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Comment Re:I was I was a lobbyist (Score 1) 162

Because Deere is going to be paying big bucks to lobby every government in the world to apply strict emission control standards on tractors that will be impossible to meet without all their electonics.

They don't want "strict" emissions controls because then they'll have to make products that meet those standards. What they want is a specific loophole that they can easily meet but is difficult or expensive for everyone else, such as a critical "safety feature" that John Deere owns the patent of.

Comment Monopolies are capitalism. (Score 1) 162

Let's be clear: Attempting to prevent the customers that 'bought' your product from repairing them is NOT capitalism.

Capitalism is all about the free market. When you try to enslave your 'customers', forcing them to come to you to repair rather than competing on the open market for repair work, you are not a capitalist. You are at best a plutocrat.

People want freedom, not to be owned by the company they thought they were buying stuff from.

Erm. that is capitalism, it's the ultimate expression of capitalism. Monopoly is the end game of capitalism. If you can literally prevent your customers from going elsewhere and being dependent on you for all future maintenance, upgrades, et al. you have the holy grail of capitalism.

Never confuse market liberalism with capitalism. A free market is not, by any means, a prerequisite for capitalism.

A strong legal system preventing abuse is the defence against that form of capitalism and what enables a free market to flourish.

Comment Stargate is over. (Score 4, Interesting) 74

Stargate has some of the strongest franchise potential out there, and a well developed universe that is wide open. Few properties have that.
There are whole new generations that have never seen the original, nor care to, but would respond to a modern series.
Canning it because of fears it would only attract old viewers is idiotic.

Stargate died 15 years ago, let it rest in peace.

Stargate effectively had a single gimmick, the underdog vs incredibly powerful enemies and somehow winning. This resulted in a trope I called "Stargate Syndrome". The Underdog, in order to beat the uber-powerful enemy needs to become more powerful to defeat them, once this happens they need to create another, even more powerful enemy which the heroes need to become more powerful to defeat and then they need an even more powerful enemy to keep the series going, so on and so forth. SG1 started fighting fake gods with high tech and ended up with all the tech fighting almost literal gods.

Joe Mallozzi, one of the writers of SG1 did another series in the 2010s called Dark Matter, which started out incredibly well but suffered from Stargate Syndrome in S2, it was cancelled before the end of S3. A shame as it had a lot of potential if they didn't make the heroes effectively untouchable.

SG1 should have stayed finished at S8, Atlantis was pretty much the perfect length at 5 seasons. Leaving you wanting just a little bit more compared to SG1's a season too far (as much as I like Morerna Baccarin, it really was terribad). The reason it has a following is because it was good, the later iterations were not good (SG Universe and Origins), it will lose it's following if they keep making terrible sequels and spin offs. What we need is more original Sci-Fi, not comfort blanket spin offs.

Comment Re:Cool... (Score 1) 176

Not every game is multiplayer, there's no need to even go online unless you're specifically playing multiplayer. There's been a recent trend of making single player games a multiplayer game of one, when you play a single player session you're still required to be online which means the single player part stops working when they turn off the servers.

Comment Re:Welcome (Score 1) 112

No, Apple didn't do that. It reduced it to avoid random restarts and sudden loss of power events. Yes, they should have been more upfront about it, but it wasn't some nefarious plan to get you to upgrade your phone.

Owning several old phones, this does not seem to be an issue with any of them.

Nor is it widely reported in Android circles.

Random restarts sounds like a hardware design problem, not a battery problem. Or just an excuse to deliberately hobble old phones because you haven't ponied up £1,000 for a new one in more than a year.

Comment Re:Cool... (Score 1) 176

Under New Zealand law, everyone will be entitled to a full refund.

Collect the money and move to something better.

This is pretty much the only way to stop this... Make the companies financially liable. Full refunds for every copy sold.

This is why Stop Killing Games is so important, it starts with games as it's easy to dismiss that as "they're just video games" but if this kind of behaviour is accepted there, it'll slowly move to consumer and business software until the frog is well and truly boiled.

Comment Re:Recipe for disaster (Score 1) 164

Labeling your item with a generic "BOMB" is such a rookie mistake. Always - always! - use more descriptive bluetooth name so you know exactly which device you are controlling. E.g., "cmdrtaco's BOMB".

Oops. Did I just make Slashdot do a U-turn?

"Bomb" is so 1991, these days we use Improvised Explosive Device (not to be confused with an IUD) or if you're really advanced, Contraterrene Device (CTD).

Comment Tackling the real issue is hard. (Score 1) 40

Blaming AI, especially as it's not Elon's AI is easy.

If American politicians really wanted to do something about shootings and suicides they'd look at introducing meaningful firearm controls, most notably penalties for misuse, stop glorifying guns and violence (fix the culture behind the shootings) and do something to help the mental health of Americans (starting with the bullying that has become endemic to American culture)... But that's all way too sensible where you can just blame the right AI for all the ills because shootings and suicides weren't a problem before AI or Altman skeezed onto the scene?

Right, guys. right?

Hey ho... just more thoughts and prayers then because that's been working fantastically so far.

Comment Re:Yeah.... no (Score 1) 130

Oh come on guys. No one is that dense. We can all see the multi-million dollar record profits that companies are making, in a bid to shore up their stock price. Then putting in the profits into stock buyback to further shore up the stock. Hiring has simply been frozen and more & more work is piled on-top of existing employees.

The existing employees donot dare rebel, and simply do as they are told, as they have seen the firings and are just doing whatever they can to scrape by. The situation does not seem very stable currently

Yes, but the "AI good, worker bad" narrative must be maintained. If they can blame remote work for something remotely bad they will.

Comment Re:local private tools are good (Score 1, Troll) 68

I hate to defend the UK, and there have been some serious mistakes made, but nobody is in jail for hate speech. It's always something like harassment or credible threats. In fact, a recent case demonstrated that even criminal damage, throwing someone's phone on the ground, isn't a crime anymore, unless there is very strong evidence that it was damaged by that specific action. That incident was preceded by months of harassment too, and the guy got away with it.

The problem is American exceptionalism. The idea that America must be better than everywhere and anywhere else in the universe (including all of the black holes) is drilled into them from childhood. The problem with this is that things have become so bad in the US they now have to engage in huge, collective fantasies to make other places seem even worse than the US.

As mentioned, no-one in the UK is in jail for hate speech. That isn't a criminal offence, they're in jail for actual offences such as threats or harassment (yes doing it "with a computer" does not magically make it not a crime). Committing a crime with a hateful motivation is a modifier in court, known as a "aggravating factor" and often leads to a harsher sentence (especially if they don't even fake remorse, which is a "mitigating factor").

Comment Re:Not just CEO's (Score 1) 76

I would say this psychosis descends to most levels of management. We have SVP's, VP's, and Senior Directors who all think the AI can just do all the work for us. I've heard that one SVP keeps asking why her son studying computer science can make all these wonderful things with AI in such a short time but we take so much longer to build and deploy things.

The thing is, most managers come from sales, HR, et al. rather than engineering or technical careers so they know that their jobs can be easily automated... this makes them think that all jobs can be replaced by AI.

Case in point: Boeing, look what happened when they replaced their engineers with MBAs. Airbus still has an engineer in charge and is going gangbusters.

Comment Re: Meta has an AI? (Score 1) 52

The problem with labelling people "neonazis" is you end up looking like a complete moron when you use it to describe a born and raised Jewish person. Try to look less like a moron in the future.

I'll give you Meta is a Trash company though.

Being Jewish does not preclude one from having Fascist tenancies... Or philosophies based on racial superiority. Ticks both the boxes on Nazism.

That being said, I don't think Meta or Zuck are fascists or racist, they're crony capitalists who don't care who or what they destroy in the pursuit of wealth and power. Arguably that's not much of an improvement.

Comment Re:The Profit Effect. (Score 3, Insightful) 112

Yes. I can actually say the word suicide without some moronic need to use idiotic terms like “unalive”. Sexual assault is a valid term and legal description for a horrific crime. Not a written prescription to dismiss the “essaaay” away because it makes you unprofitable to say.

This kind of thing comes from American Puritanism on the internet.

Most countries can handle the word "death" or "dead" being used but the US for some reason cant so American companies move to automatically censor these words. Just look at BBC programming, Top Gear presenters regularly swore (oh cock) and this was screened at 8 PM on a Sunday (one of the most popular time slots on UK TV). I expect this to get better as the US loses relevance.

Comment Re:Vancouver BC (Score 1) 68

I look to the south, and if a bit of Canadian cultural propaganda is required to counter the stuff that's been coming out of Hollywood for the last century... OK.

We value education more, guns less. We value cooperation more, greed less. We're OK with single-payer healthcare instead of letting the rich at the top get richer bleeding us to death, and you're not going to convince us that's wrong because somebody else is getting healthcare 'for free'.

There's a reason so many Americans have recently discovered their Canadian roots and want our passport, and it's not because things are going well in the US.

And that's a huge part of the problem.

Here in the UK we see little Canadian content despite being quite culturally similar and very close allies, I expect Canadians see little Australian content (as we also don't see much here in the UK). UK is a bit different as the UK has the second most powerful culture outside of it's own borders, it's not unusual to find Union Jacks on things in Europe or Asia where as a maple leaf (or southern cross) would be quire rare. Australia is better known for its animals (Kangaroos and Koalas) as a symbol than our flag.

This is largely due to the overwhelming and oppressive amount of US content. Even though the likes of China, France or India would kill to have the cultural dominance of the UK it's still a distant second to the US. It's so bad that a lot of British and Australian actors have effectively started playing "professional Americans", in the words of Idris Elba.

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