The inverse of this is why I hate the word 'motivation'. You've got your noun, 'motive'. You've got your verbified noun, 'motivate'. Then you've got your nounification of the verbified noun, 'motivation'.
As well, as it's been mentioned countless times, if you really care about PS2 games (after all the PS3s with BC are sold out), you can get a PS2 - comes complete with a rumble controller, portability, DVD player, and redundancy.
This is exactly why it's such a retarded move. The PS3's biggest competitor is [i]already[/i] the PS2 - why would they want to give the PS2 yet another competitive advantage?
If the PS3 hadn't sported full PS2 backwards compatibility, I wouldn't have bought one.
People complaining about the cost are very likely the same ones complaining about the loss of BC. These people are probably perpetual pro-Microsoft Sony bashers that you see plaguing every blog/forum with their first-out-of-the-gates comments. The (flaky) rational from these robots usually goes like this: "I care about BC, but I don't want to pay the extra price for the older PS3s (even though they've received a price cut) because there's no games (even though there are some)"
If Sony wasn't planning on discontinuing the version that had the price cut, this might be valid logic. As it stands, though, the "price cut" was actually a "fire sale." I care plenty about BC, and I was completely unwilling to drop $600 on a console. At $500, it became a reasonable thing for me to do, so I did - but partially because of the threat that I wouldn't be able to get full BC in future without spending $600 for the 80 GB version.
This new version doesn't address that. Now they're charging $200 for 40 GB of storage, software BC, and a card reader.
...there being a/. poster whose.sig referred to some software that claimed to have something like 70% of Photoshop's functionality at 10% the price. It intrigued me when I saw it, but I never bothered to follow the link. Does anyone know what that software was, or if it's a viable alternative?
You know, I'm pretty sure that copying an article verbatim and wholesale to embed in your post is a copyright violation. I'm not a real fan of modern copyright by any stretch of the imagination, but that makes even me raise an eyebrow.
I also realize that the messenger has no logical bearing on the message, but it does strike me as odd that a site which appears to stand proudly on its claimed moral high ground so casually flouts copyright law. Particularly in a case where copyright law isn't even that onerous.
It's really no different a concept than seeing a bouncing ball as subject to a constant (gravitational) force, except when it's not, as when the concrete smacks it back upward.
If you have an oscillating body of a given mass, then obviously the net force on the body isn't constant, given F=ma. There's no question about that (though it would certainly be newsworthy if someone discovered that F=ma doesn't hold). The question here is whether the input force is constant. The story is that they've replicated on a nano-scale turning a constant force input into an oscillating net force at the point of interest, something which has apparently not been done before.
If you have an alternative method for allocating spectrum, I'm sure everyone would be interested in hearing it.
(Note: a method which does not involve a central regulatory body is, in fact, a method based upon "he with the most broadcast power owns the spectrum")
Sure am. Only a sucker would give in to the man, and not replace IE with Firefox on his company laptop. What a sucker.
I haven't complained about D2's not working in IE, because I recognize that it's IE's fault. I also recognize that IE will never change as long as everyone panders to its broken-ness, so I can even respect Slashdot's decision to not do so. I'll even continue to subscribe, despite not being able to use the New Shiny most of the time, because I think Slashdot's worth supporting.
But some of us aren't in a position where it's feasible to change our client, and cheap shots at our expense aren't particularly appreciated. If you don't want to put in the time and effort to make D2 work in IE because you don't want to perpetuate the use of broken standards on the client, that's great. But I'd really appreciate not being mocked in the process.
Re:We already have this in the UK
on
Manhattan 1984
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· Score: 1
As a recent tourist in London - I didn't feel screwed over. I don't recall what my wife and I paid for our all-day any-zone tube tickets, but I do know it was much cheaper than taking cabs, much easier than taking buses (the ubiquitous tube map is brilliant in its explicative ability. The bus map, though similar in concept, was completely impenetrable), and far, far less stressful than renting a car and trying to drive around London (it was bad enough driving around Bath).
We knew we would have paid less with an Oyster Card, since they're prominently advertised that way, but I assure you, we didn't feel screwed. In fact, even at the prices we were paying - and even trying to get two weeks' worth of luggage from Paddington to Heathrow via the tube - I became a huge fan of the system.
Right, because of course the other companies involved simply decided that the FCC is all-wise, and have no interest in the decision being appealed. It's utterly beyond the realm of possibility that they collectively decided to use the member with the best PR machine to protest the decision. This is obviously Microsoft branching out on its own hook against the wishes of the other members of the coalition in an evil plot to TAKE OVER THE WORLD, MUAHAHAHA!!
Rather than go through all the replies to this story making fun of Microsoft, saying the FCC should wait for SP1, accusing Microsoft of trying to get some sort of patent on the device so they can PWN TEH AIRWAVEZ OH NOES XBOX HUEG LOL!!!eleventy-one! et cetera, et cetera, maybe it will be more effective to point out something the summary only briefly alludes to:
This is not a Microsoft initiative. This device was submitted by the White Spaces Coalition, which consists of Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung. If you're about to post some kind of rant about Microsoft taking over the world or whatever else, go through your post once (use the dreaded "Preview" button, if necessary). Everywhere you use the word "Microsoft" or "MS" or "Micro$oft" or "M$" or any pronoun whose antecedent is one of those terms, subsitute in for that word "Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung," then see if your post still makes sense.
with the cable frequencies. Had they not seen it, Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung could have pumped a few million into promoting this noisy spec to flood the market with devices laying waste to clean cable signals. Then, Microsoft's, Google's, HP's, Intel's, Philips', Dell's, Earthlink's, and Samsung's IPTV business starts looking a whole lot better. With an end to end tie-in of Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung software in the US IPTV( UltimateTV? ) market, Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung get to own the channels like they currently own the PC OEM channels. Doesn't that sound like fun?
You're conveniently ignoring that this device was collectively submitted by the entire White Spaces group, which consists of Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, and a couple others I'm forgetting.
But feel free to take any excuse to mindlessly bash Microsoft; don't let the facts get in the way of your ever-so-rational opinions.
I don't think it's quite as bleak as all that. Yes, it takes larger and larger teams to produce the full-immersion virtual worlds of GTA, Elder Scrolls, or Gears of War. But that doesn't necessarily have to be as depressing as you make it out to be.
For one thing, the full-on AAA title can still take its direction - its flavor, focus, feel, and maybe another word that starts with f or two - from one person. I think we can, as we so often do, look to the movie industry for the logical end point of this sequence. It takes a massive army of people to produce a modern movie. But that doesn't mean that you can't have individual people make names for themselves. Peter Jackson, Guy Ritchie, the Wachowskis, etc. all put their distinct stamp on a work. The key is to have someone making the top-level decisions who has a good vision to work towards.
The other encouraging thing, of course, is that we aren't at a point yet where it's impossible to make a quality, even popular, by yourself or with a small group of people. Geometry Wars and Line Rider come quickly to mind as examples. The bar is higher than it used to be, of course: the hobbyist/garage developer is forced to compete solely on gameplay, since they have no hope of competing with iD's, Epic's, or Valve's latest engine (although the availability of a product like Torque makes even this statement not as damning as it could be).
But I don't think we're at a terribly high risk of entering an era where individual names are lost to a sea of undifferentiated product. Your Mark Reins, CliffyBs, and Peter Molyneauxs are and will continue to be pivotal figures in the industry. I think we're going to continue to see such names come up.
The only risk I see on the horizon, really, is if PC gaming eventually dies. Right now, there is no real publishing barrier to entry into the market. If your game really is good enough, all you need is a web site and a file host. Consoles, however, change that dynamic. Maybe Microsoft's nascent foray into user-produced games will eventually turn into a real option for hobbyists, but if it doesn't, there's still no way to break into the console games industry unless you're already established.
Which is a shame, because there could be fantastic potential, there.
Wow. I don't know which is scarier - the possibility that you missed the joke because it was over your head, or the possibility that such a load of drivel sounded reasonable enough to you for you to debate the issue.
I'm not sure what you're arguing with, here. First, I'm not complaining about their use of sugar as a feedstock. It's not as good as cellulosic material for the reasons I mention: you don't run into any dual-use problems, and you get more total fuel per unit plant. Might soy be an adequate feedstock? Perhaps; I haven't performed a real analysis of the situation. My gut tells me not, since we're already using all the soy we're growing (obviously, or we wouldn't be growing it - though this is not to say we couldn't potentially grow more), and the energy demands we place on petroleum products are fairly high. According to the CIA factbook, the USA use more than 20 million barrels of oil a day in 2004. That's a lot of product to replace with something else, and it's going to take a lot of feedstock of something to do it.
But maybe soy would be adequate, I don't know. Even if it is, though, I don't see how it's better to use only one part of the plant as opposed to the whole thing.
I'm also under the impression that the current demand on corn as feedstock for ethanol supplies has materially driven up the price of corn such that it's had a significant deleterious effect on the ability of Mexico to feed its population. But I don't have hard evidence for that, so you may be right.
Well, pretty much ANYTHING we grow gets the bulk of its carbon from the atmosphere during photosynthesis so I'd say that problem is gotten around pretty well if we can use plant matter as fuel
Yeah. That's what I said. That's why this is a good development, it solves the carbon problem of burning gasoline. But I appreciate you reiterating it.
Ultimately even conventional oil is "solar conversion", albeit inefficient since we are releasing soalr energy that was collected, stored and converted underground by natural processes over millions of years. Anyways, what man-made technology we have to collect solar energy totally sucks when compared with the efficiency of photosynthesis.
Again - yeah, I know. That was my point. A more efficient method of transforming solar energy into kinetic energy is, obviously, better. Using E. coli to do it is a step in the right direction. If at some future point we find a yet more efficient way of turning solar energy into kinetic energy than using chemical energy as an intermediary, that would be good. I'm still not sure what you're arguing with, here, since you keep restating what I said in my post.
If we let mother nature collect the solar energy and help it along (through biotechnology) to convert it to petroleum then we can take advantage of a storage and delivery infrastructure that has been gradually built up over more than a century, and the challenges remain the same (efficient release of the stored energy).
Yes. As I said in my original post.
Don't underestimate the ability of humans to mess up the ecosystem. Humans have already messed up out ocean-bound feedstock--that being the fisheries. Wouldn't there be some consequence to growing crap on the surface of the ocean? I'd imagine that might deprive sea life at shallower depths of needed sunlight.
This is a valid point. I glossed over this problem in the interests of brevity, and because my initial solution may be based upon false data. I believe - though I'm not certain - that there are large areas of the ocean that are, to all intents and purposes, devoid of life. Now, that may be for reasons that also prevent them from being useful for the purpose of growing anything intentionally, but it may also not be. My first thought is that we could use those areas.
My second thought, though, is that we already do this to arable land - we harness essentially all the sunlight that hits the area we farm, thereby destroying whatever ecosystem was already there. I don't think it's worse to do that in the ocean than on land.
That said, the ocean definitely has a much less lim
Thanks. Seriously, thank you. I had never looked at genetic evolution through the lens of simple thermodynamics, despite my sig. Once you say it, of course, it's obviously true and I wonder why I didn't realize it sooner (kinda like those single-serving Crystal Light packets. No idea how I didn't come up with those).
In any event, having something of a fundamental truth revealed is a big deal to me, so thanks.
of course that is getting more and more expensive, but most schemes for the replacement of gasoline are still orders of nagitude more expensive such that they aren't at the economic break even point on replacing gasoline
True, but that's a self-solving problem. As petroleum becomes arbitrarily scarce, the marginal cost of the next barrel becomes arbitrarily high. Assuming that an alternative process exists that does not itself depend on the price of petroleum, at some point break-even will be reached, and the alternative becomes economically attractive.
The problems, of course, are
A) if the price of oil rises too fast, the economy will not have time to adjust. We very much depend on relatively cheap energy from petroleum. If the price of oil rises steadily but slowly (below some unknown rate threshold), the economy will simply adapt to the new costs. Overall productivity will drop, but it won't be catastrophic. Above that threshold, disaster ensues*.
B) the cost of introducing "new" carbon to the atmosphere is not factored into the measured economic cost of a barrel of oil. Which means economic break-even for the alternative fuel doesn't take into account whether or not it's a good idea from a carbon-neutral perspective.
this e coli step is of course a wonderful development, but you have to ask what the cost of the stuff is that the e coli is eating to process into gasoline: not cheaper than digging gas out of the ground
the ideal would be a creature, probably a bioengineered algae, that produces octane after exposure to sunlight. the e coli is merely a processing step on a larger chain of energy. sich a hypothetical algae would be the whole process in one little cell
Absolutely. In my mind, developments like this E. coli tech are strictly gap technologies, not solutions in themselves. They buy us time - potentially a lot of it - to find yet more efficient methods of converting sunlight into kinetic/electrical/thermal energy.
If we can get past the externalities of petroleum dependence, the market really will work towards providing more efficient (i.e., cheaper) energy conversion chains. The problem now is, as you say, petroleum is cheap in all the ways that we directly measure.
*That is, an increase of one percent a year is absorbable. An increase to infinity over a day (i.e., "oh noes, we're out of teh oilz!") would be a disaster. Somewhere between those extremes is the threshold. More accurately, probably, a range of such thresholds corresponding to noticeable but minor effects all the way through flat-out the end of civilization as we know it.
Yes - though I obviously didn't say it clearly enough, that's exactly what I meant. This development is good precisely because it avoids the problem of burning buried petroleum. The carbon released is carbon that was fixed in the short term carbon cycle.
Insofar as this can be scaled out to real production, it addresses both problems with burning gasoline: the finite supply of petroleum, as well as the introduction of "new" carbon to the atmosphere.
Yes. It releases carbon into the atmosphere that was fixed from the atmosphere in the near term. This solves the biggest current problem with burning petroleum, that it's re-introducing carbon to the atmosphere that hasn't been there for millions of years.
The other pollutants that result from gas-burning engines are manageable. Not ignorable, certainly, but there are known technologies to mitigate them to a great extent.
I wasn't thinking of putting the bacteria itself in the ocean - though that might be a strategy worth pursuing; I don't know - but rather, growing plant (algae?) feedstock to be harvested and pumped into the centralized bacterial conversion facility.
Since the summary doesn't mention it, I'll do a bit of karma-whoring and answer the obvious question: they're using sugar, derived from corn, as a food source for the bacteria. They're aware that this is less than ideal from the total volume and a competing-with-food standpoints. The goal is to replace the use of sugar with cellulosic material.
That out of the way, this is obviously promising work. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with burning hydrocarbons as a fuel - if we can get around the problems of increasing atmospheric carbon and the finite supply of said hydrocarbons. Yes, a more efficient solar-to-kinetic/electrical/thermal energy conversion process would be better, but I don't think the development of such a technology will be hindered by making it feasible to extend the use of hydrocarbons (I believe it was Larry Burns who said, "the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones."). A gap technology that staved off the critical problems of hydrocarbon dependence would give us breathing room to pursue work on other technologies.
After all, while nothing may focus the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, of the focused mind can't avoid the hanging, it doesn't matter.
All that being said, what would make a technology like this almost utopian in aspect would be the creation of a feedstock that can be grown on the surface of the ocean. There's (obviously) far more oceanic surface area than arable land area; using that would completely solve the problem of competing with food crops.
But the British government has been in bed with the US government for years, which means they pretty much do whatever the US tells them to, which means they're pretty much just a US colony, which means that this loss is obviously attributable to FBI negligence, which is clearly linked to the PATRIOT Act, which means that it's the sole responsibility of the current administration - and we all know how Karl Rove likes to publicize secret information; this loss is obviously why he's resigning - which means that George W. Bush wants criminals to go free, so he can further consolidate his power and declare himself interim president for life!!!
Slashdot Mirror
Dear internet: YHBT.
And what's the number one rule for dealing with trolls? Don't feed them.
The inverse of this is why I hate the word 'motivation'. You've got your noun, 'motive'. You've got your verbified noun, 'motivate'. Then you've got your nounification of the verbified noun, 'motivation'.
And the posters suck.
This is exactly why it's such a retarded move. The PS3's biggest competitor is [i]already[/i] the PS2 - why would they want to give the PS2 yet another competitive advantage?
If the PS3 hadn't sported full PS2 backwards compatibility, I wouldn't have bought one.
If Sony wasn't planning on discontinuing the version that had the price cut, this might be valid logic. As it stands, though, the "price cut" was actually a "fire sale." I care plenty about BC, and I was completely unwilling to drop $600 on a console. At $500, it became a reasonable thing for me to do, so I did - but partially because of the threat that I wouldn't be able to get full BC in future without spending $600 for the 80 GB version.
This new version doesn't address that. Now they're charging $200 for 40 GB of storage, software BC, and a card reader.
You'll forgive me if I'm underwhelmed.
...there being a /. poster whose .sig referred to some software that claimed to have something like 70% of Photoshop's functionality at 10% the price. It intrigued me when I saw it, but I never bothered to follow the link. Does anyone know what that software was, or if it's a viable alternative?
You know, I'm pretty sure that copying an article verbatim and wholesale to embed in your post is a copyright violation. I'm not a real fan of modern copyright by any stretch of the imagination, but that makes even me raise an eyebrow.
I also realize that the messenger has no logical bearing on the message, but it does strike me as odd that a site which appears to stand proudly on its claimed moral high ground so casually flouts copyright law. Particularly in a case where copyright law isn't even that onerous.
If you have an oscillating body of a given mass, then obviously the net force on the body isn't constant, given F=ma. There's no question about that (though it would certainly be newsworthy if someone discovered that F=ma doesn't hold). The question here is whether the input force is constant. The story is that they've replicated on a nano-scale turning a constant force input into an oscillating net force at the point of interest, something which has apparently not been done before.
If you have an alternative method for allocating spectrum, I'm sure everyone would be interested in hearing it.
(Note: a method which does not involve a central regulatory body is, in fact, a method based upon "he with the most broadcast power owns the spectrum")
Sure am. Only a sucker would give in to the man, and not replace IE with Firefox on his company laptop. What a sucker.
I haven't complained about D2's not working in IE, because I recognize that it's IE's fault. I also recognize that IE will never change as long as everyone panders to its broken-ness, so I can even respect Slashdot's decision to not do so. I'll even continue to subscribe, despite not being able to use the New Shiny most of the time, because I think Slashdot's worth supporting.
But some of us aren't in a position where it's feasible to change our client, and cheap shots at our expense aren't particularly appreciated. If you don't want to put in the time and effort to make D2 work in IE because you don't want to perpetuate the use of broken standards on the client, that's great. But I'd really appreciate not being mocked in the process.
Thanks.
Your sig is wholly appropriate.
Prick.
As a recent tourist in London - I didn't feel screwed over. I don't recall what my wife and I paid for our all-day any-zone tube tickets, but I do know it was much cheaper than taking cabs, much easier than taking buses (the ubiquitous tube map is brilliant in its explicative ability. The bus map, though similar in concept, was completely impenetrable), and far, far less stressful than renting a car and trying to drive around London (it was bad enough driving around Bath).
We knew we would have paid less with an Oyster Card, since they're prominently advertised that way, but I assure you, we didn't feel screwed. In fact, even at the prices we were paying - and even trying to get two weeks' worth of luggage from Paddington to Heathrow via the tube - I became a huge fan of the system.
Right, because of course the other companies involved simply decided that the FCC is all-wise, and have no interest in the decision being appealed. It's utterly beyond the realm of possibility that they collectively decided to use the member with the best PR machine to protest the decision. This is obviously Microsoft branching out on its own hook against the wishes of the other members of the coalition in an evil plot to TAKE OVER THE WORLD, MUAHAHAHA!!
Rather than go through all the replies to this story making fun of Microsoft, saying the FCC should wait for SP1, accusing Microsoft of trying to get some sort of patent on the device so they can PWN TEH AIRWAVEZ OH NOES XBOX HUEG LOL!!!eleventy-one! et cetera, et cetera, maybe it will be more effective to point out something the summary only briefly alludes to:
This is not a Microsoft initiative. This device was submitted by the White Spaces Coalition, which consists of Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung. If you're about to post some kind of rant about Microsoft taking over the world or whatever else, go through your post once (use the dreaded "Preview" button, if necessary). Everywhere you use the word "Microsoft" or "MS" or "Micro$oft" or "M$" or any pronoun whose antecedent is one of those terms, subsitute in for that word "Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung," then see if your post still makes sense.
If not, consider not saying anything.
Just my advice.
with the cable frequencies. Had they not seen it, Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung could have pumped a few million into promoting this noisy spec to flood the market with devices laying waste to clean cable signals. Then, Microsoft's, Google's, HP's, Intel's, Philips', Dell's, Earthlink's, and Samsung's IPTV business starts looking a whole lot better. With an end to end tie-in of Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung software in the US IPTV( UltimateTV? ) market, Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, Dell, Earthlink, and Samsung get to own the channels like they currently own the PC OEM channels. Doesn't that sound like fun?
[There. Fixed that for you.]
You're conveniently ignoring that this device was collectively submitted by the entire White Spaces group, which consists of Microsoft, Google, HP, Intel, Philips, and a couple others I'm forgetting.
But feel free to take any excuse to mindlessly bash Microsoft; don't let the facts get in the way of your ever-so-rational opinions.
I don't think it's quite as bleak as all that. Yes, it takes larger and larger teams to produce the full-immersion virtual worlds of GTA, Elder Scrolls, or Gears of War. But that doesn't necessarily have to be as depressing as you make it out to be.
For one thing, the full-on AAA title can still take its direction - its flavor, focus, feel, and maybe another word that starts with f or two - from one person. I think we can, as we so often do, look to the movie industry for the logical end point of this sequence. It takes a massive army of people to produce a modern movie. But that doesn't mean that you can't have individual people make names for themselves. Peter Jackson, Guy Ritchie, the Wachowskis, etc. all put their distinct stamp on a work. The key is to have someone making the top-level decisions who has a good vision to work towards.
The other encouraging thing, of course, is that we aren't at a point yet where it's impossible to make a quality, even popular, by yourself or with a small group of people. Geometry Wars and Line Rider come quickly to mind as examples. The bar is higher than it used to be, of course: the hobbyist/garage developer is forced to compete solely on gameplay, since they have no hope of competing with iD's, Epic's, or Valve's latest engine (although the availability of a product like Torque makes even this statement not as damning as it could be).
But I don't think we're at a terribly high risk of entering an era where individual names are lost to a sea of undifferentiated product. Your Mark Reins, CliffyBs, and Peter Molyneauxs are and will continue to be pivotal figures in the industry. I think we're going to continue to see such names come up.
The only risk I see on the horizon, really, is if PC gaming eventually dies. Right now, there is no real publishing barrier to entry into the market. If your game really is good enough, all you need is a web site and a file host. Consoles, however, change that dynamic. Maybe Microsoft's nascent foray into user-produced games will eventually turn into a real option for hobbyists, but if it doesn't, there's still no way to break into the console games industry unless you're already established.
Which is a shame, because there could be fantastic potential, there.
Wow. I don't know which is scarier - the possibility that you missed the joke because it was over your head, or the possibility that such a load of drivel sounded reasonable enough to you for you to debate the issue.
Either way, I'm scared.
But maybe soy would be adequate, I don't know. Even if it is, though, I don't see how it's better to use only one part of the plant as opposed to the whole thing.
I'm also under the impression that the current demand on corn as feedstock for ethanol supplies has materially driven up the price of corn such that it's had a significant deleterious effect on the ability of Mexico to feed its population. But I don't have hard evidence for that, so you may be right.
Yeah. That's what I said. That's why this is a good development, it solves the carbon problem of burning gasoline. But I appreciate you reiterating it.
Again - yeah, I know. That was my point. A more efficient method of transforming solar energy into kinetic energy is, obviously, better. Using E. coli to do it is a step in the right direction. If at some future point we find a yet more efficient way of turning solar energy into kinetic energy than using chemical energy as an intermediary, that would be good. I'm still not sure what you're arguing with, here, since you keep restating what I said in my post.
Yes. As I said in my original post.
This is a valid point. I glossed over this problem in the interests of brevity, and because my initial solution may be based upon false data. I believe - though I'm not certain - that there are large areas of the ocean that are, to all intents and purposes, devoid of life. Now, that may be for reasons that also prevent them from being useful for the purpose of growing anything intentionally, but it may also not be. My first thought is that we could use those areas.
My second thought, though, is that we already do this to arable land - we harness essentially all the sunlight that hits the area we farm, thereby destroying whatever ecosystem was already there. I don't think it's worse to do that in the ocean than on land.
Thanks. Seriously, thank you. I had never looked at genetic evolution through the lens of simple thermodynamics, despite my sig. Once you say it, of course, it's obviously true and I wonder why I didn't realize it sooner (kinda like those single-serving Crystal Light packets. No idea how I didn't come up with those).
In any event, having something of a fundamental truth revealed is a big deal to me, so thanks.
True, but that's a self-solving problem. As petroleum becomes arbitrarily scarce, the marginal cost of the next barrel becomes arbitrarily high. Assuming that an alternative process exists that does not itself depend on the price of petroleum, at some point break-even will be reached, and the alternative becomes economically attractive.
The problems, of course, are
A) if the price of oil rises too fast, the economy will not have time to adjust. We very much depend on relatively cheap energy from petroleum. If the price of oil rises steadily but slowly (below some unknown rate threshold), the economy will simply adapt to the new costs. Overall productivity will drop, but it won't be catastrophic. Above that threshold, disaster ensues*.
B) the cost of introducing "new" carbon to the atmosphere is not factored into the measured economic cost of a barrel of oil. Which means economic break-even for the alternative fuel doesn't take into account whether or not it's a good idea from a carbon-neutral perspective.
Absolutely. In my mind, developments like this E. coli tech are strictly gap technologies, not solutions in themselves. They buy us time - potentially a lot of it - to find yet more efficient methods of converting sunlight into kinetic/electrical/thermal energy.
If we can get past the externalities of petroleum dependence, the market really will work towards providing more efficient (i.e., cheaper) energy conversion chains. The problem now is, as you say, petroleum is cheap in all the ways that we directly measure.
*That is, an increase of one percent a year is absorbable. An increase to infinity over a day (i.e., "oh noes, we're out of teh oilz!") would be a disaster. Somewhere between those extremes is the threshold. More accurately, probably, a range of such thresholds corresponding to noticeable but minor effects all the way through flat-out the end of civilization as we know it.
Yes - though I obviously didn't say it clearly enough, that's exactly what I meant. This development is good precisely because it avoids the problem of burning buried petroleum. The carbon released is carbon that was fixed in the short term carbon cycle.
Insofar as this can be scaled out to real production, it addresses both problems with burning gasoline: the finite supply of petroleum, as well as the introduction of "new" carbon to the atmosphere.
Yes. It releases carbon into the atmosphere that was fixed from the atmosphere in the near term. This solves the biggest current problem with burning petroleum, that it's re-introducing carbon to the atmosphere that hasn't been there for millions of years.
The other pollutants that result from gas-burning engines are manageable. Not ignorable, certainly, but there are known technologies to mitigate them to a great extent.
Frankly, you're completely wrong.
There's nothing inherently wrong with burning gasoline. The problems we face from it are:
a) introducing new carbon to the atmosphere
b) finite supply of petroleum
This development, if it turns into a full-scale production technology, solves both those problems.
I wasn't thinking of putting the bacteria itself in the ocean - though that might be a strategy worth pursuing; I don't know - but rather, growing plant (algae?) feedstock to be harvested and pumped into the centralized bacterial conversion facility.
Since the summary doesn't mention it, I'll do a bit of karma-whoring and answer the obvious question: they're using sugar, derived from corn, as a food source for the bacteria. They're aware that this is less than ideal from the total volume and a competing-with-food standpoints. The goal is to replace the use of sugar with cellulosic material.
That out of the way, this is obviously promising work. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with burning hydrocarbons as a fuel - if we can get around the problems of increasing atmospheric carbon and the finite supply of said hydrocarbons. Yes, a more efficient solar-to-kinetic/electrical/thermal energy conversion process would be better, but I don't think the development of such a technology will be hindered by making it feasible to extend the use of hydrocarbons (I believe it was Larry Burns who said, "the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones."). A gap technology that staved off the critical problems of hydrocarbon dependence would give us breathing room to pursue work on other technologies.
After all, while nothing may focus the mind like the prospect of being hanged in the morning, of the focused mind can't avoid the hanging, it doesn't matter.
All that being said, what would make a technology like this almost utopian in aspect would be the creation of a feedstock that can be grown on the surface of the ocean. There's (obviously) far more oceanic surface area than arable land area; using that would completely solve the problem of competing with food crops.
But the British government has been in bed with the US government for years, which means they pretty much do whatever the US tells them to, which means they're pretty much just a US colony, which means that this loss is obviously attributable to FBI negligence, which is clearly linked to the PATRIOT Act, which means that it's the sole responsibility of the current administration - and we all know how Karl Rove likes to publicize secret information; this loss is obviously why he's resigning - which means that George W. Bush wants criminals to go free, so he can further consolidate his power and declare himself interim president for life!!!
CAN'T YOU SEE, MAN? IT'S THE END OF FREEDOM!