Sorry, I meant theoretically as in “at some distant point in the future where we’ve figured out how to make it work.” I probably read too much science fiction.

Unfortunately it’s a hard limit due to the speed of light. Theoretically you could use quantum entanglement to get around it, but then of course you wouldn’t need the satellites anymore.

Honestly I don’t have anything specific I’d recommend. When I was looking into it, I just did a ton of reading on forums along with articles about how to get everything set up. I also looked at the prices I was offered compared to the prices I’d be able to pay elsewhere, and got quotes from several different companies.

In the end there were a bunch of reasons I didn’t go with solar. I really love it as an idea, and I really want to do it, but it’s enormously expensive. There are lease options, but they’re also expensive and many of them seemed predatory. My utility ended their purchasing program for solar-generated power, and I’m still required to pay a large monthly fee to be connected to the grid, so I couldn’t plan to offset my costs there either. The tax credits are helpful, but you still need to pay up front.

There are a couple animated adaptations of some of the books, and the live-action adaptation of Hogfather is pretty good!

Unfortunately the amount of delta-V you’d need to boost it to a parking orbit of some kind, or to the moon, would be deeply impractical. And it doesn’t have the shielding required to support any sort of deep space habitation.

I’d love to see some or all of it returned to be displayed in a museum, but it would probably be more expensive to do that than it was to build it in the first place. The vehicles to return it in whole or in pieces simply don’t exist right now, and on-orbit disassembly would be incredibly difficult and dangerous for astronauts to carry out.

No, this was part of a group buy program in my area, which was designed to reduce prices. I ended up turning them down because it was still more expensive than it seemed like it should be, and they were going with an older single inverter system instead of a newer and more efficient micro inverter system.

I’ve heard the door to door guys tend to massively upcharge. I haven’t had any come through here, though, so I don’t have any direct experience.

I was talking with a solar company about a solar install with battery storage last year, and they only offered the Powerwall as an option. I literally laughed at them and said there was no way I was tying an enormously expensive piece of home infrastructure to Tesla, because they couldn’t guarantee it’d keep working if Tesla decided to shift direction.

I’m one of the admins who manage CrowdStrike at my company.

We have all automatic updates disabled, because when they were enabled (according to the CrowdStrike best practices guide they gave us), they pushed out a version with a bug that overwhelmed our domain servers. Now we test everything through multiple environments before things make it to production, with at least two weeks of testing before we move a version to the next environment.

This was a channel file update, and per our TAM and account managers in our meeting after this happened, there’s no way to stop that file from being pushed, or to delay it. Supposedly they’ll be adding that functionality in now.

Yes, CrowdStrike says they don’t need to do conventional AV definitions updates, but the channel file updates sure seem similar to me.

The file they pushed out consisted of all zeroes, which somehow corrupted their agent and caused the BSOD. I wasn’t on the meeting where they explained how this happened to my company; I was one of the people woken up to deal with the initial issue, and they explained this later to the rest of my team and our leadership while I was catching up on missed sleep.

I would have expected their agent to ignore invalid updates, which would have prevented this whole thing, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen examples of bad QA and/or their engineering making assumptions about how things will work. For the amount of money they charge, their product is frustratingly incomplete. And asking them to fix things results in them asking you to submit your request to their Ideas Portal, so the entire world can vote on whether it’s a good idea, and if enough people vote for it they will “consider” doing it. My company spends a fortune on their tool every year, and we haven’t been able to even get them to allow non-case-sensitive searching, or searching for a list of hosts instead of individuals.

Speaking as someone who manages CrowdStrike in my company, we do stagger updates and turn off all the automatic things we can.

This channel file update wasn’t something we can turn off or control. It’s handled by CrowdStrike themselves, and we confirmed that in discussions with our TAM and account manager at CrowdStrike while we were working on remediation.

VASAviation has the audio of this, along with a radar view of what happened and video from the ground. It was very, very close, and appears to be completely the controller’s fault.

https://youtu.be/KmI6pVTjCt0?si=Q39JOnyE37QYlCwB

Depends on where you are.

I’m in the Midwestern United States now, where summer is often pretty frustrating due to the high humidity. But I’m originally from Phoenix, where I really enjoyed summer (in the shade), because I love the feeling of warmth soaking into my bones, and I never got sweaty.

Have you considered calling the locating service, get them to mark the entire yard, and then taking pictures so you know areas are okay to dig in going forward? I’ve been considering doing that for my yard just so I know where I can safely landscape.

On the off chance that you’re actually asking, there have been studies that have shown the regret rate for transitioning is less than 1%.

Here’s an article about a recent study which tracked people up to 23 years post-transition, showing median regret as 0 out of 100.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself “but that’s just one study, with around 200 participants, and the results were so uniform it caused issues with the statistics. Maybe it’s wrong.” Well, here is a meta-analysis of 27 additional studies, with almost 8,000 participants, which also shows regret rates are <1%.

Hope that helps.

I grumbled about ServiceNow for years, and then my company switched to Cherwell.

Now I’d switch back to ServiceNow in a heartbeat.

But hey, this is america get your cash money.

Yes, I'm sure this is actually about the money for her, and not an attempt to ensure the company is punished in some way for her son's death. Grieving parents are famously more concerned with payouts than making sure negligence that killed their children doesn't happen again. /s

The responsibility for a safe working environment is entirely on the company here, and if they have failed to provide it they should be held liable and pay damages.

I'm not currently active on dating apps, but when I last was a couple years ago, it wasn't a problem. I'm findable online, since I have a blog and several professional profiles set up to make it easier to pass HR checks when applying for jobs, so that may have helped. But overall it hasn't been a concern with any of my partners.

He didn't ignore basic gun safety. Firearms on movie sets are not the same as firearms everywhere else. There is supposed to be a dedicated person who is directly responsible for ensuring live ammunition is never, ever brought close to a prop gun. I've posted this elsewhere at one point, but as somebody who has worked on productions with blank-firing guns, the cast and crew are not allowed to inspect, touch, or come near any firearm on set apart from the shortest time required for the scene. The firearms are secured before and after the scene, and there should never, ever be a chance for live ammunition to get inside a prop. The armorer guarantees the gun is safe, and are the ones responsible for it.

The armorer for this production appears to not have followed those protocols, and that's where Baldwin's potential culpability is-- not as an actor who shot somebody, but as a producer who should have had better oversight of the armorer.

Oh absolutely. I work in information security, and I definitely have a good amount of "but that's not how it works!" when I watch it.

But hey, it's entertaining, and it's not like other shows get it much better.

This is basically the plot of Leverage, and part of why it's such a good show.

"It's only 13% and not 100%, so it doesn't count!"

The Supreme Court blocked his attempt last year to forgive debt for another 43 million people, which was set to take effect before repayments started back up. He's trying to help but is being blocked by conservatives who want him to fail so Trump can be reelected.

Leverage is one of my favorites. The reboot is pretty good as well.

Can't speak for the person you're replying to, but I'm a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn't my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking "this is obviously a problem with $system, let's just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!" And then we get the fun job of proving it's not us and has no relation to us.

We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them...

I use this too. I've had people over who wanted to connect to the Wi-Fi, pulled up the list, and waited for a minute because "it's still loading!"

11/10, no regrets.

It's not exactly a remake, it's an adaptation of the Mean Girls musical.

You can definitely highlight text. I haven't tried exporting with edits, though, so I can't speak to that.

You can plug it in and transfer, but again, I haven't personally done it. I get most of my books from the library, so I just use the Overdrive stuff for that.

I'm going to jump on the Kobo train along with everyone else. I have a Kobo Libra H2O that I really love. I had a couple Kindles before deciding that I really didn't want to stick with an Amazon product, and chose Kobo because of its integrations with Overdrive. It's really nice to be able to check out a book from the library directly on my e-reader.

The screen is bright when it needs to be, but dims down quite nicely. The touchscreen is fairly responsive, though it's e-ink and there are limits to refresh rates. The physical buttons to turn the page are perfect, and I still can't believe Amazon took them off their Kindles (though I guess I understand them removing the keyboard... even though I liked it).

I actually like mine so much, I bought a second of the same model after I somehow managed to lose my first one. So the one thing I wish they had was integration with Apple Airtag or one of the other device tracking networks!

While you're not wrong about there being other constellations in the works, Starlink is the first to actually launch more than a (relative) few. Over 50% of satellites in orbit, total, belong to Starlink.

So while there are other projects planned or under construction, Starlink is the most visible by far, and that's a lot of why we hear about it the most.

Also yeah, it's owned by Elon Musk, so that alone guarantees it'll stay in the news.

That's great! Like I said, it's dependent on your employment contract. But for people who aren't as certain, separate work and personal devices as much as possible just to protect yourself.

Depending on where you work, your employer may be able to take that personal device you're using for work in the event of a lawsuit against the company (where they need to retain anything that may be relevant to discovery), or in the event of a security incident (where they may need it for forensics).

I work in information security, and I practice strict isolation for that exact reason. Two laptops, two phones, because if anything ever happens they can and will take devices for analysis or evidence. If you are using an issued device, they'll assign you a new one; if it's a personal device you'll get it back when they're done with it, which could take years.

Edited to add this is dependent on your employment contract, but it's better to be safe than sorry. Cover your camera and use your work computer.

I'm a security engineer, and encryption is great, but can be bypassed. Relying on encryption assumes it was implemented properly, that the system was shut down properly so all keys were flushed correctly, and the encryption algorithm doesn't have weaknesses.

Generally if somebody dedicated enough can acquire physical access to a system, they can probably find a way into it given the right resources. Did that happen here? Probably not. Could it have? Absolutely. That's why most enterprises or government hard drives are shredded rather than just relying on them being wiped or encrypted.

Encryption is part of the solution, but it's not automatically the complete solution.

We don't know what was on those servers, but it was apparently sensitive enough that the government redacted descriptions of the data in court filings.

The US government brief said the relocated servers were not wiped before being moved to a new data center. The type of data on the relocated servers was apparently so sensitive that it could not be described in the US court filing, which redacts the sentence that describes what the servers contained.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/09/us-government-slams-musk-in-court-filing-describing-chaotic-environment-at-x/

Yup. Ideally this would be handled through public policy changes, instead of relying on a quasi-private institution that's severely limited in its powers.

But apparently that's too much to ask.

The Fed only has a couple of tools to combat inflation, and none of them work very well for supply-side inflation. Personally I think they shouldn't be raising rates to deal with supply-side shortages (ideally you'd want to make it cheaper for companies to produce more and decrease shortages), but politically speaking they need to show they're taking some form of action to rein in inflation.

As the press release I linked explains, IBEW represents a lot of rail workers, though not all. Sick leave agreements have also been reached with several other rail workers unions, which means that around 60% of rail workers now have sick leave. That's still less than it should be, and the unions should not stop pushing until 100% of workers have sick leave, but it's progress.

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/most-unionized-us-rail-workers-now-have-new-sick-leave-2023-06-05/

Except the rail union got what they wanted, and credited Biden's administration for making it happen.

https://www.ibew.org/media-center/Articles/23Daily/2306/230620_IBEWandPaid

If a police aircraft gets shot down, they're just going to arrest everyone they can find nearby and work it out from there.

That's what they do when a police helicopter gets hit with a laser pointer, I would assume it would be the same in this case.

I know you're being facetious, but for anyone thinking seriously about this, shooting down aircraft, which drones are categorized as, is a Federal offense. Same with shining a laser at it, trying to jam its communications, or spoofing GPS to throw off its navigation.

And if the cops are the ones operating the drone, they'll probably be highly incentivized to arrest and prosecute you.

That's also part of why a lot of large telescope mirrors get made in Tucson, at the University of Arizona!

I run those calls through my own phone system, which I host on a system in my basement. There are a couple main options out there, I used FreePBX for a while but now I'm using 3CX. They don't require a ton of computing power-- mine runs on a virtual server inside a larger system, but you could run one off of an inexpensive thin client from eBay if you wanted to.

I get my phone number from VoIP.ms, which is pretty inexpensive and has worked well for me for years.

For a phone, you can either use a soft phone (an app on your computer or smartphone), or use an older IP phone off eBay (which is what I do since I also have a Plantronics wireless headset that connects to it).

It's pretty easy to get started, but you do need to make sure you're configuring everything correctly since selfhosted services can open up security holes in your network if you don't know what you're doing.