And "unpollute" when manufactured (just like a tree "unpollutes" the atmosphere when it grows). Ergo, there is no net effect on CO2 levels.
The only reason we're worried about CO2 levels now is because carbon was safely buried beneath earth's surface before we burned it, and now it's in the atmosphere instead.
"Memory" is a superset of "RAM", or "SDRAM" as you are probably assuming.
Note that this laptop does not include a hard disk in its specifications. This 1GB memory is for its non-volatile storage and will probably behave like a 1GB CompactFlash module. It probably has a much smaller amount of DRAM.
Except that you're missing a critical piece here: since hydrogen extraction facilities are very large and stationary (something most cars are not), they can use fuels that would simply not be an option for the cars themselves, such as wind, solar, wave or nuclear power.
Those energy sources can just as easily be used to separate CO2 and H2O into oxygen and hydrocarbons, which are easier to store, have a higher energy density, and are used in existing vehicles.
As to batteries, I have an old surplus 700 watt APC UPS that I run 4 servers and a couple of switches on. The batteries were dead when I got it and I jury-rigged 2 garden tractor batteries in series to it. It works perfectly, but your mileage may vary. The UPS manufacturers generally *do not* want you to do this, so do it at your own risk.
While you may have had good luck with this, I'd encourage others not to hook oversized batteries to their UPS. The rationale is that, by massively expanding the battery capacity, you are increasing the amount of time that the inverter may run. Most inverters in cheap UPS's (such as a typical 700-watt APC) are not designed to dissipate the heat they produce at full load for anything longer than the designed runtime. If you let them run long enough they will get hot enough to fry themselves and possibly catch on fire.
If your UPS has connectors for external batteries, chances are its invertor was designed for an expanded battery capacity. If it doesn't, chances are it wasn't. If it doesn't have fans, that's another clue.
Why would I cover my car roof? I'd cover the garage's roof. And if that wasn't enough area I could dedicate a quarter acre or so of the pasture out behind the house to it.
For a large installation such as the side of a house, you may find it cheaper and more productive to use tracking mirrors (heliostats) to focus sunlight to concentrate heat to drive a turbine or sterling engine (see Sandia's Solar Two) instead of spending the money on less-efficient solar cells. Engines, while not cheap, are usually at least 30% efficient, while only the most expensive solar cells are that efficient (most are about 12% efficient). And more/larger mirrors are cheap.
That was entirely tangential and ultimately useless information that adds no value to this discussion....which means that it was perfect for Slashdot! Keep up the good work!
Heh.
Actually, converting from tons or BTU/h to kilowatts is very useful, because that's the native measurement of your heat load. The amount of heat you need to remove from a room is equal to the amount of heat you add, which is equal to the amount of electricity your equipment uses. If the ammeter readings on the circuits going to the room total up to, say, 50 amps, and that power is at 120 volts, and you'll probably have the room stuffed with double the equipment in a few years, then you need to plan on removing 12kW. However, that's greek to HVAC people, so tell them you need a 4 ton unit.
(Immediately remove any HVAC contractor or consultant from the building that attempts to measure the area of the floor to determine equipment cooling needs. The room doesn't get hot on its own, the equipment does.)
If you spent as much money for a software product as you do on a house, you'd be able to expect as high a standard of engineering.
I am of the opinion that, in general, software's quality is inversely proportional to its cost.
This is largely because a piece of software's userbase is also inversely proportional to its cost. A $1 million software suite may only have a few hundred users. The chances that you, as a user, are the first one to try something, and have it fail to work like you expected, are quite high. With a popular consumer-level commercial software package or a popular open source application, you are walking the beaten path.
I'm also sure that some enterprising airport screeners (who are paid REALLY poorly) will, rather quickly, get the bright idea to attach a VCR to the monitor.
And what happens when the airport screener's buddy gets the bright idea to put the pictures/videos on the Internet and the press discovers it?
If the pressure is like being under 1000 meters of water, don't we have submirines that can withstand that?
The pressure isn't such a big deal as long as there isn't a pressure differential. Humans can't deal with 90 bars of pressure, so we maintain a pressure differential when we go underwater. Unmanned probes don't necessarily need to maintain a pressure differential for all of their equipment.
And if it is so hot, don't we have some steel or somekind of substance which would not melt?
Ok, let's shoot a chunk of steel at Venus. It'll get pretty soft but it won't melt. What were you expecting that chunk of steel to do?!
Probes usually contain circuitry, cameras, radios, etc. It's only a matter of time before they assume the temperature of Venus's surface. You wouldn't have the energy available to maintain your equipment in the equivalent of a cryogenic freezer. Making all of these things survive at Venus's surface temperature is quite a challenge.
What are our subs made out of?
Steel, typically, which isn't a good choice for containing sulfuric acid.
Bottom line, Mars has allure that Venus doesn't, because it would be possible to colonize Mars. You'd never be able to live on Venus.
that comes to about 24,000 joules per gram of hydrogen
Assuming you're right, using that number we can compare the cost of getting energy from hydrogen obtained via this method vs. the cost of using the energy without going through this method (in other words, its efficiency).
24000 joules per gram means 150 grams per kWh. A quick google search says H2 is good for 39kWh/kg, so with that 1kWh you'd get.15kg of H2 which in turn gives you 5.85kWh of energy out. huh?
I'd appreciate someone doublechecking my work!
The ScienceDaily article mentions "...when the bacteria eat biomass..." - is that where the majority of the energy is coming from? If so I find it amazing that they hardly touched on this.
Human: Do you ever lie to make conversation?
ALICE: As a robot I am not capable of lying.
Human: Are you capable of bending the truth?
ALICE: Yes bending the truth is one of my newer functions.
it means that Team A uses the product you want to reverse-engineer and writes as complete of a spec of it as possible
Then Team A are naughty and probably open to litigation.
While it's true that lawsuits are filed for superfluous reasons all the time and everyone, really, is open to litigation, discussing that fact isn't very productive so let me preemptively set it aside.:)
What is illegal about using software and telling people what it does?
Build a catapult like launch assist device what can be used with a variety of to-space concepts. Even a slightly redesigned shuttle might get significant payload to orbit benefits from a maglift-assisted takeoff.
Is this an improvement over the ~600mph and 50000' boost that an aircraft (such as the X-series research aircraft's B29s/B52s and SpaceShipOne's White Knight) could provide?
(747's already piggyback the Shuttle - granted, that's without boosters/external tank, but an aircraft that large still wouldn't be prohibitively expensive, and smaller aircraft can be used to further prove the concept).
The increased business brought in by advertising should more than make up for the cost of sending out a few pages of ads every week.
Does business for the industry increase as a whole, or is it zero-sum?
People may choose product A over product B, etc. because of advertising, but I'd figure that the total demand for supermarket goods would be fairly inelastic.
Junk mail keeps mail prices low for the average joe since the infrastructure is held together by all the money spent on junk mail.
Except that you indirectly pay for that infrastructure through higher costs passed on to you. If every grocery store in your area sends you ads for their latest specials, you don't have a choice but to pay for that infrastructure in your grocery bill.
You can make up for it a little by bulk-recycling the paper, using it to start fires in your fireplace, or composting it into soil for your plants.
I looked into the issue a few years back and in my country (at the time) the energy loss from the electrical distribution grad was around 1-2%.
In the US, many areas have (relatively) small transformers mounted on telephone poles that serve a handful of homes. These pole transformers alone are often only 98% efficient.
Resistive losses can also be significant - plugging in your shiny new electric car charger through an ordinary 50' 14AWG extension cord can eat a percent or two right there in the cord.
Of course, larger gains can be made from replacing older thermal power generators with newer designs such as the Kalina Cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
If the default is to receive email - the user has to go out of their way to not receive email - exactly how is that opt-in?
Clue: If you have a mailing list of people who don't really want to be on it, it probably isn't an opt-in mailing list.
If that were really true, then cities would already be drowning in smog and pristine forests would all have withered and died from lack of CO2.
Do some google searching for "carbon cycle", and maybe go outside once in a while and experience that invisible wacky "wind" stuff.
And "unpollute" when manufactured (just like a tree "unpollutes" the atmosphere when it grows). Ergo, there is no net effect on CO2 levels.
The only reason we're worried about CO2 levels now is because carbon was safely buried beneath earth's surface before we burned it, and now it's in the atmosphere instead.
"Memory" is a superset of "RAM", or "SDRAM" as you are probably assuming.
Note that this laptop does not include a hard disk in its specifications. This 1GB memory is for its non-volatile storage and will probably behave like a 1GB CompactFlash module. It probably has a much smaller amount of DRAM.
Those energy sources can just as easily be used to separate CO2 and H2O into oxygen and hydrocarbons, which are easier to store, have a higher energy density, and are used in existing vehicles.
The physics of wind power is such that for every doubling of wind speed, there is an eight-fold increase in the amount of wind power.
Erm, last I checked, both lift and drag increase with the square of speed, not the cube.
I'm glad you have an imagination, because unfortunately Knuth probably isn't. The Daily WTF could be, however it might be a while before they get around to you.
The phenomenon even has its very own word. I'm shocked, shocked that no one has mentioned it yet.
While you may have had good luck with this, I'd encourage others not to hook oversized batteries to their UPS. The rationale is that, by massively expanding the battery capacity, you are increasing the amount of time that the inverter may run. Most inverters in cheap UPS's (such as a typical 700-watt APC) are not designed to dissipate the heat they produce at full load for anything longer than the designed runtime. If you let them run long enough they will get hot enough to fry themselves and possibly catch on fire.
If your UPS has connectors for external batteries, chances are its invertor was designed for an expanded battery capacity. If it doesn't, chances are it wasn't. If it doesn't have fans, that's another clue.
For a large installation such as the side of a house, you may find it cheaper and more productive to use tracking mirrors (heliostats) to focus sunlight to concentrate heat to drive a turbine or sterling engine (see Sandia's Solar Two) instead of spending the money on less-efficient solar cells. Engines, while not cheap, are usually at least 30% efficient, while only the most expensive solar cells are that efficient (most are about 12% efficient). And more/larger mirrors are cheap.
Heh.
Actually, converting from tons or BTU/h to kilowatts is very useful, because that's the native measurement of your heat load. The amount of heat you need to remove from a room is equal to the amount of heat you add, which is equal to the amount of electricity your equipment uses. If the ammeter readings on the circuits going to the room total up to, say, 50 amps, and that power is at 120 volts, and you'll probably have the room stuffed with double the equipment in a few years, then you need to plan on removing 12kW. However, that's greek to HVAC people, so tell them you need a 4 ton unit.
(Immediately remove any HVAC contractor or consultant from the building that attempts to measure the area of the floor to determine equipment cooling needs. The room doesn't get hot on its own, the equipment does.)
The current laws say you can't fly supersonically over the US, not that you can't fly supersonic planes over the US.
It takes a couple hundred miles to get up and down from cruise altitude anyway. It's not that big of a deal to spend that time flying subsonically.
I am of the opinion that, in general, software's quality is inversely proportional to its cost.
This is largely because a piece of software's userbase is also inversely proportional to its cost. A $1 million software suite may only have a few hundred users. The chances that you, as a user, are the first one to try something, and have it fail to work like you expected, are quite high. With a popular consumer-level commercial software package or a popular open source application, you are walking the beaten path.
It's a text editor.
The "Geek Syndrome" Wired article even gives the tendency a name: "stoppage".
And what happens when the airport screener's buddy gets the bright idea to put the pictures/videos on the Internet and the press discovers it?
That's definately a question of when, not if.
We've done that.
If the pressure is like being under 1000 meters of water, don't we have submirines that can withstand that?
The pressure isn't such a big deal as long as there isn't a pressure differential. Humans can't deal with 90 bars of pressure, so we maintain a pressure differential when we go underwater. Unmanned probes don't necessarily need to maintain a pressure differential for all of their equipment.
And if it is so hot, don't we have some steel or somekind of substance which would not melt?
Ok, let's shoot a chunk of steel at Venus. It'll get pretty soft but it won't melt. What were you expecting that chunk of steel to do?!
Probes usually contain circuitry, cameras, radios, etc. It's only a matter of time before they assume the temperature of Venus's surface. You wouldn't have the energy available to maintain your equipment in the equivalent of a cryogenic freezer. Making all of these things survive at Venus's surface temperature is quite a challenge.
What are our subs made out of?
Steel, typically, which isn't a good choice for containing sulfuric acid.
Bottom line, Mars has allure that Venus doesn't, because it would be possible to colonize Mars. You'd never be able to live on Venus.
Assuming you're right, using that number we can compare the cost of getting energy from hydrogen obtained via this method vs. the cost of using the energy without going through this method (in other words, its efficiency).
24000 joules per gram means 150 grams per kWh. A quick google search says H2 is good for 39kWh/kg, so with that 1kWh you'd get .15kg of H2 which in turn gives you 5.85kWh of energy out. huh?
I'd appreciate someone doublechecking my work!
The ScienceDaily article mentions "...when the bacteria eat biomass..." - is that where the majority of the energy is coming from? If so I find it amazing that they hardly touched on this.
Human: Do you ever lie to make conversation?
ALICE: As a robot I am not capable of lying.
Human: Are you capable of bending the truth?
ALICE: Yes bending the truth is one of my newer functions.
Then Team A are naughty and probably open to litigation.
While it's true that lawsuits are filed for superfluous reasons all the time and everyone, really, is open to litigation, discussing that fact isn't very productive so let me preemptively set it aside. :)
What is illegal about using software and telling people what it does?
Is this an improvement over the ~600mph and 50000' boost that an aircraft (such as the X-series research aircraft's B29s/B52s and SpaceShipOne's White Knight) could provide?
(747's already piggyback the Shuttle - granted, that's without boosters/external tank, but an aircraft that large still wouldn't be prohibitively expensive, and smaller aircraft can be used to further prove the concept).
Sounds like you're actually agreeing with him.
BTW, this is known as the sunk cost fallacy.
Does business for the industry increase as a whole, or is it zero-sum?
People may choose product A over product B, etc. because of advertising, but I'd figure that the total demand for supermarket goods would be fairly inelastic.
Except that you indirectly pay for that infrastructure through higher costs passed on to you. If every grocery store in your area sends you ads for their latest specials, you don't have a choice but to pay for that infrastructure in your grocery bill.
You can make up for it a little by bulk-recycling the paper, using it to start fires in your fireplace, or composting it into soil for your plants.
In the US, many areas have (relatively) small transformers mounted on telephone poles that serve a handful of homes. These pole transformers alone are often only 98% efficient.
http://www.energyusernews.com/CDA/Article_Informat ion/Fundamentals_Item/0,2637,76086,00.html
Resistive losses can also be significant - plugging in your shiny new electric car charger through an ordinary 50' 14AWG extension cord can eat a percent or two right there in the cord.
Of course, larger gains can be made from replacing older thermal power generators with newer designs such as the Kalina Cycle.