perestroika

@perestroika@lemm.ee
0 Post – 12 Comments
Joined 1 years ago

Having once worked on an open source project that dealt with providing anonymity - it was considered the duty of the release engineer to have an overview of all code committed (and to ask questions, publicly if needed, if they had any doubts) - before compiling and signing the code.

On some months, that was a big load of work and it seemed possible that one person might miss something. So others were encouraged to read and report about irregularities too. I don't think anyone ever skipped it, because the implications were clear: "if one of us fails, someone somewhere can get imprisoned or killed, not to speak of milder results".

However, in case of an utility not directly involved with functions that are critical for security - it might be easier to pass through the sieve.

No problem, just tell them to ask from Baghdad, they should know where it is. :) A jug of wine or vinegar, one electrode of iron, another made of copper, voila... the Baghdad battery.

3 more...

The same that stops them from taking over a democracy. Sometimes.

If a society became anarchist enough to abolish state structures, there obviously had to exist a reason - there had to exist popular support.

Thus, someone attempting to recreate a state would face questions and opposition. People would try to persuade them of their error. If they declared a state, anarchists would not recognize it. If it claimed sovereignity above a territory, anarchists might not recognize that either.

The new state might encounter problems - unwilling residents would leave and be accepted in anarchy, annoyed anarchists would organize trade boycotts and sanctions, ultimately it could go badly and armed confrontation could follow. In some scenarios, the state might remain and attract people who want to live there. In some scenarios, war would follow - and if the majority really was anarchist, the state would lose and disappear.

3 more...

Both of you are right.

It's difficult, but how difficult depends on the task you set. If the task is "maintain manually initiated target lock on a clearly defined object on an empty field, despite the communications link breaking for 10 seconds" -> it is "give a team of coders half a year" difficult. It's been solved before, the solution just needs re-inventing and porting to a different platform.

If it's "identify whether an object is military, whether it is frienly or hostile, consider if it's worth attacking, and attack a camouflaged target in a dense forest", then it's currently not worth trying.

To resist an organized group, you communicate the problem (in an anarchist society, communicating the problem of a nascent state seems like the easy part), present evidence of the nature and severity of the problem, and ask people and existing organizations to mobilize.

Whether the next step is obstructing the state peacefully or mass production of munitions, would already depend on how bad the state has got.

True, but there's some more.

Over here, ice roads are opened on typical winters on several smaller bays. The instruction to drivers is:

  • don't wear a seatbelt
  • if ice breaks, open your door swiftly (get out first, then think about calling people)
  • if you can't open the door, lower your window swiftly
  • if you can't lower the window, break it (the side window, not the windshield - a windshield is multilayer laminate, too strong to break quickly)

Typically, if a car sinks on an ice road, people are likely to get out. A crank-operated window is handy in such a case. But regardless of instruction, sometimes folks do die. :(

In general, I would not like to experience any sort of extreme incident in an over-engineered car. I'd prefer something from the 1970-ties, but with airbags.

No conclusive proof. It didn't have a passthrough for one electrode of the two. It did have remains of acid inside and corrosion on the electrodes. One can speculate whether it was an experimental device, a faulty device or something else entirely (one alchemist trying to replicate another's secrets and doing it wrong?).

To add insult to the injury, it was lost or stolen during the war in 2003, so more analysis can't be done until it gets re-discovered. :o

I haven't heard an alternative hypothesis, though... I try to imagine what else besides electrochemistry would one do with two dissimilar metals in an acid. It ruins the metals, it doesn't make any known medicine or effective poison, it likely fouls the jug too... for a person to put copper and iron into a jug full of acid, there has to be a reason for doing it...

Smash anything but a windshield. I've needed to violently remove a windshield when replacing it (time was running out and tool shops were closed). Wearing protective glasses and pushing with both legs is what it took to somewhat loosen it, but not immediately remove it. Windshields are a multilayer structure of plastic and glass. Side windows are just glass.

/me listening to the sound of a WinXP virtual machine booting under Debian Linux

They can shoot their foot with a grenade launcher next. I'm already out of range.

Alternatively or additionally, I think oxygen plasma glows blue or green, because northern lights (near the poles, at least) are greenish.

Sadly, until the IDF starts investigating and prosecuting their members for war crimes (and stops assigning people without the required education, skills and psychological traits to essentially do police duties) - some parts of the IDF will continue to perform the role of recruiting Palestinians into extremist and militant organizations. :(

I would not be surprised if one of the dead man's relatives decides at some point to take up weapons.

Say you’re trying to defend against something like a Shahed-136. It can hit pretty much anywhere in Ukraine. You can’t stick an AA gun on everything that Russia might consider trading a Shahed-136 for.

As far as I know, the routine in the current war is - the AA gun is on a truck that moves 80 km/h, the drone comes in slower than 300 km/h, one or multiple truck crews position themselves on likely vantage points for intercepting, and the rest is luck.