The article claims that they're making ethanol, not biodiesel (they compare their process to algae-generated biodiesel as the closest in terms of efficiency).
Given that, 20,000 gallons of ethanol x 76,100 BTU/gallon x.000293 kwh/BTU = 446,000 kwh, or about 6% efficiency. Could still be a scam, but more plausible.
All isotopes of plutonium are fissile, it's just that some of them are such strong neutron emitters that it's hard to make much of a bomb from them without predetonation sapping the yield, unless you've got a really good fusion boosted design. Some isotopes also give out a huge amount of heat due to spontaneous fission, making them unsuitable for bomb designs but great for RTGs, which is the real reason why NASA uses it: According to the Nuclear Weapons FAQ (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq6.html#nfaq6.2), Pu-238 generates 567 W/kg due to radioactive heating. The NWFAQ mentions that for RTG purposes Pu-238 is normally generated by neutron bombardment of Neptunium-237, not by buying it from the Russians. Weapons-grade plutonium has only a miniscule amount of the stuff, and even reactor-grade isn't very rich in it. It's also hard to separate out since the mass difference compared to Pu-239, which is the main isotope, is so small.
My coworker was yakking about this story, but I told him to not sweat it, because some random Slashdot poster said it's just a slashdot link to a zdnet story that links to a blog called Interesting People that posted an email from an end user named David Pollack who got this information from a guy at an 800 number at Windows support.
He seemed pretty relieved, and cancelled his Amazon order for a legitimate copy of WinXP.
Or maybe Mars is a long way away and it's really hard to build a machine that can be expected to work for months on end whilst being baked and simultaneously frozen after being placed in a vacuum and bombarded with radiation...
Which leads me to think that it's a good thing we're not trying very hard to mount any manned missions to Mars in the near future. If mankind has so much difficulty getting a relatively small, unmanned probe into Martian orbit/onto Martian soil, think about how much harder it would be with a vastly larger craft that needs to keep complex life-support systems in running order the whole time, and then make a safe return trip.
I know there are a lot of Slashdot readers who think we should be all gung-ho about exploring the Solar System, and that we should be willing to accept the much higher risk that goes along with such exploration, but it's starting to look like the odds of such a mission achieving the goals of taking men to Mars and returning them safely to Earth would be pretty slim. I don't think society is prepared to wager billions of dollars not to mention human lives on a venture with a 10% chance of success. Unless we discover that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are holed up on Mars with a big stockpile of WMD, that is.
There's much more thorough coverage of the issue at Independent.co.uk, which is of course a British source and is able to examine U.S. politics from a little more distance and perspective.
One of the most chilling tidbits in the article:
What, then, is one to make of the fact that the owners of the three major computer voting machines are all prominent Republican Party donors? Or of a recent political fund-raising letter written to Ohio Republicans by Walden O'Dell, Diebold's chief executive, in which he said he was "committed to helping Ohio to deliver its electoral votes to the president next year" - even as his company was bidding for the contract on the state's new voting machinery?
The article has a lot to say about how shoddily programmed, unstable, and insecure the machines are, something already covered in Slashdot. It points out the problems inherent in not having a paper trail, discusses how the secretive contracts with the manufactures stifles the public's interest in being able to examine the outcome of the election or question the veracity of the machines, explores the GOP conspiracy angle, and more.
I'm an American. I lead a lifestyle that is substantially better than most of the people on the planet.
Spoken like someone who hasn't been unemployed for the last two years. You'd find your sympathies were different if you were in my shoes...
1) Identify what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else (or at least, anyone who is willing to work for your salary)
Therein lies the problem. It's not just call-center jobs that are going to India; it's high-skilled programming jobs, high-skilled support jobs, and lots of white-collar IT work. And it's not just IT, either. You're not hearing much about it yet, but I've read articles about how other high-skill, white-collar jobs are starting to move overseas -- Wall Street and business jobs like financial analysis, competitive analysis, research, billing, accounting, that sort of thing. Them foreign countries have lots of skilled and smart people, and with continuing improvements in communications, Internet availability of information, and infrastructure, being a remote worker will be less and less of a liability for most kinds of work that depend mostly on the quality of the grey matter.
What I'm saying is that "what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else" is increasingly going to be either service sector jobs that by their nature have to be local, or the decreasing numbers of roles that big US companies consider to be their "core competencies" and won't outsource. But as for the latter, it's pretty scary, because you're seeing that even software and IT firms don't consider software and IT to be a "core competency" that's so important that they need to keep it close at hand. Increasingly, companies are going to outsource everything except management (of course), and probably marketing, which due to cultural reasons, and due to the fact that it's the marketing of product and not the creation of product that defines the modern corporation, that will be the last thing to be outsourced.
As an experienced programmer, it's not just a matter of me picking up some O'Reilly books and reading up on technologies I don't know, because that doesn't put me ahead of an Indian coder who can read the same books. For companies determined to outsourced, there's nothing I can do to compete, since cost is their overriding consideration, and cost of living in the U.S. makes competition on those grounds not merely unpleasant, but impossible.
In the long term, I probably need to find a new career -- a shame, considering that I'm extremely skilled at what I do, and what I do will continue to be important, but as you said, I'm hardly the first to see my job function move overseas. But, being unemployed, it's the short term I need to worry about, and I'm at a bit of a loss, because in the current job market where specific experience means so very much, it's pretty hard to make a career switch. Any other field of expertise I'd jump into would have to be at entry-level, and there just aren't that many entry-level openings these days. When so many experienced folks are looking for work, no matter what kind of work that may be, why hire newbies?
I used to have a big problem with skipping in Netflix discs halfway through movies, even with discs that looked to be in perfectly good shape. It turned out to be a problem with my DVD player, because it was bad at handling the second layer of dual-layer discs. I junked it (more expensive to fix than to replace) and got a new one, and haven't had a skipping disc since.
I consider myself an audio snob, though I haven't spent what I consider to be boatloads of money on stereo gear. I have $250 headphones, and that sounds like boatloads of money to most folks, but they sound reeeeeeeal good. When I get a house big enough to have them, I will likely spend five digits on a sound system, but I don't think I'll ever wind up a case study for an article like this.
For people who think that all high-end audio is bunk, I'll say that the difference between what you can get at Circuit City for $1000 and a high-end stereo store for $3000, even, is pretty considerable, and the differences between $3000 and $25,000 are noticeable, and it's diminishing returns after that. You have to care about sound, though, and not everyone does, which is fine.
What burns me is the amount of money that high-end stereo stores try to get you to spend on things that don't make a difference, especially cables. We're not just talking about multi-thousand-dollar speaker cables. We're talking about multi-hundred-dollar digital interconnect cables. Hello? Do you understand the concept of digital transmission? I thought not.
Or, for example, the high-end audio store I was in this weekend that had high-end AC power cables running to the amplifier that were bigger in diameter than your typical garden hose. Kinda silly when you consider that on the other end of that wall plug is very low-tech 12-ga copper wire.
The example in the article about putting an air bladder underneath your equipment so the vibrations don't disturb it sounds to me like so much hooey. As long as your CD transport isn't shaking so much that it's getting a lot of errors, what difference can it make? The improvements that the owner claimed are probably placebo effect.
Spend your money where it counts. Speakers, first and foremost. Amplification next. Then a halfway-nice CD player. Forget about the rest.
This advance will allow the Pentium 5 to have an all-new 700-stage pipeline to give the architecture room to be clocked up to 10 GHz. Unfortunately, due to the length of the pipeline, a branch misprediction will cause a stall lasting approximately 20 seconds. To avoid this, Intel will dedicate 300 million transistors on the chip to the world's most advanced prediction unit...
I'm really tired of people who have never tried to write a web page before lecture people on how browsers like Opera support "standards" and browsers like IE do not. While it's true that IE supports a number of nonstandard extensions to HTML, it does a vastly better job of supporting official HTML than anything else out there, and hardly anyone will acknowledge the fact simply because Microsoft built the browser.
If you were to take IE 5.5, find a way to make it into a standalone application, put somebody else's name on it, and with no other changes, distribute it as a new web browser, everyone would be hailing it as the greatest and purest application ever written. But since it's written by Microsoft, it's instead evil incarnate.
I have a website (see the link in my info) that uses standard, if advanced HTML: CSS Level 1/2, with absolute positioning and block-level elements that are pushed around by JavaScript. No IE-specific tags or IE-specific anything, unless you consider decent rendering of standard HTML and CSS to be IE-specific [which in my experience they are]. The pages render peachy-keen in IE, but Netscape's rendering (even in the latest Mozilla milestone build) is hopeless: CSS block-level elements don't display at all, or may display very strangely depending on how much text is in them. On some pages, the block-level elements work fine, but on other pages that use the exact same style sheets and document structure, but have different amounts of text, the elements don't display at all, or everything displays at once jumbled on top of each other.
I've tried and tried to hack around Netscape's bugs to make the pages render correctly, but I've about given up. I don't even want to know about Opera; a friend of mine who is using a build of 4.0 for BeOS (he works at Be) says it pretty much craps out on the site.
This is all BS. The most important reason why a lot of professional audio gear uses higher bit depths than 16 bits and higher sampling rates than 44.1/48 kHz is so that the equipment makers can convince people to spend a lot of money upgrading their old equipment to newer and ostensibly better stuff. It may come in useful if you're going to be recording something with a lot of dynamic range, as it will leave you a lot of headroom to handle transients in the music so you can record low without being afraid that the input is going to clip (very ugly in the digital domain), but for the final mix, even 16 bits is overkill.
The whole scam about getting people to buy better equipment applies not just to the makers of pro audio gear, but to folks like Sony trying to convince suckers to shell out big bucks for a "better" CD player. If you're listening to music on a $65,000 pair of Wilson Grand SLAMMs, driven by some Martin-Logan class A amps, all in a specially-designed acoustically perfect listening room, and you're listening to chamber music recorded in an anechoic chamber which Schoeps mics, godlike preamps, and godlike A/D, and your ears are 30 years old or younger and you live and die by what your stereo sounds like, then maybe you can talk to me about 24 bits or 96 kHz sampling rates, but if not all of the above are true, forget it. The existing CD standard is way better than everything else in the audio chain, from performer to listener, for 99.9% of the audio equipment, performers, recording engineers, listeners, and types of music (Britney Spears in 24/96?) in existence.
I'm not just blowin' smoke here. I do mobile audio recording professionally (Earthworks mics, Earthworks pre, Apogee A/D, record straight to stereo DAT -- see my URL), and it's standard practice for me to record things 3-6 dB lower than peak to leave breathing room, and in post-processing, design the sound to use no more than 30-40 dB of dynamic range nearly all the time (as making a recording with more dynamic range than that makes it very difficult to listen to unless you're in a very quiet room over high-end headphones). I'm only using a fraction of what lil' ol' CD is capable of, but anything more would just capture room rumble and people's breathing in that much more detail.
If you believe that current audio is somehow shortchanging you from hearing that ineffable "something" that will make your music sound better, then give up the fake science in Sony's product descriptions, save your money on fancy CD players, and go out and buy some better speakers than those Radio Shacks that your brother Jim gave you when he went off to college.
I think I already know how GWAR will be opening the show on their next tour...something to do with the band members emerging from the nether regions of an obscenely large and anatomically exaggerated cow.
I found a couple of other interesting things in the licensing terms on www.mp3licensing.com.
Electronic Music Distribution systems, where mp3 encoded data is sold to end-users, are licensed as follows: * 1.0 % of the price charged to the listener (minimum US$ 0.01 per download).
* US$ 15,000 annual minimum, payable upon signature and each following year in January, fully creditable against annual sales.
Does this mean that if I use a properly licensed encoder to create MP3's and I sell those MP3's on my website, that I'm supposed to give them more money? What gives? Their patent covers the encoding process, and if I use an encoder that properly licensed, they should stop taking money from my wallet right there.
If I give away MP3's on my website (and maybe have paid banner ads or somesuch), are they still going to demand licensing fees?
Also, in the Broadcasting/streaming section:
We do not charge royalties for mp3 streaming or mp3 broadcasting (e.g. Internet Radio) until the end of the year 2000. Beyond this date we anticipate to charge a small annual minimum and a percentage of revenue.
Again, once I've encoded an MP3 with a licensed encoder, what's their basis for charging me solely based on how I distribute it? What if I do my streaming by embedding Windoze Media Player as an ActiveX control in my page and point it at the HTTP URL for the MP3 I want to stream? How is this legally any different from having people download it to their hard drive and playing it from there?
Jeez. If they're gonna be fartknockers about trying to squeeze money from people, they could at least be a little less vague about it.
Slashdot Mirror
The article claims that they're making ethanol, not biodiesel (they compare their process to algae-generated biodiesel as the closest in terms of efficiency).
Given that, 20,000 gallons of ethanol x 76,100 BTU/gallon x .000293 kwh/BTU = 446,000 kwh, or about 6% efficiency. Could still be a scam, but more plausible.
All isotopes of plutonium are fissile, it's just that some of them are such strong neutron emitters that it's hard to make much of a bomb from them without predetonation sapping the yield, unless you've got a really good fusion boosted design. Some isotopes also give out a huge amount of heat due to spontaneous fission, making them unsuitable for bomb designs but great for RTGs, which is the real reason why NASA uses it: According to the Nuclear Weapons FAQ (http://nuclearweaponarchive.org/Nwfaq/Nfaq6.html#nfaq6.2), Pu-238 generates 567 W/kg due to radioactive heating. The NWFAQ mentions that for RTG purposes Pu-238 is normally generated by neutron bombardment of Neptunium-237, not by buying it from the Russians. Weapons-grade plutonium has only a miniscule amount of the stuff, and even reactor-grade isn't very rich in it. It's also hard to separate out since the mass difference compared to Pu-239, which is the main isotope, is so small.
My coworker was yakking about this story, but I told him to not sweat it, because some random Slashdot poster said it's just a slashdot link to a zdnet story that links to a blog called Interesting People that posted an email from an end user named David Pollack who got this information from a guy at an 800 number at Windows support.
He seemed pretty relieved, and cancelled his Amazon order for a legitimate copy of WinXP.
Or maybe Mars is a long way away and it's really hard to build a machine that can be expected to work for months on end whilst being baked and simultaneously frozen after being placed in a vacuum and bombarded with radiation...
Which leads me to think that it's a good thing we're not trying very hard to mount any manned missions to Mars in the near future. If mankind has so much difficulty getting a relatively small, unmanned probe into Martian orbit/onto Martian soil, think about how much harder it would be with a vastly larger craft that needs to keep complex life-support systems in running order the whole time, and then make a safe return trip.
I know there are a lot of Slashdot readers who think we should be all gung-ho about exploring the Solar System, and that we should be willing to accept the much higher risk that goes along with such exploration, but it's starting to look like the odds of such a mission achieving the goals of taking men to Mars and returning them safely to Earth would be pretty slim. I don't think society is prepared to wager billions of dollars not to mention human lives on a venture with a 10% chance of success. Unless we discover that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are holed up on Mars with a big stockpile of WMD, that is.
Spoken like someone who hasn't been unemployed for the last two years. You'd find your sympathies were different if you were in my shoes...
1) Identify what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else (or at least, anyone who is willing to work for your salary)
Therein lies the problem. It's not just call-center jobs that are going to India; it's high-skilled programming jobs, high-skilled support jobs, and lots of white-collar IT work. And it's not just IT, either. You're not hearing much about it yet, but I've read articles about how other high-skill, white-collar jobs are starting to move overseas -- Wall Street and business jobs like financial analysis, competitive analysis, research, billing, accounting, that sort of thing. Them foreign countries have lots of skilled and smart people, and with continuing improvements in communications, Internet availability of information, and infrastructure, being a remote worker will be less and less of a liability for most kinds of work that depend mostly on the quality of the grey matter.
What I'm saying is that "what it is that you can do that cannot be done by anyone else" is increasingly going to be either service sector jobs that by their nature have to be local, or the decreasing numbers of roles that big US companies consider to be their "core competencies" and won't outsource. But as for the latter, it's pretty scary, because you're seeing that even software and IT firms don't consider software and IT to be a "core competency" that's so important that they need to keep it close at hand. Increasingly, companies are going to outsource everything except management (of course), and probably marketing, which due to cultural reasons, and due to the fact that it's the marketing of product and not the creation of product that defines the modern corporation, that will be the last thing to be outsourced.
As an experienced programmer, it's not just a matter of me picking up some O'Reilly books and reading up on technologies I don't know, because that doesn't put me ahead of an Indian coder who can read the same books. For companies determined to outsourced, there's nothing I can do to compete, since cost is their overriding consideration, and cost of living in the U.S. makes competition on those grounds not merely unpleasant, but impossible.
In the long term, I probably need to find a new career -- a shame, considering that I'm extremely skilled at what I do, and what I do will continue to be important, but as you said, I'm hardly the first to see my job function move overseas. But, being unemployed, it's the short term I need to worry about, and I'm at a bit of a loss, because in the current job market where specific experience means so very much, it's pretty hard to make a career switch. Any other field of expertise I'd jump into would have to be at entry-level, and there just aren't that many entry-level openings these days. When so many experienced folks are looking for work, no matter what kind of work that may be, why hire newbies?
I am imagining the N'Sync of sci-fi. And it looks a lot like the Star Trek cash-o-rama books.
I used to have a big problem with skipping in Netflix discs halfway through movies, even with discs that looked to be in perfectly good shape. It turned out to be a problem with my DVD player, because it was bad at handling the second layer of dual-layer discs. I junked it (more expensive to fix than to replace) and got a new one, and haven't had a skipping disc since.
For people who think that all high-end audio is bunk, I'll say that the difference between what you can get at Circuit City for $1000 and a high-end stereo store for $3000, even, is pretty considerable, and the differences between $3000 and $25,000 are noticeable, and it's diminishing returns after that. You have to care about sound, though, and not everyone does, which is fine.
What burns me is the amount of money that high-end stereo stores try to get you to spend on things that don't make a difference, especially cables. We're not just talking about multi-thousand-dollar speaker cables. We're talking about multi-hundred-dollar digital interconnect cables. Hello? Do you understand the concept of digital transmission? I thought not.
Or, for example, the high-end audio store I was in this weekend that had high-end AC power cables running to the amplifier that were bigger in diameter than your typical garden hose. Kinda silly when you consider that on the other end of that wall plug is very low-tech 12-ga copper wire.
The example in the article about putting an air bladder underneath your equipment so the vibrations don't disturb it sounds to me like so much hooey. As long as your CD transport isn't shaking so much that it's getting a lot of errors, what difference can it make? The improvements that the owner claimed are probably placebo effect.
Spend your money where it counts. Speakers, first and foremost. Amplification next. Then a halfway-nice CD player. Forget about the rest.
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That website is so pork.
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This advance will allow the Pentium 5 to have an all-new 700-stage pipeline to give the architecture room to be clocked up to 10 GHz. Unfortunately, due to the length of the pipeline, a branch misprediction will cause a stall lasting approximately 20 seconds. To avoid this, Intel will dedicate 300 million transistors on the chip to the world's most advanced prediction unit...
-----
I'm really tired of people who have never tried to write a web page before lecture people on how browsers like Opera support "standards" and browsers like IE do not. While it's true that IE supports a number of nonstandard extensions to HTML, it does a vastly better job of supporting official HTML than anything else out there, and hardly anyone will acknowledge the fact simply because Microsoft built the browser. If you were to take IE 5.5, find a way to make it into a standalone application, put somebody else's name on it, and with no other changes, distribute it as a new web browser, everyone would be hailing it as the greatest and purest application ever written. But since it's written by Microsoft, it's instead evil incarnate. I have a website (see the link in my info) that uses standard, if advanced HTML: CSS Level 1/2, with absolute positioning and block-level elements that are pushed around by JavaScript. No IE-specific tags or IE-specific anything, unless you consider decent rendering of standard HTML and CSS to be IE-specific [which in my experience they are]. The pages render peachy-keen in IE, but Netscape's rendering (even in the latest Mozilla milestone build) is hopeless: CSS block-level elements don't display at all, or may display very strangely depending on how much text is in them. On some pages, the block-level elements work fine, but on other pages that use the exact same style sheets and document structure, but have different amounts of text, the elements don't display at all, or everything displays at once jumbled on top of each other. I've tried and tried to hack around Netscape's bugs to make the pages render correctly, but I've about given up. I don't even want to know about Opera; a friend of mine who is using a build of 4.0 for BeOS (he works at Be) says it pretty much craps out on the site.
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The whole scam about getting people to buy better equipment applies not just to the makers of pro audio gear, but to folks like Sony trying to convince suckers to shell out big bucks for a "better" CD player. If you're listening to music on a $65,000 pair of Wilson Grand SLAMMs, driven by some Martin-Logan class A amps, all in a specially-designed acoustically perfect listening room, and you're listening to chamber music recorded in an anechoic chamber which Schoeps mics, godlike preamps, and godlike A/D, and your ears are 30 years old or younger and you live and die by what your stereo sounds like, then maybe you can talk to me about 24 bits or 96 kHz sampling rates, but if not all of the above are true, forget it. The existing CD standard is way better than everything else in the audio chain, from performer to listener, for 99.9% of the audio equipment, performers, recording engineers, listeners, and types of music (Britney Spears in 24/96?) in existence.
I'm not just blowin' smoke here. I do mobile audio recording professionally (Earthworks mics, Earthworks pre, Apogee A/D, record straight to stereo DAT -- see my URL), and it's standard practice for me to record things 3-6 dB lower than peak to leave breathing room, and in post-processing, design the sound to use no more than 30-40 dB of dynamic range nearly all the time (as making a recording with more dynamic range than that makes it very difficult to listen to unless you're in a very quiet room over high-end headphones). I'm only using a fraction of what lil' ol' CD is capable of, but anything more would just capture room rumble and people's breathing in that much more detail.
If you believe that current audio is somehow shortchanging you from hearing that ineffable "something" that will make your music sound better, then give up the fake science in Sony's product descriptions, save your money on fancy CD players, and go out and buy some better speakers than those Radio Shacks that your brother Jim gave you when he went off to college.
-----
I think I already know how GWAR will be opening the show on their next tour...something to do with the band members emerging from the nether regions of an obscenely large and anatomically exaggerated cow.
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I found a couple of other interesting things in the licensing terms on www.mp3licensing.com.
Electronic Music Distribution systems, where mp3 encoded data is sold to end-users, are licensed as follows:
* 1.0 % of the price charged to the listener (minimum US$ 0.01 per download).
* US$ 15,000 annual minimum, payable upon signature and each following year in January, fully creditable against annual sales.
Does this mean that if I use a properly licensed encoder to create MP3's and I sell those MP3's on my website, that I'm supposed to give them more money? What gives? Their patent covers the encoding process, and if I use an encoder that properly licensed, they should stop taking money from my wallet right there.
If I give away MP3's on my website (and maybe have paid banner ads or somesuch), are they still going to demand licensing fees?
Also, in the Broadcasting/streaming section:
We do not charge royalties for mp3 streaming or mp3 broadcasting (e.g. Internet Radio) until the end of the year 2000. Beyond this date we anticipate to charge a small annual minimum and a percentage of revenue.
Again, once I've encoded an MP3 with a licensed encoder, what's their basis for charging me solely based on how I distribute it? What if I do my streaming by embedding Windoze Media Player as an ActiveX control in my page and point it at the HTTP URL for the MP3 I want to stream? How is this legally any different from having people download it to their hard drive and playing it from there?
Jeez. If they're gonna be fartknockers about trying to squeeze money from people, they could at least be a little less vague about it.
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