I think what I especially dislike about the current assessment that these "markets" are not gambling is that in cases such as this it ends up placing an onus on the federal government to enforce fairness. This is extremely difficult, since it would be complicated to establish and track every necessary disclosure. I'd rather this sort of thing be litigated as a civil case, so government employees aren't having to take the initiative to research every incidental and stupid bet made on each platform. While I admit that the difference between stock trading and prediction markets is not as cut and dry as one would like, I think there's enough of a difference to justify considering Polymarket a form of gambling.

Haha, yeah. But it fits the narrrative, so they ran with it.

Quick Gemini search:

A simple search reveals that MS excused Linux but charges commercial product producers $300,000.

If the data is really that old, it sounds like they might've infiltrated a backup rather than the live account. Still a problem, but hopefully a little less so.

It's a loooong read, but it actually goes on to say that Robin Gunningham is Banksy and that he changed his name to David Jones before travelling to Ukraine. Del Naja was there, too, helping him, but ultimately the article pinpoints Gunningham as Banksy. It might say more after that, or even change its mind, but I got bored, lol.

Well said. The truth is that without proper regulation Big Tech is already dictating what many children see and think. Age restrictions empower parents.

Exactly!

Exactly!

We should all spend more time studying the history of science. There have been many instances when, for good reasons and bad, scientists have dug in their heels. The greater opposition to Darwin in the 19th century came not from religion but from science, as without genetics there were too many holes left in the equation. In short, "never" is too strong a word. Perhaps it's less common than we presume, but a fantasy about the essential open-mindedness of scientists is just as bad as a myth about them being querulous oldtimers who hate change as much as they hate kids on their lawns.

Now I am no physicist, but if expansion is slowing and could even reach 0, then it seems quite logical that the original expansion was always a result of the release of kinetic energy from the Big Bang. I get it that the data does not add up to what we would expect from a mere explosion with no dark energy, but still, if the expansion is not eternal then logically there is no fundamental or insurmountable reason why this expasion could not be caused by an event at the beginning rather than being continuously modified throughout the process by some unknown and invisible modifier. In other words, perhaps we need not scrap the standard model as a whole, but this really does seem to open the door for a major revision. Perhaps we might quibble about how to express the severity of such a revision, but I would at least argue that there could be a major philosophical difference between an ever-expanding cosmos and a was-once-expanding-but-may-even-collapse one.

Yeah. Copilot is comparable in many ways, but its failures tend to stand out. For example, it can't even export a table to Excel.

Funny, it sounds like this might be one of the few applications that might actually benefit from a blockchain!

The answer is simple: the media has lied to you. He is not the scumbag they depict him to be.

Um, except that the whole left/right thing is named after the United States.... maybe instead of redefining US politics to fit a European standard, we just shouldn't use a US-based metaphor to speak of European politics?