Yes. When a government official is supposed to be acting in the best interest of the people they should be subject to scrutiny at any level that is reasonably available. Storing older emails is a rather trivial issue of collecting, compressing and copying to an inexpensive tape or hard drive which can be archived. A 250GB IDE drive is quite inexpensive and could probably archive several hundred million emails, many more than the city is claiming it will delete.
In a time when the government is fading further from the ideal of a democracy, or even the republic which it's supposed to be, I think that accountability of the elected and non-elected government workers is critical.
In this particular case, it seems that all of the city's email is in one central location, otherwise how could they just delete it without putting that responsibility in the hands of users, or sending support people to each and every desk.
Pick a day, halt all email access inbound and outbound (government usually doesn't work on Sunday), copy all the existing email to a drive, then start the deleting process.
Since when is a political statement grounds for federal charges?
Since they enacted the Patriot act, and a slew of other "protect the people at all costs" bullshit excuses for more federal programs, police powers and general ickyness.
I can't help but call the article "alarmist" and "misleading".
The study's protocol did not sample or measure environmental levels of these chemicals, the samples are all stated to have come from swipes directly against the plastics of the devices. DUH, anything you use to wipe down a surface will accumulate some of that surface. If you use a paper towel to clean your windows you will find minute amounts of glass in the paper towel if you test.
As far as I can tell, no-one has performed any study to look at the aerial solubility and dispersion characteristics of these chemicals. In plain english: they didn't test to see how much of this stuff just floats off in to the air, or how far it goes once in the air.
Even if the chemicals do attach to "regular" atmospheric dust, such dust either passes though the computer/device without touching anything, or collects in the device, thus not posing any risk. Even when these chemicals to attach to dust and return to the surrounding atmosphere, that makes the dust heavier and it then tends to fall to the floor even faster than it would have before.
All of this of course doesn't even get to the amounts of these chemicals they've found. They measure in Pg/cm^2 or one trillionths of a gram. If I've gotten my math and conversions correct, to get 1 gram of these chemicals via swiping directly from the highest yielding computer case in the test you'd have to swipe an area roughly 18,000sq/miles or half the size of the state of Indiana, or roughly twice the size of Vermont.
And again, these levels are from direct abrasion of the plastics, not from free atmospheric testing. Using their "field blank" you're approaching the area of the entire USA worth of swiping to accumulate one gram.
Now... here's what they seem to be telling us:
If you regularly brush up against, lick or snort your computer, and you do it enough over many many years, you could accumulate a small amount of a chemical which we think may cause birth defects in some women.
Does that REALLY rise to a level where federal bans are indicated? Where's the ban on playing golf in the rain, climbing ladders, etc.
No, it's possible to sell "health" products that carry no FDA certification or approval and were developed in complete secrecy by some unknowns person or persons. Please... show me one summary in a peer reviewed study in a respected medical journal that shows that these "cleanse" products do anything beneficial for the users.
It's no coincidence that most of these products of dubious claim are sold via multi-level marketing schemes. If these products TRUELY cleaned toxins out of the body and that had a beneficial effect, you'd see doctors everywhere recommending them, you'd see FDA testing approvals on the label, and you'd see consumer product manufacturers tripping over each other to get their product on the shelf everywhere.
While that is true (it's a civil infraction), you are being charged with a violation of a law, this is not a civil matter really. When/if you are found to have committed the act, the fine does not go to the person filing the complaint (the police officer more likely than not), but to the state or town.
If the traffic rules weren't state/local laws but were merely department of transportation rules that you agreed to when you signed up for your license, then I could see this being a civil matter.
If the state profits from your being charged with violating a law by a law enforcement officer, I don't see how that could be considered a civil matter myself.
... In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law. This is the other that I think has held on....
Actually, have you ever gone to court for a traffic violation? This is certainly a matter with value over $20, the average fine is over $100 in most states. I am unclear as to the meaning of "common law", traffic laws certainly seem to be common to me. Yet in many states it is impossible to get a jury trial, only a hearing by an administrative hearing officer. You don't even get a real judge.
Re:G4 and Comcast screwed the TTV Cast - hard
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I still don't get the uproar about Leo. What's everyone see in him? The things he says are wrong just about as often as they are correct, he can't interview for shit, and nothing he says/writes is from his own knowledge/experience: it's all scammed/borrowed from other sources. Leo's "book" is a great example of this, it's a regurgitation of tips/answers from the shows he's on, but researchers or other hosts came up with the answers/tips. Then he consolidates them and looks like a hero. Other than charisma (read: on-camera goofiness), why is this guy held up as a tech authority so often?
Re:Favorite tech tv memory
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That's so sad, and so funny on so many levels.
It's sad that the guy busted the one of a kind thing, It's funny how ignorant the host was of just how unique that item was.
No, it wasn't an issue of speed, it was that with VM turned on a native PPC application needed less RAM to operate than if VM was turned on. Turning on VM still slowed things down a bit, especially during swapping.
Working at the Apple call center in the era of the Performas, I had a caller that was complaining their computer was really slow and making a lot of grinding noises.
Turns out in a system with like 16MB of RAM, they'd enabled Virtual Memory for something like 128MB, and then created a RAM disk of 92MB to which the OS was installed and booted.
I don't think the caller ever understood just what the problem was, but we got everything saved and booted to the HD and things were normal again.
For the most part these people are wrong when they say that. There is no point where replacing disk swap with real RAM will slow things down in an average system, or conversely that using disk swap instead of RAM will speed things up.
If you have 1GB RAM and 1GB swap, then change to 2GB RAM and 0GB swap, the OS will run faster. For one thing, there's a whole chunk of memory management code that doesn't need to run. Second you never have to wait for the relative eternity for data to get to/from disk.
There is one possible exception that involves running mostly idle applications that get swapped out, and a one/ a few very active ones that do a lot of processing on a few files. In this case a swap enabled system could run some tasks faster. Assuming that the apps swapped out run only very infrequently, the space opened up in RAM would allow for more of the large files to be cached and hence accessed faster. But a significant portion of the data would need to fit in RAM, or you'll just wind up going to disk anyway and loosing the swap advantage.
Personally, I don't use swap unless the system just physically can't handle the memory I need or I just can't get it installed at the moment. Once I know what the RAM requirements for the system will be, I configure enough to handle that and disable swap.
One other thing: disabling swap may well let you spin down the hard drives more often, the system is (from my experience) much more tolerant of spin-up delay for accessing normal filesystems than swap.
Hmmm. See that can be dubbed in later from a recording in the theater or the DVD. Sure they can spot video cameras with night vision equipment, but they can't detect a small microphone connected to a small recorder (like an iPod).
Import the skimmed video and audio in to a video editor and sync the two.
As for who's going to watch a feature film with no audio, perhaps you should run your history books back a few decades and look up silent films. A sound track was so novel, films with such a track were called "talkies", but didn't catch on long term and we reverted to "movies".
Of course, even without the audio the plot and characters would be clearly discernible to competitors.
Because the production of a blockbuster movie tends to be kept a secret up until near the premier. distributed computing provides little to no security.
There's no way a studio could send a scene's model to a compute node encrypted, process it encrypted, store the interim image encrypted, then send the whole mess back encrypted. At some point in processing the information must be in plain computer processable formats.
What that boils down to is that a competing studio could sign up hundreds of compute nodes and get a preview of the story line and animation. Anyone who could gather enough images could piece together clips from the film and release them in full digital format. Imagine a nefarious group of nodes all collecting the images they generate and later piecing them all together in to perfect digital non-DRMed copy of the movie; before release and before the DVD is available.
Hollywood can't stand the idea of people copying DVDs to the internet, could you imagine what they'd think of full film resolution copies of their films floating around? The heads bits: on the walls.
No... this is just a stupid suggestion from the point of view of the studios. At least until there's and OS is produced where a user it prohibited access to certain portions of RAM, and can't intercept the network traffic to/from the box.
With fossile fuels there is no cycle. I think that is a fundamentally false statement. There is a cycle but it's on a geologic and not a human time scale. The Earth is essentially a closed system as far as anything but solar energy is concerned.** If it's on/in Earth now, it has probably been here for a long long time. If there is carbon in the oil, then that carbon was in the biosphere at some point.
There was a period where carbon was freely abundant, then it started to coalesce in to plants and animals, now we are starting to liberate it all again. I'm guessing that when we've died off as a species, the carbon will again coalesce. In a few million more years some other species (or nature) will begin the release portion of the cycle again, by natural process, meteor would strike, or the actions of some new species.
**Yes I know the Earth is constantly bombarded with material from space, and we humans have started sending more and more material off world from whence it will never return. But on the whole, the mass of compounds on the planet remains unchanged. I don't know how to start compensating for the energy we radiate from the planet in the form of radio waves or what other minute flows there may be.
True if we all stopped eating meat there would be far fewer emissions of methane, one of the claimed greenhouse gasses and a lot more land on which to grow cleaner, more efficient fuel crops.
the volume or mass is converted in to useable product the percentage of energy extracted/preserved for later use the plant uses 20% of the energy it produces to maintain operations you get back 80% of the cost of the raw materials when you sell the end product
No, I don't go out of my way to do this, but I do attempt to correct it when I see such things. I do have a very low tolerance for linguistic abuse. I prefer that when having a technical discussion, the writers/speakers stick to dictionary and literal meanings for words, terms and phrases.
If this is supposed to be science then it should be objective, not subjective.
A doctor tells two people: "Nothing to drink for at least 12 hours."
Person A goes home and doesn't consume any liquids for 12 hours Person B goes home and drinks all the water and soda-pop they want Person B winds up in the emergency room, turns out person B thought the doctor meant no beer for 12 hours.
This is what colloquialisms do to our language. Instead of making things clearer and easier to understand, it makes things more confusing and open to different interpretations. If you can't tell people what you really mean, then why tell them anything?
All fossil fuels have 0 net effect on CO2, all that CO2 came from the Earth's atmosphere at some point.
I think you need to qualify your statement above. There may not be enough acreage farmed today to replace fossil fuels with current technology, I will grant you that. But... You seem to be basing your statements upon continuing to use the existing internal combustion engine technology, running on gasoline type fuels, that after almost 100 years of development is still only about 35% efficient. Changing the fuel sources and the fuel consumption mechanism combined would most likely provide enough efficiency to provide our energy needs. As it is, something like 35% of our harvested crops are never consumed and rot in solos and storage facilities.
This was about a 2 page reply, and I'm going to shorten it to just offer this: I just purchased a brand new VW TDI (1.8l diesel). It's averaging about 42mpg with a lot of city driving. Running it on biodiesel is cleaner and would be much cheaper with mass production. As you stated, the government needs to push this fuel instead of alcohol.. most al existing diesel engines can run on 100%bd, there are almost no gasoline engines that can run on 100% alcohol without essentially rebuilding the engine.
I don't understand then... when is the cutoff time between absorption and liberation for something being considered "carbon neutral". It's apparently somewhere between a week and a few million years.
This is a realistic question and I'm not trying to be sarcastic. When people choose arbitrary cutoff points to create categories of things, I'm always interested in why those points were chosen and why exactly I'm supposed to think they are of any significance.
All carbon containing fuels we consume/burn on this planet took that carbon from the atmosphere/planet. When we use the fuel we liberate that carbon. All fossil fuels are carbon neutral.
My understanding is that the US has a total oil consumption of about 20mbd, about 40% of that is supplied from foreign markets. I'm more certain of the former, and less of the latter, number.
Because TCP utilizes above-ground organic waste streams to produce a new energy source, it also has the potential to arrest global warming by reducing the use of fossil fuels... Assuming that the world is warming (as opposed to just rebalancing the heat in the ecosystem) and that warming is due to the humans burning fossil fuels. It's not just fossil fuels that cause the supposed greenhouse gasses, burning wood and other plants also produces many of the gases as does simply decomposition. The fuels produced here would do the same as they make direct reference to them being hydrocarbons....TCP produces no emissions and no secondary hazardous waste streams... That is just absurd. If the plant has no emissions then what's all this talk about steam and a fuel product, are they not emitted by the plant? Of course the article author misquoted, going back one more step to the original text: TCP produces no uncontrollable emissions
You don't know who ConAgra is do you? These are the people who are just about solely responsible for the addition of ethanol to gasoline. ConAgra (and I think Arthur Daniels Midland: ADM) lobbied hard for those requirements. See.. they had a whole lot of land they couldn't use profitably under then current government farm subsidies, so they came up with a way to grow corn and turn it in to an automotive fuel required by law. They get paid a farm subsidy to grow corn, then they are paid a federal clean-air subsidy for creating a clean-air fuel, then they sell that fuel at full market price to gasoline blenders. It's quite the cash cow. You as a consumer are actually paying well over the listed pump price for gasoline because of these hidden payments.
There are files that simply never change size, and once written don't get overwritten. (Type 1). Most programs are actually type 1...
Except that simply isn't true. Today's programs are large entities which are updated rather often (the ship first, debug later syndrome). There are programs on my computer that are updated more often than the files I view with them.
Ex: on my Mac, I used iTunes to rip my CDs. I've updated iTunes I think 4 times now, but those AAC rips haven't changed yet. iTunes is probably more "fragmented" than the files it access.
Not to rip on MS, but I do find their OS installation process to be particularly odd. I think it's the only OS I've installed where the disk is significantly fragmented in files and free space after a fresh install. Then, it's the only major OS that does it's install from a live copy of itself on the HD being installed to. GNU/Linux, MacOS and Solaris all install from some other media (bootable CD or network,or another HD) to an otherwise idle volume. Not to say that these other OSes have an optimized volume after install.
There used to be several disk access optimizations
Vendors used to do interleaving with the format/fdisk commands I recall. The idea was that writing the sectors in a continuous stream was not very efficient as the drives of the time could not move data to or from the disk so quickly. You'd read sector 1, and by the time you were ready to read sector two, sector 3 was under the head, so you had to wait almost an entire disk revolution to find sector 2 again. The interleave told the OS to skip X physical disk sectors for each 1 logical sector.
For example, assume a disk with 12 sectors on a track such that when stationary the disk's sectors align with the hours on a clock face. With interleave of 3 the OS would put sector 1 at 1:00, sector 2 at 4:00, sector 3 at 7:00, sector 4 at 10:00, sector 5 at 2:00, and so on. The OS would occasionally skip more than the "interleave" number of sectors in order to not overwrite previous sectors. This meant that by the time that logical sector 1 was read and transferred to the computer, logical sector 2 would just about be under the heads for reading, thus eliminating or at least minimizing the rotational latency.
Another big advantage was placing the directory structures in the middle tracks of the drive. This minimized the longest seek that would have to be performed. Unless a single file was very large or in just the wrong spot, it would usually be positioned completely on the inside or outside half of the tracks. After reading, the head only had to move at most half way across the disk to locate the next file or cluster/fragment to read or write; the again at most 1/2 the disk to perform the next operation.
Most of today's file systems start placing directory/catalog information at the start of the disk, this effectively doubling average seek times to the data stored on the disk.
As others mentioned, on some "faster" drives, there were filesystems that essentially treated the platters in a drive as individual units and managed then like a RAID 0, a RAIP so to speak (Redundant Array of Independent Platters).
File fragmentation in today's fast, large buffer drives is, I think, the least of our worries. Fragmented or not we need more optimization of data structures on the drive. I'd rather have related files fragmented and near-by each other than contiguous and spread evenly across the drive.
Exactly. This was just another in a long line of errors on the part of that show.
Other problems: There wasn't a human holding the phone so grounding was not the same as person. The environment in the box was static: there was no wind to aid in vapor moving in to the cell phone
Their lack of attention to detail aside, I still don't think a cell phone will set off an explosion at a fuel pump in anything but the most extreme conditions: You must have put the nozzle in the filler tube incorrectly, thus allowing large amounts of vapor to escape You must be standing VERY close to the tank filler opening The cell phone must have some mechanism for generating a significant spark, most probably a flaw or broken component. You must operate the phone in such a manner as to cause that spark.
To me... you deserve what you get if you stand in an atmosphere that smells of gasoline fumes and operate any potentially sparking or fire producing device.
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Yes. When a government official is supposed to be acting in the best interest of the people they should be subject to scrutiny at any level that is reasonably available.
Storing older emails is a rather trivial issue of collecting, compressing and copying to an inexpensive tape or hard drive which can be archived. A 250GB IDE drive is quite inexpensive and could probably archive several hundred million emails, many more than the city is claiming it will delete.
In a time when the government is fading further from the ideal of a democracy, or even the republic which it's supposed to be, I think that accountability of the elected and non-elected government workers is critical.
In this particular case, it seems that all of the city's email is in one central location, otherwise how could they just delete it without putting that responsibility in the hands of users, or sending support people to each and every desk.
Pick a day, halt all email access inbound and outbound (government usually doesn't work on Sunday), copy all the existing email to a drive, then start the deleting process.
Since when is a political statement grounds for federal charges?
Since they enacted the Patriot act, and a slew of other "protect the people at all costs" bullshit excuses for more federal programs, police powers and general ickyness.
I can't help but call the article "alarmist" and "misleading".
The study's protocol did not sample or measure environmental levels of these chemicals, the samples are all stated to have come from swipes directly against the plastics of the devices.
DUH, anything you use to wipe down a surface will accumulate some of that surface. If you use a paper towel to clean your windows you will find minute amounts of glass in the paper towel if you test.
As far as I can tell, no-one has performed any study to look at the aerial solubility and dispersion characteristics of these chemicals. In plain english: they didn't test to see how much of this stuff just floats off in to the air, or how far it goes once in the air.
Even if the chemicals do attach to "regular" atmospheric dust, such dust either passes though the computer/device without touching anything, or collects in the device, thus not posing any risk. Even when these chemicals to attach to dust and return to the surrounding atmosphere, that makes the dust heavier and it then tends to fall to the floor even faster than it would have before.
All of this of course doesn't even get to the amounts of these chemicals they've found. They measure in Pg/cm^2 or one trillionths of a gram. If I've gotten my math and conversions correct, to get 1 gram of these chemicals via swiping directly from the highest yielding computer case in the test you'd have to swipe an area roughly 18,000sq/miles or half the size of the state of Indiana, or roughly twice the size of Vermont.
And again, these levels are from direct abrasion of the plastics, not from free atmospheric testing. Using their "field blank" you're approaching the area of the entire USA worth of swiping to accumulate one gram.
Now... here's what they seem to be telling us:
If you regularly brush up against, lick or snort your computer, and you do it enough over many many years, you could accumulate a small amount of a chemical which we think may cause birth defects in some women.
Does that REALLY rise to a level where federal bans are indicated? Where's the ban on playing golf in the rain, climbing ladders, etc.
No, it's possible to sell "health" products that carry no FDA certification or approval and were developed in complete secrecy by some unknowns person or persons.
Please... show me one summary in a peer reviewed study in a respected medical journal that shows that these "cleanse" products do anything beneficial for the users.
It's no coincidence that most of these products of dubious claim are sold via multi-level marketing schemes. If these products TRUELY cleaned toxins out of the body and that had a beneficial effect, you'd see doctors everywhere recommending them, you'd see FDA testing approvals on the label, and you'd see consumer product manufacturers tripping over each other to get their product on the shelf everywhere.
Perhaps a Firewire thumb drive? FW supplies more power than USB.
While that is true (it's a civil infraction), you are being charged with a violation of a law, this is not a civil matter really.
When/if you are found to have committed the act, the fine does not go to the person filing the complaint (the police officer more likely than not), but to the state or town.
If the traffic rules weren't state/local laws but were merely department of transportation rules that you agreed to when you signed up for your license, then I could see this being a civil matter.
If the state profits from your being charged with violating a law by a law enforcement officer, I don't see how that could be considered a civil matter myself.
In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any Court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.
This is the other that I think has held on.
Actually, have you ever gone to court for a traffic violation? This is certainly a matter with value over $20, the average fine is over $100 in most states. I am unclear as to the meaning of "common law", traffic laws certainly seem to be common to me. Yet in many states it is impossible to get a jury trial, only a hearing by an administrative hearing officer. You don't even get a real judge.
I still don't get the uproar about Leo. What's everyone see in him? The things he says are wrong just about as often as they are correct, he can't interview for shit, and nothing he says/writes is from his own knowledge/experience: it's all scammed/borrowed from other sources.
Leo's "book" is a great example of this, it's a regurgitation of tips/answers from the shows he's on, but researchers or other hosts came up with the answers/tips. Then he consolidates them and looks like a hero.
Other than charisma (read: on-camera goofiness), why is this guy held up as a tech authority so often?
That's so sad, and so funny on so many levels.
It's sad that the guy busted the one of a kind thing, It's funny how ignorant the host was of just how unique that item was.
No, it wasn't an issue of speed, it was that with VM turned on a native PPC application needed less RAM to operate than if VM was turned on.
Turning on VM still slowed things down a bit, especially during swapping.
Working at the Apple call center in the era of the Performas, I had a caller that was complaining their computer was really slow and making a lot of grinding noises.
Turns out in a system with like 16MB of RAM, they'd enabled Virtual Memory for something like 128MB, and then created a RAM disk of 92MB to which the OS was installed and booted.
I don't think the caller ever understood just what the problem was, but we got everything saved and booted to the HD and things were normal again.
For the most part these people are wrong when they say that.
There is no point where replacing disk swap with real RAM will slow things down in an average system, or conversely that using disk swap instead of RAM will speed things up.
If you have 1GB RAM and 1GB swap, then change to 2GB RAM and 0GB swap, the OS will run faster. For one thing, there's a whole chunk of memory management code that doesn't need to run. Second you never have to wait for the relative eternity for data to get to/from disk.
There is one possible exception that involves running mostly idle applications that get swapped out, and a one/ a few very active ones that do a lot of processing on a few files. In this case a swap enabled system could run some tasks faster. Assuming that the apps swapped out run only very infrequently, the space opened up in RAM would allow for more of the large files to be cached and hence accessed faster. But a significant portion of the data would need to fit in RAM, or you'll just wind up going to disk anyway and loosing the swap advantage.
Personally, I don't use swap unless the system just physically can't handle the memory I need or I just can't get it installed at the moment. Once I know what the RAM requirements for the system will be, I configure enough to handle that and disable swap.
One other thing: disabling swap may well let you spin down the hard drives more often, the system is (from my experience) much more tolerant of spin-up delay for accessing normal filesystems than swap.
Hmmm. See that can be dubbed in later from a recording in the theater or the DVD.
Sure they can spot video cameras with night vision equipment, but they can't detect a small microphone connected to a small recorder (like an iPod).
Import the skimmed video and audio in to a video editor and sync the two.
As for who's going to watch a feature film with no audio, perhaps you should run your history books back a few decades and look up silent films. A sound track was so novel, films with such a track were called "talkies", but didn't catch on long term and we reverted to "movies".
Of course, even without the audio the plot and characters would be clearly discernible to competitors.
Because the production of a blockbuster movie tends to be kept a secret up until near the premier. distributed computing provides little to no security.
There's no way a studio could send a scene's model to a compute node encrypted, process it encrypted, store the interim image encrypted, then send the whole mess back encrypted. At some point in processing the information must be in plain computer processable formats.
What that boils down to is that a competing studio could sign up hundreds of compute nodes and get a preview of the story line and animation. Anyone who could gather enough images could piece together clips from the film and release them in full digital format. Imagine a nefarious group of nodes all collecting the images they generate and later piecing them all together in to perfect digital non-DRMed copy of the movie; before release and before the DVD is available.
Hollywood can't stand the idea of people copying DVDs to the internet, could you imagine what they'd think of full film resolution copies of their films floating around? The heads bits: on the walls.
No... this is just a stupid suggestion from the point of view of the studios. At least until there's and OS is produced where a user it prohibited access to certain portions of RAM, and can't intercept the network traffic to/from the box.
With fossile fuels there is no cycle.
I think that is a fundamentally false statement. There is a cycle but it's on a geologic and not a human time scale.
The Earth is essentially a closed system as far as anything but solar energy is concerned.** If it's on/in Earth now, it has probably been here for a long long time. If there is carbon in the oil, then that carbon was in the biosphere at some point.
There was a period where carbon was freely abundant, then it started to coalesce in to plants and animals, now we are starting to liberate it all again. I'm guessing that when we've died off as a species, the carbon will again coalesce. In a few million more years some other species (or nature) will begin the release portion of the cycle again, by natural process, meteor would strike, or the actions of some new species.
**Yes I know the Earth is constantly bombarded with material from space, and we humans have started sending more and more material off world from whence it will never return. But on the whole, the mass of compounds on the planet remains unchanged. I don't know how to start compensating for the energy we radiate from the planet in the form of radio waves or what other minute flows there may be.
True if we all stopped eating meat there would be far fewer emissions of methane, one of the claimed greenhouse gasses and a lot more land on which to grow cleaner, more efficient fuel crops.
It varies by who is trying to press which point.
80% efficient could mean (among other things):
the volume or mass is converted in to useable product
the percentage of energy extracted/preserved for later use
the plant uses 20% of the energy it produces to maintain operations
you get back 80% of the cost of the raw materials when you sell the end product
No, I don't go out of my way to do this, but I do attempt to correct it when I see such things. I do have a very low tolerance for linguistic abuse. I prefer that when having a technical discussion, the writers/speakers stick to dictionary and literal meanings for words, terms and phrases.
If this is supposed to be science then it should be objective, not subjective.
A doctor tells two people: "Nothing to drink for at least 12 hours."
Person A goes home and doesn't consume any liquids for 12 hours
Person B goes home and drinks all the water and soda-pop they want
Person B winds up in the emergency room, turns out person B thought the doctor meant no beer for 12 hours.
This is what colloquialisms do to our language. Instead of making things clearer and easier to understand, it makes things more confusing and open to different interpretations. If you can't tell people what you really mean, then why tell them anything?
All fossil fuels have 0 net effect on CO2, all that CO2 came from the Earth's atmosphere at some point.
I think you need to qualify your statement above. There may not be enough acreage farmed today to replace fossil fuels with current technology, I will grant you that.
But...
You seem to be basing your statements upon continuing to use the existing internal combustion engine technology, running on gasoline type fuels, that after almost 100 years of development is still only about 35% efficient. Changing the fuel sources and the fuel consumption mechanism combined would most likely provide enough efficiency to provide our energy needs. As it is, something like 35% of our harvested crops are never consumed and rot in solos and storage facilities.
This was about a 2 page reply, and I'm going to shorten it to just offer this: I just purchased a brand new VW TDI (1.8l diesel). It's averaging about 42mpg with a lot of city driving. Running it on biodiesel is cleaner and would be much cheaper with mass production. As you stated, the government needs to push this fuel instead of alcohol.. most al existing diesel engines can run on 100%bd, there are almost no gasoline engines that can run on 100% alcohol without essentially rebuilding the engine.
I don't understand then... when is the cutoff time between absorption and liberation for something being considered "carbon neutral".
It's apparently somewhere between a week and a few million years.
This is a realistic question and I'm not trying to be sarcastic. When people choose arbitrary cutoff points to create categories of things, I'm always interested in why those points were chosen and why exactly I'm supposed to think they are of any significance.
All carbon containing fuels we consume/burn on this planet took that carbon from the atmosphere/planet. When we use the fuel we liberate that carbon. All fossil fuels are carbon neutral.
My understanding is that the US has a total oil consumption of about 20mbd, about 40% of that is supplied from foreign markets. I'm more certain of the former, and less of the latter, number.
Because TCP utilizes above-ground organic waste streams to produce a new energy source, it also has the potential to arrest global warming by reducing the use of fossil fuels... ...TCP produces no emissions and no secondary hazardous waste streams...
Assuming that the world is warming (as opposed to just rebalancing the heat in the ecosystem) and that warming is due to the humans burning fossil fuels. It's not just fossil fuels that cause the supposed greenhouse gasses, burning wood and other plants also produces many of the gases as does simply decomposition. The fuels produced here would do the same as they make direct reference to them being hydrocarbons.
That is just absurd. If the plant has no emissions then what's all this talk about steam and a fuel product, are they not emitted by the plant? Of course the article author misquoted, going back one more step to the original text: TCP produces no uncontrollable emissions
You don't know who ConAgra is do you? These are the people who are just about solely responsible for the addition of ethanol to gasoline. ConAgra (and I think Arthur Daniels Midland: ADM) lobbied hard for those requirements.
See.. they had a whole lot of land they couldn't use profitably under then current government farm subsidies, so they came up with a way to grow corn and turn it in to an automotive fuel required by law.
They get paid a farm subsidy to grow corn, then they are paid a federal clean-air subsidy for creating a clean-air fuel, then they sell that fuel at full market price to gasoline blenders. It's quite the cash cow.
You as a consumer are actually paying well over the listed pump price for gasoline because of these hidden payments.
There are files that simply never change size, and once written don't get overwritten. (Type 1). Most programs are actually type 1...
Except that simply isn't true. Today's programs are large entities which are updated rather often (the ship first, debug later syndrome). There are programs on my computer that are updated more often than the files I view with them.
Ex: on my Mac, I used iTunes to rip my CDs. I've updated iTunes I think 4 times now, but those AAC rips haven't changed yet. iTunes is probably more "fragmented" than the files it access.
Not to rip on MS, but I do find their OS installation process to be particularly odd. I think it's the only OS I've installed where the disk is significantly fragmented in files and free space after a fresh install. Then, it's the only major OS that does it's install from a live copy of itself on the HD being installed to. GNU/Linux, MacOS and Solaris all install from some other media (bootable CD or network,or another HD) to an otherwise idle volume. Not to say that these other OSes have an optimized volume after install.
There used to be several disk access optimizations
Vendors used to do interleaving with the format/fdisk commands I recall. The idea was that writing the sectors in a continuous stream was not very efficient as the drives of the time could not move data to or from the disk so quickly. You'd read sector 1, and by the time you were ready to read sector two, sector 3 was under the head, so you had to wait almost an entire disk revolution to find sector 2 again.
The interleave told the OS to skip X physical disk sectors for each 1 logical sector.
For example, assume a disk with 12 sectors on a track such that when stationary the disk's sectors align with the hours on a clock face. With interleave of 3 the OS would put sector 1 at 1:00, sector 2 at 4:00, sector 3 at 7:00, sector 4 at 10:00, sector 5 at 2:00, and so on. The OS would occasionally skip more than the "interleave" number of sectors in order to not overwrite previous sectors. This meant that by the time that logical sector 1 was read and transferred to the computer, logical sector 2 would just about be under the heads for reading, thus eliminating or at least minimizing the rotational latency.
Another big advantage was placing the directory structures in the middle tracks of the drive. This minimized the longest seek that would have to be performed. Unless a single file was very large or in just the wrong spot, it would usually be positioned completely on the inside or outside half of the tracks. After reading, the head only had to move at most half way across the disk to locate the next file or cluster/fragment to read or write; the again at most 1/2 the disk to perform the next operation.
Most of today's file systems start placing directory/catalog information at the start of the disk, this effectively doubling average seek times to the data stored on the disk.
As others mentioned, on some "faster" drives, there were filesystems that essentially treated the platters in a drive as individual units and managed then like a RAID 0, a RAIP so to speak (Redundant Array of Independent Platters).
File fragmentation in today's fast, large buffer drives is, I think, the least of our worries. Fragmented or not we need more optimization of data structures on the drive. I'd rather have related files fragmented and near-by each other than contiguous and spread evenly across the drive.
Exactly. This was just another in a long line of errors on the part of that show.
Other problems:
There wasn't a human holding the phone so grounding was not the same as person.
The environment in the box was static: there was no wind to aid in vapor moving in to the cell phone
Their lack of attention to detail aside, I still don't think a cell phone will set off an explosion at a fuel pump in anything but the most extreme conditions:
You must have put the nozzle in the filler tube incorrectly, thus allowing large amounts of vapor to escape
You must be standing VERY close to the tank filler opening
The cell phone must have some mechanism for generating a significant spark, most probably a flaw or broken component.
You must operate the phone in such a manner as to cause that spark.
To me... you deserve what you get if you stand in an atmosphere that smells of gasoline fumes and operate any potentially sparking or fire producing device.