To prove that data transmission across the vast distance of 1.5 million kilometres is really feasible, the Oerlikon engineers had devised a special experiment in which they set up a laser link between the islands of La Palma and Tenerife. The transmission unit was modified in such a way that the conditions on the 144-kilometre stretch between the islands exactly reflected those that would prevail on a 1.5 million kilometre link through space. This was achieved primarily by reducing the emission aperture of the laser to a diameter of less than half a millimetre in order to weaken the light signal.
"Exactly like in space", except for the medium being (mostly) vacuum, extreme distance of gravity fields like that right next to the Earth, or interaction with all the other stuff, some unpredictable, along the vast interstellar distnaces.
"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." - Yogi Berra
So that's why most mobile phones suck: Symbian's attitude is that developers aren't worth bothering with, phones need to be "sexy" more than "good", and Linux is to be dealt with like a virus, not a solution.
I hope Google does to mobile phones what it did to online search, maps and blogging: makes them work by finally providing some competition in the core function without being trapped in its box.
He's a spitter. Just like you, Anonymous corporate libertarian anarchy Coward, claiming that you're too lazy to click the links in the page I linked to. Typical rightwing scam: pretending it's an argument, when you're just making sounds that appeal to your sense of "gotcha".
I've got a Lego Mindstorms new in the box from last Christmas. I'd pay a developer $50 to make it into something cool that my Bluetooth phone could control. Or entertain requests for more money, if it were cool enough.
Smokers, like other junkies, don't make good decisions about their addictions on their own. As NYC's smokers attested after the smoking ban sank in for a year or so, and the were grateful for the break, and regretful it had taken so long.
I'd love MIT to demo a car like that which rides on NYC subway rails, rolls out of buffers (stocked by trend analysis) on demand, is routed point to point the best route, links up with other cars through their common pathways for increased mutual efficiency, and overall acts like a timeshared private car with autopilot.
In short, convert circuit-switched subways to packet switched rail networks. With better supply fit to actual demand, better energy and routing efficiency strategies, better redundancy, and less room for crooks to hide in unobserved.
The NYC subway switching and signaling systems were last really overhauled in 1937, and still retain major incompatibilities between what was once 3 independent, competing subway companies (and their different tracks/routes/stations). The whole thing should be renovated for the 21st Century, including the update to packet-switching as modern as was the circuit-switching back in the early 20th Century when it transformed New York life into unprecedented convenience, safety and efficiency.
The kind of fanatic libertarian who thinks smokers' expressed gratitude for the break in their addiction cycle is equal to people who loved slavery.
That rightwing talkradio is some good crack. With a Ron Paul chaser, how decadent!
Get back to me when you put your libertarianism where your cornucopia of government services and investments in your life are, and renounce them on the "principle" you're trying to force others to live by. I won't wait up.
No, these punks didn't just change their grades. Anyone can see that their new grades were identical to the grades of other students who created their own grades legitimately by their own work. These punks copied those other students' grades. So, like copying those students' CDs, these punks stole their grades, from other students. Those stolen grades are worth a great deal in the marketplace, entire careers of incomes from the victims.
20 years is too good for these thieves. They should have to spend their sentences listening to each week's Top 50 pop songs, endlessly repeated on commercial radio stations.
Practical approaches have to be measured as alternatives against each other. I pointed out that creating new energy pathways through our industry requires better than adding an efficiency-eating intermediary step, even if that extra decrease has improved efficiency over its previous (prohibitively inefficient) version, if a different, simpler pathway is more efficient overall.
I don't know the true facts of the overall energy budget of corn/ethanol/fuel production. It's so politicized from several directions (petrodollars, agribiz, conflicting factions of environmentalists, inconsistently opportunistic politicians, inane ADD media...) that a clear, definitive analysis seems completely elusive. My intuition tells me that the big picture favors the ethanol over imported petroleum, so long as less petro products like fertilizer, pesticide and energy input, are consumed than the energy content of the ethanol produced (scaled by the efficiency of extracting biofuel vs petrofuel energy). In other words, as long as making enough ethanol to replace petrofuels doesn't require as much petrofuels as it "replaces" in usable energy, the ethanol is a win. Because the ethanol costs to the environment are smaller than in petrofuel production (AFAICT). And the geopolitical costs are much lower (eg. war), while the production expenses are spent much more inside the US economy, a domestic reinvestment that's more efficient in ROI to me and most other Americans than sending it to OPEC.
But I can't be sure. I don't have a conclusion about preferring ethanol to petrofuels because my intuition could be wrong, if some of those "ifs" run the wrong way.
But I do think that domestic biofuel production could replace imported fuel entirely. And that there's probably a way to do it right, without increasing food prices (in fact, probably dropping them), and without poisoning the environment as much as does the imported fuel industry. That's the line of hope I'd like to see proven out.
The majority of people in NYC living under the smoking ban, including smokers, are glad it's in place - even those who oppposed it, who would never have just voluntarily stopped. Just like the vast majority who prefer living under the spitting ban.
BTW, "Current scientific evidence shows that exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke causes death, disease, and disability.
I'm glad the law forces you not to spit or smoke near me in restaurants and bars. Because otherwise you'd be sickening in more than just your manners and your fanatical libertarianism.
That's a fascinating article, with all kinds of fundamental limits specified (like light quanta per CO2 reduced, total global biomass by category, human energy requirements, etc). And several documented experiments showing photosynthesis peaks near its actual QM efficiency (in the chlorophyll band) of 27% (of which 44.5% of photos reaching the Earth make the 12% overall efficiency).
I wonder why the 27% overall efficiency is so much lower than the 90%+ theoretical efficiency of the actual photosynthesis, once it gets started.
Nature might be only 1% efficient, leaving much of the remaining 99% to heat up the Earth. But since so much solar energy research is designed to minimize the Global Warming effects of climate change, I wonder whether increased efficiencies might offer even more benefit than just the tappable energy. If algae could be arranged in large pools to absorb 27%, rather than 1%, of sunlight energy, then that sounds like 27x the energy diverted from heating, so the direct heat reduction of a pool could match that of a pool 27x as large at 1%. If the conversion could be tuned to photons in the other 55.6% natural photosynthesis doesn't absorb (perhaps by finding some phytobenthos or others selected to consume the sunlight filtering through layers of the greener plants), we might be able to turn, say, northern lakes across Canada and Russia into "heat sponges" that buffer the increasing temperatures melting the permafrost.
Maybe even find there's a natural cycle that returns the melt to ice when photosynthetic plants can grow in the newly warmer temperatures of plentiful fresh water and low intensity sunlight. We might choose the risky path of such large scale "terraforming", if certainly faced with the crippling blow that unmitigated melting of global tundra presents. Or at least understand what's going to happen to plan for other contingencies, without trying to deflect them by reengineering the actual bioenergetics working against us.
What a fucking fool you are. We're talking about visible panels of light, not jamming. And I didn't say I wanted to jam them - I asked what to do about them. It's you who want to jam them, as a straw man to argue with.
When I defend myself from actual invasions, it's not "vigilantism", it's self defense. Especially when it's in the form of telling assholes with annoying night lights to shut them off. And assholes like you, their buddy standing next to them, fighting me, screaming that I'm from the RIAA or some other stupid analogy.
I have the right in a dark audience not to have a light in my face. I will defend that right. You don't have the right to shine a light in my face. Since you're such a shit that you can't see that basic fact, I guess I'll have to explain it to you in a dark, crowded room some night - when the anonymity that gives you your moral certainty suddenly evaporates. Thanks for speaking for your entire generation of spoiled, selfish pricks who get off on annoying people more than just getting along. Have a sour, pointless existence.
Other gigantic policies, like invading looting the Treasury, warrantless wiretapping, are not what I'm talking about. Though this government did get reelected. So no, I'm not kidding you. I'd say it's you who's kidding yourself about lack of tacit consensus, even if it's apathy - which is the same thing.
In a democracy, people get the government we deserve, more or less.
Yes, as I've seen myself in NYC subways and buses. Either when I'm shutting down the loudmouth jerk myself to applause or silent nods/smiles of thanks, or applauding someone else doing it for us.
I advise the NYC legislature's Tech committee. We've had hearings about wiring the subways for mobile service, and an important question is how to keep people from shouting into their phones once they work throughout the system. It's a major issue. I don't know where you are, but I'd like to know how your public transit avoids the problem, other than just keeping mouths shut among strangers, which is just not an option in NYC.
You're an asshole, demanding equal asshole rights. If you weren't an Anonymous Coward hiding behind not just an Internet wire but also an anonymous post, I'd be happy to tell you to your face. Just like the assholes waving their toys around for their own amusement, killing that of others, who are out of reach or earshot at shows.
Just because there's a lot of you assholes doesn't mean that I've got to just go along with your trashing public places. In fact, your increasing numbers means more defending my own rights from you. Regardless of you calling it "vigilantism" to tell assholes like you to put down your annoying cameraphones, or comparing acting to protect myself "illegal", or make some asinine comparison to corporations attacking innocent people along with those injuring them.
I am important, when I'm protecting my rights, even to simple adult behavior at adult events. When assholes like you demand to be assholes because there's so many selfish babies like you with annoying toys, it is you who are not so important. Just don't try to argue when I force that toy out of my face.
I asked others here how they'd deal with it. I don't have any use for numbskulls arguing that your increasing selfish minority deserves to trash the good times for the rest of us, just because you can't get over the shiny.
Have any kind of day you want, as long as I don't notice you.
No, you're missing the point of public health. If people were allowed to run disease incubators solely at the discretion of their sleazy clientele, we'd still have spitting and smoking the way we did a hundred years ago. I guess you think mandatory polio vaccinations are Big Brother, and fluoridated water...
So how do we stand up to spitting and littering, without making it a full time job? What kind of business opportunity is there in that?
As for government, most of it is indeed as I described. But there's a lot of government, and a little bad government goes a long way. Most of what the democratic republic does, it does right - that's what keeps the game rolling for them to fleece it in other ways.
I live in the "real" part of the multiverse, where politics and people protecting our rights isn't some comic book where everyone's a loner and simple entrepreneurial economics is the right answer to every problem. Where we all interdepend on each other at least as much as we must compete with each other. And you?
Does it? I'd be willing to believe it, though it's both counterintuitive and contrary to Wikipedia's claim that 70% of vodka is consumed in Russia. Citation?
That feature is under the general problem of phones allowing unsolicited messages from unknown parties, who don't know the phone's phone#, but which are physically near the phone. Then the phone needs secure logic to allow the message to switch its ringer to "private ring" (whether that's always vibrated, or lets an earpiece ring, or some other private signal like a flashing LED).
Probably an upgrade to the Bluetooth protocol, which would allow "system messages" without pairing, if the receiver allows them (which phones should do by default, for that purpose). Lots of personal devices, which is what Bluetooth is for, should have "privacy direction" features. And some clever apps for contacting someone who can see you nearby, but who doesn't have your phone# (yet;).
All of which should be able to be ignored by user preference, but not by default. And ignoring the warnings, both over an acoustic PA and the phone's protocols, should be dealt with harshly by ushers and the like. I think smashing a phone should be allowed as "self defense" in a darkened movie theater when it's gone off after the warnings.
I've seen over 3000 concerts, for over 25 years. What's changed is that now so many people carry cameras, not just the few who used to. And they're using them wrong: the flashes don't do anything. And the innovation of people carrying cameras with glowing preview screens which face the audience, rather than flashes facing the heavily lit stage, is completely new.
And all very annoying.
So if you don't have anything constructive to say, say nothing. You're just one more annoying little flicker with no reason to exist except serving your own selfish whim, as if the rest of us even need to know that you exist.
Another big problem these "phones" now cause is during live concerts and other theatrical events. People point their cameraphones at the stage, from inside the darkened audience. The lights from the preview screen are bright and very distracting. Then there are the people taking flash pictures inside a big room, of a stage lit with hundreds of kilowatts, who sparkle the audience with intermittent, impotent, but annoying flashes.
We can jam these phones' audio with radio that doesn't distract because we can't see that frequency. What can we do to squelch these annoying little lights, wielded by legions of selfish ignoramuses?
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"Exactly like in space", except for the medium being (mostly) vacuum, extreme distance of gravity fields like that right next to the Earth, or interaction with all the other stuff, some unpredictable, along the vast interstellar distnaces.
"In theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is." - Yogi Berra
So that's why most mobile phones suck: Symbian's attitude is that developers aren't worth bothering with, phones need to be "sexy" more than "good", and Linux is to be dealt with like a virus, not a solution.
I hope Google does to mobile phones what it did to online search, maps and blogging: makes them work by finally providing some competition in the core function without being trapped in its box.
He's a spitter. Just like you, Anonymous corporate libertarian anarchy Coward, claiming that you're too lazy to click the links in the page I linked to. Typical rightwing scam: pretending it's an argument, when you're just making sounds that appeal to your sense of "gotcha".
I've got a Lego Mindstorms new in the box from last Christmas. I'd pay a developer $50 to make it into something cool that my Bluetooth phone could control. Or entertain requests for more money, if it were cool enough.
Fat isn't contagious.
But I guess you think highway speed limits are slavery. People should just stay off the roads where people speed too much, right?
Smokers, like other junkies, don't make good decisions about their addictions on their own. As NYC's smokers attested after the smoking ban sank in for a year or so, and the were grateful for the break, and regretful it had taken so long.
I'd love MIT to demo a car like that which rides on NYC subway rails, rolls out of buffers (stocked by trend analysis) on demand, is routed point to point the best route, links up with other cars through their common pathways for increased mutual efficiency, and overall acts like a timeshared private car with autopilot.
In short, convert circuit-switched subways to packet switched rail networks. With better supply fit to actual demand, better energy and routing efficiency strategies, better redundancy, and less room for crooks to hide in unobserved.
The NYC subway switching and signaling systems were last really overhauled in 1937, and still retain major incompatibilities between what was once 3 independent, competing subway companies (and their different tracks/routes/stations). The whole thing should be renovated for the 21st Century, including the update to packet-switching as modern as was the circuit-switching back in the early 20th Century when it transformed New York life into unprecedented convenience, safety and efficiency.
The kind of fanatic libertarian who thinks smokers' expressed gratitude for the break in their addiction cycle is equal to people who loved slavery.
That rightwing talkradio is some good crack. With a Ron Paul chaser, how decadent!
Get back to me when you put your libertarianism where your cornucopia of government services and investments in your life are, and renounce them on the "principle" you're trying to force others to live by. I won't wait up.
Goodbye.
You must be new around here.
Likewise, you fail it.
No, these punks didn't just change their grades. Anyone can see that their new grades were identical to the grades of other students who created their own grades legitimately by their own work. These punks copied those other students' grades. So, like copying those students' CDs, these punks stole their grades, from other students. Those stolen grades are worth a great deal in the marketplace, entire careers of incomes from the victims.
20 years is too good for these thieves. They should have to spend their sentences listening to each week's Top 50 pop songs, endlessly repeated on commercial radio stations.
Practical approaches have to be measured as alternatives against each other. I pointed out that creating new energy pathways through our industry requires better than adding an efficiency-eating intermediary step, even if that extra decrease has improved efficiency over its previous (prohibitively inefficient) version, if a different, simpler pathway is more efficient overall.
I don't know the true facts of the overall energy budget of corn/ethanol/fuel production. It's so politicized from several directions (petrodollars, agribiz, conflicting factions of environmentalists, inconsistently opportunistic politicians, inane ADD media...) that a clear, definitive analysis seems completely elusive. My intuition tells me that the big picture favors the ethanol over imported petroleum, so long as less petro products like fertilizer, pesticide and energy input, are consumed than the energy content of the ethanol produced (scaled by the efficiency of extracting biofuel vs petrofuel energy). In other words, as long as making enough ethanol to replace petrofuels doesn't require as much petrofuels as it "replaces" in usable energy, the ethanol is a win. Because the ethanol costs to the environment are smaller than in petrofuel production (AFAICT). And the geopolitical costs are much lower (eg. war), while the production expenses are spent much more inside the US economy, a domestic reinvestment that's more efficient in ROI to me and most other Americans than sending it to OPEC.
But I can't be sure. I don't have a conclusion about preferring ethanol to petrofuels because my intuition could be wrong, if some of those "ifs" run the wrong way.
But I do think that domestic biofuel production could replace imported fuel entirely. And that there's probably a way to do it right, without increasing food prices (in fact, probably dropping them), and without poisoning the environment as much as does the imported fuel industry. That's the line of hope I'd like to see proven out.
The majority of people in NYC living under the smoking ban, including smokers, are glad it's in place - even those who oppposed it, who would never have just voluntarily stopped. Just like the vast majority who prefer living under the spitting ban.
BTW, "Current scientific evidence shows that exposure to secondhand tobacco smoke causes death, disease, and disability.
And influenza, among other infectious diseases, is spread by spit.
I'm glad the law forces you not to spit or smoke near me in restaurants and bars. Because otherwise you'd be sickening in more than just your manners and your fanatical libertarianism.
That's a fascinating article, with all kinds of fundamental limits specified (like light quanta per CO2 reduced, total global biomass by category, human energy requirements, etc). And several documented experiments showing photosynthesis peaks near its actual QM efficiency (in the chlorophyll band) of 27% (of which 44.5% of photos reaching the Earth make the 12% overall efficiency).
I wonder why the 27% overall efficiency is so much lower than the 90%+ theoretical efficiency of the actual photosynthesis, once it gets started.
Nature might be only 1% efficient, leaving much of the remaining 99% to heat up the Earth. But since so much solar energy research is designed to minimize the Global Warming effects of climate change, I wonder whether increased efficiencies might offer even more benefit than just the tappable energy. If algae could be arranged in large pools to absorb 27%, rather than 1%, of sunlight energy, then that sounds like 27x the energy diverted from heating, so the direct heat reduction of a pool could match that of a pool 27x as large at 1%. If the conversion could be tuned to photons in the other 55.6% natural photosynthesis doesn't absorb (perhaps by finding some phytobenthos or others selected to consume the sunlight filtering through layers of the greener plants), we might be able to turn, say, northern lakes across Canada and Russia into "heat sponges" that buffer the increasing temperatures melting the permafrost.
Maybe even find there's a natural cycle that returns the melt to ice when photosynthetic plants can grow in the newly warmer temperatures of plentiful fresh water and low intensity sunlight. We might choose the risky path of such large scale "terraforming", if certainly faced with the crippling blow that unmitigated melting of global tundra presents. Or at least understand what's going to happen to plan for other contingencies, without trying to deflect them by reengineering the actual bioenergetics working against us.
What a fucking fool you are. We're talking about visible panels of light, not jamming. And I didn't say I wanted to jam them - I asked what to do about them. It's you who want to jam them, as a straw man to argue with.
When I defend myself from actual invasions, it's not "vigilantism", it's self defense. Especially when it's in the form of telling assholes with annoying night lights to shut them off. And assholes like you, their buddy standing next to them, fighting me, screaming that I'm from the RIAA or some other stupid analogy.
I have the right in a dark audience not to have a light in my face. I will defend that right. You don't have the right to shine a light in my face. Since you're such a shit that you can't see that basic fact, I guess I'll have to explain it to you in a dark, crowded room some night - when the anonymity that gives you your moral certainty suddenly evaporates. Thanks for speaking for your entire generation of spoiled, selfish pricks who get off on annoying people more than just getting along. Have a sour, pointless existence.
Smoking in bars.
Other gigantic policies, like invading looting the Treasury, warrantless wiretapping, are not what I'm talking about. Though this government did get reelected. So no, I'm not kidding you. I'd say it's you who's kidding yourself about lack of tacit consensus, even if it's apathy - which is the same thing.
In a democracy, people get the government we deserve, more or less.
Yes, as I've seen myself in NYC subways and buses. Either when I'm shutting down the loudmouth jerk myself to applause or silent nods/smiles of thanks, or applauding someone else doing it for us.
I advise the NYC legislature's Tech committee. We've had hearings about wiring the subways for mobile service, and an important question is how to keep people from shouting into their phones once they work throughout the system. It's a major issue. I don't know where you are, but I'd like to know how your public transit avoids the problem, other than just keeping mouths shut among strangers, which is just not an option in NYC.
You're an asshole, demanding equal asshole rights. If you weren't an Anonymous Coward hiding behind not just an Internet wire but also an anonymous post, I'd be happy to tell you to your face. Just like the assholes waving their toys around for their own amusement, killing that of others, who are out of reach or earshot at shows.
Just because there's a lot of you assholes doesn't mean that I've got to just go along with your trashing public places. In fact, your increasing numbers means more defending my own rights from you. Regardless of you calling it "vigilantism" to tell assholes like you to put down your annoying cameraphones, or comparing acting to protect myself "illegal", or make some asinine comparison to corporations attacking innocent people along with those injuring them.
I am important, when I'm protecting my rights, even to simple adult behavior at adult events. When assholes like you demand to be assholes because there's so many selfish babies like you with annoying toys, it is you who are not so important. Just don't try to argue when I force that toy out of my face.
I asked others here how they'd deal with it. I don't have any use for numbskulls arguing that your increasing selfish minority deserves to trash the good times for the rest of us, just because you can't get over the shiny.
Have any kind of day you want, as long as I don't notice you.
No, you're missing the point of public health. If people were allowed to run disease incubators solely at the discretion of their sleazy clientele, we'd still have spitting and smoking the way we did a hundred years ago. I guess you think mandatory polio vaccinations are Big Brother, and fluoridated water...
So how do we stand up to spitting and littering, without making it a full time job? What kind of business opportunity is there in that?
As for government, most of it is indeed as I described. But there's a lot of government, and a little bad government goes a long way. Most of what the democratic republic does, it does right - that's what keeps the game rolling for them to fleece it in other ways.
I live in the "real" part of the multiverse, where politics and people protecting our rights isn't some comic book where everyone's a loner and simple entrepreneurial economics is the right answer to every problem. Where we all interdepend on each other at least as much as we must compete with each other. And you?
Tacit consensus. They have the power to stop it, but they don't. It's not like these policies are a surprise to anyone.
Does it? I'd be willing to believe it, though it's both counterintuitive and contrary to Wikipedia's claim that 70% of vodka is consumed in Russia. Citation?
That feature is under the general problem of phones allowing unsolicited messages from unknown parties, who don't know the phone's phone#, but which are physically near the phone. Then the phone needs secure logic to allow the message to switch its ringer to "private ring" (whether that's always vibrated, or lets an earpiece ring, or some other private signal like a flashing LED).
;).
Probably an upgrade to the Bluetooth protocol, which would allow "system messages" without pairing, if the receiver allows them (which phones should do by default, for that purpose). Lots of personal devices, which is what Bluetooth is for, should have "privacy direction" features. And some clever apps for contacting someone who can see you nearby, but who doesn't have your phone# (yet
All of which should be able to be ignored by user preference, but not by default. And ignoring the warnings, both over an acoustic PA and the phone's protocols, should be dealt with harshly by ushers and the like. I think smashing a phone should be allowed as "self defense" in a darkened movie theater when it's gone off after the warnings.
I've seen over 3000 concerts, for over 25 years. What's changed is that now so many people carry cameras, not just the few who used to. And they're using them wrong: the flashes don't do anything. And the innovation of people carrying cameras with glowing preview screens which face the audience, rather than flashes facing the heavily lit stage, is completely new.
And all very annoying.
So if you don't have anything constructive to say, say nothing. You're just one more annoying little flicker with no reason to exist except serving your own selfish whim, as if the rest of us even need to know that you exist.
Another big problem these "phones" now cause is during live concerts and other theatrical events. People point their cameraphones at the stage, from inside the darkened audience. The lights from the preview screen are bright and very distracting. Then there are the people taking flash pictures inside a big room, of a stage lit with hundreds of kilowatts, who sparkle the audience with intermittent, impotent, but annoying flashes.
We can jam these phones' audio with radio that doesn't distract because we can't see that frequency. What can we do to squelch these annoying little lights, wielded by legions of selfish ignoramuses?