There's no catch. This is just Google trying to spike Apple's wheels. Play Store revenue is a much smaller piece of Google's overall revenue than Apple's App Store is of its overall revenue. Google can afford to be generous on that front, with the idea that both regulators and developers will love the change. Apple can't play that game without significantly lowering its total revenue.

Of course, consumers will pay for less expensive phone apps with increased surveillance, but, let's be honest, Apple and Google are both going to increase surveillance either way.

I was afraid of that. Still, it's an improvement over IBM's early electronic mail, which used Josephoartigasia Monesi.

1. There's no such thing as a system where only White Hats get to see stuff. If the "good guys" can see something, then you must necessarily assume everyone can.

2. The "good guys" have a nasty habit of only being "good" when they feel like it. You cannot rely on them actually having any ethics or integrity, as has been demonstrated in just about every country on Earth far far too many times.

3. The "bad guys" sometimes turn out to actually be "good guys" (Manning and Snowden both revealed important information that was concealed by actual bad guys in government and the armed forces).

4. Websites and services are trying to have it both ways -- both know what is in each and every message, but also not be responsible for what is in each and every message. That is not going to fly with any sensible person. If you do not wish to be responsible, you have to act in the manner of a common carrier and therefore have no access to what is in a message. As soon as you are free to open messages to which you have no legitimate interest because you claim no responsibility, then you are committing an act of illegal wiretapping/theft of confidential information and I would want the laws to be absolutely ruthless against such acts. (I would consider such a crime to warrant the entire board of directors serving 15-to-life.)

What you describe is called indirect TPMS. It works by measuring the differences in speed between wheels through the ABS wheel speed sensors, and triggers if it detects an outlier. It doesn't require an additional sensor inside each wheel, instead using existing sensors and some arithmetic, so it costs less, but cannot indicate the pressure for each individual wheel, plus it requires the reset procedure that you referenced when new tires are installed or after you've corrected whatever caused it to trigger. My 2004 BMW has that, and so did Mazdas into the current decade.

Frankly, most email providers do a really really bad job of things. I used to run my own email server, simply because I couldf do a better job even after finishing a bottle of mead than any of the providers out there could do with "highly trained" chipmunks. I probably still could.

A fair point, but we know that the truth is that as bandwidth goes up, people load their websites more, so we end up with limited improvement for those who are on fast connections and massive consequences for those on slower connections.

Decaf is irrelevant. You will be percolated.

Seriously, AI is nothing like as significant as touted -- and I do use AI a fair bit. It is not particularly robust or reliable, it generates large numbers of errors, it crashes frequently, it consumes vast resources, and the results are of dubious value. The code it generates is sloppy, it takes months to years of repeated cycles to do any but the most basic of engineering tasks, and in terms of cost efficiency, it costs rougly three orders of magnitude more to use AI than to use people of equivalent ability. AI is decent at pattern-matching, but only if you understand the problem space well enough - and most people are far too incompetent to do that.

6G is good, 6G is useful, but not for AI.

France. The US "won" because the French did the winning.

While OpenAI may have modified their contract to remove mass surveillance on US citizens, there is curiously no mention of the other reason Anthropic was dropped by the Pentagon - using AI for autonomous lethal weapons. So it looks like they're still going to do that part. What could possibly go wrong?

The gangs in the UK have guns. They predominantly use them against other armed gangs and armed security guards. It's extremely rare that bystanders get shot, and most of the time it's in crossfire. The last school shooting isn't in living memory for many in Britain. British pop culture often focuses on defusing situations if possible, then using tactical, precision force should that fail. Precisely the same focus used by the British police and, more often than not, the British armed forces.

America has three to four mass shootings A DAY, and school shootings are just another week. American pop culture focuses on slaughtering everyone in the vicinity, as do the US police and US armed forces.

This tells me everything I need to know about those who has the unhealthy relationship to violent solutions.

Don't waste my time on cutesy theories and soundbites. Either you can offer actual evidence for your position or you cannot. And it is obvious from your reliance on cutesy theories and soundbites that you cannot.

As for "advanced weapons", the US has blown up a primary school in Iran, blew up a hospital in Afghanistan, and a civilian air raid shelter in Iraq. These "advanced weapons" are proving useless in Ukraine, as the Russians figured out over a weekend how to jam the guidance systems. Advanced crap is still crap.

Against this, the British have used aircraft with far less advanced weapons to blow up specific floors in specific buildings - something way way outside the capacity of the US. The day your "advanced weapons" in the hands of imbeciles can match crude weapons in the hands of actual experts is the day you get to tell us about these "advanced weapons".

I still want to use iTunes on my phone to replace my CD collection (or let me put the CDs in the basement while still listening to them). Sadly Apple has crippled it in another way. Songs disappear from iTunes on the phone if they would not be able to stream in your region, even though you ripped them from your own disc.

.........Why do I wonder if you've actually nipped into next week, taken a look, and reported back?

Gatherer would be oldest, hunter next, but teacher has to be the one after that because that's the sole difference between the lineage that eventually became human and all the other great apes. The others all discovered stone technology, cooking, etc, but knowledge is gained and lost at regular intervals. Our line retained and spread that knowledge.

Ship/boat builder and navigator appeared around 1.1 million years ago, priest at around 120,000 years ago, artist around 60,000 years ago, probably around the same time that storyteller appeared, with musicians appearing around 44,000 years ago (so we now know the true age of Keith Richards).

Exactly where every other early profession appeared is unclear, but the scrounger profession of this new editor probably dates back to the Neolithic, some time between 6,000 and 9,000 BC, when the human race suffered one of the greatest collapses due to a switch from work to theft.

As it stands, AIs are now mostly feeding on AI output. This will only get worse.

1 week: AIs start subscribing to newspapers to stay current
2 weeks: AIs vote AIs to be the best editors
3 weeks: Newspaper sales halve, "no need to panic"
4 weeks: AIs discover lolcat websites
5 weeks: Newspaper goes bankrupt
6 weeks: AIs are now only usable by cats who can't spell