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Cake day: September 25th, 2025

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  • I don’t really get it and details are scarce in the article. Is the model different in than in the US? It says “you’re no longer paying for the handset, but pay the same price”. Do they bundle the cost of handsets with the monthly fee and just allow you to upgrade every some number of months? But if you forget to upgrade, or don’t want to, you still pay the same?

    In the US generally they charge for the handsets split up into like 48 payments and then have some promotions for popular phones where you get 48 monthly credits to cover some or all of the cost. If you cancel service, the balance usually comes due or if you change to a lower cost plan sometimes they let you keep the payment plan, but you lose the credits. It’s done different ways, but this is an example. But the cost of the plan is always billed as totally separate line items



  • This is actually part of it though it’s more nuanced with smaller form devices, than say a desktop computer, that run on very little power and have parts from lots of different manufacturers rather than integrated motherboards.

    Firmware sometimes needs a hard reset to get past bugs, and sometimes a capacitor or two have enough power to keep a low power memory chip active for days, weeks, months, or longer.

    Problem at a high level is with devices that are not well integrated because a lot of products these days are a mishmash of pre-made rather than purpose-made components from various companies, and some have some kind of firmware running in local memory and they try to cache information rather than reloading each time to speed up startup times.

    Could be a motor driver chip for focusing the lens from some fly-by-night manufacturer with buggy firmware throws an error that the main device interprets as a potential for a catastrophic failure and refuses to start up to prevent what it thinks might cause damage or user injury. But maybe really its just a bug.

    That chip stays charged and continues to throw the error when the main board does startup checks and every time the battery is put back in, it replenishes the charge in the driver chip. Finally once it loses charge and has to load from scratch and actually runs the checks again it doesn’t remember that it previously threw an error and the current checks don’t trigger the error anymore, so it’s “fixed”. Could be that there is a part close to catastrophic failure or could have been a bug that triggered it, but for now it’s fine. Just a wild top of my head example, but the basic idea is there. Also, could be something physically is lose and it got knocked into a place where it’s making enough contact this time, but might get lose again shortly after.

    Always hard to say without a trained technician or a good product with good error handling. But good error handling isn’t profitable anymore. That means more development and testing time up front and less likelihood of the user having to replace the product sooner and since competition is more scarce these days, there’s no incentive to make better, longer lasting products.



  • Often the content is available without masking for a very short time so scrapers can access them or similar tricks to allow them access immediately after posting. But that requires that you hit the server immediately after the story is posted and there is no masking at all usually in those cases. That’s how things like archive.is get a copy for example. But none of that is client/browser side anymore, at least on the major sites. Otherwise it’s easy to defeat if the content is already provided to the browser and just masked with JavaScript or something that runs locally and can be blocked.





  • Could you mount the antennas, or even just one of them, externally? That may improve performance. A small parabolic antenna a few inches wide or a purpose made building to building bridging kit only needs a small mounting surface with a few screws, and as for the wire you might not need to drill a hole, though properly patched that’s not a big deal either, but instead use an existing hole by removing old, unused phone or cable wire.

    Alternatively, is there a window facing in the correct direction? Signals penetrate glass way better than all of the siding, insulation, drywall, etc in an external wall. Remember there’s way more material than an internal wall to penetrate. And if you have aluminum or other metal siding, cement block or brick, or certain kinds of insulation, it may not work at all. The tree branches may or may not be an issue depending on how thick they are, if they are branches with lots of leaves, the types of leaves, the density of the wood, etc. But the exterior wall penetration means it’s literally not line of site (you can’t visually see from one antenna to the other), so the rated ranges are moot and may or may not work reliably.


  • A long way.

    But first, 3 years? Maybe 3 months, though that is short and would require more fuel. More realistic is 6-12 months, though depends on at what point I’m the orbits you send them. Maybe you were seeing that the shortest distance between Earth and mars happens about every 2 1/2 years or so?

    But it’s not the brain or even feeding that’s the problem. The real issue is bone mass and muscle loss in low gravity without constant exercise, otherwise you could just improve on coma-like inducing techniques to make them safer for that length of time.

    But it would probably take longer than the trip to recondition the body to be able to survive and move around again on a planet with gravity. The amount of oxygen and food you’d save by hibernating a crew for 6 months seems minimal. It would require “artificial gravity” techniques like centrifugal force to mitigate that. But for such a short trip, the enormous amount of extra equipment for that would exponentially outweigh the air, food, and water, not to mention the enormous amount of additional power generation required.


  • Is there lime of site between the main building and the target building or is the middle building blocking line of site? If there is line of site then directional antennas are your best bet. Problem with most access points and range extenders is they’re designed to broadcast and receive in all directions. With a directional antenna you concentrate the power and reduce the likelihood of interference. And if there’s nothing solid for the signal to penetrate, these can transmit signals pretty far.




  • I mean it is a similar intent to a warrant canary, though more active. What they should have done is make sure all of the data is stored in their country if it’s that sensitive or use only products that allow full encryption and don’t store much metadata. There are ways to do these things if you aren’t lazy and actually hire an experienced architect (I’m one for example).

    This was definitely much more of a legal overstep with explicit intent to subvert court orders than a warrant canary, though, and this unethical in it’s implementation if only questionable in its intent. However, the fact that the secretive orders exist in the first place and are not done just in cases where lives or true national security are at stake and only for limited amounts of time before being disclosed or something like that as most were originally intended outside of nations with fascist-leaning administrations like the US, China, India, etc., is the real issue and the reason for both this and warrant canaries to be necessary even if it wasn’t a fascist leaning administration doing it for possibly malicious reasons.