Ah, actually I was thinking of pyrolysis, not fermented switchgrass ethanol. Still, though, I'm surprised that the process has excess residuals left over after accounting for distillation.
In this case, the study completely ignored the possibility of using an acre of switchgrass as an ethanol feedstock and then using the resulting 'waste' as a fuel to produce electricity.
Unfortunately there is no "waste" leftover when using switchgrass to produce ethanol.
Note that this is the same type of failure as what happened in the mortgage bubble. Realtors and buyers and auditors were not actually determining the real value of the houses they were trading, but were merely checking to see what everyone else thought the value was. Most of the players (at least those with the most control) had an incentive to inflate the value. So the result was a spiral of home prices that rose far beyond the true value.
Now that the market has corrected and prices are closer to the actual value, all parties are crying foul and saying they don't want to have to "mark to market" or face foreclosure or bankruptcy for their inability to correctly determine the true value of their investments.
In the same way, Wikipedia does not check for actual truth of the statements it publishes, just that they are corroborated by some other medium or by some other website. This process is subject to the same manipulation and error that has decimated the global real estate market. In the same way, the consequences of failure are externalized by Wikipedia and not borne by any of its editors, contributors, or sponsors.
Unless you're in rush hour traffic, weight actually has less to do with mileage than aerodynamics. So, if you can strap all the goats into a minivan, you'd probably save gas.
"Neutral", perhaps. But grazing grass-fed beef would actually be carbon-negative, to the extent that grass-fed beef displaces feedlot-raised beef in the market.
Goats are probably not normally given feed, so they don't really qualify as carbon-negative. But if their meat is used as a substitute for some other, more carbon-intensive meat, they might be.
Race and gender are revealed by many social media, Derek, along with age, religion, grammar and reasoning ability. And it's not yet against the law to discriminate based on grammar or reasoning ability, so you might want to reconsider your position.
Unless you're a doctor or own a clinic or something, your preference doesn't matter. Hospitals don't run on rainbows and cupcakes. They need paying customers.
The current care givers may fear seeing a drop in patients and new facilities can easily be opposed at the local or state level with enough lobbyists. Welcome to Market FAIL.
What part of preventing competition through legislation do you think can be attributed to the "free market"?
The for-profit medical insurance have a rational interest make sure the medical industry to make insurance as much of a mind-fuck as possible. That way you pay more than you need to and you end up under-covered or over-covered and paying out of your rectum on an ongoing basis or after one big event. This is neither rational nor a functional way to receive healthcare.
Of course not. So why are you paying for it willingly? Why are health insurance benefits tax-exempt? And what does this have to do with the free market?
In the government however, you can expect at least some fairness in the proceedings and the judgement can be appealed in the court system.
This is the same court system that okays spying-on and torturing Americans and generally violating their rights at all levels. You think you'll get fairer treatment from them?
The credit reporting industry is another broken industry.
Maybe if the government didn't take 30% of your paycheck to pay for health care for old people, you could afford a hospital visit every now and then? I'm sure you don't mind, though. Anything for glorious socialism, right?
I have health care coverage... and pay for my health care expenses out of pocket like you suggest
What? So which is it?
But we're talking about your wife, right? Was her $6000 broken ankle paid for by "health care coverage" or "out of pocket"? And hopefully that bill includes an ambulance ride and a some physical therapy, because this random page puts the average cost of a broken ankle at $1400 in 2003. Even at 20% annual growth*, the cost shouldn't be $6000.
*Caused in part by employers over-providing untaxed health benefits, over-insured patients burdening the system with non-essential doctor visits, and of course the state-sanctioned licensing monopoly failing to keep up with demand for doctors. But of course none of that could be solved by anything as silly as the "free market", right?
That's funny. For all of your railing against the "free market" and for socialism, it's apparent that you simply don't know how the free market is even supposed to work.
If you had taken all of that money that you happily gave to insurance companies over the years in exchange for absolutely nothing, and instead saved it for when your wife needed her ankle fixed, you would find that you could pay cash for great service. Instead you're stuck hoping not to get screwed-over by a for-profit company with absolutely no incentive to provide your wife with appropriate care. If you were a hospital, who would you treat first, patients who offer cash or those who send their insurance company to haggle with the doctors?
I agree that some parts of health care in the US are completely screwed up. But it appears that a major part is people like YOU who can't manage your own affairs, and expect to be able to pay someone else to do it for you. The free market is based on rational self-interest. You appear to be appropriately self-interested, yet completely irrational about it.
Worse, you don't seem to understand that socialist health care is exactly the same as what you already have, except the insurance companies are replaced with the government and you still get to pay out the ass in exchange for horrible service when you need it most.
Those comments are from the BBC page linked in the summary. I did cherry-pick the best parts of the best comments, but they are all there. It is not a single "message" as you say, but portions of messages from five different people that the BBC has (presumably) sourced before quoting.
Perhaps they are using British spellings because they were translated, or because they are British ex-pats, or they are Mexicans who read the BBC, or the BBC has a spell-checker that automatically replaces American spellings with British ones (okay that was a joke).
What a retarded discussion. I know that most IT people are horrible, lazy incompetents these days. But I don't expect to see so many of them on slashdot.
It's a new strain of "swine" flu (only called that because it originated in swine) that contains elements of bird, human, and swine flu viruses. It is transmitted between humans. Stop spreading misinformation.
As a doctor, I realise that the media does not report the truth. Authorities distributed vaccines among all the medical personnel with no results, because two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days even though they were vaccinated as all of us were.
I'm a specialist doctor in respiratory diseases and intensive care at the Mexican National Institute of Health. Staff are starting to leave and many are opting to retire or apply for holidays. It is killing three to four patients daily, and it has been going on for more than three weeks.
I am a doctor and I work in the State of Mexico. We doctors knew this was happening a week before the alert was issued and were told to get vaccinated.
In the capital of my state, Oaxaca, there is a hospital closed because of a death related to the porcine influenza. Many friends working in hospitals or related fields say that the situation is really bad, they are talking about 19 people dead in Oaxaca, including a doctor and a nurse. They say they got shots but they were told not to talk about the real situation.
Two of my friends at work are sick, they were sick for a couple of days, they went to the hospital and they sent them back to work. The doctor told them it was just a flu until Friday when the alarm was spread, then they were allowed to go home. I work in a call centre and I'm worried because there are no windows in the building so it cannot be ventilated and around 400 people work there. We all have talked to our supervisor but no one has done anything not even sterilise or disinfect the area. We will be sick soon and, well, do the math - 400 can infect at least another two per day.
I try to be tolerant of website ads. The closest I've come to using an ad blocker is to edit my hosts file to send particularly buggy ad providers to the bitbucket. But I finally broke down and reinstalled Flashblock a few weeks ago. You're right that sites need to start filtering ads for quality. It's just too annoying when a flash ad starts blaring noise at me as soon as I open a webpage. And while I am actually quite pleased with how unobtrusive the ads are on ABC.com, I noticed that NBC.com uses the same annoying practice of making the sound volume on their ads 10x the volume of their shows. Fortunately the mute button on my laptop works just as well as the mute button on the remote.
And don't get me started on Yahoo video ads. Every time I see that Scottrade cursor guy jerking around the screen making unintelligible noises and stupid faces I wonder whether Scottrade realizes they are paying to annoy potential customers with a video player that has all the capability of RealPlayer circa '99 without the useful BUFFERING notice.
Listening to an MP3 requires 1% of your CPU power today mostly because of the proliferation of SIMD hardware (MMX, SSE, etc.) that can speed up signal processing.
You may be right about 1995. There were quite a few Pentium I machines produced without MMX extensions. So listening to an MP3 required quite a bit of CPU.
But in 1992, MPEG decoding hardware was available, and was even commonplace, on many desktop PCs. On the right PC, listening to an MP3 then required scarcely more processing power than it does now.
Apparently, the past for Slashdot (and Google, and Pixar, etc...) is the future for most everyone else.
The bad news is that world supply of Cheetos and Mt. Dew will peak sometime in the next three years. The good news is that overpopulation is no longer a problem.
In addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a "paper system" for the day.
Hospitals have generators, true. But I know of one hospital that keeps all of it's patient records via remote Windows terminal sessions to a datacenter in the next state.
Not a small hospital either. A huge one. And it sounds like that is the norm.
Windows terminal sessions. Not a remote database for redundancy. Not something that can be cached. A hospital, with complete dependence on a single real-time data link across hundreds of miles. Let that sink in.
You think people would sail out into the gulf and attack fiberglass windmills for their copper windings? Has this happened to any of the hundreds of offshore windmills already in existence?
And then what if the windings are made from aluminum?
And what power generation source would not be a target in the event of war? Do you really think putting solar panels on your roof would exempt it from bombing if some country attacks the US?
There is original research posted to Slashdot all the time, mostly in the field of computer science.
If there is enough data in the article to draw your own conclusions, then there is enough to discuss. This is a discussion site. If Slashdot only posted agreed-upon facts, then we would all just sit here with our dicks in our hands.
What the fuck is wrong with you people lately? This isn't wikipedia. We don't need anything filtered for truthiness by the retards responsible for that site.
Slashdot Mirror
Rumor has it that old Athlons built before hardware thermal throttling could catch fire and burn down your PC. But I've never seen any proof of this.
Ah, actually I was thinking of pyrolysis, not fermented switchgrass ethanol. Still, though, I'm surprised that the process has excess residuals left over after accounting for distillation.
In this case, the study completely ignored the possibility of using an acre of switchgrass as an ethanol feedstock and then using the resulting 'waste' as a fuel to produce electricity.
Unfortunately there is no "waste" leftover when using switchgrass to produce ethanol.
America -> has lots of space
Electric cars -> expensive
Note that this is the same type of failure as what happened in the mortgage bubble. Realtors and buyers and auditors were not actually determining the real value of the houses they were trading, but were merely checking to see what everyone else thought the value was. Most of the players (at least those with the most control) had an incentive to inflate the value. So the result was a spiral of home prices that rose far beyond the true value.
Now that the market has corrected and prices are closer to the actual value, all parties are crying foul and saying they don't want to have to "mark to market" or face foreclosure or bankruptcy for their inability to correctly determine the true value of their investments.
In the same way, Wikipedia does not check for actual truth of the statements it publishes, just that they are corroborated by some other medium or by some other website. This process is subject to the same manipulation and error that has decimated the global real estate market. In the same way, the consequences of failure are externalized by Wikipedia and not borne by any of its editors, contributors, or sponsors.
Caveat emptor.
I've heard of a farmer who would sell pot-bellied pigs to people as pets and then offer to take them back for free "when they got too big".
Unless you're in rush hour traffic, weight actually has less to do with mileage than aerodynamics. So, if you can strap all the goats into a minivan, you'd probably save gas.
"Neutral", perhaps. But grazing grass-fed beef would actually be carbon-negative, to the extent that grass-fed beef displaces feedlot-raised beef in the market.
Goats are probably not normally given feed, so they don't really qualify as carbon-negative. But if their meat is used as a substitute for some other, more carbon-intensive meat, they might be.
[citation needed]
And now an entire generation of idiots believe everything they read in such "authoritative sources" and distrust everything else.
Race and gender are revealed by many social media, Derek, along with age, religion, grammar and reasoning ability. And it's not yet against the law to discriminate based on grammar or reasoning ability, so you might want to reconsider your position.
Bullshit. If it's public, it's not snooping. (Or anywhere near discriminatory.)
Well, race and gender are fairly public, once you reach the interview stage. But making hiring decisions based on this can still be discriminatory.
My preference...
Unless you're a doctor or own a clinic or something, your preference doesn't matter. Hospitals don't run on rainbows and cupcakes. They need paying customers.
The current care givers may fear seeing a drop in patients and new facilities can easily be opposed at the local or state level with enough lobbyists. Welcome to Market FAIL.
What part of preventing competition through legislation do you think can be attributed to the "free market"?
The for-profit medical insurance have a rational interest make sure the medical industry to make insurance as much of a mind-fuck as possible. That way you pay more than you need to and you end up under-covered or over-covered and paying out of your rectum on an ongoing basis or after one big event. This is neither rational nor a functional way to receive healthcare.
Of course not. So why are you paying for it willingly? Why are health insurance benefits tax-exempt? And what does this have to do with the free market?
In the government however, you can expect at least some fairness in the proceedings and the judgement can be appealed in the court system.
This is the same court system that okays spying-on and torturing Americans and generally violating their rights at all levels. You think you'll get fairer treatment from them?
The credit reporting industry is another broken industry.
Well, duh.
I am a social anarchist
Great. I'll try to speak slowly.
I am self employed
Maybe if the government didn't take 30% of your paycheck to pay for health care for old people, you could afford a hospital visit every now and then? I'm sure you don't mind, though. Anything for glorious socialism, right?
I have health care coverage... and pay for my health care expenses out of pocket like you suggest
What? So which is it?
But we're talking about your wife, right? Was her $6000 broken ankle paid for by "health care coverage" or "out of pocket"? And hopefully that bill includes an ambulance ride and a some physical therapy, because this random page puts the average cost of a broken ankle at $1400 in 2003. Even at 20% annual growth*, the cost shouldn't be $6000.
*Caused in part by employers over-providing untaxed health benefits, over-insured patients burdening the system with non-essential doctor visits, and of course the state-sanctioned licensing monopoly failing to keep up with demand for doctors. But of course none of that could be solved by anything as silly as the "free market", right?
That's funny. For all of your railing against the "free market" and for socialism, it's apparent that you simply don't know how the free market is even supposed to work.
If you had taken all of that money that you happily gave to insurance companies over the years in exchange for absolutely nothing, and instead saved it for when your wife needed her ankle fixed, you would find that you could pay cash for great service. Instead you're stuck hoping not to get screwed-over by a for-profit company with absolutely no incentive to provide your wife with appropriate care. If you were a hospital, who would you treat first, patients who offer cash or those who send their insurance company to haggle with the doctors?
I agree that some parts of health care in the US are completely screwed up. But it appears that a major part is people like YOU who can't manage your own affairs, and expect to be able to pay someone else to do it for you. The free market is based on rational self-interest. You appear to be appropriately self-interested, yet completely irrational about it.
Worse, you don't seem to understand that socialist health care is exactly the same as what you already have, except the insurance companies are replaced with the government and you still get to pay out the ass in exchange for horrible service when you need it most.
Those comments are from the BBC page linked in the summary. I did cherry-pick the best parts of the best comments, but they are all there. It is not a single "message" as you say, but portions of messages from five different people that the BBC has (presumably) sourced before quoting.
Perhaps they are using British spellings because they were translated, or because they are British ex-pats, or they are Mexicans who read the BBC, or the BBC has a spell-checker that automatically replaces American spellings with British ones (okay that was a joke).
What a retarded discussion. I know that most IT people are horrible, lazy incompetents these days. But I don't expect to see so many of them on slashdot.
It's a new strain of "swine" flu (only called that because it originated in swine) that contains elements of bird, human, and swine flu viruses. It is transmitted between humans. Stop spreading misinformation.
As a doctor, I realise that the media does not report the truth. Authorities distributed vaccines among all the medical personnel with no results, because two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days even though they were vaccinated as all of us were.
I'm a specialist doctor in respiratory diseases and intensive care at the Mexican National Institute of Health. Staff are starting to leave and many are opting to retire or apply for holidays. It is killing three to four patients daily, and it has been going on for more than three weeks.
I am a doctor and I work in the State of Mexico. We doctors knew this was happening a week before the alert was issued and were told to get vaccinated.
In the capital of my state, Oaxaca, there is a hospital closed because of a death related to the porcine influenza. Many friends working in hospitals or related fields say that the situation is really bad, they are talking about 19 people dead in Oaxaca, including a doctor and a nurse. They say they got shots but they were told not to talk about the real situation.
Two of my friends at work are sick, they were sick for a couple of days, they went to the hospital and they sent them back to work. The doctor told them it was just a flu until Friday when the alarm was spread, then they were allowed to go home. I work in a call centre and I'm worried because there are no windows in the building so it cannot be ventilated and around 400 people work there. We all have talked to our supervisor but no one has done anything not even sterilise or disinfect the area. We will be sick soon and, well, do the math - 400 can infect at least another two per day.
You have absolutely no sense of irony, do you?
I try to be tolerant of website ads. The closest I've come to using an ad blocker is to edit my hosts file to send particularly buggy ad providers to the bitbucket. But I finally broke down and reinstalled Flashblock a few weeks ago. You're right that sites need to start filtering ads for quality. It's just too annoying when a flash ad starts blaring noise at me as soon as I open a webpage. And while I am actually quite pleased with how unobtrusive the ads are on ABC.com, I noticed that NBC.com uses the same annoying practice of making the sound volume on their ads 10x the volume of their shows. Fortunately the mute button on my laptop works just as well as the mute button on the remote.
And don't get me started on Yahoo video ads. Every time I see that Scottrade cursor guy jerking around the screen making unintelligible noises and stupid faces I wonder whether Scottrade realizes they are paying to annoy potential customers with a video player that has all the capability of RealPlayer circa '99 without the useful BUFFERING notice.
Listening to an MP3 requires 1% of your CPU power today mostly because of the proliferation of SIMD hardware (MMX, SSE, etc.) that can speed up signal processing.
You may be right about 1995. There were quite a few Pentium I machines produced without MMX extensions. So listening to an MP3 required quite a bit of CPU.
But in 1992, MPEG decoding hardware was available, and was even commonplace, on many desktop PCs. On the right PC, listening to an MP3 then required scarcely more processing power than it does now.
Just nitpicking...
Apparently, the past for Slashdot (and Google, and Pixar, etc...) is the future for most everyone else.
The bad news is that world supply of Cheetos and Mt. Dew will peak sometime in the next three years. The good news is that overpopulation is no longer a problem.
hospitals have generators.
In addition, resources that should not have failed, like the local hospital's internal computer network, proved to be dependent on external resources, leaving the hospital with a "paper system" for the day.
Hospitals have generators, true. But I know of one hospital that keeps all of it's patient records via remote Windows terminal sessions to a datacenter in the next state.
Not a small hospital either. A huge one. And it sounds like that is the norm.
Windows terminal sessions. Not a remote database for redundancy. Not something that can be cached. A hospital, with complete dependence on a single real-time data link across hundreds of miles. Let that sink in.
You think people would sail out into the gulf and attack fiberglass windmills for their copper windings? Has this happened to any of the hundreds of offshore windmills already in existence?
And then what if the windings are made from aluminum?
And what power generation source would not be a target in the event of war? Do you really think putting solar panels on your roof would exempt it from bombing if some country attacks the US?
There is original research posted to Slashdot all the time, mostly in the field of computer science.
If there is enough data in the article to draw your own conclusions, then there is enough to discuss. This is a discussion site. If Slashdot only posted agreed-upon facts, then we would all just sit here with our dicks in our hands.
What the fuck is wrong with you people lately? This isn't wikipedia. We don't need anything filtered for truthiness by the retards responsible for that site.