Also, a 5MP camera addon is imminent. I'll be sorely tempted to get another Pi for some low budget Kite Aerial Photography. Just set it to take a photo every 10 seconds, and launch it
Please explain how an old Android cell phone isn't superior in EVERY WAY to a Pi for this task.
I got one, hooked it up to a USB webcam, and set up a cron job to do time lapse photography.
An old Android phone would have been cheaper, the pics much higher quality, and I bet there's already an app in the Play Store so setup would have been infinitely quicker and easier. Plus with WiFi and a battery built-in, positioning the phone might have been vastly easier.
No, Al Quaeda TV is their arab-language broadcast channel. It's not at all unusual for companies to tailor their various products to their audience, and they would be stupid to carry that content over and alienate most people their broadcast is targeting. Organizations objected to the English language network not because of its content, but because it's success would be funding the other side of the organization as well. Most boycotts work that way... it's not that Nesquik will kill you, it's that Nestle's operations in Africa are basically a criminal organization, flagrantly breaking local laws and international guidelines, which is casuing the deaths of about 1.5 million infants per year. The two issues aren't connected, except that your money goes to the organization doing those bad things, hence the boycott.
Even the Voice of America (VOA), of all networks, got into trouble with their arab-language channel broadcasting blatant pro-Al Quaeda propaganda.
The real embarrassment is that/. has never supported basic tags like <sup> which would allow proper math mark-up. Instead we get all manner of mangled, unreadable blobs for comments.
These days, 80plus PSUs are very cheap. The only things cheaper are unreliable JUNK PSUs which won't last a year. Also, because of the legal terms of using the 80plus trademark, manufacturers seem to not inflate the wattage ratings on 80plus PSUs, while you can easily find $15 "2000watt" junk PSUs.
And besides all that, I'd pay the 80plus premium just for the heat/noise reduction. Combine with a WD "Green" hard drive (or SSD), low-power CPU, and a couple low-noise fans, and you've got a very low heat and very, very quiet system.
Some tragic stories here from Death Valley, one of the most hostile places on Earth:
I don't consider Death Valley to be particularly hostile. If you have a sufficient supply of water (1-2 gallons per-person, per-day), and nothing else, you can survive there just fine for MONTHS (until you starve)... That's just assuming reasonable health. A distant number two behind water is shade or protective clothing (hat, long sleeves), because while you'll still probably be able to survive without it, you'll sure look like you didn't!
There's really no place on Earth too hot for humans to survive without protection, excepting the area immediately around volcanos, lava tubes, geysers, etc.
Cold is vastly more threatening to human survival... Yet I don't see a slashdot story about people dying when their GPS units stranded them in the snow.
I'm certain the Slashdot audience will rise above the low hanging fruit.
They used-to... They used-to. Before/. editors became professional trolls, and the site tried to copy digg and reddit, increasing story count to the point that discussion has a half-life of a few seconds.../. was once an inspiring place to be, with extremely high concentrations of experts in every technical fields, which would often chime-in on many subjects, and lead to extremely insightful discussions, and moderation which would pass over the flippant opinionated responses, and actually highlight insightful responses, especially when they ran directly contrary to popular opinion.
It's a real shame it went away. You can still look through the archives and find stories from a decade back to prove the point, but there's no substitute, today. I suppose Ars' attempts to improve the comment system has potential, but even if it goes well, their top-story churn is too high to lead to lingering, in-depth discussions.
Hacker News and PopSci have the same problems. So I'm still looking, but I've been on the verge of dumping my 15-year-old, ~16k comment,/. habit for a good long time now, because of the pile of worthless flames it's all become.
The USA has resorted to buy everything imported, since their consumers would rather whine about quality than pay for it.
In the late 90s, it ceased to be POSSIBLE for consumers to pay for quality. Instead, formerly high-end brands leased out their names, and stamped them on low-quality junk. Retailers did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of junk. There was nowhere consumers could go, and nothing they could look for, to ensure the extra money they were paying, was actually going to mean higher quality (rather than higher profits for someone else).
These days, wider usage of the internet has offered customer reviews a long reach, and a possible hedge against corporate America actively sabotaging the quality of products consumers spend their money on.
The thousands of billions spent on clothing, electronics, food, cars and building materials to name a few industries don't weigh up to the few that come in by exporting planes or mining equipment and such.
The US is the number 1 economy, and the number 1 manufacturing economy, by a solid margin, despite a fairly small population compared to China and others.
We may laugh at India or China's plans to produce their own aerospace or commercial flight equipment, but in 10 years, Boeing and Airbus will most likely be buying 90% of their parts prefabricated from those very countries and in 20 years, they will probably be reduced to a manufacturing and assembly location for them.
Cheap countries make some headway, but they're technologically limited. Boeing's latest jet is using high-tech composites, and the turbines are the most fuel-efficient available. China can't compete with that.
Chinese-made cars are cheap, but that's partly because they use decades-old engine technology, which has poor fuel efficiency and terrible emissions. With the US increasing minimum fuel efficiency standards, China can't legally sell their cheap, low-tech junk here, and there's not much hope they'll catch-up with western manufacturers.
In addition, as fuel prices rise, transporting cheap goods from China to the US adds substantially to the sale price. Some jobs are coming back to the US because of it, though honestly, many are just moving from China to Mexico, but that's still beneficial to the US.
And there's even more hope on the horizon... More advanced assembly-line robots look to be able to do the jobs of more people, which means you need less Chinese hordes, and more highly-paid robot maintenance and repair men. 3D printers suggest a future where those cheap Chinese knick-knacks can be produced cheaply and domestically with minimal human labor, and completely customized for each customer, which will again displace hordes of Chinese workers.
And in all this, you're missing out on the fact that China and others are buying lots of US products, too. Don't want to let Chinese products into the US market, and China won't let GM sell their cars in China, where they're making more money annually than they do in the US.
And all your xenophobic concerns are ones we've seen before. Japan followed the same path as China is, yet the fears of Japan overtaking and buying-out all of the US companies weren't entirely based in reality, now were they?
You've got to respect... Whoever first ate lobster.
You've got to remember, it's only very recently, and still only in the western world, that people have had more food than they can eat. The story of human history is one of huge numbers of peasants who were just barely avoiding starving to death. That's why the majority of the population can digest lactose... Not getting nutrition from that extra bit of food (dairy) meant the difference between surviving and perhaps starving to death.
You only have to go back to around WWII to see most of the western world on the edge of starvation. In the US, the great depression before WWII had about 25% of the population starving, to varying degrees. In Europe and Asia, hunger was rampant in countries that were rebuilding, even decades after WWII ended.
A generation of kids not going to school because of schmucks like this telling them they don't need a diploma to get a job will be the last nail in the coffin that is the decline of the USA into a 3rd world country.
No. The nail in the coffin of the decline of the USA would be the making of degrees mandatory (as if there's no difference between a B.S. from Berkley and Joe's University and Crab Shack),
Grade inflation is real, and a serious problem. If you pay your tuition, are motivated to get through the busy-work, and have two neurons to rub together, you're pretty much guaranteed to get that degree. It doesn't prove you're good or useful at anything... It only proves you're not poor, which is why the studies on salaries are so slanted (selection bias) towards those with degrees.
Add to that the horde of "commercial" colleges, which are exploiting people on a massive scale, sustained by the promise (from people like you) of a degree automatically increasing their pay.
First thing kids should do in High School is browse the job ads online, and see what the requirements are, and decide how to proceed. With just about all IT jobs, the wording is "College degree OR equivalent experience"...
Think about that for a second... You can spend 4 years of your life in college and $100,000 in loans that'll balloon to several times that, and you'll be paying off for decades before you can afford to buy a house... OR you can be EARNING MONEY with an entry-level job for those 4 years, saving up enough to make a down-payment on a house, having zero debt, job experience and references, etc.
A degree is a good idea if you don't know what you want to do, or what it'll take... But even then, you'd be smart to go as cheap as you can, taking the first 2 years at a community college, then the next at the cheapest state university available, working the whole time so you come out at $0, rather than severely underwater with onerous student loans.
FWIW, I have a degree, but it's extremely rare for recruiters to even ask anything about my education.
He moved to a corrupt 3rd world banana republic with no rule of law, and failed to pay a bribe a couple months ago
Believe it or not, people do actually commit crimes in corrupt, 3rd world countries, too... It's not always a frame-up. Sure, it could be... or he could be just as guilty as Hans Reiser, and just getting the benefit of every geek's doubt.
NES had a regular controller. SNES had a regular controller. N64 only added an analog joystick, which everybody does now. The Wii changed to a remote control when everybody else was copying the n64 controller, and made obscene amounts of money with it, as everyone loved the novelty and had to have one. Sony and Microsoft eventually made something to compete, but Nintendo started it, and made lots of money from it.
In WW2 it was advance technology fast or the other guys could kill everyone you love. That's a pretty big motivator to cut the red tape and bullshit, and pull as a team. His will they recreate that here?
The motivation in WWII probably isn't what you think it was... Scientists always want to do the neato next thing. What changed during WWII is any batshit crazy idea was listened-to, and given truck-loads of funding, on the off-chance it would work, saving bazillions on the battle-field, and the Manhattan project did just that.
Other WWII projects you don't hear about quite so much, include trained-pigeon guided-bombs, and gigantic aircraft carriers built out of ice, for use in the Pacific tropics. They spent some government money, but turned out to be dead-ends. Oh well.
I doubt there's any problem motivating the individuals to try and develop something new... What's really got to happen is that something is needed to seriously motivate the money men, to spend the cash on something that may pay of big, or might accomplish nothing.
I don't think the power reductions are much of a factor.
You're just speculating. I am not. Broadcast radius has been reduced. Go read up on the subject if you don't want to believe me.
Concerning preamps. if you buy a good preamplifier (mine is a winegard that is mounted up at the antenna) it really can help. My favorite channel changed from unwatchable to a good rock solid picture.
Whether a preamp helps OR HURTS depends on the sensitivity of your tuner, the noise figure on the preamp, and the distance of your cable run from antenna to TV.
Just because something isn't long-term sustainable, doesn't make it a pyramid scheme. If it was, EVERYTHING that isn't profitable would be called that, and it would lose all meaning.
Clearly, you've never been to Phoenix, AZ... The Southwestern US consists of about 300,000 sq miles of mostly vacant desert land, and only very little else. The US population at large continues to move further south and west every year.
People often like to claim that humans consume without bounds and replicate until all resources are used up and will eventually move on.
Despite the marketing implications, there really is nothing different about antennas for Digital TV. The encoding is not important. The frequency is the main factor and that has not changed substantially.
I'd have to disagree with you. The changes are a matter of degree rather than principle, but they are real.
VHF-lo has be largely (but not completely) eliminated, meaning new (digital) VHF antennas are VHF-hi only, rather than full range.
UHF channels 52-69 have been eliminated, meaning many UHF antennas that performed best at those higher frequencies, are now poor performers.
For VHF in particular, but UHF to a lesser extent, many old (and often cheap) antennas were considerably less directional than modern antennas designed for ATSC. The "fringe" antennas were always highly directional, but many (most?) were not. This would cause multipath interference, which NTSC would handle better than ATSC tuners will.
In the digital cutover, broadcast power was reduced, so now, many areas that needed only modest antenna must upgrade to higher-gain models to continue with decent reception.
Antenna "fine tuners" found commonly on old TV set-top antennas, are detrimental to ATSC reception.
ATSC receivers are generally much more sensitive than NTSC TV sets. High-noise antenna amplifiers that previously helped the signal, may now be harming the signal.
And finally, as you said, a number of broadcasters moved from VHF to UHF. In many areas, people only had VHF antennas, and now NEED UHF.
All that said... There are no standards for labeling "digital" or "high-def" on TV antennas, and so it is very often a flagrant lie, and even the worst antennas, which have ALL the problems I've listed above, get labeled as "digital HDTV ready deep fringe 150mi+".
Frankly, I'm repulsed by this notion that "Hey, we gotta keep pumping out more kids so that we have a big base paying into social security to offset all the geezers taking their benefits". In any other situation, the notion of needing lots of new contributions to help fund the payouts to the holders of mature shares would be called what it really is: a pyramid scheme.
Social Security is NOT a pyramid scheme. Full stop.
It is an indefinitely sustainable system, just not quite at the current level of benefits. There has been one big hick-up in the Social Security model... The great depression and WWII caused two decades of population growth to be compressed into a couple years, hence the baby boomers. As the baby boomers start to retire, Social Security will be (temporarily) stressed, but it will survive.
I don't get it... It's a pretty mundane detail to me, and apparently to everyone else, too, since practically none of the tech sites reported it. Why do you care so much?
Slashdot may be dying, but failing to spam its userbase with mundane stories isn't the reason why...
A company I recently worked for has hundreds of Windows PCs, and happened to use Microsoft's protection exclusively... the verdict of those there longer than me, was that it does well on extremely esoteric exploits, but completely misses swathes of common viruses. In my opinion, it's a steaming pile of worthless.
It was an interesting experience though, because I happened to be there when an obvious bit of malware was spreading unchecked through the network. Google's VirusTotal.com proved absolutely invaluable. It was just another variant of a years-old VB malware, but it was quite a nusiance, which almost nothing was picking up.
The upshot is, Kaspersky, Kingsoft, Sophos, and Symantec were the first engines to identify it as a threat. Other vendors like McAfee, Avast, AntiVir, BitDefender, and many others identified it just a few days later (TOO LATE, in my opinion), so they at least would have contained it if it wasn't so quick to exhibit symptoms. Meanwhile, AVG, Trend, Comodo, and others still don't identify that particular 0-day I unfortunately ran across, and would let it propagate like wildfire.
That's become my general ranking for antivirus solutions... And of the best, Kaspersky is the most expensive. Symantec is significantly cheaper. And Sophos is much cheaper still... they have a FREE one-off scan and disinfect tool which is a great public service to offer, and their business license is as low as $15/machine. Still, it's a toss-up as to whether the director/CTO you'll be dealing with will be a cheap SOB or a paranoid SOB who wants the most recognizable name.
If anyone from Google / VirusTotal is listening... an absolutely killer feature would be to identify exactly WHEN a given AV product was updated to start identifying a given malware file. Of course that's a non-trivial amount of complexity to add to something which is currently much simpler
When do we get them? Electric cars are all the rage... Imagine you had a non-stop range extender! Imagine your car just charges itself when parked anywhere. Better yet, imagine an RV powered by one of these... park out in the middle of nowhere, and still have a decent amount of power. Or in some cases where communities are isolated, how about end-of-the-block SRGs? The best thing about an EV/RV SRG is that the half-life is about 80 years, so just one will last you a couple lifetimes.
A number of years ago, I balparked the cost of RTGs, based on some unverified found info, and decided they were impractically expensive... But with SRGs dramatically improving the efficiency, the cost of the plutonium-238 to power one that'll be a usefully large (for range xextending EV's) would only run a bit over $100,000... a practical sum of money for a very large number of people. So when can we expect to see them on the market?
Slashdot Mirror
Please explain how an old Android cell phone isn't superior in EVERY WAY to a Pi for this task.
An old Android phone would have been cheaper, the pics much higher quality, and I bet there's already an app in the Play Store so setup would have been infinitely quicker and easier. Plus with WiFi and a battery built-in, positioning the phone might have been vastly easier.
No, Al Quaeda TV is their arab-language broadcast channel. It's not at all unusual for companies to tailor their various products to their audience, and they would be stupid to carry that content over and alienate most people their broadcast is targeting. Organizations objected to the English language network not because of its content, but because it's success would be funding the other side of the organization as well. Most boycotts work that way... it's not that Nesquik will kill you, it's that Nestle's operations in Africa are basically a criminal organization, flagrantly breaking local laws and international guidelines, which is casuing the deaths of about 1.5 million infants per year. The two issues aren't connected, except that your money goes to the organization doing those bad things, hence the boycott.
Even the Voice of America (VOA), of all networks, got into trouble with their arab-language channel broadcasting blatant pro-Al Quaeda propaganda.
The real embarrassment is that /. has never supported basic tags like <sup> which would allow proper math mark-up. Instead we get all manner of mangled, unreadable blobs for comments.
These days, 80plus PSUs are very cheap. The only things cheaper are unreliable JUNK PSUs which won't last a year. Also, because of the legal terms of using the 80plus trademark, manufacturers seem to not inflate the wattage ratings on 80plus PSUs, while you can easily find $15 "2000watt" junk PSUs.
And besides all that, I'd pay the 80plus premium just for the heat/noise reduction. Combine with a WD "Green" hard drive (or SSD), low-power CPU, and a couple low-noise fans, and you've got a very low heat and very, very quiet system.
I don't consider Death Valley to be particularly hostile. If you have a sufficient supply of water (1-2 gallons per-person, per-day), and nothing else, you can survive there just fine for MONTHS (until you starve)... That's just assuming reasonable health. A distant number two behind water is shade or protective clothing (hat, long sleeves), because while you'll still probably be able to survive without it, you'll sure look like you didn't!
There's really no place on Earth too hot for humans to survive without protection, excepting the area immediately around volcanos, lava tubes, geysers, etc.
Cold is vastly more threatening to human survival... Yet I don't see a slashdot story about people dying when their GPS units stranded them in the snow.
They used-to... They used-to. Before /. editors became professional trolls, and the site tried to copy digg and reddit, increasing story count to the point that discussion has a half-life of a few seconds... /. was once an inspiring place to be, with extremely high concentrations of experts in every technical fields, which would often chime-in on many subjects, and lead to extremely insightful discussions, and moderation which would pass over the flippant opinionated responses, and actually highlight insightful responses, especially when they ran directly contrary to popular opinion.
It's a real shame it went away. You can still look through the archives and find stories from a decade back to prove the point, but there's no substitute, today. I suppose Ars' attempts to improve the comment system has potential, but even if it goes well, their top-story churn is too high to lead to lingering, in-depth discussions.
Hacker News and PopSci have the same problems. So I'm still looking, but I've been on the verge of dumping my 15-year-old, ~16k comment, /. habit for a good long time now, because of the pile of worthless flames it's all become.
In the late 90s, it ceased to be POSSIBLE for consumers to pay for quality. Instead, formerly high-end brands leased out their names, and stamped them on low-quality junk. Retailers did absolutely nothing to stem the tide of junk. There was nowhere consumers could go, and nothing they could look for, to ensure the extra money they were paying, was actually going to mean higher quality (rather than higher profits for someone else).
These days, wider usage of the internet has offered customer reviews a long reach, and a possible hedge against corporate America actively sabotaging the quality of products consumers spend their money on.
The US is the number 1 economy, and the number 1 manufacturing economy, by a solid margin, despite a fairly small population compared to China and others.
Cheap countries make some headway, but they're technologically limited. Boeing's latest jet is using high-tech composites, and the turbines are the most fuel-efficient available. China can't compete with that.
Chinese-made cars are cheap, but that's partly because they use decades-old engine technology, which has poor fuel efficiency and terrible emissions. With the US increasing minimum fuel efficiency standards, China can't legally sell their cheap, low-tech junk here, and there's not much hope they'll catch-up with western manufacturers.
In addition, as fuel prices rise, transporting cheap goods from China to the US adds substantially to the sale price. Some jobs are coming back to the US because of it, though honestly, many are just moving from China to Mexico, but that's still beneficial to the US.
And there's even more hope on the horizon... More advanced assembly-line robots look to be able to do the jobs of more people, which means you need less Chinese hordes, and more highly-paid robot maintenance and repair men. 3D printers suggest a future where those cheap Chinese knick-knacks can be produced cheaply and domestically with minimal human labor, and completely customized for each customer, which will again displace hordes of Chinese workers.
And in all this, you're missing out on the fact that China and others are buying lots of US products, too. Don't want to let Chinese products into the US market, and China won't let GM sell their cars in China, where they're making more money annually than they do in the US.
And all your xenophobic concerns are ones we've seen before. Japan followed the same path as China is, yet the fears of Japan overtaking and buying-out all of the US companies weren't entirely based in reality, now were they?
You've got to remember, it's only very recently, and still only in the western world, that people have had more food than they can eat. The story of human history is one of huge numbers of peasants who were just barely avoiding starving to death. That's why the majority of the population can digest lactose... Not getting nutrition from that extra bit of food (dairy) meant the difference between surviving and perhaps starving to death.
You only have to go back to around WWII to see most of the western world on the edge of starvation. In the US, the great depression before WWII had about 25% of the population starving, to varying degrees. In Europe and Asia, hunger was rampant in countries that were rebuilding, even decades after WWII ended.
We've already got those... they're called "Plasma Displays".
No. The nail in the coffin of the decline of the USA would be the making of degrees mandatory (as if there's no difference between a B.S. from Berkley and Joe's University and Crab Shack),
Grade inflation is real, and a serious problem. If you pay your tuition, are motivated to get through the busy-work, and have two neurons to rub together, you're pretty much guaranteed to get that degree. It doesn't prove you're good or useful at anything... It only proves you're not poor, which is why the studies on salaries are so slanted (selection bias) towards those with degrees.
Add to that the horde of "commercial" colleges, which are exploiting people on a massive scale, sustained by the promise (from people like you) of a degree automatically increasing their pay.
First thing kids should do in High School is browse the job ads online, and see what the requirements are, and decide how to proceed. With just about all IT jobs, the wording is "College degree OR equivalent experience"...
Think about that for a second... You can spend 4 years of your life in college and $100,000 in loans that'll balloon to several times that, and you'll be paying off for decades before you can afford to buy a house... OR you can be EARNING MONEY with an entry-level job for those 4 years, saving up enough to make a down-payment on a house, having zero debt, job experience and references, etc.
A degree is a good idea if you don't know what you want to do, or what it'll take... But even then, you'd be smart to go as cheap as you can, taking the first 2 years at a community college, then the next at the cheapest state university available, working the whole time so you come out at $0, rather than severely underwater with onerous student loans.
FWIW, I have a degree, but it's extremely rare for recruiters to even ask anything about my education.
Believe it or not, people do actually commit crimes in corrupt, 3rd world countries, too... It's not always a frame-up. Sure, it could be... or he could be just as guilty as Hans Reiser, and just getting the benefit of every geek's doubt.
Through the entire article, and up-voted slashdot comments, not a single mention of the WWII era TROPICAL BAR?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_chocolate#The_Tropical_Bar
NES had a regular controller. SNES had a regular controller. N64 only added an analog joystick, which everybody does now. The Wii changed to a remote control when everybody else was copying the n64 controller, and made obscene amounts of money with it, as everyone loved the novelty and had to have one. Sony and Microsoft eventually made something to compete, but Nintendo started it, and made lots of money from it.
The motivation in WWII probably isn't what you think it was... Scientists always want to do the neato next thing. What changed during WWII is any batshit crazy idea was listened-to, and given truck-loads of funding, on the off-chance it would work, saving bazillions on the battle-field, and the Manhattan project did just that.
Other WWII projects you don't hear about quite so much, include trained-pigeon guided-bombs, and gigantic aircraft carriers built out of ice, for use in the Pacific tropics. They spent some government money, but turned out to be dead-ends. Oh well.
I doubt there's any problem motivating the individuals to try and develop something new... What's really got to happen is that something is needed to seriously motivate the money men, to spend the cash on something that may pay of big, or might accomplish nothing.
You're just speculating. I am not. Broadcast radius has been reduced. Go read up on the subject if you don't want to believe me.
Whether a preamp helps OR HURTS depends on the sensitivity of your tuner, the noise figure on the preamp, and the distance of your cable run from antenna to TV.
Just because something isn't long-term sustainable, doesn't make it a pyramid scheme. If it was, EVERYTHING that isn't profitable would be called that, and it would lose all meaning.
Clearly, you've never been to Phoenix, AZ... The Southwestern US consists of about 300,000 sq miles of mostly vacant desert land, and only very little else. The US population at large continues to move further south and west every year.
Only the highest order fools make such claims.
http://overpopulationisamyth.com/overpopulation-the-making-of-a-myth
I'd have to disagree with you. The changes are a matter of degree rather than principle, but they are real.
VHF-lo has be largely (but not completely) eliminated, meaning new (digital) VHF antennas are VHF-hi only, rather than full range.
UHF channels 52-69 have been eliminated, meaning many UHF antennas that performed best at those higher frequencies, are now poor performers.
For VHF in particular, but UHF to a lesser extent, many old (and often cheap) antennas were considerably less directional than modern antennas designed for ATSC. The "fringe" antennas were always highly directional, but many (most?) were not. This would cause multipath interference, which NTSC would handle better than ATSC tuners will.
In the digital cutover, broadcast power was reduced, so now, many areas that needed only modest antenna must upgrade to higher-gain models to continue with decent reception.
Antenna "fine tuners" found commonly on old TV set-top antennas, are detrimental to ATSC reception.
ATSC receivers are generally much more sensitive than NTSC TV sets. High-noise antenna amplifiers that previously helped the signal, may now be harming the signal.
And finally, as you said, a number of broadcasters moved from VHF to UHF. In many areas, people only had VHF antennas, and now NEED UHF.
All that said... There are no standards for labeling "digital" or "high-def" on TV antennas, and so it is very often a flagrant lie, and even the worst antennas, which have ALL the problems I've listed above, get labeled as "digital HDTV ready deep fringe 150mi+".
Social Security is NOT a pyramid scheme. Full stop.
It is an indefinitely sustainable system, just not quite at the current level of benefits. There has been one big hick-up in the Social Security model... The great depression and WWII caused two decades of population growth to be compressed into a couple years, hence the baby boomers. As the baby boomers start to retire, Social Security will be (temporarily) stressed, but it will survive.
I don't get it... It's a pretty mundane detail to me, and apparently to everyone else, too, since practically none of the tech sites reported it. Why do you care so much?
Slashdot may be dying, but failing to spam its userbase with mundane stories isn't the reason why...
NASA's RTGs are damn near indestructible! They fall from orbit without breaking open.
Outlaw smoke detectors!
I'm sure most radioactive materials are less dangerous than, say, fertilizer or gasoline.
Your anecdotal experience isn't helpful at all.
A company I recently worked for has hundreds of Windows PCs, and happened to use Microsoft's protection exclusively... the verdict of those there longer than me, was that it does well on extremely esoteric exploits, but completely misses swathes of common viruses. In my opinion, it's a steaming pile of worthless.
It was an interesting experience though, because I happened to be there when an obvious bit of malware was spreading unchecked through the network. Google's VirusTotal.com proved absolutely invaluable. It was just another variant of a years-old VB malware, but it was quite a nusiance, which almost nothing was picking up.
The upshot is, Kaspersky, Kingsoft, Sophos, and Symantec were the first engines to identify it as a threat. Other vendors like McAfee, Avast, AntiVir, BitDefender, and many others identified it just a few days later (TOO LATE, in my opinion), so they at least would have contained it if it wasn't so quick to exhibit symptoms. Meanwhile, AVG, Trend, Comodo, and others still don't identify that particular 0-day I unfortunately ran across, and would let it propagate like wildfire.
That's become my general ranking for antivirus solutions... And of the best, Kaspersky is the most expensive. Symantec is significantly cheaper. And Sophos is much cheaper still... they have a FREE one-off scan and disinfect tool which is a great public service to offer, and their business license is as low as $15/machine. Still, it's a toss-up as to whether the director/CTO you'll be dealing with will be a cheap SOB or a paranoid SOB who wants the most recognizable name.
If anyone from Google / VirusTotal is listening... an absolutely killer feature would be to identify exactly WHEN a given AV product was updated to start identifying a given malware file. Of course that's a non-trivial amount of complexity to add to something which is currently much simpler
When do we get them? Electric cars are all the rage... Imagine you had a non-stop range extender! Imagine your car just charges itself when parked anywhere. Better yet, imagine an RV powered by one of these... park out in the middle of nowhere, and still have a decent amount of power. Or in some cases where communities are isolated, how about end-of-the-block SRGs? The best thing about an EV/RV SRG is that the half-life is about 80 years, so just one will last you a couple lifetimes.
A number of years ago, I balparked the cost of RTGs, based on some unverified found info, and decided they were impractically expensive... But with SRGs dramatically improving the efficiency, the cost of the plutonium-238 to power one that'll be a usefully large (for range xextending EV's) would only run a bit over $100,000... a practical sum of money for a very large number of people. So when can we expect to see them on the market?