Posts by Fonant 353 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Mar 2014
Here's the official rules for national power rationing if the Grid is overloaded:
https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/electricity-supply-emergency-code
Check your electricity bill to find out which Load Block letter area you're in, and so when your power would be turned off.
A small advantage of fibre/VOIP equipment, at least for home use, is that it takes 12V DC power rather than 240V AC.
So small "battery backup" units can be used, much cheaper than UPS devices that need complex inverter electronics.
We have two Eaton 3S Mini UPS 36W backups, one each for our fibre terminator and router. The fibre terminator lasts many hours on it, and the router several hours. Enough to cover any planned 3-hour power outages if the UK grid starts to struggle. Keeps "landline" and internet access going, if not the desktop computer.
I remember a trip to Fawley oil-fired power station, in the afternoon when they were "switching it on" to meet the evening power demand peak. An hour or so from stopped to full power, if I remember. Lots of water and metal needing to be gently heated up, and heavy masses set spinning.
Nuclear is indeed "base load" - run constantly at full power. Far too expensive and time-consuming to switch on and off.
Hydro is pretty fast to react, in the order of minutes to ramp up to full power. Pumped storage an old proven technology for energy storage and peak demand handling, but needs mountains.
Large-scale battery banks are excellent for load balancing. Instant reaction times, and can be located almost anywhere. Add in vehicle-to-grid to make use of big static electric vehicle batteries, and grid management becomes a lot easier.
Hydrogen's nice and light, but needs three times the volume as aviation fuel if stored as liquid (very cold). Six times the volume if stored as 700bar pressurised gas.
So planes will significantly need bigger fuel tanks, but will save energy by not having to carry as much fuel weight around.
Batteries, with current technology, aren't as energy-dense as liquid hydrogen. But easier to handle.
Volumetric energy capacity:
- Petrol/aviation fuel: around 34 MJ per litre
- Compressed hydrogen (700 bar): 5.6 MJ per litre (fuel tanks six times larger)
- Liquid hydrogen: 10.1 MJ per litre (fuel tanks three times larger)
Brexit (implemented by the Tories) robbed us of:
As I understand it you can get an airline to pay for all your training. The problem then is that you're ~£100,000 in debt to them, AND they're your employer. Better to keep the debt separate from the employment, so you can switch jobs if needed.
My son is looking seriously at commercial pilot training. 18 months of intensive training costs £100,000. But that gets you to the point of being able to earn £50,000 a year starting salary as a First Officer ("co-pilot") (at least in Europe) and much higher salaries as you progress.
If you're keen enough to be a commercial pilot, you persuade someone to give you a Big Loan, which you they pay back as you earn. You have to be pretty sure it's the job you want to do!
Mentour Pilot pointed out that the training-to-earning ratio was much better for a commercial pilot than for a surgeon...
You could perhaps connect several elongated cars together, to carry many hundreds of passengers at the same time. With centralised control for safety, with some form of electronic signalling system.
For a cheaper version, replace the maglev with steel wheels on a smooth steel rail, one on each side of the vehicle.
Because the capitalist economy of the UK is collapsing. Because the rich have become too rich, and the poor too poor.
Capitalism requires ever-increasing growth as a positive percentage each year. This is mathematically impossible as the growth tends to infinity. So every now and then the whole system has to crash and reset.
That's actually more of an identifier than a key. It tells Google which account to charge the maps API usage to.
The identifier is also linked to the page domain, in the developer's Google account settings, so you can't use someone else's API key on your own website.
You can still, if you want, keep reloading the map page to trigger payments to Google by the site owner. But only Google benefits from that.
This is one answer to the question: "How risky should self-driving motor vehicles be?" - the answer being "As risky as human drivers, we've gotta get those parcels delivered as fast as possible!".
And the answer to "Should computer-driven motor vehicles always obey road laws?" - the answer being "Doh! Of course not!".
The biggest issue will be Reputation Management for the owners and manufacturers of these things. If they ever manage to get them into production.
And the human drivers won't be best pleased with the spotlight being shone on their safety record, either.
If what you say is true, why did Boris Johnson and his government make this agreement with the EU?
He signed it, and proclaimed it an excellent deal.
The status of Northern Ireland within the UK has not changed. However it is interesting that in the latest election parties wanting a united Ireland won more votes than UK Unionist parties.
Northern Ireland is doing very nicely, being both in the UK and the EU Customs Union and Single Market. That is what the real problem is for the Tories.
Russia Today would probably be happy to publish private communications of UK government ministers. Or perhaps Al Jazeera. Or WikiLeaks (is that still a Thing?). Or any one of millions of anti-UK internet forums. Or somewhere on the Dark Web, leaked to "baddies" around the world.
Ideas:
a) Send them a plain-text email containing your Book Club's latest reading list?
b) Send them a plain-text email containing the first book, phone them and tell them the second book by voice, send an SMS with the name of the third book, send a letter in the post with the fourth book, etc.
c) Communicate via a non-government approved connection, tunnelled over SSH or HTTPS. Are they going to try to make TLS illegal?
It's impossible to prevent people from encrypting messages to each other. Even if you make mathematics illegal.
Yes, you can force the most popular private messaging apps to remove their privacy, but that just forces people to a wider variety of privacy solutions. Much harder to track baddies, then.
What about internet banking? Online shopping?
Don't shoot the messenger!
I use Vivaldi, with trackers and adverts blocked by default, and no third party cookies saved. I also have uBlock Origin installed, which handles some more stuff that Vivaldi misses. And the "I don't care about cookies" plugin that removes most popups.
Global (works for all sites not white-listed by me) and fully under my control.
The EU cookie legislation is pointless, extremely annoying, and most probably makes the problem worse by people actively "accepting" dodgy cookies without thought.
Where on the risk-speed curve do societies want autonomous vehicles to be? How many deaths caused by AVs is acceptable? How fast should we allow them to drive?
Who is responsible when things go wrong? Things will go wrong, and humans will die as a result if we expect them to behave like normal heavy road vehicles.
* Self-hosted client-side analysis like Matomo (will miss some people who block such things, but otherwise interesting).
* Server-side log analysis like AWstats (can't tell you about client-side stuff, but logs every request).
* Custom server-side activity logging (customised to tell you what you want to know).
* Relax, talk to your customers, etc. Analytics can't tell you everything.
I remember "a friend" "accidentally" plugging a PC keyboard back into a Dixons demo machine, and "accidentally" deleting autoexec.bat so that the machine would not start the demo next time it was powered on.
Back in the early 1980s when "Dixons Reject!" was a powerful term of abuse for someone who was completely stupid. Sorry Dixons, RIP.
Surely the L2 point from the Earth takes exactly a year to orbit the sun?
Aha, they mean the telescope completes its tiny orbit of the L2 point every 180 days. "Utilizing thrust every three weeks or so from small rocket engines aboard Webb will keep it orbiting L2, looping around it in a halo orbit once every six months." https://blogs.nasa.gov/webb/2022/01/21/webbs-journey-to-l2-is-nearly-complete/
We risk missing the root cause of the problem: cars are intrinsically dangerous, whether driven by human beings or computers.
The questions are all effectively "where on the risk<->performance spectrum do we want cars to be?".
If you want safety, you need to have much more control over the environment. See: railways.
At last someone is moving in the right direction, away from space-hogging two-tonne SUVs that need HUGE batteries, and towards light-weight space-efficient urban vehicles.
This would be a good companion to an electric bike (for local trips) for longer "to the next town" journeys. And handy for when it's very wet, too. I'd buy one in an instant, and quickly add a cello carrying rack to it!
Trackside signals are very difficult to see in time at high speeds. And the fixed block sizes needed would mean huge gaps between trains to be safe.
In-cab signals create moving blocks, with the signals always being just in front of the train, whatever speed it's travelling at. More trains per line, almost zero feedback between a signal changing state and the driver/train being aware of that.
Autonomous cars would be a lot easier to make fast AND safe if they ran on tracks, had some sort of network-wide signalling system that knew where they all were, and could be coupled together to form "trains" that could carry hundreds of passengers in one "vehicle".
If they're not 3D-graphics-intensive they may well work fine under a copy of Windows as a virtual machine. No good for 3D games, though.
I found replacements the few Windows-only Apps I used to use. Joplin is a nice replacement for Evernote, and I've always used LibreOffice here anyway.
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