I think Linus said that Stranger in a Strange Land was his favourite book growing up. https://archive.computerhistor...

(I wonder if it could be the origin of the name 'git')

But the point of recycling isn't energy efficiency. I don't doubt it takes twice the energy. The idea, surely, is to reduce the amount of plastic waste that goes into landfill.

The book "Alex's Adventures in Numberland" by Alex Bellos talks about this. There is a difference in the way we treat numbers 1, 2, 3, possibly 4, compared to numbers 5 and above. The author suggests this is reflected in number systems. Roman numerals start I II III and there are two alternatives for four, IIII and IV. In Chinese too the first three numbers are groups of lines before it changes with four. Our Indio-Arabic glyphs for 1, 2, 3 also originate as one, two, or three lines joined up.

I would suggest that case endings in Slavonic languages might be another indicator. For two, three, or four of something you use the genitive singular (roughly: "three of apple") but then for five or more the genitive plural is used instead. (Things may get muddy when dealing with compound numbers like forty-two where you could use the same case ending as for two.)

What other languages or writing systems have a change between 2,3,4 and larger numbers?

I was assuming it was based essentially on existing digital camera hardware with an extra authentication or signing step at the point the image is written to storage. That's how these products have worked up to now. Of course if the camera manufacturers are investing big bucks in developing a secure system from the ground up, my assumptions are wrong. But I don't see any indication that's what is being offered here.

That's right, I am assuming the connection from the sensor to the rest of the camera electronics is not part of the secure system. I think that's a fair assumption, as CCD or CMOS sensors are relatively simple devices and don't have room or time for cryptographic processing at the moment the image is recorded and read out. Even if not, the point remains that you could leave the electronic parts untouched and just project in the image you want to record.

But you don't have to crack the TPM or the secure enclave. You just have to replace the camera sensor with a custom device that outputs the image you want, and if necessary set the camera's date and time or fake some GPS signals. You could even keep the hardware untouched and use a slide duplicator attachment to make an authenticated copy of any image you want.

It doesn't help that there's all these influencer-types renting teslas and filming themselves going airborne over hills and the like, doing stuff normal drivers would never do if they had to pay for it. The old adage of "Drive it like you stole it"-on-steroids applies.

While *he* was climbing up it, not I. Sigh.

You should try it just for the experience. Typically the pay isn't that great, warehouses not climate controlled so in the South, brutally humid and hot summers wear you down physically AND mentally, making mistakes more common. You are rated on your order pull numbers and constantly threatened with replacement if you can't keep your numbers up, benefits are usually slim to none, and yes, injuries were common. Saw a guy get buried under some heavy ass shit that fell over while I was trying to climb it and he was fired for it for "Ignoring safety standards that required him to get help" while simultaneously being responsible for his pull-rate and getting help would negatively effect the other person's pull rate, so basically the work environment dictated that if you follow the rules, you get fired for non-performance, but if you don't, you get fired if you get injured... I did this for 3 months during a summer and chose to just get reprimanded for my pull-rate degradation because fuck it, I got one body and I could always get another warehouse job because turnover was so high. The job sucks. On the other hand, it really made me appreciate being an office drone where my biggest enemies were status conferences, sprint planning meetings, and constantly changing requirements.

For many years advocates of more liberal drug policy have argued that addiction should be treated as a medical condition. And we're always told that mental illness should be seen as just another illness -- you wouldn't stigmatize or blame someone for having a broken arm, so you shouldn't do so if they are schizophrenic.

Well, isn't this the logical outcome? If a medical condition is severe enough to destroy your quality of life, and it isn't curable, then in some countries you have the option of assisted suicide. Why would you refuse that to someone whose condition is being addicted, if that's just another medical condition?

Hmm, you say a roundabout takes more space than a 4-way light *for the same amount of traffic*.

If that's true, it implies that roundabouts aren't that good after all? Since I thought their advantage was handling a higher volume of traffic. Like for example, if you put a four-way intersection with traffic lights it can handle an average flow of ten cars per minute, but a roundabout could take twenty cars per minute. In other words, greater throughput. (I don't know what the true numbers are.)

Perhaps the throughput is the same but a roundabout reduces the average time for a car to clear the junction -- in other words, same throughput but improved latency?

I do remember back in the day Google was known for its contrarian approach. Consultants would tell you that for an "enterprise" data centre you needed expensive servers, redundant power supplies on each unit, RAID on each unit in case a disk failed, ECC memory and so on. But Google decided to get the reliability at the large scale, throwing together large numbers of cheap systems with off-the-shelf parts and if one of them fails, well you just leave it there and use the remaining ones.

Nowdays it's conventional wisdom that servers should be "cattle, not pets". Perhaps in even in 1999 the smart people knew that. Perhaps I am setting up a straw man with these "consultants" who wanted an expensive, gold-plated approach. For sure it would have happened anyway without Google. But this guy did have to swim against the current.

Don't forget Apple/Google's cut. As always, the money is in selling the shovels, apparently.

I hope they market the augmented reality headset under the name of "Reality Distortion Field".

Typically, for small devices at least, the wall charger has a USB output and then you use a USB cable to connect it to your device. The device might have mini-USB or micro-USB or USB-C or Apple's Lightning. So you need a variety of different cables. Standardizing on a single connector means you don't need so many cables but in practice I don't think it wiill reduce the number of power bricks since USB was already a de facto standard there. And yes, there are different kinds of USB and not all the bricks will deliver the same power output, but this isn't really an issue for phones, and I think that standardizing the connector doesn't really change it.