Posts by rg287

The UK is running on empty when it comes to electric vehicle charging points

Re: Elephant in the room

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.

Not even slightly irrelevant. It is your comment which is valid but entirely off-topic.

Travel and Charging habits are entirely relevant to a discussion which started as "It is often conveniently omitted how long it takes to charge such car." Which is a misnomer because in normal usage the 99th percentile of drivers will never need to fast charge from empty. They're only tootling around locally.

T&C patterns are also relevant to the discussion of "But how will the grid cope". 20minutes at 400Amps or 8hours at 13Amps makes a significant difference when considering local supply/substation provision, cable diameters and peak vs. base loads.

What you're raising is the related but separate issue of overall generating capacity across the year, which is a bit naughty. To say that "it's the total energy use that counts." is simply wrong - do you want 50kWh supplied in an week, or in 20 minutes? Is demand flat or peaky? Having enough is important. Having enough at the right time even more so.

If everyone is charging overnight that will become peak time, and "Economy 7" will disappear.

Possibly yes. But you haven't explained how that is relevant to the discussion of:

"It is often conveniently omitted how long it takes to charge such car."

at which point you can choose to wait a bit for the delivery to complete

Wait where? The most convenient petrol station on my old commute was on the side of a 60mph A-Road and they coned off the entrance entirely preventing access to the forecourt when taking deliveries.

Yes, yes, in quieter residential areas you might be able to park up somewhere and wait out the delivery. But not always.

Re: Elephant in the room

Makes you wonder why we're not all being encouraged to walk, cycle, or eBike, instead of buying shiny new cars.

Why indeed.

Interestingly in the Netherlands car ownership runs about the same as the UK. Although they have a healthy cycling habit and some excellent tram networks, they'll say "Well I'm not carrying my weekly shop home from the supermarket".

It's certainly a thing to move towards - cycle more for commutes or local travel, move towards one-car households and halve the traffic. Save the car for transporting shopping & goods.

Re: Elephant in the room

75% of the population in affluent areas may well have off road parking

No wild assertions here. Solid facts and figures. I never claimed they were evenly distributed, and that is indeed a problem in itself (but also one which is reasonably assumed - e.g. city centres have many flats, few detached houses. I shouldn't need to spell that out).

But more than half of households are detached and semi-detached houses, which pretty much universally come with off-street parking. 27% of households are terraces. This is a bit of a toss up. If you live in a terrace like mine you have enough space to park one and a half cars where the front garden used to be, and there's a back roads to the garage at rear. Fitting a wall-charger at the front, or in the garage is a perfectly viable option. There are of course those terraces which open directly onto the street and have no rear parking. That's a tricky long-tail, but not relevant to the general direction of travel.

20.9% of households are in flats. Many city centre blocks of flats have no parking, but equally the block my partner used to live in had an allocated space per flat. Getting chargers installed would have needed the landlord to pull their finger out, but there was no physical impediment to the work. Just the mater of who was paying for it.

Yes, there are clusters - such as terraces in the valleys where there are no good answers yet. They'll be running dino juice cars till 2035, by which time public charging infrastructure will have developed - or ideally the number of cars in use will have declined thanks to the South Wales Metro pushing out and reducing the need for two-car households.

Re: Elephant in the room

And 25% of drivers not having easy access to home charging is a bloody huge number of people for whom EV ownership will continue to feel like a pipe dream whilst the availability and convenience of charging points elsewhere lags behind expectations/desires of people used to the ease with which an ICE vehicle can be "recharged"

There is indeed a long-tail of edge cases.

BUT - this is a 20+year process. In 2030 when sales of ICE-only cars end, you will still be able to buy a hybrid if you want. By 2040 there will still be millions of dino-juice cars floating around the used market.

We can already see supermarket and destination charging taking off. By 2030 it will be practicable for most people to simply charge whilst doing their weekly shop if they can't charge from home (more convenient than shopping and then stopping to fill up on your way home). In some places that is practicable now.

There are many wails of impending disaster, but cars that run on dino juice will be sold for at least another 14 years until hybrids start being phased out and will predominate on the used market for another decade after that.

You'd think for an IT site, commentards might have better memories.

EVs are being phased in over the next 15 years.

15years ago my parents were still on dial-up. Getting 4Mb off ADSL was extremely exciting. 802.11g was the hot new thing and if you were lucky you might get a signal in the room next to where the access point was.

Yes, charging infra is bad today. But it'll be better next year, and in 15 years the same smug people will be knowingly "predicting" how the next big thing is going to be a "disaster"...

Re: Not a uniform distribution

Either this has not been thought out or the majority of the populace is being wilfully written off.

Or people are wilfully being a bit intransigent.

Nobody is going to come along on Jan1st 2030 and replace every ICE car with an EV. Indeed, even after 2030 you will still be able to buy hybrids. It'll just be sales of new ICE-only cars which are banned.

This is a 20-year process. The idea that "it'll never work because charging infra is crap today" is lazy, unimaginative and/or deliberately misleading. 20years ago most of the country didn't have an internet connection and those that did were on dial-up.

When was the last time you got to a petrol station and found that it was closed / broken so you had to go somewhere else (as opposed to just having to wait longer as a couple of the pumps are broken) ?

Thinking back to 2019, I routinely couldn't go to the petrol station on my normal commute because it was getting a delivery and the forecourt was fully closed off. I had to make a detour or plan to fill up when doing the weekly shop. Simply getting home and plugging into a wall charger would have been far more convenient.

How much money this is going to cost? Can't imagine pulling a debit card every time I park somewhere and then mess with charging cables.

It's not like you'll be obliged to charge. *rolls eyes*

If you typically charge at home and are just nipping 3miles to the shops for a couple of things then you won't bother. After your 6-mile round trip you'll leave it plugged in at home. Or indeed not bother if - like most Brits - your weekly mileage is so low that it doesn't really matter so long as it gets plugged in one night a week.

Re: Elephant in the room

This assumes everyone lives in a house with a nice driveway and their workplace will have a charging point for every worker.

This is a pipe dream.

~75% of the population have offroad parking. So as far as commutes go, they can trickle-charge at home. A huge proportion of the remaining 25% live in city centres - mostly London - and don't actually own a car.

There is then a difficult bit in the middle for car owners reliant on street parking in central areas. There are solutions coming for that including lamp-post charging. But again, based on the normal weekly mileage, charging during the weekly shop, at work, or utilising other destination-charging stations.

People say that workplaces won't offer charging, but you don't have to go back all that far to find a time when workplaces didn't offer car parking - because how much were you paying your staff that they could afford a car? These days it is considered a standard "cost of business" that you'll need to double the footprint of a site to provide employee and/or customer parking. The car parks of my nearby supermarkets all have a larger square footage than the store they serve... often prime city-centre real-estate. Business invests a huge amount of money supporting car usage. Times change, the workplace will catch up.

Re: Elephant in the room

It is often conveniently omitted how long it takes to charge such car.

The average electric vehicle has a range of 180-350miles.

The average weekly mileage of UK vehicles is ~190miles. The average journey is ~8miles.

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.

For that one time a year where you go on a long trip, you can rapid charge in 30-45minutes, which is actually fine, because 200miles is 2.5-3 hours driving. As a matter of best practice this is often considered the maximum stretch one should drive before taking a break.

Moreover, a 30-45minute rapid charge would give you a full charge, giving you another 200+miles of range. In reality this is unlikely to be necessary.

Most people who need "more than 200miles" actually need 250miles of range, so assuming they haven't just bought a car with a "long range" battery pack which will do 300miles, a quick top-up mid-journey is more than sufficient and then you can destination charge wherever you're going - do 150miles, stretch your legs and top-up for 15minutes, then complete the trip. You might drive away without 100% charge, but that's because you don't need 100% charge.

There will be someone along in due course saying they have a pressing need to do 500-700miles/day, which of course means they're either exceeding the driving hours in the Working Time Directive (which admittedly only applies to HGV and Passenger Carrying Vehicles, not to high-mileage reps who drive a lot but are not employed as drivers. Arguably it should apply to anyone driving for work) or they're breaking the speed limit.

Neither is a very good look, nor a use case which manufacturers care about. Those sorts of duty cycles are bad for people's health and should be phased out. They used to be outright impossible because older cars/roads simply didn't allow it. Businesses should structure themselves to minimise travel.

Of course there's the question of if the supply cabling and substations will handle the load

The UK Grid used to peak >70GW. These days peak demand is 30-40GW. Unless capacity has been actively reduced during substation replacement or other maintenance work, there's a decent chunk of capacity there.

It's reasonable to suggest that new large scale installations (such as at service stations) will come with associated grid/substation works.

Likewise once gas heating is banned on new builds, new estates will have electrical provision appropriate for electric heating plus charging.

At the end of the day, the majority of people do < 20miles/day and will just barely trickle charge overnight. The people doing serious mileage will be destination or rapid charging at service stations, which will be appropriately provisioned.

Re: Hmm....

An EV needs lithium and cobalt, among other things, to make its battery pack. The mining of those minerals is incredibly destructive and unsustainable in its current form, and the disposal and any potential recycling are currently unsolved questions.

Recycling is largely solved. It will be completely sorted in the next 5-10 years, which is actually fine. Obviously there's a lot of virgin material extraction at the moment for the growth market, but that will tail off as the market growth slows and recycled material makes up a larger share.

Battery lifecycle will look something like:

* New cells deployed in cars

* Car reaches EOL; battery cells (with at least 70% capacity) redeployed to grid-scale battery farms

* Genuinely knackered cells recycled into fresh cells.

We also have to condsider all the additional electronics present in an EV, as well as all of the charging points, all of which take a lot of energy and resources to manufacture,

Additional electronics? Have you any idea how many sensors and black box electronics are packed into ICE vehicles? The current semiconductor shortage isn't just affecting EV production!

As for charging points... they take about the same energy and resource to manufacture as a petrol pump. The benefit is that you don't have to send tankers full of flammable liquid (which occasionally crash) to fill holding tanks (which sometimes flood or leak into the environment).

They also fit conveniently into existing car park layouts or onto the exterior wall of a house instead of having to set up a dedicated forecourt facility.

One might argue that petrol stations are a "sunk cost" in hardware terms, but this isn't really true as pumps are upgraded and replaced periodically and also require a great deal of maintenance.

In the '80s, satellite comms showed promise – soon it'll be a viable means to punt internet services at anyone anywhere

Re: Can't wait...

I'm also putting a tenner on satellite services still requiring a mandatory land line subscription...because who wants a world without BT OpenLeech except everyone?

I'll take that bet. Feel free to send it over now - StarLink doesn't require a landline subscription and never will.

That's the point.

In a complete non-surprise, Mozilla hammers final nail in FTP's coffin by removing it from Firefox

Re: Root cause.

Zawinski's Law

Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can.

More seriously, in the case of Firefox it came from Netscape, which was an "Internet suite" that included email, FTP, browsing, even support for Gopher. It was an era when ISPs used to give people email and free web-hosting with their internet.

It was useful back then.

Zawinski also said (in 1998!):

We're at the beginning of an industry, and this could all turn into television again. It could be controlled by a small number of companies who decide what we see and hear. And there's a lot of precedent for that.

Probably not a difficult prediction, but accurate nonetheless. Though if he'd tried to pick winners, he'd have got it wrong because at least two of them didn't exist yet.

England's controversial extraction of personal medical histories from GP systems is delayed for a second time

As penance, I will start reading the Guardian and watching Love Island

I wouldn't impose Love Island on my worst enemy but as far as The Grauniad goes, seems like someone has had a word with Katharine Viner (formerly of Cosmopolitan...) and commissioned a bit more Rusbridger-style investigative journalism as part of the Pegasus Project.

Duncan Campbell (occasionally of these pages) had an article in yesterday

The Graun went a bit limp-wristed after Rusbridger left with Viner being a patsy for the spooks. Someone has either applied some leverage or gone around her to get back into proper journalism.

Re: Anonymous Data is Impossible

Google (Alphabet) now knows that patient 014432 is Janet Crow

Correction - Google (Alphabet) now believes to a high degree of confidence that patient 014432 is Janet Crow...

The law of large numbers of course means that it's inevitable that Jimmy - also of SW2 - is obese with related heart problems (irregular heart beat) and has slipped a disc (lower back pain) and has searched for those terms recently.

Large scale data-correlation and de-anonymisation is a major problem, but arguably malgorithms doing it badly is an even bigger one.

Hell, even a "good" mechanism with 99.99% accuracy is going to result in thousands of people being on the end of automated decisions that are fundamentally unsound once you apply it to national populations.

Ad tech ruined the web – and PDF files are here to save it, allegedly

What he was getting at is that the browser vendors can add features willy-nilly to HTML and get them written into the standards.

That's how web standards have always worked. TBL developed HTML as a project. HTTP + HTML may or may not have surpassed gopher and been written into a standard. It's always been a matter of throwing mud at the wall and seeing what sticks.

The problem is not so much browser vendors developing new features willy-nilly. It's more that the dominant vendor (Google) not only controls the engine that most browsers use, but also the ad-platforms and huge gobs of the internet - from consumer services like Search, gmail and YouTube to developer services like Google Fonts.

If they decide that something is a good idea they can shove it into their services, add it to Chrome and bang, it's a de facto standard. Same with AMP - dev to our "standard" or drop down the rankings.

This is a very different world from when Mozilla would push a feature but it would depend on a combination of developers thinking it was useful enough to use and vendors adding support to Webkit/Blink/Trident/Presto for it to get any traction.

It's a monopoly issue rather than a living-standard issue. But as he quite correctly says, modern browsers are basically an OS and the web has become an application platform. The complexity is such that it is impractical to build a new browser engine from scratch - Microsoft of all people tried and gave up.

Combine that complexity with modern dev practices leaning heavily on brittle dependencies and you have a recipe for disaster.

Re: Dunning-Kruger

Firtman is also wrong.

PDF was originally designed to fix a layout for print, but now includes features like text reflow for viewing on arbitrary screen sizes. Like HTML it has evolved beyond it's original design goals. Is that a good thing? That can be debated ad nauseam, but if HTML is allowed to evolve to HTML 5 then PDF is surely allowed a crack at branching out.

In all honesty, PDF often "just works", even if it's not as elegant as other options in various scenarios. You can archive it, checksum it. So many sites these days basically break the Wayback Machine because the Web Archive simply can't keep up with the dependencies and dynamic structure of what could (and often should) be a static page.

In the meantime: Behold, the lightest, most compatible and responsive site on the web. An example to us all.

This is the data watchdog! Surrender your Matt Hancock smoochy-kiss pics right now!

Re: 'In the Public Interest'

I'm curious, how was 'the lady in question' an innocent party here?

Not entirely innocent, but Hancock had seniority. Obviously it's a slightly odd one because he's not a civil servant so is not a direct line manager in HR terms, but it reflects on him worse as he should be setting an example and abiding by his own department's rules.

If a manager and a subordinate are caught rule-breaking, the bulk of trouble should land on the senior party.

United, Mesa airlines order 200 electric 19-seater planes for short-hop flights

Re: Marginal gains

The key fact is that every little helps - if only 0.01% of air traffic is replaced with electric power that's still a win.

It's not just overall air traffic, it's the type of traffic.

BA bring an A380 into Heathrow. Some passengers leave the airport, some connect onto another big jet. Quite a few get a domestic connection to Manchester/Birmingham/Edinburgh, or short-haul over to Paris/Amsterdam.

Now realistically at least some of those should be replaced by HS2. For the ones that can't however, an electric jet reduces emissions over Heathrow, it also eliminates emissions over the destination.

By number of movements, short-haul outnumbers long-haul by quite a margin, and will have an outsized impact on urban air quality. Airliners also tend to be more efficient the higher they are. A Dreamliner cruising at 35,000ft for 10hours is proportionally more efficient than a short-haul aircraft bouncing up and down on five one-hour flights over the same period. If the ES19 comes to fruition then it's way more than a 0.01% win for people living near airports.

Of course modal shift to HS rail which is faster, cleaner and quieter is an even bigger win, but in some places that's not practical (usually due to large bodies of water).

Re: 250 mile range/19 passengers

On the other hand, how long would London to Amsterdam take to drive?

Why would you drive? Eurostar takes ~4hrs, which is about as long as it would take you to get a train (or drive) out to a London Airport, get touched up clear security, fly there and then get a transfer into Amsterdam proper from Schipol.

And for your effort you get a decent seat and power sockets for your mobile devices, which is more than sleazyjet can offer.

Re: 250 mile range/19 passengers

Whoop-de-do. 250 miles is basically my "might as well drive" range.

Well done you. Nonetheless, there's a market for short-haul flights as evidenced by the strong short-haul flight industry (pandemic notwithstanding). Lots of countries have less developed road infrastructure, things like mountains or are a bit islandy.

Electric short-haul is a reasonable substitute for gas burners in those cases.

Although expanded rail is still preferable - quieter, more energy-efficient, no security theatre to endure and delivers you to an actual place of habitation - not a semi-rural location somewhere out on the city's orbital.

Re: I wonder

There is one other bugbear foot rail… mountain ranges. Quite a few all over North America…

The Swiss have you covered

50km of base tunnel for about US$10.5Bn - or approximately three B2 stealth bombers.

Of course the US would need more than one, but the tunnels are small-fry in comparison to building out the rest of the rail network which the US so desperately needs.

Re: I wonder

Not a bad idea. Some sort of ground conveyor would also be useful rathet than burning power on taxiing

I recall reading somewhere that Concorde burned as much fuel taxiing to the runway as most airliners burned flying to Brussels.

Made me wonder why they didn't just tow it out from the terminal with a ground vehicle (whether electric or dead dinosaur).

Of course, as other posters have commented - any time you don't need to cross large bodies of water, you're usually better off with high speed rail. Just as fast, delivers you to your destination (not the city's outer orbital) and doesn't involve being touched up pre-travel.

Buyer of $28m Blue Origin space ticket has a scheduling conflict – so this teen will go instead

Re: Time to change the rules

Anyway soon this way the term will become inflated, and real astronauts will need a new name.

Yes, ultimately having a separate word for "someone who has been to space" will be a bit redundant.

You'll have flight crew, passengers, etc just like flying. You might be a frequent flyer, but you're still a a passenger.

We're just in that awkward transition phase where the market starts to open up from a handful of pioneers to "public access".

Re: Time to change the rules

I am sure there have been plenty of mission specialists who were not pilots. They were effectively cargo on the way up and down but did useful research and maintenance while in space. I am quite happy calling them astronauts along with pilots in pressure suits who flew experimental aircraft to over 80km altitude without performing scientific research with their other hands.

I'm not sure the suggestion was to draw a direct comparison of "pilot = astronaut", more "crew vs. passengers". Mission specialists still had the capability to perform significant crew duties and will have cross-trained for a bunch of tasks that they are not expected to actually perform except in an emergency.

Many of a ship's crew are not bridge crew or helm-trained. They might not be involved in the intricacies of casting off from a quayside or getting from a harbour to the open sea. There's nonetheless a difference between crew and passengers.

The coming of Wi-Fi 6 does not mean it's time to ditch your cabled LAN. Here's why

Re: This months of work from home showed too....

I'm sure you are aware that for under £10, you can get an Ethernet-to-USB adapter to allow you to wire the 4K Firestick.

Indeed. And I would do exactly that if I were to buy one (as it is I have the earlier 4K FireTV 2, which was a little box with ethernet rather than a stick form-factor).

The point is though, that the average punter won't.

If the router is behind the TV and there's an ethernet jack on the device and they have a spare cable lying around then they might bother to plug them in. But most people will jam it in the TV, find some power and then plug in their wifi credentials - even if the router is only a foot away :(

Re: What really grinds my gears.

I mean, in my building, I would LOVE to be able to have our property manager include in everyone's lease agreement that for the 2.4GHz band, that only channels 1,6 and 11 are to be used and only 20MHz is to be selected.

How big is your apartment that you need 2.4GHz?

Anyone "in a building" surely just knocks off the 2.4 entirely and uses 5GHz - faster (both bandwidth & -ac algorithms/MIMO support), less interference, more than enough range to cover kitchen diner, bedroom(s) and bathroom.

Caveats include consumer wireless printers (almost always 2.4GHz) and oddities like Kindles, but in that case you can split the SSIDs (mynet/mynet-2) and lock everything sensible to 5GHz by simply not giving it the key to the 2.4GHz network. The stuff that is 2.4GHz-only usually doesn't need much bandwidth anyway.

Re: This months of work from home showed too....

My brother lived in an apartment in South London. Complained his streaming was slow, despite having a decent uplink via CityFibre. I told him to get one of the crap flat Cat5 cables that will go under the carpet without making a bump and run it through to the TV.

What happened next will won't shock you.

Probably improved performance for the neighbours too.

New builds are uniformly crap, but the one thing they do seem to get right is that they've accepted that nobody wants a phone in the hallway any more and even if you did, you need power for the router, which they don't want to fit because it costs money to run wire and fit another socket. They bring the phone line/cable in next to the TV aerial socket, leaving you with half a chance that people might actually plug their TV/consoles/streaming devices in, which is handy since streaming video is basically the only way the average punter will generate a continuous, "long-lived" (more than a couple of minutes) network load. Web browsing is spiky, file downloads are generally pretty transient unless you're pulling many GBytes. But streaming can comfortably generate 10Mb/s for over an hour.

A pox on Google and Amazon for assuming wifi-only with the Chromecast/Firestick. Especially the 4K firestick. Imposing 4K wireless streaming on people's neighbours is just cruel.

Re: This months of work from home showed too....

What is the point of using a content delivery network on an encrypted link, they cannot cache anything,

Well they can - your HTTPS connection is terminated at the CDN, the CDN (hopefully) sets up an HTTPS connection to the origin. The bit in the middle is fully visible to the CDN and they cna cache at will - apart from dynamic content (obviously).

Fair comment though that the notion of CDNing something like stock data - which is real-time and probably relatively localised (what proportion of traders play on the Thai stock exchange from outside Thailand?) is a bit bizarre.

Ah, I see you found my PowerShell script called 'SiteReview' – that does not mean what you think it means

Don't have a COW man.

Staff sacked after security sees 'suspect surfer' script of shame

Re: He made one mistake

Even in Germany companies can monitor employees. Most notably in highly regulated industries like banking and healthcare but plenty of other industries too. Public confidence in the security and integrity of the banking sector trumps the right of bank employees to browse pron on their work machines.

The rules for what data can be collected; how it's stored; who can access and process it are rather stricter than in other nations but it can be done. No country outright prohibits the monitoring of employee use of company assets.

Kepler spots four rogue Earth-mass exoplanets floating in space, unbound to any star

Re: Nice confirmation

Honour to your holdfast, honour to your teyn!

Literally just finished DotL, which I spied unloved in the basement of Booth's in Hay on Wye last month.

Cracking first novel (many authors have a bit of a wobble in early books before they find their literary feet), wonderful world-building and full of themes which emerge later in his better-known works.

Data collected to promote public health must never be surrendered to police

Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous

Gun ownership has been a widespread thing in the UK through much of the 20th century.

It is foolish to conflate this with "being armed". There are many reasons for owning firearms which do not involve some pant-wetting exercise in "home defence". To say nothing of the (stateside) preppers who have enough munitions to arm a small country but don't know how to find fresh water or cultivate a food crop.

Even today more than 1% of Brits have a firearm and/or shotgun certificate. That ignores the ~10million airguns floating around unlicensed.

As a point of reference, just 0.7% of the UK population identify as Sikh. So there are more gun owners than Sikhs and we write special exemptions for them into primary legislation - for instance we ban the carrying of blades but exempting Kirpans and other religious articles.

Anything which affects whole-percentage-points of the population is "widespread", even if it's not well known.

Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous

When we were disarmed it was to prevent gun crime - which has never been worse than it is now - 20+ years after it was made illegal for someone to own a gun.

Please don't act the fool.

1. It's not illegal to own a gun. We weren't disarmed. Certain categories of handgun were banned in 1997. It was a stupid and kneejerk reaction, which flew in the face of the Cullen Inquiry which laid blame squarely at the feet of Central Scotland Police. Apparently Tony Blair found experts just as tiresome as Michael Gove.

2. Gun crime is not worse than it's ever been. It has however risen since 2010, demonstrating how in a European country with a sensible licensing regime it doesn't actually matter what you let people own (with a licence) but how well you enforce the law. Cut the Police through austerity and organised crime flourishes. Meanwhile the Czech Republic lets people own everything upto and including AK47s (with the right paperwork) and has half the number of homicides (0.6/100k people compared to the UK's 1.2/100k).

A lot of people like to compare the UK to the US, but of course you can always draw a straight line between two points. The skilled carpenter knows to measure thrice. Chart out gun ownership vs. intentional homicide for Europe, and then throw in the US at the end and it's obvious that gun ownership simply does not correlate with violent crime in any meaningful fashion.

Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous

Now the situation has changed a little, but seeing someone with a gun is still a sure sign that he is a criminal...

You might want to define some context there. I've ridden across the UK carrying firearms on the train and even the London Underground (yes, that's legal). Cased of course. Sometimes people recognise it. The ticket inspectors on the train to Brookwood know where the people with the long cases are going.

If of course you mean someone who is not a Police officer wandering around the streets with an uncased firearm then yes, that's cause for concern.

Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous

While it's a bit annoying, why does it matter? How is that some invasion of civil liberties? If they call you, either help or tell them to sod off.

Because aside from being unlawful, Police misappropriating health data will push people to avoid using the health apps - which then torpedoes the usefulness of that dataset.

In a pandemic, the operational requirements of the health services outweigh Police abusing circumstantial evidence in pursuit of petty crime. Their misappropriation of such data is not merely annoying and illegal, but actively undermining public health and safety.

Re: Singapore's decision was disastrous

Suprisingly, nobody else did, until now, that is, with Australia opening the way again.

To be fair, most other places are using apps based on the Apple/Google Exposure Notification API, which can't be abused in this manner. The UK uses QR codes but those are helping to connect anonymous identifiers on the Exposure platform.

There was of course the controversy over UK Police accessing Serco's separate Test & Trace data, notionally to enforce self-isolation rather than in pursuit of broader Policing aims but still chilling and liable to make the data less useful for public health usage, which is entirely unacceptable.

No BS*: BT is hooking up with OneWeb to tackle UK notspots

Re: Sincerely, Good Luck

*Government contracts often have annoying stuff in them, like wanting 'most favored nation' type pricing deals. So they get the lowest price, and then might want open book accounting*** and permit a modest profit margin. So if Starlink's paying X per launch, why is US government customers paying 3.14X?

Government contracts tend to have a lot of stuff like additional integration, verification and QA. Details about defence launches might be restricted to a subset of staff and requires compliance with various standards which don't apply to a normal commercial business. This requires additional work on the contractor's end.

A typical F9 launch is marketed ~$60m, the USGov typically pays >$90m. Part of that was also them specifying new boosters, which came at a premium. They'll be getting a better rate now they're starting to allow "flight tested" boosters for gov launches.

By contrast, StarLink is being launched on old boosters and endurance fleet-leaders. SpaceX can write down the costs on the basis that there's an R&D exercise going on and they might go boom and loose 60 satellites. F9 has a design life of 10 flights before major maintenance is required. The first booster to make it to 10 flights did it flying StarLink, not customer payloads.

Open the books all you like. The military wouldn't want to fly a billion dollar spy satellite on a StarLink-prepped booster.

Hydrogen-powered train tested on Britain's railway tracks as diesel alternative

Re: Whre does the Hydrogen come from?

That assumes a 1-for-1 swap of electricity and gas - e.g. replacing a 27kW gas boiler with a 27kW electric boiler.

The reality is that the replacement for gas is a ground-source heat pump, which generates ~4kW thermal per kW of electricity. Given a comparison of 4:1 then your equivalent heating cost is 16p of gas to 14p electric (albeit that seems cheap, most consumer electric tariffs are closer to 18p/kWh before the standing charge and even on an economy 7 tariff you're looking at 11-12p/kWh for nighttime usage). But with 4:1 then you're more or less at parity with gas, and if you charge a hot water tank overnight on a economy tariff then you could actually save money vs. gas.

The key problem right now being economies of scale and the number of gas boilers sold in a year vs. the number of heat pumps and associated gear. Plus for GSHP the labour required for installation - but this would be offset if done at point of build (especially for estates) where you already have plant onsite and aren't bringing in hardware and personnel specifically to dig up the garden or bore a hole for a retrofit or one-off (Grand Designer) install. Bringing in a team to bore one hole is expensive. Boring an additional hole per house (e.g. in addition to foundation piles) once the equipment is on site is almost negligibly cheap.

UK urged to choo-choo-choose hydrogen-powered trains in pursuit of carbon-neutral economic growth

Re: No all electric

Or if third rail is unacceptable (why?)

Kids being kids; can't use it over level crossings; risk to rail workers, risk of earthing due to flooding or other ground-level damage; risk to passengers if the train breaks down or derails and they have to be evacuated along the track (it should be dead by then, but passengers won't be waiting to check if they're trying to escape a train that has smoke in the carriages or suffered an obvious "fault").

Bi-mode trainsets which jump to battery for short segments (bridges/tunnels) are probably preferable - or hydrogen sets as envisaged here for operating beyond the electrified network.

Main lines are electrified, and the branch lines used by a couple of trains a day get a diesel train instead because it's cheaper, and it's apparently it's cheaper to design trains just for those lines than electrify all of them.

The MML would like a word.

Indeed, "Electric Spine" has been largely cancelled, which aimed for... a rolling electrification of those core lines not yet upgraded.

Which is why we have - admittedly very clever - trainsets like the Class 802s which can transition from running in diesel-electric mode to using overhead lines (or vice-versa) at line speed when they travel from/to the provinces (e.g. anywhere west of Cardiff) and rejoin/leave the electrified network.

USA's efforts to stop relying on Russian-built rocket engines derailed by issues with Blue Origin's BE-4

America's Ivy League are still turning out plentiful world class science and engineering people, compared to the rest of the world. This is the reason that the Chinese want to get their best people into US universities.

As with so much in the US though, this merely highlights the haves- and have-nots.

The US has some of the very best healthcare in the world. Real cutting-edge treatments... If you can afford them.

For everyone else, you get squat. Or medicare. Maybe. Depending on the incumbent president.

Likewise, the fact that Ivy League universities are undoubtedly excellent doesn't change the fact that the educational options for the majority of Americans have declined over recent decades, both in affordability/accessibility as well as in standards. Too many colleges spend too much on hand-egg and not enough on teaching.

America's best is very good indeed, but it lacks depth.

Re: Capitlaism

Also, it was politically savvy at a time when US-Russia relations were thawing. Encourage the fledging (and broke) Russian Federation to open their borders and make them a bit dependent on exports/incoming foreign currency, in return for accepting more imports from US/Western businesses.

This in the knowledge that the all-American Delta IV / RS68 engine was available in a pinch. Of course in the finest traditions of US government contractors it's a heavier, more expensive engine with an inferior thrust/weight ratio.

BOFH: When the Sun rises in the West and sets in the East, only then will the UPS cease to supply uninterrupted voltage

Re: Reminds me...

It's not even that they're designed to run at 80% (or whatever) of capacity, in a lot of cases. Different materials require tools to run at different speeds. Different tool heads require different power/speed combos, etc.

Exactly this.

A friend saved a mid-sized manufacturing firm ~£500/mo in cutting discs when he twigged that the machine was originally designed for a disc of a different composition and speed rating which had stopped being made. Somewhere along the line the current discs had been substituted and the speeds merely twiddled until they got a clean cut. They were running ~3x their proper speed.

Slowing them down involved tweaking the power supplies but lengthened tool life, saving both a decent chunk of money and improving consistency in the product.

Spacewalk veterans take a trip outside the ISS to pump up the power with new solar arrays

Re: ISS' swansong?

Is there any reason that what you propose could NOT simply extend the existing ISS? One "connection module" at a docking port and you end up with "the old station" attached to the new, a kind of "city planning" if you think about it.

That's kind of what they're planning with some of their commercial partners. Some new-space companies are looking at launching modules to the ISS which can borrow station power/utilities but develop revenue immediately as a science lab or whatnot. Then over time they'll launch additional utility modules on with the intent of undocking whenever ISS finally goes EOL and become their own independent station (or redock with other private modules). Axiom Space is the main name at the moment.

Not quite the same as ships forming a raft around a common hub, but one of the ways NASA is helping lower the bar to entry for private operators.

Sooner or later though, the core ISS will develop enough leaks and have enough stuff breaking that it'll be cheaper to deorbit and replace than keep going.

Re: ISS' swansong?

Assuming that the ISS will truly be deorbited a few years from now, it seems rather obvious at this point that this would mean having only a Chinese space station in LEO by the end of this decade.

To be fair, this depends on your definition of space station.

Each SpaceX StarShip will have approximately the same internal volume as the ISS does now. Albeit they don't (as standard) have anything like the number of docking ports, remote manipulators (Canadarm/Dexter) or other science-oriented facilities.

Compared with the hundred-billion dollar process of building and launching ISS in pieces, if NASA want a new LEO space station, the easy route will be to simply ask SpaceX to fit out one or more Starships for science operations and long-term habitation (which they will be doing anyway for Mars Transit), launch to LEO and dock them together. Indeed, you could launch a dedicated docking bus on a freight-Starship which arbitrary habitation variants could dock to.

Depending on cost, it might even be practicable for a crew to fly up in their own Starship, dock and have access to other vessels and "station power" and then go home in their Ship (rather than doing crew changes via small capsules as present), bringing back science experiments whole and allowing periodic updates/overhauls of hardware and living quarters on the ground rather than having astronauts do it on-orbit.

A strategy of assembling ships into a station would likely be the basis for a Mars space station should such a thing be found necessary. Starship is sufficiently massive that in the near future the architecture may flip so that "space stations" only consist of a dedicated docking hub/port facility (possibly with power and other amenities) with the majority of volume accounted for by the (semi-permanently) docked ships rather than small crew capsules docking to larger permanent stations.

Tim Cook: Sideloading is a disaster and proposed App Store reforms would harm user privacy and security

This.

Blocking sideloading is fantastic for some applications like primary education or enterprise where you either don't want users to install software at all, or be restricted to an approved subset of applications.

For private users, there should be a way to enable it, even if you strongly signpost users to the official store and discourage the practice.

MacOS does this to an extent throwing up a bunch of warnings about unsigned software and requiring you to dive into settings to tweak defaults. Equally you can lock it down for untrusted users.

If they want to keep pretending that the iPad Pro in particular is something akin to a real computer, they're going to have to end up loosening the reins at bit.