I don't think it's a case of "Every engine in the world must be converted to run on hydrogen obtained from urea, NOW!"
I think it's more like "This could be an environmentally friendly way to run a generator at say, a hospital or sports stadium." The first would be fairly easy to retrofit for collection, and the second....well, let's just say there's a LOT of pissing going on there.
Your analysis is good, however I must disagree with you about aerodynamics being the most important for fuel economy, it really only becomes a player at speeds above 45-50 mph (relative to other power draws from a typical passenger vehicle). The real driver for fuel economy is weight.
Totally depends on where and how you drive. I grew up in the country, and it was a 1/2 hour drive to anywhere significant. I still get out of town on a regular basis, so an awful lot of my driving, both current and historical, is at 60+ mph. Even when driving around town, I'll try to avoid short stop and go driving if I can go a little further and get on a road with a 45 or 50MPH limit. I live pretty close to the edge of town, so it's not hard for me to do, if I want to get to the opposite corner of town, for example. Saves time, and probably fuel, and doesn't irritate the crap out of me, either.
The biggest problem with nuclear is certainly perception. But in Canada, we don't have a significant problem with that, because we've got all this undeveloped wilderness space that we tend to put reactors in. At least, in Ontario we do. Darlington is east of Oshawa, and surrounded by what is essentially farmland. Bruce Nuclear is closest to me of all of them - a couple of hours drive - and it's surrounded by farmland, too. Pickering is the only one that's in a remotely built up area, east of Toronto. But the reactor was initially built in the late 60's, and expanded since, so the town really sprouted up around the reactor, rather than the other way around.
Incidentally, but relevant to this conversation, the Pickering station also has a 1.8MW wind turbine on site - the only wind turbine in the world on the site of a nuclear power plant.
I understand that nuclear power is a viable alternative to coal and oil, and that it produces constant power and all that, but how is it better for the environment than wind?
It doesn't kill birds. At least, not until the reactor blows up.....
No, it just means that you've got more space here to be a moron without getting into trouble.
I've driven in the US, Canada, and Europe. I can confidently say that you can take your eyes off the road in the US/Canada for a few seconds, and you'll probably still be in your lane, unless you have no concept of physics. In Europe, if you did the same, you'd have run into something in that few seconds. There was a place I saw in England a few years back where a pub actually stuck a foot or so into the road. The road was obviously built before everybody had cars, probably widened a bit when the car became common, and it was widened right into where the building was.
Roads in Europe were built to provide the easiest way for foot or equestrian traffic to travel. They frequently go around hills, clumps of trees, and such, and probably follow what were footpaths many centuries ago. Roads in North America, on the other hand, were built mostly after the car was invented, and were built in a straight line, because your car had no problem climbing over a hill.
A smart car sized version would probably not get the same mileage but if it got even close, that would be fantastic!
From what I can tell, this thing is bigger than a smart car. The picture with everybody standing around the car shows a couple of pretty tall guys. The one at the left looks taller than 6 foot. Doing a rough "hold my fingers apart on my monitor and guestimate" I figure this car is slightly longer than 10 feet.
According to Wikipedia, the smart is 2.5 meters long, which works out to 8.2 feet. The version available in the USA, according to smartusa.com, is 8.8 feet long. Probably due to different bumper requirements or the like.
The problem with the Smart is, it's height:length ratio is so high, which probably plays havoc with the economy it actually _could_ get, were it a little lower.
The frontal area of a Smart is a shade over 26 square feet. Makes you think my boat of an Impala should be somewhere close to 40 square feet, doesn't it? It's not. It's only 29.2. That's assuming square corners when looking from the front, which the Smart is a lot closer to than my Impala, so they're probably even closer in frontal area than this calculation figures...
I'd guess from the pics of this thing, being as narrow and low as it is, it's frontal area is under 20 square feet. Anybody who knows anything about physics knows that frontal area and aerodynamics is the most important thing for fuel economy. So this thing's going to do really well, even with better safety features as required for production.
and then there's the whole "driving around in a bomb" thing... not to mention dealing with trapped H2 gas in the ceilings of parking garrages, your home garrage, and other places it collects and explodes in. H2 is simply NEVER going to be an acceptible fuel for humans except possibly for running giant scale fuel calls at sites where H2 can be produced and stored on-site.
Driving around in a bomb.....you mean like cars that explode when something happens to the gas tank? We're already driving around in bombs. But when a gasoline powered vehicle has a fuel tank rupture, the fuel pours down to the ground, pools, and becomes very dangerous, as a simple spark can ignite it.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is so light that it immediately rises and dissipates. You ever try to light dissipating hydrogen? Unless you happen to have an open flame right at the leak point, it's pretty much impossible.
As far as it getting trapped in parking garages and your home garage.....H2 atoms are so small that it leaks fairly quickly out of a sealed latex balloon. You seriously think a parking garage is going to have better sealing than a balloon? If you'd ever been in an underground parking garage, you'd probably have seen those huge ass fans they have to provide ventilation for the toxic hydrocarbon car exhaust that is currently produced in such places. It has to be removed quickly, because people die from breathing too much of it. Do you think these fans won't work with hydrogen? If it's an above ground parking garage, well, every one of these I've ever seen has sloping ceilings, eventually rising to the point where the top level opens to the atmosphere. Even with zero wind, the hydrogen is going to climb through the building until it gets to the top, where it will rise and dissipate. With even a slight amount of wind, it will blow out the sides of the structure.
Your home garage probably has an attic access door in the garage. This obviously doesn't seal well. Any hydrogen leaked will quickly make it's way out this door, into the attic, where it will be vented through the peak vents on your roof, the cracks between 4x8 sheets of plywood, nail holes, and even directly through the wood and shingles themselves.
Seriously. Hydrogen isn't that big of a risk.
Now, as far as transportation goes, yes, it's a little more difficult. The pressures and temperatures involved make it hard to transport from, say, Alberta's oil fields to Toronto, as we currently do with crude oil and refined products.
But, the beauty of hydrogen is, it can be manufactured anywhere, with pretty small equipment. It's entirely feasible to build a small home hydrogen generator, which uses sunlight, wind, and rain to power your car. Maybe not the rain part if you live somewhere like Arizona, but in places with enough rainfall, a simple electrolysis device powered by a wind generator and solar panels, and a multi stage compression and refridgeration system (which could also be powered by wind/solar) would let you fill your car's gas tank for free. And even if it takes 4-6 hours to do it (I've never heard a time that extreme before your post, and I've looked into this quite a bit) just do it overnight. You drive to work every day with a full tank. Nothing different than the electric cars planned that you have to plug in every night.
Or, you could figure out a way to use NASA's method and fill a tank in under 5 minutes.
You've also got to consider:
- you'd have plenty of time to fill your car, unless you're on a road trip somewhere.
- venting hydrogen out of a tank lowers the tank temperature very quickly.
- using hydrogen for your engine would have the same effect as venting.
- the colder your tank is, the faster you can fill it.
- running a full tank empty on a long trip will result in a ferociously cold tank.
- you can fill that cold tank pretty quickly.
So when you need a quick fill, you can get one. When you don't, it doesn't matter.
It's not that the vehicles are impractical. It's that current ownership and insurance regulations are impratical.
A family with two working parents and a couple of teenagers should be able to own two of these things for the parents to get to work, and an SUV for the whole family and boat trailer to go to the cottage in summer and march break, at the same time getting cheaper insurance than if they had two regular, heavy, full size cars. After all, the lightweight cars that they drive regularly can't do as much damage as the 6 passenger sedan that they'd need in place of it, right?
Instead, what they get from the insurance industry amounts to:
Ok...two parents, two commuter vehicles....two teenagers, one SUV. One of the teenagers must be a full time driver of the SUV, so your insurance for the year is $8,000.
At which point the parents, rightfully so, say "screw it," and one of them drives the SUV to work daily with only one person in it.
you're modded funny but what that means is that the incredible mileage of that car will be cut in half with one overweight passenger, and two people on it will make short of the mpg promises
Wrong. Mileage is more a function of engine characteristics and wind resistance than weight.
One overweight passenger would make your acceleration suck - athough I tend to think it already would with this car. But once you get up to speed, I wouldn't be surprised if the doubled weight took only a 10% toll on fuel economy.
Since he's "running for his life," does that mean they're essentially saying "You wouldn't steal a car, but if you copy Microsoft Office, we'll kill you?"
No, I'm assuming that if they wrote malware, then their anti-malware software would have a jump on definition updates for all malware that they've written, and therefore be certain to catch said malware.
Since it doesn't really seem to catch much malware at all, I can only assume that they don't write much - if any - malware.
Did you even read your own post (assuming you're the same AC, that is...)?
According to your first post:
on Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 (in failover clusters) since late 2005
How is using the the end of June as a starting point fair, when your post itself says the latter part of the year? Especially since SQL Server 2005 wasn't even released until November 7, 2005.
Your post's subject also claimed that:
NASDAQ going on 5++ yrs. stable on Windows
Then when I called you on it, you changed that to 4++ years, which you supported with completely bogus math. The earliest possible date for 4 years on Windows would be Nov 7, 2009. As of now, we're less than 4 years.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it's a case of "Every engine in the world must be converted to run on hydrogen obtained from urea, NOW!"
I think it's more like "This could be an environmentally friendly way to run a generator at say, a hospital or sports stadium." The first would be fairly easy to retrofit for collection, and the second....well, let's just say there's a LOT of pissing going on there.
I'd have to piss somewhere in the neighborhood of 40 gallons a day to have enough fuel just to handle my daily commute.
So that just gives you an(other) excuse to get very drunk at work. :)
So will we now refer to this loss of efficiency as "piss off"?
Errrm...stupid question, maybe, but....
How exactly is the GP offtopic?
Immature, maybe. But offtopic?
Your analysis is good, however I must disagree with you about aerodynamics being the most important for fuel economy, it really only becomes a player at speeds above 45-50 mph (relative to other power draws from a typical passenger vehicle). The real driver for fuel economy is weight.
Totally depends on where and how you drive. I grew up in the country, and it was a 1/2 hour drive to anywhere significant. I still get out of town on a regular basis, so an awful lot of my driving, both current and historical, is at 60+ mph.
Even when driving around town, I'll try to avoid short stop and go driving if I can go a little further and get on a road with a 45 or 50MPH limit. I live pretty close to the edge of town, so it's not hard for me to do, if I want to get to the opposite corner of town, for example. Saves time, and probably fuel, and doesn't irritate the crap out of me, either.
My Impala is pretty much like driving my living room, but I get 35 MPG on the highway.
What exactly does your hearse have to do with the conversation?
But the point is, you can actually accumulate gasoline vapours in a real world situation, that potentially could result in an explosion.
Hydrogen can't really do that, because it's so fricking light.
I realize all that. I was being sarcastic.
The biggest problem with nuclear is certainly perception.
But in Canada, we don't have a significant problem with that, because we've got all this undeveloped wilderness space that we tend to put reactors in. At least, in Ontario we do.
Darlington is east of Oshawa, and surrounded by what is essentially farmland.
Bruce Nuclear is closest to me of all of them - a couple of hours drive - and it's surrounded by farmland, too.
Pickering is the only one that's in a remotely built up area, east of Toronto. But the reactor was initially built in the late 60's, and expanded since, so the town really sprouted up around the reactor, rather than the other way around.
Incidentally, but relevant to this conversation, the Pickering station also has a 1.8MW wind turbine on site - the only wind turbine in the world on the site of a nuclear power plant.
You missed the sarcasm.
Well, I'd thought people would pick up on the sarcasm in my post.
Judging from the responses I've received, I was apparently mistaken.
I understand that nuclear power is a viable alternative to coal and oil, and that it produces constant power and all that, but how is it better for the environment than wind?
It doesn't kill birds. At least, not until the reactor blows up.....
He already did. Read the part about the licence plates identifying cars....
No, it just means that you've got more space here to be a moron without getting into trouble.
I've driven in the US, Canada, and Europe. I can confidently say that you can take your eyes off the road in the US/Canada for a few seconds, and you'll probably still be in your lane, unless you have no concept of physics.
In Europe, if you did the same, you'd have run into something in that few seconds. There was a place I saw in England a few years back where a pub actually stuck a foot or so into the road. The road was obviously built before everybody had cars, probably widened a bit when the car became common, and it was widened right into where the building was.
You can see it on Google Maps right here:
http://maps.google.ca/?ie=UTF8&ll=53.645615,-1.849557&spn=0.000714,0.001725&t=h&z=19
Roads in Europe were built to provide the easiest way for foot or equestrian traffic to travel. They frequently go around hills, clumps of trees, and such, and probably follow what were footpaths many centuries ago.
Roads in North America, on the other hand, were built mostly after the car was invented, and were built in a straight line, because your car had no problem climbing over a hill.
A smart car sized version would probably not get the same mileage but if it got even close, that would be fantastic!
From what I can tell, this thing is bigger than a smart car. The picture with everybody standing around the car shows a couple of pretty tall guys. The one at the left looks taller than 6 foot. Doing a rough "hold my fingers apart on my monitor and guestimate" I figure this car is slightly longer than 10 feet.
According to Wikipedia, the smart is 2.5 meters long, which works out to 8.2 feet. The version available in the USA, according to smartusa.com, is 8.8 feet long. Probably due to different bumper requirements or the like.
The problem with the Smart is, it's height:length ratio is so high, which probably plays havoc with the economy it actually _could_ get, were it a little lower.
Compare the USA smart to my 2000 Impala:
Smart
Length: 8.8 feet
Width: 5.1 feet
Height: 5.1 feet
2000 Impala:
Length: 16.7 feet
Width: 6.1 feet
Height: 4.8 feet
The frontal area of a Smart is a shade over 26 square feet.
Makes you think my boat of an Impala should be somewhere close to 40 square feet, doesn't it?
It's not. It's only 29.2.
That's assuming square corners when looking from the front, which the Smart is a lot closer to than my Impala, so they're probably even closer in frontal area than this calculation figures...
I'd guess from the pics of this thing, being as narrow and low as it is, it's frontal area is under 20 square feet. Anybody who knows anything about physics knows that frontal area and aerodynamics is the most important thing for fuel economy. So this thing's going to do really well, even with better safety features as required for production.
and then there's the whole "driving around in a bomb" thing... not to mention dealing with trapped H2 gas in the ceilings of parking garrages, your home garrage, and other places it collects and explodes in. H2 is simply NEVER going to be an acceptible fuel for humans except possibly for running giant scale fuel calls at sites where H2 can be produced and stored on-site.
Driving around in a bomb.....you mean like cars that explode when something happens to the gas tank? We're already driving around in bombs. But when a gasoline powered vehicle has a fuel tank rupture, the fuel pours down to the ground, pools, and becomes very dangerous, as a simple spark can ignite it.
Hydrogen, on the other hand, is so light that it immediately rises and dissipates. You ever try to light dissipating hydrogen? Unless you happen to have an open flame right at the leak point, it's pretty much impossible.
As far as it getting trapped in parking garages and your home garage.....H2 atoms are so small that it leaks fairly quickly out of a sealed latex balloon. You seriously think a parking garage is going to have better sealing than a balloon?
If you'd ever been in an underground parking garage, you'd probably have seen those huge ass fans they have to provide ventilation for the toxic hydrocarbon car exhaust that is currently produced in such places. It has to be removed quickly, because people die from breathing too much of it. Do you think these fans won't work with hydrogen?
If it's an above ground parking garage, well, every one of these I've ever seen has sloping ceilings, eventually rising to the point where the top level opens to the atmosphere.
Even with zero wind, the hydrogen is going to climb through the building until it gets to the top, where it will rise and dissipate. With even a slight amount of wind, it will blow out the sides of the structure.
Your home garage probably has an attic access door in the garage. This obviously doesn't seal well. Any hydrogen leaked will quickly make it's way out this door, into the attic, where it will be vented through the peak vents on your roof, the cracks between 4x8 sheets of plywood, nail holes, and even directly through the wood and shingles themselves.
Seriously. Hydrogen isn't that big of a risk.
Now, as far as transportation goes, yes, it's a little more difficult. The pressures and temperatures involved make it hard to transport from, say, Alberta's oil fields to Toronto, as we currently do with crude oil and refined products.
But, the beauty of hydrogen is, it can be manufactured anywhere, with pretty small equipment. It's entirely feasible to build a small home hydrogen generator, which uses sunlight, wind, and rain to power your car. Maybe not the rain part if you live somewhere like Arizona, but in places with enough rainfall, a simple electrolysis device powered by a wind generator and solar panels, and a multi stage compression and refridgeration system (which could also be powered by wind/solar) would let you fill your car's gas tank for free.
And even if it takes 4-6 hours to do it (I've never heard a time that extreme before your post, and I've looked into this quite a bit) just do it overnight. You drive to work every day with a full tank. Nothing different than the electric cars planned that you have to plug in every night.
Or, you could figure out a way to use NASA's method and fill a tank in under 5 minutes.
You've also got to consider:
- you'd have plenty of time to fill your car, unless you're on a road trip somewhere.
- venting hydrogen out of a tank lowers the tank temperature very quickly.
- using hydrogen for your engine would have the same effect as venting.
- the colder your tank is, the faster you can fill it.
- running a full tank empty on a long trip will result in a ferociously cold tank.
- you can fill that cold tank pretty quickly.
So when you need a quick fill, you can get one. When you don't, it doesn't matter.
Yeah, sure.
They release a fuel efficient car, and you bitch that it's not luxurious enough.
They release a luxury car, and you bitch that it uses too much fuel.
Luxury adds weight, and extra features that use more engine power. You can't have it both ways.
You think a top of the line Lexus uses as little fuel as a Prius?
Not so much on that thing, as you expect it.
But when I see the same kind of logos on a Honda Civic with a fartcan?
Yeah, I laugh my head off....
It's not that the vehicles are impractical. It's that current ownership and insurance regulations are impratical.
A family with two working parents and a couple of teenagers should be able to own two of these things for the parents to get to work, and an SUV for the whole family and boat trailer to go to the cottage in summer and march break, at the same time getting cheaper insurance than if they had two regular, heavy, full size cars. After all, the lightweight cars that they drive regularly can't do as much damage as the 6 passenger sedan that they'd need in place of it, right?
Instead, what they get from the insurance industry amounts to:
Ok...two parents, two commuter vehicles....two teenagers, one SUV. One of the teenagers must be a full time driver of the SUV, so your insurance for the year is $8,000.
At which point the parents, rightfully so, say "screw it," and one of them drives the SUV to work daily with only one person in it.
you're modded funny but what that means is that the incredible mileage of that car will be cut in half with one overweight passenger, and two people on it will make short of the mpg promises
Wrong. Mileage is more a function of engine characteristics and wind resistance than weight.
One overweight passenger would make your acceleration suck - athough I tend to think it already would with this car. But once you get up to speed, I wouldn't be surprised if the doubled weight took only a 10% toll on fuel economy.
if the plane was full of Riaa Lawyers..... ....the world would have been having a huge party on the 4th July, rather than just the US....
That's only without any extra libraries.
catbag.bas will probably do what you want.
Since he's "running for his life," does that mean they're essentially saying "You wouldn't steal a car, but if you copy Microsoft Office, we'll kill you?"
Sounds like a threat to me....
It's the internet -- the cat never goes back in the bag.
Sure it does. You've just got to somehow manage to fit the entire Internet in the bag with the cat.
No, I'm assuming that if they wrote malware, then their anti-malware software would have a jump on definition updates for all malware that they've written, and therefore be certain to catch said malware.
Since it doesn't really seem to catch much malware at all, I can only assume that they don't write much - if any - malware.
Did you even read your own post (assuming you're the same AC, that is...)?
According to your first post:
on Windows Server 2003 + SQLServer 2005 (in failover clusters) since late 2005
How is using the the end of June as a starting point fair, when your post itself says the latter part of the year?
Especially since SQL Server 2005 wasn't even released until November 7, 2005.
Your post's subject also claimed that:
NASDAQ going on 5++ yrs. stable on Windows
Then when I called you on it, you changed that to 4++ years, which you supported with completely bogus math.
The earliest possible date for 4 years on Windows would be Nov 7, 2009. As of now, we're less than 4 years.
So, I repeat my question:
Been doing your calculations on Excel?