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I think I was pointing to a possible flaw in the example that was not covered on the Wiki page, namely Smith lacks exhuastive knowledge of the number of coins (even though he could easily investigate) and thus does not see that that there is no way to distinguish between himself and Jones on the basis of the number of coins. A flaw in the example does not imply that the problem does not exist. For example, there are things that are true in formal systems that can not be demonstrated to be true within the formal system according to Godel, and this might be related to the problem posed here. So, I don't know if what I point to as a flaw actually solves the underlying problem by making it go away, or if the problem is more intractible and a better example would show this, or if I've not identified a flaw at all.

If the other means that Smith employs to justify his belief is listening to the gossip that usually surrounds employment decisions, then he has no sort of knowledge on the other side either. Do you know of a clearer statement of the problem?
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Illuminate energy problems with solar power: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I'm not so sure. You seem to be getting at the inference problem, which is still a bit of a Gordian knot with frequentist or alternative approaches. This is more about dumb luck, a bit like Godel's result.

Also, some folks still feel that a priori knowledge is possible when you seem to claim that is is not.

On the subject you raise, I've found "Scientific Explanation and the Causal Structure of the World" by Wesley C. Salmon http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Explanation-Causa l-Structure-World/dp/0691101701/sr=1-9/qid=1170693 965/ref=sr_1_9/105-0836718-1902056?ie=UTF8&s=books to be helpful in laying out some of the stickier issues.
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I'm not selling my copy but I do sell solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

No problem is solved without at least a little thought, and these problems apparently have come in for considerable thought. Collecting them in this way brings attention to all of them and thus may increase the amount of thought being spent on them.

In some ways, this is no different than sending people to school where such things are discussed. And, passed unsolved problems, like the difficulty in finding a fractional form for pi, have been solved in this way.

So, I'd say this is the usual means for handling these kinds of problems and for coming up with new ones too.
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Solving energy dependence and global warming: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

This excellent. Your answer is "With letters." or even better, a koan "What is truth?"

I think you and I should offer a prize for the solution to this problem. This has become more and more of a tradition http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/01/25/233325 0. In order to to make it easy for the winner to decline the prize and thus demonstrate that the winner is a true philosopher, let us say that the person who demonstrates the existence of objective truth shall have the honor of paying us $5000 each. The winner shall be selected by popular acclamation.

Self-referential demonstrations that objective truth does not exist shall be rewarded by demonstrators paying themselves.

I claim the first of these with the statement "I think I think therefore I think I am." showing that the existence of the thinker is second order subjective and thus, practically speaking, objective truth is unapproachable. My prize award is contingent on a non-true philosopher disproving this since I can't afford to pay myself the prize.
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Rethink Solar! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

[T]wo men, Smith and Jones, who are awaiting the results of their applications for the same job. Each man has ten coins in his pocket. Smith has excellent reasons to believe that Jones will get the job and, furthermore, knows that Jones has ten coins in his pocket (he recently counted them). From this Smith infers, "the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket." However, Smith is unaware that he has ten coins in his own pocket. Furthermore, Smith, not Jones, is going to get the job. While Smith has strong evidence to believe that Jones will get the job, he is wrong. Smith has a justified true belief that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job; however, according to Gettier, Smith does not know that a man with ten coins in his pocket will get the job, because Smith's belief is "...true in virtue of the number of coins in Smith's pocket, while Smith does not know how many coins are in Smith's pocket, and bases his belief...on a count of the coins in Jones's pocket, whom he falsely believes to be the man who will get the job."

IBM, HP, Sun, etc. already offer broad IP indemnity for customers that use (vendor approved, often Redhat or Novell) Linux on their hardware. It wasn't news for them, and FSF isn't threatening them.

It's ludicrous to punish Novell for doing a service for their customers that is intended to make them feel *safe* using Linux. The fact is that many large companies are frightened that they will be sued for patent infringment if they use OSS, especially Linux. Yes, a massive cry of outrage will happen if something like that ever occurs, but a) cornered software companies can be vicious and have tremendous staying power if they feel they have nothing to lose, see SCO; b) the more risk averse companies may fire the people that chose Linux and jettison it ASAP, dealing a blow to FOSS adoption in the enterprise.

To mitigate their risks, some companies have very specific lists of approved OSS packages, vetted by lawyers for potential infringement claims. Open source Java toolkits may have less of a chance of patent infringement, so tend to be blessed more easily (and often are bundled with commercial app servers anyway, who may indemnify what's in the package, though only specific versions).

The problem is that Microsoft claims patents on absurdly broad things -- filesystems (since disproven), memory management, etc. Non-technical legal departments may or may not explore these in detail -- the quick thing to do would to tell the CIO: "no Linux". Or they may scratch the surface of these patents and see them for the joke that many of them are. We know that Microsoft has already threatened large IT shops with possible patent suits in the future (under NDA, no les), and likely offered them indemnity. Few have taken them up on this, though it seems Novell was gullible enough to bite.

If you do not believe the blog is real head over to http://exurbannation.blogspot.com/ where everything Casey is uncovered.

Chewbacca!Chewbacca!

Fake Steve is, by far, the best fake blog ever.

Hum..., you want to get together and decide about the climate, but it's strange that the UN (the way we all get together to decide things) would pick a year as a baseline? OK, I'm a big proponent of returning to preinsdustrial CO2 levels so I'm mostly with you. I don't think present levels can be shown to be safe in terms of avoiding natural feedbacks which will raise the CO2 concentration far beyond our control. That's not to say that I don't think the present concentration is not safe, I'm just not persuaded that it is. So, if you'll go along with me and reset to the preindustrial level, I'll go along with you to then look at a range of concentrations at leisure and pick one that everyone can be happy with. Deal?
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Solar: It's the reset button. http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

[...] as an advance on quantitative understanding of global warming, the report is really really nice, but in terms of modeling the effects of pursuing various policy options, it is pretty much a failure since it excludes the economically most likely scenarios.

Grrrr.... I updated the publish date and fragged the previous link. Here's the new one.

>> I would buy a Mac today if I was not working at Microsoft

this is old news and was meant to be a morale booster

Denis the SQL Menace
http://sqlservercode.blogspot.com/

Sometime back I started writing a short story about a moon base. I have a good setting going (I think), but am having trouble coming up with a compelling plot. It seems timely to get back to writing on it. Any suggestions?

I've been using products from the likes of IBM, HP, Sun, Novell and Microsoft in commercial environments for the last 30 years without having any of those kinds of problems. And as an I/T professional I could give a shit about what the "community" happens to take into it's head about what's good for it, from my perspective avoiding legal problems is a Good Thing. I've never had to contend with the threat of a lawsuit invalidating my license for implementing a solution on Solaris or Windows.

People lock their doors and feel safe. The should merely feel safer. That's what I was talking about.

Oh.

To be perfectly honest, we practically never lock the doors at my house, and I do feel safe. Not that I am not aware of various possible crimes which potentially could be committed -- on the contrary, I am fully aware that those things could happen, or for that matter that the house could burn down, or any number of other dire potentialities. Nonetheless, I feel safe. Nothing has ever happened to me worse than junior high phys ed class, and while there are all manner of things that potentially *could* happen, any given one of them probably won't, and I'm not really worried about it.

Of course, we'd probably lock the doors if we lived in a bigger city, or if we didn't have Puff.

ExxonMobil is definitely a bad actor but a lot of boycotts center on human rights violations associated with the oil industry rather than on PR or profits.

Something more direct is to work for a cut in emissions. http://stepitup2007.org/ is one way to do this by getting together on April 14.
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Solar works! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

You have picked a model uncertainty estimate, not a measurement. The observed value is well known. Also, you got the units wrong because it is a rate, not a displacement. Geez, you don't get $10K for that. Go try harder.
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Be sure, go solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

1. Greenhouse gases levels are rising.
2. Greenhouse gases make it warmer.
3. It's getting warmer.
4. Greenhouse gases are making it warmer.

But these gases, excluding water vapor, make up less than 1/2000th of our atmosphere.

Water vapor has a set of interrelated non-linear effects: evaporation, condensation, sublimation, precipitation, convection, expansion, contraction, absorption of IR and blocking of UV. Each of those effects is too complicated to model accurately, depending on the other effects, atmospheric dust, and meteorological changes. And water vapor makes up between 0 and 4% of the air, depending on temperature, altitude, and pressure, making it typically thousands of times more important than CO2 or methane for energy loss and transfer.

There is just no way to be sure that the greenhouse gases are what is making it warm. Without a causal link, why yes, it is more responsible to do nothing, so that we don't obscure the true cause, and spend ourselves into the poorhouse trying.

Experts testify to their area of competence, and both sides may bring them to the trial. The jury is told who the expert is testifying for. With ExxonMobil they are in the habit of hiding their hand in the climate debate http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/your-opinion-c ould-be-paid-for-by.html so if you want to go by rules of evidence, they'd have been thrown out of court.
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Sunshine is yours http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Experts testify to their area of competence, and both sides may bring them to the trial. The jury is told who the expert is testifying for. With ExxonMobil they are in the habit of hiding their hand in the climate debate http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/your-opinion-c ould-be-paid-for-by.html so if you want to go by rules of evidence, they'd have been thrown out of court.
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Sunshine is yours http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I dispute the study on economic grounds. Fossil fuels are becoming more expensive while renewables are getting cheaper. Market forces will put ExxonMobil's fossil fuel side out of business much sooner that the report assumes. There is a fundemental flaw in the report's assumptions!

You said you wanted economic criticism too. That'll be $10K plus travel please.
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Solar! It's cheaper! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

What is clearly needed is a rational study by qualified scientists, and discussion and even attacks on the conclusions drawn by other groups of equally qualified scientists. This is essentially the kind of thing that is done to keep scholarly journals on track.

The conflict of interest is about getting paid to reach predetermined conclusions (a problem in the report) rather than getting paid to examine the report for errors and either find it sound or not.
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Solar, its conflict free: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The report is already quite definite about its conclusions. The ExxonMobil effort is not at all likely to move us forward in the way you would like.
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Move forward wih solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

In reporting on the effects of GHG emissions, fear does not seem to be very important. This is basically a matter of fact thing. Policy makers' response may be driven by fear, as in the case of the present administration which fears the loss to their backers' funding source, or it may be driven by confidence in the manner that, say FDR, handled things. That's a leadership choice, not a scientific issue.
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Solar! Rage, rage against the dying of the light! -The other Dylan http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The scientists had already reached their conclusions before being asked to speak about them.

This is just the opposite, money is being offered to reach predetermind conclusions (that the report is wrong).

The first case is quite honorable and, as we have seen, brave, given the unscrupulous methods of those who fund the deniers.

The second case is, as the article said, an inducement to a conflict of interest, namely deciding the outcome of work before the work is performed.
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Solar! It's whats for power! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

On the other hand, leftist papers have been in a sort of "we're doomed" sort of mode.

I think that this is because the senarios used in the report (even the 2000 level stable senario) have been strongly influenced by the US political interference in the report. You can see the discomfort in the way the report goes out of its way to say that the Kyoto senario has not been included.

The base level economic/population projections are potentially unrealistic given the rapidly falling cost of renewable energy as the scale advantage comes into play. Solar is approaching $1.50 per peak W and advances in wind are also very encouraging. From a competative point of view, especially for solar which avoids long haul transmission costs, things are looking very positive. This study outlines the scale advantage http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/renewables/r eports/kpmg8.pdf which solar is taking and which fossil fuel energy sources cannot. So, renewable energy gets cheaper while fossil fuel energy can only get more expensive.

So, the gloominess is really a result of the consensus process being manipulated by groups that are not able to act in good faith, rather than a reflection of the full range of possible senarios.

Save money with solar: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I really think we're at the point of arguing about which method of suicide is best, and that is not my point. There is still a little breathing space before this link hits the slashdot front page http://www.ipcc.ch/. So, I'll just say right now, read http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/ for a bit.

From a technical call two nights ago I can say that cost per peak W for solar has hit $1.53 (fabrication not installation) and the time to pay back the energy to produce the panels is now about 1 year. This is cheap! Worrying about clean up for solar strikes me as a little silly. A defunct solar panel is defunct owing to lattice disorder caused by cosmic rays. It still has many more useful cycles after recrystalization. I would even guess that it does not have to be fully remelted, but this is a problem that we have not faced yet owing to our rather clueless addiction to fossil fuels and nuclear power. This report http://archive.greenpeace.org/climate/renewables/r eports/kpmg8.pdf explains the basic economics of large scale solar power production.

If you want to help, go to http://www.powur.com/mdsolar and click on "Become an Ecopenure."

"Um ... the Xbox has been a loss for five years now. That doesn't sound like it's much of a success for MS yet."

Xbox is not losing money anymore. They make money on it!

Well, you want to look at the placement of the plants. Many are in fairly high population density regions. The next big accident might be lucky and there will be time to evacuate, but not all of them. Remember, you want to use nuclear power to displace most of the power we use. So that means that the accidents will become more frequent, and you want to do it for a long time. Some of the accidents will be very deadly, especially those that aren't accidents at all but rather deliberate attacks.

Now, you are arguing that nuclear is better than coal or oil, and instantaneously it is likely less deadly, but you have also missed what I said about the waste being nastier than the fuel. Mammals are evolved to tolerate uranium, but all the plutonium was gone by the time we came along. Waste storage needs to segregate a portion of the Earth from mammals very tightly because our biology does not know how to protect itself from plutonium.

Every dominant species evolved from species whose evolution was strongly influenced by previously dominant species because the mere presence of those dominant species defined nitches throughout the ecosystem. So, it might not seem so out of line for our mess to define future dominant species, but the nitches that develop in the presence of nuclear waste seem to favor roaches. Not too strange, but since insects have had their turn, it seems like a bit of a step back. It would be much more interesting to leave the Earth clean and imagine what might come of that.

We can displace both coal and nuclear with solar much faster than we can displace coal with nuclear and we can do it cheaper so it seems much better to do this, especially since we need extra energy to transmute the nuclear waste we've already made. Going with nuclear becomes a trap energywise. And, while I have a deep love of coal mine disaster songs, I don't really want to get a repetoire of nuclear plant disaster anthems.
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Solar: It's disaster free! http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The ACLU fought against this exact kind of move in California - the use of paper ballots vs the use of electronic ballots - because according to them, electronic ballots are "twice as accurate" and the use of paper ballots would disenfranchise voters. According to the left and the ACLU in 2003, "punch cards are unfit for use" and are all for electronic voting.

i was there when they did this, and MAN... they were insistent that paper ballots go into the dustbin of history because of their error rates and their propensity to "confuse minority voters". Their words, not mine.

So, i guess that the governor of Florida should get his lawyers ready for this... taking their state back into the dark ages...

Me too, thanks. Now, just to cast a line in and troll along here.
There are some people who are being paid to hold an opinion, and some being paid to form an opinion.
Those who pay the opinion formers are curious about what opinion they'll come to.
Those who pay the opinion holders are curious about how high they can push their profit margin.
This is a key distinction. The original article shows that things have gone well beyond bribery and have moved on to intimidation and racketeering. One can certainly say that the ExxonMobil efforts affect thier stock prices and, being intentionally misleading http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/your-opinion-c ould-be-paid-for-by.html, could well be securities fraud.
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Solar: clean energy http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Me too, thanks. Now, just to cast a line in and troll along here.
There are some people who are being paid to hold an opinion, and some being paid to form an opinion.
Those who pay the opinion formers are curious about what opinion they'll come to.
Those who pay the opinion holders are curious about how high they can push their profit margin.
This is a key distinction. The original article shows that things have gone well beyond bribery and have moved on to intimidation and racketeering. One can certainly say that the ExxonMobil efforts affect thier stock prices and, being intentionally misleading http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/your-opinion-c ould-be-paid-for-by.html, could well be securities fraud.
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Solar: clean energy http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I tried using Zimbra, and a bunch of others (see http://poormanstech.blogspot.com/search/label/Exch ange%20Server%20Alternatives). Scalix beat it, and the various other ones I looked at, hands down. And no, I do not have a vested interest in the product. In fact I'm just using the free version. I just think that, for my needs at any rate, it worked the best from the various alternatives I looked at.

Not just prices for tortilla but most other grains (substitution) and animal products (feed) will likely go up http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2007/Update63. htm. But this has more to do with politics as usual and farm subsidies that environmentalism. May environmentalist are skeptical of bio-fuels. http://gp.org/committees/ecoaction/eco_2006_04_25. shtml Setting up a situation where food and fuel compete is a Republocrat endeavor.
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Don't eat your seed corn: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I would tend to agree with the points he brings up, but then I keep getting reminded about the City of Largo in Florida.

Six years ago I read about their linux terminal service project, in which the entire city was run using Linux apps like OpenOffice, Evolution, etc, and was blown away, thinking it was the future of Linux in the business world.

Time passed, and when this didn't happen I gradually forgot about it, until the city came up in a comment this week pointing to the lead admins blog on the new system they're putting in. Not only has Linux satisfying their business needs since 2001, but they're also adding cutting edge features like 3D desktops and all sorts of crazy features.

So how is it that this guy can claim that Linux has kept failing over and over again, when Largo has a dream Linux business system running right now?

Am I missing something here?

a. Mass transport: Due to the size, shape, and demographic dispersion it is untenable for the majority of American metropolis'.

b. Buy everyone new electric cars. For one, manufacturing all those new cars just uses more energy and produces more emissions. So people proposing that are asinine at best.

[...etc...]

This is actually a relatively easy problem to solve, or at least improve, and many Republicans even agree with the solution: Pigou taxes. To explain simply, this means imposing a tax on gas or oil because the negative externality oil imposes in both environmental and foreign policy terms. When the price of something goes up, the consumption of it goes down; such a tax would certainly improve the situation WRT a-c, although d and e might require other solutions.

It's a fairly neat policy that requires no convoluted, mangled regulations; it could replace broken CAFE standards that drove people to SUVs in the first place; it also has the benefit of denying oil revenues to despotic regimes in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia.

The passive voice is fine. The reports are clear on who is doing this and why. IMHO, you are setting up a strawman here.

Solar as an matter of fact: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

In fact, some have resigned in protest.
Susan Wood is one http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/artic le/2005/08/31/AR2005083101271.html
Rick Piltz http://www.climatesciencewatch.org/index.php/csw/d etails/ccsp-resignation/ is another.

On the other side of the conflict, the resignations have been forced as a result of the publicity surrounding their nefarious activities. Of course, the revolving door takes the sting out.
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Good morning sunshine: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I *used* to be an Apple fanboi... less and less lately :(

See http://anonymouslemming.blogspot.com/2007/01/alway s-eviltm.html for my latest discovery about Apple...

http://www.ucsusa.org/scientific_integrity/interfe rence/scientists-signon-statement.html Let me be the first to welcome our new congressional oversight overlords.
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The future is NOT bleak, it's sunny: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

The word protestant comes from the word protest and in this case I think it is the administration that doth protest too much. Their reservations do not seem to be held in good faith. Nor are they using good faith methods in support of thier beliefs.

Just as with the Catholic Church, we should expect a apology to be forthcoming in Oh... about 500 years.
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Solar: its a revolution: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Well, no my argument was an event that is 50-50 every 20 years. Half of them you say Phewwww! and the other half, well lots of people die. Take a look at the list, the distribution is disturbingly well populated.

I seem to have missed the ones where lots of people die. In the first dozen, no one dies at all; in the whole list we have well under a hundred dead (the bulk, as you note, in Chornobyl), which compares very favorably to the number killed in fossil fuel power generation. If you want, we can include the "statistically increased chance of death in the general population" numbers too, but they will make fossil fuels look even worse even if you just take into account the emphysema, lung cancer, and asthma figures and ignore things like black lung deaths of coal miners, oil drilling accidents, and the hundreds of thousands killed in wars over oil.

In addition, I stand by my earlier statement: you are attempting to extrapolate from a very small data set (the few cases with any actual deaths and not just rules violations) and this isn't a valid way to reason.

On Yucca Mountain, a permanent repository which the courts have essentially killed, the problem is attempting to engineer on time scales that are geological.

If it was, as you admit, killed by the courts than the proximal cause is lawyers, not engineers. As I said before, it was killed by politics. The whole engineering and time scale argument misses the point.

Permanent storage does not work because we can't make permanent work.

Nor have we any need to. This goes back to the fundamental illogic of the whole waste disposal argument. Things with a long half life are, by definition, more stable and thus less dangerous. And because of the way in which chain reactions (including sub-critical reactions) work, spread out is safer than concentrated (sometimes much safer). But to hear most anti-nuclear people talk, the goal is to confine the wastes in a small space, and keep them there for a very long time because we are worrying about the elements with the long half lives.

They are, in short, about as logical as the global warming deniers, and for good reason: in many cases they get their talking points from the same sort of fossil fuel industry funded "scientists." I know that you are aware of this problem when it comes to global warming.

This is the reason that transmutation is the only responsible option on the table right now. Doing this with lower energy inputs should be the main focus of research. Glass does not stand the test of geological time. Ask any beach.

Nuts. By pushing the time frame out to "permanent" and "geological time" you are just flat out misrepresenting the actual issues.

If you could get solar for cheaper than nuclear right now wouldn't you?

Of course I would. But not to the exclusion of nuclear. And in any case, I wouldn't get too smug about the prospects for solar. If it is ever perceived as a serious threat to fossil fuels, it will get the smear and FUD treatment too.

--MarkusQ

I think you need to rexamine the origin of your opinion since it sounds quite a lot like well funded talking points: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/your-opinion-c ould-be-paid-for-by.html...

FUD: Spreading Fear, Uncertainy and Doubt.

Science: Fearlessly following curiosity by using doubt to perfect experiment and quantify uncertainty.

Who wins?
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Cheap Solar: It's reality based: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

I think you need to rexamine the origin of your opinion since it sounds quite a lot like well funded talking points: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/your-opinion-c ould-be-paid-for-by.html...

FUD: Spreading Fear, Uncertainy and Doubt.

Science: Fearlessly following curiosity by using doubt to perfect experiment and quantify uncertainty.

Who wins?
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Cheap Solar: It's reality based: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Ethanol is hyrophilic which means is needs a little more handling than gas. As a mix it usually works OK but with water in the mix cold weather can be a problem. That said, E85 makes sense so long as you're not competing against food production: http://www.earth-policy.org/Updates/2007/Update63. htm
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Solar: it beats plants: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

A few items back engineer-poet posted this link: http://www.greencarcongress.com/2006/12/solix_and_ color.html which claims to get to jet fuel-like stuff:
"The algae oil can also be refined into other liquid fuels, including ethanol and jet fuel."
In this case they can leave out the intermediate step of making sugar and take advantage of the higher photosynthetic productivity of algae over rooted plants. I wonder if the two groups should get together to try to further process the algae biologically to get increased yields?
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Candy is dandy but SOLAR is quicka in 40 US states but not Costa Rica: http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html

Well, no my argument was an event that is 50-50 every 20 years. Half of them you say Phewwww! and the other half, well lots of people die. Take a look at the list, the distribution is disturbingly well populated. On Yucca Mountain, a permanent repository which the courts have essentially killed, the problem is attempting to engineer on time scales that are geological.

Permanent storage does not work because we can't make permanent work. This is the reason that transmutation is the only responsible option on the table right now. Doing this with lower energy inputs should be the main focus of research. Glass does not stand the test of geological time. Ask any beach.
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If you could get solar for cheaper than nuclear right now wouldn't you? http://mdsolar.blogspot.com/2007/01/slashdot-users -selling-solar.html