Very rarely, if ever.

The only time it is justifiable is if it’s either pre-agreed or if there is a threat to the child.

If there is reason to think they are being groomed, or used in some way, then yes. E.g. a room search after getting information that they are holding drugs for a dealer. They should be treated like a police search. Only done when there is real reason, rather than just fishing.

If it’s pre-agreed that a device isn’t private, then the rules change slightly. A younger child’s phone or computer should be subject to respectful monitoring. It should also be part of an open and equitable discussion on boundaries and rules. Even here, the goal should be to protect the child from dangers, not to snoop on what they are chatting with friends about beyond that.

Privacy, is an important thing for children. It needs to be provided with guard rails initially, but should be respected as best you can.

You’ve basically summed up what I was trying to say better than I did. To Linux users, bug reports are a good thing. They help fix things. To middle management, bug reports are a bad thing, they hurt their bonuses.

One group needs to change, and Linux users are impressively stubborn.

It’s anecdotal , but I heard that Linux bug reports are actually a problem for some game developers. When 1% of your customer base submits 10-20% of your bug reports, middle managers get upset. Apparently several games have had Linux support dropped because of this.

While Linux often has more bugs in games (and so more reports), Linux users have also been conditioned to report bugs better. It helps a lot in FOSS etc.

It’s a catch 22. A lot of good products die due to people not knowing they exist (or remembering).

I have no issues with informational based advertising. Basically the polite “we exist” or “we’ve got this now” type adverts. I take offence to adverts trying to mess with my mental familiarity levels. I’m doubly offended when they get aggressive with pushing that on me.

A great example is steam ads. It gives you some when you first start it. It’s trivial to skip or ignore them however. It also sits back and gets out of the way as soon as you’re not interested.

I always knew he was an arsehole, but I thought he was at least a like minded arsehole, when it came to saving the planet.

The trapped kids incident also the first proper crack I noticed in his image. Now, I wouldn’t touch anything of his with a 40’ pole.

In the words of Dr house “people lie”. They should take the woman’s word on things like this. However, it just takes being burnt once or twice, to not trust the answer from anyone else.

There’s a fun chess game on steam this comic keeps reminding me of.

5D Chess, with multiverse time travel

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1349230/5D_Chess_With_Multiverse_Time_Travel/

It basically allows for moves similar to this. It also creates coherent rules for jumping timelines, or time travel. It’s quite elegant how they come out, in a “my brain is melting out my ear” kind of way!

It does have a pci-e socket… 😁

Steam’s main thing is that they have recognised that killing the golden goose is a bad thing for everybody. They have consistently played for long term growth and profits, over purely short term gains.

Steam has made mistakes, but their demonstrated values have been shown to be mostly compatible with mine. I can work with that.

Also, them being privately owned means that they are less have seagull investors swooping in and demanding short term gains now now now.

The aiming is still a problem. The Hubble is relatively small. Even then, it can’t track fast enough to image the moon, let alone the earth’s surface.

Any useful reflector would be measured in Km^2 . Aiming that, with the same precision as Hubble would be a tall order. Added to that, the mirror would have to be light enough to launch. You’re basically trying to aim a sheet of tinfoil, as large as a stadium (minimum), with active tracking.

The same reason a dam owner panics over a finger sized leak. A hole becomes a crack, a crack a breach, and a breach can collapse the whole dam.

It might also be a single dev who pushed for it. With only a 1-3% market share, the company is unlikely to push resources at it. That 1 dev getting any working version out is a win in many ways.

Also, most Linux users are a lot better trained at reporting bugs. Most of the time, this is a good thing, letting them get fixed in FOSS development setups. Unfortunately, in gaming, it ends up making Linux look a buggy mess. When 60% of your big reports come from 0.5% of your users, companies can panic. Even if the same bugs exist in windows, just no one bothers to report them.

I’ll take compatible.

Most people game on windows. It’s monolithic nature also means that they will mostly encounter the same bugs.

Linux has a wider base of functionality. A bug might only show up on Debian, not Ubuntu.

End result, they spend 60% of their effort solving bugs, for 2% of their base. That’s not cost viable.

Compatibility means they just have to focus on 1 base of code. All we ask is that they don’t actively break the compatibility. This is far less effort, and a lot easier to sell to the bean counters.

Once Linux has a decent share, we can work on better universal standards. We likely need at least 10% to even get a chance there.

First off, have you got HA up and running yet? That should be your initial focus.

There are 3 main options.

• Old laptop

The cheapest option, but only if you have a spare. It doesn’t need that much grunt. You definitely want to check how much power it draws however. It’ll be on 24/7 and the cost of that can mount up.

• Raspberry Pi (or other single board computer)

This is a good “play around” option. It’s one of the cheapest choices as well. Unfortunately, Pis can become a bit unstable down the line.

• NUC, or other mini PC. The small mini PCs are my preferred recommendation. They are powerful enough to do more complex tasks, but power efficient enough to not be problematic. They are also a lot more reliable than the SBCs.

As for other hardware. Z wave is the best, but also more costly. ZigBee is cheaper, and still very functional. WiFi does the job, but needs a bit more planning. I personally use a mix of ZigBee and WiFi.

If you’re buying WiFi hardware, I would try and focus on esp based options (ESP8266, ESP8285, or ESP32). You can replace the firmware in these, with either Tasmota, or ESPhome. I personally use sonoff and/or athom hardware, but there are plenty of other options.

This might help finding appropriate hardware.

https://templates.blakadder.com/

You just reminded me of the bit where they discover that fucking with causality is BAD.

I do love how the side effects (leaking improbability) were critical to the story making any plausible sense.

Throw in bistro-mathematics as an alternative star drive.

That’s exactly what I do. I also have IoT devices that are still trucking along a decade later. I fully expect them to likely do a decade more.

Both Tasmota and ESPhome provide open source firmware for many IoT devices. They throw up a local API interface that other systems can talk to. Providing legacy support is as hard as using HTML put and get commands.

Making a lot of us angry. Unfortunately we are not as good as the french at complaining about it.

We also have the issue of this party being the better of the 2 viable options.

There’s talk of a new party forming, to the left of modern labour. Unfortunately, in a FPTP system, that can split the vote and make things worse, if done poorly.

It’s more the power that can be applied. Most people capable of getting a pedal bike up to those speeds also know how to read the road for safety. Even then, bikes can basically disintegrate in a (initially) minor accident.

A powered bike is capable of destroying itself if misused.

Proviso of this is that, globally, politicians grow a spine, along with a sense of morality, and long term planning. It would also require them to deal with the money hoarding issues with the hyper rich.

• The first step is a massive push for renewables. They should be representing 200-500% of grid demand regularly. If nuclear can get up to speed and be part of this, great, but we can’t wait on it.

• That excess power should be soaked up by large scale, portable, energy storage. Green hydrogen is the current best option, but synthetic fossil fuels could also take up the slack. Depending on the area, desalination could also be combined into this.

• We seriously decarbonise the transport networks. For vans and smaller, electric vehicles win. BYD have demonstrated that low cost electric cars are viable. For larger vehicles, where electric becomes inefficient, hydrogen is viable. This is where a lot of the excess hydrogen will be going.

• Carbon credits with teeth. Rather than relying on a planned economy mindset, we can make capitalism work for us. We need a global fixed carbon emission limit. This limit should trend towards net zero on a preset timetable. Credits are bid on, akin to stock market trades. Companies must have credits by the end of the year/period. The fine for not having credits should be a multiple of the closing credits price (10x?). The fine for falsification should be multiples of that, erring towards corporate execution levels.

This will force easy savings out of the market quickly. It will then force compulsory emitters to factor in Carbon costs.

• Combined with the carbon credits will be negative credits. If a group takes a ton of CO² out of the air, long term, they gain a new credit. They can sell this to emitters. This will provide the CO² emissions industry requires, while meeting net zero.

An example of this might be large scale bio capture on the open ocean. Grow seaweed etc on pontoons, and turn it into a solid. This can then be locked up (old coal mines?) taking carbon out permanently.

• Geo engineering. There are multiple methods of reducing incident sunlight on the earth. Everything from powders in the upper atmosphere, to mylar solar shades at the Lagrange point. They will be short term fixes, but will buy us time.

None of these require massive reductions in quality of life. They do require changes in how we do things. It’s also worth noting that I’ve not covered the numerous problems to be solved e.g. power grid upgrades to account for renewables. None of these should be insurmountable however, just engineering, or political/policing challenges.

An no, I’ve no fucking idea how to get politicians to grow a spine and do what’s required for our long term comfort/survival. Fixing the planet? That’s just a (really big) engineering problem. Fixing human nature? …Fuck knows.