Posts by cyberdemon 3170 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Jan 2010
It does tend to detonate rather easily though, over a much wider range of concentrations than methane aka "natural gas". And there have been an oddly high number of " gas explosions" in the news recently. I wonder if any are related to the addition of hydrogen to the gas supply.
They can work in those conditions, but only with either a ground source (expensive, requires a lot of land compared to the backyard many UK houses have) or else the house needs to be -extremely- well insulated, which is not possible with old houses, and can lead to damp and mould problems. I'd be curious to know what your NZ house looks like in terms of insulation etc. Fundamentally if you extract a lot of heat from 100% humidity air which is just above freezing, then the moisture will freeze directly onto the heat exchanger and force a defrost cycle, which completely wrecks any efficiency gains, and reduces the lifespan of the heat exchanger (which when it eventually fails, will release a charge of refrigerant gas into the atmposphere..)
Unfortunately Hydrogen is devilishly difficult to store. If you cool it, then it needs to be ten times lower absolute temperature than LNG to liquefy. If you pressurise it, then it leaks through everything. If you do neither, then the energy density is pitiful.
As others have said, one of the biggest issues with electrification is resilience. A gas boiler's fan, pump and burner control unit will happily run on a 200W sine inverter, whereas Heat Pumps obviously cannot, and will lock themselves out for a long while after a short power outage, or else they damage themselves.
They definitely can't cope with "freezing fog", that's for sure.
The worst condition for an air source heat pump is 100% relative humidity (condensing) at just above freezing.
Yes, they CAN work at -10C, but in those conditions the air is very dry. Here in the UK, we frequently have cold AND wet weather.
Unfortunately scientific peer review is not as meritocratic as you think. In this area particularly It's political, and it's a groupthink. If your results don't toe the party line then they won't get published. If you set out to question the canon of climatology, no matter how rigorous your methods, you won't get funding.
Right so it's a choice of WWIII now, (if we try to force everyone in the world off fossil fuels before they have an alternative, thats what we will get), or else we wait until 2040 when the oil runs out, and have WWIII then.
My suggestion is that we use the resources we have to build nuclear reactors now, and if we can get them online by 2040 then we will have an alternative to oil, so perhaps can avoid the need to fight eachother.
If we 'just stop oil', then it's war now. If we do nothing, it's war later. If we build nukes, it's a small chance of long term survival, and a chance of war anyway.
If I were a billionaire, i'd be building my self sufficient bunker.
Can't afford an EV car, if I could I wouldn't see it as a good investment. Don't want a smart meter and solar panels are useless in the UK, especially without storage and subsidised tarrifs. They also cost a lot to make, cause a lot of environmental pollution where they are made etc and I am not convinced that overall they are any better than burning gas for the small amount that I use. Heat pump, you have got to be joking. I want my heating to work when I need it, and they provide no cost benefits outside of subsidies, bugger all CO2 benefits when the electricity comes from gas, and they are bloody expensive.
The only thing guaranteed to reduce consumption is not to consume. Don't use a car, don't use the boiler put on a wooly jumper instead like the rest of us have to. Buying a new thing like an electric car or a heat pump is just more rampant consumerism.
And as for solar panels, any solar panel living its miserable existence in the UK could be much happier, it could produce 5 times as much electricity for its manufacturing cost if we er, sent it to Rwanda
Installing them in the UK is as foolish as it is selfish. Just more greenwashing
Well, you said it yourself: we already hit the buffers and blew right past them.
The warming may be man made, or it may be sunspots and nothing to do with us, but either way there seems to be bugger all we can do about it, really.
Many of the things we try to do (eg CCS, electrification, mandatory smart meters & heat pumps, biomass etc), could actually make other more immediate problems worse. But they benefit a rich few greenwashers and authoritiarians.
I simply don't trust those people who say This is for your own good. There's a shortage of believable solutions, and a huge surplus of greenwashing and profiteering, and I think a lot of people on this forum including myself are sick of it, and saying to Hell with all of us.
> We invented steam engines, gas engines, jet turbines, and put them everywhere
Then we invented Lithium sodding batteries, and told ourselves that that it's fine, we can go on with the rampant consumerism, drain tropical aquifers for the lithium and send a few more kids down cobalt mines, while we tear up the tarmac in vehicles that go twice as fast and weigh four times as much as they need to, dumping their emissions "somewhere else".
before said batteries eventually wear out and/or explode in a plume of hydrogen fluoride, and yet we somehow tell ourselves that we are saving the planet
We can't expand forever, this planet is all we have. But at the rate we are going, we will hit the buffers, i.e. a massive war over the remaining resources.
> Nuclear power (boo hiss... its evil with a capital evil) runs 24/7/365, making gigawatts of power just for your electric car listed above (and some homes) with not making gigatonnes of CO2, just 1 tiny downside..
It would seem that the more that is spent on ensuring safety from something that people cannot see, hear, smell, feel, etc. the more people are scared of it.
That, and there is one hell of a powerful group of vested interests who have stood to gain from the sidelining of nuclear.
It's the one thing that oil, coal, renewables, biomass, CCS industries could all agree on: Nuclear is the enemy.
"In a just world, all fossil fuel use would end tomorrow."
In any ecosystem, if it has evolved to make use of a particular food source, lets say fungi in a forest consuming lignin, and you suddenly take that food source away overnight, would you expect the ecosystem to adapt, or to die? If you take it away gradually, it has a chance to find a new food source.
Human society has expanded rapidly since the Industrial Revolution based on the consumption of fossil fuels, which allow large amounts of energy to be stored in liquid or gas form, to be consumed when needed.
If you were to literally take away fossil fuels overnight, the majority of humanity would die. Is that what you want? Ending fossil fuels 'just like that' is a question of die now or die later.
There are alternative energy sources (nuclear, renewables) but since the green lobby have shunned nuclear (making themselves unwitting pawns of big oil I might add) that only leaves renewables, which are unreliable and cannot be stored, and we cannot suddenly adapt our society to cope with that.
If the UKAEA hadn't been pissing into the wind with Fusion for the last 50 years, we might have developed some better Fission designs that can make better use of the fuel (traditional uranium reactors only use around 2% of their fuel before it needs swapping out) and avoid issues with waste and weapons proliferation
Biomass is the worst of all the energy sources. I think it ought to be renamed "Green Coal" because just like dirty brown coal which is partially fossilised wood versus relatively-clean black anthracite which is completely-fossilised, "green coal" is unfossilised wood which has even higher tar content and even more carbon and pollutants per kWh than the dirtiest of brown coal. It doesn't grow back, you are just chopping down the only decent carbon sink that we have and are burning it. Bio-fuel oil is burning food, most often ex-rainforest Palm Oil. It's a dirty, dirty business.
So, I think the COP is right in a way. Since we shunned nuclear, our only option is to keep using fossil fuels until we can either reverse the damage done to the popularity of nuclear, or find some magical way to store renewable energy, or adapt our society to cope with intermittent energy supply, which inevitably means an economic contraction where the poor would suffer the most
In the style of is not protected, (provided you are honest about whose style you are imitating..) But passing off as is, and there is a fine line when using AI generated tripe content.
If you post an AI image or text that has been explicitly generated In the style of someone else, but you do not explicitly state that it is NOT an original work, then it could be considered as passing off.
Similarly if you as a human copy someone else's artistic style, it's fine if you say this is done in the style of so-and-so, but if you don't say that, then you are passing it off as your own, and you could be sued.
Well my point was that it would not be possible to assign a single copyright to something that is a derivative, in varying degrees, of millions of other works. But it might be possible to estimate the proportions based on the prompt and model inputs, either by automatic means or legal/regulatory wranglings. All "AI" outputs are derivative at the end of the day, but some outputs are more derivative of specific inputs than others. And it is possible via the prompt to steer the so-called AI towards outputting something very similar to one of its inputs.
Prompts which excessively reference a particular source in the dataset should, morally speaking, attribute some credit to that source for the output, but I'm not sure how technically feasible that is.
If feasible then you could perhaps standardise an algorithm/model which attributes relative credit. To avoid excessive administration and to allow for some profit to be made, we could say that only sources which are credited more than a certain percentage should be credited at all.
The more complex and original the prompt, the more credit is given to the person using the AI tool. But i could imagine people stuffing gibberish into the prompt to get round that, or even using another AI to generate an 'original and complex' prompt, which is why it couldn't work in practice.
With existing copyright law, if I mashed an AI hard enough that I could get it to spit out a verbatim copy of one of Mr Block's books, then i'm sure any court would assign copyright to him, and not me or the model's operators. But if one word or paragraph are different then it becomes a lot more murky. This is why I think we need something better than copyright which can assign rights in varying degrees to the different entities from which the generated content was derived.
Some credit may be deserved by the prompt writer or the model's owners/operators, but definitely never all of it, is my opinion.
This should send some shivers down some spines so I expect a few downvotes.
Supposing if you were to ask a generative AI "Write a novel by Lawrence Bock" or "A mural of a dead cat by Banksy" then it should be possible to estimate how much of your query was original and how much was derivative from various parts of the dataset, and assign some kind of partial copyright
In the first case it would be 100℅ derivative, mostly to Mr Bock but also to the entire dataset of novels.
In the second case, you might be awarded 1% for your insightful suggestion of using a dead cat.
Of course it would never work because no such notion of a partial copyright exists in law afaik, and because it would be trivial to circumvent or fool the system. It would also be more complicated and expensive to estimate attribution than not to, so nobody would bother.
Alternatively if the prompts and an identifier of the dataset used for any AI output published had to be recorded and legally declared, then it could be banged out in court at a later date, but that would be even more expensive than my first suggestion, and just as unlikely to work in practice.
El Reg could have provided a link for posterity.. There are a few clips from 2000 on the U-bend.. Paxman doesn't look terribly impressed.
"The idea is that your mobile phone will vibrate in your pocket, and Ananova will be there to give you exactly what you want.. (fnarr fnarr)"
I have heard that, and I am a little skeptical how a 69MW Wind Farm can jump start the grid when the UK's biggest power station (Drax, 2.6 GW) had issued a warning that they aren't sure if even they are big enough to do it. (or perhaps they are too big?) I'm not sure how it works to synchronise and connect only the generators and disconnect all of the loads, when all power and comms are down.
But nevertheless, I think they really need to organise a full scale test of the Black Start mechanism. Much better to have a little disruption in peacetime, than to wait until we really need it and all the neighbouring grids are down due to a solar flare or enemy action.
Another part of the grid that could be affected by geomagnetic storms, I reckon, are XLPE-insulated underground cables, whether DC or AC. Overground transmission lines have a spark gap at each insulator, which protects the insulator from overvoltage due to lightning strikes etc, and these are spaced every few hundred metres. Underground cables i think would see just as much magnetic induction(?), but there is nowhere for the energy to go, because they don't have regularly spaced spark gaps, and they could also more easily overheat because they are coated in plastic and buried in a tunnel. Perhaps one of our resident HV power systems engineers could comment here
> The Victorians also struggled with the effect of space weather in 1859 when a huge solar eruption caused a geomagnetic storm that interfered with railway signalling and telegraph lines.
That was the "Carrington Event" that you mention
Current UK railway signalling equipment is pretty old, but I don't think much of it dates back to Victorian times. Signals changing from red to green is pretty unlikely. Signals failing altogether, far, far more likely.
However I'm much more worried about the effect of a CME on the world's interconnected electricity grids. HVDC interconnectors could be quite vulnerable to massive common mode current, and they tend to trip offline very easily.
The UK grid operators are also quite worried (search for "blackstart") that without the hulking coal plants with their massive turbine inertia, and with HVDC links and renewables requiring an existing 50Hz grid to sync to before they can supply power, it will be difficult to restart the grid if it does go down completely.
Sounds like it is a supply-chain attack on some kind of Cloud CRM (which ought to be banned in itself), so it could be any charity, anywhere
This is exactly the reason I gave to the chugger (Charity Mugger, the annoying clipboard-people who stop you in public places) at my local train station. She was collecting for some charity and I said I'd love to donate to you, here's some cash. "No I can't take cash since Covid". Well do you have a contactless card machine then? "No, you need to put your details into this IPad". So much for the Covid excuse then..
I told her there is no way I am putting my details in, because I don't frankly know who she is really working for, and I don't want to be on some database of people who could be persuaded to give to charity. "Oh, we don't sell your details, we take privacy very seriously". Can you guarantee that your data won't be hacked and leaked all over the internet? Er..
I asked her so then why can't you take cash or contactless card payments then? It's obvious that the marketing CRM database is as valuable if not moreso than the donations she is collecting. She started to get annoyed and said well I obviously don't want to give to charity at all.. On the contrary, waving her a £20 note, please take my cash. Take it! She would not, and fortunately for me I had a train to catch which gave me an excuse to end the ridiculous conversation.
Are you David Cameron?
You didn't reckon on the price of B****t though, did you.
There is such a concept as a hybrid fusion-fission reactor. Fusion reactors can't produce a lot of heat on their own (the reaction happens surrounded by vacuum for a start..) But they are very good neutron sources, and it is trivially easy (unlike fission reactors) to turn them off.
Thus, a fusor can be used as a neutron source to activate sub-critical Uranium. Basically the fusion becomes an on/off switch for the fission reaction, and because it is low-enriched, there isn't so much of a weapons proliferation issue.
Fusion as an energy source on its own though, is likely to be a dead end. May I remind you that the only practical fusion reactor that we have, that big one up there, has approximately the same power density as a compost heap. It's just such a mind bogglingly enormous compost heap that it glows. That's why when we try to do fusion on earth, to get a useful power out if it, we need even higher pressures and temperatures than the sun
Funny how the world is playing out to the plot of Deus Ex
When there are only two main players in a major marketplace, and the vastly bigger of the two, owned by a company with almost infinitely-deep pockets, deliberately operates at a loss, isn't that called anticompetitive?
GitHub isn't so much a marketing tool for Microsoft as a data-mine.. I was flabbergasted that they were allowed to buy it.
Not to mention the godawful and privacy-invasive HP Cloud Print service
No, I do not want my Printer to be on the Internet of Things, thanks! What's the point of printing to a printer on the other side of the country / world? It's a printer for goodness sake, it spits out a physical piece of paper that requires physical presence to pick up..
If you happen to be not near your printer but need to print something for later.. Save the PDF and print over WiFi when you're near enough to pick it up, instead of handing all your private documents to HP!
& HP have got to be the worst printer manufacturer out there when it comes to crapware, planned-obsolescence and refill-prevention DRM chips
> My point remains. We do not currently have the technologies to feed 7 or 8 o 10 million people and fuel a modern civilization.
But we do! It was called Nuclear Power, but the green lobby killed it.
It is now prohibitively expensive because the more it spends on safety, the less the uninformed masses trust it.
Er, no.
Basically a toy helicopter rotor has no friction until it gets up to speed. It doesn't need to produce power at low speeds, so it is possible to use sensorless (back EMF) commutation.
Encoders allow a brushless motor to produce torque at low or zero speed.
Even a (brushless) toy car needs Hall sensors, because it cannot, without low-speed torque, spin the brushless motor to a speed where the back-EMF can be measured, because the wheel is in contact with the road.
An EV doesn't need a clutch, but it does need an electronic sensor (an encoder) instead.
While it's possible to maintain and replace a mechanical component after the manufacturer has gone bust, it's harder to maintain and replace an electronic component
No, it's only Trussonomics if you don't do anything else to balance the books.
They could increase other taxes, such as income. If people have slightly less money to spend (because of higher income tax) but stuff costs less by the same proportion, does that not reduce inflation? What am I missing here?
> Why do we need to import nurses?
Because to become a nurse in the UK, you need a degree. It's easier, cheaper and quicker to qualify as a nurse in other countries.
And since UK nurses and junior doctors are not paid enough to recoup the cost of that degree, not many people want to study nursing.
But fundamentally, if you expel foreign skilled workers, they are gone pretty quickly.. But you can't magic up domestic skilled workers to replace them. You need years to train them up, if you can even attract enough people into the trades. It drives up inflation because the existing domestic workers that there are will demand higher pay, doing less work overall only for those who can afford it. That's why plumbers/builders/electricians/mechanics are so expensive, and why healthcare staff are moving to private healthcare providers.
> Where does the gov then get the lost VAT revenue
Well, the idea would be that it would stimulate the economy, so in the long run they would get more VAT revenue from the increased growth.
But what they did instead was to cut inheritance tax - that does absolutely nothing to stimulate the economy, and it only benefits the rich, i.e. tory voters.
