i figured he was just compaining aobu thte shear number of MS articals there have been in the past few months.. and trying to rationalize it.. although attempting to rationalize why anything is put on the front page of slashdot is about as wise as using a slashdot poll as the basis for research Yes, my research clearly shows that as of the time of this post 2689 people have committed identity fraud on CowboyNeal and are using his credit card. Also it seems that 1094 people who read slashdot and their friends are filing for chapter 11, which leads me to believe that many slashdot readers are bad credit risks.
What difference does the motives of the person who revealed the information make? Either the allegations are true and the bank is guilty, or they're false and the bank is innocent. The whole thing can be cleared up rather easily by providing proof that the "leaked" documents are fake. Either way the motives of the person are irrelevant. This isn't like a rape case because in a rape case the actions and motivations of both parties determine the legality of the situation (that is, who consented to what), where as in this case both parties are either guilty or innocent, and motivations don't factor in to it at all.
considering that this is a tech/nerd site.. and considering that MS has a very very large portion of the OS market. i would assume it logical that the number of articals on this site be in the same proportion about them.
sorry if it bothers you.. jsut filter it or stay in the linux or other sections I'm not sure exactly how your comment follows his. He wasn't complaining that/. has too many articles about Vista. Also, just because something is popular among the general public doesn't mean it should be popular on/., after all Intelligent Design is apparently fairly popular, particularly in the mid-west, but much less so on here.
Based on other comments (which admittedly are mostly speculation, but then again so is most of your comment), the frequency they would need replacing is related more to the purity of the water they're used on. The impurities in the water will tend to stick to the nano-structures ruining the surface area of the rod, so the purer the water, the longer the rod would last. Also, $50-$100 for a rod? If I had to guess, I'd think somewhere along the lines of $25 - $50 is more likely. I also wondered about the handling of these things, but there's really no way to be sure. Worst case scenario you can't handle them, in which case I'm sure they would just package them inside some sort of container that you drop into the system, much like water filters are packaged now. Anyway, this is all pure speculation on everyones part, I just wanted to comment that one of the "features" this company is advertising is that these are supposed to be significantly cheaper than the cathodes currently being used (not sure how much the current ones cost though, so can't really get a ballpark estimate on costs here).
the cathodes require routine replacement, something the article fails to clarify. these are expensive, have to be mined, recycled, stored, and it's not easy to echange them. Just a quick FYI to you in regard to this part of your comment. The big deal with these cathodes is that their significantly cheaper than the previous ones using common alloys on stainless steel rods. The way they get the efficiency up without using precious metals is by coating the rods with nano-particles which effectively increase the available surface area of the rod. You would still need to replace them fairly regularly, but they would be pretty cheap. Everything else you said is pretty much spot on though.
Those seeming to decry the loss of energy in converting water to hydrogen don't seem to grasp that it's a fuel-storage system, not a car that runs on water and nothing else...
...Clearly, this system would involve having some form of battery that would have to be recharged, but it could convert from distilled water to burnable hydrogen while on the go.
Yes, it will need to be plugged in and recharged, but it would be a lot easier and safer to have a battery, a water tank, and a small pressurized hydrogen tank as the fuel system than one huge pressurized hydrogen tank. And you dear AC have clearly not read most of the comments on here. First and foremost, what sparked a lot of these discussions was a comment in TFA that it seems was rather poorly worded and can be interpreted two ways. The first way, and the way I initially interpreted it, is that you would perform the electrolysis in the car while it's driving. This is, in short utter crap, for reasons outlined in many posts on here. The second way to interpret it, is that the electrolysis equipment would be built into the car, but you would plug it in in order to build up enough hydrogen to last you to your destination, and it would run entirely off the hydrogen while driving. This second interpretation is workable, although it does bring up the question of why you would add extra weight to the car by having the unused electrolysis equipment on board while it's driving. And lastly, why the hell would you waste energy using a battery to convert water into hydrogen to power the car when you can just use the battery in the first place.
Yes this system might be used to produce hydrogen that could be used as fuel in cars, or potentially in the production of another fuel for cars. It however makes no sense at all to have the system on board the car because it either adds unnecessary weight, or violates the laws of thermodynamics and is therefore impossible (depending on how to interpret the statement in the article).
Well, you're almost there, except since your using the battery to generate hydrogen, and then using that hydrogen to generate electricity (and remember, you get less energy out of the hydrogen than it took to make it) you're still operating at a loss for no reason, you could just run the engine straight off the batter and come out ahead. Now, you could generate the hydrogen off the power grid, and then use the hydrogen to power the car without having to worry about the battery, or you could just charge the battery and not worry about the hydrogen, but there's really no reason to try to combine the two.
That's cool, but what sorts of efficiency are we talking about here? How much energy input does it take to go from H2 + CO2, to CH3OH + H20. I notice on the methanol to gasoline article it mentions a catalyst that builds up a coating of carbon during the process and then must be "cleaned", but can only be cleaned so many times before it's toast. How expensive is this catalyst (this was after all the problem these new catalysts were created to solve, they're a whole lot cheaper than the old catalysts), and is it possible to "clean" the carbon off these things in a way that doesn't reintroduce it back into the atmosphere?
Gasoline doesn't "spontaneously fall apart" inside a combustion engine either. The gasoline doesn't need to "spontaneously fall apart", it's already in usable form, you just need to apply a small quantity of energy to release the stored energy (which is much greater than the energy required to release it). Water on the other hand is not in a usable form, you need to extract the hydrogen out of it first, which requires energy. In fact, the energy required is more than the energy you can obtain by then burning that released hydrogen. In short, there's no way this process can be self sustaining short of some revolutionary process that allows you to extract more energy out of hydrogen combustion than it takes to release the hydrogen from water. Now, hydrogen vehicles may work, but not with an on-the-go system. You'd have to extract the hydrogen while connected to the power grid, and then use that extracted hydrogen while driving.
Yes, except that the amount of energy necessary to sustain the process of a combustion engine is relatively small, and the energy output is high. Essentially you have gasoline (via spark plug) -> mechanical pressure (drives wheels and turns alternator) -> electrical (which charges battery and drives spark plugs). The important thing is that you get gas in one end, and by applying a small amount of energy you get a much larger amount out, which in turn can have a small amount siphoned off to make the process sustaining. Hydrogen engines on the other hand work by using a small amount of power to combine hydrogen and oxygen to create water and extra power, which so far works just like the previous system, but with hydrogen in place of gasoline, but the problem is, if you try to introduce the water -> hydrogen stage you just added extra energy requirements on the whole system. Obviously if you're converting water into hydrogen by applying energy, and then converting hydrogen into water by applying energy, you cannot possibly get more energy out of the system than was already present in it, as your just reversing the process and wasting energy doing it.
I think the most practical and efficient way to store hydrogen in a usable form is to bond it with short chains of atoms. Carbon seems to be the best choice as a "carrier" since you can attach two or three hydrogen atoms to each carbon atom in the chain, and the resulting compounds are liquid or gaseous at normal temperatures. I've no idea why this technology isn't already in widespread use; it's a simple matter of organic chemistry.:) That joke might be too subtle for some of the people here.
Now, producing hydrogen from either gasoline or ethanol and using that to drive the wheels, that's a different story. You'd have to run the numbers to see if that's more or less efficient than internal combustion. Less. Definitely less. The only way I see this working is if you magically get more energy out of the hydrogen then it takes to crack it, but because the hydrogen -> energy process is essentially the reverse of the water -> hydrogen process that will never happen due to the laws of thermodynamics. Where this might be useful is in producing hydrogen at home or at stations using power off the grid (with something like geothermal, nuclear, or wind feeding it), and then powering the cars with it, but that leads to the very mess problem of how to store and transport the hydrogen.
"Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
So instead of a tank of pressurized hydrogen gas you have a tank of distilled water in your car and it's broken down into hydrogen on demand. No need to store/transport/etc. hydrogen at all if this is really the case. Yes, I read it, but it seems you didn't comprehend it. You need energy to perform electrolysis, which in turn releases hydrogen. If the car is powered by hydrogen, and you propose extracting it on the go via electrolysis, where is the power for the electrolysis coming from? Unless you get more energy out of the hydrogen powered engine per unit of hydrogen, then it takes to extract that hydrogen via electrolysis, then it won't work, you have an energy deficit in the system. That was my point, but you totally missed it.
Why post articles like this? It's just an advertisement for a non-existent technology. There are tons of crap like this out there, why single this one out?
Let us know when someone actually develops something real and working, then it might be news. TFA says it is working, and at 85% efficiency. They speculate that by 2010 they could get up to 96% efficiency. Also TFA says they partnered with one of the major battery manufacturers and will be releasing a product later this year that uses their technology.
As someone pointed out in the comments on the last hydrogen story, the problem isn't so much making the stuff as it is storing it. Hydrogen cars are a pain because it's incredibly difficult to store hydrogen in such a way that it doesn't leak out. They mention in TFA that this process is so efficient that cars could do the electrolysis on the go with a tank of distilled water, but unless it's efficient enough to be self sustaining that won't work.
I swear, some people miss no opportunity to smugly mention their ad-blocker. I don't use an ad-blocker, I use a flash-blocker. The fact that it sometimes catches ads is just a bonus.
I would have thought that even with adaptive optics, this would be within the margin of error of our own atmosphere's lensing. I was kind of thinking the same thing. Seems like if they're seeing distortion then occam's razor would tend to dictate it's coming from the instruments used to do the measuring. Of course, if they can prove the distortion isn't being caused by the instruments, or other interference, they still need to prove that some other known property doesn't explain the distortion.
TFA says Cisco has gone on record as saying that employees are allowed to have private blogs so long as they follow the business code of conduct. So, short of violating some law, or trying to claim Cisco is somehow involved they'll leave him alone to do his thing.
Actually he had been told that if he revealed himself and did a public debate with the guy offering the bounty that the money would be donated to a charity (I believe of his choice, but not sure). According to TFA he hasn't responded to that offer either before or after he outed himself.
Just tried it in West Hollywood area using lynx as the browser. Even then it is getting diverted to their page. Pretty sneaky. ... you don't really understand how this whole DNS lookup thing works do you?
They've been doing it for about a year. i always thought it was fairly shady, but they rationalized it by saying other ISPs were doing it as well. This is the oldest excuse in the book, so much so that probably every mother on Earth has a response to it (adjusted for language/culture where appropriate): "If everyone else jumped off a bridge, would you?".
Slashdot Mirror
What difference does the motives of the person who revealed the information make? Either the allegations are true and the bank is guilty, or they're false and the bank is innocent. The whole thing can be cleared up rather easily by providing proof that the "leaked" documents are fake. Either way the motives of the person are irrelevant. This isn't like a rape case because in a rape case the actions and motivations of both parties determine the legality of the situation (that is, who consented to what), where as in this case both parties are either guilty or innocent, and motivations don't factor in to it at all.
sorry if it bothers you
Based on other comments (which admittedly are mostly speculation, but then again so is most of your comment), the frequency they would need replacing is related more to the purity of the water they're used on. The impurities in the water will tend to stick to the nano-structures ruining the surface area of the rod, so the purer the water, the longer the rod would last. Also, $50-$100 for a rod? If I had to guess, I'd think somewhere along the lines of $25 - $50 is more likely. I also wondered about the handling of these things, but there's really no way to be sure. Worst case scenario you can't handle them, in which case I'm sure they would just package them inside some sort of container that you drop into the system, much like water filters are packaged now. Anyway, this is all pure speculation on everyones part, I just wanted to comment that one of the "features" this company is advertising is that these are supposed to be significantly cheaper than the cathodes currently being used (not sure how much the current ones cost though, so can't really get a ballpark estimate on costs here).
Yes, it will need to be plugged in and recharged, but it would be a lot easier and safer to have a battery, a water tank, and a small pressurized hydrogen tank as the fuel system than one huge pressurized hydrogen tank. And you dear AC have clearly not read most of the comments on here. First and foremost, what sparked a lot of these discussions was a comment in TFA that it seems was rather poorly worded and can be interpreted two ways. The first way, and the way I initially interpreted it, is that you would perform the electrolysis in the car while it's driving. This is, in short utter crap, for reasons outlined in many posts on here. The second way to interpret it, is that the electrolysis equipment would be built into the car, but you would plug it in in order to build up enough hydrogen to last you to your destination, and it would run entirely off the hydrogen while driving. This second interpretation is workable, although it does bring up the question of why you would add extra weight to the car by having the unused electrolysis equipment on board while it's driving. And lastly, why the hell would you waste energy using a battery to convert water into hydrogen to power the car when you can just use the battery in the first place.
Yes this system might be used to produce hydrogen that could be used as fuel in cars, or potentially in the production of another fuel for cars. It however makes no sense at all to have the system on board the car because it either adds unnecessary weight, or violates the laws of thermodynamics and is therefore impossible (depending on how to interpret the statement in the article).
Well, you're almost there, except since your using the battery to generate hydrogen, and then using that hydrogen to generate electricity (and remember, you get less energy out of the hydrogen than it took to make it) you're still operating at a loss for no reason, you could just run the engine straight off the batter and come out ahead. Now, you could generate the hydrogen off the power grid, and then use the hydrogen to power the car without having to worry about the battery, or you could just charge the battery and not worry about the hydrogen, but there's really no reason to try to combine the two.
That's cool, but what sorts of efficiency are we talking about here? How much energy input does it take to go from H2 + CO2, to CH3OH + H20. I notice on the methanol to gasoline article it mentions a catalyst that builds up a coating of carbon during the process and then must be "cleaned", but can only be cleaned so many times before it's toast. How expensive is this catalyst (this was after all the problem these new catalysts were created to solve, they're a whole lot cheaper than the old catalysts), and is it possible to "clean" the carbon off these things in a way that doesn't reintroduce it back into the atmosphere?
But won't someone please think of the robot children?
Now that makes sense. Someone mod him up.
Yes, except that the amount of energy necessary to sustain the process of a combustion engine is relatively small, and the energy output is high. Essentially you have gasoline (via spark plug) -> mechanical pressure (drives wheels and turns alternator) -> electrical (which charges battery and drives spark plugs). The important thing is that you get gas in one end, and by applying a small amount of energy you get a much larger amount out, which in turn can have a small amount siphoned off to make the process sustaining. Hydrogen engines on the other hand work by using a small amount of power to combine hydrogen and oxygen to create water and extra power, which so far works just like the previous system, but with hydrogen in place of gasoline, but the problem is, if you try to introduce the water -> hydrogen stage you just added extra energy requirements on the whole system. Obviously if you're converting water into hydrogen by applying energy, and then converting hydrogen into water by applying energy, you cannot possibly get more energy out of the system than was already present in it, as your just reversing the process and wasting energy doing it.
"Our nanoparticle-coated electrodes make electrolysers efficient enough to provide hydrogen on demand from a tank of distilled water in your car."
So instead of a tank of pressurized hydrogen gas you have a tank of distilled water in your car and it's broken down into hydrogen on demand. No need to store/transport/etc. hydrogen at all if this is really the case.
Yes, I read it, but it seems you didn't comprehend it. You need energy to perform electrolysis, which in turn releases hydrogen. If the car is powered by hydrogen, and you propose extracting it on the go via electrolysis, where is the power for the electrolysis coming from? Unless you get more energy out of the hydrogen powered engine per unit of hydrogen, then it takes to extract that hydrogen via electrolysis, then it won't work, you have an energy deficit in the system. That was my point, but you totally missed it.
Let us know when someone actually develops something real and working, then it might be news. TFA says it is working, and at 85% efficiency. They speculate that by 2010 they could get up to 96% efficiency. Also TFA says they partnered with one of the major battery manufacturers and will be releasing a product later this year that uses their technology.
As someone pointed out in the comments on the last hydrogen story, the problem isn't so much making the stuff as it is storing it. Hydrogen cars are a pain because it's incredibly difficult to store hydrogen in such a way that it doesn't leak out. They mention in TFA that this process is so efficient that cars could do the electrolysis on the go with a tank of distilled water, but unless it's efficient enough to be self sustaining that won't work.
I think slashdot may have just jumped the shark... with frickin lasers.
TFA says Cisco has gone on record as saying that employees are allowed to have private blogs so long as they follow the business code of conduct. So, short of violating some law, or trying to claim Cisco is somehow involved they'll leave him alone to do his thing.
Actually he had been told that if he revealed himself and did a public debate with the guy offering the bounty that the money would be donated to a charity (I believe of his choice, but not sure). According to TFA he hasn't responded to that offer either before or after he outed himself.
Don't worry, big brother is watching out for you, he'll keep you safe from all that dangerous information.