There are entities that are federal registrations (eg: an aircraft with an "N-number" -- that N-number is federal) that individual states still try really hard to tax the same way as cars/trucks. Individual counties even take a stab at this.

It seems that the rules might be there for some benefit but mostly the rules help the state/county make income.

I've known people who believed they would never live past 20. I've also known people who want to live to 200. The difference in mentality between the two as well as the different approach to life is large. IMHO, the difference is directly comparable to working for what you need for the day/week vs saving for when you are 80.

Frankly, if you had just enough money to simply retire, would you risk it on employing folks who drink themselves to death, wreck expensive equipment, take responsibility for as little as possible and generally don't care about your bottom line? ... or would you retire?

Searching around, the best I have found so far for vanilla kernels is: https://linuxcvetracker.com

It does require a little clicking around to get all the info I want though. Time to pull out curl+awk! :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_learning_in_animals

Later on, we even ran an ipfilter based router from a T1 on OpenSolaris for decent IPv6 connectivity with link-aggregation+vlans when our Cisco 6509 setup was found to be inadequate for the task.

Zones were lightweight, more akin to the Linux vserver project or lxc. You could make a zone on its own zfs filesystem, clone the zone (which creates a zfs clone), launch the clone, run a throw-away task, tear the zone down which also discards the zfs snapshot+clone. It was quick and cheap but also half a decade before Docker was released or popularized.

zfs integrated into other parts of the system just as well. eg: iSCSI volumes backed by a zpool and export properties configured in zfs. All of these technologies were built with the idea of being "self-healing." Meanwhile, Linux has a disparate iSCSI daemon, lvm+ext4/reiserfs, initd, and probably 20 different tools to learn if you want to grab metrics across the stack like dtrace on Solaris was capable of.

The out of band management was amazing too. Yes, some x86 hardware had ilom but like everything else in the space, it's bolted on and not truly integrated.

Sun made really nice stuff that outpaced Linux in a lot of ways. The ecosystem came from a time of competing BSDs and looked for paying customers for the engineering marvel they had created. They were used to customers figuring out how to use Unix, and the Linux crowd at the time still fit that rubric. The OS was not optimized for low-latency terminal interaction and thus "felt slow" (aka: Slowaris) but a well tuned DB on Sparc really cooked.

Finally, I went to a few Sun events and had Sun reps come and look at what we were doing. They were definitely happy to help with any kind of outreach/onboarding we needed. The issue was none of "onboarding" but was a lot of "Linux is a movement." In early times, Linux was an anti-corporate movement and some of that energy carried through to the 2010s. It's sadly ironic because Sun itself has roots in open standards and an anti-establishment mentality.

On the other side of things, does accepting a PR from someone grant the author the ability to collect royalties for that software project? If so, how would you quantify that? LOC seems like a quick but really bad answer for what it is incentivizing.

For many, the entire point of "F" in "FOSS" is not getting tangled up in this kind of mess. I personally would never want to add "am I opening myself up to a lawsuit if I don't pay someone for their PR" to enter my calculus of accepting a PR. Especially if this is because I reject payment at all on a project.

Finally, if a company/employee submits code to FOSS under this model, do they now expect a return?

Truly though, smart-home stuff runs the whole gamut of privacy and device manufacturer relationships. eg: I have used three different smart/room AC units:

- one requires its own cloud-enabled app for any remote connectivity, no HomeKit integration - one integrates with HomeKit but then leaves an upgrade hint that can only be done through an app with a login - one integrates with HomeKit and pretty much just works

HomeKit then allows me to remotely control via HomePod/AppleTV acting as a router ... of course this is just a different cloud connectivity but with on-premises devices controlling other on-premises devices.

For each manufacturer of smart devices, there is potentially a separate cloud where data is being funneled through. Some devices support multiple upstreams.

I get that Matter should be a way to fix it but the reality feels more like https://xkcd.com/927/

Part of me just wants dumb devices back. Get rid of buttons on a microwave (just give me a knob for time and maybe another knob for power setting.) Remove touchscreens from cars (mine glares at me with certain sun-angles.) Bring back the desktop/computer hutch and phones that don't live in your pocket. However, having the ability to start cooling my bedroom 45 minutes before I arrive home is ... pretty compelling too.

False, unfortunately. Disparate news outlets covered events very differently and folks watching pro-Trump outlets (or only listening to friends who do) through the first term were under the impression that he did an excellent job. They may even still believe that the 2020 election was actually stolen. Heck, there are depositions this year while vetting appointees who refuse to admit (despite all available evidence) that the 2020 election was valid.

I get that it costs money to run a DNS service but it seems like it should be a lot cheaper at scale than a lot of companies are providing.

Fuel is often placed in wings because adding/burning fuel from your center of lift means your CG doesn't significantly change through a flight and you spend less on pumping fuel within the aircraft. With batteries, you are looking at a constant mass from the beginning of the flight to the end... so you can place it anywhere. Electric motors are orders of magnitude lighter than jet engines. Also, you don't need to pump electrons against gravity so placing all of that weight lower has handling/performance advantages.

By using an airframe shape that is well known, they are reducing risk and appealing to existing pilots. By building it from the ground-up, they are taking advantage of differences between the tech.

eg: all of that weight in the fuselage instead of the wings means that rolling is going to be much more nimble. Yaw might be affected as well, depending on the placement/moment of the batteries.

It seems like this is what the article is referencing. However, the ethernet embedded CPUs have "GigE" or even 10/100 capability. Why the need for 240 Gbps with 16 GigE ports? Are the ports 10G fiber capable and they are just future-proofing or is there something I missed with the time-slicing and RDMA?

Yes, breaking changes need to be staged carefully/compatibly across versions.

Simple renaming/reordering is not a breaking change between code versions. The wire format knows numeric ids, not names. It breaks code compilation until the renames are put into effect. There is a subtle breakage where someone renames a field (think: field -> old_field) and then later adds "field" to mean something else; software that isn't recompiled in this window might not recognize that "field" is potentially different. Uncompiled languages may suffer this even more subtly. -- All of this to say, breaking compilation is not the end of the world but there are more dragons as the scope grows.

Stop-the-world is usually only needed when someone has made an unplanned/incompatible change with versions that are still running. If your infrastructure+development is done right (hah) this should never happen.