I realize you're cherry picking the NASA buy, but I'm pretty sure Google is acting on self interests alone. Even if you choose to believe that NASA picked up the phone one day, and a bunch of politicians on the other line said, "Hey NASA, buy this thing from Canada, cause that would be awesome!" I bet that kind of simplistic worldview makes their scientists and mathematicians feel awesome.
I guess D-Wave's Google Ads campaign (Buy a 10 million dollar computer! Click here!) wasn't getting good sell through rates, huh?
I kept telling ThinkGeek, "I only have a shower stall, you insensitive clods!!!" and that their landscape oriented periodic table shower curtain doesn't fit correctly.
Now I can get a new style periodic table that fits a shower stall that's taller than it is wide!
The government is spying on our codebase! It's so cute.
More importantly, why should you be on the defensive? Isn't it good to know both things? Is it somehow a binary choice between wanting to know about the two issues? Snowden is the messenger, not the message, and you probably have a higher likelihood of impacting domestic policy than raising awareness to the 'scandal' that is foreign governments trying to disrupt or influence local politics. Especially since it doesn't take any tinfoil whatsoever to discuss USA's storied history of doing the same. This strawman of somebody who thinks that China would never stoop to what the USA stoops to all the time is pretty hilarious. This is what governments do, the world over. The idea that the USA isn't doing this, or wouldn't do it in the future is downright silly given the history of unilateral foreign interference by all world super powers.
I wish my wife would use this right...
What?
They couldn't find a single golf ball (out of hundreds of thousands) that were probably pitched off of a cruise ship or yacht?
And you thought that Michael was the funniest Palin
Hydrogen is not a power source, it's an energy storage medium.
I have never liked this line of argument. After all, it's essentially true of gasoline, too; it's just that nature did the work. (And, in a lot of cases, the hydrogen is mined too; yay natural gas.) Both are chemicals which are oxidized to release heat energy. If the meaningful difference is whether nature or we did the work, then they're both storage media.
You go on to cite energy capacity differences; those are only meaningful in apples to apples comparisons.
Any line of reasoning that assumes hydrogen is a power source - rather than just a storage medium with very poor energy density - is unfortunately based on a flawed premise.
I don't think this is actually correct.
Where do you find the actual meaningful difference to be? It's apparently not in that they're both exothermic chemistry based on the same element.
Other power sources aren't even remotely similar - eg nuclear, wind.
Why are two things that are virtually identical being seen as distinct? Is the issue whether nature put the power in instead of us? Is the difference between a power source and an energy storage medium found solely in whether you primarily imagine our having to put energy in to make them viable?
Does gasoline become an energy storage medium, despite zero actual changes, when they start sourcing it from CO2 in the atmosphere?
What is the meaningful net effect of being in one category or the other? You seem to be suggesting that the problem isn't just the energy density (and that in itself is misleading in many ways,) but rather a more sophisticated issue of whether it's a source or a medium - and that that is what's undermining their thought.
You can get hydrogen out of the ground, and you can spend energy to manufacture gasoline from the air, both today. If they're both sourced that way, does that mean that the lines of reasoning you're whargarbling at without actually showing an error, merely stating that there is one, suddenly become more ratified?
What if it happened to cost as much energy to get gasoline out of the ground as is received by burning it? That isn't the case today, but someday it will be, unless we stop using it. On that day, will it have become an energy storage medium?
Is the line about whether we have to invest energy to derive energy from it? Because calling something an energy storage medium based on how much power it takes to acquire seems ridiculous to me, as much so as does classing one chemical exothermic with nuclear and wind but against another chemical exothermic based on production rate, but I can't see any definition that seperates the two that doesn't end up with that apparent nonsense result.
Why is it that so many hydrogen cars and busses are actually doing well, if it's such a flawed premise?
Why are you measuring energy per liter? Liter is a unit of volume. The amount of energy per liter here is a direct function of pressure. No mention is made of pressure in two of the three cases.
Cryogenically stored? Room temperature? The temperature of the hydrogen or gasoline has virtually nothing to do with the amount of energy released by burning it.
Where did you get these numbers? They don't agree with the ones on Wikipedia. Granted, I'm a Wikipedia skeptic; if you can cite a valid source I'm happy to take it, but I remain somewhat doubtful that you'll be able to.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_density
The proper measure here is not the energy density; that is and always has been asinine. The proper measure here is the specific energy - that is, by weight, not by volume. Hydrogen doesn't become a better fuel (oh sorry, "energy storage medium,") just because you put it under pressure. That's ridiculous. What matters is how much energy you can carry by weight, allowing for a practical limit on storage size. Hydrogen as a whole is not meaningfully better as a storage medium every time you learn to make an improved storage tank.
Hydrogen cars have worked very well for 30 years. They're cheap, they're efficient, and they let us move the burden of production to better controlled sources than a small engine. And no, that's not because of some phantom line between media and sources; the same thing would be true if you chose to distill gasoline from the air, which many people are doing, just not yet at market cost. If gasoline is both a fuel and a power storage medium, then I submit to you with respect that the distinction is masturbatory garbage, and does not in fact exist at all.
The real problem with hydrogen cars is simple: you can't get fuel just about anywhere you go. Chicken and egg.
Do not worry, we will soon have killed all the bees and we can stop worrying about that one...
Meet in a Go-Go bar...
Sorry if I threw you for a loop on this one... I remember hardcards going into expansion slots, of which the Tandy 1000 series had (early ISA bus). My uncle had me put a 40MB hardcard in his Tandy 1000 back in the day. I thought they were the greatest thing to be invented because the entire hard drive system resided on a single card and not spread around the innards of the computer in a mass of cabling.
The Model IV didn't have conventional expansion slots. Nearly everything data I/O related, other than floppies, was done externally. Starting with page 23 of this online copy of a TRS-80 catalog, you'll see what was made for Model IVs
http://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/catalogs_extra/1985_rsc-12/
The only HD solution I was aware of for the Model IV were external units, like this: http://vintagevolts.com/?p=265
"I've seen it. It's rubbish." -- Marvin the Paranoid Android
