Mossy Earth have, and sponsor some wonderful work (and their videos are great) though it’s worth nothing that they are quite explicit that they are not a charity, nor are they a non-profit. It’s owned by the founders, and operates much like a charitable foundation in terms of their mission - this is outlined in their transparency page here:
Is Mossy Earth a charity?
We are a social enterprise incorporated as a private limited company in the United Kingdom with a for profit structure. In other words, we are a business and the membership is a payment for a service we provide, not a donation. You pay us to rewild nature, and we do our best to make sure that your money has the biggest possible impact.
Having recently done a timer replacement on a Dualit, I think that might literally be a Dualit timer module. Looks identical in the packing box photo. It wouldn’t surprise me if the heating elements were the same as well (haven’t checked) though those are probably more commonly available as generic items.
He would definitely would - though I’d imagine that most his travel would be done on a diplomatic basis - so it’s possible the Vienna conventions might apply and preclude detention. (not really sure, I’m not a lawyer).
I'm not expert on it, but I suspect that two of them might somehow be related to the Transmit and Receive stations for Australia's JORN (over the horizon radar) that are located in Western Australia near Laverton.
Though if that were the case, I'd probably guess there should be more areas at the other site locations around northern Australia - so that might invalidate my guess.
I haven’t had the opportunity to use it in production yet - but it’s worth keeping in mind.
I’ve helped fix poor attempts of “table as queue” before - once you get the locking hints right, polling performs well enough for small volumes - from your list above, the only thing I can’t recall there being in sql server is a LISTEN - but I’m not really an expert on it.
I could see that potentially being an Anti-Trust issue for them.
Given the controversy over the Activision acquisition, acquiring one of the major engine platforms, having a major game studio, and already owning the XBox platform might make for great end to end strategic alignment / platform control - but I think it would also be a big regulatory/political fight to get done.
A blog post on the excellent IP/DE blog outlines that a Delaware judge has referred a series of related entities to the Department of Justice, and their legal counsel Texas Supreme Court's Unauthorized Practice of Law Committee in a series of Intellectual Property cases by Non Practicing Entities - revealing concealment of beneficial ownership and links to a French Sovereign State Fund.
This follows up to this discussion and report last year:
In Australia, after you change your licence address, they mail you a small sticker with the updated addres, that is then stuck onto the back of your licence.
There's a small section marked on the back that is specifically for it.
I guess if you move multiple times within the expiry period, you can pull the old sticker off and replace it.
I'm not sure if the video covers it, but I do recall reading that in Madagascar, they mark the beans with pinprick initials so that it's easier to identify if they've been stolen.
I might even have read about it originally from here.
Of course that only helps if they're recovered / identified quickly - once any significant amount of co-mingling happens then it's probably too much effort to track down the origin.
You've already included the answer - "using their machines as remote terminals, doing most their actual work on some remote server".
The developer uses MFA (TOTP, Push Notification, Yubikey etc) into a virtual desktop inside the organisation (Citrix, VMWare Horizon, etc).
From there, the developer can SSH / whatever into their development environment - which is hosted "inside" the corporate network, or their cloud provider, via internal links.
All code, and dev boxes live "inside" the corporate network, and only keypresses, mouse movement, and screen diffs are sent back and forth.
Most remote access packages can prevent clipboard, USB device, file transfer etc.
If you need a password manager for work purposes, then it lives on the corporate managed network - not your remote laptop/desktop - and to be really paranoid - you only ever "copy/paste" those passwords - you don't type them in.
If you really want to lock it down further, give the remote workers dedicated corporate equipment that they only use to access the remote desktops, so you can prevent some things like screen capturing, and really lock down the software to prevent things like keylogging software/malware.
You also should have the entire development environment segregated from the "business" corporate network as well.
It's only really an issue if you want to have offline developers - in which case I don't have any thoughts ready to hand - (but would expect it to be a very locked down machine, possibly with an even more locked down VM inside it).
As someone who regularly uses multiple layers of Virtual Desktop -> Virtual Desktop -> Remote Desktop, provided the network can handle it (on both your local network, and the corporate network), it works surprisingly well.
Toyota had identified the strategic risk of chip supply some years earlier, and made sure they had access to large buffers of them, reducing the impact.
In the mid-90's, I worked at a place that had one used for our intranet server running Win NT with IIS.
Mostly used a DEC Alpha as a "visible" competitor to our major server provider at the time (Compaq) to try and manage the prices they were charging (at least until Compaq bought Digital, and then eventually bought by/merged with HP).
One interesting thing was that we had a faulty RAM chip that we only discovered due to a bug in website publishing to IIS causing a big memory leak which crashed the server. Once the the chip was replaced, we still had the underlying leak - but at least the server didn't crash any more.
I wonder if it could be a net positive for the connection point areas.
I'm speculating that areas with undersea cables are often marked as "no anchor" zones due to the risk of damage (in areas where such practices are followed).
So the drop in damage from anchors and extended motor boat presence might eventually outweigh the initial damage from laying the cable.
Although I don't have a wireless groupset on my bicycle, I'm attracted to the idea of dual batteries (like in the SRAM system) - at least that way if you forget to charge a battery - you can swap them between front and rear so you have a slightly better ability to limp home.
https://www.mossy.earth/methodologies/business-ethos
Also in their FAQs:
Is Mossy Earth a charity? We are a social enterprise incorporated as a private limited company in the United Kingdom with a for profit structure. In other words, we are a business and the membership is a payment for a service we provide, not a donation. You pay us to rewild nature, and we do our best to make sure that your money has the biggest possible impact.