Not quite correct:

1 - Erm, no: 2H2 + O2 ==> 2H2O
2. true for non-renewable power
3. true for non-renewable power
4. true, compression energy losses are significant.

Using 'green' H2 can also have significant losses:
a) Electrolyser losses
b) Compression losses
c) Fuel cell losses

A battery EV is much more energy efficient than a H2 one. You get about 90%+ power to the wheels compared with about 35% for H2.

Using H2 for heating is inefficient too because of electrolyser and compression losses. The same amount of energy driving a heat pump will give a COP of 3+.

H2 is good for long term energy storage when renewables would be otherwise curtailed.

Mind you industry uses about 70M tons of H2 as a feedstock. This would keep about 300GW of electrolysers going 24/365. That is a good use for green H2 as it directly replaces massive amounts of SMR H2 which emit about 800M tons CO2/year..

As if this is any different to organisations owned by US corporates.

Does anyone seriously think that European companies owned by Google/Facebook/Microsoft don't have to kowtow to their owners?

Non-story

When the dust on sanctions settles there will be no way that Huawei will ever use US components again in their products unless they absolutely have to. The USA has lost the purchases from the world's largest telecommunications manufacturer forever. I'm absolutely sure many other manufacturers are making the same decisions to protect themselves.

They also have given the Chinese semiconductor manufacturers the best boost they could ever get which will forever reduce the dependence of foreign tech companies on US based suppliers.

The US may have "won" the battle but are well on the way to losing the entire war.

A Pyrrhic victory indeed.

Shibboleet

https://xkcd.com/806/

Of course in the REAL WORLD you have to put up with the crap along with all the others :(

Most of the world apart from the 5% who live in North America uses metric. Even the UK uses both Imperial and metric (although road signs are still in miles). In any case scientists and engineers all use units generally based on SI.

Slashdot has an international readership so metric is the right choice.

This story brings back memories of when I was a kid and read the book "Farmer in the sky" by Robert A. Heinlein. I really wanted to be there on Ganymede.

Maybe this increases the chances of us going there in the future provided we haven't bioengineered ourselves into extinction..

"I'll put my phone on charge. Oh dear the charger is in my hotel room".

You just know how this will end.

I've been specifying emergency service systems for over 10 years, duplication, monitoring, management and processes are always at the top of the list.

I'm not convinced you need an analogue failover but you do need fully duplicated systems right down to the power subsystems and cables which you periodically switch between. There is no point having a backup if you don't use it on a regular schedule to be sure it is working properly.

The solutions are not all technical, you have to be monitoring them properly with the right people who are motivated and properly trained. You also need the proper organisational processes .

I've seen NOCs on emergency service networks where the staff on duty have been asleep or out of the room for long periods. Motivation, training and accountability are frequently not given the importance that they deserve.

If calls are lost then help is delayed. This impacts the outcome of incidents.

I'm not saying that people died because of this but I'm absolutely certain that there were some who suffered worse injury and losses because of the delays. Loss of 6,000 calls will result in a lot of hurt.

Like so many other issues, it wasn't a single fault but a chain of events. In this case there was a software failure but the fault monitoring systems and support services failed to immediately note that there were no calls going through the affected systems. A change from 1,000 calls per hour to zero should be pretty obvious.

They didn't appear to have a credible mitigation process to handle this sort of failure like diverting calls to another location. This could have been automated or manually initiated by the NOC operators.

Shit happens in all systems, the important thing is how you deal with problems.

By Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman etc. in the same way as Skype is.

I predict screaming from millions of users who find WhatsApp suddenly blocked by their ISPs.
 

Now IBM have dumped their X86 server busness onto Lenovo it looks like Lenovo might be the the best option for new deployments. At least you can (still) download patches from their website.

Another option would be Huawei, but I don't know what their support is like. At least you can be certain that the spyware on their products is coming from the NSA!

This is the sort of action you would expect from some small dictator-run country not one of the biggest countries in the world.

If you combine it with the arguments on funding which has resulted in the government effectively shutting down for the last few days and the absolute fortune being spent on making the Internet a less secure place (AKA NSA spying on everyone) then you end up with a picture of a country where the government organisations are completely out of the control of those who are supposed to set the rules.

This is not acceptable in a connected world. The spying is particularly galling, (I know GCHQ are up to their necks too) but I EXPECT that individuals not carrying USA passports should have some rights - if only the human right to privacy unless there are overriding needs in individual cases/investigations. This wholesale hoovering up of my data is plain wrong. The outright lying of some of the senior agency staff to oversight committees and FISA courts is completely unacceptable and should lead to long prison sentences, but it won't and another nail is hammered into the USA state coffin.

So I'm now generally avoiding products, hardware and software designed and manufactured in the USA - not hard anyway considering the collapse in manufacturing there and outsourcing to China of most of the supply chain.

  My recommendation for the last couple of years to clients has been to avoid Cisco and Juniper etc at the Internet gateway or areas with uncontrolled traffic and shove something else (preferably open source/IPTables based) there and review the rules very carefully. The recent news has just strengthened my view that you can't trust hardware where you can't arrange for an independent and public review of the code - IMO in general the threat of a public disclosure of a back door or designed-in weakness from a code review is sufficient to keep the vendor honest. The recent news has just reinforced my views.

Andy

Forgot to add that your VPN endpoint doesn't have to be where the VSAT or Thuraya earth station drops the traffic to the internet. You can tunnel through the Internet back to the USA and present your traffic wherever you want. Round trip delays will prevent you from going multihop satellite even if you can afford it.

Finally make sure you speak to the vendors of the VSAT/Thuraya terminals. Most VPNs don't play nicely with satellite links because of varying throughput and delays and if you are using VSAT you need an adaptive modem to squeeze all you can out of your little bit of spectrum.

Usual names apply, Astrium etc. if you want certified implementations.

Andy

In the middle east region you should consider the Thuraya IP service as it is the cheapest offering and aimed at providing Internet to communities in areas where there is little or no backhaul. It will still cost a lot though (If it remember correctly around $100/GByte). The Thuraya IP service package has 30GB/month with topups in lumps of 30GB/Month.

If you can commit to a long term contract (1 to 3 years) a better choice would be with Ku band VSAT which can work out as low as $2k-$4k/month per
megabit.

I had to research this recently.

Andy