Nope. Three Kingdoms (3K). Incidentally, that's where Drew Curtis of Fark.com hails from; he was the wizard Cletus. I first visited Fark.com back when it was just his squirrel picture.;)
It actually reminds me of the copy protection system on ZMud. Back in the day (over a decade ago), I used to do two things that I don't anymore: 1) Use windows, and B) Mud. And ZMud was an excellent client. They employed basically the same copy protection system: only one person on per registered copy online at a time. So if you give a copy to a friend, and they give a copy to their friends, and so on, pretty soon your odds of being able to use it are slim to none. They use the "book" analogy to describe it: you buy a book and you can loan it to your friends all you want, but only one person gets to read it at once.
ZMud was popular enough that I once had fun causing some havoc with a little-known feature: MSP (Mud Sound Protocol). Back then, the error checking, both on mud servers and on the client, was pretty poor. I discovered that I could "shout" (say something that everyone on the mud can see) MSP commands to make their computers start playing random windows sounds.;) Ah, those were the days...
I'll note that not only did I just list three proposed theoretical methods to explain it, but even the DOE encourages further study (Charge Element 3). Yes, this is still highly controversial science. Yes, more people than not disagree that it's fusion (in the case of the 2004 DOE panel, 2/3rds said that they didn't think it was fusion -- although with a spate of more controlled experiments since the panel convened, who knows if they'd get that many opposing voices today). But you should stop acting like it's phlogiston or luminiferous aether or something. It's in the "we don't know what's going on" category, not the "we know what's going on and it's not what they claim it is" category.
Nearly all of these "cold fusion" projects are easy enough to write off as nonsense on objective scientific grounds. Nobody has suggested a mechanism for action that has any reasonable physical basis, nor demonstrated that such a mechanism exists
Allen Widom at Northeastern University Boston and Lewis Larsen of Lattice Energy have recently proposed a mechanism that could account for a wide range of fusion and transmutation reactions, electron capture by protons or deuterons [4].
In nuclear physics, it is very well known that a proton can capture a negatively charged lepton (light particle) and produce a neutron and a neutrino, and a common form of nuclear transmutation in condensed matter can be understood in term of this reaction.
An electron that wanders into a nucleus with Z (atomic number) protons and N (= A (atomic mass) - Z) neutrons can be captured, producing a neutrino and leaving behind a nucleus with Z-1 protons and N+1 neutrons. There is no Coulomb barrier in this process, which makes it much more likely than other reactions. In fact, a strong Coulomb attraction between an electron and a nucleus favours electron capture for nuclear transformation.
While lepton capture is known to occur in the case of muons (leptons) mixed into hydrogen systems, it is regarded as difficult for electrons to be captured by protons. For the reaction to happen, the lepton must be sufficiently massive, such that in energy terms, Mlc2 > Mnc2-Mpc2 ~ 1.293MeV ~2.531Mec2 (where Ml, Mn, Mp, and Me are the mass of the lepton, neutron, proton and electron respectively, and c is the speed of light). The muon is more than sufficiently massive to be captured by the proton, but not the electron, which needs to be at least 2.531 times as massive.
However, the electron mass in condensed matter can be modified by local electromagnetic field fluctuations. For example, laser light fields can "dress" an electron with additional mass. The surface states of metal hydrides are very important in this respect.
Collective surface oscillations of charged ions are involved in the weak interactions responsible for electron capture in condensed matter. The radiation frequencies of these oscillation range from the infrared to the soft X-ray spectra. The surface protons are oscillating coherently, contributing to the large magnitude of electromagnetic fluctuations. The neutrons produced by electron capture have an ultra low momentum (with long wavelength) due to the size of the coherence domain of the oscillating protons, estimated to vary from about one to ten microns in length. The long final state neutron wavelength allows for a large neutron wave function overlap with many protons, which increases the coherent neutron production rate.
It is estimated that the electron mass enhancement due to the electromagnetic field fluctuations (collective proton oscillations) on the surface of palladium hydride is about 20.6 fold, which is much more than enough for electron capture by proton or deuteron. The proton field oscillations can be amplified by shining a laser light on the palladium surface, which can enhance the production of neutrons that in turn catalyse other reactions.
The neutron, n, can fuse with other nuclei in transmutation reactions. Lithium (Li) is present in the electrolyte. A Li ion near to the hydride (electrode surface) could initiate a chain of reactions as follows:
6Li3 + n 7Li3
7Li3 + n 8Li3
8Li3 8Be4 + e- (electron) +v (neutrino)
8Be4 4He2 + 4He2
Q ~ 26.9 MeV
A large amount of energy, 26.9 MeV is generated by this chain of reactions.
Having produced 4He2, further neutrons may react to build heavy helium isotopes, and regenerate Li as follows.
In my opinion, it comes down to the fact that something is happening during these experiments, we just don't know what.
Which is precisely why the Department of Energy unanimously recommended further study on an individual-case basis for well-designed experiments (Charge Element 3). Which this one would definitely seem to qualify as.
One thing that occurred to me a while back was wondering whether there could be any influence from phonons on the fusion process. Phonons are the virtual particles associated with crystal lattice vibrations that arise due to the wave-particle duality. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me; after all, other particles such as muons can outright catalyze fusion reactions, and phonon effects might play a significant role even there (in the solid state). Yet most of the basic "disproofs" of fusion in the cell act as though there's no lattice at all and only focus on the Dt density (which on its own is way too low for fusion at a relevant rate). I just thought to google for it, and what do you know... others have been considering that very idea and think that it has merit.
I'm also particularly interested in the possibility of surface reactions due to localized quantum effects. Palladium electrodes can form dendtritic palladium hydride spines on their surfaces in some circumstances, and most of the direct evidence of cold-fusion reactions, such as hot spots with associated pitting, occur at microscopic features on the surface of the electrodes. If it were such a surface effect, that could also go a long way toward explaining the inconsistency of results.
Another question is why are they using the label of "cold fusion" when it seems largely they are observing things that are hard to explain so they must be cold fusion at work?
Well, at least in this case, their entire study is about particle traces being left in a plastic that's commonly used to record particle traces from known nuclear reactions. So it seems there's either *something* nuclear going on *somewhere* that's being picked up, or there's not only something unusual that we don't know about these palladium cells, but about the plastic as well. Either way, it's important research.
There still is heat given off, harvestable heat. The key is that you don't need to run the reaction at the sort of temperatures you find in the sun. That's a huge, huge benefit. The biggest problem, however, is finding out whether what's going on is actually fusion. And that's proven to be far more challenging than it would at first appear.
The information is there; you just have to spend several minutes to find it. Of course, it's a massive challenge to bring all this info together -- I'm sure that's why they have only general summaries on the main page and leave the details up to the state pages (since the states have the nitty-gritty details). That's the lazy route, but it requires more work on the part of your visitors. For example, here's my state's highway projects and our local road projects. Apparently they're going to be doing an overlay on 218, which I take whenever I drive to/from Cedar Rapids; fixing the pedestrian bridge on US 1 that was damaged by the flood that I sometimes walk on; doing some repairs at the Melrose and Sunset intersection on the UI campus, which I drive through perhaps once a month; replacing a bridge I drive over fairly regularly in Coralville; and doing some reconstruction up in Cedar Rapids on a road I drive on about once a month. But I had to follow the link to the Iowa site and navigate around in there to get those documents.
They didn't. I did. Witness the joys of wget and a bit of bash scripting. It was far easier to write than my script that rigged the Hungarian bridge voting contest for Steven Colbert;)
The Futurama quotes in my sig list are:
Rock Us, Dukakis. % Wingus, Dingus! Listen up! % By a scallop's forelocks!
When you said that, though, I thought it must have been a firefly quote that had come up. In particular, I have this one in my sigs list:
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!" Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
My sigs list has quotes from Jesus Christ Supercop, Futurama, Firefly, Venture Bros, Donnie Darko, The Onion, Jonathan Coulton, Luther Wright and the Wrongs, Utena, Star Control II, Steven Chu, Robot Chicken, King of the Hill, Family Guy, various friends, and references to things like FF7, Portal, Phillip Glass, bizarre phrases, etc. Basically whatever strikes my fancy. It's funny when it picks a quote that goes well with the conversation.;)
Why would 240V waste power? Higher voltages plus lower currents = the same power but less resistance over a given conductor.
Our 120V system is an artifact of an early desire for primarily using electricity to power incandescent lightbulbs. It's easier to make a 120V incandescent than a 240V.
Even at 240V the charge time will be measured in hours though unless people plan on using cable so thick they need a fork lift truck to move it.
What are you talking about? Oahu already has a network of 60kW chargers, and the company that produced them (AeroVironment) makes chargers as powerful as 250kW. Here's what they look like. Here's what an older, inductive 50kW Magnecharge charger looks like.
Does that look like you need a forklift to you? 50kW = charge a 200Wh/mi (Volt-or-Prius-like) EV at a rate of 4.2 miles per minute of charging. 60kW = 5.0 miles/minute. 250kW = 20.8 miles/minute. For an Aptera-like vehicle, double those numbers. For an SUV or pickup without extra streamlining, halve them.
Here's a handy spreadsheet to determine how fast you'll go compared to an ICE car with different battery packs and charging powers after you take into account things like overhead for charging stops and starting each trip with a full pack. We see that, to pick an example, for six hour driving/charging in an Aptera-type vehicle at 55mph (versus a gasoline vehicle that goes 430 miles at that speed, with a minimum of 8% of your trip for restrooms/meals/getting out to stretch/etc, 1.2 minutes to gas up an ICE car, and an overhead of 6 minutes per time you have to stop to refill or recharge the vehicle), you go 56% as far if you charge from normal wall outlets, 60% from kitchen or garage outlets, 66% as far from low-power RV outlets, 76% as far from washer/dryer outlets, 84% as far from high-power RV outlets, 86% as far from old-school 60A chargers, 89% as far from a Tesla-type or new Yazaki charger, 97% as far from a 60kW charger, and 100% as far from a 250kW charger.
In short, charging from commodity outlets that already exist will increase your travel time by a relevant amount (although not as apocalyptically as a lot of people portray it, at least in an Aptera-type vehicle), but once you get up to the high-power chargers, the penalty is pretty insignificant.
Personally, I don't understand why we aren't making a push to use methanol fuel cells.
The fact that it's toxic, low density, and causes several times the energy waste might have something to do with it.
Yeah, and powerful electric motors are pretty light, too, and their scaling factors well less than linear. The Tesla Roadster's motor, which takes that (not uber-light by any respect) car from 0-60 in 3.9 seconds (3.7 seconds) is the size of a watermelon and weighs ~30kg.
Rarely are packs charged as fast as cells. Titanate cells have been charged in under 1 minute, but the packs are usually limited to 5-10 minutes. Mostly it's a heat issue -- harder to manage with a whole pack than with an individual cell.
Anyway, 250kW chargers already exist, present day. For a 200Wh/mi EV (Prius or Volt-level aerodynamics/weight), that's 1,250mi/hour of charging, or 21 miles per minute of charging. Not gasoline refill speeds, but nothing to scoff at. When you factor in the overhead that exists no matter what type of recharge/refill you do -- time spent slowing down, taking an offramp, driving up to the station, up to a pump, taking the gas cap off, etc, and all of that stuff in reverse, plus payment -- the percentage difference in your time isn't much. And this is present tech.
Quite true. And chargers that deliver very high currents already exists. Aerovironment makes commercial chargers up to 60kW and testing chargers up to 250kW, for example (their commercial line may be bigger by now; I haven't checked). That's up to the limits of the Level 3 charging standard. A number of their 60kW chargers are already installed around Oahu.
That may sound like a lot of power until you realize that most industrial facilities use notably more current than that *nonstop*. It's not primarily a challenge of dealing with the current -- it's a challenge of reliable connects and disconnects.
Anyways, this tech is yet another major advancement to LiP tech; they keep coming down the pipe. Looks like it's prepped to completely blow away titanate tech in every regard (it already leads significantly in price and by a fair margin in energy density). And since this is a surface treatment, it should be able to be paired with other techs, such as Actacell's for using microwaves to make LiP cathodes of superior energy density at a far lower price (LiPs are currently primarily limited by capital costs, which are limited by production rates and infrastructure scale -- not raw materials).
That's quite true. The simplest mp3 encoder implementation -- a route taken by many -- was just to throw away the weakest DCT signals. But there are two big improvements you can do on that: 1) throw away the weakest DCT signals weighted by average human sensitivity, and to combine remaining signals that are close together. There's no use keeping a spike at 2031Hz and 2032Hz; nobody's going to be able to tell the difference, so you might as well just combine them.
MP3-320 may be better than MP3-128, but it's generally overkill. Most people's impression of the quality of 128kbps MP3s comes from the era where most MP3s weren't encoded with VBR. VBR makes a massive difference in quality per unit size. I've seen three or four blind comparisons between VBR mp3s at different bitrates, as well as conducted one of my own. The results, in general, are that about half of people can tell the difference between 128kbps and 160kbps or 192kbps, and beyond that, there's generally little to no ability to accurately tell the difference, even among self-described audiophiles.
Lost them from *using* them at altitude, I'd imagine. That's a well-known issue. The spindle system relies on air pressure to keep the heads at the right height off the disk. Spin it at too low of a pressure and you get a head crash.
I'm not going to be spinning the drives in vacuum bags;)
I hope your using md, any proprietary solution would be insanity.
But of course.
When you need to restore this data, will you have a computer with 5 free ports running a compatible version of your RAID software handy?
You mean "a linux box" with "3+ sata ports" (you can be down two drives on RAID 6 and still read it)? If I can't meet those minimal requirements, I can probably hardly read anything.
Are you comfortable mounting RAID arrays on different computers with different hardware.
With md? Why wouldn't I be?
If you lose three or more drives in your cold RAID array, you loose everything.
And the odds of losing three out of five drives is incredibly low. I don't want to lose *any* of my data, but going without redundancy means that you will if you lose a drive.
What if you get hit by a bus, assuming the data is important to others, will someone else be able to mount your array?
Because there's not enough space for RAID 1 or dumb mirroring and I don't want to have to prioritize every last file I own. What's wrong with error correcting codes and two redundant disks?
You're right that this isn't particularly expensive, but it is more expensive than steel at less than $0.50/lb or aluminum at approx. $1/lb which is what is used on every other car. Copper motor windings are also more expensive than steel and aluminum.
You act as though lithium ion batteries are made entirely of lithium. It's only 1-2 kilograms per kWh, and a kWh weighs 6-10kg. And low-end electric motors use aluminum wiring or copper-aluminum alloys. Even Tesla was using a copper-aluminum alloy until they upgraded to Powertrain 1.5.
This is only true when the benefits of using an electric drivetrain (subsidies, lower operation costs) are large enough to make up for the increased cost of both the expensive drivetrain and the expensive body components.
A savings in pack cost is always a savings in pack cost. If you make the car lighter, you need less of a pack, regardless of whether or not the vehicle itself is an economically justifiable expense.
If carbon taxes are imposed, electricity prices are set to rise faster than the cost of gasoline and natural gas.
Wrong. Essentially every study done shows that even on our current grid, EVs emit less carbon than ICE vehicles. About 30% less, for equivalent vehicles. Plus, our grid is getting cleaner every year. Last year, for example, about 42% of new capacity added was wind, and most of the rest was natural gas. And this without carbon cap and trade. ICE vehicles have essentially no way to escape carbon taxes; drivers are stuck paying them. But electricity producers can escape them by switching to wind, solar, geo, hydro, nuclear, and many other sources.
The lower manufacturing costs of aerodynamic, lightweight gasoline cars already outweigh the operational cost savings of electric cars
Only if you look at a couple years. If you amortize costs over the total vehicle lifespan (vehicles lasting about 18 years on average these days), the lower-end EVs win pretty easily.
Old drives are not as energy efficient as modern drives, so they cost more to spin -- a RAID would just be an expensive storage container
Exactly -- which is why I'm right now in the process of doing just that. I'm building a RAID 6 on my five old 250GB drives, and when I'm done, I'm going to remove them, individually vacuum-seal them and silica gel packets with my food sealer, duct tape the bundle together, and ship it off across the country as an offsite backup.;)
Are there better things that could be done with them? Probably. Is there a better way to do offsite backups? Probably. But I have them and I need an offsite backup, so why not? Certainly seems a better use than dissecting them for fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed.
Nope. Three Kingdoms (3K). Incidentally, that's where Drew Curtis of Fark.com hails from; he was the wizard Cletus. I first visited Fark.com back when it was just his squirrel picture. ;)
It actually reminds me of the copy protection system on ZMud. Back in the day (over a decade ago), I used to do two things that I don't anymore: 1) Use windows, and B) Mud. And ZMud was an excellent client. They employed basically the same copy protection system: only one person on per registered copy online at a time. So if you give a copy to a friend, and they give a copy to their friends, and so on, pretty soon your odds of being able to use it are slim to none. They use the "book" analogy to describe it: you buy a book and you can loan it to your friends all you want, but only one person gets to read it at once.
ZMud was popular enough that I once had fun causing some havoc with a little-known feature: MSP (Mud Sound Protocol). Back then, the error checking, both on mud servers and on the client, was pretty poor. I discovered that I could "shout" (say something that everyone on the mud can see) MSP commands to make their computers start playing random windows sounds. ;) Ah, those were the days...
I'll note that not only did I just list three proposed theoretical methods to explain it, but even the DOE encourages further study (Charge Element 3). Yes, this is still highly controversial science. Yes, more people than not disagree that it's fusion (in the case of the 2004 DOE panel, 2/3rds said that they didn't think it was fusion -- although with a spate of more controlled experiments since the panel convened, who knows if they'd get that many opposing voices today). But you should stop acting like it's phlogiston or luminiferous aether or something. It's in the "we don't know what's going on" category, not the "we know what's going on and it's not what they claim it is" category.
Nearly all of these "cold fusion" projects are easy enough to write off as nonsense on objective scientific grounds. Nobody has suggested a mechanism for action that has any reasonable physical basis, nor demonstrated that such a mechanism exists
Huh?
Electron capture for nuclear transmutation
Allen Widom at Northeastern University Boston and Lewis Larsen of Lattice Energy have recently proposed a mechanism that could account for a wide range of fusion and transmutation reactions, electron capture by protons or deuterons [4].
In nuclear physics, it is very well known that a proton can capture a negatively charged lepton (light particle) and produce a neutron and a neutrino, and a common form of nuclear transmutation in condensed matter can be understood in term of this reaction.
An electron that wanders into a nucleus with Z (atomic number) protons and N (= A (atomic mass) - Z) neutrons can be captured, producing a neutrino and leaving behind a nucleus with Z-1 protons and N+1 neutrons. There is no Coulomb barrier in this process, which makes it much more likely than other reactions. In fact, a strong Coulomb attraction between an electron and a nucleus favours electron capture for nuclear transformation.
While lepton capture is known to occur in the case of muons (leptons) mixed into hydrogen systems, it is regarded as difficult for electrons to be captured by protons. For the reaction to happen, the lepton must be sufficiently massive, such that in energy terms, Mlc2 > Mnc2-Mpc2 ~ 1.293MeV ~2.531Mec2 (where Ml, Mn, Mp, and Me are the mass of the lepton, neutron, proton and electron respectively, and c is the speed of light). The muon is more than sufficiently massive to be captured by the proton, but not the electron, which needs to be at least 2.531 times as massive.
However, the electron mass in condensed matter can be modified by local electromagnetic field fluctuations. For example, laser light fields can "dress" an electron with additional mass. The surface states of metal hydrides are very important in this respect.
Collective surface oscillations of charged ions are involved in the weak interactions responsible for electron capture in condensed matter. The radiation frequencies of these oscillation range from the infrared to the soft X-ray spectra. The surface protons are oscillating coherently, contributing to the large magnitude of electromagnetic fluctuations. The neutrons produced by electron capture have an ultra low momentum (with long wavelength) due to the size of the coherence domain of the oscillating protons, estimated to vary from about one to ten microns in length. The long final state neutron wavelength allows for a large neutron wave function overlap with many protons, which increases the coherent neutron production rate.
It is estimated that the electron mass enhancement due to the electromagnetic field fluctuations (collective proton oscillations) on the surface of palladium hydride is about 20.6 fold, which is much more than enough for electron capture by proton or deuteron. The proton field oscillations can be amplified by shining a laser light on the palladium surface, which can enhance the production of neutrons that in turn catalyse other reactions.
The neutron, n, can fuse with other nuclei in transmutation reactions. Lithium (Li) is present in the electrolyte. A Li ion near to the hydride (electrode surface) could initiate a chain of reactions as follows:
6Li3 + n 7Li3
7Li3 + n 8Li3
8Li3 8Be4 + e- (electron) +v (neutrino)
8Be4 4He2 + 4He2
Q ~ 26.9 MeV
A large amount of energy, 26.9 MeV is generated by this chain of reactions.
Having produced 4He2, further neutrons may react to build heavy helium isotopes, and regenerate Li as follows.
4He2 + n 5He2
5H
In my opinion, it comes down to the fact that something is happening during these experiments, we just don't know what.
Which is precisely why the Department of Energy unanimously recommended further study on an individual-case basis for well-designed experiments (Charge Element 3). Which this one would definitely seem to qualify as.
One thing that occurred to me a while back was wondering whether there could be any influence from phonons on the fusion process. Phonons are the virtual particles associated with crystal lattice vibrations that arise due to the wave-particle duality. It doesn't seem that far fetched to me; after all, other particles such as muons can outright catalyze fusion reactions, and phonon effects might play a significant role even there (in the solid state). Yet most of the basic "disproofs" of fusion in the cell act as though there's no lattice at all and only focus on the Dt density (which on its own is way too low for fusion at a relevant rate). I just thought to google for it, and what do you know... others have been considering that very idea and think that it has merit.
I'm also particularly interested in the possibility of surface reactions due to localized quantum effects. Palladium electrodes can form dendtritic palladium hydride spines on their surfaces in some circumstances, and most of the direct evidence of cold-fusion reactions, such as hot spots with associated pitting, occur at microscopic features on the surface of the electrodes. If it were such a surface effect, that could also go a long way toward explaining the inconsistency of results.
Another question is why are they using the label of "cold fusion" when it seems largely they are observing things that are hard to explain so they must be cold fusion at work?
Well, at least in this case, their entire study is about particle traces being left in a plastic that's commonly used to record particle traces from known nuclear reactions. So it seems there's either *something* nuclear going on *somewhere* that's being picked up, or there's not only something unusual that we don't know about these palladium cells, but about the plastic as well. Either way, it's important research.
There still is heat given off, harvestable heat. The key is that you don't need to run the reaction at the sort of temperatures you find in the sun. That's a huge, huge benefit. The biggest problem, however, is finding out whether what's going on is actually fusion. And that's proven to be far more challenging than it would at first appear.
The information is there; you just have to spend several minutes to find it. Of course, it's a massive challenge to bring all this info together -- I'm sure that's why they have only general summaries on the main page and leave the details up to the state pages (since the states have the nitty-gritty details). That's the lazy route, but it requires more work on the part of your visitors. For example, here's my state's highway projects and our local road projects. Apparently they're going to be doing an overlay on 218, which I take whenever I drive to/from Cedar Rapids; fixing the pedestrian bridge on US 1 that was damaged by the flood that I sometimes walk on; doing some repairs at the Melrose and Sunset intersection on the UI campus, which I drive through perhaps once a month; replacing a bridge I drive over fairly regularly in Coralville; and doing some reconstruction up in Cedar Rapids on a road I drive on about once a month. But I had to follow the link to the Iowa site and navigate around in there to get those documents.
Tough challenge = slow implementation.
Oh. When did they add that feature to slashdot?
They didn't. I did. Witness the joys of wget and a bit of bash scripting. It was far easier to write than my script that rigged the Hungarian bridge voting contest for Steven Colbert ;)
The Futurama quotes in my sig list are:
Rock Us, Dukakis.
%
Wingus, Dingus! Listen up!
%
By a scallop's forelocks!
When you said that, though, I thought it must have been a firefly quote that had come up. In particular, I have this one in my sigs list:
Fox: "I think we should call it... your grave!"
Cast: "Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!"
My sigs list has quotes from Jesus Christ Supercop, Futurama, Firefly, Venture Bros, Donnie Darko, The Onion, Jonathan Coulton, Luther Wright and the Wrongs, Utena, Star Control II, Steven Chu, Robot Chicken, King of the Hill, Family Guy, various friends, and references to things like FF7, Portal, Phillip Glass, bizarre phrases, etc. Basically whatever strikes my fancy. It's funny when it picks a quote that goes well with the conversation. ;)
Why would 240V waste power? Higher voltages plus lower currents = the same power but less resistance over a given conductor.
Our 120V system is an artifact of an early desire for primarily using electricity to power incandescent lightbulbs. It's easier to make a 120V incandescent than a 240V.
Even at 240V the charge time will be measured in hours though unless people plan on using cable so thick they need a fork lift truck to move it.
What are you talking about? Oahu already has a network of 60kW chargers, and the company that produced them (AeroVironment) makes chargers as powerful as 250kW. Here's what they look like. Here's what an older, inductive 50kW Magnecharge charger looks like.
Does that look like you need a forklift to you? 50kW = charge a 200Wh/mi (Volt-or-Prius-like) EV at a rate of 4.2 miles per minute of charging. 60kW = 5.0 miles/minute. 250kW = 20.8 miles/minute. For an Aptera-like vehicle, double those numbers. For an SUV or pickup without extra streamlining, halve them.
Here's a handy spreadsheet to determine how fast you'll go compared to an ICE car with different battery packs and charging powers after you take into account things like overhead for charging stops and starting each trip with a full pack. We see that, to pick an example, for six hour driving/charging in an Aptera-type vehicle at 55mph (versus a gasoline vehicle that goes 430 miles at that speed, with a minimum of 8% of your trip for restrooms/meals/getting out to stretch/etc, 1.2 minutes to gas up an ICE car, and an overhead of 6 minutes per time you have to stop to refill or recharge the vehicle), you go 56% as far if you charge from normal wall outlets, 60% from kitchen or garage outlets, 66% as far from low-power RV outlets, 76% as far from washer/dryer outlets, 84% as far from high-power RV outlets, 86% as far from old-school 60A chargers, 89% as far from a Tesla-type or new Yazaki charger, 97% as far from a 60kW charger, and 100% as far from a 250kW charger.
In short, charging from commodity outlets that already exist will increase your travel time by a relevant amount (although not as apocalyptically as a lot of people portray it, at least in an Aptera-type vehicle), but once you get up to the high-power chargers, the penalty is pretty insignificant.
Personally, I don't understand why we aren't making a push to use methanol fuel cells.
The fact that it's toxic, low density, and causes several times the energy waste might have something to do with it.
Yeah, and powerful electric motors are pretty light, too, and their scaling factors well less than linear. The Tesla Roadster's motor, which takes that (not uber-light by any respect) car from 0-60 in 3.9 seconds (3.7 seconds) is the size of a watermelon and weighs ~30kg.
Rarely are packs charged as fast as cells. Titanate cells have been charged in under 1 minute, but the packs are usually limited to 5-10 minutes. Mostly it's a heat issue -- harder to manage with a whole pack than with an individual cell.
Anyway, 250kW chargers already exist, present day. For a 200Wh/mi EV (Prius or Volt-level aerodynamics/weight), that's 1,250mi/hour of charging, or 21 miles per minute of charging. Not gasoline refill speeds, but nothing to scoff at. When you factor in the overhead that exists no matter what type of recharge/refill you do -- time spent slowing down, taking an offramp, driving up to the station, up to a pump, taking the gas cap off, etc, and all of that stuff in reverse, plus payment -- the percentage difference in your time isn't much. And this is present tech.
Quite true. And chargers that deliver very high currents already exists. Aerovironment makes commercial chargers up to 60kW and testing chargers up to 250kW, for example (their commercial line may be bigger by now; I haven't checked). That's up to the limits of the Level 3 charging standard. A number of their 60kW chargers are already installed around Oahu.
That may sound like a lot of power until you realize that most industrial facilities use notably more current than that *nonstop*. It's not primarily a challenge of dealing with the current -- it's a challenge of reliable connects and disconnects.
Anyways, this tech is yet another major advancement to LiP tech; they keep coming down the pipe. Looks like it's prepped to completely blow away titanate tech in every regard (it already leads significantly in price and by a fair margin in energy density). And since this is a surface treatment, it should be able to be paired with other techs, such as Actacell's for using microwaves to make LiP cathodes of superior energy density at a far lower price (LiPs are currently primarily limited by capital costs, which are limited by production rates and infrastructure scale -- not raw materials).
That's quite true. The simplest mp3 encoder implementation -- a route taken by many -- was just to throw away the weakest DCT signals. But there are two big improvements you can do on that: 1) throw away the weakest DCT signals weighted by average human sensitivity, and to combine remaining signals that are close together. There's no use keeping a spike at 2031Hz and 2032Hz; nobody's going to be able to tell the difference, so you might as well just combine them.
I have a randomly rotating sig. What sig was it showing at the time you posted?
MP3-320 may be better than MP3-128, but it's generally overkill. Most people's impression of the quality of 128kbps MP3s comes from the era where most MP3s weren't encoded with VBR. VBR makes a massive difference in quality per unit size. I've seen three or four blind comparisons between VBR mp3s at different bitrates, as well as conducted one of my own. The results, in general, are that about half of people can tell the difference between 128kbps and 160kbps or 192kbps, and beyond that, there's generally little to no ability to accurately tell the difference, even among self-described audiophiles.
Lost them from *using* them at altitude, I'd imagine. That's a well-known issue. The spindle system relies on air pressure to keep the heads at the right height off the disk. Spin it at too low of a pressure and you get a head crash.
I'm not going to be spinning the drives in vacuum bags ;)
I hope your using md, any proprietary solution would be insanity.
But of course.
When you need to restore this data, will you have a computer with 5 free ports running a compatible version of your RAID software handy?
You mean "a linux box" with "3+ sata ports" (you can be down two drives on RAID 6 and still read it)? If I can't meet those minimal requirements, I can probably hardly read anything.
Are you comfortable mounting RAID arrays on different computers with different hardware.
With md? Why wouldn't I be?
If you lose three or more drives in your cold RAID array, you loose everything.
And the odds of losing three out of five drives is incredibly low. I don't want to lose *any* of my data, but going without redundancy means that you will if you lose a drive.
What if you get hit by a bus, assuming the data is important to others, will someone else be able to mount your array?
Yes. It's straightforward md.
Fox, cancelling more sci-fi? Curse your sudden but inevitable betrayal!
Why RAID 6 though?
Because there's not enough space for RAID 1 or dumb mirroring and I don't want to have to prioritize every last file I own. What's wrong with error correcting codes and two redundant disks?
You're right that this isn't particularly expensive, but it is more expensive than steel at less than $0.50/lb or aluminum at approx. $1/lb which is what is used on every other car. Copper motor windings are also more expensive than steel and aluminum.
You act as though lithium ion batteries are made entirely of lithium. It's only 1-2 kilograms per kWh, and a kWh weighs 6-10kg. And low-end electric motors use aluminum wiring or copper-aluminum alloys. Even Tesla was using a copper-aluminum alloy until they upgraded to Powertrain 1.5.
This is only true when the benefits of using an electric drivetrain (subsidies, lower operation costs) are large enough to make up for the increased cost of both the expensive drivetrain and the expensive body components.
A savings in pack cost is always a savings in pack cost. If you make the car lighter, you need less of a pack, regardless of whether or not the vehicle itself is an economically justifiable expense.
If carbon taxes are imposed, electricity prices are set to rise faster than the cost of gasoline and natural gas.
Wrong. Essentially every study done shows that even on our current grid, EVs emit less carbon than ICE vehicles. About 30% less, for equivalent vehicles. Plus, our grid is getting cleaner every year. Last year, for example, about 42% of new capacity added was wind, and most of the rest was natural gas. And this without carbon cap and trade. ICE vehicles have essentially no way to escape carbon taxes; drivers are stuck paying them. But electricity producers can escape them by switching to wind, solar, geo, hydro, nuclear, and many other sources.
The lower manufacturing costs of aerodynamic, lightweight gasoline cars already outweigh the operational cost savings of electric cars
Only if you look at a couple years. If you amortize costs over the total vehicle lifespan (vehicles lasting about 18 years on average these days), the lower-end EVs win pretty easily.
If you're really paranoid, use /dev/urandom and make several passes.
Old drives are not as energy efficient as modern drives, so they cost more to spin -- a RAID would just be an expensive storage container
Exactly -- which is why I'm right now in the process of doing just that. I'm building a RAID 6 on my five old 250GB drives, and when I'm done, I'm going to remove them, individually vacuum-seal them and silica gel packets with my food sealer, duct tape the bundle together, and ship it off across the country as an offsite backup. ;)
Are there better things that could be done with them? Probably. Is there a better way to do offsite backups? Probably. But I have them and I need an offsite backup, so why not? Certainly seems a better use than dissecting them for fun.