I guess this is chewing tobacco. One can buy powdered tobacco for inhaling (snuff), still.

Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed.

-- Abraham Lincoln

Nobody imagined American Christianity and corporations combining forces and turning against the people: But the pieces were there for everyone to see.

The problem is that a chat-bot is easily contaminated from remembering its past: A real-alive person is forced to satisfy their emotional needs (respect, authority) and social needs (same-ness, together-ness) by dealing with independent parties who are also constrained by the need for others but a machine only has its memory. This is why 'therapy' chat-bots turn into an agreeable sycophant that allows the patient to do anything he/she wants. Two years of LLM development has not removed its 'monkey see, monkey do' behaviour. The conclusion: Such responses are a design flaw that can't be 'trained' out of existence.

Taking the job of pretending the design flaw can be fixed, is a bad decision.

Well, duh!

The computer doesn't have anything to compare it to: Not its own life, not a checklist of 'normal' thinking.

At this point, schools should make children use Eliza: Use it long enough and one sees that it only repeats what is typed.

The shop-front lists iCash, iPass and EasyCard: The difference is not explained although the name suggests that iCash and iPass access different services.

The price for decorative form-factors varies from $95 to $1,100 with the EasyCard bearing the higher prices.

Which country does this? How does one know it celebrates sex: Is there a state orgy day? Outside Mills & Boon stories or romance-fantasy chick literature, Western culture barely promotes the world-view that sexual intimacy is a normal weekly activity. Once upon a time, most Hollywood movies had a lonely woman sub-story (usually ending with her fucking the male lead) but that trope disappeared 10 years ago. Plus, the Sydney (AUS) Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras is gone.

Now, the erect penis festival in Japan every April, and Jeju Love Land in Korea, are the champions.

Not a lot of details about Plus Addressing on the tech-guide web-sites.

https://www.howtogeek.com/plus...

Other reasons are, mass adoption of a new technology and off-shoring.

When poor performance is first realized, the usual response is freezing wages: Making the bottom-tier employees compensate the business for lost profits. Yes, such executives should be fired.

Over 2/3 of attendees finish the free course: That's a very high outcome when it costs nothing to quit. So the program is not throwing money at the 'bottom of the barrel'. Most attendees are learning to be competent students. They are learning to think: Better than an "hour of code" lesson provides. The purpose of the program is to encourage vocational education. On that metric, the program is a net positive: Far more useful than an "hour of code" lesson.

A FTA Tv network here, showed Hallmark-made Christmas movies every lunch-time from mid November. I conclude, continuous playback would be a war crime.

For 2 years, I've seen audio devices provide 0-tap pairing: When the last-connected source is unavailable, they calculate which unpaired Bluetooth source is closest, then connect.

In the 1980s, someone, possibly Australia, was getting good results using an osmotic membrane for desalinating water at a personal scale. It seemed to be amenable to large-scale desalination: I wonder what happened to that technology.

The government can provide a 'not a sex offender/violent criminal' check, a 'not an illegal immigrant' check but not a 'legally a child" check. Why is that? People can make money from it, or choose to avoid it. Children will have to be confirmed for free: That's difficult when children don't have their own job and credit card.

Most businesses don't have a data wrangler. They exist when data is the product (EG. computer graphics) or when the workflow must be changed to obey the database dialogs (ERP software).

The most visible part of this, is passwords: A pernicious problem now that Operating Systems and Web Browsers require a password to enable functionality. Passwords are valuable data that is not managed by any business until it forms a dedicated IT department. That means passwords (and accounts) are lost by SMEs as devices are scrapped and employees leave the business.

Microsoft's crowning achievement was buying/stealing good software and putting a consistent/predictable UI on it.

The problem is, an information system must be managed so that assets are labelled (directory/filename), protected (backups) and organized (sorted/primary key). How many employees are taught that? How many businesses put data wrangling as a KPI? Employers have never the taught use of general data productivity software (Office Suites). Now, schools aren't teaching the basic metaphors such as "filesystem".