Magic automotive power bar – a bargain at 35 quid!

MPS (Magic Power System) Power Shift Bar, New Plasic Packing

This compact Power Shift Bar is an Intelligent Electric Tune-up Device, which will dramatically improve the power & reduce fuel consumption of your car. Just plug it into the lighter socket of your car and drive. It is used for any vehicles operated on 12V batteries.

- enhance fuel efficiency – saves gasoline (10-30%)
- increase engine torque – increase power (2-5ps)
- reduce car emissions – contribute to the environment unconsciously
- improve car audio sounds
- the small device cleans the entire car electrically including its body
- battery level check function: LED blue light for normal, LED red light for caution
- maintenance free, use up to 2-3 years (about 2,000 hours)
- silent, no more noise
- easy to use, simply plug into cigarette lighter socket
- power input: DC12V
- Size: about 3.5 inches (9cm) long

People actually pay good money to purchase this. I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.

That’s right – this 35-quid gadget not only gives you more power from less fuel – it’s supposed to clean your car, as well.
I wonder what’s inside the device? An empty, air-filled casing? Lead shot? Gravel? Ponies?

Thanks to the awesome, inimitable Dan for the heads-up.

Bloody moronic dishonest Conroy makes me really angry.

Internet filtering plan may extend to peer-to-peer traffic, says Stephen Conroy

In a post on his department’s blog, Senator Conroy today said technology that could filter data sent directly between computers would be tested as part of the upcoming live filtering trial.

“Technology that filters peer-to-peer and BitTorrent traffic does exist and it is anticipated that the effectiveness of this will be tested in the live pilot trial,” Senator Conroy said.

Peer-to-peer file-sharing technology is the most common way for computer users to share video, picture and music files over the internet.

It was previously thought the Government’s filtering plan would be restricted to traffic on the “world wide web” – the channel through which users view websites like news.com.au.

Senator Conroy revealed the plan to trial peer-to-peer filtering technology in a reply to critical comments made on the Digital Economy Future Directions blog launched earlier this month.

What a load of crap.

Peer-to-peer and BitTorrent type traffic accounts for something like two thirds of total Internet traffic, IIRC.

Even if you had the technology to do it, in principle, there’s no way you can deal with the sheer volume of traffic.

Even if you could examine and filter unencrypted P2P or BT traffic, which you can’t, what about encrypted P2P traffic? Conroy probably doesn’t even know what a prime number is. What about VPNs? What about IRC? What about newsgroups? What about email? What about FTP? SFTP? Telnet/SSH? What about something as simple as moving a zip file over an unencrypted P2P network? Can you parse even that, huh, Conroy?

NOTHING that Conroy could possibly crap on about will make any difference to issues like child porn.

But there’s one thing that makes me even more angry than Conroy, and that is the downright offensive, ridiculous, appalling “you’re advocating pedophilia” rhetoric dished out by these bloody idiotic “won’t-somebody-please-think-of-the-children” women and their bible-bashing so-called children and “family” advocacy groups.

Internet filter protesters aim for Canberra

Chief executive of child protection group Child Wise, Bernadette McMenamin, said most of the criticisms levelled at the internet filter scheme were founded on misinformation.

“Let the 300 people march on Canberra because it looks pathetic,” he said. “It looks pathetic and shameful because most of these people are not fully aware of the facts and secondly, those who are aware are, in effect, advocating child pornography.”

Ann Druyan special on Equal Time for Freethought

Last month, to mark Carl Sagan’s birthday (he would have been 74), the WBAI radio program Equal Time for Freethought broadcast a special interview with the wonderful Ann Druyan (the half-hour interview was originally intended for a fund drive show in September, but not aired in its entirety until now). The main news was NASA’s establishment of a Sagan Fellowship to study exoplanets (planets outside the Solar System), but the wonderful conversation with Druyan ranges from the profound (how to communicate the wonder of science) to the quirky (an extended discussion of what Carl ate for breakfast). (I was surprised to learn of Sagan’s complete abstinence from coffee.)

You can download a recording of the show here.

Thanks to Joel for the heads-up.

Cat states…

I’d like to see what happens if you put a collar or harness on a cat, and then attach a laser pointer to that so that it’s always shining on the ground in front of the cat.

Marching South…

Does anybody happen to know when the cut-off date for registration for linux.conf.au 2009 would be? I’m not 100% sure if I have quite enough spare money available right now that I can commit to going and start booking attendance and booking flights and stuff, but if there’s a closing date looming in the not-too-distant future, I’ll look into borrowing some money from my parents or something so I can register.

I’ve tried the website/wiki but cannot find it mentioned.

:)

:)

“Roses are red because they contain anthocyanin and are slightly acidic. Violets are blue because they contain anthocyanin and are slightly alkaline. (I’ve been trying to use these facts in doggerel, but without success.)”

— Carl Sagan, Billions and Billions

Building a lightbox…

I found this being discarded… It’s about 650 mm square. I’m pretty sure it’s a lighting module you’d find in those square modular grid ceilings in offices and the like.

So, I cleaned the dirt off it with a damp cloth, and hooked it up to a power lead… and all the tubes work!
All the ballasts, starters, wiring – and the fluorescent tubes! – are there, all intact, and all working. And all free.

(Yeah, yeah – big image does 900 damage. Sorry.)
(I moved the lamps closer together to see how it would look when rebuilt with smaller dimensions.)

So, let’s build a lightbox.

The fluorescent tubes plus their socket assemblies take up the full width of the current steel housing, which is about 610 mm.
The current steel housing is heavy and bulky, so I’ll replace it with a wooden box.

Since the tubes plus their sockets are about 610 mm long, I’ll make it 450 mm x 650 mm, which is A2 paper size plus a little extra around the edges.

I’ll be using 16 mm white melamine laminate chipboard, since it’s reasonably priced, Bunnings sell it, it’ll be perfect structurally, and it’ll reflect and diffuse the light beautifully with no painting required. A piece about 850 mm x 650 mm will be required… I’m not sure how big a sheet is.

Of course, Ye Bunnings can also cut it for you, which is not excessively dear and a nice option since it’s easier to get a cleaner cut this way.
Five pieces will be required, obviously: 650 mm x 80 mm x 2, 482 mm x 80 mm x 2 and 682 mm x 482 mm.

2200 mm bit of wood beading, 8 mm x 10 mm or whatever they have at Bunnings, I’ll have to have a look. The glass just sits on this.
Glass or acrylic sheet: 650 mm x 450 mm.

The government’s solar PV installation rebate – now here’s an idea.

Here’s an idea.

1. Go and find a suburb or a city or a community in Australia which has 31,000 households. I’m certain there are 31,000 people in this country who support what I’m about to elucidate.

2. Each household may temporarily need to put up AUD $1200 or so. If you’re lucky enough to have access to the Krudd Bogan Bonus, that’s nearly all of that taken care of.

3. Take that 25 million US dollars and purchase one of these.

4. At 25 MWe divided between 31,000 households, that’s a little over 25 GJ per year, which is a little more than Australia’s present average household electricity consumption. This doesn’t just generate a tiny little bit of your household electricity needs – it generates 100% of it, and there will be no more electricity bills – at all.

5. That corresponds to a nameplate capacity of 807 watts per household. Since the government hands out a subsidy of $8/W for solar photovoltaics with a 20% capacity factor, they should hand out $36/W for nuclear energy with a 90% capacity factor, right? It’s the same rate of payment per energy generated which currently exists in terms of the solar PV subsidy.

6. Collect your $29,000 rebate from the government. Less the $1200 investment, that’s $27,800 immediate profit in your pocket.

7. Go to the pub. Gotta stimulate that economy, you know.

Do you think that the average person on the street would support nuclear power if you paid them twenty-seven thousand dollars to do so?

That’s pretty neat to think about, isn’t it? Did you get the moral of the story?

These little PV installations are so, so ridiculously expensive, for a tiny, trivial bit of energy generation.
The government pays this subsidy for domestic PV installations at $8 per Watt of installed nameplate capacity, up to a maximum of 1 kW.

To replace one Loy Yang type coal-fired power station with solar cells, we would need 8,537,714 homes equipped with 1 kW solar photovoltaic arrays.
With an $8000 rebate for each one, that would cost the government 68.3 billion dollars per each large coal-fired power station.

Solar photovoltaics typically have a capacity factor of about 20%, and we’ll suppose the panels have a lifetime of, say, 30 years.
Therefore, this scheme costs the government 15.2 cents per kWh generated. That alone is far more than anybody would pay for retail electricity.

If the government purchases nuclear power plants, they will cost, say, 10 billion dollars (let’s be conservative) for a nuclear power plant with two 1100 MW nuclear power reactors which will operate with a 90% capacity factor and a lifetime of 50 years. The capital cost of plant dominates the overall cost of nuclear energy.

Therefore, the nuclear power plants would cost the government 1.15 cents per kWh – 7.5 percent of the cost of the solar rebate scheme. That’s the government’s rebate alone – without the rest of the price of these systems.

There are scores of companies jumping on the bandwagon to sell these little 1 kW rooftop PV systems, advertising and promoting and installing them – because they’re making a fortune from taxpayer’s money.

All this solar rebate is is another mendacious political bullshit enterprise involving renewable energy which can’t be scaled up, which hands out free money to the public, makes a massive bunch of money for the solar panel vendors, and mendaciously makes the government look like they’re actively getting the country running on clean energy.

Rudd’s epic fail at greenhouse gas emissions mitigation.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/15/2446466.htm

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd says Australia will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020.

That’s it. 5 per cent from 2000 levels.

Rudd also says Australia “could make a cut of up to 15 per cent if other countries also sign up to stronger reductions”; but that’s just the old “But China’s not doing the same – so we don’t have to do anything” bullshit.

The 5 per cent cut is likely to anger the Greens and environmental groups…

Damn right… check out the vitriol flying around in the comments on the above news piece.

“No responsible leadership anywhere in the world can ignore the elephant in the room, an elephant of this proportion.”

Ahem.

Rudd’s announcement doesn’t come as a big surprise. Why haven’t more significant reductions been announced? Simple, really.

Because significant reductions in anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions can’t be done under current Labor government attitudes.

Where the government’s idea of an ETS means free permits for coal-fired electricity generators, free handouts of money to coal-fired electricity generators and other highly emissions intensive generators, where the electricity generators are just passing the full cost of ETS straight onto the consumers anyway, the government is “committed to coal”* and the government continues to hand out money to fictitious “clean coal”, whilst maintaining a complete dogma against nuclear energy, any significant mitigation of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions can’t be done.

It cannot be done in keeping with the Rudd government’s attitudes. That’s why it’s not being announced.

* Someone in the ranks of the ALP has clearly been wise enough to pull down the “Howard (boo! hiss!) committed to nuclear (oh noes!) – Labor: Committed to Coal” webpage.

If an industry produces over 2,000 tonnes of emissions per million dollars of revenue or 6,000 tonnes of emissions in the value it adds to a product it is eligible for 90 per cent of free permits.

If it produces over 1,000 tonnes of emissions per million dollars of revenue or 3,000 tonnes of emissions in the value it adds to a produce it is eligible for 60 per cent of free permits.

The Electricity Sector Adjustment Scheme will also provide $3.9 billion assistance to coal fired power generators over the next five years.

Assistance for what, exactly?

The white paper estimates that with a carbon price of $25 per tonne, electricity is expected to increase by around $4 per week, with a rise in gas prices of around $2.

Not bloody happy.

Fossil-fuel burning electricity generators and other high-emissions just continue emitting the same as usual, and on the off chance they’re actually expected to pay for emissions permits, the costs just go to the customers, so there’s absolutely no disincentive applied to high-emissions technology at all, which defeats the entire point of the exercise.

Meanwhile, Rudd tries to justify this fiasco with ridiculous, trivially small amounts of money being earmarked for mendacious, horrendously expensive “renewable energy” projects which generate completely insignificant amounts of energy, and which are backed up by some extremely dubious numbers.

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/12/14/2445954.htm

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has laid the ground work for tomorrow’s carbon pollution reduction scheme announcement by fast-tracking investment in solar and renewable energy.

The Federal Government’s $500 million renewable energy fund will be delivered over the next 18 months rather than the six years, as previously announced.

Mr Rudd made the announcement today at a solar farm at Windorah in Queensland’s far south-west.

500 million dollars? That’s it!? No matter what type of new, clean technology you’re building – solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal, whatever – that’s a pathetically small amount of energy. That’s nothing. You won’t even get close to seeing one coal-fired power station replaced for that amount of money.

Still… that’s enough money to purchase at least a dozen Hyperion Power Modules… but maybe that’s just wishful thinking… (Wishful thinking about the ALP’s politics, I mean… not wishful thinking about Hyperion’s product.)

Now… let’s consider this solar farm at Windorah in Queensland.

The Windorah solar farm is a small concentrating-solar-photovoltaic plant, consisting of five collector dishes, each of which “generates approximately 35 kW of electricity, depending on season, time of day and cloud cover.”
The solar farm is expected to generate about 360,000 kilowatt hours each year. If each of the five dishes has a nameplate capacity of 35 kW, and the system produces a total energy output of 360 megawatt-hours per year, then that corresponds to a capacity factor of 23 percent, so that makes perfect sense, for a solar photovoltaic installation.

The installation costs 4.5 million dollars – to generate 360 MWh per year. Suppose it has an operational lifetime of 50 years.

That’s a construction cost, then, of 25 cents per kWh generated over the plant’s lifetime.

25 cents per kWh? Nobody is going to pay that much for electricity! Keep in mind that that’s just the construction cost alone. At that price, if you scaled it up to an energy output on the same scale as a nuclear power plant or Loy Yang style coal-fired plant, the total cost would be an enormous 217 billion dollars.

A typical new nuclear power plant, say, with a pair of AP1000 reactors each with a nameplate capacity of 1100 MW, operating with a 90% capacity factor, will generate 17.4 billion kWh per year.
How much would it cost to construct? Well, to be extra conservative, we might say, say, on the order of 15 billion dollars.

That’s a construction cost, then, of 1.73 cents per kWh generated over the plant’s lifetime.

The four billion dollars Rudd is handing to the poor, disadvantaged coal generation industry (for no actual gain) would be very handy to kick off the construction of nuclear power in Australia.

These little solar or wind projects are political stunts – nothing more. They’re obscenely expensive, and they do absolutely nothing to displace coal-fired generation.

In 2007, the brown-coal-fired Loy Yang power station in Victoria generated a net electrical energy output, sent to the grid, of 14,968 GWh. (and in doing so, released just under 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide up the chimney.)

Hence, the wonderful Windorah solar power station promoted by Rudd as the infallible solution to all our greenhouse worries generates… 0.0024 percent of one single coal-fired power station.
You just need to build 41,578 of them, and then you can close down one Loy Yang.

A nuclear power station, subject to the parameters as I’ve elucidated above, generates 116% of the annual energy output from Loy Yang – so, it’s a 1 to 1 correspondence – you drop in the single replacement plant to replace the coal-burner, perhaps ideally on the same site.

Conroy’s advanced cyber technology – OMG, I has an inter-blag!

Everybody’s favourite dipshit has announced, in true-to-form pompous fashion, that, uh, he’s started a blog. A digital blog. For Australia’s digital (and kiddy-porn-free) future.

Now, with this advanced cyber-webs technology, the pollies can engage with the public, right?

Can you see where this is going?

Eleventy billion comments, every one of which seems to be strongly anti-Conroy and anti-web-censorship.

Thus far, after many, many hundreds of comments, there has been not one response from Conroy or colleagues.

Feel free to go and leave some more comments – after all, that’s why they spent your money setting up the site.