Why is the price a headline? The first video conferencing systems in the 1990s cost upwards of $80,000 in 90's money, which didn't include the requisite leased line.

A company finds that the product they are developing does not meet their quality requirements and does not launch it. I don't see why an apology is necessary. Nobody is paying for Siri AI stuff.

What they should be apologizing for, and fixing, is why Siri doesn't work as well as it did two iOS revisions ago. I mainly use it to control music playback while driving, and it has problems finding podcasts, bands, albums, songs - just about everything. It all worked perfectly a year ago.

You cannot die, McLeod. Accept it.

Also Sean Connery.

Although outsourcing is definitely a thing, a lot of companies are just not hiring, even at the expense of shipping new products. Do not discount enshittification and stagnation. Why build a new thing, when you can put lipstick on the old thing.

It doesn't matter how many more solar panels you have when they are covered in snow.

And we have the steam deck, which does this thing already without inviting MS into the home.

Only if you do zero commenting or documentation. I'd estimate 30% of my typing is code, the rest is documentation, comments, updating tickets, etc...

I learned to touch type in a writing and composition class in high school where we had to write something every day. Not anything major, but a story or report or poem. About halfway through the year I was touch typing.

It's an unofficial list of rumored announcements. You're reading a bit much into this.

transition.
everyone and I do mean everyone will lose their job.
how does fearless leader feel about consumers and cake

That's what I assumed as well. Buy Now Pay Later loans like this have a long history of being predatory. So I took a look at what it would cost to accept Klarna (as an example) as a merchant. The reality is that they have transaction fees that are very similar to credit cards. In other words, these companies do not need to rely on missed payments to make a profit.

These companies are apparently setting themselves up to replace traditional credit card payment systems, which suits me right down to the ground.

The difference is that it is much easier to get a Klarna account, and it isn't (yet) as widely available.

I felt the same way at first. Traditional BNPL schemes were very predatory. However, Klarna (and others) appear to be playing approximately the same game as the traditional credit card processors. They charge transaction fees that are roughly the same as credit card processors, and like credit cards their customers don't pay extra if they pay their bill on time. Klarna, in particular actually appears to give customers interest free time.

The difference, for consumers, is primarily that a Klarna account is much easier to get, and it isn't universally accepted. From a merchant perspective, depending on your payment provider, you might already be able to accept Klarna, and it appears that it mostly works like a credit card. It's even possible that charge backs are less of an issue, although it does appear that transaction fees are not given back in the case of a refund.

Personally, I am all for competition when it comes to payment networks. Visa and Mastercard are both devils. More competition for them is good for all of us.

That is a half-truth. China is 100% guilty of everything they are accused of, and more. That's not proaganda.

But yes, we've given them too much money and allowed their fetid mass of government to be a threat. There is propaganda sold to the west by our own oligarchs, with the notion that by allowing them to exploit the cheap labor market of China, we would all be uplifted into the intellectual and cultural elite. Obviously that doesn't work, toilets need cleaning too. However by our having invested so much money into China, rather than dominating them and cracking them open, we instead started to get infected with their rot, and yes, they now have the power to be dangerous to our oligarchs. That doesn't change the equation any, they need to be shut down.

Of course we do also need to shut our oligarchs down too.

If they drop the whole CCP thing and murder their ruling class in the streets, we'd all probably do business with them again. Maybe even to the point where we flee our oligarch hell-holes in pursuit of a better life.

Some of it is. Not most of it. China stopped importing plastic waste about 7 years ago, which kind of tanked the market for waste plastic, to the point that governments were paying recycling companies to get it off their hands. Some entrepreneurs set up illegal "recycling" centers in Vietnam and Cambodia, masking the destinations with intermediaries in South America, as you had to be a certified recycling facility to get the payouts.

That's the situation now. Dumping garbage in these rivers has been happening for decades. The fake recyclers didn't come up with the idea. They figure no one would notice the extra junk mixed in with what was already there.

Also, even though China stopped importing recycled plastic, the Yangtze has the most plastic pollution of any river in the world. That's not coming from western sources.