As far as I can see the sole purpose of the ribbon is to keep all the training companies that train office workers on Microsoft products happy, and to make it harder to change to Open Office for people used to the ribbon.
But this is the company that has made Wordpad an unusably over-complex piece of garbage - and I say that even though Windows 7 is a vast improvement over XP; installed on my laptop because XP was giving up with too many programs open, and now all those programs run nicely together.
Your high efficiency generator is going to be seriously heavy. This has to work in a vehicle which means either very exotic materials or living with a lower efficiency. The problem with AC/DC conversion is that, even with three phase, you need a DC-DC converter to get a battery charging output (because there is ripple on the generator output.) Your "large amount of cooling" is the inefficiency producing heat. Then there's the battery charge/discharge loss - easily 20%. Now, the hybrid only needs a big enough battery for maybe 30% of peak power, while if you want to run with the IC engine off, the battery must be big enough to supply full power for extended periods. You are losing 20% of a much bigger charge - and regen is rarely more than about 50% efficient (unless you're a Swiss train with 3 phase motors connected directly to 3 phase supplies), so recovering all of the energy is not an option. You appear to be missing the difference between a single speed or near-constant speed system such as a stationary generator or a rack train, and a hightly variable load/speed vehicle such as a car. The energy management of a car consumes a lot more energy as a percent because of its wide operating envelope. As for individual wheel motors, they have proven far from easy to do, and Mitsubishi (who know a thing or two) have abandoned them for their electric car.
BTW, I have looked at available energy to effective transported mass. Very roughly, a US SUV averages about 0.5% efficiency, a European turbodiesel about 1%, and a Prius about 1.1%.
That would imply the exhaust gas left the combustion chamber at 20C. This would mean that the cylinder and piston operated at 20C and the expansion cycle had expansion to well beyond atmospheric. I'm afraid that a theoretical Carnot cycle engine cannot be built unless you have an almost infinitely long stroke to bore ratio on the exhaust stroke, and are discharging into a vacuum. (I know pushing_robot was kind of making the same point, but I thought it needed to be clarified for people who haven't done practical thermodynamics.)
Sorry, but epic comprehension fail. What is the generator, the DC drive, the one or more electric motors and the gearing/CV shafts and so on that get the power to the wheels if they aren't a transmission - and a complex one at that.
There is no problem at all with maintaining legal highway speeds with a hybrid; the gasoline engine is designed to be able to maintain a speed on the level of over 100mph. US cars tend to be vastly over-engined because...because other cars are vastly over-engined, hence the fuel-glugging traffic light/highway merge race. The hybrid is a very logical solution to the problem of providing an engine with sufficient power for cruising, with a booster available for acceleration. After over 20 years of Diesels, I've now decided that hybrids are Good Enough for my next car. This is partly because I suspect that rising oil prices are going to force a change in driver behaviour; many of the worst drivers are probably only marginally able to afford their vehicles.
The difficulty with this thing is that it is NOT suitable (if you read the article) for a hybrid. That's because the engine is unsuited for use as the baseload prime mover. It is only suitable for a full electric transmission with battery storage. Full electric transmissions are expensive and inefficient and, as I note in another post, probably can't compete with plain old Diesel.
I've been looking at full electric transmission for my next boat design, using a constant speed generator Diesel to run a large alternator with direct drive to the motors and auxiliary battery to enable short term high power (i.e. twice the generator output for an hour.) So I have been doing the maths...and it doesn't add up. It is more efficient and cheaper to have a small Diesel prime mover topping out at 2400rpm, and an auxiliary electric motor to boost shaft speed to 3000 for short periods(owing to the cube law, both motors have the same power.) I'm just confirming what Toyota and others already found out - hybrid is the most efficient.
The last gasoline engines to do about 15% efficiency were two strokes. Modern ones do more like 25-30. Diesels achieve 35-45 (or even more in marines engines.) To get a high efficiency you need a high compression ratio and a relatively large combustion chamber to reduce heat loss (around 400-500cc seems to be the best tradeoff, while some CR Diesels are achieving peak combustion pressures up to 180 bar. Yes, that is combustion pressure, not injection pressure).
Now, modern variable vane turbocharged Diesels can give high torque over a wide range of speeds - more or less constant from 1500-3000 rpm is not unknown. This thing seems to be a constant speed machine. OK, do a little maths:
My guess is that the 60% efficiency is IHP, Let's be generous and assume SHP is 55% of theoretical.
The machine is constant speed and drives a generator. Generator efficiency around 85%.
55% * 85% = 47%, only very slightly better than a Diesel you can probably buy from VW or BMW today.
So what is the point? There will be new problems of pollution - running hot gas down narrow passages - new reliability and metallurgical problems to overcome. There will be a whole industrial pyramid from parts factory to service guy to tool and train. Three years? More like 25, if the time the shift to Diesel took is any guide. But, when the Diesel transition happened in Europe, Diesels had roughly 50-60% of the fuel costs of gasoline. This time, the fuel advantage would be zero-5%. It seems pretty pointless.
They failed because they were groaning slow, fragile, and cost over $2000. However, I feel it's going to take a few more years of development before tablets are fast enough to run Windows + security at acceptable speeds.
hydrogen and oxygen don't have any radioactive isotopes with long half-lives
They do. Tritium. Tritium is H3, a hydrogen isotope with a 12.6 year half life. It is a beta emitter. So, in fact, since a lot of tritium gets produced in reactors under non-nominal conditions, you have a big problem with radioactive water, and no way of filtering it out. You could in theory ultracentrifuge steam to remove the tritium oxide, but in practice it's unaffordable. The traditional solution is to discharge it into water (the Irish Sea or the Colorado River) and hope it gets very diluted.
Are you aware how radioactive tritium is? The amount involved is actually tiny. Which means you would have to electrolyse almost all the water to get it out. Deuterium in contrast is relatively common, which is why it is possible to get D2O using electrolysis. Incidentally the best thing to hydrogenate is solid uranium.
For years the British Government demanded that waste tritium be discharged as tritiated water...which is the worst possible solution. As a gas, you can collect it relatively easily. Once in water, it is very difficult.
He is not allowed to use his personal knowledge as a matter of fact, and so when the trial may create case law he must ask these questions, so that the case record will explain something that may not be understood in future. Since "website" is not part of standard English, the question has to be asked. However, these apparently stupid questions only have to be asked when some facet of the case actually depends on the answer. Essentially, the judge has to elicit a citation.
It's also very good (and it happens) when a judge asks an apparently stupid question and it turns out that nobody can answer it.
This has been going on for some time. For instance, 2 of the 3 conference chairs at MUM2009 were:
Natasa Milic-Frayling, Microsoft Research Cambridge, UK
Jonna Häkkilä, Nokia Research Center Tampere, Finland
I suspect that a significant part of Nokia has been working for this, and for a very obvious reason; career insurance. Symbian had limited life, Maemo/Meego offered limited career scope. A commitment to Microsoft meant that Nokia engineers and managers had things on their CVs that offered prospects outside Nokia. The Microsoft deal could be a vote of no confidence in the long term future of the Finnish economy, and given the way that phone components are almost entirely made in the Far East, and applications generally made in the Anglophone world or Western Europe, they might be right.
So what you're saying is, you believe a patriotic Russian anti-nuclear activist over everybody else? Not that he would have any incentive to suggest that Chernobyl wasn't nearly as bad as Westerners think, of course.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
is quite likely if you are a subsistence hunter. Just saying
Apart from the sheer idiocy of that expression beloved of Tea Partiers, how many subsistence hunters do you think there are in Bavaria? - which is one of the world's most advanced states. Bavarian hunters don't usually need to live off their wild boar, they visit the supermarket on their way home from the BMW plant, or maybe the research establishment at Garching. This is just one of the silliest posts I've read in a long time.
(I now also recollect that I ate some Bavarian wild boar in Regensburg just a few years after Chernobyl, so the GGP post is probably unusually disinformational even for/.)
I hate to argue with the proponent of the view that xmlsucks, but you're treating the Bible as if it was a one person project whereas actually it's the work of many people, many of opposing views (the author of Ecclesiates was practically an atheist.)
Unfortunately they didn't use cvs or git, unless they did and the version history is on a stack of stone tablets somewhere.
The actual first line of the Bible is, transliterated roughly, Bereshit ba'ra elohim... In the beginning, the Gods created... Further on this is confirmed when the Gods announce "...will become like us..."
It's something known to theological students, and it's a kind of "we'll just observe that and pass on". The book of Beginnings is a collection of creation myths from around the Middle East, in no particular order, and there are several different gods referenced: the plural gods of the first chapter, the god referred to as yod-he-vav-he, Adonai, and the Watchers. There isn't much connection between these old semitic legends and the Prophets demanding justice for the widowed and the orphaned; what Jeremiah would make of the Tea Party and the neocons I dread to think, except that he wouldn't get reported on Fox News. Perhaps in the New Yorker.
It's a tribute, by the way, to the passion for accuracy of the compilers of the Bible that they left Bereshit alone. It would have been so easy to substitute Adonai for Elohim - but they were too honest. The only thing they did was to change the "created" verb to singular, presumably because they felt they had to do something, but a minor change to a verb ending wasn't nearly as bad as changing a holy name to something else.
Blake believed that Satan had in fact taken over the Church from within. I know he was bonkers, but it is at least an interesting argument:
Surely, O Satan, thou art but a dunce
And cannot tell the garment from the man
Every harlot was a virgin once
Nor canst thou ever turn Kate into Nan
Thought thou art worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The son of morn in weary night's decline
The lost traveler's dream under the hill.
Any student of general Christian theology would concur that many Protestant sects are actually anti-Christian (they promote the idea that it is OK to worship both God and money, completely contrary to the NT).
Take approx. 2kg of sifted weapons grade plutonium (this is perfectly safe, it's sub-critical) and place in a mixing bowl. With a mortar and pestle grind together about 5g of polonium-210 and 10g of finely powdered beryllium. Gradually stir in to the plutonium until the mixture begins to get warm, then add about 500cc of deuterium hydroxide. Divide equally into a 12-portion muffin dish. Decorate with thorium oxide granules and bake in a suitable containment vessel until red hot. Serve on a bed of fuel pebbles with a cesium iodide dressing.
Who will ever trust a CERN press release again? Because some of the stuff that is going on nowadays seems to be about as plausible.
Reading Scientific American this month, I realised for the first time that the diameter of the Universe at the end of the proposed inflationary period was about 15mm. If someone put that in an April Fool, how many people would believe it, either way? "Early Universe expanded faster than the speed of light to the size of a grape".
So how do you encrypt your "common source" message. Ooops...
In John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy the Soviet agent gives his British mole recruit a copy of Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus before he even recruits him. This becomes a limitation because sigint eventually reveals that the communication with the mole has to be based on a single one time cipher. (Le Carré is in a position to know about this stuff.)
Although it calls itself a "constitutional monarchy", it was established during the 1688 revolution that Parliament can remove the monarch (essentially what happened - James was removed and William of Orange invited to take the job.) So yes, we are de jure and de facto a Republic whose President gets the job notionally for life and has a funny hat. The difference between us and the US is that they complain if the President does nothing, and we complain if a member of the Royal Family tries to do anything other than wave gracefully.
As a result of our high prices, we drive more efficient vehicles. Very roughly, we use half as much fuel per km as North Americans. In fact, we do not pay an awful lot more per passenger km than they do, and I would argue that our vehicles are generally safer and better engineered - in the US, safety often means just adding mass and padding. Thus we have a double insulation against fuel cost uncertainty; there is capacity for the Government to reduce taxation in a fuel price shock to maintain economic stability, and we use less of it anyway and so are less exposed. The policy has succeeded; Europe doesn't have exurbs with collapsed property values, and we have a much smaller park of uneconomic passenger trucks which represent a future drain on the US economy.
China holds today the territory it had about 200 years before Christ
Oh please. There was no "China" ca. 200 BC. That's as bad as believing that, because it says to in a book, Jews are allowed to steal Palestinian land.
Yes, the US is an aggressive and expansive imperial power. But so is China. China is gaining influence in or buying up parts of South America and Africa. NATO is currently taking out some of its military hardware in Libya, where it was courting influence with Ghaddafi. It still claims to own the (relatively free and democratic) republic of Taiwan. There are more ways of taking over the world than by naked military aggression. China and the US: Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Exactly. You *can't* plan for it. So why would you put such dangerous materials into operation in such a place? The reactors in Fukushima took what was a local and temporary event, and turned it into an event that affected the entire planet, and will have effects spanning billions of years.
You know you just lost all credibility when you posted that?
Slashdot Mirror
But this is the company that has made Wordpad an unusably over-complex piece of garbage - and I say that even though Windows 7 is a vast improvement over XP; installed on my laptop because XP was giving up with too many programs open, and now all those programs run nicely together.
BTW, I have looked at available energy to effective transported mass. Very roughly, a US SUV averages about 0.5% efficiency, a European turbodiesel about 1%, and a Prius about 1.1%.
Mitsubishi tried this for their prototype electric vehicle, gave up and reverted to single motor drive.
That would imply the exhaust gas left the combustion chamber at 20C. This would mean that the cylinder and piston operated at 20C and the expansion cycle had expansion to well beyond atmospheric. I'm afraid that a theoretical Carnot cycle engine cannot be built unless you have an almost infinitely long stroke to bore ratio on the exhaust stroke, and are discharging into a vacuum. (I know pushing_robot was kind of making the same point, but I thought it needed to be clarified for people who haven't done practical thermodynamics.)
Sorry, but epic comprehension fail. What is the generator, the DC drive, the one or more electric motors and the gearing/CV shafts and so on that get the power to the wheels if they aren't a transmission - and a complex one at that.
The difficulty with this thing is that it is NOT suitable (if you read the article) for a hybrid. That's because the engine is unsuited for use as the baseload prime mover. It is only suitable for a full electric transmission with battery storage. Full electric transmissions are expensive and inefficient and, as I note in another post, probably can't compete with plain old Diesel.
I've been looking at full electric transmission for my next boat design, using a constant speed generator Diesel to run a large alternator with direct drive to the motors and auxiliary battery to enable short term high power (i.e. twice the generator output for an hour.) So I have been doing the maths...and it doesn't add up. It is more efficient and cheaper to have a small Diesel prime mover topping out at 2400rpm, and an auxiliary electric motor to boost shaft speed to 3000 for short periods(owing to the cube law, both motors have the same power.) I'm just confirming what Toyota and others already found out - hybrid is the most efficient.
Now, modern variable vane turbocharged Diesels can give high torque over a wide range of speeds - more or less constant from 1500-3000 rpm is not unknown. This thing seems to be a constant speed machine. OK, do a little maths:
My guess is that the 60% efficiency is IHP, Let's be generous and assume SHP is 55% of theoretical.
The machine is constant speed and drives a generator. Generator efficiency around 85%.
55% * 85% = 47%, only very slightly better than a Diesel you can probably buy from VW or BMW today.
So what is the point? There will be new problems of pollution - running hot gas down narrow passages - new reliability and metallurgical problems to overcome. There will be a whole industrial pyramid from parts factory to service guy to tool and train. Three years? More like 25, if the time the shift to Diesel took is any guide. But, when the Diesel transition happened in Europe, Diesels had roughly 50-60% of the fuel costs of gasoline. This time, the fuel advantage would be zero-5%. It seems pretty pointless.
They failed because they were groaning slow, fragile, and cost over $2000. However, I feel it's going to take a few more years of development before tablets are fast enough to run Windows + security at acceptable speeds.
They do. Tritium. Tritium is H3, a hydrogen isotope with a 12.6 year half life. It is a beta emitter. So, in fact, since a lot of tritium gets produced in reactors under non-nominal conditions, you have a big problem with radioactive water, and no way of filtering it out. You could in theory ultracentrifuge steam to remove the tritium oxide, but in practice it's unaffordable. The traditional solution is to discharge it into water (the Irish Sea or the Colorado River) and hope it gets very diluted.
For years the British Government demanded that waste tritium be discharged as tritiated water...which is the worst possible solution. As a gas, you can collect it relatively easily. Once in water, it is very difficult.
It's also very good (and it happens) when a judge asks an apparently stupid question and it turns out that nobody can answer it.
I suspect that a significant part of Nokia has been working for this, and for a very obvious reason; career insurance. Symbian had limited life, Maemo/Meego offered limited career scope. A commitment to Microsoft meant that Nokia engineers and managers had things on their CVs that offered prospects outside Nokia. The Microsoft deal could be a vote of no confidence in the long term future of the Finnish economy, and given the way that phone components are almost entirely made in the Far East, and applications generally made in the Anglophone world or Western Europe, they might be right.
Good idea, why not start now?
Apart from the sheer idiocy of that expression beloved of Tea Partiers, how many subsistence hunters do you think there are in Bavaria? - which is one of the world's most advanced states. Bavarian hunters don't usually need to live off their wild boar, they visit the supermarket on their way home from the BMW plant, or maybe the research establishment at Garching. This is just one of the silliest posts I've read in a long time.
(I now also recollect that I ate some Bavarian wild boar in Regensburg just a few years after Chernobyl, so the GGP post is probably unusually disinformational even for /.)
Unfortunately they didn't use cvs or git, unless they did and the version history is on a stack of stone tablets somewhere.
The actual first line of the Bible is, transliterated roughly, Bereshit ba'ra elohim... In the beginning, the Gods created... Further on this is confirmed when the Gods announce "...will become like us..."
It's something known to theological students, and it's a kind of "we'll just observe that and pass on". The book of Beginnings is a collection of creation myths from around the Middle East, in no particular order, and there are several different gods referenced: the plural gods of the first chapter, the god referred to as yod-he-vav-he, Adonai, and the Watchers. There isn't much connection between these old semitic legends and the Prophets demanding justice for the widowed and the orphaned; what Jeremiah would make of the Tea Party and the neocons I dread to think, except that he wouldn't get reported on Fox News. Perhaps in the New Yorker.
It's a tribute, by the way, to the passion for accuracy of the compilers of the Bible that they left Bereshit alone. It would have been so easy to substitute Adonai for Elohim - but they were too honest. The only thing they did was to change the "created" verb to singular, presumably because they felt they had to do something, but a minor change to a verb ending wasn't nearly as bad as changing a holy name to something else.
Surely, O Satan, thou art but a dunce
And cannot tell the garment from the man
Every harlot was a virgin once
Nor canst thou ever turn Kate into Nan
Thought thou art worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The son of morn in weary night's decline
The lost traveler's dream under the hill.
Any student of general Christian theology would concur that many Protestant sects are actually anti-Christian (they promote the idea that it is OK to worship both God and money, completely contrary to the NT).
Take approx. 2kg of sifted weapons grade plutonium (this is perfectly safe, it's sub-critical) and place in a mixing bowl. With a mortar and pestle grind together about 5g of polonium-210 and 10g of finely powdered beryllium. Gradually stir in to the plutonium until the mixture begins to get warm, then add about 500cc of deuterium hydroxide. Divide equally into a 12-portion muffin dish. Decorate with thorium oxide granules and bake in a suitable containment vessel until red hot. Serve on a bed of fuel pebbles with a cesium iodide dressing.
Reading Scientific American this month, I realised for the first time that the diameter of the Universe at the end of the proposed inflationary period was about 15mm. If someone put that in an April Fool, how many people would believe it, either way? "Early Universe expanded faster than the speed of light to the size of a grape".
In John Le Carré's A Perfect Spy the Soviet agent gives his British mole recruit a copy of Grimmelshausen's Simplicissimus before he even recruits him. This becomes a limitation because sigint eventually reveals that the communication with the mole has to be based on a single one time cipher. (Le Carré is in a position to know about this stuff.)
This post may have been brought to you by someone whose physics is a bit pre-Newtonian.
Although it calls itself a "constitutional monarchy", it was established during the 1688 revolution that Parliament can remove the monarch (essentially what happened - James was removed and William of Orange invited to take the job.) So yes, we are de jure and de facto a Republic whose President gets the job notionally for life and has a funny hat. The difference between us and the US is that they complain if the President does nothing, and we complain if a member of the Royal Family tries to do anything other than wave gracefully.
As a result of our high prices, we drive more efficient vehicles. Very roughly, we use half as much fuel per km as North Americans. In fact, we do not pay an awful lot more per passenger km than they do, and I would argue that our vehicles are generally safer and better engineered - in the US, safety often means just adding mass and padding.
Thus we have a double insulation against fuel cost uncertainty; there is capacity for the Government to reduce taxation in a fuel price shock to maintain economic stability, and we use less of it anyway and so are less exposed. The policy has succeeded; Europe doesn't have exurbs with collapsed property values, and we have a much smaller park of uneconomic passenger trucks which represent a future drain on the US economy.
Oh please. There was no "China" ca. 200 BC. That's as bad as believing that, because it says to in a book, Jews are allowed to steal Palestinian land.
Yes, the US is an aggressive and expansive imperial power. But so is China. China is gaining influence in or buying up parts of South America and Africa. NATO is currently taking out some of its military hardware in Libya, where it was courting influence with Ghaddafi. It still claims to own the (relatively free and democratic) republic of Taiwan. There are more ways of taking over the world than by naked military aggression. China and the US: Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
You know you just lost all credibility when you posted that?