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Comment Re:Australia never cared about reducing emmisions (Score 1) 26

Seems more like political problems. They have been trying to build large wind farms and export cables for years. If they can't even manage that, they have no hope of building nuclear.

It's a tragedy really. They have massive amounts of space for this stuff. A lot of sun, and good on and off shore wind resources. The domestic solar market is actually doing okay, because it gets less political interference and there isn't all that much that can be done to stop people putting panels on their homes.

Comment Re:Europe has itself to blame for this (Score 1) 166

Eastern Europe was screaming about how dangerous this was, but they weren't listened to.

To be fair they were against the entire world. At the time there was a generalised policy idea pushed by American economists that by enriching a nation it will naturally tend towards a stable democracy. The people most shouting against this were among the poorest and they were dismissed on similar grounds.

Buying Russian gas, investing in Russia, and China, and the middle east, all of this was seen as a way to enrich the people. With riches comes education, with education comes resistance against autocracy. That was the theory anyway.

And it was only a theory.

It's easy to point the finger at Merkel, if you ignore literally everyone else in the world. But the reality was this was effectively western world policy. Merkel's gas policy just happened to seal the largest monetary deal.

And indeed, life can be comfortable as a kept woman

That it yadeyaddering a WHOLE lot of history. Europe wasn't so much a kept woman as much as she was married off unwillingly due to a war. Much of the continent was devastated not just by the way, but by the terms agreed to by the losing team. E.g. limiting the amount of armoury, the dismantling of industry, the resulting economic disaster that followed. A "beaten woman" may be a more apt description.

Comment Re:Don't believe the hype (Score 1) 26

There's a reason LULUCF is included in climate change estimates around the world: deforestation and the use of land is a huge emission source. It's easy to be quick to dismiss Australia's efforts, but the reality is LULUCF's inclusion should be applauded because Australia had a fucking horrendous historical track record on deforestation, and despite still being very bad it's encouraging to see the rate reduce since 2008. Excluding it as a source of emissions doesn't help anyone even if the accounting can be a bit more questionable than direct emissions.

Comment Re:And show what? (Score 1, Insightful) 42

Then why do they have to force non-Australian companies to produce shows if there's a healthy Australian tv-industy?

Because monopolies and oligopolies exist only to make the maximum amount of money, and the maximum amount of money is achieved by stuffing the global catalogue with global appeal. For that you still look to the USA movie industry, despite the fact they produce less movies per year than Australia on a per capita basis.

Australia seems to understand that a healthy market is maintained through regulation. Many Slashdotters on the other hand haven't seen what an economics textbook actually looks like. If they ever peaked into one, they'd realise what a horror show a truly free market is.

Comment Re:And show what? (Score 2) 42

Tumbleweeds, dying reefs and spiders? We've had enough of that already.

You're so clever showing the world your ignorance. Australia used to have one of the largest film industries in the world. Even now on a per capita basis they release more local movies than the USA does with an average of one movie every 3-4 days. The local series industry is also quite massive though America has them beat on a per capita basis there.

I can't completely fault your ignorance, you're probably a Netflix subscriber and only know what Netflix chooses to show you, and guess what, they will preference making movie deals for general world wide audiences rather than your local content.

Comment Re:Chain of thoughts (Score 4, Interesting) 73

Ha ha, Paris Accord. Guess how much France, the country which lead said accord, was fined for not meeting their own commitments? Spoiler alert, it's €1.

Yeah, and whose fault is that? Right the USA which objected to one word in the entire accord: "Shall" instead of "Should". But sure, blame the French.
Anyway blame game aside the fault is your own. The court case fine had little to nothing to do with the Paris agreement as it was brought locally by a local court against the government related to an international agreement. The fine was always going to be symbolic because there was no legal mechanism to do something otherwise. Governments can't pass laws to fine themselves. Laws don't work like that.

Incidentally the French are part of the EU and the Paris Agreement was signed in such a way that the block reports emissions. The EU is ranked "Insufficient" against the Paris target. Canada is ranked "Highly Insufficient" along with China and India, and the USA "Critically Insufficient" sharing that category with what Trump would call "3rd world shitholes".

So I wouldn't go throwing shade at France in a story about Canada.

Comment Re:An old familiar story (Score 1) 73

"We're 100% in favour of dealing with the environmental crisis unless it costs us money in which case we'll be dead by the time it gets really bad so who cares, it won't be us who have to live with it".

The problem is one of short term thinking and lack of strategy. Those who will invest money to deal with the problem are the ones that will make the most money in the future when the rest of the world plays catchup and comes asking the experts for assistance.

The future cost money but that investment pays dividends.

Comment Re:I Don't Understand At All (Score 2) 24

Amazon has long had a DNS service, called Route 53

Yes... that is ... the problem... Literally the last few major AWS outages have been the result of a Route 53 fuckup.

In other news when there's a breakdown on the highway and you reroute traffic over local roads it will be slower.

Submission + - Conde Nast fined €750,000 for placing cookies without consent (noyb.eu)

AmiMoJo writes: In December 2019, noyb had filed complaints against three providers of French websites, because they had implemented cookie banners that turned a clear “NO” into “fake consent”. Even if a user went through the trouble of rejecting countless cookies on the eCommerce page CDiscount, the movie guide Allocine.fr and the fashion magazine Vanity Fair, these websites sent digital signals to tracking companies claiming that users had agreed to being tracked online. CDiscount sent “fake consent” signals to 431 tracking companies per user, Allocine to 565, and Vanity Fair to 375, an analysis of the data flows had shown.

Today, almost six (!) years after these complaints had originally been filed, the French data protection authority CNIL has finally reached a decision in the case against Vanity Fair: Conde Nast, the publisher behind Vanity Fair, has failed to obtain user consent before placing cookies. In addition, the company failed to sufficiently inform its users about the purpose of supposedly “necessary” cookies. Thirdly, the implemented mechanisms for refusing and withdrawing consent was ineffective. Conde Nast must therefore pay a fine of €750.000.

Conde Nast also owns Ars Technica.

Comment Re:Google? wtf (Score 2) 78

LibreOffice doesn't have cloud sharing features that allow multiple users to access a shared file with different permissions.

LibreOffice Calc does allow multiple users to edit a spreadsheet on a network drive, but doesn't have a user permission system or integration with a single login somewhere. The other apps like Writer don't support collaboration at all.

Comment Re:I can see the result already (Score 1) 188

That seems unlikely. The worst case I could find for high speed rail was 52.7g/km of CO2 emitted, with a capacity of around 1,300 passengers. That includes the emissions from the stations and so forth, and equates to about 0.04g/passenger/km.

For a typical A350 you are looking at 0.18g/passenger/km in economy class, and that is just the fuel, not the airport or the aircraft or the transport to get to and from airports at either end etc.

Comment Re:Sigh. (Score 2) 78

"Dumb company runs its finances on 20-million-cell spreadsheets" is my takeaway from that.

You just called every company dumb. Either that or you just pointed out you have no idea how financial departments work. Massive excel spreadsheets are the mainstay of all large companies and even wall street. In many cases replacing a spreadsheet will require a myriad of interlinked tools, databases, calculation engines, scripts, all suddenly opaque to the end user who ultimately needs a data in a row that is able to be analysed. Most of the best data analytics tools are also designed around the ability to quickly ingest large spreadsheets and export them again.

You're just clueless as to how the world around you works.

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