Better plan: pick something that is currently and widely used in aerospace and military applications and the world will preserve working systems for you.

I have personal experience with this. 15 years ago, just before I left an employer I had worked for for some time, I took a number of Digital Alpha workstations off their hands; they just gave them away after about five years of use and replaced them with newer workstations.

It turns out there is a thriving market for this hardware because aerospace and military outfits used it for their work and today they still have drawings and material they need to deal with in original form. They have migrated the original material to newer systems, but they also still maintain the equipment and software needed to get at the material in its original form.

They pay through the nose to get replacement parts and complete systems in working condition, so a salvage market has emerged and people prowl around trying to find caches of ancient workstations. Doubtless this will be ongoing for at least another ten years, and the prices will escalate accordingly.

So if you need to ensure there will be spare parts and systems at your disposal a quarter century from now, find out what Lockheed and Boeing are designing today's jets with and use that stuff. It's built well and people pay dearly for it when new, so it tends to be carefully preserved; it's hard to trash something that cost $20k, even if it is wildly obsolete.

They tried that. They couldn't feed themselves reliably.

After 70 years of misery and decline they stopped and embarked on a new era of misery and decline, eased substantially by limited trade with the West.

They have the resources to be self sufficient. They even have the knowledge. Unfortunately, that's not enough.

To close the loop you need a functioning market of industry and ideas where property rights are respected and investors and entrepreneurs can flourish. Russians don't do that. Their culture is rotten right to the core with corruption. It's been that way since the czars, it was that way right through the commie era and it remains that way today, and any honest Russian will tell you exactly that.

So no, they can't be self sufficient. They'd be starving again inside 10 years. The grain haulers would be corralled in the switch yard of some apparatchik gang while Russians boil grass in the dark.

The best thing we can do for ourselves and the rest of the species is keep our foot firmly on their neck until they stop using force in Europe. Or until they end up under China's thumb. Which ever comes first.

Mr. Clinton and Mrs. Clinton, the former Walmart exec., gave China MFN status which started the huge growth of Chinese industry in the late 90's. The common "Walmart America" upper middle class Clintonista is all about shelves full of Chinese stuff to fill their mcmansions, and with the possible exception of Obama you can't find a bigger proponent of TPP than Clinton.

It was Obama Democrats that tripped up this trade deal. Blacks, labor and others have been made surplus people through competition with disposable foreign workers and they've finally — after half a century — figured it out.

The fuck it is. You mother fuckers are the real "austerity."

Japan had to stop indulging you hairshirt statists when they shut down their nukes. "Renewables" aren't making up the difference. Gas and oil does that. Australia had to kick you fucks to the curb after they got a good taste of what you wanted to inflict; they took your "carbon tax" and stuffed it up your tail pipe before you could ruin their country.

Your bullshit impact figures are just as bogus as your downplayed costs, your exaggerated benefits and your climate fear mongering.

You've missed the distinction between "says" and `does'. Reading comprehension issues.

She does; she says mean things about the "rich", coporations and the rest of the libtard boogey men. CA knuckleheads lap that shit up even as they're pounding on Zillow to find someplace they can afford to live after fucking up their own state.

k.... I tried to follow the thinking here and failed.

It's as though someone took the terrified mind of a Sierra Club propagandized millennial and blended it with the mind of a slashdot basement dweller; out pops a strange being that blathers endlessly about 3D printing, climate change and saving the world.

I replaced a fixed code system about 10 years ago. I'm sure there are plenty of old ones still in use, but this claim that "most openers in commercially available garage door openers" are still using these ancient techniques is bogus.

Neat hack, but it isn't the revelation this misleading story claims.

Yeah. You tell 'em. As you sit there barefoot in your yurt posting on Slashdot using telepathy; no electricity, polymers or climate control involved.

Meanwhile the top modded and most visible post in this story is an anti-LEO spiel that would be groupthink approved on any libtard site you care to name.

The Navy isn't hiding its entire fleet of war planes behind shell corps and surveilling US cities with them. There is a big difference between the sovereign armed forces of a nation and a creepy, clandestine, unaccountable government operation to surveil its citizens, and I make exactly that distinction, so this supposed "hypocrisy" is nothing more than your fevered imagination.

I'm no conspiracy nutter; this whole kerfuffle is nothing more than what happens when you employ way too many government employees and fund them with way too much money; attributing some dark conspiracy to it is probably giving it way more credit than it deserves.

But there certainly is no better way to fuel the black helicopter crowd then actually finding a fucking fleet of black helicopters. And yeah, I know they are fixed wing. Fuck off.

Yes. The codec in Windows 7 (ultimate) and its integration with Media Player produces smoother playback with less system load than VLC. The difference grows (up to a point) when other activity competes for resources while playing DVD or Blu-ray video.

You may not realize that, and it may not even occur for your particular collection of hardware. I didn't pick up on it for a long time, but at some point I noticed the difference and since then I've used Media Player. And I'm not some crazy 'phile that obsesses over imaginary minutia; I spend less than average on media gear and I'm not particularly sensitive to minor phenomena. But I can tell the difference between VLC and Media Player, and I can measure the difference in system load.

So yeah, it kinda sucks that the DVD codec Microsoft provides is going away. Will I care enough to not just use VLC? We'll see. I also use VLC frequently; it's better when coping with with random media and does a lot of tricks WMP won't. I have no problem with VLC at all. But if I can get better results with something else then I just might do that instead.

A government with the power to take one right can take the other. The strong preferences of groupthink assholes like you and Tim Cook will see both taken.

They're doing what they always do; drip drip drip out the bad news, a little worse each time. Fifty?!! Wow. 97?? Well, that's only 47 more than 50 so; "no new information," as their spokes-fucks will say.

It's going on right now with the anthrax news. Yesterday the DOD revealed they sent live anthrax into Canada, in addition to the 12 US states they had already admitted to.

The Clintons have been pulling this crap since the 90's. They're dripping out Foundation donor information one foreign turd at a time; timed to run out long before the election. They've got the State Department dripping out their copies of her emails on a published schedule now.

They know there are far more than 50 aircraft. So does the AP. They'll admit to a few more in a couple news cycles. They'll probably fess up to the whole number just before Rand Paul or whomever seats the first hearing on it.

That's a big fleet of planes. Just think, one "not secret" program inside one bureau of one branch of our Federal Government controls 50 aircraft, and we're not even allow to know what this operation is called, as they smother the whole thing under shell companies.

Isn't having a giant government great? Lets give them more money and see what they do with it.