GTA V, out of the box on PC came on 6 (possibly 7, I can't remember and can't be arsed to check) DVDs and took ages to install. I only bought the physical disks because at the time I lived in Australia and it would have taken even longer to download.

Yep, we do need to address the disinformation crisis before we become as bad as the US where people blindly believe the most obvious of lies from Fox, Trump, et al. However this isn't really the way to go about it.

I'm not concerned about the current government, I'm more concerned if someone authoritarian like Farage gets in, laws like this are tailor made to be abused by people like him.

Oh goodie... another person who thinks their credit card is "free".

Clue by four, it's not, you are paying for it but you just don't know it (and will refuse to accept that fact even after learning it).

First things first, when you use your card the merchant has to pay a percentage of that transaction in fees to the banks and payment processors, the EU capped this at 1%, it can easily exceed 5% outside the EU and routinely goes to 3%. 3 cents out of every dollar goes to paying for your card, at least. It's not free and the banks and payment processors are making serious money off it. There are a minimum of 5 parties for every card transaction You -> Your bank -> Payment processor -> Merchant bank -> Merchant. Every middleman is taking a cut for themselves.

You can argue that banning credit card fees is bad because it forces merchants to hide the cost from the consumer (which is how the banks and payment processors like it) but the EU at least capped the fees and this move would further reduce the burden on both merchants and consumers.

Payment processors like Visa, Mastercard and Amex don't want digital currencies for the same reason they're trying to kill cash. They don't get a cut of that transaction and that's wrong to them.

Yes, train your drivers better and have laws that take the bad ones off the road.

That's why the US has a road fatality rate of 14 per 100,000 pop and the UK has 2.6 per 100,000 pop. Your western countries average around 5 per 100,000 pop (Canada is 4.7, Australia 4.5, France 4.9, Germany 3.3) and we're only really beaten by the Nordic nations who are insanely safe. Before you whine, the per mile statistics aren't any better and the only reason the US drives more is because you won't walk to the shops.

So this means not only having standards for getting a license, also a standard for keeping one. This means punishing DUI, distracted driving (read: morons on the phone), et al.

Automated cars won't fix the problem with the US because the problem isn't technological, it's social. Americans feel entitled to drive the way they do, which is dangerously. In Europe, they aren't any better than human drivers, in many cases they're worse.

The big problem is it's easy to make a device that looks for open WIFI networks in order to connect to the mothership. This is made even easier by the fact that a lot of modern WiFi routers allow for WPS, which often lets you connect without having to enter a password. Sure you can disable it on your side... but what about your neighbours.

Short term solution is not to buy devices that have Wifi built in (I'm looking for a new washing machine and it looks like I'm limited to the cheap models), long term solution requires legislation by a large number of countries (erm... this pretty much means it has to be started by the EU, then adopted by everyone else) but much like GDPR they'll fight it every step of the way.

So that means Tiktok is 150% AI slop... Yes the maths was done by AI on that one.

Garbage regulations like IP create these behemoths. If you want freedom, stop regulating monopolies into existence.

Starmer is still better than the alternatives (Farage, Badenoch) but that's not saying much. The alternatives are just that shit.

Labour need to backtrack on the authoritarianism pronto, otherwise we'll be proper fucked the next time a real authoritarian gets in (like Trump bum buddy Farage). Some of the laws they're creating are made to be abused, even though Starmer isn't going to abuse them (he lacks the initiative, drive and imagination for that)

Things like this are why I prefer a wired connection. That and sound quality.

The simple answer to this is "if you want public money, give us parts of your company, otherwise fuck off and die". Also if we capped or outright stopped losses from being used to minimise taxes on profits it would help protect us against reckless billionaires.

Statism creates billionaires.

Although virtually all the parts were probably manufactured in mainland China, and the the bulk of the assembly also done there, I thought the actual design was Taiwanese, not Mainland Chinese.

What was not Taiwanese was an attempt to put a fairly new version of Android together with an outdated application architecture version which causes some incompatibility issues which I am not confident the support organization will be able to deal with.

> Meta doesn't really know how to do anything else with any skill.

They don't know how to do Facebook very well either: it's been pretty much stagnant and enshittified to death for the past 22 years, and it feels like a forum for greying people whose greying friends haven't bothered to move on either, or to get the date of the next annual meeting of the bridge club.

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

one of those companies whose sole purpose seems to be annoying you by slapping their name as a watermark on a generic image you'd like to use in a meme, and force to spend 10 seconds finding somewhere else because you were never going to pay a stupid company to remove their mark on a bad picture you can find everywhere.

I wonder how those companies still exist, let alone make any money.

Anyway, the modern way to use copyrighted photos for free is to ask stable diffusion to regenerate it, because the AI companies have done all the data stealing for you and repackaged the stolen data into "models" you can use for free.