Umm, this phenomenon used to be called Long Delayed Echos. They could be delayed by as much as eight seconds. It was a very rare phenomenon. Most think the effect was an artificial accident, not a natural phenomenon. However, like all the Bigfoot theories, there is a suspicion that a signal could get trapped briefly between layers of the Ionosphere and make a few circuits around the earth. However, such delays are relatively short; not eight seconds long.
Thirty some years ago, when I first got my start as an amateur radio operator, I used to listen to the broadcasts from Radio Moscow. I too thought it was screamingly funny, for a while.
Then, slowly, it began to dawn on me that these people really believed that stuff; and they had lots of nuclear ICBMs pointed right at the very city where I lived. It wasn't so funny any more.
Radio Pyongyang still broadcasts that infamous cold war style. They're also equipping with nukes and ballistic missiles. Yes, it's strident. It's overfull with propaganda. And it's also the pulse of a country whose leaders seriously believe most of this is true.
I listen to all sorts of international broadcasts. Very few are funny, unless they're trying to be.
EME can be made to be very reliable. However, it won't be available for much of the time. It suffers from several problems: First, it demands a great deal of power and a very sensitive receiver. Second, the data rate you can send over such a connection is pretty slow. You'd have difficulty getting a 50 baud teletype to work on a system like this. Third, it requires a fairly stable frequency source.
What is a minimalist system? Well, I've heard that some folks using DSP with a 100 Watt power amplifier, an eight element yagi with switchable polarization and nearly perfect lunar/earth position can recover their own echos.
This is not a system for the faint of heart. If you were to gear up this way, you'd be better served using a more available and reliable method such as Troposcatter.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." Basically, you can simplify a UI to a point. After that, things get more complex to use them better.
Those who argue for and against simplicity are missing this valuable point: It's about utility, not complexity.
This is a genuine attempt by a people to better themselves. It appears to have failed. That's sad. I hope that the agencies in China will do their best to learn from this experience (as all other countries have done) and rebuild.
A little more competition in the race for space is a good thing in my opinion.
Allow me add my two cents as an instrument rated private pilot and airplane owner.
First, all pilots of all aircraft have one very well known collision avoidance scheme: Their eyes. If you're in Visual Meterological Conditions (VMC) you are obligated, even if you're flying on an instrument flight plan, to see and avoid. But a UAV doesn't have this. Even if you installed cameras on the UAV, it would have to be at least a high def camera if not better. So somehow you need to be aware of the other aircraft nearby. How do you do this? Before any of you say TCAS, remember that not all aircraft are required to carry transponders. Another issue is that even if UAV had TCAS and all aircraft had transponders, the aircraft transponder may not have enough bandwidth to handle all of those transponder queries. In fact, present day airliner TCAS systems have to be dialed back in terminal approach areas because of the sheer volume of other aircraft around.
Second, to all you folks who wonder about aircraft parachutes, think about how they deploy. They use solid rocket motors to throw the 'chute in the air. The problem is that unlike sky divers who are usually at terminal velocity when they deploy their 'chutes, aircraft could be flying at any speed from a stall to full speed cruise. That's why they carry those rocket motors with them. Making such things safe for a crash landing in case they don't go off will be an interesting feat of engineering. And keep in mind, parachute or not, you're still going to have an awful lot of fuel and aircraft falling out of the sky at a decent speed. Do you want one of these things hitting a highway during rush hour?
Third, if you have a human pilot on board, they'll do their level best in an emergency to avoid hitting everyone and land safely. A malfunctioning UAV? How does it know that football field below is empty or not? How does it make decisions if it loses communications with the command center?
Fourth, RC aircraft are usually small, low powered affairs. Even so, if you're ever hit by one of these things, you could get seriously hurt or killed. RC aviators are strongly encouraged to carry insurance policies. A UAV is pretty much an RC aircraft on steriods. Get hit by one of those, and it would be like getting hit by a motorcycle going at speeds of 60 MPH or more. The aircraft may be scaled down, but the speeds they fly aren't much slower than the real thing.
Most people like to say that the military thinks it's good enough for other countries, so we should use them here. The difference is that the military assumes that control of the skies is almost absolute. It's not the same in civilian aviation. The bottom line is this: until we figure out acceptable methods for integrating these aircraft in to the National Airspace System, the best recommendation is to keep them out.
If you had actually read your very own link to Wikipedia, you'd see the following:
The THMs produced may have adverse health effects at high concentrations, and many governments set limits on the amount permissible in drinking water.
I'm sorry, THMs are not good for you, I'll agree with you there. However, compared to Arsenic, I'll take the THMs every time. Oh, and by the way, I work for a water utility. THMs are not easy to deal with. Chlorination works very well for sanitizing water. The alternatives are Ozone, and UV. Both have their downsides. Chlorine is cheap. Chlorine has a residual which can make it useful when the water may have to sit in the distribution system for a while. The other two methods are good for sanitizing the water, but not for keeping it fresh.
At some low, yet to be determined, level THMs are probably not a threat. Please don't spread FUD about it. The real problem is serious enough without misinformation such as you presented.
The danger of blobs is that they may contain a bug which could affect security. Worse, it might even contain spyware. Security being one of the chief concerns of the BSD crowd, why wouldn't TdR want to be upfront, honest, and open about what's in the blob?
Picking an "empty" channel on the FM band is not nearly as easy as it looks. The problem with broadcasting is that you rely on your listeners to let you know you're interfering with another station.
There are lots of weather conditions which can skip your signal much further than you would have intended.
As for the Medium Wave AM band, you could probably put a signal in it during daylight hours and not get caught. However, at night Ionospheric skip turns the band in to an unlistenable morass of stations all broadcasting on top of one another.
I also think you'd have a hard time hiding a MW antenna so that you could radiate with reasonable efficiency while still remaining under cover. All it would take to find you would be some bored private pilot with an ADF receiver tuned to your station. Admittedly, there are fewer and fewer of those things in aircraft these days, though I still own and use one.
I read recently that 7" vinyl record singles are starting to sell again. I guess people like the idea that they can sell, resell, and re-record their music. It may not be a CD one could rip, but at least it can't infect your computer with a rootkit while you weren't looking. People just want to listen to music they like. They'll pay once for the privilige of owning a recording. However, they won't pay attention to any ephemeral bit of legal nonsense which keeps them from using the recording wherever they might like in their personal lives.
This unilateral effort Microsoft is attempting is doomed. Other OS vendors will eat Microsoft's home PC market away when it becomes clear that they can do what Microsoft will not. The work PC market will continue to thrive based upon inertia of the PHB class of managers.
As for RIAA, their online sales will fizzle as they focus on more DRM, while the very musicians they recruit get disgusted and start voting with their feet.
Once Microsoft puts this thing on the market, I look forward to new lawsuits from RIAA against other OS firms, saying in effect that Microsoft does DRM, and you should too. We can look forward to whole new classes of peer to peer music rips. We can expect RIAA's online sales to fizzle. And over the very long haul, I expect the RIAA to shrivel in to an agency for lawyer welfare once their cash cow has left the barn and she discovered that it really isn't too bad outside.
Gosh, they seemed to be in perfect working order where I voted. I don't know what brought about your "crashes." I agree that the software should be robust and secure. When better machines become available, I doubt anyone will shy away from spending the effort and monies to improve this situation. In retrospect, I think the state of Maryland may have jumped the gun just a bit too soon. But someone has to be first...
I'm a voter in Maryland. I used the new electronic machines on the last election. There were rough spots where the election staff were still learning to use these devices.
They were used for the very first time in Montgomery County Maryland. They're still discovering the ins and outs of these machines. Most of the volunteers are retired folks. They don't have the proficiency with computers that most of us have. Yes, they make mistakes, but they're learning. Here in Howard County, they already had a good idea how these things worked and everything went smoothly.
This is about training. The issue of the security of these devices is another thing entirely. I've spoken in person with my local Maryland state delegates and they're well aware of the issue. When better machines become available, they'll use them. I don't think anyone from either party is shy about spending the money. But it has to work, it should be user freindly, it must be reliable, and (above all) traceable.
Feh. You want sophisticated badges, you should have been at the Atlanticon QRP sessions a few years ago. Those badges had IR configuration and data broadcasting, they were configured with morse code, and had stuff like callsigns moving across the displays. What does this DEFCON badge do besides blink?
Reading the article more closely, monoamine oxidase A seems to trigger "novelty seeking". The phrase "novelty seeking" could mean many things to many people. It's not just gagetry. I'm sure there are those who seek a better high, a taller mountain, a different spouse, a new social scene, and so on.
The flikering power probably has more to do with grounding practices at your local transformer, where your power feed comes from, how close you are to protected loops, and so on and so forth. In other words, these conditions can result from lots of things which may have nothing to do with whether the lines are underground, or strung up on poles.
Windows can't be everything to everybody. We've already seen a fractionalization between XP and 2003 server. In 2000, these actually were the same OS, with differently tuned kernels. XP is actually different from 2003 server.
Why not have a trend where Windows fractionalizes further so that some are optimized for game playing, some for office work, some for light server/office applications, and some for dedicated secure services.
The only obstacle I see to the latter is that despite very nice security granularity, the security policies that come boxed with windows leave a lot to be desired. They're difficult to manage, and some have holes you could drive a truck through.
Mod parent up, please. Overhead power lines are much more tolerant of higher loads. There is also the issue of insulation breakdown underground. Furthermore, burying power lines means you need to keep extremely detailed records for a very long time.
As someone who works in a water utility (where pipes are laid in the ground and expected to stay there for the next 100 to 150 years) let me be the first to point out the hazards of trying to keep such records for such a long period of time. Standards change. Reference markers get lost. Assumptions are forgotten. And yes, the earth does shift here and there. Folks, it's bad enough when you accidentally dig up a water line. It's much worse when you hit a high power electric line.
Underground electric lines look really good until you start getting in to the details. There are good reasons to leave things as they are.
Then, I suppose you wouldn't care if court documents "accidentally" were released with your name, social security number, date and place of birth, driver's license number and mother's maiden name on it.
While I think we can all agree that document redaction is sometimes abused, that does not mean there is no good reason for your government to redact information from court papers. Even in the Balco case, there is a presumption of innocence before guilt. The release of such information makes it that much harder to find impartial jurists, and places all the court proceedings of this case in jeapordy.
...and the staff to fly, service, and follow up on the data from these things comes from --Where? The UAV may be downright cheap. The people are expensive. It may be less expensive than a helicopter, but it's still far from cheap.
Considering the logistics, I have to wonder if this is truly the threat that it's being made out to be.
Here in Maryland, the state police have a fleet of Dauphin helicopters with infrared cameras and 30 million candle-power spotlights. They can see an awful lot, day or night. In theory they can spy on anyone in any public place.
In Baltimore, the city routinely used video surveillance of public areas --particularly places known to be open air drug markets. The courts upheld the convictions of those caught on tape dealing in drugs.
My question to those who object to UAV surveillance: What do you think these things do that hasn't already been done? The courts have upheld the use of all these technologies. Does the placement on an unmanned aerial vehicle make any difference?
What percentage of the community they 'serve' will actually be affected by this? Not a large enough percentage for it to matter. Most people don't work at the BoA or know anyone who does, this issue will completely pass them by.
The question is how much damage to the company's reputation will happen as this news makes the rounds. Clearly a handful of employees won't do it. But two or three hundred will. You don't have to know these folks personally to develop an opinion about this.
Let's not pretend that Americans are better at counting money than those evil foreigners from the 'Axis of Evil'.
I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. I am saying that there are loads of business traditions, policies, regulations and legislation developed over a lifetime of having lived here that a foreigner will take a long time to assimilate. One of the biggest problems with ignorant managers is that they often assume that their employees' jobs are easier than they really are. This leads to the notion that they can simply transfer a career overseas with little or no penalty.
Frankly, I think it would be wiser to try some smaller scale overseas experiments. Build on that experience, make some corrections, and expand only when you have the quality of operation you expect. What was described here is a wholesale move overseas. Everything. Right now.
This sounds quite disruptive. It also sounds like the move of an impatient CEO who is looking to retire soon and sell his stock options. Go ahead. Buy that stock. If you haven't sold it in two years time I'll be very surprised.
You may be right about that. However, the company overseas is not the bank. It's the organization of IT contractors that does banking systems. The bank itself is probably still going out of business. The conglomerate may pick up new business, but most of the old business from the completely outsourced bank is probably not coming their way.
I stand by my previous recommendation. This stock is not likely to be profitable in the long term.
It may not be wrong. But I don't think legality is the point.
Over the longer term, what have these idiotic managers done? They've disconnected themselves from the very communities they serve. Sure, it's cheaper to have a bunch of lower paid foreigners do this work. But do they really understand what they're doing and why? Will they know when they've run in to a problem? Will they be able to reason their way through regulations and laws they had nothing to do with?
And ultimately, you know how employment agencies always instruct people to leave your work on good terms? It cuts both ways. If an employer cuts ties with large groups of employees under less than favorable terms, don't expect any good will from the public when the going gets rough.
Frankly, I see this as a huge disconnect between management and the techies who actually make things go. If anyone here owns this stock, I recommend they sell within the next year or so. A company this arrogantly ignorant doesn't deserve your money. Oh, by the way, that's captalism too.
This is a huge step forward for computer assisted modulation techniques and wide band scanning. However, I should point out one very important limitation: Dynamic Range.
Now let me point out that while the A/D converter is fast, it only has 12 bits. This will give you about 72 dB of dynamic range. Modern reciever design can yeild dynamic ranges of 100 dB or better (depending on how you measure it). Some day we'll get this performace from 16 bit A/D converters. When that happens, expect the designs of radio to change to software over hardware.
This is the trade off for building a reciever of this sort. There is no free lunch folks...
Spread spectrum is only one of many techniques. It's also incredibly easy to defeat. It just takes enough power to overwhelm the first stage amplifier to where it blocks the incoming signals. Because you are operating spread spectrum, the front end of the radio is wide open, so it's not hard to overwhelm the first stage.
Second, it's not hard grab the chip rate from a direct sequence spread spectrum signal. Just look at the mixer's harmonics. You'll find a few extra carriers there. One will be the carrier and the others will be chip rate sidebands. Now, you know enough to spew a square wave on the air with amplitude and phase modulation very close to the signal you want to screw with. Let them try and dig their signal out of that.
You're looking at the problem as if nobody but the receiver can despread the signal. Well, that's not true. There are ways. I could go on and on about this.
Spread spectrum is not secure because it's spread, any more than a narrowband signal is safe because it's in a well defined channel. In fact the real reason spread spectrum is so popular is because it is very good for reuse of frequencies assiged to unlicensed operation. Otherwise, it's just another multiplexing technique.
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Umm, this phenomenon used to be called Long Delayed Echos. They could be delayed by as much as eight seconds. It was a very rare phenomenon. Most think the effect was an artificial accident, not a natural phenomenon. However, like all the Bigfoot theories, there is a suspicion that a signal could get trapped briefly between layers of the Ionosphere and make a few circuits around the earth. However, such delays are relatively short; not eight seconds long.
Thirty some years ago, when I first got my start as an amateur radio operator, I used to listen to the broadcasts from Radio Moscow. I too thought it was screamingly funny, for a while.
Then, slowly, it began to dawn on me that these people really believed that stuff; and they had lots of nuclear ICBMs pointed right at the very city where I lived. It wasn't so funny any more.
Radio Pyongyang still broadcasts that infamous cold war style. They're also equipping with nukes and ballistic missiles. Yes, it's strident. It's overfull with propaganda. And it's also the pulse of a country whose leaders seriously believe most of this is true.
I listen to all sorts of international broadcasts. Very few are funny, unless they're trying to be.
EME can be made to be very reliable. However, it won't be available for much of the time. It suffers from several problems: First, it demands a great deal of power and a very sensitive receiver. Second, the data rate you can send over such a connection is pretty slow. You'd have difficulty getting a 50 baud teletype to work on a system like this. Third, it requires a fairly stable frequency source.
What is a minimalist system? Well, I've heard that some folks using DSP with a 100 Watt power amplifier, an eight element yagi with switchable polarization and nearly perfect lunar/earth position can recover their own echos.
This is not a system for the faint of heart. If you were to gear up this way, you'd be better served using a more available and reliable method such as Troposcatter.
"Things should be made as simple as possible, but not any simpler." Basically, you can simplify a UI to a point. After that, things get more complex to use them better.
Those who argue for and against simplicity are missing this valuable point: It's about utility, not complexity.
This is a genuine attempt by a people to better themselves. It appears to have failed. That's sad. I hope that the agencies in China will do their best to learn from this experience (as all other countries have done) and rebuild.
A little more competition in the race for space is a good thing in my opinion.
Mod Parent Way Up!
Allow me add my two cents as an instrument rated private pilot and airplane owner.
First, all pilots of all aircraft have one very well known collision avoidance scheme: Their eyes. If you're in Visual Meterological Conditions (VMC) you are obligated, even if you're flying on an instrument flight plan, to see and avoid. But a UAV doesn't have this. Even if you installed cameras on the UAV, it would have to be at least a high def camera if not better. So somehow you need to be aware of the other aircraft nearby. How do you do this? Before any of you say TCAS, remember that not all aircraft are required to carry transponders. Another issue is that even if UAV had TCAS and all aircraft had transponders, the aircraft transponder may not have enough bandwidth to handle all of those transponder queries. In fact, present day airliner TCAS systems have to be dialed back in terminal approach areas because of the sheer volume of other aircraft around.
Second, to all you folks who wonder about aircraft parachutes, think about how they deploy. They use solid rocket motors to throw the 'chute in the air. The problem is that unlike sky divers who are usually at terminal velocity when they deploy their 'chutes, aircraft could be flying at any speed from a stall to full speed cruise. That's why they carry those rocket motors with them. Making such things safe for a crash landing in case they don't go off will be an interesting feat of engineering. And keep in mind, parachute or not, you're still going to have an awful lot of fuel and aircraft falling out of the sky at a decent speed. Do you want one of these things hitting a highway during rush hour?
Third, if you have a human pilot on board, they'll do their level best in an emergency to avoid hitting everyone and land safely. A malfunctioning UAV? How does it know that football field below is empty or not? How does it make decisions if it loses communications with the command center?
Fourth, RC aircraft are usually small, low powered affairs. Even so, if you're ever hit by one of these things, you could get seriously hurt or killed. RC aviators are strongly encouraged to carry insurance policies. A UAV is pretty much an RC aircraft on steriods. Get hit by one of those, and it would be like getting hit by a motorcycle going at speeds of 60 MPH or more. The aircraft may be scaled down, but the speeds they fly aren't much slower than the real thing.
Most people like to say that the military thinks it's good enough for other countries, so we should use them here. The difference is that the military assumes that control of the skies is almost absolute. It's not the same in civilian aviation. The bottom line is this: until we figure out acceptable methods for integrating these aircraft in to the National Airspace System, the best recommendation is to keep them out.
I'm sorry, THMs are not good for you, I'll agree with you there. However, compared to Arsenic, I'll take the THMs every time. Oh, and by the way, I work for a water utility. THMs are not easy to deal with. Chlorination works very well for sanitizing water. The alternatives are Ozone, and UV. Both have their downsides. Chlorine is cheap. Chlorine has a residual which can make it useful when the water may have to sit in the distribution system for a while. The other two methods are good for sanitizing the water, but not for keeping it fresh.
At some low, yet to be determined, level THMs are probably not a threat. Please don't spread FUD about it. The real problem is serious enough without misinformation such as you presented.
The danger of blobs is that they may contain a bug which could affect security. Worse, it might even contain spyware. Security being one of the chief concerns of the BSD crowd, why wouldn't TdR want to be upfront, honest, and open about what's in the blob?
Picking an "empty" channel on the FM band is not nearly as easy as it looks. The problem with broadcasting is that you rely on your listeners to let you know you're interfering with another station.
There are lots of weather conditions which can skip your signal much further than you would have intended.
As for the Medium Wave AM band, you could probably put a signal in it during daylight hours and not get caught. However, at night Ionospheric skip turns the band in to an unlistenable morass of stations all broadcasting on top of one another.
I also think you'd have a hard time hiding a MW antenna so that you could radiate with reasonable efficiency while still remaining under cover. All it would take to find you would be some bored private pilot with an ADF receiver tuned to your station. Admittedly, there are fewer and fewer of those things in aircraft these days, though I still own and use one.
I read recently that 7" vinyl record singles are starting to sell again. I guess people like the idea that they can sell, resell, and re-record their music. It may not be a CD one could rip, but at least it can't infect your computer with a rootkit while you weren't looking. People just want to listen to music they like. They'll pay once for the privilige of owning a recording. However, they won't pay attention to any ephemeral bit of legal nonsense which keeps them from using the recording wherever they might like in their personal lives.
This unilateral effort Microsoft is attempting is doomed. Other OS vendors will eat Microsoft's home PC market away when it becomes clear that they can do what Microsoft will not. The work PC market will continue to thrive based upon inertia of the PHB class of managers.
As for RIAA, their online sales will fizzle as they focus on more DRM, while the very musicians they recruit get disgusted and start voting with their feet.
Once Microsoft puts this thing on the market, I look forward to new lawsuits from RIAA against other OS firms, saying in effect that Microsoft does DRM, and you should too. We can look forward to whole new classes of peer to peer music rips. We can expect RIAA's online sales to fizzle. And over the very long haul, I expect the RIAA to shrivel in to an agency for lawyer welfare once their cash cow has left the barn and she discovered that it really isn't too bad outside.
Gosh, they seemed to be in perfect working order where I voted. I don't know what brought about your "crashes." I agree that the software should be robust and secure. When better machines become available, I doubt anyone will shy away from spending the effort and monies to improve this situation. In retrospect, I think the state of Maryland may have jumped the gun just a bit too soon. But someone has to be first...
I'm a voter in Maryland. I used the new electronic machines on the last election. There were rough spots where the election staff were still learning to use these devices.
They were used for the very first time in Montgomery County Maryland. They're still discovering the ins and outs of these machines. Most of the volunteers are retired folks. They don't have the proficiency with computers that most of us have. Yes, they make mistakes, but they're learning. Here in Howard County, they already had a good idea how these things worked and everything went smoothly.
This is about training. The issue of the security of these devices is another thing entirely. I've spoken in person with my local Maryland state delegates and they're well aware of the issue. When better machines become available, they'll use them. I don't think anyone from either party is shy about spending the money. But it has to work, it should be user freindly, it must be reliable, and (above all) traceable.
Feh. You want sophisticated badges, you should have been at the Atlanticon QRP sessions a few years ago. Those badges had IR configuration and data broadcasting, they were configured with morse code, and had stuff like callsigns moving across the displays. What does this DEFCON badge do besides blink?
There are far more nerdly badges out there...
Reading the article more closely, monoamine oxidase A seems to trigger "novelty seeking". The phrase "novelty seeking" could mean many things to many people. It's not just gagetry. I'm sure there are those who seek a better high, a taller mountain, a different spouse, a new social scene, and so on.
The flikering power probably has more to do with grounding practices at your local transformer, where your power feed comes from, how close you are to protected loops, and so on and so forth. In other words, these conditions can result from lots of things which may have nothing to do with whether the lines are underground, or strung up on poles.
Windows can't be everything to everybody. We've already seen a fractionalization between XP and 2003 server. In 2000, these actually were the same OS, with differently tuned kernels. XP is actually different from 2003 server.
Why not have a trend where Windows fractionalizes further so that some are optimized for game playing, some for office work, some for light server/office applications, and some for dedicated secure services.
The only obstacle I see to the latter is that despite very nice security granularity, the security policies that come boxed with windows leave a lot to be desired. They're difficult to manage, and some have holes you could drive a truck through.
Mod parent up, please. Overhead power lines are much more tolerant of higher loads. There is also the issue of insulation breakdown underground. Furthermore, burying power lines means you need to keep extremely detailed records for a very long time.
As someone who works in a water utility (where pipes are laid in the ground and expected to stay there for the next 100 to 150 years) let me be the first to point out the hazards of trying to keep such records for such a long period of time. Standards change. Reference markers get lost. Assumptions are forgotten. And yes, the earth does shift here and there. Folks, it's bad enough when you accidentally dig up a water line. It's much worse when you hit a high power electric line.
Underground electric lines look really good until you start getting in to the details. There are good reasons to leave things as they are.
Then, I suppose you wouldn't care if court documents "accidentally" were released with your name, social security number, date and place of birth, driver's license number and mother's maiden name on it.
While I think we can all agree that document redaction is sometimes abused, that does not mean there is no good reason for your government to redact information from court papers. Even in the Balco case, there is a presumption of innocence before guilt. The release of such information makes it that much harder to find impartial jurists, and places all the court proceedings of this case in jeapordy.
...and the staff to fly, service, and follow up on the data from these things comes from --Where? The UAV may be downright cheap. The people are expensive. It may be less expensive than a helicopter, but it's still far from cheap.
Considering the logistics, I have to wonder if this is truly the threat that it's being made out to be.
Here in Maryland, the state police have a fleet of Dauphin helicopters with infrared cameras and 30 million candle-power spotlights. They can see an awful lot, day or night. In theory they can spy on anyone in any public place.
In Baltimore, the city routinely used video surveillance of public areas --particularly places known to be open air drug markets. The courts upheld the convictions of those caught on tape dealing in drugs.
My question to those who object to UAV surveillance: What do you think these things do that hasn't already been done? The courts have upheld the use of all these technologies. Does the placement on an unmanned aerial vehicle make any difference?
What percentage of the community they 'serve' will actually be affected by this? Not a large enough percentage for it to matter. Most people don't work at the BoA or know anyone who does, this issue will completely pass them by.
The question is how much damage to the company's reputation will happen as this news makes the rounds. Clearly a handful of employees won't do it. But two or three hundred will. You don't have to know these folks personally to develop an opinion about this.
Let's not pretend that Americans are better at counting money than those evil foreigners from the 'Axis of Evil'.
I'm not suggesting anything of the sort. I am saying that there are loads of business traditions, policies, regulations and legislation developed over a lifetime of having lived here that a foreigner will take a long time to assimilate. One of the biggest problems with ignorant managers is that they often assume that their employees' jobs are easier than they really are. This leads to the notion that they can simply transfer a career overseas with little or no penalty.
Frankly, I think it would be wiser to try some smaller scale overseas experiments. Build on that experience, make some corrections, and expand only when you have the quality of operation you expect. What was described here is a wholesale move overseas. Everything. Right now.
This sounds quite disruptive. It also sounds like the move of an impatient CEO who is looking to retire soon and sell his stock options. Go ahead. Buy that stock. If you haven't sold it in two years time I'll be very surprised.
You may be right about that. However, the company overseas is not the bank. It's the organization of IT contractors that does banking systems. The bank itself is probably still going out of business. The conglomerate may pick up new business, but most of the old business from the completely outsourced bank is probably not coming their way.
I stand by my previous recommendation. This stock is not likely to be profitable in the long term.
It may not be wrong. But I don't think legality is the point.
Over the longer term, what have these idiotic managers done? They've disconnected themselves from the very communities they serve. Sure, it's cheaper to have a bunch of lower paid foreigners do this work. But do they really understand what they're doing and why? Will they know when they've run in to a problem? Will they be able to reason their way through regulations and laws they had nothing to do with?
And ultimately, you know how employment agencies always instruct people to leave your work on good terms? It cuts both ways. If an employer cuts ties with large groups of employees under less than favorable terms, don't expect any good will from the public when the going gets rough.
Frankly, I see this as a huge disconnect between management and the techies who actually make things go. If anyone here owns this stock, I recommend they sell within the next year or so. A company this arrogantly ignorant doesn't deserve your money. Oh, by the way, that's captalism too.
This is a huge step forward for computer assisted modulation techniques and wide band scanning. However, I should point out one very important limitation: Dynamic Range.
For those of you who are too lazy, read this.
Now let me point out that while the A/D converter is fast, it only has 12 bits. This will give you about 72 dB of dynamic range. Modern reciever design can yeild dynamic ranges of 100 dB or better (depending on how you measure it). Some day we'll get this performace from 16 bit A/D converters. When that happens, expect the designs of radio to change to software over hardware.
This is the trade off for building a reciever of this sort. There is no free lunch folks...
Spread spectrum is only one of many techniques. It's also incredibly easy to defeat. It just takes enough power to overwhelm the first stage amplifier to where it blocks the incoming signals. Because you are operating spread spectrum, the front end of the radio is wide open, so it's not hard to overwhelm the first stage.
Second, it's not hard grab the chip rate from a direct sequence spread spectrum signal. Just look at the mixer's harmonics. You'll find a few extra carriers there. One will be the carrier and the others will be chip rate sidebands. Now, you know enough to spew a square wave on the air with amplitude and phase modulation very close to the signal you want to screw with. Let them try and dig their signal out of that.
You're looking at the problem as if nobody but the receiver can despread the signal. Well, that's not true. There are ways. I could go on and on about this.
Spread spectrum is not secure because it's spread, any more than a narrowband signal is safe because it's in a well defined channel. In fact the real reason spread spectrum is so popular is because it is very good for reuse of frequencies assiged to unlicensed operation. Otherwise, it's just another multiplexing technique.