What Linux needs 13532

Aragorn OT: There's a strong argument suggesting that 'global warming' is, in fact, a natural cycle of the earth.

Hydrogen also has it's own problems--no one is quite sure what effect mbutt redistribution of water vapor (the byproduct of a hydrogen fuel cell) will do to sensitive environments (can you imagine how bad this would be for deserts?). Then there's the fact that the only commercially viable method of extracting hydrogen requires, you guessed it, burning hydrocarbons! This means that a shift to a hydrogen economy will not alleviate the byproduct of burning fossil fuels at all--it will simply shift the source from cars to hydrogen extraction plants. Then we run into the issue of resources. Currently hydrogen fuel cells require a metal suitable for the creation of sealed electrodes--the most commercially viable of which is *platinum*, and if you've bothered to check it's prices you'll find that platinum is quite expensive. This is directly related to the difficulty involved in finding and mining it. Unless we start mining asteroids, there *wouldn't be enough* of these metals to replace every internal combusion engine in use. Probably not enough to replace every ICE in the US alone.

This is a gross exaggeration. Even at the height of the world's nuclear arsenals, we could only scour the face of the earth a few times over. Disarmament treaties and cost of maintanence has dropped that number by quite a bit. Nuclear weapons are best used as tactical weapons--strategic arms are just too unweildy and tend to destroy the areas you are trying to take. Modern nuclear arsenals (that are publicly known, anyway) tend to reflect this philosophy.

-- "There is nothing I understand." - poo