North Carolina's largest newspaper, Raleigh's News & Observer newspaper, reports that "In the face of stiff opposition from farm equipment companies and dealers, North Carolina state senators on Tuesday walked back a provision that would have widened access to the repair of farming equipment." The so-called "right to repair" provision was included in the Farm Act of 2022, Senate Bill 762, which was discussed Tuesday in the Senate's Agriculture, Energy and Environment Committee. As introduced, the bill would have required manufacturers of farming equipment that relies on digital components to make diagnostic equipment and parts available at "fair and reasonable terms." Representatives of national farm equipment trade groups and North Carolina equipment dealers opposed the bill. Allowing repairs outside of authorized shops, they argued, could damage equipment, pose a risk of injury, and make it possible for farming equipment to violate the Clean Air Act.

After hearing from seven people, Sen. Brent Jackson, a Sampson County Republican, replaced the right to repair provision with language calling on the General Assembly's Agricultural and Forestry Awareness Study Commission to evaluate whether further action is necessary.
More from North Carolina TV station WRAL: Manufacturers and their licensed dealerships counter that they spend millions of dollars stocking parts and training field technicians to service equipment safely and within the parameters of federal laws like the Clean Air Act. More than a dozen dealers and representatives lined up to speak against the provision in the state Senate agriculture committee Tuesday... [Right-to-repair] supporters were far outnumbered by opponents, who warned that giving consumers access to embedded software would allow unsafe or illegal modifications to the equipment, from emissions compliance to safety shutoffs.

Philip Brooks, a dealer from Monroe, said his service techs receive extensive training. "A simple common rail diesel system with a line broken loose with a wrench under pressure can kill a man. We need to be careful of all these things," he told the committee.

Brian Jennings, a farm equipment dealer from Elizabeth City, testified: "I do not support the attacks — and I call them attacks — on our business. We are contracted dealers. We spend a lot of money to be dealers."

Denmark-based Poul-Henning Kamp describes himself as the "author of a lot of FreeBSD, most of Varnish and tons of other Open Source Software." And he shares this message in June's Communications of the ACM.

"The software industry is still the problem." If any science fiction author, famous or obscure, had submitted a story where the plot was "modern IT is a bunch of crap that organized crime exploits for extortion," it would have gotten nowhere, because (A) that is just not credible, and (B) yawn!

And yet, here we are.... As I write this, 200-plus corporations, including many retail chains, have inoperative IT because extortionists found a hole in some niche, third-party software product most of us have never heard of.
But he's also proposing a solution. In Denmark, 129 jobs are regulated by law. There are good and obvious reasons why it is illegal for any random Ken, Brian, or Dennis to install toilets or natural-gas furnaces, perform brain surgery, or certify a building is strong enough to be left outside during winter. It may be less obvious why the state cares who runs pet shops, inseminates cattle, or performs zoological taxidermy, but if you read the applicable laws, you will learn that animal welfare and protection of endangered species have many and obscure corner cases.

Notably absent, as in totally absent, on that list are any and all jobs related to IT; IT architecture, computers, computer networks, computer security, or protection of privacy in computer systems. People who have been legally barred and delicensed from every other possible trade — be it for incompetence, fraud, or both — are entirely free to enter the IT profession and become responsible for the IT architecture or cybersecurity of the IT system that controls nearly half the hydrocarbons to the Eastern Seaboard of the U.S....

With respect to gas, water, electricity, sewers, or building stability, the regulations do not care if a company is hundreds of years old or just started this morning, the rules are always the same: Stuff should just work, and only people who are licensed — because they know how to — are allowed to make it work, and they can be sued if they fail to do so.

The time is way overdue for IT engineers to be subject to professional liability, like almost every other engineering profession. Before you tell me that is impossible, please study how the very same thing happened with electricity, planes, cranes, trains, ships, automobiles, lifts, food processing, buildings, and, for that matter, driving a car.

As with software product liability, the astute reader is apt to exclaim, "This will be the end of IT as we know it!" Again, my considered response is, "Yes, please, that is precisely my point!"

LiveScience reports: Despite being around 4,300 miles in length, the Amazon River surprisingly has no bridges.

The Amazon River is the world's second-longest river and one of the planet's most significant waterways... Given the Amazon flows through three countries (Peru, Colombia and Brazil) and more than 30 million people live in the river's basin, according to the World Wildlife Fund, it seems somewhat improbable that no bridges span the river. So why is this the case? Are there fundamental difficulties with building such structures in a rainforest containing swaps, extensive wetlands and deep, thick undergrowth? Are there financial barriers? Or is it simply not worth the effort?
The site got answers from Walter Kaufmann, the chair of Structural Engineering at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared this summary of the explanations (condensing quotes from the article):

• There are technical and logistical difficulties.
  The Amazon is far from an ideal location for bridge builders. It has an array of natural stumbling blocks that would need to be conquered by engineers and construction workers. its extensive marshes and soft soils would necessitate "very long access viaducts and very deep foundations," and this would require hefty financial investment. Additionally, the changing positions of the river's course across the seasons, with "pronounced differences" in water depth, would make construction "extremely demanding."

• The environment at the Amazon is certainly among the most difficult in the world.
  Pontoons, or floating structures, are not a solution that would work in most parts of the Amazon, Kaufmann said, because the river is hugely impacted by seasonal variances, which adds an additional layer of complexity. For instance, during the dry season — between June and November — the Amazon averages a width of between 2 and 6 miles (3.2 and 9.7 km), while in the wet season — December through April — the river can be as wide as 30 miles (48 km), and the water level can be 50 feet (15 meters) higher than it is during the dry season, according to Britannica.

• There is no sufficiently pressing need for a bridge across the Amazon.
  The Amazon, for much of its 4,300-mile (6,920 kilometers) length, meanders through areas that are sparsely populated, meaning there are very few major roads for any bridge to connect to. And in the cities and towns that border the river, boats and ferries are an established means of moving goods and people from bank to bank, meaning there is no real need for bridges to be built, other than to make trips slightly quicker.

Would you drink a glass of Klingon Blood Wine? Or Cardassian Kanar Red Blend? Maybe you'd prefer the Andorian Blue Premium Chardonnay, or the United Federation of Planets Special Reserve Sauvignon Blanc...

Star Trek wines — a collaboration between CBS Consumer Products and Wines That Rock — has now added those four new flavors to their original two (which Ars Technica described as "far better than we expected, although very much over-priced.") So Ars hosted a wine tasting including the new wines, with their six testers joining "Q himself — aka actor John de Lancie." Also taste-testing was The Orville writer Andre Bormanis (a former science advisor for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise).

"Wine assessments were anonymous, in keeping with the gathering's super-casual vibe. And the wine was purchased out of pocket, not gifted for promotional purposes."

They'd tried this once before in 2019. Their three-year mission? To explore strange new wines... Next up: A Bordeaux blend from Chateau Picard (although the label claims it's a 2386 vintage to keep the conceit going): 85 percent cabernet and 15 percent merlot. As I noted [in 2019], this is a bona fide winery, with a centuries-old vineyard in the St.-Estephe region. It just so happens that Jean-Luc Picard's family has long run a fictional vineyard of the same name, albeit in the Burgundy region rather than Bordeaux — it features prominently in Picard. The real winery agreed to collaborate on a special edition of their cru bourgeois vintage for the Star Trek collection.

The Bordeaux blend also came out on top with the 2022 tasting crew, who declared it "perfectly quaffable" and "surprisingly good." The wine is light and dry, "easy on the palate," with "a clean finish," and fairly well balanced. It's almost as if Bordeaux wine makers have had centuries of experience to draw upon. This was the only bottle the tasting crew polished off completely.

Alas, the four new varieties in the Star Trek wine collection fall far, far short of their predecessors....

I will give the Star Trek Wine folks props for creative bottle design, especially the corkscrew shape of the Cardassian blend. The broad consensus was that the Klingon Blood Wine is trying to be a pinot noir and falling short; it's basically a very fruity California cabernet, with perhaps a hint of pepper. "Whoever supplied this blood ate nothing but fruit salad the week prior," one taster noted, with another simply writing, "Way too sweet." The most generous assessment was that it is "drinkable but not extraordinary...."

With the evergreen caveat that taste in wine is highly subjective, here's our recommendation. Stick with the original two bottles for your Star Trek wine, or save yourself some money and get something comparable for a fraction of the price — unless, of course, you're really keen to collect the whole set of unusual bottle designs. Or you're a Cardassian who loves really sweet wine.
Meanwhile, William Shatner himself is raising money for charity by auctioning off a bottle of "James T. Kirk" whiskey — the actual prop used on Star Trek: Picard. "The bottle does not contain real Bourbon just a colored liquid," its description notes — but the bottle has actually been autographed by 91-year-old Shatner.