> Apple builds the handset, the OS and the store

Remember, when iPhone came out there was no App Store.

That was a separate business that came later, competition was prohibited, and by prohibiting competition rents were extracted.

This is called "illegal tying" in the law.

They're gonna install malware on your device but heaven forbid your website sets the wrong cookie, then they're fining you 6% of annual revenue.

When did East Germany win?

US Solicitor General John Sauer disagrees.

In the oral arguments for Trump v Slaughter, on Monday, Sauer said this isn't true when Justice Kagan pushed him on it. She said that the Founders clearly intended to have a separation of powers, to which he basically said "Yeah, but with the caveat that they created the 'unitary executive'", by which he seemed to mean that they intended the president to be able to do pretty much anything.

Kagan responded with a nuanced argument about how we have long allowed Congress to delegate limited legislative and judicial functions to the executive branch in the way we allow Congress to delegate the power to create and evaluate federal rules to executive-branch agencies, but that that strategy rests on a "deal" that both limits the scope of said rulemaking and evaluative functions and isolates them to the designated agency. She said that breaking that isolation by allowing the president detailed control over those functions abrogated and invalidated the deal, unconstitutionally concentrating power in ways that were clearly not intended by the Founders.

Sauer disagreed. I'll stop describing the discussion here and invite you to listen to it. The discussion is both fascinating and very accessible, and the linked clip is less than seven minutes long.

The court seems poised to take Sauer's view, which I think is clearly wrong. If they do, it's going to come back and bite conservatives hard when we get an active liberal president, as we inevitably will someday if the Trump administration fails to end democracy in the US.

What's very sad is that we already went through all of this and learned these lessons 150 years ago. After 100 years of experience with a thoroughly-politicized executive branch, we passed the Pentleton Civil Service Reform act in 1883 specifically to insulate most civil servants from presidential interference. Various other laws have subsequently been passed to create protections for federal workers and to establish high-level positions that are explicitly protected from the president. SCOTUS seems bent on overturning all of that and returning us to the pre-Pendleton era.

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it, and it's looking we're gonna repeat a lot of bad history before we re-learn those 19th-century lessons.

that's bullshit

True, but I figure it'll be built into the next version of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

It's over.

Or, more concisely: Countries should aim to be poor.

To be fair to the nutballs, their proposal will actually slow it down as compared to not limiting immigration. That is, from their nutball perspective the proposal is an improvement, just not a total solution. For a total solution, they need to go full right-wing nutball and also ban women from working so they'll stay home and have proper Swiss babies.

without, not with, sigh.
Slashdot, wtf is so difficult about an Edit feature

"strong basic income"
in the USA? not going to happen with a massive political overhaul, think French Revolution

It fell apart for too many younger people a good while ago

Except that they aren't blocking sideloading. With the planned changes you can still install apps via:

1. Other app stores. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
2. By one-click installation from a web site. The apps will have to be signed by a registered developer account.
3. By ADB. No registered developer account required.

And for the cases that require a registered developer account, that account can be anonymous and free as long as the number of installs is small.

That would be fun, actually. I'd have to give them slashdot and substack. They'd have no idea what either of them are.

Well, it would be fun until they denied me entry.

FTFY

This is a gaslighting that he'll probably largely get away with, since most Americans -- especially his voter base -- have little contact with tourism or people from other countries.

His ongoing attempts to gaslight them over grocery prices, though, that one's going to be tougher. I'm surprised he's trying that. I mean, he's dumb, sure, and insulated from truth, but surely someone around him is smart enough and clueful enough to tell him that it would be better to sell it as a period of unfortunate but necessary pain on the way to long-lasting economic revival and stability. His base would eat that up, but even his diehard supporters are having a hard time reconciling "grocery prices are down!" with their own grocery bills, and he just keeps repeating it. He can cherry-pick specific item prices or gush about the lower-price of a (conveniently scaled-back) Thanksgiving dinner basket all he wants but people who actually buy groceries (such an old-timey word! <eyeroll/>) can see the truth during every weekly trip to the store.

"Somehow Opera still had users before this. If anyone would pay for it, it would be these people"
I'm one of "these people". I think i was using Opera when i created my 1st Slashdot account & paid for a license back in the day.
Still use it today but it hasn't been my main browser in a long time.
And, no, Hell NO, I would not pay for this.