take a look at the demographics of yesterday's vote: 49% Republicans, 51% Democrats/Independants.
You're conflating a part (Holland, a rather small city) with the whole (the entire state of Michigan). Holland (and its relatively near neighbor, Grand Rapids) is extremely right-wing compared to Detroit and the rest of Wayne county. The votes from the Republican primary were tallied on a statewide basis and mean just about nothing for the mix of the turnout in Holland. --
Why not get some Michigan/.'ers together and write a law banning the use of internet filters statewide in Michigan?
The AFA just played the losing side of a lobbying game. I wouldn't want to repeat their mistake. The two ways to get such a law passed would be to a.) pay a lot of money to lobbyists and make lots of political contributions (you probably couldn't get any votes for this outstate, and you would be likely to get a veto from Johnny Engler), or pay lots of money to petition-circulators to put it on the ballot as an initiative. The likelihood of success at the ballot box, prohibiting cities from making their own decisions, appears awfully low to me... and I'm awfully libertarian m'self.
If we adopt the tactics of the Religious Reich, we will become like they are. Let's not. --
I programmed assembler on a SPARC, and never missed the reverse byte order.
Perhaps you'd miss the performance by doing it the other way when your memory bus isn't as wide as your operands (and, if you're programming in an HLL, why are you fussing about byte-order anyway?).
History: In the ancient past, before dinosaurs evolved and foot-long dragonflies sported above the cycads in the massive forests of the carboniferous, there was the 8-bit memory bus. Now, with an 8-bit memory bus, you have to fetch your operands 1 byte at a time. Suppose you are doing a 16-bit add-immediate with your carboniferous-era processor (which you may still be able to find fossilized somewhere, like at ham swaps). To do your add, you have to first add the least significant bytes, then add the most significant bytes with carry. If you store your operands big-endian, you have to complicate your processor in one of two ways:
Use a temporary register to store the high byte until after the low byte is fetched and added. Then you can finally use the high byte.
Increment the PC by two, fetch the low byte, decrement the PC, fetch the high byte, then increment the PC by two.
Primitive processors of the carboniferous could not handle such complexity. They evolved the little-endian system to allow them to pipeline. Storing the operands little-endian allows the operand fetch to occur during the instruction decode cycle, then the least-significant byte can be added (in the 8-bit ALU) dudring the same cycle as the most-significant-byte fetch. This requires less hardware and takes only three cycles (assuming no microcode). The 6502 stores its offsets little-endian also, if I recall correctly.
Once you have a wider memory bus which can pull entire operands in one memory cycle there's still some pressure to remain little-endian and no reason for changing things; you've got all this design inventory and software tools and other things that are little-endian, and the only reason an HLL programmer would care is if she's type-punning or doing some other untoward thing. So that's why things haven't changed. --
Why not created a domain where the pornographic sites are. Perhaps a.sex or a.xxx or whatever.
How do you stop sites from putting pr0n in.com or.net sites? What if their business model hinges on getting viewers past the filters?
It would take global committment and regulation.
Do you want any kind of global regulation of the Internet? Are you insane? Think of what would be left after every bit of material that is prohibited in just one jurisdiction has to be kept out by the architecture of the system. Think of the enormous rating overhead you'd have to have before you could reach any part of the world with your pages. It would be the death of free speech, and you ought to know it better than I. --
Re:Great news! But not the last of it...
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Victory in Holland
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I am really glad that the "Decency police" have suffered a hard blow
You mis-spelled "Religious Reich".;-)
I heard on an interview Tuesday and if defeated, they will keep moving from community to community in Michigan until the Governor and his congress recognize that this should become a state requirement!
The State of Michigan has already lost Internet censorship decisions in court, and the governor (right-wing prig that he is) probably isn't eager to get his nose bloodied over the issue again. --
There is such a thing as too pessimistic
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Victory in Holland
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If you are too pessimistic, you assume you can't win and fail to put forth any effort. There is a corresponding failure of excessive optimism, which is assuming you've already won and coasting to a loss. This sounds like a very happy medium! Congrats on dealing a blow to the New Dark Ages coalition, Jamie.
I suppose this shows a good way to fight filters:
Hype up the costs. Money, money, money.
Point out who the money goes to. If you can show that the filter maker is financing the filter campaign, you've tarred them as one of the worst things they could be: a bunch of astroturfing lobbyists.
Point out that plenty of pr0n goes through the filters regardless, so it's like paying for the QE II and getting a leaky scow. No value for the money; taxpayers hate that.
If filters ever come to a vote where I live, I'm going to busy myself along these lines. And thanks for keeping us all informed. --
When I said "I think its the greenhouse risk that is holding back mass use of methane" I meant just that. I didn't know particularly why it wasnt used so much.
I don't know the situation in Wales, but the USA is criss-crossed by large pipelines carrying methane. The USA burns it to the tune of almost 20 trillion (that is 2 times ten to the thirteenth power) cubic feet every year (see this USDOE page for my source). Europe imports a great deal of it from Russia. Exactly what did you mean by "wasn't used so much"? --
The "photosynthetic efficiency" you describe as being 50% probably refers to the percentage of light absorbed over a small range of wavelengths or something similar; it thus has little to do with the overall percentage of energy extracted from the sun. Otherwise I can't rationalize the figure of 50%.
Contradicting your previous fractional-percent figure is this BBC article where they finally quote an efficiency figure for conversion of sunlight to hydrogen: 10%. That is ONE TENTH. (This is the projected efficiency rather than the current figure, true, but even 1% now is pretty impressive considering the size of the collectors we could marshall.)
I'm disappointed that the press release does nothing to speculate on the efficiency of the entire system.
Me too. The meaningless choice of units (typical of scientifically-illiterate "journalists") makes it impossible to infer anything.
Is photosynthesis-hydrogen-combustion a more efficient way to extract solar energy than photovoltaic-battery/flywheel-electric or steam-turbine-electric? Is it any cheaper?
I'll bet dollars to donuts that it is less efficient, but the cheap (and perhaps multi-purpose) pond/collector makes it likely to be more cost-effective. Solar cells are still around 3 dollars per peak watt, and that's before you even think of storing or converting the juice for some other purpose.
Would a pond get hot enought to kill the algae?
I doubt it; brewer's yeast also operates on anaerobic metabolism, and I have not noticed that fermentation vessels warm up much even when they are blowing off CO2 at the rate of liters a minute. I haven't measured the temperature, but if it was a great deal warmer I'd have noticed. --
You say that the problem with electricity is the storage. Have you ever tried to store a scum pond?
They freeze over in winter here in the North, but come spring they're soon covered with scum again. What's to store?
And how would you capture the gasses from this wondrous self-maintaining scum pond?
The gasses don't come from the pond, they come from the scum. You pump the scum into sulfur-free tanks and wait. The scum runs out of sulfur and starts the hydrolytic metabolism. After a while, you dump the energy-depleted scum back in the pond and pump in a new batch. The hydrogen is available for immediate consumption, storage or chemical synthesis. It's very easy to synthesize methane and methanol out of hydrogen and CO2.
I think I'll stick to using unleaded gasoline for my car, at least for a few more decades.
Technology advances and legality might catch you unawares. Does your car radio use tubes? Do you spot-clean your clothes with carbon tetrachloride? You might soon find yourself buying a fuel-cell hybrid car because bio-methanol is cheaper than gasoline after all the carbon taxes. If you could buy one that carried 4 people and gave you 100 MPG, who wouldn't? --
You mean, like a cornfield or a forest? We're not talking about big organisms with lots of overhead. We're talking about one-celled algae. I seem to recall (read years ago, no reference handy) that Chlorella can hit a photosynthetic efficiency of 50%. Even if that's off by a factor of ten it is still quite impressive, because it is converting water directly to a storable, transmissible fuel. To store electricity, you have to convert it to something else.
While capital costs of solar cells are high, they (unlike biological systems) require virtually no maintenance or cycling.
The biological system is self-maintaining; the biological elements reproduce themselves at no cost to the user. This is the huge advantage of the scum-pond over the solar panel; the pond is really, really cheap per unit area. --
There are numerous examples of oil producers buying patents for more efficent engines and alternative power only to bury them to protect there market share.
Okay, suppose that's so. They'd still be patents. They're published, by definition; the information is available to anyone as of the time the patent is granted. We've been hearing about these conspiracies to suppress the "100 MPG carburetor" for at least as long as I've been alive, which is longer than the term of any patent I've ever heard of. These inventions are now in the public domain. They can be legally built and sold by anyone. So why, if there's the slightest shred of truth to the rumors about how great these inventions were, aren't we swimming in 100-MPG cars and the like from the patents filed in the 40's through the 70's?
Simple answer: we don't see them because these inventions never existed. Yet the rumors continue because a large number of people are ignorant jerks who think the world owes them an effortless living, and since the laws of Nature could never make it difficult to accomplish something worthwhile, it must be some person causing their failure.
It's only one small step from there to the thinking which produced the Salem witch trials. --
Water will be coming out of the tailpipe and will be extensively present in the engine. Won't this cause a LOT of problems in places where it is very cold?
It's very obvious that you don't live in the Midwest or Northeast, because you'd see this happening all the time with gasoline cars. Gasoline produces roughly 1 molecule of water for every molecule of CO2. When the exhaust system of the car is warm, this just comes out as water vapor. When the exhaust system is cold, water condenses on the cold metal. The exhaust warms up fairly quickly, and the water briefly plays a game of hopscotch as it flows as liquid or is blown as vapor down to the muffler, vacating the forward sections of the plumbing first. During the warmup process it is not at all uncommon to see a stream of liquid water dripping or even flowing out of the tailpipe. Once the entire exhaust system is heated to 90-odd Celsius, all the water can remain as vapor without condensing and you do not see any further liquid drips. This is why your Los Angeles scenario is impossible (though not undesirable, LA could use the water). --
I don't know what pressure propane is stored at in a car's fuel tank.
If I recall correctly, propane boils around 150 PSI (gauge) at high ambient temperatures (90 F). At 20 below 0 (F) or so, its vapor pressure falls to atmospheric and you can't get any fuel flow. Therefore, propane-fuelled vehicles using natural flow (as opposed to in-tank fuel pumps and ported fuel injection) would be unable to operate under winter conditions typical in Canada, the plains and mountains. (As far as I know, nobody builds fuel-injection systems for propane, they all vaporize the liquid and carburete it into the intake air.) --
The advantage of H2 is that even if you took the most inefficient way of using it as a fuel - burning it - the byproduct is totally harmless and recyclable.
The other advantage is that you don't have to collect and fix carbon (and incur evaporative losses of water) to create hydrogen. Carbon is about 100 ppm of the atmosphere, or maybe 120 milligrams per cubic meter of air. Hydrogen is available at 110 grams per liter of water. No comparison.
I think its the greenhouse risk that is holding back mass use of methane.
Oh, are you laboring under the delusion that there is no natural gas industry because of greenhouse-warming issues? Think again. --
If this is really as big as you think it is (and I'm not convinced yet), these people and institutions should get both fame AND compensation for this invention.
The scientists who did this work are employed by the University of California at Berkeley and NREL, the NATIONAL Renewable Energy Laboratory. We, the people of the United States, paid for its development. It is a work-for-hire, and We the People own it. On the other hand, plenty of fame and merit raises are definitely in order. --
Anyway, to make an effective portable fuel you can't just carry Hydrogen around in a bottle without seriously compressing it.
Or just combine it with carbon to make a denser fuel, burn the fuel in a fuel cell, and save the reaction products as highly carbonated soda water. Off-load the fizzy-water at the same time you load more fuel. More discussion of this concept is here. --
But what about the OPEC nations? What happens to the Middle Eastern nations? What happens to Mexico, Congo, Indonesia and Scotland/Norway?
OPEC goes back to irrelevance, as their black goo is seen as the nasty, water-polluting, smog-forming, climate-changing stuff it is. Imagine how many wars would NOT have happened in the Middle East in the last 50 years if there weren't any money to be had in oil. (I suppose they could farm algae, but it's not like they have a monopoly on sunlight.) Mexico, Congo and Indonesia have other natural resources and might even benefit from cheaper energy by using their production at home to make products for export. Scotland and Norway are industrialized countries with educated populations; they'll find something to do, they aren't stupid. --
Don't get overexcited. We are talking about one announcement about one way of producing hydrogen, in an economical non-profitable way.
It's still a huge breakthrough because the collector, far from being highly-refined semiconductors, is as cheap as water (it is water, and a little green scum). Further, it has enormous possibilities for improvement. If I recall correctly, algae such as Chlorella have a photosynthetic efficiency up to 50%. If even 1/4 of this productivity can be harvested as hydrogen, you'd get something like 170 watts per square meter peak (maybe 1/4 of that average) already in the form of storable, transmissible chemical fuel. In case you hadn't noticed, storage and transmission have been the bugaboos of the alternate-energy scene. All of a sudden they look a lot less difficult.
Gas stations won't put H2 pumps up, unless there are enough cars using H2, but car owners won't buy H2 powered cars unless they can buy H2 everywhere.
Who says you'll buy H2? You might buy methanol catalytically produced from CO2 and H2. Methanol (M85) has been on sale for years as motor fuel in California. Methanol goes into jerry-cans just fine.
Oil is still needed for producing many products, like plastics.
All you need is carbon and hydrogen. From CO2 and H2, you can proceed directly to methane or ethylene using the proper catalysts. Ethylene takes you straight to polyethylene. I'm not a chemist and can't tell you what it would take to make other polymer building blocks like butadiene, styrene and acrylonitrile, but I doubt it's all that difficult. The oil industry may die due to cheap H2, but the plastics industry will hardly hiccup. --
Slashdot Mirror
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Dang. Here I was hoping you meant Moscow, Michigan.
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If we adopt the tactics of the Religious Reich, we will become like they are. Let's not.
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... with the thaw, I doubt there's any white stuff on the ground in Holland today. (Slush, maybe. ;-)
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This deserves to be moderated up.
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He died in one of the Nazi death camps he failed to condemn until it was too late. Talk about karma...
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History: In the ancient past, before dinosaurs evolved and foot-long dragonflies sported above the cycads in the massive forests of the carboniferous, there was the 8-bit memory bus. Now, with an 8-bit memory bus, you have to fetch your operands 1 byte at a time. Suppose you are doing a 16-bit add-immediate with your carboniferous-era processor (which you may still be able to find fossilized somewhere, like at ham swaps). To do your add, you have to first add the least significant bytes, then add the most significant bytes with carry. If you store your operands big-endian, you have to complicate your processor in one of two ways:
- Use a temporary register to store the high byte until after the low byte is fetched and added. Then you can finally use the high byte.
- Increment the PC by two, fetch the low byte, decrement the PC, fetch the high byte, then increment the PC by two.
Primitive processors of the carboniferous could not handle such complexity. They evolved the little-endian system to allow them to pipeline. Storing the operands little-endian allows the operand fetch to occur during the instruction decode cycle, then the least-significant byte can be added (in the 8-bit ALU) dudring the same cycle as the most-significant-byte fetch. This requires less hardware and takes only three cycles (assuming no microcode). The 6502 stores its offsets little-endian also, if I recall correctly.Once you have a wider memory bus which can pull entire operands in one memory cycle there's still some pressure to remain little-endian and no reason for changing things; you've got all this design inventory and software tools and other things that are little-endian, and the only reason an HLL programmer would care is if she's type-punning or doing some other untoward thing. So that's why things haven't changed.
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Obviously you should get some St. John's Warts.
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I suppose this shows a good way to fight filters:
- Hype up the costs. Money, money, money.
- Point out who the money goes to. If you can show that the filter maker is financing the filter campaign, you've tarred them as one of the worst things they could be: a bunch of astroturfing lobbyists.
- Point out that plenty of pr0n goes through the filters regardless, so it's like paying for the QE II and getting a leaky scow. No value for the money; taxpayers hate that.
If filters ever come to a vote where I live, I'm going to busy myself along these lines. And thanks for keeping us all informed.--
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This is starting to look like the future.
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Simple answer: we don't see them because these inventions never existed. Yet the rumors continue because a large number of people are ignorant jerks who think the world owes them an effortless living, and since the laws of Nature could never make it difficult to accomplish something worthwhile, it must be some person causing their failure.
It's only one small step from there to the thinking which produced the Salem witch trials.
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Fuel value of hydrogen is about 52,000 BTU/lb.
You were saying?
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