The energy content that comes from the solar input is renewable. Certainly the system isn't completely renewable energy, but improvement is a good thing. It would replace some of our oil use with reprocessed CO2 from coal. "It isn't perfect" is a really, really horrible reason to not do something that's far better than the current plan.
I've worked at such a company, on such a project. The project was small by NASA standards (single-digit $M), but large relative to the company. They certainly weren't gambling bankruptcy in the sense that they didn't believe there was a real risk of it. There was certainly a plausible (though unlikely) risk of losing money, but that's quite different than bankruptcy. Certainly they didn't have exact knowledge of what the job would cost, but they knew well enough to be able to budget it and put in a fixed-price quote that wasn't risking the existence of the company.
You know full well that the fusion reactor is irrelevant to most NASA work. If you want a high-reliability oxygen/hydrocarbon rocket engine with competitive performance in the 1N-100kN thrust range, I know several small companies that would be happy to quote you a fixed price development contract; a few of them might well be willing to bid on much larger ones. If you want a comparable job in satellite design and development done, there are other companies that will do that. And before you say those sorts of jobs aren't interesting because they're well understood -- that's my entire point. Most of what NASA is doing is new development work on well understood problems. (That isn't to say it isn't interesting and good stuff; it is. It's just normally the results that are interesting, as opposed to the technology to get them.)
It's no different than estimating the cost to build an automobile engine from a clean sheet design; I don't know how to do it, but I know there are a good number of companies that would be happy to quote you a contract. I'm an engineer, not a business manager, so I won't claim to be able to make the estimates myself -- but I understand what the role of a good business leader is in such things, and I have some concept of what those skills do and don't imply the ability to do. Estimating project costs in the face of a moderate number of unknowns (ie R&D) is certainly one of the implied skills.
If you're doing any sort of engineering work, and the managerial team *doesn't* understand how to estimate a development budget for a completely new product, I recommed you look for a different job.
If the devices aren't compliant, they shouldn't be sold as such. Testing for compliance and certifying devices as compliant would be the logical role of the licensing agency. They shouldn't let people put the HDMI name on something if it doesn't work. As such, it certainly is their fault that these devices don't interoperate properly. And if the standard is so complicated that they can't actually test for compliance, then that's their fault too.
I suppose you neglected to read the whole "solar energy" part of the article? The point of all these things, be they this plan or biofuels, isn't some magic pixie dust source of free energy. It's that the easiest way of getting solar energy into a useful form might be to take a detour through plants or CO or steam or something else.
Fortunately, some people are actually trying to solve these problems rather than bitching on/.
Not to mention that pencils are actually pretty bad in space -- too much graphite dust and broken pencil leads, neither of which is good for electronics.
And steam locomotives would seem easier than high-temperature turbines. "Seems easier" is not what I'd call a good metric for evaluating such a technology.
That's a very interesting thing to say, given that the companies doing fixed-priced aerospace work are the small ones, and the companies placing cost-plus bids are the large ones.
Project management and cost estimation are problems that can be understood and solved, even when R&D is involved. There's no magic involved. Well-managed companies can estimate costs even for work they haven't done before, take a fixed-price contract, and turn a profit.
If you want to get really cynical about it, you could say that the reason for cost overruns on cost-plus contracts isn't that there are major unforseen problems, or that they're incompetently managed, but that cost overruns are simply the most profitable way to operate. But that's an entirely different discussion.
My basic point is simple: I've worked on a fixed-price NASA (sub-) contract. For the majority of the work NASA needs done, it is a far superior model. The majority of NASA contracts are for things that, while new, are problems that the industry knows how to solve. They aren't leaps into a great unknown. This is true even for many things like interplanetary probes and new rocket vehicles. For the remaining minority, I think the case is less obvious, but I still believe fixed price work is a better idea.
Your argument sounds nice, but is equally applicable to any large engineering project, which are regularly done on fixed-price contracts. As such, there's something wrong with it. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what, exactly.
I've worked on a NASA contract doing rocket engine development as a sub-contractor. Our bid for the subcontract was fixed-price. Even that level of experience was enough to convince me that cost-plus contracts are a bad idea.
Most of what NASA does, while hardly trivial, is reasonably well understood. Yes, there is plenty of R&D to do, but there aren't any Apollo or Atlas-type leaps into the great unknown being taken. Even when it comes to design of significant rocket engines, satellite systems, and other space hardware, there are enough people that understand it well that NASA could get fixed-price bids if they really wanted them. These things don't need to be as outrageously expensive as they are, and cost-plus contracts are one (of many, many) reasons that they are.
Fair enough. I don't think virus kits or rootkits or exploit code should be inherently illegal to possess either. They do have useful research value, after all. Be it locks or software exploits, you need to understand the attack mechanisms in order to secure against them. And just like lockpicking, breaking insecure software can be a fun and rewarding hobby. (Not one I engage in, but exploiting a buffer overflow in a computer security class was both educational and entertaining.)
The search for extraterrestrial life has dramatic impacts on our own continued chances for survival as a species. As such, I'd say it's an inherently important problem. I'll take almost any amount of help to species-level survival over cancer drugs.
Note also that a null result is not the same as no results. Both a null result (failing to find ETI) and a positive result (finding it) convey useful information.
The issue comes when a contractor has met some deliverables, and then decides that the later ones will be more expensive than they originally bid. NASA would have the clout to get fixed-price bids if they had the willpower and desire to require them; make no mistake, the problem exists on both sides.
Another driver for fixed-price contracts in all government areas is profit margins. If a company places the lowest bid, and then produces a good product while making a 50% profit margin (because they found a better way to do it than their competitors), then the bureaucrat who allowed the company to make that high a profit gets accused of allowing the company to take advantage of taxpayer dollars. The result is that bureaucrats like cost-plus contracts, since the profits are set in advance at levels that no one much objects to. This holds even if the 50% profit margin contract costs more in total than the 8% cost-plus contract. It is, in many ways, an example of the principal-agent problem.
There is nothing inherently wrong about picking locks, just as there is nothing inherently wrong about any use of nmap -- it all depends on permission and intent. I would be willing to bet that most people using lockpicks use them as a hobby or because they're a locksmith, not because they're breaking into something. (Never mind that picking a lock is normally a much more difficult way to get in.)
Innocent until proven guilty -- if you're using the tools for legal purposes, then it should be legal to possess them, be they lockpicks or port scanners.
Historically, some of the stuff NASA was trying to get bids on was so far outside the realm of expertise of any possible bidder that no one would have been willing to just eat the cost overruns. So cost-plus contracts were awarded. It's become ingrained, and contractors have realized that they can simply threaten to not deliver if cost overruns won't be payed for.
There are some small aerospace companies that place fixed-price bids on NASA contracts, but none of the major ones do. Many of these companies are of the opinion that taking cost-plus work is severely damaging to the company mindset and correspondingly to its ability to function.
In general, I think fixed-price contracts would be a good idea. If you're worried about paying for a large project along the way, write the contract with intermediate deliverables, like test results from subsystems or prototype versions.
I own a set of lockpicks. I use them to pick locks. Both are perfectly legal (where I live, as I understand it). The locks I pick are locks I purchased for the purpose. I made the lockpicks myself. In the process I learned a bit about the world around me (locks, metalworking, etc). It's a fun and perfectly geeky hobby and it trains my manual dexterity and intellect. I see nothing wrong with this.
Now, in my jurisdiction, lockpicks automatically count as burglary tools if you're carrying them in commission of a crime like tresspassing. (AIUI. IANAL. Etc.) That makes sense to me -- they're considering it a worse crime to abuse tools and skills in the commission of a crime than to simply kick down a door and take some stuff. Or, put another way, with training comes responsibility. Analogous treatment of tools of computer crime would make sense to me -- though I would be suspicious of the certification process and authority at least until I understood the details of the proposal. Something like a PE certification would make sense, though.
In both those cases, the requirements are based on the assumption that there is a risk to the customers, that customers cannot readily evaluate. (The free market can't solve problems, like safety in some cases, that are very difficult for consumers to evaluate.)
I'm firmly against the idea of making ownership of lockpicks illegal, for the same reason as I'm against this law. As I understand the law here in North Carolina about lockpicks, I rather like it. You're allowed to own them, but if you're breaking and entering, tresspassing, or doing something similar, and carrying lockpicks then they automatically count as burglary tools. I rather like this policy -- it adds harsher penalties for those who go about acquiring tools and skills for illegitimate purposes, yet allows people like myself to own lockpicks purely because we like understanding how locks work. The analogy to computer security tools is a very good one, I think.
Requiring certification of people representing themselves as computer security experts might make sense (I'd withold judgement until I knew more about how it worked, personally). But restricting the tools doesn't. Adding something analogous to possession of burglary tools, though, does make sense to me. (Well, somewhat -- it's complicated, and since you can't really break into a computer without some level of software tool, the analogy gets strained.)
If your shift key is broken, it is permissible to use your caps lock key for the duration of the required capital letter. I know that key is abhorrent to most here, but it does have uses in the event a sudden failure of both shift keys.
I like your example, and agree completely, but this is Slashdot so I have to nitpick.
The price of money is the interest rate. If I want some more money, to buy a house or something, the interest rate represents how much money that money will cost me. Unsurprisingly, interest rates are impacted by supply and demand (of money), just like other goods. (Of course, interest rates are also affected by other things, like the Fed deciding it wants them to be higher or lower, but supply and demand plays a big role.)
Very well put. It's one of the things that makes the delta-sigma modulation at very high sample rates used in eg SACD interesting. Of course, it would help if the data stream were easier to work with, which is why I think 24/96 or even 24/192 is superior overall.
The problem gets even more obnoxious if you care about the flatness and phase response of your filter. The one time I've done data acquisition work that cared about such things at 20kHz, we ended up using a 250kHz sample rate in order to give the Bessel filter room to operate. (We could have gotten away with marginally lower, but not enough lower to avoid buy the 1MS/s ADC system. We had 4 channels, so we ran at 250kHz.)
You're missing 2 things. First, to get response to 22kHz or more, you need 44kHz or more sample rates -- remember, you can only represent frequencies out to half the sample rate. Second, there are lots of potential artifacts introduced by sampling. This includes aliasing artifacts both in the original sampling, and in any later sample rate conversions. Aliasing artifacts in the original sampling are (ideally) removed by an analog filter before the ADC; that filter may very well not actually be adjustable, so you get some sampling artifacts if you drop the sample rate. Second, if you use a sample rate that's not an even fraction of 44.1kHz, the ADC may very well upconvert it to a 44.1kHz stream before converting it into an analog signal for your speakers, introducing more artifacts. And if you drop all the way down to 22.05kHz, you've lost the 11kHz-22kHz frequency band, even assuming no artifacts, and that band is most certainly audible.
In short, do what you've already figured out -- if your system is designed for 44.1kHz, use it at 44.1kHz.
Your 22kHz square and sawtooth waves have higher frequency harmonic content. If you don't believe me, go work the fourier transform -- it's not actually that hard if you replace the sawtooth wave with a triangle wave. Regardless, what that means is if you took your 22kHz waves, and ideally low-pass filtered them at frequency f, 22kHz
If you don't believe me, you can (sortof) do the experiment yourself. Generate the waves at 1kHz and at 10kHz and play them back. With the 10kHz waves, they'll sound different, but they'll be much closer to each other than the 1kHz waves. You can do this on your 44kHz computer audio system. If you want something more convincing, do it in analog electronics and up the frequency to 22kHz. Finding speakers with good response beyond 20kHz is left as an exercise for the reader.
If there is one thing I have learned about dealing with radio interference and electrical noise in general, it's that it is unpredictable and depends on far stranger details than you would think. That you don't have trouble surprises me even less than that some people do. If it were exceedingly common I'd be surprised -- I imagine MS tested at least a handful of simple, obvious cases. Of course, we don't have proof that the XBOX is at fault, but I wouldn't be surprised either way. Whether it's reasonable to lay blame on MS for it is another question... Sometimes these things don't get along, and as long as everything is playing by FCC rules its hard to lay blame on one party.
Well, since my point was that digital is not necessarily worse than analog, I'd say it was a fine example. Of course, digital can be *better* about it than analog, just as it can be worse. The original form of the data is irrelevant.
Also, just because they're allowed to be rude about the spectrum usage doesn't mean its a good idea. Everyone knows 2.4GHz is crowded; playing nice will make your equipment work better and your customers happier. The real shame is that there aren't general-use bands with well defined management protocols, so that devices like these can stay out of each other's way.
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The energy content that comes from the solar input is renewable. Certainly the system isn't completely renewable energy, but improvement is a good thing. It would replace some of our oil use with reprocessed CO2 from coal. "It isn't perfect" is a really, really horrible reason to not do something that's far better than the current plan.
I've worked at such a company, on such a project. The project was small by NASA standards (single-digit $M), but large relative to the company. They certainly weren't gambling bankruptcy in the sense that they didn't believe there was a real risk of it. There was certainly a plausible (though unlikely) risk of losing money, but that's quite different than bankruptcy. Certainly they didn't have exact knowledge of what the job would cost, but they knew well enough to be able to budget it and put in a fixed-price quote that wasn't risking the existence of the company.
You know full well that the fusion reactor is irrelevant to most NASA work. If you want a high-reliability oxygen/hydrocarbon rocket engine with competitive performance in the 1N-100kN thrust range, I know several small companies that would be happy to quote you a fixed price development contract; a few of them might well be willing to bid on much larger ones. If you want a comparable job in satellite design and development done, there are other companies that will do that. And before you say those sorts of jobs aren't interesting because they're well understood -- that's my entire point. Most of what NASA is doing is new development work on well understood problems. (That isn't to say it isn't interesting and good stuff; it is. It's just normally the results that are interesting, as opposed to the technology to get them.)
It's no different than estimating the cost to build an automobile engine from a clean sheet design; I don't know how to do it, but I know there are a good number of companies that would be happy to quote you a contract. I'm an engineer, not a business manager, so I won't claim to be able to make the estimates myself -- but I understand what the role of a good business leader is in such things, and I have some concept of what those skills do and don't imply the ability to do. Estimating project costs in the face of a moderate number of unknowns (ie R&D) is certainly one of the implied skills.
If you're doing any sort of engineering work, and the managerial team *doesn't* understand how to estimate a development budget for a completely new product, I recommed you look for a different job.
If the devices aren't compliant, they shouldn't be sold as such. Testing for compliance and certifying devices as compliant would be the logical role of the licensing agency. They shouldn't let people put the HDMI name on something if it doesn't work. As such, it certainly is their fault that these devices don't interoperate properly. And if the standard is so complicated that they can't actually test for compliance, then that's their fault too.
I suppose you neglected to read the whole "solar energy" part of the article? The point of all these things, be they this plan or biofuels, isn't some magic pixie dust source of free energy. It's that the easiest way of getting solar energy into a useful form might be to take a detour through plants or CO or steam or something else.
Fortunately, some people are actually trying to solve these problems rather than bitching on /.
Not to mention that pencils are actually pretty bad in space -- too much graphite dust and broken pencil leads, neither of which is good for electronics.
And steam locomotives would seem easier than high-temperature turbines. "Seems easier" is not what I'd call a good metric for evaluating such a technology.
That's a very interesting thing to say, given that the companies doing fixed-priced aerospace work are the small ones, and the companies placing cost-plus bids are the large ones.
Project management and cost estimation are problems that can be understood and solved, even when R&D is involved. There's no magic involved. Well-managed companies can estimate costs even for work they haven't done before, take a fixed-price contract, and turn a profit.
If you want to get really cynical about it, you could say that the reason for cost overruns on cost-plus contracts isn't that there are major unforseen problems, or that they're incompetently managed, but that cost overruns are simply the most profitable way to operate. But that's an entirely different discussion.
My basic point is simple: I've worked on a fixed-price NASA (sub-) contract. For the majority of the work NASA needs done, it is a far superior model. The majority of NASA contracts are for things that, while new, are problems that the industry knows how to solve. They aren't leaps into a great unknown. This is true even for many things like interplanetary probes and new rocket vehicles. For the remaining minority, I think the case is less obvious, but I still believe fixed price work is a better idea.
Besides, looking for ETI is important, too.
I agree completely, though -- whatever happened to doing things because they're fucking COOL? Aren't we supposed to be nerds, here?
Your argument sounds nice, but is equally applicable to any large engineering project, which are regularly done on fixed-price contracts. As such, there's something wrong with it. I'll leave it up to you to figure out what, exactly.
I've worked on a NASA contract doing rocket engine development as a sub-contractor. Our bid for the subcontract was fixed-price. Even that level of experience was enough to convince me that cost-plus contracts are a bad idea.
Most of what NASA does, while hardly trivial, is reasonably well understood. Yes, there is plenty of R&D to do, but there aren't any Apollo or Atlas-type leaps into the great unknown being taken. Even when it comes to design of significant rocket engines, satellite systems, and other space hardware, there are enough people that understand it well that NASA could get fixed-price bids if they really wanted them. These things don't need to be as outrageously expensive as they are, and cost-plus contracts are one (of many, many) reasons that they are.
Fair enough. I don't think virus kits or rootkits or exploit code should be inherently illegal to possess either. They do have useful research value, after all. Be it locks or software exploits, you need to understand the attack mechanisms in order to secure against them. And just like lockpicking, breaking insecure software can be a fun and rewarding hobby. (Not one I engage in, but exploiting a buffer overflow in a computer security class was both educational and entertaining.)
The search for extraterrestrial life has dramatic impacts on our own continued chances for survival as a species. As such, I'd say it's an inherently important problem. I'll take almost any amount of help to species-level survival over cancer drugs.
Note also that a null result is not the same as no results. Both a null result (failing to find ETI) and a positive result (finding it) convey useful information.
Whoah. Where do you buy your capuccino?
The issue comes when a contractor has met some deliverables, and then decides that the later ones will be more expensive than they originally bid. NASA would have the clout to get fixed-price bids if they had the willpower and desire to require them; make no mistake, the problem exists on both sides.
Another driver for fixed-price contracts in all government areas is profit margins. If a company places the lowest bid, and then produces a good product while making a 50% profit margin (because they found a better way to do it than their competitors), then the bureaucrat who allowed the company to make that high a profit gets accused of allowing the company to take advantage of taxpayer dollars. The result is that bureaucrats like cost-plus contracts, since the profits are set in advance at levels that no one much objects to. This holds even if the 50% profit margin contract costs more in total than the 8% cost-plus contract. It is, in many ways, an example of the principal-agent problem.
There is nothing inherently wrong about picking locks, just as there is nothing inherently wrong about any use of nmap -- it all depends on permission and intent. I would be willing to bet that most people using lockpicks use them as a hobby or because they're a locksmith, not because they're breaking into something. (Never mind that picking a lock is normally a much more difficult way to get in.)
Innocent until proven guilty -- if you're using the tools for legal purposes, then it should be legal to possess them, be they lockpicks or port scanners.
Historically, some of the stuff NASA was trying to get bids on was so far outside the realm of expertise of any possible bidder that no one would have been willing to just eat the cost overruns. So cost-plus contracts were awarded. It's become ingrained, and contractors have realized that they can simply threaten to not deliver if cost overruns won't be payed for.
There are some small aerospace companies that place fixed-price bids on NASA contracts, but none of the major ones do. Many of these companies are of the opinion that taking cost-plus work is severely damaging to the company mindset and correspondingly to its ability to function.
In general, I think fixed-price contracts would be a good idea. If you're worried about paying for a large project along the way, write the contract with intermediate deliverables, like test results from subsystems or prototype versions.
I own a set of lockpicks. I use them to pick locks. Both are perfectly legal (where I live, as I understand it). The locks I pick are locks I purchased for the purpose. I made the lockpicks myself. In the process I learned a bit about the world around me (locks, metalworking, etc). It's a fun and perfectly geeky hobby and it trains my manual dexterity and intellect. I see nothing wrong with this.
Now, in my jurisdiction, lockpicks automatically count as burglary tools if you're carrying them in commission of a crime like tresspassing. (AIUI. IANAL. Etc.) That makes sense to me -- they're considering it a worse crime to abuse tools and skills in the commission of a crime than to simply kick down a door and take some stuff. Or, put another way, with training comes responsibility. Analogous treatment of tools of computer crime would make sense to me -- though I would be suspicious of the certification process and authority at least until I understood the details of the proposal. Something like a PE certification would make sense, though.
In both those cases, the requirements are based on the assumption that there is a risk to the customers, that customers cannot readily evaluate. (The free market can't solve problems, like safety in some cases, that are very difficult for consumers to evaluate.)
I'm firmly against the idea of making ownership of lockpicks illegal, for the same reason as I'm against this law. As I understand the law here in North Carolina about lockpicks, I rather like it. You're allowed to own them, but if you're breaking and entering, tresspassing, or doing something similar, and carrying lockpicks then they automatically count as burglary tools. I rather like this policy -- it adds harsher penalties for those who go about acquiring tools and skills for illegitimate purposes, yet allows people like myself to own lockpicks purely because we like understanding how locks work. The analogy to computer security tools is a very good one, I think.
Requiring certification of people representing themselves as computer security experts might make sense (I'd withold judgement until I knew more about how it worked, personally). But restricting the tools doesn't. Adding something analogous to possession of burglary tools, though, does make sense to me. (Well, somewhat -- it's complicated, and since you can't really break into a computer without some level of software tool, the analogy gets strained.)
Yeah, when slashdot drops it's IPv4 address, then I'll believe in this IPv6 nonsense.
OK, admit it... how many of us would go figure out how to run IPv6 if it was required to get a /. fix?
If your shift key is broken, it is permissible to use your caps lock key for the duration of the required capital letter. I know that key is abhorrent to most here, but it does have uses in the event a sudden failure of both shift keys.
I like your example, and agree completely, but this is Slashdot so I have to nitpick.
The price of money is the interest rate. If I want some more money, to buy a house or something, the interest rate represents how much money that money will cost me. Unsurprisingly, interest rates are impacted by supply and demand (of money), just like other goods. (Of course, interest rates are also affected by other things, like the Fed deciding it wants them to be higher or lower, but supply and demand plays a big role.)
Very well put. It's one of the things that makes the delta-sigma modulation at very high sample rates used in eg SACD interesting. Of course, it would help if the data stream were easier to work with, which is why I think 24/96 or even 24/192 is superior overall.
The problem gets even more obnoxious if you care about the flatness and phase response of your filter. The one time I've done data acquisition work that cared about such things at 20kHz, we ended up using a 250kHz sample rate in order to give the Bessel filter room to operate. (We could have gotten away with marginally lower, but not enough lower to avoid buy the 1MS/s ADC system. We had 4 channels, so we ran at 250kHz.)
You're missing 2 things. First, to get response to 22kHz or more, you need 44kHz or more sample rates -- remember, you can only represent frequencies out to half the sample rate. Second, there are lots of potential artifacts introduced by sampling. This includes aliasing artifacts both in the original sampling, and in any later sample rate conversions. Aliasing artifacts in the original sampling are (ideally) removed by an analog filter before the ADC; that filter may very well not actually be adjustable, so you get some sampling artifacts if you drop the sample rate. Second, if you use a sample rate that's not an even fraction of 44.1kHz, the ADC may very well upconvert it to a 44.1kHz stream before converting it into an analog signal for your speakers, introducing more artifacts. And if you drop all the way down to 22.05kHz, you've lost the 11kHz-22kHz frequency band, even assuming no artifacts, and that band is most certainly audible.
In short, do what you've already figured out -- if your system is designed for 44.1kHz, use it at 44.1kHz.
Your 22kHz square and sawtooth waves have higher frequency harmonic content. If you don't believe me, go work the fourier transform -- it's not actually that hard if you replace the sawtooth wave with a triangle wave. Regardless, what that means is if you took your 22kHz waves, and ideally low-pass filtered them at frequency f, 22kHz
If you don't believe me, you can (sortof) do the experiment yourself. Generate the waves at 1kHz and at 10kHz and play them back. With the 10kHz waves, they'll sound different, but they'll be much closer to each other than the 1kHz waves. You can do this on your 44kHz computer audio system. If you want something more convincing, do it in analog electronics and up the frequency to 22kHz. Finding speakers with good response beyond 20kHz is left as an exercise for the reader.
If there is one thing I have learned about dealing with radio interference and electrical noise in general, it's that it is unpredictable and depends on far stranger details than you would think. That you don't have trouble surprises me even less than that some people do. If it were exceedingly common I'd be surprised -- I imagine MS tested at least a handful of simple, obvious cases. Of course, we don't have proof that the XBOX is at fault, but I wouldn't be surprised either way. Whether it's reasonable to lay blame on MS for it is another question... Sometimes these things don't get along, and as long as everything is playing by FCC rules its hard to lay blame on one party.
Well, since my point was that digital is not necessarily worse than analog, I'd say it was a fine example. Of course, digital can be *better* about it than analog, just as it can be worse. The original form of the data is irrelevant.
Also, just because they're allowed to be rude about the spectrum usage doesn't mean its a good idea. Everyone knows 2.4GHz is crowded; playing nice will make your equipment work better and your customers happier. The real shame is that there aren't general-use bands with well defined management protocols, so that devices like these can stay out of each other's way.