There, I saw a 400W wind generator for $700. 400W of juice is more than enough to run an electrolysis reaction.
Take wind generator ratings with a grain of salt. The industry standard is to use the absolute *maximum* power output, which is usually at something like 50 mph winds. This is done because the most important feature of a wind generator is that it not overheat and melt at high speeds.
At average wind speeds (10-12 mph) you'll only be getting a tenth of the maximum rating. Especially poor designs won't even turn in a low breeze. So if you're not careful, you make a lot of power at high winds, but you'd essentially be trying to store it all between hurricanes.
I think the downside is that leaking ammonia is capable of catching fire. That, and ammonia is used to make everything from fertilizer to explosives to crystal meth. Widespread knowledge of its versatility is discouraged.
It seems that there may be some argument for not worrying too much about steel laminates, or ferrite cores in the coils, and simply adding a few more magnets and wires and settling for a somewhat larger machine. One immediate benifit of having "air coils" is obviously the complete lack of cogging, which, if used in a windmill should result in a machine that starts very easily.
he may increase his cost efficiency by skipping the battery array and selling excess power back to the telco.
Somehow I don't think Ma Bell would appreciate that. Seriously, though, powerco-approved inverters cost more than batteries. And in most places, they only pay wholesale rates ($0.03/kwh) anyways. You're much better-off cutting them entirely out of the equation.
the weight penalty for the FC system is 50% more than a 60 kWh Li-ion battery pack.
Which was clearly just completely made-up. I've already linked to the heaviest component in a production fuel-cell system, the cell, and it only weighed 212 pounds. Furthermore, you keep insisting on comparing "real cars" yet you can't even find one that has any of the mystical properties you attribute to lithium-ion electric cars, especially economic properties like price and lifetime.
How about this. Instead of continuing to throw worthless links at me about $50,000 sports cars that need $3000 worth of batteries every year and a half, with no weight or mileage numbers, how about you pick a battery pack with a price, weight, lifetime, power output, and energy density.
I'll then be happy to crush every one of those specs with a hydrogen fuel-cell-based system.
I'm sure that vehicular hydrogen FC's will one day pass the energy density of the best batteries.
They already have. There's something wrong with your estimates. Perhaps the mark 900 fuel cell weighed a lot or something, because Ballard says that their 902 fuel cell weighs 212 lbs. The only other components are a rather lightweight (carbon fiber and aluminum) tank and some lines. There's no way the entire system weighs 1000 lbs, let alone more than that.
Let's compare apples to apples. From your Ford Focus example, the hybrid fuel-cell/li-ion car weighs 1,600 kg = 3,527 lb. We know that a 60 kWh li-ion battery (at 200 Wh/kg) is 660 lbs of that. Through the magic of subtraction, that means a mark 902 fuel-cell-only vehicle should weigh 2,867 lbs. This is only a 217 lb penalty over a regular Focus, not 1000 lb.
Now, there are other components that differ between the two cars, but most of the rest of the weight difference is in the lack of engine and transmission, and the addition of electric motors. I don't know how much the electric motor(s) weigh. The (missing) engine weighs somewhere between 300-450 lbs, and the transmission 200 lbs or less. So that places the entire weight of the fuel-cell "system" at roughly somewhere between 717-867 lbs, conservatively including the electric motors. Without the electric motors, I'll bet this weight is close to the 660 lbs of the li-ion battery pack.
Using the (conservative) mileage for the mark 900 fuel-cell-only vehicle (which weighed way too much for some reason), means that our mark 902 fuel-cell-only system should have a range of at least 100 miles. Extrapolating based on weight differences (which may actually be accurate, since the cars have the same body) gives a (1727 kg - 1600 kg - 300 kg battery pack =) 427 kg difference, or almost 25% improvement attributable to weight alone. This makes our 100 mile range more like 125 miles.
The article also insinuates that the hydrogen storage capacity has been increased in the hybrid, by up to 40%, by increasing the pressure. This may also account for a good portion of the radical range differences between the two vehicles. Adding another 40% (40 miles) brings us to a 165 mile range which can be attributable to a mark 902 fuel-cell only vehicle.
Now for li-ion-only. The upside of the li-ion system is that it can use regenerative braking. Since Slashdot has almost unanimously questioned the validity of regenerative mileage estimates in real-world situations before, I'm inclined to take a rather pessimistic view of it's benefits. This anlysis says:
In flat country, regenerative braking is not worthwhile. In moderately hilly country, regenerative braking could give up to 10% extra range.
Nevertheless, I'll attribute the remaining 35% mileage improvement to regenerative braking. That brings us to the 200 mile (maximum) range estimate in the article. Neglecting friction, 60 kWh at maximum speed (65 kW, 80 mph) gets you about an hour of driving, or an 80 mile range. My understanding is that electric motors have no preferable rpm range, so (neglecting friction) this is a valid estimate.
This means that, assuming the weights of the li-ion and fuel-cell-only systems are about equal, adding 25 miles for weight improvements, and with regenerative braking adding an additional 35%, a li-ion-only system would have a range of about 140 miles. Remember, though, that a significant portion of this is attributable to the dubious benefits of regenerative braking, which gives rise to the wide range of mileage estimates in the article.
Lithium-ion batteries are currently smaller, lighter
They can be, but not per unit of energy. If you still think otherwise, I'd like to see proof. For instance:
The regenerative fuel cell, coupled with lightweight hydrogen storage, had by far the highest energy density--about 450 watt-hours per kilogram--ten times that of lead-acid batteries and more than twice that forecast for any chemical batteries.
and cheaper than fuel-cell systems and their high-pressure hydrogen tankage. Zinc-air is even better.
They may be cheaper up front, but they need to be replaced regularly, and are not cheaper over their entire lifetime. The car you linked to uses lead-acid batteries, which are cheaper, and easily recycled, yet heavier because they have even lower energy densities than li-ion. Notice how the majority of the car is sealed away, hiding the large battery array, and the conspicuous lack of mileage or curb weight?
Why do we want to fix on hydrogen
Again, because it has the highest energy density of easily transportible non-fossil-fuels. But of course "fixing" on hydrogen doesn't prevent you from driving and promoting battery-powered cars instead. Like you've said, the infrastructure for electric cars has existed for decades. Why aren't we driving them already?
when we have (a) technologies which are better today
Once again, we don't. Batteries have been in commercial development for decades, and have yet to reach more than a fraction of the energy density of hydrogen.
and (b) the energy supply already has very wide distribution?
You're exaggerating the difficulty of converting electricity to hydrogen. It can be done by small units installed on any street corner.
This source agrees, and has some pretty dismal figures for the cost of hydrogen vs. its gasoline equivalent.
Those sites are a dime a dozen, and they all miss the point. We shouldn't care if hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, even inefficiently, in the short term. Inefficient conversion will still be on par with internal combustion. In the long term, converting to hydrogen will be necessary because 1) it has the highest energy density of viable transport fuels and 2) there are few other methods of long term energy storage in a distributed renewable energy economy. The site you linked in particular, however, is riddled with erroneous assumptions. I stopped reading when it assumed that commercial/industrial users pay $0.12/kwh for electricity.
Electricity at even $0.10/kWh is so much cheaper than gas it's not funny
Absolutely. Yet dragging around a ton of batteries means you have to either 1) limit the range, 2) limit the size/capacity, 3) or be happy with mileage on par with internal combustion.
The aforementioned sources claim a theoretical maximum of 83%.
Fine, 90% was just a guess.
Go electric, and people will be able to make their own "motor fuel" with panels on the roof or some airfoils in the breeze
And how are people supposed to store this energy they create? Should they have two cars and leave one plugged in, or just hope that the sun is shining or wind is blowing when they need to recharge? Storing electricity "in the grid" has been dismissed as laughable even with fossil-fuel back-up, let alone in a truly renewable energy economy. Flywheels are also expensive and years from commercial feasibility. You're not advocating we keep expensive battery packs wherever we need to store energy?
What's more alternative-friendly?
Whatever can provide for all of our fuel needs while assuming transportable hydrocarbons are out of the picture.
It's commonly said that the action of creating hydrogen via a petroleum-fueled process is a net energy LOSS. That is, we'd be better to just burn the oil, than to convert it to hydrogen.
The bulk of experience we have with petroleum is burning it. If we're burning it, and using that energy to crack H2, then yeah, it's a net loss. Converting chemical energy to mechanical motion by combustion is fundamentally limited to a 50% efficiency.
Other methods, however, will be more efficient than burning. The entire process of reforming fossil fuels into hydrogen and using that hydrogen in a fuel cell ends up being about the same efficiency as burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine.
The reason that hydrogen is the way forward, though, besides dwindling fossil fuel supplies, is that electric fuel-cell-powered vehicles can take advantage of improvements such as regenerative braking, and are not, like combustion, inherently hindered by a thermodynamic efficiency barrier of 50%.
The question ought to be, what are we going to power stuff with?
For cars, we're going to power them with whatever has the highest power density. At the moment, that's gasoline. When gasoline becomes a non-option, it will be hydrogen.
if you used them to charge batteries more or less directly, you'd be able to supply the energy for your typical personal vehicle with a relatively small investment.
Have you ever actually seen a fully electric car? The Simpsons joke isn't far off. Affordable batteries are like hauling around a ton of rocks for every tank of gas. Advanced ones are little more than reversible fuel cells.
But if you insist on going through hydrogen, with 70% efficiency in electrolysis, 60% in the fuel cell and losses in compression, you're down to 40% overall efficiency
Electrolysis is more like 90%, and usually even higher. I didn't think fuel cells were up to 60% efficiency yet, but the important thing is that there's nothing stopping them from also being 90% efficient. Either way, though, if hydrogen is at 40% efficiency for the entire process, then it's already on par with internal combustion engines. That's impressive considering the technology is just beginning commercial use.
it becomes much easier to produce it from coal, oil and gas than from most kinds of renewable energy
Easier for whom? Easier for the people whose homes are demolished to make way for the coal strip mines? Easier for the people dying in oil wars? Or easier for the criminal industrialists who profit from said ventures?
What if the global warming nuts turn out to be right? Do you still think that burning hydrocarbons and trying to capture the CO2 will be the most efficient path? Besides, what will we use in 100 years? Surely even the most wide-eyed optimistic American oil-man doesn't think fossil fuels will last that long? Do you want to be the one to tell future generations that we used up all the fossil fuels and didn't even attempt to find a replacement?
the game ratings aren't in existence to be a form of thought police
But if the ESRB is influential enough that retailers carry *only* rated games, then they effectively are thought police.
Your analysis is quite thoughtful. It's true, retailers will have a difficult decision to make if the ESRB refuses to rate a popular game. But that doesn't mean that the ESRB becomes irrelevant. It just means that the mirage of the ESRB as a regulatory agency disappears. Despite all their talk of "regulating ourselves so the gov't doesn't," they never had the power to enforce standards, only to give their blessings.
Perhaps they should merely have made themselves out to be "yet another ratings board" instead of the sine qua non of video game ratings. And perhaps parents should (perish the thought) take a little more responsibility for making sure what they purchase has whatever mark of approval they prefer instead of relying upon a mandatory ratings scheme to spring forth from the free market.
It's like computing standards: if you set up a standard and promote it as the "one true path", yet no one adheres to it, it's no one's fault but your own. No one should cry if your "standard" turns out to be little more than one of many.
I mean, when was the last time YOU could fly your own jet?
Umm, never? Hopefully free software can fix this;)
Seriously, though, why is it that bureaucrats wet themselves at the thought of Russian engineers being out of work, who could be snapped up by terrorists, but unemployed Americans can go fuck themselves?
Even more seriously, though, I've got an idea. Design a generic robot arm that can be used for manufacturing. I'm sure the patent for such a thing has expired. In fact, I'm sure prior art exists:)
Then we'll see what thousands of people churning out blueprints and prototypes can come up with. If the first plans are for windmills, it could be damn well self-replicating. It's high time that open source moved into meatspace.
If you can get contiguous propery owners to collaborate, no right-of-way is needed
Depending on your state laws, no right of way may be needed at all. Lots of states are so pro-development that they'll bend over backwards to help you take the land you need. Most will happily fine anyone who cuts your lines as well. I'm looking at 150' power lines in my back yard that got built despite rejecting the power companies offer, and despite any condemnation procedures. As a property owner, there's technically not a damn thing I can do about it.
Fudging by way of drainage ditches and easements can also go a long ways.
Probably, wireless point-to-point links will be a lot cheaper, however.
For a few points, maybe, but for a neighborhood, I doubt it. Towers and antennas add up quickly. In a neighborhood with reasonable density and reasonable take-up, fiber should be doable, and scales much better.
"Mr Hanff has declared that he is opposed to big corporations owning everything. Since we are a big corporation, and much of our business is based around our owning everything, we consider our dismissal of Mr Hanff entirely justified and appropriate."
Hardly. As someone who has driven (and wrecked) one of those "200mph cars", I can tell you that they are *far* safer than almost anything else on the road. I can also tell you that the same roads in the US that are designed to take a semi truck going 75 mph can easily accomodate a small car doing 140.
What no amount of road or automobile engineering can accommodate, though, is idiots who don't know which lane to drive in, and how to keep with the flow of traffic. This GPS system would be much more effective if it were accurate enough to detect asshats going 40mph in the left lane.
Great, now you've done it. You've gone and used the 's' word. Now the Bush administration can shut down Slashdot.
Of course, feel free to use British curse words all you'd like, though. Saying 'the US is full of sods' would probably gartner agreement from most Americans, along with a healthy dose of ribbing on the size and climate of the UK.
I've actually been waiting for news of this breakthrough to reach psychologists. Imagine, making generalizations is normal. Thinking in fuzzy terms is normal. That somewhat contradicts entire swaths of the DSM.
Perish the thought that, if the majority of white people you've ever known are assholes, you make the generalization that *all* white people are assholes. That's just a little too fuzzy-minded to be "normal". Computers wouldn't "think" that way. You must have a psychological disfunction.
Libertarian socialists believe in the abolition of privately held means of production and abolition of the state as unnecessary and harmful institutions.
I'm curious how your political "philosophy" proposes to do away with both government and private property? Or are you not against private property per se, just private property protected by the state?
Somehow I think that irony will be little comfort years from now, should history show that the French acted unilaterally to ensure the progress of mankind, while the US acted unilaterally to horde resources for themselves.
Seriously, your grasp of thermodynamics is astonishing. You should remove that UIUC link from your account before an actual physicist notices it.
Taking desert sunlight and turning it into mechanical motion, and then using that to cool off millions of square miles of hot sand would make the earth warmer?
Assuming you neglect the external resources (besides sunlight!) necessary to put this "plan" into action, really all you're doing is moving water around. There's no cooling off involved. The total heat of the system remains the same no matter how much you rearrange things.
Unless there's some purpose for moving the water to the Sahara (besides building Israeli settlements), like hoping that water will reflect more sunlight from the earth than sand (it won't), it's a complete waste. Not to mention, unless you're planning on impounding the water somehow, it will flow back to the ocean. The best you could hope for is to break even (you won't).
Until just recently, liability rates were the same no matter what you drove. Collision rates have always been lower for SUVs, because they suffer less damage in accidents.
In the New York Times, Diane S. Tasaka, a spokeswoman for Farmers Insurance, states "The regular car drivers are subsidizing SUV and pickup drivers on liability insurance." (8)
That's from the first report Google turned up, here.
Slashdot Mirror
Then we know it will include Tom Cruise, and lots of running... beyond that, it's up in the air...
There, I saw a 400W wind generator for $700. 400W of juice is more than enough to run an electrolysis reaction.
Take wind generator ratings with a grain of salt. The industry standard is to use the absolute *maximum* power output, which is usually at something like 50 mph winds. This is done because the most important feature of a wind generator is that it not overheat and melt at high speeds.
At average wind speeds (10-12 mph) you'll only be getting a tenth of the maximum rating. Especially poor designs won't even turn in a low breeze. So if you're not careful, you make a lot of power at high winds, but you'd essentially be trying to store it all between hurricanes.
Based on previous comments, grandparent appears to be a poor attempt at sarcasm.
The ammonia-absorption cycle has been used for nearly 100 years in refrigerators powered by heat.
I think the downside is that leaking ammonia is capable of catching fire. That, and ammonia is used to make everything from fertilizer to explosives to crystal meth. Widespread knowledge of its versatility is discouraged.
Here's one you can make yourself.
he may increase his cost efficiency by skipping the battery array and selling excess power back to the telco.
Somehow I don't think Ma Bell would appreciate that. Seriously, though, powerco-approved inverters cost more than batteries. And in most places, they only pay wholesale rates ($0.03/kwh) anyways. You're much better-off cutting them entirely out of the equation.
You said:
the weight penalty for the FC system is 50% more than a 60 kWh Li-ion battery pack.
Which was clearly just completely made-up. I've already linked to the heaviest component in a production fuel-cell system, the cell, and it only weighed 212 pounds. Furthermore, you keep insisting on comparing "real cars" yet you can't even find one that has any of the mystical properties you attribute to lithium-ion electric cars, especially economic properties like price and lifetime.
How about this. Instead of continuing to throw worthless links at me about $50,000 sports cars that need $3000 worth of batteries every year and a half, with no weight or mileage numbers, how about you pick a battery pack with a price, weight, lifetime, power output, and energy density.
I'll then be happy to crush every one of those specs with a hydrogen fuel-cell-based system.
They already have. There's something wrong with your estimates. Perhaps the mark 900 fuel cell weighed a lot or something, because Ballard says that their 902 fuel cell weighs 212 lbs. The only other components are a rather lightweight (carbon fiber and aluminum) tank and some lines. There's no way the entire system weighs 1000 lbs, let alone more than that.
Let's compare apples to apples. From your Ford Focus example, the hybrid fuel-cell/li-ion car weighs 1,600 kg = 3,527 lb. We know that a 60 kWh li-ion battery (at 200 Wh/kg) is 660 lbs of that. Through the magic of subtraction, that means a mark 902 fuel-cell-only vehicle should weigh 2,867 lbs. This is only a 217 lb penalty over a regular Focus, not 1000 lb.
Now, there are other components that differ between the two cars, but most of the rest of the weight difference is in the lack of engine and transmission, and the addition of electric motors. I don't know how much the electric motor(s) weigh. The (missing) engine weighs somewhere between 300-450 lbs, and the transmission 200 lbs or less. So that places the entire weight of the fuel-cell "system" at roughly somewhere between 717-867 lbs, conservatively including the electric motors. Without the electric motors, I'll bet this weight is close to the 660 lbs of the li-ion battery pack.
Using the (conservative) mileage for the mark 900 fuel-cell-only vehicle (which weighed way too much for some reason), means that our mark 902 fuel-cell-only system should have a range of at least 100 miles. Extrapolating based on weight differences (which may actually be accurate, since the cars have the same body) gives a (1727 kg - 1600 kg - 300 kg battery pack =) 427 kg difference, or almost 25% improvement attributable to weight alone. This makes our 100 mile range more like 125 miles.
The article also insinuates that the hydrogen storage capacity has been increased in the hybrid, by up to 40%, by increasing the pressure. This may also account for a good portion of the radical range differences between the two vehicles. Adding another 40% (40 miles) brings us to a 165 mile range which can be attributable to a mark 902 fuel-cell only vehicle.
Now for li-ion-only. The upside of the li-ion system is that it can use regenerative braking. Since Slashdot has almost unanimously questioned the validity of regenerative mileage estimates in real-world situations before, I'm inclined to take a rather pessimistic view of it's benefits. This anlysis says:
Nevertheless, I'll attribute the remaining 35% mileage improvement to regenerative braking. That brings us to the 200 mile (maximum) range estimate in the article. Neglecting friction, 60 kWh at maximum speed (65 kW, 80 mph) gets you about an hour of driving, or an 80 mile range. My understanding is that electric motors have no preferable rpm range, so (neglecting friction) this is a valid estimate.
This means that, assuming the weights of the li-ion and fuel-cell-only systems are about equal, adding 25 miles for weight improvements, and with regenerative braking adding an additional 35%, a li-ion-only system would have a range of about 140 miles. Remember, though, that a significant portion of this is attributable to the dubious benefits of regenerative braking, which gives rise to the wide range of mileage estimates in the article.
I'll admit this range is suprising
They can be, but not per unit of energy. If you still think otherwise, I'd like to see proof. For instance:
and cheaper than fuel-cell systems and their high-pressure hydrogen tankage. Zinc-air is even better.
They may be cheaper up front, but they need to be replaced regularly, and are not cheaper over their entire lifetime. The car you linked to uses lead-acid batteries, which are cheaper, and easily recycled, yet heavier because they have even lower energy densities than li-ion. Notice how the majority of the car is sealed away, hiding the large battery array, and the conspicuous lack of mileage or curb weight?
Why do we want to fix on hydrogen
Again, because it has the highest energy density of easily transportible non-fossil-fuels. But of course "fixing" on hydrogen doesn't prevent you from driving and promoting battery-powered cars instead. Like you've said, the infrastructure for electric cars has existed for decades. Why aren't we driving them already?
when we have (a) technologies which are better today
Once again, we don't. Batteries have been in commercial development for decades, and have yet to reach more than a fraction of the energy density of hydrogen.
and (b) the energy supply already has very wide distribution?
You're exaggerating the difficulty of converting electricity to hydrogen. It can be done by small units installed on any street corner.
This source agrees, and has some pretty dismal figures for the cost of hydrogen vs. its gasoline equivalent.
Those sites are a dime a dozen, and they all miss the point. We shouldn't care if hydrogen is produced from fossil fuels, even inefficiently, in the short term. Inefficient conversion will still be on par with internal combustion. In the long term, converting to hydrogen will be necessary because 1) it has the highest energy density of viable transport fuels and 2) there are few other methods of long term energy storage in a distributed renewable energy economy. The site you linked in particular, however, is riddled with erroneous assumptions. I stopped reading when it assumed that commercial/industrial users pay $0.12/kwh for electricity.
Electricity at even $0.10/kWh is so much cheaper than gas it's not funny
Absolutely. Yet dragging around a ton of batteries means you have to either 1) limit the range, 2) limit the size/capacity, 3) or be happy with mileage on par with internal combustion.
The aforementioned sources claim a theoretical maximum of 83%.
Fine, 90% was just a guess.
Go electric, and people will be able to make their own "motor fuel" with panels on the roof or some airfoils in the breeze
And how are people supposed to store this energy they create? Should they have two cars and leave one plugged in, or just hope that the sun is shining or wind is blowing when they need to recharge? Storing electricity "in the grid" has been dismissed as laughable even with fossil-fuel back-up, let alone in a truly renewable energy economy. Flywheels are also expensive and years from commercial feasibility. You're not advocating we keep expensive battery packs wherever we need to store energy?
What's more alternative-friendly?
Whatever can provide for all of our fuel needs while assuming transportable hydrocarbons are out of the picture.
It's commonly said that the action of creating hydrogen via a petroleum-fueled process is a net energy LOSS. That is, we'd be better to just burn the oil, than to convert it to hydrogen.
The bulk of experience we have with petroleum is burning it. If we're burning it, and using that energy to crack H2, then yeah, it's a net loss. Converting chemical energy to mechanical motion by combustion is fundamentally limited to a 50% efficiency.
Other methods, however, will be more efficient than burning. The entire process of reforming fossil fuels into hydrogen and using that hydrogen in a fuel cell ends up being about the same efficiency as burning gasoline in an internal combustion engine.
The reason that hydrogen is the way forward, though, besides dwindling fossil fuel supplies, is that electric fuel-cell-powered vehicles can take advantage of improvements such as regenerative braking, and are not, like combustion, inherently hindered by a thermodynamic efficiency barrier of 50%.
The question ought to be, what are we going to power stuff with?
For cars, we're going to power them with whatever has the highest power density. At the moment, that's gasoline. When gasoline becomes a non-option, it will be hydrogen.
if you used them to charge batteries more or less directly, you'd be able to supply the energy for your typical personal vehicle with a relatively small investment.
Have you ever actually seen a fully electric car? The Simpsons joke isn't far off. Affordable batteries are like hauling around a ton of rocks for every tank of gas. Advanced ones are little more than reversible fuel cells.
But if you insist on going through hydrogen, with 70% efficiency in electrolysis, 60% in the fuel cell and losses in compression, you're down to 40% overall efficiency
Electrolysis is more like 90%, and usually even higher. I didn't think fuel cells were up to 60% efficiency yet, but the important thing is that there's nothing stopping them from also being 90% efficient. Either way, though, if hydrogen is at 40% efficiency for the entire process, then it's already on par with internal combustion engines. That's impressive considering the technology is just beginning commercial use.
it becomes much easier to produce it from coal, oil and gas than from most kinds of renewable energy
Easier for whom? Easier for the people whose homes are demolished to make way for the coal strip mines? Easier for the people dying in oil wars? Or easier for the criminal industrialists who profit from said ventures?
What if the global warming nuts turn out to be right? Do you still think that burning hydrocarbons and trying to capture the CO2 will be the most efficient path? Besides, what will we use in 100 years? Surely even the most wide-eyed optimistic American oil-man doesn't think fossil fuels will last that long? Do you want to be the one to tell future generations that we used up all the fossil fuels and didn't even attempt to find a replacement?
the game ratings aren't in existence to be a form of thought police
But if the ESRB is influential enough that retailers carry *only* rated games, then they effectively are thought police.
Your analysis is quite thoughtful. It's true, retailers will have a difficult decision to make if the ESRB refuses to rate a popular game. But that doesn't mean that the ESRB becomes irrelevant. It just means that the mirage of the ESRB as a regulatory agency disappears. Despite all their talk of "regulating ourselves so the gov't doesn't," they never had the power to enforce standards, only to give their blessings.
Perhaps they should merely have made themselves out to be "yet another ratings board" instead of the sine qua non of video game ratings. And perhaps parents should (perish the thought) take a little more responsibility for making sure what they purchase has whatever mark of approval they prefer instead of relying upon a mandatory ratings scheme to spring forth from the free market.
It's like computing standards: if you set up a standard and promote it as the "one true path", yet no one adheres to it, it's no one's fault but your own. No one should cry if your "standard" turns out to be little more than one of many.
Put intel chips in televisions themselves?
Ding-ding! We have a winnar.
I mean, when was the last time YOU could fly your own jet?
;)
:)
Umm, never? Hopefully free software can fix this
Seriously, though, why is it that bureaucrats wet themselves at the thought of Russian engineers being out of work, who could be snapped up by terrorists, but unemployed Americans can go fuck themselves?
Even more seriously, though, I've got an idea. Design a generic robot arm that can be used for manufacturing. I'm sure the patent for such a thing has expired. In fact, I'm sure prior art exists
Then we'll see what thousands of people churning out blueprints and prototypes can come up with. If the first plans are for windmills, it could be damn well self-replicating. It's high time that open source moved into meatspace.
I managed to double the number of available servers for quake. (hopefully)
If you can get contiguous propery owners to collaborate, no right-of-way is needed
Depending on your state laws, no right of way may be needed at all. Lots of states are so pro-development that they'll bend over backwards to help you take the land you need. Most will happily fine anyone who cuts your lines as well. I'm looking at 150' power lines in my back yard that got built despite rejecting the power companies offer, and despite any condemnation procedures. As a property owner, there's technically not a damn thing I can do about it.
Fudging by way of drainage ditches and easements can also go a long ways.
Probably, wireless point-to-point links will be a lot cheaper, however.
For a few points, maybe, but for a neighborhood, I doubt it. Towers and antennas add up quickly. In a neighborhood with reasonable density and reasonable take-up, fiber should be doable, and scales much better.
"Mr Hanff has declared that he is opposed to big corporations owning everything. Since we are a big corporation, and much of our business is based around our owning everything, we consider our dismissal of Mr Hanff entirely justified and appropriate."
a 200mph car that will probably kill someone
Hardly. As someone who has driven (and wrecked) one of those "200mph cars", I can tell you that they are *far* safer than almost anything else on the road. I can also tell you that the same roads in the US that are designed to take a semi truck going 75 mph can easily accomodate a small car doing 140.
What no amount of road or automobile engineering can accommodate, though, is idiots who don't know which lane to drive in, and how to keep with the flow of traffic. This GPS system would be much more effective if it were accurate enough to detect asshats going 40mph in the left lane.
Great, now you've done it. You've gone and used the 's' word. Now the Bush administration can shut down Slashdot.
Of course, feel free to use British curse words all you'd like, though. Saying 'the US is full of sods' would probably gartner agreement from most Americans, along with a healthy dose of ribbing on the size and climate of the UK.
Perish the thought that, if the majority of white people you've ever known are assholes, you make the generalization that *all* white people are assholes. That's just a little too fuzzy-minded to be "normal". Computers wouldn't "think" that way. You must have a psychological disfunction.
/all psychologists are assholes
Libertarian socialists believe in the abolition of privately held means of production and abolition of the state as unnecessary and harmful institutions.
I'm curious how your political "philosophy" proposes to do away with both government and private property? Or are you not against private property per se, just private property protected by the state?
Somehow I think that irony will be little comfort years from now, should history show that the French acted unilaterally to ensure the progress of mankind, while the US acted unilaterally to horde resources for themselves.
To the local politicians...
Seriously, your grasp of thermodynamics is astonishing. You should remove that UIUC link from your account before an actual physicist notices it.
Taking desert sunlight and turning it into mechanical motion, and then using that to cool off millions of square miles of hot sand would make the earth warmer?
Assuming you neglect the external resources (besides sunlight!) necessary to put this "plan" into action, really all you're doing is moving water around. There's no cooling off involved. The total heat of the system remains the same no matter how much you rearrange things.
Unless there's some purpose for moving the water to the Sahara (besides building Israeli settlements), like hoping that water will reflect more sunlight from the earth than sand (it won't), it's a complete waste. Not to mention, unless you're planning on impounding the water somehow, it will flow back to the ocean. The best you could hope for is to break even (you won't).
The plants absorb more sunlight.
Do I really need to continue explaining this?
Until just recently, liability rates were the same no matter what you drove. Collision rates have always been lower for SUVs, because they suffer less damage in accidents.
In the New York Times, Diane S. Tasaka, a spokeswoman for Farmers Insurance, states "The regular car drivers are subsidizing SUV and pickup drivers on liability insurance." (8)
That's from the first report Google turned up, here.