asciilifeform: in other lulz, asciilifeform buys a chinesium hf-to-120mhz upconverter thing for rtlsdr , and discovers that he has to take the thing apart and trace pcb traces, and crosscheck with chipset data sheet, to learn which hose is 'in' and which is 'out' ! they did not bother to label ! ( not even in chinese . )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: that car looks like it were shot ?
asciilifeform: ( in further continuation of the microscopy q : what the everliving fuck happened to the beta ray microscope ? theoretically can do ~same thing as sem, but no need for massive electron gun, million volt power supply, or the vacuum pumps. where is it ?? )
asciilifeform: 'What is Doina, you ask? Is it a candy bar? A protein bar? Does it contain meat, or is it gluten free and vegan? I. Don't. Know.' << lol!!
asciilifeform: in su also for production lines. and for artillery.
asciilifeform: rather than burning the 1000 manyears to bake from 1st principles
asciilifeform: was able to make because good tech intel work, neh.
asciilifeform: semiconductor -- was the item about which gave a shit.
asciilifeform: before i fughet, here's asciilifeform's microscopy crackpottery of the day : contact print. consider, 370,000 transistors, on item roughly 1cm x 1cm. attach to standard ccd, say the 25 megapixel sort, and image with e.g. soft xray.
asciilifeform: ( by some accounts ru strategic telecom ~to this day~ runs on gdr iron )
asciilifeform: better expert does not necessarily make the necessary spring available in qty.
asciilifeform: it was a problem even for asciilifeform's father, cloning film projectors and discovering that the necessary spring steel could not be had
asciilifeform: i.e. 'where do you plug in the electron microscope in goatfuckistan' problem
asciilifeform: as illustrated by kurt tank in argentina
asciilifeform: ( and when the aspiring escapees, i suspect, were the upper cut of the bell curve )
asciilifeform: it was able to exist when the wall was reasonably tight.
asciilifeform: ( even despite the 'being someone' point, consider that 1 sailor who jumped from sov ship. usa did not send him back... )
asciilifeform: mircea_popescu: re 'defectors' it is a quite nostalgic subject for asciilifeform , because it is an item from meanwhile wholly vanished, like roman empire, age, where escape from an empire was simply a matter of getting through a wall
asciilifeform: generally noobs are advised to read the log for a spell, before considering whether they have something to say
asciilifeform: it is when the folx on ~other end~ buy you plane ticket. or for that matter whole plane. and villa. etc
asciilifeform: rather than simply i buy a plane ticket.
asciilifeform: a defector as i understand the word, is a honoured guest of the crown
asciilifeform: ( plenty of folx from, e.g., ru, living and working in cn. but i am speaking of ~defectors~, as in 'i'd rather have a flat in pekin than continue as lt. colonel at nsa ' )
asciilifeform: afaik feeling is quite mutual : to my knowledge no white man to date defected, properly speaking, to the rice kingdom
asciilifeform: china would make penal colony there, or something useful.
asciilifeform: or at the very least would retain the threadbare sanity of usa circa 1980s
asciilifeform: http://btcbase.org/log/2017-11-14#1738408 << at the risk of repeating ancient thread, imho if there were a ready alternative ( as in geographic , rather than merely ideological ) to usa, for the remaining ~functional people to defect to -- usa wouldn't last a week☝︎
asciilifeform: by some accounts, d00d JustWanted(tm)
asciilifeform: ( nationalism dun work in usa because with what; and verboten in su because ottoman-style empire )
