* Posts by Displacement Activity

403 publicly visible posts • joined 2 Jun 2008

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Provider: Anti-piracy ruling has 'killed Usenet'

Displacement Activity
Headmaster

Wouldn't be arsed to reply, but...

Just in case anyone is put off trying out Usenet by this or any other post here...

Bollox. Usenet is alive and well. Pretty much my entire technical career has been based on being an "expert" (IMHO) in 4 different areas. The thing that really did it was the 4 relevant newsgroups. If you want to move on from being good to being an expert, that's the way to do it - get involved, ask questions, answer questions. I earn twice the (top-end) industry average (or work half the year), and the single most important factor in that was getting involved in the NGs. Ok, perhaps it's not what it was, but it's still invaluable, provided you can find a relevant NG that carries a reasonable number of posts.

Stackoverflow and the like are catching up, but they're not there yet. I find them good for the less structured stuff that you need to dip in and out of occasionally.

Crazy pot smokers get high on wireless power

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Yawn....

Those of us who spent several years watching SplashPower circling the drain aren't impressed.

Mozilla strokes coders with Firefox 6

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Pint

Going off FF as well...

..encouraging my IE7 users to move to Chrome. For Linux development, I'm mainly on Opera, for the simple reason that they can be arsed to provide current binaries that run on both RH and Ubuntu. I've got a pile of old and old not-so-old Linux boxes running crap and obsolete versions of FF.

Microsoft begins cagey Windows 8 disclosures

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Paris Hilton

@bazza, etc.

It's 10 years since I worked on/at ARM, but the chip I was on had 3 instruction sets.

The instruction set isn't the primary issue on low power. There are all sorts of other things which are far more important - geometry, leakage, voltage, frequency, clock gating, powering-down unused sections, and so on.

I've got a curious feeling that I posted something almost identical to this a couple of years ago and got voted down... :)

MPs slam 'unworkable' one-size-fits-all NHS care records' system

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@ACishness

The problem was just that the PCT was trying to push us to SystmOne - no specific technical problem. Two of my local practices are on it - one of them was down for a *month* when they lost everything during the move. I don't know anything about it, though I have a general uneasiness about everything being off-site.

We've had a lot of FUD about upgrades. There was a stage last year when the PCT said they'd only fund SystmOne, but they eventually went quiet about this. Just got one practice trying to move to Synergy, and the PCT hasn't complained yet...

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@CommonStandards

ITK? Never heard of it, just Googled, looks good.

- have you talked to any real potential users?

- Spine mini service looks good

- Access back into surgery systems? It's not immediately obvious that you're covering this

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@ToBeFair

> That's the situation at the moment.

Agreed, and we also have problems with SystmOne. The local PCT is only funding upgrades if you change to SystmOne; about 50% now. The thing I really miss is a way to talk to half-a-dozen different surgery systems - that's what needs to be standardised.

I really miss some way to talk to real IT people who know what's going on, rather than BT or, even worse, the PCT. Any forums out there? There must be literally hundreds of people like me who have no idea what's going on and no way to find out.

Two solicitors fined and suspended for file-sharer letters

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Bear craps in woods

Six allegations proven against these two. The way I see it, with a lot of experience, is that 1, 2, 3, and 6 are pretty much a way of life for most solicitors.

It's official: Journos are dumb as a bag of IE users

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@carpetkisser

> Significance is what people really want to know - "does this mattter or not? Is it true?" are

> the questions they're asking, and you can't judge that by just "looking" at the fucking data.

In this case, looking at the data was just fine. Look at the second graph - of the 10 traces, maybe 5 of them are absolutely monotonic. The chances of that happening in a real study have got to be very close to zero. Any the guy the BBC got to comment on the story pointed out, more or less, that people with an IQ of 80 probably couldn't use a browser anyway. And the authors admitted their bias in the last paragraph of the Reg story.

Anyway, who cares? It was a great story. Almost all the users of my stats website are on IE7. I sent them the story, but they didn't bite... :(

Crypto shocker: 'Perfect cipher' dates back to telegraphs

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Key length

>> If you use the same key twice, it is once again possible to determine key by trial and

>> error, since chances are only the real key will make BOTH messages intelligible.

Depends on how long the key is; you've only got an issue if the parts of the key used overlap. In practice, you wouldn't use a "shift" either (@PP: why would you shift anyway?); there's no point making it easy for the attacker.

Lot of people here hung up on "perfect" randomness. Not relevant for practical OTP use.

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@AC

There are all sorts of truly random processes you can observe and measure. Electron tunnelling, thermal noise, radioactive decay, yada yada. I thought ERNIE was based on Neutron decay or some such, but I can't be bothered to look it up. Physicists certainly don't consider "atom sized or larger" to be "large". Large, in the sense in which you're using it, equates to how localised an object's wave function is. You've got to be way above atom-sized to use classical mechanics. And any object with mass moving at "close" to the speed of light is "very" large.

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@Old Handle

True. Did you see the Reg story a couple of days ago about the Zodiac killer messages? Some guy essentially made up his own key to turn the message into what he wanted it to say. Most of the comments seemed to completely miss this point.

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@Thad

Sure they do (did). My old school 'SMP Advanced Tables' (which I've still got, from about ~75) has a page of random numbers. I can't remember what we used them for, but we did.

More relevantly, I can't believe that anyone could patent one-time table crypto (except in the US), because it's so bleedin' obvious.

Chinese lecturer demands his students acquire iPads

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Paris Hilton

@Cameron Colley

>> If you trust someone because of the way they're dressed you're a moron.

True. But, OTOH, it might just make sense to mistrust someone because of the way they're dressed. Which is possibly what Mr. Grundy had in mind.

Cambridge gets a white (space) wash

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Hills in Cambridge...

The gogs aren't Cambridge. The others are pretty much irrelevant - I can't imagine Castle "Hill" blocking transmissions between any two interesting points.

Displacement Activity

but also....

I'm no expert, but another problem is presumably that various systems spread signals such that they appear to be below the noise floor. A slot may appear to be clear, but adding more energy in it may swamp out these signals.

Hackers pierce network with jerry-rigged mouse

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Too obvious...

"Much more computing power, and it can be given as a gift (how many IT bods would turn down an iPhone4 or an HTC Desire S as a gift?) "

Get to a trade show, get business cards in return for entry to a competition, make sure your targets win the phone. I can feel a new career coming on.

Wouldn't have helped in this case, though, since phones weren't allowed.

Number-crunching in the Cloud

Displacement Activity
Paris Hilton

Que?

Almost interesting, except that I didn't understand a word of it.

My local NHS PCT has a problem with spreadsheets. They use them inappropriately, and as a substitute for proper data analysis. I know that you can fool 98% of your users by shipping them vast amounts of unusable data, but I'm pretty sure that they do it simply because they don't know any better.

Anyway, I've written the code to do it properly, with not a spreadsheet in sight. I want to put it in "the cloud" somewhere. I'd appreciate some practical advice. I need lots of CPU cycles, but only occasionally, and more storage than the average web app. I need to keep a database of perhaps a gigabyte in memory without swapping. I need to do the sysadmin myself and I might need to scale up to a second server if anyone actually uses the code, without dicking about with all the DNS stuff myself. Now *that* would be a useful article.

US Supremes add 'willful blindness' to patent law

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@AndrewKatz

Good points, I think. But I'm not sure that you're right in the last para about the US courts attempting to enforce their jurisdiction on transactions outside the US.

Pentalpha clearly isn't in violation of a US patent if it simply manufactures and sells in HK; that's indisputable. As for the *inducement* to sell an infringing product within the US, what I think you've missed is either that (a) Pentalpha has interests in the US, or (b) Pentalpha is a subsidiary of Global-Tech, which I'm guessing is a US corp. SEB must have taken action against some US-based entity, claiming that that entity had induced infringement in the US. So, all hunky-dory.

As for your point 3, about how you can become non-infringing. Saying you "don't know" on your download page is pretty clearly no longer sufficient. I don't know why Rik says in his opening paragraph that this ruling makes it *more* difficult for someone to be sued for inducing infringement; it appears to make it *less* difficult. In your case, you are presumably being "knowingly blind" when you say that you "don't know" if a US "patent" is being infringed. You presumably have a pretty good idea that some US patent is being infringed, but you can't be arsed to do the legwork to find out which one(s).

However, there is a simple solution. You say on your download page that you don't know, and so you have to forbid anyone in the US from downloading your software. End of story, at least if you're not losing out financially. On the other hand, If you're trying to make money out of this, you have to be clever. Move the plausible deniability along a bit. Post anonymously on message boards suggesting that US users download from Tor, and so on.

There's another simple solution. If you don't have any US interests, sod it. Just let them download; the US courts can't come after you. The worst they can do is to keep you out. Not a big deal for me - I was in LA and San Francisco last year, and the promised land it aint, not by any stretch of the imagination.

The US courts will get the message eventually. Most of my downloads are non-US anyway, and this will presumably only increase in the future, so I don't particularly case.

Wake up, Linux hippies: No one 'morally obligated' to give back

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Megaphone

@the "FOSS Community"

Shut up. The rest of us don't give a damn. "Open Source" was here long before Stallman, the FSF, the GPL, and you lot. And it'll still be here when you're all gone. We're not interested in your moral agenda. We write *real* open-source code (you remember: the licence which doesn't use 600 words to re-define "free"), and we use it, and we're sick of your whining. Go away.

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Paris Hilton

@Steven Roper

> then why should you be able to take my work and profit from it without giving your work back?

> I contributed. If you use my work in your own, so should you. Otherwise you can damn well

> pay me for it.

Why would I want to do that? I could just write it myself and do it properly.

I have occasionally released code into the public domain (the only "free" licence). I do this for complex reasons which I'm happy with. I am imposing no obligations, moral or otherwise, on anyone who wants to use it.

You should stop imposing your world view on the rest of us. We're not interested.

Microsoft waves CentOS club at Red Hat

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NFTR

Good link. I downloaded SL6 last month but haven't quite persuaded myself to install it yet...

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Black Helicopters

Hang on...

Of course, MS may just have come to the conclusion (along with everybody else who has been waiting 6 months for Centos6) that Centos is dead. That makes this move a cheap way to get brownie points without actually exposing themselves.

Besides, VirtualBox already does this job, for any Linux distro, for free. I've got clients who run Ubuntu on VirtualBox (on XP, I think). Looks great, and is good enough for everyday production work. MS would have to have a pretty damn good value proposition to beat that.

Intel, IBM, and HP back open source against VMware

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What??

Xen was "merely co-resident with" the kernel? Explain. Are you actually trying to say that KVM is now in the mainline kernel and that pv_ops is not yet in the mainline kernel? If so, you should say so. And Xen "worked well enough"? Are you saying that it works less well than KVM? Explain.

Fact 1: RedHat paid going-on *two hundred million dollars* to acquire Qumranet, at a time when they supported the GPL-ed Xen, and at a time when Xen was clearly superior.

Fact 2: RedHat started pushing KVM as the One True Solution at exactly the same time.

Fact 3: RedHat ramped down support on Xen, and moving dom0 changes upstream, after the purchase. Look at Fedora kernels post-F8 if you don't believe this. Yes, read "RedHat" for Fedora.

This has nothing to do with technical merit. It's VMware vs. RedHat, and who gets to own virtualisation. If you want to buy into the RH narrative, fine, but don't pretend in an IT forum that it's for technical reasons.

Would putting all the climate scientists in a room solve global warming...

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more hmm...

Was it just a college event? I got an invite a few months ago to something similar just down the road, simply on the basis of being an ex-undergrad.

Displacement Activity
Stop

What is a "model"?

I have to humbly differ with the other commentards who suggested that there was "less editorialising" in this article. Take this comment:

"Even the basics of how different clouds affect temperature is guesswork: water vapour feedback may have a slight negative cooling feedback, or it may have a large positive warming feedback. These must be guessed at, or imagined, through models".

No-one writes a model to "guess", or "imagine". It's like finite element analysis. You start with what you know, or think you know, and use a computer to find out what the analytically-intractable consequences are. If you're lucky, you can get some independent confirmation that the model "works", in the sense that the outcome produced by the model can be independently verified. Generally, you discover that you can't accurately verify your calculated outcome, and you go back and tweak your assumptions, or account for other variables. And so on. It's iterative. Nobody spends years writing millions of lines of code to "guess" or "imagine".

If there had been "less editorialising", this paragraph would instead have read:

"Even the basics of how different clouds affect temperature is poorly understood: water vapour feedback may have a slight negative cooling feedback, or it may have a large positive warming feedback. These effects must be estimated through models".

This is precisely what makes the climate debate so irritating. Every time you read an article, you have to start with the agenda of the author, and then find what there is of value, if anything, in what they've written, after correcting for their agenda.

An introduction to static code analysis

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FAIL

NFTR

Got to agree with most of the other commentards here. This is a bad place to advertise your product. Lots of (most?) people use "C/C++". We know what we're doing. Memory management isn't magic; all those other languages probably wrote their memory management in "C/C++" anyway.

Italian bus driver goes completely hands-free

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Re: Spain

I've been in (Southern) Spain regularly over the last 25 years. The standard of driving was incredibly bad then; the roads were full of morons, not to mention the fact that the roads themselves were generally badly built and unsafe. Things have got better, but it's still nothing like driving in the UK.

Anyone else notice the inverse correlation between countries with high road death rates, and countries with good F1 drivers, in the list above?

Reg ed rattles the Red-Headed League

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Happy

Red, proud of it

We live in a world where 95% of the population have black hair, and most of them have brown eyes. Who "wouldn't* want red hair and blue eyes? I don't remember ever being teased at school (in England). My ancestors pillaged Europe and Russia ("Red") and crossed the ocean in longboats; it's not exactly the stuff of teasing. I lived in a lot of different countries as a kid in the 60s and 70s. African kids never said anything, and didn't seem to notice; Korean ones using to follow us around, pointing. Great.

Don't know about the word "ginger", though. This smacks of sectarianism from our Northern neighbours.

CSC locked out of new NHS contracts

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ex-iSoft...

Nearly ex-user, anyway. Our PCT's now 50% SystmOne. No money for anything else.

Nikon image authentication system cracked

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Forging negatives?

Uhh... how do you do this? With a microscope and a teensy pipette that applies silver halide particles? Good luck. You forge prints, not negatives.

Chinese mapping hotline stays cold

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Britain's insistence?

"In reporting the story the China Daily makes much of Britain's insistence that militarily-sensitive parts of the UK are blurred out from Google Street View".

Que? I can get right up to the front gate of my local USAF base (Lakenheath) on streetview. If that's not enough, I can see the rest of it with high-quality aerial photos. I can get all around the perimeter of GCHQ Cheltenham. And so on.

UK is fifth free-est nation on the internet

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"Monkey-nun porn"???

Ok, I'm not going to believe that without a link.

Ellison's Oracle washes hands of OpenOffice

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Maybe there's another reason...

...Oracle realised that OpenOffice really isn't that good, and wanted to move on.

I tried, a lot. It's a sad fact that MS Office 2000 is just better.

Brain boffins in cortex mapping breakthrough

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NFTR

Wouldn't be any use, as well as being completely impractical. You're basically suggesting a complete simulation of brain development from DNA onwards, which would require so much knowledge - of physics, chemistry, biochemistry - that it would effectively make the physical processes themselves redundant.

Besides, even if you could perform this massive feat, you'd end up with nothing more than unprogrammed brain that had never been exposed to the real world.

Google hits 'prove we killed no Afghans' – Assange™

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NFTR

"the moderatrix" "blood in its hands": 1

"Rafael 1" "blood on its hands" : 4 (is there something you're not telling us?)

wikileaks blood on its hands : 3,680,000

pentagon blood on its hands : 3,630,000

Yuri Gagarin in triumphant return to London

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WTF?

Revisionist bollox

I can't believe you were downvoted for this. Anyone who seriously believes that there's any parallel whatever between the actions of the western allies on the one hand, and the Soviet Union on the other, obviously slept through all their history lessons. For starters, go and find out what the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was all about. Here's some help: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molotov-Ribbentrop_Pact.

The Soviets denied the existence of the secret protocol in the pact until 1989, when Gorbachev set up a commission to investigate. Everybody else, of course, knew all along.

Council loses £2.5m claim against Big Blue

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NFTR

Having a hard time starting work this morning. For more amusement, see cllr. Livingstone's job description at http://moderngov.southwarksites.com/mgExecPostDetails.aspx?ID=310:

"To ensure sound business planning and financial probity within the corporate framework, including the medium term financial strategy and all financial management of revenue and capital, the capital programme and the management of capital receipts. To ensure the availability and prioritisation of resources to meet the cabinet’s priorities".

His particular responsibilities include "provision of ICT", and "Corporate procurement".

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Happy

Oh, the irony...

How heart-warming to read that cllr. Richard Livingstone, the "cabinet member" for finance at Southwark council, was on the anti-cuts demo "with a 100 strong Southwark Labour contingent".

http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/blog/2011/mar/26/march-for-the-alternative-live-blog-updates

Phantom Menace to be released in 3D next Feb

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WTF?

Plinkett review?

Yeah. Great bit about how to kill the hooker you've stashed under your floorboards. I guess we'll both be filing that one away for future use.

Google whacks link farms

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Stop doing evil when you're found out

Curious that it's taken so long. Google already has a perfect database of link aggregator sites - all the sites that adwords customers have to manually block to stop click-through scams. Of course, Google gets paid for click-throughs, so perhaps it's not so surprising that it's taken them years to do something about this.

Doctors warn on patient data

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@ElReg

News organisations have a tendency to confuse "The BMA" and "doctors". When it gets down to it, few doctors have any idea what the BMA says, and even less interest. They also have a tendency to talk utter bollox: their history on commissioning is a case in point. The stuff they were writing last year is completely different to their output now; it's taken them that long to actually find out that most GPs don't want to touch commissioning with a bargepole.

I've read the bill, and the notes (or as much as I could stand), and it didn't even occur to me that there was a data privacy issue there. This is just BMA grandstanding. Oh, and the BMA "can't lobby to change the law"; there is no law to change. Yet.

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Google online services?

Any details?

Oddjob Trojan keeps banking sessions open after victims log out

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BS

Agreed. Even if they're not lying, why would anyone buy software from a security company that kept quiet until the "police" had completed their "investigation"?

Google Apps boss says cloud computing is your destiny

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Dumb and dumber

If there's one thing that demonstrates just how stupid cloud apps are, it's that Google itself is developing a local client for Chrome. No wonder Girouard "completely sidestepped the question" when asked about a "native-code version of Google Apps".

It seems that the Emperor is developing a fig leaf.

Microsoft bans open source license trio from WinPhone

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It's *not* "Open Source"; it's GPLv3

Sorry, Gavin, think you may have missed the point here. As far as I can make out from the article, the problem is specifically with GPLv3. A couple of posters above have pointed out the problem with AppStores, but I think the fundamental problem here is that no sane vendor is going to allow a GPLv3 app anywhere near their device or OS. If you distribute a GPLv3 app, you're effectively legally required to break open your DRM. GPLv2 doesn't have this problem. This is nothing to do with MS - everyone in the "device" business has this problem.

Oracle gives 21 (new) reasons to uninstall Java

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NFTR

I had the same problem a few years ago. I would just bite the bullet and learn C++; you can read 'Accelerated C++' in a couple of weeks. It's not pretty, but it more or less does the job. My 'research project' is now getting on for 100KLoC, and I'm pretty sure I would be shafted if I'd used a proper language instead.

My next few w/ends will be taken up with trying to move it all from MinGW to MSVC.. :(

Flying dildo downs Oz stag party bloke

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No frickin title

They sell *twelve* *centimetre* dildos in Australia? Que??

And if, like me, you have no idea what this is about, here's the clip from Priscilla. I still don't believe it, though. Possibly NSFW.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDu9gbuKpKc

Assange traveled in drag to evade gov spooks

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@I don't get it

Yes, it was common knowledge. This Daily Fail article was written before he was released, and says precisely where he'll go if he gets bail:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1338832/WikiLeaks-Julian-Assange-asked-judge-bail-address-secret.html

@DanGoodwin: a bit more background might have prevented the irrelevant chatter below from the Black Helicopter brigade.

Boffins squeeze a mesh onto Android handsets

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Battery life?

Pretty much a non-starter. Every unit forwarding in the mesh has to turn on its transmitter, probably on high power (note that the range at the moment is only a few hundred metres). In a disaster zone, you can hardly keep your phone plugged into a wall socket. The whole mesh would be dead in a couple of hours.

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