Thing with taking humans to Mars is that these humans need to be confined in a small space for quite a while. Messages to Earth take longer and longer, so that takes phoning home on a whim out of the picture. On top of that, vacuum packed food even has a certain amount of time it can be kept. Also, drinking your own pee is not particularly a nice prospect, but a requirement on such missions.

What if there's a mechanical problem somewhere? Sorry, you can't quickly ask for a replacement part from Earth, and you still need to poop and piss. So you need to carry all of those parts along as well. Don't forget about the human body deteriorating in various ways, simply because there's almost no gravity.

No, Mars is totally not feasible at the moment, simply because it'd take too long to get there. Having a moon-base would make it more doable, as it becomes quite a lot easier to build a massive ship to accommodate three couples, so they won't go insane and murder each other, have enough spare parts, and have enough food stuffs to reach Mars and go home again. What you'd need to get there would need to be massive, and something of that size simply can't be launched from Earth, but it can be constructed a lot cheaper in orbit of the Moon.

Isn't that already the case?

When creating art, there should be human involvement to at least some degree. There should be some effort; at least an attempt at some creativity.

If there's no human involvement in the work, then there's no creativity involved. And no, telling an AI to do something for you is not doing something yourself.

After decades of allowing the USA to shaft our IT industry we finally start looking inward at what remains of our tech industry because uncle Sam becomes a greedy, selfish megalomaniac and now google acts all butt-hurt?

There are loads of companies in the EU providing what Google, Microsoft, and Amazon could provide.

But, alas, these companies are based in the USA and so can only be considered untrustworthy (because of the CLOUD act, for example).

SuSE gmbh (German) provides an entire operating system; both for desktop and server, and they are able to provide SLA arrangements.
SoftMaker (German) provides a nice office package.
Proton (Swiss, soon to be German) provides a bunch of security related services, email, word processor, and a spreadsheet.
NextCloud (German) provides a nice cloud platform, including meeting place and office software.
ONLYOffice (Latvia) provides an office suite which has collaboration features.
Linux Mint (Ireland) is an excellent desktop operating system.
OVH (German) provides cloud infrastructure.

There are others, but these are the companies I can think of this quickly.

So, yes, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon, worry as your reputation gets destroyed by the simple fact that you're US companies. All we need to happen is that all those EU governments and large companies wake up (and it's starting to happen) and start pouring money in these EU companies.

Let the stream of malware happily continue...

Like all the other things Microsoft recently tried to implement; it'll be implemented badly and will eventually be rolled back because it's broken state.

The copilot button will be named "Microsoft assistant" and everybody will immediately think it's a cool new feature that surpasses the old one... except all they did was change an icon and a string.

Otherwise it might very well replace the Android bootloader with it's own on an update, discover there's not enough room, and brick the phone completely.

When I was young, there were limited bricks, but the sky was the limit in what you could do with them.

These days I see more and more boxes with bricks in them which can only be used in one particular way.

Now this. They're milking a very good product and making it terrible.

LEGO used to be about creativity; about building whatever pops in your mind. Now, more and more sets can only be used to build exactly one thing... maybe two or three.

Anybody remember this?

This will be the same, but 2000 times worse.

That we'll simply allow the USA to shaft us with all of these companies which are basically monopolies?

- Microsoft (Windows)
- Apple (App Store)
- Google (advertising, Android, Chrome)
- Amazon (AWS)
- OpenAI (illegally vacuuming up paid content without permission)

These monopolies deserve to be hit with regulations and, upon non-compliance, be fined. There is exactly one EU company which is a monopoly (ASML), and even that company is facing competition. All the rest need to catch up to the USA companies. Now, the EU is not playing favorites for EU companies, it's just that most tech monopolies are in the USA.

The EU is doing what the USA should have done a loooooong time ago. And now the USA is complaining because its government was basically bought by those 5 companies and/or the billionaires owning them.

Don't the various spreadsheet programs have a means to link specified cells to a query or table in a database?

Microsoft stopped caring about it's OS as an OS a loooooooooong time ago. Now it just looks at it as a means to squeeze as much money (either directly or indirectly) out of its users. Problem is, they can't immediately start charging people for the more obvious stuff - they need to put little things in there for which they can charge, such as... oh, say, access to your own data stored in the *cough* safety *cough* of the cloud. Those handy AI features, will of course eventually get integrated in *cough* helpful *cough* features in the cloud, which will, again, cost money.

Microsoft is dumping each and every single of its users om a ever so slightly, but oh, so slippery slope of dependence, data extraction, and subscription. It won't happen now, maybe not with Windows 12, but sooner or later it will come from Microsoft and every step on the way is meant to ease you right into it.

The companies aren't making that much money from their AI's, a company might be worth billions, while its revenue (not profit) might be no more than €20mln. This is going to implode as soon as the AI-fad is over.

AI is a useful tool and it has value, but right now the value of anything with AI in it is simply way too high due to it being hyped into the stratosphere. Anyone financial reads "AI" and stops thinking and starts seeing euro signs and starts investing without looking at the numbers of the company.

This is simply unsustainable. A lot of people will get burned sooner or later.

They've been taken over by the marketing machine. They're headed in the direction of the dodo.