Lamps are not effective heaters. Yes, the heat does something, but with the bulb in the ceiling, it ends up mostly heating your attic, not your room. There's a reason that space heaters either have direct emission (IR heater) or a fan to blow the heat out into the room. And even at 100% efficiency, electric heat is not cost effective compared to gas heat (as you surely know living in Minnesota). Note also that when you use incandescents to light your driveway, the waste heat is not heating your home as the lamps are outdoors.
Yes, there are CFLs that will light quickly (before you get your finger off the switch) down to 10F. Below that, it can be dicey. If you need light to shovel your driveway, get a metal halide lamp, it's far brighter, more efficient and if you get the right one it will be lit up before your finger is off the on switch (like the headlamps in a car).
When you have concrete evidence of power companies switching to VA billing for residences, I'm ready to hear it. Until then, it's just crank junk.
> you know of any CFLs that won't trigger migraines in my wife or cause my peripheral vision to "flash"? I don't really care about the color temp, but the flickering and migraines are killer cons to CFLs.
CFLs flicker at over 20,000Hz. You can't see them flicker. Your peripheral vision can pick up flickering into the hundreds of hertz, but this is far far higher than that.
If reactive power were power, then the laws of thermodynamics wouldn't hold, because the power in minus the power used (emitted as heat and light) minus the reactive power would not be net zero.
And again, when the power factor drops, it doesn't changing anything about the power used, it only means you're using more current and less voltage. This does mean the electric company has to have more current available unless they can use proper capacitive or inductive adjustments to work around it. And they are good at working around it. This is why they don't mind and in fact suggest you use CFLs.
Motors cause the same problem, so A/C presents a big issue to the grid. They're already rigged to deal with it.
CFLs are 3x more efficient in lumens per watt (or perhaps a bit more). This is for equivalent amounts of light. Your argument that you need to add more light is no more valid than saying you need to add more light with incandescents.
Yes, if you replace a 90 watt incandescent with an "equivalent" CFL replacement it will be dimmer, because the marketing people for CFLs are listing bogus figures. But even adjusting for this, CFLs are still 3x more efficient per lumen And that is a BIG difference.
> Psychologically speaking, blue-tinted light is perceptually darker than reddish light even if it is of far greater brightness in terms of your actual ability to see and distinguish objects and color. And other things like skin tone are poorly perceived in fluorescent light as well, which contributes to that perception.
No it isn't. The eye is most receptive to green, which is right between blue and yellow and the eye picks up on both yellow and blue very well. Bright blues are not seen as nighttime, they in fact are seen as very bright. See mercury vapor lamps, arc lamps, metal halide lamps, an acetylene torch or even the sun.
Color rendition is a complex issue. If you get a CFL with the proper color temperature (just look at the CFL page on wikipedia), then skin tones look correct. Due the line spectra in fluorescent light, some other things may not render well depending on the CFL and the object. If you have an object which is colored through dyes, and it's trying to be green by mixing blue and yellow (instead of having any actual green reflection to it), it may look different under fluorescent light because the mix of blue and yellow emitted may not be equal on the CFL even if the overall color temperature is good. Again, note that skin is not one of these things. In general, recent fluorescent lamps are pretty good on color rendition (see color rendition index) but still are not as good as a hot radiator like incandescent bulbs or the sun.
> Fluorescent lights produce a discrete spectrum with very little coverage of the red end of the spectrum at all.
This is not true. Just look at the picture on wikipedia.
See the line spectra? The yellow to red area is very well covered.
> And if you have a power factor of 0.5 (not at all uncommon for CFLs), you are effectively only getting a 1.5x difference in wattage in terms of peak generator capacity.
Not only is 0.5 not uncommon, but figures close to it like 0.55 are the most common by far. But as to the latter part, again, this is all fixed by adjustments in the grid, these higher current peaks are not seen at the generators.
A halogen is putting off 6x the light as a regular incandescent bulb, so of course it produces more heat. It's also only slightly more efficient, not "much more efficient". A halogen might produce twice the light of an incandescent for a given power input. But that still means it's still turning 80% into heat, that's not a huge difference from turning 90% into heat. So a 300W halogen is making 240W of heat, compared to an equivalent CFL which would throw off maybe 27W of heat.
I just tried grabbing one of my fully-enclosed CFLs from my bathroom (after letting it warm up first), it didn't burn my hand. I was going to unscrew it from the socket (a trick from incandescent days, the faster you unscrew it, the less you burn yourself), but I realized I didn't need to, I could just rest my hand on it. It didn't burn my hand. This is not the case for the equivalent incandescent next to it, I had to take my hand off that quickly.
As an added bonus, I just touched the fluorescent (not CFL) torchiere bulb (55W) I use to light my room. It directly replaced a 300W halogen. It sure does get hot right at the filament, you're right about that. I didn't burn myself though as I would have by touching my 300W halogen.
You don't need a second layer of glass to filter out UV, all CFLs are already glass tubes and the phosphors are on the inside, so the photons are already filtered.
Supply goes down even in non-regulated markets when the demand goes down.
What's your point?
As to your latter stuff, you try to substitute your own argument (that we need to get rid of coal) for mine and then say my argument falls flat. But it's not my argument.
As to it being doing much in the short-term, there's more to things than the short-term. If we hadn't run out of oil near the coast, we couldn't have drilled in deep water and had the Macondo blowout, at least not until later.
There is no good argument for wasting limited resources when we can instead conserve them.
The government cannot censor material before it is printed by regular people. But if you worked for the government and write about intelligence you learned while there, then the government can review it and "suggest" redactions before it is printed.
That's what happened here, it's just they printed 10,000 copies that were insufficiently redacted, so those will be destroyed, the company compensated and then more copies with the proper redactions printed. As to the jokers making comments about digital copies, those would be destroyed and no one compensated, because the "buying up books" here isn't to get them off the market, they won't be going to market anyway. It's just to compensate for expenses of printing books they cannot now put on shelves as-is.
This is censorship, because it is the government restricting speech. But is is a special case of info from a government employee, and that is allowed under the law, whether you agree with it or not. It has been this way for some time, I used to have a paperback from the early 70s that advertised the government went to court to stop its publication because the author worked for the CIA before. That book was eventually published with some redactions as this one will too.
Assuming by CA you mean California, not Canada. Look up your baseline usage. You pay higher rates above those levels. Baseline rates are set by what's needed to live reasonably (i.e. heat and cool your house) in your area.
Telling people they can't live better if they are willing to pay is considered anti-American. That's why the reasons is to get every person to conserve as much as they can in their current lifestyle instead of telling them they can't have a large TV.
There's no reason to waste power, even if you use less than average, if you can use less, that's a good thing. This is a good way of accomplishing that.
I agree those sockets were a bad idea. But those are just your local laws. The laws in play here (leading to the end of this factory) only specify efficiency levels, not alternative sockets or CFL specifically.
Supply and demand. Reduce the demand and prices go down. Not just for you, but for everyone. Now some guy who must use electricity to run his respirator ends up paying less too.
Conservation has many payoffs, not just in your bill.
You need to chop up the DC and then reconvert it to a higher voltage anyway, a voltage that varies by LED (and not just by brand or model, by actual LED). DC supplies wouldn't fix this problem.
Besides, if you converted AC to DC centrally for your house, that converter would still produce heat, just in a different location.
Bad math and Jenny McCarthy-style pseudo science (with a Fox question mark no less!).
I'm ashamed of you slashdot.
Fluorescents are 3x as efficient as incandescents. Yes, the efficiency is exaggerated on the labels because the bulbs don't quite put out as much light as the incandescents they are comparing against. But even if you correct for that fluorescents are far more efficient.
Heck, to prove it, just light up a bulb and touch it. Feel that heat on the incandescent? That's wasted energy that didn't go to light. Now touch an equivalently bright fluorescent bulb, it's only a little warm.
Power factor doesn't mean it's using more power than you would think from the wattage, it means it's using more CURRENT and less voltage. Anyway, changing phase like this (low power factor) doesn't mean that the meter isn't measuring correctly. If this were true, people would be strapping inductors onto the lines in their house right before the meter to get free power.
Power factor is only an issue for the electric company, they have to adjust for it. And they are adept at adjusting for it. This is evidenced by how the electric companies are very interested in you using CFLs, my electric company sends me mail about it twice a year. If the low power factors of CFLs presented problems to them, they wouldn't do this, would they?
If you don't like bluish CFLs, get yellowish ones. There are 3 colors, one is very yellow.
I agree LEDs still have limitations. I'd like to get some for my hallway but I"m not ready to make that move yet.
Dimmers are not suitable for fluorescent or LED bulbs, each should really be dimmed with a control signal instead of a rheostat. Hopefully this kind of technology will be common in homes soon so we can get rid of the buzzing from dimming fluorescent and LEDs.
The government is subsidizing your fossil fuels significantly. You don't see it in your bill, because it isn't being subsidized by giving you money to give the electric companies to pay for electricity. We massively subsidize oil drilling and production.
Frankly, I do everything by them including reading, I can't see what your beef is. But besides that, you can use any technology you want that meets the efficiency regulations. Philips even is preparing incandescents that meet the regs!
You may already use little energy, buy using less would help. Even from you. I already use very little energy too (despite my big TV), and I also still work to save energy.
I use about 330kWh a month for my 1700 square foot house. That's about $40 worth at the inflated rates in my state.
Pro-environment doesn't mean you have to do without your home theater.
First of all, your neighbor isn't using 2kW of home theater, that's more than a regular circuit in the US will supply (1875W max). He's probably using about 200-300W of TV+receiver. Third of all, your neighbor's big TV is also regulated. Energystar and other agencies are looking to reduce power usage of TVs by 50% over the next few years. So your neighbor isn't getting a free ride while you are unfairly put upon.
Pro-environment means conserving energy. Which means not wasting it. It doesn't mean you have to do without lighting or heat or your TV.
The CAFE standards to not apply to commercial trucks. And adding 5mpg to commercial trucking is not realistic.
You also say "gas-powered vehicles", comercial vehicles are generally not gas-powered, they're Diesel-powered.
Electric cars would be nice, but we're not there yet. We're not even close. As we both mention, so much of our transport energy goes into trucking, and you can't truck things long distances with electric trucks just yet. We could run our transport trucks on natural gas, but that would more than eat up the surplus and eat into that which we use to generate electricity. Reducing electricity consumption would help with this problem.
And as to your last argument. I don't see how savings 1.75% of our total energy is in any way a "totally wrong place to go". It's a good start, and we can do more from there.
You really should consider actually arguing the issue instead of trying to substitute other arguments instead. Especially if you aren't even going to look at those.
Changing the temperature in your house requires you adapt to a new lifestyle. The regulators realize (correctly) that people will resist this. But when changing lightbulbs, you still get light, the same amount of light. You don't have to change your lifestyle, just change your bulb.
As to your idea of hammering people who use more energy with higher rates, they already do.
You get your first N kWh at one rate, your next M at a higher rate and anything beyond that at a much higher rate. So if you run all your electricity-sucking appliances, you do pay higher fees.
This policies are on top of that level of encouragement to save energy. And they're really not onerous.
You are making blind arguments instead of getting informed. You really should consider reversing these two things.
So this can cut energy usage in the US by about 1.75%.
And you say it doesn't count? That's a lot of energy.
Passenger cars use about 14% of the energy in the US. You would like to increase fuel economy average in cars 5mpg. This would reduce that energy use about 15% (5mpg out of 32mpg). That's an energy reduction of 2.2%.
So you ridicule one mandate as trivially small and suggest one that is only 25% larger as the real answer? Especially when the lighting one can be much more easily implemented as it is much easier and cheaper to replace light bulbs than to replace your car.
So that's 1/5th of all the energy used in residences.
That's not minuscule.
Your last argument is ridiculous. Every bit counts, just because one thing isn't done doesn't mean another thing done isn't useful.
And by they way they ARE mandating better fuel standards. The CAFE (required fuel economy average of cars sold) goes up 2.5mpg next year (first raise in a decade) and will go up another 4.8mpg over the next 8 years.
Just efficiency levels. You can choose any technology that meets that efficiency standard.
When energy costs and availability affect our way of life and security so much, using a statism to attack a move as logical as this just doesn't make sense.
In fact, you almost have to bribe someone to get a job interview!
There isn't really multi-week training, you are put on easier lines first and work up to your aptitude.
But just because there's a line to get in doesn't mean there's any job security. When things slow down, you simply aren't brought back next week.
When you get too old for the dextrous work or your fingers grow to be too large to do some work (because their lines are virtually all 16-20 year old women) or merely when someone else will do the job cheaper because they are younger, you are out on your ear.
Like I said, I don't hate Foxconn. But it's not the same as Ford where he employed workers long term and invested in their development.
Also, MS released group chat (for pay of course, it's a Gold feature) and then lets developers disable it in their games (like Modern Warfare).
Face it, feature sets change for devices over time.
The idea that this hack happened because Linux was removed is absurd. People like to hack stuff. People like to pirate stuff. 360 never had Linux removed and it was hacked. PSP never had Linux removed and it was hacked. DS never had Linux removed and it was hacked.
The Linux sucked anyway, you'd do better to use a netbook.
I have the most recent Mac Mini. With Plex, it cannot play full-screen 1080p, even 24fps (my test is Avatar, full blu-ray file). XBMC nightly builds can do it if you have h.264 acceleration on, so maybe Plex will work soon.
All in all the Mini (even my 2.66GHz one) is probably not a good choice due to the slow CPU and high price.
It's too bad too since the Mini does HDMI audio (7.1 channels, 24-bit, 192KHz).
Also, if the Mini wakes up with no TV attached (because your amp is set to another input) it switches audio back to the internal speaker from HDMI audio out and you have to reset it.
Slashdot Mirror
MS is big into bragging lately. Braggadocio may be their #1 product now.
Lamps are not effective heaters. Yes, the heat does something, but with the bulb in the ceiling, it ends up mostly heating your attic, not your room. There's a reason that space heaters either have direct emission (IR heater) or a fan to blow the heat out into the room. And even at 100% efficiency, electric heat is not cost effective compared to gas heat (as you surely know living in Minnesota). Note also that when you use incandescents to light your driveway, the waste heat is not heating your home as the lamps are outdoors.
Yes, there are CFLs that will light quickly (before you get your finger off the switch) down to 10F. Below that, it can be dicey. If you need light to shovel your driveway, get a metal halide lamp, it's far brighter, more efficient and if you get the right one it will be lit up before your finger is off the on switch (like the headlamps in a car).
When you have concrete evidence of power companies switching to VA billing for residences, I'm ready to hear it. Until then, it's just crank junk.
> you know of any CFLs that won't trigger migraines in my wife or cause my peripheral vision to "flash"? I don't really care about the color temp, but the flickering and migraines are killer cons to CFLs.
CFLs flicker at over 20,000Hz. You can't see them flicker. Your peripheral vision can pick up flickering into the hundreds of hertz, but this is far far higher than that.
If reactive power were power, then the laws of thermodynamics wouldn't hold, because the power in minus the power used (emitted as heat and light) minus the reactive power would not be net zero.
And again, when the power factor drops, it doesn't changing anything about the power used, it only means you're using more current and less voltage. This does mean the electric company has to have more current available unless they can use proper capacitive or inductive adjustments to work around it. And they are good at working around it. This is why they don't mind and in fact suggest you use CFLs.
Motors cause the same problem, so A/C presents a big issue to the grid. They're already rigged to deal with it.
CFLs are 3x more efficient in lumens per watt (or perhaps a bit more). This is for equivalent amounts of light. Your argument that you need to add more light is no more valid than saying you need to add more light with incandescents.
Yes, if you replace a 90 watt incandescent with an "equivalent" CFL replacement it will be dimmer, because the marketing people for CFLs are listing bogus figures. But even adjusting for this, CFLs are still 3x more efficient per lumen And that is a BIG difference.
> Psychologically speaking, blue-tinted light is perceptually darker than reddish light even if it is of far greater brightness in terms of your actual ability to see and distinguish objects and color. And other things like skin tone are poorly perceived in fluorescent light as well, which contributes to that perception.
No it isn't. The eye is most receptive to green, which is right between blue and yellow and the eye picks up on both yellow and blue very well. Bright blues are not seen as nighttime, they in fact are seen as very bright. See mercury vapor lamps, arc lamps, metal halide lamps, an acetylene torch or even the sun.
Color rendition is a complex issue. If you get a CFL with the proper color temperature (just look at the CFL page on wikipedia), then skin tones look correct. Due the line spectra in fluorescent light, some other things may not render well depending on the CFL and the object. If you have an object which is colored through dyes, and it's trying to be green by mixing blue and yellow (instead of having any actual green reflection to it), it may look different under fluorescent light because the mix of blue and yellow emitted may not be equal on the CFL even if the overall color temperature is good. Again, note that skin is not one of these things. In general, recent fluorescent lamps are pretty good on color rendition (see color rendition index) but still are not as good as a hot radiator like incandescent bulbs or the sun.
> Fluorescent lights produce a discrete spectrum with very little coverage of the red end of the spectrum at all.
This is not true. Just look at the picture on wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp
See the line spectra? The yellow to red area is very well covered.
> And if you have a power factor of 0.5 (not at all uncommon for CFLs), you are effectively only getting a 1.5x difference in wattage in terms of peak generator capacity.
Not only is 0.5 not uncommon, but figures close to it like 0.55 are the most common by far. But as to the latter part, again, this is all fixed by adjustments in the grid, these higher current peaks are not seen at the generators.
A halogen is putting off 6x the light as a regular incandescent bulb, so of course it produces more heat. It's also only slightly more efficient, not "much more efficient". A halogen might produce twice the light of an incandescent for a given power input. But that still means it's still turning 80% into heat, that's not a huge difference from turning 90% into heat. So a 300W halogen is making 240W of heat, compared to an equivalent CFL which would throw off maybe 27W of heat.
I just tried grabbing one of my fully-enclosed CFLs from my bathroom (after letting it warm up first), it didn't burn my hand. I was going to unscrew it from the socket (a trick from incandescent days, the faster you unscrew it, the less you burn yourself), but I realized I didn't need to, I could just rest my hand on it. It didn't burn my hand. This is not the case for the equivalent incandescent next to it, I had to take my hand off that quickly.
As an added bonus, I just touched the fluorescent (not CFL) torchiere bulb (55W) I use to light my room. It directly replaced a 300W halogen. It sure does get hot right at the filament, you're right about that. I didn't burn myself though as I would have by touching my 300W halogen.
You don't need a second layer of glass to filter out UV, all CFLs are already glass tubes and the phosphors are on the inside, so the photons are already filtered.
Supply goes down even in non-regulated markets when the demand goes down.
What's your point?
As to your latter stuff, you try to substitute your own argument (that we need to get rid of coal) for mine and then say my argument falls flat. But it's not my argument.
As to it being doing much in the short-term, there's more to things than the short-term. If we hadn't run out of oil near the coast, we couldn't have drilled in deep water and had the Macondo blowout, at least not until later.
There is no good argument for wasting limited resources when we can instead conserve them.
The government cannot censor material before it is printed by regular people. But if you worked for the government and write about intelligence you learned while there, then the government can review it and "suggest" redactions before it is printed.
That's what happened here, it's just they printed 10,000 copies that were insufficiently redacted, so those will be destroyed, the company compensated and then more copies with the proper redactions printed. As to the jokers making comments about digital copies, those would be destroyed and no one compensated, because the "buying up books" here isn't to get them off the market, they won't be going to market anyway. It's just to compensate for expenses of printing books they cannot now put on shelves as-is.
This is censorship, because it is the government restricting speech. But is is a special case of info from a government employee, and that is allowed under the law, whether you agree with it or not. It has been this way for some time, I used to have a paperback from the early 70s that advertised the government went to court to stop its publication because the author worked for the CIA before. That book was eventually published with some redactions as this one will too.
Assuming by CA you mean California, not Canada. Look up your baseline usage. You pay higher rates above those levels. Baseline rates are set by what's needed to live reasonably (i.e. heat and cool your house) in your area.
Telling people they can't live better if they are willing to pay is considered anti-American. That's why the reasons is to get every person to conserve as much as they can in their current lifestyle instead of telling them they can't have a large TV.
There's no reason to waste power, even if you use less than average, if you can use less, that's a good thing. This is a good way of accomplishing that.
I agree those sockets were a bad idea. But those are just your local laws. The laws in play here (leading to the end of this factory) only specify efficiency levels, not alternative sockets or CFL specifically.
Supply and demand. Reduce the demand and prices go down. Not just for you, but for everyone. Now some guy who must use electricity to run his respirator ends up paying less too.
Conservation has many payoffs, not just in your bill.
You need to chop up the DC and then reconvert it to a higher voltage anyway, a voltage that varies by LED (and not just by brand or model, by actual LED). DC supplies wouldn't fix this problem.
Besides, if you converted AC to DC centrally for your house, that converter would still produce heat, just in a different location.
Bad math and Jenny McCarthy-style pseudo science (with a Fox question mark no less!).
I'm ashamed of you slashdot.
Fluorescents are 3x as efficient as incandescents. Yes, the efficiency is exaggerated on the labels because the bulbs don't quite put out as much light as the incandescents they are comparing against. But even if you correct for that fluorescents are far more efficient.
Heck, to prove it, just light up a bulb and touch it. Feel that heat on the incandescent? That's wasted energy that didn't go to light. Now touch an equivalently bright fluorescent bulb, it's only a little warm.
Power factor doesn't mean it's using more power than you would think from the wattage, it means it's using more CURRENT and less voltage. Anyway, changing phase like this (low power factor) doesn't mean that the meter isn't measuring correctly. If this were true, people would be strapping inductors onto the lines in their house right before the meter to get free power.
Power factor is only an issue for the electric company, they have to adjust for it. And they are adept at adjusting for it. This is evidenced by how the electric companies are very interested in you using CFLs, my electric company sends me mail about it twice a year. If the low power factors of CFLs presented problems to them, they wouldn't do this, would they?
If you don't like bluish CFLs, get yellowish ones. There are 3 colors, one is very yellow.
I agree LEDs still have limitations. I'd like to get some for my hallway but I"m not ready to make that move yet.
Dimmers are not suitable for fluorescent or LED bulbs, each should really be dimmed with a control signal instead of a rheostat. Hopefully this kind of technology will be common in homes soon so we can get rid of the buzzing from dimming fluorescent and LEDs.
The government is subsidizing your fossil fuels significantly. You don't see it in your bill, because it isn't being subsidized by giving you money to give the electric companies to pay for electricity. We massively subsidize oil drilling and production.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=how-much-in-subsidies-do-fossil-fue-2009-09-18
Your electric bill would be noticeably higher without these subsidies and solar would look correspondingly a little cheaper.
And they are required to by law.
http://library.findlaw.com/2002/Dec/19/132442.html
The high-frequency ballasts that run these bulbs have been around for 20 years at least.
Frankly, I do everything by them including reading, I can't see what your beef is. But besides that, you can use any technology you want that meets the efficiency regulations. Philips even is preparing incandescents that meet the regs!
You may already use little energy, buy using less would help. Even from you. I already use very little energy too (despite my big TV), and I also still work to save energy.
I use about 330kWh a month for my 1700 square foot house. That's about $40 worth at the inflated rates in my state.
Pro-environment doesn't mean you have to do without your home theater.
First of all, your neighbor isn't using 2kW of home theater, that's more than a regular circuit in the US will supply (1875W max). He's probably using about 200-300W of TV+receiver. Third of all, your neighbor's big TV is also regulated. Energystar and other agencies are looking to reduce power usage of TVs by 50% over the next few years. So your neighbor isn't getting a free ride while you are unfairly put upon.
Pro-environment means conserving energy. Which means not wasting it. It doesn't mean you have to do without lighting or heat or your TV.
It's a 1.75% savings in total energy.
The CAFE standards to not apply to commercial trucks. And adding 5mpg to commercial trucking is not realistic.
You also say "gas-powered vehicles", comercial vehicles are generally not gas-powered, they're Diesel-powered.
Electric cars would be nice, but we're not there yet. We're not even close. As we both mention, so much of our transport energy goes into trucking, and you can't truck things long distances with electric trucks just yet. We could run our transport trucks on natural gas, but that would more than eat up the surplus and eat into that which we use to generate electricity. Reducing electricity consumption would help with this problem.
And as to your last argument. I don't see how savings 1.75% of our total energy is in any way a "totally wrong place to go". It's a good start, and we can do more from there.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,509669,00.html
You really should consider actually arguing the issue instead of trying to substitute other arguments instead. Especially if you aren't even going to look at those.
Changing the temperature in your house requires you adapt to a new lifestyle. The regulators realize (correctly) that people will resist this. But when changing lightbulbs, you still get light, the same amount of light. You don't have to change your lifestyle, just change your bulb.
As to your idea of hammering people who use more energy with higher rates, they already do.
http://www.pge.com/tariffs/tm2/pdf/ELEC_SCHEDS_E-1.pdf
You get your first N kWh at one rate, your next M at a higher rate and anything beyond that at a much higher rate. So if you run all your electricity-sucking appliances, you do pay higher fees.
This policies are on top of that level of encouragement to save energy. And they're really not onerous.
You are making blind arguments instead of getting informed. You really should consider reversing these two things.
So this can cut energy usage in the US by about 1.75%.
And you say it doesn't count? That's a lot of energy.
Passenger cars use about 14% of the energy in the US. You would like to increase fuel economy average in cars 5mpg. This would reduce that energy use about 15% (5mpg out of 32mpg). That's an energy reduction of 2.2%.
So you ridicule one mandate as trivially small and suggest one that is only 25% larger as the real answer? Especially when the lighting one can be much more easily implemented as it is much easier and cheaper to replace light bulbs than to replace your car.
So that's 1/5th of all the energy used in residences.
That's not minuscule.
Your last argument is ridiculous. Every bit counts, just because one thing isn't done doesn't mean another thing done isn't useful.
And by they way they ARE mandating better fuel standards. The CAFE (required fuel economy average of cars sold) goes up 2.5mpg next year (first raise in a decade) and will go up another 4.8mpg over the next 8 years.
Just efficiency levels. You can choose any technology that meets that efficiency standard.
When energy costs and availability affect our way of life and security so much, using a statism to attack a move as logical as this just doesn't make sense.
When posting, there's a popup at the bottom next to submit. Set it to "plain old text" so that your carriage returns aren't stripped out.
I'm unclear why "plain old text" isn't the default because it's how most people expect it to work.
They have more applicants than they need.
And what do you think happens when they get their new plant near Chongqing up and running?
Line workers will not be transferred to the new location, they will simply lose their jobs.
In fact, you almost have to bribe someone to get a job interview!
There isn't really multi-week training, you are put on easier lines first and work up to your aptitude.
But just because there's a line to get in doesn't mean there's any job security. When things slow down, you simply aren't brought back next week.
When you get too old for the dextrous work or your fingers grow to be too large to do some work (because their lines are virtually all 16-20 year old women) or merely when someone else will do the job cheaper because they are younger, you are out on your ear.
Like I said, I don't hate Foxconn. But it's not the same as Ford where he employed workers long term and invested in their development.
Ford wanted his workers to have a living wage, to be able to afford the products they made.
Foxconn doesn't even employ workers long-term, they hire on a week-by-week basis.
I actually don't even dislike Foxconn, but it's not the same as the middle-class building that Ford did.
Also, MS released group chat (for pay of course, it's a Gold feature) and then lets developers disable it in their games (like Modern Warfare).
Face it, feature sets change for devices over time.
The idea that this hack happened because Linux was removed is absurd. People like to hack stuff. People like to pirate stuff. 360 never had Linux removed and it was hacked. PSP never had Linux removed and it was hacked. DS never had Linux removed and it was hacked.
The Linux sucked anyway, you'd do better to use a netbook.
I have the most recent Mac Mini. With Plex, it cannot play full-screen 1080p, even 24fps (my test is Avatar, full blu-ray file). XBMC nightly builds can do it if you have h.264 acceleration on, so maybe Plex will work soon.
All in all the Mini (even my 2.66GHz one) is probably not a good choice due to the slow CPU and high price.
It's too bad too since the Mini does HDMI audio (7.1 channels, 24-bit, 192KHz).
Also, if the Mini wakes up with no TV attached (because your amp is set to another input) it switches audio back to the internal speaker from HDMI audio out and you have to reset it.
They just roll in the rootkit.
I find the concept of rooting 98 to be bizarre. It's pre-rooted anyway.