What I found more interesting in the report is this little sentence slipped in near the end of the article:

After Google and Amazon, Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Xiaomi were listed as third and fourth in quarterly market share, respectively.

Chinese products tend to be cheaper than US-branded products. Where mass products are concerned, and the quality is good enough (the product, even if buggy as hell, doesn't break within a couple of weeks of use), price is the decisive factor. So, yes if Google wants to maintain its Android-like dominance it has to give away the speakers, or else sell the hardware side of the business to its lower margin Chinese competitors, the way it did with Motorola. Expect an Alibaba or Xiaomi Home real soon, at which point we'll probably hear an announcement of the forthcoming release of Android Voice Beta.

Ironic but true, rice actually contributes more to global warming than the other grain varieties. Just do a web search on "rice methane". The "root" cause of this is that rice requires more water than the other types of "dry" grain. To get rice to sprout, rice paddies (fields) have to be flooded, which produces an environment conducive to the production of methane. Here's an extract from a paywalled science journal abstract:

Increased atmospheric CO2 and rising temperatures are expected to affect rice yields and greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions from rice paddies. This is important, because rice cultivation is one of the largest human-induced sources of the potent GHG methane5 (CH4) and rice is the world’s second-most produced staple crop.

So what we have here is a classic chicken-and-egg dilemma. Perhaps the only solution is to export all the excess calories that the West produces in forms like junk food and breakfast cereal to the poorer rice-farming nations. Junk food is junk only when taken in the excessive super-sized amounts found in, for example, the standard American diet that leads to obesity and diseases like diabetes and heart attack.

From a purely biophysical point of view, the calories found in junk food is the same calories you'd get from eating rice. Of course, the rice has to be supplemented by more nutritious vegetables and fruits. Food sufficiency has already been solved. It's a distribution not a production problem, if only politics, ideology, and corporate greed didn't get in the way.

And all along I thought people who signed employment contracts were contractors. I think the conditions you mentioned are matters of degree and not simple binary options.

On the other hand I see a fairly painless way for such web-based service platforms to evade the ruling. If they focus merely on connecting the "client" with the "server" but don't take a cut beyond a flat membership fee, they can't be considered employers any more than I become Amazon's employer by using their web hosting service. This could end up jacking price of the service to nobody's benefit except in those statistical situations better solved by some sort of a mandatory insurance scheme, e.g. after an accident or a significant delay. Cases of outright fraud should, of course, naturally involve the authorities.

"GNOME 3.28 adds the capability to favorite files, folders, and contacts for easier organization and access."

Is this like bookmarks but done the Microsoft way? Or did the Gnome folks just come up with the desktop equivalent of GMail's multiple tag scheme?

I take it to mean Private Service Announcement. Unless of course you mean, Privately Served by Amazon, and its cloud army of servers, drones, smart speakers, and biodroids?

The non-American partner of Orbital in the Antares rocket program is Yuzhnoye, a Ukrainian company. Big difference. It's partly because of a de facto Russian invasion of Ukraine that Russia was first placed under US-led economic sanctions. Perhaps you meant that Antares evolved from Soviet-era rocket technology? Not all "Soviets" were Russians, since the Soviet Union was more like a confederation of independent states, even if they were ruled by force and united by common fear of the West (much like a matryoshka Warsaw Pact within the Warsaw Pact). It was a union more of convenience than a shared sense of destiny, a setup not much different from the relations that exist between the still deeply "communistic" regimes of East Asia like China, Vietnam and North Korea.