Once I pulled an HDD out of an old TiVo for a desktop build (Gentoo, I think — this was a while back). I called the machine “voit” because it was an anagram of TiVo — but I particularly liked that it’s a homophone for Voight, of Voight-Kampff fame.

Interesting, TIL — thanks!

Books has become e-books.

To some extent — but have you been to a hip bookstore recently? They exist, and are very much alive.

Cashless requires power all the way from PoS to wherever the servers live.

Edit: see below

It makes for a mean cappuccino, and is environmentally much, much lower impact.

Compensation for engineers in the Bay area will average much higher than $200k, and that’s not counting benefits (medical, etc.). So cost to the company will be way higher than 200k/employee.

For a project that has hardware, there will be large expenses associated with that — custom silicon has huge setup costs, for example.