Cost: The Clarity costs $108,000 US - the cheapest I've seen in a fuel cell vehicle. The Tesla Roadster starts at $92,000, but can go over $100,000 with options. (like a roof) Hydrogen vehicles that run on internal combustion engines have been around for a while, you could get your car converted to hydrogen for $30,000 to $50,000 US. But these are far less efficient than fuel cells, they have a maximum of 50% efficiency.
Until the Clarity came out, fuel cell vehicles have been between 1/3 of a million to $10 million per unit. The most expensive vehicles use liquid hydrogen, which has more energy per unit volume than gas. Even so, liquid hydrogen only has 1/3 of the energy density of gasoline.
The FCX uses compressed gas, and still pulls off 270 miles of range (max). Part of the reason both electric and hydrogen cars can get by with lower energy densities is because electric engines are far more efficient than internal combustion. (up to 95% efficiency vs roughly 35%) So your engine doesn't throw very much heat, it's mostly being converted to movement. A side effect is that range is reduced in the winter, if you need to run a heater.
The safety is not significantly different than a gasoline tank. The contents are highly pressurized, but the total energy held within a tank is very low compared to gasoline. They've got all sorts of safety features like emergency valves to vent hydrogen, and electrical grounding to prevent shocks. I should mention that 10% or more energy is wasted just compressing the gas, on top of what's required to create it. These tanks have been certified as safe enough for use in automobiles, which is all I really care about.
It requires 2 to 4 times as much electricity to create hydrogen with electrolysis as it would to recharge a battery with the same capacity. (Closer to 4 times right now) However, this is still quite low in terms of costs per mile. Electric cars cost an average of 2 to 4 cents per mile to run, so even 4x this is not a significant cost. The main cost of an electric car is replacing aging batteries, not charging them.
I find that the Wikipedia is far too optimistic for both technologies. For example, A123 has excellent li-ion batteries, which are considered a prime candidate for use in electric cars, despite having less than half the energy density listed on the wikipedia.
No, no, no! If you didn't notice, I just copied and pasted the parent post, and swapped batteries and hydrogen. Guess what? I ended up with a valid post, one that you felt should be responded to.
I know enough about both technologies that I could do the same with your post. Battery and hydrogen vehicles are neck-and-neck right now, in terms of cost and performance. They're both promising technologies. In fact, I feel that batteries are ever so slightly in the lead.
But to suggest that one has a significant advantage over the other is, in my opinion, a troll. The main difference is that batteries lose capacity every year, and need to be replaced every few years. This is a sizeable cost, especially for lithium-ion batteries. On the other hand, hydrogen costs more to produce in the first place.
I like the Tesla Roadster vs FCX Clarity example, because these cars are almost identical in terms of cost vs performance. FCX Clarity has more seats, goes a bit farther, but the Roadster has that awesome acceleration. Clarity costs more to fill up, but the Roadster needs its batteries periodically replaced. There are safety improvements in the Roadster's battery back, many sensors act on the batteries and shut down those that show signs of deformation or overheating. And there are improvements in hydrogen tanks also. 10,000 psi tanks have been certified for use in automobiles in Germany, for example.
I can use these two cars to break apart almost any argument that claims hydrogen is better than battery, or vice versa. At least, at the current time.
Let me summarize the legions of faults in your arguments.
i am more interested in batteries
This argument is one the anti-Bushies and others push, without understanding the real problems. There is no electric economy, and electricity is ridiculously hard to manage in battery form. Did you know batteries lose capacity when you use them to store electricity in them, they have to be very specific types of batteries that are ridiculously expensive and complicated. There is no infrastructure to support the additional load on the power grid, nor will there ever be one. Can you imagine the cost of replacing every gas pump with an electric recharging station, every gasoline and oil tank with a lithium-ion battery? Battery electric cars are a great dream, but will never actually function until breakthroughs are made in battery capacity and lifespan. Give up this dream and focus on what is possible now.
The number one obstacle in hydrogen-based vehicles is working with hydrogen. Full stop. And there has been so much work put into hydrogen storage technology in the last 5 years, that the time of the hydrogen car is here, and it's here to stay. Stop poopooing the technology that is proving itself to work (notice the fleets of hydrogen buses out there), and wishing for castles in the sky. Work with what's here and now.
In other news, zealots are blinded by their own views, to the exclusion of all others. The problems you mention with hydrogen are either very similar to those with batteries, or have already been solved. I invite you to read up on the FCX clarity, which has similar price and range compared to the Tesla Roadster. Also you may wish to check out home hydrogen generators.
We will never be able to "fix" life. The human race will never be perfect. I'm amazed at how often I hear variants of this argument, that we shouldn't explore space until we've solved humanity's problems. And I say, why not? We humans do all sorts of things, like exploring, discovering, inventing. Even if our new knowledge seems to have no short-term benefit. Some of us even read Slashdot. What makes space research any different?
Only one thing: it involves the possibility of extending human presence to other worlds. I've seen people say things like "We shouldn't go to Mars, if we ever colonize it we'd just wreck it the same way we wrecked Earth. We should fix Earth first." 'Life-fixers', if I may coin a term, seem to have a negative view of humanity; that we degrade and spoil everything we touch, including our own lives. They take no pride in modern civilization. Ashamed by our very existence, they loathe the idea of spreading our curse to other worlds.
Maybe this is an exaggeration, but I feel there is a grain of truth at the heart of it. And besides, what if the alien life knows the cure for cancer? There'd sure be egg on your face.
After seeing the life-like "insectothopter," Hiley jokes that she cannot look at a dragonfly in the same way anymore.
In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency's scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped.
An amateur entymologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized machine, Hiley said.
A laser beam steered the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried liquid propellant.
Despite such ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even a gentle wind. "You watch them in nature, they'll catch a breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a one-of-a-kind piece," Hiley said.
There's a simpler counter-argument here. You're assuming that this god rewards those who believe in him/her/it. I feel it is just as likely that the god punishes its believers while rewarding atheists.
Yeah, but I remember this excitement last year... and the year before that. In the last few years, I've seen tremendous improvements in the ease-of-use of Linux, and yet there has been no corresponding increase in the number of users:
The number of Linux users has been roughly flat for the last three years. To me, Linux is ready for the desktop, and has been for quite some time. However, the simple truth is that most people buy a computer to run software, the vast majority of which is for Windows. Sure, Linux comes with a TON of its own stuff, which makes it useful to many, many people.
But even more people want to run commercial software that is Windows-only. Like games. Or business apps. Or the CD that came with their camera. Face it; if Wine worked with 100% reliability, Windows would be dead.
You can rant and rave about improvements in reliability, security, efficiency, GUI elements, and so forth, but at the end of the day what people care most about is: "Will it run my software?".
Well, I'm far too selfish to upload anything. So we're OK there. But why is it stealing when I use P2P and OK when I copy from the radio? I have good reception, and honestly can't tell the difference in quality. I like to record big long chunks of radio, and cut out the ads.
"Is your life really so empty that you can't get by without your stolen music?"
It's not my fault that my life is empty. And I never stole it, I just made an exact duplicate of it using my own resources. It never cost them a dime. In fact, they actually gained a small amount of money because I pay a music tax on recordable media. And I don't hear you complaining about the mp3s I copied from the radio. Why is that? To me, it seems that I can listen to my Britney Spears guilt-free.
You do it with a Spam filter. But instead of checking for spam, it checks for signs of terrorism and criminal intent. You can even train it in exactly the same way. That way, only a tiny fraction of emails get read by actual FBI agents.
I've reached the same conclusion, but it is in fact false. With quantum entanglement, you have two particles with the exact same quantum properties. So, big deal.
But it IS a big deal. If you change one, the other one is affected. It's like the universe is made out of badly written C code. If you have two pointers with identical values, they point to the same memory address, and you only have one real variable. If you have two particles with identical quantum properties, changing one affects the other.
So you and your clone would quite literally be the same person, if every particle in your bodies had the same quantum state. Now, chew on this: what happens if you kill the original? YOU, the original YOU, will still exist, but in a different location.
Nifty! Of course, you can't actually send information using quantum entanglement, so you'd have to send the particles to the new location manually. Might as well just send yourself manually and avoid all this. See, with quantum encryption, you measure the value of your particle, and at that moment know what the remote particle's state is. Measuring the state alters it in a random way. So if you receive a radio pulse and your particle's state is 1, you got a 1. And if the state was 0, it's a zero. No way for an eavesdropper to figure it out, the pulses don't contain any data, but you don't have instantaneous communication.
IBM holds more software patents than any other company in the world. They should start selling licenses to use Windows, and threatening to sue companies who don't comply.
That would sure send a massive shock through Microsoft.
The human brain is wired to recognize faces. We're especially good at recognizing two eyes staring right at us as a sign of possible hostility. To trigger extra fight or flight instincts, bare your teeth in a grimace. It's quite likely that if you stare at the target, he'll notice you out of the corner of his eyes.
You shouldn't normally need to edit xorg.conf manually. Just run 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg' to get an ugly ASCII gui that will edit it for you. It would be nice if this was a bit better documented, I often see people who feel xorg.conf needs to be edited by hand.
Exactly, someone has to be the first to roll it out. The first IPv6 device might as well be a satellite, since these are notoriously difficult to upgrade later.
Wouldn't a fuel-cell engine be essentially an electric engine?
-Yes, the fuel cell takes in hyrodgen and outputs electricity, which runs an electric motor.
Would it be quieter than a gasoline engine? More reliable?
Yes, and yes. Electric engines are virtually silent, and have far less moving parts than internal combustion engines.
Would there be any odor?
No, the only output from a fuel cell is water vapour.
If so, they would be ideal for ultralights:
Maybe! Your main problem here is fuel density. On the one hand, electric engines are around 95% efficient, compared to gasoline engines which are around 35% efficient. On the other hand, hydrogen isn't very dense - a liquid hydrogen tank requires roughly three times the volume of a gasoline tank with similar energy. (It also needs to be very well insulated) And by eyeballing the picture, it looks like they're using a compressed tank, not liquid. Probably one of those new 10,000 psi tanks, this being Boeing. Even at that pressure, the energy density's going to be a lot less than liquid hydrogen.
I note that they don't mention the range or price, which are going to be very small and very large, respectively. A fuel cell alone can set you back 30,000$ US. The cheapest I've seen for a complete system that can power a car is $60,000 US.
FYI, Windows machines use a proprietary version of TCP that unfairly competes for bandwidth with other TCP flows. To answer your question, I feel pretty cranky about it.
The concern about the bird flu is that it's completely alien to humans, and is therefore very deadly. Once people have been exposed to it, their immune systems will be much more resistant to mutated strains. Also note that new viruses, such as swine and avian flu, tend to become less deadly of their own accord! It's not in the survival interests of a virus to kill off its hosts. (Who will then carry the virus?) Less deadly strains tend to do better.
No, it's the first emergence of an unknown virus that is feared here, and it's the new exposure that has the potential to kill off hundreds of millions of us. Next year's strain of the flu will be much less severe, and it will gradually degrade to just another influenza. That's whats happened with these things in the past.
So something that can kill off the virus when it first emerges would be very beneficial, because that's when the most lives are lost.
There's always been a lot of FUD regarding Linux and legality, but this is absurd. Since when does producing media that can be viewed on a Linux machine violate the law? By this argument, that FAQ is illegal since a Linux user is able to read it. Unless they mean that in order to verify that the Linux service works, they would need to install Linux on one of their own systems, which they view as being illegal.
But of course anyone knows all you have to do to be legal under Linux is:
-buy a license from SCO
-only use Novell's Suse Linux
-buy a couple copies of Windows just in case
Right? Right!?
I built a tele-operated robot a few years ago. I got the biggest RC vehicle they had at Radio Shack, built a water-proof plexiglass box to hold the motherboard, and hooked it up to a wireless adapter. I used a 533 mhz fanless VIA mini-ITX board, and it had Debian Linux through a flash drive. The vehicle was controlled through the parallel port.
You aren't reading the article right. Let me clear things up for you:
"It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. And it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery."
"Palmore said some performance problems - such as decreased storage capacity after repeated recharging - must be overcome before the device is marketable."
Years ago, we used to farm wild boars. In the morning my father and I would sit at the breakfast table, talk about which boar to kill, plan out how we were going to do it. We were excited, and a little afraid (wild boar are dangerous and cunning), and thinking about the kind of meat we'd get (sausage, pork chops, etc). Our goal was clear: to kill the boar.
And when we stepped outside, all the boars would look up from their troughs behind the fence, the one we had selected would run off into the bush, and the others would continue eating. We used to joke that they had a wire tap to our kitchen. It happened over and over. Now, I don't really think that any of the boars had telepathy, since I don't buy into that crap. But what if they did?
I think you could never, ever test for it in controlled conditions. If the goal of the activity is to kill a boar and eat it, it 'knows'. If the goal is to prove the existence of ESP and incidentally kill some boars, it doesn't. If there's some deep instinct in the boar that's somewhat telepathic, what does it care if humans prove some abstract ideas? Maybe it only triggers if the humans are mainly concerned with hunting and killing it. Humans are always doing strange things that would be incomprehensible to some subconscious pig instinct.
If the hunters didn't know they were in an experiment, it still might not work if the telepathy pulls its understanding from some kind of big picture of what's going on, or gets it's information from multiple humans who are interested in the pig. (say the scientists who are fooling the hunters).
Slashdot Mirror
Cost: The Clarity costs $108,000 US - the cheapest I've seen in a fuel cell vehicle. The Tesla Roadster starts at $92,000, but can go over $100,000 with options. (like a roof) Hydrogen vehicles that run on internal combustion engines have been around for a while, you could get your car converted to hydrogen for $30,000 to $50,000 US. But these are far less efficient than fuel cells, they have a maximum of 50% efficiency.
Until the Clarity came out, fuel cell vehicles have been between 1/3 of a million to $10 million per unit. The most expensive vehicles use liquid hydrogen, which has more energy per unit volume than gas. Even so, liquid hydrogen only has 1/3 of the energy density of gasoline.
The FCX uses compressed gas, and still pulls off 270 miles of range (max). Part of the reason both electric and hydrogen cars can get by with lower energy densities is because electric engines are far more efficient than internal combustion. (up to 95% efficiency vs roughly 35%) So your engine doesn't throw very much heat, it's mostly being converted to movement. A side effect is that range is reduced in the winter, if you need to run a heater.
The safety is not significantly different than a gasoline tank. The contents are highly pressurized, but the total energy held within a tank is very low compared to gasoline. They've got all sorts of safety features like emergency valves to vent hydrogen, and electrical grounding to prevent shocks. I should mention that 10% or more energy is wasted just compressing the gas, on top of what's required to create it. These tanks have been certified as safe enough for use in automobiles, which is all I really care about.
It requires 2 to 4 times as much electricity to create hydrogen with electrolysis as it would to recharge a battery with the same capacity. (Closer to 4 times right now) However, this is still quite low in terms of costs per mile. Electric cars cost an average of 2 to 4 cents per mile to run, so even 4x this is not a significant cost. The main cost of an electric car is replacing aging batteries, not charging them.
On the other hand, we'd have to generate a lot more electricity as a nation to support hydrogen. Erm, is there anything I'm forgetting? If you want to read up on this, see:
Battery electric vehicle
Hydrogen production
Hydrogen Vehicle
I find that the Wikipedia is far too optimistic for both technologies. For example, A123 has excellent li-ion batteries, which are considered a prime candidate for use in electric cars, despite having less than half the energy density listed on the wikipedia.
No, no, no! If you didn't notice, I just copied and pasted the parent post, and swapped batteries and hydrogen. Guess what? I ended up with a valid post, one that you felt should be responded to.
I know enough about both technologies that I could do the same with your post. Battery and hydrogen vehicles are neck-and-neck right now, in terms of cost and performance. They're both promising technologies. In fact, I feel that batteries are ever so slightly in the lead.
But to suggest that one has a significant advantage over the other is, in my opinion, a troll. The main difference is that batteries lose capacity every year, and need to be replaced every few years. This is a sizeable cost, especially for lithium-ion batteries. On the other hand, hydrogen costs more to produce in the first place.
I like the Tesla Roadster vs FCX Clarity example, because these cars are almost identical in terms of cost vs performance. FCX Clarity has more seats, goes a bit farther, but the Roadster has that awesome acceleration. Clarity costs more to fill up, but the Roadster needs its batteries periodically replaced. There are safety improvements in the Roadster's battery back, many sensors act on the batteries and shut down those that show signs of deformation or overheating. And there are improvements in hydrogen tanks also. 10,000 psi tanks have been certified for use in automobiles in Germany, for example.
I can use these two cars to break apart almost any argument that claims hydrogen is better than battery, or vice versa. At least, at the current time.
You, sir, are a misinformed, ignorant fool.
Let me summarize the legions of faults in your arguments.
i am more interested in batteries
This argument is one the anti-Bushies and others push, without understanding the real problems. There is no electric economy, and electricity is ridiculously hard to manage in battery form. Did you know batteries lose capacity when you use them to store electricity in them, they have to be very specific types of batteries that are ridiculously expensive and complicated. There is no infrastructure to support the additional load on the power grid, nor will there ever be one. Can you imagine the cost of replacing every gas pump with an electric recharging station, every gasoline and oil tank with a lithium-ion battery? Battery electric cars are a great dream, but will never actually function until breakthroughs are made in battery capacity and lifespan. Give up this dream and focus on what is possible now.
The number one obstacle in hydrogen-based vehicles is working with hydrogen. Full stop. And there has been so much work put into hydrogen storage technology in the last 5 years, that the time of the hydrogen car is here, and it's here to stay. Stop poopooing the technology that is proving itself to work (notice the fleets of hydrogen buses out there), and wishing for castles in the sky. Work with what's here and now.
In other news, zealots are blinded by their own views, to the exclusion of all others. The problems you mention with hydrogen are either very similar to those with batteries, or have already been solved. I invite you to read up on the FCX clarity, which has similar price and range compared to the Tesla Roadster. Also you may wish to check out home hydrogen generators.
We will never be able to "fix" life. The human race will never be perfect. I'm amazed at how often I hear variants of this argument, that we shouldn't explore space until we've solved humanity's problems. And I say, why not? We humans do all sorts of things, like exploring, discovering, inventing. Even if our new knowledge seems to have no short-term benefit. Some of us even read Slashdot. What makes space research any different?
Only one thing: it involves the possibility of extending human presence to other worlds. I've seen people say things like "We shouldn't go to Mars, if we ever colonize it we'd just wreck it the same way we wrecked Earth. We should fix Earth first." 'Life-fixers', if I may coin a term, seem to have a negative view of humanity; that we degrade and spoil everything we touch, including our own lives. They take no pride in modern civilization. Ashamed by our very existence, they loathe the idea of spreading our curse to other worlds.
Maybe this is an exaggeration, but I feel there is a grain of truth at the heart of it. And besides, what if the alien life knows the cure for cancer? There'd sure be egg on your face.
I'd like to mention that robotic, spying dragonflies were originally built over 30 years ago.
http://www.dougneeper.com/news_articles/CIA_Used_Dragonfly_Catfish.htm
The CIA once built a mechanical dragonfly to carry a listening device but found small gusts of wind knocked it off course so it was never used in a spy operation.
After seeing the life-like "insectothopter," Hiley jokes that she cannot look at a dragonfly in the same way anymore.
In the 1970s the CIA had developed a miniature listening device that needed a delivery system, so the agency's scientists looked at building a bumblebee to carry it. They found, however, that the bumblebee was erratic in flight, so the idea was scrapped.
An amateur entymologist on the project then suggested a dragonfly and a prototype was built that became the first flight of an insect-sized machine, Hiley said.
A laser beam steered the dragonfly and a watchmaker on the project crafted a miniature oscillating engine so the wings beat, and the fuel bladder carried liquid propellant.
Despite such ingenuity, the project team lost control over the dragonfly in even a gentle wind. "You watch them in nature, they'll catch a breeze and ride with it. We, of course, needed it to fly to a target. So they were never deployed operationally, but this is a one-of-a-kind piece," Hiley said.
And here's a pic: http://msnbcmedia1.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Photos/070531/070531_spytool3_hmed_10a.hmedium.jpg
Perhaps they've improved the control by now.
There's a simpler counter-argument here. You're assuming that this god rewards those who believe in him/her/it. I feel it is just as likely that the god punishes its believers while rewarding atheists.
Yeah, but I remember this excitement last year... and the year before that. In the last few years, I've seen tremendous improvements in the ease-of-use of Linux, and yet there has been no corresponding increase in the number of users:
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
The number of Linux users has been roughly flat for the last three years. To me, Linux is ready for the desktop, and has been for quite some time. However, the simple truth is that most people buy a computer to run software, the vast majority of which is for Windows. Sure, Linux comes with a TON of its own stuff, which makes it useful to many, many people.
But even more people want to run commercial software that is Windows-only. Like games. Or business apps. Or the CD that came with their camera. Face it; if Wine worked with 100% reliability, Windows would be dead.
You can rant and rave about improvements in reliability, security, efficiency, GUI elements, and so forth, but at the end of the day what people care most about is: "Will it run my software?".
Well, I'm far too selfish to upload anything. So we're OK there. But why is it stealing when I use P2P and OK when I copy from the radio? I have good reception, and honestly can't tell the difference in quality. I like to record big long chunks of radio, and cut out the ads.
Is P2P morally wrong because it's too convenient?
"Is your life really so empty that you can't get by without your stolen music?"
...
It's not my fault that my life is empty. And I never stole it, I just made an exact duplicate of it using my own resources. It never cost them a dime. In fact, they actually gained a small amount of money because I pay a music tax on recordable media. And I don't hear you complaining about the mp3s I copied from the radio. Why is that? To me, it seems that I can listen to my Britney Spears guilt-free.
God my life is empty.
Napoleon: "Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence."
Me, after using Vista: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."
You do it with a Spam filter. But instead of checking for spam, it checks for signs of terrorism and criminal intent. You can even train it in exactly the same way. That way, only a tiny fraction of emails get read by actual FBI agents.
I've reached the same conclusion, but it is in fact false. With quantum entanglement, you have two particles with the exact same quantum properties. So, big deal.
But it IS a big deal. If you change one, the other one is affected. It's like the universe is made out of badly written C code. If you have two pointers with identical values, they point to the same memory address, and you only have one real variable. If you have two particles with identical quantum properties, changing one affects the other.
So you and your clone would quite literally be the same person, if every particle in your bodies had the same quantum state. Now, chew on this: what happens if you kill the original? YOU, the original YOU, will still exist, but in a different location.
Nifty! Of course, you can't actually send information using quantum entanglement, so you'd have to send the particles to the new location manually. Might as well just send yourself manually and avoid all this. See, with quantum encryption, you measure the value of your particle, and at that moment know what the remote particle's state is. Measuring the state alters it in a random way. So if you receive a radio pulse and your particle's state is 1, you got a 1. And if the state was 0, it's a zero. No way for an eavesdropper to figure it out, the pulses don't contain any data, but you don't have instantaneous communication.
IBM holds more software patents than any other company in the world. They should start selling licenses to use Windows, and threatening to sue companies who don't comply.
That would sure send a massive shock through Microsoft.
The human brain is wired to recognize faces. We're especially good at recognizing two eyes staring right at us as a sign of possible hostility. To trigger extra fight or flight instincts, bare your teeth in a grimace. It's quite likely that if you stare at the target, he'll notice you out of the corner of his eyes.
Nothing supernatural about it.
If you RTFA, you'll note that they keep oxygen flowing to the brain.
You shouldn't normally need to edit xorg.conf manually. Just run 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg' to get an ugly ASCII gui that will edit it for you. It would be nice if this was a bit better documented, I often see people who feel xorg.conf needs to be edited by hand.
Exactly, someone has to be the first to roll it out. The first IPv6 device might as well be a satellite, since these are notoriously difficult to upgrade later.
Even with a stepladder.
Wouldn't a fuel-cell engine be essentially an electric engine?
-Yes, the fuel cell takes in hyrodgen and outputs electricity, which runs an electric motor.
Would it be quieter than a gasoline engine? More reliable?
Yes, and yes. Electric engines are virtually silent, and have far less moving parts than internal combustion engines.
Would there be any odor?
No, the only output from a fuel cell is water vapour.
If so, they would be ideal for ultralights:
Maybe! Your main problem here is fuel density. On the one hand, electric engines are around 95% efficient, compared to gasoline engines which are around 35% efficient. On the other hand, hydrogen isn't very dense - a liquid hydrogen tank requires roughly three times the volume of a gasoline tank with similar energy. (It also needs to be very well insulated) And by eyeballing the picture, it looks like they're using a compressed tank, not liquid. Probably one of those new 10,000 psi tanks, this being Boeing. Even at that pressure, the energy density's going to be a lot less than liquid hydrogen.
I note that they don't mention the range or price, which are going to be very small and very large, respectively. A fuel cell alone can set you back 30,000$ US. The cheapest I've seen for a complete system that can power a car is $60,000 US.
FYI, Windows machines use a proprietary version of TCP that unfairly competes for bandwidth with other TCP flows. To answer your question, I feel pretty cranky about it.
The concern about the bird flu is that it's completely alien to humans, and is therefore very deadly. Once people have been exposed to it, their immune systems will be much more resistant to mutated strains. Also note that new viruses, such as swine and avian flu, tend to become less deadly of their own accord! It's not in the survival interests of a virus to kill off its hosts. (Who will then carry the virus?) Less deadly strains tend to do better.
No, it's the first emergence of an unknown virus that is feared here, and it's the new exposure that has the potential to kill off hundreds of millions of us. Next year's strain of the flu will be much less severe, and it will gradually degrade to just another influenza. That's whats happened with these things in the past.
So something that can kill off the virus when it first emerges would be very beneficial, because that's when the most lives are lost.
There's always been a lot of FUD regarding Linux and legality, but this is absurd. Since when does producing media that can be viewed on a Linux machine violate the law? By this argument, that FAQ is illegal since a Linux user is able to read it. Unless they mean that in order to verify that the Linux service works, they would need to install Linux on one of their own systems, which they view as being illegal. But of course anyone knows all you have to do to be legal under Linux is: -buy a license from SCO -only use Novell's Suse Linux -buy a couple copies of Windows just in case Right? Right!?
I built a tele-operated robot a few years ago. I got the biggest RC vehicle they had at Radio Shack, built a water-proof plexiglass box to hold the motherboard, and hooked it up to a wireless adapter. I used a 533 mhz fanless VIA mini-ITX board, and it had Debian Linux through a flash drive. The vehicle was controlled through the parallel port.
Here are some pics: http://www.junction.bafsoft.com/telebot2/
You aren't reading the article right. Let me clear things up for you: "It had twice the storage capacity of an electric double-layer capacitor. And it delivered more than 100 times the power of a standard alkaline battery." "Palmore said some performance problems - such as decreased storage capacity after repeated recharging - must be overcome before the device is marketable."
Yes. If God didn't want us to eat animals, he wouldn't have made them out of meat.
Years ago, we used to farm wild boars. In the morning my father and I would sit at the breakfast table, talk about which boar to kill, plan out how we were going to do it. We were excited, and a little afraid (wild boar are dangerous and cunning), and thinking about the kind of meat we'd get (sausage, pork chops, etc). Our goal was clear: to kill the boar.
And when we stepped outside, all the boars would look up from their troughs behind the fence, the one we had selected would run off into the bush, and the others would continue eating. We used to joke that they had a wire tap to our kitchen. It happened over and over. Now, I don't really think that any of the boars had telepathy, since I don't buy into that crap. But what if they did?
I think you could never, ever test for it in controlled conditions. If the goal of the activity is to kill a boar and eat it, it 'knows'. If the goal is to prove the existence of ESP and incidentally kill some boars, it doesn't. If there's some deep instinct in the boar that's somewhat telepathic, what does it care if humans prove some abstract ideas? Maybe it only triggers if the humans are mainly concerned with hunting and killing it. Humans are always doing strange things that would be incomprehensible to some subconscious pig instinct.
If the hunters didn't know they were in an experiment, it still might not work if the telepathy pulls its understanding from some kind of big picture of what's going on, or gets it's information from multiple humans who are interested in the pig. (say the scientists who are fooling the hunters).