Very poor reporting here, and not juts from slashdot alone this time.
Two of the links talk about research done in the UK researchers, the third link about that it is done in Israel. One article mentions 62 volunteers, another 94. While it seems they are talking about the same research project - none is referring to the other though.
And of course that 83% number. That means 17% false negatives for cancer patients? How is the false positive rate then for non-patients? In other words: how useful is this test in real life? If healthy people still get a say 70% positive rate it's quite useless I'd say.
Interesting and all that a breath analyses could indicate the presence of cancer but the articles as linked do not make me believe it really exists in a working sense or that it is actually useful at this time. The articles linked at least are too light on detail, and even state facts differently. Unless there are two research groups working on the same thing together (one in UK, the other in Israel), but then why don't the articles refer to this fact?
Maybe not an important source though it is a "free" sources. You're using something that you get as a side product, that normally goes to waste, and that with a little extra effort can be harvested and put to good use. I can imagine this will also apply to many other fruits (generally high in sugar). It is of course not a complete solution, but it may be one of 100 partial solutions that together form a complete solution.
Ethanol's hydroxyl proton is very weakly acidic. The pH of 100% ethanol is 7.33, compared to 7.00 for pure water.
You contradict yourself: pH >7 is alkaline, so EtOH is a very weak base. Which means it takes in an extra proton on that O atom.
Conversion for pure Ethanol use requires a costly lining process with a petrochemical-based liner (Plastic) which then makes the container unfit for gasoline and diesel storage.
Many fuel tanks for cars are made out of plastic, usually a HMW-HDPE, and those plastics are exposed to the fuel for years on end without problems. Also many fuel tubes in the car are made out of plastics, usually PA12. So it is not true that plastic is not compatible with gasoline.
Now, if we could just solve that pesky "Ethanol is acidic, difficult to store and transport, and less efficient as a motor fuel than fossil fuels" problem.
Euhm... maybe I'm forgetting my chemistry (I've a degree in it but not working in chemical industry) but afaik ethanol is not exactly acidic. I can't think of any way it would split in water to form an acid. If ethanol fuel is acidic then it's not pure (maybe acetic acid produced as well).
Also I doubt the "difficult to store and transport part" silliness. That sounds like fud from vested interests.
Less efficient than fossil fuels may be true, I don't know the energy produced when burning 1 litre of each.
Food use for fuel is not the reason people are starving. There is more than enough food to go around in this world, people are starving in many cases because they can not safely grow their own or be supplied safely due to civil war and related problems, and in other cases simply because they are too poor to afford it.
Fuel food is done in the US and Europe, both already food exporters.
This doesn't mean there could be no better uses for the land, or the corn or whatever grown on it as animal fodder. When it comes to food production one needs much more land to produce 1 cal worth of meat (considering all the land needed to produce the food for the animal) than it is to produce 1 cal worth of bread for example.
You are partly right and partly wrong here. Yes ploughing it back in the land saves fertiliser, that's right. But on the other hand, the sugars in the water melon juice nor the water it contains do anything to fertilise the land. And those sugars is what the fuel makers are after.
So the simple solution would be to harvest the melons, squeeze out the juice for the fuel makers, and return the solid parts to the land for composting. And I'm sure juice presses can be cheap enough and US farms tend to be large enough that installing one on each farm is no problem. That way the farm retains all the bits useful for fertilising and the biofuel factory gets it's sugars.
There has long been speculation that killed inmates were used for organ donations - not in the least because often the family can not see the body, and execution dates are set usually less than a day or sometimes only hours before the execution. So many families can not say farewell to the prisoner. And organs for donation are of course best used fresh.
What is new of course, and what surprises me, is that the China government admits they are doing it. They are usually so secretive about anything that may be controversial, this admission comes really as a surprise to me.
Organ donation in China is far far lower than in the West. This is largely cultural (same as in Hong Kong, my place of residence), as people believe the body is best kept intact for burial/cremation. While in Western cultures that is not so much an issue. As a result there are very few people allowing organs to be donated.
But this article is also a bit sensationalist: they claim China puts more people to death than any other country. I am not surprised. China is the most populous nation in the world. Nr 2, India, also has the death penalty but is barely using this form of punishment. What would be more interesting would be the number of people put to death per million population or so. The USA is known for putting many people to death also, but China simply has more than four times the population.
Your comment is modded funny for obvious reasons. Moderation doesn't work perfectly but on the other hand I do think it's something that should get some serious thought.
And a way to put opposing views/opinions in an article, as there is no such thing as a one and only truth, especially when you are talking about cultural or moral issues. As long as fact and opinion are clearly marked. E.g. there are the facts about cannabis (the plant it comes from, the chemical substances, where it's grown, etc) and the opinions (using it as a drug is good/bad, using it as medication is a good/bad idea, etc).
And now I'm at it: a way to link to the same subject in a different language. I can read English, Dutch and German and with some effort also French. My wife can read English and Chinese. It would be very convenient to be able to include links to the same subject in other languages, if present. Then I can read the English language article on some subject, and then switch to the Dutch language article which may have a different viewpoint due to different cultures. Or maybe it contains more/other information.
The last O2 bottles I had were 3000psi. Hardly low pressure.
3000 psi, that is just over 20 MPa. That is indeed relative low pressure for gas cylinders. Safe, inert gases such as helium, carbon dioxide and nitrogen come in 200 MPa cilinders. Or 30,000 psi for you. I recall even inflammables such as hydrogen come in 200 MPa cylinders. But I have to say it's been like 15 years that I worked with those gases in a lab.
Acetylene is also a special case, according to Wikipedia that is usually dissolved in a solvent inside it's bottle as it tends to explode when overpressurised.
Labeling it "green" is for sure good for marketing. But that doesn't mean it's not true. The main issue about this fuel (after reading up a bit more on it on Google) is how to use it. The reaction is known and studied since the 1960s already.
It is easier to produce and easier to store: no need for high-pressure supercooled storage as needed for H2 and O2 storage. Besides, pure O2 is a very dangerous material to handle, which is why in most labs O2 cylinders are at relative low pressure. A leak can cause a fire: grease can combust spontaneously when in contact with pure O2. So handling H2 and O2 costs a lot of effort and energy. That makes them expensive as well. And in general: higher total cost means more resources used and that is always bad for the environment.
Hydrazine is also a very bad poison. Maybe not when it is burnt completely - but 100% combustion is always hard to reach, and I'm too lazy to look up the combustion of hydrazine now. And again it is a real danger in the handling stage. Or when a rocket were to explode upon launch, that is also still a real issue.
Many other solid propellants are either poisonous themselves, or have bad combustion products. Commonly used propellants are very expensive too.
This nAl-H2O (nAl = nano-Aluminium) product is very interesting as the combustion products are Al2O3 (silica) and H2. In the solid state it is also safe, you can probably eat it without adverse health effects. No nutritional values though, the Al particles likely pass unchanged.
And it has other interesting applications as well: nAl-H2O can be stored safely and easily long term, not much risk of leaks as it is a toothpaste-like substance at room temperature. If you were to bring pure nAl particles on e.g. a submarine you can use the reaction with sea water to propel your submarine with the heat of the reaction directly or with the H2 that is produced.
And finally nAl is relatively cheap to produce and Al is plentiful on this planet, water of course also doesn't cost much, and as such it can be a really cheap alternative to current fuels. Production of Al from ore takes a lot of electricity as it is an electrolysis process, which is an environmental issue, though this can be solved by using water, wind or even solar power.
Whether you agree with the practice or not is a different matter, but this is not an issue of "net neutrality". Just a web site limiting access to paying visitors only. Whether those visitors pay directly to the web site or via their provider is less important. Net neutrality has to do with the network provider (your ISP) being agnostic to the traffic being carried. The ISP would in this case allow free access to Jubii, however Jubii blocks users that did not pay.
that most of the exports of used computers imported by buyers overseas (88%) are really for reuse and repair. Otherwise, people would not pay to import them.
The above is simply silly. The scrap value of computer parts is high - very high in some cases. About a year ago they were especially in demand. PCBs are still in good demand: sometimes for recovery of soldered-on parts, but mostly for recovery of the copper and other valuable metals (gold-plated contacts for example).
I am happy to hear that 88% is being reused before being recycled (mind that most poor countries have much higher recycling rates than developed countries because labour is so much cheaper and also they don't care too much about pollution caused by the recovery of some wastes). Though it is a number that I would call unrealistically high. This considering the large number of e-scrap recyclers in China that are buying computer parts for precious metal recovery.
And it is actually the same with batteries. All kinds of batteries are being collected and exported for profit, sold at high prices to recyclers that are after the various metals used in these batteries.
So really: that people pay money for end-of-life products doesn't mean they are going to re-use it. It just means the scrap has value. And very often this value has to do with valuable materials that can be recovered from this scrap.
You mean the UK even lost the "innocent until proven guilty" principle? That's really bad. I would expect the investigators should at least have proof (and in this case pretty strong proof) that there is an encrypted volume in the first place. The idea of first showing the judge that there is a door before being allowed to get the keys or otherwise opening it.
I can't watch TV all day now want to buy a paper (which also costs money b.t.w.)
I have always had the idea in the traditional newspaper that the advertising pays for the basic news and the printing and the paper itself, and the money is mainly for the own news gathering, news analyses and editorials. The latter are indeed for me one of the most important parts of the newspaper and the main reason for me to buy one in the first place.
Bypassing an ad blocker is quite simple: normal images pass as well. Don't serve your ads from a separate domain (that is what adblockers primarily look at), use image file names that do not indicate they are ads, and you're done. Tracking clicks on those ads may become more tricky, as will be hiring a third-party company to sell the ads for you, but all that can be done for sure. And when that happens your adblocker becomes useless.
There is one major issue with paying online. It's impossible. Yes you can use a credit card (if you have one - I bet most Internet users worldwide don't), but it is inconvenient at best. On my way to the train in the morning I can walk by the newsstand, drop down HK$7, and get my paper. If I don't have time I don't buy one and don't pay anything of course. I like the paper version of the paper, many people seem to do so.
For a news web site, such a sum I would consider too much. But how on earth can you CONVENIENTLY make a payment of say $1 (USD 0.13) to get your news that day? You can't. The only option left is to subscribe for longer time and hand over a much larger lump sum of cash, making it a much bigger hurdle.
This river running next to my factory is huge, and the sea it runs to is even bigger... so who will notice if I dump a barrel of waste arsenic in that river?
Now look in what kind of mess this attitude has gotten us.
Euhm... you mean Exchange stores everything in a single file or so?? Ugh that may take a while if something goes wrong (and this being MS it will go wrong now and then). And that would immediately explain the 50MB limit on mail boxes.
Over the last five years I have collected about 15 GB or e-mail. Yes I receive many photo attachments, so it adds up fast. I wouldn't be able to do with such a small mailbox.
How are you storing all that now? Only a few years ago TB storage was mighty expensive. And it sounds like you have been taking many years to gather all this data.
And how do you manage backups? Assuming you do that in the first place.
Bank of China (like most if not all Hong Kong banks) is in very high regard. The bank system in Hong Kong is really very strong. Just the e-banking is not good... though that is the case with all banks here. Security is almost as poor as normal for US banks, luckily it is still better so we're not the target of phishers.
You don't need a good lock on your bicycle as long as your lock is better than the lock on the bicycle parked next to you. Then the thieves will target the other bicycle first.
Slashdot Mirror
Very poor reporting here, and not juts from slashdot alone this time.
Two of the links talk about research done in the UK researchers, the third link about that it is done in Israel. One article mentions 62 volunteers, another 94. While it seems they are talking about the same research project - none is referring to the other though.
And of course that 83% number. That means 17% false negatives for cancer patients? How is the false positive rate then for non-patients? In other words: how useful is this test in real life? If healthy people still get a say 70% positive rate it's quite useless I'd say.
Interesting and all that a breath analyses could indicate the presence of cancer but the articles as linked do not make me believe it really exists in a working sense or that it is actually useful at this time. The articles linked at least are too light on detail, and even state facts differently. Unless there are two research groups working on the same thing together (one in UK, the other in Israel), but then why don't the articles refer to this fact?
Maybe not an important source though it is a "free" sources. You're using something that you get as a side product, that normally goes to waste, and that with a little extra effort can be harvested and put to good use. I can imagine this will also apply to many other fruits (generally high in sugar). It is of course not a complete solution, but it may be one of 100 partial solutions that together form a complete solution.
Ethanol's hydroxyl proton is very weakly acidic. The pH of 100% ethanol is 7.33, compared to 7.00 for pure water.
You contradict yourself: pH >7 is alkaline, so EtOH is a very weak base. Which means it takes in an extra proton on that O atom.
Conversion for pure Ethanol use requires a costly lining process with a petrochemical-based liner (Plastic) which then makes the container unfit for gasoline and diesel storage.
Many fuel tanks for cars are made out of plastic, usually a HMW-HDPE, and those plastics are exposed to the fuel for years on end without problems. Also many fuel tubes in the car are made out of plastics, usually PA12. So it is not true that plastic is not compatible with gasoline.
Now, if we could just solve that pesky "Ethanol is acidic, difficult to store and transport, and less efficient as a motor fuel than fossil fuels" problem.
Euhm... maybe I'm forgetting my chemistry (I've a degree in it but not working in chemical industry) but afaik ethanol is not exactly acidic. I can't think of any way it would split in water to form an acid. If ethanol fuel is acidic then it's not pure (maybe acetic acid produced as well).
Also I doubt the "difficult to store and transport part" silliness. That sounds like fud from vested interests.
Less efficient than fossil fuels may be true, I don't know the energy produced when burning 1 litre of each.
Food use for fuel is not the reason people are starving. There is more than enough food to go around in this world, people are starving in many cases because they can not safely grow their own or be supplied safely due to civil war and related problems, and in other cases simply because they are too poor to afford it.
Fuel food is done in the US and Europe, both already food exporters.
This doesn't mean there could be no better uses for the land, or the corn or whatever grown on it as animal fodder. When it comes to food production one needs much more land to produce 1 cal worth of meat (considering all the land needed to produce the food for the animal) than it is to produce 1 cal worth of bread for example.
You are partly right and partly wrong here. Yes ploughing it back in the land saves fertiliser, that's right. But on the other hand, the sugars in the water melon juice nor the water it contains do anything to fertilise the land. And those sugars is what the fuel makers are after.
So the simple solution would be to harvest the melons, squeeze out the juice for the fuel makers, and return the solid parts to the land for composting. And I'm sure juice presses can be cheap enough and US farms tend to be large enough that installing one on each farm is no problem. That way the farm retains all the bits useful for fertilising and the biofuel factory gets it's sugars.
That is what I thought when I read TFA.
There has long been speculation that killed inmates were used for organ donations - not in the least because often the family can not see the body, and execution dates are set usually less than a day or sometimes only hours before the execution. So many families can not say farewell to the prisoner. And organs for donation are of course best used fresh.
What is new of course, and what surprises me, is that the China government admits they are doing it. They are usually so secretive about anything that may be controversial, this admission comes really as a surprise to me.
Organ donation in China is far far lower than in the West. This is largely cultural (same as in Hong Kong, my place of residence), as people believe the body is best kept intact for burial/cremation. While in Western cultures that is not so much an issue. As a result there are very few people allowing organs to be donated.
But this article is also a bit sensationalist: they claim China puts more people to death than any other country. I am not surprised. China is the most populous nation in the world. Nr 2, India, also has the death penalty but is barely using this form of punishment. What would be more interesting would be the number of people put to death per million population or so. The USA is known for putting many people to death also, but China simply has more than four times the population.
Naked bodies are not "dirty"
Agreed.
sex is not "dirty"
Not agreed.
Sex is supposed to be dirty. Body fluids being exchanged, sweat all over, etc. If it's not dirty you're doing something wrong.
Your comment is modded funny for obvious reasons. Moderation doesn't work perfectly but on the other hand I do think it's something that should get some serious thought.
And a way to put opposing views/opinions in an article, as there is no such thing as a one and only truth, especially when you are talking about cultural or moral issues. As long as fact and opinion are clearly marked. E.g. there are the facts about cannabis (the plant it comes from, the chemical substances, where it's grown, etc) and the opinions (using it as a drug is good/bad, using it as medication is a good/bad idea, etc).
And now I'm at it: a way to link to the same subject in a different language. I can read English, Dutch and German and with some effort also French. My wife can read English and Chinese. It would be very convenient to be able to include links to the same subject in other languages, if present. Then I can read the English language article on some subject, and then switch to the Dutch language article which may have a different viewpoint due to different cultures. Or maybe it contains more/other information.
The last O2 bottles I had were 3000psi. Hardly low pressure.
3000 psi, that is just over 20 MPa. That is indeed relative low pressure for gas cylinders. Safe, inert gases such as helium, carbon dioxide and nitrogen come in 200 MPa cilinders. Or 30,000 psi for you. I recall even inflammables such as hydrogen come in 200 MPa cylinders. But I have to say it's been like 15 years that I worked with those gases in a lab.
Acetylene is also a special case, according to Wikipedia that is usually dissolved in a solvent inside it's bottle as it tends to explode when overpressurised.
Yes you're totally right, my bad.
Labeling it "green" is for sure good for marketing. But that doesn't mean it's not true. The main issue about this fuel (after reading up a bit more on it on Google) is how to use it. The reaction is known and studied since the 1960s already.
It is easier to produce and easier to store: no need for high-pressure supercooled storage as needed for H2 and O2 storage. Besides, pure O2 is a very dangerous material to handle, which is why in most labs O2 cylinders are at relative low pressure. A leak can cause a fire: grease can combust spontaneously when in contact with pure O2. So handling H2 and O2 costs a lot of effort and energy. That makes them expensive as well. And in general: higher total cost means more resources used and that is always bad for the environment.
Hydrazine is also a very bad poison. Maybe not when it is burnt completely - but 100% combustion is always hard to reach, and I'm too lazy to look up the combustion of hydrazine now. And again it is a real danger in the handling stage. Or when a rocket were to explode upon launch, that is also still a real issue.
Many other solid propellants are either poisonous themselves, or have bad combustion products. Commonly used propellants are very expensive too.
This nAl-H2O (nAl = nano-Aluminium) product is very interesting as the combustion products are Al2O3 (silica) and H2. In the solid state it is also safe, you can probably eat it without adverse health effects. No nutritional values though, the Al particles likely pass unchanged.
And it has other interesting applications as well: nAl-H2O can be stored safely and easily long term, not much risk of leaks as it is a toothpaste-like substance at room temperature. If you were to bring pure nAl particles on e.g. a submarine you can use the reaction with sea water to propel your submarine with the heat of the reaction directly or with the H2 that is produced.
And finally nAl is relatively cheap to produce and Al is plentiful on this planet, water of course also doesn't cost much, and as such it can be a really cheap alternative to current fuels. Production of Al from ore takes a lot of electricity as it is an electrolysis process, which is an environmental issue, though this can be solved by using water, wind or even solar power.
Whether you agree with the practice or not is a different matter, but this is not an issue of "net neutrality". Just a web site limiting access to paying visitors only. Whether those visitors pay directly to the web site or via their provider is less important. Net neutrality has to do with the network provider (your ISP) being agnostic to the traffic being carried. The ISP would in this case allow free access to Jubii, however Jubii blocks users that did not pay.
that most of the exports of used computers imported by buyers overseas (88%) are really for reuse and repair. Otherwise, people would not pay to import them.
The above is simply silly. The scrap value of computer parts is high - very high in some cases. About a year ago they were especially in demand. PCBs are still in good demand: sometimes for recovery of soldered-on parts, but mostly for recovery of the copper and other valuable metals (gold-plated contacts for example).
I am happy to hear that 88% is being reused before being recycled (mind that most poor countries have much higher recycling rates than developed countries because labour is so much cheaper and also they don't care too much about pollution caused by the recovery of some wastes). Though it is a number that I would call unrealistically high. This considering the large number of e-scrap recyclers in China that are buying computer parts for precious metal recovery.
And it is actually the same with batteries. All kinds of batteries are being collected and exported for profit, sold at high prices to recyclers that are after the various metals used in these batteries.
So really: that people pay money for end-of-life products doesn't mean they are going to re-use it. It just means the scrap has value. And very often this value has to do with valuable materials that can be recovered from this scrap.
You mean the UK even lost the "innocent until proven guilty" principle? That's really bad. I would expect the investigators should at least have proof (and in this case pretty strong proof) that there is an encrypted volume in the first place. The idea of first showing the judge that there is a door before being allowed to get the keys or otherwise opening it.
I can't watch TV all day now want to buy a paper (which also costs money b.t.w.)
I have always had the idea in the traditional newspaper that the advertising pays for the basic news and the printing and the paper itself, and the money is mainly for the own news gathering, news analyses and editorials. The latter are indeed for me one of the most important parts of the newspaper and the main reason for me to buy one in the first place.
Bypassing an ad blocker is quite simple: normal images pass as well. Don't serve your ads from a separate domain (that is what adblockers primarily look at), use image file names that do not indicate they are ads, and you're done. Tracking clicks on those ads may become more tricky, as will be hiring a third-party company to sell the ads for you, but all that can be done for sure. And when that happens your adblocker becomes useless.
In general, the people who have an up-to-date browser and have an ad-blocker don't click on ads.
How can you click on ads when you do not see them in the first place??
There is one major issue with paying online. It's impossible. Yes you can use a credit card (if you have one - I bet most Internet users worldwide don't), but it is inconvenient at best. On my way to the train in the morning I can walk by the newsstand, drop down HK$7, and get my paper. If I don't have time I don't buy one and don't pay anything of course. I like the paper version of the paper, many people seem to do so.
For a news web site, such a sum I would consider too much. But how on earth can you CONVENIENTLY make a payment of say $1 (USD 0.13) to get your news that day? You can't. The only option left is to subscribe for longer time and hand over a much larger lump sum of cash, making it a much bigger hurdle.
This river running next to my factory is huge, and the sea it runs to is even bigger... so who will notice if I dump a barrel of waste arsenic in that river?
Now look in what kind of mess this attitude has gotten us.
Euhm... you mean Exchange stores everything in a single file or so?? Ugh that may take a while if something goes wrong (and this being MS it will go wrong now and then). And that would immediately explain the 50MB limit on mail boxes.
Over the last five years I have collected about 15 GB or e-mail. Yes I receive many photo attachments, so it adds up fast. I wouldn't be able to do with such a small mailbox.
How are you storing all that now? Only a few years ago TB storage was mighty expensive. And it sounds like you have been taking many years to gather all this data.
And how do you manage backups? Assuming you do that in the first place.
Bank of China (like most if not all Hong Kong banks) is in very high regard. The bank system in Hong Kong is really very strong. Just the e-banking is not good... though that is the case with all banks here. Security is almost as poor as normal for US banks, luckily it is still better so we're not the target of phishers.
You don't need a good lock on your bicycle as long as your lock is better than the lock on the bicycle parked next to you. Then the thieves will target the other bicycle first.