Yeah, but can you go inside the buildings? And can people inside give you quests?

It used to be that you didn't have to encourage or provide resources for young people to hang out together while at university, they did so naturally. The main concern used to be to stop or at least to limit the drunkenness, drug use, noise and various public disturbances as they did so. Certainly there were people who didn't fit the whole partying student stereotype but they were more of an exception.

But yeah, you won't be paying the ridiculous tuition fees and getting in massive debt for the rest of your life for some sort of young adult daycare. Higher education is for education. I don't know if people learn faster with an AI tutor (whatever that looks like) but you want to know that the things you learn are actually true (at least for subjects where you are at least somewhat able to claim that something is true or false).

Um, yes, US uses a lot of water, so 0.1% of that can still fill a lot of bathtubs. But 0.1% is a very small percentage. So, other usages of water that have a higher percentage can fill even more bathtubs. Thus it makes more sense to be concerned with those higher percentage usages, no?

I don't like anything to do with AI as much as the next man, possibly more so, but it's important to use arguments that make sense. So that was a bit of an unintentionally ironic post there.

Simplest isn't necessarily the best, and this is probably one of the best examples you could find. FPTP is used in UK too, and UK politics suck as a result, but I'd say that US politics suck so much worse, and to a very large extent it's thanks to FPTP.

All the problems stem from the fact that FPTP encourages people to not 'waste their vote' and vote for a candidate that's more likely to win, rather than the candidate they like the most. This is already a huge problem, this isn't how democracy is meant to work. But that naturally leads to the number of parties being reduced to the smallest viable number, which is two. And once you have a two-party system it brings an avalanche of problems.

In the UK, in spite of having FPTP we're slightly beginning to move away from the two party system largely thanks to how useless both 'main' parties have proven themselves, but in US for various reasons I'm not seeing any likelyhood of a move away from the two-party system, and it's a massive problem.

First, with a two-party system you get the same problem as having a choice between only two competing options when buying a car, or a computer, or anything else. As one of the two main parties you don't have to be actually popular, you just have to be less unpopular than the other main party. I believe you're seeing it abundantly clear now. As I see it several most recent US elections were to a large extent won not by people voting for a candidate but against the other candidate. It's accepted that the winning candidate will suck, but the hope is they won't suck as much as the other guy/woman. Obviously this doesn't lead to great quality of leadership.

But I believe the two-party system in US has lead to a even bigger problem. After so many years of a two-party system a lot of people think about politics in a fundamentally binary way and seem completely incapable of thinking in any other way. These people don't see good and bad policies, they see Democrat and Republican policies. This leads to a whole lot of rationalization and blinkered thinking and people voting for laws and candidates in spite of being obviously bad so long as it's coming from their team.

US desperately needs other parties in the mix. Even if they won't immediately start winning (it will probably take time) the threat of them becoming serious players may force the main parties to push their policies in a more popular direction. As it stands thanks to the fptp system the main parties can safely ignore independents/third parties as irrelevant weirdos and continue to push lobbyist-dictated policies.

To some extent yes, but smartphones are much worse than TV in this respect. All mediums are trying to maximise the time the user spends on them - engagement time as they call it now, eventually to the detriment to the user, but smartphones are much better at it. It's really a combination of smartphones and social media.

When you turn off the TV, it won't turn itself back on, especially important when you go to sleep. You know the TV program, you know when the stuff you want to watch is on, all other times you can ignore the TV and do something else. Otoh the smartphones you're expected to carry with you at all times and I'm betting many never switch them off. More important, social media notifications can arrive at any time. Ding! xXxDumbNamexXx has posted a reply to your comment, you want to see it right now, don't you? Ding! Omg_DragenThingy_lol just posted a negative comment on your profile, what're gonna do about that? You're not just going to let it slide are you? This is especially bad with teens because at that age they're hardcoded to be more invested in what their peers are doing and their opinions and beliefs. Even aside from the social media, the Internet can produce content at a rate orders of magnitude faster than TV ever could, and content creator subscriptions and notifications are designed to constantly keep yanking your attention back to that content.

Smartphones and social media combination has become so good at keeping teens glued to them at all times that it's eating into the time spent on everything else, like outdoor recreation, irl relationships and friendships, study, even sleep. Obviously that is having a significant negative impact on health. And certainly it's made worse by the fact that parents who could otherwise provide some alternatives are not there because they're working three jobs and a smartphone is the cheapest babysitter you can have.

I believe that access to water is a concern, being something that human beings need a constant supply of in order to not die, but the title "Violent conflicts over water" is misleading.

In the above list, only the first type (disputes where water triggered violence) can be described as "conflict over water". The other two types are conflicts merely involving water in some very small way. The incidents from Israel-Gaza and Russia-Ukraine wars simply mean that civilian infrastructure, including water sources among others, has been deliberately targeted, something that unfortunately has been a regular feature of both wars. Neither war is a conflict over water.

I find the guy's constant repetition of 'world-leading' and 'best in the world' strange. You've got some scientifically interesting results, great, go ahead and publish your findings, why put so much emphasis on what 'the rest of the world' has done in that area? This isn't some kind of 'our neutrino observatory is bigger than your neutrino observatory' contest. Maybe I'm reading too much into it, perhaps the dude is just really excited about his team's findings.

Lost somewhere among all the political talking points the OP has a very good point here. The usual fantasy/fear/sci-fi trope is turning a human being into a walking automaton, entirely taking away his free will and making him mindlessly obey all commands of the controller. This is what MKULTRA was trying to achieve, among others. But if you're willing to be more patient and subtle, techniques for controlling human behaviour existed for centuries and worked extremely well.

Brainwashing, propaganda, using mob mentality, pushing various psychological buttons, playing on fears and desires. Works better if you start from a young age. You don't have to subvert a person's free will with chemicals or tech or whatever, when you can brainwash them into believing that the thing you want them to do is what the person him/herself wants to do. People have an incredible capacity for rationalizing almost anything, no matter how insane. From a certain point you don't have to do anything anymore, people will self-brainwash from here on, and help you brainwash others. This is what we should be worried about, not some hypothetical sci-fi technology.

As for these 'researchers' and being able to directly alter human cognition, it's complete nonsense. We know next to nothing about how human thinking process works, so how can we change it directly? All we can do is super clumsy attempts like MKULTRA and similar research, and all those have achieved is messed with the heads of the test subjects without achieving any kind of control. Which, if you have no idea what you're doing, is the only possible outcome.

Education quality varies greatly between the different UK universities. At the top you have Oxford and Cambridge (some other universities ocassionally get in between the big two's dominance), but education quality in some of the universities at the bottom of the list is not great. Back when the economy was better many of those places were there for people to get the student lifestyle experience (back then involving a lot of partying and drinking) and eventually to graduate in order to get a job that requires some kind of university degree. Nowadays a lot of those places are mainly there to take in foreign students. They pay much higher tuition fees than UK students but for many of them the university course is a gateway to getting a UK residence.

Still, an actual AI-generated and AI-taught course is definitely a new low.

This is about moss spores surviving in simulated outer space conditions. What does that have to do with ISS? Unless space outside the International Space Station has some unique properties compared to space anywhere else in the galaxy, and the scientists simulated those exact unique conditions in their experiment. I guess "Moss spores survive 9 months in the lab" is a less clickbaity title.

A little of this is right, most is completely wrong.

Why on Earth would they negotiate as equals when they aren't? EU is the government of Europe (it shares that function with national governments). Its literal job is to make laws that govern Europe. For companies that do business in Europe, it's their job is to follow these laws, or face penalties set out in the above mentioned laws. Whether these laws are good, i.e. if they benefit the citizens of Europe, is another question, but in this case I believe the answer is absolutely yes.

Why are political censorship, 'interoperability' and data-sharing bundled together there? They are totally separate issues. I'm not a fan of Internet censorship at all but that is not what this article is discussing. It's about new regulation on cookies. Not sure what exactly you mean by 'mandate interoperability', but as a private citizen, interoperability is for your benefit, so shouldn't you be happy about that? And as for so-called 'data-sharing', if you're finally talking about the subject of this article, data harvesting isn't 'data sharing'. Companies aren't giving up any of their private data, you can't call it 'sharing' if the flow only goes one way.

Consumer protection and censorship are different issues, bringing them together is disingenuous. It's pointing to one set of questionable laws and then going 'see, they're bad, so any laws they come up with are bad'. It's fallacious.

That's just vague platitudes. Internet offers a great way for people from different places to communicate but it doesn't and never has offered immunity from national laws. Planning a murder or selling illegal drugs on the Internet is and has always been just as illegal as it would have been face to face. Questions of jurisdiction can be tricky but the Internet in no way negates national borders and laws that come from operating within those borders.

Indeed. There always has to be a compromise between a real but small chance of your account getting broken into and a much larger possibility that you'll simply forget your password. Yes you can reset the password via your email but that needs a password too. And yes, there are password managers but they are not much good if you're accessing a service from different devices and possibly different OSes.

Like many have said, nowadays nearly every site you interact with asks to create an account with a password. How I think about this is, if the account gets hacked into, what are they getting from it? If there are banking details there or a lot of real personal information, it gets a strong password and TFA if the service allows it. If there's only a username, a throwaway email address and maybe some fake personal info, it gets a '12345' or something like this.

If possible, it's often better to ensure that there is nothing useful to steal from somewhere than trying to stop people from stealing that data. After all, there's always a possibility that the service you use simply sells your data to some big data broker, which will put it into a giant database, and then that gets hacked because security in those places is terrible and it's a very valuable target for hackers.

No, what you characterise as Democratic position is totally wrong. Unfortunately a lot of people in US at least seem to believe this reasoning makes sense, while it makes no sense at all. To begin with what does a disproportionately male population has to do with racism? That would be sexism, no? But that's not the main point.

Racism, as defined in Mirriam-Webster dictionary means:

So racism, like all other 'isms' is a state of mind, a belief or a set of beliefs. Being white is not racist. Living in a town/city where there are no or very few black people is not racist. If no black people want / are able to move to this town, for whatever reason, what can you do exactly? Likewise, ending with mostly a white male workforce is not racist if that's what all qualified candidates happen to be. If you believe that a workforce of a particular company or the student body of an academic institution has a disproportionate percentage of people of particular races, because the people in charge of hiring hold white supremacist beliefs, you have to prove that this is the case. Innocent until proven guilty. Or are you not a fan of this principle?

I've said it before many times. If a university has less black applicants overall and less successful black applicants than what you'd expect statistically, there are obviously reasons for this. It means not enough schoolkids are getting an education of sufficient quality to get into the university on merit. So you may have to look at things like school funding, disproportionate poverty in many predominantly black communities in US, possibly a culture of low expectations of success, etc etc. Fixing all of this would be very very hard. Or you can mandate that universities find a bunch of random black people somewhere and admit them as students to get the expected racial percentages, then declare racism defeated to much fanfare. That is very easy to do, but does absolutely nothing to fix the underlying problems. I believe in science this would be called fudging the data.

It does seem a bit redundant, but who knows. This is basically like a PC that can only play games (although they may have browser and Netflix and whatever there as well, but who browses and watches Netflix on their console?). At first glance, a real PC seems a lot more useful for the same price. But with a Windows PC you have Windows, which is at this point a major drawback. This is more like a Linux PC. So why not get an actual Linux PC instead? It would make more sense but unfortunately a lot of people are still intimidated by Linux (or possibly just the idea of it). A Valve console will probably be very user-friendly and very intuitive to those familiar with Steam. If they have good modding support there may be some people interested in this.