Well, not the dead ones, of course, if that was the "spirit" of your argument (uggh - bad pun, sorry).

But as for the living ones, yes, they do have SOME access and ability to use ham (not an acronym so no need to capitalize it) radio gear and frequencies, if they think it will help. Ham radio is also known as amateur radio.

Baofeng, or similar Cheap Chinese Radios (CCR's) sell for less than $30.00 on Amazon or eBay. You can't believe that none of the protesters have relatives or friends in other countries that could BUY the gear for them? Their main problem is they are short range and will likely require a similar radio at the other end to receive them.

For longer range communications, there are a lot of different QRP, or low power - less than 5 Watts - type of "HF" transceivers that can go much longer distances but require larger and longer antennas than walkie-talkie type radios. These are a little more expensive, usually around $100.00 or so and higher, all the way through several thousand dollars for really high-end digital (SDR) all-band, all-mode "HF" transceivers.

Also, recently there has been an emergence of "mesh network" type devices. Those are usually UHF/VHF, so a local radio IP-network type of service is established by a small fleet of walkie-talkie like devices operating in a peer-to-peer fashion as "hotspots" or portable access points, all nodes in the mesh. These are not necessarily operating on amateur radio specific frequencies, but could be.

So, the protesters should have some potential to use various amateur radio services or equipment, depending on their ability to buy or smuggle in radios that were either bought for them by confederates or family members, etc. or to access ones that were available to them prior to the crackdown.

LLM-based AI can do some pretty impressive things. It *seems* to answer questions with remarkable accuracy, and it instantly produces code in response to often ridiculously vague input queries:

"Write me an app to track ant farms in Vietnam"

And what do you know? You get something that seems surprisingly useful!

Except that it's all an illusion.

I'm an experienced software developer (25 years now) and I focus on information lifecycle apps targeting workgroups and enterprise - organizations of 50+ people. As I write this, about 20,000 people are concurrently using an app I created.

Over the past year or so, I've been trying to deeply integrate AI into my workflow. It's there when I write code in VSCode, it's there when I write sysadmin/shell code, and it's there when I'm refactoring.

The more I use it, and the "better" it gets, the more frustrating I find it. It's only somewhat useful in the area that most coding projects fail: debugging.

No matter what it seems, LLM-based AI doesn't *understand* anything. It's just an ever-more-clever trickery based on word prediction. As such, it serves only as another abstraction that still must be understood and reviewed by a real person with actual understanding, or the result is untrustable, unstable, and insecure "vibe code" that is largely worthless outside of securing VC funding, which is the thing that AI perhaps does best: help unprepared people get VC funding.

You still need real people to get code you can live with, depend on, and grow with.

Technologies like OAUTH 2.0 have been around for a long, long time, and their purpose is to provide a verifiable audit-trail for users.

And it works! Although there have been (and will always be) security issues, the reality is that technologies like SAML and OAUTH do provide a very useful level of trust.

Except that, although these technologies do allow for a useful transfer of identity, the agents widely used to provide this identity (the IDP) is never an entity that provides a uniformly useful level of identity.

Here I am: Bill Jones (not my real name) citizen of the UK (not my real country, either) and I have no way to properly assert that to, say, Bank of the West (not my real bank, either) or Northern Airlines. (not my real airline)

If I have to assert my true identity, I have a state-issued driver's license or passport. Why do I have no way to assert either of these identification documents electronically?

Why can't I use my passport ID to assert myself to the bank, or the airline?

Seems to me that it would be HIGHLY USEFUL if I could. And it seems to be self-evident and proper that the agencies that issue drivers licenses or passports could offer electronic identification, even if it's sourced out to a tech company with a good reputation.

In the US, it's now become increasingly common to have a unified electronic ID to interact with agencies: see id.me. This is a start, and I know government agencies work GLACIALLY SLOWLY so maybe by the time my grandkids are having babies this could be a thing.

Eh?

> At some point you have to ask why you're using RAID at all. If it's for always-on, avoiding data loss due to hardware failures, and speed, then RAID 6 isn't really am great solution for avoiding data loss when disks get to these kinds of sizes, the chances of getting more than one disk fail simultaneously is approaching one, and obviously it was never great for speed.

If you're at this point, then using drives at all is probably already off the table. But I think this position is probably ridiculous.

I have many years of experience managing file clusters in scopes ranging from SOHO to serving up to 15,000 people at a time in a single cluster. In a cluster of 24 drives under these constant, enterprise-level loads, I saw maybe 1 drive fail in a year.

I've heard this trope about "failure rate approaching 1" since 500GB drives were new. From my own experience, it wasn't really true then, any more than it's true now.

Yes, HDDs have failure rates to keep in mind, but outside the occasional "bad batch", they are still shockingly reliable. Failure rates per unit haven't changed much, even though with rising capacities, that makes the failure rate per GB rise. It still doesn't matter as much as you think.

You can have a great time if you follow a few rules, in my experience:

1) Engineer your system so that any drive cluster going truly offline is survivable. AKA "DR" or "Disaster Recovery". What happens if your data center gets flooded or burns to the ground? And once you have solid DR plans, TRUMPET THE HECK OUT OF IT and tell all your customers. Let them know that they really are safe! It can be a HUGE selling point.

2) Engineer your system so that likely failures are casually survivable. For me, this was ZFS/RAIDZ2, with 6 or 8 drive vdevs, on "white box" 24 bay SuperMicro servers with redundant power.

3) If 24x7x36* uptime is really critical, have 3 levels of redundancy, so even in a failure condition, you fail to a redundant state. For me engineering at "enterprise" level, we used application-layer logic so there were always at least 2 independent drive clusters containing full copies of all data. We had 3 drive clusters using different filesystem technologies (ZFS, XFS/LVM) and sometimes we chose to take one offline to do filesystem level processing or analysis.

4) Backups: You *do* have backups, and you do adhere to the 3-2-1 rule, right? In our case, we used ZFS replication and merged backups and DR. This combined with automated monitoring ensured that we were ready for emergencies, which did happen and were always managed in a satisfactory way.

Now we just need to determine the world's saddest song to play on it...

Very insightful. Very few things are truly a zero-sum game in life,
that attitude completely discounts any win-win situations stupidly, selfishly and needlessly.

Yet, the firings and beatings will continue until morale improves!

Correct. This was stating the required ride fee for any potential hitchhikers that might get picked up. It was meant as a joke (mostly).

Gentlemen!

We CANNOT have a Quantum AI Space Laser Agile Computing Constellation GAP!

"Cow Corn", or Field Corn, as it's properly known, mostly goes to produce a large amount of a little product you might have heard of - automotive fuel - Ethanol, or "GASOHOL" as it's sometimes called.

Plus, it's still used to feed cows as noted, so land to grow Field Corn is not a waste by any means, it's use is more important than ever.

"Cow Corn" - it's not just for dinner anymore! (moo)

The only remotely interesting thing was about Apple making them change the computer since it became evil. I had heard before that they are militant in movie productions about not letting the "Bad Guys (TM)" have an iPhone!

I thought about that and it came to me that it was a huge spoiler for a suspense movie, a double agent having an Android would be a dead giveaway!

Also, I can't believe they're going to call the supercomputer "Colossus"! Holy fuck, did anyone of them even watch that movie?

What does the Time Variance Authority have to do with all this?

Mewbits?

It was caused by laser rot, or Laser Diode degradation. The early players had lasers in them running as hard and hot as they could make them at the time, and over time the power output would decrease and the players would start skipping, or only work on their side, and it would get worse over time.

I had 3 of the Sony D-5 original "Discman" players and they all did the same thing, they lasted with daily use for about a year or so then started to exhibit the problems. This was only a problem for the first few years of CDs, by the time re-writable CD's came out, the the lasers were capable of much higher power and would last much longer at the lower power (playback mode) settings.

Some "QRP" or low power experimenters as you state play with very low power (under 5W), but most of the 900 MHz activity is simple analog or digital repeaters, like APCO/P25. If they are using standard LMR (2 way radio, like public safety) repeaters, they are using power levels from 35 to 300W TX Power typically. The antenna gains used give them 1x to 10x gain (from unity to ~10dB), so that gives typical total ERP values of 35 to 3000W.

Most amateurs using this band do not use full legal power there, unless they are playing with EME (Earth-Moon-Earth) stations or other specialized point to point applications.

Also, 900 MHz ham operations are not that common, in my state they are almost exclusively only in large metro city areas, and for example there are 500 repeaters total on all the various ham bands, and of them there are only maybe 25 total 900 MHz systems, state wide. Most systems are on the 2 meter or 70 cm (440 MHz) bands, with 220 MHz as the next most popular band.

Note that there are protected "weak signal" areas of the band reserved for those "QRP" or ultra low-power operators and for things like satellite signal earth station works. There are distinct "preserves" or areas of the band that are designated for that low power use only and repeaters or any other signals exceeding 1 or 5 W max are very much prohibited in these parts of the band.