Pis are excellent mini computers. Unfortunately, their long term reliability isn’t quite there. When I used one, I was getting a couple of lock up crashes a year. It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s just enough to be REALLY frustrating to the (less technical) wife. The tipping point is when it goes from “nice to have” to “expected”.

I acquired a 2nd hand NUC, and it’s been bomb proof for a few years now.

Have you SEEN the price of pitchforks now?!? How the hell are peasants supposed to afford one?

I fully agree. The only thing to add is that a lot of the economic issues are due to the type of reactors used. The new designs could be a lot more economical. Unfortunately they get buried under the same red tape as the old bomb factory designs.

I suspect we won’t see a lot of them used until after fusion power renders them redundant.

Nuclear should be part of the solution. Unfortunately, most older plants are bomb factories, that happen to make power. No-one built the newer safe designs, till China got hold of the aborted UK designs.

At this point, most of the west doesn’t have the skilled personnel left to spin nuclear up quickly. We also no longer have the time to deal with building nuclear, as part of the near term solution to climate change.

I would much rather a FOSS option, that is difficult to tap into. The other option is people using proprietary setups that can be data mined without the user’s knowledge.

Its a classic “perfect is the enemy of good” situation.

They also likely have detailed plans and supplies set up for exactly this sort of action. It will be less “teenager with an AK” and more competent, trained soldiers fighting to protect his homeland from invaders.

The UK used submarines during the Falklands war.

The decision was made to sink an Argentinian warship. Critically, they didn’t attack the escort ship. They left it to recover the sailors. Apparently it horrified the British command when it ran, leaving sailors in the water.

A simple radio message “Move and we will sink you. Take no offensive actions and we will give you 5 minutes to launch lifeboats first.” Hell, even a sonar ping would have given them half a chance.

You at least do what you can to give them a fighting chance.

A radio message would have at least let them abandon ship in a (semi) orderly manner. Hell, even a solar ping would have got them into life jackets.

Normally, a sub wouldn’t risk this. They knew in advance, however, that the ship was not currently armed.

The problem with applying that part of game theory here is it makes several assumptions.

The biggest is that the bigger party are playing for maximisation, rather than just to “win”. That is very much not the game with trump.

The second is the assumption that there is only 1 game in play at a time. America could cause devastating economic damage, if it went full tantrum. Europe has noticed how vulnerable they are to that sort of action. They need to patch the holes before playing hardball.

Under these assumptions, taking fairly meaningless hits to buy time makes sense. Pull the wolf’s teeth, before challenging it to bite you.

My wife spent almost 2 weeks in hospital, after our child was born. The biggest expense was parking, at £25. £12.50/week.

Socialised health care is awesome.

Different parts of the government. Charles has all but kicked him out of the royals themselves. This would just be finishing the job.

Neither group has any real say in prosecution etc. This is just an additional ceremonial “Fuck you for making us look bad!”

The rule of thumb with servers is

• Performance
• Reliability
• Power usage
• Noise
• Size

The trick is to remember you don’t actually need much performance. A home server isn’t generally a powerful machine. What matters is that it is always there.

A raspberry pi would actually make a wonderful server. It’s power efficient, small and quiet, with enough grunt to do most jobs. Unfortunately, it falls down on reliability. Arm servers seem more prone to issues than x64 servers. Pis also seems particularly crash prone. Crashing every 3-6 months isn’t an issue for most pi usages. When it’s running your smart home, it’s a pain in the arse.

I eventually settled on a intel NUC system. It’s a proper computer (no HDD on usb etc), with a very low power draw. It also seems particularly stable. Mine has done several years at this point, without a crash.

Bigger servers are only needed when you have too much demand for a low powered option, or need specialist capabilities 24/7. Very few home labbers will need one, in practice.

It’s also worth noting that you can slave a powerful, but power hungry system, to a smaller, efficient one. Only power it on when a highly demanding task requires sorting.

I’ve fixed this several times with a bit of thick tape. It wasn’t actually the button that had worn down, but the plastic stub that pressed it. A bit of extra material kept each working for months/years after.

My current mouse has this fix over a year back, and is still working reliably.

In an ideal world, you have conservatives and revolutionaries. The revolutionaries want to make changes to try and make things even better. The conservatives act to maintain the status quo. When they balance properly then you get steady change, but slow enough to detect and fix cascading problems/failures.

In this situation, the centralists act as the balance point, being swayed one way or the other to set the path.

Unfortunately the only place this is actually close to accurate is Sci-Fi novels.

On both IOS and android, you can activate the camera without unlocking the phone. On android it’s via a double click of the power button, by default. This makes it far more difficult to delete it quickly.

Combined with an auto upload script makes their job a lot harder.

You might be able to get your hands on an old nuke, but the maintenance to keep it able to go boom is another story. You could make a dirty bomb, but a hydrogen bomb needs maintenance every few years minimum.

I personally think this is why Russia hasn’t used a nuke. They don’t know if they will go off properly, or if maintenance got skipped and they are duds.

Making and supporting nukes takes a huge amount of expertise and equipment. Hiding those completely is difficult to impossible.

If you were going to use them as a self defence tactic, you would need to prove you also had a functioning device. Either by showing it off, or setting it off. Otherwise it would simply be seen as a bluff.

You’ve basically summed up what I was trying to say better than I did. To Linux users, bug reports are a good thing. They help fix things. To middle management, bug reports are a bad thing, they hurt their bonuses.

One group needs to change, and Linux users are impressively stubborn.

It’s anecdotal , but I heard that Linux bug reports are actually a problem for some game developers. When 1% of your customer base submits 10-20% of your bug reports, middle managers get upset. Apparently several games have had Linux support dropped because of this.

While Linux often has more bugs in games (and so more reports), Linux users have also been conditioned to report bugs better. It helps a lot in FOSS etc.

While Putin was likely acting on their interests, the current situation has gone completely pear shaped on that front. Putin is stuck. If he backs down, he’s dead, if he doesn’t win, he’s dead. He’s currently riding the limbo between those situations, hoping for a 3rd option.

If he died, the powers behind him would likely take the chance to disengage. The current situation is bad for business, and plans need to be re-thought. It wouldn’t fix things long term, but short term, they would likely back down.