What is Microsoft a monopoly in? The only thing that might even come close is OS or office software, but there are plenty of alternatives in each of those categories. Apple is quite popular in the U.S. and is over 15% market share. Linux is more viable than any time in the past as a desktop alternative for normal users and custom variants like ChromeOS are available and have their own niches.

Word and Excel are far more prominent, but no one is forced to use them. Libre Office is good enough for 95% of the people who might use MS Office and alternatives like Google Docs are also quite popular.

I don't think Google needs to be split up into parts like some do, but they have a stranglehold on online advertising that rivals what MS had in desktop OS and browsers in their heyday. Outside of an old PC I keep around for web browsing and gaming, I don't regularly use Microsoft products in my personal life and am not at all inconvenienced for it. Google is far harder to get away from, even discounting online advertising.

The next generation will be saying that no child needs to have the math co-processor augment installed in their head when they have a perfectly good AI chatbot they can use instead.

I don't use TikTok and have a limited understanding of it, but what grave national security risk does it pose if China is violating EU privacy laws almost certainly for the express purposes of being able to sell targeted advertising? Is the Prime Minister conducting cabinet meetings with TikTok? Is the military publishing training material as a series of TikToks? Does China knowing which vapid e-celebrity all of the tweens are following imperial the nation?

If they're breaking the law they can pay the appropriate fine for doing so, but don't blow it out of proportion. It's no different than what Meta, Google, or any of the big non-Chinese companies are doing or trying to do in a way to skirt the laws or to avoid being caught.

I'd be more confused if there weren't dupes on /. as that's the kind of glitch in the matrix that lets you know you're not in reality.

Gambling is stupid, but banning legal gambling just creates black markets. It's better to legalize and tax it than to make it outright illegal in which case it will be conducted anyways only by criminal organizations that don't pay taxes and be far less kind than your average creditors. I don't see a particularly good argument for banning advertising for any legal activity either. Any argument that could be made about gambling advertisements affecting people in some way could be made for other products as well. You may as well bad all forms of advertising at that point, which may not be all that bad come to think of it.

When the government wants to tax me to pay for the stupidity of other people then I'm suddenly in favor of imposing limits on how much stupidity those people can get up to. You can't have unlimited freedom if you're also beholden to everyone else around you be definition. If the government were willing to let people suffer the consequences of their own poor decisions then by all means let people be as free to lead their life as they see fit. Most people find this approach ghastly, but I just look at it as a form of natural selection and less cruel in the long run.

They should have approved the genetically modified salmon that have been around for a while now. Letting natural populations of fish recover is more important than having cheaper pork. We should look into extending it to other fish populations as well.

This is the same government that inspects your non-GMO food. If you're not already skeptical about what you're getting I don't see how this should change anything for you.

I have probably read something they published in the last decade, but I just looked at their website and one of the top articles had a title ending in the cliched "and that's a good thing" that reeks of the kind of midwit tripe an LLM could spit out without anyone being able to tell. Do real human beings read this at all and have game publishers realized that it's not worth buying coverage or review scores on these sites and keeping them financially afloat.

So the public should have no say in being taxed to pay for research that they can't even access regardless of whether they could understand it or not? Can I decide to do things for your own good while making you pay for it with minimal ability on your part to understand what's happening merely because I feel as though you're part of some group of unwashed masses that I'm superior too?

The public should always have access to what their tax dollars have been spent on. Researchers aren't owed funding for their work at the expense of the public and if they can't explain or justify that cost to the people paying it, maybe they shouldn't be getting that money. Frankly the public should be getting back royalties for the valuable research they've funded that has become useful. Not all research is commercially viable, but plenty of it has worked its way into various products.

You're probably thinking of Brad Pitt's monologue at the end of Killing Them Softly which Gandolfini also starred in which ended with the line "now fucking pay me."

But the rest of your post is utterly stupid. The median pay for an electrician in the U.S. is above the median household income. It's a good job and one that can't be outsourced. It's also one that has enough requirements for professional work to be immune to immigration undercutting it and it's also a vocation that no one is coming here for on H1-B status for either.

Do you think an 18 year old who has a good shot at a solid career gives two shots about the wages of someone five decades his senior? Just because you weren't cut out for the work don't try to stand I the way of people who want to try their own hand at it, especially if they can get someone else to pay for it. Your idiotic logic suggests there only ought to be one electrician because any more would depress his wages. Why don't you apply the same logic to anyone you do business with, or is it that you think you pay them too much and would prefer a less expensive alternative.

Why would they go back when the government will give loan money to anyone who asks to pay for an education themselves? No company wont look for a way to pass on its expenses to customers or someone else. I don't think these changes were any kind of corporate conspiracy, but they realized that they could save on their own costs. Frankly I think there are a lot more vocational tech programs that fill the niche that company training programs aren't strictly necessary.

If you want to get back to that then look at how our education systems changed and start issuing rollbacks. I'm sure someone will complain about this, but I don't think we had a trillion dollar student loan debt crisis 30 years ago even if you were to adjust for inflation and population. I think our primary school teachers were significantly better as well. One consequence of women largely being excluded from corporate work was that they tended to wind up in the education system. I doubt we'd be able to recreate that, but I'm not sure it's necessary.

But as nice as the past may seem, it's largely rose-tinted lenses that are viewing it. Anyone posting here likely had better than average educational outcomes regardless of their upbringing and the particulars of their life. We should be trying to figure out how to do better. In some ways I think we are. The high school I graduated from had made some significant improvements since I graduated and is now offering classes that give students a leg up on those types of careers or at least provide them with some practical skills they could use for themselves. In other areas, there's room for improvement. We can't go back to the past, but we can learn from it.

I'm wondering how the researchers accounted for the possibility that the people they were replying to or who replied to them may have been bots themselves?

Not publishing the data would be unethical at this point. People should be made aware of what kind of tactics bots will employ or how to be able to recognize them. I am of course open to differing opinions to change my mind on the matter.

Is this an advertisement for YouTube to get more people posting videos in the hope that they too can make it rich? I doubt the odds are probably any better than someone playing football has of becoming a pro athlete, but at least you won't get CTE from YouTube. There was that one crazy lady who tried to shoot up Google HQ a few years back though, so perhaps I should an add a "probably" on getting brain damage from YouTube. Even if most people aren't getting rich from it, I think it's been a great outlet for people who occasionally have something very interesting to say.

If it beats the alternatives what do you expect. Unless the enemy is tapped in and can warn their own soldiers about the attack before your side can execute it, it's immaterial. If you know that they know you can even use it to your advantage to call in a fake attack to get them to react to it. If you're not assuming that your communications are compromised on some level you're probably deluding yourself anyway. Even if you do have a secure system at the start of a conflict, expecting it to remain secure is similarly foolish. If your bombs can land in as much time as it takes the enemy realize that they should have been elsewhere then you may as well send it over open channels just to demoralize them.