Running WCG/F@H tasks on computers and phones would be a good use.

" Some people live in towns where the job market absolutely sucks. If your choice was watching your own children starve or taking a job at ICE, what would you do?"

Move to a town where jobs are available.

Can you reprogram that key to do something more useful?

On Linux you could use xev to see if it has a keycode; if it does you can assign it to another function. I have one of the "special keys" on my keyboard assigned to automatically type my email address, for example, which is very convenient for filling out forms.

I don't know much (read: anything at all) about kindles other than the name and that they're Amazon's own ebook reader.

My question is, can or could you (still) load epub files that you have downloaded elsewhere onto one of these things?

If so then perhaps there isn't much lost other than direct access to Amazon's bookstore and if that's the case then isn't this more Amazon's loss than the end users?

These cryptocurrency payments can't be used to fund terror and evade sanctions since all the transactions are public on the blockchain! Also, would anyone like to buy a bridge?

For enhanced security.

Is this less obvious than I assumed it was, or do you just not understand what it does?

Microsoft issues the secure boot keys that are used by all Linux distributions.

If they can just arbitrarily yank someone's keys like this, apparently without explanation or appeal, then what does that mean for those Linux keys? Are they subject to withdrawal for no reason as well?

Yes, a fair voicing of "opinions" on labor conditions between one human and one globe-spanning immortal megacorporation. Very fair.

Only true for goods and services where there is perfectly inelastic demand, which kind of doesn't exist. Even demand for fuel is somewhat elastic. Health care has about the least elastic demand. Junk from Amazon has highly elastic demand.

This would certainly happen to a large degree, otherwise Amazon could price themselves out of competitiveness fairly easily.

If you make your money by owning rather than by working, that's true. Higher wages reduce business owners' income, at least in the short term. So next time someone has that opinion, find out what they do for a living. They'll probably say they "run" something.

That would add the requirement for the central repository as infrastructure which is probably not worth it bandwidth/storage-wise when so many gaming PCs are likely to be online at any time, but the possibility of a malware vector (or some kind of sabotage, maybe people would try to DoS a game by sharing corrupted compiled shaders as a form of protest) is worth considering with or without it.

BOINC protects against errors or sabotage in their distributed computing system by having 2 random different users both run the same task and ensuring that the results from both match before accepting the result. This requires centralized infrastructure, but a duplicated work verification system like this could work. Imagine the centralized system acts as a trusted private torrent tracker, only verifying a shader and making it publicly accessible once multiple uploads match. That would make uploading invalid shaders almost impossible since a group would need to conspire to do it with exclusive earliest-possible access to the game/driver/hardware combo.

Those aren't reasons for everyone to be compiling on their own. In a BitTorrent-like system nobody would be "keeping" shaders they aren't using, just sharing shaders they've compiled because they're using them. If nobody's ever done it before for the hardware/driver combination then you fall back to compilation and then share your results so others can benefit and the same work doesn't have to be done again.

Plus most users are probably on one of the latest driver versions so there would be far more hardware than driver variation.

Just like how WaPo eventually went from an assurance that nothing would change to blocking an endorsement of Kamala Harris to no longer publishing any opinions that were insufficiently pro-"free market" for Bezos' taste:

https://www.ms.now/opinion/msn...

On a related note I thought the idea of an IT staffer having time to play CoD at work was a laughably retro idea. In the post-pandemic era anyone who still has an IT job is being worked to the bone.

Yep, The Island and Altered Carbon (also an excellent TV series) were the first two works of sci-fi that came to mind, but Altered Carbon is a much closer match where the clones were brainless vs. The Island (if I say any more it'd be a major spoiler for sure, even mentioning that it contains the concept is a bit of a spoiler).