That statement seems to be based on what one (apparently ill-informed) author stated. From TFA:

As one author on the KDP Community forums, Leslie Anne Perry, noted, “Previously, I have not enabled DRM on my e-books. My thinking was that I wanted folks to be able to download them to other devices within their own household. However, I think I will enable it on any future e-books. I’m not sure I want people to be able to download them as a PDFs [sic].”

For some reason, she apparently objects specifically to PDF.

I will note that other parts of TFA indicate this may actually be a rather ham-handed attempt on the part of Amazon to discourage authors from choosing to self-publish without DRM. That would not surprise me in the least.

I'd rather pay $9.99 per month for what Netflix used to be before all the companies said, "I can milk these properties for more money if I create my own streaming service and cut out the middleman."

There may or may not be too many streaming services, but there are WAY too many streaming services owned by content distributors. You can't have any sort of meaningful free market among streaming providers if they're all just providing their own content. You still have competition among content providers at that point, but zero competition on the streaming itself.

I wouldn't call plant-based meat alternatives "healthy" unless your idea of healthy is dying of salt poisoning.

Apple was one of the cofounders of ARM (the company) in 1990. It did not create the architecture, though it likely had an impact on ARM6 (ARMv3 architecture) and later. Either way, the ARM architecture probably would not still exist if ARM (the company) hadn't been founded. The ability for multiple companies to design and manufacture chips turned out to be critical for its long-term survival and viability in the cell phone market and others.

ARM (short for Acorn RISC Machine or Advanced RISC Machine) is an acronym, and all letters are capitalized. Arm is something attached to your torso.

I'm not saying Apple Silicon isn't better than the competition — it is — but that's not a fair comparison. Raspberry Pi's performance is largely because they use Broadcom chips, which stay several generations behind the state of the art. For example, the Raspberry Pi 5 (released in 2023) was designed around the Cortex A76 CPU (released in 2018).

Disagree. They put blazingly fast single-core performance and roughly half the speed of a workstation-class laptop in the power envelope of a netbook.

• M5 PassMark CPU Mark: (28561 multi / 6001 single)
• Intel Core Ultra 9 275HX top-end laptop chip (56007 multi / 4745 single)
• i9-14900KS top-end desktop chip (60511 multi / 4828 single)

They're nowhere near the top overall, but their single-core performance (which affects perceived speed more than multi-core performance, typically) is at the top.

You really can make the comparison. Which one is best depends on the workload.

Yeah, that's about right. But Apple also uses those chips in desktop, where the comparison is not nearly as rosy.

Don't get me wrong, I love my M1 MacBook Pro. The battery life is spectacular, and performance is good enough. But I'd be lying if I said there weren't workflows for which Intel would be better. :-)

It's also a way to get around the prohibition on setting different prices for SNAP recipients. For example you can buy over the net from Costco with SNAP on Instacart but not directly. And the prices are higher there than on their site.

Using Microsoft default anything should be a felony.

Hopefully this will be enacted in Europe soon!

It is not just the artificial "intelligence" that is becoming enshitified. The impact on the real thing is every bit as serious.

No. This is nonsense. Nuclear fuel production has a massive ecological impact. Nuclear only looks good when compared to coal. Stop doing that.

Yeah, that too. :) However, in practical terms, I'd assume that given enough time, willpower, and a LOT of $$$ we would both solve the environmental challenges and develop a "spacebus" to enable more efficient colonization, so the gene pool would become sufficiently diverse before it becomes a major problem. If not, we already know how that might work out from all of the historic in-breeding of the European royal families, in particular the Hapsburgs, although YMMV on what physical attributes, or personality traits for that matter, will be more likely to be "enhanced" in the Mars colony scenario.

I can't really support doing things for coolness factor while we have so many problems here on earth. I think it would be cool to go to Jamaica, but not at the expense of defaulting on my mortgage. Because that's how responsible adults think.

That's silly, Elon is altruistic and he will definitely let other people have that opportunity before him. He will praise them as heros while he stays here.

He wants to pay for healthcare with tariffs. Americans are so screwed if he cuts back to that.

I keep saying it:

We have not fed one human for one entire day using food produced independently of Earth.

Not one day. Sure, we've played and grown cress on the ISS and all sorts of other nonsense but we've never made FOOD in FOOD quantities to FEED even a single human for a single day.

If you go to Mars, you have to send a regular, consistent, constant stream of food up to them. As well as all the other materials and any experiments you want to do... like soils and hydroponics.

But even with all the kit, we've never fed a human for a day.

And not only does that mean sending resources wherever the planets are in orbit (and Mars suddenly becomes MULTIPLES of its closest distance away from Earth or even the entire other side of the Sun), but you have to coordinate them all to launch, survive MONTHS in space, land near the humans on Mars, in order, and if you MISS even one... people could starve to death.

It could well be that things launched even every month aren't sufficient for any sizeable small "Arctic research station" size population.

We can't even arrange a fucking sandwich on Mars, and you want to talk about colonising it and having scientists roaming around on it?

Good luck with that. Birth rate might be declining in many countries, but we're still spawning around 100m new humans every year. That's an awful lot of human freight just to break even, and while prioritising shipping those of breeding age to transfer the newborns off-world (with all the physical development complications that likely entails) might help a bit, the reality is there are only two ways we get to point where more humans live offworld:

1. We take a long, long, long, time doing it.
2. A massive die off of those left on Earth.

Either way, the Earth-bound serfs are screwed.