OT Gas Prices and the Blame Game

Cheers! Rich

...

The whole idea of an acquired immune deficiency is ludicrous - you don't acquire viruses unless you already _HAVE_ an immune deficiency!

Thanks, Rich

Howdy Bill. I've been designing electronic stuff & doing a little precision machining, contemplating brewing a CNC mill, and so forth. It's all toward making certain gadgets we've discussed.

I've spent the past few days scouting out CPLDs--the CoolRunner II hardware is attractive, but the bloatware and bloated systems apparently needed to use it horrify.

Can anyone recommend an old, compact, trustworthy version of something that would run on, say, a Win98 laptop and allow in-system programming of a CoolRunner II with at least one of schematic, ABEL, VHDL, or Verilog entry? I just want use do a simple, small CPLD without loading Vista, without loading 4GB of FPGA bloatware, learning a zillion disposable acronyms and jumping through a thousand hoops.

I'd happily entertain alternate vendors as well. I need roughly 32-64 macrocells, CMOS-ish (

Sure. Blood transfusions. Needle sticks, at very low probability. Mother to child, roughly 20%, which is impressive, down to something like 1% with proper precautions. External skin contact, essentially zero. Bottom of shoe from gutter, zero. HIV is a very fragile virus that doesn't survive out on its own. Even hetero sex has a very low probability of transmission per try.

It's actually not a very efficient virus... at present. Hepatitis is a far more virulent critter; HPV probably kills more women, and is easily transmitted.

John

Never had a cold?

John

We recently got one of these:

ftp://66.117.156.8/Sherline.JPG

It was something like $2k, with the PC and software. It's really nice for small stuff, plastic and aluminum. We're doing small-run VME front panels, milled from aluminum. Then we digitally print a front-panel sticker overlay, put a swivel knife in the mill, and cut the label... outline, holes, dsubs, all that. Looks pretty good.

We added the light and the coolant pump/tray.

John

On Wed, 21 May 2008 10:17:29 -0700, mpm wrote: [snip]

Wont happen. Only 19% (if I remember correctly) of AZ is private land. All the rest is Federal or Indian Res. The only thing that will ever be allowed in the desert is 1 hiker / 100 Sq miles and probably a 3:1 ratio of park rangers to hikers.

Even if you could get past square 1 for building some mega plants in the desert, all the EPA impact requirements would take another 20 years to make it through the courts. Hell, the last numbers I saw for the new refinery out by Yuma was a billion dollars in legal/permitting cost and they have not turned a shovel of dirt.

If they are gonna allow mega plants out there I want to see some drilling rigs off the coast of FL and CA.

On Wed, 21 May 2008 12:55:38 -0400, Spehro Pefhany wrote: [snip]

I hope Sandia Labs CR5 will actually work. Could use solar, co-generation or nuke as the energy source.

From

"The prototype device, called the Counter Rotating Ring Receiver Reactor Recuperator (CR5, for short), will break a carbon-oxygen bond in the carbon dioxide to form carbon monoxide and oxygen in two distinct steps. It is a major piece of an approach to converting carbon dioxide into fuel from sunlight.

The Sandia research team calls this approach "Sunshine to Petrol" (S2P). "Liquid Solar Fuel" is the end product - the methanol, gasoline, or other liquid fuel made from water and the carbon monoxide produced using solar energy."

"The Sandia researchers came up with the idea to use the CR5 to break down carbon dioxide, just as it would water. Over the past year they have shown proof of concept and are completing a prototype device that will use concentrated solar energy to reenergize carbon dioxide or water, the products of combustion. This will form carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and oxygen, which ultimately could be used to synthesize liquid fuels in an integrated S2P system."

Still years away though.

Better give my Border Collies some weapons training...

Cute. One of my lathes is a Sherline CNC. It's presently in service, but one possibility is adding a milling column to meet my modest needs.

My needs are so modest that I could just throw something cheesy & light together in a couple days. A toy mill. It's not my top priority though. Ergo, I'm still toying with ideas.

Cheers, James Arthur

(Hey, Google CAPTCHAing me to post this...)

Cost at the well head, I believe. This is the current estimate of wells being drilled today. Older wells may have a lower cost. Some productive fields in Saudi Arabia may have extraction costs of $10-20 per barrel. The rest goes to the king.

Think about who gets that $100/barrel. In a country like Saudi Arabia, part goes to the king and part goes to cover the costs of extraction. Who is extracting Saudi oil? We are. If oil goes for $130 per barrel, but the US contractors collect $20 to cover costs, the king gets $110. If we can convince them to buy $100 per barrel technology, we pocket that and the king gets $30.

Of course, the French or Russians could bid lower, like they did in Iraq. But then we'd send in the marines, blow up their infrastructure and offer to rebuild it with their oil money.

It is the standard "15 to 20 years from viability." I think there's a press-release nonlinear mapping in which "20 years" translates to "infinity."

If I automatically denegrate every new energy breakthrough (remember MHD? Remember sodium-sulfur cells? Remember home gas turbines? Remember tokomac fusion? Remember small-scale cogeneration? [1]) I'll be right about 99.6% of the time.

John

The tool that Philips shipped for the cool runner when it was their product may be what you want. It used an Abel like language.

What are people using to program 22V10's these days? On the rare occasion when I have to do one, I use an ancient copy of the dos APEEL software.

John

MHD derivatives are used in the conversion to/from UHV DC power lines. I worked on that (only as a technician) with Woodson-Melcher,

...Jim Thompson

It always tickles me that the eco-frauds and statists are their own worst enemies.

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, Because of the Brave

Hey Jim,

I'm not discounting your comments, but I've heard on many dozens of occasions that A) The grid is antiquated and overstressed, and B) A new grid is required for large scale solar, or even wind farms in many places.

But maybe that position is just advanced by the iron and steel industry, or the IBEW.?

I agree is should, but remain unconvinced that it will.

I didn't catch the whole story on public radio last night, but apparently the US consumer has been unknowingly subsidizing the cost of gasoline in Europe!! (When our own gas is $4 gallon).

It's rooted in an Energy Bill loophole that deals with fuel subsidies for biofuels. The practice is called "Spash and Dash", where tankers of foreign (or domestic) fuels visit US ports, get a token infusion of Ethonol, and then leave for foreign ports for commercial dispensing.

Somehow, US Tax payer dollars are subsidizing these exports. I have to go back and listen to that archive to see what's really up with it.

It burns my ass to pay $68.70 for a fill-up last night (Note: The most ever!), when part of my tax dollars are going to help some Brit get cheaper gas. And people wonder what is wrong with this country...!!

See:

-mpm