Posts by Mark Haven

Congratulations, copyright infringers: You are the five per cent

Andrew you say research on economic damage gives mixed outcomes. I'm afraid this is not the case. The research findings are neatly divided along the lines of who paid for them and who conducted the studies. If funded by the media lobby they find horrific damage and if funded by the digital rights movement they find none.

What little independent research exists tends to find that revenue models have merely shifted.

Something rarely taken into account is the deliberate strategy to undermine the first sale doctrine which permits resale of physical content such as dvds. This is achieved by a shift to digital rental or purchase where the media is crippled via drm to prevent transfer / gifting etc. There have been few calculations of how much the content industry has made from this shift but it would likely compensate for loss of revenue through infringing downloads.

Brussels: Old-school lightbulbs to be gone by 2012

Light Quality & Energy Savings

The argument on energy savings of CFL's has been comprehensively rubbished. They simply don't save anything like the energy claimed due to the principle of reactive load rather than resistive load. The savings quoted are based on a lamp being left on constantly - this almost never happens in real settings. When you switch them on and off each time the reactive load uses a lot of energy. In addition, if you heat your home as opposed to cooling it, any energy saved from CFL's is further undermined because your boiler will simply have to work harder to compensate for the heat previously produced by your lighting.

When you factor in the enormous environmental costs of production and the embodied energy in the components you completely eradicate any saving at all.

Then we have to consider the hideously cold and unflattering light quality, noticeable flicker, inability to dim or badly dim, mercury pollution in the home from breakages and difficulty of disposal (because of mercury). In addition, the very best and most expensive CFL's only render colours at about 80% efficiency whereas incandescent are almost 100% - this means colours look dull with a prominence of green (the so called "green spike" dominant in all fluorescent sources). There is now masses of evidence that CFL's can worsen migraine and epilepsy in susceptible individuals.

The whole agenda is being pushed by manufacturers, an ill informed green lobby and corrupt politicians. Why? because a CFL retails at around 10 to 20 times the price of an incandescent. They stand to make a lot of money (billions) from replacement of existing bulbs with CFLs - a manifestly inferior technology. When anyone questions this strategy they and their cronies in government respond with misleading arguments about energy saving.

So, the truth is, if you want a bulb for a stairwell which is left on 24 hours a day and provides cold, unflattering light - then buy a CFL. Otherwise, stick with incandescents, halogen, LED or any of the many superior technologies available.