Yes. People get mad at me for pointing that out. I haven't coded anything in years, having moved to management; but I have colleagues who use ChatGPT to write procedures, policies, and documentation. The lack of intelligence in their product is obvious, but it allows (weak) managers to spew out performance reviews in record time. I think we will need a law suit or two to hurt companies before things change. Part of the problem is that we continue to call it AI. It's not.

A tablet is not a device for you to work, watch videos or play music. A tablet is a point of sale and a device for Apple, Google or Amazon to sell you streamable content while collecting data about you, your surroundings, and your habits so that you can better be micro-marketed to. This is why they are cheap, the price of the device is not where they are making their money. A device that functions just as a screen, does not let you buy things, and does not share your data is useless to them. How much useful to you it would be is irrelevant. So yes, such devices exist, but they are typically a lot more expensive than a typical tablet, and offer worse quality and functionality.

| consumers will get a less relevant and diverse Internet experience.

As far as ads are concerned, maybe. Personally, I believe *any* ad is irrelevant - it's not what I came here to see. Therefore, anything that lowers the selling value of ads makes my internet experience more, not less, relevant.

Yep. And dearly. Thank you for point this out. My American BA (at a private university) cost about $40K. My wife's American PhD (at a state university) cost about $100K.

But not, not, one million (billion) times NOT at your expense. We payed for it in hard-earned cash. My wife's PhD cost about US$ 100K at a state university (CSU), my BA cost about $40K at a private university (DU). On the other hand, even if you had payed for it, consider how many of the world's problems would be solved, or vastly ameliorated, if most people were educated to the top of their abilities. Hunger, overpopulation, climate, STDs, poverty, religious struggles, a ton of others. All of these are the root causes why the US is the target of so many attacks of all kinds. The truth is that this headline is sensationalist and aims to cause controversy. Using the word "owe" in this context is a sure-fire way to raise the voices of Americans. It's code, it's a dog whistle for conservatives, it connects (to them) with entitlements and a lopsided sense of economic justice. The better question to ask is: "how does it benefit the US to invest in educating foreigners?" And once again, though: every single foreign student I know of in the US pays for their education. And what's more, we pay out-of-state tuition. So back off.

Thank you for connecting to what's missing from almost every current art form and modern hobbies. I've suspected all along that it's not just that I'm getting old. It's that all technology has been done more by the MBAs than the engineers, more for the clueless mainstream than for the people who love it and is willing to dedicate long hours to it. Computers, the Internet, mobile connectivity, music, movies, home audio/video, are all focused on the masses because they must make billions. Therefore they are unappealing to the really dedicated enthusiasts. The only technical hobby that still has some appeal to me is photography. For some reason it's still possible to buy a decent SLR and take the time to learn and get better at it. There is, as the original poster says, still some challenge there.

Nah. In the last 5 years I saw a LOT of people abandon Linux. I work at a research university, I'm talking people who have been running Unix for ever and Linux since the early 90s. All of them, no exception, went to OSX. I don't know anybody who just abandoned Linux and happily moved to Windows 7. Why? Because OSX has Unix underneath. It provides basic compatibility not only of software people write, but of the way they like to do things and the way they think about systems. All of that AND a GUI that just works. I have seen the latest Windows be credited for the demise of Linux on the desktop since the late 90s. During all this time, Linux on the desktop has only grown. It has been shrinking in the past 5 years, and it correlates nicely with the growth of OSX.

Yes. But I think de Icaza philosophically agrees with Microsoft, besides being simply payed by them. To him, and to both the KDE and Gnome crowds, "Linux on the Desktop" is synonymous to "Windows experience on Linux." That's their mistake. The Linux kernel never stopped plowing ahead, innovating, incorporating things before Microsoft even realized they were good ideas, while the desktop has been lagging behind, trying to be Windows. I say throw the whole mass down the drain and start over. Apple has showed us that a Unix system can support a highly functional, highly polished GUI, and not be Windows. Get to work, guys.

The people who run the world are the ones who want to rule the world. They do what it takes. People want to hear familiar ideas framed in familiar terms. Politicians and marketers deliver just that. Moving to an evidence-based society, if accomplished, would remove all the alpha-male characteristics from leadership. It would favor hard thinking and research, and it would not favor personality and manipulative abilities. The world is as it is. I know deep in my heart that Facebook is evil, that people could be doing exactly the same thing without relinquishing their privacy, and that what people are doing on Facebook is idiotic in any event. That does not change the fact that influencing people and weaving a web of social relations is what people want to do, and what they will do. Denying human social traits is stupid, in politics, in social networking, in religion, and everywhere else. People are what they are. If geeks want to change the game, they need to learn to play the game. To be manipulative, to believe that the end justifies the means, and to not let ethics interfere. Yes, wielding power is incompatible with geek values. The sooner we learn that, the better.

Thank you.

No. What is irresponsible is not testing the heck out of your code before shipping it. You should be doing that anyway, why not code according to safe procedures and doing some real QA while you're at it? It is also irresponsible to create a whole generation of developers with no concept of security and efficiency, because modern languages are supposed to do that for them, at great expense of everybody else.

Sorry, maybe I'm old, but I don't believe in systems designed to think for people.

No matter what the question is, "switch to a different OS" is never the correct answer. People should be able to pick the best OS for the job, as well as the best language for the job. C# and .NET integrate well with Windows because they don't run on anything else. I would rather have options. And the term "premature optimization" is a good example of the kind of idiot that writes code these days. Not doing what you call "premature optimization" is what I call being sloppy. Being lazy. Do it right in the first place so you don't have to do it again.

Sure. As soon as someone comes up with a language that produces code that runs half way as fast as C on any OS, and that at least pretends to integrate with the rest of the OS. You know, make it nice for everybody else other than developers. Oh, here's a though: how about developers get their heads out of their butts and learn how to be programmers, instead of whining that real languages don't do everything for them?

Yup. I am now officially old. I've been ranting for quite some time that video is replacing everything, and for no good reason. For almost everything useful, text is so much more efficient. For you half braindead so-called "developers" out there, the reason is simple to grasp: text can be random-accessed, can be easily searched, and can be grasped pages at a time with proper training. In contrast, video is sequential. It forces me to watch things in whatever order the person making it wanted me to. For us old timers, watching video when compared to reading documentation feels like what e-mails feel to you, when compared to texting. Slashdot, you are becoming less and less relevant to me as time goes on. I get that that's the point, though. You need to attract nerds who grew up watching, not reading. It's sad, though.