El Reg has moved away from the old, snarky style significantly in recent years, as the Powers That Be increasingly seek to court the U.S. audience. For example, you'll notice there's no more "Biting the Hand that Feeds IT" at the top of the homepage. The old style was meant to be a parody of a British "Red Top" tabloid, which doesn't really translate.

I just wonder: Is it really the most effective way to solve the problems it's being used for? Or is it just a clever trick that allows companies to spin up lots of hype, but is really just an incredibly over-engineered solution to most computing tasks, like using a diesel engine to drive in wood screws?

Tell it to Comcast/Xfinity. Basically, the only way to get off the phone with them is if you agree to keep the service at a lower price, or if you tell them it's actually impossible for you to have Comcast service (because you're leaving the country or something). Lying doesn't come easily to me, but you pretty much have to lie to quit Comcast.

All I want is for iPhone users to stop annoying me with their mass texts.

Not just that. You'd probably also be on pretty strong legal footing if you made derivative works of the Steamboat Willie cartoon, provided your character looked exactly like that version of Mickey Mouse and not any later iteration. You'd probably also have to refer to him only as Steamboat Willie and not Mickey Mouse, for trademark reasons.

As someone who works in media and is a member of a union affiliated with the News Guild of New York, this sounds shitty. But I suppose that if anyone wants to use a bot to summarize news stories, I guess the bot needs to have something to summarize, which presumably would be written by people.

This headline and its summary are probably the biggest load of gibberish I've ever seen on /.

Many of what were once called single-family homes in San Francisco that have more than one story have long ago been converted into flats. So if you buy the building, you are almost by definition going to live in one story and rent out the other.

Yeah, there's a plan: Listen, mister, don't like it that you're living in public parks and downtown streets. So you can keep doing that for free and spend what money you can scrape together on drugs, OR for from $1,600-2,000 per month, you can have a roof over your head. That is, until you can't come up with the money one month, and then we'll kick you out on your ass again. Sound good?

The cost of renovation will likely be astronomical. Most office buildings don't have showers or baths, just for starters. And who would want to pay even "sub-market" San Francisco rent if their only access to their shared kitchen area and shared restrooms is by walking through somebody else's apartment? Also, while there are a lot of greedy corporate landlords in San Francisco, it is generally a tenant-friendly city. There are a lot of extra laws that apply when you want to lease a building as a residence. For example, in order to call something a bedroom, it must have both a window and a door. Each unit must have a certain amount of storage space, and so on. All of these types of modifications to turn what was designed as a functional office space into residences are non-trivial, and no landlord is going to be able to recoup their costs without heavy government subsidies. And then there's the work-from-home issue: Why create all these shoddy residences when the service industry businesses (stores, restaurants, night life) are gradually shutting down due to fallout from the pandemic, and the professional jobs don't require you to live in the City anymore?

I don't know about Vietnam, but I once went to a video store in Malaysia. It was a full storefront in a mall, with a logo, and all the employees wore uniforms like a regular store. There was one shelf near the front door selling "import" DVDs—in other words, legitimate ones—and the rest of the whole store was stocked with bootlegs. I mentioned casually to one of the employees that, at the time, you could not buy Lucasfilm movies like Star Wars or Raiders of the Lost Ark in the U.S., and he seemed genuinely perplexed. They all knew the product the were selling was unauthorized; whenever they got a tip that the "copyright cops" were going to raid them, they just didn't open their doors that day. But they really didn't seem to realize just how sophisticated the video piracy industry in Asia really was.

Yeah, but even that sounds a little bit silly. TFA seems to want to make it sound like this is some kind of massive fraud that's sweeping the nation. But in reality, which do you think happens more often:

A.) Crooks steal a tablet from a desk at a T-Mobile store, specifically so that they have 10 minutes or less to access a mobile carrier's proprietary backend software systems.
B.) Crooks steal a janitor's keyring so they can break into a building.

Either way, the opportunity is pretty small. Even if you use the keys, you'll probably trip an alarm system anyway. And while I understand that mobile phones are an essential component in most modern criminal enterprises, it seems to me that it would be a lot simpler to forego the Mission Impossible plan and just buy burner phones.

What constitutes "images with personally identifiable information"? A license plate? A photo of the big tree in my front yard?

Can someone explain to a dullard like myself what an "AI chip" even is? Why do we need new purpose-built cores for whatever these are supposed to do?

To my untrained ear, it sounds a lot like the awestruck pontificating and hand-waving that Stephen Wolfram poured into his doorstopper book on cellular automata, which he had the nerve to title A New Kind of Science.