a hybrid diesel without regenerative braking is kind of pointless except for the insane acceleration from having a 200 HP electric motor added to a 200 HP traditional engine.
TFA does not mention an electric motor, let alone a 200 HP electric motor. Where are you getting this stuff?
the govt. should raise minimum octane ratings for gasoline. If the US had higher octane ratings, we could use higher compression ratings, and turbochargers would be a lot more effective, allowing smaller displacement engines (like most japanese cars have) to produce the same horsepower as a larger naturally aspirated engine but with increased fuel economy.
That might be good advice, if not for the trend toward hybrid vehicles. The secret of hybrids' efficiency is that the gasoline engine almost always runs at whatever number of RPMs maximizes efficiency for that engine. At low speeds, when that much power is not needed, the surplus power goes toward charging the battery. When the car needs more power than can be generated by the gas engine running at the optimum RPM, intead of throttling up the gas engine, it sends some volts to the electric motor[s].
The smallish gas engines in hybrid vehicles work fine with our current octane ratings. It wouldn't make much sense to add a turbocharger to a hybrid.
the poor of this country are considerably better off than even the rich of many third-world countries.
An excellent point. It's also true that the poor of the 21st century are considerably better off than the rich of the 18th century. I'd rather be a poor person today -- having the benefit of running water, central heating, and electric lights in my low-income housing; driving a beater car for which I paid $500, and reading Slashdot on a used PC for which I paid $40 -- than a rich person in the 1700s, with no hope of aquiring any of these things.
The poor would be pretty appreciative of how good they have it, if they had a little historical perspective.
TFA says, "The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water - even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it."
If it vaporizes the water, couldn't it also be used to desalinate seawater? That would be a boon for poor dry coastal villages, like in Baja California.
tap water should only be cleaned to a certain percent, which can be used for lawns / car-washes / firefighting / pools, cleaned a bit further for household uses (laundry, bathing) by an in-home filter, and cleaned further for drinking by a tap-based carbon filter (Brita, etc). But this is a lot of equipment.
I'm sure that due to economies of scale, the water utility can purify a given amount of water more efficiently than I can. (Those Brita filters are expensive!) So here's a better idea:
Run two pipes to every home. The big pipe carries minimally-cleaned water, and the small pipe carries water purified to human consumption standards. The lawn sprinkler system uses water straight out of the big pipe. For laundry and bathing, use a blend of, say, 70% from the big pipe and 30% from the small pipe.
It's kind of like how Sunoco stations used to sell about six different grades of gasoline. There were only two tanks in the ground, and the pump mixed the top-shelf stuff with the base stuff to achieve the desired octane.
Thanks to Google News, I've made hundreds of visits to news organizations' web sites that I wouldn't otherwise have made. And on all of those visits, I've viewed ads for which the news organizations earned money.
Spray the foam on the inside surface of the tank, not the outside. This seems like a no brainer. Inside the tank, there are no aerodynamic forces to rip off pieces of cracked foam.
Rosetta is so impressive that while non-native applications will run slower, it's damned good until native versions of those applications come out, too.
I've read many times that while you can acceptably emulate x86 on PowerPC, emulating PowerPC on x86 is damn near impossible. So to those of you who understand instruction sets far more than I do, how about it... with Rosetta, has Apple accomplished the "nearly impossible"? Would they win the Nobel Prize in CompSci, if such a thing existed?
The current generation of Pentiums actually does an internal version of dynamic translation from CISC to RISC-micro-ops (which may be 1 or more per CISC instruction) and executes the micro-ops using a different instruction set internally.
Would it be possible to create a compiler that converts my code directly into these RISC-like micro-ops? Then the translation from CISC instructions to micro-ops could be bypassed entirely... and wouldn't that imply, in theory, much higher performance?
For example, how much energy would be required to create this "large magnetic field"? If it's on the order of the amount of energy required to create a wormhole, this idea is just as much a non-starter.
You're right that the process of creating H2, distributing it, and burning it as a fuel results in a net energy loss. But I'm talking about using it as a lifting gas, not as a fuel. When I say there's virtually a limitless supply, this us what I mean: you could electrolyze water to create H2, keep millions of airships filled for centuries, and Earth's sea level would not noticably decrease.
The men behind the Aereon Corporation were visionaries far ahead of their time. (Aereon Corp. still has a web presence, but sadly, the occasional small DoD research grant is their only real revenue.)
Here's a very interesting article about the history of Aereon.
Even the name "dynalifter" is derivative of Aereon's DYNAIRSHIP.
Good luck to Martin and Rist, but I hope Aereon gets credit for the original idea.
You're an idiot. Enormous dirgibles like the href="http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/macon.html" >USS Macon were awesome sights to see... one of the greatest wonders of the 20th century. What I'd give for a ride on one of those magnificent beasts...
the Hindenburg demonstrated, hydrogen has its own problems.
It's a shame that this meme is so widespread in the collective consciouness, because it's very damaging to the airship industry. Hydrogen is a superior lifting gas, it's inexpensive, and there's virtually a limitless supply.
Try to check out an article called "Odorless, Colorless, Blameless" (Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, May 1997, pp14-16) by NASA employee Richard Van Treuren. (Unfortunately this article is no longer available online.) It will convince you that the Hindenburg would have met the same fiery fate, even if it had been filled with helium. The flammable aluminum-based paint that covered the vehicle was to blame.
Slashdot Mirror
a hybrid diesel without regenerative braking is kind of pointless except for the insane acceleration from having a 200 HP electric motor added to a 200 HP traditional engine.
TFA does not mention an electric motor, let alone a 200 HP electric motor. Where are you getting this stuff?
the govt. should raise minimum octane ratings for gasoline. If the US had higher octane ratings, we could use higher compression ratings, and turbochargers would be a lot more effective, allowing smaller displacement engines (like most japanese cars have) to produce the same horsepower as a larger naturally aspirated engine but with increased fuel economy.
That might be good advice, if not for the trend toward hybrid vehicles. The secret of hybrids' efficiency is that the gasoline engine almost always runs at whatever number of RPMs maximizes efficiency for that engine. At low speeds, when that much power is not needed, the surplus power goes toward charging the battery. When the car needs more power than can be generated by the gas engine running at the optimum RPM, intead of throttling up the gas engine, it sends some volts to the electric motor[s].
The smallish gas engines in hybrid vehicles work fine with our current octane ratings. It wouldn't make much sense to add a turbocharger to a hybrid.
most of the acceleration comes from the electric motor I suspect, just as it does with most other hybrids.
What makes you think this is a hybrid? TFA doesn't say this is a hybrid.
the poor of this country are considerably better off than even the rich of many third-world countries.
An excellent point. It's also true that the poor of the 21st century are considerably better off than the rich of the 18th century. I'd rather be a poor person today -- having the benefit of running water, central heating, and electric lights in my low-income housing; driving a beater car for which I paid $500, and reading Slashdot on a used PC for which I paid $40 -- than a rich person in the 1700s, with no hope of aquiring any of these things.
The poor would be pretty appreciative of how good they have it, if they had a little historical perspective.
The big coincidence, of course, is that if you exclude helium (chemically inert), those four elements are also the most common in the Universe.
A big coincidence, or a sign of Intelligent Design?
TFA says, "The Slingshot works by taking in contaminated water - even raw sewage -- and separating out the clean water by vaporizing it." If it vaporizes the water, couldn't it also be used to desalinate seawater? That would be a boon for poor dry coastal villages, like in Baja California.
tap water should only be cleaned to a certain percent, which can be used for lawns / car-washes / firefighting / pools, cleaned a bit further for household uses (laundry, bathing) by an in-home filter, and cleaned further for drinking by a tap-based carbon filter (Brita, etc). But this is a lot of equipment.
I'm sure that due to economies of scale, the water utility can purify a given amount of water more efficiently than I can. (Those Brita filters are expensive!) So here's a better idea:
Run two pipes to every home. The big pipe carries minimally-cleaned water, and the small pipe carries water purified to human consumption standards. The lawn sprinkler system uses water straight out of the big pipe. For laundry and bathing, use a blend of, say, 70% from the big pipe and 30% from the small pipe.
It's kind of like how Sunoco stations used to sell about six different grades of gasoline. There were only two tanks in the ground, and the pump mixed the top-shelf stuff with the base stuff to achieve the desired octane.
...even with the name of their product, "OneCare." AppleCare has been around for years.
How is it "cheating"? They are sucessfully running PowerPC code on an x86 processor, and not incurring a 99% performance penalty.
What it boils down to, I think, is that those who said this was "impossible" were just plain wrong.
Thanks to Google News, I've made hundreds of visits to news organizations' web sites that I wouldn't otherwise have made. And on all of those visits, I've viewed ads for which the news organizations earned money.
Silly journalists...
Spray the foam on the inside surface of the tank, not the outside. This seems like a no brainer. Inside the tank, there are no aerodynamic forces to rip off pieces of cracked foam.
Rosetta is so impressive that while non-native applications will run slower, it's damned good until native versions of those applications come out, too.
I've read many times that while you can acceptably emulate x86 on PowerPC, emulating PowerPC on x86 is damn near impossible. So to those of you who understand instruction sets far more than I do, how about it... with Rosetta, has Apple accomplished the "nearly impossible"? Would they win the Nobel Prize in CompSci, if such a thing existed?
The current generation of Pentiums actually does an internal version of dynamic translation from CISC to RISC-micro-ops (which may be 1 or more per CISC instruction) and executes the micro-ops using a different instruction set internally.
Would it be possible to create a compiler that converts my code directly into these RISC-like micro-ops? Then the translation from CISC instructions to micro-ops could be bypassed entirely... and wouldn't that imply, in theory, much higher performance?
And a lesser question is can it run OS 9 apps in the Classic environment? (Some of us still have some beloved old pre-OS X apps.)
I run Panther, not Tiger, so I don't have OS X Dashboard yet. Can I run Yahoo's Dashboard? How do I get it... what's the URL?
1973
http://www.johnmcphee.com/bookshelf.htm
Case closed.
For example, how much energy would be required to create this "large magnetic field"? If it's on the order of the amount of energy required to create a wormhole, this idea is just as much a non-starter.
They have edited it to say "magnetic field" instead. Maybe they read your post!
The subject of McPhee's book was the Aereon 26, which was developed in the early 1970s. Ergo, the book could not have been published in 1963.
You're right that the process of creating H2, distributing it, and burning it as a fuel results in a net energy loss. But I'm talking about using it as a lifting gas, not as a fuel. When I say there's virtually a limitless supply, this us what I mean: you could electrolyze water to create H2, keep millions of airships filled for centuries, and Earth's sea level would not noticably decrease.
The men behind the Aereon Corporation were visionaries far ahead of their time. (Aereon Corp. still has a web presence, but sadly, the occasional small DoD research grant is their only real revenue.)
Here's a very interesting article about the history of Aereon.
Even the name "dynalifter" is derivative of Aereon's DYNAIRSHIP.
Good luck to Martin and Rist, but I hope Aereon gets credit for the original idea.
In his 1963 book...
It was first published in 1973.
unlike airplanes, blimps just look stupid
" >USS Macon were awesome sights to see... one of the greatest wonders of the 20th century. What I'd give for a ride on one of those magnificent beasts...
You're an idiot. Enormous dirgibles like the href="http://www.lucidcafe.com/library/macon.html
the Hindenburg demonstrated, hydrogen has its own problems.
It's a shame that this meme is so widespread in the collective consciouness, because it's very damaging to the airship industry. Hydrogen is a superior lifting gas, it's inexpensive, and there's virtually a limitless supply.
Try to check out an article called "Odorless, Colorless, Blameless" (Air & Space Smithsonian magazine, May 1997, pp14-16) by NASA employee Richard Van Treuren. (Unfortunately this article is no longer available online.) It will convince you that the Hindenburg would have met the same fiery fate, even if it had been filled with helium. The flammable aluminum-based paint that covered the vehicle was to blame.
Most parrots don't watch TV, the refresh rate is too slow.
Yes, just the other day a parrot told me "your monitor can only do 60 Hz at 1280x1024? What a piece of crap."