Apparently the angered masses are Sprint customers.
From accounts I read on the Nanog list and elsewhere, it sounds like there are more single-homed Sprint customers (including every Sprint PCS wireless subscriber) that wanted to get to sites hosted on Cogent than the other way around. Or they complained louder, anyway.
You can talk about peering traffic ratios day and night, but the fact is that if Sprint customers want access to data that's on Cogent more than the other way around, then the peering was benefitting Sprint more than Cogent regardless of volume of data and Sprint should have kept their mouths shut.
I think Sprint mis-handled this no matter how you look at it. If they filed suit against Cogent in September, then they should have let the courts handle it and not escallated the situation while it was in litigation. Since they have chosen to focus primarily on their wireless services including many PCS subscribers single-homed to their own network, they should be more careful about de-peering anyone, for any reason.
By the way, I'm a Cogent customer and no way am I looking to leave them. I agree with their actions. Also, Cogent makes it very easy to multihome between them and another provider and practically encourages you to do so. I am not a Sprint customer, so I don't know, but I bet their sales line is more like "we are all you need".
The blurb posted on slashdot states that in the human body, there are MORE BACTERIA than there are HUMAN CELLS. Which would suggest that a minimum of 51% of the human body is made up of bacteria and only 49% (or less) of our body is made of things like . . . water, carbon and other . . . you know . . . human composition stuff.
One meaning of "more bacteria than human cells" means simply that there are a larger number of bacteria than they are human cells, not a larger mass of bacteria than human cells. For example, e. coli is about 1/100 the size of a human cell. So if there was an equal number of e. coli cells and human cells in the body, it would make the mass proportion of e. coli cells about 1% not 50%.
By the way, bacteria are also made of water, carbon and other... you now... organic composition stuff. Humans don't have a monopoly on that composition.
Thanks for the good information. Like I said, though, when it's built-in and just works, let me know.
Statements like the following (and other various schema change warnings) on the wiki are not encouraging:
Slony-I does not allow you to add a table to a replication set that is already being replicated.
With MySQL replication, I never need to worry about things like this. Everything just works. All my table creates, alters, etc., just replicate like everything else, as do creating database users, grants, even creating entire databases.
Re:What ever happened to 2AM, $3 overnight shippin
on
A Look Inside Newegg
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They are still there and still taking orders until 2AM for next-day shipment. At least most of the ones I remember.
What's changed is the shipping prices have gone up. With sites like Pricewatch etc., it is harder to subsidize the shipping cost by burying it in the cost of the product. Pricing is just too competitive these days. If anything, it's the opposite now, lots of places appear charge inflated shipping to subsidize the costs of the goods.
Back when you bought your Newton, these catalog places were selling things at or close to list price. They could easily afford a $3 shipping gimmick.
What's keeping MySQL afloat? Hmmm... Incredible speed? Easy setup and administration? Handy SQL extensions? Enterprise features for those who want them and not for those who don't? These things matter, and PostgreSQL, for all that it is an impressive database, does not have them.
Not to mention built-in replication that you can setup in five minutes and just works. Last I looked, which wasn't too long ago, getting PostgreSQL replication working is a real mess involving other products.
I used to use PostgreSQL extensively but the replication situation just killed me.
Umm, airplanes ARE able to fly because of the Bernoulli effect.
If the Bernoulli effect is what makes flight possible, then how can an airplane fly upside down? Wouldn't the Bernoulli effect push it into the ground? Or how can a wing with a symmetric airfoil, for example a simple balsa glider with a flat slab wing fly at all?
The answer is that reactive lift, caused by angle of attack, also makes flight possible. In practical airplanes, both forces play a part, but reactive lift is pretty much always the bigger contributor, up to 80% for heavy-lifting planes. Planes that rely exclusively on the Bernoulli effect are not economically practical.
I've got news for everyone... this isn't the biggest problem that we've got in science education. Not by a long shot.
If I had more time I could come up with a more comprehensive list, but off the top of my head, here are a few things my daughter has been taught by her middle school (grades 5 to 8) teachers:
1. Birds do not get electrocuted when they land on power lines because their feet are insulators (I kid you not).
2. On the equinox, you can stand an egg on it's end due to the balance of gravity from the sun and the moon.
3. Airplanes are able to fly because of the Bernoulli effect.
If more people simply talked with their children about what they are being taught, much of this discussion would be irrelevant. Many more people would be disillusioned with the education system, though.
BTW Don't forget that even the Catholic Church recently came out and declared their support for evolution.
That's only "recently" in the historical sense, although I'm not sure "support" is exactly the right word. Basically what they say is that Evolution is compatible (not contradictory) with the Church's teachings. The Church only teaches that God created life, they do not presume to know the mechanism by which he chose to do so. Like many other things, they leave that to the discernment of the believer. That is the only position that I personally have ever known from the Church.
There's not much "news" there. Fifty years ago Pope Pius XII said almost the same thing in the encyclical Humani generis: "The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter."
If an Opteron produces say, on average, 50W heat output (I know this isn't accurate, but just as an example), 5000 Opterons would produce 250kW of heat. That would require an air conditioning unit larger than the building used to house the container.
Hardly -- a kWh is 3413 BTUs and 12,000 BTUs is a refrigerating ton. So they would need about 71 tons of cooling (the name of the unit is derived from the cooling capacity of a ton of ice per day). They make chillers into the hundreds of tons of capacity.
Here is some information on a 75 ton chiller. That's smaller than the shipping container it would be cooling -- a normal shipping container is 40 feet long and about 8 foot square cross-section.
In fact, if there's any truth to this story at all, I bet they fit all the computer gear in the first 22 feet of the container and the chiller in the last 18 feet.
I like AMD, my first system that I built myself was a k6 350 and it is still chugging along today. But only 128MB of ram is cachable by the chipset, and that makes many things slower than they should be. Another point where my P2 450 beats the AMD just because of a shit chipset.
It's such an old relic of an anecdote that I don't know why I bother responding, but...
The AMD K6 was a socket 7 CPU, the same as the Pentium. AMD did not make any chipsets at the time; the same chipsets were used that were used for Pentium motherboards, made by the likes of SIS and VIA, and yes, Intel. I have had several machines with AMD processors on boards with Intel chipsets.
In fact, the amount of time that AMD was able to continue using socket 7 was quite an acheivement. The K6-2+, K6-III, and K6-III+ (at up to 550Mhz) all included on-chip cache, which made the motherboard caching largely irrelevant, as it now became level-3 cache. And the on-chip cache ran at full core clock speed, unlike the P2s at half-speed. P2 chipsets do not do any caching, the cache is part of the processor module, although a separate chip except in the case of the last generation of mobile P2s, when it finally moved on-chip at full speed.
So in reality, in the era of the P2 you are comparing to, AMD still had an arguably superior product that also avoided the need to reinvest in new motherboards, chipsets, and tooling like you had to on the P2 technology path. Too bad you are comparing the P2 to the original K6 which represents a prior generation.
It's too clever to be really useful unfortunately. The big issue is of course the no "local variables". Trouble is, if you are writing in C, the compiler may well be creating local variables for you behind your back. In C++ for example there are many cases where this will certainly happen, like
where a local variable of type string will be temporarily created to pass to routine DoSomething.
You need to read the article.
It only says you can't use local variables across functions that block. Actually, it doesn't even say that you can't use them, it only says don't expect their value to be preserved.
In your example, even if the compiler does create a local variable to call DoSomething, and even if DoSomething does block, who cares if the value of that local variable is preserved, since it's impossible to reference it again after that statement?
But that was an awfully long time ago. Now it's hard to find memory chips below 1Mbit.
In the early design phases of the shuttle, the designers decided to go with solid fuel rather than liquid fuel to help keep the costs down. It seems to me in retrospect that if we'd launched both Challenger and Columbia on top of their boosters rather than strapped to the side then we'd still have a full complement of shuttles, saved a whole ton of money, and been four years further down the road than we are today.
I love these armchair rocket scientists that know more than the guys that actually built these things.
What makes you think that there would not have been other serious problems with a fully liquid-fueled shuttle system? I don't really think that you've just discovered the magic formula that those thousands of engineers overlooked. There would still have been a million other things that could have gone wrong in different ways.
The Saturn/Apollo stack was exceptionally robust, and its a shame we abandoned them so quickly.
What makes you think it was so robust?
There were 12 manned Apollo missions, with a total crew of 36. One mission was lost (Apollo 1), at a loss of three crew. Another was very nearly lost (Apollo 13) resulting in a completely failed mission.
Up to and including the first shuttle accident, there were 25 manned flights with a total crew of around 122. That accident lost 7 crew.
So which really has the better record? And that's only counting up to the first accident. If you include all flights through the present, the shuttle's record is even better.
Any way you compare, lost crew ratio, lost mission ratio, even miles flown per loss, the shuttle is ahead of Apollo/Saturn in regards to crew safety and mission successes.
When the they designed the lunar lander, they had to have something that would work 100% to get off the moon, and they used... a solid fuel rocket.
No, the lunar lander used liquid-fueled engines, powered by nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, for both the ascent and descent stages.
IBM had also planned on releasing multi-power5 processor computers, although I haven't heard anything as of late
Never heard anything as of late? Where have you been listening? IBM has many models with multiple power 5 processors and have for a while. All listed on their web site.
Yeah, I got two results with 253 bits using two different algorithms, but then I devised a different algorithm that uses only 216 bits.
No, you need to recheck your math, you can't do it in 216.
I would guess your solution won't even do it in the optimal 226 since your grouping wastes a fraction of a bit in each step due to the grouping of cards and there's only a small fraction of a bit to spare in the 226 solution.
I was wondering about the lowest number of bits in which you can stick the full order of a 52 card deck into. So far I can do it in 253 bits of information. Thats about 64 hexadecimal digit number or 78 decimal digits. So you need only some 780 decimal digits to remember order of 10 decks of cards.
I can do it in 226 bits; I would be surprised if it can be done in less.
But the manipulations required to encode/decode that sort of compressed representation is so complex it is useless as a mental technique unless you were the Rain Man and then you probably don't need it anyway.
the point is that a single jumbo actually WOULD transfer more people over the atlantic in a weeks time perioid than a cruiseliner ever would be able to.
But it will use disproportionately more fuel to do so.
I think you're wrong.
The Queen Mary 2, which is a modern and fuel-efficient cruise ship, moves 50 feet per gallon, which is about 0.01 miles per gallon. At 2,712 persons (which includes 921 crew, by the way), that's 25.8 person-miles per gallon. Source data.
A Boeing 747-400, which is a modern and fuel-efficient jumbo jet, moves 666 feet per gallon, which is about 0.13 miles per gallon. At 524 persons (not including crew), that's 66.3 person-miles per gallon. Source data.
That makes the jumbo-jet nearly three times more fuel-efficient than the cruise ship. I realize that they don't use the same types of fuel so a real efficiency comparison might require some additional correction factors, but I bet the jumbo jet still comes out way ahead. Especially if you didn't give the cruise ship the unfair advantage of counting the crew in the calculations.
The only accurate part of the submission is "The B612 Foundation hopes to alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015".
Reading the B612 site reveals that everything else was made up by the submittor. The B12 foundation has not picked the specific asteroid, and they have no intention to either "slice it up" nor return any of it to earth.
.9% + $0.30 USD to 2.9% + $0.30 USD...sending $1 would cost $0.32-0.33 USD. That's almost the same as a postage stamp.
Plus, if you sent via postal mail the recipient would actually get $1, but it would cost you $1 + 1 stamp. Through Paypal, it costs you nothing, but the recipient only gets about $0.68 USD
You do realize you could send $1.34, right?
That would give the recipient either $1.00 or $1.01 and still save you $0.03, not even considering the cost of the envelope or the check itself.
Pesonally though, I would rather see a pure zero-emission hydrogen solution. At least in the U.S. electrics are still deriving their energy from mostly fossil-fuel power plants.
But where are you going to get the hydrogen from? Hydrogen is produced by the separation of water -- electrolysis -- which, you guessed it, uses electricity.
Hydrogen is nothing more than an energy-storage mechanism for electricity, just like a battery is. The only things that make it potentially more attractive are better energy density, meaning better range and lower weight, and fast refueling, like a gasoline car.
Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel does nothing in itself to eliminate fossil fuel use, you just burn the fossil fuels at a power plant to produce electricity, which is used to produce hydrogen, rather than burning it directly in the car. It's hardly zero-emission.
Slashdot Mirror
Where are the angered masses?
Apparently the angered masses are Sprint customers. From accounts I read on the Nanog list and elsewhere, it sounds like there are more single-homed Sprint customers (including every Sprint PCS wireless subscriber) that wanted to get to sites hosted on Cogent than the other way around. Or they complained louder, anyway. You can talk about peering traffic ratios day and night, but the fact is that if Sprint customers want access to data that's on Cogent more than the other way around, then the peering was benefitting Sprint more than Cogent regardless of volume of data and Sprint should have kept their mouths shut. I think Sprint mis-handled this no matter how you look at it. If they filed suit against Cogent in September, then they should have let the courts handle it and not escallated the situation while it was in litigation. Since they have chosen to focus primarily on their wireless services including many PCS subscribers single-homed to their own network, they should be more careful about de-peering anyone, for any reason. By the way, I'm a Cogent customer and no way am I looking to leave them. I agree with their actions. Also, Cogent makes it very easy to multihome between them and another provider and practically encourages you to do so. I am not a Sprint customer, so I don't know, but I bet their sales line is more like "we are all you need".
The blurb posted on slashdot states that in the human body, there are MORE BACTERIA than there are HUMAN CELLS. Which would suggest that a minimum of 51% of the human body is made up of bacteria and only 49% (or less) of our body is made of things like . . . water, carbon and other . . . you know . . . human composition stuff.
One meaning of "more bacteria than human cells" means simply that there are a larger number of bacteria than they are human cells, not a larger mass of bacteria than human cells. For example, e. coli is about 1/100 the size of a human cell. So if there was an equal number of e. coli cells and human cells in the body, it would make the mass proportion of e. coli cells about 1% not 50%.
By the way, bacteria are also made of water, carbon and other ... you now ... organic composition stuff. Humans don't have a monopoly on that composition.
Ron Paul
Thanks for the good information. Like I said, though, when it's built-in and just works, let me know.
Statements like the following (and other various schema change warnings) on the wiki are not encouraging:
With MySQL replication, I never need to worry about things like this. Everything just works. All my table creates, alters, etc., just replicate like everything else, as do creating database users, grants, even creating entire databases.
They are still there and still taking orders until 2AM for next-day shipment. At least most of the ones I remember.
What's changed is the shipping prices have gone up. With sites like Pricewatch etc., it is harder to subsidize the shipping cost by burying it in the cost of the product. Pricing is just too competitive these days. If anything, it's the opposite now, lots of places appear charge inflated shipping to subsidize the costs of the goods.
Back when you bought your Newton, these catalog places were selling things at or close to list price. They could easily afford a $3 shipping gimmick.
What's keeping MySQL afloat? Hmmm... Incredible speed? Easy setup and administration? Handy SQL extensions? Enterprise features for those who want them and not for those who don't? These things matter, and PostgreSQL, for all that it is an impressive database, does not have them.
Not to mention built-in replication that you can setup in five minutes and just works. Last I looked, which wasn't too long ago, getting PostgreSQL replication working is a real mess involving other products.
I used to use PostgreSQL extensively but the replication situation just killed me.
Umm, airplanes ARE able to fly because of the Bernoulli effect.
If the Bernoulli effect is what makes flight possible, then how can an airplane fly upside down? Wouldn't the Bernoulli effect push it into the ground? Or how can a wing with a symmetric airfoil, for example a simple balsa glider with a flat slab wing fly at all?
The answer is that reactive lift, caused by angle of attack, also makes flight possible. In practical airplanes, both forces play a part, but reactive lift is pretty much always the bigger contributor, up to 80% for heavy-lifting planes. Planes that rely exclusively on the Bernoulli effect are not economically practical.
There is a pretty good article here.
I've got news for everyone... this isn't the biggest problem that we've got in science education. Not by a long shot.
If I had more time I could come up with a more comprehensive list, but off the top of my head, here are a few things my daughter has been taught by her middle school (grades 5 to 8) teachers:
1. Birds do not get electrocuted when they land on power lines because their feet are insulators (I kid you not).
2. On the equinox, you can stand an egg on it's end due to the balance of gravity from the sun and the moon.
3. Airplanes are able to fly because of the Bernoulli effect.
If more people simply talked with their children about what they are being taught, much of this discussion would be irrelevant. Many more people would be disillusioned with the education system, though.
It's useful to keep in mind that everyone is born an atheist.
Really? Babies believe there is no God?
Are you sure you didn't mean that everyone is born agnostic?
Even that is debatable and not a known fact.
BTW Don't forget that even the Catholic Church recently came out and declared their support for evolution.
That's only "recently" in the historical sense, although I'm not sure "support" is exactly the right word. Basically what they say is that Evolution is compatible (not contradictory) with the Church's teachings. The Church only teaches that God created life, they do not presume to know the mechanism by which he chose to do so. Like many other things, they leave that to the discernment of the believer. That is the only position that I personally have ever known from the Church.
From a catholic.net article:
There's not much "news" there. Fifty years ago Pope Pius XII said almost the same thing in the encyclical Humani generis: "The Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that, in conformity with the present state of human sciences and sacred theology, research and discussions, on the part of men experienced in both fields, take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, insofar as it inquiries into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter."
If an Opteron produces say, on average, 50W heat output (I know this isn't accurate, but just as an example), 5000 Opterons would produce 250kW of heat. That would require an air conditioning unit larger than the building used to house the container.
Hardly -- a kWh is 3413 BTUs and 12,000 BTUs is a refrigerating ton. So they would need about 71 tons of cooling (the name of the unit is derived from the cooling capacity of a ton of ice per day). They make chillers into the hundreds of tons of capacity.
Here is some information on a 75 ton chiller. That's smaller than the shipping container it would be cooling -- a normal shipping container is 40 feet long and about 8 foot square cross-section.
In fact, if there's any truth to this story at all, I bet they fit all the computer gear in the first 22 feet of the container and the chiller in the last 18 feet.
I like AMD, my first system that I built myself was a k6 350 and it is still chugging along today. But only 128MB of ram is cachable by the chipset, and that makes many things slower than they should be. Another point where my P2 450 beats the AMD just because of a shit chipset.
It's such an old relic of an anecdote that I don't know why I bother responding, but...
The AMD K6 was a socket 7 CPU, the same as the Pentium. AMD did not make any chipsets at the time; the same chipsets were used that were used for Pentium motherboards, made by the likes of SIS and VIA, and yes, Intel. I have had several machines with AMD processors on boards with Intel chipsets.
In fact, the amount of time that AMD was able to continue using socket 7 was quite an acheivement. The K6-2+, K6-III, and K6-III+ (at up to 550Mhz) all included on-chip cache, which made the motherboard caching largely irrelevant, as it now became level-3 cache. And the on-chip cache ran at full core clock speed, unlike the P2s at half-speed. P2 chipsets do not do any caching, the cache is part of the processor module, although a separate chip except in the case of the last generation of mobile P2s, when it finally moved on-chip at full speed.
So in reality, in the era of the P2 you are comparing to, AMD still had an arguably superior product that also avoided the need to reinvest in new motherboards, chipsets, and tooling like you had to on the P2 technology path. Too bad you are comparing the P2 to the original K6 which represents a prior generation.
It's too clever to be really useful unfortunately. The big issue is of course the no "local variables". Trouble is, if you are writing in C, the compiler may well be creating local variables for you behind your back. In C++ for example there are many cases where this will certainly happen, like
void DoSomething(const string&);
DoSomething("hollow, whirled");
where a local variable of type string will be temporarily created to pass to routine DoSomething.
You need to read the article.
It only says you can't use local variables across functions that block. Actually, it doesn't even say that you can't use them, it only says don't expect their value to be preserved.
In your example, even if the compiler does create a local variable to call DoSomething, and even if DoSomething does block, who cares if the value of that local variable is preserved, since it's impossible to reference it again after that statement?
But that was an awfully long time ago. Now it's hard to find memory chips below 1Mbit.
I can help you with this problem! Is 16 bytes small enough?
And since you can't use local variables, you can't use things like the C libraries or pretty well any library ever written, which is teh sux0r.
But you can use the C libraries. Just don't use local variables across functions that block. Only a very few C library functions block.
In the early design phases of the shuttle, the designers decided to go with solid fuel rather than liquid fuel to help keep the costs down. It seems to me in retrospect that if we'd launched both Challenger and Columbia on top of their boosters rather than strapped to the side then we'd still have a full complement of shuttles, saved a whole ton of money, and been four years further down the road than we are today.
I love these armchair rocket scientists that know more than the guys that actually built these things.
What makes you think that there would not have been other serious problems with a fully liquid-fueled shuttle system? I don't really think that you've just discovered the magic formula that those thousands of engineers overlooked. There would still have been a million other things that could have gone wrong in different ways.
The Saturn/Apollo stack was exceptionally robust, and its a shame we abandoned them so quickly.
What makes you think it was so robust?
There were 12 manned Apollo missions, with a total crew of 36. One mission was lost (Apollo 1), at a loss of three crew. Another was very nearly lost (Apollo 13) resulting in a completely failed mission.
Up to and including the first shuttle accident, there were 25 manned flights with a total crew of around 122. That accident lost 7 crew.
So which really has the better record? And that's only counting up to the first accident. If you include all flights through the present, the shuttle's record is even better.
Any way you compare, lost crew ratio, lost mission ratio, even miles flown per loss, the shuttle is ahead of Apollo/Saturn in regards to crew safety and mission successes.
When the they designed the lunar lander, they had to have something that would work 100% to get off the moon, and they used... a solid fuel rocket.
No, the lunar lander used liquid-fueled engines, powered by nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine, for both the ascent and descent stages.
More information on the lunar module and the fuels it used is widely available, as is information on thier development.
Well, -you-, anyway. I'll probably just run down to the clubhouse and listen there on the Icom 738. Amateur radio kicks ass.
I'm curious how you think you are going to pick up a 250W broadcast on 42.8Mhz originating in New Jersey when you are on the gulf coast?
Amateur radio doesn't kick that much ass. Of course, 42.8Mhz isn't an amateur radio frequency anyway.
IBM had also planned on releasing multi-power5 processor computers, although I haven't heard anything as of late
Never heard anything as of late? Where have you been listening? IBM has many models with multiple power 5 processors and have for a while. All listed on their web site.
Yeah, I got two results with 253 bits using two different algorithms, but then I devised a different algorithm that uses only 216 bits.
No, you need to recheck your math, you can't do it in 216.
I would guess your solution won't even do it in the optimal 226 since your grouping wastes a fraction of a bit in each step due to the grouping of cards and there's only a small fraction of a bit to spare in the 226 solution.
I was wondering about the lowest number of bits in which you can stick the full order of a 52 card deck into. So far I can do it in 253 bits of information. Thats about 64 hexadecimal digit number or 78 decimal digits. So you need only some 780 decimal digits to remember order of 10 decks of cards.
I can do it in 226 bits; I would be surprised if it can be done in less.
But the manipulations required to encode/decode that sort of compressed representation is so complex it is useless as a mental technique unless you were the Rain Man and then you probably don't need it anyway.
There was already no need to stop on a flight from New York to Tokyo:
You already didn't need to stop on a flight from New York to Tokyo:
American Airlines launches New York - Tokyo flights
Note that this is old news. It takes about twelve and a half hours.
If only a simple and integrated replication mechanism would appear, I would consider switching back to PostgreSQL from MySQL.
I miss PostgreSQL, but too many things are made easier by replication.
the point is that a single jumbo actually WOULD transfer more people over the atlantic in a weeks time perioid than a cruiseliner ever would be able to.
But it will use disproportionately more fuel to do so.
I think you're wrong.
The Queen Mary 2, which is a modern and fuel-efficient cruise ship, moves 50 feet per gallon, which is about 0.01 miles per gallon. At 2,712 persons (which includes 921 crew, by the way), that's 25.8 person-miles per gallon. Source data.
A Boeing 747-400, which is a modern and fuel-efficient jumbo jet, moves 666 feet per gallon, which is about 0.13 miles per gallon. At 524 persons (not including crew), that's 66.3 person-miles per gallon. Source data.
That makes the jumbo-jet nearly three times more fuel-efficient than the cruise ship. I realize that they don't use the same types of fuel so a real efficiency comparison might require some additional correction factors, but I bet the jumbo jet still comes out way ahead. Especially if you didn't give the cruise ship the unfair advantage of counting the crew in the calculations.
The only accurate part of the submission is "The B612 Foundation hopes to alter the orbit of an asteroid in a controlled manner by 2015".
Reading the B612 site reveals that everything else was made up by the submittor. The B12 foundation has not picked the specific asteroid, and they have no intention to either "slice it up" nor return any of it to earth.
Plus, if you sent via postal mail the recipient would actually get $1, but it would cost you $1 + 1 stamp. Through Paypal, it costs you nothing, but the recipient only gets about $0.68 USD
You do realize you could send $1.34, right?
That would give the recipient either $1.00 or $1.01 and still save you $0.03, not even considering the cost of the envelope or the check itself.
Hint: ($1.00 + $0.30) / (1 - 2.9%) = $1.34.
Pesonally though, I would rather see a pure zero-emission hydrogen solution. At least in the U.S. electrics are still deriving their energy from mostly fossil-fuel power plants.
But where are you going to get the hydrogen from? Hydrogen is produced by the separation of water -- electrolysis -- which, you guessed it, uses electricity.
Hydrogen is nothing more than an energy-storage mechanism for electricity, just like a battery is. The only things that make it potentially more attractive are better energy density, meaning better range and lower weight, and fast refueling, like a gasoline car.
Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel does nothing in itself to eliminate fossil fuel use, you just burn the fossil fuels at a power plant to produce electricity, which is used to produce hydrogen, rather than burning it directly in the car. It's hardly zero-emission.