FSF is responding to this:

( from https://www.onlyoffice.com/lic... )

Not the idea of requiring attributions.

As OnlyOffice wrote that, it is clearly an attempt at a disallowed further restriction. FSF isn't speaking toward authorship attributions in general. They are speaking to that. And that was an egregious overreach attempting to use the license as a restrictive weapon. "You can't use this anywhere that changes our logo and if you want to then you have to pay us" is not what free software or software freedoms are about.

Attributions are one thing. Trying to use the license to require that certain functionality remain is another.

The problem is going to be the following. Sometime roughly 2030 there will be 90GW of wind and 45GW of solar. Demand will be roughly 60GW peak winter and 50GW summer. The lows will be about 25GW summer and about 40GW winter.

Are you starting to see a problem? No, not yet? Lets continue.

Its January 2030. Its a cold, calm, clear early evening. There is no solar because its dark, and wind is delivering 5GW owing to the usual winter blocking high pressure zone. It has been below 10GW for a week, and will be below 20GW for another week. Nuclear is supplying around 10GW - if they haven't closed down the legacy nuclear by then, Gas has fallen to less than 10GW because the plant has hit end of life.

Where are you going to get 30-40GW from to meet peak demand?

But if you think this is a problem, now lets turn to early July. Solar is now putting out its max, around 30GW at midday. Nuclear is still delivering 10GW. Wind, well that is going a bomb because this is a time of pleasant summer breezes. Its midday. Demand is dropping to 25GW at midday.

Now the problem with solar is that most of it is not under the control of the grid operator, so they cannot turn it off. They turn off all the wind and pay constraint payments to the operators. They can't turn of the nuclear. They are looking at supply of roughly 40GW and demand of 25GW.

At this point, summer or winter, for different reasons, the flight data recorder has a pause in the dialogue between the crew, broken by someone saying 'Oh dear'. Or something a bit stronger. And then all the lights go out.

Two weeks later they are still trying to find enough spinning capacity to get the thing restarted. If its winter, people are quietly dying of cold. Their heating needs power to operate the gas boilers and cookers. If its summer they are taking cold showers, eating cold baked beans.

Meanwhile the government of the day considers the situation and comes to the conclusion that the problem is that they do not have enough solar power installed, so they adopt a plan to install a further 45GW of it. That should fix the problem. Now, how to communicate this plan to the country? That is a slight problem, Prime Minister. A lot of our communications facilities seem to be, well, out of action... because of the, well, the...the temporary interruption to grid services...

Do the math how you want. If you move a country to a generating system where peak demand is bound to coincide with low supply, and peak generation with low demand, the result will be blackouts.

Not true at all. Or, rather, it depends on some time scales and definitions.

The same way that there is no such thing as a "selfless" act - no one acts selflessly. They just value different goals in their assessment of selfishness. Selflessness is simply selfishness on a longer time scale or with a wider scope.

Chinese cars will be disruptive to the US auto industry, but devastating... that depends on what you mean. One could argue, and I would tend to agree, that the continuing artificial protections are doing the industry more overall and long term harm. The whole key to capitalism and the free market is that the market drives a path to highest efficiency. Artificially protecting Ford et al from those drivers to efficiency is creating waste and giving the worst of both worlds. The greed of capitalism and the self-serving of authoritarianism. Think of Soviet Russia circa 1980. Falling under its own weight and crumbling infrastucture because there were no drivers to efficiency.

Chinese cars are probably the only thing that can save the US auto industry. It badly needs a reset.

...

From the article...

... do they mean a "general" post on twitter today receives less than 3% of the views, or an EFF post on twitter receives less than 3% of the views that it did? Because I think the "general" post on twitter today receives prolly a quarter of the views. The rest is on them.

Twitter is twitter, and I'm sure there is a little bit of column A and a little bit of column B here, but come on. But let's be honest and ask when was the last time the EFF got a real headline?

In fact, I see this announcement as little more than a "hey guys, remember us... we used to be famous sorta", and taking potshots at a platform no one listens to them on to do it.

We are facing the same problem that Gutenberg created in the 15th century: a proliferation in the ability of everyone to create and communicate whatever they want and whatever people want to read. Due mainly to a dramatic fall in the cost of production of books. But its far more extreme than Gutenberg because the drop in costs is so much greater. In an era in which everyone has Internet access, a smart phone and/or laptop, writing in publishable format has become much easier and publishing itself has basically become free.

And the problem arises in the same areas it arose back in the day: pornography, religious heresy, political subversion. The same thing happened in 17c France, where people took their manuscripts to Holland for printing which their local booksellers in Paris were afraid to touch. Holland was also a center of piracy, where you could get a run of some best seller quickly and smuggle it back to Paris or London to sell at a discount. A sort of early predecessor of the Pirate Bay.

There is really no solution to this. You can see the same sorts of measures being taken up - the creation of a sort of index, the banning of some materials by righteous jurisdictions, For instance, as late as the 20c the works of \Joyce being banned in Ireland, Lady Chatterly in England, lots of books in the US. In the end this, and the Papal Index, were dropped because they were widely ridiculed and were not working. When the main result of your policy is to drive your best regarded novelists abroad and their works to be published in France, something is not working. And its not achieving its goal, if anything its increasing the interest in the banned material.

Governments however do not feel they can simply stop trying - and one understands this. Along with kinds of freedom of speech most here would find important and valuable, there is also the darker side of human nature that flourishes at the edges. What do you do about it? Do you decide to just give up? One understands why they feel they cannot. And one also understands that regulation and censorship of the truly vile is only possible by measures which have a dramatic negative effect on privacy.

Its a bit like speeding. You can pretty much stop speeding dead if you have enough cameras and you have number plate recognition. The side effect is that all trips and all car use then become trackable. You lower accidents. But the temptation to increase the use of the data is enormous. Similarly with facial recognition - you probably could use it in conjunction with other draconian measures to stop phone snatching and shop lifting. And there seems to be no other affordable way to do that. But the cost in privacy of such a total package is not small.

I see the problem and its historical parallels clearly enough, but don't know the answer.

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

No. They are balanced in equal proportion. The fundamental property in question is that which caused the morons to clump in the Unites States. The rest of the world got a much higher proportion of anti-morons as a result.

You ask: "And how does *also* allowing non fossil-fuel energy, like wind and solar, hurt any of that?"

Answer: intermittency. Adding wind and solar to the generating system just adds cost for no benefit.

If you want detailed case histories of this look at the UK, the usual canary. You will find that the useless intermittent supply from wind and solar comes in, on the bids, far higher than conventional. Regulation is needed to force utilities to buy it. And that is for an intermittent supply. There is no way to deliver dispatchable power from wind and solar at a cost which is competitive with conventional, ie gas or coal.

You doubt it? Go through the UK wind bids and add up the total cost of the UK electricity Net Zero push. Adding wind and solar to a conventional generation system just pushes up costs. Among the costs it adds are constraint payments. There are wind farms in the UK which are making a majority of their income from being paid not to generate, because the wind is supplying when there is no demand.

By the time you factor in the increase in gas consumption consequent on having to rely on open cycle rapid start gas to cover calms and nights its doubtful you even save any emissions either.

Its a great mystery why people who are persuaded of a climate crisis from CO2 emissions have this blind faith in wind and solar generation. Whether or not there is a climate crisis, wind and solar are not a viable generating technology and are not any kind of solution to it.

Paul Homewood has covered the UK wind constracting process in detail if you want that. Most advocates of wind do not. But here he is, as a for example, on constraint payments:
              https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

and here he is on the recent AR7 auction
              https://notalotofpeopleknowtha...

Lots more on costs, subsidies and constraint if you explore the site. The political consensus in the UK seems to be turning against the so called energy transition. The situation in the Gulf is clarifying minds. The absurdity of the idea that moving to intermittent wind and solar is either possible or is going to increase energy security or reduce energy prices is becoming obvious.

Unfortunately you can. The fact this made it into a courtroom is the most frightening part.

The idea that one can release video coverage of what happens in one's own home and invade someone ELSE's privacy by doing that - it's frightening that survived a motion to dismiss as a matter of law.

Never really understood these suits. They ask for damages, but does this mean they envisage Exxon (just as a for instance) carrying on extracting and selling fossil fuels? Because that is where the money would have to come from to pay the damages if they won.

Or do they want Exxon to close down and stop extracting and selling? At which point the company would be worthless, so it would have little prospect of paying any damages to (for instance) the residents of Colorado (just as a for instance) or anyone else.

And then you have the problems of scale and attribution. Take the problem of scale first. If you look at the percentage of total global emissions that are due to Exxon, they are rather small. Chinese emissions from coal, for instance, will dwarf them. So there is a real problem proving that Exxon has caused significant amounts of the current warming. But it gets worse, the current warming is not itself very large, Globally its around 1C. Very hard to prove that this much warming has caused significant damage, and even harder to prove that anything Exxon has done has caused significant amounts of it.

This would be the first defense. But the second defense would be attribution. Colorado, for instance, is suing because of the damage done to its residents. How do you prove it was Exxon's emissions, as opposed to the Chinese emissions from burning coal? And if the remedy requested is to close down Exxon, how much effect will that have on global emissions, global temps and local weather?

They seem to be suing people for unproven damage which may have been caused (though you'd have to prove this) by a global phenomenon to which Exxon has been a minor contributor. And requesting remedies which will be either ineffective or impossible to obtain.

Its completely different from a case where a company pollutes a bay with mercury, it enters the local food chain and poisons the locals who eat the local fish. And then sue for being poisoned. Or asbestos, where the companies can be sued by people who worked with the stuff and got asbestosis. Or tobacco, where the product has harmed those who used it, and they can sue. Or a state government can sue based on damage to its citizens. The harm done by the habit to the damaged is provable.

Here we have Colorado trying to sue for damage which may or may not have been caused by global emissions, which have only been contributed to minorly by Exxon, and where there is no provable connexion between the damage and the Exxon emissions and where an award of remedy will either be impossible to pay or will have no effect on the problem..

Simply do not understand either how they are goiing to prove what they need, or what remedy they can obtain.

Sue China, maybe. China is mining and burning more coal than the rest of the world put together, and is accounting for more than one third of global emissions. China stops emitting, global emissions really do fall by an amount which will have an effect. Exxon,,,?

Well...

First of all sure, the immigration issues you cite aren't actually what the real problem is, but let's look at it. You have a president who is willing to nationalize the state guard in order to put armed soldiers in the streets who are under his direct control. They are there, ostensibly, to open the way for ICE. ICE, an organization that openly advertises for recruitment in white nationalist magazines and recruits from white nationalist organizations. ICE, whose members openly flash white nationalist and KKK signs in photo ops together. Is that the organization that's no problem? They may want to do some laundry because their uniform shirts are looking a little... er.... brown.

Secondly, ICE isn't actually the real problem. The real problem is that there has already been political violence in the streets of your capitol. It is sparking all over the country. The rhetoric is off the charts, and your president invokes the most bizarre logic in every decision he makes. So when you say...

who's rules are you speaking of? Those are a moving target and change at the mercurial whim of the person who controls all the aforementioned organizations. Your country is on a collision course with violence that will make that Jan 6th look like a christmas party. My own take on the trends there, is that there WILL be more violence in the streets of your capitol before, or as, the 118th congress first sits. If it does. I for one think it will sit, but not before more blood is spilled.

You brushed off the warning contained in the story. The Ig Nobel organizers' decision to relocate wasn't frivolous. These are serious international academics and scientists making a calculated risk assessment. So if you brushed that off as a stunt, I suspect you will brush off my own comment here similarly. I hope rather than believe you will take a long hard look at the way things are going before violence hits your streets again. Also remember you are on the inside, with a breakdown like other people see coming being something that is just not possible. But people on the outside see it coming - sometimes people on the outside can see the trees better than the person inside the forest can.

Well....
Sure, immigration issues and ICE itself are an issue at play here, for sure. A federal police force that the nation's president is willing to invoke federalizing the state guard in order to compel states to allow it in where they aren't wanted is a concern. President-controlled national guardsmen in the streets is a concern. An 'immigration' police force that advertises in white nationalist magazines and recruits from white nationalist groups and who openly flash KKK signs in photo ops is a concern. They may want to look at doing some laundry, because their uniform shirts are looking a little.... er.... brown.

But the real concern is not immigration or VISAs. The real concern is that there already has been political violence in the streets of your capital city, there is political violence sparking all over, and there is a good chance there will be a lot more of it very soon. Mark my words, before the 118th congress convenes, or as it convenes, there will be more political violence in the streets of your capital, and this time it will spread.

More pointedly, if you can't see what's going on in your own back yard, if you can't see where the trends are taking you, and what damage the off-the-charts rhetoric is doing, then perhaps look at the decision to avoid the US made by the Ig-Nobels as a litmus test. Often times those who aren't in the forest and are looking at it from the outside can see the trees better than you can. So take a long, hard, sober look at what others are saying before you write it off as a political stunt.

Take a long hard look.

This will not end well.

Why is this a problem?

I do not want my software censoring anything I make.