I'm sorry, but 5p per year per household *is* miniscule - there's no denying that. 5p x population seems like a lot, but then you need to divide it by the population again to see that 5p per year really is just that - 5p. If there were a quadrillion people in the world, then we can make 5p x quadrillion sound like a stupid sum - that doesn't mean it counts. It's all proportional to the much bigger energy drainers.
Talking about such trivial energy wastage as though it's important is doing the damage in my opinion, because it's giving the wrong priorities (by a giant margin in this case). If we were to get electric cars even *1* minute sooner for everbody that would be the equivalent of perhaps years of using a standby feature.
"The result of this lack of meaningful numbers and facts? We are inundated with a flood of crazy innumerate codswallop. The BBC doles out advice on how we can do our bit to save the planet - for example - switch off your mobile phone charger when it's not in use; if anyone objects that mobile phone chargers are not actually our number one form of energy consumption, the mantra - every little helps - is wheeled out."
"Companies also contribute to the daily codswallop as they tell us how wonderful they are, or how they can help us "do our bit." BP's website, for example, celebrates the reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution they hope to achieve by changing the paint used for painting BP's ships. Does anyone fall for this? Surely everyone will guess that it's not the exterior paint job, it's the stuff inside the tanker that deserves attention, if society's CO2 emissions are to be significantly cut?"
"Modern phone chargers, when left plugged in with no phone attached, use about half a watt.......... about 0.01 kWh per day....... the BBC's advice, always unplug the phone charger, could potentially reduce their energy consumption by one hundredth of one percent (if only they would do it). Every little helps! I don't think so. Obsessively switching off the phone-charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon."
Okay, we'll sort out that out after the 456,917,831 other things which waste more time/energy/money. The top 100 are several orders of magnitude more important than this.
It's really a drop in the ocean. It's the equivalent of spending 5 minutes trying to cut open a can of shaving cream to get the last little bit.
I used to go a little OTT on saving paper, or closing the fridge door ASAP, until I realised that the ink is orders of magnitude more expensive, and that the worry (no matter how little) of keeping the fridge closed is not worth the relatively small amount of money lost each year.
We don't live forever. Let's make life more convenient whilst yes, picking the sensible low and/or middle hanging fruit for energy savers.
Because of the inverse cube law for wireless power transfer, I think we'll ultimately be using this kind of laser technology in future, fitted to house ceilings and street lamps. If blocking obstacles become an issue, then the receiving device can also send a purely informational laser back to the source to make sure that it's okay to beam the power laser at it, and in this case the initial source power laser can be instantly shut off, similar to those 'SawStop' table saws that shut off in milliseconds if the hand gets in the way to prevent loss of fingers.
You're right, they're far better, because they theoretically can produce any possible sound from the real world as well as any sounds you can't imagine. Computers just aren't fast enough to synthesize complex acoustic interactions properly in realtime yet.
Not to mention, it's the harmonies and rhythm that counts a lot more in my opinion.
So why doesn't everyone use heat pumps for use in the home? I researched this a while back, and I think the main problem is noise (installation is maybe a secondary consideration). They aren't exactly silent.
Or 1000w halogen floodlights. I don't have any 'seasoning disorder' but 60w bulbs to me make rooms look like caves. I'll probably be upgrading to a HID 1-2kw floodlight to put in my living room sometime soon;)
It's a bad idea I think because it encourages the player to perform worse in general than he would otherwise. I remember the shoot-em-up SWIV on the Amiga did this. It was actually a good idea to lose a single life just before the really tricky bits. In the end, you saved more lives this way.
Instead, how about we use these things called "difficulty levels"? You know, like easy, medium, hard etc., and then it's up to the game creator to make sure a consistent challenge is maintained throughout the game.
Nice answer. I would have also added that the supposedly intended meaning that anon gave seems so incredibly trivial (even though it's not mathematically true) that like you say, it's just a play on words. So trivial and obvious, that I can't imagine that to be the meaning at all.
And I'll gladly avoid working on any of your projects.
What, you think I actually enjoy working on code like this or that I really have a choice here?
Guess what. Visual C++ has something called 'code collapsing'. This can be applied to comments too. Great eh? Except it isn't, because Visual C++ has great fun expanding such code every so often randomly and at a whim. I value efficiency and flexibility, and code which might be 'dead' to you might very well come in handy later if it's better in a certain way.
For the record, I probably exaggerated when I said most of my code is commented code. But still, a good proportion is, and admittedly, some of it could be probably be wiped out. I try to get rid of any dead wood code every so often.
Guess what else would help me cut down on commented code? Yep, loop unswitching. Sigh.
I don't know if you have put something else in place of it. And I don't want to wade through a ton of comments why you added a certain bit of code to replace it either.
Yeah, I'd probably agree there, although I'm pretty sometimes bad at adding description comments, only to regret it later.
Use the damn CVS and label it. If we need that code in the future we can pull it out and see if it can be integrated in the current code base.
That's all fine and dandy, but then what happens if you want to not only incorporate bits and pieces from an older version (rather than the thing wholesale), but also where the latest version uses extra code, and so it becomes difficult to know where to insert the bits without worrying that doing so won't wreck the ordering of the code (x needs to execute before y before z etc.). So there's this messy 'interleaving' of code which can be hard to avoid.
About the 'other options', I often find that I need to keep two different pieces of code that essentially do the same thing, but there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach (often speed versus flexibility). I obviously have to choose one approach, but I keep both just in case I eventually decide to go for the other approach.
Hence, I usually have more commented code than actual code.
This would be fixed if Visual C++ etc. actually allowed one to force loop *unswitching* (different to loop unrolling!). Alas it does not, so you get very messy code, and/or loss of speed.
That seems to be the position of many "new age" spiritualities, although they come with their own baggage.
Exactly, the new agers would be the closest, although I certainly don't hold the extra arbitrary beliefs they do. Also apart from our 'souls', I don't really think anything supernatural is going on (unless you count the universe juggling trillions of atoms as being supernatural, which is pretty incredible when you think about it).
The idea that the universe exists by virtue of being observed
I wasn't so much thinking of existing by being observed so much as us actually creating it (or some subset of 'us' as perhaps they're not existing on Earth at this moment).
I don't know why this isn't mentioned more often, but there is something simpler than both of these cases.
How about that WE created the universe. We already exist, and the idea that we have an eternal soul is no more far-fetched than believing an eternal god exists. In fact it's less absurd, as we have proof of our own existence, at least in corporeal form.
At the least, I'm still amazed there aren't more people who are 'not sure' about a big entity (god or whatever), but think that we each have some kind of eternal 'soul'. I certainly fall into that camp.
Just out of interest, does someone like this get that miniscule 0.2% cut of the money pie when a song sells, or has he somehow escaped the clutches of the publisher?
I think what confuses me more than the result is why this study hadn't already been performed already. It's such an obvious study that everyone would be interested about.
I'm not so sure about the false dichotomy again here. Things aren't black and white, there are shades of grey, so mail should be sorted according to a rating, rather than a seperate folder.
Think of the potential reliability of a purely glass-and-metal structure in a hard vacuum...
I would tend to think that thin, flexible OLEDs would have better reliability still (once they get the blue OLED lifetime issues sorted). They're also solid state, which has to count for something. Glass/metal/vacuum sounds heavy/bulky too...?
Displays aren't like music which can offer many orders of magnitude of quality. OLEDs may not be a panacea, but further improvements are diminishing returns. They're so close, and will be almost perfect in say 10-20 years.
Personally I cannot wait to *remove* more screen brightness from my computer monitor
When I updated the light in our living room from 20w to 1000w halogen floodlight (to imitate daylight), the brightness of the screen is better brighter. It's just when there's a dark background that the bright screen appears overly bright. In any case, OLEDs offer far more than just brighter screens (which can be made darker anyway).
If battery tech were no object (infinitely powerful and capacity), and carbon buckyballs/nanotubes were trivial to make, how light, big and quiet in theory could we make a 'jetpack'?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but 5p per year per household *is* miniscule - there's no denying that. 5p x population seems like a lot, but then you need to divide it by the population again to see that 5p per year really is just that - 5p. If there were a quadrillion people in the world, then we can make 5p x quadrillion sound like a stupid sum - that doesn't mean it counts. It's all proportional to the much bigger energy drainers.
Talking about such trivial energy wastage as though it's important is doing the damage in my opinion, because it's giving the wrong priorities (by a giant margin in this case). If we were to get electric cars even *1* minute sooner for everbody that would be the equivalent of perhaps years of using a standby feature.
I suggest reading this, not for me to my prove point, but simply because it's really an interesting read anyway:
http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/ps/1.112.pdf
Here's some choice quotes:
"The result of this lack of meaningful numbers and facts? We are inundated with a flood of crazy innumerate codswallop. The BBC doles out advice on how we can do our bit to save the planet - for example - switch off your mobile phone charger when it's not in use; if anyone objects that mobile phone chargers are not actually our number one form of energy consumption, the mantra - every little helps - is wheeled out."
"Companies also contribute to the daily codswallop as they tell us how wonderful they are, or how they can help us "do our bit." BP's website, for example, celebrates the reductions in carbon dioxide (CO2) pollution they hope to achieve by changing the paint used for painting BP's ships. Does anyone fall for this? Surely everyone will guess that it's not the exterior paint job, it's the stuff inside the tanker that deserves attention, if society's CO2 emissions are to be significantly cut?"
"Modern phone chargers, when left plugged in with no phone attached, use about half a watt.......... about 0.01 kWh per day. ...... the BBC's advice, always unplug the phone charger, could potentially reduce their energy consumption by one hundredth of one percent (if only they would do it). Every little helps! I don't think so. Obsessively switching off the phone-charger is like bailing the Titanic with a teaspoon."
Okay, we'll sort out that out after the 456,917,831 other things which waste more time/energy/money. The top 100 are several orders of magnitude more important than this.
It's really a drop in the ocean. It's the equivalent of spending 5 minutes trying to cut open a can of shaving cream to get the last little bit.
I used to go a little OTT on saving paper, or closing the fridge door ASAP, until I realised that the ink is orders of magnitude more expensive, and that the worry (no matter how little) of keeping the fridge closed is not worth the relatively small amount of money lost each year.
We don't live forever. Let's make life more convenient whilst yes, picking the sensible low and/or middle hanging fruit for energy savers.
In other related news, they've kept up a model helicopter in the air by transferring power by laser:
http://www.brahmand.com/news/Mini-helicopter-flies-using-laser-power/4824/3/13.html
Because of the inverse cube law for wireless power transfer, I think we'll ultimately be using this kind of laser technology in future, fitted to house ceilings and street lamps. If blocking obstacles become an issue, then the receiving device can also send a purely informational laser back to the source to make sure that it's okay to beam the power laser at it, and in this case the initial source power laser can be instantly shut off, similar to those 'SawStop' table saws that shut off in milliseconds if the hand gets in the way to prevent loss of fingers.
It won't cost that much more, especially with 85% efficiency @ 15cm.
I'm prepared to go down to as much as 10% efficiency or maybe worse so that I can sit at the other side of the room if I want to.
And TV standbys if done properly probably cost around 5p per year. Not a fortune.
My laptop power transformer is pretty light, and to me it would be worth the extra weight to allow me to rid the ubiquitous wire.
No AC (live in the UK ;)
I wonder if it's theoretically possible for a heatpump/AC to be silent or near-silent (short of having it far away like underground or something).
Synthesizers are never as good as the real thing
You're right, they're far better, because they theoretically can produce any possible sound from the real world as well as any sounds you can't imagine. Computers just aren't fast enough to synthesize complex acoustic interactions properly in realtime yet.
Not to mention, it's the harmonies and rhythm that counts a lot more in my opinion.
So why doesn't everyone use heat pumps for use in the home? I researched this a while back, and I think the main problem is noise (installation is maybe a secondary consideration). They aren't exactly silent.
Incandescents won't help. Sunlight will.
Or 1000w halogen floodlights. I don't have any 'seasoning disorder' but 60w bulbs to me make rooms look like caves. I'll probably be upgrading to a HID 1-2kw floodlight to put in my living room sometime soon ;)
Everything is just 'discovered' - it's just that some things have more layers of ideas than others.
Can't you connect any of the portables via HDMI to a monitor already?
It's a bad idea I think because it encourages the player to perform worse in general than he would otherwise. I remember the shoot-em-up SWIV on the Amiga did this. It was actually a good idea to lose a single life just before the really tricky bits. In the end, you saved more lives this way.
Instead, how about we use these things called "difficulty levels"? You know, like easy, medium, hard etc., and then it's up to the game creator to make sure a consistent challenge is maintained throughout the game.
Nice answer. I would have also added that the supposedly intended meaning that anon gave seems so incredibly trivial (even though it's not mathematically true) that like you say, it's just a play on words. So trivial and obvious, that I can't imagine that to be the meaning at all.
And I'll gladly avoid working on any of your projects.
What, you think I actually enjoy working on code like this or that I really have a choice here?
Guess what. Visual C++ has something called 'code collapsing'. This can be applied to comments too. Great eh? Except it isn't, because Visual C++ has great fun expanding such code every so often randomly and at a whim. I value efficiency and flexibility, and code which might be 'dead' to you might very well come in handy later if it's better in a certain way.
For the record, I probably exaggerated when I said most of my code is commented code. But still, a good proportion is, and admittedly, some of it could be probably be wiped out. I try to get rid of any dead wood code every so often.
Guess what else would help me cut down on commented code? Yep, loop unswitching. Sigh.
I don't know if you have put something else in place of it. And I don't want to wade through a ton of comments why you added a certain bit of code to replace it either.
Yeah, I'd probably agree there, although I'm pretty sometimes bad at adding description comments, only to regret it later.
Use the damn CVS and label it. If we need that code in the future we can pull it out and see if it can be integrated in the current code base.
That's all fine and dandy, but then what happens if you want to not only incorporate bits and pieces from an older version (rather than the thing wholesale), but also where the latest version uses extra code, and so it becomes difficult to know where to insert the bits without worrying that doing so won't wreck the ordering of the code (x needs to execute before y before z etc.). So there's this messy 'interleaving' of code which can be hard to avoid.
About the 'other options', I often find that I need to keep two different pieces of code that essentially do the same thing, but there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach (often speed versus flexibility). I obviously have to choose one approach, but I keep both just in case I eventually decide to go for the other approach.
Hence, I usually have more commented code than actual code.
This would be fixed if Visual C++ etc. actually allowed one to force loop *unswitching* (different to loop unrolling!). Alas it does not, so you get very messy code, and/or loss of speed.
That seems to be the position of many "new age" spiritualities, although they come with their own baggage.
Exactly, the new agers would be the closest, although I certainly don't hold the extra arbitrary beliefs they do. Also apart from our 'souls', I don't really think anything supernatural is going on (unless you count the universe juggling trillions of atoms as being supernatural, which is pretty incredible when you think about it).
The idea that the universe exists by virtue of being observed
I wasn't so much thinking of existing by being observed so much as us actually creating it (or some subset of 'us' as perhaps they're not existing on Earth at this moment).
I don't know why this isn't mentioned more often, but there is something simpler than both of these cases.
How about that WE created the universe. We already exist, and the idea that we have an eternal soul is no more far-fetched than believing an eternal god exists. In fact it's less absurd, as we have proof of our own existence, at least in corporeal form.
At the least, I'm still amazed there aren't more people who are 'not sure' about a big entity (god or whatever), but think that we each have some kind of eternal 'soul'. I certainly fall into that camp.
Just out of interest, does someone like this get that miniscule 0.2% cut of the money pie when a song sells, or has he somehow escaped the clutches of the publisher?
I think what confuses me more than the result is why this study hadn't already been performed already. It's such an obvious study that everyone would be interested about.
What gives?
I'm not so sure about the false dichotomy again here. Things aren't black and white, there are shades of grey, so mail should be sorted according to a rating, rather than a seperate folder.
Think of the potential reliability of a purely glass-and-metal structure in a hard vacuum...
I would tend to think that thin, flexible OLEDs would have better reliability still (once they get the blue OLED lifetime issues sorted). They're also solid state, which has to count for something. Glass/metal/vacuum sounds heavy/bulky too...?
Displays aren't like music which can offer many orders of magnitude of quality. OLEDs may not be a panacea, but further improvements are diminishing returns. They're so close, and will be almost perfect in say 10-20 years.
Personally I cannot wait to *remove* more screen brightness from my computer monitor
When I updated the light in our living room from 20w to 1000w halogen floodlight (to imitate daylight), the brightness of the screen is better brighter. It's just when there's a dark background that the bright screen appears overly bright. In any case, OLEDs offer far more than just brighter screens (which can be made darker anyway).
If battery tech were no object (infinitely powerful and capacity), and carbon buckyballs/nanotubes were trivial to make, how light, big and quiet in theory could we make a 'jetpack'?
I'd say pinball dreams is in many ways better. My brother has probably got the best scores for that in the world on all tables.
"ten times smaller". Does that mean area-wise or length-wise? I never can tell; these things are so ambiguous.