Yes and no. Getting forward-depoyed engineers out to somewhere near a combat zone entails risks, but if you've got combat-ready individuals who've also got both the training *and* the authorization to do field repairs it gives a lot more flexibility to the entire system. In addition to that, there's an inescapable morale improvement when orders reflecting some semblence of reality and sanity come down from the top, and saying "yes, you can do what you need to do to get your job done with product XYZ" actually counts for a lot.

And beyond that, remember that the military is not in any way, shape, or form "all grunts." If some of those contractors want to enlist or join direct, there's a market for that too.

The principle here is simple. A journalistic outlet or blogger reported on a story and asserted that a person was involved with a terrorist organization. The university made its choice. Whether the outlet was or was not correct is a matter for the courts if the subject decides to sue for defamation or libel. AI doesn't really matter here, and plenty of anonymous reporting has indeed happened for legitimate, non-nefarious reasons.

If the subject does decide to sue the author, then discovery will turn up what it turns up.

My money, however, would be on the student lying through their teeth about their actions.

Who in their right mind approved this sentence? Why is "the virus that causes COVID-19" (and thus the global pandemic that was the most important thing since 9/11 in defining modern life) a "conservative discussion topic"? That should be an "everyone discussion topic."

You're being a bit cagey and loose with the term "immigrant" there. This covers everything from business owners to border crossers to student visa overstays to anyone else.

And yes, it's entirely reasonable for USCIS to do due diligence before giving someone the privilege of permanent residency, and certainly before becoming a US Citizen. If they came in in 2013 or 2017 and post heavily in support of Hamas on Twitter and Facebook, there's no particular reason the US *has* to provide them citizenship. And, in fact, it's debatable whether we want to keep them in the US at all even now.

Plenty of stuff out there is not appropriate for kids. Securing network via filtration is pointless on a mobile device, and kids are more than smart enough to get around various other mechanisms to access things they shouldn't be able to, including social media.

The principle has always been that something that could be secured in real life (18+ shops and events) should also be able to be secured in the cyber world, but there was never a practical way to validate it that didn't also risk exposing the token and identity of the user access it to be vulnerable to exposure. Well, we have a system now. Smart phones, like them or not, function as de-facto IDs already, and there is no rational reason for Google and Apple to be unwilling to associate the age of the cloud account holder as an AVS somehow. We have the biometrics, we have the pervasive internet, we have the standardized protocols and simple QR-encoding of relevant authentication. Banning under 16 users (for example) from Snapchat is a single, simple switch that the industry has not been willing to enable. If legislation is required to force their hand, so be it.

That "certain percentage of people" that have an "other underlying cause rather than true gender dysphoria" is around 95%. You're being a bit too glib with your analogy.

Post-pandemic we've proved WFH is viable. In an emergency. That doesn't mean it's preferable to regular office presence when it comes to productivity for the company.

Been a while since Slashdot got involved in internet drama, though.

Feels nice.

I'm glad Larry's Network Computer is finally getting another go of it. Still surprised Apple hasn't tried again.

This is a good first step, but there needs to be more done here. The Original Sin of this wasn't the browser wars, but advertising revenue and the ad market generally. Divesting that from the rest of Google (and Alphabet) and forcing both Google Search and YouTube and everything else to pick from among advertising platforms on the open market would re-inject competition into some of these spaces.

The creation of Bluesky as a viable market competitor to Twitter is a good start, but if we want to stop the privacy-obliterating centralization of tech power, we need to break up the vertical monopolies across the board so that it can actually happen.

Amazon is next (obviously).

Better keep those EMPs close by, kids. "It's our only weapon against them."

Well...maybe. But I think that's downstream of the fact that Google (read: Alphabet) itself has finagled its way into becoming the Omnibusiness, injecting itself into every layer of interaction and transaction. Altavista didn't warrant this level of oversight, nor did any of the "web portals" of the day, even the ones still hanging on like Yahoo. (Amazon is next, of course.)

The real solution here is structural: divestiture a la Ma Bell into a hundred component parts, and to force competition back into the entire tech industry. I'm hopeful it will happen, and then the smaller tech entities can have their oversight reduced as a result of their smaller scope.

I watch 95% of my YouTube on a TV, either with the app on a streaming stick and/or game console, or sometimes on the Smart TV's native app. Most of the rest is watched on an iPad rather than using a laptop or PC monitor.

YouTube Premium is literally the only subscription service I use that has a 100% absolutely, no-brainer recommendation from me, and it's kind of odd seeing anyone not feel similarly.

YouTube is not Tik-Tok; there's a crap ton of longer-form content on there in any of a zillion different subjects. The creators who put in the effort to make them -- especially the well-researched and high-quality ones -- deserve the compensation they're planning for. The world runs on ads, and ads are a part of life. No ads, no content.

I understand not liking ads; I don't like ads either. YouTube Premium gives you an ad-free experience and a few additional features, but most importantly still provides a revenue share the the creators whose content you're watching.

I get dozens of hours a month at minimum of value of having YouTube on in the background, often while I'm doing something else. Paying $20/month for me and my family to get an ad-free experience across the board on all of our devices at once is the easiest sell someone's ever going to make to me.

Remember last Gen, when Sony openly mocked Microsoft's XBox for being unable to deal properly with used games and physical transfer? We're not in Kansas any more...

More broadly, though, considering the history of Sony Corporation, Blu-ray, and the PS3, this really does feel like an unnecessary end of an era. I'd have wanted them to lean the other way. Stick that 4K Ultra UHD right on the box and make it known that the PlayStation remainds the best-in-class media player for all manner of things.