Hydrogen cars are a scam. H2 has a great energy density by mass, but a very poor energy density by volume. You need very high pressure storage in a tank.. Heavy, expensive and the hydrogen consistently "wants" to leak out, being so thin. Or you need liquid hydrogen, which needs a non trivial cryogenic apparatus. A non-starter, not even all launch rockets use liquid hydrogen.
In the end, hydrogen needs to be bound back to other atoms to be a usable fuel for transportation, some promising uses for H2 could be to manufacture CH4 using CO2 from a cement factory, or NH3 using nitrogen from air. But this consumes further energy, which would need to come from a mix of solar thermal, renewable electricity and nuclear from the grid.
Where does the H2 come? There's water electrolysis, which needs a ton of electricity. High tech schemes for cracking water into H2 and O2, using concentrated sunlight and whatever.. I don't know how's that going. And of course, the cheaper way that has actually been done on a massive scale for decades, extract hydrogen from natural gas (if you want to, that can be done from coal ultimately). That's vastly cheaper, and going through the pain of producing hydrogen that way, liquifying it for mass storage, getting it in some form in cars and burning it would make no sense at all next to just burning natural gas in cars.
To me that's like cheering for Hitler against Staline, or vice versa. Apple at least is a company that sells only to high income snobs (and some working class people in the Earth's richest countries). Amazon's motto is to take over everything and destroy retail businesses while setting back the workplace by over 100 years.
Dear leader? The French president is more like Ronald Reagan than Dear leader lately. The 75% for income above one million euros (after deductions), was a symbolic measure as it concerns very few people and is still not applied. Just stuff waived around to get elected. Same president had pleaded to renogotiate the treaty on European Stability Mechanism, but didn't. Not a single point or comma was changed. Now this government will get us in the Great Transatlantic Market, or whatever it's called in which US corporations will dictate their laws to the countries and European Union, putting an end to national democracy.
Dear leader my ass! We're trapped, with a presidency and governnement that have "socialist" in name but are right-leaning collaborationists, more in the way of Tony Blair and Gehrard Schroeder.
The first Far Cry, for instance. Or Diablo 2 quest descriptions (I play that game a few times on LAN). Far Cry had enough gameplay and an optional enough plot that it made sense to skip it, or maybe it was just about not listening to the crap.. Cut the plot and you have a great blend of old school FPS and innovative gameplay, hell it was even special as it made me actually like the checkpoint saves.
That's part of the MACHO hypothesis regarding dark matter. We could explain away dark matter with trillions of brown dwarfs but that doesn't seem satisfactory for astronomers and cosmologists. For some reason (big bang and cosmic background calculations etc.) we know think that baryonic (regular matter) is only about 4% of the universe's amount of mass-energy and about 25% of non-baryonic dark matter is needed to make it all fit. Not enough baryonic matter to have enough brown dwarfs playing the role of dark matter in/around galaxies.
You need to send a small possibly inert payload that crosses the solar station's path, not achieve any meaningful orbit. Anything colliding with the station will seriously mess it up. USSR sent a Moon impactor on a Soyouz rocket variant in 1959 so it seems hitting stuff with hardware made for LEO capability is possible. The Moon is of course a target a tad bigger than a satellite, even if the satellite in question would be much bigger than the ISS so I agree about the guidance part.
Last night demand in Ontario dropped to 12.3 GW. That is less than the minimum amount of power the grid can generate. So in order to get rid of that power, they sold it for, literally, zero cents.
No one is going to build a device who's only selling point is that it produces more of this stuff.
This is a problem posed by terrestrial solar and wind, mainly : they generate power when they feel like and regardless of any demand for it. Wind is worst in this regard, able to provide near full or near zero power on a random basis and is thus completely not base load at all. Space based solar would would pretty constant, and thus would be base load - similar to nuclear which is nearly always-on base load. So space solar would reduce that problem, vis-a-vis intermittent sources which make it worse. (ideally you have base load you can modulate, nat gas and hydro can do that ; coal does with a lot more inertia. France went for developing the very limited ability of nuclear to modulate production but that doesn't get you very far)
Of course that doesn't mean I think space based solar is a realistic or worthy idea. I would settle for a panacean energy storage made of nanotech pixie dust, if we're allowed to wish for things that don't exist.
And if that was important for consumers, Apple would have had to add SD card slots or join Blackberry in marketshare. If someone actually wants a device with a slot, they are free to buy a device with a slot - product preferences don't have to be a religion. Zombie Steve Jobs isn't holding a gun to your head.
So why are you touting all the time that Apple was not pushed off the market?, and people do complain constantly (at least here) about Android cell phones with no SD and swappable battery.
When the ipod was introduced, memory cards were expensive and stored like 64MB, they were multiple competing formats and SD was pretty much unknown. iPod had a hard drive ffs, for several generations. Now SD is the only memory card format (worth talking about), can be read everywhere or using a cheap ass USB adapter, and is about $20 for 32GB. THAT is more attractive that SD was even a couple years ago! So low end gets more storage than Iphone/Ipad for a shit ton less money. Can have high quality music and shit on the move.
SD is not on the way out, as even dumb phones are getting them, and even full size laptops not just netbooks. Examples include Wiko phones and Chinese "card phones".
You're rationalizing a regression just because you live in your little bubble and fail to see Google pulls an Apple : favor form over function and make data transfers or storage harder so they can draw more consumers to their "clouds" and then other services. It feels like over 10 years ago again, where phones got a camera but out of the box your only option was to send the photo by MMS (in a resolution like 128x128), generating income to the carrier. No USB cable in the box, USB or serial cable hard or impossible to find except maybe the carrier will deign sell it to you at a huge mark up.
You'll be able to run the car radio and such with the engine shut off (duh I'm realizing that running the car won't charge the batteries of an electric car) Might as well have a solar panel on top of a regular motorized car.
I would like to do this, and it would be especially cheap with a dumb phone + a firefox phone with no SIM card, or one SIM card for both.
But I wonder how you could manage to manage contacts etc. on the big 4" mini-tablet phone, while placing and receiving calls on the litlle dumbphone. Storing numbers/SMS on the SIM card then occasionally putting the SIM into the smartphone would be great, if all the content can be backed up to local storage + the web, cleaning up/modifying contacts, then SMS deleted from SIM card. Put the SIM back into the small phone. Nothing special needed for that.
Then, the dumb phone should be able to work without SIM card and as a bluetooth handset for the smartphone if/when you want to purpose the smartphone as "the phone" and for VOIP or Skype duties. I know of a dumbphone with bluetooth and SD already (does support MP3 playback and bluetooth audio, which must be about getting your audio playback on big speakers foremost) but handset functionality would have to be coded and hardcoded into the firmware.
Maybe some other simple functionality could be added, I've not thought of it. Mainly if the dumbphone if a USB device to smartphone's host or OTG then the smartphone can gift electricity to the dumb phone.
Shit that happens every 50 million years doesn't scare me, unless you happen to live near Krakatau or something.
If you're into geological scares, you should be worried about global warming and ocean acidification which are amazingly short term. On the scale of a human life, except the politicians, members of congress or parliament, ministers or secretary of state, presidents etc. will face the problem of not peeing themselves soon and thus don't care the slightest about it.
I thought I was generous in giving that time frame.
Why humans? I know that I will never go into space, I never ate caviar even. I was greatly inspired by the picture of Neptune taken in 1989, by an unmanned spacecraft. Seems like the current issue would be to manufacture Plutonium 238 not as a by-product of nuclear weapons, and/or to negotiate it within the IAEA.
Cheap access to LEO such as maglaunch or jet plane which launches a statoreactor thing which launches a rocket thing would be needed, after that you can use ion drive, gravity assist or more rockets etc. But if the tech gives acceleration incompatible with human beings and bearable by machinery, so be it.
LXDE is a great asset btw, it has a good and real philosophy of components independant from each other. Pcmanfm is impressive, a nautilus/thunar clone with the strengthes of both (ignoring the nautilus 3.x feature depletion).
You can use everything LXDE and a different file manager, or pcmanfm and everything different if you wish. Had a fluxbox + pcmanfm + audacious with xmms/winamp skin for music playback on a 1999 computer and it was brilliant. Lumina could just use pcmanfm-qt, give some minimal input as well as testing in *BSD lands to the project and I think it would be good.
BTW, in the gtk desktops like Mate and LXDE (possibly XFCE) I suffered from the volume control applet working with ALSA and pulseaudio but not OSS.. this on linux (mint/ubuntu/debian). I never tried PC-BSD or a FreeBSD desktop to see what happens but this is where I want the BSD community to do something I guess (even though the software is GPL..) and also I would want broader OSS support for sound cards and to be clear what exactly works (e.g. I failed to get Xonar DX working? even though dumb stereo output support would be nice already)
I have a modern-ish machine but no SSD. So I won't use the heavy desktops like Gnome 3, Cinnamon, KDE, Windows 7 because waiting for a terminal or file manager to show up whereas it was instant on Windows 3.1 or 98SE is not fun. I'm all for a "bells and whistles" desktop that would stay lightweight on I/O. Software rendering has to stay as an option as well in case I have driver or GPU crashes.
I've google it and find it not so ugly, and it has a smart form factor. Hatchback, that's good for putting stuff in esp. when you fold the rear seats down. For a really ugly car look at BMW i3, it's vomit worthy.
BTW, nobody outside of the US has heard of Chevrolet Lumina.
It's not even that, who will pay for the certification of it with every FCC-like agency, and how can you possibly go through that process every time you build it or change a single line of code? And even if that were possible : no, they won't let you have a user-modifiable SDR that operates (receive/transceive) on the GSM/LTE/3G frequencies.
To the original AC : get a HAM radio license and play on your alloted or unlicensed frequency slots. (what does HAM mean by the way?, I'm thinking of the stuff that's a bite like bacon)
Spacefaring ought to be postponed to the 22th century or late 21st.. We have more pressing things right now, mankind has yet to learn how to feed itself without destroying the land, rivers, climates and even the oceans. When we'll be able to have many terawatts of clean power at home as well as decent energy storage (maybe make fuel out of water and air, or water and CO2 found in the oceans) then maybe we can dream about making shelter, food, air and water from moon or Mars materials.
As usual we have figure for branded PCs, so the small computers shops and raw parts are left out. I'm saying "as usual" because I remember such studies where the Ipod had a huge ass market share well over 50% ; except the no-brand players were collectively dominating the market and were not accounted for.
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Hydrogen cars are a scam. H2 has a great energy density by mass, but a very poor energy density by volume. You need very high pressure storage in a tank.. Heavy, expensive and the hydrogen consistently "wants" to leak out, being so thin.
Or you need liquid hydrogen, which needs a non trivial cryogenic apparatus. A non-starter, not even all launch rockets use liquid hydrogen.
In the end, hydrogen needs to be bound back to other atoms to be a usable fuel for transportation, some promising uses for H2 could be to manufacture CH4 using CO2 from a cement factory, or NH3 using nitrogen from air. But this consumes further energy, which would need to come from a mix of solar thermal, renewable electricity and nuclear from the grid.
Where does the H2 come? There's water electrolysis, which needs a ton of electricity. High tech schemes for cracking water into H2 and O2, using concentrated sunlight and whatever.. I don't know how's that going. And of course, the cheaper way that has actually been done on a massive scale for decades, extract hydrogen from natural gas (if you want to, that can be done from coal ultimately). That's vastly cheaper, and going through the pain of producing hydrogen that way, liquifying it for mass storage, getting it in some form in cars and burning it would make no sense at all next to just burning natural gas in cars.
To me that's like cheering for Hitler against Staline, or vice versa.
Apple at least is a company that sells only to high income snobs (and some working class people in the Earth's richest countries). Amazon's motto is to take over everything and destroy retail businesses while setting back the workplace by over 100 years.
Dear leader? The French president is more like Ronald Reagan than Dear leader lately.
The 75% for income above one million euros (after deductions), was a symbolic measure as it concerns very few people and is still not applied. Just stuff waived around to get elected. Same president had pleaded to renogotiate the treaty on European Stability Mechanism, but didn't. Not a single point or comma was changed. Now this government will get us in the Great Transatlantic Market, or whatever it's called in which US corporations will dictate their laws to the countries and European Union, putting an end to national democracy.
Dear leader my ass! We're trapped, with a presidency and governnement that have "socialist" in name but are right-leaning collaborationists, more in the way of Tony Blair and Gehrard Schroeder.
The first Far Cry, for instance. Or Diablo 2 quest descriptions (I play that game a few times on LAN).
Far Cry had enough gameplay and an optional enough plot that it made sense to skip it, or maybe it was just about not listening to the crap.. Cut the plot and you have a great blend of old school FPS and innovative gameplay, hell it was even special as it made me actually like the checkpoint saves.
Frankly, I had forgotten about the new movies before seeing that /. headline.
Let me guess, there will be space planes, robots, creatures and sword fights. I think I summed up the movie already.
That's part of the MACHO hypothesis regarding dark matter. We could explain away dark matter with trillions of brown dwarfs but that doesn't seem satisfactory for astronomers and cosmologists. For some reason (big bang and cosmic background calculations etc.) we know think that baryonic (regular matter) is only about 4% of the universe's amount of mass-energy and about 25% of non-baryonic dark matter is needed to make it all fit. Not enough baryonic matter to have enough brown dwarfs playing the role of dark matter in/around galaxies.
You need to send a small possibly inert payload that crosses the solar station's path, not achieve any meaningful orbit. Anything colliding with the station will seriously mess it up.
USSR sent a Moon impactor on a Soyouz rocket variant in 1959 so it seems hitting stuff with hardware made for LEO capability is possible. The Moon is of course a target a tad bigger than a satellite, even if the satellite in question would be much bigger than the ISS so I agree about the guidance part.
Last night demand in Ontario dropped to 12.3 GW. That is less than the minimum amount of power the grid can generate. So in order to get rid of that power, they sold it for, literally, zero cents.
No one is going to build a device who's only selling point is that it produces more of this stuff.
This is a problem posed by terrestrial solar and wind, mainly : they generate power when they feel like and regardless of any demand for it. Wind is worst in this regard, able to provide near full or near zero power on a random basis and is thus completely not base load at all.
Space based solar would would pretty constant, and thus would be base load - similar to nuclear which is nearly always-on base load. So space solar would reduce that problem, vis-a-vis intermittent sources which make it worse. (ideally you have base load you can modulate, nat gas and hydro can do that ; coal does with a lot more inertia. France went for developing the very limited ability of nuclear to modulate production but that doesn't get you very far)
Of course that doesn't mean I think space based solar is a realistic or worthy idea. I would settle for a panacean energy storage made of nanotech pixie dust, if we're allowed to wish for things that don't exist.
And if that was important for consumers, Apple would have had to add SD card slots or join Blackberry in marketshare. If someone actually wants a device with a slot, they are free to buy a device with a slot - product preferences don't have to be a religion. Zombie Steve Jobs isn't holding a gun to your head.
So why are you touting all the time that Apple was not pushed off the market?, and people do complain constantly (at least here) about Android cell phones with no SD and swappable battery.
When the ipod was introduced, memory cards were expensive and stored like 64MB, they were multiple competing formats and SD was pretty much unknown. iPod had a hard drive ffs, for several generations. Now SD is the only memory card format (worth talking about), can be read everywhere or using a cheap ass USB adapter, and is about $20 for 32GB. THAT is more attractive that SD was even a couple years ago!
So low end gets more storage than Iphone/Ipad for a shit ton less money. Can have high quality music and shit on the move.
SD is not on the way out, as even dumb phones are getting them, and even full size laptops not just netbooks.
Examples include Wiko phones and Chinese "card phones".
You're rationalizing a regression just because you live in your little bubble and fail to see Google pulls an Apple : favor form over function and make data transfers or storage harder so they can draw more consumers to their "clouds" and then other services.
It feels like over 10 years ago again, where phones got a camera but out of the box your only option was to send the photo by MMS (in a resolution like 128x128), generating income to the carrier. No USB cable in the box, USB or serial cable hard or impossible to find except maybe the carrier will deign sell it to you at a huge mark up.
Nice story, but Nokia launched a smartphone in 1996 (Nokia 9000 with a 386 CPU), three years before that obscure Qualcomm.
You'll be able to run the car radio and such with the engine shut off (duh I'm realizing that running the car won't charge the batteries of an electric car)
Might as well have a solar panel on top of a regular motorized car.
I'm sure I used a PC keyboard with that style of cord on a portion of the cable.. Model M keyboard.
I would like to do this, and it would be especially cheap with a dumb phone + a firefox phone with no SIM card, or one SIM card for both.
But I wonder how you could manage to manage contacts etc. on the big 4" mini-tablet phone, while placing and receiving calls on the litlle dumbphone. Storing numbers/SMS on the SIM card then occasionally putting the SIM into the smartphone would be great, if all the content can be backed up to local storage + the web, cleaning up/modifying contacts, then SMS deleted from SIM card. Put the SIM back into the small phone. Nothing special needed for that.
Then, the dumb phone should be able to work without SIM card and as a bluetooth handset for the smartphone if/when you want to purpose the smartphone as "the phone" and for VOIP or Skype duties.
I know of a dumbphone with bluetooth and SD already (does support MP3 playback and bluetooth audio, which must be about getting your audio playback on big speakers foremost) but handset functionality would have to be coded and hardcoded into the firmware.
Maybe some other simple functionality could be added, I've not thought of it. Mainly if the dumbphone if a USB device to smartphone's host or OTG then the smartphone can gift electricity to the dumb phone.
Shit that happens every 50 million years doesn't scare me, unless you happen to live near Krakatau or something.
If you're into geological scares, you should be worried about global warming and ocean acidification which are amazingly short term. On the scale of a human life, except the politicians, members of congress or parliament, ministers or secretary of state, presidents etc. will face the problem of not peeing themselves soon and thus don't care the slightest about it.
Seriously?
I thought I was generous in giving that time frame.
Why humans? I know that I will never go into space, I never ate caviar even. I was greatly inspired by the picture of Neptune taken in 1989, by an unmanned spacecraft. Seems like the current issue would be to manufacture Plutonium 238 not as a by-product of nuclear weapons, and/or to negotiate it within the IAEA.
Cheap access to LEO such as maglaunch or jet plane which launches a statoreactor thing which launches a rocket thing would be needed, after that you can use ion drive, gravity assist or more rockets etc. But if the tech gives acceleration incompatible with human beings and bearable by machinery, so be it.
LXDE is a great asset btw, it has a good and real philosophy of components independant from each other. Pcmanfm is impressive, a nautilus/thunar clone with the strengthes of both (ignoring the nautilus 3.x feature depletion).
You can use everything LXDE and a different file manager, or pcmanfm and everything different if you wish. Had a fluxbox + pcmanfm + audacious with xmms/winamp skin for music playback on a 1999 computer and it was brilliant.
Lumina could just use pcmanfm-qt, give some minimal input as well as testing in *BSD lands to the project and I think it would be good.
BTW, in the gtk desktops like Mate and LXDE (possibly XFCE) I suffered from the volume control applet working with ALSA and pulseaudio but not OSS.. this on linux (mint/ubuntu/debian). I never tried PC-BSD or a FreeBSD desktop to see what happens but this is where I want the BSD community to do something I guess (even though the software is GPL..) and also I would want broader OSS support for sound cards and to be clear what exactly works (e.g. I failed to get Xonar DX working? even though dumb stereo output support would be nice already)
I have a modern-ish machine but no SSD. So I won't use the heavy desktops like Gnome 3, Cinnamon, KDE, Windows 7 because waiting for a terminal or file manager to show up whereas it was instant on Windows 3.1 or 98SE is not fun. I'm all for a "bells and whistles" desktop that would stay lightweight on I/O. Software rendering has to stay as an option as well in case I have driver or GPU crashes.
I've google it and find it not so ugly, and it has a smart form factor. Hatchback, that's good for putting stuff in esp. when you fold the rear seats down.
For a really ugly car look at BMW i3, it's vomit worthy.
BTW, nobody outside of the US has heard of Chevrolet Lumina.
But what if you do it regardless on the phone, will the carrier know it and terminate your contract?, or will no one ever know.
It's not even that, who will pay for the certification of it with every FCC-like agency, and how can you possibly go through that process every time you build it or change a single line of code?
And even if that were possible : no, they won't let you have a user-modifiable SDR that operates (receive/transceive) on the GSM/LTE/3G frequencies.
To the original AC : get a HAM radio license and play on your alloted or unlicensed frequency slots. (what does HAM mean by the way?, I'm thinking of the stuff that's a bite like bacon)
Spacefaring ought to be postponed to the 22th century or late 21st.. We have more pressing things right now, mankind has yet to learn how to feed itself without destroying the land, rivers, climates and even the oceans.
When we'll be able to have many terawatts of clean power at home as well as decent energy storage (maybe make fuel out of water and air, or water and CO2 found in the oceans) then maybe we can dream about making shelter, food, air and water from moon or Mars materials.
As usual we have figure for branded PCs, so the small computers shops and raw parts are left out. I'm saying "as usual" because I remember such studies where the Ipod had a huge ass market share well over 50% ; except the no-brand players were collectively dominating the market and were not accounted for.
Fine but I'm helpless now, cannot buy linked articles at 34 euros a piece and remember the warning from Wikipedia that the article was low quality.