Why is this unsustainable? Those rates aren't all that amazing.
I checked out Packet8 and I noticed that even after paying twenty bucks a month calls from the US to Taiwan are still five cents a minute. That's not so special.
Using a calling card and a modem to auto-dial I can quite conveniently call to the States from Taiwan for about twelve cents a minute and there's no monthly charge at all. If you're going to talk for less than a few hours a month, that's still cheaper.
Let's see, twenty bucks, I'd have to call the US at least four each hours a month just to reach the minimum payment.
So apparently unsustainable telecoms plans have already been around for a long time.
That was what I was going to say, but I knew if I kept reading I'd find someone else saying it because it's just too obvious.
Perhaps I'll be proven all wrong, but watching the markets over the last few months it seems a bit odd how there's all these sudden rushes where the Dow jumps a hundred points in the first few minutes of every other few trading days and just languishes or slightly drops most of the rest of the time. It sure seems like there's a big concerted push to get past that Dow10K point before cashing in and riding the next one down.
I mean techs and telecoms and now on-line music? It seems beyond irrational and into blatantly manipulation. I still don't see any good reason to upgrade these old 400Mhz machines and yet I'm hearing about the natural upgrade cycle for those ancient 1Ghz dinosaurs. WTF? And music sales are the hot new thing after years of free for all downloding and CD burning? I'm utterly baffled.
I bet you anything that what happened was those companies bought the XP hype about how the new Windows would never crash again and now that we're well into the XP life cycle they've woken up to the fact that it was just more hype. Gave IIS a nice a little bump for a bit though.
I've seen a lot of the same thing at the consumer level where people who used to ask me for help all the time went ahead and bought XP despite my forewarnings and ended up getting bit as soon as the RPC bugs started flying. It turned out to be a good thing though because this more recent round of failed hype seems to have made people more willing to try a non-Windows alternatives to applications like Explorer if not moving them all the way to a Linux desktop.
I bet the estimates on the numbers of people using Firebird in place of IE are way too low.
It's true that any irritation can cause cancer, but it's the nitrosamines that occur any time you burn a protein in the presnece of nitrogen that are specifcally carcinogenic in tobacco smoke.
For many years I thought that this meant that chewing tobacco was harmless --and I still chew tobacco regularly-- but just a few years ago I looked into making my own and I found to my dismay that the rich flavor of chewing tobacco comes from smoke curing. So, although you're not lighting it up, it is bathed in thick smoke for weeks on end and hence has a thick gooey, and yummy, coating of nitroamines which are definitely carcinogenic.
So, you're right it's not the nicotine, but there is a genuine cancer causing agent in smoke and "smokeless tobacco" which turns out to be a rather bad case of mislabeling because it should properly be called "smoke cured tobacco."
But I still chew tobacco and smoke on occasion. However, I spend a lot of my spare time researching stem cell therapies because I know I'm eventually going to need some replacements.
I think tobacco is an awesome all-American product and I love it. I just wish we could convince our fellow Americans that somatic cell nuclear transfer stem cell therapy was also a good thing. Then we'd have two killer new product lines. Now that's how you boost GDP.
Hold on there you two. It's a desert topping AND a floor polish.
I mean those are two totally different environments, but I think the grandparent post raises a really interesting point from the software side which is the "special edition" Linux software we're seeing from Oracle, IBM and mow apparently Maya as well that supposedly only works with RedHat.
I'm not going to pretend to know the specifics of how this works, or if it really even does work, but I do think it's an interesting development.
I have to agree with Mr. DSL's position that for a device developer a free as in beer Linux distro makes sense all around, but in the software world it's definitely a more complicated issue because many software firms are in a delicate position when they start playing around with a Linux version of their wares.
My personal beliefs on the issue are mostly in line with the FSF, but at the same time I think these "special edition" apps are not necessarily a bad thing for the time being and it goes back to the branding issue. I don't really think Oracle's product is all that much better than open source databases. So, getting Oracle on Linux even in this halfass manner is still a great start because now three years down the road when you switch to an open database on Debian it's hardly a noticeable change compared to going from Win2K/Oracle straight to an open solution.
It may seem an absurd proposition to many, but for decision makers in large corporations it might be almost impossible to imagine value without a dollar figure attatched to it. I would take this idea further than just large corporations and say that many people have this inability to appreciate things that aren't paid for, but that's getting onto a much broader topic.
Suffice it to say, RedHat is playing the corporate game and best wishes to them. They may not be in the mainstream of GNU/Linux much longer --if they ever were-- but let's allow them to alienate themselves slowly on their own terms. A divorce over deeply held values often ends with one party coming out far ahead without even trying and the other getting trashed by getting just the thing they desperately coveted after. And as has been pointed out so many times, Debian rocks their asses anyway.
In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production
Karl Marx The Communist Manifesto
Here's the problem with these paid services.
on
Napster Pre-Paid Cards
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I cranked up Kazaa yesterday to see what the numbers looked like. I saw 4.1 million.
Well, back when I used to check in more frequently a few months ago I rarely saw it that high. I tried some searches and it seems it's all more or less back where it was.
So, this shock and awe thing seems like a memory already. I mean what even happened to the first batch. As far as I can the majority settled for a few grand and then a whole bunch decided to fight. Well, where's the shock and awe in that? Obviously people are going to wait to see what happens in the courts. But in the mean time they're going to forget about it.
It would have been one thing if it started as a hundred suits followed by a thousand and then by ten thousand. That would have done something. But this 200 every two months is not all that shocking or awe worthy.
But of course that would also have provoked even more congressional attention. So either way they were fucked which is what evrybody said from the beginning and now it still seems to be true.
"We have measured total signal-to-noise ratio, on a cheap television, at approximately 45 dB, or between 7 and 8 bits of resolution"
Hmm. I love 8 bit mods, but I doubt this system sounds too hot. It also sounded like it was mono at this point. If that was the case, I'd say the students at MIT would be better off just downloading stuff that is high quality and freely available without restrictions. There's plenty of it.
On the other hand, I check Kazaa the other day and I noticed that there's still about four million users. Maybe they rigged up the counter.
I do too. When you've got big huge directories and you were looking at them in a file manager arranged by size or extension it's a bummer if the file chooser doesn't let you go back and find your file in the context that you remember using it.
However, the more detailed view with a few more tabs across the top could also be done as a right click perhaps. That way people who wanted it could have it and other wouldn't know it was there. Also, to be able to resize the thing when you use the detailed view can be a real breath of fresh air. But again, it could be that the dialogue doesn't allow you to resize unless you right click and request a detailed view.
Of course this would be even better. But you know --one step at a time.
I was hoping they had some artificial plasma as well. That would be miraculous and a real cost saver. But it would also be asking a bit much. The plasma is where all the interesting proteins hide, so it probably will never be suited to a dried form. But if it does get figured out, whoa look out. That will probably be about the same time somebody pinpoints the mechanism behind reprogramming after nuclear transfer. With an endless supply of human serum and flawless regprogramming, we'll be in for a brave new world!
Praise Ford and pass the soma. This is totally pneumatic.
A gas tax rather than an income tax, how amusing.
on
The End of the Oil Age
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· Score: 1
Those guys at the Economist are always good for a laugh. No, really, it's a fun mag. I love it.
I'm not painting the whole place with a broad brush because they bring in opinions from all sides. You've got to take it one article at a time.
Dear Sirs:
I notice your solution to America's dependence on gasoline includes the idea of a gas tax. It's an interesting solution that has the virtue of seeming logical on the face of it.
However, a gas tax is a tax on consumption that would affect those at the lowest income levels as much, if not more, than those at higher income levels. As we know, consumption taxes are not in that category of taxes described by Marx as progressive.
If increasing government revenues is the answer, then perhaps we should consider a fairer form of taxation in order to extract those monies in an equitable manner.
I haven't heard that one, but I will confess that I believe some interesting technologies have been tried first in nuclear.
One that really caught my attention was the French pebble reactor design using helium as a heat exchange medium. That opened my eyes the the idea that there are probably many binary turbine cogeneration designs that haven't been tried that might work with helium as a medium instead of a liquid. So often it seems the problem with heat exchange over large areas or relatively low heat is that you lose all your efficiency to the pump.
This was one of the major issues at the SEGS solar parabolic plants in the California desert. They started at 13MW and it wasn't until they had reworked all the piping to eliminate sharp bends that were working the pumps too hard that they were able to get the efficiency where they were willing to invest in an 80MW plant. They've currently got 380MW total installed.
Can you imagine? 380MW from solar using nothing but mirrors. And it's not even government funded. They got a few rebates similar to what homeowners get and the utilities gave them a good tie-in deal, but it's definitely not a government project. It's for-profit all the way.
I thought they had decided they weren't going to build any more, but I was just over there looking at the TroughNet home page and apparently it's still quite active and they imply they're going to keep adding more although they're not clear about the dates.
I've followed that project for awhile, and you wouldn't believe how little practical issues like the radius on the bend of a pipe can make a huge difference. I was quite amused when a few year back I saw an update that expalined they had "discovered" that they got better results with monstrous mirrors like twenty five feet in diameter. Well to me that seems obvious and yet it was like a major breakthrough that had never been tried.
It makes me quite curious as to whether a collector of a certain design might make the whole thing much more efficient using hydrogen as the heat exchanger instead of what they're using now which I believe is a type of dense oil field sludge.
So, it's not that we should just ignore nuclear power and all the great design ideas that have come out of it. Hydrogen heat exchange is perahps not even a great example, but there are others like the cooling towers. That's a fission nuke original design and it's classic engineering.
And a part of me thinks the ideas of using mukes for mining is kinda cool. I wondered as a kid why we didn't just ignite nukes under the surface of the earth in a cavern filled with water to create a giant high pressure steam ball that could run turbogenerators on the surface. It's fun to imagine what you could do with all that power.
I'm not anti-tech by any means. In fact, I boycott non-genetically engineered soy. I make my own tofu and soy milk, but I won't buy them damn organic beans till hell freezes over. I want my beans genetically modified and I will be glad to fight to support the right to cloning. Nothing pisses me off like these anti-cloning sons of bitches. So, I'm madly pro-technology in ways that I know others feel passionately about. But I'm still anti-nuke.
Well perhaps it's just a difference between living on credit and wanting to pay for things up front. I think we should avoid things that cost more when they're trash than when they're brand now.
I agree there probably are ways and means of disposing of radioactive waste that are permanent and safe. The question is what are the costs and at what point in the life cycle of the product do those costs come due. It's still an economic issue rather than a technical one per se.
I'm from the other side of the fence. I literally grew up protesting nukes and one of the formative experiences of my childhood was the march against Diablo Canyon on the Central Coast of California which ended up being the last full scale nuclear power plant built in the US because of the size and strenghth of the protests that I participated in as a child.
But as if that wasn't enough, my dad was a nuclear engineer. Well I guess he still is, but he quit in disgust from his early career as a civilian contractor for nuclear subs because he saw first hand what was happening with the waste in the military.
So, yeah we'll just agree to disagree, but I'm not fanatical about it despite my background. In fact, I get my power at a highly reduced rate specifically because I live so close to a great big plant called the Taiwan Number Five nuclear power plant. I'm an expat American living way up here in the jungled hills on the North Coast of Taiwan.
Speaking of which, let me cut out with a little story from Taiwan. I refused to believe this when I first heard it, but finally I saw enough news clippings about it that I was convinced it was true. You'll just have to take my word for it.
In the sixties, Taiwan built an experimental plant with US help that they kept quiet about. Well, there was an incident and it's not clear how bad the incident was, but the reactors were damaged and the cores removed. The buildings were all left standing though. Well, years later some locals started breaking into the site which was fenced off, but wasn't clearly marked for what it was as it was supposed to be a confidential deal. What they did was rip steel from the building to sell to scrap metal dealers.
Well, this radioactive steel was reccled into rebar, beams and sheets and subsequently used to build buildings in Taiwan. And when the truth was finally revealed as to the nature of the site that had been scavenged, it was already like fifteen years later like in the late eighties. So, they went around town and checked the buildings with a geiger counter and sure enough a whole bunch of buidlings built from a certain time period were radioactive and it was the metal reinforcement that was causing it. Law suits ensued and they're still dragging on today and nobody really knows what the effects were or who should be responsible.
So, perhaps something like this will never happen again if we decide that nukes are just no problem. And I'm sure the military has changed their policies about what they do with those "clean and safe" cores and all that contaminated piping and ductwork after those reactors turn thirty. I doubt they just dump it in the ocean anymore. Oops, I wouldn't really know about that, would I? But you get my point. I'm not wildly terrified of radiation and I have no doubt that mild exposure to radiation is no more dangerous than the rays of the sun or the air that we breathe, but I think it's not cool to be optomistic the long term clean up of something that's going to need to be cared for more when it's thirty years old and a burden than when it's new and profitable.
Now fusion, hey great. I'm all for it. I'm not anti-tech. I'm just opposed to something that is hyped when there's money and then the actual bill comes due thirty years down the line. I think that's a bad idea. I don't buy things on credit either though. So, I suppose we can just agree to disagree.
I think the people who pay bucks for CCD products are going to be bummed when they realize in a few months that 1.3MPixel CMOS is going to be hitting the shelves as early as the beginning of next year.
The Taiwan trade mags have had a lot about how the 1.3MP CMOS is already in full swing and they're starting on the 3MP.
It's also important to keep in mind a type of turbine operation often referred to as binary. This allows you to use lower overall operating temperatures but retain the efficiency of a turbine. The gist of it is that instead of insisting on using steam, you use a heat exchanger and the turbine itself uses something with a lower vapor pressure like pentane. Small geothermal units that come in a shipping container and can be delivered just as easily as this nuclear plant already use this system. You don't need any particularly high tech equipment to set them up. It's old technology it's just not competitive with wholesale fossil fuel prices. But neither is nuclear when you factor in disposal costs.
Binary turbine systems are used in conjunction with all sorts of thermal renewables. There's a commerical package using a binary system with solar parabolic troughs from Australia that uses just a few hundred square yards of cheap aluminum mirrors to power a 250Kw generator. The solar concentrator news list was full of plans for small home built units a few years back. Most of the problems revolved around safety issues of inexperienced and ill equipped backyard amateurs boiling hydrocarbons under pressure. But it's certainly doable if you've got enough of a budget to enable you to build with decent safety specs or buy an existing commercial package of which there are many. Hitatchi wants to use this to get subsidies so they can stomp on these renewable startups. Don't support that crap.
There are, indeed, big geothermal fields north of the area. You can get a map from a PDF published by a government agency called NREL called "The Status and Future of Geothermal Energy."
However, that map emphasizes the low hanging fruit. Your comment about digging through the crust is misleading. There's no reason to dig all the way through the crust to reach rock heated sufficiently for the production of steam.
The obstacle to geothermal is always the same old stale argument about competing with fossil fuels and start up costs. But here we have 20 million to play with and the determination to get rid of fossil fuels.
Conventional oil drilling techniques can reach hot rocks in most locations.
I think the point is, the local people didn't really consider this, Hitachi brought it up. They weren't looking at is as, we've got twenty mill and how can we spend it. They were looking at it as hmm, free twenty mill.
But solar, wind, hydro, gas turbine, biomass, geothermal, are all totally impractical. Yeah I realize it's Alaska and they don't get much sun in the Winter, but that's quite a budget.
I haven't been to Galena, but I've been a few hours north of Anchorage by plane and is seems that the interior of Alaska is riddled with rivers and dense tundra that grows so thick in the summertime you can hardly walk.
Maybe they could burn all those damn mosquitoes.
I bet ya they bring in the diesel on boats by river. The place has more rivers than wisconsin. Now I agree hydro sucks too and there's the freezing in the winter. But in the summer it would be fine.
Nonthless, with $20 million in the budget I don't see why geothermal is out of reach. For all the nuke fetishist this ought to be close enough. After all, it's just another form of nuclear energy, right?
I check both the links and the tornado in a can story was cute. Scaling stuff up or down and trying new geometries always makes for fun and innovation. But I sincerely think the problem is not technological here. In fact, it's the opposite problem --the technology has been nailed down so well that you can't beat it using conventional economic measures of success.
The idea of increasing efficiency can't beat itself. Chemical engineers spent the entire twentieth century perfecting efficiency in industrial scale materials production. It's not like they were a bunch of slouches. They did a hell of a job. Now the challenge is supposed to be about finding a way to conquer the back side, destruction, but the it's supposed to be done using the same rules of what constitutes success, ie, it's got to pay off. That was what the Torndao-in-a-Can article seemed to be emphasizing.
I think the assumption that you can always improve the efficiency of a system is a bit of blind faith. That's especially true when you're adding a whole new level of compexity to the system but using the values of a simpler system to determine what constitutes sucssess or failure. In the past, success was measured in terms production and the overall systemic effects were largely ignored. When it comes to industries like petroleum, this is still true. But there were lessons in the twentieth century where the nees to see the systemic effects became quite apparetn. Certainly nuclear power comes to mind, there was an awakening as nuclear power plants got older that you've got to take account of the clean up as well as the initial costs.
In the case of nuclear power you could say alright, it costs too much overall so we're just going to dump it. But recycling plastics is a bit different. Plastics are so ingrained on our lives. I think that's great. Plastics are wonderful and I use them extensively. However, when you start to take the systemic perspective on something like plastics it's really troubling to address in a win-win way that allows you to say --see, the markets will take care of everything with their ultra-productive new technology. I don't believe it's as simple as that.
So getting back to the corn discs, the whole thing is not such a big deal, the existing discs could be recycled for much less than the mark-up for this silly plan. But somebody has to be accountable for those costs as small as they might be. And holding businesses accoutable for systemic costs is not something that America seems to want to do these days.
There are quite a few systems in fact. I've seen pictures of plants designed in Germany that can de-polymerize PET with nothing but steam.
The unfortunate part is that even though this is a cheap and environmentally benign process compared to the other recycling alternatives, it's still not cheap compared to virgin PET resin because a lot of chemical manufacturing systems are designed to produce PET as a by-product. So, in a way even the new stuff is recycled in a manner of speaking.
Clearly the biggest problem for many recycled materials is that we're already living in an economy of excess. The myth is that the market will take care of everything, but the fact is that even the incredibly cheap and environmentally friendly recycling practices will never be able to compete with wholesale prices on virgin materials because they're excess from the beginning.
I tried to buy a few tons of recycled PET pellets in China for a building project I was planning. The people I called all told me I was throwing my money away buying recycled pellets because virgin pellets were far cheaper. I was told there's been a glut on the market for years.
It's a funny situation and in a way it's a mirror of what's going on in IT. The problem is abundance. Logically, that shouldn't be a problem, it should be a blessing rather than a curse. Clearly we need to re-think the management at the macro level.
But I'll stay off the soap box and just say yeah the idea of drilling for gas in dumps and using microturbines is a wonderful form of recycling. Another use for those same style microturbines would be to scavenge gas out of non-productive oil wells. They work on really low gas pressure. Unfortunately, for historical and political reasons there are a lot of barriers to BLM land leases in the States where there are many inactive wells.
This goes without saying. It's easy to equate the two because they're both typically used as slurs. This is like coming up with the theory that all assholes are motherfuckers. Hmm, it could be the case. Who's to say for sure. It certainly looks like something that could use some statistics to clear things up.
According to recent scientific research by scientist it has been proven scientifically that over 82 percent of assholes are also motherfuckers. In a similar study it was proven to.9937 degree of accuracy that many sonsofbitches are fucked up.
Further studies are ongoing.
It's quite possible to recycle polycarbonate CDs back into like-new monomer. All it takes is an anaerobic environment and microwave energy. All sorts of plastics can be almost completely recycled in this way. The catch is obviously the cost. But on a large scale, there's no way it would add the kinds of costs they're talking about with these corn discs.
So, all this plan does is attempt to shift costs to the consumer. It's not like you can't recycle polycarbonate, it's just nobody wants to pick up that bill. If you create a big centralized facility and ask who's going to cover the costs the manufacturer is going to get stuck with it. So if you market an even more expensive alternative with something that the consumer can easily identify with like corn, you can try to sucker them into bailing your industry out of its own responsibilities.
But I doubt consumers are as foolish as the industry hopes.
If we're talking about the solid state lasers, which the article emphaisized, then you'd think that countries big in semiconductor manufacturing would be following close behind. The technology for growing big synthetic lasing crystals is very similar to that used to create silicon for chips. As far as that goes, I've read that China's chip fabs are unusual in that some of them have their furnaces in the same compounds as the fabs.
Sure, most of China's fabs were laid out by european contractors, but that's where the technology is now.
And didn't we just read not too long ago about all these advances in the production of massive synthetic diamonds that originated in Russia.
I don't find this synthetic crystal monopoly theory too convincing.
Well, let's just hope they all get used for fission power or mining or manufacturing instead of frying innocent civilians in ultra high power long range "surgical strikes."
Thanks, I was stretching the association a bit but I appreciate the props either way.
As for drug lab on-a-chip If you have time try Googling capillary electrochromatography. It's the next step in chromatography and these days it's being used for large scale purification and separation, not just analysis, of all sorts of things. There's a quiet revolution going on in chemical engineering and it's happening at a small scale. The DEA is already using it to try and find similarities between batches of speed. That's analytical obviously, but it can be used in separations and it is, even in the food industry.
I'm sure before we see the pocket amphetamine chip we'll hear about the new superdrugs that will come from people cleaning up their speed using high pressure CEC. All a dealer has to do is take his lousy unsaleable product and filter it into pharmaceutical grade. Can even do chiral separations. That aint no country bumpkin biker meth baby.
What happens is that as you shrink the scale of the lab work you can take advantage of commodity electronics like laser diodes. At a micro scale, a tiny laser is relatively high powered. Now you have cost effective means of doing volume analyses and separations that are traditionally way too pricey for the underground market.
Instead of carrying around an ounce of junk that will get him five years, a dealer would be able to have the same potency in a few grams. There are real financial and legal motivations for such people to be ahead of the technology curve and you can bet some of them probably are.
But as far as I'm concerned, these are all positive developments. The drug laws are all wrong and clean drugs are all right. Just ask Rush Limbaugh.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is this unsustainable? Those rates aren't all that amazing.
I checked out Packet8 and I noticed that even after paying twenty bucks a month calls from the US to Taiwan are still five cents a minute. That's not so special.
Using a calling card and a modem to auto-dial I can quite conveniently call to the States from Taiwan for about twelve cents a minute and there's no monthly charge at all. If you're going to talk for less than a few hours a month, that's still cheaper.
Let's see, twenty bucks, I'd have to call the US at least four each hours a month just to reach the minimum payment.
So apparently unsustainable telecoms plans have already been around for a long time.
That was what I was going to say, but I knew if I kept reading I'd find someone else saying it because it's just too obvious.
Perhaps I'll be proven all wrong, but watching the markets over the last few months it seems a bit odd how there's all these sudden rushes where the Dow jumps a hundred points in the first few minutes of every other few trading days and just languishes or slightly drops most of the rest of the time. It sure seems like there's a big concerted push to get past that Dow10K point before cashing in and riding the next one down.
I mean techs and telecoms and now on-line music? It seems beyond irrational and into blatantly manipulation. I still don't see any good reason to upgrade these old 400Mhz machines and yet I'm hearing about the natural upgrade cycle for those ancient 1Ghz dinosaurs. WTF? And music sales are the hot new thing after years of free for all downloding and CD burning? I'm utterly baffled.
I bet you anything that what happened was those companies bought the XP hype about how the new Windows would never crash again and now that we're well into the XP life cycle they've woken up to the fact that it was just more hype. Gave IIS a nice a little bump for a bit though.
I've seen a lot of the same thing at the consumer level where people who used to ask me for help all the time went ahead and bought XP despite my forewarnings and ended up getting bit as soon as the RPC bugs started flying. It turned out to be a good thing though because this more recent round of failed hype seems to have made people more willing to try a non-Windows alternatives to applications like Explorer if not moving them all the way to a Linux desktop.
I bet the estimates on the numbers of people using Firebird in place of IE are way too low.
It's true that any irritation can cause cancer, but it's the nitrosamines that occur any time you burn a protein in the presnece of nitrogen that are specifcally carcinogenic in tobacco smoke.
For many years I thought that this meant that chewing tobacco was harmless --and I still chew tobacco regularly-- but just a few years ago I looked into making my own and I found to my dismay that the rich flavor of chewing tobacco comes from smoke curing. So, although you're not lighting it up, it is bathed in thick smoke for weeks on end and hence has a thick gooey, and yummy, coating of nitroamines which are definitely carcinogenic.
So, you're right it's not the nicotine, but there is a genuine cancer causing agent in smoke and "smokeless tobacco" which turns out to be a rather bad case of mislabeling because it should properly be called "smoke cured tobacco."
But I still chew tobacco and smoke on occasion. However, I spend a lot of my spare time researching stem cell therapies because I know I'm eventually going to need some replacements.
I think tobacco is an awesome all-American product and I love it. I just wish we could convince our fellow Americans that somatic cell nuclear transfer stem cell therapy was also a good thing. Then we'd have two killer new product lines. Now that's how you boost GDP.
Hold on there you two. It's a desert topping AND a floor polish.
I mean those are two totally different environments, but I think the grandparent post raises a really interesting point from the software side which is the "special edition" Linux software we're seeing from Oracle, IBM and mow apparently Maya as well that supposedly only works with RedHat.
I'm not going to pretend to know the specifics of how this works, or if it really even does work, but I do think it's an interesting development.
I have to agree with Mr. DSL's position that for a device developer a free as in beer Linux distro makes sense all around, but in the software world it's definitely a more complicated issue because many software firms are in a delicate position when they start playing around with a Linux version of their wares.
My personal beliefs on the issue are mostly in line with the FSF, but at the same time I think these "special edition" apps are not necessarily a bad thing for the time being and it goes back to the branding issue. I don't really think Oracle's product is all that much better than open source databases. So, getting Oracle on Linux even in this halfass manner is still a great start because now three years down the road when you switch to an open database on Debian it's hardly a noticeable change compared to going from Win2K/Oracle straight to an open solution.
It may seem an absurd proposition to many, but for decision makers in large corporations it might be almost impossible to imagine value without a dollar figure attatched to it. I would take this idea further than just large corporations and say that many people have this inability to appreciate things that aren't paid for, but that's getting onto a much broader topic.
Suffice it to say, RedHat is playing the corporate game and best wishes to them. They may not be in the mainstream of GNU/Linux much longer --if they ever were-- but let's allow them to alienate themselves slowly on their own terms. A divorce over deeply held values often ends with one party coming out far ahead without even trying and the other getting trashed by getting just the thing they desperately coveted after. And as has been pointed out so many times, Debian rocks their asses anyway.
I propose the historical cycle is broken.
In these crises, there breaks out an epidemic that, in all earlier epochs, would have seemed an absurdity -- the epidemic of over-production
Karl Marx
The Communist Manifesto
I cranked up Kazaa yesterday to see what the numbers looked like. I saw 4.1 million.
Well, back when I used to check in more frequently a few months ago I rarely saw it that high. I tried some searches and it seems it's all more or less back where it was.
So, this shock and awe thing seems like a memory already. I mean what even happened to the first batch. As far as I can the majority settled for a few grand and then a whole bunch decided to fight. Well, where's the shock and awe in that? Obviously people are going to wait to see what happens in the courts. But in the mean time they're going to forget about it.
It would have been one thing if it started as a hundred suits followed by a thousand and then by ten thousand. That would have done something. But this 200 every two months is not all that shocking or awe worthy.
But of course that would also have provoked even more congressional attention. So either way they were fucked which is what evrybody said from the beginning and now it still seems to be true.
"We have measured total signal-to-noise ratio, on a cheap television, at approximately 45 dB, or between 7 and 8 bits of resolution"
Hmm. I love 8 bit mods, but I doubt this system sounds too hot. It also sounded like it was mono at this point. If that was the case, I'd say the students at MIT would be better off just downloading stuff that is high quality and freely available without restrictions. There's plenty of it.
On the other hand, I check Kazaa the other day and I noticed that there's still about four million users. Maybe they rigged up the counter.
I do too. When you've got big huge directories and you were looking at them in a file manager arranged by size or extension it's a bummer if the file chooser doesn't let you go back and find your file in the context that you remember using it.
However, the more detailed view with a few more tabs across the top could also be done as a right click perhaps. That way people who wanted it could have it and other wouldn't know it was there. Also, to be able to resize the thing when you use the detailed view can be a real breath of fresh air. But again, it could be that the dialogue doesn't allow you to resize unless you right click and request a detailed view.
Of course this would be even better. But you know --one step at a time.
I was hoping they had some artificial plasma as well. That would be miraculous and a real cost saver. But it would also be asking a bit much. The plasma is where all the interesting proteins hide, so it probably will never be suited to a dried form. But if it does get figured out, whoa look out. That will probably be about the same time somebody pinpoints the mechanism behind reprogramming after nuclear transfer. With an endless supply of human serum and flawless regprogramming, we'll be in for a brave new world!
Praise Ford and pass the soma. This is totally pneumatic.
Those guys at the Economist are always good for a laugh. No, really, it's a fun mag. I love it.
I'm not painting the whole place with a broad brush because they bring in opinions from all sides. You've got to take it one article at a time.
Dear Sirs:
I notice your solution to America's dependence on gasoline includes the idea of a gas tax. It's an interesting solution that has the virtue of seeming logical on the face of it.
However, a gas tax is a tax on consumption that would affect those at the lowest income levels as much, if not more, than those at higher income levels. As we know, consumption taxes are not in that category of taxes described by Marx as progressive.
If increasing government revenues is the answer, then perhaps we should consider a fairer form of taxation in order to extract those monies in an equitable manner.
I haven't heard that one, but I will confess that I believe some interesting technologies have been tried first in nuclear.
One that really caught my attention was the French pebble reactor design using helium as a heat exchange medium. That opened my eyes the the idea that there are probably many binary turbine cogeneration designs that haven't been tried that might work with helium as a medium instead of a liquid. So often it seems the problem with heat exchange over large areas or relatively low heat is that you lose all your efficiency to the pump.
This was one of the major issues at the SEGS solar parabolic plants in the California desert. They started at 13MW and it wasn't until they had reworked all the piping to eliminate sharp bends that were working the pumps too hard that they were able to get the efficiency where they were willing to invest in an 80MW plant. They've currently got 380MW total installed.
Can you imagine? 380MW from solar using nothing but mirrors. And it's not even government funded. They got a few rebates similar to what homeowners get and the utilities gave them a good tie-in deal, but it's definitely not a government project. It's for-profit all the way.
I thought they had decided they weren't going to build any more, but I was just over there looking at the TroughNet home page and apparently it's still quite active and they imply they're going to keep adding more although they're not clear about the dates.
I've followed that project for awhile, and you wouldn't believe how little practical issues like the radius on the bend of a pipe can make a huge difference. I was quite amused when a few year back I saw an update that expalined they had "discovered" that they got better results with monstrous mirrors like twenty five feet in diameter. Well to me that seems obvious and yet it was like a major breakthrough that had never been tried.
It makes me quite curious as to whether a collector of a certain design might make the whole thing much more efficient using hydrogen as the heat exchanger instead of what they're using now which I believe is a type of dense oil field sludge.
So, it's not that we should just ignore nuclear power and all the great design ideas that have come out of it. Hydrogen heat exchange is perahps not even a great example, but there are others like the cooling towers. That's a fission nuke original design and it's classic engineering.
And a part of me thinks the ideas of using mukes for mining is kinda cool. I wondered as a kid why we didn't just ignite nukes under the surface of the earth in a cavern filled with water to create a giant high pressure steam ball that could run turbogenerators on the surface. It's fun to imagine what you could do with all that power.
I'm not anti-tech by any means. In fact, I boycott non-genetically engineered soy. I make my own tofu and soy milk, but I won't buy them damn organic beans till hell freezes over. I want my beans genetically modified and I will be glad to fight to support the right to cloning. Nothing pisses me off like these anti-cloning sons of bitches. So, I'm madly pro-technology in ways that I know others feel passionately about. But I'm still anti-nuke.
Well perhaps it's just a difference between living on credit and wanting to pay for things up front. I think we should avoid things that cost more when they're trash than when they're brand now.
I agree there probably are ways and means of disposing of radioactive waste that are permanent and safe. The question is what are the costs and at what point in the life cycle of the product do those costs come due. It's still an economic issue rather than a technical one per se.
I'm from the other side of the fence. I literally grew up protesting nukes and one of the formative experiences of my childhood was the march against Diablo Canyon on the Central Coast of California which ended up being the last full scale nuclear power plant built in the US because of the size and strenghth of the protests that I participated in as a child.
But as if that wasn't enough, my dad was a nuclear engineer. Well I guess he still is, but he quit in disgust from his early career as a civilian contractor for nuclear subs because he saw first hand what was happening with the waste in the military.
So, yeah we'll just agree to disagree, but I'm not fanatical about it despite my background. In fact, I get my power at a highly reduced rate specifically because I live so close to a great big plant called the Taiwan Number Five nuclear power plant. I'm an expat American living way up here in the jungled hills on the North Coast of Taiwan.
Speaking of which, let me cut out with a little story from Taiwan. I refused to believe this when I first heard it, but finally I saw enough news clippings about it that I was convinced it was true. You'll just have to take my word for it.
In the sixties, Taiwan built an experimental plant with US help that they kept quiet about. Well, there was an incident and it's not clear how bad the incident was, but the reactors were damaged and the cores removed. The buildings were all left standing though. Well, years later some locals started breaking into the site which was fenced off, but wasn't clearly marked for what it was as it was supposed to be a confidential deal. What they did was rip steel from the building to sell to scrap metal dealers.
Well, this radioactive steel was reccled into rebar, beams and sheets and subsequently used to build buildings in Taiwan. And when the truth was finally revealed as to the nature of the site that had been scavenged, it was already like fifteen years later like in the late eighties. So, they went around town and checked the buildings with a geiger counter and sure enough a whole bunch of buidlings built from a certain time period were radioactive and it was the metal reinforcement that was causing it. Law suits ensued and they're still dragging on today and nobody really knows what the effects were or who should be responsible.
So, perhaps something like this will never happen again if we decide that nukes are just no problem. And I'm sure the military has changed their policies about what they do with those "clean and safe" cores and all that contaminated piping and ductwork after those reactors turn thirty. I doubt they just dump it in the ocean anymore. Oops, I wouldn't really know about that, would I? But you get my point. I'm not wildly terrified of radiation and I have no doubt that mild exposure to radiation is no more dangerous than the rays of the sun or the air that we breathe, but I think it's not cool to be optomistic the long term clean up of something that's going to need to be cared for more when it's thirty years old and a burden than when it's new and profitable.
Now fusion, hey great. I'm all for it. I'm not anti-tech. I'm just opposed to something that is hyped when there's money and then the actual bill comes due thirty years down the line. I think that's a bad idea. I don't buy things on credit either though. So, I suppose we can just agree to disagree.
I think the people who pay bucks for CCD products are going to be bummed when they realize in a few months that 1.3MPixel CMOS is going to be hitting the shelves as early as the beginning of next year.
The Taiwan trade mags have had a lot about how the 1.3MP CMOS is already in full swing and they're starting on the 3MP.
It's also important to keep in mind a type of turbine operation often referred to as binary. This allows you to use lower overall operating temperatures but retain the efficiency of a turbine. The gist of it is that instead of insisting on using steam, you use a heat exchanger and the turbine itself uses something with a lower vapor pressure like pentane. Small geothermal units that come in a shipping container and can be delivered just as easily as this nuclear plant already use this system. You don't need any particularly high tech equipment to set them up. It's old technology it's just not competitive with wholesale fossil fuel prices. But neither is nuclear when you factor in disposal costs.
Binary turbine systems are used in conjunction with all sorts of thermal renewables. There's a commerical package using a binary system with solar parabolic troughs from Australia that uses just a few hundred square yards of cheap aluminum mirrors to power a 250Kw generator. The solar concentrator news list was full of plans for small home built units a few years back. Most of the problems revolved around safety issues of inexperienced and ill equipped backyard amateurs boiling hydrocarbons under pressure. But it's certainly doable if you've got enough of a budget to enable you to build with decent safety specs or buy an existing commercial package of which there are many. Hitatchi wants to use this to get subsidies so they can stomp on these renewable startups. Don't support that crap.
There are, indeed, big geothermal fields north of the area. You can get a map from a PDF published by a government agency called NREL called "The Status and Future of Geothermal Energy."
However, that map emphasizes the low hanging fruit. Your comment about digging through the crust is misleading. There's no reason to dig all the way through the crust to reach rock heated sufficiently for the production of steam.
The obstacle to geothermal is always the same old stale argument about competing with fossil fuels and start up costs. But here we have 20 million to play with and the determination to get rid of fossil fuels.
Conventional oil drilling techniques can reach hot rocks in most locations.
I think the point is, the local people didn't really consider this, Hitachi brought it up. They weren't looking at is as, we've got twenty mill and how can we spend it. They were looking at it as hmm, free twenty mill.
But solar, wind, hydro, gas turbine, biomass, geothermal, are all totally impractical. Yeah I realize it's Alaska and they don't get much sun in the Winter, but that's quite a budget.
I haven't been to Galena, but I've been a few hours north of Anchorage by plane and is seems that the interior of Alaska is riddled with rivers and dense tundra that grows so thick in the summertime you can hardly walk.
Maybe they could burn all those damn mosquitoes.
I bet ya they bring in the diesel on boats by river. The place has more rivers than wisconsin. Now I agree hydro sucks too and there's the freezing in the winter. But in the summer it would be fine.
Nonthless, with $20 million in the budget I don't see why geothermal is out of reach. For all the nuke fetishist this ought to be close enough. After all, it's just another form of nuclear energy, right?
I check both the links and the tornado in a can story was cute. Scaling stuff up or down and trying new geometries always makes for fun and innovation. But I sincerely think the problem is not technological here. In fact, it's the opposite problem --the technology has been nailed down so well that you can't beat it using conventional economic measures of success.
The idea of increasing efficiency can't beat itself. Chemical engineers spent the entire twentieth century perfecting efficiency in industrial scale materials production. It's not like they were a bunch of slouches. They did a hell of a job. Now the challenge is supposed to be about finding a way to conquer the back side, destruction, but the it's supposed to be done using the same rules of what constitutes success, ie, it's got to pay off. That was what the Torndao-in-a-Can article seemed to be emphasizing.
I think the assumption that you can always improve the efficiency of a system is a bit of blind faith. That's especially true when you're adding a whole new level of compexity to the system but using the values of a simpler system to determine what constitutes sucssess or failure. In the past, success was measured in terms production and the overall systemic effects were largely ignored. When it comes to industries like petroleum, this is still true. But there were lessons in the twentieth century where the nees to see the systemic effects became quite apparetn. Certainly nuclear power comes to mind, there was an awakening as nuclear power plants got older that you've got to take account of the clean up as well as the initial costs.
In the case of nuclear power you could say alright, it costs too much overall so we're just going to dump it. But recycling plastics is a bit different. Plastics are so ingrained on our lives. I think that's great. Plastics are wonderful and I use them extensively. However, when you start to take the systemic perspective on something like plastics it's really troubling to address in a win-win way that allows you to say --see, the markets will take care of everything with their ultra-productive new technology. I don't believe it's as simple as that.
So getting back to the corn discs, the whole thing is not such a big deal, the existing discs could be recycled for much less than the mark-up for this silly plan. But somebody has to be accountable for those costs as small as they might be. And holding businesses accoutable for systemic costs is not something that America seems to want to do these days.
There are quite a few systems in fact. I've seen pictures of plants designed in Germany that can de-polymerize PET with nothing but steam.
The unfortunate part is that even though this is a cheap and environmentally benign process compared to the other recycling alternatives, it's still not cheap compared to virgin PET resin because a lot of chemical manufacturing systems are designed to produce PET as a by-product. So, in a way even the new stuff is recycled in a manner of speaking.
Clearly the biggest problem for many recycled materials is that we're already living in an economy of excess. The myth is that the market will take care of everything, but the fact is that even the incredibly cheap and environmentally friendly recycling practices will never be able to compete with wholesale prices on virgin materials because they're excess from the beginning.
I tried to buy a few tons of recycled PET pellets in China for a building project I was planning. The people I called all told me I was throwing my money away buying recycled pellets because virgin pellets were far cheaper. I was told there's been a glut on the market for years.
It's a funny situation and in a way it's a mirror of what's going on in IT. The problem is abundance. Logically, that shouldn't be a problem, it should be a blessing rather than a curse. Clearly we need to re-think the management at the macro level.
But I'll stay off the soap box and just say yeah the idea of drilling for gas in dumps and using microturbines is a wonderful form of recycling. Another use for those same style microturbines would be to scavenge gas out of non-productive oil wells. They work on really low gas pressure. Unfortunately, for historical and political reasons there are a lot of barriers to BLM land leases in the States where there are many inactive wells.
This goes without saying. It's easy to equate the two because they're both typically used as slurs. This is like coming up with the theory that all assholes are motherfuckers. Hmm, it could be the case. Who's to say for sure. It certainly looks like something that could use some statistics to clear things up. .9937 degree of accuracy that many sonsofbitches are fucked up.
According to recent scientific research by scientist it has been proven scientifically that over 82 percent of assholes are also motherfuckers. In a similar study it was proven to
Further studies are ongoing.
It's quite possible to recycle polycarbonate CDs back into like-new monomer. All it takes is an anaerobic environment and microwave energy. All sorts of plastics can be almost completely recycled in this way. The catch is obviously the cost. But on a large scale, there's no way it would add the kinds of costs they're talking about with these corn discs.
So, all this plan does is attempt to shift costs to the consumer. It's not like you can't recycle polycarbonate, it's just nobody wants to pick up that bill. If you create a big centralized facility and ask who's going to cover the costs the manufacturer is going to get stuck with it. So if you market an even more expensive alternative with something that the consumer can easily identify with like corn, you can try to sucker them into bailing your industry out of its own responsibilities.
But I doubt consumers are as foolish as the industry hopes.
If we're talking about the solid state lasers, which the article emphaisized, then you'd think that countries big in semiconductor manufacturing would be following close behind. The technology for growing big synthetic lasing crystals is very similar to that used to create silicon for chips. As far as that goes, I've read that China's chip fabs are unusual in that some of them have their furnaces in the same compounds as the fabs.
Sure, most of China's fabs were laid out by european contractors, but that's where the technology is now.
And didn't we just read not too long ago about all these advances in the production of massive synthetic diamonds that originated in Russia.
I don't find this synthetic crystal monopoly theory too convincing.
Well, let's just hope they all get used for fission power or mining or manufacturing instead of frying innocent civilians in ultra high power long range "surgical strikes."
Thanks, I was stretching the association a bit but I appreciate the props either way.
As for drug lab on-a-chip If you have time try Googling capillary electrochromatography. It's the next step in chromatography and these days it's being used for large scale purification and separation, not just analysis, of all sorts of things. There's a quiet revolution going on in chemical engineering and it's happening at a small scale. The DEA is already using it to try and find similarities between batches of speed. That's analytical obviously, but it can be used in separations and it is, even in the food industry.
I'm sure before we see the pocket amphetamine chip we'll hear about the new superdrugs that will come from people cleaning up their speed using high pressure CEC. All a dealer has to do is take his lousy unsaleable product and filter it into pharmaceutical grade. Can even do chiral separations. That aint no country bumpkin biker meth baby.
What happens is that as you shrink the scale of the lab work you can take advantage of commodity electronics like laser diodes. At a micro scale, a tiny laser is relatively high powered. Now you have cost effective means of doing volume analyses and separations that are traditionally way too pricey for the underground market.
Instead of carrying around an ounce of junk that will get him five years, a dealer would be able to have the same potency in a few grams. There are real financial and legal motivations for such people to be ahead of the technology curve and you can bet some of them probably are.
But as far as I'm concerned, these are all positive developments. The drug laws are all wrong and clean drugs are all right. Just ask Rush Limbaugh.