The real reason is because hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the world (maybe universe). It is very very difficult to contain hydrogen because it diffuses through just about anything. Even in hydrogen gas cylinders, there's a loss of about 0.5% by volume a day because of H2 leaking.
It's generally accepted that H2 pipeline is not a good idea. It may work if you liquefy the H2, but this is very expensive to do because it takes so much energy.
So then are you saying that a wind turbine is 100% efficient? Of course the turbine is generating heat that is lost to the environment, otherwise known as "waste heat" because it obeys the laws of thermodynamics. The waste heat would be generated by friction.
The difference is that CmdrTaco's job doesn't exactly depend on his reputation. If you're a researcher publishing papers, credibility is one of the most important things to have, otherwise people won't beleive your results and the end result is that you won't be able to publish. This persons boss put it a good way in the article: "We need to jump on this soon as it could effect you professionally at least in Canada."
I wonder if the same award would have been given if this person wasn't a researcher who has to come up with crazy ideas in the first place.
The warming occurs because kinetic energy from the wind is converted into mechanical energy by the wind turbine. On a large scale, a lot of kinetic energy is transferred and this is what causes the temperature changes since there will actually be less wind and the wind patterns are disrupted. Also, the wind turbines are not very efficienct and therefore they produce some waste heat as well.
I think you've totally missed the point in your last statement. We're trying to stop the world from getting warmer in the first place! If the world gets warmer then all hell could break loose (ie way more disease, less rain, less food etc)
In a lot of cases, such as recycling paper, it uses even more energy than making new paper from scratch. I'm sure it's the same for other products.
Also, the efficiency of vehicles on the road today is the same as it was in 1970! This is because of all of those damn SUV's on the road....does it seriously make sense to have a 150kW engine move you when about 200W will do the same thing? (ie, 200W is roughly the amount of power you use when walking, 150kW is roughly the power of an SUV).
Oil will peak one day (some say in 6 years). When that happens North Americans will be in for a shock when they find that they'll have to grow their own food in their yards instead of importing it from 3000km away. "The End of Suburbia" is a great documentary talking about all of these things http://www.endofsuburbia.com/.
It's a little tricky saying that we are not running out or that we are running out. I think that we just have to consider some trends though:
1. The price of oil has never been so expensive 2. Shell downgraded their proven oil reserves by 1/5 a few months ago to only probable reserves 3. The current state of world affairs
There is one thing for sure: The amount of cheap oil available is definitely running out. Canada has enough oil reserves in the tar sands in Alberta to sell to the US for ~30 years (so I've heard) but it requires twice as much energy to get/reform it.
Solid oxide fuel cells us CO and H2 as a fuel. CO is extremely poisonous to people though. There's also probably a couple of other side reactions that go on which make this process a bit more complicated.
For Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (the type that will eventually replace coal power plants and used for other stationary applications), they operate at very high temperatures (about 800C at the moment). At these temperatures you can feed in pretty much anything at all (natural gas, ethanol, paint fumes, pure hydrogen) without any need to use the generated electricity to prepare the fuel. Of course, some of the useful waste heat is lost in heating the fuel up to 800C but not too much. These fuel cells are very efficient because you can use the excess heat for other things. One company that makes them http://www.fct.ca/Fuel Cell Technologies gets about 40% electrical efficiency from their 5kW SOFC and 80% total system efficiency if you recycle the waste heat. They also sold an SOFC to Ford that runs off of paint fumes.
Basically, if a fuel cell operates above ~300C, there is enough waste heat to prepare the fuel without needing to use the direct electricity that the fuel cell generates. Right now the problem with the SOFC is that they cost too much since they're made out of ceramic materials.
I ordered the powerpack cds and it took about 2.5 weeks to deliver to Canada. I'm not sure why it takes so long to hand over a small box of 6 cds to UPS. It only took UPS 3 days to deliver.
Maybe this is a sign that Linux really is on the rise? Orders that are overloading Mandrake?...I doubt it...It also takes forever for Mandrake to reply to emails too.
This is so true. I know waaaay too many people who went to University, chose 1 program and after a year switched to another, and then switched again after another year. These people end up graduating 2 years later than they should and have bad marks...plus it doesn't look good to an employer. Everything that you do will have rough patches, you just have to persevere.
One thing that I've learned is that brains mean pretty much nothing...even in University. If you can't motivate yourself to work on things that you don't like, then you won't be productive, no doubt about it. Think of all the courses that you'll be forced to take, dollars to doughnuts you won't like half of them. The same goes for anything you do, you'll always get assigned projects that you won't be interested in.
The trick is to learn how to force yourself into enjoying something.
The fuel cell is not cheap and won't be disposable even with 100 years of research into it! The cartridge (fuel supply) is either disposable or refillable.
You don't have to recharge a fuel cell! That's the point. The laptop/PDA would be running off of a small methanol cartridge (about 3% methanol, the rest water). When the cartridge is empty, you either buy a new one or refill it and pop it back into the laptop/PDA and you're done. There is no 8 hour wait to reachrge the batteries.
If you want to bring files to school or work or and copy them to a machine that doesn't have the Dell software installed, you're screwed.
How many people have 20gig HD's full of music? My 10gig ipod has maybe 3gigs of music and 6gigs of files...To me the Dell DJ is useless because of this.
Re:Too many office choices on Linux now!
on
Koffice 1.3 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
As a fairly new Linux user, I find that too much choice makes it hard to learn and it's true for lots of other types of software too. I know competition is advantageous and all but I think it would help to focus development on say 2 office choices that were in competition...competition like that between gnome and kde is good.
The economist just added a Starbuck's tall latte index (a purchasing-power parity test) similar to their Big Mac Index. How long will it be until they add an "mp3 index"?
Both the tall latte index and the Big Mac index show that the Canadian dollar is undervalued compared to the US dollar (which means that we get things cheaper here!). Sweet.
If you're a grad student in Canada (at least if you're taking engineering at most schools) you make by on about $19000/year - $5000 tuition = $14000/year!
Exactly, you can't even break even. Not even when using oil. But the fact is fuel cells are a lot more efficient than anything that uses oil which ultimately means that you waste less energy using hydrogen than when you use oil. Especially when we have to start squeezing oil out of sand. Using oil will become less and less efficient. Using hydrogen won't since we can get it from water.
The point of using fuel cells though is to move away from oil and into a hydrogen based economy. Not only for the environmental benefits but also because one day we won't have any more oil. They've come to the point where they have to squeeze oil out of sand in Alberta, and mining the oil in Alaska won't last for long.
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The real reason is because hydrogen is the smallest molecule in the world (maybe universe). It is very very difficult to contain hydrogen because it diffuses through just about anything. Even in hydrogen gas cylinders, there's a loss of about 0.5% by volume a day because of H2 leaking.
It's generally accepted that H2 pipeline is not a good idea. It may work if you liquefy the H2, but this is very expensive to do because it takes so much energy.
So then are you saying that a wind turbine is 100% efficient? Of course the turbine is generating heat that is lost to the environment, otherwise known as "waste heat" because it obeys the laws of thermodynamics. The waste heat would be generated by friction.
The difference is that CmdrTaco's job doesn't exactly depend on his reputation. If you're a researcher publishing papers, credibility is one of the most important things to have, otherwise people won't beleive your results and the end result is that you won't be able to publish. This persons boss put it a good way in the article: "We need to jump on this soon as it could effect you professionally at least in Canada."
I wonder if the same award would have been given if this person wasn't a researcher who has to come up with crazy ideas in the first place.
The warming occurs because kinetic energy from the wind is converted into mechanical energy by the wind turbine. On a large scale, a lot of kinetic energy is transferred and this is what causes the temperature changes since there will actually be less wind and the wind patterns are disrupted. Also, the wind turbines are not very efficienct and therefore they produce some waste heat as well.
I think you've totally missed the point in your last statement. We're trying to stop the world from getting warmer in the first place! If the world gets warmer then all hell could break loose (ie way more disease, less rain, less food etc)
In a lot of cases, such as recycling paper, it uses even more energy than making new paper from scratch. I'm sure it's the same for other products.
Also, the efficiency of vehicles on the road today is the same as it was in 1970! This is because of all of those damn SUV's on the road....does it seriously make sense to have a 150kW engine move you when about 200W will do the same thing? (ie, 200W is roughly the amount of power you use when walking, 150kW is roughly the power of an SUV).
Oil will peak one day (some say in 6 years). When that happens North Americans will be in for a shock when they find that they'll have to grow their own food in their yards instead of importing it from 3000km away. "The End of Suburbia" is a great documentary talking about all of these things http://www.endofsuburbia.com/.
It's a little tricky saying that we are not running out or that we are running out. I think that we just have to consider some trends though:
1. The price of oil has never been so expensive
2. Shell downgraded their proven oil reserves by 1/5 a few months ago to only probable reserves
3. The current state of world affairs
There is one thing for sure: The amount of cheap oil available is definitely running out. Canada has enough oil reserves in the tar sands in Alberta to sell to the US for ~30 years (so I've heard) but it requires twice as much energy to get/reform it.
Solid oxide fuel cells us CO and H2 as a fuel. CO is extremely poisonous to people though. There's also probably a couple of other side reactions that go on which make this process a bit more complicated.
For Solid Oxide Fuel Cells (the type that will eventually replace coal power plants and used for other stationary applications), they operate at very high temperatures (about 800C at the moment). At these temperatures you can feed in pretty much anything at all (natural gas, ethanol, paint fumes, pure hydrogen) without any need to use the generated electricity to prepare the fuel. Of course, some of the useful waste heat is lost in heating the fuel up to 800C but not too much. These fuel cells are very efficient because you can use the excess heat for other things. One company that makes them http://www.fct.ca/Fuel Cell Technologies gets about 40% electrical efficiency from their 5kW SOFC and 80% total system efficiency if you recycle the waste heat. They also sold an SOFC to Ford that runs off of paint fumes.
Basically, if a fuel cell operates above ~300C, there is enough waste heat to prepare the fuel without needing to use the direct electricity that the fuel cell generates. Right now the problem with the SOFC is that they cost too much since they're made out of ceramic materials.
I ordered the powerpack cds and it took about 2.5 weeks to deliver to Canada. I'm not sure why it takes so long to hand over a small box of 6 cds to UPS. It only took UPS 3 days to deliver.
...I doubt it...It also takes forever for Mandrake to reply to emails too.
Maybe this is a sign that Linux really is on the rise? Orders that are overloading Mandrake?
This is so true. I know waaaay too many people who went to University, chose 1 program and after a year switched to another, and then switched again after another year. These people end up graduating 2 years later than they should and have bad marks...plus it doesn't look good to an employer. Everything that you do will have rough patches, you just have to persevere.
One thing that I've learned is that brains mean pretty much nothing...even in University. If you can't motivate yourself to work on things that you don't like, then you won't be productive, no doubt about it. Think of all the courses that you'll be forced to take, dollars to doughnuts you won't like half of them. The same goes for anything you do, you'll always get assigned projects that you won't be interested in.
The trick is to learn how to force yourself into enjoying something.
God, now I have reason to kiss Canadian ground. The fact that this post is "Insightful" makes me want to throw up.
If you make drawings in Word, and open the file with open office, they'll be completely missplaced.
Hey man, if things are so bad stop complaining and move to the States! I live in Canada and I haven't experienced any of this.
No no no no no no no no!!!!!
The fuel cell is not cheap and won't be disposable even with 100 years of research into it! The cartridge (fuel supply) is either disposable or refillable.
You don't have to recharge a fuel cell! That's the point. The laptop/PDA would be running off of a small methanol cartridge (about 3% methanol, the rest water). When the cartridge is empty, you either buy a new one or refill it and pop it back into the laptop/PDA and you're done. There is no 8 hour wait to reachrge the batteries.
I'm sure though that the Canadaian DND made damn sure that it was HPs fault before announcing a law suit.
If you want to bring files to school or work or and copy them to a machine that doesn't have the Dell software installed, you're screwed.
How many people have 20gig HD's full of music? My 10gig ipod has maybe 3gigs of music and 6gigs of files...To me the Dell DJ is useless because of this.
As a fairly new Linux user, I find that too much choice makes it hard to learn and it's true for lots of other types of software too. I know competition is advantageous and all but I think it would help to focus development on say 2 office choices that were in competition...competition like that between gnome and kde is good.
The economist just added a Starbuck's tall latte index (a purchasing-power parity test) similar to their Big Mac Index. How long will it be until they add an "mp3 index"?
Both the tall latte index and the Big Mac index show that the Canadian dollar is undervalued compared to the US dollar (which means that we get things cheaper here!). Sweet.
Exactly, you can't even break even. Not even when using oil. But the fact is fuel cells are a lot more efficient than anything that uses oil which ultimately means that you waste less energy using hydrogen than when you use oil. Especially when we have to start squeezing oil out of sand. Using oil will become less and less efficient. Using hydrogen won't since we can get it from water.
Yes you are wrong.
Fuel cells do handle heat well. The type of fuel cell that the laptops will use are PEM fuel cells that operate best between 80-120C.
Fuel cells operate based on chemical reactions which are fastest at high temperatures.
The point of using fuel cells though is to move away from oil and into a hydrogen based economy. Not only for the environmental benefits but also because one day we won't have any more oil. They've come to the point where they have to squeeze oil out of sand in Alberta, and mining the oil in Alaska won't last for long.