It is Amazon's strategy to increasingly control the consumer marketplace by buying key vendors and by forcing others to sell under Amazon's terms. See Corey Doctorow's summary of his book on this topic, and he has several videos on youtube, here's one. The idea is for Amazon to become the mandatory intermediary: vendors must sell through them to reach an audience, and customers are locked in through various anti-competitive measures and lower prices extorted from the vendors. Amazon then can manipulate both sides to their profit.

And, I agree it would be truly Orwellian for Amazon to have access to such private data.

I installed the font, it is quite clear now: I l

much better.

Yeah, that is where the subjective comes in - I might be able to clearly read it and you not. Agreed the {} are overdone, and others point out it looks compressed but whatever, for me it does beat monotype and droid sans mono for clarity.

What is really going on here is Sony, like Microsoft buying to by Activision, wants to control gaming creators. They want to be the gateway between creators and gamers, with Sony collecting passive income from both sides. They can then manipulate the market - e.g. lower payment to creators and increase their profit. It is called monopsony, a monopoly on the supply side. See Corey Doctorow' and Dr Rebecca Gibney"s book - he has a succinct description of the amazon takeover of twitch there - or see this synopsis.

This is why musicians get such poor royalties from Spotify and the record labels, and why the screen writers are striking. I hope CD Projekt can survive.

Most likely this is in Australia. I do know a kind of dogma used in pathology here (and no doubt elsewhere) - match symptoms/tests with known diseases, then treat that disease rather than treating that patient. Often this abstraction works for something like acute trauma (I wouldn't be writing this if it didn't), but not so well for chronic conditions. And if one's condition doesn't match a known disease (or they fail to ID it), you are told "there is nothing wrong with you" and you're sod out of luck.

Also worth mention is medical hubris: ignoring my knowledge because I'm just some dumb cluck - there's only one person with a brain in the room and apparently it ain't me.

Sigh... First, breaking copyright is not theft or stealing. Those terms require the removal of property from the owner, look up the dictionary definitions.

Of course there are reasons (not excuses). A student in a 3rd world country cannot afford books for study or research. At the usual $100+ each, *I* can't afford to buy every reference I need, fortunately there is sci-hub and the Internet Archive. My daughter bought an ebook for a work colleague in the Philippines, the ebook would have cost her 1/4 of her rent. Are you saying the poor should not have access?

The copyright term is much too long. Dead authors do not survive on royalties. The *time-limited* copyright monopoly to authors was granted by government to promote the progress of science and the arts. Certainly authors should receive recompense for their work but after they die, there is little benefit to society in continuing the monopoly.

There is then the issue of access to *publicly-funded* research being locked up by the large scientific publishers. I recently needed a paper published in the '80s, it would cost $35 to get a copy. Copyright should not be solely for corporate profit as is the case here. This is clearly a legitimate reason to copy those works.

The other point is I haven't seen evidence that copying of books actually reduces sales. In the Hachette v Internet Archive case, the IA found from reviewing the publisher's records that sales decreased when books were withdrawn from circulation. The publishers produced no evidence of harm from Internet Archive loaning of books. Hopefully, the summary judgement will be overturned on appeal and we can then learn more.

I think the real villain here are the publishers, they should be paying a fair royalty to authors.

Hempcrete (a hemp/lime composite) purportedly has a net sequestration rate of 108kg CO2/M3. See the hempcrete site. If this is replacing conventional concrete, hundreds of kgs more. I know, it is weird this company is shipping the hemp from France with that added transport CO2, but that is not integral to its production.

There was also a light-weight cement using granulated automotive tyres that replaces conventional aggregate being developed at RMIT.

yep, another howler from the US Patent and Trademark Office. This is plainly contrary to the Alice Supreme Court case which ruled in 2014 that an abstract idea, such as transcribing a text message into a voice message referencing an attached audio recording, is not patentable. Further, an abstract idea implemented on a generic computer is not patentable.

Yes, the USPTO's motto: No Fucks Given