supportlocal4h

It can be true and still be problematic. If a small city has 100 LEO, and 15 are bad apples, the overwhelming majority still want to do the right thing.

Unfortunately 15 is still a very big problem. If they can break the law with impunity it can rightly be said that the police force is doing more harm than good. Even outnumbered 6:1 the bad apples have a larger effect on the community.

Unless the 85 good apples focus their attention specifically on the 15 above all other crime. If they enforce the law against the 15 until the problem goes away, or until the ratio is 30:1 and it is really hard for the 3 bad apples to collude... well then maybe.

No organization is perfect. But the rule enforcers have to be held to a higher standard.

As a USian, I think it is super important to question a super power that takes it upon themselves to protect the rest of the world's democracies--even if they have to force them into democracy first.

The same way I think it is super important to challenge Russia's current defense against Ukrainian aggression.

In the USA, the BLM administers some 18000 permits to farmers and ranchers who pay them grazing fees.[0] Then cattle wander on that range exactly as you propose.

The BLM also employs snipers and gunmen to intimidate ranchers who don't pay the grazing fees. Some ranchers respond with impromptu militias.

Sometimes things escalate to the point that goverment agents kill protesters. Sometimes law enforcement officers get assassinated.

But mostly, cattle graze as you suggest and the BLM collects grazing fees.

[0] https://www.blm.gov/programs/natural-resources/rangelands-an...

Then you have a dispute about who owns the 10000s of acres and who to pay for the grazing rights. And who is responsible for maintaining all that range? And can somebody be tried twice for a mistake in their management of open range? Then people with and without badges show up with guns.

Ok, that hardly ever happens.

Try scheduling activities around all those Starlink sats.

When I first heard of the balloon I thought it was brilliant. I am always amused at relatively cheap ideas that cost your opponent a lot. I figured this would cost the U.S. a lot. Even the President might waste 20 minutes with 15 highly paid experts being briefed on the balloon. It sounds like I was wrong about that. News reports stated the President was receiving regular ballon briefings.

I'm sure resources were diverted to get close video of the payload. Rooms full of people were tasked to analyze whether object 47 was a camera and if so what type of lens it was fitted with and what were its capabilities. Could object 117 be used to inject colored smoke into lower altitude air streams? What effect might that have on our already reduced chicken population?

How much did th U.S. spend to shoot this thing down, or even just to make the decision whether to shoot it down?

If we take the names out of the story, it might look different to U.S. fans. If one country could spend, say, $5000 on a toy project that would cause a $5000000 response, that seems like a great strategy. For instance, Ukraine would love to spend $5000 on the edge of Crimea that would be this distracting to Russia.

These are very good points to ponder seriously.

You can change your circumstances in another way. Reduce your expenses despite all the money that's coming in. Then find something important to you. It feels like it should be something altruistic. Funnel money to it. But also funnel your time and energy.

Buy some property in Detroit and build a safe house there. Fly in once a month to be involved, actually forming concrete, or roofing, or whatever. Then be involved in forming the management team, and be the board chair or something.

Or found an IT version of a farmer's market. Whatever that means.

Design and build a cylindrical windmill that stinks, but can be installed on balconies to harvest $5 of energy per month. Then invite people who know what they're doing to teach you how to get that up to $20/month and cost only $50 to build. Refine it until you can distribute kits.

Launch a wheelchair repair service. Coach a 4H club.

I know recent events have made altruism look bad, but I'm not advocating... well, I guess maybe I am. I never really looked into it, so I don't know. But I know it feels kinda good to shovel a neighbor's driveway every so often.

Sure. You take the two ladies who built and maintain your homegrown system and you run them through 6 months of training on Actions and Pipelines and Agents along with two other employees, then give them a Director and an official dept like "DevOps". Now you're ready for a new workflow. See all the hassle and money you've saved?

Agreed. But it was pretty clear that the world needed more than File Servers and Print Servers. NLMs weren't a clear path forward, either. We needed app servers. Desktops and workstations ran apps. Servers ran... well, servers. Windows could run both and so could Unix. Netware? Not really.

Of course that was a junior high understanding of software. But such odd views mattered. You could run Groupwise email or Oracle on Netware, but it felt off. You could write a Perl script and have it run in Apache and talk to sendmail on Linux. You could run a VisualBasic app on Windows and have it talk to Sybase and cc:Mail.

Maybe that VB app ran on a client, but the distinction between a client and a server could get blurry. Client-server apps became n-tier apps. Windows could do that. Netware really couldn't. Unix could do it amazingly. And not just Linux.

Redhat had this vision. Suse had it pre-Novell. Some people at Novell had it. But corporate vision is a challenge. And Netware was a champion. It is hard for humans to throw away the horse that made you a king and jump onto some other horse. Especially if you have to convince your customers to stay in your saddle.

It wasn't easy for Microsoft either. There was that whole OS/2 thing and LanManager and all kinds of awkward. The path forward was super murky for everyone in 1992. And Microsoft failed again and again against Netware.

But Netware really lost to BSDs and Linux as an app server. And *nix eventually lost to Windows as a directory server. By the time Novell got around to hosting their best-in-class directory server on a capable app server, it was too late. AD got good enough before anybody else put something as good as NDS on Unix. And of course, Windows clients had built in support that nobody outside was ever going to match as far as GPO capabilities.

All that said, history isn't over. The world is still waiting for a better client app server than Windows or Android. Or at least a better ecosystem. It isn't going to come from Redhat. It hasn't come from Google yet. There is room for a client OS with great Directory integration to take over enterprise computing. It won't be easy, but the right vision could pair with the right marketing to create a new winner. Funny enough, the biggest obstacle to that would be replacing AD.

Netware was huge, for its day. It beat back Microsoft more successfully than anyone else managed in the 80s and 90s.

Eventually, they came up with a stellar app OS: Suse. But they never got the business side pointed straight.

In the end, I would say Microsoft won for the strangest reason of all. They gave their desktop OS and their server OS the same name. And even though everyone that mattered knew they weren't the same, it somehow mattered that the desktop OS had such large market share.

Because Netware failed to catch the TCP/IP wave, but Suse caught it. But Windows servers could run Windows apps and Linux could not. And Novell never figured out to go all-in on Linux as an app server. The business side never made the leap. Well, at least not in time.

If you stick with Apple you buy yourself a whole new ecosystem every three years anyway.

I am not a fan of walled gardens and vendor lockin, but come on. Take some personal responsibility for your situation.

Don't complain that it is Nintendo's fault that you've paid a lot of money for consoles, controllers, games, etc. and now you're trapped.

You bought a BMW and all the add-on subscriptions for working radio, seat warmers, race mode. Now you're trapped.

If you think Apple or John Deere or Coca-Cola are a problem, then switch. If you think there are no other options, you are wrong. You are just unwilling to suck it up and do what needs to be done.

Sometimes it takes determination and effort to live up to principles.

You may say thay one person cannot turn the tide. This is usually true. Thank goodness that millions of Ukranians haven't used that as an excuse.

Reputation is a real thing.

Hyundai left the U.S. market in part because a disastrous reputation made sales difficult.

When they returned, they knew they had to overcome their existing rep. They offered warranties that meant the consumer couldn't lose. Then they proved that their new offerings were industry best at reliability and maintainability. Even today they put their money where their mouth is beyond anything "Detroit" is willing to match. And they have flipped the field. Now it's competitors like GM that suffer rep problems.

Kitchenaid built an amazing rep. More recently they have moved to plastic parts. Their rep will reflect that.

For better or worse, Linux and Windows still feel the effects of decades of reputation.

And yet, I can still buy a "not smart" phone. Because enough people have voted with their wallets. There is a market worth $millions there and vendors willing to meet the demand.

<grandpa voice> When I was a child </grandpa>

our home used the same phone for 20+ years. Now they are stocking stuffers every year.

And it's not because they got dirt cheap. Somehow somebody convinced us that life with an old phone is unbearable, even if it still works the same as it did on day one.

The idea that manufacturers would raise prices simply because a product lives longer flies in the face of Econ 100. Any time you raise prices you increase the opportunity for competition. Any improvement without raising prices gives you a competetive advantage.

It may be that the longer life comes at some cost to the manufacturer. That can safely be added to the price because any competitor would also incur similar costs to add similar value. However, if the additional cost adversely affects the price per unit of life it could very well hurt the manufacturer. A $10 wrench that lasts 10 years could be perceived as a better choice than a $15 wrench that lasts 12 years. And of course it would be a better purchase than a $12 wrench that lasts 15 years for somebody who loses their wrenches about every 8 years.

So single-factor Econ 100 homework might be over-simplified, but the principle should not be ignored.

Please explain which license would be violated?

Is an encryption key copyrightable? Or a password?

Is it illegal to recite a copywrited work? Is it illegal to recite a translation of a copywrited work?

Can you copyright a number? For instance, a long binary number? If a piece of code contains a long binary number that it transmits to another device as a raw number, does it matter if the other device can arbitrarily interpret that number as a copyrighted work using SJIS or ASCII or some tortured encoding created just to turn a specific number into a specific copyrighted work? If the number was stored in UTF8 so that each 1 was encoded as 00000001 then decoded to a 1 for transmission, can you really claim any copywrite violation?

And why does my brain waste time thinking up such questions?

I want compatability in a whole different direction. Let's get really crazy and rip the db out from under vendor solutions. Let their app with its compiled in Oracle driver communicate with a Pg server. We'll completely void any support contract we have, but at least we'll be Oracle free!

Can you imagine just swapping in Postgres under a Peoplesoft deployment? As long as you don't make me actually attempt it, it makes me chuckle.

Imagine a desalination process funded in part by producing battery-grade sodium.

All you practical people who wait until there is real world manufacturing promise are missing out on the pleasure of wild imagination.

Yep. Kinda like manufacturing cars is highly regulated. Or selling them without local dealerships. Or manufacturing industrial warehouse-sized batteries. Or building and operating an international network of charging stations.

It is pretty common for anybody with even the smallest fleet to own their own gas pump. Say a farmer with one tractor, or a flower shop with two vans.

In a world with gas stations on every corner, your argument would suggest this is foolish.

So perhaps the owners don't consider it a huge amount of capitol. Or perhaps they've found a reason or two.

But if I operated a distribution center where dozens of trucks were parked at my docks pretty much around the clock, I'd do a bit of napkin math. 1000 square meters of rooftop solar feeding giant batteries connected to 10 charging stations selling juice at $.25/kwh to trucks who are stuck here for the next hour regardless.

And I don't have to pay Exxon a penny and I wouldn't need a constant stream of tankers refilling underground tanks?

Hand me another napkin. How much battery do I need? How often would I have to replace the cables that reach from the dock to the cab? How much do those cables cost? Hmmm. Hand me another napkin...

It's interesting that Tesla hasn't made a splashy entrance into generation.

Which is one reason for team driving. One person drives while the other person sleeps. E-semis might not have cracked that nut yet.

But they don't have to solve every challenge at once. D-semis have been around forever and still haven't displaced trains. Obviously, they still have value. Where e-semis make sense, people will use them. Same for e-vans and e-bikes and e-tugboats.

And yes, people will still use d-semis and d-vans and gas scooters and horses. And clever people will keep finding ways to get the job done, whatever that job may be.

Speed relative to what?

My house is up 370%. My neighbor's house is down.

Meanwhile, we both stayed warm and dry last night.

A company like the BBC can post content to their own website completely under their own control. They can build their own platform that completely controls commenting. They can pay a large staff to build and maintain that platform exactly as they see fit. So why do they need Twitter?

Seriously, what is the value of Twitter for them? It isn't the same as for the masses who need somebody else to build and maintain all that infrastructure. For entities capable of running their own networks, Twitter and TikTok and all the other "social media" serve a different function. Indeed, when you are not only capable of running your own datacenters but actually do run them and operate your own media network, but still include Instagram as a core component of your business strategy, it is because it provides a value you aren't realizing from everything within your own datacenter.

I would color myself conservative, though most of my conservative circle might smile at that. I have no interest in seeming progressive.

I've come to accept that I am pedantic. I use phrases like "Native American" to avoid ambiguity, not for any political correctness. I don't refer to anything east of Colorado as the Midwest. I sometimes call cornets trumpets but mostly because I am ignorant. Mostly I find that it's less work to use accurate language instead of long clarifying explanations. But you got me this time.

Yes. While I originally disagreed with nkurz, I responded to their non-confrontational approach. So the above is not an argument, it's a cooperation. (I know; weird)

SNWA loses another water fight

Great Basin Water Network court case

SNWA water war

Snake Valley production wells

Tribal leaders oppose southern nevada water

It is not true that ground water from wells is freely available to whomever owns the land. See recent judgements regarding multi-billion dollar disputes in Nevada, Idaho, and Utah.

It is not a new thing for some wells to run dry because of neighbors' water use. And it isn't catching anybody by surprise. There's a whole lot of gunfighters flowing into these here parts. Uh hem, sorry. I mean lawyers.