In the stable repo, but there are backports, testing and unstable repos too, if you want later versions and accept more risk of bugs.

Because that’s a freshwater lake on the inland side with interesting wildlife. Letting the sea in is a big call.

“there was no justification, knowing what he knew, for appointing him as ambassador” (03:22)

I disgree with Ian Hislop there. The justification was pretty obvious: appoint a friend of Jeffrey to work with the friend of Jeffrey that is US president and maybe spare us some of Trump’s strange attacks. It’s not a great justification and probably shouldn’t have been enough, though. The way his appointment insults Epstein’s victims should have been enough to stop it, and the risk of it failing like it has was just a cherry on the cake.

Except they don’t, which is why they’re losing ground. Also, the BBC mission is “to serve all audiences” and “inform, educate and entertain” and not simply to give people whatever junk TV gets the biggest audiences: that’s more ITV/STV and 5.

Why would the BBC, which believes in the benefit of its output, suggest closing itself?

It won’t, but if the primary aim of change is to save money, then it’s the logical conclusion of that argument. This is proof by absurdity that the argument is flawed.

Right, I’m sure the BBC advertising iPlayer is why YouTube is now the second-most-watched “broadcaster” in the UK.

It’s not the whole reason, but it is part of it. The public have been told repeatedly by Auntie that being tracked and studied is fine.

This change in habits has been gradual but inexorable. The reason for it is obvious: because streaming at any convenient time is more convenient than being locked into a broadcaster’s schedule.

But we’re not locked into a broadcaster’s schedule! We have recording devices that now perfectly display any broadcast programme at a later time of our choosing. Maybe you didn’t realise that and I can’t blame you: the BBC haven’t been advertising it regularly for the last 15+ years.

The biggest benefit of streaming is that you can watch things that haven’t been broadcast or that your device didn’t store, but the cost of that is your privacy.

Your privacy objection is bogus. Here is the relevant section of the privacy policy.

That’s not the privacy policy, but it does link to it. It’s a misleading partial summary of some of it. If you click through to the full policy, you’ll find the stuff I quoted.

Read what I said again: we’ll be using gas in 50 years.

We’ll have to wait 50 years to know, but even if we are, it’ll be much much less under any sane government, but it would be more if left to Reform.

Your cherry picked statistics for a windy day at 22:30 are a poor example. Check again at 17:00.

It’s absurd to accuse someone of cherry-picking and then cherry-pick a time when the National Energy System Operator has invited bids for the Demand Flexibility Service because the price of gas-generated electricity is too high.

Maybe have a think about the majority of homes central heating.

A majority, but not a supermajority. Only about 60% of UK homes burn gas for heating despite all the encouragement and inducement since the 1970s in a scandal that makes promotion of diesel cars look like playschool stuff, and a farcical and pathetic target-missing attempt to encourage heat pumps in the last 10 years (target: 600,000 heat pumps per year by 2028, latest number I’ve seen: 91,000 per year and no, that’s not missing a digit).

Oh and we have never been a major importer of Russian gas.

So? Buying gas and thereby driving the market price up is enough to benefit Russia. When you hear a gas boiler roar, it’s helping fund Putin.

You’re just showboating because we’ve had nine Putin-friendly Reform UK policies so far:

1. building more gas turbine power stations
2. cutting stamp duty on the biggest properties
3. pulling out of the European Defence Fund
4. cancelling our human rights act
5. repealing the Equalities Act
6. “scrapping” the BBC
7. stopping the boats (any method that really does it will be basically either impossible or illegal)
8. defending our borders (more insular isolationism is what Putin really loves)
9. deporting illegal migrants (which would quickly become an ICE-style scandal deporting natives who look different and dwarf the Windrush scandal)

What are you talking about? Whose argument should be that? The BBC’s? Why would they say that broadcast is worth user privacy, when they aren’t violating anyone’s privacy?

They might not be violating it, in the sense that they operate within the law, but they do invade your privacy if you use iPlayer by collecting “your name and contact details, your date of birth or financial details […] your email address and age. Device information […] Location information […] Information on your activities outside the BBC […] the articles you read and the programmes you watch.” They use it, among other things “to check if you’re using BBC iPlayer and to keep the licensing database accurate […] to personalise services and give you things more tailored to your tastes […] to show you relevant advertising on another company’s site […] to help us understand what kind of services you might use And sometimes how you might share things with other people g. to recommend things we think might interest you […] to show you advertising when you access a BBC service from outside the UK”. They share it with other companies “When we use other companies to power our services […] When you use another company’s service that connects to us […] When we do collaborative research” (all quotes from the BBC Privacy and Cookies Policy).

I don’t think most viewers realise the broad consent that the BBC demands before it will let you watch iPlayer. Just the privacy section of their terms is 20 screenfuls on my laptop: it’ll be more than that on a smart TV, so it’s obviously going to be “too long: didn’t read” for most people. It’s not an informed choice. Once upon a time, the BBC would have been educating the public about these privacy drawbacks with streaming, not only marketing its own streaming services.

The BBC would say that some broadcast costs are worth more viewer privacy if they cared about public benefit.

It’s even cheaper for the BBC to close what? iPlayer?

No, close the BBC. If the BBC want to say that cost is the main problem with broadcasting, then the next step is to say we close BBC TV entirely (or maybe except for one or two news channels) and save even more. Saying it’s cheaper to close things that deliver public benefit is an absurd argument for them to use.

But the proportion of video content being watched by streaming is increasing; cutting it makes no sense at all. Maybe you meant something else, in which case you should be more precise.

The proportion of video content being watched by streaming is increasing because even the BBC is advertising and marketing streaming over all else. There are numerous adverts/trailers for its programmes shown on its broadcast services which don’t give a time or date of broadcast, but simply say “watch on BBC iPlayer” at the end. Unsurprisingly, if you have something the size of the BBC saying repeatedly to do something, the number of people doing it will increase.

Broadcasts still have value and should be the core of the BBC. It’s not the BSC, after all.

That doesn’t make sense because that would be a really stupid and dangerous line of argument for them. It’s even cheaper for the BBC to close, if that’s the logic they want to pretend they’re using.

The argument should be that the cost of broadcasting is worth the benefit of viewer privacy.

Companies hate broadcasts because they can’t track viewers as easily and gather data on them to use or sell.

… the fact DDG is not doing AI.

They are, unless you opt out.

Also, lots have apps have the main duckduckgo as a search option. I’ve not seen any have the noai as an option.

Now, now. It’s not like the USA has a super-embassy on the Thames and has a government restricting academic freedom(!) /s

Almost as bad is plastic packaging labelled as “recyclable” and when you look, it’s Terracycle, which is a private recycling provider that is almost a scam, with few recycling points on its map and most I’ve tried not existing in reality. Terracycle is short for “terrible recycling”.

Well, why did you think they forced bytedance to sell the US arm to a joint venture controlled by his chums?

More seriously how it s twisted ?

Well, someone descended from migrants hating later migrants is pretty twisted and a bit self-loathing, don’t you think? There’s got to be something wrong to want to change the rules so you wouldn’t have existed if those rules had been in place years earlier.

Also how britain is an immigrant nation ? It s a 2000 year old country. Immigration wasnt even possible in scale 100 year ago because transportation wasnt good enough.

The country of Great Britain is only just over 300 years old, but let’s pretend you meant England, which is just under 1100 years old. Boats have existed for a long time, but you’re right that they weren’t readily available to everyone, so early mass immigration events were often linked to invasions, such as the famous Normans or less famous Dutch (most recently in 1688), or expulsions and exoduses from nearby countries, such as France (Huguenots, who were about 5% of London’s population around 1700 = 30,000, with about as many in Kent) or Flanders (the Strangers). Before England was unified, there were Angles an Vikings from across the North Sea, Saxons and Romans from mainland Europe, Celts from Central Europe before them, and farmers from Spain and Turkey before that. Before that, it gets pretty hazy, but pretty much all “Brits” are descended from a mix of these immigrants.

Proceeds to list zero policies 😀

I listed three. You might like to pretend they’re not policies or something, but Reform put them in their manifesto.

We’re using gas for the next 50 years whether it’s Reform or the Greens. That curries more favour with the US or Qatar than it does Russia. You’re reaching for that to be a “Putin policy”

Really? Are you seriously claiming that Putin doesn’t want the UK buying gas for longer? As that’s the difference between Reform and the others: Reform would build more new gas power stations, prolonging the dependency mistake, while most of the other parties will phase it out more or less quickly.

Scrapping the licence fee…

Not only, but also scrapping the BBC because they believe on-demand TV has replaced it. That’s what they wrote.

And I notice you don’t disagree that Putin would want the UK out of the European Defence Fund.

What would Putin oppose? Let’s see… the top three from Reform’s site:

• stopping the boats (I know, I know)
• defend our borders
• deport illegal migrants

Don’t make me laugh! Why would Putin oppose those? Putin would love all of them, along with anything else that makes the UK more isolated and causes squabbles with its neighbours or diverts funds from NATO-level defence to petty little border patrols. That’s why he’s paid Reform politicians like Nathan Gill so much.

Encroaching crypto-fascism. A perverse desire for control,

Or sometimes it is a real desire to be seen as tough on crime without noticing that the people who want age-verification/identity-document-duplication include some of the biggest criminals.

Age restrictions is usually due to religious voters

On what grounds, and isn’t it just a pretext like here?

Possibly propaganda, but a past government. The funder of that game, “Prevent”, was a scheme started under the ill-fated Cameron government and by 2023, I think that was the Sunak government.

Then again, why shouldn’t people who act as if they’re being radicalised in the game not expect their character to be nearly arrested in the game? It’s extremely twisted if someone from an immigrant nation like the UK starts protesting against immigration, it’s not going to end well and it’s probably better for the game to explain that reality than pretend those protests don’t have a downside.