tal

tal, 8 months ago

https://archive.ph/LSiRh

tal, 8 months ago

Ehh....Not really a mechanism for that that I can see. I mean, say that there's demand for that, which I can believe. Do I go to a given distro and buy a "security hardened" version? I don't see how that would work. Is the distro going to refrain from incorporating security fixes into the "non-hardened" free version?

tal, 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vatican_Railway

The Vatican Railway (Italian: Ferrovia Vaticana) was opened in 1934 to serve Vatican City and its only station, Vatican City (Città del Vaticano [tʃitˈta ddel vatiˈkaːno], or Stazione Vaticana [statˈtsjoːne vatiˈkaːna]). The main rail tracks are standard gauge and 300 metres (980 ft) long, with two freight sidings, making it the shortest national railway system in the world.[1] Access to the Italian rail network is over a viaduct to Roma San Pietro railway station, and is guaranteed by the Lateran Treaty dating from 1929. The tracks and station were constructed during the reign of Pope Pius XI, shortly after the treaty.

Beginning in 2015, one passenger service runs each Saturday morning with passengers for Castel Gandolfo. Most other rail traffic consists of inbound freight goods, although the railway has occasionally carried other passengers, usually for symbolic or ceremonial reasons.[2][3]

tal, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I don’t care if the train takes 8 or 10 hours to go from one end of the country to the other what I care about is the fact that you are raped by the 200 plus charge.

goes to look

It looks like a rail ticket a week from now (October 10) is about £220 from London to Inverness. A bus ticket (megabus) can be had for £27. On the other hand, rail is about 8 hours and the bus 13 hours.

So if you would like to optimize for price, I suppose that the bus probably is a lot more appealing, though the trip will take longer.

EDIT: Just to check what you could theoretically get the bus time down to, Google Maps says that it's about 10 hours to go from London to Inverness in a car. So that's about the floor on what a bus service could do (no changes, no intermediate stops), short of introducing new or faster highways.

EDIT2: For completeness, air (easyJet) appears to be available for that route for £51 and take 1 hour and 40 minutes. More expensive than the bus, but also much less so than rail, and considerably faster than either.

tal, 8 months ago

Heh, I checked the air price and updated my comment after you commented but before I read your comment, but yeah, good point.

tal, 8 months ago

Well, you've got Ardour. But I suspect that there are people who do want this software package.

tal, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

I don't know if France24 is doing it because the US uses a leading currency symbol, but if so, we in the US obtained the convention of having a leading currency symbol from the British, so technically it's the Europization of Europe.

I am kind of inclined to think that France24 isn't doing it because it's a US convention, as the date right below it is DD/MM/YYYY, while the US convention would be MM/DD/YYYY (and in my opinion, the world standard should probably be YYYY-MM-DD, but that's another story).

tal, 8 months ago (edited 8 months ago)

Severn Trent Green Power published a statement on their Facebook page saying they could "confirm that at around 19:20 this evening, a digester tank at its Cassington AD facility near Yarnton, Oxfordshire, was struck by lightning resulting in the biogas within that tank igniting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod

A lightning rod or lightning conductor (British English) is a metal rod mounted on a structure and intended to protect the structure from a lightning strike. If lightning hits the structure, it will preferentially strike the rod and be conducted to ground through a wire, instead of passing through the structure, where it could start a fire or cause electrocution.

The principle of the lightning rod was first detailed by Benjamin Franklin in Pennsylvania in 1755,[2] who in subsequent years developed his invention for household application (published in 1757) and made further improvements towards a reliable system around 1760.

This seems like the sort of thing that one could reasonably equip a facility with large tanks of explosive gas with in 2023.

EDIT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaerobic_digestion

Image: Biogas holder with lightning protection rods and backup gas flare

That seems to have pointy pole things extending above their tanks.

This is a picture of the facility that just had the explosion:

https://www.stgreenpower.co.uk/assets/images/banners/Severn-Trent-Green-Power-cassington-AD-page-banner.jpg

I do not seem, at a cursory glance, to see any pointy pole things extending above the tanks at the facility that just had the explosion.

tal, 8 months ago

LK-99

I saw a lot of cautions about being cautious on this, and they were right.

It also emerged that US scientists had achieved "net energy gain in a fusion reaction" for the second time, the Financial Times reported. This adds significant heft to the case made by nuclear-energy advocates who say nuclear is nothing to be scared of and a good source of green energy.

As obnoxious as I find the anti-nuclear crowd, this is a terrible argument. First, the advance was not going to even potentially translate into a workable, commercial system for a long time to come. Second, this was an advance towards use of nuclear fusion for power generation. What the anti-nuclear crowd gets upset about is nuclear fission for power generation.