bkor

> Office is much superior to any open source and even paid alternatives, and we must remember that most people using the software don't have a degree in CS.

Germany is investing in improving free software, see https://www.sovereigntechfund.de/. Though not sure if this is linked to that state switching.

I think LibreOffice is riddled with loads of small "paper cuts". Basically loads of small issues that make it annoying to use. I hope that they understand it shouldn't be about cost, it should be about being sovereign. So hopefully the investment (ensuring additional developers, UI/UX people, etc) increases as they use more free software,

> I'm not complaining. I am trying to counter FUD that is obscuring documented history.

But you haven't actually shown any proof of your claim. You claim to "explain some history a lot of rich and influential people would prefer was forgotten", while offering no proof. While demanding proof that you aren't wrong.

> Why do you keep attacking a stranger? Do you hate me for some reason? Because it certainly feels like it.

I do not see that person attacking you. He's saying the article is bs, that is about the article, not you as a person.

> You are very hostile and keep calling me names

I haven't seen one reply from that person that is about you as a person. I see loads of replies saying the article is bs. I see loads of replies from you saying that a claim is true unless proven otherwise. Not sure, but the aggression is not one-sided.

> Then it should be easy for you to prove it wrong, then.

Again, prove that you are right. It should be easy, no?

Even a release team member at that time who says you're incorrect only resulted you in saying "citation needed" instead of acknowledging what is said.

> So prove me wrong, and when you do it, stop calling my work insulting names and accusing me of things I do not have or do, such as calling me bad-intentioned.

You keep repeating this, but it's not up to others to prove what you claim is wrong. It's up to you to prove it is correct.

> > Microsoft's legal threats were not what motivated the shift > > [[Citation needed]]

You made that claim, it's on you to prove your claim. Instead, you claim something and pretend it is true unless someone provides proof about a claim that just isn't true.

> > GNOME3 shifted because of design philosophies in a good chunk of the core developers > > [[Citation needed]]

A release team member mentions that this is true. What more do you need? I was also a release team member for 10+ years. I've never heard of anything like what you claimed. I spoke to loads of people. Further, you're confusing GNOME 3 with gnome-shell. Also, GNOME 3 took ages to come out while you're pretending it was something quickly developed.

Lastly, GNOME classic. As shipped with RHEL 7. GNOME 3 with a more classical interface. Meaning, pretty close to GNOME 3.

Spotify uses (used?) DNS TXT records as well. See e.g. the following article: https://engineering.atspotify.com/2017/03/spotifys-love-hate...

I thought they also used it in their client but cannot find a article about that.

> Way better than Canadian or European health care because it's basically a private ppo plan the state pays for.

That's a strange method to consider something better or not. It seems to lead to overpaying for stuff. And it seems to suggest that private is better without explaining why. Plus assuming that paying more is better without explaining why.

> It's really weird the spin on this.

The "spin" is coming from you.

> Space X rockets (and others) blow up all the time

SpaceX has done ~227 successful Falcon missions in a row. Those rockets do NOT "blow up all the time". Further, the success rate of the Falcon 9 is 247/249. Meaning, 99.20%. For the block 5 variant it is 192/192 or 100% success rate.

SpaceX is also developing some rockets. You seem to be comparing rockets which are under development and where SpaceX often gives a low probability of success with missions that are supposed to work. The development rockets are NOT in production, they are NOT used to bring cargo in space. It's really apples vs oranges.

> So not sure why this is being reported so negatively (well, actually, I do, of course...)

Instead of giving some stupid hint just say what you wanted to say. Up to now what you said doesn't make sense to me, so no why not explain the rest as well.

I'm aware of the following: https://harmonyagreements.org/

Still, CLAs are a barrier on their own already. Standardizing them doesn't help. Plus as another commenter mentioned: sometimes a standard CLA is used but then various bits aren't filled in.

> "Visa available both on arrival or eVisa"

That just means that they're taxing the arrivals. Turkey and Indonesia (for my country) switch between requiring a visa on arrival and not needing one. That's tied to lower/higher tourist numbers. If the number of tourists drop too much the visa on arrival is removed. That this is linked is the explanation I read in an Indonesian article on why they were removing the visa on arrival for my country.

The only slight annoyance might be that sometimes they want you to pay that "visa" in (crisp) USD, which means getting USD.

> I have a CAA on my GPL project so that I have the right to start releasing it as MIT, that is, more Free.

That really depends on the CAA. It might allow way more. The text might be (legally) not applicable or have flaws, etc.

> Do you find this disturbing?

It is a barrier to contribute. I would not even bother trying to contribute.

Your statements here are already a bit conflicting to me. You partly might want to monetize the software. You partly might want to release it as MIT. I don't see how you'd still have a means to monetize if you'd release it as MIT. Feels like you want to keep all options open.

That all said, hey, you developed it, so cool if you'd listen to people with different opinions but I'd likely not need your software anyway I guess. Further, loads of non-CAA pure GPL software never receive any contributions. It takes quite a bit of effort to be noticed and get contributions.

FYI: If I reread above parts might come across as harsh but none is meant that way.

Why? Getting someone so sign off on a CLA is a huge burden. There are loads of companies that have huge software development teams but the company is NOT an IT company. Legal isn't setup to figure out a CLA.

At least that's in my experience. It's significantly easier to not contribute back than spend ages trying to involve legal. Sort of like a barrier to entry, though maybe called a barrier to contribute.

> It also screams loudly and for long times whenever I power it on and when I want to switch the ambient noise mode.

You can disable that through the Android app.

> default is active noise cancelling, and it's broken most of the time

That's not my experience. Wonder if that was since the start as for me the noise cancelling is the sole reason I have it. If you want great sound quality it's often advised to buy something that's solely made for sound.

> The latter can be somewhat fixed with some good electrical tape

I've used "write everywhere pens" on annoying LEDs. Though up to now only on low-value devices (smoke alarms). This as I am terrible at only covering the LED, I often by accident write the area around it as well. You could cover everything except for the LED with some tape to prevent this though.

Efficiency has a huge impact on the cost/economics, something that you've highlighted. If significant more energy is needed, it'll likely be more expensive. Hydrogen is sometimes only a third as efficient as other solutions. It's pretty logical to assume it'll be

> In the early 1900s, gas was less efficient than electricity too

I think you mean gasoline instead of just gas. Hydrogen requires huge amounts of energy before it's easy to transport, which is what you responded to. In any case, in the early 1900s, gasoline had a huge amount of stored energy. It was a matter of using it efficiently, you're comparing apples to oranges. With Green Hydrogren too often people say that some technological improvement will solve the drawbacks. While ignoring that for e.g. hydrogen it's not so easy, for other options it is/was.

Same for the often suggested "solution" of using surplus energy. A factory that doesn't work 24/7 is more costly. Aside from that I understood that hydrogen is best produced continuously for it to be efficient.

Might also want to try an psychologist. The person you go to often suggests solutions that they're familiar with. Meaning, if they often cure things with drugs they'll likely give you such a solution.

You didn't really specify the problem. Sometimes it could just be the brain. E.g. sleeping issues occurs more often with ASS. So see various types of specialists so that you're not stuck to the things a specialists knows about. Might be that another specialist more easily can spot your issue.

The following site works for The Netherlands (not just Amsterdam): https://mapitout.iamsterdam.com/

It has some minor limitations to select the time (has to one of the predefined options). That can be worked around by changing the URL parameter.

It can also map out multiple locations and see the overlap.

It's fairly useful to see where you want to live while taking e.g. the office location into account. It gave me more options than I thought I had, partly because I didn't think about small towns with a train station.

> The evidence is to the contrary.

That something is not done doesn't automatically prove it's due to e.g. Middle East, or giving really old stock to Ukraine. The US is more than capable of doing multiple things at the same time. Though, yeah, the infrastructure in the US is terrible and so on. It still doesn't prove that it's due to focussing on the military. E.g. the costs for medical care is way higher than any other country. It could've been done differently, but well, that's still not due to waging a war in the Middle East.

You initially said:

>US policymakers have repeatedly stated their aim is to remove Putin, and they have plans to break up the country. > > For the Russians, this is an existential crisis.

Russia decided to invade Ukraine, you seem to imply that was partly due them needing Ukraine as buffer. That bit was a Russian talking point, until Putin said it was an excuse.

When asked for some evidence you give articles where Biden states that the war is a reason for a regime change in Russia. So Russia invaded and started a war in Ukraine. Then US said the war is a reason for a regime change. But Russia started the war for a reason that the US gave as a consequence of Russia attacking Ukraine.

This is illogical.

> If transport over big distances wasn't a problem

There's a project that's planning solar power generation in Morocco and a cable to the UK. That'll be a fairly long cable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xlinks_Morocco-UK_Power_Projec.... Though no idea how realistic this is, it seems a bit like a new electric car company website that only has a prototype. Meaning, it seems that project seems to not escape the planning stage.

There's already a lot of cables between the UK and other countries, e.g. Norway and France. Though those aren't that long in comparison to something connecting to the UK.

EU is trying to tie all the various grids of the various countries together. There are loads of initiatives around that. Aside from that the Southern EU countries are trying to connect their grids to North Africa. Though again, that's not a huge distance to cover.

> They seem to be using an awful lot of wind, and it was my understanding that how much power they produced was somewhat random

The amount of wind that's produced is predictable. In NL they do "day ahead pricing". You can get energy contracts based upon those prices. It's pretty easy to predict the amount of solar energy and wind energy a day in advance. It's not random.

> A 2014 study which looked at the same issue found that 2-megawatt wind turbines

And such wind turbines are nowadays tiny. If you look at https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lijst_van_windmolenparken_in_d... (Dutch) the column "Turbine vermogen" shows the (average?) megawatt (MW) of the windturbines. The ones planned for 2023 are 11 MW. The ones delivered in 2021 are 9.5 MW. There's a planned windpark with 14 MW turbines for delivery in 2026.

> I got that wind turbines do not actually produce more energy than was needed to build them.

Wind turbines generate way more power than what is needed to produce them. Loads of wind turbines will be installed in the North Sea by various countries to generate a huge amount of electricity. I really don't get how you'd think that creating a wind turbine requires way more energy than the electricity it'll produce.

I use Consent-O-Matic. You can configure how it should behave. By default it'll reject things. For the websites it doesn't support I often use reader mode.

> A practical collapsible container still has not been made.

That's yet another idea that people often think of when people wonder about improvements for container shipping. The container shipping company I worked for studied it every few years. There's various reason why it hasn't been done. It's not just the container or the container vessel. It would be good to reach out to the right people and see what the problems were that prevented this from being used. It wasn't about making a container collapsible, it was stuff surrounding that.

There are sometimes some really nice cost saving projects that were pretty innovative. Plus maybe also easy if someone thought of it. But often it required a bit more knowledge to think of than "add sails" or "collapsible container".

One fun thing what a few shipping companies many years ago is to take existing vessels and make them bigger. So really cutting various parts of the steel and adding more (e.g. height). An random Google example (use retrofit as search term): https://gcaptain.com/upgrades-to-famous-maersk-e-class-to-bo...

> Is whatever the standard mechanism is for securing containers to ships sufficient here?

Not in the slightest. Containers are secured by lashing them. But that's just the one level, mostly. Then after that it is twist locks. There are enough pictures of containers being ripped apart by the sea. Or stacks entirely damaged. Containers are made from steel, loads of people tend to assume they're indestructible. Or that they can hold way more weight than they can (scrapped metal people).

That video shows that they have no clue about containers or the container shipping industry.

> Have you actually talked to anyone in the cargo ship industry about your idea?

I worked in the container shipping industry. It doesn't sound like this person ever talked to anyone in the industry. It's not like "add a sail" hasn't been thought off loads of times before. I've seen a few times where people spend 6 months to run a project where they never talked to a person with experience. Then that project would eventually fail. Circumstances and restrictions sometimes change over time, so trying to solve the same thing every few years is a good thing. But "sail in a container", ehh..

> It makes the exact same observation.

I find it highly difficult to figure out what the article is trying to say. This especially as it's trying to say something about private debt vs the welfare system. I don't understand what the article is trying to say, especially the link between welfare system vs mortgages vs debt.

Credit Suisse was involved in loads and loads of scandals. Joe Blogs summarized loads of them in a video: https://youtu.be/tAJRqpDqjLU?t=325

It's insane that this questionable bank which continuously says "problems have been addressed" scandal after scandal is now being saved. Public losses, private profit.