Welcome to your Monday open thread. It’s a short week for me at work this week, plus I have a four-day weekend coming up! Hooray for me. So, what’s on your mind today.
All weekend I kept seeing a rumor that Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was either dying or dead. Business Insider takes a look at the rumors:
Twitter is buzzing on the matter, but it’s all apparently due to a Twitter account called Wikileaks Argentina, which has nothing to do with the actual Wikileaks, but has been tweeting the same Chavez death rumor since yesterday morning. And since it has Wikileaks in its handle, and since it uses the same icon as the actual Wikileaks account, it’s suckering in a few people.
All that being said, by multiple accounts Hugo Chavez is quite sick, having gone to Cuba for surgery. Some reports have him in critical condition.
For what it’s worth, the Venezuelan government has denied that he’s in critical condition.
I don’t think that really cleared it up. The only thing people seem to agree on is that Chavez went to Cuba for treatment of an undisclosed illness.
One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.
These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. The recent study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months.
This excess energy use is costing us $10/mo on our electricity bills. Remember how CRI was freaking out about a $1/month charge for the Bloom Energy deal in Delaware? Hey, CRI, perhaps you could take a look at this.
Cable providers and box manufacturers like Cisco Systems, Samsung and Motorola currently do not feel consumer pressure to improve box efficiency. Customers are generally unaware of the problem — they do not know to blame the unobtrusive little device for the rise in their electricity bills, and do not choose their boxes anyway.
Those devices may cause an increase of as little as a few dollars a month or well over $10 for a home with many devices. In Europe, electricity rates are often double those in the United States, providing greater financial motivation to conserve.
Stories like this are so incredibly frustrating. There’s an easy fix to the problem but no one is doing anything about it. This will be one of the things that future generations dealing with the effects of climate change will look at and say WTF!?