See, now I’m fine with that. I pay for Netflix and I want what I pay for to stay ad-free. Having an ad-supported tier with no fee in addition to that means that there are options for other people without enshittifying my experience.

That’s a world of difference to what Amazon have done where they’ve shoved ads into the service that I thought I was paying for, and then offered to charge me even more to get my original ad-free service back.

They said wrong answers only, wtf.

When ordering meat or fish; you should be aware that, while much effort has been taken to remove any bone, meat and fish products are nonetheless served alive. You will need to slaughter them yourself. They have been pasteurised at birth, so cooking them first is not recommended, but advised.

This is high art. Kudos on all the talent.

It always seemed weird to me that most companies just discontinued their traditional sugary variety and went diet only, instead of having a diet version and the sugary version just at a higher price.

The death of original Irn Bru is a bit of a tragedy, and I’m not even sure what the point of low sugar Lucozade is supposed to be.

This feels like something you should go tell Google about rather than the rest of us. They’re the ones who have embedded LLM-generated answers to random search queries.

Realistically, they could just move their servers abroad to a country with less problematic copyright rules and wind up their US operations. It would make no difference to the end user, unless ISPs are also ordered to block access. And even then it’d only be a VPN away.

The risk of total data loss is not zero, but it’s also not the likely outcome.

Oh yeah, I’ll just tell my wife that we’re never having sex again because we’ve now got enough kids. I’m sure this will be a healthy and emotionally viable way of strengthening our relationship over the next 30 years or so until the menopause.

A “rival operator” in the sense of route duplication seems utterly pointless. Assuming finite capacity and demand for tunnel crossings, that’ll mean halving the customers for each operator carries, reducing opportunity for economies of scale, increasing complexity for ticketing etc. Unless there’s some suggestion that Eurostar is price gouging (and they’re hardly wildly profitable compared to other operators) it won’t do much.

What we do need is more diverse routes with different destinations (so that not everything is a transfer at Paris or Brussels). There probably is capacity for that, but Eurostar (and other operators who have dipped their toes in) have generally concluded that the demand isn’t there to make the routes sustainable (at any price).

Aye. She’s a bit old for swaddling now (almost 8 months), and she doesn’t seem that bothered by white noise or the like.

In fact she resettles for me super quickly; asleep within a few seconds of me going to her. She just doesn’t stay asleep very long…

If they’re doing it the same as unpaid postage, paying them is still optional as a recipient. They’ll just only give you the item of post if you pay what’s owed.

To send things in the post?

Doner kebab is actually twice removed from the original; British doner kebabs are based on the German doner kebabs created by Germany’s own Turkish population.

The thing about a phall is that it’s not, like, a real dish. It’s the item they put on the menu for pricks who just want to be a hard man and “order the hottest thing on the menu”. It’s just an invitation for the chef to make you something inedible as a punishment for your hubris, but that also means it’s not usually a very nice actual curry.

If you want a very hot curry that is still an actual tasty curry, vindaloo is generally your man.

Vindaloo is based loosely on a Goan dish of the same name, but like all of them the British version bares only a passing resemblance to its authentic relative (which really has more in common with the Bangladeshi style of cooking).

The Government has abdicated its duties; for the they who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains themselves and anxiously hopes for just two things: meat and crumpets.

• Juvenal, 100 AD (mostly)

Realistically Google Search and Google Maps don’t provide anything unique that isn’t provided by competitors, although a) they may provide a superior experience, and b) the competitors are not necessarily much more palatable (that is, Bing Search and Bing Maps are hardly a great ethical improvement).

YouTube is probably the only Google service where this is a genuine monopoly of sorts. That is, content that is on YouTube is not generally available on other platforms, and if you want to watch that content you have to watch it on YouTube. We might all live for the day when all content creators are dual-hosting in PeerTube or the like too, but we’re a long long way from that right now.

Although I write that as someone who only very rarely actually uses YouTube, because largely the content isn’t to my interest. Other than my local football club’s channel, I can’t think of anything on there that I actually seek out.

I wonder what sort of services these are going to be running? If it’s essentially metro then that’s not the worst, but if its intercity/long distance (which you’d think it was, considering the train sets we’re talking about) that’s horendous.

The barristers the CPS employs to bring prosecutions are the same barristers used by the Post Office, using the same courts and the same judges.

That’s actually not entirely true. Although the CPS does engage “free” barristers via chambers for some cases, most CPS prosecutions are handled “in house” by salaried barristers working directly for the CPS.

CPS’s in-house barristers are (as a rough rule) extremely experienced at prosecuting common-or-garden cases, but lack the specialist experience of barristers available to hire via chambers, who they will usually bring in for the more complex prosecutions (or ones involving a specialist area of expertise).

All barristers are only as good as the evidence given to them, though, and one of the real strengths of the CPS barristers is experience in working with the police- both in terms of knowing how to get the best evidence out of them, and knowing a police wild goose chase when they see one. This is the part that really breaks down in cases like the Post Office, where it’s private corporate investigators throwing complex technical evidence over the fence at random barristers who have mostly not worked with them before.

Argh, Microsoft Store? One of the very few stores which remains doggedly impossible to get games running on Linux. Boo to you, Prime Gaming.

once

There are parents who are allowed to use a toilet without being watched literally every time?

Nothing too absurd, but with regularity I’ll put in plant-based dairy free products (because there’s a dairy allergy in the house), but be given the substitute of the dairy version of the same. Cow’s milk intead of oat milk, regular yoghurt instead of soy yoghurt, regular ice cream instead of vegan ice cream, etc.