I've been hearing about the near end of fossil fuels for most of my 40+ years. It hasn't happened yet, and I have no reason to believe that it's about to happen. We keep finding new reserves, and whatnot.
Well 30 years ago the extreme environmentalists (with nothing to back them up) were the only ones preaching our eminint demise then yeah, I'd say that it was safe to ignore them. But today when the oil and energy companies are all starting to look into alternatives, I think it is time to listen.
Well lets turn this question around. If it doesn't matter who the opinion is comming from then why do the JBOSS employees have to hide behind anonymous psuedonyms? Why don't they just admit that they are JBOSS employees and let the peole judge the merit of their posts in that light rather than pretending to be satisfied customers? The fact that they do hide thier identity shows that they believe that there is an advatage to misleading people as opposed to telling the whole truth. If they are willing to mislead people about their credintials, why should the content of the post be considered trustworthy?
And besides, an opinion is only as valid as person giving it, and a "hard data" is only as valid as the method in which that data was collected. So if company X says their product works great that is less valid then a third party saying it works great. Furthermore, if I know that group X is conducting a study I will be more on the guard for things that might might tilt the results in thier favor.
This behavior is deliberatly misleading and thus unethical. Period.
A billion plus people, a huge army, an economy that is growing rapidly and will probably soon trounce the US's to become the next Superpower.
I don't know about that. The huge boom in the chinese economy has been due to the the US outsourcing - in effect a huge chunk of the market was transfered out of the US into China, and they got all of the sales that went with it, for free. But this is quickly reaching an end. Just about everything that makes sense to outsource to China has already been outsourced. Proof of this can be seen by the fact that the growth rate has dropped from 36% at the peak of outsourcing to around 8% today. Furthermore, most economists (including the chinese) think that large sectors (like textiles) are becoming overexended and will crash if they don't put the brakes on investment soon. Most analysts expect their growth rate to come down to a normal 5-6% soon.
This makes sense. In order for your economy to grow, you need to have someone to buy your goods. As I mentioned, there isn't much opportunity for growth due to outsourcing. The current exports to the US are limited by US economic growth. Lastly the thing that allows 1st world countries (like the US) to continue to grow is that we can purchace everything we produce. However, the recent growth in China has been very disproportionate and the vast majority of the people are still dirt poor, which causes difficulty in this regard. Basically China has gotten all the free growth they are going to get, and from here on out it they will have to work hard for it the old fasion way, just like everyone else.
That said I also think that the US (or WTO or whoever) needs to force China play fair. With the free trade should come the obligation to play by the rules, and that includes not manipulating currency, and not getting unfair advantages from human rights violations.
It just seems so mean-spirited to wish for a show's cancellation-- over a hundred people lose their jobs as a result, and I'm not talking about high-paid actors, I'm talking about camera men, editors, janitors-- normal people. It's not fun losing a job, folks.
Is that true? I always figured that all the janitors, camera men etc were studio employees, and would just work on whatever projects the studio happened to be filming at the time. I also assumed that editors and writers were freelance anyway, and always tried to have a few projects going at once.
Thanks for responding! I couldn't find that paper on the biodiesel site (no responces on the normal search, too many on the report search). I posted my calculations and sources in another reply if you are interested in them.
I don't know how things are going to pan out. None of the fuel cell technologies look all that promising to me. They are either extremely expensive, dependant on petroleum, or dependant on crops and thus have the same limitation as biodiesel. The best option for most things still looks like plain ol' electricity, doesn't paint a pretty picture for the US. More densely populated first world countries like Japan and much of Europe are much better off as Electric rail is economical today and in many places already deployed.
The problem is that there are historical and legitimate reasons for executing "data" and so OSs allow it. I remember in CS 121 when we had to write a just-in-time x86 assembler. We read in the assembly code and generated byte code into an array. Then we just cast the array (pointer) as a function (pointer) and called it, like any other function. There are other cases where self-modifying code is used. This was in linux, so it isn't a problem with just "certain" OS's.
Furthermore, I may be wrong here, but I don't think the original x86 had the capability of marking code as data or code, so if that was done it was all in the OS. So the NX flag allows for a more secure way of providing this feature. Now it isn't a majic cure. One exploit that it doesn't fix is that overflows can still write to a string in the data section, which are then passed to system calls. But it is a smart policy, and I agree that it should have been done years ago.
I'm not joking. When I followed the linuxworld link this appeared in the advertisement box:
The page cannot be displayed There are too many people accessing the Web site at this time.
Please try the following:
Click the Refresh button, or try again later.
Open the www3.sys-con.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want. HTTP 403.9 - Access Forbidden: Too many users are connected Internet Information Services
I know, he has had an awful lot of submissions , most of which are for stories on his own blog.
On one hand, it it nice that his site is effectively a mirror that can actually take the slashdotting, whereas many of the original sources wouldn't be able to. But it still rubs me the wrong way.
Falling rates are a fallacious concept. Do you have any evidence whatsoever to back that up? Because just a couple years ago there were several insurance companies that were actually paying out more money than they were collecting, and making up the difference by investing in the stock market. Then the stock market crashed and they were in a tight spot for a while. Also, my insurance company has lowered my rates, after several years with no speeding tickets and no accidents.
But you are assuming that the vandals are speaking for the majority of the population. If they are not then that is not democracy, it is one minority trying to force their ideas on society by violent means.
If the author is unaware of this, or not capable of installing such a device on his Internet connection, just how seriously can we take the rest of his essay?
Hmm, $0.05 CDROM which also saves download time when helping people on modem vs $80.00 firewall that is useless for day-to-day operation (no IM or email). Yep he sure is a fool.
No, I agree with him. While they all involve open source software (how else would they get on the list), only one of those business methods actually involved making money off of open source software that you wrote.
Optimization: Align your proprietary software with someone else's open source software to make the total package less expensive for your customer without giving out any code yourself.
Dual license: Subsidize open source development with licensed version.
Subscription: Subsidise open source development with support subscriptions.
Patronage: The same as optimization, but actually subsidize the open source software you are aligning yourself with.
Hosting: Build off of open source for internal use, but don't release source.
Embedded: Subsidize open source development with hardware sales.
Consulting: This goes hand in hand with all the other models, but instead of being hired to work oh the software, you are contracted. This is the one where writing open source software *is* the business model, but it really just amounts to leveraging your knowlege with the software to get a foot into one of the other methods above.
In all of the rest of these the open source software is not the primary money maker, but either a money saver, or an added value. It is hard to talk about an open source business model, because all the places where open source thrives, the software itself isn't the focus of the business - it is just a tool that they used to get the job done and save money.
That is the mainstay of how open source software always has and always will be successfull. Group needs software to do X. Shrinkwrapped solutions are not flexible enough, and writing from scratch costs too much and will take to long. But here is an open source package that will do most of what they need. So they improve it to fit their needs, and in many cases it the added benifits of getting involved with the community* outweigh any competitive advantage they would recieve by keeping the code private, so they release it.
But is this an open source business model? Not really, it is just a small part of the implementation of an entirely different business venture.
*This includes more help and cooperation from the experts who wrote the software to begin with, a wider more varied deployment base which helps bring more bugs to surface, and less hassle with keeping the patches in sync with the main branch.
I don't think there is much money in developing a Free home desktop OS. There is money in packaging and supporting it, and you can certainly subsidize some development using that money. But more importantly, there is money in the business desktop, and if you look at the current state of affairs, the business desktop and the home desktop are extremely simular. Furthermore, most people aren't confortable switching to a new system once they have learned windows, but having used open source software at work will remove those concerns (assuming it was a good experiance:). So I really don't think there will be much of any demand for the home desktop until OSS becomes more prevelent in the workplace anyway.
In other words, not having a viable business model for the home desktop is not important, because it will ride on the coat-tails of the business desktop.
I was reading a case study about this for a class a while back. I don't remember which exact planes they were talking about, but I do remember that the fire jumpers had less problems and felt much safer using retrofitted military planes than newer ones designed for firefighting.
The biggest thing was that the updrafts from the fires would cause alot more turbulence and strain on the wings being shaken up and down, and these newer ones couldn't handle the beating as well.
Although I would think that a 747 would have even more problems that the ones I was reading about.
They chose not to renew thier contract, but they are still obligated to produce a few films for Disney under the current contract, this being one of them. Also Disney still has rights on any sequels to the movies made under the original contract, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some some "release to video" craptaculars comming out of disney using the pixar characters.
They have the right to fight piracy. They DON'T have the right to use wildly missleading numbers to convince the government to help them prop up their failing business model.
Exactly. They have been using these numbers to scare government officials into thinking that if they don't take away our rights, the music and movie industries will collapse. The results of this include:
The DCMA This law makes it illegal to decrypt copywritten files, possibly even illegal to create and discuss decryption methods, if they can be used for piracy. It is dangerous because it is written in a way that says all decryption is illegal except these few vague exceptions, rather than the tradional method of stating everything is legal except these exact items. One effect of this is that many things which were once considered fair-use are now illegal. Another effect is that many industries have attempted to use the law to create proprietary lock-in to thier product, hurting competitive markets.
The Broadcast bit. The FCC has regulated that all televisions produced after a certain date, have digital recievers which respect a broadcast bit preventing one from copying that data. Again, many types of copying that were once considered fair use, will now be illegal to to the DCMA and enforced by your equipment. This will raise the cost of consumer devices, take away your rights, and make it more difficult to produce your own content (ie camcorder).
Excessive internet radio fees. Which make it economically impossible for anyone but big business to broadcast radio over the internet legaly. Even if you are not broadcasting any RIAA music, it is your resposibility to provide complete documentation of this - ie guilty until proven innocent, so even that is impractical.
All of these hurt citizens of this country, do not benefit the artists, and create an unfair advantage for the existing large media companies.
I won't be. I'd much rather plug my cell phone in to be charged every couple days then have to refill/swap-out my fuel cell cartidge that often.
And as far as transportation goes, we are putting all sorts of research into fuel cells and still haven't found anything remotely practical, while electric rail has been economical for years.
It would will be cool if there is a breakthrough in fuel cell technology, but I am not counting on it.
Last time I did the calculations, I remember getting a number that was somewhere between the landmass of the US and Russia, just like now. At the time I saw some sources that said that the amount of arable land mass of the earth was something like 10-14 million km2, which is about what I came up with. But now I don't know how much I trust those, and have been having a hard time finding good data on that, and also on how much of the arable land is already used for food. So the "entire arable land mass" claim may or may not be an exageration depending on ones definition of arable, and other factors but it is within the ballpark.
As promised here are my numbers and sources. I couldn't find the backup with my original calculations or sources, so I redid them from scratch this evening. I even came up with about the same number as I remember from last time:)
How much bio-diesel is needed? Worldwide gasoline consumption was 20 million barrels/day in 2001. 20,000,000 * 42 gallons/barrel * 365 days/year = 307 billion gallons gasoline per year
Biodiesel has an energy content of about 35 MJ/liter while Gasoline has an energy content of about 32 MJ/liter so the amount of biodiesel needed to replace gasoline is: 307,000,000,000 gal gasoline / year * 32 gal gasoline / 35 gal biodiesal = 280 billion gallons biodiesel per year
How much land will that take? While different crops have different yields, rapeseed is a good example to look at because it is known to be feasable, can be grown in many climates, and has an above average yeild: 127 gal vegetable oil / acre rapeseed * 0.8 biodiesal/vegetable oil * 247 acres / km2 = 25100 gallons of biodiesel / km2
280,000,000,000 gal biodiesel / 25100 gallons of biodiesel / km2 = 11.2 million km2
For comparison: 42.0 million km2 : Land mass of Earth minus antartica, rivers and lakes 17.1 million km2 : size of Russia
9.6 million km2 : size of United States 13.6 million km2 : Land used for world crops in 2003? (couldn't find good info on this)
What about used vegetable oil? In 2002 around 93 million metric tons of vegetable oil was produced. 93,000,000 tons * (1,000 kg/ton) / (0.9 kg/l veg oil) * 0.264 gallons / l = 27 billion gallons of vegetable oil per year
Even if we were to recycle all of this into biodiesel it would only be enough to replace 10% of the world's gasoline use.
Conclusion As I mentioned before, this is just a back of the envelope calculation, not a full study. There are several biodiesal sources with higher yeilds than rapeseed, but which are more particular about climate. A more thorough study would look at all of these and what amount of land is available for them. On the other hand this only looked at gasoline, which accounts for only a little over one quarter of refined petroleum products. I think worldwide diesel use is almost as high as gasoline.
Sources Petro-oil Consumption: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/info_glan ce/petroleum.html Biodiesel Yields: http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html Fuel Energy Content: http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv. html Crops Statistics: http://faostat.fao.org/faostat/collections Vegeta ble Oil Stats: http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/data-sets/crops/89 002/
If you see any obvious errors in this please let me know. I was getting tired toward the end and no-one has checked my arithmatic for stupid mistakes.
February of 2004 (the most recent date I could quickly find these figures), when regular diesel was selling for around $1.60 per gallon, biodiesel fuel was selling for about $1.80 per gallon (source)
That $1.80 per gallon is only for B20 fuel which is a blend of 80% regular diesel with only 20% biodiesal. That same source says the cost of plain biodiesel (B100) is $13.75 for five gallons or $2.75 per gallon. That is 1.7 times the cost of diesel, which is lower then when I last checked, probably mostly due to the fact that the price of oil has risen since then (I think regular diesel was around $1.45).
all of our fertilizers are fossil fuel based bullshit. Of course not all, I should have said most. But from what I recall, natural fertilizers only make up a small amount of the fertilzers used in US agriculture. Same with the waste grease for biodiesel. It is a great idea and will provide some fuel, but from the numbers I saw it wasn't significant in the grand scheme of things.
I checked that vegenergy site you linked and didn't see anything that contradicted the points that I made. However, there is always the chance that I am misinformed. My numbers and sources are at home on one of my backup drives. Hopefully, I will have time to dig them up and double check them this afternoon. Whenever I do I'll post them here.
Wow, well our numbers are off by several orders of magnitude. I'll have to look at that hemp article you refered to. When I did my calculation a year or so ago I was looking at corn and rapeseed, and used the current biodiesel yeilds per acre of crop given on pro-biodiesel sites (I think it was a british site). This was after hearing someone else making the claims that I just did, and I wanted to check it out on my own. I don't have all the details (source links, actual math) with me, but you've tweaked my interest enough that I'm going to have to check this out again when I get home from work.
Kind'of like how the Classic Mac OS presented a simple usable interface to the user, with very few preferences? Because we all know how flawed and unusable the Macintosh was.
I haven't had a chance to use Gnome 2.6 yet, but from what I've read the design decisions that they made don't seem all that peculiar. It is basically very simular to the original Mac spacial finder. When you would introduce a normal Windows user to the Mac they would figure out how the finder works and get on with their lives, unlike this guy who turned around and threw a big temper tantrum, and his only argument was that it wasn't like Windows.
Biodiesal is a good fuel for replacing some of our oil usage. The other main benifit that you forgot to mention is that it is carbon neutral since any CO2 put into the air from exhaust is balenced by the CO2 taken out of the air by the plants grown to create the biodiesel.
At the moment it is only twice as expensive as diesel here in the US (although what will all the agricultural tarriffs jacking prices up and subsidies bringing them down, it is damn near impossible to calculate the true economic cost of biodiesal). There is the kink that all of our fertilizers are fossil fuel based, so the cost of producing biodiesal will go up as the cost of fossil fuel goes up. The only other alternative is to go to crop cycling and other natural sustainable methods of fertalization, which are also less cost efficient.
However the real killer is that if you sit down and do the back of the envelope calculations, you will find that growing enough biofuel to replace all the world's oil usage would require all the arable land on the entire planet. In other words we would have to bulldoze all the woods, rainforests, plains, and marshes, and replace them with biomass crops. Not only will will destroy most of the natural habitats on the planet, but at this point we also loose the carbon neutral benifit because we are taking other plants out of the carbon cycle to put ours in.
So Biodiesal, like solar, is a good supplement to our enegry needs, but not a sustainable complete replacement.
There is no story here. All fuel effeciency ratings given by the EPA are very overrated. Everyone knows that, which is why you should go to places like Consumer Reports to get the real story. Besides, your gas milage depends highly on how you drive. If you take it easy on the accelerator, and plan ahead so you can slowly coast to a stop and use your brakes less often you will get better milage than if you drive with a heavy foot. I read one article (I think in car and driver) about a guy who was actually able do get better than the EPA rating for a hybrid car, because he drove fuel effeciency minded. But most people shouldn't expect to get this.
Futhermore, all the people that I knew were looking into getting a hybrid car, were well aware that there were other cars (like the toyota echo, and VW golf turbodeisel) that were just as fuel miserly and more economical than hybrid. Their main desire in getting a hybrid was to support the bleeding edge technology that will eventually take us to a more efficent means of transportation. Look at all the advances in batteries, the new CVT transmissions, regenerative braking, smart power distribution algorithms, and tell me that these cars are nothing but hype. I don't know what will end up being the most cost effecient form of energy when the price of oil goes up, but there is a very good chance that it will be some form of electric, either from rail, battery, or fuel cell, so these cars are paving the way there.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been hearing about the near end of fossil fuels for most of my 40+ years. It hasn't happened yet, and I have no reason to believe that it's about to happen. We keep finding new reserves, and whatnot.
Well 30 years ago the extreme environmentalists (with nothing to back them up) were the only ones preaching our eminint demise then yeah, I'd say that it was safe to ignore them. But today when the oil and energy companies are all starting to look into alternatives, I think it is time to listen.
Well lets turn this question around. If it doesn't matter who the opinion is comming from then why do the JBOSS employees have to hide behind anonymous psuedonyms? Why don't they just admit that they are JBOSS employees and let the peole judge the merit of their posts in that light rather than pretending to be satisfied customers? The fact that they do hide thier identity shows that they believe that there is an advatage to misleading people as opposed to telling the whole truth. If they are willing to mislead people about their credintials, why should the content of the post be considered trustworthy?
And besides, an opinion is only as valid as person giving it, and a "hard data" is only as valid as the method in which that data was collected. So if company X says their product works great that is less valid then a third party saying it works great. Furthermore, if I know that group X is conducting a study I will be more on the guard for things that might might tilt the results in thier favor.
This behavior is deliberatly misleading and thus unethical. Period.
A billion plus people, a huge army, an economy that is growing rapidly and will probably soon trounce the US's to become the next Superpower.
I don't know about that. The huge boom in the chinese economy has been due to the the US outsourcing - in effect a huge chunk of the market was transfered out of the US into China, and they got all of the sales that went with it, for free. But this is quickly reaching an end. Just about everything that makes sense to outsource to China has already been outsourced. Proof of this can be seen by the fact that the growth rate has dropped from 36% at the peak of outsourcing to around 8% today. Furthermore, most economists (including the chinese) think that large sectors (like textiles) are becoming overexended and will crash if they don't put the brakes on investment soon. Most analysts expect their growth rate to come down to a normal 5-6% soon.
This makes sense. In order for your economy to grow, you need to have someone to buy your goods.
As I mentioned, there isn't much opportunity for growth due to outsourcing. The current exports to the US are limited by US economic growth. Lastly the thing that allows 1st world countries (like the US) to continue to grow is that we can purchace everything we produce. However, the recent growth in China has been very disproportionate and the vast majority of the people are still dirt poor, which causes difficulty in this regard. Basically China has gotten all the free growth they are going to get, and from here on out it they will have to work hard for it the old fasion way, just like everyone else.
That said I also think that the US (or WTO or whoever) needs to force China play fair. With the free trade should come the obligation to play by the rules, and that includes not manipulating currency, and not getting unfair advantages from human rights violations.
It just seems so mean-spirited to wish for a show's cancellation-- over a hundred people lose their jobs as a result, and I'm not talking about high-paid actors, I'm talking about camera men, editors, janitors-- normal people. It's not fun losing a job, folks.
Is that true? I always figured that all the janitors, camera men etc were studio employees, and would just work on whatever projects the studio happened to be filming at the time. I also assumed that editors and writers were freelance anyway, and always tried to have a few projects going at once.
Thanks for responding! I couldn't find that paper on the biodiesel site (no responces on the normal search, too many on the report search). I posted my calculations and sources in another reply if you are interested in them.
I don't know how things are going to pan out. None of the fuel cell technologies look all that promising to me. They are either extremely expensive, dependant on petroleum, or dependant on crops and thus have the same limitation as biodiesel. The best option for most things still looks like plain ol' electricity, doesn't paint a pretty picture for the US. More densely populated first world countries like Japan and much of Europe are much better off as Electric rail is economical today and in many places already deployed.
It isn't any different.
The problem is that there are historical and legitimate reasons for executing "data" and so OSs allow it. I remember in CS 121 when we had to write a just-in-time x86 assembler. We read in the assembly code and generated byte code into an array. Then we just cast the array (pointer) as a function (pointer) and called it, like any other function. There are other cases where self-modifying code is used. This was in linux, so it isn't a problem with just "certain" OS's.
Furthermore, I may be wrong here, but I don't think the original x86 had the capability of marking code as data or code, so if that was done it was all in the OS. So the NX flag allows for a more secure way of providing this feature. Now it isn't a majic cure. One exploit that it doesn't fix is that overflows can still write to a string in the data section, which are then passed to system calls. But it is a smart policy, and I agree that it should have been done years ago.
How crazy is that?
I know, he has had an awful lot of submissions , most of which are for stories on his own blog.
On one hand, it it nice that his site is effectively a mirror that can actually take the slashdotting, whereas many of the original sources wouldn't be able to. But it still rubs me the wrong way.
Falling rates are a fallacious concept.
Do you have any evidence whatsoever to back that up? Because just a couple years ago there were several insurance companies that were actually paying out more money than they were collecting, and making up the difference by investing in the stock market. Then the stock market crashed and they were in a tight spot for a while. Also, my insurance company has lowered my rates, after several years with no speeding tickets and no accidents.
But you are assuming that the vandals are speaking for the majority of the population. If they are not then that is not democracy, it is one minority trying to force their ideas on society by violent means.
If the author is unaware of this, or not capable of installing such a device on his Internet connection, just how seriously can we take the rest of his essay?
Hmm, $0.05 CDROM which also saves download time when helping people on modem vs $80.00 firewall that is useless for day-to-day operation (no IM or email). Yep he sure is a fool.
Richard Stallman's page would be a Freedom Log, one of many in the new flogging scene.
No, I agree with him. While they all involve open source software (how else would they get on the list), only one of those business methods actually involved making money off of open source software that you wrote.
Optimization: Align your proprietary software with someone else's open source software to make the total package less expensive for your customer without giving out any code yourself.
Dual license: Subsidize open source development with licensed version.
Subscription: Subsidise open source development with support subscriptions.
Patronage: The same as optimization, but actually subsidize the open source software you are aligning yourself with.
Hosting: Build off of open source for internal use, but don't release source.
Embedded: Subsidize open source development with hardware sales.
Consulting: This goes hand in hand with all the other models, but instead of being hired to work oh the software, you are contracted. This is the one where writing open source software *is* the business model, but it really just amounts to leveraging your knowlege with the software to get a foot into one of the other methods above.
In all of the rest of these the open source software is not the primary money maker, but either a money saver, or an added value. It is hard to talk about an open source business model, because all the places where open source thrives, the software itself isn't the focus of the business - it is just a tool that they used to get the job done and save money.
That is the mainstay of how open source software always has and always will be successfull. Group needs software to do X. Shrinkwrapped solutions are not flexible enough, and writing from scratch costs too much and will take to long. But here is an open source package that will do most of what they need. So they improve it to fit their needs, and in many cases it the added benifits of getting involved with the community* outweigh any competitive advantage they would recieve by keeping the code private, so they release it.
But is this an open source business model? Not really, it is just a small part of the implementation of an entirely different business venture.
*This includes more help and cooperation from the experts who wrote the software to begin with, a wider more varied deployment base which helps bring more bugs to surface, and less hassle with keeping the patches in sync with the main branch.
I don't think there is much money in developing a Free home desktop OS. There is money in packaging and supporting it, and you can certainly subsidize some development using that money. But more importantly, there is money in the business desktop, and if you look at the current state of affairs, the business desktop and the home desktop are extremely simular. Furthermore, most people aren't confortable switching to a new system once they have learned windows, but having used open source software at work will remove those concerns (assuming it was a good experiance :). So I really don't think there will be much of any demand for the home desktop until OSS becomes more prevelent in the workplace anyway.
In other words, not having a viable business model for the home desktop is not important, because it will ride on the coat-tails of the business desktop.
I was reading a case study about this for a class a while back. I don't remember which exact planes they were talking about, but I do remember that the fire jumpers had less problems and felt much safer using retrofitted military planes than newer ones designed for firefighting.
The biggest thing was that the updrafts from the fires would cause alot more turbulence and strain on the wings being shaken up and down, and these newer ones couldn't handle the beating as well.
Although I would think that a 747 would have even more problems that the ones I was reading about.
They chose not to renew thier contract, but they are still obligated to produce a few films for Disney under the current contract, this being one of them. Also Disney still has rights on any sequels to the movies made under the original contract, so I wouldn't be surprised to see some some "release to video" craptaculars comming out of disney using the pixar characters.
They have the right to fight piracy. They DON'T have the right to use wildly missleading numbers to convince the government to help them prop up their failing business model.
Exactly. They have been using these numbers to scare government officials into thinking that if they don't take away our rights, the music and movie industries will collapse. The results of this include:
The DCMA
This law makes it illegal to decrypt copywritten files, possibly even illegal to create and discuss decryption methods, if they can be used for piracy. It is dangerous because it is written in a way that says all decryption is illegal except these few vague exceptions, rather than the tradional method of stating everything is legal except these exact items. One effect of this is that many things which were once considered fair-use are now illegal. Another effect is that many industries have attempted to use the law to create proprietary lock-in to thier product, hurting competitive markets.
The Broadcast bit.
The FCC has regulated that all televisions produced after a certain date, have digital recievers which respect a broadcast bit preventing one from copying that data. Again, many types of copying that were once considered fair use, will now be illegal to to the DCMA and enforced by your equipment. This will raise the cost of consumer devices, take away your rights, and make it more difficult to produce your own content (ie camcorder).
Excessive internet radio fees.
Which make it economically impossible for anyone but big business to broadcast radio over the internet legaly. Even if you are not broadcasting any RIAA music, it is your resposibility to provide complete documentation of this - ie guilty until proven innocent, so even that is impractical.
All of these hurt citizens of this country, do not benefit the artists, and create an unfair advantage for the existing large media companies.
I won't be. I'd much rather plug my cell phone in to be charged every couple days then have to refill/swap-out my fuel cell cartidge that often.
And as far as transportation goes, we are putting all sorts of research into fuel cells and still haven't found anything remotely practical, while electric rail has been economical for years.
It would will be cool if there is a breakthrough in fuel cell technology, but I am not counting on it.
I forgot to mention this.
Last time I did the calculations, I remember getting a number that was somewhere between the landmass of the US and Russia, just like now. At the time I saw some sources that said that the amount of arable land mass of the earth was something like 10-14 million km2, which is about what I came up with. But now I don't know how much I trust those, and have been having a hard time finding good data on that, and also on how much of the arable land is already used for food. So the "entire arable land mass" claim may or may not be an exageration depending on ones definition of arable, and other factors but it is within the ballpark.
As promised here are my numbers and sources. I couldn't find the backup with my original calculations or sources, so I redid them from scratch this evening. I even came up with about the same number as I remember from last time :)
n ce/petroleum.html
Fuel Energy Content: http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv. htmla ble Oil Stats: http://usda.mannlib.cornell.edu/data-sets/crops/89 002/
How much bio-diesel is needed?
Worldwide gasoline consumption was 20 million barrels/day in 2001.
20,000,000 * 42 gallons/barrel * 365 days/year
= 307 billion gallons gasoline per year
Biodiesel has an energy content of about 35 MJ/liter while
Gasoline has an energy content of about 32 MJ/liter
so the amount of biodiesel needed to replace gasoline is:
307,000,000,000 gal gasoline / year * 32 gal gasoline / 35 gal biodiesal
= 280 billion gallons biodiesel per year
How much land will that take?
While different crops have different yields, rapeseed is a good example to look at because it is known to be feasable, can be grown in many climates, and has an above average yeild:
127 gal vegetable oil / acre rapeseed * 0.8 biodiesal/vegetable oil * 247 acres / km2
= 25100 gallons of biodiesel / km2
280,000,000,000 gal biodiesel / 25100 gallons of biodiesel / km2
= 11.2 million km2
For comparison:
42.0 million km2 : Land mass of Earth minus antartica, rivers and lakes
17.1 million km2 : size of Russia
9.6 million km2 : size of United States
13.6 million km2 : Land used for world crops in 2003? (couldn't find good info on this)
What about used vegetable oil?
In 2002 around 93 million metric tons of vegetable oil was produced.
93,000,000 tons * (1,000 kg/ton) / (0.9 kg/l veg oil) * 0.264 gallons / l
= 27 billion gallons of vegetable oil per year
Even if we were to recycle all of this into biodiesel it would only be enough to replace 10% of the world's gasoline use.
Conclusion
As I mentioned before, this is just a back of the envelope calculation, not a full study. There are several biodiesal sources with higher yeilds than rapeseed, but which are more particular about climate. A more thorough study would look at all of these and what amount of land is available for them. On the other hand this only looked at gasoline, which accounts for only a little over one quarter of refined petroleum products. I think worldwide diesel use is almost as high as gasoline.
Sources
Petro-oil Consumption: http://www.eia.doe.gov/oil_gas/petroleum/info_gla
Biodiesel Yields: http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_yield.html
Crops Statistics: http://faostat.fao.org/faostat/collections
Veget
If you see any obvious errors in this please let me know. I was getting tired toward the end and no-one has checked my arithmatic for stupid mistakes.
February of 2004 (the most recent date I could quickly find these figures), when regular diesel was selling for around $1.60 per gallon, biodiesel fuel was selling for about $1.80 per gallon (source)
That $1.80 per gallon is only for B20 fuel which is a blend of 80% regular diesel with only 20% biodiesal. That same source says the cost of plain biodiesel (B100) is $13.75 for five gallons or $2.75 per gallon. That is 1.7 times the cost of diesel, which is lower then when I last checked, probably mostly due to the fact that the price of oil has risen since then (I think regular diesel was around $1.45).
all of our fertilizers are fossil fuel based
bullshit.
Of course not all, I should have said most. But from what I recall, natural fertilizers only make up a small amount of the fertilzers used in US agriculture. Same with the waste grease for biodiesel. It is a great idea and will provide some fuel, but from the numbers I saw it wasn't significant in the grand scheme of things.
I checked that vegenergy site you linked and didn't see anything that contradicted the points that I made. However, there is always the chance that I am misinformed. My numbers and sources are at home on one of my backup drives. Hopefully, I will have time to dig them up and double check them this afternoon. Whenever I do I'll post them here.
Wow, well our numbers are off by several orders of magnitude. I'll have to look at that hemp article you refered to. When I did my calculation a year or so ago I was looking at corn and rapeseed, and used the current biodiesel yeilds per acre of crop given on pro-biodiesel sites (I think it was a british site). This was after hearing someone else making the claims that I just did, and I wanted to check it out on my own. I don't have all the details (source links, actual math) with me, but you've tweaked my interest enough that I'm going to have to check this out again when I get home from work.
Kind'of like how the Classic Mac OS presented a simple usable interface to the user, with very few preferences? Because we all know how flawed and unusable the Macintosh was.
I haven't had a chance to use Gnome 2.6 yet, but from what I've read the design decisions that they made don't seem all that peculiar. It is basically very simular to the original Mac spacial finder. When you would introduce a normal Windows user to the Mac they would figure out how the finder works and get on with their lives, unlike this guy who turned around and threw a big temper tantrum, and his only argument was that it wasn't like Windows.
Biodiesal is a good fuel for replacing some of our oil usage. The other main benifit that you forgot to mention is that it is carbon neutral since any CO2 put into the air from exhaust is balenced by the CO2 taken out of the air by the plants grown to create the biodiesel.
At the moment it is only twice as expensive as diesel here in the US (although what will all the agricultural tarriffs jacking prices up and subsidies bringing them down, it is damn near impossible to calculate the true economic cost of biodiesal). There is the kink that all of our fertilizers are fossil fuel based, so the cost of producing biodiesal will go up as the cost of fossil fuel goes up. The only other alternative is to go to crop cycling and other natural sustainable methods of fertalization, which are also less cost efficient.
However the real killer is that if you sit down and do the back of the envelope calculations, you will find that growing enough biofuel to replace all the world's oil usage would require all the arable land on the entire planet. In other words we would have to bulldoze all the woods, rainforests, plains, and marshes, and replace them with biomass crops. Not only will will destroy most of the natural habitats on the planet, but at this point we also loose the carbon neutral benifit because we are taking other plants out of the carbon cycle to put ours in.
So Biodiesal, like solar, is a good supplement to our enegry needs, but not a sustainable complete replacement.
There is no story here. All fuel effeciency ratings given by the EPA are very overrated. Everyone knows that, which is why you should go to places like Consumer Reports to get the real story. Besides, your gas milage depends highly on how you drive. If you take it easy on the accelerator, and plan ahead so you can slowly coast to a stop and use your brakes less often you will get better milage than if you drive with a heavy foot. I read one article (I think in car and driver) about a guy who was actually able do get better than the EPA rating for a hybrid car, because he drove fuel effeciency minded. But most people shouldn't expect to get this.
Futhermore, all the people that I knew were looking into getting a hybrid car, were well aware that there were other cars (like the toyota echo, and VW golf turbodeisel) that were just as fuel miserly and more economical than hybrid. Their main desire in getting a hybrid was to support the bleeding edge technology that will eventually take us to a more efficent means of transportation. Look at all the advances in batteries, the new CVT transmissions, regenerative braking, smart power distribution algorithms, and tell me that these cars are nothing but hype. I don't know what will end up being the most cost effecient form of energy when the price of oil goes up, but there is a very good chance that it will be some form of electric, either from rail, battery, or fuel cell, so these cars are paving the way there.