It's possible to have this process make enough H2 on demand to power a car, but not within reasonability of getting the system small and light enough to compete with battery or air engine technology, and it's far more complex, expensive, and prone to trouble than any of the other technologies presented.
Onother issue: By releasing H2 from H2O, where do you plan to put all the O2??? We can't release that much O2 into the air! Sure, it doesn't pollute, but high O2 levels cause all sorts of other problems, greatly increase the intensity and frequency of forest fires, and can harm animal life (including us). O2 is also a greenhouse gas, though not as poewrful a one as CO2.
The only way to make this system work is for the O2 to get bonded to something. it gets bonded to the nano material. When it's full, it needs replacement. This is the same problem with the Aluminum/H2 generation systems. Sure, water can be made available with some additional expense, and it solves the issues of H2 portabiltiy, but now we would have to mine, manufacture, store, distribute, collect, and recylce billions of tons of metal (or nano material which likely costs more and recylcles poorer, unless this is just a fancy, high surface areas aluminum structure to begin with).
worse, since this system needs energy to work, you're still talking about a plug-in car infrastructure or ethanol engine anyway, which means you actually have not 1 but 3 infrastructures to build (more power, more water, and cathode distribution/replacement).
Make power centrally, using 100% green and infinetely renewable sources. Use that power to compress air and run air powered engines. Or run the power into batteries and run cars on pure electricity. either way, it's simpler, it's available now, it's scalable over time (30,000 water stations, or H2 stations, or cathode exchange stations don't all open at once, and you can't drive where one isn't, but there's an electric outlet EVERYWHERE). Oh yea, not only all this, but it costs less too...
He's right. Why waste the energy to carry the electrolysis system, the water, the tank, and all the expensive and complex equipment associated with it, not to mention the fuel cell and all, when you could just attatch the batteries directly to the motors and put in a bigger battery.
It's all well and good that this may be possible, but noone's going to buy a car that weighs 500 lbs more, costs 50% more, is the size of a ford explorer but seats only 2, and requires perfectly pure (distilled) water to run on when they can have a Chevy Volt....besides, granted the water, assuming we can get as much as we need, purified, and distributed this way (we already have enough of a shortage of that), 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. I did not read the article, but my impression is this is a similar technology to using aluminum to release H2 from water using applied energy. (something/. covered a few months ago.)
I don't care if H2 is FREE to make. The general public will never be driving H2 cars around.
There are many reasons BOTH competing H2 technologies can't work. Most of it boils down to safety (driving H2 bombs around town), logistics (how do you ship highly compressed H2 since it can't be pipelined), fuel cells might have good reliability, but if you crack it in a wreck, it's half the cost of the vehicle to replace, the only safe ways to store H2 gas (metal infusion) weigh too much, take 8 hours to refuel, and have less than 200 mile range.
We'll have full electric cars, air powered cars, and a full ethanol industry hopping long before they solve the safety, vehicle weight/efficieny/range problems, costs, and other very big negatives surrounding H2.
the ONLY thing H2 has going for it it it burns 100% clean. So do air poewred cars and battery powered cars, and the energy used to fill the tank with all 3 can be just as clean, safer, cheaper, and less of a logistics challenge.
1: we're not comparing capitol costs here. yes, it's going to be expensive to add centralized power, but where do you expect to get the energy for your precious electric cars if we don't? Even if I did have to put up 8 times the numnber of power plants to offset the difference (which i do not), the one time cost vs 100 years of being able to use those towers (with routine replacement of inner workings of the generator itself) is far less of an environmental impact than mining, manufacturing, storing, distributing, disposing of, and recylcing all your battersies every 1500 charge cycles.
2: Solar takes a lot of land, but by using superconducting power grids, it will take up land nobody wants (desert and floating solar farms). Same goes for wind over water, in mountain ranges, and in canyons. Water power is not limited to dams and lakes. Inline sunberged turbines in free flowing rivers can be used, as well as tidal poewr generation.
3: not going to run an air car on coal power. Going to do it on free power. Both air and electric are better than coal and gas. Air is slightly less efficint overall than electric, but pollotes less and requires less infrastructure.
4: Your compressor efficincy numbers are based on AC efficincy, not potential energy storage. High efficiency compressors can obtain more than 30% of their energy used in the form of potential energy of the stored air mass. Shop compressors operate at poorer efficinecies because they try to maintain a high pressure and rapidly recompress after use. Home compressors for vehicle use can use a different model which produces better yield. also, your home tank can fill from power from your rooftop solar cells.
5: LiIons loose approx 8% energy per month. Less than 1% per day, yes, not too shabby. They increae ion heat only 1C typically in a 3 hour charge cycle. However, at 200KM per charge, I'm not waiting 3 hours per charge. Batteries that toshiba produces that have 90 second to 5 minute charge cycles due have significant (about 3%) energy loss to heat. Safe and convenient, but wasteful.
6: Carbon fiber flexible multi layer air tanks are completely safe. I was personally very worried about this one. Can't use em for H2 storage due to molecule size and leakage of flamabale gas, but for Nitrogen, they're safe and have virtually no gas loss over 48 hour terms (measurable, but near irelevent numbers). They can take a bullet sized hole and due to layering technology, only cause a stream leak of air. They will decompress over several minutes. They're immune to crushing dammage. It's like a dozen layers of kevlar all glued together.
On the other hand, under normal operation, LiIon are fairly safe, but in high heat or extreme cold environments they eiather won't work or can explode. Also, charging is safe, but overcharging causes leaks or detonations. The bulk of battery recalls have been for failure to properly detect overcharge. Also, in a natural fire (not cause by the batteries) they are extremely hazardous and dangerous, and require hazmat cleanups. Air tanks require no such safety measures and can survive 2000+ degree fires for hours on end.
7: Car batteries are recycled very well. LiIon does not recycle nearly as well, or as cost effictively as lead acid batteries. It can be done, but no industry exists today to deal with the mass of recycling needed, nor for storage and logistics of delivery of several hundred ounds of battery. I have a friend with a Prius who needed a battery replacement. Had the warranty not covered it (only 2 years in, dead car), it would have been $6000 in batteries and a huge chunk of labor (noone had equipoment available to get the battery unit out, car had to be shipped away for service at a location that could do it).
8: we're more worried about the capacitors killing the repair man, or braking the capacitors in a wreck, not someone fiddling around with the battery and electrical unit (though all those guys customizing their prius into plug-ins have had a few g
You're telling me you've never had a compressor break? Are you kidding me? I've had the compressor on my AC break *twice*, and the compressor on my refrigerator break once. Compressors operate in high-stress environments, whether they're compressing coolant or compressing air.
You've been unlucky. I have 3 refridgerators, 2 are over a decade old, one nearly 2. None have failed. In my family, out of 14 hourseholds, we've had 1 unit fail on us in less than 10 years unit life.
Also, AC and other small compressors are, well, small. They also don't compare to compressors that have direct oil feeds. High poewred compression systems, like those used in car shops, for painting, and for large capacity air compression, have typical warranties in excess of 10 years. I've never seen a fridge with a 10 year warranty without paying extra for it. My father-in-law has a massive compressor he uses in his workshop. He bought it in 1973. Never been repaired.
layered carbon multihilled tanks are specifically designed to not rupture, even under direct crushing force or penetration by a bullet. The inner and outer carbon linings are designed to only allow a steady and safe flow of air from the vessele in event of a rupture. This is like a tank gued together with several layers of teflon. They do not rupture. I was worried about this, but after researching it, am completely convinced they are safe. It's also fireproof and safe from detonation up to 2000F.
Electric motors may offset SOME of the weight of battery systems, but compressed air systems weigh even less.
The energy used at the power plant 1) is far less than individual engines in terms of energy input to output, 2) can be mitigated by reclamation, scrubbing, and other means, 3) can be from 100% free energy (solar, wind, geothermal, etc, and hopefully 100% or more of what we're adding to the system will be just that), 4) can be done cheaper, and with less logistical issues, 5) doesn't have seccondary environmental issues from ground seepage, leaks, etc, 6) doesn't require transporting across the country on trucks, 7) you get the idea yet?
I've read up on container technology, and am fairly convinced. I'm still a bit concerned about what happens when a container gets crushed (severe impact event), but i rarely happens on that scale.
A super conducting grid WILL be required for us to move to 100% free energy. To route the kind of voltage we're talking about from key areas of the country that can effctively produce wind and solar energy, and to suplement those areas with power when they fall short (night, dead wind days, etc), over those distances traditional lines can not compete (we'd need hundreds of parallel lines, and the energy loss over 100 miles is nothing compared to 3000).
In our current grid, 90% of electricity is used within 100 miles of generation. In a free energy world, most of NYC would need to be powered by the midwest winds in the mornings, and California powered by solar, wind and water. In mid-day, most everyone would draw exclusively from solar. By nightfall solar is no longer an option, and we can't possibly store this much energy in batteries, so the wind farms need to spin up higher and water and geothermal kick in to supplement. We also plan to use water being pumped uphill during daylight to run into massive resiviors so at night the water can flow downhill through dams and water power plants. A large amount of ethanol will also likely be burned locally, as well as manmade charcoal from waste products, to locally supplement the system when necessary. With a super conducting grid, we expect less than 20% of power to be generated within 100 miles of where used. the thermal and electrical waste to use copper lines for that is rediculous.
Wind, water, and solar plants may have low efficiency for turning energy into electricity, but the energy required to do that is free, unlimited, and does not directly pollute, so therefore is irrelevent. I'm NEVER going to suggest we use coal or other fuel to compress the air for air cars, nor would I for electric cars either, so this is a dead end argument...
The direct efficincy of stored energy to engine power is near 100% for air cars. Since there's no matter conversion (combustion, etc), and ther is virtually no heat generated by using air to move the poston (only the small friction not mitigated by proper lubrication), the only energy loss is in the power train itself, which every single mode of transportation suffers from as you correctly indicated.
Your numbers on electric motor efficiency are also WAY off. Yes, motors can operate at those efficienies, but only under constant and predictable (ideal) torque and RPM. In the field, they almost never come near those ideals. They do much better (60% or so efficiency for electric vs 25-30 for ICE, but combine this with distance loss of poewr over high voltage lines, battery charge loss (heat when charging), battery depreciation (loss over time), and discharge loss (bettery efficincy), and it's worse than some of the better TDI and MIT engines out there. Granted, running on electricity means we can deploy better power generation, make much of it using 100% renewable free energy, scrub emissions, and mroe. this is far more ideal than ethanol power or other biofuel alternatives. the other problems with electric cars are safety (LiIon batteries explode, capacitors can kill instantly, they're complex and expensive, batteries are very bad for environment when thrown away, we have limited resources to make enough of the batteries in the first place, and we have to call HasMat teams out if a car catches on fire!)
Air powered engines compete with electric in terms of battery to wheel efficiency, but they don't suffer from energy loss over time. They're not inherently dangerous or risky (even though 4000PSI compressed air can be an issue, it's only dangerous if not secured in a proper milti-hull carbon reinforced container, which it will be)
Also, air powered cars run on regulators. they DO NOT slow down as the tank drains. (they do, but only when less than 2% pressure remains) 4000PSI is not driven directly to the engine, only a few hundred PSI is required. They use the same CVT and drive trains other vehicles, including most electrics do, so the efficiency from the engine to the wheel would be the same, and need not be considdered, though there is talk of allowing the air to directly power each wheel individually, which can both improve overall efficincy and also improve deceleration reclamation.
Thermodynamic efficinecy has nothing to do with how much energy goes into making the car move. Air powered engines have extremely high (over 90%) efficiency, vs ICEs which at best (MIT dual injection engines and similar) can only reach about 40%.
The energy to make air into a compressed form can be done with 100% renewable energy. Even ethanol can't compete with that.
It's like an electric car, except instead of the electric motors gettign about 70% efficiency, we get much higher. Also, the thermal rediation (heat) from compression can be used to create hot water, or be directed into other reclamation systems, eliminating some or most of the waste at that level.
Also note the energy to compress air is about 5 times less than the energy input to product H2 to power a fuel cell vehicle the same distance.
From what I can research, the air tank will power the car, all by itself, for about 200Km. With a gas engine suppliment, this could be drastically extended, upwards of 400Km I would say is a fair (safe) estimate. The cars come with their own internal pump system that can run off household electricity, but it takes upwards of 4 hours to fill the tank, and assuming it operates like any other air compressor, it will be loud. The good news is high pressure canisters could refil your tank in 3 minutes or less. Houses would almost certainly have to be equipped with high pressure home filling stations. they won't take much room, could fill 2-3 cars at once, and given all day to refill. By burying them we could eliminate most of the noise. The heat generated compressing the air could even be used for hot water (or to supplement it) as a side effect.
Creating high pressure air (4000+ PSI) generates heat. Filling a tank with uncompressed air takes time almost as much for safety as for the actual time to compress. Filling stations could bury high volume, high efficiency compressors, divert the heat using geothermal options, and eliminate the bulk of noise. You could fill up in 3-5 minutes by using pre-pressurized air from massive underground tanks, or even massive above-ground tanks in some areas. they'd cost a bit to install, but over 10 years would pay better returns than fossil fuel stations. At home, if you had a smaller version system, you could either make hot water, or put in geothermal capacitors. The benefit to geothermal would mean in some markets you'd never have to shovel your walkway in the winter again (use heat pipes under concrete to both dispurse heat and melt snow, lol)
It's a bit dangerous though... carbon fiber tanks at 4000+ PSI... If one ruptuers, the force released could quite litteraly throw the car a few blocks. More likely, it would simply rupture, causing the car to act like a bomb, just without flames... Vapor expansion at this level could rip people and metal apart. these tanks need to be REALLY strong to be safe, adding significantly to vehicle weight, reducing storage space, and limiting fuel economy. Sure, we can make one that goes 800KM on a fill up and has room for 4 including luggage, but there's no way the motor safety guys are ever going to allow it on the streets...
I'm skeptical. Keep them out of my country until there's 50,000 or more of them driving around. We'll see then how safe they are.
Also, the vehicle itself is pollution free, but making the electricity to compress the air isn't. If we're moving in this direction we'll need a major investment in free energy sources like solar and wind. Also, compressing the air locally at filling stations requires power. a lot of power. We'll need a super conducting grid to make that happen (if we plan to use clean electricity instead of current local poewr plants). Of course, the same is true for electric cars.
High pressure air can be trucked around easy engouh too. We don't have to make air at every filling station. We could have a few small locations around town and drive trucks from key points to filling stations. This may lower the cost and complexity a bit in favor of logistics.
Many of these are not so much engineering feats as they are research feats. Although social engineering certainly is in this category, some of these don't belong on the list.
Some of these shuold also not be on a 21st centurt list, but a 10 year list. We'll be, for example, making solar power affordable by then with little doubt.
Here are a few engineering feats I'd like to see: - Install a superconducting electrical grid across each major continent - BUILD enough solar/wind/etc clean power plants to supply all homes and businesses with 100% renewable clean power - engineer retroviruses to target and correct or simply prevent disease/cancer/deformity/etc. - build fully automated mass transit for every city in the world and eliminate 80% or more of commuting in personal vehicles in major cities. - design and build self driving vehicles that operate as a mesh network, cars talking to other cars as well as GPS positioning, and eliminate the need for traffic lights entirely (Minority Report style autonomous driving, just with vehicles we'll actually drive) No more traffic, no more accidents, no more insurance. - develop localized terraforming (convert desert into forrest, wasteland into cropland) - Develop planetary terraforming (not just CO2 sequestration, but other things as well). Reverse global warming. control rainfall. - pass laws to make cash illegal (no cash = no drug trade, no black market, no tax evasion, no criminals on the run, no reason to mug someone, no politicians getting paid under tables, utopia...) - crack quantum mechanics and build optical quantum CPUs. - not just improve VR, but make it nearly as real as RL. - eliminate stupidity from gevernment. If you both figure out how to do it and then actually get it implemented, we can considder it the most astounding single achievment of the human histroy.
OK, I get that many people are pissed over their large investment in 3rd edition, and they believe it to be basically worthless going forward... Not so.
Sure, the data tables, ability specifics, rolls, and numbers will all need to be adjusted for 4.x, but the content, source material, monster ideas, encounter ideas, magic item ideas, all of this is still relevent to a good DM, and a player with access to this information, and a halfway good DM, should be able to reasonably translate older information into 4.x.
I have a ton of oth 2nd and 3rd edition books. I wrote a huge campaign mostly in 2nd edition, but by the time I started running it, 3rd had come out. i was able to quickly adapt to the new rules by buying only the core books and doing a bunch of reading standing in the book store with other expansion and source books. I took notes and used content where appropriate.
So long as i can build a character, and have access to the core rolling tables and stats, anything else should be readily adapted.
Back in D&D Advanced, and 2nd edition, we regularly made up our own weapons, feats, spells and more. As long as the cost of the item was reasonable for it;s poewr, compared to other items available at the same level, the DM usually approved it. Granted, this does not fly at conventions, but typically you're handed a character and expected to play it there, or at least have one 100% in conformity with published rules, and in rare cases a DM will allow just about anything if it's not rediculously overpowered. My friends and i continued this tradition into 3rd edition, and we expect our wives who also game with us now will do the same in 4th edition. My wife in particular expects to buy most of the 4.x content and run her own campaing since there will be a clear rules reset and she can follow along without feeling like she knows nothing (we'll all be on equal footing once again).
I did mention metal infused H2. It's completely safe to store, sure. It just requires extremely heavy tanks that have less than 1% of their mass as usable H2, not to mention they take 6-8 hours to "refuel" the hydrate after it's exhausted. The problem with this technology is infusing the matal with H2 generates a TON of heat, and this requires either extremely slow fueling, or it requires a lot of energy for active cooling of the tank while being filled. in fact, the energy required for active cooling in order to fill the tank in less than 10 minutes would be significantly more electricity than it would take to fill batteries to drive nearly twice as far. This doesn't count making the H2 or transporting it...
there are other options out there, like making H2 on demand by running water over aluminum. that has it's own issues in terms of weight, recyclabiltiy (it's easily recylced in terms of technology, but I'm talking about logistics of replacing the aliminum systems, storing and transporting billions of tons of metal, and installation/removal of the plates) and scale.
any technology that provides less than 350 miles per fillup, more than 10 minutes per fill-up, or costs in total more than using direct electricity (including the cost of a super conducting grid even) has no chance. Simply no chance at all. Any technology that uses more than half of the space inside a compact car to operate also has no chance as many nations simply can't support SUV and full sized sedans on their roads. If you can't put 4 people, your engine, and a fuel tank inside of a mid-sized sedan, than it won't sell.
Really, unless we're talking about anything other than electric cars with onboard generators as supliments in emergency or for long trips, then we're talking about sci-fi. Ethanol is a great system, renewable, affordable, and uses our existing technology without a complete worldwide forklift upgrade, but we can't reasonably make enough of it, not even using cellulosic processes, unless we can get it over 150MPG, which can only be done using plug-ins and high efficiency backup generators.
We can do batteries now. We can do plug-ins suplimented by ethanol turbines or small ICEs now. We have 30 years to build a bigger better energy grid to handle the load. the average car on the road is more than 15 years old. by the time we have enough cars running on plug-in, we'll have built enough new free-energy power plants and put up a large portion of our electric grid (that we need anyway). We can afford it if we simply stop blowing billions on useless technology. the investment in solar, wind, water, or geothermal power is a no-brainer! 200million for a nuclear plant that eats 4million a year in rods, or 150million for a solar plant that costs nothing to operate. Is this a tough choice? It isn't happening because of politics, that's all.
well, it's only H2 on demand if you can drive under direct full sun with enough solar panels on your roof to do it. Since solar panels get 40% or so efficeinecy, and this gets 15%, and considdering solar powered cars barely run at 25MPH in desert tests after using rediculous aerodynamic and wieght reduction methods, there's no way you can make enough H2 on the run. The only possibility for this would be refueling stations making H2 on location, instead of having it trucked in, but even with that, in most places this still would not result in anywhere near enough fuel to meet demand....and then it's still H2 powered cars, which can never be anything more then a distraction technique used by the government to keep their oil backed wallets full until big oil has the time to invest in other energy sources and cut off the market from others.... That's likely what this is reall about.
Well, personally I don't care how we get H2. It's all pointless anyways. H2 will never be a common fuel for motor vehicles.
Here's why: In regards to using liquid H2 in vehicles: - It's too dangerous. You're driving a bomb. Every car using liquid H2 is a has-mat vehicle by legal definition. Imagine the terrorists glee where they don't have to rent a car and then build a bomb because the rental car IS a bomb. - it must be trucked in liquid form - can't be pipelined, and therefore we'll have to deal with massive supply issues, thouands more has-mat trucks on the roads, and reduculous logistics. - fuleing requires extensive safety measures and extremely specialized and expensive equipment - you either have MASSIVE pressurized tanks (taking a very large portion of your vehicle space and weight) or you have to have the H2 actively cooled to extremely cold termurateres, requiring the car to be powered 100% of the time.
For metal infused H2 gas vehicles: - well, it's much safer... but: - maximum range uning even theoretical technologies is about 220 miles per fill up, assuming you leave enough seating room in a large SUV for 5 people and no luggage. - the tank is huge, and weighs hundreds of pounds, eating at vehicle efficiency and space (too big for those small commuter cars in Europe) - IT TAKES UP TO 8 HOURS TO FILL UP, and requires active cooling to prevent explosions while doing it.
H2 in general: - it's dangerous to use a vapor gas as a fuel. Imagine auto shops all over the country having to worry about gas being spilled during repairs? Spill hydrocarbon, just avoid dropping a spark in the liquid until you soak it up with sawdust. Cause an H2 leak and you have to evacuate the building, no different than a natural gas or propane leak. Also, if liquid H2 leaks, you not only have to worry about combustion, but vapor expansion and extreme freeze issues. - It costs 3-5 times more energy to make it that it would to simply run the car on electricity - It's expensive. best estimates, you go the same distance on H2 for 2-4 times the cost of gasoline, and that's with all the current government funding lowering the costs. - Where do you plan to store all the H2? Large scale containers are very difficult to make assuming you're storing it in liuquid form. We simply don't have enough room to store it in gaseous form. - Fuel cells don't get repaired, they get replaced. The repair costs will be immense, collision insurance even worse (not to mention the danger issues insuring rolling bombs). - burning H2 directly in ICEs is barely more efficient than burning ethanol. - minimum car price. You can forget about those $7,000 cars. Minimum price for a fuel cell vehicle will be in the 20K range once the government subsidies stop becoming affodable.
no, we can't power every vehicle on earth on ethanol yes, we will run out of oil, sooner than you like to admit yes, we havre to do something, but what?
What is the answer? Super conducting electrical grids (which we can make today with existing technology at reasonable costs), fed by renewable energy in target locations around the world (wind farms where it's windy, water where there's natural falls, solar in the deserts, etc). We use all that to recharge plug-in cars using batteries from Toshiba and others companies that have already been developed which have as quick as 90 second recharge times. For those of you who say we can't do it, that we can't run recharge units all around towns for people to plug into on the run, well look at how Alaska has done it, and many other countries in the fridgid north of Europe, where cars that don't have engines running need to be plugged so their heaters can prevent fuel lines from freezing. Every parking meeter in some coutries have power cables attached. We CAN do it. It's been done before. We'll still use ethanol as a backup to the battery using ethanol in ICEs until small turbines (like BMW uses in their motercycle) become more cost effective through mass production.
Wait, so what you're saying is that according to research that magnetic data tapes, like those used in our servers, have a mean bit failure rate of just 90 days? I thought these things lasted 50 years! What do you mean that's been common knowledge in the IT industry for more than 10 years? It appears we have been misled by our intelligence networ... oops, can't admit that... If I did it would mean we're guilty of going to war illegally, which is the whole reason we're hiding those tapes! erm, I mean... Oh crap.
It doesn't require a simultaneous change. As people adopt a new browser, they find there are certain sites they can't go to. eventually, its us on the old browser that find we can't go certain places.
Those who adopt chalenge response clients will still get mail from everyone, just abunch of it will end up in a filtered folder until those sending it comply. Sure, for a while early adopters will find they basically have to manage 2 inboxes. It's easy enough to use a mail recipient rule to help that. The benefit from day 1 is you get no spoofed mail...
Once a bunch of people change, and people like me force our families and friends to upgrade to clients that also support it, and word spreads, more e-amil will start going to the real inbox as validated messages, instead of filtered mail.
Companies that send e-mail to other companies for business purposes will also upgrade quick, at least their outgoing server support (so their outgoing business mail won't get filtered).
There will be some pain and adjustment... Same goes for ANY new system they try to roll out. Most of the proposed ideas have people actually having to use 2 e-amil clients, or 2 engines in the same client, to maintain compatability with those who don't get on board quick enough. It's easy enough to have the Challenge Response system detect wether or not the sending server does or does not support CR (or if the return response dies at a firewall that wasn't the one that started the message chain).
In the beginning, C/R is handled y the PERSON sending the mail, not the server. it uses the existing SMTP infrastructure to send an e-mail back to the sender. If they get it, which they should in SECONDS from sending the message, they open it, and in 1-2 seconds can click the right spot in the reply automatically verifying the captcha request. A computer can do it automatically, but needs a lot of horsepower to do so.
I send you a message, if your system requires C/R, in a few seconds it sends me an e-mail, I hear "you've got Mail!" or whatever other tone i have programmed, open it, see it's a challenge which hopefully I'm getting used to seeing, and in a few more seconds your system gets the response back and the message moves from a "warn" folder to an "approved" folder. "warn" is a folder for messages that have not been C/R verified but that I can access anyway. If the C/R I sent to you kicks back from your server becuase you were spoofed, then it comes back to me and is filtered away into a "quarantine".
This would mean that for a while every time i send an e-mail I might get a challenge I have to react to. Over time, ISPs will begin offering to upgrade tier mail servers to ones supporting C/R natively, as will companies internally. This will make people want to use those mail services. Google would jump on this faster than lightning.
Over a few years, i should see fewer and fewer C/Rs to respond to. I'll quickly see, as soon as I switch to a C/R enabled mail client or mail server that I get no more spoofed mail. I should also, as time goes on, see lees and less true spam as spammers who send automated e-mail will actually have to put horsepower behind their systems, and will instead start favoring more traditional targeted mailings as mailing a million people is no longer cost effective.
Incorrect. Where it is true that diseases and health issues later in life will be encountered by those who survive obesity by conquering it, and thus extending their life, you neglect serveral facts:
1: medical costs for those that reach higher years in life are usually short lived, predictable and the cost is relatively minimal for most people. Heart attacks and strokes, of the most common ways to die in old age, happen suddenly, and do not have extreme costs associated with either recovery or death. Contrary to common expectations, very few folks go through open heart surgery, pacemaker implantation, or other expensive procedures like transplants. Many other diseases that kill gradually are surprisingly inexpensive to treat (as treatment is usually only in the form of pain remedy and other placating treatments). Cancer is relatively expensive to treat, but extending you life by only the 3-10 years you can gain from defeating obesity has little impact on your cancer likelyhood.
2: regardless of the age you die naturally, there is a significant cost. The addition of obesity treatments, dialysis, and other costs associated with caring for and treating the obese (custom ambulances, custom beds, extra hands to move them, etc) are IN ADDITION to these other costs of dying. It is a fallacy of logic to replace one with the other. Removing dialysis does not add cancer, or a heart attack. Fat people die from many diseases, and even if they extend their life, will likely die from them anyway. By eliminating the fat, we eliminate the extra costs.
3: If you die yough due to health issues, you paid less money into the system (insurance) and therefore even if your death costs were the same as, you are a higher burden on the system than someone who lives longer than you.
4: Skinny people are more environmentally sound: The heavier you are, the harder your car works to move your fat ass, the worse your fuel economy. Big people also tend to drive bigger cars on top of that, further adding to the issue. Also, big people tend to air condition more (issues with hot environments), watch TV more (couch potato), open the fridge more times per day (snack-aholics), etc. Big people also tend to make more small trips to stores in favor of hauling large numbers of grocery bags from fewer trips, wasting more resources in travel. For the mobidly obese, add to all this the power to run their scooter chairs, powered recliners, electric stair assists, and more.
5: big people tend to ache more, taking more pain medications. They also are much more likely to be taking blood pressure medicines, diabetic treatments, and other lifelong perscriptions. Many people who simply loose the weight get to stop taking these medicines.
I have 4 friends who were morbidly obese. 1 went from nearly 400 lbs to not much over 225. He was able to stop taking over $175 per month of perscriptions and reduced his doctor visitation cycle from nearly monthly to once yearly. He also bought a smaller car, lowered his loan payment about $200 per month, his gas bill about $100 per month, and his electric bill by about $50 per month. He also said he's lowered his grocery bills by about $200 per month once he stopped overeating. He'd been on medications since 15 years old. He's about 40 now and in better health than many 25 year olds I know. He lost the weight in 3 years time and is still loosing some of it.
Another 2 friends, a couple, have each gone from about 300lbs to under 200. They did this in 2007 by averaging over 5lbs per week weighloss. Collectively, they're saving over $600 per month in medical costs, food, and other expenses. Their insurance companies are saving about $350 of that per month.
the last is a family member on my wife's side of the family. Just by loosing 30 lbs she's been able to get off blood pressure medicine. She was formerly diabetic, but is now no longer needing to do regular blood tests nor take medication for her condition. She's nearly 50 and had been on the heart m
I still want to know why challenge response e-mail never caught on. It's a simple process really, would have been easy to implement (for end users), would have allowed any who complied with it to e-mail anyone else with ease, and would have incurred major costs only for companies who send more than ten thousand or more e-mails a day (mostly advertisers and other really big firms).
It's simple. Your e-mail client gets a message. First, it quarantines the message. Next, it opens a retun connection to the sending server on another port and confirms the server sending the message has correctly identified itself (elimanating 100% of spoofed mail instantly). Now, if the server sending is valid, we ask it to compute the answer to a simple math problem, taking at most 1/10th of a second of CPU time (less for powerful servers). This is the cost that system incurrs to send the message (hurting mass mailing and spam firms the most, hopefully limiting blanket, untargeted spam completely). If the calculation is answered correctly, the message is delivered. If not, it's placed in a quarantine or junkmail folder, so even if it was blocked, you can still get the message. (unless the address was spoofed in which case it's automatically deleted).
The system requires no user interaction, happens in a fraction of a second (typically) and requires only simple software and a firewall rule change to permit the return authentication port. Anyone installing a compliant agent would gain immediate benefit of no more junk mail from firms who do not also upgrade their mail servers to support it, and no spoofed mail period.
Corperate admins would want to upgrade their servers to it quickly because even though there's a CPU hit for sending mail, it would lower incoming traffic by 80-90%, and the savings in ISP alone could pay for the upgrade and license. besides, at fractions of a second per message sent, bandwidth is likely a more limiting factor on mail server performance than the CPU activity from sending a message. They estimated a Xeon 2.3GHz could handle several thousand messages per hour. We're adding this process to stop folks who send millions of messages, not thousands...
spamming from drones or infected PCs would be useless because the challenge response would not make it into a home users PC through their firewall, even if the sending address wasn't spoofed. This type of spyware would cease to exist quickly.
and as far as Microsoft goes, if they didn't support it (which they did not), home users would quickly be dropping outlook express (our Outlook) for thunderbird and other mail programs that do support it.
Washington, as of January this year, just changed their sales tax system from an origin based tax to destination based tax. It used to be in WA that if you sold something you payed sales tax based on the location within washington you were based, except that sales shipped to destinations outside of the state were not required to pay sales taxes at all. With the change, items sold or shipped out of state are still not taxed, but items sold and shipped to locations inside washington state incur the sales tax of the zip code to where it's shipped. Since M$ shippes product from NV, they are not paying sales taxes on a lot of product today. they would not pay sales tax for items shipped out of state anyway (today) but they get away paying sales tax on items shipped into WA state....or more correctly, they get out of the corporate tax on the sale of those items, which is a much smaller number than sales tax. With the change, WA will get some income they don't get today.
This has been put in place to account for the national sales tax streamline system in which businesses will be required to collect sales tax based on the destination the product is shipped to, regardless of whre it comes from. once this takes effect in a few years, it won't matter from where or to where M$ shipps product. Taxes will be collected and will have to be paid to the state and/or local government where the purchaser lives. Once this takes effect, WA will get tax revenue from every M$ product shipped to their state (better than the $0 they get today since M$ has a loophole). Also, every other state will get a share of taxes paid for the product shipped to their residents.
What this means? buy something on line, it doesn't matter where you live, you'll pay the sales tax for your region. No more buying online to avoid paying sales taxes, no more loopholes to avoid you paying taxes. This will 1) encourage more sales from local businesses (why should I pay shipping since I'm no longer getting the discount), 2) increase state revenues, 3) simplify sales tax laws nationwide, and 4) close a lot of tax loopholes.
Well, they DO have a right. The Ford emblem, vehicle design, and likenesses are registered trademarks of their company. Where they can't prevent you from printing pictures of your own vehicles for personal use, they CAN prevent an organization (in this case a car club) from printing, selling, (and thus profiting) from those images without their permission.
Even magazines doing reviews of vehicles need the permission of the maker in order to print the article (most have standing agreements). Newspapers can, for example, show a photo of a car wreck, but were they to runa review, they'd need permission to use the images, even if they were taken of vehicles owned by the paper.
This is not Ford saying "you can't take and print pictures of your car" It's just them saying "we're so concerned we're loosing money to the imports that we're going to sue you for trying to make even a few bucks from a fund raiser, unless you're interested in profit sharing that is..."
Well, it's not really a robotic suit, it's a robotic "assist" suit. It doesn't do anything by itself, it's just a few servos with some quality sensors attached and calibtrated to the wearers movement. It helps prevent fatigue by helping the farmer balance, stand and squat, and remain bent over for long periods of time.
the software behind it isn't anything radical, and since then motors don't apply force, just resistance, most of the work is done with very little power. (power is needed to turn on and off the motor, but not to actually move limbs, so it;s kind of like assisted breaking, or power steering, but for the body.)
It's a lot more simple than people think to make it out. Many of the componenets are slight upgrades to common hobby gear... the sensors are where the real magic is, allowing the suit to move fluidly with the wearer and sense when to support and when to assist. Other than that, it's not more than a fancy mechanical brace. $2000 USD is completely beievable.
Also, misprint in the article states 8KG. It's 18KG (about 40 lbs).
Well, i haven't played with it TOO much, but google's Map system DOES include the ability to have a multi-destination route. I've done a basic route with up to 5 stops multiple times. I don't know if there's an upper limit to the system, but I'm sure 10 or so stops should be possible. I've just tried a 6 stop route and it goes at least that far...
Once you have your addresses entered, minimuze the individual directions leading from stop to stop and google lets you drag and drop the locations on the pane in the left. You can quickly and easily re-organize your stops and the the map updates in near real time. (a second or two). I was able, in about 2 minutes, to determine a near optimal route between all points. It's fairly easy for one's brain to look at a squiggle on a map and turn it into a more efficient line. The problem for salesmen in the past was actually drawing the line without drawing on the map! (this obviously is no longer a concern). Is this even a really big deal for anyone today except for folks in the delivery biz who do dozens of stops a day without pre-planned and established routes?
I was even able to zoom in on sections, optimiza a cluster of points, then zoom out and regroup another cluster. I'm sure I could easily do this for upwards of 10, even 20 locations. The problem I forsee is getting them all typed into google. If you use gmail or google chat, and you have your contacts all loaded into outllok, you can import your contacts, and then while logged into your iGoogle account, starting to type an address in the search field pulls a list of possible matches based on your search history and contacts list, so it's not bad if you do the work in advance and keep up with it I guess.
"Although the HD DVD standard is final, engineers continue developing the technology" Sourced from the official HD DVD site. HD DVD spec is being modified to support additional layers in media, updated and evolving encryption changes (changed to AACS itself), and better support for hybrid technologies including DVD/HD-DVD and Blu-Ray/HD DVD media. Firmware updates will e possible to "most" players to support emerging technologies. This basically means both are not "final" and that blu-ray actually is beating HD to the punch updating and offering more content and more features sooner (adapting faster).
The fact that HD DVD doesn't support BD+ is one of the reasons it's failing... BD+ allows for much greater media control and copy protection allowing future releases to use alternate methods of encryption. AACS does not have this flexibility, and it took the HD DVD group a LOT of encouragement to get ANY of the studios to support it. It's basically because of microsoft and all the work they did ensuring secure path worked and that Microsoft enforced hardware level controlls over the path to help keep HD secure where BR did not have the same concerns.
Blu Ray may not currently permit copying of the media, through any means, and does not have licensing restrictions as such, but current litigation in many countries is expected to turn this over. BR players will be easily updated to permit controlled coping and media portability once legally enforced as part of fair play, user rights, or whatever they want to call it. HD players, due to tight hardware limitations, do not have this flexibility. It will require "cracking" to bypass the disks AACS layers, or proprietary software and hardware "authorised" for use(ie, no legal freeware to do it for me, I'll be forced to put money in someone's pocket for a right I should have allways had). The difference is that if i crack HD, and make copies, those copies will forever work. With Blu-ray, if i make illegal copies, they can render the copies inert forcing me to crack them again (a big problem for illegal distribution firms, which is where 90% of the real lost $ from media theft comes from, not P2P as they want you to believe).
"You'd be able to store HD DVD movies on your laptop computers instead of carrying the discs around with you. You'd be able to condense movies into forms storeable on compatible portable video players. " - Well, what prevents us from doing this in Blu-Ray? nothing. The secure path system is part of HDCP, which is equally a part of BR as it is HD.
"Today if you want HD DVD, you can get a player to do it that has no major advantages over a Blu-ray player except in that it doesn't need constant firmware updates." - HD DVD is also an updatable system. However, since most HD players don't have integrated ethernet as almost all BR players do, you'll have to DL patches to your PC, burn them to disk, then manually update your player. This is more difficult for most people to accomplish than simply letting their BR player DL the updates all by itself over the already configured port.
"Blu-ray isn't finished" - ? Where did you get this? Blu-Ray is standardized, and complete. It's merely EXTENSIBLE allowing the distributers of centent to improve the copy pretection schemes in use should they become cracked. (HD DVD also has a similar system). Old movies WILL play in updated players, only some new movies may require a content protection update. Also, BlueRay players allow for software updates, interface changes, and additional network accessibly features to be added down the road, allowing the player to better evolve over time and keep up with trends. The HD DVD will become a brick far sooner...
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It's possible to have this process make enough H2 on demand to power a car, but not within reasonability of getting the system small and light enough to compete with battery or air engine technology, and it's far more complex, expensive, and prone to trouble than any of the other technologies presented.
Onother issue: By releasing H2 from H2O, where do you plan to put all the O2??? We can't release that much O2 into the air! Sure, it doesn't pollute, but high O2 levels cause all sorts of other problems, greatly increase the intensity and frequency of forest fires, and can harm animal life (including us). O2 is also a greenhouse gas, though not as poewrful a one as CO2.
The only way to make this system work is for the O2 to get bonded to something. it gets bonded to the nano material. When it's full, it needs replacement. This is the same problem with the Aluminum/H2 generation systems. Sure, water can be made available with some additional expense, and it solves the issues of H2 portabiltiy, but now we would have to mine, manufacture, store, distribute, collect, and recylce billions of tons of metal (or nano material which likely costs more and recylcles poorer, unless this is just a fancy, high surface areas aluminum structure to begin with).
worse, since this system needs energy to work, you're still talking about a plug-in car infrastructure or ethanol engine anyway, which means you actually have not 1 but 3 infrastructures to build (more power, more water, and cathode distribution/replacement).
Make power centrally, using 100% green and infinetely renewable sources. Use that power to compress air and run air powered engines. Or run the power into batteries and run cars on pure electricity. either way, it's simpler, it's available now, it's scalable over time (30,000 water stations, or H2 stations, or cathode exchange stations don't all open at once, and you can't drive where one isn't, but there's an electric outlet EVERYWHERE). Oh yea, not only all this, but it costs less too...
He's right. Why waste the energy to carry the electrolysis system, the water, the tank, and all the expensive and complex equipment associated with it, not to mention the fuel cell and all, when you could just attatch the batteries directly to the motors and put in a bigger battery.
...besides, granted the water, assuming we can get as much as we need, purified, and distributed this way (we already have enough of a shortage of that), 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. I did not read the article, but my impression is this is a similar technology to using aluminum to release H2 from water using applied energy. (something /. covered a few months ago.)
It's all well and good that this may be possible, but noone's going to buy a car that weighs 500 lbs more, costs 50% more, is the size of a ford explorer but seats only 2, and requires perfectly pure (distilled) water to run on when they can have a Chevy Volt.
I don't care if H2 is FREE to make. The general public will never be driving H2 cars around.
There are many reasons BOTH competing H2 technologies can't work. Most of it boils down to safety (driving H2 bombs around town), logistics (how do you ship highly compressed H2 since it can't be pipelined), fuel cells might have good reliability, but if you crack it in a wreck, it's half the cost of the vehicle to replace, the only safe ways to store H2 gas (metal infusion) weigh too much, take 8 hours to refuel, and have less than 200 mile range.
We'll have full electric cars, air powered cars, and a full ethanol industry hopping long before they solve the safety, vehicle weight/efficieny/range problems, costs, and other very big negatives surrounding H2.
the ONLY thing H2 has going for it it it burns 100% clean. So do air poewred cars and battery powered cars, and the energy used to fill the tank with all 3 can be just as clean, safer, cheaper, and less of a logistics challenge.
1: we're not comparing capitol costs here. yes, it's going to be expensive to add centralized power, but where do you expect to get the energy for your precious electric cars if we don't? Even if I did have to put up 8 times the numnber of power plants to offset the difference (which i do not), the one time cost vs 100 years of being able to use those towers (with routine replacement of inner workings of the generator itself) is far less of an environmental impact than mining, manufacturing, storing, distributing, disposing of, and recylcing all your battersies every 1500 charge cycles.
2: Solar takes a lot of land, but by using superconducting power grids, it will take up land nobody wants (desert and floating solar farms). Same goes for wind over water, in mountain ranges, and in canyons. Water power is not limited to dams and lakes. Inline sunberged turbines in free flowing rivers can be used, as well as tidal poewr generation.
3: not going to run an air car on coal power. Going to do it on free power. Both air and electric are better than coal and gas. Air is slightly less efficint overall than electric, but pollotes less and requires less infrastructure.
4: Your compressor efficincy numbers are based on AC efficincy, not potential energy storage. High efficiency compressors can obtain more than 30% of their energy used in the form of potential energy of the stored air mass. Shop compressors operate at poorer efficinecies because they try to maintain a high pressure and rapidly recompress after use. Home compressors for vehicle use can use a different model which produces better yield. also, your home tank can fill from power from your rooftop solar cells.
5: LiIons loose approx 8% energy per month. Less than 1% per day, yes, not too shabby. They increae ion heat only 1C typically in a 3 hour charge cycle. However, at 200KM per charge, I'm not waiting 3 hours per charge. Batteries that toshiba produces that have 90 second to 5 minute charge cycles due have significant (about 3%) energy loss to heat. Safe and convenient, but wasteful.
6: Carbon fiber flexible multi layer air tanks are completely safe. I was personally very worried about this one. Can't use em for H2 storage due to molecule size and leakage of flamabale gas, but for Nitrogen, they're safe and have virtually no gas loss over 48 hour terms (measurable, but near irelevent numbers). They can take a bullet sized hole and due to layering technology, only cause a stream leak of air. They will decompress over several minutes. They're immune to crushing dammage. It's like a dozen layers of kevlar all glued together.
On the other hand, under normal operation, LiIon are fairly safe, but in high heat or extreme cold environments they eiather won't work or can explode. Also, charging is safe, but overcharging causes leaks or detonations. The bulk of battery recalls have been for failure to properly detect overcharge. Also, in a natural fire (not cause by the batteries) they are extremely hazardous and dangerous, and require hazmat cleanups. Air tanks require no such safety measures and can survive 2000+ degree fires for hours on end.
7: Car batteries are recycled very well. LiIon does not recycle nearly as well, or as cost effictively as lead acid batteries. It can be done, but no industry exists today to deal with the mass of recycling needed, nor for storage and logistics of delivery of several hundred ounds of battery. I have a friend with a Prius who needed a battery replacement. Had the warranty not covered it (only 2 years in, dead car), it would have been $6000 in batteries and a huge chunk of labor (noone had equipoment available to get the battery unit out, car had to be shipped away for service at a location that could do it).
8: we're more worried about the capacitors killing the repair man, or braking the capacitors in a wreck, not someone fiddling around with the battery and electrical unit (though all those guys customizing their prius into plug-ins have had a few g
You're telling me you've never had a compressor break? Are you kidding me? I've had the compressor on my AC break *twice*, and the compressor on my refrigerator break once. Compressors operate in high-stress environments, whether they're compressing coolant or compressing air.
You've been unlucky. I have 3 refridgerators, 2 are over a decade old, one nearly 2. None have failed. In my family, out of 14 hourseholds, we've had 1 unit fail on us in less than 10 years unit life.
Also, AC and other small compressors are, well, small. They also don't compare to compressors that have direct oil feeds. High poewred compression systems, like those used in car shops, for painting, and for large capacity air compression, have typical warranties in excess of 10 years. I've never seen a fridge with a 10 year warranty without paying extra for it. My father-in-law has a massive compressor he uses in his workshop. He bought it in 1973. Never been repaired.
layered carbon multihilled tanks are specifically designed to not rupture, even under direct crushing force or penetration by a bullet. The inner and outer carbon linings are designed to only allow a steady and safe flow of air from the vessele in event of a rupture. This is like a tank gued together with several layers of teflon. They do not rupture. I was worried about this, but after researching it, am completely convinced they are safe. It's also fireproof and safe from detonation up to 2000F.
Electric motors may offset SOME of the weight of battery systems, but compressed air systems weigh even less.
The energy used at the power plant 1) is far less than individual engines in terms of energy input to output, 2) can be mitigated by reclamation, scrubbing, and other means, 3) can be from 100% free energy (solar, wind, geothermal, etc, and hopefully 100% or more of what we're adding to the system will be just that), 4) can be done cheaper, and with less logistical issues, 5) doesn't have seccondary environmental issues from ground seepage, leaks, etc, 6) doesn't require transporting across the country on trucks, 7) you get the idea yet?
I've read up on container technology, and am fairly convinced. I'm still a bit concerned about what happens when a container gets crushed (severe impact event), but i rarely happens on that scale.
A super conducting grid WILL be required for us to move to 100% free energy. To route the kind of voltage we're talking about from key areas of the country that can effctively produce wind and solar energy, and to suplement those areas with power when they fall short (night, dead wind days, etc), over those distances traditional lines can not compete (we'd need hundreds of parallel lines, and the energy loss over 100 miles is nothing compared to 3000).
In our current grid, 90% of electricity is used within 100 miles of generation. In a free energy world, most of NYC would need to be powered by the midwest winds in the mornings, and California powered by solar, wind and water. In mid-day, most everyone would draw exclusively from solar. By nightfall solar is no longer an option, and we can't possibly store this much energy in batteries, so the wind farms need to spin up higher and water and geothermal kick in to supplement. We also plan to use water being pumped uphill during daylight to run into massive resiviors so at night the water can flow downhill through dams and water power plants. A large amount of ethanol will also likely be burned locally, as well as manmade charcoal from waste products, to locally supplement the system when necessary. With a super conducting grid, we expect less than 20% of power to be generated within 100 miles of where used. the thermal and electrical waste to use copper lines for that is rediculous.
Wind, water, and solar plants may have low efficiency for turning energy into electricity, but the energy required to do that is free, unlimited, and does not directly pollute, so therefore is irrelevent. I'm NEVER going to suggest we use coal or other fuel to compress the air for air cars, nor would I for electric cars either, so this is a dead end argument...
The direct efficincy of stored energy to engine power is near 100% for air cars. Since there's no matter conversion (combustion, etc), and ther is virtually no heat generated by using air to move the poston (only the small friction not mitigated by proper lubrication), the only energy loss is in the power train itself, which every single mode of transportation suffers from as you correctly indicated.
Your numbers on electric motor efficiency are also WAY off. Yes, motors can operate at those efficienies, but only under constant and predictable (ideal) torque and RPM. In the field, they almost never come near those ideals. They do much better (60% or so efficiency for electric vs 25-30 for ICE, but combine this with distance loss of poewr over high voltage lines, battery charge loss (heat when charging), battery depreciation (loss over time), and discharge loss (bettery efficincy), and it's worse than some of the better TDI and MIT engines out there. Granted, running on electricity means we can deploy better power generation, make much of it using 100% renewable free energy, scrub emissions, and mroe. this is far more ideal than ethanol power or other biofuel alternatives. the other problems with electric cars are safety (LiIon batteries explode, capacitors can kill instantly, they're complex and expensive, batteries are very bad for environment when thrown away, we have limited resources to make enough of the batteries in the first place, and we have to call HasMat teams out if a car catches on fire!)
Air powered engines compete with electric in terms of battery to wheel efficiency, but they don't suffer from energy loss over time. They're not inherently dangerous or risky (even though 4000PSI compressed air can be an issue, it's only dangerous if not secured in a proper milti-hull carbon reinforced container, which it will be)
Also, air powered cars run on regulators. they DO NOT slow down as the tank drains. (they do, but only when less than 2% pressure remains) 4000PSI is not driven directly to the engine, only a few hundred PSI is required. They use the same CVT and drive trains other vehicles, including most electrics do, so the efficiency from the engine to the wheel would be the same, and need not be considdered, though there is talk of allowing the air to directly power each wheel individually, which can both improve overall efficincy and also improve deceleration reclamation.
Thermodynamic efficinecy has nothing to do with how much energy goes into making the car move. Air powered engines have extremely high (over 90%) efficiency, vs ICEs which at best (MIT dual injection engines and similar) can only reach about 40%.
The energy to make air into a compressed form can be done with 100% renewable energy. Even ethanol can't compete with that.
It's like an electric car, except instead of the electric motors gettign about 70% efficiency, we get much higher. Also, the thermal rediation (heat) from compression can be used to create hot water, or be directed into other reclamation systems, eliminating some or most of the waste at that level.
Also note the energy to compress air is about 5 times less than the energy input to product H2 to power a fuel cell vehicle the same distance.
From what I can research, the air tank will power the car, all by itself, for about 200Km. With a gas engine suppliment, this could be drastically extended, upwards of 400Km I would say is a fair (safe) estimate. The cars come with their own internal pump system that can run off household electricity, but it takes upwards of 4 hours to fill the tank, and assuming it operates like any other air compressor, it will be loud. The good news is high pressure canisters could refil your tank in 3 minutes or less. Houses would almost certainly have to be equipped with high pressure home filling stations. they won't take much room, could fill 2-3 cars at once, and given all day to refill. By burying them we could eliminate most of the noise. The heat generated compressing the air could even be used for hot water (or to supplement it) as a side effect.
Creating high pressure air (4000+ PSI) generates heat. Filling a tank with uncompressed air takes time almost as much for safety as for the actual time to compress. Filling stations could bury high volume, high efficiency compressors, divert the heat using geothermal options, and eliminate the bulk of noise. You could fill up in 3-5 minutes by using pre-pressurized air from massive underground tanks, or even massive above-ground tanks in some areas. they'd cost a bit to install, but over 10 years would pay better returns than fossil fuel stations. At home, if you had a smaller version system, you could either make hot water, or put in geothermal capacitors. The benefit to geothermal would mean in some markets you'd never have to shovel your walkway in the winter again (use heat pipes under concrete to both dispurse heat and melt snow, lol)
It's a bit dangerous though... carbon fiber tanks at 4000+ PSI... If one ruptuers, the force released could quite litteraly throw the car a few blocks. More likely, it would simply rupture, causing the car to act like a bomb, just without flames... Vapor expansion at this level could rip people and metal apart. these tanks need to be REALLY strong to be safe, adding significantly to vehicle weight, reducing storage space, and limiting fuel economy. Sure, we can make one that goes 800KM on a fill up and has room for 4 including luggage, but there's no way the motor safety guys are ever going to allow it on the streets...
I'm skeptical. Keep them out of my country until there's 50,000 or more of them driving around. We'll see then how safe they are.
Also, the vehicle itself is pollution free, but making the electricity to compress the air isn't. If we're moving in this direction we'll need a major investment in free energy sources like solar and wind. Also, compressing the air locally at filling stations requires power. a lot of power. We'll need a super conducting grid to make that happen (if we plan to use clean electricity instead of current local poewr plants). Of course, the same is true for electric cars.
High pressure air can be trucked around easy engouh too. We don't have to make air at every filling station. We could have a few small locations around town and drive trucks from key points to filling stations. This may lower the cost and complexity a bit in favor of logistics.
We'll wait and see.
Many of these are not so much engineering feats as they are research feats. Although social engineering certainly is in this category, some of these don't belong on the list.
Some of these shuold also not be on a 21st centurt list, but a 10 year list. We'll be, for example, making solar power affordable by then with little doubt.
Here are a few engineering feats I'd like to see:
- Install a superconducting electrical grid across each major continent
- BUILD enough solar/wind/etc clean power plants to supply all homes and businesses with 100% renewable clean power
- engineer retroviruses to target and correct or simply prevent disease/cancer/deformity/etc.
- build fully automated mass transit for every city in the world and eliminate 80% or more of commuting in personal vehicles in major cities.
- design and build self driving vehicles that operate as a mesh network, cars talking to other cars as well as GPS positioning, and eliminate the need for traffic lights entirely (Minority Report style autonomous driving, just with vehicles we'll actually drive) No more traffic, no more accidents, no more insurance.
- develop localized terraforming (convert desert into forrest, wasteland into cropland)
- Develop planetary terraforming (not just CO2 sequestration, but other things as well). Reverse global warming. control rainfall.
- pass laws to make cash illegal (no cash = no drug trade, no black market, no tax evasion, no criminals on the run, no reason to mug someone, no politicians getting paid under tables, utopia...)
- crack quantum mechanics and build optical quantum CPUs.
- not just improve VR, but make it nearly as real as RL.
- eliminate stupidity from gevernment. If you both figure out how to do it and then actually get it implemented, we can considder it the most astounding single achievment of the human histroy.
OK, I get that many people are pissed over their large investment in 3rd edition, and they believe it to be basically worthless going forward... Not so.
Sure, the data tables, ability specifics, rolls, and numbers will all need to be adjusted for 4.x, but the content, source material, monster ideas, encounter ideas, magic item ideas, all of this is still relevent to a good DM, and a player with access to this information, and a halfway good DM, should be able to reasonably translate older information into 4.x.
I have a ton of oth 2nd and 3rd edition books. I wrote a huge campaign mostly in 2nd edition, but by the time I started running it, 3rd had come out. i was able to quickly adapt to the new rules by buying only the core books and doing a bunch of reading standing in the book store with other expansion and source books. I took notes and used content where appropriate.
So long as i can build a character, and have access to the core rolling tables and stats, anything else should be readily adapted.
Back in D&D Advanced, and 2nd edition, we regularly made up our own weapons, feats, spells and more. As long as the cost of the item was reasonable for it;s poewr, compared to other items available at the same level, the DM usually approved it. Granted, this does not fly at conventions, but typically you're handed a character and expected to play it there, or at least have one 100% in conformity with published rules, and in rare cases a DM will allow just about anything if it's not rediculously overpowered. My friends and i continued this tradition into 3rd edition, and we expect our wives who also game with us now will do the same in 4th edition. My wife in particular expects to buy most of the 4.x content and run her own campaing since there will be a clear rules reset and she can follow along without feeling like she knows nothing (we'll all be on equal footing once again).
I did mention metal infused H2. It's completely safe to store, sure. It just requires extremely heavy tanks that have less than 1% of their mass as usable H2, not to mention they take 6-8 hours to "refuel" the hydrate after it's exhausted. The problem with this technology is infusing the matal with H2 generates a TON of heat, and this requires either extremely slow fueling, or it requires a lot of energy for active cooling of the tank while being filled. in fact, the energy required for active cooling in order to fill the tank in less than 10 minutes would be significantly more electricity than it would take to fill batteries to drive nearly twice as far. This doesn't count making the H2 or transporting it...
there are other options out there, like making H2 on demand by running water over aluminum. that has it's own issues in terms of weight, recyclabiltiy (it's easily recylced in terms of technology, but I'm talking about logistics of replacing the aliminum systems, storing and transporting billions of tons of metal, and installation/removal of the plates) and scale.
any technology that provides less than 350 miles per fillup, more than 10 minutes per fill-up, or costs in total more than using direct electricity (including the cost of a super conducting grid even) has no chance. Simply no chance at all. Any technology that uses more than half of the space inside a compact car to operate also has no chance as many nations simply can't support SUV and full sized sedans on their roads. If you can't put 4 people, your engine, and a fuel tank inside of a mid-sized sedan, than it won't sell.
Really, unless we're talking about anything other than electric cars with onboard generators as supliments in emergency or for long trips, then we're talking about sci-fi. Ethanol is a great system, renewable, affordable, and uses our existing technology without a complete worldwide forklift upgrade, but we can't reasonably make enough of it, not even using cellulosic processes, unless we can get it over 150MPG, which can only be done using plug-ins and high efficiency backup generators.
We can do batteries now. We can do plug-ins suplimented by ethanol turbines or small ICEs now. We have 30 years to build a bigger better energy grid to handle the load. the average car on the road is more than 15 years old. by the time we have enough cars running on plug-in, we'll have built enough new free-energy power plants and put up a large portion of our electric grid (that we need anyway). We can afford it if we simply stop blowing billions on useless technology. the investment in solar, wind, water, or geothermal power is a no-brainer! 200million for a nuclear plant that eats 4million a year in rods, or 150million for a solar plant that costs nothing to operate. Is this a tough choice? It isn't happening because of politics, that's all.
well, it's only H2 on demand if you can drive under direct full sun with enough solar panels on your roof to do it. Since solar panels get 40% or so efficeinecy, and this gets 15%, and considdering solar powered cars barely run at 25MPH in desert tests after using rediculous aerodynamic and wieght reduction methods, there's no way you can make enough H2 on the run. The only possibility for this would be refueling stations making H2 on location, instead of having it trucked in, but even with that, in most places this still would not result in anywhere near enough fuel to meet demand. ...and then it's still H2 powered cars, which can never be anything more then a distraction technique used by the government to keep their oil backed wallets full until big oil has the time to invest in other energy sources and cut off the market from others.... That's likely what this is reall about.
Well, personally I don't care how we get H2. It's all pointless anyways. H2 will never be a common fuel for motor vehicles.
Here's why:
In regards to using liquid H2 in vehicles:
- It's too dangerous. You're driving a bomb. Every car using liquid H2 is a has-mat vehicle by legal definition. Imagine the terrorists glee where they don't have to rent a car and then build a bomb because the rental car IS a bomb.
- it must be trucked in liquid form - can't be pipelined, and therefore we'll have to deal with massive supply issues, thouands more has-mat trucks on the roads, and reduculous logistics.
- fuleing requires extensive safety measures and extremely specialized and expensive equipment
- you either have MASSIVE pressurized tanks (taking a very large portion of your vehicle space and weight) or you have to have the H2 actively cooled to extremely cold termurateres, requiring the car to be powered 100% of the time.
For metal infused H2 gas vehicles:
- well, it's much safer... but:
- maximum range uning even theoretical technologies is about 220 miles per fill up, assuming you leave enough seating room in a large SUV for 5 people and no luggage.
- the tank is huge, and weighs hundreds of pounds, eating at vehicle efficiency and space (too big for those small commuter cars in Europe)
- IT TAKES UP TO 8 HOURS TO FILL UP, and requires active cooling to prevent explosions while doing it.
H2 in general:
- it's dangerous to use a vapor gas as a fuel. Imagine auto shops all over the country having to worry about gas being spilled during repairs? Spill hydrocarbon, just avoid dropping a spark in the liquid until you soak it up with sawdust. Cause an H2 leak and you have to evacuate the building, no different than a natural gas or propane leak. Also, if liquid H2 leaks, you not only have to worry about combustion, but vapor expansion and extreme freeze issues.
- It costs 3-5 times more energy to make it that it would to simply run the car on electricity
- It's expensive. best estimates, you go the same distance on H2 for 2-4 times the cost of gasoline, and that's with all the current government funding lowering the costs.
- Where do you plan to store all the H2? Large scale containers are very difficult to make assuming you're storing it in liuquid form. We simply don't have enough room to store it in gaseous form.
- Fuel cells don't get repaired, they get replaced. The repair costs will be immense, collision insurance even worse (not to mention the danger issues insuring rolling bombs).
- burning H2 directly in ICEs is barely more efficient than burning ethanol.
- minimum car price. You can forget about those $7,000 cars. Minimum price for a fuel cell vehicle will be in the 20K range once the government subsidies stop becoming affodable.
no, we can't power every vehicle on earth on ethanol
yes, we will run out of oil, sooner than you like to admit
yes, we havre to do something, but what?
What is the answer? Super conducting electrical grids (which we can make today with existing technology at reasonable costs), fed by renewable energy in target locations around the world (wind farms where it's windy, water where there's natural falls, solar in the deserts, etc). We use all that to recharge plug-in cars using batteries from Toshiba and others companies that have already been developed which have as quick as 90 second recharge times. For those of you who say we can't do it, that we can't run recharge units all around towns for people to plug into on the run, well look at how Alaska has done it, and many other countries in the fridgid north of Europe, where cars that don't have engines running need to be plugged so their heaters can prevent fuel lines from freezing. Every parking meeter in some coutries have power cables attached. We CAN do it. It's been done before. We'll still use ethanol as a backup to the battery using ethanol in ICEs until small turbines (like BMW uses in their motercycle) become more cost effective through mass production.
Wait, so what you're saying is that according to research that magnetic data tapes, like those used in our servers, have a mean bit failure rate of just 90 days? I thought these things lasted 50 years! What do you mean that's been common knowledge in the IT industry for more than 10 years? It appears we have been misled by our intelligence networ... oops, can't admit that... If I did it would mean we're guilty of going to war illegally, which is the whole reason we're hiding those tapes! erm, I mean... Oh crap.
It doesn't require a simultaneous change. As people adopt a new browser, they find there are certain sites they can't go to. eventually, its us on the old browser that find we can't go certain places.
Those who adopt chalenge response clients will still get mail from everyone, just abunch of it will end up in a filtered folder until those sending it comply. Sure, for a while early adopters will find they basically have to manage 2 inboxes. It's easy enough to use a mail recipient rule to help that. The benefit from day 1 is you get no spoofed mail...
Once a bunch of people change, and people like me force our families and friends to upgrade to clients that also support it, and word spreads, more e-amil will start going to the real inbox as validated messages, instead of filtered mail.
Companies that send e-mail to other companies for business purposes will also upgrade quick, at least their outgoing server support (so their outgoing business mail won't get filtered).
There will be some pain and adjustment... Same goes for ANY new system they try to roll out. Most of the proposed ideas have people actually having to use 2 e-amil clients, or 2 engines in the same client, to maintain compatability with those who don't get on board quick enough. It's easy enough to have the Challenge Response system detect wether or not the sending server does or does not support CR (or if the return response dies at a firewall that wasn't the one that started the message chain).
In the beginning, C/R is handled y the PERSON sending the mail, not the server. it uses the existing SMTP infrastructure to send an e-mail back to the sender. If they get it, which they should in SECONDS from sending the message, they open it, and in 1-2 seconds can click the right spot in the reply automatically verifying the captcha request. A computer can do it automatically, but needs a lot of horsepower to do so.
I send you a message, if your system requires C/R, in a few seconds it sends me an e-mail, I hear "you've got Mail!" or whatever other tone i have programmed, open it, see it's a challenge which hopefully I'm getting used to seeing, and in a few more seconds your system gets the response back and the message moves from a "warn" folder to an "approved" folder. "warn" is a folder for messages that have not been C/R verified but that I can access anyway. If the C/R I sent to you kicks back from your server becuase you were spoofed, then it comes back to me and is filtered away into a "quarantine".
This would mean that for a while every time i send an e-mail I might get a challenge I have to react to. Over time, ISPs will begin offering to upgrade tier mail servers to ones supporting C/R natively, as will companies internally. This will make people want to use those mail services. Google would jump on this faster than lightning.
Over a few years, i should see fewer and fewer C/Rs to respond to. I'll quickly see, as soon as I switch to a C/R enabled mail client or mail server that I get no more spoofed mail. I should also, as time goes on, see lees and less true spam as spammers who send automated e-mail will actually have to put horsepower behind their systems, and will instead start favoring more traditional targeted mailings as mailing a million people is no longer cost effective.
Incorrect. Where it is true that diseases and health issues later in life will be encountered by those who survive obesity by conquering it, and thus extending their life, you neglect serveral facts:
1: medical costs for those that reach higher years in life are usually short lived, predictable and the cost is relatively minimal for most people. Heart attacks and strokes, of the most common ways to die in old age, happen suddenly, and do not have extreme costs associated with either recovery or death. Contrary to common expectations, very few folks go through open heart surgery, pacemaker implantation, or other expensive procedures like transplants. Many other diseases that kill gradually are surprisingly inexpensive to treat (as treatment is usually only in the form of pain remedy and other placating treatments). Cancer is relatively expensive to treat, but extending you life by only the 3-10 years you can gain from defeating obesity has little impact on your cancer likelyhood.
2: regardless of the age you die naturally, there is a significant cost. The addition of obesity treatments, dialysis, and other costs associated with caring for and treating the obese (custom ambulances, custom beds, extra hands to move them, etc) are IN ADDITION to these other costs of dying. It is a fallacy of logic to replace one with the other. Removing dialysis does not add cancer, or a heart attack. Fat people die from many diseases, and even if they extend their life, will likely die from them anyway. By eliminating the fat, we eliminate the extra costs.
3: If you die yough due to health issues, you paid less money into the system (insurance) and therefore even if your death costs were the same as, you are a higher burden on the system than someone who lives longer than you.
4: Skinny people are more environmentally sound: The heavier you are, the harder your car works to move your fat ass, the worse your fuel economy. Big people also tend to drive bigger cars on top of that, further adding to the issue. Also, big people tend to air condition more (issues with hot environments), watch TV more (couch potato), open the fridge more times per day (snack-aholics), etc. Big people also tend to make more small trips to stores in favor of hauling large numbers of grocery bags from fewer trips, wasting more resources in travel. For the mobidly obese, add to all this the power to run their scooter chairs, powered recliners, electric stair assists, and more.
5: big people tend to ache more, taking more pain medications. They also are much more likely to be taking blood pressure medicines, diabetic treatments, and other lifelong perscriptions. Many people who simply loose the weight get to stop taking these medicines.
I have 4 friends who were morbidly obese. 1 went from nearly 400 lbs to not much over 225. He was able to stop taking over $175 per month of perscriptions and reduced his doctor visitation cycle from nearly monthly to once yearly. He also bought a smaller car, lowered his loan payment about $200 per month, his gas bill about $100 per month, and his electric bill by about $50 per month. He also said he's lowered his grocery bills by about $200 per month once he stopped overeating. He'd been on medications since 15 years old. He's about 40 now and in better health than many 25 year olds I know. He lost the weight in 3 years time and is still loosing some of it.
Another 2 friends, a couple, have each gone from about 300lbs to under 200. They did this in 2007 by averaging over 5lbs per week weighloss. Collectively, they're saving over $600 per month in medical costs, food, and other expenses. Their insurance companies are saving about $350 of that per month.
the last is a family member on my wife's side of the family. Just by loosing 30 lbs she's been able to get off blood pressure medicine. She was formerly diabetic, but is now no longer needing to do regular blood tests nor take medication for her condition. She's nearly 50 and had been on the heart m
I still want to know why challenge response e-mail never caught on. It's a simple process really, would have been easy to implement (for end users), would have allowed any who complied with it to e-mail anyone else with ease, and would have incurred major costs only for companies who send more than ten thousand or more e-mails a day (mostly advertisers and other really big firms).
It's simple. Your e-mail client gets a message. First, it quarantines the message. Next, it opens a retun connection to the sending server on another port and confirms the server sending the message has correctly identified itself (elimanating 100% of spoofed mail instantly). Now, if the server sending is valid, we ask it to compute the answer to a simple math problem, taking at most 1/10th of a second of CPU time (less for powerful servers). This is the cost that system incurrs to send the message (hurting mass mailing and spam firms the most, hopefully limiting blanket, untargeted spam completely). If the calculation is answered correctly, the message is delivered. If not, it's placed in a quarantine or junkmail folder, so even if it was blocked, you can still get the message. (unless the address was spoofed in which case it's automatically deleted).
The system requires no user interaction, happens in a fraction of a second (typically) and requires only simple software and a firewall rule change to permit the return authentication port. Anyone installing a compliant agent would gain immediate benefit of no more junk mail from firms who do not also upgrade their mail servers to support it, and no spoofed mail period.
Corperate admins would want to upgrade their servers to it quickly because even though there's a CPU hit for sending mail, it would lower incoming traffic by 80-90%, and the savings in ISP alone could pay for the upgrade and license. besides, at fractions of a second per message sent, bandwidth is likely a more limiting factor on mail server performance than the CPU activity from sending a message. They estimated a Xeon 2.3GHz could handle several thousand messages per hour. We're adding this process to stop folks who send millions of messages, not thousands...
spamming from drones or infected PCs would be useless because the challenge response would not make it into a home users PC through their firewall, even if the sending address wasn't spoofed. This type of spyware would cease to exist quickly.
and as far as Microsoft goes, if they didn't support it (which they did not), home users would quickly be dropping outlook express (our Outlook) for thunderbird and other mail programs that do support it.
Washington, as of January this year, just changed their sales tax system from an origin based tax to destination based tax. It used to be in WA that if you sold something you payed sales tax based on the location within washington you were based, except that sales shipped to destinations outside of the state were not required to pay sales taxes at all. With the change, items sold or shipped out of state are still not taxed, but items sold and shipped to locations inside washington state incur the sales tax of the zip code to where it's shipped. Since M$ shippes product from NV, they are not paying sales taxes on a lot of product today. they would not pay sales tax for items shipped out of state anyway (today) but they get away paying sales tax on items shipped into WA state. ...or more correctly, they get out of the corporate tax on the sale of those items, which is a much smaller number than sales tax. With the change, WA will get some income they don't get today.
This has been put in place to account for the national sales tax streamline system in which businesses will be required to collect sales tax based on the destination the product is shipped to, regardless of whre it comes from. once this takes effect in a few years, it won't matter from where or to where M$ shipps product. Taxes will be collected and will have to be paid to the state and/or local government where the purchaser lives. Once this takes effect, WA will get tax revenue from every M$ product shipped to their state (better than the $0 they get today since M$ has a loophole). Also, every other state will get a share of taxes paid for the product shipped to their residents.
What this means? buy something on line, it doesn't matter where you live, you'll pay the sales tax for your region. No more buying online to avoid paying sales taxes, no more loopholes to avoid you paying taxes. This will 1) encourage more sales from local businesses (why should I pay shipping since I'm no longer getting the discount), 2) increase state revenues, 3) simplify sales tax laws nationwide, and 4) close a lot of tax loopholes.
Well, they DO have a right. The Ford emblem, vehicle design, and likenesses are registered trademarks of their company. Where they can't prevent you from printing pictures of your own vehicles for personal use, they CAN prevent an organization (in this case a car club) from printing, selling, (and thus profiting) from those images without their permission.
Even magazines doing reviews of vehicles need the permission of the maker in order to print the article (most have standing agreements). Newspapers can, for example, show a photo of a car wreck, but were they to runa review, they'd need permission to use the images, even if they were taken of vehicles owned by the paper.
This is not Ford saying "you can't take and print pictures of your car" It's just them saying "we're so concerned we're loosing money to the imports that we're going to sue you for trying to make even a few bucks from a fund raiser, unless you're interested in profit sharing that is..."
Well, it's not really a robotic suit, it's a robotic "assist" suit. It doesn't do anything by itself, it's just a few servos with some quality sensors attached and calibtrated to the wearers movement. It helps prevent fatigue by helping the farmer balance, stand and squat, and remain bent over for long periods of time.
the software behind it isn't anything radical, and since then motors don't apply force, just resistance, most of the work is done with very little power. (power is needed to turn on and off the motor, but not to actually move limbs, so it;s kind of like assisted breaking, or power steering, but for the body.)
It's a lot more simple than people think to make it out. Many of the componenets are slight upgrades to common hobby gear... the sensors are where the real magic is, allowing the suit to move fluidly with the wearer and sense when to support and when to assist. Other than that, it's not more than a fancy mechanical brace. $2000 USD is completely beievable.
Also, misprint in the article states 8KG. It's 18KG (about 40 lbs).
Well, i haven't played with it TOO much, but google's Map system DOES include the ability to have a multi-destination route. I've done a basic route with up to 5 stops multiple times. I don't know if there's an upper limit to the system, but I'm sure 10 or so stops should be possible. I've just tried a 6 stop route and it goes at least that far...
Once you have your addresses entered, minimuze the individual directions leading from stop to stop and google lets you drag and drop the locations on the pane in the left. You can quickly and easily re-organize your stops and the the map updates in near real time. (a second or two). I was able, in about 2 minutes, to determine a near optimal route between all points. It's fairly easy for one's brain to look at a squiggle on a map and turn it into a more efficient line. The problem for salesmen in the past was actually drawing the line without drawing on the map! (this obviously is no longer a concern). Is this even a really big deal for anyone today except for folks in the delivery biz who do dozens of stops a day without pre-planned and established routes?
I was even able to zoom in on sections, optimiza a cluster of points, then zoom out and regroup another cluster. I'm sure I could easily do this for upwards of 10, even 20 locations. The problem I forsee is getting them all typed into google. If you use gmail or google chat, and you have your contacts all loaded into outllok, you can import your contacts, and then while logged into your iGoogle account, starting to type an address in the search field pulls a list of possible matches based on your search history and contacts list, so it's not bad if you do the work in advance and keep up with it I guess.
"Although the HD DVD standard is final, engineers continue developing the technology" Sourced from the official HD DVD site. HD DVD spec is being modified to support additional layers in media, updated and evolving encryption changes (changed to AACS itself), and better support for hybrid technologies including DVD/HD-DVD and Blu-Ray/HD DVD media. Firmware updates will e possible to "most" players to support emerging technologies. This basically means both are not "final" and that blu-ray actually is beating HD to the punch updating and offering more content and more features sooner (adapting faster).
The fact that HD DVD doesn't support BD+ is one of the reasons it's failing... BD+ allows for much greater media control and copy protection allowing future releases to use alternate methods of encryption. AACS does not have this flexibility, and it took the HD DVD group a LOT of encouragement to get ANY of the studios to support it. It's basically because of microsoft and all the work they did ensuring secure path worked and that Microsoft enforced hardware level controlls over the path to help keep HD secure where BR did not have the same concerns.
Blu Ray may not currently permit copying of the media, through any means, and does not have licensing restrictions as such, but current litigation in many countries is expected to turn this over. BR players will be easily updated to permit controlled coping and media portability once legally enforced as part of fair play, user rights, or whatever they want to call it. HD players, due to tight hardware limitations, do not have this flexibility. It will require "cracking" to bypass the disks AACS layers, or proprietary software and hardware "authorised" for use(ie, no legal freeware to do it for me, I'll be forced to put money in someone's pocket for a right I should have allways had). The difference is that if i crack HD, and make copies, those copies will forever work. With Blu-ray, if i make illegal copies, they can render the copies inert forcing me to crack them again (a big problem for illegal distribution firms, which is where 90% of the real lost $ from media theft comes from, not P2P as they want you to believe).
OK, a few points here...
"You'd be able to store HD DVD movies on your laptop computers instead of carrying the discs around with you. You'd be able to condense movies into forms storeable on compatible portable video players. " - Well, what prevents us from doing this in Blu-Ray? nothing. The secure path system is part of HDCP, which is equally a part of BR as it is HD.
"Today if you want HD DVD, you can get a player to do it that has no major advantages over a Blu-ray player except in that it doesn't need constant firmware updates." - HD DVD is also an updatable system. However, since most HD players don't have integrated ethernet as almost all BR players do, you'll have to DL patches to your PC, burn them to disk, then manually update your player. This is more difficult for most people to accomplish than simply letting their BR player DL the updates all by itself over the already configured port.
"Blu-ray isn't finished" - ? Where did you get this? Blu-Ray is standardized, and complete. It's merely EXTENSIBLE allowing the distributers of centent to improve the copy pretection schemes in use should they become cracked. (HD DVD also has a similar system). Old movies WILL play in updated players, only some new movies may require a content protection update. Also, BlueRay players allow for software updates, interface changes, and additional network accessibly features to be added down the road, allowing the player to better evolve over time and keep up with trends. The HD DVD will become a brick far sooner...