You sound old.

I always thought it was odd when my kids were watching Pokemon VHS tapes in the late 90s, that it was basically a cartoon about cock-fighting. These kids would travel all over the place, capture these semi-intelligent animals and then force them to fight for their amusement.

That is something they'll never do. All of their hardware exists only to channel users to their website.

It's all about entitlement. People seem to think that everything should conform to their tastes instead of them expending any effort to look somewhere else.

You can always disable location services for that app (at least on my Nexus phone running Marshmallow).

My sister was bitten by a moose once ...

SI Units? Really? I'd rather have it in football fields, or perhaps compare to an arbitrary number of cars.

You sound old.

This. The thing that bothers me the most about this whole thing is that Apple declared that they couldn't unlock our phones, that with the new OS and default encryption your data is safe, when it clearly isn't. IMO, they should open the phone for the FBI if they have the capability, then fix whatever is needed so that they actually CANNOT comply in the future.

Privacy was never protected by the restraint of public officials. It was only ever protected by the sheer volume of mail that would have to be opened, or calls to be listened to by actual humans. It was protected by technological limitations. As computers get faster, those limitations are disappearing. Restraint of public officials is a laughable concept.

You might want to rethink that assertion.

To be honest, I'd rather the Chinese government spy on my than my own government.

I see people make this complaint a lot, that they want to 'own' the things they buy. But you're ignoring all of the other huge benefits you get from non-physical media. Ebooks take up no physical space, cannot be lost or left behind. Can be read by multiple people at the same time if they're sharing a Kindle account. For example, I have four children and they were all working their way through Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series at the same time. There was no fighting over who had which copy, or where a copy had been left when one of them finished it. I don't have to store 14 large books on a shelf now when they've finished the series, or go looking for them in a few years if I feel like re-reading. And other people have already made comments about search functions, easy text highlighting, bookmarks, etc that ebooks do really well. It's a different experience than buying and reading physical books. I avoid buying physical books whenever possible

It's like you think that once you buy a physical copy of some media, you have an indestructible copy of it that will last you the rest of your life. I have no problem buying books or music or movies from iTunes or Amazon's stores. I've bought multiple copies of the same CD or DVD in the , only to have to get another one when the copy I was using got scratched by kids, pets or mishandling or just plain lost or stolen. I buy digital versions of all of music and movies now, and I don't even care that I don't 'own' the media. To me, the benefits vastly outweigh any perceived drawbacks.

Also, as someone else already noted, many (most?) ebooks from Amazon 'ship' with no DRM, and can be loaded into Calibre and changed to different formats and device fairly easily.

I think you and I have different definitions of 'comfortably'

I aggressively shut off notifications for just about everything on my phone. I'm married and we have kids in their teens, so I've left notifications on for text messages and phone calls. Everything else can wait.