I await ultracaps in practical energy storage ranges (think, car battery power to weight to space ratios). When they come, likely they'll be pretty high voltage, so we're looking at more electronics yet to run LED bulbs from them.
I have LED lights everywhere in the house now -- big house -- and spent an average of about $14/bulb. I'll get paid back for that, most likely, if they don't undergo a spate of infant mortalities the way CFLs did. Now CFLs... *that* was a boondoggle. Should have waited a few more years before jumping on that bandwagon. Hope I'm not saying the same about LEDs in five years.
Yes, let's "bring people together" by encouraging them to believe in god. Because religion has never caused any problems. Just ask Giordano Bruno. What a great way to celebrate a scientific achievement.
One question we could have now, with the advent of same sex marriage, is why incest laws should be followed with same sex marriages. There's no logical reason why I should not be able to marry my son, brother, or father, except for people thinking it's weird.
Marriage pretty much implies consummation. Heterosexual consummation, barring 100% effective birth control, with someone that closely related can (very likely will) produce offspring with significant genetic anomalies. Incest laws are really pretty well established as worthy; people with these kinds of genetic anomalies tend to not benefit from the differences. Heterosexual incest (and I'm talking blood relationship here, not step-anything) isn't a good idea and it won't become reasonable until or unless we can develop absolutely certain remediation for the genetic problems it causes.
Almost all the other ideas stigmatizing consenting, informed human relationships that have been codified into legislation -- anti-gay, anti-polygamy, anti-polyandry, anti-flirting, etc. -- are the result of superstitious and/or repressive thinking and should go away ASAP. Further, formal contracts should be enforced by the state, and other than that, the state should entirely butt out of personal relationships.
Of course if what you really mean is that it's not supported by 100% of the software you need/want to use, and you can't find suitable alternatives... well that's not really anything to do with Linux's readiness is it?
Please finish this sentence: "An OS without the applications I need is..."
The thing is, it's not a linux problem. It's (mostly) a GPL problem. The GPL is a poison pill for many commercial operations; it becomes problematic to utilize existing work and bootstrap commercial products. Well, that and the lack of a standard, unencumbered GUI. Which *is* perceived as a linux problem. You may have noticed that highly expandable and flexible applications like Apache under linux are in very wide use commercially. Reading the Apache license is also very interesting as compared to the GPL. Coincidence? Not as far as I can tell.
But, as linux users have told me many times, they don't want those nasty commercial types in there, using code and not giving back more code. And this is exactly what they got. So...:)
A great deal, actually -- I don't kill things without reason, and I try hard to avoid accidents. I'm kinder to animals and insects than they are to each other by quite a margin. But that's just me. Nature is a rough school. I have *no* idea how we would instill or install rules in actual thinking beings. I expect to see it happen, though... my guess is we're within 20 years of true AI. All the small problems have been solved -- from the mechanics of the bodies to reasonable power to weight ratio energy supplies, to data acquisition of every sense we have and quite a few we don't... it's all down to the "birth" of the first Ai; from there, if it's silicon based as I expect, it can be copied quickly and the genesis of AI #2 will take only minutes once the choice is made. Who they'll be, I don't know. But I'd like to find out!
Yes, the laws were flawed, and yes, that's the idea Asimov mined to produce some interesting stories.
But the thing here is that those laws require both a free-thinking intelligence that can reason non-linearly, and a locked-down computer-like slavish obedience to simplistic concepts. As we have yet to put any kind of actual AI in the field, we not only don't have such magic combo, we don't even know how to make such a magic combo.
The only high-level intelligence we know of is us; and getting one of us to rigidly obey the three laws would be an exercise in utter frustration. No reason to think it'd be any more practical in Robbie the Robot, esq., citizen of the Consolidated Intelligences Union.
Nice job misquoting me. That "almost" you left out is critical to understanding what I said.
See any steel mills? Visit Bethlehem and check 'em out. See any television or radio manufacturers? Other than Apple's recent foray into trash can manufacture, see any computer manufacturers? (and no, importers of Chinese parts to assemble don't count) Been to Detroit lately? That's a bloody eye-opener, I can tell you. Or just take a trip to Walmart and check country of origin on, well, just about anything.
Sure, there's a little manufacturing left, but it's a pale shadow of what we have had in the past.
So because to our knowledge nobody has ever sold a rogue nuclear weapon to someone in the past that means it will never happen in the future?
No, it probably won't happen in the future, either. There are huge technical hurdles, most likely insurmountable.
But I'll tell you something else: Say it happens. Some big city somewhere goes up in a mushroom cloud. It still won't knock civilization out. There are billions of people on the planet, hundreds of societies, and the complete destruction of a city or two -- regardless of how -- won't mean squat in the long run to civilization at large. As we have already seen many times in the last hundred years, examples that come right to mind include Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Beirut, Warsaw, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to name a few. The whole "terrorists might get a nuke and end civilization" meme is pure hysteria, nothing more.
And you can leave out the government propaganda nonsense - I don't believe in government any more than you do.
What are you talking about? Did I say I "didn't believe in" government? No, I didn't say anything of the kind. Please try to keep the strawman assembly to a minimum. Let me explain my previous post in just a few short words: Your thesis about nukes ending civilization is utter nonsense; what you ought to be concerned with is the actual threat, which is the present government out of control. None of which is propaganda: it's straight up fact. Also, just as an aside, I consider government an absolute necessity. Get it now?
It only takes one wealthy wackjob to buy a chemical or nuclear weapon and use it to kill millions of people.
No, it also takes a seller of such weapons. And there aren't any, or we'd have been sweeping up the remains of some city, political center, or major chunk of infrastructure by now. The whole "terrorists and nuclear weapons" is a total mind job done on you and yours by your government. One thing to to keep in mind: Nukes are very difficult and expensive to manufacture, and pretty damned difficult to lose track of.
Civilization isn't likely to die due to nuclear weapons. We've set off well over a thousand of them already, and there's no particular notable effects other than the low hum of hysteria at the intersection of the set of the ill-informed and the paranoid.
Also, Chemical weapons are a lot less "mass" than nukes are, barring very sophisticated delivery systems, which again, aren't available to religious tools. Bacterial weapons are vaguely possible (although still very, very technical), but incorporate the downside of most likely eventually killing everyone everywhere instead of just the target(s), and so not even your average superstition-addled dingbat seriously considers them.
If you are a US citizen, If you want to worry about civilization, you should be worrying about the decay of our government from one authorized by the constitution into a form exclusively controlled by corporate and political groups. Because unlike the "nuclear threat", said decay is real and ongoing and has already screwed things up immensely: almost 100% loss of manufacturing capacity and so also jobs, crippling inflation, loss of citizen's rights, usurpation of article five powers by the judiciary, illegal legislation that spans almost the entire bill of rights to ex post facto laws to the complete inversion of the commerce clause, promulgation of multiple very expensive, ultimately useless wars... the problem isn't terrorists. The problem is our federal government. The whole terrorist thing is to keep the citizens looking the wrong way.
The NSA is doing everything it can to save your ass.
No. US citizens are not under any real threat, either short term or long -- at least, no threat that isn't in the end posed by our government itself. What the NSA is doing is attempting to shore up the government, which, frankly, I'm beginning to feel would be better off being replaced by people, almost *any* group of people, who simply understand that it is not acceptable to break one's oath, and that the oath to the constitution is designed to, and should, ultimately govern all of our legislation.
So the Constitution states that it is not the use of collected personal information, but "unreasonable" collection and searches for information that is disallowed. The issue then swings on what could be considered reasonable.
The precise definition of what is reasonable is right there in the 4th amendment: It is probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, formally blessed as acceptable by the issuance of a warrant which describes the places to be searched, things to be seized. Once the government meets that standard of reasonableness, they may then commence to search.
It does not seem to me that collecting all telephone metadata from everyone is a narrow enough criteria to be considered reasonable.
You don't get to say what is reasonable; the 4th already does that. Is the target here a person's papers? Their home? Their property (effects)? The actual person themselves? If so, then if the standard of reasonableness explicitly laid out in the 4th is met, the government may search; otherwise, not.
The question here turns entirely on who has the ownership of that data, and what the obligations are with regard to it. Does the metadata on my calls meet the definition of being part of my papers? I think it's pretty obvious that it does, but that's just one person's opinion. If that data contains my private information, then the 4th applies. If, however, the data is not in any way "my" data/papers, then the question moves on as to the government's rights with regard to coercing data from the clutches of corporations.
Before anyone leaps to the conclusion that having done business, for instance, with the phone company or an Internet provider somehow magically makes that data public, let me point out that a letter between you and I, or you and your bank, is very definitely part of your papers. If you think the phone company being a party to your data makes your papers public, please explain why that obtains, but the letter you wrote to you bank is still in the domain of your private papers.
I think of an autoplay video as direct evidence that someone is an incompetent writer, and I leave immediately. If you can cannot express your thoughts in a quotable, orderly context, you are very likely not worth my time.
Video is information pablum. When you're talking to the intelligent, the written word is the way to go. Only use video when nothing but a moving image can serve (tip: rarely, if ever, is this the case); only use still images when words will not serve. Yes, an image is worth a thousand words: The problem is, they're not your words, they are the viewer's words.
I cannot emphasize enough how writing encourages discourse and thought, while video rarely does anything of the sort.
No. A 34 cent bulb will have a very limited lifetime. I priced the incandescents as I wrote the post, from the same source as the Cree LED bulbs. Decent incandescents, decent LED bulbs.
Even if we used 34 cents, the LED bulbs are *still* quite a bit less expensive in the end. Hell, even if your incandescents were *free*, the LED bulbs still kick their ass by a factor of three+.
As it uses 60 watts, over a period of 30,000 hours, an incandescent bulb would use 1,800,000 watt hours, or 1,800 kilowatt hours. At the current approximate price of $0.10 per kilowatt hour, you would have to pay $180.00 to run an incandescent bulb over this period.
Thus, the total cost of a 60 watt incandescent bulb over a 30,000 hour lifespan is $187.82.
Here's the thing: the average lifespan of a 60w incandescent bulb is not 30k hours. It is 1200 hours. So you get to buy 25 incandescents. Add about $1.61 per bulb, or $40.25 in bulb costs alone (never mind the annoyance of changing it 25 times) over those 30k hours. Add your electric cost of $.10 * 1800 ($180), you get $220.25 for the incandescent.
The LED, however, WILL last 30k hours (and likely longer -- the $13 Cree comes with a ten year warranty). It costs $13, and the cost is 9 watts over 30k hours, or 270000wh. At the same.10/kwh, it is (270kwh *.10 = $27) is the operating cost. Total cost is then $13+$27, or $40.
The incandescent costs $220.25 - $40 more than the LED: ONE LED bulb saves you $180.75 over the equivalent 25 incandescent bulbs.
Buying an incandescent at this point is simply shooting yourself in the foot. Replace five bulbs, save yourself about $1000.00 over their lifetime, do better environmentally, up your reliability, reduce change events... I mean, really. Just, duh.
Slashdot Mirror
I await ultracaps in practical energy storage ranges (think, car battery power to weight to space ratios). When they come, likely they'll be pretty high voltage, so we're looking at more electronics yet to run LED bulbs from them.
I have LED lights everywhere in the house now -- big house -- and spent an average of about $14/bulb. I'll get paid back for that, most likely, if they don't undergo a spate of infant mortalities the way CFLs did. Now CFLs... *that* was a boondoggle. Should have waited a few more years before jumping on that bandwagon. Hope I'm not saying the same about LEDs in five years.
Yes, let's "bring people together" by encouraging them to believe in god. Because religion has never caused any problems. Just ask Giordano Bruno. What a great way to celebrate a scientific achievement.
As it turns out, I had better things to do. :)
I always ask the fish before I get it drunk.
Maybe it's like this:
Question: What's the penalty for bigamy?
All of them.
Precisely.
Marriage pretty much implies consummation. Heterosexual consummation, barring 100% effective birth control, with someone that closely related can (very likely will) produce offspring with significant genetic anomalies. Incest laws are really pretty well established as worthy; people with these kinds of genetic anomalies tend to not benefit from the differences. Heterosexual incest (and I'm talking blood relationship here, not step-anything) isn't a good idea and it won't become reasonable until or unless we can develop absolutely certain remediation for the genetic problems it causes.
Almost all the other ideas stigmatizing consenting, informed human relationships that have been codified into legislation -- anti-gay, anti-polygamy, anti-polyandry, anti-flirting, etc. -- are the result of superstitious and/or repressive thinking and should go away ASAP. Further, formal contracts should be enforced by the state, and other than that, the state should entirely butt out of personal relationships.
Please finish this sentence: "An OS without the applications I need is..."
The thing is, it's not a linux problem. It's (mostly) a GPL problem. The GPL is a poison pill for many commercial operations; it becomes problematic to utilize existing work and bootstrap commercial products. Well, that and the lack of a standard, unencumbered GUI. Which *is* perceived as a linux problem. You may have noticed that highly expandable and flexible applications like Apache under linux are in very wide use commercially. Reading the Apache license is also very interesting as compared to the GPL. Coincidence? Not as far as I can tell.
But, as linux users have told me many times, they don't want those nasty commercial types in there, using code and not giving back more code. And this is exactly what they got. So... :)
A great deal, actually -- I don't kill things without reason, and I try hard to avoid accidents. I'm kinder to animals and insects than they are to each other by quite a margin. But that's just me. Nature is a rough school. I have *no* idea how we would instill or install rules in actual thinking beings. I expect to see it happen, though... my guess is we're within 20 years of true AI. All the small problems have been solved -- from the mechanics of the bodies to reasonable power to weight ratio energy supplies, to data acquisition of every sense we have and quite a few we don't... it's all down to the "birth" of the first Ai; from there, if it's silicon based as I expect, it can be copied quickly and the genesis of AI #2 will take only minutes once the choice is made. Who they'll be, I don't know. But I'd like to find out!
Yes, the laws were flawed, and yes, that's the idea Asimov mined to produce some interesting stories.
But the thing here is that those laws require both a free-thinking intelligence that can reason non-linearly, and a locked-down computer-like slavish obedience to simplistic concepts. As we have yet to put any kind of actual AI in the field, we not only don't have such magic combo, we don't even know how to make such a magic combo.
The only high-level intelligence we know of is us; and getting one of us to rigidly obey the three laws would be an exercise in utter frustration. No reason to think it'd be any more practical in Robbie the Robot, esq., citizen of the Consolidated Intelligences Union.
Nice job misquoting me. That "almost" you left out is critical to understanding what I said.
See any steel mills? Visit Bethlehem and check 'em out. See any television or radio manufacturers? Other than Apple's recent foray into trash can manufacture, see any computer manufacturers? (and no, importers of Chinese parts to assemble don't count) Been to Detroit lately? That's a bloody eye-opener, I can tell you. Or just take a trip to Walmart and check country of origin on, well, just about anything.
Sure, there's a little manufacturing left, but it's a pale shadow of what we have had in the past.
It's "lodestone", you infidel. And they aren't gems, either. Did you sleep through earth science?
The framework is fine. The linker isn't designed to put objects this size on the heap. Goddamned Insmell smegma registers.
Nah, those of us that think don't hang out in earthquake zones.
rimshot
Too late, already done. They're called "televisions." They kill the mind first.
There is a bottom, you heretic. It's a Yurtle.
We engineer types call that "a failure of vision."
No, it probably won't happen in the future, either. There are huge technical hurdles, most likely insurmountable.
But I'll tell you something else: Say it happens. Some big city somewhere goes up in a mushroom cloud. It still won't knock civilization out. There are billions of people on the planet, hundreds of societies, and the complete destruction of a city or two -- regardless of how -- won't mean squat in the long run to civilization at large. As we have already seen many times in the last hundred years, examples that come right to mind include Dresden, Tokyo, Berlin, Beirut, Warsaw, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, just to name a few. The whole "terrorists might get a nuke and end civilization" meme is pure hysteria, nothing more.
What are you talking about? Did I say I "didn't believe in" government? No, I didn't say anything of the kind. Please try to keep the strawman assembly to a minimum. Let me explain my previous post in just a few short words: Your thesis about nukes ending civilization is utter nonsense; what you ought to be concerned with is the actual threat, which is the present government out of control. None of which is propaganda: it's straight up fact. Also, just as an aside, I consider government an absolute necessity. Get it now?
No, it also takes a seller of such weapons. And there aren't any, or we'd have been sweeping up the remains of some city, political center, or major chunk of infrastructure by now. The whole "terrorists and nuclear weapons" is a total mind job done on you and yours by your government. One thing to to keep in mind: Nukes are very difficult and expensive to manufacture, and pretty damned difficult to lose track of.
Civilization isn't likely to die due to nuclear weapons. We've set off well over a thousand of them already, and there's no particular notable effects other than the low hum of hysteria at the intersection of the set of the ill-informed and the paranoid.
Also, Chemical weapons are a lot less "mass" than nukes are, barring very sophisticated delivery systems, which again, aren't available to religious tools. Bacterial weapons are vaguely possible (although still very, very technical), but incorporate the downside of most likely eventually killing everyone everywhere instead of just the target(s), and so not even your average superstition-addled dingbat seriously considers them.
If you are a US citizen, If you want to worry about civilization, you should be worrying about the decay of our government from one authorized by the constitution into a form exclusively controlled by corporate and political groups. Because unlike the "nuclear threat", said decay is real and ongoing and has already screwed things up immensely: almost 100% loss of manufacturing capacity and so also jobs, crippling inflation, loss of citizen's rights, usurpation of article five powers by the judiciary, illegal legislation that spans almost the entire bill of rights to ex post facto laws to the complete inversion of the commerce clause, promulgation of multiple very expensive, ultimately useless wars... the problem isn't terrorists. The problem is our federal government. The whole terrorist thing is to keep the citizens looking the wrong way.
No. US citizens are not under any real threat, either short term or long -- at least, no threat that isn't in the end posed by our government itself. What the NSA is doing is attempting to shore up the government, which, frankly, I'm beginning to feel would be better off being replaced by people, almost *any* group of people, who simply understand that it is not acceptable to break one's oath, and that the oath to the constitution is designed to, and should, ultimately govern all of our legislation.
The precise definition of what is reasonable is right there in the 4th amendment: It is probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, formally blessed as acceptable by the issuance of a warrant which describes the places to be searched, things to be seized. Once the government meets that standard of reasonableness, they may then commence to search.
You don't get to say what is reasonable; the 4th already does that. Is the target here a person's papers? Their home? Their property (effects)? The actual person themselves? If so, then if the standard of reasonableness explicitly laid out in the 4th is met, the government may search; otherwise, not.
The question here turns entirely on who has the ownership of that data, and what the obligations are with regard to it. Does the metadata on my calls meet the definition of being part of my papers? I think it's pretty obvious that it does, but that's just one person's opinion. If that data contains my private information, then the 4th applies. If, however, the data is not in any way "my" data/papers, then the question moves on as to the government's rights with regard to coercing data from the clutches of corporations.
Before anyone leaps to the conclusion that having done business, for instance, with the phone company or an Internet provider somehow magically makes that data public, let me point out that a letter between you and I, or you and your bank, is very definitely part of your papers. If you think the phone company being a party to your data makes your papers public, please explain why that obtains, but the letter you wrote to you bank is still in the domain of your private papers.
I think of an autoplay video as direct evidence that someone is an incompetent writer, and I leave immediately. If you can cannot express your thoughts in a quotable, orderly context, you are very likely not worth my time.
Video is information pablum. When you're talking to the intelligent, the written word is the way to go. Only use video when nothing but a moving image can serve (tip: rarely, if ever, is this the case); only use still images when words will not serve. Yes, an image is worth a thousand words: The problem is, they're not your words, they are the viewer's words.
I cannot emphasize enough how writing encourages discourse and thought, while video rarely does anything of the sort.
No. A 34 cent bulb will have a very limited lifetime. I priced the incandescents as I wrote the post, from the same source as the Cree LED bulbs. Decent incandescents, decent LED bulbs.
Even if we used 34 cents, the LED bulbs are *still* quite a bit less expensive in the end. Hell, even if your incandescents were *free*, the LED bulbs still kick their ass by a factor of three+.
Your numbers are nonsense. You say:
Here's the thing: the average lifespan of a 60w incandescent bulb is not 30k hours. It is 1200 hours. So you get to buy 25 incandescents. Add about $1.61 per bulb, or $40.25 in bulb costs alone (never mind the annoyance of changing it 25 times) over those 30k hours. Add your electric cost of $.10 * 1800 ($180), you get $220.25 for the incandescent.
The LED, however, WILL last 30k hours (and likely longer -- the $13 Cree comes with a ten year warranty). It costs $13, and the cost is 9 watts over 30k hours, or 270000wh. At the same .10/kwh, it is (270kwh * .10 = $27) is the operating cost. Total cost is then $13+$27, or $40.
The incandescent costs $220.25 - $40 more than the LED: ONE LED bulb saves you $180.75 over the equivalent 25 incandescent bulbs.
Buying an incandescent at this point is simply shooting yourself in the foot. Replace five bulbs, save yourself about $1000.00 over their lifetime, do better environmentally, up your reliability, reduce change events... I mean, really. Just, duh.
That "super expensive LED" costs about $13, and will save you a LOT of money over an incandescent over its lifetime. That's with a ten year warranty.