I think it was very obvious that as soon as Burt Rutan's company unveiled the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination it was obvious that the Scaled Composites company was going to be the first to win the X-Prize. This especially borne out in the fact SpaceShipOne is the ONLY spacecraft that have flown anything resembling the X-Prize flight profile.
But what next after winning the X-Prize? Given Scaled Composites' extensive experience in building very sophisticated aerospace hardware with a very low budget (shades of Lockheed Skunk Works!), I wouldn't be surprised that Burt Rutan may be looking at the ultimate goal: access to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) at very cheap rates. Imagine a space vehicle being launched on top of a modified Boeing 747-200 similar to the Trans-Atmospheric Vehicle studies done during the 1980's; if there is any company that can now pull it off, it's Scale Composites.
Also, does the hack for the EOS Digital Rebel to work as a pseudo 10D really work well? After all, the 10D has a lot of more advanced physical features than the Digital Rebel, and the hack may not be optimized for the Digital Rebel's own functions.
It's kind of like the overclock hack for the original Celeron "A" 300 MHz CPU to run at 450 MHz--it does work, but all h*** breaks loose if something does go wrong (like the CPU cooling fan failing).
Once the US switches over to low-sulpher diesel fuel it might be possible for these new diesel engines to meet the high standards we set here in California, but for the moment these new engines may be good enough for Europe but they are not clean enough to be acceptable over here.
One of the big problems with US-refined motor fuels is its very high level of sulfur compounds in the fuel--sometimes as high as 2,000 parts per million! Unfortunately, these compounds have very corrosive properties, as BMW found out much to their chargrin when their first V-8 engines were sold in the USA back in the early 1990's using all-aluminum engine blocks suffered serious corrosion problems. BMW was forced to redesign their engine blocks with iron-alloy cylinder liners to correct this problem.
However, with the EPA mandating no more than 40 parts per million of sulfur compounds starting next year, this will offer two major benefits:
For gasoline (petrol) engines, this means we can widely apply direct fuel injection (e.g., fuel is directly injected into the combustion chamber), which improves fuel efficiency as much as 15-20% compared to gasoline (petrol) engines that inject the fuel in the air just before the air-fuel mixture is sent into the combustion chamber. It also allows for better catalytic converters that remove the NOx from the engine exhaust more efficiently.
For diesel engines, it means we can apply common-rail pressurized direct injection of diesel fuel into the combustion chamber, and also apply the very latest in catalytic converter technology that not only reduces emissions efficiently, but also "burns off" the particulate particles from the diesel engine exhaust, which means a diesel engine could meet the stringent Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) standard easily. If we convert our pickup trucks, SUV's and minivans to run off these new generation of clean diesel engines we could improve fuel efficiency of these class of vehicles by an impressive 40 percent!:-)
In fact, I think CARB won't certify diesel-powered automobiles until low-sulfur diesel fuel becomes widely available in 2005--probably in time for the 2006 model year.
Rear-projection CRT I don't have any experience with. I hear that yes, burn-in can be a problem with those, probably due to the brightness they need to achieve to project that image onto the screen.
I've been reading a number of online forums that discuss home theater systems and there has been many concerns about screen burn-in problems with CRT-based rear projection TV's, mostly because of the need to have high levels of brightness to achieve a viewable display in the home environment. This is why DLP and LCOS based rear-projection TV's have become popular, mostly because you avoid this very specific issue. Also, unlike CRT-based RPTV's, DLP/LCOS based RPTV's tend to be quite a bit lighter, too; a CRT-based 50" (diagonal) RPTV could weigh over 50 kilograms (not to mention being physically very large!), while a DLP/LCOS based RPTV of the same screen size weighs around 36 kilograms, about the weight of a 32" (diagonal) CRT direct-view TV, not to mention being quite a bit physically smaller.
Until OLED's can demonstrate very long lifetimes (like at least 25,000 hours) and avoid the screen burn issue that plagues CRT and plasma displays, I don't think they will have substantial market share for widescreen home theater displays.
Already, DLP has become quite popular for large screen home theater monitors, and LCOS may within the next 18 months offer the benefits of DLP but at substantially lower prices! Also, another nice thing about DLP and LCOS widescreen projection TV's is the fact they have surprisingly low weight, like the fact most 50" (diagonal) DLP/LCOS monitors weigh only 80 pounds, which is around the weight of most 32" (diagonal) CRT television sets! Finally, unlike CRT-based rear-projection TV's and plasma displays, DLP/LCOS monitors don't suffer from screen burn problems.
In my opinion, if you want to run Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP, you really need these minimum specs:
Pentium II 300 MHz or Celeron "A" 333 MHz CPU 256 MB of RAM A 12 GB hard drive with ATA-33 interface.
I'm running Win2K Pro on an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron "A" 500 MHz CPU, 384 MB of RAM and 20 GB ATA-66 hard drive running in ATA-33 mode; I've have no problems with system response issues.:-)
Actually, the first really usable modern OS from Microsoft is Windows 2000 Professional.
Apply Service Pack 4 and all patches since then and Win2K Pro is actually a very stable and usable OS. And unlike Linux, Win2K Pro has driver support out of the wazoo, which means you can use the latest hardware out there pretty easily.
Actually, the first thing you should check out the adult education classes in your local community. They frequently teach basic cooking skills, something that everyone should at least know. Once you learn basic cooking skills you can make surprisingly delicious and filling meals regardless of the type of food you cook.
...and once your cooking skills become more advanced, you won't even want to touch the Campbell's soup because your homemade soups and sauces are superior.
That's very true, but then you run into a situation of where preparation time can get quite long, to say the least.:-(
But the very fact you can do some pretty amazing (yet still simple to make) dishes using Campbell's condensed soups tells me you can still do a lot more than just eating TV dinners.:-)
There is a REAL need for high-school and adult-education classes to teach how to do basic real cooking and more importantly, how to store multiple portions for later eating!
Kitchen appliances should be your friend, not your enemy. You'll be amazed how just with basic knowledge of cooking skills you could create quite an amazing variety of decent meals. For example, go to the Campbell Soup Company website and there are a huge number of delicious recipes you can make using Campbell's Condensed Soups as a base.
Also, you may want to invest the time and money on decent food storage; when I was living away from my parents I would make a huge pot of chicken a la king, store the portions in small Tupperware bowls, and put them in the freezer for later use over rice and/or toasted bread. You can nowadays do the same with pasta sauce, especially with the new generation of Tupperware containers that are tolerant of the acidic nature of tomato-based pasta sauces.
It's just an extension of the old proverb "Teach a man how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."
Here's the problem with pure electric vehicles in postal service: their range is too short, especially with the heavy stop-and-go driving postal vehicles go through (much more so than commuter driving!).
That's why a electric/fossil-fuelled hybrid makes a lot more sense--the range is very long, and hybrid vehicles live for stop-and-go driving (as anyone who's driven a Toyota Prius notes). That's why I'd like to see the USPS (or Canada Post, or any postal authority for that matter) buy postal carrier vehicles with hybrid drivetrains.
Go read Nick Cook's book The Hunt for Zero Point. And don't think Cook is a crackpot; he writes for the highly prestigious and influential Janes' Defence Weekly, perhaps the best-known periodical on military matters.
If Cook's assertions are correct, we may be on the verge of a energy production revolution that could make fossil fuels and fission nuclear power obselete literally overnight. It appears that the Nazis during World War II may have been playing around with the idea of zero-point energy (ZPE), developing it to the point they could power a whole building with it! =:-O
An important thing Cook mentions in the book is that Japanese companies (who have an even more vested interest in reducing the importation of oil than the USA does) may have quietly studied the potential of ZPE devices. This might just make it possible for a vehicle like the Toyota Prius (which uses a special drivetrain that is essentially an electric motor powered by a small gasoline engine and a large battery) be switched to one that uses a ZPE generator. If Toyota (one of the world's largest automobile manufacturers) does succeed watch the price of oil futures go from US$42 per barrel to under US$20 per barrel almost overnight.:-)
Note what you paid for that copy of the theatrical release verion of The Return of the King on DVD--pretty cheap considering you get a 3 hour 15 minute movie and a second disc of background material. That's still way better bargain than what you get for an album-length audio CD.
When the Extended Edition of The Return of the King comes out this November, the first week pricing will probably be US$25 per set--an amazing bargain considering how much material you get in the Extended Edition sets (just to enjoy everything on the EE's take a couple of weeks!).
If I remember from my college economics classes, a cartel is essentially a group of producers that agree to set a minimum price floor for a common product sold.
The problem is that besides the incentive to cheat from inside the cartel (as your example shows), it also creates an incentive for outsiders to get around the cartel in any manner possible. In the case of the RIAA, the US$18 per album-length Compact Disc pricing has created the economic incentive to get around the high prices, hence the rise of the original Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus, and so on.
Look at OPEC in the early 1980's--they priced oil so high that it caused 1) demand to drop and 2) created the incentive to find alternatives to OPEC production. Small wonder why by 1986 the price of oil went from US$34/barrel to around US$11/barrel. And OPEC hasn't learned its lesson--they're going to have a repeat of what happened in the 1980's again within 24 months.
I think the biggest problem with the music industry comes down to this: they are charging WAY too much for a single album-length Compact Disc.
At US$18 per disc, no wonder why music sales are down--people can't afford them! It's also created the financial incentive to try to get around these high prices, hence the rise of P2P sites. This is a classic case of an economic cartel that is being undermined. Also, for just a little bit more money you can buy a DVD movie, many of which not only have the movie but also additional featurettes out of the wazoo. Think about it: you can get the Extended Edition of the first two Lord of the Rings movies for around US$28 to US$30 at most retailers; it has so much stuff on four DVD's it would take you weeks to browse it all.
If the RIAA would just allow their member companies to price their CD's at US$11.95 per album-length CD the incentive to pirate music would drop drastically.
You have to remember that a diesel-electric locomotive is a very large piece of machinery. Even a small yard switcher locomotive is physically larger than any unstretched automobile you find on the streets today.
But with today's technology, a parallel diesel-electric hybrid vehicle could be made quite small indeed. And it will be very clean, especially with the use of sulfur-free diesel fuels and the latest in fuel-delivery and exhaust emission control technology.
I think Azure Dynamics ought to seriously look at working with the Toyota Motor Company to develop hybrid-drivetrain technologies for the future.
It's a good mix, too--Azure has the technology Toyota may not have, and Toyota has probably more experience with hybrid drivetrain vehicles than anyone else in the world, thanks to the successful sales of the Toyota Prius.
I for one would love to see the United States Postal Service eventually phase out its current fleet of small mail-carrying vehicles with ones that use a hybrid drivetrain--we're talking sales that could run into the tens of thousands!:-)
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Version 6.5 of Internet Explorer that will have tabbed browsing--but with a twist: you can configure it so when you ask IE to open a new window it will open a new tabbed display instead.
This is something I wish they'll implement in Mozilla/Firefox, unless there is a way to change this in Preferences.
Pixar have tapped into something thats been missing from stories for a long time: originality.
But you can do it the other way around, too. Look at Shrek and Shrek 2--they recycled a LOT of old ideas but did it in a really crowd-pleasing fashion (think of it as "Fractured Fairy Tales" from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show writ on a larger scale). I think what makes the two Shrek films work is the fact they were willing to use deprecating humor to parody the entire entertainment industry. =)
I think a lot of the problems with the environmental wacko crowd is that they've not bothered to factor in the ultimate determining factor of the Earth's climate, namely that thermonuclear fireball about 93,000,000 miles away called the Sun.
Because the radiation from the Sun does directly affect the Earth's atmosphere, when you have periods of strong sunspot activity it tends to heat up the atmosphere, and when you have periods of low sunspot activity the atmosphere stays relatively cool. That's why that period from the middle 17th to the middle 18th Centuries when scientists noted NO sunspot activity corresponded almost perfectly with a period very cool temperatures in Europe, cool enough that the Thames River regularly froze in winter!
Finally, there are gas and diesel powered cars that get better mileage than hybrids, and I am talking demonstratable mileage, not what you see on the EPA tag.
Yes, you see those in Europe, but those vehicles tend to be very lightweight to improve fuel efficiency even further. The Volkswagen Lupo diesel is a good example of this, but this version of the Lupo is so lightly built that I have serious worries about its highway safety.
Meanwhile, the current Toyota Prius get around 48 to 52 mpg in most people's driving styles, and it has the type of interior space you normally associate with a Honda Accord, for gosh sakes! And unlike the VW Lupo, the Prius is probably a much safer to be in case of an accident.
I think these new battery developments has more than just applications for longer-lasting batteries for laptops, PDA's and cellphones.
It could also mean substantially lighter battery pack units for hybrid drivetrains. A big issue with hybrid drivetrain cars is the fact the battery pack does take up quite a lot of space and also contributes to the deadweight of the car. By switching to these newer battery technologies they could reduce the size of the battery pack, which means more interior space and possibly even better fuel efficiency since when the gasoline engine is running you use less fuel because the car is now lighter.
Actually, if they can pull it off, it could have some very dramatic effects on the fuelling of internal combustion engines.
A little history: when Rudolf Diesel first developed the diesel engine, he designed the engine to run off vegetable oil, for gosh sakes! It was only when petroleum refiners came up with a proper fuel mix that diesel engines switched to petroleum-based diesel fuel.
The success of biodiesel engines show that if you can find a way to make biodiesel fuel on a truly massive scale (and use algae may be just the right material to attempt this), you not only create a fuel for vehicles that are 35-55% more fuel efficient than their gasoline equivalents, but because the fuel is derived from biomass it also doesn't have the particulate soot problem that plagues petroleum-based diesel fuels!
And today's diesel-powered vehicles aren't the smokey, clakety noisy engines of yore anymore; the engine on the new Mercedes-Benz E320CDI has just as much power as its gasoline equivalent, but gets fuel efficiency well past 30 miles per US gallon!:-) Small wonder why diesel-powered vehicles make up 40% of the European new-car market.
I can just imagine a big 200 x 200 km algae pond built off the coast of France or Italy and making enough clean biodiesel fuel for all of Europe....
Remember, we're talking about adding support for a second satellite navigation system. That means additional hardware to receive and decode Galileo signals in addition to GPS signals, not to mention the stringent certification process for commercial airplane and commercial shipping operators with the new system. And that can get costly pretty quickly, especially since commercial users require far more reliability and/or accuracy than users carrying portable units and units found in many high-end automobiles.
Will the ESA Galileo satellite navigation system be sufficiently different that you'll need all-new receivers to pick up Galileo navigation information?
That could get VERY expensive as manufacturers of satellite navigation receivers will have to accommodate both systems for airplanes, automobiles, trucks, boats, etc.
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I think it was very obvious that as soon as Burt Rutan's company unveiled the White Knight/SpaceShipOne combination it was obvious that the Scaled Composites company was going to be the first to win the X-Prize. This especially borne out in the fact SpaceShipOne is the ONLY spacecraft that have flown anything resembling the X-Prize flight profile.
But what next after winning the X-Prize? Given Scaled Composites' extensive experience in building very sophisticated aerospace hardware with a very low budget (shades of Lockheed Skunk Works!), I wouldn't be surprised that Burt Rutan may be looking at the ultimate goal: access to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) at very cheap rates. Imagine a space vehicle being launched on top of a modified Boeing 747-200 similar to the Trans-Atmospheric Vehicle studies done during the 1980's; if there is any company that can now pull it off, it's Scale Composites.
Also, does the hack for the EOS Digital Rebel to work as a pseudo 10D really work well? After all, the 10D has a lot of more advanced physical features than the Digital Rebel, and the hack may not be optimized for the Digital Rebel's own functions.
It's kind of like the overclock hack for the original Celeron "A" 300 MHz CPU to run at 450 MHz--it does work, but all h*** breaks loose if something does go wrong (like the CPU cooling fan failing).
Once the US switches over to low-sulpher diesel fuel it might be possible for these new diesel engines to meet the high standards we set here in California, but for the moment these new engines may be good enough for Europe but they are not clean enough to be acceptable over here.
:-)
One of the big problems with US-refined motor fuels is its very high level of sulfur compounds in the fuel--sometimes as high as 2,000 parts per million! Unfortunately, these compounds have very corrosive properties, as BMW found out much to their chargrin when their first V-8 engines were sold in the USA back in the early 1990's using all-aluminum engine blocks suffered serious corrosion problems. BMW was forced to redesign their engine blocks with iron-alloy cylinder liners to correct this problem.
However, with the EPA mandating no more than 40 parts per million of sulfur compounds starting next year, this will offer two major benefits:
For gasoline (petrol) engines, this means we can widely apply direct fuel injection (e.g., fuel is directly injected into the combustion chamber), which improves fuel efficiency as much as 15-20% compared to gasoline (petrol) engines that inject the fuel in the air just before the air-fuel mixture is sent into the combustion chamber. It also allows for better catalytic converters that remove the NOx from the engine exhaust more efficiently.
For diesel engines, it means we can apply common-rail pressurized direct injection of diesel fuel into the combustion chamber, and also apply the very latest in catalytic converter technology that not only reduces emissions efficiently, but also "burns off" the particulate particles from the diesel engine exhaust, which means a diesel engine could meet the stringent Ultra-Low Emissions Vehicle (ULEV) standard easily. If we convert our pickup trucks, SUV's and minivans to run off these new generation of clean diesel engines we could improve fuel efficiency of these class of vehicles by an impressive 40 percent!
In fact, I think CARB won't certify diesel-powered automobiles until low-sulfur diesel fuel becomes widely available in 2005--probably in time for the 2006 model year.
Rear-projection CRT I don't have any experience with. I hear that yes, burn-in can be a problem with those, probably due to the brightness they need to achieve to project that image onto the screen.
I've been reading a number of online forums that discuss home theater systems and there has been many concerns about screen burn-in problems with CRT-based rear projection TV's, mostly because of the need to have high levels of brightness to achieve a viewable display in the home environment. This is why DLP and LCOS based rear-projection TV's have become popular, mostly because you avoid this very specific issue. Also, unlike CRT-based RPTV's, DLP/LCOS based RPTV's tend to be quite a bit lighter, too; a CRT-based 50" (diagonal) RPTV could weigh over 50 kilograms (not to mention being physically very large!), while a DLP/LCOS based RPTV of the same screen size weighs around 36 kilograms, about the weight of a 32" (diagonal) CRT direct-view TV, not to mention being quite a bit physically smaller.
Until OLED's can demonstrate very long lifetimes (like at least 25,000 hours) and avoid the screen burn issue that plagues CRT and plasma displays, I don't think they will have substantial market share for widescreen home theater displays.
Already, DLP has become quite popular for large screen home theater monitors, and LCOS may within the next 18 months offer the benefits of DLP but at substantially lower prices! Also, another nice thing about DLP and LCOS widescreen projection TV's is the fact they have surprisingly low weight, like the fact most 50" (diagonal) DLP/LCOS monitors weigh only 80 pounds, which is around the weight of most 32" (diagonal) CRT television sets! Finally, unlike CRT-based rear-projection TV's and plasma displays, DLP/LCOS monitors don't suffer from screen burn problems.
In my opinion, if you want to run Windows 2000 Professional and Windows XP, you really need these minimum specs:
:-)
Pentium II 300 MHz or Celeron "A" 333 MHz CPU
256 MB of RAM
A 12 GB hard drive with ATA-33 interface.
I'm running Win2K Pro on an Abit AB-BM6 motherboard with a Celeron "A" 500 MHz CPU, 384 MB of RAM and 20 GB ATA-66 hard drive running in ATA-33 mode; I've have no problems with system response issues.
Actually, the first really usable modern OS from Microsoft is Windows 2000 Professional.
Apply Service Pack 4 and all patches since then and Win2K Pro is actually a very stable and usable OS. And unlike Linux, Win2K Pro has driver support out of the wazoo, which means you can use the latest hardware out there pretty easily.
Actually, the first thing you should check out the adult education classes in your local community. They frequently teach basic cooking skills, something that everyone should at least know. Once you learn basic cooking skills you can make surprisingly delicious and filling meals regardless of the type of food you cook.
...and once your cooking skills become more advanced, you won't even want to touch the Campbell's soup because your homemade soups and sauces are superior.
:-(
:-)
That's very true, but then you run into a situation of where preparation time can get quite long, to say the least.
But the very fact you can do some pretty amazing (yet still simple to make) dishes using Campbell's condensed soups tells me you can still do a lot more than just eating TV dinners.
There is a REAL need for high-school and adult-education classes to teach how to do basic real cooking and more importantly, how to store multiple portions for later eating!
Kitchen appliances should be your friend, not your enemy. You'll be amazed how just with basic knowledge of cooking skills you could create quite an amazing variety of decent meals. For example, go to the Campbell Soup Company website and there are a huge number of delicious recipes you can make using Campbell's Condensed Soups as a base.
Also, you may want to invest the time and money on decent food storage; when I was living away from my parents I would make a huge pot of chicken a la king, store the portions in small Tupperware bowls, and put them in the freezer for later use over rice and/or toasted bread. You can nowadays do the same with pasta sauce, especially with the new generation of Tupperware containers that are tolerant of the acidic nature of tomato-based pasta sauces.
It's just an extension of the old proverb "Teach a man how to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime."
Here's the problem with pure electric vehicles in postal service: their range is too short, especially with the heavy stop-and-go driving postal vehicles go through (much more so than commuter driving!).
That's why a electric/fossil-fuelled hybrid makes a lot more sense--the range is very long, and hybrid vehicles live for stop-and-go driving (as anyone who's driven a Toyota Prius notes). That's why I'd like to see the USPS (or Canada Post, or any postal authority for that matter) buy postal carrier vehicles with hybrid drivetrains.
But that could change soon.
:-)
Go read Nick Cook's book The Hunt for Zero Point. And don't think Cook is a crackpot; he writes for the highly prestigious and influential Janes' Defence Weekly, perhaps the best-known periodical on military matters.
If Cook's assertions are correct, we may be on the verge of a energy production revolution that could make fossil fuels and fission nuclear power obselete literally overnight. It appears that the Nazis during World War II may have been playing around with the idea of zero-point energy (ZPE), developing it to the point they could power a whole building with it! =:-O
An important thing Cook mentions in the book is that Japanese companies (who have an even more vested interest in reducing the importation of oil than the USA does) may have quietly studied the potential of ZPE devices. This might just make it possible for a vehicle like the Toyota Prius (which uses a special drivetrain that is essentially an electric motor powered by a small gasoline engine and a large battery) be switched to one that uses a ZPE generator. If Toyota (one of the world's largest automobile manufacturers) does succeed watch the price of oil futures go from US$42 per barrel to under US$20 per barrel almost overnight.
I paid 15USD for LotR RotK the day it came out.
Note what you paid for that copy of the theatrical release verion of The Return of the King on DVD--pretty cheap considering you get a 3 hour 15 minute movie and a second disc of background material. That's still way better bargain than what you get for an album-length audio CD.
When the Extended Edition of The Return of the King comes out this November, the first week pricing will probably be US$25 per set--an amazing bargain considering how much material you get in the Extended Edition sets (just to enjoy everything on the EE's take a couple of weeks!).
If I remember from my college economics classes, a cartel is essentially a group of producers that agree to set a minimum price floor for a common product sold.
The problem is that besides the incentive to cheat from inside the cartel (as your example shows), it also creates an incentive for outsiders to get around the cartel in any manner possible. In the case of the RIAA, the US$18 per album-length Compact Disc pricing has created the economic incentive to get around the high prices, hence the rise of the original Napster, Kazaa, Morpheus, and so on.
Look at OPEC in the early 1980's--they priced oil so high that it caused 1) demand to drop and 2) created the incentive to find alternatives to OPEC production. Small wonder why by 1986 the price of oil went from US$34/barrel to around US$11/barrel. And OPEC hasn't learned its lesson--they're going to have a repeat of what happened in the 1980's again within 24 months.
I think the biggest problem with the music industry comes down to this: they are charging WAY too much for a single album-length Compact Disc.
At US$18 per disc, no wonder why music sales are down--people can't afford them! It's also created the financial incentive to try to get around these high prices, hence the rise of P2P sites. This is a classic case of an economic cartel that is being undermined. Also, for just a little bit more money you can buy a DVD movie, many of which not only have the movie but also additional featurettes out of the wazoo. Think about it: you can get the Extended Edition of the first two Lord of the Rings movies for around US$28 to US$30 at most retailers; it has so much stuff on four DVD's it would take you weeks to browse it all.
If the RIAA would just allow their member companies to price their CD's at US$11.95 per album-length CD the incentive to pirate music would drop drastically.
You have to remember that a diesel-electric locomotive is a very large piece of machinery. Even a small yard switcher locomotive is physically larger than any unstretched automobile you find on the streets today.
But with today's technology, a parallel diesel-electric hybrid vehicle could be made quite small indeed. And it will be very clean, especially with the use of sulfur-free diesel fuels and the latest in fuel-delivery and exhaust emission control technology.
I think Azure Dynamics ought to seriously look at working with the Toyota Motor Company to develop hybrid-drivetrain technologies for the future.
:-)
It's a good mix, too--Azure has the technology Toyota may not have, and Toyota has probably more experience with hybrid drivetrain vehicles than anyone else in the world, thanks to the successful sales of the Toyota Prius.
I for one would love to see the United States Postal Service eventually phase out its current fleet of small mail-carrying vehicles with ones that use a hybrid drivetrain--we're talking sales that could run into the tens of thousands!
In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if we see a Version 6.5 of Internet Explorer that will have tabbed browsing--but with a twist: you can configure it so when you ask IE to open a new window it will open a new tabbed display instead.
This is something I wish they'll implement in Mozilla/Firefox, unless there is a way to change this in Preferences.
Pixar have tapped into something thats been missing from stories for a long time: originality.
But you can do it the other way around, too. Look at Shrek and Shrek 2--they recycled a LOT of old ideas but did it in a really crowd-pleasing fashion (think of it as "Fractured Fairy Tales" from the Rocky and Bullwinkle Show writ on a larger scale). I think what makes the two Shrek films work is the fact they were willing to use deprecating humor to parody the entire entertainment industry. =)
I think a lot of the problems with the environmental wacko crowd is that they've not bothered to factor in the ultimate determining factor of the Earth's climate, namely that thermonuclear fireball about 93,000,000 miles away called the Sun.
Because the radiation from the Sun does directly affect the Earth's atmosphere, when you have periods of strong sunspot activity it tends to heat up the atmosphere, and when you have periods of low sunspot activity the atmosphere stays relatively cool. That's why that period from the middle 17th to the middle 18th Centuries when scientists noted NO sunspot activity corresponded almost perfectly with a period very cool temperatures in Europe, cool enough that the Thames River regularly froze in winter!
Finally, there are gas and diesel powered cars that get better mileage than hybrids, and I am talking demonstratable mileage, not what you see on the EPA tag.
Yes, you see those in Europe, but those vehicles tend to be very lightweight to improve fuel efficiency even further. The Volkswagen Lupo diesel is a good example of this, but this version of the Lupo is so lightly built that I have serious worries about its highway safety.
Meanwhile, the current Toyota Prius get around 48 to 52 mpg in most people's driving styles, and it has the type of interior space you normally associate with a Honda Accord, for gosh sakes! And unlike the VW Lupo, the Prius is probably a much safer to be in case of an accident.
I think these new battery developments has more than just applications for longer-lasting batteries for laptops, PDA's and cellphones.
It could also mean substantially lighter battery pack units for hybrid drivetrains. A big issue with hybrid drivetrain cars is the fact the battery pack does take up quite a lot of space and also contributes to the deadweight of the car. By switching to these newer battery technologies they could reduce the size of the battery pack, which means more interior space and possibly even better fuel efficiency since when the gasoline engine is running you use less fuel because the car is now lighter.
Actually, if they can pull it off, it could have some very dramatic effects on the fuelling of internal combustion engines.
:-) Small wonder why diesel-powered vehicles make up 40% of the European new-car market.
A little history: when Rudolf Diesel first developed the diesel engine, he designed the engine to run off vegetable oil, for gosh sakes! It was only when petroleum refiners came up with a proper fuel mix that diesel engines switched to petroleum-based diesel fuel.
The success of biodiesel engines show that if you can find a way to make biodiesel fuel on a truly massive scale (and use algae may be just the right material to attempt this), you not only create a fuel for vehicles that are 35-55% more fuel efficient than their gasoline equivalents, but because the fuel is derived from biomass it also doesn't have the particulate soot problem that plagues petroleum-based diesel fuels!
And today's diesel-powered vehicles aren't the smokey, clakety noisy engines of yore anymore; the engine on the new Mercedes-Benz E320CDI has just as much power as its gasoline equivalent, but gets fuel efficiency well past 30 miles per US gallon!
I can just imagine a big 200 x 200 km algae pond built off the coast of France or Italy and making enough clean biodiesel fuel for all of Europe....
Remember, we're talking about adding support for a second satellite navigation system. That means additional hardware to receive and decode Galileo signals in addition to GPS signals, not to mention the stringent certification process for commercial airplane and commercial shipping operators with the new system. And that can get costly pretty quickly, especially since commercial users require far more reliability and/or accuracy than users carrying portable units and units found in many high-end automobiles.
Will the ESA Galileo satellite navigation system be sufficiently different that you'll need all-new receivers to pick up Galileo navigation information?
That could get VERY expensive as manufacturers of satellite navigation receivers will have to accommodate both systems for airplanes, automobiles, trucks, boats, etc.