Unbelievable. How about your great-grandchildren? Will you roll in your grave as they call you Great Grandpa Douchebag, raper of the environment?
Imagine if we found writings from people in the 1800s describing how they know that their coal plants will cause large increases in asthma, followed by a hearty laugh and a passing "good thing we'll be dead!" I'd certainly be extra pissed, and you would too.
Life isn't a generations-spanning episode of "Punk'd."
Yeah, otherwise known as RTG's, which I mentioned...
Do some research; Cassini has 3 RTGs and they provide a combined 888 W of power. RTGs are only competitive when the mission is to the outer planets, or when solar panels are impractical for whatever reason.
Also, nuclear reactors are thought to be safer since they're fully powered down during launch, which is the time of highest risk during the mission.
Exactly. Coronal mass ejections are not the main cause of concern on a long-term mission for astronauts. Now, a lot of cosmic radiation is ionizing radiation such as electrons and protons, which can be diverted electromagnetically, unlike gamma rays. However, as noted by some others, the power output required to run your magnetic shield 24/7 would almost certainly be ridiculous.
Remember that our only options for power generation right now are solar arrays and RTG's, and you're not going to get much more than a few kW of power output from either of those two. The shuttle's average power consumption is around 14kW, which is supplied by the fuel cells, so we're going to need a really beefy solar array system just to generate that. Even a nuclear reactor is expected to get somewhere around 500 kW at best, but most of that will probably be needed for whatever advanced propulsion system they're going to employ, since LH2/LOX won't cut it for that kind of long-distance mission.
If I buy a Prius, and sell my current vehicle, odds are that the person buying my car is replacing an even older vehicle. It's a trickle-down effect.
If everybody just kept running the same vehicles, it might save on raw materials, but we'd still be driving 15mpg cars with no catalytic converters, and Los Angeles would still be at the (much more) dangerous air pollution levels of the 70s.
Re:who ever heard of a Hummer lasting 300K miles?
on
Hummer Greener Than Prius?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Um, perhaps this is because the oldest Prius (in the U.S. anyway) is only 7 Years old, which to reach 300k by now would require you to drive an average of nearly 43,000 miles every year; somehow I doubt this is true for many people.
On the other hand I am positive you can find plenty of other Toyota owners who have gotten such mileage out of their cars.
Not to be insensitive to your plight, but isn't a lot of that due to the fact that the pound is worth approximately $2?
When I was in London recently I recall paying 1 pound for a Coke from a vending machine, but nobody goes around complaining that Cokes in Britain cost $2.
This only works if you've managed to already convert the entire economy to run on E100. Otherwise, you're still using fossil fuels to produce Ethanol (i.e. for all the equipment that helps grow, harvest, and process the corn) which, when you work out the numbers for our current economy, works out to a much smaller savings in CO2 emissions, even though Ethanol itself still has a positive net energy production.
The problem is that there's no feasable way to convert the entire economy to ethanol based on a crop like corn, so unfortunately it's not an ultimate solution to the problem.
Yeah, the cost of adding a hybrid drivetrain is around $3k which is about double the estimated cost to add the proposed system, and you get nearly double the efficiency gain with a hybrid, so it's not like this blows hybrids out of the water is all I'm saying.
And I mentioned it could be used in concert with hybrid technology.
Think of it, isp of the SSME without the problem of cryo systems (well at least for the fuel, LOX would still need it. Still, less is more in this case)
I'm not sure their claim about this being a better solution than hybrids is justfied. Looking at the Honda Civic and Toyota Camry, the Hybrid versions offer approx. 45% better fuel efficiency, much higher than the 25% quoted in the article for this technology.
Additionally, this technology does not eliminate idling (especially on ignition with a cold and poorly-performing catalytic convertor) which is one of the things about hybrids that gets them a high air air pollution rating (AT-PZEV from the CA Air Resources Board).
Still, because of the low cost this technology might be a great benefit to large cars which are so expensive already, even in addition to hybrid systems.
No. But then again, Doom 3 (And corresponding hardware) do not cost 1024 times as much money to aqcuire. The ratio of Fun:Cost would be a more accurate benchmark.
You're right, we shouldn't use them stupidly. If we already have a motion-sensing light system in our house, we should continue to use that tech with CFL bulbs rather than halogen, since, you know, that has nothing to do with what kind of technology the bulb uses.
Um.. how is heat in enclosed fixtures an issue with CFLs? Fluorescents give off less heat than incandescent bulbs...1/3 as much IIRC. If the old bulb works in a fixture, a fluorescent should too.
An alternative liquid-core design, the nuclear salt-water rocket has been proposed by Robert Zubrin. In this design, the working fluid is water, which serves as neutron moderator as well. The nuclear fuel is not retained, drastically simplifying the design. However, by its very design, the rocket would discharge massive quantities of extremely radioactive waste and could only be safely operated well outside the earth's atmosphere and perhaps even entirely outside earth's magnetosphere.
In other words, it would be like if your local nuclear plant was spraying the surrounding area with heavy water. Not good. Yes, a few km up the exhaust would be spread out over a few km, but how about radius you're affecting from the ground up until then?
If nuclear rockets are ever to be used on launch vehicles they would definitely have to be a closed-system design.
I work for CAM Commerce Solutions, and we provide point of sale/inventory software to medium and small businesses.
One of our customers had the free version of our software which limits you to having one physical store. To get around this, the woman (who was a very elderly lady in her 70s) would backup their database every night, bring it home on a disc, and restore it on her home computer to continue work. Then, do the same thing the next morning to get it back to their store. She actually called our support line to try to get help whenever she had restore problems.
She's probably restored her database hundreds of times since they opened.
Why another war with Romulans? 200 years after the TNG era ships I would expect that they've explored the rest of the galaxy and found lots of other interesting species to get assraped by.
So a fair comparison would be the difference in gas consumption between a 3000 mile 747 trip and a 300 mile Escalade trip.
And more people travel 300 miles because of these cars. If they had to bike 4 days to get to their relatives 2 towns over, they might not choose to travel so far.
So a fair comparison would be the difference in gas consumption between a 300 mile Escalade trip and a 30 mile bike ride. I think the bike will win out.
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Unbelievable. How about your great-grandchildren? Will you roll in your grave as they call you Great Grandpa Douchebag, raper of the environment?
Imagine if we found writings from people in the 1800s describing how they know that their coal plants will cause large increases in asthma, followed by a hearty laugh and a passing "good thing we'll be dead!" I'd certainly be extra pissed, and you would too.
Life isn't a generations-spanning episode of "Punk'd."
Yeah, otherwise known as RTG's, which I mentioned...
Do some research; Cassini has 3 RTGs and they provide a combined 888 W of power. RTGs are only competitive when the mission is to the outer planets, or when solar panels are impractical for whatever reason.
Also, nuclear reactors are thought to be safer since they're fully powered down during launch, which is the time of highest risk during the mission.
Exactly. Coronal mass ejections are not the main cause of concern on a long-term mission for astronauts. Now, a lot of cosmic radiation is ionizing radiation such as electrons and protons, which can be diverted electromagnetically, unlike gamma rays. However, as noted by some others, the power output required to run your magnetic shield 24/7 would almost certainly be ridiculous.
Remember that our only options for power generation right now are solar arrays and RTG's, and you're not going to get much more than a few kW of power output from either of those two. The shuttle's average power consumption is around 14kW, which is supplied by the fuel cells, so we're going to need a really beefy solar array system just to generate that. Even a nuclear reactor is expected to get somewhere around 500 kW at best, but most of that will probably be needed for whatever advanced propulsion system they're going to employ, since LH2/LOX won't cut it for that kind of long-distance mission.
Did anybody else catch the irony of him referencing Big Brother for his pitch to create a massive national pirate blacklist?
Thank god we aren't speaking Engligh!
Merci beaucoup, amies Francais d'Amerique!
If I buy a Prius, and sell my current vehicle, odds are that the person buying my car is replacing an even older vehicle. It's a trickle-down effect.
If everybody just kept running the same vehicles, it might save on raw materials, but we'd still be driving 15mpg cars with no catalytic converters, and Los Angeles would still be at the (much more) dangerous air pollution levels of the 70s.
Um, perhaps this is because the oldest Prius (in the U.S. anyway) is only 7 Years old, which to reach 300k by now would require you to drive an average of nearly 43,000 miles every year; somehow I doubt this is true for many people.
On the other hand I am positive you can find plenty of other Toyota owners who have gotten such mileage out of their cars.
Not to be insensitive to your plight, but isn't a lot of that due to the fact that the pound is worth approximately $2?
When I was in London recently I recall paying 1 pound for a Coke from a vending machine, but nobody goes around complaining that Cokes in Britain cost $2.
This only works if you've managed to already convert the entire economy to run on E100. Otherwise, you're still using fossil fuels to produce Ethanol (i.e. for all the equipment that helps grow, harvest, and process the corn) which, when you work out the numbers for our current economy, works out to a much smaller savings in CO2 emissions, even though Ethanol itself still has a positive net energy production.
The problem is that there's no feasable way to convert the entire economy to ethanol based on a crop like corn, so unfortunately it's not an ultimate solution to the problem.
Er.. what?
Slashdot: the only place where you can make a crappy joke and have it be misinterpreted as a statement of intellectual superiority
We will finally be able to identify the elusive Unobtainium!
Yeah, with LOX you could have a hybrid, which I'm sure Rutan and co. would be interested in.
Yeah, the cost of adding a hybrid drivetrain is around $3k which is about double the estimated cost to add the proposed system, and you get nearly double the efficiency gain with a hybrid, so it's not like this blows hybrids out of the water is all I'm saying.
And I mentioned it could be used in concert with hybrid technology.
Think of it, isp of the SSME without the problem of cryo systems (well at least for the fuel, LOX would still need it. Still, less is more in this case)
I'm not sure their claim about this being a better solution than hybrids is justfied. Looking at the Honda Civic and Toyota Camry, the Hybrid versions offer approx. 45% better fuel efficiency, much higher than the 25% quoted in the article for this technology.
Additionally, this technology does not eliminate idling (especially on ignition with a cold and poorly-performing catalytic convertor) which is one of the things about hybrids that gets them a high air air pollution rating (AT-PZEV from the CA Air Resources Board).
Still, because of the low cost this technology might be a great benefit to large cars which are so expensive already, even in addition to hybrid systems.
No. But then again, Doom 3 (And corresponding hardware) do not cost 1024 times as much money to aqcuire. The ratio of Fun:Cost would be a more accurate benchmark.
You're right, we shouldn't use them stupidly. If we already have a motion-sensing light system in our house, we should continue to use that tech with CFL bulbs rather than halogen, since, you know, that has nothing to do with what kind of technology the bulb uses.
Also, CFLs start up instantly now....
Um.. how is heat in enclosed fixtures an issue with CFLs? Fluorescents give off less heat than incandescent bulbs...1/3 as much IIRC. If the old bulb works in a fixture, a fluorescent should too.
Uh... you do realize that he wrote the original trilogy, right? Are you saying that sucked too?
Uhhh.... no.
Assuming we're talking about the Nuclear Salt Water Rocket, the engine literally ejects the contaminated fuel out the exhaust nozzle. From the wiki on Nuclear Thermal Rocket:
An alternative liquid-core design, the nuclear salt-water rocket has been proposed by Robert Zubrin. In this design, the working fluid is water, which serves as neutron moderator as well. The nuclear fuel is not retained, drastically simplifying the design. However, by its very design, the rocket would discharge massive quantities of extremely radioactive waste and could only be safely operated well outside the earth's atmosphere and perhaps even entirely outside earth's magnetosphere.
In other words, it would be like if your local nuclear plant was spraying the surrounding area with heavy water. Not good. Yes, a few km up the exhaust would be spread out over a few km, but how about radius you're affecting from the ground up until then?
If nuclear rockets are ever to be used on launch vehicles they would definitely have to be a closed-system design.
I work for CAM Commerce Solutions, and we provide point of sale/inventory software to medium and small businesses. One of our customers had the free version of our software which limits you to having one physical store. To get around this, the woman (who was a very elderly lady in her 70s) would backup their database every night, bring it home on a disc, and restore it on her home computer to continue work. Then, do the same thing the next morning to get it back to their store. She actually called our support line to try to get help whenever she had restore problems. She's probably restored her database hundreds of times since they opened.
Why another war with Romulans? 200 years after the TNG era ships I would expect that they've explored the rest of the galaxy and found lots of other interesting species to get assraped by.
Sound ze alarm! The Liberals have accused Fox News of being biased!
Ohhh snap
So a fair comparison would be the difference in gas consumption between a 3000 mile 747 trip and a 300 mile Escalade trip.
And more people travel 300 miles because of these cars. If they had to bike 4 days to get to their relatives 2 towns over, they might not choose to travel so far.
So a fair comparison would be the difference in gas consumption between a 300 mile Escalade trip and a 30 mile bike ride. I think the bike will win out.
(... forehead slap.)