600kg? For a trip like that you're not using a fiberglass-covered commuter tricycle shaped like a disembodied nose. You're using a SUV with true four-wheel drive.
Some of the roads on the far end are what SUVs are actually about - mud to the height of the tires when it's wet, sand when it's not, or snowdrifts. Going through cracks in mountains, up unpaved slopes on foothills, through brush that hasn't been cut in years. Farmwork is no joke, and the rest of the world isn't a paved and level commute. A "Mall Terrain Vehicle" won't cut it in the boonies. (Even getting to our house - right up on the "civilized" transport network - we're talking over a kilometer of that unpaved goo as the home stretch of the trip.)
One of the lightest true SUVs - a stock Jeep (non-Grand) Cherokee - is over 3,000 lbs just for starters. Then you have to add some stuff - like rock rails, skid plates, other armor, raised suspension. Don't bet on an alternative-fuel regenerative-braking-capable replacement that's as off-road capable and with similar passenger and cargo capacity to come in much lighter. Much of that weight is about strength, not power train.
Then there's the weight of the driver, the passengers (at least one) and the cargo (construction materials, tools, food and laundry for a week or two,...)
Figure you're pushing three long-tons by the time you're done. (Assuming you're not towing another ton or two of trailer.) So multiply your numbers by about another factor of five.
You don't need much battery power to do regenerative braking.
That's true for stop-and-go driving. For coming down from the sierras you might want more. Altamont pass to Livermore drops you something like 712 feet in a couple miles. Monitor pass to US 395 drops you over 3,000 feet in 2.8 miles.
Now I make several trips a year from a location near Lake Topaz (about 5000 ft) across monitor pass (8314 ft) or others similarly high, ending at the bay area (about 10 ft). I'd like to scavenge as much as possible of the energy coming down the passes to use it for crossing the central valley or commuting once I'm home. Going the other way I'd similarly like to store that energy on that last few miles down from monitor pass for driving around once there or starting the trip back.
So I'll need more than a little bit of battery. B-)
= = = = =
By the way: Elsewhere in the thread I see you're looking at the charge/discharge rates of current-production LiMH cells. There's a new nanotech-electrode LiIon that might make production soon that can charge/discharge something like 85% of its capacity in a couple minutes - which also implies really high efficiency to avoid meltdown at such energy densities. If that, or something similar makes it to market it would be a much better choice for peaking-store in a regenerative-braking application.
Or even for the primary storage. LiMH and LiIon cells work by pumping hydrogen around between two solid associations at different energy levels. So they're essentially your metal-hydride hydrogen solid-storage material, your fuel cell, your waste hydrogen storage, AND your hydrogen generation system, all in a sealed can.
Only nine percent hydrogen by weight is success? How much fuel will it waste in transportation if there is nine times as much "pakaging" material as there is hydrogen
For hydrocarbon fuels the hydrogen produces virtually all the energy and the carbon is mainly to glue the hydrogen together in an easier-to-handle package.
Weight percentage of hydrogen for various straight chain hydrocarbons is easy to calculate. It's 18.2% for propane (C3H8, the lightest straight-chain that's liquid under practical pressures), 16% for heptane (C7H16) and 15.8% for octane (C8H18). Gasoline is a mix of several that averages between them so call it 16% hydrogen by weight.
So at 9% hydrogen the solid fuel would be less than twice as heavy as an equivalent amount of gasoline. That seems reasonable.
Presume the tank is a low-pressure vessel (ala propane or butane) with a small heater to encourage the release the hydrogen (probably a pipe with engine coolant plus maybe another electrical heater for starting). Tankage would also be in the range of twice the weight of a gasoline tank.
Seems practical. (MUCH higher energy/weight than current battery technology, even after deducting the carnot-cycle tax from burning fuel in the car rather than using post-carnot stored electrical power.)
As to hauling it around: Perhaps it will be pumped as a compressed gas into the tank for bonding with the solid substrate (and the heat of solution piped out to contribute to heating the material in the "gas station"'s tankage? (Swapping partially-depleted tanks and crediting for remaining hydrogen seems like a tough sell.)
"Tanker trucks" feeding the "gas stations" could have approximately doubled fuel bills if THEY run on this stuff. But they are mainly last-mile haulage anyhow. The main transport will likely be gas pipelines. And if hydrogen catches on you might find the depot taps spaced more closely along them than along petroleum pipelines to compensate for the raised haulage costs.
"You also get more efficient transfer of heat to mechanical advantage by using the vaporization of the water powered by the heat of the regular fuel." I don't believe this is true. When water is converted to steam, some energy is used up in the heat of vaporization. This energy doesn't increase the temperature of the water at all, it is the energy required for the phase change. So instead of that energy being used to increase the combustion temperature (thus increasing combustion pressure), it is used up converting the injected water (or any injected liquid) to a gas.
The vaporization increases the volume of gas enormously - in an enclosed space. That increases the pressure drastically. So the heat of vaporization did a bunch of work without necessarily changing the temperature of the water. Meanwhile, lowering the combustion front propagation rate lets the combustion run at a higher temperature - adding more of the heat at high temperature and improving the carnot cycle efficiency. (The water is under considerable pressure and the drops are microscopic. So they get very hot BEFORE they boil. Further, things are happening so fast they can superheat far above even the raised boiling point from the local pressure.)
Think of the liquid water as working fluid you didn't have to compress before ignition.
I haven't done any thermogoshdarnic calculations to check this. Perhaps somebody with more knowledge can fill us all in.
Meanwhile, steam engines that end up with the steam superheated are noted for efficiency, despite having the same heat-of-vaporization issues - even those that don't get to scavenge low-temperature heat for the vaporization step. Unlike ordinary steam engines, internal-combustion droplet-flash-boiling can add most of the heat of vaporization at a temperature far above the softening point of the metals containing the process.
By offering NONE... pre-installed... but offering options on boxes so that they include only 100% Linux-friendly hardware.
IMHO the winning strategy for Dell is to provide one pre-installed distro with open drivers that supports all the hardware. And to provide a live-CD with any diagnostic software needed for company hardware support.
Then a user can buy the hardware with the confidence that all of it will work with linux drivers - and either stick with the stock distribution or switch to any other of his choice.
- Switching distros means you are committing to community support for the software.
- Dell can make available Dell software support for their particular "starter" distro as an option.
- Users not buying software support would get only hardware support. (So Dell might install their stock distro as the last step of the disk test - even for "bare disk" purchasers - if it simplifies their operations.)
- Dell can support the hardware without ANY reference to what distro (or even OS) is on it.
That last would let them share production with a Windows preinstalled model for improved economy of scale. (Though they might want one difference: a "shipped with/without windows" flag in the BIOS, readable by the OS. That way their stock Windows recovery disk could ask for an extra-cost "bought a license" authorization code before installing. This would be to head off claims from Microsoft that the "real" purpose of the product was to pirate Windows.)
Turbocharging already gives about a 2-to-1 boost while avoiding the knock limits - and it doesn't require a second tank, just higher-octane gas (which, at current price levels, doesn't command all that high a cost premium over regular). So the claimed 3-to-1 boost, while a significant further improvement worth going after, isn't as big a jolt as the standalone description would make you think.
(My commuting vehicle is a 4-cylinder turbo - and 15 years old. It has 100k miles on it and I'm rebuilding the vehicle around it at a cost of about 8 grand - suspension, tranny, major engine service - because I can't get an equivalently performing vehicle on the current new market at any reasonable price. That's apparently because adding a turbo to a small passenger car has enough downsides that the public isn't interested. (Or perhaps because the auto companies' marketing departments are totally clueless.))
Direct WATER injection of a high-compression ALSO gets this 3-to-1 or better boost. It has the same advantages as the alcohol injection at less cost: Higher power, reduced preignition, etc. But you can go even farther, since water won't, itself, combust.
You also get more efficient transfer of heat to mechanical advantage by using the vaporization of the water powered by the heat of the regular fuel.
And water is easier to find and cheaper than ethanol when it comes time to refil the second tank.
This has been well known for a long time.
The reason it hasn't been built into production engines so far: It requires two tanks of consumables. Run out of one and the engine has to stop, or run in a degraded mode. Auto makers haven't wanted to add that sort of operational complexity due to liability and consumer satisfaction issues.
This "new" idea has the same drawback, only moreso, since the second consumable liquid is less generally available and already highly regulated.
= = = =
On the other hand, we've now got much more flexible computerized control of the engine. With the compression boost provided by a turbo (which can be disabled by software control if the alcohol or water runs out), a car with an empty second-fuel tank can still run while meeting emission requirements and without self-damage. You'd lose 2/3 of your peak power and your MPG would drop. But the car would remain legal, street-legal, and unharmed.
So perhaps it's time to revisit direct cooling-fluid injection, dual-consumable, internal combustion engines.
But if so, unless research shows that ethanol has some BIG advantage over water, using water would have the advantage that you don't need to modify the support infrastructure.
... by about the amount of time you spend jogging (plus its share of your sleep time).
Which means that, as is alleged for fishing, "God does not deduct from a man's alloted span the time spend jogging."
So go ahead and jog. The time isn't wasted. B-)
= = = =
On the other hand, the alleged benefits of exercise in the brain are an increase in the count of cells in a section used for memory. Any bets on whether the added cells are only used to remember exercising? B-)
No, you have an interesting definition of "common carrier", since Comcast and other cable companies are not, in fact, common carriers. They are excluded from that piece of legislation, just like xDSL services. You have to rent a BRI or PRI to get common carrier privileges.
There are other "common carriers" besides telephone companies.
Like telegraph companies, trucking companies, bus lines, railroads, shipping lines,...
And ISPs.
Being a "common carrier" means any organization that transports people or goods (including information) for profit and accepts all customers (with legal cargo) on equal terms.
Some are tightly regulated, some are not. Regulation is not a necessary component for common carrier status (though it does help to obtain recognition of such status and unambiguously define the legal protection receiverd under it).
That last criterion: "accepts all customers" is the key part of the definition: By explicitly giving up the option of rejecting payloads they escape liability for decisions about what payloads they transport.
Cutting people off for "overusing" their service when they haven't published a limit is a decision, not just about how much to transport, but to avoid transporting particular types of payloads (large ones, such as IP video). In addition to being consumer fraud (false advertising - since they claimed unlimited use) it also jepoardizes any common carrier protection they might otherwise have tried to assert.
The Nimby Rousseau Banana Luddite saboteur terrorists are a nasty bunch.
Not to mention the unibomber. Anti-industrial civilization - and took it out by bombing university professors, computer store owners, software researchers, aircraft, and a host of others.
The left is noted for "direct action" of this sort. (I was almost blown up myself back during the Vietnam conflict, when the research institute I worked for - involved in remote sensing - was bombed.)
Depends on what was done about it, but I can't help thinking "better safe than sorry." When our greatgrandchildren look back on this time 100 years from now, I'd rather them laugh at our paranoia (or whatever you might call incorrect and alarmist views on climate change) than lament our complacency.
How about them cursing you for having trashed the economy so their standard of living is far below that of your time - and no resources are available for solving whatever the REAL problems of their day are - while instituting a global totalitarian repression to accomplish the "better safe" goals?
Kyoto alone talks about cutting the global economy by about a third for an "improvement" predicted (even by its advocates) to be too small to measure.
What good is insurance if you spend so much on it that you have nothing left to live on? Don't you think you need to actually do enough research to have some confidence in the results before instituting such costly measures?
Don't you think you should at LEAST get the models working to the point that they actually track the historic record of global temperature before taking draconian measures based on their predictions of the future?
In all fairness, politicians have to live up to what they say in public, why shouldn't everyone else ?
Because politicians chose to become "public persons" (and have their dirty laundry aired in the press) as a voluntary trade for their attempt to acquire coercive political power.
An anonymous poster has explicitly chosen the opposite course: Forgoing coercive power and influencing others only by the persuasiveness of his words, in order to retain a higher level of privacy.
He has chosen to expose only his anonymous persona to the mud-slinging of political discourse (and potential nonverbal retaliation), not to put his private life, peace, possessions, and employment, along with those of his family, in harm's way.
I don't think anyone should have a "right" to be anonymous, if they want to be taken seriously they need to stand up & be heard like the people they speak out against.
So I take it you were in favor of Yahoo giving Wang Xiaoning's name to the Chinese police? That if you'd know Salman Rushdie's address you'd have published it on the web or given it to Ayatollah Khomeini's government?
I take it you also disapprove of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay publishing the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius (which allowed people to debate the ideas without reference to the identity of those proposing them)?
But let's bring it a little closer to home.
If you really think that everyone should have to live up to what they say in public, why isn't YOUR NAME on your Slashdot user info page?
I think this discussion can be more enlightened by considering some particular hypothetical cases.
In this case the anonymously-posting group whose member was exposed was critical of a prominent county politician.
Suppose the anonymous poster(s) had been critical of the Chinese government's suppression of Falun Gong or occupation of Tibet.
Suppose the anonymous poster had been Salman Rushdie, at the height of the "Satanic Verses" flap, and the outing included his address.
Suppose the time was shortly before the American Revolution and the posters were people like Samuel Adams, William Molineux, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and Paul Revere.
Think about what happened to people like Yuri Orlov, Alexander Litvinenko, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Wang Xiaoning, Nathan Hale, Theo Van Gogh.
I could add names for hours. And, yes, only some of these particular critics of the powerful did so anonymously, so don't bother pointing that out: This list shows what can happen to critics and why they might want to be anonymous.
Maybe this guy won't be sent to a gulag, poisoned by thallium, vanish into the Chinese prison system, or assassinated on the street in broad daylight. But would you be surprised if he is the subject of continual harassment from now on - at least until he moves to another county?
Presumably this opens an opportunity for denial of service attacks on stocks. However,... the market distortion of a brief shutdown, even if it were a DOS attack, would be massively less than the integrated spam surge.
Two platitudes:
- In a race between weapons and armor the weapons eventually win.
- To end a war you must defeat the enemy.
My bet: Once this goes into effect the spammers will adapt. Expect the result to be a bigger problem.
The other option is to lock everything down, and say "No new immigrants." What happens then? Do you think wages will go through the roof, and jobs will grow on trees? Or do you think more companies will send the jobs to where the workers are?
They tried that. It was called "outsourcing". Results:
- Administering a project across large timezone and cultural differences causes problems that eat up a bunch of the savings. Schedules slip, quality slips,...
- There is also a limited supply of skilled talent "over there". After a while the good ones are busy and you're hiring the not-so-good ones. Meanwhile, what you have to pay to get the good ones (and the ones you later find are not-so-good) climbs. (Invisible hand at work.) Move to another country and try again? The people you're dealing with are already doing that. (India, for instance, is now sub-outsourcing to places like China.)
- Once they've gotten a good grasp of your products, processes, and IP, some of that talent jumps ship and starts their own company. Often just as your project is ALMOST done. Now THEY'RE hiring the cheap labor and coming out with a product that may be competitive with you. They're doing it under the over-there IP regime. If they're up against you one-on-one you're stuck with trying to out-compete somebody who knows the people, politics, and culture of the region and is on-site, while you've got the mess they left you with and your remaining workers. Or you can try to go after them in court - in their country's courts, staffed by their country's people, under their country's laws.
These are just three problems. There are others.
Net result is that outsourcing proved not to be such a great idea. But a lot of big companies took big hits, small companies went under, and venture capital went down the drain figuring that out. (And it's still not fully absorbed.) How much it saves (if any) and at what risk is still up in the air somewhat.
So now, after much of the talent over here was "downsized", we have things starting back up. Re-hire the dumped talent? HAH! Much cheaper to lobby for more H1Bs. Then you get much of the cost benefit of the lower price of workers from afar. But they're working here, where management can watch them, where they'll have to go back to the old country, not across the street, to open up in competition, and where you can kick 'em out if they complain about anything.
How much cash and resources do we have to spend on 9/11 related expenditures before we realize that it's going overboard?
You have to pick the right thing to compare the expenditure against. The 9/11 attack cost about 3000 lives and a few billion bucks. But an ongoing, escalating, series of such attacks could cost far more. THAT is what the spending is attempting to prevent.
"Billions for defense, not one cent for tribute!" is actually good financial management: The cent is just the first one, it doesn't stop until you stop it, and the longer you wait the bigger the job to turn it around.
Same goes when it's death and damage, not tribute.
300 people on a large jumbo-jet vs. 3000+ in an office building in manhattan. I would have taken the 300.
You're not alone in making that calculation. The passengers on the fourth 9/11 hijacked jet came to the same conclusion - even though they themselves were the collection on the light side of the balance.
(IMHO they deserve a posthumous award of the Medal of Freedom.)
Didn't RTF summary, huh? It has to be activated on board the plane.
Until somebody figures out a remote exploit.
It's just a little more software in the autopilot computer triggered by an input signal on a particular port. And it's got, or is connected to, a radio-datacom system that will remote-control it once triggered. Compromise the computer and you can fool it into believing the button was pushed (or whatever). Then you've got a plane flown by carefully-designed software written by Boeing (so YOU didn't have to write it), designed and tested to be uninterruptible by anyone on the plane, including the flight crew.
And it's remote controlled. So there's an open radio data port managed by a software driver, just waiting for a remote exploit to be used. (Remember the Broadcom blob exploit? Extrapolate it to this system.)
You need:
1) A remote control system.
2) A remote communication exploit to insert malware that:
3) Triggers the system, and
4) Changes the keying so YOUR remote control works and the official ones don't.
2), 3), and 4) are small stuff for the sort of folks that run a multi-billion dollar spam industry on botnets, and a cakewalk for a governmental infowar department.
1) will be easy, too. Once such a system is deployed the remote controls (and inventories of spares) will be all over the world - including in airports under control of countries that "sponsor terrorism". If the platforms are generic you won't even need to rip off the hardware - just clone the software. Target systems (suitable for debugging your code) will be in even broader distribution - installed in every commercial aircraft.
even without bats the next deranged whackjob to attempt hijack of a u.s. plane will probably be beaten to death pulped beyond identification by any visual means.
Something like that happened just recently: Hijacker didn't speak French. Captain did the landing announcement and in the French version told the passengers and crew he was going to do a very hard landing and for the stews and any strong male passengers to rush the cockpit and subdue the hijacker.
He hit the brakes hard. The hijacker (who was standing) tumbled over. The stews and passengers broke in and jumped him. The stews poured boiling water over him while the passengers beat him until subdued.
What you are advocating is a card approach which is not compatible with legacy passport systems still in use. The old ways die hard in gov't.
Not at all. There's no reason the material the chip is embedded in -and the electrodes are on the surface of - has to have the form factor of a credit card. You can use the the cover of the passport - front or back, outside or inside - just fine.
Passports have had plastic-coated covers for over a decade. There's no reason the plastic layer can't be made thick enough to contain the chip and support its contact patches.
The primary goal is to have a document that's harder (it's never impossible) to forge and easier to collect and process entry/exits. That's it. End of story.
So if you "need" a chip to handle the data, what's wrong with using a CONTACT-read chip like those on credit cards?
Sticking the passport in a slot is THAT much more inconvenient than waving it over a reader that you have to make the passport subject to drive-by scanning?
(Just imagine the next generation of "wardrivers". The term might end up being literal.)
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I'd have added baby seals, but those seem to have fallen out of favor.
Just as well: When you paint 'em green to save 'em from the fur market the mothers stop nursing them and they stave to death.
Or maybe they think they won't have to save as many now if the polar bears are going to have to swim farther go get between ice floes.
... so for 600kg ...
...)
600kg? For a trip like that you're not using a fiberglass-covered commuter tricycle shaped like a disembodied nose. You're using a SUV with true four-wheel drive.
Some of the roads on the far end are what SUVs are actually about - mud to the height of the tires when it's wet, sand when it's not, or snowdrifts. Going through cracks in mountains, up unpaved slopes on foothills, through brush that hasn't been cut in years. Farmwork is no joke, and the rest of the world isn't a paved and level commute. A "Mall Terrain Vehicle" won't cut it in the boonies. (Even getting to our house - right up on the "civilized" transport network - we're talking over a kilometer of that unpaved goo as the home stretch of the trip.)
One of the lightest true SUVs - a stock Jeep (non-Grand) Cherokee - is over 3,000 lbs just for starters. Then you have to add some stuff - like rock rails, skid plates, other armor, raised suspension. Don't bet on an alternative-fuel regenerative-braking-capable replacement that's as off-road capable and with similar passenger and cargo capacity to come in much lighter. Much of that weight is about strength, not power train.
Then there's the weight of the driver, the passengers (at least one) and the cargo (construction materials, tools, food and laundry for a week or two,
Figure you're pushing three long-tons by the time you're done. (Assuming you're not towing another ton or two of trailer.) So multiply your numbers by about another factor of five.
You don't need much battery power to do regenerative braking.
That's true for stop-and-go driving. For coming down from the sierras you might want more. Altamont pass to Livermore drops you something like 712 feet in a couple miles. Monitor pass to US 395 drops you over 3,000 feet in 2.8 miles.
Now I make several trips a year from a location near Lake Topaz (about 5000 ft) across monitor pass (8314 ft) or others similarly high, ending at the bay area (about 10 ft). I'd like to scavenge as much as possible of the energy coming down the passes to use it for crossing the central valley or commuting once I'm home. Going the other way I'd similarly like to store that energy on that last few miles down from monitor pass for driving around once there or starting the trip back.
So I'll need more than a little bit of battery. B-)
= = = = =
By the way: Elsewhere in the thread I see you're looking at the charge/discharge rates of current-production LiMH cells. There's a new nanotech-electrode LiIon that might make production soon that can charge/discharge something like 85% of its capacity in a couple minutes - which also implies really high efficiency to avoid meltdown at such energy densities. If that, or something similar makes it to market it would be a much better choice for peaking-store in a regenerative-braking application.
Or even for the primary storage. LiMH and LiIon cells work by pumping hydrogen around between two solid associations at different energy levels. So they're essentially your metal-hydride hydrogen solid-storage material, your fuel cell, your waste hydrogen storage, AND your hydrogen generation system, all in a sealed can.
Only nine percent hydrogen by weight is success? How much fuel will it waste in transportation if there is nine times as much "pakaging" material as there is hydrogen
For hydrocarbon fuels the hydrogen produces virtually all the energy and the carbon is mainly to glue the hydrogen together in an easier-to-handle package.
Weight percentage of hydrogen for various straight chain hydrocarbons is easy to calculate. It's 18.2% for propane (C3H8, the lightest straight-chain that's liquid under practical pressures), 16% for heptane (C7H16) and 15.8% for octane (C8H18). Gasoline is a mix of several that averages between them so call it 16% hydrogen by weight.
So at 9% hydrogen the solid fuel would be less than twice as heavy as an equivalent amount of gasoline. That seems reasonable.
Presume the tank is a low-pressure vessel (ala propane or butane) with a small heater to encourage the release the hydrogen (probably a pipe with engine coolant plus maybe another electrical heater for starting). Tankage would also be in the range of twice the weight of a gasoline tank.
Seems practical. (MUCH higher energy/weight than current battery technology, even after deducting the carnot-cycle tax from burning fuel in the car rather than using post-carnot stored electrical power.)
As to hauling it around: Perhaps it will be pumped as a compressed gas into the tank for bonding with the solid substrate (and the heat of solution piped out to contribute to heating the material in the "gas station"'s tankage? (Swapping partially-depleted tanks and crediting for remaining hydrogen seems like a tough sell.)
"Tanker trucks" feeding the "gas stations" could have approximately doubled fuel bills if THEY run on this stuff. But they are mainly last-mile haulage anyhow. The main transport will likely be gas pipelines. And if hydrogen catches on you might find the depot taps spaced more closely along them than along petroleum pipelines to compensate for the raised haulage costs.
"You also get more efficient transfer of heat to mechanical advantage by using the vaporization of the water powered by the heat of the regular fuel." I don't believe this is true. When water is converted to steam, some energy is used up in the heat of vaporization. This energy doesn't increase the temperature of the water at all, it is the energy required for the phase change. So instead of that energy being used to increase the combustion temperature (thus increasing combustion pressure), it is used up converting the injected water (or any injected liquid) to a gas.
The vaporization increases the volume of gas enormously - in an enclosed space. That increases the pressure drastically. So the heat of vaporization did a bunch of work without necessarily changing the temperature of the water. Meanwhile, lowering the combustion front propagation rate lets the combustion run at a higher temperature - adding more of the heat at high temperature and improving the carnot cycle efficiency. (The water is under considerable pressure and the drops are microscopic. So they get very hot BEFORE they boil. Further, things are happening so fast they can superheat far above even the raised boiling point from the local pressure.)
Think of the liquid water as working fluid you didn't have to compress before ignition.
I haven't done any thermogoshdarnic calculations to check this. Perhaps somebody with more knowledge can fill us all in.
Meanwhile, steam engines that end up with the steam superheated are noted for efficiency, despite having the same heat-of-vaporization issues - even those that don't get to scavenge low-temperature heat for the vaporization step. Unlike ordinary steam engines, internal-combustion droplet-flash-boiling can add most of the heat of vaporization at a temperature far above the softening point of the metals containing the process.
Doesn't this money come from the auction of the airspace freed by replacing the Analog TV service?
If so it's a bargain - a slight dribble from the great vat of money the government rakes in.
I wish *I* could make that many billions with only one billion of costs. Talk about Return On Investment...
By offering NONE ... pre-installed ... but offering options on boxes so that they include only 100% Linux-friendly hardware.
IMHO the winning strategy for Dell is to provide one pre-installed distro with open drivers that supports all the hardware. And to provide a live-CD with any diagnostic software needed for company hardware support.
Then a user can buy the hardware with the confidence that all of it will work with linux drivers - and either stick with the stock distribution or switch to any other of his choice.
- Switching distros means you are committing to community support for the software.
- Dell can make available Dell software support for their particular "starter" distro as an option.
- Users not buying software support would get only hardware support. (So Dell might install their stock distro as the last step of the disk test - even for "bare disk" purchasers - if it simplifies their operations.)
- Dell can support the hardware without ANY reference to what distro (or even OS) is on it.
That last would let them share production with a Windows preinstalled model for improved economy of scale. (Though they might want one difference: a "shipped with/without windows" flag in the BIOS, readable by the OS. That way their stock Windows recovery disk could ask for an extra-cost "bought a license" authorization code before installing. This would be to head off claims from Microsoft that the "real" purpose of the product was to pirate Windows.)
Turbocharging already gives about a 2-to-1 boost while avoiding the knock limits - and it doesn't require a second tank, just higher-octane gas (which, at current price levels, doesn't command all that high a cost premium over regular). So the claimed 3-to-1 boost, while a significant further improvement worth going after, isn't as big a jolt as the standalone description would make you think.
(My commuting vehicle is a 4-cylinder turbo - and 15 years old. It has 100k miles on it and I'm rebuilding the vehicle around it at a cost of about 8 grand - suspension, tranny, major engine service - because I can't get an equivalently performing vehicle on the current new market at any reasonable price. That's apparently because adding a turbo to a small passenger car has enough downsides that the public isn't interested. (Or perhaps because the auto companies' marketing departments are totally clueless.))
Direct WATER injection of a high-compression ALSO gets this 3-to-1 or better boost. It has the same advantages as the alcohol injection at less cost: Higher power, reduced preignition, etc. But you can go even farther, since water won't, itself, combust.
You also get more efficient transfer of heat to mechanical advantage by using the vaporization of the water powered by the heat of the regular fuel.
And water is easier to find and cheaper than ethanol when it comes time to refil the second tank.
This has been well known for a long time.
The reason it hasn't been built into production engines so far: It requires two tanks of consumables. Run out of one and the engine has to stop, or run in a degraded mode. Auto makers haven't wanted to add that sort of operational complexity due to liability and consumer satisfaction issues.
This "new" idea has the same drawback, only moreso, since the second consumable liquid is less generally available and already highly regulated.
= = = =
On the other hand, we've now got much more flexible computerized control of the engine. With the compression boost provided by a turbo (which can be disabled by software control if the alcohol or water runs out), a car with an empty second-fuel tank can still run while meeting emission requirements and without self-damage. You'd lose 2/3 of your peak power and your MPG would drop. But the car would remain legal, street-legal, and unharmed.
So perhaps it's time to revisit direct cooling-fluid injection, dual-consumable, internal combustion engines.
But if so, unless research shows that ethanol has some BIG advantage over water, using water would have the advantage that you don't need to modify the support infrastructure.
... by about the amount of time you spend jogging (plus its share of your sleep time).
Which means that, as is alleged for fishing, "God does not deduct from a man's alloted span the time spend jogging."
So go ahead and jog. The time isn't wasted. B-)
= = = =
On the other hand, the alleged benefits of exercise in the brain are an increase in the count of cells in a section used for memory. Any bets on whether the added cells are only used to remember exercising? B-)
No, you have an interesting definition of "common carrier", since Comcast and other cable companies are not, in fact, common carriers. They are excluded from that piece of legislation, just like xDSL services. You have to rent a BRI or PRI to get common carrier privileges.
...
There are other "common carriers" besides telephone companies.
Like telegraph companies, trucking companies, bus lines, railroads, shipping lines,
And ISPs.
Being a "common carrier" means any organization that transports people or goods (including information) for profit and accepts all customers (with legal cargo) on equal terms.
Some are tightly regulated, some are not. Regulation is not a necessary component for common carrier status (though it does help to obtain recognition of such status and unambiguously define the legal protection receiverd under it).
That last criterion: "accepts all customers" is the key part of the definition: By explicitly giving up the option of rejecting payloads they escape liability for decisions about what payloads they transport.
Cutting people off for "overusing" their service when they haven't published a limit is a decision, not just about how much to transport, but to avoid transporting particular types of payloads (large ones, such as IP video). In addition to being consumer fraud (false advertising - since they claimed unlimited use) it also jepoardizes any common carrier protection they might otherwise have tried to assert.
Comcast says that only .01 percent of its 11.5 million residential high-speed Internet customers fall into this category.
ONLY 1,150 customers are at risk of being cut off?
Comcast has an interesting definition of "common carrier". I wonder if the courts will agree with it...
The Nimby Rousseau Banana Luddite saboteur terrorists are a nasty bunch.
Not to mention the unibomber. Anti-industrial civilization - and took it out by bombing university professors, computer store owners, software researchers, aircraft, and a host of others.
The left is noted for "direct action" of this sort. (I was almost blown up myself back during the Vietnam conflict, when the research institute I worked for - involved in remote sensing - was bombed.)
Depends on what was done about it, but I can't help thinking "better safe than sorry." When our greatgrandchildren look back on this time 100 years from now, I'd rather them laugh at our paranoia (or whatever you might call incorrect and alarmist views on climate change) than lament our complacency.
How about them cursing you for having trashed the economy so their standard of living is far below that of your time - and no resources are available for solving whatever the REAL problems of their day are - while instituting a global totalitarian repression to accomplish the "better safe" goals?
Kyoto alone talks about cutting the global economy by about a third for an "improvement" predicted (even by its advocates) to be too small to measure.
What good is insurance if you spend so much on it that you have nothing left to live on? Don't you think you need to actually do enough research to have some confidence in the results before instituting such costly measures?
Don't you think you should at LEAST get the models working to the point that they actually track the historic record of global temperature before taking draconian measures based on their predictions of the future?
In all fairness, politicians have to live up to what they say in public, why shouldn't everyone else ?
Because politicians chose to become "public persons" (and have their dirty laundry aired in the press) as a voluntary trade for their attempt to acquire coercive political power.
An anonymous poster has explicitly chosen the opposite course: Forgoing coercive power and influencing others only by the persuasiveness of his words, in order to retain a higher level of privacy.
He has chosen to expose only his anonymous persona to the mud-slinging of political discourse (and potential nonverbal retaliation), not to put his private life, peace, possessions, and employment, along with those of his family, in harm's way.
I don't think anyone should have a "right" to be anonymous, if they want to be taken seriously they need to stand up & be heard like the people they speak out against.
So I take it you were in favor of Yahoo giving Wang Xiaoning's name to the Chinese police? That if you'd know Salman Rushdie's address you'd have published it on the web or given it to Ayatollah Khomeini's government?
I take it you also disapprove of Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay publishing the Federalist Papers under the pseudonym "Publius (which allowed people to debate the ideas without reference to the identity of those proposing them)?
But let's bring it a little closer to home.
If you really think that everyone should have to live up to what they say in public, why isn't YOUR NAME on your Slashdot user info page?
Maybe this guy won't be ... poisoned by thallium ...
Or, as in Litvinenko's case, polonium-210 - though thallium would have done the job in sufficient amounts.
I think this discussion can be more enlightened by considering some particular hypothetical cases.
In this case the anonymously-posting group whose member was exposed was critical of a prominent county politician.
Suppose the anonymous poster(s) had been critical of the Chinese government's suppression of Falun Gong or occupation of Tibet.
Suppose the anonymous poster had been Salman Rushdie, at the height of the "Satanic Verses" flap, and the outing included his address.
Suppose the time was shortly before the American Revolution and the posters were people like Samuel Adams, William Molineux, Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and Paul Revere.
Think about what happened to people like Yuri Orlov, Alexander Litvinenko, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Wang Xiaoning, Nathan Hale, Theo Van Gogh.
I could add names for hours. And, yes, only some of these particular critics of the powerful did so anonymously, so don't bother pointing that out: This list shows what can happen to critics and why they might want to be anonymous.
Maybe this guy won't be sent to a gulag, poisoned by thallium, vanish into the Chinese prison system, or assassinated on the street in broad daylight. But would you be surprised if he is the subject of continual harassment from now on - at least until he moves to another county?
Presumably this opens an opportunity for denial of service attacks on stocks. However, ... the market distortion of a brief shutdown, even if it were a DOS attack, would be massively less than the integrated spam surge.
Two platitudes:
- In a race between weapons and armor the weapons eventually win.
- To end a war you must defeat the enemy.
My bet: Once this goes into effect the spammers will adapt. Expect the result to be a bigger problem.
Maybe some of these?
The other option is to lock everything down, and say "No new immigrants." What happens then? Do you think wages will go through the roof, and jobs will grow on trees? Or do you think more companies will send the jobs to where the workers are?
...
They tried that. It was called "outsourcing". Results:
- Administering a project across large timezone and cultural differences causes problems that eat up a bunch of the savings. Schedules slip, quality slips,
- There is also a limited supply of skilled talent "over there". After a while the good ones are busy and you're hiring the not-so-good ones. Meanwhile, what you have to pay to get the good ones (and the ones you later find are not-so-good) climbs. (Invisible hand at work.) Move to another country and try again? The people you're dealing with are already doing that. (India, for instance, is now sub-outsourcing to places like China.)
- Once they've gotten a good grasp of your products, processes, and IP, some of that talent jumps ship and starts their own company. Often just as your project is ALMOST done. Now THEY'RE hiring the cheap labor and coming out with a product that may be competitive with you. They're doing it under the over-there IP regime. If they're up against you one-on-one you're stuck with trying to out-compete somebody who knows the people, politics, and culture of the region and is on-site, while you've got the mess they left you with and your remaining workers. Or you can try to go after them in court - in their country's courts, staffed by their country's people, under their country's laws.
These are just three problems. There are others.
Net result is that outsourcing proved not to be such a great idea. But a lot of big companies took big hits, small companies went under, and venture capital went down the drain figuring that out. (And it's still not fully absorbed.) How much it saves (if any) and at what risk is still up in the air somewhat.
So now, after much of the talent over here was "downsized", we have things starting back up. Re-hire the dumped talent? HAH! Much cheaper to lobby for more H1Bs. Then you get much of the cost benefit of the lower price of workers from afar. But they're working here, where management can watch them, where they'll have to go back to the old country, not across the street, to open up in competition, and where you can kick 'em out if they complain about anything.
How much cash and resources do we have to spend on 9/11 related expenditures before we realize that it's going overboard?
You have to pick the right thing to compare the expenditure against. The 9/11 attack cost about 3000 lives and a few billion bucks. But an ongoing, escalating, series of such attacks could cost far more. THAT is what the spending is attempting to prevent.
"Billions for defense, not one cent for tribute!" is actually good financial management: The cent is just the first one, it doesn't stop until you stop it, and the longer you wait the bigger the job to turn it around.
Same goes when it's death and damage, not tribute.
300 people on a large jumbo-jet vs. 3000+ in an office building in manhattan. I would have taken the 300.
You're not alone in making that calculation. The passengers on the fourth 9/11 hijacked jet came to the same conclusion - even though they themselves were the collection on the light side of the balance.
(IMHO they deserve a posthumous award of the Medal of Freedom.)
Didn't RTF summary, huh? It has to be activated on board the plane.
Until somebody figures out a remote exploit.
It's just a little more software in the autopilot computer triggered by an input signal on a particular port. And it's got, or is connected to, a radio-datacom system that will remote-control it once triggered. Compromise the computer and you can fool it into believing the button was pushed (or whatever). Then you've got a plane flown by carefully-designed software written by Boeing (so YOU didn't have to write it), designed and tested to be uninterruptible by anyone on the plane, including the flight crew.
And it's remote controlled. So there's an open radio data port managed by a software driver, just waiting for a remote exploit to be used. (Remember the Broadcom blob exploit? Extrapolate it to this system.)
You need:
1) A remote control system.
2) A remote communication exploit to insert malware that:
3) Triggers the system, and
4) Changes the keying so YOUR remote control works and the official ones don't.
2), 3), and 4) are small stuff for the sort of folks that run a multi-billion dollar spam industry on botnets, and a cakewalk for a governmental infowar department.
1) will be easy, too. Once such a system is deployed the remote controls (and inventories of spares) will be all over the world - including in airports under control of countries that "sponsor terrorism". If the platforms are generic you won't even need to rip off the hardware - just clone the software. Target systems (suitable for debugging your code) will be in even broader distribution - installed in every commercial aircraft.
even without bats the next deranged whackjob to attempt hijack of a u.s. plane will probably be beaten to death pulped beyond identification by any visual means.
Something like that happened just recently: Hijacker didn't speak French. Captain did the landing announcement and in the French version told the passengers and crew he was going to do a very hard landing and for the stews and any strong male passengers to rush the cockpit and subdue the hijacker.
He hit the brakes hard. The hijacker (who was standing) tumbled over. The stews and passengers broke in and jumped him. The stews poured boiling water over him while the passengers beat him until subdued.
What you are advocating is a card approach which is not compatible with legacy passport systems still in use. The old ways die hard in gov't.
Not at all. There's no reason the material the chip is embedded in -and the electrodes are on the surface of - has to have the form factor of a credit card. You can use the the cover of the passport - front or back, outside or inside - just fine.
Passports have had plastic-coated covers for over a decade. There's no reason the plastic layer can't be made thick enough to contain the chip and support its contact patches.
The primary goal is to have a document that's harder (it's never impossible) to forge and easier to collect and process entry/exits. That's it. End of story.
So if you "need" a chip to handle the data, what's wrong with using a CONTACT-read chip like those on credit cards?
Sticking the passport in a slot is THAT much more inconvenient than waving it over a reader that you have to make the passport subject to drive-by scanning?
(Just imagine the next generation of "wardrivers". The term might end up being literal.)