The usual way of dispatching a lobster is a knife straight in the centre of the brain and cutting forward. Not sure why anyone would want a lobster to be alive when its actually cooked.

And I thought my wife was gullible for nearly falling for a cadburys hamper giveaway scam. But this several orders of gullible worse.

Make it a world wide ban to the age of 80

It’s a pity other platforms, especially social media / video platforms don’t require full disclosure of use of AI. It might allow a lot of AI slop and misinformation to be eradicated, downvoted, or at least call itself out.

I’m laughing that the committee awarded the prize to a Venezuelan. Trump is going to be raging all day - all caps screeching about how he deserved to win, how Maria Machado is a loser, about how many conflicts he resolved etc. His government is going to be striking out against Venezuela (despite the winner being an opponent of the regime), Norway and the Nobel Prize organization. Fox will be on a rage fest too and all his proxies too. I guarantee that we’ll see esteemed members of Nobel getting detained at US borders, being deported etc because Trump is a sore loser little bitch.

Why the fuck should they hold a minute’s silence for this piece of shit anyway. He was an asshole in life, he got shot for his troubles and now the far right are trying to make a martyr of him Horst Wessel style. And that includes some some fellow traveller who happens to be an MEP in this instance.

Code signing offers slight protection from malware but not as you might think. If a company signs an installer, or executable then it tells you it came from them but not what it does. It could still be malicious, or it could be inadvertently bundled with malware in DLLs or scripts and you wouldn’t know. You’re just hoping the company has done its due diligence and you trust them to run.

Microsoft does have an antivirus system on top and fingerprints downloads too and applies some kind of trust score that is better if an exe is signed. There is probably no single mitigation that stops malware infection but apply lots of smaller mitigations in in depth and most people will be safe.

The irony is Microsoft still lets people run files ending with .scr way too easily. Much of the malware on torrent websites is a file ending with .scr knowing the OS will hide the extension, e.g. movie.mp4.scr appears as movie.mp4 in File Explorer and people click through and get infected.

It really should be a 3 level setting, disallow/allow & check/allow. Where the latter option is available but users are strongly advised to apply common sense. Because I would not be surprised if a lot of sideloaded content comes from warez sites and is infested with malware so allowing & checking is still protecting people to some extent.

Some people just don’t appreciate the irony of killing turtles with fish-shaped plastic, what can you do

PLA isn’t food safe in 3d printing mostly because of layers on a print trap foreign material / bacteria and water can also seep into microscopic gaps into infill and it becomes a breeding ground. I doubt it would be useful for anything squeezy but it might be useful for single use forks and other utensils. But paper / wood can do those things already so I don’t see PLA being much use. For sachets I expect the answer is paper with some kind of biodegradable lining which gives a product a shelf life of a few years but does degrade in time.

Also, some “biodegradable” products are only compostable in specialist facilities where it can be shredded and broken down with water / heat / pressure. I think PLA is a bit like that. If you print something out of PLA and stick it out in the garden or even toss it into a compost bin it’ll still be there in 10 years although it might be faded, warped & brittle. Maybe it eventually biodegrades but it’s not quick enough.

I’ve never seen these things before but it does seem like a waste of plastic. Even sachets of sauce shouldn’t be handed out in most circumstances, at least for dine-in food in fast food places - use dispensers and paper cups. I wonder if there is a biodegradable sachet material which has a couple of years shelf life but degrades thereafter.

Their lawsuit will fail for the simple reason they only have to age verify UK citizens, not everyone. But it does go to show how stupid this law actually is. If the UK wanted to block 4chan (for example) to under 18s, then ISPs should provide optional filtering software with every account that can be enabled per device to do it. It would be far more effective than expecting websites around the world to police the UK’s own laws.

I think the issues is that you can’t pick and choose exactly what you want in your new vehicle. You can’t say, get just a simple AM/FM radio and get bluetooth. You buy a package of accessories.

This was a Toyota RAV 4 IIRC and despite the vehicle having no subscription to this thing, it occupied the right hand side of the infotainment system and was prominent in the menus too. I had the car for nearly a month and I played around in the settings but saw no way of getting rid of it.

I don’t live in the US but the last time I rented a car there the UI was festooned with functionality for Sirius XM that couldn’t be removed or hidden. Not small icons, but big fucking chunks of the screen. I find this kind of thing intolerable. It’s one thing to plug a service but if people don’t want it, then hide it away and don’t nag them about it ever again.

Someone should launch a Project Poison which offers information to websites to protect themselves from scrapers and to poison and devalue AIs and companies that ignore their restrictions. I’m sure there are plenty of ways it could be done - nonsense about niche subjects, libelous facts about celebrities and people with money, false attribution for quotes & art, images captioned with things they do not contain, offensive slurs. Just feed AIs with sufficient trash and it will output trash.

Most sane countries leave electoral boundaries to an independent commission

I’m sure when atheists and satanists start proselytising there will be outrage - “we really meant Christians should allowed to bother their co-workers not you guys”

Of course it was piracy but it was friction free piracy. Not just the price which was low but having a really cool webstore and client application. There was nothing that the music industry offered that was remotely comparable in terms of the convenience that allofmp3 offered at the time.

The best Russian music service ever was allofmp3. Sadly long gone but fondly remembered.

It would have been smarter for the UK to mandate that every ISP must provide a family filter for free as part of their service. Something that is optional and can be turned on or off by the account holder but allows parents to set filters (and curfews) if they want. They could even require that ISPs require new signups to affirm if they want it on or off by default so people with families are more likely to start with it enabled.

Even if this guy had served in military intelligence for 4 years he would still be too inexperienced for this role.