You're probably not going to make anything close to what you're using, but if you're looking to build something more modest, that's definitely possible. It really depends on what your goal is, and how advanced of parts you're willing to accept as a starting point. Ben Eater (https://eater.net/) has a guide on building an 8bit computer from low level gates. It's a really good basis to be able to build some primitive devices that would be capable of something a little more advanced. I'm building a 16 bit version, with a display and keyboard. If one was interested, they could definitely build off something like this, adding encryption and a network interface that would allow them a fairly trustworthy device. Another approach that you could take is auditing the devices you use. There are guides on how to go from XRays of chips to decoding them. Ken Shirriff is a ninja at this, and I HIGHLY recommend his talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

"this requires leaving childish tantrums, abusive language, and toxic environments behind."

"this is more important than the coddling of a whiny child who has never reached the emotional maturity to treat people decently."

These two statements from the author seem at odds with each other.

I doubt very much that HCB, coiner of the phrase "the decisive moment", would have anything to do with camera phones. Shutter lag is horrendous on those things. The decisive moment will be long gone before a camera phone even finishes focusing. HCB would be shooting with one of those $7K digital Leica rangefinders, a small camera that uses small lenses and takes the picture when you release the shutter, dammit.

Not consistently. I enjoyed Tig Notaro's series "One Mississippi" but that's it. If you want to develop an appreciation and understanding of how science fiction movies can be both well-made and awful, try watching the stuff available on Prime. There's a seeming unending stream of films made by people who understand more about filmmaking than they do about crafting an engrossing screenplay. Just watch a sci-fi offering chosen at random and Prime will gladly recommand five more that are equally bad.

It's more important for FaceTime calls where you want to make eye contact with the person you're talking to, instead of them always looking off to the side. The solution was invented hundreds of years ago, the pinhole camera, but we've forgotten the old ways.

It is the nature of the task that the car must predict behavior. People don't generally walk right in front of a moving car except in crosswalks and at intersections. So the car "reasonably" didn't expect the woman to do what she did. If the car thought she was a deer, she might still be alive.

This technology learns how to behave from past experience, just like human drivers. The car probably didn't expect the woman to walk right in front of it outside of an intersection or crosswalk. People do lurch into the roadway at random places but they usually ease up to let the car pass if there's no reasonable way the car could stop. When they don't let the car pass, this is what happens.

This feels more like something that will be eventually sold to billionaires, people wealthy enough to own and operate their own $50-100 million aircraft. The noise regs meant that a billionaire couldn't do supersonic travel to most places even though he could afford the plane. Get the noise down and now those supersonic business jets can be built, sold and operated pretty much worldwide.

How do we know that the U.S. side is responsible for the leaks and not the Brits? The statement of public anger could just be preemptive blame shifting by the UK government.

Not all of us. A lot of West Coast asses will be grass once Crazy Don vs. Crazy Jong gets going, but North Korea will be glowing long before they produce anything that can reach the rest of the U.S.

Anyone who grew up watching over-the-air analog TV knows that television can be enjoyed with a picture and signal far worse than even the most pissant phone provides today. I watched a whole season of a program on a video iPod, just because the thing was portable and handy. Video and sound quality were both better than what I grew up with. For one thing, the picture was in color.

Feed a dog and he'll never bite you. That's the difference between a dog and a man.

The question really is ill-posed. Even without infinite storage, infinite computation collapses the polynomial hierarchy. P = NP, P = PH and in fact P = PSPACE. You could fairly quickly boostrap your way to an AI that would let you describe (in natural language!) the actions you wanted the computer to take and have the computer either write the program or perform the actions directly. No clever programming needed during the bootstrapping, just brute force searches in polynomial space will be fast enough given an infinitely fast computer.

It's what Microsoft always does. The only reason they haven't embraced and extinguished interoperability on the Internet is that they were late arriving at that particular party. Nonetheless they made quite a go of it, particularly in the e-mail space in the 1990's. Slapdash implementations of POP, IMAP, (E)SMTP, MIME... to administer a mail system in those days was to suffer.