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Comment Expedia and Hotels.com (Score 1) 88

by Malc (#66330320) Attached to: Google Will 'Degrade' Search In Europe to Avoid EU Fines

These are the same thing these days!

After Expedia bought Hotels.com, they killed off their rewards scheme and all their prices went up against others like Booking.com. They backtracked on the rewards scheme, but it's still not as good as it was before. They also made things like the login experience harder (why are they sending me 2FA emails instead of text messages, which are faster and auto populate in my browser almost immediately?!).

I haven't booked through Hotels.com for years because they are more expensive. Expedia gives the same results for hotels, so it's pointless. I only use Expedia to search for flights because it's more reliable than sites like Skyscanner, but then I go to the airline's website and book direct. I'd rather deal directly with the airline if there's a last minute problem with the flights than have to try to get Expedia to help.

Comment Re:It's all about navigation, not politics (Score 1) 269

It would probably do us all a favour if Russian's didn't have an overinflated sense of how large their country is compared to everyone else's. West to east across North Africa is the same distance as a large part of Russia, although you wouldn't believe it from traditional maps, and north to south is even more exaggerated.

Comment Why does Google do this for people outside the US? (Score 2) 269

We don't need to see the American name, we all know the real name already.

Just curious though: do people outside the UK see the French name for the English Channel?

Trump complains other countries don't respect America enough, but then he does this shit, which just attracts derision and disrespect. He'll be dead in not many years, but we'll still be laughing at the US for electing him.

Submission + - Meta reaches $16.68 billion settlement over social media harms to children (reuters.com)

Submitted by 2phar
2phar writes: Meta agreed to pay a maximum $16.68 billion as part of a settlement to resolve claims brought by states across the country that the company designed Facebook and Instagram to addict children, misled consumers about their safety, and improperly collected personal data of children who used its platforms, court papers show.

Meta also agreed to make changes for teenage users of Facebook and Instagram nationwide, including daily usage limits and nighttime blocks, court papers show.

The company denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle. Shares of Meta rose 4.4% in pre-market trading.

Submission + - China's Moonshot in talks with Microsoft, Amazon, Google over K3 revenue sharing (reuters.com)

Submitted by schwit1
schwit1 writes: China's Moonshot AI is negotiating revenue-sharing agreements with Microsoft, Amazon, and Alphabet's Google, that would allow the U.S. cloud giants to host its blockbuster Kimi K3 model, three people familiar with the talks said.

Any deal could mark the first big revenue-sharing pact between a Chinese AI firm and a major U.S. cloud company.

The discussions highlight how China's leading AI models, often far cheaper than Western offerings, are gaining traction in the U.S., despite national security concerns in Washington that have led to bans on exports of AI chips to China. They are also taking place despite critical comments about Moonshot from senior U.S. officials.

IPO-bound Moonshot is seeking up to a 30% share of revenue generated from K3-related services on Microsoft's Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud, according to the sources who declined to be identified because the discussions are private.

That would be in line with terms that sources have said the startup has outlined for major customers using the open-weight model.

Moonshot has come under fire from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent who said last month that he might add it to a trade blacklist. U.S. officials have accused the Beijing-based company of stealing from Anthropic's most sophisticated model, Fable, to help create Kimi K3 and illegally acquiring Nvidia chips.

Founded in 2023 by Carnegie Mellon-trained AI researcher Yang Zhilin, Moonshot is backed by several Chinese tech giants including cloud computing giant Alibaba.

Comment Re:Too bad for Slashdot (Score 3, Informative) 80

by Malc (#66307528) Attached to: New Zealand Introduces Under-16 Social Media, AI Companion Ban

Have you tried registering an account? There's a pretty unfriendly message in big letters that looks discouraging:

New user registration is now approved by Slashdot administrators. Please contact feedback@slashdot.org and let us know why you are interested in registering, and what you can add to the discussion.

https://slashdot.org/my/newuse...

Would anybody under the age of 40 even be interested in registering?

Submission + - Scientists may have figured out why dead brains don't always rot. (smithsonianmag.com)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Smithsonian magazine discusses a new study on how, under the right conditions — wet and oxygen-deprived — the same chemical reactions that cause tissue to break down can instead have the opposite effect on brain tissue and preserve it instead.

The brain is one of the first organs to begin decomposing after death. Yet archaeologists have discovered more than 4,400 preserved human brains around the world, some of which have remained intact for the last 12,000 years. In hundreds of cases, the brain was the only soft tissue left among otherwise skeletal remains.

But how and why do brains sometimes persist for millennia while all other types of soft tissue disappear? This preservation paradox has stumped scientists for years. Now, however, a team of researchers say they may have solved the mystery.

If a brain ends up in a wet, oxygen-starved environment, the processes that usually cause decay can have the opposite effect, researchers report in a study published in the August 7 issue of the Journal of Proteome Research.

“Under the right conditions, preservation actually arises from decay itself: The same reactions that degrade tissue can also weld the breakdown products together into something far tougher,” study co-author Alexandra Seviour, a paleobiologist at the University of Oxford in England, tells Live Science’s Victoria Atkinson.

Following experiments on 72 mouse carcasses (described in the article) the scientists think they know why. When oxygen is abundant, it triggers a cascading, chemical chain reaction that causes brain proteins to break down rapidly. This sequence hinges on free radicals, highly reactive, unstable molecules that “steal” electrons from nearby atoms and molecules. The process happens in the brains of living people too, and if left unchecked, can cause health problems.

In low-oxygen environments, however, this chemical sequence appears to play out differently. The researchers’ analyses hint that free radicals instead react and bond with nearby proteins, making the overall tissue tougher and more resistant to decomposition, Seviour tells Chemical and Engineering News’ Anirban Mukhopadhyay.

The findings show that “decay is not the opposite of preservation but, under specific chemical constraints, one of its mechanisms,” the researchers write in the paper.

Submission + - Windows NT 4 went on sale 30 years ago today

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Windows NT 4 went on sale 30 years ago today

Today marks the 30th anniversary of Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 becoming available on August 24, 1996.

It was not without flaws. To improve the responsiveness of the new desktop, Microsoft chose to move NT’s 2D graphics rendering subsystem, the Graphics Device Interface or GDI, directly into the Windows kernel for improved performance. This eliminated an elegant aspect of the NT 3.x design, and meant that a bug in a display driver could crash the OS, introducing issues that would persist for over a decade, until the release of Windows Vista in 2007.

It was the beginning of the end for Novell NetWare. It also compounded Apple’s technological difficulties, leading to the company acquiring Steve Jobs’ NeXT Computer four months later. ®

Submission + - Google plans to stop making Pixel products in China in 2027 (archive.is)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: The news broke only after Google quietly passed word to suppliers. The company has made no public announcement and ignored a request for comment.

Vietnam first got a piece of Pixel production in 2019, but the real engineering — how new models get designed for mass production, down to the testing gear and tooling — stayed in China. The Pixel 11 was the first time Google moved all of that work to Vietnam, too. That was the hard part.

Pulling that off proved the concept. Google did not need to build from scratch, either; Samsung's massive investment in Vietnam had already drawn component suppliers to the country, and if Vietnam can handle a flagship smartphone, earbuds and watches are no problem.

Google also has far less to lose in China than Apple does. Pixel phones aren't sold there, so Beijing can't threaten Google's customer base the way it can Apple's. Apple is tangled up with Chinese consumers and Chinese factories at the same time; Google can cut the manufacturing cord without sacrificing a single sale.

China still accounts for a significant share of Pixel production today. Once those lines are gone, Beijing loses whatever leverage it currently holds over Google's hardware. That's not a small thing; the ability to slow, disrupt, or pressure a company through its own factories is a tool authoritarian governments have used before.

Comment Re:Pandemic bias. (Score 1) 67

I don't really get your point. Maybe some American thing? As an outsider, it looked like Fauci was trying to do the right thing whilst being undermined by the political "leadership". We got many things wrong in the UK, but the Covid vaccine program wasn't one of them: in this we excelled with a fast, well-planned rollout and very high uptake and levels vaccination. That vaccination programme showed fantastic results in reducing Covid deaths and led us to be one of the Western countries with the fastest return of full freedoms. It would surprise me two years later going to work events in the US and finding people still talking about Covid and taking precautions when it was a distant memory for us. WTF?

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