That depends. Does FOX want to be a news service or a propaganda machine? (Not that these are mutually exclusive...)
As a major media outlet, I'd like to think they have a moral obligation to report information that is as factual as possible, such that it insures the public has the facts. Blasting headlines that we found WMDs in Iraq when it was first announced and then having the official retration to that statement barely make it on the air is hideously irresponsible at best. =Smidge=
1) More CO2 is released by burning argicultural waste (either directly or from fuels refined from it) than if you just buried it and let it rot. This is what you explained in your original post.
BUT
2) The TCP process, and the burning of fuels recovered from it, does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. This is what I was explaining in my original post. (Incidentally, the original post to which you replied was not mine.) I then suggested that it could, depending on the use of the products, REDUCE atmospheric CO2.
AND
3) Using fuels refined from the TCP process can offset use of fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels increases CO2 because it is using carbon that has been buried for millions of years, and our ecosystem has adjusted to be balanced without it. This is what the first reply (by Mr. AC) was talking about.
PLUS
4) By manufacturing a suitable fuel (and somed other goodies) "in house", countries can decrease their dependency on imported oil and fossil fuels in general.
Add it all up, and you get a Very Good Thing(tm), so in summary the thread starter AC was an uninformed dipsh*t, and let's hope economics and politics don't kill TCP waste-processing plants which could be the very solution to many our fuel problems and many others. =Smidge=
Don't tell me that the same amount of CO2 is generated by decaying e.g. a ton biowaste to soil than by burning it.
Of course not, but you're overlooking some critical parts of the process:
First, All of the carbon involved was taken out of the air to begin with as the plants grow. (which are the start of the cycle, whether you are using plant or animal wastes as feedstock). So Even in the worst case scenario, the net increase in CO2 from straight burning of the waste is ZERO.
Second, the TCP process yields more products than just light crude oil:
1) Light Crude oil 2) High quality fertilizer (as a solid) 3) Solid carbon 4) Medium to high quality fuel gas (methane, used internally to the process)
And a few other products in no real quantity...
The key here is that one of the products is solid carbon, which is almost as good as coal in terms of energy density should you use it as fuel. However, it is more useful (physically and economically) to use as an activated carbon filter for water treatment, because of the quality of the product.
In other words, at worst the process has a zero net increase of carbon from the atmosphere if you use 100% of the products as fuel and at best a net decrease if you don't. Plus it produces fertilizers and materials that can be used for water treatment! Talk about eco-friendly! =Smidge=
Or people without gardens or other uses for compost... which is probably a much higher percentage of people than you think, specially in urban environments. Even people who live in suburbia and have gardens have problems composting and using all the yard and kitchen waste they generate. Hence, it gets thrown into plastic bags and put out at the curb for a special pickup. (Some areas let you sweep it out into the street and they come by with a big vacuum truck to collect it)
Where does it go after that? I'm guessing it doesn't make it's way out to the farms... so I propose you collect it and turn it into oil. Once you have that, you can make:
-Fuels -Plastics -Greases, oils and other lubricants -High potency fertilizers -Insecticides
(All of which benefit food growers in one way or another, and...)
-Almost anything else you can make from petrolium
This is a fantastic use for it, because it's easier to find alternative, environmentally friendly ways to get petrolium than it is to ween the public off of it entirely. If you honestly believe a heartful lecture on the virtues of composting is going to convince billions of people around to world to stop using petrolium based products, you're the idiot! =Smidge=
What's to figure out? It's called thermal depolymerization (TDP) and has been around for awhile now. I'm surpized more farm waste isn't utilized in this manner.
I also propose running the TDP plants off of geothermal whenever possible. Plenty hot enough and it's essentially free energy for the taking.
How many (millions?) or tons of organic waste is produced in the USA due to farming alone? Think of all the light crude that could produce... Once you have the oil, you can use regular refinery techniques to turn it into any number of distillate products.
I'd like to see a future where you don't just recycle metal cans and glass/plastic bottles, but kitchen and yard waste as well. So sense dumping it all into a landfill when it can at least be used for something! =Smidge=
Yeah, I can't wait to see what Microsoft has in store for the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. Talk about a PR nightmare! =Smidge=
Re:Could You Choose Beta Release Medicine?
on
Cure for Cancer?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I think that's pretty much his point.
"I'm going to die soon. You have a treatment that needs testing. F*** it, if I'm going to die anyway use my as a test subject so hopefully others can benefit from what you learn."
"Oh no! We can't do that. It has to be approved for human trials first! We wouldn't want to harm you..."
"I'm going to die anyway! How much could you possibly harm me?"
"It doesn't matter, it would be unethical."
"But thousands of people die of this disease every year. Is it perfectly ethical to let this potential treatment sit on a shelf for ten years before you even start testing it?"
"Of course! We wouldn't want to harm anybody. It doesn't matter how many people die while we drag our feet through red tape. As long as we haven't touched them, we aren't responsible for their deaths!"...F'ing semantics. =Smidge=
It's not about being simple and reliable. Those are pretty much given for ANY acceptable system. And even an inexpensive one will be scoffed at if it's useless.
It's all about costg vs. value. Even if someone comes up with a $100 cesspool powered porch light, it wouldn't sell. You have a $100 light that does the same as a $30 light, probably not as well, and most people already have porch lights, so it becaomse a completely unnecessary expense.
It's the same problem with solar-electric panels: the cost is high and the yeild is low. It just doesn't make sense to invest in it, environmentally friendly or not. The only time it becomes economically feasable is when it's done on a large scale: such as at a treatment plant, where you already have millions upon millions of gallons of decomposing effluent. A minor tweak in the process can likely optomize it for methane production, and if you can generate enough juice to make the plant itself independent, then that's probably enough to make it worth the cost. (Anything more is money in the pocket, sort of speak) =Smidge=
You're right! I missed a 0 there: 100hp instead of 10. (Rest of the math still works, though. 10hp ~= 7500w):P
That's still a deep pile of crap though. I can't see the average house producing enough methane to make it worthwhile, especially when you consider all the detergents and the like that get into the septic tank and make life difficult for bacteria. =Smidge=
According to the article, he has a herd of 270 cows to power one 75kw generator. That's only about 10hp, to put it in perspective. You would probably need a 5-10hp generator for your house if you plan on having it for emergency use (storm outages and such) and keep everything in your home functioning normally.
So unless your household produces the same amount of waste as 100 cows (and are all strict vegitarians, because it's plant-material-decomposing bacteria that generate the methane!) then you're probably not going to fair too well.
Now, installing something at a municipal sewage treatment plant, that might have merit. =Smidge=
They do have "dynamic" braille lettering available. If i'm not mistaken it's a tech similar to a dot matrix printer. It would not be that difficult.
It would be far more difficult for the blind person to get their car up to the drive-through ATM machines in the first place, but considering the instructions are already in braille on those, I guess they manage somehow! =Smidge=
In theory, yeah it's no big deal. But it's not simply smashing lumps of purified uranium together - it's about critical mass. That means increasing it's density enough, fast enough, uniformly enough, and doing so with adequate material, to create a runaway nuclear reaction. Too little or too much and all you end up doing is destroying the core.
In practice, this is much harder than simple smashing two lumps of heavy metal together. Even with the theories and equations publically printed and fairly well understood by a large portion of the scientifc community, it *still* took over 20 years (1972 to 1998) for Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons. (And even then a good portion of the ones they claimed to have tested were pretty pansy... in the 4-6 kT range)
Clearly it's not something you can do in your own home. So no, I don't think it's something a couple of grad students could do at all, let alone easily.
I would be MUCH LESS worried about terrorists building nukes, and MUCH MORE worried about them simply BUYING a few from somebody. It would be cheaper, faster, and less conspicuous to do so. =Smidge=
To be fair, there isn't a cure for cancer yet... so maybe it's not hard enough?:)
Anyone know if the various weapons represent specific types of treatments? Obviously the "bosses" represent illnesses, so it would only make sense... =Smidge=
Remember: a small group of what were basically graduate students were able to build a city-buster bomb in the middle of a desert with access to only 1940's-era technology, and not really that much of it.
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look, from a distance, to Los Alamos circa late 1944.
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look to a generic group of buildings!
But it's not iTunes' problem. Basically, all Apple cares about is making iTunes legit. By not facilitating mass production, they can claim they thier product doesn't contribute to piracy.
Once the CD is made, it's the same problem they've always had with CD copying. ie: not Apple's problem. =Smidge=
It also doesn't account for the fact that Google is not responsible for the accuracy of the content, only the relevance of the results compared to your search keywords.
Books in the library tend to be checked and reviewed for accuracy of thier content. Websites generally are not. Even then, books might be wrong, so it is still up to the person doing the research to determine if the information presented is good or not.
Also, it seems the author's googling skills are somewhat lacking. It took me less than a minute to look up who the vice chairman of the parliamentary group on back care was... all I did was search for vice chairman parliamentary group on "back care" (Note the quotes!). First hit for me. Use Google's PDF view-as-html link, and scan for the magenta highlighted text ("back care"). Presto, "VCh. Janet Dean MP (Lab);"
Here's the query results. First link, about 1/4 way down...
I suppose it would help if the author decided to give a little more information about his searching methods instead of just saying "it took me xyz minutes to find it". I suppose it would also help to learn the tools, because I openly admit it would probably take me much longer than him to find certain kinds of information in a library than on the internet! =Smidge=
I don't disagree that it's more complicated that it needs to be, but I can think of three reasons why it is anyway:
1) It's always been like that. As you said, some law schools are not teaching the next generation of litigators to use this kind of language, but many still are and it's an old habit.
2) Legalese must be clear and percise in it's meaning and scope. The wording is chosen to prevent any interpretation other than what is originally intended. (Unless they deliberately leave it vauge in spots, but even then it's still intentional!)
3) Intimidation. The sheer bulk of a legal "breif" makes it difficult for the layman to really understand it, and so hopefully they'll just take the lawyer's word for it:)
Slashdot Mirror
As I posted in another thread for a slightly different reason:
"80% of misinformed Americans get thier information from FOX news" (Link to Google cache of same article, since the original seems to randomly require registration...)
Political bias is a matter of debate, but they certaintly don't seem to be "fair and balanced" do they?
=Smidge=
It's called "National Public Radio"
=Smidge=
That depends. Does FOX want to be a news service or a propaganda machine? (Not that these are mutually exclusive...)
As a major media outlet, I'd like to think they have a moral obligation to report information that is as factual as possible, such that it insures the public has the facts. Blasting headlines that we found WMDs in Iraq when it was first announced and then having the official retration to that statement barely make it on the air is hideously irresponsible at best.
=Smidge=
This PDF document has a fairly detailed explaination of what the products are, and is where I got the information from in the first place.
=Smidge=
"80% of misinformed Americans get thier information from FOX news"
It's not that people don't care as much as the media doesn't do it's job properly.
=Smidge=
I think secretly we agree:
1) More CO2 is released by burning argicultural waste (either directly or from fuels refined from it) than if you just buried it and let it rot. This is what you explained in your original post.
BUT
2) The TCP process, and the burning of fuels recovered from it, does not add CO2 to the atmosphere. This is what I was explaining in my original post. (Incidentally, the original post to which you replied was not mine.) I then suggested that it could, depending on the use of the products, REDUCE atmospheric CO2.
AND
3) Using fuels refined from the TCP process can offset use of fossil fuels. Burning fossil fuels increases CO2 because it is using carbon that has been buried for millions of years, and our ecosystem has adjusted to be balanced without it. This is what the first reply (by Mr. AC) was talking about.
PLUS
4) By manufacturing a suitable fuel (and somed other goodies) "in house", countries can decrease their dependency on imported oil and fossil fuels in general.
Add it all up, and you get a Very Good Thing(tm), so in summary the thread starter AC was an uninformed dipsh*t, and let's hope economics and politics don't kill TCP waste-processing plants which could be the very solution to many our fuel problems and many others.
=Smidge=
Don't tell me that the same amount of CO2 is generated by decaying e.g. a ton biowaste to soil than by burning it.
Of course not, but you're overlooking some critical parts of the process:
First, All of the carbon involved was taken out of the air to begin with as the plants grow. (which are the start of the cycle, whether you are using plant or animal wastes as feedstock). So Even in the worst case scenario, the net increase in CO2 from straight burning of the waste is ZERO.
Second, the TCP process yields more products than just light crude oil:
1) Light Crude oil
2) High quality fertilizer (as a solid)
3) Solid carbon
4) Medium to high quality fuel gas (methane, used internally to the process)
And a few other products in no real quantity...
The key here is that one of the products is solid carbon, which is almost as good as coal in terms of energy density should you use it as fuel. However, it is more useful (physically and economically) to use as an activated carbon filter for water treatment, because of the quality of the product.
In other words, at worst the process has a zero net increase of carbon from the atmosphere if you use 100% of the products as fuel and at best a net decrease if you don't. Plus it produces fertilizers and materials that can be used for water treatment! Talk about eco-friendly!
=Smidge=
550 deg. C after compression, and as high as 2000 deg. C during the actual combustion process!
=Smidge=
People who put it in the landfill are idiots.
Or people without gardens or other uses for compost... which is probably a much higher percentage of people than you think, specially in urban environments. Even people who live in suburbia and have gardens have problems composting and using all the yard and kitchen waste they generate. Hence, it gets thrown into plastic bags and put out at the curb for a special pickup. (Some areas let you sweep it out into the street and they come by with a big vacuum truck to collect it)
Where does it go after that? I'm guessing it doesn't make it's way out to the farms... so I propose you collect it and turn it into oil. Once you have that, you can make:
-Fuels
-Plastics
-Greases, oils and other lubricants
-High potency fertilizers
-Insecticides
(All of which benefit food growers in one way or another, and...)
-Almost anything else you can make from petrolium
This is a fantastic use for it, because it's easier to find alternative, environmentally friendly ways to get petrolium than it is to ween the public off of it entirely. If you honestly believe a heartful lecture on the virtues of composting is going to convince billions of people around to world to stop using petrolium based products, you're the idiot!
=Smidge=
What's to figure out? It's called thermal depolymerization (TDP) and has been around for awhile now. I'm surpized more farm waste isn't utilized in this manner.
I also propose running the TDP plants off of geothermal whenever possible. Plenty hot enough and it's essentially free energy for the taking.
How many (millions?) or tons of organic waste is produced in the USA due to farming alone? Think of all the light crude that could produce... Once you have the oil, you can use regular refinery techniques to turn it into any number of distillate products.
I'd like to see a future where you don't just recycle metal cans and glass/plastic bottles, but kitchen and yard waste as well. So sense dumping it all into a landfill when it can at least be used for something!
=Smidge=
FUD only works to a point
Yeah, I can't wait to see what Microsoft has in store for the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. Talk about a PR nightmare!
=Smidge=
I think that's pretty much his point.
...F'ing semantics.
"I'm going to die soon. You have a treatment that needs testing. F*** it, if I'm going to die anyway use my as a test subject so hopefully others can benefit from what you learn."
"Oh no! We can't do that. It has to be approved for human trials first! We wouldn't want to harm you..."
"I'm going to die anyway! How much could you possibly harm me?"
"It doesn't matter, it would be unethical."
"But thousands of people die of this disease every year. Is it perfectly ethical to let this potential treatment sit on a shelf for ten years before you even start testing it?"
"Of course! We wouldn't want to harm anybody. It doesn't matter how many people die while we drag our feet through red tape. As long as we haven't touched them, we aren't responsible for their deaths!"
=Smidge=
Ummm, leave it to generally disgruntled slashdotters to miss a reference. See the book "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".
=Smidge=
It's not about being simple and reliable. Those are pretty much given for ANY acceptable system. And even an inexpensive one will be scoffed at if it's useless.
It's all about costg vs. value. Even if someone comes up with a $100 cesspool powered porch light, it wouldn't sell. You have a $100 light that does the same as a $30 light, probably not as well, and most people already have porch lights, so it becaomse a completely unnecessary expense.
It's the same problem with solar-electric panels: the cost is high and the yeild is low. It just doesn't make sense to invest in it, environmentally friendly or not. The only time it becomes economically feasable is when it's done on a large scale: such as at a treatment plant, where you already have millions upon millions of gallons of decomposing effluent. A minor tweak in the process can likely optomize it for methane production, and if you can generate enough juice to make the plant itself independent, then that's probably enough to make it worth the cost. (Anything more is money in the pocket, sort of speak)
=Smidge=
You're right! I missed a 0 there: 100hp instead of 10. (Rest of the math still works, though. 10hp ~= 7500w) :P
That's still a deep pile of crap though. I can't see the average house producing enough methane to make it worthwhile, especially when you consider all the detergents and the like that get into the septic tank and make life difficult for bacteria.
=Smidge=
Don't bet on it.
According to the article, he has a herd of 270 cows to power one 75kw generator. That's only about 10hp, to put it in perspective. You would probably need a 5-10hp generator for your house if you plan on having it for emergency use (storm outages and such) and keep everything in your home functioning normally.
So unless your household produces the same amount of waste as 100 cows (and are all strict vegitarians, because it's plant-material-decomposing bacteria that generate the methane!) then you're probably not going to fair too well.
Now, installing something at a municipal sewage treatment plant, that might have merit.
=Smidge=
They do have "dynamic" braille lettering available. If i'm not mistaken it's a tech similar to a dot matrix printer. It would not be that difficult.
It would be far more difficult for the blind person to get their car up to the drive-through ATM machines in the first place, but considering the instructions are already in braille on those, I guess they manage somehow!
=Smidge=
I heard the FBI managed to squeeze 1000 of these into their annual budget...
Exa-Files.
=simdge=
No... 1,000 Gigabytes is 1 Terabyte. 1,000 Terabytes is one Petabyte. Therefore, 1,000,000 Gigabytes = 1 Petabyte.
Specifically, 1,048,576 GB
=Smidge=
In theory, yeah it's no big deal. But it's not simply smashing lumps of purified uranium together - it's about critical mass. That means increasing it's density enough, fast enough, uniformly enough, and doing so with adequate material, to create a runaway nuclear reaction. Too little or too much and all you end up doing is destroying the core.
In practice, this is much harder than simple smashing two lumps of heavy metal together. Even with the theories and equations publically printed and fairly well understood by a large portion of the scientifc community, it *still* took over 20 years (1972 to 1998) for Pakistan to develop nuclear weapons. (And even then a good portion of the ones they claimed to have tested were pretty pansy... in the 4-6 kT range)
Clearly it's not something you can do in your own home. So no, I don't think it's something a couple of grad students could do at all, let alone easily.
I would be MUCH LESS worried about terrorists building nukes, and MUCH MORE worried about them simply BUYING a few from somebody. It would be cheaper, faster, and less conspicuous to do so.
=Smidge=
To be fair, there isn't a cure for cancer yet... so maybe it's not hard enough? :)
Anyone know if the various weapons represent specific types of treatments? Obviously the "bosses" represent illnesses, so it would only make sense...
=Smidge=
Remember: a small group of what were basically graduate students were able to build a city-buster bomb in the middle of a desert with access to only 1940's-era technology, and not really that much of it.
Funny, 'cause I've heard it took about 90 PhD level physicists, many of which were Nobel Prize recipiants.
Maybe you're confusing the real Manhattan Project with the movie "The Manhattan Project"?
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look, from a distance, to Los Alamos circa late 1944.
Go check out the satellite pictures of Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan pre-November, 2001, and notice how similar they look to a generic group of buildings!
=Smidge=
But it's not iTunes' problem. Basically, all Apple cares about is making iTunes legit. By not facilitating mass production, they can claim they thier product doesn't contribute to piracy.
Once the CD is made, it's the same problem they've always had with CD copying. ie: not Apple's problem.
=Smidge=
It also doesn't account for the fact that Google is not responsible for the accuracy of the content, only the relevance of the results compared to your search keywords.
Books in the library tend to be checked and reviewed for accuracy of thier content. Websites generally are not. Even then, books might be wrong, so it is still up to the person doing the research to determine if the information presented is good or not.
Also, it seems the author's googling skills are somewhat lacking. It took me less than a minute to look up who the vice chairman of the parliamentary group on back care was... all I did was search for vice chairman parliamentary group on "back care" (Note the quotes!). First hit for me. Use Google's PDF view-as-html link, and scan for the magenta highlighted text ("back care"). Presto, "VCh. Janet Dean MP (Lab);"
Here's the query results. First link, about 1/4 way down...
I suppose it would help if the author decided to give a little more information about his searching methods instead of just saying "it took me xyz minutes to find it". I suppose it would also help to learn the tools, because I openly admit it would probably take me much longer than him to find certain kinds of information in a library than on the internet!
=Smidge=
1) It's always been like that. As you said, some law schools are not teaching the next generation of litigators to use this kind of language, but many still are and it's an old habit.
2) Legalese must be clear and percise in it's meaning and scope. The wording is chosen to prevent any interpretation other than what is originally intended. (Unless they deliberately leave it vauge in spots, but even then it's still intentional!)
3) Intimidation. The sheer bulk of a legal "breif" makes it difficult for the layman to really understand it, and so hopefully they'll just take the lawyer's word for it
=Smidge=