> Let's not forget, people still want to drive the old cars as they love them, so there needs to be a plan to let people be able to do so (even if it requires a total conversion to EV).
I doubt that would fly. A lot of classic cars are driven, appreciated and enjoyed primarily because of their engines. Ripping out a classic Lamborghini V12 to put in an electric motor would not only ruin the originality of the car, and the historic value of such engines, but the entire point of having said car.
I don't think the emissions output of classic cars would be that much of an issue tbh. They are rarely (if ever) used as commuters, they don't tend to sit in traffic for ages burning fuel, and the number of people who appreciate cars enough to have a classic are a relative minority. They also tend to take really good care of them, so they rarely produce any actual pollution ( I don't really count CO2 as a pollutant in of itself).
The only real bad emissions output was lead, but that has gone away with leaded petrol years ago, and older engines were converted to not need to use it.
I imagine, if getting access to fossil fuels ever becomes a big problem, people would just switch to biofuels. Things like Ethanol can even be made at home, due to the fact humans have been distilling that particular alcohol for millennia now, and the original engines ran on it anyway (and diesel on peanut oil), the only reason we use fossil fuels is because they were cheaper.
For most people, a car is an object to get them from A to B, they couldn't care less about aesthetics, engine note, driving experience, etc... Some snobby ones care about the badge, just for the "bling", but that is it. They will be happy with whatever is cheapest to run. Hence the modern interest in really small, low power econobox cars, and hybrids.
At this point in time, EV isn't good enough, but if (when?) EVs become better than ICE, I don't see why people wouldn't buy them. Only the enthusiasts would keep ICE cars (and what are they, maybe 2% of the world population, if that), so overall you would reduce the emissions output of the world.
After all, nobody had to ban the horse and cart when cars came about, because they were so much better. In fact the opposite, the car was deliberately crippled with regulations to prevent it taking over, which didn't work.
Yet here we try to cripple cars with regulations to make them worse than the new alternative. Which is really the wrong way to go about it, and doesn't speak well for the new alternative
No idea, but a love of big engines is not uncommon across the world.
Just that only has the USA been able to enjoy it fully. I have never been able to experience such a thing, and the way it is going, I probably never will be. I am happy that I could at least enjoy engines and manual transmission a bit (albeit for only a few years, as I only started driving 6 years ago), and I generally go out of my way to get the biggest engines available (round here, that is a 6 cylinder usually).
Feels like an end of an era, and unlike the ends of previous eras, where we had something better to look forward to, the "new way" is worse in about every single metric (except tailpipe emissions, which they don't have).
Not sure what I would do if IC cars were banned where I live, probably move away. With any luck there will be parts of the world (Africa?) which will remain detached from this stupidity long enough for me to die of old age enjoying myself. Assuming of course, it doesn't just all collapse in on itself and spare the rest of us the burden.
The way things are going, people will want to shoot down drones for all sorts of reasons.
Some due to adverts which will float around their person and follow them until they say whether they are interested or not (just you wait and see), others because peeping toms were trying to get some nudie shots of them/their loved ones.
And people who just don't like being spied upon in some dystopian society.
Not sure what the solution is. Banning drones won't work, restricting them will not work due to it being hard to enforce (short of having no-go zones like airports, which are easy to control), and allowing people to take them down themselves will just result in drones being taken down all the time, for a range of reasons as varied as the people taking action against them.
I used it to replace old failing machines before, with no problems running the original DOS programs. Plus you can boot it from a CD, which are a lot more common than floppy drives/disks nowadays (still have a usb 3.5 floppy drive if I ever need it though).
Or use a metal detector? Chances are the safe will not be too deep in the wall, and unlike pipes and wires, which would give off short beeps, a safe would register an entire square face to the detector.
" I love the car overall, so I'll keep it until such time as I get the first mailed speeding ticket based upon my car's GPS location and internal speed telemetry."
By which point you may no longer have a choice. This stuff tends to get rolled out slowly. First the water is tested by a new model, usually a special or exclusive one, then if there isn't a backlash, it trickles down the market, until all cars end up having it.
By the time it is decided by the powers at be to enable the "tickets via telemetry" or "Your 24/7 spy informer to the NSA/FBI/Whoever", probably the majority of cars will have the technology. They are not silly to enable these kinds of features while people still have alternatives. Not to mention self-driving cars, or cars which can override the occupants decisions on speed, direction and route. Sounds like a dystopian nightmare in a vehicular package to me.
And as the electronics get more integrated into cars, not only does it make it harder to rip it out and install your own, but it makes it harder to repair, potentially killing off the second hand market.
I've only ever dealt with and ran second hand cars, and one thing that you notice is that a cars electrics tend to go bad long before mechanical/engine wear becomes a problem. The more electrics a car has when new, the more there is to go wrong 10 years down the line (and the harder it is to debug). Cars that are all electric, or heavily computerised, will pretty much kill the second hand market IMO,
If the EFF wins, and people are allowed to hack/modify and replace the electronic systems within the cars, then things may turn out better than expected, but the automakers will lose lots of potential revenue. Not just from people buying second hand rather than new, but in certified garage/maintenance fees/licencing. I suspect they will fight the EFF tooth and nail over this.
Porsche 944 (although the 914 family is also good, you can fit 911 engines in those).
Because they are front engined and watercooled, purists don't see them as "pure Porsche's", so they don't have a huge markup like the classic 911's.
Still plenty fast though, derived from the 924GTP Lemans racer, so a good base to improve from, if tuning is your thing.
They were the most popular Porsche of the 80's. Hundreds of thousands were made, so to this day there are parts all over the place. Plus as they are heavily tuned and raced, all sorts of third-party performance parts suppliers are available.
Well, why don't you buy a 20-30 year old car then? I mean, I fully agree with you on all counts, as a software/computer guy, I know that there are some places where shoving in a computer is not a solution (I find people who don't fully understand computers, and see them as magical black boxes, are mostly guilty of this).
As such, I went out and got myself a car from 1982. Simple, fast enough to be fun (due to being really light compared to modern cars, it actually ends up being faster then them, despite being low in the power department) and really easy to fix.
I mean, seriously simple to maintain. As it was built mostly by people rather than robots, it was designed to be easy for a human to take apart and put together. Also, second hand parts are really cheap. Additionally, I can see that within 5-10 years, most of the parts (apart from the drive train) could be made on a decent spec 3D printer. I find 30 years is roughly the gap between what is "state of the art" and what can be done by an enthusiast in his shed.
There is one piece of computing in it though, which is the ECU, but being 30+ years old, and based on the 8051 uC, it has been reverse engineered multiple times, and could probably be reimplemented on a raspberry pi if push came to shove.
Not originally. Originally ABS was all mechanical. Nowadays they have a ECU fo do a "better job" at it (things like detecting slippage/lock on a per wheel basis).
And even then, if the ABS electrics fail, you still have full brake power, just no anti-lock. So even then, there is no "CPU between the brake pedal and the brakes". At least on every car pre 2005 (I stay away from any car that is newer, so I don't know about new ones, but I would be amazed if the brakes are fly-by-wire even now)
Paaah, real nerds didn't get invited to parties:-) We just hung out on online chat for our entire lives, arguing!:-P
Well, the result of this particular multi-year long argument was that "GNU" was dropped, and everyone (bar RMS) called it "Linux".
I was always in the "GNU/Linux" camp, because the two projects, while complimentary, were not bound for eternity. You could just as easily have GNU/Hurd or GNU/kBSD, or as we have now, "Android/Linux".
It is funny that it has taken this many years for the lack of distinction of what exactly people think "Linux" is to rear its head. The main argument of the opposing camp was that "Everyone knows what Linux is, no need to make it longer with GNU in front".
As for Picard vs Kirk, I think resurrecting one ancient flamewar is enough for today:-)
If you really want to be pedantic. Android is Linux, but it isn't GNU/Linux. Android uses the Linux kernel, but had its own userspace structure on top of it, which is not compatible with GNU/Linux (hence you have to specifically (re)write apps to run on Android).
I guess it should be called Android/Linux, and the "normal" Linux we know on our PC's is GNU/Linux. The one time where there is a real-world reason for having these things spelt out in full (there used to be a large argument about naming conventions of Linux a few years ago. Whether it was important to have the "GNU" bit at the front).
Drones are better than high power telescopes because... you don't need line of sight. A Drone can go over hedges/bushes/walls, or round corners. Things that would render a telescope useless. Drones can also theoretically go inside buildings.
Also, if you spot someone watching you with the telescope, you can see who is doing it (just look back at them with your own optics). The drone operator could be inside a building, or someone over the internet. You could not easily work out who was the operator just by looking at the drone itself.
(on the flip side, people are less likely to notice someone 500m away with a telescope than a drone buzzing above you).
Drones are not better than mortars, but they make for very good artillery spotters, giving you GPS co-ords to calculate trajectory for your target, again without the target risking finding out who is behind it.
I feel the same way, which is why I'm looking at the Neo900 project with hope. The way things are going they might actually pull it off, and I will have my n900 replacement.
No modern phone, even with a bluetooth keyboard, comes close to what the n900 could do, and how easy it was to modify, tweak and bend to your will, I miss it:-(
They did it the same way the Nazis did when they pushed in, via the railways. Railways stretched all the way across Europe. When there was no rail, it was done with trucks. To this day Russian rail network is a different gauge from the rest of Europe, to prevent an enemy easily moving troops and equipment into Russian territory.
Russia is first and foremost a land power, unlike the UK (and then the US) which are maritime powers, and would do a lot of logistics via ships, ports, etc...
Grey beards? So what of us who remember them as nerdshack.com? Before the great rebrand?
Fossils... right?:-)
But yeah, on the topic, I go out of my way now to not store data on US servers, nor do business with US based companies. It is rather hard in the IT world, but slowly and steadily I'm making progress on it.
I don't know, it sounds somewhat interesting for me. You see, In London, space is expensive. I barely have the space in my tiny flat for a desk, bed and TV. Even having the computers on overnight is annoying because I can hear the fans when I try to sleep.
Much as I would like a 3D printer, I don't have the space for it. Nor could I deal with the noise (and most likely smell) while it spends hours printing.
The only hackerspace is clear across the city for me, so it isn't really convenient to go there to use their 3D printer. The idea that I can send a STL file to Royal mail, and get the printed part back in the mail after a week or so is actually not a bad idea. Especially if (due to their ability to have larger capital expendeture) they go for one of the proper 3D printers, that are normally out of reach of mortals.
We have to see what they come up with, and if it would suit my needs, but the idea ain't that far fetched.
For a long time I used to something similar. All ports that were not in use on my firewall would redirect to a port on an old Toshiba T4800CT: 486 with 8MB of RAM and 500mb disk, running linux kernel 2.0.
It would run nethack on that port, so anyone who would try a connect scan would end up in nethack. Probably confused a bunch of people, and if someone managed to break through that, would be interesting to see what they would make of it.
The irony of your statement, is that the whole reason Russia is planning on going their own way, is because the US does not plan to renew the station come 2020, but rather deorbit it (the US have been saying so since 2009 at least). As some of the Russian modules are going up in 2017, they would be barely 3 years old when the US wants to burn it all up. And these modules are not cheap to build or send up there.
Additionally, the Chinese had to build their own space station precisely because the US did not want them on the ISS. Russians had no problem with their participation.
So from Russias point of view, come 2020, detaching their modules, letting the US burn up its part of the ISS, and then forming a new station seems like a smart decision. Those modules would have 20 more years left in them at least.
Plus, with the US no longer involved, they can invite the Chinese and the Europeans to join them if they so desire, for an ISS2.
So in many ways what you wrote was perfectly correct, just replace "Russia" with "USA" to get to reality:-) .
That has been possible since (at the very least) the first consumer Wifi APs (802.11b).
Try it yourself, take two access points, stick them on the same network, set the same ESSID/password/etc... and then connect with Wifi, if you turn one or the other AP off, your wifi client will seamlessly switch over to the other. TCP sessions will continue unaffected (except a minor packet loss blip sometimes)
The reason that these company provided "wifi hotspots" don't do that is deliberate. With the replacement of community wifi hotspots with corporate wifi hotspots, we've taken quite a few steps back, in exchange for the ability to track, meter and bill wifi usage.
If for example, you convinced your entire neighborhood to set up a WiFI AP with the same details, and a VPN connection to a single network between them all, you could all walk around the neighborhood and be handed over from AP to AP without even noticing.
I know, because that is how we did it back when we set up a wifi community in our area.
Well, unfortunately it is hard to get hold of electronic components from the 30s-40s. There was a surge in the 90's to 00's, when a lot of ex-USSR stock was sold. Nixie tubes, valves, analogue meters, old WWII equipment. The lot. As the USSR stayed with bakelite far longer than the NATO pact, you have a more items available that used it, over a greater year range.
And yeah, there was a renaissance at the time, as people built nixie clocks, displays, and did all sorts of nice things with the neon tubes and valves.
Unfortunately the ex-USSR sources has dried up, and now those parts are expensive, so unless you are a collector, you don't really pay those prices.
Stempunk does not have this problem, because quite frankly, it is mostly sticking pieces of brass and leather on an item to give it that "period look", and an appreciation of mechanics (steam engines, pistons, linkages, etc...). Nothing that is beyond a hobby machine shop (brass turning is comparatively easy), so people can make new parts that look period, but aren't ludicrously expensive. .
That is harder to do with electronic components, at least for now.
Although I'd say that the closest thing you are referring to would be called "Diesel punk", as the stage after steam punk, and deals with the inter-war period.
Slashdot Mirror
> Let's not forget, people still want to drive the old cars as they love them, so there needs to be a plan to let people be able to do so (even if it requires a total conversion to EV).
I doubt that would fly. A lot of classic cars are driven, appreciated and enjoyed primarily because of their engines. Ripping out a classic Lamborghini V12 to put in an electric motor would not only ruin the originality of the car, and the historic value of such engines, but the entire point of having said car.
I don't think the emissions output of classic cars would be that much of an issue tbh. They are rarely (if ever) used as commuters, they don't tend to sit in traffic for ages burning fuel, and the number of people who appreciate cars enough to have a classic are a relative minority. They also tend to take really good care of them, so they rarely produce any actual pollution ( I don't really count CO2 as a pollutant in of itself).
The only real bad emissions output was lead, but that has gone away with leaded petrol years ago, and older engines were converted to not need to use it.
I imagine, if getting access to fossil fuels ever becomes a big problem, people would just switch to biofuels. Things like Ethanol can even be made at home, due to the fact humans have been distilling that particular alcohol for millennia now, and the original engines ran on it anyway (and diesel on peanut oil), the only reason we use fossil fuels is because they were cheaper.
For most people, a car is an object to get them from A to B, they couldn't care less about aesthetics, engine note, driving experience, etc... Some snobby ones care about the badge, just for the "bling", but that is it. They will be happy with whatever is cheapest to run. Hence the modern interest in really small, low power econobox cars, and hybrids.
At this point in time, EV isn't good enough, but if (when?) EVs become better than ICE, I don't see why people wouldn't buy them. Only the enthusiasts would keep ICE cars (and what are they, maybe 2% of the world population, if that), so overall you would reduce the emissions output of the world.
After all, nobody had to ban the horse and cart when cars came about, because they were so much better. In fact the opposite, the car was deliberately crippled with regulations to prevent it taking over, which didn't work.
Yet here we try to cripple cars with regulations to make them worse than the new alternative. Which is really the wrong way to go about it, and doesn't speak well for the new alternative
No idea, but a love of big engines is not uncommon across the world.
Just that only has the USA been able to enjoy it fully. I have never been able to experience such a thing, and the way it is going, I probably never will be. I am happy that I could at least enjoy engines and manual transmission a bit (albeit for only a few years, as I only started driving 6 years ago), and I generally go out of my way to get the biggest engines available (round here, that is a 6 cylinder usually).
Feels like an end of an era, and unlike the ends of previous eras, where we had something better to look forward to, the "new way" is worse in about every single metric (except tailpipe emissions, which they don't have).
Not sure what I would do if IC cars were banned where I live, probably move away. With any luck there will be parts of the world (Africa?) which will remain detached from this stupidity long enough for me to die of old age enjoying myself. Assuming of course, it doesn't just all collapse in on itself and spare the rest of us the burden.
The way things are going, people will want to shoot down drones for all sorts of reasons. Some due to adverts which will float around their person and follow them until they say whether they are interested or not (just you wait and see), others because peeping toms were trying to get some nudie shots of them/their loved ones. And people who just don't like being spied upon in some dystopian society. Not sure what the solution is. Banning drones won't work, restricting them will not work due to it being hard to enforce (short of having no-go zones like airports, which are easy to control), and allowing people to take them down themselves will just result in drones being taken down all the time, for a range of reasons as varied as the people taking action against them.
What's wrong with using freeDOS? http://www.freedos.org/
I used it to replace old failing machines before, with no problems running the original DOS programs. Plus you can boot it from a CD, which are a lot more common than floppy drives/disks nowadays (still have a usb 3.5 floppy drive if I ever need it though).
Or use a metal detector? Chances are the safe will not be too deep in the wall, and unlike pipes and wires, which would give off short beeps, a safe would register an entire square face to the detector.
" I love the car overall, so I'll keep it until such time as I get the first mailed speeding ticket based upon my car's GPS location and internal speed telemetry."
By which point you may no longer have a choice. This stuff tends to get rolled out slowly. First the water is tested by a new model, usually a special or exclusive one, then if there isn't a backlash, it trickles down the market, until all cars end up having it.
By the time it is decided by the powers at be to enable the "tickets via telemetry" or "Your 24/7 spy informer to the NSA/FBI/Whoever", probably the majority of cars will have the technology. They are not silly to enable these kinds of features while people still have alternatives. Not to mention self-driving cars, or cars which can override the occupants decisions on speed, direction and route. Sounds like a dystopian nightmare in a vehicular package to me.
And as the electronics get more integrated into cars, not only does it make it harder to rip it out and install your own, but it makes it harder to repair, potentially killing off the second hand market.
I've only ever dealt with and ran second hand cars, and one thing that you notice is that a cars electrics tend to go bad long before mechanical/engine wear becomes a problem. The more electrics a car has when new, the more there is to go wrong 10 years down the line (and the harder it is to debug). Cars that are all electric, or heavily computerised, will pretty much kill the second hand market IMO,
If the EFF wins, and people are allowed to hack/modify and replace the electronic systems within the cars, then things may turn out better than expected, but the automakers will lose lots of potential revenue. Not just from people buying second hand rather than new, but in certified garage/maintenance fees/licencing. I suspect they will fight the EFF tooth and nail over this.
rtorrent is curses based, and supports proxies as well.
Here you go: https://geti2p.net/en/
Best I've found so far.
You could have argued that they may have existed in the beginning, but once Google did an IPO, that was the end of it.
Then again, if I remember correctly, Google never said their official motto was "Do no evil", but that was more like a goal they aspire to.
Amazing how an IPO can make all such aspirations vanish overnight, eh? :-)
Porsche 944 (although the 914 family is also good, you can fit 911 engines in those).
Because they are front engined and watercooled, purists don't see them as "pure Porsche's", so they don't have a huge markup like the classic 911's.
Still plenty fast though, derived from the 924GTP Lemans racer, so a good base to improve from, if tuning is your thing.
They were the most popular Porsche of the 80's. Hundreds of thousands were made, so to this day there are parts all over the place. Plus as they are heavily tuned and raced, all sorts of third-party performance parts suppliers are available.
Well, why don't you buy a 20-30 year old car then? I mean, I fully agree with you on all counts, as a software/computer guy, I know that there are some places where shoving in a computer is not a solution (I find people who don't fully understand computers, and see them as magical black boxes, are mostly guilty of this).
As such, I went out and got myself a car from 1982. Simple, fast enough to be fun (due to being really light compared to modern cars, it actually ends up being faster then them, despite being low in the power department) and really easy to fix.
I mean, seriously simple to maintain. As it was built mostly by people rather than robots, it was designed to be easy for a human to take apart and put together. Also, second hand parts are really cheap. Additionally, I can see that within 5-10 years, most of the parts (apart from the drive train) could be made on a decent spec 3D printer. I find 30 years is roughly the gap between what is "state of the art" and what can be done by an enthusiast in his shed.
There is one piece of computing in it though, which is the ECU, but being 30+ years old, and based on the 8051 uC, it has been reverse engineered multiple times, and could probably be reimplemented on a raspberry pi if push came to shove.
Not originally. Originally ABS was all mechanical. Nowadays they have a ECU fo do a "better job" at it (things like detecting slippage/lock on a per wheel basis).
And even then, if the ABS electrics fail, you still have full brake power, just no anti-lock. So even then, there is no "CPU between the brake pedal and the brakes". At least on every car pre 2005 (I stay away from any car that is newer, so I don't know about new ones, but I would be amazed if the brakes are fly-by-wire even now)
Oh, and looky here, wiki has an article about it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Paaah, real nerds didn't get invited to parties :-) We just hung out on online chat for our entire lives, arguing! :-P
Well, the result of this particular multi-year long argument was that "GNU" was dropped, and everyone (bar RMS) called it "Linux".
I was always in the "GNU/Linux" camp, because the two projects, while complimentary, were not bound for eternity. You could just as easily have GNU/Hurd or GNU/kBSD, or as we have now, "Android/Linux".
It is funny that it has taken this many years for the lack of distinction of what exactly people think "Linux" is to rear its head. The main argument of the opposing camp was that "Everyone knows what Linux is, no need to make it longer with GNU in front".
As for Picard vs Kirk, I think resurrecting one ancient flamewar is enough for today :-)
If you really want to be pedantic. Android is Linux, but it isn't GNU/Linux. Android uses the Linux kernel, but had its own userspace structure on top of it, which is not compatible with GNU/Linux (hence you have to specifically (re)write apps to run on Android).
I guess it should be called Android/Linux, and the "normal" Linux we know on our PC's is GNU/Linux. The one time where there is a real-world reason for having these things spelt out in full (there used to be a large argument about naming conventions of Linux a few years ago. Whether it was important to have the "GNU" bit at the front).
Ok, I'll give it a go:
Drones are better than high power telescopes because... you don't need line of sight. A Drone can go over hedges/bushes/walls, or round corners. Things that would render a telescope useless. Drones can also theoretically go inside buildings.
Also, if you spot someone watching you with the telescope, you can see who is doing it (just look back at them with your own optics). The drone operator could be inside a building, or someone over the internet. You could not easily work out who was the operator just by looking at the drone itself.
(on the flip side, people are less likely to notice someone 500m away with a telescope than a drone buzzing above you).
Drones are not better than mortars, but they make for very good artillery spotters, giving you GPS co-ords to calculate trajectory for your target, again without the target risking finding out who is behind it.
Tehnically, newsgroups predate the web, as that is HTTP based, no?
Being roughly Moots age, I'll get off your lawn now :-)
I feel the same way, which is why I'm looking at the Neo900 project with hope. The way things are going they might actually pull it off, and I will have my n900 replacement.
No modern phone, even with a bluetooth keyboard, comes close to what the n900 could do, and how easy it was to modify, tweak and bend to your will, I miss it :-(
They did it the same way the Nazis did when they pushed in, via the railways. Railways stretched all the way across Europe. When there was no rail, it was done with trucks. To this day Russian rail network is a different gauge from the rest of Europe, to prevent an enemy easily moving troops and equipment into Russian territory.
Russia is first and foremost a land power, unlike the UK (and then the US) which are maritime powers, and would do a lot of logistics via ships, ports, etc...
Grey beards? So what of us who remember them as nerdshack.com? Before the great rebrand?
Fossils... right? :-)
But yeah, on the topic, I go out of my way now to not store data on US servers, nor do business with US based companies. It is rather hard in the IT world, but slowly and steadily I'm making progress on it.
I don't know, it sounds somewhat interesting for me. You see, In London, space is expensive. I barely have the space in my tiny flat for a desk, bed and TV. Even having the computers on overnight is annoying because I can hear the fans when I try to sleep.
Much as I would like a 3D printer, I don't have the space for it. Nor could I deal with the noise (and most likely smell) while it spends hours printing.
The only hackerspace is clear across the city for me, so it isn't really convenient to go there to use their 3D printer. The idea that I can send a STL file to Royal mail, and get the printed part back in the mail after a week or so is actually not a bad idea. Especially if (due to their ability to have larger capital expendeture) they go for one of the proper 3D printers, that are normally out of reach of mortals.
We have to see what they come up with, and if it would suit my needs, but the idea ain't that far fetched.
Haha!
For a long time I used to something similar. All ports that were not in use on my firewall would redirect to a port on an old Toshiba T4800CT: 486 with 8MB of RAM and 500mb disk, running linux kernel 2.0.
It would run nethack on that port, so anyone who would try a connect scan would end up in nethack. Probably confused a bunch of people, and if someone managed to break through that, would be interesting to see what they would make of it.
The irony of your statement, is that the whole reason Russia is planning on going their own way, is because the US does not plan to renew the station come 2020, but rather deorbit it (the US have been saying so since 2009 at least). As some of the Russian modules are going up in 2017, they would be barely 3 years old when the US wants to burn it all up. And these modules are not cheap to build or send up there. Additionally, the Chinese had to build their own space station precisely because the US did not want them on the ISS. Russians had no problem with their participation. So from Russias point of view, come 2020, detaching their modules, letting the US burn up its part of the ISS, and then forming a new station seems like a smart decision. Those modules would have 20 more years left in them at least. Plus, with the US no longer involved, they can invite the Chinese and the Europeans to join them if they so desire, for an ISS2. So in many ways what you wrote was perfectly correct, just replace "Russia" with "USA" to get to reality :-) .
That has been possible since (at the very least) the first consumer Wifi APs (802.11b).
Try it yourself, take two access points, stick them on the same network, set the same ESSID/password/etc... and then connect with Wifi, if you turn one or the other AP off, your wifi client will seamlessly switch over to the other. TCP sessions will continue unaffected (except a minor packet loss blip sometimes)
The reason that these company provided "wifi hotspots" don't do that is deliberate. With the replacement of community wifi hotspots with corporate wifi hotspots, we've taken quite a few steps back, in exchange for the ability to track, meter and bill wifi usage.
If for example, you convinced your entire neighborhood to set up a WiFI AP with the same details, and a VPN connection to a single network between them all, you could all walk around the neighborhood and be handed over from AP to AP without even noticing.
I know, because that is how we did it back when we set up a wifi community in our area.
Well, unfortunately it is hard to get hold of electronic components from the 30s-40s. There was a surge in the 90's to 00's, when a lot of ex-USSR stock was sold. Nixie tubes, valves, analogue meters, old WWII equipment. The lot. As the USSR stayed with bakelite far longer than the NATO pact, you have a more items available that used it, over a greater year range.
And yeah, there was a renaissance at the time, as people built nixie clocks, displays, and did all sorts of nice things with the neon tubes and valves.
Unfortunately the ex-USSR sources has dried up, and now those parts are expensive, so unless you are a collector, you don't really pay those prices.
Stempunk does not have this problem, because quite frankly, it is mostly sticking pieces of brass and leather on an item to give it that "period look", and an appreciation of mechanics (steam engines, pistons, linkages, etc...). Nothing that is beyond a hobby machine shop (brass turning is comparatively easy), so people can make new parts that look period, but aren't ludicrously expensive. .
That is harder to do with electronic components, at least for now.
Although I'd say that the closest thing you are referring to would be called "Diesel punk", as the stage after steam punk, and deals with the inter-war period.