“I don’t recognize your authority to impose these controls over me.” There you go: “I don’t recognize your authority.” That’s the masked-up mentality, as bluntly put as can be.

Here’s the oath of office for Pierce County Washington where Swank is the sheriff. Presumably he took this oath when he took the position of sheriff:

“I, (state name), do solemnly swear that I am a Citizen of the United States and a resident and registered voter of Pierce County; that I will support the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Washington, and the Charter and Ordinances of Pierce County; and will faithfully, impartially, and honestly perform the duties of the office of (insert title of office), as such duties are prescribed by law, so help me God.”

source

Bold is mine. Doesn’t this mean the sheriff is admitting he will violate his oath of office?

Mesh back haul can get some distance connecting some communities aa well.

I don’t think community driven mesh networks are a realistically sized solution for the entire continental connectivity .

Ideally, to me, that would multinational orgnization building common infrastruture for the collective benefit.

Certainly that would be best for the many nations of the continent. However, that hasn’t happened and high speed internet as a basic utility has been commonplace as a utility in huge parts of the world already for decades. So without the ideal of a coalition of NGOs, are the under served nations on the African continent just supposed to go without instead of the tech companies building the infrastructure, and maintaining the ownership that comes with that, to bring these services as is detailed in the article?

So WISPs and 5G networks address “last mile” access. According to the article Google and Facebook are building undersea cables which don’t compete with last mile services, and in fact can help them as the existing backhaul circuits become saturated from continued new WISP and 5G users being added.

I think its fantastic that there are community built efforts to bring people online. However, it sounds like these are small pockets of efforts instead of national or continental efforts. If the WISPs or 5G service area are only in pockets, is it fair that millions of people should go without access to the internet just because they don’t live in one of the areas served by those existing community efforts?

What is the alternative to existing giant companies investing in the infrastructure? And why hasn’t that alternative already addressed this issue before the tech companies arrived?

Even retail gas stations have to pay upfront before operating to have their underground tanks dug up and removed in case they go out of business. Why isn’t this standard for petroleum extraction? If nothing else, the public government would benefit from investing those prepayments until the oil company successfully completes their properly secured inactive well and that money is returned to them.

As long as you’re doing your own whole disk encryption, you have a valid path to still be secure. However, if you’re running an unencrypted disk, you’re much more likely to lose your data to a non-state actor.

A pocket computer that can call.

I held that same mindset for years in the prior generation of technology. I had a Sharp Zaurus and later a Nokia n700 for pocket Linux computing. It took a large amount of effort to make them useful devices. Most people simply don’t have the time or ability to do that for themselves and products like iOS and Android deliver what they’re looking for right out of the box.

I hope it succeeds, but history hasn’t been kind to others that tried.

I want to see real Linux phones that don’t run Android and are somewhat competitive with Android phones, at least in the mid-range space.

There’s a large graveyard of attempts at this. The most recent and successful is probably Tizen. Prior to that Firefox OS. People just don’t buy them so there’s no market for them.

Except for the Nazi ringleaders, I’m perfectly ok with denying them due process

Sadly even Nazi ringleaders, otherwise Republicans will simply label those protesting ICE as “Nazi ringleaders” to deny them due process. I’m a big fan of the due process that Nazi’s received in Nuremberg and the outcome of those trial against those assholes.

Because Biden said you could? He’s the one that doubled tariffs on Chinese EVs from 50% to 100%. Biden also gave the EV tax credit which was essentially a subsidy to Tesla, which Trump ended.

I don’t fault Biden for adding a tariff on Chinese EVs to temporarily protect the American auto manufacturing envornment. We just have too many jobs tied to the domestic production of cars. The immediate loss of those jobs would plunge the USA into deep recession. It looked like this was working too with many American companies adapting and coming out with EVs.

However, most of those American EVs have been scaled back or canceled. Further, with the exception of the Chevy Bolt no domestic maker produced an affordable EV. Since American companies decided they don’t want to play in EVs anymore, I fully support removing the tariff and letting Chinese EVs into the USA. It looks like that will be the only thing that will force American car companies to compete. This situation closely mirrors the 1970s where Japan introduced small, reliable, fuel efficent cars, and affordable cars at a time when gasoline was crazy expensive.

It looks like this time around it will be the Chinese that teach the American auto market to adapt instead.

Yeah, well, there’s no Oil in Europe either,

C’mon. I’m a dumb American, but even I know without looking it up about Norway’s vast petroleum production as well as the North Sea petroleum platforms off the coast of Scotland.

So what happens if you let the elderly fall off that cliff? How will society look then?

The elderly will starve to death or die from neglect significantly shortening their lives. That’s the physical effects. I can’t imagine the psychological effect of middle aged adult sacrificing everything to try to keep their extended family alive and having to choose who gets to eat or get care. Alternatively, the government has to make these choices, but the result is the same. This most of an entire generation will die in poverty, or malnourished, or from neglect.

Do you just not understand how governments and societies work to feed and care for their elderly?

Moron.

Yep, we’re done talking when you can’t use adult words anymore and your resort to name calling. People that do what you’re doing don’t usually do it to one person. I looked at your post history and see you’re toxic in many of your conversations frequently resorting to name calling when someone disagrees with you. This is especially true when someone is correcting your uninformed opinions. You do you, I suppose, but I won’t see it anymore you’ll be doing it on my blocklist. See ya!

No worries!

I gave the proper definition of the acronym where the article did not. I’m not making commentary on the article topic.

For the 2040s, if the pattern holds, local compute power will be come dirt cheap again, and there will be very few reasons to pay someone else to host your compute power remotely. Maybe it will be supercomputers on everyone’s wrist or something.

So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

This isn’t a new idea, and it certainly predates Bezos.

I’m older now, but throughout my life there has been a pendulum swing back and forth between local compute power vs remote compute power. The price of RAM going up follows the exact same path this has gone half a dozen times already in the last 50 years. Compute power gets cheap then it gets expensive, then it gets cheap again. Bezos’s statements are just the most recent example. He’s no prophet. This has just happened before, and it will revert again. Rinse repeat:

• 1970s remote compute power: This couldn’t really compute anything locally and required dialing into a mainframe over an analog telephone line to access the remote computing power.

• 1980s local compute power: CPUs got fast and cheap! Now you could do all your processing right on your desk without need of a central computer/mainframe

• 1990s remote compute power: Thin clients! These were underpowered desktop units that could access the compute power in a server such as Citrix Winframe/Metaframe or SunOS (for SunRay thin clients). Honorable mention for retail type units like Microsoft WebTV which was the same concept with different hardware/software.

• 2000s local compute power: This was the widespread adoption of desktop PCs with 3D graphics cards as a standard along with high power CPUs.

• 2010s remote compute power: VDI appears! This is things like VMware Horizon or Citirix Virtual Desktop along with the launch of AWS for the first time.

• 2020s local compute power: Powerful CPUs and massively fast GPUs are now now standard and affordable.

• 2030s remote compute power…in the cloud…probably

In an ideal world, as they see your knowledge is harder and harder to replace, they’ll start paying more for it

This is true and happens to me.

, and that will hopefully be encouraging enough to the current workforce to learn the skills.

Here’s the challenge. Someone new that doesn’t have the skills that is enticed by the money has to make two evaluations:

• How hard is it to learn the skill?
• How long with the skill be marketable?

For me to learn the skill wasn’t difficult because is it was modern and contemporary technology at the time. Training and support resources existed, and I was able to incrementally learn how those older technologies continued to evolve or be accommodated as new technologies arrived to replace them, but then didn’t. That won’t be the case for someone new. They can’t even use the old training material I used (assuming it was even still around) because that was written assuming the technology pervasive and well supported while the opposite is true today.

As for marketability, this is an even larger gamble. Many of these technologies should have been retired decades ago, but weren’t for a variety of niche reasons. No organizations are putting out new deployments of these old technologies. The customer base/employers wanting these skills decrease every year as old legacy systems are finally retired leaving even fewer opportunities for a new person to exercise these newly acquired old skills. Its a fact that someday there will be no users of them, but when will that be? It should have happened already so what new worker would want to try and gamble on going into extensive learning on technologies that should be dead by the time they master them?

I agree about people getting dumber about computers, but sadly you’re not the first to say it.

I see it in my IT work everyday. It makes for some good job security, but I wonder what happens when the last of us that know how to work the dark magics shuffle off our mortal coil.

The Direct Denial of Service (DDOS) assault,

That’s not was DDOS means: Distributed Denial of Service

…meaning it comes from so many different sources its very hard to block.