The manufacturer of a hydrogen car unveiled in London on Tuesday will make its designs available online so the cars can be built and improved locally.

The Riversimple car can go 80km/hr (50mph) and travels 322km (200mi) per re-fuelling, with an efficiency equivalent to 300 miles to the gallon.

The cars will be leased with fuel and repair costs included, at an estimated £200 ($315) per month.

The company hopes to have the vehicles in production by 2013.

Next year, it aims to release 10 prototypes in a UK city which has yet to be confirmed.

Riversimple has partnered with gas supply company BOC to install hydrogen stations for the cars in the city where the prototypes are launched.

‘Open source’ model

The car itself is an amalgam of high-efficiency approaches in automotive design.

Its four motors are powered by a fuel cell rated at just six kilowatts, in contrast to current designs that are all in excess of 85 kilowatts - required because the acceleration from a standing start requires a great deal of power.

Riversimple’s solution is to power the car also from so-called “ultracapacitors”, which store large amounts of electric charge and, crucially, can release that charge nearly instantly to provide the power needed to accelerate from rest.

The ultracapacitors are charged as the vehicle brakes to a halt, converting the energy of the moving car into stored energy.

Under the bonnet is a comparatively tiny fuel cell

Without a combustion engine, gearbox, or transmission, and with a shell made of carbon fibre composites, it weighs 350kg.

The company claims that it is closer to market than any of its start-up competitors, but what sets them apart is an unusual business model.
“Riversimple has effectively rethought the whole of what in the business school world we call the ‘value chain’ of the auto industry,” said John Constable, chair of the Riversimple project.

The company asserts that in the leasing model, the vested interest for the manufacturer is in producing long-lasting, fuel-efficient, high-quality products, since it bears the cost of both hydrogen and repairs.

Its partnership with BOC is designed to resolve the chicken-and-egg question of who would build the infrastructure required to refuel hydrogen cars when there are none on the road. Meanwhile, would-be hydrogen car buyers are concerned about the dearth of re-fuelling stations.

“You can incrementally put in a template package of one re-fuellling point and 50 cars in different cities, and each city one by one can build an urban hydrogen infrastructure, and that incrementally builds a nationwide infrastructure,” said Hugo Spowers, the former race car designer who conceived the Riversimple idea in 1999.

The company will distribute the engineering designs to the 40 Fires foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that will make the designs “open source”.

The idea, they say, is to allow local manufacturing in small plants. This stands in contrast to the “economies of scale” that drive current plants to huge sizes and workforces.

In addition, designs can be adjusted for local markets, using locally sourced parts or materials.
The agreement will be such that if the designs are improved by a local manufacturer, those improvements will be sent back, so that what the company refers to as its “network of manufacturers” can contribute to the overall development of the product line.

From the BBC - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8103106.stm

BBC NEWS | Americas | Obama moves to curb car emissions:

Here’s what you need to know:

erbium doped fiber

Charlie Skeltons Bilderberg files | World news | guardian.co.uk

Funny and terrifying. It’s as if you or I attempted to find out what really went on at  Bilderberg 2009 in Greece.

Tonido Plug :: What is Tonido Plug?

Wow. I hadn’t seen this coming, though I suppose I should have. I’ve not been paying much attention to the small form-factor PC space lately. Ever since I built my sub 2U  home media server I kinda have lost interest. This though..this looks positively neato. I’m thinking I can ditch one of my 4 home PCs, the one that acts as a server for one of these puppies.  I’d love to reduce my household computing power draw, and I think that the 5W  this thing pulls is about as minimal as one can get.  It sports Ubuntu Linux, but can it run as a LAMP server too…that I have yet to find out.

How to Think About Taxes | Mother Jone

This is a great article. I’m reposting it in it’s entirety as it needs no improvement.

How to Think About Taxes

Here’s my contribution to today’s tax day festivities: an effort to get you to think about federal taxes a little bit differently than usual. Normally, when we talk about taxes, we end up talking about percentages of people: the top 1% pay a certain amount, the bottom third pay a different amount, etc. But this is the wrong way to look at things. What we ought to be looking at is percentages of income.

Have your eyes glazed over yet? Just wait! It’s going to get worse. But first a caveat: the numbers that follow aren’t exact. I don’t think they’re way off the mark, but they’re the result of some rough interpolation from several different data sources. Anyone with access to more detailed data is welcome to correct this, but in the meantime it should be close enough to give you an idea of how to look at this stuff.

So: percentages of income. What I mean by this is that you’d expect a group of people with, say, one-fifth of the nation’s total income to pay one-fifth of total federal taxes. (Note: one-fifth = 20%, or one quintile in tax-speak.) It doesn’t really matter if that group has one-fifth of the people or not, just that it has one-fifth of the money. Like this:

But hold on. That’s a flat tax, and I want to appeal to your native sense of fairness here. Even most conservatives agree that taxation ought to be at least mildly progressive, so let’s make this mildly progressive. First, let’s say that the middle quintile, almost by definition, ought to pay 20% of total taxes. Like so:

The next quintile up ought to pay a higher share, and the quintile above that even more. The slope of the increase doesn’t need to look like a hockey stick, but it should trend clearly upward. Let’s say it should be 8% more for each quintile:

Likewise, the quintile below the middle ought to pay a lower share, and the poorest quintile ought to pay even less. Something like this:

Question: does this seem roughly fair to you? If you’re a die-hard flat-taxer, it won’t, but for most people, even conservatives, it ought to seem reasonable. It’s progressive, but the slope is moderate and consistent. So now let’s take a look at the income cutoffs that produce our five quintiles. Here they are:

Most people are surprised at how high the income cutoffs are. But that’s how it works out. If you add up the incomes of every single household that makes less than $50,000 — all 50 million of them — they earn only a fifth of the total income. If you add up the tiny number of people who make more than $300,000, they also earn a fifth of total income. So now, instead of looking at our theoretical progressive system, let’s see the actual numbers. Here they are:

As you can see, when you add up all federal taxes and compare it to where the money is, our system is only barely progressive at all. The bottom quintile doesn’t do too badly, though they’re probably paying a little more than they should, but CEOs and bankers are paying only slightly more than teachers and engineers. And if you add in state and local taxes, even this small amount of progressivity goes away. You can come at this from a lot of different angles, but you always end up with the same answer: taken as a whole, our tax system is close to flat. Does this seem fair to you? It shouldn’t.

NOTE: As I said above, these numbers are rough interpolations from several sources. The high-end income data is from Piketty and Saez, here. The middle income aggregates and cutoffs are from Census figures, here and here. Tax shares are from the CBO, here.

Proposed Discretionary Budget, FY2009 | National Priorities Project

Yikes. I didn’t realize just how large a percentage of our annual federal budget has been going toward “national defense”..i.e military spending. These numbers include the “discretionary war funding” that are in addition to the normal budget. The source for this info is the white house…click the link above and click around for as much analysis as you can stomach on where your tax dollars are going.

It’s time to reign in the defense beast….we outpace every other nation on the planet by a large margin in defense spending….no one comes close. In fact, I’ve read that you can combine the defense budgets of China and Russia and still not come close to the U.S’ defense spending. Thank you Boeing. Thanks Lockheed. Thanks General Dynamics. Our sick, undereducated and jobless owe you a debt of …as do our children, and their children…..