Posts by midgepad

International Criminal Court kicks Microsoft Office to the curb

I'm told Congress makes the law

I'm not from there, and IANAL, but they set up the First Republic to get away from rule by fiat of King.

What stronger protections they'll put in their Second Republic I don't know.

No

Actually, we d9nt.

Librephone battles the proprietary binary blob

Re: They have absolutely ZERO chance

Secured against whom?

Qui custodiet?

We're all going to be paying AI's Godzilla-sized power bills

expect some EV modules...

As in 10 modules to a 60kW battery which have declined to 70% of rated capacity after a few years use and been salvaged, or swapped out because they declined early (at a discount)

So there's your 4kW battery, with some of its electronics built in, and a 5 year life.

They might be better in a big rack near panels with a caretaker to supervise them, or singly outside houses. There's a business or three there.

the electricity bill for Hinckley Point

is not positive, is it. Although they do use some electricity, and expect the Grid to be there to dump their surplus into.

Had you really thought out your comment?

HP is larger, and has a different contract for supply and use, but size is not the primary determinant.

cars

Mine absorbs 50kW (max 100 if almost flat) but will accept down to 1.4kW and that's driven by the charger which can b3 driven by the Grid.

So if you had quite a lot of them plugged in at a moment, you'd have a large buffer against swings in production and other demand. Useful.

Mostly they charge overnight, absorbing 7kW (some on 11kW 3 phase) during 5 hours or so. So 1GW would charge (no napkin so I'll use my head)

Fast DC: 20 cars per MW :: 20 000 per GW simultaneously, all done in 1 hour, so 5 lots in one dead of night. (100 000 if we are all up and zipping around; and ... rather a lot during the whole day)

Slow AC: 140 cars per MW :: 140 000 per GW simultaneously, during most of all or little more than dead of one night.

Perhaps my head, or that napkin, is soggy?

Germany

Didn't want fission for reason of excessive and misdirected panic.

They don't want coal, either.

Nor Russian gas. (And might have similar views on USA gas)

But they do like solar,mand are building out balcony solar, and batteries.

And I think they like wind.

Alaska

Windy, I think.

Got some rivers and tides and ocean currents nearby.

I've not been there, but isn't it quite sunny in summer, with long days?

Space Shuttle war of words takes off as senator blasts 'woke Smithsonian'

Re: Meaning of "woke"

Always projection.

Re: in accordance with the law

Asleep.

Concorde though ...

I walked through 002 last week, which was entertaining.

It didn't look like integrated circuit era electronics.

(Had a look in a Vulcan. That computer had bicycle chains)

Literal crossed wires sent cops after innocent neighbors in child abuse case

Re: How were children removed when search turned up nothing?

The out of court actions and settlements will/would not have been reported.

Windows 11 update breaks localhost, prompting mass uninstall workaround

...properly from scratch ...

Ah well, if you are used to compiling Windows from source and adding your sel3cted apps for a task then Debian and Ubuntu must feel very odd.

Me, I never could get NT to compile.

GNU...

The Gneditors are GNUs

Re: "Microsoft's quality control department"

Sent for testing after the final version is ready for, or actually in process of, distribution.

'Fax virus' panicked a manager and sparked job-killing Reply-All incident

it was this century the local NHS

...was so keen to send us faces, or possibly receive them, that they bought a fax machine and gave it to us.

Some of my staff liked it.

It worked,until the paper ran out. They didn't send any more.

Most messages went half a mile, some a couple of miles. If it was urgent I'd drop the original in on my way home, otherwise it wouldn't be there until th3 following afternoon.

As for received faces: never saw one I wanted before th3 hard copy arrived, or that could easily be read,

(We'd had a scanner, upstairs, and a laser printer, downstairs, for years, and a fax modem card, the two storey fax machine/copier)

NordVPN open sources its Linux GUI client under GPLv3

Mozilla is in America, though

Which tends to put me off anything that might be regarded as secret, private, valuable etc

A pity.

Odd place, America.

Renewables blow past nuclear when it comes to cheap datacenter juice

Re: Really!

They are variable.

The sun will shine, the wind will blow.

Per year we know reliable lower bounds for how much.

The sun shines everywhere. The wind blows everywhere. On the good and on the wicked.

And may be tapped anywhere, and by all means shared.

But the wicked don't like that.

They want power sources they can charge rent on a connection to.

Even if they must run from rivers, tides, and deep holes into the Earth.

Anything which is a constrained point source.

peak UK electricity

1970s!

Re: Why the UK?

I think we are regarded as stable, defended, and prone to giving subsidies.

I used to run a server with a UPS.

Had a battery in it.

Don't the people running data centres do that?

You understand that growing is

in doubling times, right?

Which SMR do you refer to

when you say ramp up quickly?

Nobody has built a civilian one, I think, so going from "what are the applications" to assuming it can go from low power to full power quicker than a submarine with a pressing and nearly unique need to be a long way away seems brave.

Solar thermal and heat batteries

You can take out of a solar thermal system as much heat as you put in. (- leakage)

So you take it out over, say, 24 hours, and put it in during the hours the sun shines, and those figures tell you what your heat, and therefore electrical if you are doing that, power output is.

Any heat you don't draw during PV hours increases your night-time power, which is more it's point.

If you are a Finnish village, well North, you can draw in the winter the heat you stored in the summer. And if you use melted Silicon rather than granular sand, you are in a different league of heat-grade.

Grid: Among the givens ...

is the statement about microgrids, unconnected to the Grid.

Which suggests that the availability of connections to the Grid may not be quite so significant as suggested above.

Bezos plan for solar powered datacenters is out of this world… literally

10m down?

Do we know the temperature of the regolith 10 metres deep?

Or 100m

The swings will be much smaller, around something like the average between too hot and too cold, which suggests with a bit of cleverness there could be a layer which is Just Right.

_continuous_ fire TW death rays

If you have a GW of available power, it'd support 1 TW shot per thousand time intervals, where a time interval for a millisecond shot would be a millisecond.

Isn't that how high powered lasers, DeathStars and so on work?

I've ignored efficiency for the moment, I suspect it would tend to balance out.

dark half the month ... um...

You don't have to go to the Moon to have solar panels dark half the month.

The ones on my roof here on Earth are.

Batteries exist.

Also the closer to the Lunar poles you are, the shorter are the wires needed to make a ring main.

south polar basin

Stand your solar panels up in a ring round that. they'll see sun most of the time.

material and cold

The Moon is in orbit, and has material shielding, much of which is often very cold*.

Other moons are available, but have lower solar energy densities and longer lag times and comm7nication challenges.

If you need a big complicated question answered ,in less than 6 seconds, yesterday would have been a better time to ask it.

* And some of which is generally illuminated.

keeps it out of the atmosphere

Which does seem to be important.

In the Moon might be better, though.

Energy drink company punished ERP graybeard for going too fast

Re: Oh really ?

And compost.

(Although resourceful is a favourable description of a person.)

No suds for you! Asahi brewery attack leaves Japanese drinkers dry

zero and a default strategy

Their zero alcohol beer is one of the better ones.

The requirements this week or this month are going to be the same as last week or last month.

George in the warehouse* knows what came in, what went out, and where.

Repeat last month until it is sorted out.

Accept back deliveries not needed, mostly they'll go sideways or be stocked up, write promises to pay and receipts.

Note the people who turned out to be dishonest, and deprecate them severely.

* For large values of George's and warehouses.

Hacked Ford screens put anti-RTO slogan above CEO’s face

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

If the man is paying for an ego trip.

But birthday parades are only part of a job.

If you join a company then you should be working towards the aims and for the interests of the company.

Managing likewise.

Primates are a bit more complicated than that but bear it in mind.

(If you work in the health service, you work for your patients, comm7nity, and for all mankind. And some people should remember that, also, or be reminded of it.)

Re: When you work for the man, you work for the man

What?

Greg Kroah-Hartman explains the Cyber Resilience Act for open source developers

Re: Compliance is the same overhead for all producers :(

They might sue you?

Munich Airport chaos after drone sightings spook air traffic control

Re: Banning drones

There's been some work done on that,near the Ukraine border.

Only way to move Space Shuttle Discovery is to chop it into pieces, White House told

Re: I think the word "space" is a bit poorly defined

Karman definition is adequately specific and has a physical significance.

To fly on the Karman Line you will need to move at a speed which is not lower than the orbital velocity at that radius.

It isn't a Karman Hairline, you'd draw it with a brush, and it may jiggle with seasons and so on. But it does it's job.

Re: I think the word "space" is a bit poorly defined

Karman line defines orbit/al altitude well enough.

Astronauts are well enough defined, as having been in space, with a similar radial distance (after Buckminster Fuller).

Re: I think the word "space" is a bit poorly defined

And there's an X15 to hand there.

Although it is a single seater.

Probably had more than one pilot/astronaut though.

Overall.

They could fold in

DC and Puerto Rico as a couple more States.

Struggling to heat your home? How about 500 Raspberry Pi units?

Re: Interesting idea

Well, my shower doesn't need water above 50°C

And my CPU doesn't seem to mind running at that.

The oil presumably cools better than air would, I.E. takes the heat away with a smaller temperature differential.

I expect you open a window in summer, and the unit does a quick zap s bit warmer weekly with an immersion heater in the water tank.

Submarine cable security is all at sea, and UK govt 'too timid' to act, says report

battleship

Russians just commissioned one, didn't they?

Northern fleet.

Hardware inspector fired for spotting an error he wasn't trained to find

Our local livestock market has an exhibition space, and any number of overhead sockets. On relevant days each space has an extension hanging straight down. Whether it is ladders or a cherry picker I don5 know.

Boffins fool a self-driving car by putting mirrors on traffic cones

Re: Just Stop It

There's a vehicle in front of you at 62 mph and you wish to drive at 70 mph.

I can see a failure mode here.

Fortunately the reluctance to crash function of the car has a default setting, which the driver may leave, or supplement.

ACC setting

Go into the controls and increase the following distance.

There is also a networking provision which allows cars and the road furniture to talk amongst themselves, and perhaps one day there'll be a passage of hints up and down a line.

I can imagine the conversations though.

Re: Perty cool study

So much wrong...

Re: Perty cool study

The following driver's insurer would suggest that they should have followed less closely, since a driver ahead - or their car - may respond to something visible from in front but not from even an unsafe distance behind. Or to nothing.

And they'd be right.

Along with that, my ID.3 is very good at following at a safe distance* and applying progressive braking to maintain that. Quicker reactions than I have, and a reduction in cognitive load.

(And mostly it brakes at no more than 30% of max, thus regenerating as much energy as it can, not bouncing the contents around, and being generally comfy)

* It also accepted my instruction that I'd like a little more distance than the default, as a function of speed.

Re: but his recent comments about Sadiq Khan were absolutely spot on

Imperfectly.

Re: Mirror, mirror ...

The air is noticeably cleaner, people's lungs are on a population level healthier, the costs of healthcare are probably semi-fixed and saturated, I.E. complicated, but one element of the cost of some respiratory condition care is probably partly limited.

And there's a reduction IIRC in severity and frequency of severe injury from motor vehicles hitting people not in motor vehicles.

That'd be more of a reason for a Londoner to vote for it, than for someone who doesn't want to go there but when they do wants to draw a line of smoke behind a high speed mechanism.