E-Fuel Corp has a patent-pending technology they are releasing in a product called the EFuel100 MicroFueler. The product is advertised as making “home ethanol distillation possible, cost-effective, and safe.” This personal ethanol machine uses sugar to produce the ethanol. The sugar comes in 50Lb bags and can be delivered to your door or you can buy yeast if you have your own sugar supply.
The MicroFueler is supposed to be available by end of 2008 and lists at $9,995. With a federal tax credit – for units purchased and installed in the U.S. – the federal government offers business owners a 30% tax rebate and individual non-business owners a $1,000 rebate. The micro-refinery takes 5 to 7 days to product 35 gallons of ethanol. The device weigh’s roughly 200 pounds (when empty), with a light weight design that uses ultra-tough polyurethane.
Thomas Quinn is the founder and chief executive of Los Gatos-based E-Fuel Corp. Mr. Quinn has four successful start-up companies under his belt, including Gyration, Inc., which is the patent holder of the Nintendo Wii controller.
Researchers in Sweden have found the day after we set our clocks back we reduce our risk of death or hospitalization from a hear attack by 5%. A description of the study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine by Dr. Imre Janszky of the Karolinska Institute and Dr. Rickard Ljung of Sweden’s National Board of Health and Welfare.
The study, based on 20 years of records, also found that moving clocks forward in spring causes the opposite. There are more heart attacks the week after the start of daylight saving time.
Dr. Janszky describes the idea for studying this stemming from his own problems adjusting to the spring time change. “I was on the bus, quite sleepy, and I thought of this,” said Janszky. Mondays are the worst days for heart attacks. Changing the time to increase a person’s sleep likely reduces stress at the start of the workweek. The first three days of the week had the most noticeable changes in the study
For more information you can visit the New England Journal: www.nejm.com
On Oct 7, 2008, Solyndra Inc, after three years of silence, just announced landing $1.2 billion in contracts on their new thin-film solar power modules. According to their press release, “Solyndra’s photovoltaic (PV) system is designed to generate significantly more solar electricity on an annual basis from typical low-slope commercial rooftops with lower installation costs than conventional PV flat panel technologies.” Solyndra has claimed significan advances in solar technology: their technology uses rows of cylindrical cells, which absorb more light, have less wind resistance, and are much easier to install than conventional systems.
Headquartered in Fremont, California, Solyndra has been extremely well funded with over $600 million dollars from investors that include Virgin Green Fund, Madrone Capital Partners, Rockport Capital Partners, U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Ventures and Redpoint Ventures. The two largest clients are Solar Power Inc. of Arizona (with a deal over $300 million) and Phoenix Solar AG out of Germany (with a deal over $680 million). Solynda’s facilities are state-of-the-art with over 300,000 square feet and a fully-automated manufacturing floor with heavy use of robotics.
Manfred Bachler, Chief Technical Officer at Phoenix Solar AG comments, “By eliminating the need for roof-penetrating mounts and wind ballasts, PV arrays with Solyndra panels can be installed with one-third the labor, in one-third of the time, at one-half the cost.” Learn more at www.solyndra.com.
If Linux wants to score against Windows on the desktop, it needs to offer a convincing office suite. SoftMaker has just announce a beta of their SoftMaker Office suite for Linux that is aimed squarely at topping what OpenOffice.org has to offer. SoftMaker is making the beta free-of-charge for SoftMaker Office 2008 for Linux.
Per softmarker, “OpenOffice.org, while having the advantage of being free, has its share of downsides: slow start-up speed and run-time performance, not-so-great compatibility with the MS Office file formats, and a crowded user interface.”
SoftMaker tauts the speed with which SoftMaker Office launches and operates. On modern computers. They point out the advantage on performance on netbooks such as Asustek’s EeePC where other office suites can easily bog down the computer.
SoftMaker Office 2008 for Linux contains the Word-compatible word processor TextMaker 2008, the Excel-compatible spreadsheet PlanMaker 2008, and — for the first time — SoftMaker’s PowerPoint alternative, SoftMaker Presentations 2008.
SoftMaker’s office applications have been designed with compatibility in mind from the outset. They read and write Word .doc files, Excel .xls spreadsheets, and PowerPoint .ppt presentations without hiccup, without changing charts or objects, without losing formatting. But SoftMaker did not stop with MS Office compatibility. In addition, SoftMaker Office offers features not known from Microsoft Office, such as PDF export and its ability to run from USB flash drives without needing installation on the host operating system — ideal for use in Internet cafes.
Ubuntu 8.04 is now pre-installed with Dell computers. For the non-technical user this is a major step forward. The Dell Inspiron 530N with ubuntu 8.04 starts at $439. Version 7.10 of ubuntu offered DVD Playback. Version 8.04 offers ATI Video Graphics, Dell Wireless, FingerPrint Readers, HDMI, Bluetooth and MP3/WMA/WMV support.
This new version of ubuntu looks like a winner. As always, issues have been reported, but at much lower volumes. Some of the issues we have seen on forums today include:
– No Sound After Distribution (for models) E1505n, 1420n, 1525n
– Modem Does Not Work (for models) E1505n, 1420n, 1525n, XPS M1330n
– Desktop Won’t Boot (for models) 530n
For more information on issues and a general overview, go to:
Researchers at the California Institute of Technology have developed a “microscope on a chip” that is small and can be produced very inexpensively. The Science daily, July 29, 2008 claims that it can be mass-produced at around $10.
Because this device is small, has no lens to break, and can be produced at low cost the potential applications for this new microscope are exciting. You could, for instance, develop a microscope that could fit in a cell phone sized devide. Such a device would, amoung other things, help field workers in undeveloped countries to check for malaria or for hikers to check for microbes.
The developer is Changhuei Yang, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at California Institute of Technology. Changhuei Yang commented, “The whole thing is truly compact–it could be put in a cell phone–and it can use just sunlight for illumination, which makes it very appealing for Third-World applications.”
The way the chip works is actually simple. The device has a thin layer of metal with tiny holes punched into it at about 5 micrometers apart. There is a sensor aray to which the metal is coated that is similer to sensor arrays used in digital cameras. Each hole matches to one pixel. A microfluidic channel, which is where the liquid containing samples will flow, is on top of this metal and sensor array. Objects that pass through the channel block light and a series of images are created, like a pinhole camera. All the images are then pieced together.
According to SoftMaker president Martin Kotulla, the only commercial word processor available as a native FreeBSD application, TextMaker, will no longer support that platform as of the upcoming 2008 edition. There will of course be a Windows edition, and a native Linux edition (which should be able to run through the Linux binary compatibility software in FreeBSD), but the FreeBSD edition will not grow beyond TextMaker (and the full SoftMaker Office suite) 2006 unless there is more demand from FreeBSD users, and the operating system itself becomes easier to develop for.
TextMaker has been around in one form or another for almost 20 years, but the native FreeBSD port did not exist until shortly after the release of TextMaker 2002 when some FreeBSD users requested it. At the time, Kotulla publicly said that only two lines of the TextMaker code had to be changed in order to compile the source code for FreeBSD. Since then, so much has changed in both the SoftMaker Office code and the FreeBSD base system that the simplicity of a native port has been erased.
I asked Martin Kotulla why it is so much more difficult to create a FreeBSD binary now than it was in the FreeBSD 5.1 days when the first native TextMaker binary was made. “The ever-changing ABI for one,” he said via email. “It’s not possible to create a FreeBSD application that works on 4.x, 5.x and 6.x simultaneously. Also, as we are making the applications more locale-aware (by supporting Unicode, by supporting different date, time, and currency systems), we find significant wrong behavior in the C runtime library provided by FreeBSD. For example, I remember that a certain string conversion or comparison function simply provided wrong results instead of failing, resulting in wrong sorting order inside the application. This is the stuff that’s hard to debug, and it’s discouraging.”
In a separate email, Kotulla said that there could still be a FreeBSD version of future SoftMaker products, but it depends on customer demand and the level of developer frustration when programming for FreeBSD. “Right now, FreeBSD demand is really low, and frustration is pretty high,” he told me.
The FreeBSD Project did not officially respond to two requests to comment on Kotulla’s FreeBSD-specific complaints. Unofficially, Jeremy Reed, who helps with FreeBSD marketing, suggested that Kotulla file bug reports on the issues he experienced, and that he consider dropping support for older FreeBSD releases.
At the Presidency IV rally in Orlando this past Saturday, I interviewed several Republican ambassadors (or what the Republican party of Florida (RPOF) calls “activists”) and three members of the Teenage Republicans delegation. Below are videos of the interviews along with some written commentary.
Saturday’s schedule began with the governor’s luncheon, at which I sat with a number of Republican ambassadors from all around the state of Florida. One of the most friendly and animated was Danny Sexton, a florist and longtime Republican party member from Kissimmee. We had an interesting chat about the growing sense of factionalism in the Republican party, and how the latest crop of candidates had strayed somewhat from the party’s core beliefs. Despite that, he wasn’t a big fan of the lesser-known candidates — at least at the beginning of the event.
After the luncheon, there was a dessert reception on the other side of the convention center. It was pretty loud, and various Republican party officials were trying to give speeches near where the desserts and coffee were being served. Down a quiet side hallway, several groups of people escaped the crowd and silently enjoyed their coffee and confections. One of them was Dick Windle and his wife. Dick’s actually the secretary of the Republican Executive Committee in Citrus county, and served for 16 years as an elected city councilman in Oregon before he moved to Florida, so he’s about as die-hard a Republican as you’ll find. Like many Republicans in attendance, Dick was most interested in nominating the candidate who would be most likely to defeat the Democratic opposition. Although he thought Mike Huckabee had some good ideas, he didn’t think that Huckabee would win, so he will probably not cast his primary vote for the former governor.
An in email after this article published, Dick Windle said that he was disappointed in Fred Thompson’s too-brief rally speech, but that the other top-tier candidates are still in the running. In a discussion with some sourthen Florida Presidency IV attendees after the below video clip was recorded, the group dreamed up an ideal Giuliani/Huckabee GOP ticket.
My next stop was a part of the convention hall where various Republican groups and candidate supporters had set up tables. Though several were interesting to me, I thought that the Teenage Republicans would provide the most compelling interview materials. Travis Clinger, Joshua Edson, and Devin Devenport had some very carefully worded things to say about the Republican party. 2008 will be the first presidential election that they will be able to vote in.
After the candidates’ speeches, I found Christa Johnson, her husband Stephen Johnson, and their friend Meredith Mercer relaxing near the press room. I’d actually been standing behind them during the candidates’ rally, too — they had a nice front row spot. The Johnsons, being parents of two with another child on the way, were Republicans because of the party’s stalwart position on family values. I learned something surprising from this interview: Mitt Romney’s campaign had contacted the Johnsons via email and asked them to apply to be ambassadors for Presidency IV. Surely if Romney could flood the rally with vocal supporters, the visible show of strength would be enough to convince the party’s die-hard core constituents that he was the most electable of the candidates. To me, this is dirty pool, but I suppose that’s what politics is all about. The good news was, neither the Johnsons nor their guest were particularly in favor of Mitt Romney, and had not yet decided whom they would vote for in the primary or in the presidential election.
Other Presidency IV videos
It’s hard to keep a camera still while you’re holding it up above your head for a long period of time. If you don’t mind a little shakiness, I have some video clips from Saturday’s Presidency IV events:
Fred Thompson’s rally speech:
The RPOF chairman’s rally speech introduction:
Florida governor Charlie Crist’s rally speech:
Most of Rudy Giuliani’s rally speech (in three parts):
Candidates and their representatives filled the Spin Room provided by the Fox News Channel after the Presidency IV debate, met by a small army of news media personnel. I spoke directly with Ron Paul, Mitt Romney’s son Tag, Charlie Bronson, and got some interesting comments from Mike Huckabee and another Mitt Romney representative, Tom Freeney.
Only four of the 2008 Republican presidential candidates gave speeches at Presidency IV on Saturday. A few Ron Paul supporters in the crowd shouted their discontent when Mitt Romney appeared instead of their candidate. So I asked the congressman why he wasn’t there. “I was travelling at the time, and it just wouldn’t have worked into my schedule,” he said. So it ends up being not a lack of funding or a lack of respect for Florida voters — just a simple scheduling conflict. Mike Huckabee, on the other hand, said that he opted out of the speech because his campaign did not have the $100,000 to blow on a rally speech.
Speaking of Governor Huckabee, many of the Republican ambassadors and guests I spoke to on Saturday said that they thought Huckabee had some great ideas and spoke well in the debates, but that they probably would not vote for him in the primary because they did not think he could win. When I mentioned this to Mike Huckabee representative Chip Saltsman, he said, “Well, at first we were a no-shot campaign. Then we were a long-shot campaign. And now we’re a sling-shot — our support in states where were were just an asterisk a few weeks ago is suddenly up to 18% in Iowa — and this without ads. We have not run one advertisement. Governor Huckabee is an incredibly effective communicator, and because of that he’s starting to get the respect and support he deserves.”
Mitt Romney’s representative Tom Freeney said that this was a good debate for Governor Romney, but that some of the other candidates were spoiling it for him. “Social conservatives will waste their votes by concentrating on candidates who can’t win the primaries,” he said, likely referring to Tom Tancredo, Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Duncan Hunter. “The only candidates in the nomination race are Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, and Mitt Romney will be more successful with evangelical Republicans.”
Romney had many representatives in the Spin Room — at least 5, including Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services commissioner Charlie Bronson, and Romney’s eldest son Tag. I asked them what would distinguish Romney among his conservative competitors, all of whom seemed to share the same goals and ideals. “His policies on issues that appeal to conservative Democrats,” said Tag Romney, “especially on health care and fiscal issues.” “Mitt Romney will help people help themselves,” Bronson added, “and he has always been and always will be a strong conservative.”
It was rumored among members of the press that John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Mitt Romney, and Fred Thompson were too important and popular to come out and speak with us personally. All four of them did not talk to anyone except Sean Hannity and Alan Colmes on their post-debate live television program. Only Mike Huckabee, Ron Paul, and Duncan Hunter came out to talk to the press directly, though all of them — and Tom Tancredo — had spokespeople on hand to answer questions. Like Socrates in Plato’s story of the Symposium invaded by drunken revelers, Ron Paul outlasted both Mike Huckabee and Duncan Hunter on the Spin Room floor, answering questions, shaking hands, and signing autographs. Perhaps it was not because he had more to say, or because his Hannity & Colmes interview was late in the lineup, but because it was nearly impossible for him to leave, being constantly surrounded by young journalists who all but lost their composure in his presence. “People just love him,” one reporter said to me as we watched the Ron Paul onslaught. None of the other candidates in attendance, nor the famous journalists and news entertainers associated with Fox News who were in the room with us, nor Florida governor Charlie Crist could shake them, but Ron Paul reduced those reporters and presenters to mush. At least from a media standpoint, it was the so-called “second tier” candidates that made this leg of the 2008 Republican presidential nomination race an exciting saga.
This Sunday’s debate caps the weekend Presidency IV rally in which Florida Republican politicians, political groups, and four of the Republican presidential candidates vied for attention to their views and policies. After all of the thousands of Republican ambassadors from Florida’s 67 counties filled the Gatlin ballroom at Rosen Shingle Creek Resort in Orlando, FL to hear Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Duncan Hunter, John McCain, Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Tom Tancredo, and Fred Thompson battle to establish themselves as the GOP frontrunner for the 2008 presidential election.
Before the debate began, a Fox News Channel focus group showed some of the more bizarre Florida GOP voter opinions, along with equally bizarre, attitude-heavy moderation on the Hannity & Colmes pseudo-news entertainment program. Not only did Fox News Channel presenter Frank Luntz bereate the focus group for being undecided on a Republican candidate, but one of the participants called Ron Paul “certifiably insane,” and almost every group member agreed that Hillary Clinton was a “socialist.”
All of the debate hosts were from Fox News Channel, and consistently frustrated the candidates by misquoting them and misrepresenting their stances and policies.
The first battle among the candidates was over who was more conservative. None of the candidates gave particularly inspiring responses — they commented on their voting and political records, and tossed off small attacks on various votes, political support, and positions that opposing candidates have executed over the years. The first portion of the debate frequently seemed like a series of arguments among candidates, fueled by antagonistic comments from the Fox News Channel hosts meant to encourage the participants to attack one another. In some cases, the questions asked of the candidates contained misquotes and quotes taken out of context, which all of the candidates expressed some discontent with. The exception was Mike Huckabee, whose first comment of the debate, some 20 minutes into it, were that he would not attack his fellow Republicans. Duncan Hunter even commented in his first response that the Fox hosts were trying to divide the Republican party with their questions and comments.
On the subject of health care, both John McCain and Ron Paul had in-depth analyses of how the health insurance issue can be dealt with affordably. Mitt Romney talked up his own plan in Massachusetts, which reduced regulation in state-organized health insurance. Duncan Hunter insisted that Romney’s plan would fail on a larger scale because it contained too many state mandates, and Mike Huckabee said that the larger problem was the health of the average American citizen, and that prevention of chronic diseases would be a better focus than federally organized health care plans.
Continuing the string of bizarre questions, the Fox News hosts asked Mitt Romney if he thought Hillary Clinton would make a good commander-in-chief of the US military, Romney laughed and said that the audience — which unanimously screamed “No!” — would answer for him. When told that some analyst had asserted that he and Hillary Clinton are identical on many social issues, Giuliani said incredulously, “You have got to be kidding.”
John McCain got a standing ovation for attacking Hillary Clinton for her pork-barrel spending, specifically for trying to secure federal funding for a Woodstock concert museum, admitting that he was “tied up at the time,” referring to his time spent in the “Hanoi Hotel” POW camp in Vietnam. Huckabee refused to joke about Clinton, saying that “there is nothing funny about Hillary Clinton being president.” Thompson insisted that the Republicans shouldn’t concentrate on fighting one Democrat, but to stick to Republican ideals, which he said were the best formula for running the federal government.
Despite the fact that Ron Paul was booed for saying that US troops should come home from the war in Iraq, his comments on removing all troops from “America’s empire” around the world earned him generous applause. John McCain reiterated his staunch support of US troops, and his belief that a stronger military presence is now working to win the war in Iraq, which will in turn help to remove the threat of Islamic terrorism from the middle east.
On social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and social security, Thompson, Giuliani, and Romney all agreed that extensive work needs to be done to reform these plans. Ron Paul called for giving people the option of getting out of social security — paying into it and receiving benefits from it. The other candidates favored a partial or complete privatization of social security and other benefits. Duncan Hunter said that many social security problems could be solved by fixing foreign trade deficits, tariffs, and re-claiming the manufacturing jobs the US has lost to China and other economically emerging countries, which would revitalize the middle class.
For some reason, the hosts thought that asking the candidates about diplomatic ties with Russia would elicit good responses, but the candidates only offered theorycraft and vague speculation.
If crowd reaction is any indication, warmongering is popular among Florida Republicans. Ron Paul was booed for suggesting an Iraq pullout and a strict policy of non-interventionism. He was booed again for saying that the Republican party had adopted the Democrats’ foreign policy attitude and strayed from traditional Republican philosophy, and all candidates who advocated military strength overseas were met with applause.
Post-debate coverage will be available on this site soon.
