You make a good point, but I think that you're wrong and it won't matter. I don't know if you know this, but over a year ago, Sabine Hossenfelder made an interesting video on YouTube where she talked about how some people think "Winter is coming" with regards to quantum computing. What that means is that people will realize that it is very likely impossible to ever get quantum computing working where it's actually useful and funding will dry up, with only a few hardcore universities still trying to get something out of it. That hasn't happened yet. I'm shocked to s read in the original post above that Atom Computing claims to have a 1000 qbit computer working as I thought the record for most working qbits was 60-something. Most non-IT people don't understand quantum computing at all so they won't be bothered by no practical quantum computer being built. And I know that researchers believe it will take a minimum of hundreds of thousands of qbits, possibly more, working to get any kind of practical quantum computer and that may never be possible to achieve. But quantum winter has not yet come and I'm starting to wonder if it ever will. This field may have money dumped into for decades to come and never achieve anything.

You undermined a pretty good post with "Chinese Taipei". "Chinese Taipei" is the fictitious name that China makes the nation of Taiwan compete at in international sporting competitions so that Taiwan can actually participate and China won't lose its mind over "splitism". The country's name is Taiwan.

Me - Took nephew's iPhone 13 to UBreakIFix, a national chain of computer/phone repair shops. Them - Replaced broken screen on said iPhone. iPhone worked like a champ afterward. Maybe Apple did that kind of thing in the past, but I just don't know about claiming they still do that. The price was far lower than what Apple wanted to fix it so I'm not sure at all that they used Apple parts, but it worked fine after they repaired it. It's still good like 8 months later.

I'm not disputing what you say, but I find it interesting that in all such similar posts, nobody blames Presidents Nixon and Ford for anything. Somehow everything was all Henry K's fault. I guess there is no need to actually be president when you are believed to have more power than the actual president does.

When 500 Zoomers and Millennials threaten to quit a tech company that let the CEO go unless he is brought back, that CEO is actually a cult leader. Let's be clear here. If the choice came down to Altman losing his job or those 500 employees losing their jobs, my money is that Altman stays and they are let go. The minute the company feels it will be in better financial shape to not have those 500 employees around, they're gone. I thought the whole thing about Zoomers and Millennials was that they supposedly didn't trust companies like "everybody else does" and that they won't be stupid enough to believe that a company has their best interests at heart. I guess that just goes out the winder if your CEO is charismatic. I'm warning you all - A guy with this kind of cult like following is going to run for President someday.

Is Altman really all that smart? I read about his background and he got started on his journey into the world of wealth and fame by founding a company nobody has ever heard of that took on Facebook, he sold it for a fortune before it collapsed and get this - he got scurvy because his dumb ass didn't know you needed to eat fruits and veggies . I'm kind of skeptical that he a genius who must be saved at all costs, but hey, half the country worships Donald Trump as their god, so I guess I should have seen this one coming.

Their target customer isn't IT people. I'm sure this device is targeted at people who know next to nothing about IT like doctors, dentists, lawyers, etc. Also it might be targeted at companies who are off the charts risk averse.

Just wanted to point out that an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation specifically covered the possibility of disposable people in "The Measure Of A Man" although it had nothing to do with state assisted suicide.

Not too long ago I worked for a Fortune 500 company in the USA. My severance agreement restricts for a while what I can say about them on social media, so I am not going to give you their name. I can tell you that they are in the bottom half of the Fortune 500 and North America is their largest market for what they do and while they are truly an international company, if they lost every bit of their business outside of the USA and Canada they would survive fine although they would have to do lay offs.

Apparently some time in the late 2000s we bought a Chinese company that sort of did for the Chinese market some SAAS stuff that we did in other markets. The idea was that we would use this Chinese company which we now owned to enter the marketplace in China. It never happened. Every year we had to take pretty hard core training on anti-bribery and the main point they drove home to us employees was that our company would rather not do business somewhere than break the law to get the business. "The law" can be US law here as the US doesn't allow bribery in foreign markets and you can be prosecuted in the US for doing that. They drilled it into us that you can't even do favors to friends and family of foreigners to get business. We used to have company meetings where our CEO and top execs would spesk and we did it via an online internal meeting website. At those meetings our India based staff appeared, as did our South East Asia based staff. Our top office in South America would join as did some of our European offices. You know who never joined? China. Never heard of any Chinese employees of our company ever being asked to work on any products we sold in North America. There seemed to be a huge fire wall between us and whatever the heck it was that they did in China. I don't know why we didn't just sell the company and get out, but I definitely got the impression that we couldn't break into the Chinese marketplace without bribery and we definitely couldn't trust our employees who worked in China.

As a long time IT worker, I can assure that this is not correct. While most may now want to leave, there will always be people who will not leave no matter how bad it gets and how many get laid off. Some employees are terrified of leaving their jobs and will stay until they also get laid off, ignoring all the warning signs. I'll give you an example, although it's not the only one I know. About a decade ago, I worked for a Fortune 500 company and we needed another system admin guy and we hired one from a bank. I never heard of the bank that he worked for, so they were some kind of regional bank with an HQ very far away in a distant other state. He told us that the IT department for the bank in our state consisted of him and one other guy. All the IT functions were otherwise at HQ in that other state. His co-worker continued to work for the bank but now as a 1 person IT team. After about 1 year, we had an opening for another IT guy and we asked him if his friend was interested. He asked and his friend said no. Well, about 1 year later, distant HQ closed the one person IT department and moved all functions to their state and offered the guy no choice to go there. He was laid off. Now suddenly he is interested in our job, but we filled it a year earlier and had no more openings. I remember talking with my co-worker and I said something like "He had to know the job was going to end, right? Why did he stay?" And my co-worker said that the guy knew, but he couldn't make himself leave it. So yes, some people will stay to the bitter end and get laid off despite all the warnings that eventually the lay off will come for them too.

I understand the concern, but you will die before DVD players go away. CD discs and players are still with us, approximately 40 years after CDs became hugely available to the public. VHS was a dead format and nobody wanted to make the media or the players. There are still manufacturers of blank CD, DVD and BD media and burners/readers for PCs and players for the home. That isn't going to change. DVD and BD players may get harder to find and more expensive, but they will never disappear, just like you can still buy a record turntable. When's the last time you actually bought a new record?

I'm pretty sure it won't. You can ask her about her health or whether she should voluntarily step down and going forward all we're going to get out of her is silence on every question she is asked. Hell, I bet she's going to stop going to the Senate as well.

It's cute that you actually believe that. There are lots of convicted criminals who swore they are totally innocent too. First of all, no way would Russia let him stay, basically forever, without some "cooperation" from Snowden. Once Putin dies if a friendly government ever takes over, don't be surprised when they release FSB files that show that Snowden willingly cooperated with the Russians. It's possible that he technically didn't decrypt the data for them, but let's say he encoded it with a 6 letter key, let's say "xzfajk". He could tell the Russians "It's encoded with a 6 letter key, all letters are from the English alphabet and lower case, no letter is used more than once and the first 3 letters in order are x, z and f." That way he could somewhat honestly say he never gave up the (full) key but the Russians got enough to decrypt it by brute force. I guarantee you the Russians and probably the Chinese have read a decrypted version of everything he took years ago.

I'm puzzled that you are puzzled because yes, most Slashdot users are and always have been Americans living in the USA, and yes, most Americans (which would include Slashdotters) get their news exclusively from US mainstream media.

Honestly, some of what you posted as "facts" is kind of whacko in my opinion and probably not correct. I find it interesting that you don't list your source of information but instead tell people to Google it. Lots of people do dumb Google searches and just get back information that confirms their pre-existing biases. I'm a career IT guy and one of my IT friends is the worst guy I've ever seen at doing Google or similar searches and all I can tell you is that you'd be best off to not believe anything he finds as a "fact". He believes in all kinds of kooky "health" things he found via Google searches that most people would never believe in. And I want to point out to you that if you are using something like The Telegraph as your source of truth and facts that you should be aware that they are all over the map on everything and are both for and against everything at the same time.

So I did a web search and now I know why I have never heard of them. I live in a large metropolitan area in the southern USA. It's big enough to have professional sports teams in multiple leagues. We have a whopping 2 Zara stores in my entire metro area, both located in areas I basically never get to. Good luck, Zara. I hope you're still in business if I ever get to one of your stores, although since you couldn't be bothered to place one anywhere in my country, which is quite large and populous, it may be a while.

The Animated Series is canon. The people who run Star Trek now have made this clear.

Why is this a question? Well, back in the 1970s, some guy worked for Gene Roddenberry and he wanted a raise. Gene, who was notoriously cheap, didn't want to give the guy a raise but also didn't want to lose him, so instead Gene gave the guy some kind of title that suggested the guy was the person who made decisions on what was and wasn't canon. This guy hated The Animated Series, so he said "It's not canon". Gene is long dead, the guy is either dead or not part of Star Trek any more, so the validity of the "not canon" decision has been questioned and now it's canon.