What upgrade could do that with ICE vehicles? Switching to unleaded or low-sulphur diesel were about the only things, everything further improvement (catalytic converters, better efficiency) requires changing vehicles each time.

Unleaded required car changes, too.

Earlier vehicles had valve stems in the engine - especially on the exhaust valve - which were lubricated by lead from the antiknock additive. I understand that valve slides had been changed far in advance of the requirement. But the lead additive was sold for a time for owners of older cars to add in order to protect their engines.

Similarly, some antismog oxygenates caused a lot of car fires in older cars, by rotting the rubber tubes in the parts of the fuel systems that had to flex. (This, of course, got a lot of older, high-pollution cars off the roads, reducing pollution (if you don't count the smoke of the burning car...). Thus the environmentalists didn't complain - or warn people.)

Similarly, ethanol stripped the coatings off the inside of older cars' fuel systems and attracted water, starting corrosion; dissolved some gasket sealents, creating manifold leaks, and dissolved plastic float valves from carburators, again causing major damage to (and retirement of) some older cars. (Sometimes some gasoline would have methanol in it, due to a mistake or a crooked supplier, and this would strip things almost immediately.) Many modern vehicles have different materials,and are rated for substantial percentages of ethanol in the gasoline.

Fukushima has an advantage as a site: Since it's depopulated due to the radiation hazard, there's nobody to complain about how "those ugly windmills are ruining my view".

One thing that has amused me, over the latter half of this year, is the strings of advertisements trying to get people to buy property in Belieze and move there, as a retirement home and/or tax haven.

Apparently the authorities chasing of MacAfee (allegedly on trupmed-up evidence in an effort by corrupt officials to seize his remaining wealth, or something of the sort) has caused others. seeking a comfy paradise and tax haven, decide this country is too risky and look elsewhere.

It would be interesting to find out how badly this has hurt the country's property values and economy.

Not everybody in the country. Just much of the capital city slum around the transmitting tower.

Notice that the field got so weak that, in part of the country, it was too weak to be adequately processed by a RADIO RECEIVER.

A country-covering station can easily transmit several hundred thousand watts. A fully illuminated fluorescent tube of the era is burning 10 watts per foot - at 4our or eight feet per lamp. Assuming ten thousand apartments, each with a four-foot lamp (with some wires arranged to get it to normal brightness), and you lose 400,000 watts from the radiated power.

This device will also interfere with the radio signals. It will both attenuate them and create harmonics due to the rectifiers.

"Raising ground resistance" by having radio-energy-utilizing devices pull power from the air is a non-trivial issue.

Example: A former colleague had, previously, been a plant manager for a factory in a small African country. The plant was in the country's capital, home to their "voice of the fearless leader" high-powered radio station.

One day, while touring the plant, he found a collection of burned-out fluorescent tubes, and had them hauled away. Shortly after he was contacted by his maintenance head, who asked him not to do it again. It seems there was a black market in burned out fluorescent tubes.

The radio station was so strong that, if you put three feet of wire on each end of a burned-out tube it would light up quite nicely from the radio power. A lot of people couldn't afford electricity and light fixtures. But a burned out tube and six feet of wire was readily available. So much of the town's houses were illuminated this way.

So many were, in fact, that the radio signal would no longer reach the edges of the country. So Fearless Leader would send his troops through town when the attenuation got to be a problem, and they'd confiscate and smash the tubes of all the improvised radio-powered lights they found. After each such raid, the people would be down at the plant to buy more "dead" tubes, creating a profitable side-business for the maintenance guy.

They told us about a similar case to this in EE school in the '60s. This is the story. (I have no footnotes to see if it's real...)

Power company ran high lines over a dairy farmer's land. But they would still charge him tens of thousands to run power to his site.

Farmer ran some wires under the high-tension lines and coupled well enough (B and/or E fields) to pull a bunch of power. Stepped it down with some transformers and ran his milking machines with it.

Power company noticed the drain on the high-line, looked for the source of leakage, found the farmer, and sued. Farmer said that "they should keep their power in their wires". Judge agreed and threw the suit out.

Power company, not to be stymied, analyzed how the farmer had designed his tap. Then they switched the power on the high lines in order to throw some destructive transients into his equipment (without bothering the regular grid, of course). Farmer's equipment didn't have adequate surge protection to handle this sort of thing. Result: His equipment was destroyed and his milking barn caught fire.

The lesson was about the dangers of transient on transmission lines and the fact that the energy is actually transmitted in the space AROUND the lines. But it had the subtext that trying to take advantage of the latter is really hazardous due to the former.

I stopped using Chrome because it's extensions were not up to par with Firefox addons.
And now I feel less inclined to use Chrome at all.

Ditto. What does Google hope to accomplish with this? Switching to Firefox takes less than 5 minutes.

I stopped using Chrome because they kept forcing updates that changed the interface, without asking for permission or providing a reverse-compatibility option.

The last straw for me was when they deleted the ability to purge entries from the suggestion pop-down in the address bar without completely purging the browsing history, shortly before I typoed up a not-safe-for-work URL. I'm now back on Firefox evan at my desk, while the rest of the company is still on Chrome.

I'm with the FOSS people on this point: Reducing a user's control over his own computer - especially in job-threatening ways - is evil.

They can probably determine which time zone the user mostly is in from the logs alone.

With drug users working on Doper Substandard Time? That would be a stretch.

Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them.

Oops. Make that "loses 1600 times as much power". (Multiplied the 10s but forgot to multiply the 4s.)

When a board has several chips running at 10 or more watts apiece you can easily be dealing at currents where the heating of the board consumes more power than the heating of the chips. With a rack of electronics dissipating several KW you can pay for a LOT of tiny switching regulators to avoid more than doubling that.

Give me a call when those fuel cells are ready for deployment, then we can talk about all these wonderful uses. No talk about the carbon footprint of operating fuel cells?

Natural gas (methane) has the highest energy/carbon emission ration of any saturated hydrocarbon (gas or oil) and beats the HELL out of coal. If you're going to use fossil fuels (or renewable fuel from biodegrading vegetable waste, sewage, or cow flops), and a fuel cell is in the efficiency ballpark with a grid plant, why not put the fuel cell in the rack?

The article mixes the use of fuel cells as a power source with efficiency improvements. The only place that makes sense is with the minor savings that may be seen by eliminating DC converters, but you will still need DC regulators which will have some losses.

Fuel cells are not limited by the carnot cycle efficiency limt. They can be FAR MORE EFFICIENT than a heat-engine based power plant.

Modern circuit boards in servers ALREADY HAVE switching regulators near the chips. With the very low operating voltages of modern electronics, the supply currents are SO high that you lose less energy by running 48V on the power planes of the PC board and regulating it down at the load than you do running, say 3.3, 2.5, or 1.8 volts and a correspondingly higher current across several inches of thin copper.

Remember: I-squared-R losses go up with the SQUARE of the current. So running 1.2V across a board to your chips loses 400 TIMES as much power as running 48V to the regulator next to them. It's like high-tension transmission lines in miniature. (They'd go higher except that over 50V gets you out of the easy part of the electrical code and into the region where electrocution becomes a major issue.)

Putting the switching regulator next to the chip also gives you much more stable voltage. When it's already there to save power, this makes good regulation "cheaper than free".

A major oversight of this article is the fact that fuel cells are major heat generators, not something you want in a data center. They would need to be installed in a separated structure, therefore idea that "Rack-level fuel cells would do away with data-centre-wide electricity distribution for servers" is hard to imagine.

They also need and external air supply and to have their exhaust removed rather than dumped into the room air. So you're going to give them their own plumbing. You want to SAVE that heat to keep the oxygen-transport style cells at operating temperature without wasting fuel or power to do it. So you insulate the box and run the ventilation plumbing like a stove pipe - coaxial, with the hot exhaust in the middle and the cool incoming air on the outside. This minimizes the heat loss to the room and acts like a counter-current heat exchanger to preheat the fresh air with the heat from the exhaust, while cooling the exhaust.

It's similar to what I did with my first unix box, back in the '80s or so: The thing put out as much heat as a space heater. So I hooked up a dryer vent hose to the 4" exhaust fan and dumped the hot air outside. Cooling problem solved. (In the winter I dumped it INSIDE to save on heating bills.)

Right now, if I don't have electric and gas, my water heater and furnace become inoperable.

In my remote house my heat and water heater both work fine on only propane. As long as the tank is not empty we're fine (and the tank only needs filling about three times a year).

The water heater is gas with a pilot light and no electric controls (except for the pilot light safety thermocouple, which generates enough power from the flame's heat to control the safety shutdown).

While the regular furnace has electronic controls and blower, I also have a backup: A propane "fireplace" stove in the great room, with a room layout that lets it heat the living area and keep the pipes from freezing.

Again it works with a pilot light, and the thermocouple's few millivolts also provide enough power, controlled by a mechanical-switch thermostat in the middle of the house, to operate the main gas valve as well. Though the stove's room blower will also fail in an outage, convection is more than adequate to circulate the heat in the big-open-space-in-the-middle house design. Kept things nice and comfy when we had a day-long outage in deep winter.

When away the stats are set to 55 for the furnace, 50 for the backup stove. This worked just fine one winter, when the furnace's draft sensor failed and the furnace was dead for weeks until we got there and discovered the issue. That definitely paid for the stove in one event.

If you have a fuel cell that burns methane (i.e. Natural gas) or other fuels the fuel cell will have to reform it into Hydrogen (releasing CO2) before it's used.

And if you're ultimately running from fossil fuels, methane is the least carbon-emitting choice.

Burning the hydrogen atoms to water produces MOST of the power from fossil fuels. Burning the carbon to CO2 produces a little more. But in gas and oil it's mostly there to make the hydrogen easier to handle than H2.

Methane has four hydrogens per carbon (4:1), the best ratio of all hydrocarbons. Ethane: (6: 2 = 3:1), propane: 8:3 = 2.666..."1, and so on. As you transition from gasses to oil you're approaching the large saturated hydrocarbon molecule limit of 2:1.

Then there's coal, where you're JUST burning the carbon. All CO2, much less energy (though still plenty if you burn ENOUGH of it).

Tell me when they come up with a range of affordable, small, light weight, fuel cells that efficiently make a couple hundred to a couple thousand watts by burning odorized propane with ambient air. I want one for my car, one for my travel trailer, and one for each house.

Electrolysis is not cost effective and requires more electrical power than your fuel cell could produce.

By the same argument, power grids "are not cost effective" because they require more electrical power input than they deliver to the cu
stomer.

Electrolysis may be VERY cost effective. Just think of it as a different sort of energy distribution system, not as a conversion of fuel to electricity, and compare its costs to what it replaces.

(This is similar to the bogus argument against solar panels: "They take more energy to make than they deliver over their lifetime." First that's false - they reach energy breakeven very early in their life. Second, they produce post-carnot-cycle electricity, while most of the energy going into making them is pre-carnot-cycle heat. Third, you need to compare their energy consumption apples-to-apples: How much energy does it take to build and fuel the fraction of the power grid that would deliver the same amount of electricity to the same site - from melting steel to build transformers, to clearing trees and stringing poles, to building power plants and switchgear, to fueling the plants to make the electricity (digging for and transporting coal, drilling for and pumping oil, disposing of radioactive waste, ...) to losing a fraction of that to carnot cycle efficiency, transformer losses, corona discharge, resistive heating of transmission lines, ...)

Those so-called "Death Panels" already exist. Why is it alright for Insurance Companies to pick and choose who gets to live, and who must die, while bankrupting even more people in the process? I'd feel much safer if "profit" wasnt a primary variable in whether me or my loved ones get to live or die.

A rhetorical question deserves a rhetorical answer:

Because, with private insurance companies, you can either change policies or insurance companies, to get policy terms (and "death panels") more to your liking. Or you can dump the insurance company altogether and pay the hospitals as many buck as they ask to get as much health care as you both need and can afford.

With Obama care:
  - You're forced to buy insurance.
  - You're forced to buy a plan the government approved.
  - You're forced to buy a plan with some very expensive coverage that you may not need or want.
  - And the government picks your "death panel". Don't like that one? Find another country.

Top performers burn out fast and do not return to the IT field.

And now they get ripped off, too.

People with links to other talented, employable, people have been getting finder's bonuses from their employers for recommending a good candidate.

Now Google has patented mining their email and social network metadata so THEY can get a hiring fee. They just monitized the money out of their subscribers' pockets into their own.