pedantka@9:
I suspect a better designation for Lieberman would be (BigPharma-CT), going back more than a decade.
"Oprah’s 200 million followers are out to elect Obama."
Well, if the majority of them are US citizens eligible and registered to vote, that's kind of game over, don't you think? Unless you're calling for some sort of election fraud...
Myself @32: Duh, Barr no longer being a Congress critter, I guess the main useful function he might serve at this point is to peel off some votes from McCain's right flank.
Jan @30:
I don't think they were being ironic at all, just drawing a distinction between libertarianism as a political philosophy and the Libertarian Party as it currently exists in general and the rather odious Barr in particular. Also read Bruce @12. They're right - I know and know of plenty of libertarians (small l, not necessarily members of the party) that have never given me reason to think of them as racist or bigoted in any way - Jim Henley and game designer Bill Stoddard come to mind.
None of which makes Barr's eulogy for Helms any less repugnant, of course. On the other hand, to the extent that he actually functions as a *civil* libertarian, supports the ACLU, and does things like filibuster telecom immunity, Barr may still serve a useful function nevertheless.
Steve @ 34:
Read the patent; did you? It seems apparent that the metal or metal hydrides mentioned are all *consumed* by the chemical reactions mentioned, in most cases by becoming oxides or being converted from hydrides to oxides. That is, the magnesium, lithium, sodium, or whatever in use is the real source of the energy, just being used more efficiently than in past applications if the patent is correct; in fact, the patent even says, "Such a comparison makes it obvious that, for use as non-rechargeable energy source, the metal hydrides used in the method according to the invention have much higher specific and volumetric energy densities than conventional batteries."
Note that they're non-rechargeable (e.g., if the Genepax MEA is the same thing, you need to swap it out for a new one eventually), and I'll bet you dollars to donuts that these nanocrystalline structures take a fair amount of energy to produce in the first place; probably considerably more than they ever provide for hydrolysis and running the engine.
Beth @ 20: The problem is, you can't burn the hydrogen unless it's first separated from the oxygen. This is *always* going to take more energy than you'll get back from burning it. Any claims to the contrary are either ignoring where the energy is really coming from, or claiming the equivalent of perpetual motion.
Andrea @ 23: Note again that the company claims the thing can run on sea water. There is certainly no shortage of that, and if the system can handle that kind of salinity, you could probably pee in the tank for similar results. What there is sometimes a regional shortage of is *potable* water.
samuel @ 21: What makes for new discoveries is *repeatable* experimentation. Until these folks tell others how the process works and let them try it out for themselves, there's every reason to be skeptical, even if the claimed results *didn't* contradict literally hundreds (well, almost two hundred going back to Carnot) of years of experiments and observations to the contrary. Observing that something appears to be a natural law is not a matter of closing one's eyes or mind, it is simply a statement that a whole lot of evidence to date supports that viewpoint. And pray tell, exactly what kind of energy do you think water contains so much of? Chemical energy? Not so much; although there are certainly exothermic (heat-producing) reactions involving water, they uniformly consume something else that is in more limited supply - limestone and sodium come to mind. Nuclear? Sure, if we can lick the problem of controlled fusion. Mass-energy? Certainly, but then so does every substance, and we're even further from direct mass conversion than we are from practical fusion.
"I'm having trouble working out the life cycle here, though, and trying to see if the end game here is massive drought or if I'm just missing smething."
Well, yeah - the fact that water is *far* more abundant on this planet than any sort of burnable fuel. Therefore, *if* this device worked exactly as advertised (and I'll note that it claims to work with salt water the same as fresh, which sounds like a nifty if unlikely trick), then no, it wouldn't really introduce any concerns about 'using up all our water'.
On the other hand, we can be sure it either doesn't work, or they left out some important details like something being oxidized or otherwise used up in the converter. It will *always* take more energy to split water into hydrogen and oxygen than you can ever get back by burning them, no matter how you gussy the description up. That extra energy must come from somewhere else, whether it be electric current or the consumption of some other energy/substance in the converter.
The only way you could conceivably be getting more power from the hydrogen than you're putting into the electrolysis or catalytic water splitting is if you were using it for some other kind of power generation, like cold fusion. However, these guys don't seem to be claiming to have invented Iron Man's arc reactor, so that's out.
PJ @ 111:
I'm not disputing that he may have *committed* certain crimes, such as stealing Masha's phone (although he could have said he simply borrowed it, she not being likely to ever dispute his claim). However, at the time the journo told him he couldn't simply be released, he had neither been charged nor specifically arrested for *any* of them as yet. Seems like he (and the others) should have been released, and then arrested if and only if a prosecutor decided they had done something worth prosecuting. As the judge's adding the charge from the bench shows, nobody was thinking that he was 'in there' for stealing a cell phone, so it's not really relevant to the question of what to do with the prisoners at the point Gitmo-on-the-Bay is liberated.
Now, in a world where DHS has this much power, the gubmint probably has at least as tame a Justice Department as it has now, so I could easily imagine the Feds announcing a slew of specific charges for all the 'inmates' while the CHP was still in the process of getting through all the doors. Of course, in that case... okay, can anybody recall if the judge in the book was presiding over a state or federal court? I don't recall.
My one niggle was at the end, where the journalist says that Marcus and the others can't be released from Gitmo-on-the-Bay until the charges against them are resolved. I completely missed the part where charges or indictments of any kind were actually brought against him in the first place... and would have thought that he would have been released to his parents immediately pending the decision of the local (or federal) prosecutors as to whether to bring any charges at all. It's not as though he was technically under arrest by the DHS - he was just detained.
| Year | Number of comments posted |
|---|---|
| 2009 | 1 |
| 2008 | 9 |
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