Well, this thread discussion is almost over, and probably you will never read my answer... but I decided to do it anyway, because I think some of your points deserves some comments.
First off, most of the areas where sugar-cane is currently being cultivated were *already* deforested in ending 19th century up to 1950's for coffee crops (for Parana and Sao Paulo states). So, for Brazilian biofuel program, absolutely no new areas of deforestation were open.
So, you can see clearly here, that your point of 'deforestation' is completely bogus.
Concerning USA available agricultural area for sugar cane, I will assume that your information is correct, that the 3 states cited were able to cultivate sugar cane. And I will consider as theory (and also a simplification), that whole available area of cited state would be adequate for sugar cane production.
So, just contrast the available area in each country:
a) USA: Hawaii (area of 29,311 Km^2), Florida (area 170,304 Km^2) and Louisiana (134,382 Km^2) = 333,997Km^2
b) Brazil: Sao Paulo State (area 248,209 Km^2), Parana (281,748 Km^2), Mato Grosso do Sul (357,124) = 887,081Km^2
Attention: I'm not counting Brazilian North-East states: Rio Grande do Norte, Maranhao, Sergipe, Alagoas, Pernambuco, Paraiba, Bahia. Those states had being cultivating sugar cane in the last 4 centuries, that alone will add up even more for the numbers.
And yes, you guys can extract biofuel from whatever source you wish! But pay attention that:
a) It will cost your citizens much more (money and human lifes)
b) In a really free market, the better and less expensive should be given priority
c) It will take at least 10 years, with political (Middle east nations), human (Iraq war anyone?) and environmental impacts (pay attention that USA is the number 1 source of pollution and CO2/greenhouse emission in the whole world).
Another poster had written that Australia had contributed for our biofuel program. I'm not completely sure if in the beginning of Pro-alcool (1975) we had exchanged information with them... but what I can say *for sure*, is that the currently cultivated sugar-cane varieties in the last 20 years were developed here.
Sugarcane is the best option to produce ethanol, contrary to other crops, it produces huge ratio of glucose and saccharose (i.e. one type of sugar) by its biomass. Sugar can be easily transformed to alcohol using biological fermentation process (a really simple and well understood method... I believe for more than 2000 years).
Just to give a number, yields of 80 to 120 tons (per hectare) are common in Brazilian South-East states (and in controlled conditions, it can yield more than 180 tons per hectare). Contrast that to 5 to 11 tons/ha of switchgrass.
Brazil started its bio-fuel program (named 'Pro-alcool') back in ending 70s, during the oil economic shock. At that time, the country was still dependent of oil imports (but we are now independent).
Those massive yields are results of these factors: a) More than 30 years of genetic studies to select better producing sugar-cane species/subspecies b) Tropical climate c) More than 30 years of research to improve in field conditions of the crop (fertilization, etc).
What I'm trying to explain is: good things take lots of time and hard work. Don't expect to being able to achieve high levels of efficiency in biofuel production in *high scale* in less than 10 to 20 years.
**flamebait**
Obviously, if you North-Americans have an open market (without *economic barriers*), you could be running your cars and SUVs using ecological brazilian alcohol *right* now. Instead, your government prefer to give your taxes money to terrorist or dictatorship ruled nations.
**flamebait**
Valgrind can detect use of uninitialized memory, as also access to free'd memory, memory leaks and also unmatched free/malloc calls.
You forgot to mention Bruce Peren's electric fence (http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/ElectricFence/), which will crash your program and generate a core dump in case you overflow/underflow (even by 1 byte) a given vector array. For C++ you can think about some variants, like DUMA.
I think that for stack errors, gcc-4.x does provide some extra protection to detect stack smashing, too.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-smashing_prote ction#GCC_Stack-Smashing_Protector_.28ProPolice.29 )
For C++, g++ does provide a quite unique flag: -Weffc. This little baby checks for some of Scott Meyer's rules to write better code (believe, this one catches a lot of subtle bugs).
Also, you can catch another bunch of code bugs with extensive/intensive unit tests. Recently I was involved in writing some nasty encode/decoding code between several charsets (think about GSM, UTF8, UTF16, UCS-2, etc). Even if we are going to support only english and german, we wrote some code to test other languages (chinese and arabic come to mind). It helped us to detect some missing logic on original code and detect some overflows.
OSS/Free software developers does have a good bag of tricks to help develop and test software, I don't think that the situation is so bleak.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this thread discussion is almost over, and probably you will never read my answer... but I decided to do it anyway, because I think some of your points deserves some comments.
First off, most of the areas where sugar-cane is currently being cultivated were *already* deforested in ending 19th century up to 1950's for coffee crops (for Parana and Sao Paulo states). So, for Brazilian biofuel program, absolutely no new areas of deforestation were open.
So, you can see clearly here, that your point of 'deforestation' is completely bogus.
Concerning USA available agricultural area for sugar cane, I will assume that your information is correct, that the 3 states cited were able to cultivate sugar cane. And I will consider as theory (and also a simplification), that whole available area of cited state would be adequate for sugar cane production.
So, just contrast the available area in each country:
a) USA: Hawaii (area of 29,311 Km^2), Florida (area 170,304 Km^2) and Louisiana (134,382 Km^2) = 333,997Km^2
b) Brazil: Sao Paulo State (area 248,209 Km^2), Parana (281,748 Km^2), Mato Grosso do Sul (357,124) = 887,081Km^2
Attention: I'm not counting Brazilian North-East states: Rio Grande do Norte, Maranhao, Sergipe, Alagoas, Pernambuco, Paraiba, Bahia. Those states had being cultivating sugar cane in the last 4 centuries, that alone will add up even more for the numbers.
And yes, you guys can extract biofuel from whatever source you wish! But pay attention that:
a) It will cost your citizens much more (money and human lifes)
b) In a really free market, the better and less expensive should be given priority
c) It will take at least 10 years, with political (Middle east nations), human (Iraq war anyone?) and environmental impacts (pay attention that USA is the number 1 source of pollution and CO2/greenhouse emission in the whole world).
Another poster had written that Australia had contributed for our biofuel program. I'm not completely sure if in the beginning of Pro-alcool (1975) we had exchanged information with them... but what I can say *for sure*, is that the currently cultivated sugar-cane varieties in the last 20 years were developed here.
Best regards
Savago
Friends
Sugarcane is the best option to produce ethanol, contrary to other crops, it produces huge ratio of glucose and saccharose (i.e. one type of sugar) by its biomass. Sugar can be easily transformed to alcohol using biological fermentation process (a really simple and well understood method... I believe for more than 2000 years).
Just to give a number, yields of 80 to 120 tons (per hectare) are common in Brazilian South-East states (and in controlled conditions, it can yield more than 180 tons per hectare). Contrast that to 5 to 11 tons/ha of switchgrass.
Brazil started its bio-fuel program (named 'Pro-alcool') back in ending 70s, during the oil economic shock. At that time, the country was still dependent of oil imports (but we are now independent).
Those massive yields are results of these factors: a) More than 30 years of genetic studies to select better producing sugar-cane species/subspecies b) Tropical climate c) More than 30 years of research to improve in field conditions of the crop (fertilization, etc).
What I'm trying to explain is: good things take lots of time and hard work. Don't expect to being able to achieve high levels of efficiency in biofuel production in *high scale* in less than 10 to 20 years.
**flamebait**
Obviously, if you North-Americans have an open market (without *economic barriers*), you could be running your cars and SUVs using ecological brazilian alcohol *right* now. Instead, your government prefer to give your taxes money to terrorist or dictatorship ruled nations.
**flamebait**
Best regards
Savago
Valgrind can detect use of uninitialized memory, as also access to free'd memory, memory leaks and also unmatched free/malloc calls.
e ction#GCC_Stack-Smashing_Protector_.28ProPolice.29 )
You forgot to mention Bruce Peren's electric fence (http://perens.com/FreeSoftware/ElectricFence/), which will crash your program and generate a core dump in case you overflow/underflow (even by 1 byte) a given vector array. For C++ you can think about some variants, like DUMA.
I think that for stack errors, gcc-4.x does provide some extra protection to detect stack smashing, too. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack-smashing_prot
For C++, g++ does provide a quite unique flag: -Weffc. This little baby checks for some of Scott Meyer's rules to write better code (believe, this one catches a lot of subtle bugs).
Also, you can catch another bunch of code bugs with extensive/intensive unit tests. Recently I was involved in writing some nasty encode/decoding code between several charsets (think about GSM, UTF8, UTF16, UCS-2, etc). Even if we are going to support only english and german, we wrote some code to test other languages (chinese and arabic come to mind). It helped us to detect some missing logic on original code and detect some overflows.
OSS/Free software developers does have a good bag of tricks to help develop and test software, I don't think that the situation is so bleak.