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Rockets launched by Hezbolla into Israel hurt a lot of innocent people.

Hezbollah has been firing missiles non-stop at Israel since 10/7. 60,000 Israelis had to relocate from the North. This is not an escalation.

This is the most relevant point, yet downvoted. Hezbollah decided to pile-on and attack Israel (at Iran's urging, to support their other proxy Hamas). Prior to that, there hadn't been serious conflict between the two states in years.

Exactly. The EU designates Hezbolla as a terrorist group. It is illegal for EU to sell to them.

I've seen photos posted on X and Telegram (of course I can't verify) of what look like Baofeng and Icom UHF hand-helds that have detonated. Not sure how they can get them to all blow up in unison--these aren't devices that can receive a digital message--as they apparently did at a funeral today.

If one can modify a device to incorporate an explosive, then it's surely possible to add another receiver of some kind too.

Back in the day working on land seismic crews our blasting was handled by radio signal transmitted from the observer doghouse to the blaster at the shot-hole. You could hear on the radio when the recording crew began shooting for the day's production. There was a tone that triggered the shot while the blaster was connected to the blasting cap on the down-hole charge.

If someone placed explosives in a radio device I'm sure it would be quite easy to detonate them on command with a signal tone.


Those radios do decode some digital messages, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Squelch#DCS for managing group convos (squelching others on the same channel who aren't part of the same group). There's also ANI identifiers and repeater codes, for example. So there's definitely firmware/software to work with SOME digital stuff onboard.

But I also think a lot of radios look like Baofengs, or are whitelabeled Baofengs, so who knows...

Besides, if Israel or whoever can modify the supply chain, they can add whatever receivers/chips they want into it alongside the explosives. Or just some sort of analog radio detonator/trigger.


They can detect analog tones for functions like CTCSS.

They could receive a radio broadcast.

Given apparently(?) none of them detonated prematurely, the arming device would need to be content aware so that a normal transmission didn't set them off randomly and warn the rest of the targets that the devices were compromised.

I split my time and live in two cities in two countries. I put both in my "about", but I don't know if your map will handle this.

I would imagine if they don't put an email (I don't) they don't want to be contacted. If people want to find me badly enough, they do--it's happened several times!

This can't possibly always be true.

I never had any contact details in my profile, in fact it was empty before today. I would actually love to meet like minded people. Just never thought anyone would want to (or be able to, I live kinda way out from where you'd normally find tech people). + couldn't be bothered to setup a burnable email in case of spam.

Sound like we live near each other:)

Near as in, in NZ? or like in the bay? Not many tech people stay in the bay, let alone in NZ.

Sorry I was joking because your generic description of isolation was relatable. I live in the USA.

It's amazing how profitable this was! "Smith fraudulently obtained more than $10 million in royalty payments through his scheme"

> The NT kernel is pretty nifty, albeit an aging design.

Unix is an Apollo-era technology! Also an aging design.


Except unix nowadays is just a set of concepts and conventions incorporated into modern OSs

How “modern” are they when they’re just a bunch of shell scripts on top of POSIX? SystemD caught up to NT4 and the original MacOS.

> SystemD caught up to NT4 and the original MacOS.

The transition happened to the huffing and puffing/kicking and screaming of many sysadmins.


Still a minority of sysadmins though. Most seem to have embraced it to an extent that's honestly a little sad to see. I liked to think of the linux community as generally being a more technical community, and that was true for a long time when you needed more grit to get everything running, but nowadays many just want Linux to be 'free windows'.

> nowadays many just want Linux to be 'free windows'

This means Linux has "made it."

> I liked to think of the linux community as generally being a more technical community, and that was true for a long time when you needed more grit to get everything running

I guess that grit was a gateway to a basic Linux experience for a long time - it did take a lot of effort to get a normal desktop running in the early to mid 90's. But that was never going to last - technical people tend to solve problems and open source means they're going to be available to anyone. There are new frontiers to apply the grit.


If by "modern" you mean stuff between 1930 and 1970, sure, most contemporany OSes can trace roots from that era.

Set of concepts derived from "whatever the hell Ken Thompson had in his environment circa 1972".

What percent of Unix users are using a "modern OS" and what percentage are using Linux, which hasn't significantly changed since it was released in 1994?

My point was that most people are using things like Linux, MacOS, etc. nowadays, which are all also pretty old by now but not nearly as old as ATT Unix

Linux has changed dramatically since its first release. It has major parts rewritten every decade or so, even. It just doesn't break its ABI with userspace.

Of course, I meant the design hasn't changed. Linux has had a lot of refactoring, and probably Windows has also.

let's be charitable, removal of global lock was fairly big change.

The "aging design" arguments holds water like a sieve. Electricity and engines are 1800s vintage designs The wheel is a prehistorical aging design american government is an aging design

The quality of an idea is independent of the time of its conception.

The utility of an idea is dependent on the time and place where it may be used however.


I need diamonds to play my records! What do you think a record stylus ("needle") is made from?

Sure, but those aren't gem-grade. They're usually black and opaque (polycrystalline) or yellow. And in any case they're very small.

When I say new industrial uses, I'm thinking of things that haven't been done before and hinge on large bulk volumes of material: Windows, very large diamond anvil cells, high-performance heatsinks, and stuff like that. Lots of cool things are going to be developed.


Worthless (as in low monetary value) doesn't mean useless.

Funnily enough this concept is literally called the "diamond-water paradox".

Shibata needles always commanded a premium. Can they now be manufactured in that shape ? Can all vinyl lovers now get Shibata needles ? The great thing about them is that they go deeper in the record grooves, so even if your record has been played a lot using cheaper needles, a Shibata might find virgin vinyl. Which also means that on the first play with the Shibata, it will excavate a lot of gunk.

The moon-rock tipped styluses are vastly superior. /Zappa

On a related topic, they used to sell to consumers hot-dog cookers that just put mains voltage through a hot-dog. Here's Big Clive pumping 2x the rated volage through one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2ZZbuOeNmw

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