I knew a recruiters called Richard Long and Stella Ho. I always wondered if they lived up to their names, too. Better than my friends Rob Graves and Dick Leak, at least.

Won't happen, at least not with my books.

There is a reason writing the last one took two years. Many of its passages have very carefully considered wordings. Intentional ambiguities. Alliterations. Words chosen because the other term for the same thing is too similar to another thing that occurs in the same paragraph. Names picked with intention, by the sound of them (harsher or softer, for example).

I've used AI extensively in many fields. Including translations. It's pretty good for normal texts like newspaper articles or Wikipedia or something. But for a book, where the emotional impact of things matter, where you can't just substitute one words for a synonym and get the same effect - no, I don't think so.

This is one area where even I with a general positive attitude to AI want a human translator with whom I can discuss these things and where I can get a feeling of "did she understand this part of the book and why it's described this way?".

Has it been determined whether the IT situation was related to the theft that occurred?

Obviously it sounds like basically no bad option was left unchosen when it came to their IT config; but I'm curious whether this was a situation where the perps were actually sophisticated enough (or unsophisticated at traditional smash-and-grab/balaclava-when-on-camera techniques) to incorporate the bad IT into the heist; or whether the entry was more or less pure physical access control failure that happens to put the general state of the system in stark relief?

Obviously if it were a heist movie there'd be a hoodie kid using the power of fast typing to haxx0r the cameras and guide the operatives while using a precociously cobbled-together AI to selectively delete them from the surveillance footage; but if the overall physical security posture was bad, and the building is largely accessible to the public, it seems entirely plausible that someone just cased the joint and walked in much as they would have 50 years ago; though a different interested party is probably hosting a C2 server or some exploitation payloads on their DVR.

This is the part in the bad summer blockbuster where it turns out that there was some sort of alien organism involved in the collision; and now people are quietly scrambling to ensure it doesn't make it back to earth, right?

Of course, because it's obvious you don't understand that what you want isn't the same what everyone else wants.

Defensive much?

You would have known that if you actually bothered to find things out, but you went full "not invented here" and started assuming stupid things to invent strawmen why it must horrible.

It wasn't my argument, it was yours since you specifically said "without my control or supervision", that implies you are on top of everything you install.

Funny then how inconsistent you are when doing your checking since it seems to be built on familiarity and visual cues rather than actually looking up facts.

He said while using package managers that install random software from random sources.

Learn how the world and people work, because assuming everyone has the same needs and wants is just plain stupid and lazy. You imply you are big on due diligence but your responses here shows something entirely different, because making shit up and assuming things about something you didn't even bother to look into, that is a fucking professional disgrace.

No they aren't. They're a Hong Kong newspaper. The state-run news agency is Xinhua.

And I guess all these tools makes it so you can pick 5 apps from an a la carte menu and have them installed in minutes with a few clicks without resorting to typing and running shit in an administrator console? And who uses Clonezilla to install software on Windows? Docker I can get, but Clonezilla...

Btw, in regards to professional tools - why do you think Ninite isn't one? It's not like they have a version specifically geared towards businesses.. Oh, wait! They do!

Just like you wouldn't know of any problems with any of the applications you use, right?

When was the last time you verified every source you got your software from? Because that is the basis for your argument here, and I hope that you actually do that because otherwise you are just being a hypocrite for the simple reason of not being familiar with a piece of software that hundred of thousands of people use.

So Ninite as a package-manager is now suspicious and totally unnecessary and trivial? But Chocolatey who do exactly the same thing isn't? And Scoop? The very first thing it says you should do is to open a powershell and change the execution policy so you can download and run an unknown script to install it. Funny how that isn't suspicious at all for you.

Your reaction is typical of people who instead of actually looking shit up starts throwing it on the wall for no other reason than being unfamiliar with something.

Oops. Errata. I did in fact make an error in that post on the vaporization of the rivers. I plugged in the wrong multiplier. Looks like I was off by a factor of about 6.87X in the total. So much less of the Mississippi would have been vaporized with the 500 GWe, though it would have been completely vaporized with the full primary power production. It would not have been enough to completely vaporize all of those rivers, they would have just boiled with a relatively small fraction vaporizing. I mean, it would still be enough to pretty much wipe out all the life except for extremophiles, so the point about thermal pollution being a real problem still stands, but I did make an error for which I apologize.

I don't need a better idea. They already exist. I think you've forgotten in all these posts that the whole point of this was noting that Flamanville is smaller than the average which is a little over 3 sq km per GW for nuclear power plants. Nuclear plants using ocean water can use various techniques that more or less fit into your list. For example, they can evaporate ocean water in a cooling tower, so that it gets absorbed mostly by a phase change and then goes into the atmosphere For oceanside plants though, a common method is to have a large number of cooling ponds or canals taking up a lot of ground area. Some of the heat goes into the atmosphere, some goes into the ground, etc. The point is that the water cools down first, then is returned to the ocean. Once through systems like Flamanville save on space and on cost, but they are also recognized as sources of pollution. Plenty of studies have confirmed that dumping massive amounts of hot water into the ocean is indeed harmful.

As for your other examples like into the air. That is done through two main methods. One is pure air cooling, which takes a lot of infrastructure and extra land and cost, but is really the only realistic option without a massive water source. Another uses those flowing water sources you mentioned and cooling tower where water is evaporated (pluses: doesn't heat the water source like once-through and uses less water, minus: the water is removed from the fresh water supply, which denies it to those downstream. The once-through method with flowing water sources of course adds heat pollution. To get an idea of how much, consider some of the rivers in the US by flow rate:
Mississippi (number one by flow rate): About 16.8 million liters per second. So that means that if a 1 GWe electric plant uses the whole river for cooling and the heat is distributed evenly (which does not happen, of course, they take a tiny fraction and it gets released in a hot spot), then the river is heated by about 0.179 C. Not massive, but not nothing.
Skipping the St. Lawrence because of complicated water rights issues since it is mostly Canadian.
Ohio (number three): 8 million liters per second. So a 1 GWe plant raises the whole river by 0.376 C.
Niagara (number seven): 5.8 million liters per second. So, 1 GWe plant raises the whole river by 0.517 C
Missouri (number ten): 2.44 million liters per second. S0, 1GWe plant raises the whole river by 1.23 C
Of course, that's just a 1 GWe plant. If all of the approximately 500 GWe of Electricity the US uses were generated by nuclear plants and cooled by these rivers, (assuming a 15 C starting point), the Mississippi river would be raised to 100 C and 90.5% of it would be totally vaporized to steam. Any other single US river would be totally vaporized.
If, instead of just electricity, but all approximately 3,500 GWe of US primary power the US uses were generated by nuclear plants and cooled by rivers, the top 38 rivers in the US (with the last one being the Colorado river, with about a 27th of the flow rate of the Mississippi oh, and including the full flow rate of the St. Lawrence, ignoring Canada's rights), representing probably most of the flowing water in the US (hard to find exact figures on and even the numbers I am using here probably double count a lot since some of these rivers flow into the others), would be completely vaporized. Just to note, for the above, I am taking enthalpy of vaporization into consideration.

So, the entire point is that Flamanville is not really a good example of the typical size of a nuclear plant because it gets to cheat on size by dumping heat pollution into the English channel. Plants like that get by with a grandfather exception, but new plants can't get away with that. As the analysis shows, the heat dumped by these plants is not insignificant.

Which I guess comes from random third parties that provide tools that installs software using admin privileges.

Ninite has been around 16-17 years now and if you haven't heard of it it's because of two things: 1. There has never been any issues with it security-wise, 2. No one expect you to know about every tool available.

And I have to ask, what was it about their website that made you dismiss the tool? Was it the absence of ads and fake download links, or its simple and clean design presenting everything you need at a glance?

Glad to see I'm not the only one who noticed that over time Amazon's search feature has enshitified. If that's the correct verb. It used to be fairly good. These days, nah, unless I'm looking for a book or other product from Amazon directly, as a search for the marketplace it's crap.

And since it used to be better, something must be responsible for that. Greed, most likely.

Not 99% but definitely some of the most useful ones. And yes, stack traces are one of the things that only Linux users send you without an explicit request.

And the advantage of debugging a (this specific exception) error in (this specific file) on (that specific line) over a "hey, the game crashed when I jumped out of the car" bug report cannot be overstated.

You realize that's a "the solution to pollution is dilution" argument, right? The problem is not the heating of the entire Atlantic ocean. Do you now that the house I live in is built on the Earth. That's a pretty huge thermal mass. If my house catches fire, it's not going to be noticeable in how it affects the heat of planet Earth. I might have some reasons to be concerned about the local effects, however. So, if you're not sure about the analogy there, the problem is locally where the hot water, which rises, heats the top layer of water.

Also, I should note that the _electrical_ output of Flamaville is 1.3 GW, but that translates to a _thermal_ output of about 4 GW. That's enough to raise the temperature of nearly a million liters of water by 1 degree C every second. Or say an area of 1 square km and one meter deep (once again, hot water tends to rise to the top) by 3.6 degrees C every hour. It is not trivial for the area around the outlet and, combined with all of those phosphate and iron containing pollution you mentioned, certainly risks creating giant, toxic algal blooms that kill off mass numbers of local sea life. Basically, it is clear that this nuclear station only exists because it is grandfathered. It's not like the other pollution you mentioned is OK, either, but there are good reasons not to allow this sort of thing

Note: I wrote note last to basically say there isn't much point in reading the below. It's just more or less me thinking with my fingers about options for a heat differential storage systems and what heat storage medium would be best. Basically the conclusion is that, yeah, it's water. Without some extreme need to fit it into a particularly cramped space, a suitable floor to ceiling tank should fit in most spaces.

Water has excellent heat capacity both by mass and volume, but there is the narrow heat range without a special vessel, at least when storing heat, so I was thinking about a material that can hold more heat simply by changing its temperature a lot more. You can store more heat per degree Kelvin in a cubic meter of water than a cubic meter of sand, but the sand won't explode its container if you heat it up over 100 C. Of course, there the limits for increasing the temperature are going to be based on how well insulated you can make it, and also your energy budget for heat. Obviously, you want to get as much heat as you can through heat pump techniques (possibly chained) but, at a certain point of diminishing returns, the efficiency will drop to the point where you will need to switch to resistive heating (though that should not be a problem if you have surplus electricity during the day, and that is where smart grid features should come into play, so your appliances know when to draw extra power from the grid to avoid waste). Overall though, while there is the potential to store more heat in a lower volume with a material other than water if you can simply make use of higher temperatures. Storing cold with lower temperatures obviously has more limitations though. You can't cool the material more once you hit the limit of heat pumping the way you can with simple resistive heating. With water, you can also exploit the latent heat of fusion of water when it phase changes (but you do need a container that can withstand its expansion, maybe you can keep it in some sort of slush form). You could have a water tank for when you're handling cold and a tank of other material for heat, but that negates the space savings. So, it does get a bit tricky storing both heat and cold to find a better material than water.

On the other hand, perhaps you can simply store heat for both heating and for cooling. Even in hot weather, you could exploit the differential with the air outside to drive a secondary process that would also pump heat out of the interior.

I may be overthinking trying to save space though. Taking a look at just water:

Obviously, you ideally just have enough space for a big enough water tank. If we imagine a need for a max of 50K BTUs/hour, 20 hours per day that you want to run without drawing electricity from the grid, that's 1 million BTUs or a bit over a gigaJoule or, more appropriately 252,164 kiloCalories. If we are raising from 20 C to let's say right at 100 C, that's 80 kiloCalories per kg (liter) of water, so we would need about 3,160 liters (rounding up slightly) or 3.16 cubic meters. Assuming a 2 meter tall tank, that means about a 1.6 square meter floor area, so about 1.27 meters on a side. That's not too bad actually. Obviously you would want some good insulation around the tank. Plus you would need to be able to get it through doorways, so you would want either a composite tank made of a number of tall, thin tanks, which you assemble together and surround with insulation after, or possibly the tank is custom built onsite through other methods then insulated. Something like that could fit in the kind of spaces where lots of homes currently keep their hot water heaters. With enough insulation, it could even go outside.

For cooling, you could go with the same technique. If we assume the same 50K BTUs/hour, then we need the same approx 252,164 kiloCalories. Cool the water from 20 C to 0, and your 3160 liter tank stores 63,200 kiloCalories of heat differential. To go beyond that, one approach is antifreeze, but you run into the problem that the more antifreeze you add, the less heat the solution can hold per degree Kelvin. You can't get to the point where you can get the rest of the cold you need with that volume of water while it is still a liquid. If you freeze it, you get 80 kiloCalories per kg. So freezing the water gives you the rest that you need to get the 252K+ kiloCalories and then some (just that 80 matches the 252K+ Kilocalories. Obviously, the problem there is that expansion of the water in the tank. You only need to freeze 75% of the water in the tank to reach your goal though. If the tank has enough air at the top and a pressure release valve and you freeze the water in some pattern, like having a central core of ice that does not reach the sides, you can prevent the ice from causing freeze-thaw damage to the tank. Otherwise if you can keep it as some sort of slush, etc. Also, you could combine methods so the water does have antifreeze in it, but not enough to reduce the heat capacity by too much. Enough so that you can get it below freezing, but still freeze a portion of it and reach the storage goal. Also, have to consider that a core of ice is going to be buoyant. How buoyant might vary a bit with a hybrid approach with antifreeze, but it would be based on about 9% of the mass of ice. So it would be approximately 213 kilos (about 2100 Newtons of force). That could be handled with extra space at the top of the tank, but holding down 213 kilos structurally should not be much of a challenge, just a consideration.

So, it looks like, without some really major space limitation, the extra complication of not just using water would not be worth it. Also, as far as the actual heat storage amount, obviously that might vary. However, except in cases of extremely drafty, poorly insulated houses, it should be suitable for most installations.

Not sure if they bother with masks, but they definitely have agents grabbing people in the streets. I mean, they have mobile execution vans. The masked agents in the US seem to be part of a plan to normalize that sort of thing, certainly.

Strict gun control makes significant numbers of school shootings unlikely and contributes to the low officially recorded murder rate. Looking at the stats now, they report a 99.9% case closure rate for murders which is terrifying because it is virtually impossible for it to be true. Best case is that they are just official lies, but I worry that it is because the authorities have a mandate to "solve" every case no matter what. Meaning that, if there is a murder (or even something that just looks like a murder) someone is arrested, tried, and executed for it in short order regardless of whether they did it or not.