The proximate reason is that there are no editors on Slashdot.

The broader reason is that the fortunes of tech companies are often caught up in financial headlines, so publications that cover economics are invariably syndicated here. The intended audience of these publications—the capitalist class—is deeply anxious about any changes in their host organism that may result in the contraction of their debt-based casino, so they eat up stories with pearl-clutching themes. Naturally, slave shortages are a major concern.

Patrimony is a word already. It refers to a son inheriting possessions from his father. The -monium suffix is productive in Latin and means "obligation:" testimony is the obligation to testify; patrimony is the obligation to act as a father; matrimony is the obligation to act as a mother, i.e., fulfil "womanly duties."

Whoever sold you this bullshit was lying to you, and not even doing a particularly good job.

You are being scammed.

Ads: The homescreen has a couple of small store links at the bottom that are relatively unobtrusive. There are no recommendations forced on you unless you go to the store. There is a store button at the bottom of the homescreen, which I imagine is pretty handy if you actually want to get your eBooks from them.

Organization: You have to set up book categories after putting files on the device (like how the Kindle 3 was back in the day) but there are no forced labels or anything. There are at least 2 homebrew launchers that replace the homescreen, one of which lets you use a directory structure for files.

There is no screensaver advertising at all, unlike the Kindle—you can set it to display the cover of the last book you read, a generic "sleeping" message, or upload your own pictures for random display. I was really surprised by this; it's like they asked Kindle modders what they wanted and just made it the default.

There is a trick for skipping user registration during the onboarding experience by plugging the device into a PC and editing a YAML file, allowing you to use the device without giving them any info at all—unthinkable on Kindle!

Rakuten is a small Canadian company, so their niche is being less shitty than Amazon. If they ever stopped doing that they wouldn't have any customers.

Ironically this war has worked out well for Russia—it draws media attention away from Ukraine while simultaneously expending supplies of Patriot missiles and other munitions, and the spike in oil prices has basically wiped out the benefits of crushing them with sanctions for the past four years.

These are just some of the 'miracles' you can accomplish when you let Bibi Netanyahu start another war so he can keep postponing the conclusion of his corruption trial...

My Kindle 3 died recently, and I replaced it with a basic Kobo Clara. The browser is a mixed blessing (very buggy), but certain familiar mods—custom screensavers and ssh are built in. It was very weird to buy a device that wants to be hacked! It literally comes with a file called "ssh-disabled" that contains the instructions "rename this file to ssh-enabled and reboot," no jailbreak required.

There was a time when the people who complained about soldered RAM (and I was one of those people) were a significant enough proportion of the community that manufacturers would pay attention. This was the age when gaming PCs were constructed from high end pieces from the wild-assed cases to the heavy duty PSUs to overclocked CPUs and next gen GPUs.

But overall, that segment of the consumer market has dwindled. Most folks just want to charge their new machine up, connect it to their WiFi network and get going. On the corporate end of things, save for pretty niche areas like engineering and R&D, a cube you can plug a keyboard, mouse and camera into and will last through a few upgrade cycles before it's sold back to a refurb outfit is all that is needed. Nobody in IT departments is pulling RAM chips anymore, particularly at RAM prices right now! Even the folks writing operating systems are starting to get it, and have rediscovered the glory of native apps that don't required bloated Javascript engines just to select a few radio buttons.

Yes, Windows 11 is really that bad. It's cluttered, slow, inconsistent. I've seen it on pretty high end hardware, and it's a dog. And that's before we even talk about how they tried to insert Copilot into everything. It's a shitty version of Windows and even Redmond acknowledges it. It was the impending EOL of Windows 10 that lead me to buy an M1 MacBook Pro, and I've never looked back. If I want to run Linux, I've got servers set up to do that kind of heavy lifting, but I have absolutely no need for whatever it is MS is trying to sell me these days.

Wasn't there an 80186? That literally nobody built anything with? Like, it was almost a proof of concept?

Just today I noted that GIMP 3.2.2 (an application, not an OS) has dropped support for 32-bit x86.

What's more, you really have to know what you're doing to coax it into re-using code, rather than rewriting the same functionality with each prompt.

JavaScript is actually a pretty interesting, powerful language, but one with quite a few problems. (I recommend the book JavaScript: The Good Parts by Douglas Crockford if you want to learn more about that.) TypeScript solves some, but by no means all, of those problems. From what I've heard, it's increasingly popular.

In short, Java was invented for a reason, and while it has become a victim of legacy cruft as well, the underlying concept of truly portable apps, with a minimum of fuss to jump from platform to platform, still ought to be the preferable path. The problem is that that true platform neutrality/ambiguity pretty much kills Microsoft in all but a few niches, like gaming, but only because hardware vendors put less effort into drivers for other operating systems.

Yes, Office is still king, although I think that crown is beginning to slip, and it may end up being Excel, with its large list of features, that may last the longest. But it isn't 1990, or even 2000 anymore. Developers have multiple ways of developing portable applications, and while MS may (for the nth time) update or swap out its toolchains, the real question is will developers really care?

While it is an enormous problem, possibly the most significant, we know how to shield against radiation, but it's going to take mass in the form of hydrogen-rich molecules like water or polyethylene (as examples). To solve that problem we are either going to have to make launches a lot cheaper, or figure out how to do it all in orbit.

It's at the edge of our technological capacity to produce such a spacecraft now, so the barrier is economic. That's a massive barrier, but in theory we definitely could, if we put a significant percentage of GDP of the wealthiest nations towards the project, produce a spacecraft that keep astronauts alive and relatively protected from ionizing radiation both on the journey and while on Mars.

As to your general assholery, I guess everyone has to have an outlet, though why Slashdot is a bit mysterious.

- hosting child sexual abuse material and taking a year to remove it
- creating a means for sex traffickers to turn their victims into $$$
- providing a means to sell sexual content of others (e.g revenge porn) without consent

I've seen a lot of comments here in discussion to gig work where it's considered exploitive for Uber/Lyft to not provide health coverage and other benefits, minimum pay accounting for externalities like vehicle wear, etc. Does OF provide any of that?

They can certainly be "better" than other porn sites in ways (although the lack of any physically present third party seems like a major exploitation risk, per links above) but that isn't itself some moral achievement. The guy who peddles crack is doing less harm than the guy who peddles heroin but I don't think he's due for any citizenship awards.

And OF is absurdly profitable so if they really wanted to engage in a humanitarian mission to make porn "ethical" they have lots of financial buffer to combat exploitation. It's clearly not their objective.