubt it. Turns out that yes, indeed, she has acting chops. But there's only so much an actor can do with a terrible script, nothing but a green screen to act against, and a director who isn't happy until the actor does exactly what he wants and what he wants is retarded.
Same with Ewan McGregor. To a lesser extent Liam Neeson, Samuel Jackson, and Christopher Lee, but that's because they had less screentime to erase memories of other things they've done.
So, I don't recall seeing Hayden Christiansen in anything else, but my default assumption is that he can probably act but looked horrible in those movies just like everyone else did.
You're right, in general everyone did badly. I have seen examples of good acting against a green screen, so I don't think that's the reason. (Or at least, the whole reason.) I think "what the director wants is retarded" is closer to the mark.
I saw Hayden in "Jumper", a movie that didn't totally suck, and he was a bit stiff in that, but not nearly as bad as he was in the SW movies. This could be because he had a better director.
A good director can drag good performances out of a bad actor. (Example, Barry Lyndon (1975)) A bad director can drag bad performance out of nearly anyone.
So, I'm assuming they cut Hayden Christensen's part down to only the parts he did well, right?
So, he's no longer in the movie, right?
Disagree. The plot was fundamentally broken from the second movie on. My personal theory is that The 13th Floor stole their ending and they had to wing it.
Why would they have to do the experiment in a sterile lab environment?
You can minimize the chances of a bad trip by conducting the test in a more comfortable environment and have a counselor guide the patient through the experience. It will probably be much more positive and effective treatment than giving a guy a lot of acid and locking him in the room for 12 hours.
But not as much fun to watch.
In related news, Pot is found to successfully treat some eating disorders, and Heroin is found to be helpful treating rebound headaches.
Being in IT, it's not unusual to work 50 to 70 hours a week and only allowed to put 40 hours on our timecard. A lot of our time is dead time, waiting for processes to finish or for outsourced resources to get to work (at 7:00 PM local time). A few minutes in Slashdot come out of the minutes I'd be with my family if I went home at a decent hour.
Of course, if you did nothing else but post here, that'd be different.
> The move should serve as a warning to customers
Probably because you didn't need the three or four apps that were in there.
> You can run unsigned code on Android.
Yeah, the guy I gave my Windows Phone to is going to be pissed.
You can work at least until 2020 when the support for Windows 7 is scheduled to end.
Cool. That works for me. Maybe something good will come out by then. By "good" I don't mean snazzy or revolutionary, I mean stable, fast and compatible.