The trick has been around since industrial spies noticed the first liar got away with it.

I wonder if stock-holders can successfully sue for lying about the cause of a sales slump?

Make the AI bubble pop already. I'll stop wanking off for a year if you pop it, I swear on my rosie palm.

What we really need are proper support systems for children in place, but in the real world they often don't exist. Some parents also seem to think they should have full control over their children and know everything they are doing at all times, which makes things like seeking support for being LGBTQ bother difficult for the child and something that the parents demand is not made available.

Maybe we could set up better moderated communities for this kind of thing, but that brings its own problems. As an example, with the current attacks on trans healthcare in the UK, a lot of trans kids are being forced to go the "DIY" route for treatment. It's not illegal as such, but it is something of a grey area. Any kind of official moderation is likely to make such forums useless to a lot of people.

Are you sure you were paying attention when you read it, because that's not what happens in the book. For example, Rocky needs essentially an environmental suit to survive in an atmosphere suitable for humans, due to his planet having much higher pressure and temperature. Communication is established over some time based on engineering principles, which are universal properties of the universe and a classic sci-fi trope for communicating with very different alien species.

I thought it was a pretty good book overall. Lots of interesting ideas and detail. Strong characters, at least for the protagonist and Rocky.

Artemis, about a woman living on the moon. I read it too, it was pretty good.

Bell Labs invented the transistor because the low hanging fruit of vacuum tubes had dried up. Some low hanging fruit is always dried up. That never stopped progress.

While true, the pace of the Next Big Thing is not necessarily constant.

into place to protect their oligopoly. Some blame it on "socialism" when it's really crony capitalism.

Concerned that the reason we keep doing open source is because we believe in access.
The false tradeoff there, is believing that access and exploitation are necessary corollaries. And I don't think they are.
It's a tough balance, and open source licenses have clearly failed us here.
But I'm not sure where to go with it. Shared source might be better, like the Mongo license, or something like it. The Kimi2 license had the right idea.
On the other hand, when you leave the open source path, you pay by losing access.

If a government forks GNU, they will do it at the copyright law level, not the code level.

Zork the Cockroach: "What the fuck is 'rick-rolling'?"

The Chinese have these kinds of robots deploying much larger installations. They also have drones that fly panels into mountainous areas for installation.

Not that I'm knocking it, it's good that they are copying good ideas. The cheaper solar gets the better, and for political reasons stuff like this has to be home grown.

When credit cards and bank accounts are given to children, a parent signature is required. If phones and ISP's are paid for through such venues, then they are automatically age-checked. If a parent is allowing a child to use a device the parent pays for, they should be required to opt in the device to allow the child to access mature material.

Minor grammar fix: "the low-hanging-fruit of solid state electronics R&D has dried up."

I don't believe it's because of the tax-breaks, for they still exist, but that the low-hanging-fruit of solid state electronics R&D have dried up. Software has replaced hardware for many functions of machines, and software needs less "big lab" R&D since it can be done in pajamas. Corporate hardware labs just stopped being able to pay their way.

If say quantum computing started spewing innovations, a similar "gold rush" of R&D may appear again. This is not saying "everything has been invented already", but rather that technology doesn't progress at a steady pace. The AI boom (bubble?) has produced AI labs, but I doubt its lab boom will last as long as the solid state boom.

The laws in several countries are going to require it. My preferred way is for the OS to offer a flag of "This user is of legal age in this region based on information provided to the administrator of this computer." I'll leave it up to the people with compilers to comply or not with their local laws.

My proposal is stuff the flags in a sysctl user.$UID.age var. and then let the browser send info off to other sites just like it does with language selection. That way a pam module (or systemd) can set an over/under age of majority for the region and then let the browser send a "yes/no" flag. The pam module or sysd can calulate that based on a birthday or a +18 flag so you may have to log in to reset it but the birthdate is never sent to the browser let alone to the end web sites.

This gives schools a way to control content. It allows parents to control content. It allows home router vendors to claim to control content. It allows web sites to stop annoying users about being above 16,18 or 21 depending on what they are pushing. The politicians will look at it and say the industry is working with them while patting themselves on the back.

The other solution is let the politician's owners come up with a solution and that will be an expensive id solution that tracks everyone through the web with no way to opt out.