I purchased 2 years ago a pair of single mode bi-di (single strand) SFPs with 20Km range for less than US$ 1000 including a pair of 8 port managed gigabit switches to install the SFPs on. The pair of SFPs alone costed about US$ 300 each. 120Km bi-di SFPs back then costed about US$ 1500 per pair. Widespread FTTx projects are causing gigabit ethernet optics to drop in price very fast. 2 years is a *long* time in telecom. The aggressive price reductions are now spreading onto 10 gigabit XFP stuff. If you know what to look for, you can get a very good sense on prices just searching eBay for new equipment for vendors that sell thousands of units through eBay. I just found new SFPs for 120Km for US$ 135 each on eBay ! US$ 270 a pair. That's a 80% price reduction in just 2 years. Just 10 years ago any kind of high speed WAN optical links costed in the range of ten thousand dollars in STM/SONET equipment alone. You just didn't deploy an optical network without STM/SONET. Today L2 switches can handle redundant link recovery with rSTP. Large L2 and L3 ethernet switches (L3 switch = pure ethernet router) from vendors outside the Cisco/big gang are eating away into their tradition of charging tens of millions of dollars on huge routers with enormous profit margins. With VLAN priority tagging routing is no longer needed in intermediate ISP/Carrier network hops. Routing is only needed at the borders where you service customers and where you exchange bandwidth with peers and buy upstream bandwidth. That can reduce router requirements 3 or 4 fold. Real world examples of single hop IP routing is Global Crossing and TIM Seabone. One hop from South America to Europe. One hop from South America to the West coast of USA. And the next hop is already at another network or the customer of said network. I'm not vilifying anybody, just informing people on factual information. It's important to remember that an ISP / Carrier can't redo its network every year or two or three. Investment needs to be recouped. But there's a lot to be said about what ISPs do when they are in a monopoly position. Those are definitely evil doers. Comcast seems to be one of them. Oi, Telefonica and Embratel here in Brazil are such examples. Telefonica had such a serious technical problems that it lead Brazil's FCC equivalent from suspending sales of ADSL products until the situation was solved after a streak of very serious problems affecting millions of ADSL users until the problem was solved. They had multi day DNS unavailability that essentially shutdown their network. Complaints on Comcast are pretty serious as well. We don't need to be enemies of nobody. However we have to understand that businesses exist to make money. And sometimes the easiest way to maintain a substantial profit margin involves delaying necessary investments and preventing those delays from being know by their customer base, even when they are badly needed. Politicians lie all the time, most time if they spoke the truth they would loose votes either way. Large corporations are typically in similar situations, where at least manipulating the truth is seen as absolutely normal (but of course never admitted). Add to that the tendency of the population to preferring feel good misinformation over the truth (typically the truth is very ugly), and it leads to the current wasteful government and high profit corporate environment. Backroom lobby deals. Only no bullshit information can enlighten consumers / voters. For instance the US is on its way to being bankrupt in less than 20 years. No political party has a realistic plan to avoid that. And the population can't come to terms that even the tea party solution might make things worse. The only solution is efficiency. Dumb cost cutting is bad, as well as dumb spending.
The best filesystems for managing large files are extent based, tree based filesystems. I store all my large files using XFS and I'm very happy with it. XFS delivers read performance that is the same as accessing the hard drive directly. So far what other filesystems have online defrag. It also makes a huge difference if your download software can pre-allocate files before writing to them, this can result in zero fragmentation.
Netflix aparently purchases conectivity at least with L3 networks. L3 was forced to pay Comcast in order to avoid Netflix traffic from going through their last resort upstream links currently with Tata telecom.
I have ADSL2+ service at 12000/1200 alignment speed. I can ping other users on the same local area at about 15-20ms. I can ping the access router at less than 6-11ms. I can ping sites at the my country's central internet hub (São Paulo), about 1000 miles away in fiber distance with 30-40ms.
Over subscription is the standard. All carriers/ISPs do it. For example, say an ISP have exactly 1000 customers with 10Mbps down each. That's 10Gbps downstream total sold bandwidth. I can guarantee that one 10Gbps link is an absolute overkill for that case. Even one 1Gbps link might barely reach full capacity utilization. Still overkill. Over subscription doesn't even mean running the backbone links to capacity. It just means that you don't need to purchase one Mbps for each Mbps sold.
The actual issue is the level of over subscription. As long as there's no dropped packets and lag is low enough, there's no need to upgrade. If the links are internal to the same ISPs network or is a zero cost (peering) link, and it runs on leased/owned fiber it should be kept with spare capacity, since upgrading doesn't increase monthly costs.
The issue of over subscription starts to surface when the link is paid for its speed monthly. See the Comcast link with Tata bandwidth charts leaked. That is most likely the pair of last resort links, to destinations far away from Comcast's network, where it doesn't have peering arrangements. What is not depicted on those charts is queuing level (number of packets in the transmit queues at each side) in peak times. As long as pings aren't prioritized, it can be measured by pinging the ip on the other side of the link.
Typically residential ISPs will wait until the link is projected to reach 1% packet loss before ordering an upgrade, and use QOS to give priority to higher paying customers (dedicated full links and business links). 1% packet loss is already nothing to take lightly, an upgrade should be ordered right away. Some higher cost carriers might opt to run links at 50% capacity, with pairs, so that if one link fails, the remaining one can handle the traffic. That's usual with tier 1 / 2 providers, since all their traffic is dedicated (those carriers only provide wholesale and other very high speed IP links, usually minimum 100Mbps dedicated).
Now, the 2% documented packet loss with Comcast links with Tata telecom, that's completely unacceptable. Even 1% packet loss can prevent streaming/downloads at full speed.
Full HD streams using H264 run around 10Mbps for poorly compressed video (small publishers without a video engineer doing the work). Look at wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video It says that the heaviest video streams from Netflix use 5Mbps. I just played a few of the 1080 Full HD streams I have. The highest bandwidth they use is 10Mbps. 30Mbps for a video stream is completely crazy, even if your ISP service is that fast, you won't be able to sustain that speed, there will be serious drops. Only Blue Ray uses that kind of bandwidth. Not even DVD. Maybe he's talking about video content accessed directly from Verizon. Then it's not internet streaming video, it's VOD content coming directly from your ISP.
Fiber optical very high speed equipment (used behind the xDSL/Cable copper network and behind the wireless towers) has never been as cheap as its now. Long range gigabit ethernet stuff is dirt cheap. 10 Gigabit ethernet, which allows 2 thousand 4.8Mbps streams is already very affordable for carriers. A pair of fiber strands can carry 16 10 Gigabit links easily, that's enough for 32000 top speed streams. Long distance fiber optical cables typically have at least 36 strands. Some reach as high as 144 strands. Do the math and you'll see fiber capacity is almost never the issue.
But then there's a very interesting FACT. If you exclude p2p and video streaming, 10Gbps link can provide bandwidth for one million users. That's right, typical users that don't run P2P or use video streaming/download services require just 10kbps bandwidth.
That's the conundrum. Heavy users (p2p and video streamers) are responsible for such a disproportional share of bandwidth consumption that most providers just don't care about the quality of service they deliver for such users. They might actually prefer you go elsewhere given the tight margins.
You should be glad if you can pay US$ 10 more to have higher quality service. At least that way you ISP can't complain that your piggybacking on the average light user. Honestly asking for a discount if you use little bandwidth isn't very reasonable either. A very large portion of the ISPs cost is last mile stuff that doesn't change if you're using zero bandwidth or maxed out in the xDSL case. Copper / coaxial cable stuff requires most maintenance, as they are most subject to ice storms, lighting, traffic accidents,... Fiber can have redundancy.
ADSL is the best option for video, as long as you're close enough to your ADSL provider DSLAM that you can get fast enough speed. Cable is only better if you're far from the nearest ADSL DSLAM. DSLAM is the counterpart to the ADSL modem. Your ISP should be able to estimate your max link speed with your address and tell you when you're too far for your selected speed.
Just trying to demystify some facts. Most large ISPs / carriers won't discuss this stuff openly. They prefer you don't know the real facts. I'm not trying to judge what is right or wrong from either side.
The article uses Mbps (megabits per second) and not MB/s (megabytes per second). 3.7MB/s is a LOT of bandwidth, it's 30Mbps. Not even FULL HD video uses that much bandwidth. You probably meant 3.7 Mbps.
Have to admit that until yesterday I didn't know that one of the pair of scientists behind this had some spats with Italian law. By mid year we'll know. Counting the days... Need clean energy. Coal poisoning the world.
Prime launching areas are in the equator. So much more economical that other countries developed Sea Launch. Regardless of their economic troubles, the savings in rocket fuel is very big. Cheap launching areas are in South America. With French Guyana 100% operational, and launch areas in Brazil in small scale usage. Could be in Africa as well, but not enough political stability. Yes, the cape is probably good enough. But if the only object was launch cost, then all launch would be moved much further south. The main reason its not going to happen is due to all those military and otherwise secret launches, all that classified technology behind it.
Funny. Yes, Obama did some stupid things like killing eLORAN research and destroying Loran-C infra that could be used for eLoran. GPS needs backup. Among other things. But I have to agree with Obama's Space/NASA strategy. Space should be explored for profit and scientific advancement that makes financial sense. The USA isn't great because it can waste billions of dollars in its space program. You need to be careful how you spend your dollars, or the USA will cease to be great real soon. If you analyze the recent shuttle failures, they were the result of government worst type of inefficiency at work. In the government everyone is there to share the achievements, nobody is responsible for the failures. US$ 100 million mars rover projects were excellent ideas. The technological return from that project was awesome. The international space station is a good project, specially since its cost was shared between most rich countries. US$ 10 billion send men to mars (or even back to the moon) is a huge money pit. There's too many people criticizing this new space policy due to: 1 - Being emotional about it 2 - Having some vested interest in the continuation of space business as usual 3 - Having no real solid idea of what 1 billion dollar actually means
USA is quickly loosing its predominant economic power, in a position to waste billions of dollars on popular luxuries like many aspects of the old space program. Continue doing that and giving away trillions of dollars every few years for oil producing countries and you won't last even 20 years as the world's most important economy.
Also, think about how to win the actual war against Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is actually winning, since they manage to cause fear and enormous financial cost with just one yearly commercial airplane bombing attempt, and cause the US to spend a few trillion dollars on two wars in the middle east. Since 9/11, the USA is no longer such a great place to do business with in person, due to all the hassle they forced USA to go through to feel secure. Shoe inspections, full body scanners and all kinds of extreme TSA measures.
PS: I love USA, I wish you guys the best, but sometimes the best friend is the friend that tells you what you don't want to listen, but what you actually need to listen for your own good.
I wonder how many people commenting against this have a vested interest against this working... 1 - The patent is going to the Italians, not to the Americans, Germans, French or British 2 - I hold a ton of oil/energy stock that will plummet if this is true 3 - I'm a physicist and can't profit from this 4 - I'm in the nuclear fission/wind/solar power business that probably will go under The list goes on...
The ones to gain are just about everybody else that doesn't have a vested interest against it. The ensuing power revolution will advance society greatly, just as the industrial revolution, mass production, the.com revolution,... did But there will be side effects, people out of jobs, very serious impact. Large energy producing countries that run around energy production... Will suffer hugely. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela tops the list, with Canada, Australia getting significant impact too, even my Brazil is investing hugely on ultra deep pre-salt Petrol production, oil prices might drop so much, that all those oil fields might become inviable to run. US$ 30 / barrel oil would happen for sure. Only cheap oil will survive. Thermal coal production essentially shutdown.
What about the scientist's claim that they have a prototype running continuously providing a factory with heat for the last 6 months ? How much H2 is needed to generate 10kW of heat for 6 months using non-nuclear methods ? Unless that information is a hoax as well, there's something serious about this. The quantity of hydrogen needed for burning versus fusion would be tremendously different and very easy to discern over just a few days.
On the non-disclosure. Those guys have more to gain by keeping this under as much wraps as possible from other scientists. There might be similar ways to accomplish the same thing with other metals plus hydrogen that might not be covered by their expected patents. The potential monetary value of their patent licensing is worth what, billions, the Nobel prize can wait. Finally, I'd assume they're too busy perfecting their machine to be collaborating with hundreds of other scientists on reproducing their process. This is huge business. There are lots of interest contrary to this. Specially big oil, big stakeholders in fission nuclear power plants, even wind and solar power investment might become obsolete. From my guesstimate, this would replace coal power plants with a 100 fold reduction in costs. 1 pound of Ni costs less than US$ 1 ! Just the reduction in space, the complete elimination of CO2 emissions, modularity of their initial product, this would allow for producing electricity and heat inside of factories and other heavy users of electricity.
That doesn't mean I'm 100% sold on this matter, just that I'm taking their claim very seriously. It won't take a full year to know if this is true. They claim they will begin delivering what might be pre-production units in just 3 months. No word on cost of their machine yet. They claim they're already working on a 1MW plan by combining in the order of 100 such units. We'll see. Very exciting.
Read up on more technical sites about the nuts and bolts of their work. You should find (I did):
Their results were replicated somewhere else in Italy and in a lab in NH-USA (in the latter with witnesses from the US Department of Energy).
Even though there still is some controversy around their methods, there are ways to explain this with existing theories. The main explanation is the fusion only happens with a heavier Ni isotope, which explains why their machine uses only a tiny portion of the supplied Nickle powder. Those isotopes are present in small concentrations in ordinary Nickle. Radiation is present. The way they've invited the press in, already makes this very difficult to be a hoax.
Chance discovery ? Like most fusion scientists, they've been working on this for more than 10 years. That's not chance, that's hard work, and not rejecting facts just because you can't explain it.
Besides being a lot more confident now about their technology and methods than I were when I first read this submission to slashdot, it's now clear their solution is a lot less powerful than pure deuterium (heavy hydrogen isotope - hydrogen from heavy water) fusion, it's about halfway in an exponential power scale between the best chemical reactions and pure deuterium fusion potential.
Still, 1000 times the energy output from chemical reactions is huge. Fusion should generate a million times more power than chemical reactions.
Like they said in their statements, paraphrasing with my own words, "this stuff is working right now, we don't really care if you believe in it or not, because it DOES work and we're in the process of preparing for mass production of our machine. The market will judge us, not our fellow skeptical peers"
Somewhat cold fusion has been observed for more than 50 years now. Since industrial methods that use Hydrogen and Palladium at high temperatures showed Helium production (hydrogen fusion results in helium). But in such small scale, people didn't find a viable means to harness it since.
Think about this. What is the result on the Oil/Coal industry if fusion created power becomes available in one year 100 times cheaper than burning coal ? The result will be far cheaper electric power, removing the "dirty coal" electricity argument against the electric car, making producing hydrogen for fuel cell cars using electrolisis cheap. Coal usage for electricity and heat generation = 100% obsolete by 2015, Petrol usage for gasoline and diesel generation = 100% obsolete by 2020. This will affect large coal and petrol producing companies and countries.
Notice that the first announcement of cold fusion in 1986 resulted in fusion quickly labeled as taboo science, blocking any public funding for further studies. Was this labeling truly a scientific issue, or was it the result of powerful energy company lobbies influencing the US Dept of Energy and other funding sources not to fund further studies ?
Enough said. I don't need to convince you or anybody else. I'll be anxiously waiting for 2012 when those machines should become commercially available. Hopefully by then other methods will be discovered fostering multiple fusion methods for better competition.
Earth can't tolerate any more of this indiscriminate Coal burning. Extreme floods and serious fires happening at an alarming rate. Respiratory disease around Coal power plants and other heavy coal using business. Thanks god wind power is already here. While wind really wasn't that much competitive even 5 years ago, the very latest huge 10MW wind turbines are already competitive with coal burning in wind abundant areas if you just add the health hazards of coal to the immediate vicinity population.
I just hope big energy business won't buy the patent out and shut this down. That's my main concern right now. Hopefully there will be enough press in the next few months. Once this news pops up at 8 o'clock news and newspapers worldwide, the people will demand it.
You need to consider E=mc2. One mere gram of matter transformed into energy produces 90 TJ (90000000000000 joules). That's the energy contained in an explosion of 21500 tons of TNT, roughly the blast from each nuclear bomb dropped into Japan in the end of WWII. That's also 25GWh, in the order of magnitude of the power generated by the largest hydroelectric power plants in the world in a single day ! It wouldn't be absurd to guesstimate that for each pound of nickle, one gram of matter transforms into energy. I'm 100% guessing on the actual proportion of input matter for energy output. But for the sake of argument, lets go with this. One pound of nickle costs today about one half dollar. Even US$ 1 of nickle to produce 25GWh would make the cost of the nickle absolutely irrelevant. It could be a far more expensive metal like paladium or silver instead that still the cost would still be irrelevant. 25 KWh costs me about US$ 10, that's one millionth of 25GWh. Even if the resulting copper is completely wasted for whatever reason, it would still be huge. Copper isn't toxic. Full scale production in the end of 2011, I will wait and see. That's soon enough. Either those scientists are scammers, or they just discovered something they can't explain. And the scientific community can't accept something they can't understand. Of course if this works, those scientists would be billionaires in a few years, so it wouldn't surprise me if they are in no hurry to get recognition. What they care is their patents on this discovery. Fusion is huge. Even if it's not the traditional pure hydrogen fusion, it's still huge. If this works, it will more than redouble investment on pure hydrogen fusion plants that will only use abundant water !
You should consider yourself somewhat lucky. Here in Brazil there's zero requirement for reselling ADSL lines. There's zero actual unbundling. I believe that if this ADSL resell didn't existed in your area, standard ADSL service would be a LOT worse. The incumbent carrier must differentiate, or they will loose revenue to the alternative providers.
I was co-founder of a small telecom here in my home town. The only copper unbundling contracts costed more per line than the full commercial POTS service contract. A contract just so that the incumbent can say that there is a contract. The Brazilian FCC equivalent does very little to make it viable to use the incumbent network for any kind of other telecom companies. In Brazil there's essentially zero dark fiber leasing arrangements. If you find an actual dark fiber contract, it's cheaper to run your own fiber for a 5 year investment horizon, even if all you need is a single fiber strand out of a 18 strand cable. One 2Mbps E1 local loop costs US$ 1000 per month (in the US this costs about US$ 200 per month). We ended up focusing on long distance service. Now I sold my share, the company has since switched hands twice.
Another interesting side of my story that is rosy but was very gloomy just 2 years ago. I live in a million people plus metro area in Brazil. Something akin to living in Tampa-FL or New Orleans-LA, coastal cities like my home town. Up to 3 years ago, the fastest broadband we could get at a reasonable price was 1024/300 ADSL and cable. There was 2Mbps service, but it costed 70% of the local minimum wage. Even 1Mbps ADSL / cable costed about 30% of the minimum wage back then. Of course Brazil's minimum wage isn't very high. Our comcrap is called Net servicos (the major primary long distance company - Embratel today owns 80+% of Net Servicos). Our Verizon is called Oi (catchy name for a company run by thugs with no respect for the law or their customers). The only thing thugs do that Oi don't do is to actually beat you up and kill you, all other lying / cheating / disrespect the law to-the-maximum-extent-possible they DO THAT ALL THE TIME. Sorry for the aggravation.
Then one new nationwide carrier came along (GVT) and offered ADSL/VDSL service where the SLOWEST was 3000/750 ADSL, that's right, this new carrier offered service with a minimum speed 50% fastest than the faster service before them. And 12000/1200 ADSL cost was just 20% more than 3000/750. And they also had 100Mbps/10Mbps fiber access (not cheap, but cheaper than a dedicated 1Mbps IP link). And they didn't only offered affordable residential / commercial services (their POTS and ADSL service costs exactly the same for residential and commercial customers, while the other carriers charge about 30% more for commercial customers). They also offered reasonable wholesale IP links and STM1 (OC3) links to other major urban areas at about half the previous cheapest price. If they can offer prices that cheap, the only reason the prior companies offered higher prices were lack of competition. Now, one year later, the other companies still have 1Mbps service, but prices dropped to half as before. All major large ISPs now have top service of at least 8Mbps. However all you need to do is drive 100km south/north/west and the fastest broadband you can find is still 1Mbps. On those 3rd tier cities there was no broadband competition until 3g from the mobile carriers arrived, before that it was ADSL or usually crappy Wifi based wireless access, ADSL is those cities something is so bad that you get far better service from 3g broadband than Oi ADSL. Let's call first tier cities mega metro areas like São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro, our New York and Miamis in economic importance.
The lack of competition in small / medium countryside cities is so poor that the federal government bought a bankrupt nationwide fiber company and is using that to create its own nationwide IP backbone (Telebras / PNBL = National Broadband Plan). In the country side there are lots of ISPs paying US
Akamai is very cost effective. The only reason CNN doesn't use it is due to its AOL ties. Bandwidth is probably almost free for them using AOL. Here in Brazil most serious sites host with Akamai that avoid the trip all the way to the USA/Europe. Akamai's value is huge for users outside the US-Europe area. Just normal fiber (speed of light) latency from Brazil to USA is around 100ms. Real ping ranges from 130ms to 250ms. But still then, my ISP has very decent performance when accessing normal http/flash/light video non Akamai content in the USA. Things get dicey when you try to access a movie site that offers DVD or higher quality content. Content that requires 2-3Mbps throughput can get past 1Mbps in peak hours. Even then, not all sites are the same, sites with direct connectivity to Global Crossing reach full speed without trouble. Why all this technical detail ? For instance in my case, the bottleneck seems to be the sites in the US that are not using the premium worldwide backbone providers instead of my ISP in Brazil. Not all ISPs are doing this. My ISP is actually a nationwide carrier, just not one of the huge main three. It's the same in the US, avoid Comcrap, Verizon and the other 4 largest ISPs and you might get good quality access. Of course this isn't always possible. Things got so bad for the countryside that the government is bringing it's own nationwide IP backbone to provide with an economical alternative for a small city ISP. This isn't a premium content thing, in those cities a small ISP needs to pay 3x-4x more per Mbps than in the cheapest market.
What's the point in having ultra high speed internet if most sites are slow by your own ISPs admission ??? The most absurd is this happening when 10 gigabit backbone connections are the norm, 40/100 gigabit backbone connections are starting deployment. Fiber optic cable and accessories at an all time low. Linux and Free BSD competing for lower cost router solutions. Truly absurd. Competition is the only answer. Switch to the smaller ISPs. If customers leave those greedy bastards in significant numbers, this idea will die. Thanks god I live in a city with 4 broadband options (two ADSL, two TV cable). Can somebody tell us how much a 10 gigabit link with an international internet carrier costs this days in the US ? And in other countries. Those large ISPs buy multiple 10 Gbps links. Each can supply about 1 million users at a low quality level, or 100k users at an excellent quality level. I believe those links don't cost US$ 100k / month in the largest metro areas.
This should be implemented around coal power plants, pipe the CO2 rich exaust right into the pond with the bacteria. Assuming those bacteria work in a fluid. And in equatorial and tropical areas, since sunlight is an essential component to this. There might be an issue with pH, CO2 when pumped into a liquid creates carbonic acid, so it might be necessary to regulate CO2 injection into the fluid with the bacteria. Very interesting. Hopefully there no huge hidden catch, beyond the obvious patent licensing that will have to be paid for the next 20 years. And there's always the question of what those bacteria will cause if they leak into a river or the seas. This might make electric and fuel cell cars much less appealing.
Agreed, all toolbars are junk. It's just that some are more junk than others.
Skype toolbar is the hyperbole of all junk stuff short of being a fully fledged virus.
Remember, Skype comes from the same company that gave us Napster. Some versions of Napster installed software on our computer to use it for computational intensive calculations without our approval. I'll never forget that, ergo, Skype for me will always be evil. Almost as evil as any virus.
If you run Skype on a valid internet IP address, your computer becomes a bridge to allow two skype users behind a NAT to talk to each other. My bandwidth is not free, and I don't want it wasted for other people.
I'm using minefield for all day-to-day stuff. Only issue seems to be related to 64-bit java (stuff that doesn't work with 64-bit java even on firefox 3.6.13). Downloading daily upgrades is just a matter of Help->About Minefield->Check for upgrades. Upgrades use 1 to 2MB of download. Very easy to surf the updates.
Today Brazil is self sufficient in oil, partially due to ethanol. We're shifting from net zero in our oil exports/imports to being a strong net exporter. Average commutes in Brazil are about one fifth of the avg US commute.
Since we have an overproduction of natural gas, most taxis, delivery vans and other vehicles that would otherwise use gas/ethanol, use natural gas instead.
As you can see, Brazil is a lot more efficient in it's transportation fuel usage than the US.
When I grew up, we were already using ethanol. Before 1970s, oil was cheap, even for us. Oil became expensive in the 1970s, and that's what generated the ethanol iniciative.
That applies to engines without modifications to run on ethanol !
Here in Brazil we've had cars specifically designed to run on ethanol since the 80s. They run just fine.
Also, since the 1976 our regular gas is a mixture of gas with ethanol (depending on ethanol and petroleum prices). However our engines were adapted to handle that. For more than 10 years we use a mixture with about 20-25% ethanol.
They do run just fine as well.
Also for at least 10 years we have multi-fuel engines that are designed to run on any gas-ethanol blend, so we can use whatever fuel is cheaper. They do run just fine as well.
Don't mix things up.
Corn ethanol is very bad economics. But the corn producers lobby fed all this nonsense into the US congress and the US population. If there was a huge surplus of corn production, it would make some sense.
Sugar cane ethanol is great economics for countries with lots of free land to plant ethanol in the right climate (sugar cane grows on hot weather).
Ethanol has other positive characteristics.
1 - It's octane rating is higher, allowing for higher compression ratio, resulting in a more powerful engine if designed specifically for ethanol.
2 - It produces a lot more power per CO2 generated than gasoline.
3 - By producing sugar cane or corn, the CO2 generated by burning ethanol is recycled (hence the renewable fuel concept).
When using sugar cane ethanol, the only noticeable disadvantage versus gas is that it has lower MPG, about 30% lower.
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I purchased 2 years ago a pair of single mode bi-di (single strand) SFPs with 20Km range for less than US$ 1000 including a pair of 8 port managed gigabit switches to install the SFPs on. The pair of SFPs alone costed about US$ 300 each. 120Km bi-di SFPs back then costed about US$ 1500 per pair.
Widespread FTTx projects are causing gigabit ethernet optics to drop in price very fast. 2 years is a *long* time in telecom.
The aggressive price reductions are now spreading onto 10 gigabit XFP stuff.
If you know what to look for, you can get a very good sense on prices just searching eBay for new equipment for vendors that sell thousands of units through eBay. I just found new SFPs for 120Km for US$ 135 each on eBay ! US$ 270 a pair. That's a 80% price reduction in just 2 years.
Just 10 years ago any kind of high speed WAN optical links costed in the range of ten thousand dollars in STM/SONET equipment alone. You just didn't deploy an optical network without STM/SONET. Today L2 switches can handle redundant link recovery with rSTP.
Large L2 and L3 ethernet switches (L3 switch = pure ethernet router) from vendors outside the Cisco/big gang are eating away into their tradition of charging tens of millions of dollars on huge routers with enormous profit margins.
With VLAN priority tagging routing is no longer needed in intermediate ISP/Carrier network hops. Routing is only needed at the borders where you service customers and where you exchange bandwidth with peers and buy upstream bandwidth. That can reduce router requirements 3 or 4 fold. Real world examples of single hop IP routing is Global Crossing and TIM Seabone. One hop from South America to Europe. One hop from South America to the West coast of USA. And the next hop is already at another network or the customer of said network.
I'm not vilifying anybody, just informing people on factual information.
It's important to remember that an ISP / Carrier can't redo its network every year or two or three. Investment needs to be recouped.
But there's a lot to be said about what ISPs do when they are in a monopoly position. Those are definitely evil doers. Comcast seems to be one of them. Oi, Telefonica and Embratel here in Brazil are such examples.
Telefonica had such a serious technical problems that it lead Brazil's FCC equivalent from suspending sales of ADSL products until the situation was solved after a streak of very serious problems affecting millions of ADSL users until the problem was solved. They had multi day DNS unavailability that essentially shutdown their network.
Complaints on Comcast are pretty serious as well.
We don't need to be enemies of nobody. However we have to understand that businesses exist to make money. And sometimes the easiest way to maintain a substantial profit margin involves delaying necessary investments and preventing those delays from being know by their customer base, even when they are badly needed. Politicians lie all the time, most time if they spoke the truth they would loose votes either way. Large corporations are typically in similar situations, where at least manipulating the truth is seen as absolutely normal (but of course never admitted).
Add to that the tendency of the population to preferring feel good misinformation over the truth (typically the truth is very ugly), and it leads to the current wasteful government and high profit corporate environment. Backroom lobby deals.
Only no bullshit information can enlighten consumers / voters. For instance the US is on its way to being bankrupt in less than 20 years. No political party has a realistic plan to avoid that. And the population can't come to terms that even the tea party solution might make things worse. The only solution is efficiency. Dumb cost cutting is bad, as well as dumb spending.
The best filesystems for managing large files are extent based, tree based filesystems.
I store all my large files using XFS and I'm very happy with it.
XFS delivers read performance that is the same as accessing the hard drive directly.
So far what other filesystems have online defrag.
It also makes a huge difference if your download software can pre-allocate files before writing to them, this can result in zero fragmentation.
Netflix aparently purchases conectivity at least with L3 networks.
L3 was forced to pay Comcast in order to avoid Netflix traffic from going through their last resort upstream links currently with Tata telecom.
I have ADSL2+ service at 12000/1200 alignment speed.
I can ping other users on the same local area at about 15-20ms. I can ping the access router at less than 6-11ms.
I can ping sites at the my country's central internet hub (São Paulo), about 1000 miles away in fiber distance with 30-40ms.
Over subscription is the standard. All carriers/ISPs do it.
For example, say an ISP have exactly 1000 customers with 10Mbps down each. That's 10Gbps downstream total sold bandwidth.
I can guarantee that one 10Gbps link is an absolute overkill for that case.
Even one 1Gbps link might barely reach full capacity utilization. Still overkill.
Over subscription doesn't even mean running the backbone links to capacity. It just means that you don't need to purchase one Mbps for each Mbps sold.
The actual issue is the level of over subscription.
As long as there's no dropped packets and lag is low enough, there's no need to upgrade.
If the links are internal to the same ISPs network or is a zero cost (peering) link, and it runs on leased/owned fiber it should be kept with spare capacity, since upgrading doesn't increase monthly costs.
The issue of over subscription starts to surface when the link is paid for its speed monthly. See the Comcast link with Tata bandwidth charts leaked. That is most likely the pair of last resort links, to destinations far away from Comcast's network, where it doesn't have peering arrangements. What is not depicted on those charts is queuing level (number of packets in the transmit queues at each side) in peak times. As long as pings aren't prioritized, it can be measured by pinging the ip on the other side of the link.
Typically residential ISPs will wait until the link is projected to reach 1% packet loss before ordering an upgrade, and use QOS to give priority to higher paying customers (dedicated full links and business links). 1% packet loss is already nothing to take lightly, an upgrade should be ordered right away. Some higher cost carriers might opt to run links at 50% capacity, with pairs, so that if one link fails, the remaining one can handle the traffic. That's usual with tier 1 / 2 providers, since all their traffic is dedicated (those carriers only provide wholesale and other very high speed IP links, usually minimum 100Mbps dedicated).
Now, the 2% documented packet loss with Comcast links with Tata telecom, that's completely unacceptable.
Even 1% packet loss can prevent streaming/downloads at full speed.
Obviously fiber is better....
GEPON can reach crazy speeds.
But most users are still years away from that kind of service.
Full HD streams using H264 run around 10Mbps for poorly compressed video (small publishers without a video engineer doing the work).
Look at wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-definition_video
It says that the heaviest video streams from Netflix use 5Mbps.
I just played a few of the 1080 Full HD streams I have. The highest bandwidth they use is 10Mbps.
30Mbps for a video stream is completely crazy, even if your ISP service is that fast, you won't be able to sustain that speed, there will be serious drops.
Only Blue Ray uses that kind of bandwidth. Not even DVD.
Maybe he's talking about video content accessed directly from Verizon. Then it's not internet streaming video, it's VOD content coming directly from your ISP.
Fiber optical very high speed equipment (used behind the xDSL/Cable copper network and behind the wireless towers) has never been as cheap as its now.
Long range gigabit ethernet stuff is dirt cheap.
10 Gigabit ethernet, which allows 2 thousand 4.8Mbps streams is already very affordable for carriers.
A pair of fiber strands can carry 16 10 Gigabit links easily, that's enough for 32000 top speed streams.
Long distance fiber optical cables typically have at least 36 strands. Some reach as high as 144 strands. Do the math and you'll see fiber capacity is almost never the issue.
But then there's a very interesting FACT. If you exclude p2p and video streaming, 10Gbps link can provide bandwidth for one million users. That's right, typical users that don't run P2P or use video streaming/download services require just 10kbps bandwidth.
That's the conundrum. Heavy users (p2p and video streamers) are responsible for such a disproportional share of bandwidth consumption that most providers just don't care about the quality of service they deliver for such users.
They might actually prefer you go elsewhere given the tight margins.
You should be glad if you can pay US$ 10 more to have higher quality service. At least that way you ISP can't complain that your piggybacking on the average light user. Honestly asking for a discount if you use little bandwidth isn't very reasonable either. A very large portion of the ISPs cost is last mile stuff that doesn't change if you're using zero bandwidth or maxed out in the xDSL case. Copper / coaxial cable stuff requires most maintenance, as they are most subject to ice storms, lighting, traffic accidents, ... Fiber can have redundancy.
ADSL is the best option for video, as long as you're close enough to your ADSL provider DSLAM that you can get fast enough speed. Cable is only better if you're far from the nearest ADSL DSLAM. DSLAM is the counterpart to the ADSL modem. Your ISP should be able to estimate your max link speed with your address and tell you when you're too far for your selected speed.
Just trying to demystify some facts. Most large ISPs / carriers won't discuss this stuff openly. They prefer you don't know the real facts. I'm not trying to judge what is right or wrong from either side.
The article uses Mbps (megabits per second) and not MB/s (megabytes per second).
3.7MB/s is a LOT of bandwidth, it's 30Mbps. Not even FULL HD video uses that much bandwidth.
You probably meant 3.7 Mbps.
Have to admit that until yesterday I didn't know that one of the pair of scientists behind this had some spats with Italian law.
By mid year we'll know. Counting the days... Need clean energy. Coal poisoning the world.
Prime launching areas are in the equator. So much more economical that other countries developed Sea Launch. Regardless of their economic troubles, the savings in rocket fuel is very big.
Cheap launching areas are in South America. With French Guyana 100% operational, and launch areas in Brazil in small scale usage.
Could be in Africa as well, but not enough political stability.
Yes, the cape is probably good enough. But if the only object was launch cost, then all launch would be moved much further south.
The main reason its not going to happen is due to all those military and otherwise secret launches, all that classified technology behind it.
Funny. Yes, Obama did some stupid things like killing eLORAN research and destroying Loran-C infra that could be used for eLoran. GPS needs backup. Among other things.
But I have to agree with Obama's Space/NASA strategy.
Space should be explored for profit and scientific advancement that makes financial sense.
The USA isn't great because it can waste billions of dollars in its space program. You need to be careful how you spend your dollars, or the USA will cease to be great real soon.
If you analyze the recent shuttle failures, they were the result of government worst type of inefficiency at work. In the government everyone is there to share the achievements, nobody is responsible for the failures.
US$ 100 million mars rover projects were excellent ideas. The technological return from that project was awesome.
The international space station is a good project, specially since its cost was shared between most rich countries.
US$ 10 billion send men to mars (or even back to the moon) is a huge money pit.
There's too many people criticizing this new space policy due to:
1 - Being emotional about it
2 - Having some vested interest in the continuation of space business as usual
3 - Having no real solid idea of what 1 billion dollar actually means
USA is quickly loosing its predominant economic power, in a position to waste billions of dollars on popular luxuries like many aspects of the old space program. Continue doing that and giving away trillions of dollars every few years for oil producing countries and you won't last even 20 years as the world's most important economy.
Also, think about how to win the actual war against Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda is actually winning, since they manage to cause fear and enormous financial cost with just one yearly commercial airplane bombing attempt, and cause the US to spend a few trillion dollars on two wars in the middle east. Since 9/11, the USA is no longer such a great place to do business with in person, due to all the hassle they forced USA to go through to feel secure. Shoe inspections, full body scanners and all kinds of extreme TSA measures.
PS: I love USA, I wish you guys the best, but sometimes the best friend is the friend that tells you what you don't want to listen, but what you actually need to listen for your own good.
Marcelo from Brazil
I wonder how many people commenting against this have a vested interest against this working...
1 - The patent is going to the Italians, not to the Americans, Germans, French or British
2 - I hold a ton of oil/energy stock that will plummet if this is true
3 - I'm a physicist and can't profit from this
4 - I'm in the nuclear fission/wind/solar power business that probably will go under
The list goes on...
The ones to gain are just about everybody else that doesn't have a vested interest against it. .com revolution, ... did
The ensuing power revolution will advance society greatly, just as the industrial revolution, mass production, the
But there will be side effects, people out of jobs, very serious impact.
Large energy producing countries that run around energy production... Will suffer hugely. Iran, Saudi Arabia, Venezuela tops the list, with Canada, Australia getting significant impact too, even my Brazil is investing hugely on ultra deep pre-salt Petrol production, oil prices might drop so much, that all those oil fields might become inviable to run. US$ 30 / barrel oil would happen for sure. Only cheap oil will survive. Thermal coal production essentially shutdown.
What about the scientist's claim that they have a prototype running continuously providing a factory with heat for the last 6 months ?
How much H2 is needed to generate 10kW of heat for 6 months using non-nuclear methods ?
Unless that information is a hoax as well, there's something serious about this. The quantity of hydrogen needed for burning versus fusion would be tremendously different and very easy to discern over just a few days.
On the non-disclosure. Those guys have more to gain by keeping this under as much wraps as possible from other scientists.
There might be similar ways to accomplish the same thing with other metals plus hydrogen that might not be covered by their expected patents.
The potential monetary value of their patent licensing is worth what, billions, the Nobel prize can wait.
Finally, I'd assume they're too busy perfecting their machine to be collaborating with hundreds of other scientists on reproducing their process.
This is huge business. There are lots of interest contrary to this. Specially big oil, big stakeholders in fission nuclear power plants, even wind and solar power investment might become obsolete. From my guesstimate, this would replace coal power plants with a 100 fold reduction in costs. 1 pound of Ni costs less than US$ 1 ! Just the reduction in space, the complete elimination of CO2 emissions, modularity of their initial product, this would allow for producing electricity and heat inside of factories and other heavy users of electricity.
That doesn't mean I'm 100% sold on this matter, just that I'm taking their claim very seriously.
It won't take a full year to know if this is true. They claim they will begin delivering what might be pre-production units in just 3 months. No word on cost of their machine yet.
They claim they're already working on a 1MW plan by combining in the order of 100 such units.
We'll see. Very exciting.
Read up on more technical sites about the nuts and bolts of their work.
You should find (I did):
Their results were replicated somewhere else in Italy and in a lab in NH-USA (in the latter with witnesses from the US Department of Energy).
Even though there still is some controversy around their methods, there are ways to explain this with existing theories. The main explanation is the fusion only happens with a heavier Ni isotope, which explains why their machine uses only a tiny portion of the supplied Nickle powder. Those isotopes are present in small concentrations in ordinary Nickle. Radiation is present. The way they've invited the press in, already makes this very difficult to be a hoax.
Chance discovery ? Like most fusion scientists, they've been working on this for more than 10 years. That's not chance, that's hard work, and not rejecting facts just because you can't explain it.
Besides being a lot more confident now about their technology and methods than I were when I first read this submission to slashdot, it's now clear their solution is a lot less powerful than pure deuterium (heavy hydrogen isotope - hydrogen from heavy water) fusion, it's about halfway in an exponential power scale between the best chemical reactions and pure deuterium fusion potential.
Still, 1000 times the energy output from chemical reactions is huge. Fusion should generate a million times more power than chemical reactions.
Like they said in their statements, paraphrasing with my own words, "this stuff is working right now, we don't really care if you believe in it or not, because it DOES work and we're in the process of preparing for mass production of our machine. The market will judge us, not our fellow skeptical peers"
Somewhat cold fusion has been observed for more than 50 years now. Since industrial methods that use Hydrogen and Palladium at high temperatures showed Helium production (hydrogen fusion results in helium). But in such small scale, people didn't find a viable means to harness it since.
Think about this. What is the result on the Oil/Coal industry if fusion created power becomes available in one year 100 times cheaper than burning coal ? The result will be far cheaper electric power, removing the "dirty coal" electricity argument against the electric car, making producing hydrogen for fuel cell cars using electrolisis cheap. Coal usage for electricity and heat generation = 100% obsolete by 2015, Petrol usage for gasoline and diesel generation = 100% obsolete by 2020. This will affect large coal and petrol producing companies and countries.
Notice that the first announcement of cold fusion in 1986 resulted in fusion quickly labeled as taboo science, blocking any public funding for further studies. Was this labeling truly a scientific issue, or was it the result of powerful energy company lobbies influencing the US Dept of Energy and other funding sources not to fund further studies ?
Enough said. I don't need to convince you or anybody else. I'll be anxiously waiting for 2012 when those machines should become commercially available. Hopefully by then other methods will be discovered fostering multiple fusion methods for better competition.
Earth can't tolerate any more of this indiscriminate Coal burning. Extreme floods and serious fires happening at an alarming rate. Respiratory disease around Coal power plants and other heavy coal using business. Thanks god wind power is already here. While wind really wasn't that much competitive even 5 years ago, the very latest huge 10MW wind turbines are already competitive with coal burning in wind abundant areas if you just add the health hazards of coal to the immediate vicinity population.
I just hope big energy business won't buy the patent out and shut this down. That's my main concern right now. Hopefully there will be enough press in the next few months. Once this news pops up at 8 o'clock news and newspapers worldwide, the people will demand it.
You need to consider E=mc2.
One mere gram of matter transformed into energy produces 90 TJ (90000000000000 joules).
That's the energy contained in an explosion of 21500 tons of TNT, roughly the blast from each nuclear bomb dropped into Japan in the end of WWII.
That's also 25GWh, in the order of magnitude of the power generated by the largest hydroelectric power plants in the world in a single day !
It wouldn't be absurd to guesstimate that for each pound of nickle, one gram of matter transforms into energy. I'm 100% guessing on the actual proportion of input matter for energy output. But for the sake of argument, lets go with this.
One pound of nickle costs today about one half dollar.
Even US$ 1 of nickle to produce 25GWh would make the cost of the nickle absolutely irrelevant. It could be a far more expensive metal like paladium or silver instead that still the cost would still be irrelevant. 25 KWh costs me about US$ 10, that's one millionth of 25GWh.
Even if the resulting copper is completely wasted for whatever reason, it would still be huge. Copper isn't toxic.
Full scale production in the end of 2011, I will wait and see. That's soon enough.
Either those scientists are scammers, or they just discovered something they can't explain. And the scientific community can't accept something they can't understand.
Of course if this works, those scientists would be billionaires in a few years, so it wouldn't surprise me if they are in no hurry to get recognition. What they care is their patents on this discovery.
Fusion is huge. Even if it's not the traditional pure hydrogen fusion, it's still huge.
If this works, it will more than redouble investment on pure hydrogen fusion plants that will only use abundant water !
You should consider yourself somewhat lucky.
Here in Brazil there's zero requirement for reselling ADSL lines. There's zero actual unbundling. I believe that if this ADSL resell didn't existed in your area, standard ADSL service would be a LOT worse. The incumbent carrier must differentiate, or they will loose revenue to the alternative providers.
I was co-founder of a small telecom here in my home town. The only copper unbundling contracts costed more per line than the full commercial POTS service contract. A contract just so that the incumbent can say that there is a contract. The Brazilian FCC equivalent does very little to make it viable to use the incumbent network for any kind of other telecom companies.
In Brazil there's essentially zero dark fiber leasing arrangements. If you find an actual dark fiber contract, it's cheaper to run your own fiber for a 5 year investment horizon, even if all you need is a single fiber strand out of a 18 strand cable.
One 2Mbps E1 local loop costs US$ 1000 per month (in the US this costs about US$ 200 per month).
We ended up focusing on long distance service. Now I sold my share, the company has since switched hands twice.
Another interesting side of my story that is rosy but was very gloomy just 2 years ago.
I live in a million people plus metro area in Brazil. Something akin to living in Tampa-FL or New Orleans-LA, coastal cities like my home town.
Up to 3 years ago, the fastest broadband we could get at a reasonable price was 1024/300 ADSL and cable. There was 2Mbps service, but it costed 70% of the local minimum wage. Even 1Mbps ADSL / cable costed about 30% of the minimum wage back then. Of course Brazil's minimum wage isn't very high. Our comcrap is called Net servicos (the major primary long distance company - Embratel today owns 80+% of Net Servicos). Our Verizon is called Oi (catchy name for a company run by thugs with no respect for the law or their customers). The only thing thugs do that Oi don't do is to actually beat you up and kill you, all other lying / cheating / disrespect the law to-the-maximum-extent-possible they DO THAT ALL THE TIME. Sorry for the aggravation.
Then one new nationwide carrier came along (GVT) and offered ADSL/VDSL service where the SLOWEST was 3000/750 ADSL, that's right, this new carrier offered service with a minimum speed 50% fastest than the faster service before them. And 12000/1200 ADSL cost was just 20% more than 3000/750. And they also had 100Mbps/10Mbps fiber access (not cheap, but cheaper than a dedicated 1Mbps IP link).
And they didn't only offered affordable residential / commercial services (their POTS and ADSL service costs exactly the same for residential and commercial customers, while the other carriers charge about 30% more for commercial customers). They also offered reasonable wholesale IP links and STM1 (OC3) links to other major urban areas at about half the previous cheapest price. If they can offer prices that cheap, the only reason the prior companies offered higher prices were lack of competition.
Now, one year later, the other companies still have 1Mbps service, but prices dropped to half as before. All major large ISPs now have top service of at least 8Mbps.
However all you need to do is drive 100km south/north/west and the fastest broadband you can find is still 1Mbps. On those 3rd tier cities there was no broadband competition until 3g from the mobile carriers arrived, before that it was ADSL or usually crappy Wifi based wireless access, ADSL is those cities something is so bad that you get far better service from 3g broadband than Oi ADSL. Let's call first tier cities mega metro areas like São Paulo/Rio de Janeiro, our New York and Miamis in economic importance.
The lack of competition in small / medium countryside cities is so poor that the federal government bought a bankrupt nationwide fiber company and is using that to create its own nationwide IP backbone (Telebras / PNBL = National Broadband Plan). In the country side there are lots of ISPs paying US
Akamai is very cost effective. The only reason CNN doesn't use it is due to its AOL ties. Bandwidth is probably almost free for them using AOL.
Here in Brazil most serious sites host with Akamai that avoid the trip all the way to the USA/Europe. Akamai's value is huge for users outside the US-Europe area. Just normal fiber (speed of light) latency from Brazil to USA is around 100ms. Real ping ranges from 130ms to 250ms.
But still then, my ISP has very decent performance when accessing normal http/flash/light video non Akamai content in the USA.
Things get dicey when you try to access a movie site that offers DVD or higher quality content. Content that requires 2-3Mbps throughput can get past 1Mbps in peak hours.
Even then, not all sites are the same, sites with direct connectivity to Global Crossing reach full speed without trouble.
Why all this technical detail ? For instance in my case, the bottleneck seems to be the sites in the US that are not using the premium worldwide backbone providers instead of my ISP in Brazil.
Not all ISPs are doing this.
My ISP is actually a nationwide carrier, just not one of the huge main three. It's the same in the US, avoid Comcrap, Verizon and the other 4 largest ISPs and you might get good quality access. Of course this isn't always possible.
Things got so bad for the countryside that the government is bringing it's own nationwide IP backbone to provide with an economical alternative for a small city ISP.
This isn't a premium content thing, in those cities a small ISP needs to pay 3x-4x more per Mbps than in the cheapest market.
What's the point in having ultra high speed internet if most sites are slow by your own ISPs admission ???
The most absurd is this happening when 10 gigabit backbone connections are the norm, 40/100 gigabit backbone connections are starting deployment.
Fiber optic cable and accessories at an all time low.
Linux and Free BSD competing for lower cost router solutions.
Truly absurd. Competition is the only answer. Switch to the smaller ISPs. If customers leave those greedy bastards in significant numbers, this idea will die.
Thanks god I live in a city with 4 broadband options (two ADSL, two TV cable).
Can somebody tell us how much a 10 gigabit link with an international internet carrier costs this days in the US ? And in other countries. Those large ISPs buy multiple 10 Gbps links. Each can supply about 1 million users at a low quality level, or 100k users at an excellent quality level. I believe those links don't cost US$ 100k / month in the largest metro areas.
This should be implemented around coal power plants, pipe the CO2 rich exaust right into the pond with the bacteria.
Assuming those bacteria work in a fluid.
And in equatorial and tropical areas, since sunlight is an essential component to this.
There might be an issue with pH, CO2 when pumped into a liquid creates carbonic acid, so it might be necessary to regulate CO2 injection into the fluid with the bacteria.
Very interesting.
Hopefully there no huge hidden catch, beyond the obvious patent licensing that will have to be paid for the next 20 years.
And there's always the question of what those bacteria will cause if they leak into a river or the seas.
This might make electric and fuel cell cars much less appealing.
Clap, clap, clap. Thanks mozilla crew !
Agreed, all toolbars are junk. It's just that some are more junk than others.
Skype toolbar is the hyperbole of all junk stuff short of being a fully fledged virus.
Remember, Skype comes from the same company that gave us Napster. Some versions of Napster installed software on our computer to use it for computational intensive calculations without our approval. I'll never forget that, ergo, Skype for me will always be evil. Almost as evil as any virus.
If you run Skype on a valid internet IP address, your computer becomes a bridge to allow two skype users behind a NAT to talk to each other.
My bandwidth is not free, and I don't want it wasted for other people.
Again, Skype is evil.
I'm using minefield for all day-to-day stuff. Only issue seems to be related to 64-bit java (stuff that doesn't work with 64-bit java even on firefox 3.6.13).
Downloading daily upgrades is just a matter of Help->About Minefield->Check for upgrades. Upgrades use 1 to 2MB of download. Very easy to surf the updates.
Today Brazil is self sufficient in oil, partially due to ethanol. We're shifting from net zero in our oil exports/imports to being a strong net exporter.
Average commutes in Brazil are about one fifth of the avg US commute.
Since we have an overproduction of natural gas, most taxis, delivery vans and other vehicles that would otherwise use gas/ethanol, use natural gas instead.
As you can see, Brazil is a lot more efficient in it's transportation fuel usage than the US.
When I grew up, we were already using ethanol. Before 1970s, oil was cheap, even for us. Oil became expensive in the 1970s, and that's what generated the ethanol iniciative.
That applies to engines without modifications to run on ethanol ! Here in Brazil we've had cars specifically designed to run on ethanol since the 80s. They run just fine. Also, since the 1976 our regular gas is a mixture of gas with ethanol (depending on ethanol and petroleum prices). However our engines were adapted to handle that. For more than 10 years we use a mixture with about 20-25% ethanol. They do run just fine as well. Also for at least 10 years we have multi-fuel engines that are designed to run on any gas-ethanol blend, so we can use whatever fuel is cheaper. They do run just fine as well. Don't mix things up. Corn ethanol is very bad economics. But the corn producers lobby fed all this nonsense into the US congress and the US population. If there was a huge surplus of corn production, it would make some sense. Sugar cane ethanol is great economics for countries with lots of free land to plant ethanol in the right climate (sugar cane grows on hot weather). Ethanol has other positive characteristics. 1 - It's octane rating is higher, allowing for higher compression ratio, resulting in a more powerful engine if designed specifically for ethanol. 2 - It produces a lot more power per CO2 generated than gasoline. 3 - By producing sugar cane or corn, the CO2 generated by burning ethanol is recycled (hence the renewable fuel concept). When using sugar cane ethanol, the only noticeable disadvantage versus gas is that it has lower MPG, about 30% lower.