This sounds like an interesting energy storage system. Storage is exactly what is needed to make solar energy generation practical for use when the sun is not shining at night. That idea gets me excited.
Generating the energy to fill the storage with compressed air by burning Natural Gas (NG) seems stupid to me. It is more efficient to just leave the energy stored as NG. Converting that to compressed air and then again to electricity adds a middle step that adds inefficiency.
You're right. That's why gas power plants are also silly*. Gas is burned to produce electricity (at efficiencies of no more than about 20-30%), which could then conceivably be used in an electric fire to heat up someone's house. In this situation, the energy storage mechanism has along the line switched from chemical to electrical to thermal, with heavy losses at each stage. Would have been far more efficient to pipe the gas into the same person's house to burn for heat.
The spirit of using compressed air as a storage mechanism is surely in the theoretically high efficiencies that can be achieved. Using gas, as you say, sounds silly, especially when it's Texas, with its vast untapped solar potential.
*ASIDE: Silly, though currently necessary as a fast response mechanism to electricity grid supply/demand mismatches. In the UK, we have three pumped storage facilities of about 50MW each (or thereabouts). Considering the post-EastEnders surge (when 5 million kettles are switched on following the nation's favourite daily TV soap) regularly tops 500MW of demand, you can see why pumped storage alone is not the answer. Interestingly, we have to borrow power from Europe for 5 minutes during this time to cover demand.
I have blocked the ads on the dashboard by having my router block the following sites:
msnvideoweb.vo.msecnd.net
rad.msn.com
Unfortunately, it retains the ads provided by Microsoft themselves, which are, I think provided by the same domain as the actual Xbox Live services (i.e. unblockable if you want to continue using your Xbox online). Also, you still have the god awful presence of Bing Search in your dashboard, whether you like it or not. I cannot find a way to remove Bing like it is possible to remove other crapware that Microsoft installed along with the latest update (like the 'Zune' app - why the HELL would I ever want that?).
One thing's for certain, I'm going to stick with PC gaming (or more specifically, Linux gaming) from now on. Consoles are steadily going from being a platform for games, with pretty graphics you might otherwise not be able to get on a PC, to a direct line into your living room for the big media companies to sell you more shit. I block ads on websites, and the text-based ones that get through are never clicked. If a website's 'sign up' process gets in the way of the information I want, I either don't use it or I give them a temporary email address. I use price comparison websites to find the best price, then go to the seller directly rather than clicking through. I hate companies that make money without performing any real innovation online, and I try hard to avoid letting them make any money from my online presence. Microsoft first and foremost.
I believe the 87km circumference tunnel at the Superconducing Super Collider still exists. The land above it has been built upon since, according to Wikipedia. However, the tunnel is the most capital intensive investment in a collider project, so perhaps in the distant future there could well be a Texas collider producing new physics. In contrast to the 27km circumference Large Hadron Collider, which provided evidence for the Higgs yesterday, the 87km ring would allow even higher energies to be obtained, and, along with it, hopefully some new particles (e.g. those predicted by superstring theory and other ToEs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything)).
As a citizen of the physics community and the world, here's hoping.
Michael Pritchard presented a filter device at TED in 2009 which used a similar concept to filter water. The video explains why bacteria and viruses are filtered out, and he demonstrates the process and drinks the resulting filtered water (taken from a sewage bath he concocts).
Perhaps graphene's physical strength will make it a more sturdy water filter, which would be a particularly important criteria for use in the third world, but there is at least already a working prototype using a non-graphene material.
http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pritchard_invents_a_water_filter.html
Yeah, because if nobody wants to pay for news voluntarily, we'll just force (almost) everybody to pay!
No one is forced to pay the licence fee. It is in fact remarkably easy to avoid paying. Besides, you don't need to be a licence fee payer to use the BBC News website. I know you get ads outside of the UK, and perhaps eventually non-UK users will face a paywall, but while the licence fee exists in the UK, UK-based users will not have to pay for their news.
Selling recovery discs for retail-bought machines (either pre-made discs from the manufacturer or discs produced from the recovery partition on the customer's machine before they take it home) is a way retailers and OEMs add value to their low margin hardware sales. Some discs from manufacturers cost up to £30, with a similar cost for the burning-the-recovery-partition-to-DVDs service from retailers in the UK like PC World and Comet. Having a reset/refresh button in Windows 8 will all but eliminate this extra margin stream. It'll be interesting to see what retailers do to make up for this loss.
I get that there are probably huge cost and scale issues, but it has always baffled me that police communications are still mostly unencrypted as complex encryption technology has gotten cheaper and cheaper.
Yes, until I saw this article I thought the police would have been encrypting this kind of stuff for years.
Another brilliant site for science-based lectures is ted.com. The lecture on the Large Hadron Collider doesn't go into as much detail as I would have liked as someone studying physics at university but it does serve as a great outline of the theories behind it. There is also another lecture on ted.com on superstring theory, which is also very interesting. Well worth checking out.
Edge magazine is purposefully broad to keep sales high. It covers almost every mainstream platform, so inevitably it will attract voters whose gaming experience is limited to the popular titles on their limited platform (Nintendo DS/PSP/Dreamcast/whatever).
I've read the UK edition of PC Gamer for a decade now, and they have ranked Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Medieval: Total War, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and if I recall correctly, Quake 3, on top of their hundred best. I'm biased, but I think these games are ten times better than the clichéd mess Nintendo throw out every year.
Time Warner isn't exactly the first ISP to offer such a service. Over in Britain, BT have been offering free 'WiFi minutes' to subscribers to one of their services called the 'Home Hub', which includes broadband, phone and wireless services. BT probably wasn't the first either.
Slashdot Mirror
This sounds like an interesting energy storage system. Storage is exactly what is needed to make solar energy generation practical for use when the sun is not shining at night. That idea gets me excited. Generating the energy to fill the storage with compressed air by burning Natural Gas (NG) seems stupid to me. It is more efficient to just leave the energy stored as NG. Converting that to compressed air and then again to electricity adds a middle step that adds inefficiency.
You're right. That's why gas power plants are also silly*. Gas is burned to produce electricity (at efficiencies of no more than about 20-30%), which could then conceivably be used in an electric fire to heat up someone's house. In this situation, the energy storage mechanism has along the line switched from chemical to electrical to thermal, with heavy losses at each stage. Would have been far more efficient to pipe the gas into the same person's house to burn for heat.
The spirit of using compressed air as a storage mechanism is surely in the theoretically high efficiencies that can be achieved. Using gas, as you say, sounds silly, especially when it's Texas, with its vast untapped solar potential.
*ASIDE: Silly, though currently necessary as a fast response mechanism to electricity grid supply/demand mismatches. In the UK, we have three pumped storage facilities of about 50MW each (or thereabouts). Considering the post-EastEnders surge (when 5 million kettles are switched on following the nation's favourite daily TV soap) regularly tops 500MW of demand, you can see why pumped storage alone is not the answer. Interestingly, we have to borrow power from Europe for 5 minutes during this time to cover demand.
I have blocked the ads on the dashboard by having my router block the following sites:
msnvideoweb.vo.msecnd.net
rad.msn.com
Unfortunately, it retains the ads provided by Microsoft themselves, which are, I think provided by the same domain as the actual Xbox Live services (i.e. unblockable if you want to continue using your Xbox online). Also, you still have the god awful presence of Bing Search in your dashboard, whether you like it or not. I cannot find a way to remove Bing like it is possible to remove other crapware that Microsoft installed along with the latest update (like the 'Zune' app - why the HELL would I ever want that?).
One thing's for certain, I'm going to stick with PC gaming (or more specifically, Linux gaming) from now on. Consoles are steadily going from being a platform for games, with pretty graphics you might otherwise not be able to get on a PC, to a direct line into your living room for the big media companies to sell you more shit. I block ads on websites, and the text-based ones that get through are never clicked. If a website's 'sign up' process gets in the way of the information I want, I either don't use it or I give them a temporary email address. I use price comparison websites to find the best price, then go to the seller directly rather than clicking through. I hate companies that make money without performing any real innovation online, and I try hard to avoid letting them make any money from my online presence. Microsoft first and foremost.
I believe the 87km circumference tunnel at the Superconducing Super Collider still exists. The land above it has been built upon since, according to Wikipedia. However, the tunnel is the most capital intensive investment in a collider project, so perhaps in the distant future there could well be a Texas collider producing new physics. In contrast to the 27km circumference Large Hadron Collider, which provided evidence for the Higgs yesterday, the 87km ring would allow even higher energies to be obtained, and, along with it, hopefully some new particles (e.g. those predicted by superstring theory and other ToEs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_everything)). As a citizen of the physics community and the world, here's hoping.
Michael Pritchard presented a filter device at TED in 2009 which used a similar concept to filter water. The video explains why bacteria and viruses are filtered out, and he demonstrates the process and drinks the resulting filtered water (taken from a sewage bath he concocts). Perhaps graphene's physical strength will make it a more sturdy water filter, which would be a particularly important criteria for use in the third world, but there is at least already a working prototype using a non-graphene material. http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pritchard_invents_a_water_filter.html
Yeah, because if nobody wants to pay for news voluntarily, we'll just force (almost) everybody to pay!
No one is forced to pay the licence fee. It is in fact remarkably easy to avoid paying. Besides, you don't need to be a licence fee payer to use the BBC News website. I know you get ads outside of the UK, and perhaps eventually non-UK users will face a paywall, but while the licence fee exists in the UK, UK-based users will not have to pay for their news.
...which is funded by the British licence fee. As long as the current BBC-hating government don't cripple the corporation beyond repair.
I wonder if they've checked for evidence of brain damage present from birth in people that play that pointless sport... trolololol
Selling recovery discs for retail-bought machines (either pre-made discs from the manufacturer or discs produced from the recovery partition on the customer's machine before they take it home) is a way retailers and OEMs add value to their low margin hardware sales. Some discs from manufacturers cost up to £30, with a similar cost for the burning-the-recovery-partition-to-DVDs service from retailers in the UK like PC World and Comet. Having a reset/refresh button in Windows 8 will all but eliminate this extra margin stream. It'll be interesting to see what retailers do to make up for this loss.
I get that there are probably huge cost and scale issues, but it has always baffled me that police communications are still mostly unencrypted as complex encryption technology has gotten cheaper and cheaper.
Yes, until I saw this article I thought the police would have been encrypting this kind of stuff for years.
Everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it.
Another brilliant site for science-based lectures is ted.com. The lecture on the Large Hadron Collider doesn't go into as much detail as I would have liked as someone studying physics at university but it does serve as a great outline of the theories behind it. There is also another lecture on ted.com on superstring theory, which is also very interesting. Well worth checking out.
Edge magazine is purposefully broad to keep sales high. It covers almost every mainstream platform, so inevitably it will attract voters whose gaming experience is limited to the popular titles on their limited platform (Nintendo DS/PSP/Dreamcast/whatever). I've read the UK edition of PC Gamer for a decade now, and they have ranked Half-Life, Half-Life 2, Medieval: Total War, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and if I recall correctly, Quake 3, on top of their hundred best. I'm biased, but I think these games are ten times better than the clichéd mess Nintendo throw out every year.
Time Warner isn't exactly the first ISP to offer such a service. Over in Britain, BT have been offering free 'WiFi minutes' to subscribers to one of their services called the 'Home Hub', which includes broadband, phone and wireless services. BT probably wasn't the first either.