I generally do the same. It doesn’t have to be my work laptop, mind you, just a laptop. Usually my personal laptop.

As long as it’s in a reasonable walking distance from me, I’m good. Eg. If I go out for dinner, I’ll toss my bag in the car and I’ll leave it in the car unless I get a page.

There’s a difference between engrossing yourself in another culture and being actively hostile to another person or culture.

The kind of people I’m talking about are those that get offended on behalf of a culture they’re not a part of, for someone simply participating in that cultures traditions.

They’re not out there actively mocking, attacking, or otherwise demeaning that culture, it’s traditions, or it’s people.

The difference is malicious intent.

Bullies have malicious intent in spades.

People wearing the garb of a culture they were not born into, do not.

This. The social Justice warriors that are peddling the cultural appropriation line are not representative of the culture or the people of that culture, their opinions, or feelings on the matter.

What we, as a society, need to do, is let cultures be offended when they feel offended, and not assume that they will be offended by something that we think they should be offended by.

Short version is: don’t be offended on behalf of someone else.

You don’t know them. You don’t know their culture. You don’t know what they see as offensive.

Stop assuming you do.

Buy the innovelli switches.

I picked up a bunch of them for my home and it’s been great.

You’ll pay for them up front but at least you won’t be replacing them in 6-12 months like some other vendors.

Edit to add: I’ll note, the ones I have are zwave. If you want, they also have ones with motion sensors built in (they look the same). They’re a bit more costly, but they can be useful for automations as they’re basically motion/presence sensors built into the switch instead of requiring a second device to do it. It would be useful on hallways where the switch is in a good spot to pick up people in the hallway…

IDK. Use your imagination. With innovelli, the blue series is ZigBee, Red series is zwave. There’s also a white series which is kind of neither, and both.

Good luck.

I think the 3310 had the biggest reputation for being impossible to break.

Most of the Nokia phones were pretty durable.

Early Web on the feature phones was generally useless. It took forever to load anything and most of the content wouldn’t render correctly if at all.

It was a wild time

Yeah, pretty much all of us fit in that range.

I easily fit in more with millennials than my brothers do. My oldest brother acts a lot more like Gen x than the rest of us.

You would still have that with another protocol.

I never knew someone with an analog cellphone at the time, so that one isn’t something I experienced. I was one of the first at my high school to have a PCS phone, and I remember that not all PCS phones could text.

Depending on what tech the carrier used, you either could text, or not. GSM phones came with the feature as standard, while CDMA and TDMA phones were distinctly lacking the feature for a long time. It’s funny to me that the feature that made cellphones really explode with the younger generation (texting, aka SMS), wasn’t even a universal feature when the PCS networks went live. Eventually we all switched to HSDPA, and eventually LTE which both had the feature.

Aah those were the days. Everything was slow and it was still great because the alternative was nothing.

Can we replace BGP, just because it’s a flaming dumpster fire?

Hi. I’m a network specialist. The Internet is not a big truck (it’s a series of tubes).

To explain simply: time, distance and money. That’s why nobody is doing it. All the humans are spread out over too much land, and to span the vast distances between places, you need either a really long cable (see: fiber optics) with permission to run said cable over that distance, or you need wireless relays (these don’t have as much bandwidth).

The main problem isn’t getting the power to reach a particular destination… You could fire a wireless signal from New York to LA if you had line of sight with relatively little power… The problem is, the damned earth gets in the way.

So what do we get if we try? A bunch of independent communities with spotty connections to nearby communities, and it’s likely that as soon as you go any significant distance, the demand on bandwidth would vastly outstrip any bandwidth you have.

Great, now the internet is slow, shit, and half the time, doesn’t connect to what you want to access.

The Internet is set up the way it is because it’s efficient and economical to do it this way. Let me talk at you for a minute and explain.

ISPs in your local area use copper wires, such as telephone or cable TV lines that were put in place more than a generation ago, to handle the “last mile”… The fact that we can get as fast of service down 20+ year old lines is a miracle half the time. Also, anyone with fiber, go sit in the corner, you’re in a different class.

So all these last mile runs go to their distribution building that amalgamates them into a small number of high speed, high bandwidth fiber lines that go towards the nearest exchange. Not telephone exchange, internet exchange. They’re usually located in data centers.

Internet exchanges act as a nexus of cross connectivity between ISPs, and corporations that host internet services like Meta, Google, etc. As well as transit providers, international data connectivity service providers that own undersea cables… Everyone and everything that wants to communicate on the internet is connected at these points, which is why they’re in data centers. The data center is attached to the internet exchange, not the other way around.

IX-es are connected to eachother over long distance fiber cables, usually run along utility properties, like those used for high voltage power transmission towers, or run along railroads or similar. Basically anyone who has a long, uninterrupted stretch of land, probably has been approached by transit providers to run fiber across their property between locations.

It’s a huge, complex web of companies that have agreed to move customer traffic between locations.

Recreating all of that is an insane technological challenge especially for a rag tag group of volunteers and hobbyists with little money, and no resources… From scratch.

I like the idea, but implementation is going to be nigh impossible.

A local Telco had a plan they called “my 5” which was pretty simple: you get unlimited calls and texts to 5 numbers, and everything else costs money per minute/text.

I didn’t have 5 people for my 5 so I just stuck to pay as you go on my PCS phone.

Short story. A former employer did almost everything “server less”.

So, instead of any physical servers, there would be AD controllers, file servers, and remote desktop servers in azure VMs instead.

I’m pretty sure that some of the largest deployments were nearly as expensive per year as the hardware would have been to just run it in house. Like, you can buy a whole-assed server, capable of running your entire workload, every year that you run “server less”

And what did I do? Well, I managed and maintained server VMs that happened to be in azure instead of a device that the company owns.

The whole thing was baffling. Why anyone would do things that way just amazes me.

I’ve met some people that are that fucking stupid.

It’s incredible to me that they manage to put on pants and get to work on time each morning.

I’m near the start of the millennial generation, my older brothers are Gen x and more in-between than I am. There’s about 5-6 years between all of us and we represent two generations in varying degrees.

Ehh. They mostly rode the coattails of the boomers. I dunno if I can reasonably get angry at them for taking advantage of the opportunity that the boomers made for them to prosper.

It’s the boomers that own, and frequently still run the companies that are ruining the economy. That’s for fucking sure. Gen x just got a free ride.

Of all the people I know, the Gen x are the most likely to just be coasting through life because they were downright given all the opportunities and never really struggled for much.

I just upgraded to a Xeon E5 v4 processor.

I think the max RAM on it is about 1.5 TiB per processor or something.

It’s not new, but it’s not that old either. Still cost me a pretty penny.

I think I’ve already watched this. Interesting stuff.

Pretty much everything gets it wrong in stone capacity. Some get very close, but fall short of representing radio in reality.

Just don’t.

As a qualified amateur operator, I’ll just say: that problem isn’t exclusive to die hard movies, nor die hard 1.