I worked in the Physical Security world for 17 years (key cards, cameras, alarms, that stuff). Default passwords are generally a necessity, since you need to be able to set the equipment up the first time. If the manufacturer doesn't require it to be changed after initial config that's an issue, but even if they do require it there's almost never any requirement that the installers **NOT** change it back to the default and that's what will be done more frequently than not. The reason is for ease of service, there's no guarantee that the guy who installed it today will be the same one who services it when it breaks or needs maintenance next year. Not that I'm saying that this is good practice, just that it's common.

Even more common in systems that allow secondary user accounts to be created (not all do, even with security equipment, and many building management systems don't) is to create one login to be used across all customers of the installation/service company. I could have logged in with God-like permissions in any installation in North America that was set up and/or serviced by the second-largest security company in the US, because we had their service account information. My company originally did that, until I instituted custom logins for all our customers and stored them in a Keepass database on the network. Our salescritters used that as a selling point, frequently after demonstrating how we could log into our competitions' installs.

Never updating the system software is more common than not, no one wants to take their core systems down for an upgrade unless there is critical new functionality or reliability being added, and there's always the risk of a catastrophic failure. In 2012 I updated the Lenel system at our local Coast Guard base from NT4.0 on SQL 2000, and then it was only because the hard drive on the server was spitting out errors.

Check your company's background systems (building management systems, security, elevators, power management, etc.) you may be shocked at what you find. It's terrible to find your security system is your company's biggest security hole.

I think my point didn't come across. My point was this: The laws in question aren't coded into the cash - they're enforced separately. The fact that e.g. Bitcoin doesn't code in direct support for those laws doesn't mean the laws don't apply, nor that they shouldn't apply.

Dog hit the Post button.

some sort of hero or defender of civilization. if you remove traffic accidents, caused mostly because they drive like assholes, they fall considerably lower on the list too.

Indeed, I've done several of those jobs and never insisted that society treat me as some sort of

The fun thing in this story was right at the end. They're going to allow the Flock license to expire, but unless they pay extra to remove them the cameras still stay and they're still collecting data 24x7.

Low paid profession? Average police salary is over $76,000/year, well above the US average.

They're the most obvious and visible ones, but plenty of others are queued up to take part in Trump's Fallinto Line Dance.

Reagan and Stockman made much of the 'multiplier effect' to justify their bloated military spending, but actually NASA has the highest multiplier effect of anything the US gov't does, something like 7 to 1. This would indicate NASA's R&D generates enough in taxes that they actually **MAKE MONEY** off the organization. Gerard O'Neil's university class did a study in the late '70s and found, to everyone's astonishment, that just the taxes of the advances in telecommunications generated by the space program would have paid for the entire Apollo program by the mid-'80s.

By all the gods, conservatives are the biggest frelling cowards on the planet. We spend more than the next ten countries COMBINED, eight of which are our frelling ALLIES, and it's still not enough to calm their fears of the boogieman under the bed.

The US military has two uses currently, as a protection racket for multinational corporations and dictatorships which reward our high officials sufficiently and as mercenaries against the powerless who attempt to resist them.

I think if you took all the software devs on the planet and gave them unlimited budget and time you might just possibly be able to get near that goal, although you might have to outsource bits of the task to other planets. We've been using AI to audit our code, which is well-written, commented, and documented (the boss is a stickler for that), and it's taking us as much as several weeks per item to remediate it if it's a deep-seated design issue that's been in there for 20-30 years. That's for good-quality code. Now imagine what it's going to take for Cisco-quality code. And as others have pointed out, a lot of the code in there will be to deal with hardware bugs and quirks, or bugs and quirks with other devices and systems, documented only in the memory of ol' Bill who retired 18 years ago and is now in a care home and dribbles a lot.

The idea of doing all of this in a few weeks is beyond delusional.

NASA isn't allowed to "launch something better, cobbled together with modern tech", they can only do what the herd of technophobic lawyers in Congress allow them to do. Unfortunately they put a far, far higher priority on killing people around the world than advancing our species into the future.

2025 Pentagram budget - $750 billion
All NASA budgets since creation combined, including Apollo - $650 billion

2025 Space Farce budget - $32 billion
2025 NASA budget - $25 billion

This is why we can't have nice things.

They are of the order of 60% thermally efficient,
Simply nope. Theoretical limit is 42% .... and in practice they are around 30%.

You are mixing up "combined cycle gas plants" which use a combination of gas turbines together with a steam generating boiler ... with simple gas turbines.

However 30% efficiency, is not considered particularly inefficient.

The inferencing is happening on the satellite.

Only question and result is bound by latency.

No idea where you get your numbers from.

Rice harvest in Thailand is not even 50% of what it used to be 10 years ago.

We have constant switching between super droughts and super flooding.

Perhaps somewhere they started to grow some, and it evens out a bit. Who knows? In North East Thailand - Isaan, the current rice situation is a CATASTROPHE!

Either this year this area has a drought or a floor, or the other area next year.

A day to day device with account access could facilitate that.
It can not do anything without you.
So: nope.