Polaroid only tanked because it was managed by incompetents, not because of failures of their technology.

Well, apart from the fact that their market shrunk from hundreds of millions of units to tens of thousands. It's very easy for a company to grow, but it's almost impossible for it to shrink. A factory that is efficient at producing millions of something might be extremely inefficient and cost-prohibitive if you only need to produce a few thousand. I'm sure the entrepreneurs behind this venture will learn about this soon enough.

Yes, but the laptop in question has had its serial numbers removed, which only supports the original premise that it was stolen.

The guy SPECIFICALLY said the serial number and all identifying marks were removed by the previous seller. Coupled with the fact that it was purchased on ebay, I would be 99.9% sure it's stolen. Why else would the seller remove the serial number?

Is that why my local utility is spending tons of money subsidizing and promoting CFLs? Utilities are the biggest proponents of energy efficiency. New power plants and transmission lines cost tons of money, reduced consumption doesn't.

No, they aren't benefiting from it. In fact, you can directly argue that every top 100 download on TPB is a lost sale. What the statistics are basically saying is that the major labels' marketing is working very well, but instead of creating more sales, it's creating more downloads. The labels don't care about how popular their artists are, they care about how many records they sell. I don't think you can honestly argue that their record sales are going to increase as the result of piracy. In fact, I think that their business model is going to be completely gone in another 10 years. Maybe they can reinvent themselves as something else (say, making money by licensing music for commercial use), but it will get harder and harder to sell records to consumers as digital piracy increases.

Probably. But I think the fundamental reason small labels and independent artists are struggling is because they are not publishing music that appeals to a broad range of consumers. The big labels are pretty good about picking out stuff that sells, and artists tend to gravitate towards larger labels. As a result, the smaller independent labels mainly get music that was not accepted by any of the big labels. This is a very narrow niche market that appeals to a very small number of people. All the statistics are saying is that the big labels are doing an extremely good job of picking and promoting music with broad appeal. Of course, that renders such music rather bland, but that's the price of having broad appeal.

I'm not sure how pirates figure into this. If anything, piracy hurts big labels much more than small ones. Small artists typically have more devout fans that would probably be much more likely to support the artists by buying their records. They also don't have a pre-existing business model that's based on selling a small number of hits in extremely large volumes.

Um, those are distribution transformers. They step down from 5 kV distribution voltage to 220V going to individual houses. Generally, power factor is not a significant issue with residential users. It's much more of an issue when you have a factory with tens of megawatts consumed by induction motors (which have a power factor of something like 0.3).

Even if you throw the bulbs in the trash, the environmental impact is mostly positive. The amount of mercury they contain is absolutely trivial, as has been pointed out in other comments.

I don't know why you are paying $15 for CFLs. They cost about a dollar these days. Maybe 3 or 4 for specialty lamps.

If your CFLs are lasting 3 months and giving you poor white balance, you are either buying very cheap bulbs or are using them incorrectly. Good CFLs are practically indistinguishable from incandescent lamps. One reason they might be dying so quickly is dimmers. If you have any type of electronic switch or dimmer on a lamp, you should not use regular CFLs in it. You will damage either the switch or the lamp. I've certainly seen defective lamps, but the average lifetime that I've been getting is on the order of 3-6 years.

It's critical to remember that reactive power + real power = total output of the facility. When reactive power production goes up, real power production decreases. So the idea that these lightbulbs are eating more than their share of reactive power has significant economic implications.

That's a silly argument. If everyone replaces incandescents with CFLs, you will need 2x less apparent power and 4x less real power. And "generating" reactive power doesn't require burning fossil fuels or running generators, it just requires additional equipment (capacitor/inductor banks or active PFC systems). So even in the worst case, the utility still frees up half the capacity used for lighting.

LED lights have exactly the same problem. Any switching power supply has that problem -- computers, cellphone chargers, wall warts, and even dimmer switches. Large fluorescent installations use more expensive ballasts that have power factor correction, so they don't have the problem. The problem is that making a PFC circuit costs money, and CFLs are supposed to be cheap.

Besides, it's really not much of an issue. If utilities didn't see the benefit of CFLs, they would not be encouraging everyone to install them.

The initial power surge to kick off the light will eat into your usage and savings -- very minutely, but still not the benefit you think you're getting.

There is no initial power surge to turn on a light. Where the hell are people getting this retarded idea? It does not take more power to turn on a fluorescent lamp. Any type of fluorescent lamp. The real issue is that some types of old magnetic-ballast fluorescent lamps would wear out after a relatively short number of cycles. This is not an issue with modern fluorescent fixtures.

The only problem with using a CFL for this application is that most take 30 seconds or so to reach full brightness. However, there are several types of CFLs now that reach full brightness almost instantly. Check Consumer Reports, they have a good table.

No, that would be an urban legend. Electric meters don't care about power factor, they measure real power. Also, keep in mind that modern electronic meters have a lot of features to detect tampering. So if you try to play games with the meter, the utility will know about it.

The real problem with CFLs is waveform distortion. They use rectifiers, which draw power at the peak of the cycle. This creates nonlinear currents, which cannot be fixed simply by adding inductors. If the lamps had a purely capacitive power factor, the utilities would love them, since that would help balance out the loads from various motors (which are very inductive). Also, this problem isn't unique to CFLs. Light dimmers cause exactly the same problem with incandescents, too.

That's pretty stupid. Dimming an incandescent lamp dramatically reduces its efficiency (you get something like 50% of the light at 80% of the power). Sure, you are saving 10 cents a year on bulbs, but you are probably wasting $5 a year on electricity. Put in a 60W lamp and run it at 100% you will get more light with less power. Or put in a 15W CFL and save a lot more money.

Also, for most lamps in the house the payback period is something like 2 months. One 100W lamp that's on for 6 hours a day uses $22 of electricity a year (assuming 10 cents/kWh). So even if you spend $5 a lamp, they pay for themselves fairly quickly.

A power factor of 0.5 does NOT mean that you are using twice the power. It means that you are drawing twice the current (out of phase with the voltage). That can be a problem because of transmission losses. However, it's still far better than using an incandescent lamp, which uses 4 times more power than a CFL.

Wow, you are truly retarded. OK, let me explain it in simple terms for retarded children like yourself. The Dell is made from injection-molded plastic and cheap components. The base price is $600 for that model. It is designed for consumers who will mostly keep it at home and won't use it very much. If you subject it to heavy use (traveling, using it as a primary machine), it will break very quickly. The Macbook Pro is designed for professional use. You can use it 10 hours a day, travel with it, and expect it to last at least 3 years.

Now you're not even being serious anymore.

Really? The part that you use 99% of the time is not important? You are an idiot.

Fine, for the sake of argument, I'll say that the Mac is better than Dell. The Mac still costs more, which is my frickin' point.

So a better computer costs more. Makes sense to me. What are you whining about?