EAS is really old tech that still works, but is mostly dismantled at this point. It's been replaced by IPAWS -- which has been an utter disaster. IPAWS has been the primary system for nearly 10 years, and out of those 10 years, the system failed 8 times during the yearly tests/audits. It relies on this weird XML based data flow over IP connected systems that only do a connection every few months, except for an emergency. There are different versions of the protocol and a set of non-technologists that are in charge and barely know how this stuff was designed. The times IPAWS was successful for national tests was when they built bridges between the old EAS system and IPAWS to fill in gaps -- and those basically run the whole system.

The alerts you get for amber alerts are separate. Those usually rely on somebody in the local Sherriff's department calling local contacts at the cell companies to push out alerts. Some places have it automated, but they built it outside of the EAS/IPAWS system and rely on outside vendors to do that contact for them. That system is good for very localized alerts, but isn't great for larger emergencies.

So..... Those $20k toilet seats. Digging into that one a bit further, you'll find out that was mostly because the military had to purchase some secret tech, but couldn't publicly disclose the details. They re-allocate the dollars to other things that aren't secret.

There was a NPR reports many, many years ago about people being pissed about a $100k oak desk that was purchased for some government office in Indiana. When they dug into it, it was actually for the SCIF room they built, but didn't list it out as a line-item.

Is there a TON of money blown on silly things in the military under the guise of "if we don't spend it, we won't get that money back?" yup. Is there crazy, out of control spending in other parts of the government? Not as much as people think. The GAO does keep a pretty watchful eye on stuff -- but like all things politics, they also get overridden by elected folks who aren't the best stewards of our money.

I just tried to buy some pool chemicals (chlorine, which for some reason has disappeared from the local stores). Local stores told me to just 'buy it from amazon'.

Stuff on Amazon that has the name brand on it is iffy. Half the packages are reused containers with random white powder in it (i'm not going to even guess what it is). One had sand in it rather than the chemical, and the third had what looked and smelled correct.

Generic ones were spotty at best. The problem with some of these chemicals is that random substitutions, differences in strength, etc., make a HUGE difference.

At retail, the premium ones cost like $10.... Less premium ones cost like $8, and ones sold on Amazon are between $7-10. I can't imagine that there is really enough overhead to make a difference for these folks to sell forged or knock-offs... but here we are. And with Amazon's weird policies, you really can't 'buy from a reputable dealer/store on the site' with confidence. The scammers have figured it out and have their stuff in the warehouses sitting next to the genuine products, and the pickers/packers don't know/don't care about the difference. I could see where it makes $ sense to rip off high-value products like graphics cards, CPUs or other stuff like that, but for $10 products it seems to be worse.

Short answer -- lobbyists.

Long answer -- all the phone companies that interconnect with the phone network get interconnection fees for any incoming call off their network. The theory goes, every call you get, your provider gets a nickel. Spammers sending millions of calls to your provider gets them some big money. It was pretty common to hear AT&T list IXC fees as on of their top-ten revenue sources in their shareholder reports. The lobbyists were working hard to gum up the enforcement of any reasonable measures to eliminate spam calls. Heck, the original thing the lobbyists put out called SHAKEN/STIR really was fixing the wrong problem -- but it kicked the can down the road a few years -- and they've reaped millions of dollars because of it.

Wikipedia was banned because in its first phase, most of the articles were poorly sourced and included a LOT of bias. Wikipedia has enforced stronger standards since and has flagged articles that are poorly sourced, based on rumor or are flagged as inaccurate. Unfortunately, a lot of bad data still gets into articles (for example right now it lists Kevin McCarthy as 'dead due to embarrassment of losing the house election 6 times in a row').

Things like old school encyclopedias had editors and had a very good record of publishing articles that were sourced, checked and edited for accuracy.

Teachers have been relying on services like TurnItIn to catch when students use paper-writing services or out-source to folks out of the country. Most of those paper-writing services use the same papers over and over again (or good chunks of them), and they end up in the Turn it in databases. It won't catch instances of your friend or parent writes the paper for you -- unless they turned in the same (or similar) paper elsewhere. But the ultimate solution is still there -- in person writing assignments that aren't on PCs in order to catch people who outsource their papers to other people or bots.

Stack Exchange banned ChatGPT answers because while all the answers /looked/ correct, about 30% of them were completely bogus. If you knew the subject you could tell that an answer was completely wrong, but if you were there looking for honest help, the answer looked correct enough that you wouldn't know. People were trying to use ChatGPT answers to game the point/reptuation system in Stack Exchange and not really caring about correct answers.

In the settings menu on the Google Pixel, you can easily change the function of the 'power' button to get you the old power menu. In fact, I think it gives you the option if you go through their whole setup routine. If you skip the full setup routine, it does default to summoning the Google Assistant -- but it's about three or four clicks to change it back.

ND does not prevent transcribing for closed captioning, transcoding, transrating, etc.. Those actions don't change the /content/ of the work. Closed captioning is almost always protected as fair-use. Resizing, cropping, remixing, etc. where any part of the content is changed would be prohibited with the non-derivation clause of CC.

There are other companies that have done what Pantone has done. Most have either stopped or no longer produce their references anymore.

Before I went to college, one of the print shops I worked at also supported the Kodak color matching system (their matching system started with 'KE-xxxx'. Pretty much the same idea as Pantone, but Kodak was hyper-focused print to glossies and newsprint. From what I remember, there was also a 3M and maybe another color system as well. Pantone became the standard over the years because they did the most testing against different materials and worked pretty with with companies like Adobe and Apple to get their matching systems into their apps.

RGB is just a single color space -- specifically targeted to monitors.

When dealing with printers, they often split up the color space into CYMK. There are rough translations between those, but CYMK can express some colors that RGB can't.

When dealing with anything with dye based printing (like screen printing or mixing plastics), the color space you use could be CYMKOG (or something completely different).

The list goes on and on. What Pantone gives you is the translation between all the different color spaces, in all their physical manifestations. PMS 567 looks exactly the same on screen as it does when printed using a laser printer, looks exactly the same on the T-Shirt as it does on the vinyl banner, as it does on the car paint. Pantone produces references for thousands (millions?) of different types of materials and how the color is reproduced in each one, so you can make sure it looks the same. They also produce reference books so you can color match yourself and make sure what is coming out of X printer matches what you expect.

One of the first things in my color theory class I took in college was to take an RGB image and print it on their CYMK printer. Sure, the image 'looked' similar, but the colors were all washed out and what looked black on screen (R=0, G=0, B=0), was approximated in the printer. Blacks looked grey, other colors looked.. meh. Changing the color space to CYMK to match the printer, I was able to tell the printer I wanted C=0, Y=0, M=0, K=100 and blacks looked right. They looked identical on the screen because RGB's color space doesn't do the Key/Black color space as additive.

They've made it a LOT better about a dozen years ago.

It used to be that each county in Indiana could chose to be in either Eastern or Central timezone. They could also decide if they wanted to participate in DST or not.

When going through northern Indiana, there were a few spots where you would cross a county line and the time would change 2 hours -- because you went from EST to CDT in one swoop.

I believe Indiana still has some counties in the Central time-zone, but they all have to participate in DST now.

I did some work for a school district in the mid-90's. Their IT group put out an RFP for a backup solution, and bought the absolute cheapest one they could find. Things were going fine until one day they did get a virus on the network that wiped out all their common storage (pretty much their grading system, attendance records, etc.) They later found out that while they were backing data up each night and rotating tapes each night offsite, their RFP never covered the restore function of the software. The expectation was that if they needed to restore, they could contact the company and buy the license at that time (they maybe saved a few grand?). The company that wrote the backup software went out of business by the time they needed to restore the data, meaning they couldn't go back and actually buy those licenses.

They were offline for over a week, trying to recreate records on paper. Eventually, a local college allowed them to 'borrow' their restore license so they could start the process. They still lost a good chunk of files because, surprise, surprise, at least two tapes were damaged, but they got their critical systems back online. They waited a full year before they did a new bid for backup software, and I'm sure given the option, they would have pulled that same cheap move again.

Nope. Just a link to a website that includes the metadata to a link that includes an image of the text.

Bombproof, and copy-proof. No way any of that fails sometime in the future.

You do realize that the "high speed 5G" that the companies are touting are line-of-sight or near line-of-sight deployment strategies (mmWave)? Standard deployments that are going into the rural areas will be essentially layered 4G/LTE or 5G low speed (think 10-25MB/s). Rural areas, and even medium density suburbs won't see any of the > 100MB/s 5G deployments, if they see any enhancements at all.