What with Trump recently declaring (in his usual completely coherent and not at all deranged manner) that Google Are Bad, the Supreme Court might not necessarily be feeling so keen to help out on this one.

All licence applications cost the same in the UK, regardless of what you apply for (or to be more exact: the cost scales with the size of the venue according to fixed bands related to "business rates" valuations).

Licensing conditions are actually entirely fluid and negotiable between the applicant and the local council, who act as the licensing body. Not only with regards to opening hours, but also to all sorts of weird and wonderful additional terms. In practice when it comes to opening hours, a lot of pubs and bars apply for (and are granted) licenses quite a lot later than their actual intended closing time, as it gives them leeway to open late for special occasions without the need to apply for a temporary extension, and gives flexibility for "lock ins" (i.e. continuing to serve customers after they'd normally have shut up shop).

Yes, "24 hour licensing" means that bars can apply for any licence they want, but they don't need to apply for a full 24 hours if they don't want to; they can apply for any licence terms they like.

They also don't need to open for the full terms of their licence. Just because they've been granted a 4am licence, it doesn't mean they can't still shut up shop at 10:30pm if they like. It's permission to open during those hours, not an obligation.

The UK already has 24 hour drinks licensing in theory, and lots of bars have a late licence. But in practice, very few bars actually open through the night; it turns out that the economics of keeping a bar staffed and open when most of the customers are in bed just doesn't work out.

It's pretty much just nightclubs that make any use of it.

The UK isn't quite that far, but it's absolutely the dominant text messaging and calling app in the UK. Nobody uses the built in Android or Apple tools anymore, and I'm as likely to receive a WhatsApp voice call as an actual phone call these days.

I have Signal on my phone, but I've literally never had a cause to use it; I've simply got no contacts on there.

One of these days someone should write a script that just automatically adds all the Amazon Prime games to your various Epic/GOG/etc. accounts.

I say "someone", because I'm far too lazy to do it.

But anyway, it would take a lot of work out of the job of mindlessly hoarding games I'll never get round to playing.

See, now I'm fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.

That's a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they've shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.

They said wrong answers only, wtf.

When ordering meat or fish; you should be aware that, while much effort has been taken to remove any bone, meat and fish products are nonetheless served alive. You will need to slaughter them yourself. They have been pasteurised at birth, so cooking them first is not recommended, but advised.

This is high art. Kudos on all the talent.

Something between trolling and a wish fulfillment fantasy from Farage here, but the fact that this sort of story isn't even absurd is a prety damning situation for the old Tories.

Most local parties have something in the region of 500 members, the vast majority of whom aren't active canvassers. Losing 48 door knockers would suck, but I'd bet good money that all 48 weren't door knockers.

Losing 48 passive members would be nothing; membership fluctuates by almost that margin for mundane reasons over the course of a few months anyway.

could have been interpreted as an alien abduction (or Satanic ritual abuse).

Why not both?

It always seemed weird to me that most companies just discontinued their traditional sugary variety and went diet only, instead of having a diet version and the sugary version just at a higher price.

The death of original Irn Bru is a bit of a tragedy, and I'm not even sure what the point of low sugar Lucozade is supposed to be.

That'd be a turn up for the books; usually it's the student who gets shafted by the Tories, not the other way around.

This feels like something you should go tell Google about rather than the rest of us. They're the ones who have embedded LLM-generated answers to random search queries.

I am completely satisfied with the idea that all doctors should be career doctors who have dedicated a large part of their life to the study and practice of medicine.

I am not entirely as satisfied with the idea that all politicians should be career politicians who have dedicated a large part of their life to the study and practice of politics.

Parliament would be a much richer and more effective place if it were populated by people from a range of backgrounds and specialisms. I don't think it's a good thing that a sizeable fraction of them all studied the same politics degree at the same two universities.

Old article, recently reposted on The Other Place, but a good long read.

I'm no fan of Wes Streeting, but the Canary is trash and is doing its usual of selectively quoting.

We will go further than New Labour ever did. I want the NHS to form partnerships with the private sector that goes beyond just hospitals. Here’s one example. High street opticians have the staff and equipment to provide basic tests. Meanwhile 220,000 patients have been waiting more than 18 weeks for eye care. Specsavers have welcomed Labour’s plan to use high street opticians to cut waiting lists, saying they stand ready to help.

Personally I'm not enormously bothered about high street opticians taking NHS appointments (within their competency). This is essentially the same model that GPs and dentists already follow (and always have done).

There's plenty to be guarded about, but let's not catastrophise based on half-quoted electioneering material.

Realistically, they could just move their servers abroad to a country with less problematic copyright rules and wind up their US operations. It would make no difference to the end user, unless ISPs are also ordered to block access. And even then it'd only be a VPN away.

The risk of total data loss is not zero, but it's also not the likely outcome.

Oh yeah, I'll just tell my wife that we're never having sex again because we've now got enough kids. I'm sure this will be a healthy and emotionally viable way of strengthening our relationship over the next 30 years or so until the menopause.

That'd be the same Green Party who oppose nuclear energy, whose local politicians oppose solar farms due to NIMBY issues, who opposed HS2...

They talk a good talk, and they've got the branding down, but their actual track record on genuine environmental policies is pretty blotchy.

As a trade union official myself, I'd just like to say that that is some seriously good shit. It's practically a wishlist of all the things I feel would make my job of representing people in distress easier.

I know Unite are critical, but other unions are less so. I'd suggest that Unite's criticisms are more about the strength of the pledges (i.e. how committed Labour are to implementing this stuff quickly) rather than the content of what's being promised. While they could always go further, this is nonetheless a really solid set of reforms.

If anyone is wondering, these aren't (really) new pledges, they're just a voter-friendly glossy repackaging of material that they've already published in greater detail elsewhere. So for anyone saying "this is all so vague, what does it all mean?", you can dive into the full detail at the links below.

The website for all their policies is here:
https://labour.org.uk/missions/

The high-level mini-manifesto is here:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Lets-Get-Britains-Future-Back.pdf

There are specific policy packs on each of their areas too.

The economy:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/Mission-Economy.pdf

Energy:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Make-Britain-a-Clean-Energy-Superpower.pdf

NHS and related:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/Mission-Public-Services.pdf

Crime:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/Mission-Safety.pdf

Education and related:
https://labour.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Mission-breaking-down-barriers.pdf

I think everything in these new "pledges" was already in the policy documents above with the possible exception of the "Border Security Command" thing, which is compatible with what they already announced but with a different name and a slightly different spin. That was announced properly last week, and the press release for it with a bit more detail is here:
https://labour.org.uk/updates/stories/labours-immigration-and-border-policy-stop-small-boats/

A "rival operator" in the sense of route duplication seems utterly pointless. Assuming finite capacity and demand for tunnel crossings, that'll mean halving the customers for each operator carries, reducing opportunity for economies of scale, increasing complexity for ticketing etc. Unless there's some suggestion that Eurostar is price gouging (and they're hardly wildly profitable compared to other operators) it won't do much.

What we do need is more diverse routes with different destinations (so that not everything is a transfer at Paris or Brussels). There probably is capacity for that, but Eurostar (and other operators who have dipped their toes in) have generally concluded that the demand isn't there to make the routes sustainable (at any price).

There are hardly any seats left which haven't selected a Labour candidate at this point. All of the safe seats were done ages ago. The handful that are left vacant are all the absolute no-hopers for Labour where nobody really cares who the candidate is because they're not going to win anyway.

Any defectors hoping to go that route have long since missed the boat. They'd have had to have jumped ship a year or two ago.

The Labour Party has already gone through the process of selecting a candidate for that seat. If she'd defected before that had happened she could have put herself forward for reselection (and there's a different process for that), but that ship has long sailed. The candidate is the candidate, and it's not her.

Well, if she does then Starmer can just kick her out again. He gets to have his cake and eat it that way; all of the embarrassment for Sunak of having an MP cross the floor, and the chance to performatively sack an MP that crosses a line.

A small set-top box (essentially a Steam Deck with the screen, controls and batteries removed, and with components that don't have the space restrictions that come with a mobile device) would still be an interesting proposition. Particularly if they partnered with the main video streaming services to port their apps across, and implemented Chromecast/AirPlay support.

I can see a market for it, as a "Chromecast and Apple TV competitor that also plays all your games".

Quits at the next election. Always an important distinction. No by-election this time, alas.

Aye. She's a bit old for swaddling now (almost 8 months), and she doesn't seem that bothered by white noise or the like.

In fact she resettles for me super quickly; asleep within a few seconds of me going to her. She just doesn't stay asleep very long...

If they're doing it the same as unpaid postage, paying them is still optional as a recipient. They'll just only give you the item of post if you pay what's owed.

To send things in the post?

Doner kebab is actually twice removed from the original; British doner kebabs are based on the German doner kebabs created by Germany's own Turkish population.

The thing about a phall is that it's not, like, a real dish. It's the item they put on the menu for pricks who just want to be a hard man and "order the hottest thing on the menu". It's just an invitation for the chef to make you something inedible as a punishment for your hubris, but that also means it's not usually a very nice actual curry.

If you want a very hot curry that is still an actual tasty curry, vindaloo is generally your man.

Vindaloo is based loosely on a Goan dish of the same name, but like all of them the British version bares only a passing resemblance to its authentic relative (which really has more in common with the Bangladeshi style of cooking).

It's a command that pulls a whole bunch of useful system information and sticks it on one page.

Really, the biggest use of it is for showing other people your system- especially showing off. It's a staple of "look at my system" brag posts.

But to be generous, there are (small) legit use cases for it. If you manage a lot of machines, and you plausibly don't know the basic system information for whatever you happen to be working on in this instant, it's a program that will give you most of what you could want to know in a single command. Yes, 100% of the information could be retrieved just as easily using other standard commands, but having it in a single short command, outputting to a single overview page, formatted to be easily readable at a glance, is no bad thing.

I looked at Dino and another one mentioned here and they look dated. Windows 95 feel with better anti-aliasing, rounder corners, but same colors? Gtk 2 or something?

Looks like a standard GTK4 app to me. Whether or not that is to someone's tastes is obviously subjective, but it uses the same design language as every other GTK app under the sun.

GTK apps always look out of place on Windows though. Looks far more sensible in its native environment (i.e. *nix running GNOME).

The Government has abdicated its duties; for the they who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains themselves and anxiously hopes for just two things: meat and crumpets.

• Juvenal, 100 AD (mostly)

Yes, it's always going to be unfeasible to cross the Atlantic or Pacific by train.

But the vast, vast majority of air journeys taken every day aren't trans-oceanic ones. Most journeys are between destinations within the Americas or within Eurasia and Africa. There are an awful lot of journeys by plane that could be moved to trains if the infrastructure was right.

That seems to be a rather unfair assertion to make. Boeing seems to be unique amongst the big airlines in having these problems; and they're relatively new problems for them too, in the grand scheme of things.

I've never once heard of systemic issues of this sort at Airbus, and it seems lazy to do a "they're all the same!" when this really does seem to be a Boeing problem first and foremost.

Realistically Google Search and Google Maps don't provide anything unique that isn't provided by competitors, although a) they may provide a superior experience, and b) the competitors are not necessarily much more palatable (that is, Bing Search and Bing Maps are hardly a great ethical improvement).

YouTube is probably the only Google service where this is a genuine monopoly of sorts. That is, content that is on YouTube is not generally available on other platforms, and if you want to watch that content you have to watch it on YouTube. We might all live for the day when all content creators are dual-hosting in PeerTube or the like too, but we're a long long way from that right now.

Although I write that as someone who only very rarely actually uses YouTube, because largely the content isn't to my interest. Other than my local football club's channel, I can't think of anything on there that I actually seek out.