Users should never be able to do things that cause crashes in the same way that drivers should not ever be able to press any button or press any pedal that causes the engine to spontaneously burst into flames.

I'm also a Mac user, but let's not boast here, shall we?

My personal guess would have been at least 10x. Did Microsoft bribe the study authors?

Dude, are you living under a rock?

These bands are creating new music. But the money that allows them to do so comes from their old music. I have bands in my collection that have been making music for 30 years.

No they don't. They don't even make ok money. Tours are expensive and a lot of people, from road crew to venue security, take their cut before the musicians. The big guys, they make a killing on tours. But the small ones sometimes don't even break even.

In fact, a common wisdom in the industry is that touring is worth it not because the tour itself makes profits, but because it builds a fanbase and drives what is called "catalog discovery" - both old and new fans looking buying the albums with the songs they liked (and for the old fans, didn't know).

This study: https://www.giarts.org/article... says that 28% of income across all the musicians surveyed comes from tours. The share is larger for the rock/pop sector where it nears 40% but even that isn't easy money. And if you consider that only 20% of the rock/pop musicians make more than $50,000 a year, then it becomes a hollow statement.

Plus, it goes directly against your first statement - while on tour the band is not creating new music. So if you want to drive musicians more towards constantly creating (which most of them already do), then you can't make live performances the main income source.

There is more than one study and more than one way to look at it. Especially for streaming, having a catalog matters, especially for the smaller artists who will never have a charts-level hit:

"In 2024, nearly 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in royalties from Spotify aloneâ"likely translating to over $4 million across all recorded revenue sources. What's remarkable is that 80% of these million-dollar earners didn't have a single song reach the Spotify Global Daily Top 50 chart. This reveals a fundamental shift from hit-driven success to sustainable catalog-based income, where consistent engagement from devoted audiences matters more than viral moments or radio dominance."

https://cord-cutters.gadgethac...

Also don't forget that many studies such as DiCola's "Money from Music" focus on the superstars and the big hits. That is true, the charts pop music generates 80% or so of its income within the few weeks it stays in the charts and then drops of sharply.

Honestly, I don't care about the charts and superstars. They wouldn't starve if we cut copyright terms to six weeks. I do care about the indie artists that I enjoy. Who after ten years get the band back together for another tour through clubs with 200 or 500 people capacity. I'm fairly sure they would suffer if the revenue from those albums disappeared. And disappear it would. Maybe fans would still buy the CDs from the merch booth, but Spotify would certainly not pay them if it didn't have to.

While I strongly appreciate the elite's desire to highlight influence science fiction, I assert that cosplay is a sufficient means of doing so and directly acting the severely flawed actions of the villains from said stories benefits no one... not even themselves.

People won't move away because bots get screened. They'll start moving away if the screening process shows too many false positives.

Their bigger risk is financial. If they're honest about getting rid of bots, traffic and subreddit participation will slow thereby resulting in reduced ad revenue and potential and valuation. If they're OK with that, then they'll do well. If, however, their shareholders press them to "increase ad revenue at all costs" then they'll loosen up bot restrictions, claim that the tech is advancing too much, and simply claim that all user accounts are humans for the sake of revenue generation.

He's basically a newborn :-)

Yes, but there is an important difference: TV had to appeal to an average audience member. Meanwhile the social media algorithms are intentionally working against you, trying to specifically find and use your triggers.

That's quite a different intent there.

On the TV, parents could also check the program for what they thought was suitable for their kid or not. They could watch the same program, even if not in the same room. Social media is a lot more personal and a lot harder to track and filter.

Hard disagree.

Not everything is subject to hype cycles. A lot of especially the SMALLER musicians, for example, basically live off their back catalog. I routinely buy the entire collection of artists that I freshly discover and fall in love with. And I totally feel that it is right that I pay them for music they made, no matter when they made it.

What is an abomination is copyright terms of DEATH + 70 years. Or whatever Disney pushed it to by now. I'm ok with inheritance of creative work, but it should not put the children into "never have to work in their entire life" territory.

Then again, there are two aspects: Creative control and money. I think that the Tolkien estate did a generally good job of protecting the integrity of JRR's works. Well, if we ignore Rings of Power, I have no idea what lies Amazon told them to get the approval for that shitshow.

And let's not forget that coypright law is also what protects GPL software.

The Moon is target practice. We need to get away from innovative bespoke engineering, into industrial mass production with continuous improvement. To do that we need to fly often. Mars just doesn't have the launch window availability. The biggest part of the challenge is that we were born in the bottom of a deep well. To toss enough stuff out of the well for a long journey is critical. Boosters that reliably fly on time often and cheaply enough to get ships and fuel out of the well. Ships that carry fuel into orbit and return over and over since the vast majority of the material we need to send out of the well isn't payloads or ships, it's fuel. Kilotons of fuel. Once the factories and processes are set up for that going far beyond the Moon is fairly easy. But with a narrow opportunity every two years that's not going to happen in a human lifespan. It's not enough refinement cycles per year.

I see this accelerating the Mars objective, not deferring it.

The same company that banned people for linking to the British Holocaust Museum (HMD.Org.UK) claiming the links were violations of the policy on "dangerous individuals and organizations." Zuckerberg is a pedophilic little-boy-raping sick-trash Nazi.

Not to mention that the first thing any gamer does when they get a game is turn all that artistic crap off, both to get a better framerate, but also to make the game easier to see. The fewer "artistic effects" on the screen, the easier it is to see what's happening. The idea that gamers care about "artistic intent" is hilarious if you've ever seen any gamer community.

"Identity Verification" is being thrown around too much and it's getting people whipped up into a frenzy when they don't need to be. Identity Verification establishes actual human uniqueness by recording and validating Personally Identifying Information (PII) (government ID, birth information, biometric data, etc.).

When California passed a law requiring operating systems to make available the self-designation of the primary user's age group so websites and application programmers can query for that information and then NOT provide inappropriate content to minors, people lost their minds because it was called "Identity Verification". It is not.

The same goes here. From the CEO's own mouth in the video linked in the article:

Is this not what we want? Fewer bots and NOT exposing my PII to companies unnecessarily?

Why? We already have machine code. What could an "AI-optimized programming language" do that neither machine code nor current programming languages already do?

Uh, you can do that today. That "intermediate language" is any programming language that has enough stuff on the Internet that the LLMs have trained them.

Now whether or not that's a good idea or a recipe for desaster is an ongoing discussion. As a security professional, my take is simple: Thank you AI, my job is secure until I retire. Just when technical solutions like W^X or Rust's memory ownership to list just two of dozens, were eliminating entire classes of vulnerabilities.

The best part? I don't even need to learn anything new. AI has trained on insecure code, example code, "why does this not work" Stackoverflow questions and a whole lot of other stuff full of bugs and vulns. They're all showing up again in vibe coded slop.

Unlike many on Slashdot, every computer I use has a Windows installation. That's just the reality of my needs. So, I apply the same philosophy here I do for all other products: "All good customer service is appreciated. All reductions in bad customer service is appreciated. That said, all hope and praise is withheld until at least some of the committed product is delivered."