Google has allowed Android phone owners to install any app that they want for years now, without even having to install some special "app store" to get them. I haven't heard of any large-scale problem with Android phone owners being ruined by side-loaded apps. The most common vectors have been malicious apps they got from the Google Play Store, and phishing of the user themselves for financial info, not pilfered with some spy app. The same as people on the Apple iPhone side.

It's possible. The Chinese are working while the US is distracted with internal issues.

If China win it will be because NVidia didn't sell them GPUs so they built their own. Don't think they can't.

The US isn't in some magic permission where it wins everything. Remember the US lost the space race and only won round 2 by sinking massive amounts of time and effort into it.

The classic sour grapes reaction. You can't do it, claim it's rubbish anyway.

Just reads to me like an indication that Isaacman has sold out for the chance to lead NASA, and will be doing whatever his master wants.

Remember that J.D. Vance once referred to Trump as a Nazi, and look what tune he's singing now.

The third-party AI might also do a better job (from the customer's perspective) depending on the data it has vs. Alexa, because the third-party AI can make buying decisions based solely on the information it has on the user. As someone else mentioned, the third-party AI wont favor brands/items/sellers Amazon is promoting.

Making the new machine's screen a slightly different size than their existing MacBook Air 13. Gotta start production on a one-off chassis now when they have stacks of the MBA ones already done.

This is literally the same strat Amazon has. They want Alexa to buy products unprompted for Prime users as well, based on the customer's previous buying habits. They're just annoyed someone else is doing it.

There is still tons and tons of captchas going on. Sure, some of those have been replaced with doing a checkbox, but I am seeing captchas as a whole more now than say 5 years ago.

sure, but they could have still allowed it to work, they chose to make it stop working.

No new features, or bug fixes fine. But to remove windows 7 games from running on windows 7. (or even win xp games)

I swear I have dues ex working on my rig..... I'll have to go double check but I recall doing it somewhat recent...

(sometimes i have to use older wine installs, and or lutris for some games)

What really bothers me, is trying to get older games ported to say ubuntu 10.x or 16.x(from gog), that don't work anymore, or at least wont without a lot of work.

I asked Gemini and it went the "Ancient Astronaut Theorists" route instead:

The concept of artificial intelligence (AI) has been part of human culture for thousands of years, appearing in ancient myths and legends. However, the term "artificial intelligence" was officially coined in 1955, marking its beginning as a formal academic and technological field.

The Fire Stick Select is Amazon's first Vega OS device, and a product lower in market segment than the (normal) 4K Stick. The limitations are straight from Plex.

Direct playback of personal media content is limited to H.264 with AAC audio and a bitrate of 7Mbps. Playing other types of content will require transcoding.

7 mbps? That's worthless for anything higher than basic streaming-service 1080p resolution. It must be some artificial limitation too, because the device can supposedly play back 4K/HDR - which would require it to handle 25 Mbps HEVC from a streaming provider. So it sounds like Amazon is gatekeeping the hardware abilities to "approved" partners (your video player will not be part of the club). Keep in mind Plex is not a side-loaded "illicit" app. It's an actual app available on Amazon's App Store currently and they can't even get access to hardware decoding of HEVC.

Fact-checking from a technology that's only slightly more accurate than a coin toss. That's a good one! I guess you forgot most AI "smarts" are based on the media is consumes indiscriminately from the Internet. So if it reads lies often enough, like a human it will believe them, too.