For those with an interest the book, "The Lunatic Express", by Charles Miller tells the saga of the construction of the Mombasa-Nairobi-Lake Victoria railway. If you saw the movie, "The Ghost and the Darkness", that bridge they were building was one small piece of the Mombasa... railway. An interesting book of engineering, rail history, and British imperialism.

If you search for the book don't confuse it with another book of the same title by Carl Hoffman (which is also an excellent book, btw).

Well, there was United Linux, a project with the goal of becoming the standard Linux distro. That was way back just after the turn of the century. That project fractured & died pretty quickly. I always liked their logo, though.

Your question is a good one, and valid. Red Hat have had the chance to become the "Standard Linux" (see the history of Scientific Linux & Centos for examples) more than once but, judging by their behavior, that's not what they want to be.

Admittedly a bit late now but you might have a look at the Debian 13 release notes.

https://www.debian.org/release...

Debian 13 Trixie released today.

Thanks, Debian people.

The SailGP sailboat racing teams run identical boats. The F50s are even all made in the same shop. That sets them apart from other racing games. In addition, all of the telemetry (and there's a lot) of each boat is available to all teams.

The goal is to distill everything as much as possible so that only the skill of the sailors makes the difference.

If you saw the movie, "Tenet", the sailing scene took place onboard an F50. With only a three person crew but, hey, it's a movie...

Anyway... enough about sailboat racing - and now back to our regularly scheduled programming...

Isaac Asimov wrote an essay about the first amino acids many years ago. It was included in a collection of essays (Why does ice float?, Why is the night sky black?and more...) titled, "The Left Handed Universe". So old the info may be long out of date, but an interesting read if you can find it.

There's a book about In-N-Out called, appropriately enough, "In and Out Burger", by Stacy Perman.

" In fast-food corporate America, In-N-Out Burger stands apart. Begun in a tiny shack in the shadow of World War II, this family-owned chain has steadfastly refused to franchise or be sold. It is a testament to old-fashioned values and reminiscent of a simpler time when people, loyalty, and a freshly made, juicy hamburger meant something..."

Even a JohnnyCab has a joystick which a person can use to drive. Well, after ripping out the robot driver... but, still...

I would think you'd need either the IMEI or phone number in order to even try to "target" (whatever that means) a specific phone. Otherwise, how would you do it?

Gonna miss trustworthy reviews containing sound, technical details. Much nicer than some YouTube review of a hard drive with inane drivel such as, "...and here you can see the label. Now, I sure wish they had decided to put the label on in this direction, instead. And, while we're at it, the label is just too large. A smaller label would be much neater and still able to hold all the information."

Is that "inevitable" as in, "We have no control over it" or "inevitable" as in, "We've already decided"?

Cities across the U.S. have been changing traffic patterns & street layouts in order to discourage automobile traffic. Changing four-lane streets to two, for example. Where I live there is a section of a 4 lane interstate which bottlenecks down to two and has been traffic-troublesome for decades. Now there's a plan in the works to finally expand that section of freeway and, of course, people are lining up to protest the expansion.

I'm not sure cities with this anti-auto traffic management philosophy truly want to make street traffic more efficient.

I just finished a book, "Epic Fails", by Salvador Jiménez Murguía, published in 2018. An entertaining read about such failures as the Microsoft Zune, new Coke, the mullet. etc..

One of the things that surprised me was that they mentioned only one Google product (Google Wave). I mean, regarding Google failures, how could you stop at just one?

The book, "The Idea Factory", by Jon Gertner, is a good history of Bell Labs.

Check out Better World Books for a great place to find used books at very reasonable prices.