Why not take a look into "pirate radio" in the UK in the 1960s? Public broadcasting here is a bit different to, say, the US but the BBC was the old fuddy-duddy then and was forced to create BBC Radio 1 eventually. One of the pirate radio DJs is still broadcasting on the BBC - the legend that is Tony Blackburn.

The thing about AM radio (or the "wireless" as we used to call it), is that you can broadcast to a vast audience with not a lot of stuff and eventually people will make a film about it! "So what!" I hear you cry as you stroke your socials. Now get your fucking socials working half way up a mountain in Bum Fuck, NE (I believe that is the correct terminology for a lack of modern comforts in the US)

A modern medium wave radio doesn't require some of the tricks we used back in the day to tune it to a station. Many here are unlikely to remember fiddling with a telescopic aerial on a ball and socket joint and then using a rotary tuning knob and thank $DEITY for that!

A MW or LW transmission can travel a very, very long way and can reach places that FM or anything that a mobile phone (cell) works with, can't.

BTW: I drive an EV - a Seic MG4 and my car radio can do DAB and FM (we've ditched AM here but the UK is rather smaller than the US) with no problem. No idea why you think the motors would be an issue.

An ICE could be likened to the Hindenberg. It has a whopping tank of explosive fluid in the boot (trunk) which is almost synonymous with trying to fly on hydrogen instead of helium. There is no denying that a Li fire is horrendous but it does need starting and that is quite hard but petrol can be ignited with just a fag (cigarette).

Let's get back to basics: A fire needs three things - combustible material, ignition and oxygen.

The horrid thing about a Li fire is that it provides its own oxygen once it is running. However it is quite hard to start in the first place. And it will gradually munch its way through the burnable material and it wont explode. It burns very, very hot.

A petrol fire is a doddle to start off and it will tend to want to run really quickly - it wants to "explode".

I've watched demos of cotton reel sized devices as car bombs making cars explode. I saw the bonnet of a Merc reach at least 100 feet. I suspect an EV would have a nasty gash in the side. A member of my family used to be an ATO.

ICEs have a tank of flammable fuel in the boot.

My dad was an ATO some years ago. He messed around with explosives whilst avoiding blowing himself up. I attended several demos of cars with cotton reel sized devices attached to their rear wheel wells. I recall seeing the bonnet of a Merc reaching at least 100 feet, whilst the rest of the car burned furiously.

An ICE does not have that tank of 50+ litres of explosive fluid built in. Its probably never occurred to you that it is not really a good idea to have a bag of explosive material in your boot, but you do. I could chuck a lit fag into your fuel tank and you could throw an entire packet of fireworks at my car - yours would probably explode and mine wont.

Do you have a mobile phone? With a Li battery in it? Next to your bollocks (int al) ?

I drive an EV myself. Its safer.

I own a Seic MG4 EV (2024). I also went to school in Abingdon where part of the original Morris Garage operated from.

I have to say that my MG4 is rather better built than some of the MG efforts I've seen in the past but it doesn't really have that dripping oil, panels liable to drop faster than a stripper guzzling chip fat, appeal.

My dad erm ... picked up my mum, suitably equipped with his MG Midget. Apparently the fan belt failed on the way to a dance and required knicker elastic to fix. They were both soldiers in the 1960s and I'm not going to judge them. No, I wasn't the result of car mech, I arrived rather later!

Anyway, my Seic is rather enticing, 0-30 is embarrassingly fast and its rather cheap to run.

Unfortunately the south facing (UK) part of my house roof has three dormers on it so it is impractical for solar panels. The north side might be a possibility but there are three Velux windows and a hedge/trees/etc that shades it and there is a road the other side, so I don't want to lose the hedge because it deadens the noise and staves off some pollution.

Here I can charge my EV at night at 7p/KWh my usual eleccy charge is 29p/KWh. There is also a daily "standing charge" of 44p/day. That 7p rate is valid for the rest of our usage too so we tend to treat it like the old school Economy 8 (which will mean nothing to most readers here!) The dishwasher and washing machine are stalled to kick off at 23:30 or later.

Although we have sort of got used to them, those numbers are pretty mad. Before Russia went total wanker, our usual price was way lower.

Tardo is the Latin verb that "retarded" comes from. It means: to be slow. When describing someone publically, do you think it is appropriate to describe them as "slow"?

Retarded is not a technical term anymore and is purely descriptive and absolutely pejorative.

As a famous person geezer once said: fuck off.

Who pissed in your dinner?

HA is pretty remarkable. When ever you hear the refrain "The S in IoT stands for security", HA is doing its damndest to fix that.

Mine (I have lots of them) provide single panes of glass for a lot of apps. My home one alone covers at least 15 phone apps, including eleccy supplier and even my car. There is a school in Dorset which is gradually rolling out ... ... anyway, I think HA is absolutely belting and I'm not sure what your snags actually are with it. Why not flesh out your issues with it and we can engage on the facts.

Your dad sounds amazing. I have multiple programming languages and NodeRED to fiddle with and your old man managed to do way more than me now, back in the day with PLCs and the like.

Good skills.

A country that actually has pennies (not cents) still has them. Ours have a tiny piece of thrice blessed unicorn horn baked into each one.

We're weird.

In the UK (flirted with EU, in and out and shake it all about within my lifetime!) we have similar rules.

The price on the ticket is what you pay at the till, with regards taxation etc. A receipt must provide a full breakdown if requested and will generally do so anyway.

The price on the ticket is called "an invitation to treat". That is a legal term related to forming a contract. You accept the invitation by toddling up to the checkout and offering to buy the item at the price stated on the ticket/label. The shop is well within its rights to refuse your offer of payment: a contract is a two way agreement, so if their offer to treat was in error, they can say so and refuse to accept your offer.

The price on the label is not binding but it must include tax so you will never find yourself at the till and an extra sales tax or VAT or anything else being added.

However, retail is so full of "sales" and other gadgets to grab sales, that contract law generally gets defenestrated. A retail store may honour a faulty ticket price to avoid bad publicity.

Bugger off you racist - I'm partly Devonian and have a massive collection of Commodore 64 games, that I didn't actually pay for. You'd be amazed how often you never hear "arrr!" in Plymouth or Exeter.

The "generic" SW England pirate accent thing is bollocks and a Hollywood fiction. It's closely associated with "Mummerset".

Anyway, I am a self-hosting fan to the point that up until recently my company offsite backups were stored in my home attic.

Let's do the traditional car analogy: If you are a mechanic then you can maintain your own car and your family's and your mates too. If not, then you can pay someone else to do it. You might go back to the main dealer (MS) or that bloke down the road (me).

I do run "vanity" email domains for my family and friends as well as the corporate ones for work.

"Oh, my sweet summer child,"

As soon as you kick off with that nonsense, you have lost the argument. There is a nonce (I use that term illadvisedly) on the Register who still insists on using it.

It was a mildly amusing rebuke in, say, the noughties. Leave it there. Nowadays you simply sound like a fuckwit.

DRS.

For me, the biggest win for DRS is being able to patch a cluster without pissing around with where the VMs are. I ended up writing a shitty Powershell script that nearly works - https://github.com/gerdesj/Pat... I don't bother updating that script because I'm only using it until my last VMware cluster is toast.

Proxmox HA is good enough. Note that it supports autostart too properly. A VMware HA cluster has never supported autostart - you have to bodge it.

DRS needs a properly expensive license. The old Essentials Plus didn't get it - you only got basic vMotion and certainly not Storage vMotion. You had to go Standard at a minimum and ideally Enterprise Plus for the full toybox. Then more for Tanzu containers and all that bollocks.

Proxmox gives you OpenvSwitch and HA and Ceph and the rest for nowt, if you know what you are doing. Its no harder than VMware.

Hands up who's had to deal with their vCentre running out of space on one of its 15 odd volumes or its STS cert expiring. What about discovering that administrator@VCENTER.LOCAL is not root or that both used to have a 90 day password expiration. I've been a VMware fanboi for 20 years. Been there, seen it, written the wiki page and done it more than twice. Luckily I know how to use chroot ...

Now, your hot failover - I never used that in 20 years, with VMware. I used to run a Novell NetWARE setup that did that, back in the '90s with an eye wateringly expensive set of network cards. It's 2025 and clustering and app (not host) load balancing and failover is a fixed problem without invoking that horror.

"You're confusing vSphere with vCenter."

No they are not. They had a single ESXi and whilst ESXi is only a component of vSphere (if you pay for a license) it is fair to separate freebie ESXi from "full fat" vSphere. VMware's marketing also wasn't that clear either, back in the day, until v4ish - I'm old enough to remember ESX and GSX and all that guff.

A Proxmox box has the full feature set for clustering built in - HA and file system(s). You now also get (it is still in alpha, but frankly better than some VMware releases I've dealt with over the decades) a thing called Proxmox Datacenter Manager - a sort of super vCentre. Ideal for MSPs (like my company).

20+ years I was a VMware fanboi. No more. I am doing another migration at the moment.