You needed a handbook for that?

Anyone who ever went to a business meeting could've told you that.

By my experience, it takes only 4 things to make a meeting productive: a) someone is in charge of the meeting and moderation, b) that someone had time to prepare, c) everyone in the meeting has received an agenda with enough lead time to have read it and (if necessary) prepare their part, at least a bit and finally d) there is at least a simple protocol of the meeting for those who couldn't attend, those who dozed off in the middle, and those who claim next week that something else was agreed on.

Well....

shucky darn.

John Deere remotely disabled a bunch of tractors that Russians stole from Ukraine in 2022.

Now Porsche can do the same thing to all of their vehicles in Russia.

In my experience, with only rare exceptions, the limit should be three. More than three, and you are likely involving people working on multiple projects who don't really need to know what the people on other projects are doing beyond what an email every few months would provide.

Those rare exceptions are situations where you have a meeting of managers in an org or similar with each other, where everybody is working towards the same goals, and they're planning towards those goals.

Or the way I usually describe it is that the usefulness of a meeting with n participants is one over the square of n minus 2 for all values of n greater than 2.

Time for the US to nationalise all things vehicle. Registration and taxes. Emissions and smog checks. Safety inspections. Dealership laws and regulations. Driver licensing (including for trucks, busses etc). Road rules. The lot.

Depends on what the person was doing at the time. If the person who didn't pull the trigger was holding up a liquor store and the police shot the wrong person, there's at least arguably mens rea, which is how we get things like the felony murder rule. Extending that to involuntary manslaughter when the person didn't actually pull the trigger but directly created a situation where the police did seems like not that much of a stretch to me.

They're still making DVD drives. They're just mostly USB now. Ripping is pushbutton easy these days. No messing around with getting a copy of DeCSS and such.

Alexa and Google are always hooked into Google's stuff, whether there's some at least partial local control still available in an outage or not.

I'd say local-first is *fairly* unique. Yes Homekit/Matter devices *can* be controlled locally in a peer-to-peer manner right from handsets, but Thread radios are fairly rare and I don't know if any non-apple handsets support directly talking to those devices without an intermediary.

If you don't have Apple devices, then HomeKit is a mixed bag, as sometimes the onboarding is only possible with an iPhone.

Now when you want to take it to be internet accessible, Home Assistant is a pretty rare software for easily supporting that *without* going through any cloud provider (get a dynamic dns and let's encrypt going, and Home Assistant plugins exist to automate that including renewal for those that don't want to understand how to do that themselves.

Now who is doing something "tech bro" that "isn't suitable for regular users"?

If the vendor's device doesn't support standards based management then I will just ignore them if at all possible. HomeAssistant can update firmware in any of my devices in my house.

The devices don't have a gateway set so they can't 'phone home' anywhere and if that's a deal breaker for them then it's a deal breaker for me.

I do know that there are devices consistent with 'off-cloud' usage, whether Home Assistant is at all responsible I don't know and don't really care.

To address the 'not for regular folks', they made a 'home assistant green' which is fairly decent at being an accessible, self-maintaining package. One of my relatives had a Nest thermostat that Google made stop working, and so I gave them an alternative together with Home Assistant green and they've been pretty happy.

"Only for tech bros" would be nothing but APIs and you have to assemble something yourself. Home Assistant has some tech-bro friendly deployment options, but does offer something akin to the typical cloud connected consumer electronic fare.

The devices generally do not connect to Home Assistant as a server, the Home Assistant connects to them as a client. The devices are generally oblivious about Home Assistant and it's nature.

I have z-wave thermostats. They have no idea what internet even is. They presumed they would be sold into some partner's hub ecosystem, but as a consequence Home Assistant can talk to it direct.

I attached an open firmware based controller to my garage door opener. The garage door opener doesn't know what networking is, and even the open source controller is oblivious to home assistant, just providing a general, locally accessible HTTP api. Home assistant connects to it.

If you are careful, you can generally find networkable components that do not expect to connect to any server, but can be connected to. Matter over Thread is *generally* a safe bet the device in question is friendly to local usage.

However, a lot of devices have firmware hard coded to connect only to their suppliers internet presence. Without an account you can't control them. Sometimes they start charging a subscription. Sometimes they discontinue allowing a device to connect and operate, suggesting you buy the new model after a couple of years. Meanwhile their 'cloud' doesn't add anything that you couldn't have added yourself. Get a free domain and a let's encrypt certificate and you can connect to your house from anywhere, if you want. Or keep it closed off to anything outside your house. Or 'shadow' select stuff into remote access while keeping some things local.

Big screen and big sound. Maybe it doesn't mean much because you have a house in the suburbs, but if you're in an apartment (either because you don't want to commute, you want to live in a city, or it's all you can afford for housing), TV speakers are pretty much it because anything more will get you noise complaints.

Depending on your income and housing costs, you may be limited on how big a TV you can have as well.

So a theatre is pretty much the only place if you want that sort of thing.

Granted, I don't go out to theatres much anymore either - and I spent $35 on the ticket (one, for myself), mostly because I want the big screen IMAX, but it's a far drive. And the local theatres are regular screens which aren't great. I pretty much limit myself to one movie a year or so tops.

I believe part of the reason is the year 2038 issue. A while ago I remember seeing posts about the issues FreeBSD has/had with getting around 2038 on their system. IIRC, it was a huge effort.

*EVERY* UNIX and UNIX-like system has to deal with the problem. But it's got nothing to do with 32-bit systems, because OpenBSD and NetBSD have it working since 2012 on 32-bit systems. Linux since 2020 (Linux supported 64-bit time_t on 64-bit platforms already, but 2020 is when 32-bit systems supported it).

It's not a simple solution, but it's been done before on other systems. It's also why Linux has a bunch of system calls that are merely using 64-bit versions.

To my knowledge, you are pedantically correct, but that doesn't mean you aren't in legal jeopardy for the death; you just won't face murder charges. You could still very easily be hit with civil wrongful death claims, and maybe negligent homicide or involuntary manslaughter charges for creating the situation that led to that death.

The theater I go to has none of those problems. Tickets are cheap, munchies are also not obscenely priced, the picture and sound are great and the closest I have come to distractions and noise was when I went to see Moana 2 with a bunch of kids in the theater (and even then it wasn't distracting enough to be a problem)

And the experience of seeing a movie on the big screen is going to be far better than watching it on my 32" 1080i TV with inbuilt speakers or my 1080p computer monitor and somewhat basic Creative Labs speakers.