"the difference between a story originating from the Guardian or some Russian bot-farm..." But how much difference is there? The Guardian is just a bot farm staffed by humans following a party line. Or they have been humans, though increasingly it seems like they too may be largely bots.

Yes, this is what the government has in mind. The Guardian, BBC and other certified righteous outfits would have to come at the top of searches. Other misinforming broadcasters like GBNews would come at the bottom with the Russian bot farms or not appear at all.

The faked news clips of Trump that the BBC broadcast would be at the top of the searches, and the stories that GBNews carries pointing out how they were faked would not feature at all.

This would be 'Verified Live', and challenging it would be misinformation. It would be sort of like the gender mafia at the BBC, but on a national scale.

And as a late great anti-psych writer once wrote: if you cannot talk about it, you cannot talk about the fact that you cannot talk about it. VPNs would be next, and pretty soon after that it would not be permitted to mention that there are such things. The Great Wall of Britain, Chinese media control with British characteristics. To protect people, or course.

The license fee is taxation tied to supporting one particular broadcaster. Its a government imposed tax on watching live TV from any broadcaster.

If you want an analogy from the cases you cite, it would be if you had to pay a tax on every newspaper purchase, whose proceeds were handed on to the Guardian. And if it were a criminal offence to read any newspaper without paying this tax. Go into a library, and you cannot read the papers without producing a paid permit. Go into a newsagent, and you cannot buy a paper without producing it.

Or it would be like a tax on shopping at any supermarket, whose proceeds went to Tesco. You would have to have a paid supermarket permit to allow you to shop at, for instance, Sainsburys or any other supermarket, and the proceeds would be given to Tesco, and it would be a criminal offence to shop at any supermarket without buying such a permit.

Or, put it another way, you would have to have a paid permit to drive a car, any car. The proceeds would be paid to Ford.

Still strikes you as reasonable? Still think its good value? For who is it good value? Its good value for all the people who like the BBC and would subscribe to it were subscription voluntary. Its good value because the other half of the country, or maybe more, are subsidizing them.

Its the great liberal tradition. Get something we want, then make everyone else pay for it whether they want it or not, call it 'public service xyz', then claim its great value. Because the fee, paid by everyone including all those who do not want or use it, is lower than the fee for, for instance, Sky. Which is only paid by those who want to watch it. So no wonder its cheaper.

Its like if beer from one brewer, every pint, half the cost was paid out of taxation, and they all go around saying what great cheap beer this is. Yes, because the whole country is paying half on every pint drawn, whether they drink it or not.

And then, immune from commercial pressures, the BBC goes around unaccountable and systematically making up fake news, and there is nothing you can do about it, if you want to watch any kind of live TV at all.

A garbage system. No wonder the French have dropped it.

its a noble effort, but you are posting to an environment where everyone here knows that wind+solar+batteries is cheaper than gas or coal, because the wind and the sun are free, and they have no fuel costs. They also know that the only people who are skeptical about this are climate deniers.

These deniers keep talking about something called Net Present Value and claiming that is the correct way to evaluate and compare costs of generating systems. Net Present Value is a concept you will find in all kinds of Corporate Finance textbooks, well, do I need to say more? Its hetero-normative, racist, patriarchal and neo-colonial, and probably Islamophobic and transphobic with it and denies indigenous wisdom. Its on the wrong side of history, like coal, gas and nukes. Of course it pretends that wind+solar+batteries is actually a very expensive technology.

Well it would, wouldn't it?

What's the problem?

All they have to do is build more wind and solar (and batteries). Everyone except a few climate denialists knows that wind+solar+batteries is far cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear and can generate all the electricity anyone could conceivably need from free fuel, the sun and the air.

There is absolutely no need to restrict the installation of data centers, and there is no reason whatever why their power demands should raise prices. In fact, they should lower prices, because they will be at the spearhead of the energy transition, because it will lead to a larger and larger proportion of generation moving away from legacy technology to cheap clean power.

This is so obvious to us all here on Slashdot that its a mystery why the local politicians don't see it too.

AI claims that you can still buy AZW books and read them on one of these old Kindles. The claim is that if you buy from your PC account for the old Kindle it will be supplied as AZW, which will be readable on the device after transfer to it from the PC by USB.

The claim is that what has changed is that you can no longer buy directly from the Kindle, because purchases are now KFX only. But that you can still buy books for it over the web using your PC and they will be supplied as AZW.

If this is really true, the change is not only not a bad thing, its positively a good thing, because the account details on the old Kindles were stored very insecurely so it was a real security hazard wandering around with this very stealable device with all your Amazon credentials stored in open format.

Is it true? It was true before the latest change, but is it still?

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.

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.

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.

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,,,?

"It abandons its core mandate to protect human health and the environment to boost polluting industries and attempts to rewrite the law in order to do so."

This is complete nonsense. There is no threat to American health from American CO2 emissions. No-one has ever shown that.

Reducing US emissions will have no or minimal effect on the level of global emissions. So even if you think the level of global emissions will produce heat which is a danger to health globally (which is again pretty hard or impossible to prove) you still have no case for the Endangerment Finding.

The EPA is not concerned with the global, but with the American, not with global temps, global emissions, the welfare of the rest of the world. If you could show that US emissions were driving warming and that warming was a threat to health, maybe you'd have a point.

But US emissions are not driving global emissions, so you cannot show that. Its at the level of eat your dinner because of the starving children in Africa. How, asks the kid, will that help them? Don't argue with your mother, is the reply.

I think the idea was the same as the idea of runnng MacOS on generic Intel. People wanted to do that because they liked the OS but did not want to pay over the odds for generic hardware. The Mac people always claimed that the Apple hardware was premium quality, but it never has been, its always just been commodity stuff at an inflated price.

So finally Apple comes up with what seems to be genuinely better hardware - faster, lower power consumption in packages that are at least as good as premium Intel machines. They aren't cheap, but they do seem very nice as hardware.

But, people are now saying, yes to the hardware but no to that awful locked down OS. So they naturally enough try to get Linux working on the hardware.

The difficulty they are running into is the same in both cases. Apple is determined, whenever it gets a market lead in either OS or hardware, to use that to force sell the other. So back in the day we had an OS people really wanted, but which would only run, and later was only permitted to be packaged with, hardware which was either garbage stuff like the Motorola chips or later the PowerPC ones which were too expensive and also real heaters. But the idea was, force them to buy the hardware to get the OS.

Now its force them to use the OS they don't want to be able to use the hardware they want.

The solution is not to deal with these people. Wait a while and the industry will catch up on hardware. Meanwhile just buy the best hardware you can afford and run the OS you want on it. As long as you deal with Apple you will always be in a similar situation, the only thing on their mind is how to lock you in. The specifics will vary, but the song remains the same. Some people are fine with that, some even positively like it, it makes them feel safe and special.

A lot of us don't like it and won't have anything to do with Apple. And then there are the real open source heroes, like the Asahi team, who are ready to throw themselves into a real struggle, Applaud them, support them, and they seem to be winning bit by bit. But its a struggle, its a few guys against one of the largest tech companies in the world. Wish them luck, support them, but its a bit like Wine, its an uphill struggle and probably not ready for production yet, if it ever will be.

The Microsoft bluetooth keyboard is just about silent, as quiet as you can get, and excellent build quality. Do not, however, spill coffee on it!

"that will cause a major leap in planet-heating emissions"

As usual no quantification, just the usual hysterical alarmism. Current global emissions are about 37 billion tons a year. How much will these US installations add to that? And how much additional warming will this additional amount lead to?

Can you even say by how much its going to increase US emissions? When doing this, might be an idea to start by saying what these are right now. Then we can see how important it is.

'Planet heating' is a giveaway, by the way. Straight out of the Guardian style guide.

It would help if you could be more specific about who you want destroyed. If you read the detail of the report and look at the tables (which the Guardian fails to give much information about) you will find that most of the emitting is being done by entities which are

(a) outside the West
(b) doing something other than oil extraction and sale.

So are you urging people to get out there and destroy Chinese cement plants and the HQs of the Chinese cement producers? What about the Chinese coal extraction companies, do you want to head up a delegation which goes over there and destroys them? Good luck with that! Or do you want to try persuasion? Join the club, the West has been trying to persuade China and India etc to stop or slow down for the last 20+ years, with absolutely no results.

The key entities are the nation states. That is the only place you will ever get action on curbing emissions. China, for instance, is emitting over one third of global emissions. China is using and extracting more coal than the rest of the world put together. They could stop tomorrow if they wanted to. Which entities are doing this within China is immaterial, they all have such close ties to government that they can be considered extensions of government.

Slashdot should really stop linking to the Guardian. As in this report its disconnected hysterical alarmist rants put together by literature grad. Nothing wrong with being a literature grad. But keep them away from science and engineering topics. All you will get is vague rants, like this one.

The usual recent obsession on Slashdot, on an unimportant detail of the story.

The real story is the relative size of the US and China economies, and its the same story whether its electricity or steel. China is bigger. A lot bigger. And getting bigger yet all the time.

This is the important thing about this story, not how much wind they are using, which is an unimportant detail. This is what is changing the balance of power in the Pacific, this will lead to the fall of Taiwan one of these years. This is the important thing about the story.

For goodness sake raise your eyes from this myopic progressive obsession with the climate and renewables story and focus on the geopolitical issue here which is going to change the world well within in most of our lifetimes.