The oilsands in Alberta, Canada are currently estimated to hold over a trillion barrels of reachable oil.
But getting it out is tough. First, read this fact sheet from the Athabasca Oil Sands Developers. Current production is about 1 million barrels/day. This should be up to 2 million per day by 2010, and 4 million per day in 2015. That's about where the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia is now. If everything works out right, Athabasca might be able to keep up with the decline of Middle East oil fields. (Incidentally, production in Kuwait peaked last November, somewhat to the surprise of the Kuwaitis.)
Money is being spent on oil sands development at increasing rates. In 1995, the forecast was CN$5.7 billion over 25 years. Spending is now at CN$9 billion per year and climbing. Payback is slow; more than a decade. This isn't a bonanza business, although at $60 a barrel, it's looking better than it ever did before. The oil sands industry got clobbered when oil prices dropped in the early 1990s. Investors still worry about that, since the actual cost of extracting Saudi oil is somewhere around $3/bbl.
Extraction from oil sands is a big job. The settling ponds are visible from orbit. Take a look at 57N 111.6W. Those aren't lakes. Those are man-made open pit mines and settling ponds. This is a far more expensive process than drilling and pumping. A ton of sand yields a barrel of oil.
You don't even get oil out; you get asphalt, which has to be cracked
down to crude oil, then to gasoline. Costs are running around $30/barrel.
Worse, with current technology, natural gas is used to make the steam to separate the oil from the sand. This is currently a substantial fraction of Canada's natural gas consumption. When natural gas prices go up, so does the cost of oil from oil sands. And it's a wasteful thing to do with natural gas. There's a project underway to build an oil-sands project that's self-fueling, using its own product to generate steam, but it won't be running until 2007. If that project doesn't work out, oil sands are in big trouble.
If you want a job as a heavy equipment operator, mechanic, or welder, head for Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. But apartment occupancy is at 100%, so you may end up in worker barracks.
So that's a more realistic view of Athabasca oil. It's real, but it's not a miracle.
Unclear if this is related, but some of the biggest "bulletproof hosting" services just dropped off the net. "blackboxhosting.com", the high profiile spammer hosting service located in China, just disappeared. A few other notorious names are gone, too. "specialham.com" and "spamforum.biz", discussion boards for spammers, are gone. "cheapbulletproof.com", also in China, is gone. You can find all of these sites in Google's cache, but they're all offline today.
There's definitely been some kind of purge since February 5th, when many of these were up.
Since they'll need separate tanks and fill ports for hydrogen and gasoline, the range reflects the size of the two tanks. It sounds like they kept the standard gasoline tank and added a hydrogen tank in some available space.
This is similar to a propane, natural gas, or butane conversion, all of which have been available for years.
Aargh. It seldom gets more annoying than this. First, it's a puff piece for a vendor. Second, it's on one of those stupid "review" sites with ads at top, bottom, left, and right, and a small amount of content per page. Third, the images are on a really slow server. Fourth, the description is by someone who isn't familiar with fulfilment operations, so they don't offer any insight into how this compares with competing operations.
And it isn't even a very interesting fulfilment operation. It's a manual bin picking operation using conveyors, with computers telling the people what to do. This is relatively standard; nothing exciting here.
Yes, they have a trash compactor for recycling cardboard. Like every big box-break operation in the developed world.
Monopoly isn't a requirement for a tying violation.
For a good overview of the relationship between antitrust tying violations, copyright, and patent law, see this law review article. The key point to take away here is that tying can override copyright.
Prices for new Xbox 360 core systems on eBay are hovering just above $300. At $350, they don't sell. There are still over 500 Xbox 360 core system auctions active. So if you want one and are willing to spend $325, there's no problem.
That's about where price and availability have been for weeks. There were some high-priced sales before Xmas, but after that, prices went into a dive and levelled off slightly above the retail price. The current price indicates that there is no real Xbox 360 shortage.
(It's easier to compare prices on core systems, so that's why that price is the one to track. Various bundles are available on eBay, but harder to compare. There's a glut of Xbox 360 accessories and games in retail stores, so there's no problem getting add-ons for the base box.)
The ability to run OS-X in a Xen partition would be a big win. It's probably easier than making it run on native hardware - you only need enough drivers to to talk to Xen.
Apple is at risk for an "illegal tying" lawsuit if they insist that their operating system run only on their hardware. IBM lost that issue decades ago, which is why there are IBM-compatible mainframes.
Magnetic amplifiers have a long and honorable history. They're basically transformers with at least three windings, designed so that the control winding can saturate the magnetic core. This yields gain. Magnetic amplifiers were big and slow, but solidly reliable. Absent major physical damage, they don't fail.
Magnetic amplifiers were used widely in the telephone system for decades.
In Western Electric gear, anything with a vacuum tube had to have monitoring and alarm circuitry, but a magnetic amplifier didn't. Millions of little grey boxes with mag amps inside populated the phone system.
Magnetic amplifiers can be built to handle considerable power, so they were used in motor controls. They're still used in welders.
GeoTrust's solution is that the browser should display...
"The name and logo of the CA who issued the certificate. Consumers will soon learn from news reports which CAs to trust and which CAs use sloppy procedures and should not be trusted."
We should take Geotrust at their word. Now that we're certain that their procedures are sloppy and they can't be trusted, their certs should be pulled from all browers. New releases of Firefox should not contain root certs for Geotrust. They had their chance, and they blew it.
You can't play pirated content on an HDCP display
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 1
No, they've plugged that hole. HDCP content has watermarks hidden in the audio and video. The watermarks will survive even analog conversion. HDCP-compliant monitors check for the watermarks. If watermark info is present but the input isn't coming in via a protected path with the right keys, it won't play.
So pirated movies will only play on pre-HDCP monitors. It doesn't matter if the encryption is broken if nothing will play the thing.
Re:$$$$ for nothing but higher res? Sure, guys. Su
on
The Great HDCP Fiasco
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· Score: 1
As for resolution, here's the thing: didn't I read a while back on slashdot that some study found that only 50% of US households with "Hi-def" capable TVs had their systems set up properly to view anything in hi-def, and from the sound of it most of them were oblivious?
I was just over at Fry's in Palo Alto today, and more than half the supposedly "HTDV-capable" screens playing the "HDTV demo" were actually showing the house HDTV signal. Many of them were actually running off good old composite NTSC, coming in through an RCA phono plug. Not even S-Video. All that blurring and ringing on a big $4000 plasma panel. Why bother?
"There is an omnipotent being who is in control of all things" implies that that there are occasional macroscopic state changes to the universe being made from the outside. That is potentially testable.
If you really believe that stuff, you'd expect Old Testament type events, and we're not seeing those.
Because religion's basic premise is the existence of an omnipotent force not governed by physical laws, it is by definition unfalsifiable.
The concept that religion is unfalsifiable is relatively modern. The Christian bible makes many falsifiable claims and predictions. Centuries of heavy spin control have worked around most of the problems with that. But there's major hand-waving involved.
The embarassingly obvious thing about the Christian bible, once you think about it, is that it doesn't contain anything that people back then didn't know. The Bible
has many remarks about cosmology and geography, but they show no knowledge beyond what was generally known back then. No mention that the world is round, or that the lights in the night sky are distant suns, or that the earth moves around the sun.
No notes on parts of the earth the Egyptians and Romans didn't know about. Or even that the Earth is much bigger than people thought at the time.
That doesn't sound like something written by an omniscient being. That sounds like some guys writing about what they knew.
America is way ahead on this - Robosaurus
on
A Real Transformer?
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· Score: 1
Robosaurus could eat that little toy for lunch. Made in America!
Just before the end of the Alpha line, DEC prototyped an 8-core Alpha. It's not clear that it was useful, but they did succeed in cramming eight CPUs on one die over five years ago.
I tend to agree about TrustE. In their early days, they actually did something, but now, they're toothless. TrustE used to publish watchdog report statistics, but by 2004, they were taking essentially zero enforcement actions. They don't even publish those any more.
And they're getting worse. TrustE's latest product: "certified" adware and spyware. This is another "buy your way around the filters" scheme.
If you check out Google's compliance statement with the "safe harbor" for EU data privacy law, they didn't say "yes" to "Do you agree to cooperate and comply with the European Data Protection Authorities?". They didn't sign up with a third-party neutral verifier; they just put down "in-house". The list of information collected doesn't include what Google Desktop collects. That's considered "slimeball-level" compliance. So persons in the European Union should not trust gmail or Google Desktop.
Even Microsoft does better than that. Microsoft has agreed to TrustE dispute resolution and cooperation with European data protection authorities. Google agrees to neither.
The PS2 had the advantage of launching during the dot-com boom. Note that after a while, the price was below $200, and there was no "mid life kicker" (a PS2.5, say) to push the price back up.
"Consumer confusion" isn't the problem. The price increase is the problem.
The XBox 360 costs substantially more than the XBox, and it's not selling as well as expected. Microsoft claims this is a "supply problem", but if you look on eBay, the price of core systems is starting to dip below $300, and there are still around a thousand auctions for XBox 360 systems. If you want one, you can get one. This is starting to look like a failed product launch.
Expect a relaunch at a lower price.
Somewhere in Bentonville, Arkansas, in a little office along Wal-Mart's "corridor of doom",
a very uncomfortable Microsoft VP is probably trying to keep Wal-Mart from cutting down their shelf space. Microsoft has already committed what Bentonville views as a major sin - not shipping on schedule. A Wal-Mart buyer is probably going to tell them to cut the price. And that's "tell", not "ask". That's how Wal-Mart works.
In general, consumer electronics priced below $200 sells well, but there's considerable price resistance above the $200 point. This is a basic truth in retail. All the previous consoles had to drop below $200 before they really sold well. We'll probably see that in this round.
The PS3 is not likely to launch successfully in the $400-$500 range.
Nor is a $1000 Blu-ray player going to sell in volume. DVD players are at $29.95, after all. We'll see $200 within a year after launch. By which time flat-panel TVs will break $200, too.
Microsoft has quietly announced a modest price cut on the XBox 360 in Taiwan.
So, for 2007, look for the $199 XBox 360, the $199 PS3, the $199 Blu-ray player, and the $199 TV you can hang on the wall.
Right. No way is this a union. It's a trade association for headhunters. Not, incidentally, for contract-type outsourcing firms.
What it really is, if you read their "charter", is a price-fixing scheme for headhunters. They "agree" that they should get 20% of the first year's salary, payable at hiring time.
Slashdot Mirror
But getting it out is tough. First, read this fact sheet from the Athabasca Oil Sands Developers. Current production is about 1 million barrels/day. This should be up to 2 million per day by 2010, and 4 million per day in 2015. That's about where the Ghawar field in Saudi Arabia is now. If everything works out right, Athabasca might be able to keep up with the decline of Middle East oil fields. (Incidentally, production in Kuwait peaked last November, somewhat to the surprise of the Kuwaitis.)
Money is being spent on oil sands development at increasing rates. In 1995, the forecast was CN$5.7 billion over 25 years. Spending is now at CN$9 billion per year and climbing. Payback is slow; more than a decade. This isn't a bonanza business, although at $60 a barrel, it's looking better than it ever did before. The oil sands industry got clobbered when oil prices dropped in the early 1990s. Investors still worry about that, since the actual cost of extracting Saudi oil is somewhere around $3/bbl.
Extraction from oil sands is a big job. The settling ponds are visible from orbit. Take a look at 57N 111.6W. Those aren't lakes. Those are man-made open pit mines and settling ponds. This is a far more expensive process than drilling and pumping. A ton of sand yields a barrel of oil. You don't even get oil out; you get asphalt, which has to be cracked down to crude oil, then to gasoline. Costs are running around $30/barrel.
Worse, with current technology, natural gas is used to make the steam to separate the oil from the sand. This is currently a substantial fraction of Canada's natural gas consumption. When natural gas prices go up, so does the cost of oil from oil sands. And it's a wasteful thing to do with natural gas. There's a project underway to build an oil-sands project that's self-fueling, using its own product to generate steam, but it won't be running until 2007. If that project doesn't work out, oil sands are in big trouble.
If you want a job as a heavy equipment operator, mechanic, or welder, head for Fort McMurray, Alberta. They're hiring. But apartment occupancy is at 100%, so you may end up in worker barracks.
So that's a more realistic view of Athabasca oil. It's real, but it's not a miracle.
There's definitely been some kind of purge since February 5th, when many of these were up.
This is similar to a propane, natural gas, or butane conversion, all of which have been available for years.
This same problem applies to most source-based mail authentication systems.
Nobody sends spam from their own server any more. That gets the spammer shut down, fast.
And it isn't even a very interesting fulfilment operation. It's a manual bin picking operation using conveyors, with computers telling the people what to do. This is relatively standard; nothing exciting here.
Yes, they have a trash compactor for recycling cardboard. Like every big box-break operation in the developed world.
For a good overview of the relationship between antitrust tying violations, copyright, and patent law, see this law review article. The key point to take away here is that tying can override copyright.
That's about where price and availability have been for weeks. There were some high-priced sales before Xmas, but after that, prices went into a dive and levelled off slightly above the retail price. The current price indicates that there is no real Xbox 360 shortage.
(It's easier to compare prices on core systems, so that's why that price is the one to track. Various bundles are available on eBay, but harder to compare. There's a glut of Xbox 360 accessories and games in retail stores, so there's no problem getting add-ons for the base box.)
Apple is at risk for an "illegal tying" lawsuit if they insist that their operating system run only on their hardware. IBM lost that issue decades ago, which is why there are IBM-compatible mainframes.
Magnetic amplifiers have a long and honorable history. They're basically transformers with at least three windings, designed so that the control winding can saturate the magnetic core. This yields gain. Magnetic amplifiers were big and slow, but solidly reliable. Absent major physical damage, they don't fail.
Magnetic amplifiers were used widely in the telephone system for decades. In Western Electric gear, anything with a vacuum tube had to have monitoring and alarm circuitry, but a magnetic amplifier didn't. Millions of little grey boxes with mag amps inside populated the phone system.
Magnetic amplifiers can be built to handle considerable power, so they were used in motor controls. They're still used in welders.
Let's quote what Geotrust says about relying on certificates:
GeoTrust's solution is that the browser should display ...
"The name and logo of the CA who issued the certificate. Consumers will soon learn from news reports which CAs to trust and which CAs use sloppy procedures and should not be trusted."
We should take Geotrust at their word. Now that we're certain that their procedures are sloppy and they can't be trusted, their certs should be pulled from all browers. New releases of Firefox should not contain root certs for Geotrust. They had their chance, and they blew it.
So pirated movies will only play on pre-HDCP monitors. It doesn't matter if the encryption is broken if nothing will play the thing.
I was just over at Fry's in Palo Alto today, and more than half the supposedly "HTDV-capable" screens playing the "HDTV demo" were actually showing the house HDTV signal. Many of them were actually running off good old composite NTSC, coming in through an RCA phono plug. Not even S-Video. All that blurring and ringing on a big $4000 plasma panel. Why bother?
If you really believe that stuff, you'd expect Old Testament type events, and we're not seeing those.
When you have to pay people to use your free product, you have a serious marketing problem.
The concept that religion is unfalsifiable is relatively modern. The Christian bible makes many falsifiable claims and predictions. Centuries of heavy spin control have worked around most of the problems with that. But there's major hand-waving involved.
The embarassingly obvious thing about the Christian bible, once you think about it, is that it doesn't contain anything that people back then didn't know. The Bible has many remarks about cosmology and geography, but they show no knowledge beyond what was generally known back then. No mention that the world is round, or that the lights in the night sky are distant suns, or that the earth moves around the sun. No notes on parts of the earth the Egyptians and Romans didn't know about. Or even that the Earth is much bigger than people thought at the time.
That doesn't sound like something written by an omniscient being. That sounds like some guys writing about what they knew.
Robosaurus could eat that little toy for lunch. Made in America!
Here's some real info from one of the labs working on this. The Yahoo News story is terrible.
Just before the end of the Alpha line, DEC prototyped an 8-core Alpha. It's not clear that it was useful, but they did succeed in cramming eight CPUs on one die over five years ago.
And they're getting worse. TrustE's latest product: "certified" adware and spyware. This is another "buy your way around the filters" scheme.
Even Microsoft does better than that. Microsoft has agreed to TrustE dispute resolution and cooperation with European data protection authorities. Google agrees to neither.
In other news, Disney announced the trade of Steve Jobs to Dreamworks SKG in exchange for Shrek and two minor characters to be named later.
The PS2 had the advantage of launching during the dot-com boom. Note that after a while, the price was below $200, and there was no "mid life kicker" (a PS2.5, say) to push the price back up.
Somewhere in Bentonville, Arkansas, in a little office along Wal-Mart's "corridor of doom", a very uncomfortable Microsoft VP is probably trying to keep Wal-Mart from cutting down their shelf space. Microsoft has already committed what Bentonville views as a major sin - not shipping on schedule. A Wal-Mart buyer is probably going to tell them to cut the price. And that's "tell", not "ask". That's how Wal-Mart works.
In general, consumer electronics priced below $200 sells well, but there's considerable price resistance above the $200 point. This is a basic truth in retail. All the previous consoles had to drop below $200 before they really sold well. We'll probably see that in this round.
The PS3 is not likely to launch successfully in the $400-$500 range. Nor is a $1000 Blu-ray player going to sell in volume. DVD players are at $29.95, after all. We'll see $200 within a year after launch. By which time flat-panel TVs will break $200, too.
Microsoft has quietly announced a modest price cut on the XBox 360 in Taiwan.
So, for 2007, look for the $199 XBox 360, the $199 PS3, the $199 Blu-ray player, and the $199 TV you can hang on the wall.
Now, something where the whole face of an iPod sized box was a 16:9 HDTV display would be neat.
Interestingly, flash memory SanDisk is now #2 in MP3 players. There's an advantage in being the biggest maker of flash memory in this business.
What it really is, if you read their "charter", is a price-fixing scheme for headhunters. They "agree" that they should get 20% of the first year's salary, payable at hiring time.
There's a real union for game developers - the Animation Guild, local 839, IATSE, AFL-CIO. They represent most of the animation people in Hollywood, and they're organizing game developers who are artists.