"Most people do not become ill from the asbestos they are exposed to. Asbestos exposure becomes a health concern when high concentrations of asbestos fibers are inhaled over a long time period. People who become ill from asbestos are almost always those who are exposed on a day-to-day basis in a job where they work directly with the material. As a person's exposure to fibers increases, either by breathing more fibers or by breathing fibers for a longer time, that person's risk of disease also increases. It can take anywhere from 10 to 40 years for someone to develop an asbestos-related illness after their exposure. Disease is very unlikely to result from a single, high-level exposure, or from a short period of exposure to lower levels. "
The cigarette comment was actually paraphrasing the doctor who treated my father and my grandmother for Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis when we were discussing possible environmental causes for their illness. Asbestos wasn't even on the list... but I asked because I believed as most people do, that asbestos was DANGEROUS.
Well, there goes my ability to watch any reruns of Seinfeld... starring a Microsoft shill & a racist
Actually, if I could be paid to create a pointless and counter productive ad for MS I would do it to... and I hate MS. Perhaps Jerry actually hates MS too and he intentionally accepted Millions and intentionally created a bad ad.
Maybe Jerry is like Oskar Schindler, profiting off the enemy while doing nothing to further their cause.
Actually that's really the point I was trying to make. The FCC is repeating the T-Mobile test in an effort to determine if T-Mobile's claims are justified. However, why would T-Mobile lie... if the FCC does verify thier results they could face some severe penalties (I would hope). Instead it would be in T-Mobile's best interest to ensure that the test is designed to fail.
Just like saying chemical X is harmful to humans because it kills rats in a lab when you know that chemical X is toxic to rats but not humans. I believe something like that was done with a sugar substitute once.
I realize that I used the same words more than once... but each time those words had different meanings or significance. So actually, it is a perfectly valid and readable sentence... but so that you can more easily parse it:
I have a feeling that the T-Mobile designed test will yeild the same results when it is performed by the FCC as it did when T-Mobile ran the test.
If I had mod points I would mod your critisism of my post up. Your right, asbestos was not the best example... but it is insulating the pipes above my head in my office... so it just came to me first.
There are a lot of examples where scientific evidence was provided to motivate legislation where the evidence was tainted because the testing methodolgy was not realistic to the actual application of the product or process. Pesticides are a great example of this!
That's the problem... it only SEEMS to make sense. What they really need to do is have a panel of respected and neutral engineers design their own test... one that may not be designed to fail.
There have been all kinds of laws and other legislation passed because one party managed to convince a government entity of their case by designing a test to illustrate their case.
One great example is Asbestos... Asbestos, in it's most common uses, was inert and completely safe. Even a lay person could remove asbestos tiles, insulation, etc. with little risk to their health... certainly no more risk than smoking a pack or two of cigarettes. Only those who had frequent exposure to asbestos in an airborn form were ever really at risk.
So why is asbestos, an extremely cheap and effective substance, banned in the US... simply because a test was designed which demonstrated it was unsafe. But it wasn't unsafe on the floor under your child's desk, or wrapped around a steam line, or insulating a boiler, or any of it's many uses. It was unsafe in some situations which could have been made safe with a few laws regulating it's use, the way it was mined and processed, and a few OSHA standards for individuals working with it daily.
Just like hemp, asbestos has been banned without reguard to it's value and relatively low risk to the public simply because someone created a test to show that it CAN be unsafe.
Somehow I have a feeling that T-Mobile's test will result in the same results for the FCC as it did for T-Mobile. If it doesn't then I would argue that the FCC should fine, or even remove T-Mobile's license as they are obviously not capable of properly executing a test.
My question is simply, did the FCC engineers study the actual test itself to determine if the test is really worth doing. It might be a standard test case, as such why is it news, if it's not a normal test I would try and confirm that the test itself is not skewed to prove the point.
It would be relatively easy to create a complex test that appears to illustrate a bad scenerio when in reality is simply takes advantage of some obscure phenomenon. For example, the types of antenna's used, reflection, resonance, etc... could all make the test results say something that is not generally true.
I am confused, I thought the argument being made is that it's the GPL that made Solaris open up. I will concede that the use of the GPL played a role, but it's assuming a lot to place all of the honor on the GPL.
There is nothing stopping anyone from running GPL code on Solaris. So essentially Sun could develop their own kernel (with portions pulled from BSD) and supply free GPL'd software along with some of it's own internally developed software... which is exactly what it has been doing. So what your arguement actually is, is that GPL killed BSD, in turn making it so that OpenSolaris could no longer pull free code from the BSD's to keep current. I would love for you to go on a BSD mailing list and tell them that their project is dead.
I believe its actually hardware that hurt Sun the most. For years Sun owned the high powered workstation and server market, they had the most powerful and stable machines out there. Unfortunately the edge that Sun's SPARC processors had, and that RISC had, was slowly eliminated as Intel and AMD created better and faster x86 processors. Now, even Sun is selling x86 machines and they have ported Solaris to x86. If x86 hardware were still the underdog, Sun would still be king.
Sun's major strenth is delivering rock solid hardware with a equally solid Posix compliant OS. As long as one of the BSD projects continue to develop a BSD kernel, Sun can continue to borrow code to develop Solaris.
If the GPL had never been created, it is a very likely possibility that one of the BSD's would be where Linux is now... and Sun would be opening their code to remain relevent.
It's not the GPL that hurt Sun its the fact that people like Free software more than commercial software. And, of course, that Sun's performance and stability advantages over their competitors have been greatly diminished.
I'm not trying to make them happy... but even so there is something to be said for the mindshare they have generated. I know for a fact that if not for OpenSolaris I would never have touched it or even considered it if making a purchasing recommendation.
Having seen it and used it, I may or may not depending upon the project... but the fact that I know it's there is far better than having it completely forgotten.
Another thing to consider... if Sun hadn't opened it, it's possible that they would have needed to abandon it completely as it would eventually become impossible to keep it competitive with the decreasing sales figures. At least this way there are free developers working on parts that previously only paid Sun developers could touch.
Mindshare is not code... it's actual interest in the product. I could poach code day and night, but if no one uses my software, why bother.
Sun is a corporation and they sell a product called Solaris. How do you convince someone to buy Solaris when there are free alternatives in BSD and Linux? How do you attract developers and administrators to learn to work on Solaris systems? The only way to compete with Linux for that "mindshare" to level the playing field and remove the barrier to entry.
Solaris uses code developed by BSD and tons of GPL'd software. This is not unusual, almost all modern os's use BSD derived code and GPL tools... including MS Windows. All Sun did is open their proprietary software so that new developers and admins would help Solaris maintain it's current market share and hopefully expand upon it.
Solaris is an excellent product and very well respected in it's niche... unfortunately with the low cost of hardware and the strides made by their competition Sun is finding it very hard to sell. Making it harder still is the fact that almost no one is "growing up" on the OS anymore. It used to be that Sun had servers running at all levels, from small departmental servers to large clusters; which allowed an admin to get their feet wet at on a small installation and gradually grow into a real Solairs sysadmin. Now Sun has lost most of the small and medium server business to Linux and MS... so how does one learn Solaris except to download it and install it on our own equipment.
Right... but Sun was not required to open Solaris. Their reasons for doing it had nothing to do with the GPL... it was purely to try and gain some mindshare and some industry recognition that Linux and the BSDs had taken over the years.
That's a tough argument... the GPL is very widely used but is hardly the only license. It's entirely possible that OpenSolaris would still exist if the GPL had never been used and something like BSD was used instead.
This is similar to why Linux is not yet mainstream in large organisations.
Where have you been the last 10 years... I don't know a single large organization that doesn't have a few Linux boxes doing real work. In fact, many small and medium companies use nothing else in the back of the house. Linux hasn't come to dominate the desktop in any large companies that I am aware of... but that's more of a vendor lock-in issue than a choice of open source vs commercial.
Android will always remain the esoteric maverick OS for phones which if actually installed on the phone would make your provider disconnect your phone from network.
Your under the assumption that the carrier can do this legally. If you had been following the news lately, open wireless networks are all but guaranteed. Essentially, the carrier will be required to allow your device as long as it meets standard specifications. Besides, I have yet to have any carrier disconnect my Linux laptop when I connect to their network via an aircard. As long as the radio in the phone meets the specifications for the network, there should be no fear of a phone wreaking havoc.
Apple's iPhone is current and has millions of customers. Android is virtual==zero customers. Developers want to see their code run on phones, not on emulators.
iPhone hasn't always existed, in fact it's pretty new. So at one point you could have made the same arguement against it... in fact many did. Then it was released and managed to make AT&T the fastest growing carrier in the US. And developers are writing for it. Besides, Android already has a huge selection of applications because developers have been writing for it without a phone for quite some time now.
The last thing a carrier wants is the phone receiver being overridden by some crude game written by a 13-year old who thinks it is "Hot". Corporates just don't think that way.
Your right, "corporates" think about the bottom line. If they have to disconnect a few phones because they are misbehaving on the network so what... as long as the Android phones are keeping their costs low, the customers happy, and their profits high... they will certainly be on the Android bandwagon.
You seem to think that Android is new and untested. Android has been in development for some time now, it has a large developer base, all the major carriers are watching it if not actively participating in the project to some extent, and many reputable phone manufacturers are testing it on real phones. This is not some homebrew project... it really is happening and no carrier is going to dismiss it out of hand.
I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benifit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's. The biggest issue I have with OpenSolaris is that it's still a single vendor OS. If it forks a few times and actually develops a culture and some competition between vendors than I think it will be more appealing.
That's actually what I hate and love about linux. It's a fragmented and ineffecient community, but because it's fragmented I don't have to worry that it's going away any time soon.
This guy is good, he knows his stuff and will help you choose an antenna, sell it to you, help you get it working, and guarantee it to last. He will take anything back if you are unhappy... though I can't see how you could be.
Also, many apartments have local stations coming through the cable lines (I guess they connect the cable to an antenna when not connected to cable) you might just try it.
Exactly... the US educational system is, like everything else, all about making money. I actually had professors tell us on the first day of class that we needed to have a certain book, but (wink wink) we won't actually use it during the course. Appearently he was being forced to name a text book, but wanted us to return it at our earliest convenience.
This assumes that next semester they use the same book. Publishers have been known to make changes every couple of years and discontinue the older version... forcing the professors to upgrade, making the old version obsolete.
Not to mention that I have never seen a buy back for anything close the original sale price.
Nope... the article actually states that they went one better.
Photosynthesis uses CO2 + water + sunlight to make oxygen, glucose, and water.
This process instead uses a similar technique to create hydrogen? But it doesn't, contrary to the article's title, use photosynthesis.
The thing I find strange is the requirement for a supply voltage, I almost wonder if they aren't just fooling their investors by creating a simple anode + cathode + battery + water = hydrogen & oxygen collector.
yeah... I forgot to correct some things... I started writing on one train, got interrupted, tried to salvage it, started another train of thought and appearently derailed.
The point remains however, there is plenty of evidence to support the viability of solar power as an energy source. And the arguements made in the grandparent failed when considered logically.
Your argument is valid at first glance... but it doesn't stand up if thought about logically:
1. They are not harvesting the plant material (like we animals do) to create energy, but converting carbon dioxide + water into hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. And they are trying to do it similarly to they way plants do it, because plants are the most efficient at it.
2. Not all plants are used to provide fuel to animals... in fact a relatively small portion are used for that purpose.
3. Using plant material as a fuel, as animals do, is far more inefficient and creates far more waste than using hydrogen. Animals that operate purely on plant material must spend most of their time processing the plant material to extract the energy from it. Most of what they ingest becomes waste.
(What's really interesting is that when you comparison on two animals, one that's active and one that is not... you find that much of the energy consumed is used by the processes other than moving that animal around; digestion, respiration, etc...). In fact digestion of cellulose is very very inefficient, thats why many animals chose to eat meat and get their solar energy twice removed.
4. Evolution has taught us exactly the opposite of what you suggest. One acre of farm land (solar collector, in your argument), can provide energy for many things that move about... especially if you were to consider the total energy in that 1 acre and not just the portion that is actually used. An acre of corn, for example, converts lots of sunlight into potential biomass energy... but only a small amount of that energy is actually used by animals... a few ounces of kernels per pound of plant. Not to mention the waste hydrogen that is created and simply released into the atmosphere.
Actually it's an excellent analogy... problem is it too won't work. People will continue to hide it in order to have an edge in the non-doped class.
Though in principal it would be interesting to see how the dynamics would work... for example, could a non-doped athelete beat the best doped athelete. Would people prefer to watch the doped or non-doped events? For example, heavyweight boxing is the most watched boxing class... but the speed and agility of the lower weight classes tend to make them more entertaining to actually watch.
And what could the positive ramifications be for the public... could it spur the development of a new fitness wonder drug that would essentially make all of us computer nerds more healthy? Could it instead make it more obvious how bad doping is for your body and reduce highschool locker room steriod use?
According to the Employment Standards Administration, in order to be considered exempt you must be paid on a "salary basis" (fixed amount per year), or a "fee basis" (fixed amount per job). In addition, it says that you cannot have your pay reduced for working partial days.
So if your a salaried exempt employee and your employer makes a deduction from your pay if you leave an hour or two early, they can no longer consider you an exempt employee and must follow the FLSA laws reguarding overtime. Not to mention that they might get hit with other penalties.
It seems to me that there are few employers that actually follow the FLSA at all.
(a) General rule. An employee will be considered to be paid on a ``salary basis'' within the meaning of these regulations if the employee regularly receives each pay period on a weekly, or less frequent basis, a predetermined amount constituting all or part of the employee's compensation, which amount is not subject to reduction because of variations in the quality or quantity of the work performed. Subject to the exceptions provided in paragraph (b) of this section, an exempt employee must receive the full salary for any week in which the employee performs any work without regard to the number of days or hours worked.
To qualify as an exempt executive, administrative or professional employee under section 13(a)(1) of the Act, an employee must be compensated on a salary basis at a rate of not less than $455 per week...
It says something similar with reguards to computer exemptions too.
Slashdot Mirror
... the fact that it is difficult to enforce!
http://www.hhs.gov/news/press/2001pres/20010916a.html
"Most people do not become ill from the asbestos they are exposed to. Asbestos exposure becomes a health concern when high concentrations of asbestos fibers are inhaled over a long time period. People who become ill from asbestos are almost always those who are exposed on a day-to-day basis in a job where they work directly with the material. As a person's exposure to fibers increases, either by breathing more fibers or by breathing fibers for a longer time, that person's risk of disease also increases. It can take anywhere from 10 to 40 years for someone to develop an asbestos-related illness after their exposure. Disease is very unlikely to result from a single, high-level exposure, or from a short period of exposure to lower levels. "
The cigarette comment was actually paraphrasing the doctor who treated my father and my grandmother for Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis when we were discussing possible environmental causes for their illness. Asbestos wasn't even on the list... but I asked because I believed as most people do, that asbestos was DANGEROUS.
Well, there goes my ability to watch any reruns of Seinfeld ... starring a Microsoft shill & a racist
Actually, if I could be paid to create a pointless and counter productive ad for MS I would do it to... and I hate MS. Perhaps Jerry actually hates MS too and he intentionally accepted Millions and intentionally created a bad ad.
Maybe Jerry is like Oskar Schindler, profiting off the enemy while doing nothing to further their cause.
Actually that's really the point I was trying to make. The FCC is repeating the T-Mobile test in an effort to determine if T-Mobile's claims are justified. However, why would T-Mobile lie... if the FCC does verify thier results they could face some severe penalties (I would hope). Instead it would be in T-Mobile's best interest to ensure that the test is designed to fail.
Just like saying chemical X is harmful to humans because it kills rats in a lab when you know that chemical X is toxic to rats but not humans. I believe something like that was done with a sugar substitute once.
I realize that I used the same words more than once... but each time those words had different meanings or significance. So actually, it is a perfectly valid and readable sentence... but so that you can more easily parse it:
I have a feeling that the T-Mobile designed test will yeild the same results when it is performed by the FCC as it did when T-Mobile ran the test.
If I had mod points I would mod your critisism of my post up. Your right, asbestos was not the best example... but it is insulating the pipes above my head in my office... so it just came to me first.
There are a lot of examples where scientific evidence was provided to motivate legislation where the evidence was tainted because the testing methodolgy was not realistic to the actual application of the product or process. Pesticides are a great example of this!
"seems to make sense."
That's the problem... it only SEEMS to make sense. What they really need to do is have a panel of respected and neutral engineers design their own test... one that may not be designed to fail.
There have been all kinds of laws and other legislation passed because one party managed to convince a government entity of their case by designing a test to illustrate their case.
One great example is Asbestos... Asbestos, in it's most common uses, was inert and completely safe. Even a lay person could remove asbestos tiles, insulation, etc. with little risk to their health... certainly no more risk than smoking a pack or two of cigarettes. Only those who had frequent exposure to asbestos in an airborn form were ever really at risk.
So why is asbestos, an extremely cheap and effective substance, banned in the US... simply because a test was designed which demonstrated it was unsafe. But it wasn't unsafe on the floor under your child's desk, or wrapped around a steam line, or insulating a boiler, or any of it's many uses. It was unsafe in some situations which could have been made safe with a few laws regulating it's use, the way it was mined and processed, and a few OSHA standards for individuals working with it daily.
Just like hemp, asbestos has been banned without reguard to it's value and relatively low risk to the public simply because someone created a test to show that it CAN be unsafe.
Somehow I have a feeling that T-Mobile's test will result in the same results for the FCC as it did for T-Mobile. If it doesn't then I would argue that the FCC should fine, or even remove T-Mobile's license as they are obviously not capable of properly executing a test.
My question is simply, did the FCC engineers study the actual test itself to determine if the test is really worth doing. It might be a standard test case, as such why is it news, if it's not a normal test I would try and confirm that the test itself is not skewed to prove the point.
It would be relatively easy to create a complex test that appears to illustrate a bad scenerio when in reality is simply takes advantage of some obscure phenomenon. For example, the types of antenna's used, reflection, resonance, etc... could all make the test results say something that is not generally true.
I am confused, I thought the argument being made is that it's the GPL that made Solaris open up. I will concede that the use of the GPL played a role, but it's assuming a lot to place all of the honor on the GPL.
There is nothing stopping anyone from running GPL code on Solaris. So essentially Sun could develop their own kernel (with portions pulled from BSD) and supply free GPL'd software along with some of it's own internally developed software... which is exactly what it has been doing. So what your arguement actually is, is that GPL killed BSD, in turn making it so that OpenSolaris could no longer pull free code from the BSD's to keep current. I would love for you to go on a BSD mailing list and tell them that their project is dead.
I believe its actually hardware that hurt Sun the most. For years Sun owned the high powered workstation and server market, they had the most powerful and stable machines out there. Unfortunately the edge that Sun's SPARC processors had, and that RISC had, was slowly eliminated as Intel and AMD created better and faster x86 processors. Now, even Sun is selling x86 machines and they have ported Solaris to x86. If x86 hardware were still the underdog, Sun would still be king.
Sun's major strenth is delivering rock solid hardware with a equally solid Posix compliant OS. As long as one of the BSD projects continue to develop a BSD kernel, Sun can continue to borrow code to develop Solaris.
If the GPL had never been created, it is a very likely possibility that one of the BSD's would be where Linux is now... and Sun would be opening their code to remain relevent.
It's not the GPL that hurt Sun its the fact that people like Free software more than commercial software. And, of course, that Sun's performance and stability advantages over their competitors have been greatly diminished.
I'm not trying to make them happy... but even so there is something to be said for the mindshare they have generated. I know for a fact that if not for OpenSolaris I would never have touched it or even considered it if making a purchasing recommendation.
Having seen it and used it, I may or may not depending upon the project... but the fact that I know it's there is far better than having it completely forgotten.
Another thing to consider... if Sun hadn't opened it, it's possible that they would have needed to abandon it completely as it would eventually become impossible to keep it competitive with the decreasing sales figures. At least this way there are free developers working on parts that previously only paid Sun developers could touch.
Mindshare is not code... it's actual interest in the product. I could poach code day and night, but if no one uses my software, why bother.
Sun is a corporation and they sell a product called Solaris. How do you convince someone to buy Solaris when there are free alternatives in BSD and Linux? How do you attract developers and administrators to learn to work on Solaris systems? The only way to compete with Linux for that "mindshare" to level the playing field and remove the barrier to entry.
Solaris uses code developed by BSD and tons of GPL'd software. This is not unusual, almost all modern os's use BSD derived code and GPL tools... including MS Windows. All Sun did is open their proprietary software so that new developers and admins would help Solaris maintain it's current market share and hopefully expand upon it.
Solaris is an excellent product and very well respected in it's niche... unfortunately with the low cost of hardware and the strides made by their competition Sun is finding it very hard to sell. Making it harder still is the fact that almost no one is "growing up" on the OS anymore. It used to be that Sun had servers running at all levels, from small departmental servers to large clusters; which allowed an admin to get their feet wet at on a small installation and gradually grow into a real Solairs sysadmin. Now Sun has lost most of the small and medium server business to Linux and MS... so how does one learn Solaris except to download it and install it on our own equipment.
Right... but Sun was not required to open Solaris. Their reasons for doing it had nothing to do with the GPL... it was purely to try and gain some mindshare and some industry recognition that Linux and the BSDs had taken over the years.
That's a tough argument... the GPL is very widely used but is hardly the only license. It's entirely possible that OpenSolaris would still exist if the GPL had never been used and something like BSD was used instead.
Because in order for it to operate optimally it must be part of the kernel, and Linus and crew refuse to put it in the kernel due to licensing issues.
It runs fine in userland with fuse, but it's slow.
Tell me... is ignorance bliss?
This is similar to why Linux is not yet mainstream in large organisations.
Where have you been the last 10 years... I don't know a single large organization that doesn't have a few Linux boxes doing real work. In fact, many small and medium companies use nothing else in the back of the house. Linux hasn't come to dominate the desktop in any large companies that I am aware of... but that's more of a vendor lock-in issue than a choice of open source vs commercial.
Android will always remain the esoteric maverick OS for phones which if actually installed on the phone would make your provider disconnect your phone from network.
Your under the assumption that the carrier can do this legally. If you had been following the news lately, open wireless networks are all but guaranteed. Essentially, the carrier will be required to allow your device as long as it meets standard specifications. Besides, I have yet to have any carrier disconnect my Linux laptop when I connect to their network via an aircard. As long as the radio in the phone meets the specifications for the network, there should be no fear of a phone wreaking havoc.
Apple's iPhone is current and has millions of customers. Android is virtual==zero customers. Developers want to see their code run on phones, not on emulators.
iPhone hasn't always existed, in fact it's pretty new. So at one point you could have made the same arguement against it... in fact many did. Then it was released and managed to make AT&T the fastest growing carrier in the US. And developers are writing for it. Besides, Android already has a huge selection of applications because developers have been writing for it without a phone for quite some time now.
The last thing a carrier wants is the phone receiver being overridden by some crude game written by a 13-year old who thinks it is "Hot". Corporates just don't think that way.
Your right, "corporates" think about the bottom line. If they have to disconnect a few phones because they are misbehaving on the network so what... as long as the Android phones are keeping their costs low, the customers happy, and their profits high... they will certainly be on the Android bandwagon.
You seem to think that Android is new and untested. Android has been in development for some time now, it has a large developer base, all the major carriers are watching it if not actively participating in the project to some extent, and many reputable phone manufacturers are testing it on real phones. This is not some homebrew project... it really is happening and no carrier is going to dismiss it out of hand.
I love that Sun open sourced it, however I think that the greatest benifit is not that it's open but that the technologies it offers are available to be reproduced on other nix os's. The biggest issue I have with OpenSolaris is that it's still a single vendor OS. If it forks a few times and actually develops a culture and some competition between vendors than I think it will be more appealing.
That's actually what I hate and love about linux. It's a fragmented and ineffecient community, but because it's fragmented I don't have to worry that it's going away any time soon.
http://www.dennysantennaservice.com/index.html
This guy is good, he knows his stuff and will help you choose an antenna, sell it to you, help you get it working, and guarantee it to last. He will take anything back if you are unhappy... though I can't see how you could be.
Also, many apartments have local stations coming through the cable lines (I guess they connect the cable to an antenna when not connected to cable) you might just try it.
Exactly... the US educational system is, like everything else, all about making money. I actually had professors tell us on the first day of class that we needed to have a certain book, but (wink wink) we won't actually use it during the course. Appearently he was being forced to name a text book, but wanted us to return it at our earliest convenience.
This assumes that next semester they use the same book. Publishers have been known to make changes every couple of years and discontinue the older version... forcing the professors to upgrade, making the old version obsolete.
Not to mention that I have never seen a buy back for anything close the original sale price.
Did they NOT mimic photosynthisis?
Nope... the article actually states that they went one better.
Photosynthesis uses CO2 + water + sunlight to make oxygen, glucose, and water.
This process instead uses a similar technique to create hydrogen? But it doesn't, contrary to the article's title, use photosynthesis.
The thing I find strange is the requirement for a supply voltage, I almost wonder if they aren't just fooling their investors by creating a simple anode + cathode + battery + water = hydrogen & oxygen collector.
Insightful? We get helium from natural gas reserves... better to just burn the natural gas!
yeah... I forgot to correct some things... I started writing on one train, got interrupted, tried to salvage it, started another train of thought and appearently derailed.
The point remains however, there is plenty of evidence to support the viability of solar power as an energy source. And the arguements made in the grandparent failed when considered logically.
Your argument is valid at first glance... but it doesn't stand up if thought about logically:
1. They are not harvesting the plant material (like we animals do) to create energy, but converting carbon dioxide + water into hydrogen, oxygen and carbon. And they are trying to do it similarly to they way plants do it, because plants are the most efficient at it.
2. Not all plants are used to provide fuel to animals... in fact a relatively small portion are used for that purpose.
3. Using plant material as a fuel, as animals do, is far more inefficient and creates far more waste than using hydrogen. Animals that operate purely on plant material must spend most of their time processing the plant material to extract the energy from it. Most of what they ingest becomes waste.
(What's really interesting is that when you comparison on two animals, one that's active and one that is not... you find that much of the energy consumed is used by the processes other than moving that animal around; digestion, respiration, etc...). In fact digestion of cellulose is very very inefficient, thats why many animals chose to eat meat and get their solar energy twice removed.
4. Evolution has taught us exactly the opposite of what you suggest. One acre of farm land (solar collector, in your argument), can provide energy for many things that move about... especially if you were to consider the total energy in that 1 acre and not just the portion that is actually used. An acre of corn, for example, converts lots of sunlight into potential biomass energy... but only a small amount of that energy is actually used by animals... a few ounces of kernels per pound of plant. Not to mention the waste hydrogen that is created and simply released into the atmosphere.
Actually it's an excellent analogy... problem is it too won't work. People will continue to hide it in order to have an edge in the non-doped class.
Though in principal it would be interesting to see how the dynamics would work... for example, could a non-doped athelete beat the best doped athelete. Would people prefer to watch the doped or non-doped events? For example, heavyweight boxing is the most watched boxing class... but the speed and agility of the lower weight classes tend to make them more entertaining to actually watch.
And what could the positive ramifications be for the public... could it spur the development of a new fitness wonder drug that would essentially make all of us computer nerds more healthy? Could it instead make it more obvious how bad doping is for your body and reduce highschool locker room steriod use?
I kinda like your idea!
According to the Employment Standards Administration, in order to be considered exempt you must be paid on a "salary basis" (fixed amount per year), or a "fee basis" (fixed amount per job). In addition, it says that you cannot have your pay reduced for working partial days.
So if your a salaried exempt employee and your employer makes a deduction from your pay if you leave an hour or two early, they can no longer consider you an exempt employee and must follow the FLSA laws reguarding overtime. Not to mention that they might get hit with other penalties.
It seems to me that there are few employers that actually follow the FLSA at all.
(a) General rule. An employee will be considered to be paid on a
``salary basis'' within the meaning of these regulations if the
employee regularly receives each pay period on a weekly, or less
frequent basis, a predetermined amount constituting all or part of the
employee's compensation, which amount is not subject to reduction
because of variations in the quality or quantity of the work performed.
Subject to the exceptions provided in paragraph (b) of this section, an
exempt employee must receive the full salary for any week in which the
employee performs any work without regard to the number of days or
hours worked.
To qualify as an exempt executive, administrative or
professional employee under section 13(a)(1) of the Act, an employee
must be compensated on a salary basis at a rate of not less than $455
per week...
It says something similar with reguards to computer exemptions too.