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Comment Re: Trust us. (Score 1) 82

Thatâ(TM)s why the OS has protections to limit each appâ(TM)s access to data from other apps. Allow side-loading, but require multiple warnings to install any app that doesnâ(TM)t participate in sandboxing. Make it scary enough that nobody installs non-sandboxed apps unless they are backup apps, and even then, only after carefully vetting the source.

Comment Re:Climate change? What about bug spray? (Score 3, Interesting) 66

Funny the first thing they blame is climate change, and not insecticides, which are a million times more effective today than they were a century ago. With climate change, you'd figure bugs have no problem migrating slowly as the cooler zones move geographically.

Insecticides tend to not be used in natural preserves. Unless you have a different definition of what a preserve is that I'm not aware of.

Insects tend not to stay exclusively in natural preserves, unless you have a different definition of what a preserve is that I'm not aware of.

Insects migrate. They move around to feed on food sources outside the immediate area. Some, like the monarch butterfly or the dragonfly, migrate thousands of miles, even across entire oceans. The notion that a preserve would protect insects from pesticides is based on an assumption of localized effect that doesn't always line up with the real world.

When a large percentage of insects that leave the preserve don't come back because they fed on crops sprayed with pesticides, that diminishes the population of the preserve, both directly by their loss and indirectly by the loss of offspring that would have come back in a future generation.

And if we reach a point when the only place where the insects are surviving is in the preserve, the loss of insects that leave the preserve would also reduce the genetic diversity of the preserve and accelerate the collapse of the species.

Comment Re:We take the mask off aaand ... (Score 1) 72

... 5,000 Indians pretending to be robots.

5,000 Indians controlling 100,000 robots, though, would represent a huge cost savings in this case.

First, you wouldn't have to hire in the local market, so the labor would be cheaper. The median salary in India is about $350 per month. California's minimum wage (assuming four 40-hour workweeks) is $2,640 per month. So that's almost an order-of-magnitude reduction in cost by itself.

Second, at least half of a delivery person's time is spent in a vehicle going from place to place, and in low-density areas, that increases to maybe more like 80%. Assuming the vehicles are autonomous, the workers controlling the bots won't have to do anything with a bot while it is in transit (and presumably the autonomous vehicles themselves will require only occasional human intervention), so one person will be able to control a large number of bots, taking control of a bot only when one arrives at a destination.

Third, if the bot is autonomous except in exceptional circumstances, the percentage of time that a human will be in charge will be reduced even further.

So if you assume that the cost per hour is lower by a factor of 7.5, that 75% of time is spent driving (no interaction), and that 90% of deliveries are done fully autonomously without human intervention, and that intervention takes only a quarter of the time that it would take to deliver a package entirely by hand, that would mean that a remote delivery driver would cost 0.75% as much per delivery, and that would only improve over time as the reliability of automation improves and the number of interventions decreases.

The end of for-pay non-artistic manual labor is near.

Comment Re: "COURAGE" and all that (Score 1) 21

They got to collect 30% of developers money for 20 years and will likely only be required to refund a tiny fraction. This isn't a mistake its weaponized disregard for what's right. Apple is only starting to follow the rules now after they were threatened with criminal contempt, that's how little their cost is of flaunting the law.

They're now a multiply convicted monopolist, which means everything they do from now on is going to be under much more careful scrutiny, by the courts, by other companies' lawyers, and by the DOJ. As a result, they're likely to get a lot more cases and *lose* a lot more cases. And at the rate things are going, fines are the least of their worries. They should be worrying that the DOJ might demand them to spin off the entire App Store ecosystem into a separate company and completely lose control. A little bit of short term profit doesn't really balance that out.

Comment Re:"COURAGE" and all that (Score 1) 21

This is a nightmare scenario of Tim Cook's own making.

You misspelled Steve Jobs and Phil Schiller. The mistakes happened back when Tim Cook was still VP of operations. My exact words when those iOS App Store rules were first announced were "This is an antitrust lawsuit waiting to happen." It was an obviously bad idea seventeen years ago, and the antitrust landscape has only gotten worse for Apple since then.

These big tech companies need to hire legal counsel with a more paranoid opinion of the law. They'd get in a lot less trouble if they paid some of their lawyers to tell them whether they should do something, rather than paying them to find ways to justify doing what they've already decided to do and look for legal loopholes to help them get away with doing it.

Comment Re: Would anyone have noticed? (Score 0) 61

I own a tiny indie studio in Chicagoland and my peers own the some of the huge studios in Chicagoland.

Cinespace is dead right now. It has ONE show active. The other studios are so dead that they're secretly hosting bar mitzvahs and pickleball tournaments for $1500 a day just to pay property taxes.

My studio is surprisingly busy but I'm cheap and cater to non-union folks with otherwise full time jobs.

Comment Re:rsilvergun's dissolving menstrual cup mystery (Score 1) 52

What I'm more curious about is to whether it's dissolving or disintegrating. i.e. is this thing breaking down creating microplastics, or is it going into the constituent chemicals?

Or somewhere in between. I mean, I can buy dissolvable PVA 3D printer filament right now from Amazon or whatever. But there are limited uses for plastic that can't get wet.

Comment Re: Dementia explodes among Democrat Party members (Score 1) 76

Anyone that believes Kamala Harris is more qualified than to be President than Donald Trump, or that Trump's "convictions" were legitimate, is mentally ill, has an exceptionally low IQ, or only listens to CNN/MSLSD. Either way, that person is at unusually high risk for dementia.

His policies are completely out of touch with reality. Everything about his behavior screams "sociopath". The guy deliberately moved materials around in Mar a Lago to hide them from searches by government agencies with the authority to repossess government secrets, repeatedly spouts Russian propaganda that nearly every media organization in the world other than Fox News and a few even more far-right outlets agree is full of s**t, and basically acts like Putin's puppet when it comes to America's position in the world. On top of that, literally nothing I've ever seen him say sounds like a coherent sentence uttered by someone who is fully mentally competent. Listening to him makes me understand Van Gogh.

At this point, I've concluded that he is basically second-term Reagan; his strings are being pulled by powerful oligarchs, both at home and abroad, convincing him to vote for things that benefit them, and he is basically exactly what the Republicans accused Biden of being. Funny, that. The Republicans keep accusing the Democrats of doing things that they themselves are doing. Over and over and over again.

And yet you think that he is qualified to be POTUS. Even if he had not encouraged, or at least completely failed to talk down, an uprising against the U.S. government led by his followers in his name, even if the various commissions concluded not that he wasn't a Russian agent, but rather that he had obstructed justice to ensure that they could not prove that he was, even if none of these things were true, he still would be someone who inspires through hateful fear mongering, spewing anti-immigrant, anti-world trade propaganda that is contrary to the success of this nation financially, contrary to Christian values, and contrary to basic human decency, and he does these things precisely because he knows that fear will motivate a large number of people who don't actually understand how governments operate, how economies operate, etc. to look back longingly at "the old days" that are completely infeasible to return to because technology moved on decades ago, and vote for him based on downright absurd claims that he will somehow return us to those "glory days" (short life expectancy and all) because he somehow cares about them and their problems, despite ample evidence now from both his terms that he cares only about things that benefit him, either directly or by benefitting people with large amounts of political power in his inner circle.

No, people who believe that Harris, someone who spent most of her career prosecuting criminals, who has spent years in government learning how it really works, is more qualified to be President than Donald Trump, whose failed first administration was so toxic that he lost southern states for the first time in a long, long time, whose businesses are only successful in the "they haven't completely failed yet" sense of the word, who apparently doesn't even understand how tariffs work, much less how the rest of government works, and who has spent most of his time so far releasing criminals, violating the constitution flagrantly, and generally making a mess of everything he touches, are likely neither mentally ill, low IQ, nor necessarily folks who listen only to specific news channels.

Try again, this time with more than cheap ad hominem attacks, which in case you haven't noticed, will score you zero points on Slashdot.

Comment Re:Dementia explodes among Democrat Party members (Score 1) 76

Go ahead. Tell us again how you voted for Joe Dementia and knew you did. It was nuts to do that, but to consider electing The Cackler? That’s as batshit crazy as suggesting Congressional Insider Trading should be legal.

Not sure who "The Cackler" is. If you mean Kamala Harris, she's a heck of a lot more qualified for the job than any twice-impeached convicted felon with a long history of sociopathic behavior and obvious word-salad dementia speech patterns could possibly be.

Ultimately, in the end, there may be no good candidate — only mediocre and bad candidates. I would never have voted for Harris in a primary, because her record is too Republican for my tastes in many areas. But she was clearly better than the alternative. And now that we're seeing President Trump doing all of the horrible things he said he was going to do, that his defenders kept saying he would never really do, those of us who voted for her are saying, "I told you so."

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