Brit living in Belgium and earning an income from building interfaces. Interestes include science, science fiction, technology, and European news and politics
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Trump’s 145% tariffs could KO tabletop game makers, other small biz, lawsuit claims

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One eight-person publisher says it'll be forced to pay $1.5M

WORLD WAR FEE  The Trump administration's tariffs are famously raising the prices of high-ticket products with lots of chips, like iPhones and cars, but they're also hurting small businesses like game makers. In this case, we're not talking video games, but the old-fashioned kind you play at your kitchen table.…

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PaulPritchard
1 day ago
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808 lines of BBC BASIC and a dream: Arm architecture turns 40

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'We thought it was a really obvious way to build a processor and everybody would be doing it'

It is 40 years since the first Arm processor was powered up, and the UK's Centre for Computing History (CCH) celebrated in style, with speakers to mark the event, hardware on show, and a countdown to the anniversary.…

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PaulPritchard
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Windows isn't an OS, it's a bad habit that wants to become an addiction

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Think that next refresh is going to get better? The first step to freedom is admitting there's a problem

Opinion  Windows is at that awkward stage any global empire has to go through. Around one in five of the world population is a Windows user – 1.5 billion humans. Aside from the relatively small slice that Mac takes, everyone else is happy with smartphones, so until we make contact with credulous aliens, there are no new worlds for Microsoft to conquer. In an industry obsessed with growth, this is untenable.…

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PaulPritchard
2 days ago
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Nigel Farage thinks net zero is the new Brexit. Starmer can prove him wrong | Rafael Behr

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Labour must deliver the green transition voters want, leaving Reform and the Tories on the side of economic decline and dictators

Which former British prime minister described the climate emergency as “a clock ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines … quilting the Earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2”?

The florid style gives it away. You’d guess Boris Johnson even if you’d forgotten that the master of Brexit bombast also had a sideline in net zero evangelism. It wasn’t the most memorable part of his repertoire and it didn’t catch on as a Conservative catechism.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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PaulPritchard
7 days ago
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In Trumpland, ‘defending free speech’ means one thing: submission to the president | Rafael Behr

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By claiming that any regulation is censorship, the White House is bullying Britain to abandon online safety laws and digital taxes

Compared with many countries around the world, the US is still a great democracy, but a much lesser one than it was four months ago. The constitution has not been rewritten. Checks and balances have not been dissolved. The difference is a president who ignores those constraints, and the impotence of the institutions that should enforce them.

Which is the true US, the one enshrined in law or the one that smirks in contempt of law? If the latter, should Britain welcome its embrace as a kindred nation? That is an existential question lurking in the technical folds of a potential transatlantic trade agreement.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

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PaulPritchard
14 days ago
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"[T]o fixate on campus protest politics as the main threat to western democracy when a tyrant sits in the Oval Office requires an act of mental contortion that, if not actually stupid, does a strong imitation of stupidity."
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The Blue Origin flight showcased the utter defeat of American feminism | Moira Donegan

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The trip leaned on a vision of women’s empowerment that is light on substance and heavy on a childlike, girlish silliness

There are some spectacles of US decadence and decline that almost seem too on the nose – the sort of orgies of vulgar provocation or fantastic lack of self-awareness that exceed the limits of parody, so that if they were in a novel, you’d think the writer was laying it on a little thick. Among these is the all-female flight by Blue Origin, the Jeff Bezos-owned rocket tourism company, which on Monday launched a phallically shaped pod full of women – including the pop star Katy Perry and Bezos’s partner, Lauren Sánchez – on a brief trip into space.

The flight, which was promoted for months in advance, was touted as a triumph of feminism, a win for science and an embrace of the kind of expansive, curious human spirit of striving and possibility that once animated both. Instead, the flight served as a kind of perverse funeral for the America that once enabled both scientific advancement and feminist progress – a spectacle that mocked these aspirations by appropriating them for such an indulgent and morally hollow purpose.

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PaulPritchard
14 days ago
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"Space used to be a frontier for human exploration, a fount of innovation, and a symbol of a bright, uncertain and expansive future. Now, it is a backdrop for the Instagram selfies of the rich and narcissistic."
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