black_puppydog

Worth pointing out that Germany is having an ongoing battle over our FOIA equivalent, in which a host of people who were bitten badly by it (most notably Jens Spahn) are proposing to allow exactly this kind of prohibitive fee, as well as reducing access to natural persons (so the individual reporter, not the newspaper) and only to people who have a reasonable interest, etc.

Sure, the current form of the law has some issues on the receiving end, but boy is this an obvious move to cover their own corruption better...

Actually your premise is already wrong, although to be fair I'm not sure what bearing that has on the conclusion.

Here in France at least, companies can also be subject to FOIA requests for information pertaining to contracts they have with public entities. E.g. if a city publishes a tender to run tye local bike share program, then the company that gets the contract may have to directly answer (some) requests about that program.

But like I said, not sure if this applies to data centers which are, iiuc, mostly private ventures.

Iain M Banks' Culture series. It's hilarious (not really) how badly these books are mis-read by wannabe tech dictators.

We're regularly getting demonstrations that being at the frontier is no moat at all. "Run open weights locally" was literally on the HN front page a few days ago as a primary concern/competitor for the big US labs. So there's a big and meaningful gap between "not frontier" and "bottom feeder". There's just tons of applications where you don't need "the best" model, especially not tomorrow's best model.

Well, for a techno-utopian perspective, a page called "Low Tech Magazine" might not be the right place to search. :)

Besides, the page linked is actually powered entirely by solar panels, although intentionally not battery backed in this instance.

The article reads like the act of landing the drilling equipment in Greenland was in itself illegal. Not the same as drilling, and ofc IANAL, but still...

That's what's called a life cycle assessment and these are standard in products like this for a long time. If they came out negatively, you can be damn sure that the fossil fuel industry would make us know.

Also no more limit on the cost they can bill you for providing the information. This can easily be 5 figures and isn't known before it's too late.

> price CO2 emissions at the actual cost of sucking the thing back out if the atmosphere

This is the only relevant bit actually. The rest will follow from there. And in principle, at least in Europe, we already have some mechanisms to do this. We'd "just" have to up the prices.

BUT of course with the right wing on the advance, and with them having identified basic physics (i.e. climate change) as a culture war terrain, this keeps being watered down... Oh well... This is why we can't have nice things... like a future...

I've been mapping out shops, their contacts, cuisines (for restaurants), opening hours etc in my area. It's a lot of work and much of the information will actually simply not be available to me without a shop owner. So I'm trying to get some of them to update their own shop information. But I'm really struggling to find good arguments. Small shop owners often have quite stressful days already and taking even five minutes to update some information only makes sense if I can present them with a case that this will help their business.

Does anybody here know of ways that OSM data is used and products that people actually use to find businesses? I have heard rumors that Apple pulls data from OSM every now and again in areas where their own datasets are sparse. But do we have anything more meaningful or more concrete that would work in an area like France where data is not necessarily sparse in Apple's maps? (I'm saying this looking at Google Maps here in southern France where half of the shops that it displays just don't exist anymore for years...)

well, I sure don't get to have access to all the pokémon data even if I ask very nicely, do I? I'd think that's a (related but important) difference

Even people in some French cities don't get it. Here in Toulon (southern France, between Nice and Marseille) it's hard to get the point across. Lack of public transit, lackluster bike infrastructure, and decades of car-first policy have left people without a positive vision. For them it's all just about "how do we get more parking into the city?" and "There are too many traffic jams, we need more lanes."

To an outsider (I lived in Grenoble before) it's so obvious that I joined some mobility associations as soon as I moved here, and I wasn't even politicized about this before, nor was I in any real sense active in the associative milieu.