Thunderbolt (4 etc) has been leading to things like external graphics cards and external PCI slot boxes hitting the market. This may end up taking a significant share of the "expandability" crowd away from the "internal upgrades" market.

I see this as especially significant with laptops. For years I've been using a large thunderbolt dock with my laptop at home, making it a pretty good desktop machine when I'm at home. It adds a 24" display, big external speakers and bass, camera, conference mic, external storage, gig ethernet, etc. And yet I can pull a single plug, stuff it in the bag, and hit the road with it, something not easy to do with a desktop computer. (not that it stopped us from hauling towers, monitors, keyboards, etc to LAN games in the 90s!)

I'm a little surprised I haven't seen performance CPUs or additional ram available via thunderbolt 4 yet. (or does it exist and I've just missed it?)

Maybe the next "mac pro" won't be a stand-alone computer, but instead it'll be a plug-in accessory that turns ANY mac into a mac pro?

It's been through several major design changes, maybe it'll get re-released with a more "classic" design sometime down the road?

this looks like the EVs are going to be forced to decide in advance on the trolly car problem. "Do I save my passenger by injuring pedestrians, or almost certainly get my passenger killed?"

This is going to have to be coded in software. And if you think you can just avoid coding it, the choice will be made for you, BY THE CODE. It's a binary decision, you can't opt out of making the decision because INACTION is one of your options.

So eventually legislation is going to have to get on the books to answer it. From what I can tell, right now it's not codified in law for people, and they're letting prosecutors, judges, and occasionally juries decide whether the "correct" decision was made by a human in such cases. You can't take a car to court, so for liability reasons it's going to have to have a definitive answer in code, because coders, development teams, and entire corporations are going to get dragged up on the stand to answer to charges based on the decisions that were (or were NOT) hard-coded. All sides are going to force it - injured passengers, injured pedestrians, and survivors of fatalities.

All of the "smart glasses" that I've seen are pretty obvious. They're bulky, with an easy to spot camera, and many of them even have a drop-down display panel. I'm amazed they were able to get up on the stand without anyone noticing/objecting before they even got sworn in.

This means nobody knows how a particular voter voted

My point was that it should NEVER be possible for ANYONE to determine how an individual voted. I don't care if you promise to encrypt it. That information shouldn't be stored anywhere, in any form, encrypted or otherwise.

So if THAT'S their reason for encrypting it, people need to take a step back and think about the reason.

2^11 is certainly a "convenient" number.

makes me wonder if the voting sample was much larger, and some weird bug trashed the first 2^11 votes somehow. Maybe the first block of a file got corrupted or something like that?

Signed? Sure, that makes perfect sense. But encrypted? Why do you even want to do that? Unless the ballot isn't anonymous and you can see who voted for which candidates, but I certainly hope you're not trying to do that?

160Wh is a pretty big power bank. (and they're "limiting" you to TWO?) My "big" bank is 96Wh. Maybe these people are trying to bring miniature "portable power stations" on the flight to run their laptop for hours?

If the airlines gave the passengers USB (C?) jacks at every seat, there'd be no need for powerbank use on a flight?

Just have an AI bot live your life for you, giving you the time for the sweet, sweet release of death,

considering the NUMEROUS recent cold-weather debacles, solar and batteries are probably the best responses possible. Those are the most cold-resistant things on the grid. (wind is pretty resistant too but I don't think Texas gets a lot of wind?)

For how reliant they were on natural gas and nuclear, neither had been hardened against cold. Batteries are pretty foolproof there. And since they've voluntarily isolated their grid, batteries are the only safety net option available to them.

don't forget Thing from Munsters

I remember my Apple //c booting up in about five seconds, off a 5.25" floppy. I'll never forget the distinctive sound Apple DOS made when booting.
B-R-R-R-R-R-R-R.. chk-chk, chk, chhhhhhhhhk
(I used FaskDisk, which helped quite a bit with disk access speed by optimizing sector interleave)

Times were probably the worst on the Mac Classics, booting off their 2.5" discs could take 20-30 seconds before the desktop appeared, and another 20 seconds of really sluggish user interface while the rest of the bits loaded and launched in the background.

Nowadays a reboot can take about 20 seconds to get to the desktop and be responsive, though MOST of the time I reboot is due to an OS update, which can take 10 minutes to install and reboot a few times.

I wonder how many cars ran into buildings that same day? or that week, or that month?

The only reason we hear about this is it's novel.

It's like comparing airplane crashes with car crashes. Frequency of occurrence: 1:10,000. Frequency of media coverage: 10,000:1

It's impossible to tell how unusual something is baed on whether or not it made the 6:00 news.

"If you continue to behave lawfully, we will continue to arrest you!"

alrightie then.

The latest news I've read on these is they generate milliwatts in square meters of space, and are about as useful as those "nuclear batteries" people were scamming around (again...) recently.

The only application for tech with that low of a power return is satellites?