Social gaming platforms have reshaped the digital entertainment landscape in the United States by combining interactive experiences with engaging gameplay. Their growth has been driven by ongoing technological advancements, attracting a broad audience seeking new and immersive forms of online entertainment. This transformation reflects a notable shift in how interactive gaming is experienced...
Hallmark has released more than 300 Christmas-themed TV movies since 2000, and a detailed internal rulebook obtained by film data analyst Stephen Follows explains how the company manages to produce nearly one new holiday film per week during the final quarter of each year without the whole operation collapsing into creative chaos. The document, referred to as Hallmark’s “bible” by writers and...
An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2024, 25.2% of gross final energy consumption in the EU came from renewable sources, up by 0.7 percentage points compared with 2023. This share is 17.3 pp short of meeting the 2030 target (42.5%), which would require an annual average increase of 2.9 pp from 2025 to 2030. Among the EU countries, Sweden recorded the highest share of its gross final energy...
YouTube has been winning the streaming wars for years, but its real competitive advantage comes not from prime-time viewing but from its stranglehold on daytime hours when Americans are meditating, exercising, cooking, or simply looking for background noise. At 11 a.m. in October, YouTube commanded an average audience of 6.3 million viewers compared to Netflix’s 2.8 million, according to...
Years before returning to politics, Cyril Ramaphosa was part of a group of investors who helped Seacom defeat government attempts to block the launch of its undersea cable in South Africa.
Goldman Sachs, in a note this week, via India Dispatch: There are various reasons that explains this: (i) A large part of the global education spend goes towards formal education (schools, colleges and universities), which are typically either run by governments or are not-for-profit institutions; (ii) It is difficult to replicate education quality at scale in our view, since most teachers...
Flame retardants commonly used in furniture are linked to serious health issues, including cancer and thyroid disease
Removing old furniture made with flame retardants from people’s homes can significantly reduce the amount of the toxic chemicals in blood, a new 10-year, peer-reviewed study by California regulators and public health groups has found.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints. The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as “radical” activists and “weaponized” nongovernmental organizations, fell afoul of a new visa...
The Trump administration said five regulators and researchers who work to tackle disinformation and abuse on the internet had been barred from entering the United States.
Apple, Michigan taxpayers, and one of Detroit’s wealthiest families spent roughly $30 million training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps. Not everyone lands coding jobs right away.
Rising computer memory prices make it difficult to build a gaming PC offering performance close to the PlayStation 5 Pro for cheaper than the console in South Africa in late 2025.
Big AI companies courted controversy by scraping wide swaths of the public internet. With the rise of AI agents, the next data grab is far more private.
The administration has downplayed concerns — from mass job losses, to a potential financial bubble — as President Trump cheers soaring stock prices and faster growth.
Longtime Slashdot reader MrFreak shares a public radio interview from 2015 discussing artificial intelligence as inference over abstract inputs, along with scaling limits, automation, and governance models, where for-profit engines are constrained by nonprofit oversight: Recorded months before OpenAI was founded, the conversation treats intelligence as math plus incentives rather than something...
WIRED spoke with DeepMind’s Pushmeet Kohli about the recent past—and promising future—of the Nobel Prize-winning research project that changed biology and chemistry forever.