Services the city doesn't provide.
For all the vaunted orientation training this place is supposed to have, it seems to be missing some pretty basic stuff. Like a computer literacy course.
Now, these machines are actually pretty tough for me to operate. If you gave me a chisel and a stone slab, I wouldn't know what to do with them, either. But a lot of people seem to have the reverse problem. They've never seen a computer in their lives, so there are some basic things they still need to adjust to.
For example: even in the comment threads, unless you exercise some informational security, anyone can read what you've got to say. This is a civilian network with civilian protocols: no built-in encryption. If anybody's interested in learning how to add some, well, come down to the station or up to my apartment and I'll show you how, because this is just... ridiculous.
And as a totally unrelated side note: there don't seem to be a lot of laws on the books about regulating maritime commerce. So, from an enforcing the law perspective, I'm just not that interested in whether or not anyone's launching a boat. Even if I was, I promise, my officer's handbook forbids the use of torture in interrogations. It's a matter of public record.
If someone was planning to launch a boat this weekend, though, I'd probably tell them it was a bad idea. Starting a sea voyage without having a course plotted is a little like trying to travel between solar systems without a Mass Relay: you're just going to wind up drifting in cold, empty nothingness. It's a pretty ugly way to go. Trust me on that one.
And since it's a basic principle of navigation that you can never discover your longitude from a static location, only relative to where you've traveled, that means there's exactly no way to know where you're going when you push off from the coast.
Friendly warning. And, of course, completely unofficial and hypothetical.
Now, these machines are actually pretty tough for me to operate. If you gave me a chisel and a stone slab, I wouldn't know what to do with them, either. But a lot of people seem to have the reverse problem. They've never seen a computer in their lives, so there are some basic things they still need to adjust to.
For example: even in the comment threads, unless you exercise some informational security, anyone can read what you've got to say. This is a civilian network with civilian protocols: no built-in encryption. If anybody's interested in learning how to add some, well, come down to the station or up to my apartment and I'll show you how, because this is just... ridiculous.
And as a totally unrelated side note: there don't seem to be a lot of laws on the books about regulating maritime commerce. So, from an enforcing the law perspective, I'm just not that interested in whether or not anyone's launching a boat. Even if I was, I promise, my officer's handbook forbids the use of torture in interrogations. It's a matter of public record.
If someone was planning to launch a boat this weekend, though, I'd probably tell them it was a bad idea. Starting a sea voyage without having a course plotted is a little like trying to travel between solar systems without a Mass Relay: you're just going to wind up drifting in cold, empty nothingness. It's a pretty ugly way to go. Trust me on that one.
And since it's a basic principle of navigation that you can never discover your longitude from a static location, only relative to where you've traveled, that means there's exactly no way to know where you're going when you push off from the coast.
Friendly warning. And, of course, completely unofficial and hypothetical.