This may also clear out your partition table. I forget where the partition data starts in the MBR, but it's definitely in there somewhere, and generally isn't backed up.
If you're using any modern shell, hit ctrl-v before hitting the backspace key, if you want to pass the backspace character to the command, rather than have it handled by the shell.
They're not complex at all by today's standards. In fact, analog trunk systems use the same type of voting/priority receivers that have been used by repeater systems for 20+ years, but with the added benefit that the repeaters are continuously updating the radios (a few times per second) with the status of the system.
Digital trunk systems are a bit more complex, but because of the compression used, they can fit more than one conversation into the spectrum normally used by one analog signal. All this technology has existed and has been in widespread use for at least 10 years, and the radios used with these systems aren't any bigger or physically more complex than they were before (not a surprise, given the high-density integration they do with circuits these days)
Well, maybe two entries in a database, but still...
someone paid someone else almost three million dollars to essentially have their own nameservers listed next to a domain in the COM gtld zone. This hurts my brain.
Could someone please add these two lines to the US gtld zonefile?
president IN NS ns1.example.org. president IN NS ns2.example.org.
It should only take 10-20 seconds. Maybe you could have your secretary do it if you don't have that kind of time.
You have your figures backwards, and need to be updated on what a "lumen" is.
First, these bulbs are 140 Lumens per watt. Not "watts per lumens"
Second, since they're broad spectrum lamps, as opposed to sodium lamps which are very narrow spectrum, the human eye is much more able to acquire a usable image from an environment illuminated by the more natural broad-spectrum light, and therefore can get away with using less power to light up the same area.
Third, the "lumen" is a measure of perceived light intensity. A lamp that produces 1000 lumens in a narrow spectrum centered around the 570nm-590nm range (like those orange sodium lamps) APPEARS more intense than a broad spectrum lamp that produces only 300 lumens. What matters is not the intensity of the light, but how it's distributed across all the colors the human eye can see (and needs to render a clear image for us to recognize)
In closing, what good is a high-intensity Lumen orange/yellow narrow-spectrum lamp when what we need to see is mostly in the blue-green-yellow spectrum? These broad-spectrum lamps are more efficient in energy consumption mainly because they don't need to be as "intense" for us to see more of the colors illuminated by the lamp.
Almost every house in the US built (or remodelled) after 1950 has 230VAC service. The mains feed is actually a split-phase 120-0-120 circuit, with 220-240V measured across the two phases.
The only issue that may arise if you bring your 230V appliances over is that since split-phase 220 service doesn't use a "neutral" wire as a return path, you need to make sure your appliances are double-insulated (neutral insulated from ground AND ground insulated from metal parts of the chassis) or uses a third wire to ground, separate from the two mains. If any metal part of the chassis of your appliance is connected to what you'd consider the "neutral lead" of the circuit, that same appliance will have a 120V potential (from one of the supply phases) on its chassis in reference to the building's ground, making a severe shock hazard.
and just because he said "don't tase me, man!" doesn't mean it was a taser.
I know I'm being pedantic, but imagine how you'd react if the news article stated that this scrawny white guy was subdued by 8 officers instead of two or three? What if he was accidentally shot during the incident by an accidental discharge of a sidearm but it was reported that he was shot at point blank range by an officer's shotgun? This guy was being overly dramatic, and because of bad reporting, it was made out to sound like they almost killed him or rendered him paralyzed.
All the officers were trying to do was escort him away from the microphone and out of the room. They were completely within the boundaries of their job when he decided to resist them, prompting them to use a stun gun to subdue him instead of possibly inflicting physical harm on him with a choke hold or arm-bar.
If he were actually hit by a taser, it would have been from a distance, and only if he appeared to be an imminent physical threat to the police officers. Police officers reserve tasers for violent, cranked-out ex-cons who can't be subdued any other way.
LEDs are far more efficient than CFLs but with an even higher manufacturing cost. Luxeon LEDs are used in traffic signals here (California) now, configured with five 1W LEDs (at least for green. not sure about red or amber) behind a plastic fresnel lens, and are as bright as their 150W incandescent counterparts. The actual power consumption for the 8" LED signals is about 8W, from a 120VAC circuit. If I'm not mistaken, the larger 12" red signals take about 15W, replacing 200-250W incandescent bulbs.
So for a 100W incandescent, an equally bright CFL would consume 25W, but an LED light for a single-color would consume less than 8W. To implement a full(er) spectrum lamp with LEDs, it may cost even more, and it'll consume at least 16-20W compared to a 100W white incandescent.
So you had a little stroke of bad luck - it was probably a small wire or piece of metal stuck in the socket. Obviously, the vast majority of people using CFLs aren't having this problem. Sorry about the lamp fixture but chances are you'll have a fine experience with them next time.
Window is SCARY smart, and hothothot. I've been friends with her for years, and haven't seen enough of her since she moved out of Cali. Glad she contributed her knowledge to microsoft's efforts, and even happier that she's now on the firefox train.
Using phonetics to represent our written words would have worked effectively only if we had no homonyms. Since we have many, many sets of words which sound alike but have very different meanings (even for those words which may be related in context, such as 'past' and 'passed') a phonetic alphabet will introduce even more ambiguity to the language. To use phonetics exclusively in a way that leaves no ambiguous words and ideas, we'd need to introduce a transitional vocabulary which does away with these homonyms.
In addition, what would we do with conjugations and contractions? What will become of "you'll"? Will it be really be written with the same phonetics as "yule"? Will "would've" become "wood of" or "wood uv"? And will "I'll" become written with the same phonetic spelling as "aisle"? Imagine the confusion arising from this.
Try reading this aloud: "Eye wood of bot there car but aisle half two get my lye sense first."
If heard verbally, someone else would certainly understand that you need to get a driver's license before purchasing a car. The written words, whether phonetic or simple homonyms, make absolutely no sense when separated into their respective sentence fragments. Bots have eye wood? Where is aisle "half two"? And what does a sense of lye have to do with anything? How will all these ambiguities be addressed with a purely phonetic vocabulary, if we have so many completely unrelated words that sound alike already?
Depending on the method, 5 to 40 percent gets lost as heat. Switching power supplies that are optimized for a small range of load conditions can achieve 95% or better efficiency. Most computer power supplies (built for a wide range of load conditions and voltages) are about 85-90% efficient now. Simple rectification and regulation through a linear regulator loses various amount of power through heat, depending on the load, but varies from 50-70% efficiency in a good design. This is what most wall-wart transformers do.
The primary loss of power, dissipated as heat, happens in low-frequency power transformers and in linear regulators and transistors. Slightly less is lost in rectifier diodes, switching transistors and high-frequency transformers used in switching (PWM) power supplies.
It's that that easy. Modern computers need tightly regulated DC voltage because 1) the semiconductor junctions can only pass current one way, and thus require a power source which provides voltage of one polarity, 2) any change in voltage affects the performance of high-speed circuitry, and AC is constantly changing voltage, and 3) 120 times per second, every time it swings from one direction/polarity to the other, your AC power line is at _zero_ volts. What do you suppose any computer circuit will do if all of a sudden, it has NO POWER available to it? wait around until there's power available again? CPUs run at over a billion cycles per second now. They lose all data and state information the moment no voltage is available at the supplies, because they require power to "remember" what happened even from one cycle previous. DC is steady, reliable power, when it comes to the inside of your high-performance computer.
About converting DC to DC... There are DC-DC converters now that use highly-optimized digital controllers and high-efficiency inductors and/or transformers used to buck (lower) or boost (raise) available DC power, with efficiencies for some small systems (below 50W or so) in the 90-95% range. Their efficiency is due to high-frequency pulse-width-modulated switching transistors feeding the source current into a high-frequency toroidal core transformer or inductor. Running higher frequencies (as opposed to the low 60Hz line frequency from an AC source) allows MUCH smaller inductors and transformers for the voltage conversion, and less power loss due to transformer core saturation (which happens more with lower frequencies, which is why AC line transformers are so huge)
In most new configurations of these types of switching power supplies (switchers, which is what almost every car audio amplifier uses, as well as most computer power supplies) the efficiency is about the same whether you step-up or step-down the voltage with the power supply. In fact, many PWM switching power supply designs can step-up and step-down without any change in circuitry, just by changing the pulse-width of the current being fed to the transformer.
To say stepping up DC power is inefficient while saying stepping it down is highly efficient, makes it sound like you need to brush up on modern power supply design. Also, the only application in which diodes are used to step up voltage in integer multiples, is the diode-capacitor multiplier, which only works with PULSED DC or AC, and that design is, in fact, very inefficient. Nobody would use that except in certin high-voltage, low-current supplies, like in air ionizers, older televisions, and stun guns.
first one: turn switch #1 on, turn switch #2 off, turn switch #3 on. wait two or three minutes, and turn switch #3 OFF. immediately go to the other room, and feel the two light bulbs that are off. one will be cold, one will be hot. the cold "off" bulb is controlled by switch #2, the hot "off" bulb is controlled by switch #3.
IP will give these no advantage at all.
on
TCP/IP Speakers
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
They'll be heavier than non-powered speakers because they'll need to contain an integrated power supply, an amplifier, and a microcontroller to do the interfacing. It's completely useless to bring up the "lossy speaker cable" argument, because if you were going to spend the extra money and waste an extra power cable for powered speakers, you might as well just use standard analog speakers with XLR cables (which have been VERY well established as nearly noiseless and lossless for point to point audio distribution). You can reliably have a couple double-shielded XLR cables ran from your pre-amp to your self-powered speakers for less than having speakers that speak IP.
having multiple IP speakers on a network in the same room may also introduce phase offsets, since there's ALWAYS an inherent delay between receiving the network packets, decoding them, and sending the data off to DACs before the signal gets to the amplifier. Even a 2ms difference difference in delay/phase between two speakers in the same room is noticeable, and WILL screw up accurate stereo imaging. 2ms is not uncommon as a delay on an ethernet network.
Of course, mixing analog and IP speakers in the same room is right out.
Want the best audio quality, distance, noise-resistance for your speakers? fiber optic digital audio paths. end of story.
I agree. I run an EFNet IRC server, and have observed him attacking people and servers just because someone stepped up to or disagreed with him, or simply just to get his way. He has no conscience or empathy whatsoever.
holy shit, that was funny. that'll hold me over til april first.
you gotta give them credit for creativity, though. they're taking over where the cellphone antenna booster left off! HMMM... there's an idea. a combo gift pack of the BATMAX and the ANTENNA BOOSTER! with detailed instructions for both, including the warning sticker: DO NOT interchange these devices -- it may cause total plasmic collapse of all surrounding ions, including the ones in YOUR HEAD.
There's a flaw with this logic. You see and hear about people getting arrested for driving while intoxicated all the time. Is it a warning to others? Of course. Why does it still happen? You can't prevent people from doing stupid things. It's human nature to make bad judgements occasionally, even when they are aware of the dangers.
Punishing this guy wont prevent it from happening again... only prevent HIM from doing it again (well, hopefully)
most laser-guided weapons use IR lasers, anyway. They're cheaper to make for the amount of power needed to work over the 5-10 mile span they must traverse, and IR gets absorbed the least by the atmosphere (blue gets scattered much more, so invisible UV lasers are out of the question if you need accuracy)
You'd be dumb to use a visible laser for missile guidance, anyway. any human in the vicinity would be able to follow the beam back to its source with their plain eyesight.
laser safety goggles can't be worn full-time if you expect to have useful vision. there are two main types of laser goggles, and neither are practical for this purpose. One type cuts out just one or two wavelengths of light (usually IR and the red produced by he-ne lasers) which wont be useful for diode-pumped lasers which can be 'tuned' to any wavelength, or for any laser beam of another color, and the other type, for broad-spectrum protection, would cut out so many other types of light, the instrumentation would be useless, and things outside the cockpit that are of certain "important" colors would be nearly invisible. red, green, yellow, and blue colors would all be suppressed.
And having the goggles in the cockpit but not on the pilot's face is useless. you DON'T get any warning before you get a concentrated beam of coherent narrow-spectrum light shining into your eyes.
cut the cables off, put them both behind the rear tires of a front-wheel-drive car. roll car back onto keyboards, engage emergency brake tightly so rear wheels stay locked over the keyboards. put car into gear, slide around and do donuts on your new plastic "car skates".
The author insists that monopolies would be impossible with a privatized radio spectrum, and that the total value of the radio spectrum would be $1T. The cost of ANY market has never prevented a monopoly in that market. And in the case of radio services, which are most certainly market-based, it would take one large company in a matropolitan area only a few billion dollars to snatch up all local spectrum (or to forcibly buy out smaller companies who refuse to give up their slices), and have a genuine monopoly in that market.
Additionally, the author suggests that with privatized radio spectrum, a TV operator could sell his 6MHz of TV spectrum to another radio operator for an arbitrary price. The problem with this is that consumer radio equipment would then be made available to transmit in this part of the radio spectrum, which is not necessarily allocated for this new service in other parts of the country. You end up with:
1) consumers causing interference with other services when they take their equipment to other areas,
2) more incompatibilities between equipment used in different parts of the country, unless the makers of the equipment redesign their products to work in other (read: all) parts of the available radio spectrum, which in turn WILL drive up prices of the equipment, and
3) more proprietary and unpublished specifications for radio/television services. The current FCC enforces certain rules to make sure that radio channels are used within their bandwidth, modulation, geographical, and power limits. When private companies buy spectrum and all rights to determine HOW to use it, they can easily force consumers and partners to purchase equipment that will only work with their protocols and frequencies. Imagine if HyperBigMegaCorp bought all of the television spectrum in a growing metropolitan area, and started selling televisions that only work in their area, and sublicensed their frequencies to television stations that transmitted with their own transmission protocols. Anyone who moves in or out of that metro area would be forced to buy new equipment, and potentially pay license fees to use the services in their market which might be completely free in any other area.
There are so many good things that the FCC has done for radio services in the united states, that have saved US consumers hassle and money, that the few bad things (mistakes and otherwise) they've come up with can be forgiven. I'm much happier with standardized, published policies on radio spectrum which is enforced nationally, rather than a completely fragmented radio spectrum which is micromanaged by corporations only interested in money and market share.
Slashdot Mirror
This may also clear out your partition table. I forget where the partition data starts in the MBR, but it's definitely in there somewhere, and generally isn't backed up.
If you're using any modern shell, hit ctrl-v before hitting the backspace key, if you want to pass the backspace character to the command, rather than have it handled by the shell.
mkdir
ls -ld ?
rmdir
They're not complex at all by today's standards. In fact, analog trunk systems use the same type of voting/priority receivers that have been used by repeater systems for 20+ years, but with the added benefit that the repeaters are continuously updating the radios (a few times per second) with the status of the system.
Digital trunk systems are a bit more complex, but because of the compression used, they can fit more than one conversation into the spectrum normally used by one analog signal. All this technology has existed and has been in widespread use for at least 10 years, and the radios used with these systems aren't any bigger or physically more complex than they were before (not a surprise, given the high-density integration they do with circuits these days)
Well, maybe two entries in a database, but still...
someone paid someone else almost three million dollars to essentially have their own nameservers listed next to a domain in the COM gtld zone. This hurts my brain.
Could someone please add these two lines to the US gtld zonefile?
president IN NS ns1.example.org.
president IN NS ns2.example.org.
It should only take 10-20 seconds. Maybe you could have your secretary do it if you don't have that kind of time.
That would be swell.
You have your figures backwards, and need to be updated on what a "lumen" is.
First, these bulbs are 140 Lumens per watt. Not "watts per lumens"
Second, since they're broad spectrum lamps, as opposed to sodium lamps which are very narrow spectrum, the human eye is much more able to acquire a usable image from an environment illuminated by the more natural broad-spectrum light, and therefore can get away with using less power to light up the same area.
Third, the "lumen" is a measure of perceived light intensity. A lamp that produces 1000 lumens in a narrow spectrum centered around the 570nm-590nm range (like those orange sodium lamps) APPEARS more intense than a broad spectrum lamp that produces only 300 lumens. What matters is not the intensity of the light, but how it's distributed across all the colors the human eye can see (and needs to render a clear image for us to recognize)
In closing, what good is a high-intensity Lumen orange/yellow narrow-spectrum lamp when what we need to see is mostly in the blue-green-yellow spectrum? These broad-spectrum lamps are more efficient in energy consumption mainly because they don't need to be as "intense" for us to see more of the colors illuminated by the lamp.
Almost every house in the US built (or remodelled) after 1950 has 230VAC service. The mains feed is actually a split-phase 120-0-120 circuit, with 220-240V measured across the two phases.
The only issue that may arise if you bring your 230V appliances over is that since split-phase 220 service doesn't use a "neutral" wire as a return path, you need to make sure your appliances are double-insulated (neutral insulated from ground AND ground insulated from metal parts of the chassis) or uses a third wire to ground, separate from the two mains. If any metal part of the chassis of your appliance is connected to what you'd consider the "neutral lead" of the circuit, that same appliance will have a 120V potential (from one of the supply phases) on its chassis in reference to the building's ground, making a severe shock hazard.
and just because he said "don't tase me, man!" doesn't mean it was a taser.
I know I'm being pedantic, but imagine how you'd react if the news article stated that this scrawny white guy was subdued by 8 officers instead of two or three? What if he was accidentally shot during the incident by an accidental discharge of a sidearm but it was reported that he was shot at point blank range by an officer's shotgun? This guy was being overly dramatic, and because of bad reporting, it was made out to sound like they almost killed him or rendered him paralyzed.
All the officers were trying to do was escort him away from the microphone and out of the room. They were completely within the boundaries of their job when he decided to resist them, prompting them to use a stun gun to subdue him instead of possibly inflicting physical harm on him with a choke hold or arm-bar.
If he were actually hit by a taser, it would have been from a distance, and only if he appeared to be an imminent physical threat to the police officers. Police officers reserve tasers for violent, cranked-out ex-cons who can't be subdued any other way.
LEDs are far more efficient than CFLs but with an even higher manufacturing cost. Luxeon LEDs are used in traffic signals here (California) now, configured with five 1W LEDs (at least for green. not sure about red or amber) behind a plastic fresnel lens, and are as bright as their 150W incandescent counterparts. The actual power consumption for the 8" LED signals is about 8W, from a 120VAC circuit. If I'm not mistaken, the larger 12" red signals take about 15W, replacing 200-250W incandescent bulbs.
So for a 100W incandescent, an equally bright CFL would consume 25W, but an LED light for a single-color would consume less than 8W. To implement a full(er) spectrum lamp with LEDs, it may cost even more, and it'll consume at least 16-20W compared to a 100W white incandescent.
So you had a little stroke of bad luck - it was probably a small wire or piece of metal stuck in the socket. Obviously, the vast majority of people using CFLs aren't having this problem. Sorry about the lamp fixture but chances are you'll have a fine experience with them next time.
(unless all your lamp fixtures are possessed)
Window is SCARY smart, and hothothot. I've been friends with her for years, and haven't seen enough of her since she moved out of Cali. Glad she contributed her knowledge to microsoft's efforts, and even happier that she's now on the firefox train.
Love you, WS, congratulations!
-ES
Using phonetics to represent our written words would have worked effectively only if we had no homonyms. Since we have many, many sets of words which sound alike but have very different meanings (even for those words which may be related in context, such as 'past' and 'passed') a phonetic alphabet will introduce even more ambiguity to the language. To use phonetics exclusively in a way that leaves no ambiguous words and ideas, we'd need to introduce a transitional vocabulary which does away with these homonyms.
In addition, what would we do with conjugations and contractions? What will become of "you'll"? Will it be really be written with the same phonetics as "yule"? Will "would've" become "wood of" or "wood uv"? And will "I'll" become written with the same phonetic spelling as "aisle"? Imagine the confusion arising from this.
Try reading this aloud:
"Eye wood of bot there car but aisle half two get my lye sense first."
If heard verbally, someone else would certainly understand that you need to get a driver's license before purchasing a car. The written words, whether phonetic or simple homonyms, make absolutely no sense when separated into their respective sentence fragments. Bots have eye wood? Where is aisle "half two"? And what does a sense of lye have to do with anything? How will all these ambiguities be addressed with a purely phonetic vocabulary, if we have so many completely unrelated words that sound alike already?
Depending on the method, 5 to 40 percent gets lost as heat.
Switching power supplies that are optimized for a small range of load conditions can achieve 95% or better efficiency. Most computer power supplies (built for a wide range of load conditions and voltages) are about 85-90% efficient now. Simple rectification and regulation through a linear regulator loses various amount of power through heat, depending on the load, but varies from 50-70% efficiency in a good design. This is what most wall-wart transformers do.
The primary loss of power, dissipated as heat, happens in low-frequency power transformers and in linear regulators and transistors. Slightly less is lost in rectifier diodes, switching transistors and high-frequency transformers used in switching (PWM) power supplies.
It's that that easy. Modern computers need tightly regulated DC voltage because 1) the semiconductor junctions can only pass current one way, and thus require a power source which provides voltage of one polarity, 2) any change in voltage affects the performance of high-speed circuitry, and AC is constantly changing voltage, and 3) 120 times per second, every time it swings from one direction/polarity to the other, your AC power line is at _zero_ volts. What do you suppose any computer circuit will do if all of a sudden, it has NO POWER available to it? wait around until there's power available again? CPUs run at over a billion cycles per second now. They lose all data and state information the moment no voltage is available at the supplies, because they require power to "remember" what happened even from one cycle previous. DC is steady, reliable power, when it comes to the inside of your high-performance computer.
About converting DC to DC... There are DC-DC converters now that use highly-optimized digital controllers and high-efficiency inductors and/or transformers used to buck (lower) or boost (raise) available DC power, with efficiencies for some small systems (below 50W or so) in the 90-95% range. Their efficiency is due to high-frequency pulse-width-modulated switching transistors feeding the source current into a high-frequency toroidal core transformer or inductor. Running higher frequencies (as opposed to the low 60Hz line frequency from an AC source) allows MUCH smaller inductors and transformers for the voltage conversion, and less power loss due to transformer core saturation (which happens more with lower frequencies, which is why AC line transformers are so huge)
In most new configurations of these types of switching power supplies (switchers, which is what almost every car audio amplifier uses, as well as most computer power supplies) the efficiency is about the same whether you step-up or step-down the voltage with the power supply. In fact, many PWM switching power supply designs can step-up and step-down without any change in circuitry, just by changing the pulse-width of the current being fed to the transformer.
To say stepping up DC power is inefficient while saying stepping it down is highly efficient, makes it sound like you need to brush up on modern power supply design. Also, the only application in which diodes are used to step up voltage in integer multiples, is the diode-capacitor multiplier, which only works with PULSED DC or AC, and that design is, in fact, very inefficient. Nobody would use that except in certin high-voltage, low-current supplies, like in air ionizers, older televisions, and stun guns.
first one:
turn switch #1 on, turn switch #2 off, turn switch #3 on. wait two or three minutes, and turn switch #3 OFF. immediately go to the other room, and feel the two light bulbs that are off. one will be cold, one will be hot. the cold "off" bulb is controlled by switch #2, the hot "off" bulb is controlled by switch #3.
They'll be heavier than non-powered speakers because they'll need to contain an integrated power supply, an amplifier, and a microcontroller to do the interfacing. It's completely useless to bring up the "lossy speaker cable" argument, because if you were going to spend the extra money and waste an extra power cable for powered speakers, you might as well just use standard analog speakers with XLR cables (which have been VERY well established as nearly noiseless and lossless for point to point audio distribution). You can reliably have a couple double-shielded XLR cables ran from your pre-amp to your self-powered speakers for less than having speakers that speak IP.
having multiple IP speakers on a network in the same room may also introduce phase offsets, since there's ALWAYS an inherent delay between receiving the network packets, decoding them, and sending the data off to DACs before the signal gets to the amplifier. Even a 2ms difference difference in delay/phase between two speakers in the same room is noticeable, and WILL screw up accurate stereo imaging. 2ms is not uncommon as a delay on an ethernet network.
Of course, mixing analog and IP speakers in the same room is right out.
Want the best audio quality, distance, noise-resistance for your speakers? fiber optic digital audio paths. end of story.
I agree. I run an EFNet IRC server, and have observed him attacking people and servers just because someone stepped up to or disagreed with him, or simply just to get his way. He has no conscience or empathy whatsoever.
holy shit, that was funny. that'll hold me over til april first.
you gotta give them credit for creativity, though. they're taking over where the cellphone antenna booster left off! HMMM... there's an idea. a combo gift pack of the BATMAX and the ANTENNA BOOSTER! with detailed instructions for both, including the warning sticker: DO NOT interchange these devices -- it may cause total plasmic collapse of all surrounding ions, including the ones in YOUR HEAD.
(i'm gonna go puke now)
There's a flaw with this logic. You see and hear about people getting arrested for driving while intoxicated all the time. Is it a warning to others? Of course. Why does it still happen? You can't prevent people from doing stupid things. It's human nature to make bad judgements occasionally, even when they are aware of the dangers.
Punishing this guy wont prevent it from happening again... only prevent HIM from doing it again (well, hopefully)
most laser-guided weapons use IR lasers, anyway. They're cheaper to make for the amount of power needed to work over the 5-10 mile span they must traverse, and IR gets absorbed the least by the atmosphere (blue gets scattered much more, so invisible UV lasers are out of the question if you need accuracy)
You'd be dumb to use a visible laser for missile guidance, anyway. any human in the vicinity would be able to follow the beam back to its source with their plain eyesight.
laser safety goggles can't be worn full-time if you expect to have useful vision. there are two main types of laser goggles, and neither are practical for this purpose. One type cuts out just one or two wavelengths of light (usually IR and the red produced by he-ne lasers) which wont be useful for diode-pumped lasers which can be 'tuned' to any wavelength, or for any laser beam of another color, and the other type, for broad-spectrum protection, would cut out so many other types of light, the instrumentation would be useless, and things outside the cockpit that are of certain "important" colors would be nearly invisible. red, green, yellow, and blue colors would all be suppressed.
And having the goggles in the cockpit but not on the pilot's face is useless. you DON'T get any warning before you get a concentrated beam of coherent narrow-spectrum light shining into your eyes.
cut the cables off, put them both behind the rear tires of a front-wheel-drive car. roll car back onto keyboards, engage emergency brake tightly so rear wheels stay locked over the keyboards. put car into gear, slide around and do donuts on your new plastic "car skates".
The author insists that monopolies would be impossible with a privatized radio spectrum, and that the total value of the radio spectrum would be $1T. The cost of ANY market has never prevented a monopoly in that market. And in the case of radio services, which are most certainly market-based, it would take one large company in a matropolitan area only a few billion dollars to snatch up all local spectrum (or to forcibly buy out smaller companies who refuse to give up their slices), and have a genuine monopoly in that market.
Additionally, the author suggests that with privatized radio spectrum, a TV operator could sell his 6MHz of TV spectrum to another radio operator for an arbitrary price. The problem with this is that consumer radio equipment would then be made available to transmit in this part of the radio spectrum, which is not necessarily allocated for this new service in other parts of the country. You end up with:
1) consumers causing interference with other services when they take their equipment to other areas,
2) more incompatibilities between equipment used in different parts of the country, unless the makers of the equipment redesign their products to work in other (read: all) parts of the available radio spectrum, which in turn WILL drive up prices of the equipment, and
3) more proprietary and unpublished specifications for radio/television services. The current FCC enforces certain rules to make sure that radio channels are used within their bandwidth, modulation, geographical, and power limits. When private companies buy spectrum and all rights to determine HOW to use it, they can easily force consumers and partners to purchase equipment that will only work with their protocols and frequencies. Imagine if HyperBigMegaCorp bought all of the television spectrum in a growing metropolitan area, and started selling televisions that only work in their area, and sublicensed their frequencies to television stations that transmitted with their own transmission protocols. Anyone who moves in or out of that metro area would be forced to buy new equipment, and potentially pay license fees to use the services in their market which might be completely free in any other area.
There are so many good things that the FCC has done for radio services in the united states, that have saved US consumers hassle and money, that the few bad things (mistakes and otherwise) they've come up with can be forgiven. I'm much happier with standardized, published policies on radio spectrum which is enforced nationally, rather than a completely fragmented radio spectrum which is micromanaged by corporations only interested in money and market share.
-4dB compared to what?
Absolute sound pressure level measurements start at 0dB and go up from there.
hmmm. like perl!