No, silly beanie! I'm happy to support NASA and going to the moon to gain knowledge. Going to the moon to mine He3 would never, ever, ever be as efficient in the knowledge gaining arena as going to the moon to gain knowledge, though. That's like saying that if I go into my backyard and dig in the dirt looking for fishing worms I'll learn as much as I would going into my back yard armed with a microscope and systematic plan of study (and carefully directed investment for future study). Simply not so.
Mining the moon is a complete boondoggle, you've hit the nail square on the head. Make the case for NASA and moon settlements straight up, without the boondoggles.
As for the charged particle extraction of energy and so on -- please. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Dilithium crystals might allow us to extract stray antimatter from universe-prime (the antimatter one that is separated from our real one by a thin symmetry barrier) so we could turn garbage into energy (my name isn't Doc Brown for nothing:-) once we learn how all of this works. Right now (and I reiterate) we cannot even reach break even for D-D or D-T fusion! I repeat, we cannot reach break even.
It requires significantly more energy and significantly higher pressures and temperatures to burn Helium than Hydrogen. We can't even manage sufficient confinement pressures/temperatures to fused Hydrogen, and here you are planning to mine the moon for He3? Deuterium, as I've pointed out, is so plentiful that we will exhaust the Earth's supply not long before the Sun itself has changed state to the point where the Earth isn't habitable anyway (if not long after that -- the Sun is still a pretty big question mark). Who could possibly care how much it costs to build a power plant that burns inexhaustible, dirt cheap fuel? Especially when you add to the cost of the alternative fuel going to the moon to find it and ship it home?
So how about we agree to:
* First, build a D-T reactor that actually makes more energy than it consumes.
* Second, build a D-T reactor that actually makes a lot more energy than it consumes, and get D-D and so on to work in it as well at a high fusion yield per joule of energy spent obtaining it.
* Third, build a D-D/D-T power infrastructure that burns all of the nice, cheap, abundant fuel this represents, while continuing to work on He3-He3 and other considerably more difficult fusion reactions.
* Fourth, if and when we achieve break even and then well beyond break even for He3-He3, we can look at the economics of mining He3 vs the well-established D-D/D-T technology, given the technological landscape for space travel at that time. If it makes sense, everybody will do it, because marginal profit is marginal profit. If it doesn't make sense, well, we'll just keep on burning that nasty old Deuterium for the next billion years or so, won't we?
In the meantime, I'm all for continuing the support of NASA and moon trips and Mars trips and Jupiter trips, building space stations and putting up enormous space telescopes, bringing back moon rocks and visiting Titan to look for life, and above all setting up a high post and technology base for intervening early (far away) in the event an asteroid/comet should appear coming in out of the Oort cloud on a collision course with Earth. Heck, I'm all for developing a nuclear-bomb driven mass driver specifically for this purpose! But let's not lie and try to get people to go to the moon to mine He3 that we might be able to use -- or might not be able to use -- one day, just because we want to trick them into funding all of this.
Nuclear fission produces even more neutrons. Do we have to replace plants every few years?
No, one just surrounds the core with a moderator that slows/absorbs/captures the neutrons, something like water. Which turns the neutrons into even more fuel. Then there is the problem of overcoming the Coulomb barrier -- pushing two +2e nuclei is significantly more difficult than pushing two +1e nuclei, and we can't even manage the latter yet.
This is a slight exaggeration and subject to unrealistic assumptions. Read (for example) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions -- at reasonable efficiencies, it would require close to 80 kg of fuel to run a 1/2 GW power plant, "hand held" only if you are a pretty strong person. To provide all the electricity required to fuel all the homes in the US it would require roughly 20 tons of He3 a year. To replace ALL energy sources used by the US would require roughly 25 times that, some 500 tons a year. If we pretend they are metric tons to make the arithmetic easy, that's 5x10^5 kg, where the bare "cost" of getting off the moon is roughly 3 x 10^6 J/kg, the actual cost again many times that. And these numbers all assume that we have significantly passed break even in the fusion reaction itself, something that we currently haven't done -- if the best we can do in fusion efficiency is 10%, multiply all of these numbers by 10 (for example). Suddenly our 1 GW power plant requires 1600 kg of fuel and no, you can't carry it around.
Abundant energy on the moon is no problem -- both solar and hypothetical He3 burning give you ELECTRICITY, but electricity is nearly useless for lifting spacecraft in all models except Heinlein's imaginary mass drivers. So we either have to lift real chemical fuels from the Earth to the moon to be able to ship the stuff back or tackle an enormous engineering task on the moon -- no simple "drop a bunch of He3 scavenging robots" but building a mass driving linear accelerator long enough to accelerate payloads to 2.38 km/sec (2.8x10^ Joules/kg). Suddenly we're spending a small fortune on energy to lift the fuel back to earth. Paradoxically, if we burn hydrogen and oxygen as reaction/rocket fuel to lift it back, we will be wasting more fusion energy in the rocket fuel required to lift it back than we are gaining by lifting it.
What was that? Wasting more fusion energy than we gain? The problem is this: If we can burn He3, we can damn well burn D-D and D-T. One hydrogen atom in 6400 is Deuterium right here on Earth. One ninth of the mass of the oceans is hydrogen. Concentrating Deuterium in water (making "heavy water") is straightforward, 70 year old technology and is still done for certain nuclear power plants because it makes a better moderator than ordinary water -- it is economic to do, in other words, in spite of the fact that it isn't even a fuel (there is more energy available by perhaps and order of magnitude in the moderator than in the fission fuel load of a plant that does this, if D-D fusion were efficient at all). The ocean has a mass of 1.4x10^21 kg, or 2.4x10^16 kg of Deuterium. Allowing for higher efficiencies (it requires a higher temperature and pressure to burn He3 because of its greater charge, so it is basically certain that D-D fusion will always be more efficient than He3-anything) but lower yield per reaction as a wash, we might burn as much as 2500 metric tons worldwide per year, but let's be lavish and assume 10,000 (or 10^7 kg). That means there is enough Deuterium in the oceans to fuel world civilization at a significantly higher per capita energy consumption than we now have for a few billion years -- at least a billion before the concentration of D in the ocean is even close to being halved.
So actually, lunar mining of He3 isn't just stupid, it is insanely, massively, stupendously stupid. It is a thinly veiled attempt by a former astronaut to try to keep the enormously expensive space program funded by inventing the most vaporous of vaporware -- the illusion of cheap energy from the moon!
Of course, anyone who has actually read Heinlein knows that the same mass drivers that deliver our fuel in metric ton payloads could deliver e.g. 1 metric ton rocks instead. 1 metric ton of rock hitting the Earth at escape speed is 6x10^10 Joules of heat all released in a second at a single point of impac
It's much worse than that. If we could use fusion at all, there is plenty of fuel available already. Deuterium is abundant and easy to extract from seawater -- there is enough there to fuel the world for a million years or ten, and if we ever run short we can mine Jupiter's satellites far more cheaply than the moon (with far greater abundance). We use He4 to float children's balloons until it leaks out and heads for the upper atmosphere and space (instead of heat a house for a decade or three).
It costs roughly 62 million joules per kilogram to escape the Earth's gravitational field. It still costs almost 3 million joules per kilogram to escape the Moon's. Except that in both cases, it costs many times that because of inefficiencies. Helium is much more difficult to burn in a fusion reaction than Deuterium or Tritium because it has twice the nuclear charge. We can't even achieve break even confinement and temperatures with D-D fusion or D-T fusion (which makes the most sense energetically given reasonably abundant Tritium plus breeding of more via the leftover neutrons in D-D fusion).
I absolutely love the idea of developing fusion (and Thorium), but "mining the moon" is simple shorthand for "Damn, the space program is all but dead, quick, let's find something `of value' to bring it back to life". I'd rather see it brought back to life on its own real merits -- we need it for asteroid protection, for weather, for communications, for astronomy/cosmology, for a variety of other science, and sure, we need it to give humans a far frontier. But we don't need it to mine fusion fuel, not with (literally) oceans of the stuff already here on earth.
No, Eric is Idle. This is one more piece of evidence in time travel. The reviews are clearly from the future, when the compound is a bed and breakfast that advertises "Bring your wives and children! Sleep in Osama's bed!"...
Surely we can blame the birthers for being born stupid and growing up to be batshit crazy racists? Surely we can avoid the fallacy of overgeneralization -- one policeman treats you like shit so all policement will treat you like shit? Surely we can consider fringe whack jobs who don't believe that man actually landed on the moon or that the holocaust really happened to be fringe whack jobs?
Such actions and beliefs deserve our collective disapproval, loudly asserted. Those that openly or tacitly endorsed it deserve a complete lack of respect in any public arena for the rest of their lives, including (perhaps especially) Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. Of course Palin already deserved marginalization ten times over because she is both stupid and batshit crazy, but one would have thought Trump was smarter than that. Apparently not.
Yeah, I kinda pegged that one for being pure bullshit. Unless they planned to build it out of pure platinum or gold and then build a really big pyramid over it and then kill off everybody on earth so that nobody steals it to melt it down. Otherwise, what metal has ten thousand years worth of staying power in a corrosive and often wet oxygen bath? There are a handful of metal implements more than 3000 years old, and an even smaller handful of metal implements that aren't corroded that aren't made of gold. Electrochemistry even of peltier coolers would create enough bimetallic corrosion that they would probably not make a century, let alone a thousand years.
I just kept wondering if I was a spectator at one of the shuttle launches if the blast would engulf the viewing public in a heavenly fog of KFC-Goodness.
You laugh, but a few years ago if you ran a diesel vehicle on privately scavenged biofuel, say peanut oil from a chinese restaurant or oil from french fry cookers from fast food places, you were supposed to pay a fuel tax (which bought you a special dye you could add to your fuel as a marker that you'd paid your taxes on the fuel you were using). This is even if you were a private citizen, basically saving the earth or whatever by burning a waste product instead of oil extracted from the ground at great expense.
The way cops knew to stop e.g. buses or other diesel vehicles to check their fuel was that if they were driving along behind a diesel vehicle and the exhaust smelled like french fries, hmmm, time to pull the puppy over and dip their tank.
Or, I imagine, for somebody driving a mercedes burning waste oil from KFC, smelled like chicken...:-)
Speaking of being stoned, it is difficult to resist posting http://www.hemphasis.net/Fuel-Energy/fuel.htm -- so you could be sitting around watching the shuttle's eventual replacement launch straight and just inhale deeply downrange to get stoned one day.
My brother-in-law is a medical grower -- I'll have to ask him what he spends. Aside from some capital investment in climate and humidity control and light (amortized over years), I don't think it is that much. Of course he makes a small fortune per plant sold, so I suppose it doesn't matter. Growing weeds for enormous profits -- not since tobacco has there been such a deal.
Of course I'm a bit cynical about what "AAA medical quality" is of a drug that generally isn't assayed, that is grown from dozens of different "kinds" of seeds supposedly engineered to produce different sorts of, um, medical effects, that is grown at different temperatures and humidities and with slightly different watering and feeding even in a mostly-controlled hydroponic setting... which I don't mean in a hostile way, BTW. I just find it hard to believe that anybody could spend $320, sustained, to grow a plant of pot. Power doesn't cost that. Water doesn't cost that. The growth medium doesn't cost that, or at any rate I don't see how it could (I have friends who grow hydroponic tomatoes and if they spent $320 a plant, we couldn't afford to buy their product. I suppose a chunk of a mortgage or a rental space might cost that but no, my hydroponic friend runs a whole greenhouse growing tomatoes and still sells them for a few dollars a pound at a profit.
So what exactly do you buy to spend $320 per 1-pound yielding plant? A kilowatt per plant, sustained?
rgb
P.S. -- I don't mean to sound hostile, if I do; I'm genuinely curious. I'm happy enough believing that there is some medical benefit from marijuana for at least some people, and don't care to see the selection of those people regulated by some outside agent and wish they'd just legalize it. Then a lot of people who use MM could admit that the "disease" they were controlling is chronic boredom and we could all move on.
No, no, no. You have to take fuel away. The lifetime of stars is inversely related to their mass. A red dwarf will still be burning when our sun is only a distant memory from 70 or 80 billions years ago.
Of course, this is all a remarkably silly proposition, as nobody is going to moderate the mass of the sun in any way whatsoever. Which is a shame, because global warming and cooling are in the end caused by the state of Mr. Sun, and that state is utterly beyond our control barring the discovery of new physics that I as a physicist cannot even imagine, E.E. "Doc" Smith space opera fantasy that violates all currently known physical laws and common sense. You could drop Mars into the sun and not significantly alter its steady state (aside from perhaps unleashing a burst of radiation sufficient to resterilize the Earth). Remember, you could drop the Earth itself into just one of its typical sunspots with room to spare. Even Jupiter is only 0.00095 times the mass of the Sun.
The best way to find distant civilizations is to a) do what we are doing now -- build better eyes that can see and catalog extrasolar planets; b) continue to work on discovering the rest of physics, hoping that we discover that the Universe is not as fundamentally closed to us as it appears to be; c) one way or another, go look for them.
c) at the moment is almost completely out of the question -- the energy costs of interstellar travel in anything like reasonable human times are truly ludicrous (and of course the dollar costs more so). New physics could change that; so could a rational society, but not while we spend close to half of what we make on a mix of mythology and war instead.
Personally, I'm thrilled that you are intelligent, but then, I don't find intelligent people threatening. However, intelligence is not wisdom, nor is it a guarantee of being well adjusted or happy. It can become those things, though, once you apply your considerable problem solving ability to the problem of whining less and doing more. Arguing that it is your school's fault that you have/had academic problems because they "bored you" may even be true, but WTF does that matter? If you are as smart as you claim you are, apply some of that smartness to the problem of "beating the system" or "learning on your own". One of the joys of being really intelligent -- and well-adjusted as a human being -- is how it enables you to learn far more, far faster, than most people, how it enables you to do far more, far better than most people.
You sound as if you are still young and appallingly bitter. Let go of the bitterness, and apply yourself to doing something that uses all of your mind. The world is fully of challenges that even people with IQs of 156 will never exhaust, things that people with IQs of 180 won't exhaust. Mathematics. Physics. Writing. Inventing. Solving the problems of the world. Becoming wealthy. Bringing about World Peace. Making the world a better place on a more modest scale. Fixing the many problems with the school system. Becoming a teacher.
If you really are bright, recognize that there ain't nobody but you in charge of your life, especially now that you are out of school; you, far more than most people, are what you make yourself, not what others have made you. Read a bit of Maslow, shoot for self-actualization. When smart people are bored, they have nobody to blame for it but themselves even while they are still in high school. It has never been easier to learn.
Gosh, that sounds like 70's prices, before somebody figured out that the X-generation was stupid and would pay absurd prices for what was and remains basically a weed...
But why does it cost you $20/ounce to grow your own? I would have expected it to be more like $2/ounce, or $0.20/ounce. Seeds: free (or a one time expense). Growing pots: $10, reusable forever. Potting soil (per pot) $3 if that. Water, fertilizer, light -- so little that it might as well be free but hell, call it $1/plant. Human time is opportunity cost. Total investment per pot of pot, certainly no more than $15. If each plant yields a modest one pound, that is less than $1/ounce, and if you reuse your pots, potting soil and so on (and of course allow a few plants to go to seed), the amortized cost drops to pennies per ounce, plus some pleasant time performing zen-like bansai trimming of your plants while talking to them...
Through the miracle of modern Google:
Chicken Fat: 16,873 BTU/pound
Fuel Oil #2: 19,237 BTU/pound
In fact, I got this from a study that was investigating the advantages of mixing various animal fats with fuel oil to eke the latter -- for example a blend of 1/3 chicken fat and 2/3 fuel oil. You will all be pleased to note that this mix has 18,223 BTU/pound and that chicken fat is readily miscible in fuel oil. By itself it has a moderate tendency to produce ash in the burning process, but this is mitigated in the mixture. Of course this study is investigating the burning of this sort of mix in furnaces, but the principle is the same and I'm guessing that this mix would work fine in any engine that could run on fuel oil #2. An acquaintance of mine already has experience with the standard treatment of animal fats into an acceptable biodiesel (which involves adding a bunch of stuff e.g. methanol and filtering it) and this works too, but is a bigger hassle than just filtering and mixing.
I also, of course, have the common experience of grilling fatty chicken with the skin still on, which can turn your entire grill into the moral equivalent of a rocket engine on short notice and "render" your chicken into little chunks of charcoal. There's plenty of energy in that fat, although less, as noted, than in standard grades of fuel oil. Alas, if untreated it is vulnerable to oxidation, a.k.a. "going rancid" and besides, however many chickens there are they are a lousy source of fat per se in terms of being able to provide a significant sustainable supply of biofuel. I suppose it is better to render the fat from the skins removed making skinless chicken parts, and better to remove this skin and fat than to eat it, but we're talking a drop in the bucket of energy demand.
BTW, "tallow" (saturated animal fats) are little different from more polyunsaturated chicken fat in energy content. They appear to produce less ash burning on their own (hence tallow candles) but more ash in a fuel oil blend. Pretty interesting, actually.
Children fat, however, was not listed. No doubt an oversight on the part of those conducting the study. Personally, I think that using children fat to power rock star tour buses and heat the homes of the elderly would cure the energy crisis in no time at all, as there is little that is wrong with this planet that wouldn't be seriously ameliorated by using up, say, 2-4 billion children (including some of the older children we sometimes refer to as "young adults") and dumping world mythologies in the process that encourage the unrestrained production of still more children. If we used children we could stay toasty warm in the winter and significantly reduce future demand on our limited energy reserves as well as every other fundamental scarcity created by the ongoing Malthusian disaster.
Hmmm, not sure I agree. Let's do the math. Brewing beer with malted barley with grain purchased in bulk, you might get the cost down to $2 of grain per gallon of beer at 5%. To burn it as a fuel you would then have to distill it close to dry, as water doesn't burn and boiling the water sucks the heat out of the combustion process to pay the latent heat of evaporation of the water (one reason alcohol flames in "flambe" aren't that "hot"). If we distill to 100% that requires 20 gallons of beer, or $40, not a big win there, and even if I'm off by a factor of four in price buying malted barley a freight car at a time one still isn't close (see below). Corn may be cheaper, but again you have the problem of making a mash at 5-10% and then having to make 10-20x as much as you end up with as distilled alcohol. Even cheap bourbon is more expensive than gasoline per gallon, (and note, we haven't talked about the energy costs and cost of water or the need to make a profit).
Potatoes are indeed cheaper in bulk, but they would have to be 10x cheaper than barley to break even with gasoline. In order for your numbers to be correct, $2 worth of potatoes (call it a very generous five pounds at anything like retail proces) would have to make 20 gallons of 5% alcohol pre-distillation. This is impossible. Five pounds of straight up fermentable sugar won't quite make five gallons of 5% alcohol -- a standard brew from malt sugars is six pounds for five gallons. You'd need at least twenty four pounds of pure sugar to make twenty gallons of 5% alcohol to distill to 1 gallon of 100% alcohol, plus enough energy to distill it (and a distillery that functioned without losses). Sugar in bulk costs roughly $30 for 50 pounds, so this comes out to be at least $12 for a gallon of sugar-derived ethanol independent of the source of the sugar. Of course "YMMV" if you are content to distill to only 150 proof or can get your engine to run as a steam engine at 100 proof, but the energy content of the product would be much lower (see below) so you'll have to make more to drive the same distance in the end.
If potatoes 100% ferment as efficiently as pure sugar (doubtful -- I'm guessing that they are only 2/3 to 3/4 fermentable) that is still 24 pounds of potatoes. Looking on the web for wholesale prices for potatoes, 50 pound boxes are roughly $20-25/pound (and if they are only 75% fermentable you are no better off than you are fermenting refined or unrefined sugar) which actually makes sense. If potato sugars were much cheaper than cane or corn or beet sugars, we'd get our sugar from potatoes. That means a gallon of pure alcohol derived from potatoes (or from sugar, or from...) under best-case assumptions would cost at least $10. No matter how you cut it, that's a dead loss compared to straight up gasoline prices, and you'd have to drop costs by a factor of three to have a realistic chance of breaking even.
Finally, you need between 1.6 (ethanol) and 2.1 (methanol) gallons of alcohol to match the energy content of a gallon of gasoline, so you LOSE another factor of around 2.
Overall, burning alcohols derived from food sugars or starches in cars is a stupid idea as long as gasoline is available. Perhaps one does marginally better with oils and diesel, although since people started burning vegetable oil as diesel the cost of vegetable oils has more than doubled so where it was a borderline break even proposition in 2005 it is now a total loss. Various companies (including oil companies) are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in developing new plants that can produce oils or sugars at sufficiently high energy density and low cost to be worth growing in bulk and refining into alcohols or biodiesel, but wikipedia suggests that we are five to ten years away from success here (barring skyrocketing prices for gasoline or real diesel) and even if it were break even now it would still take 5-10 years to develop cultivation of anywhere nearly enough land area to supply any reasonable fraction of global demand.
Until you end up needing a VM and a Windows license for this or that package on half the machines in the company.
Except that the VM is free, every license saved is money saved, and VMs can be locked and cloned to make installation a matter of "rsync -avz/vm/winimage newhost:/vm" and waiting a bit.
That's part of the "one sysadmin can manage 2-3 times as many linux systems as Windows systems" bit that you ignored.
HP printers don't have a penguin or systems requirements because they don't need one. They just install and work. Don't even need an "install CD".
To be charitable in a left-handed way, some of the users would stay dumb no matter what operating system they use. But most can be educated and hand-held to limited functionality with a certain set of tools, even if you still find them only using the five or six menu entries you showed them in a give GUI tool four years later...
People will indeed. But Ubuntu forums are free, and viruses alone are a major fraction of all problems encountered by "people". I know Windows Defenders (tm) will allege that Windows isn't intrinsically insecure or unstable, but historically, Windows is insecure and unstable. So much for the people -- in the corporate environment the real issue is scalability. Linux is enormously, absurdly, cheaply, scalable in a sensibly run enterprise environment. Standardize on a reasonably small set of hardware platforms, and things like kickstart and yum make it possible for one sysadmin to support far, far more people than one sysadmin can support in any Windows environment I've ever heard of. Automated installation is easy, automated upgrade is easy, security is easy and effective (because the Unix-derived client-server networking model has always been reasonably secure) viruses are all but unknown and with standard root vs user privilege control ordinary users can't really infect their systems with viruses that matter.
Linux has two or three problems. One is hardware support. In a wide-open home/laptop/desktop environment, it is difficult to guarantee that any particular piece of hardware is going to run, or at least be easy to get to run, under linux. But there is a more than spanning set of hardware to choose from that does run, and run well, and a skilled systems person can usually get almost all of the rest to work (eventually) with some effort. In a corporate environment, all this really means is that you should shop carefully for systems, something that you should do anyway even with Windows, and test prototypes to make sure that they will install and run well.
Another is marketing -- Microsoft has an enormous staff of people devoted to promoting their product, cutting deals that maintain their lock on various markets, advertising on television and in other media, and sowing FUD about any and all competing products. I can't find online statistics on this, but I'll bet that Microsoft has at least two marketing/business people for every software engineer or technical support person. Linux has virtually none.
The third is software. Like it or not, there is plenty of software in the Universe that only runs on Windows platforms. Not Linux, not Macs. Just Windows. There is far more software that runs on Linux (often only on Linux) these days -- there are literally tens of thousands of programs and libraries available, nearly all of them free, most of them of remarkably high quality. However, most corporate software, game software, and commercial software is written for Windows (or written by Apple for Apples on a proprietary basis). The reason here is obvious as well -- you make a lot more money with a proprietary package written for the most common operating system, especially when there is relatively little free software available for that system. If you try to write proprietary software for Linux systems, you face user resistance (everything else they use is free, why should they pay for your application?), you have to watch encumbrances such as GPL viral code or libraries, you risk being functionally cloned by your users in short order, and the "brilliant idea" underlying your application may well already be written and working fine under Linux, given its vast already existing library of free software.
If your business doesn't need proprietary packages -- just e.g. straight up office software, browsers, web servers, databases, and not this or that specific accounting package or word processor, then enterprise level Linux will save you a fortune. Even if you do, it is probably cheaper and simpler to still run enterprise level Linux everywhere and confine Windows to VMs only on those desktops that need it.
The problem is that IPv6 really is a lovely piece of engineering, and as I pointed out in one of my other replies to some of the objections, about as attractive as elective open heart surgery to put in a really, really technically superior artificial heart to just about everybody involved. If their primary design goal was to make the transition maximally expensive in human time (in order to optimize performance in pieces of hardware instead, for pete's sake) they could hardly have done, um, "better". Forget just changing the sizes of a few objects in the network stack, changing a few loop limits from "4" to "6" or "8" -- oh no. Rewrite everything from scratch, all of your old tables are obsolete in form, everything you've learned about managing TCP-IP network is now wrong. Back to school with you! Or, in the case of a small cap company trying to write an application with a network stack, back to the VC peoplewith you! I'm sure you won't mind giving up another 10% of your company, or your new company's profits spent rewriting your networking, or adding some more sweat equity, or taking time away from fishing or your family, or just plain going broke because everybody knows technically superior IPv6 is worth it! It's better for routers and that is clearly what really matters, right? We'd hate for machines to have to work hard at the expense of human time, after all...
However, I still think you are missing certain points. It isn't just the "IPv4 devices" that are a problem. It is all of the applications explicitly written for IPv4 and 32 bit addresses. It is all of the sysadmins who understand and can deal with/etc/hosts, nameservers, SSL, netmasks, local routing tables, port filters on routers now, but who will more or less have to go back to school and relearn networking all over for IPv6 because it is nothing like IPv4. They are every bit as excited about this as they would be if they were asked (once upon a time) to learn to administer an Appletalk network, a Novell network, Digital's old network, ATM. It is that different. It isn't a matter of altering their existing addresses in simple ways; it is a matter of completely altering their entire set of address tables. Worse, it is a matter of doing so in all probability with both tables in place, managing both kinds of networks at once.
You are doing it at home and that's great. Doing it in an environment with a few hundred (department), or a few thousand (institution), or a few tens or hundreds of thousands (ISP) of addresses is every bit as attractive to the admins of those organizations as elective heart transplant surgery. The fact that the heart in question has sixteen chambers instead of four and is proven scalable to the point where it could pump radioactive blood from Godzilla's enormous toes right up to his teensy brain isn't really the point, is it?
On the other hand, getting a pacemaker for the heart you've got -- sure, it isn't as cool and certainly won't help Godzilla -- might just keep you alive until you die of other causes. A metaphor multiplied by a large population of developers, administrators, and end users all of which have to pay in time, money, education, effort, and pain for any change. You are quite right, in one sense any change requires new software so why not go for the Godzilla solution?
The solution that I proposed, however, would let everybody keep their same old/etc/hosts and all other tables and use a simple set of software tools to handle IPv4 addresses and IPv5 addresses. In fact, it could handle all the old software at the kernel level in a compatibility mode. Set your kernel to prepend and remove IPv5's country code and otherwise communicate with a legacy app in on-the-fly converted IPv4 packets. I've written networking code before, and have a fair bit of it I still use. It is (for better or worse) 32 bit specific in a variety of ways. It is utterly incompatible with IPv6. I'm just one single instance of the vast, vast problem you are ignoring. If/when Duke finally converts to IPv6, I either have to retire my network application entirely or completely rewrite its network stack. Worse, if I want to still be able to have it function on an IPv4 network (and there are bound to be lots of them for years) I have to make it transparently function with both stacks. Rewriting it will take me how long, exactly? Let's see:
* First, I can learn all about IPv6. I'm pretty smart, and know networking in general fairly well, so perhaps this will only take me a week or two of intensive, self-directed effort.
* Second, I can learn how to program a network application in IPv6. Will the old socket systems calls still work? Are ports handled the same way? If I want to display addresses (my application does that as it actually is among other things a network activity monitor) how do I parse them, how do I print them out in human-readable form? For IPv4, I have things like Stevens and several other books that are precious like platinum for the network programmer who wishes to succeed. What similar books exist for IPv6 -- yet? Perhaps I'm lucky and I find one, or find other resources that let me template it and build a new stack next to my old one. Again, it's hard to i
In personal computers? Are you even paying attention to the idea of what I said? I'm not talking about processors used in mobile phones that didn't exist at all in the 80's and 90's when the anecdote I was referring to took place. I'm talking about a specific battle between two -- well, really more than two -- CPUs that were in direct competition for desktop space during the "personal computer revolution". My point wasn't that "segmented architectures are good" -- it was that good, bad, indifferent -- segmented CPUs were the first to really cover the desktops of the US and then much of the world. During the time of the original 8088-based IBM PC, a large amount of software was created that used segmentation, and that software created an inertia that lasted for decades and continues on in a small way today. New processors created for completely different markets didn't have the legacy issue so of course they were flat -- the technical constraints that caused processors to be segmented in the 80's no longer really existed by the 90's, certainly not by the mid-90's. However, during the 80's, if Intel had announced that (say) the 80386 was going to be completely incompatible the 16-bit 64K memory segmentation model of the previous generations of the processor family, they would have opened the door for Motorola's competing (and arguably better) processor because they would have lost all of the legacy software that gave their system inertia.
The point still being that in a developed market, it helps to provide a compatibility bridge. It probably took a decade for segmented code to mostly disappear, given that all of the major PC applications (Lotus, DOS itself, the compilers, Wordstar, and so many more) were written for the 8086 segmented family and cost to rewriting them.
To be honest, the exact same human tendency is being discussed in the eternal "why hasn't the US gone metric" thread in play at the moment. After all, SI metric has many advantages. It is faster, easier to use (when both the imperial and metric units themselves are equally intuitive, the arithmetic involved with metric is doable in your head, where that involved with imperial is not). It is used by far more people worldwide. It is important to use a single system of measurement worldwide in a world-spanning marketplace. Any sane person, when asked which system makes the most sense and should be universally adopted, would choose "metric". Indeed, they'd almost certainly strongly suggest that we redo our clock into metric and dump this 1440 minutes or 86400 seconds per day nonsense (and might wish that we could move the earth back in its orbit to where it was e.g. 400 days long:-).
Yet they don't. Why not? Because imperial works "well enough" as is for them in their everyday life, and they don't really care about global problems brought about by their decision. They'd have to change, and learn. It would take work. I teach physics and would love to live metric, but I can't even get my own family to change. If I set the thermometer in the kitchen that measures indoor/outdoor temperatures to centigrade, it gets reset to fahrenheit. If I talk about speeds in kilometers per hour or meters per second, I get blank stares. I have the same problem myself -- I should think of all mundane velocities in meters per second (SI units) but my experience with mundane velocities driving is all in miles per hour. I can manage the mph to kph conversion in my head, but I still have to resort to the google units converter to go to m/sec. It takes too much energy for me to convert completely to a sane set of life units, and of course even if I do I still have to function in a backward compatible way for the huge number of legacy humans using the old units (including those I live with).
More examples -- how about religion? Talk about a "legacy application" -- it has been perfectly obvious for several hundred years now that things like Chr
See other reply. I don't have a problem with it at all per se (aside from the vast, vast overkill), I only think it would have made more sense to build a bridge interpolating 4 and 6 and made the bridge a lot more backwards compatible. I also think that there is a bit of difference for an end user that simply plugs an IPv6-enabled machine or device in and it "just works" (because the administrator of that network has it set up to just work) and the administrator of that network. There is a larger barrier, I think, than you are acknowledging.
The issue isn't the rewriting of the code -- anybody can do that. The code has even long since been written and is in e.g. the linux kernel at least. Machines could care less if the addresses are 32 bit or 1024 bit -- you could make the entire packet header, allow every atom in the Universe to be individually addressed, and machines would still parse it once the code was written (and it wouldn't be that difficult to write, even making the code route hierarchically to distant galaxies to get at their atoms). Nor is processing power an issue, in routers or elsewhere. Nor is memory. I really do think that it is the extra complexity -- even people who could turn it on, don't turn it on. Why should they? They don't need the extra complexity. They (for the most part) don't know how routers function in the first place, and could care less as long as they route. They find it much easier to use a private internal space and NAT rather than try to deal with a backwards incompatible new standard.
I think you are missing that point altogether. The standard I proposed is not only backwards compatible, it is trivially so. If an IPv4 packet comes into a router, you just rewrite it "IPv5" with the default country code. You could even make a router that transparently strips the extra bytes of address space and writes IPv4 header packets out to connected hosts from which they receive IPv4 packets. All of this would actually be pretty simple to write and one could probably write it so that one doesn't even change the IP header layout if one used some of the "options" space in IPv4 for the extra four bytes. From the four extra bytes (two each for source and destination) you get what amounts to unlimited address space, especially when further eked out with non-routed NAT.
I absolutely agree that 128 bits allows one to do all sorts of clever things at the routing level, but it did so at the cost of making it incomprehensible and unwieldy at the human level and backwards incompatible. The history of computing is littered with the wreckage of good ideas (in principle) that ignored those two things, and one can easily count the success stories of modest kludges that were easy, and hence became universal (kludgy or not). Consider, for example, Motorola's flat address space vs Intel's segmented address space back in the 80's. Motorola's was clearly superior, right? Especially when the 8088 (that really needed it) became the 8086 (that still needed it) became in rapid succession 80[1,2,3,4,5,6...]86. Intel processors could handle segmented code in compatibility mode long after their processor was flat because of the vast "inertia" of humans who possessed legacy segmented code.
Now, count the number of Motorola vs Intel processors in use in the world today. Hmmmmm.
Hell, we don't really need a two byte extension to IPv4 address space. One would do fine for a few more decades and would easily fit into the options part of the IPv4 header. IPv5 could refer to five byte addressing, IPv6 (if it were ever needed) could refer to six byte addressing, etc. One could (of course) extend IPv5's header so that it can be backwards compatible but so that it allows for longer header lengths. Since one has 8 possible values in the version field, only one of which is ever used, that leaves 7 more bit patterns to differentiate and/or facilitate a seamless transition from IPv5 to IPvN for any N you like or need (starting by allowing for IPv5 to go ahead and "reserve" room in header-space for a more seamless transition for all future N+1 transitions.
That would have made (and would still make, if anybody just boldly went ahead and adopted it) legacy hardware useable with a FIRMWARE upgrade. That's probably impossible for IPv6. And right there you have it. Hardware inertia. User/admin inertia. No backwards compatibility. No human readability, even in xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:: notation (which more or less acknowledges, BTW, that they went insanely overboard
The reason IPv6 hasn't taken off is because it is an insane, stupid, standard and everybody knows it. It's like the network god people were taking way, way too much lithium and mixing it with their crystal meth that day. 10^38 addresses is enough to give every single gram of mass in the planets of the solar system their very own IPv4 address space! Gosh, sure, why not? Nanites are coming, after all, and they'll all need their own unique non-NAT'd IPv6 address.
The good news is that they skipped 5. Here, I'll do a better job of inventing the next Internet protocol. IPv5:
48 bit addresses (add two bytes to the left of existing IPv4 addresses, otherwise use precisely the same packet header, four whole bytes longer, six if somebody wants to add more checksumming or the like while we're at it).
Oh, wait, I'm done. That gives us 65,536 IPv4 address spaces, which is enough for every country on earth to have one, bigger countries to have 2 or even 3. It's enough to trivially provision every human on the planet with their own block of 256 addresses, with enough left over for gorillas, chimps, cetaceans, and dogs to get their own as well after we're done uplifting them, and that is without NAT.
Existing routers can probably be damn near hacked in firmware to manage the longer addresses. Existing route tables continue to function with a similarly trivial hack. The US gets the block 0.0.x.x.x.x, so all existing addresses in the US don't need to change, they just need a script to be run to prepend a couple of zeros (sorry Europe and China, but we invented the Internet and have the most addresses already assigned so by either measure this must be so). After that, we can just give countries their own block and encourage migration to the same IPv4 address(es) their hosts have now, but with their very own country code prepended. They can make up their own internet authority to manage their own internal addresses.
Naturally, this extension should come with plenty of room for NAT. We can establish one half of the space for NAT. In fact, we can make the first bit the NAT bit. No packet with the leading bit set is externally routed. Sure, we sacrifice 32,278 4-billion-address IPv4 subnets that way, but we make it REALLY EASY to make a home network address normal humans (or small business admins) can remember: 128.x.x.x.x.x, fill in whatever you like for the x's and we're done. We can either make: 255.0.0.0.0.1, loopback or make loopback x.x.127.0.0.1 at block 4 (for any address blocks), just as it is now, or both. I like both. Why not?
See how easy? See how extensible? Everybody does fine managing four byte addresses already, and basically in IPv5 one will now manage the same four byte addresses plus a country code. We can PROBABLY even make the country codes for IPv4 address spaces and the country codes for countries MATCH! What an idea! That will make them REALLY easy to look up!
Of course, that means the US starts out with both 0.0.x.x.x.x and 0.1.x.x.x.x, but that's fine, we invented the telephone too and we're most likely to exhaust the whole IPv4 space on our own even after other countries get their own and move out, so we probably will need two from the very beginning anyway, and why not 0.1.x.x.x.x? It even makes sense there.
Why only 48 bit addresses? Given NAT, it is actually very unlikely that we will really need more than two extra bytes -- truthfully we could probably make things work forever with only one. And y'know, if we ever do need another byte or two beyond this, in a century or so we can add it then and just as painlessly extend to 64 bit addresses. But honestly, I doubt that we ever will.
Oops, the damn parser doesn't like dirac bra-kets, does it. The missing line is bra dead | live ket = 0, and bra live | live ket = bra dead | dead ket = 1, normalized orthogonal states of quantum being. Curse you html! (and I'm too lazy to look up character codes, sorry...)
Hell, it beats writing a quiz for my kiddie physics students...
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No, silly beanie! I'm happy to support NASA and going to the moon to gain knowledge. Going to the moon to mine He3 would never, ever, ever be as efficient in the knowledge gaining arena as going to the moon to gain knowledge, though. That's like saying that if I go into my backyard and dig in the dirt looking for fishing worms I'll learn as much as I would going into my back yard armed with a microscope and systematic plan of study (and carefully directed investment for future study). Simply not so.
Mining the moon is a complete boondoggle, you've hit the nail square on the head. Make the case for NASA and moon settlements straight up, without the boondoggles.
As for the charged particle extraction of energy and so on -- please. If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride. Dilithium crystals might allow us to extract stray antimatter from universe-prime (the antimatter one that is separated from our real one by a thin symmetry barrier) so we could turn garbage into energy (my name isn't Doc Brown for nothing:-) once we learn how all of this works. Right now (and I reiterate) we cannot even reach break even for D-D or D-T fusion! I repeat, we cannot reach break even.
It requires significantly more energy and significantly higher pressures and temperatures to burn Helium than Hydrogen. We can't even manage sufficient confinement pressures/temperatures to fused Hydrogen, and here you are planning to mine the moon for He3? Deuterium, as I've pointed out, is so plentiful that we will exhaust the Earth's supply not long before the Sun itself has changed state to the point where the Earth isn't habitable anyway (if not long after that -- the Sun is still a pretty big question mark). Who could possibly care how much it costs to build a power plant that burns inexhaustible, dirt cheap fuel? Especially when you add to the cost of the alternative fuel going to the moon to find it and ship it home?
So how about we agree to:
* First, build a D-T reactor that actually makes more energy than it consumes.
* Second, build a D-T reactor that actually makes a lot more energy than it consumes, and get D-D and so on to work in it as well at a high fusion yield per joule of energy spent obtaining it.
* Third, build a D-D/D-T power infrastructure that burns all of the nice, cheap, abundant fuel this represents, while continuing to work on He3-He3 and other considerably more difficult fusion reactions.
* Fourth, if and when we achieve break even and then well beyond break even for He3-He3, we can look at the economics of mining He3 vs the well-established D-D/D-T technology, given the technological landscape for space travel at that time. If it makes sense, everybody will do it, because marginal profit is marginal profit. If it doesn't make sense, well, we'll just keep on burning that nasty old Deuterium for the next billion years or so, won't we?
In the meantime, I'm all for continuing the support of NASA and moon trips and Mars trips and Jupiter trips, building space stations and putting up enormous space telescopes, bringing back moon rocks and visiting Titan to look for life, and above all setting up a high post and technology base for intervening early (far away) in the event an asteroid/comet should appear coming in out of the Oort cloud on a collision course with Earth. Heck, I'm all for developing a nuclear-bomb driven mass driver specifically for this purpose! But let's not lie and try to get people to go to the moon to mine He3 that we might be able to use -- or might not be able to use -- one day, just because we want to trick them into funding all of this.
OK?
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Nuclear fission produces even more neutrons. Do we have to replace plants every few years?
No, one just surrounds the core with a moderator that slows/absorbs/captures the neutrons, something like water. Which turns the neutrons into even more fuel. Then there is the problem of overcoming the Coulomb barrier -- pushing two +2e nuclei is significantly more difficult than pushing two +1e nuclei, and we can't even manage the latter yet.
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This is a slight exaggeration and subject to unrealistic assumptions. Read (for example) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helium-3#Fusion_reactions -- at reasonable efficiencies, it would require close to 80 kg of fuel to run a 1/2 GW power plant, "hand held" only if you are a pretty strong person. To provide all the electricity required to fuel all the homes in the US it would require roughly 20 tons of He3 a year. To replace ALL energy sources used by the US would require roughly 25 times that, some 500 tons a year. If we pretend they are metric tons to make the arithmetic easy, that's 5x10^5 kg, where the bare "cost" of getting off the moon is roughly 3 x 10^6 J/kg, the actual cost again many times that. And these numbers all assume that we have significantly passed break even in the fusion reaction itself, something that we currently haven't done -- if the best we can do in fusion efficiency is 10%, multiply all of these numbers by 10 (for example). Suddenly our 1 GW power plant requires 1600 kg of fuel and no, you can't carry it around.
Abundant energy on the moon is no problem -- both solar and hypothetical He3 burning give you ELECTRICITY, but electricity is nearly useless for lifting spacecraft in all models except Heinlein's imaginary mass drivers. So we either have to lift real chemical fuels from the Earth to the moon to be able to ship the stuff back or tackle an enormous engineering task on the moon -- no simple "drop a bunch of He3 scavenging robots" but building a mass driving linear accelerator long enough to accelerate payloads to 2.38 km/sec (2.8x10^ Joules/kg). Suddenly we're spending a small fortune on energy to lift the fuel back to earth. Paradoxically, if we burn hydrogen and oxygen as reaction/rocket fuel to lift it back, we will be wasting more fusion energy in the rocket fuel required to lift it back than we are gaining by lifting it.
What was that? Wasting more fusion energy than we gain? The problem is this: If we can burn He3, we can damn well burn D-D and D-T. One hydrogen atom in 6400 is Deuterium right here on Earth. One ninth of the mass of the oceans is hydrogen. Concentrating Deuterium in water (making "heavy water") is straightforward, 70 year old technology and is still done for certain nuclear power plants because it makes a better moderator than ordinary water -- it is economic to do, in other words, in spite of the fact that it isn't even a fuel (there is more energy available by perhaps and order of magnitude in the moderator than in the fission fuel load of a plant that does this, if D-D fusion were efficient at all). The ocean has a mass of 1.4x10^21 kg, or 2.4x10^16 kg of Deuterium. Allowing for higher efficiencies (it requires a higher temperature and pressure to burn He3 because of its greater charge, so it is basically certain that D-D fusion will always be more efficient than He3-anything) but lower yield per reaction as a wash, we might burn as much as 2500 metric tons worldwide per year, but let's be lavish and assume 10,000 (or 10^7 kg). That means there is enough Deuterium in the oceans to fuel world civilization at a significantly higher per capita energy consumption than we now have for a few billion years -- at least a billion before the concentration of D in the ocean is even close to being halved.
So actually, lunar mining of He3 isn't just stupid, it is insanely, massively, stupendously stupid. It is a thinly veiled attempt by a former astronaut to try to keep the enormously expensive space program funded by inventing the most vaporous of vaporware -- the illusion of cheap energy from the moon!
Of course, anyone who has actually read Heinlein knows that the same mass drivers that deliver our fuel in metric ton payloads could deliver e.g. 1 metric ton rocks instead. 1 metric ton of rock hitting the Earth at escape speed is 6x10^10 Joules of heat all released in a second at a single point of impac
It's much worse than that. If we could use fusion at all, there is plenty of fuel available already. Deuterium is abundant and easy to extract from seawater -- there is enough there to fuel the world for a million years or ten, and if we ever run short we can mine Jupiter's satellites far more cheaply than the moon (with far greater abundance). We use He4 to float children's balloons until it leaks out and heads for the upper atmosphere and space (instead of heat a house for a decade or three).
It costs roughly 62 million joules per kilogram to escape the Earth's gravitational field. It still costs almost 3 million joules per kilogram to escape the Moon's. Except that in both cases, it costs many times that because of inefficiencies. Helium is much more difficult to burn in a fusion reaction than Deuterium or Tritium because it has twice the nuclear charge. We can't even achieve break even confinement and temperatures with D-D fusion or D-T fusion (which makes the most sense energetically given reasonably abundant Tritium plus breeding of more via the leftover neutrons in D-D fusion).
I absolutely love the idea of developing fusion (and Thorium), but "mining the moon" is simple shorthand for "Damn, the space program is all but dead, quick, let's find something `of value' to bring it back to life". I'd rather see it brought back to life on its own real merits -- we need it for asteroid protection, for weather, for communications, for astronomy/cosmology, for a variety of other science, and sure, we need it to give humans a far frontier. But we don't need it to mine fusion fuel, not with (literally) oceans of the stuff already here on earth.
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No, Eric is Idle. This is one more piece of evidence in time travel. The reviews are clearly from the future, when the compound is a bed and breakfast that advertises "Bring your wives and children! Sleep in Osama's bed!"...
Oh for a mod point -- funny!
Surely we can blame the birthers for being born stupid and growing up to be batshit crazy racists? Surely we can avoid the fallacy of overgeneralization -- one policeman treats you like shit so all policement will treat you like shit? Surely we can consider fringe whack jobs who don't believe that man actually landed on the moon or that the holocaust really happened to be fringe whack jobs?
Such actions and beliefs deserve our collective disapproval, loudly asserted. Those that openly or tacitly endorsed it deserve a complete lack of respect in any public arena for the rest of their lives, including (perhaps especially) Sarah Palin and Donald Trump. Of course Palin already deserved marginalization ten times over because she is both stupid and batshit crazy, but one would have thought Trump was smarter than that. Apparently not.
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Yeah, I kinda pegged that one for being pure bullshit. Unless they planned to build it out of pure platinum or gold and then build a really big pyramid over it and then kill off everybody on earth so that nobody steals it to melt it down. Otherwise, what metal has ten thousand years worth of staying power in a corrosive and often wet oxygen bath? There are a handful of metal implements more than 3000 years old, and an even smaller handful of metal implements that aren't corroded that aren't made of gold. Electrochemistry even of peltier coolers would create enough bimetallic corrosion that they would probably not make a century, let alone a thousand years.
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I just kept wondering if I was a spectator at one of the shuttle launches if the blast would engulf the viewing public in a heavenly fog of KFC-Goodness.
You laugh, but a few years ago if you ran a diesel vehicle on privately scavenged biofuel, say peanut oil from a chinese restaurant or oil from french fry cookers from fast food places, you were supposed to pay a fuel tax (which bought you a special dye you could add to your fuel as a marker that you'd paid your taxes on the fuel you were using). This is even if you were a private citizen, basically saving the earth or whatever by burning a waste product instead of oil extracted from the ground at great expense.
The way cops knew to stop e.g. buses or other diesel vehicles to check their fuel was that if they were driving along behind a diesel vehicle and the exhaust smelled like french fries, hmmm, time to pull the puppy over and dip their tank.
Or, I imagine, for somebody driving a mercedes burning waste oil from KFC, smelled like chicken...:-)
Speaking of being stoned, it is difficult to resist posting http://www.hemphasis.net/Fuel-Energy/fuel.htm -- so you could be sitting around watching the shuttle's eventual replacement launch straight and just inhale deeply downrange to get stoned one day.
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My brother-in-law is a medical grower -- I'll have to ask him what he spends. Aside from some capital investment in climate and humidity control and light (amortized over years), I don't think it is that much. Of course he makes a small fortune per plant sold, so I suppose it doesn't matter. Growing weeds for enormous profits -- not since tobacco has there been such a deal.
Of course I'm a bit cynical about what "AAA medical quality" is of a drug that generally isn't assayed, that is grown from dozens of different "kinds" of seeds supposedly engineered to produce different sorts of, um, medical effects, that is grown at different temperatures and humidities and with slightly different watering and feeding even in a mostly-controlled hydroponic setting... which I don't mean in a hostile way, BTW. I just find it hard to believe that anybody could spend $320, sustained, to grow a plant of pot. Power doesn't cost that. Water doesn't cost that. The growth medium doesn't cost that, or at any rate I don't see how it could (I have friends who grow hydroponic tomatoes and if they spent $320 a plant, we couldn't afford to buy their product. I suppose a chunk of a mortgage or a rental space might cost that but no, my hydroponic friend runs a whole greenhouse growing tomatoes and still sells them for a few dollars a pound at a profit.
So what exactly do you buy to spend $320 per 1-pound yielding plant? A kilowatt per plant, sustained?
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P.S. -- I don't mean to sound hostile, if I do; I'm genuinely curious. I'm happy enough believing that there is some medical benefit from marijuana for at least some people, and don't care to see the selection of those people regulated by some outside agent and wish they'd just legalize it. Then a lot of people who use MM could admit that the "disease" they were controlling is chronic boredom and we could all move on.
No, no, no. You have to take fuel away. The lifetime of stars is inversely related to their mass. A red dwarf will still be burning when our sun is only a distant memory from 70 or 80 billions years ago.
Of course, this is all a remarkably silly proposition, as nobody is going to moderate the mass of the sun in any way whatsoever. Which is a shame, because global warming and cooling are in the end caused by the state of Mr. Sun, and that state is utterly beyond our control barring the discovery of new physics that I as a physicist cannot even imagine, E.E. "Doc" Smith space opera fantasy that violates all currently known physical laws and common sense. You could drop Mars into the sun and not significantly alter its steady state (aside from perhaps unleashing a burst of radiation sufficient to resterilize the Earth). Remember, you could drop the Earth itself into just one of its typical sunspots with room to spare. Even Jupiter is only 0.00095 times the mass of the Sun.
The best way to find distant civilizations is to a) do what we are doing now -- build better eyes that can see and catalog extrasolar planets; b) continue to work on discovering the rest of physics, hoping that we discover that the Universe is not as fundamentally closed to us as it appears to be; c) one way or another, go look for them.
c) at the moment is almost completely out of the question -- the energy costs of interstellar travel in anything like reasonable human times are truly ludicrous (and of course the dollar costs more so). New physics could change that; so could a rational society, but not while we spend close to half of what we make on a mix of mythology and war instead.
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Personally, I'm thrilled that you are intelligent, but then, I don't find intelligent people threatening. However, intelligence is not wisdom, nor is it a guarantee of being well adjusted or happy. It can become those things, though, once you apply your considerable problem solving ability to the problem of whining less and doing more. Arguing that it is your school's fault that you have/had academic problems because they "bored you" may even be true, but WTF does that matter? If you are as smart as you claim you are, apply some of that smartness to the problem of "beating the system" or "learning on your own". One of the joys of being really intelligent -- and well-adjusted as a human being -- is how it enables you to learn far more, far faster, than most people, how it enables you to do far more, far better than most people.
You sound as if you are still young and appallingly bitter. Let go of the bitterness, and apply yourself to doing something that uses all of your mind. The world is fully of challenges that even people with IQs of 156 will never exhaust, things that people with IQs of 180 won't exhaust. Mathematics. Physics. Writing. Inventing. Solving the problems of the world. Becoming wealthy. Bringing about World Peace. Making the world a better place on a more modest scale. Fixing the many problems with the school system. Becoming a teacher.
If you really are bright, recognize that there ain't nobody but you in charge of your life, especially now that you are out of school; you, far more than most people, are what you make yourself, not what others have made you. Read a bit of Maslow, shoot for self-actualization. When smart people are bored, they have nobody to blame for it but themselves even while they are still in high school. It has never been easier to learn.
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Gosh, that sounds like 70's prices, before somebody figured out that the X-generation was stupid and would pay absurd prices for what was and remains basically a weed...
But why does it cost you $20/ounce to grow your own? I would have expected it to be more like $2/ounce, or $0.20/ounce. Seeds: free (or a one time expense). Growing pots: $10, reusable forever. Potting soil (per pot) $3 if that. Water, fertilizer, light -- so little that it might as well be free but hell, call it $1/plant. Human time is opportunity cost. Total investment per pot of pot, certainly no more than $15. If each plant yields a modest one pound, that is less than $1/ounce, and if you reuse your pots, potting soil and so on (and of course allow a few plants to go to seed), the amortized cost drops to pennies per ounce, plus some pleasant time performing zen-like bansai trimming of your plants while talking to them...
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Through the miracle of modern Google:
Chicken Fat: 16,873 BTU/pound
Fuel Oil #2: 19,237 BTU/pound
In fact, I got this from a study that was investigating the advantages of mixing various animal fats with fuel oil to eke the latter -- for example a blend of 1/3 chicken fat and 2/3 fuel oil. You will all be pleased to note that this mix has 18,223 BTU/pound and that chicken fat is readily miscible in fuel oil. By itself it has a moderate tendency to produce ash in the burning process, but this is mitigated in the mixture. Of course this study is investigating the burning of this sort of mix in furnaces, but the principle is the same and I'm guessing that this mix would work fine in any engine that could run on fuel oil #2. An acquaintance of mine already has experience with the standard treatment of animal fats into an acceptable biodiesel (which involves adding a bunch of stuff e.g. methanol and filtering it) and this works too, but is a bigger hassle than just filtering and mixing.
I also, of course, have the common experience of grilling fatty chicken with the skin still on, which can turn your entire grill into the moral equivalent of a rocket engine on short notice and "render" your chicken into little chunks of charcoal. There's plenty of energy in that fat, although less, as noted, than in standard grades of fuel oil. Alas, if untreated it is vulnerable to oxidation, a.k.a. "going rancid" and besides, however many chickens there are they are a lousy source of fat per se in terms of being able to provide a significant sustainable supply of biofuel. I suppose it is better to render the fat from the skins removed making skinless chicken parts, and better to remove this skin and fat than to eat it, but we're talking a drop in the bucket of energy demand.
BTW, "tallow" (saturated animal fats) are little different from more polyunsaturated chicken fat in energy content. They appear to produce less ash burning on their own (hence tallow candles) but more ash in a fuel oil blend. Pretty interesting, actually.
Children fat, however, was not listed. No doubt an oversight on the part of those conducting the study. Personally, I think that using children fat to power rock star tour buses and heat the homes of the elderly would cure the energy crisis in no time at all, as there is little that is wrong with this planet that wouldn't be seriously ameliorated by using up, say, 2-4 billion children (including some of the older children we sometimes refer to as "young adults") and dumping world mythologies in the process that encourage the unrestrained production of still more children. If we used children we could stay toasty warm in the winter and significantly reduce future demand on our limited energy reserves as well as every other fundamental scarcity created by the ongoing Malthusian disaster.
rgb
Hmmm, not sure I agree. Let's do the math. Brewing beer with malted barley with grain purchased in bulk, you might get the cost down to $2 of grain per gallon of beer at 5%. To burn it as a fuel you would then have to distill it close to dry, as water doesn't burn and boiling the water sucks the heat out of the combustion process to pay the latent heat of evaporation of the water (one reason alcohol flames in "flambe" aren't that "hot"). If we distill to 100% that requires 20 gallons of beer, or $40, not a big win there, and even if I'm off by a factor of four in price buying malted barley a freight car at a time one still isn't close (see below). Corn may be cheaper, but again you have the problem of making a mash at 5-10% and then having to make 10-20x as much as you end up with as distilled alcohol. Even cheap bourbon is more expensive than gasoline per gallon, (and note, we haven't talked about the energy costs and cost of water or the need to make a profit).
Potatoes are indeed cheaper in bulk, but they would have to be 10x cheaper than barley to break even with gasoline. In order for your numbers to be correct, $2 worth of potatoes (call it a very generous five pounds at anything like retail proces) would have to make 20 gallons of 5% alcohol pre-distillation. This is impossible. Five pounds of straight up fermentable sugar won't quite make five gallons of 5% alcohol -- a standard brew from malt sugars is six pounds for five gallons. You'd need at least twenty four pounds of pure sugar to make twenty gallons of 5% alcohol to distill to 1 gallon of 100% alcohol, plus enough energy to distill it (and a distillery that functioned without losses). Sugar in bulk costs roughly $30 for 50 pounds, so this comes out to be at least $12 for a gallon of sugar-derived ethanol independent of the source of the sugar. Of course "YMMV" if you are content to distill to only 150 proof or can get your engine to run as a steam engine at 100 proof, but the energy content of the product would be much lower (see below) so you'll have to make more to drive the same distance in the end.
If potatoes 100% ferment as efficiently as pure sugar (doubtful -- I'm guessing that they are only 2/3 to 3/4 fermentable) that is still 24 pounds of potatoes. Looking on the web for wholesale prices for potatoes, 50 pound boxes are roughly $20-25/pound (and if they are only 75% fermentable you are no better off than you are fermenting refined or unrefined sugar) which actually makes sense. If potato sugars were much cheaper than cane or corn or beet sugars, we'd get our sugar from potatoes. That means a gallon of pure alcohol derived from potatoes (or from sugar, or from...) under best-case assumptions would cost at least $10. No matter how you cut it, that's a dead loss compared to straight up gasoline prices, and you'd have to drop costs by a factor of three to have a realistic chance of breaking even.
Finally, you need between 1.6 (ethanol) and 2.1 (methanol) gallons of alcohol to match the energy content of a gallon of gasoline, so you LOSE another factor of around 2.
Overall, burning alcohols derived from food sugars or starches in cars is a stupid idea as long as gasoline is available. Perhaps one does marginally better with oils and diesel, although since people started burning vegetable oil as diesel the cost of vegetable oils has more than doubled so where it was a borderline break even proposition in 2005 it is now a total loss. Various companies (including oil companies) are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in developing new plants that can produce oils or sugars at sufficiently high energy density and low cost to be worth growing in bulk and refining into alcohols or biodiesel, but wikipedia suggests that we are five to ten years away from success here (barring skyrocketing prices for gasoline or real diesel) and even if it were break even now it would still take 5-10 years to develop cultivation of anywhere nearly enough land area to supply any reasonable fraction of global demand.
rgb
Until you end up needing a VM and a Windows license for this or that package on half the machines in the company.
/vm/winimage newhost:/vm" and waiting a bit.
Except that the VM is free, every license saved is money saved, and VMs can be locked and cloned to make installation a matter of "rsync -avz
That's part of the "one sysadmin can manage 2-3 times as many linux systems as Windows systems" bit that you ignored.
HP printers don't have a penguin or systems requirements because they don't need one. They just install and work. Don't even need an "install CD".
rgb
To be charitable in a left-handed way, some of the users would stay dumb no matter what operating system they use. But most can be educated and hand-held to limited functionality with a certain set of tools, even if you still find them only using the five or six menu entries you showed them in a give GUI tool four years later...
rgb
People will indeed. But Ubuntu forums are free, and viruses alone are a major fraction of all problems encountered by "people". I know Windows Defenders (tm) will allege that Windows isn't intrinsically insecure or unstable, but historically, Windows is insecure and unstable. So much for the people -- in the corporate environment the real issue is scalability. Linux is enormously, absurdly, cheaply, scalable in a sensibly run enterprise environment. Standardize on a reasonably small set of hardware platforms, and things like kickstart and yum make it possible for one sysadmin to support far, far more people than one sysadmin can support in any Windows environment I've ever heard of. Automated installation is easy, automated upgrade is easy, security is easy and effective (because the Unix-derived client-server networking model has always been reasonably secure) viruses are all but unknown and with standard root vs user privilege control ordinary users can't really infect their systems with viruses that matter.
Linux has two or three problems. One is hardware support. In a wide-open home/laptop/desktop environment, it is difficult to guarantee that any particular piece of hardware is going to run, or at least be easy to get to run, under linux. But there is a more than spanning set of hardware to choose from that does run, and run well, and a skilled systems person can usually get almost all of the rest to work (eventually) with some effort. In a corporate environment, all this really means is that you should shop carefully for systems, something that you should do anyway even with Windows, and test prototypes to make sure that they will install and run well.
Another is marketing -- Microsoft has an enormous staff of people devoted to promoting their product, cutting deals that maintain their lock on various markets, advertising on television and in other media, and sowing FUD about any and all competing products. I can't find online statistics on this, but I'll bet that Microsoft has at least two marketing/business people for every software engineer or technical support person. Linux has virtually none.
The third is software. Like it or not, there is plenty of software in the Universe that only runs on Windows platforms. Not Linux, not Macs. Just Windows. There is far more software that runs on Linux (often only on Linux) these days -- there are literally tens of thousands of programs and libraries available, nearly all of them free, most of them of remarkably high quality. However, most corporate software, game software, and commercial software is written for Windows (or written by Apple for Apples on a proprietary basis). The reason here is obvious as well -- you make a lot more money with a proprietary package written for the most common operating system, especially when there is relatively little free software available for that system. If you try to write proprietary software for Linux systems, you face user resistance (everything else they use is free, why should they pay for your application?), you have to watch encumbrances such as GPL viral code or libraries, you risk being functionally cloned by your users in short order, and the "brilliant idea" underlying your application may well already be written and working fine under Linux, given its vast already existing library of free software.
If your business doesn't need proprietary packages -- just e.g. straight up office software, browsers, web servers, databases, and not this or that specific accounting package or word processor, then enterprise level Linux will save you a fortune. Even if you do, it is probably cheaper and simpler to still run enterprise level Linux everywhere and confine Windows to VMs only on those desktops that need it.
rgb
The problem is that IPv6 really is a lovely piece of engineering, and as I pointed out in one of my other replies to some of the objections, about as attractive as elective open heart surgery to put in a really, really technically superior artificial heart to just about everybody involved. If their primary design goal was to make the transition maximally expensive in human time (in order to optimize performance in pieces of hardware instead, for pete's sake) they could hardly have done, um, "better". Forget just changing the sizes of a few objects in the network stack, changing a few loop limits from "4" to "6" or "8" -- oh no. Rewrite everything from scratch, all of your old tables are obsolete in form, everything you've learned about managing TCP-IP network is now wrong. Back to school with you! Or, in the case of a small cap company trying to write an application with a network stack, back to the VC peoplewith you! I'm sure you won't mind giving up another 10% of your company, or your new company's profits spent rewriting your networking, or adding some more sweat equity, or taking time away from fishing or your family, or just plain going broke because everybody knows technically superior IPv6 is worth it! It's better for routers and that is clearly what really matters, right? We'd hate for machines to have to work hard at the expense of human time, after all...
:-)
rgb
I concede your points, well argued, sir.
/etc/hosts, nameservers, SSL, netmasks, local routing tables, port filters on routers now, but who will more or less have to go back to school and relearn networking all over for IPv6 because it is nothing like IPv4. They are every bit as excited about this as they would be if they were asked (once upon a time) to learn to administer an Appletalk network, a Novell network, Digital's old network, ATM. It is that different. It isn't a matter of altering their existing addresses in simple ways; it is a matter of completely altering their entire set of address tables. Worse, it is a matter of doing so in all probability with both tables in place, managing both kinds of networks at once.
/etc/hosts and all other tables and use a simple set of software tools to handle IPv4 addresses and IPv5 addresses. In fact, it could handle all the old software at the kernel level in a compatibility mode. Set your kernel to prepend and remove IPv5's country code and otherwise communicate with a legacy app in on-the-fly converted IPv4 packets. I've written networking code before, and have a fair bit of it I still use. It is (for better or worse) 32 bit specific in a variety of ways. It is utterly incompatible with IPv6. I'm just one single instance of the vast, vast problem you are ignoring. If/when Duke finally converts to IPv6, I either have to retire my network application entirely or completely rewrite its network stack. Worse, if I want to still be able to have it function on an IPv4 network (and there are bound to be lots of them for years) I have to make it transparently function with both stacks. Rewriting it will take me how long, exactly? Let's see:
However, I still think you are missing certain points. It isn't just the "IPv4 devices" that are a problem. It is all of the applications explicitly written for IPv4 and 32 bit addresses. It is all of the sysadmins who understand and can deal with
You are doing it at home and that's great. Doing it in an environment with a few hundred (department), or a few thousand (institution), or a few tens or hundreds of thousands (ISP) of addresses is every bit as attractive to the admins of those organizations as elective heart transplant surgery. The fact that the heart in question has sixteen chambers instead of four and is proven scalable to the point where it could pump radioactive blood from Godzilla's enormous toes right up to his teensy brain isn't really the point, is it?
On the other hand, getting a pacemaker for the heart you've got -- sure, it isn't as cool and certainly won't help Godzilla -- might just keep you alive until you die of other causes. A metaphor multiplied by a large population of developers, administrators, and end users all of which have to pay in time, money, education, effort, and pain for any change. You are quite right, in one sense any change requires new software so why not go for the Godzilla solution?
The solution that I proposed, however, would let everybody keep their same old
* First, I can learn all about IPv6. I'm pretty smart, and know networking in general fairly well, so perhaps this will only take me a week or two of intensive, self-directed effort.
* Second, I can learn how to program a network application in IPv6. Will the old socket systems calls still work? Are ports handled the same way? If I want to display addresses (my application does that as it actually is among other things a network activity monitor) how do I parse them, how do I print them out in human-readable form? For IPv4, I have things like Stevens and several other books that are precious like platinum for the network programmer who wishes to succeed. What similar books exist for IPv6 -- yet? Perhaps I'm lucky and I find one, or find other resources that let me template it and build a new stack next to my old one. Again, it's hard to i
In personal computers? Are you even paying attention to the idea of what I said? I'm not talking about processors used in mobile phones that didn't exist at all in the 80's and 90's when the anecdote I was referring to took place. I'm talking about a specific battle between two -- well, really more than two -- CPUs that were in direct competition for desktop space during the "personal computer revolution". My point wasn't that "segmented architectures are good" -- it was that good, bad, indifferent -- segmented CPUs were the first to really cover the desktops of the US and then much of the world. During the time of the original 8088-based IBM PC, a large amount of software was created that used segmentation, and that software created an inertia that lasted for decades and continues on in a small way today. New processors created for completely different markets didn't have the legacy issue so of course they were flat -- the technical constraints that caused processors to be segmented in the 80's no longer really existed by the 90's, certainly not by the mid-90's. However, during the 80's, if Intel had announced that (say) the 80386 was going to be completely incompatible the 16-bit 64K memory segmentation model of the previous generations of the processor family, they would have opened the door for Motorola's competing (and arguably better) processor because they would have lost all of the legacy software that gave their system inertia.
The point still being that in a developed market, it helps to provide a compatibility bridge. It probably took a decade for segmented code to mostly disappear, given that all of the major PC applications (Lotus, DOS itself, the compilers, Wordstar, and so many more) were written for the 8086 segmented family and cost to rewriting them.
To be honest, the exact same human tendency is being discussed in the eternal "why hasn't the US gone metric" thread in play at the moment. After all, SI metric has many advantages. It is faster, easier to use (when both the imperial and metric units themselves are equally intuitive, the arithmetic involved with metric is doable in your head, where that involved with imperial is not). It is used by far more people worldwide. It is important to use a single system of measurement worldwide in a world-spanning marketplace. Any sane person, when asked which system makes the most sense and should be universally adopted, would choose "metric". Indeed, they'd almost certainly strongly suggest that we redo our clock into metric and dump this 1440 minutes or 86400 seconds per day nonsense (and might wish that we could move the earth back in its orbit to where it was e.g. 400 days long:-).
Yet they don't. Why not? Because imperial works "well enough" as is for them in their everyday life, and they don't really care about global problems brought about by their decision. They'd have to change, and learn. It would take work. I teach physics and would love to live metric, but I can't even get my own family to change. If I set the thermometer in the kitchen that measures indoor/outdoor temperatures to centigrade, it gets reset to fahrenheit. If I talk about speeds in kilometers per hour or meters per second, I get blank stares. I have the same problem myself -- I should think of all mundane velocities in meters per second (SI units) but my experience with mundane velocities driving is all in miles per hour. I can manage the mph to kph conversion in my head, but I still have to resort to the google units converter to go to m/sec. It takes too much energy for me to convert completely to a sane set of life units, and of course even if I do I still have to function in a backward compatible way for the huge number of legacy humans using the old units (including those I live with).
More examples -- how about religion? Talk about a "legacy application" -- it has been perfectly obvious for several hundred years now that things like Chr
See other reply. I don't have a problem with it at all per se (aside from the vast, vast overkill), I only think it would have made more sense to build a bridge interpolating 4 and 6 and made the bridge a lot more backwards compatible. I also think that there is a bit of difference for an end user that simply plugs an IPv6-enabled machine or device in and it "just works" (because the administrator of that network has it set up to just work) and the administrator of that network. There is a larger barrier, I think, than you are acknowledging.
rgb
The issue isn't the rewriting of the code -- anybody can do that. The code has even long since been written and is in e.g. the linux kernel at least. Machines could care less if the addresses are 32 bit or 1024 bit -- you could make the entire packet header, allow every atom in the Universe to be individually addressed, and machines would still parse it once the code was written (and it wouldn't be that difficult to write, even making the code route hierarchically to distant galaxies to get at their atoms). Nor is processing power an issue, in routers or elsewhere. Nor is memory. I really do think that it is the extra complexity -- even people who could turn it on, don't turn it on. Why should they? They don't need the extra complexity. They (for the most part) don't know how routers function in the first place, and could care less as long as they route. They find it much easier to use a private internal space and NAT rather than try to deal with a backwards incompatible new standard.
I think you are missing that point altogether. The standard I proposed is not only backwards compatible, it is trivially so. If an IPv4 packet comes into a router, you just rewrite it "IPv5" with the default country code. You could even make a router that transparently strips the extra bytes of address space and writes IPv4 header packets out to connected hosts from which they receive IPv4 packets. All of this would actually be pretty simple to write and one could probably write it so that one doesn't even change the IP header layout if one used some of the "options" space in IPv4 for the extra four bytes. From the four extra bytes (two each for source and destination) you get what amounts to unlimited address space, especially when further eked out with non-routed NAT.
I absolutely agree that 128 bits allows one to do all sorts of clever things at the routing level, but it did so at the cost of making it incomprehensible and unwieldy at the human level and backwards incompatible. The history of computing is littered with the wreckage of good ideas (in principle) that ignored those two things, and one can easily count the success stories of modest kludges that were easy, and hence became universal (kludgy or not). Consider, for example, Motorola's flat address space vs Intel's segmented address space back in the 80's. Motorola's was clearly superior, right? Especially when the 8088 (that really needed it) became the 8086 (that still needed it) became in rapid succession 80[1,2,3,4,5,6...]86. Intel processors could handle segmented code in compatibility mode long after their processor was flat because of the vast "inertia" of humans who possessed legacy segmented code.
Now, count the number of Motorola vs Intel processors in use in the world today. Hmmmmm.
Hell, we don't really need a two byte extension to IPv4 address space. One would do fine for a few more decades and would easily fit into the options part of the IPv4 header. IPv5 could refer to five byte addressing, IPv6 (if it were ever needed) could refer to six byte addressing, etc. One could (of course) extend IPv5's header so that it can be backwards compatible but so that it allows for longer header lengths. Since one has 8 possible values in the version field, only one of which is ever used, that leaves 7 more bit patterns to differentiate and/or facilitate a seamless transition from IPv5 to IPvN for any N you like or need (starting by allowing for IPv5 to go ahead and "reserve" room in header-space for a more seamless transition for all future N+1 transitions.
That would have made (and would still make, if anybody just boldly went ahead and adopted it) legacy hardware useable with a FIRMWARE upgrade. That's probably impossible for IPv6. And right there you have it. Hardware inertia. User/admin inertia. No backwards compatibility. No human readability, even in xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:xxxx:: notation (which more or less acknowledges, BTW, that they went insanely overboard
The reason IPv6 hasn't taken off is because it is an insane, stupid, standard and everybody knows it. It's like the network god people were taking way, way too much lithium and mixing it with their crystal meth that day. 10^38 addresses is enough to give every single gram of mass in the planets of the solar system their very own IPv4 address space! Gosh, sure, why not? Nanites are coming, after all, and they'll all need their own unique non-NAT'd IPv6 address.
The good news is that they skipped 5. Here, I'll do a better job of inventing the next Internet protocol. IPv5:
48 bit addresses (add two bytes to the left of existing IPv4 addresses, otherwise use precisely the same packet header, four whole bytes longer, six if somebody wants to add more checksumming or the like while we're at it).
Oh, wait, I'm done. That gives us 65,536 IPv4 address spaces, which is enough for every country on earth to have one, bigger countries to have 2 or even 3. It's enough to trivially provision every human on the planet with their own block of 256 addresses, with enough left over for gorillas, chimps, cetaceans, and dogs to get their own as well after we're done uplifting them, and that is without NAT.
Existing routers can probably be damn near hacked in firmware to manage the longer addresses. Existing route tables continue to function with a similarly trivial hack. The US gets the block 0.0.x.x.x.x, so all existing addresses in the US don't need to change, they just need a script to be run to prepend a couple of zeros (sorry Europe and China, but we invented the Internet and have the most addresses already assigned so by either measure this must be so). After that, we can just give countries their own block and encourage migration to the same IPv4 address(es) their hosts have now, but with their very own country code prepended. They can make up their own internet authority to manage their own internal addresses.
Naturally, this extension should come with plenty of room for NAT. We can establish one half of the space for NAT. In fact, we can make the first bit the NAT bit. No packet with the leading bit set is externally routed. Sure, we sacrifice 32,278 4-billion-address IPv4 subnets that way, but we make it REALLY EASY to make a home network address normal humans (or small business admins) can remember: 128.x.x.x.x.x, fill in whatever you like for the x's and we're done. We can either make: 255.0.0.0.0.1, loopback or make loopback x.x.127.0.0.1 at block 4 (for any address blocks), just as it is now, or both. I like both. Why not?
See how easy? See how extensible? Everybody does fine managing four byte addresses already, and basically in IPv5 one will now manage the same four byte addresses plus a country code. We can PROBABLY even make the country codes for IPv4 address spaces and the country codes for countries MATCH! What an idea! That will make them REALLY easy to look up!
Of course, that means the US starts out with both 0.0.x.x.x.x and 0.1.x.x.x.x, but that's fine, we invented the telephone too and we're most likely to exhaust the whole IPv4 space on our own even after other countries get their own and move out, so we probably will need two from the very beginning anyway, and why not 0.1.x.x.x.x? It even makes sense there.
Why only 48 bit addresses? Given NAT, it is actually very unlikely that we will really need more than two extra bytes -- truthfully we could probably make things work forever with only one. And y'know, if we ever do need another byte or two beyond this, in a century or so we can add it then and just as painlessly extend to 64 bit addresses. But honestly, I doubt that we ever will.
rgb
Oops, the damn parser doesn't like dirac bra-kets, does it. The missing line is bra dead | live ket = 0, and bra live | live ket = bra dead | dead ket = 1, normalized orthogonal states of quantum being. Curse you html! (and I'm too lazy to look up character codes, sorry...)
Hell, it beats writing a quiz for my kiddie physics students...
rgb