I'm no expert here, but it's my understanding that the shuttles really aren't intended for such long-duration use. Even the Soyuz capsules have a limited shelf-life. You've got cryogenic liquids powering the fuel cells, corrosive propellants in the thrusters, and who knows what else that won't keep. And I'd assume that you have to keep the temperature inside regulated to some degree, which might take a significant amount of power.
In short, that's a whole lot of complex hardware to maintain for a task that could be accomplished by something much simpler - like the existing Soyuz capsules.
I can't speak for Think Geek, but I'm quietly selling balloon payload computers now. The current board rev was intended for internal testing only, but there was enough demand that we built some extras and sold them. The next version will be more flexible and will let the user run their own code on an Arduino and maintain separation from the critical tracking tasks. For now, it's really almost too simple for educational uses. With the callsign pre-set, you only have to pop in a couple of lithium batteries, plug in the antenna, and switch it on. You get position, velocity, altitude, temperature, battery voltage, and barometric pressure, and a radio range of maybe 100 miles at altitude. It's about the size and weight of a deck of cards.
You'll still need a ham radio license, though. And you'll need to scrounge up a balloon and helium. I'd like to be able to put together a kit that would use disposable helium tanks from Wal-Mart, but even with two tanks you could only lift a very light payload.
I've got another prototype on my bench that has slow-scan TV capability to send back pictures over the air (in old-school analog modes) but I haven't had time to set up a proper ground station to test it.
"Most favored nation" makes it sound like we're awarding them BFF status or something. Go look it up:
"In international trade, MFN status (or treatment) is awarded by one nation to another. It means that the receiving nation will be granted all trade advantages -- such as low tariffs -- that any other nation also receives. In effect, a nation with MFN status will not be discriminated against and will not be treated worse than any other nation with MFN status."
Do you have ANY idea what this would mean? It's not just the Walmarts of the world that deal with China.
I run a very small company - just a couple of geeks in a little office/warehouse. We do enough business for both of us to pay the rent and put food on the table, with the occasional mention in Make or hackaday as a side benefit. We take pride in doing as much of our work domestically as we can and sourcing locally whenever possible, but I can tell you we wouldn't last 3 months without trade with China.
Global supply chains are far too interconnected for something so drastic. When the economy tanked in 2008, despite the fact that we still had plenty of orders coming in we almost went under when we couldn't get the parts we needed. Even when *our* suppliers were OK, if one of *their* suppliers was in trouble we felt it.
People seem to have this weird idea that there's some sort of China, Inc. that just sits over there on the other side of the Pacific building plastic widgets to cram down our throats via Walmart. That's not how it works. China's far from blameless, but "close our markets to Chinese exports" is right up there with "nuke Baghdad" for brilliant foreign policy.
"They need to use him for breaking into stuff, it's what he's good at apparently."
But he's NOT good at keeping his mouth shut and not getting caught, which is a bigger requirement for that sort of work. He might find work for a private firm, but no sensible government agency would hire him.
"Maybe the guy who pushed this rule is actually addicted to porn and wants to create a giant archive of it all, print it out and then roll around in the pages."
Dude... all you need for that is Usenet and a printer.
And on a completely unrelated note, make sure you wear gloves while refilling your printer's continuous ink supply system. Looks like I murdered a freakin' clown...
So yes, maybe up a bit from the early 1980s, but down by more than half from 1995. I suspect you'd see the same trend elsewhere.
I don't mean to be discouraging about the hobby - in fact, I make a living in large part from designing and producing ham related equipment. And really, I think it's possible that the hobby as a whole is getting more technical and more experimentation-oriented again. Short-range VHF/UHF voice communications and long-range HF voice and Morse code were the main reasons many people got into the hobby in the past, and now ubiquitous cell phones, email, and cheap long distance calling have eliminated most of the draw for the sort of ham who might be pejoratively described as an 'appliance operator'. Those who bother to get licensed these days are more likely to be geeks and DIYers.
If you use the FCC spectrum auctions of recent years as a yardstick, then the spectrum hams have available to them for free is worth billions of dollars. If you have any interest at all in hardware hacking or emergency preparedness, it's well worth the trouble to get your ham license.
I'd always assumed the idea of "NSA agents" was a myth, too. But if you visit the National Cryptologic Museum, there's a memorial there - apparently a duplicate of the one at Fort Meade - honoring fallen cryptologists. I seem to remember that a bunch of the names were actually just stars, because their identities were still secret. From the museum's website:
"The Memorial Wall was designed by an NSA employee and is 12 feet wide and eight feet high, centered with a triangle. The words "They Served in Silence," etched into the polished stone at the cap of the triangle, recognize that cryptologic service has always been a silent service - secretive by its very nature. Below these words, the NSA seal and the names of 153 military and civilian cryptologists who have given their lives in service to their country are engraved in the granite. The names are at the base of the triangle because these cryptologists and their ideals - dedication to mission, dedication to workmate, and dedication to country - form the foundation for cryptologic service."
I have to say that 153 sounds like an awfully high death toll if we're talking about desk workers.
'Not doing anything' would be keeping your cash under the mattress. In this case you're making money available to others who WILL do something useful with it. Or at least something more monetarily productive than investing in fuel cells.
It's a stand-alone time clock. You can buy them at Office Depot. I've never seen one with a mechanism for getting any sort of hash or minutiae data from it. It's certainly conceivable, but why would anyone go to that trouble? Anyone that intent on violating your privacy could pick up a latent print from some other object much easier. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with some very innocent-seeming task that would let you get a full set of prints from a job candidate without them ever suspecting anything.
Personally, I'd trust an employer less with my social security number - at least with the time clock I could be reasonably certain no one was going to accidentally release that information.
When I picked up a camper van in Auckland and started driving around New Zealand (and once I'd gotten over my initial terror at driving on the wrong side of the road) I found it was really easy to adapt. I made a game of it for an hour or so, trying to pick an object in the distance when I thought it was 1 km away and watching the odometer to see how close I was.
The only time it nearly caused a problem was one evening when I came to a turn that was marked <<<< 45 <<<< and I instinctively slowed down to about 50. 50 mph, that is.
So if you need a rule of thumb for metric speeds, remember that 45 kph is the speed at which you can negotiate a sharp bend on a wet road in a top-heavy camper van without crapping your pants.
That's great, but a VM Ethernet switch still doesn't offer the same gut satisfaction when it comes to shutting someone down.
Back when I worked for the Air Force and the base I worked at was making the transition from a bunch of random little networks strung together with a 10 mbit CATV coax backbone and a single T1 line to a real campus with a fiber and a firewall, we had a Major in charge of our group (one of the few with real technical knowledge to ever hold that post) who's favorite policy enforcement tool was a pair of wire cutters.
Yeah, it could have been done less dramatically, but sometimes a little showmanship is called for.
"Without the Loran our sneaky ways will have to be changed"
Come up with a list of 100 words. Danish, Esperanto, Klingon, or whatever. Assign numbers from 00 to 99. Read off your GPS coordinates using one word for every two digits. Save time by pre-defining large grids with special names to avoid having to read off more digits than necessary.
I've got notes around here somewhere on a more sophisticated version of that I was playing with for search and rescue use - not to conceal anything, but to be more efficient and accurate than reading strings of numbers. The words were simple, of a consistent number of syllables, phonetically distinct (long Hamming distance) and with multiple lists you can make it tolerant of transposition of words. The idea was for the encoding to be done on a GPS receiver - you wouldn't need to do it manually.
What history of modems completely skips the Telebit Trailblazer? Roughly 18 kbps in 1985 - many years before 14.4k modems became common. Expensive enough to be out of reach of most BBS'ers, though. But worth the money if you were doing UUCP over a long distance call every night.
Only in Western tradition. In China, there were five - Fire, Earth, Water, Metal, and Wood. They're also associated with points of the compass, which in theory ought to make it easier to navigate the gigantic Elements mall in Hong Kong, but in my experience you just wind up wandering in circles, wondering how the hell you wound up back in the 'Metal' section yet again when all you want is a coffee at Starbucks.
Apparently 'you are here' marks on maps are not a part of Eastern tradition.
96 people died, not because of rioting hooligans, but because of lack of effective crowd control. The stadium was under capacity, but people were crushed to death because no one was properly directing the rush of fans.
See also:
Luzhniki Disaster Ibrox Disaster Ellis Park Stadium Disaster The 2009 Birmingham Millennium Point stampede
I'm pretty sure someone here has this sig:
"A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."
I also worked for one of the first (maybe the first?) companies to develop such a system and use it in the US - they'd already build a similar system overseas. I didn't work directly on that project to any real degree, but I was there in the early days and at that time migrant field workers were their ONLY users.
Not that the companies ever had any trouble paying the illegal aliens with checks. This system just meant less work distributing checks, no issuing replacements for lost checks, and lower fees for the workers who didn't have to go to a check cashing outfit.
Was the company you worked for by any chance founded by a red-haired guy with a 4-letter last name?
The black gadget at the top of the picture appears to be one of my OpenTracker+ kits - I see that Geoff ordered a couple back in May. So I'm going to take this opportunity for a brief shameless plug:
His main payload computer looks to be wholly custom-built, but the OpenTracker+ (that handles taking data from the GPS receiver and transmitting it over the radio) is an off-the-shelf kit that takes maybe an hour to build, if you don't want to pay an extra few bucks for a pre-assembled unit.
It's based on the Freescale MC908JL16 microcontroller, the full source code is available under the BSD license, and it'll compile with the free version of the Codewarrior IDE. It's got a serial bootloader, so there's no need for a device programmer. If you're comfortable with C programming, it's a very cheap way to build a simple, customizable tracking and telemetry system. Or just run the regular firmware and it'll do a whole bunch of stuff without modification.
Its larger cousin, the Tracker2, does a whole lot more and the code is released under GPLv3, but unfortunately you can't compile it with the free version of the IDE. It does include a simple scripting engine, though - written mostly so balloon builders would stop bugging me with minor ad hoc changes for their particular setup.
I'm a clean cut white guy, born in the US, a business owner with no criminal record and a (now expired) security clearance, and I still get treated like a criminal by US customs, more often than not. I guess you can consider that a victory for equal rights - they treat everyone like crap, regardless. I've been treated worse by customs in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the world. From China to Bosnia, no other country has ever hassled me. Had some confusion with Thai customs when they misread a Chinese receipt, but at least they were polite.
I did discover a little trick on my last return from Asia, though. After passing through most of the customs crap, I had an agent approach me and start their 'casual' secondary questioning. Turns out the key to ending that quickly is to immediately launch into excessive, tedious detail about all of the trade shows you visited, vendors you met with, and so on.
That only goes so far with the guy at the desk who's got a list of questions he needs answered, but a little extra detail does seem to shift them from 'interrogate' mode to 'let's just hurry up and get rid of this guy.' Sure, they might not need to be declared, but since he asked I'll tell him about the toy helicopter I got for my son in Shenzhen, and the Lego knock-off set I got for my daughter, and the cute cat figurine I got for my girlfriend during the stopover in Narita.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2320#comic
I'm no expert here, but it's my understanding that the shuttles really aren't intended for such long-duration use. Even the Soyuz capsules have a limited shelf-life. You've got cryogenic liquids powering the fuel cells, corrosive propellants in the thrusters, and who knows what else that won't keep. And I'd assume that you have to keep the temperature inside regulated to some degree, which might take a significant amount of power.
In short, that's a whole lot of complex hardware to maintain for a task that could be accomplished by something much simpler - like the existing Soyuz capsules.
I can't speak for Think Geek, but I'm quietly selling balloon payload computers now. The current board rev was intended for internal testing only, but there was enough demand that we built some extras and sold them. The next version will be more flexible and will let the user run their own code on an Arduino and maintain separation from the critical tracking tasks. For now, it's really almost too simple for educational uses. With the callsign pre-set, you only have to pop in a couple of lithium batteries, plug in the antenna, and switch it on. You get position, velocity, altitude, temperature, battery voltage, and barometric pressure, and a radio range of maybe 100 miles at altitude. It's about the size and weight of a deck of cards.
You'll still need a ham radio license, though. And you'll need to scrounge up a balloon and helium. I'd like to be able to put together a kit that would use disposable helium tanks from Wal-Mart, but even with two tanks you could only lift a very light payload.
I've got another prototype on my bench that has slow-scan TV capability to send back pictures over the air (in old-school analog modes) but I haven't had time to set up a proper ground station to test it.
Seriously, WTF? How about a sentence telling us what the 'flash problem' is, and maybe a bit about WHY the article is interesting?
"Most favored nation" makes it sound like we're awarding them BFF status or something. Go look it up:
"In international trade, MFN status (or treatment) is awarded by one nation to another. It means that the receiving nation will be granted all trade advantages -- such as low tariffs -- that any other nation also receives. In effect, a nation with MFN status will not be discriminated against and will not be treated worse than any other nation with MFN status."
Do you have ANY idea what this would mean? It's not just the Walmarts of the world that deal with China.
I run a very small company - just a couple of geeks in a little office/warehouse. We do enough business for both of us to pay the rent and put food on the table, with the occasional mention in Make or hackaday as a side benefit. We take pride in doing as much of our work domestically as we can and sourcing locally whenever possible, but I can tell you we wouldn't last 3 months without trade with China.
Global supply chains are far too interconnected for something so drastic. When the economy tanked in 2008, despite the fact that we still had plenty of orders coming in we almost went under when we couldn't get the parts we needed. Even when *our* suppliers were OK, if one of *their* suppliers was in trouble we felt it.
People seem to have this weird idea that there's some sort of China, Inc. that just sits over there on the other side of the Pacific building plastic widgets to cram down our throats via Walmart. That's not how it works. China's far from blameless, but "close our markets to Chinese exports" is right up there with "nuke Baghdad" for brilliant foreign policy.
"Look, I'll make it simple for you: businesses != individuals."
I'm a sole proprietor, you insensitive clod!
"They need to use him for breaking into stuff, it's what he's good at apparently."
But he's NOT good at keeping his mouth shut and not getting caught, which is a bigger requirement for that sort of work. He might find work for a private firm, but no sensible government agency would hire him.
"Maybe the guy who pushed this rule is actually addicted to porn and wants to create a giant archive of it all, print it out and then roll around in the pages."
Dude... all you need for that is Usenet and a printer.
And on a completely unrelated note, make sure you wear gloves while refilling your printer's continuous ink supply system. Looks like I murdered a freakin' clown...
I don't have the figures for the US, but check out this graph of the number of licensed hams in Japan from 1953 to 2006:
http://www.k0nr.com/blog/uploaded_images/Japan-radio-license-chart-710990.jpg
So yes, maybe up a bit from the early 1980s, but down by more than half from 1995. I suspect you'd see the same trend elsewhere.
I don't mean to be discouraging about the hobby - in fact, I make a living in large part from designing and producing ham related equipment. And really, I think it's possible that the hobby as a whole is getting more technical and more experimentation-oriented again. Short-range VHF/UHF voice communications and long-range HF voice and Morse code were the main reasons many people got into the hobby in the past, and now ubiquitous cell phones, email, and cheap long distance calling have eliminated most of the draw for the sort of ham who might be pejoratively described as an 'appliance operator'. Those who bother to get licensed these days are more likely to be geeks and DIYers.
If you use the FCC spectrum auctions of recent years as a yardstick, then the spectrum hams have available to them for free is worth billions of dollars. If you have any interest at all in hardware hacking or emergency preparedness, it's well worth the trouble to get your ham license.
Just curious, what Garmin GPS are you using for APRS, and what equipment was used for that Rubicon message?
Scott
N1VG
I'd always assumed the idea of "NSA agents" was a myth, too. But if you visit the National Cryptologic Museum, there's a memorial there - apparently a duplicate of the one at Fort Meade - honoring fallen cryptologists. I seem to remember that a bunch of the names were actually just stars, because their identities were still secret. From the museum's website:
"The Memorial Wall was designed by an NSA employee and is 12 feet wide and eight feet high, centered with a triangle. The words "They Served in Silence," etched into the polished stone at the cap of the triangle, recognize that cryptologic service has always been a silent service - secretive by its very nature. Below these words, the NSA seal and the names of 153 military and civilian cryptologists who have given their lives in service to their country are engraved in the granite. The names are at the base of the triangle because these cryptologists and their ideals - dedication to mission, dedication to workmate, and dedication to country - form the foundation for cryptologic service."
I have to say that 153 sounds like an awfully high death toll if we're talking about desk workers.
I came across one in Hong Kong called "DON'T STEAL MY FUCKING WIFI". And of course, it was unsecured.
'Not doing anything' would be keeping your cash under the mattress. In this case you're making money available to others who WILL do something useful with it. Or at least something more monetarily productive than investing in fuel cells.
It's a stand-alone time clock. You can buy them at Office Depot. I've never seen one with a mechanism for getting any sort of hash or minutiae data from it. It's certainly conceivable, but why would anyone go to that trouble? Anyone that intent on violating your privacy could pick up a latent print from some other object much easier. It doesn't take much imagination to come up with some very innocent-seeming task that would let you get a full set of prints from a job candidate without them ever suspecting anything.
Personally, I'd trust an employer less with my social security number - at least with the time clock I could be reasonably certain no one was going to accidentally release that information.
When I picked up a camper van in Auckland and started driving around New Zealand (and once I'd gotten over my initial terror at driving on the wrong side of the road) I found it was really easy to adapt. I made a game of it for an hour or so, trying to pick an object in the distance when I thought it was 1 km away and watching the odometer to see how close I was.
The only time it nearly caused a problem was one evening when I came to a turn that was marked <<<< 45 <<<< and I instinctively slowed down to about 50. 50 mph, that is.
So if you need a rule of thumb for metric speeds, remember that 45 kph is the speed at which you can negotiate a sharp bend on a wet road in a top-heavy camper van without crapping your pants.
That's great, but a VM Ethernet switch still doesn't offer the same gut satisfaction when it comes to shutting someone down.
Back when I worked for the Air Force and the base I worked at was making the transition from a bunch of random little networks strung together with a 10 mbit CATV coax backbone and a single T1 line to a real campus with a fiber and a firewall, we had a Major in charge of our group (one of the few with real technical knowledge to ever hold that post) who's favorite policy enforcement tool was a pair of wire cutters.
Yeah, it could have been done less dramatically, but sometimes a little showmanship is called for.
"Without the Loran our sneaky ways will have to be changed"
Come up with a list of 100 words. Danish, Esperanto, Klingon, or whatever. Assign numbers from 00 to 99. Read off your GPS coordinates using one word for every two digits. Save time by pre-defining large grids with special names to avoid having to read off more digits than necessary.
I've got notes around here somewhere on a more sophisticated version of that I was playing with for search and rescue use - not to conceal anything, but to be more efficient and accurate than reading strings of numbers. The words were simple, of a consistent number of syllables, phonetically distinct (long Hamming distance) and with multiple lists you can make it tolerant of transposition of words. The idea was for the encoding to be done on a GPS receiver - you wouldn't need to do it manually.
What history of modems completely skips the Telebit Trailblazer? Roughly 18 kbps in 1985 - many years before 14.4k modems became common. Expensive enough to be out of reach of most BBS'ers, though. But worth the money if you were doing UUCP over a long distance call every night.
Only in Western tradition. In China, there were five - Fire, Earth, Water, Metal, and Wood. They're also associated with points of the compass, which in theory ought to make it easier to navigate the gigantic Elements mall in Hong Kong, but in my experience you just wind up wandering in circles, wondering how the hell you wound up back in the 'Metal' section yet again when all you want is a coffee at Starbucks.
Apparently 'you are here' marks on maps are not a part of Eastern tradition.
I just happened to be reading about the Hillsborough Disaster yesterday - it seems particularly relevant here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillsborough_disaster
96 people died, not because of rioting hooligans, but because of lack of effective crowd control. The stadium was under capacity, but people were crushed to death because no one was properly directing the rush of fans.
See also:
Luzhniki Disaster
Ibrox Disaster
Ellis Park Stadium Disaster
The 2009 Birmingham Millennium Point stampede
I'm pretty sure someone here has this sig:
"A person is smart; people are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals, and you know it."
I also worked for one of the first (maybe the first?) companies to develop such a system and use it in the US - they'd already build a similar system overseas. I didn't work directly on that project to any real degree, but I was there in the early days and at that time migrant field workers were their ONLY users.
Not that the companies ever had any trouble paying the illegal aliens with checks. This system just meant less work distributing checks, no issuing replacements for lost checks, and lower fees for the workers who didn't have to go to a check cashing outfit.
Was the company you worked for by any chance founded by a red-haired guy with a 4-letter last name?
"...and how long the executive should serve."
Senators serve six-year terms. If he wants to stay in longer than that, he'll need to run for re-election. Haven't you figured out how this works yet?
The black gadget at the top of the picture appears to be one of my OpenTracker+ kits - I see that Geoff ordered a couple back in May. So I'm going to take this opportunity for a brief shameless plug:
http://www.argentdata.com/products/otplus.html
His main payload computer looks to be wholly custom-built, but the OpenTracker+ (that handles taking data from the GPS receiver and transmitting it over the radio) is an off-the-shelf kit that takes maybe an hour to build, if you don't want to pay an extra few bucks for a pre-assembled unit.
It's based on the Freescale MC908JL16 microcontroller, the full source code is available under the BSD license, and it'll compile with the free version of the Codewarrior IDE. It's got a serial bootloader, so there's no need for a device programmer. If you're comfortable with C programming, it's a very cheap way to build a simple, customizable tracking and telemetry system. Or just run the regular firmware and it'll do a whole bunch of stuff without modification.
Its larger cousin, the Tracker2, does a whole lot more and the code is released under GPLv3, but unfortunately you can't compile it with the free version of the IDE. It does include a simple scripting engine, though - written mostly so balloon builders would stop bugging me with minor ad hoc changes for their particular setup.
Scott
N1VG
I'm a clean cut white guy, born in the US, a business owner with no criminal record and a (now expired) security clearance, and I still get treated like a criminal by US customs, more often than not. I guess you can consider that a victory for equal rights - they treat everyone like crap, regardless. I've been treated worse by customs in Los Angeles than anywhere else in the world. From China to Bosnia, no other country has ever hassled me. Had some confusion with Thai customs when they misread a Chinese receipt, but at least they were polite.
I did discover a little trick on my last return from Asia, though. After passing through most of the customs crap, I had an agent approach me and start their 'casual' secondary questioning. Turns out the key to ending that quickly is to immediately launch into excessive, tedious detail about all of the trade shows you visited, vendors you met with, and so on.
That only goes so far with the guy at the desk who's got a list of questions he needs answered, but a little extra detail does seem to shift them from 'interrogate' mode to 'let's just hurry up and get rid of this guy.' Sure, they might not need to be declared, but since he asked I'll tell him about the toy helicopter I got for my son in Shenzhen, and the Lego knock-off set I got for my daughter, and the cute cat figurine I got for my girlfriend during the stopover in Narita.