Yeah but think that through. If you want to get rid of Dad’s gun, you have to get rid of pretty much every Dad’s gun. And that has significant effects beyond just school shootings. It means every parent who used a gun to defend their family from harm now is defenseless.
Every year there are about 10,000 to 15,000 firearm homicides. 100 or less are due to terrorism or spree shooting. In contrast, per Wikipedia, there are somewhere between 67,000 and a few million defensive gun uses each year. Most are where a criminal sees a gun and runs away. Take away Dad’s gun and you get rid of almost all those defensive uses. And maybe you stop some or most of the 100 spree shooting deaths. Seems to me like doing more harm than good.

Why would you think that? That a psychopath who often spends weeks or months planning to kill people is going to be dissuaded by that, when there are black market ways to purchase or construct a firearm of their own?

Evil men will always find the tools they need to dispense their evil.

Actually school shootings is a good reason for more guns not less. There have been a number of would-be mass shootings that have been stopped by armed Good Samaritans, either off duty police or civilians with carry permits. Much like overall crime, this is a distributed problem and you don’t usually fix distributed problems with centralized solutions.

The reason you shouldn’t been weapons is very simple - you can’t.

Look at alcohol prohibition in the early 1900s. Virtually all alcohol production, storage, transport, sales, and consumption were banned. And what happened? Did people stop drinking? Did crime go down as predicted? No, quite the opposite. Crime went up because criminals now had a market for illegal goods. Prohibition was where organized crime got its real foothold in the USA.

Same thing is true with weapons. If you ban weapons, all of the law-abiding people will turn theirs in, and the criminals will not. This does not improve public safety. In fact it reduces public safety because now the criminals have weapons and the means to acquire more weapons, whereas the law abiding citizens are unarmed.

I was talking about secure boot. If the computer only runs Windows, enterprise doesn’t care. If the computer only runs Windows S, it’s an absolute nonstarter in enterprise tons of apps aren’t on the app store. But Windows S is never targeted to enterprise, only low end home users.

Anything can support secure boot, the question is, are the keys included in the BIOS so it can run that particular OS without loading extra keys?

I’ve also not personally encountered a computer where secure boot couldn’t be disabled or the list of keys modified, but I’ve definitely heard about them existing.

It’s been attempted in two ways.
First is secure boot. There were a handful of computers sold that did not allow disabling of secure boot, or changing the loaded keys. So it was basically essentially a Windows only computer.
More recently is there was Microsoft Windows S. This was a cheap version of Windows Home that ran on low end computers and was locked to only allow installing apps from the Microsoft store. It was possible to unlock it but as I recall it required an additional fee.

Enterprises almost all run Windows anyway so they DGAF.

Why would I ever want to turn it off?
Under my desk I have like 15 things plugged in. None of them ever get unplugged. Turning off the outlet is of literally zero value to me. Making those plugs into a giant fucking black hole mass that takes up half the desk is not something I want.

Yeah but the plug is FUCKING HUGE.

The elder looked at the interviewer like he was a slow child. “They will get wives from other tribes.”

I believe Darwin might have had something to say about this attitude…

I think a lot of it was frog and hot plate situation. If they had done all this stuff all at once people would have dumped them immediately, but they did it slowly always seeming reasonable and considered at each step.

And a lot of people still adopt their product because for better or worse, it is the best known and relatively easy to use.

I don’t use Plex. I have never used Plex. But based on the one time I tried, this doesn’t surprise me even a little bit.

Years ago I installed it on my NAS, it was a one click download package. I installed it and hit the button to set it up. And then it prompted me to make a cloud account.

Why do I need a cloud account? I am logging into my local server and I am not sharing anything with anybody nor am I subscribing to any cloud services. I have no need of a cloud account. But, the way they built the thing, you need a cloud account to log into your local system.

I did not create a cloud account. I uninstalled it. I concluded that a company that claims to care about user privacy, but requires cloud integration in an area that absolutely does not require cloud anything, does not actually give a shit about privacy. I Googled and found that the requirement for a cloud account was, at the time, a fairly new thing. Lots of people didn’t like it. I concluded that this company was beginning to enshittify, although this was years ago and none of us had heard that word yet. But either way, it was obvious that the company was moving in a not customer-friendly direction and I did not want to be along for the ride.

My choice has been proven right several times over the years since. And yes, every time they remove a feature, or make some other customer unfriendly decision, I retell this story.

The moral here is that a company either cares about its customers or it doesn’t, and it’s usually pretty easy to tell which one fairly quickly. When one bad decision is made, and not corrected, others will follow.

Synology is the latest example of that. For anyone not paying attention, they have recently announced that their 2025 series units will only work with Synology branded hard drives, which are of course more expensive than standard Seagate or Western Digital drives (which work just fine). But if you look, the bread crumbs are there and form a trail. Over the last few years they have removed features, for example the device is no longer can decode h.265 surveillance video, and the units will no longer display SMART data for ‘unsupported’ drives. I say no longer because they used to, but an update changed that so they no longer do.

Bottom line though is don’t do business with companies that don’t respect you.

The problem is conceptual.

There are two types of tracker devices.

AirTags, and similar devices in the Google ecosystem, are short-range Bluetooth beacons. They don’t actually have GPS receivers of their own. They rely on the swarm of other Apple / Android phones in the world that have their Bluetooth radios active. One of those phones picks up the beacon, and sends a report up to Apple / Google with its current location and the beacon signal strength. That is how you can find your stuff, because some random person’s phone called in a sighting. Because these things are very simple, just a very low power Bluetooth transmitter and nothing else, they can run for a year on a coin cell battery.

The other is an actual GPS tracker. This device has a GPS receiver to determine its own location, and a cellular radio to transmit that location elsewhere, often just by sending a text message with its ID and location to some server. This however is physically larger because you need a battery, GPS antenna, cellular antenna, and a cell phone style radio chip. That all uses a lot more power. Most of the ones designed to last for months have a power brick holding 4-8 D-cell batteries, or a large lithium pack. Obviously that is not some tiny thing you lose in a pocket. Those are usually magnetically attached to the bottom of cars. Or, in the case of fleet telemetry, it will be hardwired into the vehicle. But this sort of thing necessarily requires a subscription fee because it has a cellular radio. That cellular thing needs an account with a carrier.

Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?

I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.

But apparently it’s set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.

To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.

I’ll bet they are great live. I actually have only heard one song of theirs, which I found by accident years ago when trying to find something else. Everlasting Light, played live. One of very few songs that completely makes it obvious how much mp3 compression sucks, and even if you download the FLAC (sadly not high res) you can still hear everything wrong with your speakers and if you listen to it on good headphones then you can hear the deficiencies of the mic they used to record it.

Truly a huge amount of audio information in that track. I love it!

That’s assuming raw PCM data, no compression (lossy or lossless) whatsoever.

LDAC can do lossless redbook audio (16 bit 44.1 KHz) at 990kbps. All other modes are lossy.
It’s probably doing something much like FLAC- lossy encoder + residual corrections to ensure you get the original waveform back out, but with less bandwidth than raw PCM.

This one is excellent, thank you for posting I had been re-looking for that for a while.

I would also suggest God’s Debris and I met God on a Train.

All three have a similar idea of questioning the nature of what God might look like. No religious nonsense in any of them.

On a different tack I’d suggest Manna- Two Different Views Of Humanity’s Future. Also a very good read but nothing to do with extracorporeal beings.

The beauty of self hosting is most of it doesn’t actually require that much compute power. Thus, it’s a perfect use for hardware that is otherwise considered absolutely shit. That hardware would otherwise go in the trash. But use it to self host, and in most cases it’s idle most of the time so it doesn’t use much power anyway.

And yet you all are still using SMS two factor authentication. Why does my Xbox video game account have better security than my money?

How does that help for a package of meat that’s leaking meat juice?

I think that there are no all or nothing questions in something like this. I think the lions share of ocean plastic comes from third world countries where ‘dump it in the river’ is the most common form of trash disposal. I think that reducing harm is helpful, whether it’s a little or a lot. I would agree that tackling small issues with extremism while ignoring big ones is performative. For example, telling people in California to take 2 minute showers while ignoring the giant agricultural operations are wasting millions of gallons a day on inefficient air spray sprinkler systems.

Focusing on us, I think keeping plastic out of our landfills is generally a good thing. We use plastic for millions of things in our society. It is simply not feasible to completely switch off plastic, not anytime soon and probably not ever. But reducing or removing single use plastics does an awful lot.

So I say let’s replace single use plastic starting in places where it can be done easily and cheaply, where there are readily available cost effective alternatives. That is especially true for plastic film, like plastic bags, that can’t be recycled in a normal recycle bin.
Use paper cups instead of styrofoam. Put your take out food in aluminum foil trays or cardboard clamshells. Use paper bags for grocery check out.

And for the vegetables and meats, I don’t suggest banning those because you would get a lot of pushback from both stores and consumers.

This is a good idea. Rather than trying to collect little penny fees here and there, just get rid of the stuff. We don’t need it, we have other options.

I would like to see most single use plastic grocery bags go with that. I think there need to be exceptions, for example produce bags or meat department bags. I haven’t seen a good replacement for those yet. But at the checkout, or for carry out food, just get rid of them.