How many times have people been told to use the Oxford comma and still get it wrong?

Even worse, the use of lists without the Oxford comma is showing up more and more in publications who should know better, creating wording or joins the author never intended.

If this software is just now getting punctuation correct after several years of trying, it's doing just as well as humans.

Telescreen monitoring would have required a crazy amount of manpower.

Probably the closest real-world analog was the East German Stasi, which may have accounted for nearly 1 in 6:

The ratio for the Stasi was one secret policeman per 166 East Germans. When the regular informers are added, these ratios become much higher: In the Stasi's case, there would have been at least one spy watching every 66 citizens! When one adds in the estimated numbers of part-time snoops, the result is nothing short of monstrous: one informer per 6.5 citizens. It would not have been unreasonable to assume that at least one Stasi informer was present in any party of ten or twelve dinner guests. Like a giant octopus, the Stasi's tentacles probed every aspect of life.

— John O. Koehler, German-born American journalist, quoted from Wikipedia

Or if you're more cynical, it's like a Collateralized Debt Obligation

Thanks. I was thinking the same thing. And just like a CDO, what happens when someone doesn't, or can't, know the value of the underlying security?

They have an all-in-one package from Verizon. Phone, internet, and tv. It is well over $100/month. Cutting out tv would get them just below that amount.

When I gave up cable well over a decade ago price was the reason. I couldn't justify the yearly cost increases when I was only watching ten or so channels on a regular basis.

My parents still do though my dad keeps questioning if he wants it any longer. They don't watch much any more and the cost is out of hand.

What they do is spend two hours or so every night watching YT videos of places around the world or watching shows about this or that subject.

Who knows, maybe I could write a cool indie game during my 18 months off and I'd never need another corporate job again?

Let us know what torrent it's on.

He has a joke "You know I can see you" that he targets at live audience members who act like they are watching television.

Headline of the story is not helpful. Should have been "in-tv-cameras" or "cameras-with-TVs"...

But now I'm wondering if TikTok can watch back? Or is this just an idea for a fresh form of app perversion? You didn't notice that the ToS gives us the right to capture everything we can get from your front and back cameras, plus you gave us permission to use AI to search for the funniest bits and post those candid-camera videos online. I imagine a business model where people can claim 1% of the profits for their contributions, assuming they can actually prove the linkage... But of course such a highly ethical company will be laundering all of the money through various jurisdictions and it turns out there are no profits! (PROFIT!)

Topic certainly seems to have room for some Funny, though I'm not holding my breath waiting for today's Slashdot to deliver it.

Not sure how much I concur. There's also the possibility that he thinks there won't be any value in the currency after the coming crash, so there's no point in placing more bets. "Full faith and credit" may implode on the "faith" dimension? Or perhaps he thinks "legal tender" will implode on the "legal" dimension?

When the next Democratic president waves their hand you can be sure the Supreme Court will do its duty and say that waving is not part of presidential powers and block whatever it is they want to do.

Nearly every time they investigate, the person mixed up the pedal and the brake. When the car starts accelerating, in their panic they push said "brake" (actually the pedal) harder, and keep pushing it to the floor trying to stop the car.

Then these people shouldn't be driving. If they are unable to put their foot on the correct pedal, what else aren't they doing?

The demise of the sitck shift rears its head again.

The future remains fundamentally unknowable, but timing still matters. He's been winning those market timing games, but now he says he can't go on?

I think the root of what destroyed the stock market (pending proof via implosion) is that the metrics became broken. Mostly that means the Dow Jones as the leading metric. Originally the idea was an index of "top companies" based on reality-based factors like sales and assets, but the Dow could always swap out "slower runners" for better ones, which is a fundamentally dishonest racing system. But recently they gave up on the reality and the primary considerations for getting into the index are just size and the delta of increase in size of profit. Whether any of it's related to the real world or is just based on magic juggling of imaginary numbers is regarded as moot.

(But the YOB's too-lucky timing may let him blame others, as usual...)

Mod parent funnier for a version of the joke I was looking for? But maybe more on the level of "simplest algorithm" for "song"?

Today, country music, tomorrow rap!

Now if I was an actual comic writer, then I would know the funniest punchline. Pretty sure "rap" isn't it, and "classical symphonies" is worse, but "jazz" would be going in the wrong direction. Or maybe "jazz world" would work? How about "K-pop" or, or... Dang, I seem to have run out of music genres.

(And I'm still waiting for an updated version of "Anything you can do, AI can do better." AI can do anything better than me, but I chose not to ask for help with this attempted joke.)

Yeah, and the air stinks, too. Does it help to complain a problem that is fundamental to Slashdot's notion of time?

There are many stories that should last longer than it takes to scroll straight down the top page... Doesn't help that the real world is also uncooperative about scheduling when new stories will arrive. And substantive discussions are hard work, too.

The advantage of fiction is that all the noise can be trimmed away. The real world is full of noise without meaning, no matter how primed we humans are to see patterns and meaning in everything. Why you'd think the AIs might have learned how to hallucinate from us!

That's the joke I'm looking for on the story--and the obvious answer is that cunning and evil hackers can use it to get cash. Or maybe no hacking will even be required?

Of course any old examples are obsolete, but I'll mention one that I heard about recently. The crooks contacted real estate dealers and arranged for a "private showing" of a house. They got the keys from the realtor and then went to the property and waited for a delivery that was carefully scheduled to arrive at the time of the private showing. Can't remember what stuff they wanted delivered anonymously, perhaps drugs, but it's pretty obvious how the approach could be adapted for this.

And I was already convinced that Robinhood is another criminal enterprise, but just part of what the stock market has become. Dow Jones is actually at the root of the problem with the fake race that constantly replaces "members of the relay team" with faster runners at any random point in the race. The only requirement is that your alleged company produce bigger profits faster until Dow Jones adds your scam company to replace some value-based-on-sordid-reality company. I'm "pert' shure" Enron could have made it if they had only been able to keep the crooked books hidden another year or so... (That would have been a "Shocked, shocked" joke.