We still have no clear answers on Vegas. While odds are currently low for multiple shooters – certainly for multiple shooters that were in other rooms in Mandalay Bay – there are conflicting reports, and the discovery that the Vegas security guard appears to be an illegal certainly explains a lot of the weirdness about timelines.

On a lighter note:

Ever wish you could just get away from it all? A 62-year-old British man grew so tired of his wife’s incessant nagging that he decided to up and leave everything behind, ditching his on-the-grid lifestyle and his unhappy marriage for a decade of living off the land.

I think the headline, “Man Lived In Woods For Years To Escape Angry Wife“, says it all.

On the topic of the failure of computer standards, and how trying to create a new one usually results in one more standard, not a replacement for several:

I love the idea of USB-C: one port and one cable that can replace all other ports and cables. It sounds so simple, straightforward, and unified.

In practice, it’s not even close.

USB-C normally transfers data by the USB protocol, but it also supports Thunderbolt… sometimes. The 12-inch MacBook has a USB-C port, but it doesn’t support Thunderbolt at all. All other modern MacBook models support Thunderbolt over their USB-C ports… but if you have a 13-inch model, and it has a Touch Bar, then the right-side ports don’t have full Thunderbolt bandwidth.

If you bought a USB-C cable, it might support Thunderbolt, or it might not. There’s no way to tell by looking at it. There’s usually no way to tell whether a given USB-C device requires Thunderbolt, either — you just need to plug it in and see if it works.

Much of USB-C’s awesome capability comes from Thunderbolt and other Alternate Modes. But due to their potential bandwidth demands, computers can’t have very many USB-C ports, making it especially wasteful to lose one to a laptop’s own power cable. The severe port shortage, along with the need to connect to non-USB-C devices, inevitably leads many people to need annoying, inelegant, and expensive dongles and hubs.

Pretty much the most damning thing is having to carry my own spares rather than the “dongle” aspect so that I know what I have will work, and not really keeping a TB3 cable around, because while a TB3 port will usually work fine with USB-C cables, the opposite is not true. Outside of some small icons on the cables themselves, it’s difficult to tell at a glance, because the ends are identical, which one you’re dealing with.