Not sure it's possible to say this without being pithy, but haven't there been stories told, perhaps TV episodes and films made, regarding the concept of using human bodies to generate power in support of machine intelligence?
Seems a little on the nose to me, but I guess some days it's hard to tell what's a gag and what's a legit pitch.
To be fair, regional burns are basically Burning Man without the techbro yuppie contingent. A lot more randos, hippies, and weirdos. More like summer camp for grownups than a place to show off on IG or whatever people use these days.
*(Caveat, haven't been to one in the last 5 or 6 years so things may have changed. As always, "it was better next year!")
Yep, had that and a Touch Pro before getting a Pre and then finally (begrudgingly) accepting that there weren't gonna be any more higher-end phones with slide-out keyboards.
Mine got a hairline crack in the chassis next to the charging port, but the magnetic charger didn't have the same issue (obviously). There were plenty of issues with the Pre and immediate followups didn't do enough to solve them. That said, it was probably the last really "interesting" phone design I owned.
There was a little while where we still had unencrypted digital cable (in the US at least). I'm sure it's still around in some places, but we lost the option years ago where I live.
Digital cable (QAM or ClearQAM) came across the same wire as the rest of the stuff...cable internet, encrypted digital cable, etc. and you could tune it with any compatible ATSC tuner like the one built into most TVs and loads of cheap capture cards.
I always hated the "digital cable boxes" required for encrypted content, but for a while, an old PC with a capture card and Windows Media Center let me have a much nicer interface and DVR without the extra rental costs. In fact, I once lived in a building that was split into three apartments and we found that as long as one of us had cable internet, we also had ClearQAM cable TV...
...which I imagine is why they got rid of it. Cable modems need to be provisioned. Cable boxes need to be rented if you want to decrypt the channels you'd paid to authorize decryption of. But QAM was just on the wire. So easy to use and so easy to mooch, so the cable company used the confusion around the switch from OTA analog/digital switch to also remove QAM and switch everyone over to those rented decoder boxes.
Incidentally, it's also when I stopped watching cable TV. The boxes were an additional cost for a worse experience than I had with the built-in tuner or my HTPC. I thought about getting a new capture card with CableCard support, but that standard was a huge pain in the ass and never really took off outside of Tivo and similar turnkey devices. Thankfully, it's also when streaming and other OTT services started to take off.
I got stuck trying to explain (without being the annoying "well, actually" guy) why my SO's phone wasn't screwed up when switching from ATT to a different carrier.
Because on the old SIM it said 5G dammit! Now it only says 4G so how is that not slower??
There are a few good "un-frak your youtube" extensions as well. I've got mine set to disable autoplay, trending, chat, "related" at the end of video playback, and recommendations. Helps quite a bit.
Not sure when it was last updated, but for at least the past few years, any time I tap to install an application I got from a dev's site or whatever, it basically says "hey, you haven't given permission to install apps from this source. doing so might not be safe, etc." with a link/button to take you to the menu with the relevant toggle.
As an end user, it's akin to typing my root password to clicking "accept" on Windows UAC. I can still install it just fine, but I need to give permission and check the box accepting responsibility.
Whether that's enough to protect someone from doing something unwise can be debated, but it's not something you'd really need instructions for.