Instead we’ll build something that needs a subscription, and you can only get the filters from 1st party sources and the filters have a chip that requires you to swap them even if they are not full

Unless the set top box (apple or whoever) has an aerial/satellite /Cable input you still need to use the normal TV to watch standard channels, exposing you to the UI adverts.

I had considered buying an Apple TV, but my Samsung TV does everything I want just with stupid adverts, which I won’t be able to get away from if I have to swap sources to Apple TV and back to live TV

How do you stream TV or watch catch up?

Ford are wrong, and history will prove it.

The Sunday Independent understands the Taoiseach wrote to ministers this weekend insisting social media can no longer be a “hiding place for bullies” or people with “sinister motives” who threaten and incite violence

Mr Harris is especially concerned about the slow response times from some social media companies when they are alerted to malicious material on their platforms.

“I am most concerned about families who flag a post on a school night because of an emerging bullying problem and receive no response before content is reshared and enormous damage is done,” he said.

The Taoiseach noted that while social media companies have increased their efforts to tackle harmful content it is also clear there is “too much violent, untrue, hate-filled and racist” material being used to incite violence.

“It would not be tolerated from any of our newspapers or broadcasters so it cannot continue to be tolerated from multi-billion euro social media companies,” he added.

Mr Harris’s intervention comes in a week when one man was arrested as part of an investigation into a bomb threat on his home and a separate investigation was launched into a death threat made against Mr Harris’s family via Instagram.

Social media companies, like X and Facebook, have been blamed for fanning the flames of violent protests in Ireland and the UK in recent weeks.

Last week, Tánaiste Micheál Martin said the “appalling” violence in the North and across Britain on “mindless, ill-informed stuff” was facilitated by social media platforms, stating Elon Musk’s X is particularly problematic.

Mr Martin said he was “very concerned” about what was happening in Britain and Belfast and the level of violence involved, saying governments have to tackle social media giants, only some of whom are cooperating with nations’ leaders.

‘I think Elon Musk and I think X is problematic; they have a totally different approach in this,” he said.

In his letter to ministers this weekend, Mr Harris said the key aims of his first online safety summit in the coming weeks will be to identify how to better protect children from social media, tackle the spread of misinformation and ensure laws are enforced to ensure online crime is punished.

The Taoiseach said Coimisiún na Meán’s soon-to-be-published Online Safety Code will be “at the vanguard of Ireland and the EU’s attempt to harness the benefits of social media whilst also protecting citizens from harmful content.

“The code of the independent regulator aims to do this to a much higher level than has been seen anywhere else before.

"Put simply, self-regulation from social media companies has failed, a new era is about to begin,” he said.

New figures show Coimisiún na Mean is actively investigating over 116 complaints over alleged illegal content across media platforms.

The powerful regulator is responsible for ensuring social media giants deal with illegal content on their platforms properly - such as credible violent threats, cyberbullying and attempts to stir up hatred against a specific group of people.

Coimisíun na Meán was set up last year by the Government to hold social media companies to account over not taking illegal content seriously.

Users are able to make complaints to the regulator if they suspect content illegal under EU legislation is not being dealt with appropriately on the platforms.

The commission has received nearly 300 queries at its call centre concerning suspected illegal content on social media sites, with 130 complaints which have been escalated further up the chain.

These have included 46 passed on to its user complaints team and 84 received through the European Commission’s AGORA platform, which allows member state digital services co-ordinators to share information on the enforcement of the Digital Services Act (DSA).

Of the escalated complaints, 116 are “open” which mean they have been accepted as valid or are waiting for a decision. Fourteen have been rejected as not valid or incomplete.

The body has not fined anybody under the DSA, but it has the powers to not just fine but prosecute bosses of social media giants personally.

“The era of self-regulation of these companies is well and truly over,” Mr Harris said last week.

“This will be the year in which there will be binding codes, financial sanctions and personal liabilities on social media companies — and that day can’t come quickly enough.”

“If anybody in any social media company is dining out on or thinking that somehow or other Ireland will not be robust in relation to this, they’re about to find out how extraordinarily wrong they just are.”

The regulator declined to comment on how many complaints were from politicians.

“The role of Coimisiún na Meán as Ireland’s digital services co-ordinator is to supervise how online platforms comply with their obligations under the DSA at a systemic level,” said a spokesperson.

“These obligations include acting on reports of illegal content and ensuring that platforms diligently enforce their own rules about what they do or not allow on their services.”

The regulator defines illegal content as: credible violent threats; cyberbullying; threatening or grossly offensive content; threatening, abusive or insulting and likely to stir up hatred against a group of people based on their race, nationality, etc; unsolicited nude images which cause distress; offensive sexual content; intimate images shared without consent; encouragement or information that would help with suicide; child abuse material; encouragement or threat of terrorist activity.

Separately, the Sunday Independent understands the PSNI is co-operating in information sharing with An Garda Síochána about the presence of people from the south at the violent scenes in Belfast last weekend.

The PSNI has more robust laws than gardaí in terms of its oversight and monitoring powers at riots, primarily related to video footage.

Security sources say they expect this will be “helpful” as part of its investigations into member of the far-right suspected of involvement in criminality on both sides of the border.

It has emerged that Irish far-right activists who travelled to Belfast last weekend for an anti-immigration protest were hosted by a loyalist who was arrested in connection with the murders of five Catholics in a sectarian attack.

Narrator: It was microplastics

As a GenX’er I wholly agree!

Indeed! Although I’m sure GPT5 just moved up in schedule

It’s really interesting that these open source models are nearly as powerful as the closed source ones. Meta is really out for blood here. It’s an arms race I hope is beneficial to humanity and not the other thing!

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41589-024-01685-3

A new class of antibiotics is offering real hope of a response to the problem of antimicrobial resistance, hitting bacteria with a dual-pronged assault that’s almost impossible to combat. Called macrolones, the drugs target two bacterial processes simultaneously – and the scientists behind a new study say this makes evolving resistance 100 million times more difficult.

Wow, that’s going to take weeks or even months to sort out.

Thanks, I’ve edited the title. I used the auto generate so the site must have had the typo too!

Just what we need, more microplastics in our soil

Looks like Crowdstrike issued an update that borked all it’s customers, which are many. Fix has been issued now, but it shows how relying on a single company for services can cause major global outages.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Cloudflare, one provider has lots of power in it’s hands and if/when they go down the effect is massive.

Facing the end of the world is neither here or there

Said the judge. I wonder if he’ll remember his words in a few decades when it’s the end of the world?

the researchers deposited carbon derived from cassava plants onto metal surfaces using a low-cost high-temperature biowaste treatment process. Once the carbon bonded to the metal, it had the footprint of graphene, a material consisting of a single layer of carbon atoms. This material filled in the grooves caused by wear, creating graphene-only contact points that protected the metal beneath.

Interesting stuff, not a lubricant in the traditional sense, more of a polish to get surfaces very smooth

I’m astonished that we’ve not spotted these caves before. We’ve had detailed images of the surface for decades.

I can imagine in the future domes being built over these caves to let in light, although getting them sealed and pumped full of air would be a gargantuan task

Thats a good idea, I like that

Nobody wants to come back from the dead poor.

Luckily for the rich, making wealth immortal is more solvable than reversing death.

Estate attorneys are creating trusts aimed at extending wealth until people who get cryonically preserved can be revived, even if it’s hundreds of years later. These revival trusts are an emerging area of law built on a tower of assumptions. Still, they’re being taken seriously enough to attract true believers and merit discussion at industry conferences.

“The idea of cryopreservation has gone from crackpot to merely eccentric,” said Mark House, an estate lawyer who works with Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Alcor Life Extension Foundation, the world’s largest cryonics facility with 1,400 members and about 230 people already frozen. “Now that it’s eccentric, it’s kind of in vogue to be interested in it.”

By one estimate, about 5,500 people are planning for cryogenic preservation. House estimates he’s worked with about 100 such people.

He and others are trying to answer questions that at times seem more like prompts in a philosophy class.

Can money live indefinitely?

Are you dead if your body is cryonically preserved?

Are you considered revived if you have only your brain?

And if you’re revived, are you the same person?

How to Hoard Money

For Steve LeBel, a retired hospital executive in Michigan, the chance to join the approximately 500 people already frozen sounds like a dream come true.

LeBel, 76, is always finding new ways to spend his time, most recently as a writer of a young-adult fantasy novel. He loves living and doesn’t want money to stand in the way of a second chance.

LeBel said he has searched for about a year for a trust model most likely to hold up through centuries.

He plans to put $100,000 in his revival trust, with the rest going to his daughter and her husband and his foundation.

“I really want to figure out a solution, otherwise I’ll be in there with my fingers crossed, hoping there’s money left over, 200 years from now, to pay for the resurrection process,” LeBel said.

Who ‘You’ Really Are

The revival trust is a twist on the dynasty trust, a tool used by ultra-wealthy people who plan to pass wealth down to multiple generations.

Both can help avoid the 40% federal tax on estates worth more than $13.6 million, though investment gains are subject to income tax and trustees charge fees that can be steep. (House requires clients to have at least $500,000 to stash in the trust to ensure that fees don’t drain it.)

The difference is the beneficiaries.

House considers the revived person to be different in the eyes of the law, in part because a person can’t be the beneficiary of their own trusts. When he creates these trusts for clients, the only beneficiary is the revived person.

Trying to reverse a death certificate muddies the legal waters, House said. He names a trust protector—some person or entity that can modify the trust agreement—with the power to determine whether revival has happened.

To Peggy Hoyt, a Florida-based estate planner, the revived person is the same person.

She said trusts need active beneficiaries, so she often stipulates that the client’s family members or cryonic facility will receive money while they’re frozen. Including the cryonic facility or a charity allows for some assurance that the trust will have a beneficiary, even if the client’s heirs die. She also requires clients to explain their personal definition of revival.

“Some people will say they consider revival only if they’re the same person they are today with all their memory intact,” Hoyt said. “Some people are content to say that a human clone would be equivalent of revival. Others said they don’t care if they have a body if their brain is uploaded to a computer.”

Perpetual Trusts

Revival trusts also push the limits of laws against perpetual trusts, which are intended to prevent rich families from hoarding money for generations.

Many state laws restrict trusts’ lifespan to 90 to 100 years. But some states have repealed or extended the rule against perpetuities, to compete for the investment income tax from trusts, said George Bearup, a senior legal trust adviser at Greenleaf Trust.

Arizona, where House lives, now allows trusts to continue for 500 years. In Florida, it’s 1,000 years.

“It started to get people thinking, ‘Well, if I had a trust for 1,000 years, what do I want to do?’” Bearup said. “I think that precipitated some of these people thinking about preserving their body.”

What Could Go Wrong

Much like the prospects of revival, the trust structures are a leap of faith that could go sideways if policies or businesses change. That’s one reason Bearup hasn’t attempted one of these arrangements.

“I would probably run the other direction,” he said. “How do you draft for something that could take place in 1,000 years from now? Who knows what the rules will be?”

Cryonic estate planners are grappling with the potential implications of the Alabama Supreme Court’s ruling in February that frozen embryos are children and subject to the state’s wrongful death law.

An arrangement must account for the emergence of technology and medical procedures not yet invented. The federal government could conceivably outlaw perpetuities. Trusts typically are managed by trust companies or banks, but no one knows if a trustee will still exist when a person is revived.

That’s why flexibility and succession planning for trust managers and protectors is key.

“When you start looking at a multi-century time frame, you can’t have anything static,” House said.

LeBel doesn’t want to take the risk of a bank or trust company as the trustee. He’s working with the board of the Michigan-based Cryonic Institute to try to get that preservation facility to double as a trust company, which he sees as a surer model.

House said he’s been working with Alcor to create trust protector committees that would have new members appointed after a certain number of years. When the original protector named in each arrangement dies, the committee takes over.

The revival trust should specify what happens if some term in the trust fails or if, years from now, scientists figure out it’s impossible to resurrect the dead from a frozen head, said Victoria Haneman, a Creighton University trust and estate professor who studies the tax consequences of revival.

If revival isn’t possible, a court would review the trust. The terms of the trust should include what happens to the money in that scenario, such as naming a charity that could receive the funds, Haneman said.

But who decides that revival isn’t possible?

Rich People, Immortality

Still, the fascination with immortality and its implications is undeniable.

As science improves, more people are seeing cryopreservation as their last great experiment. Tech moguls Jeff Bezos, Sam Altman, Larry Ellison, and Larry Page have pledged hundreds of millions of dollars toward companies trying to defy death and aging.

“I believe the aging process is going to be cured,” LeBel said. “It’s a disease. The technology isn’t there yet, but I can bridge that time gap with cryonics.”