BREAKING: NEW YORK TIME WRITES COMPLETELY UNBIASED ARTICLE ABOUT GUNS!

[Vene]

It depends on the med, some are safer than others. Some are, um, nasty fuckers. This is a lesser concern, but still one that needs to be addressed, but allergies, you need to know who in your organization has them and to what.

[Shibboleet The Annihilator]

FOOD: It's an investment that you can eat. Buy rations, eat them just before they expire. It's impossible to waste your money on them and some of them are quite good.

[BabylonHoruv]

Has there been a guerrilla resistance that was effective outside the context of heavy jungle though?

The US doesn't have as much dense natural cover. Temperate rainforest is a very different than tropical rainforest.

Afghanistan vs Russia.

[BabylonHoruv]

personally, i think you are underestimating the efficacy that a guerrilla resistance could bring to bear in the states, but i don't know if there's really any way to come to a really good idea of how that would play out...

You know, one thing I never see talked about for these hypotheticals is communications networks. How do you communicate? Phone and internet is out, that's able to be controlled by the gov't. Air wave frequencies are easy to intercept as well. You'd have to have a way to organize a lot of people over sizable distances.

Oh, and supplies, supplies are very important. Not just weapons and ammunition, but food, medicine, and clothing. These materials are something we rely upon the gov't for a lot more than the typical person realizes.

Use the government controlled channels of communication but talk in code. 

[Triple Zero]

unless they take down the entire internet, it's not that hard to encrypt your messages properly. in fact it's stupidly easy and yet nobody does it. but then, neither have I. one day I will make myself a GPG keypair, honest.

oh and even if internet's gone, computers might still work. a micro SD is way easier to hide, encrypt and transport than the corresponding file cabinet of folders and papers it contains.

[Elder Iptuous]

FOOD: It's an investment that you can eat. Buy rations, eat them just before they expire. It's impossible to waste your money on them and some of them are quite good.

rations?
like MRE type stuff? bleh....

Eat what you buy, and buy what you eat for the most part.  just have a larger pantry full.
for long term storage there is freeze dried food that is not bad with a stated shelf life of 30 years, but i wouldn't really call it 'rations'.

Use the government controlled channels of communication but talk in code. 

with ham radio, this is explicitly forbidden, so it would have to be innocuous sounding.  doesn't preclude it, just saying that it's not officially allowed....  if you couch code words in normal sounding chit chat, you could get predetermined messages across, but you couldn't really carry on an extensive coded conversation without a significant effort.
of course, you could encrypt messages in data like steganographic images or something...

[Triple Zero]

with ham radio, this is explicitly forbidden,

what, really?

how or why?

[Elder Iptuous]

with ham radio, this is explicitly forbidden,

what, really?

how or why?

its the law.  (or FCC regulation, at least...)
i don't know exactly why, other than some abstract security concerns....

[Telarus]

Has there been a guerrilla resistance that was effective outside the context of heavy jungle though?

The US doesn't have as much dense natural cover. Temperate rainforest is a very different than tropical rainforest.

Afghanistan vs Russia.

I really, really REALLY recommend this movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_of_War

... for anyone who wants an idea of what fighting a guerrilla resistance in afganistan means, and why the Afgans have so much experience protecting their terrain from mechanized warfare (i.e. Russia).

[ñͤͣ̄ͦ̌̑͗͊͛͂͗ ̸̨̨̣̺̼̣̜͙͈͕̮̊̈́̈͂͛̽͊ͭ̓͆ͅé ̰̓̓́ͯ́́͞]

Has there been a guerrilla resistance that was effective outside the context of heavy jungle though?

The US doesn't have as much dense natural cover. Temperate rainforest is a very different than tropical rainforest.

Afghanistan vs Russia.

I really, really REALLY recommend this movie: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_of_War

... for anyone who wants an idea of what fighting a guerrilla resistance in afganistan means, and why the Afgans have so much experience protecting their terrain from mechanized warfare (i.e. Russia).

I'll check it out.

Admittedly, I'm not much of a war nerd, but it sounds enlightening.

[BabylonHoruv]

FOOD: It's an investment that you can eat. Buy rations, eat them just before they expire. It's impossible to waste your money on them and some of them are quite good.

rations?
like MRE type stuff? bleh....

Eat what you buy, and buy what you eat for the most part.  just have a larger pantry full.
for long term storage there is freeze dried food that is not bad with a stated shelf life of 30 years, but i wouldn't really call it 'rations'.

Use the government controlled channels of communication but talk in code. 

with ham radio, this is explicitly forbidden, so it would have to be innocuous sounding.  doesn't preclude it, just saying that it's not officially allowed....  if you couch code words in normal sounding chit chat, you could get predetermined messages across, but you couldn't really carry on an extensive coded conversation without a significant effort.
of course, you could encrypt messages in data like steganographic images or something...

I actually meant communicating on the phone and internet.  There's a lot more traffic there than on HAM, so it'd be that much less likely to be intercepted and analyzed.

[Triple Zero]

with ham radio, this is explicitly forbidden,

what, really?

how or why?

its the law.  (or FCC regulation, at least...)
i don't know exactly why, other than some abstract security concerns....

I bet that if you have an old <not-very-much> baud modem, it'd be easy enough to hook it into the ham and broadcast a piece of binary data, right?

Sure, that may not be legal either, esp if it's encrypted data, but transmitting a few 10kb's should not take more than a couple of seconds, so who's gonna track you down?

[Requia ☣]

That's been done actually.  There are specific standards for it and everything.

[Elder Iptuous]

oh yeah.
there's ham repeater networks for data. there's people sending digital video, pictures, teletype kinda data, all kinds of ad hoc shit...
there's even BBS type setups.
you go on some bands and you just hear tons of bleep-bloop-hiss, and it's people talking back and forth.  and you can pack a good amount of shit in smaller bandwidth.
there's bands specifically set aside for it.

you should check out ham.  you'd probably like it.  it's not your grandfather's hobby anymore.  i don't know about over there, but here, it's ridiculously easy to get the entry level license, which allows you to do a pretty decent amount.
you can get a handheld receiver (looks like a walkie talkie) for pretty cheap.  i've got a Yaesu VX-7, which is pretty small, waterproofish, not too expensive,  good reception.  it's fun.

[Triple Zero]

So uh it's illegal to speak words in code over the ham radio, but it's just fine to send binary data??

And I'll look into it, indeed it sounds interesting. I'll probably get to deal with the whole Dutch Pirate Radio scene ... which is not as awesome as it sounds ... not at ALL. They hijack local radio frequencies and play EXCLUSIVELY and only Dutch schlager and party-schlager music. Which is the musical equivalent of the "crying boy" painting ... (ok actually it's kinda funny when you hit a pirate station while driving, cause the music is so stupid and you're bored from driving and in a silly mood, and the DJs speak in unintelligible dialect, and the little song-info-text on the display is showing weird messages glimpses of some scene where people call eachother by their first names ...) It's really, really weird, actually. In fact it would be pretty damn awesome cool if only the music wasn't so horrifyingly bad.

Also this whole "license" business intrigues me. How come you need a license for this stuff? Also who's going to check that you have one? Aren't you allowed to operate a ham radio, or just not own one?

And fuck yeah, if this thing allows me to transmit data to far away (how far does it go btw?) without having to rely on the Internet, that's definitely something I need to get into.

Ok transmitting data is not that hard (check out the bandwidth of me throwing this USB stick to the other side of the room! 8GB in 2 seconds!), it's the lack of latency that makes it more valuable