You can’t even show me the right speed limit due a sign on a different road that say 5MPH, when I’m on a 30MPH road, and suddenly you start beeping at me cause I’m going too fast?

Insurance company using police report: “Sorry, your rates are going up because you were going 25MPH over the speed limit. What were you thinking?”

I agree with your sentiment, and that the world should work like your hypothetical.

how could they possibly ever know

Lawyers doing lawyer stuff. As to why, you said it:

I made mega money and they found out

We’d have to have real lawyers weigh in, but for the most part I think unless you found an undiscovered market then they won’t care. Programming isn’t unique in the respect that the tools you need to do world-changing work aren’t that different between what you might have at home versus a well funded computer science research lab, but you’re much more likely to stumble into a marketable app than you are a quicker FFT.

I don’t get how anyone could EVER enforce a law or agreement or rule that says something I wrote at home on my device on my time is theirs.

Check your employment terms. I’d wager the first step of that is seeing if you have a paper copy. I know I don’t for all the places I’ve worked or acquisitions I’ve been through.

Something like an ALCU or Second Amendment Foundation that focused on nothing but that would be a nice-to-have. I think it overall destroys creativity in the industry.

It’s depressing to be wasted pointless effort in a bureaucratic corporate nightmare.

And depending on the details of your employment, if you code for fun, on your own time, at home, using your own equipment, the company still owns it.

There’s literally nothing for detectors to go on anymore.

It’s harder for users as well. Even youtubers I’ve followed for a while have started using the recipe of having a ridculous thumbnail such as “WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER BUY THIS” with an arrow pointing to something. After a couple of times of catching me because I own one of the things the arrow is pointing to (and then watching a 10:01 long video not talking about the item in question) I decided not to fall for it. I noticed that discovery of a new channel got hard. They’re all following the recipe now since I guess youtube mandates it, so it’s the same bas relief thumbnails that seem like they pose a question and a video that doesn’t answer it. We’ll end up with a new Betteridge’s Law and the resource youtube once was is lost forever and we’ll stand around making dumb faces thinking how we’re all getting ripped off…

So to sweep all of the water systems in the country in advance isn’t doable in any time frame?

IR isn’t an acronym I’m familiar with.

If budget weren’t an issue, how many clones of your teams would it take to do that for all the water systems in the US in five years?

What are the odds that the average muncipality understands the security implications of just existing on the internet these days?

“No, their platform doesn’t support any real secure protocols and won’t route over a VPN, it needs to be on the same subnet as the devices. […]”

They won’t know that much. They don’t understand that their job isn’t running a water department, it’s running the computers that maintain the water department and that includes security. For someone familiar with computer security it’s easy to recognize negligence, but until the law sees it as criminal negligence nothing’s going to change.

Small town municipal water departments aren’t going to be able to afford the guy holding the shield against international state actors.

Debian.

This is the future so Virtual Machines and containers are where most of the stuff will end up anyway. If you need a specific distro it’s minutes away with a VM or container.

If you think there’s a chance you might want some Redhat cert for a job at some point it might be the time to jump to Rocky, and I’ve never used Proxmox so I can’t comment except to say that if I come into two fairly large computers for self hosting, the first one will get Rocky so I can get much more familiar with it, and the second will get Proxmox.

It’s all systemd anyway.