Yeah, in the States, triclosan and stuff would be a concern.
Here in Japan, there are two separate sewage paths in most of the country, for soft sewage (sinks, shower, etc., mixes with the storm sewer outside (deep gutters!), and for hard sewage, i. e., the flush toilet. Some places have non-flush toilets, or have light-flush toilets, that drop into septic tanks, generally under the house. One house my wife and I looked at once in Kakogawa had a partial treatment plant on the septic tank -- stirred the sewage regularly to speed up the conversion. With the tanks, you'd have to have the septic truck come around every so often, and put a big vacuum house down the outside access and take it away.
Anyway, most Japanese people are very sensitive to sewage issues and don't wash industrial waste down either path. (Part of the reason is that there are often rice fields that use the storm sewers for irrigation in many neighborhoods, even in the cities, so it's easy to remember that what you wash down the drain could come back to haunt you.) Lake Biwa (which I really want to go see sometime) turned red some thirty years ago because of stuff in detergents, and citizens groups formed to push the detergent companies to make and sell bio-friendly detergents at reasonable prices, and to encourage the avoidance of the bad stuff. By the time they made laws, conformance was mostly not an issue any more.
Not everywhere in Japan has had such success with the environment, but there is a difference between Japan and the US. People don't tend to use old engine oil to kill ants and weeds here, either.
But, yeah, these are the sorts of problems that might have to be worked out to make common effluent useable for fuel crops.
But I'm not really thinking of dumping the septic lines directly on the land where the switchgrass would grow.
What I'm thinking is stopping the sewage processing at the point where it becomes hard. Aerate the slurry a bit and then send it to fuel fields instead of evaporation pools. Maybe coarse filter it for toys and jewelry and such things that get occasionally dropped down the toilet, but I think that's usually done before aeration anyway.
The biggest problem with human waste as fertilizer is the parasites, and those are pretty much destroyed by the time aeration is complete. Any bacterial/viral products or biological poisons will break down naturally if you let the field lie unfertilized a year before you convert to food.
Of course, these days there are other things in the sewage, leftover anti-depressants and such. Is that what you're talking about? I'm guessing those will be better handled by putting them in fields than by putting them in the rivers. Guessing being the operational word, and I don't have the tools to test the guess.
Yeah, it looks like going with butanol with this (patented) process would be a better return on human investment than ethanol from corn, but how does it compare to ethanol from other sources? (And is there a possibility that going to butanol instead of ethanol might make it easier to clear the cellulose barrier?)
Factories on land that can produce cereal grains are not a good idea. But factories on land the kind of land that switchgrass grows on would be much less a waste of good land.
The lobbies whose proponents don't even recognize themselves as part of a formal lobby are even more powerful in the end than the ones that hide their existence.
My wife says I make too much of that. My kids say so too.
(I suppose this may seem off-topic, but what I'm thinking is that processed human waste, while difficult to get approval as fertilizer for food crops probably could get easier approval for fuel-only crops. That is, you wouldn't have to have so much processing. In areas where the sewage system is split into dirty and clean paths (like most of Japan), easing the burden on the dirty sewage processing could significantly improve waste management and water quality.)
just another excuse for more hardware doing less work and making it possible for more people to earn minimum wage pushing buttons and failing to think.
Gates could afford to build a special fork of one of the Linux or BSD distros. (Linux would require less work, but he may find the BSD licensing more palatable, as we know.) He could afford to develop several sandboxed WINE environments capable of emulating the clot of software relevant to each OS release from 3 to whatever level of support he is dropping. He could afford to put into the packages for this special fork open source converters that would convert old documents to whatever is current at Microsoft (since he is not likely to be willing to convert to the more logical option). And, as a bonus, he could even provide software to check the sandbox for damage and report and repair it. (Actually, the repairing would not really just a bonus.)
Why doesn't he do it?
Dang, and why doesn't Apple make MOL an official product? Or even MOM?
They sell you a server. The server is for storing your files. They advertise backup.
They don't don't tell you what it actually does for you. If it's just for storage, why should the average user even buy it? If that's all, and if it's just for the "backup" that a lot of disk space gives you, a large (firewire or USB) external drive is sufficient, and can be extended with yet another.
They're selling fractional-solutions as solutions again. They say, "Our secretaries use their filing cabinets this way, and it works for us, so we'll sell you a computer system that (almost) imitates their methods." And they use terminology that happens to match up with technological terminology that means something sort-of related, but significantly harder to do with a computer and get right. And they imply that it's a general solution.
That is why M$ is evil. If they would be more circumspect with their sales, they would have just another OS that works for some purposes. But they couldn't make billions doing that, so they lie.
I mean, what is the purpose of the home file server?
Everyone wants magic "management" of their files. Microsoft sells a server that will handle some forms of incremental backup. Users try to edit the backup _directly_ and the system bombs.
Microsoft is selling the 20% solution as the 80% solution again. Or, more correctly, the 1% of functionality as the 100% solution. Yeah, they cover the most commonly requested cases, but the most commonly requested cases are not the most commonly needed. And as computer "professionals", there is a certain amount of fraud and negligence in their behavior, but because even the judges are unfamiliar with the technology, they expect to get away with it.
But, of course, someone tries an edit directly on the backup. What they probably want to do is a branch. It shouldn't even be allowed as an edit.
Think about this. The server would have to _automatically_ generate a virtual sandbox for the user. Specifics about the sandbox depend on the nature of the application doing the editing.
Even if that succeeds, the server then has to make a bunch of guesses about how to label the branch, and guide the user through some dialogs that would hopefully resolve the parts that guessing simply isn't going to work on. And you know who doing things like this with dialogs is. (Wizards? Yeah. Sure. Right. "Wizard" is an appropriate terminology here, considering that were dealing with things that don't exist in the real world. The train you, the user, where to decide you really didn't want to do that hard to manage thing, after all, and they call it a solution.)
That's the question that has my mind boggled here.
I mean, yeah, one could imagine a backup system that would notice any attempted write to a backed-up file and "do the right thing" in every case, but I'm not familiar with any real implementations.
(subversion notwithstanding.)
(Hopefully, I'm stating the obvious, as usual, but I'm wondering how you automate forks.)
to read a few of your recent posts, and it would appear that you are somebody's troll user.
From what I know of manufacturing costs, etc., your theory is all wet.
However, I don't care. The XO pushes technology in a direction that is sorely needed.
If I had a spare million dollars, I would go contract with someone to make about four thousand in a more conservative style. If I could buy a run from the guys that the OLPC group are having manufacture them, five thousand. I know where I could sell them. At profit. To adults, not kids.
If I had a spare two million, I'd be torn between porting the code and the non-CPU design to ARM or PPC (just because I'm prejudiced) and buying a run to sell in a design targeted to the upper-class kids market. Those, I'd sell at 400% markup.
iBook (Use it at work, can't leave it there because I cycle between three offices every week.) Japanese Book of Mormon -- About 1.5 inches thick, not available in electronic form yet. English "Quad" (Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine & Covenants, Bible) -- 2 1/5 inches thick. Computer reference texts -- Java or Perl cookbook, Nutshells, Unix manuals, etc. 2 liter bottle of water, lunch, etc. Work records.
I'd get the English scriptures in electronic form, but reading on the iBook is not fun when you're standing up. (And the battery charging circuit died some years back when I was foolish enough to carry in a spandex case. I really ought to fix that.)
Th Iliad several people have mentioned, if I could hang a 4G flash on it, looks really nice, and might even motivate me to scan in the Japanese Book of Mormon.
While you're at it, why don't we see Freescale/xStreme Spectrum's UWB wireless, which could make all of these cables superfluous around the house and around the office?
It's not just the speed. You'd have to build an intelligent controller into the adaptor to behave like a firewire node on the firewire cable and a USB node on the USB cable.
But I have a USB to SCSI adaptor, so the idea is probably not entirely without merit. It's not as useful as it seemed at first that it would be, but it allows me to read MOs on my old clamshell iBook.
Slashdot Mirror
no milk in them.
(Well, actually, I think I have seen milk toppings on kakigori in Japan. I know I've seen cocoa toppings on it.)
I like my ice cream crunchy.
In fact, I used to put three scoops of vanilla in a cup of milk with a tablespoon of cocoa and stir, just for the ice crystals.
--
I scream, you scream, we all scream for flea blood in our ice cream
Yeah, in the States, triclosan and stuff would be a concern.
Here in Japan, there are two separate sewage paths in most of the country, for soft sewage (sinks, shower, etc., mixes with the storm sewer outside (deep gutters!), and for hard sewage, i. e., the flush toilet. Some places have non-flush toilets, or have light-flush toilets, that drop into septic tanks, generally under the house. One house my wife and I looked at once in Kakogawa had a partial treatment plant on the septic tank -- stirred the sewage regularly to speed up the conversion. With the tanks, you'd have to have the septic truck come around every so often, and put a big vacuum house down the outside access and take it away.
Anyway, most Japanese people are very sensitive to sewage issues and don't wash industrial waste down either path. (Part of the reason is that there are often rice fields that use the storm sewers for irrigation in many neighborhoods, even in the cities, so it's easy to remember that what you wash down the drain could come back to haunt you.) Lake Biwa (which I really want to go see sometime) turned red some thirty years ago because of stuff in detergents, and citizens groups formed to push the detergent companies to make and sell bio-friendly detergents at reasonable prices, and to encourage the avoidance of the bad stuff. By the time they made laws, conformance was mostly not an issue any more.
Not everywhere in Japan has had such success with the environment, but there is a difference between Japan and the US. People don't tend to use old engine oil to kill ants and weeds here, either.
But, yeah, these are the sorts of problems that might have to be worked out to make common effluent useable for fuel crops.
What part of human waste is non-biodegradable?
But I'm not really thinking of dumping the septic lines directly on the land where the switchgrass would grow.
What I'm thinking is stopping the sewage processing at the point where it becomes hard. Aerate the slurry a bit and then send it to fuel fields instead of evaporation pools. Maybe coarse filter it for toys and jewelry and such things that get occasionally dropped down the toilet, but I think that's usually done before aeration anyway.
The biggest problem with human waste as fertilizer is the parasites, and those are pretty much destroyed by the time aeration is complete. Any bacterial/viral products or biological poisons will break down naturally if you let the field lie unfertilized a year before you convert to food.
Of course, these days there are other things in the sewage, leftover anti-depressants and such. Is that what you're talking about? I'm guessing those will be better handled by putting them in fields than by putting them in the rivers. Guessing being the operational word, and I don't have the tools to test the guess.
joudanzuki
Or something other than corn?
Yeah, it looks like going with butanol with this (patented) process would be a better return on human investment than ethanol from corn, but how does it compare to ethanol from other sources? (And is there a possibility that going to butanol instead of ethanol might make it easier to clear the cellulose barrier?)
Factories on land that can produce cereal grains are not a good idea. But factories on land the kind of land that switchgrass grows on would be much less a waste of good land.
are the ones that no one can pin down.
The lobbies whose proponents don't even recognize themselves as part of a formal lobby are even more powerful in the end than the ones that hide their existence.
There are better food uses for those grains, as well.
(The idea that you shouldn't burn your food has a certain ironic twist when applied to beer.)
My wife says I make too much of that. My kids say so too.
(I suppose this may seem off-topic, but what I'm thinking is that processed human waste, while difficult to get approval as fertilizer for food crops probably could get easier approval for fuel-only crops. That is, you wouldn't have to have so much processing. In areas where the sewage system is split into dirty and clean paths (like most of Japan), easing the burden on the dirty sewage processing could significantly improve waste management and water quality.)
just another excuse for more hardware doing less work and making it possible for more people to earn minimum wage pushing buttons and failing to think.
if you can read through his language:
There are a lot of managers making money in the software industry by failing to solve problems.
They don't like their boats rocked, because they all dream of becoming like Bill Gates.
... it's not the usual turn of phrase, ...
Bill Gates has how many billions of dollars?
(Can he fire the Ballmer?)
Gates could afford to build a special fork of one of the Linux or BSD distros. (Linux would require less work, but he may find the BSD licensing more palatable, as we know.) He could afford to develop several sandboxed WINE environments capable of emulating the clot of software relevant to each OS release from 3 to whatever level of support he is dropping. He could afford to put into the packages for this special fork open source converters that would convert old documents to whatever is current at Microsoft (since he is not likely to be willing to convert to the more logical option). And, as a bonus, he could even provide software to check the sandbox for damage and report and repair it. (Actually, the repairing would not really just a bonus.)
Why doesn't he do it?
Dang, and why doesn't Apple make MOL an official product? Or even MOM?
when asking many of them to simply save as rtf is way more than they can handle without hand-holding, even the second or third time around?
I smell the smell of a new "service" in the works -- convert your old documents to the new formats "safely".
Yeah, I want to experiment with using LVM to make snapshots, but how do you provide a system that allows you to directly edit a snapshot?
I don't think it's something you really want to do.
They sell you a server. The server is for storing your files. They advertise backup.
They don't don't tell you what it actually does for you. If it's just for storage, why should the average user even buy it? If that's all, and if it's just for the "backup" that a lot of disk space gives you, a large (firewire or USB) external drive is sufficient, and can be extended with yet another.
They're selling fractional-solutions as solutions again. They say, "Our secretaries use their filing cabinets this way, and it works for us, so we'll sell you a computer system that (almost) imitates their methods." And they use terminology that happens to match up with technological terminology that means something sort-of related, but significantly harder to do with a computer and get right. And they imply that it's a general solution.
That is why M$ is evil. If they would be more circumspect with their sales, they would have just another OS that works for some purposes. But they couldn't make billions doing that, so they lie.
joudanzuki
I mean, what is the purpose of the home file server?
Everyone wants magic "management" of their files. Microsoft sells a server that will handle some forms of incremental backup. Users try to edit the backup _directly_ and the system bombs.
Microsoft is selling the 20% solution as the 80% solution again. Or, more correctly, the 1% of functionality as the 100% solution. Yeah, they cover the most commonly requested cases, but the most commonly requested cases are not the most commonly needed. And as computer "professionals", there is a certain amount of fraud and negligence in their behavior, but because even the judges are unfamiliar with the technology, they expect to get away with it.
But, of course, someone tries an edit directly on the backup. What they probably want to do is a branch. It shouldn't even be allowed as an edit.
Think about this. The server would have to _automatically_ generate a virtual sandbox for the user. Specifics about the sandbox depend on the nature of the application doing the editing.
Even if that succeeds, the server then has to make a bunch of guesses about how to label the branch, and guide the user through some dialogs that would hopefully resolve the parts that guessing simply isn't going to work on. And you know who doing things like this with dialogs is. (Wizards? Yeah. Sure. Right. "Wizard" is an appropriate terminology here, considering that were dealing with things that don't exist in the real world. The train you, the user, where to decide you really didn't want to do that hard to manage thing, after all, and they call it a solution.)
That's the question that has my mind boggled here.
I mean, yeah, one could imagine a backup system that would notice any attempted write to a backed-up file and "do the right thing" in every case, but I'm not familiar with any real implementations.
(subversion notwithstanding.)
(Hopefully, I'm stating the obvious, as usual, but I'm wondering how you automate forks.)
to read a few of your recent posts, and it would appear that you are somebody's troll user.
From what I know of manufacturing costs, etc., your theory is all wet.
However, I don't care. The XO pushes technology in a direction that is sorely needed.
If I had a spare million dollars, I would go contract with someone to make about four thousand in a more conservative style. If I could buy a run from the guys that the OLPC group are having manufacture them, five thousand. I know where I could sell them. At profit. To adults, not kids.
If I had a spare two million, I'd be torn between porting the code and the non-CPU design to ARM or PPC (just because I'm prejudiced) and buying a run to sell in a design targeted to the upper-class kids market. Those, I'd sell at 400% markup.
But you are a troll.
How do you know?
Maybe that radiation was keeping some pest in check.
Oh, and thinking about the reactor in the basement, yeah, there would be nothing close but the cockroaches.
And rats.
What would it be like to have your own private 200kW source in your own basement, though?
Things in my bags when I ride the train to work:
iBook (Use it at work, can't leave it there because I cycle between three offices every week.)
Japanese Book of Mormon -- About 1.5 inches thick, not available in electronic form yet.
English "Quad" (Book of Mormon, Pearl of Great Price, Doctrine & Covenants, Bible) -- 2 1/5 inches thick.
Computer reference texts -- Java or Perl cookbook, Nutshells, Unix manuals, etc.
2 liter bottle of water, lunch, etc.
Work records.
I'd get the English scriptures in electronic form, but reading on the iBook is not fun when you're standing up. (And the battery charging circuit died some years back when I was foolish enough to carry in a spandex case. I really ought to fix that.)
Th Iliad several people have mentioned, if I could hang a 4G flash on it, looks really nice, and might even motivate me to scan in the Japanese Book of Mormon.
If you want one of those that isn't tainted by charity, build your own.
You can, you know.
While you're at it, why don't we see Freescale/xStreme Spectrum's UWB wireless, which could make all of these cables superfluous around the house and around the office?
It's not just the speed. You'd have to build an intelligent controller into the adaptor to behave like a firewire node on the firewire cable and a USB node on the USB cable.
But I have a USB to SCSI adaptor, so the idea is probably not entirely without merit. It's not as useful as it seemed at first that it would be, but it allows me to read MOs on my old clamshell iBook.
Or do inferior memes rule over superior memes, as well?
(Actually, there is a better way to describe this, but it's a verse of Mormon scripture: D&C 1: 19.)