I find this "insight" particularly interesting as I think back to my time growing up in the midwest US.
I vividly recall the governement paying farmers to *not* harvest their corn crops in an efford to normalize pricing and to prevent a depression that would have sent many of them to the poor house. This followed on the heels of the massive oil shortages that resulted from the OPEC embargoes of the '70s (I'm barely old enough to remember those days, being born in 1971).
In my teens and early 20's, I remember finding out that ethanol blend gasolines were actually only a midwestern thing, and only a very few US refineries were capable of making it. Being an alchohol not too dissimilar from that which is burned in "top fuel" drag cars (another interest from my teens), it seemed silly to me then, and now, that we as a nation could kill two proverbial birds with one stone by not only giving corn farmers an expanded market, but also diminish our reliance on fossil fuels, be they foriegn or domestic.
I'm glad that "the powers that be" are finally starting to look at this more closely. I guess it took the real emergence of fuel alternatives, such as hydrogen feul cells, and yet more major conflict in the middle east, which threatens our foriegn oil supply, for the nation as a whole to start looking around for real, viable alternatives.
Of course, even if they made IC engines that burned pure ethanol, it will still be a while before they could have it available on enough corners in the country to make it viable. But the same can be said about any gasoline or diesel fuel.
It's my understanding that Intel will not be continuing the IA-64 line as they finally admitted, due to a combination of poor marketing and/or architechture, that the platform isn't viable (and, imho, the overwhelming supiriority of the Opteron platform versus IS-64 or Xeon).
Yet Debian is earmarking this as a "keeper" when they're trimming some fat? Odd. And what about the cage-rattling I heard not long ago about a "Debianized" verison of Open Solaris? Guess that's died before being born?
I've been using H&R Block's online program since the year it launched, or close -- at least the last 4-5 years. I've never had a problem with it.
3 great things about their online service:
1) It's only $50 total for e-file and direct deposit combined ($30 fed, $20 state). I don't qualify due to income for the free returns posted by a few (many won't if you make more than $75k/year).
2) It's kept as current as any TurboTax or similar software, possibly moreso only because it IS online and bug fixes can be made near-real-time instead of pressing new media.
3) It works FLAWLESSLY with Mozilla (my browser of choice) and FireFox. No need for nasty IE (this has changed in the last couple years. I was forced to use IE for their site originally).
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I find this "insight" particularly interesting as I think back to my time growing up in the midwest US.
I vividly recall the governement paying farmers to *not* harvest their corn crops in an efford to normalize pricing and to prevent a depression that would have sent many of them to the poor house. This followed on the heels of the massive oil shortages that resulted from the OPEC embargoes of the '70s (I'm barely old enough to remember those days, being born in 1971).
In my teens and early 20's, I remember finding out that ethanol blend gasolines were actually only a midwestern thing, and only a very few US refineries were capable of making it. Being an alchohol not too dissimilar from that which is burned in "top fuel" drag cars (another interest from my teens), it seemed silly to me then, and now, that we as a nation could kill two proverbial birds with one stone by not only giving corn farmers an expanded market, but also diminish our reliance on fossil fuels, be they foriegn or domestic.
I'm glad that "the powers that be" are finally starting to look at this more closely. I guess it took the real emergence of fuel alternatives, such as hydrogen feul cells, and yet more major conflict in the middle east, which threatens our foriegn oil supply, for the nation as a whole to start looking around for real, viable alternatives.
Of course, even if they made IC engines that burned pure ethanol, it will still be a while before they could have it available on enough corners in the country to make it viable. But the same can be said about any gasoline or diesel fuel.
It's my understanding that Intel will not be continuing the IA-64 line as they finally admitted, due to a combination of poor marketing and/or architechture, that the platform isn't viable (and, imho, the overwhelming supiriority of the Opteron platform versus IS-64 or Xeon). Yet Debian is earmarking this as a "keeper" when they're trimming some fat? Odd. And what about the cage-rattling I heard not long ago about a "Debianized" verison of Open Solaris? Guess that's died before being born?
I've been using H&R Block's online program since the year it launched, or close -- at least the last 4-5 years. I've never had a problem with it. 3 great things about their online service: 1) It's only $50 total for e-file and direct deposit combined ($30 fed, $20 state). I don't qualify due to income for the free returns posted by a few (many won't if you make more than $75k/year). 2) It's kept as current as any TurboTax or similar software, possibly moreso only because it IS online and bug fixes can be made near-real-time instead of pressing new media. 3) It works FLAWLESSLY with Mozilla (my browser of choice) and FireFox. No need for nasty IE (this has changed in the last couple years. I was forced to use IE for their site originally).