There is no reason people need to eat 3.7 pounds (1.6Kg) of meat per week....
I'd consider that near starvation. But then I'm in the upper 1% by height and upper 25% by weight of males in the USA. I just chuckle to myself about "suggested serving size" on food packages, I take that number and multiply by two for an estimate on what I'll eat.
So, "no reason" to eat that much meat? How about needing 3000 calories per day if I just sit on my ass and still have enough calories to keep my brain warm?
(I'm sure that there's a joke about sitting on my brains in there. Go ahead, make my day.)
Someone check my math but this is what I came up with. Wind produces 1/3rd the CO2 of nuclear but costs twice as much. Solar produces 2/3rds the CO2 but costs *TEN TIMES* as much. I'm taking into account installed capacity, operational lifespan, and capacity factor. You can take into account things like cleanup costs after the power plant is retired, lifetime operational costs, etc. Some people just love to point out the extreme costs of building a nuclear power plant but if the actual potential for producing power is taken into account it looks real cheap.
Trying to find actual historical costs of energy of these energy sources has been difficult. Lots of people like to "estimate", "project", or just plain leave things out of their study. A study by what people might assume to be biased pro-nuclear shows electricity costs around the world: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/p... It shows solar to be quite expensive compared to anything else in the study.
By my estimates wind and nuclear really win out here. Solar might look marginally better than nuclear for reducing CO2 but the costs are just outrageous.
I was just reading yesterday on how Staten Island has a deer problem so they are culling the deer. Now usually one would think this means trapping or shooting the deer but no, that would make sense. What the New York City government is doing is giving the bucks they catch a vasectomy.
Not even a castration, which would not only be easier but also avoid the rut behavior that puts them at risk of automobile collisions as they travel around the island. They are giving the bucks a vasectomy.
Don't deer fart too? What of their methane production? Not only that but the reason they want to get rid of the deer on the island is that they are effectively an invasive species spreading disease, causing property damage, and putting people's lives at risk from automobile collisions.
The inmates are running the asylum in New York City. Those deer should be hunted for their tasty meat and to remove the risks to life and property they cause. But no one wants to vote to kill Bambi, so they spend millions of taxpayer dollars to catch the deer, give them a vasectomy, and then... let them go. That way the deer can die naturally, by getting hit by a truck.
Anyway, your nuclear rant is as pointless as always
Right, pointless to do some math to get a handle on the problem.
The USA has a current installed electric production capacity of 1000 GW, China has 1500 GW. Both are dominated by fossil fuels. If we assume that burning fossil fuels is a problem then we need something to replace these power plants.
If we assume either country builds one gigawatt class nuclear reactor every month then it'd take 40 years to get roughly 500 GW capacity. If you account for a capacity factor of 80% to 90% then it's more like 1.2 GW needed, or perhaps 1.4 GW, which happens to be about the capacity of the popular AP-1000 and VVER-1200 designs. That 500 GW of capacity is about 1/2 of the current USA capacity and 1/3 of China's. That's not adding new capacity necessarily, it's just replacing existing fossil fuel generation.
Since a nuclear reactor built today is expected to last 60 years then it's more like 750 GW, 3/4 of the USA capacity and 1/2 of China's. That's not all of either nation's electric generation demand, and does not account for growth, but building one new nuclear reactor per month in both nations is close to the right number for just keeping up with demand.
How do we fill in the rest of the demand? To do so with wind power there would have to be 3000 one megawatt windmills for every gigawatt of capacity needed, since wind gives about a 30% capacity factor. Assuming a 40 year life span then we get, just like the nuclear example above, 500 GW of capacity if we just keep building 3000 windmills every month. But the operating lifespan of a windmill is more like 20 years. So, to get that same 500 GW there would have to be 6000 windmills made every month.
What of solar? Ivanpah (concentrated solar) and California Flats (PV) are some of the biggest solar power plants in the world and they produce about 300 MW each and have planned capacity factors of 25%. Let's assume 33% capacity factor and call it 100 MW. Planned lifespan is about 25 years but we'll assume that they last 40 years. How many of these would we have to build to maintain 500 GW capacity? At one per month you'd have only 50 GW capacity before they'd have to be replaced, so it's more like 10 per month.
How much does this cost? Ivanpah cost $2.2 billion for 100 MW of real capacity (300MW x 30% capacity factor). I couldn't find the costs on California Flats but I'll assume it's close to Ivanpah given that Apple's $850 million investment was given as something like 1/3rd of the total costs. Votgle units 3 & 4 cost about $14 billion for 2 GW of real capacity (about 2.2 GW x 90% capacity factor). So solar is about $22 billion for 1 GW and nuclear is about $7 for 1 GW. Solar costs three times of nuclear and I was *VERY* generous on the costs of solar.
To complete the math we assume the same 40 year lifespan for wind. Costs per one megawatt windmill is about $1.5 million. To get 1 GW with a 30% capacity factor would mean 3000 windmills. That costs $4.5 billion. A more realistic lifespan is 20 years so it's more like double that, $9 billion.
So, assuming 40 year lifespan for all power sources, and 500 GW capacity, we can compute the cost per month for each power source. Nuclear is $7 billion, wind is $4.5 billion, and solar is $22 billion. If we give more realistic lifespans of 60 years for nuclear, 30 years for solar, and 20 years for wind we get $4.6 billion for nuclear, $9 billion for wind, and $30 billion for solar. Remember that this is about one nuclear power plant per month, 6000 windmills, or 10 solar power collector built every month to maintain 500 GW generating capacity, not grow but just maintain.
Nuclear looks real cheap, doesn't it? It's math. If I made a mistake above somewhere (which I likely did) then please provide a correction.
As someone that has had to program in a number of languages I can say that strongly typed languages can catch a lot of trivial bugs quickly. One example is an if/then statement that allows non-Boolean arguments. If I mistype a comparison in an if/then statement then I should expect an error on compile. If I type an assignment "if (foo = bar)" instead of a comparison "if (foo == bar)" I expect this to get flagged, but some languages don't see this as a problem.
I prefer strongly typed languages as it can catch a lot of typographical errors and sloppy logic. It can also be frustrating at times since it can mean nesting type conversions to near absurdity. VHDL comes to mind in this. It can also be frustrating if trying to do something quickly and the compiler complains on what I would think is a pretty obvious implied type conversion.
It's interesting to see someone try to get an idea on how many errors strongly typed languages would catch. I'm not sure this makes an argument for one language over another. It might make an argument for testing, coding style, and such though.
You couldn't do even a simple search on Wikipedia or Google before stating something so easily proven false?
If the USA would finish a nuclear power plant each month, what wouod they di with the power? Where is the demand for it?
Did you even read my post before you thought to type that question? I said why we'd have to build them at that rate in the same sentence I said the rate at which they should be built. This is what I said:
The USA should be breaking ground on a new nuclear power plant every month to keep up with the closures of existing coal and nuclear power plants.
There are roughly 100 operating nuclear power plants in the USA now, and as I understand it all of them are now operating beyond their designed lifespan. We'd have to build a new nuclear reactor every month for more than 8 years to replace them all. There's over 300 gigawatts of coal fired power plant capacity in place in the USA today. If we build a gigawatt nuclear power plant per month it would take over 30 years to replace all those coal fired power plants. It would take us roughly 40 years of building a new gigawatt capacity nuclear reactor every month in the USA just to keep up with the shutting down of existing coal and nuclear power plants. That's not adding any new capacity, that's just keeping up with what we have now.
Guess what happens 40 years from now if we build a new nuclear reactor every month starting today? Those nuclear reactors we build today would reach the end of their operating lifespan and we'd have to build another nuclear reactor to replace it.
The question isn't if it is possible to build a new nuclear reactor every month. It must be possible because we don't have much of a choice. The question is why we haven't started already. If we don't start building new nuclear reactors then we'd have to fill in the existing need some other way. This could be by building roughly 1500 windmills per month, roofing 2 million homes with solar panels per month, or continue doing what we are now and keep building natural gas plants to replace coal and nuclear.
We can choose fossil fuels, nuclear power, or the lights going out. We might have another option in the future but today we have only those three choices.
I do know something about the technology and this kind of accuracy has been in the works for a while. The military grade code was supposed to provide accuracy that only the government was supposed to be able to use. It took me about two seconds to figure out that just knowing some basic properties of the signal could provide similar accuracy if someone was willing to throw enough processing at it. Advancement in computer technology has made the processing needed very cheap, light, and small. There is still an advantage to knowing how to decode the military grade signal, it's just that the advantage is very small unless traveling in ways that are generally unique to the military.
Early NavStar signals had a civilian accessible code which gave a "quick and dirty" navigation and a military grade signal that required the decoding of the first code to be useful. Now the "quick and dirty" code is still there for legacy reasons, then there is a higher accuracy civilian signal, and the hyper accurate (and now independent of the other signals) military coded signal. If one has access to the encryption keys for the military grade NavStar signal then one can get hyper accurate location in real time with minimal processing and few satellites in view.
What it sounds like these new systems are doing to get their location as accurate as they do is stack NavStar, GLONASS, and Galileo on top of each other, and do some intense processing of those signals. This is impressive accuracy that is comparable to what NavStar provides with the military grade signal alone. Unless a shooting war breaks out this hyper accurate GPS will remain just as good as the military NavStar signal.
If there is a shooting war then there is the possibility of the US federal government shutting off the civilian signals on NavStar to deny that to the enemy. The remaining military signal would still give some location information to those willing to throw a lot of processing at it but the accuracy would suck without the civilian cleartext signals to work from. It's this possibility (threat?) of the USA turning NavStar off that prompted the European Union to develop their own system, and Russia their own.
Somehow, China has people in government who are actually interested in the future. The USA has become risk-averse.
I agree. China has plans for 20 nuclear power plants in the next 5 years or so while the USA has plans for maybe 10 in the same time period. That might not seem like much of a difference given the population difference between the two nations. It's an astonishing difference once one takes into account the economic output of the two nations. The USA should be breaking ground on a new nuclear power plant every month to keep up with the closures of existing coal and nuclear power plants.
China is moving away from coal because they have to import so much of it, burning it for heat and industry creates air quality problems (indoors as well as outdoors), and it is a strategic energy reserve that may run out quickly if they cannot find an alternative. Nuclear power is clean and domestically abundant, solving a number of problems for them. They face some very real health and economic risks if they do not expand nuclear power production.
The USA does not face the same problems. There's enough coal and natural gas in the USA to last potentially centuries, oil reserves are also likely as abundant. Since Americans tend to burn coal in properly vented and designed coal furnaces the health risks are much lower than China's. Nuclear power would still be a good way to further improve energy independence in the USA. Bu the perceived risks of nuclear power have become real effectively because we deem them so. The greatest risks nuclear power faces in the USA are political. A well run nuclear power plant project should be able to complete in 3 or 4 years. There is no reason such a build cannot complete in less than 2 years. But because of ever changing government rules and regulations they tend to drag out over 5 years, sometimes over decades. If the government would just stop with the nonsense of calling them risky then the risks would almost disappear.
We've built fully functional nuclear power plants in a matter of months, not years, in the USA before. They've been very safe and profitable. All we need is the will to do so again and it can happen.
Imposing a tariff on solar power will make nuclear look more attractive. This would do little to competition from natural gas but if the USA wants to keep that cheap gas for heating then it needs cheap nuclear for electricity. This also means being able to keep the oil flowing for fuels and coal for industrial feedstock.
Free electricity from sunshine negatively impacts gov't tax revenues, therefore it is against gov't's interests to allow solar panels to be easy to obtain and install for cheap.
Against the government's interests? The government just *LOVES* to buy votes. You know what also negatively impacts government revenues? Tax deductions on electric and natural gas cars. Why do you suppose those were ever created? Any tax deduction negatively impacts tax revenues. That includes deductions for children, mortgages, education loans, and on and on. The government deducts taxes on things they want you to do, like buy solar panels. It's how the government effectively pays people to do things it wants people to do. The government wants people to have kids, get an education, and buy a house. They also want people to get solar panels.
We've had this technology for decades, yet you STILL can not walk into a Walmart or Home Depot today and load your pickup truck with solar panels (overpriced puny toy panels don't count). Yet you can pick up a noisy and expensive to operate gasoline powered generator at ANY of those big box stores quite easily...
Why do you think that is? Think about what a portable gasoline generator is used for. I emphasize "portable" because that's the kind you are going to pick up at a big box store, as opposed to a stationary one that would be a special order item that's not stocked on a shelf. A portable generator is very useful because it is portable. It can be put on the back of a truck or on a trailer and brought just about anywhere. They run on common gasoline. They will provide power at any time. They are also relatively cheap at about a kilobuck each, which is not a whole lot if it means saving food from spoiling in a power outage, getting work done on a job site, or just making sure that the guys are able to see a football game and drink cold beer while on a weekend away from the wife and kids.
The reason you can't just stop at a big box store and get a truckload of solar panels is the same reason you cannot just stop at a big box store and get a truckload of shingles. Neither are a high volume item. When people buy shingles they will want a particular size, shape, color, just like they would want a particular kind of solar panel. I'm sure if you are not picky about how you cover your roof then you could find something in a big box store that would be suitable. If you don't care that the roof of your house is covered with white corrugated sheet metal then you can pick that up, because that's pretty common stuff for barns, sheds, garages, factories, and even the occasional home owner that doesn't care what's on the roof so long as it keeps the rain out. If you want anything else then you are going to have to order it.
A bit of searching the internet tells me that a 5kW solar panel system will take up about 500 square feet, weigh about a half ton, and cost about $20,000. In contrast a 5kW generator takes up probably 6 square feet, weighs about 200 pounds, and costs about $1000. Operating costs for that noisy generator is of course an issue but then people don't typically use them regularly for electricity. They use it for power outages, work sites, and camping trips.
If everyone managed to jump off the grid tomorrow, the gov't would be up a creek without a paddle due to all the tax revenues drying up. You can bet they aren't going to let that happen. So the war against cheap solar panels continues...
Yep, the government is conspiring against solar panels. The small market has nothing to do with the costs and inconvenience of solar panels. I think you have your aluminum helmet on too tight.
Out here in the Midwest these portable generators see a jump in sales about twice every year. They'll get bought up when the winds and rain threaten in the summer, and when ice and snow threaten in the winter. There's a lot of overhead power lines that can be damaged i
I'd love to see political lobbyists outlawed, period.
How would that work? First, you'd have to define a political lobbyist. Second, you'd need an enforcement mechanism.
Part of the problem in making political lobbying illegal is that everyone has the right to communicate with their elected officials. Are you going to say that once someone makes a profession of communicating with a politician that they cannot talk to them any more? Okay, define the point at which a person is a professional lobbyist.
For an example let's assume I want clean water for my community. So, I start a little group, Keep My Water Clean. I collect donations, hold fundraisers, and so forth so that I can spend my time traveling through the state and the nation telling those in public office that there needs to be government enforcement on keeping municipal water safe to drink and to fund the creation of municipal water sources for growing communities. You want to ban that?
Let's say there is a ban. How should I be punished if I violate this law and create Keep My Water Clean in spite of the ban? Would you have me jailed? Should I be fined? How do you think that would look in a court of law? Or, the court of public opinion?
I've seen arguments like this before and the typical response would be that non-profit corporations would be exempt. Okay, did you know that the NFL was a non-profit until there was enough public outrage that they changed their legal status? Being a non-profit doesn't mean the entity cannot be very large and make a lot of people a lot of money. Also, suppose a bunch of people got together to make a non-profit that made it no secret of it's affiliation with a large for-profit entity. Let's call this group Pepsico Employees for Clean Water. Every member of the group is a Pepsico employee, and the board is identical to the board of Pepsico. When they hold a meeting they "rent" a conference room at Pepsico headquarters, and Pepsico then "donates" this rent to the non-profit Pepsico Employees for Clean Water, which is then noted on their tax return as a donation to a non-profit.
I say let people say what they want.
I've heard this somewhere before and it comes to mind here, liberals want people to shut up while conservatives want people to keep talking. Go ahead, keep talking. Let the best argument win.
Sure, for a cellular phone to work the phone must announce it's location to the carrier. The issue at hand though is that the phone does not have to tell the government where it is located to work. The carrier should not have to tell the government where a phone (and therefore the person carrying it) is located without a warrant. Also, the government cannot set up a fake cell site to scoop up the locations of people without a warrant.
I'm trying to think of how these fake cell sites could be used any more after a ruling like this. For these things to work they have to announce their presence to every phone in range and just kind of hope the person they are looking for is in range. In the process though they'll be grabbing the phone numbers, locations, and perhaps more information from every cell phone in range. In a large city this could easily be thousands of people as they move in and out of range. How can a fake cell site be made to work and not scoop up all this information?
I doubt that this will be the end of this nonsense, but it should make the government think real hard about doing stuff like this again.
If in need of some "weighted dummies" then stop in front of a Wal-Mart and offer free service to get people to participate in your test. Just be careful not to exceed the load capacity of the frame, which I imagine would be all too easy to do.
With conventional buses there is no method to refuel while the bus is en route. Not that it needs it, a typical bus does not seem to stop for fuel often. An electric bus could be recharged with overhead wires along common routes and/or stops. That should make the bus more viable and not add too much to the expense or limit it's ability to change routes to match traveler's needs, traffic patterns, construction, etc. An electric trolley is a common sight still in some cities, and I recall that in those cities they've adapted hybrid buses to use those overhead lines to reduce fuel use. These buses have no electric storage, they just use the electric drive when traveling on a route shared with a street trolley.
If there are buses, for example, used as an airport shuttle service then the overhead charging lines can be at the airport terminal. Every time it is stopped at the terminal to wait for loading and unloading passengers it can be recharging. Once it runs it's loop around the parking lot, or to and from a hotel, and returns it can run on battery.
If capacitors work better then batteries in this case then use them. Perhaps a combination of capacitors and batteries would work. Point is that if the bus has a ready recharge point that coincides with a stop to load and unload passengers then the range can be improved without as many batteries than would be needed to do an "off line" recharge at a bus corral at the end of the day.
Driving around an empty parking lot while not carrying any people or luggage means it's not really been tested. In a real world there will likely have to be a way to charge the battery, or at least allow to run on a "third rail" so the battery isn't drained in that time.
I've seen the math and electric vehicles are suitable to a quite narrow set of applications. Overhead lines for buses would seem a minimal set of infrastructure needed to expand the usefulness of the vehicles, especially where they already exist in some form. I just wonder if some freeloader type might modify a car to tap into that.
No, it's an indicator. It's a means to determining if there is a need for further investigation of health problems. People with a high or low BMI will likely need an additional check for body fat. There are a number of means to double check this, buoyancy, skin pinch, waist to hip ratio, likely more.
I don't believe that BMI needs to be redone, just that it needs to be taken with the knowledge that it is an incomplete indicator of health. As you stated for your life insurance the BMI was taken along with waist, hip, and chest measurements. That's likely to cover all but the rarest of cases as an indicator of health.
I believe the BMI has been a victim of it's own success. It works well so often to indicate that a person is over or under healthy weight that people have put more faith in it than it deserves. I guess that it's pretty rare for people to have a "bad" BMI and good health, neglecting other indicators of good health. Just like it is possible but rare for people to have a "good" BMI and poor health, neglecting other indicators of poor health.
From what I understand the combination of BMI with waist to hip ratios covers probably an additional 9% on top of the 90% that BMI alone does not cover. The last 1% will just have to get a note from a physician on their health and life insurance policies.
Wait, doesn't Nabisco own Philip Morris? If they can't keep people hooked on cookies then maybe get them hooked on tobacco. Put nicotine in the chocolate perhaps?
Maybe they could get in the marijuana business, that should help their cookie sales.
Literally everyone else in the smartphone market Is at 10+ years per cable interface change.
That is just plain provably false. The mini-USB connectors came out in 2000, the micro-USB connector came out in 2007 (which made the mini connectors obsolete), and USB-C came out in 2014. Unless new smartphones are coming out with the obsolete mini-B port for charging, which could not be certified by the USB-IF group, they've changed the ports on their smart phones at least once in the last "10+ years". In 2007 we also saw China demand cell phone makers decide on a common port, precisely because "everyone else" was using their own connector.
Now, if you are talking about the OTHER end of the cable, the end that plugs into the charger brick or computer then you might have a point. That port, the original USB-A, has been essentially unchanged since it came out in 1996. In that case Apple is no different than "everyone else" because Apple iPhones have used USB-A for chargers since they were introduced "10+ years" ago and still do today, which is precisely what people are complaining about. Had Apple changed to USB-C then they'd have broken their "10+ years" of using the same USB-A port to charge their phones.
Micro USB had been around for equally long and has had no problems keeping up with the Joneses during that time.
Oh, really? Where's the micro-USB quick charger? The micro-USB port is only specified to carry 10 watts. Some manufacturers have exceeded the specification to get maybe 15 watts through it but that's no longer a USB port since it violates the specification, it only looks like a USB port.
In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as âoeopaque and arbitrary,â warning that the changes could affect the âoeinfrastructure of the modern internet,â which largely relies on consistent standards across websites.
When will people learn that what is provided to a web browser is merely a series of suggestions? The browser can take the suggestions, or discard them, and there is only so much the server side can do about it. I've seen website refuse to show content to browsers that block JavaScript or cookies but that's fine, I don't have to go to your site.
If their advertising model can be broken with a web browser that provides a feature that people want then perhaps they should change their advertising model. Disposing of cookies that want to exist until the end of time is a place to start. Ignoring autoplay requests would also be nice. If I want to watch your video then I'll hit the play button, thankyouverymuch.
No one asked for this feature, but Apple wants to give it to us anyway.
Then it will show up in device sales and user surveys. Voice activated login was a thing for a while, going WAY back in time. Maybe that's still a thing, I just don't know of anyone that uses it. If it's broken in some way, and/or people just don't like it, then it will quietly go away. If it works and people like it then that will also show in sales and surveys.
If they included a $3 USB-C to USB-A adapter like this [dx.com] there would be very little reason to complain since you'd get faster charging with the "native" charger and hey it kinda works with any other USB port too.
They'd complain about a non-standard adapter being included in the box. That adapter is a fire hazard since it allows people to plug two USB-A ports together if used with a standard male USB-C to male USB-A cable. Such an adapter might pass the USB standards testing if it had a USB to USB controller in it, but then it wouldn't be $3 any more, it'd be more like $30.
But chargers are a profit center, most people need more than one (home, cabin, car, travel) and they lose or forget them so hey, let's buy one more.
Yes, people do typically buy more than one. So then why complain about the one that comes in the box? Keep it as a cheap spare and buy the charger you really wanted and be done.
And in some people's mind there's only brand chargers and cheap knock-off fire hazards from eBay, a lot of people will only buy it almost no matter how much they charge.
Out of curiosity, why would people think that the cheap knock offs from eBay are fire hazards? Perhaps because people started fires with stuff they got from eBay? Remember, we're talking about a $1000 electronic device here. Isn't it worth the extra $30 to make sure that your $1000 investment isn't destroyed by a cheap $10 charger? I seem to recall a discussion, on this very forum, on how cheap chargers and cables were destroying expensive phones, tablets, and laptops.
If they'd released a USB-C iPhone 7 and then the USB-C MacBook Pro there would have been far fewer complaints.
I doubt it. Perhaps what you say is true but I have my doubts. First is the order of events. An iPhone with USB-C charging and no laptop with USB-C ports creates near certainty of complaints since people will have to buy a new cable for wired connection to their laptop. There are ways to connect wirelessly but that's not as simple, fast, or reliable.
Getting the laptop with USB-C first means being able to use a USB-C to A adapter, which many would get anyway for other devices, to connect the iPhone. Alternatively a USB-C to Lightning cable for connecting to the laptop for data and charging, and being able to use the laptop charger to quick charge the phone.
Apple hasn't jumped in with USB-C with both feet yet and I don't just mean their iDevices. They are still selling a line of laptops with USB-A, MagSafe, and ThunderBolt2. I don't recall their desktop lines, If they have USB-C then they also have some "legacy" ports too.
I was looking at a laptop I considered buying. It was a Lenovo, as I recall, and it could charge from USB-C or their standard coaxial charger plug. That's an interesting combination, and something I would have liked on the Apple's offering, as in keep the Magsafe for old chargers but also allow charging with USB-C. I'm sure that there are a lot of technical and marketing reasons they didn't do that. I've seen MagSafe-like charging cables for USB-C that break away in the middle if tugged but they offer no data transfer, not even USB 2 speeds like the Apple "charging cable". The "charging cable" will still move USB 2.0 data back and forth but it's really just a cheaper alternative to the more expensive Thunderbolt3/USB3 cable.
If you think Apple is going to put USB-C on the phone itself, to replace the Lightning port, then I believe you are going to be disappointed for a while. The closest we'll get any time soon is the USB-C adapters.
Who was it that said, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap." I believe the same, but for a different reason. Those were the words of some entertainer trying to create a "look".
What I'm thinking of are people that buy cheap stuff that wears out, breaks, or whatever, and then they have to try to keep it together with duct tape and baling wire or try to scrape together enough money for a replacement that is also cheap. They are constantly trying to save money getting junk products not realizing that if they just stopped for a bit, saved up a little money, and bought something that would last for once, that they could get themselves out of this hole.
I did that. It takes a lot of self control. When I broke my laptop I panicked and immediately started looking for a replacement. I calmed down a bit and I was able to get my laptop working as a desktop, the battery is shot. I could try to replace the battery, and pound out the dents I put into the case when I dropped it, but I decided to save up for a new laptop instead. It's not likely to be as nice as the one I broke but it won't be a cheap pieced of crap like I was about to get in my earlier panic. Spending money on repairing my current laptop means putting money into a computer that is already 5 years old and the repair may not be successful.
Between my laptop (which is now shackled to my desk), my iPhone, and computer labs on campus, I've been able to get by so far. I'm going to see if I can last until Christmas before buying, that can mean a lot of after Christmas sales for a laptop for next semester.
It's actually not that expensive to look "cool" if you can contain yourself from getting the latest and greatest every year. Any more it's hard to tell a 5 year old laptop from a 5 month old laptop if you buy nice stuff and take care of it.
If I were to drop $200 on headphones, I'd make sure they had AKG, Beyerdynamic or Sennheiser written on them.
That's what I did. I came to a point years ago where I decided I need new headphones, nice headphones. I kept looking at cheap headphones because that's what I always bought. Then I realized that if I was shopping for speakers that only I could hear, such as for my hi-fi in my basement, that I would not even blink at spending $200 on them. This put me in a new mindset. I started to look at the features I wanted first, then look at the price. Looking at the price first eliminated so many headphones from further inspection and consideration.
I ended up with Beyerdynamic headphones for something like $200 and I love them. I'd bring them to work so I could filter out all the chatter from coworkers as I worked. When I had computer based training I could filter out the noise of the other students taking their own courses in the same room, where they use a microphone to reply in the chat program the course provided. I brought them on my European vacation so I could filter out the noise on the plane. They aren't "noise cancelling" like so many others in it's price range, they just have well designed sound insulation.
I heard the same about paying extra for the "green paint" on John Deere tractors. Sounds like the same deal here. Go tell a farmer that they're just buying a tractor for the color of the paint and they'll smile and laugh... all the way to the bank. They're making money with that "green paint" while their neighbors are letting crop rot in the field since their cheaper equipment is down for repair.
For that logo to mean something they have to build a reputation. Just charging a lot of money for crap doesn't make a successful business. Last I checked Apple and John Deere were both successful companies in their respective fields.
Ah, you seem to forget that the cell phone makers had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into using a standard charging port. If China and the EU had not made the cell phone makers get in a room and come up with a standard battery charging port then you'd be complaining (still) about how every phone maker has a different charger.
Apple uses a USB port to charge like every other cell phone. Sure, you have to buy a cable to plug it in, also like any other cell phone. You don't have to buy cables from Apple either, I found "Apple certified" cables for $8 on Amazon. I'm sure you can find them cheaper too, just like you can get a cheap USB-C cable and take your chances on it not working or breaking your phone. Before the USB port was mandated as a standard a lot of 5 billion dollar construction projects were funded from selling vendor specific chargers.
The transition to USB-C hasn't exactly been smooth either. Lots of cell phone makers couldn't be bothered with complying with the standard. The phone might have a port that *LOOKS* like a USB-C port but plugging in a charger other than what came with it could damage the phone, or limit it to slow charging rates as it reverted to voltage and current that complies with USB 2.0. I seem to recall an article on this website called Slashdot, perhaps you've heard of it, where there was a discussion on Google "suggesting" that Android phone makers comply with the USB standard or lose the Google endorsement.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no reason people need to eat 3.7 pounds (1.6Kg) of meat per week....
I'd consider that near starvation. But then I'm in the upper 1% by height and upper 25% by weight of males in the USA. I just chuckle to myself about "suggested serving size" on food packages, I take that number and multiply by two for an estimate on what I'll eat.
So, "no reason" to eat that much meat? How about needing 3000 calories per day if I just sit on my ass and still have enough calories to keep my brain warm?
(I'm sure that there's a joke about sitting on my brains in there. Go ahead, make my day.)
Construction Costs:
Nuclear: $14 billion (Vogtle units 3 & 4) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Solar: $2.2 billion (Ivanpah Solar Power Facility) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Wind: $1.5 million (typical 1 megawatt windmill in USA) https://emp.lbl.gov/sites/all/...
Power produced:
Nuclear: 2 GW (2 units x 1.2 gigawatts each x 0.85 expected capacity factor)
Solar: 80 MW (400 MW capacity x 0.2 measured capacity factor)
Wind: 0.33 MW (1 MW x 0.33 typical measured capacity factor)
Expected Operational Lifespan:
Nuclear: 60 years
Solar: 25 years
Wind: 20 years
CO2 emissions: https://web.archive.org/web/20...
Nuclear: 60 g/kWh
Solar: 40 g/kWh
Wind: 21 g/kWh
Someone check my math but this is what I came up with. Wind produces 1/3rd the CO2 of nuclear but costs twice as much. Solar produces 2/3rds the CO2 but costs *TEN TIMES* as much. I'm taking into account installed capacity, operational lifespan, and capacity factor. You can take into account things like cleanup costs after the power plant is retired, lifetime operational costs, etc. Some people just love to point out the extreme costs of building a nuclear power plant but if the actual potential for producing power is taken into account it looks real cheap.
Trying to find actual historical costs of energy of these energy sources has been difficult. Lots of people like to "estimate", "project", or just plain leave things out of their study. A study by what people might assume to be biased pro-nuclear shows electricity costs around the world: https://www.oecd-nea.org/ndd/p... It shows solar to be quite expensive compared to anything else in the study.
By my estimates wind and nuclear really win out here. Solar might look marginally better than nuclear for reducing CO2 but the costs are just outrageous.
I was just reading yesterday on how Staten Island has a deer problem so they are culling the deer. Now usually one would think this means trapping or shooting the deer but no, that would make sense. What the New York City government is doing is giving the bucks they catch a vasectomy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
Not even a castration, which would not only be easier but also avoid the rut behavior that puts them at risk of automobile collisions as they travel around the island. They are giving the bucks a vasectomy.
Don't deer fart too? What of their methane production? Not only that but the reason they want to get rid of the deer on the island is that they are effectively an invasive species spreading disease, causing property damage, and putting people's lives at risk from automobile collisions.
The inmates are running the asylum in New York City. Those deer should be hunted for their tasty meat and to remove the risks to life and property they cause. But no one wants to vote to kill Bambi, so they spend millions of taxpayer dollars to catch the deer, give them a vasectomy, and then... let them go. That way the deer can die naturally, by getting hit by a truck.
Anyway, your nuclear rant is as pointless as always
Right, pointless to do some math to get a handle on the problem.
The USA has a current installed electric production capacity of 1000 GW, China has 1500 GW. Both are dominated by fossil fuels. If we assume that burning fossil fuels is a problem then we need something to replace these power plants.
If we assume either country builds one gigawatt class nuclear reactor every month then it'd take 40 years to get roughly 500 GW capacity. If you account for a capacity factor of 80% to 90% then it's more like 1.2 GW needed, or perhaps 1.4 GW, which happens to be about the capacity of the popular AP-1000 and VVER-1200 designs. That 500 GW of capacity is about 1/2 of the current USA capacity and 1/3 of China's. That's not adding new capacity necessarily, it's just replacing existing fossil fuel generation.
Since a nuclear reactor built today is expected to last 60 years then it's more like 750 GW, 3/4 of the USA capacity and 1/2 of China's. That's not all of either nation's electric generation demand, and does not account for growth, but building one new nuclear reactor per month in both nations is close to the right number for just keeping up with demand.
How do we fill in the rest of the demand? To do so with wind power there would have to be 3000 one megawatt windmills for every gigawatt of capacity needed, since wind gives about a 30% capacity factor. Assuming a 40 year life span then we get, just like the nuclear example above, 500 GW of capacity if we just keep building 3000 windmills every month. But the operating lifespan of a windmill is more like 20 years. So, to get that same 500 GW there would have to be 6000 windmills made every month.
What of solar? Ivanpah (concentrated solar) and California Flats (PV) are some of the biggest solar power plants in the world and they produce about 300 MW each and have planned capacity factors of 25%. Let's assume 33% capacity factor and call it 100 MW. Planned lifespan is about 25 years but we'll assume that they last 40 years. How many of these would we have to build to maintain 500 GW capacity? At one per month you'd have only 50 GW capacity before they'd have to be replaced, so it's more like 10 per month.
How much does this cost? Ivanpah cost $2.2 billion for 100 MW of real capacity (300MW x 30% capacity factor). I couldn't find the costs on California Flats but I'll assume it's close to Ivanpah given that Apple's $850 million investment was given as something like 1/3rd of the total costs. Votgle units 3 & 4 cost about $14 billion for 2 GW of real capacity (about 2.2 GW x 90% capacity factor). So solar is about $22 billion for 1 GW and nuclear is about $7 for 1 GW. Solar costs three times of nuclear and I was *VERY* generous on the costs of solar.
To complete the math we assume the same 40 year lifespan for wind. Costs per one megawatt windmill is about $1.5 million. To get 1 GW with a 30% capacity factor would mean 3000 windmills. That costs $4.5 billion. A more realistic lifespan is 20 years so it's more like double that, $9 billion.
So, assuming 40 year lifespan for all power sources, and 500 GW capacity, we can compute the cost per month for each power source. Nuclear is $7 billion, wind is $4.5 billion, and solar is $22 billion. If we give more realistic lifespans of 60 years for nuclear, 30 years for solar, and 20 years for wind we get $4.6 billion for nuclear, $9 billion for wind, and $30 billion for solar. Remember that this is about one nuclear power plant per month, 6000 windmills, or 10 solar power collector built every month to maintain 500 GW generating capacity, not grow but just maintain.
Nuclear looks real cheap, doesn't it? It's math. If I made a mistake above somewhere (which I likely did) then please provide a correction.
As someone that has had to program in a number of languages I can say that strongly typed languages can catch a lot of trivial bugs quickly. One example is an if/then statement that allows non-Boolean arguments. If I mistype a comparison in an if/then statement then I should expect an error on compile. If I type an assignment "if (foo = bar)" instead of a comparison "if (foo == bar)" I expect this to get flagged, but some languages don't see this as a problem.
I prefer strongly typed languages as it can catch a lot of typographical errors and sloppy logic. It can also be frustrating at times since it can mean nesting type conversions to near absurdity. VHDL comes to mind in this. It can also be frustrating if trying to do something quickly and the compiler complains on what I would think is a pretty obvious implied type conversion.
It's interesting to see someone try to get an idea on how many errors strongly typed languages would catch. I'm not sure this makes an argument for one language over another. It might make an argument for testing, coding style, and such though.
China is not importing coal. China is the worlds biggest coal exporter.
http://www.hellenicshippingnew...
Chinese seaborne steam coal imports have grown significantly in the last decade, from 17mt in 2008 to over 160mt in 2016.
The only nation that imports more coal than China is Japan.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
You couldn't do even a simple search on Wikipedia or Google before stating something so easily proven false?
If the USA would finish a nuclear power plant each month, what wouod they di with the power? Where is the demand for it?
Did you even read my post before you thought to type that question? I said why we'd have to build them at that rate in the same sentence I said the rate at which they should be built. This is what I said:
The USA should be breaking ground on a new nuclear power plant every month to keep up with the closures of existing coal and nuclear power plants.
There are roughly 100 operating nuclear power plants in the USA now, and as I understand it all of them are now operating beyond their designed lifespan. We'd have to build a new nuclear reactor every month for more than 8 years to replace them all. There's over 300 gigawatts of coal fired power plant capacity in place in the USA today. If we build a gigawatt nuclear power plant per month it would take over 30 years to replace all those coal fired power plants. It would take us roughly 40 years of building a new gigawatt capacity nuclear reactor every month in the USA just to keep up with the shutting down of existing coal and nuclear power plants. That's not adding any new capacity, that's just keeping up with what we have now.
Guess what happens 40 years from now if we build a new nuclear reactor every month starting today? Those nuclear reactors we build today would reach the end of their operating lifespan and we'd have to build another nuclear reactor to replace it.
The question isn't if it is possible to build a new nuclear reactor every month. It must be possible because we don't have much of a choice. The question is why we haven't started already. If we don't start building new nuclear reactors then we'd have to fill in the existing need some other way. This could be by building roughly 1500 windmills per month, roofing 2 million homes with solar panels per month, or continue doing what we are now and keep building natural gas plants to replace coal and nuclear.
We can choose fossil fuels, nuclear power, or the lights going out. We might have another option in the future but today we have only those three choices.
I do know something about the technology and this kind of accuracy has been in the works for a while. The military grade code was supposed to provide accuracy that only the government was supposed to be able to use. It took me about two seconds to figure out that just knowing some basic properties of the signal could provide similar accuracy if someone was willing to throw enough processing at it. Advancement in computer technology has made the processing needed very cheap, light, and small. There is still an advantage to knowing how to decode the military grade signal, it's just that the advantage is very small unless traveling in ways that are generally unique to the military.
Early NavStar signals had a civilian accessible code which gave a "quick and dirty" navigation and a military grade signal that required the decoding of the first code to be useful. Now the "quick and dirty" code is still there for legacy reasons, then there is a higher accuracy civilian signal, and the hyper accurate (and now independent of the other signals) military coded signal. If one has access to the encryption keys for the military grade NavStar signal then one can get hyper accurate location in real time with minimal processing and few satellites in view.
What it sounds like these new systems are doing to get their location as accurate as they do is stack NavStar, GLONASS, and Galileo on top of each other, and do some intense processing of those signals. This is impressive accuracy that is comparable to what NavStar provides with the military grade signal alone. Unless a shooting war breaks out this hyper accurate GPS will remain just as good as the military NavStar signal.
If there is a shooting war then there is the possibility of the US federal government shutting off the civilian signals on NavStar to deny that to the enemy. The remaining military signal would still give some location information to those willing to throw a lot of processing at it but the accuracy would suck without the civilian cleartext signals to work from. It's this possibility (threat?) of the USA turning NavStar off that prompted the European Union to develop their own system, and Russia their own.
Somehow, China has people in government who are actually interested in the future. The USA has become risk-averse.
I agree. China has plans for 20 nuclear power plants in the next 5 years or so while the USA has plans for maybe 10 in the same time period. That might not seem like much of a difference given the population difference between the two nations. It's an astonishing difference once one takes into account the economic output of the two nations. The USA should be breaking ground on a new nuclear power plant every month to keep up with the closures of existing coal and nuclear power plants.
China is moving away from coal because they have to import so much of it, burning it for heat and industry creates air quality problems (indoors as well as outdoors), and it is a strategic energy reserve that may run out quickly if they cannot find an alternative. Nuclear power is clean and domestically abundant, solving a number of problems for them. They face some very real health and economic risks if they do not expand nuclear power production.
The USA does not face the same problems. There's enough coal and natural gas in the USA to last potentially centuries, oil reserves are also likely as abundant. Since Americans tend to burn coal in properly vented and designed coal furnaces the health risks are much lower than China's. Nuclear power would still be a good way to further improve energy independence in the USA. Bu the perceived risks of nuclear power have become real effectively because we deem them so. The greatest risks nuclear power faces in the USA are political. A well run nuclear power plant project should be able to complete in 3 or 4 years. There is no reason such a build cannot complete in less than 2 years. But because of ever changing government rules and regulations they tend to drag out over 5 years, sometimes over decades. If the government would just stop with the nonsense of calling them risky then the risks would almost disappear.
We've built fully functional nuclear power plants in a matter of months, not years, in the USA before. They've been very safe and profitable. All we need is the will to do so again and it can happen.
Imposing a tariff on solar power will make nuclear look more attractive. This would do little to competition from natural gas but if the USA wants to keep that cheap gas for heating then it needs cheap nuclear for electricity. This also means being able to keep the oil flowing for fuels and coal for industrial feedstock.
Free electricity from sunshine negatively impacts gov't tax revenues, therefore it is against gov't's interests to allow solar panels to be easy to obtain and install for cheap.
Against the government's interests? The government just *LOVES* to buy votes. You know what also negatively impacts government revenues? Tax deductions on electric and natural gas cars. Why do you suppose those were ever created? Any tax deduction negatively impacts tax revenues. That includes deductions for children, mortgages, education loans, and on and on. The government deducts taxes on things they want you to do, like buy solar panels. It's how the government effectively pays people to do things it wants people to do. The government wants people to have kids, get an education, and buy a house. They also want people to get solar panels.
We've had this technology for decades, yet you STILL can not walk into a Walmart or Home Depot today and load your pickup truck with solar panels (overpriced puny toy panels don't count). Yet you can pick up a noisy and expensive to operate gasoline powered generator at ANY of those big box stores quite easily...
Why do you think that is? Think about what a portable gasoline generator is used for. I emphasize "portable" because that's the kind you are going to pick up at a big box store, as opposed to a stationary one that would be a special order item that's not stocked on a shelf. A portable generator is very useful because it is portable. It can be put on the back of a truck or on a trailer and brought just about anywhere. They run on common gasoline. They will provide power at any time. They are also relatively cheap at about a kilobuck each, which is not a whole lot if it means saving food from spoiling in a power outage, getting work done on a job site, or just making sure that the guys are able to see a football game and drink cold beer while on a weekend away from the wife and kids.
The reason you can't just stop at a big box store and get a truckload of solar panels is the same reason you cannot just stop at a big box store and get a truckload of shingles. Neither are a high volume item. When people buy shingles they will want a particular size, shape, color, just like they would want a particular kind of solar panel. I'm sure if you are not picky about how you cover your roof then you could find something in a big box store that would be suitable. If you don't care that the roof of your house is covered with white corrugated sheet metal then you can pick that up, because that's pretty common stuff for barns, sheds, garages, factories, and even the occasional home owner that doesn't care what's on the roof so long as it keeps the rain out. If you want anything else then you are going to have to order it.
A bit of searching the internet tells me that a 5kW solar panel system will take up about 500 square feet, weigh about a half ton, and cost about $20,000. In contrast a 5kW generator takes up probably 6 square feet, weighs about 200 pounds, and costs about $1000. Operating costs for that noisy generator is of course an issue but then people don't typically use them regularly for electricity. They use it for power outages, work sites, and camping trips.
If everyone managed to jump off the grid tomorrow, the gov't would be up a creek without a paddle due to all the tax revenues drying up. You can bet they aren't going to let that happen. So the war against cheap solar panels continues...
Yep, the government is conspiring against solar panels. The small market has nothing to do with the costs and inconvenience of solar panels. I think you have your aluminum helmet on too tight.
Out here in the Midwest these portable generators see a jump in sales about twice every year. They'll get bought up when the winds and rain threaten in the summer, and when ice and snow threaten in the winter. There's a lot of overhead power lines that can be damaged i
I'd love to see political lobbyists outlawed, period.
How would that work? First, you'd have to define a political lobbyist. Second, you'd need an enforcement mechanism.
Part of the problem in making political lobbying illegal is that everyone has the right to communicate with their elected officials. Are you going to say that once someone makes a profession of communicating with a politician that they cannot talk to them any more? Okay, define the point at which a person is a professional lobbyist.
For an example let's assume I want clean water for my community. So, I start a little group, Keep My Water Clean. I collect donations, hold fundraisers, and so forth so that I can spend my time traveling through the state and the nation telling those in public office that there needs to be government enforcement on keeping municipal water safe to drink and to fund the creation of municipal water sources for growing communities. You want to ban that?
Let's say there is a ban. How should I be punished if I violate this law and create Keep My Water Clean in spite of the ban? Would you have me jailed? Should I be fined? How do you think that would look in a court of law? Or, the court of public opinion?
I've seen arguments like this before and the typical response would be that non-profit corporations would be exempt. Okay, did you know that the NFL was a non-profit until there was enough public outrage that they changed their legal status? Being a non-profit doesn't mean the entity cannot be very large and make a lot of people a lot of money. Also, suppose a bunch of people got together to make a non-profit that made it no secret of it's affiliation with a large for-profit entity. Let's call this group Pepsico Employees for Clean Water. Every member of the group is a Pepsico employee, and the board is identical to the board of Pepsico. When they hold a meeting they "rent" a conference room at Pepsico headquarters, and Pepsico then "donates" this rent to the non-profit Pepsico Employees for Clean Water, which is then noted on their tax return as a donation to a non-profit.
I say let people say what they want.
I've heard this somewhere before and it comes to mind here, liberals want people to shut up while conservatives want people to keep talking. Go ahead, keep talking. Let the best argument win.
Sure, for a cellular phone to work the phone must announce it's location to the carrier. The issue at hand though is that the phone does not have to tell the government where it is located to work. The carrier should not have to tell the government where a phone (and therefore the person carrying it) is located without a warrant. Also, the government cannot set up a fake cell site to scoop up the locations of people without a warrant.
I'm trying to think of how these fake cell sites could be used any more after a ruling like this. For these things to work they have to announce their presence to every phone in range and just kind of hope the person they are looking for is in range. In the process though they'll be grabbing the phone numbers, locations, and perhaps more information from every cell phone in range. In a large city this could easily be thousands of people as they move in and out of range. How can a fake cell site be made to work and not scoop up all this information?
I doubt that this will be the end of this nonsense, but it should make the government think real hard about doing stuff like this again.
Keep your distance but don't LOOK like you're keeping your distance. Fly casual.
If in need of some "weighted dummies" then stop in front of a Wal-Mart and offer free service to get people to participate in your test. Just be careful not to exceed the load capacity of the frame, which I imagine would be all too easy to do.
With conventional buses there is no method to refuel while the bus is en route. Not that it needs it, a typical bus does not seem to stop for fuel often. An electric bus could be recharged with overhead wires along common routes and/or stops. That should make the bus more viable and not add too much to the expense or limit it's ability to change routes to match traveler's needs, traffic patterns, construction, etc. An electric trolley is a common sight still in some cities, and I recall that in those cities they've adapted hybrid buses to use those overhead lines to reduce fuel use. These buses have no electric storage, they just use the electric drive when traveling on a route shared with a street trolley.
If there are buses, for example, used as an airport shuttle service then the overhead charging lines can be at the airport terminal. Every time it is stopped at the terminal to wait for loading and unloading passengers it can be recharging. Once it runs it's loop around the parking lot, or to and from a hotel, and returns it can run on battery.
If capacitors work better then batteries in this case then use them. Perhaps a combination of capacitors and batteries would work. Point is that if the bus has a ready recharge point that coincides with a stop to load and unload passengers then the range can be improved without as many batteries than would be needed to do an "off line" recharge at a bus corral at the end of the day.
Driving around an empty parking lot while not carrying any people or luggage means it's not really been tested. In a real world there will likely have to be a way to charge the battery, or at least allow to run on a "third rail" so the battery isn't drained in that time.
I've seen the math and electric vehicles are suitable to a quite narrow set of applications. Overhead lines for buses would seem a minimal set of infrastructure needed to expand the usefulness of the vehicles, especially where they already exist in some form. I just wonder if some freeloader type might modify a car to tap into that.
High BMI is a red herring
No, it's an indicator. It's a means to determining if there is a need for further investigation of health problems. People with a high or low BMI will likely need an additional check for body fat. There are a number of means to double check this, buoyancy, skin pinch, waist to hip ratio, likely more.
I don't believe that BMI needs to be redone, just that it needs to be taken with the knowledge that it is an incomplete indicator of health. As you stated for your life insurance the BMI was taken along with waist, hip, and chest measurements. That's likely to cover all but the rarest of cases as an indicator of health.
I believe the BMI has been a victim of it's own success. It works well so often to indicate that a person is over or under healthy weight that people have put more faith in it than it deserves. I guess that it's pretty rare for people to have a "bad" BMI and good health, neglecting other indicators of good health. Just like it is possible but rare for people to have a "good" BMI and poor health, neglecting other indicators of poor health.
From what I understand the combination of BMI with waist to hip ratios covers probably an additional 9% on top of the 90% that BMI alone does not cover. The last 1% will just have to get a note from a physician on their health and life insurance policies.
Wait, doesn't Nabisco own Philip Morris? If they can't keep people hooked on cookies then maybe get them hooked on tobacco. Put nicotine in the chocolate perhaps?
Maybe they could get in the marijuana business, that should help their cookie sales.
Literally everyone else in the smartphone market Is at 10+ years per cable interface change.
That is just plain provably false. The mini-USB connectors came out in 2000, the micro-USB connector came out in 2007 (which made the mini connectors obsolete), and USB-C came out in 2014. Unless new smartphones are coming out with the obsolete mini-B port for charging, which could not be certified by the USB-IF group, they've changed the ports on their smart phones at least once in the last "10+ years". In 2007 we also saw China demand cell phone makers decide on a common port, precisely because "everyone else" was using their own connector.
Now, if you are talking about the OTHER end of the cable, the end that plugs into the charger brick or computer then you might have a point. That port, the original USB-A, has been essentially unchanged since it came out in 1996. In that case Apple is no different than "everyone else" because Apple iPhones have used USB-A for chargers since they were introduced "10+ years" ago and still do today, which is precisely what people are complaining about. Had Apple changed to USB-C then they'd have broken their "10+ years" of using the same USB-A port to charge their phones.
Micro USB had been around for equally long and has had no problems keeping up with the Joneses during that time.
Oh, really? Where's the micro-USB quick charger? The micro-USB port is only specified to carry 10 watts. Some manufacturers have exceeded the specification to get maybe 15 watts through it but that's no longer a USB port since it violates the specification, it only looks like a USB port.
In an open letter expected to be published this afternoon, the groups describe the new standards as âoeopaque and arbitrary,â warning that the changes could affect the âoeinfrastructure of the modern internet,â which largely relies on consistent standards across websites.
When will people learn that what is provided to a web browser is merely a series of suggestions? The browser can take the suggestions, or discard them, and there is only so much the server side can do about it. I've seen website refuse to show content to browsers that block JavaScript or cookies but that's fine, I don't have to go to your site.
If their advertising model can be broken with a web browser that provides a feature that people want then perhaps they should change their advertising model. Disposing of cookies that want to exist until the end of time is a place to start. Ignoring autoplay requests would also be nice. If I want to watch your video then I'll hit the play button, thankyouverymuch.
No one asked for this feature, but Apple wants to give it to us anyway.
Then it will show up in device sales and user surveys. Voice activated login was a thing for a while, going WAY back in time. Maybe that's still a thing, I just don't know of anyone that uses it. If it's broken in some way, and/or people just don't like it, then it will quietly go away. If it works and people like it then that will also show in sales and surveys.
If they included a $3 USB-C to USB-A adapter like this [dx.com] there would be very little reason to complain since you'd get faster charging with the "native" charger and hey it kinda works with any other USB port too.
They'd complain about a non-standard adapter being included in the box. That adapter is a fire hazard since it allows people to plug two USB-A ports together if used with a standard male USB-C to male USB-A cable. Such an adapter might pass the USB standards testing if it had a USB to USB controller in it, but then it wouldn't be $3 any more, it'd be more like $30.
But chargers are a profit center, most people need more than one (home, cabin, car, travel) and they lose or forget them so hey, let's buy one more.
Yes, people do typically buy more than one. So then why complain about the one that comes in the box? Keep it as a cheap spare and buy the charger you really wanted and be done.
And in some people's mind there's only brand chargers and cheap knock-off fire hazards from eBay, a lot of people will only buy it almost no matter how much they charge.
Out of curiosity, why would people think that the cheap knock offs from eBay are fire hazards? Perhaps because people started fires with stuff they got from eBay? Remember, we're talking about a $1000 electronic device here. Isn't it worth the extra $30 to make sure that your $1000 investment isn't destroyed by a cheap $10 charger? I seem to recall a discussion, on this very forum, on how cheap chargers and cables were destroying expensive phones, tablets, and laptops.
If they'd released a USB-C iPhone 7 and then the USB-C MacBook Pro there would have been far fewer complaints.
I doubt it. Perhaps what you say is true but I have my doubts. First is the order of events. An iPhone with USB-C charging and no laptop with USB-C ports creates near certainty of complaints since people will have to buy a new cable for wired connection to their laptop. There are ways to connect wirelessly but that's not as simple, fast, or reliable.
Getting the laptop with USB-C first means being able to use a USB-C to A adapter, which many would get anyway for other devices, to connect the iPhone. Alternatively a USB-C to Lightning cable for connecting to the laptop for data and charging, and being able to use the laptop charger to quick charge the phone.
Apple hasn't jumped in with USB-C with both feet yet and I don't just mean their iDevices. They are still selling a line of laptops with USB-A, MagSafe, and ThunderBolt2. I don't recall their desktop lines, If they have USB-C then they also have some "legacy" ports too.
I was looking at a laptop I considered buying. It was a Lenovo, as I recall, and it could charge from USB-C or their standard coaxial charger plug. That's an interesting combination, and something I would have liked on the Apple's offering, as in keep the Magsafe for old chargers but also allow charging with USB-C. I'm sure that there are a lot of technical and marketing reasons they didn't do that. I've seen MagSafe-like charging cables for USB-C that break away in the middle if tugged but they offer no data transfer, not even USB 2 speeds like the Apple "charging cable". The "charging cable" will still move USB 2.0 data back and forth but it's really just a cheaper alternative to the more expensive Thunderbolt3/USB3 cable.
If you think Apple is going to put USB-C on the phone itself, to replace the Lightning port, then I believe you are going to be disappointed for a while. The closest we'll get any time soon is the USB-C adapters.
Who was it that said, "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap." I believe the same, but for a different reason. Those were the words of some entertainer trying to create a "look".
What I'm thinking of are people that buy cheap stuff that wears out, breaks, or whatever, and then they have to try to keep it together with duct tape and baling wire or try to scrape together enough money for a replacement that is also cheap. They are constantly trying to save money getting junk products not realizing that if they just stopped for a bit, saved up a little money, and bought something that would last for once, that they could get themselves out of this hole.
I did that. It takes a lot of self control. When I broke my laptop I panicked and immediately started looking for a replacement. I calmed down a bit and I was able to get my laptop working as a desktop, the battery is shot. I could try to replace the battery, and pound out the dents I put into the case when I dropped it, but I decided to save up for a new laptop instead. It's not likely to be as nice as the one I broke but it won't be a cheap pieced of crap like I was about to get in my earlier panic. Spending money on repairing my current laptop means putting money into a computer that is already 5 years old and the repair may not be successful.
Between my laptop (which is now shackled to my desk), my iPhone, and computer labs on campus, I've been able to get by so far. I'm going to see if I can last until Christmas before buying, that can mean a lot of after Christmas sales for a laptop for next semester.
It's actually not that expensive to look "cool" if you can contain yourself from getting the latest and greatest every year. Any more it's hard to tell a 5 year old laptop from a 5 month old laptop if you buy nice stuff and take care of it.
If I were to drop $200 on headphones, I'd make sure they had AKG, Beyerdynamic or Sennheiser written on them.
That's what I did. I came to a point years ago where I decided I need new headphones, nice headphones. I kept looking at cheap headphones because that's what I always bought. Then I realized that if I was shopping for speakers that only I could hear, such as for my hi-fi in my basement, that I would not even blink at spending $200 on them. This put me in a new mindset. I started to look at the features I wanted first, then look at the price. Looking at the price first eliminated so many headphones from further inspection and consideration.
I ended up with Beyerdynamic headphones for something like $200 and I love them. I'd bring them to work so I could filter out all the chatter from coworkers as I worked. When I had computer based training I could filter out the noise of the other students taking their own courses in the same room, where they use a microphone to reply in the chat program the course provided. I brought them on my European vacation so I could filter out the noise on the plane. They aren't "noise cancelling" like so many others in it's price range, they just have well designed sound insulation.
I heard the same about paying extra for the "green paint" on John Deere tractors. Sounds like the same deal here. Go tell a farmer that they're just buying a tractor for the color of the paint and they'll smile and laugh... all the way to the bank. They're making money with that "green paint" while their neighbors are letting crop rot in the field since their cheaper equipment is down for repair.
For that logo to mean something they have to build a reputation. Just charging a lot of money for crap doesn't make a successful business. Last I checked Apple and John Deere were both successful companies in their respective fields.
Ah, you seem to forget that the cell phone makers had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into using a standard charging port. If China and the EU had not made the cell phone makers get in a room and come up with a standard battery charging port then you'd be complaining (still) about how every phone maker has a different charger.
Apple uses a USB port to charge like every other cell phone. Sure, you have to buy a cable to plug it in, also like any other cell phone. You don't have to buy cables from Apple either, I found "Apple certified" cables for $8 on Amazon. I'm sure you can find them cheaper too, just like you can get a cheap USB-C cable and take your chances on it not working or breaking your phone. Before the USB port was mandated as a standard a lot of 5 billion dollar construction projects were funded from selling vendor specific chargers.
The transition to USB-C hasn't exactly been smooth either. Lots of cell phone makers couldn't be bothered with complying with the standard. The phone might have a port that *LOOKS* like a USB-C port but plugging in a charger other than what came with it could damage the phone, or limit it to slow charging rates as it reverted to voltage and current that complies with USB 2.0. I seem to recall an article on this website called Slashdot, perhaps you've heard of it, where there was a discussion on Google "suggesting" that Android phone makers comply with the USB standard or lose the Google endorsement.