partial_accumen

“I don’t recognize your authority to impose these controls over me.” There you go: “I don’t recognize your authority.” That’s the masked-up mentality, as bluntly put as can be.

Here's the oath of office for Pierce County Washington where Swank is the sheriff. Presumably he took this oath when he took the position of sheriff:

"I, (state name), do solemnly swear that I am a Citizen of the United States and a resident and registered voter of Pierce County; that I will support the Constitutions of the United States and the State of Washington, and the Charter and Ordinances of Pierce County; and will faithfully, impartially, and honestly perform the duties of the office of (insert title of office), as such duties are prescribed by law, so help me God."

source

Bold is mine. Doesn't this mean the sheriff is admitting he will violate his oath of office?

Mesh back haul can get some distance connecting some communities aa well.

I don't think community driven mesh networks are a realistically sized solution for the entire continental connectivity .

Ideally, to me, that would multinational orgnization building common infrastruture for the collective benefit.

Certainly that would be best for the many nations of the continent. However, that hasn't happened and high speed internet as a basic utility has been commonplace as a utility in huge parts of the world already for decades. So without the ideal of a coalition of NGOs, are the under served nations on the African continent just supposed to go without instead of the tech companies building the infrastructure, and maintaining the ownership that comes with that, to bring these services as is detailed in the article?

So WISPs and 5G networks address "last mile" access. According to the article Google and Facebook are building undersea cables which don't compete with last mile services, and in fact can help them as the existing backhaul circuits become saturated from continued new WISP and 5G users being added.

I think its fantastic that there are community built efforts to bring people online. However, it sounds like these are small pockets of efforts instead of national or continental efforts. If the WISPs or 5G service area are only in pockets, is it fair that millions of people should go without access to the internet just because they don't live in one of the areas served by those existing community efforts?

What is the alternative to existing giant companies investing in the infrastructure? And why hasn't that alternative already addressed this issue before the tech companies arrived?

I don't see how that rephrasing changes the outcome of the question. What's your view on it? What is the difference you're seeing with that modified question?

Even retail gas stations have to pay upfront before operating to have their underground tanks dug up and removed in case they go out of business. Why isn't this standard for petroleum extraction? If nothing else, the public government would benefit from investing those prepayments until the oil company successfully completes their properly secured inactive well and that money is returned to them.

As long as you're doing your own whole disk encryption, you have a valid path to still be secure. However, if you're running an unencrypted disk, you're much more likely to lose your data to a non-state actor.

A pocket computer that can call.

I held that same mindset for years in the prior generation of technology. I had a Sharp Zaurus and later a Nokia n700 for pocket Linux computing. It took a large amount of effort to make them useful devices. Most people simply don't have the time or ability to do that for themselves and products like iOS and Android deliver what they're looking for right out of the box.

I like the essay's highlighting European contributions to software and technology, but it doesn't quite answer the fundamental question of its title:

Why there’s no European Google?

The essay's answer is [paraphrased] "...because we don't need it.".

I don't quite understand that position because if a Google wasn't needed in Europe then Google could disappear from Europe and no one would notice or care. Yet that isn't likely the case. If Google disappeared overnight it would likely have massive impacts on business and personal lives across Europe.

I guess my answer to the article's question as to "Why is there no European Google" is that creating Google (or a European Google) is extremely resource and financially expensive. Unless the funding for that effort comes from somewhere, it won't just happen in Europe spontaneously without replicating the same private business model that many dislike about Google.

P.S. Another European created technology that should be added to the list for accolades is the creation of Deepmind machine learning/AI. This also lead to the creation of Google Gemini. While this is owned by Google, it was created out of the London offices.

I hope it succeeds, but history hasn't been kind to others that tried.

I want to see real Linux phones that don’t run Android and are somewhat competitive with Android phones, at least in the mid-range space.

There's a large graveyard of attempts at this. The most recent and successful is probably Tizen. Prior to that Firefox OS. People just don't buy them so there's no market for them.

Thank you for that link, I appreciate it. Here's what I searched, and as you can see your link doesn't show up:

Your direct link does indeed show China successfully tested it. Thanks!