I wouldn't mind one, if it was written right.

All ISPs with more than, say, 1000 customers are required to offer IPv6 services starting in 2016, for instance.

That gives organizations enough time to plan ahead without forcing the customer to do anything. The mom and pop shops who have less than 1000 customers won't be forced into it (by law at least - they'll have to change eventually).

Normally I wouldn't go for such a thing, but many ISPs seem willing to put it off until the crunch, and some hardware providers still aren't properly supporting IPv6. I wouldn't be surprised if my cable operator didn't try forcing us on NAT before they went IPv6.

I agree. It's funny, I didn't have any real issue with McCain (although his idea to shut the government down was a bit out there), and I don't have much problem with Romney based on his time in Massachusetts, but I didn't support either of them primarily because I want a Democrat with the veto stamp. (That, and the Republicans need to be punished for Bush. WMDs my ass.)

I never really cared that much for Obama - I wanted Clinton.

Not that it matters. I'm in Oklahoma, where a non-Republican vote doesn't count.

I switched because I got sick of waiting on glibc. Once Slack 7 came out, Debian's package management had me hooked. Something about Slack 7 just never felt right to me - I was too used to 3.x.

(Of course, back then I was downloading and compiling the X and GNOME source about once a month, but at least I didn't have to worry about the main system).

Cane sugar isn't the same thing as what you get in the bag. It has to be refined first. Raw sugar cane wouldn't have any advantage over other biomass for making pure carbon.

Concerning energy production, sugar cane is one of the few places where ethanol fuel makes sense. In Brazil they estimate they get 1.3 times the energy from ethanol than they put into producing it. That's a much better figure than corn ethanol, which is an energy loss.

As far as growing sugarcane not being taxing - I've seen sugarcane farmers at work in Okinawa. It made me glad to have a desk job :) (It's also the only time I saw any Japanese people wearing the conical reed hats that Americans stereotype asians with.)

Coal probably wouldn't work. It contains impurities that would need to be removed. That's why steel was traditionally smelted with charcoal.

Also, bear in mind that this is a university project, not a factory. They can just send an undergrad to the market to pick up sugar. I'm not sure what the price there is (I never bought sugar when I lived there, since I ate at the chow hall and can't drink coffee), but they grow sugar cane in Okinawa and probably don't have the price fixing that sugar has in America.

As a guess, I'd say it was because grass clippings and other vegetable matter aren't very consistant and would require refining to attain the purity of carbon needed.

Sugar (sucrose, anyway) is a refined product. I know, I pick up truckloads of it in Louisiana from the Domino refinery every now and again :) A fellow truck driver got a bag of raw sugar off a dump truck that was being delivered there, but he couldn't use it because it had sand in it.

The price would go up, which defeats the point of using sugar in the first place.

No idea from the scientific point of view. The article wasn't aimed at a technical audience.

It's a sugar battery because journalists think it'll generate interest in their stories.

You're missing a huge factor of scale here.

We're using corn, soybeans, etc. as fuel. They're the energy source, so a lot of the market goes into fuel instead of food. Run out of fuel, you need more corn.

These guys are using sugar to make a component on the battery. The energy comes from somewhere else. No matter how many times you recharge the battery, you won't use any more sugar.

Even if we went into full scale production of these and replaced Li-Ion batteries altogether, it wouldn't make an appreciable difference on the sugar market.

As an aside, you also have to consider that by removing the requirement of lithium, you're moving from a scarce resource to a common one. We could make those batteries in the U.S. (or whatever country you happen to be in) and not require buying lithium from China. Lithium is used for several drugs, and by removing the demand for lithium, those drugs may drop in price to the point they'll be more accessible to people in poorer countries.

His message will be why people should hate Democrats, and why they should vote Republican. That message works for both the people who hate Democrats already (to keep them excited about voting) and the independants who haven't decided. As far as the content of the message, the independants are key, since he really just needs the political equivalent of pep rallies to keep the Republicans voting for him.

I suppose I could have phrased that differently. Historically, the president tends to be a focal point for policy matters in a party. It's not written in stone, and of course there's plenty of examples of unpopular presidents who lost the confidence of their party, but for the most part the president can steer party policy to a greater degree than any other individual in the party.

I've viewed it as one of Obama's failings that he hasn't taken advantage of this to push his agenda. A progressive party needs leadership, since there's so many different ways to define progress. Then again, just like he never said he wanted to end the PATRIOT ACT, he also said he felt legislation should come from the legislature, not the executive, so it's not really a surprise.

The legislative branch does repeal laws, but Obama is the head of the Democratic party which had control of both houses. They could have repealed the PATRIOT ACT; they chose not to.

And while the president is not the "prosecutor-in-chief", he does appoint and direct the Attorney General, which is basically the same thing. The Justice Department would act as the plaintiff (in the name of the U. S. government) in a war crimes case against Bush and his cronies. No sane president would do so, of course, because it would be political suicide. We can wish, though :)

No, I'm sure there's many like me who don't fly because of the TSA.

Showing up three hours early for my flight? Be treated like some bomb-carrying nutjob because I (gasp!) only bring a carry-on and have my shampoo and conditioner with me? No thanks. I've got a '65 Galaxie that rides like a dream and has a trunk you could fit Rhode Island in, I've got the money to keep the tank full, and I've got the time to take the scenic route. Screw the TSA.

I used some trig yesterday for the first time in years. I had a piece of wood I needed to cut at an angle, and I didn't have a protractor.

It was sad - I had to look up which of the basic trig functions was opposite/adjacent (tangent, of course). And it's been less than a decade since I took college trig.

(It was pointless, though. My dumb ass used 6" as the opposite side rather than 5 1/2" for a 1x6 plank, so the angle came out wrong. It was my derp for the week.)

Considering that (at the time I'm posting this) there's 640 comments, I'd wager to guess that nerds like this kind of question. I find it interesting to see what other Linux users have used in the past, and I would probably qualify as a nerd (although after you hit 20 or 25 the label doesn't fit well).

Your question sounds like an invitation for a massive flame fest. Perhaps that's why it wasn't selected.