Well, to give you an idea of the weight and height needed: Dinorwig (a large pumped storage plant in the UK) uses 390 m^3 of water per second and has a water column of 570 m above the turbines to produce 1800 MW. So they're using 1.4 million m^3 of water an hour. Now a mechanical solution would work differently, but I'd be surprised if 1.4 million tons suspended at 570 m height was not within an order of magnitude for a pendulum storage system that can produce 1.8 GWh. That's quite a lot of weight to be hoisting that high.
It measures light to a precision of one part in 2,000
So that's 11 bits of intensity information? Most professional camera CCD's are 12 bits per color. Some are 14 bits per color. Doesn't sound very impressive. And with multiple exposures, it should be possible to get a much higher resolution.
14 bits is all nice and good if your light source is the local star and you can saturate your CCD within milliseconds. We're measuring starlight here, at maybe 10 orders of magnitude less light. Try getting 14-bit resolution at that level without drowning in noise.
Same thing we do very night, Pinky: try to take over the world! You see, I have commissioned a company by the name of Logitech to deliver ONE BILLION mice, an army large enough to overwhelm any defence system known to man. [ding dong] Ah, that will be my delivery. Soon, Pinky, the world will be ours for the taking.
...
Crikey, Brain, these mice are kind of odd. Why are their tails so long, and what is this hard shell [toc] all around them?
The Falcon 9 first stage on top of the stand is about 25 m high (I've assumed it's half the total height of the Falcon 9). The stand appears a bit over 2x as high as that first stage, so 60 m/180 ft would be my initial guess.
The Element Four site doesn't say, but the inane "3 lightbulbs" remark from the Guardian article suggests it uses 200-300 W to produce 12 liters of water per day, if the humidity is >30%. Assuming 200 W, that's 1750 kWh/year. The site markets this to First World households. But is that where its value lies? I get potable water from the tap, and so does most of Europe (and I pay E 1/m^3 instead of $0,30/litre). IDK about the States. The site mentions a ludicrous amount of bottled water, is that because US tap water isn't potable or is it just a fad?
The locations that most need this (hot and dry climates) I guess would fail the "humidity >30%" criterium.
The site only compares its efficiency with that of "bottled water" production, but what we need would be a comparison with e.g. a desalinisation plant.
Sorry for rambling a bit, but it adds up to this: is this condensor something the world needs, or just another "a fool and his money are soon parted" scheme?
The HMMWV predates C&C by a decade or two. The military loves acronyms. I did some work for a defence contractor once, and they needed a 120-page dictionary to list all the acronyms they used.
It's also a cooling issue. 500 kW of input power gets turned into 400 kW of heat and some light, so you need a cooling system that can dissipate 400 kW in all conditions (including equatorial desert). If you want to run the laser continuously, you need a cooling system of the size used for 50-ton lorries. Bigger, in fact, since you need to dissipate 400 kW at standstill instead of being able to count on 50 mph winds, i.e. pretty big to fit on a HMMWV.
Don't be ridiculous. I'm suggesting you spend minimal effort in switching off/sleeping/hibernating equipment you're not using. I'll bet you leave the lights (and the AC) on when you're not home, too. If you can save 20% on your electric bill with simple measures which won't affect your lifestyle at all, why not?
Here in Europe, emergency services are experimenting with RDS. The TA and TP functions can switch a car stereo from whatever source it's playing to a specific radio channel. This is currently used for traffic announcements, but if you put a transmitter in an emergency vehicle it would be able to alert the cars around it without having to resort to earthshattering noise.
NOBODY expects the Slashdot Inquisition! Our chief weapon is FUD...FUD and DDOS attacks...DDOS attacks and FUD.... Our two weapons are DDOS attacks and FUD... and ruthless bickering.... Our three weapons are DDOS attacks, FUD, and ruthless bickering...and an almost fanatical devotion to our own opinion.... Our four... no, Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as DDOS attacks, FUD... I'll come in again.
The gruesome possibility that criminals may hack off a finger has already been discounted by Hitachi's scientists. Asked if authentication could be "forged" with a severed finger, the company says: "As blood would flow out of a disconnected finger, authentication would no longer be possible."
So you'd need a contraption that feeds blood through the finger. It's an extra obstacle, but if you're desperate/psychopatic enough to sever someone's finger, rigging a blood supply is no big obstacle.
The total power usage of your house gives you no clue of what the biggest contributors are, unless you're prepared to spend a few weeks running only one appliance at a time. This data would only help to see if the energy-saving measures you're taking have worked. Get a Kill-A-Watt and take some time to learn the characteristics of your appliances. The even simpler approach would be to read the appliance's type plate or manual. Hell, any website on in-house power usage will have a list of the biggest power hogs in an average household. Start with those.
And there's another approach: spend some time observing your family. Do they leave the lights etc. on in empty rooms? Do computers run 24/7 instead of when they're needed? Are the laundry/dishwasher programs they use appropriate, or can a shorter/more economical program be used with satisfactory results?
I always believed that systems left on have a longer life span because the chips never cool down, but that can't be true for some of the computers moving parts..
I don't expect thermal stress to be a problem before the computer is ~10 years old (i.e. way after the computer has become obsolete), so you're optimising for something that has very little value at the expense of something that has significant, real and unavoidable cost (the electricity you use by keeping the computer warm when you don't need it). Please hibernate the damn things, or at least put them to sleep if you can't bear to wait 20 seconds for the computer to wake up.
It takes more than a state of mind, and you're dismissing their problems too easily.
1. The Netherlands took 1000 years or more to get where we are now. For the last 100 years, we've been continuously building major infrastructure to keep dry feet.
2. The Netherlands has money to burn (and has been in that fortunate situation for hundreds of years now). We spend on the order of the Maledives' entire GDP ($ 1.5 B) every year.
3. For a long time, land reclamation projects were extremely unambitious, no more than what a farmer and his personnel could achieve in the off-season. Each year the farmer would add another few hundred m of dikes and reclaim a patch of land. After 100 years of that, you've got quite a bit of land, but this only works if the area you're working is shallow marshes. The Maledives don't have that easy option. They would need to go for the expensive option (working directly against the ocean) immediately.
4. All of our (.nl) efforts were directed at shortening the coastline, which is easy enough if most of the area is land with low marshes in between. The Maledives would need to fortify 650 km of coastline in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, to give you an idea of the weight and height needed:
Dinorwig (a large pumped storage plant in the UK) uses 390 m^3 of water per second and has a water column of 570 m above the turbines to produce 1800 MW.
So they're using 1.4 million m^3 of water an hour.
Now a mechanical solution would work differently, but I'd be surprised if 1.4 million tons suspended at 570 m height was not within an order of magnitude for a pendulum storage system that can produce 1.8 GWh. That's quite a lot of weight to be hoisting that high.
It measures light to a precision of one part in 2,000
So that's 11 bits of intensity information? Most professional camera CCD's are 12 bits per color. Some are 14 bits per color. Doesn't sound very impressive. And with multiple exposures, it should be possible to get a much higher resolution.
14 bits is all nice and good if your light source is the local star and you can saturate your CCD within milliseconds.
We're measuring starlight here, at maybe 10 orders of magnitude less light. Try getting 14-bit resolution at that level without drowning in noise.
A similar distinction is made in the field of sound and acoustics: reverb vs. echo.
Same thing we do very night, Pinky: try to take over the world! You see, I have commissioned a company by the name of Logitech to deliver ONE BILLION mice, an army large enough to overwhelm any defence system known to man.
[ding dong]
Ah, that will be my delivery. Soon, Pinky, the world will be ours for the taking.
Crikey, Brain, these mice are kind of odd. Why are their tails so long, and what is this hard shell [toc] all around them?
Bill Gates has not just sat on his horde.
Obl Dictionary nazi: it's hoard, as in, "How many boards would the Mongols hoard if the Mongol hordes were bored?"
Does anyone know how tall that test stand is.
The Falcon 9 first stage on top of the stand is about 25 m high (I've assumed it's half the total height of the Falcon 9). The stand appears a bit over 2x as high as that first stage, so 60 m/180 ft would be my initial guess.
The great big plume of fire and smoke is impressive, but I would have preferred a pre-ignition closeup of the engine cluster.
or is it?
$0.3 per liter implies it uses 3.75 kWh per liter. At 300 watts, it takes 12.5 hours to generate a liter of water.
But TFA also claims the machine produces 12 liters of water per day, not ~2.
The Element Four site doesn't say, but the inane "3 lightbulbs" remark from the Guardian article suggests it uses 200-300 W to produce 12 liters of water per day, if the humidity is >30%. Assuming 200 W, that's 1750 kWh/year.
The site markets this to First World households. But is that where its value lies? I get potable water from the tap, and so does most of Europe (and I pay E 1/m^3 instead of $0,30/litre). IDK about the States. The site mentions a ludicrous amount of bottled water, is that because US tap water isn't potable or is it just a fad?
The locations that most need this (hot and dry climates) I guess would fail the "humidity >30%" criterium.
The site only compares its efficiency with that of "bottled water" production, but what we need would be a comparison with e.g. a desalinisation plant.
Sorry for rambling a bit, but it adds up to this: is this condensor something the world needs, or just another "a fool and his money are soon parted" scheme?
We've heard of it.
You must be new here.
For a moment, I thought Otto Hahn's family had fallen victim to a fanatic bent on turning back the clock of nuclear proliferation....
Whoever added the tag has no clue. This IS a generator.
The HMMWV predates C&C by a decade or two.
The military loves acronyms. I did some work for a defence contractor once, and they needed a 120-page dictionary to list all the acronyms they used.
It's also a cooling issue. 500 kW of input power gets turned into 400 kW of heat and some light, so you need a cooling system that can dissipate 400 kW in all conditions (including equatorial desert). If you want to run the laser continuously, you need a cooling system of the size used for 50-ton lorries. Bigger, in fact, since you need to dissipate 400 kW at standstill instead of being able to count on 50 mph winds, i.e. pretty big to fit on a HMMWV.
Don't be ridiculous. I'm suggesting you spend minimal effort in switching off/sleeping/hibernating equipment you're not using. I'll bet you leave the lights (and the AC) on when you're not home, too.
If you can save 20% on your electric bill with simple measures which won't affect your lifestyle at all, why not?
Here in Europe, emergency services are experimenting with RDS.
The TA and TP functions can switch a car stereo from whatever source it's playing to a specific radio channel. This is currently used for traffic announcements, but if you put a transmitter in an emergency vehicle it would be able to alert the cars around it without having to resort to earthshattering noise.
The energy crisis still hasn't sunk in yet, I see. You're burning scarce resources for no benefit at all.
NOBODY expects the Slashdot Inquisition! Our chief weapon is FUD...FUD and DDOS attacks...DDOS attacks and FUD....
Our two weapons are DDOS attacks and FUD... and ruthless bickering....
Our three weapons are DDOS attacks, FUD, and ruthless bickering...and an almost fanatical devotion to our own opinion....
Our four... no, Amongst our weapons... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as DDOS attacks, FUD...
I'll come in again.
The gruesome possibility that criminals may hack off a finger has already been discounted by Hitachi's scientists. Asked if authentication could be "forged" with a severed finger, the company says: "As blood would flow out of a disconnected finger, authentication would no longer be possible."
So you'd need a contraption that feeds blood through the finger. It's an extra obstacle, but if you're desperate/psychopatic enough to sever someone's finger, rigging a blood supply is no big obstacle.
The total power usage of your house gives you no clue of what the biggest contributors are, unless you're prepared to spend a few weeks running only one appliance at a time. This data would only help to see if the energy-saving measures you're taking have worked.
Get a Kill-A-Watt and take some time to learn the characteristics of your appliances. The even simpler approach would be to read the appliance's type plate or manual. Hell, any website on in-house power usage will have a list of the biggest power hogs in an average household. Start with those.
And there's another approach: spend some time observing your family. Do they leave the lights etc. on in empty rooms? Do computers run 24/7 instead of when they're needed? Are the laundry/dishwasher programs they use appropriate, or can a shorter/more economical program be used with satisfactory results?
I always believed that systems left on have a longer life span because the chips never cool down, but that can't be true for some of the computers moving parts..
I don't expect thermal stress to be a problem before the computer is ~10 years old (i.e. way after the computer has become obsolete), so you're optimising for something that has very little value at the expense of something that has significant, real and unavoidable cost (the electricity you use by keeping the computer warm when you don't need it). Please hibernate the damn things, or at least put them to sleep if you can't bear to wait 20 seconds for the computer to wake up.
go and live in a monastery?
It takes more than a state of mind, and you're dismissing their problems too easily.
1. The Netherlands took 1000 years or more to get where we are now. For the last 100 years, we've been continuously building major infrastructure to keep dry feet.
2. The Netherlands has money to burn (and has been in that fortunate situation for hundreds of years now). We spend on the order of the Maledives' entire GDP ($ 1.5 B) every year.
3. For a long time, land reclamation projects were extremely unambitious, no more than what a farmer and his personnel could achieve in the off-season. Each year the farmer would add another few hundred m of dikes and reclaim a patch of land. After 100 years of that, you've got quite a bit of land, but this only works if the area you're working is shallow marshes. The Maledives don't have that easy option. They would need to go for the expensive option (working directly against the ocean) immediately.
4. All of our (.nl) efforts were directed at shortening the coastline, which is easy enough if most of the area is land with low marshes in between. The Maledives would need to fortify 650 km of coastline in short order.