Corn syrup only looks cheaper at the store, because you already paid for it with your taxes.
The Agriculture Bill is one of the biggest items in the budget-- $121.1 billion in 2009- that's about $363 per American, so it is easy to see how it can distort prices of things at the market.
Farmers are rewarded for overproducing with guaranteed prices that encourage them to grow unlimited amounts on minimal acres. Only way to do that is maximize chemical inputs, adding to the profits of Exxon and Dow and Big Chem.
Big Pharma gets to try to keep all those cows alive in CAFOS by feeding them most of the antibiotics that are produced.
A system only lobbyists for the biggest old companies could love.
Thanks so much for the story on Gram Negative infections.
A MRSA hospital infection killed my dad, so I follow the issue closely.
Unfortunately, I believe they left out the most important point.
You have to ask- where are these resistant bugs coming from? Doctors tend to assume they evolve in people using antibiotics. Or they come from Nature's repository. Not likely.
But in truth, the majority are coming from a really stupid, short sighted and corrupt business practice we should abandon on economic grounds if not health grounds: CAFOs. (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations- as promoted by misguided Govt policy.)
For respectable background see http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/wise_antibiotics/pamta.html
But that isn't strongly enough stated. We know H1N1 came from the neighborhood of a Cargill Pork CAFO in Mexico. We know some strains of MRSA in the UK came from pork plants in the Netherlands. We know where nasty e-Coli comes from- Beef CAFO's in the USA. Doctors are mostly ignorant of the impact of using most of our antibiotics to help keep "healthy" animals alive and happily obese in tiny factory feed lots.
If terrorists decided to create a super-bug to kill us all, they could hardly do better than build a modern CAFO.
And CAFO's are not even the cheapest way to make meat. They are the most efficient way to gather the largest amount of taxpayer subsidies (mostly for corn) together in the smallest space. Cheaper meat (for the consumer and taxpayer) would actually be safer meat!
We simply cannot afford to breed superbugs to make meat 5% cheaper (for the meat packer)!
These dogs are hilarious to watch- they are oddly similar. It is like you are in the Matrix and you notice the same dog over an over again- Uh Oh!
Or the video game developer couldn't afford art assets for more than one dog geometry- but its real!
Mixed feelings about escalating the drug-war technology. We had an airport in South Carolina evacuated in fear of a bomb threat, because a sniffer dog alerted authorities about a soap star's dainty purse with a reefer hidden inside it. Gotta decide what you want dogs looking for, bombs or drugs.
Of course they have trained dogs and pigs to sniff for cancer, so this is an area of technology where there can be other spin offs.
We had nearly wiped out malaria. It was down to a few cases. But we banned DDT and it came back and is now the 2nd biggest killer on the planet.
We are likely to make the same mistake with Polio- forgetting to go the final inch. Almost eradicated is not the same as eradicated.
DDT was used terribly irresponsibly. They sprayed my whole suburban neighborhood in Michigan where no malaria had been seen in 100 years. They killed all the bugs and birds and probably started quite a few extra Dioxin cancers, to avoid a few bites.
But DDT is a really amazing insect repellent. Mosquitoes turn around and fly away from a house where the walls have been sprayed with just a small amount. That saves lives!
I'm a big believer in lasers and robotics to kill pest bugs on plants and weeds.
But we already know how to stop malaria. Long lasting mosquito nets and a bit of DDT and good basic health care and treatment of infected people is the answer we can afford.
Just because we used DDT irresponsibly shouldn't give us the right to ban it worldwide. We should have found a way to continue to use it in a more appropriate fashion. We could have taxed it to make massive applications unaffordable. Could have treated it as a prescription medicine for treating the house.
If we had regulated DDT right, the worlds 2nd biggest killer would no longer bother us, and one million people a year would not die of it.
SciFi just came out of the closet and renamed herself SyFy... They will now be focusing on the girl-geek-dyke market, which may be few in number, but great in enthusiasm. With all those cable channels there has to be one for every niche. The wrestling will be replaced by roller-derby and Lacrosse.
Anything going 1000mph is an airplane. It has plenty of power to fly away from the ground, and it would be far safer to do so. Because aerodynamic effects can cause it to pitch and roll and ascend and descend rapidly. It is never safe to fly airplanes (Or airplanes masquerading as cars) within inches of the ground for sustained distances.
RIGHT!
Also, don't panic. Monitor your disk temperature but don't assume they will fail more often at 30C.
Based on LOTS of data, Google published a paper that shows that disk temperature has to be right up to the rated max temp before any extra chance of failure appears.
I'm guessing the true story was probably far worse because of the low operating temperatures of the rivets at the time. Common steels/irons exhibit a transition to brittle failure (depending on many things including alloying and impurity levels), and given the description of how dirty this iron was it is very likely that the energy required to pop the heads off of the rivets in sub-32F water would mean that the real failure loads could have been far lower than the 4000kg recorded -- perhaps a factor of 2, and nothing I've found online so far indicates whether they did the testing at temperature or not.
If you are too young to remember Sputnik, you really should see the newly made documentary
"The Fever of 57", the story of the development of Sputnik and
its repercusions that ranged from renewed funding for science
and technology education, and in lauching the cold war and the
arms race.
Amazing to see boys and men buying chemistry sets and building rockets at home to help the USA catch up with the USSR.
I always say that my father's education was paid for by Sputnik, or the post Sputnik realization that training Engineers was in the national interest. Too bad we lost that meme- cheaper to outsource thinking to India and China.
Your Slot Car idea isn't actually crazy.
People have suggested inductive charging at stop lights also, and circuits that turn on when the credit card data is sent.
These guys take it furthur- with PodCars brand of PRT (Personal Rapid Transit!)
Check out the video of your slot car (upside down)!
Actually PHEV's don't have a problem with charge time. Their small 20-30 mile battery charges on a normal AC outlet. If you forget to charge it, you just need to buy more gas.
And Real EV drivers don't usually complain about charge time because most humans require 7 hours of downtime per day during which time their car can be recharged.
Dude! That prize dumped money on the head of one Paul MacCready aerovironment founder.
There is NO SMARTER thing you could do with money than dump it on the head of a young MacCready!
He wasn't interested in Human Powered Flight either, no one should be!
But he was the guy responsive enough to beat out the competition and win the prize, and save his company.
Now his company is using similar tech to make Solar Powered perpetually flying aircraft which hopefully will soon make communications satelites obsolete.
And they are also making a lot of those mini-drone aircraft our boys and girls in Iraq are relying on... (I'm no fan of the Iraq Colony, but I do want the troops to come home safe.)
The Kremer Prize was an incredible success!
You will never see human powered practical aviation. At least not until "humans" get stronger.
But you are already seeing the benefits of pushing technology to the limit and exploiting the new materials and construction techniques.
I love people who have numbers at their fingertips!
Happily your numbers are out-of-date. Not too out of date, either. But substantially! The EPA's Energy-Star cerification program and the improving regulations have been astoundinly successful, each year for the last 5 or so.
What we need are regulations for other appliances. I just measured my TV and found that it uses 24W OFF. (Thank you Infocus.) That is WAY WAY too much to keep an IR receiver active... (267W ON is a lot to but at least it is doing something for me!)
One of the reviewers claims the thing takes up to 70W. Didn't say if that max is atypical, or what the average would be. I don't view anything over 20W as "portable".
And anything over 25W is REPREHENSIBLE in a TV Receiver. Those Comcast Cable boxes use 35W ON or OFF which is probably more juice than your new refrigerator is using. How many Coal power plants in the US are dedicated exclusively to keeping the little red lights on the ComCast box lit up?
So this is supposed to be a better solution for campers and RV's than the standard DirectTV they are already carrying around. But it doesn't sound like the dish aim procedure is easy- you can get automated systems that work while you are driving. This one wont work unless you are stationary.
My DirectTV Tivo uses 29W ON or OFF, day or night, so thats about $70/year in electricity. But that is a fair sight less than the 70W claimed for this unit! I don't understand why making it portable would double the power consumption.
Actually Democrats aren't too dumb to fill out a ballot properly. Machines in democratic or black districts are set up to trick them in to submitting bad ballots.
Everyone can use a bit of help making sure they haven't spoiled their ballot, by marking two candidates for the same race, for example. So the Optical Scan machines are designed to spit out a spoiled ballot so the voter can fix it.
Which they do, in white districts in Florida.
In predominantly black districts, the machines accept spoiled ballots silently, which are then thrown out and not counted later. This is done "to speed things up" which is Floridian for "throw the election to the Repuglicans."
Same machine, different setting. THe voting officials have discretion.
In 2000, over 100,000 votes were not counted, using this cool setting.
Greg Palast wrote about it...
And of course there is always the electronic ballot stuffing option on the machines. Memory cards need to have 0 votes at the start of the election, but that can include 100 votes for bush and -100 votes for gore. One Florida precinct accidentally released interim counts for gore that shrank in 2000 due to such pre-loaded memory cards. Oh, they said it was a hardware failure... but what programmer would allow negative vote counts by mistake?
I'm mostly concerned about the fact nobody seems to be writing curriculum for the students who get the OLPC's. And there don't seem to be tools for teachers to write curriculm (and test it) either. We know it has a browser that runs javascript and not very much memory- so how is that web page going to look?
I'm VERY EXCITED about the attention to the features I desire. I want the OLPC for me! With the screen in 200dpi black and white mode, and sipping power with no backlight on, I could actually find it a decent book reading experience in the park.
And I am ENTHRALLED with the latest power supply. (Not the old crank design.) I've always wanted a tredle powered laptop and now somebody is listening. I totally need that generator for camping trips, and it will beat out all those small solar panels they are installing. (Way cheaper and works at night!)
And it will beat out all the crank designs.
I think it will help students a lot. Even if all it does is bring Python and Wikipedia.
Google has a Google Grants program where they give free adwords adverts to IRS 501c3 non profits. But I haven't seen any of these for wikipedia. Probably doesn't need them anyway, and its a bit hard to buy adwords for every subject in wikipedia. I think it gets prominent placement from Google because it is popular with users.
I bet Google would prefer Wikipedia to make room for AdSense ad syndication and then they would have all the money they need in a mutually beneficial way.
But non-profits can't always do things that would make sense if they want to stay non-profit. Folks that want their institutions to grow and thrive may be better off avoiding the IRS Tax break candy and forming a for profit company, even if their goal is charitable. At least then they can offer goods and services and grow to meet the need with the profit. Non profits can't grow without increasing their begging, so they can never really solve problems.
One can compare the energy in gas to the energy in electricity, but electric motors are more efficient.
Also Electricity is usually gathered (charged) at night where in most of the country it is a waste product.
Check http://calcars.org/ for the latest news in PHEV research and hacking. They have built a number of Plug In cars, including one over the weekend in front of an audience at the Orielly Maker Faire.
Bush is acting with typical GOP morality when he made his decision.
Bush didn't ban stem cell research on embryonic stem cells.
He allowed researchers to use cess from the EXISTING LINES of cells, from established GOP companies.
That is the key to GOP morality. You are free to do anything you want,
as long as you buy it from the established companies we have stock in.
The fact that those established cell lines are mostly old and useless is the kind of complaint you could make about most old school inside the beltway GOP corporations.
No new competitors are allowed in the GOP varient of capitalism.
On related topics, you can cure AIDS but not with generic drugs.
You can make Ethanol for cars, but not from crops other than corn, or
from companies other than ADM and Cargill.
You can rebuild New Orleans, iff GHWB owns your stock.
Actually a lot of the low order geometric work is done in the optic nerve, which is way more than an ethernet cable. The optic nerve does a lot of the simple stuff such as edge and motion and shape detection before the signals even get to the brain.
So I want to leave my internet open, but I want to at least ask people not to abuse it.
Also, I want to give people the opportunity to pay me to maintain/upgrade my internet connection, thru paypal.
(This might not be popular with some ISP's.)
So what would be perfect is to upload FIRMWARE for the Linksys (or other) router to make it work like
one of those hotel systems that has a neighbor friendly introduction screen and disclaimer.
Welcome to my Free Internet Access.
So far this month, neighbors have contributed $X.XX to maintining my $50/mo connection.
If $75 is recieved, I will upgrade us to the 4MBPS connection speed.
If $100 is recieved, $6 MPBS!
Please Click Here to Acknowledge That you won't do Anything Illegal, and start using the internet.
Slashdot Mirror
Corn syrup only looks cheaper at the store, because you already paid for it with your taxes.
The Agriculture Bill is one of the biggest items in the budget-- $121.1 billion in 2009- that's about $363 per American, so it is easy to see how it can distort prices of things at the market.
Farmers are rewarded for overproducing with guaranteed prices that encourage them to grow unlimited amounts on minimal acres. Only way to do that is maximize chemical inputs, adding to the profits of Exxon and Dow and Big Chem.
Big Pharma gets to try to keep all those cows alive in CAFOS by feeding them most of the antibiotics that are produced.
A system only lobbyists for the biggest old companies could love.
Unfortunately, I believe they left out the most important point.
You have to ask- where are these resistant bugs coming from? Doctors tend to assume they evolve in people using antibiotics. Or they come from Nature's repository. Not likely.
But in truth, the majority are coming from a really stupid, short sighted and corrupt business practice we should abandon on economic grounds if not health grounds: CAFOs. (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations- as promoted by misguided Govt policy.) For respectable background see
http://www.ucsusa.org/food_and_agriculture/solutions/wise_antibiotics/pamta.html
But that isn't strongly enough stated. We know H1N1 came from the neighborhood of a Cargill Pork CAFO in Mexico. We know some strains of MRSA in the UK came from pork plants in the Netherlands. We know where nasty e-Coli comes from- Beef CAFO's in the USA. Doctors are mostly ignorant of the impact of using most of our antibiotics to help keep "healthy" animals alive and happily obese in tiny factory feed lots.
If terrorists decided to create a super-bug to kill us all, they could hardly do better than build a modern CAFO.
And CAFO's are not even the cheapest way to make meat. They are the most efficient way to gather the largest amount of taxpayer subsidies (mostly for corn) together in the smallest space. Cheaper meat (for the consumer and taxpayer) would actually be safer meat! We simply cannot afford to breed superbugs to make meat 5% cheaper (for the meat packer)!
These dogs are hilarious to watch- they are oddly similar. It is like you are in the Matrix and you notice the same dog over an over again- Uh Oh! Or the video game developer couldn't afford art assets for more than one dog geometry- but its real!
Mixed feelings about escalating the drug-war technology. We had an airport in South Carolina evacuated in fear of a bomb threat, because a sniffer dog alerted authorities about a soap star's dainty purse with a reefer hidden inside it. Gotta decide what you want dogs looking for, bombs or drugs.
Of course they have trained dogs and pigs to sniff for cancer, so this is an area of technology where there can be other spin offs.
We are likely to make the same mistake with Polio- forgetting to go the final inch. Almost eradicated is not the same as eradicated.
DDT was used terribly irresponsibly. They sprayed my whole suburban neighborhood in Michigan where no malaria had been seen in 100 years. They killed all the bugs and birds and probably started quite a few extra Dioxin cancers, to avoid a few bites.
But DDT is a really amazing insect repellent. Mosquitoes turn around and fly away from a house where the walls have been sprayed with just a small amount. That saves lives!
I'm a big believer in lasers and robotics to kill pest bugs on plants and weeds.
But we already know how to stop malaria. Long lasting mosquito nets and a bit of DDT and good basic health care and treatment of infected people is the answer we can afford.
Just because we used DDT irresponsibly shouldn't give us the right to ban it worldwide. We should have found a way to continue to use it in a more appropriate fashion. We could have taxed it to make massive applications unaffordable. Could have treated it as a prescription medicine for treating the house.
If we had regulated DDT right, the worlds 2nd biggest killer would no longer bother us, and one million people a year would not die of it.
SciFi just came out of the closet and renamed herself SyFy... They will now be focusing on the girl-geek-dyke market, which may be few in number, but great in enthusiasm. With all those cable channels there has to be one for every niche. The wrestling will be replaced by roller-derby and Lacrosse.
Anything going 1000mph is an airplane. It has plenty of power to fly away from the ground, and it would be far safer to do so. Because aerodynamic effects can cause it to pitch and roll and ascend and descend rapidly. It is never safe to fly airplanes (Or airplanes masquerading as cars) within inches of the ground for sustained distances.
RIGHT!
Also, don't panic. Monitor your disk temperature but don't assume they will fail more often at 30C. Based on LOTS of data, Google published a paper that shows that disk temperature has to be right up to the rated max temp before any extra chance of failure appears.
I'm guessing the true story was probably far worse because of the low operating temperatures of the rivets at the time. Common steels/irons exhibit a transition to brittle failure (depending on many things including alloying and impurity levels), and given the description of how dirty this iron was it is very likely that the energy required to pop the heads off of the rivets in sub-32F water would mean that the real failure loads could have been far lower than the 4000kg recorded -- perhaps a factor of 2, and nothing I've found online so far indicates whether they did the testing at temperature or not.
Amazing to see boys and men buying chemistry sets and building rockets at home to help the USA catch up with the USSR.
I always say that my father's education was paid for by Sputnik, or the post Sputnik realization that training Engineers was in the national interest. Too bad we lost that meme- cheaper to outsource thinking to India and China.
These guys take it furthur- with PodCars brand of PRT (Personal Rapid Transit!) Check out the video of your slot car (upside down)!
http://www.solarevolution.com/prt/sweden/
Actually PHEV's don't have a problem with charge time. Their small 20-30 mile battery charges on a normal AC outlet. If you forget to charge it, you just need to buy more gas.
And Real EV drivers don't usually complain about charge time because most humans require 7 hours of downtime per day during which time their car can be recharged.
There is NO SMARTER thing you could do with money than dump it on the head of a young MacCready!
He wasn't interested in Human Powered Flight either, no one should be! But he was the guy responsive enough to beat out the competition and win the prize, and save his company.
Now his company is using similar tech to make Solar Powered perpetually flying aircraft which hopefully will soon make communications satelites obsolete.
And they are also making a lot of those mini-drone aircraft our boys and girls in Iraq are relying on... (I'm no fan of the Iraq Colony, but I do want the troops to come home safe.)
The Kremer Prize was an incredible success!
You will never see human powered practical aviation. At least not until "humans" get stronger. But you are already seeing the benefits of pushing technology to the limit and exploiting the new materials and construction techniques.
Insightful! As is the LCD comment. Would be lovely to know the steady-state power consumption.
I love people who have numbers at their fingertips!
f rig.search_products_submit
Happily your numbers are out-of-date. Not too out of date, either. But substantially!
The EPA's Energy-Star cerification program and the improving regulations have been astoundinly successful, each year for the last 5 or so.
As you can tell here
http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=re
you can get a nice mid-size side-by-side Fridgidaire that consumes only 45W.
Skimp a little and get the best in class and you are down at 35W.
What we need are regulations for other appliances. I just measured my TV and found that it uses 24W OFF. (Thank you Infocus.) That is WAY WAY too much to keep an IR receiver active... (267W ON is a lot to but at least it is doing something for me!)
One of the reviewers claims the thing takes up to 70W.
Didn't say if that max is atypical, or what the average would be.
I don't view anything over 20W as "portable".
And anything over 25W is REPREHENSIBLE in a TV Receiver. Those Comcast Cable boxes use 35W ON or OFF which is probably more juice than your new refrigerator is using. How many Coal power plants in the US are dedicated exclusively to keeping the little red lights on the ComCast box lit up?
So this is supposed to be a better solution for campers and RV's than the standard DirectTV they are already carrying around. But it doesn't sound like the dish aim procedure is easy- you can get automated systems that work while you are driving. This one wont work unless you are stationary.
My DirectTV Tivo uses 29W ON or OFF, day or night, so thats about $70/year in electricity. But that is a fair sight less than the 70W claimed for this unit! I don't understand why making it portable would double the power consumption.
MIT's One Laptop Per Child OLPC will be a splendid book reader.
In black and white 400dpi mode, it will burn 1W.
In colour, 5W at normal DPI.
Everyone can use a bit of help making sure they haven't spoiled their ballot, by marking two candidates for the same race, for example. So the Optical Scan machines are designed to spit out a spoiled ballot so the voter can fix it. Which they do, in white districts in Florida. In predominantly black districts, the machines accept spoiled ballots silently, which are then thrown out and not counted later. This is done "to speed things up" which is Floridian for "throw the election to the Repuglicans."
Same machine, different setting. THe voting officials have discretion.
In 2000, over 100,000 votes were not counted, using this cool setting.
Greg Palast wrote about it...
And of course there is always the electronic ballot stuffing option on the machines. Memory cards need to have 0 votes at the start of the election, but that can include 100 votes for bush and -100 votes for gore. One Florida precinct accidentally released interim counts for gore that shrank in 2000 due to such pre-loaded memory cards. Oh, they said it was a hardware failure... but what programmer would allow negative vote counts by mistake?
I'm VERY EXCITED about the attention to the features I desire. I want the OLPC for me! With the screen in 200dpi black and white mode, and sipping power with no backlight on, I could actually find it a decent book reading experience in the park.
And I am ENTHRALLED with the latest power supply. (Not the old crank design.) I've always wanted a tredle powered laptop and now somebody is listening. I totally need that generator for camping trips, and it will beat out all those small solar panels they are installing. (Way cheaper and works at night!) And it will beat out all the crank designs.
I think it will help students a lot. Even if all it does is bring Python and Wikipedia.
At least with them at the bottom the graphic was downloaded before you saw it, so the screen didn't move around on you.
I bet Google would prefer Wikipedia to make room for AdSense ad syndication and then they would have all the money they need in a mutually beneficial way.
But non-profits can't always do things that would make sense if they want to stay non-profit. Folks that want their institutions to grow and thrive may be better off avoiding the IRS Tax break candy and forming a for profit company, even if their goal is charitable. At least then they can offer goods and services and grow to meet the need with the profit. Non profits can't grow without increasing their begging, so they can never really solve problems.
One can compare the energy in gas to the energy in electricity, but electric motors are more efficient.
Also Electricity is usually gathered (charged) at night where in most of the country it is a waste product.
Check http://calcars.org/ for the latest news in PHEV research and hacking. They have built a number of Plug In cars, including one over the weekend in front of an audience at the Orielly Maker Faire.
No new competitors are allowed in the GOP varient of capitalism.
On related topics, you can cure AIDS but not with generic drugs. You can make Ethanol for cars, but not from crops other than corn, or from companies other than ADM and Cargill. You can rebuild New Orleans, iff GHWB owns your stock.
Actually a lot of the low order geometric work is done in the optic nerve, which is way more than an ethernet cable. The optic nerve does a lot of the simple stuff such as edge and motion and shape detection before the signals even get to the brain.
YOU WILL HAVE FREE INTERNET EVERYWHERE
instead of having to use fon.net
So what would be perfect is to upload FIRMWARE for the Linksys (or other) router to make it work like one of those hotel systems that has a neighbor friendly introduction screen and disclaimer.
Welcome to my Free Internet Access.
So far this month, neighbors have contributed $X.XX to maintining my $50/mo connection.
If $75 is recieved, I will upgrade us to the 4MBPS connection speed. If $100 is recieved, $6 MPBS!
Please Click Here to Acknowledge That you won't do Anything Illegal, and start using the internet.