I honestly don't know where you've been. I *was censored* aka banned from a popular aggregating website for making a statement inconvenient to the prevailing Covid narrative *which has now been scientifically proven* and published in a scientific journal.

Now tell me, what's the difference *to me* if I am banned on a website for stating something that is politically unpopular but true, or if if the website's plug is pulled and it goes dark because of a lawsuit.

I'm certainly not going to defend that website's existence. Good riddance!

No. The internet **is not** dead if section 230 falls. Just like the U.S. Flag *was not dead* when people started to burn the flag. The flag burners got their jollies and went home.

The problem with section 230 is it was twisted by big tech to suit their own agenda purposes rather than use it to dwell and create a usable public space.

If section 230 goes away then nothing literally happens. Except that Big Tech no longer has the excuse to act like a nanny on behalf of the FBI

The fact that Democrats have been rushing to protect the FBI at every turn in an 180 degree U-turn from Democrats of old tells you all you need to know about the FBI.

They would not be doing so unless they were obtaining direct assistance from the FBI. Perhaps as an example would be the failure to investigate and prosecute Hunter Biden's laptop. Which Hunter has now even claimed was his.

Note, this is a single example among many.

60,000 feet sounds like a lot but it's nothing in the world of RF. It is just over 11 miles. **And it was completely obstacle free**. Ask any amateur radio operator how far away their low wattage handy talkies reach the repeaters sitting on a mountain.

It was easy. For the Chinese.

No. It did not explode. What you saw was the flames from the rocket motor burning through it. They didn't want it to explode because somebody hopefully wants to dissect it while it's intact to see what data it was capturing. But you'd think that the Chinese would anticipate that. But you can still learn a lot just by knowing the frequencies it was using.

My guess is that the balloon was using WiFi frequencies and sending back scooped Intel on simple wifi to ground station spies or boxes hidden anywhere. The equipment could be simple generic off the shelf who-cares stuff even.

The Pentagon really can't jam wifi signals without shutting down everyone's internet.

The balloon itself 'moved with purpose' and was steerable as well as able to adjust altitude. It was as low as 35,000 feet and when shot down was at 61,000 feet.

Well, you might say "It doesn't matter there's satellites." That's true, but they're too high up to do what this balloon was trying to do.

Exactly what would that be??? Well here's a possibility for you. Konnech, a company that supplies election management software to municipalities scooped the passwords, SSNs, driver's license numbers, election center floorplans, vote machine storage locations, home addresses, employment address *as well* as the poll worker's family members data. Roughly *2 million* people's detailed information.

Konnech had all that data on a server at a Chinese University in Wuhan. As we all should know China doesn't really have an internet as much as it does a giant WAN so you can be very certain that the CCP was looking at that information. And in fact connections have been established between Konnech CEO Eugene Yu and high level CCP party members.

So here's an idea. Put some of those wifi passwords on a balloon and send it over the continental U.S. *and see what you can scoop up*. Where a ground spy couldn't reach far into a big building to log into certain networks an overhead balloonmay not have the same problem. In fact, the balloon hanging around nuke silos could have been a misdirection to the spy balloon's true purpose. The balloon wouldn't have had enough time to scoop data though, **it would be planting malware and opening back doors** on things already planted around!

Imnsho opinion letting the balloon skate around the country like that was both an intelligence and military failure/disaster. Worse than Afghanistan. Btw, my theory is that Afghanistan happened the way it did so the Chinese could wander in and buy $85 billion dollars of military equipment that the CCP could reverse. But I digress.

The balloon actually entered the U.S. shaped like a dirigible but somewhere along the way "deployed" to the traditional more innocuous shape it had as it entered the U.S." The reason being because the Chinese don't need to fool everybody, they just need to fool certain people. "Ooooopsie it's just a weather balloon!!" China, monitor your own g@d d@mn weather!!

The balloon had a massive solar panel array (the black squares you see in pictures) and had no shortage of power to drive multiple transmitters. The heatsinking missile really didn't because those solar panels would have been blazing hot.

The other disturbing thing - this is coming on the heels of the airport hack that grounded every plane in the U.S.

Don't ask me about elections,,,,,
https://da.lacounty.gov/media/...

While 'get woke, go broke' is a trite phrase used as a joke in certain political circles, there is an amount of objective truth to it.
Look what happened.

Somewhere along the way (I think it was Mozilla or freebsd someone correct me) decided to re-engineer their code of conduct to be all expansive and to legislate down to minute detail, behavior and interactions so minorities (primarily sexual ones) can control other people's language/ and actions but ultimately control their thoughts as well. They were scorned by some but embraced by a majority of others who thought of themselves as better.

The problem with creating more rules is that the number of rule breakers exponentially increase as well as the expense to enforce the rules and bring compliance in line as well. The expense can be measured in both time and money.

But as alluded to, the rules were not meant to simply encourage polite and collegial behavior among colleagues. But instead the rule embracers used them to show how virtuous their organization was (as opposed to the lowly scorned knuckledragging heathens that can't afford to be as virtuous). Hence they manage to elevate themselves to be above all in the shiny heavens.

We go through life stumbling around everybody does and your toe will get stepped on and people will step on your toe. That's just life. It's unavoidable. And we can try to handle when we do in polite ways.

The problem is when you elevate yourself by using rules to do so, you have to answer to the rules you made. The more you make the more costly it can be sometimes in surprising and unpredictable ways. You know the phrase "don't make promises you can't afford to keep?" That's essentially what people are unknowingly doing by being rule embracers/writers.

Hence "the go broke" part.

Sorry Apache organization. Even if you have a massive bank account the amount of time suck in dealing with a name change is legion. And it's going to suck precious time away from volunteers that do not want to climb to the shiny virtuous place above. They just want to get code done. But now they're gonna get dragged along with your journey which actually feels more like being dragged down not up!

My educated guess is that the Native American coders knows this actually. A local college uses a name associated with the local Native Americans and they give away free scholarships and cash stipends to the namesake tribe, adjusted with cost of living I'm sure. It's a win-win you'd think.

Ultimately, that's what people really want. It's human nature *which stretches across race*. You want to look virtuous? Now pay up!

But I got a secret. The Native American coders don't have a leg to stand on - for more than reason. For multiple reasons actually. First, they didn't oppose the trademark filing back in 1999. They had their chance to argue 'cultural appropriation' to a sympathetic liberal bureaucracy back then.

Maybe the reason they didn't is because the name did not come from the tribe, but rather from a government entity. The Native American name they call their differing tribes is entirely different. The name 'Apache' comes from the Spanish conquistadors who called people in the present day southwest 'Apachu de Nabajo' (see Wikipedia). So literally, the 'Apache' are ultimately 'culturally appropriating' the name from the Spanish!!

One might argue that it's not their fault they're called that. And that's exactly right it's not!! There's no fault in 'culturally appropriating' anything. Everyone does it one way or another. It's like me being English heritage being angry that a candy maker is making money from a candy called 'English Toffee'. They need to stop that!! /s

But hey, we got to drag ourselves back to woke-land now!

One might say that well the Native Americans have been on their lands since the beginning of time and therefore deserve special treatment. But that's not really true either. The people known as Apache actually arrived from Canada in the southwest only a few hundred years before the Mayflower arrived in 1620 a.d. perhaps as late as 1500 a.d. So they're migrants just as much as the Pilgrims were! Coincidentally the Spanish started calling the Native Americans Apache about 1620 - the same time the Pilgrims arrived!

I by no way mean disrespect to the Dene (one the names that the tribes in that area actually call themselves) but I respectfully disagree with the Native American coders on their insistence to ownership of a word that does not originate from them in the first place!!

I had a neighbor who thought I did damage to their property. Their demands were too excessive and I turned it all over to the insurance company and they ended up getting nothing from me. Ultimately the Apache foundation will need to do the same thing. Have an attorney write them a polite letter.

This is ham-fisted woke grift from a bunch of people who happen to be thought of as Native Americans. You'd think that being coders they'd might know better!

And if Apache wants to change their name, they should change their name to 'Mayflower'. A name that describes a noble migrant people who fought extremely difficult conditions in a new land and survived.

And I won't bitch about it 'culturally appropriating' my heritage either!!!

Oh, Apache, simplify if not get rid of the code of conduct. Have a simple policy to deal with detrimental behavior. If Google can get rid of "do no evil" you can do the same as well.
 

That's great for your RV. However not everyone has the resources nor space for solar panels and the required battery. Parent is right about inefficiencies, one which is transmission line loss which you simply do not incur.

I also sincerely doubt this is about childhood asthma. Climate change adherents want to extinguish any flame they can find.

While combustion products are dangerous, there's probably a lot of ways to improve venting so very little if any combustion products are released indoors.

After all, countless water heaters are safely used indoors. Or are we going to ban those too!

The problem is buying Netgear in the first place. They've always shipped products with buggy firmware. I bought a print server that never worked as advertised they just kept sending me replacement units until they EOLd it out of warranty.

Naturally Netgear anything has never passed through my hands again.

You mean like a Windows computer??? /s

Let me state an example here that nobody remembers, but has happened before.

The year was 1981, and Ronald Reagan was president. Even though there was a law stating that air traffic controllers could not strike, PATCO, the union did so anyway. Reagan exercised his authority and fired every last one of the strikers. Iirc 13,000 of them.

The air traffic controllers were replaced. Granted there were some problems but the full force of the US government was brought to bear and eventually the air traffic controller system returned to normalcy.

The point is not whether Reagan was right/wrong or the union was either (which was decertified). My point is that there was enough resources to bring to bear to replace the strikers. That's the gamble that the strikers took and they lost.

Everyone is replaceable. Even the pope is replaceable

Malcontent workers would have been taken into account by Elon when he purchased the company. Even though he paid a steep price for an overvalued company, he still has enough resources to reform (err rehire) the entire company.

So go ahead, crow about how tough things are for Elon. My guess they'll even be tougher for those who lost their jobs in what is now a recessionary economy. And being let go from twitter I can promise *will not* be a resume highlight.

Twitter will go on. He'll give the unwashed masses what they finally want. Their own small soapbox they can stand on and have a chance to be heard. I can promise that's going to be far more compelling than microregulating what might hurt the feelings of the traditional blue checkmarks.

We're only a few weeks out. I submit that the demise of Elon or Twitter has been greatly exaggerated!

China doesn't care any more about possible Indian ocean interdictions. There is a reason why "ruler greater than Mao" Xi Jinping has visited with Russia's Putin over 20 times over the last few years. There's multiple and soon to be redundant overland oil pipelines heading east from Russia to China. So China doesn't have to rely on ocean traffic for it's energy supplies. Russia also just christened a new nuclear ice breaker to help with possible new north pole trade routes due to global warming.

Welcome your new communist Chinese overlords.

As a side note, this might be another reason Putin wants to close Ukraine's access to the sea. It essentially blocks that route for overland pipelines.

Anker is headquartered in China where it manufactures it also manufactures its equipment. So there will certainly be CCP influence in what it does.

The CCP is collecting information on the American people. Likely to advance it's spying operations when needed. They are likely collecting this information for possible use in the future.

It would not even necessarily be their target even, *but the people around* their desired target which *they may try to reach in order to influence their primary target*.

Recently it was found that the Chinese had the complete information stored in their database of election poll workers (see Konnech inc) in the US. It *also had* all the information about their family members. Including social security numbers, driver license numbers, and all the passwords they used.

The president of the FCC recently came out and suggested that TikTok be banned. You can be sure that the CCP is collecting all that data and constructing rainbow hash tables with it.

Who doesn't re-use a password??? I rest my case.

Let's be clear on this so we're on the same page. "Hate speech" to liberals is whatever speech that happens to cause a narcissistic injury and hurt their feelings.

Otherwise telling someone (usually a liberal) that they might could "learn to code" would not be a bannable offense on twitter.

But mocking a Christian by telling them "god is Santa Clause in the sky" is perfectly acceptable if not encouraged.

I don't even think the latter bothers conservatives as much as the hypocrisy and two tier "justice system" in place at Twitter. And all the hysteria surrounding Elon taking over Twitter amounts to nothing more than hilarious pearl clutching.

Actually no. You're fooling yourself. Apple's core value is to whoever they can curry favor with. Here in the US it's virtue signaling to Democrats. In China it's the Chinese communist government that wants (and gets) censorship on Apple devices. In the middle east it's turning a blind eye to cultures that toss lgbt off roofs.

Apples core value is to self serve and curry favor with liberals in the U.S. who make up the majority of its customers.

Hardly "core values."

Momentum and a convenient pandemic that kept everyone home.

Walmart is working hard to compete with their own app and it's getting better by the day and better than Amazon in some respects. I'm rooting for them to succeed.