Thanks for those stats on corn prices. Do you know (with citations perhaps) whether the notorious subsidies not to grow corn have also dropped since 2000 as prices have doubled to 1996 levels? Or is the price rise a combination of market demand as well as continuing price supports?
It's creepy how people are slamming farmers for switching to corn for ethanol now that it's profitable compared to oil prices. But not slamming the oil producers for raising oil prices something like 4-5x in the past decade, almost entirely going to higher profits, while carmakers have sold as many 12-15MPG cars as possible, instead of the 30-50MPG cars we can make now.
Since the oil doesn't cost much more to extract and deliver now than before prices are rising, that means profits have gone up even more with the rising sale price. Instead of a $25 barrel costing $12 to sell, for $13 profit, now a $112 barrels cost about $15 to sell, for $98 profit. That's 7.5x the profit.
Those SUVs get as little as about 1/4 the mileage of the most efficient cars. Therefore using 4x the fuel. Which therefore generates 30x the profits (and 4x the pollution).
So I don't think the whining about corn farmers following the market is that high a priority, especially since the corn farmers are Americans spending their profits in the American economy and taxes. Get to the whining about the oil industry first, and I'll be more sympathetic.
Bush also wasn't the first foreigner to invade the Mideast catastrophically. It even broke the Mongolian horde, and converted them to Islam, when they tried it (shortly before the Little Ice Age, in fact).
Dooming yourself to repeat history by ignoring it doesn't excuse you. In fact, it makes you even more to blame than the first to fall to it, because you had their example to learn from, to know better. As so many people did know better, and screamed loud warnings this time around, Bush hasn't ignored just history, but also defied the people he's elected to be protecting and representing right now.
Uncountable gallons of blood on Bush's hands. Rubbing off on people making up weak excuses to protect him from blame.
OK, Anonymous pitiful Coward, you're safe because even Microsoft doesn't want access to your futile and boring life. But that doesn't mean MS or I "hate" you. And I don't blame MS for that, either.
As far as I can tell, those protocols weren't documented for consuption by anyone outside Microsoft. Yet programmers inside Microsoft were able to use them to write software.
That does indeed make them as useful as "secret APIs" to programmers writing for Office/Exchange 2007.
Anyone who ever saw that icon on their Windows desktop that says "My Computer", and picture Bill Gates saying it, not themselves, should think about giving Microsoft that kind of complete access to their entire lives.
If the source were open, it were stored locally or encrypted at customer-selected third-party networked datacenters, this app could be wonderful, a lifesaver. But trust Microsoft with one's entire life? That sounds like putting it all in once place to be ruined or stolen.
So Microsoft finally releases a huge tome of secrets Microsoft uses to compete with other vendors on its closed system. After years of denying that, after years of keeping them secret from even the thousands of paying customers buying what they thought was equal access to the MS platform.
And somehow that admission that MS has been lying about something so central to protecting its anticompetitive abuses of its monopoly is supposed to reassure antitrust investigators?
If you haven't seen how we're screwing up the big Earth by covering it with our huge industrial footprint already, with the full consensus of the Earth's environmental scientists, and even politicians in the pockets of the polluters finally admitting we're screwing it up, I'm not going to convince you in a Slashdot post.
If you think "Global Warming" is good, then I'm not going to bother appealing to your sense of reason.
But since you just admitted that you don't even know that there's plenty of effort underway to plant more trees to mitigate the damage we've done, why don't you just admit that you really don't know much about these matters. And instead of going around talking like your talk has some basis for listening to it, why don't you go learn something first.
This climate change stuff is important. It's irresponsible to go around talking like you know what you're talking about, when you don't.
I mean, how old are you? How long ago did you learn about evolution? Do you really thing that accepting the scientific fact of evolution means that you want to die, since that's how evolution works? Do you think that accepting the fact of death means that you want to die?
No one is saying that "we're going to kill the Earth". Those among us who know what we're talking about are warning that we're killing ourselves. That's not some abstraction like "the beautiful progress of natural evolution". It's the concrete reality of personal survival, of ourselves, our families and (most of) the civilization we've built.
What you're saying isn't "humorous". It would be laughable if it weren't so ignorant without admitting it about something so serious.
Er, I hear about reforestation and planting all the time. But maybe that's just because I've lived in N California and NYC. I've planted (and had planted) many trees and plants myself.
But just increasing CO2 output doesn't increase the amount of trees/plants, because we're busy cutting them down faster than they can grow back. Otherwise we'd have no problem.
So we should both reduce our CO2 output, and plant trees/plants. And also start investing more energy in scrubbing pollution before it escapes, and investing some more of that "pollution" into usable byproducts. That's why plants and nature are balanced: there is no "waste": all outputs are inputs to something else we evolved to live among.
Has anyone seen a single thumbdrive that includes Flash storage and a Bluetooth antenna, all in one little (and hopefully cheap) device? Perfect would be a Bluetooth dongle with an SDIO, MemoryStick, or CompactFlash slot for detachable memory, but just some permanently bundled Flash on the Bluetooth would be good.
Go back to sleep, Anonymous denial Coward, and shut up while we save your lazy ass. Or wake up and do something besides just making more CO2 than you deserve.
Thanks. I just hope I'm (and you are) speaking for a lot of us. Because we're all in it together, whether we act that way or not, for better or for worse.
I agree with your alternatives for conservation, especially new rail. I'd like to see us installing along the many point-to-point commuter corridors feeding cities some new "car trains": railways filled with large individual flatbed conveyor cars continuously running like a moving road surface. That people just drive up and park on, then get carried to the destination, where they drive off. Bulk transport by energy generated at higher efficiency elsewhere, its emissions captured in a way that won't work with cars. The reduced "turbulence" from eliminated individual traffic would make the capacity of such a road many times that of current roads with individual steering. And eliminate collisions, unexpected delays, and all the stress of that segment of a trip. The centralized infrastructure that makes many cities a bottleneck to transit through their region would instead increase higher throughput. And building the car train on/off ramps through large parking garages intermodal to other mass transit like passenger rail and buses would really cut down the energy/pollution, while improving the quality and convenience of access.
But I think that we should also consider accepting investing a portion of direct energy efficiency away from just its kinetic output, and into some preventative sequestering of the carbon (and nitrogen: N2O is a serious Greenhouse gas). If the energy efficiency is lower upfront, but reduces the pollution enough, then burning more of the fuel to compensate for the "lost" energy will be OK, because it will cut costs later by vastly more (say, when considering a hurricane's or drought's costs).
We've got to do it all, right away. That's how we balance centuries of doing nothing, now that we're staring the consequences right in the face.
Thanks for volunteering to kill yourself now, to cut your contribution to the Big Picture Greenhouse problem. Send us a note when you're dead and gone.
The Greenhouse has proven that human industrial intervention in these climate processes is arrogant in the extreme: we don't really know the consequences of what we're doing, except that they'll be big. We barely understand even the CO2 cycle, and that only recently. Not enough to start dumping vast amounts of stuff into the system and hope for the best.
Where we've got the most certainty is in just cutting our intervention, like reducing our Greenhouse outputs into the existing natural systems. We're more sure that the results will allow the highly "buffered" (though limited in buffer capacity) system to return to its previous chaotic attractor "grooves", without passing a tipping point into some other metastable range in which we can't survive.
If we learn a lesson from our calamitous Greenhouse adventure, it's that messing with something we can't (yet) understand that's so complex and essential is a big mistake. We have to not only look before we leap, but recognize with some certainty where we'll land. Or we'll likely jump to some kind of conclusion flat on our faces, and bury ourselves.
There's a difference between consuming the current 100 billion barrels over the next 17 years, already more than enough to destroy us (100Bbbl in 35 or 45 years could be OK). But another 100Bbbl on top of that would be 100Bbbl in 8-9 years, which would surely destroy us, with no chance of escape.
100Bbbl is quite a lot, and worth getting excited about. Iraq claims only 112Bbbl of "proven" oil reserves (and it's likely only about 50Bbbl). But if we burn it dirty the way we always do, the excitement should be like that surrounding a plane crash (into a pair of office towers in NYC). If we burn it smart, even using some of its energy to drive Greenhouse pollution out of the air, we should get the kind of excited that we've been trained to get when we see a gusher blasting up out of the ground. Just this time not so much into the sky.
Kids can learn to change. If you put them in jail to rot, all you'll do is create a rotten adult. If you hold their parents responsible, for one the parents will be more likely to teach the kids not to do stuff like that. For another, the kid will learn that their parents were responsible for raising them wrong. I didn't say a kid committing a crime shouldn't also be punished or corrected in some way, just not jail. Just that jailing them like an adult is only going to turn them into a bad adult, and leave their parents learning that they can get away with bad parenting that causes serious damage and it isn't their fault.
If we pump another 100 billion barrels of oil into the sky, it will destroy us.
If there's really that much oil, then some of the energy in it could be used to suck the CO2 and other emissions into liquid or solid byproducts, sunk into plastics or other materials we'd use to make things out of, instead of just letting all that pollution spew into the air. It might seem more energy efficient to let the byproducts just fly out, but the energy required to clean it up (if that's even possible) is like the energy required to put the smoke back into a match after lighting it.
You're right about the capacity factor that I'd left out of my comparisons - thanks.
I'm not sure that BD-R DRM will work on Linux, if the player is an OSS app against raw BD data, because the player SW would have to support the DRM, and that can be removed from its source. In fact I've heard that there's already a Linux app that has broken BD DRM (I've seen ads for a Windows version), but I don't know what that Linux app is. However, the cat's evidently out of the bag, and so it's only a matter of time before both cheap BD-Rs and free SW players are available.
Blank recordable Blu-Ray discs (BD-Rs) cost $109 for a 10-pack of 25GB/1L ($11ea), and a 50GB/2L costs $175 ($37ea).
DVD-R costs $190 for a 1000-pack, $0.19ea.
Sony's got to cut those BD-R prices really a lot, to something like 2-5%, to get the IT industry using them the way we use DVDs. Compared to media prices, the burners even at $500 are only the price of 15-45 blank discs.
There's still not much demand for single packages of content spanning multiple DVDs, which is where BD is better. BD is only 5-10x DVD, so once content is larger than a single DVD, there's good chance it's larger than a single (1S) BD. So real applications will still need a changer, which is expensive. By that time, the whole contraption is more expensive than a competing HD (eg. 200BD changer is at least $2000 for IT, BD-R drive is at least $500, discs at least $2180, so $4680 (probably well over $5000) for 5TB, which is clunkier and slower (and less rewritable) than 7*750GB HDs @$115ea = $805 + maybe $150 for an entire 1Gb ethernet host PC, at $955 for a way better system. But one that doesn't spit out 25GB or 50GB discs you can hand or mail to someone, or let some normal user put in their "videodisc" player.
You can, however, get a 20-disc 1xBD-R USB duplicator for $3025. Which should cost $500.
It's easy to reconcile. This is real life, not just a test. Just like students are free to study whatever they want, but then get tested. And like people in general are free to do what we want in life, then get tested. That's why I mentioned biological diversity: education is largely certification that your own personal performance makes it past the selection criteria. And like I said, learning to meet the selection criteria without necessarily really believing it, or even learning how to get around those criteria, is possibly the most valuable lesson in life.
The selection criteria are necessary for most people who don't learn to survive outside of being officially prepared and approved. But the most successful people learn to live free of them. While the least successful people need to be packaged like that, or they can't survive.
So it's a dynamic process, not just a timeless program setting children's values and moving on to the next one. That's how the two views, that schools test children and offer training to pass the test, while parents are free to teach their kids whatever they want, are reconciled. Because the school's test is not the absolute controller of the consequences of learning or not learning how to pass its test. For the most part it is, for most people, but there's a lot of freedom. Including the freedom to fail. Which can mean failing the test, but not failing in life what the test was claimed to test for. Life is the real test. Likewise, passing the test can leave you to fail in life (if all you learned was the test, and it was bad - especially "if" life changes, but the test was before the change).
So in fact taking life that way means both freedom and preparation. FWIW, it also means learning what most people will be like and expect, all there explicitly in the test they all must try to pass, which also helps people get along with mutual expectations (and helps some people get over on people by not being limited to the test's performance, though they can use it as a target of how other people will perform).
Education gives people opportunities to meet basic standards. And to exceed them, and even to fail to meet them if that's how they're raised, and even to ignore them if they can pull it off.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for those stats on corn prices. Do you know (with citations perhaps) whether the notorious subsidies not to grow corn have also dropped since 2000 as prices have doubled to 1996 levels? Or is the price rise a combination of market demand as well as continuing price supports?
It's creepy how people are slamming farmers for switching to corn for ethanol now that it's profitable compared to oil prices. But not slamming the oil producers for raising oil prices something like 4-5x in the past decade, almost entirely going to higher profits, while carmakers have sold as many 12-15MPG cars as possible, instead of the 30-50MPG cars we can make now.
Since the oil doesn't cost much more to extract and deliver now than before prices are rising, that means profits have gone up even more with the rising sale price. Instead of a $25 barrel costing $12 to sell, for $13 profit, now a $112 barrels cost about $15 to sell, for $98 profit. That's 7.5x the profit.
Those SUVs get as little as about 1/4 the mileage of the most efficient cars. Therefore using 4x the fuel. Which therefore generates 30x the profits (and 4x the pollution).
So I don't think the whining about corn farmers following the market is that high a priority, especially since the corn farmers are Americans spending their profits in the American economy and taxes. Get to the whining about the oil industry first, and I'll be more sympathetic.
Bush also wasn't the first foreigner to invade the Mideast catastrophically. It even broke the Mongolian horde, and converted them to Islam, when they tried it (shortly before the Little Ice Age, in fact).
Dooming yourself to repeat history by ignoring it doesn't excuse you. In fact, it makes you even more to blame than the first to fall to it, because you had their example to learn from, to know better. As so many people did know better, and screamed loud warnings this time around, Bush hasn't ignored just history, but also defied the people he's elected to be protecting and representing right now.
Uncountable gallons of blood on Bush's hands. Rubbing off on people making up weak excuses to protect him from blame.
If Microsoft is trying to convince anyone that its hostile takeover of Yahoo isn't evil, it's going in exactly the wrong direction.
OK, Anonymous pitiful Coward, you're safe because even Microsoft doesn't want access to your futile and boring life. But that doesn't mean MS or I "hate" you. And I don't blame MS for that, either.
As far as I can tell, those protocols weren't documented for consuption by anyone outside Microsoft. Yet programmers inside Microsoft were able to use them to write software.
That does indeed make them as useful as "secret APIs" to programmers writing for Office/Exchange 2007.
Anyone who ever saw that icon on their Windows desktop that says "My Computer", and picture Bill Gates saying it, not themselves, should think about giving Microsoft that kind of complete access to their entire lives.
If the source were open, it were stored locally or encrypted at customer-selected third-party networked datacenters, this app could be wonderful, a lifesaver. But trust Microsoft with one's entire life? That sounds like putting it all in once place to be ruined or stolen.
So Microsoft finally releases a huge tome of secrets Microsoft uses to compete with other vendors on its closed system. After years of denying that, after years of keeping them secret from even the thousands of paying customers buying what they thought was equal access to the MS platform.
And somehow that admission that MS has been lying about something so central to protecting its anticompetitive abuses of its monopoly is supposed to reassure antitrust investigators?
How is it obvious that the ancient climate was hospitable to animal life?
If you haven't seen how we're screwing up the big Earth by covering it with our huge industrial footprint already, with the full consensus of the Earth's environmental scientists, and even politicians in the pockets of the polluters finally admitting we're screwing it up, I'm not going to convince you in a Slashdot post.
If you think "Global Warming" is good, then I'm not going to bother appealing to your sense of reason.
But since you just admitted that you don't even know that there's plenty of effort underway to plant more trees to mitigate the damage we've done, why don't you just admit that you really don't know much about these matters. And instead of going around talking like your talk has some basis for listening to it, why don't you go learn something first.
This climate change stuff is important. It's irresponsible to go around talking like you know what you're talking about, when you don't.
I mean, how old are you? How long ago did you learn about evolution? Do you really thing that accepting the scientific fact of evolution means that you want to die, since that's how evolution works? Do you think that accepting the fact of death means that you want to die?
No one is saying that "we're going to kill the Earth". Those among us who know what we're talking about are warning that we're killing ourselves. That's not some abstraction like "the beautiful progress of natural evolution". It's the concrete reality of personal survival, of ourselves, our families and (most of) the civilization we've built.
What you're saying isn't "humorous". It would be laughable if it weren't so ignorant without admitting it about something so serious.
Er, I hear about reforestation and planting all the time. But maybe that's just because I've lived in N California and NYC. I've planted (and had planted) many trees and plants myself.
But just increasing CO2 output doesn't increase the amount of trees/plants, because we're busy cutting them down faster than they can grow back. Otherwise we'd have no problem.
So we should both reduce our CO2 output, and plant trees/plants. And also start investing more energy in scrubbing pollution before it escapes, and investing some more of that "pollution" into usable byproducts. That's why plants and nature are balanced: there is no "waste": all outputs are inputs to something else we evolved to live among.
Wood for victory! They make nice neighbors, even if you cut them down - so long as you move some new ones in.
Yeah, when the world was so inhospitable to human life that its sudden return would destroy us.
Thanks for so concisely proving my point.
Has anyone seen a single thumbdrive that includes Flash storage and a Bluetooth antenna, all in one little (and hopefully cheap) device? Perfect would be a Bluetooth dongle with an SDIO, MemoryStick, or CompactFlash slot for detachable memory, but just some permanently bundled Flash on the Bluetooth would be good.
Go back to sleep, Anonymous denial Coward, and shut up while we save your lazy ass. Or wake up and do something besides just making more CO2 than you deserve.
Thanks. I just hope I'm (and you are) speaking for a lot of us. Because we're all in it together, whether we act that way or not, for better or for worse.
I agree with your alternatives for conservation, especially new rail. I'd like to see us installing along the many point-to-point commuter corridors feeding cities some new "car trains": railways filled with large individual flatbed conveyor cars continuously running like a moving road surface. That people just drive up and park on, then get carried to the destination, where they drive off. Bulk transport by energy generated at higher efficiency elsewhere, its emissions captured in a way that won't work with cars. The reduced "turbulence" from eliminated individual traffic would make the capacity of such a road many times that of current roads with individual steering. And eliminate collisions, unexpected delays, and all the stress of that segment of a trip. The centralized infrastructure that makes many cities a bottleneck to transit through their region would instead increase higher throughput. And building the car train on/off ramps through large parking garages intermodal to other mass transit like passenger rail and buses would really cut down the energy/pollution, while improving the quality and convenience of access.
But I think that we should also consider accepting investing a portion of direct energy efficiency away from just its kinetic output, and into some preventative sequestering of the carbon (and nitrogen: N2O is a serious Greenhouse gas). If the energy efficiency is lower upfront, but reduces the pollution enough, then burning more of the fuel to compensate for the "lost" energy will be OK, because it will cut costs later by vastly more (say, when considering a hurricane's or drought's costs).
We've got to do it all, right away. That's how we balance centuries of doing nothing, now that we're staring the consequences right in the face.
Thanks for volunteering to kill yourself now, to cut your contribution to the Big Picture Greenhouse problem. Send us a note when you're dead and gone.
The Greenhouse has proven that human industrial intervention in these climate processes is arrogant in the extreme: we don't really know the consequences of what we're doing, except that they'll be big. We barely understand even the CO2 cycle, and that only recently. Not enough to start dumping vast amounts of stuff into the system and hope for the best.
Where we've got the most certainty is in just cutting our intervention, like reducing our Greenhouse outputs into the existing natural systems. We're more sure that the results will allow the highly "buffered" (though limited in buffer capacity) system to return to its previous chaotic attractor "grooves", without passing a tipping point into some other metastable range in which we can't survive.
If we learn a lesson from our calamitous Greenhouse adventure, it's that messing with something we can't (yet) understand that's so complex and essential is a big mistake. We have to not only look before we leap, but recognize with some certainty where we'll land. Or we'll likely jump to some kind of conclusion flat on our faces, and bury ourselves.
There's a difference between consuming the current 100 billion barrels over the next 17 years, already more than enough to destroy us (100Bbbl in 35 or 45 years could be OK). But another 100Bbbl on top of that would be 100Bbbl in 8-9 years, which would surely destroy us, with no chance of escape.
100Bbbl is quite a lot, and worth getting excited about. Iraq claims only 112Bbbl of "proven" oil reserves (and it's likely only about 50Bbbl). But if we burn it dirty the way we always do, the excitement should be like that surrounding a plane crash (into a pair of office towers in NYC). If we burn it smart, even using some of its energy to drive Greenhouse pollution out of the air, we should get the kind of excited that we've been trained to get when we see a gusher blasting up out of the ground. Just this time not so much into the sky.
Kids can learn to change. If you put them in jail to rot, all you'll do is create a rotten adult. If you hold their parents responsible, for one the parents will be more likely to teach the kids not to do stuff like that. For another, the kid will learn that their parents were responsible for raising them wrong. I didn't say a kid committing a crime shouldn't also be punished or corrected in some way, just not jail. Just that jailing them like an adult is only going to turn them into a bad adult, and leave their parents learning that they can get away with bad parenting that causes serious damage and it isn't their fault.
If we pump another 100 billion barrels of oil into the sky, it will destroy us.
If there's really that much oil, then some of the energy in it could be used to suck the CO2 and other emissions into liquid or solid byproducts, sunk into plastics or other materials we'd use to make things out of, instead of just letting all that pollution spew into the air. It might seem more energy efficient to let the byproducts just fly out, but the energy required to clean it up (if that's even possible) is like the energy required to put the smoke back into a match after lighting it.
You're right about the capacity factor that I'd left out of my comparisons - thanks.
I'm not sure that BD-R DRM will work on Linux, if the player is an OSS app against raw BD data, because the player SW would have to support the DRM, and that can be removed from its source. In fact I've heard that there's already a Linux app that has broken BD DRM (I've seen ads for a Windows version), but I don't know what that Linux app is. However, the cat's evidently out of the bag, and so it's only a matter of time before both cheap BD-Rs and free SW players are available.
Blank recordable Blu-Ray discs (BD-Rs) cost $109 for a 10-pack of 25GB/1L ($11ea), and a 50GB/2L costs $175 ($37ea).
DVD-R costs $190 for a 1000-pack, $0.19ea.
Sony's got to cut those BD-R prices really a lot, to something like 2-5%, to get the IT industry using them the way we use DVDs. Compared to media prices, the burners even at $500 are only the price of 15-45 blank discs.
There's still not much demand for single packages of content spanning multiple DVDs, which is where BD is better. BD is only 5-10x DVD, so once content is larger than a single DVD, there's good chance it's larger than a single (1S) BD. So real applications will still need a changer, which is expensive. By that time, the whole contraption is more expensive than a competing HD (eg. 200BD changer is at least $2000 for IT, BD-R drive is at least $500, discs at least $2180, so $4680 (probably well over $5000) for 5TB, which is clunkier and slower (and less rewritable) than 7*750GB HDs @$115ea = $805 + maybe $150 for an entire 1Gb ethernet host PC, at $955 for a way better system. But one that doesn't spit out 25GB or 50GB discs you can hand or mail to someone, or let some normal user put in their "videodisc" player.
You can, however, get a 20-disc 1xBD-R USB duplicator for $3025. Which should cost $500.
It's easy to reconcile. This is real life, not just a test. Just like students are free to study whatever they want, but then get tested. And like people in general are free to do what we want in life, then get tested. That's why I mentioned biological diversity: education is largely certification that your own personal performance makes it past the selection criteria. And like I said, learning to meet the selection criteria without necessarily really believing it, or even learning how to get around those criteria, is possibly the most valuable lesson in life.
The selection criteria are necessary for most people who don't learn to survive outside of being officially prepared and approved. But the most successful people learn to live free of them. While the least successful people need to be packaged like that, or they can't survive.
So it's a dynamic process, not just a timeless program setting children's values and moving on to the next one. That's how the two views, that schools test children and offer training to pass the test, while parents are free to teach their kids whatever they want, are reconciled. Because the school's test is not the absolute controller of the consequences of learning or not learning how to pass its test. For the most part it is, for most people, but there's a lot of freedom. Including the freedom to fail. Which can mean failing the test, but not failing in life what the test was claimed to test for. Life is the real test. Likewise, passing the test can leave you to fail in life (if all you learned was the test, and it was bad - especially "if" life changes, but the test was before the change).
So in fact taking life that way means both freedom and preparation. FWIW, it also means learning what most people will be like and expect, all there explicitly in the test they all must try to pass, which also helps people get along with mutual expectations (and helps some people get over on people by not being limited to the test's performance, though they can use it as a target of how other people will perform).
Education gives people opportunities to meet basic standards. And to exceed them, and even to fail to meet them if that's how they're raised, and even to ignore them if they can pull it off.