How far are the turbines from the caves? What happens if the wind that should be generating electricity for the compressors takes the day off and chooses to make an unfashionably late arrival? How much of a boost do the turbines get from the compressed air? I'd think with enough losses along the way (steps up/down in voltage at transformers to transmit the power to the compressors, mechanical inefficiencies of the compressors, dependence of the turbines' optimum performance on this assistance) the project, while novel, could take a while to pay for itself. I'm not suggesting that bleeding-edge science should be economically feasible - that should come after the science is established - but that efficiency should be priority number one so that the technology can become competitive with other ways to store potential energy.
I'm pretty sure the rich kids who have expensive clothes and handbags (and for that matter, late model BMW cars) will always be this kind of frivolous. Personally, I'd like to see a ghetto-fabulous chameleon paint job on this thing; one would have many more angles and so many more colors at a given time with the skin stretched as it is in the demo video.
Clearly you've not been cross-hatching, stippling, or shading with the monochrome crayons in the set; give it a try and you will be able to draw shades of colors that are beyond difficult to achieve by altering applied pressure alone.
$45 million for 250 miles means they need to get 5+ miles of MAGLEV per million dollars. It costs more per mile to build paved roads when one considers the costs of concrete, interrupting and rerouting utilities, traffic control signals, and wages for the guys who lean on their shovels and pretend to work. With this kind of budget it would be wiser to widen interstate highway 15 at major points of congestion than to blow it on exorbitantly-expensive research.
\begin{comment} It might well put a damper on piracy efforts that rely on decentralized distribution to stay afloat, but it will seriously hurt the (few) legitimate uses of peer-to-peer distribution. Imagine the strain on software development if the the good will and bandwidth of end users disappeared from their distribution model. At the end of the day somebody has to pay for the $n$ million downloads at 700MB apiece; I seriously doubt the paid development, marketing, sales, and support staff want to see it reallocated from their budgets. \end{comment}
The "apt-proxy" package is easy to install in Ubuntu and takes care of only caching the files requested. It keeps a copy of current packages available (like/etc/apt/sources.list) then downloads packages from remote mirrors named in its configuration file on-demand and caches them locally. It is slick and saved me a good bit of hassle when updating 3 x86 Ubuntu machines on a slow connection.
I agree completely. I broke my back in September and had to spend all but 1-2 hours per day in bed for the entire months of September and October, as well as a good part of November. In less than a week I looked forward to that one hour of time on my feet, even time on a toilet. In less than a month, I developed orthostatic hypotension (passing out when I got up). I would not take any amount of money to be stuck in bed. It is unhealthy.
My office is in half of a pole barn built by the construction/engineering firm from which we split. The mechanical and electrical consulting engineering firm for which I work uses primarily folding 6 and 8 foot tables up against modular partition walls and routes cabling through the few sheetrock walls in the area. Sure I'd like the place to be prettier, but functional improvements can make time spent at work far more effective. I would rather see a few things that optimize my time spent at work (and increase my chance of leaving near quittin' time) than feel like I work in a hip place.
1) Accessible wiring could ease relocation of workstations to allow existing spaces to accommodate more employees or furniture changes 2) Centrally-located printing could minimize time spent running to and from printers when hard copies are required 3) Multiple monitors could reduce ink and paper consumption on project-specific reference material that would otherwise clutter a desk only to be discarded each revision cycle 4) Standing workstations could optimize floor space (good for the company), increase alertness (it's harder to fall asleep standing than sitting) and improve posture (9-11 hours in a chair can be bad for you). 5) Asterisk PBX could forward telephone calls on a per-employee basis to whichever workstation that employee is logged into (or to voice mail if that employee is not logged in) rather than using a switchboard that routes calls to a given wall jack.
>>It's been a long time since I've come across any hardware that doesn't work OTOB.
That's a bit of a stretch. It's been about two years since (Ubuntu) Linux did not play nice with my M-Audio fancy-pants digital/analog/MIDI in/out card. I've not yet tried Ubuntu 8.04 on my MacBook with atheros wirless, but Ubuntu 7.10 did require me to build my own wireless module. It has, however, been a long time since Linux distributions I've tried have lacked OTOB support for common or outdated hardware. Expecting support for brand new, top-of-the-line hardware for which hardware details are undocumented is unreasonable.
I liked the content of your comment and agree with you in most regards. If you use homophones properly people who regularly read and write in English will pay more attention to your posts.
Sincerely, Your Friendly Neighborhood Grammar Fascist
I hear you on that one. I use Linux at home by choice to do everything I want to do (games are for consoles) and have to use Windows at work to do anything I need to do. If your work is just geeky enough you can use Linux or Windows; every bit of software I used for mass spectrometry in a research laboratory was available for Windows or Linux from Hiden Analytical or National Instruments. They wanted us to move to Linux too; as an undergraduate I got a call back the day after requesting information about Linux versions from Hiden when I explained that I had to pitch the transition to my supervisor.
They use a pitot-static tube to measure a pressure. By finding the pressure gradient across the kite it can be reconfigured to harness the wind optimally or reeled in if the wind is too strong. The entire process from measurement to reading to adjustment is automated: autopitot.
I agree completely that the community aspect of FOSS is its best selling point. I explained to a girl I dated that I use linux because I can get online support for just about everything. Occasionally some jerk will give me the old JFGI treatment, but most of the time I can find software to fit my needs and get help installing and using it live via IRC. I then explained how IRC is similar to AIM (which has a free client called gaim, now pidgin, which does more than the AIM client without pesky adverts) but for chatting with helpful strangers around the world rather than gossiping with friends. If a user unfamiliar with FOSS is given the impression that they can learn new things or not based on their interaction with well-versed users and even programs' developers that user will be much more comfortable than going for something because it is "free"; after all, every game and every version of photoshop that user pirated in the past was "free".
Some of the worst AIDS epidemics are in relatively poor areas where education and prophylactics are in short supply. Defeating a virus is a noble goal, but before that is possible it will be important to work on the problems of feeding and educating at-risk populations. Dying of a nasty disease is nasty. Sentencing people to die of famine by eradicating a nasty disease and causing rapid population growth is cruel.
Having an extra monitor would certainly be a waste of space. I recently purchased a MacBook, upgraded its memory and hard drive with third-party components, and am selling the stock bits on eBay. I don't know a thing about your monitors; they could be far nicer than those built into iMacs. If you could part with either of your monitors you could drive the price of an iMac close to that of a Mac mini. I wish you luck trying to resolve this conflict between what you want and what you do not need.
Most software is also distributed on a set of CDs or DVDs (used to be floppies) for the consumer to use if reinstallation or repair are necessary. Paper packaging and pressed discs are inexpensive to manufacture, but shipping replacement discs to OEMs and requiring those OEMs to alert consumers by mail, ads, or news can be a very expensive process.
I'll agree with you that car analogies don't fit exactly, but getting your pile of bits to consumers has an associated cost much higher than getting the original pile of bits to the OEMs.
I crashed Calc a few times trying to load large data sets from laboratory work. The parent poster was not making a joke. It's a really annoying failure in OOo Calc.
It's between 2200-2300 pixels in 103 diagonal inches, or about 21-23 pixels per inch. Unless the viewer sits very far away from the screen (which would be quite a waste as I'd imagine the goal is a theater-like experience) the pixels will be visible. To compare, my several-years-old LCD monitor at 1280x1024 and 17" has about 96-97 pixels per inch.
The article's premise is flawed. The author writes about using electrolysis to produce hydrogen and then compressing and cooling it for transport as a liquid. Neither of these are preferred methods.
The costs of compressing and cooling hydrogen to liquid form can be offset by not being stupid. Rather than carrying around hydrogen, it is far easier to carry around a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Alcohols can be broken down to yield some hydrogen and some carbon-oxide byproducts. Carbon monoxide, one of the byproducts, can undergo a water-gas shift reaction to produce more hydrogen from water, yielding products of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Carry around a tank of hydrocarbon fuel and make hydrogen as-needed for much greater energy density during transport. If you really must store hydrogen, use a metal hydride. Lanthanum-nickel (LaNi5) can absorb hydrogen at relatively low pressures (about 3-4 atmospheres) and then release it at atmospheric pressure. As an added bonus, the amount of hydrogen than can be absorbed into the bulk structure of LaNi5 is greater than the amount of liquid hydrogen that would occupy the same volume.
\begin{tinfoilhat}
Which oil company sponsored this research? The guy only looked at failed, poorly-though out solutions.
\end{tinfoil hat}
Slashdot Mirror
How far are the turbines from the caves? What happens if the wind that should be generating electricity for the compressors takes the day off and chooses to make an unfashionably late arrival? How much of a boost do the turbines get from the compressed air?
I'd think with enough losses along the way (steps up/down in voltage at transformers to transmit the power to the compressors, mechanical inefficiencies of the compressors, dependence of the turbines' optimum performance on this assistance) the project, while novel, could take a while to pay for itself. I'm not suggesting that bleeding-edge science should be economically feasible - that should come after the science is established - but that efficiency should be priority number one so that the technology can become competitive with other ways to store potential energy.
What an eloquent way to say "FR!ST P0$T!!1!!11!" while remaining on-topic. Well played, sir.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
I'm pretty sure the rich kids who have expensive clothes and handbags (and for that matter, late model BMW cars) will always be this kind of frivolous. Personally, I'd like to see a ghetto-fabulous chameleon paint job on this thing; one would have many more angles and so many more colors at a given time with the skin stretched as it is in the demo video.
Clearly you've not been cross-hatching, stippling, or shading with the monochrome crayons in the set; give it a try and you will be able to draw shades of colors that are beyond difficult to achieve by altering applied pressure alone.
touche
I just hate saying "nth" without using $n^{\text{th}}$ knowing that HTML is a primitive beast.
Cheers,
Ryan
$45 million for 250 miles means they need to get 5+ miles of MAGLEV per million dollars. It costs more per mile to build paved roads when one considers the costs of concrete, interrupting and rerouting utilities, traffic control signals, and wages for the guys who lean on their shovels and pretend to work. With this kind of budget it would be wiser to widen interstate highway 15 at major points of congestion than to blow it on exorbitantly-expensive research.
\begin{comment}
It might well put a damper on piracy efforts that rely on decentralized distribution to stay afloat, but it will seriously hurt the (few) legitimate uses of peer-to-peer distribution. Imagine the strain on software development if the the good will and bandwidth of end users disappeared from their distribution model. At the end of the day somebody has to pay for the $n$ million downloads at 700MB apiece; I seriously doubt the paid development, marketing, sales, and support staff want to see it reallocated from their budgets.
\end{comment}
The "apt-proxy" package is easy to install in Ubuntu and takes care of only caching the files requested. It keeps a copy of current packages available (like /etc/apt/sources.list) then downloads packages from remote mirrors named in its configuration file on-demand and caches them locally. It is slick and saved me a good bit of hassle when updating 3 x86 Ubuntu machines on a slow connection.
I agree completely. I broke my back in September and had to spend all but 1-2 hours per day in bed for the entire months of September and October, as well as a good part of November. In less than a week I looked forward to that one hour of time on my feet, even time on a toilet. In less than a month, I developed orthostatic hypotension (passing out when I got up). I would not take any amount of money to be stuck in bed. It is unhealthy.
My office is in half of a pole barn built by the construction/engineering firm from which we split. The mechanical and electrical consulting engineering firm for which I work uses primarily folding 6 and 8 foot tables up against modular partition walls and routes cabling through the few sheetrock walls in the area. Sure I'd like the place to be prettier, but functional improvements can make time spent at work far more effective. I would rather see a few things that optimize my time spent at work (and increase my chance of leaving near quittin' time) than feel like I work in a hip place.
1) Accessible wiring could ease relocation of workstations to allow existing spaces to accommodate more employees or furniture changes
2) Centrally-located printing could minimize time spent running to and from printers when hard copies are required
3) Multiple monitors could reduce ink and paper consumption on project-specific reference material that would otherwise clutter a desk only to be discarded each revision cycle
4) Standing workstations could optimize floor space (good for the company), increase alertness (it's harder to fall asleep standing than sitting) and improve posture (9-11 hours in a chair can be bad for you).
5) Asterisk PBX could forward telephone calls on a per-employee basis to whichever workstation that employee is logged into (or to voice mail if that employee is not logged in) rather than using a switchboard that routes calls to a given wall jack.
>>It's been a long time since I've come across any hardware that doesn't work OTOB.
That's a bit of a stretch. It's been about two years since (Ubuntu) Linux did not play nice with my M-Audio fancy-pants digital/analog/MIDI in/out card. I've not yet tried Ubuntu 8.04 on my MacBook with atheros wirless, but Ubuntu 7.10 did require me to build my own wireless module. It has, however, been a long time since Linux distributions I've tried have lacked OTOB support for common or outdated hardware. Expecting support for brand new, top-of-the-line hardware for which hardware details are undocumented is unreasonable.
Let's play the homophone game:
http://www.answers.com/there
http://www.answers.com/their
Which should you have used in your opening sentence?
I liked the content of your comment and agree with you in most regards. If you use homophones properly people who regularly read and write in English will pay more attention to your posts.
Sincerely,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Grammar Fascist
I hear you on that one. I use Linux at home by choice to do everything I want to do (games are for consoles) and have to use Windows at work to do anything I need to do. If your work is just geeky enough you can use Linux or Windows; every bit of software I used for mass spectrometry in a research laboratory was available for Windows or Linux from Hiden Analytical or National Instruments. They wanted us to move to Linux too; as an undergraduate I got a call back the day after requesting information about Linux versions from Hiden when I explained that I had to pitch the transition to my supervisor.
I have no idea, man. I'm glad you understood it. That means a few dozen people got it and the one with the mod points fell for it.
They use a pitot-static tube to measure a pressure. By finding the pressure gradient across the kite it can be reconfigured to harness the wind optimally or reeled in if the wind is too strong. The entire process from measurement to reading to adjustment is automated: autopitot.
I agree completely that the community aspect of FOSS is its best selling point.
I explained to a girl I dated that I use linux because I can get online support for just about everything. Occasionally some jerk will give me the old JFGI treatment, but most of the time I can find software to fit my needs and get help installing and using it live via IRC. I then explained how IRC is similar to AIM (which has a free client called gaim, now pidgin, which does more than the AIM client without pesky adverts) but for chatting with helpful strangers around the world rather than gossiping with friends.
If a user unfamiliar with FOSS is given the impression that they can learn new things or not based on their interaction with well-versed users and even programs' developers that user will be much more comfortable than going for something because it is "free"; after all, every game and every version of photoshop that user pirated in the past was "free".
Some of the worst AIDS epidemics are in relatively poor areas where education and prophylactics are in short supply. Defeating a virus is a noble goal, but before that is possible it will be important to work on the problems of feeding and educating at-risk populations. Dying of a nasty disease is nasty. Sentencing people to die of famine by eradicating a nasty disease and causing rapid population growth is cruel.
Having an extra monitor would certainly be a waste of space. I recently purchased a MacBook, upgraded its memory and hard drive with third-party components, and am selling the stock bits on eBay. I don't know a thing about your monitors; they could be far nicer than those built into iMacs. If you could part with either of your monitors you could drive the price of an iMac close to that of a Mac mini. I wish you luck trying to resolve this conflict between what you want and what you do not need.
Looking at the UK Apple Store, iMacs range from £800-£2300. I have cut your gap down to £100.
I used Excel with some frequency doing laboratory research. That job didn't suck at all, and Excel is much easier to use the OOo Calc or Gnumeric.
Most software is also distributed on a set of CDs or DVDs (used to be floppies) for the consumer to use if reinstallation or repair are necessary. Paper packaging and pressed discs are inexpensive to manufacture, but shipping replacement discs to OEMs and requiring those OEMs to alert consumers by mail, ads, or news can be a very expensive process.
I'll agree with you that car analogies don't fit exactly, but getting your pile of bits to consumers has an associated cost much higher than getting the original pile of bits to the OEMs.
I crashed Calc a few times trying to load large data sets from laboratory work. The parent poster was not making a joke. It's a really annoying failure in OOo Calc.
It's between 2200-2300 pixels in 103 diagonal inches, or about 21-23 pixels per inch. Unless the viewer sits very far away from the screen (which would be quite a waste as I'd imagine the goal is a theater-like experience) the pixels will be visible. To compare, my several-years-old LCD monitor at 1280x1024 and 17" has about 96-97 pixels per inch.
The article's premise is flawed. The author writes about using electrolysis to produce hydrogen and then compressing and cooling it for transport as a liquid. Neither of these are preferred methods. The costs of compressing and cooling hydrogen to liquid form can be offset by not being stupid. Rather than carrying around hydrogen, it is far easier to carry around a liquid hydrocarbon fuel. Alcohols can be broken down to yield some hydrogen and some carbon-oxide byproducts. Carbon monoxide, one of the byproducts, can undergo a water-gas shift reaction to produce more hydrogen from water, yielding products of hydrogen and carbon dioxide. Carry around a tank of hydrocarbon fuel and make hydrogen as-needed for much greater energy density during transport. If you really must store hydrogen, use a metal hydride. Lanthanum-nickel (LaNi5) can absorb hydrogen at relatively low pressures (about 3-4 atmospheres) and then release it at atmospheric pressure. As an added bonus, the amount of hydrogen than can be absorbed into the bulk structure of LaNi5 is greater than the amount of liquid hydrogen that would occupy the same volume. \begin{tinfoilhat} Which oil company sponsored this research? The guy only looked at failed, poorly-though out solutions. \end{tinfoil hat}