tal
@tal@kbin.social
- Comment on UK network operators ask govt to fend off attacks on fiber 8 months ago:
(I’m a bit doubtful, I bet they use colour).
goes to investigate
Google search for: site:theregister.com color:
About 41,100 results (0.29 seconds)
Google search for: site:theregister.com colour:
About 88,400 results (0.20 seconds)
You appear to be correct.
- Comment on Large Language Models Are Drunk at the Wheel 8 months ago:
AGI is not a new term. It’s been in use since the 90s and the concept has been around for much longer.
It's not new today, but it post-dates "AI" and hit the same problem then.
- Comment on Writing games the blog dedicated to text-based game development (MUDs) 1 year ago:
Text-based-games and MUDs are not the same thing. There's a considerable library of text-based interactive fiction out there.
- Comment on Jeremy Hunt pushed for HS2 rail line to end in central London | Financial Times 1 year ago:
- Submitted 1 year ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 1 comment
- Comment on Fireball in Oxfordshire turns sky orange after lightning strike 1 year ago:
Severn Trent Green Power published a statement on their Facebook page saying they could "confirm that at around 19:20 this evening, a digester tank at its Cassington AD facility near Yarnton, Oxfordshire, was struck by lightning resulting in the biogas within that tank igniting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_rod
A lightning rod or lightning conductor (British English) is a metal rod mounted on a structure and intended to protect the structure from a lightning strike. If lightning hits the structure, it will preferentially strike the rod and be conducted to ground through a wire, instead of passing through the structure, where it could start a fire or cause electrocution.
The principle of the lightning rod was first detailed by Benjamin Franklin in Pennsylvania in 1755,[2] who in subsequent years developed his invention for household application (published in 1757) and made further improvements towards a reliable system around 1760.
This seems like the sort of thing that one could reasonably equip a facility with large tanks of explosive gas with in 2023.
- Comment on UK Windows and Doors: 500 jobs to go as firm goes bust 1 year ago:
https://sundries.com.ua/en/the-lithuanian-capital-will-share-window-glass-with-ukraine/
The Lithuanian capital will share window glass with Ukraine
Window glass is what the cities and villages of Ukraine affected by enemy shelling need today. Unfortunately, the country is unable to meet this need. Residents and businesses of Vilnius are urged to hand over windows and double-glazed windows to restore housing in Ukraine damaged by Russian shelling. The corresponding address was made by the mayor of the Lithuanian capital Remigijus Šimašius on Facebook.
According to him, mayors and residents of Ukrainian cities are asking for help in restoring windows, as many houses have holes covered with cardboard instead of windows.
“If you are a business, you may still have windows from your renovated home. If you make glass, you can contribute to helping Ukraine. I have already invited companies from the Municipality of Vilnius, the community of developers and members of the Lithuanian Builders’ Association. Thank you to everyone who responded quickly,” – Šimašius wrote.
He also called on his compatriots to make an inventory of their garages and dachas in search of building materials that could remain after the repairs. While, glass sheets with an area of at least 1 square meter are suitable for collection. (possible with frames) and double-glazed windows. Shimashius noted the points where you can pass.
The self-government of the Lithuanian capital is taking over the delivery of glass to Ukraine.
- Comment on UK Windows and Doors: 500 jobs to go as firm goes bust 1 year ago:
googles
It looks like the British government is presently subsidizing insulation improvements to British homes. One option that it apparently chose not to do was to subsidize upgrading to double-glazed windows:
Some trade associations and manufacturers agreed with the proposed measures but pointed
towards benefits that additional measures could bring, such as insulation measures for doors
and windows. Draught proofing, double glazing, and ventilation measures were the most
common ones highlighted by respondents as missing from the Scheme. A few respondents
pointed towards the need to incentivise solid wall insulation further, which is needed in many
fuel poor homes.Of the minority that disagreed with our proposal, the most popular suggestion was to allow
further insulation measures such as double glazing or draught proofing, to provide suppliers
and households with the maximum level of flexibility.Were the UK to increase the rate of upgrading to double-glazing and further incentivize the donation of the removed single-glazed windows, I would think that this would kill two birds with one stone.
- Comment on UK Windows and Doors: 500 jobs to go as firm goes bust 1 year ago:
Submitting this, as it's a bit surreal to see a window manufacturer go out of business after reading a bunch of articles about how Ukraine's been unable to obtain windows. When I was reading some documents from the Ukrainian government last year, one of their most-immediate economic asks was for funds to help build window and glass construction facilities, because they couldn't get ahold of windows to replace those destroyed by explosions.
A team of Warsaw-based volunteers have won praise for their campaign to replace windows in Ukraine damaged by Russian shelling.
Co-founded by Polish activist Zofia Jaworowska and Kyiv architect Petro Vladimirov, the Okno Projekt (Project Window) has so far seen hundreds of disused windows gathered and transported to enjoy a second life in war-torn Ukraine.
Born in July of last year, the initiative was launched when a wave of Ukrainians began returning home from Poland to liberated territories around Kyiv and the Chernihiv and Kherson oblasts.
Jaworowska said: “Winter was coming and it was necessary to help with repairing houses as soon as possible – in the first two months alone we managed to collect nearly 700 windows from across Poland send two full trucks to Ukraine.”
Explaining the urgency of the action, Vladimirov added: “Because of explosion, glass and windows are the first thing that are destroyed so we decided to concentrate on supplying windows. We found out that Ukraine has no facility producing window glass and that before the war 75 percent of it was imported from Russia and Belarus.”
By contrast, Poland is the largest exporter of windows in the EU.
“One and a half thousand windows in a year sounds like 'wow' to someone, but looking at the scale of the destruction, we understand that it is just a drop in the ocean,” said Vladimirov.
- Submitted 1 year ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 4 comments
- Comment on Shock as yew tree which 'predates the Battle of Hastings' felled - Battle 1 year ago:
It looks like the UK has some drastically-older yews.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortingall_Yew
The Fortingall Yew is an ancient European yew (Taxus baccata) in the churchyard of the village of Fortingall in Perthshire, Scotland. Considered one of the oldest trees in Britain, modern estimates place its age at an average of 5,000 years.[1]
Some estimates put the tree's age at between 2,000 and 3,000 years; it may also be a remnant of a post-Roman Christian site and around 1,500 years old.[2] Others have suggested an age as great as 5,000 to 9,000 years. Forestry and Land Scotland consider it to be 5,000 years old.[1] This makes it one of the oldest known trees in Europe.[3] (The root system of the Norway spruce Old Tjikko in Sweden is at least 9,500 years old.[4]) The Fortingall Yew is possibly the oldest tree in Britain.[2]
- Comment on Shock as yew tree which 'predates the Battle of Hastings' felled - Battle 1 year ago:
The farmer has been doing work around the fields and cut back overgrown trees which I know needs to be done.
Rother District Council said it would not comment as the tree is on private land.
Not quite the same thing as cutting down the Sycamore Gap tree, which was on public land.
It was a quite old tree, but it's also someone removing a tree on their land.
- Comment on Self-driving buses that go wherever you want? How the UK is trying to revolutionise public transport 1 year ago:
I don't see a lot of point.
If you have a human driver, it reduces labor costs to have a larger vehicle. More reason to use larger vehicles like busses.
But if you have a computer driving, car size or even smaller become more relatively-appealing.
- Comment on Grant Shapps to send UK troops to Ukraine 1 year ago:
Rheinmetall recently announced that they were starting up a facility in Ukraine.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/10/business/rheinmetall-german-tank-factory-ukraine/index.html
Rheinmetall will open an armored vehicle plant in Ukraine within the next 12 weeks, shrugging off concerns other Western defense companies reportedly have about building a presence in the country while it is at war with Russia.
I am guessing that the factor is more that Ukraine's considered to have a decent-enough air-defense situation now that it's reasonable to start operating factories without worrying about them getting hit with missiles or something.
- Comment on BBC News - Sycamore Gap: Man in his 60s held after Hadrian's Wall tree cut down 1 year ago:
That’s like if stone henge was knocked down
I mean, it was.
In fact, it looks like bits are still coming back these days:
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/stonehenge-missing-piece-england-scli-gbr-intl/index.html
Missing piece of Stonehenge monument returned after 60 years
“The last thing we ever expected was to get a call from someone in America telling us they had a piece of Stonehenge,” Heather Sebire, English Heritage’s curator for Stonehenge, said in a news release.
- Comment on ‘The quotes were £5,000 or more’: electric vehicle owners face soaring insurance costs 1 year ago:
If the issue producing the high repair costs is large batteries, though, one would get lower repair costs.
- Comment on ‘The quotes were £5,000 or more’: electric vehicle owners face soaring insurance costs 1 year ago:
EV batteries are huge, hard to repair, and expensive.
Seems like one could make multiple smaller batteries.
- Comment on Sunak expected to limit powers of councils in England to curb car use 1 year ago:
I can see limiting highly-restrictive speed limits, as there could be a broader public interest in having traffic moving. Like, when traffic is moving from point A to B to C, B may be on the only route from A to C and not care how long it requires to get from A to C.
But how does limiting traffic cameras make sense? I mean, either you have a speed limit or you don't. I can't see a good argument for limiting enforceability of speed limits.
- Comment on Boy, 16, arrested over felling of iconic ‘Robin Hood tree’ next to Hadrian’s Wall 1 year ago:
Hmm. I was wondering if the National Trust would object to plantings -- I dunno if you can do that in national forests here in the US -- but it looks like they do plant stuff:
https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/support-us/plant-a-tree
Help plant more trees
For only £5, you can plant a tree that will tackle climate change and support life for years to come. Your support will help to plant and establish 20 million trees by 2030.
National Trust to plant 1,200 hectares of flower-filled grassland in Devon
- Comment on Boy, 16, arrested over felling of iconic ‘Robin Hood tree’ next to Hadrian’s Wall 1 year ago:
I mean, that's probably part of it too, but I also feel like they wouldn't have filmed the scene at Canary Wharf.
Honestly, given that Robin Hood's home was Sherwood Forest, Sycamore Gap is about...checks Google Maps about 172 miles by (modern day) road out of the way, too.
- Comment on Boy, 16, arrested over felling of iconic ‘Robin Hood tree’ next to Hadrian’s Wall 1 year ago:
I think it’s called the Robin Hood Tree because it was in a Robin Hood film.
Yeah, but the movie was presumably filmed there because they were looking for something that didn't have houses or whatnot in view, looked like it did during the time of Richard Lionheart.
- Comment on Boy, 16, arrested over felling of iconic ‘Robin Hood tree’ next to Hadrian’s Wall 1 year ago:
https://aeon.co/essays/who-chopped-down-britains-ancient-forests
Much of England had been cleared as early as 1000 BCE, some two millennia beforehand. The Bronze Age saw intensive farming on a scale that we are only just beginning to appreciate. As Oliver Rackham puts it in The History of the Countryside:
It can no longer be maintained, as used to be supposed even 20 years ago, that Roman Britain was a frontier province, with boundless wild woods surrounding occasional precarious clearings on the best land. On the contrary, even in supposedly backward counties such as Essex, villa abutted on villa for mile after mile, and most of the gaps were filled by small towns and the lands of British farmsteads.
Rackham describes the immense clearance undertaken during the Bronze Age, boldly claiming that ‘to convert millions of acres of wildwood into farmland was unquestionably the greatest achievement of any of our ancestors’. He reminds us how difficult it was to clear the woodland, as most British species are difficult to kill: they will not burn and they grow again after felling. Moreover, in his dry phrase, ‘a log of more than 10 inches in diameter is almost fireproof and is a most uncooperative object’. The one exception was pine, which burns well and, perhaps as a consequence, disappeared almost completely from southern Britain, the presumption being that prehistoric man could easily burn the trees where they stood: the image of pine trees burning like beacons across the countryside is a strong one.
Or a contemporary of Stonehenge's builders.
- Comment on Boy, 16, arrested over felling of iconic ‘Robin Hood tree’ next to Hadrian’s Wall 1 year ago:
General manager Andrew Poad said the sycamore had been "an important and iconic feature in the landscape for nearly 200 years".
Well, Robin Hood was supposed to have been running around in the 12th century, so I suppose it was a bit ahistorical in the context of the guy anyway.
Maybe have the little lumberjack go up and try his hand at being an arborist and plant some new sycamores along the wall for future generations.
- Comment on National Gas explores paying UK households to turn down heating | Financial Times 1 year ago:
https://www.theecoexperts.co.uk/blog/uk-gas-sources
UK natural gas imports by country of origin (in 2021)
Natural gas (in metric tons)
Country Natural gas (metric tons) Norway 1,440,000 United States 92,000 Denmark 45,000 Belgium 45,000 Russia 12,000 France 8,000 That's not a very high proportion that was coming from Russia even before the invasion.
Maybe demand for Norwegian gas has increased due to other countries that did import a lot from Russia wanting to import from Norway.
- Comment on Police officers widely misusing body-worn cameras 1 year ago:
Why is it even possible to turn off or delete footage from these cameras?
I mean, police have a lot of privileged access to various locations. If they think that there's an emergency, they can enter your house, say. I think that I'd want to have the technical ability to have footage of that deleted.
- World's most powerful laser to be built in UK and will be 'million, billion, billion' times brighter than the sunnews.sky.com ↗Submitted 1 year ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 9 comments
- Comment on National Gas explores paying UK households to turn down heating | Financial Times 1 year ago:
- Submitted 1 year ago to unitedkingdom@feddit.uk | 5 comments
- Comment on Sunak hails Rosebank oil field approval amid climate outcry 1 year ago:
What Rosebank produces will be sold at world market prices, so the project will not cut energy prices for UK consumers,
Well, it will a little bit, in the sense that any input to the global market does.
Tax revenue generated for the UK is probably more relevant, though.
- Comment on Thames Water: Is this the worst company in Britain? 1 year ago:
Thames Water found itself at the centre of another industry scandal, with the supplier yesterday ordered by Ofwat to hand back over £100m to customers after failing to meet standards for fixing pipe leakages, sewage overflows and environmental protection.
Industry regulator Ofwat has ordered the UK’s largest supplier – which serves 15m customers- to cut bills after its latest annual performance review had found the supplier had fallen short of standards.
The report is the latest blow for the troubled supplier, which has been struggling under a £14bn debt pile,
My suspicion is that utility companies are not generally going to spend more on infrastructure if they have their price limits get cut, especially ones that can't handle their existing debt.
Maybe a better way to deal with this is to say that, for utilities with natural monopolies, like water companies, that aren't doing well, they can be compelled to sell part of their network to a neighboring utility that isn't having problems.