asciilifeform: many differences, yes. chinese have a few thou. yrs. of practice collapsing empire and re-constituting, etc.
asciilifeform: undefended arse can be just as lethal as heart
asciilifeform: fact is, every mega-empire has 'fault lines', along which it can be cleaved, whether by 'natural' decay, or external 'help.'
asciilifeform: ukraine is a complicated beast. most of the folks there with 'national identity' are actually from the western half (really, pre-partition poland)
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: in as far as the chinese didn't allow themselves to be 'chinese spring'-ed, it is close.
asciilifeform: Apocalyptic: moved with family as a boy
asciilifeform: the ones around here are roughly the size of a traditional pay phone
asciilifeform: miniature GC/MS instruments have been churned out in astounding quantity, for the 'homeland security' market (sarin sensors on subways, post-'95)
asciilifeform: this scenario is not as fantastic as it might appear
asciilifeform: TATdoesReno: for this to fit in the spirit of the nsa funfest, it'd have to be something like 'toilets discovered to contain embedded drug sensors and cell modems, rat you out'
asciilifeform: what, boar is 'endangered species' now?
asciilifeform: they use ms 'bing' for the back end now
asciilifeform: if i recall, their search engine was killed and buried long ago
asciilifeform: there's even the old folks still renting phones from at&t (this particular racket was sold to lucent, and still brings in ~$20mil/yr. until they die of old age)
asciilifeform: someone is still using yahoo. and aol...
asciilifeform: if you take out $2999, the jail cries for you immediately, in all likelihood.
asciilifeform: pankkake: this was about cash withdrawals from bank
asciilifeform: (officially: if intent can be proven)
asciilifeform: phun phact: in the u.s., taking out < $X cash, where X is the government reporting minimum, is an indictable crime.
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: afaik, no one sells a usable pc-compatible chording kbd
asciilifeform: kakobrekla: 10K? bought a golden toilet to sit on?
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: reminiscent of your observations re: dope addicts. that is, one marvels at their ability to get hold of the $$$$ to carry on
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: i suppose she is 'calling someone who cares'
asciilifeform: KRS1: partitions are trivial to lay out, the issue was that the bsd loader presumes that '/boot' and '/' are on the same partition.
asciilifeform: what's the object bolted to the wall?
asciilifeform: the only reason i even tell this story here is to note how obscenely bloated modern unixlikes have become
asciilifeform: and stuck doing compile on a pentium 1...
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: and what if i were 'civilian', rather than a weirdo with a physical drive hooked through a dongle to a vm for installs/overnight compile of whatever
asciilifeform: but with an os that presumes that it lives on one mbr part.
asciilifeform: KRS1: not an issue with the boot loader
asciilifeform: seems like openbsd won't even try to install /boot to a separate mbr part.
asciilifeform: the machine in question is more than an idle plaything, it has a dos fat16 part. (to drive CO2 laser)
asciilifeform: it hardcodes '/boot/kernel/...' into the loader, it seems
asciilifeform: freebsd (1st try) didn't like having its '/boot' live on a separate mbr part.
asciilifeform: the bootloader wasn't the issue - the *bsds seem to insist on a massive single mbr partition subdivided into bsd 'labels'
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that's more or less all that's left. now if someone here knows how to get a bsd to boot from a small separate partition below 1024 cylinders, and mount root fs, etc. from a larger one...
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: recently tried, and failed, to get several different OS running acceptably on a '90s laptop
asciilifeform: BingoBoingo: (unrelated) i now sympathize with your travails re: that Mac SE
asciilifeform: but it strikes me as plausible - i can see why they'd rather not risk it.
asciilifeform: i don't know for a fact that this is so - he never had the slightest desire to set foot in a casino.
asciilifeform: someone i know was involved in the design of video poker machines, long ago, and was told that his name will probably end up on the 'reject list' (turn out at the door)
asciilifeform: casino politics is an interesting subject
asciilifeform: i always wondered if the de-facto rule in meatspace casinos is 'don't win more than it costs to have your body fed to pigs,' or the like.
asciilifeform: jurov: hard part is to ensure that somebody is usefully listening.
asciilifeform: you could probably set up an optical version of this, using a mirror in space.
asciilifeform: know how in the early days of computing they had 'delay line memory'?
asciilifeform: ham radio 'moon bounce' method is a good way to indestructibly store bits. for a few min. anyway.
asciilifeform: there is no cloud; only other people's disks.
asciilifeform: 'for every smart arse, there's a correctly-threaded cock.' (rus. saying)
asciilifeform: arguably vulnerable to DDOS by the gestapo, however, unless each unit comes with unique key and maintains a table of 'known friendly' ones.
asciilifeform: (and presumably their 'symbiotic' voyeurs)
