"It takes nearly a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol"\
There have been many estimates by many people, IIRC the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates a maximum output energy figure of ten times the input energy. You happened to select the worst result from a study that has been shown to be based on discredited data and assumptions. You then paraphrase thier "gallon per gallon" catchphrase on slashdot. You have to ask yourself, why? (unless of course you are from Faux News).
To the mods who marked this as informative, do some simple fsking research, don't just say to yourself "oh yeah, I remeber hearing that somewhere the other day".
To the people who harp on about "you have to count the oil for the tractor". Yes if all you are growing is Ethanol then any idiot can work that out, no paper on the subject would pass a serious peer-review if it was not accounted for in some way. However the tractor is way down the list in energy consumption. Most of the energy used to create Ethanol is the heat used in distillation (unless you are stupid enough to transport the raw materials over long distances). Also irrigation can consume alot of energy. In the case of collecting a waste by-product (US version), the energy used in production is still used regardless of what you do with the waste. You would only count any extra costs in harvesting and loading the raw material onto the distillery truck.
In Brazil you can now get cars that "sense" the ratio of ethanol/petrol in your tank and self-tune the engine dynamically, they run on anything from zero to 100% Ethanol. Since oil has shot up in price the Brazilians have been coming back to Ethanol in hoards. They are do not make it out of left over corn and then claim "a gallon only makes a gallon", they use sugarcane, yes the whole plant not the produce they couldn't sell last year. Preemtive: Yes, it still has plenty of inefficiencies and an overall negative impact on the environment.
Oil consumption levels and prices are not going to fall until we run out of the stuff. It makes economic and strategic sense to ramp up efficient ethanol production. Environmentally it's one of the most cost-effective of several band-aid fixes aimed at softening the impact of our CO2 emmisions.
Hilarious, also the lost wages for your triumphant day in court will always exceed the fine amount, so you pay more even when you win. Bueracracy at it's finest (pun intended), they can even work the expected revenue into thier budget forecasts by using quotas to "measure officer performance".
Disclaimers:
1. I live in Victoria, Australia (traffic offences are a state/council matter and penalties vary quite a bit).
2. I have been fined unfairly twice for parking offenses, I bitched at the council and paid up, the other numerous tickets I have had, I bitched at myself and paid up. I think the injustice I suffered is a small price to pay for what we all get in return. In my state we have some of the toughest speeding, DUI and seatbelt penalties in the world. The stats clearly show the laws have had a huge impact on the road toll. IIRC, the toll is now ~1/4 of the 1969 toll even though there are ~3-5 times as many cars on the road. My respect for traffic & parking cops has done a complete backflip since the day I first took to the road. I am gratefull to them for kicking my arse when I needed it and possibly saving someones life. I figure the few minor unjust slaps I have recieved must be karma adjustments. Above all I am gratefull for the 25-odd years of not being forced to risk life and limb driving with traffic rules that are akin to the law of the jungle where the cops buy and sell guilt. The fine is the stick, every driver eats the carrot daily.
"a traffic ticket is not a crime, it is a code violation" - Whatever you call it, if you don't pay you will either go to the slammer or get "community service".
You call him a fool, he shoots you down with brilliance and you come back with...
He did say "swing set"; you made up the "paedophile" part.
...demonstrating that you cannot comprehend the concept of "indirect reference".
(With that in mind, I hope you don't intend to take up C programming.)
If you replied with, say, "Touche!" you would have been both acurate and humble. To have ignored his reply would have been predictable. The reply you chose, let's just say I smell a whole lot of karma burning.
I am an "hourly reader", I saw the article and agree with the GP post that Sodium is indeed an "absurd magic bullet". IANAChemist but when you read "the key is Sodium" and the article is talking about making Hydrogen for cars it doesn't take much to work out it's pure bullshit.
The whole point of making Hydrogen or Bio-fuel cars is to prevent pumping extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently Hydrogen is normally produced in commercial quantities by "cracking" hydrocarbons, (ie: oil is split into Hydrogen for your car, the CO2 still comes out of the refinery ), so that process has no real benifit.
It's true that Sodium mixed with water creates Hydrogen and zero C02. This "solves" the CO2 problem but the byproducts are much, much, worse than the existing CO2 byproduct. The water used to "release" the Hydrogen becomes dilluted Caustic Soda ("Draino"). The process used to create the Sodium in the first place (melting salt with an arc furnace) uses huge amounts of energy and creates an equal amount of Chlorine (Mustard gas) as a by-product.
As the GP post stated the way to create Hydrogen is via electrolysis but to be benificial the electricty needs to come from a "clean" source. Not from a source that creates a similar amount of CO2 byproduct (burning fossil fuels) and certainly not from something that creates a far worse eco-disaster than the one you are "solving".
"Not quite tested and perfected" - Magic bullets always seem to be in the NQR state, I wonder why?
"1.29 gal of oil to create the ethanol equivalent of less than 1 gal of oil" - The "Duh" part is using oil to create oil rather than some other fuel (most of the energy is used for heat in distilation). Not to mention the "researcher's" figures have also been thoroughly discredited (eg: assuming 100% irrigation rather than the actual 16%, using only the corn kernnel not the whole plant, etc).
Before you accept and defend the nonesense of some yahoo on Yahoo, go back and read the UCS article. The USc are highly respected for thier impartiality and the scientific expertise they bring to bear on a problem. They claim the process can yield up to 10 times the input energy using current technology and different plant species.
Yes it has and it was deliberate. Does that make my post irrelevant?
Could it be that droping a nuke on a large city is so extreme that it is hard to find another evil with a catchy slogan that adequately compares to that kind of genocidial thinking?
The CD solution is used by many corporates and Universities who have the $$$ and the economy of scale to set things up. I have been developing for Windows and to a lesser extent *nix for 15yrs and have never...yes that's right never...had malware problems while working on a corporate backbone (yes I know the SOE admins deal with it on a daily basis and I am proof they do a great job).
I still run Win95 as my main PC at home, it gets sick about once maybe twice a year. When it gets sick it gets really sick because in these situations I am loath to re-install (I am lazy and rarely back anything up at home, I also don't have an army of admins).
No matter how many times you need to remove malware I cannot see how the premise of TFA makes any sense at all. If you are a corporate then a re-install costs $X and the user should be slapped around the head if they have lost more than a few hours work. A corporate saves nothing by buying a new PC since it will aslo cost $X to load up the new PC. You loose $400.
If you are grandma and take it to the local PC shop (so they can rescue your data) it costs, say ~$130. If you throw it out it costs $400. You loose ~$270 and your data!!!
There is always a point when the PC gets too old, corporates have a depreciation shedule to work the date out. Gradma is on her own so a malware infection may eventually trigger buying a new PC. Malware is not the reason for buying a new PC it's a trigger to asses the age and value of the PC. In other words the new PC would also have to be a few years more advanced than the old one because grandmothers with cash are not normally morons.
I think the shame is that they didn't at least try that approach, thier apparent willingness to use nukes against japaneese cities and the diliberate firestorming of Dresden tell's us something about human nature nobody wants to belive.
Yes he has a right to his free speech (even though I consdier it incitement rather than speech). I never said he should be killed, harmed, arrested or even to shut the fuck up. What I did was use my free speech to highlight my opinion that nuking ANY city is a manifestly evil thought that should be rejected by all of us.
PS: I do not live in the US and you are not Ben. Franklin.
Thanks for the link to Roger Nash Baldwin. I'm from Australia and don't know much about the history of the ACLU, so I followed the link. I fail to see why you would consider him a "galaxy-class Nut" or why you would cherry-pick a quote that portrays him as a communist radical.
The article states he broke off all radical communist ties in disgust over the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939, he was a commited pacifist and conciencious objector to WW1. He also rubbed shoulders with the number one communist hunter, General MacAurtur. After WW2 MacAurtur invited him to establish civil liberties organisations in Japan, Germany and Austria. He was awarded both the Medal of Freedom by J.Carter and the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japaneese Government. All of the above does not even scratch the surface of his other accomplishments such as the original Scopes trial.
"But I sure as hell don't need the ACL-freakin'-U to 'protect' me."
I think you need them more than most, your anology with "singing and dancing" is not about commerce. It is a lame excuse for your willingness to kiss the arse of the man who wields the whiskey bottle.
The parent post could only be considered insightfull if read like this...
"I hope a terrorists gets in and blows up tons of people...This is evil. It is so unfuckingbelievable"
I don't want Disney to have my prints either but wishing for people to be blown up for your own parinoid ideology is certainly evil. Doesn't matter who the fuck you are, eh George?
You know, you had a reasonable (if somewhat rambling) argument in your post right up until the last sentance...
"I hope a nuke goes off in NYC, or should I say NYX."
...why, because the Iraq war is unjustified, or because the cops stole your fingerprints? I have no idea where you live but it is irrelevant. I know people born and bred in my country who would also recommend nuking cities as a political tool.
Your kind are of no particular colour, you cover the spectrum of politcs and privlage. You need not worry about Disney or the cops, you are easy to recognise from your advocacy of a "final solution" that makes the rest of us want to puke!
"Evangelicals are despised by liberals yet they despise them less than islamic fanatics that cowardly kill innocent women and children."
You respond to some imaginary bias with your own bias against liberals?
Most people would call me "liberal" but I'm obviously not worthy of that label since I don't despise anybody for being a religious fanatic. If anything I feel a tad sorry for them and thier followers. However I do despise violence, no matter if it's a terrorist bomb placed on a bus or a military bomb dropped from a Tomcat, it's still a fucking bomb, innocent people WILL be killed and maimed. In both cases the people who are planning and executing the bombing are well aware that what they are doing will result in death and/or serious injury to innocent people. Terrorists will ease thier consience by calling those people conspirators, Generals will do the same by calling them collateral damage, neither one of them is thinking "what if it was my family?".
A week before the London bombs the US carried out an air raid on a suspected terrorist hideout in Afganistan. The hideout was actually a normal home in a small village. Most of the 17 innocent victims (some of them children) were killed by a second bombing run because they had rushed to help the victims of the first bombing run (reminisent of the way terrorist sometimes strike twice in the same spot in the hopes of killing rescue workers). I see absolutely no moral difference between what the terrorists did in London and what the US did to that village, from my "liberal" point of view both events equate to mass murder. If someone here can enlighten me as to why the two events should be treated so very differently I would be gratefull.
The GP post is spot on, bombing terrorists (and any hapless civilians who are near the target area) will simply create more terrorists. Kind of ironic since the WW2 blitz on London has already shown that you cannot bomb a people into submission. What actually happens is the exact opposite, ie: the survivours will become more determined to strike back at any cost. Why would anyone expect a "terrorist" population to react differently?
You may now mod me to Hell and call me a traitor for suggesting the US kills far more innocent people than the terrorists could ever hope to kill.
"special page for Australian IPs telling the people they need to do something about their laws."
Australia recently signed a free trade agreement with the US, in it we agreed to "harmonize" our IP laws with the US laws. Therfore I don't think we will need a special page for Australia, we only need to "harmonize" with the relevant US page.
Slashdot Mirror
"It takes nearly a gallon of oil to produce a gallon of ethanol"\
There have been many estimates by many people, IIRC the Union of Concerned Scientists estimates a maximum output energy figure of ten times the input energy. You happened to select the worst result from a study that has been shown to be based on discredited data and assumptions. You then paraphrase thier "gallon per gallon" catchphrase on slashdot. You have to ask yourself, why? (unless of course you are from Faux News).
To the mods who marked this as informative, do some simple fsking research, don't just say to yourself "oh yeah, I remeber hearing that somewhere the other day".
To the people who harp on about "you have to count the oil for the tractor". Yes if all you are growing is Ethanol then any idiot can work that out, no paper on the subject would pass a serious peer-review if it was not accounted for in some way. However the tractor is way down the list in energy consumption. Most of the energy used to create Ethanol is the heat used in distillation (unless you are stupid enough to transport the raw materials over long distances). Also irrigation can consume alot of energy. In the case of collecting a waste by-product (US version), the energy used in production is still used regardless of what you do with the waste. You would only count any extra costs in harvesting and loading the raw material onto the distillery truck.
In Brazil you can now get cars that "sense" the ratio of ethanol/petrol in your tank and self-tune the engine dynamically, they run on anything from zero to 100% Ethanol. Since oil has shot up in price the Brazilians have been coming back to Ethanol in hoards. They are do not make it out of left over corn and then claim "a gallon only makes a gallon", they use sugarcane, yes the whole plant not the produce they couldn't sell last year. Preemtive: Yes, it still has plenty of inefficiencies and an overall negative impact on the environment.
Oil consumption levels and prices are not going to fall until we run out of the stuff. It makes economic and strategic sense to ramp up efficient ethanol production. Environmentally it's one of the most cost-effective of several band-aid fixes aimed at softening the impact of our CO2 emmisions.
Hilarious, also the lost wages for your triumphant day in court will always exceed the fine amount, so you pay more even when you win. Bueracracy at it's finest (pun intended), they can even work the expected revenue into thier budget forecasts by using quotas to "measure officer performance".
Disclaimers:
1. I live in Victoria, Australia (traffic offences are a state/council matter and penalties vary quite a bit).
2. I have been fined unfairly twice for parking offenses, I bitched at the council and paid up, the other numerous tickets I have had, I bitched at myself and paid up. I think the injustice I suffered is a small price to pay for what we all get in return. In my state we have some of the toughest speeding, DUI and seatbelt penalties in the world. The stats clearly show the laws have had a huge impact on the road toll. IIRC, the toll is now ~1/4 of the 1969 toll even though there are ~3-5 times as many cars on the road. My respect for traffic & parking cops has done a complete backflip since the day I first took to the road. I am gratefull to them for kicking my arse when I needed it and possibly saving someones life. I figure the few minor unjust slaps I have recieved must be karma adjustments. Above all I am gratefull for the 25-odd years of not being forced to risk life and limb driving with traffic rules that are akin to the law of the jungle where the cops buy and sell guilt. The fine is the stick, every driver eats the carrot daily.
"a traffic ticket is not a crime, it is a code violation" - Whatever you call it, if you don't pay you will either go to the slammer or get "community service".
You call him a fool, he shoots you down with brilliance and you come back with...
...demonstrating that you cannot comprehend the concept of "indirect reference".
(With that in mind, I hope you don't intend to take up C programming.)
He did say "swing set"; you made up the "paedophile" part.
If you replied with, say, "Touche!" you would have been both acurate and humble. To have ignored his reply would have been predictable. The reply you chose, let's just say I smell a whole lot of karma burning.
"The world needs a scapegoat, so here I am." - Several years before Columbine became "his fault".
"(see Brazil)" - Your comment made me think of this article from the BBC. It gives a nice summary of Brazil's experience over the last three decades.
I am an "hourly reader", I saw the article and agree with the GP post that Sodium is indeed an "absurd magic bullet". IANAChemist but when you read "the key is Sodium" and the article is talking about making Hydrogen for cars it doesn't take much to work out it's pure bullshit.
The whole point of making Hydrogen or Bio-fuel cars is to prevent pumping extra CO2 into the atmosphere. Currently Hydrogen is normally produced in commercial quantities by "cracking" hydrocarbons, (ie: oil is split into Hydrogen for your car, the CO2 still comes out of the refinery ), so that process has no real benifit.
It's true that Sodium mixed with water creates Hydrogen and zero C02. This "solves" the CO2 problem but the byproducts are much, much, worse than the existing CO2 byproduct. The water used to "release" the Hydrogen becomes dilluted Caustic Soda ("Draino"). The process used to create the Sodium in the first place (melting salt with an arc furnace) uses huge amounts of energy and creates an equal amount of Chlorine (Mustard gas) as a by-product.
As the GP post stated the way to create Hydrogen is via electrolysis but to be benificial the electricty needs to come from a "clean" source. Not from a source that creates a similar amount of CO2 byproduct (burning fossil fuels) and certainly not from something that creates a far worse eco-disaster than the one you are "solving".
"Not quite tested and perfected" - Magic bullets always seem to be in the NQR state, I wonder why?
"1.29 gal of oil to create the ethanol equivalent of less than 1 gal of oil" - The "Duh" part is using oil to create oil rather than some other fuel (most of the energy is used for heat in distilation). Not to mention the "researcher's" figures have also been thoroughly discredited (eg: assuming 100% irrigation rather than the actual 16%, using only the corn kernnel not the whole plant, etc).
Before you accept and defend the nonesense of some yahoo on Yahoo, go back and read the UCS article. The USc are highly respected for thier impartiality and the scientific expertise they bring to bear on a problem. They claim the process can yield up to 10 times the input energy using current technology and different plant species.
Sorry, there are a few too many "get" words in that last (hic) post. BuuUURRRRrrPPPP!
A blog about how bloggers can get rich, gets him get rich from blogging.
Yes it has and it was deliberate. Does that make my post irrelevant?
Could it be that droping a nuke on a large city is so extreme that it is hard to find another evil with a catchy slogan that adequately compares to that kind of genocidial thinking?
The CD solution is used by many corporates and Universities who have the $$$ and the economy of scale to set things up. I have been developing for Windows and to a lesser extent *nix for 15yrs and have never ...yes that's right never...had malware problems while working on a corporate backbone (yes I know the SOE admins deal with it on a daily basis and I am proof they do a great job).
I still run Win95 as my main PC at home, it gets sick about once maybe twice a year. When it gets sick it gets really sick because in these situations I am loath to re-install (I am lazy and rarely back anything up at home, I also don't have an army of admins).
No matter how many times you need to remove malware I cannot see how the premise of TFA makes any sense at all. If you are a corporate then a re-install costs $X and the user should be slapped around the head if they have lost more than a few hours work. A corporate saves nothing by buying a new PC since it will aslo cost $X to load up the new PC. You loose $400.
If you are grandma and take it to the local PC shop (so they can rescue your data) it costs, say ~$130. If you throw it out it costs $400. You loose ~$270 and your data!!!
There is always a point when the PC gets too old, corporates have a depreciation shedule to work the date out. Gradma is on her own so a malware infection may eventually trigger buying a new PC. Malware is not the reason for buying a new PC it's a trigger to asses the age and value of the PC. In other words the new PC would also have to be a few years more advanced than the old one because grandmothers with cash are not normally morons.
I think the shame is that they didn't at least try that approach, thier apparent willingness to use nukes against japaneese cities and the diliberate firestorming of Dresden tell's us something about human nature nobody wants to belive.
Yes he has a right to his free speech (even though I consdier it incitement rather than speech). I never said he should be killed, harmed, arrested or even to shut the fuck up. What I did was use my free speech to highlight my opinion that nuking ANY city is a manifestly evil thought that should be rejected by all of us.
PS: I do not live in the US and you are not Ben. Franklin.
If gunpowder were brains, you would realize how moronic you sound.
"some guy made a speech"
"Fuck the revolution!" - Bono condeming IRA violence at a Boston(?) concert, (Rattle & Hum video).
Rome and Greece were both empires, the concept of a "Nation state" has only been around for a few hundred years. /pedantic
Thanks for the link to Roger Nash Baldwin. I'm from Australia and don't know much about the history of the ACLU, so I followed the link. I fail to see why you would consider him a "galaxy-class Nut" or why you would cherry-pick a quote that portrays him as a communist radical.
The article states he broke off all radical communist ties in disgust over the Soviet-Nazi pact of 1939, he was a commited pacifist and conciencious objector to WW1. He also rubbed shoulders with the number one communist hunter, General MacAurtur. After WW2 MacAurtur invited him to establish civil liberties organisations in Japan, Germany and Austria. He was awarded both the Medal of Freedom by J.Carter and the Order of the Rising Sun by the Japaneese Government. All of the above does not even scratch the surface of his other accomplishments such as the original Scopes trial.
"But I sure as hell don't need the ACL-freakin'-U to 'protect' me."
I think you need them more than most, your anology with "singing and dancing" is not about commerce. It is a lame excuse for your willingness to kiss the arse of the man who wields the whiskey bottle.
The TV channel and Disney are both in the entertainment bussines, how could the article or the poll be Neutral?
"..I just went to disney about 2 months ago...I would never consent to such an invasion of my privacy"
Numerous posts have pointed out the system has been in use for up to 10yrs, are you saying Disney time travel really works?
The parent post could only be considered insightfull if read like this...
"I hope a terrorists gets in and blows up tons of people...This is evil. It is so unfuckingbelievable"
I don't want Disney to have my prints either but wishing for people to be blown up for your own parinoid ideology is certainly evil. Doesn't matter who the fuck you are, eh George?
You know, you had a reasonable (if somewhat rambling) argument in your post right up until the last sentance...
...why, because the Iraq war is unjustified, or because the cops stole your fingerprints? I have no idea where you live but it is irrelevant. I know people born and bred in my country who would also recommend nuking cities as a political tool.
"I hope a nuke goes off in NYC, or should I say NYX."
Your kind are of no particular colour, you cover the spectrum of politcs and privlage. You need not worry about Disney or the cops, you are easy to recognise from your advocacy of a "final solution" that makes the rest of us want to puke!
Gayniggers from Outer Space is a horrible movie but definitely not at troll.
"Evangelicals are despised by liberals yet they despise them less than islamic fanatics that cowardly kill innocent women and children."
You respond to some imaginary bias with your own bias against liberals?
Most people would call me "liberal" but I'm obviously not worthy of that label since I don't despise anybody for being a religious fanatic. If anything I feel a tad sorry for them and thier followers. However I do despise violence, no matter if it's a terrorist bomb placed on a bus or a military bomb dropped from a Tomcat, it's still a fucking bomb, innocent people WILL be killed and maimed. In both cases the people who are planning and executing the bombing are well aware that what they are doing will result in death and/or serious injury to innocent people. Terrorists will ease thier consience by calling those people conspirators, Generals will do the same by calling them collateral damage, neither one of them is thinking "what if it was my family?".
A week before the London bombs the US carried out an air raid on a suspected terrorist hideout in Afganistan. The hideout was actually a normal home in a small village. Most of the 17 innocent victims (some of them children) were killed by a second bombing run because they had rushed to help the victims of the first bombing run (reminisent of the way terrorist sometimes strike twice in the same spot in the hopes of killing rescue workers). I see absolutely no moral difference between what the terrorists did in London and what the US did to that village, from my "liberal" point of view both events equate to mass murder. If someone here can enlighten me as to why the two events should be treated so very differently I would be gratefull.
The GP post is spot on, bombing terrorists (and any hapless civilians who are near the target area) will simply create more terrorists. Kind of ironic since the WW2 blitz on London has already shown that you cannot bomb a people into submission. What actually happens is the exact opposite, ie: the survivours will become more determined to strike back at any cost. Why would anyone expect a "terrorist" population to react differently?
You may now mod me to Hell and call me a traitor for suggesting the US kills far more innocent people than the terrorists could ever hope to kill.
"special page for Australian IPs telling the people they need to do something about their laws."
Australia recently signed a free trade agreement with the US, in it we agreed to "harmonize" our IP laws with the US laws. Therfore I don't think we will need a special page for Australia, we only need to "harmonize" with the relevant US page.