In fact the only reasonable way we can make the hydrogen we need is to build abotu 75 nukes here in Alberta. I am perfectly prepared to back this up.
Here in Alberta we are trying to ramp synthetic crude production to about between 3 and 4 million barrels per day. For each atom of carbon we mine, we need to find an atom of hydrogen. If we can't find the hydrogen we can leave 1/2 the carbon in a waste heat or burn the carbon - thereby losing a significant amount of what we mine in the form of CO2.... the later idea is the Fischer-tropche process.
If we use F-T we produce CO2 in quantities that are measured in millions of barrels of liquid CO2 per day.
In the past, H2 was produced from methane. If you have lots of methane this is a cheap way to do it.
But North America peaked in Methane production in January of 2001. We have a shortage of methane too... and as a consequence, a major percentage of the fertilizer industry in North America shut down. If the plastics feedstocks industry has not also started this shutdown process, then they will... because they will be next (probably). The glass industry is also in jeapardy.
Dont' for a minute think that the "oil industry" is going to just "strip the H from the O&G"! The truth is the oil industry is in dire need of H2... So the idea of using a wind mill to create H2 is acutally a good idea.
Here in Alberta we would need so many windmills to produce the energy equivalent of 75 GIGAWATTS of H2 per DAY that I have no idea where we would park them.
I would probably prefer windmills to nuclear plants.... This is just a personal feeling. But I don't know how we can do it.
We really don't have enough land in Alberta with good wind resources to be able to plant the number of windmills we need. Alberta is a big place.
The short of it is... don't count on the oil industry to produce the H2 you commented on. It ain't gonna happen.
I have written this many times and sometimes people send me flack. Those who do clearly do not grasp what I am talking about.
If one looks at commerce from the point of view of money flows for services, what one sees is that money flows in the OPPOSITE direction of goods and services. As such it facilitates transactions and good things happen.
Now with the net, we have this situation: A web master (or owner of a website such as Wikipedia) is clearly providing a service. Clearly there is no reason for people to even log into the net (much less pay for access) if there is no content they are interested in.
So what we have is this.
consumer {--- ISP {--- telecom {--- (uplink) {--- website (flow of content = a service)
Note: I would have used left and right arrows instead of the braces but I can't figure out how to coax slashdot's system into allowing me to use them.
What we see is that the telecomunications industry, with their monopolistic and oligoplistic powers is in a position to effectively hold everyone to randsom and bill everyone for their services.
The point is the web content creation industry is actually providing a service, and they should be paid for this service. If one considers the amount of money that flows into the telecommunications industry for instance from the delivery of internet content, the numbers of mind boggling. Yet except for a small number of isolated cases, those who create the content receive no compensation and do not participate in the revenue stream.
As an internet subscriber I have already paid my ISP for access to the content, My ISP has paid their uplink and if they bypass the uplink, then they pay someone else such as Akaimi.
But the website owners? The money flow reverses direction before it reaches them.
This is terribly unjust.
An example of how unjust this is follows:
Consider a company like Telstra (Australia's main telecom).
Telstra with all its power is not able to obtain content which flows through the USA for free. So Telstra pays American Telecommunication carriers for access to content which flows through the USA and Telstra also pays for content which originates in Australia and flows to the USA.
Now consider an Aussie website? Telstra bills them for the bandwidth they "USE".
This puts Telstra in the position of paying American Interests while at the same time billing Austrlian interests for the exact same thing... IE. Providing access to internet content.
Of course, Telstra also bills those who want access to the content.. IE.. the general public. But it is expected the consumer should pay for this access because after all they are the ones who want access to the content comming out of websites like Wikipedia.
I do not know to change the system. I do know I've phoned the head offices of the telephone company that handles the region I live in and I have spoken with the VP in charge of this area. He agrees with what I'm writting here - that its an unfair system. He foresees the day when the Telecommunications industry will pay for access to websites and perhaps will lose the right to proxy and cache the content... because this is making copies (IE. This would be copyright infringment were in not for the fact that the laws were changed to allow the ISP's and Telecomms to duplicate at will). However, he didn't have any idea when this might happen and I don't see the industry doing anything about this unfair system until they are forced to.
In the mean time I would suggest that anyone worried about losing access to the Wikipedia should perhaps look at doing a websuck (wget) and save the content on a DVD. Of course, while a caching proxy doesn't quite work like wget does, from a practical stanpoint it accomplishes the same thing. So ISP's can make the copies and proxy Wikipedia and continue to charge for supplying the conten
This has to be one of the stupidest ideas launched in a long time.
Electricity is a low entropy energy source. Heat is a high entropy source. The maximum efficiency one can obtain from _any_ heat engine is the sterling cycle and it is limited by the differences in the temperature between the hot and cold energy source and sink.
It is just amasing how little thermodynamics people know. So why is this story on slashdot? It would find a better home in the rags at the supermarket checkouts.
A much smarter idea would be to use the energy to produce yas hydrogen (if we had a place to store it) and failing that even pumping water up to the top of a hill to power a hydro-electric station makes more sense.
Unless they create this food-sourced, genetically-altered- yeast-produced "gasoline" in biosafety level 4 factories, these little buggers are going to get out into the environment
You'll need level 5 and they will still get out.
It is likely they will not be well adapted to compete in the natural world. However... they will likely survive and if they have enough good genes and food ( and remember the food will be there for them!!! This is what we are planing on building them for!!! IE a veritable feast of dead plant matter ). If they survive which is pretty much guaranteed, then they will adapt.
So, you make a very good point! Rounding these things up will not be possible.
I am starting to believe the end of the human race is visible and it will come in the form of our tinkering with the microbial world. But then what do I know eh?
You are correct in your assement. Liquid fuels are alkanes which are CnH(2n+2) which you simplified to CnH2n which is ok... I said 2:1 hydrogen to carbon. We are both saying the same thing.
Now this issue is where a biological system obtains its energy inputs. You mentioned ITER. I would not count on it. However we do have technology on the shelf in the form of the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) which was developed by Argonne Labs by 1994 under the guidance of Dr. Charles Till. This machine will burn all the actinides which means it is both safe to use and instead of producing wastes it burns the wastes. It can be used to burn existing nuclear wastes (all of them), and in so doing there is about a 60,000 year supply of uranium and other actinides on hand already mined and ready to burn. This can power a fleet of about 100 reactors in the gigawatt range. To produce 100% of our power we need about 1200 reactors of this size which means our fuel supply is only about 5,000 years... but I didn't add in new mining and I didn't add in thorium. I did add in all the "depleated" uranium which is BTW still about 80% as radioactive as natural uranium and in fact is still about 80% as radioactive as the enriched uranium fuel stuffed into the light water pressurized reactors in common use in the USA. ALL of the spent fuel can also be put into an IFR system.
So why don't we build them? Well - go ask Bill Clinton. His administration shut the program down in 1994.
Back to the plants.
Biological sources can capture radiation to produce biofuels, but not on the fermentation side. The technology is clearly well developed in the plant kingdom mind you.... but not in the fungal kingdom. Yeast is a fungus. So is Trichoderma reesei which is being looked at for cellulose->ethanol production.
So we are still left with where the fungus obtains its energy during fermentation and this is by oxidizing carbon and releasing CO2. What this means is that a sizable percentage of the biomass we start with is lost to CO2. We are still left with the issue of obtaining hydrogen or at a bare minimum conserving it.
A pure chemical process such as Fischer Tropsche might be just as efficient and easier to operate. Nuclear can be used to create a supply of hydrogen using say steam electrolysis.
I think it is very important to note that using a plant source is going to likely be considerably more expensive than other sources of energy... This is easy to see since the plant source contains about 50% of its mass in the form of oxygen. Note: (CH2O)n. With n=6 we have simple sugars.
But costs aside.
If we cart off the dead plant material to a fuel factory then we can clearly convert it to liquid fuels of which one choice (a good one) is ethanol. Note: Methanol (CH3OH) is NOT a good choice.
If we do not cart off the dead plant matter then it will still be oxidized to CO2. The fungus in the environment will do this. So we will neither increase or decrease the amount of CO2 in this part of the planetary carbon cycle by converting to liquid motor fuels and burning them. About all will will do is take some of the food the fungi consume and let our cars consume it instead. I frankly don't think the fungi will care all that much.
But what of the other option? What of continuing to mine carbon/hydrogen and burn it? This will continue to dump CO2 into the planetary carbon cycle. This is not bad. This is in spite of the feelings (but not logic) of a large percentage of the population which have been brainwashed with the religeon that CO2 must be bad for us.
The earth can quite easily cope with atmospheric CO2 levels many times what it is now. During the Ordovician for instance the CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now... and in fact CO2 levels are presently at a very low level. This low level might be partially explained by the C4 plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_plant
Oh... I should add. The issue of producing ethanol from starch is the same as making beer. Note that beer is typically 5% ethanol. Thus 20 gallons of beer contain about 1 gallon of ethanol.
If ethanol is going to compete on price with gasoline then we're going to need to be able to make it at under $2.50 per gallon. The process to produce ethanol from starch includes converting the starches into sugars (mashing) and then converting the sugars into ethanol (fermentation). This means beer is an intermediate step.
The short of this is that if we can produce ethanol cost effectively as an energy source compared with say gasoline, then we should be able to make beer for less than $2.50 per keg ( A keg of beer is about 58.6 liters = 15.5 US gallons = 12.5 imp gallons )
Note there is a lot of CO2 released in this conversion. Some of it can be used to make the beer fizzy.
I think this gives new meaning to the phrase "Don't drink and drive" and perhaps it needs to become "Drink and don't drive" or "Drive and don't drink" as the later phrases more clearly convey the alternatives. In any event in the new world order with ethanol available as a fuel competatively priced with gasoline I can see little reason to justify beer prices much above $2.50 per keg.
Horray for a brave new world. Technology advances clearly can and should drive costs down.
It doesn't really matter all that much what the end product is... ethanol is perfectly fine. The point is one ton of dry woody biomass is about the same as 2 barrels of oil and this if you can convert for free.
Starches are fine to start with, but only a small amount of the plant ends up as starch. An even smaller amount ends up as oils. Celulose, pentosans and lignins compose the majority of plant tissues. There are many fungi which digest these and some can be harnessed to produce alcohols. The issue is we are still stuck with one ton of dry plant matter equals about 2 barrels of oil.
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day. From a plant source this is 40 million tonnes per day.
A cheaper and more promising way to produce this oil is using the Fischer Tropche process and doing coal->liquids or coal->gas. Note that Alberta Tar Sands operations are essentually bitumin->liquids. Bitumin is a little closer chemically to what we need than coal is... IE both are hydrogen poor in that liquid fuels in the Alkane series (most of what we use) have about a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to carbon.
Coal depending on the type is about 0.6:1 and bitumin is closer to 1:1.
Methane is 4:1. This means that methane is a good chemical feedstock from which to obtain the hydrogen needed.
This also means it is stupid to be burning methane... it is far more valuable as a chemical feedstock than a fuel.
Plant matter does fit into the equation, it is not as hydrogen poor. Plant matter is basically (CH2O)n and from this we can see that it is a partially oxidized hydrocarbon. This means that plant matter is hydrogen poor unless we can break the H2O bonds and this is the same problem we face with coal and bitumin. Ie... in the case of coal and bitumin, we can break H2O bonds in river water or lake water or ocean water to obtain our hydrogen.
Note that alcohols are also partially oxidized hydrocarbons. Ethanol for instance is C2H5OH. This means it is easier to obtain ethanol from sugar because both the sugar and the ethanol contains Oxygen. The flip side of this is that since the molecule is already partially oxidized, it doesn't contain as much energy as an un-oxydized Alkane such as the ethane (C2H6) parent molecule. Also note that ethane for instance has an atomic weight of 30 while ethanol has an atomic weight of 46. So you have less energy with about 1.5 times the weight.
(BTW - this is the short of why the oil industry is building LNG tankers. Methanol (CH3OH) is safer and easier to transport than CH4 (liquid), but 1/2 the weight of methanol is oxygen).
All this means is there isn't a free lunch. Production of any fuel from a sugar polymer source (dry plant matter) is going to require energy and the only biological source of this energy comes from oxidizing carbon to obtain the energy required to salvage the hydrogen. This results in massive releases of CO2 (of course - its the raw material plants use to create dry matter - hense it is not polution and is in fact fertilizer). Next you lose a significant amount of the total mass of the dry matter we start with. We eventually are left with one ton of dry plant matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil - if we can convert it for free.
We are back to needing 40 tonnes of dry plant matter per day and massive factories which don't exist.
I have several copies of NT 4.0 partly because I was a dealer back then and got burned and never managed to sell some of them. Mind you, on one of my systems was a copy of an upgrade version of 4.0.
NEVER AGAIN
That was such a pain in the ass to install that I will NEVER touch any crap like that ever again. It was authorized from NT3.5 or Winders 95 and I recall having to fart around looking for the previous CD and even having to install a copy and boy what a joke.
NEVER AGAIN
Another joke was upgrading the motherboard to a dual processor board. I used a MICROSOFT utility. It never even checked to see if the DLL versions were ok. It was a bloody nightmare and I swear I have seldom seen such shoddy workmanship in my life.
It was 3 days before I could get the system to boot and about the only reason I could fix it is because I used a FAT organisation for the boot partition and was able to boot to DOS to rescue the system. Fortunately nothing was lost but what a nightmare.
Arrgghhh. Bad moderation again. I was a moderator yesterday. Damn... no points.
This is NOT off topic. This is dead on topic.
Alas, what this illustrates is that most people do not do their due dilligence.
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Now I am a member of a small stock club. I have learned so much about how people think from this endvour. I would urge others to try something similar (a small stock club I mean).
What I have learned is that it is unbelievable how poor people's judgment is. If they are buying something for themselves they might analyse it to death. We've all heard of people who drive all over town looking for the best price.
But when it comes to a stock... someone steps forward and says they can make a great deal of money if they buy "XYZ" but that the train has almost left so "you better hurry", and the greed factor kicks in and its almost as if their brains shut down as they hand over their hard won sheckles.
Due Dilligence? hahahaha.
Take HAO.V (trades on Vancouver) as an example. Read the press releases. Check the press releases from MENV.PK (pink sheets).
Check and see what sort of oil production they have... or the actual interest in the wells they participate in.
Check the insider trading.
All of this information is available. An hour of due dilligence and a quick trip to a bulletin board will show the facts... yet - these POS companies collectivly have market caps over $25 million bux. They trade on the TSX, pink sheets and Frankfurt.
Why don't the regulators do something about this? I don't know. Perhaps the press releases are factual even as they are misleading. Perhaps the regulators have bigger fish to fry. Perhaps there are so many of these scams going on.
Perhaps the regulators just look at it and shrug their shoulders and say to themselves that its a free market. If people don't do their homework before they invest then too bad.
In any event... I'm not too worried about the stock spam. If I were worried about it I'd make a list and simply avoid the stocks. The few percent commented on in the artical is peanutz.
If you bring the insulation in the walls to about R50 (fibergalss is fine) and the ceiling to about R70 then you can get rid of the furnace. The cost of insulating the house is going to be in the taking the walls apart and putting them back together... the isulation itself should cost you about a buk per square foot.
Along with this you want to install a very good vapour barrier and calk the plastic together. Air seepage is a major loss of energy. Use a heavy polyethlene sheeting as well. Remember - you only need to do this once and after it is done it will pay you dividends for as long as you own the place. When you sell it make sure you ask for a premium.
Next... the way to do this is to screw a 2x2 spacer onto the studs. Then screw a 2x2 to the spacer. Use about 3 of them per stud. The extension should make the wall exactly 1 foot thicker. This is sort of important for the finishing.
The windows and doors will then be in pockets. You probably won't want to feel like you are looking through a tunnel.
So get some mirror tiles (1 foot by 1 foot) and glue them to the sides of the window frame. That will finish it nicely. Get a nice floor tile and glue it to the bottom. Now you can put plants in the windows where they belong! Any water will not bother the tiles.
You'll have to move all of the electrical services of course... and with the walls apart you may as well wire it properly. Put plugs near the corners... within say 30" of the corners. People like to put coffee tables and end tables in corners and need plugs nearby. Many contractors like to put the plug in the middle of the wall. This is a pain. Their reasoning must be that you can always pull the couch out and use an extension cord.
While you are at it - install at least cat 5 and lots of telephone jacks and cable TV jacks. These should not be daisy chained together like electrical... they should run back to a service center. Label everything with plastic tags that won't fall off.
These little details will not cost you much and it is just so NICE to be able to have a separate phone line for instance for the kids or for a tenant down the track. Make sure you have two phone jacks in each drop... the duplex boxes cost about the same as the singles and you might want to add a fax someday.
Note: The future of telephones is probably VoIP and you might want to run an Asterix server someday as this will provide both local and long distance services to any other asterix server at no cost. This means you can probably call up your phone company and tell them to take a hike and cancel your services. This alone will pay for the wiring in about a year or less.
Finally... if you can figure out a way... see if you can provide a way to run fiber optics. I _think_ one way might be to just install plastic conduit into each room. Its pretty easy to fish whatever cables you might need in the future through a conduit. I've not priced this out... Also - talk to an electrician about how the fishing will be done. Electricians are brlliant at this.
I redid my house about 10 years ago. I made some mistakes and not thinking far enough ahead was the big one. So I ended up trying to figure how I could run 10base-T over TV cables. Now we have wireless.
But I still think that in the future if we get fiber to the house then we'll want fiber in the house... and this means to each room.
Before you start... watch Total Recall. Arnie and Stone have a gorgeous view from their window. Note this scene... its not a window - its a flat panel display that looks like a window. I expect these will be common place within about a decade.
Regardless where people live they tend to live in houses most of the time and look out windows. I see no reason why a camera can't be mounted at a nice beach and the image displayed in real time in a display that looks like a window. The displays are being built by companies like Westaim (wed.to) http://www.westaim.co
A friend and I have been looking for shares to short for about 3 years now. Alas. No luck.
The biggest issue with the share price is that many investors are not computer software or legally informed and I say ditto with the press given the pathetic musing that I see in the papers. Sooo... they unfortunately do not see much of the real picture and they certainly for the most part don't read slashdot and groklaw.
Thus, they and much of their money will soon be parting.
Its too bad that IBM will probbaly not see their day in court. They certainly will likely not be able to even recover costs. I intend to buy IBM products in the future. Maybe if enough people do this will add to their bottom line. It won't be measureable of course. But what else can we do?
I use both Vi (vim) and Emacs. Brief is better
on
The Birth of vi
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· Score: 2, Funny
Brief (by underware) is better.
I use both VI and Emacs and I just miss Brief. I thing is that the code was sold to Borland which last I looked became Impress (which isn't impressing me) and the code base is shelved. Can we OSS the code base?
I understand the issues. What I do not understand is why the HUGE advancements in VI for instance are so obscure that I use it at only a very primative level. Then we have Emacs and xEmacs.
I think we need some courses put together for kindergarten kids. The biggest issues is that most people are not willing to spend endless hours digging through unorganised and disjointed documentation. So we don't learn what our tools can do.
This is sad.
Here is what I think. I think editors have been around for 40 years at least. Some have horrible personalities. But the issue is not the personality... it is the person who loves the personality.
So perhaps we need to ask why I cannot ask Emacs to present the full "Brief" personality. I know that Emacs can do this. I've programmed a number of elisp commands. The issue then becomes.. how do we work as a community?
I am certain there are at least a billion answers. I kinda think there is a lot of code laying around that the authors of which pained over and they have "given up".
I do not know all the things VI can do. I wish I did. I wish I could rent a lecture that showed me. Numbers I got are that this costs $1000 a minuet.
while true, it does nothing to explain the speed at which it is happening, and completly ignores the fact that there is more carbon in the air now then in the last 800,000 years. Yes eight hundred thousand years.
800,000 years ago is a drop in the bucket... it is a pitifully short time and it illustrates why people have such a difficult time undertanding why we do not have global warming.
We have had about 20 ice cycles in the last 2 million years. These occur about every 110,000 years and seem to be tied the the Milankovitch cycles. CO2 levels have changed during this ice cycles but the rise in CO2 follows the rise in temperature by about 1000 years.
5 million years ago antarctica and greenland were not frozen over. The present ice age seems to have started about 30 million years ago, however there was cooling before that and this cooling is corellated with the significant mountain building that has taken place since the eocene. Another corellation occured during the Ordovician taconic orogeny and at that time CO2 levels were 13x to 17x greater than now.
There are many factors which seem to need to come together to cause a major cooling such as we have now. Note that for over about 80-90% of the last 600 million years, the planet has been about 10C warmer than now. Some of the factors include the distribution of land mass on the planet, presence of large mountain ranges and where they are located, ocean currents, where our solar system is in the galaxy.
The thing is CO2 does not correlate with temperature changes.
Further more, the levels of CO2 are so small compared to the most important green house gas which is water vapour, that were the climate so sensitive to overall greenhouse gases, a single el-nino event would tip us into a huge warming phase. Note that the effects of an el-nino are several percent more moisture in some areas and several degree. Just compare the absolute humidity for instance to the total CO2. It is quite literally the same as comparing the thickness of a sheet of toilet paper to a tree stump.
So... Gore would qualify as a perfect example of why we should ignore him.
Libraries typically have photocopiers available so clients can make copies of copyrighted material. Hmm, come to think of it I would think a library should be illegal in Oz because it would enable people to have access to copyrighted materials which they might them cart of to photocopiers. And what of the records, tapes and movies found in the libraries...
Oh... then we have Blockbuster and other movie rental outfits. Surely they must be guilty as well because someone might cart off the tape or DVD and copy it.
What is clear is that the courts do not understand the net. Neither do the pollies. On the one hand we have the livihood of programmers being threatened by software patents and on the other hand we have scapegoats held to blame when the public misuses what a website offers. In all cases it is the IT folks who are paying the price. We are under attack.
Oh... and we have yet another abuse. Companies like Telstra pay for access to copyrighted internet content flowing from and through the USA. Telstra, of course, charges their customers for access to this content. Telstra's customers include bigpond, but they also include all the smaller ISP's in Oz. These ISP's pay heafty fees to Telstra.
While Telstra pays for access to content which originates and flows through the USA, Telstra at the same time refuses to pay anything to access content which originates within Oz. An exception is made however to certain newspapers which have "converged". This is when they did a share swap and so they became partner businesses. The insiders in the game do get paid for access.
THe fine gets paid by the shareholders and customers and perhaps a few low level employees who get fired. The fine is not paid by those who are guilty.
They are running a business in a competitive environment. The reason they were spamming is they were trying to increase business. Many businessmen do not see spamming as being significantly different than advertising. Remember commercials have been shoved down the throats of the TV watching public for decades. So why should folks think a computer is all that much different than a TV? Ie... if they can get away with it they will.
A boycott mind you may get their attention and it may force them to drop the law suit. Negative public opinion is not good for business.
Slashdot Mirror
You undertake a personal attack on me in public? And call me an arrogant pissant?
I think when you point a finger there are 4 pointed in your direction.
What do you mean by "least afford to be so"?
This idea is patently absurd!
We have a HUGE hydrogen shortage.
In fact the only reasonable way we can make the hydrogen we need is to build abotu 75 nukes here in Alberta. I am perfectly prepared to back this up.
Here in Alberta we are trying to ramp synthetic crude production to about between 3 and 4 million barrels per day. For each atom of carbon we mine, we need to find an atom of hydrogen. If we can't find the hydrogen we can leave 1/2 the carbon in a waste heat or burn the carbon - thereby losing a significant amount of what we mine in the form of CO2.... the later idea is the Fischer-tropche process.
If we use F-T we produce CO2 in quantities that are measured in millions of barrels of liquid CO2 per day.
In the past, H2 was produced from methane. If you have lots of methane this is a cheap way to do it.
But North America peaked in Methane production in January of 2001. We have a shortage of methane too... and as a consequence, a major percentage of the fertilizer industry in North America shut down. If the plastics feedstocks industry has not also started this shutdown process, then they will... because they will be next (probably). The glass industry is also in jeapardy.
Dont' for a minute think that the "oil industry" is going to just "strip the H from the O&G"! The truth is the oil industry is in dire need of H2... So the idea of using a wind mill to create H2 is acutally a good idea.
Here in Alberta we would need so many windmills to produce the energy equivalent of 75 GIGAWATTS of H2 per DAY that I have no idea where we would park them.
I would probably prefer windmills to nuclear plants.... This is just a personal feeling. But I don't know how we can do it.
We really don't have enough land in Alberta with good wind resources to be able to plant the number of windmills we need. Alberta is a big place.
The short of it is... don't count on the oil industry to produce the H2 you commented on. It ain't gonna happen.
I guess you can't read.
If we had a place to store it
I am perfectly aware of the difficulties with hydrogen storage. This is why I commented "If we had a place to store it".
I have written this many times and sometimes people send me flack. Those who do clearly do not grasp what I am talking about.
If one looks at commerce from the point of view of money flows for services, what one sees is that money flows in the OPPOSITE direction of goods and services. As such it facilitates transactions and good things happen.
Now with the net, we have this situation: A web master (or owner of a website such as Wikipedia) is clearly providing a service. Clearly there is no reason for people to even log into the net (much less pay for access) if there is no content they are interested in.
So what we have is this.
consumer {--- ISP {--- telecom {--- (uplink) {--- website (flow of content = a service)
consumer ---} ISP ---} telecom {--- (uplink) {--- website (flow of money)
Note: I would have used left and right arrows instead of the braces but I can't figure out how to coax slashdot's system into allowing me to use them.
What we see is that the telecomunications industry, with their monopolistic and oligoplistic powers is in a position to effectively hold everyone to randsom and bill everyone for their services.
The point is the web content creation industry is actually providing a service, and they should be paid for this service. If one considers the amount of money that flows into the telecommunications industry for instance from the delivery of internet content, the numbers of mind boggling. Yet except for a small number of isolated cases, those who create the content receive no compensation and do not participate in the revenue stream.
As an internet subscriber I have already paid my ISP for access to the content, My ISP has paid their uplink and if they bypass the uplink, then they pay someone else such as Akaimi.
But the website owners? The money flow reverses direction before it reaches them.
This is terribly unjust.
An example of how unjust this is follows:
Consider a company like Telstra (Australia's main telecom).
Telstra with all its power is not able to obtain content which flows through the USA for free. So Telstra pays American Telecommunication carriers for access to content which flows through the USA and Telstra also pays for content which originates in Australia and flows to the USA.
Now consider an Aussie website? Telstra bills them for the bandwidth they "USE".
This puts Telstra in the position of paying American Interests while at the same time billing Austrlian interests for the exact same thing... IE. Providing access to internet content.
Of course, Telstra also bills those who want access to the content.. IE.. the general public. But it is expected the consumer should pay for this access because after all they are the ones who want access to the content comming out of websites like Wikipedia.
I do not know to change the system. I do know I've phoned the head offices of the telephone company that handles the region I live in and I have spoken with the VP in charge of this area. He agrees with what I'm writting here - that its an unfair system. He foresees the day when the Telecommunications industry will pay for access to websites and perhaps will lose the right to proxy and cache the content... because this is making copies (IE. This would be copyright infringment were in not for the fact that the laws were changed to allow the ISP's and Telecomms to duplicate at will). However, he didn't have any idea when this might happen and I don't see the industry doing anything about this unfair system until they are forced to.
In the mean time I would suggest that anyone worried about losing access to the Wikipedia should perhaps look at doing a websuck (wget) and save the content on a DVD. Of course, while a caching proxy doesn't quite work like wget does, from a practical stanpoint it accomplishes the same thing. So ISP's can make the copies and proxy Wikipedia and continue to charge for supplying the conten
This has to be one of the stupidest ideas launched in a long time.
Electricity is a low entropy energy source. Heat is a high entropy source. The maximum efficiency one can obtain from _any_ heat engine is the sterling cycle and it is limited by the differences in the temperature between the hot and cold energy source and sink.
It is just amasing how little thermodynamics people know. So why is this story on slashdot? It would find a better home in the rags at the supermarket checkouts.
A much smarter idea would be to use the energy to produce yas hydrogen (if we had a place to store it) and failing that even pumping water up to the top of a hill to power a hydro-electric station makes more sense.
All a website needs to do is set autorefresh and load the exploit page x minutes after the innocent page and only once.
Many users open a web page and walk away.
Unless they create this food-sourced, genetically-altered- yeast-produced "gasoline" in biosafety level 4 factories, these little buggers are going to get out into the environment
You'll need level 5 and they will still get out.
It is likely they will not be well adapted to compete in the natural world. However... they will likely survive and if they have enough good genes and food ( and remember the food will be there for them!!! This is what we are planing on building them for!!! IE a veritable feast of dead plant matter ). If they survive which is pretty much guaranteed, then they will adapt.
So, you make a very good point! Rounding these things up will not be possible.
I am starting to believe the end of the human race is visible and it will come in the form of our tinkering with the microbial world. But then what do I know eh?
You are correct in your assement. Liquid fuels are alkanes which are CnH(2n+2) which you simplified to CnH2n which is ok... I said 2:1 hydrogen to carbon. We are both saying the same thing.
Now this issue is where a biological system obtains its energy inputs. You mentioned ITER. I would not count on it. However we do have technology on the shelf in the form of the IFR (Integral Fast Reactor) which was developed by Argonne Labs by 1994 under the guidance of Dr. Charles Till. This machine will burn all the actinides which means it is both safe to use and instead of producing wastes it burns the wastes. It can be used to burn existing nuclear wastes (all of them), and in so doing there is about a 60,000 year supply of uranium and other actinides on hand already mined and ready to burn. This can power a fleet of about 100 reactors in the gigawatt range. To produce 100% of our power we need about 1200 reactors of this size which means our fuel supply is only about 5,000 years... but I didn't add in new mining and I didn't add in thorium. I did add in all the "depleated" uranium which is BTW still about 80% as radioactive as natural uranium and in fact is still about 80% as radioactive as the enriched uranium fuel stuffed into the light water pressurized reactors in common use in the USA. ALL of the spent fuel can also be put into an IFR system.
So why don't we build them? Well - go ask Bill Clinton. His administration shut the program down in 1994.
Back to the plants.
Biological sources can capture radiation to produce biofuels, but not on the fermentation side. The technology is clearly well developed in the plant kingdom mind you.... but not in the fungal kingdom. Yeast is a fungus. So is Trichoderma reesei which is being looked at for cellulose->ethanol production.
So we are still left with where the fungus obtains its energy during fermentation and this is by oxidizing carbon and releasing CO2. What this means is that a sizable percentage of the biomass we start with is lost to CO2. We are still left with the issue of obtaining hydrogen or at a bare minimum conserving it.
A pure chemical process such as Fischer Tropsche might be just as efficient and easier to operate. Nuclear can be used to create a supply of hydrogen using say steam electrolysis.
I think it is very important to note that using a plant source is going to likely be considerably more expensive than other sources of energy... This is easy to see since the plant source contains about 50% of its mass in the form of oxygen. Note: (CH2O)n. With n=6 we have simple sugars.
But costs aside.
If we cart off the dead plant material to a fuel factory then we can clearly convert it to liquid fuels of which one choice (a good one) is ethanol. Note: Methanol (CH3OH) is NOT a good choice.
If we do not cart off the dead plant matter then it will still be oxidized to CO2. The fungus in the environment will do this. So we will neither increase or decrease the amount of CO2 in this part of the planetary carbon cycle by converting to liquid motor fuels and burning them. About all will will do is take some of the food the fungi consume and let our cars consume it instead. I frankly don't think the fungi will care all that much.
But what of the other option? What of continuing to mine carbon/hydrogen and burn it? This will continue to dump CO2 into the planetary carbon cycle. This is not bad. This is in spite of the feelings (but not logic) of a large percentage of the population which have been brainwashed with the religeon that CO2 must be bad for us.
The earth can quite easily cope with atmospheric CO2 levels many times what it is now. During the Ordovician for instance the CO2 levels were 13x to 17x higher than now... and in fact CO2 levels are presently at a very low level. This low level might be partially explained by the C4 plants. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C4_plant
Note that the C
Oh... I should add. The issue of producing ethanol from starch is the same as making beer. Note that beer is typically 5% ethanol. Thus 20 gallons of beer contain about 1 gallon of ethanol.
If ethanol is going to compete on price with gasoline then we're going to need to be able to make it at under $2.50 per gallon. The process to produce ethanol from starch includes converting the starches into sugars (mashing) and then converting the sugars into ethanol (fermentation). This means beer is an intermediate step.
The short of this is that if we can produce ethanol cost effectively as an energy source compared with say gasoline, then we should be able to make beer for less than $2.50 per keg ( A keg of beer is about 58.6 liters = 15.5 US gallons = 12.5 imp gallons )
Note there is a lot of CO2 released in this conversion. Some of it can be used to make the beer fizzy.
I think this gives new meaning to the phrase "Don't drink and drive" and perhaps it needs to become "Drink and don't drive" or "Drive and don't drink" as the later phrases more clearly convey the alternatives. In any event in the new world order with ethanol available as a fuel competatively priced with gasoline I can see little reason to justify beer prices much above $2.50 per keg.
Horray for a brave new world. Technology advances clearly can and should drive costs down.
It doesn't really matter all that much what the end product is... ethanol is perfectly fine. The point is one ton of dry woody biomass is about the same as 2 barrels of oil and this if you can convert for free.
Starches are fine to start with, but only a small amount of the plant ends up as starch. An even smaller amount ends up as oils. Celulose, pentosans and lignins compose the majority of plant tissues. There are many fungi which digest these and some can be harnessed to produce alcohols. The issue is we are still stuck with one ton of dry plant matter equals about 2 barrels of oil.
The USA burns about 20 million barrels of oil per day. From a plant source this is 40 million tonnes per day.
A cheaper and more promising way to produce this oil is using the Fischer Tropche process and doing coal->liquids or coal->gas. Note that Alberta Tar Sands operations are essentually bitumin->liquids. Bitumin is a little closer chemically to what we need than coal is... IE both are hydrogen poor in that liquid fuels in the Alkane series (most of what we use) have about a 2:1 ratio of hydrogen to carbon.
Coal depending on the type is about 0.6:1 and bitumin is closer to 1:1.
Methane is 4:1. This means that methane is a good chemical feedstock from which to obtain the hydrogen needed.
This also means it is stupid to be burning methane... it is far more valuable as a chemical feedstock than a fuel.
Plant matter does fit into the equation, it is not as hydrogen poor. Plant matter is basically (CH2O)n and from this we can see that it is a partially oxidized hydrocarbon. This means that plant matter is hydrogen poor unless we can break the H2O bonds and this is the same problem we face with coal and bitumin. Ie... in the case of coal and bitumin, we can break H2O bonds in river water or lake water or ocean water to obtain our hydrogen.
Note that alcohols are also partially oxidized hydrocarbons. Ethanol for instance is C2H5OH. This means it is easier to obtain ethanol from sugar because both the sugar and the ethanol contains Oxygen. The flip side of this is that since the molecule is already partially oxidized, it doesn't contain as much energy as an un-oxydized Alkane such as the ethane (C2H6) parent molecule. Also note that ethane for instance has an atomic weight of 30 while ethanol has an atomic weight of 46. So you have less energy with about 1.5 times the weight.
(BTW - this is the short of why the oil industry is building LNG tankers. Methanol (CH3OH) is safer and easier to transport than CH4 (liquid), but 1/2 the weight of methanol is oxygen).
All this means is there isn't a free lunch. Production of any fuel from a sugar polymer source (dry plant matter) is going to require energy and the only biological source of this energy comes from oxidizing carbon to obtain the energy required to salvage the hydrogen. This results in massive releases of CO2 (of course - its the raw material plants use to create dry matter - hense it is not polution and is in fact fertilizer). Next you lose a significant amount of the total mass of the dry matter we start with. We eventually are left with one ton of dry plant matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil - if we can convert it for free.
We are back to needing 40 tonnes of dry plant matter per day and massive factories which don't exist.
I have several copies of NT 4.0 partly because I was a dealer back then and got burned and never managed to sell some of them. Mind you, on one of my systems was a copy of an upgrade version of 4.0.
NEVER AGAIN
That was such a pain in the ass to install that I will NEVER touch any crap like that ever again. It was authorized from NT3.5 or Winders 95 and I recall having to fart around looking for the previous CD and even having to install a copy and boy what a joke.
NEVER AGAIN
Another joke was upgrading the motherboard to a dual processor board. I used a MICROSOFT utility. It never even checked to see if the DLL versions were ok. It was a bloody nightmare and I swear I have seldom seen such shoddy workmanship in my life.
It was 3 days before I could get the system to boot and about the only reason I could fix it is because I used a FAT organisation for the boot partition and was able to boot to DOS to rescue the system. Fortunately nothing was lost but what a nightmare.
NEVER AGAIN
Arrgghhh. Bad moderation again. I was a moderator yesterday. Damn... no points.
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This is NOT off topic. This is dead on topic.
Alas, what this illustrates is that most people do not do their due dilligence.
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Now I am a member of a small stock club. I have learned so much about how people think from this endvour. I would urge others to try something similar (a small stock club I mean).
What I have learned is that it is unbelievable how poor people's judgment is. If they are buying something for themselves they might analyse it to death. We've all heard of people who drive all over town looking for the best price.
But when it comes to a stock... someone steps forward and says they can make a great deal of money if they buy "XYZ" but that the train has almost left so "you better hurry", and the greed factor kicks in and its almost as if their brains shut down as they hand over their hard won sheckles.
Due Dilligence? hahahaha.
Take HAO.V (trades on Vancouver) as an example. Read the press releases. Check the press releases from MENV.PK (pink sheets).
These for instance:
http://www.habaneroresources.com/s/NewsReleases.a
http://www.micronenviro.com/s/NewsReleases.asp?Re
Check the phone numbers.
Check and see what sort of oil production they have... or the actual interest in the wells they participate in.
Check the insider trading.
All of this information is available. An hour of due dilligence and a quick trip to a bulletin board will show the facts... yet - these POS companies collectivly have market caps over $25 million bux. They trade on the TSX, pink sheets and Frankfurt.
Why don't the regulators do something about this? I don't know. Perhaps the press releases are factual even as they are misleading. Perhaps the regulators have bigger fish to fry. Perhaps there are so many of these scams going on.
Perhaps the regulators just look at it and shrug their shoulders and say to themselves that its a free market. If people don't do their homework before they invest then too bad.
In any event... I'm not too worried about the stock spam. If I were worried about it I'd make a list and simply avoid the stocks. The few percent commented on in the artical is peanutz.
If you bring the insulation in the walls to about R50 (fibergalss is fine) and the ceiling to about R70 then you can get rid of the furnace. The cost of insulating the house is going to be in the taking the walls apart and putting them back together... the isulation itself should cost you about a buk per square foot.
Along with this you want to install a very good vapour barrier and calk the plastic together. Air seepage is a major loss of energy. Use a heavy polyethlene sheeting as well. Remember - you only need to do this once and after it is done it will pay you dividends for as long as you own the place. When you sell it make sure you ask for a premium.
Next... the way to do this is to screw a 2x2 spacer onto the studs. Then screw a 2x2 to the spacer. Use about 3 of them per stud. The extension should make the wall exactly 1 foot thicker. This is sort of important for the finishing.
The windows and doors will then be in pockets. You probably won't want to feel like you are looking through a tunnel.
So get some mirror tiles (1 foot by 1 foot) and glue them to the sides of the window frame. That will finish it nicely. Get a nice floor tile and glue it to the bottom. Now you can put plants in the windows where they belong! Any water will not bother the tiles.
You'll have to move all of the electrical services of course... and with the walls apart you may as well wire it properly. Put plugs near the corners... within say 30" of the corners. People like to put coffee tables and end tables in corners and need plugs nearby. Many contractors like to put the plug in the middle of the wall. This is a pain. Their reasoning must be that you can always pull the couch out and use an extension cord.
While you are at it - install at least cat 5 and lots of telephone jacks and cable TV jacks. These should not be daisy chained together like electrical... they should run back to a service center. Label everything with plastic tags that won't fall off.
These little details will not cost you much and it is just so NICE to be able to have a separate phone line for instance for the kids or for a tenant down the track. Make sure you have two phone jacks in each drop... the duplex boxes cost about the same as the singles and you might want to add a fax someday.
Note: The future of telephones is probably VoIP and you might want to run an Asterix server someday as this will provide both local and long distance services to any other asterix server at no cost. This means you can probably call up your phone company and tell them to take a hike and cancel your services. This alone will pay for the wiring in about a year or less.
Finally... if you can figure out a way... see if you can provide a way to run fiber optics. I _think_ one way might be to just install plastic conduit into each room. Its pretty easy to fish whatever cables you might need in the future through a conduit. I've not priced this out... Also - talk to an electrician about how the fishing will be done. Electricians are brlliant at this.
I redid my house about 10 years ago. I made some mistakes and not thinking far enough ahead was the big one. So I ended up trying to figure how I could run 10base-T over TV cables. Now we have wireless.
But I still think that in the future if we get fiber to the house then we'll want fiber in the house... and this means to each room.
Before you start... watch Total Recall. Arnie and Stone have a gorgeous view from their window. Note this scene... its not a window - its a flat panel display that looks like a window. I expect these will be common place within about a decade.
Regardless where people live they tend to live in houses most of the time and look out windows. I see no reason why a camera can't be mounted at a nice beach and the image displayed in real time in a display that looks like a window. The displays are being built by companies like Westaim (wed.to) http://www.westaim.co
WOW.
So a 2.5" drive should be a 1.5" platter in a 2.5" drive?
This would mean if we can get the drive down to 1" then we can eliminate the platters eh?
That would be good. Such a drive would have zero latency. It could have zero seek times too. It could be a virtual drive.
It would probably be more than a billion hours between failures!
WOW.
You don't know what you are talking about.
He should have checked copyright law before he started. He is an employee of the state therefore it ist he state's property. A cop out to know this.
A friend and I have been looking for shares to short for about 3 years now. Alas. No luck.
The biggest issue with the share price is that many investors are not computer software or legally informed and I say ditto with the press given the pathetic musing that I see in the papers. Sooo... they unfortunately do not see much of the real picture and they certainly for the most part don't read slashdot and groklaw.
Thus, they and much of their money will soon be parting.
Its too bad that IBM will probbaly not see their day in court. They certainly will likely not be able to even recover costs. I intend to buy IBM products in the future. Maybe if enough people do this will add to their bottom line. It won't be measureable of course. But what else can we do?
Brief (by underware) is better.
I use both VI and Emacs and I just miss Brief. I thing is that the code was sold to Borland which last I looked became Impress (which isn't impressing me) and the code base is shelved. Can we OSS the code base?
I understand the issues. What I do not understand is why the HUGE advancements in VI for instance are so obscure that I use it at only a very primative level. Then we have Emacs and xEmacs.
I think we need some courses put together for kindergarten kids. The biggest issues is that most people are not willing to spend endless hours digging through unorganised and disjointed documentation. So we don't learn what our tools can do.
This is sad.
Here is what I think. I think editors have been around for 40 years at least. Some have horrible personalities. But the issue is not the personality... it is the person who loves the personality.
So perhaps we need to ask why I cannot ask Emacs to present the full "Brief" personality. I know that Emacs can do this. I've programmed a number of elisp commands. The issue then becomes.. how do we work as a community?
I am certain there are at least a billion answers. I kinda think there is a lot of code laying around that the authors of which pained over and they have "given up".
I do not know all the things VI can do. I wish I did. I wish I could rent a lecture that showed me. Numbers I got are that this costs $1000 a minuet.
Maybe this is why its not there.
Alas
while true, it does nothing to explain the speed at which it is happening, and completly ignores the fact that there is more carbon in the air now then in the last 800,000 years. Yes eight hundred thousand years.
800,000 years ago is a drop in the bucket... it is a pitifully short time and it illustrates why people have such a difficult time undertanding why we do not have global warming.
We have had about 20 ice cycles in the last 2 million years. These occur about every 110,000 years and seem to be tied the the Milankovitch cycles. CO2 levels have changed during this ice cycles but the rise in CO2 follows the rise in temperature by about 1000 years.
5 million years ago antarctica and greenland were not frozen over. The present ice age seems to have started about 30 million years ago, however there was cooling before that and this cooling is corellated with the significant mountain building that has taken place since the eocene. Another corellation occured during the Ordovician taconic orogeny and at that time CO2 levels were 13x to 17x greater than now.
There are many factors which seem to need to come together to cause a major cooling such as we have now. Note that for over about 80-90% of the last 600 million years, the planet has been about 10C warmer than now. Some of the factors include the distribution of land mass on the planet, presence of large mountain ranges and where they are located, ocean currents, where our solar system is in the galaxy.
The thing is CO2 does not correlate with temperature changes.
Further more, the levels of CO2 are so small compared to the most important green house gas which is water vapour, that were the climate so sensitive to overall greenhouse gases, a single el-nino event would tip us into a huge warming phase. Note that the effects of an el-nino are several percent more moisture in some areas and several degree. Just compare the absolute humidity for instance to the total CO2. It is quite literally the same as comparing the thickness of a sheet of toilet paper to a tree stump.
So... Gore would qualify as a perfect example of why we should ignore him.
As if I needed a good reason to look for something else.
Libraries typically have photocopiers available so clients can make copies of copyrighted material. Hmm, come to think of it I would think a library should be illegal in Oz because it would enable people to have access to copyrighted materials which they might them cart of to photocopiers. And what of the records, tapes and movies found in the libraries...
Oh... then we have Blockbuster and other movie rental outfits. Surely they must be guilty as well because someone might cart off the tape or DVD and copy it.
What is clear is that the courts do not understand the net. Neither do the pollies. On the one hand we have the livihood of programmers being threatened by software patents and on the other hand we have scapegoats held to blame when the public misuses what a website offers. In all cases it is the IT folks who are paying the price. We are under attack.
Oh... and we have yet another abuse. Companies like Telstra pay for access to copyrighted internet content flowing from and through the USA. Telstra, of course, charges their customers for access to this content. Telstra's customers include bigpond, but they also include all the smaller ISP's in Oz. These ISP's pay heafty fees to Telstra.
While Telstra pays for access to content which originates and flows through the USA, Telstra at the same time refuses to pay anything to access content which originates within Oz. An exception is made however to certain newspapers which have "converged". This is when they did a share swap and so they became partner businesses. The insiders in the game do get paid for access.
Clearly not those who are responsible!
THe fine gets paid by the shareholders and customers and perhaps a few low level employees who get fired. The fine is not paid by those who are guilty.
Yes I expect a spammer to care.
They are running a business in a competitive environment. The reason they were spamming is they were trying to increase business. Many businessmen do not see spamming as being significantly different than advertising. Remember commercials have been shoved down the throats of the TV watching public for decades. So why should folks think a computer is all that much different than a TV? Ie... if they can get away with it they will.
A boycott mind you may get their attention and it may force them to drop the law suit. Negative public opinion is not good for business.
Ok everyone - get on the phone and call the company and advise them there is a boycott and they may lose some business over this.
They need to be hit hard where it hurts, right in their pocket book.
The idea that to be a good manager one should not be technically competant is bullshit advanced by incompetant people.
My advise to anyone hearing this crap is to dust off your resume and get out fast.