That's easy to do even in a minivanm, Yugo or 2CV. Just put it in front of a road train moving at speed, or a railroad train ditto. Voila, amazing acceleration from the pokiest of vehicles! (Oh, you wanted to do it twice? Why didn't you say so first?)
This poster is a professional. Please don't try this at home, severe injury may result, poster not liable for your failure to heed this warning. --
It violates no laws about police powers because the police are not involved, just a contract between the rental agency and the customer. The issue involved here is that there was apparently no understanding on the part of the customer about the meaning of this brand-new contract language, which means (if I understand civil law correctly, which I probably don't because IANAL) that the contract was not valid.
The hokey explanations on the part of the ACME rep about the "need" to use GPS to track speed (not just location, which is all they require for their vehicle retrieval needs) indicate that ACME may have written that contract in less than good faith. If so, they're just begging for a judicial spanking.
(And as #18 says, a bit of aluminum foil over the GPS antenna and the problem goes away... at least in this incarnation of the system.) --
The action against 2600 Magazine is on-going. Until the legal system realizes that they cannot (and more imporantly, must not) block the flow of knowledge implicit in the concept of "fair use", you are still at risk. Maybe not for DeCSS, but for the hack for the next "secure" (fair-use-free) technology and the one after that, and the one after that... --
it's ethically wrong in my opinion, since the students apparently haven't given you permission to do so.
Try again; it is not the instructor placing the work under the GPL (how could s/he? only the author can do that!). The issue is that of the students placing their own work under the GPL.
With that out of the way, I don't see how the university could object. The GPL gives the entire world a perpetual, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use the code. Unless the university has some other clause which restricts what the student may allow the rest of the world to do, the GPL would appear to be entirely compatible with the U's terms. --
CO2 isn't a likely suspect. CO2 ice is not stable at the equator of Mars, but water ice would be at the average temperature.
Sure would make life easier for Martian explorers and colonists if they only had to drill down a few feet to find permafrost that they could tap for water. H2O + CO2 + yields rocket fuel, among other things. Zubrin's Mars Direct concept works even better if you don't have to ship any hydrogen along. --
Why can't the USPTO have network and software engineers review patents (that potentially affect the livelihood of millions of people)? Because of COSTS?
Yes, because of costs. A mistake on an airliner is very expensive in publicity; it can get people to the polls. A mistake on a patent is cheap, it is only of interest to a few lawyers and their clients. The pol has every incentive to put money into aircraft safety and take money away from the patent system. --
How can you be sure that the right members of the public are going to be looking at the proposed patent during that critical week? Most people have better things to do than work as patent examiners for no pay, and the people who don't may not have the knowledge to recognize either obviousness to one skilled in the art or prior art when they see it. --
I beleive you'll find that the 70 cent/gallon figure hinges on the use of used fryer oil that is currently available for free (IOW, that covers only the cost of methanol and NaOH plus processing equipment). Once the demand is sufficient to exhaust the supply of used fryer oil the marginal cost of the oil input will rise to the level of fresh oil. I don't know what it is in bulk, but at the supermarket I pay a lot more for cooking oil than I would for diesel. --
Yeah, except that neither coal, house paint, or well water produce additional toxins...
All of the energy released by the fission products of uranium (and plutonium) was already there in the uranium atom; nothing was created there either.
they just shuffle around the stuff that's already there.
Like the conversion of cinnabar into methyl mercury "just shuffles around the stuff that's already there". Never mind that it's thousands or millions of times as toxic. Pulling down the water table admits air into rock formations which were formerly anoxic, oxidizing arsenic into soluble forms and making whole aquifers undrinkable. That's also "just shuffling around the stuff that's already there". The issue is the damage it can do and how it can be limited. For nuclear, the minuscule volume of the waste and its time-limited toxicity means that it can be guaranteed not to do more than X amount of harm if isolated in a suitable fashion. You can't do that for stable chemical elements like mercury and arsenic.
Fission reactions, however, produce these hideous poisons not found in nature (on earth anyway) basically out of thin air.
It doesn't come "out of thin air", it comes from a ubiquitous naturally-occurring element. Ask anyone who's spent a pile of money to vent radon out of their basement!
And sure 50K years is not long by geological standards, but it could sure bung up our civilization, and the next 10 civilizations after ours.
Most fission products have half-lives under 30 years. 1000 years is at least 33 half-lives, leaving about one ten-billionth of the original quantity. The oldest of the great pyramids in Egypt is what, 5000 years old? That's proof that civilizations - even ones we consider primitive - can build structures sufficiently durable to hold things as long as would be required for nuclear waste disposal. Putting things in sealed underground passages would be good for probably 100 times as long at a minimum.
What does this buy us? It gives us enough energy to run a civilization without altering the climate in untoward ways (which may upset civilization all by itself) and without generating toxic ash heaps too big to effectively isolate from the environment for even a few decades. My money's on nuclear for a safe future. --
You might want to ask a nuclear scientist what the remnant radioactivity is likely to do to the wax, and a geologist about how likely the wax is to stay around your stuff. If the wax is decomposed into gases and coke by radiolytic cracking, or if it melts from the heat and floats away upward, or migrates into pores in the rock, it doesn't do you much good.
The real problem with biodiesel is that it is probably all fertilized with nitrates, which are ultimately produced from non-renewable (and CO2-emitting) natural gas (CH4 + O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2, 3 H2 + N2 -> 2 NH3, use NH3 (anhydrous ammonia) directly or oxidize NH3 to make nitric acid). The same thing applies to ethanol as auto fuel. There are little "gotchas" everywhere, aren't there? If you want to be sure you're accounting for the environmental cost you can't just tax petroleum diesel and gasoline at the pump; you have to tax the raw materials as far back in the chain as you can, to avoid making loopholes and creating perverse incentives. --
A recycling technology for nuclear waste already exists, its called reprocessing. Only thing is that it was outlawed... because it produces weapons grade plutonium.
Except it doesn't; weapons-grade plutonium is specially made (from uranium irradiated for very short periods, then reprocessed) to be low in the higher isotopes of plutonium (Pu-240 and Pu-241). Nobody's ever made a bomb from plutonium anything like the mix that comes out of today's pressurized-water reactors; the closest anyone ever came was a bomb made from Pu from a British "Magnox" reactor, at a fraction of the "burnup" used today... and it wasn't a notable success IIRC. Making a bomb out of material from a power reactor would require isotope separation facilities to remove the contaminant isotopes, and if you have that you might as well make your bomb from uranium instead. --
However, I think nuclear energy is certainly a great solution for most power needs. BUT UNTIL we figure out a way to either recycle or safely dispose of nuclear waste, it's simply not a good alternative.
That's the stock anti-nuke line: say it would be great if we could just do X, but we can't do X (while blocking efforts to find ways to do X and ignoring known ways of doing X while propagandizing that X is impossible to do). This tactic has taken in lots of unsuspecting people, including yourself from the looks of it.
What do you put nuclear waste IN?
The first issue is how you define "waste". If you are talking about the raw fuel as it comes out of the reactor, cladding and all, you're defining it much too broadly (you're throwing away over 90% of the energy inherent in the original uranium). If you are talking about the fission products, it's a much simpler issue.
Fission products have an inherent environmental advantage over most other poisons. The mercury from the coal plant, the lead in old house paint, the arsenic in your well water... these things are toxic forever. Fission products decay away! Even icky nasty plutonium decays back to uranium with a maximum half-life of less than 25,000 years; if you can put it someplace where it can't leak out for a million years, 40 half lives will have passed and only a trillionth will remain.
There are a few fission products that last millions of years, like technetium-99. The anti-nukes raise this like a banner, but they don't tell you these two important things:
An element with a half-life of a million years is 100,000 times less radioactive than one with a half-life of ten years. In other words, it takes a whole lot of technetium to be dangerous.
It's easy to stop technetium from migrating in groundwater. It's less chemically active than iron, so all you have to do is plant your waste deposit in the middle of a bunch of scrap iron or steel. The technetium plates out on the steel and iron ions go into the seeping water instead. (This is how dissolved copper is recovered from the water trickled through piles of ore; the mining companies buy the steel cans from your recycling bin and run the copper-sulfate mixture through them, let the iron-sulfate run off and smelt the remains for the copper.)
Seal it in lead barrels, then dump it? Great, now we drink leaded water until the radioactive material seeps through.
Convert the metal radwaste ions to salts, absorb the salts in zeolites, press the zeolite powder under heat to form it into solid billets (inside stainless-steel cans), stick the cans in concrete bunkers above ground until the fast-decaying isotopes have bled off most of their energy and the heat output has mostly disappeared, then dump them in the mine shafts under Yucca Mountain with a few feet of iron filings as a buffer against groundwater seepage (the iron will be there for much longer than the technetium; there's still native iron on Earth from before the rise of oxygen-producing plants). That's a lot more secure and responsible than anyone has ever been with the nasty crap from coal ash. --
I'm surprised more people are talking about burning grain alcohol or other biomass.
Among the less-knowledgable, some are surprised that more people aren't talking. The more-knowledgable know that there are good reasons for this.
Plant uses photosynthesis to convert H20 and CO2 into sugar. We use yeast to convert sugar into alcohol. (Or other biological fuels such as methane.) Then we burn the alcohol. CO2 is released, but it is never more than the plants first took out of the air with photosynthesis.
On the other hand, how much cropland would be required to produce amounts of alcohol equivalent to the amount of petroleum we currently consume?
Too much. The plants used to make ethanol are very lossy, planting, cultivating and harvesting is energy-intensive, the fermentation process loses a lot of energy (CO2 bubbles off, lost carbon), distilling loses more, and finally you've got a rather small fraction of the original solar energy going into your fuel tank. Other things make more sense.
... does anyone know of a nitrogen fixing crop that can be easily turned into alcohol?
Why alcohol in particular? Think soybeans (soybean oil to biodiesel). Perhaps an advanced fuel process could turn the stalks and leaves of the soybean plant into alcohol, but I don't believe we're there yet.
Of course, the most efficient system is probably just to make hydrogen from green slime and sunlight. This avoids most of the miscellaneous metabolic processes of advanced plants (which are great but don't contribute to the desired fuel product), plus all the lossy steps of fermentation and distillation. --
Gasoline will probably never allow a direct fuel cell...
As I recall, it's already been done. The Monolithic Solid Oxide Fuel Cell has been run directly on hydrocarbons. If the coking problem can be beaten, this will eventually include all of the hydrocarbons in gasoline. At the low temperatures involved there is essentially no NOx produced, and the other emissions can be oxidized quite effectively.
The problem with running on such hydrocarbons, at least as far as global warming is concerned, is that you're producing the CO2 at the vehicle tailpipe. This makes it difficult and expensive to do anything other than release it into the atmosphere.
... and the reformers will always be dirtier than methanol.
Eh? Methanol itself comes from reforming (oxidizing) methane, then you have the same CO2 issue. You may be able to get rid of all nitrogen oxides and most hydrocarbons and CO, but you're not going to be able to deal with CO2 as effectively as you can with off-vehicle reforming. --
This treaty does not apply to the following areas....Only civil and commercial law are included.
So the clown buying himself a verdict against you in a kangaroo court in Morocco can't have you thrown in jail, he can only take everything you own and throw you and your family out on the street. That's a big reassurance. --
The UN is just a means of making treaties (which governments have to do anyway) and denying responsibility (which committees are created to do anyway). Not all that much would change if the UN went away, except some things would become harder and more expensive.
Not that this would be all bad, but the bad things should become harder and more expensive and the good things should become cheaper and easier. E.g., the UN should have voting restrictions based on the nature of the member government; dictatorships shouldn't be able to vote on many (most?) items. It should also have strict limits on the nature of the measures it's allowed to take, a la the prohibitions in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States but without the loopholes. --
You forget that the US multinationals behind this have more money than many (most?) of those governments, and can easily buy off their pols and judges. --
Unfortunately you're all wrong about transformers, and
#23
has errors too. Once more into the breach...
First, you'll usually have a transformer. They are
notoriously inefficient[1] because of how they work[2]. They are
basically two coils with differing numbers of turns[3]next to each
other[4]. The input/output ratio is related to the ratio of turns[5]. Basically,
power is applied to the primary coil, which has a resistance[6]. The secondary coil
actually generates power from the EM field emitted by the primary[7]. It doesn't take
a genius[8] to realise that most of the power applied to the primary is lost in the
air[9].
I'm afraid it takes a point-by-point refutation to show just how badly you went wrong.
Transformers are not "notoriously inefficient". They can have efficiencies close to 100%.
The inefficiency in wall warts is due to the design tradeoffs, not the underlying physics.
Not all transformers have differing numbers of turns on the primary and secondary windings.
Isolation transformers are a case in point.
The salient feature isn't that the coils are next to each other (they may be on opposite sides
of the transformer core, or they may be concentric). What matters is that they share almost
all of their magnetic field (a feature known as "mutual inductance").
It's not "related", the voltage is directly proportional to the number of turns.
There are superconducting transformers, which have no resistance. They work under the same principles.
That's a gross and misleading oversimplification.
The combination of the primary winding and the core material (if any) have inductance.
Inductance resists the change of current; for a coil of zero resistance, V = L dI/dt.
If you apply a sinusoidal waveform to an inductor, you'll get a current through it which
is inversely proportional to the frequency and proportional to the voltage, and lagging by 90 degrees (for
the lossless case): if the applied voltage
is Vmax cos(t), the current is I = Vmax sin(t)/L. The magnetic field uses no
power, but losses in the windings (IR voltage drop) and in the transformer core (hysteresis and eddy
current losses) do use power.
There's also a time-varying magnetic field associated with this current. This field induces
a time-varying voltage in any conductor exposed to it (including the primary itself).
If you allow a current to flow through one of these other ("secondary") conductors in the
direction of the induced voltage, it will create another magnetic field. More to
the point, the induced voltage will always be in the same direction as the voltage in the
primary coil, but the field created by the secondary (driven) coil will be opposite from the
field created by the primary (driving) coil.
Since the field in the secondary coil opposes the field created by the primary coil, the
reverse voltage (the voltage resisting the change in current) on the primary coil is reduced. Ergo,
more current flows in the primary coil until the two voltages balance again.
(That was more than I really wanted to write.)
It doesn't take a genius to avoid making silly mistakes from oversimplifying things, but you've
not managed to steer clear of those pitfalls.
Air is an essentially lossless medium for magnetic fields. The
excess losses in a transformer are almost entirely due to:
Undersize transformer cores which require greater magnetizing current, also leading to
Hysteresis and saturation losses in the core, plus
Eddy-current losses from core laminations which are too thick (but they're cheaper), and
Under-sized winding wire which has excessive resistance, causing IR losses (compounded
by the extra magnetizing current required by under-sized cores).
You can see that if you use a properly-sized and properly built transformer you can minimize the
losses you hate. Unfortunately wall warts are built to be cheap, not efficient. (I
never intended to write this much on the subject...)
One last thing about wall-warts. They may have a nominal voltage printed on the nameplate, but
as they are likely to be designed for the specific appliance they are running they may not produce
their rated voltage under a different load (think of resistance in under-sized, cheap windings). The
wart which makes 3 volts running a Nintendo may be 6 volts open-circuit. Caveat substitutor! --
The only realistic solution that you are suggesting is cutting back on energy consumption drastically.
Yes and no. Heating your DHW with the sun falling on your roof uses no less energy, but it sure cuts your gas or electric consumption. Insulating your walls does cut consumption, but at no impact to your lifestyle. Using a hybrid-electric car gets pretty much the same transportation (lifestyle) with less consumption.
You have to draw a distinction between reducing energy and changing to a less-comfortable lifestyle. The two are different.
Gasoline is an amazing thing. It really is quite incredible. It contains an impressive amount of chemical energy for its weight.
Don't presume to lecture me. I have been saying this, under various nomes de plume, since before the WWW was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye. I've been claiming loudly that the California ZEV mandate is a ridiculous boondoggle because batteries suck as an automotive energy supply, and castigated the nitwits at CARB for not allowing hybrid-electrics to meet at least part of the requirement. This is all because gasoline is such an incredibly dense, handy and usable way to store energy.
That said, you can still do some amazing things with batteries. Stick some batteries on a car and you can reduce its gasoline consumption by what looks like around 40%, by recycling the braking energy. If you used tricks like sophisticated energy management to drain the battery just as you got to your destination and then recharged it from the grid, you could replace even more gasoline. All this takes is off-the-shelf parts and smart software; in other words, we should have a major push to have test vehicles on the road tomorrow and things in production by 2003.
It doesnt address emerging nations, where the majority of the future coal and oil will be burned (China and India). The Global Effort should be "FIND A NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY THAT IS A GOOD REPLACEMENT FOR FOSSIL FUELS."
Now this, I agree with. <politics> This is why neither major-party candidate for President was a good choice on this issue. Gore (and Nader) would have signed the protocol, and left China and India to wreak havoc without any consequences. Bush was trying to scuttle it altogether, making the problem worse. Ironically, Bush may have no alternative but to go for the protocol after negotiating India and China under its umbrella; from the worst candidate, to possibly the best outcome. </politics> --
Yup. I'm going to make you do it until you get it right, or at least until I see some evidence of critical thinking from you.
U.S. demand has been growing exponentially around 5% a year.
Where'd you get this number? I've been searching the DOE site and have been unable to find any year-by-year historical data to confirm or refute it directly, but this page shows only a 24% increase in electrical generation over the period 1989-1999; that is only about 2% a year. I've read from other sources that aggregate US energy demand is only growing at about a 3% annual rate; energy required per unit of GDP is falling at about a 2% annual rate.
A ten-fold increase in generating capacity will roughly double the time until demand exceeds supply.
That's bullshit and you should know it. Demand for electricity exceeds supply in California right now (at least at current retail prices). A ten-fold increase in capacity will support 5% annual growth for almost fifty years.
So once the demand problem is fixed, the plants won't be need. We'll have thousands of nuclear plants sitting around.
Yeah, right. Only about 20% of the USA's electricity comes from nuclear, and less than 10% from hydroelectric. Total non-hydro renewable is down in the noise. If you're trying to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, do you think you're going to shut down even one nuclear plant before you've turned off all the coal-fired capacity (about half the total)? Get real. Demand for other things, like juice to charge electric cars, will keep watts flowing through the grid in the evening. If anything, the shift to time-of-day pricing will tend to increase demand at the off hours.
And no, it's not wrong that demand is much, much lower in the evening. That's why evening prices are so much lower. Solar homes are usually spec'd to have a week of storage. For grid-tied solutions we don't need that much. We just need to get the majority of homes through the night.
That was in response to your claim "you don't really need that much storage", and it is still just plain wrong. We will need huge amounts, or huge changes in the way energy is consumed. There's no two ways about that.
If there's anything to be learned from the furor in California, it's that you can't just take care of the majority. You have to supply everyone, or else all hell breaks loose. You also have to degrade gracefully; rolling blackouts are not graceful. Since the system is not designed to discriminate between priorities of uses, such as traffic lights, elevators and desk computers (priority 1), overhead lights (priority 2), climate control and air conditioning (priority 3) and water heating (priority 4), the only way to manage demand and avoid a grid collapse is to shut off blocks of users. That's a system design flaw that needs to be fixed, badly.
I'd pick your argument apart some more, but I've got someone waiting for me. --
Slashdot Mirror
This poster is a professional. Please don't try this at home, severe injury may result, poster not liable for your failure to heed this warning.
--
The hokey explanations on the part of the ACME rep about the "need" to use GPS to track speed (not just location, which is all they require for their vehicle retrieval needs) indicate that ACME may have written that contract in less than good faith. If so, they're just begging for a judicial spanking.
(And as #18 says, a bit of aluminum foil over the GPS antenna and the problem goes away... at least in this incarnation of the system.)
--
The action against 2600 Magazine is on-going. Until the legal system realizes that they cannot (and more imporantly, must not) block the flow of knowledge implicit in the concept of "fair use", you are still at risk. Maybe not for DeCSS, but for the hack for the next "secure" (fair-use-free) technology and the one after that, and the one after that...
--
if you're paying them?
--
With that out of the way, I don't see how the university could object. The GPL gives the entire world a perpetual, royalty-free and non-exclusive license to use the code. Unless the university has some other clause which restricts what the student may allow the rest of the world to do, the GPL would appear to be entirely compatible with the U's terms.
--
Sure would make life easier for Martian explorers and colonists if they only had to drill down a few feet to find permafrost that they could tap for water. H2O + CO2 + yields rocket fuel, among other things. Zubrin's Mars Direct concept works even better if you don't have to ship any hydrogen along.
--
--
How can you be sure that the right members of the public are going to be looking at the proposed patent during that critical week? Most people have better things to do than work as patent examiners for no pay, and the people who don't may not have the knowledge to recognize either obviousness to one skilled in the art or prior art when they see it.
--
When the only tool you have to sell is a hammer, you describe every problem like a nail.
--
I beleive you'll find that the 70 cent/gallon figure hinges on the use of used fryer oil that is currently available for free (IOW, that covers only the cost of methanol and NaOH plus processing equipment). Once the demand is sufficient to exhaust the supply of used fryer oil the marginal cost of the oil input will rise to the level of fresh oil. I don't know what it is in bulk, but at the supermarket I pay a lot more for cooking oil than I would for diesel.
--
What does this buy us? It gives us enough energy to run a civilization without altering the climate in untoward ways (which may upset civilization all by itself) and without generating toxic ash heaps too big to effectively isolate from the environment for even a few decades. My money's on nuclear for a safe future.
--
I know, I'm a wet blanket.
--
With advances like the NEC proton polymer battery yet to hit the market, it's safe to say that the era of the muscle car hasn't even begun yet.
--
The real problem with biodiesel is that it is probably all fertilized with nitrates, which are ultimately produced from non-renewable (and CO2-emitting) natural gas (CH4 + O2 -> CO2 + 2 H2, 3 H2 + N2 -> 2 NH3, use NH3 (anhydrous ammonia) directly or oxidize NH3 to make nitric acid). The same thing applies to ethanol as auto fuel. There are little "gotchas" everywhere, aren't there? If you want to be sure you're accounting for the environmental cost you can't just tax petroleum diesel and gasoline at the pump; you have to tax the raw materials as far back in the chain as you can, to avoid making loopholes and creating perverse incentives.
--
--
Fission products have an inherent environmental advantage over most other poisons. The mercury from the coal plant, the lead in old house paint, the arsenic in your well water... these things are toxic forever. Fission products decay away! Even icky nasty plutonium decays back to uranium with a maximum half-life of less than 25,000 years; if you can put it someplace where it can't leak out for a million years, 40 half lives will have passed and only a trillionth will remain.
There are a few fission products that last millions of years, like technetium-99. The anti-nukes raise this like a banner, but they don't tell you these two important things:
- An element with a half-life of a million years is 100,000 times less radioactive than one with a half-life of ten years. In other words, it takes a whole lot of technetium to be dangerous.
- It's easy to stop technetium from migrating in groundwater. It's less chemically active than iron, so all you have to do is plant your waste deposit in the middle of a bunch of scrap iron or steel. The technetium plates out on the steel and iron ions go into the seeping water instead. (This is how dissolved copper is recovered from the water trickled through piles of ore; the mining companies buy the steel cans from your recycling bin and run the copper-sulfate mixture through them, let the iron-sulfate run off and smelt the remains for the copper.)
Convert the metal radwaste ions to salts, absorb the salts in zeolites, press the zeolite powder under heat to form it into solid billets (inside stainless-steel cans), stick the cans in concrete bunkers above ground until the fast-decaying isotopes have bled off most of their energy and the heat output has mostly disappeared, then dump them in the mine shafts under Yucca Mountain with a few feet of iron filings as a buffer against groundwater seepage (the iron will be there for much longer than the technetium; there's still native iron on Earth from before the rise of oxygen-producing plants). That's a lot more secure and responsible than anyone has ever been with the nasty crap from coal ash.--
Of course, the most efficient system is probably just to make hydrogen from green slime and sunlight. This avoids most of the miscellaneous metabolic processes of advanced plants (which are great but don't contribute to the desired fuel product), plus all the lossy steps of fermentation and distillation.
--
The problem with running on such hydrocarbons, at least as far as global warming is concerned, is that you're producing the CO2 at the vehicle tailpipe. This makes it difficult and expensive to do anything other than release it into the atmosphere.
Eh? Methanol itself comes from reforming (oxidizing) methane, then you have the same CO2 issue. You may be able to get rid of all nitrogen oxides and most hydrocarbons and CO, but you're not going to be able to deal with CO2 as effectively as you can with off-vehicle reforming.--
Generals? Have you been following the corruption scandals in the various South American militaries lately?
--
--
Not that this would be all bad, but the bad things should become harder and more expensive and the good things should become cheaper and easier. E.g., the UN should have voting restrictions based on the nature of the member government; dictatorships shouldn't be able to vote on many (most?) items. It should also have strict limits on the nature of the measures it's allowed to take, a la the prohibitions in the Bill of Rights of the Constitution of the United States but without the loopholes.
--
You forget that the US multinationals behind this have more money than many (most?) of those governments, and can easily buy off their pols and judges.
--
- Transformers are not "notoriously inefficient". They can have efficiencies close to 100%.
- The inefficiency in wall warts is due to the design tradeoffs, not the underlying physics.
- Not all transformers have differing numbers of turns on the primary and secondary windings.
Isolation transformers are a case in point.
- The salient feature isn't that the coils are next to each other (they may be on opposite sides
of the transformer core, or they may be concentric). What matters is that they share almost
all of their magnetic field (a feature known as "mutual inductance").
- It's not "related", the voltage is directly proportional to the number of turns.
- There are superconducting transformers, which have no resistance. They work under the same principles.
- That's a gross and misleading oversimplification.
- It doesn't take a genius to avoid making silly mistakes from oversimplifying things, but you've
not managed to steer clear of those pitfalls.
- Air is an essentially lossless medium for magnetic fields. The
excess losses in a transformer are almost entirely due to:
- Undersize transformer cores which require greater magnetizing current, also leading to
- Hysteresis and saturation losses in the core, plus
- Eddy-current losses from core laminations which are too thick (but they're cheaper), and
- Under-sized winding wire which has excessive resistance, causing IR losses (compounded
by the extra magnetizing current required by under-sized cores).
You can see that if you use a properly-sized and properly built transformer you can minimize the losses you hate. Unfortunately wall warts are built to be cheap, not efficient. (I never intended to write this much on the subject...)- The combination of the primary winding and the core material (if any) have inductance.
Inductance resists the change of current; for a coil of zero resistance, V = L dI/dt.
- If you apply a sinusoidal waveform to an inductor, you'll get a current through it which
is inversely proportional to the frequency and proportional to the voltage, and lagging by 90 degrees (for
the lossless case): if the applied voltage
is Vmax cos(t), the current is I = Vmax sin(t)/L. The magnetic field uses no
power, but losses in the windings (IR voltage drop) and in the transformer core (hysteresis and eddy
current losses) do use power.
- There's also a time-varying magnetic field associated with this current. This field induces
a time-varying voltage in any conductor exposed to it (including the primary itself).
- If you allow a current to flow through one of these other ("secondary") conductors in the
direction of the induced voltage, it will create another magnetic field. More to
the point, the induced voltage will always be in the same direction as the voltage in the
primary coil, but the field created by the secondary (driven) coil will be opposite from the
field created by the primary (driving) coil.
- Since the field in the secondary coil opposes the field created by the primary coil, the
reverse voltage (the voltage resisting the change in current) on the primary coil is reduced. Ergo,
more current flows in the primary coil until the two voltages balance again.
(That was more than I really wanted to write.)One last thing about wall-warts. They may have a nominal voltage printed on the nameplate, but as they are likely to be designed for the specific appliance they are running they may not produce their rated voltage under a different load (think of resistance in under-sized, cheap windings). The wart which makes 3 volts running a Nintendo may be 6 volts open-circuit. Caveat substitutor!
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You have to draw a distinction between reducing energy and changing to a less-comfortable lifestyle. The two are different.
Don't presume to lecture me. I have been saying this, under various nomes de plume, since before the WWW was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye. I've been claiming loudly that the California ZEV mandate is a ridiculous boondoggle because batteries suck as an automotive energy supply, and castigated the nitwits at CARB for not allowing hybrid-electrics to meet at least part of the requirement. This is all because gasoline is such an incredibly dense, handy and usable way to store energy.That said, you can still do some amazing things with batteries. Stick some batteries on a car and you can reduce its gasoline consumption by what looks like around 40%, by recycling the braking energy. If you used tricks like sophisticated energy management to drain the battery just as you got to your destination and then recharged it from the grid, you could replace even more gasoline. All this takes is off-the-shelf parts and smart software; in other words, we should have a major push to have test vehicles on the road tomorrow and things in production by 2003.
Now this, I agree with. <politics> This is why neither major-party candidate for President was a good choice on this issue. Gore (and Nader) would have signed the protocol, and left China and India to wreak havoc without any consequences. Bush was trying to scuttle it altogether, making the problem worse. Ironically, Bush may have no alternative but to go for the protocol after negotiating India and China under its umbrella; from the worst candidate, to possibly the best outcome. </politics>--
If there's anything to be learned from the furor in California, it's that you can't just take care of the majority. You have to supply everyone, or else all hell breaks loose. You also have to degrade gracefully; rolling blackouts are not graceful. Since the system is not designed to discriminate between priorities of uses, such as traffic lights, elevators and desk computers (priority 1), overhead lights (priority 2), climate control and air conditioning (priority 3) and water heating (priority 4), the only way to manage demand and avoid a grid collapse is to shut off blocks of users. That's a system design flaw that needs to be fixed, badly.
I'd pick your argument apart some more, but I've got someone waiting for me.
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