Bang on. I am the ideal target consumer for a Tesla - own my home, drive mostly short distances, tech savvy, etc. I was seriously considering a Tesla for my next car, until that guy revealed to the world what a giant asshole he is. I'm not giving him any of my money.

I think I started reading /. on a daily basis sometime in 1998.

Maybe people don't want a huge corporation listening to every word they say in their own homes 24/7 ?

I'm a techie, but my wife is not, and she is even *more* insistent that we not have any live microphones in the house. It got to the point that she was about to veto our new TV purchase because it had Alexa "built-in", but we compromised by getting the TV but never connecting it to the internet. (OLED TVs that *don't* have Alexa or some other assistant built-in are hard to find)

Why does this have to be about Ukraine?

It's freaking funny no matter what the motivation.

Windup Girl is great!

Beware of Chicken is awesome! on Royal Road, I am also enjoying He Who Fights With Monsters

I thought it was good but not nearly as good as his other book, "The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic", but that might just be because of my specific interests.

Fantasy:
* The Cradle series by Will Wight is fantastic. It starts a little slow, but by halfway through the first book it picks up nicely. Currently at 10 books.

History:
* A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson is more a history of science, but is still excellent
* The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire by Kyle Harper
* Lost to the West: The Forgotten Byzantine Empire That Rescued Western Civilization by Lars Brownworth
* Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages by Dan Jones

Biography:
* The Storyteller by Dave Grohl is really good if you are a punk / grunge / Nirvana / Foo Fighters fan.

Premium spirits need to be in a glass bottle. Nothing says "cheap" like a plastic bottle, and a paper one is even worse.

I read the first two (of four) Murderbot books, and they were OK. Not good enough for me to read the other two.

Lexar card are crap, I agree. The only SD Cards I've ever had fail on me is Lexar.

And nothing of value was lost.

Google never had plans to do that. From the outset, Google always said it was just scanning the books to make them searchable, not downloadable (save for works in the public domain).

Making orphan works available was the Authors Guild's idea, but it was shot down by the judge because the AG didn't have sufficient authority to make that kind of deal.

Wrong. The US didn't join the Berne Convention until 1989. All the books in question entered the US public domain due to time-since-publication in the 1960s and 70s. Once a work has entered the US public domain, it stays there even if copyright periods are later lengthened. You can't lengthen a public domain book's copyright retroactively.

I thought space radar was capable of keeping track of things as small as flecks of paint. How can any satellite be too small for it?