Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:The real reason (Score 1) 254

SSD industry is also not very far from monopoly and moving in that direction. Check who is manufacturing and supplying the flash memory to most SSD producers. Hint: http://www.isuppli.com/Abstract/P13699_20110621100254.pdf Note that economies of scale are possible only for very large volumes, so anything below 5% is probably losing money.

Comment Industrial lobby in action (Score 1) 123

The question is not only about children, green... etc. Korea is one of the main producers of LCD and related technologies. The company Saaamsooong ;-) is practicaly governing the country and they need reliable buyers of their tech to ramp up the volumes. Check who will be the main supplier of the tech and who will profit most from government money.

Comment Europe? (Score 1) 402

I live 20 km from Brussels - THE Center of EU. The Internet market is a practical monopol - cable TV Telenet (and related companies) offers 30Mbps and Belgacom (and related companies) offer ADSL. ADSL usually runs below 6Mbps. The prices are high - because of the monopol. Technically the situation here is like in Korea 10 years ago.

Comment Re:How could battery more green than wire? (Score 1) 168

Thinking "Korean engineers"? This must be a novel concept. Korean engineers are well known for their lack of creativity. There is absolutely nothing novel in the idea of battery powered buses. Regenerative braking is well known and has been used for decades. The only missing part is the good battery. And this is probably the weak point of these buses. Trolley buses are the way to go in places like Seoul, but local mafia (read Samsung, LG, ...) want the government to buy their batteries, so they arranged the deal with the "freindly" city-hall...

Comment This all story starts to look like swine flu (Score 1) 459

Sure there are bugs in the code. Any code has bugs. ANY car has bugs. I have the feeling that somebody is making a black PR campaign to create panic to humble Toyota.
Same was with swine flu - somebody wanted a panic to sell more medicines. There was also SARS several years before that.

How many people died or were injured because of the claimed Toyota software bugs? Give me a number.

Comment Re:Balance of power? (Score 1) 546

You do not have to register it. The law can say that SW copyright will hold only if the binaries come with source or some way to get the source, much the same like GPL requires the source to be offered.

I had such ideas long time ago - for software and for art. Limited terms may work quite well for patents too.

Comment Re:Just Basic Organic Chemistry... (Score 2, Interesting) 316

So the article is misleading. But can we extract some use of it?

I am not working in this area, but this is what I understand: We have CO2. We want to convert it to H2-C-H2 groups and bigger molecules + O. This requires energy, sure. Maybe in form of high temperature... So we need heat.

Here is my suggestion: there are large amounts of unused heat in power plants - both conventional and nuclear. This is why you see all these tubes and white smoke near them. Power plants transform chemical (nuclear) energy to thermal and then to electrical. It is a natural (physics) property of transformation heat -> electricity that it has low efficiency. Look at your thermodynamics books why. So not all thermal energy is converted into electricity in the power plants. Large parts of it (50%) are radiated in the air or used for heating of houses near the power plants IF there are living areas near the power plant. But in many cases there are no such consumers near by. Here is where the new process may be used - put such devices in the existing power plants and use as much as possible of this now unused thermal energy.

The result: power plants will produce same amount of electrical energy, but also O2 and hydro-carbonic substances, which may be used as fuel. And will use CO2 for this. If this is done efficiently, this can be a very big contribution to CO2 emission reduction in the power plants.

Just my thoughts ...

Slashdot Top Deals

The key elements in human thinking are not numbers but labels of fuzzy sets. -- L. Zadeh

Working...