Not at all. In fact Creality seems quite open for a Chinese company. There’s literally an option on the touch screen menu to enable root access. That gives you full SSH access to everything on the board, no hacks or jailbreaks needed.

The firmware is Klipper based, mostly open but there’s a few binary bits. There are some open source firmware forks but the one thing they haven’t got running yet is the bed pressure sensor so you need to add a separate sensor for leveling and z axis zeroing.

However the stock firmware works great and with some open source scripts you can add whatever you want to it like fluidd/mainsail.

My k1 Max has lived its entire life on a private network segment, only internet access it gets is NTP to set the clock. It’s perfectly fine. I have never registered with Creality cloud nor has the machine tried to force me too. I use orca slicer and feed it the g code and it works great.

Yes it can.

The fob has no idea what it has access to, in most systems it just has a serial number. When you tap it on the reader, the reader scans its serial number. The system has a list of which key numbers are allowed to open which doors at which times, if your key matches it opens the door. These almost always have some kind of log of which key opened which door when. Whether the building management knows how to access that is anyone’s guess.

If he loves in a building with fobs there’s probably cameras also.

So if he’s worried about after the fact investigation into his movements, he should live somewhere else.

That would require genuine intelligence. We only have artificial intelligence, both in the machines and the empty suits who market them.

For the last year or two AI has been the buzzword of the day. Anyone not investing in AI is considered dinosauric. Just like cloud was 5 to 10 years ago.

Only the cycle has happened a little more quickly this time. AI was supposed to produce immediate revolution, and we are seeing the immediate results are… Just okay.

Google spends billions building an AI that takes 10x more power per query than a standard search, only so it can tell people to superglue their pizza together and jump off the Golden Gate Bridge when they are depressed.

Copilot 365 costs about as much as an E3 license, so turning it on basically doubles your monthly spend with Microsoft. I don’t see it doubling anybody’s productivity.

AI is like cloud. There are some places where it makes sense, where it can be helpful, where it can save time or help do difficult jobs. That is not everywhere doing everything for everybody, and I think perhaps some of the world is starting to realize that.

I’ll bet they are great live. I actually have only heard one song of theirs, which I found by accident years ago when trying to find something else. Everlasting Light, played live. One of very few songs that completely makes it obvious how much mp3 compression sucks, and even if you download the FLAC (sadly not high res) you can still hear everything wrong with your speakers and if you listen to it on good headphones then you can hear the deficiencies of the mic they used to record it.

Truly a huge amount of audio information in that track. I love it!

Not sure about better but I can add a step. Fire up Microsoft word, then write a macro which outputs a shortcut that launches Internet explorer with a URL that loads and local HTML page which after 1 second redirects to a .exe. then click open instead of save as. That only works with really old school internet explorer of course not the modern edge version.

Bow tie for sure. I suggest raise the hat a little bit so you can see the eyes a bit better.

How does that help for a package of meat that’s leaking meat juice?

I think that there are no all or nothing questions in something like this. I think the lions share of ocean plastic comes from third world countries where ‘dump it in the river’ is the most common form of trash disposal. I think that reducing harm is helpful, whether it’s a little or a lot. I would agree that tackling small issues with extremism while ignoring big ones is performative. For example, telling people in California to take 2 minute showers while ignoring the giant agricultural operations are wasting millions of gallons a day on inefficient air spray sprinkler systems.

Focusing on us, I think keeping plastic out of our landfills is generally a good thing. We use plastic for millions of things in our society. It is simply not feasible to completely switch off plastic, not anytime soon and probably not ever. But reducing or removing single use plastics does an awful lot.

So I say let’s replace single use plastic starting in places where it can be done easily and cheaply, where there are readily available cost effective alternatives. That is especially true for plastic film, like plastic bags, that can’t be recycled in a normal recycle bin.
Use paper cups instead of styrofoam. Put your take out food in aluminum foil trays or cardboard clamshells. Use paper bags for grocery check out.

And for the vegetables and meats, I don’t suggest banning those because you would get a lot of pushback from both stores and consumers.

This is a good idea. Rather than trying to collect little penny fees here and there, just get rid of the stuff. We don’t need it, we have other options.

I would like to see most single use plastic grocery bags go with that. I think there need to be exceptions, for example produce bags or meat department bags. I haven’t seen a good replacement for those yet. But at the checkout, or for carry out food, just get rid of them.

Lol Just because the automation exists doesn’t mean it’s always used. In big planes, the system is called cat III autoland and it only works at some airports. It also produces a notoriously rough landing. In little planes, it’s an emergency assistance feature that gives you a ‘emergency land’ button in the cockpit. Not something that you use everyday. And also not something most little planes have, it’s part of a top of the line autopilot system. Given that everything for airplanes costs way too much due to ridiculous certification requirements that do more to keep safety tech out of people’s budgets then to improve safety, not many little planes have it. To take a basic Cessna type airplane and add the system can cost as much as a car.

You can still get a private pilot license if you have 20/40 vision or your eyes can be corrected to 20/40 with glasses or whatever. Even without that, if you can drive you can fly a light sport aircraft. That’s a different category that has more limitations. But those limitations are rapidly going away, FAA is working on something called MOSAIC which will expand the definition of light sport to cover an awful lot of single engine airplanes. And with that you only need a driver’s license.

Pilot here.
There’s already a huge amount of automation available for airplanes large and small. The current top of the line will allow the airplane to connect every phase of flight except for the takeoff, coming all the way down to landing on the runway. In your average airline flight, probably 80 to 95% of the flight is flown by computer. The pilots are managing the aircraft, talking to ATC, etc. So you could argue that that is already there.

If you mean the ability to conduct a trip without an operator, IE little girl jumps in the back of the car and says ‘Tessie take me to school!’ and the car drives her to school, that will absolutely happen in cars before airplanes. The simple reason is edge cases and emergencies. In a car, if something goes wrong, you simply pull over. Or, worst case scenario, just slow down and stop. It’s not great but it’s not terrible. If something goes wrong in an airplane, you need to keep operating the airplane for anywhere between 10 minutes and 4 hours including a landing. A lot of what pilots do in emergencies is figure out exactly how their airplane has been damaged and strategize around that. A lot of that is intuition, the rest is deduction based on understanding of how the airplane works. Since the computer can’t see out the window or feel things like buffets and sound, a computer won’t necessarily be as good at that. So the pilots aren’t going anywhere.

create an out-group so they can control the in-group

That’s not just the media. It’s basically everyone in power. Media, politics, government, corporations… Everyone.

It applies to the Democrats too. Especially in the 2016 election, they managed to successfully make Republicans the out-group. But I believe that was hugely damaging to the country, it created a lot more division when what is really needed is unity to focus on the issues that most people can agree on.

Because here’s the cold truth- there is a body of policies that probably 80% of Americans would agree on. Things like efficient government, ending government corruption, reducing corporate control over government and elections, reducing income inequality, etc.
To quote Dylan Ratigan’s famous rant, the United States is being extracted. And I think most people would like to stop that extraction.
But no major candidate stands for that. Bernie did, but the DNC iced him out because their wealthy corporate donors didn’t want Bernie.

And that in my opinion is why Trump won. Harris certainly didn’t push any major message of radical reform, just a bunch of the usual ‘help the middle class’ talk. Trump may be terrifying, but he does push a message of radical reform and changing the system.
To write that off and say half the country is racist or misogynist is to avoid learning from this situation.

I think most commenters here are missing the point.

There is a more extreme reaction to transgender people as opposed to gay or lesbian people, because of issues like sports and bathrooms. And that hits at people’s sense of injustice. For example if you have a young daughter, a lot of people will hate the idea of a person with a penis going into the women’s room and being around their little girl. Or if that daughter grows up and joins a sports team, the idea of somebody who is hormonally male and thus naturally more muscular competing against your daughter is unpleasant.

Put differently, I think a lot of people we now classify as ‘transphobic’ don’t actually have much problem with trans people themselves. Rather, with how the efforts to ensure trans people receive the full treatment of their chosen gender can affect the rest of society.

For me personally, I don’t know what the answer is. I generally don’t care which bathroom you use as long as you wash your hands. I have no problem with anyone presenting themselves to the world as whatever they wish, if it makes you happier than by all means. At the same time though, I don’t think it’s transphobic to point out that somebody who is largely or entirely biologically male will have a natural competitive advantage in the field of sports.
So while I certainly don’t want to exclude anybody, I think there is at least a little justification for restricting some women’s sports to those who are genetically female.

I. Do. Not. Care. About. The. Tech.

Exactly. The tech doesn’t matter. Tech only exists in service of the gameplay, and (introduced with HL1), the story (previous to HL1 the ‘story’ of most games was just a quick blurb on why there’s monsters and why you have to shoot them).

Gamers DGAF about new tech. Gamers wanted to be told a story. We LOVED the story.

Valve could’ve used the existing engine, built NOTHING AT ALL NEW, and just finished the story with existing assets and we’d all have been over the moon happy.

Half-Life. I know there’s been some successful efforts to modernize it, but those only bring it up to Source 2 era.

I would love a fully modern remake. Modern lighting and raytracing could do great things for the detail of a headcrab infected scientist.

Absolutely. Game had a great mix of large-scale, good pace of a fight, and social element.

VGW

That’s the sort of shit I hope they get away from.
Lower taxes and more efficient less intrusive government are good ideas. They’re just too far in the pocket of big business so ‘lower taxes and more efficient government’ often comes off as ‘let’s give the 0.01% more tax breaks and defund the bloated inefficient EPA’.

If the Democrats lose, there is not going to be any soul searching. There is going to be a lot of finger pointing and blame. And most of it is going to be at Republicans, at the media, at Trump idiots, etc.

I am hoping that Trump loses if only because I think they’re actually be some realignment within the GOP. Unlike the Democrats, there is some actual question of direction within the GOP currently from what I’ve seen. Not everybody over there is happy with Trump. Many who just want power see him as too divisive and cultish, a Trump win is a win for Trump not necessarily for the GOP. There are some actual conservatives in the GOP who feel (IMHO correctly) that Trump is more of a cult of personality than a reflection of conservative values.

If nothing else, if Trump loses this time, he is probably finished. At least I hope so and I think there’s a good chance of it. Look at the younger generations, how many people under say 30 do you see waving Trump flags?

At least I really hope that realignment happens. And I also hope it comes with a realignment of message. I think there are a lot of conservative positions that could have mainstream appeal, that deserve a voice in politics, but the GOP has abandoned a great many of them in favor of harassing gay people and immigrants. That’s not a good way for us to go as a country.

Not really because their rights have not been violated, nothing was stolen from them. They were presented with a software product that had a limited license, and they accepted that. As far as they are concerned, the developer has fulfilled their contractual obligation to them; they were never offered a GPL license so they got exactly what they were offered.

The author of the GPL’d code however is another story. They wrote software distributed as GPL, Winamp took that code and included it without following the GPL. Thus that author can sue Winamp for a license violation.

Now if that author is the only one who wrote the software, the answer is simple- Llama Group pays them some amount of money for a commercial license of the software and a contract that this settles any past claims.

However if it’s a public open source project, it may have dozens or hundreds of contributors, each of which is an original author, each of which licensed their contribution to the project under GPL terms. That means the project maintainer has no authority to negotiate or take payments on their behalf; each of them would have to agree to that commercial license (or their contributions would have to be removed from the commercial version of the software that remains in Winamp going forward). They would also each have standing to sue Llama Group for the past unlicensed use of the software.