Groups like EOSS have been doing this for at least 30 years, probably more. It's very common for a balloon launch to be a featured event in a ham radio conference. Their budgets per payload are similar, although they are able to do more technical work than featured in the MIT students work and often design their own radios, command devices, etc. None of this, though, is out of the range of a dedicated amateur. Note that there is a software-defined GPS in development that might be the best way to get around the 20K foot altitude limit of consumer GPS devices. Its component cost is pretty low, despite the $495 cost charged for an assembled device at that site.
I agree that it sounds seriously bogus, and the board with paper clips and hairs between them isn't an 18 watt panel unless the hair is on fire. The big question would be whether anyone could duplicate getting power out of a single hair. This should be an easy experiment with a digital voltmeter. But there is no information on what would be the required first step, polarizing the hair.
Wikipedia is turning to peer review. And they need to. Because wikipedia is a top search-engine return, pretty much everybody who uses the internet understands it now, and every kid is going to want to joke it, and everybody with a gripe, the list goes on.
If you are so unlucky as to be portrayed by a Wikipedia article, and you've read your article history, you'll know about the folks with gripes.
Can you think of a way to have quality without doing peer review? Doesn't every significant Open Source software project have it these days?
Bruce, why is your perens.com weblog (bottom of your home page) filled with spam?
It looks like someone figured out how to inject a page containing search optimization links into Wordpress. You only get it if your URL has a trailing slash. I'll flush it.
It's my fault for using Wordpress. I like a more lightweight blogging solution.
Going to the moon is a big elliptical orbit. The Apollo missions had an abort of just letting the vehicle pass the moon and head back to earth. I think one of the early missions used it, and Apollo 13.
A Gemini with a hatch in its heat shield is in the Air Force Museum in Dayton. At the Udvar-Hazy museum at Washington Dulles airport, there is a non-space-capable Gemini practice vehicle that was built to hang under a Rogalo wing and has runway landing gear. The intent was that they'd hang-glide the Gemini to a precision landing.
Reviving a 30-year-old Russian capsule which lost out to Soyuz sounds risky.
Search and rescue have sufficient VHF and UHF bands. We're talking about HF, which is for long range, which is a very different sort of disaster communication from search and rescue. One band won't do for this, because ionospheric weather varies throughout the day and over longer cycles, and thus the frequency that worked for long-range communication an hour ago might not work now. Thus, there are several ham bands. They are well-used and all of them in total are much narrower than a single TV channel!
Frequency planning is an area you would need to study further before you could make sensible statements about it. Sorry, and good luck if you do decide to look into it.
The problem was that the Bush administration was sold on BPL and put pressure on FCC. Dubwa made public statements in favor of it.
There are any number of FCC staffers who are well educated in RF. I've met some of them. The problem comes when the commissioners don't let them do their job.
There are two different things that can be considered power-line networking. One is the kind where the powerline is used to provide internet to many homes all the way from a central location through intermediate power transformers. This, fortunately, is already obsolete, because it could not provide good enough bandwidth to pay for itself. It did interfere with many radio users, not just hams.
The other is within-home networking like Homeplug. ARRL dealt with early interference issues and has not reported any recent ones as far as I'm aware. But the very earliest models allowed us to hear your phone call on shortwave! Fortunately, people who owned those were found and warned, for the most part.
TVs all used the horizontal sweep frequency, around 14 KHz, to drive their flyback transformers. That's gone. But now we have switching power supplies, which can make noise too. Just not all the same frequency.
I used to be able to hear graphics being drawn on my PC. The power supply would ring. I don't think I can hear that high any longer.
People who label themselves as "pragmatic" simply aren't willing or able to consider their own interests on a longer timeline. A lot of them tell me that they finally realized that RMS was right about something, but it took them years, including a bad experience that was their own fault, to realize.
You need both windcatchers and an underground water reservoir (a quanat). The windcatchers create a lower pressure zone which pulls air in through the quanat. There is evaporative cooling in the quanat. I don't think this would get near freezing temperature unless your water source is really cold.
There is a way to make ice in a dry environment by exposing water to the coolness of the night sky and insulating it during the day.
That is how satellite killer missles work. Unfortunately, any solution to this problem must take into account the fact that there are many thousands of pieces of space junk big enough to track.
It would be wiser to accept 1-3 days latency from reported theft to recovery data.
Sure, if that's the cost. But you are assuming a 1-3 day fixed backlog length, rather than a forever increasing one. I'm not yet clear this is a justified assumption.
OK, I should state clearly that OpenDHT's capability should not be abandoned.
But IMO it's sort of a big job to make this scale. It takes people with a pretty strong mathematical computer science background, and a lot of testing, and long-term support. Hopefully the right folks will step up (and don't look at me, I don't have the math).
The reason for using OpenDHT, I think, was that Adeona didn't want it to be possible to trace user's movements using their system until the laptop was reported as stolen. Not that I am entirely clear on this. Perhaps the best thing to do for the time being would be to back off on the unbreakable-privacy goal until a reliable system arises, and use a database like the rest of us.
Yes, this is dangerous, in that it centralizes in one place the call-in data regarding some large number of laptops. And it makes it tempting for some government to subpoena the data, use it for eavesdropping, etc. So it should not be allowed to stand forever. But it seems kind of silly to just fold up tents until some reasonably blue-sky software meets production goals.
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Groups like EOSS have been doing this for at least 30 years, probably more. It's very common for a balloon launch to be a featured event in a ham radio conference. Their budgets per payload are similar, although they are able to do more technical work than featured in the MIT students work and often design their own radios, command devices, etc. None of this, though, is out of the range of a dedicated amateur. Note that there is a software-defined GPS in development that might be the best way to get around the 20K foot altitude limit of consumer GPS devices. Its component cost is pretty low, despite the $495 cost charged for an assembled device at that site.
Wow, another thing Blondes aren't good at! :-)
Yes, but if you want to demonstrate power rather than voltage, just put the appropriate resistor across the meter.
I agree that it sounds seriously bogus, and the board with paper clips and hairs between them isn't an 18 watt panel unless the hair is on fire. The big question would be whether anyone could duplicate getting power out of a single hair. This should be an easy experiment with a digital voltmeter. But there is no information on what would be the required first step, polarizing the hair.
That was another substance, like "twing". It was the window in phss-th-pok's spaceship.
Wikipedia is turning to peer review. And they need to. Because wikipedia is a top search-engine return, pretty much everybody who uses the internet understands it now, and every kid is going to want to joke it, and everybody with a gripe, the list goes on.
If you are so unlucky as to be portrayed by a Wikipedia article, and you've read your article history, you'll know about the folks with gripes.
Can you think of a way to have quality without doing peer review? Doesn't every significant Open Source software project have it these days?
Bruce
It looks like someone figured out how to inject a page containing search optimization links into Wordpress. You only get it if your URL has a trailing slash. I'll flush it.
It's my fault for using Wordpress. I like a more lightweight blogging solution.
Going to the moon is a big elliptical orbit. The Apollo missions had an abort of just letting the vehicle pass the moon and head back to earth. I think one of the early missions used it, and Apollo 13.
Reviving a 30-year-old Russian capsule which lost out to Soyuz sounds risky.
Frequency planning is an area you would need to study further before you could make sensible statements about it. Sorry, and good luck if you do decide to look into it.
There are any number of FCC staffers who are well educated in RF. I've met some of them. The problem comes when the commissioners don't let them do their job.
The other is within-home networking like Homeplug. ARRL dealt with early interference issues and has not reported any recent ones as far as I'm aware. But the very earliest models allowed us to hear your phone call on shortwave! Fortunately, people who owned those were found and warned, for the most part.
Bruce
I used to be able to hear graphics being drawn on my PC. The power supply would ring. I don't think I can hear that high any longer.
People who label themselves as "pragmatic" simply aren't willing or able to consider their own interests on a longer timeline. A lot of them tell me that they finally realized that RMS was right about something, but it took them years, including a bad experience that was their own fault, to realize.
It's because the tool itself would need to be DRM-locked if you wanted to enforce the time expiration on the intended recipient.
If the decryption key is ever available to the browser, a modified version of the tool could store it and decode the document forever.
There is a way to make ice in a dry environment by exposing water to the coolness of the night sky and insulating it during the day.
I am concerned that ablation would break off blobs. It does work much faster, of course.
That is how satellite killer missles work. Unfortunately, any solution to this problem must take into account the fact that there are many thousands of pieces of space junk big enough to track.
We need to work on how to de-orbit it. My favorite scheme is to use infrared lasers to apply light pressure, and slowly change the orbit.
"symbolset" wrote:
Sure, if that's the cost. But you are assuming a 1-3 day fixed backlog length, rather than a forever increasing one. I'm not yet clear this is a justified assumption.
OK, I should state clearly that OpenDHT's capability should not be abandoned.
But IMO it's sort of a big job to make this scale. It takes people with a pretty strong mathematical computer science background, and a lot of testing, and long-term support. Hopefully the right folks will step up (and don't look at me, I don't have the math).
The reason for using OpenDHT, I think, was that Adeona didn't want it to be possible to trace user's movements using their system until the laptop was reported as stolen. Not that I am entirely clear on this. Perhaps the best thing to do for the time being would be to back off on the unbreakable-privacy goal until a reliable system arises, and use a database like the rest of us.
Yes, this is dangerous, in that it centralizes in one place the call-in data regarding some large number of laptops. And it makes it tempting for some government to subpoena the data, use it for eavesdropping, etc. So it should not be allowed to stand forever. But it seems kind of silly to just fold up tents until some reasonably blue-sky software meets production goals.
Bruce
People who like to smell flowers tend to do it to other people,
He's got my number :-)