Central banks do a lot of useful things, but they don't give currency a value (they can, however manipulate the value others give it by printing it, destroying it, changing interest rates, changing the amount of reserve banks need and the multiple they can lend, etc). What gives a currency value is supply and demand- the fact other people want that currency. Which is also what sets international exchange rates.

There's also the fact you need it to pay taxes, which sets a base amount of demand. But beyond that it's all supply and demand when deciding how much value it has against other currencies or physical objects.

WHich is different from crypto how? You print it from doing large amounts of useless work on a computer that provides no value and is immediately thrown out. Or the new proof of stake algorithms, in which you print it by having previously printed it. I'll take cash, thanks.

"the difference between a story originating from the Guardian or some Russian bot-farm..." But how much difference is there? The Guardian is just a bot farm staffed by humans following a party line. Or they have been humans, though increasingly it seems like they too may be largely bots.

Yes, this is what the government has in mind. The Guardian, BBC and other certified righteous outfits would have to come at the top of searches. Other misinforming broadcasters like GBNews would come at the bottom with the Russian bot farms or not appear at all.

The faked news clips of Trump that the BBC broadcast would be at the top of the searches, and the stories that GBNews carries pointing out how they were faked would not feature at all.

This would be 'Verified Live', and challenging it would be misinformation. It would be sort of like the gender mafia at the BBC, but on a national scale.

And as a late great anti-psych writer once wrote: if you cannot talk about it, you cannot talk about the fact that you cannot talk about it. VPNs would be next, and pretty soon after that it would not be permitted to mention that there are such things. The Great Wall of Britain, Chinese media control with British characteristics. To protect people, or course.

The license fee is taxation tied to supporting one particular broadcaster. Its a government imposed tax on watching live TV from any broadcaster.

If you want an analogy from the cases you cite, it would be if you had to pay a tax on every newspaper purchase, whose proceeds were handed on to the Guardian. And if it were a criminal offence to read any newspaper without paying this tax. Go into a library, and you cannot read the papers without producing a paid permit. Go into a newsagent, and you cannot buy a paper without producing it.

Or it would be like a tax on shopping at any supermarket, whose proceeds went to Tesco. You would have to have a paid supermarket permit to allow you to shop at, for instance, Sainsburys or any other supermarket, and the proceeds would be given to Tesco, and it would be a criminal offence to shop at any supermarket without buying such a permit.

Or, put it another way, you would have to have a paid permit to drive a car, any car. The proceeds would be paid to Ford.

Still strikes you as reasonable? Still think its good value? For who is it good value? Its good value for all the people who like the BBC and would subscribe to it were subscription voluntary. Its good value because the other half of the country, or maybe more, are subsidizing them.

Its the great liberal tradition. Get something we want, then make everyone else pay for it whether they want it or not, call it 'public service xyz', then claim its great value. Because the fee, paid by everyone including all those who do not want or use it, is lower than the fee for, for instance, Sky. Which is only paid by those who want to watch it. So no wonder its cheaper.

Its like if beer from one brewer, every pint, half the cost was paid out of taxation, and they all go around saying what great cheap beer this is. Yes, because the whole country is paying half on every pint drawn, whether they drink it or not.

And then, immune from commercial pressures, the BBC goes around unaccountable and systematically making up fake news, and there is nothing you can do about it, if you want to watch any kind of live TV at all.

A garbage system. No wonder the French have dropped it.

"Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant,"

So... no... AI didn't win a case.

He's also going to have to pay that money back, have all his assets seized to do so (proceeds of crime), and then the tax man is going to be asking "Hey, you earned £2m, right? Where's the tax on that?"

Now that he's been jailed, they have years to unpick it all, file additional charges, seize everything he owned, even take any "gifts" that he gave to friends and family, and build a case for tax fraud to jail him further.

Why would you do that? If you're using it for non-strings, you'd never have used strncpy, you'd have used memcpy. Which is the same thing without the null termination rules of strncpy. You'd never use the str versions unless actually working on strings.

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

Statism creates billionaires.

You need to read The Secret Barrister novels, written by a real criminal-law barrister.

The UK courts are an absolute mess of chaos, that's not the lawyer's or the judges fault.

You would think that with a former-lawyer as the prime minister now it would get sorted, but they've made only token changes to an absolutely nonsensical court-appointment system that operates largely on constant fire-fighting and ill-preparedness and throwing lawyers to the wolves making them run from case to case with little to no preparation or warning.

It's continued because "that's how it's always been done" but the court system outgrew the capacity decades ago.

So does... Starlink own space now?

Maybe if you hadn't sent up countless thousands of satellites without asking anyone but the US, people will give a damn about where they were.

its a noble effort, but you are posting to an environment where everyone here knows that wind+solar+batteries is cheaper than gas or coal, because the wind and the sun are free, and they have no fuel costs. They also know that the only people who are skeptical about this are climate deniers.

These deniers keep talking about something called Net Present Value and claiming that is the correct way to evaluate and compare costs of generating systems. Net Present Value is a concept you will find in all kinds of Corporate Finance textbooks, well, do I need to say more? Its hetero-normative, racist, patriarchal and neo-colonial, and probably Islamophobic and transphobic with it and denies indigenous wisdom. Its on the wrong side of history, like coal, gas and nukes. Of course it pretends that wind+solar+batteries is actually a very expensive technology.

Well it would, wouldn't it?

What's the problem?

All they have to do is build more wind and solar (and batteries). Everyone except a few climate denialists knows that wind+solar+batteries is far cheaper than coal, gas or nuclear and can generate all the electricity anyone could conceivably need from free fuel, the sun and the air.

There is absolutely no need to restrict the installation of data centers, and there is no reason whatever why their power demands should raise prices. In fact, they should lower prices, because they will be at the spearhead of the energy transition, because it will lead to a larger and larger proportion of generation moving away from legacy technology to cheap clean power.

This is so obvious to us all here on Slashdot that its a mystery why the local politicians don't see it too.

If you are using signed and end-to-end encrypted emails, let me tell you:

You're merely using email as a transport mechanism, where ANY OTHER SUCH MECHANISM would suffice and be just as secure.

Including things like Jabber, etc.

Email is utterly monopolised because if you want to send/receive email to the major players... you MUST abide by whatever ridiculous restrictions they put on things (e.g. 10 DNS lookups for SPF, blacklists, domain verification, spam categorisation, etc.) regardless. Even if you're only using it as a communications medium for encrypted, signed comms, you still have to comply.

Email as a protocol needs to die. The stuff we do by email can be done PROPERLY AND BETTER by just basing the same top layers on something else that actually works and does the end-to-end encryption, domain verification, signing, authnetication etc. for you anway).

Bolting shit onto email to make it "work" is no different to how bolting shit onto FTP to make it "secure" was. You still have to deal with NAT traversal, packet-rewriting, etc. and all kinds of other nonsense that come FROM that use of a terrible, inefficient, outdated protocol as the base of your communications.

Email just needs to die.

That's all there is too it.

It was designed for a different era, and makes many, many terrible assumptions, and throws most of them out of the window in the worst possible way at the worst possible time.

Plus, it's built on "honesty", and everything security, or authentication, or even just claiming who you actually are as an email sender are all bolt-ons that don't work to their full extent.

Even with DNSSEC+SPF+TLS+DKIM+greylisting+limiting.... there's still no way to reliably know who can see your email, and that it's secured end-to-end and that people are who they APPEAR to be, and no way to reliably discard email that you don't want to receive or people have no place sending in the first place.

We need to just bin the whole thing. POP3, IMAP, SMTP, the lot.