Back when I was doing this stuff in the late nineties, I absorbed the FCC Part 15 regulations. The limit in field strength for 88-108 MHz is 250 microvolts per meter at 3 meters, which is achieved by feeding 10 nanowatts into a half wave dipole antenna. One of the end results of the work of unlicensed stations such as the one I built, Radio Limbo, was that the FCC started the LPFM service which squeezes lower power stations between the existing ones. This is what the Ecuadorian community needs there. Unfortunately, the Christians have taken over LPFM.

Whether or not it's listened to by most people, AM radio is indeed the best means of reaching people in an emergency. It has very broad coverage (especially at night) and receivers are already present in most all cars on the road. Our society has become so accustomed to the Internet working everywhere that we've forgotten about the simpler, more robust ways of getting messages out.

The American Dream is to have a proprietary system. Musk was heavily invested in the American Dream. He may be having second thoughts now that he's living the American Nightmare,

That's an early one. I worked at a Byte Shop in 1978 when the serial numbers were around 3000, and I got to repair one in the 200s.

My dad brought home a Motorola MEK6800D1 development kit in 1976. My older brother absorbed it thoroughly and we got it running the next year. We added a homebrew 16x32 text display, a homebrew keyboard, a cassette tape interface, a 4K memory card from Chrislin, a Flexowriter, a 256x256 pixel oscilloscope graphics display, modem to do dialup DECsystem-10 access,etc. He wrote a 2K BASIC interpreter, an assembly language chess game, a text editor, and any other programs. I did most of the Flexowriter interface.

Tom Van Baak. He took 3 of the clocks to the top of Mt. Lemmon outside Tucson, since gravity is less at higher elevations. I met with him and checked out his minivan full of Agilent cesium clocks. He ended up gaining 50 nanoseconds or so from staying on the mountain top.
The relativistic effects are quite noticeable at the nanosecond level in aircraft or spacecraft. It's a good thing that we have computers that can deal with that complexity.

It's not my hobby, I only own old cars. 1958 and 1963 Chevies. Unfortunately, my phone is spying on me. Fortunately, it's not linked to my Gmail account so it doesn't know much.

Any car that does over-the-air updates is assumed to be able to tell that you've hacked its OS. Why is this even a question?

I spent some time at the South Pole, and I had a similar experience. The clocks there are on NZ time because that's what the LC-130s use. The telescope I worked on was parked so that its dish was in the sun in the NZ afternoon. One day we tried working on it in the AM, and nearly froze. It was warm enough to remove Big Red and even your sweater in the late afternoon.

Craigslist replaced the horrible newspaper online classifieds with free ones that didn't suck. But they didn't do it to get rich, so that revenue just disappeared. Oopsie!

Perhaps the management will be woken up by these failures of their software vetting process. We'll see. In any event, software can be done right.

You must not know much about what goes into a modern electronics product. The phones and tablets and laptops being sold today are too small for off-the-shelf fasteners to be used. I make Nixie tube wristwatches in the USA, and I use the smallest American screw I can get to hold them together. That screw is about twice as big as the average screw in a modern phone.

I have the same general job, but I'm mostly a hardware designer. I write a good bit of assembly language, because. I just wonder if all the different CPUs' assembly languages count as different languages.

The Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station has a nice greenhouse in which fresh food has been grown for ten years or so. I was there a few months back, and ate some of their greens. Yummy! This experiment must be a bit more exotic, otherwise it wouldn't be newsworthy.

Your stereotype of Burning Man people is true for perhaps 2% of the people at Burning Man. The rest of us are people who work for a living and go there to enjoy each other's company amidst the fun stuff we create.