555 karma · joined September 13, 2016
You only need a license to transmit.
The FT-60 can also be modified to transmit on other radio service bands (like FRS/GMRS/Marine VHF), though it is only legal to transmit on those bands with non-type-approved hardware in honest-to-god emergencies.
I always cringe at the prepper types who boast about how much they spend on their arsenal, but cheap out on radio gear. Realistically, cooperation ensures the best chance of survival. A good radio and an aftermarket whip antenna will be more useful in all situations besides the end of the world.
It took me weeks to get my radio set up exactly how I like it, but now I can tune into emergency services, GMRS/FRS, Marine VHF, and hundreds of ham repeaters throughout the NYC metro area.
My two key takeaways so far are A: you will not be able to look up what frequencies are used by which services if you don't plan ahead of time. RadioReference and RepeaterBook are useless if you can't get online. Your radio will be useless if you don't take the time to program it for your needs ahead of time. B: If you expect to lean on your radio for communication, there is simply no way to assess it's capabilities unless you put it to use, and for this you really ought to get a license. The technician class license only requires a passing score on a 35 question test. It should be well within reach for many of the technically minded folks who read this forum.
As far as general emergency preparedness goes for myself, what I like to do is take on hobbies with an emergency/survival aspect to them. I go hiking and camping and have the bare necessities to survive in the wilderness for a while. I do ham radio so I can figure out what the hell is going on if the cell network or internet becomes inaccessible, and I play Airsoft with my buddies every once in a while, which affords me some gear and a skill I'll hopefully never need to use off the field. I do all these things because they are interesting to me. The survival/preparedness aspect is just an additional benefit / excuse.
RT has played the strategy of going in and eating the domestic media's lunch when they hesitate to cover legitimate stories, and that has given them a dedicated following. Unfortunately, as time has passed, it has grown more clear (at least to me) that this bona-fide coverage is the bait they pull people in with, and that their coverage in general is of the journalistic quality of Fox News. They use the same tactics of lying through omission, stoking panic, appealing to emotion, and selecting stories to promote an agenda.
As for the social media shilling, the situation is extremely nuanced. At this point there are probably tens of thousands of organizations astroturfing social media to promote their interests. Russia gets a lot of attention, because they seem to be doing it on the largest scale in terms of influencing geopolitics, but I agree that they aren't the only ones doing it, and that if we make them stop, the problem won't go away. The media has spoken up a lot about Russia's twitter/facebook botting and shilling, but if we were to take a much closer look at the data, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to see some shady domestic political think tanks and action committees doing it to the same extent. In fact, the shadowy domestic PACs engaging in astroturfing are probably ecstatic that Russia has taken the focus (and blame) off of them! The Internet has become a ideological battleground, and at this point, anybody who has any power to gain/lose has rolled up their sleeves and entered into the fray. I'm not quite sure what to do about it.
This has been a problem since the dawn of the Internet, and along the way we have seen some interesting approaches at comment moderation (Slashdot is a classic example). Moderation has the potential for abuse, and as such, should be applied reasonably and transparently. That said, I can't blame anyone for searching for new ways to fight trolling and the promotion of blatant ignorance in this day and age.
The New York Times has even resorted to limiting discussions (or not rolling them out to every last article in the first place) and human moderation. It slows down discussion, and it may be subject to censorship, but it goes a long way towards helping both sides have a say in the discussion without it devolving to Youtube quality discourse.
We have hit a paradox in news publication. If we let everyone disseminate the news, we end up with Lord of the Flies esque cults surrounding every rumor. If we only allowed figures of authority to disseminate the news, we'll never know if a story was intentionally buried or misrepresented. There's no easy answer here. This is human nature.
[1] https://www.scout.ai/story/the-rise-of-the-weaponized-ai-pro...
On the other hand, do an exemplary job, and I'll seriously consider donating or buying merchandise. I've chipped money to Wikipedia, Reddit, and LWN, as well as Debian, the FSF and the EFF. Not everything needs to be for profit, and not every website is entitled to making money. If the work you do is important enough, it will find a way.
I haven't heard one single reasonable explanation for why the US taxpayers should put $15 BILLION (before budget overflows and deadline pushbacks) into this wall. Until it is remotely justifiable, a knee-jerk monument to collective racism and xenophobia is ALL it is.
Starting a trade war with Mexico so we can say they paid for it though creative accounting will hurt our economy and cost the working class much more than a simple crackdown on employers exploiting illegal immigrants.
With the current state of documentation, learning GTK+ is impossible unless you are willing to dive into dozens of other people's projects in multiple programming languages to figure out how all the pieces come together. The lack of literature also makes it hard to know the difference between good, idiomatic constructs (within the context of Gobject/GTK+), and hacks which work by coincidence.
I get the feeling many GTK+ based projects suffer from lack of manpower, and I'm pretty sure this is why.
Ubuntu's Amazon integration was a failed experiment in an ecosystem with literally hundreds of other players to choose from while Microsoft's Windows telemetry is an inescapable dogma forced upon all Windows users.
There are some cases where tmux could help me, but my X session and terminal emulators are stable enough where I'm not worried about them crashing and interrupting my shell session. As such, I have no need for tmux, and using it just for terminal emulator scrollback seems hamfisted.
The only use case I can think of is running large distribution updates which might potentially pull the rug out from under your graphical session, but I tend to run those on a non-X terminal if they look sketchy.
Edit: I'd totally consider using tmux as an alternative to X on my Raspberry Pi, but if I have X/Wayland, It doesn't offer me much.
This is essentially the case with GTK+. Glade, though it has potential, is practically useless in it's current state. I've searched far and wide to find a mature project using it - so I can learn how to use it on the next level - and came up empty handed. There is no next level.
As far as it goes with GTK+, the only people designing UIs are programmers. It's all either hard coded in C or Vala (or sometimes C++), or defined in XML using tons of features that aren't implemented in Glade at all, and require an intimate knowledge of the GTK+ API.
As a free software enthusiast trying to work on a GTK+ application, I'll be the first to say, things could be (need to be) much better here! Beyond a couple trivial examples, the reference, and a couple dated books, documentation is extremely scarce. The tooling is incomplete, and it seems that the majority of people working in GTK+ have either grown used to working like this, or moved to another UI stack. Making GTK+ programming more accessible doesn't seem to be a priority (and adding more language bindings, or entirely new languages don't help nearly as much as a couple solid books on GTK+/GTKmm and a first class Glade would).
The only way to really learn the ropes seems to be by meticulously dissecting dozens of free software projects. No one will ever invest their time do this commercially when they can hit the ground running with Qt. It only seems remotely possible for stubborn people who write software as a hobby, and people who have matured to the point they can sell their knowledge. For a UX designer to end up here, they would have developed much more valuable skills in the process.
In the meantime, it's not like you can migrate your Signal, Telegram, iMessage, or even Gmail/Hotmail accounts. I think Matrix needs a few more client/server implementations before the spec can't truly be set in stone.
It's a trade off. You can have rough edges but community control and 100+ backup plans, or you can have sleek, polished, but at the mercy of next year's soldered RAM and SSD pricing guidelines. I personally love breaking things to figure out how they work, but some people have a job to do and can't deal with distractions.
Arch also has the AUR (Arch User's Repository) which provides a lot of software that isn't available through most distributions for various reasons, such as quality, stability, maturity, patent, freedom or packaging/dependency issues. This makes customization a lot easier, at the expense of all the trust, stability, and security expected from using a distribution (I guarantee none of you actually verify the packages aren't malware when installing through AUR)
From my perspective, Arch seems a little expedient. It provides a good Desktop experience, but is not as robust as distributions based on package managers like Portage, APT, or RPM. It is a lot easier to install and set up than Gentoo though, and provides similar benefits in terms of software freshness and builds with a few different configurations - hence my assessment.
Edit: Matrix already works great as an IRC bouncer for networks which have been bridged.
Edit: Take a look at how any Stable/LTS Linux disto handles this. If a bunch of hackers can do it on such a diverse software stack, surely the company with the largest cash reserves in the world can figure out how to do it on a software/hardware stack they control completely.
App developer insisted upon a review, so they got one.
This is true - however these devices have also completely taken away our computational freedom as well. In fact, I'd argue that computer literacy is more important than ever. The only thing that has changed is that now society suffers as a whole from computer illiteracy, instead of just the computer illiterate. They can still post cat photos on social media, but a growing segment of the population has no idea how any of this works, and is at the mercy of Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook, Zynga, etc.
As someone who grew up with computers and started making Doom maps when I was 8, and programming C++ on Linux when I was 14, I see this trend as an oncoming storm. Its as if we were replacing libraries with cable television. Computers (phones and tablets specifically) are transforming from a platform that enables us to do anything we want, to a sort of Disneyland marketplace where nothing exists unless there is money to be made, regardless of ethics.
I think its more important now than ever for people to understand how to identify and select legitimate software that doesn't have ulterior motives, and put together a system which serves no one but it's owner. I suppose this is exactly what TFA says is impossible, but damn is it important.
We have the technological means to ensure reasonable levels of privacy. There's no excuse for lemon technology that exposes every intimate detail of our lives.