Confidently displaying your ignorance on a topic isn't a great look. Internalize that you don't know how commercial refrigeration works and either solve that by learning or decide it doesn't matter and move on. Doubling down on stupid shouldn't be the option you choose but based on so much of your incessant posting it seems to by your favorite.

Read the article again. Nowhere does it say they were SET to 50C. It said some REACHED 50C. This is quite obviously because it was forced into hot gas defrost with the termination timer and temp sensor bypassed.

You're making a logical mistake here, assuming it was possible to set them to that temperature. That's not what the article said was done. It specifically says they raised the temperature to that.

What they've most likely done here is activated the reversing valve - a thing that would be normally used for hot gas defrost - and bypassed the defrost termination time and temp sensors.

These things aren't like your home fridge.

That's an excellent point. And in the mean time lots of people are going to end up getting screwed while they catch up with the two new realities: we now live in a low-trust society and a shockingly large number of people have no shame.

Sure, we'll just assign "master all things x509" to engineer #78 of 205... in our four-person shop.

Everyone in this conversation seems to be assuming every company has a massive IT department with folks just standing around picking their noses waiting for real work to show up and break the monotony. Outside Silicon Valley and Fortune-500s, that's an extreme rarity.

There's also an implicit assumption we're all running major-vendor enterprise-grade software written within the last twenty years; rather than an actively automation-hostile "best of a bad breed" industry-specific solution cobbled together by the nephew of a paranoid former CEO around the time I was graduating high-school, and it's sadly still the top tool of the trade.

Those who enjoy the luxury of never needing to leave Entra to do their jobs should stop throwing stones, take a step back, and realize their world isn't representative of the real world of IT.

When they are slapped on by the Orangutang in Washington they have no market value, but are childless tantrums by Trumplestiltskin.

so don't do charging stations, do battery replacement stations. Hot swappable batteries does away with the charge time and makes a whole new subscription business model for the service stations to move to and not die. The Govt. could specify a standard battery compartment and hookups, allowing for a HUGE 3rd party market. Just imagine the AmazonBasics[tm] battery line that catches fire as often as AIs hallucinate.

Proper light meters exist and have existed for a long time to deal with this. Specifically for state inspection reasons.

Of course it's a bit more than just a light meter, but what's required is far from any tecnological or financial bar to mass production. So amazing that people on here are still so confidently wrong about basic decades old technology.

Okay, so you're agreeing the organizations and people signing these contracts are incompetent to evaluate them? Doesn't that sound like a huge problem to you?

You realize you don't have the power to "press charges", right? Whether or not Flock is happy with the situation, they have zero ability to compel the police to do a damned thing about it. Now... Sure, nobody can promise the feds won't investigate (though they wouldn't even have jurisdiction without abusing something like interstate commerce), but most colleges "are" their containing town, including the local PD. Remember why Cornell is currently in the spotlight for how poorly a particular investigation went down? Why would a purely external police matter reflect poorly on Cornell?

As for what I'd tell anyone who did investigate - Nothing at all, because 1) read the above, 2) absolutely nothing we ignore our fifth amendment rights to say will be used for our benefit, and 3) we'd need to be a complete moron to show our faces while cutting down a flock pole; and while I may be no genius, I'm also not a complete moron.

Do you not understand that what I'm saying is the people who are responsible should be held responsible? Or are you just trying to say it's impossible to hold anyone accountable anymore? Because that's simply not true unless they are billionaires.

You've badly missed the point of my post, and instead decided to exaplain how a contract containing the problematic clauses I've called out works.

The poles are 20lbs of high-quality aluminum - Ironically, jokes about letting tweakers know about the gold in the e-waste Flock keeps leaving on the side of the road aside, the poles themselves are the single most valuable part of an installation (as scrap).

More importantly, a simple hacksaw will go through them like butter.

Maybe not, but this is a college campus. Simply make it known nobody's going to investigate their disappearance, and they'll be gone by morning.

I'm actually surprised this played out as long as it did - Had the same battle taken place at my alma mater, I can promise you I'd personally have cheerfully harvested them for parts the same day, and I'm by no stretch unusual in that regard.

How are colleges and municipalities finding themselves in situations where they've signed contracts for someone else's equipment to be installed on their property, sometimes literally on a piece of infrastructure they they own/control and legally unable to physically remove the equipment? I woud consider signing that contract to be gross incompetence and negligence if I were a resident of a municipality like that, and it should be a fireable offense for whoever is responsible at that college.

This isn't just about flock either. I just don't understand how we've come to such a large number of people demonstrating startliing levels of incompetence in the performance of their assigned duties.