And what exactly would this competitor hope to achieve? Vast majority of IE users don't use bing, to which it defaults - they use google. Most of mozilla's value to google is search referrals. This wouldn't change in any way if a competitor decided to oust google from mozilla. Most users would just switch default engine to google and keep on trucking.
And since most competitors want the same things as google from FF - minimal power to user, maximum power to the page itself, interface that is as close to their own browser's as possible while being obviously inferior to provide as little differentiation and desire to switch as possible and no actions that would block things like tracking or advertising, I'm having trouble seeing any kind of meaningful threat to google from completely losing control over mozilla. Other than FF starting to look like inferior IE instead of inferior chrome.
It's far worse than that. Google pays for search referrals. It's well known that most people in the world prefer google as their main search, including users of IE which defaults to bing.
In other words, any changes would likely cause most people to switch default search engines back to google, and mozilla wouldn't get any significant sums of money from the competitors. Which is why it's completely dependent on google for funding.
Because vast majority of people do not do this, your actions are akin to the idiot facing the huge tsunami and telling it he doesn't see the issue because he has the surfing board in his hands.
And for last of those many, many years we've seen firefox project made from a distrinctly different browser into inferior google chrome clone. We've seen mozilla abandon several anti tracking and anti advertisement initiatives. We've seen mozilla use funds to create utterly pointless things like mobile OSs obviously designed to fail from the start because they're built specifically to benefit google by being essentially thin clients completely reliant on web services (google's business model).
This is starkly differentiated from days when google clearly didn't exercise its power over mozilla years ago.
When you are paid by an entity, you are called "bought" in real world. Because that means that such an entity effectively has unlimited power in guiding your actions, by simply threatening, or even implying of pulling of funding. Effectively the entity becomes an existential requirement, with unlimited control over the subsidiary.
That is the position in which google and mozilla have been for a while. The only thing that changes is that over last few years, google clearly started using this position. You can see this in most mozilla's actions, ranging from dumbing down their browser interface from clearly differentiated and easily customizable to an inferior clone of google chrome, their abandonment of of various anti tracking and anti advertising initiatives and so on.
To conclude: mozilla is currently completely dependent on google. Most importantly - quite significant salaries of people in charge of mozilla are completely dependent on google. As a result, google actually has more control over mozilla than if it directly owned it, simply because the human drive to "please the guy who pays your big salary" will drive such people to push for changes they might think their "boss" would even remotely approve of. It's a well known business tactic and why certain kind of outsourcing where entity doing outsourcing work is completely dependent on single client is often more efficient than internal entity doing the same work.
I'm rather surprised that in this day and age with all the outsourcing issues someone would even bother arguing otherwise. It would require complete ignorance of reality.
Firefox is already an inferior version of chrome, so you can upgrade to it now if you want. Not because firefox wasn't one, but because it was intentionally made into one over last couple of years.
That is like arguing that if your neighbors business has a client that supplies 90% of revenue and profit and one that supplies 10%, losing the 90% one means that 10% one will step out.
The point is that they effectively made firefox from a very functional and clearly differentiated power user browser into an inferior chrome clone ever since 3.6.x batch. That is indeed selling out.
No one is arguing about whether they need the money or not. The argument is that they sold out for that money.
Actually, slave trade choked down pretty badly after Roman empire collapsed and until colonization period. It existed, but it wasn't as pervasive, as massive amounts of cheap and mobile human labor wasn't needed. There's basically a threshold after which, as Romans discovered, slave revolts and institutionalized pervasive slavery become far too expensive on societal level to control.
Explosion in slavery is usually combined with large empires that need to control wide areas of land so that costs of slavery are smaller than those incurred in trying to get work force needed from free men. Outside those, humans are fairly tribal resulting in slaves being "bred into" tribe population over a couple of generations unless they are significantly ethnically different (distinct uniqueness of slave trade in exceptionally large empires that encompass areas with vastly different looking ethnicities, such as those of colonial age).
As you go into periods and areas where there wasn't a huge empire driving slave trade, it was usually a fairly small phenomenon in comparison to the rest of the population. And while serfdom did impose some limits, Medieval Europe's inhabitants were actually very mobile, often voting with their feet to such extent that local lord would lose power to loss of military power (resulting from reduced tax income, as most soldiers of that time were private mercs, another example of mobility of people in that time - and many of the mercs were freemen, often serfs who chose life of a mercenary over life as a serf).
Vast majority of those were not so much genocide as standard conquering. You have to remember that when you wipe out men and take women as prostitutes and slaves, these women tend to procreate about as much as before. The cold math of procreation is that if you wipe out all the men and bring completely new men from outside, total amount of children will remain roughly the same. And vast majority of genocide in human history has been about killing enemy men and taking their women as slaves. Hell, you'll find references to this even in the bible and quran.
US was an exception in that it didn't do that. Instead it actually went for genocide for all ages and sexes. That is fairly rare in human history.
Japan is a group of islands. It has a very long shoreline. The problem is both in the fractured electrical grid and the fact that off-shore wind is still a nonstarter, as German example has already shown.
They do have a single floating offshore wind turbine in front of Fukushima though afaik. It's more about politics and PR that any meaningful power generation though.
"Leads the world in development" != technology exists.
And in reality, we have a far better chance of getting functional materials that can make gearbox survive the wind turbine load at high speed, which would actually make wind turbine sorta functional as base load, as it wouldn't have to shift to neutral the moment wind gets too strong. Which is the main problem with wind farms at the sea.
Building batteries for gigawatt-hours of chemical batterycapacity is by no means a functional solution.
Heck storage in general isn't that grand even though we have a far more convenient solution already available (though not in land-limited Japan). But it has been tried, among other places in Germany. They pump the water up into reservoir during high production phase, and extract the energy back by pushing it back through a turbine when energy is needed. Problem is, while it's a somewhat functional solution, it's exceptionally inefficient and very limited in capacity.
So no, any argument about wind power as base load anywhere is a lie for foreseeable future.
1. Offshore wind cannot provide base load without investments that would likely bankrupt the country. If it can and you have means to do so, you should patent these asap. You are going to be a guaranteed multi-millionaire. Since you are posting here about it, I'm assuming that you're just regurgitating same naive talking points that much of green movement likes to use. 2. Doubling something marginal isn't hard. Japan could have increased it ten times and it would have still remained a marginal power generation source. 3. Power plant was not critically damage by the earthquake. This was very clearly outlined in the reports of several international watchdogs. If it wasn't hit by tsunami, the backup generators would have continued to supply the power to the cooling systems and current situation would have never occurred. Problem was that seawall shielding the plant itself was about 1/4 of tsunami's height, as no one in the region was ready for what happened. Which considering the damage to the rest of the area is pretty obvious. Tsunami came and flooded the diesel generators feeding power to cooling systems of the reactor, stopping them and causing the eventual partial meltdown. Without tsunami, generators would have happily continued to supply cooling systems with power, and while it would have likely taken a while until reactor could be restarted, it did not inflict critical damage on it. To reiterate, this is the reactor that was designed to withstand magnitude 7. It took magnitude 9. It survived it just fine. It took the tsunami flooding the generator rooms to cause the meltdown.
It would be really nice if people would stop regurgitating same half truths and lies all over and over again.
And let us remind ourselves of another fact: even without Fukushima, the combination of that earthquake and tsunami was among the most if not the most damaging natural disasters to ever hit Japan.
I'm yet to see any evidence of this "latent solar, wind, geothermal and conservation potential" not being thoroughly exhausted as far as meaningful numbers go. Japanese went through amazing campaign of conservation after the tsunami and shutdown of all nuclear plants in the country in the middle of very hot summer after it was made "cool" (in Japanese way) to conserve energy. It still wasn't enough to prevent occasional brownouts.Fact is, you need base power, especially when you're industrialized country with a lot of heavy industry. There's not much conservation potential beyond what was done back then. Wind and solar offer zero solution here.
The location is appropriate as long as plant is up to date and not a 60s design. If anything it proved just how safe plants are, that the plant designed for magnitude 7 took a hit from magnitude 9 which is a hundred times stronger and still survived it with no problems. It took a followup tsunami that killed over 30.000 and devastated a huge area to kill it.
I do see the typical "industry is BAAAAAD" claim here repeated a lot though as that is the main source of "nuclear dependency". LDP was specifically responsible for industrializing Japan, uplifting it to its current level of wealth from poor post war state. Calling this "bad" is nothing short of treason against humanity.
Reality is, Japan has a grand two options for sufficient base power generation. Burning coal/carbohydrates or nuclear. It has unsuitable geography for hydro, geothermal could increase earthquake risk even further which is a far greater risk to human health than nuclear and other options are too marginal in terms of power produced. And right now, with nuclear being off the table because of hysteria, they're stuck with coal. A lot of which is older coal plants that emit significant SO2 and NOx, which is far more dangerous to human health in short term than Fukushima. Not to even speak of long term greenhouse gas CO2 consequences.
Yes, it's kind of like the barter that fisherman and fish have.
Seriously stop regurgitating the same spindoctoring bullshit. Just because fisherman needs an attractive bait doesn't mean that he's bartering with the fish.
Customer is the entity that drives your business by paying for services you provide. Product is the service you provide.
Views by the people who download are the service that is being provided to advertisers who pay. That is the business model. No amount of spindoctoring will change that.
America is a colony where indigenous people were all but wiped out. Using that as an example of an average country is like using a hooker dying of AIDS as an example of average woman.
Sweden hasn't been genetically and socially homogenous in a long time. They have Sami minority in the north, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian across the country and they have been taking refugees to the point where they now have about 10% of nation formed from first and second generation migrants from various conflicts across the globe.
That's not what Sweden does though. It does jail people for drug offenses and it doesn't go tough on driving offenses. Please don't attach your preferences to someone else's success.
Slashdot Mirror
And what exactly would this competitor hope to achieve? Vast majority of IE users don't use bing, to which it defaults - they use google. Most of mozilla's value to google is search referrals. This wouldn't change in any way if a competitor decided to oust google from mozilla. Most users would just switch default engine to google and keep on trucking.
And since most competitors want the same things as google from FF - minimal power to user, maximum power to the page itself, interface that is as close to their own browser's as possible while being obviously inferior to provide as little differentiation and desire to switch as possible and no actions that would block things like tracking or advertising, I'm having trouble seeing any kind of meaningful threat to google from completely losing control over mozilla. Other than FF starting to look like inferior IE instead of inferior chrome.
It's far worse than that. Google pays for search referrals. It's well known that most people in the world prefer google as their main search, including users of IE which defaults to bing.
In other words, any changes would likely cause most people to switch default search engines back to google, and mozilla wouldn't get any significant sums of money from the competitors. Which is why it's completely dependent on google for funding.
Because vast majority of people do not do this, your actions are akin to the idiot facing the huge tsunami and telling it he doesn't see the issue because he has the surfing board in his hands.
For quite a long while the only reason to use FF has been extensions. Even IE is better in vanilla state.
And for last of those many, many years we've seen firefox project made from a distrinctly different browser into inferior google chrome clone. We've seen mozilla abandon several anti tracking and anti advertisement initiatives. We've seen mozilla use funds to create utterly pointless things like mobile OSs obviously designed to fail from the start because they're built specifically to benefit google by being essentially thin clients completely reliant on web services (google's business model).
This is starkly differentiated from days when google clearly didn't exercise its power over mozilla years ago.
When you are paid by an entity, you are called "bought" in real world. Because that means that such an entity effectively has unlimited power in guiding your actions, by simply threatening, or even implying of pulling of funding. Effectively the entity becomes an existential requirement, with unlimited control over the subsidiary.
That is the position in which google and mozilla have been for a while. The only thing that changes is that over last few years, google clearly started using this position. You can see this in most mozilla's actions, ranging from dumbing down their browser interface from clearly differentiated and easily customizable to an inferior clone of google chrome, their abandonment of of various anti tracking and anti advertising initiatives and so on.
To conclude: mozilla is currently completely dependent on google. Most importantly - quite significant salaries of people in charge of mozilla are completely dependent on google. As a result, google actually has more control over mozilla than if it directly owned it, simply because the human drive to "please the guy who pays your big salary" will drive such people to push for changes they might think their "boss" would even remotely approve of. It's a well known business tactic and why certain kind of outsourcing where entity doing outsourcing work is completely dependent on single client is often more efficient than internal entity doing the same work.
I'm rather surprised that in this day and age with all the outsourcing issues someone would even bother arguing otherwise. It would require complete ignorance of reality.
Firefox is already an inferior version of chrome, so you can upgrade to it now if you want. Not because firefox wasn't one, but because it was intentionally made into one over last couple of years.
That is like arguing that if your neighbors business has a client that supplies 90% of revenue and profit and one that supplies 10%, losing the 90% one means that 10% one will step out.
In real world, that usually means bankruptcy.
This shows that they are in fact completely "dependent" on google.
Biggest "independent" (of major multinationals) browser right now is probably opera.
The point is that they effectively made firefox from a very functional and clearly differentiated power user browser into an inferior chrome clone ever since 3.6.x batch. That is indeed selling out.
No one is arguing about whether they need the money or not. The argument is that they sold out for that money.
Actually, slave trade choked down pretty badly after Roman empire collapsed and until colonization period. It existed, but it wasn't as pervasive, as massive amounts of cheap and mobile human labor wasn't needed. There's basically a threshold after which, as Romans discovered, slave revolts and institutionalized pervasive slavery become far too expensive on societal level to control.
Explosion in slavery is usually combined with large empires that need to control wide areas of land so that costs of slavery are smaller than those incurred in trying to get work force needed from free men. Outside those, humans are fairly tribal resulting in slaves being "bred into" tribe population over a couple of generations unless they are significantly ethnically different (distinct uniqueness of slave trade in exceptionally large empires that encompass areas with vastly different looking ethnicities, such as those of colonial age).
As you go into periods and areas where there wasn't a huge empire driving slave trade, it was usually a fairly small phenomenon in comparison to the rest of the population. And while serfdom did impose some limits, Medieval Europe's inhabitants were actually very mobile, often voting with their feet to such extent that local lord would lose power to loss of military power (resulting from reduced tax income, as most soldiers of that time were private mercs, another example of mobility of people in that time - and many of the mercs were freemen, often serfs who chose life of a mercenary over life as a serf).
At least samsung pays for that trolling, unlike some competitors :D
In games, cosmetics that are not tested on in-game animals are considered unethical!
Vast majority of those were not so much genocide as standard conquering. You have to remember that when you wipe out men and take women as prostitutes and slaves, these women tend to procreate about as much as before. The cold math of procreation is that if you wipe out all the men and bring completely new men from outside, total amount of children will remain roughly the same. And vast majority of genocide in human history has been about killing enemy men and taking their women as slaves. Hell, you'll find references to this even in the bible and quran.
US was an exception in that it didn't do that. Instead it actually went for genocide for all ages and sexes. That is fairly rare in human history.
Japan is a group of islands. It has a very long shoreline. The problem is both in the fractured electrical grid and the fact that off-shore wind is still a nonstarter, as German example has already shown.
They do have a single floating offshore wind turbine in front of Fukushima though afaik. It's more about politics and PR that any meaningful power generation though.
Was supposed to say "any more hydro". Japan, like most industrialized nations has pretty much tapped everything they can in terms of hydro by now.
"Leads the world in development" != technology exists.
And in reality, we have a far better chance of getting functional materials that can make gearbox survive the wind turbine load at high speed, which would actually make wind turbine sorta functional as base load, as it wouldn't have to shift to neutral the moment wind gets too strong. Which is the main problem with wind farms at the sea.
Building batteries for gigawatt-hours of chemical batterycapacity is by no means a functional solution.
Heck storage in general isn't that grand even though we have a far more convenient solution already available (though not in land-limited Japan). But it has been tried, among other places in Germany. They pump the water up into reservoir during high production phase, and extract the energy back by pushing it back through a turbine when energy is needed. Problem is, while it's a somewhat functional solution, it's exceptionally inefficient and very limited in capacity.
So no, any argument about wind power as base load anywhere is a lie for foreseeable future.
1. Offshore wind cannot provide base load without investments that would likely bankrupt the country. If it can and you have means to do so, you should patent these asap. You are going to be a guaranteed multi-millionaire. Since you are posting here about it, I'm assuming that you're just regurgitating same naive talking points that much of green movement likes to use.
2. Doubling something marginal isn't hard. Japan could have increased it ten times and it would have still remained a marginal power generation source.
3. Power plant was not critically damage by the earthquake. This was very clearly outlined in the reports of several international watchdogs. If it wasn't hit by tsunami, the backup generators would have continued to supply the power to the cooling systems and current situation would have never occurred. Problem was that seawall shielding the plant itself was about 1/4 of tsunami's height, as no one in the region was ready for what happened. Which considering the damage to the rest of the area is pretty obvious.
Tsunami came and flooded the diesel generators feeding power to cooling systems of the reactor, stopping them and causing the eventual partial meltdown. Without tsunami, generators would have happily continued to supply cooling systems with power, and while it would have likely taken a while until reactor could be restarted, it did not inflict critical damage on it.
To reiterate, this is the reactor that was designed to withstand magnitude 7. It took magnitude 9. It survived it just fine. It took the tsunami flooding the generator rooms to cause the meltdown.
It would be really nice if people would stop regurgitating same half truths and lies all over and over again.
And let us remind ourselves of another fact: even without Fukushima, the combination of that earthquake and tsunami was among the most if not the most damaging natural disasters to ever hit Japan.
I'm yet to see any evidence of this "latent solar, wind, geothermal and conservation potential" not being thoroughly exhausted as far as meaningful numbers go. Japanese went through amazing campaign of conservation after the tsunami and shutdown of all nuclear plants in the country in the middle of very hot summer after it was made "cool" (in Japanese way) to conserve energy. It still wasn't enough to prevent occasional brownouts.Fact is, you need base power, especially when you're industrialized country with a lot of heavy industry. There's not much conservation potential beyond what was done back then. Wind and solar offer zero solution here.
The location is appropriate as long as plant is up to date and not a 60s design. If anything it proved just how safe plants are, that the plant designed for magnitude 7 took a hit from magnitude 9 which is a hundred times stronger and still survived it with no problems. It took a followup tsunami that killed over 30.000 and devastated a huge area to kill it.
I do see the typical "industry is BAAAAAD" claim here repeated a lot though as that is the main source of "nuclear dependency". LDP was specifically responsible for industrializing Japan, uplifting it to its current level of wealth from poor post war state. Calling this "bad" is nothing short of treason against humanity.
Reality is, Japan has a grand two options for sufficient base power generation. Burning coal/carbohydrates or nuclear. It has unsuitable geography for hydro, geothermal could increase earthquake risk even further which is a far greater risk to human health than nuclear and other options are too marginal in terms of power produced. And right now, with nuclear being off the table because of hysteria, they're stuck with coal. A lot of which is older coal plants that emit significant SO2 and NOx, which is far more dangerous to human health in short term than Fukushima. Not to even speak of long term greenhouse gas CO2 consequences.
Yes, it's kind of like the barter that fisherman and fish have.
Seriously stop regurgitating the same spindoctoring bullshit. Just because fisherman needs an attractive bait doesn't mean that he's bartering with the fish.
Opt in for DEVELOPER. People who download get boned and don't get asked if they want a condom or not.
Customer is the entity that drives your business by paying for services you provide. Product is the service you provide.
Views by the people who download are the service that is being provided to advertisers who pay. That is the business model. No amount of spindoctoring will change that.
America is a colony where indigenous people were all but wiped out. Using that as an example of an average country is like using a hooker dying of AIDS as an example of average woman.
Sweden hasn't been genetically and socially homogenous in a long time. They have Sami minority in the north, Finnish, Danish and Norwegian across the country and they have been taking refugees to the point where they now have about 10% of nation formed from first and second generation migrants from various conflicts across the globe.
That's not what Sweden does though. It does jail people for drug offenses and it doesn't go tough on driving offenses. Please don't attach your preferences to someone else's success.