Gasoline and liquid motor fuels are primarily alkanes. These have the chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). If n=8 you have octane and I assume you have heard of the octane rating of gasoline.
You _can't_ have gasoline without carbon unless you are god and can change the laws of chemistry.
Ethanol is C2H5OH. It is a partically oxidized alkane. n=2 in this case. the OH makes it an alcohol. The reason ethanol carries less energy than gasoline is simply because it is partially oxidized. Note it is liquid also because of the oxygen in the molecule. Methanol: CH3OH is also liquid for the same reason.
It would make sense to convert Methane (CH4) to methanol (CH3OH) instead of trucking and shipping it around as Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) except for a couple factors:
1) methanol is poisonous. <rant> This is why it is sometimes used to denatured alcohols. This is also why methanol is often used instead of ethanol even though industrially ethanol can be made for about the same cost as methanol and often either will do the job.
The idea is that instead of the kid simply getting drunk if he gets into the photocopier cleaner... we blind him or kill him. Anyone working with alcohol based wood finishes also gets caught in this trap.... instead of using a reletively safe alchohol (ethanol) - one gets exposed to a known carcinogen instead (methanol). Why? Well we wouldn't want the guy to mistake his shelac thiner for a beer now would we? Better to kill him or blind him instead. Righto! </rant>
Industrially if we have large amounts of CH3OH being hauled around then expect many accidents. Its a poison we are better off without.
2) that oxygen in the molecule both reduces the energy content per gallon as well as adding dead weight. The OH will eventually end up as H2O when the fuel is fully oxidized. One way to look at this is that chemically by weight it is about 30% water already.
If you manage to eliminate all the carbon from gasoline you are left with hydrogen. There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liguid hydrogen. Also - there is a LOT more energy.
In fact - we have a serious shortage of hydrogen. If we had a surplus of hydrogen then one of the best ways to transport it would be to toss in some carbon and turn it into gasoline. This is what they do in order to make synthetic crude. Its part of the Tar Sands operations. Shell for instance has built a HUGE plant in Alberta to do precisely this.
The short of it is that hydrogen as a motor fuel probably doesn't make much sense. Ideas of converting alkanes to hydrogen by eliminating the carbon don't make much sense. The CO2 is a plant nutrient anyways. The biosphere can easily cope with CO2 levels even 20x greater than they are now. Biological studies of crop production in greenhouses for decades have been focused on CO2 enrichment.
As for global warming driven by CO2. IMHO its hooey. One needs a better handle on the most important green house gas: Water Vapour. Levels of water vapour in the tropics and sub tropics are in the vicinty of 40,000 PPM compared with CO2 in the range of 380 PPM. We do not know if water vapour goes up 5,000 or down 5,000 and we don't know if there are any long or short term trends. Meanwhile it is true that CO2 is up by about 90 ppm over the last century. With the increase in CO2 we see an increase in plant growth.
Geologically, CO2 has been over 15x greater than now. Our paleoclimatologists say CO2 is not linked to planetary temperatures in the geological record.
It doesn't much matter what you start with: raw crude or refined fuel... what is at issue is the percentage. 30% of either is about 7 million barrels per day equivalent and lordy I have no idea where they plan to get it. Alberta for instance is running flat out trying to boost tar sands production to about 3.3 million BOPD by 2015.
Note that world production is around 81 million BOPD. World production is close to being flat. On page 10 of the report we see that Saudi Arabia's production declined. This is very significant when you consider that the largest field in the world... the Ghawar field - is in Saudia Arabia and has been reported as being in decline. If so then the top four (4) fields are in decline and these fields produce say about 15% of the world's production. Normally when fields go into decline the production shortly thereafter drops by about 10% per year. If so then the world will shortly be seeing declines at least in the range of about 1.5% per year which will exceed a million BOPD and this will compound exponentialy.
We better hope someone figures out how to make up the shortfall. If not we all go on an oil diet. Personally I see nothing over the horizon other than perhaps high prices and gas rationing.
It accomplishes little to have the critter if we have little to feed it.
One ton of dry organic matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil on an energy basis if one can convert it for free. This is the cellulose to fuel pathway.... cellulose and pentosans and liganans. T. verdii which is the fungus that brings us stone washed blue jeans is cited as a candidate for cellulostic ethanol but T. verdii is a cellulose digester. Other fungus digest the pentosans and lignans as well - fungus such as P. ostrates and it also will live in liquid culture.
Now the issue with the bacteria is the food supply. Are they to digest woody plant materials? Are they to digest a fungus which digests woody plant materials. Is there some other food source being proposed?
Another fact is that if 100% of the USA corn crop were to be converted to ethanol - then this would supply USA liquid fuel needs for about 2 weeks. Any bushel of corn converted to ethanol will come out of someone's mouth. It may be a pigs mouth or it may be a mouth in the 3rd world - but someone has to give up their food so that we can feed a car.
Personally I think bio-fuels have a bright future. However I'm not convinced these guys are on the right track. Alga can produce bio-diesel from sunlight. Here we know the energy source. In the case of e-coli and other bacteria the energy source is sugar which leaves us with exactly the same issues of ethanol... namely: there isn't enough corn and other grains around to make much of a difference even if we can perfect the technology to convert it into a fuel for almost free.
However if we can convert the cellulose, pentosans and lignans then maybe because there are a lot of herbacious plant wastes kicking around. If so - then one tonne of dry plant matter will convert to about 2 barrels of oil. If a barrel of oil is worth $75 bux then one has $150 bux per tonne in the budget to obtain and convert the plant matter.
Something to consider is that normally in the case of agriculture this material is returned to the soil where it contributes to the organic matter that creates a high quality soil. If this material is carted off to a fuel plant then what happens to the quality of the soil?
The story could have shown a list of the tested viruses verses the AV software being tested. A simple table would have conveyed a great deal more information than the druel the fellow wrote. Yes I RTFA and as I said - it is not very informative.
Frankly I am sick and tired of hearing these references to global warming. Of course those who like to use these references like spices typically know next to nothing about the subject.
It is my opinion that if one wants to know how CO2 might affect the planet then one should probably look first at the geological record to see what effect CO2 might have had in the past. I think anyone who disagrees with this premise should show why CO2 levels during such and such a geological period should be expected to not behave as CO2 levels are expected to behave now.
On this basis...
Over the last 570 million years the planet has been about 10 degrees ON AVERAGE warmer than now for at least 80% of the time period. There have been three (3) major cooling events and we are at the bottom of one now. 5 million years ago it was much warmer than now. 2 million years ago there were trees growing north of the arctic circle. Actually I have a friend who is a hard rock geologist and they were drilling Kimberlites in Canada's tundra and struck wood - 2 million year old wood - at a depth of about 150 meters. Yes. There were trees in Canada's tundra back then. The earth was much warmer then.
But what of CO2 driven global warming?
During the Ordovician, the planet plunged from a very warm climate to a very cold climate. The CO2 levels back then were about 13x to 17x greater than now... Even with CO2 levels about 5,000 ppm this gas was not able to prevent the earth from slipping into an ice age. Note that at present, CO2 is about 370 ppm and this is up from about 280 ppm in the 1800's. Yes, CO2 has increased. But geologically it is still at a geological historical low.
Then, during the Carboniferous, there was a cooling. CO2 was much much higher than now.
The paleoclimatology community says that CO2 levels are not linked to temperature in the geological record.
IMHO - global warming is just an excuse for people to worry over something. Mass media wants people to worry. People tend to worry about things they don't understand. People tend to worry about things they do understand also. Pollies like to use this to justify unpopular laws and taxation.
Personally I think there are many things worth worrying about. The Fckd USA health care system is something worth worrying about because a sizable percentage of/.'ers are going to be caught up in it.
The oil wars are worth worrying about. The conflict in the middle east scares me. There is much more going on than we are told. I side with those who say we are at peak oil production. North America passed peak gas production in Jan 2001. We have NOTHING on the back burner now that will provide the energy we need.
When I read and hear about the new security measures I worry. Like why? The system we had before wasn't all that bad. Why the emphasis on security? Then I think about war. If our governments are planning to start WWIII then it all makes sense. Is this something I and other/.'ers should be worrying about?
Many/.'ers are young enough that they will be fighting an oil war - which is a resource grab. Who wants this?
There are alternatives. Many stories address this. One alternative is nuclear.
Maybe instead of worrying about ghosts that probably do not exist we should be all looking at the real problems we do have to face.
Global Warming is not one of them.
The principal green house gas is Water Vapour and at 40 degrees C which is common in the tropics the absolute humidity is about 5% which is 50,000 ppm. We do not know historically if this is higher or lower. CO2 levels are 370 ppm and they are up about 90 ppm over the last say 100++ years.
We cannot even measure water vapour over the planet accurately enough to determine of water vapour levels are up 90 ppm or down 90 ppm or even if they are up 1000 ppm or down 1000 ppm. When the most important variable in the model is ignored then
One needs to look closely at the projected economics.
It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S.
Bullshit!
A gigawatt power plant costs in the range of a billion regardless of the energy source. Does anyone think there is even the remotest of chances that geothermal can come in at 1/100th the cost of other energy sources and that no one would try to develop it? Why else would geothermal be experimental? Or are they suggesting that over 50 years a geothermal plant might produce as much power as 104 nuclear plants do in a year?
The most obvious conclusion is that comments like this are just stoopid and illustrate the ignorance of people.
Their website has a good description of the progress and the problems they have encountered. I looked at investing in the company a few years back. So this isn't even current news.
The _real_ problems have not yet surfaced. There are two (2) major issues.
1) The amount of water one needs to push through the rocks tends to be rather large before one can obtain a significant amount of energy. At a 1 gigawatt level we are talking close to a river's worth. Of course 1 gigawatt is a lot of power and a 1 gigawatt plant of any sort would be expected to cost over a billion.
2) Fracing is a big problem. When you frac a formation the cracks tend to follow the weak spots and not go where you want them to go. So GDY.AX has a few holes down but this is still all experimental and there is nothing at this point that says when they pump down water that it will find its way to the well from which they want to pump the water up. In fact they may need to drill a few more wells to find where the water goes.
I certainly hope their venture is successful. However at this point I am declining to become an investor.
Any in Slashdot who wish to are certainly welcome. At least now you know the company and the trading symbol and the exchange. No thanks to the article of course!
After reading the references to economics with regard to the bridge construction I'm reminded of the poem: The Deacon's Masterpiece.
You see - the Deacon built the shay perfectly. Each piece was perfectly designed and beautifully crafted. This is why it lasted 100 years.
The Deacon eliminated all un-needed redundancy. His shay never needed to be fixed. It worked perfect until its last moment. Then all parts failed simultaneously.
If we could perfect engineering then we could build modern structures and machines this way. Why have components fail after the machine or structure no longer serves any useful purpose? Its a waste right?
Maybe the shay the Deacon built wasn't nearly as perfect as his engineering skills and his ability to optimize. Perhaps our accountants, efficiency experts, and engineers are merely striving to reach the standards set by the Deacon.
Maybe we've been misinterpreting the poem all along.
The reason you don't follow this is because a good programmer will know when the memory is released that the pointer is not going to be used again so its contents become a don't care.
A bad programmer releases the memory but doesn't really check if the pointer will or will not be used.
A crash occurs if some function tries to use the pointer when it is not valid to use it. An exploit occurs if you load the proper data via normal load procedures such as asking a web server to say load a jpeg and the jpeg is coded as a jpeg and looks like a jpeg but contains a segment of code in a location which is determined by the particular buggy program in question.
Once the code is in the machine then the next step is to cause the errant program to execute the improperly coded function which is often an error handler which typically get written and never checked out properly.
One way around this is trivially simple. Free the memory and set the pointer to null. Of course there can be other pointers which are set. One can have several pointers to a chunk of memory. Sometimes this is the _only_ way to do a task efficiently. A for instance is scanning a list and returning the address of the item found.
Of course this can easily be handled by prudent programming practices. One needs to understand that a list is an object. As such its FIRST word should be its status. This is ALWAYS the case. If zero then the status is normal. If no-zero then its an error or a warning and its programmer's glory how this is set up.
Then, Any function that needs to work with the list needs the list address and the address of say an item in the list. Any code using the address of an item must check the list status first.
A simple way to do this with a dynamic list in say shared memory would be to put an interator on the list which increments each time there is a modification to the list. Then the address of an item which should also be seen as an object would have the list iteration number as part included with the address of the item in question. By doing this any code needing to process the item which was for instance looked up by helper functions will know if the list is valid for the item being referenced.
Of course. Most programmers I know don't do this. They write buggy code.
Most people I know go by the idea that if something works its good enough. A serious and professional programmer must change this to the mathematical standard which is we must be able to prove it cannot fail.
I am a manager and an employer and a businessman. This is probably pretty close to the correct order but the vast majority of businessmen are salesmen and they look for the money first. Any programmer working for one will be constantly under pressure to do it fast and we can fix it later.
Think of this as brain surgery. Would you want the surgeon to do it fast and suggest it can be fixed later?
Yes you can do dual plant (stage) You can probably do triple stage.
The first issue is the starch. In ripe corn there isn't all that much sugar. You need to malt it which is the same as beer production from barley and the seed produces both alpha and beta amalayse which break down the starches into simple sugars like glucose and dextrose. Sugar cane produces sucrose which is a fructose and glucose molecule hitched up. The non-chemists can think of this as marriage.
Long chain starches eventually are called celulosic polymers. Alpha amalyase doesn't work very well on these long chain sugar polymers so they don't get broken down into something yeast can use. They cause horrible things if you are brewing like starch hazes and crap like that. From a fuel standpoint - its an unfinished job.
But.
You can parge the wort of all the good stuff you get and if you do your best from most grains including corn you get about 100 brewers pounds per quarter. I'm not going to tell anyone here what a brewer's quarter is or what brewer's pounds are.
The left overs.
The protein to a certain extent is concentrated. In some circles this is good because it means we can use the leftovers (brewers grains) as animal feed to make lean meat instead of fat. But hamburgers and sausages like fat.
The rest of the mix is still there.
For fuel, one might want to use an acid catalyst to break down the sugar polymers. Acids break down the sugars as well. If you use the biological pathway then you can extract the fermented sugars as a 1st phase and reprocess what is left behind which if you know your medieval conversion constants regarding brewers pounds and quarters and the like turns out to be about 1/3 of what you put in if you start with high quality grain.
I posted in a previous essay (diatribe) that using 100% of the USA corn production in 1990 creates by way of fermentation about 4% of the liquid fuel demand. IE. Its folly. There are far better ways.
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So "what of what" is left over from a fermentation process. These are called brewers grains. The best use is cattle feed. But your question is if we are dumb enough (my tilt) (your's is a good question) then what if we tried to convert our brewers grains as well.
Do do this we can use more microbiology. Fungal spoecies such as Tricoderma verdi are excellent cellulose digesters. There are others: Pleurotis spp, Lentunula spp. Stropharia spp. Amarillia spp and of course I can toss in one shroom (cellulose digester) that should strike fear into the heart of even the most brave - Galerina spp. Note that several Galerina spp look to the unaware almost identical to Psylocybin spp. Only one can kill you. It takes about a week - maybe a bit longer. But these are just the large macro fungus.
Tricoderma spp is one genus. The species Imogen is working on was isolated in about 1942 in Guam. Its used to make our stone washed blue genes. It is a good cotton = cellulose digester. Nevertheless I suspect its claim to fame with cellulose to ethanol is more related to government grants that to suitability. Other fungus have much broader digestive pathways and are far more robust and also can be grown in liquid culture.
So... We can run a 'shroom through the brewer's grains. I don't think it will make any economic sense to do it and I question if Starch _. Ethanol will ever make sense. Nevertheless - we can do it.
After the best digestion of whatever species of shrooms we chose takes place we can still run another species. But its marginal.
3rd stage would by pyrolic decomposition.
But. We can do this at stage one and has been pointed out in other post the F-T process does this with ANY carbon - hydrogen chemical feedstock.
The simple observation is that if we want a tonne of ethanol which by energy is about 40% loaded with oxidization byproducts. (this is borken chemical links and the O itself) then with an alcohol such as ethanol (C2H5OH)
You are correct of course the H can come from within the F-T reaction itself. The problem here in Alberta is that our only real surplus H comes from Methane and we are past the peak of North American production as of 2001. So we need to look elsewhere. Hence I still stand behind my comments that unless we are willing to create the H from nuclear energy disassociating water (steam electrolysis perhaps) then we will be creating a stream of liquid CO2 measured in the millions of barrels as we produce a stream of synthetic crude measured in the range of 5 million barrels per day.
This is when we get there.
Our other alternative is to leave up to 1/2 of the carbon we mine in a coke pile. The H is simply not in the feedstocks.
The issue of why we have a severe hydrogen shortage when we look at synthetic fuel production is quite easy to see. Liquid motor fuels for the most part are alkanes which have the chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). Bitumin from the tar sands is close to 1:1. With coal it varies and can be down at CH0.6.
Octane for instance is C8H18 (n=8).
Clearly if we mine (CH)n and need CnH(2n+2) then for large values of n we need about a hydrogen for each carbon or we need to discard 1/2 the carbon we mine. This is more true with coal than with bitumin which perhaps explains why tar sands operations make more sense than coal mining even now and even though we have massive amounts of coal and the coal is not 2/3 sand.
Your comments of sulphur in the coal feedstock are correct. However my analysis is just a rough ball park - I did not even consider the economics and details of anything. I simply wanted to illustrate that the ethanol hype we are hearing now is based on a poor understanding of the problem. Its expensive, it takes food out of mouths, and even if we push the technology of starch to ethanol as far as we can we won't make much of a difference other than to drive up the price of corn and grain. Food will become more expensive. However there is so much middle man costs in a loaf of bread for instance that fuel demands cannot possibly compete. Expect the pork industry to go broke though. Cattle will be better but not much because grain is used to finish cattle. Poulty uses a lot of grain.
I do think cellulose to ethanol from non-grain sources might have a great deal of potential. I also think that biological processes will make a great deal of sense.
I am left with the pyrolic methods... they are robust and simpler. We should be able to use these methods on our garbage which presently is not handled IMHO even close to the way it should be handled. For instance in my mind all organic waste should be converted to fertilizer and returned to the land. We have to stop mining our land. God's not making all that much more land for us to destroy.
When I look at coal as a chemical feedstock for liquid fuel and consider Nuclear as the source of hydrogen then to me it looks like a winner.
Biosources yield chemical feedstock with the general chemistry of (CH2O)n (Set n=6 and you get C6H12O6) which means one is carting around 50% of the load as oxygen. You can't cart it all that far before your economics go to pot.
Ethanol is C2H5OH which is 24+5+16+1 = 46. 16/46 = 35%. There is still a huge amount of the load which is not productive. In fact its about 40% of the load which is non-productive. Not only are you carting about the heavy oxygen, you also lost 2 carbon:hydrogen bonds and the energy from them. This is one reason the oil industry wants to transport methane as LPG instead of turning it into an alcohol. Best route is probably gas to liquids.
Comments like NOx is reduced may not necessarily make sense if one computes the NOx per mile. Also, NOx is reduced when the combustion temperature goes down and when one looks at the thermodynamics one sees the efficiency of the engine goes down with the combustion temperature. We saw this before with the EPA regulations where the emissions went down... but the motors were de-tuned and this really hurt the gas milage. I remember calculating that the total emissions per mile driven went up.... the issue is the equation used by the EPA resulted in the denominator becoming larger due to the poor milage and the bigger denominator masked things.
I'll give an example.
Car #1 gets 20 miles to the gallon and produces x grams of emissions per liter of exhaust.
Car #2 gets 10 miles to the gallon and produces 75% of x grams per liter of exhaust.
Car #2 has an emission level that is 3/4 of car #1. One can say that Car #1 produces 1/3 more emissions.
But car #2 produces 1.5 grams of emissions per 20 miles driven while car #1 only produces x grams. This means that Car #
World corn production is about 475 million tonnes of which the USA produces about 200 million.
You can get about 10 liters max of ethanol from the starch in a bushel of corn which weighs 56 lbs. 2000/56 = 35 bushes * 10 = 350 liters per tonne.
Ethanol has about 17,000 btu per gallon verses gasoline at 27,000. This is about 2/3.
There are about 158 liters in a petroleum barrel. So the ethanol barrel equivalent of the starch in the the world's corn crop is:
475*350/158*17/27 = 662 million barrels.
For the USA... they burn about 22 million barrels of oil per day.
200*350/158*17/27 = 279 million barrels.
279 / 22 = 12.7 days. If the USA gives up 100% of its corn crop they can feed their cars for 2 weeks.
Offsetting this we get the brewers grains which are high in protein but lack the starches since we converted them.
Since this is only 4% approximately and I have not even considered the energy required to run these plants and haul the stuff around - I think it is rather foolish to give up potentially 100% of the corn crop for 4% of the fuel required. This simply not even within the ballpark of making sense.
One tonne of dry biomass on an energy basis is about the same as two barrels of oil. Another pithy fact is that one needs to be able to brew beer at $2.50 per keg in order to compete on an energy basis with gasoline. The last factoid is easy to see. A keg is about 60 liters and at 5% this is three (3) liters of ethanol. Ethanol has about 2/3 the energy of gasoline.
We seldom see these issues described in a compact form. I keep seeing terms like "Ethanol is an oxygenated fuel". In fact it is a partially oxidized fuel which is why it carries considerably less energy than say gasoline or diesel. Liquid motor fuels are for the most part Alkanes and have a chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). Ethanol is an alcohol which has an OH tacked on to an alkane. Ethanol is C2H5OH which is a partially oxidized propane. The oxygen makes it liquid hence relatively safe and easy to transport. Methanol is partially oxidized methane: CH3OH.
Hence it is immediately clear that if we had a large supply of propane then the shortest chemical route to produce ethanol would be from the gas - not from sugar or starch and certainly not from cellulose or other plant matter... except for one thing. The biologic source is renewable. The geological source as best we know is not renewable.
Now the thing that is not emphasized in these discussions is that every gallon of ethanol produced from starch will come out of someone's mouth. It might not be your mouth or mine - it might be a pig's mouth or a chicken's mouth but it will be someone or something currently in the food chain who will have to give up their source of food in order for us to feed our cars.
This is obvious. We do not have a HUGE amount of excess agricultural capacity and we also do not have huge piles of unused grain hanging around. Hence it is clear that we eat what we produce and there is little long term surplus.
The world consumes about 82-84 million barrels of oil per day. This can be found in the BP statistical oil review - there are other sources but this is a very good one. North America consumes about 24-25 million barrels per day if you include Canada.
I share the opinions of those who say we are probably at the world peak of oil production. We will probably stay near this peak for a couple years more. On the news two days ago was an EIA forecast that world consumption is forecast to grow by another 2 million barrels per day next year and that OPEC is expected to step up to the plate. I laughed. I expect that OPEC production will be flat and that the forecast demand will simply drive the price up until the demand is destroyed. Mathew Simmons says it could take over $300 per barrel to destroy the demand. I don't know if I believe what Simmons says will happen before 2015 but I do have a great deal of respect for him. He could very well be right.
Now the issue of cellulostic ethanol. Probably this makes some sense. But you still need to collect and transport a tonne of organic matter to the ethanol plant in order to create the equivalent on an energy bassis of two (2) barrels of oil. Then this material has to be converted at 100% efficiency into ethanol and at zero (0%) cost.... and it has to be 100% convertable into ethanol.
Other alternatives are coal liquifaction and coal gasification to create a hydrogen source for the development of synthetic crude.
As I see it - the ONLY way that make sense is synthetic crude.
We are doing this in Alberta at the tar sands. We are expecting to ramp up production into the 3.3 million barrel per day level by 2015. The problem is that by 2015 if world oil peaks between now and 2010 for instance then we can lose conventional production at a rate of 10% per year on a production base of say 84 million barrels at peak - and this compounds annually... it is an exponential function.
Without nuclear power to create a source of hydrogen we either have to discard literally 1/2 of the carbon we mine or we have to use a chemical process such as Fis
I can remember back in the good old DOS days that I reprogrammed the CRTC registers in the VGA cards at the time to bring up 176 columns on a monitor. This overdrove it somewhat but it did last 18 months and that was long enough for me to organize dual heads under OS/2.
Back before the dear old DOS days I did a contract for a company which had an IT department headed by a fool.. This fool later became a VP of IT in a large oil company which shows that the management of big companies can be totally out to lunch. Of course I never offered to write any code for that company.
They had an indentation policy and a long identifier policy. I had no issue with the identifiers (variable names). The problem is they never managed to figure out that if you indent 5 spaces and use 20 character variable names and a space around every operator that you are doing almost all of your programming in column 70++. Oh. They had a limit of 72 columns back then because they used the old fortran convention of storing line numbers in columns 73-80.
I think 80 columns is enough. Certainly 256 columns should do it. The thing is the more that is available the more likely it is that someone will find a way to abuse it.
Yes, as a matter of fact I did work int he banking industry in their operations department in one of their data processing centers. They were incompetent them too.
One of the major issues the mangers of the center had was getting the summary reports printed off. They were using an IBM mvs system. It prints the documents in numerical order of the document name which was typed on the JCL of the control deck we ran through the card readers. All that was required was renumbering the printouts which I did. Management was elated. I didn't get a raise but I sure got a pat on the back.
Next they told every other data center in Canada how to fix the problem.
A couple weeks later I was chastized. Toronto called and said the new numbers could f*k up the spoolers because they only had limited disk space.
Well - I counted the pages that had been moved the the front of the queue. The number was less than 20.
So here was this twit calling me up bitching and trying to suggest I created a problem because 10 pages that management really needed happened to be printed before the 1000's of pages of other reports. Those were high speed printed then - and they printed steadily for 8 hours each night shift.
Like bullshit the management reports were going to screw up the spoolers. It was a red herring he was handing out.
I declined the promotion to Toronto. My pay doubled in less than a year.
The problem with this idea is that as my bank demonstrates - they are incompetent. Mind you the vast majority of people have practically no clue whatsoever about security and hence the bank does need to do something to protect itself. At present they have a HUGE liability and this is illustrated by the fact that there are keystroke loggers and viruses residing in at least 1/3 of PC's at one time or another.
Now here is a for instance to illustrate the outright incompetence of my bank's tech support people:
One of their servers was misconfigured and reported a file not found error. Of course - they sent it to me. The message contained the IP address and the apache version number. Sooo... I know what internal addresses they are using and what version of the webserver daemon. No big deal.
But why do they send their error messages to the client? Am I suppose to debug it for them? A guess the short answer might be "yes" because I - along with a number of other programmers - might be working in the apache source code so potentially we do debug their systems. But this was just a misconfiguration.
So I was nice enough to call their tech support and advise them of the problem. The tech support person insisted I re-boot my computer! Not only this she would NOT pass on my error report to the department which handles their servers. When I demanded to speak with her supervisor I found the supervisor also stonewalled me. So I flatly told her that she is incompetent and as such should not be making decisions about things she knows nothing about. Since she would not pass the error report to the people responsible for dealing with it - she made the decision that it isn't necessary for them to know one of their servers was misconfigured.
So this is what you get. Banks are large beauracratic organisations filled with incompetent people who like to sweep things under the rug and are too stupid to both think outside of the box or pass even a trouble report over to someone who might be responsible for dealing with it.
Why would we want people like this to run code in our computers? Why would we want to be held resonsible for their errors - which will happen under the New Zealand system?
This reminds me when I wanted to set up an e-commerce system. The bank at the time was in bed with a company out of India. They wanted the root password for my servers. I said No.
Why should I had over the root password to a group of unknown people in India? If something happens have I any recourse against them? Of course not. Sue in an Indian Court? Bullshit! We all know that would go nowhere and be bloody awful expensive and even if we did win India has laws which prevent money leaving their country. You can pay money to Indian citizens after you go to great trouble - but just forget the idea of taking money out of the country.
So its triple-ly a poor idea to hand over a root password to a company in a foreign country! Of course I advised the bank that their e-commerce terms were totally unacceptable.
Guess what? The company they dealt with in India was bankrupt within a year. It truely was fly by night.
This is what you get from large beauracratic organisations filled with incompetent people: You get really dumb ideas hatched.
Richard Feynman writes in one of his books about the incompetence of the military with regard to the Manhattan project at Los Almos. Back then they had a hole in the fence. They had guards stationed at the main entrance and made everyone sign in and out. But they didn't fix the hole in the fence and didn't station guards there either. So Feynman too great joy for a while by entering through the main gate and signing in - then exiting via the hole and signing in again. This did not trigger a red light in the guard's mind. Neither did me telling the tech support person at my bank that one or more of their servers was misconfigured and was bitching about it.
The short of it is that the banks really do have a problem and the way they handle things they are probably some of the worst people to address their problems. In part - this is why the banks have a serious problem.
To be good at software development you need to be smart and if you are smart then you can get the grades. Since I am a manager and employer I do know the difference between productivity of various individuals and I can tell you right now most human resources departments sux really big time. Top programmers don't get paid anything near what they are worth and poor programmers get in and do absolutely awful work because the standards they are judged by are for the most part irrelevant.
My recommendation. Get the grades.
My son just graduated on the dean's list with great distinction. He took 5 years to do a 4 year degree because he was running a business and working. He lost out on some scholarships because of this... IE he wasn't taking enough classes to qualify. In his last two (2) years he changed it around and kicked ass.
He did win scholarships for his last two (2) years... they paid his tuition. He could have lived here for free and I'm within walking distance of the uni. But he chose to buy his own place and like I said took the full complement of classes and did very well.
He's not looking for a job mind you. He created his own. He's been VP of finance in his own company now for 5 years.
Thing is that he's now go both the grades and the job experience and more.
I would give it a shot and go for the grades. They give you bragging rights forever.
With the current fear of doing anything that might have a consequence it is quite clear that the pioneering spirit is more or less dead in the water. Given the current conserns about doing anything at all, it is quite clear to me that if our society were transported 500 years into the past and located in Europe than no-one would dare to colonise North America. People would be running around proclaiming all sorts of fears.
Terraform Mars? Ha! We might find life there one day. We better not take the chance eh?
Mind you _if_ we can cheaply get into space then its probably likely that we will develop the asteroid belt. Its not in a gravity well and there are HUGE mineral resources available. Not to mention... there is a lot of space to build things in.
There is one additional thing.
I don't think government is going to find a way to park its big fat ass on real estate in the asteroid belt.
Just as Britain was unsuccessful extracting taxes from its colonies in North America I suspect terrestrial governments will be unsuccessful controlling development and extracting taxes from the asteroid belt... once we can get there that is. But... it will have to wait until private industry can provide the transportation systems into space.
Once we start to move into space mind you we will see exponetial growth of the population and the economy. There are vast energy resources in space and vast mineral wealth. A space based economy will develop very quickly and experience phenominal growth.
Things we will be able to do in space which we cannot do on earth:
-- Vast resources of very cheap energy including nuclear. We could have a nuclear economy now! We've been lied to.
-- Vast mineral resources and all the energy we need to process them.
-- Unlimited space to build things in.
-- Absence of government regulations which tie projects up in red tape sometimes for decades and longer.
Of all these issues... I think the latter is probably the most important.
There is another issue as well. As I see it - more than 50% and possibly more than 75% of the time people spend at work is channeled into non-productive directions. Its work that simply does not need to be done.
Currently the tax free day is past June 30 in most 1st world countries. I think most agree that more than 1/2 of what government does is non-productive. In the far flung reagions of the asteroid belt I do not think uselesses will be quite as viable as a career option.
You can only sue the person or organization that has wronged you. You cannot sue the people behind it. This comment does consider issues of a "court of equity". Quantum Meruit falls into this area.
A for instance. Your neighbor is on holidays and there is a storm and his tree falls on his house and there is a big hole. Being the nice guy you are you organize tarps and so forth to at least keep out the rain and maybe burglars. So you spend a little money on your neighbor's behalf and expect to be compensated when they get back.
When they get back they say thank you and F*ck you! They appreciate what you did but see no obligation to compensate you. There is no contract.
This is what Quantum Meruit addresses. IE. You have a right to be compensated.
I do not know how this principal would apply to a case where a legal organization goes out harassing people and one tries to poke through this legal veil and sues the ones who finances the abuse. I especially do not know how one would do this when we consider that the businesses involved really are being ripped off sometimes.
I think a better solution to this issue is to only distribute copyrighted material which the owners say can be distributed and then adhere to their licenses. The GPL is an example. A corlarly of this idea might be to boycott any products distributed with terms one is not willing to agree to.
If the issue is music... then at IUMA.COM there is a lot of really great stuff that can be distributed.
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I boycott KRAFT. When I was in Uni which was more than 20 years ago I was told there is a KRAFT boycott because of the way they treated the Quebec Dairy farmers. No one has told be this boycott is over. So - I don't touch anything by Kraft. This means I don't eat my mother's salads.
Of course this doesn't address the bull that leads to Quebec farmers getting quota's for milk production and cheese being imported from Quebec into Alberta (where I live). This has to do with marketing boards and quota's and all sorts of politics (which I also do not support). The short of it is that the cost of a license to milk a cow costs more than a cow. These laws are put in place to benefit the producers... but they don't. These laws just keep milk out of baby's mouths. The laws benefit the producers who gets grandfathered in and everyone else loses. A simple economic observations is that since we have more or less pure competition then any benefit confered by anything will simply become capitalized.:-)
OF course this is why taxi license in major cities cost more than Taxis.
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So why did I write this? Because I think the idea of boycotting music or abusing the rights of those who choose to sign with a record company has to be about as non-productive as boycotting Kraft because they abused a group who abused another group who had a privileged position confered upon them... in Canada because they happen to speak French and thus have some political clout.
I would suggest being positive and promoting IUMA and boycott the labels.
JUST SAY NO!
If you don't like the license then don't listen to the music. Find something better.
Some of the best and most expensive batteries currently available are good for only about 3000 cycles with about a 2/3 draw down. The batteries in the Toyota Prius are drawn down about 25% and are good for only about 3000 cycles at this level. This is with the best battery management we can conceive.
If I calculate the amount of energy the battery will furnish at the best possible management of the battery system what I come up with is that they are at best marginal. Now Toyota has much better usage data than I have and perhaps the physics of the battery system is that they get many more cycles at lower draw downs and at draw down/recharge cycles which are quite short. I don't have the data. Maybe others do. If so then it would be great to put up a website with a consolidated explanation of the care and feeding of battery systems.
Nevertheless, having invested bux in RailPower (TSE:P) after doing the engineering and concluding their systems would not work... I conclude now that I was foolish to have relied on their engineers. The short of it is that their systems didn't work! They ended up selling hybred locomotives and then buying them back for about 1.5x what they sold them for in order to avoid litigation - litigation presumably for fraud.
Toyota and Nissan are playing this game now and I suspect they are banking on developments in battery technology IN THE NEAR FUTURE to bail them out when their present battery systems start to fail.
Perhaps this is what GM faced. I suspect they would have clicked their heels and screamed "Yahoo!" if the battery systems in the EV* autos were standing up. They seem to have done pretty much every thing else right. Of course the owners loved the car. We just need batteries that work.
Last I looked, the best batteries cost about $10,000 and could convert a Prius into a true EV with gas assist as required. I think this is an excellent way to go. But even with these batteries we are looking at 3,000 cycles.
The short of it is that most batteries wear out faster than tires.
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What we are looking for is a way to store energy or to buffer energy.
Toyota and Nissan designed their current hybrids to buffer energy.
Its a small step as people have noted to buffer from the wall outlet to the office and call it an EV.
There are nuclear alternatives. Alpha emitters can be used to create a small to large and continuous energy flow which can _slowly_ recharge batteries. These are totally safe. But they provide no surge ability. In this hypothetical senerio if when you get home you forget to plug your car in then what does the car do with its extra juice once the batteries are full? One option: make lotsa noise then run a big toaster and finally if that fails catch on fire?
What of a high pressure air tank?
What of phase change?
Here is a funny idea: Lets use CO2. In liquid form its at 800 PSI at say room temperature. When compressed it can provide quite a lot of energy. We could expand it through a normal motor and run the low pressure gas into a bag. For regenerative braking we could take the low pressure gas and re-compress it. The problem is the size of the bag. To do anything useful the bag for a Prius sized auto might have to be about the size of a city bus. We could put this on a trailer - like a boat trailer of course and tow it behind the car.
This system would have virtually unlimited cycles and I guess when the car wears out we could trade in the car and keep the old bag and trailer system.
Obviously I write this tongue in cheek. I wish to illustrate the problem.
How do we store or buffer the energy?
If we can solve this problem the rest of the problem is simply a matter of good engineering and even GM showed they have very good engineers available.
Since few people update their AV software each day they use their computer and indeed since the best that AV software can do is reactive in nature... AV software is more like the month after pill or even the 9 months after pill.
At best AV software is doomed to failure. This incident illustrates how serious the lack of security in common practice is. Clearly the perpetrators were a novices. Perhaps they were just a couple script kiddies playing around wondering if the lack of security was real.
If an amateur can do this, then consider that organized crime must know tonnes of passwords. A lot of people do online banking and online stock trading. The exposure our financial systems are exposed to is incredible.
Slashdot Mirror
Give us a break!
Gasoline and liquid motor fuels are primarily alkanes. These have the chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). If n=8 you have octane and I assume you have heard of the octane rating of gasoline.
You _can't_ have gasoline without carbon unless you are god and can change the laws of chemistry.
Ethanol is C2H5OH. It is a partically oxidized alkane. n=2 in this case. the OH makes it an alcohol. The reason ethanol carries less energy than gasoline is simply because it is partially oxidized. Note it is liquid also because of the oxygen in the molecule. Methanol: CH3OH is also liquid for the same reason.
It would make sense to convert Methane (CH4) to methanol (CH3OH) instead of trucking and shipping it around as Liquified Petroleum Gas (LPG) except for a couple factors:
1) methanol is poisonous. <rant> This is why it is sometimes used to denatured alcohols. This is also why methanol is often used instead of ethanol even though industrially ethanol can be made for about the same cost as methanol and often either will do the job.
The idea is that instead of the kid simply getting drunk if he gets into the photocopier cleaner... we blind him or kill him. Anyone working with alcohol based wood finishes also gets caught in this trap.... instead of using a reletively safe alchohol (ethanol) - one gets exposed to a known carcinogen instead (methanol). Why? Well we wouldn't want the guy to mistake his shelac thiner for a beer now would we? Better to kill him or blind him instead. Righto! </rant>
Industrially if we have large amounts of CH3OH being hauled around then expect many accidents. Its a poison we are better off without.
2) that oxygen in the molecule both reduces the energy content per gallon as well as adding dead weight. The OH will eventually end up as H2O when the fuel is fully oxidized. One way to look at this is that chemically by weight it is about 30% water already.
If you manage to eliminate all the carbon from gasoline you are left with hydrogen. There is more hydrogen in a gallon of gasoline than in a gallon of liguid hydrogen. Also - there is a LOT more energy.
In fact - we have a serious shortage of hydrogen. If we had a surplus of hydrogen then one of the best ways to transport it would be to toss in some carbon and turn it into gasoline. This is what they do in order to make synthetic crude. Its part of the Tar Sands operations. Shell for instance has built a HUGE plant in Alberta to do precisely this.
The short of it is that hydrogen as a motor fuel probably doesn't make much sense. Ideas of converting alkanes to hydrogen by eliminating the carbon don't make much sense. The CO2 is a plant nutrient anyways. The biosphere can easily cope with CO2 levels even 20x greater than they are now. Biological studies of crop production in greenhouses for decades have been focused on CO2 enrichment.
As for global warming driven by CO2. IMHO its hooey. One needs a better handle on the most important green house gas: Water Vapour. Levels of water vapour in the tropics and sub tropics are in the vicinty of 40,000 PPM compared with CO2 in the range of 380 PPM. We do not know if water vapour goes up 5,000 or down 5,000 and we don't know if there are any long or short term trends. Meanwhile it is true that CO2 is up by about 90 ppm over the last century. With the increase in CO2 we see an increase in plant growth.
Geologically, CO2 has been over 15x greater than now. Our paleoclimatologists say CO2 is not linked to planetary temperatures in the geological record.
(BOPD = barrels oil per day)
4 8&contentId=7033471
One of the best sources for this information is the BP statistical review of world energy. You can find it on the BP website: http://www.bp.com/productlanding.do?categoryId=68
It doesn't much matter what you start with: raw crude or refined fuel... what is at issue is the percentage. 30% of either is about 7 million barrels per day equivalent and lordy I have no idea where they plan to get it. Alberta for instance is running flat out trying to boost tar sands production to about 3.3 million BOPD by 2015.
Note that world production is around 81 million BOPD. World production is close to being flat. On page 10 of the report we see that Saudi Arabia's production declined. This is very significant when you consider that the largest field in the world... the Ghawar field - is in Saudia Arabia and has been reported as being in decline. If so then the top four (4) fields are in decline and these fields produce say about 15% of the world's production. Normally when fields go into decline the production shortly thereafter drops by about 10% per year. If so then the world will shortly be seeing declines at least in the range of about 1.5% per year which will exceed a million BOPD and this will compound exponentialy.
We better hope someone figures out how to make up the shortfall. If not we all go on an oil diet. Personally I see nothing over the horizon other than perhaps high prices and gas rationing.
It accomplishes little to have the critter if we have little to feed it.
One ton of dry organic matter is equivalent to 2 barrels of oil on an energy basis if one can convert it for free. This is the cellulose to fuel pathway.... cellulose and pentosans and liganans. T. verdii which is the fungus that brings us stone washed blue jeans is cited as a candidate for cellulostic ethanol but T. verdii is a cellulose digester. Other fungus digest the pentosans and lignans as well - fungus such as P. ostrates and it also will live in liquid culture.
Now the issue with the bacteria is the food supply. Are they to digest woody plant materials? Are they to digest a fungus which digests woody plant materials. Is there some other food source being proposed?
Another fact is that if 100% of the USA corn crop were to be converted to ethanol - then this would supply USA liquid fuel needs for about 2 weeks. Any bushel of corn converted to ethanol will come out of someone's mouth. It may be a pigs mouth or it may be a mouth in the 3rd world - but someone has to give up their food so that we can feed a car.
Personally I think bio-fuels have a bright future. However I'm not convinced these guys are on the right track. Alga can produce bio-diesel from sunlight. Here we know the energy source. In the case of e-coli and other bacteria the energy source is sugar which leaves us with exactly the same issues of ethanol... namely: there isn't enough corn and other grains around to make much of a difference even if we can perfect the technology to convert it into a fuel for almost free.
However if we can convert the cellulose, pentosans and lignans then maybe because there are a lot of herbacious plant wastes kicking around. If so - then one tonne of dry plant matter will convert to about 2 barrels of oil. If a barrel of oil is worth $75 bux then one has $150 bux per tonne in the budget to obtain and convert the plant matter.
Something to consider is that normally in the case of agriculture this material is returned to the soil where it contributes to the organic matter that creates a high quality soil. If this material is carted off to a fuel plant then what happens to the quality of the soil?
Not much here.
The story could have shown a list of the tested viruses verses the AV software being tested. A simple table would have conveyed a great deal more information than the druel the fellow wrote. Yes I RTFA and as I said - it is not very informative.
Frankly I am sick and tired of hearing these references to global warming. Of course those who like to use these references like spices typically know next to nothing about the subject.
/.'ers are going to be caught up in it.
/.'ers should be worrying about?
/.'ers are young enough that they will be fighting an oil war - which is a resource grab. Who wants this?
It is my opinion that if one wants to know how CO2 might affect the planet then one should probably look first at the geological record to see what effect CO2 might have had in the past. I think anyone who disagrees with this premise should show why CO2 levels during such and such a geological period should be expected to not behave as CO2 levels are expected to behave now.
On this basis...
Over the last 570 million years the planet has been about 10 degrees ON AVERAGE warmer than now for at least 80% of the time period. There have been three (3) major cooling events and we are at the bottom of one now. 5 million years ago it was much warmer than now. 2 million years ago there were trees growing north of the arctic circle. Actually I have a friend who is a hard rock geologist and they were drilling Kimberlites in Canada's tundra and struck wood - 2 million year old wood - at a depth of about 150 meters. Yes. There were trees in Canada's tundra back then. The earth was much warmer then.
But what of CO2 driven global warming?
During the Ordovician, the planet plunged from a very warm climate to a very cold climate. The CO2 levels back then were about 13x to 17x greater than now... Even with CO2 levels about 5,000 ppm this gas was not able to prevent the earth from slipping into an ice age. Note that at present, CO2 is about 370 ppm and this is up from about 280 ppm in the 1800's. Yes, CO2 has increased. But geologically it is still at a geological historical low.
Then, during the Carboniferous, there was a cooling. CO2 was much much higher than now.
The paleoclimatology community says that CO2 levels are not linked to temperature in the geological record.
IMHO - global warming is just an excuse for people to worry over something. Mass media wants people to worry. People tend to worry about things they don't understand. People tend to worry about things they do understand also. Pollies like to use this to justify unpopular laws and taxation.
Personally I think there are many things worth worrying about. The Fckd USA health care system is something worth worrying about because a sizable percentage of
The oil wars are worth worrying about. The conflict in the middle east scares me. There is much more going on than we are told. I side with those who say we are at peak oil production. North America passed peak gas production in Jan 2001. We have NOTHING on the back burner now that will provide the energy we need.
When I read and hear about the new security measures I worry. Like why? The system we had before wasn't all that bad. Why the emphasis on security? Then I think about war. If our governments are planning to start WWIII then it all makes sense. Is this something I and other
Many
There are alternatives. Many stories address this. One alternative is nuclear.
Maybe instead of worrying about ghosts that probably do not exist we should be all looking at the real problems we do have to face.
Global Warming is not one of them.
The principal green house gas is Water Vapour and at 40 degrees C which is common in the tropics the absolute humidity is about 5% which is 50,000 ppm. We do not know historically if this is higher or lower. CO2 levels are 370 ppm and they are up about 90 ppm over the last say 100++ years.
We cannot even measure water vapour over the planet accurately enough to determine of water vapour levels are up 90 ppm or down 90 ppm or even if they are up 1000 ppm or down 1000 ppm. When the most important variable in the model is ignored then
I clipped the correct one! Contents were from the worng page! Blame firefox. Blame me for not checking this before I posted the comment.
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Geodynamics website can be found here: http://www.geodynamics.com.au/IRM/content/home.ht
One needs to look closely at the projected economics.
It said an investment of $800 million to $1 billion could produce more than 100 gigawatts of electricity by 2050, equaling the combined output of all 104 nuclear power plants in the U.S.
Bullshit!
A gigawatt power plant costs in the range of a billion regardless of the energy source. Does anyone think there is even the remotest of chances that geothermal can come in at 1/100th the cost of other energy sources and that no one would try to develop it? Why else would geothermal be experimental? Or are they suggesting that over 50 years a geothermal plant might produce as much power as 104 nuclear plants do in a year?
The most obvious conclusion is that comments like this are just stoopid and illustrate the ignorance of people.
I'd say its a pretty crappy article.
_ heat;_ylt=AjvFzIDtqIn2aRl98jpXkE.s0NUE
The Ozzy company in question is Geodynamics and you can find their web site here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap//ap_on_sc/drilling_for
Their website has a good description of the progress and the problems they have encountered. I looked at investing in the company a few years back. So this isn't even current news.
The _real_ problems have not yet surfaced. There are two (2) major issues.
1) The amount of water one needs to push through the rocks tends to be rather large before one can obtain a significant amount of energy. At a 1 gigawatt level we are talking close to a river's worth. Of course 1 gigawatt is a lot of power and a 1 gigawatt plant of any sort would be expected to cost over a billion.
2) Fracing is a big problem. When you frac a formation the cracks tend to follow the weak spots and not go where you want them to go. So GDY.AX has a few holes down but this is still all experimental and there is nothing at this point that says when they pump down water that it will find its way to the well from which they want to pump the water up. In fact they may need to drill a few more wells to find where the water goes.
I certainly hope their venture is successful. However at this point I am declining to become an investor.
Any in Slashdot who wish to are certainly welcome. At least now you know the company and the trading symbol and the exchange. No thanks to the article of course!
After reading the references to economics with regard to the bridge construction I'm reminded of the poem: The Deacon's Masterpiece.
You see - the Deacon built the shay perfectly. Each piece was perfectly designed and beautifully crafted. This is why it lasted 100 years.
The Deacon eliminated all un-needed redundancy. His shay never needed to be fixed. It worked perfect until its last moment. Then all parts failed simultaneously.
If we could perfect engineering then we could build modern structures and machines this way. Why have components fail after the machine or structure no longer serves any useful purpose? Its a waste right?
Maybe the shay the Deacon built wasn't nearly as perfect as his engineering skills and his ability to optimize. Perhaps our accountants, efficiency experts, and engineers are merely striving to reach the standards set by the Deacon.
Maybe we've been misinterpreting the poem all along.
The reason you don't follow this is because a good programmer will know when the memory is released that the pointer is not going to be used again so its contents become a don't care.
A bad programmer releases the memory but doesn't really check if the pointer will or will not be used.
A crash occurs if some function tries to use the pointer when it is not valid to use it. An exploit occurs if you load the proper data via normal load procedures such as asking a web server to say load a jpeg and the jpeg is coded as a jpeg and looks like a jpeg but contains a segment of code in a location which is determined by the particular buggy program in question.
Once the code is in the machine then the next step is to cause the errant program to execute the improperly coded function which is often an error handler which typically get written and never checked out properly.
One way around this is trivially simple. Free the memory and set the pointer to null. Of course there can be other pointers which are set. One can have several pointers to a chunk of memory. Sometimes this is the _only_ way to do a task efficiently. A for instance is scanning a list and returning the address of the item found.
Of course this can easily be handled by prudent programming practices. One needs to understand that a list is an object. As such its FIRST word should be its status. This is ALWAYS the case. If zero then the status is normal. If no-zero then its an error or a warning and its programmer's glory how this is set up.
Then, Any function that needs to work with the list needs the list address and the address of say an item in the list. Any code using the address of an item must check the list status first.
A simple way to do this with a dynamic list in say shared memory would be to put an interator on the list which increments each time there is a modification to the list. Then the address of an item which should also be seen as an object would have the list iteration number as part included with the address of the item in question. By doing this any code needing to process the item which was for instance looked up by helper functions will know if the list is valid for the item being referenced.
Of course. Most programmers I know don't do this. They write buggy code.
Most people I know go by the idea that if something works its good enough. A serious and professional programmer must change this to the mathematical standard which is we must be able to prove it cannot fail.
I am a manager and an employer and a businessman. This is probably pretty close to the correct order but the vast majority of businessmen are salesmen and they look for the money first. Any programmer working for one will be constantly under pressure to do it fast and we can fix it later.
Think of this as brain surgery. Would you want the surgeon to do it fast and suggest it can be fixed later?
Yes you can do dual plant (stage) You can probably do triple stage.
The first issue is the starch. In ripe corn there isn't all that much sugar. You need to malt it which is the same as beer production from barley and the seed produces both alpha and beta amalayse which break down the starches into simple sugars like glucose and dextrose. Sugar cane produces sucrose which is a fructose and glucose molecule hitched up. The non-chemists can think of this as marriage.
Long chain starches eventually are called celulosic polymers. Alpha amalyase doesn't work very well on these long chain sugar polymers so they don't get broken down into something yeast can use. They cause horrible things if you are brewing like starch hazes and crap like that. From a fuel standpoint - its an unfinished job.
But.
You can parge the wort of all the good stuff you get and if you do your best from most grains including corn you get about 100 brewers pounds per quarter. I'm not going to tell anyone here what a brewer's quarter is or what brewer's pounds are.
The left overs.
The protein to a certain extent is concentrated. In some circles this is good because it means we can use the leftovers (brewers grains) as animal feed to make lean meat instead of fat. But hamburgers and sausages like fat.
The rest of the mix is still there.
For fuel, one might want to use an acid catalyst to break down the sugar polymers. Acids break down the sugars as well. If you use the biological pathway then you can extract the fermented sugars as a 1st phase and reprocess what is left behind which if you know your medieval conversion constants regarding brewers pounds and quarters and the like turns out to be about 1/3 of what you put in if you start with high quality grain.
I posted in a previous essay (diatribe) that using 100% of the USA corn production in 1990 creates by way of fermentation about 4% of the liquid fuel demand. IE. Its folly. There are far better ways.
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So "what of what" is left over from a fermentation process. These are called brewers grains. The best use is cattle feed. But your question is if we are dumb enough (my tilt) (your's is a good question) then what if we tried to convert our brewers grains as well.
Do do this we can use more microbiology. Fungal spoecies such as Tricoderma verdi are excellent cellulose digesters. There are others: Pleurotis spp, Lentunula spp. Stropharia spp. Amarillia spp and of course I can toss in one shroom (cellulose digester) that should strike fear into the heart of even the most brave - Galerina spp. Note that several Galerina spp look to the unaware almost identical to Psylocybin spp. Only one can kill you. It takes about a week - maybe a bit longer. But these are just the large macro fungus.
Tricoderma spp is one genus. The species Imogen is working on was isolated in about 1942 in Guam. Its used to make our stone washed blue genes. It is a good cotton = cellulose digester. Nevertheless I suspect its claim to fame with cellulose to ethanol is more related to government grants that to suitability. Other fungus have much broader digestive pathways and are far more robust and also can be grown in liquid culture.
So... We can run a 'shroom through the brewer's grains. I don't think it will make any economic sense to do it and I question if Starch _. Ethanol will ever make sense. Nevertheless - we can do it.
After the best digestion of whatever species of shrooms we chose takes place we can still run another species. But its marginal.
3rd stage would by pyrolic decomposition.
But. We can do this at stage one and has been pointed out in other post the F-T process does this with ANY carbon - hydrogen chemical feedstock.
The simple observation is that if we want a tonne of ethanol which by energy is about 40% loaded with oxidization byproducts. (this is borken chemical links and the O itself) then with an alcohol such as ethanol (C2H5OH)
You are correct of course the H can come from within the F-T reaction itself. The problem here in Alberta is that our only real surplus H comes from Methane and we are past the peak of North American production as of 2001. So we need to look elsewhere. Hence I still stand behind my comments that unless we are willing to create the H from nuclear energy disassociating water (steam electrolysis perhaps) then we will be creating a stream of liquid CO2 measured in the millions of barrels as we produce a stream of synthetic crude measured in the range of 5 million barrels per day.
This is when we get there.
Our other alternative is to leave up to 1/2 of the carbon we mine in a coke pile. The H is simply not in the feedstocks.
The issue of why we have a severe hydrogen shortage when we look at synthetic fuel production is quite easy to see. Liquid motor fuels for the most part are alkanes which have the chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). Bitumin from the tar sands is close to 1:1. With coal it varies and can be down at CH0.6.
... but the motors were de-tuned and this really hurt the gas milage. I remember calculating that the total emissions per mile driven went up.... the issue is the equation used by the EPA resulted in the denominator becoming larger due to the poor milage and the bigger denominator masked things.
Octane for instance is C8H18 (n=8).
Clearly if we mine (CH)n and need CnH(2n+2) then for large values of n we need about a hydrogen for each carbon or we need to discard 1/2 the carbon we mine. This is more true with coal than with bitumin which perhaps explains why tar sands operations make more sense than coal mining even now and even though we have massive amounts of coal and the coal is not 2/3 sand.
Your comments of sulphur in the coal feedstock are correct. However my analysis is just a rough ball park - I did not even consider the economics and details of anything. I simply wanted to illustrate that the ethanol hype we are hearing now is based on a poor understanding of the problem. Its expensive, it takes food out of mouths, and even if we push the technology of starch to ethanol as far as we can we won't make much of a difference other than to drive up the price of corn and grain. Food will become more expensive. However there is so much middle man costs in a loaf of bread for instance that fuel demands cannot possibly compete. Expect the pork industry to go broke though. Cattle will be better but not much because grain is used to finish cattle. Poulty uses a lot of grain.
I do think cellulose to ethanol from non-grain sources might have a great deal of potential. I also think that biological processes will make a great deal of sense.
I am left with the pyrolic methods... they are robust and simpler. We should be able to use these methods on our garbage which presently is not handled IMHO even close to the way it should be handled. For instance in my mind all organic waste should be converted to fertilizer and returned to the land. We have to stop mining our land. God's not making all that much more land for us to destroy.
When I look at coal as a chemical feedstock for liquid fuel and consider Nuclear as the source of hydrogen then to me it looks like a winner.
Biosources yield chemical feedstock with the general chemistry of (CH2O)n (Set n=6 and you get C6H12O6) which means one is carting around 50% of the load as oxygen. You can't cart it all that far before your economics go to pot.
Ethanol is C2H5OH which is 24+5+16+1 = 46. 16/46 = 35%. There is still a huge amount of the load which is not productive. In fact its about 40% of the load which is non-productive. Not only are you carting about the heavy oxygen, you also lost 2 carbon:hydrogen bonds and the energy from them. This is one reason the oil industry wants to transport methane as LPG instead of turning it into an alcohol. Best route is probably gas to liquids.
Comments like NOx is reduced may not necessarily make sense if one computes the NOx per mile. Also, NOx is reduced when the combustion temperature goes down and when one looks at the thermodynamics one sees the efficiency of the engine goes down with the combustion temperature. We saw this before with the EPA regulations where the emissions went down
I'll give an example.
Car #1 gets 20 miles to the gallon and produces x grams of emissions per liter of exhaust.
Car #2 gets 10 miles to the gallon and produces 75% of x grams per liter of exhaust.
Car #2 has an emission level that is 3/4 of car #1. One can say that Car #1 produces 1/3 more emissions.
But car #2 produces 1.5 grams of emissions per 20 miles driven while car #1 only produces x grams. This means that Car #
World corn production is about 475 million tonnes of which the USA produces about 200 million.
You can get about 10 liters max of ethanol from the starch in a bushel of corn which weighs 56 lbs. 2000/56 = 35 bushes * 10 = 350 liters per tonne.
Ethanol has about 17,000 btu per gallon verses gasoline at 27,000. This is about 2/3.
There are about 158 liters in a petroleum barrel. So the ethanol barrel equivalent of the starch in the the world's corn crop is:
475*350/158*17/27 = 662 million barrels.
For the USA... they burn about 22 million barrels of oil per day.
200*350/158*17/27 = 279 million barrels.
279 / 22 = 12.7 days. If the USA gives up 100% of its corn crop they can feed their cars for 2 weeks.
Offsetting this we get the brewers grains which are high in protein but lack the starches since we converted them.
Since this is only 4% approximately and I have not even considered the energy required to run these plants and haul the stuff around - I think it is rather foolish to give up potentially 100% of the corn crop for 4% of the fuel required. This simply not even within the ballpark of making sense.
One tonne of dry biomass on an energy basis is about the same as two barrels of oil. Another pithy fact is that one needs to be able to brew beer at $2.50 per keg in order to compete on an energy basis with gasoline. The last factoid is easy to see. A keg is about 60 liters and at 5% this is three (3) liters of ethanol. Ethanol has about 2/3 the energy of gasoline.
We seldom see these issues described in a compact form. I keep seeing terms like "Ethanol is an oxygenated fuel". In fact it is a partially oxidized fuel which is why it carries considerably less energy than say gasoline or diesel. Liquid motor fuels are for the most part Alkanes and have a chemical formula of CnH(2n+2). Ethanol is an alcohol which has an OH tacked on to an alkane. Ethanol is C2H5OH which is a partially oxidized propane. The oxygen makes it liquid hence relatively safe and easy to transport. Methanol is partially oxidized methane: CH3OH.
Hence it is immediately clear that if we had a large supply of propane then the shortest chemical route to produce ethanol would be from the gas - not from sugar or starch and certainly not from cellulose or other plant matter... except for one thing. The biologic source is renewable. The geological source as best we know is not renewable.
Now the thing that is not emphasized in these discussions is that every gallon of ethanol produced from starch will come out of someone's mouth. It might not be your mouth or mine - it might be a pig's mouth or a chicken's mouth but it will be someone or something currently in the food chain who will have to give up their source of food in order for us to feed our cars.
This is obvious. We do not have a HUGE amount of excess agricultural capacity and we also do not have huge piles of unused grain hanging around. Hence it is clear that we eat what we produce and there is little long term surplus.
The world consumes about 82-84 million barrels of oil per day. This can be found in the BP statistical oil review - there are other sources but this is a very good one. North America consumes about 24-25 million barrels per day if you include Canada.
I share the opinions of those who say we are probably at the world peak of oil production. We will probably stay near this peak for a couple years more. On the news two days ago was an EIA forecast that world consumption is forecast to grow by another 2 million barrels per day next year and that OPEC is expected to step up to the plate. I laughed. I expect that OPEC production will be flat and that the forecast demand will simply drive the price up until the demand is destroyed. Mathew Simmons says it could take over $300 per barrel to destroy the demand. I don't know if I believe what Simmons says will happen before 2015 but I do have a great deal of respect for him. He could very well be right.
Now the issue of cellulostic ethanol. Probably this makes some sense. But you still need to collect and transport a tonne of organic matter to the ethanol plant in order to create the equivalent on an energy bassis of two (2) barrels of oil. Then this material has to be converted at 100% efficiency into ethanol and at zero (0%) cost.... and it has to be 100% convertable into ethanol.
Other alternatives are coal liquifaction and coal gasification to create a hydrogen source for the development of synthetic crude.
As I see it - the ONLY way that make sense is synthetic crude.
We are doing this in Alberta at the tar sands. We are expecting to ramp up production into the 3.3 million barrel per day level by 2015. The problem is that by 2015 if world oil peaks between now and 2010 for instance then we can lose conventional production at a rate of 10% per year on a production base of say 84 million barrels at peak - and this compounds annually... it is an exponential function.
Without nuclear power to create a source of hydrogen we either have to discard literally 1/2 of the carbon we mine or we have to use a chemical process such as Fis
I can remember back in the good old DOS days that I reprogrammed the CRTC registers in the VGA cards at the time to bring up 176 columns on a monitor. This overdrove it somewhat but it did last 18 months and that was long enough for me to organize dual heads under OS/2.
Back before the dear old DOS days I did a contract for a company which had an IT department headed by a fool.. This fool later became a VP of IT in a large oil company which shows that the management of big companies can be totally out to lunch. Of course I never offered to write any code for that company.
They had an indentation policy and a long identifier policy. I had no issue with the identifiers (variable names). The problem is they never managed to figure out that if you indent 5 spaces and use 20 character variable names and a space around every operator that you are doing almost all of your programming in column 70++. Oh. They had a limit of 72 columns back then because they used the old fortran convention of storing line numbers in columns 73-80.
I think 80 columns is enough. Certainly 256 columns should do it. The thing is the more that is available the more likely it is that someone will find a way to abuse it.
Yes, as a matter of fact I did work int he banking industry in their operations department in one of their data processing centers. They were incompetent them too.
One of the major issues the mangers of the center had was getting the summary reports printed off. They were using an IBM mvs system. It prints the documents in numerical order of the document name which was typed on the JCL of the control deck we ran through the card readers. All that was required was renumbering the printouts which I did. Management was elated. I didn't get a raise but I sure got a pat on the back.
Next they told every other data center in Canada how to fix the problem.
A couple weeks later I was chastized. Toronto called and said the new numbers could f*k up the spoolers because they only had limited disk space.
Well - I counted the pages that had been moved the the front of the queue. The number was less than 20.
So here was this twit calling me up bitching and trying to suggest I created a problem because 10 pages that management really needed happened to be printed before the 1000's of pages of other reports. Those were high speed printed then - and they printed steadily for 8 hours each night shift.
Like bullshit the management reports were going to screw up the spoolers. It was a red herring he was handing out.
I declined the promotion to Toronto. My pay doubled in less than a year.
The problem with this idea is that as my bank demonstrates - they are incompetent. Mind you the vast majority of people have practically no clue whatsoever about security and hence the bank does need to do something to protect itself. At present they have a HUGE liability and this is illustrated by the fact that there are keystroke loggers and viruses residing in at least 1/3 of PC's at one time or another.
Now here is a for instance to illustrate the outright incompetence of my bank's tech support people:
One of their servers was misconfigured and reported a file not found error. Of course - they sent it to me. The message contained the IP address and the apache version number. Sooo... I know what internal addresses they are using and what version of the webserver daemon. No big deal.
But why do they send their error messages to the client? Am I suppose to debug it for them? A guess the short answer might be "yes" because I - along with a number of other programmers - might be working in the apache source code so potentially we do debug their systems. But this was just a misconfiguration.
So I was nice enough to call their tech support and advise them of the problem. The tech support person insisted I re-boot my computer! Not only this she would NOT pass on my error report to the department which handles their servers. When I demanded to speak with her supervisor I found the supervisor also stonewalled me. So I flatly told her that she is incompetent and as such should not be making decisions about things she knows nothing about. Since she would not pass the error report to the people responsible for dealing with it - she made the decision that it isn't necessary for them to know one of their servers was misconfigured.
So this is what you get. Banks are large beauracratic organisations filled with incompetent people who like to sweep things under the rug and are too stupid to both think outside of the box or pass even a trouble report over to someone who might be responsible for dealing with it.
Why would we want people like this to run code in our computers? Why would we want to be held resonsible for their errors - which will happen under the New Zealand system?
This reminds me when I wanted to set up an e-commerce system. The bank at the time was in bed with a company out of India. They wanted the root password for my servers. I said No.
Why should I had over the root password to a group of unknown people in India? If something happens have I any recourse against them? Of course not. Sue in an Indian Court? Bullshit! We all know that would go nowhere and be bloody awful expensive and even if we did win India has laws which prevent money leaving their country. You can pay money to Indian citizens after you go to great trouble - but just forget the idea of taking money out of the country.
So its triple-ly a poor idea to hand over a root password to a company in a foreign country! Of course I advised the bank that their e-commerce terms were totally unacceptable.
Guess what? The company they dealt with in India was bankrupt within a year. It truely was fly by night.
This is what you get from large beauracratic organisations filled with incompetent people: You get really dumb ideas hatched.
Richard Feynman writes in one of his books about the incompetence of the military with regard to the Manhattan project at Los Almos. Back then they had a hole in the fence. They had guards stationed at the main entrance and made everyone sign in and out. But they didn't fix the hole in the fence and didn't station guards there either. So Feynman too great joy for a while by entering through the main gate and signing in - then exiting via the hole and signing in again. This did not trigger a red light in the guard's mind. Neither did me telling the tech support person at my bank that one or more of their servers was misconfigured and was bitching about it.
The short of it is that the banks really do have a problem and the way they handle things they are probably some of the worst people to address their problems. In part - this is why the banks have a serious problem.
I would not even apply at your company.
To be good at software development you need to be smart and if you are smart then you can get the grades. Since I am a manager and employer I do know the difference between productivity of various individuals and I can tell you right now most human resources departments sux really big time. Top programmers don't get paid anything near what they are worth and poor programmers get in and do absolutely awful work because the standards they are judged by are for the most part irrelevant.
My recommendation. Get the grades.
My son just graduated on the dean's list with great distinction. He took 5 years to do a 4 year degree because he was running a business and working. He lost out on some scholarships because of this... IE he wasn't taking enough classes to qualify. In his last two (2) years he changed it around and kicked ass.
He did win scholarships for his last two (2) years... they paid his tuition. He could have lived here for free and I'm within walking distance of the uni. But he chose to buy his own place and like I said took the full complement of classes and did very well.
He's not looking for a job mind you. He created his own. He's been VP of finance in his own company now for 5 years.
Thing is that he's now go both the grades and the job experience and more.
I would give it a shot and go for the grades. They give you bragging rights forever.
Good luck
I thought 850 chips were slow by today's standards. What am I missing?
I always thought we Linux people picked the Penguin for our mascot because it lives in a tough world.
Five (5) feet high! This is a big bird! So what is Microsoft's mascot? A fish perhaps?
With the current fear of doing anything that might have a consequence it is quite clear that the pioneering spirit is more or less dead in the water. Given the current conserns about doing anything at all, it is quite clear to me that if our society were transported 500 years into the past and located in Europe than no-one would dare to colonise North America. People would be running around proclaiming all sorts of fears.
Terraform Mars? Ha! We might find life there one day. We better not take the chance eh?
Mind you _if_ we can cheaply get into space then its probably likely that we will develop the asteroid belt. Its not in a gravity well and there are HUGE mineral resources available. Not to mention... there is a lot of space to build things in.
There is one additional thing.
I don't think government is going to find a way to park its big fat ass on real estate in the asteroid belt.
Just as Britain was unsuccessful extracting taxes from its colonies in North America I suspect terrestrial governments will be unsuccessful controlling development and extracting taxes from the asteroid belt... once we can get there that is. But... it will have to wait until private industry can provide the transportation systems into space.
Once we start to move into space mind you we will see exponetial growth of the population and the economy. There are vast energy resources in space and vast mineral wealth. A space based economy will develop very quickly and experience phenominal growth.
Things we will be able to do in space which we cannot do on earth:
-- Vast resources of very cheap energy including nuclear. We could have a nuclear economy now! We've been lied to.
-- Vast mineral resources and all the energy we need to process them.
-- Unlimited space to build things in.
-- Absence of government regulations which tie projects up in red tape sometimes for decades and longer.
Of all these issues... I think the latter is probably the most important.
There is another issue as well. As I see it - more than 50% and possibly more than 75% of the time people spend at work is channeled into non-productive directions. Its work that simply does not need to be done.
Currently the tax free day is past June 30 in most 1st world countries. I think most agree that more than 1/2 of what government does is non-productive. In the far flung reagions of the asteroid belt I do not think uselesses will be quite as viable as a career option.
You can only sue the person or organization that has wronged you. You cannot sue the people behind it. This comment does consider issues of a "court of equity". Quantum Meruit falls into this area.
:-)
A for instance. Your neighbor is on holidays and there is a storm and his tree falls on his house and there is a big hole. Being the nice guy you are you organize tarps and so forth to at least keep out the rain and maybe burglars. So you spend a little money on your neighbor's behalf and expect to be compensated when they get back.
When they get back they say thank you and F*ck you! They appreciate what you did but see no obligation to compensate you. There is no contract.
This is what Quantum Meruit addresses. IE. You have a right to be compensated.
I do not know how this principal would apply to a case where a legal organization goes out harassing people and one tries to poke through this legal veil and sues the ones who finances the abuse. I especially do not know how one would do this when we consider that the businesses involved really are being ripped off sometimes.
I think a better solution to this issue is to only distribute copyrighted material which the owners say can be distributed and then adhere to their licenses. The GPL is an example. A corlarly of this idea might be to boycott any products distributed with terms one is not willing to agree to.
If the issue is music... then at IUMA.COM there is a lot of really great stuff that can be distributed.
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I boycott KRAFT. When I was in Uni which was more than 20 years ago I was told there is a KRAFT boycott because of the way they treated the Quebec Dairy farmers. No one has told be this boycott is over. So - I don't touch anything by Kraft. This means I don't eat my mother's salads.
Of course this doesn't address the bull that leads to Quebec farmers getting quota's for milk production and cheese being imported from Quebec into Alberta (where I live). This has to do with marketing boards and quota's and all sorts of politics (which I also do not support). The short of it is that the cost of a license to milk a cow costs more than a cow. These laws are put in place to benefit the producers... but they don't. These laws just keep milk out of baby's mouths. The laws benefit the producers who gets grandfathered in and everyone else loses. A simple economic observations is that since we have more or less pure competition then any benefit confered by anything will simply become capitalized.
OF course this is why taxi license in major cities cost more than Taxis.
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So why did I write this? Because I think the idea of boycotting music or abusing the rights of those who choose to sign with a record company has to be about as non-productive as boycotting Kraft because they abused a group who abused another group who had a privileged position confered upon them... in Canada because they happen to speak French and thus have some political clout.
I would suggest being positive and promoting IUMA and boycott the labels.
JUST SAY NO!
If you don't like the license then don't listen to the music. Find something better.
Most batteries wear out faster than tires!
Some of the best and most expensive batteries currently available are good for only about 3000 cycles with about a 2/3 draw down. The batteries in the Toyota Prius are drawn down about 25% and are good for only about 3000 cycles at this level. This is with the best battery management we can conceive.
If I calculate the amount of energy the battery will furnish at the best possible management of the battery system what I come up with is that they are at best marginal. Now Toyota has much better usage data than I have and perhaps the physics of the battery system is that they get many more cycles at lower draw downs and at draw down/recharge cycles which are quite short. I don't have the data. Maybe others do. If so then it would be great to put up a website with a consolidated explanation of the care and feeding of battery systems.
Nevertheless, having invested bux in RailPower (TSE:P) after doing the engineering and concluding their systems would not work... I conclude now that I was foolish to have relied on their engineers. The short of it is that their systems didn't work! They ended up selling hybred locomotives and then buying them back for about 1.5x what they sold them for in order to avoid litigation - litigation presumably for fraud.
Toyota and Nissan are playing this game now and I suspect they are banking on developments in battery technology IN THE NEAR FUTURE to bail them out when their present battery systems start to fail.
Perhaps this is what GM faced. I suspect they would have clicked their heels and screamed "Yahoo!" if the battery systems in the EV* autos were standing up. They seem to have done pretty much every thing else right. Of course the owners loved the car. We just need batteries that work.
Last I looked, the best batteries cost about $10,000 and could convert a Prius into a true EV with gas assist as required. I think this is an excellent way to go. But even with these batteries we are looking at 3,000 cycles.
The short of it is that most batteries wear out faster than tires.
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What we are looking for is a way to store energy or to buffer energy.
Toyota and Nissan designed their current hybrids to buffer energy.
Its a small step as people have noted to buffer from the wall outlet to the office and call it an EV.
There are nuclear alternatives. Alpha emitters can be used to create a small to large and continuous energy flow which can _slowly_ recharge batteries. These are totally safe. But they provide no surge ability. In this hypothetical senerio if when you get home you forget to plug your car in then what does the car do with its extra juice once the batteries are full? One option: make lotsa noise then run a big toaster and finally if that fails catch on fire?
What of a high pressure air tank?
What of phase change?
Here is a funny idea: Lets use CO2. In liquid form its at 800 PSI at say room temperature. When compressed it can provide quite a lot of energy. We could expand it through a normal motor and run the low pressure gas into a bag. For regenerative braking we could take the low pressure gas and re-compress it. The problem is the size of the bag. To do anything useful the bag for a Prius sized auto might have to be about the size of a city bus. We could put this on a trailer - like a boat trailer of course and tow it behind the car.
This system would have virtually unlimited cycles and I guess when the car wears out we could trade in the car and keep the old bag and trailer system.
Obviously I write this tongue in cheek. I wish to illustrate the problem.
How do we store or buffer the energy?
If we can solve this problem the rest of the problem is simply a matter of good engineering and even GM showed they have very good engineers available.
I still have my dataproducts line printer and it still works just fine - 300 lpm and serial interface. I ran it off my PC before lasers came out.
Anyone interested... it does multipart forms!
Noooo.
Since few people update their AV software each day they use their computer and indeed since the best that AV software can do is reactive in nature... AV software is more like the month after pill or even the 9 months after pill.
At best AV software is doomed to failure. This incident illustrates how serious the lack of security in common practice is. Clearly the perpetrators were a novices. Perhaps they were just a couple script kiddies playing around wondering if the lack of security was real.
If an amateur can do this, then consider that organized crime must know tonnes of passwords. A lot of people do online banking and online stock trading. The exposure our financial systems are exposed to is incredible.