I used to be a huge firefox fan but then I tried Opera 10 and never looked back. It's fast, has a very good ad blocker by right clicking on the page and simply disabling ads.

And it has a sync feature that permanently stores all your settings online so you will never loose them.

Trust me and give it a week, it's awesome. it occationally locks up, but it restarts with all your tabs in place. I haven't lost a session in my 2 months of using it.

The ads put money in your journalists' wallets so that you - and also manufacturers who want to have their products lied about favourably - don't have to.

So how big a battery can be currently replaced, or for how much money, or by when? And yeah, that much energy in one place could be released by a short-circuit - any store of energy short of hydrogen or helium for atomic fusion is subject to that. Even fission nuclear reactors catch fire. But maybe you could divert the ultracapacitor discharge into an EMP instead.

If these get good enough, would be interesting to see if there's any benefit/savings that could be had by having an intelligent electricity supply for the home - the system could charge capacitors during the night when electricity is cheaper and use the stores during the day. When combined with home generation of solar/wind power, could be a massive improvement for our national electrical grid

AdBlock Plus removes all the ads. you don't even realize they are not there anymore.

I think it's neat that they're considering storage mechanisms that in case of a fault could theoretically discharge say 90W-hrs
over the course of a fraction of a second. Or is there more internal resistance in these things than that?

"350 Farads" for a D sized cell might sound impressive, but it means little without knowledge of the operating voltage range.

Lawrence, not so fast.

You've assumed a resistive load (exponential discharge). These days gizmos use switching regulators. As well as being far more efficient than linear regulators, the operating input voltage range is very wide (step up and down), hence regulation isn't really a problem.

"the capacitor needs an exponentially increasing voltage to pack in more charge"
Not so. The relationship is entirely linear (Q=CV). More significantly, the energy (the useful bit) is proportional to the square of the voltage (E=0.1CV^2), so in practice is actually the reverse of what you stated.

...the days of being able to charge my mobile phone using the three-phase outlet will be here. :)

if you really are that fustrated at the ads, download firefox and then install the adblock plus addon, -I- see ZERO ads on this site, none, what so ever, of any kind. Plus both are 100% FREE, FREE FREE

The fundamental difference between capacitors and batteries is that batteries can maintain a (mostly) constant voltage during most of their discharge cycle, while a capacitor suffers an exponential falloff in voltage as it discharges.

Correspondingly, you can charge a battery with the same voltage, while the capacitor needs an exponentially increasing voltage to pack in more charge.

Do they have regulators that can deal with this? Alternatively, you can get around the problem by varying the capacitance as it charges/discharges. I’d give more details, but ... Hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet.

" ...like threads on a think-pile carpet"
Who's your shag?

LiPol batteries are the lightest there are. If you want heavy batteries, you should try packing some NiMH, NiCad, or even worse, lead-acid batteries.

As for 1980s "laptops" I have an old Eagle "luggable" with a full-sized keyboard as its base, a monochrome CRT monitor, two disk drives, and amazingly, a hard drive too. I doubt it'd run long at all on modern batteries, especially since it was designed to plug into a wall.

So be thankful for what you have!

One common criticism of green power generation schemes is that the sun may not be shining or the the wind may not be blowing when we need electricity. With capacity in the hundreds of farads, perhaps banks of these devices could serve to store juice produced by windmills or solar systems until it is needed.

There are a number of private companies working on the same problem. If some of their claims of energy density are true electric vehicles could be a reality. Expect some NDA's to be opened up a bit before the end of the year.

EESTOR FTW !

excuse the spelling, thats how angry i am over the stupid ads.

and then i would use it on the inquirer staff as evenge for theose stupid ads.

until then, deleted from bookmarks and off to tg!!

...to get rid of these evil Lithium-Polymer batteries!
Heavy crap...Why does battery tech seem so slow compared to the massive jumps of solid state integrated chips lol.

Saying that, I wonder how long a 1980's laptop would last on a modern day high capacity battery :)

DIY Rail-gun, here I come.