Radio behaves exactly the same as all other EM radiation, we just think of the various types in different terms - e.g. gamma and X-ray are generally thought of in energy units (eV), UV/visible/IR in wavelength (nm), and microwave/radio in frequency (Hz).
The famous 21-cm hydrogen line, detected by radio telescope at 1420MHz, is a well-understood quantum phenomenon and is definitely an emission of a photon It's just detected electronically, rather than by a photochemical reaction of a silver halide on film. Same as most visible light photos these days...so I'd say while I get your gut feeling, there's realistically no difference between a radio telescope image and an optical one nowadays.
I used to wash it after every shift on the line, much to the amusement of the dishwashers. Also took it swimming in saltwater quite a bit, and running in the rain more times than I can count. Never a problem. So far, my vanilla S7 is just as durable, if not more so - the waterproof USB port is a quantum leap over the stupid little flap-door-thing on the S5. If the heat wouldn't get to it, I'd try putting it in the dishwasher..
Once I opened up the airbox and got a properly designed full exhaust on it, it had a pretty throaty purr. Not the syncopated thrum of a V, still the flat-scream of a 4, but satisfyingly deep and lush. Guy I knew put a turbo on his, same engine, same exhaust from the cat back actually, sounded like a muffled bass kazoo.
Cantrell is now drawing an elaborate diagram, and has even slowed down, almost to a stop, the better to draw it. It begins with a tall rectangle. Set within that is a parallelogram, the same size, but skewed a little bit downwards, and with a little circle drawn in the middle of one edge. Randy realizes he’s looking at a perspective view of a door-frame with its door hanging slightly ajar, the little circle being its knob. STEEL FRAME, Cantrell writes, hollow metal channels. Quick meandering scribbles suggest the matrix of wall surrounding it, and the floor underneath. Where the uprights of the doorframe are planted in the floor, Cantrell draws small, carefully foreshortened circles. Holes in the floor. Then he encircles the doorframe in a continuous hoop, beginning at one of those circles and climbing up one side of the doorframe, across the top, down the other side, through the other hole in the floor, and then horizontally beneath the door, then up through the first hole again, completing the loop. He draws one or two careful iterations of this and then numerous sloppy ones until the whole thing is surrounded in a vague, elongated tornado. Many turns of fine wire. Finally he draws two leads away from this huge door-sized coil and connects them to a sandwich of alternating long and short horizontal lines, which Randy recognizes as the symbol for a battery. The diagram is completed with a huge arrow drawn vigorously through the center of the doorway, like an airborne battering ram, labeled B which means a magnetic field. Ordo computer room door.
"Wow," Randy says. Cantrell has drawn a classic elementary-school electromagnet, the kind of thing young Randy made by winding a wire around a nail and hooking it up to a lantern battery. Except that this one is wound around the outside of a doorframe and, Randy guesses, hidden inside the walls and beneath the floor so that no one would know it was there unless they tore the building apart. Magnetic fields are the styli of the modern world, they are what writes bits onto disks, or wipes them away. The read/write heads of Tombstone’s hard drive are exactly the same thing, but a lot smaller. If they are fine-pointed draftsman’s pens, then what Cantrell’s drawn here is a firehose spraying India ink. It probably would have no effect on a disk drive that was a few meters away from it, but anything that was actually carried through that doorway would be wiped clean. Between the pulse-gun fired into the building from outside (destroying every chip within range) and this doorframe hack (losing every bit on every disk) the Ordo raid must have been purely a scrap-hauling run for whoever organized it—Andrew Loeb or (according to the Secret Admirers) Attorney General Comstock’s sinister Fed forces who were using Andy as a cat’s paw. The only thing that would have made it through that doorway intact would have been information stored on CD-ROM or other nonmagnetic media, and Tombstone had none of that.
IMO NYC does it right - $2.50 gets you into the subway and you can ride to your heart's content. Yes, it is unfair to both ten-block-hops and massive city-spanning expeditions, but two wrongs make a right - the short Midtown-confined trips that businesspeople and tourists take in droves balance out my cross-metro trips from northern Manhattan out to the Rockaways in the summer (over an hour and close to 30 miles). Also vastly cheaper in terms of implementation and operation - if a card has adequate fare or time remaining, the turnstile opens and that's the end of the transaction. I really don't get why a proper metro-area mass transit system would ever be metered (commuter rail is a different beast, but that's regional).
Here in NYC the Metropolitan Transit Authority (subway, buses, regional commuter rail, bridges and tunnels - anything you pay a fare or toll for) had a 2013 budget (PDF) of $1,357,806,000. And that's still bleeding damn near another billion a year, with 25% fare increases and 25% service cuts. You could probably slash that overrrun quite a bit more by stopping all current and planned construction/improvements and going to a minimal-maintenance schedule, good luck with that.
Yeah, free transit is a great idea in theory, but if you've figured out how to squeeze three billion dollars a year in sustainable tax revenue out of a single city, even a large one, you're a better economist than I.
Clue this: the homeless have pretty much free access to the subways - most stations no longer have attendants on duty so hopping a turnstile and riding for days on end is feasible. Hell, I've done it myself (I have a monthly pass so not swiping isn't taking a fare). Foul smelling, insane homeless emptying entire train cars is a bigger problem than them freezing to death, at least in this town.
Haven't done any reviewed work in years, I kinda miss it! I'm not going to bother doing full citations, just title and link, if that's OK with you.
"With a 50 ng/mL cutoff concentration and following low doses of 10 to 45 mg cocaine by multiple routes, detection times extended up to 98 h." - Urinary Excretion of Ecgonine and Five Other Cocaine Metabolites Following Controlled Oral, Intravenous, Intranasal, and Smoked Administration of Cocaine, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3159558/
If you've only been exposed to cell phones and retail-level cameras you might think it's just a gimmick Nokia is using, but...you'd be wrong. The Nikon D800 DSLR is at 36; Hasselblad/Mamiya/Pentax/Leica medium-format bodies are anywhere from 50 to 80. Have been since 2006 or so. Give it another two generations on the DSLR front and you'll be getting a $499 50MP Nikon or Canon at Wal-Mart.
Anyway, even on my D5100@16MP I can pull recognizable images if it's a frame-filling portrait, anything more is just making it easier.
Sure, most downmarket cars don't have the ability to switch off the stuff, but then again who wants to zip a Fiesta around like Vettel? (Well, the ST is amazing, but I digress). Funny thing though, most of the high-end vehicles still offer plenty of ways to shut down all the aids. Hell, most of 'em come with a Big Red Switch conspicuously labeled "RACE MODE" that handily switches everything off and resets the suspension for performance. I take it that should all be banned, no?
Come to think of it, why should ANY car capable of exceeding 75mph, or getting there in 15 seconds, be legal? Seriously?
Also, if you enjoy a sports car with anything other than TC and ABS (both of which make it faster) you have no business wasting money and fuel driving it.
Looking at the pictures, it's pretty freakin' obvious the driver went "Lemme show you what the car can do - I got skillz yo, no worries!" and pegged it on a public street. Regardless of any risk to others, it's insanely moronic to drive like that off-track simply because there's zero margin. You fuck up, you die. No nice kerbs or runoff or gravel pits or SAFER walls to hit...just trees and lightposts. At 45mph, that car was perfectly safe, probably safer than anything else on the road that day because it's designed to go, and crash, much faster.
But it wasn't exactly going 45 now, was it? Even IF something in the car broke, and that was why there was a loss of control - there was a loss of control at MASSIVELY EXCESSIVE SPEED. The gearhead-hooligan in me is sad, but the Responsible Adult is pleased these idiots sanitized the gene pool.
I, along with most other "enthusiasts", wholeheartedly appreciate all the electronic gear and realize that a lot of it does make for outright faster lap times - but at the same time, I'd like to be able to switch it off should I choose. There's something to be said for hanging the ass out with a healthy jab at the throttle and shrieking around a parking lot trailing smoke, or slip-sliding around a corner on an empty gravel road in the boonies. OTOH, with extensive winter driving experience, there's also something to be said for having every driver aid known to man spinning a set of Blizzaks in the middle of a wicked nor'easter - all that skulduggery has gotten me home with far less stress than my reflexes and skills alone. There's a time and a place for everything, but a lot of manufacturers these days are eliminating the choice.
As in sits in a wheelchair or bed sort of looking around vacantly, with a 10% chance of even cracking a smile on seeing me. Can't speak, move, or do much of anything. It's one of the more unpleasant life experiences I can imagine.
That being said, she has a proper living will, so when she's finally unable (well, actually, forgets how) to swallow that will be it. But, from what I understand, since death by starvation/dehydration is painful and unpleasant, she'll be given a morphine drip...perhaps calibrated wrong, whoops. I can think of worse way to go..
When I was a kid, we heated with wood, I used the fireplace and stove in my college house, lived in Maine for seven years burning wood by the cord. It definitely affected my lungs...my hematocrit was over 55 at my physical last month, my VO2max is north of 50, and I run half-marathons in well under 1:30 and getting close to a sub-6-minute 5K. That pack-a-day COPD inducing toxic brew I grew up in was sure horrid, uh huh. Come to think of it, we pretty much all had woodstoves growing up (small town in CT) and our running teams were state elite, bred a couple of national-classers. I'll say that breathing all that smoke and doing sprint workouts outdoors in the winter at 15F actually developed our pulmonary systems.
That being said, woodburning on a large scale can be a particulate pollution problem, and if you have a really smoky, leaky stove I can see a problem. I know there's massive issues in the 3rd world with respiratory disorders from nasty sooty unventilated indoor cooking fires...but really, developed-world woodstoves don't fill your house with noxious fumes any more than an oil or gas furnace.
The Vignelli Map. A triumph of minimalist, functional design - and pure beauty to boot. The original had some geographic information (parks, major landmarks, etc) but when he redesigned it for the Weekender he stripped even that out. Now it's just lines and stops, as it should be. You need to worry about geography on the street, not in the Land of the Mole People.
Massimo Vignelli redid both the signage and the map for the MTA in the 70's. Minimalism all the way - the signage remains to this day, white Helvetica on a black background, simple colored circles for the lines, and almost nothing else...there's barely even any arrows.
And his map...oh, it's a thing of beauty. "It was not a map. It was a diagram. It was not about what happens aboveground. The purpose of the diagram was to show where the subway lines go." So perfect that when the MTA wanted a weekend-service-change map they had him reissue it (and this time he eliminated ALL geographic information, and people love it)...and a copy of the original,a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=89300">still hangs in the Museum of Modern Art
If you could get isotopically pure Pu-239, which doesn't exist, it would work - but even the tiniest traces of Pu-240 will spoil it. Quoth Wiki: "The presence of the isotope plutonium-240 in a sample limits its nuclear bomb potential, as plutonium-240 has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate (~440 fissions per second per gram—over 1,000 neutrons per second per gram),[20] raising the background neutron levels and thus increasing the risk of predetonation."
Long story short, all those extra neutrons make a chain reaction far more likely to occur - so likely that if you use gun assembly, supercriticality is reached long before the two pieces are physically together and they just blow back apart with a negligible yield. Granted, "negligible" in the sense of nuclear weapons means anywhere from a few to a few hundred tons, and there's still an intense load of radiation and fallout, so for terroristic purposes it might suffice...but you aren't building a city-leveling device with Pu and a surplus artillery barrel.
Anyway, breeding it with a neutron tube would be slow, Like building a skyscraper with a set of Craftsmen tools slow. Reactors are the *only* way to synthesize >mg quantities of any transuranic. If you have those resources, a simple (albeit large) implosion system is pretty much trivial.
My midrange-consumer camera (Nikon D5100) makes color images at ISO6400 that are roughly comparable in quality to "consumer" (say Fuji drugstore-brand) color film at ISO200. It captures 5 stops, 2^5 times more, light for the same (or better) overall quality. If by "capture light" you mean dynamic range or tonality or something other than raw ISO sensitivity there's more to discuss.
It's LTE so it should theoretically be global. Slide-out keyboard and all the other bells and whistles...1.2GHz dual-core A9, 1GB RAM, microSD slot. Slightly lower-res screen (4" 960x540, still entirely reasonable) but other than that it's entirely adequate. Runs 4.1 stock, I'm sure Cyanogen or AOSP is up to date though.
With a 22-250 stuffed with 40-grain bullets@4200 fps. I had the drive set up at 25 yards, facing me - I aimed for the spindle, and by sheer luck hit it dead-on. At that speed, the thing literally detonated; the covers were intact but bulged, outside of that there was nothing left bigger than my fingernail...even the frame. Possibly the most satisfying act of destruction I've ever carried out.
The researchers freezing the phone weren't doing it for anything as trivial as a root exploit; they were doing it to break the filesystem encryption. Freezing the phone (with it switched on) slows down the RAM decay enough so that quickly (~0.5sec) popping out the battery will reboot the system without the RAM erasing. From there, they start the phone up into "fastboot" mode, which is a pre-OS state that allows the device to be attached to a computer and have a custom OS loaded. That OS sniffs the RAM for the keys that had to be stored while the phone was on and decrypted, bippity boppity bacon you have access to the AES-scrambled filesystem. It's a nontrivial exploit and also nothing new, low-temperature data remanence is a known weakness of cryptosystems in general.
Sennheiser HD280 Pros. No fancy bells and whistles, no big-name musicians attaching their names, and especially a dead-flat frequency curve so you get out of them exactly what you put into them - they don't have some "inherent warmth" but if you play with your EQ you can make them sound however you damn well please. There's a reason they're in just about every recording studio on Earth.
I was working at Brookhaven with a fancy-pants laser-driven time-of-flight mass spectrometer. We needed (ideally sub-)nanosecond resolution with as close to zero variability as possible (at that point you need to account for things like cable length to the cm and "refraction" across connectors). The kind of technical minutiae that gives audiophiles hard-ons and makes One Billion Dollars for the cable companies.
We used...high-quality oxygen-free copper cables with gold-plated BNC connectors. Certainly not the $5.99 bargain bin from Staples, but we were paying ~65 for a one-meter stretch. It's not like I was dumb enough to fall for Monster's schtick before that, but it made the point in a way I don't think anything else quite ever could.
The minimum legal length in the US is sixteen inches. That being said, the ATF generally considers it "constructive intent" if you have the parts to make an illegal weapon and ONLY an illegal weapon. It's been officially clarified that having a Thompson Contender interchangeable-barrel handgun, a rifle stock for the TC, AND a legal-length barrel is not constructive intent - while you could make a short-barreled rifle by putting the stock on TC, the long barrel justifies owning the stock. Same goes for AR pistols, if you have an AR pistol and an AR stock but no full-sized AR rifle, you're gonna be in some pretty serious poop. If you do have a rifle though, you're fine.
It is legally grey and I'm sure the ATF has played fast and loose with it before, but AFAIK it isn't a huge problem.
Slashdot Mirror
Radio behaves exactly the same as all other EM radiation, we just think of the various types in different terms - e.g. gamma and X-ray are generally thought of in energy units (eV), UV/visible/IR in wavelength (nm), and microwave/radio in frequency (Hz).
The famous 21-cm hydrogen line, detected by radio telescope at 1420MHz, is a well-understood quantum phenomenon and is definitely an emission of a photon It's just detected electronically, rather than by a photochemical reaction of a silver halide on film. Same as most visible light photos these days...so I'd say while I get your gut feeling, there's realistically no difference between a radio telescope image and an optical one nowadays.
I used to wash it after every shift on the line, much to the amusement of the dishwashers. Also took it swimming in saltwater quite a bit, and running in the rain more times than I can count. Never a problem. So far, my vanilla S7 is just as durable, if not more so - the waterproof USB port is a quantum leap over the stupid little flap-door-thing on the S5. If the heat wouldn't get to it, I'd try putting it in the dishwasher..
Once I opened up the airbox and got a properly designed full exhaust on it, it had a pretty throaty purr. Not the syncopated thrum of a V, still the flat-scream of a 4, but satisfyingly deep and lush. Guy I knew put a turbo on his, same engine, same exhaust from the cat back actually, sounded like a muffled bass kazoo.
sir pball here!
IMO NYC does it right - $2.50 gets you into the subway and you can ride to your heart's content. Yes, it is unfair to both ten-block-hops and massive city-spanning expeditions, but two wrongs make a right - the short Midtown-confined trips that businesspeople and tourists take in droves balance out my cross-metro trips from northern Manhattan out to the Rockaways in the summer (over an hour and close to 30 miles). Also vastly cheaper in terms of implementation and operation - if a card has adequate fare or time remaining, the turnstile opens and that's the end of the transaction. I really don't get why a proper metro-area mass transit system would ever be metered (commuter rail is a different beast, but that's regional).
Here in NYC the Metropolitan Transit Authority (subway, buses, regional commuter rail, bridges and tunnels - anything you pay a fare or toll for) had a 2013 budget (PDF) of $1,357,806,000. And that's still bleeding damn near another billion a year, with 25% fare increases and 25% service cuts. You could probably slash that overrrun quite a bit more by stopping all current and planned construction/improvements and going to a minimal-maintenance schedule, good luck with that.
Yeah, free transit is a great idea in theory, but if you've figured out how to squeeze three billion dollars a year in sustainable tax revenue out of a single city, even a large one, you're a better economist than I.
Clue this: the homeless have pretty much free access to the subways - most stations no longer have attendants on duty so hopping a turnstile and riding for days on end is feasible. Hell, I've done it myself (I have a monthly pass so not swiping isn't taking a fare). Foul smelling, insane homeless emptying entire train cars is a bigger problem than them freezing to death, at least in this town.
Haven't done any reviewed work in years, I kinda miss it! I'm not going to bother doing full citations, just title and link, if that's OK with you.
"With a 50 ng/mL cutoff concentration and following low doses of 10 to 45 mg cocaine by multiple routes, detection times extended up to 98 h." - Urinary Excretion of Ecgonine and Five Other Cocaine Metabolites Following Controlled Oral, Intravenous, Intranasal, and Smoked Administration of Cocaine, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3159558/
"In serum, in chronic users, benzoylecgonine (primary metabolite of cocaine, the standard screening chemical) (BE; LOD 25 ng/mL) was detectable for 5.1 days on average (maximum 8.6 days)." - Detection Times of Drugs of Abuse in Blood, Urine, and Oral Fluid, http://www.researchgate.net/publication/8480649_Detection_times_of_drugs_of_abuse_in_blood_urine_and_oral_fluid/file/60b7d52a213aab0fb
If you've only been exposed to cell phones and retail-level cameras you might think it's just a gimmick Nokia is using, but...you'd be wrong. The Nikon D800 DSLR is at 36; Hasselblad/Mamiya/Pentax/Leica medium-format bodies are anywhere from 50 to 80. Have been since 2006 or so. Give it another two generations on the DSLR front and you'll be getting a $499 50MP Nikon or Canon at Wal-Mart.
Anyway, even on my D5100@16MP I can pull recognizable images if it's a frame-filling portrait, anything more is just making it easier.
Sure, most downmarket cars don't have the ability to switch off the stuff, but then again who wants to zip a Fiesta around like Vettel? (Well, the ST is amazing, but I digress). Funny thing though, most of the high-end vehicles still offer plenty of ways to shut down all the aids. Hell, most of 'em come with a Big Red Switch conspicuously labeled "RACE MODE" that handily switches everything off and resets the suspension for performance. I take it that should all be banned, no?
Come to think of it, why should ANY car capable of exceeding 75mph, or getting there in 15 seconds, be legal? Seriously?
Also, if you enjoy a sports car with anything other than TC and ABS (both of which make it faster) you have no business wasting money and fuel driving it.
Looking at the pictures, it's pretty freakin' obvious the driver went "Lemme show you what the car can do - I got skillz yo, no worries!" and pegged it on a public street. Regardless of any risk to others, it's insanely moronic to drive like that off-track simply because there's zero margin. You fuck up, you die. No nice kerbs or runoff or gravel pits or SAFER walls to hit...just trees and lightposts. At 45mph, that car was perfectly safe, probably safer than anything else on the road that day because it's designed to go, and crash, much faster.
But it wasn't exactly going 45 now, was it? Even IF something in the car broke, and that was why there was a loss of control - there was a loss of control at MASSIVELY EXCESSIVE SPEED. The gearhead-hooligan in me is sad, but the Responsible Adult is pleased these idiots sanitized the gene pool.
I, along with most other "enthusiasts", wholeheartedly appreciate all the electronic gear and realize that a lot of it does make for outright faster lap times - but at the same time, I'd like to be able to switch it off should I choose. There's something to be said for hanging the ass out with a healthy jab at the throttle and shrieking around a parking lot trailing smoke, or slip-sliding around a corner on an empty gravel road in the boonies. OTOH, with extensive winter driving experience, there's also something to be said for having every driver aid known to man spinning a set of Blizzaks in the middle of a wicked nor'easter - all that skulduggery has gotten me home with far less stress than my reflexes and skills alone. There's a time and a place for everything, but a lot of manufacturers these days are eliminating the choice.
I'd have put en.wikipedia at at least a couple of terabytes. Not inconceivably large, but with some housecleaning I could actually get 100GB free.
As in sits in a wheelchair or bed sort of looking around vacantly, with a 10% chance of even cracking a smile on seeing me. Can't speak, move, or do much of anything. It's one of the more unpleasant life experiences I can imagine.
That being said, she has a proper living will, so when she's finally unable (well, actually, forgets how) to swallow that will be it. But, from what I understand, since death by starvation/dehydration is painful and unpleasant, she'll be given a morphine drip...perhaps calibrated wrong, whoops. I can think of worse way to go..
When I was a kid, we heated with wood, I used the fireplace and stove in my college house, lived in Maine for seven years burning wood by the cord. It definitely affected my lungs...my hematocrit was over 55 at my physical last month, my VO2max is north of 50, and I run half-marathons in well under 1:30 and getting close to a sub-6-minute 5K. That pack-a-day COPD inducing toxic brew I grew up in was sure horrid, uh huh. Come to think of it, we pretty much all had woodstoves growing up (small town in CT) and our running teams were state elite, bred a couple of national-classers. I'll say that breathing all that smoke and doing sprint workouts outdoors in the winter at 15F actually developed our pulmonary systems.
That being said, woodburning on a large scale can be a particulate pollution problem, and if you have a really smoky, leaky stove I can see a problem. I know there's massive issues in the 3rd world with respiratory disorders from nasty sooty unventilated indoor cooking fires...but really, developed-world woodstoves don't fill your house with noxious fumes any more than an oil or gas furnace.
The Vignelli Map. A triumph of minimalist, functional design - and pure beauty to boot. The original had some geographic information (parks, major landmarks, etc) but when he redesigned it for the Weekender he stripped even that out. Now it's just lines and stops, as it should be. You need to worry about geography on the street, not in the Land of the Mole People.
Massimo Vignelli redid both the signage and the map for the MTA in the 70's. Minimalism all the way - the signage remains to this day, white Helvetica on a black background, simple colored circles for the lines, and almost nothing else...there's barely even any arrows.
And his map...oh, it's a thing of beauty. "It was not a map. It was a diagram. It was not about what happens aboveground. The purpose of the diagram was to show where the subway lines go." So perfect that when the MTA wanted a weekend-service-change map they had him reissue it (and this time he eliminated ALL geographic information, and people love it)...and a copy of the original ,a href="http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=89300">still hangs in the Museum of Modern Art
If you could get isotopically pure Pu-239, which doesn't exist, it would work - but even the tiniest traces of Pu-240 will spoil it. Quoth Wiki: "The presence of the isotope plutonium-240 in a sample limits its nuclear bomb potential, as plutonium-240 has a relatively high spontaneous fission rate (~440 fissions per second per gram—over 1,000 neutrons per second per gram),[20] raising the background neutron levels and thus increasing the risk of predetonation."
Long story short, all those extra neutrons make a chain reaction far more likely to occur - so likely that if you use gun assembly, supercriticality is reached long before the two pieces are physically together and they just blow back apart with a negligible yield. Granted, "negligible" in the sense of nuclear weapons means anywhere from a few to a few hundred tons, and there's still an intense load of radiation and fallout, so for terroristic purposes it might suffice...but you aren't building a city-leveling device with Pu and a surplus artillery barrel.
Anyway, breeding it with a neutron tube would be slow, Like building a skyscraper with a set of Craftsmen tools slow. Reactors are the *only* way to synthesize >mg quantities of any transuranic. If you have those resources, a simple (albeit large) implosion system is pretty much trivial.
My midrange-consumer camera (Nikon D5100) makes color images at ISO6400 that are roughly comparable in quality to "consumer" (say Fuji drugstore-brand) color film at ISO200. It captures 5 stops, 2^5 times more, light for the same (or better) overall quality. If by "capture light" you mean dynamic range or tonality or something other than raw ISO sensitivity there's more to discuss.
It's LTE so it should theoretically be global. Slide-out keyboard and all the other bells and whistles...1.2GHz dual-core A9, 1GB RAM, microSD slot. Slightly lower-res screen (4" 960x540, still entirely reasonable) but other than that it's entirely adequate. Runs 4.1 stock, I'm sure Cyanogen or AOSP is up to date though.
Specs
With a 22-250 stuffed with 40-grain bullets@4200 fps. I had the drive set up at 25 yards, facing me - I aimed for the spindle, and by sheer luck hit it dead-on. At that speed, the thing literally detonated; the covers were intact but bulged, outside of that there was nothing left bigger than my fingernail...even the frame. Possibly the most satisfying act of destruction I've ever carried out.
The researchers freezing the phone weren't doing it for anything as trivial as a root exploit; they were doing it to break the filesystem encryption. Freezing the phone (with it switched on) slows down the RAM decay enough so that quickly (~0.5sec) popping out the battery will reboot the system without the RAM erasing. From there, they start the phone up into "fastboot" mode, which is a pre-OS state that allows the device to be attached to a computer and have a custom OS loaded. That OS sniffs the RAM for the keys that had to be stored while the phone was on and decrypted, bippity boppity bacon you have access to the AES-scrambled filesystem. It's a nontrivial exploit and also nothing new, low-temperature data remanence is a known weakness of cryptosystems in general.
http://www1.cs.fau.de/frost
Sennheiser HD280 Pros. No fancy bells and whistles, no big-name musicians attaching their names, and especially a dead-flat frequency curve so you get out of them exactly what you put into them - they don't have some "inherent warmth" but if you play with your EQ you can make them sound however you damn well please. There's a reason they're in just about every recording studio on Earth.
I was working at Brookhaven with a fancy-pants laser-driven time-of-flight mass spectrometer. We needed (ideally sub-)nanosecond resolution with as close to zero variability as possible (at that point you need to account for things like cable length to the cm and "refraction" across connectors). The kind of technical minutiae that gives audiophiles hard-ons and makes One Billion Dollars for the cable companies.
We used...high-quality oxygen-free copper cables with gold-plated BNC connectors. Certainly not the $5.99 bargain bin from Staples, but we were paying ~65 for a one-meter stretch. It's not like I was dumb enough to fall for Monster's schtick before that, but it made the point in a way I don't think anything else quite ever could.
The minimum legal length in the US is sixteen inches. That being said, the ATF generally considers it "constructive intent" if you have the parts to make an illegal weapon and ONLY an illegal weapon. It's been officially clarified that having a Thompson Contender interchangeable-barrel handgun, a rifle stock for the TC, AND a legal-length barrel is not constructive intent - while you could make a short-barreled rifle by putting the stock on TC, the long barrel justifies owning the stock. Same goes for AR pistols, if you have an AR pistol and an AR stock but no full-sized AR rifle, you're gonna be in some pretty serious poop. If you do have a rifle though, you're fine.
It is legally grey and I'm sure the ATF has played fast and loose with it before, but AFAIK it isn't a huge problem.