If I had any mod points left, I'd mod you insightful.
While I truly feel for these news organizations that are bleeding profit left and right. It is their inability to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and they struggle on, grasping for branches in outcroppings as they fall down the copyright cliff. Copyright is dieing, but no one want to admit it. Which of course doesn't bode well for me either as a software business owner. But, i don't make my money from the general public.
These companies all deserve to be able to try to make a profit. But, they need to take a long hard look at reality and find a better solution. I don't have it. I certainly don't want to see news "nationalized" or even worse "globalised". However, the writing is on the wall many news agencies are going to go under, and the choice of news outlets will be diminished and news reporters will become scarce. Perhaps only a few meganews corporations and some non-profit and public supported news agencies.
Most Americans want their Social Security and Unemployment benefits, and cheap sugar and other cheap foods which are subsidized by the Fed. We've got lots of socialism in America. It's just well camouflaged. Or not so well, if you actually are one of those Americans that uses your brain for something other than texting while driving. Let's not forget Americans love to have those nasty Labor Unions too.
Who ever said Humans were logical? - James Tiberius Kirk.
I'd have to recommend the ArchOS also. They have a dongle for 3G, costs extra, which can host your own SIM card. Very handy for traveling to various countries that require different SIMs.
I'm fairly certain that I could live without a cell phone, but wouldn't like it.
I am however 100% positive that I cannot live without nourishment.
Sure I could live without eating, it is just the most convenient way of nourishing my body. I could however attach a drip tube and nourish myself that way.
So eating is not a necessity, but nourishment is. Just to delineate what a necessity really is.
Few things in this world are "necessary". Many things are just "convenient".
The poster here is correct. Find yourself a criminal lawyer, because undoubtedly once this reaches a corporate level employee, you're going to be arrested. It doesn't matter whether you've done anything illegal or not. If they accuse you of violating the CFAA you're going to jail. Maybe only for a few nights or months if your lawyer can get you bail. It may be a few years before you can prove your innocence or not. Expect to spend whatever money you have fighting this. Get used to the idea of using Food Stamps and living in a rat-infested apartment, after you get out of jail.
You don't have to be guilty of anything to become a victim of the New Improved American Justice system. Nor do you have to have committed any wrongdoing to be sued. Just ask IBM about SCO, and they'll be able to enlighten you as to our wonderful legal system. Or ask B&N about Microsoft.
But, it's also possible the poster of the question is really an RIAA covert agent and this whole question has been a sting operation of the FBI, paid for by Microsoft and the RIAA, to take down all those terrible hackers on/.
On the bright side the poster may be a juvenile and will only wind up in Juvie PMITA detention as opposed to PMITA prison. Best of luck to you son. You're going to need it if you are in the US or any country where the US will get you extradited. Although, this must be a really simple hack, since the poster was dumb enough to blast the news of his hack publicly on/., even if he withheld the details. But the good news is we here on/. will get to follow the story as it gets posted and reposted over the next 10 years.;')
Well being the father of a girl scout, I can tell you it teaches girls several useful skills. Math, writing, advertising, money handling, socialization, sales skills, working in a team, etc. So, while it doesn't teach them how to produce anything, it teaches valuable skills, and selling cookies isn't the only thing they do. They do plenty of producing things too. I think it's great they got involved in doing some science with normal everyday household chemicals. Reminds me of playing with chemistry sets and making cannons out of tennis balls, rubbing alcohol, duct tape and soda cans.
But, GS do still bake cookies, or at least my girl's troop does. I know, because we did it together last spring. Yes, I'm a cookie Dad.
Well that's $15B gross profit. You have to deduct the patent fee you'd have to pay to the inventor,... uhm... discoverer, uhm... well, the guy who owns the patent on graphene. Because naturally occurring things are getting patents these days. It's all the rage. I plan to patent every single gene in my body. Profit!
I'm betting the patent fee will be somewhere around $14.99999597B.
Have to agree here. It's got to be a scam. I didn't make it past the fourth paragraph of the article before we delved into the world of pseudoscience. Heating thorium makes it "more" dense ad that's why it give off more heat? There must be a Nobel prize in there somewhere. A material that compresses when you heat it, rather than expanding. While it might, or might not, be true at a certain temperature and pressure, like the triple point or some other boundary condition, it certainly wouldn't be true in a general sense.
The article seems to point to building a laser out of thorium, and thus creating a energy cascade inside the thorium. This would produce plenty of energy, but while thorium might have the equivalent of 7500 gallons of gasoline, you couldn't extract all that energy. Just as you can't extract all the energy in a gallon of gasoline. Extracting all the energy from a material would leave it as 0 degrees Kelvin. Good luck with that one in a 500 lb engine block!
While they are correct that a single sheet of aluminum foil will block the alpha and beta radiation of thorium, you'll need a good thickness of lead to stop the gamma radiation. And if you're creating a cascade event in the thorium as a beam of energy, you're going unleash a whole mess of gamma radiation.
All that said, the idea of a thorium engine is certainly feasible. and might someday be a useful space engine. As a car engine, plausible? Irrelevant. No government is going to allow people to drive around with big, or little, piles of thorium. It would be trivial to build an accelerator device, in your storage shed, to enrich the thorium into uranium (q.v. Nuclear Boy Scout).
Actually, the plant itself sits at 1004 ft above sea level making the wall 10 ft high and they used to be less than 10 ft. So saying the water is at 3 ft up a 10 ft wall is a bit different still. But since most all of Nebraska is at 900-1000 ft above sea level, there's lots of room for the muddy Missouri to spread out rather than up. Nebraska is THE flattest state I have ever seen. Not that 10ft walls really inspire confidence in me when it comes to Nuclear power plants.
Well, that's grand plan, except for a few minor details.
1) The certificate will either have the wrong name and the browser will complain about that, or 2) they will have created certificates in the name of pretty much everyplace you want to go, which would clearly be a huge amount of work and very illegal to boot, or 3) they will create on-the-fly fake certificates which the browser will likely complain about, or you'll have funky behavior when you actually get to the real site, because the certificates won't match and the encryption won't match. 4) If they successfully fool you and take your encrypted datastream that is intended for another site, and decrypt it and send it along and forward the responses back, that would be highly criminal.
In any event your scenario is highly improbable to go undetected.
You can do the same thing with Mediacom. I bought my own modem, called up mediacom tech support, gave them my account number and they queried my modem and got the MAC address off it and that was it. But if you don't have your own modem you have to deal with all the Mediacom crap. Even before I had my own modem, I only had Linux and everything worked fine. But that was ages ago, before they started pulling all this stupid stuff. Now, I just block Mediacom from transmitting to port 80. So, when the 404s come down they tell me they can't find some wonky Mediacom url. At least I don't see the damn Mediacom pages, although Mediacom is regularly blocking some sites or just has a broken DNS., so I get some bogus 404s sometimes.
The problem here is you are using oranges to compare with apple. Most of the EVs on the market are hybrids., Tesla excepted. Secondly everyone always wants to compare the weight of a EV with the dry weight of a gasoline powered car. The gasoline actually weighs something though and some people keep their tanks full. The weight of all that gasoline and the gas engine are significant. If you remove the gas and the gas engine from the Chevy Volt you could gill up that space with batteries and wind up with an EV with many times the original capacity and a comparable weight. The Tesla is an anomaly, it's a sports car. I'm betting the Toyota Yaris isn't a sports car. I doubt you'd bet much range from a Maserati. While you may like driving 5 hours straight, and I've done more than twice that, most people stop every two to three hours for a break or whatever. Any fuel stop is likely to take several minutes. I know it takes me at least three minutes to fill my tank. I timed it once. Five minutes to charge an EV is not going to be noticeable to most people.
I didn't say I have a 7kW furnace. I have a 48,000 BTU furnace, roughly 14kW, connect to a 60A (I was wrong the twin breakers are 30A not 25A) 240V (14.4kW) service connection. I'd be surprised if my furnace ever pulled 14kWh, but it could conceivably. It might be hotter than Hell in the house if it did.
Nor did I say that I would use a single 3.5-7kW connection, in fact that was my whole point use many smaller circuits rather than one large one.
I was merely stating my existing wiring for AC and for heat can draw those amounts from a single connection existing standard home wiring scheme. Using that as a basis for determining the wiring needs, I could install ten 30 Amp, 220V circuits in a new box giving me a 600 Amp service box producing 13.2kW of charging power. That would charge a Chevy Volt, 12kWh battery in an hour. Nope, nothing wrong with my math. I simply didn't give my math. Just an overview.
The reason batteries are not affordable is because of patents.
Take the Chevy Volt for example. The EPA average range rating is 35 miles. Not open it up , pull out the the 1.x L gas engine, and replace that dead weight with 6 of the same batteries currently installed. Your pure EV now has a range of 245 miles. Thirty five miles less than my current vehicle, or at an average speed of 60 mph, four hours of driving. Pull out the gas tank and add up to 6 more batteries and your range is now up to over 420 miles or seven hours of driving. That should be enough for everyone except SPCK (Spring Break College Kids).
I say up to because I don't know the size of the battery pack used, or if you could fit 13 of them in a Volt. Not even sure 6 will fit in the engine compartment, but from pictures it seems quite certain you could get at least six in somehow. So a ~250 mile range is very doable with a modified Volt.
That's funny, I could have sworn my furnace was hooked up to a pair of 25 Amp service breakers. Here, let me check... Yep, sure 'nuff my furnace can draw up to 50 Amps right off my grid. I know some only using 40. It wouldn't take much to run 500 Amp service like that or more.
The trick is in how you set up your battery array in the vehicle, and the charging coupling. Instead of using one big 0000 cable, you run multiple 20, 30, 40, 50 amp cables. Those cables could connect to a single "connector", while still maintaining isolation. You then charge in parallel with each wire drawing no more than the amp rating, and the battery charging happens spread out over the array, in parallel. No big super hot cables or coupling devices.
This is not rocket science people. It just requires the right design on the part of the people making the cars. Drawing power from multiple smaller cables is the logical home choice. Instead of one big 80kWh battery, use twelve 7kWh batteries, or 24 3.4kWh batteries. Sure even then you won't be able to hook up and charge in 5-10 minutes. But my AC draws 3.5kWh, and my furnace draws at least twice that. So with either of the two later scenarios of batteries, I could charge a car in an hour. The time it takes me to make and eat dinner.
Lastly, on capacity, I rarely ever drive more than 2-3 hours without refueling. While stopping every hour would be an inconvenience, doubling that would have almost zero impact on most people's driving habits. So, being able to get 250-300 mile range on a charge is plenty of capacity. There was one commercial EV that had that capacity, until they pulled it from they market. So it's doable.
I don't and didn't dispute the article is wrong, only that the poster was. Silica is not the only material, nor even the most common material used today to make aerogels. You're right about the superconducting aspect. I hadn't meant to say superconducting, but rather super capacitors, a name I've seen used to describe ultracapacitors. As for the rest of your comment, I specifically said I couldn't speak for the claim of a carbon nanotube aerogel.
You claim that carbon nanotubes can never be in a gel. Never is long time. It hasn't been done, but that is not the the same as can't be done. I'm not so confident it can't be done.
However, the article may have mistaken metal doped aerogels which were used as a base to grow MWCNT for a CNT aerogel. Which is still not a CNT aerogel, but an aerogel with a CNT forest grown on it.
I'm not sure how one might go about building a CNT gel, if it is even possible, considering the only ways we know of creating CNT are not conducive to making gels. It might be possible to build CNT gels by combining CNT and fullerenes. I doubt it, but there might be a way to make CNT gels. The endpoints of CNT can host other atoms and these could be used as sites for merging into a lattice structure in a material that can gel. It is at least feasible to build a CNT gel. But the big question is why would you want to. It would invariably be weaker than building linear CNT forests, or ordinary CNT. There are no logical reasons for building one. Not because it can't be done, but that there is no benefit in doing so. It would be: 1) more time consuming, 2) more expensive, 3) weaker, 4) have less conductivity, 5) have less surface area than unordered CNT. I'm sure there are other reasons, but that should suffice.
However, it makes a lot of sense to grow CNT on aerogels.
I can't speak to the material in the article, but aerogels are made from all kinds of materials, not just silica. Silica aerogel was possibly the first aerogel. Carbon aerogels are real aerogels, and made by baking organic aerogels. They can be further altered under steam and pressure. That is the normal process for making superconducting capacitors (ultracapacitors).
Actually, most modern facilities use CO2 as the solvent, ok all, and these aerogels can be quite large. They use some in the LHC. There are some rather large manufacturing facilities making this stuff. Think in the tens of thousands of gallons and you're getting closer to the mark.
Built one way they make great ultra-capacitors. In fact aerogels are the material of choice for ultra-capacitors.
It is not difficult to dope these aerogels with metal salts. If one of these doping agents resulted in a carbon-lithium aerogel, you could fill it with an electrolyte and make highly efficient lithium batteries packed in a small space. This would be an outstanding battery for long distance batteries in automotive vehicles. Or even for aircraft.
Carbon aerogels have been doped in the past with metal salts, since the 1990s. It is only natural that soon carbon-nanotube aerogels will be doped in the same manner. Then someone will use lithium as the doping material and add an electrolyte, making the most efficient lithium battery ever. Then thirty some years from now, electric cars with 100 mile/charge batteries will be economical. After the patents expire for this obvious, but as yet unmade idea.
While the news article totally sucked, they were correct. This material has a very bright possible future in both capacitors and batteries, and of course insulation and collision devices. To think it's only taken about 80 years to realize the potential uses of aerogels.
Right, because they did such a BANG UP job with that reactor in Pennsylvania, that was really designed for New Jersey. You know Three Mile Island. Where the water boiled out because of a defective valve, and some GENIUS thought it was a good idea to but a water sensor at the bottom of the water trap (you know the exact same trap that holds water in your sink and toilet so you don't smell the decaying feces gases).
My confidence in those "nuculer" power guys is so much improved and restored knowing we are in such good hands. Nothing like that could ever happen again. I mean really what's the big deal they only had a >50% meltdown and had less than an hour to total meltdown and only one tiny hydrogen explosion. No worries, it's only Pennsylvania.
I may trust the science, it's the people building and running them I don't trust. Plus there is also the issue of what to do with a pile of radioactive waste, that you have to keep well away from lifeforms for "effectively" forever.
And your source for "around half the oil evaporated quite soon after the spill"? I've never seen oil evaporate in any timeframe I'd call soon. Of course we're talking crude oil here. So without having the assay, it's impossible to say how much of the oil evaporated. It'd be nice, if your number was right, but I suspect it's a bunch of prospective future oil in the form of the male bovine variety. I have a suspicion where you got that figure. Granted the methane evaporated, but that figure is separate from the crude figure.
But as for the article and "there's now a life killing layer of oil near the well area", all I can say is "Thank you Capt'n Obvious".
Plus I expect your analysis is very flawed. While overall the Gulf is probably going to be ok, That is not to say that area that had oil on the surface/below the surface is not going to be devastated for the next decade. History supports my theory. The Exxon Spill and the previous spill close in to Mexico. The area that was affected by the spill was some of the richest shrimping grounds in the Gulf. I predict a lot of really good bargains in the Gulf states. They might even be able to compete with Michigan soon for land value.
One thing pretty much everyone is missing is that 20-30 years from now, if no more tragedies occur the marine life in that area is going to skyrocket and be even richer than before from all the decomposed nutrient rich oil. This is also a historical fact. But what affect it has on global diversity and the long-term evolutionary scheme of things I can't say. That's the scary part. Trying to project the really long term impacts of our stupidity/greed as a species on this planet. For such intelligent creatures we do a lot of really idiotic things. You know, overall, as a species.
Unplug them. Pull out the 120VAC to DC converter. Install a $25-50 Solar panel on your roof, or wherever you have Sol access. Power the Plug PC by straight DC. End of heat problems, or add a fan where the converter was..
You could even add a modified UPS in the mix.
Come on this is/., where's all the hacker, geek solutions?
Pfft.
Then again, TFA didn't even attempt to give a solution for how to bypass the ISPs, whose wire your traffic is going to flow over. It's a temporary solution at best. Until someone builds a new network that doesn't rely on easily switched of wires. Until enough people start running their own wireless networks we are all at the mercy of those who would control.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had any mod points left, I'd mod you insightful.
While I truly feel for these news organizations that are bleeding profit left and right. It is their inability to see the light at the end of the tunnel, and they struggle on, grasping for branches in outcroppings as they fall down the copyright cliff. Copyright is dieing, but no one want to admit it. Which of course doesn't bode well for me either as a software business owner. But, i don't make my money from the general public.
These companies all deserve to be able to try to make a profit. But, they need to take a long hard look at reality and find a better solution. I don't have it. I certainly don't want to see news "nationalized" or even worse "globalised". However, the writing is on the wall many news agencies are going to go under, and the choice of news outlets will be diminished and news reporters will become scarce. Perhaps only a few meganews corporations and some non-profit and public supported news agencies.
And of course numerous small hometown papers.
Most Americans want their Social Security and Unemployment benefits, and cheap sugar and other cheap foods which are subsidized by the Fed. We've got lots of socialism in America. It's just well camouflaged. Or not so well, if you actually are one of those Americans that uses your brain for something other than texting while driving. Let's not forget Americans love to have those nasty Labor Unions too.
Who ever said Humans were logical? - James Tiberius Kirk.
That would be barratry, not barristry.
Barratry is the practice of filing frivolous and baseless lawsuits in an attempt to harass and extort.
Barristry is something quite different.
I'd have to recommend the ArchOS also. They have a dongle for 3G, costs extra, which can host your own SIM card. Very handy for traveling to various countries that require different SIMs.
Thank you Captain Obvious!
I realize this is /., but really how is this news?
Solar storms can interfere with radio signals, who knew?
Oh, anyone who ever paid attention in middle school science class.
And this on a supposedly geek "newsite".
Sheesh!
I'm fairly certain that I could live without a cell phone, but wouldn't like it.
I am however 100% positive that I cannot live without nourishment.
Sure I could live without eating, it is just the most convenient way of nourishing my body.
I could however attach a drip tube and nourish myself that way.
So eating is not a necessity, but nourishment is. Just to delineate what a necessity really is.
Few things in this world are "necessary". Many things are just "convenient".
The poster here is correct. Find yourself a criminal lawyer, because undoubtedly once this reaches a corporate level employee, you're going to be arrested. It doesn't matter whether you've done anything illegal or not. If they accuse you of violating the CFAA you're going to jail. Maybe only for a few nights or months if your lawyer can get you bail. It may be a few years before you can prove your innocence or not. Expect to spend whatever money you have fighting this. Get used to the idea of using Food Stamps and living in a rat-infested apartment, after you get out of jail.
You don't have to be guilty of anything to become a victim of the New Improved American Justice system.
Nor do you have to have committed any wrongdoing to be sued. Just ask IBM about SCO, and they'll be able to enlighten you as to our wonderful legal system.
Or ask B&N about Microsoft.
But, it's also possible the poster of the question is really an RIAA covert agent and this whole question has been a sting operation of the FBI, paid for by Microsoft and the RIAA, to take down all those terrible hackers on /.
On the bright side the poster may be a juvenile and will only wind up in Juvie PMITA detention as opposed to PMITA prison. /., even if he withheld the details. But the good news is we here on /. will get to follow the story as it gets posted and reposted over the next 10 years. ;')
Best of luck to you son. You're going to need it if you are in the US or any country where the US will get you extradited.
Although, this must be a really simple hack, since the poster was dumb enough to blast the news of his hack publicly on
Well being the father of a girl scout, I can tell you it teaches girls several useful skills. Math, writing, advertising, money handling, socialization, sales skills, working in a team, etc. So, while it doesn't teach them how to produce anything, it teaches valuable skills, and selling cookies isn't the only thing they do. They do plenty of producing things too. I think it's great they got involved in doing some science with normal everyday household chemicals. Reminds me of playing with chemistry sets and making cannons out of tennis balls, rubbing alcohol, duct tape and soda cans.
But, GS do still bake cookies, or at least my girl's troop does. I know, because we did it together last spring. Yes, I'm a cookie Dad.
Well that's $15B gross profit. You have to deduct the patent fee you'd have to pay to the inventor, ... uhm ... discoverer, uhm ... well, the guy who owns the patent on graphene. Because naturally occurring things are getting patents these days. It's all the rage. I plan to patent every single gene in my body. Profit!
I'm betting the patent fee will be somewhere around $14.99999597B.
Have to agree here. It's got to be a scam. I didn't make it past the fourth paragraph of the article before we delved into the world of pseudoscience. Heating thorium makes it "more" dense ad that's why it give off more heat? There must be a Nobel prize in there somewhere. A material that compresses when you heat it, rather than expanding. While it might, or might not, be true at a certain temperature and pressure, like the triple point or some other boundary condition, it certainly wouldn't be true in a general sense.
The article seems to point to building a laser out of thorium, and thus creating a energy cascade inside the thorium. This would produce plenty of energy, but while thorium might have the equivalent of 7500 gallons of gasoline, you couldn't extract all that energy. Just as you can't extract all the energy in a gallon of gasoline. Extracting all the energy from a material would leave it as 0 degrees Kelvin. Good luck with that one in a 500 lb engine block!
While they are correct that a single sheet of aluminum foil will block the alpha and beta radiation of thorium, you'll need a good thickness of lead to stop the gamma radiation. And if you're creating a cascade event in the thorium as a beam of energy, you're going unleash a whole mess of gamma radiation.
All that said, the idea of a thorium engine is certainly feasible. and might someday be a useful space engine. As a car engine, plausible? Irrelevant. No government is going to allow people to drive around with big, or little, piles of thorium. It would be trivial to build an accelerator device, in your storage shed, to enrich the thorium into uranium (q.v. Nuclear Boy Scout).
Actually, the plant itself sits at 1004 ft above sea level making the wall 10 ft high and they used to be less than 10 ft. So saying the water is at 3 ft up a 10 ft wall is a bit different still. But since most all of Nebraska is at 900-1000 ft above sea level, there's lots of room for the muddy Missouri to spread out rather than up. Nebraska is THE flattest state I have ever seen. Not that 10ft walls really inspire confidence in me when it comes to Nuclear power plants.
Actually, you can use your own DNS servers. I've done it in the past.
Well, that's grand plan, except for a few minor details.
1) The certificate will either have the wrong name and the browser will complain about that, or
2) they will have created certificates in the name of pretty much everyplace you want to go, which would clearly be a huge amount of work and very illegal to boot, or
3) they will create on-the-fly fake certificates which the browser will likely complain about, or you'll have funky behavior when you actually get to the real site, because the certificates won't match and the encryption won't match.
4) If they successfully fool you and take your encrypted datastream that is intended for another site, and decrypt it and send it along and forward the responses back, that would be highly criminal.
In any event your scenario is highly improbable to go undetected.
You can do the same thing with Mediacom. I bought my own modem, called up mediacom tech support, gave them my account number and they queried my modem and got the MAC address off it and that was it. But if you don't have your own modem you have to deal with all the Mediacom crap. Even before I had my own modem, I only had Linux and everything worked fine. But that was ages ago, before they started pulling all this stupid stuff. Now, I just block Mediacom from transmitting to port 80. So, when the 404s come down they tell me they can't find some wonky Mediacom url. At least I don't see the damn Mediacom pages, although Mediacom is regularly blocking some sites or just has a broken DNS., so I get some bogus 404s sometimes.
I simply block any web traffic on port 80 from Mediacom.
The problem here is you are using oranges to compare with apple. Most of the EVs on the market are hybrids., Tesla excepted. Secondly everyone always wants to compare the weight of a EV with the dry weight of a gasoline powered car. The gasoline actually weighs something though and some people keep their tanks full. The weight of all that gasoline and the gas engine are significant. If you remove the gas and the gas engine from the Chevy Volt you could gill up that space with batteries and wind up with an EV with many times the original capacity and a comparable weight. The Tesla is an anomaly, it's a sports car. I'm betting the Toyota Yaris isn't a sports car. I doubt you'd bet much range from a Maserati. While you may like driving 5 hours straight, and I've done more than twice that, most people stop every two to three hours for a break or whatever. Any fuel stop is likely to take several minutes. I know it takes me at least three minutes to fill my tank. I timed it once. Five minutes to charge an EV is not going to be noticeable to most people.
I didn't say I have a 7kW furnace. I have a 48,000 BTU furnace, roughly 14kW, connect to a 60A (I was wrong the twin breakers are 30A not 25A) 240V (14.4kW) service connection. I'd be surprised if my furnace ever pulled 14kWh, but it could conceivably. It might be hotter than Hell in the house if it did.
Nor did I say that I would use a single 3.5-7kW connection, in fact that was my whole point use many smaller circuits rather than one large one.
I was merely stating my existing wiring for AC and for heat can draw those amounts from a single connection existing standard home wiring scheme. Using that as a basis for determining the wiring needs, I could install ten 30 Amp, 220V circuits in a new box giving me a 600 Amp service box producing 13.2kW of charging power. That would charge a Chevy Volt, 12kWh battery in an hour. Nope, nothing wrong with my math. I simply didn't give my math. Just an overview.
The reason batteries are not affordable is because of patents.
Take the Chevy Volt for example. The EPA average range rating is 35 miles. Not open it up , pull out the the 1.x L gas engine, and replace that dead weight with 6 of the same batteries currently installed. Your pure EV now has a range of 245 miles. Thirty five miles less than my current vehicle, or at an average speed of 60 mph, four hours of driving. Pull out the gas tank and add up to 6 more batteries and your range is now up to over 420 miles or seven hours of driving. That should be enough for everyone except SPCK (Spring Break College Kids).
I say up to because I don't know the size of the battery pack used, or if you could fit 13 of them in a Volt. Not even sure 6 will fit in the engine compartment, but from pictures it seems quite certain you could get at least six in somehow. So a ~250 mile range is very doable with a modified Volt.
That's funny, I could have sworn my furnace was hooked up to a pair of 25 Amp service breakers. Here, let me check ... Yep, sure 'nuff my furnace can draw up to 50 Amps right off my grid. I know some only using 40. It wouldn't take much to run 500 Amp service like that or more.
The trick is in how you set up your battery array in the vehicle, and the charging coupling. Instead of using one big 0000 cable, you run multiple 20, 30, 40, 50 amp cables. Those cables could connect to a single "connector", while still maintaining isolation. You then charge in parallel with each wire drawing no more than the amp rating, and the battery charging happens spread out over the array, in parallel. No big super hot cables or coupling devices.
This is not rocket science people. It just requires the right design on the part of the people making the cars. Drawing power from multiple smaller cables is the logical home choice. Instead of one big 80kWh battery, use twelve 7kWh batteries, or 24 3.4kWh batteries. Sure even then you won't be able to hook up and charge in 5-10 minutes. But my AC draws 3.5kWh, and my furnace draws at least twice that. So with either of the two later scenarios of batteries, I could charge a car in an hour. The time it takes me to make and eat dinner.
Lastly, on capacity, I rarely ever drive more than 2-3 hours without refueling. While stopping every hour would be an inconvenience, doubling that would have almost zero impact on most people's driving habits. So, being able to get 250-300 mile range on a charge is plenty of capacity. There was one commercial EV that had that capacity, until they pulled it from they market. So it's doable.
I don't and didn't dispute the article is wrong, only that the poster was. Silica is not the only material, nor even the most common material used today to make aerogels. You're right about the superconducting aspect. I hadn't meant to say superconducting, but rather super capacitors, a name I've seen used to describe ultracapacitors. As for the rest of your comment, I specifically said I couldn't speak for the claim of a carbon nanotube aerogel.
You claim that carbon nanotubes can never be in a gel. Never is long time. It hasn't been done, but that is not the the same as can't be done. I'm not so confident it can't be done.
However, the article may have mistaken metal doped aerogels which were used as a base to grow MWCNT for a CNT aerogel. Which is still not a CNT aerogel, but an aerogel with a CNT forest grown on it.
I'm not sure how one might go about building a CNT gel, if it is even possible, considering the only ways we know of creating CNT are not conducive to making gels. It might be possible to build CNT gels by combining CNT and fullerenes. I doubt it, but there might be a way to make CNT gels. The endpoints of CNT can host other atoms and these could be used as sites for merging into a lattice structure in a material that can gel. It is at least feasible to build a CNT gel. But the big question is why would you want to. It would invariably be weaker than building linear CNT forests, or ordinary CNT. There are no logical reasons for building one. Not because it can't be done, but that there is no benefit in doing so. It would be:
1) more time consuming,
2) more expensive,
3) weaker,
4) have less conductivity,
5) have less surface area than unordered CNT.
I'm sure there are other reasons, but that should suffice.
However, it makes a lot of sense to grow CNT on aerogels.
I can't speak to the material in the article, but aerogels are made from all kinds of materials, not just silica. Silica aerogel was possibly the first aerogel. Carbon aerogels are real aerogels, and made by baking organic aerogels. They can be further altered under steam and pressure. That is the normal process for making superconducting capacitors (ultracapacitors).
Actually, most modern facilities use CO2 as the solvent, ok all, and these aerogels can be quite large. They use some in the LHC. There are some rather large manufacturing facilities making this stuff. Think in the tens of thousands of gallons and you're getting closer to the mark.
Built one way they make great ultra-capacitors. In fact aerogels are the material of choice for ultra-capacitors.
It is not difficult to dope these aerogels with metal salts. If one of these doping agents resulted in a carbon-lithium aerogel, you could fill it with an electrolyte and make highly efficient lithium batteries packed in a small space. This would be an outstanding battery for long distance batteries in automotive vehicles. Or even for aircraft.
Carbon aerogels have been doped in the past with metal salts, since the 1990s. It is only natural that soon carbon-nanotube aerogels will be doped in the same manner. Then someone will use lithium as the doping material and add an electrolyte, making the most efficient lithium battery ever. Then thirty some years from now, electric cars with 100 mile/charge batteries will be economical. After the patents expire for this obvious, but as yet unmade idea.
While the news article totally sucked, they were correct. This material has a very bright possible future in both capacitors and batteries, and of course insulation and collision devices. To think it's only taken about 80 years to realize the potential uses of aerogels.
Right, because they did such a BANG UP job with that reactor in Pennsylvania, that was really designed for New Jersey. You know Three Mile Island. Where the water boiled out because of a defective valve, and some GENIUS thought it was a good idea to but a water sensor at the bottom of the water trap (you know the exact same trap that holds water in your sink and toilet so you don't smell the decaying feces gases).
My confidence in those "nuculer" power guys is so much improved and restored knowing we are in such good hands. Nothing like that could ever happen again. I mean really what's the big deal they only had a >50% meltdown and had less than an hour to total meltdown and only one tiny hydrogen explosion. No worries, it's only Pennsylvania.
I may trust the science, it's the people building and running them I don't trust. Plus there is also the issue of what to do with a pile of radioactive waste, that you have to keep well away from lifeforms for "effectively" forever.
And your source for "around half the oil evaporated quite soon after the spill"? I've never seen oil evaporate in any timeframe I'd call soon. Of course we're talking crude oil here. So without having the assay, it's impossible to say how much of the oil evaporated. It'd be nice, if your number was right, but I suspect it's a bunch of prospective future oil in the form of the male bovine variety. I have a suspicion where you got that figure. Granted the methane evaporated, but that figure is separate from the crude figure.
But as for the article and "there's now a life killing layer of oil near the well area", all I can say is "Thank you Capt'n Obvious".
Plus I expect your analysis is very flawed. While overall the Gulf is probably going to be ok, That is not to say that area that had oil on the surface/below the surface is not going to be devastated for the next decade. History supports my theory. The Exxon Spill and the previous spill close in to Mexico. The area that was affected by the spill was some of the richest shrimping grounds in the Gulf. I predict a lot of really good bargains in the Gulf states. They might even be able to compete with Michigan soon for land value.
One thing pretty much everyone is missing is that 20-30 years from now, if no more tragedies occur the marine life in that area is going to skyrocket and be even richer than before from all the decomposed nutrient rich oil. This is also a historical fact. But what affect it has on global diversity and the long-term evolutionary scheme of things I can't say. That's the scary part. Trying to project the really long term impacts of our stupidity/greed as a species on this planet. For such intelligent creatures we do a lot of really idiotic things. You know, overall, as a species.
Unplug them. Pull out the 120VAC to DC converter. Install a $25-50 Solar panel on your roof, or wherever you have Sol access. Power the Plug PC by straight DC. End of heat problems, or add a fan where the converter was..
You could even add a modified UPS in the mix.
Come on this is /., where's all the hacker, geek solutions?
Pfft.
Then again, TFA didn't even attempt to give a solution for how to bypass the ISPs, whose wire your traffic is going to flow over.
It's a temporary solution at best. Until someone builds a new network that doesn't rely on easily switched of wires. Until enough people start running their own wireless networks we are all at the mercy of those who would control.