Because the electromagnetic spectrum is already polluted by unintentional radiators, due to lax regulation by the FCC. These devices don't go away until they break or are replaced, which may be decades.
The electromagnetic spectrum is a finite resource. There are ways of using it more efficiently. There is no magic wand that will create more spectrum. That means that somebody, such as the FCC, has to allocate it to the competing uses and demands.
Some of the hype behind UWB is the modern equivalent of perpetual motion, a promise to provide something for nothing.
That is what happens when law enforcement agencies are underfunded, undertrained, or just don't give a shit. If the state is not going to fulfill its criminal justice function, the people have no other choice but to do it themselves. Doing nothing is not an acceptable option.
I don't expect perfection from the police. I do expect them to make an effort. If you don't want mob justice, you better provide an alternative.
Having a snazzy acronym does not repeal the laws of physics and communications engineering. There is no such thing as free bandwidth. Increase the data rate, the range decreases. Increase the power, the range increases and the noise floor goes up, degrading every other user's SNR.
UWB is the modern equivalent of the spark-gap transmitter, which was banned many years ago. It is like dumping your old motor oil in the city water reservoir. If a few people do it, nobody notices. If everyone does it, the reservoir becomes a toxic waste dump.
64-bits should be good enough for a while. The issue isn't the size of integers, it is address space. 32-bits is way too small. There are some neat ideas, such as single-level storage, global/network address spaces, that will eat up vast amounts of virtual address space.
I think it is very unlikely that the 8086 was designed in three weeks. I used to have a book on the 8086, written by the chip's architects.For what the chip was designed to do, they did a good job. Intel thought that most of the software for the chip would be written in PL/M or Pascal. The segmented architecture was a good match to those languages. The floating point hardware (8087) was a major advance, being the predecessor of IEEE floating point. 8080 programs could be mechanically translated into 8086 programs. The 8086 supported all of the peripheral chips that had been designed for the 8080.
Can you honestly sit there and tell me that the all the gun owners in this country somehow make up a militia, well regulated or no?
It's in the U.S. Code (10 USC 311) that all able-bodied males between the age of 17 and 44 are part of the unorganized militia. See this page for the applicable sections of the U.S. Code.
I think Bork was right about original intent. The first amendment has never been an absolute right to engage in any kind of speech. There have been laws against obscene material since the beginning of the republic. The definition of obscenity has changed over the years, most notably with the Warren court. You can argue whether this is good or bad, but I think you will have a hard time finding any evidence that the founders intended to protect obscene speech.
Encryption can be used to solve the problem of old documents and email on backup tapes. The idea is to store everything in encrypted form. The electronic documents are destroyed by destroying the associated key. You would need a fairly sophisticated system to automatically generate and manage the keys. Plus, you have to make sure that the keys don't end up on the regular backup tapes. There isn't anything illegal about doing this. You still need a document retention policy/schedule and you better not nuke all of your keys if you see the feds talking to the receptionist.
Closed design/architecture doesn't mean a damn thing. I can make all of the Ford replacement parts that I like, without Ford's permission, as long as I don't violate any Ford patents, copyrights or trademarks. The same applies to Sony, although I'm sure they patented everything they could on the PS1/2.
If I was willing to wait for the patents to expire, the only thing stopping me from manufacturing PlayStation clones would be the copyright on the firmware. Calling something "closed" does not create intellectual property rights.
They also have I/O channel controllers, which are like simple processors dedicated to I/O related tasks that can run user-specified programs. This takes some of the load off the main processor. The main processor doesn't have to do the bit fiddling needed in PC device drivers.
Why not just buy a big cylinder of hydrogen from an industrial gas supplier? I'm assuming that this device can run off bottled hydrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere.
Americans have come a long way since the times of wanting Carradine over Bruce Lee
You are comparing apples and oranges.
Bruce Lee was in some great martial-arts films, but the films were just vehicles for showing Lee's amazing fight scenes. Plot? Character development? No budget for that.
The Kung Fu TV series didn't have any great fight scenes. It did have real actors, plots with some depth, and good production values. So what if Carradine was not a martial-arts expert, that wasn't the point of the series, despite the title.
What made "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" so successful, is that it was not the stereotypical chop-socky film. Most martial-arts films remind me of Western opera. The plot is secondary to the music and singing.
Many professional associations offer mail forwarding services to their members. This lets you give out an email address (jre@ieee.org) that is independent of whatever ISP (769438@conglomo.net) you happen to be using.
SABRE is a real-time database system with insane storage, speed and reliability requirements. It runs on the biggest, baddest mainframes money can buy, with an enormous disk storage farm. It doesn't run on a normal mainframe operating system like MVS.
What is the true cost of bandwidth? Not the price, but the actual cost. It used to be very expensive to provision a T1 over copper. It took a lot of manpower and equipment. Bridge taps and loading coils had to be removed, repeaters had to be installed, and it required two high-quality copper pairs. Modern technology (HDSL2) can do the same job, on a single pair, without line conditioning, and without repeaters for many spans. The cost of providing a T1 circuit is much lower. At the termination point, the data can be muxed on high-capacity fiber for transport to the Network Service Provider. I don't know what the costs are for transporting data over fiber, but I think it is safe to assume that improvements in technology have also reduced those costs.
To me, "real broadband" has the following characteristics:
symmetric bandwidth
static IP numbers
no restrictions on servers, services, VPNs
In other words, IP dialtone. Transport the bits from point A to point B. Everything that I have seen that is marketed to the "consumer" is crippled in one or more ways. The only way that I can get IP dialtone is to buy a T1, for more than I pay in rent for my home.
Availability and reliability are also needed for a broadband service that can be part of the national infrastructure. If I order telephone service, the telephone company does not say "too bad, you are too far away from the central office, and besides, we don't market telephone service in your (scummy) neighborhood." If my telephone service goes out, which is a rare event, it gets fixed in a day or two.
Maybe it's a matter of personal taste, but I find that flat panel displays are much easier on my eyes than CRTs. CRTs tend to give me headaches and eyestrain.
The difference in size and weight for an equivalent display size is important to me. Large CRTs are just too big and heavy.
I bought a cheap (less than $400) Samsung 15" LCD (model 570V) and I am very happy with it.
This scheme appears to add a lot of hardware and complexity to any consumer electronics equipment that supports it. What is the benefit for the end user? Nothing that I can see. In fact, the end user is saddled with new and annoying restrictions on how content can be viewed. When will these idiots realize that their content is not that valuable? We aren't talking about a video conference of the National Security Council.
All of the definitions that I've read of inalienable state that an inalienable right can't be waived, sold or given away, even if the person wishes to do so. I can't sell myself into slavery.
Even if you think some unknown number of destroyed compact flash cards is an acceptable price for killing bacterial spores, that will rarely be present, what about other things that can be damaged or destroyed? What about blood, stool and tissue samples that are mailed to medical labs for testing? How many people will die because the sample was degraded or destroyed, and the test result was incorrect? What about prescription medicines that are damaged by the radiation? Sure, the packages can be labelled. We all know how delivery services take careful note of labels on packages.
Where the hell did you get your figures man? So-Called "breeder" reactors are called that because they generate plutonium, a substance that has a half-life of 35,000 years and 1 gram has the lethality potential to kill nearly a million people.
And where do you get your figures?
Pu239 has a half-life of approximately 24,000 years, and contrary to the ravings of some environmentalists, it is not "the most toxic substance known to mankind." There are many organic compounds that are far more poisonous.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the electromagnetic spectrum is already polluted by unintentional radiators, due to lax regulation by the FCC. These devices don't go away until they break or are replaced, which may be decades.
The electromagnetic spectrum is a finite resource. There are ways of using it more efficiently. There is no magic wand that will create more spectrum. That means that somebody, such as the FCC, has to allocate it to the competing uses and demands.
Some of the hype behind UWB is the modern equivalent of perpetual motion, a promise to provide something for nothing.
That is what happens when law enforcement agencies are underfunded, undertrained, or just don't give a shit. If the state is not going to fulfill its criminal justice function, the people have no other choice but to do it themselves. Doing nothing is not an acceptable option. I don't expect perfection from the police. I do expect them to make an effort. If you don't want mob justice, you better provide an alternative.
UWB is the modern equivalent of the spark-gap transmitter, which was banned many years ago. It is like dumping your old motor oil in the city water reservoir. If a few people do it, nobody notices. If everyone does it, the reservoir becomes a toxic waste dump.
64-bits should be good enough for a while. The issue isn't the size of integers, it is address space. 32-bits is way too small. There are some neat ideas, such as single-level storage, global/network address spaces, that will eat up vast amounts of virtual address space.
I think it is very unlikely that the 8086 was designed in three weeks. I used to have a book on the 8086, written by the chip's architects.For what the chip was designed to do, they did a good job. Intel thought that most of the software for the chip would be written in PL/M or Pascal. The segmented architecture was a good match to those languages. The floating point hardware (8087) was a major advance, being the predecessor of IEEE floating point. 8080 programs could be mechanically translated into 8086 programs. The 8086 supported all of the peripheral chips that had been designed for the 8080.
It's in the U.S. Code (10 USC 311) that all able-bodied males between the age of 17 and 44 are part of the unorganized militia. See this page for the applicable sections of the U.S. Code.
I think Bork was right about original intent. The first amendment has never been an absolute right to engage in any kind of speech. There have been laws against obscene material since the beginning of the republic. The definition of obscenity has changed over the years, most notably with the Warren court. You can argue whether this is good or bad, but I think you will have a hard time finding any evidence that the founders intended to protect obscene speech.
The courts have always had the power to ignore, modify or selectively enforce contracts that were held not to be in the public interest
Encryption can be used to solve the problem of old documents and email on backup tapes. The idea is to store everything in encrypted form. The electronic documents are destroyed by destroying the associated key. You would need a fairly sophisticated system to automatically generate and manage the keys. Plus, you have to make sure that the keys don't end up on the regular backup tapes. There isn't anything illegal about doing this. You still need a document retention policy/schedule and you better not nuke all of your keys if you see the feds talking to the receptionist.
Closed design/architecture doesn't mean a damn thing. I can make all of the Ford replacement parts that I like, without Ford's permission, as long as I don't violate any Ford patents, copyrights or trademarks. The same applies to Sony, although I'm sure they patented everything they could on the PS1/2. If I was willing to wait for the patents to expire, the only thing stopping me from manufacturing PlayStation clones would be the copyright on the firmware. Calling something "closed" does not create intellectual property rights.
You need more than a CS degree. Can you read schematics, use test equipment, fix/modify hardware?
They also have I/O channel controllers, which are like simple processors dedicated to I/O related tasks that can run user-specified programs. This takes some of the load off the main processor. The main processor doesn't have to do the bit fiddling needed in PC device drivers.
Why not just buy a big cylinder of hydrogen from an industrial gas supplier? I'm assuming that this device can run off bottled hydrogen and oxygen from the atmosphere.
You are comparing apples and oranges.
Bruce Lee was in some great martial-arts films, but the films were just vehicles for showing Lee's amazing fight scenes. Plot? Character development? No budget for that.
The Kung Fu TV series didn't have any great fight scenes. It did have real actors, plots with some depth, and good production values. So what if Carradine was not a martial-arts expert, that wasn't the point of the series, despite the title.
What made "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" so successful, is that it was not the stereotypical chop-socky film. Most martial-arts films remind me of Western opera. The plot is secondary to the music and singing.
Many professional associations offer mail forwarding services to their members. This lets you give out an email address (jre@ieee.org) that is independent of whatever ISP (769438@conglomo.net) you happen to be using.
AirBus uses only the finest bugs, lovingly crafted and maintained by the DGSE.
SABRE is a real-time database system with insane storage, speed and reliability requirements. It runs on the biggest, baddest mainframes money can buy, with an enormous disk storage farm. It doesn't run on a normal mainframe operating system like MVS.
What is the true cost of bandwidth? Not the price, but the actual cost. It used to be very expensive to provision a T1 over copper. It took a lot of manpower and equipment. Bridge taps and loading coils had to be removed, repeaters had to be installed, and it required two high-quality copper pairs. Modern technology (HDSL2) can do the same job, on a single pair, without line conditioning, and without repeaters for many spans. The cost of providing a T1 circuit is much lower. At the termination point, the data can be muxed on high-capacity fiber for transport to the Network Service Provider. I don't know what the costs are for transporting data over fiber, but I think it is safe to assume that improvements in technology have also reduced those costs.
- symmetric bandwidth
- static IP numbers
- no restrictions on servers, services, VPNs
In other words, IP dialtone. Transport the bits from point A to point B. Everything that I have seen that is marketed to the "consumer" is crippled in one or more ways. The only way that I can get IP dialtone is to buy a T1, for more than I pay in rent for my home.Availability and reliability are also needed for a broadband service that can be part of the national infrastructure. If I order telephone service, the telephone company does not say "too bad, you are too far away from the central office, and besides, we don't market telephone service in your (scummy) neighborhood." If my telephone service goes out, which is a rare event, it gets fixed in a day or two.
The difference in size and weight for an equivalent display size is important to me. Large CRTs are just too big and heavy.
I bought a cheap (less than $400) Samsung 15" LCD (model 570V) and I am very happy with it.
This scheme appears to add a lot of hardware and complexity to any consumer electronics equipment that supports it. What is the benefit for the end user? Nothing that I can see. In fact, the end user is saddled with new and annoying restrictions on how content can be viewed. When will these idiots realize that their content is not that valuable? We aren't talking about a video conference of the National Security Council.
This is too damn easy.
All of the definitions that I've read of inalienable state that an inalienable right can't be waived, sold or given away, even if the person wishes to do so. I can't sell myself into slavery.
Even if you think some unknown number of destroyed compact flash cards is an acceptable price for killing bacterial spores, that will rarely be present, what about other things that can be damaged or destroyed? What about blood, stool and tissue samples that are mailed to medical labs for testing? How many people will die because the sample was degraded or destroyed, and the test result was incorrect? What about prescription medicines that are damaged by the radiation? Sure, the packages can be labelled. We all know how delivery services take careful note of labels on packages.
And where do you get your figures?
Pu239 has a half-life of approximately 24,000 years, and contrary to the ravings of some environmentalists, it is not "the most toxic substance known to mankind." There are many organic compounds that are far more poisonous.