It's pedantic because most people would consider a bottle of hydrogen an energy source. This is just like most people thinking a battery (rechargable or otherwise) is an energy source even though it has taken far more energy to charge or produce the battery. The point is that in certain situations it pays to think of the bottle of hydrogen as an energy source even though over all it is an energy sink. Supprisingly, studies show that most people aren't scientists.
I don't want to be an apologist for OO but you can't deny the fact that MS has had about 10 years long to get MSO right than the OOo people have had to get OO right. Now that isn't to say that we should or will have to wait ten years till OO is as good as MSO is today but we should cut them a bit of slack if the software isn't a slick an lean as it could be. In a very short period of time the OOo team have gone from nothing to something that can rival MSO. Assuming the pace of development continues OO will, I feel, be as good as MSO in two years.
Here we go again. Someone will say that hydrogen is a power source and then a bunch of pedants will jump on him / her claiming that it's not a power sources it's a power store as it uses more energy to create it. Then there will be an argument over what constitutes a power source. Does that about sum up the discussion?
They aren't over engineered for the environment they were expected to operate in. Our understanding of the martian environment led the engineers to believe that the solar panels would become dirty quickly. I'm sure cleaning systems were considered but a desision was made to have rovers that lasted 3 months without a cleaning machanism. Turns out we didn't understand the martian environment all that well and wind is keeping the panels clean enough to power the rovers. That's just shear luck.
As for the other parts of the rovers out lasting their usefulness - well that just goes to show how good some areas of engineering have become. Yes they could probably have fitted wheel bearings that would seize after 3 months but as they would weigh the same as (or damn near) the ones that have lasted 2 years a desision was made to fit the better bearings. There will always be one weakest component in this case our best guess at what is was was wrong. I'd be interested to know what part eventually fails and kills the rovers. If nothing else this is an interesting experiment into long term rover deployment. I am sure the engineers are getting plenty of interesting telemetry back on what is failing on the rovers.
With the success of the iPod which does basically nothing but play music how come no one has figured out that there could well be a market for a phone that does little more than make calls. While some may be interested in a phone with hundreds of extra features I would like a phone that basically just lets me make calls. Adding a camera to a mobile phone has, IMHO, got to be one of the worst combinations of technology since someone combined chocolate and fireguards.
So what this guy is trying to say is that we should attach a piece of wire with a key on the end to a kite and fly it into the storm thus tapping the stored enegry. This will not only provide us with a huge amount of free energy but disapate the storm as well. Cool.
I'll wait while this numb skull goes and tries his ideas out.
I agree it is going to be a painful and slow move to hydrogen (I don't see any realy alternative to hydrogen powered cars in one form or another) but one that I think can be done, in a fairly short amount of time, if the people and government want it to happen.
I suspect that it would be more difficult for America to switch over than it would be for many European countries simply because people are more distributed meaning there is a lot more infrastructure to add / update.
I don't know what it is like in the states but over here in the UK LPG was introduced about 5 years ago (I think - I don't have an LPG car so I've not really paid much attention). There is very little incentive to switch to LPG other than it is a bit cheaper than petrol because it isn't taxed as much. The break even point is something like 25000 miles when you take in to account the cost of the conversion. Dispite the drawbacks there are a supprising number of garages that now carry it on at least one pump.
My point is that even though LPG offers only the most minimal of advantages over petrol it has caught on. Hydrogen on the other hand seems to offer some pretty good advantages. The problem is that hydrogen doesn't offer any advantages that can be observed by the person shelling out twice as much for the same journey. Perhaps if petrol was taxed to include the cost of the clean up required it would make hydrogen appear rather quickly.
Perhaps we should refer to things as an energy source if after treatment / production they is a net release of energy. Hence coal, petrol, natural gas etc which all require some for of treatment / production (even if it is just digging it out of the ground) would all be energy sources where as hydrogen is not an energy source since treatment / production requires more energy than we get back. Seems like a simple enough definition and it fits all types of energy production. That does of course leave us with a bit of a problem describing what hydrogen is. Over all it is an energy sink but when it is beign used in a car it's an energy source.
While I generally agree with what you say I have to say that I feel your assesment of the risks feels biased against hydrogen.
Having seen a high pressure gas tank lose it's head I know how dangerous they can be but I don't think the problem is enough to stop the adoption of hydrogen. After all, many of us drive around with 50+ litres of petrol contained in a single skined tank in the back of the car. No one really worries about that. I'm sure though if a manufacturer was to suggest the idea now we wouldn't have petrol powered cars! A high pressure tank isn't the only solution to hydrogen storage though. Metal filled tanks are coming on in leaps an bounds and may well be a solution to the problem. At the end of the day it is a matter of accepting some level of risk. Driving is dangerous we have to accept that.
As for carrying around 50+ Kgs of magnesium not being as risky as carrying around hydrogen I think you need to have a re-think. Magnesium isn't that hard to ignite (harder than hydrogen though). Don't forget as well that in a major accident you may well have some hydrogen around anyway from the production system. Further, if the boiling water came in to contact with the whole magnesium wire there would be hydrogen all over the place. What have you solved? Sounds just as bad if not worse to me.
Of course it fails completely to mention the fact that by adding another step to the process of producing the hydrogen we are wasting more energy. Distrubuting hydrogen efficiently is not easy but at least one you have it you can use it directly. The thought of making metal to make hydrogen just sounds a little dim.
You state that losing the menus is the most important failing of recoridng from the output. While I admit that it may be considered a failing for some personally I quite like it when the menus are stipped off. It makes a DVD simplicity itself. You put the disk in teh drive... that's it. The film just plays. It's really quite relaxing in fact.
Please read this post it will, I hope, clear up any confusion about what a seed is (hint: 9 times out of 10 it's what the farmer is collecting at harvest time).
Yes and no. I was thinking specifically about harvesting corn where you collect the seed. As such harvest time is when you have the most seed even though you are going to grind most of it to make flour. If you were thinking about carrots or some other such crop where you rarely let them go to seed then yes you are correct you would have no seeds at harvest time.
In my defence however I offer these two bits of evidence. Firstly, most (western) people consider harvest time to be when the corn is collected since that is the staple food stuff of most (maybe all) western countries. Secondly, since corn easily the most grown crop I think it would be a fair bet that the amount (number) of seed produced easily outweighs that produced for any other crop.
You've got to just love P2P for things like this. My country mirror is already doing a good impression of a three legged dog but the torrent has more seeds than a farmer at harvest time.
Electrolysis of water is easy enough to do if you want to utilize some of that excess day time power. I have often wondered if it would be worth houses with solar cells using the spare day time power creating hydrogen and then using the hydrogen with a fuel cell at night. I suppose it all depends on how efficient you can get the hydrogen production. Since power in the day costs many times what it does in the evening and night time in many places it probably isn't economically viable.
If you are interested the hydrogen is probably produced by
steam reforming natural gas. This is pretty cheap and easy way to make pretty pure hydrogen for fuel cells. The problem is that it produces carbon monoxide as well which is a poison to most fuel cells. IIRC commercially the hydrogen is purified by filtration through a sheet of red hot palladium. Presumably in this set up they are using some sort of catalyst to oxidize up the CO to CO2.
While the car is impressive the really impressive technology here (IMHO) is producing a steam reforming plant that can fit in an average house.
While this is great news it doesn't really tell us anything about how many people are using firefox. Every good geek out there downloads just about every new release which means that figure is huge compared to the user base. They might as well have just said "We do a lot of releases". It has basically the same meaning.
Fed up with watching others make impact craters on Mars the international consortium building the ISS have decided to up the ante by making a crater on Earth. Since the only thing they have in space is the ISS it was odds on that they would chose this to crash into Earth. Reports say that it should be a spectacular show especially for the people it hits.
I would mod you but you are already at +5 so I'll comment. I couldn't agree more with what you say. Bang for pound sending people into space seems like a very expensive luxury at the minute. Even if we say that there are spin-offs from sending people into space I think it's expensive.
In fact I would go as far as to say there are very few spin-offs from sending people into space for one very good reason. No one wants to see astronauts die so all the technology that is used is very tried tested. With a robotic mission no one gets killed if it goes wrong (although some heads roll) so there is more of an incentive to be a little adventurous.
I would much rather see the money being spent directly on basic research. I think there is potential for developing some very exotic new materials and some interesting advances in biology. Not to mention innovation in power production. All areas that could do with £200 million a year.
I like sci-fi as much as the next geek but could someone please explain to me what there is to like about Doctor Who? Even when I was a kid and a fervent imagination could (partially) make up for the utterly terrible special effects and boring / unconvincing drivel that passed for a story I didn't find it interesting / compelling / etc/etc.
In fact I can only think of one kid that actually liked it and just about everyone in the school avoided him. So come on - convince me that there is something to like about Dr Who.
Slashdot Mirror
It's pedantic because most people would consider a bottle of hydrogen an energy source. This is just like most people thinking a battery (rechargable or otherwise) is an energy source even though it has taken far more energy to charge or produce the battery. The point is that in certain situations it pays to think of the bottle of hydrogen as an energy source even though over all it is an energy sink. Supprisingly, studies show that most people aren't scientists.
I don't want to be an apologist for OO but you can't deny the fact that MS has had about 10 years long to get MSO right than the OOo people have had to get OO right. Now that isn't to say that we should or will have to wait ten years till OO is as good as MSO is today but we should cut them a bit of slack if the software isn't a slick an lean as it could be. In a very short period of time the OOo team have gone from nothing to something that can rival MSO. Assuming the pace of development continues OO will, I feel, be as good as MSO in two years.
Here we go again. Someone will say that hydrogen is a power source and then a bunch of pedants will jump on him / her claiming that it's not a power sources it's a power store as it uses more energy to create it. Then there will be an argument over what constitutes a power source. Does that about sum up the discussion?
They aren't over engineered for the environment they were expected to operate in. Our understanding of the martian environment led the engineers to believe that the solar panels would become dirty quickly. I'm sure cleaning systems were considered but a desision was made to have rovers that lasted 3 months without a cleaning machanism. Turns out we didn't understand the martian environment all that well and wind is keeping the panels clean enough to power the rovers. That's just shear luck.
As for the other parts of the rovers out lasting their usefulness - well that just goes to show how good some areas of engineering have become. Yes they could probably have fitted wheel bearings that would seize after 3 months but as they would weigh the same as (or damn near) the ones that have lasted 2 years a desision was made to fit the better bearings. There will always be one weakest component in this case our best guess at what is was was wrong. I'd be interested to know what part eventually fails and kills the rovers. If nothing else this is an interesting experiment into long term rover deployment. I am sure the engineers are getting plenty of interesting telemetry back on what is failing on the rovers.
With the success of the iPod which does basically nothing but play music how come no one has figured out that there could well be a market for a phone that does little more than make calls. While some may be interested in a phone with hundreds of extra features I would like a phone that basically just lets me make calls. Adding a camera to a mobile phone has, IMHO, got to be one of the worst combinations of technology since someone combined chocolate and fireguards.
So what this guy is trying to say is that we should attach a piece of wire with a key on the end to a kite and fly it into the storm thus tapping the stored enegry. This will not only provide us with a huge amount of free energy but disapate the storm as well. Cool.
I'll wait while this numb skull goes and tries his ideas out.
Wine it's always wine never beer.
I agree it is going to be a painful and slow move to hydrogen (I don't see any realy alternative to hydrogen powered cars in one form or another) but one that I think can be done, in a fairly short amount of time, if the people and government want it to happen.
I suspect that it would be more difficult for America to switch over than it would be for many European countries simply because people are more distributed meaning there is a lot more infrastructure to add / update.
I don't know what it is like in the states but over here in the UK LPG was introduced about 5 years ago (I think - I don't have an LPG car so I've not really paid much attention). There is very little incentive to switch to LPG other than it is a bit cheaper than petrol because it isn't taxed as much. The break even point is something like 25000 miles when you take in to account the cost of the conversion. Dispite the drawbacks there are a supprising number of garages that now carry it on at least one pump.
My point is that even though LPG offers only the most minimal of advantages over petrol it has caught on. Hydrogen on the other hand seems to offer some pretty good advantages. The problem is that hydrogen doesn't offer any advantages that can be observed by the person shelling out twice as much for the same journey. Perhaps if petrol was taxed to include the cost of the clean up required it would make hydrogen appear rather quickly.
Perhaps we should refer to things as an energy source if after treatment / production they is a net release of energy. Hence coal, petrol, natural gas etc which all require some for of treatment / production (even if it is just digging it out of the ground) would all be energy sources where as hydrogen is not an energy source since treatment / production requires more energy than we get back. Seems like a simple enough definition and it fits all types of energy production. That does of course leave us with a bit of a problem describing what hydrogen is. Over all it is an energy sink but when it is beign used in a car it's an energy source.
While I generally agree with what you say I have to say that I feel your assesment of the risks feels biased against hydrogen.
Having seen a high pressure gas tank lose it's head I know how dangerous they can be but I don't think the problem is enough to stop the adoption of hydrogen. After all, many of us drive around with 50+ litres of petrol contained in a single skined tank in the back of the car. No one really worries about that. I'm sure though if a manufacturer was to suggest the idea now we wouldn't have petrol powered cars! A high pressure tank isn't the only solution to hydrogen storage though. Metal filled tanks are coming on in leaps an bounds and may well be a solution to the problem. At the end of the day it is a matter of accepting some level of risk. Driving is dangerous we have to accept that.
As for carrying around 50+ Kgs of magnesium not being as risky as carrying around hydrogen I think you need to have a re-think. Magnesium isn't that hard to ignite (harder than hydrogen though). Don't forget as well that in a major accident you may well have some hydrogen around anyway from the production system. Further, if the boiling water came in to contact with the whole magnesium wire there would be hydrogen all over the place. What have you solved? Sounds just as bad if not worse to me.
Of course it fails completely to mention the fact that by adding another step to the process of producing the hydrogen we are wasting more energy. Distrubuting hydrogen efficiently is not easy but at least one you have it you can use it directly. The thought of making metal to make hydrogen just sounds a little dim.
You state that losing the menus is the most important failing of recoridng from the output. While I admit that it may be considered a failing for some personally I quite like it when the menus are stipped off. It makes a DVD simplicity itself. You put the disk in teh drive... that's it. The film just plays. It's really quite relaxing in fact.
Please read this post it will, I hope, clear up any confusion about what a seed is (hint: 9 times out of 10 it's what the farmer is collecting at harvest time).
Yes and no. I was thinking specifically about harvesting corn where you collect the seed. As such harvest time is when you have the most seed even though you are going to grind most of it to make flour. If you were thinking about carrots or some other such crop where you rarely let them go to seed then yes you are correct you would have no seeds at harvest time.
In my defence however I offer these two bits of evidence. Firstly, most (western) people consider harvest time to be when the corn is collected since that is the staple food stuff of most (maybe all) western countries. Secondly, since corn easily the most grown crop I think it would be a fair bet that the amount (number) of seed produced easily outweighs that produced for any other crop.
You've got to just love P2P for things like this. My country mirror is already doing a good impression of a three legged dog but the torrent has more seeds than a farmer at harvest time.
I don't believe it! I only downloaded and installed RC3 4 hours ago. Grrrr.
The martians dragged it into a cave when they noticed it was drawing to much attention. Sheeeesh do these people know nothing.
Electrolysis of water is easy enough to do if you want to utilize some of that excess day time power. I have often wondered if it would be worth houses with solar cells using the spare day time power creating hydrogen and then using the hydrogen with a fuel cell at night. I suppose it all depends on how efficient you can get the hydrogen production. Since power in the day costs many times what it does in the evening and night time in many places it probably isn't economically viable.
If you are interested the hydrogen is probably produced by steam reforming natural gas. This is pretty cheap and easy way to make pretty pure hydrogen for fuel cells. The problem is that it produces carbon monoxide as well which is a poison to most fuel cells. IIRC commercially the hydrogen is purified by filtration through a sheet of red hot palladium. Presumably in this set up they are using some sort of catalyst to oxidize up the CO to CO2.
While the car is impressive the really impressive technology here (IMHO) is producing a steam reforming plant that can fit in an average house.
While this is great news it doesn't really tell us anything about how many people are using firefox. Every good geek out there downloads just about every new release which means that figure is huge compared to the user base. They might as well have just said "We do a lot of releases". It has basically the same meaning.
Fed up with watching others make impact craters on Mars the international consortium building the ISS have decided to up the ante by making a crater on Earth. Since the only thing they have in space is the ISS it was odds on that they would chose this to crash into Earth. Reports say that it should be a spectacular show especially for the people it hits.
You'll need more than your tin foil hat if the ISS lands on you.
but I wouldn't like to try wearing it on my wrist.
I would mod you but you are already at +5 so I'll comment. I couldn't agree more with what you say. Bang for pound sending people into space seems like a very expensive luxury at the minute. Even if we say that there are spin-offs from sending people into space I think it's expensive.
In fact I would go as far as to say there are very few spin-offs from sending people into space for one very good reason. No one wants to see astronauts die so all the technology that is used is very tried tested. With a robotic mission no one gets killed if it goes wrong (although some heads roll) so there is more of an incentive to be a little adventurous.
I would much rather see the money being spent directly on basic research. I think there is potential for developing some very exotic new materials and some interesting advances in biology. Not to mention innovation in power production. All areas that could do with £200 million a year.
I like sci-fi as much as the next geek but could someone please explain to me what there is to like about Doctor Who? Even when I was a kid and a fervent imagination could (partially) make up for the utterly terrible special effects and boring / unconvincing drivel that passed for a story I didn't find it interesting / compelling / etc /etc.
In fact I can only think of one kid that actually liked it and just about everyone in the school avoided him. So come on - convince me that there is something to like about Dr Who.