Priuses use NiMH batteries, not lithium. They're considering offering a high-performance version that does, but the stock prius has always been a NiMH battery pack.

The "3 million base pairs are 6 million bits" isn't because each pair has two parts, it's becuase each pair has four possibilities. 3 million digits in base 4 is equivalent to 6 million digits in base 2.

For instance, decimal 15 is "33" in base 4 and is "1111" in base 2. You could think of it as one bit for which basepair is at this point in the chain, and one bit for which orientation it's in.

Hey, it's nine-eleven here partly to avoid the digit string. Putting it into the other (more sensible, in my opinion) order makes it even less associated with the phone code for emergency.

The difference is ~95% efficiency in a big electric motor vs. ~20% efficiency in an internal combustion engine. Running two thermo cycles instead of one invokes Carnot twice, which with current materials caps out at a theoretical maximum of ~60%, and in practice we end up at ~30-40% efficiency for a big power plant using a steam cycle and ~20% for a gas cycle engine. Just having an internal combustion engine in the loop makes the thing around four times more expensive to run. And that's not counting any profit margin for the conversion company, either.

er, apparently I was mixing up OPF, (Also XML based, looks almost the same) and ePub. Oh well.

AZW is actually mobipocket format with a token change (Device IDs for azw allow a character that isn't allowed for mobi), which in turn is ePub packaged to fit into a palm DB.

At least for the power draw when idle, if it does, then it's either dumping the power as heat or self-destructing. You can't overcharge a lithium battery or you get metallic lithium in the cell and ruin and make it unsafe. It's certainly not going to be on the same order of magnitude as charging it for use. You'd need to actively design it to perform that badly, or have a dumb converter attached to the mains, to get a significant power consumption when idle if you had the neccessary circuitry to keep the batteries from catching fire. As for the life of the batteries, that does depend on how they've done things. Some companies (panasonic's toughbook division) seem to rate their batteries at the capacity they'll have in the middle of their lifespan, which would pretty much leave the average MPG unaffected. But it'd be a nice question to have answered.

You know, we build locomotive engines as hybrids because converting mechanical to electrical and back ends up as a more efficient system for them than doing it purely mechanical. They don't have batteries for regenerative braking. If the volt is doing things at all right, that little engine is running at its peak efficiency any time it's on, which you simply can't do if you require the engine to be able to impart a reasonable acceleration to the car.

The apparatus to ferment cellulose into digestibles internally is rather large and high-maintainence. There's the multiple 'stomachs' before the main one where the bacteria breed, the cow routinely vomits up some to mechanically reprocess, and occasionally when venting becomes blocked for any reason a cow dies becuase their lungs were crushed by the expanding gasses in their stomach. termites get away with a lot because of being small. Additionally, there was that study that indicated that developments in the human intellect were associated with us starting to use cooking as an external digestion method - might not be the best thing for us in particular to add digesting some of the hardest foodstuff to use when we already diverted that energy to brainpower. And if we use cows properly we get the best of both worlds anyways - fueling ourselves off of cellulose with only the effort of keeping a few cows to eat. Of course, we don't, and use them as an inefficient step between stuff we /can/ eat and us, but that's another issue.

The point that the total amount of mercury in a CFL (~5micrograms) is a little lower than the amount of mercury in five ounces of average tuna, and you're supposed to /eat/ the tuna, and won't exactly be licking the traces of mercury out from the broken shards of the bulb. The level of exposure that you get from the CFL being worriesome probably precludes all seafood of any sort...

It's also a volume of mercury several orders of magnitude smaller than that in a mercury thermometer, which is much more of a concern.

What coefficient do you put on transuranic waste vs. irradiated steel? It seems hard to me to reasonably weight final value between different types of waste, at least without making this look really good, but I suppose there is probably a way.

On the other hand, this machine would then be converting what they are asserting is hard to deal with transuranic waste to mere irradiated metals - this might be a situation where it really would be better to need to dispose of irradiated reactor parts rather than a smaller mass of worse waste. They are wanting to use this to take just the hard to burn fraction of the waste, and burn that to get rid of it - most of the waste is burning in normal breeder reactors like the ones other countries use and the US doesn't build.

From what I can tell, this is asserting that breeder reactors can't effectively burn some of the elements that get produced, and this can. If you read carefully, they do mention that they want to do most of the reprocessing in less exotic reactors, and then just take the stuff that those can't effectively burn and "hit them with a sledgehammer", i.e. expose them to a much stronger neutron source, to burn /those/.

I'd swap over to 2.6 if you're swapping to a COM Express module - I'd worry about support for PCIe and devices based on it in 2.4, and the whole point of COM Express over other board designs is to get PCIe and other differential signaling. Also, 2.6 runs snappy on 64MB ram and a 300MHz PII - I don't remember seeing any COM Express modules with worse specs than that, and /certainly/ not an Atom-based one. Unless you're doing something very peculiar, the ~3MB of a 2.6 kernel on disk shouldn't hurt either; the small on-board disks for those modules I'm remembering being 512MB.

TFA is mostly talking about there not being, for instance, a sufficient link across state boundaries - I don't think that the wind power company having to build new lines from the state in the middle of the country (where the wind is) it's generating power in to the coast of the US (where the people are) to be able to do buisiness is on the same scale as tying a plant to the grid next to it.

It's saying that "the grid" can't carry the power long-haul from sparsely populated places where there's easily collected power to densely-populated areas where there isn't, not that the local line from the wind farm is too small/too expensive.