3 Oct 2003 ncm   » (Master)

Bram: Why start by turning all this great high-grade energy into heat? Photons are about as clean an energy source as ever there was, albeit oscillating three or four orders of magnitude faster than we can quite manage to rectify efficiently yet. Lightning is already electricity! You need extreme temperatures to get any respectable efficiency from a heat engine, and all a heat engine does is turn dirty heat into clean motion. The problem with lightning is that it releases an extreme energy burst (1.21 gW? :-) in a millisecond, but you usually need smaller amounts of power over a longer period. Therefore, what you need is really a storage system that can absorb a huge amount of energy in an instant, and then feed it (all of it!) back slowly. Run the lightning through a coil to generate a magnetic field, and use the field to loft a heavy object that releases gravitational potential energy as it descends.

mrd: I can't imagine you neglected to put a "$" at the end of your regular expression to anchor it to the end of the file name...

Evolution 1.4.5 crashed, twice. Back it goes onto my GNOME panel, even though it's quite a lot better, crashwise, (maybe 5x) than 1.4.4. Crashiness seems to be triggered by searching, FWIW.

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