Hydrogen has no future. You need more energy to create it than you get out of it. Its "energy return on investment" (EROI) is negative. Biodiesel has a positive EROI.
Moreover, as a carrier, hydrogen has all kinds of problems (safety, you need a major overhaul of the entire infrastructure, entirely new cars, etc...).
Hybrid diesel and hybrid biodiesel cars are the only real alternative.
In 2003, MIT's Lab for Energy and the Environment made a study comparing the entire lifecycle for idealized automotive drive systems (internal combustion, hybrids, fuel cells).
The results were very clear:
-straight gasoline scores worst of all
-gasoline hybrids score far worse than diesel hybrids
-diesel hybrids are nearly just as good as the best fuel cell systems.
The study didn't include biodiesel in hybrid diesel cars, but any laymen can dedude that it is the technology of the future.
de Brey has a very immature notion of what life is: life is nothing more than the evolution of genetic material which is passed on over generations.
In that sense, we are already immortal.
De Brey focuses on the individual too much, but life has nothing to do with individuals; life is a group thing, and based on permanent exchanges of genetic info.
Take away this motor, which de Brey wants to do, and you end up with a nice engineered set of individuals, but not with life. In fact, you destroy the essence of life.
de Brey basically doesn't know what he's talking about.
A stay in Space as a tourist is like owning a very expensive handbag made of very precious Amazonian crocodile leather (uh). It's a status symbol, nothing more. And now that the crocs are gone and Antarctic tourism is passe, they need something new.
For the rest, space is what it is, a very cold void for the wealthy.
Google's new service "Google Suggest" (beta) uses the same algorithm to guess what you're looking for and suggest terms while you type.
A quick test reveals that this service, like the Zeitgeist, is completely out of touch with reality too:
-Type: "po"... >> Google suggests: poems, pottery barn, post office, etc... [not what we're looking for]
-Continue: "por"... >> Google still suggests silly things like: porsche, portable dvd players, etc...
[obviously not what we're looking for, can't afford it]
-Let's stick to it: "porn"... >> Google has just stopped suggesting alternatives, although it could have mentioned "pornalíy" (a beautiful town in Slovakia), "pornattaya" (a famous Thai writer), "pornocrates" (a classic painting by Belgian artist Félicien Rops), etc...
This entire DRM issue is an infringement of our right to privacy. The technology will allow producers to track every move of every piece of content, any time. They will know what I watch or listen to, how many times, when and where.
In short, they will have to come up with something less intrusive, or a lot of people will go for "trackfree" content instead.
How nice to discover more and more about the EU, every single day, because of this kind of news.
Now at least we all know that the EU has its own Court of First Instance. Let's all be grateful to Microsoft!
It's truly amazing to see how delusional the new world bourgeoisie can get. Curitiba is praised by green boys and girls from the rich west as being the world's first ecologically sustainable city.
And now we get this architecturally mediocre tower to add to the ecology-cum-technology image.
All the while, in the bas fonds of Curitiban society, live the hundreds of thousands of people who have to survive on less than a dollar a day, and who survive in an hellish, brutal and informal slum economy.
The image of the Western bourgeois, looking out over the poor masses, from his luxury tower, hallucinating about ecology and the environment as his new ideology, is really more colonialist than the worst colonialist will ever be.
I have a cliché and I can't refrain from posting it: the japanese obsession with technological gadgetry even pervades their sexuality. Not that their sexlives are technologized, but they're "fetishized". The fetish is in sexuality, what a gadget is in economic behavior.
Now ask any h**ker who's ever worked in Japan, and she'll tell you that the Japanese are into things such as sniffing feet, touching zippers, cutting toenails and making origami from panties. Everything is fragmented, the person is reduced to an assemblage of sexual gadgets.
There must be something very deeply anthropological about this fetishization of ordinary life. You can't explain Japan's gizmobsession simply by referring to demographics, social space-time factors or other such sociological schemes. There must be something deeply ritualistic in all this, stemming from the traditional mind of the Japanese.
Ah well, maybe it's too much of a cliché and maybe it says more about our Eurocentric obsession with the East. We will never really know.
Well, despite your irony, you're telling the truth. I'd rather be killed in an accident because my government was promoting the common good, than be killed in an accident because a few individuals wanted more profit. It's a major difference.
In 1905, Belgian colonial entrepreneurs called the Red Rubber massacres in the Congo the result of "negligence which goes with the industrial extraction and exploitation of the resources of our great Crown Colony". Millions of people died ("they didn't drink enough water, we told them to do so; they died from exhaustion", "we cut off their hands to teach them that they should drink more water", etc...).
The perpetrators have never been brought to justice. Instead, they have received statues and monuments. Brussels, my city, was built on the profits stemming from those ideological "accidents".
And the capital which was amassed by these perpetrators still works today, in mysterious ways. It has increased and expanded. I'm sure UC will be punished and will give some financial compensation. But Capital moves so much faster than the sorrow and the memories of the people whose lives have been destroyed by it.
In my teenager years, I often participated in political and party ad campaigns. This was before the age of the internet and electronic advertising. So I went out with my friends, in a minibus, to paste posters in the streets. We got paid for it. It was a very pleasant war, between youth "gangs". All you had to do was to paste as many posters over the other party's posters, or rip theirs off, to bankrupt them faster than your own party. Those who held out longest and were best organized, won. This was all very legal.
The lesson I learned was that the best strategy is to paste ("click") your competition into bankruptcy. We often succeeded in convincing rival pasters to throw away their posters ("click their own ads"), and we would then pay them part of our money.
Exactly, and on this same topic Yahoo reports that Pacific islanders (who are already sueing the US government) now have new ammunition for legal cases blaming the United States for global warming, advocates say.
Claims linked to climate change could dwarf billion-dollar awards against tobacco companies if U.N. forecasts to 2100 of rising temperatures, higher sea levels, catastrophic storms and droughts turn out to be true, they said.
"This is the kind of evidence that will help those seeking compensation," Peter Roderick, director of the Climate Justice Program which advises plaintiffs, said of a study of Europe's 2003 heatwave published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"Reverse migration" is a sociological term, indicating the reversal of reasons for migration from one to another culture.
A "host culture" has certain elements which attract immigrants (e.g. the West has political freedom, and great salaries). When a few of these elements in the host culture get eroded, and these same elements become attractive in the "home culture", the effect is that not only the immigrants may decide to return, but that people from the "host culture" follow them along and become immigrants themselves.
It's quite a well established sociological concept.
The end goal is still to slaughter the lower races into obeying the American Empire and its unsatiable appetite for other people's resources.
The part where you say that the American Army is there to protect you, is basically a way to appease you. The business of Empires is not so much to protect you; it is to butcher others into obedience.
It's a classic: go to a different culture and stay there for at least one year.
In this age of anti-political correctness and anti-multicul, I dare to hold a plea for the "foreign culture experience". It teaches you who you really are, what you're really good at, and it opens you up to your hidden qualities. It may boost self-confidence for the long term.
I don't believe in simulation when it comes to learning "life skills" (like leadership). Simulation is good for learning how to drive a car - for simple, technical things. And I'm sure most of us would not like to be treated like cars by technocrats without real skills.
Leadership has a lot more to do with instinct, affect, and charisma; it's not something you learn consciously, it's something you acquire subconsciously.
Anyway, I firmly believe that the future of learning will be one away from simulation and virtual environments, back to exploring 'phenomenological' contexts much deeper. Maybe both are not mutually exclusive anyways.
Yahoo story, just in:
http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/ 20040928/ap_on_el_pr/election_observers_1
Presidential Elections - AP
Observers Foresee Snags in U.S. Election
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Problems loom for the presidential election including voting equipment changes that could delay the outcome past Nov. 2, a group of international observers said Tuesday in a report.
A five-member team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation (news - web sites) in Europe, a 55-state security group invited by the Bush administration, also pointed to problems with voter registration lists and provisional and absentee ballots, allegations of voter intimidation and slow implementation of the Help America Vote Act.
"In general, the nationwide replacement of voting equipment, inspired by the disputes witnessed during the 2000 elections, primarily in Florida, may potentially become a source of even greater controversy during the forthcoming elections," said the 11-page report.
Many of the new touch-screen machines that will be used by up to 50 million voters on Nov. 2 do not produce the paper ballots needed for a manual recount of votes, the report said.
This "may cause postelection disputes and litigation, potentially delaying the announcement of final results," it said.
The OSCE (news - web sites) observers were in the United States from Sept. 7-10. A larger group will return for the election and focus on the potential problems noted in Tuesday's report. Among them:
_Slow implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.86 billion to replace outdated machines and reform election procedures.
_Poorly maintained voter registration lists and a hodgepodge of procedures for handling absentee and provisional ballots could result in voter disenfranchisement and postelection litigation. Provisional ballots are a new feature, meant to allow anyone who shows up at the polls to vote even if their name isn't on precinct lists.
_The report criticized steps by states to allow military and overseas voters to fax rather than mail their completed ballots, calling them inconsistent "with the principle of the secrecy of the vote."
_The observers said the scale of complaints about intimidation of minority voters was difficult to assess but that "such allegations were repeated by Democratic Party representatives, while the Republican Party officials did not seem to share these concerns."
OSCE: http://www.osce.org/odihr/?pageelections
We called our son Virgin 1, our two daughters Virgin 2 and Virgin 3, I still call my wife Virgin Absolute, and our dog's called Virgin 4. (Sit! Virgin 4, sit!)
We are a creative family. We are saving for a Virgin car because we know beardie's going to brand a sleek hydrogen car soon. We are going to call it our Virgin 5.
We are a creative family. We considered to follow the "Easy" brand, but Virgin conveys a sense of purity. We are a pure family. We have values and such.
I'm a strong supporter of the compulsory vote. In my country, the system works perfectly. It is undoubtedly the most democratic system in the world.
I think democracy and citizenship imply an "active duty" on the part of the citizen.
It's just becoming difficult to call the US a democracy when you see that more people voted on "American Idol" than during the previous elections where turnout was at historic lows.
Moreover, sociologists know very well that the ones who would benefit most from being politically represented, are the ones who don't turn up to vote under a free system like that of the US.
Compulsory voting is the way to go. It has nothing to do with curtailing freedom. On the contrary, it is a condition to gain freedom.
I read some confused messages here about the US being "first and foremost a Republic".
I would just want to point out that "republic" and "democracy" are not mutually exclusive, they are simply referring to two different things:
-a republic is a state form -a democracy is a legislative-cum-electoral process within a particular state form.
The US is a Republic with a representative democracy. My country is a parliamentary democracy with a Royal House as its highest authority. Socialist democratic republics (like the DDR) were Republics who called themselves democratic but their democracies were not directly representative, although they were republics.
In short, do not confuse the republic as a state form, with democracy as a political process. Both are analytically belonging to different orders.
And for those who are implying that the US is a Republic and hence "republicanism" should remain the driving force, I can tell you that the Bush family is the first in US history who seem to be trying to create a dynasty, despite their superficial Republicanism.
A Republic and a democracy are not mutually exclusive, they just refer to two different things:
-a republic is a state form -"democracy" is an election and legislation process organized within a particular state form
You can be a Republic and have a Democracy at the same time. This is the case of the US. There are other cases, like my country, which is a parliamentary democracy with a royal house as the highest power; so not a republic.
The problem begins when Republicans start to promote people who show clear signs of being willing to get rid of the Republic, and install a dynasty instead, if possible via a pseudo-democratic process. This is clearly the case with the Bush family.
I think the OSCE's role should not be exaggerated. They are monitors. They have no legal, political or "rectifying" authority. At best they have a mild form of moral authority (and only for Europeans, I guess).
If the US re-elects Bush in a fair way, we Europeans will be disappointed, but we respect your choice. If the US re-selects Bush in an unfair way, we will be even more disappointed, but we respect your politics. After all, there's not much we can do. Sending monitors is all we got.
Slashdot Mirror
Hydrogen has no future. You need more energy to create it than you get out of it. Its "energy return on investment" (EROI) is negative. Biodiesel has a positive EROI.
1 _RP.pdf
Moreover, as a carrier, hydrogen has all kinds of problems (safety, you need a major overhaul of the entire infrastructure, entirely new cars, etc...).
Hybrid diesel and hybrid biodiesel cars are the only real alternative.
In 2003, MIT's Lab for Energy and the Environment made a study comparing the entire lifecycle for idealized automotive drive systems (internal combustion, hybrids, fuel cells). The results were very clear:
-straight gasoline scores worst of all
-gasoline hybrids score far worse than diesel hybrids
-diesel hybrids are nearly just as good as the best fuel cell systems.
The study didn't include biodiesel in hybrid diesel cars, but any laymen can dedude that it is the technology of the future.
You have to look at the entire lifecycle, when comparing technologies. And hydrogen/fuel cells are not efficient.
MIT's study can be found here (pdf): http://lfee.mit.edu/publications/PDF/LFEE_2003-00
de Brey has a very immature notion of what life is: life is nothing more than the evolution of genetic material which is passed on over generations.
In that sense, we are already immortal.
De Brey focuses on the individual too much, but life has nothing to do with individuals; life is a group thing, and based on permanent exchanges of genetic info.
Take away this motor, which de Brey wants to do, and you end up with a nice engineered set of individuals, but not with life. In fact, you destroy the essence of life.
de Brey basically doesn't know what he's talking about.
A stay in Space as a tourist is like owning a very expensive handbag made of very precious Amazonian crocodile leather (uh). It's a status symbol, nothing more. And now that the crocs are gone and Antarctic tourism is passe, they need something new.
For the rest, space is what it is, a very cold void for the wealthy.
Google's new service "Google Suggest" (beta) uses the same algorithm to guess what you're looking for and suggest terms while you type.
... >> Google suggests: poems, pottery barn, post office, etc... [not what we're looking for]
A quick test reveals that this service, like the Zeitgeist, is completely out of touch with reality too:
-Type: "po"
-Continue: "por"... >> Google still suggests silly things like: porsche, portable dvd players, etc... [obviously not what we're looking for, can't afford it]
-Let's stick to it: "porn"... >> Google has just stopped suggesting alternatives, although it could have mentioned "pornalíy" (a beautiful town in Slovakia), "pornattaya" (a famous Thai writer), "pornocrates" (a classic painting by Belgian artist Félicien Rops), etc...
This is disapp...
This entire DRM issue is an infringement of our right to privacy. The technology will allow producers to track every move of every piece of content, any time. They will know what I watch or listen to, how many times, when and where. In short, they will have to come up with something less intrusive, or a lot of people will go for "trackfree" content instead.
How nice to discover more and more about the EU, every single day, because of this kind of news.
Now at least we all know that the EU has its own Court of First Instance. Let's all be grateful to Microsoft!
It's truly amazing to see how delusional the new world bourgeoisie can get. Curitiba is praised by green boys and girls from the rich west as being the world's first ecologically sustainable city. And now we get this architecturally mediocre tower to add to the ecology-cum-technology image.
All the while, in the bas fonds of Curitiban society, live the hundreds of thousands of people who have to survive on less than a dollar a day, and who survive in an hellish, brutal and informal slum economy.
The image of the Western bourgeois, looking out over the poor masses, from his luxury tower, hallucinating about ecology and the environment as his new ideology, is really more colonialist than the worst colonialist will ever be.
This is quite appalling.
I have a cliché and I can't refrain from posting it: the japanese obsession with technological gadgetry even pervades their sexuality. Not that their sexlives are technologized, but they're "fetishized". The fetish is in sexuality, what a gadget is in economic behavior.
Now ask any h**ker who's ever worked in Japan, and she'll tell you that the Japanese are into things such as sniffing feet, touching zippers, cutting toenails and making origami from panties. Everything is fragmented, the person is reduced to an assemblage of sexual gadgets.
There must be something very deeply anthropological about this fetishization of ordinary life. You can't explain Japan's gizmobsession simply by referring to demographics, social space-time factors or other such sociological schemes. There must be something deeply ritualistic in all this, stemming from the traditional mind of the Japanese.
Ah well, maybe it's too much of a cliché and maybe it says more about our Eurocentric obsession with the East. We will never really know.
Well, despite your irony, you're telling the truth. I'd rather be killed in an accident because my government was promoting the common good, than be killed in an accident because a few individuals wanted more profit. It's a major difference.
In 1905, Belgian colonial entrepreneurs called the Red Rubber massacres in the Congo the result of "negligence which goes with the industrial extraction and exploitation of the resources of our great Crown Colony". Millions of people died ("they didn't drink enough water, we told them to do so; they died from exhaustion", "we cut off their hands to teach them that they should drink more water", etc...).
The perpetrators have never been brought to justice. Instead, they have received statues and monuments. Brussels, my city, was built on the profits stemming from those ideological "accidents".
And the capital which was amassed by these perpetrators still works today, in mysterious ways. It has increased and expanded. I'm sure UC will be punished and will give some financial compensation. But Capital moves so much faster than the sorrow and the memories of the people whose lives have been destroyed by it.
In my teenager years, I often participated in political and party ad campaigns. This was before the age of the internet and electronic advertising. So I went out with my friends, in a minibus, to paste posters in the streets. We got paid for it. It was a very pleasant war, between youth "gangs". All you had to do was to paste as many posters over the other party's posters, or rip theirs off, to bankrupt them faster than your own party. Those who held out longest and were best organized, won. This was all very legal.
The lesson I learned was that the best strategy is to paste ("click") your competition into bankruptcy. We often succeeded in convincing rival pasters to throw away their posters ("click their own ads"), and we would then pay them part of our money.
Exactly, and on this same topic Yahoo reports that Pacific islanders (who are already sueing the US government) now have new ammunition for legal cases blaming the United States for global warming, advocates say.
Claims linked to climate change could dwarf billion-dollar awards against tobacco companies if U.N. forecasts to 2100 of rising temperatures, higher sea levels, catastrophic storms and droughts turn out to be true, they said.
"This is the kind of evidence that will help those seeking compensation," Peter Roderick, director of the Climate Justice Program which advises plaintiffs, said of a study of Europe's 2003 heatwave published on Wednesday in the journal Nature.
"Reverse migration" is a sociological term, indicating the reversal of reasons for migration from one to another culture. A "host culture" has certain elements which attract immigrants (e.g. the West has political freedom, and great salaries). When a few of these elements in the host culture get eroded, and these same elements become attractive in the "home culture", the effect is that not only the immigrants may decide to return, but that people from the "host culture" follow them along and become immigrants themselves. It's quite a well established sociological concept.
The end goal is still to slaughter the lower races into obeying the American Empire and its unsatiable appetite for other people's resources. The part where you say that the American Army is there to protect you, is basically a way to appease you. The business of Empires is not so much to protect you; it is to butcher others into obedience.
Maybe Mr Ashcroft knows how to fix this. The man is watching everything.
It's a classic: go to a different culture and stay there for at least one year.
In this age of anti-political correctness and anti-multicul, I dare to hold a plea for the "foreign culture experience". It teaches you who you really are, what you're really good at, and it opens you up to your hidden qualities. It may boost self-confidence for the long term.
I don't believe in simulation when it comes to learning "life skills" (like leadership). Simulation is good for learning how to drive a car - for simple, technical things. And I'm sure most of us would not like to be treated like cars by technocrats without real skills.
Leadership has a lot more to do with instinct, affect, and charisma; it's not something you learn consciously, it's something you acquire subconsciously.
Anyway, I firmly believe that the future of learning will be one away from simulation and virtual environments, back to exploring 'phenomenological' contexts much deeper. Maybe both are not mutually exclusive anyways.
Yahoo story, just in: http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/ 20040928/ap_on_el_pr/election_observers_1
Presidential Elections - AP
Observers Foresee Snags in U.S. Election
By ERICA WERNER, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - Problems loom for the presidential election including voting equipment changes that could delay the outcome past Nov. 2, a group of international observers said Tuesday in a report.
A five-member team from the Organization for Security and Cooperation (news - web sites) in Europe, a 55-state security group invited by the Bush administration, also pointed to problems with voter registration lists and provisional and absentee ballots, allegations of voter intimidation and slow implementation of the Help America Vote Act.
"In general, the nationwide replacement of voting equipment, inspired by the disputes witnessed during the 2000 elections, primarily in Florida, may potentially become a source of even greater controversy during the forthcoming elections," said the 11-page report.
Many of the new touch-screen machines that will be used by up to 50 million voters on Nov. 2 do not produce the paper ballots needed for a manual recount of votes, the report said.
This "may cause postelection disputes and litigation, potentially delaying the announcement of final results," it said.
The OSCE (news - web sites) observers were in the United States from Sept. 7-10. A larger group will return for the election and focus on the potential problems noted in Tuesday's report. Among them:
_Slow implementation of the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which authorized $3.86 billion to replace outdated machines and reform election procedures.
_Poorly maintained voter registration lists and a hodgepodge of procedures for handling absentee and provisional ballots could result in voter disenfranchisement and postelection litigation. Provisional ballots are a new feature, meant to allow anyone who shows up at the polls to vote even if their name isn't on precinct lists.
_The report criticized steps by states to allow military and overseas voters to fax rather than mail their completed ballots, calling them inconsistent "with the principle of the secrecy of the vote."
_The observers said the scale of complaints about intimidation of minority voters was difficult to assess but that "such allegations were repeated by Democratic Party representatives, while the Republican Party officials did not seem to share these concerns."
OSCE: http://www.osce.org/odihr/?pageelections
We called our son Virgin 1, our two daughters Virgin 2 and Virgin 3, I still call my wife Virgin Absolute, and our dog's called Virgin 4. (Sit! Virgin 4, sit!)
We are a creative family. We are saving for a Virgin car because we know beardie's going to brand a sleek hydrogen car soon. We are going to call it our Virgin 5.
We are a creative family. We considered to follow the "Easy" brand, but Virgin conveys a sense of purity. We are a pure family. We have values and such.
Maybe I am your ex girlfriend.
I'm a strong supporter of the compulsory vote. In my country, the system works perfectly. It is undoubtedly the most democratic system in the world. I think democracy and citizenship imply an "active duty" on the part of the citizen. It's just becoming difficult to call the US a democracy when you see that more people voted on "American Idol" than during the previous elections where turnout was at historic lows. Moreover, sociologists know very well that the ones who would benefit most from being politically represented, are the ones who don't turn up to vote under a free system like that of the US. Compulsory voting is the way to go. It has nothing to do with curtailing freedom. On the contrary, it is a condition to gain freedom.
I hate the thought of spending US$ 200,000 for 3 minutes of weightlessness. I want a space blimp instead. I like it slow and big.
I read some confused messages here about the US being "first and foremost a Republic".
I would just want to point out that "republic" and "democracy" are not mutually exclusive, they are simply referring to two different things:
-a republic is a state form
-a democracy is a legislative-cum-electoral process within a particular state form.
The US is a Republic with a representative democracy. My country is a parliamentary democracy with a Royal House as its highest authority. Socialist democratic republics (like the DDR) were Republics who called themselves democratic but their democracies were not directly representative, although they were republics.
In short, do not confuse the republic as a state form, with democracy as a political process. Both are analytically belonging to different orders.
And for those who are implying that the US is a Republic and hence "republicanism" should remain the driving force, I can tell you that the Bush family is the first in US history who seem to be trying to create a dynasty, despite their superficial Republicanism.
exactly, "republic" refers to a state form, "democracy" refers to a legislative-cum-election process within a particular state form.
I've posted this before. The babble about the US being first and foremost a Republic (as if both are mutually exclusive), is non-sensical.
Why do you make this nuance?
A Republic and a democracy are not mutually exclusive, they just refer to two different things:
-a republic is a state form
-"democracy" is an election and legislation process organized within a particular state form
You can be a Republic and have a Democracy at the same time. This is the case of the US. There are other cases, like my country, which is a parliamentary democracy with a royal house as the highest power; so not a republic.
The problem begins when Republicans start to promote people who show clear signs of being willing to get rid of the Republic, and install a dynasty instead, if possible via a pseudo-democratic process. This is clearly the case with the Bush family.
I think the OSCE's role should not be exaggerated. They are monitors. They have no legal, political or "rectifying" authority. At best they have a mild form of moral authority (and only for Europeans, I guess).
If the US re-elects Bush in a fair way, we Europeans will be disappointed, but we respect your choice. If the US re-selects Bush in an unfair way, we will be even more disappointed, but we respect your politics. After all, there's not much we can do. Sending monitors is all we got.