The 2.3 patch makes it easier to get Badges of Justice, which can be used to buy Primal Nether, so they're addressing that point as well.
The 2.3 patch and the switch from client to server side targeting, along with the interaction with the global cooldown, has also had a crippling effect on melee classes, especially in PvP, which may cause some loss of customers.
Theoretically, if we had candidates that represented us instead of the interests of corporations and special interest groups, our right to vote would be worth a great deal.
The problem is, the right of an specific individual to vote is not worth very much, to that individual. Indeed, one might argue the right is worthless, since the cost of voting, to that individual, almost always exceeds the benefit. The reason is simple: the marginal benefit to the voter from his vote is very small, since not only is it unlikely to influence the election, but even if it did, the effect would be spread over everyone, not just concentrated on the voter.
Now, the fact that everyone else is able to vote is beneficial to me, since, collectively, they constrain politicians. But again, this is 'tragedy of the commons' situation. It would be rational for me (or for any of those other voters) to trade away the right to vote. The loss of control of the politicians is a cost bourne by others, while only I reap the benefit.
Economists are a bit puzzled that anyone bothers to vote, given that it is economically irrational to do so. The guesss is there's a social status benefit to being able to proclaim you voted (hence those 'I Voted Today!' stickers they hand out at polling places.) Paradoxically, this means that the increasing use of mail-in ballots may actually depress voting, since it removes the ability to separate voters from non-voters in this status game.
The spinoffs of the space program are grossly exaggerated. For example, computers are not a spinoff of it. The first major use of integrated circuits was military, you know. Indeed, most of the supposed spinoffs owe more to the much larger amount of money that was dumped into military R&D in the 1950s and 60s rather than manned space spending. If anything, the space program *itself* was a spinoff of the massive investment made in rocket engines and ballistic missiles in the 1950s and 60s.
Whether there are other problems to be solved on Earth is besides the point. Even if there weren't putative pressing problems here, the manned space program is not worth doing. Moon base? It'll be as useless as ISS, just in a somewhat more energetic orbit. All the breathless ideas about how the moon will be used (ice mining, 3He, oxygen) aren't going to be possible with an operation on the scale NASA is contemplating, even assuming they're worth doing. Mission to Mars? Please, leave my tax dollars in my pocket. I can find plenty of things to spend them on that I personally have higher priorities for than watching videos of astronauts on Mars picking up rocks.
And if you dont think space exploration helped develope many technologies that we use every day, than you are misinformed.
No, the misinformation is the gross (and I mean very gross) exaggeration of the importance of the manned space program as a source of 'spinoffs'. Neither Tang, nor Velcro, nor Teflon, nor Corningware, nor integrated circuits, nor sliced bread or fire are spinoffs of the manned space program.
Notice I said 'manned'. If you want to justify astronauts in space, you have to point to the spinoffs that came from putting astronauts in space. Unmanned satellites could be, and were, developed independently, and the spinoffs from those (and the direct applications of those) would have occured even if people had never been placed in orbit.
There was some work at Microsoft's research labs that came out in 2001 that's directly applicable to this thread: Don Slutz's work on massive stochastic testing of SQL systems. Basically, he generated random SQL queries and threw them at several database systems, looking for discrepancies and crashes. This kind of testing is disturbingly effective at finding weird bugs.
I would not be at all surprised if Microsoft has banks of servers do nothing but continuous randomized testing of their database product.
The more recent versions of GCC also perform transformations on a tree-based intermediate form, before converting that into the older RTL form. There are certain high level optimizations that just work better on abstract syntax trees.
But it's mainly cellulose. What kind of processing is needed to *efficiently* convert this biomass into energy units??
I'm not sure what 'energy units' are, but converting loosely constrained biomass (including the cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin) into useful fuels can be done by various thermochemical processes. The most common approach is an endothermic reaction with steam to form synthesis gas (a mixture of CO and hydrogen) that, after being cleaned of acid gasem, sulfur, tars, etc., can be converted to fuel + water by the Fischer-Tropsch reaction on various catalysts. FT diesel is one of the more promising fuels being produced by this route, but other fuels are possible, including ethanol, with the right choice of catalyst and operating conditions. Being thermochemical, this is not nearly as picky as approaches that use enzymes to process the biomass; it can even use old tires, garbage, coal, etc. as feedstocks. The downside is the plant has to be bigger to achieve economies of scale. Enzymatic corn ethanol plants can be small, which is one reason why you're seeing so many being built.
I also think that emzymes to breakdown cellulose into fermentable sugar will be developed to increase ethanol effiencies pretty soon so even wood chips, saw dust and especial tree bark will turn up as ethanol in our tanks.
I suspect thermochemical techniques will ultimately win, since they can also use the lignin that the enzymatic approaches can't break down. Lignin has lots of energy in aromatic rings. According to this link, just the waste biomass available in the US alone (from agriculture, forestry, and organic waste streams) could produce 130 billion gallons of ethanol, 153 billion gallons of mixed alcohols (C1-C5), or 59 billion gallons of very high quality diesel fuel per year.
Whether the EROEI is 0.8:1 or 1.3:1, neither one is a winner relative to our current consumption of energy.
We don't have a shortage of energy. We have a shortage of liquid fuels for transportation. If the energy input to growing corn is not petroleum, but non-liquid fossil fuels, nuclear, or other non-fossil sources, then it's just fine if the energy ratio is approximately 1. Think of it as solar-assisted synfuel production.
I understand sugar cane actually enriches the soil on which it is grown; there are places near the coast of Brazil where cane has been grown for hundreds of years, with increasing yields.
One theory about this is the charcoal produced when burning back the stubble is causing progressive enrichment of the soil. Charcoal, it has recently been discovered, is a wonderful soil amendment for tropical soils, preventing the loss of many important nutrients that would otherwise wash right out. Pre-columbian inhabitants of the Amazon basin terraformed huge areas by adding charcoal, creating 'indian dark earths' that are highly fertile even today. 'Slash and char' agriculture could be a huge advance over 'slash and burn'; it also sequesters carbon in the soil.
If cellulosic (or lignocellulosic) ethanol processes become dominant, we may see the rain forests being cut down to produce the fuel, and perhaps converted to tropical tree farms (perhaps with charcoal soil improvement). Water and sunlight are available and usable year round in the tropics, so the yields per acre per year would be much higher than in temperate zones.
If that (power output is lower) is the case, it's only because of improper engine design. The vehicle should be able to inject more ethanol without making the mixture too fuel-rich. This should actually cause there to be more mass in the cylinder at a given temperature, so power should be higher. Modern engines with oxygen sensors should be able to tell the difference and adjust the fuel injection accordingly.
The 1.3x number comes from Pimentel and coworkers. They make unnecessarily pessimistic assumptions. Properly done, most studies have shown the fossil energy input is less than the energy in the ethanol. (The energy input including the sunlight is of course greater than the energy in the ethanol, but that is irrelevant.)
Even Pimental et al.'s numbers are only for corn-derived ethanol. Ethanol from cellulose, sugar cane, or gasified biomass (via a modified Fischer-Tropsch process) produce many times the energy content of the fossil fuels used to grow, harvest, and process the biomass. For sugarcane, the energy returned is eight times the energy spent.
Sorry, those numbers aren't possible for a heat engine operating at reasonable temperatures (i.e. below plasma on the hot end and above cryogenic on the cold)
So, tell me: what's the carnot limit on the efficiency of a system operating at a combustion temperature of 1800 K, dumping waste heat at 400 K? Bit higher than the 60% figure he mentioned, isn't it?
There are existing, operating natural gas combined cycle plants with efficiencies close to 60%, and they're constantly finding new ways to improve the designs (for example, use closed cycle steam instead of bleed air to cool the turbine blades, or use a Kalina cycle for bottoming.)
And if you have a high temperature fuel cell, that heat is released at up to 1000 C, and can then be used in subsequent bottoming cycles. A large SOFC/gas turbine/steam turbine cascade can convert as much as 80% of the chemical energy value of natural gas as work.
Could someone explain what's so trollish about my worry that powerful entities might bury such a technique?
It displays complete cluelessness about how the world actually operates. You might as well be asking 'could someone explain what's so silly about my fear that monsters live in my closet?'
Perhaps you could start by explaining the mechanism by which these supposed powerful entities could do such a thing. Orbital mind control lasers, maybe? Remember, the explanation has to work globally.
Are you sure that the neutron flux would be high enough to really pose a threat
A fast neutron flux sufficient to raise your body temperature by a thousandth of a degree C will kill you. Now imagine standing next to a device pumping out kilowatts of power in neutrons.
So, your argument that these reactions don't occur is simply wrong.
Your counterargument doesn't even contradict what I wrote. Yes, D+D-->T+p and D+D-->3He+n are possible, These reactions work by the formation of an extremely shortlived intermediate excited state of 4He (more than 20 MeV above the ground state; this is orders of magnitude higher than the particle kinetic energy in fusion plasmas), which decays to either T+p or 3He+n. The decay time of this intermediate state is on the order of the time equired for a nucleon to cross the nucleus. Occasionally it will decay by emission of a photon, leaving 4He in a bound state, but this is extremely rare, since electromagnetic emission is a rather slow process on nuclear timescales. If there is a particle channel (as there is in d + d fusion) it will typically dominate. The d + p reaction you mention doesn't have a particle channel (except back to the intial reactants).
'Cold' fusion is actually an old phenomenon: catalysis of fusion by muons. In this kind of cold fusion, the branching ratios are not significantly altered. So, no, creating the compound nucleus by some means other than the kinetic penetration that occurs in 'hot' fusion doesn't cause wild changes in branching ratios.
What cold fusion can do is change the relative rate of reaction of different initial combinations. For example, p + d --> 3He + gamma could be accelerated much more relative to a thermal plasma than d + d would be. This doesn't save P&F results, though; gammas from this reaction aren't seen either.
As for your other arguments, by your kind of reasoning, superconductivity and superfluidity shouldn't exist either, because, hey, we all know, currents are little particles that keep bumping into things, right?
You shouldn't use gibbering non sequiturs like this in public. You come across as an idiot.
Your comment displays an ignorance of nuclear physics. In nuclear reactions such as these, the reaction goes through a 'compound nucleus' with properties largely independent of its origin. The compound nucleus, an excited state, is far more likely to decay by particle emission (in this case, a proton or neutron) than to an alpha particle and something electromagnetic.
Moreover, the lifetime of the compound nucleus is so short that even if it could decay electromagnetically, it could not transfer energy to the lattice -- the atoms in the lattice are too far away. It could only emit photons (or, possible, energetic electrons/positrons), which would not only be trivially detectable, but actually dangerous at the putative rate of heat production claimed.
They've managed to reproduce the additional heat output
After fiddling with experiments long enough and doing a sloppy enough measurement job they managed to get experimental artifacts that fool the self-deluded into thinking there's additional heat output.
It's incomprehensible to me how anyone could have the reckless disregard for their personal integrity to lie so baldly and maliciously misinform naive readers.
The thing is, we're not terminally deluded, as you apparently are. To the extent P&F's results were reproduced, it was because others reproduced the experimental sloppiness that led P&F to delude themselves into thinking they had discovered something interesting.
There was a flood of mutually inconsistent 'results' during the initial flurry of work. It can all be explained as a variety of experimental errors, perhaps combined with outright fraud. There are no -- repeat, no -- convincing, replicable experiments that show nuclear reactions occuring in 'cold fusion' experiments of the P&F variety.
But the cranks and idiots will continue to believe in cold fusion, just as they believe in UFOs as alien spacecraft, ESP, Bigfoot, and numerous other pseudoscientific tropes.
Slashdot Mirror
The 2.3 patch makes it easier to get Badges of Justice, which can be used to buy Primal Nether, so they're addressing that point as well.
The 2.3 patch and the switch from client to server side targeting, along with the interaction with the global cooldown, has also had a crippling effect on melee classes, especially in PvP, which may cause some loss of customers.
Theoretically, if we had candidates that represented us instead of the interests of corporations and special interest groups, our right to vote would be worth a great deal.
The problem is, the right of an specific individual to vote is not worth very much, to that individual. Indeed, one might argue the right is worthless, since the cost of voting, to that individual, almost always exceeds the benefit. The reason is simple: the marginal benefit to the voter from his vote is very small, since not only is it unlikely to influence the election, but even if it did, the effect would be spread over everyone, not just concentrated on the voter.
Now, the fact that everyone else is able to vote is beneficial to me, since, collectively, they constrain politicians. But again, this is 'tragedy of the commons' situation. It would be rational for me (or for any of those other voters) to trade away the right to vote. The loss of control of the politicians is a cost bourne by others, while only I reap the benefit.
Economists are a bit puzzled that anyone bothers to vote, given that it is economically irrational to do so. The guesss is there's a social status benefit to being able to proclaim you voted (hence those 'I Voted Today!' stickers they hand out at polling places.) Paradoxically, this means that the increasing use of mail-in ballots may actually depress voting, since it removes the ability to separate voters from non-voters in this status game.
The spinoffs of the space program are grossly exaggerated. For example, computers are not a spinoff of it. The first major use of integrated circuits was military, you know. Indeed, most of the supposed spinoffs owe more to the much larger amount of money that was dumped into military R&D in the 1950s and 60s rather than manned space spending. If anything, the space program *itself* was a spinoff of the massive investment made in rocket engines and ballistic missiles in the 1950s and 60s.
Those "flags and footprints" sustained the space program and kept it going for well-on 30 years.
If something is wasteful and useless then sustaining it is a bug, not a feature.
(Unless you happen to be personally feeding at this trough of federal dollars, I suppose.)
Whether there are other problems to be solved on Earth is besides the point. Even if there weren't putative pressing problems here, the manned space program is not worth doing. Moon base? It'll be as useless as ISS, just in a somewhat more energetic orbit. All the breathless ideas about how the moon will be used (ice mining, 3He, oxygen) aren't going to be possible with an operation on the scale NASA is contemplating, even assuming they're worth doing. Mission to Mars? Please, leave my tax dollars in my pocket. I can find plenty of things to spend them on that I personally have higher priorities for than watching videos of astronauts on Mars picking up rocks.
And if you dont think space exploration helped develope many technologies that we use every day, than you are misinformed.
No, the misinformation is the gross (and I mean very gross) exaggeration of the importance of the manned space program as a source of 'spinoffs'. Neither Tang, nor Velcro, nor Teflon, nor Corningware, nor integrated circuits, nor sliced bread or fire are spinoffs of the manned space program.
Notice I said 'manned'. If you want to justify astronauts in space, you have to point to the spinoffs that came from putting astronauts in space. Unmanned satellites could be, and were, developed independently, and the spinoffs from those (and the direct applications of those) would have occured even if people had never been placed in orbit.
There was some work at Microsoft's research labs that came out in 2001 that's directly applicable to this thread: Don Slutz's work on massive stochastic testing of SQL systems. Basically, he generated random SQL queries and threw them at several database systems, looking for discrepancies and crashes. This kind of testing is disturbingly effective at finding weird bugs.
I would not be at all surprised if Microsoft has banks of servers do nothing but continuous randomized testing of their database product.
The more recent versions of GCC also perform transformations on a tree-based intermediate form, before converting that into the older RTL form. There are certain high level optimizations that just work better on abstract syntax trees.
If you were Microsoft, and you tried that, you might see your copyrights voided in Europe. Oops.
If you're doing software development, how about using those spare cycles for random testing? I find lots of bugs this way.
But it's mainly cellulose. What kind of processing is needed to *efficiently* convert this biomass into energy units??
I'm not sure what 'energy units' are, but converting loosely constrained biomass (including the cellulose, hemicellulose, and lignin) into useful fuels can be done by various thermochemical processes. The most common approach is an endothermic reaction with steam to form synthesis gas (a mixture of CO and hydrogen) that, after being cleaned of acid gasem, sulfur, tars, etc., can be converted to fuel + water by the Fischer-Tropsch reaction on various catalysts. FT diesel is one of the more promising fuels being produced by this route, but other fuels are possible, including ethanol, with the right choice of catalyst and operating conditions. Being thermochemical, this is not nearly as picky as approaches that use enzymes to process the biomass; it can even use old tires, garbage, coal, etc. as feedstocks. The downside is the plant has to be bigger to achieve economies of scale. Enzymatic corn ethanol plants can be small, which is one reason why you're seeing so many being built.
I also think that emzymes to breakdown cellulose into fermentable sugar will be developed to increase ethanol effiencies pretty soon so even wood chips, saw dust and especial tree bark will turn up as ethanol in our tanks.
I suspect thermochemical techniques will ultimately win, since they can also use the lignin that the enzymatic approaches can't break down. Lignin has lots of energy in aromatic rings. According to this link, just the waste biomass available in the US alone (from agriculture, forestry, and organic waste streams) could produce 130 billion gallons of ethanol, 153 billion gallons of mixed alcohols (C1-C5), or 59 billion gallons of very high quality diesel fuel per year.
Whether the EROEI is 0.8:1 or 1.3:1, neither one is a winner relative to our current consumption of energy.
We don't have a shortage of energy. We have a shortage of liquid fuels for transportation. If the energy input to growing corn is not petroleum, but non-liquid fossil fuels, nuclear, or other non-fossil sources, then it's just fine if the energy ratio is approximately 1. Think of it as solar-assisted synfuel production.
I understand sugar cane actually enriches the soil on which it is grown; there are places near the coast of Brazil where cane has been grown for hundreds of years, with increasing yields.
One theory about this is the charcoal produced when burning back the stubble is causing progressive enrichment of the soil. Charcoal, it has recently been discovered, is a wonderful soil amendment for tropical soils, preventing the loss of many important nutrients that would otherwise wash right out. Pre-columbian inhabitants of the Amazon basin terraformed huge areas by adding charcoal, creating 'indian dark earths' that are highly fertile even today. 'Slash and char' agriculture could be a huge advance over 'slash and burn'; it also sequesters carbon in the soil.
If cellulosic (or lignocellulosic) ethanol processes become dominant, we may see the rain forests being cut down to produce the fuel, and perhaps converted to tropical tree farms (perhaps with charcoal soil improvement). Water and sunlight are available and usable year round in the tropics, so the yields per acre per year would be much higher than in temperate zones.
If that (power output is lower) is the case, it's only because of improper engine design. The vehicle should be able to inject more ethanol without making the mixture too fuel-rich. This should actually cause there to be more mass in the cylinder at a given temperature, so power should be higher. Modern engines with oxygen sensors should be able to tell the difference and adjust the fuel injection accordingly.
The 1.3x number comes from Pimentel and coworkers. They make unnecessarily pessimistic assumptions. Properly done, most studies have shown the fossil energy input is less than the energy in the ethanol. (The energy input including the sunlight is of course greater than the energy in the ethanol, but that is irrelevant.)
Even Pimental et al.'s numbers are only for corn-derived ethanol. Ethanol from cellulose, sugar cane, or gasified biomass (via a modified Fischer-Tropsch process) produce many times the energy content of the fossil fuels used to grow, harvest, and process the biomass. For sugarcane, the energy returned is eight times the energy spent.
Sorry, those numbers aren't possible for a heat engine operating at reasonable temperatures (i.e. below plasma on the hot end and above cryogenic on the cold)
So, tell me: what's the carnot limit on the efficiency of a system operating at a combustion temperature of 1800 K, dumping waste heat at 400 K? Bit higher than the 60% figure he mentioned, isn't it?
There are existing, operating natural gas combined cycle plants with efficiencies close to 60%, and they're constantly finding new ways to improve the designs (for example, use closed cycle steam instead of bleed air to cool the turbine blades, or use a Kalina cycle for bottoming.)
And if you have a high temperature fuel cell, that heat is released at up to 1000 C, and can then be used in subsequent bottoming cycles. A large SOFC/gas turbine/steam turbine cascade can convert as much as 80% of the chemical energy value of natural gas as work.
lets say that a kilo of people is raised 1 C by 10 J
This is a gross underestimate of the energy required. It takes 4180 J to raise a kilogram of water by 1 C. Perhaps you confused cal and Cal (= kcal)?
"Fair" == "agreeing with Microsoft", right?
Could someone explain what's so trollish about my worry that powerful entities might bury such a technique?
It displays complete cluelessness about how the world actually operates. You might as well be asking 'could someone explain what's so silly about my fear that monsters live in my closet?'
Perhaps you could start by explaining the mechanism by which these supposed powerful entities could do such a thing. Orbital mind control lasers, maybe? Remember, the explanation has to work globally.
Are you sure that the neutron flux would be high enough to really pose a threat
A fast neutron flux sufficient to raise your body temperature by a thousandth of a degree C will kill you. Now imagine standing next to a device pumping out kilowatts of power in neutrons.
So, your argument that these reactions don't occur is simply wrong.
Your counterargument doesn't even contradict what I wrote. Yes, D+D-->T+p
and D+D-->3He+n are possible, These reactions work by the formation of
an extremely shortlived intermediate excited state of 4He (more than 20 MeV
above the ground state; this is orders of magnitude higher than the particle
kinetic energy in fusion plasmas), which decays to either T+p or 3He+n.
The decay time of this intermediate state is on the order of the time
equired for a nucleon to cross the nucleus. Occasionally it
will decay by emission of a photon, leaving 4He in a bound state, but this is
extremely rare, since electromagnetic emission is a rather slow process
on nuclear timescales. If there is a particle channel (as there is
in d + d fusion) it will typically dominate. The d + p reaction
you mention doesn't have a particle channel (except back to the intial
reactants).
'Cold' fusion is actually an old phenomenon: catalysis of fusion by muons.
In this kind of cold fusion, the branching ratios are not significantly
altered. So, no, creating the compound nucleus by some means other than
the kinetic penetration that occurs in 'hot' fusion doesn't cause wild
changes in branching ratios.
What cold fusion can do is change the relative rate of reaction of different
initial combinations. For example, p + d --> 3He + gamma could be
accelerated much more relative to a thermal plasma than d + d would be.
This doesn't save P&F results, though; gammas from this reaction
aren't seen either.
As for your other arguments, by your kind of reasoning, superconductivity and superfluidity shouldn't exist either, because, hey, we all know, currents are little particles that keep bumping into things, right?
You shouldn't use gibbering non sequiturs like this in public. You come across as an idiot.
Your comment displays an ignorance of nuclear physics. In nuclear reactions such as these, the reaction goes through a 'compound nucleus' with properties largely independent of its origin. The compound nucleus, an excited state, is far more likely to decay by particle emission (in this case, a proton or neutron) than to an alpha particle and something electromagnetic.
Moreover, the lifetime of the compound nucleus is so short that even if it could decay electromagnetically, it could not transfer energy to the lattice -- the atoms in the lattice are too far away. It could only emit photons (or, possible, energetic electrons/positrons), which would not only be trivially detectable, but actually dangerous at the putative rate of heat production claimed.
They've managed to reproduce the additional heat output
After fiddling with experiments long enough and doing a sloppy enough measurement job they managed to get experimental artifacts that fool the self-deluded into thinking there's additional heat output.
It's incomprehensible to me how anyone could have the reckless disregard for their personal integrity to lie so baldly and maliciously misinform naive readers.
The thing is, we're not terminally deluded, as you apparently are. To the extent P&F's results were reproduced, it was because others reproduced the experimental sloppiness that led P&F to delude themselves into thinking they had discovered something interesting.
There was a flood of mutually inconsistent 'results' during the initial flurry of work. It can all be explained as a variety of experimental errors, perhaps combined with outright fraud. There are no -- repeat, no -- convincing, replicable experiments that show nuclear reactions occuring in 'cold fusion' experiments of the P&F variety.
But the cranks and idiots will continue to believe in cold fusion, just as they believe in UFOs as alien spacecraft, ESP, Bigfoot, and numerous other pseudoscientific tropes.