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The second-generation of the best-selling MG4 has been revealed. But despite being Britain's best-selling affordable EV for two years, drivers in the UK won't be able to get one.

Thy are set to open this year

In an op-ed for MIT Technology Review, authors Carsten T. Charlesworth, Henry T. Greely, and Hiromitsu Nakauchi make the case for human "bodyoids" that could reduce animal testing, improve drug development, and alleviate organ shortages: Why do we hear about medical breakthroughs in mice, but rarely see them translate into cures for human disease? Why do so few drugs that enter clinical trials receive regulatory approval? And why is the waiting list for organ transplantation so long? These challenges stem in large part from a common root cause: a severe shortage of ethically sourced human bodies. It may be disturbing to characterize human bodies in such commodifying terms, but the unavoidable reality is that human biological materials are an essential commodity in medicine, and persistent shortages of these materials create a major bottleneck to progress. This imbalance between supply and demand is the underlying cause of the organ shortage crisis, with more than 100,000 patients currently waiting for a solid organ transplant in the US alone. It also forces us to rely heavily on animals in medical research, a practice that can't replicate major aspects of human physiology and makes it necessary to inflict harm on sentient creatures. In addition, the safety and efficacy of any experimental drug must still be confirmed in clinical trials on living human bodies. These costly trials risk harm to patients, can take a decade or longer to complete, and make it through to approval less than 15% of the time. There might be a way to get out of this moral and scientific deadlock. Recent advances in biotechnology now provide a pathway to producing living human bodies without the neural components that allow us to think, be aware, or feel pain. Many will find this possibility disturbing, but if researchers and policymakers can find a way to pull these technologies together, we may one day be able to create "spare" bodies, both human and nonhuman. These could revolutionize medical research and drug development, greatly reducing the need for animal testing, rescuing many people from organ transplant lists, and allowing us to produce more effective drugs and treatments. All without crossing most people's ethical lines. Although it may seem like science fiction, recent technological progress has pushed this concept into the realm of plausibility. Pluripotent stem cells, one of the earliest cell types to form during development, can give rise to every type of cell in the adult body. Recently, researchers have used these stem cells to create structures that seem to mimic the early development of actual human embryos. At the same time, artificial uterus technology is rapidly advancing, and other pathways may be opening to allow for the development of fetuses outside of the body. Such technologies, together with established genetic techniques to inhibit brain development, make it possible to envision the creation of "bodyoids" -- a potentially unlimited source of human bodies, developed entirely outside of a human body from stem cells, that lack sentience or the ability to feel pain.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Famed Australian media and gambling tycoon James Packer has splurged a whopping $174million on seven bedroom, three-storey mansion in Los Angeles.

If you need a unique ID, UUIDs provide a variety of options. It's worth noting that variants 1, 2, and 7 all incorporate a timestamp into the UUID. In the case of variant 7, this has the benefit of making the UUID sortable, which can be convenient in many cases (v1/v2 incorporate a MAC address which means that they're sortable if generated with the same NIC).

I bring this up because Dave inherited some code written by a "guru". Said guru was working before UUIDv7 was a standard, but also didn't have any problems that required sortable UUIDs, and thus had no real reason to use timestamp based UUIDs. They just needed some random identifier and, despite using C#, didn't use the UUID functions built in to the framework. No, they instead did this:

string uniqueID = String.Format("{0:d9}", (DateTime.UtcNow.Ticks / 10) % 1000000000);

A Tick is 100 nanoseconds. We divide that by ten, mod by a billion, and then call that our unique identifier.

This is, as you might guess, not unique. First there's the possibility of timestamp collisions: generating two of these too close together in time would collide. Second, the math is just complete nonsense. We divide Ticks by ten (converting hundreds of nanoseconds into thousands of nanoseconds), then we mod by a billion. So every thousand seconds we loop and have a risk of collision again?

Maybe, maybe, these are short-lived IDs and a thousand seconds is plenty of time. But even if that's true, none of this is a good way to do that.

I suppose the saving grace is they use UtcNow and not Now, thus avoiding situations where collisions also happen because of time zones?

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The clip was filmed in Legian, a popular tourist area located between the bustling hive of Kuta to the south and the less crowded Seminyak area to the north with its well known surf beach.

ALISON BOSHOFF: A date has been set at last, and numerous sources suggest that the wedding of the year, nay, the century, will be a romantic affair in Venice in June.

It started with humble beginnings and has grown to many people's favourite place

A Phoenix elementary school teacher was arrested after he was accused of relieving himself in front of his classroom and exposing himself to students.

Brittany Fortinberry, 31, who has been accused of asking underage boys to 'gangbang' her while wearing Scream masks has been re-photographed after spending weeks behind bars.

Donald Trump said he wants to set up a White House 'compensation fund' for a group of people he said were 'treated very unfairly' by Joe Biden.

A POPULAR singer from Brightlingsea who appeared on Eurovision and has gone onto to achieve great success  has spoken about not winning an Emmy award.

A POPULAR singer from Brightlingsea who appeared on Eurovision and has gone onto to achieve great success  has spoken about not winning an Emmy award.

Several local business owners, including those from the Bubble Tea shop, have expressed concern that despite making multiple reports.

A fire at a waste recycling site in Braintree was “most likely” caused by a battery which had been disposed of incorrectly, the fire service says.

Christy Collins, 27, said that her "relationship with food wasn't healthy"

Frederik officially ascended the throne on January 14, 2024, after Queen Margrethe stepped down following her 52-year reign.

Oprah Winfrey has been dragged into hip-hop icon Russell Simmons' high-profile rape case.

Actress Cindyana Santangelo - better known as 'the Latin Marilyn Monroe' has died at age 58.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Software developer Xe Iaso reached a breaking point earlier this year when aggressive AI crawler traffic from Amazon overwhelmed their Git repository service, repeatedly causing instability and downtime. Despite configuring standard defensive measures -- adjusting robots.txt, blocking known crawler user-agents, and filtering suspicious traffic -- Iaso found that AI crawlers continued evading all attempts to stop them, spoofing user-agents and cycling through residential IP addresses as proxies. Desperate for a solution, Iaso eventually resorted to moving their server behind a VPN and creating "Anubis," a custom-built proof-of-work challenge system that forces web browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing the site. "It's futile to block AI crawler bots because they lie, change their user agent, use residential IP addresses as proxies, and more," Iaso wrote in a blog post titled "a desperate cry for help." "I don't want to have to close off my Gitea server to the public, but I will if I have to." Iaso's story highlights a broader crisis rapidly spreading across the open source community, as what appear to be aggressive AI crawlers increasingly overload community-maintained infrastructure, causing what amounts to persistent distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on vital public resources. According to a comprehensive recent report from LibreNews, some open source projects now see as much as 97 percent of their traffic originating from AI companies' bots, dramatically increasing bandwidth costs, service instability, and burdening already stretched-thin maintainers. Kevin Fenzi, a member of the Fedora Pagure project's sysadmin team, reported on his blog that the project had to block all traffic from Brazil after repeated attempts to mitigate bot traffic failed. GNOME GitLab implemented Iaso's "Anubis" system, requiring browsers to solve computational puzzles before accessing content. GNOME sysadmin Bart Piotrowski shared on Mastodon that only about 3.2 percent of requests (2,690 out of 84,056) passed their challenge system, suggesting the vast majority of traffic was automated. KDE's GitLab infrastructure was temporarily knocked offline by crawler traffic originating from Alibaba IP ranges, according to LibreNews, citing a KDE Development chat. While Anubis has proven effective at filtering out bot traffic, it comes with drawbacks for legitimate users. When many people access the same link simultaneously -- such as when a GitLab link is shared in a chat room -- site visitors can face significant delays. Some mobile users have reported waiting up to two minutes for the proof-of-work challenge to complete, according to the news outlet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.