It is about UI.

That Microsoft tries to push AI everywhere is only tangential to the change. It just happens that their latest app is the Copilot app, and they experimented their new UI on that app, since it is new, there is less resistance to change, and they can experiment a bit more. Now that they found it to their liking, they are migrating their other apps, starting with Edge, and it will probably be the basis of Windows 12.

To be honest, I think it is a good approach. If executed well, that is. Considering the level of incompetence Microsoft has show for the last decade when it comes to UI, I don't have high hopes, they are probably going to do a half-assed job. I would have preferred they fixed their existing inconsistent mess before trying something else but I don't think they did anything wrong here.

All facilities are a nuisance: factories, roads, power plants, landfills, airports, etc... NIMBY is there for a reason.

But I would like to think that datacenters are low on the nuisance scale. In fact I have never noticed a datacenter by myself, someone has to point me at what looks like some nondescript office building and tell me "it is a datacenter" for me to notice. Maybe giant datacenters are different, but I wouldn't be surprised if there were less of a nuisance than the farmland they replace. Farmland consumes a whole lot of water, farming equipment is noisy and pesticides are likely not great for health.

I suspect the reason is simply that locals simply see no benefits. No jobs, no local service, etc... But there is an easy fix: tax the datacenters for the benefit of the communities. In fact, I am sure it is the root of the problem. Electricity bills should not increase, whoever is exploiting the datacenter should pay for the difference and then some more to compensate for the nuisance, a reasonable request from the locals. Of course, whoever is building the datacenter don't want to, they want to take everything and give nothing, so in response the locals tell them to go fuck themselves, giving every reason they can.

Note that I am not comparing the value of datacenters vs farms or any other industry, just the nuisance they cause to the locals vs what they get in return.

Phones are becoming more and more expensive and each iteration brings less and less to the table, as hardware is no longer a limiting factor 99+% of the times. Also, and this is a good thing, support and warranties are getting longer.

All that mean people don't change phones as often as they used to, so why release a new model every year if people don't buy it because the one they already have is just fine... and they may not have finished paying it.

Everyone is a big dumb-dumb then, including you and me.

That's how human brains work, no amount of understanding will change that. You can work around the problem, like they do in aviation, using strict protocols, but even with that in mind, sometimes, "glitches" in radio communication have deadly consequences, including the worst accident in the history of aviation, the Tenerife disaster.

And the proper response to a technology that is flawed is to fix it, not have people learn how to deal with it. Education is important, but reducing cognitive load is important too. Doctors have other things to think about than the technicalities of video calls.

Recipes are not copyrightable, and they have traditionally been shared freely. And when the internet came along, cooking recipes were one of the first things to be shared, I think even before the web existed.

Some people make a living editing them, giving them a nice presentation, that part is copyrightable and that's the value added, the recipe is not. Many recipe websites are terrible enough to make the added value negative, pages of useless content and ads. AI rights this wrong in a sense, if the experience of recipe websites is bad enough for people to turn to AI slop instead, maybe that's the problem. Other than giving a nice presentation, there is value in careful selection, if you make a name based on the quality of the recipes you present, people will come to you and ignore the slop, because they want *your* recipe, because they know it is good. If the recipes in the website are of uneven quality, people might as well get the slop and skip the annoyances like ads.

It is not "others platforms we have identified", it is "unknown". It can be BSD, but it can also be a bot, someone running anti-fingerprinting extensions, a mobile browser in desktop mode, some embedded system, etc... Anything that doesn't match their rules. There is probably a higher proportion of Linux users than Windows or Apple users in there because Linux users are more likely to have a weird setup, but I wouldn't count on it.

We may have one before the earth no longer exists and the sun has turned into a white dwarf.

Effective antimatter bombs are purely science fiction. They are not only impossible to produce with technology of the foreseeable future, but I don't think they offer a strategic advantage over regular nukes, they are an awfully inefficient way of making a big boom. The only (still sci-fi) potential application for its extreme energy density at a macroscopic level seems to be about powering spaceships. At a microscopic level, antimatter has research applications of course, and for medicine (PET scans are a current day application), maybe for nanoscale engineering (like electronics).

My 90 year old grandparents take passwords seriously, they have them written on a paper notebook in an obfuscated fashion (like fake contacts or appointments). They learned as adults that their credit card PIN code is important and think the same of passwords, also their online presence is very limited, so they have few of them.

Nowadays, it is as if everything requires an account even when it shouldn't require one, and most accounts involve passwords. I have 350 of them in my password manager! They are an annoyance and kids being kids, they will find the quickest, easiest way around the problem, and that's weak passwords. A habit that is likely to be carried over into adulthood. And yes, it is easier to type "123456" whenever there is a password field than to use a password manager, security be damned.

Ok, developers didn't lower their prices to match the reduced commission. Which means more money for the developers, and for some reason, giving more money to developers prevent them from innovating or making their software safer.

And maybe non-EU developers got 86% of the benefits from the reduced commission, which for some reason is worse for the EU than giving it all to Apple, a non-EU company.

Come on Apple, you are out of arguments besides "we want more money".

If the trend continues, Europeans will move about their cities in trains, trams and buses, also on bikes.
Most European cities want cars out, self-driving or not.

It is not about making it impossible for bots, it is about making it more expensive than hiring an army of human captcha solvers in a low-income country.

They will be cracked eventually, and I believe that most of them already are, that's why they are constantly changing them. It is a cat-and-mouse game.

And how about staying on topic instead of digging up dirt on people for no good reason, I didn't realize that Slashdot was that toxic.

His point is relevant. Cheating is a problem recognized by gamers and the industry alike, to the point of driving people away from PC gaming. As a result many people see intrusive anti-cheats as a necessary evil.

And one of the ways for cheaters to work around anti-cheat systems is to run Linux, because anti-cheat systems are either absent or easier to bypass there. And when called out and banned, they will start wining about being banned because they are running Linux and that evil game company doesn't like Linux, not great PR...

So why would a game company publishing a game where cheating is a problem want to support Linux? It is more work for only a tiny fraction of gamers, it will make the cheating problem worse, and when you try to address it, you will only get complaints.

I don't know of a company besides Valve that makes the effort to care about both cheating and Linux compatibility. And Valve is the company behind Proton, the Steam Deck, and is the one most interested in ending the monopoly Microsoft has on PC gaming.

First experience with the Prime free trial and the following cancellation was in 2016 (called Premium at the time), I did several times after that and I never had a problem. I never had a problem with Amazon in general, except for the following, who were mostly my fault:

- Forgot to unsubscribe after my trial period of Audible so I had to pay the monthly fee for a month, didn't get a refund but no problem cancelling, Maybe I could have got a refund by calling support, but I didn't bother and used the voucher I got.

- A single noticeable counterfeit received over about 100 purchases, a fake Samsung charger, but of good quality. I expected that considering I paid well below retail price. Didn't dispute, used the charger for years without problems. Now, I mostly stopped buying from sellers that don't pass the smell test on Amazon. If I want cheap Chinese crap, I usually go for AliExpress, which is significantly cheaper for the same product. In fact, many such Amazon listings are dropshipped from AliExpress.

In your situation, I suspect that someone else used your CC number for their own Prime account. It is possible that whoever stole your CC number had other payment methods, probably other stolen CC numbers, and he paid with them to renew his subscription. The surprising part is that both Amazon and your bank let an obviously fraudulent transaction pass several times, it looks like a big mess.

Not only cancelling Prime is easy, but they will also refund you if you get charged after your free trial ends and cancel before using your paid subscription. I actually never paid for Prime, but took advantage of these free trials several times and cancellation never was a problem.

Of course they will try to make you stay, and you have to click a couple of confirmation buttons. But that's standard commercial practice, everyone does that.

If you think clicking two buttons instead of one is hard, you probably never had a subscription that is hard to cancel. No phone call, no snail-mail, no deliberately broken website,... I remember a time when I was told the best way to cancel your ISP subscription was to ask your bank to stop paying the bills, ignore the threatening letters from your ISP and wait for them to cancel your subscription on their side. In theory, is is illegal to do it like that, but these ISPs knew enough not to get too much attention on their practices by taking it to court.

It could have to do with trademarks.

Mickey Mouse is a Disney trademark, and trademarks don't expire as long as you use them. So if you use Steamboat Willie in an ad, it may suggest that Disney is endorsing the product, violating trademark law. Usually, out of caution, you don't use other's trademarks at all in ads. In some situations, you can, but you have to be careful, and by filing that lawsuit in advance, that's the law firm being careful.