Any government that hands over citizen's data to a private entity, even more so one that is primarily foreign, should be investigated for being a traitor to the public. That's a general statement, not solely confined to the Palantir guys. They kind of gave it away by chosing that name alone already - damn thieves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palant%C3%ADr).

... are we saying government should never use any corporate to deliver services? Not Outlook? No Google Workspace? No AWS? I am so confused.

Isn't it strange how Washington makes laws in the EU?

I wonder if these lobbyists get paid a lot.

Money is the international language, after all. Why would oligarchs limit their influence to their own country?

Meh, you're right but the EU also makes laws in the US (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brussels_effect). In the end it's not about who makes the law but whether it's a good law. Ecodesign laws making US vacuum cleaners more economical is good. Trade pressures undermining EU privacy protections maybe not so good.

I like how out of all examples to pit up against eroding privacy protections was consumer vacuum stuff from ages ago.

Who cares where a law originates? What matters is whether it’s a good idea or bad. Eroding privacy protections is bad. If the EU had come up with that all on their own (and they try that aplenty too; chat control anyone?) then it’s also bad.

Good point. Nonetheless alternatives are needed.

I can not say whether the shown alternatives are qualitatively useful or not, but I am mighty tired of the orange demented mafia currently running the USA. It is now clear to everyone that the clown on top is not the true "leader"; the decision-making process is clearly done by other people, just as there are others who write his fake speeches now. Dementia revealed that problem. No european money should help fuel this insanity from that Epstein cronie any longer. That Epstein network also must be much deeper than what is already known.

Probably that we lacked proper means to control the oligarchs.

One only has to look at the stock market - some with insider knowledge are pocketing away a lot of profit right now.

This means the Epstein connection must be much deeper than we already knew. We kind of need a global movement here that investigates all of those party-goers. Invading another country also serves as an ideal distraction.

I think the UK has been handling their end shockingly well, fwiw

Arresting Andrew does kind of indicate that they're taking it seriously...

The key message that poster before tried to convey was that they themselves do not believe into their own products, not that rich kids are privileged royal kings today. This ties into e. g. Facebook trying to addict people into using it - infinite scrolling as an example. The latter can be quite a problem on youtube or people using smartphones while riding in a subway, jumping from pointless video to pointless video - this is quite addictive.

Books have some advantages. I find it easier to concentrate when reading a hardcopy book.

Nonetheless I myself transitioned primarily towards a digital-only style of learning. It also has advantages, such as convenience.

Is that good or bad?

My gut feeling says to lean more on the bad side. I am very skeptic when corporations announce "this is for the win". Then I slowly walk over to the Google Graveyard and nod my head wisely in sadness ... https://killedbygoogle.com/

Considering how awful Microslop's Win11 is, Linux could really gain some traction if it were to begin to consider the desktop environment as a useful target. Server is already dominated, top 500 supercomputers running linux (since 2017; https://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/1/) - yet the desktop area is one where I don't feel there is really a lot of real improvement. I know, I know, GNOME and KDE keep on promoting how above they are beyond epic perfection already, but this is just buzzword-PR-chaining. GTK is a mostly-GNOME-only toolkit now and qt has its own objectives. Things that should be super-simple and work on Linux, do not work that well for Average Joe for the most part. One can fix most things with some research, but not everyone knows how to do so, or will fatigue after a while. Now most gamers are usually young and tend to be more tech-savvy, so they can solve things more easily, but even then one has to wonder why so much time has to be invested to make things work well. Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority? Smartphones are a special place as the environment is mostly controlled by one private vendor or an open ecosystem (which then is usually much smaller, and still does not yield real improvements for the desktop system, for the most part, give or take; GNOME3 kind of looks and feels like a smartphone-UI).

> Why does Linux not consider the desktop system a priority?

No company big enough has decided to heavily invest in Linux desktop for end users yet. The community is composed of techies and they make products for techies.

Valve's solution is to use their own semi proprietary Steam Big Screen as the default interface of SteamOS.

Valve are the primary financiers of Techpaladin, a team of over a dozen developers that work specifically on KDE Plasma and Qt.