* Posts by itzman

1945 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2011

Space nukes: The unbelievably bad idea that's exactly that ... unbelievable

itzman
Mushroom

Re: Game Theoretic Analysis

Sadly your game theory relies on sane and Christian morality following national leaders.

A world in which you are the last man standing and all that complicated tech you were afraid of and couldn't duplicate has ceased to exist, along with anything that stands in your way, and billions of people occupying land that you quite fancy owning, as well as a few billion you couldn't offer a future to , is an ideal outcome from the likes of the Ayatollah, and Putin.

And is not such a bad outcome if all those dead people were people you technically owed billions of dollars to, as well.

The nuclear Ctrl-Alt-Delete reboot of civilisations is favoured by many people .

And the winners write the history books.

itzman

Re: That was my thought, too.

Not nearly as much money as Putin has given them.

Putins oil income is in the hands of a few oligarchs and the state, who have no reason not to deploy it entirely towards benefiting Russia's enlargement and their own pockets.

Affordable, self-healing power grids are closer than you think

itzman
Facepalm

If it were that easy, everyone would be doing it.

More eco nonsense from YAGS - Yet Another Grant Seeker.

Get the gummint OUT OF TE WAY with its regulations and subsidies and bureaucrats and let the market discover what works.

New cars bought in the UK must be zero emission by 2035 – it's the law

itzman

Re: Think of the Grid!

Drax I thought still had one coal boiler.

But the ones converted to wood cannot be retro converted easily.

itzman

Re: Think of the Grid!

Ah! Another Art Student who Cant Do Sums.

Try computing the energy content of all the road fuel sold annually, taking an reasonable fraction - say 30% - and converting to KWh, and dividing by the hours in a year, to get the *average* amount of extra electricity required - even assuming the grid is up to it.

It comfortable exceeds existing generating capacity. Do the sums. Preferably without taking your socks off when numbers greater than ten are involved

Scientists mull Solar Radiation Management – a potential climate-change stop-gap

itzman

Re: Denier no more?

The denial of the overwhelming body evidence of refuting AGW is where the plot holes lie.

itzman
Facepalm

Re: What is it with morons

But who will bell the renewable cat and build these batteries made of unobtanium and fairy fart electrolyte?

In the end hte cost of a totally (or even partially) renewable grid far far exceeds a nuclear one, which doesn't need all the fairy farts. And handwavey technology that not only does not exist, but cannot.

Nature does not change the laws of electrochemistry just because someone wants to sell you a windmill.

itzman

folks in attendance...

...pretty much all agreed on one unequivocal fact: the Earth is warming and it's warming quickly.

Er no, that only because its morning here. In Australia its cooling quickly.

Nuclear-powered datacenters: What could go wrong?

itzman

Re: Why will SMR's be less regulated

Because they are small enough to not need active cooling under SCRAM conditions - they can use simple convection, and that removes a huge chunk of regulatory nonsense. You don't need to regulate a triply redundant backup system that you didn't install.

Because they are small enough to be build in a factory and *type approved*, thus not needing specific regulatory approval at each site, and small enough to be shipped more or less complete to the installation site.

And in the context of data centres, cheap enough so that you can have two for redundancy, and generate revenue from the second one when the first is operational.

SMRs are also cheap enough to be fundable by large industrial and IT corporations in a way a 3GW monster is not.

itzman

Re: Interesting

I havbe a relative in Norway. The price of electricity has doubled now they can sell it to the UK

itzman
Unhappy

Re: Interesting

I think that for commercial organisations running an SMR may have nothing to do with outages, but a simple acknowledgement of the fact that a modern SMR will deliver electricity at less than one third the price of electricity sourced from a 'renewable' grid.

China bans export of rare earth processing kit

itzman
Angel

"as the world moves towards net zero"

Bless!

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

itzman

Wet air is actually warmer.

|The rate of evaporation of sweat is massively greater in dry air. I can tolerate 50°C in a dry desert but am suffering in tropical damp heat of 35°C.

In winter it is the wind and the low *absolute* humidity that punishes.

I think the issue with people from cold countries was highlighted by my niece, who moved to te UK from Sweden at one point. There was snow on the ground and it was -5 °C but I dressed in simply a T shirt and IIRC a fleece. And drove to see her...

'Where is your winter coat?'

'Don't need one - 50 yards from the car to your door isn't going to kill me'

And that is it really, in cold climates people expect clothes with several inches of insulation and a windproof outer layer *as a matter of course*. We are more used to milder temperatures so we simply don't bother with all that arctic level crap.

And then feel cold as a result

itzman

Re: Just trying to work out which Led Zeppelin album to put on

"When the levee breaks"...Hydrogen scares me almost as much as lithium batteries do.

'Wobbly spacetime' is latest stab at unifying physics

itzman

Dead cert bet

No scientific theory is ever proven 'right'. At best. it's 'not wrong, so far'...

NASA to tear the wings off plane in the name of sustainability

itzman

NASA are not exactly amateurs...

Unlike the posters here.

Everything in airliner design is geared towards reducing total lifetime cost of the passenger mile. As engine designs develop, and the market changes, aircraft design also must change.

There is a complex optimisation between aircraft cruising speed (= more passenger miles per yer) , aircraft drag (=more fuel per passenger mile), wingspan (=less terminals can accomodate giant planes) and wing aspect ratio, (long thin wings have less drag - sailplanes) (=greater structural issues, needing more weight to bring strength).

Adding a strut creates lift, and reduces the need for wing root strength, but adds drag.

One assumes the overall equation is marginally positive, or they wouldn't be doing it.

You get the internet you deserve

itzman

Recycled excrement

Is infinitely sustainable and terribly green...and that's what we have been told we want and need.

Look! Up in the sky! Proof of concept for satellites beaming energy to Earth!

itzman

Of course...

...the cost and ecological footprint would only be 100 times greater than a nuclear plant or ten times greater than a windfarm, but hey, money grows on magic trees.

Sizewell C nuclear plant up for review as UK faces financial black hole

itzman

You may be sure

Not one penny of renewable subsidies will be affected.

And the UK gummint is not funding Sizewell. EDF is. At a strike price well below the holistic cost of any renewable+grid extension+ gas backup + rotten capacity factor + short lifetime + STOR plant + battery short term grid stabilisation + cost of inevitable grid outages..

Micro molten salt reactor can fit on a truck, power 1k homes. When it's built

itzman

U233 and bombs...

Really not a good idea. Its a nasty hot material and you dont want your military anywhere near it.

Japan reverses course on post-Fukushima nuclear ban

itzman

Re: Wind and solar

France decided to use rivers to cool some of its reactors, but then the envirionmental lobby decreed that warm fish was a nono, so they werent allowed to fully utilise them

Japan has a lot of coastline.

Windmills kill birds and bats and parachutists and cause sleep disturbances in humans.

Windmills are not safe.

itzman

Re: Wind and solar

"The development of nuclear power does not imply that renewable energy sources are not also being developed."

That depends on whether engineer politicians or profiteers are setting the policy:

"There is nothing a fleet of dispatchable nuclear power plants cannot do that cannot be done worse and more expensively and with higher carbon emissions and more adverse environmental impact by adding intermittent renewable energy."

itzman

Re: Similar to the way scrap metal is treated on decomissioning

Yeah, the science is settled. a gamma ray from material that came out of a nuclear plant is COMPLETELY DIFFERENT from a gamma ray that occurs naturally when 'natural' uranium decays...

That's why you don't have to clear Dartmoor at 20mSv/yr, but you do have to clear Fukushima at 2mSv/yr

Like Ubuntu, just a bit less hassle: Linux Mint 21 'Vanessa'

itzman

Mint is looping

..then replace your hardware..

Being declared dead is automated, so why is resurrection such a nightmare?

itzman

I do miss Lemmy...

Thanks for the clip.

China rallies support for Kylin Linux in war on Windows

itzman

Perhaps the CCP will develop a shim to allow windows code to run on their Linux.

The world would thank them for that...

Microsoft sounds the alarm on – wait for it – a Linux botnet

itzman

Re: knock, knock.

I get thousands of root ssh attempts an hour, but root ssh is not enabled. I don't think any other user has been attempted

South Yorkshire to test fiber broadband through water pipes

itzman
Coat

Re: Great idea...

I think they felt that there was enough shit in the sewer pipes already.

Feds take down Kremlin-backed Cyclops Blink botnet

itzman
Coat

What happened to Gorgon Stare?

That I read about

UK Cyber Security Centre advises review of risk posed by Russian tech

itzman

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

There really are fairies at the bottom of my garden, and secret microchips in the vaccines they gave me.

The precautionary principle: A justification for spending enormous sums of other people's money on something that doesn't exist, and never will.

Cui Bono? Is that man warning you about this, a purveyor of a solution perhaps?

The wild world of non-C operating systems

itzman

Re: What about Assembly Language?

Fairly sure MSDOS precedes 8086 C and was written in assembler, as was CP/M...

Volcano 'shredded' submarine cable, vastly complicating repair job

itzman
Coat

Re: Turbidity currents

Cause was clearly Cthulhu

Fibre broadband uptake in UK lags behind OECD countries

itzman

Re: Why I'm spoiling the statistics

"What catches many out is the need for a double power outlet at the NTU so that the modem and router can be directly attached."

Not for those of us who have a cat 5 wired house. No need for the router to be anywhere near the modem

itzman

Re: It's of no interest to me.

Yes, today's content is easily handled for a normal household with 20Mbps.

I have fibre more for reliability and upload speed. - 10Mbps. The only time I notice the download speed is when software upgrades come along.

itzman

UK is a crowded islannd

That started the telephone revolution before anywhere else. It has a huge installed base of copper, and some very tight ducting.

It also has high wage levels for skilled people.

Its simply more expensive to throw fiber in, but it is coming.

Just be happy you don't live in e,g., rural USA. Or Germany.

Linux Mint 20.3 appears – now with more Mozilla flavor: Why this distro switched Firefox defaults back to Google

itzman
FAIL

Re: Quick fix for the stupid skinny scroll bars.

that menu chain doesnt exist in MATE

No more DRM-free downloads as Amazon's ComiXology app set to disappear inside Kindle

itzman

DRM effectively ruined ebooks

I really wanted to have an ebook collection. DRM means all I had was access to someone elses collection until they revoked the privilege.

I now am back to buying paper

The Ministry of Silly Printing: But I don't want my golf club correspondence to say 'UNCLASSIFIED' at the bottom

itzman

Re: Back in the early 90's

yesterdays memories are in RAM. last centuries are on disk.

old age reboots every might...

Rolls-Royce set for funding fillip to build nuclear power stations based on small modular reactor technology

itzman
Mushroom

assuming you buy the 'co2 causes massive warming' scenario which has failed to predict anything accurately in the last 30 years.

In the end Global warming doom is irrelevant. Northing the uk does will make the slightest difference.

'Saving the planet' is down to India and China.

Our problem is more local. with ecohippies shrieking against fracking we have no economically viable local energy source left.

Do we really want to rely on Arab nations and Russia?

In the limit uranium is abundant everywhere. And you don't need very much. A mass produced production engineered bog standard reactor is exactly what we need to meet any future challenges

Waterfox: A Firefox fork that could teach Mozilla a lesson

itzman

Re: Open source closed devs

you can always tell someone who has either never installed linux, or last did so in 2001...

A Windows 11 tsunami? No, more of a ripple as Microsoft's latest OS hits 5% PC market

itzman
Linux

Thank Clapton I run Linux...

...and will be able t pick up all that incompatible with win11 hardware for a song...

Facebook may soon reveal new name – we're sure Reg readers will be more creative than Zuck's marketroids

itzman

Re: How about Muckraker

WankTank™

itzman
Coat

Shagtown

SleazeIsUs

Boeing 737 Max chief technical pilot charged with deceiving US aviation regulators over MCAS

itzman

golden parachutes...

Are only issued to ex employees that have valid evidence of their superior's complicity.

itzman
Facepalm

Re: Some extra info

Even if the answer is 'those stupid pilots don't know how to fly' that is merely an indication that the training given to them was inadequate, an that was own to Boeing's failure to fully document the changes.

We have some sad news about Facebook. It has returned to the internet after six-hour mega outage

itzman
Coat

Re: I love the Register

"I am still none the wiser as to what the fuck BGP is"

Think of it as stanav for IP packets.

"At the router, take the third exit"

itzman
Linux

Re: Not a failure of testing - a failure of change enablement

"How do you know that this wasn't a malicious attack?"

Hume's Problem of Induction. You cant know anything for sure, so you go with the balance of probabilities.

Access to BGP tables is something very few people need to have and would likely be extremely hard to hack from outside. As supported by the fact it had to be fixed from inside.

So it was most likely a fat finger or equivalent.

Whether that finger was paid to be fat? Or was consciously fat?

We can argue for the nmext ten years and not know the answer...

Compromise reached as Linux kernel community protests about treating compiler warnings as errors

itzman

Re: A billion years ago...

Yup. Sure its a faff when you get a null pointer returned from a function and apply a test to it and the compiler says 'but its not an integer' BUT if you explicily cast it to one, the next bloke along compiling onto a 16 bit integer target with a 32 bit address bus at least knows what you were TRYING to do...

NSA: We 'don't know when or even if' a quantum computer will ever be able to break today's public-key encryption

itzman
Boffin

Re: Not asking the right people

"If you stop measuring light, does it stop moving? Or perhaps head off in a random direction till you measure it again?"

The fact that anything not directly observed even exists, is in the end only an article of faith.

You appear to be blind to the Materialist worldview which you assume to be true, for no other reason than it vaguely explains your experience.

Once you confuse models in your mind with the RealWorld™, you have stopped learning anything.

EU to formally probe Nvidia's $54bn takeover over British chip designer Arm – report

itzman

Whatt???

It simply is none of the EU or Chinas business.

They have no legal say in it.