Oh crap! People might have to cut back on their cigaweed, or cook 2 meals a month at home instead of shopping at McD's all the time, to afford their TikToks and Instagrams! Will the atrocities never cease?!? What if they have to cancel one of their streaming services to pay for the internet connection?

Broadband at home is not a right, or even really a necessity. It's really helpful sometimes, yes, but... public libraries have it. Pretty much everyone (in the US) has a phone that has it now. And if they don't have it on their phone, they can go get it for free at McDonalds while feasting on their sloppy meals for 4x the price of cooking something healthy at home. Or they could go work for 2 hours somewhere to pay for a month of service (left coast wages, anyway).

I've known a lot of poor people. The vast majority of them aren't poor because things cost so much, they're poor because they make poor choices. They eat fast food because someone once told them it's cheaper than cooking at home (it's not, unless you buy particularly expensive food). They buy crap they don't need on Amazon and Temu. They don't like to work, and blame the world when they get fired because they don't show up or act professionally. There are a few legit reasons it can be hard to hold a job, the biggest one is for single parents - child care is a PITA. Kids are a PITA. Truly. They can make it really hard to hold a job. But even so, the cost of "Broadband" for a basic plan is not that much, and many of the people wanting these discounted programs are spending far more on hair, and nails, and streaming services, and other stupid crap they don't need, than they would on a basic cable internet plan.

Definitely fun times. We had a place here in Ottawa called Century 21 (No relation to the realtor) that had used computer...stuff. Everything from Mainframe tape drives to all sorts of weird an obscure stuff. I traded a bunch of Apple ][+ manuals I dumpster dived for all the RAM I needed for the Apple ][+ clone I was building. It was a great place to hang out and oogle weird looking equipment and try to guess what it was for.

Most people forget, or never knew, that OS/2 was a joint IBM and Microsoft project. So with MS's marketing and IBM project management, it could have done well. But MS feared that it would compete with MS WIndows 3.x...whichwas true, it would have blown the doors off Windows. I wrote a kiosk application on OS/2...started on OS/2 2.1 just before OS2 3.0 Warp came, using what was called "IBM's Audio Visual Connection", or AVC, which later became the Ultimedia Builder. The big trick that AVC had was a IBM video capture and playback card that cost upwards to $5,000 or so I seem to remember. It could capture then play back video in either a resizable window, or full screen. The kiosk had a touch screen, and AVC could interact and control it all running under OS/2. The kiosk program I wrote was a tourism app called "Touch Ottawa/Hull". After using the touch screen to select the area Otawa you were interested in, and what you were looking for, eg Fast Food, it would bring up a menu of Fast Food resteraunts in that area. When you selected the fast food place, it pop up a screen that would show you a picture of the of the place, and/or some text, and would open window beside that to play a video clip, usually a commercial for the place. Then, if the place offered it, you could have it then print out a discount coupon for the resteraunt.

The company had me make a modified version of it, and it was renamed "The Electronic Trade Show". Again using the touchscreen selection, it could bringing up a commercial or just a graphic and text, it would allow businesses to advertise at trade shows to anyone who walked up to one of the kiosks and touched the screen. It could also optionally print out a business card or contact info for the company. The Government of Canada used this all over the world.

Fun days.

Oh, true, where "fringe minority" means racists, fascists, misogynists, etc. And "unacceptable views" means hatred and intolerance. Right on, 100% true!

Nabu was an Ottawa, Ontario Canada company that built their system around the North American Presentation-Level-Protocol Syntax (NAPLPS) for providing information over the Cablevision networks. It had some amazing technology but like the Hyperion Computer, it was another "Next Great Thing" that failed...not from the tech, it was excellent for its day, it was the lack of venture capital to grow the company from the respectable beginnings into an international product offering.

That's the reality and why so many figures are undisclosed. These do have a niche in the supply chain where they'll shine, local and fixed route trips where you'll have chargers at birth end points. They're FAR from replacing OTR trucks for long hauling until there's some maybe leap in battery capacity, even getting charge times down to parity with diesel is no good because stopping every 500ish miles will eat into efficiency substantially.

We saved several thousand (maybe even several tens of thousand) lives of people who are mostly going to die in the next few years anyway, and in the process effed up an entire generation of young people with their entire lives ahead of them, tanked our economy, and put a whole lot of people through needless stress and misery.

This is exactly what those of us who were against the lockdowns and school shutdowns predicted.

Was it really worth it?

...many dividers went up, and certain parking spaces became cross-hatched, creating a lot of 78-stall parking lots around France.

As the song says, "It's all about the Bass".

Nah, they just become the unwashed masses who now can't have the privilege of car ownership and will have to take Uber or eventually autonomous taxis everywhere. I own a hike and sunny even have a good place to install an ev charger, I can't imagine what ALL the apartment dwellers are supposed to do, bike I guess.

Similar, I use a wire or a bit of plastic packaging (the kind everyone curses as they cut themselves trying to get it open) cut to a point. But, I currently have a wood chip or something so jammed in there that NOTHING wants to get it loose, including the end of a paperclip.

I do think the physical shape of the lightning connector would be preferable to USB-C, but the standardization of USB-C is preferably. They just need to address the physical interface and come out with a more robust USB-D, without the tiny crevices to get packed with crap.

On the flip side, my USB-C connector always gets so full of crap that cables won't stay plugged in... I wake up in the morning and the phone is sitting on the nightstand, and the cable is on the floor. I've had a couple issues with wireless, but it's been far more reliable for me (due, again, to crap in the USB-C port, which at the moment I can't seem to get clean enough for a cable to seat properly for some reason).

The worst is when I use a chainsaw w/ the phone in my pocket. Somehow the wood shavings ALWAYS find their way into my charging port.

I believe there is, as there has been a steady production of spare parts for the Beaver by Bombardier but I don't know if that includes the full airframe or just parts that tend to wear and/or break. But I would think that they probably have full tooling since creating all of that equipment from scratch would be very expensive, and, I think, prohibitive. The fact that they are putting the DHC-6 Twin Otter, and the Beaver back into production as well as a new CL-515 firefighting water bomber would lead me to think that they have complete tooling for at least those aircraft, and maybe for all the type certs they acquired from Bombardier.

It may be out of current production, but Viking Air bought all the type certs for the de Havilland Canada planes from Bombardier and has actually been producing new parts for them. They are also tooling up to restart production of the Beaver due to demand, as well as an updated airframe version. Unfortunately, all of this has been pushed back by the plague, so who knows when/if they will start production of new Beavers.

Harbour Air in Vancouver, Canada has been testing their eBeaver seaplane since 2019, and it is working with Transport Canada & the FAA in the US for getting type certification for this plane. It is a modified de Havilland Canada DHC-2 Beaver with its radial engine with an electric one. There is precedent for this, as there is a certified type Beaver which has had its engine replaced with a Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6 turboprop engine creating the Turbo Beaver. Thus a fair bit of work has already been done towards certifying a DHC-2 Beaver with a different engine and help speed the process of getting its type cert.