In Brazil, ethanol is extracted from sugar cane. Sugar cane plantations are far from the Amazon, in fact, there are many in the southeast region of the country (close to the city of Sao Paulo).
So, the land had sugar cane growing on it. You install a plant next to it, harvest the cane, extract ethanol, and that's it.
Brazil is as large as the continental US, and the Amazon is just but a part of it.
...when you can get decent renewable energy on Earth?
Oh, so you can't create a reactor that spits out more energy than it takes in? What about putting research effort into creating a more energy-efficient way to extract ethanol from corn?
In countries like Brazil, ethanol has a positive energy balance. It polutes much less than gasoline and it's easily renewable.
Going to the moon for He3 sounds like an overly elaborate and exotic, not to say stupid, idea.
What I find particularly annoying in renewable energy discussions is that most people omit ethanol, which is probably THE best renewable energy source.
Cars in Brazil already routinely run with 20% ethanol added to gasoline with no ill effects. Ethanol burns cleanly and is derived from sugar cane or, in the US, corn.
The US govt, however, is very protective of the national industry and imposes huge tariffs on the import of ethanol. The energy balance is negative in the US, for ethanol: it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get from burning it. In Brazil, however, it is a very efficient process.
Why this hasn't sparked more debate is beyond me...
...this isn't news. In Brazil, some CDs have already been released like this [Notably, the Tribalistas CD which was nominated for a Latin Grammy].
This didn't keep me from ripping it in iTunes into AAC. The software that installs itself only works under Winblows, of course, since that's 95% of the market right there.
As for WMA not working in your MP3 player, they don't work in my iPod either. I convert my WMAs into WAV and then back into AAC. Sounds perfect.
Google doesn't have any problems with its results. If Apple computer shows up more than real apples, it's because nobody gives a crap about real apples, nowadays. If you want to find information on tulips but don't want florists, add -florist to your search query, and so forth.
What google is really bad at, however, is following links with ? in them -- querystrings. Google USED to be really good at that, but recently it has simply started ignoring new pages of the type/bla.php?date=20030721.
People who publish information in that format have had to do some hacking to remove the querystrings. According to this article, google started indexing pages with querystrings sometime in 2001.
However, I started publishing a bunch of pages with querystrings in Aug 2002 (in an otherwise well-indexed site) and none of them were indexed until I removed the querystrings in March 2003. The day after I did that, google was all over the site, hitting pages like mad.
I don't have a blog, but google refuses to index my content. I don't use the word blog, I wrote my own php scripts, and I don't ever read/link to any blogs, nor does any of them link to me.
For example: try searching google for "key biscayne triathlon trilogy" (no quotes). You will only find useless links. Or try finding a bike ride we have here, "great tour of coconut grove" -- same story.
Yet I've had decent content for both of those topics, with photos, in pages that have dates in them, here and here.
Or, if you want yet another example...try searching for "Arnaldo Cohen Jacksonville" -- Arnaldo Cohen is a pianist...and I have a page up with qt movies of the performance, here -- and google doesn't have it.
I see googlebot on my "blog" all the time -- but nothing's ever added to the index, or if it is, it stays there for 1 day and then disappears.
Alltheweb.com, which is powered by fastsearch's engines, have nearly all my stuff indexed, even though they have about 1 billion fewer pages indexed than google.
So what's the story? Am I being excluded because Google thinks I'm a blog? Or do Google's crawlers suck?
Maybe because I live in the US, not in Brazil, and maybe because I have a laptop, not a desktop, and maybe because I type in multiple languages, some of them requiring accents.
Also, maybe because a regular keyboard is perfectly adequate, if only you have the functionality available to users of the Windows US-International keyboard layout, which I now happen to have, right here on my Powerbook.
That's why I can type things like: "Eu sou de São Paulo e você é um babaca" or "Tu es un connard sans frontières", but of course you just don't get it, do you?
This is the only person who "gets it". I guess it makes sense; we're both from Brazil, where we NEED accents to make ourselves understood. A word without an accent may have a completely different meaning.
Sorry, I should have said that I already knew about the "option+letter" combinations. That's what I meant by "funky" key combinations, in my original post.
This US International keyboard at brockerhoff.net is THE REAL DEAL. It is truly absurd that Apple doesn't incorporate it into OS X.
No, anything else *isn't* good enough. Dead-key typing means typing 'a to get á. Anything else is a distraction.
If you can't hear the pops, it might be because you're not listening to quiet enough music, or your listening environment might have noise above the level of the electrostatic 'pop'.
Try a quieter location, or try listening to a sequence of classical music tracks.
Notice that the pop isn't only passive: it's active as well; when you press next/previous & play buttons, the pop is there too.
If you STILL can't hear the pops, then I'm stumped. I almost hope you can, because then it's more likely that it's a firmware issue.
...and now this. So they've made it easier to get into school, but once you do, slap your wrist for setting up a pr0n server!
I wonder if this has anything to do with students being used as relay for spam. I know cornell doesn't implement any sort of spam filtering -- at least not for alums using their email server for forwarding.
There's no reason to be proud of sitting at the "D" table, but if you did, it's your own fault.
I went to a small high school with a small contingent of "bullies" or "jocks" but of course in High School there were the usual cliques. Still, quite a few people managed to play a ton of sports, take a shitload of tough IB courses (IB is like the AP, but in Europe), and perform in bunch of extra-curricular activities. They were all the more popular for it. Of course they got good SAT scores and went to kickass universities.
A lot of it has to do with the parenting. If you were a socially inept geek/nerd, I believe in large part your parents didn't get you to interact with others very much while you were growing up. That's a crucial part of maturing into a well-balanced individual.
If the geeks made a bigger effort to blend in with the cool people, it would certainly be reciprocated -- you could make some friends among the "popular" guys/gals, and everybody would benefit; you from their popularity, they from your intelligence.
One thing parents have to do is get their kids involved in sports -- no matter how geeky you are, there's gotta be some game you're willing to play (aside from computer games or chess).
As for jocks going on to getting flip-burger type jobs, that isn't necessarily true. I know a bunch of kids from my high school who were bona-fide jocks and academic losers who in the end shaped up to managerial positions and some even became doctors or lawyers. Some people are just late bloomers intellectually (I think *most* people are in that category, actually).
I can surely understand all of their reasoning. However, why are they complaining that their proprietary scripting language has an "unpleasant syntax"? If they developed it themselves, couldn't they have made it as nice as any other nice language?
I've delivered three large web applications in Java in the past two years, one in Websphere, and the last two in BEA Weblogic 6/Portal 4. Java *is* very slow, unfortunately. A big beefy server is required for something that would take only seconds to perform on a php system.
It pissed me off, because I *love* Java. But I always joke that if we used php I could do our entire site (which usually takes 6-12 months) in a week.
PHP is much quicker for development. Java can get very, very large, because you want to modularize and use all of its nice features.
One thing that's particularly annoying is that Java doesn't run well on Solaris. You'd think a Sun language would run well on a Sun OS, but it doesn't. Doesn't run very well on Linux, either. As the poster said, there *are* differences among the vendors -- among application servers, specifically. Some don't implement all of the J2EE servlet specifications as they should be implemented.
So, Java is very very nice, but PHP is much faster and quicker to learn. If Y! chose it, they certainly know what they're doing.
Two very good reads by a very good writer. Sorry, I know some people don't like Philip and this isn't flamebait -- I truly admire many of his initiatives, like the free Remindme and Clickthrough services, in addition to the remarkable photo.net which has grown enormous tentacles nowadays. Both books are intimately related to those efforts.
Your elected representatives will pay attention to you, the American voters, only for the next 3 weeks or so. Mobilize if you can; otherwise suffer 2 more years of the same but please don't complain!.
Well, I'll complain anyway. The biggest problem is that 99% of the population doesn't know and doesn't understand DRM issues. That includes the politicians who passed this ludicrous law by unanimous vote.
In a nascent digital/Internet industry, doubtless some laws will be passed whose effects will only later be fully understood. Right now, even the tech elite doesn't fully understand the complete ramifications of the DMCA, much less the masses! What we have to do is spread the knowledge, educate the voters and the politicians so that laws like these aren't passed in the future.
Does anybody hate them too? I cancelled my service in February to switch over to DirecTV DSL. Bellsouth spent the last three months billing me for service. Last week I called in -- they hadn't cancelled my service after all! After fighting a bit on the phone I switched to emails (which don't require you to stay on hold for 40 minutes and be switched multiple times and then hear "Oh, my manager is in a meeting, but leave us your number and you'll be contacted").
Finally they issued me credit.
Their whole argument was that there was nothing on the record that I cancelled service in Feb. My point was: look at your logfiles. I haven't logged in since then. Interestingly, when I called last week to inquire about my service, I got disconnected (was calling from my cell phone) and their service rep cancelled my service (as if to perhaps get them off the hook? "Oh, you called in to cancel your service only last week!")
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This explanation doesn't hold water -- then why don't they charge for software updates, and why not charge $1.99, or $0.99, or even $0.01, instead?
In Brazil, ethanol is extracted from sugar cane. Sugar cane plantations are far from the Amazon, in fact, there are many in the southeast region of the country (close to the city of Sao Paulo).
So, the land had sugar cane growing on it. You install a plant next to it, harvest the cane, extract ethanol, and that's it.
Brazil is as large as the continental US, and the Amazon is just but a part of it.
...when you can get decent renewable energy on Earth?
Oh, so you can't create a reactor that spits out more energy than it takes in? What about putting research effort into creating a more energy-efficient way to extract ethanol from corn?
In countries like Brazil, ethanol has a positive energy balance. It polutes much less than gasoline and it's easily renewable.
Going to the moon for He3 sounds like an overly elaborate and exotic, not to say stupid, idea.
What I find particularly annoying in renewable energy discussions is that most people omit ethanol, which is probably THE best renewable energy source.
Cars in Brazil already routinely run with 20% ethanol added to gasoline with no ill effects. Ethanol burns cleanly and is derived from sugar cane or, in the US, corn.
The US govt, however, is very protective of the national industry and imposes huge tariffs on the import of ethanol. The energy balance is negative in the US, for ethanol: it takes more energy to produce ethanol than you get from burning it. In Brazil, however, it is a very efficient process.
Why this hasn't sparked more debate is beyond me...
This didn't keep me from ripping it in iTunes into AAC. The software that installs itself only works under Winblows, of course, since that's 95% of the market right there.
As for WMA not working in your MP3 player, they don't work in my iPod either. I convert my WMAs into WAV and then back into AAC. Sounds perfect.
Google doesn't have any problems with its results. If Apple computer shows up more than real apples, it's because nobody gives a crap about real apples, nowadays. If you want to find information on tulips but don't want florists, add -florist to your search query, and so forth.
/bla.php?date=20030721.
What google is really bad at, however, is following links with ? in them -- querystrings. Google USED to be really good at that, but recently it has simply started ignoring new pages of the type
People who publish information in that format have had to do some hacking to remove the querystrings. According to this article, google started indexing pages with querystrings sometime in 2001.
However, I started publishing a bunch of pages with querystrings in Aug 2002 (in an otherwise well-indexed site) and none of them were indexed until I removed the querystrings in March 2003. The day after I did that, google was all over the site, hitting pages like mad.
For example: try searching google for "key biscayne triathlon trilogy" (no quotes). You will only find useless links. Or try finding a bike ride we have here, "great tour of coconut grove" -- same story.
Yet I've had decent content for both of those topics, with photos, in pages that have dates in them, here and here.
Or, if you want yet another example...try searching for "Arnaldo Cohen Jacksonville" -- Arnaldo Cohen is a pianist...and I have a page up with qt movies of the performance, here -- and google doesn't have it.
I see googlebot on my "blog" all the time -- but nothing's ever added to the index, or if it is, it stays there for 1 day and then disappears.
Alltheweb.com, which is powered by fastsearch's engines, have nearly all my stuff indexed, even though they have about 1 billion fewer pages indexed than google.
So what's the story? Am I being excluded because Google thinks I'm a blog? Or do Google's crawlers suck?
A dead "~" becomes a ~ simply by pressing the space bar after typing ~.
Maybe because I live in the US, not in Brazil, and maybe because I have a laptop, not a desktop, and maybe because I type in multiple languages, some of them requiring accents.
Also, maybe because a regular keyboard is perfectly adequate, if only you have the functionality available to users of the Windows US-International keyboard layout, which I now happen to have, right here on my Powerbook.
That's why I can type things like:
"Eu sou de São Paulo e você é um babaca" or "Tu es un connard sans frontières", but of course you just don't get it, do you?
This is the only person who "gets it". I guess it makes sense; we're both from Brazil, where we NEED accents to make ourselves understood. A word without an accent may have a completely different meaning.
Sorry, I should have said that I already knew about the "option+letter" combinations. That's what I meant by "funky" key combinations, in my original post.
This US International keyboard at brockerhoff.net is THE REAL DEAL. It is truly absurd that Apple doesn't incorporate it into OS X.
No, anything else *isn't* good enough. Dead-key typing means typing 'a to get á. Anything else is a distraction.
Try a quieter location, or try listening to a sequence of classical music tracks.
Notice that the pop isn't only passive: it's active as well; when you press next/previous & play buttons, the pop is there too.
If you STILL can't hear the pops, then I'm stumped. I almost hope you can, because then it's more likely that it's a firmware issue.
...and now this. So they've made it easier to get into school, but once you do, slap your wrist for setting up a pr0n server!
I wonder if this has anything to do with students being used as relay for spam. I know cornell doesn't implement any sort of spam filtering -- at least not for alums using their email server for forwarding.
Sorry, /. editors are morons for posting this. Can anybody read this and actually believe it's true?
It *is* true, but Bill Gates would've never said it.
WTF is Focus Magazine, anyway?
There's no reason to be proud of sitting at the "D" table, but if you did, it's your own fault.
I went to a small high school with a small contingent of "bullies" or "jocks" but of course in High School there were the usual cliques. Still, quite a few people managed to play a ton of sports, take a shitload of tough IB courses (IB is like the AP, but in Europe), and perform in bunch of extra-curricular activities. They were all the more popular for it. Of course they got good SAT scores and went to kickass universities.
A lot of it has to do with the parenting. If you were a socially inept geek/nerd, I believe in large part your parents didn't get you to interact with others very much while you were growing up. That's a crucial part of maturing into a well-balanced individual.
If the geeks made a bigger effort to blend in with the cool people, it would certainly be reciprocated -- you could make some friends among the "popular" guys/gals, and everybody would benefit; you from their popularity, they from your intelligence.
One thing parents have to do is get their kids involved in sports -- no matter how geeky you are, there's gotta be some game you're willing to play (aside from computer games or chess).
As for jocks going on to getting flip-burger type jobs, that isn't necessarily true. I know a bunch of kids from my high school who were bona-fide jocks and academic losers who in the end shaped up to managerial positions and some even became doctors or lawyers. Some people are just late bloomers intellectually (I think *most* people are in that category, actually).
I can surely understand all of their reasoning. However, why are they complaining that their proprietary scripting language has an "unpleasant syntax"? If they developed it themselves, couldn't they have made it as nice as any other nice language?
I've delivered three large web applications in Java in the past two years, one in Websphere, and the last two in BEA Weblogic 6/Portal 4. Java *is* very slow, unfortunately. A big beefy server is required for something that would take only seconds to perform on a php system.
It pissed me off, because I *love* Java. But I always joke that if we used php I could do our entire site (which usually takes 6-12 months) in a week.
PHP is much quicker for development. Java can get very, very large, because you want to modularize and use all of its nice features.
One thing that's particularly annoying is that Java doesn't run well on Solaris. You'd think a Sun language would run well on a Sun OS, but it doesn't. Doesn't run very well on Linux, either. As the poster said, there *are* differences among the vendors -- among application servers, specifically. Some don't implement all of the J2EE servlet specifications as they should be implemented.
So, Java is very very nice, but PHP is much faster and quicker to learn. If Y! chose it, they certainly know what they're doing.
His Travels With Samantha was one of the first online free books ever, circa 1992-3. Later, he wrote the stupendous book on web publishing, Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing with his samoyed, Alex.
Two very good reads by a very good writer. Sorry, I know some people don't like Philip and this isn't flamebait -- I truly admire many of his initiatives, like the free Remindme and Clickthrough services, in addition to the remarkable photo.net which has grown enormous tentacles nowadays. Both books are intimately related to those efforts.
Well, I'll complain anyway. The biggest problem is that 99% of the population doesn't know and doesn't understand DRM issues. That includes the politicians who passed this ludicrous law by unanimous vote.
In a nascent digital/Internet industry, doubtless some laws will be passed whose effects will only later be fully understood. Right now, even the tech elite doesn't fully understand the complete ramifications of the DMCA, much less the masses! What we have to do is spread the knowledge, educate the voters and the politicians so that laws like these aren't passed in the future.
How's that any different for a sync chip? Cooler sync chips also run significantly faster.
Finally they issued me credit.
Their whole argument was that there was nothing on the record that I cancelled service in Feb. My point was: look at your logfiles. I haven't logged in since then. Interestingly, when I called last week to inquire about my service, I got disconnected (was calling from my cell phone) and their service rep cancelled my service (as if to perhaps get them off the hook? "Oh, you called in to cancel your service only last week!")