I regularly work with equipment that produces signals up to 50 GHz and let me tell you... components get much higher in cost the higher in frequency they go.
Depends on how precise you want to be. Conducting and measuring signals in that region of the spectrum with low-loss gear can be tough. Generating and receiving them isn't, necessarily. Not many people realize that some of the very first wireless communications experiments were done in the 60 GHz range, two years before Marconi.
There is a reason we didn't need jazz up science 100 years ago to get people interested. That is because science is interesting.... That is an extremely insightful statement right there. Science and nature are inherently interesting.
I don't know about that. 100 years ago, leading-edge hard science was a lot more interesting and relevant to the common folk than it is now. You had people like Tesla and Marconi using brand-new principles from scientists like Hertz and Maxwell, duking it out to see who could blow people away with the coolest stuff anyone had ever seen. You had everything from remote-controlled vehicles to wireless communications (oh, and any minute now, someone's going to figure out how to send voices and music across the ocean, not just buzzes and static), to gargantuan Gothic machinery capable of throwing out 100-foot lightning bolts and transmitting power for miles.
What's leading-edge research look like now? "Millimeter-Wave Modulated Optical Signal Generation with High Spectral Purity and Wide Locking Bandwidth Using a Fiber-Integrated Optical Injection Phase-Lock Loop." Oops, sorry, that paper's 7 years old. How about "Two gamma quarkonium and positronium decays with Two-Body Dirac equations of constraint dynamics?"
Never mind the flying car they promised me... what happened to my 100-foot lightning bolts and disembodied voices from the ether? Something has to be done to get normal kids interested in the natural and physical sciences... if only because we need willing taxpayers to fund future generations' basic research.
1) You almost never see one used without negative feedback (which just means there's a way for some or all of its output voltage to find its way back to its inverting input).
2) By varying the voltage at its output pin, an opamp with negative feedback will do whatever it takes, subject to its DC and AC specs, to make the voltage at its - input equal to whatever voltage is applied to its + input.
That's 99% of it. No, really.
Opamps are cool because it's easy to apply negative feedback to them. Negative feedback is probably the most important principle in electronics, after Ohm's Law.
Why do you believe these ratings should be enforced for games, and not for other forms of media (music, movies, books, magazines...)?
There is just as much evidence of harm to children caused by exposure to these other forms. What's special about games?
Finally, what part of "Congress shall make no law" is unclear to you and Sen. Brownback? The government is not supposed to be in the business of rating video games, any more than it's supposed to be in the business of reviewing Sunday sermons.
I have the Spartan 3 and T-Rex C1 kits on my shelf, but they're just gathering dust, despite my efforts to come up with an excuse to develop something with them. What I find in my own projects is that either a simple AVR/ATmega chip is enough, or a full-fledged Mini-ITX motherboard is preferable.
FPGAs just never seem to be the best part for control applications. Bus-level interfacing, sure... but there always seem to be higher-level solutions for that (often involving someone else's FPGA-based design). I'm not sure they belong in any classroom setting unless you're explicitly teaching advanced logic design.
Of course, if I were building 1,000,000 units of something, I imagine the decision-making process would be pretty different.
Awesome, give a bunch of random schoolkids an FPGA devkit.
At least you'll find out if one of the kids is going to be the next Woz. Everybody else will take one look at it and spend the rest of the day in the library sniffing paste.
That is just bizarre. I will never understand why people choose PICs over AVRs in applications like that. Guess it's just a matter of what the instructor or department head is familiar with.
What do you suppose we should do instead: Have teachers tell their students that their parents are stupid?
Yeah, I think that's probably the right thing to do. In any decent society, children should benefit from several fundamental, guaranteed human rights. The right not to be indoctrinated with religious horseshit is near the top of that list, in my opinion. It's time we stopped assuming that parents have some kind of inalienable right to brainwash their children.
Your right to fill your child's head with crap ought to be secondary to your child's right to be educated with the best scientific knowledge available. It's exactly the same argument that you'd make against a family of Jehovah's Witnesses who want to deny their child a lifesaving blood transfusion. Ignorance is a curable disease, if caught early enough. The law ought to require schoolkids to be vaccinated against it.
The problem with school vouchers is that they're likely to have the opposite effect. I'm afraid that they'll be used primarily by parents who wish to avoid exposing their children to a reality-based curriculum.
That would rock, all right... it'd be great to see a popular community site for self-study participants. It'd be more like a natural extension of the OSS developer-support process. Instead of explaining how to use API function X or feature Y, you'd see people answering questions about lecture points and even swapping exams for grading. (The idea of being accountable to someone else, even an anonymous study partner 2,000 miles away, would be a great motivator for many people.)
Not sure. If FreeBSD's ftp "mput" command frequently times out when used as intended to transmit multiple files, then that would be a dead giveaway that Microsoft used their code.
Anyway much more importantly, the CW tests are as good a way as any to test someone's level of seriousness and discipline.
Couple of questions:
1) How does that explain the behavior on 75 phone? Every one of those wannabe-Rush Limbaughs passed their CW test. 2) So: built anything interesting lately?
A ham license is the ticket, not the ride. Nobody really seems to get that.
A "hertz" is a cycle per second, so what they're really saying is that they're getting 2.4 bits per cycle of the carrier. I agree that bits/sec/Hz is a ridiculous term for someone to have made up, but they would probably justify it by pointing out that there's not just one effective "carrier" in a modern modulation scheme.
In any event 2.4 bits/s/Hz is nothing special, unless it applies to individual subcarriers in an OFDM-like scheme. 802.11g sends 54 MB/sec in a channel about 20 MHz wide, for a bandwidth efficiency of 2.7 bits/second/Hz. Sounds like they basically threw a metric assload of RF bandwidth at the problem (another technical term found in relatively-few EE textbooks).
The problem with the ACLU stance on the Second Amendment is that they take an actively-adversarial stance on it. As an organization, they do not believe in any form of a self-defense right, exercised with or without any particular weapons.
Their position on the Second Amendment is an endorsement of the barking-mad Miller decision in which the Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment was, in contrast to the rest of the Bill of Rights, written to grant power to the government rather than the citizenry.
By explicitly endorsing the idea that an armed state should have a monopoly on the use of force, the ACLU has gone well beyond just leaving the Second Amendment to the NRA to defend. If they actually wanted to remain neutral on the subject, they could have done so without endorsing U.S. versus Miller.
My whole point is that there is no such thing as a DRM-encumbered "public domain work." In the presence of hypothetically-unbreakable DRM, the ability to copy and/or access the distributed work will continue to be denied by DRM technology after the law says it should become accessible to everyone. In effect, the rightsholder has had his cake, eaten it, and still won't turn over the recipe.
This situation amounts to nothing more than government-sanctioned robbery. Previous generations of rightsholders had to allow their content to enter the public domain, so what's so special about the ones publishing today?
And where, pray tell, would this recording come from? All would be fine and dandy if the original master recording is still around. But for all we know, the company having done such recording may long have gone bust, or they might still be around, but unwilling to provide it for whatever reason.
Heh... stick around, and someone will eventually trot out the tried-and-true, "B-b-but there's no such thing as unbreakable protection. A friendly hacker will eventually come along and deprotect the work!" argument, using lofty-sounding language worthy of Madison himself.
DRM and the expiration of copyright are irrelevant to each other. When copyrights expire, there are any number of avenues for you to leave behind your DRMed file.
Really? How so? Are you aware that rightsholders are no longer required to deposit a copy of their work with the Library of Congress? That requirement was established precisely to ensure the eventual availability of protected works to the public domain, and it didn't actually go away until 1976, I believe. Without the requirement to deposit a copy in an accessible form, all of your suggested "avenues to leave the file behind" are entirely voluntary.
But I'm sure that almost everyone who takes advantage of the DMCA's anti-circumvention protection has deposited unprotected copies for release to the public domain at the appropriate time... right?
Most importantly, in 50 or 60 years when the copyrights actually expire, will you still even want your 128kbps mp3? Of course not. The public domain file will be provided in a superior format from a master recording.
Um. OK, I guess, if you say so.
Moreover, there's no fundamental reason why future DRM can't include a system which automatically disables DRM upon copyright expiration.
Then there's no fundamental reason why future laws can't be passed to take that into consideration.
Oh, I'm sorry, was I not actually supposed to cite the constitution and what it actually says? Was I supposed to take your bald assertion on faith?
No, you were supposed to actually read what you were cutting and pasting. Specifically, the part about a "limited time."
Does your DRM scheme contain an automatic sunset provision to ensure that you actually live up to your end of the copyright bargain... the part that says your work must revert to the public domain upon expiration? If it doesn't (and let me take a wild guess here: it doesn't), then you are not operating within the bounds of copyright law as envisioned by the framers.
That's not to say that the deal you're offering is necessarily a bad one for consumers, but in any reasonable world, the minute you take steps to ensure that your content can never enter the public domain, you should no longer be entitled to legal monopoly protection. You're just another looter looking for a free ride at public expense.
If the only limit is that you can not mass distribute it, then you limit the ability of companies to offer products with more flexible and personalized limits.
Your business model is not a government entitlement program. The rest of us are not bound to rewrite our laws to support it.
Why exactly can't, for example, you and I come to some agreement that, for example, you write some song and I am allowed to listen to it exactly once since this we came to a mutually agreed upon price for which I agreed to listen to it only once?
You should certainly be able to do that under private contract law, but because your business model represents the grossest-imaginable violation of the Constitution's language authorizing copyrights, you should not be able to leverage Federal copyright law to enforce your terms.
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Not to mention the regulatory hurdles associated with spark gaps...
I regularly work with equipment that produces signals up to 50 GHz and let me tell you... components get much higher in cost the higher in frequency they go.
Depends on how precise you want to be. Conducting and measuring signals in that region of the spectrum with low-loss gear can be tough. Generating and receiving them isn't, necessarily. Not many people realize that some of the very first wireless communications experiments were done in the 60 GHz range, two years before Marconi.
There is a reason we didn't need jazz up science 100 years ago to get people interested. That is because science is interesting. ... That is an extremely insightful statement right there. Science and nature are inherently interesting.
I don't know about that. 100 years ago, leading-edge hard science was a lot more interesting and relevant to the common folk than it is now. You had people like Tesla and Marconi using brand-new principles from scientists like Hertz and Maxwell, duking it out to see who could blow people away with the coolest stuff anyone had ever seen. You had everything from remote-controlled vehicles to wireless communications (oh, and any minute now, someone's going to figure out how to send voices and music across the ocean, not just buzzes and static), to gargantuan Gothic machinery capable of throwing out 100-foot lightning bolts and transmitting power for miles.
What's leading-edge research look like now? "Millimeter-Wave Modulated Optical Signal Generation with High Spectral Purity and Wide Locking Bandwidth Using a Fiber-Integrated Optical Injection Phase-Lock Loop." Oops, sorry, that paper's 7 years old. How about "Two gamma quarkonium and positronium decays with Two-Body Dirac equations of constraint dynamics?"
Never mind the flying car they promised me... what happened to my 100-foot lightning bolts and disembodied voices from the ether? Something has to be done to get normal kids interested in the natural and physical sciences... if only because we need willing taxpayers to fund future generations' basic research.
Two things:
1) You almost never see one used without negative feedback (which just means there's a way for some or all of its output voltage to find its way back to its inverting input).
2) By varying the voltage at its output pin, an opamp with negative feedback will do whatever it takes, subject to its DC and AC specs, to make the voltage at its - input equal to whatever voltage is applied to its + input.
That's 99% of it. No, really.
Opamps are cool because it's easy to apply negative feedback to them. Negative feedback is probably the most important principle in electronics, after Ohm's Law.
Why do you believe these ratings should be enforced for games, and not for other forms of media (music, movies, books, magazines...)?
There is just as much evidence of harm to children caused by exposure to these other forms. What's special about games?
Finally, what part of "Congress shall make no law" is unclear to you and Sen. Brownback? The government is not supposed to be in the business of rating video games, any more than it's supposed to be in the business of reviewing Sunday sermons.
Ummm, how about no more new keys for software players.
There's no other kind.
I have the Spartan 3 and T-Rex C1 kits on my shelf, but they're just gathering dust, despite my efforts to come up with an excuse to develop something with them. What I find in my own projects is that either a simple AVR/ATmega chip is enough, or a full-fledged Mini-ITX motherboard is preferable.
FPGAs just never seem to be the best part for control applications. Bus-level interfacing, sure... but there always seem to be higher-level solutions for that (often involving someone else's FPGA-based design). I'm not sure they belong in any classroom setting unless you're explicitly teaching advanced logic design.
Of course, if I were building 1,000,000 units of something, I imagine the decision-making process would be pretty different.
What I mean by this is that most of the important work a Physicist will do will have been done by age 35.
Yeah, and by white men of European descent.
Awesome, give a bunch of random schoolkids an FPGA devkit.
At least you'll find out if one of the kids is going to be the next Woz. Everybody else will take one look at it and spend the rest of the day in the library sniffing paste.
That is just bizarre. I will never understand why people choose PICs over AVRs in applications like that. Guess it's just a matter of what the instructor or department head is familiar with.
Go with AVRs and get a real free C++ compiler. Assembler? Dunno, I've never needed to touch it.
What do you suppose we should do instead: Have teachers tell their students that their parents are stupid?
Yeah, I think that's probably the right thing to do. In any decent society, children should benefit from several fundamental, guaranteed human rights. The right not to be indoctrinated with religious horseshit is near the top of that list, in my opinion. It's time we stopped assuming that parents have some kind of inalienable right to brainwash their children.
Your right to fill your child's head with crap ought to be secondary to your child's right to be educated with the best scientific knowledge available. It's exactly the same argument that you'd make against a family of Jehovah's Witnesses who want to deny their child a lifesaving blood transfusion. Ignorance is a curable disease, if caught early enough. The law ought to require schoolkids to be vaccinated against it.
The problem with school vouchers is that they're likely to have the opposite effect. I'm afraid that they'll be used primarily by parents who wish to avoid exposing their children to a reality-based curriculum.
That would rock, all right... it'd be great to see a popular community site for self-study participants. It'd be more like a natural extension of the OSS developer-support process. Instead of explaining how to use API function X or feature Y, you'd see people answering questions about lecture points and even swapping exams for grading. (The idea of being accountable to someone else, even an anonymous study partner 2,000 miles away, would be a great motivator for many people.)
Not sure. If FreeBSD's ftp "mput" command frequently times out when used as intended to transmit multiple files, then that would be a dead giveaway that Microsoft used their code.
There are problems to be solved here first.
No kidding. All that bear shit in the back of the cave is really starting to reek.
Anyway much more importantly, the CW tests are as good a way as any to test someone's level of seriousness and discipline.
Couple of questions:
1) How does that explain the behavior on 75 phone? Every one of those wannabe-Rush Limbaughs passed their CW test.
2) So: built anything interesting lately?
A ham license is the ticket, not the ride. Nobody really seems to get that.
Er... the 'B' is wrong. Just, just... forget I said anything. :)
(Sorry; I just hit the Shift key one time too many when typing 54 Mb/sec. The calculation is right but the 'M' is wrong.)
A "hertz" is a cycle per second, so what they're really saying is that they're getting 2.4 bits per cycle of the carrier. I agree that bits/sec/Hz is a ridiculous term for someone to have made up, but they would probably justify it by pointing out that there's not just one effective "carrier" in a modern modulation scheme.
In any event 2.4 bits/s/Hz is nothing special, unless it applies to individual subcarriers in an OFDM-like scheme. 802.11g sends 54 MB/sec in a channel about 20 MHz wide, for a bandwidth efficiency of 2.7 bits/second/Hz. Sounds like they basically threw a metric assload of RF bandwidth at the problem (another technical term found in relatively-few EE textbooks).
The problem with the ACLU stance on the Second Amendment is that they take an actively-adversarial stance on it. As an organization, they do not believe in any form of a self-defense right, exercised with or without any particular weapons.
Their position on the Second Amendment is an endorsement of the barking-mad Miller decision in which the Supreme Court decided that the Second Amendment was, in contrast to the rest of the Bill of Rights, written to grant power to the government rather than the citizenry.
By explicitly endorsing the idea that an armed state should have a monopoly on the use of force, the ACLU has gone well beyond just leaving the Second Amendment to the NRA to defend. If they actually wanted to remain neutral on the subject, they could have done so without endorsing U.S. versus Miller.
My whole point is that there is no such thing as a DRM-encumbered "public domain work." In the presence of hypothetically-unbreakable DRM, the ability to copy and/or access the distributed work will continue to be denied by DRM technology after the law says it should become accessible to everyone. In effect, the rightsholder has had his cake, eaten it, and still won't turn over the recipe.
This situation amounts to nothing more than government-sanctioned robbery. Previous generations of rightsholders had to allow their content to enter the public domain, so what's so special about the ones publishing today?
And where, pray tell, would this recording come from? All would be fine and dandy if the original master recording is still around. But for all we know, the company having done such recording may long have gone bust, or they might still be around, but unwilling to provide it for whatever reason.
Heh... stick around, and someone will eventually trot out the tried-and-true, "B-b-but there's no such thing as unbreakable protection. A friendly hacker will eventually come along and deprotect the work!" argument, using lofty-sounding language worthy of Madison himself.
DRM and the expiration of copyright are irrelevant to each other. When copyrights expire, there are any number of avenues for you to leave behind your DRMed file.
Really? How so? Are you aware that rightsholders are no longer required to deposit a copy of their work with the Library of Congress? That requirement was established precisely to ensure the eventual availability of protected works to the public domain, and it didn't actually go away until 1976, I believe. Without the requirement to deposit a copy in an accessible form, all of your suggested "avenues to leave the file behind" are entirely voluntary.
But I'm sure that almost everyone who takes advantage of the DMCA's anti-circumvention protection has deposited unprotected copies for release to the public domain at the appropriate time... right?
Most importantly, in 50 or 60 years when the copyrights actually expire, will you still even want your 128kbps mp3? Of course not. The public domain file will be provided in a superior format from a master recording.
Um. OK, I guess, if you say so.
Moreover, there's no fundamental reason why future DRM can't include a system which automatically disables DRM upon copyright expiration.
Then there's no fundamental reason why future laws can't be passed to take that into consideration.
Oh, I'm sorry, was I not actually supposed to cite the constitution and what it actually says? Was I supposed to take your bald assertion on faith?
No, you were supposed to actually read what you were cutting and pasting. Specifically, the part about a "limited time."
Does your DRM scheme contain an automatic sunset provision to ensure that you actually live up to your end of the copyright bargain... the part that says your work must revert to the public domain upon expiration? If it doesn't (and let me take a wild guess here: it doesn't), then you are not operating within the bounds of copyright law as envisioned by the framers.
That's not to say that the deal you're offering is necessarily a bad one for consumers, but in any reasonable world, the minute you take steps to ensure that your content can never enter the public domain, you should no longer be entitled to legal monopoly protection. You're just another looter looking for a free ride at public expense.
If the only limit is that you can not mass distribute it, then you limit the ability of companies to offer products with more flexible and personalized limits.
Your business model is not a government entitlement program. The rest of us are not bound to rewrite our laws to support it.
Why exactly can't, for example, you and I come to some agreement that, for example, you write some song and I am allowed to listen to it exactly once since this we came to a mutually agreed upon price for which I agreed to listen to it only once?
You should certainly be able to do that under private contract law, but because your business model represents the grossest-imaginable violation of the Constitution's language authorizing copyrights, you should not be able to leverage Federal copyright law to enforce your terms.