I.E. at the very least, have one of those "type the word in the graphic" things.
On a tangential note, the war between spambots to read those things and websites to obfuscate them is starting to lead to a lot of websites that are asking me to find the hideously distorted numbers in completely unintelligible scribble.
Eventually, as spambots get smarter and smarter, they're going to start having to retain the services of that guy who draws "Where's Waldo": "There are six numbers hiding in the magical forest. Can you find them all?"
I see a story mentioning a new feature of Google. I don't see an endorsement for the corporation.
Unless you're very new here, you're probably aware that Slashdot also mentions it whenever Microsoft announces a new feature.
Unless you're very new here, you're also probably aware that Slashdot does not officially endorse Microsoft (although, you know, nearly every single poster thinks that company is just the best thing since open source sliced bread).
I would. Walking right past the line is actually pretty nice. But I don't want to pay a dollar over box office for the privilege. Since Fandango is *more* efficient than paying teenagers six bucks an hour to hand out tickets from those little bulletproof booths, it should cost *less*.
Weird how that concept has been lost on the big chains so far.
They could ask you what type of search you are doing - technical research, entertainment, etc. and sort your results accordingly.
And in doing so, Google would create a brand new business model:
1. Create a website that advertises having pictures of Britney Spears and Natalie Portman in compromising positions and completely uninhibited, but of course contains only seven thousand banner ads.
2. Create hundreds of spambots to report to Google that your website is *the best* place to find quality research on apache, linux, lemmings, the San Francisco earthquake, herpes simplex B, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Calvinism, and navel lint.
3. Profit (see, that time step two existed)
They should allow people to rate and review websites. That would make a little more sense, don't you think? Plus, it would be original.
Considering that probably Google's prime concern is creating a tamper-proof search system, I don't think they'd invite a system that practically screamed "Please tamper with our rating system by posting rave reviews for your brochure site for herbal Viagra."
...unless, of course, the reviews were presented in such a way that they didn't affect which web sites people decided to click on - in which case the whole rating system would be little more than a waste of resources.
Using Outlaw Golf as an example is a shame, because it detracts from the rest of your post. Outlaw Golf is multi-platform (PC Xbox Gamecube) and isn't that good
Also, a quick Google of "Outlaw Golf PS2" seems to imply that the title likely has been ported to the PS2 - but only in French.
Anyway, the point is, Outlaw Golf is an example - one of many - of titles that do not present a compelling reason to pick the XBox over the PS2.
In fact, unless you're a real FPS die-hard and can't live without Halo, I haven't really seen any compelling reasons to pick the XBox over the PS2. (Well, unless you're looking to hack it and use it as a webserver:)
One point repeated in the editorial is the idea that the game publishers will have to invest too much to develop games for the Xbox 2. So what if Microsoft gave away development hardware and software to all those existing PS2 publishers?
Certainly that could help. But, honestly, I think one of Microsoft's major problems is simply cultural. The status quo looks like this:
1. The majority of titles worth playing are made in Japan.
2. Japan's business climate is still exclusionary and very difficult for foreigners to navigate.
You'll notice that the XBox has no trouble snatching up titles from companies like Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take 2 games, which is HQ'ed in New York.
But, you know, I'm a big fan of Koei games, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga's Ambition. As far as I know, Koei games have been on every single Nintendo, Sega and Sony platform. Suddenly, RTK9 comes out, and as an XBox owner, I'm out of luck.
I do not think that breaking Sony's hold on many Japanese game developers is going to be an easy task for Microsoft. Companies that look like eight-hundred-pound gorillas in America often simply can't leverage their massive finances to their advantage overseas - e.g., read up on Coke and Pepsi's frustration in trying to take the middle eastern markets.
Weak Titles? You mean weak like Halo, Splinter Cell, PGR2, Mech Assault, Crimson Skies, KOTOR etc etc?
Or did were you talking about upcoming weak titles like Halo 2, Mech Assault 2, Doom 3, Fable, or Jade Empire?
The problem, here, that KotOR is the only one of these titles that isn't a finger-twitcher shoot-em-up (or, okay, kick-em-up, in the case of Jade Empire).
For gamers who simply have itchy fingers that need scratching, really, any platform will suffice.
For gamers who actually value things like story and strategy, the XBox is simply inadequate. Unless the "Story Mode" on Kakuta Chojin really does it for you;)
The belief within Microsoft's top Xbox executives, according to company insiders, is that the main reason that Xbox has failed to seriously challenge the PlayStation 2 is because Sony had first mover advantage
Isn't this obvious to everyone??! What the hell is wrong with these Xbox executives?
The reason that the Xbox hasn't challenged the PlayStation 2 is that when you walk into a GameStop, there's an entire wall of PS2 games - plenty of good titles, at that - and three little rows of stuff that's either terrible (Outlaw Golf, anyone?) or available on PS2.
The reason XBox hasn't challenged PlayStation 2 is the same reason the Sega Master System couldn't challenge the NES: Despite the fact that the former are superior pieces of hardware, the latter has the best, and most, contracts with game designers.
I think the XBox is a fantastic machine. I've played GTA3 on both XBox and PS2, and it's simply more enjoyable for XBox.
But, as an XBox owner, every time I think "You know, I'd like to play a strategy game.. or maybe an RPG..." all I can do is lament the fact that all the good titles are on the other wall.
I'm sure these carbon based lifeforms are happy they are having their jobs outsourced to robots next year
That's not the same thing as outsourcing.
Outsourcing would be if we scooped up samples of water and shipped them to India, where college-educated engineers willing to work 80-hour weeks for $7.50 an hour analyzed them for pollutants.
When a job becomes automated, that's called, last time I checked, "technological progress."
Yes, technological progress causes some irritation. For example, when French makers of wooden shoes, called "sabots", found that their jobs were being "outsourced" to shoe-making factories, they hurled their sabots into the machinery of one factory in order to shut it down... giving us the word "sabotage."
So, yes, the sabot-makers were pissed... but as I sit here today, I'm glad my shoes cost less than $500, and are not made out of wood.
I had a conversation with these robots, and they explained to me how they will protect me from water-borne pollutants.
The first one declared that his function was to push a water sample into a purification chamber. The second one then declared that his function was to shove pollutants out of the water.
After a brief debate over which function was superior, they agreed that water-borne pollutants have a terrible power. Then they politely asked me to go stand by the stairs. That was weird.
The article noted that the script to this installation of "Max Payne" is four times longer than a movie script.
Now, I haven't played the game, but if that means it's an eight-hour movie with a little "Okay, move from point A to point B now" thrown in.. no thanks.
I feel that way about some of the Final Fantasy games. I remember thinking "Wow... 90 minutes in... wonder when I'll, you know, fight a battle."
That stuff was great when I was 14 and on summer vacation. At 25, I want something I can *play* in 2 hours.. not "get all set up to start playing."
Depends who you ask. Some think that in English, they should be 3-5-3 instead.
No kidding. 17 syllables is a lot of room to maneuver in English... far, far less in Japanese.
Ever try watching anime with both the English subtitle and the English dubbing turned on? A Japanese character will say something subtitled, e.g., "I'm cold" and they'll have to dub in something like, e.g., "I feel cold. It's cold in this room!" just to make the syllable count come close.
The guy is apparently a bit eccentric, labeling himself a hard-line anti-American and an opponent of capitalism... but I thought this bit was just hilarious...
brb have to shut chooks in.
"I have just deconstructed the encryption protocol designed by Apple's finest enginee..ah fuck the chicken has escaped"
They also found that eight EU member nations have yet to implement the directive despite the deadline for compliance falling more than six months ago.
The rogue nations - Belgium, Germany, Greece, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland - have been threatened with legal action.
The problem with international laws is that nationalistic countries are generally inclined to ignore them.
Honestly, since I couldn't find a single link to the actual legislation, it's hard to tell whether employers could actually be held liable for spam, or whether this is just FUD.
Obviously, if an employer intentionally turns off the spam safeguards on one woman's machine, because she's very religious and he knows it'll freak her out, then that's sexual harassment through spam.
But spam that slips through the cracks despite reasonable efforts to stop it... I have to say, I don't think any court in the world would find a tort there.
No, thank you... that was certainly an awesome response you just gave, which would have taken me at least two or three hours to research and write... I don't frequently run across people quite so committed to writing something so supported.
Your central argument seems to be that TD is good, and helpful, but inadequate to meet earth's oil demands.
The real fallacy I think you're making is when you come up with an analysis of the output of TD, beginning with this:
The US animal industry produced 1.4 billion tons(us)[5] of waste
You calculate that U.S. animal waste (And from your source, I'm not sure if that's excrement, inedible portions of slaughtered livestock, uneaten or wasted food, or all three), fed into a TD process, would produce only 3.9/35, or about 10-11% of the U.S. energy needs. Your figures look good to me. I think we can both agree, too, that you'll never get all 1.4 billion tons into TD tanks.
Based on that, you argue that TD is inadequate to meet the U.S. oil demand. But livestock waste is only one category of waste that could be fed into the system. There's also:
1. Agricultural waste - corn husks, dead leaves, etc. Yes, much of this is recycled back into the process as mulch, fertilizer, or animal feed, but a great deal goes to waste.
2. Garbage!! You address "human waste", as in human excrement, but make no mention of the ludicrous amounts of carbon waste end up in landfills. I have to wonder how much oil you could generate just by depolymerizing NYC's landfills. (I should look it up, but time is short...)
I think what it boils down to is this: the entire earth is and always has been run on solar power, and the question is the degree of inefficiency in harnessing that power.
Drilling for oil is a massively inefficient process: 1. Plants use solar power to pull carbon from the atmosphere and build themselves; 2. Those plants die and get buried under layer after layer of other dead plants; 3. Heat and pressure depolymerize them and turn them into oil; 4. We come along a thousand years later and pull it out of the ground.
Depolymerization is simply a better cycle; 1. Plants use solar power to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and build themselves; 2. We depolymerize those plants, burn the resultant oil, and release the carbon back into the atmosphere.
"Solar Power" as most people think of it, on the other hand, is not very good, because its efficiency is (AFAIK) utterly pathetic compared to the efficiency of photosynthesis.
I don't think it's really even a question of whether TD can solve Earth's oil problems. I think it's a question of whether we can, and will, build the necessary infrastructure before causing some kind of ecological or sociopolitical disaster.
TD has only been around for three or four years at this point. I believe that trying to understand its impact is a little like trying to understand the impact of the modem in 1970. Chances are, in 1970, it was difficult to conceive of the massive infrastructure it would take to completely revolutionalize the transfer of information in our society; we didn't even truly begin on the project in earnest until about 25 years later.
1. Like all other forms of alternative energy, we have run out of time to implement it before the crash. Currently, only one TD plant is operational.
That's absolutely true. Then again, when the price of drilling oil out of the ground goes higher than $8-10 a barrel (the current price of TD), TD will become extremely profitable - and it's not unusual for hundreds of plants to spring up overnight if you're looking at something particularly profitable.
2. TD is really nothing more than high-tech recycling. Most of the waste input (such as plastics and tires) requires high-grade oil to make it in the first place.
That's absolutely untrue. You could throw a living human being in a TD tank, and two hours later, you'd have something like 70 pounds of water, 15 pounds of oil, 30 pounds of natural gas, and some mineral solids. Not to say we *would* throw any living human beings in, but it works great with, for example, the bones of slaughtered turkeys and other agricultural waste.
3. It is unclear what the EPR of oil derived from TD is. How much energy does the TD process require to produce a barrel of oil? If the EPR of oil derived from TD does not approach the EPR of traditional oil, it will not alleviate our problems.
From memory, you get 100 BTU out for every 15 BTU in. The EPR of traditional oil, of course, increases as oil becomes scarce - as you "scrape the bottom of the barrel" - and eventually drops to zero. So there will certainly come a time when TD outperforms conventional drilling.
So in short, if you don't have a free energy device up your sleeve that you haven't sold to CA for some completely unknown reason
Christ on a pony, that was a long post:) For a second I wondered if it was a repost, until I saw the Homestar Runner reference...
I used to think along some of the same lines as you re: oil, until I read a May, 2003 article in Discover magazine.. unfortunately Discover has pulled it from their server, but it's about "Thermal Depolymerization", which is the process of creating oil from pretty much any carbon waste.
Google it - it's very interesting. I've always thought there must be a shortcut to making oil, beyond "let organic waste sit under the ground for thousands of years." Remember the recent lawsuit by DeBeers because scientists can now arrange carbon atoms into perfect gem-quality diamonds? Well, if you can arrange carbon that way...
To say nothing of warfare, as everyone scrambles to come out on top (or merely survive) in the "new world order".
I don't know about a "new world order," but resource shortages are a common reason for war, if not the primary reason for war, if not the only real root cause for all war.
especially since there are at least a dozen ways we're likely to wipe ourselves out before that future
You really think so? It's been widely suggested that among the top three modern contenders - global nuclear war, asteroid strike, and ecological disaster - none would quite do the trick. A nasty enough asteroid strike might reduce the population down to a few thousand or even a few hundred humans wealthy or powerful enough to live in shelters for a century or two... but probably not extinct us as a species.
Today, other than essentially irrelevent theories like "We're actually living in a computer simulation and it gets shut down" or "alien species decide to exterminate us" (irrelevant because little or nothing can be done even if they are possible), about the only reasonable chance we seem to have of causing our own extinction is nano-terrorism - the "grey goo" scenario. And, really, that may not turn out to be any more reasonable than yesterday's fear that "a nuclear weapon will set the atmosphere on fire."
I think when people say environmental issues are about our survival as a species, they overstate the case. But survival isn't all that matters; there's quality of life, too. Global warming probably has no chance to wipe us out as a species, but it certainly could - and probably will - lead to widespread famine and disease.
Wow... the British have a "foresight project"?? They're actually recognizing that the reactive nature of democracy might be a disaster when it comes to environmental issues?? They're spending taxpayer money on problems that haven't occurred yet?? Amazing.
It occurs to me that over on my side of the Atlantic, we have an administration almost universally described as "the worst administration in modern history in terms of manipulating science to suit its politics."
I guess, given our political climate, we could try to start up a "nosight project"... "Project See No Evil", maybe? Obviously it would have to be an offshoot of the Department of Homeland Security, and its focus would be determinining how terrorists are actually responsible for global warming.
In the future, your process for decoding your bank statements will work 50% of the time, but of course observing whether your bank statement has been decoded (by you) will completely undermine the decoding process.
Therefore, you will receive your bank statements in the mail, and you can leave them unopened and mathematically consider them 50% decoded.
Slashdot Mirror
I.E. at the very least, have one of those "type the word in the graphic" things.
On a tangential note, the war between spambots to read those things and websites to obfuscate them is starting to lead to a lot of websites that are asking me to find the hideously distorted numbers in completely unintelligible scribble.
Eventually, as spambots get smarter and smarter, they're going to start having to retain the services of that guy who draws "Where's Waldo": "There are six numbers hiding in the magical forest. Can you find them all?"
I see a story mentioning a new feature of Google. I don't see an endorsement for the corporation.
Unless you're very new here, you're probably aware that Slashdot also mentions it whenever Microsoft announces a new feature.
Unless you're very new here, you're also probably aware that Slashdot does not officially endorse Microsoft (although, you know, nearly every single poster thinks that company is just the best thing since open source sliced bread).
but who really wants to buy movie tickets online?
I would. Walking right past the line is actually pretty nice. But I don't want to pay a dollar over box office for the privilege. Since Fandango is *more* efficient than paying teenagers six bucks an hour to hand out tickets from those little bulletproof booths, it should cost *less*.
Weird how that concept has been lost on the big chains so far.
They could ask you what type of search you are doing - technical research, entertainment, etc. and sort your results accordingly.
And in doing so, Google would create a brand new business model:
1. Create a website that advertises having pictures of Britney Spears and Natalie Portman in compromising positions and completely uninhibited, but of course contains only seven thousand banner ads.
2. Create hundreds of spambots to report to Google that your website is *the best* place to find quality research on apache, linux, lemmings, the San Francisco earthquake, herpes simplex B, Neon Genesis Evangelion, Calvinism, and navel lint.
3. Profit (see, that time step two existed)
They should allow people to rate and review websites. That would make a little more sense, don't you think? Plus, it would be original.
...unless, of course, the reviews were presented in such a way that they didn't affect which web sites people decided to click on - in which case the whole rating system would be little more than a waste of resources.
Considering that probably Google's prime concern is creating a tamper-proof search system, I don't think they'd invite a system that practically screamed "Please tamper with our rating system by posting rave reviews for your brochure site for herbal Viagra."
Using Outlaw Golf as an example is a shame, because it detracts from the rest of your post. Outlaw Golf is multi-platform (PC Xbox Gamecube) and isn't that good
:)
Also, a quick Google of "Outlaw Golf PS2" seems to imply that the title likely has been ported to the PS2 - but only in French.
Anyway, the point is, Outlaw Golf is an example - one of many - of titles that do not present a compelling reason to pick the XBox over the PS2.
In fact, unless you're a real FPS die-hard and can't live without Halo, I haven't really seen any compelling reasons to pick the XBox over the PS2. (Well, unless you're looking to hack it and use it as a webserver
One point repeated in the editorial is the idea that the game publishers will have to invest too much to develop games for the Xbox 2. So what if Microsoft gave away development hardware and software to all those existing PS2 publishers?
Certainly that could help. But, honestly, I think one of Microsoft's major problems is simply cultural. The status quo looks like this:
1. The majority of titles worth playing are made in Japan.
2. Japan's business climate is still exclusionary and very difficult for foreigners to navigate.
You'll notice that the XBox has no trouble snatching up titles from companies like Rockstar Games, a subsidiary of Take 2 games, which is HQ'ed in New York.
But, you know, I'm a big fan of Koei games, like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga's Ambition. As far as I know, Koei games have been on every single Nintendo, Sega and Sony platform. Suddenly, RTK9 comes out, and as an XBox owner, I'm out of luck.
I do not think that breaking Sony's hold on many Japanese game developers is going to be an easy task for Microsoft. Companies that look like eight-hundred-pound gorillas in America often simply can't leverage their massive finances to their advantage overseas - e.g., read up on Coke and Pepsi's frustration in trying to take the middle eastern markets.
Weak Titles? You mean weak like Halo, Splinter Cell, PGR2, Mech Assault, Crimson Skies, KOTOR etc etc?
;)
Or did were you talking about upcoming weak titles like Halo 2, Mech Assault 2, Doom 3, Fable, or Jade Empire? The problem, here, that KotOR is the only one of these titles that isn't a finger-twitcher shoot-em-up (or, okay, kick-em-up, in the case of Jade Empire).
For gamers who simply have itchy fingers that need scratching, really, any platform will suffice.
For gamers who actually value things like story and strategy, the XBox is simply inadequate. Unless the "Story Mode" on Kakuta Chojin really does it for you
The belief within Microsoft's top Xbox executives, according to company insiders, is that the main reason that Xbox has failed to seriously challenge the PlayStation 2 is because Sony had first mover advantage
Isn't this obvious to everyone??! What the hell is wrong with these Xbox executives?
The reason that the Xbox hasn't challenged the PlayStation 2 is that when you walk into a GameStop, there's an entire wall of PS2 games - plenty of good titles, at that - and three little rows of stuff that's either terrible (Outlaw Golf, anyone?) or available on PS2.
The reason XBox hasn't challenged PlayStation 2 is the same reason the Sega Master System couldn't challenge the NES: Despite the fact that the former are superior pieces of hardware, the latter has the best, and most, contracts with game designers.
I think the XBox is a fantastic machine. I've played GTA3 on both XBox and PS2, and it's simply more enjoyable for XBox.
But, as an XBox owner, every time I think "You know, I'd like to play a strategy game.. or maybe an RPG..." all I can do is lament the fact that all the good titles are on the other wall.
So will there only be one per water source, or will they spend all day throwing each other out of the water?
Throwing?! A warning to everyone here on Slashdot: do not trust nizo. He is malfunctioning. Shoving is the answer.
I'm sure these carbon based lifeforms are happy they are having their jobs outsourced to robots next year
That's not the same thing as outsourcing.
Outsourcing would be if we scooped up samples of water and shipped them to India, where college-educated engineers willing to work 80-hour weeks for $7.50 an hour analyzed them for pollutants.
When a job becomes automated, that's called, last time I checked, "technological progress."
Yes, technological progress causes some irritation. For example, when French makers of wooden shoes, called "sabots", found that their jobs were being "outsourced" to shoe-making factories, they hurled their sabots into the machinery of one factory in order to shut it down... giving us the word "sabotage."
So, yes, the sabot-makers were pissed... but as I sit here today, I'm glad my shoes cost less than $500, and are not made out of wood.
I'd be worried about sitting on the toilet, you might get a nasty (painful) surprise
Meanwhile, one robot would report back that it had found a hot spot of water-borne pollutants...
I had a conversation with these robots, and they explained to me how they will protect me from water-borne pollutants.
The first one declared that his function was to push a water sample into a purification chamber. The second one then declared that his function was to shove pollutants out of the water.
After a brief debate over which function was superior, they agreed that water-borne pollutants have a terrible power. Then they politely asked me to go stand by the stairs. That was weird.
The article noted that the script to this installation of "Max Payne" is four times longer than a movie script.
Now, I haven't played the game, but if that means it's an eight-hour movie with a little "Okay, move from point A to point B now" thrown in.. no thanks.
I feel that way about some of the Final Fantasy games. I remember thinking "Wow... 90 minutes in... wonder when I'll, you know, fight a battle."
That stuff was great when I was 14 and on summer vacation. At 25, I want something I can *play* in 2 hours.. not "get all set up to start playing."
Depends who you ask. Some think that in English, they should be 3-5-3 instead.
No kidding. 17 syllables is a lot of room to maneuver in English... far, far less in Japanese.
Ever try watching anime with both the English subtitle and the English dubbing turned on? A Japanese character will say something subtitled, e.g., "I'm cold" and they'll have to dub in something like, e.g., "I feel cold. It's cold in this room!" just to make the syllable count come close.
The guy is apparently a bit eccentric, labeling himself a hard-line anti-American and an opponent of capitalism... but I thought this bit was just hilarious...
brb have to shut chooks in.
"I have just deconstructed the encryption protocol designed by Apple's finest enginee..ah fuck the chicken has escaped"
The law is irrelevent, because not too many countries are following it.
From BBC news:
They also found that eight EU member nations have yet to implement the directive despite the deadline for compliance falling more than six months ago.
The rogue nations - Belgium, Germany, Greece, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal and Finland - have been threatened with legal action.
The problem with international laws is that nationalistic countries are generally inclined to ignore them.
Honestly, since I couldn't find a single link to the actual legislation, it's hard to tell whether employers could actually be held liable for spam, or whether this is just FUD.
Obviously, if an employer intentionally turns off the spam safeguards on one woman's machine, because she's very religious and he knows it'll freak her out, then that's sexual harassment through spam.
But spam that slips through the cracks despite reasonable efforts to stop it... I have to say, I don't think any court in the world would find a tort there.
Thanks for your replies!
No, thank you... that was certainly an awesome response you just gave, which would have taken me at least two or three hours to research and write... I don't frequently run across people quite so committed to writing something so supported.
Your central argument seems to be that TD is good, and helpful, but inadequate to meet earth's oil demands.
The real fallacy I think you're making is when you come up with an analysis of the output of TD, beginning with this:
The US animal industry produced 1.4 billion tons(us)[5] of waste
You calculate that U.S. animal waste (And from your source, I'm not sure if that's excrement, inedible portions of slaughtered livestock, uneaten or wasted food, or all three), fed into a TD process, would produce only 3.9/35, or about 10-11% of the U.S. energy needs. Your figures look good to me. I think we can both agree, too, that you'll never get all 1.4 billion tons into TD tanks.
Based on that, you argue that TD is inadequate to meet the U.S. oil demand. But livestock waste is only one category of waste that could be fed into the system. There's also:
1. Agricultural waste - corn husks, dead leaves, etc. Yes, much of this is recycled back into the process as mulch, fertilizer, or animal feed, but a great deal goes to waste.
2. Garbage!! You address "human waste", as in human excrement, but make no mention of the ludicrous amounts of carbon waste end up in landfills. I have to wonder how much oil you could generate just by depolymerizing NYC's landfills. (I should look it up, but time is short...)
I think what it boils down to is this: the entire earth is and always has been run on solar power, and the question is the degree of inefficiency in harnessing that power.
Drilling for oil is a massively inefficient process: 1. Plants use solar power to pull carbon from the atmosphere and build themselves; 2. Those plants die and get buried under layer after layer of other dead plants; 3. Heat and pressure depolymerize them and turn them into oil; 4. We come along a thousand years later and pull it out of the ground.
Depolymerization is simply a better cycle; 1. Plants use solar power to pull carbon out of the atmosphere and build themselves; 2. We depolymerize those plants, burn the resultant oil, and release the carbon back into the atmosphere.
"Solar Power" as most people think of it, on the other hand, is not very good, because its efficiency is (AFAIK) utterly pathetic compared to the efficiency of photosynthesis.
I don't think it's really even a question of whether TD can solve Earth's oil problems. I think it's a question of whether we can, and will, build the necessary infrastructure before causing some kind of ecological or sociopolitical disaster.
TD has only been around for three or four years at this point. I believe that trying to understand its impact is a little like trying to understand the impact of the modem in 1970. Chances are, in 1970, it was difficult to conceive of the massive infrastructure it would take to completely revolutionalize the transfer of information in our society; we didn't even truly begin on the project in earnest until about 25 years later.
Time will tell...
Let me know what you think.
That's what I do best...
1. Like all other forms of alternative energy, we have run out of time to implement it before the crash. Currently, only one TD plant is operational.
That's absolutely true. Then again, when the price of drilling oil out of the ground goes higher than $8-10 a barrel (the current price of TD), TD will become extremely profitable - and it's not unusual for hundreds of plants to spring up overnight if you're looking at something particularly profitable.
2. TD is really nothing more than high-tech recycling. Most of the waste input (such as plastics and tires) requires high-grade oil to make it in the first place.
That's absolutely untrue. You could throw a living human being in a TD tank, and two hours later, you'd have something like 70 pounds of water, 15 pounds of oil, 30 pounds of natural gas, and some mineral solids. Not to say we *would* throw any living human beings in, but it works great with, for example, the bones of slaughtered turkeys and other agricultural waste.
3. It is unclear what the EPR of oil derived from TD is. How much energy does the TD process require to produce a barrel of oil? If the EPR of oil derived from TD does not approach the EPR of traditional oil, it will not alleviate our problems.
From memory, you get 100 BTU out for every 15 BTU in. The EPR of traditional oil, of course, increases as oil becomes scarce - as you "scrape the bottom of the barrel" - and eventually drops to zero. So there will certainly come a time when TD outperforms conventional drilling.
So in short, if you don't have a free energy device up your sleeve that you haven't sold to CA for some completely unknown reason
:) For a second I wondered if it was a repost, until I saw the Homestar Runner reference...
Christ on a pony, that was a long post
I used to think along some of the same lines as you re: oil, until I read a May, 2003 article in Discover magazine.. unfortunately Discover has pulled it from their server, but it's about "Thermal Depolymerization", which is the process of creating oil from pretty much any carbon waste.
Google it - it's very interesting. I've always thought there must be a shortcut to making oil, beyond "let organic waste sit under the ground for thousands of years." Remember the recent lawsuit by DeBeers because scientists can now arrange carbon atoms into perfect gem-quality diamonds? Well, if you can arrange carbon that way...
To say nothing of warfare, as everyone scrambles to come out on top (or merely survive) in the "new world order".
I don't know about a "new world order," but resource shortages are a common reason for war, if not the primary reason for war, if not the only real root cause for all war.
especially since there are at least a dozen ways we're likely to wipe ourselves out before that future
You really think so? It's been widely suggested that among the top three modern contenders - global nuclear war, asteroid strike, and ecological disaster - none would quite do the trick. A nasty enough asteroid strike might reduce the population down to a few thousand or even a few hundred humans wealthy or powerful enough to live in shelters for a century or two... but probably not extinct us as a species.
Today, other than essentially irrelevent theories like "We're actually living in a computer simulation and it gets shut down" or "alien species decide to exterminate us" (irrelevant because little or nothing can be done even if they are possible), about the only reasonable chance we seem to have of causing our own extinction is nano-terrorism - the "grey goo" scenario. And, really, that may not turn out to be any more reasonable than yesterday's fear that "a nuclear weapon will set the atmosphere on fire."
I think when people say environmental issues are about our survival as a species, they overstate the case. But survival isn't all that matters; there's quality of life, too. Global warming probably has no chance to wipe us out as a species, but it certainly could - and probably will - lead to widespread famine and disease.
Wow... the British have a "foresight project"?? They're actually recognizing that the reactive nature of democracy might be a disaster when it comes to environmental issues?? They're spending taxpayer money on problems that haven't occurred yet?? Amazing.
It occurs to me that over on my side of the Atlantic, we have an administration almost universally described as "the worst administration in modern history in terms of manipulating science to suit its politics."
I guess, given our political climate, we could try to start up a "nosight project"... "Project See No Evil", maybe? Obviously it would have to be an offshoot of the Department of Homeland Security, and its focus would be determinining how terrorists are actually responsible for global warming.
Yes.
But only 50% of the time.
Oh, well then this is simple.
In the future, your process for decoding your bank statements will work 50% of the time, but of course observing whether your bank statement has been decoded (by you) will completely undermine the decoding process.
Therefore, you will receive your bank statements in the mail, and you can leave them unopened and mathematically consider them 50% decoded.
and the government of Israel
And yes, I know this is inaccurate, but it was fun to say.