Posts by cyberdemon

Huawei's UK tech eviction reportedly caused Sky to fall on mobile customers

Re: Don't keep repeating a lie

Do they have the facility for "OTA" firmware updates?

If so, then they have the facility to install a backdoor..

Re: Don't keep repeating a lie

GTFO, our backdoors are for the Chinese secret police and organisations approved by the CCP, of which the NSA is not one.

Nuclear-powered datacenters: What could go wrong?

Re: One thing commonly overlooked

Interesting post, but it misses the point that the vast, vast majority of the "low-level waste" that you talk about, is just stuff that is "potentially contaminated" so has to be classified as nuclear waste, even if it is not radioactive at all. The disposable plastic and paper overalls, gloves, overshoes that I had to wear when entering any controlled area, for example. These were packed into barrels and presumably buried somewhere.

On the other end of the scale, your other post mentions the site of the Trinity test, where we took a load of Plutonium and detonated it out in the open, causing incalculable orders of magnitude more contamination than any civil nuclear operation, not even Chernobyl would have come close to that. Yet the people of New Mexico have not turned into 'ghouls'..

We have daft rules like ALARA/ALARP that say anything that is classified as being part of the nuvlear industry must have emissions targets of zero, while the rest of industry gets away with murder, relatively speaking. Coal power plants chuck up vastly more radioactive material into the environment than the nuclear industry does. The site where I worked had a mass panic because some visiting scientist made a radioactive source out of a box of Gas lamp mantles (which are mildly radioactive) and they were far stronger than any of the sources the site was permitted to use, had to be shipped out at great expense and treated as intermediate level nuclear waste! These are mantles you can buy at a camping shop.

It really is insanity. The IAEA must be run by a mix of CND fifth columnists and Oil industry vested interests.

So why don't utility companies go for farms of SMRs then?

Also, nuclear reactors are fairly prone to suddenly tripping offline, due to extremely cautious failsafe systems, and I don't see why SMRs should be any different in that regard..

Used singly for a datacentre, they would need Diesel back-up, and a very long running tank for the time it takes to re-certify a reactor after it has tripped a safety system. But in a farm of a hundred or so, this could be handled easily without any major outage.

> It didn't go commercial, for reasons.

Reasons including the flip flopping of Margaret Thatcher.. Same reason we've barely got a railway left but have lots of motorways full of expensive, polluting, coffins on wheels.. And people moan on about the safety of nuclear power!

But yes, you're right, if they aren't useful for a private power utility, they're not going to be useful to a software company. Unless the software company just wants to do a bit of greenwashing, as mentioned in the webcast

But I would contest that the reason they're not useful is more to do with politics, fearmongering and overzealous regulation than anything technical.

Re: One thing commonly overlooked

> Perhaps AI will provide the solar breakthrough we desperately need?

"We don't know who struck first, us or them. But we do know that it was us, who scorched the sky.."

'The Matrix' wouldn't have been as exciting if the machines could have simply exterminated all the humans and built their own SMRs to power their datacentres, eh?

Edit: Someone obviously missed the /s on the end of your post. Next time use the Joke icon, for the left-ponders

Or, perhaps they disagreed with your claim about the 'nasty business' of making fuel rods. Care to enlighten us on that one? Does it involve oompa-loompas?

Re: Interesting

No, i think it's more interesting that the likes of Microsoft and Google are betting hard against the idea of a future grid supported by just renewables and storage. That they are so seriously considering having their own SMRs with all the regulatory headaches that entails, suggests that they are seriously worried that the national grids may have long-duration, severe, perhaps complete outages in the near future. On that worry I would agree with them.

Local power outages don't normally affect datacentres because they usually have their own substations connected to the national transmission system which rarely goes down except for dire emergencies.

I would have thought that datacentres are also pretty good at load-shaping. They can be told to scale back demand without affecting software (except for response times, etc) by suspending CPU cores, pausing processes or changing mainboard power budgets.

Microsoft's recent decision in ireland to colocate with an OCGT gas plant, I thought was more about making a bit of money on the balancing market, and maximising the use of their expensive grid transformer by being able to put it in 'full reverse' by powering their servers from auxiliary Diesel generators and simultaneously running the gas plant, to prop up the grid at times of dire need and juicy balancing prices.

But to put a nuke in would actually say they are preparing for the potential long-term/permanent downfall of the national grid, which is only likely to happen through war...

Now where did I put my cold war bunker

The alternative to stopping climate change is untested carbon capture tech

Re: This is bonkers

Because in China, local landowners and planning objectors are simply relocated to Xinjiang, and protesters are suppressed with machineguns

Re: Carbon sinks

Could we perhaps design some container to either keep the air out or the water in?

Expensive perhaps, but maybe less expensive than charring it, where so much of its anticipated benefit would be negated up front?

Re: Energy cost

> I've no doubt Carbon capture schemes can be shown to capture carbon

I've no doubt that I can take a piss in the ocean. But I'd be rather deluded if I said that it would have a significant effect on its overall pH.

Carbon capture schemes a) don't work, because they require a rather infeasible amount of er, energy, to work, and b) aren't stable. The CO2 even if it could be captured, is much harder to store for thousands of years, per TWh than nuclear waste

What they -are- useful for, is as a money spinner for owners of empty oil wells.

Re: This is bonkers

There has also been rather a lot of FUD spread about nuclear power over the last few decades... Cui bono? The trillion dollar fossil fuel industry, perhaps? The renewables gang, too.. We all know that Wind and Gas are symbiotic.

And now we have flipping Drax and the biomass/BECCS lobby pretending they can deliver "negative emissions"..

One point I agree on is that we have run out of road.. It is too late to power our current civilisation with nuclear. Toxic politics has made it impossible to build nuclear power stations in an acceptable timeframe and cost.

The only likely outcome AFAICT is a devastating third world war which will bring the human population back to a sustainable level. Perhaps a few Inuit tribespeople might survive.. Hopefully they can someday build a new and better civilisation on the lessons of our doomed one.

I think you are delusional if you really believe that humanity hasn't had much of an impact on this planet. Just look at deforestation, factory farming, and the latest trend of chopping down trees and burning them because they are cheaper than oil (and because we can scam politicians into thinking this is somehow good for the planet..) Micro-plastic pollution is having an utterly terrible effect on wildlife.

Ok on the scale of Billions of solar orbits, you could say that all life is a blip. But that doesn't really help anyone does it..

As to whether or not CO2 is solely to blame.. I actually have a degree of sympathy for Piers Corbyn there. But nevertheless it is obvious that humanity's continued expansion is unsustainable. I agree with Agent Smith on that one.. Globalisation has allowed us to grow beyond the planet's means to support us, and when globalisation collapses.. See icon.

Re: Carbon sinks

Why char it? How about just burying it? In the absence of Oxygen, there's nothing to turn it into CO2..? Where's the Paris icon when you need her..

Could we not ban drax, and tell them to just stop burning trees? Let's bury them instead?

Why can't datacenter operators stop thinking about atomic power?

Yes, just ask Thames Water

Many 'green snobs' also have their own wood-burning stove and/or pizza oven. Cos it's green, innit.

When the crap goes up in the atmosphere via the chimney or into the ocean via the toilet, it's all fine.

But the trouble with 'nuclear' waste is that it's dead easy to spot in the most miniscule amounts, and it's possible to prove where it came from.

Next time post a link to something that I can read, without having to listen to some knobhead youtuber wittering on.

But yes, obviously nuclear power is far less polluting than combustion, which dumps its waste into the atmosphere continually.

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

Re: Couple of fun bits from the Pi launch article you missed

> Second, the custom power chip they codeveloped (with Renesas) is capable of delivering 20 amps.

Do you know what voltage the USB-C port requests/accepts? Because from the looks of it (no inductors in sight) it is still 5 volts, which would be disappointing, because we'd still need short/thick cables that can carry a high current without too much voltage drop.

Re: Analogue audio jack

You could make beep and boop noises with a small mosfet connected to a GPIO, a little 8 ohm speaker and a capacitor.

I assume for audio, the HDMI connector works?

Twitter, aka X, tops charts for misinformation, EU official says

Re: Twitter / X is a sewer

> X is like an open sewer, with an endless supply of turds floating to the top.

Ah, I see Elon has found employment for all of the ex- Thames Water execs then..

California governor vetoes bill requiring human drivers in robo trucks

Re: using firearms and explosives to commit hijack and robbery

> I don't give a fuck if autonomous vehicles are hijacked and robbed.

That would give a future governor the excuse to allow autonomous vehicles to have autonomous guns, which can shoot back to defend themselves..

And the next step after that is ED-209s instead of patrol cars

Sadly, big business always wins, and attacks by individuals just make it stronger.

Google killing Basic HTML version of Gmail In January 2024

Re: “a core consideration“

They already know the content of the email, badoc HTML or not..

Full fat GMail is more about knowing how much time you spend reading each one, the exact path of your mouse cursor, your 'typing gait', etc. I wouldn't be at all surprised if Chrome had an eyeball-tracking API for supported hardware.. (Pixel perhaps?)

I use the basic HTML version on my phone.. It works much better than the 'full' version, which tries to make me use the App, which of course won't work on this de-googled phone (/e/ OS)

US military F-35 readiness problems highlighted in aptly timed report

Re: "we stand ready to partner with the government"

> The fatal flaw was thinking they didn't need to pay for in house expertise to run the design phase of the program. So the whole project was stocked by the worst of the self serving industry it was supposed to reform.

Argh. Now where have I heard that one before..

Ah yes, every major engineering project the UK has undertaken since the days of David Cameron..

Have the UK government somehow infiltrated the USA?

What IS "call me Dave" doing these days? He's not working in the DOD is he?

Google on trial: Feds challenge deals that set your web search defaults

Re: setting browser defaults

Here we all are blasting Google for bribing its way into the default browser spot, yet somehow Microsoft gets away with forcing itself on users, not even giving them the option of using their browser of choice, unless they resort to third-party hacks.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Re: Someone with a clue :)

Yeah and what happens if there is an incident at one of Britain's three (yes, three) LNG import terminals?

They are already a major bottleneck, with LNG ships queuing to unload, just to maintain the UK's gas needs.

Icon: the energy contained in one LNG tanker is approximately the same as one of these

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

The point is, home AC charging of EVs without extra taxes etc. is effectively subsidised, since it pays no fuel duty or road tax. If i filled an ICEV with "red diesel" and dodged road tax, then it would be cheaper to run than an EV.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

They can pry my Bakolite electromechanical meter out of my cold, dead hands

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Not if all the factories and their supply chains have closed down, because in the 2020s we made them unprofitable with our daft pie-in-the-sky legislation! We'll have to import Russian Ladas or something.

I'm sure someone has thought all this through, and is laughing maniacally right now..

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

> Whilst EVs will place a load on the grid, the larger load is heating.

If we stop producing Diesel engines, transmissions, ECUs, exhausts, etc. because they are not profitable anymore, then we will have to consider electrifying road freight. That is where most of the energy is, not your teslas, not even your stupid SUVs.

Eventually someone will realise that Electric road freight is just not feasible due to the weight of the batteries. But it will be too bloody late.

You're right that heating is a big part of it, perhaps the biggest, but you can't sit there while we are at 10% car adoption and say that we can feasibly electrify all road vehicles, when we haven't even STARTED on freight

XLinks

I have never heard anything so daft, what a waste of copper to drag those electrons 7000km from Morocco and back, only to be blown up by a russian sub when the time is right.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

> Straw man alert!!! I have literally never before heard the idea that anyone is trying to decommission either the gas grid or petrol stations.

take a look at this then It will be shut down when it is no longer profitable to maintain.

It will happen faster than you think, due to positive feedback.

The government bans gas boilers for new builds and private landlords, that means the same money to maintain the network and profitability has to be made from fewer customers. So the price goes up. More people switch away from gas and the cycle continues.

EVs are being adopted faster than anticipated too, because it is no longer profitable to invest in a factory that produces ICEs.

Re: carbon capture technology

That's the same argument as Fusion though.

Of course, LFTR would be great, but let's not let it delay us in building reactors that we CAN build right away.

The only beneficiaries of the anti nuclear panic as far as I can tell, are the oil and renewables industries. And Drax, which I don't count as renewable

Of course I agree that we should be researching better fission designs though. I've said here before if only we could have spent on that instead of Fusion

Re: Someone is working at the 'skipping the infrastructure' problem

> the original quote of most cars having less than 2 sq meters, which is incorrect and leads to vastly different numbers

The original quote was "little more than 2 square metres" which is not the same as "less than 2 square metres". And it does not lead to "vastly different numbers" it's the same order of magnitude whether its 2 square metres or 3. You are splitting hairs.

Re: The electric cult

Is it all a clever psyop to weaken western nations before WWIII drops? Or is it just incompetence with a lot of greed and corruption thrown in? We'll probably never know. Hanlon's Razor is getting blunt and rusty these days.

Re: carbon capture technology

Not just profit! They are actually being subsidised by the taxpayer for their tree-burning, which produces more CO2, organic, and particulate pollution per MWh than the dirtiest of dirty German brown coal.

The tories don't have the balls to cut their subsidies, mainly because they are on the list of shareholders and beneficiaries. Will Labour do any better? I hope so, but somehow I doubt it.

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

> "Something like 75-80% of vehicles in the UK are able to be parked off road at home"

> I've no idea where the fuck the RAC got these figures

I think these figures come from insurance companies and they increased suddenly and inexplicably around the time when it became widely known that claiming to have off-road parking reduced one's insurance premiums

carbon capture technology

See icon.

Can you point to ONE example of CCS that actually works?? I can only think of one: A tree. When it is old, leave it to transfer its carbon i to the soil or chop it down and build something with it. Whatever you do don't burn it or else you undo the carbon capture.

As far as I, and the editors of the Private Eye, can tell, CCS and BECCS is a convinient pipedream that allows the likes of Drax, Shell and BP to print yet more money while pretending to be "green".

But if it really is feasible to store 100 million tons of CO2 under the sea with no risk of it ever leaking out, then surely it must be possible to store a few thousand tonnes of nice solid vitrified nuclear waste under the sea with no risk of it ever leaking out.

Someone with a clue :)

Interesting and informative post, thanks Max.

As a utilities man then, do you actually think that it is wise for the UK to get rid of all energy distribution systems except for electricity? Are we ever going to test the "black start" plan? Will it work?

Are you at all concerned about the frequency and voltage stability in the UK, especially with all the nonlinear loads being added? I notice NG are doing "demand control by voltage reduction" tests, but I predict that won't work, as most loads these days are regulated constant power loads, e.g. IT equipment, inverter driven HVAC, industrial robots - as you reduce the voltage they will just draw more current. Even heaters will respond to a drop in voltage by increasing their duty cycle if they have a good thermostat. EVs are the exception as they can reduce their rate of charging if you ask nicely.

Re. HTLS. Yes I have heard of this and tbh it sounds on the face of it, a terrible idea to run pylons at high temperatures, however little sagging occurs. It's inefficient. We all know that resistive losses go with the square of current, so running transmission lines at such high loads that they get hot, is surely a fools game. What is the loss in terms of MW/km of an HTLS transmission line under its max load?

Is there any chance of a new voltage standard between 400V and 11kV? It strikes me that something around 2kV could massively improve distribution capacity for EV charging while saving on copper. We don't really want 1000A underground cables do we? They would be very expensive, i think.

How does directional drilling work in urban areas where the exact contents of the ground is not well known? Is there anything to stop you accidentally hitting a gas pipe, water main, fibre optic or another electricity cable?

Yes I know about GIS. Doesn't it involve surrounding busbars and switchgear with a gas which is about 23000 times worse than CO2 for the greenhouse effect, and which never ever gets destroyed or removed by nature? What happens if it leaks? It needs to be replaced as fast as it is leaking or else the busbar will arc to its casing and fail, no? How much SF6 do you get through?

Re: Someone is working at the 'skipping the infrastructure' problem

Depends on the size of your car! What is the roof area of a "tiny little 2 seater Smart car"? I can barely imagine one square metre of useful solar panel mounted to such a vehicle..

Re: apples and (im)perfect oranges

> PS Yes, I did pass on your strawman.

Would that be the flaming, stinking strawman? LiS batteries are well known for exploding violently without warning, much worse than NMC Lithium batteries. They burned down a whole building on the site where I used to work.

Re: If have the extra power to refine more petrol...

> At the very least, there will need to be some sort of negotiation between the car and the grid as to whether/when it can charge overnight

Yes and that will lead to a loss of equality i.e. I predict there will be an auction system whereby you set your max bid for power and your car may or may not be charged in the morning, depending on the load on your local transformer and the bids placed by your neighbours.

That way, the fat cats at the electricity companies will be paid for their own incompetence - the less they invest in your infrastructure, the more money they will make!

Re: apples and (im)perfect oranges

I had to look up Nirvana Fallacy but I think "net zero through electrification of everything" fits the definition provided to me by Google..

The trouble with Lithium Batteries is that they became too good too quickly. The scientists involved (some of whom I know personally) stumbled upon what is electrochemically just about the best battery possible. Everyone assumed that the tech would improve at a comparable rate to other tech, but it hasn't, because we found the best chemistry so early on.

Now, we are tweaking and perfecting the engineering, but not the science. We cannot increase power density without sacrificing energy density or safety. We can't increase safety without sacrificing power or energy density. It's just a classic "Engineering Triangle".

Re: Cost of refining oil

Yep. 5 million x 2Wh vape batteries = 10MWh or 200 EVs per week being thrown in the bin, to be crushed and set fire to our recycling facilities.

That's so bad it could be considered hybrid warfare..

Re: Evolutionary dead end

If you say so.

Meanwhile the ministers have no clue about anything except how to profit from the collapse of the country.

Nope

Even in the sunniest places on earth, it would have very disappointing performance.

It's a gimmick, sadly.

Eventually we will all realise that the promise of EVs for everyone and having everything powered by renewable electricity was another gimmick..

The only feasible way to cut carbon emissions to what we are saying is needed, is to drastically reduce consumption i.e. not to have cars, central heating, hot showers, meat etc. at all, and to vastly reduce our numbers on this planet. I can think of one feasible path to that, it's achievable in a few years... See icon.

And then after the war it'll turn out to have been sunspots all along

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

For the downvoter: that's obviously not what I want to happen, just what i think -will- happen.

If we hadn't shunned fission and instead took the research money that we wasted on fusion and spent it on improved fission designs, we should have had energy that really was "Too cheap to meter".

But, sadly there is more money to be made for the privatised utility companies from the wildly fluctuating prices that renewables cause, and there is lots of money and data to be had from surveillance, so I believe in future everything will be smart-metered.

We already have 'black box' accelerometer/GPS devices that you can fit to your car for a 'discount' on your insurance.

On modern, (ULEZ-compliant) cars, these surveillance features are built-in and could easily be made mandatory.

Apple races to patch the latest zero-day iPhone exploit

Re: new to IT

> No one reading this needs to worry about being hacked by these exploits, because NSO Group goes to great lengths to insure that only a few thousand people in the world in total will have Pegasus used against them.

.. And if you believe that, you'll believe anything!

UK rejoins the EU's €100B Horizon sci-tech funding program

Re: @JMiles

I'm fairly convinced that Brexit was the first test of the sabotage of democracy by Facebook et al on a major western democracy. Without Brexit, we may not have had Trump. Bolsonaro. Modi. We may not have had the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Will Brexit eventually lead to, or at least hasten, WWIII? Quite possibly it will. How can you call something like that a "lie"?

If you like to play along with the illusion of privacy, smart devices are a dumb idea

Re: "Bose products are shuffling info off to the Meta social media"

You forgot "don't pay through the BOSE"

Smart Home

All of this bollocks reminds me of the old joke about the Smart Home..

A bloke visits a showhome for the new Microsoft House.

The salesman explains to him that everything in the house is automated by voice command. More than just the lights and music etc. This house can do anything. If he wants a coffee, the house makes it. If he wants to sleep, it will make his bed.

So he asks

"Find me a seat" and a robot arrives with a chair.

"Cook me some dinner" and a robot arrives a while later with a steaming dish.

So he looks around, gobsmacked at this house that will do anything on command, and says

"Well, bugger me."

BMW deems drivers worthy of warmth, ends heated car seat subscription

Re: connected services as a strategic imperative and a driver of future revenue

How about the weight of extra batteries needed to power the heated seats?

Bombshell biography: Fearing nuclear war, Musk blocked Starlink to stymie Ukraine attack on Russia

Re: Is it possible ( by dredging or whatever ) to construct a deepwater port?

It depends on how much value you place on human life, vs your ability to buy/construct specialised heavy machinery

But at this point, moving Mount Olympus would have been cheaper.