Posts by John Brown (no body) 25368 publicly visible posts • joined 21 May 2010
No, for the same reason I don't have a coal or other mining "slag heap" or a council waste refuse landfill site in my garden. Because that would be fucking stupid! On the other hand, a single canister of vitrified waste buried 30 meters down would probably be safer than those other options and much less of a smell or eyesore.
"Getting storage sorted out really shouldn't be beyond us."
Currently, it's a physics problem. Energy storage density. And unless something other than current battery technology is used, lack of materials to make the batteries and the pollution caused in making them.
There may come a time when the renewables power sources "boot strap", and renewables are used to create renewables, but I doubt it will happen without a lot of nuclear in the mix.
"Wherever there is a car accident, it can be cleared up within at most a few days and more usually a few hours. Chernobyl? Fukushima? Decades..."
Have you considered how man decades of time it takes to clear ALL of those car accidents across the entire world, every year? Death by a 1000 cuts? You seem to think million of small bad things are better than on big bad thing. Millions of car accidents per year compared to 3 nuclear accidents in the last, what, 30-40 years?
"First, it assumes that humanity NEEDS to continue consuming current levels of power, as a justification for Nuclear."
ABSOLUTELY RIGHT ON BRO'
We need to be planning for a FAR BIGGER consumption as the poorer parts of the world get lifted up to modern levels. Demand will increase dramatically, not remain stable at current levels.
Oh, hang on. I just read the rest of your comments. Your plan is to decimate the worlds population while dragging the remains of the advanced countries back down to the levels of the 3rd world. Good luck with that!
Interesting quote though. About the only people I ever hear use the term "metric tons" are Americans who want to sound "cool" and think "metric tons" are sooo much bigger than "real" tons :-)
(I usually assume "ton" means imperial and tonne is metric)
"8.4% biomass (whatever that is)."
Primarily, that's burning wood. Essentially, the same as a coal fired power station, only it's little pellets of wood blasted into the flames instead of ground up coal dust. Most of the wood pellets are from cutting down trees in the USA and shipping them over to the UK using ships running on the dirtiest most obnoxious "diesel" imaginable. Those US forest are supposed to be fully "sustainable", but some investigation (BBC? Panorama?) have shown they are not always planting any trees to replace them, let alone the better than 1:1 replacement they claim.
"On average, the temperature increases by about 25°C for every kilometer of depth."
I'm not sure how much heat is actually needed, but with the sort of technology used in ground- or air-sourced heat pumps, it seems like not a lot. There's a project about a mile up the road from me where they are drilling down to old mine workings, the plan being to extract the heat from the water down there for a local home heating. I'm not aware of the economics or grants/subsidies involved, and they seem to have been drilling for an awful long time. But that's probably exacerbated by it being a residential and shopping area so can't drill when people are literally 10-15 meters away and would like to sleep :-)
Probably not useful for electricity generation, but certainly one solution for heating.
Or drink some Atomik Vodka
Considering the high food standards in the UK, surely this must be illegal by your reasoning. Except it isn't.
"By any metric you can name, the risk from nuclear is many, many orders of magnitude less risk to the planet. And yet people still fear it more because a nuclear explosion is intuitively risky, whereas millions (really, millions) dying from extreme weather, crop shortages and air pollution does not."
It's similar reasoning as to why people fear plane crashes or train crashes and yet are happy to drive on the roads every day. Planes and trains may be safer, but a single "incident" is bigger in effect than a single car crash.
There's a nuclear power plant about 20 miles from my house so I'm inside the area of potential death and destruction from a scary meltdown. Few people ever seem to give the place much thought. It's just there. Has been for over 40 years. I barely registers on my consciousness. That's how little I worry about living near a nuclear power plant.
Here it is.
"Can you point to 1,000 square miles of exclusion zone on the map due to coal? "
Yes. Spoil and slag heaps all over the world, full of toxins, adding up to far more than 1000 square miles. In many countries, fenced off as dangerous areas. Some have had a foor or two of top soil added to hide the bare, barren "moon-scape" like image they would naturally have. But many remain unstable and during very wet weather can come crashing down onto any nearby homes.
On the other hand, if one of the "kings" dies unexpectedly, before the slow and tax free (or at least tax low) processes are started or completed, it can get expensive to inherit.
"After Samsung Group Chairman Lee Kun-hee passed away in 2021, South Korea’s inheritance tax made headlines as Lee’s family was saddled with a world-record breaking inheritance tax estimated at KRW 12 trillion (over USD 10 billion)."
It's not a straightforward "The king is dead, long live the king" process, even there.
"The bit I can't work out is how one individual can matter so much for the country's economic health."
The BBC gave a better report into the background of these huge cheabols.
"I hope whoever agreed to allowing catering to use the server room for cooling received their pink slip before the day was over."
It was described as a "server closet" and "at the turn of the century", so I'm guessing we aren't talking about "server central" and BOFH + PFY roaming around. More likely a rack or two and barely room to swing a cat.
"Dear lord that's a horrendours[sic] decision."
Despite the above, I still agree with this bit :-)
Pretty much that. According to gov.uk;
".2 Duration of the rights
A recording of a performance is ‘released’ when it is first published, played or shown to the public.
Rights in unreleased performances last for a 50 year period. The period begins from the year in which the performance occurred. If during this 50 year period a recording of the performance is released, then the following rules apply:
So yeah, Cliff "won" for "sound recordings", but didn't seem so bothered about other recordings. I guess he gets more income from his songs than for his films. Especially since much of his film income is from the songs he performed in them anyway and the songs were, obviously, all released as "sound recordings" too. He's more interested in Spotify than TV re-runs of the films.
"One could argue that Cliff did exactly that, it's just not the same pot you pay into. Where is it written that we must all piss into use the same pot?"
One could argue for the extension of patents to match that of copyright using that same logic of comparing it to a pension pot. Also, that "pension pot" starts paying out immediately, not just when you retire, so why should inventors not get the same benefits as artists and authors? It's worth bearing in mind that the only people arguing for extending copyright are the copyright holders. There doesn't seem to be the same drive to extend patents.
The winning sentence "wide-angle shot from below of a female astronaut with an athletic feminine body walking with swagger toward camera on Mars in an infinite universe, synthwave digital art,"
Does this AI produce exactly the same output when given the same input? Or does add more data of it's own randomly/algorithmically from some extra data? If so, how does it "decide" what to add to the users specifications?
In relation to copyright though, rather than treat AI "like a human", maybe it's time to look at copyright, what it is, what it means and who (and for how long) it benefits? Maybe it's time to treat copyright more like patents and give it a fixed life? Death of author plus seventy years is excessive IMO, especially for works created at the early stages of an authors career. That works against a successful author bothering too much later in life if they have a few "big hits" early on that keeps paying. Not to mention the general trend for people to live longer. Let's not even go near "corporate" copyrights and Disney!
People like Cliff Richard, who's pretty much done nothing for 20 years, says the royalties are his "pension". Well, why didn't he pay into a pension pot like everyone else and not have to worry about the royalties?
...or teach people the things they were supposed to learn as toddlers. Wash your hands properly, with soap, then dry them. This guy may have "washed" his hands, but I despair at the numbers of people who think "washing" their hands is a quick wipe under the running water then walk out shaking dirty water all over the place. Those drips may or may not have been contaminated water.
Doing hardware support for multiple OEMs. One of them has a mandatory procedure to follow which means logging in to their systems and following the diagnosis procedure. You only get to touch their kit if you've already completed their mandatory training. The problem with the online fault diagnosis system is that it's clearly aimed at people who are untrained and have no clue what to do. I have yet to see it come up with a "solution" I could not come up with ten times faster. In theory, on is supposed to carry out each step, one at a time and the click on the result, which then takes you to the next logical step. It even starts with checking the power is on and power cycling. FFS, I KNOW THAT. I DO THAT. IT TAKES A FEW SECONDS. But following their mandatory and monitored online process takes at least 10 minutes just to get that far. The process goes downhill from there :-(
We just upgraded one of our in-house apps. I say "we". I mean TPTB imposed it on us Some functions don't work in Edge, the "approved" browser, some don't work in Firefox and there's no complete overlap in the Venn diagram. We've been told it fully works in Internet Explorer and to use that instead. Unfortunately, the standard user build doesn't include the now EOLed IE and security policies forbid "unapproved" s/w installs by users, including IE
I've noticed a trend, at least here in the uk, to leave the colour out of the paint job. Grey cars that look like only the undercoat and final gloss finish has been applied. I wonder if that's a cheaper option? I doubt it, since one I saw today was a Porche. They probably charge extra for that option ;-)
"Oh, that's right, the big ISPs spend a big chunk of that money bribing our lawmakers,"
It does make one wonder why LTD didn't get comms carrier status in 7 of the 15 states they applied for. I've never heard of them, so there may be good technical reasons why they didn't get that. But seeing how the incumbents operate, I'd not be surprised to learn the likes of AT&T et al spent money lobbying against them in some form or other.
I forgot to add, Meta's new chatbot thinks Zuckerberg is stupid and Facebook exploits people.
...they described as "leaving a party by sneaking out the back door" :-)
On the other hand, why are people so concerned about what others might think of them? I thought the default these days, especially amongst the younger crowd, is that it's doesn't matter what others think. I'm constantly seeing (and hearing!) other peoples phone conversations, about all sorts of sensitive stuff, because so many think it's right and proper to hold phone conversations in public on speaker phone. One woman, just yesterday, was complaining to some energy provider or other that the money had not gone on her card. Back in my day, you had conversations like that in private! Clearly these must not be the same people worried about the "fall out" of leaving a WhatsApp group.
"Which begs the question: does anyone know of a company that has supplied a phone to an employee they said "has" to be on Whasapp (etc) but who doesn't own a phone."
Yeah, me! I've never owned a personal mobile phone and still don't. I've been in jobs where a company mobile phone was provided since the "brick" phones where finally going away, replaced with little black Nokias. Current employer has WhatsApp groups for remote teams to keep in easy touch for general chat, work-related etc that's neither company sensitive nor of interest outside of the team. It's lighter, easier and less hassle than Teams (which we also use for "official" company business)
"One of the first to realize this in the commercial sphere was Kenna Security & Cyentia 2018 ROI of fixing vulnerabilities:"
I wonder if the ROI takes into account the losses caused by unfixed bugs and vulnerabilities when the customers systems go TITSUP or they get hacked? Maybe if the customers could sue the vendors for those "hey, it''s cheaper to ignore that bug" line items, the ROI might look a little different.
So, ignoring all the bugs until a concatenation turns them into an exploit is ok by you? If the first bug had been fixed, the exploit would not have happened in the first place. Ignoring the bugs until some combination becomes exploitable is security by obscurity. The black hats might find the exploit first, and use it first.
"The work shouldn't be getting Linux to do a thing that Windows does by just configuring this, download this package, update this library, now modify this config, oh wait, missing another dependency, etc. It gets in the way of the actual goal of whatever the work is. It's gotten a LOT better over the years, but can still be a big pain."
I think mindset is a major part of the problem. "getting Linux to do a thing that Windows does" Is that really what is needed? Or is there another way to do it? I suspect that after 20+ years of standardising on Windows on the desktop, it's very difficult for most people to even conceive of doing something that is not "The Microsoft Way". And due to that very fact, it can be hard, if not impossible to do many things without using Windows because there's no userbase, so no development and therefore no support for s/w to do those things.
Back in the days when different companies used different computers and OS', they trained their people in their way of doing things. Nowadays, it's expected that new hires all know Windows and how to drive it, along with at least the standard "default" apps, no training required, other than maybe for one or two "business" tools, SAP stuff and the like.
I never have issues saving my LO Calc files to Excel format and sending them to others. I frequently have issues with people using the many whizz-bang "features" of Excel, "Just Because They Can" which add nothing to either the data or the presentation, but make importing it into LO Calc a problem.
On the other hand, that's the same problem Word and Excel have had with previous versions of Word and Excel for many years. Not everyone can or will upgrade to the latest shiny as soon as it's released.
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