pgeorgi

"I represent the holders of the patents in question" is simple enough. I wonder if it's fraud, if all you're putting out is an unverifiable claim on the net. The pool operators do that all the time.

A drive-by patent owner can show up on anything, and if they don't want to license to you, your entire product is bust.

Even if it's AptX and Qualcomm issues you a license in exchange for money. I wouldn't even bet on being able to claw back these license costs after being ordered to destroy your AptX-equipped product after it ran into somebody else's patent.

The risk that this happens is _exactly_ the same for Opus or AptX.

You're right. I could still amend the post, so I added the 20+ years caveat. Thanks!

No codec (or any other technical development, really - edit: except for 20+ years old stuff, and only if you don't add any, even "obvious" improvements) is known patent free, or clear on "who owns what."

Folks set up pools all the time, but somehow they never offer indemnification for completeness of the pool - because they can't.

See https://en.kangxin.com/html/2/218/219/220/11565.html for a few examples how the patent pool extortion scheme already went wrong in the past.

> Why do you assume that the benefits would outweigh said costs? That's a weird burden to set on the format.

I'm not assuming that there are those benefits, but that there are people to see them. Those who _very_ vocal about browsers (and Chrome in particular) not supporting it seem to think so or they wouldn't bother.

If I propose integrating good old Targa file support into Chrome, I'd also be asked about a cost/benefit analysis. And by building and using a polyfill to add that support, I show that I'm serious about Targa files, which gives credence to my cost/benefit analysis and also lets people play around with the Targa format, hopefully making it self-evident that the format is good, and from there that these benefits based on native support would be even better.

For JXL I see people talking the talk but, by and large, not walking the walk.

if you're quoting me, do so completely: you silently dropped "threatened to do so"

In 2009, Gazprom proposed various alternatives to the main route, some including alternative routes through Ukraine that Ukraine rejected. In the end they shipped some ~12% of their usual through-Ukraine amount as additional shipments on other routes. Doesn't sound like russia was unwilling to deliver. But I'll concede that point as uncertain, given that the EU fact finding mission to figure out who stopped the shipments to the EU didn't come to conclusive results. (some data in https://www.cep.eu/Analysen_KOM/KOM_2009_363_Sicherheit_der_...)

2014: "Asked if sanctions could affect Russian gas transit, Yatsenyuk said the move could possibly mean halting 'all types of transit, from air flights to transit of resources.'" (https://webarchive.archive.unhcr.org/20230603044044/https://...)

In the end, I think Germany should have gotten out of fossils in general, no matter what happens to Eastern Europe once the mafia-run petrol station that cosplays as a country feels the pressure. would've-should've-could've.

Before 2022 Ukraine shut down the pipeline to the EU in 2009 and threatened to do so again in 2014.

I'm not sure what other country or bloc would ever accept the national security concept of "we can cut you off from energy at any time, to keep you aligned against that other guy" as something they're supposed to support.

Meanwhile the pipelines existed and can be configured to work the other direction, so the somewhat friendly relations at the time between Germany and russia could have secured gas supplies for Poland and Ukraine.

So "we'll cut you off when we want", "you're evil anyway" and "hey, don't bypass us", all at the same time. No, thanks.

That said, the "moral high ground" solution would have been to get rid of fossils earlier - which wasn't much of a talking point by the objectors to Nord Stream 2, except for the Green party.

Of course, Poland and Ukraine would have lost their leverage that way as well, while Germany would have lost the lever of economic relations with russia, so that option might have been even more fragile for Eastern Europe.

Nordstream 2 hasn't transported a single m^3 of natural gas for sale (there was probably some minor net flow from initial pressurization), as promised in case of russia ending the peace.

That thing was a money sink: About 5bn€ of Gazprom money, about 1bn€ each for 5 energy traders from Germany (2x), France, Austria and Great Britain.

> There were repeated votes strongly in favor (like, 8-to-1 ratio) of halting the project in European Parliament

And the natural gas they used came from a random non-russian pipeline. Nevermind that it was ~half russian in origin. Hypocrites.

> strong and vocal opposition from the US, Ukraine, Poland and the Baltics

- US: Hey, buy our LNG. (and now: no, not like that!)

- Ukraine, Poland: Hey, don't bypass our pipelines, we want the money!

- Also Poland: "Germany is bad", practically all the time, practically on every subject. At some point you tune out the noise from Warsaw.

> This type of stuff also might explain one of the reasons why German governments and big conglomerates seemingly have a mental block when dealing with Putin's Russia.

The guy is Austrian.

> The Nord Stream might be the most "famous" one. How can a society so conservative and risk averse to the point of ridiculousness allow their whole country to be almost exclusively dependent of Russia? It doesn't make any sense.

Nord Stream brought in 55% of natural gas managed in Germany. 50% of natural gas managed in Germany was for export. So there's no "almost exclusive" dependency, use of russian gas wasn't a German peculiarity, and Germany could have thrown the rest of Europe under the bus to quickly get rid of any association with russian gas at a moment's notice (by restricting exports to compensate for the loss.) For the record, Germany didn't do that.

Germany took cheap natural gas, Europe took cheap natural gas, and when the source for cheap natural gas turned out to be a problem, gears were shifted to get away from that. At a cost, certainly, but probably still cheaper than relying only on more expensive gas sources for 50 years. With the added benefit of calming down the cold war (and the attempt to repeat that performance later-on, which in hindsight was unsuccessful)

Both issues seem to have known workarounds that could have been integrated to support JXL on iOS properly earlier than by waiting on Apple (who integrated JXL in Safari 17 apparently), so if anything that's a success story for "provide polyfills to support features without relying on the browser vendor."

> It's so frustrating how the chromium team is ending up as a gatekeeper of the Internet by pick and choosing what gets developed or not.

https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js is based on Chromium tech (Squoosh from GoogleChromeLabs) and provides an opportunity to use JXL with no practical way for Chromium folks to intervene.

Even if that's a suboptimal solution, JXL's benefits supposedly should outweight the cost of integrating that, and yet I haven't seen actual JXL users running to that in droves.

So JXL might not be a good support for your theory: where people could do they still don't. Maybe the format isn't actually that important, it's just a popular meme to rehash.

I guess you're referring to the idea that the flag made the previous implementation practically non-existent for users. And I agree!

But "implement something new!" is a very different demand from "you took that away from us, undo that!"

Actual users, perhaps. Or maybe concern trolls paid by a patent holder who's trying to prepare the ground for a patent-based extortion scheme. Or maybe Jon Sneyers with an army of sock puppets. These "actual users" are just as real to me as Chrome's telemetry.

That said: these actual users didn't demonstrate any hacker spirit or interest in using JXL in situations where they could. Where's the wide-spread use of jxl.js (https://github.com/niutech/jxl.js) to demonstrate that there are actual users desperate for native codec support? (aside: jxl.js is based on Squoosh, which is a product of GoogleChromeLabs) If JXL is sooo important, surely people would use whatever workaround they can employ, no matter if that convinces the Chrome team or not, simply because they benefit from using it, no?

Instead all I see is people _not_ exercising their freedom and initiative to support that best-thing-since-slices-bread-apparently format but whining that Chrome is oh-so-dominant and forces their choices of codecs upon everybody else.

Okay then...

It has a flag implication because jpeg-xl never came without being hidden behind a flag. Nothing was taken away from ordinary users at any point in time.

And I suppose the Chrome folks have the telemetry to know how many people set that damn flag.

"jxl without a flag" can't be re-added because that was never a thing.

All those requests to revert the removal are funny: you want Chrome to re-add jxl behind a feature flag? Doesn't seem very useful.

Also, all those Chrome offshoots (Edge, Brave, Opera, etc) could easily add and enable it to distinguish themselves from Chrome ("faster page load", "less network use") and don't. Makes me wonder what's going on...

Not "highly curated" but "not showing certain types of results that were specifically blacklisted" (there, I said it. Boo.)

A sure hit in that regard with American services is anything remotely sexual.

I'd expect such services to become better than the current "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave." and, while somewhat obnoxious perhaps, will lead to a result (to take the above example "The term whitelist is controversial because ... The allowlist feature in OpenWRT can be configured as follows: ...")

It's a petabit in raw data, the way they're writing it. After error correction, framing and whatever else is done to the data, the capacity that users care about will be a fair bit smaller.

That argument was tried by Lindows: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Lindows.com....

While it looked like it'd hold up in Anglophone countries (and so Microsoft withdrew to avoid losing the trademark officially), others sided with Microsoft.

Capped at 0.3% for credit card transactions, 0.2% for debit card transactions

See https://www.consilium.europa.eu/en/press/press-releases/2015...

> I'm just hoping the EU doesn't decide we need another annoying pop-up or something. We've got enough of those already.

It didn't. The website operators decided to be a pain towards their customers so they can continue to track the hell out of them. They could just, you know, not do that.

Residential electricity has the full rates on everything. Commercial electricity is a bit cheaper because taxes and network fees are reduced, and industrial electricity is even cheaper because the reductions are even higher.

In case of the network fees, residential customers directly subsidize industrial customers: network fees cover the network operation costs, so it's a zero-sum game where one party's reduction is another party's increase.

It's still somewhat expensive to operate electricity heavy industry in Germany, but much less outrageous than the residential prices that are usually used in for comparisons in the news.

ETH is Switzerland. The claim was "nearby". And when you're in Germany's south (even in Munich, which is relatively far east), the major French universities are pretty accessible, too.

Check your provider's current rate, it's probably closer to 30 cents. Then call them and ask if they want you to switch at the next opportunity or if they're willing to hoist you over into the new rate.

They even backdated my contract change by a few months when I did that.

A ship off the Canaries has a pretty high chance of finding Africa. A ship off Africa has a pretty high chance of missing the Canaries.

https://dserver.bundestag.de/btd/20/102/2010284.pdf has a list of railway infrastructure elements (track switches, bridges, overhead electrical lines, rail tracks, track crossings, signal boxes, support structures) that are, while still safely usable, in the condition categories "einschränkend" (limiting), "schlecht" (bad), and "mangelhaft" (deficient) - that is, the condition categories that require some kind of maintenance and might reduce efficiency of the rail network. Starts on page 9, ends on page 494.

It's a matter of focus: Having some time to tinker and try out stuff that might just fail is great. If it consumes so much development time that the must-haves deteoriate, you let down your customers.

It's fewer operators that are full of shit and might mess up things.

Cattenom, Fessenheim, Tihange etc are already getting their share of criticism and protest, but that's all German citizens can do about foreign reactors that happen to be built right across the border.