Posts by Nonymous Crowd Nerd 148 publicly visible posts • joined 26 Nov 2014
"Gas pipes need retrofitting and replacement every couple decades
They might need it but they certainly haven't been getting it. When they came fix a gas leak outside our (London) house, they revealed a 10" gas main that might have been eighty years old. (Actually it might have been original, so ~125 years.) It was made of about 12' lengths of cast iron pipe each bolted to the next at joins sealed with putty.
The repairer explained that the old town gas has enough water in it to keep the putty moist. "New" natural gas is dry, so during droughts, the putty dries right out completely and leaks.
They were repairing three joints.
I waved vaguely in the direction of Kingston about a mile and a half down the road and asked how much of that was the same and how much were they replacing.. "Oh, all the same," he said. "We only fix the leaks that people call in."
He said that if they were to walk down the road with their gas sniffer device they'd find leaks on almost all the joints.
And that's with the natural gas. Replacing it with hydrogen is an utter, total non-starter!
.. used to have a flaw such that there was an apparently logical command line that a controller could input that crashed the whole system every time. This was in the early eighties and some generations of software back...
However..
If you watch the GB News interview with the Minister for Avoiding Questions, you'll hear the interviewer start with a question suggesting a very similar scenario. (The interviewer was rather excited that the command message came from France.) Had the interviewer heard something from a genuine source?
Surely it couldn't be that several generations of software have actually failed to remove the vulnerability? The word incompetence might even come to mind. We'll probably never know. Certainly the Minister for Avoiding Questions played a very straight bat and revealed exactly sweet FA.
This says it all about so many new systems.
And it's not just problems with poorly designed User Interface. It's not just someone who - with good intentions but lacking skill and experience - screws up the design...
There can't be any doubt that there are those whose actually intention is to force you to follow their preferred path through any given process and prevent people from working in any other way.. They sometimes deliberately work to hide the data structure - or to prevent us from performing free searches.
These people want to curate our entire experience - it's like being forced to follow the preferred path through IKEA without skipping sections or going directly to the department you came for!
So why is half the article, supposedly about Mercedes, actually knocking copy on Tesla?
If Tesla of in the middle, who else is at the top with Mercedes? When do we think the next car will make level 3 and whose will it be?
And if we must talk about Tesla, is their "Full Self Driving“ short on a particular feature, if so what? Or is it that Tesla aren't keen on the admin process of getting the system certified?
And what's the position with a car that's been verified getting over the air updates that might degrade the conformance - does each update get re-checked?
There are quite a few questions not answered here.
Bjørn Nyland on YouTube has now tested approximately a dozen cars that will cover 1,000km with less than an hour of charging time en route. That's about 600 miles.
His reference test with a petrol car was really quite tricky as stopping for less than an hour in the nine hours it takes is not advisable, safe or sensible.
I think it's actually not quite the same this time.. With the foul up over the 737 MAX still in people's memory, I think they've realised that this time..
It's existential.
They would not be able to shrug off these two lives in the blinding glare of worldwide live publicity as they have all the others.
If this rocket fails Boeing cannot survive in their current form. In particular I think that the whole would be split and anything identifiable as the "space division" would be folded. This in turn would shrink the whole company and leave them very much less able to fund the CEO merrigoround and disguise cross-subsidies.
With this in mind, the rocket may never launch.
They will be employing Chat-GPT plus a public relations army to come up with the next 3 month excuse.. And the next..
The battery, tbh, does sound a bit on the challenging side. 150MW - the size of the one built previously - is a lot less than 3GW. But there are stacks of interconnects working all over Europe which are very useful without the need for batteries.
I wonder if Bevan Slattery might have been somewhat biased against the project.
I do like the premise that innovation may have slowed. I think I would agree that it might have.
But how do you measure "disruptive"? If you have to compare the disruptive impact of an iPhone, a flush toilet, a steam engine, a pneumatic tyre, Word for Windows and a pushbike... How do you even start?
1.2 million tonnes.
Please.
So brief and comprehensible.
The Register really needs a code of conduct on units. Press releases tend to units that sound big (for the output of a fission experiment) or American like the acre foot when it comes to really big amounts of water (for instance behind the Hoover Dam.)
Gallons are also used when "they" want to make the number sound big - and American.
The consumption of the current plant under discussion is (suspiciously) very close to 1,000 acre feet.
Interesting that using your figure of 15kWh per electric car - and there being around 650,000 electric cars now in the UK, that would give around 9GWh of storage. (Assuming the cars are driving only around 5% of the time.) That's 45 times more than this new battery.
Thus, if we could use 15kWh each from all the car batteries that would be able to store half the output from the 400 6MW Dogger Bank turbines for about 7½ hours. And that's longer than most intense storms.
These figures do begin to make sense.
The 15kWh is about half the capacity of my 6-year-old car, so one wouldn't have to deep cycle the batteries and they wouldn't suffer excessive wear.
Of course they would suffer normal wear for which the car owner would have to be compensated. By my reckoning the Grid would benefit to the tune of about 60p per cycle by charging the cars when electricity is cheap and selling when it's expensive. But with this system working at scale it would make it possible to remove a coal power station from the mix and that would be a considerable extra saving perhaps making the saving up to say £1 a cycle for ordinary grid conditions. The cycles would be worth more during extreme storms or when the grid is stretched.
Is that enough for the wear on the battery? This doesn't look so great. In 100,000 miles my car has done around 1,700 of these shallow cycles. But £1,700 would not compensate me for 100,000 miles of battery life. It would work much better for the newest LFP batteries which may be approaching a million miles life. Especially since the rest of the car likely wouldn't last a million miles.
For all that this, like the others penalties, is a derisory fine, I think the cumulative effect is beginning to weigh on Facebook significantly now.
Their drop in profits wasn't trivial and it wasn't all down to the Metaverse misstep.
(Perhaps it should be called called one small misstep for a Zuck, one giant misleap for Zuck-kind.)
I'm always cynical, but here in particular I'm having trouble reining in my scepticism. Automakers are facing a huge technology shift towards electric cars and correspondingly huge unusable skills, training and infrastructure that they've made over the last decade or so in the hopes that the practical electric car might be headed off before it arrived.
Too late.
This situation that high tech cars can't be delivered suits both sides. The automakers can sustain sales of the old school petrol and diesel cars.. The chip makers can keep prices up by pointing to insatiable demand from automakers. The electric cars can be kept scarce allowing super profits to be made.
The fact that the chips in question are sometimes very cheap indeed besides the cars (and physically small) allows for the unscrupulous to buy and store extremely large numbers of the chips keeping the market tight.
So that's 8 hours at full capacity... So in the real world we could be looking at a couple of days in the dark, cold, windless days of winter.
Speccing the capacity of the storage to cope with a challenging winter is surely the point of the whole exercise. And it's not going to be easy.
I think the implication is that the CO2 would be converted into something useful like jet fuel. The problem, as you point out, is that this is very inefficient. It only makes sense
1. If there's a a large surplus of sustainable generation over energy transmission and efficient storage,
2. If there's an overriding demand for the fuel, for instance for high priority air travel or defence.
Get the same problem when trying to look at road safety and statistics are relayed in terms of
deaths and serious injuries.
But of course, the powers that be immediately go in for an orgy of redefinition around what is a "serious injury"
As in "We've improved deaths and serious injuries on the roads by 21%." But haven't you chosen to remove broken arms from the definition of serious?
"It would interesting to have more details on how NorthC produces (or gets) the hydrogen
Yes. Wouldn't it just. My guess is that it will be "green" roughly until the first or second tank full is exhausted, and then it will quietly be obtained from the "grey" market and hence no better than the diesel it's replacing - especially after taking into account the cost of the kit.
This whole thing is an exercise in greenwash - pure and simple.
I agree with others about the poor phrasing of the question with the half negative towards the end. Even a slightly close result in these circumstances is rendered worthless.
There is actually an episode of a BBC programme on this same subject. I think it was in the series More or Less and if you're lucky you might be able to find it in the murky waters of the deeply messed-up app that is BBC Sounds.
The particular issue they discuss, if I remember correctly, was an opinion poll on the Holocaust for which it appeared they'd deliberately devised a question like this in order to get a clickbait headline because such a large proportion of the population had voted that they didn't not think that the holocaust had never occurred. Or maybe it wasn't the other way around?
Maybe in summary the decision maker for the recruitment has been promoted to young. (S)he's grown overpaid before they grown wise and sufficiently cynical to avoid the pitfalls, and the traps in the for of new architectures and new management methods laid for them by the big multinationals.
In any sane universe this merger damages competition and choice.
If any competition authority anywhere in the world approves it, the individuals should directly leave the building, turn out the lights as they go, throw away the key and sign on the dole.
Recent years have seen precious few mergers banned outright and for me at least, it feels as though the competition authorities pay nothing but lip service to investigating anything. There is literally utterly no point in paying for a competition authority that never bans a merger.
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