Admittedly this is a problem I did not consider because I'm from Germany and our plugs are reversible. Likewise, plugspreading is less of a problem because most power strips have the sockets at a 45-degree angle. Purely Europlug power strips are affected but few people use them because they're incompatibe with Schuko plugs.

Besides, plugspreading becomes less of a problem if you buy a multi-port USB power brick or two. I just spent fifteen bucks on a 30W three-port brick with one Quick Charge 3 port. It's not much bigger than your typical smartphone charger, has its USB ports at the end and replaces three separate chargers. That cleared up a lot of space on the power strip.

Or you can go straight for a power strip with built-in USB ports.

(As for the Apple: You do realize that it only supplies 5W? Their 12W device has a less convenient form factor - in fact, the 18W charger that came with my smartphone has a smaller footprint than Apple's 12W one.)

That has its own downsides:

Firstly, this would make smartphone chargers unneccessarily big. Those things fit in a pocket and it's good that way. (The oh-so-terrible waste of space by a smartphone charger shown in TFA could have been solved by moving the charger one outlet to the right. The horror.)

Secondly, this would mean adding cables rated for 240V AC to devices that are supposed to supply 5V or maybe 12V DC. That's a waste of copper.

You are aware that Slashdot is a social media site? It's not the share-your-life kind of social media but its heavy emphasis on discussion does make it social media.

Of course the rest of your point still stands. Non-pseudonymous social media are inherently dangerous and Facebook is about as trustworthy as a guy waving around a burning torch inside a fireworks factory.

Single button press, yes. But then the till takes a few seconds each to enable the card reader and deal with the completion of the transaction because the POS system is, well, a POS. Like many POS systems are. Of course some stores are faster than that but, well, our cashiers are super fast already so even a substantial improvement over cash doesn't save a significant amount of time.

I'm from Germany, actually. Our cashiers are damn fast so there's not much of a speed bonus to going cashless. Maybe if you use your phone and have it auto-approve every transaction but we're still talking a few seconds here. I'll stick with cash.

Not in my experience. (Note that self-service kiosks aren't really a thing outside of vending machines where I live so my experience always involves cashiers.) For cashless you have to tell the cashier to use a card, wait for them to turn on the card/NFC terminal, wait for the terminal to recognize the card/device, wait for the server to issue a challenge, enter your pin and then wait for your response to be verified. Takes twenty seconds if everything goes well and up to a minute if something goes wrong and the cashier has to restart the transaction.

For cash you give your money to someone who spends half of their workday efficiently sorting currency into and out of an organized box, then take back the change. Ten seconds if you're lucky, thirty if you're really not.

There's an app called Duet Display that turns an iOS device into a second screen with a touch bar. A friend of mine uses it and seems to like it.

And a whole bunch of those don't need a Mac Pro in the first place. For instance, the company I work for offers a Xamarin-based app. Our iOS build server is an older Mac mini, which is still plenty fast for our purposes - despite the fact that building a Xamarin app for iOS is extremely slow due to architectural decisions by Apple. Unless you regularly need to build something really big you're probably going to get away with something less expensive than a Mac Pro.

The ashtray is really a completely different beast than the cheese grater. It's more akin to a souped up Mac mini. Cool if you need a silent and beefy desktop computer; less cool if you need a crazy powerful workstation.

And I agree - the cheese grater gave you space for expansion, relied on standardized internal interfaces for good interoperability and had tons of ports. Those are all things Apple don't like in their hardware these days.

I fail to see how jet engines employ frequency-division multiplexing, which you insist is a necessary requirement for using the term "broadband". Of course if you use the term "frequency-division multiplexing" vaguely enough it describes any medium in which signals of differing frequencies can occur at the same time – but in that case the sun becomes an implementation of FDM since its light is not monochromatic. Either FDM describes an implementation that specifically takes advantage of the medium's capacity for multiple signals to convey multiple streams of data (which jet engines don't) or the term itself is pointless because it is synonymous with "any analog signal".

Also, again, it's plainly obvious that the usage of "broadband" for fast internet speeds was coined by means of analogy, just like we use terms like "stream" or "data flow" despite no liquids being involved. The observed thing behaves similarly enough to something we already have a name for to suggest the adaptation of the existing name.

Again, "broadband" has been coined independently by several different groups of people. The fact that some used it to describe a specific technology does not change the fact that different people have used it to describe different things. For instance, here is a patent from the 50s for an antenna that uses the term without having anything to do with FDM beyond the fact that radio signals have a finite bandwidth. Here is a paper from 1988 that refers to "broadband" acoustic signals.

The common ground for these definitions is "has a relatively large bandwidth", which would make "broadband" a natural fit. Using the term for internet speeds was a small step since in the domain of radio transmissions an increase in bandwidth generally corellates to an increase in data transmission capacity.

"Boadband" has never been particularly well defined. It can be used to mean "wideband", it can be used to mean "every signal that isn't passband" and it can be used to mean "every signal that occupies multiple non-masking channels". All of those definitions are correct. The meaning of "transmission speeds generally considered fast" has been in general use for well over two decades now, making it about as uncontroversial as the use of "to hack" in a context that doesn't involve an axe.

Broadband has never had anything to do with FDM specifically. Or rather, there have always been definitions of the term that didn't have anything to do with FDM.

You can replace a character with a different version and have it work. DC did so repeatedly with Green Lantern and despite the fact that they ended up with multiple Green Lanterns at the same time it seems to work well. The various iterations of Blue Beetle are another example (although BB is a lower-tier character than GL, of course). You do need to be very careful about doing this with A-listers but it can work if done right and in good measure.

The main problem is that Marvel hasn't been careful at all; it seems that they replaced their entire A-list roster in a short period of time. (Spider-Man just got more alternate versions of various characters, as is tradition.)

Do watch the new one, though. It's really good.

We were actually sober. That game really is a pretty damn good party game.

Kinect Star Wars. The game has a terrible reputation; it's often seen as a total joke. However, my experience with it is a bit different.

A friend who has an X360 wanted to host a barbecue night and wanted to get a multiplayer-friendly game for that. I talked him into getting Kinect Star Wars as a joke before we'd get to the real games. So we put it in, got everything set up and launched straight into the dance minigame.

Six hours later we had finally obtained top ranking on all songs, burned off almost as many calories as we had consumed and were convinced that Kinect Star Wars is the best game ever released for the Xbox 360. It's silly, yes, but there is something to be said in favor of a game where a gothic lolita Death Star gunner meets Boba Fett for a dance-off in an Imperial disco while a recruitment song set to the tune of YMCA plays. (Just search YouTube for "Empire Today extended", although the player there scandalously does not use Odella as his character.)