• 4 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • Temporarily stopping a train has only so many useful applications for crime, sabatage or terrorism. Might be useful to rob a train if you can stop it in a remote location and steal some high value goods, but realistically most goods are either bulk commodities or shipping containers which are intentionally difficult to identify the contents of when closed. Basically you’re just forced to open some containers and hope you find goods valueble enough to resell and make the risk worth the reward

    Potentially you could stop a train with some auto racks and steal the vehicles but the VINs will be immediately marked as stolen so the resale value is immediately trashed, plus you’d have to figure out the logistics of getting the vehicles off of a train stopped in the middle of nowhere (they use specialized ramps to drive the vehicles onto and off of the ends of the train when loading and unloading)

    From a terrorism/nation state perspective maybe if you can fly some planes overhead and keep spamming a stop signal for a few days you might be able to cause some logistics chaos by stopping all trains in the vicinity of a busy railroad yard, but given modern flight tracking that’s extremely identifiable. Better to setup unmanned ground transmitters but that runs the risk of being caught/identified too quickly, and wireless signal triangulation is so easy there’s even hobbiest events where people try to manually triangulate a signal for fun. Maybe if an attacked setup several base stations around the country and only sent the brake application signal extremely rarely they could lower rail reliability enough to cause some issues but to cause enough trouble to actually be useful from a nation state/terrorism point of view they’d have to show their cards. Honestly a terrorist or sabatuer is probably better off just blowing up a few bridges and tunnels which would be far more effective






  • This is an enterprise drive, so it’s useful for any usecase where a business needs to store a lot of lightly used data, like historical records that might be accessed infrequently for reporting and therefore shouldn’t get be transfered to cold storage.

    For a real world example, the business I’m currently contracting at is legally required to retain safety documentation for every machine in every plant they work in. Since the company does contract work in other people’s plants that’s hundreds of PDFs (many of which are 50+ page scans of paper forms) per plant and hundreds of plants. It all adds up very quickly. We also have a daily log processes where our field workers will log with photographs all of their work every single workday for the customer. Some of these logs contain hundreds of photographs depending on the customer’s requirements. These logs are generated every day at every plant so again it adds up to a lot of data being created each month




  • But it only offers that at I think 20 V, which my phone can’t take

    This is actually a big part of many of the high speed charging standards that phones use, is it will actually charge at a higher voltage to lower the amperage. I don’t know off the top of my head if USB-PD does this on phones but I know the old Qualcomm Quick Charge standard did it a lot. I think it went as high as 24V if I remember correctly

    Then of course for a while lots of phones supported competing standards of quick charging and nobody allowed anyone else to use the same branding so identifying compatible chargers for your phone’s specific type of quick charge was a royal pain in the butt