Espresso is a base for other coffee drinks, hot and cold. Putting a shot of room temperature espresso from a dispenser into one of those is going to save quite a bit of both time and money at the scale of something like a Starbucks franchise, and if you're getting your coffee from that kind of chain you're either not going to notice any difference anyway - or deny ever being there in the case of the coffee snobs. No more scooping grounds, prepping the machine, and forcing hot water through the grounds into the cup; the barista just shoves the cup under an optic, pushes a button, then moves onto the next step.

The real savings though are going to come for the manufacturers of those pre-bottled coffee drinks you find in the chillers at supermarkets; that's the kind of scale TFS is alluding to; where the coffee is brewed in industrial sized vats. Especially so if the concentrate approach is viable; add one 10L (or whatever) carton to your vat, then dilute with whatever milk/fake-milk/water/flavouring combinations needed to assemble your pre-bottled coffee-based drink. Coffee snobs are not admitting to buying those either. Also, as a side-benefit, there will be less waste as the grounds will be processed centrally so can be collected and fed into a suitable secondary product - they're excellent for providing fertiliser for some plants, for instance.

All of which probably saves you enough power and money (globally) to run a single AI data centre for a few minutes, but such is the price of progress I guess. :)

They're going to make 30% of the population immortal and you think the number is made up?

I'd like to see corporations able to be tried as people. 5 year jail sentence = 5 year government ownership.

Tie it to GDP and use it to make sure no companies get too big to fail so we don't need to socialize the risk. It'll also assure that there's competition.

I think we're both somewhat sarcastic, but there is a certain beauty to using it as a way to foster competition and reduce the need for bail outs.

I'm not into socialism, but I'm not convinced it's worse than 1 company having control of what's today's entire GDP in the relatively short term. And that's what SpaceX is claiming they'll have in the case for their valuation.

I had kits for both an Eagle and a Hawk (which is somewhat surprising in retrospect given it only appeared in one or two episodes, IIRC). The Eagle model was a much more complex kit with far more parts than the Hawk, which was also somewhat smaller despite them both supposedly being to the same scale. Tbh, I always thought the Hawk was the cooler looking ship due to its more aggressive lines, which is probably why it was blessed with a model kit, but you can't argue with the sheer practicality & flexibility of the modular Eagle design. And its ability to survive so many crashes - usually at the hands of Alan Carter - of course!

There was also a range of diecast toys and plastic action figures for the series, I think.

This. The problem isn't the technology; that can demonstrably be shown to work in models and simulations because of things like - as you say - needing less space between vehicles, and also more complex things like reducing capillary action in the overall traffic flow (the stop-start effect you often get in heavy traffic). The reason why you don't see those benefits is the growing number of entitled drivers who ignore the signage in the hope of gaming the system for personal gain (e.g. shorter travel time), so you do need robust enforcement with stricter tolerances and more punitive fines to try and deter that.

It's the classic Prisoner's Dilemma. The best solution for the greater good is to obey the signage, but the best solution for the individual is almost always to look out for Number One. Smart traffic flow systems do still seem to improve things, despite entitled drivers, although that's probably more down to the enforcement measures keeping those bending the rules from bending them as far as they'd like to.

No, I'm pointing out where the slippery slope goes. The US has its approach to business ownership and control, China has theirs, the rest is semantics.

Functionally, there is not a lot of difference between a company with direct ties to the Chinese government that is obligated to share data on the QT, because that is what Chinese law says they have to do, and a US one that receives a National Security Letter and does the same, because that's what US law says they have to do. It's pretty much an open secret at this point that the NSA et al are plugged into most of the big tech companies and have been for ages (cf. Room 641a), so if the US and China were to end up in a game of tit-for-tat on this and don't hit the brakes it could go an awfully long way in directions that might not be immediately apparent, and that will have repercussions elsewhere in the world as well.

ALL of them, from the tech giants all the way down to the smallest of "Mom & Pop" stores. They pay their taxes (mostly), then Congress allocates a proportion of those taxes to the DoD's budget, which then spends them on the MIC. Pretty much the same as any country, including China.

The US is stepping onto a very slippery slope here, and if the Chinese start to respond in kind then it's an awfully long way down given it's pretty clear by now that Trump has no clue that playing tit-for-tat isn't a good strategy. They could legitimately start with Boeing and the like, of course, because they directly manufacture military hardware, then move onto the service/support part of the MIC and companies like Microsoft and OpenAI, and if things really get out of control into the supply chain, then that's an awfully big web that is going to reach into some very unexpected places, including some of those "Mom & Pops". The rest of the world will quite naturally want no part of that trade war (which is what this really is), so don't be surprised if this kind of thing just accelerates their on-going pivot away from US suppliers to reduce the impact of any blowback.

Fortunately, as we saw with tariffs, Xi Jinping (and just about everyone else) does seem to realise that is a poor strategy though, so it might not be a fast decent into chaos before sanity prevails, but that also just buys more time for the smarter players to make their pivot towards alternative supply chains.

I'm pretty sure a data center cutoff is bad on an under voltage too.

1) grid under supplies and voltage drops
2a) grid requests more power from flexible (gas) plants
2b) HUGE customers completely cut their draw
3) more power with less demand causes huge over voltage

Is Twitter operating just as well?

The gutted moderation lead to a lot less advertisers bidding on views.

The unreliability of the service during the transition to being so far reduced dramatically reduced the number of daily users.

The company isn't public, so we don't know if it's making more/losing less money than it was. But we can be pretty certain that the operations are not the same (reduced users less money per user).

They probably didn't want to do a large build if it's 30% price increase on a years old device.

You need to dock it to do work.

But a sub $50 dongle on a desk with a monitor, mouse, and keyboard you're good to go.

In that sense it's sort of less portable than a laptop (need the work desk reserved for it), but in other ways it's more portable (smaller and lighter). The same device can dock at a TV and be a console, or dock at a desk and be an office PC. It's pretty convenient if you have multiple use spaces that are fixed. It's very inconvenient to take to the cafe and work.

and yet the only photo is clearly not a steam deck.

Seems as likely planted misinformation as real.

I doubt the price will come back down.

It'll stay this price until the deck 2 comes out, and the deck 2 will release at this price (Valve has basically said they were shocked to learn that people wanted to spend more on more powerful devices than the steam deck, but people did).