Based on the last 100 crackpots that said the speed of light was wrong... or that it was variable... and that I've never heard of this guy, and no other physicists are talking about this that I can tell... I'm calling bullshit.
Maybe I'll feel dumb tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure physics blogs would be exploring right now if this were even remotely true.
Presumably this happens all the time for light so what we've measured as the speed of light is correct, it's just that the true universal speed limit is higher and only neutrinos travel that fast. So we should find out that speed and use the speed of neutrinos when doing relativistic corrections.
But we are pretty sure neutrinos have mass now... so nope.
Safety History? Random news stories on CNN or Slashdot are now safety studies?
If you want to ban an entire industry, you should have some evidence to back up your claims. I don't see drones as a physical threat at all. There's lots of other reasons why they're threatening. But if I can knock the thing out of the air with a fly swatter I'm not too worried about it. If Amazon were trying to deliver barbells with drones, I'd be concerned. But if they limited it to books under a certain weight? USB cables? Things like that? I dont have a problem with it.
And this is what the FAA should have done. Under a certain mass and speed they should have remained unregulated. Over 5lbs and 10mph (or some other arbitrary numbers) they'd have a legitimate concern.
ok, so if we're pretty sure there's no "intelligent" life capable of nuking us...
How about we just send a reactor there... land it on the ice, and let it do its thing until it melts its way through? Is it possible to have a controlled reaction long enough to get through the ice... the spread the fissile material out in some way and have it seal itself tight for the next 10k years?
Once through, the reactor should provide plenty of power to get a signal through the ice I would think. Also, the radiation from Jupiter would make anything from the reactor trivial. Of greater concern are the heavy metals it would decay to... But I'd hope we could think of a way to seal it. The biggest concern is: We have no idea what it's like down there. What if its under insane amounts of pressure, as we start melting our way through a geiser just blows our probe back into orbit?
I've yet to see downtown parking in any city that wasn't already predatory and a scam. Usually, however, that's perpetrated by the city, not some app.
The city intentionally zones and permits businesses to concentrate tax revenue within a small area. Buildings get taller, roads get narrower... Then the city complains about congestion, charges insane fees for parking, trys to charge to even bring a car downtown. I know! Bycycles will fix it! So they take away the parking lane and turn it into a bike lane... Now the bike racks are full. Better start charging for bike parking to!
These issues are directly caused by the city governments themselves. I've no sympathy at all for them. Stop concentrating population density, let it spread out. I know you get a lot of tax revenue because of it. But how much is it costing?
By the time you add all the manpower, compliance, and lawyering, it's cheaper to just buy it from the photographer/agency with a contract clearly spelled out
My company came to the same conclusion. "Creative Commons" is a legal minefield. Commercial stock photo agencies like Shutterstock and 123rf have clear contracts, much better selection, better search engines, and cost effective bulk licenses. If you have legal counsel involved, Creative Commons is already costing you more than commercial licensing. I prefer to pay artists and photographers rather than lawyers.
We don't even use that. We order CDs full of pictures. I dunno where they come from, I don't care. We own the photos outright and they are good for generalized photos (i.e. some support person with a headset smiling, ready to take your order) They have some sort of system where you can log that you used a picture so its not reused in a way that leads to problems. I don't do it much, I'm usually doing applications and need buttons or icons. Lucky for me the CD's incidentally include them and the rest of the company doesn't use them much.
For more customized images, for example someone enjoying some new service we have, you can't order that online. So the art department had a great idea... they have a contest. The hire a local photographer and have employees volunteer. Whomevers photo gets picked by the art department wins a small bonus (like $1k) and gets slightly famous locally. Most people aren't interested but there are always a few who are. Then art photoshops all the human qualities out of your pic and viola! You're an ad!
They even did a commercial once and used this old field tech we had to show us "hard at work!" etc... He was surprised to later get a SAG card in the mail. We'd tease him when he'd call in... asking him how Bra Pitt was and such. lol
From the sounds of it, you wont be able to afford enough of it to kill you.:-)
I think this is a great thing. If you don't want to quit, nothing can help you. But there are a lot of people that need help during moments of weakness. I got put on a prescription once that was highly addictive, not as bad as street stuff, but still a pain. The doctor wanted me to go off of it, so did I, but it was still there if I needed it. You have to remember how hard it is to give up something like this. You only have to screw up for a split second and you're starting your withdraw all over. It's something that gets progressively worse as time goes on. You feel like you're going to die. All you have to do is reach over and open the bottle to make the pain and psychological suffering stop... But if you do that, you literally start the withdraw process completely over. It's not like it's just a setback. You start from the beginning as if you'd never tried to quit at all. I had to restart 6 times myself, and I've got crazy willpower and self control. I finally just had the doctor cancel the script, I personally talked to pharmacists of the places I could go in my HMO and told them not to help me no matter what. They all agreed, and acted like my request wasn't uncommon at all.
If I could have had a medication that I'd have to stop taking for 3 days before I could go back on my other medication... that would have been wonderful. It turns addiction on its head. Now it's a waiting game to go back on it... you only need a moment of clarity to take the anti-medication and be clean for 3 days. That's a fantastic scenario imo.
Again, the thing only needs to charge the battery to send a pulse to the speaker. Antenna sizes are... screwy... to say the least. There are plenty of ways to increase surface area via the geometry of the antenna. This is a ready to go IC that includes the antenna... that you can order and have to your door in a few days. So maybe it's filled with magic leprechauns, I don't know. I believe the whitepapers I find on Mouser.com more than random anon posts however.
Right, but while all that makes sense, it's impossible to prove they've done it to any one particular person. What we need is a Snowden style whistle blower inside the justice department to provide direct evidence for specific cases in which this was done. Sadly the feds are making damn sure everyone in the world knows what will happen to the next person that trys that will not be good.
Perhaps we should start crowd funding that will pay out a reward for evidence leading to a conviction? Spending the rest of your life in Moscow might not be so bad if you're a millionaire.
As somebody familiar with RF engineering, I'd say this is obviously a scam. And it's not a miniaturization issue. It's a power density issue. Yes, I could build something that would gather energy like they're saying. And with the power draw of a BT device, I bet every 10 days or so, I'd have harvested enough energy to run it for an hour.
Fact is, the RF energy needed to be harvested to do even small amounts of work would cook you if you got in the way. The amounts that are just free floating around you from cell phones for example is around -60dBm. Or -90dB. 1dB is 1 watt, -10dB is.1 watt, -20dB is.001 watt, so the typical cell phone signal is.000000001 watt by the time you receive it. And if anybody is going to try to tell me that you're going to power anything off of that sort of energy....yeah, but no. Just no.
Keep in mind, the user is walking around broadcasting RF via wifi and cellular while they are looking for the tag. All the tag has to do is pick up enough stray power to make the bluetooth handshake and start beeping. It's basically dormant 24/7 waiting for the "I lost you" signal to start beeping. It would need the most power when you were first setting it up and syncing it with your phone. Notice they tell you to put the tag right next to your phone when doing that? Now that I think about it, why does it even need bluetooth to start beeping? Perhaps bluetooth is only used to set it up. Once the phone has the tags serial number it may just broadcast an analog radio signal or something. Making it far less energy intensive to trigger.
It's plausible... what's more suspicious is their lack of response to questions. I don't know if it's a scam or not, but this isn't technically impossible. There are ready made, VERY low power ICs out there now thanks to cellphones. They use less and less power all the time.
Ok, So I actually looked up the components you'd need to do this. Here's the first low power Bluetooth chip I came across... the FIRST: https://www.csrsupport.com/dow... It needs 16mA while transmitting. 1mA while idle 900nA while in sleep mode The size is well with their specs.
It's about 1/2" square, so it's a little big. But it's already designed to power sensors.
The first chip already has a capacitor in it. This even has use cases in the whitepaper describing something very close to what this kickstarter wants to do! So the reciever charges the capacitor. When the capacitor gets enough charge to transmit, the Bluetooth chip does exactly that. So it's not a continuous connection. Based on the amount of RF in the area, it will transmit more or less often. It appears, based on my back of an envelope math, it would have enough RF energy to operate continuously at at least 5meters from your typical Wifi AP or router. The further away you got, the fewer pings you'd get. But given our almost ubiquitous wifi coverage now, I'm pretty sure it would work.
Since your most likely device for connecting to it would be your cellphone, it's a pretty simple use case to say it would work like this: You put the tag on your keys or cat You install their "Find my tag" app When you can't find the keys or cat, you open the app The app TURNS ON the wifi in your phone, to power the tag. You walk around looking, when you get near the tag, the wifi FROM YOUR PHONE will charge it. All the tag does at that point is start beeping. That's it. You follow the sound. The "I've lost you" signal is likely incredibly tiny.
This is all assuming they are even using the real Bluetooth standard. Who knows. I do not know if this is a scam or not. It very well maybe. But the premise is entirely plausible if you just think about what they're really trying to do.
Thing is, it is being called a scam by people who are familiar with miniaturization and physics.
A classic element of pseudoscience and scams like this is to take something that has some small connection with physics but the numbers are so far off the engineering actually is impossible. This particular one is actually a pretty old 'free energy' thing, with people claiming you can collect usable amounts of energy from ambient signals. But the numbers, even though yes they are non-zero, are so tiny as to be useless.
Useless? It's bluetooth. It hardly uses any power to begin with. I'm not saying this isn't a scam... I'm saying they don't provide enough details to refute it, and the people trying to refute it have even less evidence other than "Well, I couldn't design this so it's not possible"
I know one thing though, give me $500k and I betcha I could figure it out. I might go with mechanical power generation though. Especially if this is going on a keyring or pet collar.
Because the NSA is collecting the same kind of data, providing it to law enforcement, that then use the data to form a target and reverse engineer probable cause. The thing is, even though that sort of thing is clearly unconstitutional, they've crafted their methods in such a way that it would rarely, if ever, come up in a court room. So there is no court finding that state specifically that it's unconstitutional. Law enforcement has been pretending they're dumb in this regard and going along the lines "Well, no judge has told us we can't do this... so it must be ok" while at the same time doing everything in their power to prevent a judge from having to rule on it.
Well, this states that it's clearly unconstitutional. But the government is taking any wiggle room they can find and just ignoring the law, court orders and the constitution, so I doubt this will change anything. The courts weren't really designed to deal with Law Enforcement trying to do an end-run around them. It's very difficult for the EFF and other like them to get a ruling on this behavior if the state never uses it in a case against someone.
I've got a new term I'd like to coin, to explain why I wouldn't use this service. It's called "Abgoogled" A combination of the words Abandoned and Google.
Google has a tendency to offer services for a while, get distracted and then wander off, leaving its customers in a lurch. This has happened with dozens of google products.
As such, I'll not be using Googles domain registry service because I fear that in a few years I'll get Abgoogled, and have to find a new registrar on short notice.
Abgoogled - Abandon by Google when they stop providing a service you've grown dependent on.
Just because harvesting of RF energy is a legitimate field does not mean that this product is genuine.
Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon.
ok, WHY is it disingenuous? What about their claims don't make sense then? They plan to make a product that is clearly possible, so why is it a scam?
I read through a lot of that supposed "proof" and all I can find is some general wishy washy "Well, it wouldn't get enough power from the air" That's not nearly as definitive as the summary makes it out to be.
Or maybe he thinks that when people post no proof of their claims, all data they have provided have been refuted by pretty much all sources, and the people post nothing to contradict those sources it probably is a scam.
Or not. I'm sorry, I don't trust kick starter campaigns. I don't donate to them, nor would I ever. But, to say what they're claiming to be able to do is impossible? That's clearly wrong. I could build an EM harvester in my livingroom in an afternoon. This isn't even that complicated technology. Can they fit in something the size of a dog tag? I dunno, I'm not a miniaturization expert. Attach that to a small battery, the bluetooth locater thing are in IC's everywhere. The only question in my mind is the size thing, so to claim this is an obvious scam is patently false.
Anwar al-Awlaki posted videos urging all Muslims to commit violence against American civilians. Regardless of his specific role within al Qaeda, he certainly declared himself an "enemy combatant".
As compared to our political leaders who actually are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Arab world?
I'm not trying to justify violence. Far from it... but casting stones (or missiles) is stupid. There shouldn't be anything that you can "SAY" that gets you an immediate death penalty.
62% of the more than 18,000 U.S. consumers it polled said social media had no influence on their buying decisions.
Are the customers able to recognize whether they got influenced? I thought that current advertising methods are predominantly trying to influence subconsciousness rather then consciousness decisions.
Exactly. The typical ad campaign gets people to say "Dove Soap!" as many times as possible online. So then you're standing in the supermarket, trying to pick soap and "Dove" seems familiar to you... so you buy it. You likely don't even remember the reason you heard it before is some crazy dude made a wax sculpture of a a polar bear out of dove soap bars and it was a meme that got liked 100x in your feed a few weeks ago.
"Micros Systems customers all switching to alternative providers"
When Oracle bought the company that produces the software packages I support management was of the opinion "Well... how bad can it really be?" Now their attitude is "For the love of God find a way to get us out of this contract!"
Right, quite a few years ago my state wasn't "Right to work" and I was forced into several unions. They take the dues right out of your check, you have no choice at all. After my state went right to work, you could ask to be removed from the union. This had little effect on you personally, but for the first few years there was a lot of derogatory comments thrown at me. I didn't mind, I was getting paid more and the Union never did a damned thing for me.
Those locations are very limited. Basically only in major cities. Netflix will not allow you to use that peering location for customers that aren't in the immediate area. For example, they have a peering location in Chicago, but if you have customers in southern IL they aren't going to let those customers connect through that peer. I suspect it's related to the licensing agreements they have with Hollywood, I'm not sure though. So for customers outside their geographical limits you're back to peering with 3rd parties.
So a better question for you: If you're in the industry, why do our ISPs hate customers and not want them to watch Neflix? That seems to be the hot topic. Why is it ONLY Netflix? Why not Hulu? Youtube? Why is it that this stuff only flares up when Netflix is involved? Is it that the entire telecommunications industry is just hating on one company? Or could it possibly be that the only thing common throughout these disputes, Netflix, might be the problem?
Outright traffic shaping part of the debate, but not the entire debate. Some of the higher-profile NN disputes have been over peering agreements, e.g. Comcast's refusal to increase its peering with Level 3, who is Netflix's provider, because of Comcast's claims that the benefit of the peering agreement is asymmetric.
The problem is Netflix refuses to sign reciprocal peering agreements. Neflix signs up with Level3 and makes no guarantees that they wont switch overnight. And in fact, that's exactly what they do. The providers understand this, give Netflix discounts and then charge the ISPs an fortune. The price Netflix pays to Level3 for a 10gig trunk is heavily discounted because Level3 knows how high profile that traffic is. When Comcast comes to them for the same sized trunk so they can get that data uncongested, Level3 jacks the price way up. With other content providers like Google or whomever... the ISP would go to Google and say "The rates with level3 are too high, can we move to a provider with better rates?" and Google would work with you. Netflix refuses. They go with the cheapest, irrelevant of the impact on their users and then they make a stink in the media to make it appear like it's all the ISPs fault when they are equally to blame.
So what's started to happen is providers like Level3 have turned the screws a bit too tight on the ISPs. The ISPs are balking now and just refusing to sign. So now the customers are hurting. It's basically a game to see who will blink first. Netflix or the ISPs. The best solution for this problem is either regulation on providers like netflix that forces them to play nice, or regulation that would force providers to charge the same price for the same trunk weather it's coming or going.
I work in the industry and hear the people that negotiate these peering agreements constantly complain about Netflix. The impression I get is that they feel Netflix is outright hostile to ISPs. It's almost as if they're intentionally trying to hurt them.
It depends on the model. In "The standard model" there is one Higgs boson. There are other models where there are more. This is a strong confirmation of the Standard model which is where the real story is. A lot of models for the universe just died. When the LHC restarts we should get some really interesting data.
Slashdot Mirror
Based on the last 100 crackpots that said the speed of light was wrong... or that it was variable...
and that I've never heard of this guy, and no other physicists are talking about this that I can tell...
I'm calling bullshit.
Maybe I'll feel dumb tomorrow, but I'm pretty sure physics blogs would be exploring right now if this were even remotely true.
also, this is just a blog post...
Presumably this happens all the time for light so what we've measured as the speed of light is correct, it's just that the true universal speed limit is higher and only neutrinos travel that fast. So we should find out that speed and use the speed of neutrinos when doing relativistic corrections.
But we are pretty sure neutrinos have mass now... so nope.
Safety History? Random news stories on CNN or Slashdot are now safety studies?
If you want to ban an entire industry, you should have some evidence to back up your claims. I don't see drones as a physical threat at all. There's lots of other reasons why they're threatening. But if I can knock the thing out of the air with a fly swatter I'm not too worried about it. If Amazon were trying to deliver barbells with drones, I'd be concerned. But if they limited it to books under a certain weight? USB cables? Things like that? I dont have a problem with it.
And this is what the FAA should have done. Under a certain mass and speed they should have remained unregulated. Over 5lbs and 10mph (or some other arbitrary numbers) they'd have a legitimate concern.
ok, so if we're pretty sure there's no "intelligent" life capable of nuking us...
How about we just send a reactor there... land it on the ice, and let it do its thing until it melts its way through? Is it possible to have a controlled reaction long enough to get through the ice... the spread the fissile material out in some way and have it seal itself tight for the next 10k years?
Once through, the reactor should provide plenty of power to get a signal through the ice I would think. Also, the radiation from Jupiter would make anything from the reactor trivial. Of greater concern are the heavy metals it would decay to... But I'd hope we could think of a way to seal it. The biggest concern is: We have no idea what it's like down there. What if its under insane amounts of pressure, as we start melting our way through a geiser just blows our probe back into orbit?
I've yet to see downtown parking in any city that wasn't already predatory and a scam. Usually, however, that's perpetrated by the city, not some app.
The city intentionally zones and permits businesses to concentrate tax revenue within a small area.
Buildings get taller, roads get narrower...
Then the city complains about congestion, charges insane fees for parking, trys to charge to even bring a car downtown.
I know! Bycycles will fix it! So they take away the parking lane and turn it into a bike lane... Now the bike racks are full. Better start charging for bike parking to!
These issues are directly caused by the city governments themselves. I've no sympathy at all for them. Stop concentrating population density, let it spread out. I know you get a lot of tax revenue because of it. But how much is it costing?
By the time you add all the manpower, compliance, and lawyering, it's cheaper to just buy it from the photographer/agency with a contract clearly spelled out
My company came to the same conclusion. "Creative Commons" is a legal minefield. Commercial stock photo agencies like Shutterstock and 123rf have clear contracts, much better selection, better search engines, and cost effective bulk licenses. If you have legal counsel involved, Creative Commons is already costing you more than commercial licensing. I prefer to pay artists and photographers rather than lawyers.
We don't even use that. We order CDs full of pictures. I dunno where they come from, I don't care. We own the photos outright and they are good for generalized photos (i.e. some support person with a headset smiling, ready to take your order) They have some sort of system where you can log that you used a picture so its not reused in a way that leads to problems. I don't do it much, I'm usually doing applications and need buttons or icons. Lucky for me the CD's incidentally include them and the rest of the company doesn't use them much.
For more customized images, for example someone enjoying some new service we have, you can't order that online. So the art department had a great idea... they have a contest. The hire a local photographer and have employees volunteer. Whomevers photo gets picked by the art department wins a small bonus (like $1k) and gets slightly famous locally. Most people aren't interested but there are always a few who are. Then art photoshops all the human qualities out of your pic and viola! You're an ad!
They even did a commercial once and used this old field tech we had to show us "hard at work!" etc... He was surprised to later get a SAG card in the mail. We'd tease him when he'd call in... asking him how Bra Pitt was and such. lol
Lets just call them synonyms.
So you'll take more of it. Then you may die.
From the sounds of it, you wont be able to afford enough of it to kill you. :-)
I think this is a great thing. If you don't want to quit, nothing can help you.
But there are a lot of people that need help during moments of weakness.
I got put on a prescription once that was highly addictive, not as bad as street stuff, but still a pain.
The doctor wanted me to go off of it, so did I, but it was still there if I needed it.
You have to remember how hard it is to give up something like this. You only have to screw up for a split second and you're starting your withdraw all over. It's something that gets progressively worse as time goes on. You feel like you're going to die. All you have to do is reach over and open the bottle to make the pain and psychological suffering stop...
But if you do that, you literally start the withdraw process completely over. It's not like it's just a setback. You start from the beginning as if you'd never tried to quit at all. I had to restart 6 times myself, and I've got crazy willpower and self control. I finally just had the doctor cancel the script, I personally talked to pharmacists of the places I could go in my HMO and told them not to help me no matter what. They all agreed, and acted like my request wasn't uncommon at all.
If I could have had a medication that I'd have to stop taking for 3 days before I could go back on my other medication... that would have been wonderful. It turns addiction on its head. Now it's a waiting game to go back on it... you only need a moment of clarity to take the anti-medication and be clean for 3 days. That's a fantastic scenario imo.
Again, the thing only needs to charge the battery to send a pulse to the speaker. Antenna sizes are... screwy... to say the least. There are plenty of ways to increase surface area via the geometry of the antenna. This is a ready to go IC that includes the antenna... that you can order and have to your door in a few days. So maybe it's filled with magic leprechauns, I don't know. I believe the whitepapers I find on Mouser.com more than random anon posts however.
Right, but while all that makes sense, it's impossible to prove they've done it to any one particular person. What we need is a Snowden style whistle blower inside the justice department to provide direct evidence for specific cases in which this was done. Sadly the feds are making damn sure everyone in the world knows what will happen to the next person that trys that will not be good.
Perhaps we should start crowd funding that will pay out a reward for evidence leading to a conviction? Spending the rest of your life in Moscow might not be so bad if you're a millionaire.
As somebody familiar with RF engineering, I'd say this is obviously a scam. And it's not a miniaturization issue. It's a power density issue. Yes, I could build something that would gather energy like they're saying. And with the power draw of a BT device, I bet every 10 days or so, I'd have harvested enough energy to run it for an hour.
Fact is, the RF energy needed to be harvested to do even small amounts of work would cook you if you got in the way. The amounts that are just free floating around you from cell phones for example is around -60dBm. Or -90dB. 1dB is 1 watt, -10dB is .1 watt, -20dB is .001 watt, so the typical cell phone signal is .000000001 watt by the time you receive it. And if anybody is going to try to tell me that you're going to power anything off of that sort of energy....yeah, but no. Just no.
Keep in mind, the user is walking around broadcasting RF via wifi and cellular while they are looking for the tag. All the tag has to do is pick up enough stray power to make the bluetooth handshake and start beeping. It's basically dormant 24/7 waiting for the "I lost you" signal to start beeping.
It would need the most power when you were first setting it up and syncing it with your phone. Notice they tell you to put the tag right next to your phone when doing that?
Now that I think about it, why does it even need bluetooth to start beeping? Perhaps bluetooth is only used to set it up. Once the phone has the tags serial number it may just broadcast an analog radio signal or something. Making it far less energy intensive to trigger.
It's plausible... what's more suspicious is their lack of response to questions. I don't know if it's a scam or not, but this isn't technically impossible. There are ready made, VERY low power ICs out there now thanks to cellphones. They use less and less power all the time.
Ok,
So I actually looked up the components you'd need to do this.
Here's the first low power Bluetooth chip I came across... the FIRST:
https://www.csrsupport.com/dow...
It needs 16mA while transmitting.
1mA while idle
900nA while in sleep mode
The size is well with their specs.
The we have the harvester:
Again, the first IC I could find:
http://www.powercastco.com/PDF...
It's about 1/2" square, so it's a little big.
But it's already designed to power sensors.
The first chip already has a capacitor in it.
This even has use cases in the whitepaper describing something very close to what this kickstarter wants to do!
So the reciever charges the capacitor. When the capacitor gets enough charge to transmit, the Bluetooth chip does exactly that. So it's not a continuous connection. Based on the amount of RF in the area, it will transmit more or less often.
It appears, based on my back of an envelope math, it would have enough RF energy to operate continuously at at least 5meters from your typical Wifi AP or router. The further away you got, the fewer pings you'd get. But given our almost ubiquitous wifi coverage now, I'm pretty sure it would work.
Since your most likely device for connecting to it would be your cellphone, it's a pretty simple use case to say it would work like this:
You put the tag on your keys or cat
You install their "Find my tag" app
When you can't find the keys or cat, you open the app
The app TURNS ON the wifi in your phone, to power the tag.
You walk around looking, when you get near the tag, the wifi FROM YOUR PHONE will charge it.
All the tag does at that point is start beeping. That's it. You follow the sound.
The "I've lost you" signal is likely incredibly tiny.
This is all assuming they are even using the real Bluetooth standard. Who knows.
I do not know if this is a scam or not. It very well maybe. But the premise is entirely plausible if you just think about what they're really trying to do.
Thing is, it is being called a scam by people who are familiar with miniaturization and physics.
A classic element of pseudoscience and scams like this is to take something that has some small connection with physics but the numbers are so far off the engineering actually is impossible. This particular one is actually a pretty old 'free energy' thing, with people claiming you can collect usable amounts of energy from ambient signals. But the numbers, even though yes they are non-zero, are so tiny as to be useless.
Useless? It's bluetooth. It hardly uses any power to begin with.
I'm not saying this isn't a scam... I'm saying they don't provide enough details to refute it, and the people trying to refute it have even less evidence other than "Well, I couldn't design this so it's not possible"
I know one thing though, give me $500k and I betcha I could figure it out. I might go with mechanical power generation though. Especially if this is going on a keyring or pet collar.
To not see the glaring red flags of scamminess is patently blind.
What? Where? You're saying its a scam, what's your argument? I don't see a damned thing that sounds credible to me.
Because the NSA is collecting the same kind of data, providing it to law enforcement, that then use the data to form a target and reverse engineer probable cause. The thing is, even though that sort of thing is clearly unconstitutional, they've crafted their methods in such a way that it would rarely, if ever, come up in a court room. So there is no court finding that state specifically that it's unconstitutional. Law enforcement has been pretending they're dumb in this regard and going along the lines "Well, no judge has told us we can't do this... so it must be ok" while at the same time doing everything in their power to prevent a judge from having to rule on it.
Well, this states that it's clearly unconstitutional. But the government is taking any wiggle room they can find and just ignoring the law, court orders and the constitution, so I doubt this will change anything. The courts weren't really designed to deal with Law Enforcement trying to do an end-run around them. It's very difficult for the EFF and other like them to get a ruling on this behavior if the state never uses it in a case against someone.
I've got a new term I'd like to coin, to explain why I wouldn't use this service.
It's called "Abgoogled"
A combination of the words Abandoned and Google.
Google has a tendency to offer services for a while, get distracted and then wander off, leaving its customers in a lurch. This has happened with dozens of google products.
As such, I'll not be using Googles domain registry service because I fear that in a few years I'll get Abgoogled, and have to find a new registrar on short notice.
Abgoogled - Abandon by Google when they stop providing a service you've grown dependent on.
http://abc.cs.washington.edu/
Just because harvesting of RF energy is a legitimate field does not mean that this product is genuine.
Or to give you a car analogy, just because internal combustion engines are used to drive cars does not mean that you can run a 4 litre V8 engine at full power and get 100 miles to the gallon.
ok, WHY is it disingenuous? What about their claims don't make sense then? They plan to make a product that is clearly possible, so why is it a scam?
I read through a lot of that supposed "proof" and all I can find is some general wishy washy "Well, it wouldn't get enough power from the air" That's not nearly as definitive as the summary makes it out to be.
Or maybe he thinks that when people post no proof of their claims, all data they have provided have been refuted by pretty much all sources, and the people post nothing to contradict those sources it probably is a scam.
Or not. I'm sorry, I don't trust kick starter campaigns. I don't donate to them, nor would I ever. But, to say what they're claiming to be able to do is impossible? That's clearly wrong. I could build an EM harvester in my livingroom in an afternoon. This isn't even that complicated technology. Can they fit in something the size of a dog tag? I dunno, I'm not a miniaturization expert. Attach that to a small battery, the bluetooth locater thing are in IC's everywhere. The only question in my mind is the size thing, so to claim this is an obvious scam is patently false.
Anwar al-Awlaki posted videos urging all Muslims to commit violence against American civilians. Regardless of his specific role within al Qaeda, he certainly declared himself an "enemy combatant".
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/sep/30/anwar-al-awlaki-video-blogs
As compared to our political leaders who actually are directly responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of civilians in the Arab world?
I'm not trying to justify violence. Far from it... but casting stones (or missiles) is stupid. There shouldn't be anything that you can "SAY" that gets you an immediate death penalty.
Are the customers able to recognize whether they got influenced? I thought that current advertising methods are predominantly trying to influence subconsciousness rather then consciousness decisions.
Exactly. The typical ad campaign gets people to say "Dove Soap!" as many times as possible online. So then you're standing in the supermarket, trying to pick soap and "Dove" seems familiar to you... so you buy it. You likely don't even remember the reason you heard it before is some crazy dude made a wax sculpture of a a polar bear out of dove soap bars and it was a meme that got liked 100x in your feed a few weeks ago.
"Micros Systems customers all switching to alternative providers"
When Oracle bought the company that produces the software packages I support management was of the opinion "Well... how bad can it really be?"
Now their attitude is "For the love of God find a way to get us out of this contract!"
Right, quite a few years ago my state wasn't "Right to work" and I was forced into several unions. They take the dues right out of your check, you have no choice at all. After my state went right to work, you could ask to be removed from the union. This had little effect on you personally, but for the first few years there was a lot of derogatory comments thrown at me. I didn't mind, I was getting paid more and the Union never did a damned thing for me.
Those locations are very limited. Basically only in major cities. Netflix will not allow you to use that peering location for customers that aren't in the immediate area. For example, they have a peering location in Chicago, but if you have customers in southern IL they aren't going to let those customers connect through that peer. I suspect it's related to the licensing agreements they have with Hollywood, I'm not sure though. So for customers outside their geographical limits you're back to peering with 3rd parties.
So a better question for you: If you're in the industry, why do our ISPs hate customers and not want them to watch Neflix? That seems to be the hot topic. Why is it ONLY Netflix? Why not Hulu? Youtube? Why is it that this stuff only flares up when Netflix is involved? Is it that the entire telecommunications industry is just hating on one company? Or could it possibly be that the only thing common throughout these disputes, Netflix, might be the problem?
Outright traffic shaping part of the debate, but not the entire debate. Some of the higher-profile NN disputes have been over peering agreements, e.g. Comcast's refusal to increase its peering with Level 3, who is Netflix's provider, because of Comcast's claims that the benefit of the peering agreement is asymmetric.
The problem is Netflix refuses to sign reciprocal peering agreements. Neflix signs up with Level3 and makes no guarantees that they wont switch overnight. And in fact, that's exactly what they do. The providers understand this, give Netflix discounts and then charge the ISPs an fortune. The price Netflix pays to Level3 for a 10gig trunk is heavily discounted because Level3 knows how high profile that traffic is. When Comcast comes to them for the same sized trunk so they can get that data uncongested, Level3 jacks the price way up. With other content providers like Google or whomever... the ISP would go to Google and say "The rates with level3 are too high, can we move to a provider with better rates?" and Google would work with you. Netflix refuses. They go with the cheapest, irrelevant of the impact on their users and then they make a stink in the media to make it appear like it's all the ISPs fault when they are equally to blame.
So what's started to happen is providers like Level3 have turned the screws a bit too tight on the ISPs. The ISPs are balking now and just refusing to sign. So now the customers are hurting. It's basically a game to see who will blink first. Netflix or the ISPs. The best solution for this problem is either regulation on providers like netflix that forces them to play nice, or regulation that would force providers to charge the same price for the same trunk weather it's coming or going.
I work in the industry and hear the people that negotiate these peering agreements constantly complain about Netflix. The impression I get is that they feel Netflix is outright hostile to ISPs. It's almost as if they're intentionally trying to hurt them.
It depends on the model. In "The standard model" there is one Higgs boson. There are other models where there are more. This is a strong confirmation of the Standard model which is where the real story is. A lot of models for the universe just died. When the LHC restarts we should get some really interesting data.