The Energy Saved By Ditching DVDs Could Power 200,000 Homes 339
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "The environmental benefits of streaming a movie (or downloading it) rather than purchasing a DVD are staggering, according to a new U.S. government study by researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. If all DVDs purchased in 2011 were streamed instead, the energy savings would have been enough to meet the electricity demands of roughly 200,000 households. It would have cut roughly 2 billion kilograms of carbon emissions. According to the study, published in Environmental Research Letters, even when you take into account cloud storage, data servers, the streaming device, streaming uses much less energy than purchasing a DVD. If, like me, you're thinking, 'who buys DVDs anymore, anyways?', the answer is 'a lot of people.'" The linked paper is all there, too — not just an abstract and a paywall.
Hard copy (Score:5, Funny)
And if you're unable to read the study online, you can order a paper copy.
Re:Hard copy (Score:4, Insightful)
You joke, but I always wanted to know what happens when the cloud blows away? A hard copy will still play. My Blu-ray player has but does not require network access. I can play Blu-rays and DVDs during a cable outage. I can (legally) play games that do not phone home without net access.
And that does not even get into the question of what happens when a cloud provider goes out of business or decides to end their service for whatever reason.
Imagine how much we're saving already with mail (Score:3)
Just par for the course for the internet, with snail mail being it's first and biggest victim (and slowest to die).
A more interesting question to me, is what future libraries will look like bereft of physical media.
Who knew, when they were building thepiratebay, they were simply making the library of the future? Not just in an idealized sense, but in an actual sense of keeping the industry somewhat honest, like what the used car or textbook business does.
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Snail mail is serving an important role in small-package delivery, something that wasn't needed very much prior to the commercialization of the internet and the invention of Ebay.
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Are you kidding me? Sears and Roebuck, America's biggest retailer up to the late 1980s, built it's business on mail order back in the late 1890s. Mail order catalogs were huge up to the 1990s, internet merely replaced it, didn't invent it.
That said, the USPS still cut it's distribution centers in half a while back:
http://www.federaltimes.com/ar... [federaltimes.com]
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People didn't mail-order nearly as much as stuff back in those days as they do now.
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Not that many people mail-ordered houses in those days, and even when they did, the USPS did not deliver it. We're talking about the USPS's business here. Look, youngster, I remember the 80s quite well, and mail order was not very common then. People ordered stuff once in a while, but this was a time when not everyone had credit cards, bank-issued Visa/MC debit/ATM cards did not exist, so paying for things usually meant a money order and waiting around hoping it would be delivered within a month. Fedex
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We got several packages a month mail-order. When I was a kid in the 60's we lived on a farm in central Illinois. My parents and grandparents did a lot of catalog shopping. USPS used to deliver packages frequently. Big mail-order businesses at the time included Sears, Fingerhut (first catalog in 1948), Hammacher Schlemmer (first catalog in the 1800s), JC Penney, Montgomery Ward, Spirgel, and more. Most of these places had accounts, but you had several payment options.
Most common method of or
Energy cost of DRM? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did they also calculate how much energy would be saved if we would not waste processor power on DRM decoding?
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Don't Worry, We Spent All the Energy Already (Score:5, Insightful)
>> If all DVDs purchased in 2011 were streamed instead, the energy savings would have been enough to meet the electricity demands of roughly 200,000 households.
Or, if you're like my family, the energy "saved" from spinning up DVDs on two different TVs has now gone into a more powerful wireless router (to support better streaming), bigger TVs (bought with money saved from cancelling cable), a digital antenna booster (so we can watch HD network TV without cable), and personal tablets that none my three kids had in 2011.
It's the energy cost of the drive (Score:5, Informative)
If you read the article in detail, the energy cost for a DVD rented or purchased by mail is pretty much identical to that of one streamed (figure 4.)
The purported energy cost difference between DVD and streaming is entirely due to the fact that they assume you drive to the store to buy or rent the DVD. (In fact, there is actually a tiny bit more carbon emitted if you stream instead of rent or buy by mail, if you look at the right image on figure 4).
I assume if you buy or rent from a store you're going to visit anyway, this differnce vanishes
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I assume if you buy or rent from a store you're going to visit anyway, this difference vanishes
They accounted for that, only 50% of the trip is assumed to be for the DVD.
You could cycle or walk to the store.
Re:It's the energy cost of the drive (Score:5, Insightful)
That 50% assumption is stupid. You can't stream the food items or other things you buy while you're at that store. So you need to go to the store anyway, DVD or not.
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It means that for every time you were going to the store anyway (but get a DVD too), you go to the store only for the DVD.
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That 50% assumption is stupid. You can't stream the food items or other things you buy while you're at that store. So you need to go to the store anyway, DVD or not.
I agree completely. If you're going to make the trip for any item, plus dvd, the only fair comparison is the extra energy used to carry the weight of the dvd around as a percentage of the other items you bought. Which would, of course, be negligible.
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Not usually harder, just less pleasant.
Re:It's the energy cost of the drive (Score:5, Interesting)
I assume if you buy or rent from a store you're going to visit anyway, this difference vanishes
They accounted for that, only 50% of the trip is assumed to be for the DVD.
You could cycle or walk to the store.
I rent or buy Blu-ray, not DVD. I do stream every so often. However, the local Redbox, which is within walking distance, is cheaper. I did have Netflix for a while, but they suck for new movies so I dropped them.
I'm willing to bet that the energy use would reverse if they did the same study using Blu-ray quality bit-rates. The energy used to go to the store to rent would end up being the same (possibly lowed due to higher fuel efficiency) but the streaming energy cost would increase due to the higher amount of data being stored, streamed, etc.
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The study assumes a set top box of some sort being used for streaming. It's no surprise to me that the energy usage of that is about half that of a dvd player.
However, with the number of people streaming on PC, and the number playing DVD on PC, it is a nontrivial point that they have excluded - the cost of running those devices. I bet the power consumptions of those devices are dwarfed
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Of course, they also made the mistake of providing numbers. Energy cost differential for one hour of DVD vs Streaming is about 1KWh.
Which amounts to maybe 5% of the cost of the DVD. And it's not like you get a discount on cost because you're saving all that energy....
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Even if you didn't read the article, the obvious conclusion should be that watching only broadcast/cable TV will save even more electricity than streaming; or that watching no TV at all is best! Articles like this come with a built-in question: "what are they trying to sell me?"
Re:Don't Worry, We Spent All the Energy Already (Score:4, Insightful)
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You completely missed the point. Completely.
Streaming movies instead of distributing them on physical media is just one way that digital distribution has changed the way we do things. My bank sends me one statement a year now, the rest is paperless online. No paper is wasted to get me daily news articles any more, and I don't need shelves full of packaged up discs that will eventually end up in landfill any more. Sometimes I browse the web via tablet or phone, instead of a full power desktop PC.
Technology i
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I know this is a joke, but seriously I think our houses are much more efficient that it used to be. I have no idea how much an old tube TV cost to run, but the new 40" tvs are rated at about $10 a year. ... So really as we move to solid state we are going to increasingly see significant reduction in electricity usage, of course offset by more technology.
Yes, that was Jon's point, and it has been observed by economists as the Jevons paradox. [wikipedia.org] As we get greater efficiency, we use more. An old TV was terribly inefficient, but you generally had only the one, and it wasn't running all day. Now, a typical house has a TV in every inhabited room.
The real fun will begin if electric cars [teslamotors.com] and distributed renewable energy [solarcity.com] become popular. Then household electricity consumption trends could become extremely nonlinear for a while.
False comparison (Score:5, Insightful)
.
When I buy a DVD, I own that DVD. That is why I buy DVDs. I don't want some DRM server somewhere suddenly saying that I cannot stream a movie I purchased.
Now if streaming allowed me to purchase and keep a copy free of DRM, then I'd be interested.
But so long as there is DRM, I'll continue buying DVDs.
Don't forget privacy (Score:2)
If I pay with cash, it's mine and nobody has that data to sell to someone about me. Also, nobody ever knows if I ever watched it at all, or if I went back and watched a hot sex scene or some dude's head exploding over and over again.
Streaming services track this kind of info. Many just blow that off, but it matters to some.
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In addition, streaming from, say, Amazon only provides the movie itself, not any "extras" - and, for example, I enjoyed the extras for Gravity (on Bluray) a lot. Do other streaming sources, like Netflix provide more? In addition, the experience / bit rate is limited by the available bandwidth and any transient events (I had a streaming movie from Amazon pause on me for about 30 seconds 3/4 the way through the movie last night)
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DVDs are generally fine - a given DVD will always work on any DVD player around at the time it is created, and any newer player.
Blu-Ray is different - those can potentially be retroactively revoked, but in practice this isn't implemented. Otherwise discs will always work on newer players, but potentially not in older ones. At least, not until the master keys are determined (I don't think they are yet, but if enough get discovered they apparently can be found).
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Because they're using TVs with 480p resolution. It's what they've had for ages, and for awhile DVDs were actually much higher quality than broadcast or even analog cable. It is not until people started buying big screen TVs with higher HDTV resolutions, *and* start watching HD channels or use bluray, that they start noticing DVD quality is annoying in comparison.
"In this day and age" is just a code phrase for "I upgraded my system before other people", since the previous "age" was less than a decade ago w
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DVD DRM is so trivial, and already circumvented, that it might as well be ignored.
More advanced DRM forms cannot be ignored, and haven't been circumvented yet.
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If I can't "own" a copy on my own disk and copy that to another disk that I also control, then I don't really "own" anything.
Doesn't matter if it's physical media, a stream, or a file.
Centralized revocation of rights through DRM is a very real problem. Access to works get revoked or entire services go offline.
Some of my own media is older than any corresponding "service".
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That is one thing they're NOT talking about. Companies are trying to push people away from all concepts of ownership.
They want you to rent:
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I think you're being a bit pessimistic, and I definitely have to disagree that this is a new trend. I'm currently reading Vanity Fair - a book written in the 1840s that's mainly about the social and domestic life of the wealthy and wannabe wealthy of England after the Napoleanic wars. I was surprised to discover how many of the accoutrements of wealth were actually rented by the British nobility. They would borrow hunting horses from a livery stable, rent a (furnished) townhouse from a middle class landl
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Streaming services are also selling to "own" as well, but it's rather lame. It just means you can watch it many times without a time limit, but when the company decides not to stream anymore, or the internet is down, then you no longer have access to it. It's way for them to charge you $15 for a movie instead of $5.
(I used to think owning the movie wasn't such a smart move, but then a lot of parents tell me that they had kids who wanted to see the same movie each and every weekend)
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When I buy a DVD, I own that DVD. That is why I buy DVDs.
When I rent a DVD, I own that DVD. That is why I rent DVDs.
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When I buy a DVD, I own that DVD. That is why I buy DVDs.
When I rent a DVD, I own that DVD. That is why I rent DVDs.
When I illegally download a DVD, I own that DVD. That is why I illegally download DVDs.
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But buying the DVD robs you of the opportunity to stare at a "buffering" screen 4 or 5 times randomly throughout the movie... Why would you deny yourself the chance to make your blood pressure surge like that?
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I agree, but in the future, if companies like Sony get their way, you will have to be online to view content you even have the physical media for. ( with all the checks to see how many sets of eyes are in the room, the size of the screen, if its your house, etc etc. )
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Most people aren't hoarders. Once I've watched a show or movie, it's unlikely that I'll watch it again in the near future or ever.
They assume a purchased DVD will be watched five times, based on a cited study.
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It's not a lot of space really. If it's something you like, then you will watch it again. When that time comes, you won't have to worry about whether or not it's being shown any more or whether or not it's being shown in some mutilated form.
"cable edits" were a big problem for awhile.
Then there are carriage disputes and the likely Netflix equivalent.
Some people are just intent on making themselves as powerless as possible.
And how much energy will be spent... (Score:3)
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ha ha
most of the internet buildout of the last few years have been to support streaming. without streaming video 10 megabit would be more than enough for everyone
the streaming cost should include all the switches and routers added in the last 5 years while the delivers for DVD's is already there to deliver other things. not like UPS/Fedex only drive around and deliver DVD's
DVD still have use. (Score:5, Insightful)
I still buy physical DVDs - primarily because they are passively archival and don't depend on me a) having connectivity or b) having my server nearby. I view programming at some locations (like my cottage) where it's easier to bring a few DVDs than it is to copy a bunch of data onto a hard disk and then connect a computer to the television.
I also wonder if the energy consumption considers the issues of ramped-up Internet infrastructure and server capacity required to store, back up and stream the content. This isn't free and isn't emission-neutral. High-def (e.g. Blu-Ray) content is even moreso whereas the cost of a Blu-Ray disc versus DVD is actually almost trivial. Once you own the Blu-Ray player, you're done except for the marginal two or three dollar cost for the higher definition media.
So you are saying is... (Score:3, Insightful)
That pirating movies has actually been helping the environment the whole time? I for one am glad keep up with my civic duty for a better tomorrow...
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if you pirate CP, you're doing the world two favors!
what about ongoing streaming costs? (Score:2)
i buy a DVD or blu ray all the delivery costs are paid for once
i stream Dune or some other movie more than once and the costs of the data center and delivery have to be paid each time in electricity
maybe geeks don't watch movies on TV, but all my movies are watched on a TV using the same game console or an apple TV. and every blu ray player does streaming as well
Is this a joke? (Score:3)
And if cloud services didn't disappear from time to time either all together or on legacy platforms, risk me losing access to content due to an account block on some other part of the providers service, rely on me always having a fast connection handy, allowed me to download the content in high quality and transcode it for all my devices, maybe that would be okay.
But they don't. So it isn't.
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Oh and let's not forget with Comcast buying out TWC and talking more about metered/capped plans, it may in fact soon cost even more money if you want to watch too much of the content you've "bought" or rented, every time you watch it.
Came to say the same thing (Score:2)
The savings are infinite when you cannot play at all what you wanted to see, a dark screen uses no power at all.
How many are reading that paper in ... (Score:3)
Environmental benefits staggering? (Score:4, Informative)
So all of the 'environmental benefits' boil down to the assumptions they make about those purchases.
Perhaps it's just me, but I would lean more towards people already being at a store/mall for another purpose and picking up the dvd as an impulse buy. Non-impulse buys of dvd would seem to more logically take place over the internet.
Re:Environmental benefits staggering? (Score:5, Informative)
This - THANK you, someone on Slashdot knows how to read! Hell, you don't even need to read, just look at the pretty chart.
Physically dragging yourself to the store, just for the purpose of buying or renting a single DVD comes out to more energy used. Every other scenario comes out to less energy, including buying it and having it mailed to you. And if you ignore the salmon-colored portion of each bar (the part that goes toward driving) because, for example, you bought a DVD while out and already at the store getting other stuff... Store-bought would actually come out as the most efficient.
More suspiciously, I find it odd that they dropped the "client device operation" energy consumption by over half for streaming. I don't know about you, but my USB-powered DVD drive draws under 2.5W; My TV draws 80-90W. I'd love to ask the authors what part of streaming magically makes my TV 20x more energy efficient.
"This info-tisement brought to you by Netflix and Blockbuster, who really wish you'd quit insisting we stock all these damned physical discs; and by the MPAA, who would like to remind you that you only license the contents of your DVDs, they can still revoke that license any time they want."
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Being the faithful /.er, I didn't read it either. I guess it depends on whether you have kids or not, and I would bet the authors don't, because if you have kids there is no possible way that streaming a movie 10000 times is more economical than buying the damned disc.
..and the drawbacks just as bad (Score:5, Insightful)
1. no control over purchase as it can be revoked at any time for any reason.
2. even the best internet streams hitch, lag, and drop frames.
3. complexity: the majority of nontechnical people understand the concept of placing a disk in a tray and hitting play.
4. value proposition. I won't pay $20 for a movie I can't really own.
Still buying DVDs here (Score:5, Insightful)
Still buying DVDs here (Score:2)
Well said. I buy my music on CDs for the same reason. (Granted, I rip it and file the originals away almost instantly; I still actually use my DVD and Blu-Ray media but that might change soon too if I can ramp up the server space).
What about multiple lecture? (Score:2)
Movies I buy (and I still do buy DVDs as well as online content such as through iTunes), usually are bought because I plan to watch more than once.
I'm sure the manufacturing and distribution costs of my DVD purchases are a lot less of a strain on the environment than having streamed these movies over and over. I cant count how many times I have watches some movies in my collection.
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Cloud severs don't require power? (Score:3)
Streaming vs downloading (Score:4, Insightful)
And streaming is stupid... Downloading movies would make a lot more sense than DVDs, but streaming is ridiculous...
Most people would want to watch movies around the same time, so think of the crippling bandwidth requirements all at once. And what about those who can't get fast connections at home for whatever reason - streaming would be impractical, but downloading would usually still be quicker than a mail order dvd.
These researchers need to get out of the lab... (Score:3)
... and find out what broadband is like in the private sector. It sucks like a tornado outside the major metropolitan areas. Between crummy bandwidth and data caps -- neither of which, I suspect, the researchers ever have to deal with -- physical DVDs are the easiest way to watch movies in many locations.
Not sure on some of these assumptions... (Score:4, Insightful)
1. 17 km to drive and purchase DVD? 50% of the trip is apportioned to the DVD transport to account for multiple purchases and errands per trip in the base-case? I doubt people are driving 10 miles just to purchase a DVD, or as only 50% of the reason to take the trip in the first place.
2. Average disc lifetime 5 years? I still have 'The Matrix' that I got for free with my first DVD player back in 1999. None of my DVDs seem to really have a 'lifetime' that I can tell.
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Yes, the assumptions are complete BULLSHIT.
My DVD's arrive by mail or UPS, and NONE of my commercially pressed optical media has failed in service going back to the free CDs that came with my Sony CD player that I purchased 31 years ago.
This is complete malarkey.
Damn! (Score:3)
AOL must have single-handedly doubled the CO2 output of the earth during the 1980's and '90's.
Re:Nice try cloud guys (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone who has spent the last decade virtualizing anything with a power supply that wasn't critical, you would be astounded as to the savings from yes, *gasp* running apps in the 'cloud'.
It just doesn't mean what YOU think it means.
The cloud isn't just a hosted application that moves seamlessly around a cluster. It can be a head on a cluster, that hosts an application and save thousands of KW a year and you the end user wouldn't know the difference. It's a direct analog to the idea of ditching DVDs. Move the application where the backing resources can be shared, and managed remotely and you will save carbon.
Re:Nice try cloud guys (Score:4, Informative)
Don't start all this "can't tell the difference" crap. Until you can get internet lags and stutters completely eliminated we'll be able to tell the difference.
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NEWS FLASH RUSS, The Cloud is not the Internet. There are clouds on the internet. Last mile's gonna always lag, but I'm still trying to figure out what you exact beef here is.
Re:Nice try cloud guys (Score:5, Informative)
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Public and Hybrid clouds are, Private clouds aren't...
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All "clouds" must be over the internet. The whole point of "the cloud" is that it is located remotely, on someone else's hardware, managed by someone else's IT staff. Elsewise, it's nothing more than the same data center you had a decade ago.
Not necessarily true. One aspect of the cloud is being able to rapidly expand capacity or relocate workloads based on application needs. "located remotely, on someone else's hardware, managed by someone else's IT staff" is more like a definition of out-sourcing. Cloud can be on my hardware, managed by my staff, be migrated to or augmented by remote capacity during peak times or special circumstances.
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"The Cloud" is more of a marketing term than a technical description of a specific hosting set up, and different people will use different definitions. You can let them continue the guessing game of which meaning you're using and keep calling them idiots, or you can define the term that you're using.
To me, "the cloud" is just a buzz word which corresponds roughly to the thin client rage of yesteryear.
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You are both idiots for not knowing how to argue. Zeromous, perhaps your point is "Someone can be hosting a cloud locally to support a business/agency. So it can be available over 1gbit LAN with indiscernible latency, or be in a geographically close data center with an interconnect of equivilant bandwidth."
But you didn't provide any supporting facts so your equally ridiculous.
Zeomous of poor reading comprehension says: "I'm still trying to figure out what you exact beef here is." when Russ had just said "
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The cloud is highly shared and redundant clustering that is automated and agnostic. It can be public or private.
Wait, so I can save carbon by having a private cloud in my basement? I mean sure, that saves the lag and whatnot from the always-problematic last mile, but how does the movie get to my private cloud? I'm not seeing the carbon savings!
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So like... mainframes and dummy terminals all over again?
Why did we stop using those?
Round and round we go...
In IT, it really is true. What goes around, comes around. Over and over and over and over and over.
Re:Nice try cloud guys (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Nice try cloud guys (Score:4, Insightful)
Cloud computing is definitely cool and useful for many tasks. I've migrated all my home based server things to an EC2 instance and quite pleased with the results. I however would NEVER advocate ditching my home based General Purpose computer in exchange for a thin client and a cloud backed CPU.
It just sets a bad precedent for one. I immediately think of bad things like the GP computer going byebye and everyone having to rent time from a cloud compute CPU to do anything useful. Not to mention the surveillance implications of having all your stuff only accessible by remote (meaning others can access it by remote as well.)
Cloud computing has a place, but it is NOT a replacement for the home based General Purpose computer.
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Maybe your application is not a target for the cloud (or not as mission critical as you think it is)... or perhaps both.
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Or in the case of the situations and environments I work, your statement should read: "Move the applications to where they are not accessible when you have no internet connection while you need to do your work".
The definition of a networked system is "one you can't use because some computer you never heard of is down".
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>All it is, is virtualized servers and services - absolutely NOTHING new here.
Absolutely wrong. It is Automated, Agnostic virtualization and services.
Re: Nice try cloud guys (Score:3)
How different is that from automated nightly builds with a fricking multi-arch makefile?
You keep defending "the cloud" like it's something new. It's not! People got faster Internet connections so services like google docs, Netflix, AWS, etc got a lot faster and more sophisticated. There is nothing intrinsically new here. The buzz word sounds good to the public and to knowledge-less managers, so it stuck.
It's no different than you calling the cloud "autonomous" or "agnostic". People have considered computers
Re:Nice try cloud guys (Score:4, Interesting)
I worked in a shop where circuit breakers were beginning to blow owing to the increasing number of physical boxes running at under 15% capacity.
Virtualization was obviously the first step, since we'd have more physical rackspace, and less idle hardware pulling power.
But the problem with virtualization is that if a host box breaks down or one of the virtual guests suddenly gets hungrier, you have to manually reconfigure stuff.
Cloud software takes care of a lot of that stuff automatically.
Re:Nice try cloud guys (Score:4, Informative)
Actual KW saved by not running directly on metal, and squeezing every possible resource out of a highly efficient and redundant server.
On the other hand, many "cloud" services are actually grid services that run on many, redundant, small servers, in contrast to the blade center HP and IBM tries to shove down your throat. One example is GMail and the assorted google services. So, while I understand your point about virtualization, cloud and virtualization are two very different and very distinct things.
It means asset depreciation is much lower, so server churn is much lower (less carbon, less waste less garbage)
It depends how you measure it. In a pure cpu-power-per-watt, 1U servers are way cheaper than an equivalent blade solution, easier to service, and will run cooler. They do take more space, but asset depreciation on a 50K blade cage vs 30K of 1U servers is bigger in the blades.
every watt is consumed rather than dissipated as heat
Well, its not, and this is one of the biggest fallacies of virtualization. It wildly varies according to the workload and your configuration. For small workloads, you may even spend more in hardware to provide proper virtualization than you had to pay for a metal solution. You do gain flexibility, and yes, when well done, you may take more advantage of your hardware, but this is not a novel concept. When possible, solutions like linux containers, solaris zones and freebsd jails allows at least some level of flexibility with a smaller execution footprint.
And regarding usage... well, most cpu's even implement an instruction that internally halts the cpu if not in use. Cpu consumption varies according to the workload, and most of the specs mention max consumption, not average consumption. It may even happen that your beefier setup actually spends more power per vm than single dedicated servers.
It means common parts for all servers which leads to less manufacturing waste.
Yes, but is it cheaper? As an example, almost all industrial processes wastes copious amounts of water, when often more sofisticated and reusable replacements are available. But water is cheaper. Its a bit like saying "this aluminium package is 20% smaller, so we can stop using cardboard packaging because it generates less waste". I would like to see proper metrics on that, not sure if it is that obvious.
Actually, yes it is. (Score:2)
There are advantages and drawbacks to cloud computing; how insightful of you to point out one of the benefits in such an amusing way.
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I also found blu-rays to be often cheaper than digital offerings (e.g. many TV shows are cheaper on blu-ray than the
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I still see a lot better quality from disk. We stream nearly everything, but on the occasion that I put in a Blu-ray, I always say, "Wow, that looks really sharp!" At least for the first minute or two. After that I'm not sure if I notice or care. Hard to tell once you get into the story.
Technical expl. of harmonics, with car analogy (Score:4, Funny)
It means, as the poster alluded to FREE ENERGY. Though, as he says - it's not - because then we would call him a quack. He's just implying that 100-102% efficiency is possible when you synchronize the frequency of your input power source to the harmonic frequency of your target power consumption or device.
If you need a car analogy, it's like filling your gasoline tank in your car and marking down the mileage, and then checking to see how many miles you have gone when you fill up the next time. This is where the quantum effect also plays a role, because by simply never filling the tank all the way up, you'll get an infinite number of miles per gallon. Example: Fill tank at 12,400miles, partial fill 4 times, then complete fill of 8.26 gallons at 13,175 miles = (13,175-12,400)/8.26 = 93.8 miles per gallon. Once you fill up the tank and mark the mileage down, though, you've cut off your "harmonics" and you'll get a finite value. That's why it's not really "free energy" because to get free energy or over unity you would never be able fill up the car all the way. The longer you can go without completely filling the tank and triggering the measurement, the closer you are to matching the engine/gasoline fill harmonics. I've achieved well over 300mpg in my truck this way, but I've also got special magnets on my fuel line and installed an "open flow" regulator on the air intake, so there are other advantages which helped me achieve this which are unrelated to the harmonics.
The same thing applies to power - whether it be lightbulbs or networking equipment or freely spinning bicycle wheels, though in an entirely different way.
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This is what causes bridges (and everything else) to fail. Resonating at the harmonic frequency of anything will eventually cause it to fail.
BS meter pegged (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yes, but if we get rid of other particular people, it'd benefit both the environment and society. Comcast, Verizon, and MPAA executives would be a good start.
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No kidding! (Score:2)
Up here, there really only is one broadband provider, and they gouge us by forcing us to bundle their cable service to their cable modem, and the total cost runs us over $150 for a basic 60 GB.
s/Video/Versatile (Score:2)
I've burned plenty of DVD's with absolutely no video in sight (and I fully expect to burn in Hell for a truly horrible double entendre).
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Analog meaning a physical item compared to a stream of transient electrons.
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The Magnificent Seven is $4.99 from Amazon (and that includes shipping if you're a Prime member), or it's $3.99 to rent it for 24 hours from iTunes. The BR disc re-sells for $4-8 on eBay, the iTunes purchase can't even be watched the second day.
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> I decided to move completely to streaming (via iTunes), rather than buying discs. Two advantages:
>
> 1) When the next format comes out, I don't have to re-purchase the same movie yet again (VHS --> DVD --> Blu-ray --> 4K --> ???)
Sure you do. Services like iTunes won't give you the HD version for free. If you want that, you will have to PAY for it.
Who are you trying to kid? Apple is not a charity.
Then there are the decoders. Do you seriously think that your current ATV will be able to d