You are exaggerating what I say, and you still miss my point; You can't look at electricity prices in the EU and say whether they are below or above the production cost, nor can you interfere that production prices are high, just because the consumer prices are high.

To sum up again; French consumer electricity prices have been artificially low for decades, not because nuclear energy is cheap, but because French taxpayers are paying subsidies over their taxes, and because government regulation have kept prices under control. The latter have resulted in that EDF (mostly state owned) have been bleeding billions of Euros every year.

Again, read the Moody's statement.

Only regimes where market forces plays no role, invest heavily in nuclear power. China and Russia don't care if the consumers are paying above market prices, because a free energy market doesn't exist in either place. They want nuclear power for other reasons than cheap energy, nuclear weapons to mention one thing.

There are no free market driven building of nuclear reactors, and it has been like that for the last last 20 years. All new reactors are heavily subsidized by local states.
No private capital are willing to finance new nuclear power-plants unless the local government gives state guarantees for profitability simply because nuclear power is too expensive to generate profit.

It doesn't help that all new EU reactors build the last couple of decades have had extreme budget overruns, and all the promises about standardization and factory modules instead of on location construction have turned out to be false both when it came to realization, quality control and prices. So construction cost have skyrocketed too. In the meantime, competing energy sources have become ever more advanced, efficient and cheap.

If nuclear reactor technology doesn't gain significant technological progress soon, especially on cost, it will become ever more marginalized. That France is winding down its dependency on nuclear power really says it all.

Again, there is no relation between the production prices and consumer prices in the EU.

The German electricity prices are very high because Germany is investing heavily in new energy technology, most importantly the worlds most advanced electricity network so they can shuffle electricity around the country, like cheap wind energy from northern Germany to the south, or export, import or even transit electricity from around the EU.

It is the German electricity consumers who are paying for this investment through higher prices, while in France it is the _taxpayers_ who are funding the subsidization of the nuclear industry.

Take a look a Moody's downgrading of EDF stock (EDF owns most nuclear plants in France):

"The rating downgrade reflects the risks associated with the transition of EDF's French power generation and supply activities from a predominantly regulated cost-reflective tariff model towards an increasing exposure to market power prices. Moody's notes that this transition is happening at a time when market prices are low and below the regulated price for nuclear output."
https://www.moodys.com/researc...

As can be seen, Moody's says nuclear power electricity production prices are higher than the market value. It therefore logical that they foresee problems when EDF is also facing a reduction in subsidies.

Nuclear power simply is much more expensive than natural gas, wind and solar power.

The French government have been heavily subsidizing the nuclear industry for decades, but the economic crisis and increasing EU competition makes such subsidies unfeasible in the long run.

That is why the present French government will wind down some of the nuclear industry, and start to invest more in cheaper energy sources like wind and solar. They are also trying to make consumers pay more in line of what the electricity actually cost to produce, and stop the nuclear industry from bleeding to death by accumulating debt like they do now.
So even more price hikes are in sight for French consumers.

Please notice that there is a difference between consumer electricity prices and electricity production prices.

The French consumer electricity prices are low, not because the production prices are low, but because the prices are subsidized by taxpayers and because government regulation fixes the prices at an artificially low level.

Also, notice that some countries with high electricity prices, like Germany and Denmark, are putting high taxes on consumer electricity prices. The high prices doesn't reflect high production prices, only high taxation. So looking at consumer prices alone says very little of what electricity production prices are.

The fact is that the French nuclear industry are totally unable to compete on price with other European non-nuclear power, which is why it is so heavily subsidized; it would simply be bankrupted if it had to compete with EU production prices.

In the future there will be less subsidization in France, resulting in several announced double digit price hikes for the next couple of years for consumers.

Some electricity generation is profitable because they have a de facto monopoly and can sell to consumers at artificially high prices. If they had to compete on market prices most nuclear reactors would sell electricity at a loss.

That is exactly the reason there isn't a free market working in France on electricity; it would bankrupt the nuclear industry.

The nuclear sector in France have state guaranteed profits. Even the new electricity tarif scheme with some market elements in it, ensures that they get guaranteed minimum price for the generated electricity, the difference being paid by French tax payers and consumers.

Regarding EDF's failure to build new reactors on time on budget; well, the entire nuclear industry suffers from this, including the ones in China and Russia. It basically means that new reactors will rely even more on state subsidies and regulation to operate.

French electricity prices and subsidization is highly complex, including extra subsidization for families below a certain income level. And now it is changing yet again. The new change will introduce a element of market pricing. This is why Moody's and Standard and Poor have been downgrading EDF stock:

https://www.moodys.com/researc...

Be wary of using simple charts of electricity prices across EU: the one you quoted includes various taxes too, so it doesn't reflect _production prices_ at all, only what the consumers pays, probably averaged heavily too, since the price structures are varying like different day and night prices etc. Some countries have high electricity taxes making their consumer prices high, even though the production price may be low.

If you look at production prices, nuclear power can't compete. This is also the reason why no one really builds new nuclear power plants in the US, since local laws often forbid passing above market prices to consumers.

There may be good reasons to have nuclear power plants, like the ability to make nuclear weapons, reduce CO2, etc., but they can't compete on production prices, so consumers and tax payers will have to foot the bill.

The electricity prices are still low in France thanks to government regulation, but they are scheduled to rise significantly over the next years. The prices have been artificially held low so that the French nuclear energy sector (EDF etc.) have been bleeding money and raking up debt like there is no tomorrow, while taxpayers have footed the rest of the bill.

So the French nuclear sector are also effectively subsidizing their nuclear power by making French tax payers pay the bill. Yes, they still have low electricity prices, but that is only because they pay more taxes on their wages to keep the electricity prices artificially low. This can't go on.

The move to reduce dependency on nuclear power is made because France is moving away from subsidized prices, so the consumers will pay more in line with what it actually cost to produce the energy directly instead of hiding the costs in higher taxes or forcing the utility companies to sell at too low prices.

The problem for the nuclear sector is that it is unable to compete on market prices. So if you want a more competitive and less regulated energy market in France, you have to reduce the reliance on nuclear power.

The main reason is cost. Nuclear power can't compete on price with neither fossil fuels nor renewable energy like solar or wind. So basically every french nuclear power station is a hole into which the consumers are shoveling money into.

You simply can't build or operate a nuclear reactor power station anywhere in the world that can compete on market prices.

For France, the ever more connected EU electricity grid means an ever increasing pressure on the energy sector to be able to compete on EU electricity prices. The long term prospects for nuclear energy to ever be able to compete on prices looks bleak, even if fossil fuel prices rises significantly.

In the meantime much more nimble energy technologies like solar and wind continues to make significant progress in cost and efficiency. And unlike nuclear power plants, they can quickly deploy the newest technology in the field.

So it really makes a lot of sense for France to lower its reliance on nuclear power and start to invest more in renewable energy resources.

The Enigma with Steckerbrett used with good operational procedures was actually practically unbreakable even in the decades after the war. While some aspects of the Enigma designed "leaked" info about its configuration, it was a sound design, and AFAIK, practically identically to what the allied used. That the allies could decrypt Enigma messages was almost entirely caused by bad German operational procedures and the capture of code books. Even today it is a massive computational effort to break historical Enigma messages.

So the countries receiving Enigmas could have had practically unbreakable crypto with the right operational procedures.

No. The reason why the allies kept extremely mum about cracking the enigma was simply because they had learned the hard way that this was the right thing to do.

It goes back to the first world war when the British "Room 40" cracked German naval codes. The German navy knew nothing of this until W. Churchill published a history of the war where he "spilled the beans" about it. The German Navy and army where shocked when they learned how their crypto had been compromised and decided to strengthen their crypto to previously unheard levels. That is the reason why they bought and deployed the Enigma machines.

The Enigma was practically unbreakable at the time if used correctly, so it was by a thin margin that the Allies where able to decrypt Enigma messages. So they felt it was absolutely vital reveal nothing about their successes after the war, so future potential enemies didn't improved their crypto and crypto-procedures even more.

The conservatives are just getting their panties in a bunch because they can no longer demand "moral" state backed censorship of the net.

Hyperbolic claims are about SPAM not being allowed to be blocked, are just sad political attempts to institute state sponsored censorship through the backdoor.

Looking at V. Ford's homepage just says she unsurprisingly supports companies right to unlimited spamming of customers, something that the new rules also forbid.

Of course SPAM filtering is allowed under the new rules.

Maybe there is an EU member state where SPAM/UCE is legal, but in all EU countries I know of, it is illegal and therefore can be blocked. Not only is the act of spamming illegal, but since they almost always use criminal methods like mass hacking, that fact too is reason for blocking all such SPAM.

ISP default content filtering or state mandated content filtering of legal stuff will be prohibited. So the UK state dictated "opt out" filtering will be illegal, while Symantec's etc. individually enabled and user controlled content filtering will be allowed.

You sound like you have been badly informed by some punter site.

At first glance the new net neutrality rules looks very good. The "non-blocking" rules seems to make default and opt-out ISP porn-filtering illegal. If a site/service isn't illegal in one way or another, the ISP must not block it.

Sure, the ISP can offer various content filters as an opt in solution, leaving any such decisions to the individual where such decisions belongs, but the ISP can't "opt in" everybody, nor can any member state make any such filters mandatory.

From a free speech perspective that is a huge win on top of the network traffic net-neutrality rules.

I can't see anywhere if these rules are only binding within the EU, or if it is legal to block/throttle non-illegal sites and traffic from sites outside the EU. Does anybody know?

No, I mean many many kernel developers, including the guy who maintain all long term stable Linux kernels for the Linux-foundation. Basically the second guy besides Linus Torvalds that the LF employ.

I have seen zero kernel developers backing any other Linux init-system. In fact, the Linux developers seems to actually flee from the rather toxic systemd-hater camp that you and your juvenile behaviour are stellar examples of.

Seriously, who would ever work in a project with a poisonous guy like you?

[snip: about "journalctl -b -1 -p err"]

I chose the example because it has proven really useful to me. The example will quickly show any serious error that may have cause a system to fail. Being able to filter out all boot-sessions that aren't relevant is really useful. Being able to see all serious errors on a system at a glance is really useful too. Being able to easily combine such queries into one is pure gold.

But there is so much more that syslog doesn't log. This brings on another fundamental problem with text logs; they are hard to parse for machines due to their lack of structures, and they become hard to parse for humans too if they contain too much information.

Monotonic and micro-precision timestamps are great, but they foul up the readability of syslog textfiles simply because they make the lines longer. So basically syslog can't put the same amount of logging info in the log files, not for direct technical reasons, but because the log file format is inadequate.

The systemd journal on the other hand, can easily be extended with ever more fields as needs arise. And it can do so without breaking userland!

Because another problem with the unstructured syslog text logs are that they have no programmatic API or even "labels" for each part of a logging entry. That means the very structure of the log entries has become a sort of API, so changing that structure by adding more information, and thousands of userland log-watcher scripts that rely on "cut" simply breaks down.

Many of the problems can't be solved by adding features to syslog. If you want "metal-to-metal" logging you just got to design something like journald for so many technical reasons, including that the Linux kernel only accept one owner of /dev/log.

But as said, the most fundamental problems are the total lack of coordination between stuff in Linux. It is almost impossible to improve some things because of that. The Rsyslog team have fought valiantly over the years, but the sheer lethargy and no formal coordination means changes are hard to impossible.

The systemd team solved this problem in the most elegant way possible; they made a new logger that were 100% backwards compatible with syslog, but at the same time introduced radical new features. The end-users could user whatever option that suited them best, and userland didn't have to change a line of code, while still benefiting from the new features.
This way all the systemd Linux distros and userland programs can slowly migrate to using the new journald logging API. No "flag day" problems!

I think the above examples greatly illustrate several problems with syslog text-files.
But first; despite spanning several lines, it isn't even remotely close to what "journalctl -b -1 -p err" does. It isn't an ad hoc query either, so it doesn't have any useful information from before it was set up.
It doesn't filter the errors to a particular boot, nor does it (AFAIK) show errors above "error".

It also introduce yet another log-file. On some systems you will find perhaps +20 such log files scattered all over the system. Madness I say. The reason for the splitting is of course, that it is damn hard to extract similar information with ad hoc queries. Especially newbies doesn't stand a chance.

With systemd's journal, you get a single view of _all_ log files on the entire system, including that pesky ".xsession-errors" that hides in /~user and only grows since it isn't log rotated.

And is so trivial to extract the information you want that no splitting is needed.

regex _is_ hard. This is partly because it is so powerful and generic. But using it is also hard because there are both regular _and_ extended regular expressions, _and_ maddening variations of both in awk/grep besides the Posix ones etc.

If it was easy to use regex on syslog text files there would never be a need to split them up.
Most Linux users these days don't know regex, so they use vi/less to read the logs and perhaps use grep if they are advanced users.

No, read again. What I said was that it should be easy to replicate the "journalctl -b -1 -p err" query since you claim it was n00b stuff. You utterly failed to do so.

You see, the genial thing about journald is that it is totally compatible with syslog-ng and all other syslog(3) implementations, and it actually enhances them by getting early boot logging info they can't obtain otherwise. All legacy userland logwatcher and log-analysing software still work when using journald that way.

It is possible to replace journald with a similar implementation, so in theory the syslog-ng could do that. But the functionality would have to be extremely similar (API etc). So they would basically just have another journald replica, and what would be the purpose of that?

Also, remember that journald isn't a log-sink while syslog-ng and Rsyslog are. So while Rsyslog isn't needed as a local system logger on ordinary machines, it still have a good purpose.

Regarding the monolithic claims. First, many parts of systemd are actually designed to have independent implementations with stable API's and what not. Here is a table of which parts and some known alternative implementations:
http://www.freedesktop.org/wik...

Also, a lot of the systemd stuff is in shared libraries so it is trivial to make alternative implementations, or in case of the networking stack, use it on non-systemd distros too. (it is basically "connman" turned into a library for many functions).

Finally, there are very few core dependencies for systemd; basically: the systemd daemon, udev and journald. And even the latter two can be ripped out (see minimal builds) for use in embedded systems.
Everything else is optional and can be substituted with any other Linux solution.

That some of the tools like "journalctl" should work outside a systemd context is a crazy requirement. They are systemd specific tools, just like the ext4 file system tools are ext4 specific.

The whole "monolithic" claim is hugely overblown and all stems from some people that felt entitled to leach parts of the systemd code so they didn't have to do the work themselves.

Why should I care that you don't use a systemd distro? If you are making money on Linux, great. If you are using eg. Slackware to do so, hey, that is great too. I respect mr. Volkerding and his way of making a distro.

I like freedom of choice and I think systemd provides exactly that. Even if you don't like it, you benefit from the fact that there now are several udev-implementations (before there was just udev and the limited mdev) and several ConsoleKit/systemd-logind implementations (before systemd there was only CK).

But apparently the freedom of choice doesn't include the right to choose systemd.

That is a major problem with the behaviour of the anti-systemd camp; they won't accept that highly skilled Linux developers (including Kernel developers) and experienced distro and system maintainers, thinks that systemd is superior to whatever else out there, and therefore chooses to build their distro around it.

This lack of accepting other peoples freedom of choice is why you are trolling a Debian thread, even though you don't use the distro and claim you never will.

So think about what you are actually doing before saying "freedom of choice" again.