I would argue that our modern concept of rule of law, comes from Achemenid Persia, which had a meaningful system for holding the people who made the laws, accountable for also following them.

The copyright stuff is a side issue. Wrap your head around this:

> officials are not required to disclose what exactly the charges are or who
> has brought them until the initial investigation is complete under Italian law

That is a *terrifying* abuse of power. They can show up to your house and just take you and your stuff into custody and NOT SAY WHY until their investigation is complete.

That is so many kinds of horrifying.

Eh, that's probably true for a lot of people on Slashdot, who have actual stuff they care about on their devices. For someone like my mom, it wouldn't matter: if her phone were seized for some reason, the thing she'd be upset about would be the cost of the phone itself. (It's not even an expensive model. It's the one the phone company sent her when they shut down the 3G network in the area, because her previous phone did not support 4G.)

Regardless of that, there are some borders that you just shouldn't cross, at all, or at least not without an exceptionally good reason. The PROC is rapidly rising up the list of countries that are really not safe for Westerners to visit. I mean, it's not as high on the list as e.g. Myanmar, but nonetheless it's really not a good choice at this point. Be safe: go to Taiwan, or Japan, or Indonesia, even. And that goes double if you have family or friends in China, because visiting them there endangers them more than it endangers you.

And yes, this article is about people who are visiting China from overseas, specifically. For anybody with a mainland-Chinese cellphone carrier, this is entirely moot: the CCP already has all of the data from those, that's not news.

If they were doing this in 1985, or even 1995, I might think they were attempting to re-invent the IMAX format. But in 2025, with a quote in the summary about box office revenues for blockbuster Hollywood films, I don't think that's necessarily what's going on.

Rather, I think a lot of people have gotten so used to watching movies at home, that they don't bother going to the movie theater at all unless it's to see the film "on the big screen". Cinema revenues have therefore dropped so much, that the modest number of people who go to an IMAX theatre to see Hollywood's schlock on an even bigger screen (which is not at all the same thing as going to an IMAX theatre to see an actual IMAX production), are starting to look like a significant chunk of market share, and the (surviving) cinema chains are looking at at that, going, "Why is their screen bigger than ours?" So they put in bigger screens, but people don't know about it and don't suddenly flock to it, because IMAX is already famous for having the biggest screens. So now the theaters want to market the fact that they've got big screens. Which is fine, as far as it goes, but it won't stop movie theaters from rapidly becoming a fundamentally obsolete business model. It puts me horribly in mind of West Virginia, in the mid twentieth century, when coal mining was becoming less and less profitable, and instead of moving to diversify into other industries, like everyplace else that had been relying on coal mines as a major source of economic activity, the entire state of West Virginia collectively went, let's double down on coal mining and corner the market, and push coal from 60% of our economy, up to 80% or more of our economy, nothing can go wrong with this plan.

Depends on which version of each respective OS we're talking about (especially on the Windows side), and on your system specs, and also on what software you're running; but mostly, yes. Especially these days.

If they really want to save battery life and improve performance, they should start by fixing the Windows Updates system so it doesn't try to store half the internet in virtual memory whenever it's downloading updates, because that results in a *lot* of swapping; and relatedly they should rip out the Eight/Ten/Eleven virtual memory subsystem and replace it with something that occasionally swaps out a page that is NOT going to be the very next one needed. Even the NT vm system that Seven had, was better, and that is pretty dire. (This happens to be an area where Linux does pretty well, at least in my experience, although of course no vm system will ever be as good as just having enough physical RAM to hold everything.)

Oh, and they need to add an API for third-party installers to call to say "here is the URL to check for a list of updates in this publicly documented format", so their new Windows Updates subsystem that they need to rewrite from scratch anyway, can also handle updates for third-party web browsers and PDF viewers and so on and so forth, so there aren't a dozen different update services running in the background all the time.

Oh, I am sure it will be fine. Nothing can possibly go wrong. When has a California state government policy ever caused any problems at all?

Honestly, it'll probably even be entertaining to watch. For those of us living elsewhere. Such as here in the Midwest, for instance. If we have a sufficiently dark sense of humor.

This isn't _entirely_ unique to the tech sector, although the fundamental nature of software does make it a little different...

I mean, let's step away from tech for a second and talk about, I don't know, fast food, for example. Why does everybody have a drive-through window? Because whoever introduced it first, was making a lot of money from it. Why do they all offer meal-deal options on their menu, where you get a main dish and a side dish and a beverage for one price? It was a money maker for whoever introduced it first, and everyone copied it. Why do nearly all pizza chains deliver? Same reason. When your direct competitor introduces something that's wildly popular and makes a ton of money, you do something like that too, in order to stay competitive. That's the nature of business, and it's *mostly* a good thing, most of the time.

There's a reason you can't copyright ideas, only specific expressions thereof.

With all of that said, I said the nature of software does make it a little different, and what I mean is this: the cost of implementing a software feature is the same whether you're rolling it out to fifty users or fifty million users, so you spend the same amount, but you get more benefit if you're larger. This does somewhat amplify the advantages of being a large company.

But yeah, all businesses that are any good at business, copy their competitors' best ideas. Otherwise they eventually go out of business. Why did Sears, once a quite major company, shrivel and die? Because they were badly run and didn't keep up. Amazon exists, and you think people are going to wait for your *quarterly* catalog to arrive in the mail, and order from that? Sorry, no, you lose. (It isn't just Amazon, of course. Their brick and mortar business could have survived the arrival of online ordering, but then they would have had to figure out how to compete with Wal-Mart and Target. They didn't.)

The thing I don't quite understand, is what support an office suite would have for any particular currency, other than the inclusion of the currency symbol in the character list, which these days is handled by the Unicode people and whoever makes your fonts. What else is there for the office suite to do, to support a currency? Maybe the currency symbol needs to be on a list of currency symbols that can be recognized as currency symbols so the spreadsheet knows to treat things like $700 as a number rather than a string? Can't that just be handled with format strings in the cell properties? I mean, what if I'm creating a spreadsheet of NetHack shop prices and I want to list them in zorkmids (so, like, 200zm)? Shouldn't there just be a general-purpose way to do that sort of thing without the software developers needing to hardcode every single individual currency?

I mean, if you're just now noticing for the first time that most people have terrible taste, you must have been living in a cave, or under a rock, or on a three-square-yard island with two palm trees, ever since you were a small child.

But as for the AI-generated music, probably most of the people "listening" to it aren't actually listening; they've turned on background music, and probably also a television that they aren't actually watching, to create ambient noise so they don't have to hear themselves think while they go about working or playing or cooking or cleaning or gardening or changing diapers or doom-scrolling social media or doing whatever else it is they're doing. A non-trivial portion of the population does this all the time. It's the same people drink caffeine to calm themselves down, because their brain chemistry is wired upside-down and backwards compared to the rest of us.

My assumption is that most of those million plays happened when somebody who likes ambient noise and hates silence (which is surprisingly common for people with a significant attention deficit), had Spotify playing music in the background, while they were doing other unrelated stuff. A lot of them probably also had a television running, at the same time as the music. You think I'm kidding? I personally know people who do this. They aren't actually listening to the music, so as long as it sounds vaguely similar to music, that's good enough. It doesn't have to stand up to close scrutiny.

And honestly, if they're not listening to it closely enough to notice that it's AI-generated garbage, then it really doesn't *matter* that it's AI-generated garbage. It's doing what they want it to do: preventing them from getting distracted by the unwanted ability to hear themselves think. Frankly, somebody should probably start a music service that *only* plays AI-generated garbage, because it would be cheap to run.

Do *I* want to listen to that? Well, no, but I'm picky about what I listen to (not so much in terms of genre; my tastes are relatively eclectic in that regard; but in terms of quality), because I actually *listen* to it.

I mean, the way things are currently going, it appears they will in fact be stopped in Ukraine.

Oh, you meant *voluntarily* stop? Nevermind then.

Carbon dioxide is a red herring here, completely insignificant compared to the other environmental costs of burning coal, let alone all the other costs of manufacturing solar panels in a country with no effective environmental regulations at all. Just China's terrible mining practices, for example, do more environmental harm in a single year, than all the carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels in the entire history of China, possibly in the entire history of the world. And then you have what they're doing to their water and air.

Are solar panels made in China still a net win for the environment? I don't know, honestly. But I do know, if you're only looking at the CO2, you aren't even a little bit serious about enviornmental impact, you're just mindlessly virtue signaling your partisan politics.

Eh. In practice, what you really need to know here is that this disease isn't realistically ever going to be an epidemic in the modern developed world, *even* if it develops a strain that is 100% resistant to all antibiotics (which thus far hasn't quite happened). The conditions for massive spreading just aren't there. It was a large problem in the medieval world, but conditions were very different then. The plague doesn't normally spread from person-to-person directly, in the manner of something like an influenza or a coronavirus. I'm not saying that can't ever happen at all, but it's far too unusual to ever result in any kind of epidemic. To have a bubonic plague epidemic, you have to have a completely out-of-control population of intermediate carriers (principally, rodents) living in close proximity to the human population, and a lot of biting insects (principally, fleas) that routinely prey on both. We're talking full-on Monty-Python-and-the-Holy-Grail levels of societal poverty here, people laying down in straw beds because that's what's available, dealing with flea bites by scratching, grain stored in burlap sacks, rats everywhere, mice everywhere, the whole nine yards. If you clean up your society and control the vermin, ipso facto, the plague is mostly contained and hardly spreads at all.

Sure, it's not completely extinct. But it doesn't need to be, because it doesn't spread that readily. You're five thousand times more likely to be killed by a drunk driver, than to be infected by the plague bacterium. (This is assuming you live in America; yes, I looked up the actual numbers.) And most people who do get infected, don't die, because it's treatable these days, because, you know, modern medicine and stuff.

Cholera, similarly, is not an epidemic threat if you have anything resembling modern sewage treatment. So you can cross that one off your panic-immediately-if-there-is-one-case list as well.

The one that would be all kinds of scary if it ever got loose in the human population again, is smallpox. That thing spreads almost as readily as influenza, and most countries haven't vaccinated for it in decades. In America, routine vaccination was stopped more than fifty years ago, so most of the population, has not been vaccinated. We do *have* quite effective vaccines for it, but in the event of an epidemic, I doubt whether we could ramp up production fast enough, to keep up with the terrifying rate at which smallpox spreads. The one notable piece of good news is, it doesn't mutate much, so once any given patient is vaccinated against smallpox, they won't need the vaccine again. Booster shots not required, thank God. If that weren't the case, we'd probably still be losing a double-digit percentage of the human population to it every generation or so.

Eh. I do really question the wisdom of including Cubans in this. Venezuelans, despite the undeniably genuine nature of their need to get out of Venezuela, are a sudden surge, a large numeric increase within the last few years, and that has significantly contributed to the disruption and the problematic nature of the current situation in America. Haitians, as a group (albeit, perhaps not every person individually), have made their own problems at home. Nicaraguans, I don't really know their situation, so I can't really comment on their inclusion. But Cubans have been trickling into America to more or less the same extent for more than half a century; they're victims of international communism that was *not* home grown in Cuba and is ultimately not really their fault at all, individually or collectively; and they are (as a group) pretty consistently good workers, reasonably innovative (not in a high-tech sense necessarily, but I mean in economic terms: they find ways to contribute positively to society); they're overall a net gain for the US economy, have been for decades; and most of them are generally law-abiding. They also have a pretty good naturalization rate, and a reasonable integration rate (meaning, they don't just keep to themselves as a closed-off isolated community; they interact with the rest of society, pretty extensively, albeit mostly within certain geographical areas). Maybe I'm missing something, but I really don't see how involving them in this whole mess is a good idea.

In that price range, there's also a significant amount of vetting, to keep out hoi polloi (and, in locations where there are a lot of celebrities, paparazzi). You're paying partly for exclusivity.