Because there are large corporations interested in profiting from the oil under that ground. Those large corporations can't do that if the the governments are nice and docile.
I wish people would quit calling Iraq a war. If it were a war, we wouldn't be holding presidential elections right now. It was a publicity stunt, that grew into a short war, and then settled down into a method for grabbing power.
A war is indicated by justified "shoot first, question later." Everything in Iraq now is "ask first", because you'll be dragged into a tribunal for a court martial if you make a mistake. That's not soldier work. That's police work.
pay to replace the millions of dollars worth of existing equipment that's currently in use
Why would I pay to replace your illegal equipment. If you don't have a liscense to operate within these frequencies and you spent money on equipment that isn't smart enough to do frequency hopping, then I'd say you'd be getting your just deserts.
So why does your desire to use available frequency trump my desire to use available frequency? There were concerts and ball games long before there were wireless microphones.
What happens when you set your WMs up for game night, and I set mine up for the concert across the street. You do your setup the night before, I do mine the morning of. Who should be allowed precedence? Who is at fault for the resulting interference? Why should my GooglePhone have the same rights to the radio spectrum as anyone's WM?
Modern digital tuners are still analog at the receiver, and they do indeed need this. A reciever has to match a transmitter's frequency very closely. There is absolutely no cost effective way of matching frequencies with enough accuracy to be useful, and then the frequencies of both the transmitter and receiver will wander slightly with temperature changes (among other things).
The solution is a feedback loop, a PLL, that will make the receiver lock on onto the transmitter and try to hold onto that peak signal strength. The frequencies will wander around slightly, but at least the receiver wanders WITH the transmitter.
The scary scenario is cramming the stations so close together that there's not "low spot between them". You've probably encountered this. You're midway between two distant stations that are on slightly different frequencies. Which one your radio picks up will often be determined by which one it locks onto first. Over the next few minutes, the selected station slowly gets stronger. Turn the radio off and go to a different room so that the other station has the stronger signal, and it will pick up the second station and hang onto it...even if you return to the original place.
Digital radios just convert the digital signal transmitted over the radio to binary. The radio still are, and behave exactly like, the radios we've always known.
You do know that it is possible to interfere with a television signal with a skillsaw, a blender, a window fan, a damaged radio, any piece of electronics that has been damaged,.....
Must be something to do with the air expanding out of a relatively small nozzle, causing rapid cooling.
It has more to do with the amount of air passing through the engine.
A airplane engine (of any kind) produces thrust by by accelerating air, not by heating it. If the air is coming out hot enough to set something on fire, then a lot of energy has been lost. You recover that loss by increasing the bypass ratio. Basically, you just make the inlet larger to increase the amount of air that you're ingesting and accelerating. You may not accelerate each pound of air as much, but the amount of thrust is mass*acceleration.
He wouldn't need clearance in the US. Ultralights have to weigh less than 254lbs, and carry less than 5 gallons of fuel. There is no regulatory oversight of ultralights, the idea that a man should be able to compete for a Darwin award as long as he doesn't hurt anyone else in the process.
KFFA, the airport located at the site of the Wright Bros first flights, is class D airspace. He wouldn't een need to carry a radio; though, considering KFFA's proximity to several restricted and special use airspace regions, he'd probably want to.
Not only that, but he's launching at 2,500m. Typical GA airplanes have a glide ratio of around 10 to 1. Some much more, some much less, but 10 is a decent first guess if you don't know.
Launching from from 2,500m would give him a glide to 25km, without the engines. The engines only have to get him another 10km. Launching from 2,500m with 90kts of forward velocity is not the same as launching from a standstill on the ground.
What he's doing is more like "falling, with style."
I with you, orclevegam. I don't appreciate being snookered. They can keep their damn cable, and the phone to go with it. Unfortunately, we're surrounded by people who seem to think that $75 for a 3 foot of 26AWG wire and a fragile connector is the way the world should be.
Could be that you have a limited view of what their core business is. Is it selling databases? Or, could it be selling database services?
For a given number of dollars, what is the optimum hardware to run a database? How much memory of what type vs how much/many hard disks? Which OS? Which drivers?
Selling the hardware will let them present an entire solution that is optimized for the one thing that they want to do...serve data as quickly as possible. The customer is presented with an appliance that will offer the maximum database performance for a given dollar point. Well, at least as optimized as anything can be with an Oracle Database stamp on it.
I honestly can't figure out the point of it all, clearly someone has an interest in pushing garbage features on the public, but I'm at a loss to figure out who.
Then there's the other end of this carrot/stick combo which is the gotchas they attach to everything, like having to shell out $75 for a fucking cable just so you can download/upload photos/contacts/whatever to your phone without having to pay $1.25 (per item) to transfer the data across their damn network.
You know what's going on, you just don't know that you know.
It's marketing at work. If you buy the $60, no-feature phone, how are they going to entice you to use the $75, get-your-picture cable (which costs about $0.57 to make).
I don't carry a cell-phone. The last thing I need is another leash for people to yank. But my wife is a real-estate agent, where it is pratically required. The has one with all the bells and whistles.
Let's look at the features:
- Mobile internet access. A ridiculous ($40?) fee every month so that she can get spotty internet access at modem speeds on a 3 inch screen.
- GPS. Tried to use it once trying to find my son's wrestling at an away match. It was so far off (opposite side of the town) that we've never tried to use it again. It was simply pathetic.
- MP3 player. She hasn't even considered using it for an MP3 player. When she's at home, she has a stereo system. When she's in the car, she has a stereo system. The only other place she would consider using a player is when she's exercising. There is no way she (or I) would entertain the thought of trying to carry an bulky and expensive piece of delicate electronics on an extend jog so that it can be bounced around.
- Camera. Again, exhorbitant fees to use a crappy digital camera. They want to charge you to transfer each picture. Why?! I can use my $100 camera that holds 1000 decent snapshots at reasonable resolutions and transfer them to my computer with a USB cable. All for free.
YMMV, but my experience is that cell-phone features are either useless or priced out of reasonableness. Now I'm sure there are plenty of counters of "I get feature X for free" or "I get googly-bits of data access and I don't mind $40/month", but the point is that there is a lot of marginal, overpriced features that most people don't find useful for their situation.
They should have applied for a grant and gotten much more detailed data. A rubber duck is plenty large enough to hold a GPS reciever, an APRS transmitter, and enough battery to keep it going for a couple months if the transmission rate is kept low enough. Some small solar cells would extend the useful life.
I doubt it would do well at the bottom of the glacier, but at least they would know where it disappeared from the surface and would possibly know when and where it pops back out (if it pops back out).
I think your model is restrictive. You seem to only consider the userbase size in determining how much effort will be invested by some developer. I submit that you should also consider necessary effort.
Some jobs, simple utilities for example, are small and can be coded in a few days or weeks by a single programmer. These will be completed and distributed even if the potential user base is extremely small.
Other programs require considerable commitment of time and effort, but the user base is immense. Emacs, OpenOffice, Firefox. Developers will commit themselves to assisting these projects just to get their name on the credit list, because the user base is so large.
Then there are programs that are extremely difficult, but the user base is limited. Parametric 3D CAD. It has a limited user base, and is extremely hard to do. There are few representative applications in the open-source world.
There are some applications that just don't lend themselves to the open source model.
I have argued this over and over, but you never listen. The baby killing doesn't belong in the kernel. It should be a user space program. Keeping the code in the kernel removes the user's ability to remove the code if they are morally opposed to baby killing, whereas others would prefer to set different limits on how long child processes are allowed to continue before being killed.
I don't care to read the book, but I will give you rational, plausible, budgeted and non-suicidal. "Justified"...now that is where our parlay will break down. Justified, like art, is in the eye of the beholder and often requires some selling to get the justificatee to agree (yes, I just made up that word). One way of thinking of it is that justification isn't a property of an object, but is something that is done to it.
The only justification I've seen is an effort for Mars missions is to prove that life once existed there. When I was young, the hope was that we'd find some weird alien creepy-crawlies scurrying about. Now the hope is that there is some water that a microscopic lifeform might have once inhabited. The basis for the need of effort is to prove that life can autogenerate anywhere. You may not believe it, but the vast majority of the people who pay taxes respond to this sales job with a great big "Who the f&&k cares?!"
You and I may believe the expense of a manned mission is justified, but we are woefully/painfully outnumbered. That leaves us with one of two options. Sell the manned missions as an escape route from a dying Earth. That puts us in the "OH, NOZ!! We're all gonna' die!" alarmist category. Unless we can point out a REAL viable threat to the Earth, we will soon be marginalized. "There is a 1 in 8 billion chance of a catastrophic asteroid impacting the Earth within the next 1000 years" does not cross the 'valid' hurdle in mind of most people.
The second option is to send cheap probes. People like them because of the gee-whiz features, and they're not expensive enough to cause economic pain. They can also see useful applications for much of the technology involved. The science is slow, but it is progressing. The things we learn from the probes will make a manned mission safer and cheaper, since some possible eventualities will be eliminated and not need to be planned/prepared for.
In short, a manned mission has not been justified, evidenced by the complete lack of support for it. Just look at the tepid response Bush's Mars plan garnered. And I believe half of the positive response was little more than nostalgia for the Space Race heyday. Bush didn't justify the need to expend the resources necessary, and neither has anyone else.
Because every material known to man will eventually wear out. Every time a capsule traverses the cable it will either pull on it to go up, or push on it to slow down. This surface friction will abraid and wear the cable.
The cable/ribbon will be hanging through 60 miles of atmosphere, constantly blowing at various speeds and in various directions. The traversing capsules will cause varying taughtness on the cables and set up all sort of varying harmonics. I've used varying a lot, because the important point is that the harmonics in the cable will be unpredictable. Calculations of the static stresses are only a first step in calculating how this "plucked string" will handle the real world.
There would probably be a need to set up a nanotube fabrication plant at the base of the ribbon to perform a constant replacement of cables.
Slashdot Mirror
Because there are large corporations interested in profiting from the oil under that ground. Those large corporations can't do that if the the governments are nice and docile.
I wish people would quit calling Iraq a war. If it were a war, we wouldn't be holding presidential elections right now. It was a publicity stunt, that grew into a short war, and then settled down into a method for grabbing power.
A war is indicated by justified "shoot first, question later." Everything in Iraq now is "ask first", because you'll be dragged into a tribunal for a court martial if you make a mistake. That's not soldier work. That's police work.
pay to replace the millions of dollars worth of existing equipment that's currently in use
Why would I pay to replace your illegal equipment. If you don't have a liscense to operate within these frequencies and you spent money on equipment that isn't smart enough to do frequency hopping, then I'd say you'd be getting your just deserts.
You invested $9K in equipment that basically made illegal use of wireless equipment not assigned to them? And you expect me to care?
So why does your desire to use available frequency trump my desire to use available frequency? There were concerts and ball games long before there were wireless microphones.
What happens when you set your WMs up for game night, and I set mine up for the concert across the street. You do your setup the night before, I do mine the morning of. Who should be allowed precedence? Who is at fault for the resulting interference? Why should my GooglePhone have the same rights to the radio spectrum as anyone's WM?
So why does your wish to avoid using a wired microphone trump my wish to avoid using a wired computer?
Modern digital tuners are still analog at the receiver, and they do indeed need this. A reciever has to match a transmitter's frequency very closely. There is absolutely no cost effective way of matching frequencies with enough accuracy to be useful, and then the frequencies of both the transmitter and receiver will wander slightly with temperature changes (among other things).
The solution is a feedback loop, a PLL, that will make the receiver lock on onto the transmitter and try to hold onto that peak signal strength. The frequencies will wander around slightly, but at least the receiver wanders WITH the transmitter.
The scary scenario is cramming the stations so close together that there's not "low spot between them". You've probably encountered this. You're midway between two distant stations that are on slightly different frequencies. Which one your radio picks up will often be determined by which one it locks onto first. Over the next few minutes, the selected station slowly gets stronger. Turn the radio off and go to a different room so that the other station has the stronger signal, and it will pick up the second station and hang onto it...even if you return to the original place.
Digital radios just convert the digital signal transmitted over the radio to binary. The radio still are, and behave exactly like, the radios we've always known.
You do know that it is possible to interfere with a television signal with a skillsaw, a blender, a window fan, a damaged radio, any piece of electronics that has been damaged, .....
Must be something to do with the air expanding out of a relatively small nozzle, causing rapid cooling.
It has more to do with the amount of air passing through the engine.
A airplane engine (of any kind) produces thrust by by accelerating air, not by heating it. If the air is coming out hot enough to set something on fire, then a lot of energy has been lost. You recover that loss by increasing the bypass ratio. Basically, you just make the inlet larger to increase the amount of air that you're ingesting and accelerating. You may not accelerate each pound of air as much, but the amount of thrust is mass*acceleration.
To be truly informative:
He wouldn't need clearance in the US. Ultralights have to weigh less than 254lbs, and carry less than 5 gallons of fuel. There is no regulatory oversight of ultralights, the idea that a man should be able to compete for a Darwin award as long as he doesn't hurt anyone else in the process.
KFFA, the airport located at the site of the Wright Bros first flights, is class D airspace. He wouldn't een need to carry a radio; though, considering KFFA's proximity to several restricted and special use airspace regions, he'd probably want to.
Not only that, but he's launching at 2,500m. Typical GA airplanes have a glide ratio of around 10 to 1. Some much more, some much less, but 10 is a decent first guess if you don't know.
Launching from from 2,500m would give him a glide to 25km, without the engines. The engines only have to get him another 10km. Launching from 2,500m with 90kts of forward velocity is not the same as launching from a standstill on the ground.
What he's doing is more like "falling, with style."
No. Only brown ones.
-MP3 player: How does your cell phone respond when it is soaked in sweat? Where do you carry it when your jogging? Banging around in a fanny pack?
-Camera: agreed. Which is why the the camera isn't used? The camera is marginal. The business model renders it completely useless.
I with you, orclevegam. I don't appreciate being snookered. They can keep their damn cable, and the phone to go with it. Unfortunately, we're surrounded by people who seem to think that $75 for a 3 foot of 26AWG wire and a fragile connector is the way the world should be.
Could be that you have a limited view of what their core business is. Is it selling databases? Or, could it be selling database services?
For a given number of dollars, what is the optimum hardware to run a database? How much memory of what type vs how much/many hard disks? Which OS? Which drivers?
Selling the hardware will let them present an entire solution that is optimized for the one thing that they want to do...serve data as quickly as possible. The customer is presented with an appliance that will offer the maximum database performance for a given dollar point. Well, at least as optimized as anything can be with an Oracle Database stamp on it.
I honestly can't figure out the point of it all, clearly someone has an interest in pushing garbage features on the public, but I'm at a loss to figure out who.
Then there's the other end of this carrot/stick combo which is the gotchas they attach to everything, like having to shell out $75 for a fucking cable just so you can download/upload photos/contacts/whatever to your phone without having to pay $1.25 (per item) to transfer the data across their damn network.
You know what's going on, you just don't know that you know.
It's marketing at work. If you buy the $60, no-feature phone, how are they going to entice you to use the $75, get-your-picture cable (which costs about $0.57 to make).
I don't carry a cell-phone. The last thing I need is another leash for people to yank. But my wife is a real-estate agent, where it is pratically required. The has one with all the bells and whistles.
Let's look at the features:
- Mobile internet access. A ridiculous ($40?) fee every month so that she can get spotty internet access at modem speeds on a 3 inch screen.
- GPS. Tried to use it once trying to find my son's wrestling at an away match. It was so far off (opposite side of the town) that we've never tried to use it again. It was simply pathetic.
- MP3 player. She hasn't even considered using it for an MP3 player. When she's at home, she has a stereo system. When she's in the car, she has a stereo system. The only other place she would consider using a player is when she's exercising. There is no way she (or I) would entertain the thought of trying to carry an bulky and expensive piece of delicate electronics on an extend jog so that it can be bounced around.
- Camera. Again, exhorbitant fees to use a crappy digital camera. They want to charge you to transfer each picture. Why?! I can use my $100 camera that holds 1000 decent snapshots at reasonable resolutions and transfer them to my computer with a USB cable. All for free.
YMMV, but my experience is that cell-phone features are either useless or priced out of reasonableness. Now I'm sure there are plenty of counters of "I get feature X for free" or "I get googly-bits of data access and I don't mind $40/month", but the point is that there is a lot of marginal, overpriced features that most people don't find useful for their situation.
They should have applied for a grant and gotten much more detailed data. A rubber duck is plenty large enough to hold a GPS reciever, an APRS transmitter, and enough battery to keep it going for a couple months if the transmission rate is kept low enough. Some small solar cells would extend the useful life.
I doubt it would do well at the bottom of the glacier, but at least they would know where it disappeared from the surface and would possibly know when and where it pops back out (if it pops back out).
http://aprs.org/
That depends entirely upon where you work.
I've been at places where the quality teams job was to ask, "What the hell is this SUPPOSED to be?!"
No design team (or documents). You're supposed to ask the developer how it is supposed to work, and then write your test cases accordingly.
I think your model is restrictive. You seem to only consider the userbase size in determining how much effort will be invested by some developer. I submit that you should also consider necessary effort.
Some jobs, simple utilities for example, are small and can be coded in a few days or weeks by a single programmer. These will be completed and distributed even if the potential user base is extremely small.
Other programs require considerable commitment of time and effort, but the user base is immense. Emacs, OpenOffice, Firefox. Developers will commit themselves to assisting these projects just to get their name on the credit list, because the user base is so large.
Then there are programs that are extremely difficult, but the user base is limited. Parametric 3D CAD. It has a limited user base, and is extremely hard to do. There are few representative applications in the open-source world.
There are some applications that just don't lend themselves to the open source model.
Could it be that they see hyperinflation coming. Borrowers win out during times of high inflation.
I have argued this over and over, but you never listen. The baby killing doesn't belong in the kernel. It should be a user space program. Keeping the code in the kernel removes the user's ability to remove the code if they are morally opposed to baby killing, whereas others would prefer to set different limits on how long child processes are allowed to continue before being killed.
Why is this so hard to understand?
I don't care to read the book, but I will give you rational, plausible, budgeted and non-suicidal. "Justified"...now that is where our parlay will break down. Justified, like art, is in the eye of the beholder and often requires some selling to get the justificatee to agree (yes, I just made up that word). One way of thinking of it is that justification isn't a property of an object, but is something that is done to it.
The only justification I've seen is an effort for Mars missions is to prove that life once existed there. When I was young, the hope was that we'd find some weird alien creepy-crawlies scurrying about. Now the hope is that there is some water that a microscopic lifeform might have once inhabited. The basis for the need of effort is to prove that life can autogenerate anywhere. You may not believe it, but the vast majority of the people who pay taxes respond to this sales job with a great big "Who the f&&k cares?!"
You and I may believe the expense of a manned mission is justified, but we are woefully/painfully outnumbered. That leaves us with one of two options. Sell the manned missions as an escape route from a dying Earth. That puts us in the "OH, NOZ!! We're all gonna' die!" alarmist category. Unless we can point out a REAL viable threat to the Earth, we will soon be marginalized. "There is a 1 in 8 billion chance of a catastrophic asteroid impacting the Earth within the next 1000 years" does not cross the 'valid' hurdle in mind of most people.
The second option is to send cheap probes. People like them because of the gee-whiz features, and they're not expensive enough to cause economic pain. They can also see useful applications for much of the technology involved. The science is slow, but it is progressing. The things we learn from the probes will make a manned mission safer and cheaper, since some possible eventualities will be eliminated and not need to be planned/prepared for.
In short, a manned mission has not been justified, evidenced by the complete lack of support for it. Just look at the tepid response Bush's Mars plan garnered. And I believe half of the positive response was little more than nostalgia for the Space Race heyday. Bush didn't justify the need to expend the resources necessary, and neither has anyone else.
Because every material known to man will eventually wear out. Every time a capsule traverses the cable it will either pull on it to go up, or push on it to slow down. This surface friction will abraid and wear the cable.
The cable/ribbon will be hanging through 60 miles of atmosphere, constantly blowing at various speeds and in various directions. The traversing capsules will cause varying taughtness on the cables and set up all sort of varying harmonics. I've used varying a lot, because the important point is that the harmonics in the cable will be unpredictable. Calculations of the static stresses are only a first step in calculating how this "plucked string" will handle the real world.
There would probably be a need to set up a nanotube fabrication plant at the base of the ribbon to perform a constant replacement of cables.