1) Just because you *can* do something doesn't mean you should. Not everybody wants to install the Walmart app on their phone. 2) If you think only people who drive to Walmart shop there, and there are no Walmart's anywhere near public transport I have no idea what planet you are on, but it isn't planet Earth.

Immense vertical integration. China's industrial base. Huge support by the Chinese government. Low cost manufacturing, with a low paid work force. Subsidized pricing to get market share. Stolen intellectual property. Yeah - China's going to win every time with that recipe.

I'm sure that will comfort the grieving family. Q: "What happened? Why didn't you answer when I called 911? Why are they dead?" A: "Don't worry ma'am ... it's just a design and implementation issue. I'm sure they have the system still working in Heaven. I hear they don't have any idiots who think that blaming everything on the engineers makes sense up there"

Microsoft never follows anyone's conventions, usually reversing the standard when possible. They use "\" rather than "/" as filesystem separators, for example. In this case there is StandardCamelCase, and then there is microsoftCamelCase. Microsoft does not capitalize the first word or syllable, but they redefine the term CamelCase to "PascalCase" despite the fact that it originated in earlier languages like Smalltalk and Mesa, and just call microsoftCamelCase CamelCase, despite the fact that it can be confused easily with Hungarian Notation (staring the variable name with a type specifier.) They do all of this to try to keep market share, so that it becomes more uncomfortable to move to systems that actually follow standards. If all if this is confusing, that was Gates' intent when he began this kind of shitfuckery 4+ decades ago. His legacy of standing in the way of progress in computer technology continues into the present day. It is *never* about what is good for the customer or developers, and *always* about what generates more money and greater lock-in.

Users decide what applications they install and use, or they get a system administrator to do so. Since you said "your computer" it is fair to say that "you" are both the user and administrator. You can't explain it further because you don't even understand what you are saying. If you are running an OS that forces you to use AI then you are using the wrong OS. Furthermore, you aren't force to set up your applications to use AI running locally on your computer. Finally, you can enable and disable service, even on Windows. If you are going to try to snarky at least be right.

Make a good system that's free. Let it become the standard. Then start charging for it. Boy.... it's exactly the same way a lot of companies in the US work. I'm surprised we can still even view PDF files for free.

How 'bout if I buy now and pay after I die?

It would absolutely have been more accurate for me to say "even more extremely dangerous." Good point.

I'm not sure you know what a user is or what it is that a user uses.

"So by that logic your computer became a piece of crap over night because an application platform deemed it so."

What logic? I can't find any of it in your comment.

This question doesn't require multiple paragraphs to address (wrongly, I might add), because there is already a single sentence that you should have heard in a high school civics class you either never heard, forgot, or didn't understand: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety," - Benjamin Franklin

First of all, this is directly related to the threats presented by AI and AGI. It's called mass surveillance that leads to a police state. You don't think that AI is a major component in modern mass surveillance technologies? Secondly, even if I concede that global warming is the bigger threat, so what? Are you incapable of understanding more than one problem at a time? Lastly, you are so put out by the cost of having stories on this topic in the feed that you took the time to post in the comments section.

How do you propose to make an issue of US Constitutional violations a local issue? Do you propose to make the Constitution opt-in with each state, county, town and villa deciding for themselves? I understand your point, and it sounds great ... until you think about it. The Constitution protects us from exactly that problem. If it didn't then outsiders traveling to and through certain sections of this country would be very dangerous indeed.

>On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text.
 
You're living in 2023 if you think any company worth their salt is still scraping the live internet for quality content. Everyone has their own curated library already Nobody has been scraping en masse for at least two years, unless there's a blog article about bleeding edge science research or something. Even then they will probably just scrape the scientific paper itself, rather than coverage of it.

sounds like the plots of a cheap SF movie.

How did we get from the question of if the story was appropriate for Slashdot (which it definitely is) to how the comment section turned into a bunch of racist rants? A series of events happened. A man is dead. If people can't focus on the facts, choosing instead to assume his color is somehow the reason, that is on the racists, not the editors.