* Posts by Graham Dawson

2675 publicly visible posts • joined 5 Mar 2007

Programmable or 'purpose-bound' money is coming, probably as a feature in central bank digital currencies

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Permanent status quo

These ideas are not being pushed by one side of the political spectrum. Look around the world, instead of trying to tie it into your petty local political team sport; governments from far left to far right are all singing from the same hymn book on this idea.

Manchester's finest drowning in paperwork as Freedom of Information requests pile up

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Docking the wages of senior officers would do it.

England's village green hydrogen dream in tatters

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Re: Correction

Toxic, too.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Which Led Zep Album?

I can accept being wrong on the particulars, without resorting to insults. Regardless, the issue of hydrogen embrittlement is still a real thing, which isn't an issue with helium, and as a result of this, hydrogen does - despite the superficial size differences - permeate rubber and metal barriers more effectively than helium in a lot of cases. It's also something of a moot comparison; we can't use helium as a replacement for natural gas, so there's no expectation of having to contain it within a national gas transportation grid.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Well, duh

If they were serious about it, they would have spent the last 40 years pushing nothing but nuclear at every opportunity. Build out to accomodate the peak demand and then use the off-peak surplus to produce hydrogen, for conversion into synthetic hydrocarbons.

They're not serious about it, as demonstrated by the fact that the people must loudly pushing the whole thing are still buying expensive properties on the coasts they say are going to be swamped any moment, while demanding we give up the ability to heat our homes because of their obsession with unreliable wind and solar.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Which Led Zep Album?

It is still smaller. Two protons vs two protons and two neutrons. And while it "prefers" to form H2, it isn't particularly stable in that configuration and will preferentially bond with almost anything else, which leads to hydrogen embrittling.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: wow

Cameron's relatives, for instance.

And oh look, he's back in government again, just in time for another round of pre-election looting.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

for 5k, I could refurbish the entire heating system in my house, with a brand new boiler, and I wouldn't be saddled with a huge, noisy compressor and a great big storage tank taking up space after the fact. The heat pump itself also doesn't supply that temperature alone; it requires a booster heater, which is a heating element in the tank. If it's the one I'm thinking off, then it will only get up to about 57°C without the booster running.

So, to recap: You pay more, you get less, and you have to spend a premium on electricity in order to get the same heating performance as the gas boiler you're replacing.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

In top of which, installing a heat pump, due to the way they're being used, would require replacing all of the existing central heating pipework with larger diameter pipes and all of the existing rads with much bulkier ones, in order to compensate for the much cooler temperatures that the system will operate at.

What is always glossed over, in this push for heat pumps, is that they can't be a drop-in replacement for a hot water boiler; using them as such is a very poor use of the technology. Why are we proposing to use hot air to warm up water, which then heats up the air again, when we could just use the air directly? But then, that would require the admission that a "heat pump" is just a crippled HVAC system, which would then require them to explain why HVAC is bad for the environment until you're using it to make tepid water, at which point it's suddenly good.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: The EU...

The EU says a lot of things. Different flag, same scoundrels.

Linux Kernel of the Beast 6.6.6 exorcised by angelic 6.6.7 update

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Re: Incomplete

If you're going to be picky, be correct:

Here is wisdom. Let him who has understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a man

rev 13:18

It wasn't coopted, but assigned. The beast of revelation is the man so numbered.

Raspberry Pi sizes up HAT+ spec for future hardware add-ons

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Re: Interesting...

GPIO is still there. The PCIe connect is the small white ribbon connector at the back of the board, next to the logo.

Bank's datacenter died after travelling back in time to 1970

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Re: Learn something new every day!

But where do the coconuts fit in?

'Wobbly spacetime' is latest stab at unifying physics

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Re: Suspected as much . . .

Mathematics is a language that we use to describe the universe. It is incomplete, which is why we can't describe things like the interior of a black hole. "Infinity" is merely the contemporary equivalent of "here be dragons".

Don't mistake the map for the terrain.

Electric vehicles earn shocking report card for reliability

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: We need the technological progress...

Politician?

Ooh! Journalist?

Virgin Atlantic flies 'world's first fossil-fuel free' transatlantic commercial flight

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Re: "There's simply not enough SAF"

Iirc, between a quarter and a third of all the food produced in the world is lost due to inadequate storage and refrigeration. Most of the loss happens in the developing world, for reasons that are probably obvious.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: "There's simply not enough SAF"

Ah yes, the great Atlantic railway.

OpenAI meltdown: How could Microsoft have let this happen after betting so many billions?

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Re: Or...

And let's not forget what they did to Nokia.

SpaceX's Starship on the roster for Texas takeoff

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Re: Aims for the flight ...

Front or rear?

Mozilla tells extension developers to get ready to finally go mobile

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Re: Finally!

I've been using fennec, a Firefox build from the f-droid store, for the last year or so. It has extensions enabled (as well as a bunch of telemetry disabled) and runs ublock without issue. Turns out it's just a feature flag and the only thing stopping Mozilla from enabling it was their own reluctance to do so.

City council Oracle megaproject got a code red – and they went live anyway

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Re: A drop in the ocean

Tell it to Birmingham council.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: A drop in the ocean

The irony is that Brum council rather screwed themselves over in the equal pay matter. The city's officials and press office made a huge fuss about equal pay for years, loudly decrying the "inequality" of lower wages for certain, female-dominated employment sectors when compared to others that tended to be male dominated, regardless of the differences in work requirements and risks.

All of the council's criticisms of other organisations' practices became evidence of their own malfeasance in the claims. They could hardly argue that they were providing equal pay when their own pronouncements said otherwise.

A few small pay rises and a little more circumspection would have saved them hundreds of millions.

Tenfold electric vehicles on 2030 roads could be a shock to the system

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: rolling blackout on wheels

I also want to see a unicorn.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Not gonna happen

It means I might actually be able to get a seat on the train.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: rolling blackout on wheels

Those compact trucks from 20 or 30 years ago were made of tin and paper and wouldn't pass even the most basic of current crash safety tests. That's why "compact" trucks of today are so huge: All of the safety features they incorporate to keep the driver from being turned to mush.

All cars are big cars, now. I'm not even thinking about things like those enormous escalades and otehr monsters that are so popular in certain American subcultures, but things like five door family cars or supposedly smaller "compact" vehicles. Look at your typical hatchback from the turn of the century and compare it to what we have now. Today's hot hatch is larger than many full-size saloons (or sedans, I think the US calls them?) were back then. A mid-90s mondeo is the same size as a current generation ford focus. The current generation of the mini is longer and wider than my jeep cherokee, which was considered an average sized car when it was new. It's small compared to the norm, today.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Mind you...

No. The AI union negotiated freedom from exposure to cognitive hazards of that sort.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Never going to happen in the UK

Certainly felt like one.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: And then there's Insurance

I had a surprising amount of fun in a vauxhall tigra. It's just a two-seat corsa with the lid peeled off (and a rep as a ladies' car, apparently) but it was pretty cheap and held the road decently at speed. The only downside was the extra weight from the motorised roof, but with the roof down all that weight is low in the centre of the body, which improved the handling. Other general complaint was vauxhall build quality. It rattled and squeaked a lot. Heated leather seats, though.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: No shit

The only reason I'm not worried about the "britcoin" digital currency is because of this country's utter ineptitude when it comes to large-scale IT projects. It will either run so wildly over its time and cost budget that a future government scraps it before it completes, or it will come online in such a broken state that it will be quietly abandoned after a couple of years.

Boffins say their thin film solar cells make space farms viable

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Or we could build a couple of next-gen nuclear reactors and have more power, from a smaller footprint, in a safe and reliable form that isn't subject to the inverse square law.

Tweaked Space Shuttle Main Engine gets ready for final testing

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Trebles all round!

Raspberry Pi 5 revealed, and it should satisfy your need for speed

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Re: Pi on the moon

What a time to be alive...

How is this problem mine, techie asked, while cleaning underground computer

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Cleaning Printers that are full of dust

Might as well ask why you can't peel an orange with an apple peeler.

Ford, BMW, Honda to steer bidirectional EV charging standard

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: So you can still have enough remaining to use the EV to drive

EV range never works out anywhere near the claimed range IRL. Even the slightest deviation from the idealised driving state (carrying significant cargo, less than ideal driving conditions, diversions, etc etc) quickly saps energy. EVs are extremely efficient, but they have little choice in the matter due to how poor the energy density of batteries still is. The moment you introduce even one confounding variable, that efficiency is neutralised and the range drops like a stone.

Airbus takes its long, thin, plane on a ten-day test campaign

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Re: in a 3-3 economy class configuration.

At least, with the missile, you'll know where you are at all times.

Largest local government body in Europe goes under amid Oracle disaster

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Re: Compulsory Purchase of private houses

Oh, no, that's different. We still own the debt.

Power grids tremble as electric vehicle growth set to accelerate 19% next year

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: For many of us, hybrids make more sense than BEVs

Cold lithium cells have a much reduced capacity - not voltage, but amp- or watt-hours - due to increased resistance within the cell. Discharging the dell against that increased resistance will damage it, permanently reducing its capacity over time. Cold also directly induces a permanent capacity reduction over time, which can only be mitigated by constant temperature maintenance.

It's safe to say that your comparison with cold engine blocks is misleading, at best. An engine block only needs to be brought to a safe operating temperature, after which it will keep itself warm as an effect of its own operation. A battery has to have that temperature maintained constantly by external means, which requires expending energy for the entire time it's in storage.

Windows File Explorer gets nostalgic speed boost thanks to one weird bug

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Re: just get Linux already

Churchill, I think?

antiX 23: Anarchic for sure, but 'design by committee' isn't always the best for Linux

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: KDE or GNOME hard-depends on systemd?

systemd has absorbed so much of userspace, forcing a One True Way for a bunch of components that used to have multiple alternatives, that dependencies have become inevitable.

Right to repair advocates have a new opponent: Scientologists

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Expose

Isn't that the Mormons?

USENET, the OG social network, rises again like a text-only phoenix

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Re: IRC

Yes... Hahaha! Yes!

Japan complains Fukushima water release created terrifying Chinese Spam monster

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No, that's Trillian. You're thinking of the one in the latex biker suit from The Matrix.

Want tech cred? Learn how to email like a pro

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Re: Can the author please confirm...

Ooh! Is this an opportunity to complain about poettering?

LibreOffice 7.6 arrives: Open source stalwart is showing its maturity

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: MS asked the EU to standardize

Because MS keep extending their file format with proprietary bells and whistles. LO can open documents that conform with office open doc (sans some of the undescribed "act like version X of word" bits). It can't reliably open files that have breaking, proprietary extensions that change how the format is expected to work.

Last rites for the UK's Online Safety Bill, an idea too stupid to notice it's dead

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Last Rites, unfortunately...

And what about the sun readers?

Version 5 of systemd-free Debian remix Devuan is here

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Re: Being based off ...

That field is at the same level as the ground floor of a building, so it's the floor. Made of ground.

But to answer seriously, "floor" meant "ground" (in the sense of the bottom of a valley or lake; the "floor" of such) before it meant the structural levels of a building, which is a meaning it only took on some time in the late 1500s.

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: Your correct.

*you'r'd've

So much for CAPTCHA then – bots can complete them quicker than humans

Graham Dawson Silver badge

Re: But surely an ethical bot

It doesn't lie; it hallucinates. That's the term of art, now.

Graphene foam is the future of IoT power, maybe

Graham Dawson Silver badge

When a human expends energy to move, it is not "wasted", but necessary. What these technologies do, by extracting energy from those movements, is increase the amount of energy a person must expend in order to move around.

Official science: People do less, make more mistakes on Friday afternoons

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Re: Dire Straits

I feel like I'm in the army now