It's not trivial. If you know how to do it, please patent it, form a company quickly and do it - you'll be a multi-millionaire in a couple of months. There are legions of math PhDs trying to come up with a solution.
Triangulation as you suggest only if you have constant measurements being made on your neighbours cells. They are not constantly being made, I assure you of this.
You are very wrong.
Coarse-grained "GPS" done to 1000-meter accuracy using 3 cell phone towers is a process known as "trilateration". It is extremely common. Some Sprint phones, in fact used it even though they were built on chipsets containing true (satellite) GPS, because the GPS chips pulled too much power. GPS could not be switched on on those phones even by custom apps. Only the 911 call mechanism could use it.
Terrorists downed a Malaysian Airlines flight just a few months ago. Clearly planes are still a target. Getting into the cabin or ramming a prominent landmark might have become more difficult in the wake of 9/11, but killing the couple of hundred people on the plane remains an attractive option for terrorist groups.
Well, I hope you've informed the international authorities about that. Last report I heard was that there was no definite knowledge on what happened, and that it could have just as easily been a problem with the flight crew.
Certainly no terrorist organization has come forth to believably claim credit, and if no one knows you did it, how are you going to get them to fear you?
Such a bomb could well house a small battery for detonation, big enough to also power the device for a short time for the trigger swipe. Rejecting devices that don't work is absolute insanity.
A bomb is a device with a high level of potential energy that can be released very rapidly.
So are batteries, as Apple, among others, has proven.
So what was the variability? Realize I actually understand electro-chemistry?
Beats me. I was just a flunky back then. My boss was the engineer.
At least some of these things were lithium batteries, as I understand it. The person who came after me claimed to have blown a hole in the floor when he dropped one accidentally.
I have a LaCrosse charger that will test and return stats on NiCD and NiMh AAA and AA cells. I just used it to screen batteries for Hurricane Season. Some of them didn't even come close to rated capacity, even when they didn't ring up as flat "defective". Presumably the testing units at my old employer were doing something similar. That, after all was our specialty - microprocessor-driven control systems.
Don't believe another word from whoever told you the battery story. It's laughable, from a quality control POV. You really think that at battery line is that variable? Is your view of the industrial workplace best informed by 'The Simpsons'?
I hate to pop your bubble, but I used to work for a company that provided their testing and grading machines.
It's not that simple. WallMart can't give away the shoes they sell. Don't know why they still stock them.
But other products are decent quality and often as not, identical to the product sold at competitor's stores. Just like a 'Harbor Freight' cherry picker. It's good enough.
Long before Sam Walton was born and selling American-made products wherever he could, there was this business concept known as the "Loss Leader".
You'd sell something for less than what you paid for it in the expectation that it would either pull people in who'd then be tempted to buy stuff with higher profit margins or at least to ensure that they didn't go elsewhere to buy something you didn't stock and pick up things they'd otherwise buy from you (to your profit) from a competitor. That's your crappy shoes.
Wal-Mart and Communism have a lot in common though. You don't go there expecting exceptional quality. You get the Common Denominator of the Masses.
Even a name-brand product is often manufactured in a "Wal-Mart" edition where corners were cut in order to allow the manufacturer to still make a profit when the product had to sell for Always the Low Price. One well-known lawnmower brand isn't carried there because they refused to do that. I know that a world-famous manufacturer of batteries tests each unit and assigns one of 5 grades, which are all sold under the same packaging but to different classes of merchants: Radio Shack, convenience stores, upscale retauil, discount Big Box, and so forth.
Actually, Wal-Mart allegedly once toyed with the idea of selling fur coats. That idea was met with resounding laughter.
buy this years ver of it we don't make parts for stuff after 1.5-2.0 years also no software updates as well.
The LED display in the clock on my oven is about to go. It's not wired into anything critical, so it's basically just a time-of-day/timer digital clock.
From what I can tell, getting something that's an exact replacement would run me probably about $250 if I can get it at all.
A new knob to replace one of the burner knobs that warped due to too much heat (imagine that!) would run me over $25.
This is a cheap contractor-grade unit so presumably they made lots of them back in the early '90's and that's the best I can do for parts????
When I worked at KFC, we used to cook the chicken sandwiches that way. They'd come in a sealed bag that you'd just toss into boiling water. Who knew the place was gourmet!?
Funny you should mention KFC. The Colonel was famous for hacking the cookers when he came into a restaurant to demo his new way of making fried chicken.
Those, however the days when it was Kentucky Fried Chicken and not KFC.
If you want pizza that's pizza and not just bread with tomato sauce on it, you need at least 375C/700F. Some people have actually hacked cleaning cycles to approach that, but that's too far into the voids-the-warranty territory for me. I love well-executed pizza, but replacing the house would be a bit much.
My ideal oven would be able to do that plus have easily-maintainable steam injectors for bread baking. Plus a good way to ensure heat doesn't build up in the kitchen during the Summer.
I don't do large animal carcasses in my oven, so I'll leave to others the features that could be improved in that area.
As would yours, if you were willing to accept that a refrigerator is a luxury item, that air conditioning was a rare extravagance, that electrical power was not something you could expect to be there any time you wanted it.
PHP was expressly designed to display web pages. Originally the acronym meant something like "Personal Home Pages".
Yes, it has warts, security issues and the original database services were anything but plug-compatible, but it's a great language for quick-and-dirty.
If you want something architecturally cleaner, if not necessarily more secure, there's Python.
Perl has certainly done yeoman service on the web. Its main faults are that it is infamously "write-only" and that - as in the case of sed commands - if you sneeze while typing, you'll have created a valid program. Probably one that does something horrible.
Man, you got some tough weeds where you live! Either that or your soil is like rock!
I was thinking more like if I had robotic garden assistants, they'd be out there every morning rooting out weeds while they were still puny seedlings.
The "dirt" around here is about 1 step up from beach sand. A cheap Radio Shack motor would have enough torque to spin that. A bigger fixed motor driving a flex cable would actually carry the advantage that you could use it to make the carriage more tip-proof. That way you could also use the same basic lightweight arm mechanism without the elaborate stem-grabbing attachment that you're positing.
You don't want to assault the weed stem, anyway. A lot of weeds will grow back from the roots, so uprooting them is usually better. Plus you don't have to contaminate the site with Agent Orange or deal with the fact that lasers don't work very well on underground objects.
Perfectly fine in theory but probably sufficiently mechanically complicated so as to be impractical for low-cost robotics.
Probably less complicated than chemicals or lasers. All the corkscrew has to do is rotate, Garden Weasel [TM] style. The positioning hardware is probablty going to be virtually identical.
WEEDING a garden is hard. Got a robot for that? Didn't think so.
That's actually one of the interesting things I'd expect robotics to solve in the decades to come. There's quite a few things a robot should be able to do to weed - electrocution and precise microwave heating (mm waves?) come to one's mind.
It's amazing what you can do with a little corkscrew device.
> I suppose listening to ham radio now is a crime.
No, but recording and publishing it all on the Internet probably would and should be a crime. Which is more or less what Google did.
No, according to the Communications Act of 1932, you could listen to and repeat anything that was publicly broadcast, and you could listen to anything.
That changed when Ronald "Get the Government off the Backs of the People" Reagan took office and it was made illegal to listen to cell phone frequencies. Which at the time were not digital.
Curiously, the famed cell intercept that caused Newt Gingrich so much grief was never prosecuted.
i did this in my backyard. except with a bar. I build a bar that had a canopy, on the canopy i attached a few panels, enough to power the lighting, a small stereo and a handful of USB chargers build into the bar itself. I dont have a large backup battery yet so its really only useful during the day time right now, however this makes perfect sense to do in parks, small scale solar is great for isolated outdoor areas
Florida has had solar-powered benches for ages.
On a typical summer day, they can sear unprotected flesh to medium-well done in under 5 minutes!
Turns out what I bought was a downloadable 500-byte Adobe key that on certain selected devices (not even the majority of my book-reader devices) so long as certain seller infrastructure remains intact and the owners of that infrastructure feel willing will allow me to read the books using selected software. It will not allow me to excerpt the book, lend out the book, read using a reader program with superior features, print even the smallest part of the book or do anything that the "sellers of this book" don't want me to do.
It's a cookbook, so that means that if I need a copy of a recipe in the kitchen, I have to hand-copy it from the display screen.
For about $1.50 more I could have bought a physical copy of that book. I still wouldn't be able to print it, but at least I could have photocopied a page when I needed a recipe instead of copying it out longhand.
I'm not "buying any more e-books" via that channel. I'll stick to the channels that actually present me with usable copies of the books. In other words, sell me the book not a minimally-useful key that costs as much as the actual flamin' book itself!
The Free Market and Libertarianism are not the same thing, any more than Socialism and Communism are the same thing.
Libertarianism is a philosophy that extends to government in general and not just economics.
The Free Market, as many have noted, rarely exists, and while it's fashionable to blame it all on government, any market that has economies of scale bears within it the seeds of its own destruction, as competitors are pushed via its positive-feedback mechanisms towards either monoply or extinction. And don't get me started on the distorted version of Darwinism that many market fans espouse.
if The Market were an abstract quantity, we'd say "have at it", but many markets affect our daily lives in terms of livelihood, medical care, and even basic freedom. Government is one of the few mechanisms that can dampen the positive-feedback mechanisms of a spiralling market and ensure that we aren't all simply crushed under the juggernaut.
The idealized role of Libertarianism is to ensure that Government itself doesn't become a juggernaut. However, Libertarians often undercut themselves by uncritically claiming that The Market Will Make Everything Wonderful, if you just let it. It won't. It allows more scope for trial-and-error than central planning, but that doesn't mean that some of the results cannot be far worse as well as far better.
The Libertarian label is often also adopted by deadbeats who want the benefits of government while not actually having to pay for them. It's really amazing how many BMW owners I know who cry "I'm Libertarian" while cruising down the Interstate Highways.
You could argue that if the system was actually an open market with private security firms competing for the government's business then you'd have open-ness.
Maye you could, but in all conscience, I could not.
An open market doesn't confer superior morality. In fact, it doesn't even confer superior product or service.
The Invisible Hand selects for profitability, and if you can be profitable enough while selling people toxic pet food or children's toys laced with heavy metals, you can wipe your feet on competitors who provide better products.
Open bidding has nothing at all to do with open operation, in any event. You can have limited bids for an operation that works "in the sunshine" or open bids for an operation that works with Nixonian paranoia.
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It's not trivial. If you know how to do it, please patent it, form a company quickly and do it - you'll be a multi-millionaire in a couple of months. There are legions of math PhDs trying to come up with a solution.
Triangulation as you suggest only if you have constant measurements being made on your neighbours cells. They are not constantly being made, I assure you of this.
You are very wrong.
Coarse-grained "GPS" done to 1000-meter accuracy using 3 cell phone towers is a process known as "trilateration". It is extremely common. Some Sprint phones, in fact used it even though they were built on chipsets containing true (satellite) GPS, because the GPS chips pulled too much power. GPS could not be switched on on those phones even by custom apps. Only the 911 call mechanism could use it.
Gravity bends space, although always in the same basic way. (I think)
So lets imagine there may be some other way of bending space...
You don't bend it, you fold it.
Of course, you need a supply of the spice melange, first.
Terrorists downed a Malaysian Airlines flight just a few months ago. Clearly planes are still a target. Getting into the cabin or ramming a prominent landmark might have become more difficult in the wake of 9/11, but killing the couple of hundred people on the plane remains an attractive option for terrorist groups.
Well, I hope you've informed the international authorities about that. Last report I heard was that there was no definite knowledge on what happened, and that it could have just as easily been a problem with the flight crew.
Certainly no terrorist organization has come forth to believably claim credit, and if no one knows you did it, how are you going to get them to fear you?
So the TSA is accomplishing what exactly?
Getting people used to invasive authority?
Naw. They're pretty well OK with it at this point.
Such a bomb could well house a small battery for detonation, big enough to also power the device for a short time for the trigger swipe. Rejecting devices that don't work is absolute insanity.
A bomb is a device with a high level of potential energy that can be released very rapidly.
So are batteries, as Apple, among others, has proven.
So what was the variability? Realize I actually understand electro-chemistry?
Beats me. I was just a flunky back then. My boss was the engineer.
At least some of these things were lithium batteries, as I understand it. The person who came after me claimed to have blown a hole in the floor when he dropped one accidentally.
I have a LaCrosse charger that will test and return stats on NiCD and NiMh AAA and AA cells. I just used it to screen batteries for Hurricane Season. Some of them didn't even come close to rated capacity, even when they didn't ring up as flat "defective". Presumably the testing units at my old employer were doing something similar. That, after all was our specialty - microprocessor-driven control systems.
Don't believe another word from whoever told you the battery story. It's laughable, from a quality control POV. You really think that at battery line is that variable? Is your view of the industrial workplace best informed by 'The Simpsons'?
I hate to pop your bubble, but I used to work for a company that provided their testing and grading machines.
It's not that simple. WallMart can't give away the shoes they sell. Don't know why they still stock them.
But other products are decent quality and often as not, identical to the product sold at competitor's stores. Just like a 'Harbor Freight' cherry picker. It's good enough.
Long before Sam Walton was born and selling American-made products wherever he could, there was this business concept known as the "Loss Leader".
You'd sell something for less than what you paid for it in the expectation that it would either pull people in who'd then be tempted to buy stuff with higher profit margins or at least to ensure that they didn't go elsewhere to buy something you didn't stock and pick up things they'd otherwise buy from you (to your profit) from a competitor. That's your crappy shoes.
Wal-Mart and Communism have a lot in common though. You don't go there expecting exceptional quality. You get the Common Denominator of the Masses.
Even a name-brand product is often manufactured in a "Wal-Mart" edition where corners were cut in order to allow the manufacturer to still make a profit when the product had to sell for Always the Low Price. One well-known lawnmower brand isn't carried there because they refused to do that. I know that a world-famous manufacturer of batteries tests each unit and assigns one of 5 grades, which are all sold under the same packaging but to different classes of merchants: Radio Shack, convenience stores, upscale retauil, discount Big Box, and so forth.
Actually, Wal-Mart allegedly once toyed with the idea of selling fur coats. That idea was met with resounding laughter.
Swings of 25F are enough to throw off that balance, yielding loaves that are too high or too low or too brown or other problems.
Most home ovens do it very badly. It seems to me that's a much more fixable problem without spending a fortune on the ultimate oven.
A pizza stone can held reduce temperature swings by adding thermal mass. The downside being that it needs pre-heating, since it has thermal mass.
Then of course, there's the old advice about leaving the door closed.
Two low-tech, low-cost ways to improve the operation of an existing oven.
parts?
buy this years ver of it we don't make parts for stuff after 1.5-2.0 years also no software updates as well.
The LED display in the clock on my oven is about to go. It's not wired into anything critical, so it's basically just a time-of-day/timer digital clock.
From what I can tell, getting something that's an exact replacement would run me probably about $250 if I can get it at all.
A new knob to replace one of the burner knobs that warped due to too much heat (imagine that!) would run me over $25.
This is a cheap contractor-grade unit so presumably they made lots of them back in the early '90's and that's the best I can do for parts????
When I worked at KFC, we used to cook the chicken sandwiches that way. They'd come in a sealed bag that you'd just toss into boiling water. Who knew the place was gourmet!?
Funny you should mention KFC. The Colonel was famous for hacking the cookers when he came into a restaurant to demo his new way of making fried chicken.
Those, however the days when it was Kentucky Fried Chicken and not KFC.
If you want pizza that's pizza and not just bread with tomato sauce on it, you need at least 375C/700F. Some people have actually hacked cleaning cycles to approach that, but that's too far into the voids-the-warranty territory for me. I love well-executed pizza, but replacing the house would be a bit much.
My ideal oven would be able to do that plus have easily-maintainable steam injectors for bread baking. Plus a good way to ensure heat doesn't build up in the kitchen during the Summer.
I don't do large animal carcasses in my oven, so I'll leave to others the features that could be improved in that area.
The real question is "who cooks at 800C?". I do quite a bit of baking and the only reason to go over 200C is pizza.
That's reason enough, right there!
Their cost of living is 1/6 too.
As would yours, if you were willing to accept that a refrigerator is a luxury item, that air conditioning was a rare extravagance, that electrical power was not something you could expect to be there any time you wanted it.
Their productivity would be considerably less than 1/6 as well
If quality were that important relative to price, Wal-Mart would have gone out of business years ago.
We'd rather buy cheap junk and think that we're "rich".
PHP was expressly designed to display web pages. Originally the acronym meant something like "Personal Home Pages".
Yes, it has warts, security issues and the original database services were anything but plug-compatible, but it's a great language for quick-and-dirty.
If you want something architecturally cleaner, if not necessarily more secure, there's Python.
Perl has certainly done yeoman service on the web. Its main faults are that it is infamously "write-only" and that - as in the case of sed commands - if you sneeze while typing, you'll have created a valid program. Probably one that does something horrible.
Beatings will continue until you are happy and productive.
There are MILLIONS of people in [Third World Country] who would be HAPPY to do your job for 1/6th the price!
Man, you got some tough weeds where you live! Either that or your soil is like rock!
I was thinking more like if I had robotic garden assistants, they'd be out there every morning rooting out weeds while they were still puny seedlings.
The "dirt" around here is about 1 step up from beach sand. A cheap Radio Shack motor would have enough torque to spin that. A bigger fixed motor driving a flex cable would actually carry the advantage that you could use it to make the carriage more tip-proof. That way you could also use the same basic lightweight arm mechanism without the elaborate stem-grabbing attachment that you're positing.
You don't want to assault the weed stem, anyway. A lot of weeds will grow back from the roots, so uprooting them is usually better. Plus you don't have to contaminate the site with Agent Orange or deal with the fact that lasers don't work very well on underground objects.
Perfectly fine in theory but probably sufficiently mechanically complicated so as to be impractical for low-cost robotics.
Probably less complicated than chemicals or lasers. All the corkscrew has to do is rotate, Garden Weasel [TM] style. The positioning hardware is probablty going to be virtually identical.
WEEDING a garden is hard. Got a robot for that? Didn't think so.
That's actually one of the interesting things I'd expect robotics to solve in the decades to come. There's quite a few things a robot should be able to do to weed - electrocution and precise microwave heating (mm waves?) come to one's mind.
It's amazing what you can do with a little corkscrew device.
> I suppose listening to ham radio now is a crime.
No, but recording and publishing it all on the Internet probably would and should be a crime. Which is more or less what Google did.
No, according to the Communications Act of 1932, you could listen to and repeat anything that was publicly broadcast, and you could listen to anything.
That changed when Ronald "Get the Government off the Backs of the People" Reagan took office and it was made illegal to listen to cell phone frequencies. Which at the time were not digital.
Curiously, the famed cell intercept that caused Newt Gingrich so much grief was never prosecuted.
i did this in my backyard. except with a bar. I build a bar that had a canopy, on the canopy i attached a few panels, enough to power the lighting, a small stereo and a handful of USB chargers build into the bar itself. I dont have a large backup battery yet so its really only useful during the day time right now, however this makes perfect sense to do in parks, small scale solar is great for isolated outdoor areas
Florida has had solar-powered benches for ages.
On a typical summer day, they can sear unprotected flesh to medium-well done in under 5 minutes!
I thought I bought a book yesterday.
Turns out what I bought was a downloadable 500-byte Adobe key that on certain selected devices (not even the majority of my book-reader devices) so long as certain seller infrastructure remains intact and the owners of that infrastructure feel willing will allow me to read the books using selected software. It will not allow me to excerpt the book, lend out the book, read using a reader program with superior features, print even the smallest part of the book or do anything that the "sellers of this book" don't want me to do.
It's a cookbook, so that means that if I need a copy of a recipe in the kitchen, I have to hand-copy it from the display screen.
For about $1.50 more I could have bought a physical copy of that book. I still wouldn't be able to print it, but at least I could have photocopied a page when I needed a recipe instead of copying it out longhand.
I'm not "buying any more e-books" via that channel. I'll stick to the channels that actually present me with usable copies of the books. In other words, sell me the book not a minimally-useful key that costs as much as the actual flamin' book itself!
The Free Market and Libertarianism are not the same thing, any more than Socialism and Communism are the same thing.
Libertarianism is a philosophy that extends to government in general and not just economics.
The Free Market, as many have noted, rarely exists, and while it's fashionable to blame it all on government, any market that has economies of scale bears within it the seeds of its own destruction, as competitors are pushed via its positive-feedback mechanisms towards either monoply or extinction. And don't get me started on the distorted version of Darwinism that many market fans espouse.
if The Market were an abstract quantity, we'd say "have at it", but many markets affect our daily lives in terms of livelihood, medical care, and even basic freedom. Government is one of the few mechanisms that can dampen the positive-feedback mechanisms of a spiralling market and ensure that we aren't all simply crushed under the juggernaut.
The idealized role of Libertarianism is to ensure that Government itself doesn't become a juggernaut. However, Libertarians often undercut themselves by uncritically claiming that The Market Will Make Everything Wonderful, if you just let it. It won't. It allows more scope for trial-and-error than central planning, but that doesn't mean that some of the results cannot be far worse as well as far better.
The Libertarian label is often also adopted by deadbeats who want the benefits of government while not actually having to pay for them. It's really amazing how many BMW owners I know who cry "I'm Libertarian" while cruising down the Interstate Highways.
You could argue that if the system was actually an open market with private security firms competing for the government's business then you'd have open-ness.
Maye you could, but in all conscience, I could not.
An open market doesn't confer superior morality. In fact, it doesn't even confer superior product or service.
The Invisible Hand selects for profitability, and if you can be profitable enough while selling people toxic pet food or children's toys laced with heavy metals, you can wipe your feet on competitors who provide better products.
Open bidding has nothing at all to do with open operation, in any event. You can have limited bids for an operation that works "in the sunshine" or open bids for an operation that works with Nixonian paranoia.