You must not have been watching the news very much. Either that or I'd like some of what you've ben smoking, because most of the populace in Afghanistan is kind of sitting on the sidelines hoping for anything better than they have now.
The Afghan people aren't the targets -- the accursed terrorists and the political leaders harboring them are, so the idea that we have to "decimate" the population is pure bunk. As far as I can tell, most Afghanis hate the Taliban, with some of them hating the Northern Alliance more. Which is why most scholars and pundits people thing that the best hope is for the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban, and then have the deposed king convene a grand council of the different tribes (agreed to by the N.A., BTW).
That way no single ethnic group can dominate and screw things up for the rest, like the Taliban is doing, and there might be a Truman/Marshall plan type way of getting Afghanistan back on it's feet.
This is the first time in ages that the Aurora may be easily visible where I'm at (near KCMO, USA), (if the clouds break up a bit more).
Obviously I will need to get away from the city lights, but if it is visible, I could sure use some info/recommendations on photo exposure times/films/etc.?
Second question: how much is this latest blob of solar goo supposed to do in terms of radio interference, etc.?
...in this case, I am glad for the analysis which they have done. As I have read the basic news stories on this, all I ever heard was that certain politicians had "concerns", but no legal analysis of what is good and bad in the proposed changes to the current laws.
My interest in posting is to pose questions as to the various facets of the currently proposed laws could be improved to so that the various gov't agencies who are charged with keeping the rest of us reasonably safe have a better legal tool set with which to do so, without the significant loss of civil liberties.
So, what are the/. thoughts/analysis on these questions: Is the ACLU analysis spot on? extremist? Not harsh enough?... Are there other views on these various points that we should consider important enough to not protest all of the changes? and finally, my pet question: how can we get the ACLU as up in arms about the DCMA and the SSSCA as they are about these acts?
Looking at the article, I noticed a couple things worth follow up questions/thoughts:
1).
Because the distance the data must travel is shorter, the new packaging helps boost the overall speed and performance of the chip., and
2):Intel calls the new packaging technology, for which it has already secured a number of patents, bumpless build-up layer, or BBUL, packaging.
My questions are mainly related to the first item, as follows:
Has the signal distance reduction (less layers) been cut sufficiently to allow the 10X increase in speed?
Is the density of transistors currently limited by the layers, and finally
(sort of a cross betweern the first two questions) Assuming that the 10X increase is possible, doesn't it require that the same kind of technology be used for all of the remaining high speed chips?
The observation is related to the second item. For the sake of discussion, let us assume that the "bumpless" technology is the absolute best state of the art for a while. Will the fact that Intel has patented the technology give them a de-facto monopoly on ultra high speed/high performance chips, and if so, is this really good news or not?
Actually, my thought about "more types of problems to be solved" isn't about quantity or quality, it's about diversity.
I don't think (and am not a researcher, so this is more of a guess than a statement of fact) that the so-called sixty or so lines of stem cells okayed by the feds would include enough different DNA sets to apply to all of the kinds of problems and peoples that can ultimately be aided by the results of such research.
You might also look at another one of my replies regarding the issue of rejection, etc.
People do not have abortions or miscarriages to give science more research material.... These are either cells grown expressly for that purpose or harvested from freshly dead.
Actually, no. Embryonic stem cells come from embryos left over from in-vitro fertilization(s) (commonly called "test tube babies"). When an in vitro fertilization is done, they pharmaceutically induce a woman's body to produce a number of mature eggs at once. These eggs are then fertilized in a solution with the father or donor's sperm, and then the most viable one (or more?) are re-introduced into the/a woman's uterus for implementation and brought to term.
So many of the leftover fertilized embryos could become human beings if they were similarly implanted, which is where the idea that using these embryos to develop the stem cells used in research involves "terminating a life".
The so-called "acceptable lines" of embryonic stem cells are derived from the embryos which have already been "killed", and the funding ban is essentially on doing research that would involve "killing" new embryos.
The controversy is that many of these embryos will be discarded anyway, which means that they could feasibly have been better used in scientific research. The "slippery slope" comes into play when, for example, if a person or set of parents gave permission for the extra embryo(s)to be used in scientific research, this thing that could have become a human life is now a form of property. Taken to the extreme, think about what this means if these other embryo(s) were then brought to term in a surrogate, or cloned, etc.
I am not arguing against embryonic stem cell research so much as affirming that there are alot of legal/moral/ethical things that need to be worked out and brought into law before carte blanche is given to the scientific community in this area.
My point in mentioning the moral issues then is simply an acknowledgement that they are there, followed by the more important discussion that if the science of stem cell research can be developed so that adult and placental/umbilical stem cells, I see a whole lot more potential benefits. Even some very respected medical ethicists are looking at embryonic stem cell research without having made up their minds as to "whether destroying an embryo which could otherwise develop into a normal human child" in order to do research is on a so-called "slippery slope".
So my statement about moral issues is not meant to be disingenous, just an acknowledgement that for many people -- myself included-- those considerations are there. Now before you get all worked up in responding -- I haven't made up my mind yet on this issue. And, at least at present, stem cell research outside the existing lines can and probably is taking place -- but without US federal government funding, the position taken by our current Prez.
But let's be clear here: the context in which you used the abbreviated word "fundies" presumably refers to people with a particular set of religious beliefs which you disagree with. But I find the use of the word "brain dead" to be frankly intolerant and disgustingly prejudiced, because, like a number or other posts I have seen on/., it assumes that everyone in a particular group is as irrational as the extreme fringes of the group. This is the same kind of thinking that tends to state things like "all believers in Islam are irrational supporters of terrorism", or that "all homosexuals are pedophiles", or --in perhaps the most famous study on prejudices --that "all children with X color eyes are smarter than all children with Y color eyes".
Returning to topic, however, I would wager that if you andf I sat down and talked, you would probably that some - but not all of my views on things to be similar to those expounded by what you would probably call "religious fundamentalists", even though most of my reasoning in arriving at those views came from completely different intellectual basis(es) [damn--forgot how to spell the plural of that word -- not enough sleep last night--definitely a bit of brain death gloing on this morning:-)]
But I would also wager that it would be an intelligent, rigorous conversation that would not allow you to conclude that I was *cough cough* "brain dead." If our conversation included the subject of stem cell research, I would probably learn something in the process that would take me closer to a fully defined position on the specific parts of the issue, because, as is always noted -- most of the embryos we are talking about will eventually be destroyed anyway.
Leaving these issues aside, what I would still really like to know more about is related to the questions of tissue rejection, namely if that tissue were developed from stem-cells not original to a patient's body would have the same kinds of issues that face people receiving organ transplants, etc., which is why I see the adult stem cell research as potentially more important.
I understood that. But --and with an acknowledgement that my analogy is incomplete--
Isn't that approach sort of like getting treated for the flu after you have given it to all of your friends, instead of getting a flu shot first and never passing the flu bug on?
Sorry, but the most energy efficient way to use the energy required to make elemental hydrogern is to make synthetic hydrocarbons via what is known as Fisher-Tropsch synthesis processes.
You can get everything from methane, to synthetic gasolines, to heavier oils and even paraffinic waxes. IIRC it also uses up a bunch of waste carbon monoxide (C0) and dioxide C02) if done at the combustion source C0 or C02. In fact, countries with alot of coal but poor hydrocarbon production like South Africa use coal burned in a low oxygen environment to produce the CO for the process and are among the best in the world at it. (try sasol + fisher in any search engine).
In essence, the best way to transport hydrogen as a fuel is to attach carbon to it and use it in it's new form.
On a pount to pound comparison, hydrogen as about three times better than any of the pure hydrocarbons (62,000 BTU/lb vs. around 21000-22000 for methane, on down through the diesels, etc. (18,500 or so per lb) and then the alchohols, carbon monoxide, and sulfur.
What hydrogen is not is a good fuel by volume: in order to carry a sufficient volume of the stuff, it has to be in the form of liquid hydrogen (also known as LH2), with the accompanying problems of keeping it at cryogenic temps, etc.
Other problems besides the question of where to get the hydrogen from and transport, etc. also contribute to why it probably won't be used on airlines any time soon: Cryogenic tanks would tend to be very heavy, and weight is the enemy of fuel efficiency on aircraft. Secondarily, hydrogen burns very very hot and unburned hydrogen is very corrosive to many kinds of metals. So you have secondary issues about how to handle the fuel as it transitions from it's extremely cold liquid state through the gaseous phase into combustion, and then keeping the engine temps sub-critical.
But if all the other problems were solved, the LH2 fueled 747 could fly the same number of passengers about three times the distance on the same weight of fuel.
I'd be more excited if they could do it from non-embryonic stem cells. Aside from the moral issues associated with embryonic stem cells, there are more types of problems to be solved than there are existing stem cell lines to work with.
However, if the tech were available to rapidly cause a non-embryonic stem cell to do the same type of thing, a hospital could potentially create as much of my specific blood type etc. from my own cells as I might need, or grow new bone marrow from a healthy stem cell, or any number of things, without the current problems with rejection, etc. because the dna would presumably be an exact match to my own. Or creating a more unlimited supply of the T-cells which the HIV virus seems to mess with
Or (purely theoretical thoughts/questions here) a stem cell could be differentiated to the point of re-introducing (for example) the gene which is lacking in kids with cystic fibrosis, replacing pancreatric islet cells (which would cure juvenile diabetes, I think, etc.) again without so much danger of rejection.
I hope you were being sarcastic, but if not and for any body else who might not understand, here's my list of reasons why a high degree of focus on security is not ridiculous, but mandatory:
DDOS attacks, etc. that use your machine to do the dirty work,
Net worms which may be propagated from an insecure machine
back doors: perhaps you will do something useful, valuable, or important on your computer in the future, only to get clobbered or ripped off by whoever's bug installed the backdoor, not to mention the loss of your time to recover your valuable work (if you even can) or to reinstall and reformat.
remote keyboard monitors... first time you use your credit card to make an online purchase, and bam, script kiddie has your cc # and can attempt to use it or sell it to even less scrupulous folks,
and my personal favorite reason: to make it less worth the script kiddies time to try to take down yours, mine, and everybody else's machines for kicks and giggles. Think about the bragging rights between "hey my new ultra-virus took down four machines, or "hey, my new ultra-virus took down 200,000 machines..."
Course, if those four machines were the front end machines for M$, that might be worth a brag or two;-)
But let me offer a different perspective. What if the security holes in your machine allowed big gov't, or someone else to snoop on what you were doing online all the time? Would you think about closing the security holes in your machine then?
I mean, the only way Apple gets blamed is if Microsoft's Mac IE team got approval from a managerial level inside Apple to include the "run as default" in the spec for IE-Mac. I doubt mgmt at Apple is that stupid... so I would be willing to bet that no-one at Apple ever saw the offending code, primarily because M$ is so damned arrogant about their own perceived superiority based on market share. (insert obligatory rant about M$ marketing techniques here). So the chances of anyone at an outside company being given code review privileges were probably between microscopic and non-existent.
IE is not an Apple product and you can bet that now that the problem has been exposed there is going to be some serious backrooms yelling at the idiots in Redmond who are inflicting their poor security models and thinking on the Mac platforms, and that Microsoft is going to have to spend some additional development bucks to fix it.
Of course, we all trust Microsoft's patches to behave themselves, right? NOT!!!!!
Damn right and I wish I had a moderator point for you.
Leading to my obligatory pet peeve that gov'ts should mandate that the cyber-patrol software creators not encrypt their filter lists so that intelligent users, parents, and sys admins had an honest chance of getting a good day's worth of research done without the filter nazi mucking things up, and the ability to add any and all sites (which are not in the filter lists) for my family that I feel should be.
Actually, the problem is slightly different, and is known as "deep linking". Courts have held that bypassing part of a provider's content to exclude the remaining content is a form of theft. The applicable case is one in which a company was wrapping their own interface around the data from a Ticketmaster site, bypassing all of the advertising, etc. thus essentially stealing the Ticketmaster site's bandwidth without enabling Ticketmaster to earn revenue by the advertising on their own site pages.
So while a poster can include a link (which is their responsibility only), a company such as the one that owns/. cannot.
Although it is an almost foregone conclusion that most of the U.S. Congress is more for sale than for principles, the larger majority will flee from passing anything that is brought to their attention as being probably unconstitutional or reducing valuable protections for Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms, because let's face it: while what is good for Microsoft, Hollywood, etc. is in general good for the politicos in a few states (Washington, California, NY, etc.), folks across the rest of the country have representation as well -- enough to cause trouble with the desired agendas of the big companiers.
Trouble is, the big players spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to package the lie in FUD and mis-direction so that the only issues brought up for debate favor passage -- which IIRC is exactly how the DCMA was snuck through. I (for one) would love to get my hands on a definitive and complete copy of the legislative history of how often and how in depth "constitutionality" and "freedom" were at issue in the committees and floor debate when the DCMA was slipped through.
Best opportunity for us: get in touch en-masse with the representative branch of the US Gov'g with lucid, non-inflammatory communications that reference why the SSSCA and DCMA, etc. are in conflict with some of our most cherished rights (which do NOT include copyright theft, music or video piracy, by the way!), and get behind the EFF, etc. so that all of the issues are part of the debate.
And without declaring allegience to either party, campaign finance reform was defeated by a very narrow margin by politicians who are very closely allied with the big companies. So pushing the campaign finance reform onto your representative's legislative agenda is not a bad idea either.
Just a bit more data about alternative diesel fuels, smells, etc. as follows:
Apparently one of the problems they're trying to overcome is that the smell produced can be unpleasant... As you noted, part of the research is to convert animal fats into diesel like fuels as well as to reprocess used vegetable oil(s). Currently, while animal fats can be converted, it is much more difficult to get what we would think of as a "clean" fuel --especially in regards to smell -- than that produced from used vegetable oils.
By the way, the most common source of the used veggie oils is the fast food industry -- so it is a somewhat humorously stated but true that the exhaust from a diesel engine using this type of biodiesel smells quite a lot like french fries.
"I believe Rudolf Diesel's third prototype) ran quite well on hemp oil...." It is correct that Diesel had planned and had some success using vegetable oils, prior to his somewhat mysterious and untimely demise. However, hemp is not anywhere close to being the best source of vegetable oil -- that belongs to several different classes of mostly tropical trees, canola (otherwise known as rapeseed), then soybean, then a few others, then hemp. Part of the benefit to hemp, however, is that the hemp fiber is better than cotton for many clothing applications, etc., with the oil being a free and useful side-product.
In terms of fuel efficiency, bio-diesel is about the same as higher grade, low-sulfer diesels which the government is now mandating for use in future engines, so the main problems are now not scientific, but governmental and in achieving a doable economics-of scale, as follows:
If a biodiesel plant processes used veggie oils, the cost to produce the fuel is quite low (on the order of 60 cents per gallon or so in small to medium quantities), mainly for the methanol and/or ethanol used in the process. Conversion directly from crops would cost a bit more, but could and probably would be better done at the or aggregator (silos, etc.) level than at a "biodiesel refinery". However, IIRC by the time all of the regulatory red tape is factored in, a commonly state industry figure is that biodiesel could be produced and retailed for between $2.80 and $4.00 a gallon -- but "it could be cheaper if more people bought it!"
The best hope of breaking the regulatory stranglehold held by the petroleum companies is probably in the agricultural sector, because the regulations aren't about who can produce the fuel, but are regulations governing what makes the fuel "sellable". At present, an ag-co-op has a lot of rights which resemble those of an individual, so some farmers are banding together within the coops and setting up facilities to produce larger quantities of bio-diesel without so much regulatory overhead.
By the way and finally, the only other big consideration is that biodiesel ain't good for rubber, so the hoses, etc. for a diesel engine need to be made of other materials.
With heat and water as the byproducts, would it be possible to use the heat to boil the water thereby powering a steam generator of some kind?
Well perhaps. But the best efficiency fuel cells only convert about 60% of the heat energy of their fuels into electricity. So at max you have another 480 watts of heat energy with which to create steam, and the best efficiency steam generators (the really really big ones) are only about 40% efficient. So now were down to reclaiming what, 192 Watts of energy if the best efficiency plants could be microsized?
So about the only reasonable use for the waste energy would be to heat up a fairly small amount of water.
Which, btw is similar to the oft-quoted maxim that solar water heating is a usually a more energy efficient use of roof space than current generation PVs.
Which are also by the way the so called "hydrogen economy" still hasn't been created: 1) there is still no relatively inexpensive and safe way to store hydrogen at the consumer level, and 2) producing H2 from water doesn't make sense in terms of the economics: for liquid or gaseous fuels it is still much more energy efficient to convert ag wastes or coal to synthetic gases and fuels than to produce pure hydrogen.
Now then, if you really wanted to get me excited.... you'd be talking about a consumer grade 5 Kw or so Fuel cell that could operate with good efficiency using a high grade of Bio-diesel. Which BTW can be made from virtually any vegetable oil or even oil derived from diatom algae. Of course, you'd have to learn to make your own fuel from the leftover peanut oil that the local burger joint cooked it's fries, in, but fortunately, the book with the recipe for how to do it isn't that hard to obtain...
I would agree with everything in your post but the "liable for $100/hour" part, with four slightly different reasons.
With the speed of distribution, virtually every major software house would be out of business the moment a bug was discovered,
Joe little guy sells his way-cool nifty program, with an unknown bug. See case #1, then add any large client taking away all of Joe little guy's assets if the bug takes too long or isn't resolvable
the software failure is in a mission critical application (a SQL server instance connected to IIS perhaps), in which repairing and reimbursing a serious flaw needs to cost much much more, and
What about proprietary software on an open source platform? Who pays if the bug is in the OS?
That said, in order for corporate produced software (i.e. non-Open Source, non-Shareware, proprietary & EULA'd software to be sold, I believe that it makes sense for some type of minimal or greater warranty to be required, just like the lemon laws which apply to "real goods".
Which is why big companies demand "Service Level Agreements" or "SLA"(s) from virtually all of their outside computer hardware and software vendors, with all of the nit picky details hammered out by the attorneys for both sides in advance of the software licensing deal being signed.
Or why every line of code used by any component of an airliner has to pass some fairly rigorous testing in order for the component to be sold, and I imagine [but can't reliably state] that medical tech software probably has similarly stringent legal requirements.
Shouldn't the little guys be able to collectively negotiate some of the same rights via legislated warranty minimums?
BTW, in my navy analogues, other than describing how groups of ships as "fleets" I was specifically trying to avoid referencing a USA-centric navy. Trouble is, I do not know the names for any other nation's fleets if they are currently maintaining them in multiple oceans like the USA does.
Capital "launching" ships=Aircraft Carriers Not so much on the Star Trek Series, but Galactica, Star Wars, some on B5)
Large Spacecraft="ships of the line" For example NCC-1701A = Constellation Class Cruiser, NCC-1701D= Galaxy Class Cruiser although they probably more closely fit the current definition & capabilities of a battleship, Voyager might be the rough equivalent of a small cruiser or large frigate, DS-9's Defiant is probably most like a Destroyer, but if equipped w/Cloaking technology becomes an attack submarine,
the runabouts, fighters, etc. correspond to PT-Boats and launched fighter aircraft, and finally
Photon torpedoes = Explosive ordinance (torpedoes or large shells, phasers = bullet type weapons
Put all the ships together and you have a fleet, (for example the USA's Atlantic Fleet, based mainly out of NYNY and Norfolk, VA, or the USA's Pacific Fleet, based out of Pearl Harbor, San Diego & Seattle). This is different from the USAF where the divisions are more by the mission of a particular type of aircraft, i.e SAC = Strategic Air Command, MAC = Military Airlift Command & TAC = Tactical Air Command, etc.
There are probably a dozen more analogues, but you get the idea.
Slashdot Mirror
The Afghan people aren't the targets -- the accursed terrorists and the political leaders harboring them are, so the idea that we have to "decimate" the population is pure bunk. As far as I can tell, most Afghanis hate the Taliban, with some of them hating the Northern Alliance more. Which is why most scholars and pundits people thing that the best hope is for the Northern Alliance to topple the Taliban, and then have the deposed king convene a grand council of the different tribes (agreed to by the N.A., BTW).
That way no single ethnic group can dominate and screw things up for the rest, like the Taliban is doing, and there might be a Truman/Marshall plan type way of getting Afghanistan back on it's feet.
Obviously I will need to get away from the city lights, but if it is visible, I could sure use some info/recommendations on photo exposure times/films/etc.?
Second question: how much is this latest blob of solar goo supposed to do in terms of radio interference, etc.?
My interest in posting is to pose questions as to the various facets of the currently proposed laws could be improved to so that the various gov't agencies who are charged with keeping the rest of us reasonably safe have a better legal tool set with which to do so, without the significant loss of civil liberties.
So, what are the /. thoughts/analysis on these questions: Is the ACLU analysis spot on? extremist? Not harsh enough?... Are there other views on these various points that we should consider important enough to not protest all of the changes? and finally, my pet question: how can we get the ACLU as up in arms about the DCMA and the SSSCA as they are about these acts?
Or an M$ programmer teach a class in "writing efficient C++ code" ;-)
- Has the signal distance reduction (less layers) been cut sufficiently to allow the 10X increase in speed?
- Is the density of transistors currently limited by the layers, and finally
- (sort of a cross betweern the first two questions) Assuming that the 10X increase is possible, doesn't it require that the same kind of technology be used for all of the remaining high speed chips?
The observation is related to the second item. For the sake of discussion, let us assume that the "bumpless" technology is the absolute best state of the art for a while. Will the fact that Intel has patented the technology give them a de-facto monopoly on ultra high speed/high performance chips, and if so, is this really good news or not?I don't think (and am not a researcher, so this is more of a guess than a statement of fact) that the so-called sixty or so lines of stem cells okayed by the feds would include enough different DNA sets to apply to all of the kinds of problems and peoples that can ultimately be aided by the results of such research.
You might also look at another one of my replies regarding the issue of rejection, etc.
Actually, no. Embryonic stem cells come from embryos left over from in-vitro fertilization(s) (commonly called "test tube babies"). When an in vitro fertilization is done, they pharmaceutically induce a woman's body to produce a number of mature eggs at once. These eggs are then fertilized in a solution with the father or donor's sperm, and then the most viable one (or more?) are re-introduced into the/a woman's uterus for implementation and brought to term.
So many of the leftover fertilized embryos could become human beings if they were similarly implanted, which is where the idea that using these embryos to develop the stem cells used in research involves "terminating a life".
The so-called "acceptable lines" of embryonic stem cells are derived from the embryos which have already been "killed", and the funding ban is essentially on doing research that would involve "killing" new embryos.
The controversy is that many of these embryos will be discarded anyway, which means that they could feasibly have been better used in scientific research. The "slippery slope" comes into play when, for example, if a person or set of parents gave permission for the extra embryo(s)to be used in scientific research, this thing that could have become a human life is now a form of property. Taken to the extreme, think about what this means if these other embryo(s) were then brought to term in a surrogate, or cloned, etc.
I am not arguing against embryonic stem cell research so much as affirming that there are alot of legal/moral/ethical things that need to be worked out and brought into law before carte blanche is given to the scientific community in this area.
So my statement about moral issues is not meant to be disingenous, just an acknowledgement that for many people -- myself included-- those considerations are there. Now before you get all worked up in responding -- I haven't made up my mind yet on this issue. And, at least at present, stem cell research outside the existing lines can and probably is taking place -- but without US federal government funding, the position taken by our current Prez.
But let's be clear here: the context in which you used the abbreviated word "fundies" presumably refers to people with a particular set of religious beliefs which you disagree with. But I find the use of the word "brain dead" to be frankly intolerant and disgustingly prejudiced, because, like a number or other posts I have seen on /., it assumes that everyone in a particular group is as irrational as the extreme fringes of the group. This is the same kind of thinking that tends to state things like "all believers in Islam are irrational supporters of terrorism", or that "all homosexuals are pedophiles", or --in perhaps the most famous study on prejudices --that "all children with X color eyes are smarter than all children with Y color eyes".
Returning to topic, however, I would wager that if you andf I sat down and talked, you would probably that some - but not all of my views on things to be similar to those expounded by what you would probably call "religious fundamentalists", even though most of my reasoning in arriving at those views came from completely different intellectual basis(es) [damn--forgot how to spell the plural of that word -- not enough sleep last night--definitely a bit of brain death gloing on this morning :-)]
But I would also wager that it would be an intelligent, rigorous conversation that would not allow you to conclude that I was *cough cough* "brain dead." If our conversation included the subject of stem cell research, I would probably learn something in the process that would take me closer to a fully defined position on the specific parts of the issue, because, as is always noted -- most of the embryos we are talking about will eventually be destroyed anyway.
Leaving these issues aside, what I would still really like to know more about is related to the questions of tissue rejection, namely if that tissue were developed from stem-cells not original to a patient's body would have the same kinds of issues that face people receiving organ transplants, etc., which is why I see the adult stem cell research as potentially more important.
Isn't that approach sort of like getting treated for the flu after you have given it to all of your friends, instead of getting a flu shot first and never passing the flu bug on?
You can get everything from methane, to synthetic gasolines, to heavier oils and even paraffinic waxes. IIRC it also uses up a bunch of waste carbon monoxide (C0) and dioxide C02) if done at the combustion source C0 or C02. In fact, countries with alot of coal but poor hydrocarbon production like South Africa use coal burned in a low oxygen environment to produce the CO for the process and are among the best in the world at it. (try sasol + fisher in any search engine).
In essence, the best way to transport hydrogen as a fuel is to attach carbon to it and use it in it's new form.
On a pount to pound comparison, hydrogen as about three times better than any of the pure hydrocarbons (62,000 BTU/lb vs. around 21000-22000 for methane, on down through the diesels, etc. (18,500 or so per lb) and then the alchohols, carbon monoxide, and sulfur.
What hydrogen is not is a good fuel by volume: in order to carry a sufficient volume of the stuff, it has to be in the form of liquid hydrogen (also known as LH2), with the accompanying problems of keeping it at cryogenic temps, etc.
Other problems besides the question of where to get the hydrogen from and transport, etc. also contribute to why it probably won't be used on airlines any time soon: Cryogenic tanks would tend to be very heavy, and weight is the enemy of fuel efficiency on aircraft. Secondarily, hydrogen burns very very hot and unburned hydrogen is very corrosive to many kinds of metals. So you have secondary issues about how to handle the fuel as it transitions from it's extremely cold liquid state through the gaseous phase into combustion, and then keeping the engine temps sub-critical.
But if all the other problems were solved, the LH2 fueled 747 could fly the same number of passengers about three times the distance on the same weight of fuel.
However, if the tech were available to rapidly cause a non-embryonic stem cell to do the same type of thing, a hospital could potentially create as much of my specific blood type etc. from my own cells as I might need, or grow new bone marrow from a healthy stem cell, or any number of things, without the current problems with rejection, etc. because the dna would presumably be an exact match to my own. Or creating a more unlimited supply of the T-cells which the HIV virus seems to mess with
Or (purely theoretical thoughts/questions here) a stem cell could be differentiated to the point of re-introducing (for example) the gene which is lacking in kids with cystic fibrosis, replacing pancreatric islet cells (which would cure juvenile diabetes, I think, etc.) again without so much danger of rejection.
What do y'all think?
- DDOS attacks, etc. that use your machine to do the dirty work,
- Net worms which may be propagated from an insecure machine
- back doors: perhaps you will do something useful, valuable, or important on your computer in the future, only to get clobbered or ripped off by whoever's bug installed the backdoor, not to mention the loss of your time to recover your valuable work (if you even can) or to reinstall and reformat.
- remote keyboard monitors... first time you use your credit card to make an online purchase, and bam, script kiddie has your cc # and can attempt to use it or sell it to even less scrupulous folks,
- and my personal favorite reason: to make it less worth the script kiddies time to try to take down yours, mine, and everybody else's machines for kicks and giggles. Think about the bragging rights between "hey my new ultra-virus took down four machines, or "hey, my new ultra-virus took down 200,000 machines..."
But let me offer a different perspective. What if the security holes in your machine allowed big gov't, or someone else to snoop on what you were doing online all the time? Would you think about closing the security holes in your machine then?Course, if those four machines were the front end machines for M$, that might be worth a brag or two ;-)
I mean, the only way Apple gets blamed is if Microsoft's Mac IE team got approval from a managerial level inside Apple to include the "run as default" in the spec for IE-Mac. I doubt mgmt at Apple is that stupid... so I would be willing to bet that no-one at Apple ever saw the offending code, primarily because M$ is so damned arrogant about their own perceived superiority based on market share. (insert obligatory rant about M$ marketing techniques here). So the chances of anyone at an outside company being given code review privileges were probably between microscopic and non-existent.
IE is not an Apple product and you can bet that now that the problem has been exposed there is going to be some serious backrooms yelling at the idiots in Redmond who are inflicting their poor security models and thinking on the Mac platforms, and that Microsoft is going to have to spend some additional development bucks to fix it.
Of course, we all trust Microsoft's patches to behave themselves, right? NOT!!!!!
Leading to my obligatory pet peeve that gov'ts should mandate that the cyber-patrol software creators not encrypt their filter lists so that intelligent users, parents, and sys admins had an honest chance of getting a good day's worth of research done without the filter nazi mucking things up, and the ability to add any and all sites (which are not in the filter lists) for my family that I feel should be.
So while a poster can include a link (which is their responsibility only), a company such as the one that owns /. cannot.
Trouble is, the big players spend a lot of time and money figuring out how to package the lie in FUD and mis-direction so that the only issues brought up for debate favor passage -- which IIRC is exactly how the DCMA was snuck through. I (for one) would love to get my hands on a definitive and complete copy of the legislative history of how often and how in depth "constitutionality" and "freedom" were at issue in the committees and floor debate when the DCMA was slipped through.
Best opportunity for us: get in touch en-masse with the representative branch of the US Gov'g with lucid, non-inflammatory communications that reference why the SSSCA and DCMA, etc. are in conflict with some of our most cherished rights (which do NOT include copyright theft, music or video piracy, by the way!), and get behind the EFF, etc. so that all of the issues are part of the debate.
And without declaring allegience to either party, campaign finance reform was defeated by a very narrow margin by politicians who are very closely allied with the big companies. So pushing the campaign finance reform onto your representative's legislative agenda is not a bad idea either.
Apparently one of the problems they're trying to overcome is that the smell produced can be unpleasant... As you noted, part of the research is to convert animal fats into diesel like fuels as well as to reprocess used vegetable oil(s). Currently, while animal fats can be converted, it is much more difficult to get what we would think of as a "clean" fuel --especially in regards to smell -- than that produced from used vegetable oils.
By the way, the most common source of the used veggie oils is the fast food industry -- so it is a somewhat humorously stated but true that the exhaust from a diesel engine using this type of biodiesel smells quite a lot like french fries.
"I believe Rudolf Diesel's third prototype) ran quite well on hemp oil...." It is correct that Diesel had planned and had some success using vegetable oils, prior to his somewhat mysterious and untimely demise. However, hemp is not anywhere close to being the best source of vegetable oil -- that belongs to several different classes of mostly tropical trees, canola (otherwise known as rapeseed), then soybean, then a few others, then hemp. Part of the benefit to hemp, however, is that the hemp fiber is better than cotton for many clothing applications, etc., with the oil being a free and useful side-product.
In terms of fuel efficiency, bio-diesel is about the same as higher grade, low-sulfer diesels which the government is now mandating for use in future engines, so the main problems are now not scientific, but governmental and in achieving a doable economics-of scale, as follows:
If a biodiesel plant processes used veggie oils, the cost to produce the fuel is quite low (on the order of 60 cents per gallon or so in small to medium quantities), mainly for the methanol and/or ethanol used in the process. Conversion directly from crops would cost a bit more, but could and probably would be better done at the or aggregator (silos, etc.) level than at a "biodiesel refinery". However, IIRC by the time all of the regulatory red tape is factored in, a commonly state industry figure is that biodiesel could be produced and retailed for between $2.80 and $4.00 a gallon -- but "it could be cheaper if more people bought it!"
The best hope of breaking the regulatory stranglehold held by the petroleum companies is probably in the agricultural sector, because the regulations aren't about who can produce the fuel, but are regulations governing what makes the fuel "sellable". At present, an ag-co-op has a lot of rights which resemble those of an individual, so some farmers are banding together within the coops and setting up facilities to produce larger quantities of bio-diesel without so much regulatory overhead.
By the way and finally, the only other big consideration is that biodiesel ain't good for rubber, so the hoses, etc. for a diesel engine need to be made of other materials.
Well perhaps. But the best efficiency fuel cells only convert about 60% of the heat energy of their fuels into electricity. So at max you have another 480 watts of heat energy with which to create steam, and the best efficiency steam generators (the really really big ones) are only about 40% efficient. So now were down to reclaiming what, 192 Watts of energy if the best efficiency plants could be microsized?
So about the only reasonable use for the waste energy would be to heat up a fairly small amount of water.
Which, btw is similar to the oft-quoted maxim that solar water heating is a usually a more energy efficient use of roof space than current generation PVs.
Now then, if you really wanted to get me excited.... you'd be talking about a consumer grade 5 Kw or so Fuel cell that could operate with good efficiency using a high grade of Bio-diesel. Which BTW can be made from virtually any vegetable oil or even oil derived from diatom algae. Of course, you'd have to learn to make your own fuel from the leftover peanut oil that the local burger joint cooked it's fries, in, but fortunately, the book with the recipe for how to do it isn't that hard to obtain...
- the first medieval transcriber got confused and left off the "K" (cause it didn't make sense at the time), and
- if the fellow who wrote the book to begin with was
... *cough cough* ... looking prophetically at Slashdot's rendition of Bill Gates as a Borg...
Wasn't there some little verse in the Book of Revelations about the number of the beast???- With the speed of distribution, virtually every major software house would be out of business the moment a bug was discovered,
- Joe little guy sells his way-cool nifty program, with an unknown bug. See case #1, then add any large client taking away all of Joe little guy's assets if the bug takes too long or isn't resolvable
- the software failure is in a mission critical application (a SQL server instance connected to IIS perhaps), in which repairing and reimbursing a serious flaw needs to cost much much more, and
- What about proprietary software on an open source platform? Who pays if the bug is in the OS?
That said, in order for corporate produced software (i.e. non-Open Source, non-Shareware, proprietary & EULA'd software to be sold, I believe that it makes sense for some type of minimal or greater warranty to be required, just like the lemon laws which apply to "real goods".Which is why big companies demand "Service Level Agreements" or "SLA"(s) from virtually all of their outside computer hardware and software vendors, with all of the nit picky details hammered out by the attorneys for both sides in advance of the software licensing deal being signed.
Or why every line of code used by any component of an airliner has to pass some fairly rigorous testing in order for the component to be sold, and I imagine [but can't reliably state] that medical tech software probably has similarly stringent legal requirements.
Shouldn't the little guys be able to collectively negotiate some of the same rights via legislated warranty minimums?
Durn it, where's a moderator point when I need it. Laughed so hard I nearly tipped outta my chair...
BTW, in my navy analogues, other than describing how groups of ships as "fleets" I was specifically trying to avoid referencing a USA-centric navy. Trouble is, I do not know the names for any other nation's fleets if they are currently maintaining them in multiple oceans like the USA does.
- Space = a 3D Ocean
- Planet = land masses
- Stations = Outposts
- Capital "launching" ships=Aircraft Carriers
- Large Spacecraft="ships of the line"
- the runabouts, fighters, etc. correspond to PT-Boats and launched fighter aircraft, and finally
- Photon torpedoes = Explosive ordinance (torpedoes or large shells, phasers = bullet type weapons
Put all the ships together and you have a fleet, (for example the USA's Atlantic Fleet, based mainly out of NYNY and Norfolk, VA, or the USA's Pacific Fleet, based out of Pearl Harbor, San Diego & Seattle). This is different from the USAF where the divisions are more by the mission of a particular type of aircraft, i.e SAC = Strategic Air Command, MAC = Military Airlift Command & TAC = Tactical Air Command, etc.the medium in which things travel, battles take place, etc.
Things that you go to for whatever reason,{trade, conquest, negotiating, R&R, etc.}
Smaller, strategically placed defensive or trade locations (DS-9, Babylon 5, etc.)
Not so much on the Star Trek Series, but Galactica, Star Wars, some on B5)
For example NCC-1701A = Constellation Class Cruiser, NCC-1701D= Galaxy Class Cruiser although they probably more closely fit the current definition & capabilities of a battleship, Voyager might be the rough equivalent of a small cruiser or large frigate, DS-9's Defiant is probably most like a Destroyer, but if equipped w/Cloaking technology becomes an attack submarine,
There are probably a dozen more analogues, but you get the idea.