I've never really bought the argument that biofuels are causing a food shortage considering that there is still so much unused farmland in the US and farming practices here in the EU. I must admit this out of my field so I have no real evidence to support my suspicion, but there have been a trickle of articles from publications like Der Spiegel and the NY Times which indicate there is some suspicion these shortages have just as much to do with commodity speculation and manipulation.
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/12/business/speculate.php http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,559550,00.html (in English) Geoff Galitz Blankenheim NRW, Deutschland http://www.galitz.org -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Vincent Diepeveen Sent: Mittwoch, 25. Juni 2008 16:07 To: Jon Aquilina Cc: Beowulf Mailing List; Mark Hahn Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Re: "hobbyists" Even worse, Why is there subsidy on bio fuels that get produced out of food eaten by poor people? This causes as we speak people dying as they can no longer for a cent or so buy food made out of it; the prices have doubled if not more for such types of cheap food because of subsidy in the 1st world countries for this. I assume EU will take measures to turn back those subsidies on bio fuels that get produced out of food that feeds billions, who now hardly can afford to buy food anymore as it gets burned for energy in first world countries, whereas commercially spoken it cannot get burned, it is just because of subsidy it can exist. Even better i would be in favour of a ban on bio fuels that are outright food products in 3d world countries. When i just walked previous week into a shop and my sister was interested in a new washing machine, i pointed her to the fact that the thing she was interested in, was eating 3.8 kW, versus the 100 euro more expensive thing next to it was eating 1.14 kW. It is something that only very few will notice. It is easy to cheaply produce equipment that eats more power than equipment of competitors, that is the fundamental problem. Vincent - speaking for himself On Jun 25, 2008, at 8:43 AM, Jon Aquilina wrote: > how much does a sugar glass window cost now that sugar and other > things are being used for bio fuels? > > On Wed, Jun 25, 2008 at 12:20 AM, Mark Hahn <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > More specifically for HPC, linux seems designed for the desktop, and > for small memory machines. > > the only justice I can see in that is that there hasn't been all > that much effort to get bigpages widely/easily used. in > particular, I don't > see that scheduler or general memory-management issues in linux are > particularly biased for desktop or against HPC. > > > That's funny, because I've heard people get scared that it was the > complete > opposite. That Linux was driven by Big Iron, and that no one cared > about > the "little desktop guy" (Con Kolivas is an interesting history > example). > > Con didn't play the game right - you have to have the right > combination of social engineering (especially timing and proactive > response) and good tech > kungfoo. kernel people are biased towards a certain aesthetic that > doesn't > punish big-picture redesigns from scratch, but _does_ punish > solutions in search of a problem. > > so the question is, if you had a magic wand, what would you change > in the kernel (or perhaps libc or other support libs, etc)? most > of the things I can think of are not clear-cut. I'd like to be > able to give better info from perf counters to our users (but I > don't think Linux is really in the way). I suspect we lose some > performance due to jitter > injected by the OS (and/or our own monitoring) and would like to > improve, > but again, it's hard to blame Linux. I'd love to have better > options for cluster-aware filesystems. kernel-assisted network > shared memory? > > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf > > > > -- > Jonathan Aquilina > _______________________________________________ > Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] > To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit > http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf _______________________________________________ Beowulf mailing list, [email protected] To change your subscription (digest mode or unsubscribe) visit http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
