I don't see how this is sustainable, and I was a dues-paying member of the IEEE Computer Society for about 20 years and of the ACM for about 10 years. I even attended meetings and donated quite a bit of time to the CS. Minor writing and enough refereeing to become a "senior referee" at the end. I think they are doing some important stuff, but there are costs... And eventually I stopped paying dues. (But now I'm also remembering a database conference that may have been paid for by my employer.)

By the way, I used to read the magazines I received cover to cover. That time actually became a significant negative factor. Lots of good stuff, but too much time required. On that front I think the main effect of paperless publishing will be to significantly reduce the incentive to read all of an entire issue... Why not just ask an AI to summarize the parts that are most relevant to my work?

So if you're going to push me for an overall assessment, I think it's a net negative and will make the ACM less relevant. Perhaps even imperil it's survival.

But I also have a solution approach to ignore: What if the ACM supported books with special webpages to address the time problem? Each computer-related book would have some QR codes pointing to the errata, a bibliography, a searchable and dynamic index, and even forward links to later work on related topics. Kind of a post-publishing future bibliography? In this fantasy, at least the publishers would be providing some funding to sustain the relevance of the books they are selling.

I think you have lost track of the current priorities of the DoJ. But perhaps time for the old joke? Unfortunately I can't remember the exact form of the quote that underlies the joke. A Russian guy? Something about "Behind every great fortune there is a crime"?

I actually think there are two ways to become excessively rich, and crime is only one of them. The second way is to be lucky, though the luck can take various forms. Most common form is inheriting the profits from a parent's crimes.

So the joke is that the old saying is obsolete because these days you use some of the loot to bribe the cheapest politicians to fix the law so that it's no longer a crime. Investing in politicians has had an obscene RoI for a long time now.

It's not the same thing, maybe it has something to do with the nature of the hot air convection inside. Things like fries come out way better in the air fryer than in a convection oven. Also, I find them very easy to clean. Just a quick go with the brush and some washing up liquid, done. The racks go into the dishwasher.

Ignoring the problem has yet to make it go away.

And I strongly disagree that today's google sincerely cares about anything except getting more money.

Why did you quote "not simple". You made me think I had written that, and I certainly don't think so. Maybe you should have used bold for emphasis?

Now I think you're mostly referring to the publishers. Funny business that, even before Amazon tipped over the table. Most of the books they publish are failures that don't even recover the cost of the first print run. I've heard numbers from 80% to above 90%, but that was a while ago, and largely from a delivery driver who delivered fresh books while picking up the unsold ones. The profits were entirely from the bestsellers, and of course the publishers love opium-like books for that reason.

I acknowledge that things have probably changed now. I've already mentioned the Amazon problem, but I also think AI is offering new ways to assess which books might become bestsellers (resulting in fewer books making the first cut).

I'm trusting Michael Lewis on this, but I don't think that applies to the members of the exchanges, and the high speed traders are members. The fees for trades are limited to the little suckers like you and me.

Well, also I've read some of the proposals for transaction fees, and none of them seem to make sense unless the current transactions are without fees.

Thank it for its cooperation?

How is this company worth a trillion $? I don't see many assets, significant IP, a strong competitive edge, or a model for monetization other than becoming an "AI AWS" The latter has some merit, if 1) a strong market for AI Cloud services emerges (and that means corporate clients, not generic chatbots), and 2) they manage to secure a corner on scarce supplies like memory and AI-capable chips.

It might well be the 'partners' themselves that wanted to give up. If they saw no market, then yep - cut the investment. It's been a long long time since the CEO magazines hyped the 'metaverse' every flaming day.

You're kidding, right? The way things work in China is highly conducive to innovation, from small startups and even individuals to factories. From electronics to vehicles and even space flight. They are not afraid to blatantly copy ideas, which gives them a leg up...they don't stop there, the copy is just the starting point of their development. Meanwhile, the government doesn't micro-manage innovation, they provide focus... and that comes with resources. Some advantages they have:
- Companies, even large ones, seem to do very well at scaling up as well as scaling down production runs.
- Extremely short iterations. Want to try something new, with new materials, new shapes? Takes weeks or months in the West, but the Chinese will overnight it. Something that Apple commented on: they did not shift a lot of R&D to China because of cost, but because of speed.
- Lots of cross-pollination between innovators, especially the smaller ones. So-called innovation hubs work in China.

They do go from prototype to production a little fast sometimes, cutting crucial corners. But the speed is impressive. Remember that ridiculous idea of putting a bus on stilts so it could drive over traffic jams? They actually built one. Didn't take more than a few weeks either. I don't think they can get their Starship clone in orbit and back down in one piece before SpaceX will... but if they do, it would not surprise me greatly either.

Fishing for Funny in the dark. Pretty sure I didn't get there, but also expressing my disappointment than no one else got there first.

Getting away from funny, but 'modern capitalism' is supposed to be based on a kind of adversarial model. The companies want to sell us as much stuff as possible with the highest profits, while we are supposed to be trying to find the best values to force the companies to offer better products at lower prices. But the powers are not balanced in this 'game'. Individuals are acting alone and mostly in ignorance, while the companies continue to become larger and increasingly powerful. From this perspective, collecting customer information is like ammunition for tomorrow's attacks on the customers' credit cards.

Some stories are worth more discussion than the standard scrolling time allows... I think Slashdot should allow for some stories to move down the front page more slowly than others.

Quoted against the censor trolls. My degree of concurrence is complex. Goes back to Fermi...

Seems obvious enough that the phishing website will ask for the google login information if that is the target of the phishing scam. Possibly disguised as one of those authorization requests to link and login from the google account?

Pretty sure I've seen a bunch of these, but not a significant fraction of the phishing spam I receive each day. I'd estimate that about three to five false negatives slip through on a daily basis, though the false positives have been mostly eliminated. I'm "tracking" about five email systems and it is interesting to see the differences in the volumes and kinds of spam targeted at each email system, but mostly I only use one of them. Microsoft's Outlook had a major spam storm a few days ago...

I still think the best way to address the spam scam problem is to go after the money, but that would call for working with the potential victims and no one (running a major email system) cares that much about the peasants (like you and me). I can't yet decide if the "countermeasure" described in this story is more or less laughable than average. But I'm predicting the spam will continue apace.