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Comment Re:White elephant (Score 1) 63

Liquid hydrogen has around 120 MJ/kg versus 43 for jet fuel. Liquid hydrogen has 8.5 MJ/l to jet fuel's 35. Funny, about 3:1 for both, just in reverse directions.

Weight is more important when you're trying to take off.

A cryogenic cooled and massively insulated tank will not be light weight!

It will also be considerably larger in volume, perhaps triple the volume required for kerosene. Where will that volume go?

Personally, I don't know I'm comfortable flying a plane with a cryogenic fuel. Talk about wing icing!

It's only cold at standard atmospheric pressure.

I assume the trade-off between temperature/pressure is one of the things they'll be researching, along with insulation to keep the wings ice-free.

In the case of a crash I think that being frozen by hydrogen will hurt less than being burnt by kerosene, so... that's a win!

Adding insulation to keep it cool will add weight and volume. And as pressure goes up, so does the mass required to maintain structural integrity.

Not sure being frozen to death by liquid hydrogen would be very pleasant either. But then, if you've already crashed to the point of rupturing fuel tanks, chances are you're pretty mangled already, so it's probably a moot point.

All in all, I'd be surprised if H2 powered planes are at all viable, or competitive with synthetic fuel that might be manufactured using excess renewable resources.

With $107b in investment, you could massively over provision the wind and solar power you need, so that any excess could be used for synfuel production, and planes can use that synfuel with existing technology and infrastructure.

Comment Re:White elephant (Score 1) 63

Hydrogen is NOT a fuel, and the whole thing is going to be a costly white elephant...

Liquid hydrogen has three times more energy per kg than kerosene. The logistics of hydrogen (storage/delivery) might not work for cars, etc., but it might might work for aircraft.

eg. https://www.airbus.com/en/inno...

What is the volumetric energy density vs kerosene?

It doesn't matter how much it doesn't weight, if the super-insulated tank required to contain it in liquid form dwarfs the rest of the aircraft.

Comment Nadine Dorries (Score 3, Informative) 70

The UK's then serving culture secretary, part of the actual government of the UK, admitted sharing her Netflix account passwords in questioning by other MPs on the privatisation of one of the state owned broadcasters.

You couldn't make this shit up:

https://www.theguardian.com/po...

Of course, that was two Prime Ministers, and three Chancellors of the Exchequer, ago, in May 2022.

Comment Re:The usual "Microsoft feature" question (Score 5, Interesting) 241

Alas, no.

Windows ignores your default browser settings when it wants to push Edge.

In fact, it popped up Edge (which isn't my default browser) to try and push Windows 11 (which isn't available yet, and won't even run on my laptop anyway.)

Fuck Microsoft!

Comment Re:Build different. (Score 1) 112

The W5xx series were some of the best full-sized laptops ever built. Sad that Lenovo did not continue that screen size and capability set.

Never liked the w530 I had from work. Ran hot, very power hungry, and the form factor was just too big to be comfortable on the lap.

Typing this on a t61,which is my main personal machine, and I love it.

Comment Re:No. That is not how it works (Score 1) 437

It's not about spotting suspicious data, it's about spotting suspicious activity.

Something which opens and reads existing files, and writes out identical length (or nearly identical if it has some sort of header) random looking files looks pretty suspicious. You'd only need to trigger the UAC once or verify the source application or website against known ransomware to at least pause the application with a chance of keeping data intact.

Comment Re:No. That is not how it works (Score 1) 437

Actually, encrypted data would be easy to detect,

No, it would not be. Please be minimally competent before you comment on encryption.

Encrypted data will look like random data, and will have high entropy, be in-compressible, basically have no identifiable patterns in it.

I'm quite confident I could identify encrypted data with reasonable reliability, just using some simple statistical analysis.

Comment Re:No. That is not how it works (Score 2) 437

As soon as an application can read and write a file, it can encrypt it. The OS cannot judge what the application does and it cannot determine whether a file does lot look like it should. Entropy checks (basically the only thing you can do automated to determine whether something is encrypted) fail on compressed data nd on random or random enough binary data.

Actually, encrypted data would be easy to detect, and the combination of an existing file being re-written (encrypted) by a new application (or a browser) could trigger a UAC pop-up, or at least preserve the existing data.

Comment Re:Nope (Score 3, Informative) 253

all that I have will now be directed at convincing people away from you

Away from Huawei, and towards...? Who are the smart phone manufacturers that let you boot your own OS?

Google, Motorola, HTC, Samsung, LG (and they're just the brands I've personally owned and installed Cyanogenmod/LineageOS on.)

Comment HTML installer (Score 3, Interesting) 179

At my previous company, we used a Mozilla based installer front end. We used a cut down mozilla browser, without address bars or anything like that, which allowed easy UI creation for a wizard, embedded HTML online release notes, built in JS engine for customization at the product/package level, easily extended to interface with back end installers using XPCom. All in all, it was a great piece of work and very stable, this was 2004/2005.

Then we were acquired by an unnamed big blue bohemouth, who didn't like the MPL, and moved us to one of their in-house installers (which was awful beyond words.) And just like that, it was gone.

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