Wait a sec. The reaction requires 48 g (12 of NaBH4 and 40 of water) of fuel to generate 8 g of hydrogen. Hydrogen has 3 times the energy density by mass of gasoline, so a corresponding amount of gas would be 24g, or about half of the sodium borohydride. Since gasoline is 2/3 as dense (.7 g/cm^3 compared to 1.07 g/cm^3), it should read "twice the mass and 30% more volume". Which is absolutely fantastic compared to storing the raw H2; that would take at best 3 times the volume and leak like a sieve.
Either my chemistry is wrong (say it isn't so!) or they exaggerated slightly on their web page.
Otherwise we could all get our 50 karma by posting mathematics formulae, now couldn't we?
E = MC^2 !
0 = ax^2 + bx + c !
s = s0 + vt +.5at^2 !
Oh, wait, I've already got 50 karma.
Anyway, oil companies wouldn't have much to worry about. Well, they would, but it's not like the only thing we use oil for is to power our cars. There's plastics, there's airplanes until they switch over to something a little less nasty, fertilizers, all the common byproducts of oil refining.
The article states that the process of charging up the borax produces pollution, though so does this not just represent the "make the pollution elsewhere" paradox of electric cars, whereby one uses coal-generated electricity to drive around instead of gasoline, substituting one fossil fuel's energy for another?
I'm assuming that you are only referring to pollution from generating power to generate hydrogen to run the reaction, not the reaction itself.
In which case, I will point out the huge differences between the little generator in your car and the big generator downtown. The little one must be lightwieght and portable. It has to have a power-to-weight ratio sufficient to cruise itself around town. I don't know about you but I have yet to see a 200MW power station tooling around on the interstate!
Furthermore, not every country thinks fossil fuels are wonderful like the US. France, for all their other shortcomings, generates most of their power with nuclear fuels. Much cleaner than coal. Furthermore, You can use things like that nifty solar chimney going up down under. True solar powered cars are a joke, but if the car charges off the grid and the grid were powered by solar (or hydro, or wind, or tides, or...) then wouldn't that be a very clean car indeed?
it says that is not dangerous and nonflammable, etc. but hydrogen is one of the byproducts?? that sounds rather misleading
Pure oxygen and hydrogen are both materials you don't want to be around with an open flame, but saying that 'water isn't dangerous or flammable' is not by any stretch of the imagination misleading, despite its components.
This is really a very Good Thing. One of the biggest problems with H2 fuel cells is storing the H2. It's so pesky as a gas and impractical as a liquid. Storing it as part of another compound which can then be reused makes things a lot simpler. And it's not like Sodium borohydride is the new black gold; it's a charged battery for cars. You use it up, you get borax and take it back to the shop to be recharged with hydrogen. Very neat.
The difficulty now is how to 'charge' up the battery. Do the gas stations send all their spent borax (the customers sure aren't gonna keep it) back to the plant or would they keep facilities on site to generate H2 and run the borax -> sodium borohydride reaction? The former will increase shipping costs (though it's probably on par with getting the stuff from the Middle East), the latter more expensive to the gas stations and making it harder to switch to a different fuel should it become available.
Ha! I can see a future in which the auto industries don't settle on one type of fuel cell and gas stations are forced to carry a number of types of fuels as a result.
From: Vincent Weaver (weave@Glue.umd.edu)
Subject: NT 5.0
Newsgroups: um.wam
Date: 1997/11/18
I just saw at www.slashdot.org (an intersting news site) that it was
announced at Comdex that Windows NT 5.0 won't be shipping until 1999. I
find that sort of amusing. Linux will probably be at revision 3.0 by then ;) Seriously though. Often when I complain about a NT4.0 "feature" I get
told "just wait 5.0 will have that fixed and more..." but I guess MS is
falling behind...
It's nice to be able to use the computer for more stuff because adding new capabilities is often just a matter of a new program for it. With dedicated equipment, it's virtually impossible to change how it works without simply replacing it. And while linking devices together is certainly a requirement these days (what good are electronics if they can't talk to one another?), the protocols they use change rather a lot.
How long till DVD players (or as you suggested, a separate device that just reads the data and plays it) can play all of today's popular video formats? Two years; three? If I buy a dedicated MP3 player today and then tomorrow Ogg becomes more common, I'm stuck with a fairly useless piece of equipment. Waiting for it to be implemented in hardware is not an answer anymore. Designing the device so that it can load and understand new codecs would be make it nearly as complicated as a normal computer and certainly more expensive.
If it's properly done, for instance having a dedicated Linux box that plays MP3's, DVD's, whatever and does nothing else, then for all intents and purposes it is as stable as your tape deck. And its capabilities can be changed by adding a new piece of software, something your tape deck can never do. The PC was designed to be a multi-purpose machine, after all. It's just a shame that the range of its applications has increased faster than its reliability.
I'm planning out the A/V network to run alongside the ethernet one. It'd basically end up with the DVD on channel 1, MP3/DivX/VCD's from the dedicated media computer on 2, the hacked satellite on 3, my work computer screen on 4 (goes nicely with the wireless keyboard and mouse!), the surveillance camera outside the front door on 5 (hmmm, ThinkGeek sells remote controlled deadbolts), etc, etc. Run that coax line to all the rooms and you can show whatever you want on any TV. The expensive part is the equipment that merges the RCA A/V lines onto the coax. But nearly all of it could be controlled from a single universal remote and some inventive programming.
Next goal is to try and put the landline phone and my cellphone into the mix.
How do you get the computer to receive IR signals from the remote? That the remote control can be used as such and that software could interpret the signals is obvious, but how do you get from one to the other?
Good point. So we need one drive that is a realtime mirror, another drive that is backed up once per week and another once per month? Assuming that the backups are securely stored offsite, nothing short of an EMP is going to hurt that data. But quadrupling (at least!) the cost of his storage was probably not what the poster had in mind...
So as long as I don't fuck her I can kill her and the censors won't mind so much?:)
I see your point, but it's still stupid reasoning. They showed Saving Private Ryan, uncut, on one of the big networks a few weeks back. If someone can explain to me why reinacting hundreds of guys getting turned into hamburger is fine art while the killing of a woman who never actually existed in the first place is worthy of being banned, I'll listen.
Re:Future of videogames
on
Aussies Ban GTA3
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Indeed. A Star Trek holodeck program would be rated X, no matter what it's supposed to be. There's simply too much freedom of action to slap a label on it. In our quest for realistic gaming experiences, we are rapidly approaching a level at which you can do virtually anything you want within the theme of the game. And what will things be like after that?
What about strategy games? Should it be illegal to raze a virtual city and kill its inhabitants, especially when some of them have real-life counterparts? What is the criteria that censors use to say that computer generated violence is unacceptable? Anyone who's played Master of Orion is familiar with sterilizing entire planets, how is that OK but the CG killing of single person (there have been more people killed on TV than exist on planet Earth) is banned? None of it is real anyway.
Re:hmm, now there's a moral dilemia
on
Aussies Ban GTA3
·
· Score: 2
Hahaha, that's a great point! How does one rate a game when its level of violence is set not by the programmers but rather by the depravity of the person playing it?
Have you got anything to say or are you just going to insult anyone who doesn't instantly agree with you regardless of your lack of proof? If you have a problem with nuclear waste but think fossil fuels are just dandy, kindly explain to us why putting it underground, far below the water table is somehow worse than burning coal and letting everyone share in the joyful experience of breathing in the smog.
But then again, you might be right; Georgia Tech does indeed have a nuclear power plant, and while it was never running during my time there, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Nuclear and Radiological engineering department got rid of any nasty materials by giving it to the dining halls...
Maintenance costs would be on par with that of a hydro power plant. In other words, much less than a fossil fuel or nuclear plant.
A big shadow, yes, most of that shadow is going to fall onto the surrounding greenhouse.
Average of 200MW, yes. This thing works 24 hours a day. It doesn't generate quite as much (something like 70%) but then usage at night goes down as well.
It is a neat idea, and I'm rather pissed off at that executive in the Wind power sector who dismissed it as "just a chimney" and claimed it won't work. Never mind that fact they built a smaller 20KW model in Spain a few years back that worked qutie well.
Yes, the pollution from nuclear plants is highly toxic, but you can stick it in a barrel and bury it in the deepest darkest hole you can find and be done with it. Smoke from burning coal and oil is rather harder to catch.
Uh, the tower is 1 km high but the turbines are at the base; either a vertical one inside the tower or a bunch facing outwards from the base. It's just a matter of hooking it to the grid.
Tower is 1km tall, not 10. The greenhouse works quite well. You can use something like 75% of the area under it for growing crops. Living in it is a interesting new idea...
Oddly enough, urbanizing one of these would be like recycling energy. Any waste heat the 'city' produces from the generated electricity is used to heat the air and generate more electricity. You couldn't live anywhere near the base of the tower since the winds get quite impressive there. Heating bills would be nonexistent. Some politician moght get it into his head to outlaw air conditioning in the greenhouse, but that's stupid since the A/C is inefficient and the net effect is to raise the temperature even more.
So they'd rather have a nice oil fired power plant? Or maybe coal, either one of which will spend half this thing's costs in fuel each year? Or nuclear, which is better, but still has all the nasty radioactive byproducts which compels people to protest. Solar chimneys are extremely cheap to operate, totally clean, and can turn a large chunk of desert into an arable greenhouse. What more do you want?
And written by one of my favorite authors, no less. Steve Stirling does a lot of alternate history novels (go read the Draka books; terrifying villains and an awesome fiction of what the Space Race could have been) and military sci-fi.
I'm not sure if you could truly adapt The Hitchhikers' books since so much of what made them good was unspoken; flashbacks, history lessons, excerpts from The Guide, and such. Some scenes would be fantastic; chasing the sofa, the flying party, Marvin facing down the giant tank-bot, to name a few; but you can't make a movie out of them. The Dirk Gently books lend themselves a bit more towards the big screen, but they're just not the same.
Judging by the IMDB entry, I think that the 'Terminatrix' was a joke on the part of the submitter. The working title for T3 appears to be 'Rise of the Machines'.
Slashdot Mirror
Either my chemistry is wrong (say it isn't so!) or they exaggerated slightly on their web page.
Tidal energy
Now repeat after me, "High-energy civilization does not require fossil fuels".
E = MC^2 !
0 = ax^2 + bx + c !
s = s0 + vt +
Oh, wait, I've already got 50 karma.
Anyway, oil companies wouldn't have much to worry about. Well, they would, but it's not like the only thing we use oil for is to power our cars. There's plastics, there's airplanes until they switch over to something a little less nasty, fertilizers, all the common byproducts of oil refining.
I'm assuming that you are only referring to pollution from generating power to generate hydrogen to run the reaction, not the reaction itself.
In which case, I will point out the huge differences between the little generator in your car and the big generator downtown. The little one must be lightwieght and portable. It has to have a power-to-weight ratio sufficient to cruise itself around town. I don't know about you but I have yet to see a 200MW power station tooling around on the interstate!
Furthermore, not every country thinks fossil fuels are wonderful like the US. France, for all their other shortcomings, generates most of their power with nuclear fuels. Much cleaner than coal. Furthermore, You can use things like that nifty solar chimney going up down under. True solar powered cars are a joke, but if the car charges off the grid and the grid were powered by solar (or hydro, or wind, or tides, or...) then wouldn't that be a very clean car indeed?
Pure oxygen and hydrogen are both materials you don't want to be around with an open flame, but saying that 'water isn't dangerous or flammable' is not by any stretch of the imagination misleading, despite its components.
This is really a very Good Thing. One of the biggest problems with H2 fuel cells is storing the H2. It's so pesky as a gas and impractical as a liquid. Storing it as part of another compound which can then be reused makes things a lot simpler. And it's not like Sodium borohydride is the new black gold; it's a charged battery for cars. You use it up, you get borax and take it back to the shop to be recharged with hydrogen. Very neat.
The difficulty now is how to 'charge' up the battery. Do the gas stations send all their spent borax (the customers sure aren't gonna keep it) back to the plant or would they keep facilities on site to generate H2 and run the borax -> sodium borohydride reaction? The former will increase shipping costs (though it's probably on par with getting the stuff from the Middle East), the latter more expensive to the gas stations and making it harder to switch to a different fuel should it become available.
Ha! I can see a future in which the auto industries don't settle on one type of fuel cell and gas stations are forced to carry a number of types of fuels as a result.
Hahaha..
From: Vincent Weaver (weave@Glue.umd.edu)
Subject: NT 5.0
Newsgroups: um.wam
Date: 1997/11/18
I just saw at www.slashdot.org (an intersting news site) that it was
announced at Comdex that Windows NT 5.0 won't be shipping until 1999. I
find that sort of amusing. Linux will probably be at revision 3.0 by then
;) Seriously though. Often when I complain about a NT4.0 "feature" I get
told "just wait 5.0 will have that fixed and more..." but I guess MS is
falling behind...
Anyone have a slightly more revised estimate?
It's nice to be able to use the computer for more stuff because adding new capabilities is often just a matter of a new program for it. With dedicated equipment, it's virtually impossible to change how it works without simply replacing it. And while linking devices together is certainly a requirement these days (what good are electronics if they can't talk to one another?), the protocols they use change rather a lot.
How long till DVD players (or as you suggested, a separate device that just reads the data and plays it) can play all of today's popular video formats? Two years; three? If I buy a dedicated MP3 player today and then tomorrow Ogg becomes more common, I'm stuck with a fairly useless piece of equipment. Waiting for it to be implemented in hardware is not an answer anymore. Designing the device so that it can load and understand new codecs would be make it nearly as complicated as a normal computer and certainly more expensive.
If it's properly done, for instance having a dedicated Linux box that plays MP3's, DVD's, whatever and does nothing else, then for all intents and purposes it is as stable as your tape deck. And its capabilities can be changed by adding a new piece of software, something your tape deck can never do. The PC was designed to be a multi-purpose machine, after all. It's just a shame that the range of its applications has increased faster than its reliability.
I'm planning out the A/V network to run alongside the ethernet one. It'd basically end up with the DVD on channel 1, MP3/DivX/VCD's from the dedicated media computer on 2, the hacked satellite on 3, my work computer screen on 4 (goes nicely with the wireless keyboard and mouse!), the surveillance camera outside the front door on 5 (hmmm, ThinkGeek sells remote controlled deadbolts), etc, etc. Run that coax line to all the rooms and you can show whatever you want on any TV. The expensive part is the equipment that merges the RCA A/V lines onto the coax. But nearly all of it could be controlled from a single universal remote and some inventive programming.
Next goal is to try and put the landline phone and my cellphone into the mix.
How do you get the computer to receive IR signals from the remote? That the remote control can be used as such and that software could interpret the signals is obvious, but how do you get from one to the other?
Good point. So we need one drive that is a realtime mirror, another drive that is backed up once per week and another once per month? Assuming that the backups are securely stored offsite, nothing short of an EMP is going to hurt that data. But quadrupling (at least!) the cost of his storage was probably not what the poster had in mind...
There's a perfectly good reason why Unix keeps the system filenames obfuscated. It's to make us all look much more impressive to non-*Nix experts :)
Glad it only took them 15 years to figure out that strange 'more than one mouse button' paradigm.
So as long as I don't fuck her I can kill her and the censors won't mind so much? :)
I see your point, but it's still stupid reasoning. They showed Saving Private Ryan, uncut, on one of the big networks a few weeks back. If someone can explain to me why reinacting hundreds of guys getting turned into hamburger is fine art while the killing of a woman who never actually existed in the first place is worthy of being banned, I'll listen.
Indeed. A Star Trek holodeck program would be rated X, no matter what it's supposed to be. There's simply too much freedom of action to slap a label on it. In our quest for realistic gaming experiences, we are rapidly approaching a level at which you can do virtually anything you want within the theme of the game. And what will things be like after that?
What about strategy games? Should it be illegal to raze a virtual city and kill its inhabitants, especially when some of them have real-life counterparts? What is the criteria that censors use to say that computer generated violence is unacceptable? Anyone who's played Master of Orion is familiar with sterilizing entire planets, how is that OK but the CG killing of single person (there have been more people killed on TV than exist on planet Earth) is banned? None of it is real anyway.
Hahaha, that's a great point! How does one rate a game when its level of violence is set not by the programmers but rather by the depravity of the person playing it?
Have you got anything to say or are you just going to insult anyone who doesn't instantly agree with you regardless of your lack of proof? If you have a problem with nuclear waste but think fossil fuels are just dandy, kindly explain to us why putting it underground, far below the water table is somehow worse than burning coal and letting everyone share in the joyful experience of breathing in the smog.
But then again, you might be right; Georgia Tech does indeed have a nuclear power plant, and while it was never running during my time there, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the Nuclear and Radiological engineering department got rid of any nasty materials by giving it to the dining halls...
Maintenance costs would be on par with that of a hydro power plant. In other words, much less than a fossil fuel or nuclear plant.
A big shadow, yes, most of that shadow is going to fall onto the surrounding greenhouse.
Average of 200MW, yes. This thing works 24 hours a day. It doesn't generate quite as much (something like 70%) but then usage at night goes down as well.
It is a neat idea, and I'm rather pissed off at that executive in the Wind power sector who dismissed it as "just a chimney" and claimed it won't work. Never mind that fact they built a smaller 20KW model in Spain a few years back that worked qutie well.
Yes, the pollution from nuclear plants is highly toxic, but you can stick it in a barrel and bury it in the deepest darkest hole you can find and be done with it. Smoke from burning coal and oil is rather harder to catch.
Uh, the tower is 1 km high but the turbines are at the base; either a vertical one inside the tower or a bunch facing outwards from the base. It's just a matter of hooking it to the grid.
Tower is 1km tall, not 10. The greenhouse works quite well. You can use something like 75% of the area under it for growing crops. Living in it is a interesting new idea...
Oddly enough, urbanizing one of these would be like recycling energy. Any waste heat the 'city' produces from the generated electricity is used to heat the air and generate more electricity. You couldn't live anywhere near the base of the tower since the winds get quite impressive there. Heating bills would be nonexistent. Some politician moght get it into his head to outlaw air conditioning in the greenhouse, but that's stupid since the A/C is inefficient and the net effect is to raise the temperature even more.
So they'd rather have a nice oil fired power plant? Or maybe coal, either one of which will spend half this thing's costs in fuel each year? Or nuclear, which is better, but still has all the nasty radioactive byproducts which compels people to protest. Solar chimneys are extremely cheap to operate, totally clean, and can turn a large chunk of desert into an arable greenhouse. What more do you want?
Might hurt the cows? Kindly explain that.
And written by one of my favorite authors, no less. Steve Stirling does a lot of alternate history novels (go read the Draka books; terrifying villains and an awesome fiction of what the Space Race could have been) and military sci-fi.
I'm not sure if you could truly adapt The Hitchhikers' books since so much of what made them good was unspoken; flashbacks, history lessons, excerpts from The Guide, and such. Some scenes would be fantastic; chasing the sofa, the flying party, Marvin facing down the giant tank-bot, to name a few; but you can't make a movie out of them. The Dirk Gently books lend themselves a bit more towards the big screen, but they're just not the same.
Judging by the IMDB entry, I think that the 'Terminatrix' was a joke on the part of the submitter. The working title for T3 appears to be 'Rise of the Machines'.
Well, since the 'protector' got upgraded as well, shouldn't Arny get a shiny new shapeshifting body this time?