Posts by anothercynic

Trump lifts US supersonic flight ban, says he's 'Making Aviation Great Again'

Re: "so that US companies can dominate supersonic flight once again"

Political machinations were very much one of the hurdles for Concorde. Environmentalists were one problem, but the biggest was the PANY (Port Authority of NY, who owned JFK at the time). They banned Concorde on noise grounds until BA and Air France proved that Concorde was quieter on approach and departure than PANY made it out to be, and historical accounts also mention that BA, AF, and the manufacturers worked a lot on approach and departure procedures to make sure noise was not an issue.

Washington DC (well, Virginia) didn't have such qualms and happily let the jet fly into Dulles. Braniff funnily enough did a Concorde service from Texas to Washington (and switching crews and registrations for onward flights to London and Paris), but sadly that was subsonic but still very much appreciated. Singapore Airlines had a deal with BA with a technical stop in Bahrain for fuel and did their flight in 9 hours, and Air France did the same to Rio with a stop in Dakar (Senegal). The Rio flight was actually the first commercial flight for Concorde. :-)

Re: Opposite direction of the market

At least California HSR (from Bakersfield up to San Fran) is *being* built, although there they also still have no idea which way they'll take the train into the city, and the LA to Bakersfield connection is still way up in the air.

The Brightline thing (which you described) is interesting... Brightline's made quite the waves in Florida with their train there, so... hooray! Amtrak is hamstrung by the fact that they rely on federal funding (Washington to Boston on the Acela is not enough to make money), but the private operators can probably pick and choose what they want to do.

Re: Opposite direction of the market

With the right impetus, the TSA screening processes and private gates are not a problem. We know LAX already does a tailored service for celebrities of a certain status where they do their TSA clearance in a different area, and are then driven to their flight. Similar things exist at other airports to ensure that the highest-status fliers don't mingle with smelly and grubby hoi polloi. It'll be a problem for the likes of Heathrow who don't seem to think beyond the end of their noses, so... ;-)

Re: Opposite direction of the market

With the right status at the right airport, even checking in with luggage is not a problem. Because there's no massive queue and your luggage doesn't end up in the luggage 'warehouse' in the main terminal, your luggage will end up with a nice priority tag, in a priority bin, being taken to the plane from the 'special status' terminal at the last minute as you board, to make sure the bin your luggage is in is in fact off-loaded first. :-)

I'll just point at certain carriers flying from the Middle East and a certain carrier flying from the country of Wurst und Bier. ;-)

Re: "Test flights in January proved out the concept [of Boom Supersonic]"

That's debatable. We won't know until Boom actually build a full-scale test vehicle. The current is a scaled-down version to prove the concept.

£127M wasted on failed UK nuclear cleanup plan

Re: Where does the money go?

Contractors brought in to manage things at a price that's 500% higher than what a permie would cost? :-)

Whether the US cleaned things up a bit better is up for debate. ;-)

I was going to comment pretty much what you said. Given that much of the nuclear industrial/military stuff started at Windscale in the early fifties, including the first major nuclear incident (the graphite pile starting to burn because of the Wigner effect not being handled correctly - hence the hurried renaming of 'Windscale' to 'Sellafield'), and the British Nuclear Fuels Limited reprocessing plant (hey THORP! *waves*) being on the same site and having some... ahem... problems, the joint is seriously polluted.

If you look at other decommissioned nuclear installations in the UK (Harwell in Oxfordshire as a research site, Dounreay in Scotland, Hinkley Point in Somerset, Berkeley, Hunterston et al), the Windscale (Sellafield) site is a factor or a few worse than any of the others. Dounreay was arguably the second worst, given how radioactive material washed up on beaches not too far from that plant, whereas others were decommissioned without drama.

The US has quite a few 'superfund' sites dealing with the same problem. Oak Ridge in Tennessee is one of them, Hanford in Washington state being another. Both of them were Manhattan project sites.

Ship abandoned off Alaska after electric cars on board catch fire

Re: DPF

@Steve, in the not too distant past, diesels were marketed as being a lot better in terms of grunt and power, because you could use heavier fuel oils. Petrol (or gasoline, in all y'all's parlance in the Leftpondian republic) requires lighter hydrocarbons which, if you have heavy crude oil, require some cracking (which adds to pollution). Light crude oil is easier to refine to petrol.

However, diesel comes with some drawbacks, as Mercedes and other diesel engine manufacturers discovered. Diesel you have to burn in one of two ways:

- You either have to burn diesel at a temperature that generates minimal nitric oxides (NOx), but that generates particulates of the PM10 and PM2.5 kind,

- Or you burn diesel at a high enough temperature that leaves no particulates, but you end up emitting a lot of NOx. Nitric oxides (i.e. NO, NO2, N2O, etc) are irritants and contribute to breathing difficulties.

Your general consumer diesel engine uses the first, because you can simply slap a DPF between the engine and the exhaust, which captures the sooty PM10 and PM2.5 particles, and leaves you with decent power and minimal NOx pollution. The engine doesn't have to burn at as high a temperature, which means it doesn't need an additive and a catalyser that deals with NOx.

For commercial/freight diesel engines, Mercedes, the inventor of AdBlue, suggested running the engines a lot hotter, but injecting a platinum catalyser with exactly measured urea compound (which is what AdBlue is) that will break down the nitric oxides into water, nitrogen and other, less irritating compounds. That takes care of having to clear/exchange the DPF often, but requires the additive instead.

I know AdBlue (and similar additives) have a bit of a bad reputation in the US, and the same with DPF (and I know a certain segment of society who actively modify their trucks to remove the DPF because 'I ain't lettin' some manufacturer tell me I can't have all the power I want from my truck').

The diesel engine scandal is related to this in that the manufacturers played with the Bosch injector controller to set it into a test mode that minimises the NOx output and passes emission tests, but then switches to a less... ahem, environmentally friendly mode once running at speeds that require more oomph. Cue a lot more NOx emissions from cars at 60+ mph (because the engine then burns hotter and gets rid of the particulates). Naughty manufacturers...

Re: Tesla that burned so hot, it melted part of the road

This is it. pour enough cold water on the conflagration and the temperature will drop sufficiently to stop the thermal runaway. That's the primary purpose of 'drowning' the battery with water (despite LiI-Ion batteries being sensitive to water). The shorting is less of an issue if the battery remains/returns to being cold enough to not go into thermal runaway.

US to deny visas to foreign officials it says 'censor' social media

Re: I may have already mentioned this

I effectively told friends in the US that I would not visit again while the US government went for social media vetting and other options, and my friends understood.

Now, with the current ICE behaviour at ports of entry, the US is permanently off limits for me. If there *is* a requirement for me to attend a conference or something, I'll travel via Dublin, where TSA preclearance happens on Irish soil, and where you do not end up in some US 'detention facility' for two weeks because some twat with a chip on his shoulder didn't like the look of you... In Dublin you can simply turn around and say "thanks, bye." and abandon your trip safely.

'Close to impossible' for Europe to escape clutches of US hyperscalers

That's only the case (currently) because we chose to use uranium + plutonium as fuels, whereas (apparently) thorium would be a much better bet because its fission products turns into isotopes that are stable and non-radioactive a lot sooner. There was a graph somewhere a while ago showing what uranium turned into and that in particular was not pretty because the actinides created by uranium were highly radioactive for a long long *long* time.

The idea to use thorium to burn through *all* actinides to end with something like a non-radioactive isotope of lead was cooked up before the large uranium deposits were found in Australia, Namibia, and Canada in the Western bloc, and Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan in the Eastern bloc, and everyone ran for the easy option. Niger became a huge source for France, China had its own resources. So yes... running for the cheap option has cost the planet dearly (although in terms of volume, the amount of radioactive materials, including the irradiated metal structures in decommissioned reactors, is a damn sight less than the huge amounts of spoil and ash generated by coal since (and the ash, ironically, is also radioactive to a degree because as much as carbon has burnt out of the material, uranium and other actinides that co-exist in coal have not and have been concentrated).

China is looking at thorium now to see what difference that makes. Maybe it will be the case that the rest of the world looks at China and decides that maybe they are doing it right. Who knows. If given the choice between coal and nuclear, I'll pick the latter any day of the week, mostly from the daily pollution standpoint. And if it comes to base generation, I think that nuclear is a viable option, although CCGT-powered stations can ramp up and down a lot faster than nuclear can, but gas will not be endless either, and as supply dwindles, countries will fight each other over it (case in point, the scramble to secure gas supplies post-Ukraine-invation).

Whodunit? 'Unauthorized' change to Grok made it blather on about 'White genocide'

Re: "it illustrates how some people insist on remaining stuck in the past."

Ahhhh, die Kaapse taal... jirre you know... That's something I do miss from down south. :-)

As for you understanding Flemish better, you'll find that Flemish is linguistically closer to Afrikaans than the modern Dutch is, as much as the Dutch claim that Vlaams is not a language of its own (no, it's a dialect, but one that's kept much of its original roots). You're probably pretty spot on with your assessment that the three languages diverged around the same time. Much of Belgium (which Flanders is part of) didn't exist at the time Jan van Riebeeck left the then Dutch Republic, Flanders (then the Southern or Catholic Netherlands) had freshly split from the republic as part of the 80 years war. There soon were a lot of the Huguenots who fled to Africa (both from France and from the Netherlands). The rest is history ;-)

Re: "it illustrates how some people insist on remaining stuck in the past."

I love Zapiro. Incisive and often all too painfully accurate.

Well said, Frank, well said.

I will point to various (white) South African influencers who are thoroughly ripping those 'refugees' a new one on TikTok and Instagram. One of those 'refugees' claimed he'd left his mother and dog behind - what, he couldn't persuade his mother that she was a hard-done-by woman and a refugee from the dangers of the 'swart gevaar'? Maybe his mother was the smarter one in the family.

Let this be known - every country has its problems, and those with colonial pasts have more complicated ones, especially when it involves multiple colonial powers over the centuries (South Africa = English + Dutch). It's just unfortunate that people who once were part of the power leading the country and who are not anymore, can't move on and get on with life and the new status quo... The sooner one adjusts and the sooner one realises what other opportunities there are, the better.

US Navy sailor charged in horrific child sextortion case

Excellent job

Beers all round for catching yet another despicable creep involved in this kind of depravity.

While I would agree with the sentiments that some have, habeas corpus also applies to this type of scum, so may the full force of the law bring him down. And who in their right mind links their own phone number and address to accounts involved in stuff like this? Only people supremely stupid, or people supremely confident they won't be caught. I think we now know which he is...

Greater Manchester says its NHS analytics stack is years ahead of Palantir wares

Re: Wait...

Actually, it should be the other way around. Other ICBs in the country should be knocking on GM ICB's door asking "hey, can we see what you've done, and can we 'buy' it off you?"

If Palantir is nowhere near what GM ICB has today, then it makes sense to give other ICBs access to what is available TODAY, and get the jump on analytics that already makes sense and has been designed by people who understand local conditions better.

Ex-NSA bad-guy hunter listened to Scattered Spider's fake help-desk calls: 'Those guys are good'

The sad thing is that the bank insists you identify yourself to them, while they are absolutely astonished when you insist they identify themselves to you! "What do you mean? The phone number says we're who we say we are!"

Right you are, love, but with a bit of diddling, I could make it look like I'm calling from Number 10, sooooo... no, you'll have to identify yourself to me, or give me a number I can check against my bank's details where I can ring you.

AMD’s first crack at Nvidia hampered by half-baked training software, says TensorWave boss

Re: There are better ways to do the training?

You read my mind. I read that Tencent piece and went "what if they don't bother with Nvidia but maybe someone else... like AMD?"

And BAM - someone else has the same brainwave. Have a beer (later, when it's more appropriate than before 9am) :-)

Qatar’s $400M jet for Trump is a gold-plated security nightmare

Re: And then there was 2

You'll find that the Qataris will not take kindly to being described as Saudis or vice versa. There is no real love lost between the two tribes.

Nip chip smugglers by building trackers into GPUs, US Senator suggests

Re: Auditors??

With the alternate reality sponsored by Fox News and other alt-right news sources.

As US scientists flee Trump, MP urges Britain to do more to nab them

To be fair, on civil service scale, you tend to have other non-tangible benefits that have been very useful. I'm speaking from past experience.

Of course, being restrained by civil service policies (like getting only a 1% payrise, or none at all) also absolutely sucks. But to be fair to the management of our institution, we got additional bennies to make up for that (like extra days holiday that could be sold).

Re: Hmm

Let's just be clear... the 'rejects' are ultimately those who got in on 'legacy', i.e. "my daddy and my grandaddy went to X, so they pulled strings so I can go to X too". That goes for all colours, all genders.

Well, we don't want *them* here. :-)

Re: Hmm

Thankfully, nothing stops us consumers from not buying the agricultural shyte the Americans want us to eat... ;-)

37signals is completing its on-prem move, deleting its AWS account to save millions

Re: Cloud crazies incoming....

I will say that both on-prem and 'cloud' (i.e. commercial stuff like AWS/Azure) have their place. However, it requires some planning and careful evaluation to see what works better. Punting close to 2 TB into S3 storage to be processed there by a variety of things makes sense-ish, as does rapid prototyping of things. But production? No, on-prem will do nicely.

My biggest peeve is things like UDP fragmentation protection that Azure doesn't let you switch off (unless you really really really pester them about it and tell them that you're taking your business elsewhere if they don't switch it off), or doing some other stuff under the hood that annoys/upsets some protocols that are still in use across the world. Yes, RADIUS packet fragmentation is a thing, so stop making it difficult for people to run up stuff in their tenancy with network properties *they* need!!

Well, one would hope that the cloud deals that UK HE gets through the four-letter company from Bristol are at least decent... :-)

There are moments where being able to quickly spin something up in Azure or AWS is welcome, especially if you need to test something quickly. But production stuff? Nahhh, the 'on-prem' data centre is still useful, especially if you're plumbed into Janet... ;-)

Amen!

US Transpo Sec wants air traffic control rebuild in 3 years, asks Congress for blank check

Re: Amazing ..

I would agree with you if it was anything but the MAGA cabal. Authorising the spend all up front sounds nice and all, but it also lends itself for a quick get-rich scheme that will then miraculously run over budget and will require more spending, and some more, and yet more again...

But yet, dragging the FAA (well, ATC in particular) into the 21st century would probably be much appreciated by the aviation community. Of course, one would hope that they actually test stuff with real ATC controllers to make sure the new stuff doesn't induce higher stress levels instead of lowering them, because ATC controllers are leaving at a somewhat worrying rate.

NASA JPL boss bails for 'personal reasons' as budget cuts bite

Re: "Personal Reasons"

Especially given she's a woman... and the chances are that because she's a science person, she will rub up the tradwife/tradwoman movement inside MAGA the wrong way.

Re: Next JPL boss

Pasadena has more MAGAs than Hollywood, but distinctly less than Orange County. ;-)

EU tells US scientists to dump Trump for a lab in Europe

Re: Exodus

Well, in the UK we cut off our nose to spite our face, and everyone believed the Tories when they promised that British science and academia would still be richly rewarded post-Brexit. Well guess what, we didn't, did we? And then the immigration policies that the Tories so gleefully tightened up made it virtually impossible to get academics and scientists that have *gasp* *shock* *horror* a FAMILY! So... yeah, UK science and academia is in a funk, and slowly but inexorably moving towards the abyss.

And no, just because "in the thirties and forties we did wonders with pennies in our pockets" it does not mean that we'll be able to do that again, or *want* to for that matter. People would like a decent wage for their work and their efforts, not living in a single room in "Mrs Doubtfire's Boarding House" or whatnot.

The EU at least knows that they can score big by not only rescuing data (which they have been doing and continue to do), but by also offering science in the US a way out of the shit hole that Cheeto Trumpet is creating.

Re: Don't forget the non-monetary advantages

Sorry, but Hungarian academics will disagree with you there, as will Georgian and Moldovan academics. Yes, the latter two countries are part of Europe, albeit not the EU.

Microsoft gets twitchy over talk of Europe's tech independence

Re: Dump Outlook & Exchange and be happy…

Here's a nice website that documents the alternatives to some US services. Maybe it's time to look at these and start making decisions :-)

https://european-alternatives.eu/alternatives-to

Re: And no search/arrest warrant needed

There's a good book about Blackwater (you know, the mercenary company that the US government loves to use so much), and it also goes into the back room machinations about this. The Christian fundamentalist right has been plotting for decades to 'bring the country back' (referring to the country of ye olde tymes where women were seen, not heard, preferably pregnant and in the kitchen, where white men ruled supreme, any human liberties didn't exist unless a white man offered it), and Prince and his goons are just part of it.

I had to stop reading it because it was just too infuriating and disturbing, especially in the light of recent events!

Tell us another one, Brad...

... When it becomes no longer viable or economic to defend European customers against the rapaciousness of the Cheeto Trumpet regime, Microsoft will also pull the plug or throw its customers to the wolves.

I'd love to believe the chief lawbook thrower at Microsoft, but I won't. Consider the US tech industry at risk of being suborned into compliance in some form or fashion, park it on your company's risk register, and be prepared to lift and shift what you have from them to someone else.

The one interview question that will protect you from North Korean fake workers

Re: Hiring candidates who can't pronounce their own name?

Aoife. Caoimhe. Saoirse.

These *definitely* get tongues twisted if they're not actually Irish. Saoirse Ronan can attest to that.:-)

Ghost in the shell script: Boffins reckon they can catch bugs before programs run

Shellcheck

There's an amazing Github project called shellcheck that already does a lot of this work... I wonder if the researchers were aware of it?

Nationwide power outages knock Spain, Portugal offline

Re: In 1970's UK ...

Quite... It didn't look like "oh, a cloud moved over a solar farm" to me... that must've been something more substantial.

Having looked into this again a bit more, the inverters are included in the deals the German companies do. And apparently, the only thing you *do* need to do is have your meter changed (to avoid backwards-running meterage that is considered fraud, since on a small DIY setup you're not paid a FIT).

Getting a small 800Wp setup (the maximum you can have in a DIY setup without regulatory fuss) for €200-300 is pretty darn good, and if you add a small (2kWh) battery storage pack to that for another €800-900, you can save a lot of electricity apparently. Of course, this does not mean you can run your home off-grid completely. For that you'd probably need a professionally-installed* setup.

* YMMV

Not by choice though... Texas *chooses* to be special and isolated...

Germany is seeing a boom in 'micro generation', or as they call it, 'Balkonkraftwerke'. They've gone for the plug-in style type panel designs, so as long as you remain under a certain wattage, you can plug your panels into the wall. What then happens is that you use more of your own juice instead of the grid's, so I suspect power usage and generation is a lot more local and evened out. However, I think to feed back into the grid, you need to have your setup installed by professionals and also connected to your meter. Or at least that was the case a couple of years ago when this was raised by a relative.

Re: To channel a certain class of reader ...

Same reason why El Reg reported on Heathrow being caught with its pants down after the substation caught fire recently.

And given there's a plan to build a large number of solar plants in Morocco, and connecting that to a HVDC line to the UK, maybe connecting through Spain/Portugal would probably out of the question now.

DOGE may help Elon Musk's biz empire dodge $2.4B in liabilities – Senate probe

Wow. Telling us the obvious...

Enough said, really.

Europe fires up beefier booster for Ariane 6 and Vega-C

Excellent news!

Upgrades are always good, especially if they allow us to heave heavier stuff into orbit. :-)

Let's hope the thing doesn't go *pop* next time it gets fired up.

£136M government grant saves troubled Post Office from suboptimal IT

Re: Another idea

Until the mid-2000s, Giro Cheques still existed. I know because I used to be an Alliance + Leicester customer (remember them?) and the PO was effectively my bank. And yes, around that time, people still used the PO for stuff like their benefits.

Re: The utter shittiness of English law

Judges are not the problem here. Prosecutors? The PO was the prosecution! They were until recently allowed to bring these prosecutions without input from the CPS!

The evidence was fudged, we all know this now, but at the time, not so much (although it became clearer as time went on). And yes, the legal system severely let people down and allowed them to be prosecuted when they shouldn't have been! Hindsight is always 20/20. The MoJ is the org that should be apologising on their behalf.

Hubble Space Telescope is still producing science at 35

I just watched a series on Hubble (and various other space efforts in the US) on Channel 5 in the UK. It was fascinating to see how they combined 4 CCDs to make one big image. Now if they upgraded those CCDs to even better ones, who knows what else we'd spot! :-)

Like you, I'm all for keeping the Hubble a while longer. :-)

Claims assistance firm fined for cold-calling people who put themselves on opt-out list

Re: Paulie Walnuts

Corporate crime makes the money wheel go round for the City of London... Welcome to the largest money laundrette on the planet.

Re: What a surprise... oh wait... it's not

Chances are they'll just borrow some random address out of the 'phone book' as some companies have been found to do.