I also saw a similar thing. I also naively pointed at "cosmic rays". It wasn't until someone found the actual bug that I realised how unlikely that was.
The actual bug was unsafe code somewhere else in the application corrupting the memory. The application worked fine, but the log message strings were being slightly corrupted. Just a random letter here and there being something it shouldn't be.
The question really should have been, if this was truly cosmic interference, why only this service and why was the problem appearing more than once over multiple versions of the application?
Cosmic rays are a great excuse to problems you don't yet understand. But the reality of them is extremely rare and it's like 99% a memory corruption bug caused by application code.
Exactly, unless someone is in imminent danger there's basically no reason to do a high speed chase. Get the plate, track it on the thousands of ANPR cameras that exist, look up the owner and just knock on their door later on.
Like 99% of high speed chases only end when the culprit crashes their car, and often that's into someone else's car risking harm to innocent civilians.
Producing power by the mid 2030s? Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power. Or is this just a pipe-dream we were sold?
Like, I imagined these things being compact enough to be shipped to the outskirts of towns and producing power. Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
This Rolls Royce design isn't all that "small." A RR SMR design is a 470MWe PWR. About half the size of a typical PWR reactor. Fukushima Daiichi Unit 1 was 460MWe. Calling this an "SMR" is a stretch, likely for PR purposes.
It's a rather conventional design, low enriched fuel, no exotic coolants. There is a paper on it at NRC[1]. And they've never built one, so if they get it running by the 2030's they'll be doing pretty well for a Western company.
I downplayed there, because occasionally I try to moderate my extreme cynicism.
It would be miraculous, in the biblical sense of the word. Not only because it would be a technical and regulatory triumph for RR and the UK, but because it would mean this is something other than what it appears to be to me.
None of this will get built. It's all fake, and after the benefits are taken, and the subsidy budgets are drained, and the various political and academic and regulatory folks have populated the requisite non-profit no-show jobs, and the professional opposition leaders have collected all the anti-nook bucks, and RR et al. have wiggled out of whatever obligations they're pretending to pursue via the holes they've already carefully arranged for themselves, these papers and headlines will be forgotten.
Closer to a third for recent models (the French P4 reactors from the 80s were 1300, the later N4 1450~1500, the EPR is 1650). 500-ish is a relatively typical density for reactors from the mid to late 60s.
The reactor is still to be developed by Rolls Royce, which is hidden in mid article. The don't have plans, not even a working prototype yet, so expect delays to at least the mid 2040s.
One has to expect any promise of future nuclear to have the optimism turned up to 11, right to the limit of plausibility. The reality will inevitably disappoint.
It might not be as bad as it sounds. A few comments over someone had a preliminary permit application which described the technical details.
The gist of it is, the reactor is a 500MW pressurized water reactor, Gen3/3+. Not any fancy new Gen4 thing that you usually hear about when talking about small modular reactors. No molten salt, no high temperature gas cooling, no weird moderators, no heap of crumbling carbon/uranium spheres, no liquid lead/bismuth/natrium, no thorium.
So I guess it could actually be possible to keep that timetable, because it is actually old, boring and proven technology, just a little smaller and maybe more prefabricated than the usual 1GW to 1.5GW PWRs that were built in the last 4 decades.
> Isn't the entire point of SMRs that they are effectively a complete package and it takes very little effort to ship them out and getting them to produce power.
That's the point if / when we have actually working SMRs, with production lines set up. But the limited development of small civilian reactors before the 80s and the 3 decades freeze on most things nuclear means SMRs are only just getting out of research status (e.g. in the US only NuScale's VOYGR are currently certified).
This has kind of been the problem with SMRs; they sound great, but as you develop them, they get less and less small and modular. These are 470MWe. Coincidentally, the (very old) 'normal' MAGNOX reactors which used to operate at this site were 490MWe; in their day they were considered quite large.
> Afterall, they are from the same technology that was powering nuclear subs, right?
That was just for the news headlines, nuclear isn't and never has been, "practical". Look on the bright side, so much taxpayer money will go into this, it's probably going to make someone richer.
Nuclear subs are a "money no object" technology, as our supposed insurance policy against Soviet invasion and/or armageddon, it's whatever it takes.
That technology is so expensive, so far from economically viable, that only two countries (US & France) are even using it for aircraft carriers, despite its potential huge advantages over oil (stay at sea for years at a time without refuelling, no need for vulnerable supply ships etc.)
The secret sauce for me is that it is a complete out of box experience. You'll boot it and sign into steam and that's it. Like, sure you can get little PCs off Amazon or build your own micro-atx system with more performance. But I just wanna buy something and have it done for me. I want to buy a system that developers know is kind of a "base" spec.
If the Steam Machine becomes the base configuration that most games start targeting, then I think everyone will benefit from it.
Playing games with friends has never been more popular. I guess couch co-op has been replaced with online multiplayer. The assumption being that if you want to play with friends, they'll have their own device.
But there's still plenty of couch co-op games. They're usually quite niche though and not your typical racing or shooting game.
> I guess couch co-op has been replaced with online multiplayer. The assumption being that if you want to play with friends, they'll have their own device.
You can represent time zones with that format. So long as you have a source time zone, target time zone and tzdata you can convert any time accounting for all the particularities of any particular zone.
ISO 8601 timezone only allows an offset. You can't encode "04:00 in Cairo on 13th November 2036" as there's no way to know what UTC offset Cairo will have in October 31st 2036.
> 2036-11-13 04:00:00 Africa/Cairo
Is fine
> 2036-11-13 04:00:00 +0200
Is not, as the rules around moving from +3 to +2 may well have changed by them.
That’s got literally nothing to do with ISO 8601 though. Times are just hard and there’s no way to know the future with any kind of certainty. In this case there’s no way of knowing whether Egypt will by 2036 have changed their timezone or added or eliminated DST. Nothing to do with ISO 8601, just the world is uncertain.
Take the UK for another example. The daylight savings dates are actually set by act of parliament. Although they always have fallen in the pattern that everyone knows, for dates in future years beyond the ones they have already set, they could hypothetically (if you want to be literal-minded about it) change the law to make DST happen on absolutely any day of the year or not at all.
ISO 8601 only allows timezones as offsets, not as locations.
If it allowed "Africa/Cairo" instead of "+0200" that would be fine.
> they could hypothetically (if you want to be literal-minded about it) change the law to make DST happen on absolutely any day of the year or not at all.
That's the whole point - that's why you store future date/times with the location, not the offset, and not in UTC
The fact that ISO8601 does not store time zones (only fixed UTC offsets, which is not the same thing) obviously has something to do with ISO8601. I'm not sure what you're going on about?
I’m saying the problem is the time zone, not the fixed offset. The fixed offset always means a specific time (which may or may not be the time in a particular place, due to problems with the definition of time zones). Times for dates in the future are a problem due to time zones, not due to offsets. If you know the offset, the time is exactly specified.
Are you scheduling a restaurant reservation for 2036? Will it change from 09 to 10 in the morning depending on DST?
Sure, we cant know what unix date it resolves to, but it doesn't matter, because future dates are more of a contract intentionally bound to context that is subject to change.
Most modders aren't reverse engineering the game. There's a small community that are doing the obfuscation and then everyone else is effectively working from normal Java code.
I also recently flew on BA and bypassed the free WiFi restrictions just by using a VPN. Not sure why that worked, but with Mullvad I was able to browse Hacker News in the air. Didn't need anything more advanced than that!
The actual bug was unsafe code somewhere else in the application corrupting the memory. The application worked fine, but the log message strings were being slightly corrupted. Just a random letter here and there being something it shouldn't be.
The question really should have been, if this was truly cosmic interference, why only this service and why was the problem appearing more than once over multiple versions of the application?
Cosmic rays are a great excuse to problems you don't yet understand. But the reality of them is extremely rare and it's like 99% a memory corruption bug caused by application code.
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