The registrar probably treats all their customers shoddily when problems arise, and itch may not be that large a customer—do we know how many domains itch actually had with them? Probably not enough to form a significant percentage of the registrar's income, and either that or the possibility of Rabid Attack Lawyers (which the big companies like Microsoft have on retainer) would be required to get special treatment from many companies.
I'm not saying that the registrar is in the right. They messed up, and it would serve them right to go under for this (although they probably won't). I'm just saying that it's unsurprising that itch was mistreated by a corporate bureaucracy.
They're not really all that massive, just a medium-large fish in a small pond. If this had been about Microsoft or Sony or some other brand that any random non-gamer you stop in the street will have heard of, they might have gotten special treatment from the registrar, but itch.io? Not even nearly big enough. gog wouldn't be either. Steam might just pass the minimum threshold.
What it means for traditional banking is pretty much nothing, because the majority of the population don't in fact think about currency any differently than they did in the pre-Internet era (and the only way they've changed how they think about banking is that they expect greater convenience and remote access). Crypto is an unsecured investment vehicle, not a currency, because the set of goods and services it can be directly, legally exchanged for is small.
Thing is, most of the lower-level management have no more power here than the workers. It's the highest-level people that need to be out slogging, and they wouldn't be able to deliver enough mail to make a difference.
The only people that win out on inkjet are maybe the rare folks that print like a handful of things every single week.
Also those who regularly print on certain things other than paper—print-on-fabric systems are usually inkjet, which makes sense when you think about it. And as of 10-15 years ago, some of the more expensive and complex inkjets (not the <$100 consumer loss leaders) had better colour fidelity than the average colour laser, which visual artists are willing to pay extra for.
The inkjet printer has a place, but it's a small niche, and 98% of people buying them really should be buying lasers instead.
They are simple, but they are not easy. Sorting M&Ms according to colour is also a simple task for any human with normal colour vision, but doing it with an Olympic-sized swimming pool full of M&Ms is not easy.
Computers are very good at examining data for patterns, and doing so in exhaustive detail. LLMs can detect patterns of types not visible to previous algorithms (and sometimes screw up royally and detect patterns that aren't there, or that we want to get rid of even if they exist). That doesn't make LLMs intelligent, it just makes them good tools for certain purposes. Nearly all of your examples are just applying a pattern that the algorithm has discerned—in bank records, in natural language, in sound samples, or whatever.
As for people being fooled by chatbots, that's been happening for more than fifty years. The 'bot can be exceedingly primitive, and some people will still believe it's a person because they want to believe. The fewer obvious mistakes the 'bot makes, the more lonely and vulnerable people will be willing to suspend their disbelief.
"Can I have that once you're finished with it?" Physical newspapers are subject to being given away by the original purchaser (or getting picked up from cafe tables or pulled from trashcans—people used to leave the damned things lying around everywhere), if you can't afford to pay for them. It's a bit more difficult to do that with digital content.
You're the one who brought up the Boomers, not me. And I don't believe the behaviour of the Catholic Church is justified or should be permitted in a modern society—their priests committed secular crimes and should be doing time in prison for it like the rest of the non-clergy. The Vatican's shielding them is reprehensible and the people in their hierarchy who did so should be charged with aiding-and-abetting. My point was that you can't blame their centuries-old misbehaviour on a group of people that haven't even been around for a single century.
(And you say you can't hold the dead accountable—the Catholics have actually done that before, too. Look up the Cadaver Synod some day when you're really bored.)
I think the problem is that it's difficult to tell whether it's a joke or a troll, because of this crappy timeline we find ourselves in. I'll accept that it was intended as a joke, but it read as a troll to me initially.
If you cannot see the difference between an invasion of privacy that was done without permission and could be curtailed if sensible laws were passed, and one that is mandated by law, then I give up.
Cities should start implementing a “Congestion Charge” for their downtown cores. Every vehicle should have a transponder so once it enters a specific area in a city centre it gets pinged and tolled.
Except that that allows every vehicle to be tracked. Anywhere, not just in the city center, since a transmitter elsewhere would be able to ping transponders too. The privacy hit is way too high a cost in return for a teeny reduction in congestion (because most people will just continue driving, pay the charges, and then complain they can't afford other stuff. See also: price of gas. The stick approach to public transit does not work).
Still, given that our dear Premier seems bound and determined to put more cars on the road, removing the tolls on the 407 seems like it would be cheaper and easier than tunneling under the 401.
Mental inertia. It's the same kind of thinking that keeps some people using Windows. They've convinced themselves that the option with the familiar name will take less effort to learn than the one with the new name, when in fact the mental effort required to make the familiar-named thing work properly is greater.
I'd assume that "geologically stable" was one of the requirements when they first made a list of potential locations.
Fortunately, all of the heavy-water CANDU reactors currently in commercial service in Ontario are fueled by unenriched uranium, so the worst possible outcome shouldn't result in much more contamination being released into the environment than we would see with a natural uranium deposit of comparable size nearby. Which isn't nothing, but the result would be a smallish statistical increase in cancers, not people dropping dead from Acute Radiation Syndrome. Many industrial sites do more damage and are less scrutinized, but we get all weird about radiation the moment the word "nuclear" comes up, and have a hard time putting the risks in perspective.
Attacks only machines running specific Ubuntu kernels and using specific boot methods. Plus no actual payload. This doesn't yet represent a real risk.
Where we'll be in ten years' time is unknowable, however. I think the Ars commentors who suggested going back to forcing jumper cap swaps or other hardware-mediated access requirements before overwriting the mobo's boot firmware might be on the right track, even if it's inconvenient for large corporate deployments. It's normal for security and convenience to pull in opposite directions, and sometimes you just have to grin and bear it.
Depends on how low your standards are. I mean, there were [a small number of] people who convinced themselves that the 1960s chatbot ELIZA was a person with feelings, and the bots have only become more convincing since then. I can certainly see the modern ones fulfilling the emotional needs of someone who really, really wants to believe they're speaking to a sapient being who cares about them, and as for the other, well, some people have pretty low sex drives or find phone sex fulfilling enough (at least for a time).
There's no point in listening to what Trump says—he's previously demonstrated that he won't stick with most of it. Likely, he says some of it just because he enjoys watching people scurry. The media needs to stop giving his bullshit an exaggerated platform. This should have been dealt with through quiet behind-the-scenes contingency planning just in case he remembers what he said in several months time, not blown up into a front page bomb.
Because you're using an external device to extend the capabilities of the port. It can't do that without the dock, so now you have two things to carry around.
If you look at the comments on this, there are two distinct camps of people who will never agree: those who expect their laptop to be a self-contained unit that doesn't require anything that wasn't packaged with it to meet common use cases (which requires more ports), and those who are okay with docks and dongles and adaptors.
The registrar probably treats all their customers shoddily when problems arise, and itch may not be that large a customer—do we know how many domains itch actually had with them? Probably not enough to form a significant percentage of the registrar's income, and either that or the possibility of Rabid Attack Lawyers (which the big companies like Microsoft have on retainer) would be required to get special treatment from many companies.
I'm not saying that the registrar is in the right. They messed up, and it would serve them right to go under for this (although they probably won't). I'm just saying that it's unsurprising that itch was mistreated by a corporate bureaucracy.