It's inconsequential for the most part. If it went to Apple instead it would be spread out to shareholders through dividend payments. Large developers that are publicly owned companies may do the same themselves. Either company may invest the that money in something else which pays it to some third party that now has it. This only changes who is doing the distribution and who might be on the receiving end of that. There can be further downstream effects from this which may be more or less beneficial than some alternatives, but these can't be accurately predicted with any degree of reliability.

If the desired goal of the legislation was to reduce prices for consumers then it failed to achieve that goal. Saying that it's still good anyway just for other reasons is only shifting the posts.

Based on their history, Windows 12 will be decent*, but then they'll shit the bed again when they try to get everyone to upgrade to Windows 13. I don't know why they do it this way, but it's been a consistent trend for decades now.

* For a Microsoft product.

I don't think Sony is subsidizing the hardware. Both Sony's and Microsoft's consoles are basically PCs. You could put together one with similar performance for around the same price. Both are 8-core Zen 2 CPUs and RDNA2 graphics integrated on the chip with 16 GB of RAM shared between the CPU and GPU. Nothing particularly special and AMD sells APUs that are even beefier with more modern cores if you wanted an integrated solution. Unfortunately they're not selling them as a standalone product so you'd have to buy an entire system with one in it right now.

I don't think the PS5's design is particularly good. To me it's trying too hard and I'd have preferred something more basic. If you really like it you could just 3D print a shroud that looks like a PS5 and put it around a PC built with a microATX board.

What prevented any of those people from selling through competitors like iTunes, Amazon Music, Bandcamp, or any of the other numerous alternatives that sprang up since then? I think you're engaging in some historical revisionism as mp3.com wasn't sued until they started offering services to allow people to register a physical album and stream songs from it through their site. The problems with this and why the record labels were upset should be obvious.

It's rather dubious that any bands that weren't already making a good living from their music were finding that through mp3.com. I would need some concrete examples as even artists who are successful and sell a large number of albums make most of their money through touring. Even if record companies weren't taking the majority of that revenue, a band would need to sell at least 50,000 albums per year for the members to be able to live off of their music without needing an additional job. If they're charging less per album (as is common for independent acts), it's at least 100,000 per year. Most independent artists won't sell that many and even known artists with a huge fan base can struggle to sell more than a few hundred thousand albums.

What makes these (or most any) artists their money is touring and live concerts. Lesser known acts can open for a more established band/artist and get people to hear their music and even buy an album and merchandise is always a good moneymaker as a production costs of a $10 poster or a $20 shirt are low. Even artists who do sell millions of records will still make more money from touring. The revenue from a few years of large concerts can easily exceed that from a band's entire catalog of records sales.

Your screed against capitalism would be better directed at copyright law. Of course then you wouldn't have made this post in the first place. Presumably you can point to any number of successful examples of online music stores in socialist (outright or at least directionally adherent) countries where evil capitalism didn't cause these problems. Or perhaps you can't because they don't exist and as awful as record companies may be, property rights even for intangible goods like music, can make musicians wealthy even if it's not through record sales. The mere fact that copyright exists means that a musician that owns their music can get a sizable amount of money from a song being used in commercials or films. A lack of such rights just means that the most successful distribution model is the Pirate Bay. That's not necessarily bad for musicians as getting people to hear your music and pay for a live performance is financially beneficial, but we can argue over which makes the most money for them.

Sounds like payola all over again. Only now it's more centralized and a lot easier to bribe someone at Spotify to give preferential treatment to a song than having to buy off hundreds of DJs at different stations.

The only reason for Apple to need their own satellites is if they wanted to offer a replacement for cellular providers. Having something that works around the globe would be a good selling point. You can already imagine the sappy commercial set to He's Got the Whole World in His Hands they'd use to sell it to the masses. I think I can hear Jobs weeping in his grave at the mere suggestion.

Too bad it'll never come to pass. No government would permit such a thing.

That would be a terrible idea. Imagine it's your case that just got completely tossed because your lawyer used AI. How is that justice for you in any way. Worse yet, if the case were high enough stakes it creates an incentive to bribe opposing counsel to use AI and have the case thrown out. If it's a case worth billions someone would do it.

There are examples where rulings have been overturned or trials had to be redone due to someone having ineffective counsel.

A six billion dollar plan to end hunger is wildly optimistic. What you might be able to do is feed everyone on the planet for a time, but it wouldn’t solve future problems. It also likely ignores that some countries (e.g. North Korea) would be unwilling to participate and their people would still be starving.

I suspect this figure is wrong based on a quick search that reported global spending for this problem during a a five year span was over $60 billion. In other words the world is already collectively spending twice as much and not solving the problem permanently.

Musk has enough money that he could throw away $6 billion on something like this without suffering much from it. I can already guarantee it wouldn’t work work whatever it actually was. If it were actually that easy (and inexpensive) it would have been solved. If it's the little you could probably crowd source the funding. Start a fund to accumulate the $6 billion and implement the plan. You'd only need 60 million people to kick in $100 each, which is a lot of people, but there are easily that many who could.l contribute that much without missing it. I can already tell you everyone will be as skeptical as Musk when it's their own money.

Is that what happened here? If not, it's as irrelevant and off topic as complaining about terrorists hijacking planes and intentionally crashing them into buildings. The original comment gives the implication that this is exactly the sort of improper maintenance that was done on this plane and responsible for the failure and crash.

I could understand if they had a massive backlog of things to be translated that was constantly growing because the volunteers couldn't keep up as having a mediocre machine translation is often better than none at all, but there's no reason to replace the completed human translations. This is even more stupid when one stops to consider that the were getting this for free.

That's the problem with UI and UX designers. Even when something is already good they're looking to change it to something else if for no reason other than for the sake of change itself. Design something good and leave it the hell alone. The icons can change when there's a major revision to the OS. Otherwise it's pointless wankery.

I can't think of one meaningful change Apple or Microsoft have made to the look and feel of their respective operating systems over the last two decades that was absolutely necessary. Most of it has been shuffling stuff around or trying to make it look new and shiny. Invest that time in making it faster and more stable instead. I don't need major changes more than once a decade. It's unlikely there are many things actually worth changing anyway.

When they die I hope that they have to spend a minute in purgatory for every minute of someone's time they wasted with pointless UI changes over the years. I can think of a few who will be stuck there for a small eternity. Some might even be beyond redemption. I can easily imagine them trying to rearranging the circles of hell.

These sound like they're being used to build and test software. That's an important part of development, but it's not critical infrastructure that the business absolutely needs to be up 24/7. If they buy the cheapest Mini, it's $600 each and that's $120,000 in hardware costs. They may have some replacements over the life of the hardware, but they'll be able to use those for another five years at the least. Someone needs to wrangle those machines so add another $120,000 for that. Apple's chips are quite efficient so while they will need to pay power and cooling costs to host their own hardware as well, it won't be that bad. All in all it's going to be a lot less expensive for something that doesn't really need to be in the cloud or gain much from being there aside from easy scaling of resources.

This is an article about the FBI. If it were the CIA they would've already overthrown the Canadian government and installed puppets to do their bidding without openly asking. The FBI is too busy entrapping retards into committing terrorist acts in the U.S. to have time to go after Canadians, retarded or not. Canada should ignore them. They're probably more harmless than the ATF that would shoot their dogs and possibly even their moose. Just tell the FBI to send any requests through a respectable and fearsome agency like the BIA or USDA if they want an actual response.

Does is matter much if you lose a job because of AI instead of offshoring or any other reason? What prevents a company from eliminating jobs because they've contracted with a third party that provides the services for them that may be done in let or whole by AI and not reporting it because they're not replacing anyone with AI themselves? They may not even know to what extent AI is being used by that third party to even be able to report it. Maybe they hired a consultant that's actually an AI masquerading as human.

If the government wants to do something actually useful it should try to find ways to make it easier for people lacking jobs to find employment. This just sounds like a shakedown signal whereby politicians alert companies that they'd better open their pocketbooks and contribute to the reelection fund lest they find themselves the target of legislation designed to shit all over them. Fortunately for these companies, politicians are stupid enough that they'll play themselves and wind up with yet another case of regulatory capture where the companies make rules to their own benefit even beyond what politicians can extort.

This will probably die in committee or somewhere else along the way after someone pays up, but it won't do anything useful. Unless it also measures jobs created because of AI or productivity gains in other workers resulting from its use, it's a one-sided look at the problem. They may as well require similar reporting on all of the negative impacts of electric vehicles that ignore any benefits they bring.

Just wait until they get old and start bitching about the gammas (or whatever they wind up being called) that can't sit still long enough to watch a microdrama and spend all of their time consuming nanoquickies in VR-space while macrodosing on LSD. Maybe one of them will buy /. and vibe code support for Unicode, so it won't be all bad.