Comment Re:as the birds go (Score 2) 610
Pretty certain that Coal kills more birds than wind power
Is that better or worse?
Killing more birds sounds worse, unless wind turbines kill more endangered (or otherwise valuable) species.
Pretty certain that Coal kills more birds than wind power
Is that better or worse?
Killing more birds sounds worse, unless wind turbines kill more endangered (or otherwise valuable) species.
I believe you are incorrect. The phrase contains 7 dictionary words. The linux dictionary contains more than 47000 words. To do a "dictionary attack" you would have to go through 47000 words in each of the 7 locations to even get close to brute forcing the password. Lets not forget to include capitalization, punctuation, and spaces in there! Compare that with the 8 character password which is comprised of ascii characters. To brute force that, you would only need to try at most 120 or so characters in 8 locations. It is clear that using the easily remembered dictionary words is more resilient against a brute force attack.
If you know the password is made of an English phrase, you can cut down the phrase search space a lot by applying english grammar rules.
Guess what? Your consumption and all the other houses in your area are just a rounding error.
And where will these LEDs and insulation come from when the fossil fuel fiesta stops?
You better get used to insulating with animal hair and mud, if you can afford to raise animals by candlelight, that is.
Ahh, but fossil fuels won't just suddenly 'stop', they'll just get more and more expensive as it becomes harder and harder to extract from the ground. As fossil fuels rise in price, making changes to use less fuel becomes more attractive. Of course, it's much cheaper and easier to make the switch now while fossil fuels are plentiful, but there's no reason to believe that fossil fuel production will suddenly stop and we'll all be raising animals by candlelight.
Put up warning signs and include the penalty warning in the "In the case of a water landing you may not be able to update your facebook status.." presentation at the beginning of each flight. Then just have the air waitresses scan before the flight to make sure everything is off. During flight have them scan and take down the people's names and put them on the "never gets to fly again, EVER!" list. Good luck getting back from Hawaii, asshole!
After enough walkers/bussers/boaters (depending on where they want to travel) start screaming online most other special snowflakes will get the clue.
Yeah, that sounds much better than making sure that airliners are immune to common sources of RF interference (including terrestrial sources that are going to exist whether or not anyone uses Wifi on the plane). Put grandma on a no-fly list because she wanted to play angry birds and didn't know how to put her phone into airplane mode. While on other aircraft, airlines *encourage* you to use Wifi to access inflight internet and entertainment.
Oh man, I'm cryin'
Over 1300 aircraft, that's only around $10,000 each, or for a plane that makes one flight per day for a year, that's less than $30 per flight.
Cheaper option: Have the flight attendants go around with wifi scanners and arrest people who have it operating during the flight. (And smack them over the head.)
That's only cheaper if you think flight attendants work for free (and that they have the power to arrest anyone). Labor is a significant portion of an airline's budget.
Besides, the FAA approved hammer used to smack passengers over the head would probably cost more than just swapping out the equipment.
If they came here on a solar sail, they must be experts at tacking upwind. I admit, I haven't done the calculations on converting mass into energy, but neither have you. I'm just guessing here, but the light pr3ssure exerted by alpha-centauri on the ort cloud approaches ZERO pretty damn quick.
I think the theory behind the solar sail is to deploy a huge (many many square kilometers) sail when you have the solar wind behind you (perhaps with some laser assist from your home planet)to pick up speed, then stow it away when you're no longer going with the wind. When you approach your destination, you deploy the sail again to slow down.
If ETs have enough energy at their disposal to get here, certainly they have enough energy to deal with anything that this world's religions can throw at them.
Depends. If they got here on a solar sail, they may not have much in terms of "space blasters" and such. Then again, just what CAN religion throw at them? Pamphlets? Tracts? Bibles?
Of course, if they came here on a Solar Sail, after thousands of years traveling here, they are probably anxious to get off their ship and onto solid ground. After taking care to squash any ants or other undesirable creatures that may be crawling around on the planet.
Did you factor in time value of money?
I thought I was pretty clear in describing my assumptions, if you want to factor in the time value of money, feel free.
But over a year or two timespan, I wouldn't expect it to significantly change the economics.
LEDs are only expensive if your electricity is free.
Clearly not. If my electricity is $0.01/kWh, then it will take 8.5 years just to pay for a $10 LED. Is anyone paying only a penny per kWh? No, but I just refuted your claim. FWIW, I'm paying about $0.10 a kWH-- including the delivery charges, which people forget about-- so it would take me about a year to pay for a $10 LED. A lot of people aren't getting even a year out of theirs, so you can see why they are upset.
You refuted my claim with a made-up rate that you admit that no one is actually paying? Why didn't you just make up a negative number and claim that the power company pays *you* for energy you consume so LED's actually make you lose money?
I repeat the part of my comment that you did not understand "Yeah, most of them will last a lot longer than the printed date, because chances are you won't buy them and install them on the day they make them."
I am talking about bulbs that should have lasted 2 years of constant use, 12 years of actual, use, but I had to replace 8 months after I bought them.
If they had a 2 year past manufacture date guarantee, it would solve my problem.
But to be honest, I did not even try to return the curly bulb 8 months after I bought it. But I seriously doubt a normal retailer would have accepted it's return.
So that is why I want a guarantee printed on the bulb, based on constant use from date of manufacture. To get the manufacturer to stand behind their product, not screw everyone over ridiculously.
What good is a 2 year "sell by" date on a product that the manufacturer says will last 15 years? Does that really provide the consumer with useful information? The buld doesn't age appreciably when it's sitting on a store shelf, so what good is a fake "expiration" date that has no correlation at all to expected lifetime? All it will do is drive up the cost of bulbs when merchants and manufacturers have to carefully control inventory to make sure they don't have bulbs sitting in a warehouse long enough to appreciably affect the expiration date - and merchants may be left holding unsellable inventory as consumers dig through the boxes to buy "expires March 2015" bulbs before the "Expires January 2015" bulbs even though there's no real difference in expected lifetime.
If you're going to ask for a change that makes a different to consumers, why not require merchants to exchange bulbs for X years after purchase, and require manufacturers to do a mail-in exchange for the full advertised lifetime? Purchase date (well, in-use date) is much more relevant than manufacture date.
That said, I exchanged two 6 month old CFL's (expensive high wattage lamps) at Home Depot when they burnt out within weeks of each other, but others from the same purchase were still running fine (and 3 years later, they are still fine)
way too early.
I want a required "Good till" date printed on them, that guarantees they last at least X days, just like soda.
Yeah, most of them will last a lot longer than the printed date, because chances are you won't buy them and install them on the day they make them.
But still, if a curly bulb is supposed to last 5 years, and it dies one year after you install it, there should be an easy way to get a refund.
While lifetime is complicated and involves on/off cycles in addition to runtime, a bulb rated to last 16,000/hours will be past its lifetime after 2 years of 24x7 use (but would last 12 years at 4 hours/day). So a simple expiration date is not realistic.
If you gave trouble returning bulbs that died after a day, you need a better retailer.
LEDs are only expensive if your electricity is free. If you replace a 100w bulb with a 20w replacement and burn it 4 hours/day, you'll save 117 kWh/year. Or $14/year at $.12/kWh. If you get just 6000 hours of life from it, it will last about 4 years and will have saved you about $60 over that time.
Not trying to be contentious here, but if you wanted optimal resource usage, you'd be looking more at blade-style compute nodes with no local drives.
Who would you be contentious with? I'm just telling you what Amazon says in their published docs. If you don't believe what they say, or if you think they could do it better you can bring it up with them, or start your own cloud service that does things "right".
But I can tell you that some use cases are perfect for Amazon's model of providing locally attached instance storage since I/O rates are much better than we can get with EBS volumes.
Xen is software, not AWS, AWS is an entire infrastructure, and they can not (or will not) live migrate customer VM's.
They are very clear in their documentation that customers should be able to tolerate VM restarts and to use multiple AZ's and regions to help mitigate downtime. I have several hundred instances scheduled for reboot, but they are doing one AZ at a time.
Since Xen is rumored to be the VM host for AWS (or at least large parts of it), I'd have to think it's "will not".
I can believe it's "can not", since amazon provides gigabytes (or terabytes) of local instance storage for most of their instance types - that's a lot of data to live migrate. Even if the underlying Xen software technically *can* live migrate VM's, that doesn't mean their infrastructure can support migrating thousands of customer instances.
Except that in a cloud, storage is part of the cloud, not part of the server. The only thing that has to physically move is the RAM image of the running VM from one host to another. And it's almost certainly going to be faster to replicate that than to destroy and rebuild it (reboot).
No, Amazon says that instance storage is directly attached to the host machine, so if they live-migrate a VM, they'd have to carry along the instance storage.
http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWS...
Many Amazon EC2 instance types can access disk storage from disks that are physically attached to the host computer. This disk storage is referred to as instance store.
And there's no evidence that they use any type of shared SAN for instance storage -- instance storage only stays around for as long as the machine is running (or rebooted). If you stop the machine (as opposed to rebooting), or if Amazon has to migrate to a new physical host, you lose the instance store.
If A = B and B = C, then A = C, except where void or prohibited by law. -- Roy Santoro