User: Spamalamadingdong

No they don't

On: Running Vehicles on Vegetable Oil?

Vegetable oil is a lot more viscous than diesel fuel, and doesn't atomize as well in the fuel injectors. This leads to worse combustion and more smoke/particulates. Converting the oil to methyl esters changes the characteristics so the fuel works better in typical diesel injectors.

It's hard to see how using any waste product and getting good use out it with minimal added energy/effort can be called "grossly inefficient".
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How about food-waste-based engines?

On: Running Vehicles on Vegetable Oil?

You use the spent vegetable oil after it's spent a few days in the fryer tank; it becomes diesel fuel and glycerine (good for soap). You take the stuff that's spent a day or so in the people, and digest that in a big tank; it yields methane, which can be burned in most kinds of engines.

The point is, we're growing, transporting and using this stuff anyway. We might as well squeeze a bit more benefit out of it, because it's effectively free.
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It's all over, you just don't see it.

On: Running Vehicles on Vegetable Oil?

This vegetable oil vehicle is not the answer as it requires massive energy expenditure to just get the oil to market.

Maybe not "the" answer, but there's a lot of vegetable oil already being processed and running through restaurant fryers here and now. The used oil is a bit rancid, but still makes good fuel. Taking the restaurant's waste product and turning it into fuel (easily done locally) requires very little in the way of transport or other costs, just NaOH and methanol.
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Should be no surprise

On: Greenhouse Gases and Carbon Sequestration

Pollution research is full of tales of lakes and ponds that had lots of excess nitrogen and potash, but didn't have algae problems... until something added phosphorus. THEN the algae growth exploded, the water was full of green growing scum by day and green respiring scum by night, the fish and bottom-dwelling plants died off, and people wondered what the hell happened.

It turns out that CO2 isn't the limiting nutrient for loblolly pines in a typical forest; nitrogen is. Okay. Sounds like a good thing to use when an SUV driver argues for the harmlessness of their habits because they can always re-plant the forests we once mowed down in Vermont, Guatemala and the Amazon basin.
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You just hit on something important there

On: Launchcast Sued

I mean, I would actually PAY for the launch service, if they wanted the money.

Don't you see it? The RIAA wants to force Launch into a takeover situation, so that one of the RIAA members owns it. By shutting down the last real independent Internet music channel, they can own it all.

It's all about monopoly and control, just like Microsoft.
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You make it sound so hard; it's *easy*.

On: Security - Logitech Wireless Mice & Keyboards Can Be Sniffed

Yeah, running a wire between them for a moment when it's first installed is *so* hard...

Sure. First it costs money to put the wire there. Then it costs money if people screw it up, or think they did and call the 800 number. You need long term storage to hold the key (FLASH, NVRAM, whatever), and if it is battery backed you will need that cable again in a few years, or there is another 800 call.

You don't need a wire, you only need a set of contacts on the keyboard which match a set on the receiver. Touch the two together, and they sync keys. I could do this trivially with some CMOS-level electronics on the receiver and a static-protected input on the keyboard hooked to an open-drain driver, allowing bidirectional communications. This would also be very easy for consumers to understand ("touch the units together until the keyboard lights flash") and eliminate the need for the sync switches on the two units as well. You want an existence proof that it can be done? Look at the Dallas Semi iButton.
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The dilemma: pollution vs. bootstrapping

On: More Progress On Hydrogen-Air Fuel Cells

Excellent article. I particularly like the detail on the issue of market penetration: it happens to be much better for CO2 reduction to make hydrogen from natural gas and put only hydrogen on the car, but putting gasoline or methanol in the car's tank and reforming it on-board is far more likely to be accepted by near-future consumers and create a bigger market for the cells themselves.

A better illustration between virtue and practicality would be harder to find. I suppose one could have the worst of both worlds, where the company tries to go the off-vehicle reformer route and consumers stick with internal combustion engines, causing no improvement in either respect.
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Just shows how important key management is

On: Security - Logitech Wireless Mice & Keyboards Can Be Sniffed

It's amazing how many ways this could have been done right, and it is still wrong. For instance, the system could use a Diffie-Hellman key exchange by giving the PC side a transmitter and the keyboard side a receiver. Or the keyboard could have had a light sensor and use flashing patterns on the screen as the data back-channel (you only need it during sync). Or, if the keyboard used rechargable batteries, the key-exchange could be done by hardwired connection while it was on its docking/charging stand.

But no, Logitech had to do something that "works" but gives people zero privacy and no security. I hope this product gets hacked to hell, publicized to the ends of the universe and all products with crappy security get such a black eye in the press and a drubbing in the market that nobody even thinks about trying to sell something like that ever again.
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Not just RF Keyboards

On: Security - Logitech Wireless Mice & Keyboards Can Be Sniffed

Yeah, the IR models aren't sniffable with a radio receiver; you probably have to use a telescope with a sensitive IR detector to do something that fancy. <sarcasm> And we know that nobody could or would do that, right? Right. </sarcasm>
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Headlines can't be as good as abstracts, y'know.

On: Fire and Ice

While I agree with a lot of the sense of your complaints, I think you're being overly critical. Especially when you come down to this:

It may be methane in a frozen state, but that is hardly the conventional meaning of the term "ice".

When cometary scientists talk about "ice", they mean not only frozen water but also frozen methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide... In some contexts "ice" is a term of art which has a somewhat different meaning from the common usage.
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There are other issues involved

On: Fire and Ice

If microbes are responsible for the formation of the methane, why isn't there a method to get the methane directly from the microbes work? There is plenty of organic waste available.

There are several such methods. HOWEVER:

1. Digesting organic waste (such as municipal garbage or crop stalks) only yields a relatively small amount of fuel.
2. The amount of carbon currently inventoried in arctic permafrost and continental shelf sediments is thousands (millions?) of times as much as the annual turnover on farms.
3. We wouldn't want to harvest the biomass of the arctic to digest it directly, because we'd disturb the ecosystem rather badly. Grabbing some methane that's only going to escape into the atmosphere anyway is much less of a disturbance.
4. Methane is a greenhouse gas some 200 times as powerful as carbon dioxide, so harvesting and burning this methane for fuel may be better for the environment than letting it escape freely.
5. We may have no choice about this, because warming already on the way is likely to free up a lot of methane currently trapped in hydrates; we can either let it give the warming trend an enormous push, or use this methane ourselves (and perhaps replace lots of coal and oil with it).

That's just a few things off the top of my head.

... melting the ice to get to the methane you have to pass through that nasty latent heat of fusion barrier. Or drag the ice to warmer climates.

Or just use warm surface water (continental-shelf hydrates) or heat pipes from the surface during the summer (arctic hydrates) to do it essentially for free.
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Re:VirtualDub and IP

On: First Legal Test of the GPL

A contract = I agree to do something and you agree to do something in return. Period. There's nothing insidious about it.

Apparently you've never heard of conscionability limits, statutory rights, and inalienable rights. (IANAL, and even I've heard of these things.)

I know you're just a troll, but I'm sure that even you wouldn't stand for Microsoft adding a term to its Windows licensing agreement (after you're locked into Windows) that you have to pay 10% of your personal/business income to Microsoft for the priviledge of using Windows or Office, and you must continue to pay for the rest of your life. By your logic this would be okay, but courts would probably find Microsoft's terms to be unconscionable and refuse to hold people to them (and possibly make Microsoft pay the legal expenses of the people challenging the terms).
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Patents apply to ideas

On: First Legal Test of the GPL

It's copyrights that apply to implementations; if implementations were the only things protected by patents, everyone who wrote their own LZW implementation would be immune to the Unisys patent on the GIF format, and there would never have been a "Burn all GIFs" movement.
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Sugar isn't what you want kids eating fruit for

On: Software Tracks Kids At School

Fructose is the primary usable in Fruit to begin with. A fruit juice quite often is merely a reflection of the original article.

The reason you want kids eating fruit is because it has vitamins, minerals and fiber that other foods lack. Replacing the fruit with pulp-free juices loses the fiber. Replacing most of the fruit juice with corn-derived sweetener also loses the vitamins and minerals. If they are going to get the vitamins from supplements you might as well give them a vitamin pill and cut the sugary crap; among other benefits, it'll save their teeth.

A diet too high in fruit isn't good for you either. It's too sugary, and causes your blood sugar and insulin levels to yo-yo. Foods with a high glycemic index (GI) have been shown to cause belly-fat accumulation and pre-diabetic symptoms in rats, and you can't get much higher in GI than simple sugars like fructose.
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What have you learned?

On: Software Tracks Kids At School

Call it a hunch, call it FSCKING INTUITION, but maybe, just maybe, something was eating at their kid badly enough to screw with his appetite. Or perhaps that there was something going on in his biochemistry which was making him crave sweets -- you think maybe this could be the first stage of diabetes, you stupid ignorant baka parents?

And maybe, just maybe, they were saving their kid from the insulin roller-coaster which leads to belly fat, a lifetime of obesity and insulin-resistance diabetes later in life. Heck, maybe the schools SHOULDN'T SELL ice cream and "fruit juice" drinks that are 12% fruit juice and 80% corn syrup. At least one pair of parents are doing the right thing!
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You're welcome

On: Are Hybrid Solar/Grid Houses Practical?

The reason that guy used motor oil was because of its thermal capabilities. It holds heat really well...

That's why you don't want it; you want something that will take heat easily, store a lot of it and give it up on demand, not hold onto it. The specific heat of water is a lot higher than oil (per gram, per unit volume it's even better as water is denser than oil). Your pipes will be just fine if you fill the system with distilled or deionized water; it's a closed system so you only need to do that once, barring leaks. It's mighty hard to get mineral deposits when you use water without minerals.

I think a wire screen could protect a solar panel. Let's say 3/4" by 3/4" screen primed and painted black...

Which would block a fair amount of the incoming light, making your per-watt cost even higher. After a point it makes sense to pay insurance and just replace anything that gets damaged by hail.

I'm going to have to dig around for details on how to convert and store the electricty those cells pump out.

www.homepower.com. You'll find people selling off-grid systems and grid-intertied systems, something for everybody.

How much wind do we have to have a productive windmill?

I think that requires a site study (of your particular site; two spots a quarter-mile apart can be like night and day and a tower can make all the difference in the world). You can find people selling recording anemometers if you look around.
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There isn't much fruit juice in "fruit juice".

On: Software Tracks Kids At School

This kid has now been banned from buying fruit juice!!!! How can you call that junk food?

Look at the ingredients list on something like Sunny Delight. The very first thing on that list is "high-fructose corn syrup". Real orange juice is one thing (it has vitamins and some fiber in it) but all fruit "drinks", most reconstituted fruit "juices" and some real fruit juices (like grape juice) are mostly sugar with few or no redeeming qualities.
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Re:That's not how it works.

On: Are Hybrid Solar/Grid Houses Practical?

Suggestion: Learn how to use the

and

tags.

No, I've seen it done with a 120MW unit, three years ago.

Yes? Without looking at the actual phasor for the unit, how would you know what it was doing? Steam turbines have to be kept rotating even when they are not in use, or the shafts acquire a "set" due to gravity; how do you know that the unit was only being powered to keep it ready for operation, as "spinning reserve"? Here's what you said in #41:

To correct this some units in power stations are run as motors instead of generators, it consumes power but ensures that the power that goes out will run electrical equipment reliably.

That statement sounds good to the ignorant, but to anyone who's studied electrical power engineering it is just a nonsensical string of buzzwords.

I'm talking about the power stations, where they don't have to worry about electricity consumption, just fuel, maintainance and capital costs, and consuming a small amount of extra fuel to fix the power factor is how it is done sometimes.

If the utility is doing that, the utility is run by morons. First, generating VARs at the generating stations increases the current carried by the lines and transformers. This consumes their capacity without actually carrying power, so you max out at less than their actual capability. Second, generating VARs at the generating station increases the resistive losses in those same lines and transformers; less of your real power gets to the customer, driving your costs up and forcing you to start your peaking plants sooner than you otherwise would have. It is much cheaper to generate VARs close to the point of consumption, because a VAR requires only a tiny amount of power to generate (the losses in the capacitor plates and dielectric). This lets you devote the entire capacity of your lines and transformers to carrying watts, and keep them from overheating and breaking down (like Aukland did not long ago).

You're talking about enormous capacitors there.

A 1000 uF capacitor across a 120 V RMS 60 Hz line takes a current of 120/(1/2fC) = 750 mA, or about 90 VARs; that's not a very big capacitor, and it's sufficient to offset the inductive load from your typical refrigerator motor. A properly designed network has lots of capacitors sprinkled all over it, to generate VARs wherever they are needed. If you look up a power pole sometime you may see a gray box with two wires going to it. That's a capacitor; you've probably been seeing them all your life and had no idea what they were.

As for extra power generation capacity, the stop-gap measure put in place here (Queensland, Australia) was a few jet engines running on Avgas!

I don't know what your Aussie terminology is, but in the USA "avgas" is aviation gasoline and is completely unsuitable for turbine fuel; it contains tetraethyl lead as an octane enhancer, and the lead products foul turbine blades just as badly as they do spark plugs (you may have a few tens of hours before a mandatory overhaul). The lubricity is all wrong for the typical turbine fuel pump, too. If those machines were running on aviation fuel of any kind, it was all but certainly jet fuel (JP-4), which is essentially kerosene. Diesel fuel and heating oil would be likely substitutes, on the basis of cost and suitability.
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Re:I would like to do this

On: Are Hybrid Solar/Grid Houses Practical?

A few comments on your concept:

1. Stay away from used motor oil in your system. Stay away from oil, period. If you have a leak or a line rupture, you could have a hazmat/groundwater pollution problem that's worth more to clean up than your house and land combined. Stick with water and ethylene or propylene glycol; they are easy to handle, easy to pump and biodegradable.
2. Before you think about solar heating systems, think about insulation. Every watt of heat you can keep from leaking out of the house is a watt that does not have to be generated or captured.
3. Many solar panels are laminated onto plate glass. I don't know how much hail these are able to stand. This panel is rated for one-inch hail, but I wouldn't expect it to handle two-inch. The only way to protect a panel against hail is probably to put it on a tracking stand and turn it vertical (edge-on to the hail) when your conditions were bad. Making a hail-detector that can trigger the stowing process soon enough is probably a problem with no off-the-shelf solution. If you are talking about a solar-thermal panel for heating water, it's likely to have its cover glass busted in a hailstorm. You might be able to deal with this using a plastic top layer, but I have no idea who makes such things. Try doing a little research.
4. Solar (photovoltaic) panels love the cold. The cell voltage improves as the temperature goes down.
5. If you have strong winds in the winter, definitely think about a wind generator. You can probably heat your house with the power generated during winter gales; a 10 KW machine is good for better than 30,000 BTU/hr if you dump the output to heating elements, and several times that much if it runs a heat pump.

Surf over to Home Power and check out their advertisers.
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That's not how it works.

On: Are Hybrid Solar/Grid Houses Practical?

To correct this some units in power stations are run as motors instead of generators, it consumes power but ensures that the power that goes out will run electrical equipment reliably.

Someone misinformed you. Loads which draw reactive power (inductive loads, lagging power factor) are balanced with three things:

1. Generators which create reactive power (over-excited synchronous generators),
2. Loads which create reactive power (over-excited synchronous motors), and
3. Capacitors.

A company might have a synchronous motor running without a load in order to balance their VAR consumption and keep their electric bill down, but they are not going to operate a generator as a load (consuming real power) just to balance VARs.

As for solar hot water systems - surely California is warm enough for them to operate?

That's what makes the complaints of poor San Diegans so funny; they live in one of the sunniest parts of the nation, and some of them have the gall to whine that they can't afford to take hot showers! Geez, you can go to a camping store and buy a black 5-gallon bag that you fill with water and stick in the sun, and have a hot shower for the cost/effort of the water.

Gray Davis is an idiot. If he had a brain in his head, he would have pushed to make solar water heaters mandatory on all rental housing and new construction. Instead he keeps pointing fingers at the utilities. I hope the voters of California are smart enough to boot his mangy bum out of politics (I'm smart enough not to live in California).
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Re:(OT) DC distribution

On: Mundie Responds

The problem with DC is that a power surge will melt your whole line.

I hate to tell you this, dude, but a power surge sufficient to melt a line will melt an AC line too (how many times the rated current do you think it takes to make a wire fail physically?). That's what circuit breakers are for. A DC line will handle this kind of thing in the power converters, which are switching anyway and can be cut off in half a cycle or less even without any special provisions.

You should also check out this response and this course tutorial to which it refers.

(Yes, I am an engineer, and qualified to comment on this professionally.)
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Re:(OT) DC distribution

On: Mundie Responds

Apparently you're not familiar with HVDC power transmission. Hint, for the same peak voltage you can move more power, and you can even save money on wire by using the earth as the return conductor. You can't do that with AC. The historic problem with DC transmission has been voltage conversion, and modern electronics have made this cheap and reliable.
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Who's made the model work?

On: Mundie Responds

Whether you love 'em or hate 'em, you just can't point to any other company and say they've had the same results.

Nope, not Visicorp, not Borland, not Banyan, not Novell... nobody's had the same results as Microsoft with the closed-source model. It's only the open-source model that's proving to be anything close to competitive with Microsoft's predatory practices and FUD. Hmmm, wonder why.
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Re:Commercial software: A drain on the world econo

On: Mundie Responds

In other words, if we could replace the commercial software industry with free software, we would save businesses $175 billion annually.

Not necessarily. If a business has a particular need and does not have a strong in-house software development capability, it is probably better off going out to the commercial software industry and buying a solution; the list of companies which took huge losses trying to do it themselves is as long as your arm.

On the other hand, open-source commodity software is a huge deal. Instead of paying $200/desktop/year for commercial software to do word processing, spreadsheets and e-mail, most companies would probably be better off using Linux or *BSD and open-source equivalent applications. The commercial software industry should be solving new problems, not re-inventing the wheel or putting customers on an upgrade treadmill.
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(OT) DC distribution

On: Mundie Responds

I've noticed that almost nobody has DC running into their house anymore, at least in North America...

DC seems to have three major uses in N. America:

1. Long-distance power transmission, where elimination of the need to match phase and compensate for reactive drops is an advantage.
2. Subways and whatnot, which are legacy DC systems.
3. Off-grid energy systems, which typically generate DC (all solar panels, most small wind turbines) and require DC for the storage batteries.

That last is the only home-user group, unless you count people connected to the DC-powered telephone system. If you use that technicality, the user-set rises to almost all households.
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