If AI were compelled to pay royalties on the copyrighted data they trained on, it might slow down a little. But not enough.

This administration is pouring gasoline on the fire because they WANT a roaring stock market and a weaker, more insecure middle class. There's a lot of 1% money that's tied up in the stock market, and the owners would love nothing more than a home foreclosure spree to shift into.

If you're not convinced, why are all the AI people building impregnable bunkers?

Setting aside SM for a moment...

Looking back, I think the internet caught a terminal disease when LinkExchange and WebRing were bought out (for purposes of ending them), and cable Internet giants were allowed to merge with each other and then merge further with entertainment companies. Even Comcast offered "free homepages" which ended in 2015 (which I was surprised to learn... without a ring/exchange, you were totally reliant on Google and precise search terms which kind of killed publishing for the people).

Of course this merger fever meant we were creating incentive to reshape the Internet as a form of cable TV. Maybe it would have burned without policymakers pouring gas on the fire. But it's happened. The vast majority of Internet traffic is now "apps", generally social media. And the mergers are not stopping. The world is being carved up not by nations, but by billionaires who want (above all) want common people to be disconnected.

If you go back to forums you used to visit in 2014, they are absolute ghost towns. I feel for those admins who are probably spending $1,000s a year to keep them running, hoping people will come back. Networks (of the people kind) don't reverse decline.

  I'd love to see a return of webring/linkexchange, something that's not depending on a central server (I don't know if this new DNS-over-HTTPS and Javascript talkint to DNS-HTTP servers could be a starting point).

If we ever want to take it back, and I don't think we can, but there needs to be a new technology or an old one brought back but also made low-friction and without any easy points of failure.

MFI exists because of security. Let me know when the last Android USB roofing exploit gets closed.

0% of people who wanted to mandate Apple use USB-C actually have an Apple device.

You could try to sell them on Lightning being a âoeone handedâ plug in operation, but they can not relate.

Oracle bought Sun for 7 billion... and as owners of that IP, they've won a $9 billion lawsuit against Google.

That's 28%.

>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

What the frell? No Farscape??

I misread the headline as:
Viagra May Help People Pay For Space Burials

In checking your other posts, I realize when you said "Apple turfers" you may have meant "anti Apple turfers", not "Apple astroturfers".
If that's the case, sorry I let you have both barrels because you mispoke or I misunderstood.

Still, group labeling of accounts is pretty offensive. You can block any user.
  I guess I don't participate in /. conversations as much as I did in the nineties, so I've only had to block on a few occasions.

"Labeling" users? How offensive. How do you propose doing that, by affixing "armbands" to their usernames? Maybe you are the one who needs to wear a stigmatic identifier.

I'm -pretty sure- Apple's roaring success depends naught on maintaining an army of "turfers". However there seems to be no end of anti-Apple posters like yourself, suggesting they exist. I see the value of pre-emptively accusing your opponent of your OWN sins, however all documented instances of "astroturfing" have been attributed to Microsoft or their agents.

I'm not an Apple fanboy. Been running Linux at home since 1994. But at least Apple advanced desktop computing, while Microsoft held it back AND helped change the Internet into this incredibly insecure thing, by virtue of a PERMANENT army of zombie computers. Old MacOS was never as cavalier about security as Windows still is, and Apple's record on security is pretty damn good with OS X. I can still gripe about the window dressing on the Mac desktop, but the underpinnings of OSX are a solid standard UNIX kernel... the modern Apple OS foundation is solid, unlike Microsoft's.

This -does- have the feel of something which came out of a 'monetize' brainstorming session. The description reads just as badly... it sounds like Soulskill is reading off of marketing's talking-points.

So HOW exactly does this benefit Slashdot users? Or is there one at all?
  HOW are sponsor representatives represented in discussion? Are their comments automatic +5, and totally immune to moderation?
This doesn't need explanation, apparently. :-/

I've been on Slashdot.org for about 14 years, and seen it survive the threat from Digg (and the the Digg self-destruct). But my interest is declining. The original stories are less insightful, more incidence of stories linking to overtly 'controversial' blog posts elsewhere designed to troll web clicks. Years ago I switched from viewing this website, to monitoring the RSS feed, and less and less often do I find reason to stick around when I click one of the feed items.

My biggest complaint of all is there is no benefit or advantage to the older accounts. I gave up submitting stories because even if I were one of the first (just a guess), there are semi-professional story submitters who get the credit. No wait, that's not my worst grievance... Slashdot has a checkbox for "Do not display ads", given for past participation on the site... but the checkbox doesn't work.

Maybe the worst annoyance is when I visit my ~user page, it tells me there's a new post on Will Wheaton's Slashdot journal.. which was deleted like 10 years ago, and because of that deletion I can't unsubscribe from it (it's a silent error, but probably failed SQL stupidity... and my support emails to slashdot go unanswered).

I think Slashdot recognizes that their future's probably in nurturing "communities" where the users interact more with each other (like Slashdot USED to be). GOOD call. But that space is served by Ning. If Slashdot's owners think the answer is "commercially sponsored questions and posts"... really? lulz. For me the answer is, different websites for different genres of information. That's way easier to follow, and you can somewhat get to know people.

I'm sorry, you lack cynicism: what this submission IS is a troll for ad revenue. It's almost a troll... kind of like every John Dvorak article since 1990 (but without the legitimacy he had built up prior to that time).

I thought I had it good when we ditched our "desktop" computers 6 years ago and went with just laptops in the home. Now it's an iPad 1 and 2. When I am developing for Drupal, I use my iPad and laptop (Ubuntu, with Komodo IDE). When I take notes or read OReilly/Safari Books, it's the iPad. When I take notes or set appointments, it's the iPad and Google apps. When I play games, I use either the iPad or the PS3. When I watch movies, it's NetFlix on the iPad or PS3. I suppose for some the droid tablets are the same (although they all seem rather sluggish to me, and have inconsistent UIs.. but maybe I'm just jealous).