It's important to keep using accurate language if you want to think clearly about things.

That sounds like a good idea, until someone says the word "hacker" and then you realize you lost the debate decades ago.

Words' meanings change, and nobody can ever do anything about it.

Yes, look for "commercial" or "digital signage" displays. Probably 3-4x the cost of smart TVs.

Or Spectre still makes a few dumb TVs at consumer price points. No OLED or miniLED or other fancy display tech though.

As far as cars go - Ford still puts the cell module in a separate unit you can physically unplug from power+antenna+CANbus without breaking anything, just disables the FORDpass app and its related functions. Not sure about other manufacturers.

Excuse me, have you been alive for the last 2 years?

The last 2 years is over, and there's gonna be big changes. This is the month that the new Grand Theft Auto comes out.

I have been using ScreenFloat (and similar tooling) for decades; those are more useful than this because it works on every application and not just the browser.

It's quite possible I am missing something from their demo, but based on what they show: 1) it's just for Firefox; and, 2) it's really kind of a pain in the ass to use.

No, he's telling the truth: Internet Explorer is deeply integrated into Windows.

Oh shit, sorry! I thought you were talking about someone else. Never mind.

Why would a manufacturer's device need a trusted introducer to communicate with that same manufacturer? Vizio can be its own CA. There's no intermediary between themself and themself.

From a 1960s comedy:

Interviewer: "Have you ever had any experience running a high-speed digital electronic computer?"

Virgil: "Yes, I have."

Interviewer: "Where?"

Virgil: "My aunt has one."

It was an absolutely absurd thing to say in 1967, but in 2026 the joke is about as dated as anything can be. I wonder if young people today even get it.

I don't know when you went larval, but your low uid suggests it was probably a very long time ago. I speculate that a few decades back, a type of tool once thought to be for business (which IBM had earlier predicted had a worldwide market size of about a half dozen) somehow fell into your hands, and you fell in love at a personal level. No? Did I guess right?

In a lot of industries, people learn about tech at work first, and then maybe adopt it personally. But with computers, at least for GenX-and-later, it mostly worked in the reverse: you get a personal computer and master it, and then when you're 18 you show up at a business totally loaded with years of experience and skills.

Why? Because unlike Bessemer converters or bucket wheel excavators or magnetic resonance imaging machines, computers are cheap. All the "capital" (if you can even honestly call it that) you need is just a few thousand dollars at most, maybe even just a few hundred.

The way things have worked in the last few decades (I'd think especially for old Slashdotters) is that the "professional" tool was already very familiar long before you got the job where you work with it. And anything involving cheap electronics is going to remain like that. Unless it's just totally illegal, there's no way millions of people aren't going to have it and use it personally.

Just ban them all in public, except perhaps for people with special needs (who could wear e.g. bright red ones with polkadots -- that nobody else wants to).

All the crap I wrote above was just to say: special needs is everybody. Don't hop in your time machine and tell 1979-me that I can't use a computer, or I'll become a very angry kid, and by 1984 I would consider it an inexcusable Act of War.

Now if you wanna mandate wearable displays be bright red with polka dots, you might get away with that. But don't be surprised if you end up changing fashion itself. Wearable displays don't really appeal to me yet (they haven't been commoditized where I can choose from many manufacturers, all of whose product can run the same defacto-standardized Free Software, just like how an x86 motherboard can) but maybe some day the market will produce a wearable display that I would be willing to use.

If it's bright red with polka dots, then I just might end up losing the black-band-shirt-and-jeans look, and start dressing like the love-spawn of Liberace and Quetzalcoatl, just so my glasses match the rest of me.

searches made through its AI Mode generate less revenue than traditional search

Have you thought about disabling AI Mode and returning customers to traditional search? It'll not only make you more money, but result in happier users too. Everyone-except-Nvidia wins.

Remember when we were all techno-optimists who thought we would end up with 401Ms and even 401Gs? We're as dumb as the flying-car believers.

He was here to save our asses. We should have shown a little gratitude.

I love the idea of Facebook money being used to teach kids how to block advertisements. $25B should be enough to teach every single kid in New Mexico how to do it, going forward forever, as a permanent addition to public school curriculum.

I was going to suggest that maybe we could even use a tiny portion of the money to establish a state DNS server that blackholes the adservers the way pi-hole does. Then kids stuck running proprietary "apps," instead of accessing things through their Manifest-V2-compatible web browser, wouldn't have to install their own DNS server.

But then I realized the aforementioned ad-blocking curriculum ought to have resulted in every kid building their own pi-hole at school anyway, so a state pi-hole is unnecessary.

Only if you upgrade to goldtooth.

So every kid needs to have a brokerage account now?

No, each kid needs to get an X ("The Everything App") account.

Normally, you don't license media (whether it's digital or analog is irrelevant). That CD or tape or vinyl record is sold, such that you own that copy. Title is transferred just exactly the same as how title is transferred when you buy (not license) a loaf of bread, or a screwdriver, or a book. (WARNING: Though I say "normally," what's normal does change. I'm aware that a lot of people use proprietary streaming to consume media now, instead of playing locally-stored purchased copies, and those people likely did agree to a licensing contract rather than purchasing anything.)

But with software, they've been claiming that a piece of paper that they inserted into the box, retroactively causes the sale to not have really happened, even though the information that the sale was a fraud, is hidden inside the box until after the fraud has been perpetrated. The customer thinks they bought the box rather than licensed it.

There was some monumental decision reinforcing this a while back. I'm not sure this is the best example, but it's well-illustrated in this decision in favor of Blizzard against a cheatbot named Glide, where the judge supports the outrageous assertion that WoW purchasers actually did not purchase what they thought they purchased. And then instead of throwing Blizzard's executives into prison for a decade to deter future fraud, he found in their favor instead. Dirty judge. He actually fucking says this:

section 3 of the EULA provides that Blizzard explicitly retains title to “all copies” of the game client software

[emphasis mine]

For whatever reason, nobody's tried that outside of software (that I know of). I still haven't seen a EULA packed in a loaf of bread or a music CD case. But maybe some day....?

You wouldn't necessarily be wrong to expect this form of fraud to happen some day, so perhaps you're right that Congress should nip it in the bud ASAP. Sure, ok. But Congress is normally reactive so it also makes sense they're seeing it just as software problem. None of their constituents are complaining about media companies defrauding them, just software companies.

More people should spend more time trying to enjoy their own lives instead of obsessing over what other people are doing

I mistook your sig for a final paragraph in your post, and did a double-take!

Reading other people's code is a big part of how I learned to do things. I enjoyed Abacus' "Anatomy of the Commodore 64" for it's commented disassembly of the C64 ROMs. But it was easy for that to make sense, because it had been written in assembly language.

But once you're looking at to binaries compiled from higher-level languages, it gets more complicated to .. uh .. recreate the original intent.

Now they got computers to do that? Fuck yeah!