What the hell has that to do with the security of the flight?
Nothing. And that's perfectly ok - customs doesn't care about the security of flights, because they search your stuff after the flight is over. They're looking for things that are illegal to bring into the country (narcotics, weapons, large amounts of cash without proper paperwork, certain kinds of foodstuffs, etc).
...with my company laptop which I will bring with me this monday ?
Don't bring it with you. Or don't have any important information on it.
Should I let it be searched by customs, or should I call the legal department of my (very large) company to handle the situation ?
To answer this question, first consider this simple question: Who will the customs officer detain/subject to full cavity search/deport/mark for disappearance - the person carrying the object in question or some companys legal department ?
The reason they can search your suitcase is that it might have a bomb in it.
Customs doesn't search for bombs. They search for anything that is illegal to bring into the country (drugs, weapons, large amounts of cash without proper paperwork, certain kinds of foodstuffs, etc).
It's called proportional representation. You might want to add a sufficiently high threshold for entry into the parliaments (5% if you really like smallish parties, 10-15% if you want to keep the nutcases out for sure) to keep the system from exploding into a bunch of micro-parties that cannot agree on anything (see: Weimar republic as a historic example, or Italy today).
Unfortunately, this would force the two big parties to form coalitions and compromises with the smaller parties if they want to run the countries. This is something neither of the big parties likes. The big parties run the country right now. This means that the chances of any change happening are zero.
Let me see... The answer for an alternative fuel is... ?
cooking oil, vegetable oils, uhhh ethanol
Bzzzzzzzzzz Nope. I'm sorry. You are still burning hydrocarbons so you get greenhouse gases. Next Contestant please!
You can emit as much CO2 as you want, as long as most of the carbon in that CO2 has come out of the air in the last few years (not million years) instead of the ground.
Oil may not just be for cars, but looking at it from a perspective of percentages, probably 99% or more of oil production goes to gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and asphalt. All of these are directly used for transportation.
You forgot heating oil. Well, it's about the same as diesel, but not for cars.
Heck. I use about 720 liters of diesel per year for driving, and probably twice that for heating...
Although we have been working on it around the world since at least the 70's with the last oil crisis and haven't seemed to find anything viable enough to replace oil long term yet.
No, we haven't been working on it since the 70s. We started working on it in the 70s, but then the oil got cheap again and we completely forgot that we wanted to work on it.
Maybe we can stick to working on it till we actually come up with a solution this time. The time where the oil price will skyrocket for real (i.e. not driven by a cartel like in the 70s, and not driven by speculators like right now) isn't far ahead.
You do realize that plants are much more efficient solar collectors than photovoltaic cells?
Photosynthesis efficiency is about 6%. Commercial photovoltaic cells are somewhere between 10% and 20%. And they also work in below-freezing temperatures (even better than when it's warm), which you cannot claim of plants.
Plants may be better at turning solar power into stored chemical energy, though. Depends on how long the winter is where you grow them.
That is wrong. In a new diesel, it will run pure biodiesel with no modifications.
Cool. Will you buy me a new engine if I try that in mine (model-year 2004, should be new enough) ? Because the manual says something along the lines of "Under no circumstances run this vehicle with biodiesel or vegetable oil.".
Ferment into what? It is running in a diesel engine, not a ethanol engine.
Yes, and vegetable oil is not biodiesel. Biodiesel is an ester made from vegetable oil.
The best way to lighten an automobile is to get rid of the huge asshole inside. Then safety's almost a given.
I've got a better suggestion - remove the big, heavy chunk of metal under the hood that burns all the gasoline. Then the car is perfectly safe and emission-free.
It's not just plastics, lots of things depend on ground-sourced chemicals that are extremely uneconomical to make from plants.
If you have enough plants, you can run them through biomass-to-liquid process (basically turning them into synthesis gas and then synthesizing hydrocarbons from that). That's as economical or uneconomical as making gasoline from plants.
I always stay out of oil debates because there's a temptation to repeatedly scream "OIL IS NOT JUST FOR CARS!".
Last I heard, 95% of the oil are used for fuels of some sort, and only 5% are used for other petroleum products.
wikipedia claims the triple point of water is 611.73 pascals which would put it just below martian surface pressure, so liquid water should be able to exist albiet in a pretty narrow temperature band.
The pressure axis in the phase diagram doesn't refer to the total pressure, but to the partial pressure of water vapor (or, to be more precise, to the pressure of water vapor since the phase diagram assumes that there are no other substances present).
Since water vapor differs significantly from an ideal gas, the partial pressures of other gases do have an effect on water, but they cannot just be added to the pressure axis in the phase diagram.
its depressing how feeble and unreliable the space probe design are compared to the insane amounts of investment.
And you're... qualified to make this statement ? Are you any kind of engineer (ME or something along those lines would be best) ?
shovel, to scoop up dirt, instead of some decent drilling apparatus that could get samples from much deeper and from harder surface.
Yes, of course, a drill. How brilliant. So where do you get all the power to run that drill ? How do you keep it lubricated ? How do you keep your lubricant from polluting your samples ? How do you move the drill around to drill in different places ? And remember, this is a space probe. Weight is at a premium.
solar panels that get covered in dust because someone is too lazy to add windscreen wipers.
So how well do your windshield wipers work when its completely dry ? How do you avoid scratching the surface of the solar panels (which will permanently degrade their output) ? What do you do when the wiper breaks down in the middle of its operation (which will knock out that solar panel completely) ?Also, now we've learned that Martian winds are strong enough to keep the panels clean.
making things heavier and more robust than needed resulting in insane liftoff prices.
Hey, you're the one suggesting adding all kinds of heavy (and useless) stuff to probes.
if businesses would be contracted to design and make happen space missions we would have 1000 men moon base by now.
If business were contracted to do so, we'd have a lot of dead people on the moon, a couple of businesses that have gone belly-up, and some shareholders and CEOs that got insanely rich in the process. Not sure if that's any better than what we have now.
you could just give the budget and say use what you must to accomplish it and the leftover is your profit.
Great, give me the money, here's your space probe. Business closes, owners and CEOs make off with wads of cash, space probe fails because they've been cutting a few corners too many. And don't even think of delaying payment until the probe was successful - no businessperson in their right mind would accept such a delay in payment.
Same reason why you usually don't launch rockets from the poles - delta-V.
Why would they be any tougher than landing anywhere else on the planet?
Because you need to deal with a much higher delta-V when landing on the pole compared to landing on the equator (provided that you're landing on the side of the planet that rotates in the direction that your spacecraft is coming in - if you try the other side, you're going to have to deal with twice the delta-V of a polar landing, so don't do that).
Even if they use ethanol from algae, hemp, switchgrass, or sugar cane, this might reduce our need for oil, but it can't replace oil used for other things like plastic.
Yes, it can. Because all the resources (and more) you mentioned can be turned into synthesis gas (basically a mix of CO and H2), which can then be turned into the hydrocarbon of your choice, essentially providing synthetic "natural" gas, gasoline, diesel, etc.
What is wrong with using a vegetable oil in a diesel engine?
Particulate filters and modern injection systems (which provide a lot of the efficiency gain) rely on certain fuel properties (lubrication, thermal stability, etc) that straight vegetable oil doesn't provide. So, yeah, you can build a diesel engine that runs on straight vegetable oil, but do expect it to live up to all the disadvantages of this engine type (loud, low power, dirty) that modern technology has managed to hide.
It is not the CO2 that makes Venus so hot. It is the fact that Venus rotates backwards which causes it to only do one rotation in about a year. That and it is closer to the sun.
Mercury is half the distance from the sun that Venus is, and also rotates slowly. Yet, the maximum temperature on Mercury is lower than the average temperature on Venus, despite Mercury receiving four times the irradiance of Venus.
Plus, Venus is pretty much isothermal, i.e. it's a hellhole regardless of whether you're on the day or the night side. And Venus' albedo is about twice that of Earth (39% vs. 76%), so the power available for heating the atmosphere is about the same as on Earth, since Venus receives about twice the solar irradiance of Earth.
Your statements are simply nonsense. Come back when you've got things to say that aren't trivial to refute.
In your mention of the A2, you forget to mention... the car's fucking UGLY.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye, a body with a Cw value of 0.25 (lowest value that any mass-produced car has reached, ever) is aesthetic all by itself.
If you want ugly, try an older Fiat Multipla (the one that looks like a squished frog) or Pontiac Aztek. Ugh.
And in your mention of the smart, you forget to mention, among other things, that the Mk-1 smart's handling is a joke.
They must have used one of the _very first_ models that did not come with ESP (or disabled the ESP on their Smart). ESP was added in 2003 and definitely does not fatten the car by a whole 60 kg. That only happened last year when they changed the body.
Please explain how everyone's desire to own a cheap car causes car manufacturers to makes cars heavier, not lighter?
Because the car has to fulfill safety standards. To make it lighter while still fulfilling the standards, you need to use expensive materials (e.g. aluminium), which, by pure coincidence, also take a lot more energy to manufacture than inexpensive materials (e.g. steel).
The Audi A2 was a marvel in this regard. Made out of aluminum and whatnot. Didn't sell at a 20000€ price tage since no one wanted to pay that much for a small car, but got 80 mpg in the most efficient version.
The original Smart was also lighter (745kg), but they had to fatten the car by a whopping 60kg to pass US safety standards.
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Nothing. And that's perfectly ok - customs doesn't care about the security of flights, because they search your stuff after the flight is over. They're looking for things that are illegal to bring into the country (narcotics, weapons, large amounts of cash without proper paperwork, certain kinds of foodstuffs, etc).
Don't bring it with you. Or don't have any important information on it.
Should I let it be searched by customs, or should I call the legal department of my (very large) company to handle the situation ?
To answer this question, first consider this simple question: Who will the customs officer detain/subject to full cavity search/deport/mark for disappearance - the person carrying the object in question or some companys legal department ?
Customs doesn't search for bombs. They search for anything that is illegal to bring into the country (drugs, weapons, large amounts of cash without proper paperwork, certain kinds of foodstuffs, etc).
It's called proportional representation. You might want to add a sufficiently high threshold for entry into the parliaments (5% if you really like smallish parties, 10-15% if you want to keep the nutcases out for sure) to keep the system from exploding into a bunch of micro-parties that cannot agree on anything (see: Weimar republic as a historic example, or Italy today).
Unfortunately, this would force the two big parties to form coalitions and compromises with the smaller parties if they want to run the countries. This is something neither of the big parties likes. The big parties run the country right now. This means that the chances of any change happening are zero.
You can emit as much CO2 as you want, as long as most of the carbon in that CO2 has come out of the air in the last few years (not million years) instead of the ground.
You forgot heating oil. Well, it's about the same as diesel, but not for cars.
Heck. I use about 720 liters of diesel per year for driving, and probably twice that for heating
No, we haven't been working on it since the 70s. We started working on it in the 70s, but then the oil got cheap again and we completely forgot that we wanted to work on it.
Maybe we can stick to working on it till we actually come up with a solution this time. The time where the oil price will skyrocket for real (i.e. not driven by a cartel like in the 70s, and not driven by speculators like right now) isn't far ahead.
Photosynthesis efficiency is about 6%. Commercial photovoltaic cells are somewhere between 10% and 20%. And they also work in below-freezing temperatures (even better than when it's warm), which you cannot claim of plants.
Plants may be better at turning solar power into stored chemical energy, though. Depends on how long the winter is where you grow them.
And 1/10 of additional velocity roughly translates to 20% more energy that needs to be dissipated.
Hate to break it to you, but a lot of the exhaust of hydrocarbon-burning vehicles is water, too.
Cool. Will you buy me a new engine if I try that in mine (model-year 2004, should be new enough) ? Because the manual says something along the lines of "Under no circumstances run this vehicle with biodiesel or vegetable oil.".
Ferment into what? It is running in a diesel engine, not a ethanol engine.
Yes, and vegetable oil is not biodiesel. Biodiesel is an ester made from vegetable oil.
I've got a better suggestion - remove the big, heavy chunk of metal under the hood that burns all the gasoline. Then the car is perfectly safe and emission-free.
If that was true, you'd see a lot more diesel-powered cars in the US.
If you have enough plants, you can run them through biomass-to-liquid process (basically turning them into synthesis gas and then synthesizing hydrocarbons from that). That's as economical or uneconomical as making gasoline from plants.
I always stay out of oil debates because there's a temptation to repeatedly scream "OIL IS NOT JUST FOR CARS!".
Last I heard, 95% of the oil are used for fuels of some sort, and only 5% are used for other petroleum products.
The pressure axis in the phase diagram doesn't refer to the total pressure, but to the partial pressure of water vapor (or, to be more precise, to the pressure of water vapor since the phase diagram assumes that there are no other substances present).
Since water vapor differs significantly from an ideal gas, the partial pressures of other gases do have an effect on water, but they cannot just be added to the pressure axis in the phase diagram.
And you're ... qualified to make this statement ? Are you any kind of engineer (ME or something along those lines would be best) ?
shovel, to scoop up dirt, instead of some decent drilling apparatus that could get samples from much deeper and from harder surface.
Yes, of course, a drill. How brilliant. So where do you get all the power to run that drill ? How do you keep it lubricated ? How do you keep your lubricant from polluting your samples ? How do you move the drill around to drill in different places ? And remember, this is a space probe. Weight is at a premium.
solar panels that get covered in dust because someone is too lazy to add windscreen wipers.
So how well do your windshield wipers work when its completely dry ? How do you avoid scratching the surface of the solar panels (which will permanently degrade their output) ? What do you do when the wiper breaks down in the middle of its operation (which will knock out that solar panel completely) ?Also, now we've learned that Martian winds are strong enough to keep the panels clean.
making things heavier and more robust than needed resulting in insane liftoff prices.
Hey, you're the one suggesting adding all kinds of heavy (and useless) stuff to probes.
if businesses would be contracted to design and make happen space missions we would have 1000 men moon base by now.
If business were contracted to do so, we'd have a lot of dead people on the moon, a couple of businesses that have gone belly-up, and some shareholders and CEOs that got insanely rich in the process. Not sure if that's any better than what we have now.
you could just give the budget and say use what you must to accomplish it and the leftover is your profit.
Great, give me the money, here's your space probe. Business closes, owners and CEOs make off with wads of cash, space probe fails because they've been cutting a few corners too many. And don't even think of delaying payment until the probe was successful - no businessperson in their right mind would accept such a delay in payment.
Same reason why you usually don't launch rockets from the poles - delta-V.
Why would they be any tougher than landing anywhere else on the planet?
Because you need to deal with a much higher delta-V when landing on the pole compared to landing on the equator (provided that you're landing on the side of the planet that rotates in the direction that your spacecraft is coming in - if you try the other side, you're going to have to deal with twice the delta-V of a polar landing, so don't do that).
I have a phase diagram of water here that disagrees with you (and anyone who modded you informative. geez, people, hand in your geek licenses please).
See that boundary line in the lower-left corner, where vapor and ice are directly adjacent to each other ? That's where water sublimes.
http://encarta.msn.com/media_461541579/phase_diagram_for_water.html
Yes, it can. Because all the resources (and more) you mentioned can be turned into synthesis gas (basically a mix of CO and H2), which can then be turned into the hydrocarbon of your choice, essentially providing synthetic "natural" gas, gasoline, diesel, etc.
What is wrong with using a vegetable oil in a diesel engine?
Particulate filters and modern injection systems (which provide a lot of the efficiency gain) rely on certain fuel properties (lubrication, thermal stability, etc) that straight vegetable oil doesn't provide. So, yeah, you can build a diesel engine that runs on straight vegetable oil, but do expect it to live up to all the disadvantages of this engine type (loud, low power, dirty) that modern technology has managed to hide.
Probably because heating a larger amount of soil would have been too much of a drain on the batteries of the thing.
But I agree. 1 mm diameter particles are tiny.
Let the baking begin.
Mercury is half the distance from the sun that Venus is, and also rotates slowly. Yet, the maximum temperature on Mercury is lower than the average temperature on Venus, despite Mercury receiving four times the irradiance of Venus.
Plus, Venus is pretty much isothermal, i.e. it's a hellhole regardless of whether you're on the day or the night side. And Venus' albedo is about twice that of Earth (39% vs. 76%), so the power available for heating the atmosphere is about the same as on Earth, since Venus receives about twice the solar irradiance of Earth.
Your statements are simply nonsense. Come back when you've got things to say that aren't trivial to refute.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and to my eye, a body with a Cw value of 0.25 (lowest value that any mass-produced car has reached, ever) is aesthetic all by itself.
If you want ugly, try an older Fiat Multipla (the one that looks like a squished frog) or Pontiac Aztek. Ugh.
And in your mention of the smart, you forget to mention, among other things, that the Mk-1 smart's handling is a joke.
They must have used one of the _very first_ models that did not come with ESP (or disabled the ESP on their Smart). ESP was added in 2003 and definitely does not fatten the car by a whole 60 kg. That only happened last year when they changed the body.
Because the car has to fulfill safety standards. To make it lighter while still fulfilling the standards, you need to use expensive materials (e.g. aluminium), which, by pure coincidence, also take a lot more energy to manufacture than inexpensive materials (e.g. steel).
The Audi A2 was a marvel in this regard. Made out of aluminum and whatnot. Didn't sell at a 20000€ price tage since no one wanted to pay that much for a small car, but got 80 mpg in the most efficient version.
The original Smart was also lighter (745kg), but they had to fatten the car by a whopping 60kg to pass US safety standards.