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Some good, but kind of off hand you throw away all options except fusion, which doesn't work yet. I'm all for fusion, but it seems like on this very website, other alternatives have been discussed that give us options in the meantime, including Thermal Solar, mentioned here:
http://www.sandia.gov/Renewable_Energy/solarthermal/NSTTF/index2.htm.

Also, more words not necessarily better, looks more like raving/emotional venting...

And the pyramids were built when the government had absolute power. ;)

People are doing this in several locations: Sandia Labs being a big one. Stirling engines are pretty good at it. The problems are largely that you have to build an enormous set of tracking mirrors, when mechanical systems are always the worst reliability problem, and apparently there are issues with getting good, efficient heat transfer from the focal point to the working fluid because you have so much heat you destroy whatever's at the focal point.

OK, can someone tell me where my calculation is wrong:

The designer's diagram shows 50lbs of weight falling 58 inches. Google tells me in metric that's about 23kg falling 1.5m; under the force of gravity (9.8N/kg), that gives a total potential energy of 23*1.5*9.8 Joules—call it 350J to be generous.

Now, the claim is that this thing outputs 600-800 lumens of light. Let's assume that LEDs can put out 200 lumens per watt of electricity delivered—this is apparently quite generous. That means the LEDs will need at least 3 watts of electricity to give out that amount of light.

As everyone here knows, 3 watts is 3 joules/second—meaning our total of 350J will last slightly less than two minutes; this is substantially less than the claimed four hours!

Either my number-crunching is wrong (in which case I'd be delighted to be enlightened—excuse the puns), or this device ain't ever going to do what it claims...

So.....

Can you store 'electricity' as easily as chemical fuels?

I doubt it unless you happen to own a pumped storage power station. Batteries and other 'under development' technology are sucky.

Limited number of recharges, declining power output during discharging phase, large size and mass etc. This is a major consideration in vehicle design for example. High power density batteries remain a dream and as long as there are other (cheaper and with fewer drawbacks) ways of achieving high power densities, they will be used first

A Hydrogen fuel cell (or an internal/external combustion engine for that matter) can be made to run at full power until its fuel is exhausted. Not much room, but still need high power? Well, use a bigger fuel cell/motor and just refill your storage tank as often as is required. No need to wait for a recharge or to swap out heavy batteries

Can you use it to power EXISTING infrastructure?

(ok, so Hydrogen fuel would require engines/turbines etc. to be modified - but very similar designs and/or tooling to hydrocarbon fuelled machines could still be used)

Try running your (currently ICE powered) car on electric power - you won't go very fast or get very far with just the started motor turning. Even if you did a conversion to an electric vehicle drive, ultimately the electrical power used to charge up its batteries has been generated (mostly) by the use of chemical fuels

Chemical fuels are valuable because of their EASE OF USE and flexibility (in application)

People often refer to Hydrogen as a 'just means of energy distribution' (true enough, but on a long enough timescale, fossil fuels are too) and use that reasoning to completely dismiss any notion of a 'Hydrogen Economy' because 'Hydrogen is not a fuel'. Frankly, if any kind of 'energy' is not a 'fuel' then electrical power is THE prime example.

Frankly, if Hydrogen can be generated (and stored - in a tank or whatever) with a 'cell' or even with a suitable a wind turbine then its use as a FUEL should not be discounted. Ever given any thought as to what you will power aircraft with in future? Something tells me that a 747 isn't going to fly too far on NiMh cells and solar panels.

Chemically powered machines can (and do) achieve far higher power densities than any electrically powered machines in current (or more likely my lifetime's - I'm 33) use.

That said, this http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/sunshine.html is also an interesting read.

Perhaps you should rename yourself to 'misled'? And no, this isn't a deliberate troll; no previous posts under this thread by me btw, I just can't be arsed to register.

Anyway, on the subject of vehicles, I can't imagine that rebuilding and/or modding an electric motor will ever be as much fun as it is with a piston engine. Do not want.

Besides the problem of fertilizer production, irrigation, machines burning diesel fuel, the biofuel craze is increasing pressures on farm land, promoting deforestation, and contributing to global food price rises. But that doesn't mean we won't eventually get a biofuel that has more energy in it than we put into it. Once we reach this point, then the biofuel itself can fuel its production. But in the mean time there are some other intriguing alternatives.

Just today I was listening to CBC's "Quirks and Quarks" talking to Sandia labs about using solar energy to convert CO2 and H2O into H2 and CO, which can be effectively combined to make hydrocarbons. Unlike bacteria or algae, this process uses a special solid substance that, when exposed to the intense light, has its oxygen molecules stripped off, releasing O2 into the atmosphere. Then this substance is taken out of the sunlight, exposed to CO2 and Water, and it rips the oxygen molecules out of those substances, leaving H2 and CO behind, both of which can be fairly economically combined into hydrocarbons like methanol and gasoline. What's intriguing is that the substance they are using to rip the oxygen out of the water and CO2 can do this over and over again. Right now they are using CO2 from sources other than the atmosphere, making this not carbon neutral. However they plan to work towards harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere. In the meantime, though, this is a great way of increasing the efficiency of energy extraction from, say coal. If, someday, we could capture all CO2 from coal plants and convert it to gasoline for use in autos, that would have an overall decrease in our CO2 emissions because the coal could now be used to generate electricity *and* drive cars, reducing the CO2 emissions from refined gasoline. Assuming we can control particulates, nitrous oxides, and sulfur dioxides from burning gasoline, in the future perhaps gasoline-burning cars will be the cleanest things on the planet! Certainly as the scientist pointed out, gasoline (hydrocarbons anyway) is the best way of storying energy. Generating electricity is nice, but we have to use it as we generate it. Batteries and H2 production aren't really that good at storing energy as densely. The radio program is http://www.cbc.ca/quirks/archives/07-08/feb09.html and the Sandia press release is http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/sunshine.html

If we are wise, then I think the push to biodiesel or solar gasoline will ultimately be our ticket.

'I can respect having an obsessive hobby. Especially when it produces such spectacular results.'

Though with some people, this sort of thing can get just a bit _too_ obsessive:

http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN02-13-98/cherry_story.html

'The switch mechanisms Kaczynski used were hand-made switches that he would spend weeks building...He machined his own screws.'

Seems to be a couple years old though, this page (second story down) which includes the same photo is dated feb 2006, and includes a much better description of how it works, including how they use alternate direction rotation rings for heat conservation within the drum, although it looks like they've more recently been trying it with CO2 instead of H20. This page contains more info and diagram of the counter rotating drum. Very interesting stuff though.

Nope, molten salts. I don't know what these guys are using, but the National Solar Thermal Test Facility has settled on a mix of 60% sodium nitrate and 40% potassium nitrate.

Kinda neat that this coincides with some new findings about Tunguska and how it may have been far smaller than was earlier predicted. More or less the atmosphere may worked to direct the blast, and the explosion may have been significantly smaller. Of course this effect would be far less significant on Mars with its thin atmosphere.

It may be far greater impact than Tunguska was, but only cause may suck more at math than we though.

http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/asteroid.html

Being in the same size class as the 1908 Tunguska asteroid, they should be fine (earth wasn't darkened by giant dust clouds in 1908, no?) While the article says that there will be a significant dust plume, I guess it'll seetle more rapidly and be more localized."

You've perhaps missed the recent news that puts the bulk of the Tunguska event's destruction on the preceding fireball & blast wave when the (now presumed much more smaller) asteroid exploded in the atmosphere, while making the 'size' of the object itself strictly dependent on composition - "Because of the additional energy transported toward the surface by the fireball, what scientists had thought to be an explosion between 10 and 20 megatons was more likely only three to five megatons. The physical size of the asteroid, says Boslough, depends upon its speed and whether it is porous or nonporous, icy or waterless, and other material characteristics."

Since the atmosphere on Mars is much thinner than on Earth and primarily carbon dioxide, the Mars event will be more impact/strike related, where the Tunguska asteroid exploded before it had a chance to do much physical damage on its own.

Remember the famous Face on Mars?

The Sandia labs simulation of the Tunguska impact has its own face - forward the video to 3.13e+00 seconds to see the Face of Tunguska!

Clearly, the Face on Mars is the "thumbprint" of a previous Tunguska event!

QUOTE (with minor editing for grammar): 98. December 19, 2007 There is a press-release [at] http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2007/asteroid.html on Sandia researcher Mark Boslough calculations of Tunguska. There are some computer graphics, but there is practically no info on physical models on which the calculations are based!

I can say that the graphics resembled [to] me the one in their calculations presented in 1995! And what I read (in his 1995 paper) on the sparse info about the models is not convincing.

Moreover one of the calculations' outcome was a proposal that satellites in orbits are in danger due to 'plumes' from rather small meteoroids ('meteorites')! (see the Boslough's abstract on Tunguska-96 conference here: http://www-th.bo.infn.it/tunguska/abstr3.html ).

Interesting that several groups of researchers using 'the most advanced' computer calculations obtain rather different results! :) But there is one point [on] which I could agree with Boslough -- the strength of the forest [destruction] used to be overestimated indeed, but in reality it should be incorporated into calculations in much more complicated form than Boslough has done. In my opinion this would alter the results of the calculations completely. :UNQUOTE

So, why are we getting this rehash of a 12-year-old study now? Could it be the upcoming Centennial?

Check out video number 7 at 3.13e+00 seconds to see the Easter egg cartoon that those wacky scientists at Sandia slipped into the simulation! Those crazy guys are having some fun for the holidays!

Funny stuff, guys, way to go! This is the best prank evar!!!!

Sandia has facilities in both states. New Mexico is the larger of the two.

While government agencies surely have the upper hand here, there is always the possibility that a mole in the NSA gets their hands on the backdoor information, or a lone genius working in say Russia finds a mathematical flaw in the system.

As far as poisoning your water supply etc. lookie here:

http://sandia.gov/scada/home.htm

Hardware errors are a potential problem, but they are #3 on the list after human and software problems. Why search for hardware problems when the first two are far more likely to bear fruit?

True 3D solid-state flash LIDAR devices exist. We've visited Advanced Scientific
Concepts in Santa Barbara, CA, and have seen an eye-safe 128 x 128 pixel solid state
flash 3D LIDAR suitable for outdoor work in operation on an optical bench. The device
consists of two custom chips bonded back to back using ball grid array techniques. The
front chip contains the array of detectors, and the rear chip contains the counters, timers,
and interface logic. The detector chip typically uses indium arsenide technology. Some
versions are front-ended by a photomultiplier cathode, like a night vision device. (The
photomultiplier effect is at the atomic level, and has no integration delay, so it can be
used to front-end a LIDAR detector.) The two-chip approach is a convenience for
prototyping; a volume production unit would probably be a single chip.

Of course, you also have the Z machine. A bit more wacky, but certainly scores high on my looks-cool-o-meter. :P

Doesn't the Z machine require vast amounts of electricity just to "fire" once? They only fire it once or twice a day at MOST and it fires for only billionths of a second. It's not a continually running thing. It also produces a shockwave something like a mini-earthquake when it fires.

Also look at this link: http://www.sandia.gov/media/z290.htm

"Stockpile stewardship" is not about solving our energy problems... Well, at least not peacefully... It's all about ensuring that the aging nukes will perform as expected on demand. A large part of Sandia is dedicated to this mission.

I believe all sorts of radiation is released when they vaporize things in the Z machine... THAT's why its useful for stockpile stewardship.

At one time, I was stupid enough to think that The Department of Energy was concerned with producing/supplying energy for the nation. Despite appearances, they seem more concerned with finding new ways of quickly releasing energy upon other nations.

If society won't even accept safe fission designs, what makes you think we will ever get far more powerful fusion reactors built? I think the largest problem now is the culture of misinformation and fear, not the problem of technology.

Unless I'm wrong, the production of non-military nuclear reactor designs in the US for the last 30 years have been... zero. Unless you count the Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini space probes. Call me when we upgrade all of our reactors from 1973 designs to a much safer and cleaner Gen IV design -- like this bad boy (now with free hydrogen!) instead of taking high-level radioactives --potential fuel-- driving them recklessly around the country in truck, and shoving it into a salt mine, or some similar brilliant idea.

Besides, though I lust for the sheer coolness of magnetically confined plasma as much as any proper geek, the the simple fact is we have had the technology to use fusion for power for quite some time now(press release from 1998, although building the X-1 was promptly cancelled without reason) with Z-pinch inertial confinement on the insanely cool Z machine at Sandia.

Yawn. Wake me went the politics of our time aren't ruled by Luddites with pitchforks and torches...

If society won't even accept safe fission designs, what makes you think we will ever get far more powerful fusion reactors built? I think the largest problem now is the culture of misinformation and fear, not the problem of technology.

Unless I'm wrong, the production of non-military nuclear reactor designs in the US for the last 30 years have been... zero. Unless you count the Galileo, Ulysses, and Cassini space probes. Call me when we upgrade all of our reactors from 1973 designs to a much safer and cleaner Gen IV design -- like this bad boy (now with free hydrogen!) instead of taking high-level radioactives --potential fuel-- driving them recklessly around the country in truck, and shoving it into a salt mine, or some similar brilliant idea.

Besides, though I lust for the sheer coolness of magnetically confined plasma as much as any proper geek, the the simple fact is we have had the technology to use fusion for power for quite some time now(press release from 1998, although building the X-1 was promptly cancelled without reason) with Z-pinch inertial confinement on the insanely cool Z machine at Sandia.

Yawn. Wake me went the politics of our time aren't ruled by Luddites with pitchforks and torches...

In fact, a lattice QCD problem was one of the model problems for the Track 1 proposals. Proposers had to "provide a detailed analysis of the anticipated performance of the proposed system on the following set of model problems...A lattice-gauge QCD calculation in which 50 gauge configurations are generated on an 84^3*144 lattice with a lattice spacing of 0.06 fermi, the strange quark mass m_s set to its physical value, and the light quark mass m_l = 0.05*m_s. The target wall-clock time for this calculation is 30 hours." Full details here.

This is a Big F-ing Problem that does in fact require Big F-ing Computers to solve. To meet the target time would require at least a petaflop of sustained performance; hence the inclusion of this problem in the call for proposals. The other model problems came from CFD and molecular dynamics, and there was a wide range of smaller required problems as well.

Now, none of this explains how these machines will really be used, or to what end. Nevertheless, I can vouch for such large machines being used under heavy load to solve very large problems. Poke around any of the national supercomputing labs' websites, and you should be able to find at least plenty of news releases, if not papers.

Here are some quick samples:

• ASC at Lawrence Livermore National Lab (home of BG/L, Top500 #1)
• NCCS at Oak Ridge National Lab (home of Jaguar, Top500 #2)
• Sandia National Lab (home of Red Storm, Top500 #3)
• NERSC at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab

tm

Let's start with a Slashdotting of NASA...

• Scalable Dynamic Chimera Methods for Unsteady Aerodynamics is one of those packages mere mortals like us will have either no use for or will have to just drool over.
• Fully Unstructured Navier-Stokes 3D is a nice Fortran-based CFD, requires some hefty paperwork to obtain, and may need you to use G95 rather than GCC's GFortran, due to compiler bugs.
• OVERFLOW and related CFD software.
• Three Dimensional Multi-block Advanced Grid Generation System is the component that actually lets you do a lot of the necessary grid work for CFDs.
• Viscous Upwind ALgorithm for Complex Flow ANalysis is the hardest of the CFD codes at NASA to obtain, but if you want to work on anything hypersonic, it's the best place to start. Do Not Use hypersonic airflows for CPU cooling.

• Astrophysical Thermonuclear Flash Simulator - well, you never know.
• Geant4, for the subatomic nuclear physicist in your life...
• Open Field Operation and Manipulation is a nice open-source CFD package.
• Parallel Basic Local Alignment Search Tool gives you a parallelized search engine for nucleotides and proteins.
• Stanford Exploration Project provides some nice parallel geophysics applications and tools.
• Tachyon Parallel Raytracer is a nice example of what you can do with parallelism and graphics.

• Kerrighed is an up-and-coming clustering system for Linux. I saw it demonstrated at SC|05 - and was less than impressed. It needed a lot of work at that point. However, it looks like it has improved a lot since then, and it would be unreasonable to not mention it.
• MOSIX is the second-oldest clustering technology to gain a fan following to rival Star Trek. It's very good, though hard to get if you're not in academia. Arguably for entirely fair reasons.
• OpenMOSIX was originally a fork from MOSIX but is now essentially its own clustering technology. Development is nowhere near the speed I'd like, it does need far more eyes, but is well-known and highly regarded. Moshe Bar is also one of the coolest developers I've encountered.

• DAKOTA is a program for profiling parallel applications and should be useful in telling you where you are gaining and losing.
• HPC Toolkit is another toolkit for profiling HPC applications.
• is yet another profiler for parallel software. Between this and the others I've listed, you should have more information than sequential programmers ever get to work with.
• Performance API is a facility used by most of the profiling software to provide an architecture-independent view of performance counters. I have it on good authority that some (now former)

Disclaimer: I'm not very experienced in scientific parallel computing, but I do it.

I don't have any firsthand knowledge of actual research problems being solved with 4096 processors, but here's a link to some parallized scientific software that can be scaled that high. Pay particular attention to the efficiency difference between "fixed-size" and "scaled-size" problems.

Just get in contact with Sandia National Lab to get a hold one of their Radiation-hardened line of processors and MBs and you are all set.

http://www.sandia.gov/LabNews/LN12-18-98/intel_sto ry.htm/

Since it's hard to replace/repair stuff once a probe is launched, the hardwares on those have to be extremely stable. Of course, it's going to be expensive and from prior generations of technology.

I wouldn't know for sure, but I don't think it's valid to compare any form of computing based on binary logic with quantum computing. I searched for "quantum transistor" and found this, which makes use of the term to refer to transistors that rely on principles of quantum mechanics to function properly. This would be relevant to conventional computing, but not quantum computing. If I understand correctly, quantum computing is not a replacement for binary logic computing, but an alternative or supplement.

I recently read an article about solar power in Wired magazine: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.07/solar.htm l

The article mentions a new design for a concentrator that only uses two motors. To quote the article -

"Then, in a weekend flash of inspiration, a young Caltech physics grad named Kevin Hickerson figured out how to reduce the number of motors needed to move 25 mirrors independently, a major cost factor. Instead of two motors for each mirror - the traditional approach - Hickerson's solution requires only two motors for any number of mirrors. The key is a mathematical curve known as the conchoid of Nicomedes (named for the ancient Greek mathematician, who discovered it). A grid of ball bearings arrayed to match the conchoid is attached to a frame inside the Sunflower. As the motors move the frame, the bearings control each mirror's position individually."

I have found this but it is not helping me much:

http://nvizx.typepad.com/nvizx_weblog/2005/08/conc hoid_of_nic.html

I have been unable to locate a more detailed explanation of the system and I'm not sure if this basic math is patentable. My advanced math skills are very rusty and I'm not quite sure where to start to understand this. I have an idea that this technique might be useful and I want to understand how to design such a frame. I did look at the concentrator page here: http://www.sandia.gov/pv/docs/PVFarraysConcentrato r_Collectors.htm but it was not much help.

These articles as well also have some implications for the benefits of a simple energy source:

http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/09/1 2/1621204&tid=126&tid=14

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/printout/0,8816, 1101299,00.html

Also, this today triggered my interest again:

http://www.renewableenergyaccess.com/rea/news/stor y?id=46765

I want to understand how to make a spreadsheet or something that would allow me to input number mirrors, focal length, size and it tell me shape, size a location of pivots. Can you explain it to someone who hasn't touched calculus in 18 years? I want to build a cheap one on my roof!

Sigh... After I showed the Z-machine to my wife, she started worrying that some day scientists would create a black hole that would destroy the earth. I was hoping for an "oh yeah, wait till you hear about Tesla" discussion...

BTW, physicists were worried at one point that the first atomic explosion would burn up all the oxygen in the earth's atmosphere... ;)

or light?

Sandia National Labs is a government owned research facility, operated by independent contractors. The government decides how much money to provide the facility. The contracted management corporation decides how to spend it, though if they fail to meet government expectations then the government can decide to rebid the contract.

So a judgment against the facility would come out of government funds originally intended to support research. The government can then either increase funding to cover the judgment, accept a reduction in research, and/or fire the management.

As to why use such contracts? Part of the idea is to create a profit motive by allowing the managing corporation to keep a profit if they can fulfill the government's expecations for less than the originally bid price. So a judgment like this would potentially eat into their ability to profit in that way. The other argument for such contracts is to reduce bureaucracy and political pressure at research institutions.

Now a microscopic tungsten lattice -- in effect, a tungsten filament fabricated with an internal crystalline pattern -- developed at Sandia has been shown to have the potential to transmute the majority of this wasted infrared energy (commonly called heat) into the frequencies of visible light.

This would raise the efficiency of an incandescent electric bulb from five percent to greater than 60 percent and greatly reduce the world's most vexing power problem -- excess electrical generating capacity and costs to homeowners caused by inefficient lighting.

Pace VanDevender, a plasma physicist who used to be the VP of the organization I worked in at Sandia National Labs, Albuquerque, NM. He gave a fascinating talk on ball lightning a couple summers ago, and he seems like an all-round brilliant guy. As for the ball lightning created in the Brazilian lab, this doesn't seem to have any of the physical properties of observed ball lightning (except that it's a glowing ball). The ball lightning that has been observed is much larger (up to a meter or more wide), lasts for much longer (minutes/hours), seems to float or move in *any* direction at "will" (unlike this stuff, which just moves like a marble dropped on the floor), and most importantly, is capable of seemingly passing through some objects while completely obliterating others. One possibility is that there are multiple classes of what we would call "ball lightning", each with their own unrelated cause.

National Renewable Energy Lab http://www.nrel.gov/

Sandia National Labs http://www.sandia.gov/pv

Solar energies association http://www.seia.org/

Solar Trade Association - Solar Energy, Energy for a Cleaner Environment http://www.greenenergy.org.uk/sta/solarenergy/cont ent.htm

PV-UK http://www.greenenergy.org.uk/pvuk2/

Solar design associates http://www.solardesign.com/experience.html

PV power resource site http://www.pvpower.com/

PV Materials Efficency http://www.iea-pvps.org/pv/materials.htm

Solar Cell Technologies http://www.solarbuzz.com/Technologies.htm

Here's some cocktail napkin math to back up my point.

Cost of war in Iraq - $350 billion (so far)
Cost of the first large scale solar power tower - $100 million (cost declines with each plant built)
So if, instead of going to war in Iraq, we had diverted 100% of that money into producing renewable power, we could have built at least 3500 solar power plants in Nevada. At approx. 40 MW each, this would produce a total of 140,000 MW, or 87 times as much as the largest nuclear plant in the world. (which won't even be finished until 2010)

Not many people will deny that Iraq was a war about oil and control of said oil. So, instead of going to war in Iraq, we COULD HAVE built enough solar power generation to replace hundreds of coal and oil burning power plants with clean, efficient, low maintenance solar towers. So tell me again, which type of power is more efficient?

This is the temperature reached by the Sandia National Laboratories http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2006 /physics-astron/hottest-z-output.html with their "Z Machine". Apparently they can't really explain why they get such a high temperature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z_machine

Why nobody talks about the Z machine?

Last experiments heat up to 2 billions degree. Bore B11 goes to only 1 billion. Regular nuclear fusion goes to half a billion.

And it is clean! No nasty radioactive waste!

http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2006 /physics-astron/hottest-z-output.html

The phrase "hydrogen economy" is an idiocy at best; a fraud at worst.

Considering that hydrogen use be intended for vehicles only, and I think
bio-diesel is a better alternative to hydrogen in the near term.

Alot of what "kfg" says is relevant, but the quoted phrase is not, if some
ways to produce hydrogen are considered.

Such as:

Thermal Hydrogen production from sunlight, I'd like to see
something on the scale of a solar furnace array of mirrors
applied in Death Valley or the Sahara, and other low population
high heat areas.

http://www.hionsolar.com/n-hion96.htm

High Efficiency solar production of electricity that can be used
to produce hydrogen when the electricity demand is lower than production:

http://www.sandia.gov/news/resources/releases/2004 /renew-energy-batt/Stirling.html

The total amount of solar power reaching the earth's surface is:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power#Advantage s

122 Peta-Watts or 122,000 Tera-Watts, and we use 13 Tera-watts,
about 9,384 times less. Granted most of the earth we cannot
cover in solar furnaces, but some areas that are brutally hot
and not populated would be ideal for this use.

Passive low-destructive tidal power generators located at
the largest tidal shift on earth, non-dam type underwater turbines.

The Bay of Fundy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_of_Fundy#Tidal_el ectrical_power_generation

Each day 100 billion tonnes of seawater flows in and out of the Bay of Fundy
during one tide cycle more than the combined flow of the world's freshwater rivers.

Other high flow underwater locations are located around the world,
but none on this scale.

Hot spots like Iceland also exist in many places around the world and
could be used to make hydrogen.

Also wind power current makes 58 Giga-Watts, and is slated to soon be 120 Giga-Watts,
and a large ramp up could help offset costs to make hydrogen, unless a
better clean fuel can be derived.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wind_power#Large_scal e

Eletric cars might be viable if they can perfect the Super Capacitors.

Solar, Wind, Tidal, GeoTherm, and others can help make hydrogen viable.

Ex-MislTech

This started with the Sandia spherical hopper. "A pre-programmed microprocessor inside the hopper reads an internal compass, and a gimbal mechanism rotates the offset-weighted internal workings so that the hopper rolls around until it is pointed in the desired direction. The combustion chamber fires, the piston punches the ground, and the hopper leaps." That was back in 1997. Now, it looks like it is approaching production.

America's army of killer robots is coming. Soon.

Especially if it smells of, say, a fresh baked handgrenade or some tasty C4. I guess these machines will have a hard time then...

View source on this page. Doh! I guess hidden information in a wiki isn't exactly hacked... But I wonder what's in it for the people putting that stuff on there?

Ok. http://www.sandia.gov/ASC/rsinsitu.html

Do I win the pissing match?

or somehow account for approximately 60 tons of missing aircraft debris at the Pentagon.

Huh?

Let's take a step back for a moment:

1. There were dozens upon dozens of eyewitness reports who say that a commercial jetliner was what crashed into the Pentagon. These were all just ordinary people, going about their business in the DC area, some affiliated with government and/or miltary, some not. Of the witnesses who say it "sounded" like a missile (note the word "sounded"): how is that even relevant? I ask because of the obvious: how many of these people even know what a missile "sounds" like? How many people have heard a commercial jetliner just hundreds of feet (and at some point, tens of feet) off the ground travelling at ~400-500mph? And to repeat, many, many, many people reported directly seeing an American Airlines commercial jetliner.

2. All of the "conspiracy" reports talk about how "no wreckage" was found at the scene. That is patently false. There was TONS of Boeing 757 wreckage recovered, in total, from the Pentagon. Ironically, here are even large pieces of 757 wreckage visible in the photos used to try to "prove" there was no wreckage! Not to mention that the air disaster photos picked for the video were no doubt picked because there WAS wreckage.

3. Remains 184 of 189 of the victims aboard flight 77 were identified AT THE SCENE from DNA: http://www.dcmilitary.com/army/stripe/6_48/nationa l_news/12279-1.html

4. The ONLY place I've EVER seen any claims about supposed video from the Sheraton, gas stations, etc., is in the internet flash video. I have seen no reference or proof ANYWHERE else, from ANY source, that videos have supposedly been confiscated "minutes" later by the FBI.

5. Also, stop and think about this: where was the (visible) "wreckage" from the WTC towers? Is the only reason we even believe that commercial planes crashed into the towers is because we were able to see it with our own eyes? And even that isn't enough for the conspiracy theorists: they still claim that the WTC towers were *rigged with explosives*, such that they could be made to fall AFTER jetliners rammed into the buildings!

For a detailed analysis, see:

Detailed analysis of building, crash, and events:
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_7 57_plane_evidence.html
http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread79655/pg 1

Article debunking the conspiracy story:
http://www.prisonplanet.com/articles/august2004/11 0804factsstraight.htm

http://www.snopes.com/rumors/pentagon.htm

http://anderson.ath.cx:8000/911/pen06.html

Purdue University also did a simulation, with associated report, that approximates what happened to flight 77 that day:

http://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/projects/popescu/p entagonVis_files/pentagonVis2003.mpg
http://www.cs.purdue.edu/cgvlab/projects/popescu/p entagonVis_files/paper_422.pdf

And finally, you might be interested in a test done years ago at Sandia National Laboratory, in which an F-4 was crashed into a concrete wall. Not a 757 and not the Pentagon, but I'd implore you to find any recognizable "wreckage":

http://www.sandia.gov/media/mov_mpg/f_4crash_test_ slow.mpg

This was covered back in '02 on /. :

This Place is Not a Place of Honor
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/05/1 1/011235

Check out the official SANDIA report:
http://infoserve.sandia.gov/sand_doc/1992/921382.p df

I doubt it. I think the dozen or so Mac users I know are more typical than these supposed IT-experts the poster mentioned.

Have you been to many conferences or universities lately?
Hell, last year at Crypto, nearly half the laptops in the audience were Apples (as was the machine that they used to record and stream the rump session talks). And I know that a good portion (about 60% last time I noticed) of this group use Apples as their standard machines.

Methinks you need to get out more.

How often do Apple market at the technologically savvy?

All the time?. Well, not on TV, but they have touted its unixesque abilities in a number of print ads.

I was fortunate to work with some of the guys who developed CLIPS, a very nice forward-chaining rule engine that can be applied to a surprisingly wide variety of projects. Several variants of it have appeared in the intervening years. There is an actively-developed and fine successor to it, Jess.

Does chip wiring or transistors waste the most heat ?

I don't understand why there aren't any attempts made to move away from silicon & copper/aluminum wiring ?

We have quantum tunneling transistors that work right now !

http://www.google.com/search?q=quantum+tunneling+t ransistors&start=0&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefo x-a&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official
http://www.sandia.gov/media/quantran.htm

From the articles I've read, this was accomplished using (some subset of) ASC Purple, which is full of a lot of either custom or IBM-proprietary stuff (or else stuff that nobody but IBM seems to be using).

According to the published/unclassified spec sheet:

"Purple has 2 million gigabytes of storage from more than 11,000 Serial ATA and Fibre Channel disks. ... Each login node has eight 10-gigabytes-per-second network connections for parallel file transfer protocol and two 1-gigabyte-per-second network connections for network file systems and secure shell protocol. The system has a three-stage 1,536 port dual plane Federation switch interconnect ..."

I think that it was this last thing, the Federation interconnect, that they were pushing the data over in this test, since it forms the backbone of the machine and links the storage nodes to the login node controllers, which then connect to the login nodes themselves (of which there are apparently over 1,400 of, according to this). I couldn't find much information on Federation, as it seems to only be used in a few systems, of which Purple is the most notable. One reference I found seems to put it at 1.49 GB/sec (11.92 Gbit/s) bandwidth, although it's not clear if that's "dual plane" Federation or not. 4X SDR Infiniband is around 10 Gbit/sec, IIRC, so Federation's a little faster.

It does sound a little like it was a case of "hey, what can we do with $230M worth of hardware? I know, let's break some records." So they did. I'm not sure that there's anything there that anyone else couldn't do, with different technologies, given the same investment of capital -- it's just a matter of who else wants to, and has the capability.

And this one is just thoroughly confusing: http://www.sandia.gov/media/images/jpg/3MILLION.jp g

2400x1586 JPEG of Z