Posts by Phil O'Sophical 7408 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Oct 2011
There was dozens of volts between the grounds of the 2 buildings !
Often unnoticed in the past until Ethernet arrived, and someone ran a coax cable between the buildings. A few volts earth difference between network equipment cases, a nice low-resistance path along the sheath of the coax, and no fuses in the circuit. The result was spectacular melting of many power & network cables upon connection.
Grant Shapps telling me to buy petrol as normal makes me want to panic buy petrol. I don't even own a car
Same logic that led people to panic buy bog roll when there was no shortage. People can be amazingly stupid in groups.
Molotov cocktails in the subsequent riots. [Most dangerous Finnish invention after the sauna]
I think the Finns just gave it that name, in response to Russian bombing, but they didn't invent it.
due to a national CO2 shortage
So on the one hand we have too much of it in the air, but on the other we don't have enough to pack our food (and presumably release into the air later)? Is it really beyond our abilities to perhaps just extract it from the air & kill two birds with one (renewable) stone?
And Boris is at the UN dissing Kermit the Frog
Bit of a waste of time, Kermit's doing a fine job of it by himself.
We were only allowed to book Group 1, but some of the folks who travelled regularly to Glasgow soon learned that the only automatics available were luxurious (for the time) exec-spec Granadas. They would always book Group 1 automatics, rental company had no choice but to upgrade them.
The ultimate communist dream.
That's not communist, the communist solution would be to provide a central public charging point where everyone would take their phones for a free charge (during which the contents would be scanned to check for un-party data).
What you describe is bureaucratic paternalism, the government knows what's best for us and we should be pleased that it is spending our tax money to make these choices for us, so we don't have to make any decisions ourselves.
I suppose this sort of thing could happen anywhere......say in the English Channel.....
If governments start trying to recoup fuel duty by road pricing I daresay we'll start seeing it on the M25, or the autoroutes & autobahns in Europe.
building a really resilient tech stack in the face of aggressive attackers is actually hard: it's expensive, requires specialized expertise, takes time,
The same is true of building aircraft, bridges, skyscrapers and the like. Should we therefore not prosecute Boeing etc. when their constructions fail, because it was too hard to do them right?
We had a lightning-induced power outage of our office some years back. Server room was on UPS+genny, all backend work continued as normal, but most ordinary offices were (intentionally) not protected. While we waited for the power to come back we soon discovered that one coffee machine had been accidentally connected to the UPS. It never had to work so hard in it's life!
Vaccination is not just to protect the vaccinated, it is to protect those they come in contact with. If people refuse to be vaccinated that's their choice, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to bar them from places where they could pass on the virus if they are contagious, including a workplace. We do it for smokers, to protect non-smokers from the harm of secondary smoke, the principle is much the same.
Closed source is not better by design
It is certainly no freer from bugs than OSS code, but the opportunites to insert malicious code are fewer simply because the group of people who can contribute is smaller, and closed. It also has more accountability, the reputation of the company that supplies it is on the line for any problems, which should make them more careful about checking it than an amorphous "community". As always, where it's "everyone's" responsibility to do something that invariably means that it's no-one's responsibility.
I built my Sinclair Scientific from a kit (thanks Mum!), it still works. If anyone wants to see what it is like, have a look at this great piece of reverse engineering by Ken Shirriff.
Wait, isn't anybody going to check some form of corroborating identification?
There is a problem with that, as the French government has only belatedly noticed. Legally only the police and gendarmerie are allowed to ask for ID in connection with a health check, the library has no power to do so. Instead, the police will supposedly carry out random checks within such buildings (presumably when they have nothing else pressing to do, like catching jewel thieves racing away on scooters). By that stage it will be far too late to identify the (potentially contagious) person with the fake pass.
There's another issue with the French vaccination certificate which is causing problems for some British expats. In France a married woman is still legally referred to by her maiden name, even if she has chosen to take her husband's surname (which is considered just as a name of convenience). A married British woman's French ID will have both that maiden name and her married name, but her UK ID (passport, for example) may only have her married name. The 'pass sanitaire' has only the maiden name. Problems arise at airports, etc.
Why would "The Government" know more than the NG?
And, obviously, your answer would be "And why would the NG know more than the government".
No, actually. My answer would be: Because it's the government who collects the information to set policy. If it doesn't know at least as much as the NG, then it has no business legislating on things which require NG co-operation.
I would (naturally, because it substantiates my point) tend to believe the people who run the thing more than "The Government", whoever they are... :D
Understandable, but if you look at the report I referenced it is far more detailed than the flyer from the NG which can't even get the terminology correct. NG is a private company whose main aim is to make money, and for obvious reasons is not going to say anything which would suggest it isn't all set for any future demands.
Also, you assume the generating capacity will remain static
No, not at all, although it would be better if it weren't falling as it has over the past year. The problem is that to increase capacity in a useful way (i.e. not by simply throwing gas turbines at the problem) takes years of planning. To meet an "all new cars much be EVs" directive by 2030, NG should have had it's plans for new capacity ready & approved by government back in 2010 if not before, with construction well under way by now. Does it? We're talking of HS2-level construction, with 20+ year lead times.
Ideally nuclear generating capacity, IMHO, but sadly I suspect I'm more likely to win the lottery two weeks running than THAT happening...
Yeah, me too, and I don't even play the lottery... :-)
The average electric vehicle has a range of 180-350miles.
The average weekly mileage of UK vehicles is ~190miles. The average journey is ~8miles.
True, but irrelevant. You need to consider the total energy consumed per year by the transport fleet, and then work out where that energy is coming from. It doesn't matter if it's a 20 minutes fast charge, or an overnight slow charge, it's the total energy use that counts.
The 99th percentile will trickle charge their EVs at home off a 3kW or 7.5kW wall socket, possibly overnight on an Economy-7 plan. It will be a rare thing for them to dip below 75% capacity.
If everyone is charging overnight that will become peak time, and "Economy 7" will disappear.
Sure, from he NG itself.
"an extra 100 terrawatt hours from our current 300 terrawatt hours consumed."
The "Transport Decarbonisation Director" who plays down the figures (see my previous post), doesn't even know the correct units and blithely claims "the growth in wind power from the extra offshore wind farms being developed will adequately meet the future demand for electrifying transport " without any figures?
Wishful thinking, I fear.
And your cite is.
The UK Government figures show that road transport consumed about 40mtoe (million tonnes of oil equivalent) in 2019, of which about 12m is petrol cars, and 11m diesel cars. That's about 270TWh.
Let's assume that EVs are almost twice as efficient as ICE in terms of getting input energy turned into movement, so it would take around 150TWh of grid electricity just to meet current car transport needs.
From the same source, total UK supply in 2019 was 346TWh, of which 325TWh was generated in the UK and 21TWh was imported.
Total UK generating capacity in 2019 was 78GW (down from 83GW in 2018), and of which 22GW is from intermittent renewables. Over the 8760 hours in a year, total possible generation (every source running 24/7) would be between 490 and 680 TWh depending on wind/sun. The max is clearly impossible because renewables are intermittent, and other systems gave to be taken offline for maintenance.
With non-transport UK electricity demand of 346TWh, and 150TWh for car transport, demand would rise to just under 500TWh, just barely possible if everything is running flat out, and without considering the 100+TWh that would also be required if diesel lorries were replaced by electric.
.
We need to be very careful that we don't overcharge for electricity.
Who is "we" ?
More than half the pump price of petrol/diesel is tax & duty, and no government is going to forego those billions. The price of of electricity at the charging point will have to be per-mile comparable to that of petrol, or else other taxes will go up to compensate.
Again, the National Grid seem to suggest we already have enough supply for the EV transition.
Citation, please?
The figures I've seen show that just for light vehicles, charging would require that all the UK power stations run at full capacity 24/7. That's totally unfeasible, the grid can't get that power to where it will be needed anyway, and it doesn't even begin to address HGVs.
To provide goods at the current price point manufacturers have slashed the margin. This is counterproductive, being part of the reason manufacturers look for other ‘revenue streams’ by for instance locking you in to their parts and servicing.
True, but if they charged a higher price on the grounds that spares would be affordable, people wouldn't buy them because "they are expensive, and yet they obviously break down". They can't win as long as end-users shop only on price.
the "pump water up a Welsh mountain into a lake, then let it back down through turbine generators" strikes me as both ecological and entirely feasible
It works well, but Wales doesn't have enough suitable mountains. Scotland does, if it wants to re-invent itself as England's battery :-)
Depends on what you burn it in. In pure O₂ you indeed get water, but diesel only produces the NOx pollutants because it's burnt in air, which is 78% nitrogen. Burn H₂ in air and you'll get other combustion byproducts, especially since it burns very hot. Burning it in a fuel cell will be better, of course.
What an idiotic claim.
In absolute terms perhaps so, but it has a grain of truth. No doubt a certain percentage of people who died "of COVID" were already ill and would have died of something, like flu, in the near future. Do we count them as "COVID deaths" or just "deaths"?
It's a problem that doctors face all the time, technically we all die because our heart stops but identifying the actual cause of that failure is non-trivial. Does a person who already has severe breathing difficulties die "of COVID" or "of the flu", or simply "with" them?
USA 1st. UK 7th. For deaths.
The USA is big, of course it has more deaths, although still fewer than the EU. Looking at deaths per million population, which is the only sensible measure, the UK is 20th, the USA 21st. The EU as a whole is 29th. Given the different reporting and calculation measures, and the trustworthiness of those from places like China, Russia, N. Korea, etc., I doubt we'll be able to draw accurate conclusions for 5 years or more, when the true excess deaths figures become available. That will also allow us to look at the numbers for people who died due to directly COVID, but also due to side effects (hospitals reprogramming care, people scared to go to hospital, etc.).
That is the result of incompetent government and stupid people and nothing else.
It's way, way more complicated than that simplistic analysis.
her disastrous policies?
You mean the ones that broke the control of the unions and put the country on the path to recovery and prosperity after the economically disastrous policies of the 60's and 70's you mean? My whole generation is in good shape thanks to those "disastrous" policies.
But far, far more people cared about the community, each other and the environment etc., there was little of MeMeMe and a strident demand for divisiveness.
The past viewed through rose-tinted glasses, eh?
No-one back then gave a damn about the environment, it was the "white heat of technology", burn more resources, build, build, build. Thatcher was one of the last UK prime ministers with a scientific background, who actually understood the science of the issues.
Milk Snatcher
You might at least credit wikipedia when you copy/paste from it.
NASA Engineers don't just design systems that work, they sit down and ask themselves what could go wrong and what can be done to make sure it doesn't happen, or if it does happen, how can it be fixed.
Just imagine where we'd be now if they had used "Agile". They wouldn't even have had those 40-year-old docs to look at.
HTML is currently effectively just whatever the browser vendors say it is
Isn't that the idea of a markup language? It just says "emphasize this", "use large text" or "make a list", and it's up to the browser to do that in whatever way it feels appropriate. It was never intended to be a precise page description language, even though it is sometimes (ab)used for that.
His argument seems to be that HTML is too flexible, and he doesn't like the way people take advantage of that, so he wants to rigidly define how information is displayed. That's his (rather OCD?) choice, but it's more a personal choice of a particular publication mechanism than of a standard for the web. A bit like a film maker choosing to use black & white silent film, and decrying colour or sound, it's just one choice among many, and will have its fans & its detractors.
