Posts by Missing Semicolon 1761 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Nov 2013
Great. And if the grid is busy one night, I can't drive to work in the morning.
And, "auction off those slots to the highest bidder and earmark all profits from those auctions to distribution network improvements". Did you keep a straight face with that one?
This, definitely. I watch it all the time (sad that way). Then you get to see how narrow the generation margin is on windless days.
Far from being reassuring, it's scary.
For example, on 10-11th of January this year, the OCGT was is use for several hours at peak time.
"Clearly as the adverts keep telling me smart meters will solve this problem."
They might, too.
Yes, they will. They are there for the purpose of implementing demand pricing (the whole cut-you-off-if-the-lights-are-about-to-go thing is a strawman) so that power shortage will be fixed by you implementing your own power cut.
"100% renewable"
1) Most "renewable" energy is Biomass. I.e., burning American wood pellets. The process overall (including harvest, processing and transport) generates just as much CO2 as coal.
2) The remainder comes from unreliable wind.
So, the 100% figure is a chimera. When the wind isn't blowing, everybody is using electricity from nuclear or combustion.
This winter, since there was a bit of an outage at a couple of Nuclear plants, they were forced to fire up the Open-Cycle gas turbines when there was approximatey 0.0GW of wind power for several days. Very wasteful, very expensive.
Ok, a quick explanation.
The actual CPU on the die is running much faster than the (comparatively) slow operations on the external pins. The pins are running at 100's of MHz, but the CPU core runs at 2-3GHz. The CPU deals with the cache memory, and the cache manager is actually connected to the pins, fetching and flushing as needed.
All this means that the actual, current state of the CPU core is not reflected on the external pins at all. Only source data and (much later) results are visible.
That's the shortfall. The fund is supposed to go massively in surplus in the good times, to keep paying policyholders in the thin times. In the boom 80's big companies got let off contributing as they claimed the surpluses were a waste of good money.
It's yesterday's theft that leads to today's shortfall.
You forget two things:
1) 30 years ago, the science of Switched-Mode power supply design was less advanced than now. Plus, really cheap "offshore" PSU's were often a bit marginal even when not abused.
2) Cascading failure. Imagine you connect +12V (or -5V) to +5V, you would fry a lot of components powered from the +5V rail on the motherboard . If they then fail short, the PSU can then go into overload. Or even the PSU itself might not tolerate +12V on the +5V rail. Once caps start failing in the PSU, the high fault currents will start killing semiconductors, which could overvolt or reverse polarity the remaining caps. While there may not necessarily be actual flames, I could well imagine much smoke, and an acrid smell.
Quote: "It is noteworthy that, at the time of writing, ours are the only news articles listed on Google that have mentioned the Home Office Investigatory Powers Unit"
This is how the MSM is manipulated in the UK. Not by direct lying, but by just leaving out the important bits. When you read an article in a paper, and think "huh? what was that about?" it may well be that the key information as been "soft-pedalled".
... that's been a thing for ages. Take one large box, and resell user accounts.
On Ye Olden Days, you got shell login, email to your domain directed to your user account, and a ~/htdocs (and possibly a ~/cgi_bin) to put your applications in. No installs needed, you just used what's provided.
Extend it to J2EE/other server-platform-de-jour (~/webapps ? ) and you've got "serverless deployment" - only without the lock-in.
First bought mine in 1999.
Sigh. If you want "LOM" (Lights-off Management), then just stick a LOM card in the machine. If you are selling corporate boxes, put the LOM hardware on the motherboard. Either way, we get to remove the LOM functionality by yanking the card or pulling the configuration links. So any security snafu is completely fixable in the future.
Bill? $600-800 for a tablet-with-a-keyboard?
Why not just buy an actual laptop with a real X86 processor in it, and run real Windows?
Until they killed them, Intel had a nice range of Atom-based chipsets that made nice Windows TWACs, that could run real Windows.
It really depends on when the battery management decides the cell is at 0% and cuts off. If it does that a 3V, then the cell will be fine. 2.5V (or even 2.4V) and we are in damage territory.
The problem is that in order to get 4 stars for battery life from new the pressure will be to suck all of the available juice from the cell to get that rating.
I expect that the big builders were aware of this coming, and have already put their land bank in a suitably anonymous trust/foreign vehicle to hide the extent of their holdings.
Remember, it's not just for the profitz that the builders are not building on the land they hold. They bought a crap-ton during the last housing bubble, which is on the books at values that far exceed any real return available. If they were to actually build on the site, they would crystallize their losses, and become insolvent the next time their assets were properly audited.
Proposal:
Voting machine has the usual touch screen.
Plus, a transparent window that lets you view a till-roll-style strip. The machine has several 100's of feet of paper, so it need not be opened until the poll is over.
You vote.
Vote is printed in an OCR-able form on the paper.
You confirm the vote (through the window) on the paper is as you voted.
The votes get stored both electronically, and as 4 inches of paper on the roll in the machine.
When a recount is requested, you can take the long reels of paper and count them either in another machine, or, in extremis, by hand.
So, the primary count is electronic, but it can be backed-up by two levels of physical re-count.
"The Group is focused on investments in China, Russia and other countries and regions of 'One belt, One Road' area to maximize return for investors and meanwhile dedicate to the national strategy and economic development"
In other words, it's an arm of the state. One belt, One Road is a vehicle for Chinese expansionism.
Sorry - I read the Hutton report.
And the only sensible conclusion to the evidence was that the dossier was indeed "dodgy" and had had the drafting lead very firmly by the JSC, under the direction of Blair. The JSC did not write the words - they just sent it back until it contained the words they wanted.
The actual conclusion of course, was the usual whitewash. David Kelly died in vain, unfortunately.
Private Equity types like buying asset-rich but cash-poor businesses, using the assets as collateral of infeasible amounts of debt, then essentially refunding their initial investment in special divvies, "fees" and other shenanigans. They then sit there, banking the dividends until the business goes bust, or they get to cash out again in an "IPO".
Bastards.
With Google there's a deal. We give you all these free shinies, and you pay in personal data. The shinies are actually pretty good, so we accept the price.
With Mobile Operators, I pay for the service already. The subsequent monetization of my PII is essentially theft.
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