Almaz was finally successfully launched into space as Salyut 3 in June 1974. [...] The Nudelman cannon inherited from the Soyuz VI was retained as an active defence system in the event of an attack by an Apollo spacecraft. The cannon was supplemented with space-to-space missiles.
Now that is a juicy bit! They were probably aircraft-type ait-to-air missiles just like on a MiG fighter, not ballistic types.
So, while the Muppets were showing us their "Pigs in Space" segments, the Soviets were busy with their own "MiGs in Space"... (ducks)
Explosives on Soviet space satellites
on
The Shadow Space Race
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
It has long been rumored that since the US started the Shuttle program, the Soviet recon sats were equipped with a small self-destruct explosive charge. The idea was that the charge would be a deterrent in case NASA attempted to grab one of the Soviet birds.
But precisely, there have been countless books on early computing, including machines used during WWII on both sides. The Z4 was extensively studied and documented. The auto-pilot of the V1 and V2, the radiobeam guidance system used by German bombers, all these innovations have been studied in great details and documented in many books.
And yet, something as major as this -- statistical tabulators in camps-- would never have been documented? Until Black, a disgruntled ex-IBMer fired from his job and with no historian background, comes around and miraculously "finds" about this?
It just doesn't pass the smell test.
I wasn't there, so I have to take the word of other people. But none of the historians I read have ever written about tabulating machines in the equipment that was seized in the extermination camps' offices. Black's book dissolved after the threat of a defamation lawsuit.
You're joking. Are you refering to that book by Black about IBM in Germany, which was instantly debunked? Black's book was tripe. Even the most lurid Nazi and leather nostalgia screwball out there could not take it seriously.
Computers. Why not Jew-sniffing attack squirrels, while we are at it?
You know, it's the kind of crap that plays right into the hands of negationnists. If history can be bent to include mainframes in camps, surely it can be bent a bit more to turn the camps into Club Meds, right? (Yes, that was sarcasm).
That's also what I learned. In the early 1800s, the French tapestry manufactures started to purchase the newfangled Jacquard mechanical looms that got their patterns from punched cards. The silk worker corporations didn't like it one bit. Fearing for their employment, they started a Luddite campaign against the devious machines, discreetly throwing wooden shoes (French "sabot") into the delicate mechanism while the foreman wasn't looking. Hence the word.
Of course, as is often the case, the machines actually increased employment in French manufactures by lowering the price of tapestries and increasing productivity . Fear of automation is nothing new.
ATF was against letting these specialists telework because it says the material they need to remove from agency offices in order to telework posed a security risk.
I can see why. I mean, the poor guys need to bring work home, obviously. In case you do'nt know what the ATF does, it turns out that this is the Official Agency that solves the big problem created by alcohol, firearms and tobacco. I went to their web site and it's kinda technical -- it has to do with seizing stuff and closing down places, I'm not sure I understood all the jargon. But obviously, someone has to consume all that seized wood alcohol and those contraband cigarettes, while testing these confiscated firearms.
Which lets us picture the average ATF telecommuter, in a corner of his living room, working from home for the ATF, drinking seized gutrot moonshine, smoking Chinaese-made fake Marlboros, and shooting a deer silhouette adorned with his ex-wife portrait with confiscated AK-74 imitations.
Of course, it's a security risk!
And you wonder why the neighbors don't want more telecommuting Federal employees?
TFA is plain wrong on so many levels that it hurts my brain.
First, the fact that music is increasingly rid of the DRM pest doesn't mean people stop buying. Witness Amazon and Walmart. Their MP3 downloads represent very juicy sales, thank you. I refuse to buy DRM-infected music, only free formats, for practical and philosophical reasons. I am obviously not the only one.
Second, even if the music studios were somehow wiped off the face of the planet, the US economy would survive (shock! gasp!) and the world would barely notice. Oh, sure, quite a few coke dealers and luxury whores would feel the pinch if they were to lose their affluent clientele of music studio execs, but I am confident they'd somehow manage.
Look at the numbers. The music industry gets about $14 billions a year from CD and online sales. Add the derived rights and you get what, $15 to 20 billions? That's less than half a day of the US GNP, which was about 14000 billions last year. So 12 hours of GNP. Big hoopla. Music might have a large cultural influence, but it's hardly an economic engine. That's true for most forms of art, BTW. (Yes, I agree that some of the music out there can be only called "art" with some far-fetched definitions of art).
Conclusions: It remains to be seen that DRM-free music is bad for the studio. The studios could convulse, die horribly and rot, and their disappearance would not even be a hiccup on the economic scale. And I'm sure quite a few artists and consumers will dance in the street.
The whole Uwe Boll saga is a sad illustration of the Law of Unintended Effects. The German lawmakers, aware that the high German taxes were hampering the media industry, wanted to give a break to some noisy lobbyist. Cut taxes? Naah, that'd be against the prevalent Big All-Encompassing State mindset.
So instead, lawmakers concocted a bug-ridden, horribly deficient tax shelter law with untested, badly designed rules -- the legal equivalent of Windows ME.
When accountants started to exploit the loopholes, it took said lawmakers years to identify and plug the hole.
Meanwhile, huge amounts of money were spent on crappy movies that will act as a deterrent for anyone trying to make a *good* SF or fantasy flick. "Hey, mister Studio Exec, I want to adapt this great fantasy story. Wanna produce it?" "Oh no, look, this Name of the King flick failed, so clearly, fantasy does not sell. Let's make an eight remake of Freaky Friday instead."
Had these lawmakers had a clue, they'd have done the proper thing and cut taxes. The German investors would have bought beemers and luxury schnaps, providing jobs to the German economy instead of creating temporary employment to foreign film crews who now have these embarassing Boll stains on their resume.
If there is a lawsuit, Ford doesn't stand a chance. Fair use rules support the calendar publishers. Then again, in court, he with the deepest pockets often wins.
This is but the continuation of a sad trend. Now, when a model maker wants to sell a plastic scale model kit of a US military aircraft, the manufacturer (Boeing or MDD) requires royalties because the model uses the image of the aircraft.
Never mind that the US taxpayer has paid for the development and production of the aircraft (and how!). For example, you'd think that for the $80 or so that the average American adult paid for the V-22 development, they'd have the right to get a break on the 1:72 scale model.
The only consolation is that the model makers are generally foreign and that the royalties are levied on the worldwide market.
As far as I understand, it started with people wondering why Clarkson wasn't going ballistic after the poor IT management practices of UK government agencies were recently revealed (again). For some reason, he decided to cut them some slack on this one and to de-dramatize the situation. Maybe he didn't want to look like he was a kneejerk critic of the Labor gummint. After all, these days, everybody is slamming them, and contrarians like him will always try to go against the flow.
Turns out it IS really a big deal, after all, and that you can't go wrong bashing an agency run by Labor politicians.:-)
Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich.
Not according to financial data. MSFT have a 54 billion income, vs. 96 billion for IBM.
Microsoft is facing a saturated market. Every desktop PC on the planet that could run an MS app is already doing so. The rest is running non-MS OSes and that percentage is growing. In the server world, Linux is a very strong competitor. Same in the consumer electronics world. Mobile phones? Against Symbian and Linux, Microsoft CE is losing market shares. Set-top boxes? After what MS did to AT&T's IPTV project (delayed because of Windows CE problems), carriers will think twice. Airplane in-flight entertainment systems? Linux again.
MSFT is trying to make inroads on new markets, but it has so far failed to achieve domination in anything but the desktop.
So I wouldn't sell them short, but I wouldn't expect them to skyrocket either.
Thank you, but I am not an authority on the subject by any means.
One more thing, we EE routinely talk about radio-frequency radiations when talking about RF, antennas and SAR. It's important to make sure people understand these radiations are just this, radiated energy. The term "radiations" is generally understood by the public as something nasty that is produced by radioactive materials. That's only one form of radiation. Those are said to be ionizing because of their high energy, and that high energy is why they are dangerous: Each gamma-ray photon, for example, carries enough punch to potentially damage a DNA molecule.
On the other hand, radio-frequencies, light, heat (infrared) are also forms of radiations, but are harmless at low levels.
Make sure that people around you understand the difference, it's easy to get scared by "radiations"!
You are absolutely correct, the electromagnetic flux generated by an antenna decreases as the square of the distance. If you are, say, one inch away from an antenna and receive flux F, you will receive only one tenth of that flux if you move 3.16 inches away (because 3.16 squared is ten). Using a corded headset with your cell phone will allow you to move your cell phone antenna far enough that the flux intercepted by your brain decreased a hundredfold or more. So that's a good solution if you want to achieve your ten-fold flux reduction.
What about Bluetooth headsets? Well, there are many models. Class 1 headsets radiate 100 mW of power, while class 2 are limited to 2.5 mW. Even a class 1 headset (100 mW) radiates about an order of magnitude less than cell phones. So having a class 1 Bluetooth headset is still exposing your head to roughly 5-10 times less RF than putting a cell phone onto your ear. Use a class 2 if you want even less exposure.
As for routers, their power is typicaly 100 mW, so unless you put one in your pillow, the flux is negligeable when compared to cell phones.
BTW, old cell phones used to radiates 2-3 watts. Nowadays, digital cell phones rarely radiate more than 600 mW. And that's when you're far away from the tower. If you have a good signal, the cell phone will adjust its power and emit only a fraction of this to save its battery.
One esteemed responder in a previous conversation (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=379287&cid=21573611) said he believed you shouldn't keep your cell phone on your lap because 'nads don't react well with RF. There is no evidence of this, but I pass it along for what it's worth.
A SAR of 1.4 W/kg is actually in the high range of GSM cell phones (the highest SAR models give about 1.6 W/kg).
FYI, SAR is measured by blasting a liquid-filled fake head with RF and then measuring the electric field within the liquid inside the fake head.
If this experiment can be reproduced, it's a major deal because it would invalidate a lot of assumptions about RF absorption in human tissues. It would also reveal an unknown interaction mode between RF and tissues.
That said, the paper is really terse. I'd really like to see more details. Maybe in further papers?
One theory trying to explain these clouds is the X-ray activity of the sun. The sun is a highly variable star when it comes to X-rays. During its 11-year cycle, the X-ray flux emitted by the sun varies by a factor of 15, with ferocious bursts. We are at a solar minimum, so we see few sun spots and the X-ray activity is also lower on average.
I found an article that is short and readable explaining the link between solar cycles and X-rays: http://solar.physics.montana.edu/nuggets/2000/000407/000407.html. Note that the X-ray activity can vary hugely from the current solar minimum to, say, the 2000-2001 solar max.
The problem is that we don't have that much data on it yet. We need to accumulate several cycles worth of observations before we can answer these questions: * When does the sun emit X-rays? Is it linked to sun spots? * What do solar X-rays do to the upper atmosphere?
The X-rays are absorbed by the ionosphere (fortunately for life forms), and this energy transfer is not well known. During each solar minimum, less X-rays arrive in the upper atmosphere, which therefore should cool down. Is it the reason why we see these noctilucent clouds? If so, they should start disappearing in a couple of years, when sun spots return.
This is a very interesting keyhole on a yet unknown mechanism. I hope we'll see updates on the subject.
I am an EE too, you know...
You claim to have a PhD yet you write like a 14-yaer old. You must be very precocious.
As for cops and gonad cancer... I think the donuts are the obvious cause.
Now, if you stop insulting people and expose your arguments. I am interested.
Thank you for your precisions. I didn't know that the effective RF output of a cell phone tower was so low.
However, as explained by Moofie's post, this drives the nail even further in the alarmist stories' coffin, since the RF intensity values I describe are much greater than the real life ones.
Even at 600 mW as opposed to 1 W, a cell phone still creates a much higher intensity for the user than the towers and wifi APs. So the conclusions are unchnanged.
I am sick and tired of hearing voodoo science scaremongers. So here we go.
As far as possible interactions with the human body go, the 900 MHz to 1900 MHz spectrum is roughly the same. Both WiFi and cell phones use bursts of transmissions with approximately the same spectral characteristics. So we can simplify the problem and focus only on intensity.
A cell phone that is far from the nearest tower can transmit up to one watt. A typical home router transmits 100 mW (one tenth of a cell phone). A very powerful cell tower transmits 1000 W. However, signal intensity per surface unit decreases as the square of the distance. So if you are 100 meters (300 feet, one-half furlong for our US friends) from a 1-kW cell tower, you get the same exposure as if you are one metter (0.005 furlong, 3 ft) from a wifi router. And of course, all of this is dwarfed by the intensity of signal you get a few centimeters away from a 1-W cell phone.
So test cell phones. If they don't fry your brain, forget about wifi routers and towers, their effect is negligeable next to a cell phone's signal flux. And cell phones were innocented by several studies.
Attention journalists: When you cover technology, either learn the basics of what you're talking about or go back to freelancing for people rags.
Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3.
Yeah right. All you need to do is connect your missile's engine to the PlayStation Missile Guidance Port, right? </sarc>
Puhlease. Asymmetric warfare might be becoming more widespread, but it's not because of videogames. It's because it's cheap when you can rely on a bottomless supply of expandable human detonators, better known as suicide bombers. Who needs a sophisticated warhead delivery vehicle when you can load a dozen 155-mm rounds on a truck and give the driver a dead man switch for him to release when he crashes on the target?
Very few IED attacks or terrorist bombings use clever hacks and brilliant designs. Those don't reliably work, can't be duplicated by untrained workers, and don't scale. Remember, warfare is a number game. You need do perform your attacks cheaply and often.
This is true for clandestine organizations, but also for established governments. Look at the Germans during WWII. The sophisticated MG42 machine gun was the ancestor of today's assault rifles, but it cost a fortune because it was overengineered. Look at the Me262, the mot brilliant piece of engineering ever flown at the time, yet too hard to build and not widespread enough to make a difference. Compare and contrast with the crude but reliable American standard equipment, mass produced in huge quantities.
Cheap production and good logistics beat clever engineering most of the time. Of course, politics is subject to different rules, and it has a greater influence on warfare than all weaponry.
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the best part:
From TFA:
Almaz was finally successfully launched into space as Salyut 3 in June 1974. [...] The Nudelman cannon inherited from the Soyuz VI was retained as an active defence system in the event of an attack by an Apollo spacecraft. The cannon was supplemented with space-to-space missiles.Now that is a juicy bit! They were probably aircraft-type ait-to-air missiles just like on a MiG fighter, not ballistic types.
So, while the Muppets were showing us their "Pigs in Space" segments, the Soviets were busy with their own "MiGs in Space"... (ducks)
It has long been rumored that since the US started the Shuttle program, the Soviet recon sats were equipped with a small self-destruct explosive charge. The idea was that the charge would be a deterrent in case NASA attempted to grab one of the Soviet birds.
But precisely, there have been countless books on early computing, including machines used during WWII on both sides. The Z4 was extensively studied and documented. The auto-pilot of the V1 and V2, the radiobeam guidance system used by German bombers, all these innovations have been studied in great details and documented in many books. And yet, something as major as this -- statistical tabulators in camps-- would never have been documented? Until Black, a disgruntled ex-IBMer fired from his job and with no historian background, comes around and miraculously "finds" about this? It just doesn't pass the smell test.
I wasn't there, so I have to take the word of other people. But none of the historians I read have ever written about tabulating machines in the equipment that was seized in the extermination camps' offices. Black's book dissolved after the threat of a defamation lawsuit.
You're joking. Are you refering to that book by Black about IBM in Germany, which was instantly debunked? Black's book was tripe. Even the most lurid Nazi and leather nostalgia screwball out there could not take it seriously.
Computers. Why not Jew-sniffing attack squirrels, while we are at it?
You know, it's the kind of crap that plays right into the hands of negationnists. If history can be bent to include mainframes in camps, surely it can be bent a bit more to turn the camps into Club Meds, right? (Yes, that was sarcasm).
That's also what I learned. In the early 1800s, the French tapestry manufactures started to purchase the newfangled Jacquard mechanical looms that got their patterns from punched cards. The silk worker corporations didn't like it one bit. Fearing for their employment, they started a Luddite campaign against the devious machines, discreetly throwing wooden shoes (French "sabot") into the delicate mechanism while the foreman wasn't looking. Hence the word.
Of course, as is often the case, the machines actually increased employment in French manufactures by lowering the price of tapestries and increasing productivity . Fear of automation is nothing new.
From TFA:
ATF was against letting these specialists telework because it says the material they need to remove from agency offices in order to telework posed a security risk.
I can see why. I mean, the poor guys need to bring work home, obviously. In case you do'nt know what the ATF does, it turns out that this is the Official Agency that solves the big problem created by alcohol, firearms and tobacco. I went to their web site and it's kinda technical -- it has to do with seizing stuff and closing down places, I'm not sure I understood all the jargon. But obviously, someone has to consume all that seized wood alcohol and those contraband cigarettes, while testing these confiscated firearms.
Which lets us picture the average ATF telecommuter, in a corner of his living room, working from home for the ATF, drinking seized gutrot moonshine, smoking Chinaese-made fake Marlboros, and shooting a deer silhouette adorned with his ex-wife portrait with confiscated AK-74 imitations.
Of course, it's a security risk!
And you wonder why the neighbors don't want more telecommuting Federal employees?
TFA is plain wrong on so many levels that it hurts my brain.
First, the fact that music is increasingly rid of the DRM pest doesn't mean people stop buying. Witness Amazon and Walmart. Their MP3 downloads represent very juicy sales, thank you. I refuse to buy DRM-infected music, only free formats, for practical and philosophical reasons. I am obviously not the only one.
Second, even if the music studios were somehow wiped off the face of the planet, the US economy would survive (shock! gasp!) and the world would barely notice. Oh, sure, quite a few coke dealers and luxury whores would feel the pinch if they were to lose their affluent clientele of music studio execs, but I am confident they'd somehow manage.
Look at the numbers. The music industry gets about $14 billions a year from CD and online sales. Add the derived rights and you get what, $15 to 20 billions? That's less than half a day of the US GNP, which was about 14000 billions last year. So 12 hours of GNP. Big hoopla. Music might have a large cultural influence, but it's hardly an economic engine. That's true for most forms of art, BTW. (Yes, I agree that some of the music out there can be only called "art" with some far-fetched definitions of art).
Conclusions: It remains to be seen that DRM-free music is bad for the studio. The studios could convulse, die horribly and rot, and their disappearance would not even be a hiccup on the economic scale. And I'm sure quite a few artists and consumers will dance in the street.
So die already, we're eagerly waiting.
some banking sites that require activeX
I changed banks recently, I made sure my new bank's web site does not require IE before signing up.
A bank relying on MS for security might as well keep its money in an open suitcase on the sidewalk. On a windy day.
The whole Uwe Boll saga is a sad illustration of the Law of Unintended Effects. The German lawmakers, aware that the high German taxes were hampering the media industry, wanted to give a break to some noisy lobbyist. Cut taxes? Naah, that'd be against the prevalent Big All-Encompassing State mindset.
So instead, lawmakers concocted a bug-ridden, horribly deficient tax shelter law with untested, badly designed rules -- the legal equivalent of Windows ME.
When accountants started to exploit the loopholes, it took said lawmakers years to identify and plug the hole.
Meanwhile, huge amounts of money were spent on crappy movies that will act as a deterrent for anyone trying to make a *good* SF or fantasy flick. "Hey, mister Studio Exec, I want to adapt this great fantasy story. Wanna produce it?" "Oh no, look, this Name of the King flick failed, so clearly, fantasy does not sell. Let's make an eight remake of Freaky Friday instead."
Had these lawmakers had a clue, they'd have done the proper thing and cut taxes. The German investors would have bought beemers and luxury schnaps, providing jobs to the German economy instead of creating temporary employment to foreign film crews who now have these embarassing Boll stains on their resume.
I am afraid your understanding of the situation is pretty accurate, and I am not sure this situation is very sound... :-)
If there is a lawsuit, Ford doesn't stand a chance. Fair use rules support the calendar publishers. Then again, in court, he with the deepest pockets often wins.
This is but the continuation of a sad trend. Now, when a model maker wants to sell a plastic scale model kit of a US military aircraft, the manufacturer (Boeing or MDD) requires royalties because the model uses the image of the aircraft.
Never mind that the US taxpayer has paid for the development and production of the aircraft (and how!). For example, you'd think that for the $80 or so that the average American adult paid for the V-22 development, they'd have the right to get a break on the 1:72 scale model.
The only consolation is that the model makers are generally foreign and that the royalties are levied on the worldwide market.
As far as I understand, it started with people wondering why Clarkson wasn't going ballistic after the poor IT management practices of UK government agencies were recently revealed (again). For some reason, he decided to cut them some slack on this one and to de-dramatize the situation. Maybe he didn't want to look like he was a kneejerk critic of the Labor gummint. After all, these days, everybody is slamming them, and contrarians like him will always try to go against the flow. Turns out it IS really a big deal, after all, and that you can't go wrong bashing an agency run by Labor politicians. :-)
Microsoft is huge, bigger in revenue than IBM, and enormously rich.
Not according to financial data. MSFT have a 54 billion income, vs. 96 billion for IBM.
Microsoft is facing a saturated market. Every desktop PC on the planet that could run an MS app is already doing so. The rest is running non-MS OSes and that percentage is growing. In the server world, Linux is a very strong competitor. Same in the consumer electronics world. Mobile phones? Against Symbian and Linux, Microsoft CE is losing market shares. Set-top boxes? After what MS did to AT&T's IPTV project (delayed because of Windows CE problems), carriers will think twice. Airplane in-flight entertainment systems? Linux again.
MSFT is trying to make inroads on new markets, but it has so far failed to achieve domination in anything but the desktop.
So I wouldn't sell them short, but I wouldn't expect them to skyrocket either.
Were you working with the CRC in the 80s by any chance?
Thank you, but I am not an authority on the subject by any means.
One more thing, we EE routinely talk about radio-frequency radiations when talking about RF, antennas and SAR. It's important to make sure people understand these radiations are just this, radiated energy. The term "radiations" is generally understood by the public as something nasty that is produced by radioactive materials. That's only one form of radiation. Those are said to be ionizing because of their high energy, and that high energy is why they are dangerous: Each gamma-ray photon, for example, carries enough punch to potentially damage a DNA molecule.
On the other hand, radio-frequencies, light, heat (infrared) are also forms of radiations, but are harmless at low levels.
Make sure that people around you understand the difference, it's easy to get scared by "radiations"!
You are absolutely correct, the electromagnetic flux generated by an antenna decreases as the square of the distance. If you are, say, one inch away from an antenna and receive flux F, you will receive only one tenth of that flux if you move 3.16 inches away (because 3.16 squared is ten). Using a corded headset with your cell phone will allow you to move your cell phone antenna far enough that the flux intercepted by your brain decreased a hundredfold or more. So that's a good solution if you want to achieve your ten-fold flux reduction.
What about Bluetooth headsets? Well, there are many models. Class 1 headsets radiate 100 mW of power, while class 2 are limited to 2.5 mW. Even a class 1 headset (100 mW) radiates about an order of magnitude less than cell phones. So having a class 1 Bluetooth headset is still exposing your head to roughly 5-10 times less RF than putting a cell phone onto your ear. Use a class 2 if you want even less exposure.
As for routers, their power is typicaly 100 mW, so unless you put one in your pillow, the flux is negligeable when compared to cell phones.
BTW, old cell phones used to radiates 2-3 watts. Nowadays, digital cell phones rarely radiate more than 600 mW. And that's when you're far away from the tower. If you have a good signal, the cell phone will adjust its power and emit only a fraction of this to save its battery.
One esteemed responder in a previous conversation (http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=379287&cid=21573611) said he believed you shouldn't keep your cell phone on your lap because 'nads don't react well with RF. There is no evidence of this, but I pass it along for what it's worth.
A SAR of 1.4 W/kg is actually in the high range of GSM cell phones (the highest SAR models give about 1.6 W/kg).
FYI, SAR is measured by blasting a liquid-filled fake head with RF and then measuring the electric field within the liquid inside the fake head.
If this experiment can be reproduced, it's a major deal because it would invalidate a lot of assumptions about RF absorption in human tissues. It would also reveal an unknown interaction mode between RF and tissues.
That said, the paper is really terse. I'd really like to see more details. Maybe in further papers?
One theory trying to explain these clouds is the X-ray activity of the sun. The sun is a highly variable star when it comes to X-rays. During its 11-year cycle, the X-ray flux emitted by the sun varies by a factor of 15, with ferocious bursts. We are at a solar minimum, so we see few sun spots and the X-ray activity is also lower on average.
I found an article that is short and readable explaining the link between solar cycles and X-rays: http://solar.physics.montana.edu/nuggets/2000/000407/000407.html. Note that the X-ray activity can vary hugely from the current solar minimum to, say, the 2000-2001 solar max.
The problem is that we don't have that much data on it yet. We need to accumulate several cycles worth of observations before we can answer these questions:
* When does the sun emit X-rays? Is it linked to sun spots?
* What do solar X-rays do to the upper atmosphere?
The X-rays are absorbed by the ionosphere (fortunately for life forms), and this energy transfer is not well known. During each solar minimum, less X-rays arrive in the upper atmosphere, which therefore should cool down. Is it the reason why we see these noctilucent clouds? If so, they should start disappearing in a couple of years, when sun spots return.
This is a very interesting keyhole on a yet unknown mechanism. I hope we'll see updates on the subject.
Yeah, I shouldn't verb my nouns, it weirds the language (as Calvin would say).
One eight of a mile, or 201 m in Système International units.
What the hell is V0 delta t? Gove me the answer before I go ballistic.
I am an EE too, you know... You claim to have a PhD yet you write like a 14-yaer old. You must be very precocious. As for cops and gonad cancer... I think the donuts are the obvious cause. Now, if you stop insulting people and expose your arguments. I am interested.
Thank you for your precisions. I didn't know that the effective RF output of a cell phone tower was so low. However, as explained by Moofie's post, this drives the nail even further in the alarmist stories' coffin, since the RF intensity values I describe are much greater than the real life ones. Even at 600 mW as opposed to 1 W, a cell phone still creates a much higher intensity for the user than the towers and wifi APs. So the conclusions are unchnanged.
I am sick and tired of hearing voodoo science scaremongers. So here we go.
As far as possible interactions with the human body go, the 900 MHz to 1900 MHz spectrum is roughly the same. Both WiFi and cell phones use bursts of transmissions with approximately the same spectral characteristics. So we can simplify the problem and focus only on intensity.
A cell phone that is far from the nearest tower can transmit up to one watt. A typical home router transmits 100 mW (one tenth of a cell phone). A very powerful cell tower transmits 1000 W. However, signal intensity per surface unit decreases as the square of the distance. So if you are 100 meters (300 feet, one-half furlong for our US friends) from a 1-kW cell tower, you get the same exposure as if you are one metter (0.005 furlong, 3 ft) from a wifi router. And of course, all of this is dwarfed by the intensity of signal you get a few centimeters away from a 1-W cell phone.
So test cell phones. If they don't fry your brain, forget about wifi routers and towers, their effect is negligeable next to a cell phone's signal flux. And cell phones were innocented by several studies.
Attention journalists: When you cover technology, either learn the basics of what you're talking about or go back to freelancing for people rags.
Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3.
Yeah right. All you need to do is connect your missile's engine to the PlayStation Missile Guidance Port, right? </sarc>
Puhlease. Asymmetric warfare might be becoming more widespread, but it's not because of videogames. It's because it's cheap when you can rely on a bottomless supply of expandable human detonators, better known as suicide bombers. Who needs a sophisticated warhead delivery vehicle when you can load a dozen 155-mm rounds on a truck and give the driver a dead man switch for him to release when he crashes on the target?
Very few IED attacks or terrorist bombings use clever hacks and brilliant designs. Those don't reliably work, can't be duplicated by untrained workers, and don't scale. Remember, warfare is a number game. You need do perform your attacks cheaply and often.
This is true for clandestine organizations, but also for established governments. Look at the Germans during WWII. The sophisticated MG42 machine gun was the ancestor of today's assault rifles, but it cost a fortune because it was overengineered. Look at the Me262, the mot brilliant piece of engineering ever flown at the time, yet too hard to build and not widespread enough to make a difference. Compare and contrast with the crude but reliable American standard equipment, mass produced in huge quantities.
Cheap production and good logistics beat clever engineering most of the time. Of course, politics is subject to different rules, and it has a greater influence on warfare than all weaponry.