Turns out communism was just a red herring!

Honestly I don’t have anything specific I’d recommend. When I was looking into it, I just did a ton of reading on forums along with articles about how to get everything set up. I also looked at the prices I was offered compared to the prices I’d be able to pay elsewhere, and got quotes from several different companies.

In the end there were a bunch of reasons I didn’t go with solar. I really love it as an idea, and I really want to do it, but it’s enormously expensive. There are lease options, but they’re also expensive and many of them seemed predatory. My utility ended their purchasing program for solar-generated power, and I’m still required to pay a large monthly fee to be connected to the grid, so I couldn’t plan to offset my costs there either. The tax credits are helpful, but you still need to pay up front.

Unfortunately the amount of delta-V you’d need to boost it to a parking orbit of some kind, or to the moon, would be deeply impractical. And it doesn’t have the shielding required to support any sort of deep space habitation.

I’d love to see some or all of it returned to be displayed in a museum, but it would probably be more expensive to do that than it was to build it in the first place. The vehicles to return it in whole or in pieces simply don’t exist right now, and on-orbit disassembly would be incredibly difficult and dangerous for astronauts to carry out.

No, this was part of a group buy program in my area, which was designed to reduce prices. I ended up turning them down because it was still more expensive than it seemed like it should be, and they were going with an older single inverter system instead of a newer and more efficient micro inverter system.

I’ve heard the door to door guys tend to massively upcharge. I haven’t had any come through here, though, so I don’t have any direct experience.

I was talking with a solar company about a solar install with battery storage last year, and they only offered the Powerwall as an option. I literally laughed at them and said there was no way I was tying an enormously expensive piece of home infrastructure to Tesla, because they couldn’t guarantee it’d keep working if Tesla decided to shift direction.

Sure, and I’ll even broaden that. I’m pretty sure everything that has ever been used as a medium of exchange has been used in a scam somewhere, and the easier it is to use that medium of exchange, the more scams have been perpetrated using it.

Janet Yellen is not in charge of the United States money supply. You’re thinking of the Federal Open Market Committee, which is comprised of the seven members of the Federal Reserve Board, the president of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and four of the eleven regional Federal Reserve Bank presidents on a yearly rotating basis.

And I’m not sure why you’re bringing up a criticism of our collective net worth on a discussion around whether Bitcoin is used in scams, unless you’re trying to push the narrative that traditional fiat currency is somehow worth less than an unbacked security. Which is both irrelevant to the conversation, and a pretty good indication that you don’t really understand how currency works.

I’m one of the admins who manage CrowdStrike at my company.

We have all automatic updates disabled, because when they were enabled (according to the CrowdStrike best practices guide they gave us), they pushed out a version with a bug that overwhelmed our domain servers. Now we test everything through multiple environments before things make it to production, with at least two weeks of testing before we move a version to the next environment.

This was a channel file update, and per our TAM and account managers in our meeting after this happened, there’s no way to stop that file from being pushed, or to delay it. Supposedly they’ll be adding that functionality in now.

Yes, CrowdStrike says they don’t need to do conventional AV definitions updates, but the channel file updates sure seem similar to me.

The file they pushed out consisted of all zeroes, which somehow corrupted their agent and caused the BSOD. I wasn’t on the meeting where they explained how this happened to my company; I was one of the people woken up to deal with the initial issue, and they explained this later to the rest of my team and our leadership while I was catching up on missed sleep.

I would have expected their agent to ignore invalid updates, which would have prevented this whole thing, but this isn’t the first time I’ve seen examples of bad QA and/or their engineering making assumptions about how things will work. For the amount of money they charge, their product is frustratingly incomplete. And asking them to fix things results in them asking you to submit your request to their Ideas Portal, so the entire world can vote on whether it’s a good idea, and if enough people vote for it they will “consider” doing it. My company spends a fortune on their tool every year, and we haven’t been able to even get them to allow non-case-sensitive searching, or searching for a list of hosts instead of individuals.

Speaking as someone who manages CrowdStrike in my company, we do stagger updates and turn off all the automatic things we can.

This channel file update wasn’t something we can turn off or control. It’s handled by CrowdStrike themselves, and we confirmed that in discussions with our TAM and account manager at CrowdStrike while we were working on remediation.

VASAviation has the audio of this, along with a radar view of what happened and video from the ground. It was very, very close, and appears to be completely the controller’s fault.

https://youtu.be/KmI6pVTjCt0?si=Q39JOnyE37QYlCwB

Depends on where you are.

I’m in the Midwestern United States now, where summer is often pretty frustrating due to the high humidity. But I’m originally from Phoenix, where I really enjoyed summer (in the shade), because I love the feeling of warmth soaking into my bones, and I never got sweaty.

On the off chance that you’re actually asking, there have been studies that have shown the regret rate for transitioning is less than 1%.

Here’s an article about a recent study which tracked people up to 23 years post-transition, showing median regret as 0 out of 100.

Now, you might be thinking to yourself “but that’s just one study, with around 200 participants, and the results were so uniform it caused issues with the statistics. Maybe it’s wrong.” Well, here is a meta-analysis of 27 additional studies, with almost 8,000 participants, which also shows regret rates are <1%.

Hope that helps.

Oh absolutely. I work in information security, and I definitely have a good amount of “but that’s not how it works!” when I watch it.

But hey, it’s entertaining, and it’s not like other shows get it much better.

This is basically the plot of Leverage, and part of why it’s such a good show.

Can’t speak for the person you’re replying to, but I’m a security engineer and stuff still makes its way to me that you would think would get filtered out by others (and isn’t my job to fix). It just takes the right person thinking “this is obviously a problem with $system, let’s just send it straight over to them so they can fix it quickly!” And then we get the fun job of proving it’s not us and has no relation to us.

We got a ticket today for packet loss between two systems, neither of which have any of our tools on them…

While you’re not wrong about there being other constellations in the works, Starlink is the first to actually launch more than a (relative) few. Over 50% of satellites in orbit, total, belong to Starlink.

So while there are other projects planned or under construction, Starlink is the most visible by far, and that’s a lot of why we hear about it the most.

Also yeah, it’s owned by Elon Musk, so that alone guarantees it’ll stay in the news.

That’s great! Like I said, it’s dependent on your employment contract. But for people who aren’t as certain, separate work and personal devices as much as possible just to protect yourself.

Depending on where you work, your employer may be able to take that personal device you’re using for work in the event of a lawsuit against the company (where they need to retain anything that may be relevant to discovery), or in the event of a security incident (where they may need it for forensics).

I work in information security, and I practice strict isolation for that exact reason. Two laptops, two phones, because if anything ever happens they can and will take devices for analysis or evidence. If you are using an issued device, they’ll assign you a new one; if it’s a personal device you’ll get it back when they’re done with it, which could take years.

Edited to add this is dependent on your employment contract, but it’s better to be safe than sorry. Cover your camera and use your work computer.

I’m a security engineer, and encryption is great, but can be bypassed. Relying on encryption assumes it was implemented properly, that the system was shut down properly so all keys were flushed correctly, and the encryption algorithm doesn’t have weaknesses.

Generally if somebody dedicated enough can acquire physical access to a system, they can probably find a way into it given the right resources. Did that happen here? Probably not. Could it have? Absolutely. That’s why most enterprises or government hard drives are shredded rather than just relying on them being wiped or encrypted.

Encryption is part of the solution, but it’s not automatically the complete solution.