Spell AEIOU (Austria Est Imperare Orbi Universo)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A.E.I.O.U.

Sure, but not legally so. Patents are the reason there are only really two x86-64 vendors and a company could similarly patent their own RISC-V modifications.

It’s literally faster and more convenient??

You also have to walk around in a store and can’t wait at a bar in the front while an underpaid intern is forced to fetch the items on your shopping list.

Why would you want a service human just to scan your groceries?

Anyone can design and sell little circuit blocks and on chip peripherals, even proprietary ones, for use on any chip.

What’s the likelihood of a dominant player emerging and implementing patented, proprietary RISC-V architecture changes which turn out to be necessary for high-performance? And if such a company gains sufficient market share, they could turn RISC-V into basically another x86-64 with many proprietary extensions. Sure, others could create their own RISC-V base processor - but if their performance is 500% lower than processors from the proprietary vendor who would purchase them?

Try Mullvad browser, it works well in my opinion. It should be used with a VPN (i.e. shared IP address space) though.

Just because there is no ethical consumption does not imply all consumption is equally unethical.

As an extreme example: Paying for CSAM directly supports those who produce it and is several magnitudes more unethical than paying an OnlyFans model.

Yes, if the induced demand results in similar levels of congestion - which it very often does - there would be more emissions in the end.

And you’re right, cars will exist for the forseeable future. I do not however want the government subsidizing car dependency since it is destructive to the environment and to everyone’s health and safety.

A couple of possibilities to drastically reduce traffic:

• turn all multi-lane streets within cities into single-lane streets for cars with exclusive bus and bike lanes to treat all forms of traffic equally
• reduce all inner-city speed limits to 30 km/h to reduce car noise, emissions and increase pedestrian safety
• traffic lights should prefer public transit, pedestrians and bicyclists instead of cars
• stop subsidizing parking spaces for cars with city money and drastically reduce on-street parking as cars take away massive amounts of space
• put toll roads onto highways as their cost is massively higher compared to fuel taxes. After all, trains have to pay a costly fee to use train tracks already - why should cars have this privilege?

There’s a lot more I could write here but you get the gist. Making car traffic more efficient does not reduce emissions in the long term in the slightest. Making car traffic less efficient reduces emissions instead because people will not use cars as frequently.

And keep in mind, I’m not talking about Bumfuck Nowhere (population: 725) when mentioning public transit. Cities have insane amounts of car traffic which can be massively reduced with just a couple of decisions. This would make car traffic less efficient as right now it enjoys many privileges over other forms of transportation.

And next year the congestion will be the same as before, except with even more cars and even more emissions.

This is equivalent to building another lane on a highway to increase throughput and decrease traffic jams. In the beginning, emissions will be reduced since traffic jams occur less frequently. And then, through induced demand, there’s congestion again.

Improving car throughput directly leads to increased emissions with a small delay.

From the paper:

Increased speeds from adaptive signals may induce additional travel, as people opt to drive more or travel farther, potentially offsetting some congestion benefits. Our models do not fully capture induced demand due to data limitations, but adaptive signaling generally supports higher traffic volumes and smoother flows.

There are none of them as good as Proton.

For example, AirVPN hasn’t had any security audits and doesn’t seem too interested in them either due to monetary concerns. That’s a deal breaker for me.

It’s source available, not open source.

It severely limits what can legally be done by restricting modifications and prohibiting “commercial” distribution:

You may not remove or obscure any functionality in the software related to payment to the Licensor in any copy you distribute to others.

You may distribute the software or provide it to others only if you do so free of charge for non-commercial purposes.

Non-commercial purposes is extremely vague by the way. Depending on the country - or even the court in a country - nearly everything distributed on the internet is for commercial purposes.

For example, in Germany, only commercial websites have to put up a legal disclosure consisting of address, full name, phone number and email. Yet courts have ruled that every single website that is available to the public is “commercial” - only private webpages available to a handful of people are non-commercial. If anyone redistributed the software in Germany this license would be grounds for a successful lawsuit.

Zu Hilf’! Das Kind brennt lichterloh!