The fact that you would even ask such an obvious question shows that you have no business criticizing them. The fact that you would be modded up for it shows that mods will support any post, no matter how inaccurate, that supports their preconceived notions (information wants to be freeeeee!!!).
To answer, for the millionth time in this thread, knowing the name of a courier doesn't instantly give you OBL's home address. They had to do a shitload of police work tracking him down. But if OBL knew we knew the couriers name, he might get spooked and leave. Honestly, this is common sense. It shouldn't need explaining.
It gets worse. Apparently, this mansion was several times larger than any other building in the area. It was surrounded by 15 foot high walls, topped with barbed wire. It had no phone or internet hookup, and an on-site trash incinerator. People from the community (being interviewed on Al Jazeera) claim that the residents never came out into the town, and only took occasional visitors (couriers). If that doesn't scream hide out, nothing does.
At least some people in the Pakistani hierarchy must have known he was there.
The tip that eventually lead to this mission came about 8 months ago. I wonder if it was one of the villagers who dropped the dime. I'm pretty sure there was a million dollar reward for any tips leading to his capture, but you wouldn't want to stick around in Pakistan after taking that reward.
Killing friends and relatives and countrymen all around you? So you mean the Taliban? Because they kill far more Muslims than the US does.
The people who choose to join with terrorists do so because they think of it as a glorious struggle. If you take away the glory by fighting them with robotic drones and killing all the famous ones, that makes it far less attractive.
You mean how the Israelis have won outright and now just need to weather the occasional pitiful rocket attack? And how the Israelis will now almost certainly get to keep all of Jerusalem because the Palestinians have no bargaining strength left? Look, I don't particularly like what Israel has done, but it has been enormously effective, especially when compared to the war on drugs.
No, those folks searched for him for a year or so before being ordered by Bush to focus on Iraq and its imaginary WMDs. Obama, upon taking office, made their top priority to find OBL. A little over two years later, it's done.
They're right about the time. Lots of stations are reporting that they held off on the announcement while performing a DNA test. Last thing Obama wants is to announce we got him, and then come back a few days later and say "oops".
MSNBC just reported that the mansion was several times larger than any other building in the town, surrounded by a 15 foot wall topped with barbed wire, with a double gate, and no telephone wires connecting it to the outside. If that doesn't scream "hide out", nothing does. I'm thinking there were a lot of locals who knew and didn't care. Their loss I guess, they missed out on that million dollar reward.
The difference is that drugs are big business. Wherever there's a fortune to be made, there will always be plenty of willing participants. But when you're looking at living in fear of drone strikes, with your leaders dying ever few months, recruiting gets harder.
Bullshit. Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden. Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region, and we found him in a little over two years.
Just think if we had done that from the start. Bin Laden still dead, without wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq.
Unfortunately, this project doesn't look to be completed or manufacturable. In fact, it looks like all they have is some HDL. Do they know what process technology they're going to use? Have they done any layout work? Did they do so with manufacturability in mind? Have they given thought to test modes? Do they have anyone to develop a test program?
Making a chip is hard. Even if you have all the IP, you're still looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a thorough test program and work out all the chip's kinks. Sure, you can just hand over the mask set to a foundry and buy the wafers, but then you have thousands of chips and no way of knowing which ones work, or how well.
You can't really get around using a VCO. Ceramic resonators lack the accuracy needed for complex modulation. You need the sub-100 ppm accuracy of a crystal, but crystals can't operate in the GHz range. So you use the crystal as a reference for a PLL and multiply the frequency up to the desired level, and VCOs are an integral part of PLLs.
Also, using a ceramic resonator wouldn't allow for "smaller" transceivers. Transceivers are already integrated circuits, with the only external components being a crystal and maybe some tuning components on the antenna.
What frequency are you working in? Obviously something like AM/FM radio, RFID, or TV will draw low current because the frequency is relatively low. But once you start getting up to the GHz range, there's no way a VCO could draw that little current, unless your entire radio had less than 30 fF of capacitance. Are you sure it's the RF VCO that's running, and not some IF one?
Lots of problems with the laser... how does the phone know where the closest tower is, especially if you turn it off while flying across the country or the world? What happens if something gets in the way of the laser? Can you even use it inside?
A directional, directable antenna might be possible, but it still presents some problems. You'd need a moving part with three axes of motion that can respond as quickly as a person swings a phone from one ear to another, and you'd need the motors behind it to operate on low enough current for it to be worthwhile. And moving parts tend to break. Maybe there are directional antennae that can be steered electrically (as opposed to mechanically).... that's really outside the scope of my knowledge.
A better solution, which I think we'll have to move to regardless as the wireless spectrum becomes more crowded, is to focus on short range wireless with ubiquitous minitowers connected up with fiber. Spend as little time in the air as possible. Less signal is lost, fiber transmits faster anyway, and you only need to compete for spectrum with people in your immediate vicinity. Rural areas would still be problematic though.
Unfortunately, that still leaves the bulk of the power getting used up in your LO. Maybe some physicist will come up with something awesome, like an electrically-controllable phononic oscillator or who knows what. But as long as we're using the current method, I don't see us getting more than a 30% improvement in energy efficiency out of transceivers.
Well, some companies are working on HUD goggles for personal computers, so I guess that's a step in the right direction, even if it does make you look like a total dork.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty fundamental problem with making more efficient transceivers. They have to operate, by their very nature, at high frequencies. High frequency signals inevitably draw more current, because they see capacitors as having a low impedance. Basic EE stuff: Z = 1/(jwC). And how do we generate the radio frequency? With a VCO that invariably involves big capacitors (big for an IC, at any rate). Those VCOs typically end up drawing at least 50-60% of your operating current.
Another third or so is the amplification, no real way around that unless you find a way to cool the universe a couple hundred Kelvin so we can lower the noise floor. Then you have all the DACs and ADCs and comparators and whatnot that do all the mod/demod and soak up the rest of your current, but they're pretty small potatoes.
Build a better VCO and the world (or at least Silicon Valley) will beat a path to your door.
If you have 19% of a billion dollar market one year, and 14% of a ten billion dollar market the next, then you're in pretty good shape. You'll need to put some work in interoperability due to the connected nature of the smart phone market, but RIM is already doing that by supporting Android apps.
They may not be the dominant force they were in the crackberry years, but they're not about to die either.
You clearly haven't dealt with Apple or contract manufacturers. At least at my company, we regularly joke that Apple's secrecy policies are similar to those of the Kremlin. Meanwhile, contractors in China or Taiwan will do the minimum to get paid. You need to send someone over at least once a quarter to let them know you mean business, otherwise they figure you aren't paying attention and start slacking off. You can always see when we visit their factories by looking for the spikes on the yield charts, followed by a steady roll-off until the next visit.
You can be reasonably confident that Foxconn didn't care until Apple noticed and started making a fuss.
For what it's worth, I don't mean to deride either group. Apple has every right to protect their IP... if physical dimensions were given out, who knows what else was? And cheap Asian contractors aren't the only ones who slack off. There are plenty of companies right here in the USA who will do the same -- it's just easier to keep an eye on them.
There is nothing that says customers can't band together and force AT&T to arbitrate with a large group of people at the same time. Or drag out the arbitration proceedings until they are no longer profitable.
The arbiters are on AT&T's payroll. If you try to drag out arbitration, they will simply decide in the corporations favor and force you to pay all legal costs.
There is literally nothing you can do. As long as the SCOTUS is dominated by conservative hacks, you have no rights. Even your voting doesn't matter, since they can and will overrule any act of Congress. The only thing you can do is keep Congress and the White House in Democratic hands until the conservatives on the court die -- and God willing that will be soon. Our country can't take much more of this looting.
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The fact that you would even ask such an obvious question shows that you have no business criticizing them. The fact that you would be modded up for it shows that mods will support any post, no matter how inaccurate, that supports their preconceived notions (information wants to be freeeeee!!!).
To answer, for the millionth time in this thread, knowing the name of a courier doesn't instantly give you OBL's home address. They had to do a shitload of police work tracking him down. But if OBL knew we knew the couriers name, he might get spooked and leave. Honestly, this is common sense. It shouldn't need explaining.
False dichotomy much? I thought Slashdot was supposed to be good at spotting logical fallacies.
As coroner, I must confer, I've thoroughly examined her... and she's not only merely dead, she's really most sincerely dead!
Oh, it was a man? Well, I never said I was a particularly good coroner.
It gets worse. Apparently, this mansion was several times larger than any other building in the area. It was surrounded by 15 foot high walls, topped with barbed wire. It had no phone or internet hookup, and an on-site trash incinerator. People from the community (being interviewed on Al Jazeera) claim that the residents never came out into the town, and only took occasional visitors (couriers). If that doesn't scream hide out, nothing does.
At least some people in the Pakistani hierarchy must have known he was there.
The tip that eventually lead to this mission came about 8 months ago. I wonder if it was one of the villagers who dropped the dime. I'm pretty sure there was a million dollar reward for any tips leading to his capture, but you wouldn't want to stick around in Pakistan after taking that reward.
Killing friends and relatives and countrymen all around you? So you mean the Taliban? Because they kill far more Muslims than the US does.
The people who choose to join with terrorists do so because they think of it as a glorious struggle. If you take away the glory by fighting them with robotic drones and killing all the famous ones, that makes it far less attractive.
You mean how the Israelis have won outright and now just need to weather the occasional pitiful rocket attack? And how the Israelis will now almost certainly get to keep all of Jerusalem because the Palestinians have no bargaining strength left? Look, I don't particularly like what Israel has done, but it has been enormously effective, especially when compared to the war on drugs.
You don't think intel got diverted to Iraq, to search for those mythical WMDs?
No, those folks searched for him for a year or so before being ordered by Bush to focus on Iraq and its imaginary WMDs. Obama, upon taking office, made their top priority to find OBL. A little over two years later, it's done.
They're right about the time. Lots of stations are reporting that they held off on the announcement while performing a DNA test. Last thing Obama wants is to announce we got him, and then come back a few days later and say "oops".
MSNBC just reported that the mansion was several times larger than any other building in the town, surrounded by a 15 foot wall topped with barbed wire, with a double gate, and no telephone wires connecting it to the outside. If that doesn't scream "hide out", nothing does. I'm thinking there were a lot of locals who knew and didn't care. Their loss I guess, they missed out on that million dollar reward.
The difference is that drugs are big business. Wherever there's a fortune to be made, there will always be plenty of willing participants. But when you're looking at living in fear of drone strikes, with your leaders dying ever few months, recruiting gets harder.
Bullshit. Bush diverted most of our military to a pointless fight in Iraq, and unsurprisingly we never caught Bin Laden. Obama set finding Bin Laden as our top goal in the region, and we found him in a little over two years.
Just think if we had done that from the start. Bin Laden still dead, without wasting a trillion dollars and thousands of lives in Iraq.
Of course, that's how boss battles work, isn't it?
World War 2 ended when a prisoner escaping from some castle gunned down Cyborg-Hitler, after all.
Unfortunately, this project doesn't look to be completed or manufacturable. In fact, it looks like all they have is some HDL. Do they know what process technology they're going to use? Have they done any layout work? Did they do so with manufacturability in mind? Have they given thought to test modes? Do they have anyone to develop a test program?
Making a chip is hard. Even if you have all the IP, you're still looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars to develop a thorough test program and work out all the chip's kinks. Sure, you can just hand over the mask set to a foundry and buy the wafers, but then you have thousands of chips and no way of knowing which ones work, or how well.
You can't really get around using a VCO. Ceramic resonators lack the accuracy needed for complex modulation. You need the sub-100 ppm accuracy of a crystal, but crystals can't operate in the GHz range. So you use the crystal as a reference for a PLL and multiply the frequency up to the desired level, and VCOs are an integral part of PLLs.
Also, using a ceramic resonator wouldn't allow for "smaller" transceivers. Transceivers are already integrated circuits, with the only external components being a crystal and maybe some tuning components on the antenna.
Nah, that's corporate speak for "Interns? They don't need a laptop to make coffee! Just dig up something from storage and let 'em play with that."
What frequency are you working in? Obviously something like AM/FM radio, RFID, or TV will draw low current because the frequency is relatively low. But once you start getting up to the GHz range, there's no way a VCO could draw that little current, unless your entire radio had less than 30 fF of capacitance. Are you sure it's the RF VCO that's running, and not some IF one?
Lots of problems with the laser... how does the phone know where the closest tower is, especially if you turn it off while flying across the country or the world? What happens if something gets in the way of the laser? Can you even use it inside?
A directional, directable antenna might be possible, but it still presents some problems. You'd need a moving part with three axes of motion that can respond as quickly as a person swings a phone from one ear to another, and you'd need the motors behind it to operate on low enough current for it to be worthwhile. And moving parts tend to break. Maybe there are directional antennae that can be steered electrically (as opposed to mechanically).... that's really outside the scope of my knowledge.
A better solution, which I think we'll have to move to regardless as the wireless spectrum becomes more crowded, is to focus on short range wireless with ubiquitous minitowers connected up with fiber. Spend as little time in the air as possible. Less signal is lost, fiber transmits faster anyway, and you only need to compete for spectrum with people in your immediate vicinity. Rural areas would still be problematic though.
Unfortunately, that still leaves the bulk of the power getting used up in your LO. Maybe some physicist will come up with something awesome, like an electrically-controllable phononic oscillator or who knows what. But as long as we're using the current method, I don't see us getting more than a 30% improvement in energy efficiency out of transceivers.
Well, some companies are working on HUD goggles for personal computers, so I guess that's a step in the right direction, even if it does make you look like a total dork.
Unfortunately, there's a pretty fundamental problem with making more efficient transceivers. They have to operate, by their very nature, at high frequencies. High frequency signals inevitably draw more current, because they see capacitors as having a low impedance. Basic EE stuff: Z = 1/(jwC). And how do we generate the radio frequency? With a VCO that invariably involves big capacitors (big for an IC, at any rate). Those VCOs typically end up drawing at least 50-60% of your operating current.
Another third or so is the amplification, no real way around that unless you find a way to cool the universe a couple hundred Kelvin so we can lower the noise floor. Then you have all the DACs and ADCs and comparators and whatnot that do all the mod/demod and soak up the rest of your current, but they're pretty small potatoes.
Build a better VCO and the world (or at least Silicon Valley) will beat a path to your door.
Depends on the size of the market.
If you have 19% of a billion dollar market one year, and 14% of a ten billion dollar market the next, then you're in pretty good shape. You'll need to put some work in interoperability due to the connected nature of the smart phone market, but RIM is already doing that by supporting Android apps.
They may not be the dominant force they were in the crackberry years, but they're not about to die either.
You clearly haven't dealt with Apple or contract manufacturers. At least at my company, we regularly joke that Apple's secrecy policies are similar to those of the Kremlin. Meanwhile, contractors in China or Taiwan will do the minimum to get paid. You need to send someone over at least once a quarter to let them know you mean business, otherwise they figure you aren't paying attention and start slacking off. You can always see when we visit their factories by looking for the spikes on the yield charts, followed by a steady roll-off until the next visit.
You can be reasonably confident that Foxconn didn't care until Apple noticed and started making a fuss.
For what it's worth, I don't mean to deride either group. Apple has every right to protect their IP... if physical dimensions were given out, who knows what else was? And cheap Asian contractors aren't the only ones who slack off. There are plenty of companies right here in the USA who will do the same -- it's just easier to keep an eye on them.
There is nothing that says customers can't band together and force AT&T to arbitrate with a large group of people at the same time. Or drag out the arbitration proceedings until they are no longer profitable.
The arbiters are on AT&T's payroll. If you try to drag out arbitration, they will simply decide in the corporations favor and force you to pay all legal costs.
There is literally nothing you can do. As long as the SCOTUS is dominated by conservative hacks, you have no rights. Even your voting doesn't matter, since they can and will overrule any act of Congress. The only thing you can do is keep Congress and the White House in Democratic hands until the conservatives on the court die -- and God willing that will be soon. Our country can't take much more of this looting.
Every vote in favor of this ruling came from a Republican. Every vote against this ruling came from a Democrat.
I know you need to rationalize your decision to vote for a Republican, but the truth is that the parties are very very different.
Keep telling yourself that. The Supremes just ruled otherwise, and their opinion is the one that counts.