Sometimes the fact that a Slashdot post, like the parent, is modded "Funny" is funnier than the post itself. It's almost Zen-like in its beautiful recursiveness.
I wonder if Data is also chock-full of pr0n, mp3z, videos of cats doing amusing things and a prodigious stack of warez which he downloaded because he could, but will never get round to installing.
It's true that you would need about 10x the amount of electrical generating capacity (about 150TWh) to replace ALL oil currently used. Nevertheless, the political appetite to keep industry and people moving is going to be huge, and the energy is being generated in a clean(ish) way.
Here's a quick internal combustion engine 101, then:
In a really good engine, about a third of the fuel energy goes to move the pistons (there are subsequent losses from drivetrain and tyres), a third goes to the radiator via the cylinder walls, and a third goes out of the exhaust as hot, fast-moving gas.
You can recover a little of the exhaust losses with a well-matched turbocharger, but it doesn't help much in a spark-ignition engine because you have to drop the compression ratio to avoid detonation, which itself worsens efficiency. Turbodiesels, with no compression limit, are noticeably more economical than non-turbocharged diesels (VW do both types in the range - try comparing mpg between "SDI" and "TDI" models).
The Wankel engine is never going to be as efficient as a "boinger" because the combustion chamber is a non-ideal shape for efficient burning. I'm not sure about the RX-8, but some rotary engines needed a separate combustion chamber afetr the engine, which produced no useful power but just ensured the rest of the fuel got burned before it went out of the exhaust.
Going into dreamland for a moment, to make a massively efficient engine
you'd want it to be adiabatic (no heat losses to the cylinder walls) which would mean pretty funky ceramic materials to resist the heat build-up without expanding. Diesel engine, of course, since you want a high compression ratio to reduce the energy lost to exhaust and your red-hot adiabatic cylinder would ignite any petrol mixture well before the spark.
Let's get it into perspective though: a good turbodiesel is about 33% efficient, which is better than an electric car running on juice from a coal-fired plant hundreds of miles away.
The aeroplanes you're thinking of had RADIAL engines. They were still "boingers", it's just that the pistons were arranged in a ring around the crankshaft. The propeller was attached to the pistons and the cranshaft was stationary, so the whole lot whirled round together, giving betetr cooling (and presumably horrendous torque reaction when the pilot opened the throttle).
A couple of Camel trivia: because of the difficulty feeding fuel to a spinning engine, it had no throttle. You had to blip the engine on and off to slow down. Also, they used a total-loss lubrication system based on castor oil, which inevitably got breathed in by the pilot. As well as having a life expectancy of a few hours, most Camel pilots had the galloping trots.
With respect, the return to an agrarian economy ain't gonna happen. As soon as an energy crisis arises, we're going to start building nuclear reactors like they're going out of fashion. You can run your cars on nuke-electrolysed hydrogen and heat your home with nuke electricity. Uranium supplies a problem? Use fast breeder reactors. OK, you're going to upset a few people and need a small army to protect the reactors from fundamentalist nutters, but no way are people going to accept a Pol Pot style regime.
Rotary engines have an Achilles heel, apart from prodigious fuel and oil consumption. If you start one up (e.g. to move the car out of the garage) and then shut it down without FULLY warming it up - which could take 5 miles or more - carbon from inside the combustion chamber can get lodged between the wall and the tip seal, causing a seized engine. There's no way to avoid this by design, because the tip seals have to be a certain shape to work and this happens to be an ideal shape to trap solids.
Running on gas, far less carbon is produced and therefore the risk is reduced accordingly.
32K of RAM, Microsoft (yup, the very same) BASIC in ROM, Motorola 6809E CPU of just over 1MHz. In BASIC you could POKE &HFFD7,0 and switch the CPU to a double speed mode. Weird. An almost identical computer was sold as the Tandy TRS-80 in the US, which meant a steady supply of games:-)
In Usenet groups with a relatively small number of regular contributors, you frequently have a couple of individuals who have disagreed over an issue in the past and will immediately shoot down anything the other says out of principle. Likewise, you get the obvious interloper from another group who will post deliberate flamebait occasionally; the uk.rec.cycling and uk.rec.driving groups have long been plagued by this.
In a press release from hell, 'It is important for videogame manufacturers not to use the emblem in their games, including for matters related to its right-wing purpose, such as anti-Semitism or general genocide,' said the ghost of Josef Goebbels, head of afterlife propaganda for the Nazi Party.
True, but knowing a drug is available to save your life but the funding isn't there to pay for it must be worse than just dying in ignorance. Many cancer drugs fall into this category - there's a current UK case where a woman needs Herceptin but the local health authority (where I live, incidentally) won't pay for it.
I don't know what the solution is, but basically people will die because they/their countries are poor, bot because science can't cure them.
A proportionate charge is OK. What isn't OK is the gouging in which some hotels indulge, such as those using Swisscom Eurospot. For the 24 hour charge you could have home broadband for a month or two - and then they put a download cap on it too! It's tempting just to hack into another local WLAN.
It was a dark and stormy night...GREETINGS IN GOD. I AM THE ONLY SURVIVING NEPHEW OF GENERAL SIR CHARLIE BROWN, WHO WAS TRAGICALLY KILLED IN AN AUTOMOBILE ACCIDENT IN JULY 2005, LEAVING AN UNCLAIMED PERSONAL FORTUNE OF $64,000,000 (SIXTY FOUR MILLION DOLLARS US). YOUR NAME HAS BEEN PASSED TO ME AS A TRUSTWORTHY AND RELIABLE PERSON
I've heard from people who have lived in Germany that a BMW 3-series, at least, is pretty much on a par with a Ford Mondeo (or Cortina, for those old enough to remember). They're heading that way in the UK too - they're so damn common now that people are taking the cash and sorting out their own company cars. Fords and Vauxhalls (Vauxhall is GM's UK brand) are just too "repmobile" for the notoriously badge-conscious British, which is partly why both parent companies are struggling.
I've done this, although not deliberately. As long as the "entry and exit" points are on the same hand, it's just an unpleasant spasm (and left long enough, would burn). Mind you, if it earths through your other hand or your foot, you could find out why only Nebraska still mandates electrocution.
I once went out with a girl just like Daria, right down to the hair, the short skirt, the boots and the bad attitude. I still find the cartoon spooky to watch.
The law in this case does seem to be a bit of an ass. Selling ambergris doesn't hurt the whale any more than it hurt Shatner to sell his kidney stone (although presumably it was a little unpleasant for him at the time said stone actually came out, ouch).
You can't catch and kill a whale to extract ambergris, because the stuff has to weather naturally for years, so it should be obvious it was just a lucky find.
Incidentally, the captcha for making this post was "inerited". WTF?
Re:isn't this what speed step did back with the PI
on
Undervolting a Laptop
·
· Score: 1
I'm sorry, but I couldn't read all of your comment. All those repeated ®'s damaged my retinas.
There's an interesting point here. Domestic cats are stuck in a kind of kitten mentality because they have been taken away from their mothers and raised by humans from an early age, which is where the playing, purring and cuddling comes from.
The purring seems to be an instinct sparked by physical proximity more than contentment: any vet will tell you that an injured cat in severe pain will still purr, and purring doesn't necessarily indicate the cat is comfortable.
They're amazingly "well designed" animals compared to us monkeys though - I suspect cats could take over the world if they wanted to, but they just can't be arsed.
A colleague once trod in some "used food" deposited on the floor rather than in the pan by a kind visitor. In a straight fight between one of those seats and my (admittedly festering) keyboard, my money's on the seat.
Slashdot Mirror
Sometimes the fact that a Slashdot post, like the parent, is modded "Funny" is funnier than the post itself. It's almost Zen-like in its beautiful recursiveness.
I wonder if Data is also chock-full of pr0n, mp3z, videos of cats doing amusing things and a prodigious stack of warez which he downloaded because he could, but will never get round to installing.
Nuclear fusion is the Holy Grail, of course.
In a really good engine, about a third of the fuel energy goes to move the pistons (there are subsequent losses from drivetrain and tyres), a third goes to the radiator via the cylinder walls, and a third goes out of the exhaust as hot, fast-moving gas.
You can recover a little of the exhaust losses with a well-matched turbocharger, but it doesn't help much in a spark-ignition engine because you have to drop the compression ratio to avoid detonation, which itself worsens efficiency. Turbodiesels, with no compression limit, are noticeably more economical than non-turbocharged diesels (VW do both types in the range - try comparing mpg between "SDI" and "TDI" models).
The Wankel engine is never going to be as efficient as a "boinger" because the combustion chamber is a non-ideal shape for efficient burning. I'm not sure about the RX-8, but some rotary engines needed a separate combustion chamber afetr the engine, which produced no useful power but just ensured the rest of the fuel got burned before it went out of the exhaust.
Going into dreamland for a moment, to make a massively efficient engine you'd want it to be adiabatic (no heat losses to the cylinder walls) which would mean pretty funky ceramic materials to resist the heat build-up without expanding. Diesel engine, of course, since you want a high compression ratio to reduce the energy lost to exhaust and your red-hot adiabatic cylinder would ignite any petrol mixture well before the spark.
Let's get it into perspective though: a good turbodiesel is about 33% efficient, which is better than an electric car running on juice from a coal-fired plant hundreds of miles away.
A couple of Camel trivia: because of the difficulty feeding fuel to a spinning engine, it had no throttle. You had to blip the engine on and off to slow down. Also, they used a total-loss lubrication system based on castor oil, which inevitably got breathed in by the pilot. As well as having a life expectancy of a few hours, most Camel pilots had the galloping trots.
With respect, the return to an agrarian economy ain't gonna happen. As soon as an energy crisis arises, we're going to start building nuclear reactors like they're going out of fashion. You can run your cars on nuke-electrolysed hydrogen and heat your home with nuke electricity. Uranium supplies a problem? Use fast breeder reactors. OK, you're going to upset a few people and need a small army to protect the reactors from fundamentalist nutters, but no way are people going to accept a Pol Pot style regime.
Running on gas, far less carbon is produced and therefore the risk is reduced accordingly.
32K of RAM, Microsoft (yup, the very same) BASIC in ROM, Motorola 6809E CPU of just over 1MHz. In BASIC you could POKE &HFFD7,0 and switch the CPU to a double speed mode. Weird. An almost identical computer was sold as the Tandy TRS-80 in the US, which meant a steady supply of games :-)
I'd love to name names, but I won't ;-)
On the other hand, being left with a 16-year old woman now I'm 35...that WOULD be a recipe for a court case :-)
In a press release from hell, 'It is important for videogame manufacturers not to use the emblem in their games, including for matters related to its right-wing purpose, such as anti-Semitism or general genocide,' said the ghost of Josef Goebbels, head of afterlife propaganda for the Nazi Party.
I don't know what the solution is, but basically people will die because they/their countries are poor, bot because science can't cure them.
Mmmmm...grey goo
A proportionate charge is OK. What isn't OK is the gouging in which some hotels indulge, such as those using Swisscom Eurospot. For the 24 hour charge you could have home broadband for a month or two - and then they put a download cap on it too! It's tempting just to hack into another local WLAN.
etc
I've heard from people who have lived in Germany that a BMW 3-series, at least, is pretty much on a par with a Ford Mondeo (or Cortina, for those old enough to remember). They're heading that way in the UK too - they're so damn common now that people are taking the cash and sorting out their own company cars. Fords and Vauxhalls (Vauxhall is GM's UK brand) are just too "repmobile" for the notoriously badge-conscious British, which is partly why both parent companies are struggling.
I've done this, although not deliberately. As long as the "entry and exit" points are on the same hand, it's just an unpleasant spasm (and left long enough, would burn). Mind you, if it earths through your other hand or your foot, you could find out why only Nebraska still mandates electrocution.
Well, to be pedantic, we had manmade nuclear fusion in the 1950s. It just wasn't very suitable for generating electricity.
I once went out with a girl just like Daria, right down to the hair, the short skirt, the boots and the bad attitude. I still find the cartoon spooky to watch.
You can't catch and kill a whale to extract ambergris, because the stuff has to weather naturally for years, so it should be obvious it was just a lucky find.
Incidentally, the captcha for making this post was "inerited". WTF?
I'm sorry, but I couldn't read all of your comment. All those repeated ®'s damaged my retinas.
The purring seems to be an instinct sparked by physical proximity more than contentment: any vet will tell you that an injured cat in severe pain will still purr, and purring doesn't necessarily indicate the cat is comfortable.
They're amazingly "well designed" animals compared to us monkeys though - I suspect cats could take over the world if they wanted to, but they just can't be arsed.
Seems like a classic opportunity for an "I, for one, welcome..." post on Slashdot.
Seriously, I love cats, but contrary to popular belief, they are the LEAST "spiritual" animals I know.
A colleague once trod in some "used food" deposited on the floor rather than in the pan by a kind visitor. In a straight fight between one of those seats and my (admittedly festering) keyboard, my money's on the seat.