Do superhet receivers really bounce that much back out of the antenna?
Superheterodyne receivers don't "bounce" anything at all. They radiate a low-level signal that's generated internally to convert the incoming broadcast signal to a fixed, lower intermediate frequency, where it can be amplified and processed more effectively.
BSEE for contract or hire
Sounds like you didn't get the education you paid for.:-(
Sure, there's a "way." Most FM radios in the US, presumably including the ones in most cars, do their analog signal processing work at an intermediate frequency (IF) of 10.7 MHz. To convert the station's frequency to the IF, the radio uses a local oscillator tuned to either Fincoming+10.7 MHz or Fincoming-10.7 MHz -- usually the former, since it means the range of the oscillator is smaller as a percentage of its output frequency. So if you're listening to a station at 95.5 MHz, your radio is emitting a very weak local-oscillator signal at 106.2 MHz. A receiver at the billboard's location only has to watch for the LO signals corresponding to the stations that are paying to advertise on it at the moment. Often you can demonstrate this yourself by putting two FM radios next to each other, tuning one to a blank spot on the dial near the high (or low) end of the band and sweeping the other one back and forth across the band until it appears to interfere with the first radio.
This is also how UK residents who operate their TV sets without the proper government license are ferreted out. A van cruises around the neighborhood listening for radiated TV local-oscillator signals from unlicensed households.
Locking it up in the glass of a CRT is a pretty damned good way to keep discarded lead out of the water table. In fact, I can't think of a better one. Can you?
But that's a big difference, since in this case the public transit system was expected to pay for itself -- an expectation no one has for roads.
My point stands, though: I think the only real way to judge the relative merits of two transportation systems is to imagine the effects of their sudden removal from society. Take away (or don't build) the multi-billion dollar monorail or LRT systems, and a few people will be somewhat inconvenienced. Take away the Sound Transit bus system, and a lot of people will be inconvenienced, with a few others being seriously fucked.
But if you take away the roads, we're all fucked. Unfortunately, that's what the Washington state voters seem hell-bent on doing. Within the next ten to twenty years, the Seattle area will be completely unlivable from the point of view of anyone with a car. Only then will it become clear to the more stubborn anti-car evangelists among us that cars have benefits to society, too... benefits that simply aren't achievable with any form of mass transit that doesn't empower individuals to travel where they want, when they want.
Sheesh, you'd think they actually had to buy truckloads of dead trees and run printing presses for a living, or something.
My sympathy for Salon is pretty limited. Requiring me to sit through a Mercedes-Benz ad in order to read the Bush-bash du jour seems like a pretty broken business model.
But you know what? No matter how hard they try, there is no C++ string class on Earth that will let you type "foo" + "bar", because string literals in C++ are always char*'s, never strings.
WTF? Has he never heard of temporaries? I don't understand this point at all.
The original smarty men may be gone, but I doubt much of their knowledge has been forgotten by the organization.
You might be surprised. My understanding is that a lot of the technical data from the Apollo era is no longer recoverable, being stored on magnetic tape of debatable quality by machines that no longer exist. Anyone with a closet full of Apple II floppies and no Apple II can perhaps understand, if not forgive, NASA's predicament.:(
The reason telephones are POSes these days (I agree BTW) is that they aren't owned by Ma Bell and leased to consumers anymore. Back in the rotary-dial days, Western Electric built those puppies to shrug off World War III.
For any number of reasons, the last thing the telcos wanted was customers with phones that didn't work. But as soon as there was money to be made selling you a new phone every couple of years, that old truism went right out the door. The fact that all phones made today suck ass has absolutely nothing to do with any perceived trend in overall manufacturing quality.
Put another way: over a generation's use, one of those leased Western Electric phones probably cost you or your parents a couple thousand bucks or so. Dunno about you, but I'd rather buy a disposable POS every couple of years.
Personally, I think the unlimited ability to retroactively extend copyright spits on the notion of "limited times"
You're right. The trouble Lessig is encountering, though, has to do with the fact that 70 years is not "unlimited." The Bono Copyright Act doesn't grant any unlimited terms; it just extends the existing terms. The Supremes are likely to sympathize with Lessig's argument on a personal basis, but they won't (or at least shouldn't) hand down a judgement based on gut feelings. Unfortunately, I don't think this dog's gonna hunt.
If you're eager to have your eyes corrected, get good old fashioned RK, there's less side effects, a wider range of procedures that can be performed (since it's been done for over 50 years), and the results are just as accurate if not more so. I had a girlfriend that had RK performed, and a friend from high school as well, they were both quite happy with it, and didn't have any of the side effects you'll hear laser treated people have.
You're either confusing RK with PRK, or you're completely out of your mind.
You can (and should) run the Baseline Security Analyzer tool to find stuff like that. All the UCSB campus IT people need to do is get all their users to run the BSA assessment, and they should be OK as far as the glaringly-obvious vulnerabilities are concerned.
That's not really fair to say. The service manuals for the fifth-generation Corvette give you practically everything but the ECU's source code. I don't know about GM's other vehicles but would guess that's a company-wide practice.
The truth is, most manufacturers were already on board with this policy.
Wrong. The royalties from "Rhapsody in Blue" help pay for the education of those named in Gershwin's last will and testament, so that they can go to music school and eventually continue to produce new musical works.
Another point of view: at some point, it's time to quit coasting on Daddy's legacy and either do something cool yourself, or get a real job.
Yeah, they might actually design circuits that do calculations correctly because they actually understand the calculations...
More likely, they'll design a servo loop that breaks into oscillation and jams the X-band transponder because they had no understanding of how to work with real components of the non-mathematical variety.
What are we building, anyway?
on
Engineer in a Box?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Those can't be real transistors and wires down there, can they?
I never experienced that kind of dissonance until I accidentally barbecued an Athlon XP chip a few weeks ago. The chip package cracked open from thermal stress, and I broke it the rest of the way apart with my thumbnail. Inside, there was... nothing. Just a featureless, amorphous gray substrate that might have been a rock from my driveway. Maybe half a million violated transistors lay along that fault line, but my crime against Messrs. Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley left not a trace of evidence to be seen.
At some level I was already aware that IC fabrication processes had reached the point at which even the largest features would be entirely invisible to the naked eye. But I never appreciated it until looking inside that Athlon chip. I don't know what kind of '1337 t3ch they found at Area 51 when that UFO augered in, but I'll bet when they cracked it open, it looked just like the guts of an Athlon XP-1800 some idiot tried to run without a heatsink fan.
I don't know anything about XP's WLAN support (Windows XP is the first MS product that crosses my personal threshold of big-brother toleration, so I have no intention of upgrading beyond Win2K until absolutely forced to). But those DLink cards are garbage.
Snag a couple of Lucent Orinoco Silver cards on eBay -- they go for a song these days -- and plug them into the DLink PCI carriers you're already using. You'll instantly see a 50% or more improvement in effective working range.
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Do superhet receivers really bounce that much back out of the antenna?
:-(
Superheterodyne receivers don't "bounce" anything at all. They radiate a low-level signal that's generated internally to convert the incoming broadcast signal to a fixed, lower intermediate frequency, where it can be amplified and processed more effectively.
BSEE for contract or hire
Sounds like you didn't get the education you paid for.
Sure, there's a "way." Most FM radios in the US, presumably including the ones in most cars, do their analog signal processing work at an intermediate frequency (IF) of 10.7 MHz. To convert the station's frequency to the IF, the radio uses a local oscillator tuned to either Fincoming+10.7 MHz or Fincoming-10.7 MHz -- usually the former, since it means the range of the oscillator is smaller as a percentage of its output frequency. So if you're listening to a station at 95.5 MHz, your radio is emitting a very weak local-oscillator signal at 106.2 MHz. A receiver at the billboard's location only has to watch for the LO signals corresponding to the stations that are paying to advertise on it at the moment. Often you can demonstrate this yourself by putting two FM radios next to each other, tuning one to a blank spot on the dial near the high (or low) end of the band and sweeping the other one back and forth across the band until it appears to interfere with the first radio.
This is also how UK residents who operate their TV sets without the proper government license are ferreted out. A van cruises around the neighborhood listening for radiated TV local-oscillator signals from unlicensed households.
Locking it up in the glass of a CRT is a pretty damned good way to keep discarded lead out of the water table. In fact, I can't think of a better one. Can you?
On the contrary, Verizon's a major provider of both landline and cellular service in the Seattle area.
But that's a big difference, since in this case the public transit system was expected to pay for itself -- an expectation no one has for roads.
My point stands, though: I think the only real way to judge the relative merits of two transportation systems is to imagine the effects of their sudden removal from society. Take away (or don't build) the multi-billion dollar monorail or LRT systems, and a few people will be somewhat inconvenienced. Take away the Sound Transit bus system, and a lot of people will be inconvenienced, with a few others being seriously fucked.
But if you take away the roads, we're all fucked. Unfortunately, that's what the Washington state voters seem hell-bent on doing. Within the next ten to twenty years, the Seattle area will be completely unlivable from the point of view of anyone with a car. Only then will it become clear to the more stubborn anti-car evangelists among us that cars have benefits to society, too... benefits that simply aren't achievable with any form of mass transit that doesn't empower individuals to travel where they want, when they want.
Public roads don't make any money either.
Like hell they don't. Shut them down and see what happens to your local economy.
Sheesh, you'd think they actually had to buy truckloads of dead trees and run printing presses for a living, or something.
My sympathy for Salon is pretty limited. Requiring me to sit through a Mercedes-Benz ad in order to read the Bush-bash du jour seems like a pretty broken business model.
Yeah, I guess there's no way to override operator + for built-in types, huh. :(
But you know what? No matter how hard they try, there is no C++ string class on Earth that will let you type "foo" + "bar", because string literals in C++ are always char*'s, never strings.
WTF? Has he never heard of temporaries? I don't understand this point at all.
FairTunes is what you're talking about.
The original smarty men may be gone, but I doubt much of their knowledge has been forgotten by the organization.
:(
You might be surprised. My understanding is that a lot of the technical data from the Apollo era is no longer recoverable, being stored on magnetic tape of debatable quality by machines that no longer exist. Anyone with a closet full of Apple II floppies and no Apple II can perhaps understand, if not forgive, NASA's predicament.
The reason telephones are POSes these days (I agree BTW) is that they aren't owned by Ma Bell and leased to consumers anymore. Back in the rotary-dial days, Western Electric built those puppies to shrug off World War III.
For any number of reasons, the last thing the telcos wanted was customers with phones that didn't work. But as soon as there was money to be made selling you a new phone every couple of years, that old truism went right out the door. The fact that all phones made today suck ass has absolutely nothing to do with any perceived trend in overall manufacturing quality.
Put another way: over a generation's use, one of those leased Western Electric phones probably cost you or your parents a couple thousand bucks or so. Dunno about you, but I'd rather buy a disposable POS every couple of years.
Of course, an "electron cannon" at atmospheric pressure would be about as dangerous as a broken CRT.
Well, part of the Constitution, anyway.
Personally, I think the unlimited ability to retroactively extend copyright spits on the notion of "limited times"
You're right. The trouble Lessig is encountering, though, has to do with the fact that 70 years is not "unlimited." The Bono Copyright Act doesn't grant any unlimited terms; it just extends the existing terms. The Supremes are likely to sympathize with Lessig's argument on a personal basis, but they won't (or at least shouldn't) hand down a judgement based on gut feelings. Unfortunately, I don't think this dog's gonna hunt.
... did the cool-ass machine in Kafka's "The Penal Colony" run Linux or Windows?
If you're eager to have your eyes corrected, get good old fashioned RK, there's less side effects, a wider range of procedures that can be performed (since it's been done for over 50 years), and the results are just as accurate if not more so. I had a girlfriend that had RK performed, and a friend from high school as well, they were both quite happy with it, and didn't have any of the side effects you'll hear laser treated people have.
You're either confusing RK with PRK, or you're completely out of your mind.
You can (and should) run the Baseline Security Analyzer tool to find stuff like that. All the UCSB campus IT people need to do is get all their users to run the BSA assessment, and they should be OK as far as the glaringly-obvious vulnerabilities are concerned.
The radios in an ambulance cost more than the rest of the vehicle and medical equipment combined.
Bull.
That's not really fair to say. The service manuals for the fifth-generation Corvette give you practically everything but the ECU's source code. I don't know about GM's other vehicles but would guess that's a company-wide practice.
The truth is, most manufacturers were already on board with this policy.
Wrong. The royalties from "Rhapsody in Blue" help pay for the education of those named in Gershwin's last will and testament, so that they can go to music school and eventually continue to produce new musical works.
Another point of view: at some point, it's time to quit coasting on Daddy's legacy and either do something cool yourself, or get a real job.
Yeah, they might actually design circuits that do calculations correctly because they actually understand the calculations ...
More likely, they'll design a servo loop that breaks into oscillation and jams the X-band transponder because they had no understanding of how to work with real components of the non-mathematical variety.
Those can't be real transistors and wires down there, can they?
I never experienced that kind of dissonance until I accidentally barbecued an Athlon XP chip a few weeks ago. The chip package cracked open from thermal stress, and I broke it the rest of the way apart with my thumbnail. Inside, there was... nothing. Just a featureless, amorphous gray substrate that might have been a rock from my driveway. Maybe half a million violated transistors lay along that fault line, but my crime against Messrs. Brattain, Bardeen, and Shockley left not a trace of evidence to be seen.
At some level I was already aware that IC fabrication processes had reached the point at which even the largest features would be entirely invisible to the naked eye. But I never appreciated it until looking inside that Athlon chip. I don't know what kind of '1337 t3ch they found at Area 51 when that UFO augered in, but I'll bet when they cracked it open, it looked just like the guts of an Athlon XP-1800 some idiot tried to run without a heatsink fan.
I don't know anything about XP's WLAN support (Windows XP is the first MS product that crosses my personal threshold of big-brother toleration, so I have no intention of upgrading beyond Win2K until absolutely forced to). But those DLink cards are garbage.
Snag a couple of Lucent Orinoco Silver cards on eBay -- they go for a song these days -- and plug them into the DLink PCI carriers you're already using. You'll instantly see a 50% or more improvement in effective working range.
Jesus, $60? I wonder what I could get on eBay for the U5-Apple source backups I still have squirreled away in the attic someplace.