Posts by Elongated Muskrat

US Dept of Energy set to reveal fusion breakthrough

Actually, looking at the numbers (Q being around 3MJ, and the energy used to pump the lasers around 300MJ), Q needs to be around 100 to break even, not 10.

What this has demonstrated is that you can get nuclear fusion to "ignite" using big ol' lasers, as well as by other methods (magnetic confinement, or siting your fuel on top of a fission bomb and using the energy output from that to ignite it).

It's an important proof-of-concept, but I can't see it ever becoming practical, due to the sheer amount of energy loss from pumping and discharging the lasers. Even if you can achieve Q = 1000 or something crazy like that, that sort of energy density is going to be very hard to deal with, because for every MJ you deliver to the target, you have 100 MJ being lost to the environment that you need to deal with. You might be able to "catch#" some of it by hooking up turbines to the outside of the lasers, but that really does sound ick.

So, basically, all we need now is a load of massive lasers that operate with 100% efficiency, and beam confinement that doesn't leak anything into the environment. Physics is not on your side in those hopes.

Re: Cold Fusion PR

I'll just add, vagaries of US politics aside, that the whole "research is a waste of money because some research produces no results" argument is as tired as the day is long.

If we don't do research, much of which isn't targeted at producing specific results (because then it wouldn't be research, it would be manufacturing), and much of which doesn't produce any useful results (because research is, by definition, a process of discovery), then we don't advance. Someone else will do that research, though, and beat us to the punch when it does turn up something useful. Society advances as a result of new discoveries and inventions. If that wasn't the case, then you wouldn't be reading this comment on a computer screen of some sort, you'd probably be out throwing rocks at mammoths, hoping a sabre-toothed cat doesn't eat you today.

Re: Only Twenty Years Away...

I'm not ignoring it at all (read my other posts on this same article).

Just because I'm pointing out the imperfections in one method of power generation, don't infer that I'm endorsing others that are much worse. The implication there was not intended.

I'd much rather we got all of our power from the cleanest sources we can. I can't help but wonder whether we'd all be using clean and efficient geothermal energy if the same amount of money had been pumped into solving the technical issues with deep-bore geothermal as has been into nuclear. But you can't make big explosions out of hot rocks, entirely coincidentally as a by-product, of course.

Re: Only Twenty Years Away...

Oh, I'm by no means saying the alternatives are better, and things like coal are way, way worse, but we must be careful not to paint an overly-rosy picture of nuclear power, because it only gives the detractors ammunition, and some of those are very well funded by the fossil fuel lobby.

Specifically, we need to be honest about the TCO, and not dismiss the decommissioning costs as an externality.

Personally, I'm pro-nuclear, but with caveats, such as not building lots of fast breeder reactors to make plutonium for bombs whilst claiming that they are primarily for energy generation. That's probably wishful thinking, because it relies on the existence of honest politicians, or, actually even worse, it relies on the non-existence of dishonest ones.

Re: Only Twenty Years Away...

Whilst the issue with fission are often massively overblown, it's still far from perfect. The TCO is high, you still have to deal with high-level waste (which usually involves hiding it and pretending it doesn't exist for tens of thousands of years) and also the much larger quantities of medium and low-level waste (such as the rubber gloves used to handle something that has been near something that has been near something inside the reactor).

Oh, and the fact that, as we can see with current world events, if you have a militaristic neighbour who doesn't care about their own people, you could end up with a big radiological problem if someone tries to blow it up or hit it with loads of rockets.

Certainly, Western democracies would stop having to pretend to be friends with certain Middle-Eastern autocracies.

Re: Q>1

I was with you until you started talking about waste heat, because in power generation, heat is the thing you are after, and it is only "waste heat" once you have extracted useful work from it (e.g. via a turbine) and the remaining temperature difference is too low to get any more meaningful use out of it (there's a reason the laws of thermodynamics are called the laws of thermodynamics, and it's tied up with the industrial revolution and the drive to make steam engines efficient).

So-called "waste heat" from power generation is something you get from any generation method, and it's not the problem we have from coal. Coal has a number of very significant issues from the simple greenhouse emissions, to production of sulphur dioxide and toxic ash, and also radioactive fallout (what, you thought coal was pure carbon? How sweet).

If a method of power generation is "clean" and safe enough, there's no reason why it can't be interspersed with other buildings, where that heat can be put to good use as district heating in commercial and residential properties.

In other words, if we're worrying about what to do with the waste heat, we've probably already cracked the problem of getting enough of it to generate power.

Re: Cold Fusion PR

I'm pretty sure this is very, very hot fusion, and nothing at all to do with the miniscule, and irreproducible effects reported by Fleischmann and Pons.

Anyway, the whole "X is a waste of money therefore Y is a waste of money", where the only connection between X and Y is tenuous at best, isn't exactly a strong demonstration of causal reasoning.

tl;dr: you're talking bollocks, mate.

Re: Not even close

I'll sit up and listen when someone can demonstrate a fusion reactor that not only produces Q well over 1, but can also capture the released energy, turn it into useful work, and do it repeatedly, and frequently, over a period of years, without having to be rebuilt each time. There's a number of very large technical obstacles to overcome between making a tiny capsule go pop more brightly than the lasers pumping it and something that pumps hydrogen isotopes in and electricity out.

Tiny steps, though, and all that...

Look like Bane, spend like Batman with Dyson's $949 headphones

Re: Good idea

Right you are, I'll cycle with my wife to visit her family on the other side of the country at Christmas then.

What's that? Use public transport? Sure thing, I'll use the fairy-bus to get to the middle of rural Norfolk.

Whilst I agree that we should be avoiding unnecessary car journeys, and walking or cycling instead, or using public transport, where we can, those who seem to think that cycling is the answer to everyone's transport needs obviously live in places where it is practical, and are young and fit and healthy enough to use it.

Some of us don't live in places where it is possible (such as very hilly areas or miles from anywhere) or are otherwise unable to cycle (got any disabled friends?).

We need a change to infrastructure (and ways of working / living) to reduce our need for cars, but don't blame the people in cars for having to have a car, and don't get all "high and mighty" because your own circumstances mean you can cycle to wherever it is you are trying to go.

Re: Good idea

Something that doesn't cover your nose and mouth, and which doesn't have some serious micro-particulate filters in it, is going to be as effective at filtering out such things as the square root of fuck all.

This thing will probably just blow ozone up your nose from the electric motors, which isn't good for you...

When I took on my allotment, the previous tenant had left a rusty old wheelbarrow at the end of the plot with a perished and flat tyre. A replacement wheel (with a solid tyre) and axle cost about a tenner, and I have a fully functional wheelbarrow, thank you very much. I dread to think how much a replacement "ball" costs, but I'm willing to bet you can buy an entire "conventional" wheelbarrow for a comparable amount. And those balls are plastic, so they are going to perish and crack if left outside, because UV light in sunlight "cures" plastics, and temperature cycling of rigid plastics eventually causes cracking from thermal expansion.

Maybe I should have pointed out the irony for those for whom it was not apparent.

For clarity, ball barrows are shit, his loud fragile overpriced vacuum cleaners are shit, and brexit is shit.

The upper limit needs to be significantly higher, to get a decent frequency response curve. If the "limit" is 22KHz (or 21, or whatever it actually is) then you'd expect the actual response at that frequency to be pretty dull. Yes, most adults can't hear beyond about 20KHz, but some can, and most young children can hear well beyond that, and let's face it, these things look like they were designed for a child, albeit one with very rich parents.

Re: "best" headphones

Anyway, I am going to (reasonably) assume that these $949 Dyson headphones have the sound quality of $99 headphones with a fan motor attached to them to eat up the balance of your hard-earned, yet stupidly-spent, money.

Since the frequency response apparently only goes up to 21KHz, and most $99 headphones are going to go up to about 30KHz, I'd say they're more like $19.99 children's toy headphones.

Re: I forgot the Airblade!

Yeah, I fucking hate those things. When they did a "refurb" of the communal areas of our office building (back when we had to actually be there), they replaced the working had-dryers with those awful Dyson things (the ones that just blow a column of air, and not the "blade" ones). About a month later, they stuck large panels of acrylic to the walls behind them to deal with the damp and peeling paint. Half the time, they don't detect your hands under them, or stop after about five seconds.

When I've had to use the "blade" ones that you put your hands under (rather than in), you end up having to do a Tommy Cooper impression just to keep the thing blowing air at your hands.

Downvoted, for not knowing the difference between Singapore, where he has moved his offices, for tax purposes, and Malaysia, where he has moved his manufacturing for slavery-level wage purposes.

Neither is exactly "red-white-and-blue brexit proud British company" is it?

Who looks like the idiot now? The person who checked their facts, or the one who stuck his hand straight into the ad-hom bin and pulled out an armful?

I believe that's a typo and should read 22KHz, which is still shit for a modern pair of headphones.

Unlike Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is so hip, he has trouble seeing over his own pelvis.

Man, what a hoopy frood he is...

Re: A kick my butt sign

It's a useful indicator for the sort of person who is likely to have a wallet or phone worth stealing in their back pocket, and won't notice you doing it.

Re: HOW MUCH?!!

Indeed, my (still rather expensive) Corsair headset cost a tenth of that, and it's not made out of fucking plastic (well, bits of the casing are, but the bits that count are powder coated steel). That has a frequency range of 20Hz-30KHz, so better drivers too.

FWIW, anything below 20HZ is considered infrasound, and is likely to not be heard but instead sensed as an uncomfortable vibration on the side of your head.

Re: IBM Engineer...

6 Hz is well below the normal range of human hearing. I wonder if that's just the limit of the noise-cancelling in order to minimise the rumble from the fan motors below your ears.

I write software for a living. If something I produced had an expensive and complicated work-around for a side-effect of another "feature", we'd call that "code smell," and go back and work out what had been done wrong. In this case, "what has been done wrong" is clearly the amount of coke the marketing department are hoovering dysoning up their noses.

Re: The Dyson Zone, with its visor attached, weighs in at 670 grams,

670g might sound heavy for something to plonk on your head, but bear in mind, that anyone who buys this will already have a sturdy neck to go with their thick head.

Re: <Peers over glasses>

We've got a Vytronix one, bagless, cordless, battery with a decent charge in it. Sucks up dirt adequately.

I think it cost about £80, which last time I checked was about 1/5th that of a die-some.

Don't be mean, he invented a wheelbarrow with a ball for a wheel, which was a brilliant idea, and caught on everywhere! Just tell me the last time you saw a wheelbarrow with a normal wheel on it?

Other brilliant ideas he has also had include supporting brexit, and moving all his manufacturing to the far east to take advantage of the much lower wages he can get away with paying. Who needs ethics when you can employ marketeers to come up with slick ad campaigns?

UK arrests five for selling 'dodgy' point of sale software

Re: The kitchen staff have their own software

There's nowt wrong with horsemeat.

Most people will certainly eat a lot worse before they get really hungry, and I'd pick it over McDonalds any day.

As it happens, after the Findus horse-meat scandal a few years back, one of our local pubs was doing a nice line in "exotic meat" burgers. IIRC, as well as horse, which was very nice, they also had ostrich and kangaroo (both of which are commonly enough eaten to be found in supermarkets), alongside crocodile (like fishy chicken), camel (didn't try that one), and some sort of wild goat, which tasted, unsurprisingly, like goat.

As long as it's ethically farmed, why not? Horses are certainly no more intelligent than some of the other animals we eat, such as pigs.

Server installer fails to spot STOP button – because he wasn't an archaeologist

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

It would be an example of the sunk cost fallacy

Re: BRBs

Some of that old kit, the disks would probably still be spinning if you got the power back on within a minute or two.

Re: Paint all over everything, including power sockets and emergency buttons?

It might be amazing what you can insure, but I'm willing to bet that if you did insure a battleship, one of the exclusions would be loss due to war, rendering the insurance rather pointless.

No shut-off valve at the outlet?

It's not like teenage boys have form for lighting the taps in chemistry labs, and a suitable tap doesn't exist to stop it (otherwise the room is already going to be full of gas).

Or had this already grown too hot to touch?

Uber fined $14m for lying to get customers to ditch cabs

Re: I really dislike UberEats

That's probably because they can't find many riders willing to take a delivery on a three-day drive across a venom-infested desert.

Re: I really dislike UberEats

Most of the *current* price increases are due to the increase in prices of ingredients, and, due to inflation, of labour. If something that you pay £5 for previously cost £4 to make and serve, but due to inflation, now costs £4.75, it's fair for the seller to raise the price to £6, so that they can still make a profit and feed themselves.

We need to tackle the causes of inflation, which are largely down to increased costs in the supply chain. Some of this is down to "global" factors like the war in Ukraine, especially on products that originate largely from that part of the world, such as sunflower oil, but a lot is self-inflicted by brexit and profit-extraction by essential utilities which nobody can avoid paying.

Re: I really dislike UberEats

My experience, of Deliveroo, not UberEats (because I, too, have zero trust in that particular company, although Deliveroo are arguably no better), is that restaurants that deliver themselves (and some do, because they resent paying their delivery fee to Deliveroo) deliver faster than some of the Deliveroo riders.

Some of the delivery riders are really shit as well. I know it's a horrible job, but I have a personal policy of giving a decent tip to the riders who can find my front door and who are polite, and not tipping those who do a half-arsed job. They get the tip for service that a waiter would get in a restaurant; they're basically doing the equivalent job.

However, often, the riders try to deliver "to the postcode" and not follow the delivery instructions (postcodes cover several properties, and putting mine into google maps takes you to the shops 200m down the road). Food turns up cold, or in damp torn bags, because they've thrown it into a backpack and knocked it about. I've had ones argue with me like it's my fault that the company's website doesn't let you properly give directions in a way that shows up to the rider, and only lets you put in an address. It's like waiting staff getting pissy with you because they can't find your table number. No tip.

Deliveroo take a quite a hefty cut, though, from the restaurant, and the customer. This is reflected in higher item prices, plus a "service" fee, plus a delivery fee (unless you have "Plus"). I'm sure it's a profitable business model.

Musk's Hotel California erected at Twitter HQ, as some offices converted into bedrooms

Re: When it comes to the products of human effort ...

This time of year, with the "seasonal diet", my cheese content may well be getting above that level.

Re: Nice idea in some ways...

I doubt Twitler* is thinking about letting his slaves staff take naps. If he wanted them well rested, he'd continue to allow them to work from home...

*attrib: the poster above who used this. I'm nicking this, thanks.

Re: When it comes to the products of human effort ...

If you're going to quote Theodore Sturgeon, at least get the quote right.

And on that hangs Sturgeon’s revelation. It came to him that [science fiction] is indeed ninety-percent crud, but that also – Eureka! – ninety-percent of everything is crud. All things – cars, books, cheeses, hairstyles, people, and pins are, to the expert and discerning eye, crud, except for the acceptable tithe which we each happen to like.

The subtlety, of course, is that the 10% which is not crud, is largely a matter of personal opinion.

Raspberry Pi hires former spy gadget-maker who baked devices into surveillance ops

Re: Covert Policing

here are never *some* "bad apples". It's either all or nothing

Absolute bollocks.

That's like saying all humans are serial killers because Jeffrey Dahmer.

Covert Policing

I can see both sides of the argument here to be honest (and it should be to R-Pi's chagrin that they have not).

I think it's pretty clear that the police in the UK have some "bad apples", there is a story in the news today about one Met officer being prosecuted for two counts of rape, for example. There was also a case where covert officers had a "romantic relationship" with a "person of interest" in order to monitor them, and this sort of thing is absolutely not OK.

However, just because some officers abuse the system, doesn't mean covert policing doesn't have its place, for example, in tackling organised crime. Its very nature means it can't be done in the open with decent oversight, and sadly, this is going to attract some of the wrong type of people.

Some surveillance is done by the police for political reasons too, especially by the Met, who don't exactly seem like a paragon of trustworthiness right now.

So I think the nuance here, is that we have to have police doing this sort of thing, but that it is open to abuse, and sometimes widely so. It could do with more oversight, but the nature of this sort of work means that the oversight has to be behind closed doors, due to operational security.

At the end of the day, I think people forget that cops are people, and, like all people, can be corrupted, but they can be honest too.

Attacking all policing due to the bad actions of an element is the wrong approach; we do need police because there are criminals out there. We need much better regulation and oversight of the police we have, and possibly a review of the organisational structures that have failed to do that job well so far.

Don't expect that under a Tory government, though, because they are all about deregulation.

Re: Whats the point

In my eyeline, at the moment, are a Pi-400 (being used as a NAS server), two Picos (one being used as a debug probe to the other), and a Pi Zero W in a component box on the shelf.

I've got one of the original Pis in a drawer next to me as well, which was used as a host to a number of USB bitcoin mining sticks, back when a bitcoin was about £100, and you could mine them using a few tens of watts, and such things were an interesting curiosity.

I fail to see how any of these are vapour-ware, just because there may be supply-chain issues at the moment, largely due to their popularity. A quick check shows Pimoroni have 8Gb Pi-4s, Picos, and Pico-Hs with or without headers, in stock right now, again, hardly vapour.

Victims of IT scandal in UK postal service will get fresh compensation

Re: Why BEIS ?

It's a general human trait to project your own motivations and moral framework onto others, and with this in mind, it says an awful lot about the senior management types here. When they saw that their systems were supposedly picking up financial fraud on a large scale within sub post-offices, their thoughts were that they had uncovered fraud that they previously didn't know about. Their mindset is that everyone will attempt to defraud their employer if they think they can get away with it.

It makes one wonder whether they hold their positions simply because they, themselves, are good at "getting away with it".

They should all have their past histories examined in detail by the police. I'm willing to bet that this would turn up at least one case of serious criminal wrongdoing.

Re: !!! - RANT ALERT - !!! 'I fully understand'

The most important thing to know about Grant Shapps, is that he is the man Alan Partridge looks up to in the most recent series of the "From the Oasthouse" podcast.

When a parody of the most awful kind of human being looks up to someone, rather than down on them, well...

Re: Bring manglement to book

This is straying into the criminological discussion about the rehabilitative ideal.

In short, should prison be a deterrent, a punishment, or a means of rehabilitation so that the offender returns to being a productive member of society and doesn't re-offend?

It's not a simple question, and anyone giving a simple answer is giving a wrong one.

Locking people up for vengeance isn't an answer, as it doesn't solve anything.

In some cases, removing someone from society and permanently depriving them of their liberty is the only way to protect wider society (whole life sentences for serial killers, for example). There are still ethical issues with these, as they do not cater for any rehabilitation, you cannot lock someone up for a crime they have not yet committed, or "thought crime", etc.

In other cases, imprisonment is clearly not productive for any involved. Minor crimes committed out of a need to survive and extreme poverty, for example, or crimes committed due to drug addiction. Prison almost always makes life worse for such people, and when they are released, the reasons for committing their crimes are often increased.

And then we have the example of the US prison system, which is basically a loophole for slavery; when slavery was "abolished" in the US, there was the clause "except for punishment" (or equivalent). Prison labour in the US accounts for a significant part of their economy, they have the highest per-capita prison population, and highest absolute prison population of any nation, and the racial make-up of the prison population is wildly distorted compared to the overall ethnic make-up of the country. Draw your own conclusions.

My feeling here, for the people responsible for the Horizon fiasco, is that a custodial sentence of several years would be appropriate, along with confiscation and sale of assets (proceeds going to the treasury, which is the same pool of money that the compensation would come from), and a lifetime ban from holding any board-level position in any business. Maybe they could get jobs as sub-postmasters to make ends meet.

"The people responsible" here is also a pretty wide remit. It should be everyone who knew there was an issue and covered it up, both inside the organisation, and outside, including those at Fujitsu-Siemens, and any politicians who got involved (and I'll bet you there are political connections here). In the end, this is not only corporate manslaughter, fraud, false accounting, and perjury, but there's bound to be an element of corruption, and "conspiracy to commit ..." as well.

Britain has likely missed the boat for having a semiconductor industry

Re: Lack of PR….

It really depends on whether you think compromise, which coalitions bring, is favourable to the one-party-rules-all system we have, where the party in power can force through any policies it likes just by having a majority (that is actually a minority of voters). For example, we currently have a Prime Minister who is being actively encouraged by his own party to rush through legislation that removes workers' rights to strike. If you know anything at all about the history of workers' rights, that will not end well for anyone. It either results in rich business-owners starving whole villages, or lethal violence. Either way, people will die as a result...

US commerce bosses view EU rules as threat to its clouds

Re: "ensure that non-EU suppliers cannot access the EU market on an equal footing"

If anything, it is ensuring that non-EU providers do enter the market on an equal footing, and not an unequal one where their EU competitors have to follow the rules and they do not.

"But, but, but, then I can't make money selling your data on". Cry me a river, late stage capitalism is killing its host.

Rolls-Royce, EasyJet fire up first hydrogen-fueled jet engine

Re: £700k ($836k) to airports for future-proofing efforts

Sea walls, and raising runways?

Most airports are on flat land, for some reason. And for some other reason, a lot of flat land tends to be low-lying (admittedly not all).

I suspect sea-level rise is a significant risk for some of these.

Re: Burning hydrogen at high temperatures ::snip for length::

Yup, nitrogen and oxygen like to party together in various different ways. IIRC, nitrogen can happily form oxidation states from -3 (ammonia) right up to +5 (dinitrogen pentoxide). For most of these gases, you will not be laughing if you breathe them.

Nitrogen dioxide, for example, will react readily with water to form nitric and nitrous acid. Get any amount of that in your lungs, and there's no coming back.

Twitter gives up fight against COVID-19 misinformation

based on the number of unexplained deaths within days amongst people previously fit following vaccines n+1, n+2

[citation really really really required]

I hear a lot of anecdotal "FOAF died from the vaccine" stories, but these are never backed up by published stats, and the person involved in never identified (or when they are, it turns out to be bullshit, like that "testicles swelled up" story from America)

I'm inclined to believe that if there were such things happening, the stats would be published, and there's not some vast conspiracy amongst the whole medical and scientific community to cover it up.

As they say, the plural of anecdote is not evidence.

Re: On Covid Misinformation

Whodathunkit, someone said something that might not have been 100% factually correct, so you can go and believe something that is 100% factually incorrect instead.

Two signs in the comms cabinet said 'Do not unplug'. Guess what happened

Keys are hard to find when the time is NOW!, especially keys that are seldom used.

They'll probably have been put in "a safe place", by someone else, who isn't present.

Blockchain needs a reason to exist, Boris Johnson tells roomful of blockchain pros

NFT

Now Futile Trash?