I prefer the Martian bear.

Forgetting he exists would be the best punishment.

I think the infographic they put out said that the "always listening" features were not available in the EU and China. Although honestly I don't see how anyone can trust the hardware when the "always recording conversations" features are part of the SIP.

I can't wait to see how many places ban this Apple Watch entirely. First, there's no way this is legal in two-party consent states, and I don't care how Apple tries to re-define "record."

Secondly, I don't think anyone really cares how secure Apple says "Private Cloud Compute" is, no one is going to trust that a device that's designed to "listen" (but not "record") every conversation in the vicinity isn't "recording" especially when it can produce an AI summary of a conversation.

There's no way this Apple Watch will be allowed in government buildings or anywhere else that people may not want to be recorded, no matter Apple's privacy claims. I expect to see "No Apple Watch Allowed" signs start appearing all over the place once this releases.

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.

It is kind of shit, mainly because it's increasingly out of touch. If they wanted to make a culturally relevant game, it should be Grand Theft America, where the goal is to rename everything America, alienate all of your friends, and start fights you can't win.

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.