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.

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).

If memory serves, there is a bubonic plague vaccine but it's used sparingly as it can have some bad side effects and plague isn't really wide spread enough to warrant inoculation. Quarantines and hygiene generally keep it under control as well as modern medical techniques for those already infected, it's not the huge killer it was in the 16th century, where quarantines were used to get rid of it (by this I mean the plague victims were sealed in and left to die, it was a simpler time).

What's interesting is that this doesn't seem to be affecting other developed countries, outside the US. it seems to be most prevalent in Africa where health care is patchy to non-existent.

https://www.cdc.gov/plague/maps-statistics/index.html

I always knew there was something dodgy about Brave... I mean just from the name but good to see some evidence confirming it.

Yep, the old school Superman movies (think Reeve) and cartoons (50s or 60s IIRC) were quite bright and uplifting, Superman being a good guy and the bad guys being beaten by him. It's a recent phenomina to turn everything into a dark, gritty, film grainy, speech-become-unintelligible-grunty type of film.

Is it so wrong to have a 2 hour simplistic plot where a good guy defeats evil in lighting that means you can see what's going on?

I'm waiting for this kind of thing to run afoul of consumer protection laws in somewhere like the UK, Australia or various EU countries. A device that can be killed by blocking access to online services is not fit for purpose.

This is why I believe companies should reserve a percentage of dividends to be given to employees. To encourage employees to work to make the company more profitable as they see a return on their work. If the company does not issue dividends, the employees do not receive them, but if they do they must receive them. The same should go for any other form of shareholder or executive compensation/remuneration because I know they'll just find a new way to avoid paying people.

However this is somehow considered communist and instantly dismissed by corporate bootlickers.

The problem is not so easy because you're not always aware of these things before buying the product, you are not given a set date for the shut down either. When you buy a time limited product, you're given at least an estimate of how long the product will keep working for ("disposable" is considered such).

This is one reason game publishers and extortion companies like Denuvo are getting upset at Steam. The little orange/yellow box that says "this game is limited to 5 activations" or "this game requires an internet connection", so on and so forth are really upsetting them as a few people are reading these and thinking... Yarrrr, if they're going to treat me this way I may as well not buy it.

In the US you might be correct as the US is corrupt as hell and run by the corporations, however in the rest of the world this is very much a matter for consumer law and long past time that it was addressed in said law.