Not sure that is true? On a quick search, in the UK 3 in 10 had used it for point of sale purchases and 8 in 10 had used it online in 2023-2024. Of course that is used it at least once and does not reflect its actual market share.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1389396/paypal-adoption-in-uk/
You can try a site like justwatch.com to see if the film is available on a streaming sire you could use.
You can also search for rentals online so you can pay for it.
You can look on eBay or similar for cheaper second hand copies.
Or piracy.
Balls go further than sticks. Theyre more aerodynamic for a start.
Dont worry, the Military Industry Complex is all about killing people, so it would be using sticks if it was beneficial.
We live in an era where anyone who is an arsehole can inflict themselves and their hate on other people. This is horrible and I’m very sorry to hear people in the gnome community are having to deal with this.
Its interesting when its not obvious whether someone is on drugs or just isn’t very good at writing clear English. Maybe both? Certainly was a ride!
Yeah its wine/proton and linux together. Wine/Proton efficiently handles translating the Windows programmes API calls into POSIX calls while Linux seems to offer a lower OS overhead so there is more system resource available for the games.
I do think Proton gets a little too much credit. Its wine plus faudio, dxvk and other open source projects combined. Proton is great but it is standing on the shoulders of giants.
This perfectly encapsulates how anti vaxxers and others think. “Ive thought it through and it cantnbebright”. Its incredible how we can have access to vast amounts of information and yet live in an age of gleeful ignorance.
Yeah the poster talking about “coding” is talking a bit of nonsense. “Coding” here is slang for “code blue” which is an American medical euphemism for cardiac arrest or medical emergency. Code blue is partially used to not cause alarm with patients (for example if tanoyed or if people overheard staff) and medical staff are familiar with it because its common in the US system. “Coding” is just a slang that medical staff say to each other and is a quasi medical term; its not an official term and would not be written in peoples notes for example.
And it is not an universal term. In the UK we call a cardiac arrest a cardiac arrest and put out an “arrest call”. It is unambiguous and doesnt fall into a trap of creating other “codes” that become confusing. Similarly we have Trauma Calls for trauma teams and so on.
Some US hospitals apparently use a range of codes like code purple, code white, code gray etc. To my knowledge its not even standardised in the US or often between nearby hospitals (although code blue wouldn’t have other meanings). I wouldn’t be surprised if some US hospitals also don’t use code blue at all anymore because it is unnecessarily ambiguous.
They were talking about CO2 which is what the algae tank is about.
Trees have other benefits around filtering pollutants that affect air quality such as sulphur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide. Also the shading effect reduces ozone accumulation as well as generally helping reduce the urban heat island effect (which in turn reduces the amount of air conditioning needed, even a small amount saves energy and reduces pollution from power stations).
City parks have clean air partly because of tree but also because youre away from roads and buildings so further from car exhausts and chimney stacks. The concentration of pollutants in wide open spaces is lower because the wind can move it around more easily, and there isn’t a pollution source directly near by. Tree and grass do help too.
By far the most effective way of reducing pollution is reducing the sources. Trees are CO2 sinks and would reduce some CO2 if there was massive reforestation globally but that is outweighed by the ongoing CO2 production. The best solution is clean energy sources and getting rid of combustion engines.
I dunno, this seems like a reasonable statement to me? It is wrong to say the supreme courts decision is invalid; of course its valid. The supreme court doesnt make the law, it just interprets it. But its a straw man argument - people are not attacking the supreme court, they’re unhappy with the results of the interpretation of the law as it is apparently written. So the minister “defending” the supreme court is a nonsense misdirection.
Parliament is supreme and can change the law - and that is what’s really disingenuous about this whole thing.
The MPs are pretending like they have no choice and the supreme courts decisions is final. But we’re a parliamentary democracy and labour have a huge majority - they could change the law quickly if they disagree with the supreme courts interpretation. This is not the USA where we need 2/3 majority and this is not the US constituion. Its an act of parliament that can be ammended or even replaced. They do it every day.
The reality is labour dont want to change things because its politically difficult for them. It will split the party and also give the Tories ammunition for their “woke” nonsense. They choose to pretend its out of their hands and a matter for the courts or an argument about the courts, when its a matter for parliament and an argument about the law itself.
I wonder how low it will go. I was tentively planning a holiday trip to New York and another to a conference in Chicago. Both of which are totally off the cards having seen the horror stories of people having their phones searched, refused entry and even being detained for extended periods without justification.
Instead, I think I’m going to finally make a long wished trip to Canada.
I do feel sorry for those working in the US tourism and hospitality industry. It’s hardly well paid work and often filled by new migrants and the young / students. It won’t start recovering until the craziness of ICE abates but it’s the sort of damage that is fast to take place and takes a long time to heal once it’s reversed - and a reversal isn’t even on the cards for the foreseeable future.
You need a whatsapp account still to use a bridge like thjs. The bridges are for Matrix which is an open source messaging network.
Beeper is built using matrix, and is owned by an American for profit company that also owns WordPress. They’re hosting the bridges, and they encrypt your chat but the bridges are vulnerable to service operators like WhatsApp not locking them out.
Personally I am going for Signal (which ia run by an American non profit) and SMS, and completely leaving WhatsApp.
You can’t directly convert the app to make it natively android; android is too different for that. The app is built to use the whole android OS, not just the kernel (which is forked from linux). That means the android app is designed to run on mobile processors (usually ARM), and will be making calls to the android OS for everything.
You can’t repackage it directly as a linux app. However there are emulators and translation layers that cannbebused to run android apps within linux.
Waydroid for example allows android apps to run using android containers in linux. Anbox is also a container approach to running android apps. Both these approaches essentially translate for the android apps, and reduce the overhead asnthey dont have to emulate everything and can directly pass instruction to the linux host system. You can also use full virtualization to emulate an android device and run a whole virtual device. This would have a bit more overhead though.
I’m not aware of tools that can be used to compile android apps from source in to linux apps. It could be done in theory but would be complex due to the degree of translation of android APIs needed. Again compiling into some kind of container approach (I. E. Compile to include anbox or waydroid) might be doable but would bloat the app. I dont think there is the demand for that kink of approach when building in containers into Linux (and Windows) allows direct reuse of the android apks.
We’re still in Europe; its more than fhe EU.
The reality is what youre asking for is very complex - you’re asking for lagless streaming for a desktop. That is running a GUI on remote hardware, and then streaming that video to another computer with low latency so you have no perception of lag in moving the mouseor interaction, and continuous streaming of desktop updates.
There are lots of factors at play that can make it a poor experience.
You can have what you want if:
Its very hard to achieve all those things even when youre creating machines that are dedicated for remote desktop streaming. I have done that in my work with Windows devices and to get good quality streaming we needed dedicated hardware, dedicated software and high quality internet. And even then some of our users had bad experiences.
Most remote servers are definitely not set up to provide what you want. Dedicated software for the task will help as there are lits of tricks that they apply to make a streaming desktop appear latency free versus simpler solutions that just stream the actual desktop.
VNC is not a good solution - its basically just taking screenshots and streaming those to you. It works with fast devices on a local network, but is very limited in your use.
If you really want to solve this look at software optimised for low latency uses such as gaming. For example Moonlight/Sunshine are for game streaming but work with desktops. They are designed to be low latency high quality. But to achieve that you need the video hardware on your server, and the good low latency stable internet connection.
Real world high quality desktop streaming also needs good graphics hardware and optimised tools. It can be achieved with open source software but you need the hardware to to do the heavy lifting.
Wow, I’m a huge fan of Terry Pratchett. What a lovely story - I didn’t realise he was a such a big fan of oblivion. Also the makers of that mod are very kind to have adapted the mod in ways that would help him enjoy the game despite his Alzheimer’s.
I’m not a fan of people applying nationalism to open source software. I get this is a reaction to another country’s nationalism but it really undermines what open source software is all about.
Yea, The Document Foundation is based in Germany. But Libre Office is an international collaborative open source project, with contributors in many countries.
Open source projects dont have a nationality. Even the ones with organisations based in the USA. And if people really are concerned about US based legal orgs then we should be looking at forking the software.
Its already under open source licences and belongs to everyone regardless of nationality.
I work in the NHS and I’m not a fan of these plans. It feels too blunt and unplanned an approach.
A couple of months ago Streeting said no major reform of the NHS, and it’d distract from fixing front line problems. Then he suddenly decided to merge NHS England with the DOH, to slash duplication and save money.
Suddenly now it’s abolish NHS England entirely and also close “100s more health quangos”.
These stories honestly feel more like they’re targeting keeping telegraph and mail voters happy rather than actually fixing the NHS.
Cutting 25000 jobs and closing agencies isn’t fixing the problem: demand is going up and up for health and social care. Either cut demand or increase capacity. But that means unpopular choices like small charges to use GPs, finea for abusing ED or higher taxes, or even a public health insurance system.
Streetings plan sounds bold but its just more tinkering to avoid the actual solutions.
I agree with this although really all Linux distros have to follow US laws to various extents as they are available across borders. Almost all linux distros are international projects with contributors everywhere, but the jurisdiction where the project is hosted is what most matters for the legal side.
We shouldn’t fall into the trap of “nationalising” linux projects too much though - being based somewhere does not mean owned by or controlled by those countries. These are international collaborative projects and not reflections of geopolitics. They still follow open source licensing. However I do share the jurisdiction concerns about the US which have gotten even worse in the last few months.
On my main PC I personally use OpenSuSE which is based in Germany. However I do have a living room PC running Nobara based on Fedor (both US based) - I dont intend to change that at the moment but the current US government behaviour has made me more wary.
Some alternatives: Linux Mint is based in Ireland, and it is derived from Ubuntu, which is based in London. Personally I’m not a fan of Snap or the commerical side of Ubuntu but I’ve previously used Mint and still use it happily on some VMs.
Manjaro is “developed” in Austria, France and Germany according to its site, with a legal entity in Europe, and it’s based off Arch which distrowatch lists as originating in Canada.
Other elements - I use KDE for my desktop which is legally based in Germany too. The GNOME foundation is based in California, USA. Again both are open source collaborative projects so where they are based legally may not matter. Also distros take their code and package it themselves. Plus projects can move and be forked should the need arise.
Personally I’m into the buy European movement in terms of avoiding US companies but at the moment I’m not changing my linux habits. But awareness is important particularly given the US approach to global law and order now.
Distrowatch.com does provide the origin / base country of each distro if people feel more strongly about moving away from US based linux distros.
A well written summary of the finales plot and its flaws. Its full of spoilers in case people haven’t see it yet.
Personally I think Doctor Who needs a long rest and a fresh start if it returns. I’d even suggest a hard reboot.
This current season has looked good but been a mess, and the finale is an incoherent mishmash of ideas and set pieces. There is far too much fan service and far too many ideas being crammed in that it just doesnt make sense.
The show has been in trouble for years. Both Ncuti Gatwa and Jodie Whittaker were good actors ill served by the writing. Peter Capaldi was also a good actor served by uneven writing but the show was still good.
Now its just a mess with convoluted plots, far too much fan service, and an inability to make an over arching season long plot work. Judging by the finale Gatwa leaving was probably unexpected and Billie Piper’s casting seems like a desperate stop gap while RTD decides what to do next (in the 2 year gap already expected because he is making a spin off series this year into next).
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Disney deal comes to an early end and Doctor Who is shelved for years while they decide what to do next.