Perhaps I am too paranoid, having spent my working life watching certain political groups attack social security or change it into a managed wall street moneymaker (we at xxx investing, will take our experience and your money
From what I have read of the Carrington event, this cats cradle of wires that suspends our electricity dependent civilization above the abyss got a big surge of induced current. Not sure how useful AI would be to cope with that sort of a problem. While all of my electronics float on surge suppression power bars or regenerative UPS supplies, doubt that this is anywhere typical. And would be curious as to how all the high voltage transmission lines would hold up.. Maybe a really big surge suppressor network.
One gets the impression that the hardware requirements of Windows 11 are more intended to drive a total hardware replacement. Was surprised to see a long list of Xeon processors that no longer make the cut -- including my three year old Lenovo workstation. Hopefully MS will refrain from sabotaging existing Win 10 Pro installations through the 'patch' process. Or be as disfunctional as the daily application update process that appeared on one of my machines that fails to update MS applications.
Sounds like the venture capitalists and sales folks have been busy spinning their yarns. Its going to be wonderful. All they need are some actual workers and tangible products and they will be golden. Sigh...
As a Canadian who hates standing in line, the idea of more services being online is hopeful. But the reality is tempered with unique to Canada requirements (not just software) that make adopting a commercial package complex. The systems I have encountered at both the federal and provincial levels are buggy and seem under-resourced, dont even try doing anything in prime time. And good luck getting anything that passes for support. But the part that really concerns me is that these are all wrapped with disclaimers and disavowals of responsibility -- you have to use their systems but if they loose critical documents or their database gets hacked (or a copy left in a cab...) its largely your problem. You have to agree or nothing will be done. Even Canada Post has terms and conditions for package tracking -- which also excludes their management from any responsibility. Caveat emptor...
First a bit of history -- from what I have read, adding corn-derived alcohol was originally developed back in the Depression as an additional income source for struggling farmers. Then the idea was revived when peak oil was considered a problem and we needed stuff to replace petroleum distillates in our cars. The, out of nowhere, came the idea that it was somehow good for the environment and we all needed to consume it. Now I know that it took a lot of work to change gaskets and hoses to not be destroyed by the stuff. But in the years that this has been a thing, every car that I have driven ran worse on the stuff than straight gasoline -- mileage was always poorer. Still is. Now someone has observed that producing it is not emission-free (no surprise there) and roughly 40% of the corn crop is used. Effectively just burning it. Granted some folks are making a pile of money on this idea... and clearly have the ear (or is it lower down...) of the government to push it. But it is very hard to not see that the best thing for the planet would be to just stop doing this -- fewer emissions and more efficient cars. But no... and my head just hurts.
Dont know where you live, but up here fiber connections are the minority. Most of the ISPs I have dealt with consider a couple of meg to be just fine. So 'up to' 10mb/sec.... reality was maybe 2. So streaming video was a bit of a stretch and HD, let alone multiples, impossible. Thats the problem with this stuff. Remember when my kid was working for Microsoft a while back and the typical developer station had more MIPs that a few datacenters I have run. Don't assume because you have the best of everything that what is fine for you works the same for ordinary users.
Which is fine, for the folks who have a local fiber connection. But for the dialup, wimax or satellite crowd... Personally, I always thought the old style of remote computing with someone else being responsible had a lot to recommend it. But most places I have lived did not have the network plumbing to make that possible. And for folks like me who take the occasional set of astro images -- say a couple hundred at 40mb each, there might be a slight delay in getting anything at all done.
Both wind and solar are driven by weather. There was a reason why our ancestors abandoned such power sources when steam came along. In a time of climate change, when old weather patterns are changing and new problems arising, the reasons, as highlighted in the article, should seem all too obvious.
Agreed. And the problem with this approach is that when Hp decide you need to buy another printer they just discontinue the ink cartridges. And a year ago, even inserting an off-brand replacement bricked the printer. So we got a Brother laser... and it just worked. The unsolved problem this left me is how to print my colour and monochrome art images. Am ignoring it for now. Never got rid of my wet process materials... maybe.
Been blowing stuff up for a long time. Suspect you are right about the impact relative to all the other infernal combustions. And then there are the wild fires... Personally I don't think there is any real solution other than to move forward with less destructive technologies. Took a few centuries to get to this point, getting out of it won't be any faster. BTW, agree with your sig. Thanks.
While we are fussing about Turkmenistan, it might be fun to look at all the shooting wars around the globe and be honest about the amount of greenhouse gases their explosions and fires are releasing. One suspects that the methane leaks from the many unmaintained or abandoned oil and gas wells pale next to what is being intentionally released by all the combatants. And poor Turkmenistan is far from the only country with leaky plumbing on the globe.
Yep... 10kw is about right, the size of ours when we lived on Amherst Island in eastern Ontario. Had air source heat pumps backed up by electric baseboards. No natural gas so sized the propane tank to be 3x the longest power outage the locals could recall. No, the local utility (futility?) does not make outage statistics public. This legislation is typical cart before the horse kind of a problem -- the solution maybe wonderful, but only with a reliable, fault-resilient supply. And a personal nuke is a tad out of my price range. Maybe in another 100 years...
That is the problem with relying on electricity for most power needs. But in this particular case there is the cross-Med extension cord that could be easily severed. But one suspects this road is inevitable -- so maybe working on attitudes...
Seems this issue has been addressed already... perhaps thats a starting point.
"And remember: Evil will always prevail, because Good is dumb." -- Spaceballs
