Say what you will about Google Maps, but if ...

... then you have a *real* map that will always tell you what direction you are realy going in. Myself, I have never used Google Maps while travelling. I have paper maps and a hand-held GPS receiver. Even in the car.

You are mistaken. I am no fool.

Several years ago I cancelled my FB account, after deleting as much as I could. There was just too much nonsense and too many unthinking people. I tried to caccel my account at LinkdIn but could not find how to do it (probably an intentional "feature"). Only post now on SlashDot and a few specialist groups at Groups.io. I am comfortable with this situation and tend to avoid people who post a lot on FB or other media, as their values seem not to overlap much with my own. As others have posted above, the corporations seem to have enshittified for their own profit above other goals.

Hear! Hear! Microsoft is the epitomy of the American Business Model -- make money no matter how.

So the critics clained there was evidence of AI in the winning writings. At this point I am not sure if any claims of AI can be acccurate. Just the other day I submitted one of my personal webpages to a Search Engine Optimization website that claimed to be able to tell if your page had been written by an AI. (OK, it only accepted the first 2048 words submitted, so the sample is small.) Well, the damned website claimed that my page was "80%" written by an AI. In fact, none of my pages have any AI content at all; they are all composed and presented by myself, alone. Maybe it was my pedantic, stilted, technophilic writing style that mislead the SEO site to conclude "80%". I don't know. But the exercize was very interesting, and now I don't trust any of this controversy about what I call "so-called artificial intelligence".

So if I were a literary writer (which I am not), I would not worry about this.

[ Need I say more? ]

Maybe you should buy a hybrid, or even an EV. With them, the A/C and other accessories continue to run (because of the big battery at the back of the car) even when the gasoline engine turns off at a stop-light or in heavy traffic.

Yes, you are correct, they do have an electric motor, and that is why they are so much better that an internal combustion engine. If everyone drove a hybrid or an electric vehicle, we wouldn't even have to discuss this.

I drive a hybrid. When the engine isn't needed, as in idling, it automatically stops running. (Saves gas and pollution.) The car is still On and when I take my foot off the brake or touch the accelerator pedal, the engine automatically comes to life again. What could be simpler? Saves gas and pollution. But some big companies and many car owners have this love affair with gasoline. I am afraid that they hasten the coming lethal effects of global warming. (For details, read "The Next Civil War" by Stephen Marche (2022), well researched and very prophetic.

So, an apparently portable device that can affect people apparently no matter where they worked in the embassy, and apparently or probably located at some distance from the embassy ... So, the rate of diminishment of the supposed radiation would be 1/r^2, I guess. So some kind of focussing process must be used to direct all that energy at the embassy. But it is still portable? And how does it affect anyone nearer to it than the embassy? No word about wavelength, so I suppose microwaves or shorter. So, lots of questions here.

Fixing that. https://www.nordspace.com/spac...
But I don't know when it will be operational.

... but how can I buy one of those "Zero" badges ??

No need really to "verify it", because the "AI" generated every possible combination of the 13 letters (like the thousand monkeys that I mentioned above), so of course "MarvinMerrill" is in that list, and my name too, and yours as well ! Not to mention the names of all of the suspects, regardless of their involvement.

But what was done is not cryptography and it all proves nothing at all.

A thousand monkeys, each with a typewriter. One will everntually type "Marvin Merrill".

Hear! Hear! Very eloquently stated.