bla bla bla

the issue with carbon recycling the form of CO2 is twofold - it's a gas that must be stored under high pressure, like propane or butane, and two, it's not so great on energy density once you have to capture and haul along the heavy CO2 from like an automobile... harvesting CO2 from the atmosphere via ethanol amine ponds could be pondered, but otherwise all green life forms compete for the 0.03% CO2 in air, which is rising though and creates global warming and desertification or junglification and bad weather, but by far the fastest growing tomatoes are grown in the Dead Sea Valley which is the lowest dry point on Earth, and the sole reason is partial pressure of CO2 and carbon availablity is the highest anywhere in the world... such is the issue with scarcity of CO2 scrubbed from the atmosphere, but that is not to say, that when you have energy to blow, like solar in a desert, and nothing good to store it into, harvesting even humidity and CO2 from the atmosphere wasting a ton of energy because energy is cheap is not economically feasible

but otherwise, if a full recycling circle is done, a liquid or solid end product carried back to a recycling gas station is preferable, and in this lithium borohydride to lithium borate fuel cell for cars sounds like an expensive but leaves the CO2 recycling in the dust, or, even just lithium metal, beryllium metal (toxid), boron, or aluminum, and their hydrides beat carbon in energy storing efficiency by weight, but for stationary home based uses environmentally fairly friendly alkaline zinc air or iron air battery type setups might be more economical on a storage density by volume and cost basis even if by weight they both suck, and the zinc or electrolytic iron cathodes can be removed and stacked in a pile..

carbon's main ergonomic and energy efficiency efficiency lies in the fact that it's a gas that can be freely emitted through an exhaust, and capturing it back from that dilute form is very expensive energy wise.. not emitting it, and capturing it, like a car that has no exhaust pipe and instead embarks on compressing and heat echange cooling the CO2 into a compressed liquid cylinder has all kinds of issues, similar to the loco loco's page i'll cite below in the references

ref 1: chart I made a while back that relates to rocket fuels and this CO2 recycling question:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
it also explains why the space shuttle running on liquid hydrogen was such a bad idea, compared to solid rocket boosters based on aluminum - just compare carbon, hydrogen and aluminum (or boron or beryllium or lithium) in the above chart. Yes hydrogen has the highest energy storage density by weight even if it really really sucks by volume (cryogenic hydrogen that must be vented to stay cold is only 1/8th the density of water) and plain gasoline has more hydrogen in a gallon than cryogenic liquid hydrogen does, true it weighs a whole lot more.. still.. if you have to carry along the oxidizer too, such as liquid oxygen required for rockets, hydrogen sucks compared to aluminum powder powered solid rocket boosters even that mammoth dinosaur contraption of a Shuttle had to resort to just to get up there into space

ref.2 here is a chart I made a while back that somebody revised into svg with python
  http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...
here is the original I made with an Excel screenshot
  http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...
note that iron and zinc, with easy aqueous battery chemistries leave liquid hydrogen in the dust when it comes to energy density by volume, but they do suck by weight indeed.. boron, aluminum, silicon, lithium have no easy aqueous recycling chemistries, though some semi-aqueous processes might be found that are economical for both the abundant aluminum and magnesium. I'm a big fan of liquid ammonia, as it can be made from water and nitrogen with energy input, if they could only find suitable processes.. that is one of the most elusive problems in inorganic chemistry (or organic) is efficient nitrogen fixation, because even the Haber Bosch process wastes a ton of energy in compression, which could be recouperated though similar to reverse osmosis membrane desalination processes, but both RO and Haber are large scale processes, and for small scale, like hillbilly yeoman farmer DIY home based processes, distillation or lithium nitride energy wasting but easy to small scale electrolyze processes may be more feasible

ref 3. a lovely discussion related to efficiency and ergonomics and maintenance complication nightmares involving steam locomotives, such as compound engines or lugging around huge condensers, and when push comes to shove the savings if fuel are often hard to justify if fuel is relatively cheap, and the simple steam engine with the superheater only complication for fuel savings, developed by Wilhelm Schmidt in the 1880's, after James Watt in the 1700's created the gobbly clunky vacuum steam engine which was huge compared to the power output, but safe, for stationary mining applications such as pumping sump water, and still beat beast of burden muscle power economically when coal was plenty, but the real and only true breakthrough in steam engine design was the high pressure (but unsafe) compacting of steam power, done by many but Stephenson's Rocket of 1829 gave the first heat transfer rate for any kind of decent horsepower, through increasing the surface area for heat exchange contact via a boiler with multiple tiny flue tubes going through it... boiler and heat exchanger design hasn't advanced much from that shape, tube and shell boiler or heat exchanger, ever since, I wonder if it's even possible to advance, but inadvertently all tube and boiler heat exchangers, even stainless ones, suffer from a single issue: corrosion or fatigue failure, especially at the weld or joining points, and tube leaks

http://www.douglas-self.com/MU...

there is a yummi adventure of pages upon pages of technology through simplicity design enthusiasts.. i especially like the nonround wheel invention for better traction from increased contact surface areas when in good contact with the ground, how about them wind cutter shapes that slice through the wind and send it sideways, as opposed to fish shapes or raindrop shapes that tell that in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics you can have a blunt tip but it is the boundary layer separation and vacuum cavitation in the back thats the real issue, and there is a maximum slope you can have to avoid boundary layer separations, while in a perfect fluid, like liquid helium below the lamda point approximates as superfluidity, and craws up along the walls of vessels and out of them, hydrodynamic drag becomes very low for almost any shape, because the pressure from the back is equal the pressure from the front, and viscous forces and cavitation from them is near nil

btw let me take this opportunity to say fuck Obamacare not about you but his filthy rich scam artist insurance buddies that need to all find an honest way to make a living, and fuck willful infecting of people over it, also fuck Monsanto that designs the infections, and lays waste to the wilderness of nature by promoting lawn mowing carried to an excess, and killing of flowers that they brainwash everyone into thinking it's "weed", something that must be eradicated by spraying it with their roundup, so they can make another dollar from this senseless destruction of wilderness and genetic variability and the whole world follows like lemmings, and there is green flowerless deserts everywhere as far as the eye can see.. what about the butterflies and the bees? i mean weed killer and insecticides to protect food crops, yeah.. but just for a mere admiring of otherwise useless piece of land and claiming that flowerless lawns are appropriate, and promoting it to the whole world where it used to not be done, i say fuck Monsanto to that.. thank you for letting me get that out of my system and I will keep doing it til the minute I die or things change

You know, I always hate how my grunt work for companies makes them 4 times the money they pay you. It's just greedy theft. We should start a movement where the means of production are owned by the workers rather than investors and management!

Check out My Gate Array Project if you haven't already done so. The EE work is done by Chris Testa KD2BMH, I mostly do systems programming and business but do a lot of design checks, etc.

Repeating the AC because he's posted at karma 0. That's "University of California at Berkeley", AC, but the rest of this is spot on:

Berkeley University is pushing really hard to get universities to adopt RISC-V (an Open ISA and set of cores) as a basis for future processor and architecture research. The motivation behind RISC-V was to have a stable ISA that isn't patent encumbered, isn't owned by one company, and is easily extensible (OpenRISC didn't fit the bill here).

I can see that ARM and MIPS would have a problem with this, especially as there is nothing particularly innovative or performance gaining about either ISA, and some recent RISC-V cores have demonstrated similar performance to some recent ARM cores in half the area. This is there way of fighting back against something open that stands to lose them significant marketshare.

Cool. Someone found us the agenda!

I get paid to train EEs within large companies on intellectual property issues, and to help the companies and their attorneys navigate those issues. Infringement is rife within software companies. Not because anyone wants to infringe, but because of a total lack of due diligence driven by ignorance.

You've made my point for me.

And any informed patent holder knows that any violation must be prosecuted, or the validity of the patent evaporates.

No, that's just the ignorance of the uninformed that "everybody knows", but it's wrong. You don't lose your patent from failing to enforce it. You might be confusing it with trademarks, which can go into the public domain if you allow them to become generic terms rather than specific brands. And you can sometimes lose the capability of being able to enforce against a specific infringer if you hold back until the market develops, that's the Doctrine of Laches. But you don't lose your patent. Nor would you lose your copyright due to failure to enforce.

There's no such thing as a typical safe following distance. It's not defined in the law at all. Safe following distance is defined, and surprise surprise it actually changes depending on what you're driving and the conditions.

If braking hard is what you do every time someone mergers in front of you to maintain your safe distance then there is still a problem with your driving style.

Thermodynamics. You are using at least twice the energy to convert the CO2 and H2O to diesel as the chemical energy in the diesel. Factor in efficiency of the engine that is burning said diesel, and you are at best around 15% efficiency, but 8% is much more likely.

In contrast, using the "renewable energy source" directly yields much higher net benefit.

Effectively, this is a battery with terrible efficiency meant to make the oil industry look green.

Now, as I said in my original post, sometimes 8% efficiency isn't bad-- if it is able to use energy that would otherwise be wasted. Usually that is not the case with a process that requires heating something to 800C, but who knows.

you must consult with Imagination before you change it.

Yes. And what happens then?

I haven't in general met many professors (or EEs) who understand much about intellectual property.

OK. Can we see your agreements, please? Because that did sound very much like trolling for additional intellectual property to add to your portfolio.

People who read this article have pointed out three open CPU designs in addition to the one that I remembered.

While your product might be "production ready", please keep in mind that open projects are very often written to a higher standard than commercial ones, and the researchers involved are no less professional than your own developers. And their projects come with fewer intellectual property issues than yours.

It's only "free" for academia.

Not even them. This is a lure for universities to create tech that they are not allowed to produce in hardware, but the company that provided the original tech can monetize.

The patent terms are whatever they want them to be. In general "reasonable" and "patent" don't happen together much. And "tiny", well I really doubt it.

Having a company provide funds for a research grant and then reap the patent royalties isn't in general a good thing for society. The student researchers get paid like slave labor (if they get paid at all) and put what may be the best idea of their lives in some company's pockets.

But I was under the mistaken impression that one could only burn an FPGA once. Thanks for clarifying that they can be reused.