My brain is not a turing machine, and I don't have /usr/bin/cc installed in my cerebral cortex.

I'm not going to read the source code to sox to learn how to resample a wav file for an audio book I want to listen to. I am not a contributor to the sox program, and have no desire to dig through the source code. Fortunately, the docs are pretty good, and I found out how to do that in a few minutes.

I'm not going to read the source code to perl to learn the arguments for the sort function. It took me thirty seconds to find that out the other day, most of which was me walking over to my bookshelf to get my copy of Programming Perl.

I'm sure as hell not going to read the source code to Windows to turn off the annoying startup noise it makes even when you choose "no sounds" as your sound profile, since even if I was so masochistic to try it isn't available anyway. I blundered about and figured that out on my own, since I have no faith in the Microsoft help system (I don't use Windows enough to know where stuff is anymore, but boot it every now and again to run a program I can't run with Wine).

If you need to read the source code to figure out how to use a program, then that program is useless to 99.9% of computer users. Yes, it will tell you exactly what the program does, but in the real world your documentation needs to be more accessible.

JavaDocs are documentation that you include with java classes. They fill the same niche as sections 2 and 3 of the UNIX man pages.

If you've ever used perl POD documentation, they work kind of like that on a conceptual level.

This is all documentation aimed at programmers, of course, not application or system documentation. If you want to provide documentation for a java application, you generally don't do it with JavaDoc.

None of those qualify.

1) He's not starving, he wanted it for the novelty.
2) This works with refined sugar. This is raw sugar. Yes, you'd get some sugar out doing this, but it's not the same.
3) He's a truck driver, not a chemist, and raw sugar isn't evenly granulated.
4) That's not what he wanted the sugar for.

You're probably right.

I didn't realize lithium was (fairly) cheap. I coulda sworn I read that there was a scarcity of it due to its use in batteries.

Okay, wise guy, explain to me how you'd separate raw sugar from sand at home, with the intent on eating the raw sugar in its raw state.

Seriously?

Why did you bother to take time to post that? Don't you have anything better to do?

It's the same with IPv4, really. Stuff gets updated all the time.

Maybe not IP and TCP anymore, but there have been lots of changed to the basic protocols in recent years.

That particular change doesn't affect you anyway unless you're a programmer. The IPv4 in IPv6 address space was only meant for applications to use internally (so you could use the same data type for IPv4 and IPv6 addresses). Those addresses aren't valid over the wire.

AT&T's new DSL requires you to change your router, and the new routers are IPv6 capable (in name, at least. I haven't actually tested it, but I did get an IPv6 address from one when I tried it).

Mobile devices don't last long enough to be a problem, and AT&T offers free phones when you renew your contract.

No idea about Verizon (my Mifi device I use in the truck doesn't get an IPv6 address, but that's the only Verizon service I use) or Comcast.

Also note that just because an ISP offers IPv6 doesn't mean you have to use it. IPv6 runs fine along IPv4.

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.