Why did eBay even have a thousand employees to lose? What could these people have been working on?

The key word is "try." They try through the art of persuasion, to make buyers think copyright law says something other than what it says.

Google is free to completely ignore these bullshit requirements and stop doing business in Europe.

For whatever reason, they have chosen to keep transacting with Europeans. Perhaps they chose poorly, and should have instead consulted Slashdot posters about whether or not making tons of money is worth the outrageous indignity.

Doesn't adding the disclaimer truly fix the problem, though? Apparently nontechnical users didn't understand what incognito does, so a sufficiently-well-written disclaimer ought to be able to fully correct the misunderstanding.

On the techie side, we all know that a browser setting isn't going to somehow magically keep other peoples' computers from remembering users' requests, but non-techies didn't understand that magic isn't a thing, so Google's understandably under some pressure to better-document the incognito feature.

Imagine the [unlikely?] case where someone wants to implement FACstamp on their own computer. Can they?

They'd end up facing a similar problem as DRM standards: whoever backs it can't allow any independent implementations, because that would undermine the purpose: preventing people from signing the "wrong" data.

So this FACstamp idea requires proprietary software for every step of the process, with a key obfuscated or hidden inside a TPM chip or something like that. Wanna write something that is interoperable with it? You can't.

Authors can license textbooks instead of selling them, but do they?

I guess I wouldn't be surprised if kids these days (yes, I'm old) are agreeing to EULAs when they open their textbook apps. But I know for sure that tens of millions of people still alive today, purchased textbooks instead of licensing them. If those textbooks still exist, then the knowledge is attainable without any contracts, so there's no means of discriminating against computers.

Just avoid the weird textbooks (ones that require special software to read) and anyone's LLM can get around the problem you're describing.

"This unit only has a handful of games on it."

It has "M.U.L.E." on it. And what appears to be a possible 4 player possibility. That alone makes it worth it for me. I haven't seen a full list of games on it, but if it includes ARCHON, then it's heaven -- wit a fuji logo.

How many errors before it should count?

Wow, Google advocates that I should be able to maintain a media player without any particular weird dependencies?

Maybe you can really get this stuff moving fast toward the midpoint, but how do you stop at the destination?

With onboard propulsion you would just flip the craft at the halfway mark, and fire the rocket (or whatever) in the other direction, but if this is using the momentum from Earth photons to go, I'm drawing a blank on how to decelerate. Do I have to .. *shudder* .. RTFA?

Two can play at that game. Inject the mic with epoxy, freezing the diaphragm so it doesn't conduct sound.

Score 2 points out of 5 for the que-cat reference. I still have mine.

Full marks for those who thought "i-Opener".

My rips from 20ish years ago are all in Vorbis and so I still play Vorbis files occasionally, but it's slowly becoming less frequent. For the last few years I've been re-ripping all my old CDs to FLAC, but I'm super-lazy. Every few months I have a burst of giving-a-fuck and I'll rip another boxfull, but then I put it aside for another few months. I suspect it'll be years until I get rid of the last Vorbis file, if ever.

Everything new is FLAC.

I do still use Vorbis for Navidrome's on-the-fly transcoding for my remote players (i.e. phone), but probably ought to upgrade to Opus.

Stop making jokes about us, or else a customer service agent will be with your shortly.

If I not-hypothetically bought a $100,000 Cybertruck with debt tomorrow, I'd receive an asset arguably worth $100k

You're the best kind of correct on definitions, but Cybertruck is arguably the worst example.