Yeah. But the difference is with Facebook, people know they are logging into Facebook and handing their information over to Meta. With Nigerian websites, people think they are logging into their Office 365 or something to claim their 'reward', new benefits, etc. when they are really giving their login credentials to Nigerian Princes who will immediately get into things before even a TOTP code can expire.

So basically what is being said here are all of the Nigerian princes are up in arms over telecommunications issues costing them a few American dollars worth of business. Kind of funny in a sad way that all of the corruption and crime in the country is making it harder for them to conduct their scams around the world.

Something to consider about the solar shade idea is the Moon (Luna) and how it is close enough to the Earth to where you can effectively remote control stuff on the Moon from Earth. We all like remote work anyway. Something else to consider about this project is SpaceX's Starship and Elon Musk's plan of making access to space on a large scale dirt cheap. Then consider things like efficient space only propulsion, solar sails, and catapults on the Moon. So the thing you want to do is to build manufacturing facilities on the Moon, build solar sails / Sun shades on the Moon, and then seeing the Moon is a low gravity environment and has no atmosphere, you just fling the solar shades into space from the surface of the Moon. From there, they solar sail out to the Earth-Sun L1 Lagrange point and start blocking the Sun. At this, you wouldn't even notice the dimming. To get the Earth back to the temperature we are looking for, you are talking about say the dimming caused by a business jet passing between you and the Sun at 45,000 ft. Yeah, I bet you never even notice when that happens because the dimming is so negligible.

You look at Solar 2 out by Daggett, CA back int the 1990's and subsequent plants built in other countries after Dick Cheney killed the 6 GWs by 2006 project and it seems we know a lot more about handling molten salt than we did in the 1960's. I am sure China has been doing its homework on this subject and figuring out the materials science to make this nuclear reactor work. There are really a lot of things that go into this type of nuclear reactor as Gen IV reactors are obviously a bit more advanced than this light water garbage reactors we have been accustomed to and as far as I can tell they are all very solve-able problems. So while we get mired down in Hollywood movies and bad politics killing whatever the last guy (or gal) was promoting, the Chinese march forward on a straight path to long term energy stability.

When are they going to setup good camera systems so we may have a chance to get a look at who is doing this? Maybe even station drones at the power substations so when activity is caught, they can launch off from inside the yard and stalk the perps until police arrive? Some cameras, Internet access which could take a few different forms depending on the site, and a drone that can be controlled over the network link should be quick, easy, and cheap to implement.

I think an important point I should have brought up sooner to answer what Linus Torvalds said to me is people like us don't buy specialized hardware because we want to feel special and more important than others. We buy the specialized hardware because the other stuff is junk and does not have the functionality we need to be most effective with our time to do the things we are trying to do. At this as Linus points out is these other people buying the lesser hardware often need something better and often don't even realize it. Why try to save a buck going with non-ECC RAM as the head Linux maintainer of all things when that is going to lead to trouble down the road that is going to waste your time and lead to other issues you may not immediately notice and you even know it leads to well know problems when you can just spend a little more and go with a different hardware configuration to have a number of reliability improvements to your system including that ECC RAM by default?

I suppose one thing I am hoping doesn't happen is like for example a ways back I told Hans Reiser that CoW based file systems such as WAFL were better because of superior snapshotting capabilities and such. He angrily replied that LVM snapshotting worked just fine and so no need for CoW based file systems. Shortly after I heard in the news that his ex-wife went missing. Please just continue on with the good work Mr. Torvalds. You have done a lot of good work and I much appreciate it.

I found the post I am referring to: https://www.realworldtech.com/...

If you do some digging, you will find somebody (me) told him so, but he just got angry and said what he was doing was fine; he didn't need that special memory. To clarify a bit, Linus Torvards had Linus Sebastian on Linus Tech Tips build him a Threadripper (not Pro) system. At the time Linus Torvalds could have used a more workstation oriented EPYC board and used ECC registered memory to get around the issue of poor availability of ECC UDIMMS. I had been trying to prod AMD into making a workstation version of EPYC before this, but not sure if that contributed to them making the Threadripper Pro or not.

Something to consider when this was looked at years ago is it was found that wind in the USA needed to be backed by natural gas fired power plants to compensate for the rapid shifts in generation versus demand. This backing ended up being 89% of the power generation came from natural gas and 11% came from wind. It was estimated that if a full battery setup was added, the share of wind power could be raised to 22% with the other 78% coming from fossil fuels. For solar I went through a study done by Sandia National Labs and they came up with solar placed in the southwest, the best spot in the country, with overnight molten salt storage with solar concentrating plants they were working on could get up to 70% of the annual energy. The reason they couldn't go above this were seasonal shifts and cloudy days. With our current power grid, we cannot get all of our power from the Southwest, so solar would largely need to come from less ideal places where the share it could do would be 60% or less. Many places where people live in the USA are more like 40% due to cloud cover and seasonal shift from being further up North than the Southwest if you had batteries for overnight storage. Seeing we lack the overnight storage, you are talking more like 25% maximum share with the rest coming from fossil fuels, preferably natural gas to handle fast swings such as when clouds blow over a solar farm. So then say you are in Europe and the natural gas running these natural gas fired plants making renewable grid energy possible is shut off, which Russia has shut off the gas and so Europe is running on reserves. Well if that natural gas runs out, you cannot balance renewables on the grid and the grid operates on moment to moment supply and demand. So then you have to shut off the renewable sources because you don't have the natural gas fired power plants available to even out the energy coming from rapidly fluctuating renewable sources. This is the double whammy because both the natural gas fired power plants are effectively gone and the renewable is effectively gone at the same time. Then the grid has issues with losing the power when you try to go long distances. This has been mitigated some by using HVDC power lines, but we only have so many of those and they only do so much to alleviate the problem.

So now you start talking about advanced nuclear power. China is firing up a LFTR reactor. This is using molten salt and thorium. These reactors are passively safe. These reactors can burn through all of the fuel in a continuous cycle. They were invented by the same guy who came up with the light water reactor, but his project got shut down due to politics, not technical reasons. Now China is building these power plants because we dropped the ball many years ago on it. Molten salt is really interesting because you can run a gas turbine off of it and not need any water at all. Actually China is interested in part because they are looking to set these up in desert regions where there is no water for these plants. Molten salt is cheap enough to where you could store a bunch of it and have variable power generation throughout the day. If you do have access to water, you can have a second stage using steam for additional power generation. You can actually do a lot of interesting and useful stuff with these reactors, but this is getting to be kind of long as it is.

This sounds made up. I mean out here in SoCal, everyone i know at least with an EV is on a TOU (Time of Use) plan. While there are different TOU plans across the state, a common theme is it costs a more from 4pm to 9pm. So people with EVs come home, plug in their EV, and it sits there and doesn't charge. Then at some point after 9pm the chargers kicks on and charges the EV. Nobody out here actually charges between 4pm and 9pm. This is why it is made up. You only drive so many miles in a day and especially with traffic out here can only make it so far trudging through traffic (and its bad again). Most people with EVs can charge at anywhere from 230V @ 32A to 230V @ 48A depending on the charging equipment they have at home, which is fine for starting late at night and being ready in the morning. A lot of EV owners don't plug in every night because they just don't go far enough to need to while still keeping their batteries pampered by keeping in the optimal longevity range. (Never do 100% to 0%. With most EVs, people try to keep it from 80% to 30% SoC, though the few LFP battery owners can go up to 100% SoC without worry about longevity.)

Normally you are supposed to design these facilities with lots of margin. If they can't even take 40 C, that is not a lot of margin from what normally happens in a year. Hardware tends to be rated anywhere from 60 C to 100+ C in max operating temperature, so it is just a game of temperature delta's. Also if power is an issue on the hottest days, there are backup generators on site.

Seeing these outfits can do whatever they want with the hardware design, the obvious answer is to do negative pressure liquid cooling to all of the real heat producing components, which have ratings anywhere from 85 C to 100+ C and back of rack radiators so air cooling can be used for the lowered powered stuff, some of which have max ratings as low as 60 C. If you have ever liquid cooled a server CPU with many cores or large die GPU / other large accelerator, they tend to stay fairly close to the temperature of the liquid in the water block on top of them. If there is a problem with say a high performance CPU, you can always dynamically scale back the TDP of the CPU so its temperature delta doesn't get too high above warm coolant on an exceedingly hot day. For the lower powered components receiving air cooling, it shouldn't be too energy consuming to say chill the coolant to say 30 C when it is say 40 C outside for the back of rack cooler. I found for example my high efficiency for a window unit window AC was chilling the inside air down to -20 C according to my temperature gun when it was 35 C outside, granted it was still warm in the room. It is just that a window AC needs to be designed to much different cooling parameters than a back of rack cooler only focused on lower powered server components while a different more direct cooling loop is used for the high powered components.

Talking about temperature deltas in a direct liquid cooling setup, my high end PCs that are liquid cooled are seeing ~6 C from the room temp to the coolant temp and up to 2.5 C from the 'cold' side to the 'hot' side of the loop when under full load and this is with some of the higher power enthusiast hardware running at full load. Then for liquid cooled GPUs for example I see another ~12 C rise over the coolant temperature when pulling ~320 W. This all adds up to you could use 40 C air at full load no problem and see a GPU only get up to ~60 C when it is rated for 85 C max. A data center would probably try to squeeze more out of the radiators placed outside and try to do more with a lower flow rate per device, so then maybe you end up with a GPU getting up to 70C when it is 40C outside. Still perfectly acceptable and room to spare as the climate crisis gets worse. CPUs are generally rated up to 100 C and when you have a big CPU package with 64 cores to spread the heat load across, keeping that CPU under 100 C with a water block on it should be easy enough.

If push comes to shove, maybe you start setting up the servers with a liquid metal thermal compound between the die and water block, granted the heat load on server CPUs is much more spread out in most cases, so only say an extreme case where license restrictions on say your Oracle server pushes you to one of those server CPUs setup more like a gaming CPU to extract more from each CPU core to keep the per core licencing costs down.

This technology is nothing new as it goes all the way back to Nikola Tesla and was even demonstrated in California back in the 1990's to power a bus at freeway speeds. Here is the thing, you plug in your EV to go hundreds of miles.

The big battery in current EVs sucks up energy to push around and so needs to be bigger and heavier and suck down even more energy to go the required distance. The big battery is not 100% efficient at storing and releasing energy. Instead at best maybe 85% of the energy that goes into the battery comes out and at best 77% of what comes from the grid goes to the wheels. The best roadway induction systems I saw at Oak Ridge National Labs using modern power electronics (compared to 1990's power electronics in the 1990's California demonstration) was doing around 86% efficiency to the vehicle. So yeah, instead of going to the battery, you go straight to motor controller when the battery is charged and it is just as efficient as storing in a battery, no additional loss. When you do charge the battery, if you have this in all of the major thoroughfares with mainly the side streets needing battery power, you have a much smaller and lighter battery requiring less energy to move around. In other words if mass implemented, you don't really lose any net efficiency. Maybe if outfits like Theion can prove their LiS technology and mass produce it, you could have an ultra-light short range battery in your car or truck, making EVs lighter drive train wise than ICE power vehicles while also being very eco friendly and light on precious resources to mass produce. With semi-trucks that drive fixed routes this is important as the EV semi-truck could haul more than its ICE counterpart due to a small, light LiS battery, light electrodynamic roadway induction system, and light electric motor systems weighing a lot less than the traditional ICE counterpart.

As we are not going to switch everything over to being on electrified trains, but instead have trains in their niche and continue to use roads for more general transport, it is important to electrify the roads. This is a nice, hidden away method of powering EVs and we really need to be doing it.

And people thought the movie Idiocracy was a movie about the future. In a way this is worse than watering crops with Brando. Actually this is another problem is a lot of this corn is grown with well water and the water tables are dropping and won't recover. Really, there is a whole lot of bad and no good from an ecological standpoint. Other world leaders have rightfully called this a waste of food. We don't grow things because it is efficient, because it is not. We grow things because it is the only way we know to have food. When you sum it all up, even more than these incomplete studies, it is actually far worse what we are doing to the planet to get this corn ethanol. The only way we can mess it up more is to use hydrogen fuel cell vehicles. Oh wait, these same people are also promoting that as a 'green' alternative while dissing actual greener technologies. Sad.

The bad part about this is these are the new laser linked satellites. There was just a story about SpaceX being in Tonga trying to restore Internet service. There are not enough laser linked satellites in orbit to connect Tonga to a place that has Internet access as it is too far without the laser links. This batch being mostly lost has got to be a real setback to that hope of getting Tonga back online ASAP. Hopefully they can get that undersea cable fixed soon. One other point is there have been reports of stuff slowly burning up in Earth's atmosphere over the past few days with the videos showing them seeming to go about the same apparent speed as I have seen of the "string of pearls" of recent Starlink launches just after sunset. Meteors from deep space zip into the inner solar system at a pretty good clip and then accelerate more as they fall into Earth. In other words fast streaks, leaving the slow streaks for satellites re-entering from LEO. So at least some of these satellites are probably already gone and that is why they didn't come out of safe mode. For some reason dust clouds in the upper atmosphere just don't respond well to commands sent to them from ground stations.