>The only area where the GPL is clear is statically linked C code, everything else is very open to interpretation No. It is not.
>Now somebody comes along, takes all the graphics and releases a proprietary game with them. Absolutely and without any doubt. If the graphics were under the same license as the code, then any other game using them is a derivative work and must also be GPLd. You may be confused because of the REAL scenarios where game code is GPLd but the assets are under a proprietory license (ID software releases for example) but then it's also perfectly cleared. The GPL applies to the code, the proprietary license to the assets.
> but loads them from the web or straight out of your git repository or their fork of your git repository That would be a violation. Unless he's found a magical way to load them without copying them to disk or memory ? In which case it's still unclear that it wouldn't be a violation. About the only way you could argue it isn't a violation is if the program randomly finds image using something like google-image-search and happened to pull your assets in by random chance - with no particular dependence on those images. A generic program that hit something randomly would probably be deemed fair use.
> What if it's not graphics, but interpreted code code? A violation. No doubt about it. The GPL applies to anything copyrightable that it is applied to. No exceptions exist - and none of your examples are exceptions because there are no such thing as exceptions. Eben Moglen knows the law better than you do.
>At what point do the assets require the rest of the code released under GPL At the moment when you distribute something that uses them. There are no exceptions.
> You can go with "never", "always" or "up to a judge's interpretation". The answer is 'always' - there is no doubt about that, and as it happens - no sane judge would interpret it any other way than 'always'.
> On one side, if you use one of their GPLed libraries, your main app shall be released as GPL as well. Yes. No doubt about it. No exception.
>. But on the other side they want the right to clone proprietary APIs without adhering to the license Cloning an API is not 'linking to a library' and until just a few months ago no court had ever considered it a copyrightable thing. Even then API cloning was held to be fair use - so it's still not an issue, and not a conflict at all. And yes, you are perfectly allowed to clone the API of a GPL'd library without GPL-ing your code, as long as you implement the library yourself.
> Shall APIs have copyright or not? The FSF wants it both ways. No they don't. APIs should not be copyrightable - but whether they are or not has NOTHING to do with linking to/using a GPL'd LIBRARY. The two actions have nothing in common. If you want to create a proprietary API-compatible clone of the GPL'd GNU/readline library - the FSF will not do anything to stop you. You're allowed to do that, but if you use the readline library they implemented then your program must be GPLd as well. You are conflating two things which have nothing in common to create a false narative. All I can interpret is that you must be busy practising for your interview to work as an Oracle Shill.
No, the license say it MUST be GPL - not another license.
You completely fail to understand what GPL-compatible means. Something is under a GPL-compatible license if I am allowed to use it in a GPL program, it never works the other way around - nothing based on GPL code can ever be anything BUT GPL.
The GPL3 isn't a single bit more 'viral' than the GPL2 which Apple had used - so clearly virality had nothing to do with their decision. Apple however is the grand pubahs of walled gardens, hardware lock-downs/lock-ins and patent insanity -things the GPL3 does pursue more strenuously - specifically there are rules in there that states that if your program is meant for a particular device you cannot make it so modified versions cannot run on the same device (AKA the TIVO problem). That is what Apple doesn't like about GPL3 - they can't allow you to make modified versions of something while still preventing you from USING those versions.
No. There is absolutely nothing unclear about how the GPL works. The small number of court cases is not a reason to think it is unclear- it's proof of how clear it is. Almost no cases go to court because as soon as violators are caught they almost always immediately make changes to comply - they don't go to court because the license is so explicitly clear that none of them think they have a chance of winning a defence.
The few cases that were taken to trial all went for the plaintiffs. The only GPL case yet to NOT be instantly won by the plaintiff is the VMware case and that may well change on appeal as the original loss was due to a failure by the plaintiff to prove their code was in the product (suggesting a problem with discovery).
The license is very clear - if you use the code in a program the ENTIRE program must be under the same license. It seems like WIX seriously believed if you share back what you change to upstream you aren't tied to that part. I have my doubts - the company couldn't be this successful AND that incompetent.
>It's funny because a *lot* of people criticised his appointment due to his previous industry appointment Indeed, and 99 out of 100 times - they would be right, nearly all revolving-door candidates end up being terrible. He seems to be the 1/100 exception.
I get the feeling Wheeler is one of those rare people who just does his job as well as he possibly can without much caring who he is doing it for. When he led their trade association he fought for everything they wanted, when he got the job as FCC chairman - he decided to be the best FCC chairman he could be and now he was representing the people as hard as he once represented the ISPs.
How exactly is "You can't sell my information without my permission" NOT a privacy law protection ?
>this is protectionism by the incumbents to prevent competition. Yeah, republicans say this about ALL regulations up to and including antitrust law. It may be true sometimes, but you've been crying this wolf so many times the ony thing sane people can do is assume it's NEVER true.
This goes back way further than the teabaggers. This began way back in 1964. LBJ had recently passed the civil rights act - with great difficulty and through a lot of hard realpolitik in a rare moment when the circumstances allowed it (in many ways - that law may never have happened if Kennedy had lived for though Kennedy had pushed for it -congress wouldn't have gone for it, LBJ could ride on the 'legacy of the lost leader' thing to pull them in). Either way - there was a huge (and expected) backlash - all the dixiecrats departed the democratic party and joined the republicans.
And in this mess came the 1964 Republican nominee for president - running on a platform of anti-civil rights, shouting racial slurs throughout his campaign speeches, bombastic and demagogic and quite crazy with no respect for the democratic process or the constitution, indeed running on nothing but populist ethno-nationalism and flat-out racism. The original Donald Trump mister Barry Goldwater. Goldwater took the republican nomination in a landslide - in part with the help of the Southern dixiecrats who pulled the republican party from the one that ended slavery into the new home for crazy racists (northern republicans remained relatively sane - conservaitve, but not crazy - but were helpless before the onslaught).
Goldwater got his ass handed to him in the election. LBJ trounced him and won a decisive second term in one of the biggest landslides in American election history (though Trump looks set to beat his record for least votes to a major party-candidate ever). In 1955 some 40% of black voters voted republican - they were a big chunk of the religious right. In 1964 it was less than 5% - no sane black man would vote for Goldwater after all. It would be like a black man seeking membership of the KKK and volunteering to be lynched..Thus the 60's ran along and 1968 came around. The republicans had learned some lessons. Shouting ni***** in your speeches pissed of moderate republicans, scared of even the most religious of black voters away. But to keep the dixiecrats they had to be racist... and Nixon appeared on the scene with his 'Southern Strategy' - a way to appease the racists by saying racist things without saying them - so that the moderates didn't run away, and the rest of society couldn't condemn you so easily. The main brains behind it was Nixon's campaign strategist Kevin Phillips - Phillips was actually hired by Trump in this year's campaign but like so many others he didn't last, you can't get Trump to use dog whistles, he loves using foghorns too much.
Either way - that set the stage for republican politics ever since. To quote Philips' own description of what he taught Nixon: "Instead of nigg*r, nigg*r, nigg*r you just say 'law and order' and everybody knows you really mean nigg*er but they can't prove it". Of course Nixon was a disaster as a president but the Southern Strategy was a roaring success. It would keep the hard-right racists in the republican fold without forcing the republican party to go full-crazy, and it worked very welll for decades. It got the republicans three presidential victories in a row in between Reagan and the first Bush and kept Carter to a single term (though he had contributed to that with some mistakes of his own). The democrats didn't get a succesfull counter until Clinton turned them into a center-right party that paid lip-service to liberal ideals with token legislation of no real signfiicance only. Basically, it was the Southern-Strategy done backwards. Clinton's most liberal law ever was giving the vote to Romani people, the rest of his time in the white house included welfare reform and don't-ask-don't-tell (very anti-liberal laws both). Of course Bush II stopped Gore from puling that off again - and ditto defeated Kerry - mostly by expanding the Southern Strategy using some seriously crazy levels of pandering to the religious right. But have you wondered why he had to pander to the religious right ? Because the demographics were shifting - even in
They should just clone python. It's developer base is not *that* far behind java, it is a much nicer language to code in and because the original language is under the LGPL there is no risk of being sued for an alternative implementation (indeed several alternative implementations already exist - ironpython for example).
I daresay that if you tell your shareholders "We are dropping the case because it would be extremely expensive to pursue and the odds of victory are exceedingly slim" then your shareholders don't have a any cause of action to sue you. By not wasting money on a lawsuit you probably can't win you are protecting shareholder value. To sue Oracle for dropping this case now would be akin to suing your fund manager for not investing your retirement savings in lottery tickets. Sure you lost out on the possibility of retiring a multi-millionaire but the odds of that possibility was so astoundingly low that if he had done so you could sue him for 'investing' your retirement savings so recklessly.
Yes, Oracle does treat it's people well - I'll grant them that. I used to say of my time there: "They make you sell your soul, but at least they pay well for it".
False. As an ex-employee of Oracle I can tell you that statement is categorically false. They do use Linux very heavily but employees can choose their own OS - most developers use macbooks and linux desktops, most non-tech staff use Windows.
Green is a bit of a flexible term - many things are green in some ways and not in others. By some measures plastics are green - deforestation would be a LOT further along if plastics hadn't provided a cheaper replacement for wood, on the other hand it is very not green because it isn't biodegradable and kills animals.
In the case of woodburning generators - they are green from a climate change perspective as they are carbon neutral, the carbon they burn are already part of the short-term carbon cycle and if you didn't burn it the bacteria that ate the wood after it died would have released the same amount of CO2, which is exactly balanced with the O2 the tree produced in it's lifetime. It is less green in some other respects (like particulate polution) - though it is much, much greener than coal in those regards.
>Renewables are still mostly more costly than coal,
This is not even generally true anymore. Here in South Africa we have two big coal plants being built (both now several years late and way over budget), and the government is trying hard to get a 15-Billion rand nuclear deal passed (because the president's son owns the biggest local uranium mine - and that's just the start of the corruption). If it goes ahead- that will be 15 years minimum to get any power from, and likely far more overbudget (nuclear always is).
There was a study done here - which compared the cost per kw/h of those plants with wind and solar (our climate is among the best for solar with well over 300 sunny days a year and lots of coastal wind too). At the original quoted prices - with the expected costs of coal/uranium factored in the coal plants came in at around R1.20 per kw/h over their lifetime. Nuclear at about R1.90 - Solar - 75c, wind slightly worse at 95c. Oh and a solar plant with the same capacity as those coal plants can be up in 2 years, to match the nuclear you only need to add another 3 months - and they are usually under-budget.
We don't have much hydro possibility and we're already using what we can (mostly imported from our neighbours), the area is completely geologically dead (so no geothermal) and our tides are tiny (so tidal isn't practical) but we should be investing in what we can do.
But let's assume that solar and wind wouldn't be reliable enough to supply our industrial needs without excessive investment in additional storage tech (and the nicest one - hydro-pumps aren't an option). That still leaves the obvious answer which I wish government would take: give people serious incentives for home solar. Lets get every house off the grid, we distribute the cost (and it's been shown that solar is so economical here that if you BORROW the money to do solar you will still profit because the savings exceed the the interest rates, you can pay back the loan with the savings and have money left over - and that's assuming a worst case scenario where the batteries have to be replaced in just 5 years and the panels in 7 - they've both been way beyond that for some time). If we get all the residential demand off-grid, then the grid ONLY has to worry about supplying industry - which means we no longer need to have shortfalls (coal which provides nearly all our power at the moment can't keep up. We have one active nuclear plant but that only supplies one city). And by distributing the cost so widely the price per taxpayer is hugely reduced and you can optimise the process to build high-demand first.
Then your need for the grid-plants is lower, so you can get rid of half of them and use the savings to upgrade and maintain the other half.
The idea that solar and wind is more expensive is simply not true. Now it may be MORE true in Europe and the USA where, presumably, the climate mandates a greater investment in storage - but it isn't true globally. The real market where they lose is the market for bribing politicians. Big Russian government-owned nuclear companies (whose track record includes the worst nuclear disaster of all time) can afford much bigger bribes than solar companies can.
Lets be fair though - nuclear is only cleanish on the generation part, the supply is a disaster. There is no more destructive form of mining than uranium mining. It even makes coal mines look like nice places to live.
Of course - you aren't counting the millions of people NOT getting serious respiratory diseases from coal (which kills at every step of production - indeed it is the deadliest form of energy by a huge margin and has by far the highest rate of death for people not directly involved anywhere in the production chain) which you no longer have to pay for. Considering that Canada has single payer healthcare - EVERYBODY who does NOT get sick from coal is money in YOUR pocket.
But sure, let's keep coal going, we'll just make the market far - that doesn't just mean gettting rid of all subsidies - it means the costs they've been outsourcing onto the rest of society, they have to pay - and charge their customers. So you have to have a ZERO emision plant, and you'll just have to pay for those scrubbers and (for disposing of the used filters in a sustainable manner) by charging more. It means ZERO coal dust mining operations - we don't even HAVE the tech for that so they'll have to invest in some serious R&D - which they'll be charging back to customers. Most people suggest dealing with this stuff by taxing them- but this is a more efficient way and nobody gets to argue the tax is out of line with the actual cost of the impact (either too low or too high) and there is zero risk that the tax will end up being lost to corrupt politicians or anything BUT cleaning up the mess. So, I favour just forcing them not to outsource their costs. Which is against every principle of a free market anyway as it forces people to bear the costs of a transaction they are not party to and have not consented to.
Now sure, we'll also let solar and wind and hydro pay for whatever costs they impose, by forcing them NOT to impose those costs.
You may find that coal power will cost a shitload more than those - because it's harm factors are so incredibly high.
But unless THAT Is what you're comparing, you are not comparing apples to apples and your argument is bullshit intended to push your personal ideology and not based on any real facts or economics.
Coal ALWAYS costs MUCH more than any other power source - its just that most of the money you spend on it you don't KNOW you're spending on it. Con artistry is not savings.
After eating curry my pants can be fartless for several minutes at a time.
Germany is a seriously tiny country. Yes, yes I know it looks big on the map- that's the mercator projection for you, Iceland looks bigger than France on that same map and the actual place can down in Lake Michigan. So can Germany by the way.
You think there are no health effects within 1000m of a coal plant ? Hell the health effects of coal are far worse, over a much larger area - and of course you get it double because living anywhere within about 50-thousand meters of a coal MINE is seriously hazardous to health as well.
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>The only area where the GPL is clear is statically linked C code, everything else is very open to interpretation
No. It is not.
>Now somebody comes along, takes all the graphics and releases a proprietary game with them.
Absolutely and without any doubt. If the graphics were under the same license as the code, then any other game using them is a derivative work and must also be GPLd. You may be confused because of the REAL scenarios where game code is GPLd but the assets are under a proprietory license (ID software releases for example) but then it's also perfectly cleared. The GPL applies to the code, the proprietary license to the assets.
> but loads them from the web or straight out of your git repository or their fork of your git repository
That would be a violation. Unless he's found a magical way to load them without copying them to disk or memory ? In which case it's still unclear that it wouldn't be a violation. About the only way you could argue it isn't a violation is if the program randomly finds image using something like google-image-search and happened to pull your assets in by random chance - with no particular dependence on those images. A generic program that hit something randomly would probably be deemed fair use.
> What if it's not graphics, but interpreted code code?
A violation. No doubt about it. The GPL applies to anything copyrightable that it is applied to. No exceptions exist - and none of your examples are exceptions because there are no such thing as exceptions. Eben Moglen knows the law better than you do.
>At what point do the assets require the rest of the code released under GPL
At the moment when you distribute something that uses them. There are no exceptions.
> You can go with "never", "always" or "up to a judge's interpretation".
The answer is 'always' - there is no doubt about that, and as it happens - no sane judge would interpret it any other way than 'always'.
> On one side, if you use one of their GPLed libraries, your main app shall be released as GPL as well.
Yes. No doubt about it. No exception.
>. But on the other side they want the right to clone proprietary APIs without adhering to the license
Cloning an API is not 'linking to a library' and until just a few months ago no court had ever considered it a copyrightable thing. Even then API cloning was held to be fair use - so it's still not an issue, and not a conflict at all. And yes, you are perfectly allowed to clone the API of a GPL'd library without GPL-ing your code, as long as you implement the library yourself.
> Shall APIs have copyright or not? The FSF wants it both ways.
No they don't. APIs should not be copyrightable - but whether they are or not has NOTHING to do with linking to/using a GPL'd LIBRARY. The two actions have nothing in common. If you want to create a proprietary API-compatible clone of the GPL'd GNU/readline library - the FSF will not do anything to stop you. You're allowed to do that, but if you use the readline library they implemented then your program must be GPLd as well.
You are conflating two things which have nothing in common to create a false narative.
All I can interpret is that you must be busy practising for your interview to work as an Oracle Shill.
No, the license say it MUST be GPL - not another license.
You completely fail to understand what GPL-compatible means. Something is under a GPL-compatible license if I am allowed to use it in a GPL program, it never works the other way around - nothing based on GPL code can ever be anything BUT GPL.
If you don't check the license on a library BEFORE you use it then you're incompetent at best.
The GPL3 isn't a single bit more 'viral' than the GPL2 which Apple had used - so clearly virality had nothing to do with their decision.
Apple however is the grand pubahs of walled gardens, hardware lock-downs/lock-ins and patent insanity -things the GPL3 does pursue more strenuously - specifically there are rules in there that states that if your program is meant for a particular device you cannot make it so modified versions cannot run on the same device (AKA the TIVO problem).
That is what Apple doesn't like about GPL3 - they can't allow you to make modified versions of something while still preventing you from USING those versions.
No. There is absolutely nothing unclear about how the GPL works. The small number of court cases is not a reason to think it is unclear- it's proof of how clear it is. Almost no cases go to court because as soon as violators are caught they almost always immediately make changes to comply - they don't go to court because the license is so explicitly clear that none of them think they have a chance of winning a defence.
The few cases that were taken to trial all went for the plaintiffs. The only GPL case yet to NOT be instantly won by the plaintiff is the VMware case and that may well change on appeal as the original loss was due to a failure by the plaintiff to prove their code was in the product (suggesting a problem with discovery).
The license is very clear - if you use the code in a program the ENTIRE program must be under the same license. It seems like WIX seriously believed if you share back what you change to upstream you aren't tied to that part. I have my doubts - the company couldn't be this successful AND that incompetent.
Python has never been dual-licensed, and there is no company Oracle can buy.
>It's funny because a *lot* of people criticised his appointment due to his previous industry appointment
Indeed, and 99 out of 100 times - they would be right, nearly all revolving-door candidates end up being terrible. He seems to be the 1/100 exception.
I get the feeling Wheeler is one of those rare people who just does his job as well as he possibly can without much caring who he is doing it for. When he led their trade association he fought for everything they wanted, when he got the job as FCC chairman - he decided to be the best FCC chairman he could be and now he was representing the people as hard as he once represented the ISPs.
Don't forget "charging double for other websites not owned by the ISP to be useful".
How exactly is "You can't sell my information without my permission" NOT a privacy law protection ?
>this is protectionism by the incumbents to prevent competition.
Yeah, republicans say this about ALL regulations up to and including antitrust law. It may be true sometimes, but you've been crying this wolf so many times the ony thing sane people can do is assume it's NEVER true.
This goes back way further than the teabaggers. This began way back in 1964. LBJ had recently passed the civil rights act - with great difficulty and through a lot of hard realpolitik in a rare moment when the circumstances allowed it (in many ways - that law may never have happened if Kennedy had lived for though Kennedy had pushed for it -congress wouldn't have gone for it, LBJ could ride on the 'legacy of the lost leader' thing to pull them in). Either way - there was a huge (and expected) backlash - all the dixiecrats departed the democratic party and joined the republicans.
And in this mess came the 1964 Republican nominee for president - running on a platform of anti-civil rights, shouting racial slurs throughout his campaign speeches, bombastic and demagogic and quite crazy with no respect for the democratic process or the constitution, indeed running on nothing but populist ethno-nationalism and flat-out racism. The original Donald Trump mister Barry Goldwater.
Goldwater took the republican nomination in a landslide - in part with the help of the Southern dixiecrats who pulled the republican party from the one that ended slavery into the new home for crazy racists (northern republicans remained relatively sane - conservaitve, but not crazy - but were helpless before the onslaught).
Goldwater got his ass handed to him in the election. LBJ trounced him and won a decisive second term in one of the biggest landslides in American election history (though Trump looks set to beat his record for least votes to a major party-candidate ever). In 1955 some 40% of black voters voted republican - they were a big chunk of the religious right. In 1964 it was less than 5% - no sane black man would vote for Goldwater after all. It would be like a black man seeking membership of the KKK and volunteering to be lynched. .Thus the 60's ran along and 1968 came around. The republicans had learned some lessons. Shouting ni***** in your speeches pissed of moderate republicans, scared of even the most religious of black voters away. But to keep the dixiecrats they had to be racist... and Nixon appeared on the scene with his 'Southern Strategy' - a way to appease the racists by saying racist things without saying them - so that the moderates didn't run away, and the rest of society couldn't condemn you so easily. The main brains behind it was Nixon's campaign strategist Kevin Phillips - Phillips was actually hired by Trump in this year's campaign but like so many others he didn't last, you can't get Trump to use dog whistles, he loves using foghorns too much.
Either way - that set the stage for republican politics ever since. To quote Philips' own description of what he taught Nixon: "Instead of nigg*r, nigg*r, nigg*r you just say 'law and order' and everybody knows you really mean nigg*er but they can't prove it". Of course Nixon was a disaster as a president but the Southern Strategy was a roaring success. It would keep the hard-right racists in the republican fold without forcing the republican party to go full-crazy, and it worked very welll for decades. It got the republicans three presidential victories in a row in between Reagan and the first Bush and kept Carter to a single term (though he had contributed to that with some mistakes of his own).
The democrats didn't get a succesfull counter until Clinton turned them into a center-right party that paid lip-service to liberal ideals with token legislation of no real signfiicance only. Basically, it was the Southern-Strategy done backwards. Clinton's most liberal law ever was giving the vote to Romani people, the rest of his time in the white house included welfare reform and don't-ask-don't-tell (very anti-liberal laws both). Of course Bush II stopped Gore from puling that off again - and ditto defeated Kerry - mostly by expanding the Southern Strategy using some seriously crazy levels of pandering to the religious right. But have you wondered why he had to pander to the religious right ?
Because the demographics were shifting - even in
They should just clone python. It's developer base is not *that* far behind java, it is a much nicer language to code in and because the original language is under the LGPL there is no risk of being sued for an alternative implementation (indeed several alternative implementations already exist - ironpython for example).
I daresay that if you tell your shareholders "We are dropping the case because it would be extremely expensive to pursue and the odds of victory are exceedingly slim" then your shareholders don't have a any cause of action to sue you. By not wasting money on a lawsuit you probably can't win you are protecting shareholder value.
To sue Oracle for dropping this case now would be akin to suing your fund manager for not investing your retirement savings in lottery tickets. Sure you lost out on the possibility of retiring a multi-millionaire but the odds of that possibility was so astoundingly low that if he had done so you could sue him for 'investing' your retirement savings so recklessly.
Yes, Oracle does treat it's people well - I'll grant them that. I used to say of my time there: "They make you sell your soul, but at least they pay well for it".
Yes, that is the rule as it was when I worked there.
False. As an ex-employee of Oracle I can tell you that statement is categorically false. They do use Linux very heavily but employees can choose their own OS - most developers use macbooks and linux desktops, most non-tech staff use Windows.
I'm an ex-oracle employee. I resigned in protest over this lawsuit when it was first launched.
Green is a bit of a flexible term - many things are green in some ways and not in others. By some measures plastics are green - deforestation would be a LOT further along if plastics hadn't provided a cheaper replacement for wood, on the other hand it is very not green because it isn't biodegradable and kills animals.
In the case of woodburning generators - they are green from a climate change perspective as they are carbon neutral, the carbon they burn are already part of the short-term carbon cycle and if you didn't burn it the bacteria that ate the wood after it died would have released the same amount of CO2, which is exactly balanced with the O2 the tree produced in it's lifetime.
It is less green in some other respects (like particulate polution) - though it is much, much greener than coal in those regards.
>Renewables are still mostly more costly than coal,
This is not even generally true anymore. Here in South Africa we have two big coal plants being built (both now several years late and way over budget), and the government is trying hard to get a 15-Billion rand nuclear deal passed (because the president's son owns the biggest local uranium mine - and that's just the start of the corruption). If it goes ahead- that will be 15 years minimum to get any power from, and likely far more overbudget (nuclear always is).
There was a study done here - which compared the cost per kw/h of those plants with wind and solar (our climate is among the best for solar with well over 300 sunny days a year and lots of coastal wind too). At the original quoted prices - with the expected costs of coal/uranium factored in the coal plants came in at around R1.20 per kw/h over their lifetime. Nuclear at about R1.90 - Solar - 75c, wind slightly worse at 95c. Oh and a solar plant with the same capacity as those coal plants can be up in 2 years, to match the nuclear you only need to add another 3 months - and they are usually under-budget.
We don't have much hydro possibility and we're already using what we can (mostly imported from our neighbours), the area is completely geologically dead (so no geothermal) and our tides are tiny (so tidal isn't practical) but we should be investing in what we can do.
But let's assume that solar and wind wouldn't be reliable enough to supply our industrial needs without excessive investment in additional storage tech (and the nicest one - hydro-pumps aren't an option). That still leaves the obvious answer which I wish government would take: give people serious incentives for home solar. Lets get every house off the grid, we distribute the cost (and it's been shown that solar is so economical here that if you BORROW the money to do solar you will still profit because the savings exceed the the interest rates, you can pay back the loan with the savings and have money left over - and that's assuming a worst case scenario where the batteries have to be replaced in just 5 years and the panels in 7 - they've both been way beyond that for some time). If we get all the residential demand off-grid, then the grid ONLY has to worry about supplying industry - which means we no longer need to have shortfalls (coal which provides nearly all our power at the moment can't keep up. We have one active nuclear plant but that only supplies one city). And by distributing the cost so widely the price per taxpayer is hugely reduced and you can optimise the process to build high-demand first.
Then your need for the grid-plants is lower, so you can get rid of half of them and use the savings to upgrade and maintain the other half.
The idea that solar and wind is more expensive is simply not true. Now it may be MORE true in Europe and the USA where, presumably, the climate mandates a greater investment in storage - but it isn't true globally. The real market where they lose is the market for bribing politicians. Big Russian government-owned nuclear companies (whose track record includes the worst nuclear disaster of all time) can afford much bigger bribes than solar companies can.
Lets be fair though - nuclear is only cleanish on the generation part, the supply is a disaster. There is no more destructive form of mining than uranium mining. It even makes coal mines look like nice places to live.
As somebody who has done both - it is MUCH nicer to live near a nuclear plant.
>Coal don't care about the time of day, it slaughters as many people at midnight as it does at noon...in any time zone.
FTFY
Of course - you aren't counting the millions of people NOT getting serious respiratory diseases from coal (which kills at every step of production - indeed it is the deadliest form of energy by a huge margin and has by far the highest rate of death for people not directly involved anywhere in the production chain) which you no longer have to pay for.
Considering that Canada has single payer healthcare - EVERYBODY who does NOT get sick from coal is money in YOUR pocket.
But sure, let's keep coal going, we'll just make the market far - that doesn't just mean gettting rid of all subsidies - it means the costs they've been outsourcing onto the rest of society, they have to pay - and charge their customers. So you have to have a ZERO emision plant, and you'll just have to pay for those scrubbers and (for disposing of the used filters in a sustainable manner) by charging more. It means ZERO coal dust mining operations - we don't even HAVE the tech for that so they'll have to invest in some serious R&D - which they'll be charging back to customers. Most people suggest dealing with this stuff by taxing them- but this is a more efficient way and nobody gets to argue the tax is out of line with the actual cost of the impact (either too low or too high) and there is zero risk that the tax will end up being lost to corrupt politicians or anything BUT cleaning up the mess. So, I favour just forcing them not to outsource their costs. Which is against every principle of a free market anyway as it forces people to bear the costs of a transaction they are not party to and have not consented to.
Now sure, we'll also let solar and wind and hydro pay for whatever costs they impose, by forcing them NOT to impose those costs.
You may find that coal power will cost a shitload more than those - because it's harm factors are so incredibly high.
But unless THAT Is what you're comparing, you are not comparing apples to apples and your argument is bullshit intended to push your personal ideology and not based on any real facts or economics.
Coal ALWAYS costs MUCH more than any other power source - its just that most of the money you spend on it you don't KNOW you're spending on it. Con artistry is not savings.
After eating curry my pants can be fartless for several minutes at a time.
Germany is a seriously tiny country. Yes, yes I know it looks big on the map- that's the mercator projection for you, Iceland looks bigger than France on that same map and the actual place can down in Lake Michigan. So can Germany by the way.
You think there are no health effects within 1000m of a coal plant ? Hell the health effects of coal are far worse, over a much larger area - and of course you get it double because living anywhere within about 50-thousand meters of a coal MINE is seriously hazardous to health as well.