The most remarkable thing about this abject collapse is that not a single facsimile of a leader who understands what is happening and has a glimmer of an idea what to do about it is in evidence. It's just not natural.
You can believe if you want that all 300 million citizens without exception are either STUPID or have no leadership skills whatsoever. But methinks Occam's Razor suggests that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface.
SUVS = terrorists? That is about the most nonsensical statement I ever heard, and I have heard a LOT of nonsense. Extreme animosity = terrorists, and the most usual forces driving extreme animosity are racial and religious hatred.
Since you spell "western democracy" with a small w, small d, Venezuela is a western democracy. So just what do you mean by "antics of Chavez"?
As for Iran (which is really neither western nor eastern), I'm afraid that no matter whether you trade with Iran for fuel or not, you have no practical choice but to "put up with the theatrics of Iran". Racial and religious hatred is not going to go away, regardless of anybody's foreign relations with Iran.
You don't want too much oxygen, especially since it's flammable.
Not big on chemistry, are you? Oxygen is not flammable. It is the opposite of flammable. Flammability is the property of being combinable with oxygen in such a way as to produce flame. O2 does not combine with O2.
Not to be too pedantic, but it's not exactly true that noise limits your SNR. It's a ratio. You can increase SNR by either decreasing N or increasing S. I'll grant you that there are tradeoffs and practical limits to increasing S.
That said, I wouldn't dream of ever using wireless unless wired is not available. At home I practically never use wireless. In fact I don't even have my AP turned on most of the time.
Oh, as far as performance on gigabit: it's true that you can get full bandwidth in terms of raw data, but using ssh with the default cipher will take you down to 20-50% of theoretical due to compute overhead, depending on the horsepower of your two hosts. But "ssh -carcfour128" will get you back up near 100% if your CPU horsepower is in reasonable fairly modern desktop or laptop territory.
If the "3Mbps" 3G wireless is in fact only good for 500kbps-1Mbps or so (which has been my experience), it doesn't beat 256kbps DSL by much, and the 2-5GB per month hard or soft cap on wireless is really crippling. It probably still wins if your 256k DSL is flaky.
I call a CRI of a little over 80 markedly poorer than 100, which is what incandescents have. Except there is no 6000 K cool white LED that has a CRI of 80. They are mostly around 70. The Philips are warm white 2800 K; that's how they manage to have the improved CRI, but it's still not the real thing. The newest model is getting pretty close to the real thing, though, at 90+.
You're entirely right that the color temperature does not tell the whole story. Even together with the CRI, it does not tell the whole story. Even high CRI LEDs have a spectrum with pronounced peaks and valleys.
It's still gonna be a piece of junk. It will probably fail from a circuit board weakness. That said, I was able to fit a fairly cheap cool white LED "bulb" in the socket in the freezer of my refrigerator, and it seems very well suited for that purpose. Everyone remarks that it looks blazingly bright, thought it is actually not putting out any more lumens than the 40 watt appliance bulb that was in there.
I'll match your anecdote with my own. I have had CFLs running 24x7 for well over 2 years, which is well over twice their rating of 8000 hours, and at least sixteen times the rated life of an incandescent.
If you don't like the warm light of an incandescent, you won't like these. It's very, very close in character. There's no reason they couldn't make cool white LED "bulbs" at 6000K. They would in fact be significantly more efficient, but would have a markedly poorer CRI.
2700 K with a CRI of 83. The light to me is indistinguishable in character and beam pattern from an incandescent. That was the previous generation. The new one has a CRI of 92.
I got several of them at $40, and they made complete sense even at that cost (see http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2792583&cid=39714065). Then I got some more at $15 at a Massachusetts Home Depot (they are subsidized up the wazoo in the green republic). Nothing like 'em.
The cheap ones are complete garbage. The Philips are different. I've had several of the previous generation Philips 819933 12.5w 800 lumen "bulbs" running for almost a year, one 24x7 and others piling up a lot of hours. Not the slightest problem from any of them. The quality of the light is just as good as incandescent.
You may not have looked at the price dispassionately and analytically. One of these uses $37.50 in electricity over its 25,000 hr rated life, at 12.5 cents/kWh. You would have to buy twenty-five 60 watt incandescents (total cost $12.50-$25.00?) and run them one at a time to burnout to make the same amount of light for the same period, and these would use $180.00 in electricity.
So total cost is $40 (retail) + $37.50 = $87.50 for the LED, versus $12.50 + $180.00 = $192.50 for the incandescents. That's a saving of $105.00. Actually my electricity rates are closer to 18 cents per kWh, so I save a lot more than that. Not to mention saving yourself 24 bulb changes. Oh, and this previous generation Philips is available for under $20 locally where I live.
Most of the "bulbs" on that page are complete crap. Nowhere near bright enough to be more than night lights, and I can assure you they are built like crap. One or two look almost decent, but I'll bet the specs are fantasy.
There is a reason the Philips costs more. Several reasons. Damn good ones.
These other LED bulbs may be RATED for 20 years, but it's very unlikely they will reach that in practice. None of the ones I have seen are built anywhere near as well as the Philips. Also, none of them are as bright or as efficient, and most of them suffer from very poor tint in the light emitted. In a word they are crap.
They are dimmable. To be fair, some dimmers work better than others, and there is a limit to how dim they will go. Try one of the Philips previous generation first; the 12.5w 800 lumen 819913. They started at $40 but are cheap now. I have found them for under $20 locally.
They will not burn out from bumping. Ever. Maybe if you threw it against concrete you would wreck it.
The one caveat is not to use them in closed enclosures. Open fixtures only. They don't make much heat compared to incandescents, but if the heat can't escape it will cook the electronics.
This is very true. Cheap low end multi-LED lights are garbage. The worst ones use extremely poor 5mm LEDs with no heat sinking which typically degrade to half brightness within SINGLE DIGIT to double digit hours of use, and suffer significant complete burnout of individual LEDs within the same period. The LEDs used in the Philips bulb are cutting edge high power LEDs with very sophisticated heat sinking and remote phosphor. They are also designed to have an extremely high CRI (color rendering index) almost as good as incandescent, and far superior to common CFLs and less-elite LED "bulbs". I have seen a tear-down of the Philips, and the evident quality in every respect is astonishing.
SpriderOak not only LETS you keep your keys; they MAKE you keep your keys. They don't want to see them. They can't access them. They CAN'T decrypt your data, no matter what nazi demands it of them (and they can't get your password back for you if you forget it). The keys never leave your PC. At least that's what they claim. How you prove that when the client is proprietary closed source code, I don't see.
One assumes that you would be as dismissive of biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University, microbiologist Scott Minnich at the University of Idaho, and mathematician William Dembski at Baylor University. I doubt, however, that you would convince many thinkers by categorizing them as stupid. Intelligent design theorists do not so dismiss evolutionists.
Assuming you would like to learn a bit about the difference between intelligent design and creationism, you could check the following:
Thank you for the interesting engagement. I mostly see your points as good ones. I particularly like your idea on sleep. It's worth mentioning just a few areas where it seems to me the question hasn't been met.
On two and only two sets of teeth being an economy (if I may paraphrase): the mechanism evolved to regenerate teeth. The evolutionary energy has already been expended. The point that two sets is enough to ensure propagation of the species is a good one. But why did evolution continue to operate and come up with a mechanism to "turn off" the regeneration ability after a single cycle? That would appear to be a pointless evolutionary step.
Do you really think that two kidneys confers more advantage than two hearts?
Thank you for a very thoughtful reply. The point where I believe creationism and intelligent design do differ is in the specifics. I.D. as I understand it does not deny evolution. It does not make silly claims such as the universe being created 6000 years ago. It may speculation on the particulars of the designing agency, but does not assign a particular mystical one. I could be mistaken in this distinction, but in any case that's what I personally think of as I.D.
I don't disagree strongly with any of your ideas re: religion. For my own part, it would probably surprise our zealous moderator friends to learn that I have not made up my own mind, and don't have any dogmatic beliefs. I do have questions.
Telling a falsehood is an actual provable act, to the extent you can prove the validity or invalidity of the claim. On the other hand "lying" is a thought offense, because lying requires telling a falsehood KNOWINGLY, and nobody can say what another actually believes or does not believe inside his own mind. Punishing someone for what you THINK they believe or do not believe is clearly an evil act.
And equally, punishing someone for telling a falsehood which they believe to be true is clearly an evil act because you cannot mandate that everyone have perfect judgement and analytical skills.
Therefore, punishing anyone for telling an untruth, whether OR NOT they know they are wrong, is evil. I think it is best if we do not punish anyone for anything they say. If you want to go after someone for yelling fire in a crowded theater, go ahead and try. In the event you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew there was no fire (good luck with that), then they would be guilty of public endangerment and you could nail them for that, not for the ridiculous charge of oralizing a false statement.
A civil case for defamation (slander or libel) is a different matter, because you do not punish for civil misdeed; you asses damages. To the extent defamation is criminalized, then I call that criminalization evil.
Slashdot Mirror
The most remarkable thing about this abject collapse is that not a single facsimile of a leader who understands what is happening and has a glimmer of an idea what to do about it is in evidence. It's just not natural.
You can believe if you want that all 300 million citizens without exception are either STUPID or have no leadership skills whatsoever. But methinks Occam's Razor suggests that there is a powerful, sinister organization which is ruthlessly stamping out any leaders who even start to surface.
SUVS = terrorists? That is about the most nonsensical statement I ever heard, and I have heard a LOT of nonsense. Extreme animosity = terrorists, and the most usual forces driving extreme animosity are racial and religious hatred.
Since you spell "western democracy" with a small w, small d, Venezuela is a western democracy. So just what do you mean by "antics of Chavez"?
As for Iran (which is really neither western nor eastern), I'm afraid that no matter whether you trade with Iran for fuel or not, you have no practical choice but to "put up with the theatrics of Iran". Racial and religious hatred is not going to go away, regardless of anybody's foreign relations with Iran.
Not big on chemistry, are you? Oxygen is not flammable. It is the opposite of flammable. Flammability is the property of being combinable with oxygen in such a way as to produce flame. O2 does not combine with O2.
Why would you think a diesel Beetle or an Insight would not have a black box?
What article is dated 2007? The article in the first link provided in the aummary is from this month. It references a previous writing from 2007.
Not to be too pedantic, but it's not exactly true that noise limits your SNR. It's a ratio. You can increase SNR by either decreasing N or increasing S. I'll grant you that there are tradeoffs and practical limits to increasing S.
That said, I wouldn't dream of ever using wireless unless wired is not available. At home I practically never use wireless. In fact I don't even have my AP turned on most of the time.
Oh, as far as performance on gigabit: it's true that you can get full bandwidth in terms of raw data, but using ssh with the default cipher will take you down to 20-50% of theoretical due to compute overhead, depending on the horsepower of your two hosts. But "ssh -carcfour128" will get you back up near 100% if your CPU horsepower is in reasonable fairly modern desktop or laptop territory.
If the "3Mbps" 3G wireless is in fact only good for 500kbps-1Mbps or so (which has been my experience), it doesn't beat 256kbps DSL by much, and the 2-5GB per month hard or soft cap on wireless is really crippling. It probably still wins if your 256k DSL is flaky.
I call a CRI of a little over 80 markedly poorer than 100, which is what incandescents have. Except there is no 6000 K cool white LED that has a CRI of 80. They are mostly around 70. The Philips are warm white 2800 K; that's how they manage to have the improved CRI, but it's still not the real thing. The newest model is getting pretty close to the real thing, though, at 90+.
You're entirely right that the color temperature does not tell the whole story. Even together with the CRI, it does not tell the whole story. Even high CRI LEDs have a spectrum with pronounced peaks and valleys.
It's still gonna be a piece of junk. It will probably fail from a circuit board weakness. That said, I was able to fit a fairly cheap cool white LED "bulb" in the socket in the freezer of my refrigerator, and it seems very well suited for that purpose. Everyone remarks that it looks blazingly bright, thought it is actually not putting out any more lumens than the 40 watt appliance bulb that was in there.
I'll match your anecdote with my own. I have had CFLs running 24x7 for well over 2 years, which is well over twice their rating of 8000 hours, and at least sixteen times the rated life of an incandescent.
If you don't like the warm light of an incandescent, you won't like these. It's very, very close in character. There's no reason they couldn't make cool white LED "bulbs" at 6000K. They would in fact be significantly more efficient, but would have a markedly poorer CRI.
2700 K with a CRI of 83. The light to me is indistinguishable in character and beam pattern from an incandescent. That was the previous generation. The new one has a CRI of 92.
I got several of them at $40, and they made complete sense even at that cost (see http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2792583&cid=39714065). Then I got some more at $15 at a Massachusetts Home Depot (they are subsidized up the wazoo in the green republic). Nothing like 'em.
The cheap ones are complete garbage. The Philips are different. I've had several of the previous generation Philips 819933 12.5w 800 lumen "bulbs" running for almost a year, one 24x7 and others piling up a lot of hours. Not the slightest problem from any of them. The quality of the light is just as good as incandescent.
You may not have looked at the price dispassionately and analytically. One of these uses $37.50 in electricity over its 25,000 hr rated life, at 12.5 cents/kWh. You would have to buy twenty-five 60 watt incandescents (total cost $12.50-$25.00?) and run them one at a time to burnout to make the same amount of light for the same period, and these would use $180.00 in electricity.
So total cost is $40 (retail) + $37.50 = $87.50 for the LED, versus $12.50 + $180.00 = $192.50 for the incandescents. That's a saving of $105.00. Actually my electricity rates are closer to 18 cents per kWh, so I save a lot more than that. Not to mention saving yourself 24 bulb changes. Oh, and this previous generation Philips is available for under $20 locally where I live.
Most of the "bulbs" on that page are complete crap. Nowhere near bright enough to be more than night lights, and I can assure you they are built like crap. One or two look almost decent, but I'll bet the specs are fantasy.
There is a reason the Philips costs more. Several reasons. Damn good ones.
These other LED bulbs may be RATED for 20 years, but it's very unlikely they will reach that in practice. None of the ones I have seen are built anywhere near as well as the Philips. Also, none of them are as bright or as efficient, and most of them suffer from very poor tint in the light emitted. In a word they are crap.
They are dimmable. To be fair, some dimmers work better than others, and there is a limit to how dim they will go. Try one of the Philips previous generation first; the 12.5w 800 lumen 819913. They started at $40 but are cheap now. I have found them for under $20 locally.
They will not burn out from bumping. Ever. Maybe if you threw it against concrete you would wreck it.
The one caveat is not to use them in closed enclosures. Open fixtures only. They don't make much heat compared to incandescents, but if the heat can't escape it will cook the electronics.
This is very true. Cheap low end multi-LED lights are garbage. The worst ones use extremely poor 5mm LEDs with no heat sinking which typically degrade to half brightness within SINGLE DIGIT to double digit hours of use, and suffer significant complete burnout of individual LEDs within the same period. The LEDs used in the Philips bulb are cutting edge high power LEDs with very sophisticated heat sinking and remote phosphor. They are also designed to have an extremely high CRI (color rendering index) almost as good as incandescent, and far superior to common CFLs and less-elite LED "bulbs". I have seen a tear-down of the Philips, and the evident quality in every respect is astonishing.
SpriderOak not only LETS you keep your keys; they MAKE you keep your keys. They don't want to see them. They can't access them. They CAN'T decrypt your data, no matter what nazi demands it of them (and they can't get your password back for you if you forget it). The keys never leave your PC. At least that's what they claim. How you prove that when the client is proprietary closed source code, I don't see.
One assumes that you would be as dismissive of biochemist Michael Behe of Lehigh University, microbiologist Scott Minnich at the University of Idaho, and mathematician William Dembski at Baylor University. I doubt, however, that you would convince many thinkers by categorizing them as stupid. Intelligent design theorists do not so dismiss evolutionists.
Assuming you would like to learn a bit about the difference between intelligent design and creationism, you could check the following:
Intelligent Design and Creationism Just Aren't the Same
What is Intelligent Design?
Darwin's Black Box
Thank you for the interesting engagement. I mostly see your points as good ones. I particularly like your idea on sleep. It's worth mentioning just a few areas where it seems to me the question hasn't been met.
On two and only two sets of teeth being an economy (if I may paraphrase): the mechanism evolved to regenerate teeth. The evolutionary energy has already been expended. The point that two sets is enough to ensure propagation of the species is a good one. But why did evolution continue to operate and come up with a mechanism to "turn off" the regeneration ability after a single cycle? That would appear to be a pointless evolutionary step.
Do you really think that two kidneys confers more advantage than two hearts?
Thank you for a very thoughtful reply. The point where I believe creationism and intelligent design do differ is in the specifics. I.D. as I understand it does not deny evolution. It does not make silly claims such as the universe being created 6000 years ago. It may speculation on the particulars of the designing agency, but does not assign a particular mystical one. I could be mistaken in this distinction, but in any case that's what I personally think of as I.D.
I don't disagree strongly with any of your ideas re: religion. For my own part, it would probably surprise our zealous moderator friends to learn that I have not made up my own mind, and don't have any dogmatic beliefs. I do have questions.
YOU shut the fuck up, asshole. You are a stupid twit. And you are lying.
Telling a falsehood is an actual provable act, to the extent you can prove the validity or invalidity of the claim. On the other hand "lying" is a thought offense, because lying requires telling a falsehood KNOWINGLY, and nobody can say what another actually believes or does not believe inside his own mind. Punishing someone for what you THINK they believe or do not believe is clearly an evil act.
And equally, punishing someone for telling a falsehood which they believe to be true is clearly an evil act because you cannot mandate that everyone have perfect judgement and analytical skills.
Therefore, punishing anyone for telling an untruth, whether OR NOT they know they are wrong, is evil. I think it is best if we do not punish anyone for anything they say. If you want to go after someone for yelling fire in a crowded theater, go ahead and try. In the event you can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew there was no fire (good luck with that), then they would be guilty of public endangerment and you could nail them for that, not for the ridiculous charge of oralizing a false statement.
A civil case for defamation (slander or libel) is a different matter, because you do not punish for civil misdeed; you asses damages. To the extent defamation is criminalized, then I call that criminalization evil.