SirEDCaLot

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.

The problem isn't capitalism. US has always had capitalism and once we put good protections in it worked great, like post WWII up until like 1990ish. That golden arrow was mainly because there were strong protections for workers that were relevant to the time. A man working minimum wage could live decently and feed his family.

The three factors of production are land, labor, and capital. All three are supposed to have equal seats at the table. But starting somewhere between the Reagan years and 1990s, we started to let capital run the table. Labor took a back seat. And what we have now is the result.

Housing and health care became investments rather than services. Minimum wage didn't track inflation, didn't track CPI, and sure as hell didn't track worker productivity. The federal minimum wage has less buying power today than at any point since the minimum wage was implemented. And there is a very real trickle down effect, in that if the lowest worker is making $7.25, all other wages adjust based on that. IE, the slightly higher end worker makes $15 or $20 because that's double or triple the minimum wage. If the lowest worker was making $20, the slightly higher end worker would be making $40 or $60.

The result is that the American people have less buying power at their disposal than they have in a very long time. Significantly less than during those golden years of the latter 1900s. And that is why shit sucks.

Capitalism is not the problem. Unchecked unregulated capitalism is the problem. Regulatory capture is part of that problem. And that's what we have now in many industries.

Fix that, raise the minimum wage, and stop letting corporations exploit not just workers but the nation as a whole. Then you have some capitalism that works for everybody.

They aren't even trying to come up with believable lies any more, right?

Yeah I'm wondering that too.

I looked at the thread on Reddit and I can't find one single user who says this is a good idea.

I used to. I turned it off. There's an option somewhere to completely turn off Reddit chat.

Sadly Japan may be a culture in decline.
Their culture is basically work yourself to the bone even more than the US. Young people study their ass off and get a job working long hours while still living at home because they still can't afford their own place. And you have stuff like if the subway is a minute late they hand out apology slips to workers so they don't get in trouble with their bosses for being 30 seconds late. Meanwhile there is a very strong 'defer to elder authority' note in their culture. And in many industries people are expected to work a 10-hour day and then go drinking with the bus until 2:00 a.m. only to be back at work the next day at 8:00 a.m.
The end result is young people have neither the time nor the money to have kids. So they don't.

Their population is literally aging and shrinking. They are facing a very serious problem in wondering who is going to take care of their elderly. Their birth to death ratio is 0.44, meaning that for every baby born in a year more than two people die. In a nation of about 125 million, the population is shrinking by just under a million every year. That's not good.

And while the Japanese people are highly educated and very capable, the 'defer to authority' culture prevents the sort of entrepreneurship you see in the US. An example of this, Japanese companies have a stamp called the hanko, when a paper memo is circulated around the office each employee stamps it with their personal hanko stamp to signify that they have read it. Many Japanese companies stayed in person during COVID simply because there was no digital equivalent to the hanko and managers refused to give it up.

If you wants an example, look at Toyota Motors. It's been obvious to everyone with eyes that electric vehicles are the future, and it has been obvious for probably 8 or 10 years. Every major automaker is investing in EV technology. Except Toyota, which up until recently was still betting the farm on hybrids and hydrogen. But that's because the good Mr Toyoda didn't like EVs, and unlike in an American company no one would dare challenge him on that.

It is really too bad. Japan is a wonderful place with an amazing culture and rich history. But if they are going to survive they need to make very serious changes to their society and they need to do it soon. That is going to involve dumping most of what currently qualifies as Japanese business culture, an instituting some real work-life balance laws with teeth. I don't know if they're going to do it.

Yeah exactly. I tried to set it up once, installed it on a NAS box, and it starts talking about me making a cloud account. Why do I need a cloud account to log into my own hardware on my own network?

I do not want the cloud
I do not need the cloud
I will say it very loud
No cloud, no cloud, no cloud.

But apparently it's set up so the only way to log into your own locally hosted software on your own locally hosted hardware is with an external cloud account.

To that I said no thank you and uninstalled it.

Oh of course. For them and their OEM partners too. Nobody else benefits from throwing 2-5 generations of perfectly functional hardware in the fucking trash.

That all said though, Microsoft has been one of the biggest pushes behind replacing passwords with more secure authentication. And TPM does play a role in that. Certainly not the driving factor for throwing away millions of perfectly good computers though.

This is true. But that's also true of almost any execution method. IE, someone who would die of lethal injection would move in the restraints and try to make it hard to inject them.

Actually with nitrogen it's not tricky at all.
Gas chambers use toxic cyanide gas which is extremely painful to breathe in. After the execution the corpse has to be decontaminated so it does not poison mortuary workers. This is not a good system.

The air you are breathing right now is about 80% nitrogen (and 20% oxygen). Nitrogen is all around us. You breathe it with every breath. It is harmless and non-toxic.
Execution by nitrogen does not kill the prisoner because they are breathing nitrogen. It kills the prisoner because breathing 100% nitrogen means they are not breathing any oxygen. Our bodies need a constant flow of oxygen to survive. Remove that, even by simply displacing all the oxygen with a harmless substitute, and the person dies.

Thus if done correctly, all you really need is a breathing mask. You can have other people right next to the prisoner during the execution and they will suffer no ill effect as long as the room is generally ventilated.

For somebody that actually wants to be dead, nitrogen is the most painless method I am aware of. The key is breathe 100% nitrogen little or no recycled breath or atmosphere air, and have this continue for several minutes. There is no choking sensation or pain. You just get light-headed and pass out and eventually die of hypoxia.

Look at this video. This guy is training to be a fighter pilot. They put you in a high altitude chamber to create hypoxic effects so you know what to recognize when you're in the air. Fighter pilots breathe pure oxygen delivered through a series of regulators, gang load your regulator means manually select maximum flow rate on all regulators. So the point of this training is to recognize when you get hypoxic so you can crank up your oxygen.
Point is though, that guy isn't suffering. He's having a blast. He will keep holding up the wrong card and calling it four of spades all day. But that is what happens when the brain is starved of oxygen. If they reduce the oxygen level even farther in that chamber he would pass out, high enough and he would eventually die from it. Breathing 100% nitrogen at sea level does the exact same thing.

One assisted suicide group built a sort of death pod around this concept. I'm sure you can find it on Google. But the basic concept is it's an enclosure and when you push a button on the inside, a liquid nitrogen tank in the base starts delivering gaseous nitrogen to the pod in enough quantity to push away any CO2 you exhale. They put a ton of research into it, like it has safety interlocks and override switches and I think it can even play music.

For whatever it's worth, I hope you never have reason to make use of this information. I believe all life is precious.
But I also think that for somebody with a degenerative disease who's quality of life is going downhill who absolutely 100% is not going to get better, I think the option of choosing to die with dignity rather than suffer for a few more years in an expensive hospital in constant pain is something that should be available. I think that's a very personal decision and there's nobody on the fucking planet who has any right to make it for anyone other than themself.

I really wish there was something regulatory that could be done about this. There are millions of perfectly good fully working computers that are going to go in the fucking trash because of this. I understand the desire for a TPM on every machine. It makes sense in a way. But the pure environmental impact is just indefensible. All of those computers had a significant environmental footprint to build them and ship them and again to dispose of them plus building and shipping their replacements.
If Microsoft had such a hard-on for TPM, they should have worked with computer manufacturers to make some sort of retrofit system or way of easily determining if a TPM can be added to an existing computer

Absolutely 100%. I think basic self-defense should be a required course in middle school or high school, especially for women. And I would encourage any woman or any person for that matter to take charge of their personal defense, in whatever way is most comfortable for them. Carry a gun, carry a taser, carry pepper spray, take martial arts classes like Krav, etc.