While some users can be inconceivably stupid, I somehow doubt that the vast majority of them are going to not notice that over the past day their computer suddenly slowed down. Another option (sure to please the crowd around here and get this modded up:) is that the user might say "hmmm... windows just gets slow after you use it for a couple of months, maybe I should try linux" and the zombie problem is solved through an alternate solution...
My heart bleeds for you. Oh woe! You want to send your users with messages that you think are legitimate (something they may disagree with) but do not want to be bothered with the inconvenience of putting up with your users asking you to participate in a spam rate-limiting mechanism or ask them to add you to their whitelist.
If the "individual enthusiast and small business person" is too lazy or ignorant to deal with this then maybe this is how we will revoke your license to drive on the information superhighway...
Did you even read the proposal? I ask because both your original post and your response the the first reply iindicate that you still have no idea how this works, even after someone has been kind enough to save you from your own laziness and point out this proposal is not talking about a montary transation.
So, for your benefit, here is the "proof of work for complete idiots" version:
-You send your spam. Each recipient asks you to perform a proof of work, a mathematical problem that requires some CPU cycles. -Your CPU starts chugging away at the requests and eventually performs all of the required proof of work. -Your system responds to the proof of work request and the message is delivered. -Your spam to your users is delivered, but not instantly because several hours of CPU work were required. -Cost to you: nothing except a bit of electricity to keep your CPU chugging.
Others have mentioned that this will make it easier for the user to notice that their PC has been hijacked, but another side-effect is that it will perform a rate-limiting service on that zombie. If each zombie can only send 100 messages an hour instead of 100,000 then that is another important benefit.
You will have to change your signup mechanism to notify the user that they have to add you to the whitelist, and you will need to change the list admin email to first send a message to a user reminding them of this fact and only after they reply to this standard response to all complaints message will the message filter up to your mailbox. This is a couple of hours of coding for anyone maintaining a mailing list package.
READ THE PROPOSAL FIRST PLEASE!
This is not asking you to spend money, it is asking you to perform a proof of work. This is hashcash, not real money.
Why is this a problem? If what you are expected to pay depends on volume then it means that a non-spammer who only sends a few emails a day will have almost nothing to pay while a spammer will be unable to afford the work required to send thousands of emails. Since this is based upon proof of work and not an actual monetary amount, it will not be a cost that is difficult to bear.
Yes, some people who run email lists out of their account will be inconvenienced, but not as much as they claim. They will just need to change the signup message to say "this is a mailing list that you signed up for, so add us to your whitelist because we will not be performing proof of work challenges and will drop you from the list when the first proof of work request arrives."
Some will claim that the hordes of spam zombies out there will be able to do the work on the spammer's behalf so this is not a solution, but it will at least provide some rate limiting for that zombie and it will also make it much more likely that the zombie will be noticed by the user when it starts to chew up CPU cycles.
I think that the reason you don't have any good equipment is because the USMC and the USN blew their allowance on a wasted IT upgrade from EDS. You know, that 7 _BILLION_ dollar contract which has already triggered SEC investigations for fraud.
Want to bitch about not having bullets? Look to your own leadership and stop whining about how the Army is going to spend its budget.
What people in the EU fail to understand is that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not some legislative act that can be swept aside or abridged for some higher purpose. The governement, literally, does not have the power to do this. The EU can bitch and moan all it wants, but one of the distinguishing features between our systems of government is that there are things we have prohibited our government from doing and no treaty or law can touch it.
The only thing that can change this is to amend the constitution, and if you would like to get a feeling for what the word "impossible" really means I would suggest that you try to get an amendment to either the first or second amendments through congress and then past two-thirds of the state legislatures. For good or bad, these two amendments are sacrosanct in this country and will never, EVER be changed. End of story.
Food is easy. Try packing all of the water and air you will use for the next 9 months in a small suitcase...
Both of these consumables can be recycled slightly (water more than O2) but there will still be loss because we have not come close to building a closed loop environmental support system that is ready for space or small enough to make it up there. A closed-loop water system is close enough to reality that some of it could be applied here, but a closed-loop system for breathing is not going to be flying anytime soon (these involve things like growing plants to convert CO2 to O2, which increases the volume and weight of the spacecraft significantly.)
A body at rest consumes about 0.3L of O2 per minute. That is 432L per day of metabolic consumption and 116000L over nine months. Using 3000psi composite cylinders (larger, but lighter and we are weight-restricted here) you are looking at about 1.5 tons of weight for gas storage with no reserve and with no allowance for regulation or distribution of the O2. If the astronauts were actually going to do more than lie very still for nine months then your O2 budget goes up.
For water the problem is both easier and harder. It is easier because we have actually made good progress on small, lightweight water recycling systems, and it is harder because each litre of water lost carries a significant cost in terms of weight. An average person consumes 2L of water per day, so you would need 540L for your nine-month mission. We will start by saying that your water needs for cooling and other uses can be handled by non-recoverable losses in the recycling system. Now, if your water recycling system is 80% efficient you will still need to lug up 250 pounds of water and another hundred pounds of container and piping.
Now we are talking about 2 tons of consumables per astronaut, assuming the astronauts do nothing more than lie in their chairs and watch TV for nine months...
BTW, the grandparent came up with three years because for a Mars trip there are two options, short stay or long stay. For your short trip the astronauts would have a couple of weeks on the surface before they would have to leave so that their return transfer orbit would be able to catch up to the earth. The other option is to keep the astronauts on the surface for a year and meet up with earth after both planets have cicled around and are close enough for a transfer orbit. The grandparent poster was also assuming a more fuel-efficient transfer to Mars using a Hohmann transfer orbit, which takes 8.5 months.
No one gets a "three month" stay on Mars, at least not if they want to return to Earth. It is either weeks or a year. Any other option requires a lot (and I do mean A LOT) of fuel to catch up with the Earth.
Re:While the use of LTA aircraft...
on
Zeppelin Flies Again
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· Score: 2, Interesting
There is not freighter in use today that could not run rings around a LTA craft. In addition to being faster, the freighter can haul more cargo and it can do so through weather that will turn your LTA aircraft into a twisted lump of plastic and carbon fiber sitting on the bottom of the ocean. The amount of volume needed to turn any of these things into a "heavy lift" vehicle also makes them pretty much useless for that task.
Compared to ships there is almost nothing an LTA aircraft can do that a ship cannnot do better, safer, and cheaper. Compared to other aircraft there are only a few things that an LTA can do that a HTA can't; the big advantages of LTA aircraft are loiter time and almost silent operation. The only real use cases for these things are as high-altitude communication relays, long-loiter reconnaisance, and sightseeing.
He who is merely arrested forfeits personal biometric identification (DNA) which is not at all like fingerprints, but carries very personal and private data about his genetic makeup, health, probability of disease and much else.
No, it is just like a fingerprint, except that it is compared by a computer and is not subject to the same fuzzy matching and "guesses" that happen with conventional fingerprints. Your DNA fingerprint is not a sequence of your genome. It does not reveal any private data about you except your gender (which would have been noted on your arrest form anyway.) It does not reveal anything about your health, it reveals nothing about what diseases you might get in the future, etc.
Here is a quick reality check for you: if it was so easy and cost effective to get your genetic testing done at the police crime lab, why is it that it costs the medical system thousands of dollars to do a test to see if you are suceptible to a single disease?
DNA also can tell you a lot more about a person than a fingerprint. Even if you don't have the person's DNA on file, you can still develop a profile of the person given a good DNA sample. You can get the person's race and sex, at the very least. All that having a fingerprint of a person tells you is that they have a finger.
This is complete BS. A DNA fingerprint does not work on the same markers that are used for determining these features. You will get the person's gender (e.g XX or XY) but that is it. It will not tell you that person's ethnicity, age, eye color, tendency to get diabetes in old age, or anything else that other genetic testing can determine.
It is just a pattern that happens to be unique to a particular individual (or set of individuals in the case of identitical twins) that came from a particular zygote.
Then you could write all the code you wanted, but in order to run the compiler (or interpreter) even once you had to pay a million dollars. If your program generated compiler errors and you needed to run it again after fixing your code you would need to pay another million dollars for the compiler run.
Still think that open source would exist in this world?
What people posting to this thread seem to ignore is that fact that it is easy to come up with a good idea in biology and hiddeously expensive to turn a good idea into a useful treatment. These costs are not going to go away because people tend to care a great deal about what medical treatments are conducted on fellow human beings. This concern manifests itself in length regulations and review processes that turn any clinical trial into a multi-million dollar expense that might not lead to a working treatment.
Software is easy and the capital cost for its production is very low. Biotech is the exact opposite.
Guess what will happen. No one will use your process. They will do whatever is necessary to avoid anything which ties their hands in this way. Not because they are greedy, but because the part that you did, coming up with a good idea, is cheap and easy. Good ideas are a dime a dozen. The cost comes in when it becomes necessary to turn the idea into a useful product through years of additional research and clinical trials.
Slow burst speed is not a problem with the firmware or the lens/focus hardware, it is a simple I/O problem. Do the math here. If your digital camera could take 5 fast shots of 4 megapixels each, where would it put the data? It can't get it through that slow CF or SD interface that fast, so it has to buffer it somewhere. What the expensive cameras have that the cheap ones lack is RAM for the buffer so that it can store the shots while waiting to push them off to the storage device.
It is just a rhetorical trick to try to point out the hidden agenda behind the "use hemp as a replacement for " claims. It would be stupid and dangerous to actually try this, but if hemp was actually the wonder product that its proponents suggest then it would be worth the trade-off of never getting high off of cannabis again in order to get the benefit they claim.
Yes, yes, it is all one big conspiracy. The fact that diesel engines produce higher levels of NOx (which leads to acid rain) and soot particles (a proven carcinogen) using our existing diesel fuel would have nothing to do with the restrictions. Once the US switches over to low-sulpher diesel fuel it might be possible for these new diesel engines to meet the high standards we set here in California, but for the moment these new engines may be good enough for Europe but they are not clean enough to be acceptable over here.
The reality of the situation has nothing to do with corporate conspiracies and is completely dependant on two factors: US diesel fuel has more sulpher than european diesel (it acts as a lubricant) which makes the "new" diesel emission control techniques less effectiive, and California has the highest emission standards in the world.
Oh yeah, and all of trucks, trains, and industrial equipment you mention will eventually be covered by these laws as well. The way most such emissions laws work is that you regulate new entrants and do not try to apply new regulations to existing equipment. As the old stuff wears out and is replaced you end up with everything meeting the standard without needing to force everyone to go through the expensive process of replacing equipment that still actually works.
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing, but you are incorrect. The first Diesel engine was designed to run on coal dust, but this proved a bit problematic so he switched to vegetable oil. The first demonstration of his engine at the 1898 world fair in Paris used peanut oil.
Paper comes from fast growing trees planted specifically for that purpose, so using hemp as a fiber would not cut down on deforestation (you are better off claiming you want to use hemp as a replacement for cotton, which uses a lot of water.)
As far as using hemp oil as a biodiesel source, it is possible but there are better oil producing plants out there so why choose an inferior source of vegetable oil?
Dude, if you want to light up a blunt just say so. Do not try to wrap your argument around some BS economic justification about how "the man" wants to hide all of the great secondary hemp products that would somehow be superior to what we are now using. Once petroleum-based products like nylon replaced hemp as a rope fiber the only real economic niche that hemp occupied disappeared. The problem with trying to make an economic case here is that when cheaper alternatives are brought up as counter-claims your main argument becomes weaker and the longer you cling to it the more it looks to others like you are just being deceptive. Say that you want to indulge in recreational cannabis use and that the parts of the plant that you do not want have a minor economic value. No one is fooled for a second when you try to reverse your argument.
To test out your arguments, try this one. If industrial hemp (which has an almost non-existent level of THC) was legalized in the US, but _only_ a variety which carried a terminator gene that would kill any other related plants that were unlucky enough to have a speck of the GMO plant's pollen land on them, would you still support industrial hemp? In other words, if the side-effect of allowing this "economic panacea" was that all non-industrial hemp would be destroyed by cross-polination and other factors, would you still be promoting industrial hemp? Didn't think so...
It is free because no one else is competing with you for that resource. As soon as someone else walks into that restaurant and tells the manager that they will pay them one cent per gallon for the used oil let's see how far you get with your "I will pay you nothing because you already used the oil" argument.
Additionally, it is not a renewable resource. When you burn the biodiesel it is gone. There will be no more of it raining down from the sky (where you sent the soot particles and NOx, thanks a lot...) It may come from a plant, but that plant was sown using a large machine, it was grown using water pumped by a machine, it was harvested using a machine, and it was processed into oil using another set of machines. None of those machines runs on sunlight or good intentions. Strangely enough, biodiesel seems to be embraced by the "let's run our cars on hemp-oil" crowd but I have yet to read a story about a farmer running his diesel tractor on biodiesel. Closing the open energy loop in the production process would be the first step towards making this a green fuel, so why are we not reading stories about how biodiesel stations are popping up all over the midwest and plains states where the precursors to this fuel are actually harvested?
or hydrogen they're not counting the sun's energy as an input overall.
That is because for hydrogen electrolysis the sun is not an input source of any statistical significance. Less than 1% of the US electricity generation capacity is provided by geothermal, wind, and solar (the "other" category but we will be generous and give you the benefit of geotherm to boost your numbers...)
While they are probably not taking into account land use and water use they probably include fertilizer production costs because it is the largest energy cost in biodiesel and would be hard to hide. Land use and water use also have almost no significant impact on the energy efficiency calculation since these particular factors have long-ago been made hyper-efficient and amortized over generations as a consequence of several thousand years of tech improvements in agribusiness (perhaps they are not "green", "sustainable", or "fair", but they are most certainly efficient...) OTOH, they were probably not including the external energy costs of the petroleum-based logistical "tail" that is the no-so-hidden secret of the so-called hydrogen economy (i.e. the energy cost of the US maintaining a military to protect oil production regions, or the energy cost to ship all that coal to the power plant to generate your hydrogen, etc.)
They are talking about the reality of the NOW. Please keep your arguments grounded in this particular set of assumptions.
It's called an attractive nuisance
on
Safe and Insecure?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
It is not acting in reckless disregard, the legal term you are looking for is "attractive nuisance."
For an example, lets say you have a swimming pool. You put up a fence keep the gate locked. You post signs saying "danger, no lifeguard." You chase away all the neighbor hood kids when they come around, but one climbs in late at night and drowns. You are at fault.
The author of this article has shown himself to be a sophisticated technical consumer. Someone who knows what they are doing. By choosing _not_ to protect access to his line he is acting in a negligent manner and his open AP could be considered an attractive nuisance.
It is all about having the right mix of tools available. I do not think anyone is suggesting that this plane would replace anything but the largest current fire tankers, what is being offered is a new capability.
A 747 has a higher operating cost, but it also has a significantly larger carrying capacity. If the ability to make a few larger drop runs offsets the cost of maintaining a swarm or smaller aircraft then this might start to make sense.
As far as accessiblity goes, you are correct that there are a limited number of locations that the 747 could operate from. To balance this out, the 747 has a range and loiter capability that no other aircraft could match. You could load up in Denver to drop water in Arizona. The 747 could also load up and head into a fire location with the intention of just waiting around for the right opportunity to make its drop. With a loiter time that would exceed 12 hours this plane could sit around waiting in case a sudden wind shift or other event made it necessary for the firefighters to suddenly change strategy. This plane could make a single run to cut off a path for the fire in minutes.
Speed and accuracy are a mistaken assumption on your part. While it is not the most maneuverable plane at lost speed, the 747 can fly low and slow when it needs to.
Hydrogen atoms also do not exist on this planet without being bound to another atom (and in nature this atom is never another H atom) -- usually with a rather tight bond that requires a lot of energy to liberate it.
Until you can point out to me where your mythical hydrogen mines are located perhaps you are the one who should save the flip answers for the ignorant rubes who believe your FUD.
Slashdot Mirror
While some users can be inconceivably stupid, I somehow doubt that the vast majority of them are going to not notice that over the past day their computer suddenly slowed down. Another option (sure to please the crowd around here and get this modded up :) is that the user might say "hmmm... windows just gets slow after you use it for a couple of months, maybe I should try linux" and the zombie problem is solved through an alternate solution...
My heart bleeds for you. Oh woe! You want to send your users with messages that you think are legitimate (something they may disagree with) but do not want to be bothered with the inconvenience of putting up with your users asking you to participate in a spam rate-limiting mechanism or ask them to add you to their whitelist.
If the "individual enthusiast and small business person" is too lazy or ignorant to deal with this then maybe this is how we will revoke your license to drive on the information superhighway...
Did you even read the proposal? I ask because both your original post and your response the the first reply iindicate that you still have no idea how this works, even after someone has been kind enough to save you from your own laziness and point out this proposal is not talking about a montary transation.
So, for your benefit, here is the "proof of work for complete idiots" version:
-You send your spam. Each recipient asks you to perform a proof of work, a mathematical problem that requires some CPU cycles.
-Your CPU starts chugging away at the requests and eventually performs all of the required proof of work.
-Your system responds to the proof of work request and the message is delivered.
-Your spam to your users is delivered, but not instantly because several hours of CPU work were required.
-Cost to you: nothing except a bit of electricity to keep your CPU chugging.
Others have mentioned that this will make it easier for the user to notice that their PC has been hijacked, but another side-effect is that it will perform a rate-limiting service on that zombie. If each zombie can only send 100 messages an hour instead of 100,000 then that is another important benefit.
You will have to change your signup mechanism to notify the user that they have to add you to the whitelist, and you will need to change the list admin email to first send a message to a user reminding them of this fact and only after they reply to this standard response to all complaints message will the message filter up to your mailbox. This is a couple of hours of coding for anyone maintaining a mailing list package.
READ THE PROPOSAL FIRST PLEASE!
This is not asking you to spend money, it is asking you to perform a proof of work. This is hashcash, not real money.
Why is this a problem? If what you are expected to pay depends on volume then it means that a non-spammer who only sends a few emails a day will have almost nothing to pay while a spammer will be unable to afford the work required to send thousands of emails. Since this is based upon proof of work and not an actual monetary amount, it will not be a cost that is difficult to bear.
Yes, some people who run email lists out of their account will be inconvenienced, but not as much as they claim. They will just need to change the signup message to say "this is a mailing list that you signed up for, so add us to your whitelist because we will not be performing proof of work challenges and will drop you from the list when the first proof of work request arrives."
Some will claim that the hordes of spam zombies out there will be able to do the work on the spammer's behalf so this is not a solution, but it will at least provide some rate limiting for that zombie and it will also make it much more likely that the zombie will be noticed by the user when it starts to chew up CPU cycles.
I think that the reason you don't have any good equipment is because the USMC and the USN blew their allowance on a wasted IT upgrade from EDS. You know, that 7 _BILLION_ dollar contract which has already triggered SEC investigations for fraud.
Want to bitch about not having bullets? Look to your own leadership and stop whining about how the Army is going to spend its budget.
but many if not all of the states in the US have similar laws on the book.
Wrong, less than a third do. Care to try again?
What people in the EU fail to understand is that the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is not some legislative act that can be swept aside or abridged for some higher purpose. The governement, literally, does not have the power to do this. The EU can bitch and moan all it wants, but one of the distinguishing features between our systems of government is that there are things we have prohibited our government from doing and no treaty or law can touch it.
The only thing that can change this is to amend the constitution, and if you would like to get a feeling for what the word "impossible" really means I would suggest that you try to get an amendment to either the first or second amendments through congress and then past two-thirds of the state legislatures. For good or bad, these two amendments are sacrosanct in this country and will never, EVER be changed. End of story.
Food is easy. Try packing all of the water and air you will use for the next 9 months in a small suitcase...
Both of these consumables can be recycled slightly (water more than O2) but there will still be loss because we have not come close to building a closed loop environmental support system that is ready for space or small enough to make it up there. A closed-loop water system is close enough to reality that some of it could be applied here, but a closed-loop system for breathing is not going to be flying anytime soon (these involve things like growing plants to convert CO2 to O2, which increases the volume and weight of the spacecraft significantly.)
A body at rest consumes about 0.3L of O2 per minute. That is 432L per day of metabolic consumption and 116000L over nine months. Using 3000psi composite cylinders (larger, but lighter and we are weight-restricted here) you are looking at about 1.5 tons of weight for gas storage with no reserve and with no allowance for regulation or distribution of the O2. If the astronauts were actually going to do more than lie very still for nine months then your O2 budget goes up.
For water the problem is both easier and harder. It is easier because we have actually made good progress on small, lightweight water recycling systems, and it is harder because each litre of water lost carries a significant cost in terms of weight. An average person consumes 2L of water per day, so you would need 540L for your nine-month mission. We will start by saying that your water needs for cooling and other uses can be handled by non-recoverable losses in the recycling system. Now, if your water recycling system is 80% efficient you will still need to lug up 250 pounds of water and another hundred pounds of container and piping.
Now we are talking about 2 tons of consumables per astronaut, assuming the astronauts do nothing more than lie in their chairs and watch TV for nine months...
BTW, the grandparent came up with three years because for a Mars trip there are two options, short stay or long stay. For your short trip the astronauts would have a couple of weeks on the surface before they would have to leave so that their return transfer orbit would be able to catch up to the earth. The other option is to keep the astronauts on the surface for a year and meet up with earth after both planets have cicled around and are close enough for a transfer orbit. The grandparent poster was also assuming a more fuel-efficient transfer to Mars using a Hohmann transfer orbit, which takes 8.5 months.
No one gets a "three month" stay on Mars, at least not if they want to return to Earth. It is either weeks or a year. Any other option requires a lot (and I do mean A LOT) of fuel to catch up with the Earth.
There is not freighter in use today that could not run rings around a LTA craft. In addition to being faster, the freighter can haul more cargo and it can do so through weather that will turn your LTA aircraft into a twisted lump of plastic and carbon fiber sitting on the bottom of the ocean. The amount of volume needed to turn any of these things into a "heavy lift" vehicle also makes them pretty much useless for that task.
Compared to ships there is almost nothing an LTA aircraft can do that a ship cannnot do better, safer, and cheaper. Compared to other aircraft there are only a few things that an LTA can do that a HTA can't; the big advantages of LTA aircraft are loiter time and almost silent operation. The only real use cases for these things are as high-altitude communication relays, long-loiter reconnaisance, and sightseeing.
How about UTFT: understand the f*cking technology
He who is merely arrested forfeits personal biometric identification (DNA) which is not at all like fingerprints, but carries very personal and private data about his genetic makeup, health, probability of disease and much else.
No, it is just like a fingerprint, except that it is compared by a computer and is not subject to the same fuzzy matching and "guesses" that happen with conventional fingerprints. Your DNA fingerprint is not a sequence of your genome. It does not reveal any private data about you except your gender (which would have been noted on your arrest form anyway.) It does not reveal anything about your health, it reveals nothing about what diseases you might get in the future, etc.
Here is a quick reality check for you: if it was so easy and cost effective to get your genetic testing done at the police crime lab, why is it that it costs the medical system thousands of dollars to do a test to see if you are suceptible to a single disease?
DNA also can tell you a lot more about a person than a fingerprint. Even if you don't have the person's DNA on file, you can still develop a profile of the person given a good DNA sample. You can get the person's race and sex, at the very least. All that having a fingerprint of a person tells you is that they have a finger.
This is complete BS. A DNA fingerprint does not work on the same markers that are used for determining these features. You will get the person's gender (e.g XX or XY) but that is it. It will not tell you that person's ethnicity, age, eye color, tendency to get diabetes in old age, or anything else that other genetic testing can determine.
It is just a pattern that happens to be unique to a particular individual (or set of individuals in the case of identitical twins) that came from a particular zygote.
Please keep the hysterical FUD to a minimum.
Then you could write all the code you wanted, but in order to run the compiler (or interpreter) even once you had to pay a million dollars. If your program generated compiler errors and you needed to run it again after fixing your code you would need to pay another million dollars for the compiler run.
Still think that open source would exist in this world?
What people posting to this thread seem to ignore is that fact that it is easy to come up with a good idea in biology and hiddeously expensive to turn a good idea into a useful treatment. These costs are not going to go away because people tend to care a great deal about what medical treatments are conducted on fellow human beings. This concern manifests itself in length regulations and review processes that turn any clinical trial into a multi-million dollar expense that might not lead to a working treatment.
Software is easy and the capital cost for its production is very low. Biotech is the exact opposite.
Guess what will happen. No one will use your process. They will do whatever is necessary to avoid anything which ties their hands in this way. Not because they are greedy, but because the part that you did, coming up with a good idea, is cheap and easy. Good ideas are a dime a dozen. The cost comes in when it becomes necessary to turn the idea into a useful product through years of additional research and clinical trials.
Slow burst speed is not a problem with the firmware or the lens/focus hardware, it is a simple I/O problem. Do the math here. If your digital camera could take 5 fast shots of 4 megapixels each, where would it put the data? It can't get it through that slow CF or SD interface that fast, so it has to buffer it somewhere. What the expensive cameras have that the cheap ones lack is RAM for the buffer so that it can store the shots while waiting to push them off to the storage device.
It is just a rhetorical trick to try to point out the hidden agenda behind the "use hemp as a replacement for " claims. It would be stupid and dangerous to actually try this, but if hemp was actually the wonder product that its proponents suggest then it would be worth the trade-off of never getting high off of cannabis again in order to get the benefit they claim.
Yes, yes, it is all one big conspiracy. The fact that diesel engines produce higher levels of NOx (which leads to acid rain) and soot particles (a proven carcinogen) using our existing diesel fuel would have nothing to do with the restrictions. Once the US switches over to low-sulpher diesel fuel it might be possible for these new diesel engines to meet the high standards we set here in California, but for the moment these new engines may be good enough for Europe but they are not clean enough to be acceptable over here.
The reality of the situation has nothing to do with corporate conspiracies and is completely dependant on two factors: US diesel fuel has more sulpher than european diesel (it acts as a lubricant) which makes the "new" diesel emission control techniques less effectiive, and California has the highest emission standards in the world.
Oh yeah, and all of trucks, trains, and industrial equipment you mention will eventually be covered by these laws as well. The way most such emissions laws work is that you regulate new entrants and do not try to apply new regulations to existing equipment. As the old stuff wears out and is replaced you end up with everything meeting the standard without needing to force everyone to go through the expensive process of replacing equipment that still actually works.
Bzzzt. Thanks for playing, but you are incorrect. The first Diesel engine was designed to run on coal dust, but this proved a bit problematic so he switched to vegetable oil. The first demonstration of his engine at the 1898 world fair in Paris used peanut oil.
Paper comes from fast growing trees planted specifically for that purpose, so using hemp as a fiber would not cut down on deforestation (you are better off claiming you want to use hemp as a replacement for cotton, which uses a lot of water.)
As far as using hemp oil as a biodiesel source, it is possible but there are better oil producing plants out there so why choose an inferior source of vegetable oil?
Dude, if you want to light up a blunt just say so. Do not try to wrap your argument around some BS economic justification about how "the man" wants to hide all of the great secondary hemp products that would somehow be superior to what we are now using. Once petroleum-based products like nylon replaced hemp as a rope fiber the only real economic niche that hemp occupied disappeared. The problem with trying to make an economic case here is that when cheaper alternatives are brought up as counter-claims your main argument becomes weaker and the longer you cling to it the more it looks to others like you are just being deceptive. Say that you want to indulge in recreational cannabis use and that the parts of the plant that you do not want have a minor economic value. No one is fooled for a second when you try to reverse your argument.
To test out your arguments, try this one. If industrial hemp (which has an almost non-existent level of THC) was legalized in the US, but _only_ a variety which carried a terminator gene that would kill any other related plants that were unlucky enough to have a speck of the GMO plant's pollen land on them, would you still support industrial hemp? In other words, if the side-effect of allowing this "economic panacea" was that all non-industrial hemp would be destroyed by cross-polination and other factors, would you still be promoting industrial hemp? Didn't think so...
It is free because no one else is competing with you for that resource. As soon as someone else walks into that restaurant and tells the manager that they will pay them one cent per gallon for the used oil let's see how far you get with your "I will pay you nothing because you already used the oil" argument.
Additionally, it is not a renewable resource. When you burn the biodiesel it is gone. There will be no more of it raining down from the sky (where you sent the soot particles and NOx, thanks a lot...) It may come from a plant, but that plant was sown using a large machine, it was grown using water pumped by a machine, it was harvested using a machine, and it was processed into oil using another set of machines. None of those machines runs on sunlight or good intentions. Strangely enough, biodiesel seems to be embraced by the "let's run our cars on hemp-oil" crowd but I have yet to read a story about a farmer running his diesel tractor on biodiesel. Closing the open energy loop in the production process would be the first step towards making this a green fuel, so why are we not reading stories about how biodiesel stations are popping up all over the midwest and plains states where the precursors to this fuel are actually harvested?
or hydrogen they're not counting the sun's energy as an input overall.
That is because for hydrogen electrolysis the sun is not an input source of any statistical significance. Less than 1% of the US electricity generation capacity is provided by geothermal, wind, and solar (the "other" category but we will be generous and give you the benefit of geotherm to boost your numbers...)
While they are probably not taking into account land use and water use they probably include fertilizer production costs because it is the largest energy cost in biodiesel and would be hard to hide. Land use and water use also have almost no significant impact on the energy efficiency calculation since these particular factors have long-ago been made hyper-efficient and amortized over generations as a consequence of several thousand years of tech improvements in agribusiness (perhaps they are not "green", "sustainable", or "fair", but they are most certainly efficient...) OTOH, they were probably not including the external energy costs of the petroleum-based logistical "tail" that is the no-so-hidden secret of the so-called hydrogen economy (i.e. the energy cost of the US maintaining a military to protect oil production regions, or the energy cost to ship all that coal to the power plant to generate your hydrogen, etc.)
They are talking about the reality of the NOW. Please keep your arguments grounded in this particular set of assumptions.
It is not acting in reckless disregard, the legal term you are looking for is "attractive nuisance."
For an example, lets say you have a swimming pool. You put up a fence keep the gate locked. You post signs saying "danger, no lifeguard." You chase away all the neighbor hood kids when they come around, but one climbs in late at night and drowns. You are at fault.
The author of this article has shown himself to be a sophisticated technical consumer. Someone who knows what they are doing. By choosing _not_ to protect access to his line he is acting in a negligent manner and his open AP could be considered an attractive nuisance.
It is all about having the right mix of tools available. I do not think anyone is suggesting that this plane would replace anything but the largest current fire tankers, what is being offered is a new capability.
A 747 has a higher operating cost, but it also has a significantly larger carrying capacity. If the ability to make a few larger drop runs offsets the cost of maintaining a swarm or smaller aircraft then this might start to make sense.
As far as accessiblity goes, you are correct that there are a limited number of locations that the 747 could operate from. To balance this out, the 747 has a range and loiter capability that no other aircraft could match. You could load up in Denver to drop water in Arizona. The 747 could also load up and head into a fire location with the intention of just waiting around for the right opportunity to make its drop. With a loiter time that would exceed 12 hours this plane could sit around waiting in case a sudden wind shift or other event made it necessary for the firefighters to suddenly change strategy. This plane could make a single run to cut off a path for the fire in minutes.
Speed and accuracy are a mistaken assumption on your part. While it is not the most maneuverable plane at lost speed, the 747 can fly low and slow when it needs to.
Hydrogen atoms also do not exist on this planet without being bound to another atom (and in nature this atom is never another H atom) -- usually with a rather tight bond that requires a lot of energy to liberate it.
Until you can point out to me where your mythical hydrogen mines are located perhaps you are the one who should save the flip answers for the ignorant rubes who believe your FUD.