An interesting aside to that though. Even your description was better than shortly before that when computer was a job title and the whole company depended on rooms full of people clacking away on mechanical adding machines. All of that got replaced at a tiny fraction of the cost.

Yet businesses that ran profitably for decades like that have now cut customer service to the bone, never reduced prices, and employee pay hasn't kept up with inflation for decades but still they cry poor.

Depending on uncertain imported oil and gas is already not profitable and has a higher probability of becoming fantastically expensive every time some kooky world leader sneezes.

I prefer AppImage. Flatpak feels like it went way past the point of diminishing returns for efficiency and functionality vs. complexity.

Perhaps you need to run the 'testing' release, currently forky. That gets you much more current software versions.

Something other than a single continuous infrasound might. That wasn't tested, just one particular not well described sound.

They showed that the particular infrasound they used did nothing with a handful of people.

It's more nuanced than that. There may be some particular characteristic of infrasound that cause the issue.You would need to look at the infrasound in places that have reports of the phenomenon and try to replicate that first, then try to find commonalities in the sound characteristics and come up with a wholly artificial sound that replicates the phenomenon.

The Mythbusters showed that whatever particular Infrasound they used in the test did nothing statistically significant is their small sample.

Consider, I propose that sound can make people afraid. So I get a group of 10 people and one at a time I put them in a room for 5 minutes. 2.5 minutes in, I play the sound of a kitten mewing at normal volume. Nobody shows signs of fear or panic. Myth busted? Might the results have been different with a bicycle horn? Bear growling? Gunshot?

And that's why so many are skeptical of our court system.

The crazy thing about that exemption is that critical infrastructure has the highest need to be independantly repairable. You need it back up and running yesterday, there's no time to play salesman games where they try to get you to buy a forklift upgrade instead of repair.

The lobbying is IBM and Cisco declaring openly that they intend to profit from holding critical infrastructure hostage.

Only badly written right to repair. A good right to repair law should block you from contracting a special variant only sold to you, or require you to stockpile spares, but shouldn't require you to stockpile a commodity part. Of course, small businesses are unlikely to be ordering custom chips with pins swapped around compared to the commodity part like Apple does. More likely a small business' design will not feature anything not available from DigiKey or Mouser.

If you decide you no longer wish to support a device at all, publish schematics, gerbers, and CAD and you've discharged your obligation.

I still remember many many years ago, I had to use a hacking tool called burglar to get in to a netware server that had expired every password including the admin password. Novell support wasn't at all helpful.

If we treated everything like that, lawn mowers would be banned because some guy back in the early '90s thought it would be smart to pick up a running mower and use it to trim the hedge.

The Engineer had agency. The AI (or google search, or a stack of text books) does not.

Of course, if the mad bomber instead posed as a student and found some non-evil reason for wanting the exits to collapse first (even a thin one like directing the dust upwards), the engineer is less culpable or not culpable at all.

But we need to be very careful about imagining an AI has agency. There are many legal and philosophical implications behind that.

The real problem is "connected", not un-encrypted.

So the addresses are bigger, so what?

In most cases, all you care about is the prefix, which is just 64 bits, expressed as 4 groups of 4 hex digits. This is IT, is hex really beyond people's grasp?

Most of the admin is done one terminals that support cut and paste anyway.