"If all you do is look at the hardware features, the Murena One is a good, but not exceptional, 4G LTE smartphone."

I had an S5 set up exactly how I would have happily wanted it with LineageOS but was totally blindsided by voLTE. So have they got the voLTE firmware code still working on this thing so a person can actually make CELL calls in the US? Skype or Signal via wifi don't count. If it isn't working cell, nothing should be called a "phone".

(Oh, and my Pinephone just installed half a gig of update this morning and rebooted just fine. Looks like that is where I'm going since I am one of those "low expectations" people regarding phones who will be happy enough with that option and the programs it provides.)

If all you can do is communicate with your fellow conspirators on Signal without voLTE it isn't really a "phone" in the US, is it? Could just as well install LineageOS on an S5 and save money if this is what you want.

Thought they tried that in the Species franchise and only ended up in a lot of bad sex.

That's real progress!

Got a good introduction starting probably a decade ago when our Minnesota suburb put one very near us under a local 4-lane so there was the main circle under it, the on-and-off ramp circles on both sides and the frontage roads those fed on each side of the main road. The advantages seem clear and I'm all for them. I think we just find it disquieting in America wondering what percentage of drivers coming at us are ignorant, stupid or sociopathic when it is their place to yield.

OK, this is all "cutting edge" and there is a genuine "iffy" factor, but I was an early adopter who got the medical they offered before the FDA stomped on her. First: it correlated very well with what I knew of family history. You might ask, "So, like, WHY?" Confirmation and clarification, dude. Second: I admit I didn't have genes for anything horrible, but >I thought they did a _very_ good job of qualifying and detailing the research available and reminded people they should seek professional advise before looking at sensitive results. So I think she got a raw deal, and I seriously wonder what lobbyists activated their endowed congressmen to pursue how she was "underselling" individual DNA test revenue.

That said, I do understand 23andMe's monetary flow is data and they have sort of stagnated at the consumer level. I bit on one of Dante Lab's "we're CRAAAAZY! Holiday Specials" on the "full genome+" with no problems at all -- and it basically just confirmed 23andMe (available research such as it is don'-ya-know) -- but that means I'm not "upgrading" 23andMe at their current offering. And that means 23andMe does have a consumer issue staying ahead of the curve.

I've already thought ahead that if these things ever become a medicare condition for senior stay-at-home my senile behavior will show an odd habit of thinking my always-on radio should be right next to the "other electronics". Wherever visiting aides move it.

compared to the Yeti $40 5-gallon bucket

Net output -- if and when it ever occurs -- won't impress me much. When one of these multi-billion, twitchy wonders run by nuclear scientists beats an acre of solar cells I'll quit laughing hysterically.

Even among intelligent people, what percentage _want_ to believe warp drive is PRACTICALLY (not theoretically) possible? And if you discount some of the silly science in Outer Limits and Twilight Zone episodes virtually everyone alive has "seen" aliens on TV and I have to believe fantasy does bleed into people's perceptions of reality. And is it really so unreasonable for people with little science background to see how much intelligent people love space opera and conclude from it that there must be something to it? So I try not to be too judgmental.

But, yeah, I'm 99.9999+% certain it's all an update to Fatima sightings of the Virgin Mary. Or defense projects. I try to have a teaching moment if it comes up and admit it isn't _impossible_ that an advanced civilization with extraordinary technology and extraordinary energy resources might send out baseball-sized probes and use their extraordinary social patience and/or personal longevity to wait the hundreds/thousands of years to get data back from the probes.

Why do I have "Excellent Karma" from the 90s and I can't score this up?

Exactly. I like to compared this fascination with FTL during our primitive space endeavors with the alchemist's aspirations to turn lead into gold when they were mucking their way to chemistry. We _have_ succeeded in turning other elements into gold for chuckles. The energy to transmute a pleasant chunk of matter into gold would be insanely impractical with a lot a exclamation points that approach the infinite of impossible. The future will see our aspiration for FTL as the same sort of fantasy. These are _practical_ impossibilities, and, no, future technical tweaks won't always make a practical impossibility practical.

I'm finding that xlinks2 has some interesting advantages for many sites.

Fire up a SystemRescue and still use fsarchiver for a whole laptop. And rsync -gloptruv for data.

  And have retro fun with taxes. Ten disk DVD box. Toss the 2 oldest and make 2 new. So far this century each disk holds 2 .isos of a running all-years-to-date and two checksums. A 3rd disk goes in safe deposit. Mount and copy the latest iso, add the current year, "re-iso" with repair files and make the new set of DVDs.