Agreed. It is this kind of overthinking that is being discussed that annoys people so much that they elected a fascist dictator in America. I like your interpretation of thin blue line and will continue to use it and ignore the nutjobs who are trying to ban it.

Every party switch will require purging the internal enemies installed by previous regimes and neutrality won't save anyone.

Eventually the armed forces will be affected which is a great way to turn into (r)ussia, but enlisted careers will be safer than officers.

The armed forces have been affected at least since the officer candidate schools began asking whether the student would obey orders to disarm the US citizen civilians in an area. (If I recall correctly this was during the Obama administration.)

Lousy, unaccountable email servers are a feature of the GOP, not a bug.

Also a feature of at least one recent Democrat presidential candidate. B-)

I know the article snippets get posted pretty much verbatim

But it seems to me that the posting editor ought to read it enough to catch that the submitter's cut-and-paste picked up some inter-paragraph HTML buttons and edit their button-text out of the article posting.

Even at fractional-inch scales and pressure changes from a lever and striker ...

Sorry. Just from a lever. The "striking" feeling in a piezo-electrical igniter is the result of a sudden release of back-pressure when the voltage across the quartz crystal is suddenly discharged by the spark, letting the crystal shrink slightly along the direction it's being compressed.

Rails don't spark even when dropped on each other while stacking scrap. It takes "wheel slip" (skidding induced by braking or acceleration of locos and rolling stock) to manage that with MUCH greater point loads and interface speeds.

Seems to me we should be looking, not for mechanical, but for electrical, sparks.

Earthquakes release massive underground pressures on rocks (as well as applying such pressures to others in the form of acoustic waves). Some of those rocks are quartz deposits, which are piezoelectric: Changes of pressure create hysterical voltages across a quartz crystal. Even at fractional-inch scales and pressure changes from a lever and striker you're talking voltages that can jump a short spark in a spark plug or gas lighter.

Granted an underground quartz deposit won't have the crystals all alligned so the voltages add up. But the pressure changes are high enough that even throwing rock sized crystals might produce multi-kilovolt spikes, and even a slight tendency for rocks' crystal structures to be oriented similarly could make voltages tend to add somewhat for miles, generating voltages comparable to a thundercloud. Meanwhile, the energy available is comparable to a large nuclear bomb.

With voltages like that occurring along the ground, a train track rail sitting on the ground - with a resistance between the rail and the ground measured in fractions of an ohm - might short across a substantial ground potential. This would focus the voltage (that would have been distributed along the rail path) at the end discontinuities of the rail - where it actually ends, makes a turn, or has an electrical gap (like a block-signal insulated joint, or the open side of a rail routing swich). This could result in a lightning-like spark on the scale of feet.

I've had AT&T DSL with fixed IP addresses for a couple decades now. They haven't maintained the copper well and have been trying to abandon it for some years now.

Twice in the last few years my DSL has had outages that took them a MONTH to fix. No refund.

This week they're killing DSL and migrating the customers to
All-fi / internet air (5g link to the home/office hotspot and ethernet router.) No fixed IP addresses, though. They don't offer them in the area until they get around to rolling out fiber - maybe sometime in the next year, maybe not. No other fixed-IP service available in the area from them, they say to try Comcast...

The all-fi device also blocks two ports, one of which is the SMTP port.

Not a happy camper today.

Amazing how he allegedly found everything a MAGA chud could yearn for in his most fevered wet dream, right there in plain, security free English.

Including saved emails with hashes of their content, encrypted by a Google mail server ephemeral private key, which (absent the breaking of public key encryption or Google leaking the private key) prove they moved through a Google mail server during the period that key was in use and came from the mail server of the well-known sender's account.

Was that before or after the dipshits fucked up the chain of custody making any subsequently retrieved info suspect?

For starters, some of the emails could be authenticated as passing through Google's mail servers within the time and from the (well-known) corporate sender, using a mail-processing security system dependent on a google server's for-a-time-period ephemeral private key which was never published (though its companion public key was widely published and archived). After-the-fact forgery of the covered contents of the emails (all but some of the header lines) without that private key is not possible, short of breaking public key cryptography.

So for those emails, chain of custody is not an issue. The bits themselves, in combination with the archived public key, is sufficient to prove their authenticity.

The security expert who authenticated one of the emails for a news operation that obtained access to the drive contents published the procedure he used. Now anyone with enough expertese to follow his system and access to the alleged disk image can also authenticate any of the stored emails that went through these or similarly-configured servers in a similar manner.

Interestingly, shortly after this there were calls for Google to publish these private keys some time after each is retired, specifically to "protect" email users from having intercepted email provably traceable to them (or their email accounts). Last I heard, Google has not done so. B-)

This and the fact that the opioid problem appears to be burning itself out. Thereâ(TM)s been articles about it recently. Nobody is sure whatâ(TM)s going on, ....

But it may be related to (at least?) one cartel being concerned about being blamed for the fentanyl deaths (both by the outgoing and incoming US administrations - regardless of which one won the election), becoming subject to military-grade "law enforcement", so they ordered their rank-and-file not to sell or possess fentanyl (on pain of death), and enforced this edict over the recent few months.

A major cartel liquidating any of its number that persist in selling fentanyl could put a major dent in the US opiate-related death rate.

These things produce less power than the average termite fart. They have extremely limited applications, such as bios batteries and low power clocks.

And Internet of Things protocols such as BLE are designed so they operate in short bursts on a schedule. A microwatt gives you a miliwatt for a milisecond every second, which is quite enough for substantal crunch and radio action if you spend the other 999 miliseconds asleep. This is how they run for years on a tiny coin cell. A long halflife betavoltaic battery paired with a supercapacitor is a good match for their power needs. (Upsize it by a factor of two and you can run the gadget for a whole halflife before it flakes out.)

(BLE devices actually turn off everything but a wakeup timer which is tiny, mostly an oscillator and counter, and actually DOES use a quartz watch crystal to gain economy of scale.)

Now if they'd just pay similar attention to solar power equipment.

Nearly all solar power smart electronics is not just contract manufactured in China, but is actually rebranded Chinese designs or Chinese/US co-designs, with the base firmware having been Chinese even if tweaked by the US brand.

It has long been suspected that there are "remote brick-it" back doors in it, suitable for shutting down solar power installations should some US-China dispute arise, both shutting down residential, small industrial, and solar farm power and destabilizing the grid by making much of the (currently substantial) solar power input disappear.

In November, Deye (manufacturer of the premier model of their own branded "all in one box", also that of Sol-Ark (USA/North America), Sunsynk (UK) and inverex (Pakistan)), proved it existed by activating it, bricking a number of Deye branded systems, mainly in Puetro Rico.

This appears to have been fallout of a dispute over regional exclusive marketing and non-compete agreements with their OEM rebrand customers. But it shows the world, including state actors and ransomware artists, that the backdoor is already there and exploitable in their products, and raised again the issue that the CCP may mandate such remotely-exploitable backdoors in ALL Chinese-manufactured solar equipment.

(It also exposed that, even though the cloud-"Service" remote administration "features" of Sol-Ark had been moved from a Deye server in China to a new service on a Sol-Ark server in North America, the Sol-Ark box still "phoned home" to, and could be administered by, BOTH servers. Not due to the bricking, but by a user noticing, years after the move, that the old account and service still worked, and posting about it in the discussion, and by others using traffic monitoring tools on their networks.)

I read once that a grid scale D-T fusion plant would burn through the world's supply of tritium in a matter of days to weeks.That's why most fusion plants would involve a lithium lining in order to generate more tritium.

The "stripping reaction" D + D -> T + P is nuclear-scale exothermic, too. (0.9389 MeV vs. about 17 MeV for D + T -> He + N) So some approaches involve two reactors, one to make a little energy and some tritium to feed the other - or alternatively do both in one reactor in multiple steps by feeding D and not cleaning out the "ash" for a while.

Plants, stupid. Eat fucking plants.

My car won't run on unprocessed plants, (even if they're actively reproducing).

Plants, stupid. Eat fucking plants.

If you don't eat a LOT of the RIGHT plants you get sick and probably die.

Even if you DO eat a LOT of the RIGHT plants, in the right (and rather large) variety, you still get sick unless you eat synthetic B12, some bugs, a whole LOT of shiitake mushrooms, or some particular breeds of seaweed or algae...