Dont insult America man and we will be cool.I "can" insert my real life fist in your real life face.Good thing about America is that you can travel relatively easy and cheap,due to us adopting the cheapest and easiest to produce combustion engine.

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GO ahead I would love to throwdown with an idiot stupid enough to talk shit over the net to someone they know nothing about. Anytime, anyplace. Don't make empty promises your ass can't keep or too pu$$y to follow through with.

A) I didn't insult America
B) You need to work on your reading comprehension
C) Who the F*CK are you to dictate what the hell I say?
D) I suppose your way is the 'correct' way to think? Never question, never challenge?
E) Empty threats over the net are pathetic

“You're not supposed to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who says it.” - Malcolm X

You think Henry Ford started the industrial revolution? LOL. America didn't even start the industrial revolution. Britain beat us to it by like 50+ years. We didn't even develop the first car! Daimler developed it well before Henry Ford. You need to get your history straight before you come in here calling out people.

Cut the super-patriotism shit. America has a history of thievery and piracy - and that's why we're successful. Henry Ford stole the engine from the Europeans. So why don't you give the Europeans some credit for developing a shitty engine? Cause it wasn't us. It wasn't even close to being us.

Anyway, among the not jaded engineers there's a pretty large debate about what would've been the best option. I'm a firm believer that electricity/battery powered would've been the best option. Unfortunately at the time it was unfeasible because of lack of investment - there wasn't enough money to support a large scale electric system, and there definitely wasn't enough money to fund battery development. Now you're probably all like "Batteries can't travel far distances" no shit, sherlock. Neither could the internal combustion engine when it first came out. And it still can't. The absolute best ICE is 50% efficient. Most are 20-30% efficient. By comparison, electric motors start at about 70% efficiency for the shittiest ones.

So yeah. Your ICE sucks dick. It took 150 years of extensive engineering to make an engine that was half efficient? L-O-Fucking-L. Lets assume we take all the time and money that we've spent developing the shitty ICE and put it into electric motors instead. I guarantee you we'd have developed a smaller, longer lasting battery - along with a more efficient engine. Thus leading to cheaper travelling over the long run. Instead, they did what you and the rest of your generation has always done. F*CK the long run we want short run profits! So here we are, 150 years later - and we're more fucked than usual.

And I wont even get into how much more epic the speed/reliability/design of electric cars can be than your shitty ICE powered cars. But I assure you, the advantages are there. And some companies are finally seeing that. Take Nissan for example.

Hooker ftw.
Also, apparently they are going to try to use cement to patch the spill? I only caught the end of the noon news..does anyone know more ?

Who needs school these days? We've got noobfest here to teach us everything. GO HOOKER!

Ya that's there plan. I think it's gonna start tomorrow or Wednesday. It's called there top kill plan, they'll shoot a concrete mix into the broken wells to try and seal off the flow. If that doesn't work though there next plan is relief wells to divert the flow. But those wont be done until August at the earliest. So this could possibly end up being the biggest oil spill in recorded history.

For hooker:

I've studied batteries and electrical motors. While electrical systems are more efficent, you're forgetting that we need oil/coal/nuclear to make electricity. Have you taken into account the efficency of the power grid and power generation when making the claim that electric cars are better than ICE cars? Also electrical components don't scale as well as mechanical systems.

Also 150 years ago we didn't have semiconductors which are critical to any modern electronic system. ICE science was much better understood than electronics back then.

I think you need to understand that you are young and not so experienced. America has a long history of innovation and invention. Taking something and improving on it is not thievery...it's called evolving a product. Henry Ford's innovation was in the invention of the assembly line which enabled mass production of his product.


Actually what is debated about this is not what type of engine would have been the best choice it is the type of design that would have been best. Electric motors at the turn of the century were completely unfeasible, and the technology to make large scale use of elctric motors in automobiles was almost a century away.

Even today this is not really the answer...it sounds good but the fact is that the majority of electricity generated today comes from fossil fuels in the form of coal or diesel powered generators. If we were to all start driving electric cars around the demand for power would cause a massive increase in the amount of fossil fuels consumed to genrate the power required, and even though the electric motor is far more efficient than the ICE the production and transmission of the electricity they consume is not. The result is that it is highly likely that we would end up burning more fossil fuel than we do now to produce enough electricity to power a world full of electric cars.


Oh to be 19 again...I remember the days when I knew everything there was to know. Life was so simple and solutions were so easy to see. Now I am 44 and dumb as a rock, what the hell happened?

As I said previously when you account for the complete life cycle of the power that an electric motor needs to operate the overall efficiency is likely lower or at best no better than what you get from an ICE today. Until someone comes along and invents a realistic technology that can produce free power mass deployment of the electric motor for automobiles is a pipe dream. Large scale deployment of elctric cars will cripple the power infrastucture of the world today. Without safe, efficient, and distributed electric power generation it just will not work.

At the time the ICE was developed for mass production there really were no better alternatives. Imagine battery technology at the turn of the 19th century...you would have needed an array of storage cells as large as a freaking house to get a car to go 10 miles. Lithium-Ion batteries have only been around for 20 years or so, and the idea that 19th century scientists could have produced that technology if they had chosen to spend a little more money on research is preposterous.


No argument there, but these advantages come at a huge cost. The environmental impact from large scale production of batteries for automotive use is severe. Nickel foam is nasty stuff, and it ends up literally getting shipped around the world before it makes it into a battery because about the only places you can legally refine the crap are in Eastern Europe where there are few environmental restrictions and less regulation. Hell, NASA uses the nickel mining site in Ontario to test Mars landers because the place is so freaking toxic.

Bottom line...there is no easy solution to a complex problem, and the sooner you realize that the sooner you will be able to identify real solutions. The larger the scale of an issue the more research and analysis must be done to ensure that you are not just creating a larger problem than the one you intend to fix.

@ Shredder:

Piracy fuels innovation faster than anything else. You're smart so I'm going to assume you've read some Matt Mason/Cory Doctorow.

Yes, you are correct about the energy having to come from somewhere - I left that part out as it's a problem separate from ICE. But like I said, the lack of investment in the long run is really the bane of our society. We invested heavily in inefficient energy harvesting technologies because they're cheap. Again with the short run gains and long run woes. More efficient stuff is coming out now, but it's only a small improvement...leaps and bounds could be seen here. I mean really.

For simplicity's sake I left all of that out. Books have been written about this shit. I have no desire to sit here and write a book just to prove my point to super.

Basically what you need for electricity to be feasible is this:
-Very good power grid (Our sucks. It's just like how the copper internet lines are terrible, same idea.)
-Reliable, cheap, efficient source of energy - AKA solar energy, or (I haven't read into this yet "Bloom" energy...?)
-Better/different form of battery
-Widespread public acceptance


Which all take a lot of money.

The problem with some in this thread (and most in society) is the speed at which they point their fingers to blame and/or insult rather than acknowledging problems and errors and working toward resolution. If you're smarter (if not quit trying to pretend you are) then use that intelligence to find a solution; don't just try to slam it in everyone else's face, because nothing is accomplished from that.

Back to the topic....

I don't know the likelihood of success of BP's idea to cement the pipe. They claim it is 70% likely to work, but I have no confidence in them. Again, if they are so sure this will work why did they wait a month to try it?

I can't even begin to describe the shit my company is going through just to tell BP and the government we have products that work and have a warehouse full of them. This is not only an environmental nightmare, but also a political clusterfuck.

There have been several people who designed engines that run on water in some form or another, but guess what? The oil companies own all the patents. Funny huh? They are going to wait to the last minute then act like our saviors. In reality they have just held society back from further development for decades. I have to find the video, but I will post a news piece on a guy who figured out how to "burn" water.

Im glad Super Effect's generation is the past and Vision and Hooker is the future.

I agree purple, if more people cared more about the environment and its impact on society then on earning money, we'd be in a much better place, eh?

Unfortunately, if you think that you need to go back to school. NOTHING will ever be like that, but we can hope.

They should be more open to newer ways of cleaning up this mess, heck it might turn out to be the best way invented, if only we liked change...

OH WELL

as promised...

Hmm, that is some pretty interesting shit there purple.

Stirling engines have not traditionally been built out to produce the kind of horsepower it takes to drive a car, but I can definitely see a myriad of applications for this invention if indeed it can produce more power out of the reaction than it takes to produce it.

I guess that is the big question...how much energy does it take to produce the electro-magnetic field, and is what we are seeing here just a form of electrolysis or is it really something new. I would be very interested in what a real scientific analysis shows.

It is kinda funny, a friend of mine works as a safety officer on a norwegian oilrigg, and he told me that the safetymeassures on the american platforms wouldnt be eaven close to passing the test here. So basicly your government has to take some responsibility for not having strict enugh demands on backup solutions in the oilwells and on the platforms.

This is failure all the way. They should have put a valve "somewhere" that could shut this off. Multiple valves would have helped. Fail.

As far as the rest of the posts go, you F*CKERS need to tone down and realize that n00bfest is pro-USA. We don't need novels explaining to the group why you think your point of view is best. Really, we don't.

For now and most likely for a long..long.. time oil is the life blood of our economies. With out it...everything stops...so any discussion about stopping the drilling blah blah sarah palin this and that is idealistic bull shit. Why do we always have to tie our hands behind our backs to compete? One nuclear accident...stop everything...now we are 20 years behind. Now what? The fact his that we've made it harder for companies to drill....why do u suppose BP needs to drill that far out? Do you guys really want to pay $4 a gallon....because we are turning into the biggest pussies in the world?

There will always be accidents....its how you plan to mitigate them when they happen that matters. Rigs that are forced to drill that far out and that far down should have a plan and a plan that's been checked by insurance companies, third party audits, and I'm sure a governmental agency. Is this the first spill that's been nearly a mile below the surface? So, the mitigation plan was never proven. So, we have another disaster.... clean it up and learn. You don't just stop and walk away from it...because no other country would.

Honestly doesnt that sound like common sence? Sounds a lot more simple that trying to go a mile down and shoot concrete into a broken pipe...

they had one valve/seal, but it did not work. They were supposed to have a backup blowout preventer, which is required almost everywhere else but here. Those cost about $5 million and BP didn't want to pony up the dough. There's no way to know if the backup blowout preventer would have worked, but those oil companies make that much money in like an hour, and if it would've worked it would have saved them billions....

man thats nasty