It would likely be the same in the eyes of the payment processor. It technically is the same thing, except you must "top up" your account with money first before buying a game, instead of buying it directly.

Yes, places where this would work well would be street protests, concert venues, sports stadiums, etc. Could also be useful for conferences to send people in the same room links or something. Edit: short range comms during net shutdowns like iran recently

Oh man, I'm a bit late to the party here. He really believes the far-right Trump propaganda, and doesn't understand what diversity programs do. It's not a war between white men an all the other groups of people... It's just that is has proven to be difficult to for example write a menstrual tracker with a 99.9% male developer base. It's just super difficult to them to judge how that's going to be used in real-world scenarios and what some specific challenges and nice features are. That's why you listen to minority opinions, to deliver a product that caters to all people. And these minority opinions are notoriously difficult to attract. That's why we do programs for that. They are task-forces to address things aside from what's mainstream and popular. It'll also benefit straight white men. Liteally everyone because it makes Linux into a product that does more than just whatever is popular as of today. Same thing applies to putting effort into screen readers and disabled people and whatever other minorities need. If he just wants what is majority, I'd recommend installing Windows to him. Because that's where we're headed with this. That's the popular choice, at least on the desktop. That's what you're supposed to use if you dislike niche. Also his hubris... Says Debian should be free from politics. And the very next sentence he talks his politics and wants to shove his Trump anti-DEI politics into Debian.... Yeah, sure dude.

I think the original commenter means that Google got off with a tap on the wrist

Why would every American buy one if they can't afford insurance + medical bills to pay for health care? "Oh look, I'm having a heart attack. Good to know. Guess I'll just keep working."

I believed they were doing such things against budding competitors long before the LLM era. My test is simple. Replace it with China. Would the replies be the opposite of what you've recieved so far? The answer is yes. Absolutely people would be frothing at the mouth about China being bad actors. Western tech bros are just as paranoid, they copy off others, they steal ideas. When we do it it's called "innovation".

That update though: "... completely removed..." I assume this is because someone at Meta realized this was a huge breach of trust, and likely quite illegal. Edit: I read somewhere that they're just being cautious about Google Play terms of service. That feels worse.

It’s funny how the article asks the question, but completely fails to answer it. About 15 years ago, Nvidia discovered there was a demand for compute in datacenters that could be met with powerful GPU’s, and they were quick to respond to it, and they had the resources to focus on it strongly, because of their huge success and high profitability in the GPU market. AMD also saw the market, and wanted to pursue it, but just over a decade ago where it began to clearly show the high potential for profitability, AMD was near bankrupt, and was very hard pressed to finance developments on GPU and compute in datacenters. AMD really tried the best they could, and was moderately successful from a technology perspective, but Nvidia already had a head start, and the proprietary development system CUDA was already an established standard that was very hard to penetrate. Intel simply fumbled the ball from start to finish. After a decade of trying to push ARM down from having the mobile crown by far, investing billions or actually the equivalent of ARM’s total revenue. They never managed to catch up to ARM despite they had the better production process at the time. This was the main focus of Intel, and Intel believed that GPU would never be more than a niche product. So when intel tried to compete on compute for datacenters, they tried to do it with X86 chips, One of their most bold efforts was to build a monstrosity of a cluster of Celeron chips, which of course performed laughably bad compared to Nvidia! Because as it turns out, the way forward at least for now, is indeed the massively parralel compute capability of a GPU, which Nvidia has refined for decades, only with (inferior) competition from AMD. But despite the lack of competition, Nvidia did not slow down, in fact with increased profits, they only grew bolder in their efforts. Making it even harder to catch up. Now AMD has had more money to compete for a while, and they do have some decent compute units, but Nvidia remains ahead and the CUDA problem is still there, so for AMD to really compete with Nvidia, they have to be better to attract customers. That’s a very tall order against Nvidia that simply seems to never stop progressing. So the only other option for AMD is to sell a bit cheaper. Which I suppose they have to. AMD and Intel were the obvious competitors, everybody else is coming from even further behind. But if I had to make a bet, it would be on Huawei. Huawei has some crazy good developers, and Trump is basically forcing them to figure it out themselves, because he is blocking Huawei and China in general from using both AMD and Nvidia AI chips. And the chips will probably be made by Chinese SMIC, because they are also prevented from using advanced production in the west, most notably TSMC. China will prevail, because it’s become a national project, of both prestige and necessity, and they have a massive talent mass and resources, so nothing can stop it now. IMO USA would clearly have been better off allowing China to use American chips. Now China will soon compete directly on both production and design too.