... is going. I read that as Phoebe Cates.

Seriously, the idea that we know all the practically important physics there is is the kind of thing only somebody who's never done science or engineering would believe.

My guess: It's a scam, built on pre-existing 'bot technology.

When it's all done with, the "investors" will have a huge tax write off for their losses plus some neat new data centers, high end servers and utility resources to go into Bitcoin mining big time.

In related news, Netflix turns a failed $11 million investment into a $55 million tax loss.

Bialystock and Bloom have nothing on Netflix.

You bought The Bible?

Then who remains to buy iCrap?

Yes. And no.

Free apps will continue. As long as they are actually free. Anything that owes (owed?) Apple that 27% of in-app sales or other revenue sources is either not free. Or written by a very generous developer. Apple gots ta' get paid.

What do you think the current 27% fee is? Maybe replaced with a fee for Apple Store server space and installation bandwidth. That's what the now defunct Apple Tax supposedly covered. But the in-app sales revenue stream doesn't necessarily run through Apple systems. And presents no cost to them.

Industrial R&D is important, but it is in a distrant third place with respect to importance to US scientific leadership after (1) Universities operating with federal grants and (2) Federal research institutions.

It's hard to convince politicians with a zero sum mentality that the kind of public research that benefits humanity also benefits US competitiveness. The mindset shows in launching a new citizenship program for anyone who pays a million bucks while at the same time discouraging foreign graduate students from attending universtiy in the US or even continuing their university careers here. On average each talented graduate student admitted to the US to attend and elite university does way more than someone who could just buy their way in.

The supremacy clause applies to LAWS. Congress declined to enact such a law.

Yes, it belongs to Congress, not the President. Executive orders are literally orders given by the President to the executive branch of the federal government.

So the effectiveness of an executive order is very questionable in this case. If a state passes a law, what's the executive order going to do? Send the Army to invade? What could go wrong?

This will be great for Haiku, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD installs, there's not the remotest possibility there'll be binaries for these. Not because the software couldn't be ported, but because the sorts of people politicians hire to write software would never be able to figure out the installer.

Time to stop coddling US industries with tax write-offs for phony R&D investments and generous depreciation allowances for capital investments. Either get to work actually innovating and building stuff. Or go out of business.

Probably true.

I'm using my converter to "rescue" older displays. Which don't do the full spec performance. So down conversion isn't an evil I must put up with. It's a necesity. I suspect many converters are on the market for exactly this reason.

The whole bugaboo over display performance and human visual accuity is best left for a flame war in another thread. But suffice it to say, the HDMI Forum and Blue Ray Disc Association are wasting a lot of energy over the insoluble issue of content piracy. The market for illicit movie copies, which is well satisfied with garbage filmed in movie theaters by people with cell phones, intersected with the set of people who insist on pristine 4K HD copies is pretty much the null set.

It's like Prohibition. Many people will be satisfied with the booze distilled in automobile radiators. Even if they do go blind. Crap movie copies will always be with us.

Yep, all the biggest from the dotcom era were companies that provided the proverbial pickaxes and shovels, and we *mostly* see that here too (Apple largely being unrelated, Google actually a bit, but not wholly in the game of actually training models, mostly the big players are mostly providing hardware or infrastructure to all these.

The big cautionary tales that everyone remembers like pets.com and webvan had silly high valuations, but no where near the heights attained by Intel, Cisco, Oracle, and Microsoft of the time. It was just so many of those dotcoms sourcing from the vendors propping up their valuations, but the vendors remained viable businesses just as they were before.

Even OpenAI, the most hyped of the hyped purely AI plays is still relatively dwarfed by Meta. OpenAI would be an example of something more akin to the intrinsically dot-com startup. So OpenAI has probably done more for the market valuation of nVidia and Microsoft than themselves.