Or are Slashdot stories becoming just one marketing release after another? I mean, it's been a problem for some time, but now it's just getting ridiculous.

Yeah? Well, F* his executive orders.

He can get bent.

I'll be surprised if I find out EOs have any authority outside the executive branch of the federal government. Otherwise a presnit could just unilaterally ban abortion, change federal, state, and locals laws and tax rates, disband Congress...

So join ANTIFAI - anti-f*-ai.

Though it might get you labeled as a ter'ist. Especially if you don't buy the products they're pushing.

I still can't get ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude to write a decent story or do an engineering design beyond basic complexity. They're all improving, but they're best thought of as brain-storming aids rather than actual development tools.

OMG!

As the saying goes, the defender has to get it right every time, but the attacker only has to get it right once. AI is good at getting something impressive sometimes, not so good at always getting it right.

Republicans equate being pro-market with being pro-big-business-agenda. The assumption is that anything that is good for big business is good for the market and therefore good for consumers.

So in the Republican framing, anti-trust, since is interferes with what big business wants to do, is *necessarily* anti-market and bad for consumers, which if you accept their axioms would have to be true, even though what big business wants to do is use its economic scale and political clout to consolidate, evade competition, and lock in consumers.

That isn't economics. It's religion. And when religious dogmas are challenge, you call the people challenging them the devil -- or in current political lingo, "terrorists". A "terrorist" in that sense doesn't have to commit any actual act of terrorism. He just has to be a heathen.

Yep. Although some Nazis saw Fraktur as an expression of German "kultur", Hitler always personally disliked it. What really pushed it over the edge was the conclusion that it made communicating to populations in the occupied territories more difficult.

...they gotta use Papyrus! "So classy."

What's the point of having a national military if you can't use it to pump taxpayer dollars into corporate coffers?

*scenario*

"Fox company, we'll airdrop a licensed mechanic and a licensed parts salesman onto your position around 0930, as soon as they finish repairing some stuff the enemy captured last year and make their way back to our side of the lines. Division says hold your position as best you can until then -- and remind the riflemen not to use their weapons as clubs, as that will void their warranty. It would be better for the overall war effort to let you position be overrun."

"No, Davies can't fix the autocannon even if your lives depend on it. Division says to shoot him in the arse if he so much as touches it."

Social media has become a toxic dump. If you wouldn't allow children to play in waste effluent from a 1960s nuclear power plant, then you shouldn't allow them to play in the social media that's out there. Because, frankly, of the two, plutonium is safer.

I do, however, contend that this is a perfectly fixable problem. There is no reason why social media couldn't be safe. USENET was never this bad. Hell, Slashdot at its worst was never as bad as Facebook at its best. And Kuro5hin was miles better than X. Had a better name, too. The reason it's bad is that politicians get a lot of kickbacks from the companies and the advertisers, plus a lot of free exposure to millions. Politicians would do ANYTHING for publicity.

I would therefore contend that Australia is fixing the wrong problem. Brain-damaging material on Facebook doesn't magically become less brain-damaging because kids have to work harder to get brain damage. Nor are adults mystically immune. If you took the planet's IQ today and compared it to what it was in the early 1990s, I'm convinced the global average would have dropped 30 points. Australia is, however, at least acknowledging that a problem exists. They just haven't identified the right one. I'll give them participation points. The rest of the globe, not so much.

Xbox has always been weak, and likely has never been profitable, and hardware has never really been Microsoft's thing. Xbox getting only 10% market share, however, is new territory. This may be leading to more pain than Microsoft is willing to take. Back in the Genesis days, would you have thought that Sega would ever walk away from consoles?

People who can't do simple arithmetic are so fun.

If you haven't worked it out, doubling your net worth every day for a month means you end the month with one billion times what you started with.

Multiply that by two million...