and the answer is....
forty-two?
1946 publicly visible posts • joined 28 Jun 2011
Steganography is likely to be the big growth industry - even simply to protect commercially confidential information. Along with one time pad techniques.
These government measures will simply catch the innocent and the stupid. Particularly since we know exactly what they are likely to be.
When its surrounded by sufficient mumble blather and called an inconvenient truth.
No doubt after the fully renewable grid has been built and on the coldest February night of the year with not a breath of wind stirring, neap tides on the turn and zero sola,r wind and wave on the grid, some renewable energy wonk will say 'we must build more solar farms: its lack of investment in renewable energy that has causes this blackout '
Renewable energy lobby claims have over the last few months deviated from exaggerations and truth economy into outright lies. There is simply no other word for it. I have done many many calculations in a sincere effort to make renewable energy deliver a reliable grid - and I can't even achieve that, let alone at a sane cost.
My most spectacular conclusion was that an all wind grid could be achieved if all of the country and most of the north sea were covered in wind turbines and pylons at a cost magically just shy of £10 a unit. (wholeseale electricity costs around 5p a unit at the moment).
It almost beggars belief: a friend said to me 'don't sent me that climate skepticism stuff: I have met James Hansen and seen ice melting'
The sheer inanity and illogic of that reply has left me speechless and depressed for days..
I can only conclude that people are simply in love with an idea to such an extent that they cannot bear to step back and consider the fact that it might be totally and fundamentally wrong.
On the industry side, of course, the reasons are clear: why have to compete with efficient and difficult to design and manufacture technology when a stroke of the legislative pen can make any old mediaeval rubbish plonked somewhere in someone else's back yard instantly massively profitable?
Beats working for a living anyway!
Since I paid off my mortgage years ago, I can only wish that my electricity bill matched it..
I am not sure what you mean by 'blink first'.
China and the USA never signed up to Kyoto. They pay only lip service to 'carbon reduction'. Only in the EU where Germany makes serious profits out of supplying wind turbines and solar panels have 'renewables' any real traction, and now the Chinese are making them cheaper than the Germans can, you may expect a policy U turn as well. Especially since they are completely nonexistent on the cost benefit graph of 'things that save carbon emissions at reasonable prices'.
no. My browser wont be. Its got root write privileges only and cannot be patched by a user process, even if that user process knows that it was compiled from source and running on Linux.
This is a windows specific trojan that relies on the fact that firefox etc and users have the complete ability to write and modify anything in the windows systems folders.
That's not how climate ' science' is done. When the results don't fit the model, you discard all the data points that are out of whack and tweak the constant a bit and lie about everything else.
Knowing you are right means the science bit is a mere formality. Like the man in the soap powder adverts in an astonishingly white coat, who tell you its scientifically proven' to wash whiter than white'
The optimal way would be to do the equivalent of a CCGT power station. Blow coal dust into a compressed airflow and ignite it on a continuous basis and run it through a turbine, and then through a secondary steam cycle.
BUT the point remains, why bother?. Better to drive a genny in a fixed plant and use leccy locos instead.
thermodynamic efficiency is very much a function of the ratio between working fluid (steam) peak temperatures and the exhaust temperature (in degrees absolute).
A steam power station struggles to reach 36% with supercritical high temperature steam and heavily condensed low pressure turbines at the arse end.
From memory no steam locomotive ever achieved much more than 20%, and most were less than 10%.
Gas turbines - jet engines and so one - get to about 37% by dint of higher combustion temperatures as do some high efficiency diesels.
The best place to burn coal or biomass is in a power station where the bulk of the condensers is not a drawback. And likewise the scrubbers to remove ash and other noxious elements from the exhaust.
Its an amusing project, but its not a serious contender:
all the small independents have good service and relatively open and transparent contractual arrangements. And dont throttle or shape or inspect your deep pan pizzas.
The do charge a bit more tho. And restrict how much data you can shift before paying extra.
You wont get virgins fibre services from them though- ADSL only.
Then you cant have actually used them. Their nameservers were unreachable for a couple of hours.
MAYBE you had lookups cached, but I lost every single 123 domain because my slave nameserver follows the rules of timeouts, which in my case are quite short.
They didn't answer the phone to me, either,
Time to do domain names directly with nominet methinks.
Ok, we have digital transmission and every single channel comes with subtitles.
SO WHY do we have to have sign speak lunatics gurneying in the corner of the screen?
The amount of money saved by getting rid of these would be enough to cover the cost of sacking them, easily..
No. are you an engineer who has spent three years determining if this is remotely possible? No?
I am. If we are generating all our energy from renewables that will be the 100 million of us hunter gatherers left globally scouring the crumbling landscape of a collapsed civilization looking for a tin of beans that someone else missed.
I am sure it will be great for biodiversity, but the main species at risk will be homo sapiens.
And of course the water cycle is the planets thermostat. Hotter=more vapour=more cloud carrying heat up to radiate to space = more cold rain falling to cool planet surface and sea and more cloud shielding the earth from the sun.
Completely obliterating the effects of and CO2 change by and large.
Now this is in fact interesting
if you regard the air as an insulator at night, allowing ground to get very cold while air is somewhat warmer, then destroying that insulation layer will keep the ground warmer. And mixing cold low level air with warmer upper level air will in fact lead to global warming overall, as it will lower the upper air temperatures slightly and decrease nighttime radiation from the high level atmosphere.
Of course during the day the reverse is true as it will toss hot air higher.
Sow whilst it will affect local microclimates a lot, the effect on global temperatures is less easy to state with certainty - the same goes with clouds which can both insulate at night, and block sun by day depending on the types of cloud and their altitudes.
Because I cant see it.
A rather deficient and expensive operating system tied to one hardware platform and not easily portable to others.
A rather poor bloated and buggy set of office and internet and media applications.
a consumer world that actually isn't interested in operating systems any more - it just wants to run 'apps' on its fondleslabs.
a corporate world that is more interested in value for money than ever before.
servers have by and large gone or are going Linux,
Consumer toys are broadly Linux
Apple went BSD with some eye candy.
The only reason to have Windows is because you have a WORKSTATION and that's the program launcher your BigApp runs on.
But porting that to Linux is not a wildly impossible dream either.