Not really. It's under the control of a different establishment, one that is clearly hostile to US interests (both establishment and the general population), and with a history of violently suppressing anyone they consider inferior - which is everyone.

1) It's not "reading a book," it's voice acting, and that's a very different skill from writing a book.

2) Setting up a decent home studio is not cheap. In fact, it would probably cost more than most independent authors will make off of several books. And without a proper home recording studio, the quality will be so crap it will tank sales on any future book they release.

3) It takes quite a lot of time they'd rather spend writing their next book.

4) Not everyone has a voice suitable for performance in the first place.

Seems to me, forcing a company to do business with someone they don't want to do business with would violate the 13th amendment.

But out them for it, sure, and let them eat the consequences. (And the consequences aren't negative, then the company isn't the problem, the government is.)

Given the (in)accuracy of things like facial recognition, and the inability of police to use it correctly, I'd think the proper place for a ban on police use of it should come from the higher ups in the department, but maybe Microsoft is trying to avoid legal liability for that kind of misuse that we see so often.

You are not the typical Appletard.

I will point out that philosophy has worked out pretty well for Apple. Who Microsoft have been copying for years.

Since many corporations have a net profit of less than 5%, you've just put virtually all small, family owned business out of business and rendered tens of millions of people out of work.

Your mother must be proud.

You conflate "work for free" with "can't expect to get obscenely wealthy."

That is what's called a fallacy.

People who won't enter a field where their greed says they can't get obscenely rich certainly have a quality, but one cannot help but wonder if it's a desirable quality or an anti-social psychosis.

When greed rules the industry, people who are motivated by a sincere desire to server their fellow man will avoid it. That's where we are now.

And Slashdot, of all places, knows how unlikely people driven by money - MBA types - are to understand the technical side of a business.

Note the timing vis a vis the election, and the likelihood that a lot of what it's doing is going to be struck down by the courts - after the election, and reach an inevitable conclusion.

You, of course, parrot that talking points your masters have given you. Good little sheeple, well trained.

Or just use virtual numbers for anything online, as others have noted.

(And yes, credit card numbers can be stolen in brick and mortar stores, too. I have more than one credit card. One for online, with only virtual numbers, and one for brick and mortar, that is never used online.)

Cancel the card entirely, and get a new one from a different bank.

Or just report it stolen, which is obviously is, and point out that he's no longer responsible for any charges on it by law.

Same here, locked or just deleted, instantly, in the app.

And the virtual numbers stay working if I lose the card and get a new one. When I lost it, it was the most painless replacement ever.

I have learned the joys of virtual card numbers. A different number for each online merchant, that I can lock or delete instantly in the app.

And when I lost the card, the number on the plastic changed, naturally, but none the virtual cards were affected.

The blind, stupid panic over COVID, and the massive economic and psychological damage done by it, and the ongoing complete lack of faith in people who should know what they're talking about is a real life example of The Boy Who Cried Wolf.

Fauci pretty conclusively demonstrated that he ceased being a scientist, and became an administrator, long ago, then he evolved into being an attention whore, and whether he was right or wrong ceased to matter because people stopped paying attention to him (including politicians who told us we had to act like his lies were true or be punished. (Note that every elected official named was a Democrat, not a Republican who resisted the blind, stupid panic from the beginning. They clearly didn't take Fauci seriously, even while threatening legal action against anyone else who didn't.)

Even your own words show you agree with me: ". . . being overly cautious . . ."

Overly means "to an excessive degree". Too cautious. More cautious than is appropriate.

"The moral stated at the end of the Greek version is, "this shows how liars are rewarded: even if they tell the truth, no one believes them"."