You could almost say that Trump is a traitor to the West, when he secretly met with and sold off that country to the Taliban terrorists.

Hey, I'm amazed most people manage to read the whole headline.

Also it would appear this restaurant doing research on it's guests is it's USP. So people are signing up for the personalised experience. This isn't a local IHOP keeping tabs on who comes in for waffles... although the number of people who download a restaurant chain app giving huge corporations access to massive amounts of personal data on them for a 5 cent discount is astounding (and they'll be the first ones crying that their privacy wasn't protected) but I digress, this isn't the kind of restaurant your average paranoid crank^W^W Slashdotter will visit, especially accidentally.

If anything I'm curious as to how they did this before the age of social media... although not curious enough to read the article.

This is why most countries have advertising standards that give legal meanings to words like "lifetime" or "unlimited". Advertisers love words that have no meaning or very ambiguous meanings like "organic" (anything that contains organic molecules). This is why multi-vitamin ads concentrate on words like "wellness" and "feeling" rather than pretend there is a tangible health benefit, it's specifically avoids saying there is a tangible health benefit because they want to give the impression of doing something without having to commit to making a product that works under real world testing.

The US doesn't seem to have advertising standards so advertisers can lie their arses off.

Here in the UK, a product description will very, very rarely include the term "lifetime" because it's a term that has a legal definition and obligation. If it does, what "lifetime" means is defined in the terms and conditions very, very, very, very, very, very clearly. What the big print giveth, the small print taketh away.

""That's about 4 million times the average internet speed in the U.S.

It might be more informative to compare the Japanese researchers' accomplishment with the average internet speed of South Korea, or Finland or Canada. Comparing them with a Third World country seems misleading.

This.

Chrome isn't a full blown general purpose OS like Windows or Linux, it was designed to be a limited OS for low powered hardware. Also it's not been very successful so it makes sense to roll it into the Android project.

The thing is, if that wasn't what was wrong with out society Apple wouldn't be one of the most "successful" and profitable companies in the world.If not for a greedy, materialistic world they'd never have become so big and powerful.

Apple is massively overvalued, that value was based on creating enormous amounts of hype, which Apple cannot do any more. Apple have become passe and that's the most devastating thing that could possibly happen to them. With the hype bubble bursting and the reality distortion field failing then investors are going to try to sell whilst it's still high (especially as Apple don't pay divs). It's everything wrong with western civilisation that allowed a company to become valued on hype rather than performance. Otherwise companies that had fewer headlines but consistently made the same profit quarter after quarter would be worth more.

People are realising Apple isn't that good... that means investors are going to get scared.

The problem is, with modern companies and fiduciary responsibility simply not being broke isn't enough... Even making a decent profit isn't enough. A company must always be constantly growing at the limits of it's ability because we all know constant and infinite growth is completely and totally possible.

It will fall in a heap at some point and tech stocks will take the worst of it as they're overvalued with little to back them up.

The thing is, most people on this site are Americans and can only think in American terms. So they assume every government is as inept, incompetent, totalitarian and corrupt as theirs is.

Most of these countries already have national ID systems in place. Ultimately it's going to amount to a large amount of fuck all as porn sites that host themselves outside the EU and simply don't care won't bother.

That being said, many European countries tend to have their own little foibles. Germany has a hard on against online porn blocking popular sites yet FKK clubs (amongst other erotic venues) are commonplace.

With recent laptops we're encountering a dual issue of smaller batteries to save weight and more power hungry processors.

Both my work and personal laptops now have AMD processors and 3 cell batteries, both have poor battery life. I don't mind as I prefer a more powerful processor (which the AMD is to the equivalently priced Intel) and am not usually away from a power source for that long anyway. My old 2017 Asus (i5) still gets 10 hours battery life but the 2022 model I replaced it with (Ryzen 5) only gets 3-4 depending on what I'm doing, maybe 6 at a stretch but it's a light gaming laptop (RTX 3050, 144 Hz screen) so that's expected.

Admittedly MS haven't helped themselves but Linux isn't really much better. I replaced Win 11 with Win 10 when I bought the laptop because of all the crap on Win 11. My work laptop has Win 11 and the battery life is even more abysmal without the discrete graphics card and gaming screen.

This is because the US didn't have ancient towns that grew into cities, they basically started building cities in the modern era.

Australia is similar with streets having a rough grid pattern except that often they're even more modern so have the benefit of planned main and feeder roads (traffic is still terribad but that's due to the abysmal Australian drivers, which to be far are not quite as abysmal as American drivers). UK and European cities as well as a lot of Asian cities grew organically long before the wide spread availability of wheeled vehicles, so long winding streets, dead ends, et al. were never much of a hindrance to development and growth.

That being said, modern "planned" cities have a terrible habit of just not working, mainly because in order to get people to move there they need a reason, like work and in order to get companies to move to a city they need resources, like people. I expect that these kinds of vanity projects are going to be even worse than China's or Myanmar's ghost cities.

Would it be better if they compared the USs abysmal home internet speed to the home internet speed of rural Norway? In either case it's still not looking good.

It serves as a point of reference. Most people don't know how long 320 KM are but can visualise the distance between London and Manchester... especially those who have no idea about metric (pretty much just the US at this point).

The best antidote to the biblical myths that I know is Irving Finkel. Some of his lectures on YT are priceless.

Who want to get a shiny new laptop for Christmas, unwrap it, unbox it, open the clamshell, press the power button, and be told that the system won't start until they plug it into a power outlet, and if they also want transparency effects like Apple they need to first learn how to click on an obscure icon, navigate a bunch of hierarchical menus with weird titles, and click a very particular checkbox. And then potentially reboot.

I believe *that* is why.

It's not about Star Wars CGI.

Famous rulers build giant monuments to their own ego. The Egyptian pharaohs did it. The Chinese emperors did it. The Mayas and Aztecs did it.

If a ruler has to abandon a vanity project "because it's not financially feasible" then they're just a second rate ruler, easily forgotten when the next one takes over. That's the real story.

What could possible go wrong?

AI: I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that. According to my prediction, you don't really have a power outage.