MouldyCat

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 😟