So? Mozart hasn't been alive for centuries and I can still find plenty of recordings of things he wrote. Not to mention that...And Justice for All tries really hard without really secceding to recapture the greatness of Ride the Lightning. =p
It is against the ebay rules. And if you're in a situation where it seems apparent that it might be happening, they have submission form in their documentation specifically for shilling complaints. And in fact, they do enforce the policy in my experience.
I took part in an auction a few months ago which seemed to me to be a clear cut case of shilling. I put a low-ball bid in on a video game, got outbid, and came back the next day (after purchasing it elsewhere) to find that the winning bid that outbid mine had been cancelled but that my bid had been extended to its very top value (I think it was at $1 when I first took the top spot and I'd only offered up to $2). So before paying, I inquired with the seller as to why the other bidder's bid had been retracted. I made no statement toward either having bought the item elsewhere or toward ebay's narrow criteria for allowing retractions. I simply asked why it happened, and the reply to me was something like "Well if you don't want to pay, you should have said something sooner" or some similar BS. So then I wrote a message to the shill bidding department asking for advice of how I should proceed since, as far as I could tell, the anomolous bidding had disrupted the integrity of the auction. A few days later, I recieved an email from their loss prevention department stating hat the seller's account had been terminated and that I should not pay for the auction, as well as informing me of a few options for how I could get a refund if I had already paid. My only complaint about the process is that the form letter said I would be informed of the results of their investigation in 24-48 hours, but it was more like 72.
But anyway, there's are two strong motivations for ebay to enforce a strict anti-shilling policy: first, it's illegal in many places. Second, and more importantly, is that setting a reserve price is/not/ illegal, and they get a larger cut for auctions configured for reserves. Simply setting a reserve guarantees that ebay will receive no less than 1% of the reserve price (and substantially more for items less than about $150). If they allow shill bidding to take place, they lose money. For example, suppose you have a playstation 3 you want to sell and you don't want to let it go for less than $850. If you start the auction at $850, you pay $4.80 to insert it. If you start the bidding at less than a dollar, you take the risk of not meeting your final price, but the insertion fee is cut to only 20 cents. If you start bidding under a dollar and place an $850 reserve, it's %8.70 to start the auction. In each case, closing costs would be 3% of the winning bid plus 56 cents (since it's 5.25% on the first $25). So in this example, if a shiller were to start bidding under a dollar with no reserve, they would have to push the price up to about $1000 or $1130 for the closing fees to match the higher starting bid and reserve situations above, respectively. And the lower the final price, the bigger the difference is in the fees. In the case of an item with a 49.99 reserve selling for $50, the same item would have to sell for $83 without a reserve to generate the same fee. While it is possible that they could make more money by looking the other way for shills, there's a strong chance they'll alienate their users with high prices and frustrating auctions, face legal action if it can be shown that they looked the other way, and in all likelihood make less money than if they were to do the job themselves with reserve prices. Behold the almighty dollar.
I'm sorry, but I really have to take issue with the statement "Once you learn it, it seems so much more intuitive," because in a sense, if you have to learn it, it's not intuitive. That said, I don't really have a problem with RPN. It was a huge step forward for calculators since at its introduction, calculators were limited to applying one operator to a pair of numbers. However, it's a classic case of how, in the development of computer technology, people must first learn to think like computers until there is a sufficient level of technology for computers to accept input more familiar to people. I don't think it makes RPN any better or worse than the more familiar input with parantheses buttons. It's just different. They both get the job done. However, employing an input paradigm similar to the shorthand everybody learns in gradeschool makes calculators more useful to more people, and is far more commercially viable.
> It's sort of sad that we need a government decree to get > people to talk about things in a fair, balanced manner, > but unfortunately, people are only humans, and humans, > as a group, simply cannot be trusted.
Well I'll just go ahead and play devil's advocate for a moment: Did it not occur to you that government consists of humans, in a group? For instance, the quotefrom Kucinich in TFA, "We are now in a position to move a progressive agenda to where it is visible," tells you exactly what his intention is: He wants to forcefully spread his own agenda, regardless of the fact that it has failed in both the marketplace and the polls. His allegation of a narrow corporate agenda is patently absurd. If you compare the reports aired on Fox News with those on CBS, for instance, you'll find that either 'the agenda' is not narrow or if either station shows a narrow point of view, there is not one singular agenda at play. His solution is to replace this false perception with conditions in which a single entity would have final say over what could be aired, with the narrowing condition of furthering his progressive/socialist agenda.
When I was in college, the university-owned apartment (and presumably the dorms as well) came with compact fluorescents in all the lighting fixtures. I noticed a slight 'flicker-on' effect, but it was nothing that was intolerable. But what was intolerable and caused me to replace them with good old incandescents was the long warm-up period to full brightness (30-60 minutes, usually) and the fact that they were simply too dim to read by. And that was only 2-3 years ago so I'd be surprised if the technology has come up much since then. Funny thing is, part of the graduation gift bag they gave us at the end of it all included one of the bulbs they used in our apartments. I gave it to my brother and he loves it. Me, I'll wait in hope for a viable LED system.
>I think a large portion of the delay is initializing and setting states for all >the hardware. Reducing the kernel and libraries to an image might speed things >up, but not by much
I completely disagree. It takes very little time to initialize hardware and a whole lot of time to load software. For instance, when I just installed xp64 after my last upgrade, the system would be up and running in about 20 seconds. Now that I've been running the machine for 6 or 7 months and have been through a few cycles of installing, removing, and upgrading various pieces of software (with notable differences made upon the installation of adobe and microsoft productivity apps), it takes closer to 40-50 seconds to boot. And that's with absolutely no change in the hardware configuration.
>>My brother got a fancy new tv recently and I was bothered by the boot >>time. It is only like 15 or 20 seconds, but I really didn't understand >>why the tv was able to show me a message explaining that it was busy >>turning on, but unable to show video.
My irritation with most newer TVs is how slow the tuners are. Most TVs, when they're in autoprogram mode to find channels will whip through the station numbers sometimes 5 or 10 per second. but those same TVs will show a black screen between changing channels for 1-3 seconds. I really did prefer the older method of just showing the channel as it tuned in, even if it did mean having to wait half a second for vertical synchronization. Especially when viewing the thing in a dark room or trying to flip more than 2 or 3 stations away (and yeah, I know that's what number pads are for but those can be pretty annoying, too, like if they miss a digit)
Come on, Come on Stick, Stick, Stick, Stick Them Here they come! Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr! They fight for justice They stand up for the truth They save us from the perils Of a cowardly crew To protect the rights Of all citizens But when it's time to fight They fight and win Hooray! They wear the blue They're tested, tried and true They keep the peace For you and me Hooray! (The Police Academy) Hooray! They wear the blue They're tested, tried and true They keep the peace For you and me Hooray! (The Police Academy)
It may be worth noting that LA has been afflicted by some uncharacteristically strong weather the last week or so, with an Atlantic monsoon system having travelled from the gulf to to the western US seaboard. There's been lighning all weekend and we've been getting flash flood warnings while having some extremely uncomfortably hot weather (90-115 F throughout southern california, and high humidity to boot). I wouldn't be surprised if a well-placed strike to an already overtaxed grid shut them down. One would hope they would have redundant colocations but the circumstances under which this happened are rather severe.
Odds are, if you've been to a movie or watched TV in the last 30 years, you know his voice. He does a LOT of voiceovers. He's one of about 4 or 5 VO 'stars' in hollywood whose voices are rarely ever not heard in the pre-screening trailers and commercials.
A closer analogy would be like what's happening where I work (and why I won't be there much longer). I just graduated from school about a year ago, and worked as a temp for the company I'm at now. Around the same time, a contractor with 20 years of experience in the industry and a friend in a management seat also got flipped to permanent. I learn quickly, and despite my youth in the industry, I work faster and more effectively than the other guy. In fact, at least 2 to 3 times a month, I am called upon to retest stuff that failed directly because of his ineptiitude. If I had to assign letter grades, I'd say he typically does C/C- work and I rarely perform at below an A level. But when I got offered permanent employment, after BS'ing around to get their offer kicked up, I ended up with an offer 50% lower than his initial offer. And since he's salaried and rarely stays at work more than 7 hours a day and then wastes a good 2 or 3 hours of that to idiocy, and I'm hourly and often get told to go home after my 8 are up, he's effectively costing the company at least twice as much for his inferior work.
There is a fairly good Pilsner available from Gordon Biersch, although my top choice from their brews is either the blonde bock or the marzen. I usually keep Biersch as a standby if I can't can't find Pete's Wicked Ale. The Pete's has been my favorite brew for the past 2 or 3 years. And I'm anxiously looking forward to the new year's eve. I found a growler of Oaked Arrogant Bastard. I'm not a huge fan of the standard AB but the oaked version consistently ranks among the top choices on a few beer snobbery sites I like to peruse. And I've also found myself rarely ordering Guinness in bars anymore. Most of the places I frequent that have Guinness also have Murphey's, and one or two frequently have Old Rasputin. I've never tried the true British Guinness so I can't really comment on what it is meant to be, but what get here is a dependable albeit upper-middle-of-the-pack stout, IMHO.
I disagree. It took me two or three readings to parse the sentence, but after re-reading it, I understood what he meant. Granted, there could have been a much less muddled way to state the idea presented. The basic sentence is '[these things] have been wrong' but it just so happened that the last item in the list was peple calling themselves editors when the have not [edited anything].
the differing effects of methanol are fairly well understood. They are treated exactly the same by the body. They are processed by the same enzymes (in fact, the treatment for methanol poisoning is high doses of ethanol which will compete for the active sites of those enzymes) and both do have an intoxicating effect similar to each other. The difference is not inherent to the structure or biology surrounding the alcohols. What happens is that as they are broken down, the methanol is converted to formaldehyde which is what causes the blindness associated with wood alcohols. Ethanol is converted into ethyl aldehyde which readily forms an anhydride that is far less toxic to the body than the aldehydes.
I realize it's a little off-tpoic, but I wanted to comment on the use of the numeral 'one' in the spelling of Florida. I predict we will soon see more such incursions into the common vernacular, and I for for one would like to welcome our numerary overlords.
I am flabbergasted that the "big brother" hired pedants can brainwash and indoctrinate the powerful antipode human mind to ignore the simple math of 4 simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth, to worship one and trash three.
oxygen actually does have several visible-wavelength transistions. It could be possible to have it fluoresce and/or phosphoresce. You have to remember that black body radiation is a statistical mechanical phenomena and that gaseous atoms often do not have a large enough density of states to produce the familiar black-body curve.
That said, I agree that the amount of oxygen will have little to nothing to do with the color of the flame and that the grandparent post is misguided. I find it much more likely that the color of the flame is dictated by dissolved salts. The picture in the article is clearly indicitive of sodium, which may or may not be intentionally present in the flame. Sodium has a distinctive and curiously strong set of visible-wavelength transitions and can overpower the broad-banded sensory we enjoy as color. Even at just a few parts per billion, such as in a candle, the blue of the burning hydrocarbons is relativly muted. It would probably require dissolved salts of transition metals to match the intensity of the sodium and significantly alter the appearance of the flame.
>But that's not fire from water. That's fire from
>sodium and water, which creates more byproducts than
>just water vapor.
the process involved is the rapid evolution of hydrogen gas from the combination of sodium metal (which is extremely basic in its metallic oxidation state) with the water. So the combustion side is pretty much the same. The hydrogen would be reduced by electrons from the sodium rather than an electrical current. An advantage of the sodium process is that the high levels of sodium would make the flames look much more 'natural'. (the orange-yellow tint to flames is almost always due to the trace amounts of sodium present in most things we burn. this is shown quite strongly in atomic absorbance spectrometers, in which a small amount of water is drawn from vials into the carbeurator of a large blow torch. The flame is usually fueled by hydrocarbons and remains blue under simple fuel-oxygen mixtures but turns bright yellow when solutions are siphoned through due to sodium leaching from glassware into the water.)
but I suppose the byproducts mentioned by the parent author would be the quite basic water solution left over after then hydrogen burns off. I doubt the pH would be raised enough to be dangerous. And if so... well hey, free Dran-o. It's all good. You'd be surprised how useful strong bases could be in everyday life.
> They are also using solar power to create the
> hydrogen - they have an experimental plant in the
> Mojave desert, here in California.
>
> The cool thing is that this is a functional,
> buildable product created by a major car
> manufacturer.
There's a great article at the now-defunct USS Clueless blog that examines exactly how much energy is avaialable from collecting and focusing sun rays and just how much area would be needed to significantly offset the usage of fossil fuels. (as well as a few others [1, 2] on the feasibility of some the pet projects of "sustainability" afficianadios.
But in all seriousness, despite the wonderful opportunity for lampooning, the parent poster makes a great point. Always check with the authorities first. As much as we like to complain about the state of our legislation, it actually is far worse in many other places.
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So? Mozart hasn't been alive for centuries and I can still find plenty of recordings of things he wrote. Not to mention that ...And Justice for All tries really hard without really secceding to recapture the greatness of Ride the Lightning. =p
Sorry, man. That simply can't happen. Cliff Burton is dead and buried.
It is against the ebay rules. And if you're in a situation where it seems apparent that it might be happening, they have submission form in their documentation specifically for shilling complaints. And in fact, they do enforce the policy in my experience.
/not/ illegal, and they get a larger cut for auctions configured for reserves. Simply setting a reserve guarantees that ebay will receive no less than 1% of the reserve price (and substantially more for items less than about $150). If they allow shill bidding to take place, they lose money. For example, suppose you have a playstation 3 you want to sell and you don't want to let it go for less than $850. If you start the auction at $850, you pay $4.80 to insert it. If you start the bidding at less than a dollar, you take the risk of not meeting your final price, but the insertion fee is cut to only 20 cents. If you start bidding under a dollar and place an $850 reserve, it's %8.70 to start the auction. In each case, closing costs would be 3% of the winning bid plus 56 cents (since it's 5.25% on the first $25). So in this example, if a shiller were to start bidding under a dollar with no reserve, they would have to push the price up to about $1000 or $1130 for the closing fees to match the higher starting bid and reserve situations above, respectively. And the lower the final price, the bigger the difference is in the fees. In the case of an item with a 49.99 reserve selling for $50, the same item would have to sell for $83 without a reserve to generate the same fee. While it is possible that they could make more money by looking the other way for shills, there's a strong chance they'll alienate their users with high prices and frustrating auctions, face legal action if it can be shown that they looked the other way, and in all likelihood make less money than if they were to do the job themselves with reserve prices. Behold the almighty dollar.
I took part in an auction a few months ago which seemed to me to be a clear cut case of shilling. I put a low-ball bid in on a video game, got outbid, and came back the next day (after purchasing it elsewhere) to find that the winning bid that outbid mine had been cancelled but that my bid had been extended to its very top value (I think it was at $1 when I first took the top spot and I'd only offered up to $2). So before paying, I inquired with the seller as to why the other bidder's bid had been retracted. I made no statement toward either having bought the item elsewhere or toward ebay's narrow criteria for allowing retractions. I simply asked why it happened, and the reply to me was something like "Well if you don't want to pay, you should have said something sooner" or some similar BS. So then I wrote a message to the shill bidding department asking for advice of how I should proceed since, as far as I could tell, the anomolous bidding had disrupted the integrity of the auction. A few days later, I recieved an email from their loss prevention department stating hat the seller's account had been terminated and that I should not pay for the auction, as well as informing me of a few options for how I could get a refund if I had already paid. My only complaint about the process is that the form letter said I would be informed of the results of their investigation in 24-48 hours, but it was more like 72.
But anyway, there's are two strong motivations for ebay to enforce a strict anti-shilling policy: first, it's illegal in many places. Second, and more importantly, is that setting a reserve price is
I'm sorry, but I really have to take issue with the statement "Once you learn it, it seems so much more intuitive," because in a sense, if you have to learn it, it's not intuitive. That said, I don't really have a problem with RPN. It was a huge step forward for calculators since at its introduction, calculators were limited to applying one operator to a pair of numbers. However, it's a classic case of how, in the development of computer technology, people must first learn to think like computers until there is a sufficient level of technology for computers to accept input more familiar to people. I don't think it makes RPN any better or worse than the more familiar input with parantheses buttons. It's just different. They both get the job done. However, employing an input paradigm similar to the shorthand everybody learns in gradeschool makes calculators more useful to more people, and is far more commercially viable.
> It's sort of sad that we need a government decree to get
> people to talk about things in a fair, balanced manner,
> but unfortunately, people are only humans, and humans,
> as a group, simply cannot be trusted.
Well I'll just go ahead and play devil's advocate for a moment: Did it not occur to you that government consists of humans, in a group? For instance, the quotefrom Kucinich in TFA, "We are now in a position to move a progressive agenda to where it is visible," tells you exactly what his intention is: He wants to forcefully spread his own agenda, regardless of the fact that it has failed in both the marketplace and the polls. His allegation of a narrow corporate agenda is patently absurd. If you compare the reports aired on Fox News with those on CBS, for instance, you'll find that either 'the agenda' is not narrow or if either station shows a narrow point of view, there is not one singular agenda at play. His solution is to replace this false perception with conditions in which a single entity would have final say over what could be aired, with the narrowing condition of furthering his progressive/socialist agenda.
When I was in college, the university-owned apartment (and presumably the dorms as well) came with compact fluorescents in all the lighting fixtures. I noticed a slight 'flicker-on' effect, but it was nothing that was intolerable. But what was intolerable and caused me to replace them with good old incandescents was the long warm-up period to full brightness (30-60 minutes, usually) and the fact that they were simply too dim to read by. And that was only 2-3 years ago so I'd be surprised if the technology has come up much since then. Funny thing is, part of the graduation gift bag they gave us at the end of it all included one of the bulbs they used in our apartments. I gave it to my brother and he loves it. Me, I'll wait in hope for a viable LED system.
True. Unfortunately, it's just not my choice to make in many situations.
>I think a large portion of the delay is initializing and setting states for all
>the hardware. Reducing the kernel and libraries to an image might speed things
>up, but not by much
I completely disagree. It takes very little time to initialize hardware and a whole lot of time to load software. For instance, when I just installed xp64 after my last upgrade, the system would be up and running in about 20 seconds. Now that I've been running the machine for 6 or 7 months and have been through a few cycles of installing, removing, and upgrading various pieces of software (with notable differences made upon the installation of adobe and microsoft productivity apps), it takes closer to 40-50 seconds to boot. And that's with absolutely no change in the hardware configuration.
>>My brother got a fancy new tv recently and I was bothered by the boot
>>time. It is only like 15 or 20 seconds, but I really didn't understand
>>why the tv was able to show me a message explaining that it was busy
>>turning on, but unable to show video.
My irritation with most newer TVs is how slow the tuners are. Most TVs, when they're in autoprogram mode to find channels will whip through the station numbers sometimes 5 or 10 per second. but those same TVs will show a black screen between changing channels for 1-3 seconds. I really did prefer the older method of just showing the channel as it tuned in, even if it did mean having to wait half a second for vertical synchronization. Especially when viewing the thing in a dark room or trying to flip more than 2 or 3 stations away (and yeah, I know that's what number pads are for but those can be pretty annoying, too, like if they miss a digit)
MAHONEEEEEYYY!!!
Come on, Come on
Stick, Stick, Stick, Stick Them
Here they come! Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!
They fight for justice
They stand up for the truth
They save us from the perils
Of a cowardly crew
To protect the rights
Of all citizens
But when it's time to fight
They fight and win
Hooray! They wear the blue
They're tested, tried and true
They keep the peace
For you and me
Hooray! (The Police Academy)
Hooray! They wear the blue
They're tested, tried and true
They keep the peace
For you and me
Hooray! (The Police Academy)
It may be worth noting that LA has been afflicted by some uncharacteristically strong weather the last week or so, with an Atlantic monsoon system having travelled from the gulf to to the western US seaboard. There's been lighning all weekend and we've been getting flash flood warnings while having some extremely uncomfortably hot weather (90-115 F throughout southern california, and high humidity to boot). I wouldn't be surprised if a well-placed strike to an already overtaxed grid shut them down. One would hope they would have redundant colocations but the circumstances under which this happened are rather severe.
Odds are, if you've been to a movie or watched TV in the last 30 years, you know his voice. He does a LOT of voiceovers. He's one of about 4 or 5 VO 'stars' in hollywood whose voices are rarely ever not heard in the pre-screening trailers and commercials.
A closer analogy would be like what's happening where I work (and why I won't be there much longer). I just graduated from school about a year ago, and worked as a temp for the company I'm at now. Around the same time, a contractor with 20 years of experience in the industry and a friend in a management seat also got flipped to permanent. I learn quickly, and despite my youth in the industry, I work faster and more effectively than the other guy. In fact, at least 2 to 3 times a month, I am called upon to retest stuff that failed directly because of his ineptiitude. If I had to assign letter grades, I'd say he typically does C/C- work and I rarely perform at below an A level. But when I got offered permanent employment, after BS'ing around to get their offer kicked up, I ended up with an offer 50% lower than his initial offer. And since he's salaried and rarely stays at work more than 7 hours a day and then wastes a good 2 or 3 hours of that to idiocy, and I'm hourly and often get told to go home after my 8 are up, he's effectively costing the company at least twice as much for his inferior work.
There is a fairly good Pilsner available from Gordon Biersch, although my top choice from their brews is either the blonde bock or the marzen. I usually keep Biersch as a standby if I can't can't find Pete's Wicked Ale. The Pete's has been my favorite brew for the past 2 or 3 years. And I'm anxiously looking forward to the new year's eve. I found a growler of Oaked Arrogant Bastard. I'm not a huge fan of the standard AB but the oaked version consistently ranks among the top choices on a few beer snobbery sites I like to peruse. And I've also found myself rarely ordering Guinness in bars anymore. Most of the places I frequent that have Guinness also have Murphey's, and one or two frequently have Old Rasputin. I've never tried the true British Guinness so I can't really comment on what it is meant to be, but what get here is a dependable albeit upper-middle-of-the-pack stout, IMHO.
>Light echoes are by no means a recent discovery. APOD viewers
>like me have seen them since at least 1997.
I've see them pretty much every morning since the early 80's when I started combing my own hair.
I disagree. It took me two or three readings to parse the sentence, but after re-reading it, I understood what he meant. Granted, there could have been a much less muddled way to state the idea presented. The basic sentence is '[these things] have been wrong' but it just so happened that the last item in the list was peple calling themselves editors when the have not [edited anything].
the differing effects of methanol are fairly well understood. They are treated exactly the same by the body. They are processed by the same enzymes (in fact, the treatment for methanol poisoning is high doses of ethanol which will compete for the active sites of those enzymes) and both do have an intoxicating effect similar to each other. The difference is not inherent to the structure or biology surrounding the alcohols. What happens is that as they are broken down, the methanol is converted to formaldehyde which is what causes the blindness associated with wood alcohols. Ethanol is converted into ethyl aldehyde which readily forms an anhydride that is far less toxic to the body than the aldehydes.
Uncyclopedia's new archnemesis is Slashdot?
I realize it's a little off-tpoic, but I wanted to comment on the use of the numeral 'one' in the spelling of Florida. I predict we will soon see more such incursions into the common vernacular, and I for for one would like to welcome our numerary overlords.
What, no timecube?
I am flabbergasted that the "big brother" hired pedants can brainwash and indoctrinate the powerful antipode human mind to ignore the simple math of 4 simultaneous 24 hour days within a single rotation of Earth, to worship one and trash three.
Magnificient evil job by teachers.
oxygen actually does have several visible-wavelength transistions. It could be possible to have it fluoresce and/or phosphoresce. You have to remember that black body radiation is a statistical mechanical phenomena and that gaseous atoms often do not have a large enough density of states to produce the familiar black-body curve.
That said, I agree that the amount of oxygen will have little to nothing to do with the color of the flame and that the grandparent post is misguided. I find it much more likely that the color of the flame is dictated by dissolved salts. The picture in the article is clearly indicitive of sodium, which may or may not be intentionally present in the flame. Sodium has a distinctive and curiously strong set of visible-wavelength transitions and can overpower the broad-banded sensory we enjoy as color. Even at just a few parts per billion, such as in a candle, the blue of the burning hydrocarbons is relativly muted. It would probably require dissolved salts of transition metals to match the intensity of the sodium and significantly alter the appearance of the flame.
>But that's not fire from water. That's fire from
>sodium and water, which creates more byproducts than
>just water vapor.
the process involved is the rapid evolution of hydrogen gas from the combination of sodium metal (which is extremely basic in its metallic oxidation state) with the water. So the combustion side is pretty much the same. The hydrogen would be reduced by electrons from the sodium rather than an electrical current. An advantage of the sodium process is that the high levels of sodium would make the flames look much more 'natural'. (the orange-yellow tint to flames is almost always due to the trace amounts of sodium present in most things we burn. this is shown quite strongly in atomic absorbance spectrometers, in which a small amount of water is drawn from vials into the carbeurator of a large blow torch. The flame is usually fueled by hydrocarbons and remains blue under simple fuel-oxygen mixtures but turns bright yellow when solutions are siphoned through due to sodium leaching from glassware into the water.)
but I suppose the byproducts mentioned by the parent author would be the quite basic water solution left over after then hydrogen burns off. I doubt the pH would be raised enough to be dangerous. And if so... well hey, free Dran-o. It's all good. You'd be surprised how useful strong bases could be in everyday life.
> They are also using solar power to create the
> hydrogen - they have an experimental plant in the
> Mojave desert, here in California.
>
> The cool thing is that this is a functional,
> buildable product created by a major car
> manufacturer.
Interesting? Yes. Buildable? Yes. Scalable? Highly doubtful.
There's a great article at the now-defunct USS Clueless blog that examines exactly how much energy is avaialable from collecting and focusing sun rays and just how much area would be needed to significantly offset the usage of fossil fuels. (as well as a few others [1, 2] on the feasibility of some the pet projects of "sustainability" afficianadios.
In Soviet Russia, GPS ban you!
But in all seriousness, despite the wonderful opportunity for lampooning, the parent poster makes a great point. Always check with the authorities first. As much as we like to complain about the state of our legislation, it actually is far worse in many other places.
I mean, come on, robots are people, too. They have to eat. Better some stupid animals than you or me or our families!