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Pastimes : The New Qualcomm - write what you like thread. -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: John Walliker who wrote (4453)	3/30/2002 6:38:58 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12231

John, Orimulsion works okay and is used. Sulphur is 2.9%http://www.pdvsa.com/orimulsion/fotos/typical.html which isn't high compared with other heavy fuel oils. Power stations have flue scrubbers so the SO2 [and soot and metals] isn't just poured into the atmosphere these days. If the chimneys stay above the dew point, there isn't corrosion anyway - it's only when exhaust gases cool and water condenses, dissolving the SO2 to form strong acids that there's a problem. That's a reason why heavy diesel engines can successfully burn very sulphurous fuels as long as they stay hot - condensation is bad. A colleague of mine was working on Orimulsion in the good old days when it was being proven. Customers here: pdvsa.com pdvsa.com <BITOR´s commercial activity in the year 2000 resulted in exports of 6 million 253 thousand metric tons of ORIMULSION. Contractual shipments were dispatched to New Brunswick Power in Canada; Energi E2 in Denmark; RWE Systems in Germany; Lithuanian State Power System in Lithuania; ENEL in Italy; Hokkaido Electric Power, Kansai Electric Plant and Kashima Kita Electric Power in Japan; China National United Oil Corporation in the Popular Republic of China; PowerSeraya in Singapore, Arawak Cement in Barbados and Guatemala Generating Group in Guatemala.> The main problem with Orimulsion is its effect on OPEC agreements. That's why BP set up Bitor as a separate entity to try to pretend that Orimulsion wasn't competing with oil, which it is of course. It's a bit like the Globalstar wackoes tried to pretend that Globalstar wasn't competing with terrestrial mobile services or Iridium - the claim being that they are servicing different markets. Of course Globalstar and Iridium are competing with other mobile services - if terrestrial coverage gaps are acceptable to a terrestrial subscriber, they don't bother with the huge cost and large clunky Globalstar phone and service. If the price was low, they would buy Globalstar to fill those gaps. Well, a fig-leaf and euphemism are always handy to cover reality, but it doesn't change the fact that plenty of Venezuela heavy crude is being burned in power stations and plenty of Saudi crude oil would find its way to power stations if Orimulsion wasn't used. The production cost was something like 50c a barrel in the 1980s and I doubt that cost has increased. It's probably less - the main ingredients are water [which is cheap] and surfactants, which are expensive but like most stuff, gets cheaper as time goes on and technology is improved and production costs cut. The water makes the usually gooey stuff pumpable and is also sprayed into the furnace. Although there's 30% water in Orimulsion, to make it easily pumpable, the energy loss due to water evaporation is only about 3%, which is a fact which surprises a lot of people - they imagine that with so much water, it wouldn't burn. Notice the long-term contracts the customers have. That's so that the volatility which Ashley mentioned doesn't enter into the customers' supply and pricing. The prices are obviously low enough that it would take a big downswing in OPEC prices to undercut them. I dare say there are also long-term supply contracts with electricity wholesalers who have long-term supply contracts with customers such as alumina smelters and other base-load buyers. Mqurice

To: John Walliker who wrote (4453)	3/30/2002 7:16:54 PM
From: Maurice Winn	Respond to of 12231

* Earcell [TM] * John, I just clicked on your profile to see how you knew about Orimulsion and found <Design DSP hardware and software for cochlear implants and signal processing hearing aids. > This is my favourite topic! About 1993, I went to see the Phonak Managing Director here [in NZ] and he suggested I write to their HQ in Switzerland. I thought that Phonak phonak.com and QUALCOMM should get together and everybody in the world should have a couple of CDMA-linked Phonak "Earcells" so they could talk to anyone anywhere and have sound control in factories and other noisy environments. It would be so nice to be able to stand beside somebody and speak normally to them without a lot of racket making conversation impossible - Earcells could enable that. Driving trucks, cars or working handsfree at some manual job would not make communication difficult. Stopping doing something to hold a phone is annoying and time-wasting. He said they had their hands full so the whole thing hasn't gone anywhere [as far as I know anyway]. But look! The ESPrit 3G has just been announced. cochlear.com Phonak's share price has risen over the years. investor-relation.flife.de These three companies should be working together: qualcomm.com phonak.com cochlear.com With a Bluetooth or 80211 link to a subscriber device, the Earcell could deliver perfect sound either to the ear drum via sound waves or the cochlear via the inductively-coupled cochlear implant. Do you think that a cochlear implant could deliver high fidelity sound? By high fidelity, I mean better representation of the actual sound than that provided by wax and fungi-filled ear canals, damaged ear drums and dodgy inner ears, which is what a LOT of people have to put up with. I say cut out the costs of the middle-man and deliver the sound directly to the nerves in the cochlear. Disintermediation is the name of the game in cyberspace. Or, at least combine hearing aids and cellphones for the ultimate hands-free cellphone - with stereophonic sound no less! Sound filtration would be nice to have - avoid the background sound pollution and hear PureVoice. It'll be a few years before people are comfortable with having their head cut open to get ASICs, batteries and wires in the bone behind their ear, under their scalp [for direct reception of Globalstar CDMA signals] and wired into their cochlears. But no more would anyone be lost at sea, or in a desert, or in the snow, out of communication range, with the Globalstar cochlear implants, SnapTrack/gpsOne and cyberspace links. Mqurice