You realize you don't have the power to "press charges", right? Whether or not Flock is happy with the situation, they have zero ability to compel the police to do a damned thing about it. Now... Sure, nobody can promise the feds won't investigate (though they wouldn't even have jurisdiction without abusing something like interstate commerce), but most colleges "are" their containing town, including the local PD. Remember why Cornell is currently in the spotlight for how poorly a particular investigation went down? Why would a purely external police matter reflect poorly on Cornell?

As for what I'd tell anyone who did investigate - Nothing at all, because 1) read the above, 2) absolutely nothing we ignore our fifth amendment rights to say will be used for our benefit, and 3) we'd need to be a complete moron to show our faces while cutting down a flock pole; and while I may be no genius, I'm also not a complete moron.

The poles are 20lbs of high-quality aluminum - Ironically, jokes about letting tweakers know about the gold in the e-waste Flock keeps leaving on the side of the road aside, the poles themselves are the single most valuable part of an installation (as scrap).

More importantly, a simple hacksaw will go through them like butter.

Maybe not, but this is a college campus. Simply make it known nobody's going to investigate their disappearance, and they'll be gone by morning.

I'm actually surprised this played out as long as it did - Had the same battle taken place at my alma mater, I can promise you I'd personally have cheerfully harvested them for parts the same day, and I'm by no stretch unusual in that regard.

That's an older version. The RFC has since been upgraded to owl then to raven. Maybe update your system and you'll get a response.

The current bid is $2600 USD.

I know reading the summary is hard, but it's not even a long one!

Golly, wouldn't life be awesome if we could just take a few pills per day to get all our nutritional needs like some kind of 1960s sci-fi trope? Oh, wait - No, no it wouldn't. Food is enjoyable, to the point most people like eating so much we have an obesity epidemic in the Western world.

It's also worth mentioning that countless studies have failed to find any benefit of taking supplementary vitamins on either lifespan or quality of life in otherwise well-fed individuals. Conversely, ~600 kids per year (in the US alone) need medical treatment from OD'ing on them.

Tech bros and finance bros are the same people. "Tech bros" aren't programmers, they don't like tech; they're people looking to make money or status from technology. People who actually like tech are here posting on Slashdot about RAM doublers from the 80s. How does that make anyone money or give status?

I think finance people are responsible for the ridiculously high cost of housing, but I haven't been able to prove it.

All great questions, and I realize you said this a bit tongue-in-cheek, but... No, a contractor didn't "fail" to install updates. Most cheesy mobile games refuse to run and automatically kick us over to the app store when a new version comes out. The goddamned FBI's MDM can't even manage the same basic level of enforced integrity?

Oh goody, scapegoat #1 has been arrested and scapegoat #2 fired. Now how about the spoils-system appointed idiots who chose a platform less secure than a random gooner gatcha?

I think so. I was but a tyke in that era, but I clearly remember my uncle bitterly complaining at the time: "We can put a man on the moon, but we still can't measure the nutrient levels in vegetables with sufficient accuracy!"

Life is so much better now.

I saw your comment out of the corner of my eye, and immediately wondered what Donald Knuth had to do with this.

In advance, I promise I'm not promoting any conspiracy theories here, this is a sincere question...

There's an old, largely ridiculed idea of the "nuclear hand-grenade", with most references talking about using a particular isomer of Halfnium. The primary objection I've seen to the idea is we have no practical way to "excite" nucleons in any meaningful sense - at least not without gear the size of a particle accelerator. But... This clock appears to be making use of exactly such an effect, just at sub-fissile energy levels.

Is this effectively a disproof of the most common disproof of the "Halfnium grenade"?

Sure, the rest of the market is barely keeping pace (4%) with inflation (3.4%) YTD; but but but, NVidia is shiny and AI is going to save us all! Pay no attention to the billionaires promising us a post-scarcity world while building massive survival bunkers in the background.

In server-grade hardware, sure. And you paid $$$$$ for it.

The earliest "consumer" grade RAID cards, by contrast, were basically just softRAIDs with a built-in IDE controller - And that's still true to a large degree; the "RAID-mode" in your gaming PC's BIOS is still merely offloading the hard work to the CPU.

I'm not claiming Linux' softRAID implementation was or wasn't faster than cheap RAID hardware, but I have no problem believing it could at least be comparable.

Nah dude, you're a Windows programmer. I am fully in concordance that hardware RAID controllers were faster on Windows. Microsoft probably made a deal with RAID hardware manufacturers to keep their software controller slow. That's the Microsoft way.

But on Linux? The software RAID controller was faster. The job is I/O bound, not CPU bound.

You're thinking of what amount to ultra-SFF PCs. In the truly embedded space, having a fixed (and usually tiny) amount of RAM on-die is the norm rather than the exception.

That said, Meta clearly isn't targeting 68HC05s here, so the distinction is largely meaningless.