You'll use up a whole lot more water fracking to keep the price of gas low than you would using the water renewably to grow plants.
But you're right, ethanol is a bad idea. We should be doing biogas and biodiesel instead; it's incredibly trivial to make natural gas and companies are already making diesel and fake-gasoline from plants that you can use in your conventional vehicle today.
Ethanol is a greasy handout to certain already-wealthy constituencies.
how does your solar panel work on cloudy days, rainy days, snow days and at night?
Works absolutely great, from the batteries it filled during sunlit hours.
How does your coal plant work when the coal's run out, the delivery truck has failed to supply coal, the coal miners are on strike, or the gennies thrown a main bearing?
C'mon, just give it up, energy storage is a solved problem. You're beating a dead troll.
3d metal printing on demand was invented at roughly the same time as plastic printing, in the mid-1980s. I think the first ones were sintering, but now there's several other methods. Go look at wikipedia.
But anyway 3d metal printing has been available to the unwashed masses for quite a while now. It's not cheap, but it's easily done if you've got the simoleons.
Shapeways was offering stainless steel printing with 21 days lead time at $10 per cubic centimeter to pretty much anybody by 2009, and nowadays you can even get titanium printed objects without any major effort. Don't bother building a printer, just email your design files and a valid credit card number to one of the vendors.
Solar, wind, hydro, and most importantly carbon-neutral biomass energy plants spotted all over the country on a true "smart grid" is the way to go. Solve dozens of social and economic problems while eliminating the pollution caused by burning petroleum.
Incidentally, I'm not the first to figure this out. Nikola Tesla talked about the idiocy of burning limited resources in 1915, before we compounded the problem by building terrestrial fission plants.
We should have ditched the com, net and org and just force everyone to use TLDs according to their countries. Sites like www.ebay.com would be www.ebay.us, etc.
Corporations are people, remember? And the important ones that buy and sell legislatures like bars of soap are all multinational corporations. They don't have countries.
Nice rant about not being able to print through the VPN but I bet there are several reasons for this.
Not being able to print is the tip of the iceberg. That was one example of a local resource being blocked by stupid VPN dogmatism. There are many more! Here's one: You have an end user who needs to VPN-connect from a business partner site to use a single app. You've forced all the traffic from the end user through the VPN tunnel (as advocated in the post inspiring the rant) so now the end user cannot reach his local mail server. If you create some baroque combination of filters so that painfully slow access to the local mailserver works by routing traffic through the WAN and back again, so a year later when the mail service configuration changes on the local site the VPNs all have to be reconfigured - and the email admins do not know this, of course, so it's designed to fail.
Instead of Ranting on/. about it, ask the IT dept why. You may be suprised at the answer.
It's impossible to set up a WAN link to an independently administered network without talking to the other end of the connection, so why in the world would you assume nobody has asked? Of course the question's been asked.
Smart IP netadmins have used only IANA registered names since before Jon Postel died, and smart WAN admins don't use one-size-fits-all security solutions that wreck end-user productivity.
You cannot run an interpreted language faster than a compiled language on the same hardware unless you cheat. You're cheating semantically; anything is rhetorically "comparable" to anything else.
Java is slower than C and you know it. "Approaching C speed?" Hey, a snail bathed in salt approaches C speed. Semantics.
That's remarkable.. 1.2 GB! I've never experienced this no matter how hard I worked the browser (I have created and destroyed at least a hundred tabs today, and have 8 in use now).
Just like with shakelights, quality varies, and some have batteries in them that will not last. But you can continuously use a good squeezelight for a half hour or more (depending on your hand strength - I can use mine for hours because I type a lot) and the light beam will stay focused right where you want it the whole time - which is impossible with any shakelight.
Also, since shakelights have powerful neodymium magnets in them and the housings are plastic, they screw up magnetic media (like credit cards) that get too close. The dynamos in the old no-battery Russian squeezelights never do that.
My squeezelight is at least 15 years old, and probably older, and sees regular use. I did have trouble finding a replacement for the primitive CCCP lightbulb it uses, but when I found some on eBay I bought 30 of them for a couple bucks so no worries now. The bearings in this thing are made of oiled wool, it's incredibly robust and repairable.
The only downside is dynamos are noisy, so when you're camping with the family everybody complains if you get up in the night to water the shrubbery.
Grown? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I've had streaming, synchronized, multi-room wireless music playback in my home for quite a few years now. And until I read this forum, I was barely aware that "AirPlay" existed!
We took a lighting strike at my daughter's school a few years back, that struck dirt less than ten feet from the building in the middle of the night.
The server room UPS was turned into a smoking pile of fused plastic and metal from the ground surge. The network switches were fried by the UPS and every single powered-on system connected to the network (including the servers) was toasted. The end user PCs were a total loss, but we salvaged the HDDs from the servers and put them in new chassis, and the printers only lost their (replaceable) network interface cards. User PCs on switched-off power strips were completely unaffected by this event, even though several of them were closer to the actual strike than the UPS was.
So,
7) powered down computers are less likely to be damaged by lightning strikes.
Humans generally sleep about a third of our lifetimes. So I turn off my computer while I'm asleep and reduce many of my computing risks and costs by 30% or more.
I've never seen anyone other than myself change their mind or behavior based on an Internet argument so I certainly won't try to convert you.
But I'll tell you anyway why I think running your computer all the time is stupid and wasteful, and we can both happily celebrate your freedom of choice.
I support some fairly large computer installations at work, two churches, and two schools. Some people use your philosophy, some use mine. I have seen the results.
1) Computers do not catch zero-day infections when they are not running. The only true defense against zero-day exploits is to reduce attack surface, and a powered off computer has no attack surface.
2) Computers are never exploited by internet criminals to set up child porn distribution nodes while they are not running. I had to testify in a court case once in which a young man barely escaped being permanently labeled a sex offender simply because his windows PC was hacked. Always-on PCs are high-value targets for such criminals, and in most US jurisdictions simply owning the PC makes you a guilty party, under child porn laws, regardless of any other issues.
3) Computers do not spontaneously catch fire when they are not running. I have seen three or four of them burst into flame with no warning during my career (the worst was an IBM 5151 monitor, which was burning like a campfire and belching thick carcinogenic smoke in less than five minutes). If this had happened during non-working hours the entire building probably would have been heavily damaged by the fire department's hoses.
4) Computers that are not running do not generate profits for companies (such as the major energy producers and telcos) that spend money to undermine my preferred culture and systems of government. Running your computer 24/365 sends at least $100 a year to the power company, for most people more like $250 a year (use a kill-a-watt meter and a calculator to determine your own expenditure).
5) Computers that are not running do not generate pollution. My grandfather and favorite uncle died of lung cancer, so pollution is a very personal issue. Power in my area is from natural-gas fired turbines running off fracked gas, so running my computer pollutes water tables and increases earthquake risk as well as making air pollution.
6) In the Windows world (I run linux, personally) when you shut down daily you can install updates at shutdown time and thus maintain your patchlevels without interupting your use of the computer. Always-on computers are slightly less convenient to keep patched up-to-date, since you often have to reboot windows to get patched up properly.
But to each his own, I guess... my systems all boot in less time than it takes for me to settle in at a workstation so that's not an issue for me. I don't parachute from orbit into a chair and start typing furiously, it's just not my style!
You have to make your own risk and value assessments. If you decide the risk and cost is not worth saving a few milliseconds at boot time, make sure you put the computer on a power strip. Nearly all PCs don't really turn off any more without a powerstrip.
Why not? I'm unaware of any physical handicap that would require this, so I assume the problem is mental?
Minimally computer-literate humans don't browse the web on servers, and don't run machines that aren't servers when they are asleep. Why not do a clean shutdown and reboot when you wake up?
It's shameful to waste resources on this when the same money could've been used to help increase the adoption rate and to sponsor adoptions. There are children already alive who need parents, no need to make more.
I just don't understand these poor sad people who are so self-obsessed that they think they can only love a child that carries their own DNA.
If the closed source vendors didn't regularly make their old products obsolete, they'd have to work harder on a slimmer profit margin, and that's not their business model. They want to get rich, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
But for many enterprises, basing critically important operating software on something that won't evaporate next quarter makes more sense.
For example, if you set your company DNS up on a BIND server 20 years ago, and you're still running on it, you'll have spent significantly less on software maintenance and hardware to achieve the same level of security, reliability and interoperability that could have been provided through any other means.
Microsoft legitimately tries (unlike some companies) to provide strong backwards compatibility, so that staying on the treadmill of upgrades is not excessively onerous (just expensive) and they have slowly become much better about releasing patches in a timely fashion (though they still can't match open source on that front). The whole silverlight/.NET debacle shows, though, that their business model is still the same as other proprietary vendors, still relying on costly forced upgrades.
why does the Linux kernel need manufacturer-specific modules to support graphics cards? Shouldn't the kernel just include the basic things like the ability to talk to a PCI Express device, and then graphics drivers would be implemented at a higher level?
Why do you need specific wavelengths of light to see? Shouldn't your eyeballs support anything, and your brain sort it out?
Why do you need road surfaces of a particular firmness to drive? Shouldn't your tires just drive on any sort of atoms, regardless of their liquid, solid or gaseous state?
Why do.... ah, never mind. The answer is that jones_supa hasn't paid for things to be any better. Cough up the cash like you do for Microsoft and you can pay for the mods you want.
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You'll use up a whole lot more water fracking to keep the price of gas low than you would using the water renewably to grow plants.
But you're right, ethanol is a bad idea. We should be doing biogas and biodiesel instead; it's incredibly trivial to make natural gas and companies are already making diesel and fake-gasoline from plants that you can use in your conventional vehicle today.
Ethanol is a greasy handout to certain already-wealthy constituencies.
Works absolutely great, from the batteries it filled during sunlit hours.
How does your coal plant work when the coal's run out, the delivery truck has failed to supply coal, the coal miners are on strike, or the gennies thrown a main bearing?
C'mon, just give it up, energy storage is a solved problem. You're beating a dead troll.
3d metal printing on demand was invented at roughly the same time as plastic printing, in the mid-1980s. I think the first ones were sintering, but now there's several other methods. Go look at wikipedia.
But anyway 3d metal printing has been available to the unwashed masses for quite a while now. It's not cheap, but it's easily done if you've got the simoleons.
Shapeways was offering stainless steel printing with 21 days lead time at $10 per cubic centimeter to pretty much anybody by 2009, and nowadays you can even get titanium printed objects without any major effort. Don't bother building a printer, just email your design files and a valid credit card number to one of the vendors.
If only there were some options other than nuclear fission and burning brown coal in an open pit!
Oh, wait, there are.
Here in reality, decentralized heterogenous power production would be inherently better for human culture and society, since it has less tendency to create economic disparities large enough to engender wholesale regulatory capture or militarization of power production, has fewer military vulnerabilities, and employs more working people gainfully (instead of funneling money to banksters), and would potentially allow a less expensive grid to carry more total power.
Solar, wind, hydro, and most importantly carbon-neutral biomass energy plants spotted all over the country on a true "smart grid" is the way to go. Solve dozens of social and economic problems while eliminating the pollution caused by burning petroleum.
Incidentally, I'm not the first to figure this out. Nikola Tesla talked about the idiocy of burning limited resources in 1915, before we compounded the problem by building terrestrial fission plants.
Corporations are people, remember? And the important ones that buy and sell legislatures like bars of soap are all multinational corporations. They don't have countries.
Not being able to print is the tip of the iceberg. That was one example of a local resource being blocked by stupid VPN dogmatism. There are many more! Here's one: You have an end user who needs to VPN-connect from a business partner site to use a single app. You've forced all the traffic from the end user through the VPN tunnel (as advocated in the post inspiring the rant) so now the end user cannot reach his local mail server. If you create some baroque combination of filters so that painfully slow access to the local mailserver works by routing traffic through the WAN and back again, so a year later when the mail service configuration changes on the local site the VPNs all have to be reconfigured - and the email admins do not know this, of course, so it's designed to fail.
It's impossible to set up a WAN link to an independently administered network without talking to the other end of the connection, so why in the world would you assume nobody has asked? Of course the question's been asked.
Smart IP netadmins have used only IANA registered names since before Jon Postel died, and smart WAN admins don't use one-size-fits-all security solutions that wreck end-user productivity.
That's pretty much how I feel about PHP.
Tom-ate-to To-MAH-toe.
You cannot run an interpreted language faster than a compiled language on the same hardware unless you cheat. You're cheating semantically; anything is rhetorically "comparable" to anything else.
Java is slower than C and you know it. "Approaching C speed?" Hey, a snail bathed in salt approaches C speed. Semantics.
I bet COBOL would run pretty fast if you could build a mainframe the size of Yankee Stadium.
I'm sorry that you care more about your utterly worthless time than your do about my incredibly important and meaningful feelings. ;)
Where's the water going to go?
That's remarkable.. 1.2 GB! I've never experienced this no matter how hard I worked the browser (I have created and destroyed at least a hundred tabs today, and have 8 in use now).
All shake flashlights are pretty horrible compared to old Russian squeezelights.
Just like with shakelights, quality varies, and some have batteries in them that will not last. But you can continuously use a good squeezelight for a half hour or more (depending on your hand strength - I can use mine for hours because I type a lot) and the light beam will stay focused right where you want it the whole time - which is impossible with any shakelight.
Also, since shakelights have powerful neodymium magnets in them and the housings are plastic, they screw up magnetic media (like credit cards) that get too close. The dynamos in the old no-battery Russian squeezelights never do that.
My squeezelight is at least 15 years old, and probably older, and sees regular use. I did have trouble finding a replacement for the primitive CCCP lightbulb it uses, but when I found some on eBay I bought 30 of them for a couple bucks so no worries now. The bearings in this thing are made of oiled wool, it's incredibly robust and repairable.
The only downside is dynamos are noisy, so when you're camping with the family everybody complains if you get up in the night to water the shrubbery.
Grown? I don't think that word means what you think it means.
I've had streaming, synchronized, multi-room wireless music playback in my home for quite a few years now. And until I read this forum, I was barely aware that "AirPlay" existed!
Useless to mindless consumers, yes. It's only of interest to creative technical people who build things.
I think "Ow! My Balls!" is on another channel.
Aha, got it. Much less risk/cost involved!
But I do that with my Ubuntu system for months (until a new kernel comes out) and never see any memory leaks from FFox!
It's not that I don't believe they exist, I've just never seen any... the only plugins I run are noscript and adblock, though.
Hmm. Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
We took a lighting strike at my daughter's school a few years back, that struck dirt less than ten feet from the building in the middle of the night.
The server room UPS was turned into a smoking pile of fused plastic and metal from the ground surge. The network switches were fried by the UPS and every single powered-on system connected to the network (including the servers) was toasted. The end user PCs were a total loss, but we salvaged the HDDs from the servers and put them in new chassis, and the printers only lost their (replaceable) network interface cards. User PCs on switched-off power strips were completely unaffected by this event, even though several of them were closer to the actual strike than the UPS was.
So,
7) powered down computers are less likely to be damaged by lightning strikes.
Humans generally sleep about a third of our lifetimes. So I turn off my computer while I'm asleep and reduce many of my computing risks and costs by 30% or more.
I've never seen anyone other than myself change their mind or behavior based on an Internet argument so I certainly won't try to convert you.
But I'll tell you anyway why I think running your computer all the time is stupid and wasteful, and we can both happily celebrate your freedom of choice.
I support some fairly large computer installations at work, two churches, and two schools. Some people use your philosophy, some use mine. I have seen the results.
1) Computers do not catch zero-day infections when they are not running. The only true defense against zero-day exploits is to reduce attack surface, and a powered off computer has no attack surface.
2) Computers are never exploited by internet criminals to set up child porn distribution nodes while they are not running. I had to testify in a court case once in which a young man barely escaped being permanently labeled a sex offender simply because his windows PC was hacked. Always-on PCs are high-value targets for such criminals, and in most US jurisdictions simply owning the PC makes you a guilty party, under child porn laws, regardless of any other issues.
3) Computers do not spontaneously catch fire when they are not running. I have seen three or four of them burst into flame with no warning during my career (the worst was an IBM 5151 monitor, which was burning like a campfire and belching thick carcinogenic smoke in less than five minutes). If this had happened during non-working hours the entire building probably would have been heavily damaged by the fire department's hoses.
4) Computers that are not running do not generate profits for companies (such as the major energy producers and telcos) that spend money to undermine my preferred culture and systems of government. Running your computer 24/365 sends at least $100 a year to the power company, for most people more like $250 a year (use a kill-a-watt meter and a calculator to determine your own expenditure).
5) Computers that are not running do not generate pollution. My grandfather and favorite uncle died of lung cancer, so pollution is a very personal issue. Power in my area is from natural-gas fired turbines running off fracked gas, so running my computer pollutes water tables and increases earthquake risk as well as making air pollution.
6) In the Windows world (I run linux, personally) when you shut down daily you can install updates at shutdown time and thus maintain your patchlevels without interupting your use of the computer. Always-on computers are slightly less convenient to keep patched up-to-date, since you often have to reboot windows to get patched up properly.
But to each his own, I guess... my systems all boot in less time than it takes for me to settle in at a workstation so that's not an issue for me. I don't parachute from orbit into a chair and start typing furiously, it's just not my style!
You have to make your own risk and value assessments. If you decide the risk and cost is not worth saving a few milliseconds at boot time, make sure you put the computer on a power strip. Nearly all PCs don't really turn off any more without a powerstrip.
Why not? I'm unaware of any physical handicap that would require this, so I assume the problem is mental?
Minimally computer-literate humans don't browse the web on servers, and don't run machines that aren't servers when they are asleep. Why not do a clean shutdown and reboot when you wake up?
I can't work productively more than 36 hours continuously any more, so that's not a problem for me.
Firefox runs fine on all my systems with dozens of tabs open, no memory leaks that I've ever seen, even though I create and destroy tabs constantly.
Disrespecting the end user is one of the stages of software development team meltdown.
It's shameful to waste resources on this when the same money could've been used to help increase the adoption rate and to sponsor adoptions. There are children already alive who need parents, no need to make more.
I just don't understand these poor sad people who are so self-obsessed that they think they can only love a child that carries their own DNA.
If the closed source vendors didn't regularly make their old products obsolete, they'd have to work harder on a slimmer profit margin, and that's not their business model. They want to get rich, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that.
But for many enterprises, basing critically important operating software on something that won't evaporate next quarter makes more sense.
For example, if you set your company DNS up on a BIND server 20 years ago, and you're still running on it, you'll have spent significantly less on software maintenance and hardware to achieve the same level of security, reliability and interoperability that could have been provided through any other means.
Microsoft legitimately tries (unlike some companies) to provide strong backwards compatibility, so that staying on the treadmill of upgrades is not excessively onerous (just expensive) and they have slowly become much better about releasing patches in a timely fashion (though they still can't match open source on that front). The whole silverlight/.NET debacle shows, though, that their business model is still the same as other proprietary vendors, still relying on costly forced upgrades.
Why do you need specific wavelengths of light to see? Shouldn't your eyeballs support anything, and your brain sort it out?
Why do you need road surfaces of a particular firmness to drive? Shouldn't your tires just drive on any sort of atoms, regardless of their liquid, solid or gaseous state?
Why do.... ah, never mind. The answer is that jones_supa hasn't paid for things to be any better. Cough up the cash like you do for Microsoft and you can pay for the mods you want.