This is all very interesting. Do you think that my RFID scenario, where the tags are immobile and read by immobile readers, can get to 99% reliability? If the tags and readers are installed in places they're reliably read and then left there. If the readers have to read tags through drywall, studs and maybe cinder block, across up to 30 meters? How about also through concrete floors? Across up to 100m?
There's probably not a lot of use for that scenario with static tag values. But with dynamic tag values, if they're installed in the right place, they could be a cheap one-way sensor network. If they work.
If not, what's the chances that Zigbee will cost under $20 per sensor within the next couple years? Under $10?
The 2011 deficit was $1.299T. The 2011 military budget was unauditable it was so literally out of control, but nearly $1.3T even using the government's (surely undercounting) numbers. Of course cutting the military isn't the only cut, but if it were cut to $400B that would require raising taxes only $400B to balance the budget.
Just making capital gains for people collecting over $250K income the same rate as regular income would raise over $200B of that. A 0.1% financial transaction tax would raise over $100B more. Ensuring that people earning over $1M paid at least 30% taxes, regardless of deductions and loopholes, gets another $35B a year under the Buffett Rule. The remaining $50B or so can be raised by closing loopholes like the scam of borrowing against shares, never selling them until your heirs do when you die. Making "carried interest" by stock traders taxable as income instead of capital gains is another $18B.
That's not many tax changes. They're all already in Congress, including in Obama's budget sent there today, except the financial transaction tax is only proposed at a piddling 0.03%. You can argue about whether any or all of them are worth doing. But it's perfectly clear that cutting defense and raising taxes can produce enough money to balance the budget, and indeed to pay down the debt until the interest no longer generates its own sizeable deficit demanding more debt.
Personally your.sig links to a research project for finding a cancer cure that is funded by a lot of government research.
Also, spending freezes are cutting off funding because costs increase while funding is frozen. If the status quo buys less, the difference with cutting funding is purely wordplay.
For one, nobody knows what the story is with that picture. It could easily have been a pose.
For another, what are you even citing as "anti-intellectual" in that video? It's a guy saying that in technology everything seems possible, while complaining that in social sciences everything is unfairly made to seem impossible.
More importantly, OWS has actual official policies, decided by its General Assemblies. Cite some of those for anti-intellectualism if you can. You can't.
For another, there aren't nearly as many OWS people as there are Republicans who reject evolution (the theory, and possibly the practice).
You merely cited one of many cases in which elected Republicans betray the values of the Republicans (and anyone else) who voted them into power.
For laughs, do you think schools should teach that any random unprovable assertion about the creation of the universe is wrong? Like say it was sneezed out of the nose of a Great Green Arkleseizure?
Then he did nothing to get the country straightened out. He did nothing to create a job or even control spending. He did what he'd always done: giveaway to the rich, grab from everyone else, and interfere with Democrats regardless of the damage to the country.
McConnell's a liar. Your citing his more detailed lie makes nothing clear except that you're willing to repeat his lies.
Claiming the Republican platform claims "all the scientists in the world are part of one big conspiracy" is hyperbole, but it's accurate in sign if not magnitude. That's the point of hyperbole. The constant and consistent Republican attacks on climate science show that the hyperbole is certainly not "outright deception".
The rest of the post is not even hyperbole.
You chose the standard Republican tactic of rejecting everything on the basis of one cherry-picked disagreement. Congratulations on consistency with Republican anti-intellectualism.
Because Bush's AIDS spending was a subsidy to American drug corps it was required to be spent on.
This is true of most foreign aid. Either direct subsidy to American vendors through a foreign customer, or freeing up foreign funds from the American funds' target so foreign funds can be spent on American vendors. And amidst the $billions, some is spent on even less direct strategic subsidies to American vendors.
The benefits of these programmes, while including foreign consumers, typically accrue mainly to the rich Americans who make the foreign deals, and the large shareholders and their financial support class.
Republicans are against evolution and climate change science; Democrats are for them. They are two of the most fundamental sciences bearing on public policy. Before that Republicans were against "tobacco kills science" while Democrats were for it. The list goes on.
The government is responsible for mandates that protect public health. Religions do not get to violate laws because of their unproveable belief.
It's pretty bad that some businesses can ignore a law like health insurance covered expenses, but that's politics. And the politics here was satisfied by a tweak that satisfied the complainer to the government: the Catholic Health Association, that also covered the expense under the insurance.The politics all plays out within the unfair (and Constitution violating) privilege churches get to avoid taxation, under laws that undeniably respect an establishment of religion. And within the surge to Republican frontrunner of Santorum, a fundamentalist Catholic who would outlaw not just all contraception, but any sex apart from procreation.
As for Republicans tending to be more "Conservative", especially fiscally, that is an idea that is nothing but politics.
It's insurance. The women pay for it, along with the rest of their healthcare through insurance.
Contraception is more critical to women's health and wellbeing than to men's because men walk away from pregnancies without health problems, an STDs are more infectious to women. Denying contraception is a way to keep women down.
I haven't worked with RFID sensors, so I'm enjoying the feedback in this discussion from people who have.
I wasn't talking about harvesting the RFID reader energy to power the sensors, though that's interesting even though you say it's not enough. I was talking about powering the sensors and their RFID display by harvesting the mechanical energy of the moving door/window they're sensing. Which, since I have worked with distributed wireless sensors other than RFID (Zigbee, some other standards, some proprietary), could be sufficient depending on the energy consumption of the RFID display components, which is the point of my interest.
What you're saying about the whole approach is that using an RFID reader in a building to read RFID tags, even the currently common static tags, across up to a hundred meters or so through building walls and inventory, will not work reliably. I thought that warehouses were routinely tracking inventory that way, even using 2-3+ readers to locate the tags in 3D space. Are you saying that the reliable range of current RFID readers is just a few meters? Or maybe even less?
I think you're right about inventory control. But I'm interested in cheap, low power, reliable and possibly mobile distributed sensors that use RFID as the transmission network back to the sensor host.
You're right about the HW I'm describing, but I'm talking about the dynamic RFID tag as a sensor network device. For example, every window and door could have one whose RFID digits are flipped only whenever it's opened/closed. Then a RFID reader would poll them periodically (or continuously if desired). The reader is line powered, but the sensors/displays are battery powered (these might even be recharged by the mechanical power opening/closing the door/window, even if that's a human hand). Presence detection could be extended to outdoors, without line power and cheap enough that replacement is no great loss.
That means the sensors are cheap, the batteries last a long time (so cheap to replace over years). And the RFID is constantly available for reading, unlike the intermittent transmission of current wireless distributed sensor tech (Zigbee, etc).
Then, since all wires (not just signal, but also power) are cut, they could be mobile. Two or three RFID readers could stereoscopically monitor location, without any power consumed by the remote node.
It seems cheaper, lower power, more reliable and more mobile than the current alternatives. It also would leverage a larger existing industry (RFID), rather than add a new infrastructure as new sensor tech is doing. Even before some breakthru in printing the actual circuits (and antennas/displays), which would probably eventually arrive, since that's where conventional static RFID is already going.
No, the other reply is correct: I'm not talking about printing a dynamic RFID display. I'm talking about e-ink (or other techniques) simply because they're so low power, and seem otherwise suitable for the application.
The Moon is a great place for collecting solar energy and beaming it back to Earth. It's probably a better place than Earth for fission reactors. It's probably also a great place to locate low gravity and micropressure manufacturing at large scales. Better for experiments and manufacturing of contagious biology. Better than Earth's gravity well for basing Earth satellite maintenance and operations. All of those have both scientific and engineering/commercial benefits.
And then there's all the benefits for exploring, experimenting on and expoiting the rest of the Solar system, and beyond. Especially as an energy base outside the Earth, its gravity well and its ecosystems.
Beyond the direct science and commercial benefits, putting a manned American base on the Moon is good for the country, and good for the species (while being good for the country as a leader in the species). That kind of achievement is inspiring in its own right.
Which is why liars like Newt hijack it: cannibalize the inspiration with cheap talk. Newt and his ilk are interested in good national investments only as scams to reap for their own personal glory and money for a few plutocrat sponsors. But the actual value, easy to recognize, is what attracts them to redirect them into scams. A Lunar base isn't fool's gold - it's the real gold in the hills that Newt discredits with goldplated lies.
I'm not looking to print the logic that maintains the display, or the display. That would be awesome, and cheap, but the "ink" I'm talking about isn't really ink. It's just called that because it's a "set and forget" device, like ink is, even though it's dynamic (resetable), addressable - just not as quickly as displays whose state must be actively maintained. For example e-ink displays in the (monochrome, for simplicity) Kindle are an array of tiny balls, black one one hemisphere and white on the other, that are flipped by a tiny charge but stay in place without applying power.
Something like that, which is "black/white" in the RF band rather than the visible, seems like a very useful approach to radio telecom. It might not cost $0.10 apiece, but $1 or even $10 apiece is better than the $20-30 apiece alternatives like Zigbee (and any other 802.15.4 radios, and alternatives like Ant). And instead of powering broadcast by the remote nodes, they could spend power on only flipping the RFID "digits" on the display. Which means longer battery life, or more power for more complex remote operations, like sensing and data preprocessing, or smaller/cheaper batteries. Plus constantly displaying the remote node state for reading by more centralized, line powered readers means more reliability and less complex telemetry acquisition procedures than the radio network broadcasts that consume power every transmit to join the network, repeat frames every time (without handshaking) to improve delivery probability, etc.
Plus I think RFID has a much larger installed base than any low-power radio network like Zigbee has; maybe even more than Bluetooth. If the remote nodes never receive any data, but only send back to the reader, like RFID, then "dynamic RFID" seems like the best model for cheap/reliable, and therefore ubiquitous.
You're not getting me. I favor funding NASA 10x its current budget, even raising my taxes to do so, but preferably at the expense of waste like the Pentagon.
But even a committed NASA booster like me doesn't see how discovering exoplanets benefits any field but astronomy. Which for me is plenty worth it. But exoplanets don't improve electronics, medicine, medical sensors, weather reporting/prediction, orbital imaging for terrestrial resource exploration, materials. Nor does the instrumentation or science developed to discover them actually spin off into those. Discovering exoplanets is a very narrow discipline with little spinoff.
AFAIK, anyway. If you are getting me but disagree, can you link to anything showing exoplanet science spinoffs into other developments outside astronomy?
Why not put the entire Atari 800 in FPGA, in a PC, and use SVGA (and higher) output? That sounds like a really fun turn that "classics emulation" could take.
Are Atari computer game ROMs and software binaries still copyright restricted?
Well, e-ink is a tech that uses electrostatics to position and maintain the display states, but it seems to me that magnetics, possibly optics, or even microfluidics - or something else - could be used to do it. What they have in common is digital control, so "digital ink". But probably e-ink is the method an RFID display would use, since it's the most mature and cheap.
The Kindle is pretty cheap, partly because it uses e-ink. An e-ink RFID display with only 64 pixels seems pretty cheap, depending on the expense of converting from visible light to RF display elements.
Slashdot Mirror
This is all very interesting. Do you think that my RFID scenario, where the tags are immobile and read by immobile readers, can get to 99% reliability? If the tags and readers are installed in places they're reliably read and then left there. If the readers have to read tags through drywall, studs and maybe cinder block, across up to 30 meters? How about also through concrete floors? Across up to 100m?
There's probably not a lot of use for that scenario with static tag values. But with dynamic tag values, if they're installed in the right place, they could be a cheap one-way sensor network. If they work.
If not, what's the chances that Zigbee will cost under $20 per sensor within the next couple years? Under $10?
Who made the generics?
The 2011 deficit was $1.299T. The 2011 military budget was unauditable it was so literally out of control, but nearly $1.3T even using the government's (surely undercounting) numbers. Of course cutting the military isn't the only cut, but if it were cut to $400B that would require raising taxes only $400B to balance the budget.
Just making capital gains for people collecting over $250K income the same rate as regular income would raise over $200B of that. A 0.1% financial transaction tax would raise over $100B more. Ensuring that people earning over $1M paid at least 30% taxes, regardless of deductions and loopholes, gets another $35B a year under the Buffett Rule. The remaining $50B or so can be raised by closing loopholes like the scam of borrowing against shares, never selling them until your heirs do when you die. Making "carried interest" by stock traders taxable as income instead of capital gains is another $18B.
That's not many tax changes. They're all already in Congress, including in Obama's budget sent there today, except the financial transaction tax is only proposed at a piddling 0.03%. You can argue about whether any or all of them are worth doing. But it's perfectly clear that cutting defense and raising taxes can produce enough money to balance the budget, and indeed to pay down the debt until the interest no longer generates its own sizeable deficit demanding more debt.
Personally your .sig links to a research project for finding a cancer cure that is funded by a lot of government research.
Also, spending freezes are cutting off funding because costs increase while funding is frozen. If the status quo buys less, the difference with cutting funding is purely wordplay.
For one, nobody knows what the story is with that picture. It could easily have been a pose.
For another, what are you even citing as "anti-intellectual" in that video? It's a guy saying that in technology everything seems possible, while complaining that in social sciences everything is unfairly made to seem impossible.
More importantly, OWS has actual official policies, decided by its General Assemblies. Cite some of those for anti-intellectualism if you can. You can't.
For another, there aren't nearly as many OWS people as there are Republicans who reject evolution (the theory, and possibly the practice).
You merely cited one of many cases in which elected Republicans betray the values of the Republicans (and anyone else) who voted them into power.
For laughs, do you think schools should teach that any random unprovable assertion about the creation of the universe is wrong? Like say it was sneezed out of the nose of a Great Green Arkleseizure?
Then he did nothing to get the country straightened out. He did nothing to create a job or even control spending. He did what he'd always done: giveaway to the rich, grab from everyone else, and interfere with Democrats regardless of the damage to the country.
McConnell's a liar. Your citing his more detailed lie makes nothing clear except that you're willing to repeat his lies.
Claiming the Republican platform claims "all the scientists in the world are part of one big conspiracy" is hyperbole, but it's accurate in sign if not magnitude. That's the point of hyperbole. The constant and consistent Republican attacks on climate science show that the hyperbole is certainly not "outright deception".
The rest of the post is not even hyperbole.
You chose the standard Republican tactic of rejecting everything on the basis of one cherry-picked disagreement. Congratulations on consistency with Republican anti-intellectualism.
Because Bush's AIDS spending was a subsidy to American drug corps it was required to be spent on.
This is true of most foreign aid. Either direct subsidy to American vendors through a foreign customer, or freeing up foreign funds from the American funds' target so foreign funds can be spent on American vendors. And amidst the $billions, some is spent on even less direct strategic subsidies to American vendors.
The benefits of these programmes, while including foreign consumers, typically accrue mainly to the rich Americans who make the foreign deals, and the large shareholders and their financial support class.
Republicans are against evolution and climate change science; Democrats are for them. They are two of the most fundamental sciences bearing on public policy. Before that Republicans were against "tobacco kills science" while Democrats were for it. The list goes on.
Your false equivalence is what's bullshit.
The government is responsible for mandates that protect public health. Religions do not get to violate laws because of their unproveable belief.
It's pretty bad that some businesses can ignore a law like health insurance covered expenses, but that's politics. And the politics here was satisfied by a tweak that satisfied the complainer to the government: the Catholic Health Association, that also covered the expense under the insurance.The politics all plays out within the unfair (and Constitution violating) privilege churches get to avoid taxation, under laws that undeniably respect an establishment of religion. And within the surge to Republican frontrunner of Santorum, a fundamentalist Catholic who would outlaw not just all contraception, but any sex apart from procreation.
As for Republicans tending to be more "Conservative", especially fiscally, that is an idea that is nothing but politics.
It's insurance. The women pay for it, along with the rest of their healthcare through insurance.
Contraception is more critical to women's health and wellbeing than to men's because men walk away from pregnancies without health problems, an STDs are more infectious to women. Denying contraception is a way to keep women down.
I haven't worked with RFID sensors, so I'm enjoying the feedback in this discussion from people who have.
I wasn't talking about harvesting the RFID reader energy to power the sensors, though that's interesting even though you say it's not enough. I was talking about powering the sensors and their RFID display by harvesting the mechanical energy of the moving door/window they're sensing. Which, since I have worked with distributed wireless sensors other than RFID (Zigbee, some other standards, some proprietary), could be sufficient depending on the energy consumption of the RFID display components, which is the point of my interest.
What you're saying about the whole approach is that using an RFID reader in a building to read RFID tags, even the currently common static tags, across up to a hundred meters or so through building walls and inventory, will not work reliably. I thought that warehouses were routinely tracking inventory that way, even using 2-3+ readers to locate the tags in 3D space. Are you saying that the reliable range of current RFID readers is just a few meters? Or maybe even less?
How long until there's an Android app that keeps a swarm of cars scurrying around me as I walk around?
Swarm of copters?
Idiot troll.
I think you're right about inventory control. But I'm interested in cheap, low power, reliable and possibly mobile distributed sensors that use RFID as the transmission network back to the sensor host.
That's already a risk with rewritable static RFID tags. I'm surprised we haven't seen such an exploit in the wild already reported on Slashdot.
You're right about the HW I'm describing, but I'm talking about the dynamic RFID tag as a sensor network device. For example, every window and door could have one whose RFID digits are flipped only whenever it's opened/closed. Then a RFID reader would poll them periodically (or continuously if desired). The reader is line powered, but the sensors/displays are battery powered (these might even be recharged by the mechanical power opening/closing the door/window, even if that's a human hand). Presence detection could be extended to outdoors, without line power and cheap enough that replacement is no great loss.
That means the sensors are cheap, the batteries last a long time (so cheap to replace over years). And the RFID is constantly available for reading, unlike the intermittent transmission of current wireless distributed sensor tech (Zigbee, etc).
Then, since all wires (not just signal, but also power) are cut, they could be mobile. Two or three RFID readers could stereoscopically monitor location, without any power consumed by the remote node.
It seems cheaper, lower power, more reliable and more mobile than the current alternatives. It also would leverage a larger existing industry (RFID), rather than add a new infrastructure as new sensor tech is doing. Even before some breakthru in printing the actual circuits (and antennas/displays), which would probably eventually arrive, since that's where conventional static RFID is already going.
No, the other reply is correct: I'm not talking about printing a dynamic RFID display. I'm talking about e-ink (or other techniques) simply because they're so low power, and seem otherwise suitable for the application.
The Moon is a great place for collecting solar energy and beaming it back to Earth. It's probably a better place than Earth for fission reactors. It's probably also a great place to locate low gravity and micropressure manufacturing at large scales. Better for experiments and manufacturing of contagious biology. Better than Earth's gravity well for basing Earth satellite maintenance and operations. All of those have both scientific and engineering/commercial benefits.
And then there's all the benefits for exploring, experimenting on and expoiting the rest of the Solar system, and beyond. Especially as an energy base outside the Earth, its gravity well and its ecosystems.
Beyond the direct science and commercial benefits, putting a manned American base on the Moon is good for the country, and good for the species (while being good for the country as a leader in the species). That kind of achievement is inspiring in its own right.
Which is why liars like Newt hijack it: cannibalize the inspiration with cheap talk. Newt and his ilk are interested in good national investments only as scams to reap for their own personal glory and money for a few plutocrat sponsors. But the actual value, easy to recognize, is what attracts them to redirect them into scams. A Lunar base isn't fool's gold - it's the real gold in the hills that Newt discredits with goldplated lies.
I'm not looking to print the logic that maintains the display, or the display. That would be awesome, and cheap, but the "ink" I'm talking about isn't really ink. It's just called that because it's a "set and forget" device, like ink is, even though it's dynamic (resetable), addressable - just not as quickly as displays whose state must be actively maintained. For example e-ink displays in the (monochrome, for simplicity) Kindle are an array of tiny balls, black one one hemisphere and white on the other, that are flipped by a tiny charge but stay in place without applying power.
Something like that, which is "black/white" in the RF band rather than the visible, seems like a very useful approach to radio telecom. It might not cost $0.10 apiece, but $1 or even $10 apiece is better than the $20-30 apiece alternatives like Zigbee (and any other 802.15.4 radios, and alternatives like Ant). And instead of powering broadcast by the remote nodes, they could spend power on only flipping the RFID "digits" on the display. Which means longer battery life, or more power for more complex remote operations, like sensing and data preprocessing, or smaller/cheaper batteries. Plus constantly displaying the remote node state for reading by more centralized, line powered readers means more reliability and less complex telemetry acquisition procedures than the radio network broadcasts that consume power every transmit to join the network, repeat frames every time (without handshaking) to improve delivery probability, etc.
Plus I think RFID has a much larger installed base than any low-power radio network like Zigbee has; maybe even more than Bluetooth. If the remote nodes never receive any data, but only send back to the reader, like RFID, then "dynamic RFID" seems like the best model for cheap/reliable, and therefore ubiquitous.
ADC seems pretty cheap, straightforward and common in the kind of FPGA board you'd put in a PC and run an Atari simulation on.
The real question is whether ANTIC, POKEY and other complex circuits are available as FPGA cores, since a 6502 core is available.
You're not getting me. I favor funding NASA 10x its current budget, even raising my taxes to do so, but preferably at the expense of waste like the Pentagon.
But even a committed NASA booster like me doesn't see how discovering exoplanets benefits any field but astronomy. Which for me is plenty worth it. But exoplanets don't improve electronics, medicine, medical sensors, weather reporting/prediction, orbital imaging for terrestrial resource exploration, materials. Nor does the instrumentation or science developed to discover them actually spin off into those. Discovering exoplanets is a very narrow discipline with little spinoff.
AFAIK, anyway. If you are getting me but disagree, can you link to anything showing exoplanet science spinoffs into other developments outside astronomy?
Why not put the entire Atari 800 in FPGA, in a PC, and use SVGA (and higher) output? That sounds like a really fun turn that "classics emulation" could take.
Are Atari computer game ROMs and software binaries still copyright restricted?
Well, e-ink is a tech that uses electrostatics to position and maintain the display states, but it seems to me that magnetics, possibly optics, or even microfluidics - or something else - could be used to do it. What they have in common is digital control, so "digital ink". But probably e-ink is the method an RFID display would use, since it's the most mature and cheap.
The Kindle is pretty cheap, partly because it uses e-ink. An e-ink RFID display with only 64 pixels seems pretty cheap, depending on the expense of converting from visible light to RF display elements.