Long ago, people (usually older) lamented the decline in book reading and reading in general due to the increased viewing of banal TV shows. Before that, it was radio programs and movies. I believe video games had their share of derision, too. At least, people have to read most tweets, though that is no longer necessary. Next, TikTok.

Yes, the voters re-elected the politicians who approved the prior failed deals. Wisconsin loves to be grifted.

True, those impersonations are protected speech, as they are not intended to deceive.

Clearly, impersonating someone is illegal and unethical. The longer view is that AI will eventually render characters that look and sound better than humans. It is more than just replicating a living being. When your record someone, a lot is lost or misrepresented in the 3D-2D conversion, color palette mapping, audio frequency range, harmonics, etc. There are tons of tools to 'fix' these things and, in some cases, make them better than the original (e.g., Autotune). Eventually, the software will create digital people who fit their media perfectly and eliminate the 'middle man' entirely. There was even a movie made about it, S1m0ne, starring Al Pacino. It is a fiction, but life mimics art.

I have thought they have been breathing their own exhaust for a long time. This seems to reaffirm that conjecture. I remember Intel twice developing new architectures to replace the x86 - the 432 and Itanium. Both were progressive ideas that never developed enough market momentum. Those failures seem to inhibit Intel from trying again. Too bad, the third time is the charm.

Strangely, it is like the lottery winner. If you look back at anything, there are myriad reasons to 'justify' the why. Apple and Microsoft were two of the early entrants, and either could have destroyed the other at some point. However, they did not. Why? There are myriad reasons, too.

OS/2 was originally designed for the 80286 architecture, which had no future as a 16-bit hybrid. IBM was wed to it, partly because of the IBM/AT and, though few would say this, the base/displacement similarities to the 370 architecture, which made IBM what it was (a.k.a., mainframe mentality). By the time developers got hold of the OS/2 SDK, the 80386 was already done, and Microsoft realized its inevitability. It was Windows/386, not Windows 2.0, that inspired Microsoft to split with IBM. 80386 led Microsoft to NT, and IBM was too slow with OS/2 for 80386. IBM wanted many business-class functionalities from their OS (e.g., 3270, SNA) and was more inwardly focused. Microsoft was much quicker and market-driven.

I remember IBM's TSO/SPF/INFOSYS software, about 40 years ago. You got a good editor, shell scripting, email, calendar, instant messaging, and project management system on an MVS/IMS/CICS mainframe that could support hundreds of users with the processing power and storage less than today's iPhone.

Intel's x86 legacy is going the way of IBM's 360 hardware architecture (now the z14). IBM barely mentions hardware, emphasizing Solutions instead. Intel is doing the same, albeit less demonstratively. Eventually, x86 architectures and their successors will be buried inside Intel-As-A-Service. That means hardware announcements like this will be relegated to a technical note.

I thought it would have been ten times that, maybe more. After all, the Russians and Chinese probably have much of it already.

Early in AT&T's history, when human switchboard operators were the way telephone calls connected, their HR department concluded that telephony growth would require that everyone in America become a switchboard operator within 20 years. Then they invented the electro-mechanical telephony switch.

Craigslist was putting pimps out of business and liberating female sex workers when, all of a sudden, https://www.congress.gov/bill/... came along and shut that down.

While there is an excellent chance that some of these UAPs are naturally occurring phenomena, domestic/international skunkworks, or extraterrestrials, the greatest mystery is understanding whether the federal governments can tell the difference. Nuclear war has been considered over weather-related misobservations. It would not take much more than that to fool them or us into believing one of these UAPs might be an attack. As such, it would not take aliens much effort to trick us into destroying ourselves, not that we need any help.

The title should have been, "Apple says third-party app stores would open iPhone to MORE scammers." Apple has always branded to the elite. It did so against Windows (a.k.a. malware world), and it lost market share, almost going under. Steve Jobs once said that Apple should be the BMW or Mercedes of computing, having about 2% marketshare. Steve is gone, but that business philosophy seems to have remained.

Art is in the eye of the beholder. I hope he gets rich.