Yes well done, it’s the “if it pays for them” aspect that the news sites were unhappy about, and that the French government said Google should be doing. But Google doesn’t pay websites for summaries it publishes on its search results, and likewise they didn’t pay the news sites to summarise their articles. So for a while, Google News was unavailable in France.

It is really fascinating how religions begin and spread and evolve. I think the fact that no advanced civilisation has appeared without its own religion is a strong indication that religion is a very powerful element in the development of human society. The fact that no two civilisations that arose fully independently of each other had the same religion is pretty clear evidence that not only does the exact content of the religion not matter, but none of the religions that appeared have any real truth to them.

Study of religion and its history is definitely enlightening when one wants to understand the history of human society. It’s a bit of a shame that so many people today still believe that there’s any truth in their particular religion. But I do think that once everyone is on the same page, that study will be a lot more fruitful due to no longer being hindered by religious followers getting upset or reading too much into some scientific finding or other e.g. Christians who are emboldened by any evidence that there actually was a person at that time who heard voices in his head which he took to be God talking to him. No dear, people who hear voices in their head need medical treatment, do not try to look at their lives for guidance about important issues in your own life.

That depends where you keep it surely

err in Europe we use bricks to build houses. A house made out of wood is not a house, it is a shed.

I spent a thousand dollars replacing the cheap compressor in my fridge

So was it worth it? How long ago did you do it and what are the differences you’ve noticed so far?

Yeah I think you’d definitely want a battery. TBH I just threw that question about grow lamps in there to draw attention to how you can not only run low/medium power solar setups in Germany, but you can also grow a couple of weed plants for your own use.

I think Germany might actually be the only country in Europe where you can do that fully legally? I used to think growing your own weed was fully legal in Spain and Portugal, but now after speaking to some of my family who live in Spain, I think it’s really just a grey area and not technically legal at all.

Anyway, I’m not actually trying to grow my own weed or anything like that, I just think it’s a stupid thing to make illegal. So go Germany, we’re all counting on you!

why would you rather people go by bus than by bike or foot? It seems everything is better about safe bike & pedestrian routes - they are healthy, produce less pollution (both noise and fumes), often quicker, safer and more agreeable for residents, not to mention cheaper to maintain.

After rapidly falling behind in the global rush to artificial intelligence, Brussels has a fresh chance at an economic success story in the emerging field of quantum technology. But in a new strategy to be released Wednesday, the EU will warn that promising homegrown quantum tech risks being snatched up to make money abroad as the bloc continues to lag in turning research into “real-market opportunities,” To many, it’s déjà vu. Europe is generally best in class in the research that precedes revolutionary technologies, as it was in artificial intelligence. But the U.S. and China leapfrogged the continent in building the companies to deploy mass-market applications.

My feeling is that the EU has often taken a protectionist approach to the challenges from new tech. That is, the EU will pass legislation to protect existing dominant businesses, even if that is not necessarily in the best interests of Joe Public. I’m thinking of how France banned Google from scraping news sites to show in its news summaries, and also how roadblocks were put in the way of Google maps in order to protect the business models of existing satnav companies such as Garmin and TomTom (namely selling “map packs” for download rather than distributing always-up-to-date map data online).

Those attempts to protect the old guard, the status quo, were unsuccessful, and if anything, encouraged EU companies to stick with old and out-dated business models longer than they should have. So has the EU now learnt that it is a mistake to try to hobble new technology just to protect existing institutions? Some institutions don’t deserve to be saved, no matter how big they are, when technology offers better solutions, be they cheaper, more direct (fewer middlemen), and/or more powerful.

The EU has had its fair share of successful tech startups, so hopefully the EU will now be more willing to embrace the “disruptive” side of modern technology. I genuinely hope so.

That’s neat. Someone told me about inverters you could just plug into a wall socket and have it feed appliances in the house here in Spain, but I just thought they were crazy.

In Germany, can you use the solar panels to directly feed the grow-lamps for a couple of healthy cannabis plants? Is that also permitted?

pleasing about buying a Windows 11 laptop, and immediately replacing Windows

there really is! I just got a new laptop, and it really wanted me to go through the Lose-dows setup wizard crap. That wasn’t so much an MS thing, rather the laptop’s idiot-proofing. For instance, I had to hold the power button for a full 10 seconds to get it to hard power-off, and getting a boot menu so I could boot from USB was not as easy as it could’ve been.

But those initial frustrations were replaced by sheer glee once I did finally get to a linux prompt, and using fdisk was able to nuke all those horrible Win partitions from orbit.

This shouldn’t be limited to games IMO. If it said software instead of games, not only would it appeal to more potential signees, but it would have more chance of being taken seriously by the government and the press. No one really takes video games seriously.

But… but… it has gold-plated connectors 😟

I’ve been playing keyboard & mouse so far so I just tried it with an XBox controller. Doesn’t seem to really support it at all - there weren’t any default bindings for it and while you can assign functions to some of the buttons in the key-bind settings, it doesn’t seem possible to assign anything to analogue inputs such as the sticks and triggers, or even the d-pad.

For some reason, in the thumbnail, it’s much easier to convince my brain that it’s a white and gold dress in shadow. When I expand the image, it’s pretty much impossible for me to see it as anything other than blue & black.

Some paragraphs from the article:

The “Green Claims Directive” would require companies to provide hard facts to back up claims that their products are carbon-neutral, biodegradable or “less polluting.” Businesses would need to submit evidence for environmental claims for approval by independent verifiers—with fines and other penalties for failure to comply.

But the center-right European People’s Party—parliament’s biggest force, which is now pushing to roll back parts of the EU’s green agenda—was not satisfied with the [directive], and asked this week for the commission to withdraw it. EU chief Ursula von der Leyen, who hails from the EPP, has pledged to make life easier for businesses in a bid to re-launch the European economy.

But fellow lawmaker Sandro Gozi, of the centrist Renew group, called the decision “shameful.” “It is unacceptable that the EPP, in tandem with the far-right, is trying to undermine a fundamental piece of legislation to protect European citizens from corporate environmental fraud,” he said.

What a waste of time!

roller skates

old world, which I got for €10 in the GOG sale. I wanted something like the OG civ experience, where you slowly build up your civilisation, creating a network of cities with good transport links, strong agriculture supporting healthy growth, then, when the bloodlust gets too strong to ignore, building small military forces to go out and crush your neighbours.

I’m enjoying myself so far. The game does seem like a more straightforward and casual Civ - the learning curve is so gentle and you don’t feel like you’re overloaded with admin details that you can’t keep track of. Last time I played Civ, it was Civ 6 and it was fun until a rival civilisation plonked a city down right in the middle of one of my own conglomerations. Perfect excuse for kicking some ass, so I assembled a little force and invaded the city to kick it out. Unfortunately you can’t just declare war and get away with it, and there were a lot of side-effects to contend with, such as becoming a pariah on the world stage affecting trade. War was just not economically viable, and while that might be realistic for some time periods, it just wasn’t the game I wanted to play.

So I am happy with old world. It’s pretty much what I wanted so far - but will the simpler mechanics make the game less replayable? It may well do, but I’m enjoying it for now. Above all, what I like about these sorts of games - zero time pressure. I can take as long as I like on each turn, there’s absolutely no rush to decide what to do, I’m free to bimble about and make sure I’ve not forgotten anything.

well, maybe it helps to know that companies don’t actually want their brand name to become a generic term, even if it seems like a sign of immense success. The brand name loses its distinctiveness as a trademark. Essentially, the public starts to perceive the brand name as the name of the thing itself, rather than a specific brand of that thing.

For instance, in the UK, people still say things like, “I’m going to hoover the front room” to mean they’re going to clean it with a vacuum cleaner. Notice that the brand of vacuum cleaner doesn’t actually matter in this case - most people own non-Hoover vacuums, yet will still say, “love, get me the hoover out the cupboard”.

Other brands that this has happened to include Aspirin, Cellophane, Band-Aid.

So maybe we should actually start saying, “I’m going to google this with Qwant”. In principle, we’d be undermining and devaluing the brand.

Definitely not, lol. Nearby countries with fast rail - France, Spain, Germany - would perhaps give a slight bemused smile in the direction of HS2. Those are big countries where high-speed rail makes actual sense - as just one example, from the German town of Karlsruhe right by the border with France, you can take a TGV to Lyon, about 350 miles away. It takes around 5 hours and will probably cost you less than €100.

However all those countries are all too familiar with their own governments mismanaging public works. So they wouldn’t be shocked at the huge sacks of cash that are being tipped into great holes in the ground, and any laughter would be at the idea that this ridiculously unnecessary governmental vanity project is even being built at all.

if they hit you, you’re going underneath, not over the top

I don’t really understand American car categories, such as SUV, but anyway, older models of the Nissan Leaf have done well in the “Vulnerable Road Users” (VRU) part of crash tests, with the most recent model on the Euro NCAP site scoring 71% in the VRU Protection category.

That’s the 2018 model, so quite old. I wouldn’t expect this latest model to perform much worse than that though and I wouldn’t be surprised if it performs even better. Here’s the side view - it doesn’t look as low and angled at the front as the 2018 model, but you can still see that it’s been designed with not killing pedestrians in mind: