Curious_Canid

I predict a dramatic increase in the number of suicides. Specifically among those desperately calling 911 for help.

I can't say I'm shocked that this could have happened, but I am appalled. How does a court convict a man of multiple crimes without any evidence whatsoever? The username may have started that mess, but it should never have made it past the initial investigation into the man who was convicted.

Protestants don't call it mass.

My guess is that the ones that are really used are proprietary, but there are probably early versions of those that originated in academia that could be used.

My experience was actually with the APIs and not with the main app. They originally allowed free access to the API for individuals, with registration, and a lot of excellent third-party apps let you enter your API to use them. When IBM purchased it, they priced the use of the APIs so that there was no option that made sense for individuals. If you weren't using it in volume, and paying tens of thousands of dollars a year, you were just out of luck.

I hadn't heard that IBM sold it off. I will have to go back and look at the original app. I had thought it also went through a big price jump, but that may have settled out in the meantime. It's been a while now.

I generally agree with you. I suspect the current weather station hardware is mostly designed to report in to its corporate owners, but that could probably be worked around. Building a decentralized network for collecting weather data should be possible.

The hard part is that turning the raw data into actual forecasts requires a lot of processing power. My first thought was that it could be done by a large distributed network, similar to what was done with the SETI at Home or the protein folding project. My second thought is that there might be enough processing power that way, but it would be too slow to be useful. There's a lot of lag time in that kind of decentralized arrangement. It would likely produce accurate forecast of what happened several hours ago. I'm not sure how to solve that part of the problem.

Strongly agree. You can dress up the interface in all kinds of ways, but if the data being presented isn't good the rest of it doesn't matter.

For a long time the data from Weather Underground was the gold standard. Then IBM bought them, made the data an expensive subscription, and effectively killed it for non-corporate users.

Then Dark Sky broke new ground with hyper-local weather reporting. Which was great until Apple bought them, killed the Android app, and made it exclusively available to iPhone users.

The best source of free data that is still available in the US is still the National Weather Service. Unfortunately the quality has been degraded by massive budget cuts while whole sections of the API have been taken away.

Finding a high quality data source at a reasonable price has become almost impossible.

It's impressive that after all these years and all those billions of dollars, Zuckerberg still gets up every morning and thinks, "How can I make the world an even worse place than I have already?"

I've tried that in the past, but I don't think it will currently work. I'll look into it, though.

Thank you! I will check that out.

I recently upgraded to Windows 11. I've been putting it off, but there are a few apps I need that simply do not work under 10 anymore. Bleah.

I've been using it on a work machine for several years, but I am still surprised at just how much it sucked to switch from 10. My personal setup has been heavily customized over many years to suit my particular needs and wants. More than half of that customization is no possible under 11. There are workarounds for a few pieces of it, but even those are unlikely to remain stable and functional for very long. Microsoft is constantly changing things that cause unsupported features to break.

So I now have a slower, less reliable, less versatile, and less configurable software environment. It also conducts far more surveillance and sends even more information about me to Microsoft. There is not one single way in which this could be considered an upgrade, except by Microsoft's shareholders.

I'm going to set up dual boot with Zorin. That will allow me to boot into Windows 11 for the few things I need that will only run in that environment. The remaining 99.9% of the time I will just run Linux. (I already know Linux pretty well, I just haven't run it as my primary desktop.)

I suspect my next project will be replacing my Android phone's OS with something less invasive.

I think we need to start holding paintball battles around Flock cameras. Just to provide the surveillance techs with some entertainment, of course.