But to her surprise, she found instead that the new material was magnetic even above 200 C. Until now, the highest temperature at which a non-metallic material was magnetic was 255 C. This record was held by a different form of buckyballs.
Cut and pasted straight from the article. Now, my eyesight may be going, but I'm pretty sure that there's no minus 255 C in there. Kindly shut the hell up.
It's evidently a typo on New Scientist's part. They could mean -255 C, they could also mean 255 K, which would make just as much sense.
If power were really dirt cheap (approaching $0) what ramifications would we face?
You'd rather keep an artificial scarcity of energy to protect ourselves from the ramifications? What if the majority of those ramifications are extremely good? The media industries are trying to do this with music and whatnot, look how well they're succeeding.
Would we see the current power industries (like oil and nuclear) moving to protect their interests?
Well of course they would. I wouldn't like them for it, but I could certainly understand their motives. But really, too fscking bad for them. Adapt or die, it's the oldest law on the books.
That's right, I remember reading about some guys who dumped a whole bunch of some iron compound into otherwise 'dead' ocean trying to encourage a bloom. Here's link number one grom Google.
But it's very expensive. Solar cells cost over $1/watt the last time I looked. And 1KW of solar cells gives you far less than 1KW of delivered power most of the time -- they are rated for peak power
No kidding. Normal solar cells just aren't economical yet. So, what are some other methods for getting power from the sun? There's mirror/boiler combos, solar chimneys (particularly nice since they run at night as well), and what else?
Then you also have to store the energy for night-time use. In a house-sized system, that storage is batteries, so you also need a batter charger and inverter to convert from and to AC
Not neccesarily. Flywheels or water electrolysis could be used instead of chemical batteries. They don't have to be replaced every few years and aren't hazardous if and when you throw them out.
What would really make it economical would be to mine the materials and build the SPS in space
Duh. Building anything really big in space by bringing the components out of Earth's gravity well is just stupid. Not until launch costs are cut by several orders of magnitude would it be remotely economical. Don't hold your breath waiting for NASA to do that...
That's what the Hindenburg [nlhs.com] used for lift, right? That's 7,062,100 cubic feet of Hydrogen gas right there.
200,000 cubic meters of hydrogen at 1 atmosphere and room temperature is all that much. At STP, H2 is.09 g/L while gasoline is 740 g/L. The Hindenburg filled with the same mass of gasoline would therefore be 24 cubic meters. However, H2 has about 3 times the energy density so for purposes of combustion, that much H2 could be represented by 72 m^3 of gasoline. This is equivalent to 270,000 gallons. It's a lot of gas, but not quite a mind-boggling amount.
As the article stated, his plan is to use solar cells on the garage to electrically break up water. That's hardly a problem, though scale could be an issue. Or just use *any* conveniently available source of electricity.
Agree. You could run the electrolysis machine off of the power grid and you'd still come out ahead since even with the distribution loss the efficiency of the power plant is probably still greater than your car. Using a free energy source like the sun is icing on the cake.
converting a gasoline engine to hydrogen is fairly trivial
Really? That's good, I didn't know that. What do you have to do, anyway?
The problem that has plagued hydrogen engines for a very long time is the issue of carrying the hydrogen around in the car in a matter that can survive a collision. It' nasty stuff. It goes *BOOM* very easily.
Gasoline isn't exactly the most stable substance in the world, either. Assuming you are in an accident and the fuel tank is ruptured, you can either have the fuel dispersing into the air or dripping onto the ground all around your car. Take your pick.
The system also works on weekends and other days in which you don't drive the car, storing up additional H2. There's probably enough roof space on the average house (apartment's are slightly more problematic) for enough panels to provide a buffer. The biggest problem is simply the price of the panels. So what are some other good ways of generating power from the sun?
How about a solar chimney plant built next to a river? The power from the plant is used to split the available water and stores the H2 and O2. Solar power, fuel cell power, and greenhouse all in one.
I tried zooming out to a few thousand km to try and get a good full planet view and was rather disappointed. Only two terrain features were still visible (green and snow); nearly all the lakes and rivers had vanished and there were no large bodies of water no matter how high I set the water level. Didn't look anything at all like a planet when it had finished rendering.
I think someone asked a NASA head honcho this very question once and they pointed out that there have been astronauts of both sexes going up for several years now and nobody on the ground asks 'official' questions about it. So it's kinda up to your imagination.
Depends on what you mean by 'thin'. Compared to the vacuum of space, even Mars' atmosphere is thick as pea soup and would work fine for aerobraking.
The danger lies in using aerobraking to rid yourself of all your velocity. If you use if to get rid of a nice portion of it and then thrust your way to a complete stop (relatively speaking, of course), you get the use of the atmosphere with less risk.
The list is not necessarily a list of used numbers. The telemarketers could easily produce such a list themselves. The trick is to get names and demographic info along with the number.
In fact, there is a guy (can't remember his name) who became VERY wealthy by "patent squatting". He would think of ideas and patent them and then sue companies that would implement the ideas many years later.
Jerome Lemelson, aka The Patent King. $1.5 billion by the time he died.
There are supposedly laws against this sort of behavior now, but they don't seem to be in effect for companies
Sort of. The only thing that I know for sure they changed was how long until the patent expires. No more of the infinite extensions Lemelson loved so much that gave his patents 50-year lifespans.
They used to require working prototypes with submission but eventually were unable to manage all the inventions, thereby dropping the requirement
The Patent King, Jerome Lemelson, made fortunes off that. He had hundreds of patents and he kept them active for decades by make updates to them which 'resets' the clock on the patent expiration. In the 50's he patented "hooking up a video camera to a computer" and one of his last acts before he died was to bring suit against anyone selling laser-barcode readers as infringing on that patent. The USPTO actually changed a number of their regulations just to keep people like him from being able to do so much damage.
The wierd thing is that doing a search on him on Google yields a surprising number of "Jerome Lemelson, a tribute to American ingenuity", which is actually pretty accurate, just not the way they think. He spent the better part of his life making Rambus look like amateurs.
The point is, telling me that I'm not allowed to use this perfectly good but not quite top notch cd player simply because I might do something naughty with it is stupid. I absolutely refuse to buy a 'certified' cd player to do the job they deem my CD-ROM incapable of doing.
Besides,in the end you will still be sending a message which makes no sense of any kind (the encrypted string). The FBI will come kocking on your door and say (prob not very politely) that they want the key. This is exactly the same result you would get if you used PGP and hadn't surrendered the key.
A perfectly encrypted message is indistinguishable from noise. And if they start arresting people for poor line quality, well...
Oddly enough, there's that British law that says you have to surrender passwords and keys upon request. Punishable by several years as a guest of the state. Was that just proposed or was it actually passed?
Slashdot Mirror
You are a carbon-biased life form
/.
You sure? I mean, there's a lot of really wierd people here on
Ok, evidently the problem is with some browsers just not showing the negative sign. HTML typo, not an editing one.
But to her surprise, she found instead that the new material was magnetic even above 200 C. Until now, the highest temperature at which a non-metallic material was magnetic was 255 C. This record was held by a different form of buckyballs.
Cut and pasted straight from the article. Now, my eyesight may be going, but I'm pretty sure that there's no minus 255 C in there. Kindly shut the hell up.
It's evidently a typo on New Scientist's part. They could mean -255 C, they could also mean 255 K, which would make just as much sense.
If power were really dirt cheap (approaching $0) what ramifications would we face?
You'd rather keep an artificial scarcity of energy to protect ourselves from the ramifications? What if the majority of those ramifications are extremely good? The media industries are trying to do this with music and whatnot, look how well they're succeeding.
Would we see the current power industries (like oil and nuclear) moving to protect their interests?
Well of course they would. I wouldn't like them for it, but I could certainly understand their motives. But really, too fscking bad for them. Adapt or die, it's the oldest law on the books.
The only real wasteland is in the open ocean
That's right, I remember reading about some guys who dumped a whole bunch of some iron compound into otherwise 'dead' ocean trying to encourage a bloom. Here's link number one grom Google.
Here on the earth, we do not recieve most high frequency radiation
Do you have any figures on how the extra high-frequency rays improve solar cell performance?
But it's very expensive. Solar cells cost over $1/watt the last time I looked. And 1KW of solar cells gives you far less than 1KW of delivered power most of the time -- they are rated for peak power
No kidding. Normal solar cells just aren't economical yet. So, what are some other methods for getting power from the sun? There's mirror/boiler combos, solar chimneys (particularly nice since they run at night as well), and what else?
Then you also have to store the energy for night-time use. In a house-sized system, that storage is batteries, so you also need a batter charger and inverter to convert from and to AC
Not neccesarily. Flywheels or water electrolysis could be used instead of chemical batteries. They don't have to be replaced every few years and aren't hazardous if and when you throw them out.
What would really make it economical would be to mine the materials and build the SPS in space
Duh. Building anything really big in space by bringing the components out of Earth's gravity well is just stupid. Not until launch costs are cut by several orders of magnitude would it be remotely economical. Don't hold your breath waiting for NASA to do that...
The amount of hydrogen used in fusion reactions is many orders of magnitude less than you'd use to power a car by chemical means.
That's what the Hindenburg [nlhs.com] used for lift, right? That's 7,062,100 cubic feet of Hydrogen gas right there.
.09 g/L while gasoline is 740 g/L. The Hindenburg filled with the same mass of gasoline would therefore be 24 cubic meters. However, H2 has about 3 times the energy density so for purposes of combustion, that much H2 could be represented by 72 m^3 of gasoline. This is equivalent to 270,000 gallons. It's a lot of gas, but not quite a mind-boggling amount.
200,000 cubic meters of hydrogen at 1 atmosphere and room temperature is all that much. At STP, H2 is
As the article stated, his plan is to use solar cells on the garage to electrically break up water. That's hardly a problem, though scale could be an issue. Or just use *any* conveniently available source of electricity.
Agree. You could run the electrolysis machine off of the power grid and you'd still come out ahead since even with the distribution loss the efficiency of the power plant is probably still greater than your car. Using a free energy source like the sun is icing on the cake.
converting a gasoline engine to hydrogen is fairly trivial
Really? That's good, I didn't know that. What do you have to do, anyway?
The problem that has plagued hydrogen engines for a very long time is the issue of carrying the hydrogen around in the car in a matter that can survive a collision. It' nasty stuff. It goes *BOOM* very easily.
Gasoline isn't exactly the most stable substance in the world, either. Assuming you are in an accident and the fuel tank is ruptured, you can either have the fuel dispersing into the air or dripping onto the ground all around your car. Take your pick.
The system also works on weekends and other days in which you don't drive the car, storing up additional H2. There's probably enough roof space on the average house (apartment's are slightly more problematic) for enough panels to provide a buffer. The biggest problem is simply the price of the panels. So what are some other good ways of generating power from the sun?
How about a solar chimney plant built next to a river? The power from the plant is used to split the available water and stores the H2 and O2. Solar power, fuel cell power, and greenhouse all in one.
What an annoying problem. The most common element in the universe, as well as the simplest, and we can't find any here all by itself. Grrr....
Of course, if it was left to /.ers to handle computer laws would we be any better off?
/.ers know that when it comes to computer legislation, less is more and technical solutions are infinitely better than legal ones.
The vast majority of
My CPU fan makes more noise than my hard drive. I don't even want to talk about some CD-ROMS I've seen. They sound like jet engines when they spin up.
I tried zooming out to a few thousand km to try and get a good full planet view and was rather disappointed. Only two terrain features were still visible (green and snow); nearly all the lakes and rivers had vanished and there were no large bodies of water no matter how high I set the water level. Didn't look anything at all like a planet when it had finished rendering.
I think someone asked a NASA head honcho this very question once and they pointed out that there have been astronauts of both sexes going up for several years now and nobody on the ground asks 'official' questions about it. So it's kinda up to your imagination.
Depends on what you mean by 'thin'. Compared to the vacuum of space, even Mars' atmosphere is thick as pea soup and would work fine for aerobraking.
The danger lies in using aerobraking to rid yourself of all your velocity. If you use if to get rid of a nice portion of it and then thrust your way to a complete stop (relatively speaking, of course), you get the use of the atmosphere with less risk.
The list is not necessarily a list of used numbers. The telemarketers could easily produce such a list themselves. The trick is to get names and demographic info along with the number.
Micr'Soft is our bitch
Hmmm, that sounds a little forced. How about "Congress is our bitch"? Sounds better and is just as true!
Uh, Ex Post Facto, bu other than that, correct.
In fact, there is a guy (can't remember his name) who became VERY wealthy by "patent squatting". He would think of ideas and patent them and then sue companies that would implement the ideas many years later.
Jerome Lemelson, aka The Patent King. $1.5 billion by the time he died.
There are supposedly laws against this sort of behavior now, but they don't seem to be in effect for companies
Sort of. The only thing that I know for sure they changed was how long until the patent expires. No more of the infinite extensions Lemelson loved so much that gave his patents 50-year lifespans.
They used to require working prototypes with submission but eventually were unable to manage all the inventions, thereby dropping the requirement
The Patent King, Jerome Lemelson, made fortunes off that. He had hundreds of patents and he kept them active for decades by make updates to them which 'resets' the clock on the patent expiration. In the 50's he patented "hooking up a video camera to a computer" and one of his last acts before he died was to bring suit against anyone selling laser-barcode readers as infringing on that patent. The USPTO actually changed a number of their regulations just to keep people like him from being able to do so much damage.
The wierd thing is that doing a search on him on Google yields a surprising number of "Jerome Lemelson, a tribute to American ingenuity", which is actually pretty accurate, just not the way they think. He spent the better part of his life making Rambus look like amateurs.
"selling old VCR's..."
shouldn't that read "trafficking media copyright circumvention devices" ?
*grin*
It's funny now. At the rate we're going, in 5 years it'll be a felony.
The point is, telling me that I'm not allowed to use this perfectly good but not quite top notch cd player simply because I might do something naughty with it is stupid. I absolutely refuse to buy a 'certified' cd player to do the job they deem my CD-ROM incapable of doing.
Besides ,in the end you will still be sending a message which makes no sense of any kind (the encrypted string). The FBI will come kocking on your door and say (prob not very politely) that they want the key. This is exactly the same result you would get if you used PGP and hadn't surrendered the key.
A perfectly encrypted message is indistinguishable from noise. And if they start arresting people for poor line quality, well...
Oddly enough, there's that British law that says you have to surrender passwords and keys upon request. Punishable by several years as a guest of the state. Was that just proposed or was it actually passed?