> Depends, most buses are more wasteful then if everyone on the bus drove an efficient car instead.
Is this actually true? Has anyone done a study on this? It seemed to me to have some merit, as every weekday I follow home (on a 48 MPG (measured) motorcycle) one of those nearly empty huge articulated diesel buses, but anecdotal evidence isn't sufficient. It'd be interesting to see a summary of total fuel use per passenger mile of the bus system. I've never seen anything like that, though.
> Actually, the hot setup would be hydrogen created from solar energy captured on top of your garage (which can always be backed up from the grid on cloudy days). One still needs a distribution system for people taking long trips, but it doesn't need to cover most usage.
Although I don't have the numbers on this, (it should be straightforward to calculate) I suspect that there isn't enough roof area on the average home to create anywhere near enough hydrogen for the average commuter. That's why most hydrogen car scenarios postulate some kind of centralized, cheap source of lots and lots of electricity. Solar panels would *help*, but the great majority of your electricity would still come from the grid. That's why it's important to consider where your electricity is coming from.
Re:More than scientific learning
on
LHC Success!
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· Score: 1
> My only question is, when the smoke clears and we're all fine, will the doomsayers ever learn for
> the next time? Probably not. I'm sure next time they'll say
> "this time, its different, the world is really going to end this time".
An astute observation that could apply to many fields.
Be careful of that. It's important not to confuse point emission with total emissions. Hydrogen has to be made by some process and then transported some distance, and the total emission footprint depends on how this is accomplished.
It takes electricity to create hydrogen, and (I just looked this up) just under 50% of our electricity comes from coal, and only about 7% from hydroelectric, so in most cases you're trading one type of pollution for another. It might be a good trade, because of economies of scale, but you still have to consider transportation, and the fact that hydrogen bulks more than fossil fuels -- a tanker truck can't hold as much energy in hydrogen as it can energy in petrol, so there has to be more trucks for a given energy requirement, which tends to drag down the benefits. The further you are from the source, the worse this becomes.
Hydrogen, essentially, isn't an energy source, it's a way to move energy around. This is because very little raw hydrogen exists naturally on Earth -- it has to be made somehow, and the best you can do is get slightly less energy out of it than the energy used to make it. If the energy used to make it is from a high pollution source, all you've done is move the pollution somewhere else.
To make hydrogen viable as a "friendly" fuel, you need to start with cheap, plentiful, low-footprint electricity to create hydrogen, and then have a way to get it to the pumps efficiently. It almost seems like we should stick with electric cars because the distribution network already exists. But I can see where hydrogen would probably be more practical for long trips, and the recharge time is much shorter.
The hot setup would be hydrogen created by fusion plants powered by deuterium from seawater, (a reaction we can not sustain yet) and transported via pipeline (which does not currently exist). But who knows -- maybe the existence of hydrogen vehicles will drive the need for a cheap source and cheap delivery.
I think it's positive that you're trying to see the whole picture instead of just the point emissions. How the materials will be recycled is a good start.
You should probably also try to find out the total manufacturing footprint, including how the materials are produced and how far they travel. For instance, if materials are mined in Canada, manufactured in China, assembled in Japan and sold in America, that constitutes a larger total footprint over the life of the vehicle than vehicles manufactured from more local materials.
If it's an electric car, how is electricity produced in your area? Hydro, coal, natural gas, renewable? What is the environmental impact of the electricity you're using? If hydro, what impact to river ecosystems? If coal, what of emissions? Don't forget to take transmission losses into account.
If a hybrid, you should look at what kind of driving you do. Hybrids have a clear advantage in stop-and-go traffic, but lose advantage at high speed over significant time. If most of your driving is on unobstructed freeway, you might consider a small conventional car instead.
What happens when the batteries are starting to go, but aren't yet at the point where you need to replace them? It seems like the engine would have to run longer, or start and stop more often, which probably affects gas mileage. So, over time, the in-town mileage of your hybrid will probably drop. How much I can't say, it depends on the design.
Good luck. The results might make interesting reading.
> You built it yourself. Why would you be taking it to a repair shop?
Because... it doesn't work? Because you've botched the ignition or torqued the steering improperly or pinched a wire somewhere?
> And what is with the can't do attitude? A constant theme on/. is the "anti-science" or "anti-intelligence" attitude in the US. Why is an "anti-ability to bolt a few parts together" attitude any better?
Oh, there's obviously going to be many successes. Lots of people have successfully built kit cars -- the AC Cobra replicas, Lotus Seven, etc. I'm not disputing that people who put together kit cars couldn't do this. I'm wondering aloud if this is a way to solve the carbon footprint of construction. I'm having a difficult time believing that the kind of person who wants to build a car to reduce their carbon footprint is the same kind of person who builds a Pagano in his garage.
Re:Ugly.. Hybrid.. Motorcycle.. with Safety Issues
on
DIY Hybrid Car Kit
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· Score: 1
- Small shaft drive motorcycle IC engine.
Very good ideas, but are you sure of this one? My impression was that the real fuel economy of a hybrid is the use of an Atkinson cycle engine. I'm thinking a motorcycle engine will significantly cut into your fuel economy. It (Otto engines in general) provides power you don't need at a cost the design can't afford.
> At least that way repair shops won't have to be all confused about fixing the new technology [...]
Yeah, they can be all confused trying to figure out what the user has done to the thing.
Let's take an example we can relate to. A company advertises that they can send you the parts to a PC and directions on putting it together. Many of the unwashed public take advantage of this. Local nerdshops are inundated with half-assed assembly jobs, and the natives get really unfriendly when they're told that the best thing to do is junk it as a bad investment and buy an assembled car, er, PC off the lot, er shelf.
One could argue that this deal is for people who know what they're doing. I submit that this is not exactly true -- it's for people with $25,000 who *think* they know what they're doing.
>> Considering open access to ad-free shows and
>> movies via BitTorrent, is Amazon's service too
>> pricey?
> When compared to that, anything is too pricy, if you ignore the potential legal hassles.
Not at all. For example, $19 for a CD is too much. I will not purchase any CD for that price. I'm more likely to pay $6.99 for a CD, (used) and even more likely to pay 89 cents per song for the songs I want.
With a few minutes research, I can almost always find the title I want for a price I'm willing to pay. For the stuff that's not available for a reasonable price, wait a month or so and it pops up on the used market. (This assumes you can resist the temptation to be first on your block to own a new title.)
Under those circumstances, piracy is unnecessary and unappealing because the price is in line with the customer's perception of value. When price is forced to be substantially above perceived value, piracy becomes more attractive. I firmly believe it's not about balancing the potential of legal hassle against getting something for free, it's about paying a fair price. And $19 for 9 songs, 7 of which are filler, is not a fair price.
There's always going to be a hardcore group that pirates music for the challenge or excitement or just because they can. That yields good stories for the press but (going out on a limb here,) doesn't have a measurable effect on the bottom line. When the rank and file think they're being skinned, (...and perception is everything...) that's when piracy is more likely to happen in monetarily significant numbers. Especially since the hardcores have developed all those nice tools in the meantime.:-)
There's still part of me that suspects that half the people here will change their handle and adopt new arguments when global temperature starts dropping. Stay tuned.
Potting boards is common in military applications. But it makes 'em harder than heck to repair.
If it's just a coating, you can sometimes scrape it off enough to put in a new component, and then pot over it. The potting residue makes it difficult to solder and trying to remove it puts the traces and pads at risk. Nasty, but can be done.
But if it's completely potted, like a brick in which you can dimly see components, when it fails you just throw it away. No point in trying to fix it.
In your case, you have to ask yourself things like how you're going to replace the bios battery.
I'm as quick to slam the government as anyone, but I did not get the impression that big brother is specifying what parts of the internet are essential. Rather, they're saying that a reasonable person would consider these features essential, a measuring stick used by governments for everything from boundry disputes to self defense.
In this particular case, I happen to agree. Without flash and java, a lot of sites will not work. A reasonable person would not consider that "all parts of the internet". Apple's marketing got carried away, and they deserved to be spanked.
I've also noticed that larger IT departments don't necessarily mean better service. The problem with this observation is that management is likely to conclude the inverse is also true -- that the way to keep performance high is to run "lean and mean" (translation: overworked and pissed off) and depend on high pressure and constant threats of outsourcing to raise performance levels. What they actually get is "brain drain" (only the untalented and timid remain at the job) and a rat's nest of off-the-cuff solutions. Eventually the company has to lower it's IT expectations or outsource to some three-letter company and suffer through a major transition. But I digress.
I had the opportunity once of working for a utility in a major metropolitan area that had two competing power companies -- gas and electricity. Both had the usual Winders/*NIX/BigIron mix. The one I worked for (I won't say which) used the "lean and mean" approach (see above) which meant the more talented and/or energetic of us were pretty much in constant interview mode.
And so, at one point I had a rare opportunity to interview with the competition, and learned a few things. I say rare because attrition was practically non-existent. The IT budget of our competitors was -- I kid you not -- an order of magnitude larger than ours, with at least three times the personnel. Amazingly, the expected service level was about the same. At first, I thought, "what a waste" and took some pride in the fact that my group had been able to do as much with far less. But then I noticed a few things at this other company. Attrition was extremely low. Talented people stayed at the job and seemed happy about it. Outages were much rarer and more easily dealt with. They actually had an on-call rotation and a DR plan. Stress was way lower. They ended up not hiring me (too much competition for one seat) but the interview was a thought-provoking experience.
It was interesting seeing, for the first time, an IT position that was just a job, and not a continuous, grinding ordeal. It gave me higher goals in subsequent job searches.
I'm not saying that bigger is necessarily better. I guess I'm saying that you have to be "big enough" to provide a sustainable level of service -- to have the headroom for planning and organization, to keep adequate track of your service contract costs and equipment rotation, and enough spare cycles and budget to put emergency procedures in place. Whether your big, adequately funded IT organization can actually do this is a direct function of leadership -- else all you get is the same morass with more time to play and more toys to play with.
The issue is not just that the tires break loose and cause damage to natural reefs, although that's the major problem. Besides that, the tires themselves contain toxins that are damaging to sea life. Another learning from the Florida disaster is that marine life doesn't attach well to old tires anyway, even when they're filled with concrete so they don't wander.
You're right, I was talking about the Florida disaster, but if you go here and skip down to "South Asia mess", it's apparent that Indonesia is just now discovering that this is a bad idea. Florida got a decade head start and had an opportunity to see the consequences earlier.
I won't belabor the point. This is not really about man-made reefs, it's about our natural tendency to want to take action in a crisis, which is laudable, with expensive, inadequately tested solutions, which is not.
More info on Osborne Reef can be found here and here.
> Have they realized Vista is an O/S about nothing?
Now that would be a cool commercial.
They really missed an opportunity, though, not going with Jeff Foxworthy. "You know you're a redneck when you buy a computer 'cause the view is better than out your front winder."
Slashdot Mirror
> Depends, most buses are more wasteful then if everyone on the bus drove an efficient car instead.
Is this actually true? Has anyone done a study on this? It seemed to me to have some merit, as every weekday I follow home (on a 48 MPG (measured) motorcycle) one of those nearly empty huge articulated diesel buses, but anecdotal evidence isn't sufficient. It'd be interesting to see a summary of total fuel use per passenger mile of the bus system. I've never seen anything like that, though.
> Actually, the hot setup would be hydrogen created from solar energy captured on top of your garage (which can always be backed up from the grid on cloudy days). One still needs a distribution system for people taking long trips, but it doesn't need to cover most usage.
Although I don't have the numbers on this, (it should be straightforward to calculate) I suspect that there isn't enough roof area on the average home to create anywhere near enough hydrogen for the average commuter. That's why most hydrogen car scenarios postulate some kind of centralized, cheap source of lots and lots of electricity. Solar panels would *help*, but the great majority of your electricity would still come from the grid. That's why it's important to consider where your electricity is coming from.
> My only question is, when the smoke clears and we're all fine, will the doomsayers ever learn for
> the next time? Probably not. I'm sure next time they'll say
> "this time, its different, the world is really going to end this time".
An astute observation that could apply to many fields.
Be careful of that. It's important not to confuse point emission with total emissions. Hydrogen has to be made by some process and then transported some distance, and the total emission footprint depends on how this is accomplished.
It takes electricity to create hydrogen, and (I just looked this up) just under 50% of our electricity comes from coal, and only about 7% from hydroelectric, so in most cases you're trading one type of pollution for another. It might be a good trade, because of economies of scale, but you still have to consider transportation, and the fact that hydrogen bulks more than fossil fuels -- a tanker truck can't hold as much energy in hydrogen as it can energy in petrol, so there has to be more trucks for a given energy requirement, which tends to drag down the benefits. The further you are from the source, the worse this becomes.
Hydrogen, essentially, isn't an energy source, it's a way to move energy around. This is because very little raw hydrogen exists naturally on Earth -- it has to be made somehow, and the best you can do is get slightly less energy out of it than the energy used to make it. If the energy used to make it is from a high pollution source, all you've done is move the pollution somewhere else.
To make hydrogen viable as a "friendly" fuel, you need to start with cheap, plentiful, low-footprint electricity to create hydrogen, and then have a way to get it to the pumps efficiently. It almost seems like we should stick with electric cars because the distribution network already exists. But I can see where hydrogen would probably be more practical for long trips, and the recharge time is much shorter.
The hot setup would be hydrogen created by fusion plants powered by deuterium from seawater, (a reaction we can not sustain yet) and transported via pipeline (which does not currently exist). But who knows -- maybe the existence of hydrogen vehicles will drive the need for a cheap source and cheap delivery.
> Maybe dumping them in a remote country or island will solve part of the problem.
No no no. Artificial reefs!
I think it's positive that you're trying to see the whole picture instead of just the point emissions. How the materials will be recycled is a good start.
You should probably also try to find out the total manufacturing footprint, including how the materials are produced and how far they travel. For instance, if materials are mined in Canada, manufactured in China, assembled in Japan and sold in America, that constitutes a larger total footprint over the life of the vehicle than vehicles manufactured from more local materials.
If it's an electric car, how is electricity produced in your area? Hydro, coal, natural gas, renewable? What is the environmental impact of the electricity you're using? If hydro, what impact to river ecosystems? If coal, what of emissions? Don't forget to take transmission losses into account.
If a hybrid, you should look at what kind of driving you do. Hybrids have a clear advantage in stop-and-go traffic, but lose advantage at high speed over significant time. If most of your driving is on unobstructed freeway, you might consider a small conventional car instead.
What happens when the batteries are starting to go, but aren't yet at the point where you need to replace them? It seems like the engine would have to run longer, or start and stop more often, which probably affects gas mileage. So, over time, the in-town mileage of your hybrid will probably drop. How much I can't say, it depends on the design.
Good luck. The results might make interesting reading.
> You built it yourself. Why would you be taking it to a repair shop?
Because... it doesn't work? Because you've botched the ignition or torqued the steering improperly or pinched a wire somewhere?
> And what is with the can't do attitude? A constant theme on /. is the "anti-science" or "anti-intelligence" attitude in the US. Why is an "anti-ability to bolt a few parts together" attitude any better?
Oh, there's obviously going to be many successes. Lots of people have successfully built kit cars -- the AC Cobra replicas, Lotus Seven, etc. I'm not disputing that people who put together kit cars couldn't do this. I'm wondering aloud if this is a way to solve the carbon footprint of construction. I'm having a difficult time believing that the kind of person who wants to build a car to reduce their carbon footprint is the same kind of person who builds a Pagano in his garage.
- Small shaft drive motorcycle IC engine.
Very good ideas, but are you sure of this one? My impression was that the real fuel economy of a hybrid is the use of an Atkinson cycle engine. I'm thinking a motorcycle engine will significantly cut into your fuel economy. It (Otto engines in general) provides power you don't need at a cost the design can't afford.
(But the rest is brilliant.)
> At least that way repair shops won't have to be all confused about fixing the new technology [...]
Yeah, they can be all confused trying to figure out what the user has done to the thing.
Let's take an example we can relate to. A company advertises that they can send you the parts to a PC and directions on putting it together. Many of the unwashed public take advantage of this. Local nerdshops are inundated with half-assed assembly jobs, and the natives get really unfriendly when they're told that the best thing to do is junk it as a bad investment and buy an assembled car, er, PC off the lot, er shelf.
One could argue that this deal is for people who know what they're doing. I submit that this is not exactly true -- it's for people with $25,000 who *think* they know what they're doing.
We can put out crappy ads that make no sense and still own most of the market.
Sigh. True, too.
> What's the difference between a Mac and PC besides the operating system?
Price.
>> Considering open access to ad-free shows and
>> movies via BitTorrent, is Amazon's service too
>> pricey?
> When compared to that, anything is too pricy, if you ignore the potential legal hassles.
Not at all. For example, $19 for a CD is too much. I will not purchase any CD for that price. I'm more likely to pay $6.99 for a CD, (used) and even more likely to pay 89 cents per song for the songs I want.
With a few minutes research, I can almost always find the title I want for a price I'm willing to pay. For the stuff that's not available for a reasonable price, wait a month or so and it pops up on the used market. (This assumes you can resist the temptation to be first on your block to own a new title.)
Under those circumstances, piracy is unnecessary and unappealing because the price is in line with the customer's perception of value. When price is forced to be substantially above perceived value, piracy becomes more attractive. I firmly believe it's not about balancing the potential of legal hassle against getting something for free, it's about paying a fair price. And $19 for 9 songs, 7 of which are filler, is not a fair price.
There's always going to be a hardcore group that pirates music for the challenge or excitement or just because they can. That yields good stories for the press but (going out on a limb here,) doesn't have a measurable effect on the bottom line. When the rank and file think they're being skinned, (...and perception is everything...) that's when piracy is more likely to happen in monetarily significant numbers. Especially since the hardcores have developed all those nice tools in the meantime. :-)
There's still part of me that suspects that half the people here will change their handle and adopt new arguments when global temperature starts dropping. Stay tuned.
Potting boards is common in military applications. But it makes 'em harder than heck to repair.
If it's just a coating, you can sometimes scrape it off enough to put in a new component, and then pot over it. The potting residue makes it difficult to solder and trying to remove it puts the traces and pads at risk. Nasty, but can be done.
But if it's completely potted, like a brick in which you can dimly see components, when it fails you just throw it away. No point in trying to fix it.
In your case, you have to ask yourself things like how you're going to replace the bios battery.
> It'll be interesting to see how this dovetails with any effort to create Red Flag Linux to move away from the Wintel-opoly.
Except they don't need to move away from the Wintel-opoly. The cost of Windows in China is essentially the cost of media.
When Windows is free, there's not much motivation to explore alternatives.
>Frankly, living in the deep south, I appreciated the break this year, although it probably means we're in for a bitter winter.
That prediction has my vote. I'm putting in extra firewood this year.
Never mind. It was a lot funnier in my head.
I'm as quick to slam the government as anyone, but I did not get the impression that big brother is specifying what parts of the internet are essential. Rather, they're saying that a reasonable person would consider these features essential, a measuring stick used by governments for everything from boundry disputes to self defense.
In this particular case, I happen to agree. Without flash and java, a lot of sites will not work. A reasonable person would not consider that "all parts of the internet". Apple's marketing got carried away, and they deserved to be spanked.
> And what about the cows at the equator?
They spin like tops. That's where we get butter from.
I've also noticed that larger IT departments don't necessarily mean better service. The problem with this observation is that management is likely to conclude the inverse is also true -- that the way to keep performance high is to run "lean and mean" (translation: overworked and pissed off) and depend on high pressure and constant threats of outsourcing to raise performance levels. What they actually get is "brain drain" (only the untalented and timid remain at the job) and a rat's nest of off-the-cuff solutions. Eventually the company has to lower it's IT expectations or outsource to some three-letter company and suffer through a major transition. But I digress.
I had the opportunity once of working for a utility in a major metropolitan area that had two competing power companies -- gas and electricity. Both had the usual Winders/*NIX/BigIron mix. The one I worked for (I won't say which) used the "lean and mean" approach (see above) which meant the more talented and/or energetic of us were pretty much in constant interview mode.
And so, at one point I had a rare opportunity to interview with the competition, and learned a few things. I say rare because attrition was practically non-existent. The IT budget of our competitors was -- I kid you not -- an order of magnitude larger than ours, with at least three times the personnel. Amazingly, the expected service level was about the same. At first, I thought, "what a waste" and took some pride in the fact that my group had been able to do as much with far less. But then I noticed a few things at this other company. Attrition was extremely low. Talented people stayed at the job and seemed happy about it. Outages were much rarer and more easily dealt with. They actually had an on-call rotation and a DR plan. Stress was way lower. They ended up not hiring me (too much competition for one seat) but the interview was a thought-provoking experience.
It was interesting seeing, for the first time, an IT position that was just a job, and not a continuous, grinding ordeal. It gave me higher goals in subsequent job searches.
I'm not saying that bigger is necessarily better. I guess I'm saying that you have to be "big enough" to provide a sustainable level of service -- to have the headroom for planning and organization, to keep adequate track of your service contract costs and equipment rotation, and enough spare cycles and budget to put emergency procedures in place. Whether your big, adequately funded IT organization can actually do this is a direct function of leadership -- else all you get is the same morass with more time to play and more toys to play with.
If I had breasts, I'd never have to leave the house.
Mod this up for humor.
The issue is not just that the tires break loose and cause damage to natural reefs, although that's the major problem. Besides that, the tires themselves contain toxins that are damaging to sea life. Another learning from the Florida disaster is that marine life doesn't attach well to old tires anyway, even when they're filled with concrete so they don't wander.
You're right, I was talking about the Florida disaster, but if you go here and skip down to "South Asia mess", it's apparent that Indonesia is just now discovering that this is a bad idea. Florida got a decade head start and had an opportunity to see the consequences earlier.
I won't belabor the point. This is not really about man-made reefs, it's about our natural tendency to want to take action in a crisis, which is laudable, with expensive, inadequately tested solutions, which is not.
More info on Osborne Reef can be found here and here.
> Have they realized Vista is an O/S about nothing?
Now that would be a cool commercial.
They really missed an opportunity, though, not going with Jeff Foxworthy. "You know you're a redneck when you buy a computer 'cause the view is better than out your front winder."