I download all my books DRM-free from bittorrent.

My ebook reader is an ancient Sony PRS-650, it still works fine and it has no trouble reading files that haven't been messed up by Amazon. What a concept eh?

"What about the book's authors who aren't getting paid when you download their stuff for free?" I hear you say:

Yes, I wish I could pay for what I downloaded. But I can't. The best option I could find was to buy the paperback as well, so some of my money would trickle back to them. But that's mighty stupid and totally not environmentally-friendly.

I did try to pay an author directly once (the late Ian M. Banks) but he send me an angry email back saying even if he got money from me, I was robbing his editor and distributor, and I should just buy his book normally - which I would, if that didn't entail leaving an undeserved cut to effing Amazon.

So there we are: there's no mechanism to legally buy books that aren't hamstrung by DRM. So honest people who value their consumer rights can't be honest.

Wood burning is very much alive - both old-stylee polluting open-fires and stoves, and ultra-efficient pellet, wood-chip and wood dust burning in power stations. And it's renewable. Try visiting any nordic country some day...

Also, just because burning wood has downsides doesn't mean it has to be ditcheds it entirely. Solve the downsides instead...

Grading on a curve was meant to hide the fact that some teachers couldn't teach, some could, some wouldn't, and others would. It protected the professor at the expense of the students' education.

And it ruins grades as a marker of achievement or ability. From a student's perspective, if I pay for a course, the result should be that my grade reflects the degree to which I've mastered the material, not the variations between the quality of the students and the quality of the instruction. Grading on a curve allows a deadbeat professor and a deadbeat class to essentially turn the class into a credential mill without the necessity of education.

Students can safely assume that courses graded on a curve are staffed by incompetent or lazy professors, taken by lazy or incompetent students, or quite possibly both. When I was in university, this type of grading was used most often in the general education electives, where the professors didn't really care about the students, and the students didn't care about the subject. To adopt the same approach for mainline courses is to transform the entire university from a place of learning into a credentials broker or diploma mill.

With respect to being a "lying snake," this is the C-Suite, not rank and file employees. When it comes to the C-Suite, such behavior is generally accepted, if not expected, and hardly a reason for firing.

I mean, can you even name the last time a CEO was fired for lying?

The biggest problem with replicating CUDA is not the technical aspects, but finding VC with enough brains to know whom to hire. Most CS grads have the knowledge, but not the drive. Most liberal arts grads have the drive, the creativity, but not the knowledge. You need to find one with both, because creating the next Nvidia killer will require someone who is boring enough to reinvent the wheel, but has enough creativity to find novel solutions to performance problems.

The computer science and hardware engineering behind the hardware and software (Nvidia/CUDA) have been known for decades. The Nvidia hardware could be replicated with FPGAs - notwithstanding any patents Nvidia might have. The software API could be replicated rather easily; parallelism has been known and studied in computer engineering (again) for decades now. What Nvidia did was political - they provided both the hardware and the API to easily use it in one package which could be understood by the C-Suite class. The challenge was never technical, but marketing.

More specifically, you'd need to understand how compilers work, and how to use YACC or bison, or something similar to generate the compiler code for you. You'd have to understand digital logic and how to create logic functions with NAND gates. If you see an FPGA development kit, know what it is, and think to yourself, "What I could do with that..." you're probably a good fit for the job. And you'd need someone willing to bankroll your project until you could demonstrate that you beat Nvidia on something marketable - like floating point performance. Or power consumption.

From an engineering standpoint, what Nvidia has done is trivial - because the solution could be reproduced by an engineer using already known techniques. But what Nvidia did was to combine technical knowledge with an understanding of their market to produce the dominant position they have today. Any computer engineer worth his diploma could produce a design with FPGAs that would beat Nvidia GPUs, but Nvidia did it first.

So even hackers can be replaced by AI now? What is this world coming to?!

One U.S. ISP that technically blocks inbound TCP over IPv6 is T-Mobile Home Internet (fixed wireless). The gateway appliance included with the plan offers no way to forward a port to the subscriber's computer. (Source) I've read that most major U.S. ISPs threaten to disconnect a home subscriber for running a publicly accessible server. (Source)

One large legacy network in the U.S. is Frontier fiber, which is still IPv4-only in 2026.

CloudFlare was an aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation. Now it's an AI-powered aggressive global internet surveillance and privacy invasion operation.

Why don't I feel excited about it?

Crypto grift, AI bubble and psychopathic billionaire CEO.

It'll help exactly as much as Unreal experience helps if you apply at a Godot shop.

In case your answer is "Well there aren't many Godot shops", then why is that?

There's no organized conspiracy as much as a less-formal worldwide shift in the Overton window toward more surveillance and less tolerance of erotica and nontraditional gender expression. Left-wing governments in other countries are just as eager to surveil their citizens. Look at how the People's Republic of China has expanded criminal background checks into a numeric "social credit score." The UK has its own share of conservatism; just look at Brexit and the "TERF Island" movement. And as long as global economies depend on hydrocarbon fuel from the Middle East, Salafis (Arabic for "reactionaries") will continue to have a platform.

Anonymous Coward mentioned two categories of "them". In case you don't see AC comments, I'll rephrase:

1. Government agencies interested in performing the same sort of predictive policing that led to Terrorism Information Awareness of the early 2000s.
2. The sort of religious conservatives who ultimately want sex and violence purged from even media intended for grown-ups, as we saw with Collective Shout pressuring payment processors to pressure itch.io to remove erotic works.

Reduced mental workload in having to put on a show of meeting society's behavior expectations for one's assigned gender all the time.

How is Unreal Engine noticeably superior to Godot in a way that noticeably affects a beginner learning video game development for the first time?

Unreal Engine is proprietary software with a free replacement that is adequate for beginners. That's why.