GET requests should never cause an action, like sending that mail. POST requests are designed to allow actions.
Oh come on; that's the standard way of launching emails: <a href="mailto:address?subject=Subject&body=Body">Mail us</a>. It's not really a GET request; it never gets sent to a server. It's just a way to tell the browser, "bring up an email client". And any crawler that doesn't recognize mailto is an idiot. There's not even an "HTTP" in there.
Oh come on. Every time I have to make a webapp work across all browsers, 9 times out of ten, if a bit of code works perfectly fine in every browser but one, that one is IE. And IE7 is still chock full of problems. Random example (I could point to hundreds): As a home project, I'm in the middle of cross-platform debugging for a Google Maps-integrated electric vehicle simulator. If you design a vehicle in it (rather than just using a preset), you can submit it to me to consider for inclusion as a preset. It's emailed so I'm made aware of it right away and have a chance to scour over the numbers that they're providing to make sure it makes sense. The easiest way to do this is just with a mailto HREF that supplies a body. Fine, right?
Well, IE (incl. 7) has a tiny GET limit, and this applies to mailtos as well. It only allows 2083 characters. By comparison, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc are for all practical purposes unbounded. 2083 characters is too small to hold all of the vehicle stats, such as the tables of how efficient the drivetrain and battery pack are under hundreds of different conditions. So, IE throws a cryptic error when it sees it. There are workarounds, of course, such as a web form that submits mail by CGI, but you know what? No. I'm getting sick of pandering to a lousy browser in project after project. I've in general decided to take the same approach that these sites are taking: disable any feature that IE has trouble with, and tell them to use a better browser if they want to have that feature available to them.
I remember the first time that, just using a consumer-grade, non-DSLR camera (a Sony DSC-H2), I was able to image the Galilean moons. Blew me away. At first I thought I must have just captured bright background stars that just happened to be near Jupiter in the same plane, but I went back home and set my time and location in Celestia, it was a perfect match. I took more shots later and was able to see them changing positions around Jupiter appropriately.
It's amazing what you can do without any special equipment these days.
I mean, come on. The Titan mission had an nuclear sterling engine powered orbiter that was going to fly through the plumes of Enceladus with special equipment to study, was going to drop a floating lander with an illuminated video camera into a known Titan sea that could look for floating matter, waves, and detect prebiotic and even biochemistry going on in the liquid, and a Montgolfier nuclear-hot-air-balloon that would study the organic chemistry going on in the atmosphere, make detailed maps of the surface (studyin things like cryovolcanoes and alluvial channels), and after the initial mission completed, likely make low passes right over the surface.
How could they pick this really unimpressive Europa mission over that? Aaargh!
Wow. I didn't think people would be inept enough to not look past the first page of a website, or even read the text for that matter. I guess I was wrong.
America's problems are even bigger than I thought.
FYI, the full text is right there on the front page. As well as all sorts of other tools, like state-by-state job breakdowns And as the site states, as contracts are given out, they'll show up, as well as projects down to the district level.
Oh, my bad. Since there exists a company that got a loan, apparently the financial sector is rolling along smoothly. Silly me.
My father is the CEO of one of the US's largest oil refiners. My uncle is a VP of Rolls Royce. I've listened to both talk on end about what a nightmare it is trying to secure the large amounts of capital financing they need to survive in this current environment. Of course, simple lending statistics could have told you as much. One of my favorite stats is the near complete obliteration of the Baltic Dry Index. Companies have been leaving goods rotting on the docks because they haven't been able to get the loans to ship them. It's not just business financing that's in a miserable state; a good chunk of the collapse of the car market, just to pick a random example is due to how much harder it is to get financing these days. Just to make the scale of the car market collapse, here's just part of England's share. Start panning.
"I can't overstate (blank)" is such a cliche, but in the case of the severity of our current economic crisis, it really is a challenge to do so.
You can hand-pick talking points out of the bill. Or, you could actually see the breakdowns. Your call, I suppose. Once the grants start going out, that site will even have every last contractor, what's going to what congressional district for what projects in that district, and on and on.
You left out the bit about them needing replacement every couple of years.
1886 called; their want their knowledge of battery chemistry back.
The longevity of a battery pack depends entirely on its chemistry. Early 1900s EVs were often powered by nickel-iron cells, which have extremely long lifespans. Jay Leno has one that's still operating on its original batteries today. At the same time, they also had lead-acid batteries, which were much cheaper and had more storage capacity, but had very short lifespans.
You see the same thing in today's chemistries. Traditional li-ion gets 160-180Wh/kg. However, they're unstable and only last for a few years. But phosphates and stabilized spinels, while they only get 90-120Wh/kg, lasts for decades under accelerated aging tests.
There is nothing fundamental about being a "battery" that means it must die in short order. Ask any owner of a RAV4EV.
As for novel chemistries, there's a ton of them at various stages of working their way toward commercialization. Even if most of them fail, the odds of *all* of them failing seem vanishingly small. Li-ions should be in the 250-400Wh/kg range within a decade, and be significantly cheaper per watt hour to boot.
How do you plan to give people "faith in the system"? Do you have any clue how much toxic debt there is circulating out there? If you think things are bad right now, just wait to see what the unemployment situation is like by the time the financial system has worked it all out of its system; unemployment always lags behind everything else. Right now, about the only entities that *can* borrow money effectively are governments -- in particular, the US government.
$800B sounds like a lot, but we'll be lucky if it even manages to stop the slide, let alone pull us back. The numbers I've seen going around from economists are more like $2-3 trillion over the same timeframe.
1) We're talking about li-ion, not "lithium batteries". Lithium batteries are a completely different tech.
2) There is no single type of battery known as "li-ion"; it's a family of different chemistries. Each one has their own different traits regarding recycleability.
3) The single element that makes it hardest to recycle li-ions is the presence of a cobalt cathode, which makes the cells much more flammable and provides pretty much all of their (limited) toxicity. Most EV manufacturers are looking at li-ion variants that don't use them.
4) Even in cells that use cobalt cathodes, such as Tesla's, they're perfectly recycleable.
5) The main reason li-ions aren't generally recycled isn't due to some sort of impossibility of it; it's that the ingredients, especially in the newer variants, are dirt cheap. Cobalt is a relevant portion of the costs of traditional li-ions, but that's gone in the latest. What in a LiP cell is worth recycling? Lithium carbonate at $7 a kilogram? Graphite at even cheaper? Phosphorus and iron? The raw ingredients are pretty worthless. Which brings us to our next points.
6) There is not a "limited" amount of lithium in the least. Lithium carbonate can be recovered from seawater in virtually limitless quantities at $22-$32 a kilogram with first generation technology. That's a couple percent of the total cost of the batteries. The reason people don't generally do that is because it can be gotten *even cheaper* from places like Bolivia, Chile, China, etc, for $7-8/kg (used to be $4-5/kg, but recent demand has outpaced scaleups of the mines). It's so cheap people can afford to use it for low-value uses like greases and glasses. In fact...
7) At *current prices*, they have big competition right here in the US. These sorts of prices make the Kings Valley lithium deposits (Nevada) being developed by Western Lithium Corporation economical, for example. There's enough lithium in that one deposit, for example, to build hundreds of millions of electric vehicles.
I could keep going, but I think I've made my point that you know nothing about what you're talking about.
Every type of battery is different; categorizing them all with a single statement about the consequences of their manufacturing is silly. You might as well just claim "My understanding is that businesses pollute the environment... do you really want a business in your back yard?"
FYI, but the sorts of batteries being looked at here -- mostly phosphate or manganese li-ions, lacking in cobalt cathodes -- are among the most environmentally benign battery chemistries out there.
I knew a sysadmin a decade ago who accidentally got infected by one of those email viruses. He immediately recognized it and wanted to look at the source code, but accidentally clicked to run it instead of to view source. Yep, accidents happen. But those kinds of accidents aren't what cause the *majority* of infections.
A bit off topic, but I'll never forget my favorite Linux "email virus":
-------- Subject: LOVE-YOU VIRUS for Linux
I-LOVE-YOU VIRUS for Linux
this one works on the honor system...
1. cd to/usr/bin 2. type ls -l and pick 3 or 4 files at random 3. type rm -f filename for each of the chosen files 4. forward this email to 50 friends also running linux.
Why should Windows users enjoy all the excitement? --------
Good idea -- they should do something to get noticed. You know, perhaps they could find some super-popular tech-related website. Explain their problem. Get posted in the front page for doing so, you know that sort of stuff.
And use their real name and a link to their website.... doh, blew that chance!
You need to lose the energy you used to get there. Technically it's possible to be captured without burning any energy except for course correction maneuvers and leaving Earth orbit, but you want to be going far faster than that. Generally things going to Mars are either aerocaptured or aerobrake, sometimes in addition to a kick stage. Aerobraking would take too long for humans, and ISS can't be aerocaptured. You need a kick stage.
Who needs rapid acceleration? Slow and steady. ISS can already withstand the sort of thrust used in stationkeeping maneuvers, which should be plenty. Perhaps they could even use something like a larger version of VASIMR for the cruise stage -- 50-100N thrust (current version is ~5N).
Since ISS wouldn't be able to withstand aerocapture, and humans wouldn't be up to slow, multi-month aerobraking maneuvers, you'll need a braking stage. Same for Earth departure, return, and insertion -- but nothing with a huge amount of thrust. And you'd need to have a docked vehicle for landing and return come along for the ride.
Quite the opposite of ludicrous, I think this is a great idea. You know how much it costs to build and loft a craft with the sort of facilities as ISS has? Obviously it's not going to be able to go in its current state, but I can't imagine that retrofitting it would be *more* expensive than building and launching a whole new craft.
There's some crazy stuff going on in the field of radio communications and radar. While I was there -- and again, I left in the early '00s -- we saw a presentation from a researcher in the field. In particular, he pointed out some of the stuff the Chinese are working on. For example, picture a radar that instead of broadcasting a single frequency, broadcasts pure white noise across the entire spectrum, and then looks for statistical changes in the return and translates that to the radar echo. It'll require a completely different approach to jam, to home in ARMs, and so on. The Chinese are really pushing for technological supremacy in this field; the US has played the rest of the world for decades by being able to listen into everyone else's communications, jam their communications, and prevent the same from happening to us all pretty much at will, and China is looking to reverse the situation.
Hey, my interface was much nicer than an oscilliscope, you insensitive clod!;)
Also, the antenna wasn't a dish. Or a horn. It looked more like some kind of old rooftop TV antenna. But yeah, they had a real kid-in-a-candy store look to them. It was neat listening to them trying to figure out what modulation just by listening to the sound of the signal on a different demodulation. It wasn't one we could tune into, but they were able to narrow it down just by sound. Pretty neat.;)
It was kind of fun developing it. For example, to make sure that it worked, we made sure we could tune into cell phone calls with it, and there's only one way to figure that out... Cell phone signals are so freaking obvious on a scanner like that -- big, sharp blips, easy as heck to spot. We also used the device as a normal radio when 9/11 struck and everyone wanted to listen to news all day.
Oh, hey, to any "spooks" out there using "Bullfrog" (if it's still in use): on the frontend display (the one that doesn't keep a history, but has bouncing ball which shows you what frequency you're currently at and that has a little snapshot bar on the bottom that you can turn on and off): try turning that bar on and off precisely 42 times.
Back when I worked at Rockwell-Collins, I was developing software for a piece of SIGINT hardware. Every so often, a group of spooks from the client would come on over to play with the tools (I never learned which branch of the government they were from; management liked being vague). On one of these occasions they were scanning through the spectrum and tuning in to various signals that popped up with various demodulations. Then they encountered a signal they didn't recognize and couldn't understand, and got all excited like kids in a candy store. Someone suggested that it was probably something being worked on at Rockwell itself, and so they pulled out a directional antenna, left our office, and started running through the halls trying to track it down.
Hmm, here's a possibility for how they could get the "over unity" efficiency numbers that they'd need. If they pair it up with an electric motor.... gasoline drivetrains are very inefficient -- ~20% in a non-hybrid, 30 to 35% in a hybrid. But if they can pipe the power straight back to an electric motor, it'd be converted to kinetic energy at the usual electric motor 85-90% average efficiency range. So you'll get a 3 to 1 return on suspension-recovered motion versus new motion from gasoline power.
Of course, this benefit won't apply on electric vehicles.
Please do so. I would be interested in seeing them. Sandburg shows a 10% in fuel consumption difference across the entire spectrum of European roads. Velinsky and White shows that a rough road increases rolling drag by "up to" 20% (at highway speeds, rolling drag is about 1/3 of total drag). Segel and Lu show a 10% difference. And, as I mentioned, at "offroading" speeds and driving conditions, you're operating in such an extremely inefficient performance envelope that you're wasting huge amounts of energy to all sorts of other mechanisms.
So unless this device is 100% to 300% efficient and the roads they're giving the 10% number for are awful yet you're driving in a reasonable performance envelope (not much start/stop, etc)....
Slashdot Mirror
GET requests should never cause an action, like sending that mail. POST requests are designed to allow actions.
Oh come on; that's the standard way of launching emails: <a href="mailto:address?subject=Subject&body=Body">Mail us</a>. It's not really a GET request; it never gets sent to a server. It's just a way to tell the browser, "bring up an email client". And any crawler that doesn't recognize mailto is an idiot. There's not even an "HTTP" in there.
Oh come on. Every time I have to make a webapp work across all browsers, 9 times out of ten, if a bit of code works perfectly fine in every browser but one, that one is IE. And IE7 is still chock full of problems. Random example (I could point to hundreds): As a home project, I'm in the middle of cross-platform debugging for a Google Maps-integrated electric vehicle simulator. If you design a vehicle in it (rather than just using a preset), you can submit it to me to consider for inclusion as a preset. It's emailed so I'm made aware of it right away and have a chance to scour over the numbers that they're providing to make sure it makes sense. The easiest way to do this is just with a mailto HREF that supplies a body. Fine, right?
Well, IE (incl. 7) has a tiny GET limit, and this applies to mailtos as well. It only allows 2083 characters. By comparison, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc are for all practical purposes unbounded. 2083 characters is too small to hold all of the vehicle stats, such as the tables of how efficient the drivetrain and battery pack are under hundreds of different conditions. So, IE throws a cryptic error when it sees it. There are workarounds, of course, such as a web form that submits mail by CGI, but you know what? No. I'm getting sick of pandering to a lousy browser in project after project. I've in general decided to take the same approach that these sites are taking: disable any feature that IE has trouble with, and tell them to use a better browser if they want to have that feature available to them.
I remember the first time that, just using a consumer-grade, non-DSLR camera (a Sony DSC-H2), I was able to image the Galilean moons. Blew me away. At first I thought I must have just captured bright background stars that just happened to be near Jupiter in the same plane, but I went back home and set my time and location in Celestia, it was a perfect match. I took more shots later and was able to see them changing positions around Jupiter appropriately.
It's amazing what you can do without any special equipment these days.
I mean, come on. The Titan mission had an nuclear sterling engine powered orbiter that was going to fly through the plumes of Enceladus with special equipment to study, was going to drop a floating lander with an illuminated video camera into a known Titan sea that could look for floating matter, waves, and detect prebiotic and even biochemistry going on in the liquid, and a Montgolfier nuclear-hot-air-balloon that would study the organic chemistry going on in the atmosphere, make detailed maps of the surface (studyin things like cryovolcanoes and alluvial channels), and after the initial mission completed, likely make low passes right over the surface.
How could they pick this really unimpressive Europa mission over that? Aaargh!
any idea where you got it?
Here.
Always nice to have the official version.
I take it you didn't notice the .gov in the URL? This isn't some myspace page here.
Wow. I didn't think people would be inept enough to not look past the first page of a website, or even read the text for that matter. I guess I was wrong.
America's problems are even bigger than I thought.
FYI, the full text is right there on the front page. As well as all sorts of other tools, like state-by-state job breakdowns And as the site states, as contracts are given out, they'll show up, as well as projects down to the district level.
Oh, my bad. Since there exists a company that got a loan, apparently the financial sector is rolling along smoothly. Silly me.
My father is the CEO of one of the US's largest oil refiners. My uncle is a VP of Rolls Royce. I've listened to both talk on end about what a nightmare it is trying to secure the large amounts of capital financing they need to survive in this current environment. Of course, simple lending statistics could have told you as much. One of my favorite stats is the near complete obliteration of the Baltic Dry Index. Companies have been leaving goods rotting on the docks because they haven't been able to get the loans to ship them. It's not just business financing that's in a miserable state; a good chunk of the collapse of the car market, just to pick a random example is due to how much harder it is to get financing these days. Just to make the scale of the car market collapse, here's just part of England's share. Start panning.
"I can't overstate (blank)" is such a cliche, but in the case of the severity of our current economic crisis, it really is a challenge to do so.
You can hand-pick talking points out of the bill. Or, you could actually see the breakdowns. Your call, I suppose. Once the grants start going out, that site will even have every last contractor, what's going to what congressional district for what projects in that district, and on and on.
You left out the bit about them needing replacement every couple of years.
1886 called; their want their knowledge of battery chemistry back.
The longevity of a battery pack depends entirely on its chemistry. Early 1900s EVs were often powered by nickel-iron cells, which have extremely long lifespans. Jay Leno has one that's still operating on its original batteries today. At the same time, they also had lead-acid batteries, which were much cheaper and had more storage capacity, but had very short lifespans.
You see the same thing in today's chemistries. Traditional li-ion gets 160-180Wh/kg. However, they're unstable and only last for a few years. But phosphates and stabilized spinels, while they only get 90-120Wh/kg, lasts for decades under accelerated aging tests.
There is nothing fundamental about being a "battery" that means it must die in short order. Ask any owner of a RAV4EV.
As for novel chemistries, there's a ton of them at various stages of working their way toward commercialization. Even if most of them fail, the odds of *all* of them failing seem vanishingly small. Li-ions should be in the 250-400Wh/kg range within a decade, and be significantly cheaper per watt hour to boot.
How do you plan to give people "faith in the system"? Do you have any clue how much toxic debt there is circulating out there? If you think things are bad right now, just wait to see what the unemployment situation is like by the time the financial system has worked it all out of its system; unemployment always lags behind everything else. Right now, about the only entities that *can* borrow money effectively are governments -- in particular, the US government.
$800B sounds like a lot, but we'll be lucky if it even manages to stop the slide, let alone pull us back. The numbers I've seen going around from economists are more like $2-3 trillion over the same timeframe.
Where to start?
1) We're talking about li-ion, not "lithium batteries". Lithium batteries are a completely different tech.
2) There is no single type of battery known as "li-ion"; it's a family of different chemistries. Each one has their own different traits regarding recycleability.
3) The single element that makes it hardest to recycle li-ions is the presence of a cobalt cathode, which makes the cells much more flammable and provides pretty much all of their (limited) toxicity. Most EV manufacturers are looking at li-ion variants that don't use them.
4) Even in cells that use cobalt cathodes, such as Tesla's, they're perfectly recycleable.
5) The main reason li-ions aren't generally recycled isn't due to some sort of impossibility of it; it's that the ingredients, especially in the newer variants, are dirt cheap. Cobalt is a relevant portion of the costs of traditional li-ions, but that's gone in the latest. What in a LiP cell is worth recycling? Lithium carbonate at $7 a kilogram? Graphite at even cheaper? Phosphorus and iron? The raw ingredients are pretty worthless. Which brings us to our next points.
6) There is not a "limited" amount of lithium in the least. Lithium carbonate can be recovered from seawater in virtually limitless quantities at $22-$32 a kilogram with first generation technology. That's a couple percent of the total cost of the batteries. The reason people don't generally do that is because it can be gotten *even cheaper* from places like Bolivia, Chile, China, etc, for $7-8/kg (used to be $4-5/kg, but recent demand has outpaced scaleups of the mines). It's so cheap people can afford to use it for low-value uses like greases and glasses. In fact...
7) At *current prices*, they have big competition right here in the US. These sorts of prices make the Kings Valley lithium deposits (Nevada) being developed by Western Lithium Corporation economical, for example. There's enough lithium in that one deposit, for example, to build hundreds of millions of electric vehicles.
I could keep going, but I think I've made my point that you know nothing about what you're talking about.
Every type of battery is different; categorizing them all with a single statement about the consequences of their manufacturing is silly. You might as well just claim "My understanding is that businesses pollute the environment... do you really want a business in your back yard?"
FYI, but the sorts of batteries being looked at here -- mostly phosphate or manganese li-ions, lacking in cobalt cathodes -- are among the most environmentally benign battery chemistries out there.
I knew a sysadmin a decade ago who accidentally got infected by one of those email viruses. He immediately recognized it and wanted to look at the source code, but accidentally clicked to run it instead of to view source. Yep, accidents happen. But those kinds of accidents aren't what cause the *majority* of infections.
A bit off topic, but I'll never forget my favorite Linux "email virus":
--------
Subject: LOVE-YOU VIRUS for Linux
I-LOVE-YOU VIRUS for Linux
this one works on the honor system...
1. cd to /usr/bin
2. type ls -l and pick 3 or 4 files at random
3. type rm -f filename for each of the chosen files
4. forward this email to 50 friends also running linux.
Why should Windows users enjoy all the excitement?
--------
Good idea -- they should do something to get noticed. You know, perhaps they could find some super-popular tech-related website. Explain their problem. Get posted in the front page for doing so, you know that sort of stuff.
And use their real name and a link to their website.... doh, blew that chance!
Better luck next time, "illini1022"
You need to lose the energy you used to get there. Technically it's possible to be captured without burning any energy except for course correction maneuvers and leaving Earth orbit, but you want to be going far faster than that. Generally things going to Mars are either aerocaptured or aerobrake, sometimes in addition to a kick stage. Aerobraking would take too long for humans, and ISS can't be aerocaptured. You need a kick stage.
Who needs rapid acceleration? Slow and steady. ISS can already withstand the sort of thrust used in stationkeeping maneuvers, which should be plenty. Perhaps they could even use something like a larger version of VASIMR for the cruise stage -- 50-100N thrust (current version is ~5N).
Since ISS wouldn't be able to withstand aerocapture, and humans wouldn't be up to slow, multi-month aerobraking maneuvers, you'll need a braking stage. Same for Earth departure, return, and insertion -- but nothing with a huge amount of thrust. And you'd need to have a docked vehicle for landing and return come along for the ride.
Quite the opposite of ludicrous, I think this is a great idea. You know how much it costs to build and loft a craft with the sort of facilities as ISS has? Obviously it's not going to be able to go in its current state, but I can't imagine that retrofitting it would be *more* expensive than building and launching a whole new craft.
But what if it's not mice or rats at all? What if it's Chuck Mangione, living in the dealership, trying to shut off network access to prevent sales?
There's some crazy stuff going on in the field of radio communications and radar. While I was there -- and again, I left in the early '00s -- we saw a presentation from a researcher in the field. In particular, he pointed out some of the stuff the Chinese are working on. For example, picture a radar that instead of broadcasting a single frequency, broadcasts pure white noise across the entire spectrum, and then looks for statistical changes in the return and translates that to the radar echo. It'll require a completely different approach to jam, to home in ARMs, and so on. The Chinese are really pushing for technological supremacy in this field; the US has played the rest of the world for decades by being able to listen into everyone else's communications, jam their communications, and prevent the same from happening to us all pretty much at will, and China is looking to reverse the situation.
Hey, my interface was much nicer than an oscilliscope, you insensitive clod! ;)
Also, the antenna wasn't a dish. Or a horn. It looked more like some kind of old rooftop TV antenna. But yeah, they had a real kid-in-a-candy store look to them. It was neat listening to them trying to figure out what modulation just by listening to the sound of the signal on a different demodulation. It wasn't one we could tune into, but they were able to narrow it down just by sound. Pretty neat. ;)
It was kind of fun developing it. For example, to make sure that it worked, we made sure we could tune into cell phone calls with it, and there's only one way to figure that out... Cell phone signals are so freaking obvious on a scanner like that -- big, sharp blips, easy as heck to spot. We also used the device as a normal radio when 9/11 struck and everyone wanted to listen to news all day.
Oh, hey, to any "spooks" out there using "Bullfrog" (if it's still in use): on the frontend display (the one that doesn't keep a history, but has bouncing ball which shows you what frequency you're currently at and that has a little snapshot bar on the bottom that you can turn on and off): try turning that bar on and off precisely 42 times.
Have fun! ;)
"Los Alamos Nuclear Weapons Laboratory and Taco Stand: Come for the Nukes; stay for the tacos. "
Announcer: "If we lose your sensitive nuclear secrets, your next contract is FREEEEEE!!!!"
Back when I worked at Rockwell-Collins, I was developing software for a piece of SIGINT hardware. Every so often, a group of spooks from the client would come on over to play with the tools (I never learned which branch of the government they were from; management liked being vague). On one of these occasions they were scanning through the spectrum and tuning in to various signals that popped up with various demodulations. Then they encountered a signal they didn't recognize and couldn't understand, and got all excited like kids in a candy store. Someone suggested that it was probably something being worked on at Rockwell itself, and so they pulled out a directional antenna, left our office, and started running through the halls trying to track it down.
Hmm, here's a possibility for how they could get the "over unity" efficiency numbers that they'd need. If they pair it up with an electric motor.... gasoline drivetrains are very inefficient -- ~20% in a non-hybrid, 30 to 35% in a hybrid. But if they can pipe the power straight back to an electric motor, it'd be converted to kinetic energy at the usual electric motor 85-90% average efficiency range. So you'll get a 3 to 1 return on suspension-recovered motion versus new motion from gasoline power.
Of course, this benefit won't apply on electric vehicles.
Please do so. I would be interested in seeing them. Sandburg shows a 10% in fuel consumption difference across the entire spectrum of European roads. Velinsky and White shows that a rough road increases rolling drag by "up to" 20% (at highway speeds, rolling drag is about 1/3 of total drag). Segel and Lu show a 10% difference. And, as I mentioned, at "offroading" speeds and driving conditions, you're operating in such an extremely inefficient performance envelope that you're wasting huge amounts of energy to all sorts of other mechanisms.
So unless this device is 100% to 300% efficient and the roads they're giving the 10% number for are awful yet you're driving in a reasonable performance envelope (not much start/stop, etc)....