High pressure vessels don't generally "blow up" creating shrapnel and the energy released when they vent is pretty limited. Just not enough energy there to overcome the generally over engineered pressure vessel which is designed to withstand the working pressure plus a fairly large safety factor. As long as it stays attached to the car, if you punch a hole in it somehow (or more likely knock the pipe fittings screwed into it off) it's just going to vent. Venting is pretty quick, but unless it ignites it's going to be generally harmless if you are more than a foot or so away with nothing in between. I still think the issue would be an explosion cased by the vented hydrogen gas, but even if there is an ignition source you are more likely to get a quick flame and not something that goes boom. This is similar to gasoline, only the fuel will dissipate much faster if it doesn't happen to ignite so your window of risk will be shorter.
Well.. "Free energy" is demonstrable at a high school science fair, that doesn't mean it's a viable technology. I'm going to take it as a joke then... LOL
Hydrogen is extremely reactive, the instant it leaks out.
So what's the flash point of hydrogen? It may be reactive, but it's not going to just explode unless you have the right mixture and an ignition source. I've played with H2 on occasion (in small quantities) and it's not that dangerous.
I love how you illustrated the point. Excellent way to explain this. I'm guessing though, that it will be lost on most of the people who read it, even on SlashDot as I've run into difficulty trying to find a majority that understand the thermodynamic concept of entropy enough to understand that "waste heat" isn't being wasted....
Actually, given the standard size of a car and the amount of energy you could store in each of the three cases discussed, I would think that gasoline would be the hands down winner for the biggest boom. Hydrogen would run dead last.
Hydrogen's biggest benefit would be that any leaks would quickly dissipate, epically out doors, while hydrocarbons sink and stay close to the ground.
Heck just getting your hands on hydrogen gas to put into your storage system is quite the process. In fact, I would think it is the bulk of the effort and energy consumption here.
If you think of a fuel cell as a source of electrical power, your average hybrid car would require little "adjustment" (at least in the drive train) to accommodate getting power from a fuel cell instead of a generator attached to a gasoline engine.
But, this whole fuel cell thing is nutty from the start. Not a good idea.
Going to hydrogen gas is also NOT a environmentally sound solution either.
Dispute the press and common belief otherwise, moving to Hydrogen does not reduce emissions overall, but is actually worse. Now I'm not saying that what comes out of the tailpipe of a hydrogen powered car is anything but water and heat, but the issue is where and how you produce hydrogen gas on an industrial scale. You basically have two choices on how you want to produce hydrogen gas, electrolysis or reforming natural gas.
Electrolysis is extremely inefficient. You loos about 50% of the electrical energy you put into this process. For now, electricity is produced MOSTLY from fossil fuels (especially in Japan right now) so it would be more efficient to just burn the fossil fuel in the automobile. Heck, it's more efficient to use a rechargeable battery instead of electrolysis and hydrogen as fuel.
Reforming Natural Gas is also not efficient and releases significant amounts of carbon-dioxide. I do not know the exact numbers on how efficient this process is, but it involves heating the gas and passing it though a catalyst, then compressing and cooling to separate the gas fractions to isolate the hydrogen gas. This requires both electricity and natural gas to do. This is obviously going to waste energy. So one can confidently claim that using this method is clearly going to be inefficient compared to just burning natural gas as a motor fuel. (Not to mention that there are problems with using hydrogen produced from this process in fuel cells due to the impurities produced from the hydrocarbon used as a source of hydrogen.)
All this is just simply nuts if you ask me. What we need to really do is burn natural gas as motor fuel, at least for the foreseeable future. If we ever really run out of fossil fuels (or if we want to plan to stop using them) then the only choices are electric power (rechargeable batteries, with renewable sources/Nuclear/Fission) and bio-mass fuels (diesel from vegetable oil, alcohol) assuming the latter doesn't cause food shortages and starve folks.
> significant power demands in the winter when electricity is used for heating
In Germany almost nobody is using electricity for heating because it's stupid.
And the houses are often well insulated.
So they burn fossil fuels to heat their homes? If you care about C02 emissions, wouldn't you want to do something else? I applaud their well insulated homes, which really makes one of my major points about all this: Conservation is more effective per dollar at reducing C02 than just about ANYTHING you can do, but if you use natural gas for heat there is a problem...
If the whole point here is to reduce C02 emissions by generating electricity using solar power.... What you are saying logically leads to an admission that fossil fuels are here to stay long term.... There are folks round here that don't like that truth.
I don't know what it's like in Germany, but in the US it is summer that has the highest demand for electricity (air conditioning, fans, etc.). The decrease in demand in winter is probably greater than the decrease in sunlight.
That said, Germany may be different. If they use a lot of electric heaters, for example, their winter demand may be quite significant.
dom
Surprisingly, there are significant power demands in the winter when electricity is used for heating, and if you are dumping fossil fuels like yesterdays newspaper guess what gets used to heat stuff?
Here in Texas, obviously the hot summer evenings are when we have our peak demand, but we have some significant spikes in demand on those cold nights in January/February too.
Actually the CHARGE for this service, but no matter. The ISSUE is that cable companies are required by law to pay for doing this, Aereo is trying to do an end run around having to pay. Because of how Aereo did it, the issue was murky enough so the courts had to sort it out.
It was a noble try there guys.... Next time, we are going to have to get the law changed instead of depending on dodgy technicalities in how you do it.
Free to receive and view, but not free as in you can do anything you want with the material. The copyright holder still owns and controls the material so you cannot consider it yours and distribute it for anything beyond acceptable personal use, "fair use" or the other legal exceptions.
So as I read this, if you personally want to watch OTA signals captured from equipment you own and operate over the internet, fine, you just cannot do it for somebody else and certainly cannot charge anybody if you did.
Wouldn't the ruling also make cable boxes illegal, too?
The cable network is a public network in the sense that hundreds or thousands of people are on that network.
Uh, no... The ruling simply says Areo is operating a cable service and is thus required to obtain rights to retransmit the material (by paying fees). The cable company has already obtained retransmit rights (and paid the necessary fees) and thus can place their box in your home.
In short, Areo is governed by the SAME laws and rules as the cable company.
Perhaps not, but if you receive a C & D demand in such a case, just take the image down. If you acted responsibly and stopped infringing as soon as you are made aware of it the court is unlikely to award significant damages, which means the person who owns the copyright is unlikely to file suit. If they do take you to court, go with hat in hand, ready to explain where you got the image, what license you thought it had and make note of the fact that you removed the image right away when you became aware of the issue. You might want to go to some paid services and find out what similar images cost to license and bring those quotes along. Also insist that they prove they are the copyright holder. Be reasonable and the judge is not likely to go nuts with damages.
Unless of course you have deep pockets, in which case, just hire somebody to produce the images you need and forget about this issue.
They've been wrestling with the problem for decades.
Great, so can we see what their approach to these issues might be?
Personally, I don't think most of these people know much more than how to make cool looking graphics out of existing data, and the "existing" data isn't what we are being told it is... But hey...
No, I'm claiming IR is too, but I'll stipulate #1 because it's not a major problem in the list. It's that last logical leap being made that I dispute mostly.
If you know the device is the same one, does not loose it's accuracy or change over time and if the observations are consistently made. I'm not saying you cannot normalize data, I'm saying that there are more variables here than just the observed temperature, more reasons for the observed temperatures may have changed. I'm guessing nobody has attempted to consider all the variables here and when you normalize the data, you are possibly changing the observed results.
Slashdot Mirror
You've been watching Myth-busters again eh?
High pressure vessels don't generally "blow up" creating shrapnel and the energy released when they vent is pretty limited. Just not enough energy there to overcome the generally over engineered pressure vessel which is designed to withstand the working pressure plus a fairly large safety factor. As long as it stays attached to the car, if you punch a hole in it somehow (or more likely knock the pipe fittings screwed into it off) it's just going to vent. Venting is pretty quick, but unless it ignites it's going to be generally harmless if you are more than a foot or so away with nothing in between. I still think the issue would be an explosion cased by the vented hydrogen gas, but even if there is an ignition source you are more likely to get a quick flame and not something that goes boom. This is similar to gasoline, only the fuel will dissipate much faster if it doesn't happen to ignite so your window of risk will be shorter.
Well.. "Free energy" is demonstrable at a high school science fair, that doesn't mean it's a viable technology. I'm going to take it as a joke then... LOL
You stole my response.... Smart watch???? You mean that thing that requires another device to actually DO something?
I'll keep my old analog watch because it takes no batteries, keeps reasonable time, and is going to work when all else fails...
I'm not sure to laugh at that or not... I sure hope you are NOT serious because it's pretty funny if you take it that way, still....
Hydrogen is extremely reactive, the instant it leaks out.
So what's the flash point of hydrogen? It may be reactive, but it's not going to just explode unless you have the right mixture and an ignition source. I've played with H2 on occasion (in small quantities) and it's not that dangerous.
You mean it's not a closed system?
I love how you illustrated the point. Excellent way to explain this. I'm guessing though, that it will be lost on most of the people who read it, even on SlashDot as I've run into difficulty trying to find a majority that understand the thermodynamic concept of entropy enough to understand that "waste heat" isn't being wasted....
Even better... Just burn Natural Gas in existing equipment.... Very clean compared to gasoline or diesel and refueling times that rival hydrogen.
Actually, given the standard size of a car and the amount of energy you could store in each of the three cases discussed, I would think that gasoline would be the hands down winner for the biggest boom. Hydrogen would run dead last.
Hydrogen's biggest benefit would be that any leaks would quickly dissipate, epically out doors, while hydrocarbons sink and stay close to the ground.
Heck just getting your hands on hydrogen gas to put into your storage system is quite the process. In fact, I would think it is the bulk of the effort and energy consumption here.
10 years ago, we'd never consider getting rid of copper lines to the home.
Oh, you mean for DATA.... Ah... Well, I guess that because we use Aluminum for power delivery, you are still correct..
Because there are times when she needs to take five 200 pound adults and their luggage 300 miles and she can afford only one car.
If you think of a fuel cell as a source of electrical power, your average hybrid car would require little "adjustment" (at least in the drive train) to accommodate getting power from a fuel cell instead of a generator attached to a gasoline engine.
But, this whole fuel cell thing is nutty from the start. Not a good idea.
Going to hydrogen gas is also NOT a environmentally sound solution either.
Dispute the press and common belief otherwise, moving to Hydrogen does not reduce emissions overall, but is actually worse. Now I'm not saying that what comes out of the tailpipe of a hydrogen powered car is anything but water and heat, but the issue is where and how you produce hydrogen gas on an industrial scale. You basically have two choices on how you want to produce hydrogen gas, electrolysis or reforming natural gas.
Electrolysis is extremely inefficient. You loos about 50% of the electrical energy you put into this process. For now, electricity is produced MOSTLY from fossil fuels (especially in Japan right now) so it would be more efficient to just burn the fossil fuel in the automobile. Heck, it's more efficient to use a rechargeable battery instead of electrolysis and hydrogen as fuel.
Reforming Natural Gas is also not efficient and releases significant amounts of carbon-dioxide. I do not know the exact numbers on how efficient this process is, but it involves heating the gas and passing it though a catalyst, then compressing and cooling to separate the gas fractions to isolate the hydrogen gas. This requires both electricity and natural gas to do. This is obviously going to waste energy. So one can confidently claim that using this method is clearly going to be inefficient compared to just burning natural gas as a motor fuel. (Not to mention that there are problems with using hydrogen produced from this process in fuel cells due to the impurities produced from the hydrocarbon used as a source of hydrogen.)
All this is just simply nuts if you ask me. What we need to really do is burn natural gas as motor fuel, at least for the foreseeable future. If we ever really run out of fossil fuels (or if we want to plan to stop using them) then the only choices are electric power (rechargeable batteries, with renewable sources/Nuclear/Fission) and bio-mass fuels (diesel from vegetable oil, alcohol) assuming the latter doesn't cause food shortages and starve folks.
> significant power demands in the winter when electricity is used for heating
In Germany almost nobody is using electricity for heating because it's stupid. And the houses are often well insulated.
So they burn fossil fuels to heat their homes? If you care about C02 emissions, wouldn't you want to do something else? I applaud their well insulated homes, which really makes one of my major points about all this: Conservation is more effective per dollar at reducing C02 than just about ANYTHING you can do, but if you use natural gas for heat there is a problem...
If the whole point here is to reduce C02 emissions by generating electricity using solar power.... What you are saying logically leads to an admission that fossil fuels are here to stay long term.... There are folks round here that don't like that truth.
I don't know what it's like in Germany, but in the US it is summer that has the highest demand for electricity (air conditioning, fans, etc.). The decrease in demand in winter is probably greater than the decrease in sunlight.
That said, Germany may be different. If they use a lot of electric heaters, for example, their winter demand may be quite significant.
dom
Surprisingly, there are significant power demands in the winter when electricity is used for heating, and if you are dumping fossil fuels like yesterdays newspaper guess what gets used to heat stuff?
Here in Texas, obviously the hot summer evenings are when we have our peak demand, but we have some significant spikes in demand on those cold nights in January/February too.
Aereo does it for free!
Actually the CHARGE for this service, but no matter. The ISSUE is that cable companies are required by law to pay for doing this, Aereo is trying to do an end run around having to pay. Because of how Aereo did it, the issue was murky enough so the courts had to sort it out.
It was a noble try there guys.... Next time, we are going to have to get the law changed instead of depending on dodgy technicalities in how you do it.
The signals are free right?
Free to receive and view, but not free as in you can do anything you want with the material. The copyright holder still owns and controls the material so you cannot consider it yours and distribute it for anything beyond acceptable personal use, "fair use" or the other legal exceptions.
So as I read this, if you personally want to watch OTA signals captured from equipment you own and operate over the internet, fine, you just cannot do it for somebody else and certainly cannot charge anybody if you did.
You want OTA? Put up a bloody antenna. It's not that hard.
Can I put one up at your house and then just stream it over the internet to mine? Oh wait...
Wouldn't the ruling also make cable boxes illegal, too?
The cable network is a public network in the sense that hundreds or thousands of people are on that network.
Uh, no... The ruling simply says Areo is operating a cable service and is thus required to obtain rights to retransmit the material (by paying fees). The cable company has already obtained retransmit rights (and paid the necessary fees) and thus can place their box in your home.
In short, Areo is governed by the SAME laws and rules as the cable company.
I guess my drone hunting license is useless....
It always was.
Perhaps not, but if you receive a C & D demand in such a case, just take the image down. If you acted responsibly and stopped infringing as soon as you are made aware of it the court is unlikely to award significant damages, which means the person who owns the copyright is unlikely to file suit. If they do take you to court, go with hat in hand, ready to explain where you got the image, what license you thought it had and make note of the fact that you removed the image right away when you became aware of the issue. You might want to go to some paid services and find out what similar images cost to license and bring those quotes along. Also insist that they prove they are the copyright holder. Be reasonable and the judge is not likely to go nuts with damages.
Unless of course you have deep pockets, in which case, just hire somebody to produce the images you need and forget about this issue.
They've been wrestling with the problem for decades.
Great, so can we see what their approach to these issues might be?
Personally, I don't think most of these people know much more than how to make cool looking graphics out of existing data, and the "existing" data isn't what we are being told it is... But hey...
"There is a sucker born every minute!"
Things like this prove him right. "A fool and his money are soon parted...."
No, I'm claiming IR is too, but I'll stipulate #1 because it's not a major problem in the list. It's that last logical leap being made that I dispute mostly.
If you know the device is the same one, does not loose it's accuracy or change over time and if the observations are consistently made. I'm not saying you cannot normalize data, I'm saying that there are more variables here than just the observed temperature, more reasons for the observed temperatures may have changed. I'm guessing nobody has attempted to consider all the variables here and when you normalize the data, you are possibly changing the observed results.