The link attached to that number gives the breakdown of how they calculated it.

I know, I know, this is Slashdot and I should be happy you read past the title, but c'mon man, try a bit harder?

Anyone remember when theme parks weren't just arcades / interactive movies with fancy seating?

Hell, the average price for a family of four to spend a week at Disney has climbed to a mind-numbing $7,250. That would buy one hell of a VR setup that keeps working after the end of the week.

Agree in spirit, but if one vendor breaching one contract means you're instantly and irreparably out of business overnight... You second-source it or do it in-house!

No court order in the world can un-burn a dollar.

Then we're going to need a lot more funnels to refill all those toothpaste tubes.

If you removed every foreign-made product from a typical Walmart, you'd basically be left with a steel-frame building stripped to the beams.

If you replaced every one of those products with an American version - You'd have Niemann Marcus plus Erewhon, with some products simply not available at any price (short of bespoke).

"its suggested commission gives it fair compensation for the App Store platform."

Which is a pretty bold claim given this is specifically targeting devs/publishers who don't want to use their walled garden but have no choice if they want an audience of more than a few dozen hardcore geeks.

Never mind "under that approach, the fee would be zero" - Under that approach, the fee should be negative! People are actively trying to work around Apple's lock-in. I can't speak for everyone, but I usually don't go out of my way to avoid beer and BJs.

On the contrary, I think most of your comment is as relevant as ever. A carefully designed UI is still better for almost any specific task than what "agents" will produce. It will probably be more efficient to describe what you want precisely enough to get it right. It will not be undermined by problems like non-repeatability, non-determinism and hallucinations that are inherent in LLM-backed agents.

Agents can be quite effective at getting something that seems about right, as long as you don't care too much about the details. And of course they get there much quicker than doing it manually as a human. This is useful for some tasks, and why they have become popular.

Unfortunately, it turns out that for many of the things we really care about, "about right" doesn't cut it. Right now, today, the software industry is already being overwhelmed by AI slop. It's hard to believe, but it's still only been a few months since agentic development processes arrived on the scene. And yet after just those few months of management trying to replace real developers with agents, we can see the slow-motion train wreck happening right before our eyes. And in return, where are the new applications that radically improve on what we had before thanks to all this added "productivity"? If this tech is going to change the world as the AI tech bros and the sycophantic CxOs kneeling at their feet would have us believe, where's my flying car?

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of AI-generated cybersecurity nightmares...

Key difference: You're paying a lot of money for that useless first semester.

I would be supremely pissed to fork over $40k just to get a "pass" in Freshman-101.

If U-M is doing the now-common waste of a first semester packed with "Freshman 101" bullshit, I would agree with you.

If students are taking real classes, then no, I'd call that the second most important semester (with only the very last one mattering more). Why? Because that's when half the incoming class realizes they are wildly unprepared for college and either pursues an exciting career in fast food, or for those only slightly overwhelmed, switches to a 2-year structured a lot more like an advanced version of highschool.

Not everyone should be going to college, that is the real problem here. There's nothing new under the sun, dumb kids exist and they become dumb adults.

You're right that wasn't an exhaustive list - I'm personally a counterexample to my own comment in that I'm a mere peon of a coder... Who is often tapped to assist with M&A, major vendor changes, and onboarding new customers (in the B2B sense). I do have privileged information that would be illegal to trade on.

But this is Slashdot, not Investopedia. The "tl;dr" is, if you have actionable insider information, you're not merely guessing, you damned well know it and almost certainly signed an NDA specifically covering what you can and can't do with that information.

It is. The fact that our dominant desktop operating systems are still using security models from last century is probably the #2 disaster of modern tech security, coming in just behind so much software with potential security implications still being written in languages like C and C++ at #1. And the understandable yet still deeply regrettable reason for both disasters is the same: momentum.

I normally connect to all online conference calls via their web UIs. At least then it takes both a screw-up in the communications system and a screw-up in a browser security sandbox that is independently developed to allow something like an RCE or data leakage vulnerability to be exploited.

People have called me crazy for not wanting to install native apps from the likes of Microsoft, Google and Zoom in the modern era of remote working, but every now and then, there's another story like this one that reminds me why I am extremely careful about what native software I install on anything these days.

What, specifically, do you mean by "personal Windows installations"?

Are you suggesting that any business of any size should only ever use Enterprise editions of Windows?

Congress "did not intend" to legalize straight-up gambling nationwide through what amounts to a semantic loophole. There is absolutely no doubt about that, on any side of this discussion (including the CFTC).

It's funny - Online discussions among (real) investors often worry about, and frequently caution each other about insider trading. The reality is, insider trading isn't applicable to the vast majority of us. Unless you're a C-level employee, specifically working in M&A, or maybe as the lead on a truly revolutionary new product (no, your company's Facebook wannabe or thinly disguised open source ripoff ain't it) - You have no insider information to trade on. Sincere belief that your employer's cool new toys are going to change the world ain't it - every company has cool new toys in the pipeline, and most of them are going to flop or at best be just another branded widget.

Thanks to Kalshi and Polymarket, congrats, every single one of us can now have truly actionable insider information. And that's not good, because as the past year has shown repeatedly, the average Joe is more than willing to use that information and has zero comprehension of securities regulations.

And to be clear, I have no substantial objection to gambling. This sham is something else entirely, however, and that something is a naked power grab.