Monkey With A Shell

A deadline set by a government agency for government workers, NOT a ‘Google Pixel Deadline’. Stop writing alarmist headlines to make it sound like Google is gonna shut off your phone if you don’t comply. You should update, but knock this writing style off people.

Not contracted monopolies or direct city run, but like ‘IAAS’ seems to work. Much like how you see some small cell companies providing unique offers riding on one of the big carriers networks. Often those small carriers provide better deals, particularly when the carriers they ride on are forced to sell wholesale access at reasonable rates.

The city selling wholesale access funds the infrastructure maintenance and the carriers are better able to compete with each other since all they really have to do is set up a router and pay the city’s access rate fees.

Not so far off, providing infrastructure locally then leaves a lot of the major transit to backbone carriers to make the interconnects. Those providers are largely transparent to the end users. Now nationalizing carriers like that would be a hefty lift, but if we can take the local service out of the ISPs hands it would let the municipal hosts negotiate those peering arrangements in bulk. How many towns are well equipped to handle that might be another matter though.

Pretty well every case I’ve read of municipal owned fiber nets has been a grand success, barring interference by the local carriers. Let the city own the infra and the carriers compete for access. Of course you get the whinging about ‘muh free market/choice’ but that’s the case for any public works really.

Hard to say, but with how few sizeable chunks of natural stone/metal meteors make it through it’s tough to expect some relatively fragile satellites would survive the trip down.

I’ve been a user of GOG for a while principally because of the no-drm ability to download a copy of what you bought. When the library starts getting past a certain size though you start to wonder about those things like what if the producer has a falling out and wants to yank it from the platform, does it vanish from my library then too? Are there contracts that say ‘forever’ when they offer it? Would love to find some ‘download all’ option to take a full copy offline of the bought items at once but it’d probably overrun the monthly ISP limits even if they had one.

Seen too many things on Netflix or Spotify that I liked vanish because ‘fuck off, we can’ and although I never anticipated it being ‘bought’ in those cases it does give a lot of justification to find alternate means to reestablish that access.

Crowded spaces it’s a problem, I was more talking to notion of just plain shooting them rather than a use case. A rifle would be dang near impossible, but a scattered spray, you really only need to stop one prop and it’s probably on the ground for a standard 4 prop deal. At least mine got real screwy when a blade split mid flight.

Edit: It also could be noted that while a lot of pellets would miss, they would pose a lot less risk that a rifled bullet coming back down. The weight of an individual shot pellet is a fraction of the weight of a bullet, so less momentum, plus the don’t have a ballistic spin to maintain their speed that a rifle round does. Basically someone shooting a shot round in the air would come down with about as much force as a handful of gravel once the air resistance slows it a bit.

At range sure, nearby though an open choke shotgun would be pretty viable. Skeet shooting has been a thing for a while and unless it can change direction between the trigger and the pellets reaching it the drone’s likely at least impaired.

Can’t think where I’ve seen any there, some software but not even really games since those have largely gone for distribution via Steam or similar.

I avoid the things where at all possible, less for the tech aspect and more for the moral annoyance. Here I am going into your store, tracking down the things I need, carting them all over, and now you can’t even hire someone to run a till? The switch some shops have made to have only self chec makes me start to question what purpose the store serves other than to funnel extra money to the corpos holding them. There’s no marked reduction of price, someone lost a job (not much of one but it might have been the lifeline they needed), and we’re putting up some shiney retail frontend with all the additional environmental and economic costs…

Just skip the show, open a warehouse and give me the keys to a forklift already, at least they’re more fun to drive than a shopping cart.