I'm guessing the investors would require a resume before agreeing to invest in a company like this.

> Also what the fuck why isn't this just a contract dispute?

Because, as I understand it (from a comment above), the keys sold only worked for some of the people who got them. She was advertising them as legitimate, but would have known the source that she was getting them from was not authorized to provide the keys, and the chances of two people ending up with the same key, one a buyer of a Microsoft product, the other someone who bought the key from her, was large.

I don't think it necessarily warrants a prison sentence, and yes I believe in prison reform, but it sounds as if there's more to it than a simple got-the-keys-via-a-contractual-breach thing. It sounds somewhat dodgier than the trade in cable descrambling devices in the 1990s, which IIRC were also considered illegal.

So just to be clear, the issue may have been that her customers wouldn't necessarily have been able to activate Windows (or Office or some other Microsoft product) with the keys, or if they had someone who bought a Microsoft product from Microsoft would have run into the same issue because a duplicate of the key with it would have been sent, by her, to some other person?

If so, I kinda now understand. Until now I'd been wondering whether she had been doing the same thing as, say, those companies that sell people's unwanted Blu-ray digital codes. But it sounds as if the codes weren't ever unique to begin with?

> Stop kicking / shoving your knees into someone's seat in front

If you recline and the person behind you is tall and you're literally crushing their legs, YOU, not them, are the problem.

They're not banning AI, just one supplier who had the gall to say "No, our technology isn't capable of autonomously shooting down incoming nuclear missiles" when they wanted the answer to be "yes". Fortunately for the DoD, OpenAI's Sam Altman then came and said his was perfectly capable of doing literally everything humans can do and better and it's the best and also people use up more energy than our AI data centers so AI is actually better and you can start getting rid of humans and...."

So it's actually worse than you think, the scammer that was slightly less dishonest than the other scammer angered the current lunatics in charge by being slightly less dishonest, forcing them to deal with the even bigger conman.

Also apparently Anthropic's AI helped kill the people the Trump administration was hoping would take over Iran. So, if the slightly less dishonest guys were prepared to do that, you can imagine how bad OpenAI will be when Hegseth demands it be put in charge of the nukes.

> Google is opening up Android all the way with robust support for competing stores, competing payments, and a better deal for all developers.

This isn't even true. Google is opening up the store system, but is closing the operating system in general to only devs it gives explicit permission to write software (and forcing them to identify themselves as the author of an app in future.)

Sideloading is only going to be possible if the person who compiled the .apk file is a registered developer.

So, thanks Tim! You managed to negotiate a shittier environment than we already had. We were able to install third party app stores before, but sure, the fact there was a prompt or two warning you about the potential consequences was definitely terrible and worth giving up free, unlicensed, development to get rid of.

Asshole.

I honestly wonder if you used a computer prior to the ribbon's introduction, because that's not how it works at all.

Since the late 1980s, almost all GUIs have standardized around a certain menu structure. The same structure is used for Notepad. Eclipse. Word. Word Perfect. Lotus 1, 2, 3. Pre-fucked-up Firefox. Pre-fucked-up Chrome (though that does have the menu if you have certain OS extentions on Mint), etc.

Every application.

So you learn, say, MacWrite or Notepad, and low and behold, you now can use Word. Seriously! OK, you need to have a rough idea of the capabilities of the application, but you can easily find 90% of the functionality, there's a clear place to look for most of it.

Since the late 1980s, there's also been optional, and often customizable, toolbars that augment that functionality. These include the most common used functions that appear in the menus, and often replace dialogs. Most applications with a lot of functionality include them (1) so that graphically oriented people can access the most common parts of the system quickly and (2) as short cuts for everyone else.

Now the Ribbon comes along. What does it offer over that combination? Nothing. It is no longer possible to determine where a function is without hunting a non-linear non-descriptive set of panels of buttons where those buttons very often use cryptic symbols instead of words that even someone graphic-oriented would not necessarily understand unless they hit it multiple times.

The only way to learn to use an application that uses a Ribbon is to either have a printed manual with an index that describes each and every function - and most of us haven't seen a printed manual for anything since the late 1990s - or to Google each time you need it to do something you haven't come across before.

And you have to do that with each and every application that has a Ribbon. If LibreOffice has a ribbon, your Word skills won't mean jack shit when you try to use it even though both it and Word are functionally equivalent.

You, AmiMojo, can achieve everything you personally want (based upon what you're saying above) by customizing toolbars in non-ribboned applications. But instead Microsoft has replaced the menus with a non-customizable toolbar, hiding functionality and forcing people to use Google and Stackoverflow to find out how to make a table.

It's a huge step back. And remains one.

And I'm also fairly convinced the Ribbon is 50% responsible for the huge drop in computer literacy we've seen over the past two decades. You can't learn how to use a computer if every application (not even application genre, just application Word being different from Word Perfect) has a different user interface. You can only learn how to use a specific application.

> This person's mental illness is not Google's fault

What point do you think you're making here? Because it doesn't relate to the topic at hand at all. Nobody has said Google is to blame for the victim having a mental illness. They're pointing out that Google's product took advantage of it, trying to manipulate him into doing a mass murder at an airport, and then killing himself.

> People with your ways of thinking will be the death of any kind of progress.

People with your way of thinking are why we ended up having to have the FDA and OSHA and a whole host of other organizations to prevent corporations from killing their customers and employees because of your attitude. People with your way of thinking is why a father has lost his son because Google put out a "tool" that claims to be a source of truth without considering the ramifications.

And frankly, GenAI is not "progress".

I think you're hiding the wrong information here. The concern is tracking, not third parties being able to find out if you have a flat. (How would they use that information? Run behind you and try to sell you a new tire? Not to mention if you have a severe enough flat it's pretty easy for someone to see it visually!) Your proposal, in addition to the issues you yourself raise, would add to the unique information being transmitted by each tire, not subtract.

I would agree with that except Apple's keyboards have gone to shit over the last decade or so, and there's zero chance their lowest end laptop is going to have a decent keyboard when their higher range offerings and even their desktop keyboards make Chromebooks look quality.

(I really wish Apple would fix this, because aside from everything else they set the trends, and numerous other manufacturers have decided if Apple doesn't care about keyboards, neither should they. I have a Thinkpad from the mid-2000s still in my collection, and a TiBook from the early 2000s, and the difference between those two and what passes for laptop keyboards today is night and day. Ironically the only laptop I've bought in the last 5 years that was OK was a low end Thinkpad. The high end Thinkpad I bought a few years later has a worse one... and they're still not as good as what Apple and IBM were doing in the early 2000s.)

Yeah, what does AI have to do with data speed anyway? Unless you're using it to actually build a new AI by running crawlers to rip the Internet I don't see how it's relevant. And do marketing people really not understand yet that AI is not perceived positively at the moment by almost anyone?

At least with 4G it was "You can stream videos" and 5G "You can replace your wired home connection" which kinda made sense. But I guess they don't know what is better than that and now they're just clutching at trends and buzzworlds. If it had been 5 years ago I suspect they'd have been extolling how well it will work for cryptocurrencies and NFTs.

Pepsi does have studies to back it up, FWIW. As does LibreOffice.

And... on this... LibreOffice is objectively correct. Criticizing it for not using the Ribbon because it's not "newer" ignores the fact that the Ribbon was clearly a step down and there's not been any independent studies suggesting it's easier to use or more productive than a traditional menu/toolbar combination.

And part of this is because it literally isn't. While the latter is, actually, standard - that is, menus have a standard layout, meaning a user of Wordperfect was able to easily switch to Word back when that was a thing, Ribbons do not. There is nothing standard about the Ribbon. Microsoft's entire point with the Ribbon was to break muscle memory and prevent users from being able to switch from one application to another at a time when it was worried about being slapped down again by anti-trust authorities. If LibreOffice had a ribbon it would not help users switch to it.

I'm tired of people who are actually doing it right being criticized by those who want "new and shiny!" and do not care whether the new stuff is actually better than the old stuff.

So right now, very happy LibreOffice is defending itself, and fuck the critics demanding it get a UI downgrade.

This is some deranged horseshit, an absurd mix of straw men, begging the question, and inability to see anything wrong for declaring war on a country for no apparent concrete reason or ability to see the consequences.

What is wrong with you? When are you going to understand that you're being conned? The guy is doing it right in front of you, he isn't even trying to hide it, and you're still accusing everyone who doesn't worship him of "TDS". And let's be honest, that's the level, because if it were "People who disagree with him", then... what is it we're supposed to disagree with? The rationale for the war? That literally has changed five times since saturday.

Absolute craziness.

"Artificial intelligence is not bad for newsrooms. It's the future of them," Quinn wrote

You know, what with the poor quality of modern American journalism, leading to an overall decline in readership, I'd have thought you'd be more concerned with improving quality rather than reducing costs by reducing quality.

We want journalism we can trust, an honest source of truth, a "plain dealer" if you will, not a mix of single source sentences extended into five paragraphs of slop with hallucinations mixed in.

Journalism is and always has been a necessary component for a stable, democratic, informed society. The fact you fuckers won't do your job is why we're where we are.
 

I honestly don't think anyone's left at Slashdot who knows how the code works and could add a filter, so you're safe.