When I started using C++Builder (and some Delphi), .net did not exist
4,815 karma · joined December 16, 2013
That isn't to relativize in any way what others are doing - which is often even worse, no argument there - but I'm not grading on a scale where you get a passing grade at 40% just because China and Putin - and others - are even worse. Being the lesser evil doesn't make you "good".
One of the most used metrics is the so called Levelized Cost of Electricity (LCOE). The LCOE includes investment, maintenance and operation, fuel and "carbon" costs, as well as waste costs. However, the waste costs are only calculated for the years of operation, so it's not really a great number to look at in terms of actual total cost.
Regardless, the LCOE the German federal government uses is 4-8 cents/kWh for onshore wind, 2-6 for photovoltaic, 14-19 for nuclear.
The (former) nuclear plant operators in Germany are required to pay into a fund that is meant to be used for covering the costs of decommissioning and disposal of the plants, as well as long term storage (except not everything is covered[0]). This is not included in the LCOE. Anyway, operators are required to pay a total of 47 billion EUR into that fund[1].
The old East German plants that got shut down right after the German reunification and are in the process of slowly being deconstructed and disposed of[2] are now estimated to cost 3-7 billion EUR a piece for full disposal (but not storage). If that's any indication, even when considering "lessons learned" will lower costs for future decommissioning and deconstruction, those 47 billion EUR is very unlikely to cover the eventual costs of deconstructing those 20-odd decommissioned German nuclear facilities and store spent fuel and contaminated materials for the first few decades. Some economists from the DIW (the private German Institute of Economic Research, not exactly tree huggers) calculated the eventual cost until 2100 will be closer to 169 billion EUR in 2019s money.
There are some eco lobbying organizations - obviously not without their own bias - that make claims such as "the true cost of nuclear is 42.2 cents/kWh while wind is 8.1 cents/kWH"[3]. I have previously looked through their numbers and argument in more detail, and it sounded mostly very sound to me, however I am a layperson.
Regardless, the fact is: we do not actually know yet the total cost of nuclear power.
[0] E.g. German tax payers have spent 1.5 billion EUR just on exploring potential long term storage sites so far. Just exploring.
[1] This is still litigated a bit, as the German legislature only really had the great idea to make a law about that in 2016. That's another reason nobody historically included it or now includes it in the LCOE.
[2] E.g. the old Greifswald plant. When it operated, it employed 10,000 people. Now 32 years after it officially ceased operation in 1990, it still employs around 1,000 people. Full deconstruction and disposal is now expected to happen by 2028 and will eventually have accumulated costs of a total of 6.5 billion EUR according to the company in charge of the disposal. Not including long term storage costs. Since the operator of those things used to the East Germany, it's now the Federal Republic of Germany's full responsibility to pay for that.
[3] https://www.bund-sh.de/energie/atomkraft/hintergrund/die-wah...
[1] "If you operate a pseudonymous Twitter account, we understand the risks an incident like this can introduce and deeply regret that this happened. To keep your identity as veiled as possible, we recommend not adding a publicly known phone number or email address to your Twitter account."
https://privacy.twitter.com/en/blog/2022/an-issue-affecting-...
You may be fine with banning those VPN users, or even want that - lots of bots will try to hide behind "legitimate" VPNs - but one has to be aware of this consequence at least, especially considering that more and more people seem to use them - probably also thanks to the aggressive "sponsoring" certain providers such as ExpressVPN do on e.g. a wide variety youtube videos.
E.g. you cannot just keep medical records (unless you are e.g. a hospital and are required to safely keep that data) or dick pics either. Decisions about other less sensitive PII often haven't been made yet, but chances are the courts will not side with you but with the person whose PII is concerned.
What you can keep is enough information to identify the paid user in court (e.g. name and address data) and enough information to e.g. show you fulfilled your contract. E.g. if you're an email provider you probably can keep logs that show a paid user accessed your service and sent and received emails regularly, i.e. meta data about usage. What you cannot keep is e.g. the actual emails a user wrote or received or what contacts were in their address book.
Then, there are statues of limitations, e.g. in Germany usually 3 years for any debt disputes. Keeping data beyond that wouldn't be covered by exemptions, as the data would no longer be necessary to mount a defense.
You also forget 5) Outright scams, like rugpulls or boiler room-style scams.
Then you have specific instances of Asian people (systematically) being mistreated in the US. Chinese railroad construction workers come to mind, who were basically treated as serfs and whose lives were considered "expendable". People with Japanese origins were put into concentration camps during WW II, along with societal repressions against anybody who "looked" Japanese, on top of the general racist stance of the time.
Asian-Americans were effectively as segregated as Black Americans for a long long time. While the Asian-American population might not have experienced slave-labor to the same degree, Asian-American communities certainly were for a long time pushed to the edges of society, usually even physically segregated, systematically and ideologically denied access to upwards social mobility, and so on.
>Also "13 vessels and more than 500 data points" for a finding this sweeping in its assertions is enough to make any microbial oceanographer fall off their lab bench laughing.
As for security, yeah, there are some good reasons for not embedding auth info in the link (tho one could still POST the same data instead without a third party cookie, etc), as well as for having a dedicated domain for user content.
Google on the other hand has a variety of products. Even when it comes to their biggest product i.e. ads, they'd still make a shitton of money without tracking and storing everything in perpetuity. Would they make less? Very likely.
But they will not "stop existing", even if they were forced to stop all tracking tomorrow. They can still sell ads not based on the users tracking history, but based on other context that doesn't require a huge data store, but ephemeral information at most (e.g. "user is searching for term x RIGHT NOW, and has a German IP RIGHT NOW"). And of course they can still make money from the "play store tax", money from users of their APIs, cloud and services.
If we actually prohibited tracking now, far beyond what even the GDPR does, advertisers would still spend money, like they did in the print and television days as well. And google controlling a large part of the market already with an iron grip (search, youtube, android) would still come out ahead of the competition.
The current government that has the Greens as a major coalition partner isn't really investing in new fossil fuel stuff, but replacements of existing fossil fuel stuff. E.g. the LNG terminals are meant to replace the capacity lost from ceased imports from Russia.
Building nuclear now isn't really an option anyway, at least not to deal with the current situation.
The operators of nuclear plants already signaled that running their plants longer is not an option. That would require a lot of investment, and more importantly a lot of time to renovate, modernize and re-certify these things. An effort I believe they said was in the range of 3 or more years.
Building entirely new plants, even with existing designs, would require at least 4 years even on a very expedited schedule.
So in the short term the only option is to keep using fossils - sourced from some place not-Russia. The Greens, while they certainly do not like that, understood this.
Would we Germans be better off if we had some nuclear plants left? Sure. But we'd also be better off if we instead had that energy mix that the Greens envisioned at the start of the century, that entailed renewables at the core, a bit of carbon (mostly from renewable sources, with tech to make it more or less carbon-neutral in totality) and storage, and investments (driven by government incentives) to use less energy in the first place.
If I had to blame anybody, it would be the 16 years of Merkel governments which managed to fuck up both nuclear and renewables, not the Green party.
It has to be said tho that the Green party is doing "realpolitik" now. While they aim at one hand to drastically accelerate renewables, right now they also invest heavily in getting a more secure energy situation in the near future still using a lot of fossil fuels, including rapidly building up LNG terminals and securing deals with parties they previously frowned upon, e.g. a gas deal with Qatar, the government of which the Green party previously heavily criticized for the human rights situation in the country. And e.g. they accepted - with some bickering - the temporary gas (as in petrol) price subventions the other coalition parties wanted, in exchange for temporary public transport price subventions (a 9-Euro regional ticket, that is valid for a month at a time, 21M sold by July 1, population 83M).
They are still rejecting nuclear power generation, neither wanting to build new plants, nor keeping old plants running (the operators of said old plants already called the idea of keeping those plants running "infeasible" to outright "stupid").
It remains to be seen what the blowback will be if inflation doesn't at least slow down, or if autumn and winter come and people start getting cold. Tho right now, the politicians and leading experts and "experts" say, it doesn't look like there there will be a shortage on a scale that gets life-threatening to some people.
[0] 20-24% share in recent polls, vs the 14.8% they actually got in the last election in Sep 2021. They are actually slightly ahead of the SPD (social democrats) in the polls now. The SPD is the majority partner in the coalition.
Yeah, that thing is clearly not meant for people to live in, unlike the article suggests.
And it's only a misdemeanor after the police already warned you and you continue to take video from closer than 8ft.
If it is a scheme and he had no intention of ever actually buying twitter, the government would still have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did it for this fraudulent reason. Or at least collect enough evidence to make him accept a plea deal for fear he could lose in court.
It would seem to me that him backing out now has a bunch of other very plausible explanations beyond "it was fraud all along", including the one this document states, that twitter breached their agreement by not providing the data he wanted to assess the prevalence of fake account himself. Or even that buying some "media company" is just what billionaires do[1], but him being "eccentric" he went in too hard and fast and is now backing out that he has seen the backslash and/or has done some actual due diligence, which would make him stupid and/or irresponsible but not criminal. All that to me seems like good ways for lawyers to claim there is "reasonable doubt" should he ever get charged with fraud, unless the government would happen to find some "smoking gun" piece of evidence.
And of course it assumes there is actually political will to nail him.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/billionaires-who-bought-publish...
What can I say, it is very distinguishable to me, at least for images that contain larger "homogeneous" areas like skies.
>In essence, the author discovered how to make JPEG images look better by increasing their file size.
This is not what the article is about. E.g. the first image with the large blue sky area, the result was a file size that was halved for Q15+fix compared to the Q50 source, and the Q18 comparison image at the same file size as Q15+fix looks like crap.
So the author got vastly more visual quality for the same or similar file size, while still producing valid jpegs.
It might not matter that much in the grand scheme of things, but it probably matters a lot to the company he is working for, which specializes in image processing, compression and delivery as a service it seems (bandwidth and traffic are cheap, but not free). And it will probably matter at least for some of their customers as well.
It probably won't matter much if you are e.g. on reddit (or are reddit), and that post with that 90kb jpeg (which could have been maybe 50-60 kb with the optimizations mentioned in the article) pulled in 10.1 MB of other crap (wire size) in the 30 seconds the page was open. With an ad-blocker active. Yes, I just ran this very unscientific test.
In the future, other formats like webp (already somewhat widely deployed), avif (browser support is getting there) or jpeg-xl (very promising results per watt compared to avif and sometimes webp, with a nifty lossless jpeg<->jxl mode) - but probably not heif because of the patent situation - might become more dominant, but for the time being a lot of images online and offline will remain jpeg and produced as jpegs.
(png and svg the grandparent poster brought up are for other use cases, btw, and offer lousy to untenable compression for photographs)
It establishes the age and id of UK children to websites and services. However, unless all these services children use are siloed off from the rest of the internet and UK only, bad people from other countries (and those in the UK savvy enough to mask themselves behind some kind of VPN/TOR) will still be able to use these services without having their ids established the same way, and will keep trying and sometimes succeed to groom and abuse children.
Did you just call the US underdeveloped? :P
But seriously, the US does not have a standardized "ID card" either. They have things like passports (which not that many people have), state-issued driver's licenses (so 50+ different ones, not sure how it's handled in all the non-state areas like Guam or Puerto Rico), social security numbers (which aren't exactly ID either), birth certificates, voter id cards (for people without a driver's license), and a slew of other things the government and businesses will accept under certain circumstances. What they do not have is a nation id card.
No, sorry, it's not. I don't see that in the article. The leader was accused of coercing sex and having sex with a (as in one) minor[0]. Yes, that's bad, I am not trying to say it's not.
But extending what that leader allegedly did to include all members, or suggesting those members were at least fine with it, or at the very least knew about it and did nothing, is not helpful, honestly. If we did that, we would have to apply the same logic to every Catholic, as the Catholic Church enabled and hid a lot more - and in a lot more systematic fashion - abhorrent child abuse cases committed by their leaders (well, "middle-management" for the most part).
[0] The other victims he allegedly coerced were characterized as "young men", which doesn't mean they are underage.
>As of 2014, there were eight Muslim-majority countries where apostasy from Islam was punishable by death, and another thirteen where there were penal or civil penalties such as jail, fines or loss of child custody.
I'd say at least in those eight death penalty countries, you practically are not allowed to leave. And if the state letting you live but is taking away your children from you, you'll too think twice about leaving, too...
In some regions, while apostasy is not official punished by law, people will still punish it extra-legally e.g. by committing "honor killings".
Of course, this does not reflect all of Islam/all Muslims, and what people think about how apostates should be dealt with varies a lot regionally.
If it even is legally (under religious laws) possible to leave the religion is a contested issue between theological scholars, however the bulk of theological scholars seem to consider it an absolute crime against God, but may disagree on whether it's up to people to punish the crime, or punishment be left to God.
But even in Western countries there can be significant support within Muslim communities to harshly punish apostates.
> A similar survey of the Muslim population in the United Kingdom, in 2007, found nearly a third of 16 to 24-year-old faithful believed that Muslims who convert to another religion should be executed, while less than a fifth of those over 55 believed the same. [0]
That said, other religions, including an in particular Christianity, historically haven't been nice to apostates, either.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/jan/29/thinktanks.religi...
However, that's not even what Schwarz is targeting here. They are targeting the IT departments of existing companies that aren't necessarily in the tech space at all. I know of a bunch of companies who'd love to move a lot of their stuff into a managed cloud, but wouldn't touch a US-owned cloud for compliance reasons. They stay aware from Telekom, because... well... Telekom. They stay away from Hetzner because Hetzner is not considered "serious" enough for now. So they often end up running their own infra or at most do unmanaged colo.
The GDPR I do like, and are a bit prideful that the EU made it happen.
But it isn't about pride here so much anyway, as it is about political and regulatory realities.
Schwarz has to convince their potential customers that they are "serious" (and Schwarz is considered pretty serious in the business space), that they can execute on promises (and Schwarz again has a reputation for that too, though in the retail space) and that they can offer a cloud that is compliant with regulations, even if at first it's not much more than some managed vms/colos.
Maybe latter on this thing will do AWS-style provisioning and services, but right now that doesn't even seem to be a current goal.
>They claim they are the German AWS
I see some media claim their are that, but it doesn't look like they themselves make that claim.
While you have a point in general, I have no idea from where you got your numbers...
Lidl had revenue of 100.8bn EUR (~108bn USD) in 2021, the entire Schwarz Group of 133.6bn EUR [0].
>How much is Lidl actually investing in this?
Nitpicking, but Lidl isn't, Schwarz Group is. I suppose how much they will invest is a matter of how promising it will look. Remember that amazon started out selling books. ;)
I genuinely think that Schwarz Group has a real chance to become a player in the long run, at least in Europe, if they really try. If it happens, it will not happen quickly. But they seem to have the "company culture" to make it happen, the deep pockets to make it happen, the political connections too. They are however a new player in this "IT thing". They might as well end up scraping the idea again, or be content on just being a datacenter provider for colo for other EU deep pockets instead of offering the full range of AWS services.
[0] https://www.zeit.de/news/2022-05/19/schwarz-gruppe-steigert-...
The reputation when it comes to "tech" as in "IT" is not stellar for sure, but it's not unrecoverable bad, and you're forgetting political dimensions.