Yes, agreed that "now everything is markedly more complex with little to no benefit"!

There are some holdouts, thank goodness. Too bad that Debian succumbed to this nonsense. They had a great opportunity to go to runit or similar, and blew it.

The real problem people are having is that maybe sudo and setuid should be replaced. Possibly so.

But they don't see why their replacement should be in an init system.

Neither do I, and my conclusion is, its time to look very seriously at Void or MXLinux, and runit.

If Poettering wants to write a replacement for sudo, fine. Just don't incorporate it into the init system.

The thing people are objecting to is that its so monolithic, and this is an example. You will not be able to choose to install Debian or Fedora or even Arch without the replacement. And, as the history of the controversy shows, you cannot just pick another init system and get rid of systemd in favor of your choice. Very complicated, a large development effort.

I think its time to say no more of this.

Also slackware, artix.

Void linux, MX Linux.

"Nobody stops you from making your own copy of Wikipedia with your own theories about climate change"

I think you're missing the point. The aim to prevent or deter the expression of some ideas is widespread in the West. It also is increasingly successful in recent decades. How this aim is realized, who has the aim and the power to realize it, are different in Western societies because their institutions are different, and so the aim is tried for and achieved in different ways.

When looking at societies its important to realize that changes are not always what they seem, often they are more of the same, but in a very different and disguised manner. Often you can only tell by looking at the disguised effects. In the former Soviet Union, for instance, the expression of dissent was treated as a mental illness by confinement. How different was that from incarceration and internal exile under Czarism? Recently schools and medical professionals have started to treat evidence of gay sexuality as as gender dysphoria, something to be treated. We arrive at the same point by different means, with the same underlying idea. In the Soviet case its that Marxism-Leninism was indubitable revealed truth. In the gender case the idea is lurking that heterosexuality is the true normal and that difference is a medical condition.

The point about Wikipedia is not that you can start up your own. The point is that Wikipedia plays a certain role, as does Facebook and Twitter, and it therefore attracts the activist impulse to prevent the publication of dissent in those forums. What has happened in the English speaking world is that some ideas are now beyond criticism in many forums. To express gender critical views in private can lead to firing, as Maya Forstater found in England. It can also lead to workplace agitation which forces you out of your employment, as Kathleen Stock and Suzanne Moore found, one in a university, the other in the Guardian. Bari Weiss found the same at the NY Times. It can also lead to meetings being impossible to hold, if you are engaging the wrong speakers who will voice the wrong ideas. Think about the issues which arose with the recent meeting of conservative politicians in Brussels. Serious attempts, partially successful, were made to prevent it from being held. Think about the opprobrium which greeted any dissent from whole hearted endorsement of BLM.

But, you will say, Forstater could get another job. So could Stock, so could Moore. Yes, maybe. Not the point, is it? The point is that a university or a newspaper or an employer which play important roles in society have become dissent free zones.

The point is, we may think, we have always assumed, that in the West there is free speech, and that is a key difference between the Western liberal democracies and China, Russia, North Korea etc. Yes and no. Yes, there is no state board of censorship. There is no index of banned books. Don't be so sure. Is a book banned when privately owned publishers all refuse it because they are afraid of the consequences of accepting it? Its not the same as being obliged to be a member of the Writers Guild. No, its not the same as what Russia is doing and what China does. There really is a difference between the UK's attempt to clean up the Internet on the grounds of child safety, and the Great Firewall of China, or the wholesale elimination of historical narratives on some subjects by Russia.

But it rhymes.

"In other words, the DMA is lobbing some serious stink bombs into Apple's walled garden."

This is the point. The Commission has an agenda of which this is part. Its not financial. Its to open the walled garden. Its not to compel anyone to buy or use anything. Its to make the iPhone as open a platform as an Android phone for those that want to exercise the freedom that openness will give.

"The EU is simply picking on Apple because none of their member countries can contribute much to technology, and Apple has a lot of money, so they're being total GOONS."

No, they are not interested in raising money from Apple. Their aim is much more serious, it really is totally to demolish the walled garden.

For some reason most Apple fans don't want the freedoms this will bring. But whether they want them or not, whether they use them or not, they are going to get them.

If may be that a lot of buyers of GM cars are very happy to buy only GM parts, and do not want to be able to buy from third parties in the aftermarket. All the same, the FTC makes sure they can, and then whether they do or not is up to them. Back in the day, people might have only wanted to buy their PBX from ATT or the local Bell company. When deregulation happened, no-one obliged them to go elsewhere. All that happened was that they had a choice whereas earlier they did not.

Same thing, just its the Commission doing it.

It is of course different if its done by a state agent acting on behalf of state censorship.

But Wikipedia in English is heavily censored and rewritten by activists, presumably acting as individuals or loose associations of them. Try expressing sketpicism on Wikipedia about whether there is a climate emergency and whether wind and solar are the solution, or part of it. If your entry lasts 24 hours that will be a miracle. So don't get too enthusiastic and complacent about the English version either.

As for the impulse to censor (and indeed criminalize) speech, the recent tendency in the English speaking world to criminalize something called 'hate speech' has quite strikingly, as expected, moved increasingly into attempts to criminalize dissent from a given approved line.

The latest and most striking example of this is the Scottish Hate Crime and Public Order Act. The Scottish government's own account of this is that

"New measures to tackle the harm caused by hatred and prejudice come into force today".

You notice the objective: to tackle the harm caused by hatred and prejudice. Not to tackle the harm that can be done from acting on hatred and prejudice, the aim is not to penalize that. Its to tackle the thing itself, hatred. Also prejudice. Good luck with that!

There is a BBC summary here, pretty reasonable account:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/art...

The result of this was that the day it came into force, the calls starting coming in, and in the first week reached 8,000.

The question of course is what is "hatred and prejudice". In Scotland it appears to include doubting that men can be turned into women. In English universities it can apparently include expressing skepticism about veganism while on the phone in one's own room, but unknowingly being overheard from the room next door:

https://freespeechunion.org/un...

In the English speaking world we do not have the kind of officially sanctioned censorship and penalization of some kinds of speech that the post cites in Russia. There is of course something similar in China. And in the US at least there is the Consititutional protection of the First Amendment.

But a similar role is being played now by the small army of zealots in the English speaking countries who define disagreement as hate, and vilify and target anyone publicly dissenting from the party line. And by 'target' is meant attempts to drive people out of their place of employment (the Guardian is notorious for this) or calling the police who then will record the accusation as a non-criminal hate incident.

Harry Miller for instance (obviously a Monty Python fan) received such a visit after tweeting:

âoeI was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Donâ(TM)t mis species me.â Miller also tweeted: âoeTranswomen are women. Anyone know where this new biological classification was first proposed and adopted?â. He later wrote that the statement was âoebollocksâ."

https://www.theguardian.com/so...

So don't sit there reading about barbaric and authoritarian Russia and think that everything in the West is hunky dory. It isn't. It happens through different mechanisms, but it still is happening.

"Newsom announced the state now had battery storage systems with the capacity of more than 10,000 megawatts â" about 20% of the 52,000 megawatts the state says is needed to meet its climate goals."

And for how many hours can these 10,000 megawatts be supplied? That's the question.

Similarly with the 52,000. Again, how many hours storage are needed at this rate of discharge?

A 90% drop seems like a lot. But its over 15 years, starting from tiny production levels. The interesting question for the future of grid level battery storage is how much costs fell in the last couple of years. Not much.

The future of grid level wind and solar is parallel amounts of gas generation. The more wind and solar you put in, the more gas you have to put in. Wind and solar can supplement gas, not the other way around.

Read the UK Royal Society report on energy storage:

https://royalsociety.org/news-...

"....should generate enough clean electricity to power 16 million Indian homes... "

On a calm, dark evening? Its called intermittency.

It may generate enough in aggregate, but the question is whether it generates it in line with demand. And if not, how much storage and of what kind is being proposed to make it usable for the purpose.

The issue is with the strategy. Its to remain at the high end and charge a premium. Its worked very well so far, but the problem is that the size of that segment tends to reduce in most markets over time as the low end suppliers catch up on features at far lower prices. In effect your price premium gives them a safe area where they can raise their game.

This happened to Apple in the PC market, its happened in the tablet market, it happened in the music player market. They have been able to draw the process out in the phone market by trading on linking different products together, the ecosystem strategy. But it delays rather than stops the process.

The first indicator is slowing sales growth. To be followed by real falls in sales. At that point you either tackle the problem head on, become competitive at lower prices, which is where the market is now. You retreat to the niche and forget growth. Or you find a new market, like for instance VR headsets. But that seems not to be going all that well.

To everything there is a season, and this is a season to sell the shares.

"...If Amazon can show that it meets their climate goals...."

Amazon does not have, should not have, cannot have any climate goals. It has what are, if properly described, energy use goals.

Amazon getting to net zero will have no effect on the climate. In fact, if the US gets to net zero it will have no effect on the climate. Indeed, if the West gets there, that too will have no effect.

People need to stop pretending that their odd reductions of tiny amounts of CO2 emissions have anything to do with the climate.

Its not clear why Amazon should want to do anything to affect the climate. They are in the business of selling goods online. But suppose they do, what should they do? The only thing they can do is start agitating with world governments, starting with the largest and fastest growing emitters, to persuade them to start freezing and then reducing their emissions. This is not something that individual actions, corporate actions can have any effect on. It is a government level problem, and as the name "global warming" sort of suggests, its a global problem.

Well publicized initiatives to make meaninglessly small reductions in emissions are not climate goals.

By the way, the piece also shows the issues with the much ballyhooed move to EVs. Not enough capacity in the electricity supply sector, then the issue about charging times, and the requirement for the network of charging points. Similar things happen with the desired move to heat pumps, everyone does it and the grid cannot handle demand. And then there is the demand that this power, which we don't have, be supplied by wind and solar farms, which we also don't have, and when we have them, they will be far far away from demand, so the expense of transmission will be huge. Is huge - the UK, in its usual engaging innocence is publishing estimates for just how huge, and its mind-boggling. And when we go out to tender for construction of wind farms, the price per MW is going to be way, way over conventional. As the UK also has found out.

And when you have done all this, and finally got the stuff installed, the power is coming in to where you want it, you encounter the final disastrous problem. Its darkness, and calms. Its amazing, the sun goes down once a day for hours on end, and theres no power! And then, even worse, there are these calms when you only get 5% of faceplate from your wind. And you have a ton of heat pumps that have suddenly stopped working, and cars that are not charging, and it goes on for days at a time....

So don't lets think about any of that, lets just buy a bunch of electric delivery trucks and tell everyone how virtuous we are. Right!

"The EU is doing what it always does. For them it is about stealing from America what they won't or can't create for themselves.
That's all they have done for the last almost twenty years now.

If you or anyone else actually wanted a phone that worked like a desktop, you would have gone and built it. But they won't."

This is, obviously, nothing to do with the capabilities of the phones. Its only to do with the policies Apple is following. There already is "a phone that works like a desktop" in that its a phone (many of them) that let you install whatever you want: all Android phones are like this. Use FDroid or side load. Google does not stop you. But this is irrelevant, the action is not about a new phone with a given capability, its about what users can do with the IPhone they already have.

It similarly isn't an answer to the EU policy to say, fine, just buy an android phone. No, this is not what they want. They don't want there to be phones with the ability to install whatever you want on them. There already are such phones, many of them.

What the EU wants (whether iPhone users want it, we will see) is for iPhone users to have this same capability, to buy apps and install them without having to pay a percentage cut to Apple. This is not about developing a different phone, its about not preventing the user from using the Iphone they already have in certain ways.

The EU is attacking Apple anti-competitive Apple policies. If it is stealing anything from America in this respect, what its stealing is old fashioned anti-trust law and practice. Its pursuing the same policies America has pursued on subjects like linked sales, right to repair, aftermarket tied sales. Its the same approach that is the reason why GM cannot prevent people using third party replacement parts.

"Can you or someone actually make a list out of things that users will gain from all of this...?"

As usual here, you don't understand where the EU Commission is coming from. For them it is always about economics, its about opening competition for some players in some segments under some conditions. In this case its about dismantling the walled garden. Its about giving vendors (not just developers, though that may be a first step) the ability to sell apps to iPhone users. It is about making the application market for smart phones work in a similar way to that for the desktop or laptop PC.

People, particularly Apple fans, may not like this, they may not want it for themselves, they may also be very happy with the walled garden and positively like that it exists for everyone, they may like it because they think its good for Apple, but all that is immaterial to the EU. The EU wants to see competition for the Apple app store, so its going to, step by step, ensure that other suppliers can sell apps to iPhone users.

It isn't at all interested in whether, right now, the iPhone users want this. Its not interested in users. Its interested in markets and company power in them.

It has almost unlimited powers to bring about what it wants. It can give itself whatever legal powers it wants, it can issue orders and assign financial penalties to them which will give even a company the size of Apple very serious problems. As you would have seen, had you been following the recent EU legislation on this.

What we will now see is efforts by Apple to implement the letter of the regulation, but in such a way as to try and make sure that the alternative suppliers get as little as possible share. The EU will progressively slap down every measure Apple takes to enforce this. In this contest between a government the size of the EU and a company, no matter how large, the smart money is on the government.

If you want to understand the EU, its Bismarck's Zollverein updated. It has its earlier roots in Colbert. Competition internally, tariff and regulatory barriers externally. Rigorous enforcement of the rules on foreign entrants, less so for local players. When, through some accident of technology or innovation, you find yourself with a foreign player with dominant share of an important market segment, you get to work. The whole apparatus then focuses on how to clip its wings.

You all never heard of the Zollverein, and when you look it up, cannot see what that has to do with anything.

No, I guess not.

They can obviously draft regulations and pass them into law. But is it really possible for the UK to affect AI use in its borders?

The servers may be anywhere in the world. Are they going to try and regulate access to them? If they are going to try and regulate the end product appearing in the UK, is it going to be provable that it resulted from a forbidden use? And then there is the difficulty of distinguishing in law the use of AI for some purpose which is unlawful, when to use just a non-AI model of some other variety is lawful.

Are they really going to get into regulatory detail about exactly how its legal for a model to use evolutionary adaptations? Some uses for some purposes count as illegal use of AI, others for other purposes are fine?

It reminds one of the last great ignorant IT mania in the UK, the demand that all children be taught how to do something called coding. This idea was promoted with fervor by people who had never seen a shell script, let alone written one, let alone ever written an application and had no clear idea what they were wanting taught. The idea seems to have died a natural death, just as well.

Something similar here, a sort of moral panic about something by liberal arts graduates who don't have the slightest real understanding of it. But who are confident they know it has to be regulated and are rolling up their sleeves to save civilization from its misuse.

Also, read the Manhattan Contrarian on the New York plans.

https://www.manhattancontraria...

Very similar to the UK case. Anyone trying to convert to wind and solar to get to net zero is going to run into the same problem.