"BA in Politics and History "
But sadly not the history of governement IT failures.
Which would have been quite a relevant subject for her to study.
Yet another Minister with a "Big Idea."
16326 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
2019 Decide to take IT back in house.
Switch from heaviliy bespoked SAP to Oracle.
Estimate £20m
Current estimate £100m
Migrating a single major ERP to another single ERP.
This top-down centrally planned migrate-and-merge has f**ked up so many times before what's the odds HMG wil succeed? 100:1?
Don't get me wrong. Data centres should be merged to the places with the lowest operating costs. Remote working staff should not have to migrate if that's somewhere remote (next to a hydrolectric dam in Cumbria for example).
But it should be organic, encouraging mergers, not forcing them.
Of course following the successful campaign by SI's to emasculate the Civil Service of not just people who can do technology but even people who can manage the process of doing technology they have no f**king clue of what a s**tstorm this will be.
Oh but in Johnson's head he already is a Great Man.
It's just all those little people who don't see his greatness and think of him as a vacous, lazy, superficial chancer who's driven by self interest and a massive sense of entitlement.
control over the vast majority of EU regulation. "
Or perhaps UK MEP's failure to work with other countries parties because they are soooo special
Or electing UKIP MEP's who trousered their money and did litereally b**ger all work for their constiuents (IE the UK).
Or that might have been because the UK had the smallest number of civil servants in the EU secretariat* Even Romaina was better represented.
Or maybe that's just a string of stories you read in the Daily Heil.
Here's the thing. The UK didn't take the European Parliament very seriously long after it became a very serious body indeed. They sent the clown prince Farage there (but they'd never be stupid enough to elect him to a "real" constituency, despite his trying (so far) 7 times).
*A body of 46 000 people (1/2 the size of the UK DWP) to administer 28 countries.
Actually Boris Johnson said this.
In fact you could sum up his "philosophy" (as far as he has one) as
"Fuck business" (over Brexit)
"Fuck America" (over the Norther Ireland/RoI border-that's-not-a-border mess and Joe Biden's interest in it)
I'd include "F**k smart young blondes, even if you're already married" but he's never said that out loud so I couldn't include that. It's more of an impression I have about him.
But the idea that (political) actions have actual physical (and financial) consequences IRL doesn't really seem to penetrate the majority of the public school and Oxbridge people who are running the UK government at the moment. And hasn't done so for a very long time.
Proper X plane programmes are designed to acquire a "Capability"
In this case "Exceed M1 at an acceptable altitude and with an acceptable level of boom"
In an X programme everything is sacrificed to the core goal. Everything else should be as OTS as possible (which BTW is what most pilots who've seen the SR71 cockpit notice. "Most of the controls are so normal"). So don't expect its fuel consumption to be good enough for a real SST, because that's not a core requirement.
It's to get the data into the database that the next generation of (US based) aircraft mfgs can use to build an actual passenger carrier.
Note that per Skunk Works doctrine LM do a chunk of their own flight testing before it goes to NASA, although it's been decades since LM left the commercial airline business.
The terminology for this is tricky. I think the common phase is "Ring wing"
Yes they have been researched, mostly in the 20's and 30's but later in the 50's. Nasa NTRS, Cranfield and the U North Texas servers should have several reports on them (UNT treats NACA as a separate section which is probably when the work was done). And yes people have built actual aircraft to test the idea out. Yes they do fly, but I don't recall any of them going to M1 IRL.
Usuaully the line of reasoning has been "Wings form drag producing vortices at their ends. What if we extend them together so there are no ends?"
So it's usually viewed as a drag reduction strategy.
Good luck and happy reading.
Well it was the only civilian aircraft ever with an afterburner :-)
Both mfgs were aware of this and had they had a continual programme of flight tests during the early days.
Had they got to the 17th Concorde they planned a series of structural and engine upgrades that would cut the noise and ended in eliminating the AB entirely.
Eliminating AB saves a lot of fuel from the takeoff and punching through the M1 drag rise (which drops back around M1.1. IOW all the early transonic aircraft were trying to fly in the worst speed for drag rise).
And lets not forget that Concorde demonstrated supercruise (no AB) for decades before the F35 made such a big thing of it.
Oh you mean like the Buccanneer did in the 50's? * It cut the size of the wing by about half
It'll be fun to see what happens when someone finally applies Pradtl's second paper on optimising the wing to reduce root loading to the supersonic design problem.
*Roughly the nearest UK equivalent to the A4 Skyhawk.
The story was written in 1980 and the other articless and essays up to 1995
And f**k me sideways how much of the points raised and solutions suggested are still relevant close to 30 years later
You know, like charging for email sending with a crypto currency?
I need a drink. The same old stupidity over-and-over...and-over is too depressing.
They are like f**king cockroaches.
As Upton Sinclair observed "No man's ignorance is so great as a man whose livelyhood depends on his ignorance"
And if you're playing the TOTC card you don't want to hear anything about "No you can't have "unsecure encryption on demand," which is basically what you want. It doesn't work that way. It's all or nothing. The mathamatics of cryptography trumps your belief that we can do this."
No.
It's the same old cabal of data fetishists, so many of whom seem to be Oxford PPE graduates.
Many of these high level civil servants are are in the Intelligence community (Policy, not operations. IRL the equivalent to "Thomas Brian Reynolds" in Enemy of the State) so are used to putting out a cover story to hide what they want and why.
They don't give a s**t about kiddie fiddlers, except as a useful lever to control their behaviour of course. The C in MICE.
Their real "heroes" are
a) Francis Walsingham and his reputed ability to read every letter posted in England.
b) Cardinal Richel Richelieu and "Give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest man, I will find something in them which will hang him"
It's a very inefficient way to catch sexual predators.
It's an excellent way (if you can remote update the "suspect words list," and you can bet any system they mandate will require such a mechanism) to spy on the whole population.
It's an excellent way to spy on a whole population
Welll....
IIRC the original of the term was from Wilhelm Reich's later work and his idea of "Orgon"energy released by sex.
He also believed that this energy could be used to control the weather, using a "cloud cannon."*
But has anyone been reading the 1995 edition of Vernor Vinges "True Names"?
*Yes the thing you see in the video for Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting."
I think that would require Titan to have a radio beacon to eject in the first place.
I'm not sure there's any evidence that was the case
"Release the emergency buoy" is a common trope in submarine fiction. IRL in mini-subs......
this has happened before..
There's at least one case of a submersible in the North Sea being trapped on the sea bed in the 70's. Yes they did use "pingers" to navigate around the legs of the drilling rig.
They were rescued in time, but the CO2 level got high. That means killer headaches, gasping for breath and thick "brain fog" :-(
Can I count the number of single point failures in this design?
No backup submersible (SOP for the offshore oil business)
No backup game controller!! WTF
BTW 10m of water --> 1 atm additional pressure.
4000m --> 400atm
That's higher than the pressure inside the Shuttle main engines.
Which makes Yucca Mountain with a life expectancy of 10 000 years sound exceptionally bat-s**t crazy, does it not?
The thing is CO2 does actually have several large uses, such as blowing it through sea water to make concrete IOW make net carbon negative concrete. That's pretty important given concrete is the #1 construction material on the planet.
No that's just PR-Speak.
All Uranium ore has different levels of total uranium. A viable deposit can have Uranium at 250ppm (basically 250g/tonne) up to several % (US ash pile from coal fired power plants have been checked and found to be about 125-150ppm).
But the U235 part is always 0.7%.
So you want 19% enrichment? That's going to need roughly (19-0.7)/0.7 tonnes of uranium (not ore) to get that level of U235.
But IRL the process is not 100% efficient and as you chase more and more of that 0.7% the energy needed goes way up. Typically they go down to 0.2%, so actually that 195 is (19-0.7)/0.5 tonnes of U needed.
For PWRs enrichment sticks about 20-25% on the costs of fuel. For higher enrichment it will be much higher.
Amongst other things they helpe designed the Kuznetsov turboprops that make the Tu95 one of the few propeller aircraft that can break 900KmH
And IIRC Von Braun came out of hiding to talk to the US Military and offered to bring his team to the US (which they quite liked the sound of).
No kidnapping required
The Russian offer (cold rooms, inadequate food, wall to wall guards) not so appealing.
Unfortunately you're mistaken.
The decision by the AEC to go all-out on the sodium cooled fast breeder also meant they pulled all funding on any other design, including the work at ORNL on molten salt designs which lead ultimately to Glenn Seaborg's resignation. *
AFAIK no US reactor design got built without AEC funding assistance (like the BWR) that was the end of the divergent reactor development in the US.
*IIRC the key decision maker was a disciple of Rickovers and a big fan of the choose-one-design-and-make-lots-of-them school.
Oh really. Let's see what the NRC has to say on the subject
"Moderator temperature coefficient of reactivity
As the moderator (water) increases in temperature, it becomes less dense and slows down fewer neutrons, which results in a negative change of reactivity. This negative temperature coefficient acts to stabilize atomic power reactor operations. "
The French (80% of whoe power is from PWRs) use them for frequecy control and power leveling on their grid.
And of course there's the requirement in the EPRI "Utility Requirements" and EU "Utility Requirements" documents for being able to ramp future reactors for power grids (regardless of type) at 5-10% of Full Power/minute (which IIRC the Hinckley Point C PWR can meet).
what you call "slowing down lenght" is what happens in a moderator.
The common name for "slowed down" neutrons is "thermal" spectrum.
Fast spectrum breeders don't have moderators at all. BTW Natrium is a fast spectrum design that's not meant to breed (but will anyway, given the fuel is < 100% U235)
SOP for a FS breeder is to wrap the core in a "blanket" of "fertile" material, which is anything that's got U238 in it.
This also helps shield the RPV from the severe radiation damage. In LWR's this is done by the water, in other other thermal spectrum
I've never read the classified SL1 mishap report but I'd guess the bit where one of the operators was found pinned to the ceiling after they'd been harpooned by the only control rod would make for fairly uncomfortable reading. From 20MW to 3GW in a fraction of a second. Impressive.
Wrong again.
Light water reactors (of which the PWR is a subset) couldn't match the thermal efficiency of the coal plants of the 1950's.
Today a coal plant can hit 50% efficiency as a combined heat-and-power uniit and maybe 44% for electricity only. But LWR's are no efficient than the day the first one went critical, around 1953. Adequate for turning the propellers of a sub. Not so good for an alternator.
Safety wise the CANDU (the 2nd most common reactor type on the planet) has never had a TMI like meltdown. (but then it's never been operated by ex-Navy personnel who were taught that running a 600MW on-shore reactor is exactly like running a 60MW submarine unit)
In fact when the British developed the AGR they knew by using the steam conditions of their coal plants they could use OTS steam turbines, as used by the 8000 fossil few PP around the world, not th few 100 built-to-order of an LWR. LWR's produce quite poor quality steam that needs a lot of work in both babysitting the chemistry, and in the blade design.
The old "It's sooo small, how can it matter?" argument.
Posed in the court case aroudn Silent Spring about DDT in the environement.
The level of CO2 he's talking about is 400ppm
IIRC at 5ppm of Testoterone and 3ppm of Estrogen you're a man.
reverse those numbers and you're a woman.
So yes, Bob, small number can make quite a big difference. In fact per head of population Australia is the #2 emitter, after Saudia Arabia (because 10% of what they pump out the ground goes straight in the boilers to run their chemical works).
I'll certainly admit she was a stunningly poorly prepared guest, given this guy, but then the fossil fuel industries have always been able to hire the most plausible mouthpieces to make their case.
Fun fact. Used nuclear fuel cannot be moved off US sites due to Congressional mandate.
Which is why UNF has been piling up at US NPP's since the 1970's.
The mandate on not reprocessing started with Gerald Ford and was continued and expanded by James Carter, also in the mid 70's.
It has never been seriously challenged.
All that waste is > 10yrs old, which means it's radiation level is 1/13 the design level of the fuel repro system built (and used) by the EBR II project. Logicially break the UNF down. 50%(by mass) is Nuclear grade Zirconium at 20-40$/Kg, 95% of it will be U238, keep all the TRU's together (or as the Korean call it "Dirty Pu"), Cs/Sr (causing most of the heat). The best place for all the TRU's is back in a reactor.
CO2 in the atmosphere has a life of between 300 and 1000 years.
Think about that figure for a minute.
IOW if all CO2 production stopped tomorrow natural processes will take 3-10 centuries to drop levels back to near-pre-industrial levels (not quite there as there's a lot more people on the planet now).
But that is not going to happen, is it? Fun fact. At >2degC rise all coral dies. So if you haven't seen a coral reef yet.....
So yes CCS at the source at the chimmney of a large power station is a pretty good idea. Turning it into the raw material for cement mfg (being done in California) is a damm good idea (given concrete is the #1 global construction material) as well. Creating "Seacrete" by passing electricity through a mesh to create structures (pioneered by a German scientist in the 70's) also captures CO2 from the whole world.
But time will tell if it's enough if humans join the list of species we made extinct. We don't have 300 years to wait. We damm sure don't have 1000 years left at this rate.
Strange idea really. Commiting racial suicide. Yet that appears to be exactly what the human race is doing.
The UK experience of the Dounreay Fast Reactor is summarised Here
Fast breeder reactors were a great idea in the 1940s,50s and 60s
By the end of the 70s. Not really . By the 80's Costs >> Benefits. By the 90s WTF??? BTW even the Nerva nuclear rockets were not fast spectrum either. All the graphite in the structure made them thermal/epithermal.
10% of channels in the CANDU had >1MeV neutrons. So conventional reactors do have neutron fluxes that can both breed more fuel (U238-->Pu239) and fission transuranics IE Np-Fm, which are the source of the long term heating and radiation of UNF and the reason for the "Geological storage must survive 10 000" year bu***hit IE 2x the entire length of recorded human civilisation (one of my sanity tests is to say something out lound. I ask myself "Did I just sound bats**t crazy just now?" If the answer is yes I tend to think it is a stupid idea. This idea fails my sanity test).
Which was when fast reactors (for breeding Pu from U238) were conceived.
Back when the #1 use for Uranium was "Ceramic pigment." (it makes a really nice Yellow apparently). IOW people had no idea how much U was out there. Did the Manhattan project consume all of the world's supply? 10%? 1%? No one really knew.
Cue 30 years of worry stoked by 4 highly optimistic AEC reports in the late 60s/early 70s predicting (by the year 2000) America would need 2 TerraWatts of nuclear electricity and the LWR's would max out the entire US Uranium reserve at 1 TW.
Ohh noews. QED. Must develop fastest possible breeder (one that makes maximum amount of Pu more than fuel it consumes) NOW
IRL. Three Mile Isalnd showed how to turn a $1Bn asset into a $2Bn liability on the corporate balance sheet, US domestic and mfg users got a bit more interested in buying efficient goods and systems and 9 of the 10 biggests uranium deposits on the planet (the biggest IIRC is in Canada, over the border and easiliy invadable if you're that worried) came on stream from the mid 70's onward.
Using the heat to drive offline storage for later release is clever. US operators have an obsession with running their nukes 100% 24/7 as baseload and seem very timid when it comes to ramping them. A bolder operator (or a better design) could run at 90% then wait when the spot price of electricity rose before putting in a bid on the market and picking up a nice little bag of cash. The salt storage could give them that flexibility. Right now the dirty little secret of the renewable business is that when the sun don't shine, and the wind don't blow, they are going to buy in electricity from people who can respond quickly IE gas turbine operators. :-(
Fun fact.
All reactors breed. The 1st generation Russian, French and British thermal spectrum reactors #1 goal was to breed Plutonium for bombs. Electricity was a by-product. People have been living with the consequences of those design decisions ever since.
PWRs would have to refuelled much sooner if they didn't run partly on the Plutonium produced by irradiating the U238 which is what roughly 94% of the metal in the fuel is.
The choice of a fast reactor for this is baffling. Upside is you eliminate need for a moderator. Downside 1. Need high enrichment to make it work at all. "High-assay low-enriched" is PR-speak for near-HEU IE bomb grade Uranium. Most (all?) civilian mfg plants are only licensed up to about 5% as to run higher you have to totally change the whole factory layout to keep it "criticality safe" IE no accidental chain reactions. Doing so cuts the mfg capacity massively so many fewer fuel pins/assemblies go out the door in any period.
Downside 2. Neutron fluence (IE lifetime flux) to the walls goes up 100x and they are all "fast" IE high energy (no material inside the reactor to slow down/absorb them) material swelling for the wrong wall alloy (either the pressure vessel or the cladding) can hit 24% due to some atoms being displaced and void formation. Side note. Swelling was what killed the plan to use Beryllium for AGR cladding (they'd cracked the brittleness problem already :-) ). Steel required enrichment. Had they gone with Zirconium alloy they might have been able to run with natural uranium, like the Magnox stations. CEGB stated going enriched made a big difference to their economics. But I guess we will never know. (althought that might make an interesting topic for someone on a relevant course. ) :-( .
Lastly 9 of the 10 biggest uranium deposits didn't come on-stream till the mid 70's. Between the decades of stockpiled Used Nuclear Fuel (Let me be clear, in case there is any doubt of my PoV. Calling it "spent" nuclear fuel is a f***ing lie) available to existing nuclear nations and the deposits available the need for a sodium cooled fast spectrum reactor is about as great as that for a coal fired steam car
That was my take at first.
But this stuff is not self-aware.
So it cannot be told directly and get better from it's own mistakes (which I think was part of the DK experiment)
OTOH the people using this stuff think they are superb because the AI generates the code for them.
Hmm.
The Dunning-Kruger effect by proxy?
Yup.
Out of power.
Carry out act of terror.
Spread lies
Attempt to discredit the electorial process if their candidates don't win
Attempt to discredit reporting of their agenda by actual journalists
In power
Institute/expand mass surveillance
Widen reasons to arrest and imprison people
Target specific groups for outright murder.
I know of countries where that pattern has played out. But I can't tell if it's a right-wing or a left-wing group.
Because it doesn't matter. Their real enemy is the democratic process itself.
The right of people to have an election and say "We're tired of you authoritarian nutjobs. We want some sane grownups in now."
They are using "Reasoning by analogy."
It's popular with Evangelical Christians, Flat Earthers and various other SEL's.
Usually the analogy fails because it does not stand up to close inspection.
Mostly because the people using them are not trying to find the truth of a situation. They are trying to win an argument, often one that is either undecidable, or just wrong.
Indeed.
Musk's idea of "freedom" is starting to look a whole lot like The Golden Rule.
However while the Gold lets you make the rules (in this little part of the universe) it does not mean that people have to like your rules or even (dare I suggest it) actively seek to work around them.
Musk has achieved great things and I'm actually quite an admirer of those achievements.
That does not excuse acting like an enormous Ahole.
Donald Trump really does have that niche very well covered already.
I sense a part of Musk wants to be universally loved but doesn't quite get the idea that if you speak carelessly and act agressively then you shouldn't expect everyone to love you 24/7.
In fact you should either STFU or accept that some (possibly even the majority) of people who know of you think Musk --> Colosal Cockwomble.
It never ceases to amaze me how someone with such a huge wad gets sooooo wound up over some stuff. My view would be more along the lines of "I have $170Bn in the bank. Do I look like I f**king care who knows where my plane is? Anyone actually getting that close will be meeting my personal security team who will encourage them to step back."
Then again maybe it's his belief that he is beyond criticism and is offended that anyone believes they can still express any PoV that is not 100% +ve. Of course that would imply an ego the size of Jupiter.....
This is what they say themselves
"We have made a significant contribution to 3i, including producing software for the fuel management system, on-board vehicle systems, structural health management and elements of the navigation and cockpit display system."
Yes you're right it was the DoD decision to allow C++.
A decision US taxpayer will be paying for decades from now.
I think you're right. I also think that the "Mission data packages" have to come from the US (as US not sharing the code to generate them) basically means all of these aircraft are bricked if the UK (or any other buyer) wants to fly a mission the US don't approve of.
Question is that the chicken, or the egg?
Mfg offer new versions of stuff at higher prices.
Airforces can't buy all of whatever type they want.
Airforce issues "Multirole" spec.
IIRC the 3 versions of the F35 have diverged so much from their original plan that they now have 20% commonality.
so you're still left with nearly all the logistics issues of 3 aircraft and the compromises involved in the original design.
I've always been most impressed by the B52, U2 and SR71 in this regard. They had a set of payload bays, a mass limit and what services they could supply the payload, and let the payload designers get on with it. The U2 is still flying after 7 decades, as is the B52.
Whooosh.
Still Mr (or Ms) AC you showed the EU, right? You stood up to be counted. You and the other 15 million (who are still alive) that voted for this.
As one of the delusional/greedy/gullible types who Dominic Cummins managed to play like an orchestra of banjos at an Ozark hoedown.
The Remain campaign thought leaving the EU was mad.
They failed to consider it was possible to form a coalition-of-the-mad and the British education systems astonishing ability to turn out people with poor (or non existent) critical thinking skills AKA bu***hit detection, who would believe whatever crap they were spoon-fed by their conspiracy theories, propoganda, ads, general lunatic rantings "news" feed on their favourite social medial platforms.
Something I'm sure that will be considered the next time this question comes up.
No, more like < $100m/ aircraft
OTOH the B21 "Raider" stealth bomber is about $1Bn/aircraft.
LM pitched the F35 build process by a)Using production tooling for the development aircraft b)Rolling out any improvements by fixing them in the field
The ideal aircraft for this model is one that is a)Very conventional (little/no ground breaking tech) b)Unlikely to need major upgrades just to provide basic capability.
The Hawker Siddley Hawk was one such (very successful) aircraft built this way.
The F35 is nothing like a good choice for this model of construction. :-(
Turns out when this model of construction is applied to something like the F35 it's a recipe for massive bills to the DoD
And massive profits to LM.
Funny how that works is it not?
Yes, AIUI that was what the battery room was for, a nice smooth transition to Mr Diesels mechanical wonder.
Which (in theory) could run the operation indefinitly as long as it's tank was topped up.*
*Or in our case if it was filled to begin with :-(
Not surprising.
Looking into the history of Intel's successful processors (8085 onward) you see they didn't design them.
They were implementing someone elses design (in that case for a Point of Sale terminal)
Then the deal fell through and they got to keep the processor design for free.
IIRC the 8088 was another "inherited" design.
Basically Intel are a foundtry that was able to move up the value chain. It took till the 386 before they could cope with context switching.
I'd call everything else "Lipstick on a pick" but that's just my rather jaundiced view of them and their relationship with their fellow co-dependent enabler.