So you think you can run an entire factory off an extension cord? Afterall, it shouldn't matter "which way the watts are flowing", right? A simple application of common sense here would reveal that those giant overhead power lines probably carry a bit more juice than the USB charger you have hooked up to your computer. But the electricity flows along each of those conduits until reaching its destination.

Load balancing is incredibly important to the stability of a power grid, especially a small one, like, say, what you'd find on a chain of islands. Power distribution networks are continuously monitoring loads and adjusting plant output and opening and closing circuits continuously to keep the flow stable, and -- importantly, in phase. Within the United States, there are only about a dozen peer points between the various regional grids where very expensive and purpose-built equipment provides coupling between the different networks by providing phase correction -- an out of phase load will create destructive harmonic interference, resulting in radical spikes in voltage. At the energy levels a power plant produces, we're talking about the equivalent of a half ton of TNT's worth of thermal shock suddenly coming out of the equipment. It would cause a huge explosion.

My point is this: It's not a small problem for Hawaii. Hooking up backfeeds into the system that do not have the ability to be shunted to ground or disconnected have the potential to not just destroy the home owner's equipment, but quite possibly everything near that home as well: The sudden application of a large amount of electricity out of phase could cause sudden electrical failure in dozens of homes and office buildings, triggering fires, electrocution, and equipment damage.

You do not just hook up a generator, flip the switch, and call it a day here. These are complex networks that, even with proper computer controls and monitoring, occasionally flip out with serious consequences for society. Our power grids aren't currently designed to peer with houses -- they are loads, not sources. It would require a major overhaul of hundreds of billions in infrastructure and a radical rethinking of how to insulate and protect equipment, homes, and lives, from private owners who simply aren't going to have the level of competence and training to always install the equipment correctly. And if they screw it up, the consequences can be fatal.

That's an incredibly stupid thing to say. Police tend to enter into the record what they considered probable cause. "Anonymous" phone calls... in this day and age? Pretty amusing. But even if you were right... there'd still be a record of the call, and that would be part of the criminal complaint.

You clearly don't understand how the justice system works. They document and record everything.

Or c) Almost all crimes are a matter of public record in the United States. Them not releasing statistics doesn't really mean anything. Black and white thinking: It'll screw you every time.

... So besides being wrong, you're an arrogant prick. Wonderful. Your sample size of 3 is ridiculously small. It's in an uncontrolled environment, and it's not independently verifiable. Now please sit down and be quiet. Real scientists are talking.

Excuse me, but Snowden didn't create anything. He stole them from the NSA. This is false attributation. Shame on you, Slashdot! You're a news organization for crying out loud -- can you at least get your facts marginally correct? The NSA is the owner of those documents, not Snowden.

This statement shows a clear lack of comprehension over what "service life" means. It does not mean all bulbs, ever, last 5.7 years. It means that in an aggregate group of say, 1000 bulbs, the average would be 5.7 years. It's like how the average IQ is 100 -- but there's plenty of people smarter, and dumber, than that. It's called a bell curve, and if you had studied statistics you'd know that.

When I mentioned that the bulbs haven't been on the market for that long -- this is not support for your statement. It's stating that we can't estimate the service life yet because there's not enough data. Substituting your own personal experience is not how you go about this: That is not objective.

Actually, you and him are both the problem. You point the finger at the rich people but fail to offer any explanation for why. It's as though hand-waving and saying "they're rich" is sufficient explanation for any behavior. And the other guy thinks that the environmental argument actually holds any weight.

The average incandescent bulb lasts about 1000 hours. Currently, the average cost per kilowatt hour is 12 cents in this country. So a 100 watt bulb run for 1000 hours costs about $1.20 in electricity. The bulbs cost about $0.57 each. An equivalent LED bulb costs $36 per, and consumes only 13% of the energy used by an incandescent. They say these will last approximately 50,000 hours.

So, 50,000 hours of incandescent is $60 for electricity, and $28.50 in bulbs -- total: $78.50 The LED consumes bulb consumes $7.80 in electricity and costs $36 for bulbs: $43.80 total.

The problem here though is nobody knows whether 50,000 hours is accurate. That would mean the bulb runs continuously for 5.7 years before failure. They haven't been on the market that long. To my knowledge, an extensive engineering test has not been done to see if they actually meet this standard. Limited anecdotal evidence suggests that these bulbs do not last 5 years before requiring replacement on average -- I know several people who have switched. The replacement devices, as the author here points out, are much more sensitive to voltage spikes. An incandescent bulb doesn't care much about brownouts or lightning strikes -- but LED bulbs do. This is because they use solid state electronics that are vulnerable to static electricity and sudden power spikes -- just like your computer is. And the bulbs prices are artificially low: The government has been subsidizing the sale of each bulb. The costs are 20-50% higher from what I have read elsewhere online.

And many of these bulbs, especially CFCs, contain mercury or other highly toxic materials. LEDs may be a light source which is efficient, but the industrial processes used to create them require a lot of highly corrosive acids and are mostly made out of plastic. Conventional bulbs are made out of metal and glass -- things which can harm a person if they try to handle a broken bulb, but the materials themselves are biologically of low toxicity.

The fact is that nobody on either side of the debate has considered the total life cycle of this technology. The environmentalists are only focusing on the lower power use, and ignoring the higher economic burden and (like most so-called "green" initiatives) are not accepting responsibility for merely moving the problem elsewhere, not solving it.

In truth, both the environmentalists, the industrial lobbyists, the bulb hoarders -- they're all equally to blame and equally wrong in their conclusions. Lighting only accounts for 13% of the use of electricity in this country. Far more goes to refrigeration, heating, and industrial uses. But ignoring all of that, the reason we're introducing these laws has nothing to do with environmentalism or economics, not directly.

It comes down to the simple fact that power usage is rising but we aren't building new infrastructure due to NIMBY and anti-nuclear lobbying, which has crippled our ability to generate more electricity. That's why these bulbs are being deployed. It's not because they're better for the environment... it's because they're a bandaid solution to buy us a few more years before we have to face the political reality of our growing energy crisis.

Yes, that's right: Like always, our government is procrastinating on coming up with a real solution, and the net result is everybody loses in higher costs, while the problem continues to grow worse.

Take a page from the US play book: Just fine their companies a fraction of the profit they made from it, tell everyone it was the "harshest penalties ever handed out" for such a conspiracy, and then reiterate their commitment to the "consumers" affected by the "isolated" case of fraud.

I can't believe someone up-modded you for saying such a patently stupid thing. This is like saying the tires and the gas tank on a car are interchangeable. These are separate resources, and any competent network administrator will conduct simulations to find out what the proportions of each will be. And it's different for every project and use scenario.

Facebook has far different needs for its database than Google does; Even if they are both websites. Google needs to take large amounts of data which is randomly accessed and perform complex queries on it; it is much more cpu-intensive than Facebook, which while its pages are rendered dynamically, can be heavily cached and predictive algorithms will be highly effective -- people don't search on Facebook, they view.

You're full of shit suggesting that you can make "drastic" tradeoffs here. You might be able to make a non-trivial tradeoff, even a significant one in certain use scenarios -- but to suggest that everything is interchangeable is absurd. There are limits that simply cannot be exceeded no matter how much wishful thinking you want to throw at it.

Is now a bad time to point out that many researchers have built clusters based out of thousands of GPUs to model the weather, protein folding, and other things? As it turns out, gamers aren't the only ones that buy GPUs. And GPUs aren't functionally all that different from FPGAs, which as I understand Linus went off to Transmeta to build CPUs based off such architecture.

I'm irritated whenever people here on slashdot can't see past their own personal experience; it's become quite sad. The true innovators don't see something that's already been done and figure out how to do it better. They see the same things as everyone else, but put them together in radically new ways nobody's ever thought of before.

GPUs for database processing? That's crazy! Which is why it's innovative and will push the limits of informational technology. three hundred quintillion polygasmic retina displays with 99 billion pixels to play Call of Duty 27 will never do that. Most slashdotters that put down an idea like this really have no concept of what geeks and hackers do.

We push the limits. We fuck with things that ought not to be fucked with. We take the OSI 7 layer model, set it on fire, turn it inside out, and hack out new ways to do do it by breaking every rule we can find. We go where we aren't wanted, aren't expected, and we push every button we can find. We do things precisely because people tell us it's impossible, that it can't or shouldn't be done, and take great pleasure in finding novel new ways to do something even if there's already twenty proven ways to do it.

And while probably 99 times out of a 100, the experience matters only for the hacker or geek doing it, and is done merely to learn... that glorious one time when something unexpected and interesting happens, that is what all progress on this industry is based on. And people like you who belch about "synthetic benchmarks" and insist nobody would do X because that's just stupid will never understand.

You seem to be misunderstanding: A failed businessman is much less of a problem than a failed worker. Smoking pot = less productivity. That's why we throw him in jail for years at a go, whereas the failed businessman at least was making an attempt to improve the glory of our lord and savior, the Dollar. I only wish this statement was entirely sarcastic, instead of merely mostly. :(

This is America. Even The Doctor knows to raise his hands and beg us not to shoot when he drops in for a visit. We are rather careless with human life -- between our murder rates, military, religious-controlled government, capital punishment, etc., we do away with a lot of people. Unwanted fetuses though, suspiciously, we have a problem with. A lot of people need to take a car trip to get rid of one, and listen to a doctor lecturing them. We don't have to endure that for any other type of destruction of human life... take what you will from that.

But yeah, deleting an unwanted twit, I mean, tweet, requires an act of Congress and a note from God. Or an injunction served by a wealthy company. Really the same thing in this country...

Yeah. I'm always a little disappointed when someone doesn't break out the caps lock too. -_- You know shit got real then. On a different note, I don't think a single tweet is a reason to end someone's prospects at doing more than "Would you like fries with that?" no matter how offensive it was.

But on the internet, lives are created and destroyed every day in radically disproportionate ways; This is one of the big problems with our culture eliminating privacy; It makes every mistake you make a lifelong one. Posting a tweet can now carry a level of personal responsibility similar to having unprotected sex and getting pregnant.

Fair? No. But nobody seems to much care that it's happening until they're the ones under the bus.

And this, right here, is why you fail. Trade, defined: An exchange. To a computer, this is a very simple procedure; 1 or 0. Either it happened, or it didn't. If you want to play the exchange's game of "we're double secret trading stuff by moving database records around", well okay. Got some premier ocean front property to sell you in Florida then too.

There's a lot of negative things I could say about bitcoin, but this situation is the one case where I might have something good to say. Every bitcoin has a transaction log associated with it. If they're alleging higher volumes than other believe... Why not simply "query the database" as it were and analyze the data. This would be a fairly straightforward procedure for a forensic accountant.

There is no need for speculation in this case; It's one of the few things about bitcoin that we can make objective statements about.