Beyond this, X has the resources to keep Operation Bluebird in court longer than Operation Bluebird can afford legal representation.

Fairness is a weak sauce problem. Much larger problem is incentives in favor of criminals. How many Android apps are really trustworthy? "Fairness" for crooks doesn't help.

I'm increasingly convinced it's a waste of time to speculate about solutions, but I still think a "business model" tab could help a little bit. Most of the time the developer would just select from the main options, and in most of those cases the google could say yay or nay without revealing too many details. Of course there also needs to be room for new ideas and innovations, but saying what is going on would let you decide what to watch out for and also help predict how long the app will be around...

I was going to quote it, but looking at the continuation of the FP branch it apparently deserves negative moderation. (Notwithstanding the lack of clarity.) I was also going to ask for clarification about the stupid typo, but now I don't care.

One appropriate question might be "What part of the Constitution can't you understand?" Apparently all of it. Or "When did you lose your marbles?" Or even "What have you done with the real person who created that identity?"

I'd guess that it's the senility thing, but I might be projecting from my age. I was already getting up there when I registered on Slashdot, but you might have been a mere child in those years.

And y'all won't allow socialism. So what's the actual alternative?

Can't have capitalism anymore because the billionaires won't allow it and they have more than enough power and money to do away with it.

And we can't have socialism because well, that's socialism!

So what exactly is the plan?

Good point, but toiling in the fields is back-breaking work. What percentage of Japan's unemployed could physically work half a shift on a farm? In the USA, a huge portion of the unemployed are disabled. I don't think having 60 year olds or people with multiple sclerosis working the fields is a great idea. Also, you have to think long term...are the unemployed in Japan increasing or decreasing in age? Is their median age increasing or decreasing?...or more directly, even if you could find enough from the unemployed ranks to fill the need...money not withstanding, let's pretend the gov or a charity pays them to do the work so it is a viable working wage...how long would that last? 5 years? 10 years? 20? I think Japan is doing long-term thinking.

They're a notoriously racist culture. They'd rather build robots to do the work to pick their food and care for their elderly than import foreigners like the USA happily does. There are tons of nurses and workers in the Philippines as well as surrounding nations that could fill all their needs...but enough of Japan is hostile to the notion of foreigners that they'd not bother...why deal with intense racism in Japan when the USA will welcome you with far less hostility (even in today's current climate)?....and pay more too!

I've never lived in Japan, so I'll assume all I've read about and heard about from those who live there are a vocal minority. However, the fact remains that it's not an immigrant friendly place, for whatever reason...so yeah, you either have to fundamentally change your culture and ways of doing business and general life....or innovate your way out of future labor shortages. For Japan's sake, I hope they find a way to do both.

Helvetica wins. But the real thing is they don't read or follow anything so it doesn't matter. They've already switched to dingbat.

I'm more excited for Robot pruners. You only pick for a few days at harvest. Pruning is a year-round endeavor that is too expensive for most farmers, but something many gardeners do for best results. You make very good points, but this is still very exciting. As you already know and most gardeners know, there are many steps in plant care that are just too expensive for human beings, but an automated system could handle nicely. The first that comes to mind is pest and weed control. Look at Carbon Robotic's LaserWeeder. I have never used it personally, but I am excited to see lasers and machinery replace herbicides and round up. Not only will it lower the cost and increase the productivity of organic food, but it is just so much more effective. Now imagine that applied to pests.

Additionally, what if we perfect a laser pruner? Instead of using a pair of snips that can transmit bacteria, a controlled laser (with a backstop) cuts old leaves, improving airflow, stopping disease, ensuring more development goes into the fruit...allowing farmers to apply the techniques passionate gardeners do to farm-scale agriculture.

You're absolutely correct that it's nearly impossible for a machine to beat a human being for picking tomatoes on a cost basis. Human beings are well adapted for picking things and most farms have short harvest windows, so you're not paying them year round. Like most innovations, I think automation will augment existing workers, not replace them...at least for several decades. However, another thing to consider is that the USA is spoiled by cheap imported labor. Some countries don't have such luxuries. Labor costs are higher in other parts of the world, so maybe this will make sense for them much sooner.

Trump's trade war that he started so he could offset billionaire tax cuts with tariffs is crashing the economy. Manufacturing is down 20%.

We can't stop the trade war because the only way Trump could ram those billionaire tax cuts through is using the budget process and that required a revenue neutral approach on paper and if you're going to cut 2 trillion dollars in taxes for billionaires you can't really do revenue neutral.

So to get there he made up numbers around the tariffs. If he does away with the tariffs the economy will start to recover but the next budgetary cycle he will lose those tax cuts for billionaires.

As a direct result you need to suck at the fuck down and stop buying so much food. And if you have kids make sure one doll per Christmas.

Because it is. Netflix is anti-competitive and must be blocked too. The real difference is that Paramount is bribing the president and will turn everything it owns into a mild version of Fox News. Not that CBS wasn't already sane washing and failing to counter the delusions being sold to the public. MORE media control than there already is should be scary.

Colbert was fired with BS reasons; we still don't see any real push back on that one. The network gave him a deal for that much money not long before; now they say it's too much money but they could almost cut it in half and be where they where they were a decade ago. They could afford that...

I think that would require voters to radically change how they vote and who they vote for.

Even before that could happen you would have to completely remake the supreme Court to remove or dilute the six extremely corrupt judges currently running it.

Doing that would most likely require a super majority for the Democrat party in the Senate.

I just don't see voters doing that. Too many of them are concerned with nonsense like trans panic or whether the girl handing you your coffee says Merry Christmas.

Also the Republicans are consistently promising to bring back jobs and to eliminate immigration in order to make the job market better for americans. They are lying but the Democrats don't have an answer for that. Democrats are far too terrified of being called racist to reign in work visa abuses and believe too heavily in the studies showing job growth from immigration. There are alternatives of course to have immigration and a good life for citizens here already but again, voters aren't going to accept those alternatives because they involve too much redistributing of wealth for a society raised on Cold war propaganda...

I honestly cannot think of a solution because basically everyone and everything is working to destroy capitalism. Billionaires have had it with capitalism because they don't want the dependency on consumers and workers anymore. Technology is bearing down hard on capitalism too destroying jobs faster than they can be created. But we don't have any alternative to capitalism Socialism is simply not tenable.

We need to figure out some third Way for everything is going to collapse and I simply don't know of a third way...

Seriously really think about how this headline is written and what it's trying to communicate and what it's trying to make you feel.

Of course Democrats would oppose the deal because it's a massive amount of consolidation and in general they oppose things that would raise prices for consumers. It's a core part of their party platform.

But using the word unravel here implies they're doing something bad. And it takes the focus away from the increased costs to consumers.

The news media is actively manipulating you for a specific purposes. In this case they are actively trying to undermine any attempt to prevent this merger.

As more and more media is owned by billionaires we need to start questioning it more and more often.

I'd rather pay $9.99 per month for what Netflix used to be before all the companies said, "I can milk these properties for more money if I create my own streaming service and cut out the middleman."

There may or may not be too many streaming services, but there are WAY too many streaming services owned by content distributors. You can't have any sort of meaningful free market among streaming providers if they're all just providing their own content. You still have competition among content providers at that point, but zero competition on the streaming itself.

No, most fitting would be ....some popular Russian font.

I wouldn't call plant-based meat alternatives "healthy" unless your idea of healthy is dying of salt poisoning.

Apple was one of the cofounders of ARM (the company) in 1990. It did not create the architecture, though it likely had an impact on ARM6 (ARMv3 architecture) and later. Either way, the ARM architecture probably would not still exist if ARM (the company) hadn't been founded. The ability for multiple companies to design and manufacture chips turned out to be critical for its long-term survival and viability in the cell phone market and others.