This needs to be killed, with prejudice.

https://www.baen.com/chapters/W200011/0671319744___1.htm

I'm not going to comment on my subject line immediately; I use a cheap Chinese Android tablet (<$150), and for the purposes described (email, web, shopping, youtube, music, video calls), i use it regularly and successfully, with no problems. My wife, however, uses an iPad tablet, a Samsung tablet, and a Samsung phone. She FAR prefers the Samsung devices. And Samsung hardware is regularly ranked as highly reliable.

If you want to interact with Apple systems (for example, FaceTime), get an Apple. If you want the Apple integration described elsewhere, get an Apple. For most uses, Android will work fine, and you won't hurt your pocketbook nearly as much. But if you're already invested in the Apple ecosystem, you won't like Android.

If you're planning on upgrading regularly anyway, you don't really need hardware with a long lifespan. For me, a new tablet every two years is an amortized cost of about $0.20/day.

My wife, again, uses some apps that are available on Android, but not on Apple. You may use apps that are Apple only. In general, buy the system that does what you want to do, optimally. Some people optimize for style; some optimize for convenience; some optimize for prestige; some optimize for price. You do YOU.

"Opposition was led by Green MEPs, who decried what they saw as a populist move..."

Doesn't "populist" mean this is what the PEOPLE want?

Since the courts have said that you can't claim copyright on AI-genned art, doesn't that mean that Velvet Sundown songs are now public domain? (Prior art and plagiarism excepting...)

...a cassette???

“That happened on Earth once,” said Louis Wu. “A yeast that could eat polyethyline. It was eating the plastic bags off the supermarket shelves. It’s dead now. We had to give up polyethyline.”

- RINGWORLD, Larry Niven

"Henceforth, all beef cattle must be grass-fed or fed a diet to minimize the output of methane. Furthermore, all cattle must be individually fitted with an Automated Collection and Methane Extraction (ACME) system, and each individual shall be indelibly tattooed with its methane creation license number, as issued by the Department of Homeland Flatulence, the Social Security Number or Taxpayer Identification of its owner, and the production records of each individual shall be submitted to the DHF. Overproduction shall be cause for termination of the genetic line. All costs will be borne by the owner of the cattle..."

It's a bad sign when the world is catching up to my sarcasm...

Curious correlation of the fortune in the footer:

"Money will say more in one moment than the most eloquent lover can in years."

That sounds like a bribe, to me.

Just sayin'.

Any product that "indiscriminately facilitates anonymous transactions," wrote the US Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control, represents a "threat to US national security."

So CASH is a threat to national security. Good to know.

They reinvented PIT?

AI applied to audiobooks is simply the next step in the same progression of AI and skilled labor, as applied to audiobooks, that we see everywhere else in our society.

I have been listening to TTS books since before 2008, when I used eSpeak to make an audiobook of the Shon Harris 4th Edition Complete CISSP Study Guide. I have since used eSpeak for gigabytes of fiction. However, now I listen to the Google TTS on Android, using AlReader.

eSpeak sounded like a "drunken robot", and I hid some of those errors by using an accent that was not my own--in my case, a UK English voice. Listening to eSpeak required you to train your ear to the inflections of the robot, but while it was mechanical, it had remarkable pronunciation and moderately good inflection. It handled commas, colons, semicolons, periods, question marks, and exclamation marks with reasonable choices for stresses in the generated voice, better than other TTS voices AT THAT TIME. What it couldn't do was sound natural.

AlReader uses the Google TTS voices on my phone, and handles ePub, mobi, text, and some other formats. It still stumbles on some words; "CO", as "Commanding Officer", is regularly read as "Colorado".

An indicator of how TTS has improved is that I no longer use UK voices unless the narrator is British. The American accents don't jar me the way they used to. And the inflections have improved; are the performances less than perfect? Yes. However, I would say that the Google TTS performances are better than a bad Librivox effort, almost equivalent to a poor commercial effort. One significant advantage: the TTS voices NEVER get tired. The accent doesn't change across chapter breaks. If it mispronounces something, it ALWAYS mispronounces it the same way.

But THESE have been mechanical reproductions, without AI contributions. I expect that AI reproductions will begin to sound even better, so that their efforts will be as good as a good LibriVox recording, BETTER than a poor commercial recording.

But one thing eSpeak COULD do was follow markup language for voice synthesis. I experimented once, and found that I didn't know quite what I was doing--but the Russian speaker had a deep voice with a Russian accent, while another character had a British accent, and another...if the markup language was made available with the Google TTS engine, you might hear something quite remarkable.

The AI impact on copyright and voice performance and reproduction rights is going to take years to shake out, and I'm not going to even TRY to predict where it's going. But cars are built by robots, now.

You took the words EXACTLY out of my mouth!

So is your son arglebargle_xiii?

If you apply Sturgeon's Law, and Pareto's Principle, then 66% noise is actually pretty good...

Polychron was foolish for suing because of Amazon's Rings Of Power; it was a prequel that was at least founded in canon.

Fellowship of the King, OTOH:

""Publisher Description (https://fable.co/book/the-fellowship-of-the-king-by-demetrious-polychron-9798986410456#about)
Long before Annatar, the original Rings of Power were forged by the Elven Lord Celebrimbor and the Dwarven smith Narvi in Eregion near the Misty Mountains. These first magic Rings were far more powerful than those that came after and were corrupted by Sauron to be fought for in the War of the Ring.

Elanor, daughter of Samwise, is nervous the night before her debutante party in the Shire. In the 22nd year of the Reign of the High King Elessar the Blue Wizards return from out of the East bearing perilous news: the rest of the Rings of Power have been found and they are in deadly danger. Thus begins the War Of The Rings To End All Wars Of The Rings. Before it is over Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Men and races long forgotten or never seen before will join the Quest to find Celebrimbor's originals and the last of Sauron's corrupted Rings of Power.

Elanor and two Hobbit friends join the Crown Prince Eldarion, his Elvish uncles Elladan and Elrohir, and the wizard Alatar in a war across Middle-earth battling for their lives. If they fail they will witness the return of the Vala Morgoth, the source of Evil and former master of the long defeated Sauron. With all the Rings of Power at his command, Morgoth will enslave the whole of Middle-earth - forever."

Lots of problems here: the other Rings were LESS powerful than the One Ring; Morgoth was long since destroyed; all the elves took ship at the Grey Havens and left Middle Earth while Elanor was an infant; Sauron captured the other rings, except the three elvish rings, long before. There's probably more...

So Polychron's book is a non-canon mish-mash, and suing Amazon for the prequel was stupid. Including the Tolkien Estate was BEYOND stupid.