“President Trump has called. President Trump shows up. President Trump takes the time to hear our loved ones’ stories, why won’t you do the same?”

Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris
·
As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation.

It is not a place for politics.

And… Show more
12:14 PM · Aug 31, 2024

The statement was disgusting on its face. While claiming to "never politicize" the deaths of American soldiers, she quite literally politicized them by using their families to attack Donald Trump for the grave sin of actually showing up to honor the fallen. That was something Harris herself couldn't be bothered to do, and to this day, she has never spoken to any of the Gold Star families involved. //

As of this writing, eight different families have released video responses criticizing Kamala Harris for both her behavior and her failures while in office.

Kamala is taking what was a solemn remembrance for the families and is now making it a political issue herself. She's doing what she's accusing Trump of doing.

That's just vile and disgusting. She truly has no shame; she's effectively attacking the families. But it's all about trying to wreck the fact that Trump was doing the job that she and Biden were supposed to be doing here. And it's right in line with how badly the Biden-Harris team has treated the families for years. //

JD Vance @JDVance
·
President Trump was there at the invitation of families whose loved ones died because of your incompetence.

Why don’t you get off social media and go launch an investigation into their unnecessary deaths?

Kamala Harris @KamalaHarris
As Vice President, I have had the privilege of visiting Arlington National Cemetery several times. It is a solemn place; a place where we come together to honor American heroes who have made the ultimate sacrifice in service of this nation.

It is not a place for politics.

And…
Last edited
12:54 PM · Aug 31, 2024

WAGO lever nuts are typically used for household electrical - often in place of wire nuts.

They can also be used for splicing or splitting audio lines.

Here is a simple distribution box with WAGO components mounted on a DIN rail:

The WAGO 221-413 lever nuts are mounted on a 221-500 mounting carrier which is mounted in turn on a 222-510 angled DIN-rail adapter.

The end stops on the DIN rail are "DIN Rail Terminal Blocks End Stopper Bracket" (Amazon).

A 2FA Mule is a mobile phone configured to forward SMS 2FA codes via email.

This divorces 2FA from the mobile phone you carry with you and makes it possible to perform 2FA without your phone, after having your phone lost or stolen, while on an airplane, or while roaming in a foreign place with an alternate SIM card.

In my case, the 2FA mule sits in my office lab connected to mains power.

It is an unlocked Google Pixel phone with no google account and no apps installed except for "SMS Forwarder".

It is configured to forward all SMS to an email address via encrypted SMTP.

John Kozubik - john@kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com

On the morning of September 11, I was awakened by my alarm clock telling me of an airplane flying into one of the towers of the world trade center. Although I had been to New York City many times, I had never visited those twin towers, but I had an idea of what they looked like. I imagined the scene of a private plane - some propellor driven machine whose pilot had suffered a heart attack. Perhaps a publicity stunt gone horribly wrong.
I thought to myself what a mess it would be, and pondered the nightmare of looking up from the sidewalk and seeing fallen wreckage falling onto the New York City streets.

As I finished dressing I heard the words "commercial jet liner". Then the crash of the second plane into the other tower was reported. I ate a small breakfast as the president addressed the nation from a public school he was speaking at. I had to get to work.

We'd heard of SwissDisk here at rsync.net, but they rarely showed up on our radar screen.  We were reminded of their existence a few days ago when their entire infrastructure failed.  It's unclear how much data, if any, was eventually lost ... but my reading of their announcement makes me think "a lot".
I'm commenting on this because I believe their failure was due to an unnecessarily complex infrastructure. Of course, this requires a lot of conjecture on my part about an organization I know little about ... but I'm pretty comfortable making some guesses.

It's en vogue these days to build filesystems across a SAN and build an application layer on top of that SAN platform that deals with data as "objects" in a database, or something resembling a database. All kinds of advantages are then presented by this infrastructure, from survivability and fault tolerance to speed and latency. And cost. That is, when you look out to the great green future and the billions of transactions you handle every day from your millions of customers are all realized, the per unit cost is strikingly low.

It is my contention that, in the context of offsite storage, these models are too complex, and present risks that the end user is incapable of evaluating. I can say this with some certainty, since we have seen that the model presented risks that even the people running it were incapable of evaluating.

This is indeed an indictment of "cloud storage", which may seem odd coming from the proprietor of what seems to be "cloud storage". It makes sense, however, when you consider the very broad range of infrastructure that can be used to deliver "online backup". When you don't have stars in your eyes, and aren't preparing for your IPO filing and the "hockey sticking" of your business model, you can do sensible things like keep regular files on UFS2 filesystems on standalone FreeBSD systems.

This is, of course, laughable in the "real world". You couldn't possibly support thousands and thousands of customers around the globe, for nearly a decade, using such an infrastructure. Certainly not without regular interruption and failure.

Except when you can, I guess:

 # uptime
 12:48PM  up 350 days, 21:34, 2 users, load averages: 0.14, 0.14, 0.16

(a live storage system, with about a thousand users, that I picked at random)

 # uptime
  2:02PM  up 922 days, 18:38, 1 user, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

(another system on the same network)

One of the most common pre-sales questions we get at rsync.net is:

"Why should I pay a per gigabyte rate for storage when these other providers are offering unlimited storage for a low flat rate?"

The short answer is: paying a flat rate for unlimited storage, or transfer, pits you against your provider in an antagonistic relationship. This is not the kind of relationship you want to have with someone providing critical functions.

Now for the long answer...

JCI now offers FreeBSD 11 Cloud Servers that provide significant enhancements over previous versions of FreeBSD. Under FreeBSD 11 you will be running a true virtual cloud server and not the more limited "jail" VPS. This allows complete independent server instances with on-the fly expandability, secure root access and custom backup capability.

Choose the server from our standard FreeBSD server plans below with the memory, disk, IPs, bandwidth and backup required to support your application.

At long last, git is supported at rsync.net.
We wrestled with the decision to add it for some time, as we place a very, very high value on the simplicity of our systems. We have no intention of turning rsync.net into a development platform, running a single additional network service, or opening a single additional TCP port.

At the same time, there are a number of very straightforward synchronization and archival functions inherent to subversion and git that lend themselves very well to our offsite filesystem.

John Kozubik - john@kozubik.com - http://www.kozubik.com

In the very recent past, the world has crossed a threshold, beyond which anonymous free speech can only be limited by completely removing the basic infrastructure of commerce.

The union of cryptography, ubiquitous portable computers and low-cost-standards-based wireless networking does not guarantee free speech, but it does guarantee that such restrictions imply an inability to conduct modern business and a dramatically lowered standard of living.

In this environment freedom of speech is atomic - it cannot be partially limited. It can be both global and instantaneous. Most importantly, it is not dependent on centralized public networks like the Internet.

It will be shown that tools available to anyone in a society that takes part in modern commerce are all that is required for anonymous free speech. It will further be shown that such tools must be available for such a society to continue participating in modern commerce, and that their availability is an all or nothing proposition. Finally, it will be shown that a high value should be placed on open standards and interoperability as well as peer-centric attitudes towards communication and networks.

Taken as a whole, the FSOSA concept should be used to encourage free speech and to discourage policymakers from pursuing policies that are destined either to fail, or to relegate them to the "stone age".

Once we engineered a selective shutdown switch into the Internet, and implemented a way to do what Internet engineers have spent decades making sure never happens, we would have created an enormous security vulnerability. We would make the job of any would-be terrorist intent on bringing down the Internet much easier.

Computer and network security is hard, and every Internet system we’ve ever created has security vulnerabilities. It would be folly to think this one wouldn’t as well. And given how unlikely the risk is, any actual shutdown would be far more likely to be a result of an unfortunate error or a malicious hacker than of a presidential order.

But the main problem with an Internet kill switch is that it’s too coarse a hammer.

Yes, the bad guys use the Internet to communicate, and they can use it to attack us. But the good guys use it, too, and the good guys far outnumber the bad guys.

Shutting the Internet down, either the whole thing or just a part of it, even in the face of a foreign military attack would do far more damage than it could possibly prevent. And it would hurt others whom we don’t want to hurt.

For years we’ve been bombarded with scare stories about terrorists wanting to shut the Internet down. They’re mostly fairy tales, but they’re scary precisely because the Internet is so critical to so many things.

Why would we want to terrorize our own population by doing exactly what we don’t want anyone else to do? And a national emergency is precisely the worst time to do it.

Just implementing the capability would be very expensive; I would rather see that money going toward securing our nation’s critical infrastructure from attack.

In Windows Vista or later, you can create a "junction folder"/"Symbolic link" to redirect the contents of one to another.

Simply type:

 mklink /d "c:\data\network docs" "\\server\shareddata\"

You must have Admin privileges when you run CMD.

Bash let is a built-in command in Linux systems used for evaluating arithmetic expressions. Unlike other arithmetic evaluation and expansion commands, let is a simple command with its own environment. The let command also allows for arithmetic expansion.

rocket bodies, satellites, space debris in earth orbit

Q: What is the highest apogee of a satellite in Earth orbit they need to avoid? Ignore any satellites in Solar or lunar orbit.

A: There are over a hundred satellites in Molniya orbit, a few tens in Tundra orbit and a handful in really high earth orbits. The first two of those go above geostationary orbit; there are examples of the last with perigee of at least 375,000km. //

James Webb Space Telescope, at the Earth-Sun L2 point, is roundly a million miles from Earth, but still gravitationally bound to the Earth-Moon system.

Other than that, there are very few if any permanent satellites beyond the "graveyard orbits" used to park expired geostationary satellites. These are typically only a few hundred kilometers higher than geosynchronous, however, so roundly if they're well beyond the 24 hour orbital period, they'd be well clear of anything we put up intentionally and left there. //

Then there is stuff, mostly debris, that is more critical, because by nature those pieces are very fast, the orbit is not stable, so it changes a little every round and the kinetic energy would be able to penetrate any hull that is not specifically designed to withstand such impacts. For example, this debris of an Iridium satellite - at the time of writing at altitude ~366,000km and counting, spiralling outwards at 1km/s (the map does not mention a size or weight though. But it is big enough to be trackable obviously).

Those variables are shell variables. To expand them as parameters to another program (ie expr), you need to use the $ prefix:

 expr $x / $y

The reason it complained is because it thought you were trying to operate on alphabetic characters (ie non-integer)

If you are using the Bash shell, you can achieve the same result using expression syntax:

echo $((x / y))

Or:

z=$((x / y))
echo $z

Why not use let; I find it much easier. Here's an example you may find useful:

start=`date +%s`
# ... do something that takes a while ...
sleep 71

end=`date +%s`
let deltatime=end-start
let hours=deltatime/3600
let minutes=(deltatime/60)%60
let seconds=deltatime%60
printf "Time spent: %d:%02d:%02d\n" $hours $minutes $seconds

Another simple example - calculate number of days since 1970:

 let days=$(date +%s)/86400

There is actually a pattern developing here.

Every time the Harris campaign exposes their candidate to the public, the public reacts negatively. It happened after the DNC as well.

You can also see the reduction in Harris's popularity in other places too. The betting website, Polymarket, also saw Trump pull away from Harris after the interview aired.

Former President Donald Trump visited Arlington National Cemetery on Monday, as August 26 marked three years since President Joe Biden’s absolutely disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan that left 13 American servicemen dead.

Unlike Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, who were nowhere to be found, Trump’s visited the important site in-person — but the media still found a way to court controversy.

Many in the establishment media took turns criticizing Trump’s team for photographing and videoing the occasion at Section 60 — the eastern part of the cemetery — old footage of Biden has resurfaced of him doing the same thing. //

https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1264936762570407936

Joe Biden @JoeBiden
·
To all the members of our military and our military families, especially those who have lost their service member, thank you. We owe you. We can never lessen the magnitude of your loss, but this I can promise you: we will never forget. #MemorialDay
[embedded video]
11:10 AM · May 25, 2020 //

At the one-minute mark, the ad shows Biden at Arlington Cemetery as he was photographed there on May 31, 2010, while vice president to former President Barack Obama.

This is all to say, the very thing the Trump is being bashed for, the Biden campaign did in 2020.

It is undeniable this is a campaign ad.

The clip ends with a message saying, “Text Joe to 30330” while “PAID FOR BY BIDEN FOR PRESIDENT” runs across the bottom of the screen. //

To note, the Gold Star families issued an official statement expressing their support for Trump and stating their approval for filming and photography on Monday.

What should be angering to the public, and what should be covered by the media, is Biden’s and Harris’ complete no-show.

They are responsible for the catastrophe that took place three years ago that saw American lives lost and billions of dollars in military hardware left behind for the Taliban.

Whatever feelings there are about Trump and his upcoming election bid, the Gold Star families wanted him there and he showed up.

That’s far more than the current White House occupants can say.

Elon Musk has picked a day for X to move out of San Francisco, and it is a day that his superstitious employees will appreciate. //

In leaving San Francisco in his dust, Elon Musk is throwing superstition to the winds.

Employees of San Francisco-based X were told in a memo sent around on Thursday that the date has been set for leaving their offices, according to Fortune, which based its account on a source it did not name.

The date is Sept. 13, which this year arrives on a Friday.