I prefer the Martian bear.

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.

Yes, Don-boy, I called you a fuckup. Tell the FCC to ban the internet.

There has been erosion over many years, but Trump is doing it's best to make it one right now.

Lucky for us he's an utter fuckup.

I'm more interested in the game than in the packaging.

That was my first thought. It's a big step towards pointing out how invasive it is.

US businesses only cry "free market" when they're trying to kill regulatory legislation.

IMO buying and selling are a matter of gambling on which way you think other people gamble.

I know what .rar and .gz are. If .lz is something similar, maybe dark matter is a compression artifact.

I'm sure that hopping on the AI bandwagon will fix everything.

The fact that it makes a big cloud around a galaxy or cluster rather than collapsing puts a lot of constraints on what it can do.

For more info, you'll have to go to someone who knows more about it than what I've read on science-news websites.

Dark energy is a real puzzle. As I understand it, it's too weak by a factor of 10^30 or 10^60 in comparison from what we should expect the known vacuum energy would cause. You see this mentioned very occasionally, but most treatments of DE that a layman runs across just ignore it in favor of wringing their hands over some issue that is trivial in comparison.

Some boffin cam up with that idea, but they rule it out because DM apparently doesn't interact with itself (very much) other than by gravity, so it can't clump up tight like a star or a planet or a living thing. (Something to do with shedding energy, IIRC.)

But it's a cool idea. If I were a novelist I'd run with it.

Every time people hear what it actually involves is outrage and opposition, at least all the way back to when Intel first announced that they wanted to hardcode identity numbers inside CPUs in 1999. But the corporations involved have been relentless, and have sunk countless billions of dollars steadily forcing it forwards, and building front organizations to obfuscate and whitewash it.

With Windows 11, Microsoft was finally able to FORCE Trusted computing hardware into every new computer. Not just every new Windows computer, but every computer.

Every new Intel PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new AMD PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. Every new ARM PC CPU has built in Trusted Computing enforcement hardware. The only processor lines that DON'T have it are the microcontrollers.

There are some unlocked smartphones available, but as far as I can determine it's literally impossible to buy a smartphone that doesn't have hardware trusted computing built in.

I specified that enforcing Trusted Computing at the internet access level is still a long term goal, they couldn't get away with it today. However they are well on the way to success. Virtually all new hardware supporting trusted computing, all the front groups rolling out standards and systems, and as it gets incorporated into things everyone is going to increasingly running into situations where they get locked out of stuff if they're not Trusted Computing compliant. Streaming already restricts you to the worst quality if you're not compliant, and it's only going to get worse as pre-Win11 computers fade out and as more things require it.

I'd hardly call exact date of birth "low information content".

And yes this does reveal exact date of birth, regardless of the bullshit obfuscation that it supposedly only reports age range. The server simply tracks the reported result every time the user connects, and on some specific day the result CHANGES to announce their date of birth.

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This is based on SLSA (Supply-chain Levels for Software Artifacts), brought to you by the same fuckers making Trusted Computing and the TMP (Trusted Platform Module). It's part of the same shitstack to prohibit you from altering your software and to lock you out of your own files, and to send spy reports out over the internet so you can be cut off if you "fail" the Trusted Computing check.

The software can use a TPM's (Trusted Platform Module) Sealing function to encrypt your data such that it's impossible to access your own data if the software is modified. It can then pass control over that data only to software updates that carry a signed security certificate from Broadcom (or any other company using this system).

It is no longer open source, your system no longer works as you can no longer access your Sealed data if you change so much as a single letter of the code. Even recompile unaltered code won't work, unless you magically manage to get your build environment absolutely identical to the company's build environment and get byte-for-byte output. Even that may be impossible with the newer levels of non-deterministic compiler optimizations.

Also, with TMP's Remote Attestation feature can be used to transmit your machine's software configuration over the internet, so that you can be cut off if your system doesn't match Broadcom (or other company's) cryptographically signed certificate.

And then of course there's Network Access Control (NAC) / Trusted Network Connect (TNC). In the long term, the goal is for ISPs to use NAC/TNC to interrogate your computer for Trusted Computing compliance, and deny you any internet access whatsoever if your machine isn't compliant. Software with this sort of "security" certificate would pass inspection, while any attempt to alter the code would be detected as "tampering". You then get "quarantined". What "quarantine" means is that you are denied internet access - with the exception that you do get very restricted access which can only be used to download the approved software to "fix" your computer into Trusted Computing compliance.