...we finally not only have job growth (albeit still weak), the unemployment rate dropped a percentage point, and I think probably will drop two or three more at least by next year's election.
No, we don't.. The unemployment rate (a percentage statistic) went down because people are leaving the work force (though some jobs were added). They've given up, retired, settled on lower-paying jobs, or whatever, but this notion that it's just a little weak is nonsense. The universe of eligible employees just got smaller. People are still losing their jobs, and none of these windbags are even discussing engineering a way to fix it.
And while I wouldn't vote for Newt, at least he at one point in his life uttered the phrase ''I would rather rely on engineers than diplomats...". It's a start.
The NSF is now requiring this as part of grant applications. You have to have a data management plan that includes the public deposit of both the data and results from grant funded work. Other funding orgs are following suit.
This is a fairly major project at the university I work for, both from the in-process data management perspective (keeping field researchers from storing their only copies on thumbdrives and laptops) and from the long-term repository perspective for holding the data when the grant is completed (that's what I'm involved with).
Storage is cheap. Convincing university administrators to pay for keeping it accessible is another problem, but the NSF position is helping.
I don't know about him/her, but I bought six 10W CFLs to replace the 75W incandescent bulbs in my bedroom in 1988. Having a west-facing upstairs room in Arizona during the summer is hot enough without an extra 450W of space heat from lighting (along with my 286, some tube-based HAM gear, CRTs, etc.). Changing to CFL made a huge difference.
The CFLs I bought were made by Commercial Electric, and weren't the spiral type. These had four 4" glass 'rods', 3/8" in diameter, which were connected together in such a way as to make one continuous tube. They would flicker and blink for about a second when first turned on, but once lit were at full brightness (unlike the CFLs in my current home which take 30s to warm up). The tubes were also replaceable (they unplugged from the base with 2 pins) but I never had to replace one in the 12 years I lived there. It's been a long time, but I think they were actually for commercial lighting purposes, not residential. IIRC they were about $12/ea (1988 dollars).
I guess my point is that they have been around for a long time, just not cheaply. Oh, and the store was the Home Depot1/2 mile from where I lived at the time.
I believe in individual freedom, but I also don't want YOUR individual freedom to infringe on MY individual freedom.
That statement pretty well defines Libertarianism as it is understood by most; I'm free to do whatever I want, as long as it doesn't infringe on your freedom to do whatever you want.
I'm not trying to start a semantic flame war, and I agree that the definition of Liberalism has been warped (it seems now to mean "do what you want and someone else will pay for it"; your opinion may vary). That definition is what most people accept, however, and like most of its mirror philosophies on the right, it does not advocate individual freedom for everyone (it divides individuals into classes).
Liberalism is the idea that everyone should be free to do what they want to do.
I think the word you're looking for, at least in the USA, is "Libertarianism". Both the left (hate-speech/crime laws, social justice via tax code) and right (religiosity) routinely act counter to that idea, regardless of what their ideologues might say in public.
If this is actually true, you should probably get it checked out by a licensed electrical contractor. You (or a neighbor) may have a loose or bad neutral connection that is causing the current to flow on the (usually grounded) coax lines. I've seen this before, and it can burn your house down (coax is not designed to carry house current on the shield). Electricity doesn't just take the "path of least resistance", it takes ALL paths that it can.
With regard to point #2, I (as a residential customer) already pay different rates depending on the hour here in AZ. SRP, one of our local utilities, has a time-of-use system with a digital meter they can read and program remotely. Currently it only has 2 rate schedules, but it can support up to four.
During on-peak (1pm - 8pm; M-F) power is twice what the standard rate payers pay. But it's less than half during off-peak hours and we've tried to shift most of our usage to those times. Laundry, dishes, A/C, lighting, pool pump, etc. are all timed to run during off-peak only as much as possible. All lighting is CF or LED (even the night-lights).
Granted, when it's 115F outside the A/C will run some. But we pre-cool way down before 1pm, and let it rise as much as is tolerable with ceiling fans on (between 83-85F as it's fairly dry here). The result is a power bill about half of my similarly sized neighbors. It's fairly easy to compare in tract houses where they're all the same anyway:).
Actually, recording engineers have been actively "making sound quality compromises" since the beginning of recorded audio history. It's part of the deal -- you work within the confines of the transport medium you are targeting.
Case in point: RIAA Equalization Curve. (Yes, the RIAA weren't entirely evil at one point. Well, okay, maybe they were, but at least they standardized some things along the way to help consumers get the best sound out of mechanical recording media)
So, as an audio engineer myself (albeit semi-professional -- I work for hire but I'm by no means a golden-eared big-gun) I absolutely do target the medium and make compromises to enhance listenability. Sometimes that means making changes I wouldn't personally agree with, but I'm not writing the checks just cashing them. At the end of the day, my clients are listening on their iPods, car stereos, mismatched component home stereo systems, computer speakers, or crappy plastic home-theater-in-a-box speakers. They're most definitely not the listening through the (several thousand $) studio monitors I mixed them on in an ideal room.
So when clients say "why isn't it as loud as band X?", I usually try to show them what that does to their music, visually and audibly. If they still don't get it, I'll give them what they want (and paid for) or point them in the direction of band X's mastering house. There are very few mixing and mastering engineers who can tell a client "no" and still pay the bills.
Yes, I agree, mp3 is trash, but the iPod does do lossless formats. I use them where I need them (works of Mahler, anyone?), but lossy compression is invaluable for say, an unabridged audiobook copy of the Lord of the Rings (also on my iPod).
I think your calculator had a meltdown. Unless I'm missing something, an image 4096 pixels wide X 2160 pixels high is 8,847,360 pixels per frame.
Still, that puts a film at 6.115 TB, about half their number, so you're right about it being BS. I work with uncompressed video from time to time, and haven't seen any 64bit color depth frames yet either...
If there's a university CS program that gives degrees without courses in Operating System and Compiler design taught in C, I'd love to hear about it.
Mine did. If I had chosen to, I could have made it through the entire curriculum primarily using Java.
My Operating Systems course had an assignment writing multi-threaded applications using semaphores and a simulated scheduler. You could write it in C or in Java. The option was there because about half the students never took C as part of their 100-level and 200-level core (you could take either Java or C). Compiler design was covered in one class, but it was entirely theoretical book work with no implementation IIRC (been a few years).
Some courses required using C or C++, but if you wanted to you could avoid them. Sure you get "exposure" to C/C++ in 200-level Intro to Programming Languages, but it was cursory at best unless you were self-directed. Even 3D graphics allowed the java openGL wrapper. Yuck.
My point is, you could have made it through with maybe one semester worth of very basic C. But like any educational experience, what you get out of it is what you put into it. I know I got a lot more out of it then many of my peers who took CS because "computer stuff pays well." I'm not so sure it's paying them well now, unless they took jobs managing geeks like me instead of being a geek themselves.
Sure. Lets take a natural gas furnace as an example.
The one in my house is 90%+ AFUE (Trane XV90). That means that, according to Trane and ASHRAE Standard 103 at least, 90% of the available heat energy in one unit of natrual gas is transferred into my home.
Using our previous measure of the COP 1.0 resistive heating element, that one unit of fuel is used far less efficiently to heat your home because of the losses involved in converting it to electrical energy and back to heat.
A few miles from my house there is a natural gas fired demand power plant. It's one of the most efficient around, since it's a hybrid gas turbine engine + steam turbine plant (the exhaust from the gas turbine heats water which powers a steam turbine). Its peak efficiency is around 50%. Then the power is transformed from generation voltages to transmission voltages, sent across transmission lines, transformed at a substation back to distribution voltages, then transformed in front of my house to consumable voltage levels. This combines for a loss of about 7.2% according to the DOE http://climatetechnology.gov/library/2003/tech-opt ions/tech-options-1-3-2.pdf.
So that energy from one unit of natural gas my furnace converted to heat at 90% has now become 1 Unit * 50% (generation efficiency) * 92.8% (transmission efficiency) * 1.00 (conversion to heat by resistive heating element) = 46.4% efficient.
But, the furnace heats my entire house, not the one room I'm sitting in, so your point is valid -- it's best only to heat the space you're using at any given time. My contention is that with our current technologies and power distribution systems, there are more efficient ways to bring heat into a room than with lamps. This is particularly true at night when I don't want all the lights on.
Compact flourescents aren't for everyone. We use them in every room in our home except one closet, but we chose bulbs with good color temperatures and selected our paint colors under that light so it looks correct. But then, we try to be as efficient as possible with our power and gas use; not because we believe in all the current environmentalism hype and trends (I don't), but because I am conservation minded and hate writing big checks to the utility companies.
Speaking of thermodynamics, you might want to check your understanding of heat pumps. Heat pumps don't create heat in the same way a resistive heating element (in this case, lightbulb) does, as your thinking indicates. They move it from one place to another; typically from outside to inside (but the process works both ways).
So, yes, a resistive heater is the baseline of efficiency (1 joule electrical energy == 1 joule useful heat). However, using that same amount of electricity, a heat pump can move 4 times the amount of heat from outside your home to inside.
While your argument and the very use of an incandescent light bulb may serve your purpose paricularly well (light and heat in the small area you need both), I'd shy away from accusing others of not understanding thermodynamics until you read a bit more first.
Every light in my house is CF except for the 40W globe over my kitchen table. I buy them from Home Depot, but I take time to write the reciept number and date of purchase on the base. A lot of the bulbs HD sells are "7 year guaranteed" or whatever. Take them back if they die before then.
The local power company here did a promo where you could buy the six-packs of bulbs for $4 (after tax). I bought 5 packs (it's a big house -- lots of 4-bulb ceiling fans, table lamps, etc.). All the bulbs from one pack died within a month - all with the same lot number.
HD took them back and gave me a new pack. No reciept, no questions. The only other one that has died in 2 years was because my 5-year-old hit it with a poorly aimed nerf projectile and cracked it.
When we choose paint colors, we make sure the samples look right under the CF light and natural light from the windows. Sure it takes a few extra minutes, but with a little planning you can't really complain about the lights changing the room color.
Everything. Gov't orgs don't run on logic, they run on politics. I work for a govt. IT org (University) and we have to pay for our water cooler. There are about 10 of us in the pool, we rotate the monthly bill between us.
About 8 years ago they took away pretty much everything 'somebody' deemed 'frivolous': Kleenex, keyboard/phone cleaner, etc. However, I can walk into the stores closet and grab all the batteries, mechanical pencils, dry-erase markers, wall clocks, and Advil one could ever want. No auditing, no accountability.
Most of us think it's because a dean saw someone they didn't like blowing their nose on 'company Kleenex' and took it away as political revenge. There is far more waste / loss in other areas than the $25/month they'd have to cough up for the water cooler, but it's much easier to ignore I guess.
I always like it when people work out the math of problems on/. And while your math seems fine, I think a few of your assumptions are...well, a bit on the high side. That said, I am not a statistician (and statistics was one of my weaker engineering degree subjects).
For starters, you assume that each person talked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (6.5KB/s * 2 * 86,400 sec = 1.066GB/day). Longest time I ever spent on the phone in one shot was 10 hours. I think perhaps there are numbers out there that might show it's slightly lower than that. We could say up to 2 hours a day, on average, for fun. My guess is it's closer to that of the link I cited, about.18 hours a day (again, on average). That gives us 93.6MB/day, or 34GB/yr. The numbers from the table would be about 8.5MB/day or 3.1GB/year.
Second, you assume that all 250 million people in the US have phones. Five live in my house, and we have a land line and two cell phones (my oldest is 5). There are about 110 million households in the USA. The last census said about 93% had phones. There are more than 100 million cellphones out there. But I don't use both at once. There are 220 million people in the US, age 16 and up, arguably the predominant class of phone users.
You also assume that no two people are talking to one another (250 million bi-directional conversations). That's 500 million "conversers" (assuming no three way calling). Hopefully a sophisticated spying system wouldn't record both conversation directions on each end.
Anyway, I work out that, assuming more probablistic use of the phone system, in terms of raw storage, they'd need:
6.5KB/s * 648sec/day * 365days = 1.58GB/yr per channel (on average nationwide)
220 million users, one 'speaking' channel each * 1.58GB/yr = 347,600,000GB/year.
347,600,000GB / 300GB = 1,158,666 $100 hard drives, or $115 million. Peanuts.
My math could be wrong though, I did use windows calc;).
Oh, and there are also pretty good compression routines for voice out there (much better than 53kbps/channel), speech recognition for suspicious keywords that would allow routinely deleting obvious calls to grandma about aunt Mildred's bunions, etc.
I hope this didn't come off as a flame. I thank you for motivating me to actually think about it, actually:).
I know that, at least on my DirecTiVos, it is also tracking other information such as mute, volume up/down, TV power {on|off}. You can see it with an IR code scanner...it sends two sets of codes with every non-TiVo specific command -- one to the TV or receiver to perform the action, and one to the TiVo to log it. Kinda pisses me off because it makes the remote slower / less responsive to commands.
So I guess, in addition to knowing when you skip commercials while you are timeshifting, they also know when you're muting them live or changing channels on your OTA tuner (in my case)...
While I agree with you at least in concept, there is the issue (being a parent of 3 kids is my anecdotal evidence) of having to take care of the little buggers when they DO get sick. I absolutely HATE it when my kids are sick. Yes it's part of life as a parent, but I think it's far more stressful on me than it is on them.
That said, my approach is to teach them basic hygenic principles but not be a paranoid nut about it. They play in parks and public play areas, go to the kiddie-care section when my wife goes to the gym, e.g. they are exposed to all sorts of stuff. They also wash their hands after using the bathroom, when they come home from the play areas, and we keep their nose and face generally clean (so they're not "snotty-nosed brats").
The one thing I'm a stickler about is hands/fingers in the mouth. Maybe I spent a little too much time looking at what's actually under fingernails in the microscope in biology class, but I just don't let them do it. And they know better now -- they just don't do it or they get some kind of minor penalty (verbal warning, 30 second time out, etc.)
Does it work? Judging by all the different responses (even within families) I'd say it's hard to tell. What I do know is that my relatives who do not enforce basic hygiene with their children (e.g. "snotty nosed kids" with long dirty fingernails that they stick in their mouths all the time); their kids are sick far more often than mine are.
Small statistical sampling? Yeah. But if it means I don't have to take prozac because I'm not stressing about my kids being sick every other week? I'll take the risk with a little soap here and there.
OT, but... They should. Particularly if it can be shown that there was evidence manipulation (omission or fabrication of) or failure to consider other leads because they "got their guy and don't need to keep looking."
The only disincentive for law enforcement and criminal justice not following their due diligence in prosecution is a little political egg on the face and a "that's too bad". That's why we have the media witch-hunt prosecutions we have now. Even if the accused is innocent and had nothing to do with it, the stigma is with them forever.
Want to destroy someone's life? Accuse them of being a paedophile and leak it to the local news (particularly effective for teachers and church leaders). Even if the accusation is 100% false and total BS, you still get the puppy-dog eyed anchor talking about "safety of the children" and the person's career is over.
I actually asked a similar question to a PV install vendor here, since our desert temperatures are around 45 Celsius during the day. This reduces the output of panels (which are rated at 25 Celcius) significantly, and it would seem ideal to cool the panels with water and pre-heat your hot water system, spa, etc.
The problem is, if you are grid-tied or have a certified installer work on your system, they are extremely reluctant to even talk about mixing liquids with electricity. Often they tie the panels together in series resulting in very high (several hundred) DC voltages being sent to the inverters. You also have to comply with local and federal electrical codes plus whatever constraints your utility has (if you grid-tie).
I'm not saying it couldn't or shouldn't be done -- it seems like a great idea to extract even more energy in the form of heat while increasing efficiency. It's just that few are willing to attempt safely putting the two together for consumer applications. I mean, can you really see Joe sixpack being careful when one of the components dies, leaks, or otherwise needs service? "It's just solar panels and water, can't really be all that much juice!"
Slashdot Mirror
...we finally not only have job growth (albeit still weak), the unemployment rate dropped a percentage point, and I think probably will drop two or three more at least by next year's election.
No, we don't.. The unemployment rate (a percentage statistic) went down because people are leaving the work force (though some jobs were added). They've given up, retired, settled on lower-paying jobs, or whatever, but this notion that it's just a little weak is nonsense. The universe of eligible employees just got smaller. People are still losing their jobs, and none of these windbags are even discussing engineering a way to fix it.
And while I wouldn't vote for Newt, at least he at one point in his life uttered the phrase ''I would rather rely on engineers than diplomats...". It's a start.
The NSF is now requiring this as part of grant applications. You have to have a data management plan that includes the public deposit of both the data and results from grant funded work. Other funding orgs are following suit.
This is a fairly major project at the university I work for, both from the in-process data management perspective (keeping field researchers from storing their only copies on thumbdrives and laptops) and from the long-term repository perspective for holding the data when the grant is completed (that's what I'm involved with).
Storage is cheap. Convincing university administrators to pay for keeping it accessible is another problem, but the NSF position is helping.
Can I see your birth certificate?
-or-
Are you a citizen or legal resident of the United States?
*ducks*
Sorry, couldn't resist (and I don't associate myself with groups of either persuasion, but thought it was funny).
I don't know about him/her, but I bought six 10W CFLs to replace the 75W incandescent bulbs in my bedroom in 1988. Having a west-facing upstairs room in Arizona during the summer is hot enough without an extra 450W of space heat from lighting (along with my 286, some tube-based HAM gear, CRTs, etc.). Changing to CFL made a huge difference.
The CFLs I bought were made by Commercial Electric, and weren't the spiral type. These had four 4" glass 'rods', 3/8" in diameter, which were connected together in such a way as to make one continuous tube. They would flicker and blink for about a second when first turned on, but once lit were at full brightness (unlike the CFLs in my current home which take 30s to warm up). The tubes were also replaceable (they unplugged from the base with 2 pins) but I never had to replace one in the 12 years I lived there. It's been a long time, but I think they were actually for commercial lighting purposes, not residential. IIRC they were about $12/ea (1988 dollars).
I guess my point is that they have been around for a long time, just not cheaply. Oh, and the store was the Home Depot1/2 mile from where I lived at the time.
I believe in individual freedom, but I also don't want YOUR individual freedom to infringe on MY individual freedom.
That statement pretty well defines Libertarianism as it is understood by most; I'm free to do whatever I want, as long as it doesn't infringe on your freedom to do whatever you want.
I'm not trying to start a semantic flame war, and I agree that the definition of Liberalism has been warped (it seems now to mean "do what you want and someone else will pay for it"; your opinion may vary). That definition is what most people accept, however, and like most of its mirror philosophies on the right, it does not advocate individual freedom for everyone (it divides individuals into classes).
Liberalism is the idea that everyone should be free to do what they want to do.
I think the word you're looking for, at least in the USA, is "Libertarianism". Both the left (hate-speech/crime laws, social justice via tax code) and right (religiosity) routinely act counter to that idea, regardless of what their ideologues might say in public.
If this is actually true, you should probably get it checked out by a licensed electrical contractor. You (or a neighbor) may have a loose or bad neutral connection that is causing the current to flow on the (usually grounded) coax lines. I've seen this before, and it can burn your house down (coax is not designed to carry house current on the shield). Electricity doesn't just take the "path of least resistance", it takes ALL paths that it can.
With regard to point #2, I (as a residential customer) already pay different rates depending on the hour here in AZ. SRP, one of our local utilities, has a time-of-use system with a digital meter they can read and program remotely. Currently it only has 2 rate schedules, but it can support up to four.
:).
During on-peak (1pm - 8pm; M-F) power is twice what the standard rate payers pay. But it's less than half during off-peak hours and we've tried to shift most of our usage to those times. Laundry, dishes, A/C, lighting, pool pump, etc. are all timed to run during off-peak only as much as possible. All lighting is CF or LED (even the night-lights).
Granted, when it's 115F outside the A/C will run some. But we pre-cool way down before 1pm, and let it rise as much as is tolerable with ceiling fans on (between 83-85F as it's fairly dry here). The result is a power bill about half of my similarly sized neighbors. It's fairly easy to compare in tract houses where they're all the same anyway
Dude, kudos for the Superman reference. I'd +1 if I could :)
Actually, recording engineers have been actively "making sound quality compromises" since the beginning of recorded audio history. It's part of the deal -- you work within the confines of the transport medium you are targeting.
Case in point: RIAA Equalization Curve. (Yes, the RIAA weren't entirely evil at one point. Well, okay, maybe they were, but at least they standardized some things along the way to help consumers get the best sound out of mechanical recording media)
So, as an audio engineer myself (albeit semi-professional -- I work for hire but I'm by no means a golden-eared big-gun) I absolutely do target the medium and make compromises to enhance listenability. Sometimes that means making changes I wouldn't personally agree with, but I'm not writing the checks just cashing them. At the end of the day, my clients are listening on their iPods, car stereos, mismatched component home stereo systems, computer speakers, or crappy plastic home-theater-in-a-box speakers. They're most definitely not the listening through the (several thousand $) studio monitors I mixed them on in an ideal room.
So when clients say "why isn't it as loud as band X?", I usually try to show them what that does to their music, visually and audibly. If they still don't get it, I'll give them what they want (and paid for) or point them in the direction of band X's mastering house. There are very few mixing and mastering engineers who can tell a client "no" and still pay the bills.
Yes, I agree, mp3 is trash, but the iPod does do lossless formats. I use them where I need them (works of Mahler, anyone?), but lossy compression is invaluable for say, an unabridged audiobook copy of the Lord of the Rings (also on my iPod).
4K is 4096 x 2160 = 4,527,360 pixels/frame
I think your calculator had a meltdown. Unless I'm missing something, an image 4096 pixels wide X 2160 pixels high is 8,847,360 pixels per frame.
Still, that puts a film at 6.115 TB, about half their number, so you're right about it being BS. I work with uncompressed video from time to time, and haven't seen any 64bit color depth frames yet either...
Mine did. If I had chosen to, I could have made it through the entire curriculum primarily using Java.
My Operating Systems course had an assignment writing multi-threaded applications using semaphores and a simulated scheduler. You could write it in C or in Java. The option was there because about half the students never took C as part of their 100-level and 200-level core (you could take either Java or C). Compiler design was covered in one class, but it was entirely theoretical book work with no implementation IIRC (been a few years).
Some courses required using C or C++, but if you wanted to you could avoid them. Sure you get "exposure" to C/C++ in 200-level Intro to Programming Languages, but it was cursory at best unless you were self-directed. Even 3D graphics allowed the java openGL wrapper. Yuck.
My point is, you could have made it through with maybe one semester worth of very basic C. But like any educational experience, what you get out of it is what you put into it. I know I got a lot more out of it then many of my peers who took CS because "computer stuff pays well." I'm not so sure it's paying them well now, unless they took jobs managing geeks like me instead of being a geek themselves.
Hey, wait a minute....
....Or was that "My life for Aiur!" I could never tell what those damn zealots were saying.
Sure. Lets take a natural gas furnace as an example.
t ions/tech-options-1-3-2.pdf.
The one in my house is 90%+ AFUE (Trane XV90). That means that, according to Trane and ASHRAE Standard 103 at least, 90% of the available heat energy in one unit of natrual gas is transferred into my home.
Using our previous measure of the COP 1.0 resistive heating element, that one unit of fuel is used far less efficiently to heat your home because of the losses involved in converting it to electrical energy and back to heat.
A few miles from my house there is a natural gas fired demand power plant. It's one of the most efficient around, since it's a hybrid gas turbine engine + steam turbine plant (the exhaust from the gas turbine heats water which powers a steam turbine). Its peak efficiency is around 50%. Then the power is transformed from generation voltages to transmission voltages, sent across transmission lines, transformed at a substation back to distribution voltages, then transformed in front of my house to consumable voltage levels. This combines for a loss of about 7.2% according to the DOE http://climatetechnology.gov/library/2003/tech-op
So that energy from one unit of natural gas my furnace converted to heat at 90% has now become 1 Unit * 50% (generation efficiency) * 92.8% (transmission efficiency) * 1.00 (conversion to heat by resistive heating element) = 46.4% efficient.
But, the furnace heats my entire house, not the one room I'm sitting in, so your point is valid -- it's best only to heat the space you're using at any given time. My contention is that with our current technologies and power distribution systems, there are more efficient ways to bring heat into a room than with lamps. This is particularly true at night when I don't want all the lights on.
Compact flourescents aren't for everyone. We use them in every room in our home except one closet, but we chose bulbs with good color temperatures and selected our paint colors under that light so it looks correct. But then, we try to be as efficient as possible with our power and gas use; not because we believe in all the current environmentalism hype and trends (I don't), but because I am conservation minded and hate writing big checks to the utility companies.
Speaking of thermodynamics, you might want to check your understanding of heat pumps. Heat pumps don't create heat in the same way a resistive heating element (in this case, lightbulb) does, as your thinking indicates. They move it from one place to another; typically from outside to inside (but the process works both ways).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump#Efficiency
So, yes, a resistive heater is the baseline of efficiency (1 joule electrical energy == 1 joule useful heat). However, using that same amount of electricity, a heat pump can move 4 times the amount of heat from outside your home to inside.
While your argument and the very use of an incandescent light bulb may serve your purpose paricularly well (light and heat in the small area you need both), I'd shy away from accusing others of not understanding thermodynamics until you read a bit more first.
I'd pay a hell of a lot of money to see it happen!
Now...if only I had a hell of a lot of money...
Wonder how Pelosi feels about it....
t he-hill-for-the-children-and-the-grandchildren/
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/on-
I know I posted this elsewhere yesterday, but with the "thinkofthechildren" tag, I couldn't resist.
At least she makes no bones about using the think-of-the-children excuse to do whatever she wants:
t he-hill-for-the-children-and-the-grandchildren
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/01/04/on-
What that means to you I guess depends on your particular leanings... [Raise taxes|Shred constitution|trample rights|etc.]
Every light in my house is CF except for the 40W globe over my kitchen table. I buy them from Home Depot, but I take time to write the reciept number and date of purchase on the base. A lot of the bulbs HD sells are "7 year guaranteed" or whatever. Take them back if they die before then.
The local power company here did a promo where you could buy the six-packs of bulbs for $4 (after tax). I bought 5 packs (it's a big house -- lots of 4-bulb ceiling fans, table lamps, etc.). All the bulbs from one pack died within a month - all with the same lot number.
HD took them back and gave me a new pack. No reciept, no questions. The only other one that has died in 2 years was because my 5-year-old hit it with a poorly aimed nerf projectile and cracked it.
When we choose paint colors, we make sure the samples look right under the CF light and natural light from the windows. Sure it takes a few extra minutes, but with a little planning you can't really complain about the lights changing the room color.
Everything. Gov't orgs don't run on logic, they run on politics. I work for a govt. IT org (University) and we have to pay for our water cooler. There are about 10 of us in the pool, we rotate the monthly bill between us.
About 8 years ago they took away pretty much everything 'somebody' deemed 'frivolous': Kleenex, keyboard/phone cleaner, etc. However, I can walk into the stores closet and grab all the batteries, mechanical pencils, dry-erase markers, wall clocks, and Advil one could ever want. No auditing, no accountability.
Most of us think it's because a dean saw someone they didn't like blowing their nose on 'company Kleenex' and took it away as political revenge. There is far more waste / loss in other areas than the $25/month they'd have to cough up for the water cooler, but it's much easier to ignore I guess.
I always like it when people work out the math of problems on /. And while your math seems fine, I think a few of your assumptions are...well, a bit on the high side. That said, I am not a statistician (and statistics was one of my weaker engineering degree subjects).
.18 hours a day (again, on average). That gives us 93.6MB/day, or 34GB/yr. The numbers from the table would be about 8.5MB/day or 3.1GB/year.
;).
:).
For starters, you assume that each person talked 24 hours a day, 7 days a week (6.5KB/s * 2 * 86,400 sec = 1.066GB/day). Longest time I ever spent on the phone in one shot was 10 hours. I think perhaps there are numbers out there that might show it's slightly lower than that. We could say up to 2 hours a day, on average, for fun. My guess is it's closer to that of the link I cited, about
Second, you assume that all 250 million people in the US have phones. Five live in my house, and we have a land line and two cell phones (my oldest is 5). There are about 110 million households in the USA. The last census said about 93% had phones. There are more than 100 million cellphones out there. But I don't use both at once. There are 220 million people in the US, age 16 and up, arguably the predominant class of phone users.
You also assume that no two people are talking to one another (250 million bi-directional conversations). That's 500 million "conversers" (assuming no three way calling). Hopefully a sophisticated spying system wouldn't record both conversation directions on each end.
Anyway, I work out that, assuming more probablistic use of the phone system, in terms of raw storage, they'd need:
6.5KB/s * 648sec/day * 365days = 1.58GB/yr per channel (on average nationwide)
220 million users, one 'speaking' channel each * 1.58GB/yr = 347,600,000GB/year.
347,600,000GB / 300GB = 1,158,666 $100 hard drives, or $115 million. Peanuts.
My math could be wrong though, I did use windows calc
Oh, and there are also pretty good compression routines for voice out there (much better than 53kbps/channel), speech recognition for suspicious keywords that would allow routinely deleting obvious calls to grandma about aunt Mildred's bunions, etc.
I hope this didn't come off as a flame. I thank you for motivating me to actually think about it, actually
I know that, at least on my DirecTiVos, it is also tracking other information such as mute, volume up/down, TV power {on|off}. You can see it with an IR code scanner...it sends two sets of codes with every non-TiVo specific command -- one to the TV or receiver to perform the action, and one to the TiVo to log it. Kinda pisses me off because it makes the remote slower / less responsive to commands.
So I guess, in addition to knowing when you skip commercials while you are timeshifting, they also know when you're muting them live or changing channels on your OTA tuner (in my case)...
While I agree with you at least in concept, there is the issue (being a parent of 3 kids is my anecdotal evidence) of having to take care of the little buggers when they DO get sick. I absolutely HATE it when my kids are sick. Yes it's part of life as a parent, but I think it's far more stressful on me than it is on them.
That said, my approach is to teach them basic hygenic principles but not be a paranoid nut about it. They play in parks and public play areas, go to the kiddie-care section when my wife goes to the gym, e.g. they are exposed to all sorts of stuff. They also wash their hands after using the bathroom, when they come home from the play areas, and we keep their nose and face generally clean (so they're not "snotty-nosed brats").
The one thing I'm a stickler about is hands/fingers in the mouth. Maybe I spent a little too much time looking at what's actually under fingernails in the microscope in biology class, but I just don't let them do it. And they know better now -- they just don't do it or they get some kind of minor penalty (verbal warning, 30 second time out, etc.)
Does it work? Judging by all the different responses (even within families) I'd say it's hard to tell. What I do know is that my relatives who do not enforce basic hygiene with their children (e.g. "snotty nosed kids" with long dirty fingernails that they stick in their mouths all the time); their kids are sick far more often than mine are.
Small statistical sampling? Yeah. But if it means I don't have to take prozac because I'm not stressing about my kids being sick every other week? I'll take the risk with a little soap here and there.
OT, but... They should. Particularly if it can be shown that there was evidence manipulation (omission or fabrication of) or failure to consider other leads because they "got their guy and don't need to keep looking."
The only disincentive for law enforcement and criminal justice not following their due diligence in prosecution is a little political egg on the face and a "that's too bad". That's why we have the media witch-hunt prosecutions we have now. Even if the accused is innocent and had nothing to do with it, the stigma is with them forever.
Want to destroy someone's life? Accuse them of being a paedophile and leak it to the local news (particularly effective for teachers and church leaders). Even if the accusation is 100% false and total BS, you still get the puppy-dog eyed anchor talking about "safety of the children" and the person's career is over.
I actually asked a similar question to a PV install vendor here, since our desert temperatures are around 45 Celsius during the day. This reduces the output of panels (which are rated at 25 Celcius) significantly, and it would seem ideal to cool the panels with water and pre-heat your hot water system, spa, etc.
The problem is, if you are grid-tied or have a certified installer work on your system, they are extremely reluctant to even talk about mixing liquids with electricity. Often they tie the panels together in series resulting in very high (several hundred) DC voltages being sent to the inverters. You also have to comply with local and federal electrical codes plus whatever constraints your utility has (if you grid-tie).
I'm not saying it couldn't or shouldn't be done -- it seems like a great idea to extract even more energy in the form of heat while increasing efficiency. It's just that few are willing to attempt safely putting the two together for consumer applications. I mean, can you really see Joe sixpack being careful when one of the components dies, leaks, or otherwise needs service? "It's just solar panels and water, can't really be all that much juice!"