This is the model that Better Place Motors is taking. Their cars have swappable battery packs. Yes, the batteries weigh a few hundred pounds, but they get swapped out by robot at the "gas station." The discharged battery stays behind and gets charged up for the next guy.
You purchase the car; the battery is paid for by usage. Swapping batteries is a flat fee, plus an incremental fee per kWhr of energy you net. The approach they take is similar to cell phones: you own the phone and purchase minutes. You can also charge the car at home, like a typical EV, though I suspect there is still a "lease" fee in those cases.
They have demonstration-scale setups in a few places worldwide. Israel and Denmark are big backers. I would think it a perfect solution for Hawaii. Like so many alternatives to the present automobile infrastructure, it'll take a while, and huge amounts of capital, to reach a critical mass in any market.
It's hard to get more fair than a completely flat tax. Millionaires or billionaires could not completely avoid it because they have to spend money and you wouldn't be able to use a shell company to make personal purchases.
It may be equitable, but that is not the same thing as fair
Temperatures lag behind CO2 concentration, for this simple reason: CO2 keeps more energy here on Earth, and that energy goes into warming the Earth, but because the Earth has enormous heat capacity, it can absorb a whole lot of energy before showing significant changes in temperature. Temperature lags behind heat flow just as surely as a capacitor's voltage lags current: these are basic principles of physics, available to any backyard tinkerer
For an analogy, consider an electric oven. Turn the power on for, say, 2 minutes, while recording the temperature for the next hour. The temperature won't show an appreciable change right away, and won't reach peak temperature for several minutesafter you turn the power off. This is because it takes time for the heat to conduct out from the heat element, and the heat capacity of the oven itself acts with a sort of inertia: it resists warming up as well as cooling down.
The unfortunate corollary is that, even if we stopped all CO2 emissions tomorrow, temperatures will continue to rise for a long while: decades at least. This is because the "inertia" of the Earth's heat capacity is enormous, and because the CO2 already in the atmosphere will persist for decades to centuries.
Ah, House - where internists do brain surgery, psychiatrists run MRI scanners, everyone does their own labs, and a brilliant medical team only has one patient to deal with at a time! Why can't all of medicine work that well?
The speed of fMRI is limited in part by the speed with which oxyhemoglobin levels in the brain change. Although blood flow patterns in the brain can change quickly (less than 1 sec), the speed at which oxygen and hemoglobin saturation levels in the tissue change is longer (several seconds).
You can't get (useful) temporal information that is faster than the phenomenon you are trying to measure. For instance: turn on an oven and measure the temperature. Sure, you can read a temperature sensor at almost arbitrary speeds - MHz is not out of the question. But the oven itself isn't going to get up to temperature in anything less than a few minutes.
Multi-source supply - ARM processors are produced by lots of companies. And although Calxeda is the only source of these new server-intended ARM processors, they are only the first.
In my case the sheet of paper is in a safe deposit box. Only my wife and I can access it, and our survivors (should we both suddenly kick the bucket) have power of attorney. It may not protect against a subpoena, but I am not that concerned.
The submitter mentions that he changes his passwords monthly. Overkill in my opinion, but I won't fault him for it. Making monthly trips to the brick-and-mortar bank are a bit inconvenient, but hardly the end of the world.
I'm not sure if you are being snarky or ignorant. Since you posted as anonymous coward, I will assume the worst. In any event, if you had bothered to read the article, you would have found this:
Two catalysts are needed for [water electrolysis] — one that liberates the hydrogen atoms, and another for the oxygen atoms — but the oxygen reaction has been the limiting factor in such systems.
Hydrogen aside, there are plenty of situations where it would be handy to have a ready source of oxygen. Existing oxygen concentrators are nice, but only concentrate oxygen, rather than produce near-pure oxygen.
The architecture puts ARM into more direct competition with Intel and its 64-bit Xeon processors
Maybe I've just got a certain prejudice, but I don't see any direct comparison, let alone competition, between ARM processors and Xeon processors, no matter how wide their addressing is. ARM processors run some really sophistocated stuff... in my smartphone. A Xeon processor allows my CAD workstation to handle 3D models with thousands of components, or run an ANSYS simulation that solves the equivalent of 10 million simultaneous equations.
A smart heat pump thermostat would probably need external sensors for the outdoor temperature, and maybe even add things like wind speed, ambient heat from direct sunlight vs overcast, etc to determine when to start up the heat pump and stay only in the most efficient heat pump mode yet still get to the desired temperature at the desired time
Sounds like you need the equivalent of a boiler reset control (PDF). It has a sensor for measuring outdoor temperature, and a sensor that measures the boiler exit temperature. Based on a setting or two from you during setup, it will cycle the boiler on and off to keep the boiler exit temperature within X degrees of a setpoint temperature (whenever there's a call for heat from a thermostat, that is). That setpoint temperature varies inversely with outdoor temperature: when it is 50 F outside, the boiler exit temperature setpoint may be 120 F; when the temperature drops to 0 F, the exit temperature setpoint will increase to 170 F.
The software running this algorithm probably amounts to about 50-100 lines of code. Using something like an Arduino, you could write the rest of the software using their standard libraries in about another 300-500 lines of code. You could program the heat profile pretty easily over the plain-text serial terminal (available to your computer over USB). The hardware interface to the heat pump could be done for a slap-dash $50, or more properly for $100-$200.
If it really bugs you that much, why not just have a go and fix it?
If I were paying for the heat I would probably install a programmable thermostat to try and save
So.... why not just do that? It takes all of five minutes to wire in a thermostat (2-3 wires), and just about as long to remove it. Your landlord doesn't need to know, and you get some satisfaction about not being so wasteful. Better yet, ask your landlord for permission - he or she may even subsidize the cost, because they are paying for the waste.
Is the only reason anybody tries to conserve is because they're trying to save money? I can understand that being the case at the level of entire industries and populations, but is it really so much to ask for a little ecological altruism at the individual level?
What is to stop people from simply purchasing a $50 DVD burner, removing the laser mechanism, providing a power source and appropriate optics for the required application?
Nothing, except for the fact that most idiots that shine lasers at people wouldn't know a soldering iron if it were jammed up their ass.
Look at your electric bill lately? You should thank your lucky stars that you aren't paying 6 dollars per kWh.
On a related rant: it amazes me how blithely unaware most people are about their personal energy consumption. Some might be able to vaguely guesstimate what they paid the utility company for electricity or natural gas last month, but very few could actually say "I used XX kWh of electricity last month. The cost of the electricity was $YY, and the cost of delivery was $ZZ." What is the typical cost per kWh for your electricity? Where is most of it produced? Using what fuel? About the closest people are able to come are to know what the price of a gallon of gas is near them, and how far they can get between fill-ups. That's a good start, but transportation is only about 1/3 of U.S. energy consumption. No wonder politicians can so easily manipulate the discussion about energy: practically no one knows anything about it!
How about this: the whole program is just a wash to put more money in the hands of corrupt politically-connected creeps. Look at the history of government funding solar power in America...any scandals come to mind
You could easily swap "solar power" for "defense systems". The scandals related to government support of solar power pale by a few orders of magnitude to the overt graft and fraud in military research and acquisition. What's your point? Are you suggestion that we shouldn't be funding either?
For software engineering, I could agree with him that languages, IDEs, paradigms, etc., are still evolving very quickly. For all I know, they will be evolving at that speed in perpetuity.
On the other hand, I don't think this is true for all "techies." The tools for electrical design, for instance, haven't changed much since the introduction of 2D CAD tools for PCB layout in the 1980s. If you've been soldering, prototyping, debugging, and laying circuits out for the last 20 years, chances are pretty good that your skillset is still market competitive with people who've just been trained. If you've been out of work for the last two years, I doubt that you are any less good at doing those things than a fresh college grad. Perhaps more so, since there are many finer points of electrical engineering that only can be learned via experience. You might still have difficulty getting a job in the current environment, but it won't be because your skills are out of date.
And although new versions of SolidWorks (for instance) come out every year, the tools for 3D mechanical modeling haven't changed since the introduction of parametric modeling over twenty years ago. If you were designing manufacturable parts five years ago, and were able to produce quality detailed drawings and discuss designs with other people, you should be able to jump right back in and do that today: you haven't missed anything substantial. The biggest change, perhaps, has been the introduction of rapid prototyping machines. You can approach them differently than you would traditional manufacturing, but that's hardly necessary to start making use of them.
I have to commend the authors for their deft handling of page layout - inserting those strange squiggly characters inline with the text and integrated into graphs and figures is pretty neat. LateX, do you think?
all the helium thats ever existed on earth is still here
All the helium that was present at the start of the Earth, which was never very much, has long since escaped our atmosphere. The helium that exists on Earth today comes almost entirely from radioactive decay of heavy elements: alpha particles are helium nuclei, and electrons to balance the charge can be had from the parent nucleus. Helium tends to not stick around very long, so it is lost at about the rate that is generated. It is too rare in the atmosphere to economically extract: nearly all that we use is extracted from oil and gas wells.
They couldn't find a facility? Wasn't the whole point of these programs to build new facilities?
Fisker has a facility in the United States - in Delaware. They will use this facility, much like Tesla is using the old NUMMI facility in SoCal, for their mass manufacturing. The problem, so Fisker claims, is that they wanted to use a contract manufacturer for their initial production run (presumably while getting their main facility running, and by debugging their mfg processes with the early production run), but could not find a suitable contract manufacturer in the U.S. It's not like just any ol' company can build a car, and those that can are already doing just that: they go by the names of Ford, Chrysler, GM, and Toyota.
The (erroneous, and much disproved) argument made by the anti-vaccine crowd is, explicitly, that the thimerosal causes autism. Theirs is a causal hypothesis. Eliminating the cause and getting the negative result would disprove the hypothesis.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the model that Better Place Motors is taking. Their cars have swappable battery packs. Yes, the batteries weigh a few hundred pounds, but they get swapped out by robot at the "gas station." The discharged battery stays behind and gets charged up for the next guy.
You purchase the car; the battery is paid for by usage. Swapping batteries is a flat fee, plus an incremental fee per kWhr of energy you net. The approach they take is similar to cell phones: you own the phone and purchase minutes. You can also charge the car at home, like a typical EV, though I suspect there is still a "lease" fee in those cases.
They have demonstration-scale setups in a few places worldwide. Israel and Denmark are big backers. I would think it a perfect solution for Hawaii. Like so many alternatives to the present automobile infrastructure, it'll take a while, and huge amounts of capital, to reach a critical mass in any market.
It may be equitable, but that is not the same thing as fair
Temperatures lag behind CO2 concentration, for this simple reason: CO2 keeps more energy here on Earth, and that energy goes into warming the Earth, but because the Earth has enormous heat capacity, it can absorb a whole lot of energy before showing significant changes in temperature. Temperature lags behind heat flow just as surely as a capacitor's voltage lags current: these are basic principles of physics, available to any backyard tinkerer
For an analogy, consider an electric oven. Turn the power on for, say, 2 minutes, while recording the temperature for the next hour. The temperature won't show an appreciable change right away, and won't reach peak temperature for several minutesafter you turn the power off. This is because it takes time for the heat to conduct out from the heat element, and the heat capacity of the oven itself acts with a sort of inertia: it resists warming up as well as cooling down.
The unfortunate corollary is that, even if we stopped all CO2 emissions tomorrow, temperatures will continue to rise for a long while: decades at least. This is because the "inertia" of the Earth's heat capacity is enormous, and because the CO2 already in the atmosphere will persist for decades to centuries.
Ah, House - where internists do brain surgery, psychiatrists run MRI scanners, everyone does their own labs, and a brilliant medical team only has one patient to deal with at a time! Why can't all of medicine work that well?
The speed of fMRI is limited in part by the speed with which oxyhemoglobin levels in the brain change. Although blood flow patterns in the brain can change quickly (less than 1 sec), the speed at which oxygen and hemoglobin saturation levels in the tissue change is longer (several seconds).
You can't get (useful) temporal information that is faster than the phenomenon you are trying to measure. For instance: turn on an oven and measure the temperature. Sure, you can read a temperature sensor at almost arbitrary speeds - MHz is not out of the question. But the oven itself isn't going to get up to temperature in anything less than a few minutes.
Multi-source supply - ARM processors are produced by lots of companies. And although Calxeda is the only source of these new server-intended ARM processors, they are only the first.
In my case the sheet of paper is in a safe deposit box. Only my wife and I can access it, and our survivors (should we both suddenly kick the bucket) have power of attorney. It may not protect against a subpoena, but I am not that concerned.
The submitter mentions that he changes his passwords monthly. Overkill in my opinion, but I won't fault him for it. Making monthly trips to the brick-and-mortar bank are a bit inconvenient, but hardly the end of the world.
Not looking forward to the U.S. Presidential election?
Hydrogen aside, there are plenty of situations where it would be handy to have a ready source of oxygen. Existing oxygen concentrators are nice, but only concentrate oxygen, rather than produce near-pure oxygen.
Maybe I've just got a certain prejudice, but I don't see any direct comparison, let alone competition, between ARM processors and Xeon processors, no matter how wide their addressing is. ARM processors run some really sophistocated stuff ... in my smartphone. A Xeon processor allows my CAD workstation to handle 3D models with thousands of components, or run an ANSYS simulation that solves the equivalent of 10 million simultaneous equations.
Sounds like you need the equivalent of a boiler reset control (PDF). It has a sensor for measuring outdoor temperature, and a sensor that measures the boiler exit temperature. Based on a setting or two from you during setup, it will cycle the boiler on and off to keep the boiler exit temperature within X degrees of a setpoint temperature (whenever there's a call for heat from a thermostat, that is). That setpoint temperature varies inversely with outdoor temperature: when it is 50 F outside, the boiler exit temperature setpoint may be 120 F; when the temperature drops to 0 F, the exit temperature setpoint will increase to 170 F.
The software running this algorithm probably amounts to about 50-100 lines of code. Using something like an Arduino, you could write the rest of the software using their standard libraries in about another 300-500 lines of code. You could program the heat profile pretty easily over the plain-text serial terminal (available to your computer over USB). The hardware interface to the heat pump could be done for a slap-dash $50, or more properly for $100-$200.
If it really bugs you that much, why not just have a go and fix it?
So.... why not just do that? It takes all of five minutes to wire in a thermostat (2-3 wires), and just about as long to remove it. Your landlord doesn't need to know, and you get some satisfaction about not being so wasteful. Better yet, ask your landlord for permission - he or she may even subsidize the cost, because they are paying for the waste.
Is the only reason anybody tries to conserve is because they're trying to save money? I can understand that being the case at the level of entire industries and populations, but is it really so much to ask for a little ecological altruism at the individual level?
Nothing, except for the fact that most idiots that shine lasers at people wouldn't know a soldering iron if it were jammed up their ass.
Start charging them for their electricity usage. Simple economics: want to reduce the use of a limited resource, make it expensive.
Not only that: it is limited to concentrating solar thermal power.
Look at your electric bill lately? You should thank your lucky stars that you aren't paying 6 dollars per kWh.
On a related rant: it amazes me how blithely unaware most people are about their personal energy consumption. Some might be able to vaguely guesstimate what they paid the utility company for electricity or natural gas last month, but very few could actually say "I used XX kWh of electricity last month. The cost of the electricity was $YY, and the cost of delivery was $ZZ." What is the typical cost per kWh for your electricity? Where is most of it produced? Using what fuel? About the closest people are able to come are to know what the price of a gallon of gas is near them, and how far they can get between fill-ups. That's a good start, but transportation is only about 1/3 of U.S. energy consumption. No wonder politicians can so easily manipulate the discussion about energy: practically no one knows anything about it!
You could easily swap "solar power" for "defense systems". The scandals related to government support of solar power pale by a few orders of magnitude to the overt graft and fraud in military research and acquisition. What's your point? Are you suggestion that we shouldn't be funding either?
One of the main players in prosthetic hands is iLimb. (Not an apple subsidiary)
For upper limb amputations, between 2/3 and 3/4 are due to trauma: motorbike crashes and soldiers. sources: [1], [2], [3]
For lower limbs, they are mostly vascular-related, secondary to heart disease and diabetes.
For software engineering, I could agree with him that languages, IDEs, paradigms, etc., are still evolving very quickly. For all I know, they will be evolving at that speed in perpetuity.
On the other hand, I don't think this is true for all "techies." The tools for electrical design, for instance, haven't changed much since the introduction of 2D CAD tools for PCB layout in the 1980s. If you've been soldering, prototyping, debugging, and laying circuits out for the last 20 years, chances are pretty good that your skillset is still market competitive with people who've just been trained. If you've been out of work for the last two years, I doubt that you are any less good at doing those things than a fresh college grad. Perhaps more so, since there are many finer points of electrical engineering that only can be learned via experience. You might still have difficulty getting a job in the current environment, but it won't be because your skills are out of date.
And although new versions of SolidWorks (for instance) come out every year, the tools for 3D mechanical modeling haven't changed since the introduction of parametric modeling over twenty years ago. If you were designing manufacturable parts five years ago, and were able to produce quality detailed drawings and discuss designs with other people, you should be able to jump right back in and do that today: you haven't missed anything substantial. The biggest change, perhaps, has been the introduction of rapid prototyping machines. You can approach them differently than you would traditional manufacturing, but that's hardly necessary to start making use of them.
I have to commend the authors for their deft handling of page layout - inserting those strange squiggly characters inline with the text and integrated into graphs and figures is pretty neat. LateX, do you think?
Whoa
Too bad they never made any sequels. [xkcd]
All the helium that was present at the start of the Earth, which was never very much, has long since escaped our atmosphere. The helium that exists on Earth today comes almost entirely from radioactive decay of heavy elements: alpha particles are helium nuclei, and electrons to balance the charge can be had from the parent nucleus. Helium tends to not stick around very long, so it is lost at about the rate that is generated. It is too rare in the atmosphere to economically extract: nearly all that we use is extracted from oil and gas wells.
Fisker has a facility in the United States - in Delaware. They will use this facility, much like Tesla is using the old NUMMI facility in SoCal, for their mass manufacturing. The problem, so Fisker claims, is that they wanted to use a contract manufacturer for their initial production run (presumably while getting their main facility running, and by debugging their mfg processes with the early production run), but could not find a suitable contract manufacturer in the U.S. It's not like just any ol' company can build a car, and those that can are already doing just that: they go by the names of Ford, Chrysler, GM, and Toyota.
The (erroneous, and much disproved) argument made by the anti-vaccine crowd is, explicitly, that the thimerosal causes autism. Theirs is a causal hypothesis. Eliminating the cause and getting the negative result would disprove the hypothesis.