Muehe

can’t see how this can possibly be a good thing, you know it will mean funding with conditions.

Well, the things they are funding will get funded? How is that a bad thing?!

The conditions range from very broad, like "fix bugs" (curl), over somewhat specific like "improve cross-platform compatibility and the Linux RNG" (Wireguard), to very specific like "create a test-suite and drive development on the Fediverse account migration functionality" (ActivityPub).

You can see more for yourself at https://www.sovereign.tech/tech

All of these seem to be rather tame conditions that are just there to ensure the funds get used in the way they were intended to be used. And I don't really see how that gives the STF any sort of direct control over these projects, while it gives those projects resources to achieve more than they might have otherwise. There are no long-term funding models that would enable implicit control over these projects.

They could set up an account on one of the larger well established Canadian instances or even better start up their own.

Both of these options have their pros and cons, and I think it is important to explain these well to the council if you want to have any hope of convincing them.

A line of argument that has had some success in Europe is what has become known as "Digital Sovereignty", basically a fancy term for saying government should control its own infrastructure. So you might want to sell it as an easy way to have a permanent archive of public communication and a method for it that is under their direct control, rather than as a way to find more engagement.

As others have said self hosting has a maintenance and moderation overhead, but this can be lessened by running an instance together with other cities while still retaining most of the benefits of self hosting.

Seeing from the linked cross-post that this is about Port Alberni, and considering that http://portalberni.ca/ returns an empty reply while https://portalberni.ca/ lets me know I have been geoblocked because I'm outside of Canada and the US, I'd say you have an uphill battle before you though. These people made a website (probably paid for it, too), and then killed much of its use by geoblocking most of the world.

Good luck.

There is a blue van in the right lane,

*car in front of a blue road sign

at 270 km/h (168 MPH), he’s going to be right behind it in a second.

The bollards on the right side of the road are at a distance of 50m from each other, by which we can estimate that the other car is at least 250 to 300 meters away. 270km/h equals 75m/s so they are about 4 seconds behind (if the other car was stationary).

Therefore the lane is not – in fact – free.

To answer this question it is much more important to know what is on the right lane next to or behind the car, which we do not see in this image anyway.

FYI you have a typo in your last screenshot (This sign m[a]y not...):

I don't know if there is any single takeaway here, this story is just fucking ridiculous on every single level.

1. They bullshited themselves into a search warrant based on typical cannabis "investigation methods".
2. In a state where recreational cannabis use is legal.
3. Persisted in the search even after their main argument for it, high energy usage indicating a grow-op, fell away when it was clear it was indeed a medical facility.
4. Made the motherfucking "Gun flies to MRI" TV trope a certified reality. This is a thing that verifiably happened now.
5. Instead of getting help, used a sealed (!) emergency shutdown button...
6. ...which damaged the machine. And released thousands of dollars worth of helium gas.
7. Forgot their loaded magazine on the ground.

This can't be real. I'm fucking dying over here. Please let there be bodycam footage of the cop speaking in a high pitched voice after. (I know the helium was probably not released into the room, but one can hope I guess)

android auto

First I heard of this, but since it seems to be just some software that runs on the hardware of car manufacturers it seems rather unlikely. But very theoretically possible, if the car manufacturer was using default process scheduling in a CPU constrained machine and now switches to real-time scheduling in an update. But that was possible for years before this news, the code has just been mainlined to the default kernel now. If the car manufacturer cared about that they would probably have done it already with a patched kernel.

And it keeps getting worse. Basically the whole base plus some forests and residential areas seem to be burning.

I think these are satellite measurements that accumulate over 24 hours though, so not sure if the image reflects the current situation well.

Link to the NASA map btw if anybody wants to check it out

Because bee stingers are mostly used against other insects. They don't get stuck in a chitin exoskeleton, only in the more flexible skin tissue of mammals. In insects the barbs instead pull out soft tissue from inside, thus making them more lethal (to the bees victim).

Sittenhaft

*Sippenhaft

Sippe = kin/clan Sitte = morals/tradition

You thought it was AI, but she just has ulnar polydactyly. How do I know this is ulnar instead of radial or central polydactyly? The wedding ring, it's on the ring finger.

(/s of course, this is obviously AI. But yeah people with extra fingers do in fact exist. They or the parents often cut away the extra finger for cosmetic reasons.)

They never saw the message, they saw anon disconnecting, anon saw them disconnecting. Behind the scenes Blizzard made them shadow-ban each other, they will never share the same server shard again. Both sides think they won and Blizzard will continue taking money from both. /conspiracy

[...] a public institution is really not a great example of the general population [...]

Which I touched upon in my disclaimer, but in some ways it is a great example. Public institutions are defined by the general population, indirectly through their representatives creating the rules that govern them, and directly through contact with the public at large. Now if all our institutions still use this very outdated technology, and you can have trouble convincing them - during a global pandemic mind you - that using email is just as safe as using fax (so not safe at all basically), then that speaks to a larger mindset in the general population.

Many in the general public are also a lot quicker, some might even say careless, with adopting new technology of course. But as a society we are rather slow, and there are surprisingly many individuals who are hesitant or entirely resistant to adopting new technology. The fediverse usage is a bubble in a bubble here.

The internet infrastructure is another good example for this on the societal level, as there were plans in the 1980ies [!] to lay out a glass fibre network between every publicly used building in the country, which would have gotten us a good part of the way towards adopting this new material at scale. But in the end it was deemed unnecessary and too expensive and the project got canned (mixed in with rumours of "close friendship" between the chancellor and a major copper producer). Instead now we have people running around thirty years later and collecting signatures at the door for last-mile fibre network projects that seldom make quorum and thus almost never materialise public funding.