I totally agree that it's cool and would provide some personal satisfaction, so I am gonna do it - risks of putting my name on a future alien hit list be damned. I was being pedantic that opting out would have the same minuscule weight (mass?) impact as opting in.

That's my point, everyone makes a choice (to put their name in or not), and the choice made way will have some molecular level impact on the weight, as you noted. If you add your name it will be lighter than if you don't, and if you don't it will be heavier than if you did. To quote Rush, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice..." To extend the thought, how you spell your name would also have an impact. Bob and Robert would have different weights.

The question is if having your name engraved has a different impact than not having your name engraved. If you have your name engraved, then the chip will be lighter (as presumably engraving would remove material from it). If you don't have your name engraved, it would be heavier as no material would be removed from it.

You could have simulated pins, but it would be as not fun as video pinball. Maybe I am just old, but I find activities where my physical actions have some direct physical impact in the real world to be fun. I suck at bowing and maybe do it once a year, but throwing a heavy object and knocking stuff over is fun. Doing it digitally would not be. I played lots of (mechanical) pinball as a kid; I never liked computer pinball games - boring and the speed/physics were never right.

Of course you can. Free and anonymous Internet is available via public WIFI in many locations.

Uber's model seems to work okay with regard to tipping. You enter your route, get quoted a couple of price options, you pick one, they pick you up, and then drop you off. After all of this is done you have the option in the app to rate your driver/trip and to provide a tip (which can be based on the level of service you received). This model seems to work well.

The TPM has a variety of uses. Whether they are all DRM related is a matter of opinion as is what "DRM" means to the speaker. Granted in this forum DRM usually refers to copy protection and is considered a negative thing. Outside this echo chamber (of the DRM topic), there are anti-malware functions and secure private key storage, which are positive use cases of a TPM even if you call it "DRM".

Are passwords and non-privileged access bogus and arbitrary too? Is the requirement of needing password to log in and using sudo (or similar) to get root access arbitrary? How about using a firewall to block inbound connections from the Internet?

While you can (and did) make the argument that you believe the motivation of Microsoft is to sell more licenses, there is another motivation to ship a system that is in a secure configuration when used by non-computer-expert users. Many of the security features in Windows rely on a TPM, and if you don't have a TPM, those security features, don't work.

Those in in the "mile high" club?

Yeah, but pattern changing dragon armor is still cool...

By this you mean synchronizing multiple music players so that you could have the same music playing in multiple rooms at the same time? The squeezeserver software has done this for a very long time.

There is likely even more prior art - prior to when the "first to file" changes occurred. Slim Devices goes back to like 2000 - They had this feature as well. Evidence to the age of the code can be found here.

This might. Wherever you may be, it's still cruel and unusual...

I thought cruel and unusual punishment was not allowed.

Well it did have adult content, like needing a pocket knife.