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Self Contained Power Source?
McOSEN writes "Your Server Cabinet could have a 100% self sustained power source. It's called Parallel Path Technology and it's being coined as a revolution in the magnetic motor industry. From Segways to Vacuum cleaners to Server Cabinets. The article talks about the technology but doesn't exactly lay out specifics."
I hear this was developed specifically for the new Phantom gameconsole and online service. I cant wait to get duke nukem whenever going on that baby!
I thought they were called squirrel cages. And they're not perpetual, someones gotta feed the squirrels!
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"Lisa, in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Yet another 'Coming Soon' thing that will always be 'Coming Soon'
Did someone forget entropy?
Imagine a beowulf cluster made out of vaporware
Those who live by the sword, get shot by those who live by the gun...
Mod parent down, he is high and posting crap.
Everything I needed to know about life, I learnt from Blake's Seven
The CB App. What's your 20?
"... in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics!"
Whoo, signature!
DesireCampbell.com
Bullshit detector overload!
This is Slashdot, for crying out loud. We're nerds, we don't fall for this idiotic screed even a high school freshman could debunk.
Ooooh, big words are scary! Stator, rotor, magnetic flux. Dammit, both the editor and article submitter should hand in their geek cards.
This guy does have a real patent, though. I don't know which is worse, the ignoramus patent examiner who allowed this one through or the baboon who posted it to Slashdot. Check the USPTO link here.Infinite Energy magazine runs out. Sure, I'm all for the occassional "Crystal Chakras Power Generates Excess Neutrons" story, but after awhile, it gets ridiculous.
> I always thought that Slashdot editors are somewhat literate as
> basic science goes...
New here, aren't you?
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
> Electric motors are already 80-90% efficient, while this might make
> it closer to 100% it won't go over, unless someone discovered some
> new laws of physics.
The only natural law involved here is "There's a sucker born every minute".
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Hey at least they didn't claim it ran on Zero Point energy. My favorite current flavor of snake oil.
Obligatory UserFriendly strip:
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=20030922
This sig cannot be proven true.
sheesh - you're taking this way too seriously. Don't you know that it says "It's funny, laugh!" if you put your mouse over the foot up here . . . wait a sec...
Well I thought it was very funny anyway. Especially the bit that says "The article talks about the technology but doesn't exactly lay out specifics".
That's the beauty of it! You connect the axes of two of these things together. Power one, and use the power exceeding 100% efficiency to power the other as a generator!
Can anyone tell me why there's no big foot on this story?
-Peter
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I wonder if the USPTO will make him create a working model.
Kernel Krunch - Part of a Complete OS
Slashdotters should stick to commenting on computer stuff and not venture into the realm of hardware, especially the stuff that involves physics, electric current and the like. In their ignorance, Slashdotters are forgetting (if they ever knew) that an exponentially increasing magnetix flux in a perpendicular field arrangement - as the article describes - will be able to couple with the zero-point energy of the normal space.
This is the energy associated with a prediction of quantum thoery which proposes that (and here I'm a bit fuzzy myself) at the very smallest length scales even empty space is filled with short-lived particles, constantly popping into and out of existance. The longevity of a particle (and its anti-particle) is inversly proportional to its energy - so a high energy 'creation' stays around for a very very short time, and vica versa.
Normally the total energy of a particle and its anti-particle is a zero since they cancel out but, as the theory goes, under the right magnetic flux density and orientation conditions the particle pair could be separated and their intrinsic energies harnessed - zero-point energy. It has always been recognised that this could be a tremendous source of energy - but it was thought that only in the heart of a sun do magnetic field conditions arise that could lead to this energy release (which is now how cosmologists explain the energy gap between that generated from a sun's internal nuclear reactions and that required to: i) keep a body as large as a sun that far above the ground, and ii) overcome friction as it moves through the sky).
What is amazing - and I must say somewhat implausible really - is that this team claim to have gathered enough magnetic flux to harness zero-point energy. But if this is true, then apparent perpetual motion is entirely possible. I say 'apparent' because zero-point energy is of course being added to the system, so it's not really perpetual since the universe will one day implode, as Galileo predicted, and the source of energy will cease.
I think the real question is how they managed to keep the magnetic flux cool during operation. Magnetic flux will decay into 'flax', a type of polymer, if heated beyond a critical temperature. This is where the sun gets its mass, but the same process could lead to problems with their design and really gum up the works.
Anyway, hats off to them. And to the poster for bringing this to everyone's attention - I wish I could detail and describe these technical matters with as much scientific accuracy and insight. And to the Slashdot editors for realising the important and singular value of this post, and not being too distracted by extraneous details that might - at first sight - seem nonsensical and rediculous.
they just add a couple of magnets for extra power source. Magnet =~ extra battery.
Of course, the magnets will eventually run out...
it makes sense.
they will be able to do the dynamic analysis as soon as they get some venture capital for buying yachts... i mean engineers.
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Interesting ... but just wondering, whatever happened to the idea of backup power being stored in giant underground flywheels; the energy would be stored by bringing these up to speed, and released by slowing them down.
This idea is already in use: Even as we speak, dead physicists the world over are spinning in their graves from the posting of this Slashdot article. We simply need to harness this energy to solve the worlds energy problems!
But... they're open source! Open source is good!
Perpetual motion machines are impossible. The reaction is almost automatic. It's proven. It's scientific law. It's been proven unquestioningly impossible to do.
Really!? When?
Even if it were possible to prove something impossible, we haven't done it here. Now.. I'm not defending the article, it's certainly BS.. but the idea that the universe is not a closed loop system, the idea that once energy enters one of it's forms it cannot possibly take any other form ever under any circumstance, I would think, would meet with a little more thought, a little more scrutiny than just flat out immediate acceptance from everyone everywhere.
Even in the world of Sci-Fi where time travel, consciousness swapping and instantaneous travel over long distances are nauseatingly regular plot elements, they never dare to imagine things not needing a centralized power source. What is so horribly wrong with assuming that heat energy, just like all other forms of energy, could be convertible into a useful form. (For those who's minds immediately jump to engines and fire and steam and "we've been doing this for years".. I'm talking about heat as a source for energy, not a heat difference which is what all currently known heat based power technologies require, totally 100% completely different things. I'm talking about pulling the heat out of something and turning that heat energy into another useful form like electricity.)
People often point to the second law of thermodynamics as "proof" that heat is impossible to gather energy from, but this law no more proves that than the law of gravity proves that heavier than air objects can't fly. Just because things heavier than air "tend" to fall, doesn't mean we can't carefully construct things that reliably don't. I imagine that if birds didn't exist smacking the possibility in our face constantly, we'd still assume it was impossible to fly. I, for one, think it is possible to turn heat into energy.
So. What if it were possible...
Imagine if you will, a chip, shaped similar to a CPU. This chip had some network of atomic scale contructions that could somehow turn heat into electricity inside it. The removal of heat energy from the chip would manifest itself as cold (a lack of heat energy) and so when power was drawn from it, it would get cold. The more power was drawn from it, the colder it would get (within design limits). Play with the idea... I do. It's fun. The implications are wild.
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You cannot get energy from magnets.
You can burn them.
Trust me, I work for the government.
Actually several such devices have been developed. The oil industry however squelched them by buying them out or killing the inventors. There is to much money in oil at the moment for such devices to be allowed in the market.
Besides, if power suddenly became free there would not be much money in that. There might be money in building such power plants and in supplying the raw materials to build those plants. But there would be very little money in the generation of the power itself. The big effect it would have would be reducing the costs of almost everything else. No power costs, other than transmission infrastructure, should in a free economy translate into cheaper prices for all other goods. Which would in turn cause economies all over the global to collapse because they are used to the higher costs. It would result in deflation of worlds money supplies. At least for the short term. Lots of unemployment, starving people, increase in homelessness.
Its a good thing that the big businesses and governments of the world have kept such things off the market. It would be a disaster!