On Saturday 09 April 2005 07:30, Keith Alexander wrote: > It was all in jest, guys--lighten up, OK? No, I haven't noticed any > difference in the brightness of my lights depending on whether or not > I'm running Prime95!
Me neither. But I do notice how much brighter the room lights seem to be when I turn off my monitor - a nice 17" LCD monitor; I've spent a long time getting a reasonable colour / lightness match to prints so I don't want to mess around with the controls. In any case it's not unreasonably bright, just comfortable in normal daylight. > I also *knew* that most of our > electricity comes from yukky sulfur-laden coal, and not oil. Here in Europe most electricity production is from "clean" natural gas. The problem with cutting down on suphur emissions is that "dirty" SO2 (and SO3) (a bit smelly, and unpopular with environmentalists who blame suphur for "acid rain") are very good at countering the "greenhouse" effect of carbon dioxide emissions. So much so that it's only since suphur emissions were reduced that the warming effect of burgeoning carbon emissions has become noticeable. Well, dubiously - the graphs of global temperature and atmospheric CO2 content do run in phase to some extent but there are obviously other factors at work - some of them undoubtedly natural. One thing that seems to be fairly obvious is that we can't keep dumping more and more CO2 into the atmosphere without something _eventually_ breaking; but it also seems to be obvious that so long as major energy users (USA, with PRC rapidly becoming a serious contender) keep depending on "yukky sulfur-laden coal" for the bulk of their energy supplies, the longer all of us will have to sort out the problems of global over-consumption. Hopefully by cutting our populations to sustainable levels rather than by reverting to Third World economies - which probably aren't sustainable anyway with a world population exceeding 6 billion. > The auto > companies here have a lot of power, Here too. Just look at the kerfuffle caused by the last major "British" auto manufacturer going bust (again). > and with the dumb way we've built > our metropolitan areas, many folks live 25+ miles from where they work, > so we *must* all drive cars and have no decent public transportation Things aren't different in the UK, except that government is centralised in the one metropolis which does have an almost bearable public transport service (thanks to mega-subsidization through taxation paid by those of us who have no public transport services at all). Problem is that chronic underinvestment in the road system - despite crippling taxation levels on road transport - affects us all; chronic congestion drives up business costs and so the cost of living even more than the raw cost of the taxation policy. > (with a few noteable exceptions--Chicago, Toronto, e.g.). Plus, the SUV > (Sport Utility Vehicle, for those still living in the 80s) which is the > largest segment of auto sales these days, is able to bypass the federal > CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards, because they're > technically categorized as TRUCKS, not CARS, so they get a relaxed > mileage requirement. > Stupid. Mind you the effect of European legislation in terms of "safety" is to make cars heavier and less fuel efficient - even compact models grow bigger and heavier with every revision. Handling and braking performance suffer so increased accident survivability _for occupants_ doesn't neccessarily result in a reduction in casualties. Pedestrians & cyclists are actually at greater risk because drivers, feeling more secure, tend to drive less safely. Meanwhile fancy electronics attatched to the engine - in the name of reducing exhaust emissions (for some reason CO2 is overlooked) - reduce throttle response; already we are at the point where almost everything with a petrol (gasoline) engine is effectively undriveable, which is the main reason I will no longer consider anything but diesel. Vehicle taxation should be levied at the factory gate / import terminal and should be based on the square of the vehicle weight multiplied by the floor pan area. This would also act to encourage design to increase the average life of vehicles; environmentally, building a new vehicle and disposing of it at the end of its life is _very_ expensive compared with the annual cost of running it, so designing for 5 years / 60,000 miles (as seems to be the current trend) is ludicrous. There should be an extra tax incentive to produce one- and two- person vehicles since it is in this mode that most privately owned vehicles are used most often, irrespective of the number of seats fitted. Regards Brian Beesley _______________________________________________ Prime mailing list [email protected] http://hogranch.com/mailman/listinfo/prime
