There was a huge amount of firewood rationing and shortages as well.

Whoops - that's actually $390 AUD per 128Gb! Looked at the invoice properly.... On June 16th 2025, a 64Gb kit was $195 AUD...

I upgraded both of my home lab Proxmox servers to 128Gb of DDR4 - cost me $390 AUD per 64Gb kit (2 x 32Gb sticks).

Could sell that second hand now for over $1600 AUD... Problem is, then you have nothing to replace it with because everything else is just nuts.

A while back, I upgraded from an AMD 5700XT GPU to a 6700XT and it cost me ~$200 out of pocket... Mostly for the mining craze wanting the 5700XT...

I haven't bought any real major upgrades since - its just too expensive...

One would hope that given this guy was deprived of his freedom through no fault of his own that there would be substantial compensation due.

It's one thing to just vacate the sentence, its another to make up for what those actions of the state did to this guy...

I have been playing with routing tables. I have a few virtual machines around the globe that have full BGP routing tables and that gives me great IP -> ASN details. That means someone comes into a server and that might get redirected to as1221.my2026.example.com but that is a virtual web server with a few hundred thousands others. Everything nice and fast until there is a problem. Once that hits, that ASN gets redirected to the slow scrape box.

Also there is ipasn.net created at APNic. host -t txt 8.8.8.8.ipasn.net gives ownership of the block and other details involving things like its Route PKI status. It is part of their lab so I'm not sure how much traffic it can cope with.

Worst part, you can only screw a community so many times before they just decide not to play ball anymore.

At that point, its almost impossible to restore the status quo - which is likely bad for everyone using MS kit at that point.

Does DNS over HTTPS (aka Private DNS) not fix this issue?

A former head of AT&T back when it was The Phone Company made a comment along the lines that the long distance network had to be built to cope with with mother's day and everything else was free. It was used as an example of how guesses about CapEx vs OpEx can go very wrong. It might have been Fred Kappel who said that.

Ireland and Italy and Spain have its share of people who see angels. Oddly the number of UFO sightings and angel sightings are highly concentrated around areas with geological pressure Peltier related electrical oddities. Oddly New England has ghost issues around the similar geology.

I want thin frames and a color that sort of just disappears. I don't see putting a camera and battery into that form. Of course I don't see that form much any more and not in the proper colors. It may not help that there seems to be one company in the wold left that makes frames another that makes lenses and one is a subsidiary of the other.

Upper middle class means going on holidays twice or more a year. Lower middle class means holidays at least every 2 years.

You mean, pull social media out of Australia?

Yes please!

If a government forks GNU, they will do it at the copyright law level, not the code level.

The laws in several countries are going to require it. My preferred way is for the OS to offer a flag of "This user is of legal age in this region based on information provided to the administrator of this computer." I'll leave it up to the people with compilers to comply or not with their local laws.

My proposal is stuff the flags in a sysctl user.$UID.age var. and then let the browser send info off to other sites just like it does with language selection. That way a pam module (or systemd) can set an over/under age of majority for the region and then let the browser send a "yes/no" flag. The pam module or sysd can calulate that based on a birthday or a +18 flag so you may have to log in to reset it but the birthdate is never sent to the browser let alone to the end web sites.

This gives schools a way to control content. It allows parents to control content. It allows home router vendors to claim to control content. It allows web sites to stop annoying users about being above 16,18 or 21 depending on what they are pushing. The politicians will look at it and say the industry is working with them while patting themselves on the back.

The other solution is let the politician's owners come up with a solution and that will be an expensive id solution that tracks everyone through the web with no way to opt out.

I'm in favor of fixing this properly before the politicians mandate something stupid.
My proposal is a sysctl value set by a pam module (or systemd on systems infected with that). The browser then does something like language verification much like the HTTP Language headers. Those can be intercepted, checked or forced in environments that have to provide web access to kids like schools. A web site should be able to ask for something like Australia's under 16 and can return a AGE_AU_VIC_Under_16=True if and only if configured to do so. This allows things like online news papers to allow under 16 access to news but not the discussion forums. The proposal still needs work, but it allows for parents to set things as they wish and keep the politicians out of it while letting them claim they fixed it. In the past local ISPs were required to give out software to lock down kids computers and the take up was smaller than the number of people who supported the law.