i wonder if those with a non-alphabetic language, like the various Chineses or Japanese, would have chosen a keyboard at all? It seems to me that the keyboard is really designed around a language that uses a limited number of glyphs. Even the addition of dïaçrìtîçs are really hacks on the keyboard.
Considering that most users of electric vehicles would be charging them overnight at home, the only market for fast-charge stations will be travelers. The sort of equipment to charge a vehicle in 5 minutes is really heavy and expensive - it would involve massive on-site power storage, too, because you can't just switch 5MW loads on and off the grid at the will of a man at a 'fuel pump'. Realistically, we are talking millions here.
I am suspicious of the economics of this, and if you can't have a rapid charge station at least every 150KM, for every likely route that a driver might take, the whole EV concept breaks down.
Oh, and travelers will slow-charge overnight at the motel too, remember!
Many people try to point out that energy companies bought many fuel-saving inventions, and they disappeared. Instead of a conspiracy, they forget the most likely thing: they put the work into researching them further, and that revealed design flaws and issues that made them unfeasible. Some of them were found to be usable, and today are everyday features; others found niches, like the Wankel rotary engine: Great performance, but with intractable reliability problems that keeps it from the main stream.
UM, Gravity is not a form of energy. It is a force. (Yes, I have heard of "Gravitational potential energy", and it doesn't mean what you think it means.) Ditto magnets: a _changing_ magnetic field can carry energy, but that energy is from whatever is causing the field to change. If someone created a machine that kept running, outputing energy, even if only in form of frictional heat in it's bearings, we would look for, and be confident that we would find, some form of energy input _that is being depleted_. All 'gravity' or 'magnetic' 'perpetual motion' machines do not work, and the evidence provided is generally explained by a failure in the measuring system. For instance, they produce electrical outputs that vary rapidly, like having repeated high-voltage peaks, which are very difficult to measure. An idea: connect the output to a heating element, and measure how long it takes to boil a jug of water. Or just connect it to a capacitor, use the capacitor to provide the input power, and see how long it keeps the capacitor charged.
Well, we can get near complete combustion by pushing the temperatures higher. But the hotter exhaust gases mean that the engine is less efficient, and you get hot oxygen molecules 'burning' with nitrogen producing Nitrous Oxides, which are toxic and produce smog.
If we could easily deal with the results of incomplete combustion, we could run engines even cooler, which would improve efficiency and pollution. Bonus points if we could then capture any chemical energy leaving the energy and turn it back into fuel.
It sounds a little like the idea of a windmill-powered vehicle.
This enzyme needs a source of energy to work. Note that CO (Carbon monoxide) has some chemical energy left in it: it is, after all, the result of incomplete combustion. Is this enzyme converting 2nCO to nCO2 + nC, and connecting the carbon into chains? That would make sense. We can use heat to crack CO2 into CO, which would make sense of the 'fresh air' claims.
EGR can actually increase efficiency and power because exhaust gases have a better specific heat than air, so they expand more than air when heated. That extra expansion does require heat energy, so the temperature is lower, which reduces NOX production as a nice side effect. So for the same flow of fuel you get more power out of the engine, because less of that fuel's energy leaves as heat in the cooler exhaust gasses. You do need enough oxygen to efficiently burn the fuel you add, which limits the amount of EGR a petrol engine can use, and if you are running richer to get peak power, egr must be turned off. Diesel engines can use lots of EGR at cruise power levels, because they pull in a full charge from the intake manifold on every stroke (no throttle), so most of that can be exhaust gases: they only need enough fresh air to provide the oxygen to burn the fuel that they add. Again, peak power, lots of fuel, needs more air, so less EGR. (A diesel engine, recirculating almost all it's exhaust, with a little bit of bottled oxygen being added as needed to burn the fuel, would be a very efficient thing, as long as you ignored the energy required to purify the O2!) Many people think that EGR hinders the working of an engine, but, as you can see, this is not the case.
As the silver is vapor-deposited a few atoms thick - I don't think it is going to affect the world stocks of silver. Granny's old plate could keep us going for a few thousand years.
It could be that he lacks the equipment and resources to do such. But he has what he considers to be interesting evidence, and is throwing it at the ceiling to see if it sticks.
More investigation using better equipment could show it to be a glitch in the noise, or it could clean it up and we are on our way to something really big. Does it belong on slashdot yet? Well, that depends on future results!
I don't think anyone has plan 'B's, at least not after the entire rig goes boom. There was a similar incident off the western coast of Australia a few years ago. Fairly similar story with the clean up: Many attempts to top kill it, which usually are a failure (working kilometers down, trying to pump in heavy mud against a strong, high-pressure flow - not likely to work) until the relief well was finished a few months later, that allowed the sealing of the original well to succeed. We were lucky that this well was further off shore, and winds and currents remained off-shore for the entire incident. No oil came on shore, although there is some evidence of damage to fish stocks in the Indian ocean. It would be nice for relief wells to be drilled as a precaution, and we might see it for wells that might be higher risk. At the moment, the cost/benefit seems in their favor, but I admit i have no idea of the cost!
Because it looked ugly. One of the screens was either all white, or had been badly hit by a reflection, and dominated the picture. They did a rush photochop, posted it, and got on with work. If it looked ugly, none of the news agents that they might have been producing it from would have used it. Plenty of reasons for a quick job
None of the people were altered. Some ugly-looking screens were. They were to busy with something else to do a brilliant job about the alteration. You'd think they had something else on their minds.
My, the amount of vitrol floating about in these waters is making me sound like a BP apologist! Ah well, my karma is good enough to deal with it.
Well, If I were doing what those guys were, and someone sent me such a memo, I'd.. well, I'd probably just toss it in the bin, and get on with important work.
If anything, this shows that they are focusing on the clean-up work, and some less important PR stuff is slipping. As it should be.
Yes a watt-hour (w*h) is a unit of energy. As the watt is a joule per second, multiplying it by a unit of time cancels the time units and gives a certain number of joules. A watt-hour is 3600 joules. But the journalists don't say watt-hours, do they. And they don't mean 3600 joules, either.
Instead they say silly things like "the sun shines down at a rate of 1000 watts per hour." Which is, of course, totally ridiculous and meaningless. A watt per hour (w/h), well, it would be a rate of increase (or decrease) in energy production/consumption. Maybe they are referring to what happens between 5:30 and 6:30 every evening?
It's all part of the 'Knots per hour' and 'Watts per day' malaise that all journalists are infected with.
None of them* can use units correctly, leaving us to try to interpret what the scientist, who wrote the notes that were mismassaged into a press release which was misinterpreted by the journalist, was trying to say.
Yes, getting it started is catch-22 - how do you get people to accept that it has value if they are not sure that other people will accept it too? However, once people accept that it has extrinsic value, then the system is up and running.
As an example for you: For some time after the fall of the old Iraq government, the people of Iraq kept using the currency of that no-longer-extant government. Surprisingly, as the government was no longer around to print more, the supply was limited, and they experienced deflation as the orphan currency _increased_ in value.
Whatever people accept as currency is currency. It really is as simple as that. If enough people will accept bitcoins in exchange for something, then bitcouns have real value.
I isn't their job to be making official statements, and they know nothing more than the job they are doing - "I'm picking up this oily mud and putting it in that bucket, but you knew that already so stop bugging me!" The journalists should be kept out of that type of work area, for everyone's sake.
Oh, and here's a statement - by me, not anyone else - "Support the clean-up - Buy BP."
It may not be just the journalists, who are aware of the issues and careful with what they do, but how about the hordes of rubberneckers out for a spin? Those booms do not sit high in the water, so it does not take much of a wave to push oil over the top of them.
I could just imagine a tourist motoring along at half-plane, looking at the oil, inadvertently washing most of it over the top of the boom in his wake.
I would argue that, if a work still has value and currency after 15 years, then it is an important piece of cultural property that _Desperately_ needs to be in the public domain.
Where is the browser plugin for Media Player Classic? It would at least be a starting point.
For most if it's life, waiting for macromedia/adobe to release the flash specs. I think they have partially released them, but its not proving easy to implement. There are projects like gnash and swfplayer.
Applauding GIMP all these years hasn't achieved much.
What's to achieve? Some people didn't like the UI, which was always based around 'getting lots of work done fast', not 'looks real simple for the newbies', and did assume some linuxisims (like 'it's easy to set a window always-on-top if you need it') - but gimp has always been great, and is getting better - even getting a more standard ui to annoy us actual users.
Slashdot Mirror
i wonder if those with a non-alphabetic language, like the various Chineses or Japanese, would have chosen a keyboard at all? It seems to me that the keyboard is really designed around a language that uses a limited number of glyphs. Even the addition of dïaçrìtîçs are really hacks on the keyboard.
They are being sued for 'computer', in other words.
To the original poster: You live on planet earth. You therefore are liable to being sued by Microsoft.
Sour and Bitter are two different tastes, but that's kind of the idea!
True where balance = overwhelming defeat for all our enemies.
Thank you: some nice numbers there. Maybe it is feasible, when and if battery tech makes teh vehicles possible.
Considering that most users of electric vehicles would be charging them overnight at home, the only market for fast-charge stations will be travelers. The sort of equipment to charge a vehicle in 5 minutes is really heavy and expensive - it would involve massive on-site power storage, too, because you can't just switch 5MW loads on and off the grid at the will of a man at a 'fuel pump'. Realistically, we are talking millions here.
I am suspicious of the economics of this, and if you can't have a rapid charge station at least every 150KM, for every likely route that a driver might take, the whole EV concept breaks down.
Oh, and travelers will slow-charge overnight at the motel too, remember!
Many people try to point out that energy companies bought many fuel-saving inventions, and they disappeared. Instead of a conspiracy, they forget the most likely thing: they put the work into researching them further, and that revealed design flaws and issues that made them unfeasible. Some of them were found to be usable, and today are everyday features; others found niches, like the Wankel rotary engine: Great performance, but with intractable reliability problems that keeps it from the main stream.
UM, Gravity is not a form of energy. It is a force. (Yes, I have heard of "Gravitational potential energy", and it doesn't mean what you think it means.) Ditto magnets: a _changing_ magnetic field can carry energy, but that energy is from whatever is causing the field to change.
If someone created a machine that kept running, outputing energy, even if only in form of frictional heat in it's bearings, we would look for, and be confident that we would find, some form of energy input _that is being depleted_.
All 'gravity' or 'magnetic' 'perpetual motion' machines do not work, and the evidence provided is generally explained by a failure in the measuring system. For instance, they produce electrical outputs that vary rapidly, like having repeated high-voltage peaks, which are very difficult to measure. An idea: connect the output to a heating element, and measure how long it takes to boil a jug of water. Or just connect it to a capacitor, use the capacitor to provide the input power, and see how long it keeps the capacitor charged.
Well, we can get near complete combustion by pushing the temperatures higher. But the hotter exhaust gases mean that the engine is less efficient, and you get hot oxygen molecules 'burning' with nitrogen producing Nitrous Oxides, which are toxic and produce smog. If we could easily deal with the results of incomplete combustion, we could run engines even cooler, which would improve efficiency and pollution. Bonus points if we could then capture any chemical energy leaving the energy and turn it back into fuel.
It sounds a little like the idea of a windmill-powered vehicle.
This enzyme needs a source of energy to work. Note that CO (Carbon monoxide) has some chemical energy left in it: it is, after all, the result of incomplete combustion. Is this enzyme converting 2nCO to nCO2 + nC, and connecting the carbon into chains? That would make sense. We can use heat to crack CO2 into CO, which would make sense of the 'fresh air' claims.
EGR can actually increase efficiency and power because exhaust gases have a better specific heat than air, so they expand more than air when heated. That extra expansion does require heat energy, so the temperature is lower, which reduces NOX production as a nice side effect. So for the same flow of fuel you get more power out of the engine, because less of that fuel's energy leaves as heat in the cooler exhaust gasses. You do need enough oxygen to efficiently burn the fuel you add, which limits the amount of EGR a petrol engine can use, and if you are running richer to get peak power, egr must be turned off.
Diesel engines can use lots of EGR at cruise power levels, because they pull in a full charge from the intake manifold on every stroke (no throttle), so most of that can be exhaust gases: they only need enough fresh air to provide the oxygen to burn the fuel that they add. Again, peak power, lots of fuel, needs more air, so less EGR. (A diesel engine, recirculating almost all it's exhaust, with a little bit of bottled oxygen being added as needed to burn the fuel, would be a very efficient thing, as long as you ignored the energy required to purify the O2!)
Many people think that EGR hinders the working of an engine, but, as you can see, this is not the case.
As the silver is vapor-deposited a few atoms thick - I don't think it is going to affect the world stocks of silver. Granny's old plate could keep us going for a few thousand years.
It could be that he lacks the equipment and resources to do such. But he has what he considers to be interesting evidence, and is throwing it at the ceiling to see if it sticks.
More investigation using better equipment could show it to be a glitch in the noise, or it could clean it up and we are on our way to something really big. Does it belong on slashdot yet? Well, that depends on future results!
I don't think anyone has plan 'B's, at least not after the entire rig goes boom. There was a similar incident off the western coast of Australia a few years ago. Fairly similar story with the clean up: Many attempts to top kill it, which usually are a failure (working kilometers down, trying to pump in heavy mud against a strong, high-pressure flow - not likely to work) until the relief well was finished a few months later, that allowed the sealing of the original well to succeed.
We were lucky that this well was further off shore, and winds and currents remained off-shore for the entire incident. No oil came on shore, although there is some evidence of damage to fish stocks in the Indian ocean.
It would be nice for relief wells to be drilled as a precaution, and we might see it for wells that might be higher risk. At the moment, the cost/benefit seems in their favor, but I admit i have no idea of the cost!
Because it looked ugly. One of the screens was either all white, or had been badly hit by a reflection, and dominated the picture. They did a rush photochop, posted it, and got on with work. If it looked ugly, none of the news agents that they might have been producing it from would have used it. Plenty of reasons for a quick job
None of the people were altered. Some ugly-looking screens were. They were to busy with something else to do a brilliant job about the alteration. You'd think they had something else on their minds.
My, the amount of vitrol floating about in these waters is making me sound like a BP apologist! Ah well, my karma is good enough to deal with it.
Well, If I were doing what those guys were, and someone sent me such a memo, I'd .. well, I'd probably just toss it in the bin, and get on with important work.
If anything, this shows that they are focusing on the clean-up work, and some less important PR stuff is slipping. As it should be.
My, that simple post stired things up a bit!
Yes a watt-hour (w*h) is a unit of energy. As the watt is a joule per second, multiplying it by a unit of time cancels the time units and gives a certain number of joules. A watt-hour is 3600 joules. But the journalists don't say watt-hours, do they. And they don't mean 3600 joules, either.
Instead they say silly things like "the sun shines down at a rate of 1000 watts per hour." Which is, of course, totally ridiculous and meaningless. A watt per hour (w/h), well, it would be a rate of increase (or decrease) in energy production/consumption.
Maybe they are referring to what happens between 5:30 and 6:30 every evening?
It's all part of the 'Knots per hour' and 'Watts per day' malaise that all journalists are infected with.
None of them* can use units correctly, leaving us to try to interpret what the scientist, who wrote the notes that were mismassaged into a press release which was misinterpreted by the journalist, was trying to say.
*unjustified absolute. YHBT
Yes, getting it started is catch-22 - how do you get people to accept that it has value if they are not sure that other people will accept it too?
However, once people accept that it has extrinsic value, then the system is up and running.
As an example for you: For some time after the fall of the old Iraq government, the people of Iraq kept using the currency of that no-longer-extant government. Surprisingly, as the government was no longer around to print more, the supply was limited, and they experienced deflation as the orphan currency _increased_ in value.
Whatever people accept as currency is currency. It really is as simple as that. If enough people will accept bitcoins in exchange for something, then bitcouns have real value.
I isn't their job to be making official statements, and they know nothing more than the job they are doing - "I'm picking up this oily mud and putting it in that bucket, but you knew that already so stop bugging me!"
The journalists should be kept out of that type of work area, for everyone's sake.
Oh, and here's a statement - by me, not anyone else -
"Support the clean-up - Buy BP."
It may not be just the journalists, who are aware of the issues and careful with what they do, but how about the hordes of rubberneckers out for a spin? Those booms do not sit high in the water, so it does not take much of a wave to push oil over the top of them. I could just imagine a tourist motoring along at half-plane, looking at the oil, inadvertently washing most of it over the top of the boom in his wake.
I would argue that, if a work still has value and currency after 15 years, then it is an important piece of cultural property that _Desperately_ needs to be in the public domain.
...how to identify Venus would be a great help. Some people even need help identifying the moon
Where is the open source response to Flash?
HTML5/Vorbis.
Where is the browser plugin for Media Player Classic? It would at least be a starting point.
For most if it's life, waiting for macromedia/adobe to release the flash specs. I think they have partially released them, but its not proving easy to implement. There are projects like gnash and swfplayer.
Applauding GIMP all these years hasn't achieved much.
What's to achieve? Some people didn't like the UI, which was always based around 'getting lots of work done fast', not 'looks real simple for the newbies', and did assume some linuxisims (like 'it's easy to set a window always-on-top if you need it') - but gimp has always been great, and is getting better - even getting a more standard ui to annoy us actual users.