You're being obtuse. There's only a certain amount of usable land, and it has important uses significantly different from producing fuel -- to live on, to grow food, and things like greenspace for biodiversity. Oil, however, doesn't have much use outside the products of the petroleum industry.
The tide is turning against fuel crops. About the only thing keeping the current system going is government inertia.
I don't believe this will ever actually get fuel to the pump in any reasonable quantity, but if someone ever invents a roomba powered by dog hair, I'm definitely in line for that.
But I suspect it'd weigh 800 pounds and you'd have to feed three medium-sized dogs to it to get your living room vacuumed.
Actually, there's an interesting idea there. Converting the waste to fuel may never have a significant effect on the nation's fuel usage, but it could at least cause the process of waste management to be self-powered.
My favorite visual image is the "roiling alligator-filled wall of flame". A close second is James Carville emerging from the conflagration riding a burning alligator.
> Is the answer the same no matter what (limited resource) is?
Good question. I'd say, it depends on whether one can eat (limited resource). In the case of... say... oil, for instance, I can't eat it, so it's a better candidate for transportation. And although I'm aware that the major cause of starvation is logistics (food is here, starving people are over there, and there's a difficult obstacle in the way, like for instance a hostile government) I think it's at very least in bad taste to burn our food for fuel when people are starving elsewhere.
How huge? Nationally we use 138 billion (with a b) gallons of gasoline a year. I don't have a breakdown for a medium size town, but I strongly suspect the process would be doing good producing enough gas to cut the lawn needed for the process. Not that this would be a bad thing. Hey, free gas for the lawnmowers. And the lawn is cut. But I think it's important to be realistic. We're several orders of magnitude short of the volume necessary to make any real difference in people's lives.
That's actually the best answer I've heard so far. Although I suspect that the total practical national fuel output of a cellulose-to-fuel industry would still be several orders of magnitude less than the amount of fuel we actually use today.
Steganography. Hide your messages as every... oh, say, cycle through the first 100 prime numbers... particular bytes in, say, a pirated porno. If they even detect it, they'll think it's VCR noise.
Agreed. I made up the number "a million gallons a year". I think it'll actually be less. But let's say it's ten times more. Let's say it's a hundred times more. Ok, a thousand times more. It's still a drop in the proverbial bucket.
So, we can turn old newspapers into fuel. This could create, I dunno, hundreds of gallons of fuel a year. Ok, let's say thousands. Ok ok ok, let's say a million gallons a year. This will surely make a dent in the 380 million gallons the US uses (www.eia.gov) every day.
I was going to say, this will be useful on an individual basis because it gives savvy people the opportunity to make their own fuel at home. I mean... wait a minute... I haven't bought a newspaper in probably six years. I guess I'll need to start stealing my neighbors' paper.
> Well, it all depends on how many earthquakes you've ever experienced before.
That is absolutely true. There is a natural tendency to overreact to stimuli you have never before experienced. It's not so much the hysteria of the common people, but the hysteria of the media that was the issue. They ought to know better. I would submit that it is their *job* to know better.
> For people who are used to living on ground what doesn't move much, your first earthquake can be exceedingly unnerving, because you have no idea of what is happening at first. It also managed to pretty much clear out most of the buildings downtown, and many of them stayed closed until everybody could do an assessment.
You cleared out on a 5.0? Seriously? I guess it's a whole 'nother world.
> Though, by all accounts, I do gather this storm was much more hyped than it needed to be... but, after thinking "oh, gee, nothing will happen" and seeing what happened with Katrina... I don't think I'm overly surprised that the level of fear around these things has been ratcheted up.
The difference there was that the people in New Orleans knew that it was a Cat 5 heading their way, not a tropical storm, not 30 mile winds and 10 inches of rain, but a real, honest-to-beelzebub Category Five Hurricane. And, because of where they lived, they ought to know what "Category Five" meant. Just like a denizen of San Francisco *knows* what a 7.0 earthquake means and if there was a way to tell when it was going to happen, they'd hightail it away from the fault line. The folks in New Orleans got a righteous warning and too many ignored it. The folks in the northern east coast got a bunch of caterwauling for the sake of ratings. Big difference.
> Of course, since you're living in a zone more likely to be rattled, give us an update after you've had your 9.0, and half of the West Coast is lying in ruins. Let us know how well you slept through that.
Oh, it'd be bad. San Francisco, which is prepared for quakes, was hurt bad by the the 7.0 in 1989.
The point is, the hurricane heading your way...wasn't. And the media continued to shriek for hours after it was apparent that it had petered out. This is what we're talking about -- not that it could have been bad -- a cat 5 would wipe out New York, no argument -- but that even after it was apparent that the storm had blown itself out the media was still trying to make a big deal about it. "Well, this town is under several inches of water" when the video showed no such thing. And so forth. It was embarrassing. And the panic they were intentionally drumming up might have caused harm. Probably did cause harm.
By the way, I've read since then that it's normal for hurricanes that head north, where the water is cooler, to tend to reduce in size. So it seems that Irene did what Meteorology would have predicted it would, had anyone listened to the meterologists.
> Of course, you living in California must mean you'll be roughing it all the time and wouldn't make stupid mistakes like underestimating the severity of say... an earthquake. Would you?
I live in Oregon now, and we don't get many earthquakes up here. (The last one was around 4.5 several years ago.)
But I was born in California and spent a significant part of my life living near the San Andreas fault, was no stranger to earthquakes. As to underestimating them... it depends on what you mean by "underestimate". We don't dive under desks or run to doorways or run screaming from buildings. That gets old after awhile. We do step away from big plate glass windows because when the building frame shifts it has been known to suddenly blow them out. We make it a point to not stand on balconies. We don't stand next to tall bookcases or other heavy things that might fall over. But we don't run for cover because you'd be spending a significant part of your life running for cover. Some people, perhaps those who haven't experienced an earthquake, might think that irresponsible, but I guess anything can seem blase through repetition.
I went to college in Arizona, experienced summers that got up to 117 degrees f, where you run your air conditioner full blast to get the inside temp into the low eighties. You learn to stay properly hydrated, keep your transportation in good shape and wear hats.
Oregon occasionally gets strong rains and winds and trees fall over, power lines go down and the power goes out for awhile. I have a wood burning stove, maglights in clips on the walls, four fire extinguishers clamped to various places in the house, hurricane lanterns. A big storm to me means FREE FIREWOOD. A chance to rev up the chainsaw and rent a log splitter. (Will have to buy one someday.)
I also have three months of food in the garage including pet food which a lot of people forget. No, I'm not Mormon, although my mom's side of the family is and I thought a little emergency preparation sounded like a good idea.
So, you have to understand, those of us who have lived in (a) hot weather, (b) earthquake territory, (c) areas with strong storms (although I've not yet been in a typhoon) have to wonder what all the fuss is about if new york gets 30 mile winds and 10 inches of rain.
I also have to wonder how many injuries or even deaths were caused by the media whipping up panic just to sell advertising space.
Well, right, but you can lose someone in any kind of weather. There are casualties around here whenever the temperature drops below freezing, usually among the indigent. It's a tragedy for them, but not a multi-state catastrophe as CNN was trying to sell to us.
A few days ago, a couple from Europe died of heat stroke in Death Valley. The local temperature was 105 degrees fahrenheit, which was low for that place in this time of year. In places I've lived, 105 degrees is a nice day. But since two people died, does that mean the weather was catastrophic? Well, if you look at the translated pages from their home town, yeah, they were getting all hysterical because these people were out in 41c weather. I guess where you happen to live, that can seem like a lot.
When the earthquake hit the east coast and everyone got hysterical, wife and I had to laugh. Having lived right on the fault in California, we'd wake up, go "that felt like a 5.3, maybe a 5.5" and go back to sleep.
Back in 1949, George Orwell wrote about TVs that could also watch you, and a government that would use them to keep an eye on their citizenry.
A little later when cable TV came out, a few really paranoid friends said that was the start of 1984, and I said no, the communication is only one way, and to make the connection two way would be too difficult. And then in the 1980's I got involved with the fledgling internet, and I said no, it *still* wasn't anywhere near fast enough or with a high enough penetration to make 1984 happen, and wouldn't be any time soon. And besides, the sheer volume of information would not be manageable.
And then we got fiber to the last mile, and TVs with network connections built-in, and toys like Kinect, and massive, relatively cheap supercomputers, and huge leaps in facial recognition technology, and now a huge leap in network throughput, all presided over by a government that believes they have the right to fondle my nutsack before they let me on a plane.
And I'm starting to get worried.
I'm not saying that Google is evil, necessarily. Often the people creating the technology don't necessarily know or believe what evil to which it could be put.
I'm sure that if I dug into it some more, I'd find all sorts of reasons not to live there.:-) I already have quite a few reasons not to move to, say, Chicago, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
380 million gallons per day. So many good ideas run afowl of orders of magnitude.
You're being obtuse. There's only a certain amount of usable land, and it has important uses significantly different from producing fuel -- to live on, to grow food, and things like greenspace for biodiversity. Oil, however, doesn't have much use outside the products of the petroleum industry.
The tide is turning against fuel crops. About the only thing keeping the current system going is government inertia.
I don't believe this will ever actually get fuel to the pump in any reasonable quantity, but if someone ever invents a roomba powered by dog hair, I'm definitely in line for that.
But I suspect it'd weigh 800 pounds and you'd have to feed three medium-sized dogs to it to get your living room vacuumed.
Actually, there's an interesting idea there. Converting the waste to fuel may never have a significant effect on the nation's fuel usage, but it could at least cause the process of waste management to be self-powered.
My favorite visual image is the "roiling alligator-filled wall of flame". A close second is James Carville emerging from the conflagration riding a burning alligator.
> Is the answer the same no matter what (limited resource) is?
Good question. I'd say, it depends on whether one can eat (limited resource). In the case of... say... oil, for instance, I can't eat it, so it's a better candidate for transportation. And although I'm aware that the major cause of starvation is logistics (food is here, starving people are over there, and there's a difficult obstacle in the way, like for instance a hostile government) I think it's at very least in bad taste to burn our food for fuel when people are starving elsewhere.
How huge? Nationally we use 138 billion (with a b) gallons of gasoline a year. I don't have a breakdown for a medium size town, but I strongly suspect the process would be doing good producing enough gas to cut the lawn needed for the process. Not that this would be a bad thing. Hey, free gas for the lawnmowers. And the lawn is cut. But I think it's important to be realistic. We're several orders of magnitude short of the volume necessary to make any real difference in people's lives.
That's actually the best answer I've heard so far. Although I suspect that the total practical national fuel output of a cellulose-to-fuel industry would still be several orders of magnitude less than the amount of fuel we actually use today.
Steganography. Hide your messages as every... oh, say, cycle through the first 100 prime numbers... particular bytes in, say, a pirated porno. If they even detect it, they'll think it's VCR noise.
Agreed. I made up the number "a million gallons a year". I think it'll actually be less. But let's say it's ten times more. Let's say it's a hundred times more. Ok, a thousand times more. It's still a drop in the proverbial bucket.
Ok, but this goes back to the old debate -- are fuel crops a good use of land? Last I heard, even Algore doesn't believe that anymore.
So, we can turn old newspapers into fuel. This could create, I dunno, hundreds of gallons of fuel a year. Ok, let's say thousands. Ok ok ok, let's say a million gallons a year. This will surely make a dent in the 380 million gallons the US uses (www.eia.gov) every day.
I was going to say, this will be useful on an individual basis because it gives savvy people the opportunity to make their own fuel at home. I mean... wait a minute... I haven't bought a newspaper in probably six years. I guess I'll need to start stealing my neighbors' paper.
> Well, it all depends on how many earthquakes you've ever experienced before.
That is absolutely true. There is a natural tendency to overreact to stimuli you have never before experienced. It's not so much the hysteria of the common people, but the hysteria of the media that was the issue. They ought to know better. I would submit that it is their *job* to know better.
> For people who are used to living on ground what doesn't move much, your first earthquake can be exceedingly unnerving, because you have no idea of what is happening at first. It also managed to pretty much clear out most of the buildings downtown, and many of them stayed closed until everybody could do an assessment.
You cleared out on a 5.0? Seriously? I guess it's a whole 'nother world.
> Though, by all accounts, I do gather this storm was much more hyped than it needed to be ... but, after thinking "oh, gee, nothing will happen" and seeing what happened with Katrina ... I don't think I'm overly surprised that the level of fear around these things has been ratcheted up.
The difference there was that the people in New Orleans knew that it was a Cat 5 heading their way, not a tropical storm, not 30 mile winds and 10 inches of rain, but a real, honest-to-beelzebub Category Five Hurricane. And, because of where they lived, they ought to know what "Category Five" meant. Just like a denizen of San Francisco *knows* what a 7.0 earthquake means and if there was a way to tell when it was going to happen, they'd hightail it away from the fault line. The folks in New Orleans got a righteous warning and too many ignored it. The folks in the northern east coast got a bunch of caterwauling for the sake of ratings. Big difference.
> Of course, since you're living in a zone more likely to be rattled, give us an update after you've had your 9.0, and half of the West Coast is lying in ruins. Let us know how well you slept through that.
Oh, it'd be bad. San Francisco, which is prepared for quakes, was hurt bad by the the 7.0 in 1989.
The point is, the hurricane heading your way ...wasn't. And the media continued to shriek for hours after it was apparent that it had petered out. This is what we're talking about -- not that it could have been bad -- a cat 5 would wipe out New York, no argument -- but that even after it was apparent that the storm had blown itself out the media was still trying to make a big deal about it. "Well, this town is under several inches of water" when the video showed no such thing. And so forth. It was embarrassing. And the panic they were intentionally drumming up might have caused harm. Probably did cause harm.
By the way, I've read since then that it's normal for hurricanes that head north, where the water is cooler, to tend to reduce in size. So it seems that Irene did what Meteorology would have predicted it would, had anyone listened to the meterologists.
> Of course, you living in California must mean you'll be roughing it all the time and wouldn't make stupid mistakes like underestimating the severity of say ... an earthquake. Would you?
I live in Oregon now, and we don't get many earthquakes up here. (The last one was around 4.5 several years ago.)
But I was born in California and spent a significant part of my life living near the San Andreas fault, was no stranger to earthquakes. As to underestimating them... it depends on what you mean by "underestimate". We don't dive under desks or run to doorways or run screaming from buildings. That gets old after awhile. We do step away from big plate glass windows because when the building frame shifts it has been known to suddenly blow them out. We make it a point to not stand on balconies. We don't stand next to tall bookcases or other heavy things that might fall over. But we don't run for cover because you'd be spending a significant part of your life running for cover. Some people, perhaps those who haven't experienced an earthquake, might think that irresponsible, but I guess anything can seem blase through repetition.
I went to college in Arizona, experienced summers that got up to 117 degrees f, where you run your air conditioner full blast to get the inside temp into the low eighties. You learn to stay properly hydrated, keep your transportation in good shape and wear hats.
Oregon occasionally gets strong rains and winds and trees fall over, power lines go down and the power goes out for awhile. I have a wood burning stove, maglights in clips on the walls, four fire extinguishers clamped to various places in the house, hurricane lanterns. A big storm to me means FREE FIREWOOD. A chance to rev up the chainsaw and rent a log splitter. (Will have to buy one someday.)
I also have three months of food in the garage including pet food which a lot of people forget. No, I'm not Mormon, although my mom's side of the family is and I thought a little emergency preparation sounded like a good idea.
So, you have to understand, those of us who have lived in (a) hot weather, (b) earthquake territory, (c) areas with strong storms (although I've not yet been in a typhoon) have to wonder what all the fuss is about if new york gets 30 mile winds and 10 inches of rain.
I also have to wonder how many injuries or even deaths were caused by the media whipping up panic just to sell advertising space.
Well, right, but you can lose someone in any kind of weather. There are casualties around here whenever the temperature drops below freezing, usually among the indigent. It's a tragedy for them, but not a multi-state catastrophe as CNN was trying to sell to us.
A few days ago, a couple from Europe died of heat stroke in Death Valley. The local temperature was 105 degrees fahrenheit, which was low for that place in this time of year. In places I've lived, 105 degrees is a nice day. But since two people died, does that mean the weather was catastrophic? Well, if you look at the translated pages from their home town, yeah, they were getting all hysterical because these people were out in 41c weather. I guess where you happen to live, that can seem like a lot.
When the earthquake hit the east coast and everyone got hysterical, wife and I had to laugh. Having lived right on the fault in California, we'd wake up, go "that felt like a 5.3, maybe a 5.5" and go back to sleep.
> [...] but said that Samsung could get around this simply by upgrading its phones to Android 3.0."
Samsung is absolutely screwed.
Roger that!
The former, not so much. The latter, a true master.
Back in 1949, George Orwell wrote about TVs that could also watch you, and a government that would use them to keep an eye on their citizenry.
A little later when cable TV came out, a few really paranoid friends said that was the start of 1984, and I said no, the communication is only one way, and to make the connection two way would be too difficult. And then in the 1980's I got involved with the fledgling internet, and I said no, it *still* wasn't anywhere near fast enough or with a high enough penetration to make 1984 happen, and wouldn't be any time soon. And besides, the sheer volume of information would not be manageable.
And then we got fiber to the last mile, and TVs with network connections built-in, and toys like Kinect, and massive, relatively cheap supercomputers, and huge leaps in facial recognition technology, and now a huge leap in network throughput, all presided over by a government that believes they have the right to fondle my nutsack before they let me on a plane.
And I'm starting to get worried.
I'm not saying that Google is evil, necessarily. Often the people creating the technology don't necessarily know or believe what evil to which it could be put.
Back in MY day, we took 300 baud and LIKED it. You could almost play Rogue! ("Worms" would overrun the buffer.)
Really? I have Frontier, and it's fiber to my house. Of course, they bought it already set up from Verizon.
I'm sure that if I dug into it some more, I'd find all sorts of reasons not to live there. :-) I already have quite a few reasons not to move to, say, Chicago, for instance.