Battery low in the fast lane

[alvino]

This thread is so funny.


Will read again. Highly recommended.

 

[muz]

NEGATIVITY ! What a condescending insulting remark to make. You do not know what you are talking about. This thread was not posted to get abusive comments from the likes of you. I suggest that instead of insulting people who know far more than you do about the subject or "Backs to the Wall" philosophy, it would be more educational for you to appreciate the points of view and experiences of others that you have never had the fortune or misfortune to personally experience. GURU ? It`s a joke surely. I can get a better "Guru" comment from Goofy in Disneyland.

As an ex-parachute soldier I don`t need your irrelevant advice on what to do when the chips are down. What a disgusting remark from a total nondescript, we were taught it in very hard terms by guys who knew what they were talking about AND we never did much retreating. Para`s don`t walk backwards very often. "Chips are down", from you that is a big laugh.

So please refrain from making provocative and insulting statements that are not justified against people who have been exposed to life situations you have never even dreamed of and have no qualifications to criticize.

This is a nice thread, so regard it as such and stop making personal abusive comments. Try another thread more in line with your muck-raking and insulting attitude.

If I annoy you, then be my guest, I find it somewhat pleasing. I can see that you have never had your back to the wall in your life and do not have the slightest respect for others that have. Just to sit back with your computer and poke fun at people who have earned their spurs in both education and life`s rich pattern of events.

Face it man - any alternative cobble-up to natural oil reserves is a hypothetical and irrational pipe dream. The oil supplies gobbled up from Mother Earth`s vast supplies by colossal demand after millions of years being created will NEVER be matched by man-made equivalents. The prospect of compensating for the Earth`s massive oil reserves by man-made solutions is impossible - the astronomic demand will outstrip production in seconds.

John Bull

I for one find this post quite out of line . Just as your saying that other members shouldnt be making what you claim as provocative or insulting statements against yourself because they are not aware of the life situations you have been in . I feel here you should certainly would do well to take heed of your own advice and follow it as you for once know nothing of setishocks experience of life . Without knowing that you are completely unqualified to make such statements regarding his life and his right to an opinioon
The paragraph i have bolded i find the most objectionable in the fact that you know nothing of others life experiences and would do well to remember that your not the only person who has ever had their "back to the wall" as you say
The attitude i get a feel of from your style of posing here is one assuming that all the members here are 15 year old kids who havent had to worry about realy life . Youd go quite far to forgetting that assumption straight away and realise that this forum is made up of a number of distinctively different people

Another point if in his opinion your opinion is negative i do not find an issue with him expressing that and in terms of the rules is certainly not objectionable. As far as i can see he was regarding your personal opinion as negative which is merely his observations regarding your opinion rather than you whop are actually resorting to personal insults agains setishock . Id advise reading the rules and taking heed of them for future situations like this

 

[berry120]

John,

As an ex-parachute soldier

Branding careers around doesn't help your case unless we can a) be sure you're telling the truth AND b) it's directly related to your field of argument. This, frankly, isn't. If you were the CEO of Google giving your opinion on the next generation of mobile technologies, I'd sit up and listen straight away.

The prospect of compensating for the Earth`s massive oil reserves by man-made solutions is impossible - the astronomic demand will outstrip production in seconds.

Crude oil still has to be processed; this is a relatively demanding and difficult process! It's not just a case of whacking it out the ground and into cars. It'd probably be easier to set up huge electrolysis plants all over the place than it would be to process crude oil - much easier in fact.

If no other form of fuel is going to be viable, what are you saying when oil supplies run out, will there just be no cars?

I'm going to put aside the negative tone this thread has taken thus far for a moment. Using scientific evidence / sources to back your claims up, can you please state your objection to hydrogen powered vehicles, why they won't take off and why they're dangerous? Could you also compare them to traditional petrol / diesel variants and state how much more dangerous, qualitatively, hydrogen powered vehicles will be and why? I've alluded to science when backing up my claims so far (for instance stating auto ignition temperatures) whereas your argument seems to fall along the lines of "pressurised must be dangerous because things like that tend to blow up." If, from this point onwards you can give a good, scientific argument for your case, I'll sit up and listen.

 

[tom-knox]

9/10 on this thread. Summarised by cf members offering serious and challenging interpretations of the fuel crisis and John Bull twiddling his thumbs between random spurts of ill informed uneducated rapture. The ignorance of his posts never ceasing to amaze me. Thanks for the quality read.

 

[root]

WOW ! Just think of it, bombing down the Freeway or stuck in some big city traffic and that red light goes on. How do we play it now Coach ? And Gee, look at that tail-back.

I`m beginning to become hysterical again so I`ll ask the question :-

What do you all think of our being inundated with trundling Electric buggies clogging up the roads and Freeways with all those dead battery jobs getting stuck in front of you ?

Eat ya heart out LA, you `aint seen nuttin yet.

I don't understand, even in the most basic of devices we have bettery meters.

take my phone for example, (it's an iphone) I have a battery meter that tells me exactly how much battery life I have percentage wise left, it tell me how many hours I can use the phone to view videos, surf the web using wifi, or surf the web using 3g etc...

currently in cars we have a needle, if you're bombing down the motorway/free way whatever and you ignore the gauge you run out of fuel and your car stops, what's the difference? people still need to pay attention to how much juice they have left in their batteries, just as they need to pay attention to how much juice they have left in their tank now before starting on a journey.

WOW Tommy Boy, not a lot of people know this - but the Hindenburg was stuffed full of Hydrogen and Whammy ! It went up like a huge fireworks display in one mighty puff.

as pointed out before, the hydrogen didn't burn, the aluminium skin burned,
that's why it burned with an orange flame, the flame from hydrogen so pale that it is mostly clear if I recall chemistry correctly. the Hindenburg burned bright. (i.e it's not the hydrogen that burned).
even in the videos of the disaster it becomes very clear that it's actually the Aluminium resin doped outer skin that's burning, not the hydrogen filled cells inside. this also becomes clear in the burn pattern that starts at the bottom of the tail. if there was a hydrogen leak, it'd have started at the top, since hydrogen is the lightest element in the universe it's have gone upwards.

Hi Foothead,
Of course I know all the scientific facts concerning Hydrogen characteristics as a gas and the Hindenburg disaster as reported at the time. My dialogue WAS intended to be humorous and at the same time making a serious scientific and factual point.

it's widely accepted now that the facts reported at the time were wrong.

We are told by the egg-heads that global oil supplies will start to decline around 2020. Well, that sure `aint far away. Alternative means of power will have to be studied and put into practice very soon. Mind you, the scientists often forecast Armageddon and it never happens,

indeed the "peak oil crisis" has been predicted since he 70's and the date that we reach the top of the bell curve at which exploration/extraction/refinement costs become greater than the worth of the end product is always being moved back.

One thing is certain - Electric or Hydrogen powered vehicles will never happen.

funny, I thought that they can/were/are happening...

or did I just make believe the Geewizz car or the tesla car, (I believe even ford have come up with a monster electric pickup truck based on the F510

One suffers from a myriad of practical non-starters and the other from a safety issue which is more demanding than trying to prevent one enormous BANG when there is a catastrophic leak in the liquid Hydrogen circuits of an orbital rocket

LPG is fairly common now, and that's large pressurized containers of a more flammable than petrol gas. but is deemed pretty safe, safe enough to be fitted to cars that are on the road now in fact.

Electric cars - think again, they are totally impractical.

why?

Sorry about the Hindenburg example. It was necessary, but not intended to drive the post off topic.

Who cares anyway ? The big bag has gone. I do not give a fig whether it was static electricity igniting the Hydrogen or an inflammable covering. The example was worth making. Just forget it.

I don't understand, all the example did was prove that there are still people believing miss-truths told in the past?

you might say that the example proves that hydrogen is dangerous, it categorically does not prove this.

There is NO alternative to oil/petroleum products that will satisfy the present day demands of industry and civilised mobility. When that time comes, no scientific solution will be practical. It becomes a Mickey Mouse syndrome of total incapability to survive.

Civilisation as we know it today will cease to exist. KAPUT ! Back to the Stone Age.
The only alternative will be to revert back to steam and the faithful horse.
Piddling around with Electricity and Hydrogen or any other crack-pot idea will simply be waste of time and totally futile.

really? because I think that ethanol derived from Sugar is working to power a lot of cars in Brazil pretty well? (and has been for a long time).
oil derived from vegetable products is working pretty well for bio-oils, (and doesn't even need any kind of conversion to work in a lot of diesel engines).

we've also gotten pretty good at developing fully synthetic oils...

I don't see where this massive leap back to the stone age is going to happen! we're already pretty good at using grown fuels in a lot of industries,
a lot of power stations can also burn wood rather than coal dust, it's not quite as efficient, but is a by-product of existing industry, -hence cheap and plentiful!

as for hydrogen of electric cars being crackpot ideas... I don't see how you draw that conclusion, especially when they DO work with today's technology, and there are many technologies that are being developed that would only allow it to work better...
the biggest problem with today's battery technology for example is the time taken to recharge. but there are quite a few things that are in the pipeline that seek to resolve that.

I'm fairly certain that if I remember correctly there is, or was four years ago when I worked in a university, people experimenting with carbon nano tubes as energy storage devices, they worked much like a battery, except that they had incredibly fast charge times and a good ability to store power.

(basically the problem with taking ages to charge a batter was solved at least four years ago, and I imagine that they are still working on bringing the technology to the masses in the last four years, so super efficient fast charging batteries are just around the corner).

Ones I can think of:
corn oil (diesel engines can run it with zero modification)
ethanol (yes impractical, but it isn't oil)
electric
hydrogen
solar (by then I am sure they will Have perfected that new type of solar cell)
steam (lol 18th century ftw!)

yes, even steam, or at least using stored and release heat energy to drive turbines.
fundamentally, all power stations work on steam technology...

solar panels are (at least in my opinion) not efficient enough, better to use arrays of mirrors to focus light, to boil water to drive a steam turbines, there is a working example of one of these in Spain at the moment. I believe it makes enough energy to power most of Seville.

also consider steam coming from the ground, where water is pumped into fishers in rocks, and is heated by energy from the earth in order to produce pressurised steam to drive turbines, (it's geo-thermal energy).

it would be more educational for you to appreciate the points of view and experiences of others that you have never had the fortune or misfortune to personally experience. GURU ? It`s a joke surely. I can get a better "Guru" comment from Goofy in Disneyland.

As an ex-parachute soldier I don`t need your irrelevant advice on what to do when the chips are down. What a disgusting remark from a total nondescript, we were taught it in very hard terms by guys who knew what they were talking about AND we never did much retreating. Para`s don`t walk backwards very often. "Chips are down", from you that is a big laugh.

never going backwards, except when there's a technological challenge you're thinking that the whole human race will revert to the stone age just because we've run out of black gold?

anyway, yes, Seti is a guru. he's actually one of the nicer members on this board, 99.999% of the time he's articulate and intelligent and knows exactly what he's talking about.

and I actually agree with his comment, when a crisis faces humanity, and our world as we know it, we do come together and explore solutions in the most unlikely of places, we come together, we pull through and improve our lot.

that's how we got a whole bunch of stuff, times were bad and we all pulled together.
sometimes in the most unlikely way.

instead of looking back at when times have been tough and appreciating the things that we've gotten from it.
Nuclear energy, -developed during WW2, better planes - developed in WW2 and in the 50's during the cold war, computers -developed during WW2, rockets -developed in ww2, GPS navigation systems - Developed to help track troop movements in battle fields...

you might sense a theme here! most of 'our' inventions that have changed the world have been developed when times were hard, they were developed as a way of preserving our way of life at the time.

don't you think that is the oil ran out tomorrow there wouldn't be a similar flurry of great new things to replace it.

just as in the past during wars, we like our lives, we like our way of life and we'll go to extraudinary lengths to protect it. not just sit back, renounce all ideas that are coming up and say,

Solution ? Have`nt a clue, but good luck to those who are searching for a satisfactory alternative