here’s the article on the Nasa site: https://www.nasa.gov/missions/mars-science-laboratory/curiosity-rover/nasas-curiosity-rover-catches-stunning-martian-dawn/

edit: direct link to just the panoramic image: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/pia26728-curiosity-captures-dawn-breaking-on-wind-carved-cliffs-.jpg

cattle are conscious beings though

Money is not fictional. Money is a convenience that allows people to trade items that require effort to produce without the problems of barter trading. Money has been invented multiple times in various parts of the world, and its ubiquity is an indication of its utility.

The baseline value of money is human effort. That is not a concrete thing but it is by no means fictional.

If you want to have some carrots for dinner, you can grow them from seed over several weeks and finally harvest them and eat them. For free - well, the seeds have to come from somewhere - but you can allow some carrots to produce flowers and get pollinated and then you have your seeds for free too.

Or you can buy the carrots off someone else who has made the effort to produce them.

Have you not seen Swordfish? I imagine something like that, but with a soldering iron not a keyboard.

a felony murder rule would mean he could be charged for that

I’m by no means an expert, but there is also a more general legal principle of accomplice liability that could apply in such a case: “Accomplice liability is a legal doctrine that holds a person criminally responsible for a crime they did not directly commit but intentionally assisted, encouraged, or facilitated. This liability is often equal to that of the principal offender”.

The article seemed sparse on the details, so I googled it and here’s the key details, taken from a couple of other articles I found:

The teenager was between 15 and 17 when the offences were committed

The Swedish case was also being watched for another reason: whether someone sitting behind a computer could be held responsible for violent crimes physically carried out by somebody else.

The court decided they could. Senior prosecutor Jenny Ostling said that finding could become important as authorities deal with similar cases.

The now-18-year-old is being convicted, among other things, of orchestrating a high-profile knife attack in the Stockholm suburb of Hässelby last year, when another young person within the 764 movement attacked an older man.

He has been jailed for more than 10 years for attempted murder, rape and other violent crimes despite carrying them out from behind a screen.

The 18-year-old, known publicly only as “Chai,” targeted young people online and pressured them into harming themselves and carrying out sexual acts.

Among his victims was a young person in Germany who was harmed so severely that they nearly died. He was also convicted of sexual and violent offences against a teenage girl in Australia.

For older folk, “Good morrow, you jolly japester”

Cool! I miss the CS 1.6 days when you’d have a favorite server or two where you’d play with familiar faces.

yeah lol it does seem to have the same form factor as a standard desktop PC though:

https://www.youtube.com/live/XT7fGf28hJ0?t=2196

That video is the keynote from a couple of days ago by AMD’s Senior Vice President at the Berlin tech event Internationale Funkausstellung, which the article is based on.

I dug it up because I wanted to know more about this line from the article: “The AMD executive gave a brief demonstration of its potential at the event by generating an entire 3D world and flight simulator from a single prompt.”

That was kind of disappointing, all he does is bring out a couple of laptops, one running something that looks like a 3D game and the other a helicopter sim, and which he claims is an “entire 3D world” created locally on the laptop from a single prompt. He only holds them up for a few seconds before they’re gone. TBH I suspect they’re short AI video clips rather than interactive games - jump to 23:00 if you want to see it, but it’s honestly not worth it. (These are not made with the Threadripper Halo though, these are allegedly created on a new HP eBook, with some kind of AMD AI on board, with 192 Gb of unified memory)

Would that be CS 1.6? Can you get your game server to appear in the public list when you do it this way?

those airplane ears and that face … Treble looks like he or she is just about to attack!

It’s important to bear in mind that those pictures show well-off urban people, who were by no means the majority.

During the first half of the 20th Century, even up to the 70s maybe, there was a growing sentiment amongst well-educated people throughout the Islamic world that secular societies like those of Europe and the US would be the way forward for their own countries.

Egypt for instance made great progress towards a more modern society under President Nasser. Before the 2 world wars, Turkey famously had Ataturk. These leaders framed religion as a personal matter while positioning the secular state as the vehicle for modernization, anti-imperialism, and economic progress.

Things were not all sunshine and rainbows of course, and there was terrible inequality and governments tended to be authoritarian. Rather than working tirelessly to foster more fair and open societies, the US and European govts were quite happy to exploit the nascent regimes for economic gain (typically access to oil) and political advantage (over the USSR).

Shitty behavior by US and European govts went a long way to destroying any good reputation and moral standing they may have had in the Middle East. Examples include, but are not limited to, the CIA coup that installed the Shah in the 50s and the 1956 Suez Crisis, where Britain and France held secret meetings with Israel and devised a plot where Israel would attack Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula, giving Britain and France a pretext to intervene militarily as “neutral peacemakers” to secure the canal zone.

personally I don’t think any alcoholic beverage tastes good - at least not the traditional ones like wine, beer, spirits. I do still drink and have done since I was a kid because it does make you feel kind of happy and socialising is easier and more enjoyable. (just two or three drinks though - more than that and it starts having negative effects)

Have you thought about putting your cat in an induced coma, permanently? It’s the best way to be sure they stay out of harm’s way and live long and happy lives.

Hmm. Maybe. How much VRAM you got?

A Frankfurt Airport worker has died of malaria after a rare outbreak led to six employees contracting the serious infection spread by mosquitoes. The Robert Koch Institute - a German federal government agency and research institute for disease control and public health - said malaria in Germany almost exclusively affects long-haul travellers who were infected in malaria-endemic areas, and that malaria transmitted within a German airport is rare. “The lack of a travel history can lead to a delayed diagnosis. A delayed diagnosis increases the risk of a severe course of the diseases,” the institute said. The last case of airport malaria was in 2023 also at Frankfurt Airport, it added.

6 workers getting infected from one plane seems pretty remarkable. Does that mean multiple mosquitos were on it, or just one that bit them all? I suppose they or it could have travelled in the hold, assuming that remains pressurised for the flight.

Us PieFed users can leave (and see, obviously) emoji reactions to posts, and someone has reacted with the vomiting emoji. There’s also 3 party emojis FYI.

Sadly the “Insert Image” feature seems to be broken on PieFed ATM so I can’t show you a screenshot of the wondrous glory you are missing.

aww this reminds me of the time I took my cat to the beach. She was in her cat carrier and as we reached the beach and walked past the “no dogs” sign onto the sand, a lifeguard came running up to us, saying breathlessly, “I’m so sorry but dogs aren’t allowed on the beach!”

I turned the carrier so the lifeguard could see in and said, “OK but she’s a cat”. The surprised and flummoxed look on the lifeguard’s face was priceless, “Oh… well… Oh… I guess that’s OK then”

Admittedly the beach is not a great day out for a cat and I don’t particularly recommend it, but she did enjoy playing in a little rock pool next to us.

There’s always so much money to be made running care homes - children’s homes, nursing homes, halfway homes etc.

All these used to be run completely by the government, but they’ve been moved into the private sector supposedly because that’s the only way to make them provide better service at lower cost. This article is about unregulated children’s home providers, but even ones that are fully legit often fail to provide a good standard of care.

The staff at these privatised institutions always seem to be earning absolute rock-bottom wages, so where is all the money going?

You could try getting collars with just a simple bell on. These make enough noise to prevent one cat sneaking up on the other so at least the younger cat won’t be pouncing on Paxton. It might help defuse the situation.