I've got a Samsung SCH-i760, and I have to agree. Not since my oldest kid hit the terrible twos has anything proven to be such a threat to my mental tranquility. It takes all of my self restraint to stop myself from smashing it to bits two or three times a week.
It's slow. It crashes frequently. It randomly doesn't work. Like right now - I was taking pictures with it earlier (always a risky proposition) and now it's dead. Gotta hit the reset button and wait until it reboots. If I want to use the browser, that's another two minutes of waiting. And then I might get through three pages before it crashes - or perhaps just stops letting me scroll.
Try to type a text message, and more often than not it'll pop up the contacts list after you've typed in a few letters. Enter a phone number in the contacts list using the numeric keypad, and it comes out as letters.
I have to say that the third-party RSS reader I downloaded works well. The telnet client too isn't bad. But for the things I bought it for - phone, email, and light web browsing - it's damn near useless, and it has nothing to do with the small screen and keyboard.
"I frankly don't see the actual use in war, besides transporting things..."
And that's not enough for you? Logistics is a MAJOR part of war. Freighters aren't good for much else in war besides transporting things. Neither are flatbed trucks. Or cargo planes. Seriously, the military spends a lot more time hauling stuff around than shooting at people. You don't have to put a gun on something to make it militarily useful.
If this really IS being followed at the highest levels, then I can't help but comment.
I worked at a certain major AFSPC base for almost a decade as a contractor. Back in the early days, when we first got a base-wide Internet connection, the local Comm Squadron was free to implement security systems as they saw fit, and we had some good stuff in place - we sorted out the Sidewinder mess that CITS dumped on us, added our own IDS, and made the best of our home field advantage, setting up tripwire alarms and things on hosts scattered throughout the network to catch internal scanning.
This was all done by contractors, mind you, and it got done because we liked what we were doing, took pride in doing a good job of it, and we had support from the squadron commander. The blue suiters had a very high turnover rate, with average retention at something like 6-9 months for the folks down at our level. None of them ever learned to do much besides process NOTAM paperwork and handle accreditation pacakges.
Once the MAJCOM started taking control of the security stuff, our defensive posture went to crap. What we'd done didn't fit with the overall plan, so it was all removed. We were left with poorly-implemented downward-directed systems operated by poorly-trained drones. Every week we'd have to explain to these people (mostly MAJCOM-level people, the AFCERT folks were usually a little better) basic concepts like IP spoofing (I wrote a 2-page form letter on the subject), and teach them how to read their own ASIM logs.
I have to say that the aggressor squadron teams that'd come in and attack the network knew their stuff. And of course they were able to break in every time. But it felt a little like being armed with a paintball gun and having the Marines sent at you. We KNEW how to help prevent, detect, and respond to these attacks, but we weren't given the authority, time, or resources to do anything about it.
If Cyber Command is going to do anything useful on the defensive side of things, then the best thing they can do, IMO, is to deploy a small garrison force to each base and give them the responsibility for base network defense. Let them interface directly with the BNCC, and plan on having them in one place for AT LEAST 18-24 months. Let all of these forces communicate with each other at the working level to share information and strategies. Some of our most productive contacts were those we made with other bases on our own initiative, and not through the chain of command. Keep the chain of command in the loop, but let the people at the bottom talk to each other.
Most importantly, make it clear that their job is security, and not paper pushing. Certainly there's always going to be paperwork involved, but when I left, the CND office did nothing BUT push paper, and paper that was largely worthless. Not a single thing they did would have ever helped to detect an attack from within the base network.
I don't mind saying all of this, and I'll be happy to say plenty more, because I don't work there any more, and I frankly don't care to ever get another penny of Air Force money. I WOULD like to know that the trend toward totally incompetent central management of base security is being reversed, though.
I was just thinking about this the other day. You can already get membrane keypads fairly cheaply (after a few grand in setup fees, anyway) but until now, displays have always required more mechanical complexity. How long before they start printing screens along with keypads?
Yeah, I think most of the keypads suck (the metal dome type aren't as bad), but it still means a richer user interface and lower cost devices. And probably animated cereal boxes.
Didn't the US government do exactly this sort of thing to someone else? I think it was a country in the Middle East, and it involved HP printers, IIRC.
Seems to be popular today - after all, if you limit contestants to operating within the laws of physics, you're just going to get more of the same old stuff! No matter that it can't ever be built and serves absolutely no practical purpose.
I think it was Popular Science (maybe Popular Mechanics) that had a safety product design contest after 9/11. One of the winning entries was a device the size of a tube of lipstick that was supposed to contain an absurd amount of compressed oxygen - something like 30 minutes worth - to help the user escape from a burning building. If only firefighters knew about this magic technology - they wouldn't have to lug around those bulky SCBA tanks anymore! Us SCUBA divers would be quite interested, too. An 8-inch long 'spare air' cylinder holds a whopping 1.7 cubic feet - something like 60 breaths.
I don't remember *any* of those winning designs being practical. The closest was a system for firefighters that would provide personnel tracking and 3D maps of buildings - no mention of who was supposed to gather that data for thousands of buildings and keep it up to date, though. Maybe someone can provide a link to the article.
For a magazine, it's understandable, if a bit insulting. For a university, it's kind of pathetic. If our education system was working, ANY high school graduate ought to be able to show how this lamp (or the oxygen cylinder) is totally unworkable, or at least realize that the numbers are off by a couple of orders of magnitude or more.
For another craft to match velocities with the satellite (not just smash into it), it'd have to be capable of achieving orbit itself. That's NOT going to be a small missile like an SM3. What you're talking about is a space tug, and it'd require a real booster - a Pegasus being probably about the smallest thing you could put it up with. Grabbing a big, unwieldy (and maybe tumbling) satellite is also not a simple problem.
The tug's also going to have to have enough fuel to impart enough change in velocity on the satellite that it reenters quickly enough to be predicted with enough accuracy to, say, drop it in the Pacific. On the whole, it's easier to just toss something up into its path (like an SM3's kinetic warhead) and let it smash itself to pieces.
I think Lockheed built this one, but anyway - that was my first thought too, an independent destruct mechanism with its own power source and receiver.
Aside from the safety issues involved (they're already handling fuel and ordnance emplacement during satellite assembly anyway) I think the main limitation would be weight. A destruct mechanism on a rocket's no big deal - they don't need much encouragement to blow up, usually. A linear shaped charge down the side of a solid rocket booster does the job quite nicely. As does a defective weld or air bubble in the fuel, for that matter.
But when you've got something the size of a bus totally packed with high-tech gadgets packaged to survive the rigors of launch and the harsh environment of space, how much explosive are you going to need to pack in there to destroy it all? Plus, in a vacuum you don't have atmosphere to compress and contribute to blast effects - that might not matter much when the explosives are inside the vehicle, but it can't help anything.
Rendering electronics unusable isn't hard. Blasting them into small enough pieces that you can't get any useful information from is much harder. Consider that the memory chip used to load an FPGA and configure it with who-knows-what kind of fancy crypto or signal processing algorithms might have a die not more than a millimeter or so on a side, encased in tough plastic or ceramic, maybe potted in epoxy, and sealed up in a machined aluminum chassis. Seems to me the best you could hope for there is to blast the spacecraft into enough pieces that even if they come down on land, no one's going to find them, or if they do, they won't realize what they've got.
I love how the voiceover - done by someone who's clearly a native English speaker - sticks exactly to the fractured English script. You've got to wonder if it just wasn't part of his job to point out all of the errors, or if the non-native speaker who wrote it had too high an opinion of his own language skills to listen to him.
It's also not too difficult to get one of those cheap systems on the network, even if it's somewhere reasonably remote - there are some mountaintop systems around here, for example. I'm a little biased, but at least for the AAG stations I think the best option is one of my kits - they'll talk directly to the station, and can be used with just about any junker 2-meter ham radio you can find on eBay. A ham license is required, of course. If you set it up to control power to the radio, you can knock the average power consumption down to under 100 mW, which makes running a station on a cheap 5-watt panel and a smallish gel cell battery feasible.
In the US, just getting a packet out on 144.39 MHz gives you a pretty good shot at making it on to the Internet. There are gateways all over the country, and an extensive network of mountaintop repeaters. The same exists in several other countries, though not always on the same frequency.
In California they use magstripe readers. Not that they can't be faked, but they take a little more equipment, and you can't really just paste one over the real stripe.
I'm sure the process isn't as painful for us citizens, but still - I'm a native Californian, and my last trip through US customs at LAX was the most unpleasant experience I've ever had in customs. And that includes the crossing into communist China a few days before on a last-minute visa. And it wasn't even that I got pulled aside or got any special attention, it was just slow and required a long time standing and answering questions and putting up with the agent's attitude. I can't imagine an RFID system shaving more than 5 seconds off that time.
On the other hand, that 5 seconds would have roughly halved the time it took me to get through French customs at CDG.
I'm not so sure I agree - to my knowledge, no country (except perhaps North Korea) has ever FAILED to successfully detonate a nuclear weapon on their first try. Yes, we tested a bomb before Hiroshima, but NOT the uranium gun type that was used there. The scientists who designed it were so confident it'd work they decided there was no need for a test. That was over 60 years ago, and virtually no computing power at all was available to the designers.
Yes, designing efficient and compact modern weapons probably requires quite a bit of processing power - I'm sure you couldn't design something like the prolate primary that's (reportedly) used in the W88 without it, but who cares? What you really need is a lot of really smart people and a fairly advanced industrial capability to produce the materials and assemble the weapons.
Morse code is overrated, but useful. I had to pass the 5 WPM test, but I don't feel bad that I never had to take the 20 WPM test to get my extra class license - I think coding Bell 202, PSK-31, and SSTV modems from scratch in an 8-bit micro makes up for that. CW (Morse code) was long retained as an artificial barrier to keep out those who weren't serious more than it was to ensure aptitude in a useful skill. There are MANY other ways the average Slashdot nerd can prove their 'worthiness' and stay true to the spirit of the hobby without learning CW.
Up to 802.11b speeds are in general use - mostly using 802.11b equipment, in fact. Megabit range data links aren't uncommon for microwave frequencies.
Myself, I stick mostly to slow but useful 1200 baud AFSK on VHF. When you're passing things like short text messages, telemetry, and position reports, you don't NEED huge amounts of speed. What you need is a system to get the most critical information to where it will do the most good. And 1200 baud has a big advantage in that you can use it over damn near anything that'll pass a voice signal. You can fit an entire modem and protocol stack in a $2, 8-bit microcontroller, too - no fancy ASICs or DSPs needed (see my link below).
As for the long-distance HF communications people usually associate with ham radio, there's PSK-31 which is a very robust and efficient mode designed for keyboard-to-keyboard use. It's slow, but works when almost nothing else does. It can be encoded with the above-mentioned MCU (I do that for propagation beacons and such) but most people just use a sound card and PC.
Pactor III and other modes give you speeds suitable for email on the HF bands, and they're used for that quite a bit.
Ham radio in emergency situations is less about fancy toys, though, and more about having people with the training and knowledge to be able to use them, and to improvise when things go wrong. That's another reason I stick with relatively low-tech stuff - I'd rather build low-cost devices that can be kludged into doing all sorts of useful things than to focus on finicky, expensive, cutting-edge stuff that's going to fall apart when the fecal matter hits the air circulating device.
Yes, there are a lot of crusty old guys on the radio. But keep in mind that ham radio is what nerds did BEFORE computers and Slashdot, and a lot of them remember that spirit, even if they've fallen behind the curve a bit in technology. There's also a growing number of young hams developing exciting things like GNU Radio, and the open source philosophy is increasingly prevalent in the community. I'm certain that in the next decade open source will be THE major driving force in the hobby.
In the end, it's really just a return to the hobby's roots. There's always been a great deal of information sharing and experimentation, but much of that spirit has dwindled in recent years because of the aging population and the increasing complexity and manufacturing costs associated with modern gear. Open source software, plus DSP, FPGAs, fast computers, and software-defined radios, as well as increased ease of collaboration and access to contract manufacturing are swinging things back the other way.
Think of it this way - a weekend's worth of dedicated cramming can get you a license that grants access to some rather large chunks of spectrum, often with relatively little in the way of restrictions on how you use it. That's the sort of resource that corporations spend millions for - look at the 700 MHz auctions going on now. That license gets you a huge radio frequency playground that's not only wide open for experimentation, it NEEDS active experimentation and exploitation or it will be taken away and auctioned off to the corporations. Don't wait for Google's Android to save wireless communications from the likes of AT&T - go develop an open replacement for a proprietary mode (start with Pactor III or D*Star's AMBE codec), or start a solar-powered 802.11b backbone, or SOMETHING.
Hell, just to make things interesting - I'll send one of my OpenTracker+ kits, free, anywhere in the world, to anyone with a Slashdot account that already exists as of today who gets a license before the end of February 2008. It may not be everyone's thing, but A) it's free and B) it comes with source code. Email scott@argentdata.com.
You think THAT was the biggest plot hole? What about the fact that whatever they were using to feed the humans could have been used to generate electricity FAR more efficiently by other means.
But what about the slow rotation? It takes what, 243 Earth days for Venus to complete one local day? It'd be rather difficult to maintain Earth-like conditions like that.
I had a company pull this on me, too. And at the time I was developing some stuff on the side that's since turned into a reasonably profitable business for me. I didn't want them trying to lay claim to it, when it obviously had nothing to do with my day job.
I told them as much, and got them to provide a signed letter stating that they would make no claim to any inventions or developments not directly related to my employment.
Now, it helped that I was an established employee (they were taking over a government contract that I'd worked on for years) and that they really couldn't afford to lose me at the time, and that the company wasn't involved in the sort of stuff I was doing, so your mileage may vary.
I think it wasn't so much a sinister attempt on their part to grab IP they had no legitimate right to - it was just something the company lawyers said they should require just to be safe. HR had no problem granting an exemption (albeit a limited one) when the alternative was alienating a valued employee. Well, as valued as any drones were at that place, I guess. It probably wouldn't hurt to ask.
Well, that was my fallback plan, but she didn't want holes drilled in her pretty iPod dock. Of course, I'm pretty sure it was the cute little touch sensors that were killing the volume control chip in the first place. I added in some extra ESD protection while I was at it.
Yeah, they can be repaired... it's just not always practical.
My girlfriend's expensive iPod speaker system got its volume stuck at full, and it fell to me to repair it. Actually, her remedy was just to pile pillows on top of it, but we don't really have enough pillows to get a decent volume control range, and it took up a lot of space.
I didn't have too much trouble tracking down the faulty volume control IC, but it helped that I have a workshop with several thousand dollars of test and rework equipment. Honestly, it could have been done with a cheap voltmeter or logic probe and some patience.
I knew exactly what chip to replace, but there are NO distributors of that part in North America. Minimum order from Taiwan was something like 10,000. No equivalents available, either. I managed to talk the company into sending a couple of engineering samples - 'free' parts that only cost me $70 in FedEx charges. (Ah, the things us geeks do for love.) Installing the part was again not a big deal, but only because I have a hot air rework station designed for the task.
Component availability problems can be overcome, but the bigger problem is lack of information. Without at least a schematic it can be very tough to troubleshoot modern electronics, and good luck getting that sort of information out of a manufacturer.
Still, I suppose it's worth pointing out that 3 of the last 4 cellphones used in my house have had their lives extended significantly through repair. 90% of the time the problems there are related to mechanical and interconnect parts - charging connectors, flex cables in hinges, speaker contacts, and so on, and it doesn't take a genius to spot and fix those problems. The last phone I fixed turned out to have a failed connection where some foam had worn out. The fix was to jam a piece of paper in its place.
Forty years ago my dad had a TV and general electronics repair shop, and customers could bring in any random gadget and reasonably expect that there was a good chance he'd be able to fix it, or at least tell them what was wrong with it and why it wasn't worth fixing. Those days are long gone, at least in the realm of consumer electronics. Yeah, you can specialize in XBox repairs, or iPods, or some limited scope like that, and folks like me will make their best attempt at fixing devices for their friends and family, but doing general repairs commercially? Your success rate is going to be too low, and the chances of breaking things further is too great. And the situation is only going to get worse as integration increases. Just wait until all of our electronics are made in 3D fabricators, with each IC die and passive component buried in a solid block of material and no possibility of access to ANY discrete part.
Yeah, as I recall, one of the drawbacks of this design is that it can't glide like a plane or autorotate like a helicopter. If it loses power, it's coming DOWN. For a UAV that's not a big problem, I suppose.. though I wouldn't want to be underneath it.
For that matter, a large-scale model would be a little scary to be around during takeoff and landing. I've done hover loads on a Huey (climbing in while it's hovering about 3 feet off the ground) and it still feels like the rotor's about to take your head off. Not to mention how it blows dust and gravel everywhere. This thing would be like a whirling death machine.
Still, for a small, agile robotic observation platform, I can see where it'd be useful. But with several decades of experience with helicopters behind us, I doubt it's going to happen unless there are some VERY compelling performance differences.
Say what? I've never heard of reduced gravity as being an advantage of launching near the equator. It's all about the Earth's rotation - you pick up about 1,000 mph relative to launching from the poles. That's 1,000 mph less delta V you need to get out of your propulsion system to reach orbit. That's why you'll never see a satellite orbiting east to west.
And it's not like the exact center of the Earth is the source of its gravity. All of the Earth's mass contributes to the gravity field at any given point on the surface.
Also, launching from anywhere but the equator means that you've got to make a plane change if you want to take up a geosynchronous orbit, and that's a rather expensive maneuver in terms of delta V.
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I've got a Samsung SCH-i760, and I have to agree. Not since my oldest kid hit the terrible twos has anything proven to be such a threat to my mental tranquility. It takes all of my self restraint to stop myself from smashing it to bits two or three times a week.
It's slow. It crashes frequently. It randomly doesn't work. Like right now - I was taking pictures with it earlier (always a risky proposition) and now it's dead. Gotta hit the reset button and wait until it reboots. If I want to use the browser, that's another two minutes of waiting. And then I might get through three pages before it crashes - or perhaps just stops letting me scroll.
Try to type a text message, and more often than not it'll pop up the contacts list after you've typed in a few letters. Enter a phone number in the contacts list using the numeric keypad, and it comes out as letters.
I have to say that the third-party RSS reader I downloaded works well. The telnet client too isn't bad. But for the things I bought it for - phone, email, and light web browsing - it's damn near useless, and it has nothing to do with the small screen and keyboard.
"I frankly don't see the actual use in war, besides transporting things..."
And that's not enough for you? Logistics is a MAJOR part of war. Freighters aren't good for much else in war besides transporting things. Neither are flatbed trucks. Or cargo planes. Seriously, the military spends a lot more time hauling stuff around than shooting at people. You don't have to put a gun on something to make it militarily useful.
If this really IS being followed at the highest levels, then I can't help but comment.
I worked at a certain major AFSPC base for almost a decade as a contractor. Back in the early days, when we first got a base-wide Internet connection, the local Comm Squadron was free to implement security systems as they saw fit, and we had some good stuff in place - we sorted out the Sidewinder mess that CITS dumped on us, added our own IDS, and made the best of our home field advantage, setting up tripwire alarms and things on hosts scattered throughout the network to catch internal scanning.
This was all done by contractors, mind you, and it got done because we liked what we were doing, took pride in doing a good job of it, and we had support from the squadron commander. The blue suiters had a very high turnover rate, with average retention at something like 6-9 months for the folks down at our level. None of them ever learned to do much besides process NOTAM paperwork and handle accreditation pacakges.
Once the MAJCOM started taking control of the security stuff, our defensive posture went to crap. What we'd done didn't fit with the overall plan, so it was all removed. We were left with poorly-implemented downward-directed systems operated by poorly-trained drones. Every week we'd have to explain to these people (mostly MAJCOM-level people, the AFCERT folks were usually a little better) basic concepts like IP spoofing (I wrote a 2-page form letter on the subject), and teach them how to read their own ASIM logs.
I have to say that the aggressor squadron teams that'd come in and attack the network knew their stuff. And of course they were able to break in every time. But it felt a little like being armed with a paintball gun and having the Marines sent at you. We KNEW how to help prevent, detect, and respond to these attacks, but we weren't given the authority, time, or resources to do anything about it.
If Cyber Command is going to do anything useful on the defensive side of things, then the best thing they can do, IMO, is to deploy a small garrison force to each base and give them the responsibility for base network defense. Let them interface directly with the BNCC, and plan on having them in one place for AT LEAST 18-24 months. Let all of these forces communicate with each other at the working level to share information and strategies. Some of our most productive contacts were those we made with other bases on our own initiative, and not through the chain of command. Keep the chain of command in the loop, but let the people at the bottom talk to each other.
Most importantly, make it clear that their job is security, and not paper pushing. Certainly there's always going to be paperwork involved, but when I left, the CND office did nothing BUT push paper, and paper that was largely worthless. Not a single thing they did would have ever helped to detect an attack from within the base network.
I don't mind saying all of this, and I'll be happy to say plenty more, because I don't work there any more, and I frankly don't care to ever get another penny of Air Force money. I WOULD like to know that the trend toward totally incompetent central management of base security is being reversed, though.
I was just thinking about this the other day. You can already get membrane keypads fairly cheaply (after a few grand in setup fees, anyway) but until now, displays have always required more mechanical complexity. How long before they start printing screens along with keypads?
Yeah, I think most of the keypads suck (the metal dome type aren't as bad), but it still means a richer user interface and lower cost devices. And probably animated cereal boxes.
Didn't the US government do exactly this sort of thing to someone else? I think it was a country in the Middle East, and it involved HP printers, IIRC.
Seems to be popular today - after all, if you limit contestants to operating within the laws of physics, you're just going to get more of the same old stuff! No matter that it can't ever be built and serves absolutely no practical purpose.
I think it was Popular Science (maybe Popular Mechanics) that had a safety product design contest after 9/11. One of the winning entries was a device the size of a tube of lipstick that was supposed to contain an absurd amount of compressed oxygen - something like 30 minutes worth - to help the user escape from a burning building. If only firefighters knew about this magic technology - they wouldn't have to lug around those bulky SCBA tanks anymore! Us SCUBA divers would be quite interested, too. An 8-inch long 'spare air' cylinder holds a whopping 1.7 cubic feet - something like 60 breaths.
I don't remember *any* of those winning designs being practical. The closest was a system for firefighters that would provide personnel tracking and 3D maps of buildings - no mention of who was supposed to gather that data for thousands of buildings and keep it up to date, though. Maybe someone can provide a link to the article.
For a magazine, it's understandable, if a bit insulting. For a university, it's kind of pathetic. If our education system was working, ANY high school graduate ought to be able to show how this lamp (or the oxygen cylinder) is totally unworkable, or at least realize that the numbers are off by a couple of orders of magnitude or more.
For another craft to match velocities with the satellite (not just smash into it), it'd have to be capable of achieving orbit itself. That's NOT going to be a small missile like an SM3. What you're talking about is a space tug, and it'd require a real booster - a Pegasus being probably about the smallest thing you could put it up with. Grabbing a big, unwieldy (and maybe tumbling) satellite is also not a simple problem.
The tug's also going to have to have enough fuel to impart enough change in velocity on the satellite that it reenters quickly enough to be predicted with enough accuracy to, say, drop it in the Pacific. On the whole, it's easier to just toss something up into its path (like an SM3's kinetic warhead) and let it smash itself to pieces.
I think Lockheed built this one, but anyway - that was my first thought too, an independent destruct mechanism with its own power source and receiver.
Aside from the safety issues involved (they're already handling fuel and ordnance emplacement during satellite assembly anyway) I think the main limitation would be weight. A destruct mechanism on a rocket's no big deal - they don't need much encouragement to blow up, usually. A linear shaped charge down the side of a solid rocket booster does the job quite nicely. As does a defective weld or air bubble in the fuel, for that matter.
But when you've got something the size of a bus totally packed with high-tech gadgets packaged to survive the rigors of launch and the harsh environment of space, how much explosive are you going to need to pack in there to destroy it all? Plus, in a vacuum you don't have atmosphere to compress and contribute to blast effects - that might not matter much when the explosives are inside the vehicle, but it can't help anything.
Rendering electronics unusable isn't hard. Blasting them into small enough pieces that you can't get any useful information from is much harder. Consider that the memory chip used to load an FPGA and configure it with who-knows-what kind of fancy crypto or signal processing algorithms might have a die not more than a millimeter or so on a side, encased in tough plastic or ceramic, maybe potted in epoxy, and sealed up in a machined aluminum chassis. Seems to me the best you could hope for there is to blast the spacecraft into enough pieces that even if they come down on land, no one's going to find them, or if they do, they won't realize what they've got.
From the little time I've spent hanging out in Second Life, I've found that this sort of problem is apparently more prevalent than you might think.
Turns out the combination of fur and latex fetishes generates an ungodly amount of static electricity...
I love how the voiceover - done by someone who's clearly a native English speaker - sticks exactly to the fractured English script. You've got to wonder if it just wasn't part of his job to point out all of the errors, or if the non-native speaker who wrote it had too high an opinion of his own language skills to listen to him.
It's also not too difficult to get one of those cheap systems on the network, even if it's somewhere reasonably remote - there are some mountaintop systems around here, for example. I'm a little biased, but at least for the AAG stations I think the best option is one of my kits - they'll talk directly to the station, and can be used with just about any junker 2-meter ham radio you can find on eBay. A ham license is required, of course. If you set it up to control power to the radio, you can knock the average power consumption down to under 100 mW, which makes running a station on a cheap 5-watt panel and a smallish gel cell battery feasible.
In the US, just getting a packet out on 144.39 MHz gives you a pretty good shot at making it on to the Internet. There are gateways all over the country, and an extensive network of mountaintop repeaters. The same exists in several other countries, though not always on the same frequency.
In California they use magstripe readers. Not that they can't be faked, but they take a little more equipment, and you can't really just paste one over the real stripe.
I'm sure the process isn't as painful for us citizens, but still - I'm a native Californian, and my last trip through US customs at LAX was the most unpleasant experience I've ever had in customs. And that includes the crossing into communist China a few days before on a last-minute visa. And it wasn't even that I got pulled aside or got any special attention, it was just slow and required a long time standing and answering questions and putting up with the agent's attitude. I can't imagine an RFID system shaving more than 5 seconds off that time.
On the other hand, that 5 seconds would have roughly halved the time it took me to get through French customs at CDG.
I'm not so sure I agree - to my knowledge, no country (except perhaps North Korea) has ever FAILED to successfully detonate a nuclear weapon on their first try. Yes, we tested a bomb before Hiroshima, but NOT the uranium gun type that was used there. The scientists who designed it were so confident it'd work they decided there was no need for a test. That was over 60 years ago, and virtually no computing power at all was available to the designers.
Yes, designing efficient and compact modern weapons probably requires quite a bit of processing power - I'm sure you couldn't design something like the prolate primary that's (reportedly) used in the W88 without it, but who cares? What you really need is a lot of really smart people and a fairly advanced industrial capability to produce the materials and assemble the weapons.
I live north of most of the problems
Is that a euphemism for Canada?
Morse code is overrated, but useful. I had to pass the 5 WPM test, but I don't feel bad that I never had to take the 20 WPM test to get my extra class license - I think coding Bell 202, PSK-31, and SSTV modems from scratch in an 8-bit micro makes up for that. CW (Morse code) was long retained as an artificial barrier to keep out those who weren't serious more than it was to ensure aptitude in a useful skill. There are MANY other ways the average Slashdot nerd can prove their 'worthiness' and stay true to the spirit of the hobby without learning CW.
Myself, I stick mostly to slow but useful 1200 baud AFSK on VHF. When you're passing things like short text messages, telemetry, and position reports, you don't NEED huge amounts of speed. What you need is a system to get the most critical information to where it will do the most good. And 1200 baud has a big advantage in that you can use it over damn near anything that'll pass a voice signal. You can fit an entire modem and protocol stack in a $2, 8-bit microcontroller, too - no fancy ASICs or DSPs needed (see my link below).
As for the long-distance HF communications people usually associate with ham radio, there's PSK-31 which is a very robust and efficient mode designed for keyboard-to-keyboard use. It's slow, but works when almost nothing else does. It can be encoded with the above-mentioned MCU (I do that for propagation beacons and such) but most people just use a sound card and PC.
Pactor III and other modes give you speeds suitable for email on the HF bands, and they're used for that quite a bit.
Ham radio in emergency situations is less about fancy toys, though, and more about having people with the training and knowledge to be able to use them, and to improvise when things go wrong. That's another reason I stick with relatively low-tech stuff - I'd rather build low-cost devices that can be kludged into doing all sorts of useful things than to focus on finicky, expensive, cutting-edge stuff that's going to fall apart when the fecal matter hits the air circulating device.
Yes, there are a lot of crusty old guys on the radio. But keep in mind that ham radio is what nerds did BEFORE computers and Slashdot, and a lot of them remember that spirit, even if they've fallen behind the curve a bit in technology. There's also a growing number of young hams developing exciting things like GNU Radio, and the open source philosophy is increasingly prevalent in the community. I'm certain that in the next decade open source will be THE major driving force in the hobby.
In the end, it's really just a return to the hobby's roots. There's always been a great deal of information sharing and experimentation, but much of that spirit has dwindled in recent years because of the aging population and the increasing complexity and manufacturing costs associated with modern gear. Open source software, plus DSP, FPGAs, fast computers, and software-defined radios, as well as increased ease of collaboration and access to contract manufacturing are swinging things back the other way.
Think of it this way - a weekend's worth of dedicated cramming can get you a license that grants access to some rather large chunks of spectrum, often with relatively little in the way of restrictions on how you use it. That's the sort of resource that corporations spend millions for - look at the 700 MHz auctions going on now. That license gets you a huge radio frequency playground that's not only wide open for experimentation, it NEEDS active experimentation and exploitation or it will be taken away and auctioned off to the corporations. Don't wait for Google's Android to save wireless communications from the likes of AT&T - go develop an open replacement for a proprietary mode (start with Pactor III or D*Star's AMBE codec), or start a solar-powered 802.11b backbone, or SOMETHING.
Hell, just to make things interesting - I'll send one of my OpenTracker+ kits, free, anywhere in the world, to anyone with a Slashdot account that already exists as of today who gets a license before the end of February 2008. It may not be everyone's thing, but A) it's free and B) it comes with source code. Email scott@argentdata.com.
You think THAT was the biggest plot hole? What about the fact that whatever they were using to feed the humans could have been used to generate electricity FAR more efficiently by other means.
Not yet - but the source for Craig Venter is published, and I hear there's less than 1% variation between the two. You just need to get the diffs.
But what about the slow rotation? It takes what, 243 Earth days for Venus to complete one local day? It'd be rather difficult to maintain Earth-like conditions like that.
I had a company pull this on me, too. And at the time I was developing some stuff on the side that's since turned into a reasonably profitable business for me. I didn't want them trying to lay claim to it, when it obviously had nothing to do with my day job.
I told them as much, and got them to provide a signed letter stating that they would make no claim to any inventions or developments not directly related to my employment.
Now, it helped that I was an established employee (they were taking over a government contract that I'd worked on for years) and that they really couldn't afford to lose me at the time, and that the company wasn't involved in the sort of stuff I was doing, so your mileage may vary.
I think it wasn't so much a sinister attempt on their part to grab IP they had no legitimate right to - it was just something the company lawyers said they should require just to be safe. HR had no problem granting an exemption (albeit a limited one) when the alternative was alienating a valued employee. Well, as valued as any drones were at that place, I guess. It probably wouldn't hurt to ask.
Well, that was my fallback plan, but she didn't want holes drilled in her pretty iPod dock. Of course, I'm pretty sure it was the cute little touch sensors that were killing the volume control chip in the first place. I added in some extra ESD protection while I was at it.
Yeah, they can be repaired... it's just not always practical.
My girlfriend's expensive iPod speaker system got its volume stuck at full, and it fell to me to repair it. Actually, her remedy was just to pile pillows on top of it, but we don't really have enough pillows to get a decent volume control range, and it took up a lot of space.
I didn't have too much trouble tracking down the faulty volume control IC, but it helped that I have a workshop with several thousand dollars of test and rework equipment. Honestly, it could have been done with a cheap voltmeter or logic probe and some patience.
I knew exactly what chip to replace, but there are NO distributors of that part in North America. Minimum order from Taiwan was something like 10,000. No equivalents available, either. I managed to talk the company into sending a couple of engineering samples - 'free' parts that only cost me $70 in FedEx charges. (Ah, the things us geeks do for love.) Installing the part was again not a big deal, but only because I have a hot air rework station designed for the task.
Component availability problems can be overcome, but the bigger problem is lack of information. Without at least a schematic it can be very tough to troubleshoot modern electronics, and good luck getting that sort of information out of a manufacturer.
Still, I suppose it's worth pointing out that 3 of the last 4 cellphones used in my house have had their lives extended significantly through repair. 90% of the time the problems there are related to mechanical and interconnect parts - charging connectors, flex cables in hinges, speaker contacts, and so on, and it doesn't take a genius to spot and fix those problems. The last phone I fixed turned out to have a failed connection where some foam had worn out. The fix was to jam a piece of paper in its place.
Forty years ago my dad had a TV and general electronics repair shop, and customers could bring in any random gadget and reasonably expect that there was a good chance he'd be able to fix it, or at least tell them what was wrong with it and why it wasn't worth fixing. Those days are long gone, at least in the realm of consumer electronics. Yeah, you can specialize in XBox repairs, or iPods, or some limited scope like that, and folks like me will make their best attempt at fixing devices for their friends and family, but doing general repairs commercially? Your success rate is going to be too low, and the chances of breaking things further is too great. And the situation is only going to get worse as integration increases. Just wait until all of our electronics are made in 3D fabricators, with each IC die and passive component buried in a solid block of material and no possibility of access to ANY discrete part.
Yeah, as I recall, one of the drawbacks of this design is that it can't glide like a plane or autorotate like a helicopter. If it loses power, it's coming DOWN. For a UAV that's not a big problem, I suppose.. though I wouldn't want to be underneath it.
For that matter, a large-scale model would be a little scary to be around during takeoff and landing. I've done hover loads on a Huey (climbing in while it's hovering about 3 feet off the ground) and it still feels like the rotor's about to take your head off. Not to mention how it blows dust and gravel everywhere. This thing would be like a whirling death machine.
Still, for a small, agile robotic observation platform, I can see where it'd be useful. But with several decades of experience with helicopters behind us, I doubt it's going to happen unless there are some VERY compelling performance differences.
Say what? I've never heard of reduced gravity as being an advantage of launching near the equator. It's all about the Earth's rotation - you pick up about 1,000 mph relative to launching from the poles. That's 1,000 mph less delta V you need to get out of your propulsion system to reach orbit. That's why you'll never see a satellite orbiting east to west.
And it's not like the exact center of the Earth is the source of its gravity. All of the Earth's mass contributes to the gravity field at any given point on the surface.
Also, launching from anywhere but the equator means that you've got to make a plane change if you want to take up a geosynchronous orbit, and that's a rather expensive maneuver in terms of delta V.