Mains power voltage drop to reduce usage?

There's nothing new about a cap with a negative incremental c:v slope. I doubt that one is going to revolutionize computing.

I wonder if the engineers needed were actually train drivers (which are sometimes called "engineers").

"Nothing" comes to mind, that is, a vacuum can be used as an insulator.

Surely the drivers would be stuck with the stranded locos in the first place? Plus, engineers is not really a term used for British train drivers, it is more an American term.

It's impossible to live entirely on uncooked food. People try it, and get rather sick after a time.

Only in America. In the UK engineer doesn't have a particularly clear meaning but in this context it means someone qualified to service rolling stock prior to an ordinary driver taking it out on the track.

The train drivers were already in the cab when the power went down and the trains all ground to a halt. Like their passengers they were unable to leave until someone came and rescued them.

Indeed. In this case the software seemed particularly silly.

However, it didn't get noticed or dealt with until it caused utter chaos. I can't believe that nobody had pointed it out as a serious potential defect before it actually caused so much disruption.

It is exactly the sort of thing that design reviews are supposed to find - What happens if the mains power fails? How do we restart again safely?

Maybe they did and with the mechanical constraints of the motors mean that the only way is to have a qualified systems engineer manually tweak it into a safe condition where it can be restarted.

Oh I think its possible to live on it, but fire was one of man's earliest technologies.

I think even the most stone age of existing peoples - Rwandan pygmies, S American rain forest dwellers, bushman and australian aborigines all know fire and cooking.

Raw meat and fruit is perfectly OK and probably very healthy until the worms kick in and then you fast.

Till they die

We've been cooking food for, perhaps, 100,000 years; plenty of time for our digestive system to be simplified.

Of course you can eat /some/ raw food; quite a lot in fact, including meat and fish; but not /just/ raw food.

Parasites in food are a different matter, and are /one/ reason for cooking.

Emergency-stored food can be cooked. There are some quite good beans and such in cartons. We can also cook long-stored pasta on the BBQ.

In the 1989 earthquake, we first had a neighborhood ice cream party, then cooked stuff from the freezer before it went bad, but that was just a couple of days without power.

Jacks are quite good.

Are you talking of he sum of nominal power for each windmill added by solar panel nominal power ?

These are bogus watts, like PMPO watts in the audio industry.

The annual average of all wind turbines are often 20-50 % of nominal power.The power can drop below 10 % for weeks.

Solar panels annual output is 10-30 % of nominal peak power.

Thus, if you have a nominal output, which is three times the load, the system will work on an average day. On a bad day, the production is blow consumption and you may have to fire up some gas turbines and the greenies are unhappy :-).

BULLSHIT.

More bullshit. The Masai did fine on just milk and cattle blood.

Bizarre what humans can do fine on.

In Northern Scandinavia a few years ago, the temperature dropped to

-50 C and the power failed. It was considered to evacuate elderly people but the power was restored in a few hours.

I have been sleeping in a tent in the winter, but it was quite uncomfortable despite having a stove in the tent. There is a risk of burning your feet and your head could freeze to the ground :-). The outside temperature was not severe, only -20 C.

But the Masai prove that out digestive system didnt simplify.

You don't get enough parasites that matter with fruit and veg and it is perfectly possible to do fine on those alone.

But that is because some of them would be too stupid to just go to bed till the power came back.

It took longer than that when the main feed from SE australia was taken out by a massive storm which brought down the

And when Canada lost some of its main distribution system in a massive ice storm which also brought the main lines down.

The antarctic explorers didnt have any stove in their tents and only died because they ran out of food.

Gets a lot colder than that in the antarctic.

This goes across a lot more than just the rail industry.

Elsewhere there's a discussion that the NHS restricts prescriptions to one month's supply, in case the patient loses them.

Some of the prescriptions are for drugs costing a couple of pounds. Which is dwarfed by the cost of prescribing them every month.

Andy

Nope. I was thinking mostly of gas.

That's health and softy bullshit, if they lose them someone else might take them and er.... feel better, I mean die.

The quantum computers are what's meant to revolutionise.

Bubble memory, too. And memristors.