According to this page, when I looked at it, the US could have built 4,722.5 miles of maglev track for the cost of the war in Iraq. That's nearly twice the distance between NY and LA, as the crow flies.
But how would the train run without the fuel from the souls of tortured Iraqi civilians?
I guess I make a distintion between CO2, water, and other natural wastes and the industrial wastes in which there are no natrual processes to use. So while burning Coal may release CO2, Water, Sulfer Dioxide, and Mercury I am only concerned about the last two. CO2 and Water will be used by the ecosystem.
SO2 and Hg exist in nature as well, though not in the concentrations they are regularly produced by industrial processes. Many polluters produces purely "natural" waste (industrial farms, for example) and can do a great deal of damage to the ecosystem. The only way the free market can resolve policy questions such as this is if companies are held responsible (or given credit) for the externalities they impose on society.
Many activities which are currently "profitable" would not be if companies weren't unloading the lion's share of their costs on an unsuspecting public. Likewise, many currently unprofitable plans would be profitable due to positive externalities or lack of negative externalities. This is a real problem and it isn't likely to improve in the near future, as those who profit by imposing the true costs of their business on the public at large have a great deal of political power in this country (United States) and would be able to block any attempt at reform. They've also exported this foolhearty policy to every country where they've built factories/plants/mines/etc.
I want laws to prevent dumping of wastes into our air and water.
I would rather the governmetns have a hands off policy on CO2 and just let the market take care of it.
CO2 is one of those wastes some companies dump into the air. These companies profit in part by avoiding the cost of properly cleaning up after themselves, whatever those true costs may prove to be. Whatever you think the impact of CO2 or any other waste product may be, you should be in favor of stiff penalties for companies that impose the costs associated with their industrial capacity on others. Then, and only then, can the market "take care of" CO2.
If this is all true, then why isn't the media running with it?
Didn't you hear? Paris Hilton is in jail! Lindsay Lohan is in rehab! Angelina Jolie may take time off to focus on her rapidly growing family!
The so-called prolefeed has been in overdrive for the last decade or so, as you can make a much greater profit producing non-news/public interest stories than actually taking time and money to produce real news.
I bet curious people like you help keep these scams funded too. It really does sound interesting to get scammed a few bucks on purpose.
I don't go in for this sort of thing. If you try to short an illiquid stock, though, you'll likely sit on the order for a while and have it filled after conditions have changed or end up canceling it. Any money you lose will likely go to your broker in transaction fees, as the pump&dumpers wouldn't benefit from your shorting their stock (your selling of borrowed shares would actually cut into their market).
Eww. a 5% change in stock price is not much potential for profit. Would have to do this year round to make any money (because only doing it, without fail or losing money dozens of times over, would you gradually accumulate wealth 5% at a time)
If you ran one such scam per week making 5% each time on an initial investment of (say) $10000, you would make around $110,000 in profit your first year. Once these guys have their spam bots set up, keeping this scam going would require maybe 30 mins/day.
If you read your own link you will see the point the parent to your post was making. These stocks are often illiquid, so there is no pool of shares to borrow from and thus short selling is problematic, especially on the short time-frames relevant to such a scam. The poster wasn't saying that short selling of these securities was illegal, but that it was impracticable.
Spend a few bucks and see if you can get a short position on one of these pump and dump penny stocks in a reasonable period of time.
Really, this should be the easiest to crack. Someone has to take the money. Or some company which then turns it over to some person. The SEC should be busting these left and right.
Just have your spam company send your front company the spam first and you can claim that you merely had the good fortune of being at the top of the spammer's list.
I guess this just might be the price one pays to be able to use the technology before the term expires.
You get into antitrust and patent misuse issues pretty quickly if you go down that road. A patent holder can be sanctioned very heavily for patent misuse. IIRC, a patent holder's monopoly right can even be revoked for such abuse, at least in the US.
Apple's legal hounds are legendary by their actions going after even individual users for such small things like "making a MacOS theme for Windows XP", or such things.
Apple's legal "hounds" would be negligent if they didn't go after people attempting to dilute their trademark/tradedress rights. As a quick rule of thumb, you can assume than any litigation that could possibly be associated with trademarks or trade dress is a business necessity for the company bringing suit. Lawyers are expensive and such litigation targets generally can't pay their own lawyers, much less damages, so Apple loses a lot of money every time they have to squash someone such as the seemingly innocuous user in your example.
As for going after end users for patent infringement, you might want to look up the first sale doctrine. This particular patent seems more directed at the service providers so it wouldn't be relevant to end users, but in general patent battles are fought between companies rather between one company and another company's past customers. I'm sure there's an exception somewhere and at some point someone has no doubt tried to play tricks with accounting and corporate structure to circumvent this part of the system, but in general as a consumer you should not be concerned with anything but copyright violation, which has statutory damages. The most a patentee can get you for is lost profits or a reasonable royalty. That's a few hundred bucks return on a million dollar law suit for just about any consumer device.
Whereas lack of credibility might make one skeptical, the falsity of an idea does not follow from a consideration of who said it.
GPP was impugning the credibility of the source, as it was fabricated to reach the desired conclusion and not subject to the peer review process that serious fields of study use to ensure quality and reliability in their publications. Because the data, claims, and reasoning in the article in question haven't been vetted by experts in the field any reader should treat all cites, assertions, and conclusions with extreme skepticism.
Perhaps more importantly, though, the article in question is little more than a list of references to papers which make no claims of the "Unstoppable 1500-year climate cycle" with a sentence added at the end of the article claiming that the loosely connected list of references constitute clear and convincing evidence of a phenomenon that none of the articles in question claim.
The only studies the article points to that even mention such cycles are inferences of solar cycles from ice cores, but those studies don't address the authors' claims that current warming phenomena are caused by variations in solar intensity rather than other factors. Curiously the authors made no attempt to link recent climate data with solar intensity data despite the availability of such data and such data being more relevant to their assertions than 95% of the papers they cited.
Basically, if you read beyond the title of the article you can tell that the author either doesn't understand what he's talking about or is pushing an agenda for some unstated reason. The inflamatory nature of the title would tell most savvy readers that the article had a political rather than scientific purpose.
Googling S. Fred Singer's name reveals multiple sources claiming that Singer is a hired gun of the "energy" lobby but that's not really relevant to this -- more of an indictment of the process. If oil companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for this guy to write shit than anyone who reads beyond the title can tell is shit then that means 1) our decision-makers must require no more than a veneer of credibility to call him an "expert" and use his assertions over the conclusions of the scientific community and/or don't even bother to read the positon they're endorsing for the public and 2) relatively few people with letters after their names are willing to sacrifice their academic integrity for money (supply and demand and all that).
Slashdot really needs a -1 dumbass moderation. I have mod points but there wasn't an option appropriate for the idiocy of the parent post.
The canonical "yelling fire in a crowded theater" example is a proxy for any behavior which creates grave, immediate danger of irrepairable harm to others with little or no benefit to self. If civil courts had the power to take your life and/or remove your body parts and organs and give them to the people you killed or maimed with your reckless actions then perhaps that would work for your victims. It still would not represent a significant deterrent as if you'd thought about the consequences of your actions prior to taking them you wouldn't have taken them. We use the criminal justice system to deal with such persons because either because they are incredibly reckless, representing a significant, persistent threat to others or because they are sadistic psychopaths who take such actions becuase they enjoy inflicting the inevitable pain.
The parent post neither understands the function of our criminal and civil systems nor the underlying reasoning behind their function.
2. Paternalism - The laptop project is based on the idea that smart but poor kids can learn, create and program, for themselves.
This conflicts with embedded western psychological beliefs about how you need a nice western strong man/organistion/society (i.e. 'Hilter') to go and sort those foreigners out.
Yes, I think critics really mean that the impoverished third world needs more Hitlers and fewer laptops.
(Perhaps FDR would be a more accurate and less inflamatory example for you to use the next time you make this argument. I know Hitler was big on public works and organization, but some people might get hung up on that genocide thing.)
So what's the solution? Big artificial carbon converters. It would be terribly inefficient to plant another billion trees, and that's what the planet needs to handle all the carbon that modern human activity spews into the air. So let's make our own carbon converters. 2CO2 + energy -> C2 + 2O2.. it's really not complicated. Even if we were to get all the energy for that equation by burning coal or oil, we'd still be able to keep the carbon in the atmosphere at acceptable levels.. but using nuclear or solar or wind power is a better idea.
If you just, you know, stop releasing so much CO2 into the air the planet will take care of itself. The environment has a great many carbon sinks that don't require us to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Primary residences get slightly different treatment from other assets in order to stimulate home ownership. IIRC, the interest paid on the mortgage for your primary residence is also tax-deductable.
When dealing with illiquid assets (such as real estate or, in this case, baseball cards) you are only required to recognize and pay taxes on income when you convert the illiquid asset into cash or a cash equivalent. When you trade illiquid assets, though, you keep your original basis for tax purposes. If you paid a nickel for your baseball card and I paid $500 for mine, we can swap without being taxed but when you sell your card you will be taxed on the sale price less your original basis (.05) as will I, even though the card you're selling was bought for $500 and the card I'm selling was bought for $.05.
There's one cool tax consequence of this, btw. As a taxpayer, you can allocate basis when you receive both cash and an illiquid asset in exchange for your own asset. So, if I buy my card for $500 and you bought yours for $.05, I can sell you my card for $500 plus your card and not owe any taxes until I sell your card. For baseball cards that's small potatos, but for things like real estate it can make a huge difference in whether a transaction is profitable or not.
Damages change with the circumstances. If you can't prove they knowingly violated your patents sometimes all you can win is an injuction and court costs.
Knowledge is an element in whether or not the infringement was willful. If a court finds an infringement willful, damages can be trebled. Otherwise, knowledge that a competitor has a patent over a technology is irrelevant (though independent invention is useful if you want to argue obviousness). It's your responsibility as a business to avoid infringing upon the technology of others because, in theory, the patent serves both to communicate new, useful, and nonobvious technologies and to clearly mark the boundaries of the claimed invention. Theory and practice have diverged significantly in this aspect of patent law.
If Transmeta wins a case like this, it can be awarded actual damages. If Transmeta can attribute the failure of its business to Intel infringing on their patents and undercutting their prices, this could be substantial. Alternatively, Transmeta could ask for a reasonable royalty on past sales. These damages are in addition to a permanent injunction against infringement for the life of the patent. (Damages to make whole for past infringement, injunction to prevent future infringement).
Sure, manybe a few people need to be placed in suspended animation to be sent into deep space or such, but for such small numbers freezing is probably OK.
Good luck freezing anything larger than an embryo without destroying it. Freezing a human without killing him (and, almost as difficult, reheating said human without killing him) are about as far off into soft scifi fantasy land as you can get.
If they want to change the rules like that in the name of "fighting t3h terr0rz!" then they can get to work trying to convince 3/4 of the state legislatures that it's the right thing to do. Otherwise, "shall not" means just that.
What constitutes an unreasonable search changes with both time and technology. No constitutional change is necessary -- the erosion of the 4th amendment will occur gradually as a reasonable person's expectation of privacy erodes. The police will never be able to go into your home and take your possessions without a warrant, but before too long you'll have no privacy in your words or actions. I'd rather pro-liberty lobbying resources be spent on reducing the ever-growing list of illegal activities than on fighting an impossible battle against information gathering. Fighting against advances in information gathering by lobbying and litigating will ultimately be no more effective than the RIAA's attempt to lobby and litigate file sharing into oblivion.
2. There is no economic value of such a object at current time (aside: I agree, but see my last aside; science doesn't always have immediate economic uses: anyone think Gregor Mendel would have thought he was pioneering a multi-billion dollar industry with those peas?).
If there was immediate economic value to the ISS, the government wouldn't (and shouldn't) be doing it -- private industry would be doing it instead.
For whatever reason, a lot of people complain when the government "wastes" their money on projects unlikely to be profitable in the short term. That's clearly the only thing the government should be spending money on, as anything likely to be profitable in the short term will be accomplished by private industry, likely more quickly and more cheaply. If you are mad about high taxes being spent on botched, potentially profitable ventures, blame the $400Bn pork barrel project also known as the Department of Defense.
1. The CO2 released from burning ethanol was only recently sequestered, such that (in theory) an ethanol economy would have no net effect on CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The problem with fossil fuels is that the carbon released during combustion has been sequestered for a long time, such that that CO2 is effectively "new" to the system. With Ethanol, CO2 is part of a short cycle while with fossil fuels it's part of a very, very long cycle. In trying to limit the increase in atmospheric CO2 (and trying to limit the rate of such change), that makes all the difference.
2. I wouldn't call CO2 a "byproduct" of combustion. In most cases, the conversion of solids or liquids to hot gasses performs the desired work. The release of CO2 from the fuel stock is a primary rather than secondary or incidental product.
Certainly, human exploration is much more flashy and is the only type of exploration that captures the imagination of the average population. But what can we possibly learn from doing yet another moon mission? If you're looking to explore the universe, more systems like Hubble will do fine. If you're looking to explore the solar system, robotic probes go farther for a lot less. If you're looking for a microgravity environment, the ISS will do fine. If you're looking for a launch platform to Mars, the ISS or - for that matter - any old orbit around earth is much closer to home (read inexpensive).
In theory, at least, the moon could support a self-sustaining industrial complex capable of producing food, oxygen, and equipment for the exploration and permanent settlement of space. Granted, this program looks more like a camping trip than an attempt to establish such a complex and is likely a waste of resources that could be spent establishing such a complex. The ISS or low Earth orbit are unsuitable because the lack of raw materials allows only for orbital assembly, and every part has to be launched out of Earth's atmosphere and gravity well.
It's replacing 110 million 60-watt bulbs with CF's that'd be "equivalent" to 1.3 million cars. That's roughly 4 kW of lightbulb capacity savings (13 watt CF's) per car. Lightbulbs are presumably used more often and 57kW is the peak power output of the Prius (maybe you spend a minute or two a day at peak power output in normal driving(. While the claim may seem unreasonable, there's nothing in a quick glance at the numbers that'd suggest it to be false.
Slashdot Mirror
But how would the train run without the fuel from the souls of tortured Iraqi civilians?
SO2 and Hg exist in nature as well, though not in the concentrations they are regularly produced by industrial processes. Many polluters produces purely "natural" waste (industrial farms, for example) and can do a great deal of damage to the ecosystem. The only way the free market can resolve policy questions such as this is if companies are held responsible (or given credit) for the externalities they impose on society.
Many activities which are currently "profitable" would not be if companies weren't unloading the lion's share of their costs on an unsuspecting public. Likewise, many currently unprofitable plans would be profitable due to positive externalities or lack of negative externalities. This is a real problem and it isn't likely to improve in the near future, as those who profit by imposing the true costs of their business on the public at large have a great deal of political power in this country (United States) and would be able to block any attempt at reform. They've also exported this foolhearty policy to every country where they've built factories/plants/mines/etc.
CO2 is one of those wastes some companies dump into the air. These companies profit in part by avoiding the cost of properly cleaning up after themselves, whatever those true costs may prove to be. Whatever you think the impact of CO2 or any other waste product may be, you should be in favor of stiff penalties for companies that impose the costs associated with their industrial capacity on others. Then, and only then, can the market "take care of" CO2.
Didn't you hear? Paris Hilton is in jail! Lindsay Lohan is in rehab! Angelina Jolie may take time off to focus on her rapidly growing family!
The so-called prolefeed has been in overdrive for the last decade or so, as you can make a much greater profit producing non-news/public interest stories than actually taking time and money to produce real news.
I don't go in for this sort of thing. If you try to short an illiquid stock, though, you'll likely sit on the order for a while and have it filled after conditions have changed or end up canceling it. Any money you lose will likely go to your broker in transaction fees, as the pump&dumpers wouldn't benefit from your shorting their stock (your selling of borrowed shares would actually cut into their market).
If you ran one such scam per week making 5% each time on an initial investment of (say) $10000, you would make around $110,000 in profit your first year. Once these guys have their spam bots set up, keeping this scam going would require maybe 30 mins/day.
If you read your own link you will see the point the parent to your post was making. These stocks are often illiquid, so there is no pool of shares to borrow from and thus short selling is problematic, especially on the short time-frames relevant to such a scam. The poster wasn't saying that short selling of these securities was illegal, but that it was impracticable.
Spend a few bucks and see if you can get a short position on one of these pump and dump penny stocks in a reasonable period of time.
Just have your spam company send your front company the spam first and you can claim that you merely had the good fortune of being at the top of the spammer's list.
You get into antitrust and patent misuse issues pretty quickly if you go down that road. A patent holder can be sanctioned very heavily for patent misuse. IIRC, a patent holder's monopoly right can even be revoked for such abuse, at least in the US.
Apple's legal "hounds" would be negligent if they didn't go after people attempting to dilute their trademark/tradedress rights. As a quick rule of thumb, you can assume than any litigation that could possibly be associated with trademarks or trade dress is a business necessity for the company bringing suit. Lawyers are expensive and such litigation targets generally can't pay their own lawyers, much less damages, so Apple loses a lot of money every time they have to squash someone such as the seemingly innocuous user in your example.
As for going after end users for patent infringement, you might want to look up the first sale doctrine. This particular patent seems more directed at the service providers so it wouldn't be relevant to end users, but in general patent battles are fought between companies rather between one company and another company's past customers. I'm sure there's an exception somewhere and at some point someone has no doubt tried to play tricks with accounting and corporate structure to circumvent this part of the system, but in general as a consumer you should not be concerned with anything but copyright violation, which has statutory damages. The most a patentee can get you for is lost profits or a reasonable royalty. That's a few hundred bucks return on a million dollar law suit for just about any consumer device.
GPP was impugning the credibility of the source, as it was fabricated to reach the desired conclusion and not subject to the peer review process that serious fields of study use to ensure quality and reliability in their publications. Because the data, claims, and reasoning in the article in question haven't been vetted by experts in the field any reader should treat all cites, assertions, and conclusions with extreme skepticism.
Perhaps more importantly, though, the article in question is little more than a list of references to papers which make no claims of the "Unstoppable 1500-year climate cycle" with a sentence added at the end of the article claiming that the loosely connected list of references constitute clear and convincing evidence of a phenomenon that none of the articles in question claim.
The only studies the article points to that even mention such cycles are inferences of solar cycles from ice cores, but those studies don't address the authors' claims that current warming phenomena are caused by variations in solar intensity rather than other factors. Curiously the authors made no attempt to link recent climate data with solar intensity data despite the availability of such data and such data being more relevant to their assertions than 95% of the papers they cited.
Basically, if you read beyond the title of the article you can tell that the author either doesn't understand what he's talking about or is pushing an agenda for some unstated reason. The inflamatory nature of the title would tell most savvy readers that the article had a political rather than scientific purpose.
Googling S. Fred Singer's name reveals multiple sources claiming that Singer is a hired gun of the "energy" lobby but that's not really relevant to this -- more of an indictment of the process. If oil companies pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for this guy to write shit than anyone who reads beyond the title can tell is shit then that means 1) our decision-makers must require no more than a veneer of credibility to call him an "expert" and use his assertions over the conclusions of the scientific community and/or don't even bother to read the positon they're endorsing for the public and 2) relatively few people with letters after their names are willing to sacrifice their academic integrity for money (supply and demand and all that).
Slashdot really needs a -1 dumbass moderation. I have mod points but there wasn't an option appropriate for the idiocy of the parent post.
The canonical "yelling fire in a crowded theater" example is a proxy for any behavior which creates grave, immediate danger of irrepairable harm to others with little or no benefit to self. If civil courts had the power to take your life and/or remove your body parts and organs and give them to the people you killed or maimed with your reckless actions then perhaps that would work for your victims. It still would not represent a significant deterrent as if you'd thought about the consequences of your actions prior to taking them you wouldn't have taken them. We use the criminal justice system to deal with such persons because either because they are incredibly reckless, representing a significant, persistent threat to others or because they are sadistic psychopaths who take such actions becuase they enjoy inflicting the inevitable pain.
The parent post neither understands the function of our criminal and civil systems nor the underlying reasoning behind their function.
Yes, I think critics really mean that the impoverished third world needs more Hitlers and fewer laptops.
(Perhaps FDR would be a more accurate and less inflamatory example for you to use the next time you make this argument. I know Hitler was big on public works and organization, but some people might get hung up on that genocide thing.)
If you just, you know, stop releasing so much CO2 into the air the planet will take care of itself. The environment has a great many carbon sinks that don't require us to violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Primary residences get slightly different treatment from other assets in order to stimulate home ownership. IIRC, the interest paid on the mortgage for your primary residence is also tax-deductable.
When dealing with illiquid assets (such as real estate or, in this case, baseball cards) you are only required to recognize and pay taxes on income when you convert the illiquid asset into cash or a cash equivalent. When you trade illiquid assets, though, you keep your original basis for tax purposes. If you paid a nickel for your baseball card and I paid $500 for mine, we can swap without being taxed but when you sell your card you will be taxed on the sale price less your original basis (.05) as will I, even though the card you're selling was bought for $500 and the card I'm selling was bought for $.05.
There's one cool tax consequence of this, btw. As a taxpayer, you can allocate basis when you receive both cash and an illiquid asset in exchange for your own asset. So, if I buy my card for $500 and you bought yours for $.05, I can sell you my card for $500 plus your card and not owe any taxes until I sell your card. For baseball cards that's small potatos, but for things like real estate it can make a huge difference in whether a transaction is profitable or not.
EMS heckling is a big thing here. Lots of fun.
You call that a tracheotomy?
Maybe I'm spending too much time w/med students, though.
Knowledge is an element in whether or not the infringement was willful. If a court finds an infringement willful, damages can be trebled. Otherwise, knowledge that a competitor has a patent over a technology is irrelevant (though independent invention is useful if you want to argue obviousness). It's your responsibility as a business to avoid infringing upon the technology of others because, in theory, the patent serves both to communicate new, useful, and nonobvious technologies and to clearly mark the boundaries of the claimed invention. Theory and practice have diverged significantly in this aspect of patent law.
If Transmeta wins a case like this, it can be awarded actual damages. If Transmeta can attribute the failure of its business to Intel infringing on their patents and undercutting their prices, this could be substantial. Alternatively, Transmeta could ask for a reasonable royalty on past sales. These damages are in addition to a permanent injunction against infringement for the life of the patent. (Damages to make whole for past infringement, injunction to prevent future infringement).
Good luck freezing anything larger than an embryo without destroying it. Freezing a human without killing him (and, almost as difficult, reheating said human without killing him) are about as far off into soft scifi fantasy land as you can get.
What constitutes an unreasonable search changes with both time and technology. No constitutional change is necessary -- the erosion of the 4th amendment will occur gradually as a reasonable person's expectation of privacy erodes. The police will never be able to go into your home and take your possessions without a warrant, but before too long you'll have no privacy in your words or actions. I'd rather pro-liberty lobbying resources be spent on reducing the ever-growing list of illegal activities than on fighting an impossible battle against information gathering. Fighting against advances in information gathering by lobbying and litigating will ultimately be no more effective than the RIAA's attempt to lobby and litigate file sharing into oblivion.
"these people are less concered with cancer than we are about being eaten by a lion."
Tell that to my agrizoophagophobia support group.
If there was immediate economic value to the ISS, the government wouldn't (and shouldn't) be doing it -- private industry would be doing it instead.
For whatever reason, a lot of people complain when the government "wastes" their money on projects unlikely to be profitable in the short term. That's clearly the only thing the government should be spending money on, as anything likely to be profitable in the short term will be accomplished by private industry, likely more quickly and more cheaply. If you are mad about high taxes being spent on botched, potentially profitable ventures, blame the $400Bn pork barrel project also known as the Department of Defense.
1. The CO2 released from burning ethanol was only recently sequestered, such that (in theory) an ethanol economy would have no net effect on CO2 levels in the atmosphere. The problem with fossil fuels is that the carbon released during combustion has been sequestered for a long time, such that that CO2 is effectively "new" to the system. With Ethanol, CO2 is part of a short cycle while with fossil fuels it's part of a very, very long cycle. In trying to limit the increase in atmospheric CO2 (and trying to limit the rate of such change), that makes all the difference.
2. I wouldn't call CO2 a "byproduct" of combustion. In most cases, the conversion of solids or liquids to hot gasses performs the desired work. The release of CO2 from the fuel stock is a primary rather than secondary or incidental product.
In theory, at least, the moon could support a self-sustaining industrial complex capable of producing food, oxygen, and equipment for the exploration and permanent settlement of space. Granted, this program looks more like a camping trip than an attempt to establish such a complex and is likely a waste of resources that could be spent establishing such a complex. The ISS or low Earth orbit are unsuitable because the lack of raw materials allows only for orbital assembly, and every part has to be launched out of Earth's atmosphere and gravity well.
It's replacing 110 million 60-watt bulbs with CF's that'd be "equivalent" to 1.3 million cars. That's roughly 4 kW of lightbulb capacity savings (13 watt CF's) per car. Lightbulbs are presumably used more often and 57kW is the peak power output of the Prius (maybe you spend a minute or two a day at peak power output in normal driving(. While the claim may seem unreasonable, there's nothing in a quick glance at the numbers that'd suggest it to be false.