Posts by Androgynous Cupboard 1777 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2012
Alright then clever clogs, why don't you share your LOLs with us inferior plebs - which bit of the quoted text from the Indy is incorrect?
Ratcliffe really did shout about building his Grenadier in the UK, and really did change his mind when he realised how much that would cost him due to his beloved Brexit. And as I've pointed out before, he did all this from the safety of his tax-haven domicile in Monaco.
Guns and internal combustion engines. It's all there in Leviticus:
"He who does not favour the rapid expansion of gas in a confined tube over other forms of energy transmission shall displeasure the LORD"
It's not in every translation but there in the original Hebrew, honest.
I interviewed at Goldman Sachs back in about 1998 - got the contract. When I turned up two months later on the start date, I didn't recognise anything - in that time they had rearranged the office, putting up dry-wall, and the team I was joining were also all in a meeting so I literally had no idea what to do next. To complete the bizarre, while standing there trying to work out my next move I got a tap on the shoulder and it was someone I had worked with 5 years previously, on the other side of the planet. He took my to my team and normal service resumed. It remains one of the odder starts to my day.
I just knew this comment would turn out be useful. The figures you seek lie within.
"Although you cannot be jailed for not paying the licence fee, you can be jailed for not paying the fine for not paying the licence fee."
You also cannot be jailed for parking on a yellow line, but you can be jailed for refusing to pay the fine for parking on a yellow line. This is how fines work, they are set by the court - call that "the power of the state" if you like, most people simply call it the legal system. Before you slate it, please consider the alternatives.
An utterly absurd comment. First, the ultra-orthodox jews would very happily kick the shit out of anyone gay, just as they would out of anyone driving on a Saturday - muslim, jewish or tourist. I believe most Israelis dislike them intensely, and lord knows I do too after they pelted my car with rocks. Secondly, the head covering issue is something you'll see in Iran or Saudi, but both countries represent a small proportion of the muslim world. The most populous muslim country? Indonesia - no head coverings there. Your observation is as accurate as judging all of Christianity based on the behaviour of Billy Graham. The Palestinians I met didn't appear to give two fucks about head coverings - most simply want to get to work without being shot by a twitchy teenager with a Galil assault rifle.
Now you want opinions? Make up your mind already.
Cisco claiming a tax rebate from the Russian Government after smashing all their own stuff is amusing - an opinion, sure, one I share but each to their own. However the implication that it's more amusing because Putin is a first class c**t is a stone cold statement of fact.
I've been in Morocco and elsewhere during Ramadan and cafés serving (run by non-muslims, for non-muslims) used to put up newspaper to cover the windows so people observing Ramadan couldn't see you eating. You're not even supposed to smoke in public. A lof of variation across the Arab world of course, as you'd expect, and that was how it was in the cities - no doubt different in the tourist zones.
I was immediately reminded of this: https://www.theregister.com/2008/06/10/have_your_say/. Unfortunately it looks like the twat-o-tron has gone 404 - perhaps succumbing to a stroke in a fit of virtual apoplexy, but more likely has been redeployed to writing policy documents for the home office.
For what it's worth, from someone that has been pro-nuclear+renewables for a few years I am very slowly coming round to this opinion. I don't think it's a criticism of nuclear, I think it's a criticism of the way the UK does major infrastructure projects, but either way.
My concern is a UK on 100% renewable is a UK with - strokes chin, puts finger in the air - a six-fold increase in wind generation (based on over-provisioning by about 100%, so we can generate green hydrogen to burn in CCGTs on windless days). This is also a major infrastructure project, but has the advantage of being mostly offshore where the parish council can't object. Is it going to be quicker and easier than building another couple of nuclear plants? I don't know.
Nope. There is no way that peace was going to spontaneously break out just because Sinn Fein were making no headway, that's not how things work - they fester and bubble rather than going away. Try and name one insurgency that disappeared all by itself - I can't. Blair and Mo Mowlam came in, and the latter in particular got the respect of both sides for the first time, managed to get them to make progress and actually achieve results rather than letting it simmer.
Number of IRA incidents in London, 1990 until Good Friday agreement in 1997: 86
Number of IRA incidents in London since 1997: 8, with none after 2001.
Those are rough numbers from Wikipedia bulletpoints but you get the idea. So while I share your dismay at the current set of clowns, it can definitely get worse. Tony Blair gets, and deserves, a lot of stick for Iraq, but I will eternally give him a gold star for "getting Ulster done".
Never trust anyone claiming to be a Doctor of Theology - I should know, I only bought mine because it went nicely with the ordination I'd purchased the previous year. "The Reverend Doctor" has a nice ring to it. The only place I used the title was on my frequent flyer card and I never once got an upgrade, it seems people have no respect for authority.
For sport a few years ago I bought an old one on ebay, hooked it up to the wrong end of the vacuum cleaner and turned it on. After about 40 minutes it was filling 90% of the living room. Yes, I was having a few drinks with some friends at the time.
I'm firmly of the left, but the proposals as summed up in this article sound, on the surface reasonable.
However I categorically agree that anything originating from the Tufton Street wingnuts needs very, very careful assessment for the reasons rg287 spelled out. Taking economic advice from the theorists behind the biggest act of self harm to the UK economy since.... well, the last one they got behind (Brexit) needs to be done very, very carefully. For some reason Shakespeares springs to mind.
QUEEN ELIZABETH: "Shall I be tempted of the devil thus?"
RICHARD III: "Ay, if the devil tempt you to do good."
A pedometer - just how many children do you have to have before you need machinery to count them?
Also I'll just leave this here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arkangel_(Black_Mirror)
Aerogel is pretty much the worlds greatest heat insulator, so at least the proposal has that going for it. Quite how it does in the visible spectrum I don't know - hopefully it's a bit more transmissive, or things are going to get pretty bleak. I have a roll of it in the shed, looks like a gray hairy carpet, but I believe it comes in other forms too.
A few missed headline opportunties there - "Asteroid approaches the end of the world" would have pulled in a few more eyeballs (sadly even in the Argentinian press it wasn't reported like that)
I was skippering a yacht when the guy I was in convoy with - vastly more experienced, also a complete idiot and fairly drunk at the time - dropped anchor in a bay in Greece where the main feed for the island came ashore. I pulled up a few hundred meters away and we went down with snorkels - best as we could tell he'd missed it by a few meters. So I can't tell you exactly what happens, but that's probably for the best. I know the fine was at least €10,000 because it was written on a BIG RED DO NOT ANCHOR SIGN clearly visible from where he anchored.
I now suspect you're the same AC I was talking to about a year ago the last time X-links came up. As you know what you're talking about, I have a question - why is the North Sea Link viable at 720km? Surely they will hit all the same issues at that length than you'd expect on 1000km or longer? I am naively assuming that all other things being equal, a cable twice as long will simply have twice as many issues. Not the case?
I had the same question re. Spain, which is very short of interconnects. As I understood it, the UK electricity market would generate more profit.
The North Sea link is 720km and its losses are priced at 3.4% - I'm going to presume that's pretty close to the measured loss.
So a 4000km cable would have roughly 19% losses (assuming same construction and capacity, which it's not - NSL is 1.4GW, this was 3.2GW, but I'm back-of-the-enveloping here). Even at 20 or 25% loss, I believe SGs power mix is currently very dirty so there's an incentive to do this, as demonstrated by the fact they had so many firms signing up.
Overall I'm a little sad to see this one go, and I'm not sure it was a bonkers as made out - you can get over most of the issue described, but I imagine plate tectonics would be the deal-breaker.
Ah thanks, that's very interesting. My use case was charging from solar, so I wanted to scavenge every last coulomb (a yacht battery). But when you're charging from the grid I suppose it makes a lot of sense just to dump excess with linear regulators.
I privately suspect that a lot of the improvements in EV range over the last few years have come from improvements in BMS tech rather than the batteries themselves or the motors. A friend has a Porsche Taycan and confirms he really has seen it charge at the listed 350kW. Even with an 800V pack that is an astonishing 430 amps to distribute - you'll only get close to that rate when the pack is fairly depleted, but the engineering blows me away.
A few years ago I had a go at designing a BMS to balance four large cells - using (essentially) an Arduino as the brains.
It turns out to be quite a hard job to do well. I read a lot of whitepapers (google "Quasi-Resonant LC Converter cell balancing" for my favoured design), tested a few prototypes - almost all revolved around sucking charge out of cell A into a capacitor, then pushing it back into cell B. As the cells are hooked up in series you need to be able to switch a "floating" capacitor across a single cell to charge, then switch both sides of it to a another cell with a lower voltage to discharge. Switching had to be controlled very carefully - the two cells are in series with eachother, so at completely different ground voltages. Also, you're talking about very small voltage differences so switching losses really started to add up unless you used a clever design (like the QRLC)
It all got quite complicated, and that was with just four cells. Balancing across N for large versions of N would require more than one capacitor, and with N cells and M capacitors you've got a proper wiring headache. I don't know how they do it in cars - I'd love to find out. In the end I gave up with the conclusion this is a lot harder than it looks.
For reference, one of the best documented, if not most efficient options available for DIY was this http://cleanpowerauto.com/files/HousePower%20BMS.pdf. As I recall this one balanced by simply bleeding charge out of the highest cells into a fat resistor until they were all equal.
Cute, but not new. Essentially a pretty G-Whiz, with the same issues
No mention of pack size in kWh unfortunately, which I find intensely irritating as it prevents any checking of figures. It also raises my "snake oil" detector a notch.
> Do you think journalism might be more for the walking brain dead, and it is the comments sections which are alive keeping everything ticking over whilst considering its collapsing and the parts IT and AI are to play in its destruction and demise/creation and rebirth?
To be honest no, that's not what I was thinking :-)
Compose a comment in the style of amanfrommars from theregister.co.uk
"Well, well, well, what have we here? CNET, one of the stalwarts of tech journalism, apologizing for their use of AI in writing articles? Tsk tsk tsk.
It seems that the old adage 'if it ain't broke, don't fix it' has once again proven to be true. The use of AI in journalism, while touted as a way to increase efficiency and output, has done nothing but detract from the value of human-written content and raise important ethical questions.
But kudos to CNET for recognizing their mistake and committing to using only human journalists in the future. It's a shame that it took such a public apology for them to see the error of their ways, but better late than never, I suppose.
One can only hope that other outlets will take note and follow suit, for the sake of the integrity of journalism and the trust of the reading public."
I think we can say that although journalism might be dead, the comments section is safe for some time.
Allow me:
Compose a statement from CNET apologising for the using AI to write articles and explain why that decision was made
"We at CNET deeply apologize for our previous decision to use AI to write articles. We understand that this decision may have caused concern among our readers and the journalism community. We made this decision in an effort to increase efficiency and output, but we now realize that the use of AI in journalism raises important ethical questions and undermines the value of human-written content. In the future, we will ensure that all of our articles are written by our dedicated team of human journalists, who are committed to providing accurate and unbiased reporting."
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