Posts by Doctor Syntax

Re: About Accidents

Agreed. Coal tip collapses and dam collapses* also shouldn't occur. We need to take them all into account when making decisions.

* Tailings dams from mineral extraction holding back toxic waste as well as hydroelectric dams.

Re: Biggest hurdle is trust

It doesn't help having industrial qualities of mistrust being manufactured by those who fail to compare one technology with another.

Re: Volcanoes ?

"here will also be some downward convection"

That's at the subduction zones. There are usually volcanoes quite near them on the principle that what goes down must come up. I don't know how the timescale works for that relative to nuclear wast half lives. Anybody?

Re: "Why is anyone worried about the plant at Zaporizhzhia being shelled"?

Nor is hydro-electric or anything else.

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

"Some people think that Chernobyl was the result of experiments with military Plutonium production, not a general exercise."

I thought it was due to vodka.

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

"Yet again, it's convenient for you to ignore them because each one may be small."

They're easy to ignore. After all, they're Somewhere Else and they haven't had as much exposure on the news.

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

"I'd expect 25 years lifespan"

Perhaps you should divide by two as you'll only be using it half the time. What are you going to use the other half?

Re: Deaths are not the only metric

Tritium!!!

Weak beta, half life about 12 years.

Up to a point. The "investment in nuclear technologies that work" is largely reaching the end of its working life. Not investing in anything at the rate needed is more like it.

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

Uranium, yes, plutonium, no.

Re: Bang On - except the death stats

"But how can solar air pollution kill so many?"

Figure such as those quoted are total deaths, not just those due to air pollution produced at the point of generation. They will include pollution produced in mining raw materials and processing and industrial accidents in installing and operation. The relative numbers vary between different categories, that's why it's necessary to take an overall figure.

Failing to do the accounting properly is apt to lead to a distorted view of risks and consequent bad decisions. It doesn't help that decisions are made by politicians who seem to have an adverse reaction to expert opinion. The political forces that drive them come from the public urged on by scare stories.

"Put 10 kw or 30 kw on your roof,"

Which is fine if you have a roof. The amount of roof on a multi-story block of flats isn't going to provide a big share per flat.

Re: Waste

Methane has a half-life because it will be oxidised. It's about 9 years. CO2 can also be removed naturally - proving nature is given a chance - and artificially but that's in its infancy as yet. However, there's been no excuse for several decades for generating energy from fossil carbon.

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

A report in the other place a day or two ago quoted another report from Germany - https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/germany-sees-tidal-shift-in-sentiment-toward-atomic-energy-a-05f47c3c-d20e-44dc-bd6d-1e1dbfb7f0cd - that opinion is shifting there rather quickly.

Is that what they mean by realpolitik?

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

You think Greenpeace might actually admit they could be wrong?

Re: Waste

By putting the brakes on development for decades we are now decades behind on development of designs to reduce lng-lived low level waste.

Re: I have been on about this since I was a teenager

Also the fossil carbon fuels are a raw material for other industries which cannot be easily replaced.

Re: Advanced Server Room Dynamics

Caterers might not know that and in this case the evidence points to there being no such facility.

Re: This is why

"Love the way you refer to the company that hires your services server room, as MY server room."

You appear to be unfamiliar with BOFHs. You are advised not to enter any stariwells or lift shafts in the company of any of your IT staff and to keep clear of any windows when they're about. Parking your car away from anywhere where a heavy object may fall fromm a building is also a good idea.

Re: Russia

Different oligarch.

Re: Crikey, what more do these bloody AIs want?

Can we have Anonymous AI as an alternative handle for anonymous posts? It's so unfair to the AIs out there if they can't post anonymously.

That gives them a provenance problem. The more I think about it the "The AI did it" seems more and more likely to be an attempt to distance the copyright of the output from the training data.

Re: Compiler analogy

Don't forget the training data. That's an input too and by far the largest.

Re: "You need to listen to your users more" - Offsite Experts

"Experts". Riiiight.

Maybe it was the experts.

Re: Nothing changes

GIGO

Re: "Just be like me"

"For printing A3 photographs?"

Can you thing of a different use case than yours?

Re: UX Designer?

Worse that Ariel?

Re: UX Designer?

On reflection, given their fondness for putting huge chunks of white space in their page design it seems even stranger that they can't deal with it in data.

Re: Just stop there. That gets carried over to the UK. …

"in a US address really represents a US post office"

In the UK "city" has a very specific legal meaning in that it denotes somewhere with a royal charter. It doesn't even have to be a very big place.

In Royal Mail parlance - or at least in terms of the field name in PAF - the equivalent term would be "Post town". I don't expect the US to actually use UK terminology but they could at least think that their S/W might be used where their norms don't apply and try for a neutral term.

But it's worse than that. I've seen it used in genealogical S/W where the historical context could well pre-date the US postal service so even for a US location it would be an anachronism. It's not adherence to some standard, it's just lack of thought.

As to street numbers "preferred" doesn't mean anything. S/W needs to be able to accept the actual format of the real data without preferences or assumptions. If you can't do that you run into trouble. I had major problem getting a parcel delivered from the German vendor whose site didn't accept non-numeric addresses, not helped by DPD insisting that my address is at some single location at the geographic centre of the post code and I get the impression that their drivers aren't even allowed to deviate from that even if it's wrong.

In fact it's just the sort of thing where calling them out on social media might be effective. It's almost - but not quite - worth getting an account.

Re: Nooooo, it's always the software.

It was and they were interviewing candidates to find out how to do the tuning.

Re: "What are you trying to achieve by this ?"

This.

It may well be that the product doesn't do what the user's trying to do or it does it in a different way*. The first step in problem solving is to work out what the problem is. (The zeroth step is to identify that you have a problem.)

*Example - although I eventually discovered the answer without askingt: The recent addition of mail to Vivaldi clearly shows custom folders on the UI but no obvious way to set them up. It turns out that something which is a click away on TBird can't be done at all in Vivaldi. The "custom folders" just reflect those, if any, which are set up on the server.

Re: "Just be like me"

Judging by the complaints about inkjet printers there are an awful lot of people with a use case which is better suited to a laser than an inkjet. Which is the better response: keep on with the inkjet or switch to laser?

Re: UX Designer?

Dark grey on black is also a favoured choice.

Re: UX Designer?

You describe a broken process leading to a broken result. Cut out all those middlemen and just pay a decent salary for a few intelligent developers. You might even break the iron triangle and deliver something quicker, better and cheaper.

Re: So, obvious answers aside, …

"recipient; delivery address; city..."

Just stop there. That gets carried over to the UK. A lot of UK citizens may live in a city but many don't.

Then there's an assumption that every house has a number. I've run into that trying to order stuff online where with a site refusing to accept an address without one.

Re: UX Designer?

"unable to parse the spaces out of a credit card number"

Add to that - surprise, surprise - DVLA. The V11 has a 16 digit number in groups of 4. The web application accepts a maximum of 16 characters. It doesn't matter whether they can parse spaces or not, there isn't room for them.

Re: colour me sceptical

A long time ago, when round pin sockets were still lingering in older UK houses I had a unversal plug. There was a slider adjacent to the flex entry point which would uncover different sets of holes in the plug face to let different sets of pins fall through - I think the selected pins could be rotated to lock them into place.

It was very clever except for one detail. It didn't have a conventional cable clamp, maybe it would have got in the way of the slider. It had plastic fitting which just clamped round the cable with a self tapper so that pulling the cable would have jammed the fitting up against the side of the plug and held it firm that way. The self tapper was so positioned that it could easily bridge the line and neutral....