If it could go to one of those "new generation" websites that says almost nothing in really big letters, and then figure out what the hell it's all about and report back to me in something approaching usable information, then MAYBE it has some use.

Otherwise, I'll do my browsing myself, thanks. I don't need a computer to take over my idle-but-trying-to-look-like-I'm-working time, thanks.

Are they still harping on about this? It's been a week already: https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...

Here's what I said last time around: https://slashdot.org/comments....

Age based limits aren't the solution to all ills - just like having an age limit for alcohol doesn't stop alcoholism. However, it gives the person a chance to grow up enough to be able to think through what they're doing - at least a little bit before taking it on.

In the case of social media, it's obviously designed to be addictive. At 13 you've got zero skills to resist that addiction. At 16 you might have a few, and at (say) 20 you'll have a few more and at 40+ you'll have lots. You might still become addicted, but at least you get a chance not to be.

Personally, I can't see why we wouldn't *all* have age limits set by government. After all, they're only set by the pushers themselves at the moment - and that seems far too slanted in their favour. Also, an age limit doesn't preclude other measures being introduced later (just as we have anti-drink-driving laws for alcohol, for example).

As for defining 'engagement' in order to ban some of it, that's going to be tricky. Is slashdot working for your engagement, for example? Irrefutably it is, but we wouldn't consider it a 'social media network' like we do facebook. Privacy violations are probably easier to determine though - and separates out the likes of slashdot from the likes of facebook quite clearly.

True - it's a game no one care about because it's actually got no tangible benefit to anyone.

They've got this new chip - good for them. Why is Co-Pilot still so shit? Google's got their TPU, and Gemini 3 is actually really good. I have a $60 USB-connected TPU on my CCTV NVR, and it's really awesome, so it's working hard on my behalf. If Microsoft can make the same sort of thing for say $30, then maybe it'll be worth thinking about, but otherwise, I just can't get excited about this at all.

Honestly, this ranks down there with the story about a new website for the xbox. Absolutely no benefit to the customer at all.

> Their security sucks so much...

yes, it does, and the Chinese, North Koreans, Elbonians or aliens from the planet Zod shouldn't have been able to listen in. BUT of the named politicians, they all have a secret weapon - they *speak* in code. It's a code so complex that only very few can decypher is, and there's no way the Chinese can.

Boris: We're going to, er, well, er, put it mildly, er, well, herd immunity, er, I'll do a speech on television, er, rectum
Chinese code breaker: Sorry boss, I have no idea

...some time later...

Lizz Truss: Right, Kwarzi, we're going to chop out a whole load of laws and rules, get the tax code cleaned up and get the nation moving, right!?
Kwarzi Kwarteng: You bet - when will the revolution of the British economy take place?
Lizz Truss: Put out a mini statement - not a budget, not a statement, just a mini statement - we need the element of surprise!
Chinese code breaker: Sorry boss, I can't make head nor tail of it, I mean, it sounds simple enough, but no one's *that* stupid are they? They must be feeding us false information because they're on to us

I have the same problem. When I'm rich and famous, I'm going to have an assistant walk around with me and whisper in my ear as people come close. Then I'll be oozing #charm...

"Ah Michael Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenbergerdorff, lovely to see you again. How long's it been? I think we last met a couple of years back at the charity gig. How are the wife and kids? Er... Peregrine, Batholomew and Quvenzhane? How old are they now? They were just getting into Cockermouth Secondary School last time we met, how's that going?"

There may be a point to this...

Taking TurboTax as an example. Lets say I use it to fill out my tax return - it's entirely conceivable that I could create an app that does that one task perfectly adequately. If you believe the hype, I could create such a thing by vibe-coding it in a weekend. Thus, TurboTax has no utility for all those customers who just use it to fill out their tax returns (it still has value to those who maybe do other tax related things with it though).

The problem of course is that any old fool can use AI to make something that *looks* like it's filling in your tax return correctly. However, a couple of years down the line, the tax collector comes-a-knocking because you didn't do something you should have done. By then of course, everyone's forgotten any of the original story, Intuit has gone out of business and now you have no where else to go, but back to the AI.

In the short term (ie. next 5+ years), I can't see how paying for the AI credits to write your software is any better than paying for the software that's already available. At least in the latter case you know it works - and you have someone to call if there's a problem.

However, as you say, a lot of companies have made a living out of selling absolute shit which has features no one asked for, and "no one" uses, and the core features are buggy and annoying - and they're priced high because of all the features you don't use. The value of those companies is likely to fall as people realise they don't really need to suffer all the crap just to get the one gem they use all the time. AI might be an amplifier of that trend, but it's by no means the only force making it happen.

FWIW, I foresee a load of new SaaS products coming along (quite probably AI-created, or at least rapidly developed). They won't be super complex or all that clever, but they'll be cheap and easy to use. They'll do what they do excellently well, but they won't do a bajillion other things most people don't need. Since they're small, they'll be cheap to manage, cheap to run and so really will cost less than the (AI credits + hassle factor) to build it yourself.

I was thinking mostly the launch as being where the carbon comes from (although aluminium smelting to the grades used is also carbon intensive, as are creation of some of the other things used to make the satellite). After that, there's suggestion that aluminium in our upper atmosphere could be really bad for us, as would other chemicals used to make up the satellites - but as things stand, we don't really know for sure what that's all going to do to us - it's a safe bet to suggest it's not going to be good as we (and our environment) aren't adapted for it, and it's probably also safe to assume the companies putting those satellites up there won't be held accountable for it.

A smaller constellation means they're going to be much more careful about the satellites they have in orbit. Contrast to the Starlink style of operations where they've asset-written-off the satellite after 5 years, so it can burn up and they don't mind - they'll just launch a dozen new ones.

Whilst the burn-up-and-replace option may be cheaper/simpler, it sure is wasteful - and despite what some say, carbon emissions are costing us a lot. No one knows for sure what the atmospheric cost of the burn-ups is, but I'm sure it's not going to be good.

No, you're teaching the microwave how it should behave. You're being a good parent!

Microwaves should rotate the dish to the exact same position it was in when the cycle started. None of them seem to manage this, so stopping the cycle before the end so the handle of the jug, or the dry side of the plate or whatever is at the front is just showing the microwave what it should aspire to.

We've had our microwave for at least 10 years, and it's still not got the message. If that's not evidence of a lack of intelligence, and probably consciousness, I don't know what is. Then again, I've known dogs not get the gist of fetching a ball for longer than that, so maybe there's hope yet for the microwave.

Personally, I'm waiting for them to come up with a use case that actually justifies the card. Until then, I'm in the "no fucking way" camp, mostly for the reasons you state, I've read 1984, and I have German family, who can still remember "papers please", and so are about as opposed to it as you could ever imagine.

This iteration of the ID Card was entirely made-up and absolutely was nothing to do with the right to work. Illegals already can't get "nice" jobs in the UK because they are already ID checked and are so publicly toxic that no sane employer will hire them. Tightening that regime so that even the shonky employers have to do the same still doesn't require ID cards (as demonstrated here).

In a sense, you want an ID card for the immigrants (who perhaps don't have driving licenses, passports etc), and not for the general population (who do). Obviously that can't work, but that's the only sensible ID card that is required to check if you're allowed to work here.

The same sort of thing was true the last time it was proposed - you make all the people you already know/like carry a pointless card, because somehow that weeds out the people you don't know and like. Given the expense of implementing it, there has to be some benefit for someone - and it sure as shit isn't the people carrying the card. When you start to think who does benefit, you start to realise what a terrible idea it is.

It's rightly been canned, and so we'll be ID-card-free for another few years at least until the next round of idiots propose it. You'd hope they'd learn, but seemingly it looks like they can't/won't/don't.

GPS signals work on the 'edges' of the signal, not the strength of it. That is, you "listen" to some noise at a particular frequency in the required band, but just at the moment you're expecting it to do so, there's a "high to low" edge in the noise. You wait a bit more at a different frequency, and then there's another... and another... gradually, you gain 'signal lock' which is essentially your listening expectation matching up with the signal sent by the satellite. You need a pretty accurate clock to be able to listen in the right places in the radio band at the right times. Every satellite uses a different pattern of frequency hops and edge directions, so you need to know which one you're trying to listen to as well.

Jamming such a signal isn't easy - you actually need to send an edge just before the real one arrives, in the right place in the frequency band. The receiver needs to "think" your edge is the real one, and it then bases its timing and therefore location off it, rather than the real edge that came from space. You obviously need to do that continuously and reasonably correctly to convince the receiver of your bogus location.

All that said, 'spamming' edges may cause a receiver not to get signal lock because (say) every second real edge isn't found properly. It's still not just a matter of "blatting" a load of noise across the spectrum though - you need to think about how the receivers are actually listening and 'tune in' to that to do it successfully.

All this is thanks to Spread Spectrum modulation. for which you can thank Hedy Lamarr, an actress and Austrian immigrant to the United States.

Instead of interest on its own, how about the percentage of your tax take that's required to pay that interest?

If that percentage gets too high, then people just see you taking loads of tax off them, but "nothing" happening in return - which means pitchforks and lynching. If the percentage is too low, then you're perhaps missing an opportunity to invest in some infrastructure that would get your tax take higher and ultimately result in a *lower* percentage, even though your national debt was actually higher than it used to be.

You make a good point about long and short term debt though. Some sort of clever measure of that would likely also help to 'rank' countries so that those thinking themselves similar to each other could aim to have similar numbers. It would also shine a light on those leaders who were raiding the piggy back and leaving the next leaders to carry the can.

Is it just me, or has Lego always struggled with 'tech'? I mean, waaay back when they used to do Technic sets it looked like they might be on to something. Then they stopped making them.

Then they did Mindstorms, which also looked really promising... then they stopped that too.

The did another 'tech' option a couple of years back - was insanely expensive if I recall, I believe also has been canned.

Now this... how long before they kill this one too?

All of this is a real shame - it'd be great to be able to make robots and stuff out of lego. It kinda means you need to do some programming, which I guess is why they keep struggling with this, because of all the people playing with lego, only a small number ever want to do any coding.

I'm finding what you're describing more and more (especially with ID checks, but other things too). My guess is the mobile versions of their sites/products get tested on iPhones, top-of-the-line Samsungs and Googles and that's all. My little old motorola has a bit less capability than any of those, and seemingly the browser can't keep itself in memory when I switch to another app (even getting to the password manager is a gamble in some cases).

There are multiple problems here... the browsers aren't always very good at asserting themselves into the OS, the pages the browsers (or apps) are showing are far, far too big for the amount of content they actually have on them (likely due to umpteen Javascript frameworks and general inefficiencies from the web devs) and of course the operating system itself trying to be too clever or careful or whatever else. Then there's the "old phone" problem too, I guess.

Not sure what the solution is...? Use the desktop version? Use a different product/company? (I just ditched a well respected bank because of their crappy sign up experience) Get a better phone?