My point was that the claimed output levels, energy-wise--10,000 gallons of diesel per year per acre--correspond to an energy output of 350 MJ per square meter per year.
I was coming at it from two angles--how much energy does the claimed process produce, and how much energy does the region supposedly producing it receive in sunlight. Since, as you point out, the sun shines a lot more than 350 MJ of energy on a given square meter per year, it's certainly plausible on an energy basis.
Wait, I can get more precise. Average values have been shown to be around 125 to 375 W/m^2. So, guessing an average of 250, we can get 7.2 MJ per day. Since algae doesn't care about seasons or anything like that, we can multiply that by the 365 days in a year to get 2.6 GJ per year.
So, the algae has to be around 13.3% efficient to get an energy yield of 10,000 gallons of diesel per acre. I have no idea if that efficiency is plausible or not.
One gallon of diesel has 135000 Btu of energy, or 142 MJ. 10,000 gallons is 1.42 TJ. One acre is roughly 4046 square meters. So (presumably you're talking about annual yields here), each square meter of land will be producing roughly 350 MJ per year.
Peak solar power at sea level is 1 kW/m^2. Let's make the totally unrealistic assumption that the sun shines at peak brightness for an average of eight hours a day, no clouds or anything. That makes 28.8 MJ of solar input energy per day.
Huh. I'm rather stunned. Sure, it bespeaks a significantly impressive efficiency on the part of the algae, but there's likely no perpetual-motion tomfoolery here. Man, I'm going to grow a tank of greasy algae in my backyard!
It's really vague to compare two languages' "power". The only definitive comparison you can make is whether they're both Turing-complete. In that case, Perl = C = INTERCAL = Unlambda.
So the price of wireless ethernet is that it's so hard to do properly that only having a single vendor toolchain, from hub to host, can make it work? Yecch.
Bluetooth, also, I've never seen work properly. Be it a bluetooth laptop (this one was running XP), or a bluetooth cellphone headset, it strikes me as part of a growing acceptance of crapulent technology.
Here, I'll give you an example. "Hmm, our phones are reliable, clear and functional. Y'know what'd be great? Going back to the Bad Old Days of random disconnections, and having to shout into the phone five times to be understood--let's all get cellphones and use them even when we're in our own homes!"
I've used wireless a few times, on different machines, different networks and different platforms, with different wireless adapters connecting to different hubs. In no case has it ever worked right the first time. The proprietary Windows driver program (with cutesy nonstandard user interface that looks like it was carved out of a 1970s station wagon) will display hubs, but simply not connect to one, and not provide an explanation or any way to get an explanation. If it does eventually decide to work, it will not be for any conceivable reason.
Remember this joke? "SCSI is *not* magic. There are *fundamental* *technical* *reasons* why you have to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain every now and then." Yeah, wireless ethernet is now like that for me. I am utterly unimpressed with the technology. What good is all this shiny if it's so unreliable as to be useless?
I'll care about wireless when it's easier to use than running a bunch of Cat5.
I'm sorry, I know this is going to sound weak, but it's the only episode I saw through to the end, and I didn't get the episode number. It was a few years ago.
Gee, I'm sure the liberals would like to throw all the violent psychopaths into the clink, but there's just no room in there since you conservative types have filled up the jails with nonviolent pot smokers.
Whoops, makin' way too much sense here. I'd better give it a rest.
What's Green Friday? The day after Thanksgiving is supposed to be the biggest retail day of the year, right? That's why it's also Buy Nothing Day, right?
I saw an episode of, I think, CSI, where a cop who'd been kicked off the force had fabricated evidence to get someone sent to jail who he was real sure was guilty. The guy turned out to be innocent--the real killer had gone free, and murdered again, partly because this guy had planted the evidence.
So, you'd think we'd be watching a tale about this guy's hubris, and his fall from grace, and how he learns the importance of due process. You'd be wrong.
The episode centered around our other leads buttering this guy up, telling him how much the force needed him, and how he couldn't let himself succumb to his guilt, because there were bad guys out there that needed catchin'.
I shit thee not. This is the kind of story they tell, which is why I refused to watch another damned episode. I don't care how cleft the leads' chins are, or how clever the zoom effects.
Sure enough, the feckless dramaturge later shows us a technician clattering away at the keyboard of a laptop, by which time we are able to see that the shadowy figures in the distant window, though still barely resolved, may be up to no good. "That's about as good as I can get it... in analog," says the technician.
"What about...digital?" Asks the redheaded crime-fighter, portentously.
You actually want to prevent someone from owning things? You can't do that without destroying freedom. Go read Hayek and learn a few things.
The problem isn't that people end up having tremendous wealth, it's that the nation works tremendously hard and the profits end up concentrated at the very top. Do you think a pyramid-shaped social structure, with a few elites at the top serviced by hordes of serfs, is ideal? Recall some of the great political engineering feats of the last century, such as the G.I. Bill, which lifted an entire generation of Americans into the middle class--without "destroying freedom", as you say.
Sure, I've been involved in Usenet politics for years now, involved in newsgroup creation, and I enjoy that sort of thing. If I didn't, I wouldn't be doing it. But I've walked through the countryside of Maine in the snow and seen branches bent to the ground under the weight of it because of Usenet, I've been in a room with fifty people screaming the chorus of "March of Cambreadth" at a Heather Alexander concert in Seattle because of Usenet, I've written some of the best damn stuff I've ever written in my life because of Usenet, I *started* writing because of Usenet, I understand my life and my purpose and my center because of Usenet, and you know 80% of what Usenet has given me has fuck all to do with computers and everything to do with people. Because none of that was in a post. I didn't read any of that in a newsgroup. And yet it all came out of posts, and the people behind them, and the interaction with them, and the conversations that came later, and the plane trips across the country to meet people I otherwise never would have known existed.
That's what this is all about. That's why I do what I do.
People.
Do you know what it's like to see something that you've put your heart and soul into creating grow and flourish and *become* one of those communities? What it feels like to give back to someone, someone just discovering the Internet, those same feelings of wonder and awe and warmth and community and friendship that you found? To receive, not the welcome random bit of thanks here and there, but the far deeper and more wonderful knowledge that you've built and maintained something that people are *using* and using to do things and see things and think things that they otherwise would never be able to do or would have no outlet for?
Do you know what it's like to have a friend of yours randomly on a whim decide something in a newsgroup you created is interesting and engaging enough to post to Usenet for the first time? And then to experience the horrible, sinking knowledge that with that post he's likely to get his mailbox flooded with spam? Or the raw fear that he'll then never post again, scared away, when this place that has given you so much could give that to him as well, and that he could give the same to other people? And that, damn it all, he's one of the cool people in this world, and you don't know what these groups are all for, in the end, but if they're for anything at all, they should be for people like him?
Do you know what it feels like to know that your news server, despite the fact that it's some of the best hardware you can get with your available resources for an application that most people just don't care about, is running a backlog? That you're dropping incoming articles? That somewhere, *somewhere* there are things being posted which you are not receiving? They could be junk, they could be beautiful, well-expressed pieces of someone's soul, and you DON'T KNOW, you CAN'T KNOW, because legions of fucking vandals are throwing so much *CRAP* at your news server that it's running flat out trying to process it and delete it and just can't go any faster?
Let me tell you this: there's a rage in that. There is a cold rage that you feel at that because, God damn it, it is not acceptable, it is NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE for a *single* post that is from a *person* talking to other *people* to be deleted, to be dropped on the uncaring floor to make room for machine generated spew.
Copyrights and patents aren't two names for the same thing. Inventions can be patented; the creative expression of an idea can be copyrighted. The idea itself cannot; see Feist v. Rural.
His point was that never again will hijackers be able to say, "sit down, shut up and fly the plane--and you'll live", and be believed. 'Cause that's what the 9/11 hijackers did, and everyone figured they'd be making an unscheduled trip to Cuba or something, because that's how hijackings went until then.
I doubt any gaggle of passengers is going to believe a hijacker who tries that line on them again, and I think that's what the OP was saying.
Come on, someone has to have some kind of massive tagging system for porn. Anyone? Damn it, when will I be able to satisfy my desire of finding tattooed girls with brightly-dyed hair wearing jog bras and boxers? It can't just be me, can it?
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My point was that the claimed output levels, energy-wise--10,000 gallons of diesel per year per acre--correspond to an energy output of 350 MJ per square meter per year.
I was coming at it from two angles--how much energy does the claimed process produce, and how much energy does the region supposedly producing it receive in sunlight. Since, as you point out, the sun shines a lot more than 350 MJ of energy on a given square meter per year, it's certainly plausible on an energy basis.
Wait, I can get more precise. Average values have been shown to be around 125 to 375 W/m^2. So, guessing an average of 250, we can get 7.2 MJ per day. Since algae doesn't care about seasons or anything like that, we can multiply that by the 365 days in a year to get 2.6 GJ per year.
So, the algae has to be around 13.3% efficient to get an energy yield of 10,000 gallons of diesel per acre. I have no idea if that efficiency is plausible or not.
One gallon of diesel has 135000 Btu of energy, or 142 MJ. 10,000 gallons is 1.42 TJ. One acre is roughly 4046 square meters. So (presumably you're talking about annual yields here), each square meter of land will be producing roughly 350 MJ per year.
Peak solar power at sea level is 1 kW/m^2. Let's make the totally unrealistic assumption that the sun shines at peak brightness for an average of eight hours a day, no clouds or anything. That makes 28.8 MJ of solar input energy per day.
Huh. I'm rather stunned. Sure, it bespeaks a significantly impressive efficiency on the part of the algae, but there's likely no perpetual-motion tomfoolery here. Man, I'm going to grow a tank of greasy algae in my backyard!
It's really vague to compare two languages' "power". The only definitive comparison you can make is whether they're both Turing-complete. In that case, Perl = C = INTERCAL = Unlambda.
So the price of wireless ethernet is that it's so hard to do properly that only having a single vendor toolchain, from hub to host, can make it work? Yecch.
Bluetooth, also, I've never seen work properly. Be it a bluetooth laptop (this one was running XP), or a bluetooth cellphone headset, it strikes me as part of a growing acceptance of crapulent technology.
Here, I'll give you an example. "Hmm, our phones are reliable, clear and functional. Y'know what'd be great? Going back to the Bad Old Days of random disconnections, and having to shout into the phone five times to be understood--let's all get cellphones and use them even when we're in our own homes!"
WHY do people put up with such crap?
I've been asking myself the same thing.
I've used wireless a few times, on different machines, different networks and different platforms, with different wireless adapters connecting to different hubs. In no case has it ever worked right the first time. The proprietary Windows driver program (with cutesy nonstandard user interface that looks like it was carved out of a 1970s station wagon) will display hubs, but simply not connect to one, and not provide an explanation or any way to get an explanation. If it does eventually decide to work, it will not be for any conceivable reason.
Remember this joke? "SCSI is *not* magic. There are *fundamental* *technical* *reasons* why you have to sacrifice a young goat to your SCSI chain every now and then." Yeah, wireless ethernet is now like that for me. I am utterly unimpressed with the technology. What good is all this shiny if it's so unreliable as to be useless?
I'll care about wireless when it's easier to use than running a bunch of Cat5.
I'm sorry, I know this is going to sound weak, but it's the only episode I saw through to the end, and I didn't get the episode number. It was a few years ago.
Aagh! Memories! Horrible, horrible memories of Jon Katz!
He fell off a cliff or something, didn't he?
Gee, I'm sure the liberals would like to throw all the violent psychopaths into the clink, but there's just no room in there since you conservative types have filled up the jails with nonviolent pot smokers.
Whoops, makin' way too much sense here. I'd better give it a rest.
I tell you, after playing Carmageddon for about a week, I'm driving really, really carefully nowadays.
Ba-zing. I can't believe the show would market a video game and sanctimoniously preach against them. That's just... wow. Words fail me.
What's Green Friday? The day after Thanksgiving is supposed to be the biggest retail day of the year, right? That's why it's also Buy Nothing Day, right?
Oh, wait. I got it.
Wait, who are you?
I saw an episode of, I think, CSI, where a cop who'd been kicked off the force had fabricated evidence to get someone sent to jail who he was real sure was guilty. The guy turned out to be innocent--the real killer had gone free, and murdered again, partly because this guy had planted the evidence.
So, you'd think we'd be watching a tale about this guy's hubris, and his fall from grace, and how he learns the importance of due process. You'd be wrong.
The episode centered around our other leads buttering this guy up, telling him how much the force needed him, and how he couldn't let himself succumb to his guilt, because there were bad guys out there that needed catchin'.
I shit thee not. This is the kind of story they tell, which is why I refused to watch another damned episode. I don't care how cleft the leads' chins are, or how clever the zoom effects.
And certainly not anyone who's ever heard of jury nullification!
It was the dirty dirty pervert that did it, right? Man, I'm like a fucking' CSI judo master. I should go into police work myself.
The Left Hand of Darkness is coma-inducing? It's under three hundred pages, and moves along pretty briskly.
You actually want to prevent someone from owning things? You can't do that without destroying freedom. Go read Hayek and learn a few things.
The problem isn't that people end up having tremendous wealth, it's that the nation works tremendously hard and the profits end up concentrated at the very top. Do you think a pyramid-shaped social structure, with a few elites at the top serviced by hordes of serfs, is ideal? Recall some of the great political engineering feats of the last century, such as the G.I. Bill, which lifted an entire generation of Americans into the middle class--without "destroying freedom", as you say.
No story about Usenet Is Dying would be complete without Russ Allbery's excellent rant. An excerpt:
Sure, I've been involved in Usenet politics for years now, involved in
newsgroup creation, and I enjoy that sort of thing. If I didn't, I
wouldn't be doing it. But I've walked through the countryside of Maine in
the snow and seen branches bent to the ground under the weight of it
because of Usenet, I've been in a room with fifty people screaming the
chorus of "March of Cambreadth" at a Heather Alexander concert in Seattle
because of Usenet, I've written some of the best damn stuff I've ever
written in my life because of Usenet, I *started* writing because of
Usenet, I understand my life and my purpose and my center because of
Usenet, and you know 80% of what Usenet has given me has fuck all to do
with computers and everything to do with people. Because none of that was
in a post. I didn't read any of that in a newsgroup. And yet it all came
out of posts, and the people behind them, and the interaction with them,
and the conversations that came later, and the plane trips across the
country to meet people I otherwise never would have known existed.
That's what this is all about. That's why I do what I do.
People.
Do you know what it's like to see something that you've put your heart and
soul into creating grow and flourish and *become* one of those
communities? What it feels like to give back to someone, someone just
discovering the Internet, those same feelings of wonder and awe and warmth
and community and friendship that you found? To receive, not the welcome
random bit of thanks here and there, but the far deeper and more wonderful
knowledge that you've built and maintained something that people are
*using* and using to do things and see things and think things that they
otherwise would never be able to do or would have no outlet for?
Do you know what it's like to have a friend of yours randomly on a whim
decide something in a newsgroup you created is interesting and engaging
enough to post to Usenet for the first time? And then to experience the
horrible, sinking knowledge that with that post he's likely to get his
mailbox flooded with spam? Or the raw fear that he'll then never post
again, scared away, when this place that has given you so much could give
that to him as well, and that he could give the same to other people? And
that, damn it all, he's one of the cool people in this world, and you
don't know what these groups are all for, in the end, but if they're for
anything at all, they should be for people like him?
Do you know what it feels like to know that your news server, despite the
fact that it's some of the best hardware you can get with your available
resources for an application that most people just don't care about, is
running a backlog? That you're dropping incoming articles? That
somewhere, *somewhere* there are things being posted which you are not
receiving? They could be junk, they could be beautiful, well-expressed
pieces of someone's soul, and you DON'T KNOW, you CAN'T KNOW, because
legions of fucking vandals are throwing so much *CRAP* at your news server
that it's running flat out trying to process it and delete it and just
can't go any faster?
Let me tell you this: there's a rage in that. There is a cold rage that
you feel at that because, God damn it, it is not acceptable, it is NOT
FUCKING ACCEPTABLE for a *single* post that is from a *person* talking to
other *people* to be deleted, to be dropped on the uncaring floor to make
room for machine generated spew.
Period.
Copyrights and patents aren't two names for the same thing. Inventions can be patented; the creative expression of an idea can be copyrighted. The idea itself cannot; see Feist v. Rural .
His point was that never again will hijackers be able to say, "sit down, shut up and fly the plane--and you'll live", and be believed. 'Cause that's what the 9/11 hijackers did, and everyone figured they'd be making an unscheduled trip to Cuba or something, because that's how hijackings went until then.
I doubt any gaggle of passengers is going to believe a hijacker who tries that line on them again, and I think that's what the OP was saying.
"A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read." --Mark Twain
Come on, someone has to have some kind of massive tagging system for porn. Anyone? Damn it, when will I be able to satisfy my desire of finding tattooed girls with brightly-dyed hair wearing jog bras and boxers? It can't just be me, can it?