Pretty much all electricity markets worldwide set the unit price based on the the cost of the "marginal" (most expensive) generator running during each time period. It's a weirdly common misconception that the UK is unique in doing this.
If you paid generators what they bid, then they're incentivised to manipulate their bids to try and make the most money, distorting the market.
Almost all the wind farms and many solar farms in the UK operate under the "contract for difference" system, where they're guaranteed a fixed price per unit and have to pay back any income above that. So a lot of the money paid is clawed back through that method.
The reason the UK's electricity has been expensive over the last few years comes down to:
- Shutdown of several nuclear plants without any replacement
- Shutdown of coal plants and replacement with gas
- The Ukraine war affecting gas prices
- Clean energy surcharges on bills (which hit electricity bills a lot harder than gas bills, regardless of how clean the electricity is...)
There will be a bunch more renewables coming online soon which will hopefully start crowding out gas and driving the price down more regularly, so hopefully prices will start dropping faster soon.
A CIO is more onerous than a CLG because a CIO is a charity, and comes with the charitable reporting requirements (and also the tax benefits).
A pure CLG doesn't have the charitable tax benefits but it's still a non-profit governance structure, and you only have to file with Companies House and HMRC. The CLG is the lowest-hassle non-profit structure.
(Confusingly, CLGs can also be charities - because charitable status can act as a "wrapper" around other corporate structures - and indeed a lot of charities are CLGs because the CIO is a more recent invention.)
I wrote about this, ages ago, I think it's mostly still correct:
> It seems to me like this is a shortcoming of the English (and American) legal system, where non-profit organizations and such can only be founded as "regular" companies and then tax-exempted. This means they are still subject to all the normal procedures surrounding companies like sales, and still tend to have one or a few owners who are solely in charge of everything.
This isn't true in the UK. There's a structure called a Company Limited by Guarantee, which has no shareholders so it can't be sold. It's an association.
These are quite common, and in fact Freenode Limited is one. It was never "sold" in any conventional sense. There is no owner of Freenode Limited, but Andrew Lee is currently the only voting member so he has full control.
Smarkets is disrupting the global betting industry by offering a modern betting exchange with significantly lower transaction fees than the competition. We're a well-funded company with a small, agile development team.
Our office near Old Street in London is shared with other exciting startups and has a pool table, foosball table, and fully stocked fridge.
We're heavily driven by user-focused design and a focus on technology and engineering as a first class discipline.
We write our software in Python and Erlang, and rely heavily on asynchronous programming techniques and REST. We build on a modern, open-source software stack which includes Linux, Vagrant, Flask, Eventlet, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, ElasticSearch, Graphite, Chef, and Git.
We make extensive use of version control, configuration management, and automated testing, which lets us deploy code to production several times a day.
It's probably because modern tweet IDs are larger than a 32-bit integer. Presumably some JSON parsers aren't too hot on parsing bigints, so they give you the option of having a string instead.
We really should have mentioned them in the blog post as they're sponsoring us. It's obviously a big plus to have these being fabricated in the UK instead of China due to our really tight lead times.
They are starting with engines. The rest of their ideas are simply concepts at this stage. It's a small company.
The problem is that plenty of people have tried and failed to produce a successful air-breathing rocket engine. Nobody wants to invest any money in Reaction Engines until they can prove that the core concept that the company is built on works. And proving this costs a certain amount of cash. Some of this is being financed by the ESA, in very much the same way that NASA is financing new commercial spaceflight efforts.
In the next year or two we're either going to see them succeed and garner lots of investment, or fail and fade into obscurity.
It's not a conventional jet engine - it has an intake turbine, but it's powered by the same helium cycle used by the precooler, and not by combustion byproducts.
The compressed air (or liquid oxygen when in rocket mode) and hydrogen is then combusted in a way similar to a conventional rocket engine. REL calls it an "air-breathing rocket engine", but it shares more in common with a ramjet than a conventional turbojet.
> Here incomming air is highly compressed -- and thus heated up -- due to impacting plane parts at hypersonic velocities.
The problem is that at high mach numbers, the incoming air is too hot to successfully combust. They have to chill it (using the cryogenic fuel), and chilling it would usually result in icing.
The whole point of these tests is to prove that their precooler system resists icing.
Well, this is their secret sauce, which they claim will make the SABRE engine work where other scramjets have failed.
The tests they're currently running are of the pre-coolers, which have a proprietary design to prevent icing. If it works, they will have overcome the biggest hurdle to building a hybrid scramjet/rocket engine.
> Also, is sharing of ground facilities (fueling, launch, recovery) with other operators necessary for the business to be economic?
I don't think so - it seems like the cost of running the ground-based infrastructure is quite minimal compared to the actual operational costs of launching. Although SpaceX is using some of the original NASA/USAF infrastructure at Cape Canaveral and Vandenberg, it seems like they've built most of their facilities from scratch.
We used MarkMonitor at Last.fm. It's probably best to think of them as an abstraction layer above the registrar level which handles any residual pain that might generate:
* They will register all TLDs. A lot of more obscure ccTLDs (e.g. Norway, Hong Kong, Argentina) require domains are registered with a local company. MarkMonitor will set the local presence up for you and charge you a fixed fee. Some other registrars support some of these TLDs but none support all of them, so otherwise you're split between registrars. If (for whatever reason) MarkMonitor can't register a domain themselves, they'll go as far as getting a credit card out and using another registrar who can.
* They invoice you: you don't have to worry about expired credit cards or any other payment problems. You get one invoice every month for all your domains. (If you've ever had to deal with submitting expenses receipts for 80 domain renewals, this is definitely a bonus. Now consider that most huge companies have tens of thousands of domains.)
* They handle the domain "sunrise" applications for you (this is apparently a big brand protection deal if you're a big company), so you'll regularly get emails saying "do you want to register the .xxx domains for all your brands?".
* They do SSL certificates as well, and they automatically get renewed and invoiced.
* You get an actual friendly human account manager to talk to.
I can't remember what their actual pricing is. The price per domain is perhaps 2-10x more than other registrars. I'm not sure if they charge a recurring fee.
The reason for that is there's a an important satellite ground station on Svalbard - it's in an ideal place to communicate with polar-orbiting satellites:
As mentioned in that man page, the /etc/lsb-release file only contains details on what version of the LSB the distribution conforms to (if the distribution isn't LSB-compliant, the file shouldn't exist). It doesn't have the version of the distribution itself, which lsb_release finds in distribution-specific locations.
Yes. At Last.fm, Germany was the first country we had to censor our content in.
If you try and view content which is deemed inappropriate by the German government (fun fact: even the list of inappropriate content is restricted), you get something which looks like this:
If you paid generators what they bid, then they're incentivised to manipulate their bids to try and make the most money, distorting the market.
Almost all the wind farms and many solar farms in the UK operate under the "contract for difference" system, where they're guaranteed a fixed price per unit and have to pay back any income above that. So a lot of the money paid is clawed back through that method.
The reason the UK's electricity has been expensive over the last few years comes down to:
There will be a bunch more renewables coming online soon which will hopefully start crowding out gas and driving the price down more regularly, so hopefully prices will start dropping faster soon.