The point of the energy deficite is that it takes 6 joules of energy to grow and refine 1 joule worth of ethanol.
It doesn't matter if the energy comes from oil, atomic power, hydro, wind or plain old muscle power. Which means that unless you have like 100 million serfs tilling the grain fields by hand, it costs you more fuel and/or electricity to make than you get from burning what you made.
Bottom line, it AIN'T a renewable energy source, its a political tool for getting votes from the Midwest.
It also means that ethanol cannot possibly be manufactured in the volumes required to replace oil, not even for a little while.
I've worked in medicine in Canada and the USA both. You show up at any emergency room in the USA in any condition with no ID and no money, you get treated. By law. They don't treat you, you just won the lottery.
By contrast, try showing up at a Canadian hospital without your health card. They DON'T have to treat you and may not. People have died from this, and recently.
Give it up, this issue is a dead one. The USA is the most bountiful, generous place on the whole fucking planet. The only people who seem to think otherwise are American liberals and Arab terrorists.
What you are arguing is the typical socialist blather about the uncaring Capitalist. There are indeed private water systems, private electric systems, private medical care etc. all over the world and they work quite well. In fact there is a rather nice private highway running the full length of Toronto called the 407. Its the only highway in Toronto that moves faster than 10 mph at rush hour. One does have to pay for the service of course, but then one has to pay one's taxes as well. The key difference is all the private guy can do is cut off your water. The government can do damn near anything at all.
Governments serve best when they provide for keeping the peace and enforce contracts. Private enterprise and private philanthropy are far more efficient and flexible than government at delivering both comercial goods and services and charity.
There are always crooks, but the damage they can do in private business is considerably less than they can do in a socialist government. See the history of the 20th Century for further evidence.
Come to Canada, where the health care is "free". Unfortunately the word free has been re-defined by the Government of Canada from "available at no cost" to "free to stand in line until you die, or get sick of waiting and go pay for it in America."
Some things governments do well. Roads and armies are two such things. Health care is not one of them, and all you have to do is visit a country that has a single payer system to see it in living colour.
See, "free" healthcare is actually just a government monopoly. It means you may only have the government issued service. You are forbidden to purchase the service elsewhere.
As in, you are forbidden from buying an x-ray at a nice clean private clinic with no line up. You have to wait in Emergency for ten hours with your busted leg in the same waiting room with the screaming kids, tuberculosis ridden winos and possibly some guy with SARS or something worse. Waitinjg times for things like hip replacements are often a year or more, depending on where you live.
Canadians are about to be relieved of this nightmare finally, the Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that the government cannot forbid private companies from providing a medical service covered by Medicare if the public system has a huge waiting list. Nor can they forbid people from buying private insurance to pay for it. Thank God.
The availability of private health care is a social good, and private companies always provide better service for less money and with less waiting than government run facilities. This is an obvious, measurable, verifiable fact, much like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
Furthermore the existence of an excellent private system does not mean an excellent public system cannot be provided for the poor, such as currently exists in the USA. You think the county hospital sucks where you are, visit the "free" hospital in Canada sometime. You'll get an eye opener.
Now, all of the above is easily available knowledge. The reason one cannot talk sense to a socialist is that they consistently deny the obvious truth and insist their way is the only way no matter how many times they fail or how many people die as a result.
You wanna see people die from something? Check out the number of fatalities on the cancer treatment waiting list, or the hip replacement list, or the cardiac bypass list, etc. ad nauseam.
Bottom line, if all else fails an individual can sue a private company and get restitution. You can't sue the government.
So my fine socialist, before you go casting aspersions on the "free market religion" have a look at your own dogma. See if your solution works befor jamming down my throat.
Valium. So I'll be too sleepy to notice the 45 degree Leftish slant of the Times and of the Slashdot editors? I don't think I could miss that even on major valium. Its kind of like a moose head on the dining room table.
Point being/. assumes "conservatives", meaning racist/bigot/homophobe/add your hate group here Republican operatives are going to screw up this noble experiment, and naturally they miss the boat completely.
Pervs and people who steal shit are what fucks up society, not conservatives.
Drink some of that coffee you're smelling there, eh?
So, was it those wascawy Wepubwicans who "defaced" the LA Slimes wikitorial? Who screwed it up so bad that it had to be taken down after only two days?
Was it those darn Religious Right fruitbats who did it? Darn them all to heck!
Nope. Porno posters. Dickheads who most likely vote (wait for it) DemocRat when they bother to vote at all.
Low life, in other words. Scum. People with the social graces of a goat and the smell to match. They kind of people who will piss in the soup pot when no one is watching.
Some day all you Info Wants To Be Free warriors are going to finally understand that Open Source and Free Software (capitalized to indicate the name of the ideas) are based on philanthropy, not entitlement.
For those of you who skipped your English and history classes, that means a company which releases their hardware spec for use by Linux or BSD or whomever is giving you a gift. They present you with something they made themselves, at considerable effort and cost, for you to use. This gift may well be motivated by self interest, as they hope you will buy their hardware, but this does not alter the fact of it being a gift freely given.
So banging on Nvidia or ATI to release their hardware spec is like banging on some random stranger's front door and demanding a free lunch.
It is a moral distinction I'd like to see made much more often in these discussions. We the public are NOT entitled to the intellectual property of private companies or individuals, pretending otherwise is really quite rude. Rude behaviour ought not be rewarded.
Thank you anonymous one, I needed a good laugh. Obviously the media tax will continue, and indeed be increased from time to time. Obviously some copyright law will be passed further eroding the range of legal options open to Canadians. And obviously it will be roundly ignored by everyone in the country just like the gun registry and the satellite tv laws. You know its an offence up here to have a satellite dish unless you have Bell Expressvue or Rodger's Satelite? Think anybody ever gets charged with that?
So the Great White North slowly slides farther into the post-Christian Eurorelativist swamp, where every manner of theft and slease is accepted unless you piss off the cops.
Personally I plan to buy all my audio/video recording widgetry before whatever idiot law they pass comes into force and they stick it all full of spyware/DRM bullshit. Same idea as using obsolete operating systems. Windows 95 is crap, but at least it don't phone home to Bill.
This is a novel approach. Kewl! I was afraid (before rtfa at least) that it would be another rehash of the old semi-permiable membrane schtick that's been around since Time Tunnel at least.
Keen if it works, O2 bottles are a large pain to fill and transport. Just ask a welder. ~:D
It will be rather nice to have an actual TEST of superstring theory that can prove or disprove something, rather than the usual hot gasses issuing from competing theorists.
An ounce of experimental data is worth a ton of mathematics.
Same here in Ontario, with the difference that this bunny hugging madness is GOVERNMENT POLICY. Two levels of government in fact, federal AND provincial. Result, there's a mating pair of geese parked on the school lawn at the end of my street. Not only are the bastards without fear of humans, they aren't even afraid of dogs! Leash law, y'know. No chasing the nice geese.
Part of the problem is pure ignorance of course. Urban dwellers don't know why there is no undergrowth in the local park, and they don't know why that's a bad thing either. Nobody is making any effort to tell them is the rest of the problem.
Just another major problem dumped on us courtesy of the Looney Left. Watermellon politics, green on the outside, red on the inside. Who but a Red would rather see thousands of starving miserable animals instead of hundreds of happy fat ones?
Tell you what though, you let people know that geese carry West Nile Virus, and then point at that 5 tons of goose shite on the parking lot festering away in the sun, they get the message REAL quick.
Biased much? Try thinking from an alternate viewpoint for just a milisecond. It may hurt, but it may be worth it.
Hunting is a NORMAL part of human life. Remember evolution? We're carnivorous Timmy. We have carnivore teeth. Animals are attractive because they are food. Only dumbass urban dwelling, Smartcar driving bunny huggers think deer are cute, mostly because they've never seen deer except in the zoo.
So Timmy, you ignorant city slicker, how cute is it when Bambi and her mummy step out in front of your car at dusk on the highway and freeze in the headlights? You're doing 70 mph in your environmentally friendly Smartcar, and Bambi is coming right in there to share the front seat with your animal loving self plus whoever else is in the car. Wife, kids, girlfriend... Happens every single friggin' day on the highways around New York City. Because why? Because no hunting therefore too many deer, that's why.
Or how cute is it when you see Bambi and her mother and brothers, sisters, cousins, second cousins twice removed and a whole passle of others standing in the middle of a denuded forest where there's nothing green less than seven feet off the ground. The deer are nothing but skin and bone, they have putrescent sores, and they smell like an uncleaned hamster cage. That cute? Happening right now in the Pennsylvania woods around Philly. Because why? No hunting, that's why.
How about Lyme disease? Cute eh? Explosion of deer ticks EVERYWHERE in the Northeast to match the deer explosion, you can't wear shorts in your own backyard. Because why? Because guys like Timmy insist on gassing off about "innocent animals" and smearing the morals of hunters. You can't hunt or even target shoot in the urban Northeast without being a social pariah.
Now think about the legions of Canada Geese on ever goddamn lawn in the USA. And goose poo. And West Nile virus. Be brave Timmy, you can think it. Yes! Congratulations Timmy you have got it in one. No hunters = bad things happen.
Timmy, your religious views are getting people killed in car wrecks, ruining the environment and spreading disease. Actions have consequences, you should maybe think about that a bit.
And yes, web hunting is unsportsmanlike. Get out and look it in the eye when you shoot it. And eat what you shoot.
ooooh, SPECTACLE RAPE no less! And you call ME a troll? BWAHAHA!!!! Now that's tolerance and respect for diversity in action if I ever saw it. You're hillarious kid! You're a perfect ecoweenie.
Let me enlighten your darkened state. The reason nobody other than watermellons like yourself can be bothered with fuel economy trials is that they are BORING. Its like watching paint dry. Even observed motorcycle trials are more exciting to watch, and I say that as a trials rider. Men in funny hats riding rrrrreal slow over big rocks beats ecowhizbangs driving tiny cars with bicycle tires and 50cc moped engines in circles hands down.
You know what else is impressive? Being able to hit a dime at 100 yards without a scope. Fun to do, but boring to watch. Oops, shocked you again.
You -can- write papers that run contrary to the professor's views and still get an "A" if you are A) older that the prof B) much, much larger than the prof C) let him/her know you aren't going to accept any bullshit marks because they don't like your conclusions, and D) Don't make any mistakes.
My experience was writing papers showing that gun control does not reduce crime for a public health weenie at an extremely liberal/lefty New York school. Got an A after butting heads with the prof for a whole semester. The look on his face was so absolutely worth every minute of it. To this day it still warms my black heart.
It is easier to just slide along with the crowd, but much more fun to chuck some sand in their salad. Besides, half the time the stupid commie bastards are dead wrong anyway. If you're not willing to waste your very expensive education quoting Lenin you end up doing battle with them, there's pretty much no escape.
Wow, an American who doesn't know shit about drag racing. You're a Greenie college student, right?
Hybrids don't impress me much because they are all about being poor. Their great claim to fame is that they save fuel. Big deal, rickshaws run on rice. Let the Europeans drive 'em.
I'm not impressed by some glorified golf cart that seats two uncomfortably, gets 80 miles per gallon and costs 30 grand. I'm impressed by the unbeliveable technology and skill it takes to get a car to 300 miles per hour in 300 yards and keep it on the track.
Any fool can bolt together an 80 mpg vehicle, the third world is full of the damn things. I have no objection to hybrids or non-petroleum engines per se, its just that this pretence that they are somehow cool irritates me.
Drag races have a standing start. The winner of the race is the first car across the finish line, not the fastest time or highest top speed.
Pomona California track record was broken this year by Tony Schumacher with a run of 330.88 mph at 4.533 seconds. Not the fastest ET, just the highest speed.
Schumacher held the fastest ET on record at 4.441 seconds back in 2003, I'm not sure what it is now.
So if a hybrid does it in four flat, which hasn't been done by anybody in a car to my knowledge, then I'll be impressed.
There's more to consider than just greenhouse gas. CO2 is not a poison, burning grass makes more than plain old CO2, that's the point.
BTUs available by weight of fuel for coal and oil are considerably higher than grass (or wood or corn)therefore fossile fuels are more efficient energy storage with less non-combustible mass.
Coal and oil can be much more finely divided (atomized in a spray or powder form) and you get a much more complete combustion, resulting in essentially CO2 and water. That's the goal, 100% combustion. Modern gasoline engines closely approach 100% combustion.
The more extraneous chemicals you have present, like sulphers, nitrates, proteins, sugars etc. the more stinky pollutants result. Like sulphuric and nitric acid, hydrogen sulphide and etc. which have to be scrubbed out of exhaust and disposed of somehow. Hence the catalytic converter on cars, and the titanic scrubbers they have on power plants.
Then there is the ash to consider. Hard coal burns with almost no slag if done properly because it is pretty much pure carbon. Oil has no ash at all. (How much solid crap do you get when you vacuum out the furnace every other year? Couple ounces, maybe.)
Wood produces considerable ash, and so do all the other pelletized products. It won't burn, so you have to bury it. That'd be the 20% left over from Mr. Cherney's 80% efficient combustion. Sounds better when he says it, right?
Bottom line, while it is "possible" to burn grass pellets cleanly, it is more expensive per BTU than easilly available alternatives like coal and oil and you need a lot of scrubbing equipment. And somewhere to dump the ashes too.
Now then, biofuel uses solar energy to grow. Truth. The energy expenditure I'm talking about is the fossil fuel used to drive the lawnmower that cuts the grass, the truck that takes it to the pellet factory, the electricity that runs the factory, the truck that brings the pellets back to your house, etc. Then there's ploughing, weeding, fertilizing... you get the idea.
It has been firmly established that it takes more than one gallon of ethanol fuel to grow and process a gallon of ethanol from corn. As in 1:>1 per Mr. Cherney.
The growing of corn in the USA is amazingly efficient, I very much doubt the growing of grass is going to even aproach it for fuel efficiency. And you can't eat grass.
That's the physics and chemistry biofuel is up against. If for some reason fossil fuels are not available we can probably make it work, but it will suck from a pollution stand point and economically it will be a disaster. Think $100 dollars a gallon for fuel and think about what that will mean for the average schlub. No car, no electricity, no nice clothing made by electricty, no food from California shipped by refrigerated truck etc. Think Darfur, Biafra, etc.
Because biofuel simply cannot be grown in the volumes required and at the price required to match coal and oil. Do some simple BTU/ton and ton/acre/year calculations, it will become very clear.
There are some innovative projects being done with turning manure and other biotrash into synthetic oil and also incinerators to burn it directly. These are useful as additions to the electric grid because they burn material that has to be disposed of somehow. In this way the incinerator kills two birds with one stone and therefore has a positive economic effect. Example for grass, if you own a sod farm installing a grass pellet furnace and a pellet maker might be economical (depending on equipment cost) because you literally have grass clippings to burn. But it is not as efficient nor as clean as fossil fuel, and completely impractical as a replacement.
Now, as to nuclear generation, it is at the moment the only reliable, industrial sized method of producing electricity that does not produce greenhouse gas, period. So for those who consider CO2 a greenhouse gas and therefore a pollutant a la Kyoto, nuclear is the single solitary solution.
Any reasonably dry organic material from grass pellets to corn to camel shit will burn. There are corn powered stoves and furnaces on the market right now, as well as ones that burn sawdust pellets.
Problem being they burn dirty. Dirtier than wood or the deeply despised coal, and MUCH dirtier than fuel oil or natural gas.
You wanna see some smog, just let grass pellet furnaces become popular. Particulates, sulphates, nitrogen oxides, all the fun stuff that Greenies have been shreiking about lo these many years.
I wish people would give their head a shake befor climbing on these bandwagons. There's no clean fuel that's practical for large scale generation other than nuclear right now. Fusion is still science fiction and wind power is 90% hot air. You want electricity you've got to burn something.
And incidentally, most "biofuels" return less energy that it takes to grow, harvest and process them into fuel.
So unless people want a quick return to the 17th century, maybe it would be good if nuke plants got another look.
hockey stick = Kyoto protocol Pew Charitable Trust = McCain Feingold campaign finance "reform" bill AND a whole Supreme Court decision. http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110006449 Pew+Ford+Tides+couple more liberal foundations = gun control lobby = assault weapon ban
Sadly, public policy decisions get made based on pure voodoo all the time. The hockey stick is just the latest, greatest example. The whole gun control "debate" is based on some of the worst examples of junk science you'll ever see, 90% of it paid for by five or six large liberal leaning foundations, the other 10% being government money from the Clinton era CDC. Those guys don't release their raw data either.
This type of shenanigans by "scientists" is the main reason Republicans doubt the existence of global warming in the first place. Too many people with shaky data making huge claims = scam. Doesn't take a genius to know BS when you step in it.
Two different things. As a taxpayer you have a right to decide if there IS medicare and who gets it. Representative republic, you vote in your congresscritter and he/she/it does your bidding. Theoretically, of course.
Once you have decided that there shall be Medicare and that there shall be a bureacracy to take care of it, you have no particular rights to anything that happens inside it, unless its happening to you. Doctor/patient confidentiality applies irrespective of who's paying the doctor, both moraly and legaly.
The researcher taking public money is a completely different case. He's doing research for the government, which means for you. Theoretically, of course. Absent pressing matters of national security, there is no reason that the results of publicly funded research should not be available to taxpayers. You paid for it, you should get to look at it.
One caveat, if the researcher used a proprietary method or machine or software to either acquire the data or process the results, you are only entitled to the data and results, not the proprietary device. The government rented the use of it, they didn't buy the rights to it.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
The Star Trek franchise is run by people with zero imagination and a Leftward slant like an A frame roof. To wit:
Scott Bakula's character (or any Trek captain for that matter) would be court martialed and cashiered in any military organization on Earth. If he survived the mutiny, anyway. He disobeys orders, he's insubordinate, he gets his ship shot up every goddamn time they go out. He behaves like a friggin' high school kid out for a joy ride in a stolen car. Not Bakula's fault, its the writing.
The Trek SOP for exploring a new planet: Come into a strange system at a high rate of speed, assume orbit over a planet and scan the place with active sensors. Finally, broadcast a big ol' "Howdy!" just in case the planet guys missed the armed alien starship painting their cities with targeting radar.
Trek exploration missions: we come in peace at great expense and for no particularly good reason,we're harmless humans who only mean well, but we still manage to shoot somebody about every ten minutes.
Alien chicks always find Trek crew members attractive. Crew boy goes for it every single time no matter how many times he's gotten shot, or got pregnant, or got a rash, or started a war... Rinse, repeat. And repeat, and repeat, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
The Earth is at risk of being destroyed by alien bad guys with a planet buster and they send one ship to stop 'em. What, they couldn't buy another ship someplace? Or steal one? And that was a "good" season.
Space battles that only take place at point blank range, shields that don't, aliens that aren't, ray guns that can vaporize a truck but can't penetrate a wooden crate, bad guys that can't shoot straight, artificial gravity that stays on even in wrecked ships with no power. These are a few of our favorite things.
And that's why after thirty nine years people are turning it off. Paramount is quite right to pull the plug, nobody is watching it.
Maybe getting cancelled will wake the franchise owners up, but I doubt it. There's all that syndication money keeping them fat, after all.
Trek fans should lynch them, not raise money for the stupid bastards. Hell, at two million plus per episode for this sorry crap their shareholders should lynch them!
Now, all you little pissants can mod me down, but the fact that hard core fans have to protest and raise charity money to keep the bloody thing on the air is proof enough of what I'm saying.
Grow up, pissants. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it ain't so. This horse is dead. Beating it isn't going to get it to run.
This is nothing though. I got booted off/. for a week recently, my crime was suggesting that possibly George B. had a brain cell firing when he cut taxes, and that possibly Canadians might be over taxed. (60%? Seems like a lot to me.) I had a whole string of comments modded down to -1.
Its getting to be a badge of honor anymore. You have to browse at -1 to see anything that isn't dyed shocking pink.
Slashdot Mirror
Verily, it must be so. Right after the Dems poison all their opposition.
The point of the energy deficite is that it takes 6 joules of energy to grow and refine 1 joule worth of ethanol.
It doesn't matter if the energy comes from oil, atomic power, hydro, wind or plain old muscle power. Which means that unless you have like 100 million serfs tilling the grain fields by hand, it costs you more fuel and/or electricity to make than you get from burning what you made.
Bottom line, it AIN'T a renewable energy source, its a political tool for getting votes from the Midwest.
It also means that ethanol cannot possibly be manufactured in the volumes required to replace oil, not even for a little while.
I've worked in medicine in Canada and the USA both. You show up at any emergency room in the USA in any condition with no ID and no money, you get treated. By law. They don't treat you, you just won the lottery.
By contrast, try showing up at a Canadian hospital without your health card. They DON'T have to treat you and may not. People have died from this, and recently.
Give it up, this issue is a dead one. The USA is the most bountiful, generous place on the whole fucking planet. The only people who seem to think otherwise are American liberals and Arab terrorists.
What you are arguing is the typical socialist blather about the uncaring Capitalist. There are indeed private water systems, private electric systems, private medical care etc. all over the world and they work quite well. In fact there is a rather nice private highway running the full length of Toronto called the 407. Its the only highway in Toronto that moves faster than 10 mph at rush hour. One does have to pay for the service of course, but then one has to pay one's taxes as well. The key difference is all the private guy can do is cut off your water. The government can do damn near anything at all.
Governments serve best when they provide for keeping the peace and enforce contracts. Private enterprise and private philanthropy are far more efficient and flexible than government at delivering both comercial goods and services and charity.
There are always crooks, but the damage they can do in private business is considerably less than they can do in a socialist government. See the history of the 20th Century for further evidence.
Come to Canada, where the health care is "free". Unfortunately the word free has been re-defined by the Government of Canada from "available at no cost" to "free to stand in line until you die, or get sick of waiting and go pay for it in America."
Some things governments do well. Roads and armies are two such things. Health care is not one of them, and all you have to do is visit a country that has a single payer system to see it in living colour.
See, "free" healthcare is actually just a government monopoly. It means you may only have the government issued service. You are forbidden to purchase the service elsewhere.
As in, you are forbidden from buying an x-ray at a nice clean private clinic with no line up. You have to wait in Emergency for ten hours with your busted leg in the same waiting room with the screaming kids, tuberculosis ridden winos and possibly some guy with SARS or something worse. Waitinjg times for things like hip replacements are often a year or more, depending on where you live.
Canadians are about to be relieved of this nightmare finally, the Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that the government cannot forbid private companies from providing a medical service covered by Medicare if the public system has a huge waiting list. Nor can they forbid people from buying private insurance to pay for it. Thank God.
The availability of private health care is a social good, and private companies always provide better service for less money and with less waiting than government run facilities. This is an obvious, measurable, verifiable fact, much like the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
Furthermore the existence of an excellent private system does not mean an excellent public system cannot be provided for the poor, such as currently exists in the USA. You think the county hospital sucks where you are, visit the "free" hospital in Canada sometime. You'll get an eye opener.
Now, all of the above is easily available knowledge. The reason one cannot talk sense to a socialist is that they consistently deny the obvious truth and insist their way is the only way no matter how many times they fail or how many people die as a result.
You wanna see people die from something? Check out the number of fatalities on the cancer treatment waiting list, or the hip replacement list, or the cardiac bypass list, etc. ad nauseam.
Bottom line, if all else fails an individual can sue a private company and get restitution. You can't sue the government.
So my fine socialist, before you go casting aspersions on the "free market religion" have a look at your own dogma. See if your solution works befor jamming down my throat.
Score zero, troll. Predictable Lefty response. When criticism arises, CRUSH IT. Why not go for -1 and waste another mod point, you bunch of juveniles?
Valium. So I'll be too sleepy to notice the 45 degree Leftish slant of the Times and of the Slashdot editors? I don't think I could miss that even on major valium. Its kind of like a moose head on the dining room table.
/. assumes "conservatives", meaning racist/bigot/homophobe/add your hate group here Republican operatives are going to screw up this noble experiment, and naturally they miss the boat completely.
Point being
Pervs and people who steal shit are what fucks up society, not conservatives.
Drink some of that coffee you're smelling there, eh?
So, was it those wascawy Wepubwicans who "defaced" the LA Slimes wikitorial? Who screwed it up so bad that it had to be taken down after only two days?
Was it those darn Religious Right fruitbats who did it? Darn them all to heck!
Nope. Porno posters. Dickheads who most likely vote (wait for it) DemocRat when they bother to vote at all.
Low life, in other words. Scum. People with the social graces of a goat and the smell to match. They kind of people who will piss in the soup pot when no one is watching.
As usual.
Some day all you Info Wants To Be Free warriors are going to finally understand that Open Source and Free Software (capitalized to indicate the name of the ideas) are based on philanthropy, not entitlement.
For those of you who skipped your English and history classes, that means a company which releases their hardware spec for use by Linux or BSD or whomever is giving you a gift. They present you with something they made themselves, at considerable effort and cost, for you to use. This gift may well be motivated by self interest, as they hope you will buy their hardware, but this does not alter the fact of it being a gift freely given.
So banging on Nvidia or ATI to release their hardware spec is like banging on some random stranger's front door and demanding a free lunch.
It is a moral distinction I'd like to see made much more often in these discussions. We the public are NOT entitled to the intellectual property of private companies or individuals, pretending otherwise is really quite rude. Rude behaviour ought not be rewarded.
Thank you anonymous one, I needed a good laugh. Obviously the media tax will continue, and indeed be increased from time to time. Obviously some copyright law will be passed further eroding the range of legal options open to Canadians. And obviously it will be roundly ignored by everyone in the country just like the gun registry and the satellite tv laws. You know its an offence up here to have a satellite dish unless you have Bell Expressvue or Rodger's Satelite? Think anybody ever gets charged with that?
So the Great White North slowly slides farther into the post-Christian Eurorelativist swamp, where every manner of theft and slease is accepted unless you piss off the cops.
Personally I plan to buy all my audio/video recording widgetry before whatever idiot law they pass comes into force and they stick it all full of spyware/DRM bullshit. Same idea as using obsolete operating systems. Windows 95 is crap, but at least it don't phone home to Bill.
This is a novel approach. Kewl! I was afraid (before rtfa at least) that it would be another rehash of the old semi-permiable membrane schtick that's been around since Time Tunnel at least.
Keen if it works, O2 bottles are a large pain to fill and transport. Just ask a welder. ~:D
It will be rather nice to have an actual TEST of superstring theory that can prove or disprove something, rather than the usual hot gasses issuing from competing theorists.
An ounce of experimental data is worth a ton of mathematics.
Same here in Ontario, with the difference that this bunny hugging madness is GOVERNMENT POLICY. Two levels of government in fact, federal AND provincial. Result, there's a mating pair of geese parked on the school lawn at the end of my street. Not only are the bastards without fear of humans, they aren't even afraid of dogs! Leash law, y'know. No chasing the nice geese.
Part of the problem is pure ignorance of course. Urban dwellers don't know why there is no undergrowth in the local park, and they don't know why that's a bad thing either. Nobody is making any effort to tell them is the rest of the problem.
Just another major problem dumped on us courtesy of the Looney Left. Watermellon politics, green on the outside, red on the inside. Who but a Red would rather see thousands of starving miserable animals instead of hundreds of happy fat ones?
Tell you what though, you let people know that geese carry West Nile Virus, and then point at that 5 tons of goose shite on the parking lot festering away in the sun, they get the message REAL quick.
Biased much? Try thinking from an alternate viewpoint for just a milisecond. It may hurt, but it may be worth it.
Hunting is a NORMAL part of human life. Remember evolution? We're carnivorous Timmy. We have carnivore teeth. Animals are attractive because they are food. Only dumbass urban dwelling, Smartcar driving bunny huggers think deer are cute, mostly because they've never seen deer except in the zoo.
So Timmy, you ignorant city slicker, how cute is it when Bambi and her mummy step out in front of your car at dusk on the highway and freeze in the headlights? You're doing 70 mph in your environmentally friendly Smartcar, and Bambi is coming right in there to share the front seat with your animal loving self plus whoever else is in the car. Wife, kids, girlfriend... Happens every single friggin' day on the highways around New York City. Because why? Because no hunting therefore too many deer, that's why.
Or how cute is it when you see Bambi and her mother and brothers, sisters, cousins, second cousins twice removed and a whole passle of others standing in the middle of a denuded forest where there's nothing green less than seven feet off the ground. The deer are nothing but skin and bone, they have putrescent sores, and they smell like an uncleaned hamster cage. That cute? Happening right now in the Pennsylvania woods around Philly. Because why? No hunting, that's why.
How about Lyme disease? Cute eh? Explosion of deer ticks EVERYWHERE in the Northeast to match the deer explosion, you can't wear shorts in your own backyard. Because why? Because guys like Timmy insist on gassing off about "innocent animals" and smearing the morals of hunters. You can't hunt or even target shoot in the urban Northeast without being a social pariah.
Now think about the legions of Canada Geese on ever goddamn lawn in the USA. And goose poo. And West Nile virus. Be brave Timmy, you can think it. Yes! Congratulations Timmy you have got it in one. No hunters = bad things happen.
Timmy, your religious views are getting people killed in car wrecks, ruining the environment and spreading disease. Actions have consequences, you should maybe think about that a bit.
And yes, web hunting is unsportsmanlike. Get out and look it in the eye when you shoot it. And eat what you shoot.
ooooh, SPECTACLE RAPE no less! And you call ME a troll? BWAHAHA!!!! Now that's tolerance and respect for diversity in action if I ever saw it. You're hillarious kid! You're a perfect ecoweenie.
Let me enlighten your darkened state. The reason nobody other than watermellons like yourself can be bothered with fuel economy trials is that they are BORING. Its like watching paint dry. Even observed motorcycle trials are more exciting to watch, and I say that as a trials rider. Men in funny hats riding rrrrreal slow over big rocks beats ecowhizbangs driving tiny cars with bicycle tires and 50cc moped engines in circles hands down.
You know what else is impressive? Being able to hit a dime at 100 yards without a scope. Fun to do, but boring to watch. Oops, shocked you again.
You -can- write papers that run contrary to the professor's views and still get an "A" if you are
A) older that the prof
B) much, much larger than the prof
C) let him/her know you aren't going to accept any bullshit marks because they don't like your conclusions, and
D) Don't make any mistakes.
My experience was writing papers showing that gun control does not reduce crime for a public health weenie at an extremely liberal/lefty New York school. Got an A after butting heads with the prof for a whole semester. The look on his face was so absolutely worth every minute of it. To this day it still warms my black heart.
It is easier to just slide along with the crowd, but much more fun to chuck some sand in their salad. Besides, half the time the stupid commie bastards are dead wrong anyway. If you're not willing to waste your very expensive education quoting Lenin you end up doing battle with them, there's pretty much no escape.
Wow, an American who doesn't know shit about drag racing. You're a Greenie college student, right?
Hybrids don't impress me much because they are all about being poor. Their great claim to fame is that they save fuel. Big deal, rickshaws run on rice. Let the Europeans drive 'em.
I'm not impressed by some glorified golf cart that seats two uncomfortably, gets 80 miles per gallon and costs 30 grand. I'm impressed by the unbeliveable technology and skill it takes to get a car to 300 miles per hour in 300 yards and keep it on the track.
Any fool can bolt together an 80 mpg vehicle, the third world is full of the damn things. I have no objection to hybrids or non-petroleum engines per se, its just that this pretence that they are somehow cool irritates me.
Y'watermellon.
You're not an American, are you?
Drag races have a standing start. The winner of the race is the first car across the finish line, not the fastest time or highest top speed.
Pomona California track record was broken this year by Tony Schumacher with a run of 330.88 mph at 4.533 seconds. Not the fastest ET, just the highest speed.
Schumacher held the fastest ET on record at 4.441 seconds back in 2003, I'm not sure what it is now.
So if a hybrid does it in four flat, which hasn't been done by anybody in a car to my knowledge, then I'll be impressed.
Idiot.
I'll think hybrids are cool when I see one do the quarter mile in 4 seconds flat at 300mph. Until then, its an econobox.
There's more to consider than just greenhouse gas. CO2 is not a poison, burning grass makes more than plain old CO2, that's the point.
BTUs available by weight of fuel for coal and oil are considerably higher than grass (or wood or corn)therefore fossile fuels are more efficient energy storage with less non-combustible mass.
Coal and oil can be much more finely divided (atomized in a spray or powder form) and you get a much more complete combustion, resulting in essentially CO2 and water. That's the goal, 100% combustion. Modern gasoline engines closely approach 100% combustion.
The more extraneous chemicals you have present, like sulphers, nitrates, proteins, sugars etc. the more stinky pollutants result. Like sulphuric and nitric acid, hydrogen sulphide and etc. which have to be scrubbed out of exhaust and disposed of somehow. Hence the catalytic converter on cars, and the titanic scrubbers they have on power plants.
Then there is the ash to consider. Hard coal burns with almost no slag if done properly because it is pretty much pure carbon. Oil has no ash at all. (How much solid crap do you get when you vacuum out the furnace every other year? Couple ounces, maybe.)
Wood produces considerable ash, and so do all the other pelletized products. It won't burn, so you have to bury it. That'd be the 20% left over from Mr. Cherney's 80% efficient combustion. Sounds better when he says it, right?
Bottom line, while it is "possible" to burn grass pellets cleanly, it is more expensive per BTU than easilly available alternatives like coal and oil and you need a lot of scrubbing equipment. And somewhere to dump the ashes too.
Now then, biofuel uses solar energy to grow. Truth. The energy expenditure I'm talking about is the fossil fuel used to drive the lawnmower that cuts the grass, the truck that takes it to the pellet factory, the electricity that runs the factory, the truck that brings the pellets back to your house, etc. Then there's ploughing, weeding, fertilizing... you get the idea.
It has been firmly established that it takes more than one gallon of ethanol fuel to grow and process a gallon of ethanol from corn. As in 1:>1 per Mr. Cherney.
The growing of corn in the USA is amazingly efficient, I very much doubt the growing of grass is going to even aproach it for fuel efficiency. And you can't eat grass.
That's the physics and chemistry biofuel is up against. If for some reason fossil fuels are not available we can probably make it work, but it will suck from a pollution stand point and economically it will be a disaster. Think $100 dollars a gallon for fuel and think about what that will mean for the average schlub. No car, no electricity, no nice clothing made by electricty, no food from California shipped by refrigerated truck etc. Think Darfur, Biafra, etc.
Because biofuel simply cannot be grown in the volumes required and at the price required to match coal and oil. Do some simple BTU/ton and ton/acre/year calculations, it will become very clear.
There are some innovative projects being done with turning manure and other biotrash into synthetic oil and also incinerators to burn it directly. These are useful as additions to the electric grid because they burn material that has to be disposed of somehow. In this way the incinerator kills two birds with one stone and therefore has a positive economic effect. Example for grass, if you own a sod farm installing a grass pellet furnace and a pellet maker might be economical (depending on equipment cost) because you literally have grass clippings to burn. But it is not as efficient nor as clean as fossil fuel, and completely impractical as a replacement.
Now, as to nuclear generation, it is at the moment the only reliable, industrial sized method of producing electricity that does not produce greenhouse gas, period. So for those who consider CO2 a greenhouse gas and therefore a pollutant a la Kyoto, nuclear is the single solitary solution.
Any reasonably dry organic material from grass pellets to corn to camel shit will burn. There are corn powered stoves and furnaces on the market right now, as well as ones that burn sawdust pellets.
Problem being they burn dirty. Dirtier than wood or the deeply despised coal, and MUCH dirtier than fuel oil or natural gas.
You wanna see some smog, just let grass pellet furnaces become popular. Particulates, sulphates, nitrogen oxides, all the fun stuff that Greenies have been shreiking about lo these many years.
I wish people would give their head a shake befor climbing on these bandwagons. There's no clean fuel that's practical for large scale generation other than nuclear right now. Fusion is still science fiction and wind power is 90% hot air. You want electricity you've got to burn something.
And incidentally, most "biofuels" return less energy that it takes to grow, harvest and process them into fuel.
So unless people want a quick return to the 17th century, maybe it would be good if nuke plants got another look.
hockey stick = Kyoto protocol
Pew Charitable Trust = McCain Feingold campaign finance "reform" bill AND a whole Supreme Court decision. http://www.opinionjournal.com/diary/?id=110006449
Pew+Ford+Tides+couple more liberal foundations = gun control lobby = assault weapon ban
Sadly, public policy decisions get made based on pure voodoo all the time. The hockey stick is just the latest, greatest example. The whole gun control "debate" is based on some of the worst examples of junk science you'll ever see, 90% of it paid for by five or six large liberal leaning foundations, the other 10% being government money from the Clinton era CDC. Those guys don't release their raw data either.
This type of shenanigans by "scientists" is the main reason Republicans doubt the existence of global warming in the first place. Too many people with shaky data making huge claims = scam. Doesn't take a genius to know BS when you step in it.
Two different things. As a taxpayer you have a right to decide if there IS medicare and who gets it. Representative republic, you vote in your congresscritter and he/she/it does your bidding. Theoretically, of course.
Once you have decided that there shall be Medicare and that there shall be a bureacracy to take care of it, you have no particular rights to anything that happens inside it, unless its happening to you. Doctor/patient confidentiality applies irrespective of who's paying the doctor, both moraly and legaly.
The researcher taking public money is a completely different case. He's doing research for the government, which means for you. Theoretically, of course. Absent pressing matters of national security, there is no reason that the results of publicly funded research should not be available to taxpayers. You paid for it, you should get to look at it.
One caveat, if the researcher used a proprietary method or machine or software to either acquire the data or process the results, you are only entitled to the data and results, not the proprietary device. The government rented the use of it, they didn't buy the rights to it.
Enterprise costs multiple millions per episode to make. Andromeda costs multiple thousands per episode.
They draw roughly the same audience. Since network big cheeses have assistants who are good at math, Andromeda survives and Enterprise doesn't.
That's called "Capitalism". This being Slashdot it may be a new concept for you.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
The Star Trek franchise is run by people with zero imagination and a Leftward slant like an A frame roof. To wit:
Scott Bakula's character (or any Trek captain for that matter) would be court martialed and cashiered in any military organization on Earth. If he survived the mutiny, anyway. He disobeys orders, he's insubordinate, he gets his ship shot up every goddamn time they go out. He behaves like a friggin' high school kid out for a joy ride in a stolen car. Not Bakula's fault, its the writing.
The Trek SOP for exploring a new planet: Come into a strange system at a high rate of speed, assume orbit over a planet and scan the place with active sensors. Finally, broadcast a big ol' "Howdy!" just in case the planet guys missed the armed alien starship painting their cities with targeting radar.
Trek exploration missions: we come in peace at great expense and for no particularly good reason,we're harmless humans who only mean well, but we still manage to shoot somebody about every ten minutes.
Alien chicks always find Trek crew members attractive. Crew boy goes for it every single time no matter how many times he's gotten shot, or got pregnant, or got a rash, or started a war... Rinse, repeat. And repeat, and repeat, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
The Earth is at risk of being destroyed by alien bad guys with a planet buster and they send one ship to stop 'em. What, they couldn't buy another ship someplace? Or steal one? And that was a "good" season.
Space battles that only take place at point blank range, shields that don't, aliens that aren't, ray guns that can vaporize a truck but can't penetrate a wooden crate, bad guys that can't shoot straight, artificial gravity that stays on even in wrecked ships with no power. These are a few of our favorite things.
And that's why after thirty nine years people are turning it off. Paramount is quite right to pull the plug, nobody is watching it.
Maybe getting cancelled will wake the franchise owners up, but I doubt it. There's all that syndication money keeping them fat, after all.
Trek fans should lynch them, not raise money for the stupid bastards. Hell, at two million plus per episode for this sorry crap their shareholders should lynch them!
Now, all you little pissants can mod me down, but the fact that hard core fans have to protest and raise charity money to keep the bloody thing on the air is proof enough of what I'm saying.
Grow up, pissants. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it ain't so. This horse is dead. Beating it isn't going to get it to run.
Amen, Shagrat.
/. for a week recently, my crime was suggesting that possibly George B. had a brain cell firing when he cut taxes, and that possibly Canadians might be over taxed. (60%? Seems like a lot to me.) I had a whole string of comments modded down to -1.
This is nothing though. I got booted off
Its getting to be a badge of honor anymore. You have to browse at -1 to see anything that isn't dyed shocking pink.
Flame on, pinkies!