On a related note, I think final car safety tests should be performed with the CEOs of the car company inside the car.
The inadequate suspension of the Chevy Corvair killed one of a Cadillac General Managers sons (pretty sure that was Cal Verner)... Didn't help as much as you'd think, still all spin and coverup.
Could it be possible that there was life on mars... and not any more? Those long dead critters are continuing to decay and release the gas.
Coal, Oil wells, and NatGas wells are basically the same thing. If those deposits existed on mars, King Bush II and Haliburton would have been invading Mars for Oil rather than mostly innocent middle eastern countries for Oil. Therefore, theres no hydrocarbon fields on Mars. So, if the methane isn't from fossils, its from modern/current critters...
Methane is unstable on the order of centuries in the martian atmosphere, so they all died off VERY recently, not so "long dead" as you might think.
The problem is that on mars all methane should vanish in months due to oxidizing soil. Therefore something must be replenishing it.
Its a more complicated problem than that. First of all, there is no viable explanation for a source, assuming no lifeforms on mars, no active volcanoes, not enough meteors... Secondly, methane is localized and produced at weird rates, almost like weather... errr growing seasons... Third, methane is photochemically unstable in UV, it should all disappear in a couple centuries, except it is measured as disappearing much more quickly, VERY coincidentally about the timeframe of one martian year, so grasping at straws, it must be "oxidizing soil" or something. Fourthly the ESA guys claim when they detect methane, it also coincidentally comes along with yummy water vapor (actually, probably fizzy carbonated water crossed with stinky swamp gas)
Now it is refreshing after the quack climatologists basically making stuff up to "prove" their hypothesis, to see that real scientists studying mars are very carefully and appropriately skeptical about declaring martian life. But eventually Occams Razor kicks in and the complicated non-life workarounds become more ridiculous than admitting it makes more sense to assume there's life on mars. I think that tipping point is extremely close.
If someone says, "I'm gonna bust a cap in the president's head", they could be referring to destroy some sort of hat or other head covering. The computer will back me up on this.
Ah that's nothing, think of all the fun when Pete Souza sends emails that he's going to "shoot the president" at a certain public appearance.
(For the google impaired, Souza was appointed by Obama to the post of "official white house photographer", and weirdly enough I believe he was also Reagans photographer)
It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open. This isn't necessarily something you'd want to do all the time, but I can certainly see how it would be useful in some situations. If I'm working on multiple code files, and for each of those files I have two or three browser windows open containing references for the specific file
KDE "kpager" the desktop switcher and right click configure KDE panel - uncheck "Show windows from all desktops"
Or it sounds like you're describing emacs?
Or it sounds like you're describing a development IDE?
That being said, I think in the end we're going to have tabbed windows because
GUI designers need to justify their existence, so the GUI must expand. Of course this means the "content" shrinks.
The good news, is we'll all have 40 inch ultra high res monitors.
The bad news, is just like cable tv news channels or "modern" desktop environments, those displays will be framed to death until "your content" is about the size of a postcard and "their content" fills the rest of the 40 inch screen.
Assuming you're not just making this all up, I would guess you really enjoyed "the little schemer" LISP/Scheme textbook series?
I'm related by marriage to two school teachers. This is a great plan for teaching math, like you mentioned, such as trigonometric identities. Not so good for creative writing. The other problem is, according to my relatives, and most things I've read online, "teachers" only really "teach" a small portion of the time, the majority is devoted to social worker, surrogate parent, role model, baby sitter/prison guard/overseerer, drill sergent, psychologist, councilor, nurse, etc.
Also the theory of mind is pretty weak for learning so the programmed courses will be pretty weak. Some folks learn things best in a different order, or by a somewhat different method. Also some folks just skip certain areas, take the hit to the grade and move on. Given that, I don't think your plan will work for everyone in all situations.
Bullshit. There ARE no such e-readers, unless the only print you've ever seen is darkish grey text on lightish grey paper. E-reader displays are NOWHERE NEAR 'printlike' yet. Ugh.
There are LCD screen book readers that are better than most non-artsy printed books, where the battery life is merely a week or so. Certainly higher contrast than an old yellowed paperback.
Then there are e-Ink or e-Paper or whatever screen book readers, that have no redeeming characteristic at all, other than a battery life measured in page turns, which for a slow reader is possibly measured in months.
The problem is the assumption that given that its technologically hard to make a high contrast display, thus expensive, therefore a high contrast display must inherently be better because its expensive thus more profitable for the manufacturer, err uh umm, I mean marketing says the more expensive one causes less eyestrain. However, there is plenty of evidence that LOWER contrast reduces eyestrain...
Native support for ZFS is a good reason to choose FreeBSD over Linux.
I see things differently.
Log10(# of Ext3 installs) is probably around 8, plus or minus 1.
Log10(# of ZFS installs) is probably around 4, plus or minus 1.
As a first approximation, the odds of being "the poor enduser whom discovered a shattering new data loss filesystem bug" is probably about 4 orders of magnitude worse for ZFS users than ext3 users.
Users should be scared, when file server designers "feel like trying a new filesystem" unless there is a desperate requirement.
The whole point of a burn and run NAS "distribution" is so end-users can click-n-drool, and I suspect the web based front end won't support all the cool features of ZFS, and the "click and drool" crowd would never understand what is possible, much less demand it.
Did they bother to teach you about the timescale over which these geological changes occurred? Or are you simply incapable of grasping that tens of thousands of years is a long time, millions of years is a longer time, and tens or hundreds of millions of years is a very long time indeed?
Yes, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. Thanks for agreeing with me. Over a long enough time period, human caused global warming is completely swamped into the noise by the extremes of natural change. For example, going all "Pol Pot" on western civilization might make the next ice age come a few years, decades, maybe centuries earlier, or maybe later, who knows, who cares. But, the next ice age is still coming, regardless if we select "Pol Pot" or "Party On". And we'll be buried under volcanic debris again. And we'll be the bottom of an inland sea again. A mere two or three ice age cycles from now, you'd never know the difference between "Pol Pot" and "Party On". Certainly in a couple million years or so, it would be nearly impossible to tell.
No, wait, don't tell me -- you stopped listening when they mentioned any date before 4004 BC.
No, those were the conservative kids that thought the earth never changed and never will change because its so young, and they bought into the whole "noble savage"/"garden of eden" rot, and they bought into the whole "original sin" rot that we are all guilty of ruining the world, and had the belief that belief in an authoritarian, fear-mongering religion would "save them", and I'm not talking about Christianity.
Actually, people in Wisconsin seemed pretty freaked out a year or two ago when the Wisconsin river flooded. Especially the ones that had houses washed away.
God knows the Might Miss never changed her course before global warming, and certainly never will again, if and only if we go all "Pol Pot" on our civilization. And some scientist promised me if I move into a grass hut like he wants, the glaciers will never come again, either.
You might be thinking of the famous "Lake Delton Disaster", where a manmade dam, which made a pretty nice lake for a couple decades, finally finished washing away, taking quite a few houses with it. Maintenance or lack-thereof is not really global warming related. Probably never should have built a dam there anyway, from what I read, but now we're stuck with one forever.
There is quite clear evidence in the email dump of widespread conspiracy and of several actual commissions of fact to evade the requirements of the FOIA. As that is a felonious activity, to conceal your knowledge of it is the crime of misprision.
Also, if the releaser was ordered by the conspirators to destroy evidence, not releasing could have resulted in charges for obstruction of justice, unless he saved a copy in some other format, like on wikileaks or whatever.
"Obstruction charges can also be laid if a person alters or destroys physical evidence, even if he was under no compulsion at any time to produce such evidence."
Wisconsin? Did someone mention my home state? WI geology is a good example of why "global warming" is a coastie religion and midwesterners are by and large, unconverted.
See, where I grew up, they teach us geology by pointing out the glacial terrain features that a mile or two of ice carves out every 10-20K years or so... Then they move on to our local industry, such as limestone pits formed when WI, currently 600 feet ASL, was a warm -n- toasty (relatively) inland seabottom. Then there's the ancient volcanic granite outcroppings.
On the coasts, I think they teach kids the temperature has never been a degree above or below where it is today, etc etc.
So, after a good WI education, when the coasties hearts flutter about a degree here and a meter there, we're just not too impressed based on our states natural history.
Even worse, lets say we go all "Pol Pot" on our civilization like the global warming religion desperately wants us to, and then wait a million years, in wild Wisconsin, the weather we had before is, the weather we'll have again, glaciers, floods, and all, as if a degree here and there or a meter here and there would even be noticeable to us...
How is the Carnot cycle apply here? This is direct heat conversion, and the efficiency should be near 100%, you would have line losses.
Reading thru a filter of journalist ignorance, I think the journalist is trying to say they're using a heat pump to reject the heat from the cooling system into the heating system's boiling water. There is a Carnot cycle limit to heat pumps.
I was modeling the accelerator in my head as a simple electrostatic "potential drop" linear as a simplification of the very complicated circular thing that the LHC is.
At the target, there is no way to tell the difference between getting hit by a 7 terravolt linear and a 7 TeV LHC, the difference is in the construction.
Since the linear model is basically a 7 TV battery with a certain beam current flowing across it. Stick a V*A wattmeter on the linear and you get watts. It is a valid model... Like sticking a wattmeter on a XRay machine...
It is simpler to build a LHC than a 7 TV linear, so thats why we have a LHC instead of a linear.
eV does equal V in a singly charged linear accelerator.
This is why I'm always horrified by stores selling clothing under fluorescent light. It's complete fiction in terms of color perception.
My clothing is almost exclusively viewed under fluorescent light. I think that is normal in a first world country.
Other than outdoors, or some spots inside my house, its all fluorescent or CFL... work, stores, most of my house.
At home I don't care much.
As for outside, well, I live in a climate where its cold enough for a coat for 7 months, so no one sees my clothes, and too hot to wear much at all for 4 months, so no one sees much clothes, leaving just a few days a year where it matters.
$X for bulb $Y per kwh (cite sources, current prices in what locale, projected prices) Z lifetime Q consumption rate
Don't forget labor costs to procure/install and replace/dispose/recycle.
Incandescent works in ANY fixure, buy at every little convenience and grocery store, very safe to dispose of and recycle (just glass and a little wire) but has to be replaced every couple years.
CFL may not fit in every fixture, can only buy at home improvement stores (special trip, burn some gas), similar lifetime to Incandescent or even shorter due to cheap Chinese manufacturing, terribly toxic to dispose of due to being full of mercury. As a plus theres lots of greenwashing marketing to make the buyer feel good.
LED probably won't fit in a fixture or app that was not designed for a LED, mostly only buy online (pay shipping, burn UPS's diesel/kerosene to transport it), lasts pretty much forever, semi-toxic to manufacture but "mostly harmless" to throw away.
Even if everything were the same price and I'd "save" $5 of energy by using a LED (merely resulting in burning $5 more natural gas in my furnace to keep warm), if I have to spend $10 on shipping to buy it, not so good of a deal.
Also, incandescents don't live long in my ceiling fans, CFLs don't live long period, but LEDs run forever in that app, so the economics change for different apps. The bulb in my closet will never wear out in my lifetime, and uses virtually no energy per year, so fancy bulbs are a waste of money for my closet.
Thing is, it shouldn't be too hard to improve the PFC, should it?
No, virtually impossible.
LEDs conduct anytime they cross more than a couple volts. Hook up to a decent bridge rectifier and a switching power supply in constant current mode, and its no great challenge to get a PF of one. You can run the LED itself on constant DC forever if you want. A nice simple nearly resistive DC load means a nice simple efficient power supply.
CFLs being a tube of glowing gas have to be fed AC or the electrode at the + end will overheat and erode (think arc welding). The current-voltage curve is crazy. Also when it's not conducting, its essentially a capacitor and an insulator in series. You'd need a AC-DC switching supply to make DC with a good PF and then another separate DC-AC inverter to handle the icky PF of the tube. Or you could just cheap out and sell a lamp with a simple supply and a "bad" PF.
Its interesting that other than thermal issues and eventual phosphor wear out, you really can't make a LED that will work at all, that won't work for a long time. On the other hand, its easy to make a CFL that'll kind of work, for a little while, and then promptly burn out. Pretty clear which technology better fits the China/Walmart/Big Box Store business model... I would never buy a CFL from a place like that, LED maybe, but never a CFL.
24x7 walmart sign, gas station sign, etc. All the outdoor commercial signs I'm familiar with, use old fashioned florescent tube lights, for extremely even illumination and efficiency. This might vary based on location, it never gets above 100F here, maybe in vegas that type fails in the summer, or in coastie areas they corrode.
The other reason to run a light all night is to offend your sleeping neighbors, if you're either into that generally, or trying to offend one individual neighbor. At one point, I had both my neighbors running floodlights all night, does that mean all my neighbors are jerks, or all my neighbors think I'm a jerk (or both?)
Weirdly enough, the difference between the 1.0 and 10.0 womens face seems to be little more than body fat percentage. Actually, IRL for the whole body, isn't the difference between 1.0 and 10.0 little more than body fat percentage?
Slashdot Mirror
On a related note, I think final car safety tests should be performed with the CEOs of the car company inside the car.
The inadequate suspension of the Chevy Corvair killed one of a Cadillac General Managers sons (pretty sure that was Cal Verner)... Didn't help as much as you'd think, still all spin and coverup.
Could it be possible that there was life on mars... and not any more? Those long dead critters are continuing to decay and release the gas.
Coal, Oil wells, and NatGas wells are basically the same thing. If those deposits existed on mars, King Bush II and Haliburton would have been invading Mars for Oil rather than mostly innocent middle eastern countries for Oil. Therefore, theres no hydrocarbon fields on Mars. So, if the methane isn't from fossils, its from modern/current critters...
Methane is unstable on the order of centuries in the martian atmosphere, so they all died off VERY recently, not so "long dead" as you might think.
The problem is that on mars all methane should vanish in months due to oxidizing soil. Therefore something must be replenishing it.
Its a more complicated problem than that. First of all, there is no viable explanation for a source, assuming no lifeforms on mars, no active volcanoes, not enough meteors... Secondly, methane is localized and produced at weird rates, almost like weather... errr growing seasons... Third, methane is photochemically unstable in UV, it should all disappear in a couple centuries, except it is measured as disappearing much more quickly, VERY coincidentally about the timeframe of one martian year, so grasping at straws, it must be "oxidizing soil" or something. Fourthly the ESA guys claim when they detect methane, it also coincidentally comes along with yummy water vapor (actually, probably fizzy carbonated water crossed with stinky swamp gas)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atmosphere_of_Mars#Methane
Now it is refreshing after the quack climatologists basically making stuff up to "prove" their hypothesis, to see that real scientists studying mars are very carefully and appropriately skeptical about declaring martian life. But eventually Occams Razor kicks in and the complicated non-life workarounds become more ridiculous than admitting it makes more sense to assume there's life on mars. I think that tipping point is extremely close.
So, in summary, if we block the ads, we'll have the internet of 1992, which I rather enjoyed?
If someone says, "I'm gonna bust a cap in the president's head", they could be referring to destroy some sort of hat or other head covering. The computer will back me up on this.
Ah that's nothing, think of all the fun when Pete Souza sends emails that he's going to "shoot the president" at a certain public appearance.
(For the google impaired, Souza was appointed by Obama to the post of "official white house photographer", and weirdly enough I believe he was also Reagans photographer)
It's not the same thing. With windows containing tabs for multiple applications and/or documents, you don't have one taskbar; you have as many "taskbars" as you have windows open. This isn't necessarily something you'd want to do all the time, but I can certainly see how it would be useful in some situations. If I'm working on multiple code files, and for each of those files I have two or three browser windows open containing references for the specific file
KDE "kpager" the desktop switcher and right click configure KDE panel - uncheck "Show windows from all desktops"
Or it sounds like you're describing emacs?
Or it sounds like you're describing a development IDE?
That being said, I think in the end we're going to have tabbed windows because
GUI designers need to justify their existence, so the GUI must expand. Of course this means the "content" shrinks.
The good news, is we'll all have 40 inch ultra high res monitors.
The bad news, is just like cable tv news channels or "modern" desktop environments, those displays will be framed to death until "your content" is about the size of a postcard and "their content" fills the rest of the 40 inch screen.
There is no excuse for not totally changing our school system.
Could have just given a link to wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programmed_instruction
Assuming you're not just making this all up, I would guess you really enjoyed "the little schemer" LISP/Scheme textbook series?
I'm related by marriage to two school teachers. This is a great plan for teaching math, like you mentioned, such as trigonometric identities. Not so good for creative writing. The other problem is, according to my relatives, and most things I've read online, "teachers" only really "teach" a small portion of the time, the majority is devoted to social worker, surrogate parent, role model, baby sitter/prison guard/overseerer, drill sergent, psychologist, councilor, nurse, etc.
Also the theory of mind is pretty weak for learning so the programmed courses will be pretty weak. Some folks learn things best in a different order, or by a somewhat different method. Also some folks just skip certain areas, take the hit to the grade and move on. Given that, I don't think your plan will work for everyone in all situations.
Bullshit. There ARE no such e-readers, unless the only print you've ever seen is darkish grey text on lightish grey paper. E-reader displays are NOWHERE NEAR 'printlike' yet. Ugh.
There are LCD screen book readers that are better than most non-artsy printed books, where the battery life is merely a week or so. Certainly higher contrast than an old yellowed paperback.
Then there are e-Ink or e-Paper or whatever screen book readers, that have no redeeming characteristic at all, other than a battery life measured in page turns, which for a slow reader is possibly measured in months.
The problem is the assumption that given that its technologically hard to make a high contrast display, thus expensive, therefore a high contrast display must inherently be better because its expensive thus more profitable for the manufacturer, err uh umm, I mean marketing says the more expensive one causes less eyestrain. However, there is plenty of evidence that LOWER contrast reduces eyestrain...
http://ergonomics.about.com/od/eyestrain/a/reduce_contrast.htm
If these games have access to users' personal information you'd think they'd know enough about each user to use "his" or "her" in place of "their."
That pesky transgendered problem rears its head again...
it sounds like you're dissing small talk rather than dissing facebook as a medium for small talk.
Ah, thats not a real diss, try these:
My old quote: "facebook is a workflow automation system for relationships between stereotypical middle school girls"
My new quote: "facebook is a computer optimized maximal shallowness solution to impress people you don't care about".
Now, which one is more accurate, and/or offensive?
Native support for ZFS is a good reason to choose FreeBSD over Linux.
I see things differently.
Log10(# of Ext3 installs) is probably around 8, plus or minus 1.
Log10(# of ZFS installs) is probably around 4, plus or minus 1.
As a first approximation, the odds of being "the poor enduser whom discovered a shattering new data loss filesystem bug" is probably about 4 orders of magnitude worse for ZFS users than ext3 users.
Users should be scared, when file server designers "feel like trying a new filesystem" unless there is a desperate requirement.
The whole point of a burn and run NAS "distribution" is so end-users can click-n-drool, and I suspect the web based front end won't support all the cool features of ZFS, and the "click and drool" crowd would never understand what is possible, much less demand it.
Did they bother to teach you about the timescale over which these geological changes occurred? Or are you simply incapable of grasping that tens of thousands of years is a long time, millions of years is a longer time, and tens or hundreds of millions of years is a very long time indeed?
Yes, that is exactly the point I was trying to make. Thanks for agreeing with me. Over a long enough time period, human caused global warming is completely swamped into the noise by the extremes of natural change. For example, going all "Pol Pot" on western civilization might make the next ice age come a few years, decades, maybe centuries earlier, or maybe later, who knows, who cares. But, the next ice age is still coming, regardless if we select "Pol Pot" or "Party On". And we'll be buried under volcanic debris again. And we'll be the bottom of an inland sea again. A mere two or three ice age cycles from now, you'd never know the difference between "Pol Pot" and "Party On". Certainly in a couple million years or so, it would be nearly impossible to tell.
No, wait, don't tell me -- you stopped listening when they mentioned any date before 4004 BC.
No, those were the conservative kids that thought the earth never changed and never will change because its so young, and they bought into the whole "noble savage"/"garden of eden" rot, and they bought into the whole "original sin" rot that we are all guilty of ruining the world, and had the belief that belief in an authoritarian, fear-mongering religion would "save them", and I'm not talking about Christianity.
Actually, people in Wisconsin seemed pretty freaked out a year or two ago when the Wisconsin river flooded. Especially the ones that had houses washed away.
God knows the Might Miss never changed her course before global warming, and certainly never will again, if and only if we go all "Pol Pot" on our civilization. And some scientist promised me if I move into a grass hut like he wants, the glaciers will never come again, either.
You might be thinking of the famous "Lake Delton Disaster", where a manmade dam, which made a pretty nice lake for a couple decades, finally finished washing away, taking quite a few houses with it. Maintenance or lack-thereof is not really global warming related. Probably never should have built a dam there anyway, from what I read, but now we're stuck with one forever.
There is quite clear evidence in the email dump of widespread conspiracy and of several actual commissions of fact to evade the requirements of the FOIA. As that is a felonious activity, to conceal your knowledge of it is the crime of misprision.
Also, if the releaser was ordered by the conspirators to destroy evidence, not releasing could have resulted in charges for obstruction of justice, unless he saved a copy in some other format, like on wikileaks or whatever.
"Obstruction charges can also be laid if a person alters or destroys physical evidence, even if he was under no compulsion at any time to produce such evidence."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obstruction_of_justice
They were all in Wisconsin, IIRC.
Wisconsin? Did someone mention my home state? WI geology is a good example of why "global warming" is a coastie religion and midwesterners are by and large, unconverted.
See, where I grew up, they teach us geology by pointing out the glacial terrain features that a mile or two of ice carves out every 10-20K years or so... Then they move on to our local industry, such as limestone pits formed when WI, currently 600 feet ASL, was a warm -n- toasty (relatively) inland seabottom. Then there's the ancient volcanic granite outcroppings.
On the coasts, I think they teach kids the temperature has never been a degree above or below where it is today, etc etc.
So, after a good WI education, when the coasties hearts flutter about a degree here and a meter there, we're just not too impressed based on our states natural history.
Even worse, lets say we go all "Pol Pot" on our civilization like the global warming religion desperately wants us to, and then wait a million years, in wild Wisconsin, the weather we had before is, the weather we'll have again, glaciers, floods, and all, as if a degree here and there or a meter here and there would even be noticeable to us...
Fragmentation means all projects suffer just a little more of not being able to put the much needed cut and polish in or those extra needed features.
Classic authoritarian mistake of thinking, if I just kill off some dudes pet project, then he will do exactly what I want.
I'm all about radiant hot water heat these days. You don't have to worry about mold
Until it starts leaking. Then you have cold, and mold.
How is the Carnot cycle apply here? This is direct heat conversion, and the efficiency should be near 100%, you would have line losses.
Reading thru a filter of journalist ignorance, I think the journalist is trying to say they're using a heat pump to reject the heat from the cooling system into the heating system's boiling water. There is a Carnot cycle limit to heat pumps.
I was modeling the accelerator in my head as a simple electrostatic "potential drop" linear as a simplification of the very complicated circular thing that the LHC is.
At the target, there is no way to tell the difference between getting hit by a 7 terravolt linear and a 7 TeV LHC, the difference is in the construction.
Since the linear model is basically a 7 TV battery with a certain beam current flowing across it. Stick a V*A wattmeter on the linear and you get watts. It is a valid model... Like sticking a wattmeter on a XRay machine...
It is simpler to build a LHC than a 7 TV linear, so thats why we have a LHC instead of a linear.
eV does equal V in a singly charged linear accelerator.
This is why I'm always horrified by stores selling clothing under fluorescent light. It's complete fiction in terms of color perception.
My clothing is almost exclusively viewed under fluorescent light. I think that is normal in a first world country.
Other than outdoors, or some spots inside my house, its all fluorescent or CFL... work, stores, most of my house.
At home I don't care much.
As for outside, well, I live in a climate where its cold enough for a coat for 7 months, so no one sees my clothes, and too hot to wear much at all for 4 months, so no one sees much clothes, leaving just a few days a year where it matters.
Whats the TCO?
$X for bulb
$Y per kwh (cite sources, current prices in what locale, projected prices)
Z lifetime
Q consumption rate
Don't forget labor costs to procure/install and replace/dispose/recycle.
Incandescent works in ANY fixure, buy at every little convenience and grocery store, very safe to dispose of and recycle (just glass and a little wire) but has to be replaced every couple years.
CFL may not fit in every fixture, can only buy at home improvement stores (special trip, burn some gas), similar lifetime to Incandescent or even shorter due to cheap Chinese manufacturing, terribly toxic to dispose of due to being full of mercury. As a plus theres lots of greenwashing marketing to make the buyer feel good.
LED probably won't fit in a fixture or app that was not designed for a LED, mostly only buy online (pay shipping, burn UPS's diesel/kerosene to transport it), lasts pretty much forever, semi-toxic to manufacture but "mostly harmless" to throw away.
Even if everything were the same price and I'd "save" $5 of energy by using a LED (merely resulting in burning $5 more natural gas in my furnace to keep warm), if I have to spend $10 on shipping to buy it, not so good of a deal.
Also, incandescents don't live long in my ceiling fans, CFLs don't live long period, but LEDs run forever in that app, so the economics change for different apps. The bulb in my closet will never wear out in my lifetime, and uses virtually no energy per year, so fancy bulbs are a waste of money for my closet.
Thing is, it shouldn't be too hard to improve the PFC, should it?
No, virtually impossible.
LEDs conduct anytime they cross more than a couple volts. Hook up to a decent bridge rectifier and a switching power supply in constant current mode, and its no great challenge to get a PF of one. You can run the LED itself on constant DC forever if you want. A nice simple nearly resistive DC load means a nice simple efficient power supply.
CFLs being a tube of glowing gas have to be fed AC or the electrode at the + end will overheat and erode (think arc welding). The current-voltage curve is crazy. Also when it's not conducting, its essentially a capacitor and an insulator in series. You'd need a AC-DC switching supply to make DC with a good PF and then another separate DC-AC inverter to handle the icky PF of the tube. Or you could just cheap out and sell a lamp with a simple supply and a "bad" PF.
Its interesting that other than thermal issues and eventual phosphor wear out, you really can't make a LED that will work at all, that won't work for a long time. On the other hand, its easy to make a CFL that'll kind of work, for a little while, and then promptly burn out. Pretty clear which technology better fits the China/Walmart/Big Box Store business model... I would never buy a CFL from a place like that, LED maybe, but never a CFL.
Why are you having lights on outside all night?
24x7 walmart sign, gas station sign, etc. All the outdoor commercial signs I'm familiar with, use old fashioned florescent tube lights, for extremely even illumination and efficiency. This might vary based on location, it never gets above 100F here, maybe in vegas that type fails in the summer, or in coastie areas they corrode.
The other reason to run a light all night is to offend your sleeping neighbors, if you're either into that generally, or trying to offend one individual neighbor. At one point, I had both my neighbors running floodlights all night, does that mean all my neighbors are jerks, or all my neighbors think I'm a jerk (or both?)
Imagine, a site that you can go to and evolve the face of the woman of your dreams?
Just the face? Thats all? Try again.
Your project has already been done, anyway.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Averageness
Weirdly enough, the difference between the 1.0 and 10.0 womens face seems to be little more than body fat percentage. Actually, IRL for the whole body, isn't the difference between 1.0 and 10.0 little more than body fat percentage?