They're only looking to get a 30% efficiency increase. The Govt. actually worked with the manufacturers to try and come up with reasonable attainable goals for this program...

Buy decent LED and stop repeating the B.S. you've heard form people that don't have a clue. The new screw in LED are damned bright. Cree and Phillips make great bulbs.

No it doesn't. Imagine that - they saw your idea coming. Duh...

LED, they work fine.

I replaced 4x 120Watt floods with LED that draw no more than 20watts each. Some of those floods were on for hours a day at nightfall and others popped on when motion was detected. While I don't expect to notice a huge drop in my power bill I feel pretty good knowing I've saved some power. I only replaced one of them when it blew and when I saw the LED was just as good I swapped them all out - one set even has MORE light than the bulbs it replaced if the box is to be believed.

I have friends with a large home - they have zillions of these incandescent bulbs in ceiling "cans" in their home. The silly things are at least 60 watts apiece and flipping a switch turns out 4-5 of them at least. I know it will cost but I'm getting them to slowly switch over and the savings of going from 60watts each to 12 should be pretty significant IMO.

That's odd.... None of the LED bulbs in my home were made by GE. I have Cree, some Chinese knock offs, some (okay a lot) of Philips, but no GE. How exactly did GE benefit from this?

The LED bulbs in all of my enclosed fixtures - about ten of them - haven't failed and some of them are 2 years old. CFL on the other hand do pretty badly in thoseand I had to replace them about once every year or so.

Halogen bulbs, in the same wattage as incandescent, are at least 30% more efficient which is why they are allowed. Where is this added heat you speak of coming from?

http://heatball.de/en/

Wish i had mod points, that was really helpful! Thankfully my only issues are some of these fixtures that take small base bulbs - yuck!

I have replaced some incandescent bulbs I was using as plant lights (they burned out - again) with LED bulbs. Before I did this touching the housing was likely to remove my fingerprints, now with the LED I can grab the bulb bare handed and unscrew it if I want - no problems. Yes, LED produce some heat but nowhere in the ballpark of what incandescent did.

How about using devices for heat that are INTENDED to produce heat? You think it's the same as a baseboard heater? The one that's temp controlled and placed correctly? Why the hell would you want a baseboard heater? Most of the world lives in those climates? Really? How about we use light bulbs for light, block heaters for warming oil, and high SEER devices for producing circulating warmth in a home instead of being an idiot trying to justify an inefficient lightbulb?

BTW - specialty bulbs are legal for things like hen houses, they will just cost more. Why not shop here http://heatball.de/en/ for the silly warming bulbs?

I'm using some of the LED floods from that Home Depot page as well as some Cree and the ones with the yellow phosphor on them. The floods use maybe 20watts apiece and replaced bulbs drawing 120watts apiece. They dim fine, they throw a ton of light, and I know they don't get hot although outside I could care less. The packages on that page are multipacks but when I first started buying bulbs single bulbs could be as much as $40 - they're still running 2 years later. I've swapped out a ton of the older bulbs and many of the fluorescent ones too. So far no LED have burned out on me and they light well. I no longer feel the need to keep a bunch of bubs in the closet - I don't ever need replacements. I couldn't say that before!

Yup, I was thrilled to see Cree finally come out with a bulb! Decent light distribution, not very heavy, and the 60watt is actually too bright for many places in my home. I have a bunch of these and a bunch of all th eothers too that I've been buying for a good while now to play with. The Cree aren't uber sophisticated but they work wonderfully well! To date I've only had one LED give me issues and it was part of a pack from Costco that was dirt cheap and flashed at me. Every other I've bought in the last 2 years is still going strong. They use peanuts for power too :-)

What does this have to do with a machine having a GPU? You can equip a machine with a GPU and not hook a monitor to it - still works for processing just fine...

Actually as one of those "gamers" I'd love to be using my GPU to speedup real world things like x.264 and ffmpeg but sadly GPU isn't being used there and seems to be actively scorned. A real bummer as I'd love to be putting this bad boy to more use in things I do that tax my heavily overclocked CPU.

GPU crunch numbers well, look at the differences made in password cracking for instance. In the right situation the GPU isn't used for video at all.
I know several people who have invested serious cash in GPU that don't even have a graphic interface on the systems they're used on :-)