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. :)

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.

The first American to orbit, John Glenn, was also a Marine.

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.

Why?

Even if you could do that effectively, wouldn't that further entrench the idea that The People are the government's bitch

I'm assuming that when they do one of those distribution plots of the output values (the ones that show clear patterns for pseudo random generators when run for long enough) they can prove that the distribution is totally uniform, and with time as a further axis, every attempt achieves that even distribution in a different sequence. That implies they can account for, or negate the impact of, every potential variable in the system.

Lava lamps (like Cloudflare actually use as part of their RNG, IIRC) might be just as good, but mathematically proving that could be a little more challenging, and there may be any number of corner case effects, such as the temperature on either side of the glass or minute variations in the heating coils, that cause an almost imperceptable bias towards the denser coloured fluid in the lamp being in certain parts of the lamp than others for short periods of time.

As to whether we need this, quite probably not. However, TFS does propose use as a kind of "master clock" to regulate other systems that would be less precise (or random, in this case) on their own. Whether that's more cost effective or practical than just combining multiple sources of randomness together to get a single output data stream I guess will be determined by any users that really, really, need a truly random data stream, and how the realities of a post-quantum world eventually play out. If you are in some kind of situation where an adversary can keep retrying at a suitable rate and only needs to predict/guess the next in sequence correctly once to "win", then perfect randomness over a sufficiently large search area is something you are going to be all over.

See my post above for a bit more detail, but this looks like it could be an SPF include failure. They have included "_spf-ssg-a.microsoft.com" in the SPF, which in turn includes "spf.protection.outlook.com". AFAIK, that's basically the Outlook.com webmail service, so quite possibly at least some, and possibly any, users of that service could impersonate "microsoftonline.com" and get an SPF pass.

If so then yeah, that's *totally* the kind of lack of attention to detail you tend to expect from Microsoft.

It was (and still is), but this is the problem that SPF was designed to solve (as opposed to being the FUSSP some made it out to be). If you have a critical domain that you use for sensitive stuff, like "microsoftonline.com", or any bank's domain, etc, then you need to be very specific on your SPF record's contents and make sure it has an "-all" in there to force a reject for failures, rather than the looser "~all" or (heaven forbid) "+all" which is really only intended for testing. Spammers know this, and seldom waste their time trying to spoof domains that will cause a failure; every domain I have setup SPF with "-all" on has seen Joe-Job bounces drop to zero pretty much overnight. DKIM works slightly differently, but adds another layer to this. Microsoft for sure knows this too and does indeed do both, but that doesn't mean you can't slip up and leave a hole somewhere.

So, taking a quick look, as things stand, the SPF record for "microsoftonline.com" is:

"v=spf1 ip4:216.32.180.228 include:spfa.microsoftonline.com include:spf-exacttarget.microsoftonline.com include:spf-msods.microsoftonline.com include:spf-mfa.microsoftonline.com include:_spf-ssg-a.microsoft.com -all"

They've got the "-all" in there, which is good, but also a whole bunch of "include" directives, including one that refers to ExactTarget a third party MSP, but the one that appears like it could possibly be the problem is the last one. That contains a further include, and in there is "spf.protection.outlook.com". All the includes do have "-all" but, AFAIK, that domain covers the outbound mail gateways for a least some parts of the Outlook.com webmail service, so if the spammers have been able to a suitable account using a server within one of the many IP ranges listed in that include that doesn't properly restrict the domains able to send their mail, then they are good to go.

I think it's more horses for courses, and can also vary considerably between what different demographics, both contemporary and historical, think of as "perfection". Hollywood is largely driven by white western males, so they naturally favour your "20% silicone", although that does seem to be undergoing a gradual change of late, but that's not the case for world cinema as a whole; you'll find far fewer wannabe Barbie Dolls in African cinema, for instance.

From a people portraiture perspective, especially candids, there is also a night and day difference between what a photographer would most typically want to shoot in a studio vs. on the street. The former is very much about some ideal of perfection, with hours spent on makeup and clothing the model(s) and setting up the lighting rigs, before the camera even gets turned on, whereas in the streets and fields, you are totally going to home in the people with the most interesting features, and those often tend to be very much the definition of imperfection. You are actively looking for the aged faces with more lines than a metro map, more piercings/tats than Vogue would likely ever consider acceptable, and anything else that really tells a story about the kind of life the viewer of the resultant image might imagine them to live. For the right images, there is absolutely value that can be measured in both clicks and dollars there too.

Also, why limit it to women implanting silicone to comply with some visual aspirational idea of perfection being forced on them by men (mostly), media, and entirely unrealistically proportioned dolls? Have you seen the lengths some men are going to as part of the "looksmaxxxing" fad? There's going to be a Darwin Award winner there real soon now, I'm sure.

Doesn't count until we see some in the wild.

Actually, I think it was Fred Schwed Jr. 86 years ago, but still just as relevant. In case it's not obvious from the fee, this is totally not about making YOU financially better off.