There’s also a TOTAL lack of information as to conversion-rates, i.e. how much gas do you have to feed this thing for it to produce 1Kwh worth of electric energy ?

At the end of the day, it’s just a gas-powered generator, no it doesn’t combust the gas, but it’s still a case of “air + gas” in and “CO2 + electricity” out.

1. It takes 30 min to bring the unit temp to the 1000 degC level. That energy comes from grid, and a suitable resistance heat elements must be provided.
2. The picture of the stack plates shows a plain square shape. That is about the worst configuration from the point of view of the thermal cycling and the associated expansion/contraction and does strongly depend of the type of heating involved to bring it up to the operationg temperature. The perception of stack implies a forced flow heat exchange and a circulating blower to move the operating gas around.

Chemically binding hydrogen in a liquid removes storage and infrastructure problems. One such good example is Direct Methanol Fuel Cells. Have you looked into these?

MRV is a really nice feature, but W7MC (combined with my WHS server and other W7 clients in my house) will be able to watch those same videos, though I cant pause/resume somewhere else. I have two TiVos in my house (S2, TiVo HD) and have never used that feature because my network couldn’t keep up with streaming the recording from one location to another (and they’re both wired ethernet though the S2 is Ethernet to USB). I believe W7MC finally has something similar to Season Passes (“Series Recording” – you specify a channel and an approximate time).

Its nice that TiVo is working hard to try and sell me other stuff – especially in this economy – but I guess I’d rather go the build-your-own route (the “geeky stuff” as you put it).

Yes, this isn’t the perfect DVR, but replacing my TiVo with an HTPC would certainly give me a number of other benefits – for example, I wouldn’t ever really need to buy DVDs or BRs of TV shows if I can pull all the shows off the DVR and put them on my multi-TB WHS box. 1.5TB HDs are going for under $100 (Fall 2009), and thats enough HDTV (in H.264) for over 1,400 hours of programming. Every episode of my favorite TV shows available on demand? Sounds awesome. TiVo still doesn’t handle drives larger than 1TB (internal/external, for a total of 2TB), and their lack of media-hub features are what I have a problem with.

Each HDTV stream is at most, 20Mb/s, so four streams is an aggregate of 80Mb/s or 10MB/s. All current 3.5″ HDs can sustain 10MB/s of writes, even random writes (1MB block size). If the Q9550s chip I get from newegg cant handle it, there isn’t much that will.

Take your ignorant, irrational hatred elsewhere.

John