Microsoft has control over distribution of the copyrighted Windows operating system. It has used this control to dictate whether or not makers of devices that include Windows are allowed to let users load their own custom keys. For example, Microsoft required makers of devices that come with Windows RT (the port of Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 to ARM architecture) to block end users from turning off Secure Boot and block end users from loading their own custom keys, as conditions for a license under copyright to distribute Windows RT on those devices.

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?

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.

How granular would the permission be? If web browsers start blocking all animation and post-load layout shifting by default, including CSS transitions and animations, this would encourage website operators to structure the page to coerce permission to animate in each document. For example, a website operator could make each page load blank other than a notice to the effect "Tap or click to view 'Title of Article' on Name of Site."

In my experience on laptops and tablets, I've found the exact opposite (eager loading) helpful in some situations with limited or no data. I would download an entire page on unmetered Wi-Fi, go offline, and read while riding as a passenger in a car or bus.

I sincerely doubt that 14,500 USD per year (full-time minimum wage) is near enough to pay for income tax, rent, food, health insurance, and a round-trip taxi ride every weekday in most of the United States. I'd be interested to read examples of budgets that you have in mind.

Recent graduates tend to be stuck with hourly food service and retail jobs. These tend to treat availability outside 9 to 5 as a condition for hiring, not to be doable from home, and not to pay enough for a taxi. Even a cyclist needs a backup during bad weather.

If someone happens not to have this privilege, then how would they go about traveling to or from work at night or on Sundays, when all the bus drivers are at home with their families? (Source: Citilink in Fort Wayne, Indiana, USA)

I imagine that most gamers are unwilling to pay for business-class service if business-class service is the only "real" service offered at their home address.

How are you going to host a game server on a home computer if you share your IPv4 address with other subscribers to the same ISP in the same neighborhood,[1] and the combined modem and router that your home ISP requires all subscribers to use lacks an option for port forwarding? Both of these are true, for example, of T-Mobile US Home Internet.

[1] Many home ISPs apply carrier-grade network address translation (CGNAT) to conserve IPv4 addresses since the worldwide exhaustion.

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...