I don't think that carrying out a full-coverage municipal wi-fi project requires adding access points where there are already access points. That was kind of the point of the article. New access points would be added were there are currently none, possibly. Existing access points would be used where they are available, and traffic tunneled over them in an encrypted form, for social and legal reasons.
I think that this structure should help, not hurt, the access point clashing that goes on in highly dense urban areas. In certain office buildings in particular, there are just too many separate businesses that each want to run their own encryption-protected access point within the physical radius. With this scheme, some of those access points might go away, replaced by using the one local muni-wifi point, with the business willing to do it because they are confident in it's encryption.
Another solution, would be to open up more bandwidth to the 802.11x protocols. That seems unlikely to happen from a political point of view. Maybe if some sort of software radio module became widely available, people could just take some unused spectrum. Encryption and tunneling to share what is already there seems more likely.
Our constitution allows for patents to be awarded to inventors, and an inventor is a type of human being. An institute cannot be an inventor. Of course thesis topics are not developed in a vaccuum, but if the thesis advisor was a co-inventor then just put his name on the patent too.
When places such as MIT demand a part of any patent before it is actually invented, and other corporations demand a piece of any patent even if the invention was developed outside of their environment, it corrupts the whole purpose of the patent system -- to make people try harder to invent things, thus advancing the state of science and the useful arts. Instead, it encourages the ambitious to establish suffocating institutional policies, hire lawyers, and make 200 page documents for new employees to sign.
I'm in favor of throwing out the whole patent system, at least for a couple of decades, until the current crop of professors, engineers, and corporate management that has been mentally poisoned by it retire and pass from the scene. Failing that, we ought to consider making patent rights non-transferable, so royalties have to be paid to the corporate employee who patented it, and that employee can accept royalties from anyone. IBM would switch to a policy of "you may never, ever, ever under any circumstance patent anything" pretty quickly !
I don't know if it is better done in software or not, but it is plausible to me that it might be.
If which case, why are we paying so much for a video card ? Why don't we write a very good version of Mesa3D or something, so we can run $30 SiS cards and get the same performance as the $300 cards ?
Either way, whether the value is in the card or in the software, hiding things is not in the benefit of the consumer or the computer industry in general. If the hardware cards really are that good, let's see a full spec so we can write the drivers we want, or an open source driver from which was can derive a spec. If they aren't not that good, let's figure that out write drivers just as good that work on cards that will save use $50 a year in smaller power consumption costs.
I don't believe it is ESR's position that you should write Free code except when you can make a lot more money by writing un-Free code. He's a bit more of a capitalist and right-winger, but he's the kind of right-winger to whom Freedom is important.
ATI used to produce a full spec for their cards. We should encourage them to return to that practice, because then we will have better computers. It's that simple.
If they instead want to produce hardware dongles for proprietary code, given what we know about how a proprietary code computer industry evolves into crap, we should not buy their stuff and should even support projects such as the open graphics card ( http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php ) until ATI goes out of business and is run by someone who wants to sell us something we want to buy.
If, as a marketplace, we pay ATI to make more money for keeping secrets, than for producing good hardware, then we will get what we pay for -- bad hardware and closed drivers. It's a free market, and you should buy neither ATI now NVidia nor Intel if they aren't selling what you want; fortunately, since 3D acceleration is a trivial unnecessary decoration on a computer, and there are plenty of old ATI Radeon 9500s for sale on Ebay, you don't have to send your money to these guys if you don't want to.
Often, not as much is done in the hardware as is advertised. I have been told that examination of some modern graphics drivers reveals them to be very good implementions IN SOFTWARE of graphics libraries. If those companies were to release the source, their competitors drivers would gain in ability, and projects such as OpenGL might suddenly become a lot better.
Essentially, it is partly the case that graphics cards are hardware dongles for graphics libraries (drivers).
I would be nice if ATI released open source drivers, both for Linux and for Windows. However, none of the big graphics card manufacturers are likely to do that unless they believe that their own card can compete on a pure hardware basis alone. The fact that they don't do it, is evidence that these overpriced 3D watt-burning powerhogs aren't really all they are hyped up to be.
I believe that was the best Word Perfect. Rumours have it that it was the last WP written in all assembly.
It was made to run on Unix, SCO specifically. With the SCO emulation kernel modules, you can make it run on linux, if you can find a copy.
I believe that if WordPerfect 5.1 for Linux were to be made available for something less than $20, perhapes download only or a mail-order CD, it would sell well enough to justify the trouble.
The VW beetle showed the country that Detroit was producing overpriced garbage. The Toyota Corolla proved it again. Detroit didn't die, because after all there are people who like to buy overpriced garbage on an installment plan, but consumers nor hot-rod hobbiests nor budding automotive engineers no longer feel constrained by whatever the idiots-in-charge in Detroit decide. We can always go foreign now.
I sincerely hope that the OLPC, Linux, and devices like this do the same for Microsoft and Intel. The fact is, even if you compile software, do graphical design, and encode mp3s, you can get by more than nicely with a $200 used IBM Thinkpad, 600 MHz and 256 MB RAM, which consumes only 15 to 23 watts (I measured).
You don't need a 2 GB, 3.2 GHz machine to browse the web any more than you need 300 horsepower to get to the grocery store, merge into traffic with a load of kids, and take the occasional road trip. The 600 watt power supply was invented because people will buy bloatware if a TV commercial tells them to.
It used to be that a big part of what a LUG did was let people know that Linux existed, and correct misconceptions. We would put up flyers in coffeehouses and around campus to let people know that Linux even existed, we would get booths at tradeshows with computers running linux at the table, to correct the "it's text command line only" people, etc. At meetings a lot of the conversation would always revolve around the same things -- you don't need to get two harddisks to dual boot, yes there is a picture editor kind of like photoshop, yes you can access a shared windows drive, etc etc. Other big activities included letter writing and lobbying related to open source use in government, and Microsoft's yearly law buying activities.
Essentially, LUGs were often a grassroots advertising and lobbying campaign.
I think the population LUGs are trying to reach no longer needs to be told that Linux exists and that you can browse the web on it. Lobbying never was an activity of face-to-face meetings, because we didn't have much need to lobby each other.
Now, most of the people who should be using linux and who aren't are being held back because they can't figure out something technical, or they have no time to figure it out, not because they don't know what linux is or that it can do what they need. They need actual help, the kind where they can bring their computer to a meeting and have someone look at it or someone to come to their home or business.
The LUG I am most active in, ALE (not to be confused with the Atlanta group with the same initials), is an all hands on workshop type format. We meet at a place where we have power and internet, courtesy of TekRepublik, and attendance has been growing. There are no scheduled presentations, people just bring their stuff and work on it. Sometimes someone brings something cool as show-and-tell, for example recently someone brought in one of the Dell Ubuntu machines and we examined it pretty thoroughly.
The other linux group (the first and larger one -- ALG) in Austin is also very active, but I attend it less regularly.
One thing LUGs often did and sometimes still do, that I always thought was totally pointless, was the vendor presentation. I guess it isn't totally useless, when the MySQL guys came to the ALE group, probably the only such event we ever had, it was definitely interesting converstation. However, most of the time that is a complete waste of both the vendor's and the group's time.
The university and college LUGs are often run by someone ambitious who is just networking and resume-building. The vendors come essentially because they are shopping for fresh employees.
In the non-academic LUGs, there is often a cadre of older fellows who cut their teeth during times when large corporations were much more socially dominant, and they remember the format of groups such as the Homebrew Computer Club and HAL-PC in Houston.
These guys seem to believe that large corporations should be lobbied to use linux, and that we have to work to make sure that HR departments know what linux means on a resume, that managers know that their organization alreay uses linux in some places, etc etc. This is largely unnecessary, because careers and the direction of technology just doesn't depend as much on large corporations any more.
HAL-PC and the Homebrew Club and similar groups were features of a time when it cost a lot to have computing as a hobby, and the members of those clubs spent lots of money. It made sense for a vendor to court them, and it made sense for those guys to comparison shop and examine all the options and debate PC versus Clone or whatever as they prepared to spend the price of a new car on something they would use as a glorified typewriter. It's not like that any more though. Computing and Linux is one of the cheapest hobbies you can have. Everytime the city garbage collection has a large-item-di
I think the plant described in the article doesn't have to produce ethanol. It makes synthesis gas which can be "upgraded" all the way to gasoline or diesel as long as you put in the energy. why stop at ethanol which has a lower value ? They are probably just trying to ride the ethanol hype wave, which is focused on yeast made ethanol (for now) and the "cellulostic ethanol" which is really supposed to mean a low-energy enzyme based process, not a high energy gasification process.
I like your point about the cheapest way to get alcohol being from oil or natural gas. I noted several years ago that news stories appeared indicating that much of the cheap vodka on the market in Russia comes from oil refineries, not wheat or potato fields. Even longer ago, there was once a scandal in France relating to whether cognac was being produced from agricultural output or whether there was "cheating" going on; the agricultural lobby carbon-dated cognac on the market, and showed by the isotope ratios that if it was all from agricultural output it would have to be thousands of years old. Of course manufactures were violating France's farm-protectionist "food purity" laws and using oil-derived alcohol.
You say you support hemp as a source. If it were really economically viable, wouldn't the big plants in Russia (where any law can be broken) Europe (where hemp is legal) be "cheating" in their alcohol and energy production by buying cheap hemp ?
One factor in favor of biomass over coal as a source of feed for a gasification / synthetic fuel production is that the removal of polluting sulphur from the coal, usually post-gasification, consumes energy and is complecated. I have been doing a bit of reading on the subject.
You mention the Fischer-Tropsch. If surphur is present in the coal feed, you will have hydrogen sulphide in the resulting hydrocarbons from Fischer-Tropsch.
I think it would be interesting to build a small plant that heated the carbon feed with microwaves, and fed in H2 separated electrolytically instead of by burning some of the carbon. You might be able to make a small stationary plant, that could be feed from intermittent power from a windmill. It would operate robotically as long as it's feed hopper was full and it could get water. If something like that were placed actually in the fields, then the ash or clinkers could easily be re-spread on the ground. I suspect it would only be viable in agricultural areas so remote that it is expensive to transport fuel to them and product to the market.
And that leads to some observations about your objection to starch and yeast derived alcohol. Farmers have traditional produced such alcohol as a way of "concentrating" their agricultural output for easy transportation, which is one reason why that production is traditional in the mountain areas of the south. But the current tax-break-subsidized boom in ethanol is not from small tubs and stills on the farms themselves, it is directed towards larger corporate stills that operate in town, still requiring some transportation of the bulky feed. I believe it is unlikely the economies of scale of a whiskey still pay for the transportation. The United States maintains its old laws that tax a distilled alcohol product from the minute it is produced, unless you pay a tax bond that is available only to the big producers, thus keeping small independents out of the business. One more reason not to put that tank-rusting ethanol crap in your vehicle.
The electric service you promote in your link apparently has MLM characteristics in the sales structure. Is this true ? If I sign up "under you" do you somehow get a cut, and then I can sign up more people ?
I realize that even if it is true, that does not mean it's a bad deal. Will I come out financially ahead even if I don't bother with the sales aspect of it, and just get the panels on my house ?
Also, if lighting strikes and destroys all the panels, do I pay to have them replaced or does the company ?
I have been doing some armchair research on gasification for a while. My original goal was to make a gas synthesizer that would be attached to a vehicle or small generator, as people did in some places during WWII. I have become less enthusiastic about that project, as I have come to realize it will be difficult to make any device that doesn't have the potential to kill you with carbon monoxide.
If you are interested in the chemistry and thermodynamics behind gasification you should obtain and read "Synthetic Fuels" by Ronald F. Probstein and R. Edwin Hicks, published by Dover (1982, 1990, 2006), ISBN 0-486-44977-7. The first portion of it deals with gasification. The later parts of it deal with taking the "synthesis gas" and forming it into bigger molecules of methane or even liquid fuels. The amount of energy consumed, and the heats and presures and sometimes expensive catalysts, are fairly depressing to the backyard hobbiest.
However, it might be possible to build something that gasifies waste into hydorgen and steam and carbon dioxide, which would then be burned in an engine. A recent slashdot article about a gasification procedure that uses microwaves seems hopeful, because if you gasified in the presense of steam with no oxygen you might have less carbon monoxide. Usually, oxygen has to be present because a portion of the waste is burnt in the same chamber as the gasification occurs, to provide the heat needed.
Of course, playing around with a microwave magnetron has it's own dangers as well.
I believe it is possible to build an apparatus about the size of two shipping pallets and 6 feet high that would take in household garbage and yard waste and produce a considerable amount of electricity. Whether it would be economical, except in places where grid electricity is not available, is a different matter. Having it produce a liquid fuel suitable for storage and use in an internal combustion engine seems like a big leap, but that's what I would like to aim for.
I think what is going on here, is that a lot of people who have not previously experienced Dell's style of selling are suddenly being exposed to it. Contradictory pricing and conflicting deals are not something Dell has applied only to Linux vs. Windows, it is the standard operating procedure.
It is not uncommon to find deals on Dell's web site that the salesperson you talk to has difficulty finding. Sometimes those bargin hunter web sites will post links to specials that are apparently not linked to from any other Dell page, but are legitimate and respected by sales when you send them the URL. In the non-consumer side, different groups give different amounts of discount if you pay by check instead of credit card.
While it must be frustrating if you do a lot of business with them or work there, I am not sure the situation is all that bad business-wise for Dell. By making it so you can often find a better deal by searching and waiting, the people who are extremely constrained by price are able to buy there, but you can still get the higher profit margin on those who are not concerned with price. It is similar to the variation in prices for airline tickets in the same plane going to the same place, or how they vary with Saturday night stayover, etc.
My guess is that all this uproar indicates that selling Ubuntu is bringing new customers to Dell, who had previous not shopped there. Probably most them assembled their own computers and installed Linux. This is a good thing for Dell.
Knoppix derived live CDs can get completely into RAM, freeing up the CD burner, if you have a gigabyte of RAM or more. There should be an easy to use (for the skill level of the average Dell customer) rescue CD that does the same thing in even less RAM.
One technique you might think about, coming from a "first do no harm" strategy to avoid being blamed if something goes wrong with the equipment, is to try to not add new sensors or valves and etc to the equipment, but try to take advantage of the increases in computing power to simply read it and recognize the situation exactly as a human would.
Check out this project: http://www.eissq.com/DialADC.html It describes software that uses a webcam pointed at an anologue needle gauge to recognize the position of the needle. Why not, as much as possible, set up passive sensors that don't touch or interact with the equipment in any way, feed them into a cheap multi-gigahertz computer, and process everything that way ? If the furance has a big accident, it would be hard to blame your apparatus.
If all humans were like you, we'd still be hunting with spears, because "hunting is for hunters, doing it with your half-assed bent stick and string that throws a small spear is dangerous."
Look dumbass, how do you think the "professionals" do it ? They just "homebrew" it and slap some fancy decals on it.
Google has always hyped itself, and been hyped, as an incredibly productive and creative organization. All this talk of 20% of time on independent projects, etc.
However, a lot of Google's recent history consists of buying other businesses, not of developing cool stuff themselves. They bought youtube, blogger, jotspot, writely, measure map, and now Marratech and of course Doubleclick.
This is not reminiscent of a "skunkworks" full of geniuses producing cutting edge technology. Rather, it is more reminiscent of Microsoft from the early 90s onward. Microsoft likes to wait until it realizes that a certain niche of technological innovation (like the internet) is actually going to pan out, then buy some relatively cheap player in the area and re-brand it's technology and re-sell it quickly to get a foot in the door with some crap backed by marketing muscle, and then re-work that purchased technology through a few versions until it is passable.
It seems to me that this is what google is doing. It is only a matter of time before the executive suite and associated beancounters beggin to look at buying startups and hiring cheap "commoditity" programmers from overseas as the most reliable way to make money, and begin to look with suspicion on the high salaries and benefits of the Googleplex genius set.
Of course, when I first saw the iPod, I thought to myself "They're going to try to be the Gucci or Ferrari of friggin' mp3 players ? Apple is finally dead." So take my predictions with a grain of salt . . .
The reason why a spam-receiver would loose money by buying spam-stocks is that the spammer is making that money.
The spamstocktracker.com site keeps track of the stock price in the long run. But the SPAMMERS aren't holding the stock for the long run -- they dumped it as the spam went out -- they were expecting YOU to buy it, and end up holding it in the long run, for lack of a buyer.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think that carrying out a full-coverage municipal wi-fi project requires adding access points where there are already access points. That was kind of the point of the article. New access points would be added were there are currently none, possibly. Existing access points would be used where they are available, and traffic tunneled over them in an encrypted form, for social and legal reasons.
I think that this structure should help, not hurt, the access point clashing that goes on in highly dense urban areas. In certain office buildings in particular, there are just too many separate businesses that each want to run their own encryption-protected access point within the physical radius. With this scheme, some of those access points might go away, replaced by using the one local muni-wifi point, with the business willing to do it because they are confident in it's encryption.
Another solution, would be to open up more bandwidth to the 802.11x protocols. That seems unlikely to happen from a political point of view. Maybe if some sort of software radio module became widely available, people could just take some unused spectrum. Encryption and tunneling to share what is already there seems more likely.
"Overselling is only an issue if the hosting provider is not prepared to provide the service when called upon to do it."
That's like saying theft is only an issue if you take someone else's stuff.
Overselling, by definition, means selling more than you can deliver. Otherwise, it would be called "selling", not "OVERselling".
That said, I have heard nothing but good things about dreamhost until this thread, and I know several people who went with them.
Our constitution allows for patents to be awarded to inventors, and an inventor is a type of human being. An institute cannot be an inventor. Of course thesis topics are not developed in a vaccuum, but if the thesis advisor was a co-inventor then just put his name on the patent too.
When places such as MIT demand a part of any patent before it is actually invented, and other corporations demand a piece of any patent even if the invention was developed outside of their environment, it corrupts the whole purpose of the patent system -- to make people try harder to invent things, thus advancing the state of science and the useful arts. Instead, it encourages the ambitious to establish suffocating institutional policies, hire lawyers, and make 200 page documents for new employees to sign.
I'm in favor of throwing out the whole patent system, at least for a couple of decades, until the current crop of professors, engineers, and corporate management that has been mentally poisoned by it retire and pass from the scene. Failing that, we ought to consider making patent rights non-transferable, so royalties have to be paid to the corporate employee who patented it, and that employee can accept royalties from anyone. IBM would switch to a policy of "you may never, ever, ever under any circumstance patent anything" pretty quickly !
I don't know if it is better done in software or not, but it is plausible to me that it might be.
If which case, why are we paying so much for a video card ? Why don't we write a very good version of Mesa3D or something, so we can run $30 SiS cards and get the same performance as the $300 cards ?
Either way, whether the value is in the card or in the software, hiding things is not in the benefit of the consumer or the computer industry in general. If the hardware cards really are that good, let's see a full spec so we can write the drivers we want, or an open source driver from which was can derive a spec. If they aren't not that good, let's figure that out write drivers just as good that work on cards that will save use $50 a year in smaller power consumption costs.
I don't believe it is ESR's position that you should write Free code except when you can make a lot more money by writing un-Free code. He's a bit more of a capitalist and right-winger, but he's the kind of right-winger to whom Freedom is important.
ATI used to produce a full spec for their cards. We should encourage them to return to that practice, because then we will have better computers. It's that simple.
If they instead want to produce hardware dongles for proprietary code, given what we know about how a proprietary code computer industry evolves into crap, we should not buy their stuff and should even support projects such as the open graphics card ( http://wiki.opengraphics.org/tiki-index.php ) until ATI goes out of business and is run by someone who wants to sell us something we want to buy.
If, as a marketplace, we pay ATI to make more money for keeping secrets, than for producing good hardware, then we will get what we pay for -- bad hardware and closed drivers. It's a free market, and you should buy neither ATI now NVidia nor Intel if they aren't selling what you want; fortunately, since 3D acceleration is a trivial unnecessary decoration on a computer, and there are plenty of old ATI Radeon 9500s for sale on Ebay, you don't have to send your money to these guys if you don't want to.
Often, not as much is done in the hardware as is advertised. I have been told that examination of some modern graphics drivers reveals them to be very good implementions IN SOFTWARE of graphics libraries. If those companies were to release the source, their competitors drivers would gain in ability, and projects such as OpenGL might suddenly become a lot better.
Essentially, it is partly the case that graphics cards are hardware dongles for graphics libraries (drivers).
I would be nice if ATI released open source drivers, both for Linux and for Windows. However, none of the big graphics card manufacturers are likely to do that unless they believe that their own card can compete on a pure hardware basis alone. The fact that they don't do it, is evidence that these overpriced 3D watt-burning powerhogs aren't really all they are hyped up to be.
Who now owns WordPerfect 5.1 ?
I believe that was the best Word Perfect. Rumours have it that it was the last WP written in all assembly.
It was made to run on Unix, SCO specifically. With the SCO emulation kernel modules, you can make it run on linux, if you can find a copy.
I believe that if WordPerfect 5.1 for Linux were to be made available for something less than $20, perhapes download only or a mail-order CD, it would sell well enough to justify the trouble.
I sincerely hope that the OLPC, Linux, and devices like this do the same for Microsoft and Intel. The fact is, even if you compile software, do graphical design, and encode mp3s, you can get by more than nicely with a $200 used IBM Thinkpad, 600 MHz and 256 MB RAM, which consumes only 15 to 23 watts (I measured).
You don't need a 2 GB, 3.2 GHz machine to browse the web any more than you need 300 horsepower to get to the grocery store, merge into traffic with a load of kids, and take the occasional road trip. The 600 watt power supply was invented because people will buy bloatware if a TV commercial tells them to.
For a while, that is.
Essentially, LUGs were often a grassroots advertising and lobbying campaign.
I think the population LUGs are trying to reach no longer needs to be told that Linux exists and that you can browse the web on it. Lobbying never was an activity of face-to-face meetings, because we didn't have much need to lobby each other.
Now, most of the people who should be using linux and who aren't are being held back because they can't figure out something technical, or they have no time to figure it out, not because they don't know what linux is or that it can do what they need. They need actual help, the kind where they can bring their computer to a meeting and have someone look at it or someone to come to their home or business.
The LUG I am most active in, ALE (not to be confused with the Atlanta group with the same initials), is an all hands on workshop type format. We meet at a place where we have power and internet, courtesy of TekRepublik, and attendance has been growing. There are no scheduled presentations, people just bring their stuff and work on it. Sometimes someone brings something cool as show-and-tell, for example recently someone brought in one of the Dell Ubuntu machines and we examined it pretty thoroughly.
The other linux group (the first and larger one -- ALG) in Austin is also very active, but I attend it less regularly.
One thing LUGs often did and sometimes still do, that I always thought was totally pointless, was the vendor presentation. I guess it isn't totally useless, when the MySQL guys came to the ALE group, probably the only such event we ever had, it was definitely interesting converstation. However, most of the time that is a complete waste of both the vendor's and the group's time.
The university and college LUGs are often run by someone ambitious who is just networking and resume-building. The vendors come essentially because they are shopping for fresh employees.
In the non-academic LUGs, there is often a cadre of older fellows who cut their teeth during times when large corporations were much more socially dominant, and they remember the format of groups such as the Homebrew Computer Club and HAL-PC in Houston.
These guys seem to believe that large corporations should be lobbied to use linux, and that we have to work to make sure that HR departments know what linux means on a resume, that managers know that their organization alreay uses linux in some places, etc etc. This is largely unnecessary, because careers and the direction of technology just doesn't depend as much on large corporations any more.
HAL-PC and the Homebrew Club and similar groups were features of a time when it cost a lot to have computing as a hobby, and the members of those clubs spent lots of money. It made sense for a vendor to court them, and it made sense for those guys to comparison shop and examine all the options and debate PC versus Clone or whatever as they prepared to spend the price of a new car on something they would use as a glorified typewriter. It's not like that any more though. Computing and Linux is one of the cheapest hobbies you can have. Everytime the city garbage collection has a large-item-di
Thanks for your informative response.
How many installations has the company done so far ? Or is it still in start-up mode, not having installed any ?
I think the plant described in the article doesn't have to produce ethanol. It makes synthesis gas which can be "upgraded" all the way to gasoline or diesel as long as you put in the energy. why stop at ethanol which has a lower value ? They are probably just trying to ride the ethanol hype wave, which is focused on yeast made ethanol (for now) and the "cellulostic ethanol" which is really supposed to mean a low-energy enzyme based process, not a high energy gasification process.
I like your point about the cheapest way to get alcohol being from oil or natural gas. I noted several years ago that news stories appeared indicating that much of the cheap vodka on the market in Russia comes from oil refineries, not wheat or potato fields. Even longer ago, there was once a scandal in France relating to whether cognac was being produced from agricultural output or whether there was "cheating" going on; the agricultural lobby carbon-dated cognac on the market, and showed by the isotope ratios that if it was all from agricultural output it would have to be thousands of years old. Of course manufactures were violating France's farm-protectionist "food purity" laws and using oil-derived alcohol.
You say you support hemp as a source. If it were really economically viable, wouldn't the big plants in Russia (where any law can be broken) Europe (where hemp is legal) be "cheating" in their alcohol and energy production by buying cheap hemp ?
One factor in favor of biomass over coal as a source of feed for a gasification / synthetic fuel production is that the removal of polluting sulphur from the coal, usually post-gasification, consumes energy and is complecated. I have been doing a bit of reading on the subject.
You mention the Fischer-Tropsch. If surphur is present in the coal feed, you will have hydrogen sulphide in the resulting hydrocarbons from Fischer-Tropsch.
I think it would be interesting to build a small plant that heated the carbon feed with microwaves, and fed in H2 separated electrolytically instead of by burning some of the carbon. You might be able to make a small stationary plant, that could be feed from intermittent power from a windmill. It would operate robotically as long as it's feed hopper was full and it could get water. If something like that were placed actually in the fields, then the ash or clinkers could easily be re-spread on the ground. I suspect it would only be viable in agricultural areas so remote that it is expensive to transport fuel to them and product to the market.
And that leads to some observations about your objection to starch and yeast derived alcohol. Farmers have traditional produced such alcohol as a way of "concentrating" their agricultural output for easy transportation, which is one reason why that production is traditional in the mountain areas of the south. But the current tax-break-subsidized boom in ethanol is not from small tubs and stills on the farms themselves, it is directed towards larger corporate stills that operate in town, still requiring some transportation of the bulky feed. I believe it is unlikely the economies of scale of a whiskey still pay for the transportation. The United States maintains its old laws that tax a distilled alcohol product from the minute it is produced, unless you pay a tax bond that is available only to the big producers, thus keeping small independents out of the business. One more reason not to put that tank-rusting ethanol crap in your vehicle.
The electric service you promote in your link apparently has MLM characteristics in the sales structure. Is this true ? If I sign up "under you" do you somehow get a cut, and then I can sign up more people ?
I realize that even if it is true, that does not mean it's a bad deal. Will I come out financially ahead even if I don't bother with the sales aspect of it, and just get the panels on my house ?
Also, if lighting strikes and destroys all the panels, do I pay to have them replaced or does the company ?
If you are interested in the chemistry and thermodynamics behind gasification you should obtain and read "Synthetic Fuels" by Ronald F. Probstein and R. Edwin Hicks, published by Dover (1982, 1990, 2006), ISBN 0-486-44977-7. The first portion of it deals with gasification. The later parts of it deal with taking the "synthesis gas" and forming it into bigger molecules of methane or even liquid fuels. The amount of energy consumed, and the heats and presures and sometimes expensive catalysts, are fairly depressing to the backyard hobbiest.
However, it might be possible to build something that gasifies waste into hydorgen and steam and carbon dioxide, which would then be burned in an engine. A recent slashdot article about a gasification procedure that uses microwaves seems hopeful, because if you gasified in the presense of steam with no oxygen you might have less carbon monoxide. Usually, oxygen has to be present because a portion of the waste is burnt in the same chamber as the gasification occurs, to provide the heat needed.
Of course, playing around with a microwave magnetron has it's own dangers as well.
I believe it is possible to build an apparatus about the size of two shipping pallets and 6 feet high that would take in household garbage and yard waste and produce a considerable amount of electricity. Whether it would be economical, except in places where grid electricity is not available, is a different matter. Having it produce a liquid fuel suitable for storage and use in an internal combustion engine seems like a big leap, but that's what I would like to aim for.
I think what is going on here, is that a lot of people who have not previously experienced Dell's style of selling are suddenly being exposed to it. Contradictory pricing and conflicting deals are not something Dell has applied only to Linux vs. Windows, it is the standard operating procedure.
It is not uncommon to find deals on Dell's web site that the salesperson you talk to has difficulty finding. Sometimes those bargin hunter web sites will post links to specials that are apparently not linked to from any other Dell page, but are legitimate and respected by sales when you send them the URL. In the non-consumer side, different groups give different amounts of discount if you pay by check instead of credit card.
While it must be frustrating if you do a lot of business with them or work there, I am not sure the situation is all that bad business-wise for Dell. By making it so you can often find a better deal by searching and waiting, the people who are extremely constrained by price are able to buy there, but you can still get the higher profit margin on those who are not concerned with price. It is similar to the variation in prices for airline tickets in the same plane going to the same place, or how they vary with Saturday night stayover, etc.
My guess is that all this uproar indicates that selling Ubuntu is bringing new customers to Dell, who had previous not shopped there. Probably most them assembled their own computers and installed Linux. This is a good thing for Dell.
I think that this site is relevant to the discussion about EULAs: http://reasonableagreement.org/
Knoppix derived live CDs can get completely into RAM, freeing up the CD burner, if you have a gigabyte of RAM or more. There should be an easy to use (for the skill level of the average Dell customer) rescue CD that does the same thing in even less RAM.
One technique you might think about, coming from a "first do no harm" strategy to avoid being blamed if something goes wrong with the equipment, is to try to not add new sensors or valves and etc to the equipment, but try to take advantage of the increases in computing power to simply read it and recognize the situation exactly as a human would.
Check out this project: http://www.eissq.com/DialADC.html It describes software that uses a webcam pointed at an anologue needle gauge to recognize the position of the needle. Why not, as much as possible, set up passive sensors that don't touch or interact with the equipment in any way, feed them into a cheap multi-gigahertz computer, and process everything that way ? If the furance has a big accident, it would be hard to blame your apparatus.
If all humans were like you, we'd still be hunting with spears, because "hunting is for hunters, doing it with your half-assed bent stick and string that throws a small spear is dangerous."
Look dumbass, how do you think the "professionals" do it ? They just "homebrew" it and slap some fancy decals on it.
Google has always hyped itself, and been hyped, as an incredibly productive and creative organization. All this talk of 20% of time on independent projects, etc.
However, a lot of Google's recent history consists of buying other businesses, not of developing cool stuff themselves. They bought youtube, blogger, jotspot, writely, measure map, and now Marratech and of course Doubleclick.
This is not reminiscent of a "skunkworks" full of geniuses producing cutting edge technology. Rather, it is more reminiscent of Microsoft from the early 90s onward. Microsoft likes to wait until it realizes that a certain niche of technological innovation (like the internet) is actually going to pan out, then buy some relatively cheap player in the area and re-brand it's technology and re-sell it quickly to get a foot in the door with some crap backed by marketing muscle, and then re-work that purchased technology through a few versions until it is passable.
It seems to me that this is what google is doing. It is only a matter of time before the executive suite and associated beancounters beggin to look at buying startups and hiring cheap "commoditity" programmers from overseas as the most reliable way to make money, and begin to look with suspicion on the high salaries and benefits of the Googleplex genius set.
Of course, when I first saw the iPod, I thought to myself "They're going to try to be the Gucci or Ferrari of friggin' mp3 players ? Apple is finally dead." So take my predictions with a grain of salt . . .
Try out www.zoneminder.com
Those results don't contradict each other.
The reason why a spam-receiver would loose money by buying spam-stocks is that the spammer is making that money.
The spamstocktracker.com site keeps track of the stock price in the long run. But the SPAMMERS aren't holding the stock for the long run -- they dumped it as the spam went out -- they were expecting YOU to buy it, and end up holding it in the long run, for lack of a buyer.
I didn't see a link to that on your product page. How much does it cost ?
I agree that IAX2 is the way to go, because of SIP's firewall and NAT problems.
I have even had trouble with SIP over some VPNs.
However, there are not as many IAX2 softphones available, as there are for SIP.
How could this story run with no comments mentioning Bingbong and Doug Glanville ?
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http://espn.go.com/mlb/columns/stark_jayson/12012
Slashdot was all over this when it happened:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/05/19/21362
Presuming that you meant "sentence" not "sentience", it is not even close. The top story in the hall of fame easily beats it.
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http://politics.slashdot.org/politics/04/11/03/16
http://slashdot.org/hof.shtml