The issue is a map that already has your route marked for you, versus one in which you must create the route yourself. This process includes Step One, which is finding your present location on a map. I think you'll find that the average American driver, at least, can do this only with the greatest difficulty, and only if given multiple guesses. As for finding an unknown destination on a map, not to mention the best route to it -- well, most couldn't find water if they fell out of a boat.
...is to research and develop products for the future, not the present. It's called having "vision" and being able to (correctly) see where the industry was heading, and having products available when they're wanted.
Toyota's understanding of what buyers will value in the future enabled it to identify low emissions as a key selling feature as early as 1992, in the first version of its Earth Charter. Unlike US automakers, who likely would send this announcement (if it existed at all) to their PR firm to be published and forgotten, this program was acted upon by Toyota's R&D organization, as a bet on how the industry would change in the future.
One of the most frustrating parts of US auto companies is their apparently ingrained belief that their industry doesn't change. You hear it from their laid-off workers all the time -- "I thought I would always have a job here. My father worked at this plant, and his father, and...." The fundamental reasons for Toyota's success are that they expect the market to change, they have a good vision of where that change is going, and they act on that vision, by investing in R&D on the products of the future.
On the other hand, why is the "Post Anonymously" label emboldened? None of the other labels are. This would be a good example of an improper use of bold text, IMHO.
Wow. I just never pictured having the govt. tell me what to do with every aspect of my life. What's next...what days of the week I can wash clothes or water my lawn?
I understand and (reluctantly) accept where you're going (and, apparently, where the industry has already gone), but let me state for the record that your argument is faulty.
Italics do not, and should not, indicate "yelling." They indicate clear and precise diction, emphasizing the content above the rest of the text. That's why book titles are italicized in citations and, when read aloud, they should be read exactly the same as any other italicized text -- especially clearly and perhaps a little slower -- as should condensed instructions like ibid., transfers from other languages like ex post facto (ibid. counts two-for-one here), and all other usages of italics of which I can think. If you have a communications background, it's reducing the data rate of the most important parts of the message to get a lower error rate.
Your cited example was an italicized, not emboldened, title in the original text, and your argument was weakened by switching it to bold text -- bold and italicized text are not interchangeable, for they mean different things. (I also don't know of a case in which properly-used bold text doesn't imply a "strong" voice, but that's neither here nor there.)
That said, I do not fight the weather, and will now return to following the Prime Directive: Conform to existing standards.
One thing that has always puzzled me about multiband public-service radios is how access to the various networks would be managed.
Traditionally, the reason agencies have different networks on different radio channels is for efficiency and security. By having separate networks, the firemen and the city road maintenance crews aren't bothered by each others' communications, nearly all of which are irrelevant to the other organization. It's easy to see that the policemen usually don't want to be bothered by the water utilities guys, and that the customs people don't want their communications overheard by local law enforcement (and, likely, vice-versa).
But, with a multiband, software-defined radio, the plan is for these types to be able to communicate with each other in emergencies. Fine -- but who lets whom on who's network, and when? If the local water utility guy in his truck sees a water main break underneath the local customs facility, how many layers of management will he have to work through to get his radio allowed on the customs network, and how long will that take? Technically, it's a trivial matter (once the radios are in the field, that is), but from an organizational standpoint I can see a big morass of internecine squabbling if this feature is to be used.
Yes -- this is good advice to overcome conventional writer's block, too. The solution is usually explained to writers as follows:
If you suffer from writer's block when asked to write a story about your home town, write about a block of your home town. If that doesn't work, write about a building. Still nothing? A brick. At some point in this process, you'll find a start, the dam will burst (metaphorically), and you'll be on your way.
Like the donkey that starved between two bales of hay, most cases of writer's block are actually caused by having too much, rather than too little, to write about, and the brain stalls in trying to find the best way to start. By moving to the smallest possible component, this problem is overcome.
I think you'll find that phrase in most component specifications for consumer products. You don't have to have too many 10,000 unit/day production lines shut down due to a vendor's unexpected component change before the spec department starts adding the phrase to the boilerplate of all new specs. Surprises are too expensive.
Major manufacturers of batteries have very good quality control, and can give the design engineer good statistical distributions of most major performance parameters of interest. The engineer can then design his system to support these levels of variation. That's easy -- and also not the problem. The problem is the knockoff guys, whose products are wildly different from the mainstream products.
As I've mentioned above, the reason you haven't seen any products fail with AAA batteries is likely that you haven't used any batteries other than those from major manufacturers, and you haven't used your products in extreme conditions.
Keep in mind that consumer products can be pulled from the market with only a handful of catastrophic failures -- out of tens of millions produced. (cf. the Sony battery problem.) It's unlikely that any given individual will see a failure (or even know someone who has seen a failure) if the rate of failure is measured in parts per million, yet that is the standard to which consumer products must be designed.
Every battery-powered product more complicated than a flashlight already attempts to detect "bad" batteries. However, defining -- let alone determining in a operating product -- a "funny" current, voltage or resistance reading is a very difficult technical problem, and I would be pleased to have you present your solution so that we could all use it. Keep in mind that any Type II errors, in which you falsely detect a bad battery when the battery is good, are indistinguishable from product defects, and will appear as increased warranty costs and bad PR for the product.
Also recognize that a major complaint of consumers is that the existing products are too complicated to use, so that you must also design an interface that explains "what you are doing and why" to a user in a way that he will understand. Given the amount of misinformation and misunderstanding about batteries that has appeared just on this thread, from supposedly technically-sophisticated IT specialists, that would be a difficult technical problem in and of itself.
Leaks usually take years to develop when batteries from reputable manufacturers are used. In the second and third world, a lot of the batteries available to consumers are from local manufacturers, who make batteries that, well, leak early and often.
How long batteries last can very much be a part of the specs, since it is often very much not a function of how much energy they contain. The internal resistance, not the stored energy, of a battery frequently determines end of life, especially if there is a low-voltage threshold below which a system reset or other undesired behavior results.
Note that it's often difficult for the product itself to determine when the battery is exhausted: Different cell chemistries have different voltage profiles, and their voltages vary under load. Determining a battery's state of charge is actually a difficult engineering problem, even if you know exactly what the battery is.
And yet, any AA battery will work in any device which takes AA batteries.
Sorry, no. An "AA battery" isn't even an electrical specification, because it specifies only the mechanical size of the cell. It can be a carbon-zinc cell, a manganese dioxide ("alkaline") cell, a rechargeable nickel-cadmium cell, or even a lithium cell, just to name a few. (If you're still not convinced, look at this list, and try to develop a way for the product to determine even what kind of lithium cell it's been connected to.) The designer of the product has to consider how his product will behave when the consumer puts each of these in his product, and design around them -- for "anything not expressly prohibited is guaranteed to occur."
The reason you can say that "any AA battery will work in any device which takes AA batteries" is because (1) it's not really true, because your sample size is only a small set of what's available world-wide, and (2) the engineers of the consumer product have designed in extra circuitry, at the cost of money, size, and weight, to avoid or minimize undesirable behavior when all of these possibilities do occur -- circuitry you pay for when you buy the product, and have to lug around when you carry it.
Oh, and the protection circuitry has to be in the battery because if the battery terminals are shorted, the product is unpowered, while the battery is attempting to ignite. Think about it.
Any battery with the same specifications should work..
At the risk of incipient tar-and-feathering, let me offer a contrasting point of view.
All batteries are not alike. The length of a proper battery specification for a consumer application is enormous (several hundred pages), and usually includes a requirement along the lines of, "No change shall be made to an approved product [i.e., the battery], whether or not such change affects performance to the specifications herein, without prior express written consent of the XYZ Corporation" -- in other words, once it's working in our application don't change anything, whether or not we've thought to control that parameter in the spec. The problem is, the consumer has no way of knowing that the battery he's buying actually meets the product's battery specification -- and there are plenty of motivational reasons for the knockoff battery supplier to cut corners. Even an ethical battery manufacturer has to work very closely with the consumer product design team to understand the details of the battery specification.
I spent 25 years designing portable products for consumer applications, and I stand before this frenzied mob to say that one of the largest problems one faces when engineering these products are non-standard batteries. The consumer buys a knockoff battery, and when the product sooner or later (a) catches fire, (b) has terrible battery life, or (c) exhibits some unusual behavior, I am here to tell you that the consumer will blame the product, rather than the battery, 100% of the time, driving warranty costs through the roof. This leads to incredible feats of over-engineering in the product itself, to account for as many types of battery variation as the engineering staff can think of, and that the development program cost and time goals allow. The ability to design for a specific type of battery -- and only that type of battery -- was a luxury often discussed among the engineers with which I worked, since we knew we were adding cost, size, and weight to our designs as "defensive engineering" against the knockoffs.
I can see that you remain unconvinced, so let me give you a few examples of battery specifications, and the problems caused when they are not met.
1. Internal resistance. Batteries do not all source the same amount of current when given the same load. Take a dozen manganese-dioxide AAA batteries from a dozen battery vendors around the world. Periodically place, say, a 10-ohm resistor across their terminals, and measure the voltage across the battery terminals over time. The difference between the open-circuit battery voltage and the voltage under load is controlled by the internal resistance of the battery. A fresh, good cell from a reputable manufacturer will have an internal resistance of approximately 1 to 1.5 ohms, so the voltage under load remains high, approaching the open-circuit voltage.
A cell from a less reputable manufacturer can have an internal resistance of several dozen ohms; when this cell is placed in a product that draws, say, 100 mA from its battery (for example, when sending an audible alert, or turning on a few LEDs), the battery voltage seen by the product can drop from the nominal 1.3 V to as low as 0.3 V, usually leading to a system reset. The consumer, of course, knows only that that crappy product from XYZ Corporation doesn't work (or stopped working sooner than expected, or does funny stuff when the volume knob is set too high); there's no way for him to know the internal resistance of the battery he bought.
Note that the internal resistance of all batteries increases as the battery is discharged, so a major part of power management in portable products is addressing this issue. Frequently, especially in products with high peak-to-average current drain ratios, battery internal resistance, rather than energy exhaustion itself, is the factor that determines battery life, so how fast internal resistance changes over the life of the bat
"During Cheney's years in the Bush administration, the official vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington had been transformed into a kind of fortress with a hardened bunker in case of another terrorist attack. Armed security guards, multiple barriers, explosive-sniffing dogs, and two fences protected the house, a stately but weathered 19th-century Queen Anne mansion on a hill."
--Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 417.
Exactly right. In fact, the relationship is even closer than the parent states. Telegrams have a true packet structure, with a header and payload. Further, the headers have distinct fields, including a unique message ID, message types, source and destination addresses, detailed QoS (Quality of Service) provisions, timestamps, and message length, just to name a few.
The Western Union network used location-based routing, with smaller, local-area lines connected to hubs having dedicated point-to-point links to other hubs. When a link went down, control messages were sent announcing the problem to other hubs, and paid messages were re-routed.
The ARRL National Traffic System, an amateur radiotelegraph network established in 1949, has many, many features "rediscovered" in modern wireless data networks, including:
-A hierarchical network structure (a "network of networks") -A master-slave structure in each network, with a beaconing master (the "net control station", or NCS) -RTS/CTS channel access -Multicast messaging ("book" messages)
Some of its other features, including the separation of control and data functions into separate logical channels (data is exchanged between hierarchical levels by designated representatives, not by the NCS, which controls each network), could still find application in wireless data networks today.
The US Federal Aviation Administration rules relevant to unmanned rocketry are in CFR Title 14, 101.21 to 101.27. In 101.22 one finds the definitions of "Model Rocket", "High-Power Rocket", and "Advanced High-Power Rocket" relevant in the United States:
101.22 Definitions. The following definitions apply to this subpart:
(a) Class 1--Model Rocket means an amateur rocket that:
(1) Uses no more than 125 grams (4.4 ounces) of propellant;
(2) Uses a slow-burning propellant;
(3) Is made of paper, wood, or breakable plastic;
(4) Contains no substantial metal parts; and
(5) Weighs no more than 1,500 grams (53 ounces), including the propellant.
(b) Class 2--High-Power Rocket means an amateur rocket other than a model rocket that is propelled by a motor or motors having a combined total impulse of 40,960 Newton-seconds (9,208 pound-seconds) or less.
(c) Class 3--Advanced High-Power Rocket means an amateur rocket other than a model rocket or high-power rocket.
Sound waves and radio wave behave similar in how they move through the air.
Anyways, I'm not sure that there is anything stopping the appearance of the radio wave from emitting in another location then they actually are.
Sorry, no -- you're mixing up about three things here.
Conventional Stereo Sound Conventional stereo sound works because the sources (the two speakers) have a controllable relative phase and amplitude relationship, and because the directivity of the receiving system (that'd be the head and ears of the listener) is poor: Regardless of the orientation of your head, you hear sound from both speakers at all times. Stereo sound systems use these facts to produce sound that can seem to be located at any position between the two speakers -- you can't make sound seem to come from "outside the room." Adding additional speakers enables one to produce sound that can seem to originate from any point within the perimeter of the speakers -- so-called "surround sound" or, if you're old enough, "quadraphonic." Recent systems also add psychoacoustic clues to add realism.
Radio systems can and do use the concept of controlled amplitude and phase; see phased arrays, just to start. However, there are a couple of problems in using them in the manner you suggest.
First, it's practically very difficult to control the relative phase and amplitude of microwave sources over the large areas required to survive multiple ARM strikes, because the wavelength is so small -- centimeters or less -- and the required separation of the sources so large -- hundreds of meters or more. Maintaining a phase accuracy of a few degrees, say even ten degrees (1/36 wavelength), means that the maybe 100-meter-long transmission lines (or whatever is used to establish the phase reference) must be constant to millimeter precision, over temperature variations and mechanical stress, not to mention other wartime hazards.
Second, and more importantly, the enemy you're trying to fool has a phased-array antenna on his own receiver, with excellent directivity (i.e., a narrow beam), and is using it to scan for your transmitter(s). Remember that this trick depends upon the receiver being able to hear all sources simultaneously. In this case, however, it is very unlikely that he will be able to hear all of your transmitters simultaneously, unless he is so far away that they all appear as single point source and your subterfuge is meaningless. Instead, he'll scan across one of your transmitters, hear it, launch ARM 1, restart scanning, scan across another, hear it, launch ARM 2, etc., until all are gone.
"HyperSonic Sound(tm)" Sound is a pressure wave in a supporting medium -- in this case, air. The audio technique to which you refer (I think) depends on the (slightly) nonlinear properties of air; two very strong ultrasonic sound beams, generated by conventional transducers, cross in the air, and an intermodulation product -- the frequency difference between the two beams -- is produced. (There's also the frequency sum of the two beams produced, but it's not used in this application.) If the frequency difference is in the audible range, it will be heard by an observer. If that observer moves out of one or more of the beams, so that the difference product is not made where he is, he will hear nothing. Note that, since the ultrasonic sound can be of very short wavelength, the beams can be quite narrow and the volume of air in both beams quite small. Also note that, since the intersection of two beams is the critical feature, it is possible to achieve this effect "outside the room."
However, this effect is entirely determined by the pressure nonlinearity of the air. Electromagnetic radiation is unaffected by this property (at least up to the point of molecular breakdown), so it is absolutely impossible to generate false radio locations by this means. The o
What you are looking for is a defensive publication that patent examiners are likely to search when reviewing a patent application. One candidate is The IP.com Journal, part of the prior-art database maintained at ip.com. The ip.com prior-art database is accessible on-line; in addition, physical copies of the journal are distributed to patent offices and libraries worldwide.
ip.com has many well-known corporations as clients, entities most likely to need the services provided by an effective defensive publication. The cost of electronic publication for an individual invention, $200 (plus $40 if you want the entire disclosure, not just an abstract and reference to the online version, to be in the printed edition), is much less than a patent application.
[Disclaimer: I have no association with ip.com, other than as a satisfied user: They have published several of my inventions, none of which I have ever seen patented elsewhere.]
Slashdot Mirror
Not to mention the Galvin Electricity Initiative, from the family that founded Motorola.
The slowing of the Earth's rotation is already the cause of those damnable leap seconds. You want more?
The issue is a map that already has your route marked for you, versus one in which you must create the route yourself. This process includes Step One, which is finding your present location on a map. I think you'll find that the average American driver, at least, can do this only with the greatest difficulty, and only if given multiple guesses. As for finding an unknown destination on a map, not to mention the best route to it -- well, most couldn't find water if they fell out of a boat.
Sad, really.
...is to research and develop products for the future, not the present. It's called having "vision" and being able to (correctly) see where the industry was heading, and having products available when they're wanted.
Toyota's understanding of what buyers will value in the future enabled it to identify low emissions as a key selling feature as early as 1992, in the first version of its Earth Charter. Unlike US automakers, who likely would send this announcement (if it existed at all) to their PR firm to be published and forgotten, this program was acted upon by Toyota's R&D organization, as a bet on how the industry would change in the future.
One of the most frustrating parts of US auto companies is their apparently ingrained belief that their industry doesn't change. You hear it from their laid-off workers all the time -- "I thought I would always have a job here. My father worked at this plant, and his father, and ...." The fundamental reasons for Toyota's success are that they expect the market to change, they have a good vision of where that change is going, and they act on that vision, by investing in R&D on the products of the future.
Headers imply a strong voice. What's the problem?
On the other hand, why is the "Post Anonymously" label emboldened? None of the other labels are. This would be a good example of an improper use of bold text, IMHO.
Wow. I just never pictured having the govt. tell me what to do with every aspect of my life. What's next...what days of the week I can wash clothes or water my lawn?
Landscape Irrigation Water Restrictions...
I understand and (reluctantly) accept where you're going (and, apparently, where the industry has already gone), but let me state for the record that your argument is faulty.
Italics do not, and should not, indicate "yelling." They indicate clear and precise diction, emphasizing the content above the rest of the text. That's why book titles are italicized in citations and, when read aloud, they should be read exactly the same as any other italicized text -- especially clearly and perhaps a little slower -- as should condensed instructions like ibid., transfers from other languages like ex post facto (ibid. counts two-for-one here), and all other usages of italics of which I can think. If you have a communications background, it's reducing the data rate of the most important parts of the message to get a lower error rate.
Your cited example was an italicized, not emboldened, title in the original text, and your argument was weakened by switching it to bold text -- bold and italicized text are not interchangeable, for they mean different things. (I also don't know of a case in which properly-used bold text doesn't imply a "strong" voice, but that's neither here nor there.)
That said, I do not fight the weather, and will now return to following the Prime Directive: Conform to existing standards.
*sigh*
Thanks for clearing up the mystery. At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon, however, I do have the following subsidiary questions:
1. How the heck is one supposed to know this, if not via an off-topic conversation with one of the knowledgeable?
2. Who the heck decided that <i> for "italics" and <b> for "bold" was too complicated, and needed to be simplified to <em> and <strong>, respectively?
It's a bug in Slashcode somewhere. Happens to all of my archived posts when I view them -- anything I put in italics or boldface turns into a
blockquote
. Yes, it's really annoying, but it's not the submitter's fault.
One thing that has always puzzled me about multiband public-service radios is how access to the various networks would be managed.
Traditionally, the reason agencies have different networks on different radio channels is for efficiency and security. By having separate networks, the firemen and the city road maintenance crews aren't bothered by each others' communications, nearly all of which are irrelevant to the other organization. It's easy to see that the policemen usually don't want to be bothered by the water utilities guys, and that the customs people don't want their communications overheard by local law enforcement (and, likely, vice-versa).
But, with a multiband, software-defined radio, the plan is for these types to be able to communicate with each other in emergencies. Fine -- but who lets whom on who's network, and when? If the local water utility guy in his truck sees a water main break underneath the local customs facility, how many layers of management will he have to work through to get his radio allowed on the customs network, and how long will that take? Technically, it's a trivial matter (once the radios are in the field, that is), but from an organizational standpoint I can see a big morass of internecine squabbling if this feature is to be used.
>$100 for an iPod battery?
iPod batteries are $59.
$200 for my laptop battery?
Even batteries for the 17" Apple laptop are only $129.
Yes -- this is good advice to overcome conventional writer's block, too. The solution is usually explained to writers as follows:
If you suffer from writer's block when asked to write a story about your home town, write about a block of your home town. If that doesn't work, write about a building. Still nothing? A brick. At some point in this process, you'll find a start, the dam will burst (metaphorically), and you'll be on your way.
Like the donkey that starved between two bales of hay, most cases of writer's block are actually caused by having too much, rather than too little, to write about, and the brain stalls in trying to find the best way to start. By moving to the smallest possible component, this problem is overcome.
I think you'll find that phrase in most component specifications for consumer products. You don't have to have too many 10,000 unit/day production lines shut down due to a vendor's unexpected component change before the spec department starts adding the phrase to the boilerplate of all new specs. Surprises are too expensive.
Major manufacturers of batteries have very good quality control, and can give the design engineer good statistical distributions of most major performance parameters of interest. The engineer can then design his system to support these levels of variation. That's easy -- and also not the problem. The problem is the knockoff guys, whose products are wildly different from the mainstream products.
As I've mentioned above, the reason you haven't seen any products fail with AAA batteries is likely that you haven't used any batteries other than those from major manufacturers, and you haven't used your products in extreme conditions.
Keep in mind that consumer products can be pulled from the market with only a handful of catastrophic failures -- out of tens of millions produced. (cf. the Sony battery problem.) It's unlikely that any given individual will see a failure (or even know someone who has seen a failure) if the rate of failure is measured in parts per million, yet that is the standard to which consumer products must be designed.
["common on"?]
Every battery-powered product more complicated than a flashlight already attempts to detect "bad" batteries. However, defining -- let alone determining in a operating product -- a "funny" current, voltage or resistance reading is a very difficult technical problem, and I would be pleased to have you present your solution so that we could all use it. Keep in mind that any Type II errors, in which you falsely detect a bad battery when the battery is good, are indistinguishable from product defects, and will appear as increased warranty costs and bad PR for the product.
Also recognize that a major complaint of consumers is that the existing products are too complicated to use, so that you must also design an interface that explains "what you are doing and why" to a user in a way that he will understand. Given the amount of misinformation and misunderstanding about batteries that has appeared just on this thread, from supposedly technically-sophisticated IT specialists, that would be a difficult technical problem in and of itself.
Leaks usually take years to develop when batteries from reputable manufacturers are used. In the second and third world, a lot of the batteries available to consumers are from local manufacturers, who make batteries that, well, leak early and often.
How long batteries last can very much be a part of the specs, since it is often very much not a function of how much energy they contain. The internal resistance, not the stored energy, of a battery frequently determines end of life, especially if there is a low-voltage threshold below which a system reset or other undesired behavior results.
Note that it's often difficult for the product itself to determine when the battery is exhausted: Different cell chemistries have different voltage profiles, and their voltages vary under load. Determining a battery's state of charge is actually a difficult engineering problem, even if you know exactly what the battery is.
And yet, any AA battery will work in any device which takes AA batteries.
Sorry, no. An "AA battery" isn't even an electrical specification, because it specifies only the mechanical size of the cell. It can be a carbon-zinc cell, a manganese dioxide ("alkaline") cell, a rechargeable nickel-cadmium cell, or even a lithium cell, just to name a few. (If you're still not convinced, look at this list, and try to develop a way for the product to determine even what kind of lithium cell it's been connected to.) The designer of the product has to consider how his product will behave when the consumer puts each of these in his product, and design around them -- for "anything not expressly prohibited is guaranteed to occur."
The reason you can say that "any AA battery will work in any device which takes AA batteries" is because (1) it's not really true, because your sample size is only a small set of what's available world-wide, and (2) the engineers of the consumer product have designed in extra circuitry, at the cost of money, size, and weight, to avoid or minimize undesirable behavior when all of these possibilities do occur -- circuitry you pay for when you buy the product, and have to lug around when you carry it.
Oh, and the protection circuitry has to be in the battery because if the battery terminals are shorted, the product is unpowered, while the battery is attempting to ignite. Think about it.
Any battery with the same specifications should work..
At the risk of incipient tar-and-feathering, let me offer a contrasting point of view.
All batteries are not alike. The length of a proper battery specification for a consumer application is enormous (several hundred pages), and usually includes a requirement along the lines of, "No change shall be made to an approved product [i.e., the battery], whether or not such change affects performance to the specifications herein, without prior express written consent of the XYZ Corporation" -- in other words, once it's working in our application don't change anything, whether or not we've thought to control that parameter in the spec. The problem is, the consumer has no way of knowing that the battery he's buying actually meets the product's battery specification -- and there are plenty of motivational reasons for the knockoff battery supplier to cut corners. Even an ethical battery manufacturer has to work very closely with the consumer product design team to understand the details of the battery specification.
I spent 25 years designing portable products for consumer applications, and I stand before this frenzied mob to say that one of the largest problems one faces when engineering these products are non-standard batteries. The consumer buys a knockoff battery, and when the product sooner or later (a) catches fire, (b) has terrible battery life, or (c) exhibits some unusual behavior, I am here to tell you that the consumer will blame the product, rather than the battery, 100% of the time, driving warranty costs through the roof. This leads to incredible feats of over-engineering in the product itself, to account for as many types of battery variation as the engineering staff can think of, and that the development program cost and time goals allow. The ability to design for a specific type of battery -- and only that type of battery -- was a luxury often discussed among the engineers with which I worked, since we knew we were adding cost, size, and weight to our designs as "defensive engineering" against the knockoffs.
I can see that you remain unconvinced, so let me give you a few examples of battery specifications, and the problems caused when they are not met.
1. Internal resistance. Batteries do not all source the same amount of current when given the same load. Take a dozen manganese-dioxide AAA batteries from a dozen battery vendors around the world. Periodically place, say, a 10-ohm resistor across their terminals, and measure the voltage across the battery terminals over time. The difference between the open-circuit battery voltage and the voltage under load is controlled by the internal resistance of the battery. A fresh, good cell from a reputable manufacturer will have an internal resistance of approximately 1 to 1.5 ohms, so the voltage under load remains high, approaching the open-circuit voltage.
A cell from a less reputable manufacturer can have an internal resistance of several dozen ohms; when this cell is placed in a product that draws, say, 100 mA from its battery (for example, when sending an audible alert, or turning on a few LEDs), the battery voltage seen by the product can drop from the nominal 1.3 V to as low as 0.3 V, usually leading to a system reset. The consumer, of course, knows only that that crappy product from XYZ Corporation doesn't work (or stopped working sooner than expected, or does funny stuff when the volume knob is set too high); there's no way for him to know the internal resistance of the battery he bought.
Note that the internal resistance of all batteries increases as the battery is discharged, so a major part of power management in portable products is addressing this issue. Frequently, especially in products with high peak-to-average current drain ratios, battery internal resistance, rather than energy exhaustion itself, is the factor that determines battery life, so how fast internal resistance changes over the life of the bat
Are apostrophes misused in French, too?
"During Cheney's years in the Bush administration, the official vice presidential residence at the Naval Observatory in northwest Washington had been transformed into a kind of fortress with a hardened bunker in case of another terrorist attack. Armed security guards, multiple barriers, explosive-sniffing dogs, and two fences protected the house, a stately but weathered 19th-century Queen Anne mansion on a hill."
--Bob Woodward, The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2008, p. 417.
The location and description of this bunker is in Bob Woodward's latest book, The War Within , published by Simon & Schuster on 8 September 2008.
Exactly right. In fact, the relationship is even closer than the parent states. Telegrams have a true packet structure, with a header and payload. Further, the headers have distinct fields, including a unique message ID, message types, source and destination addresses, detailed QoS (Quality of Service) provisions, timestamps, and message length, just to name a few.
The Western Union network used location-based routing, with smaller, local-area lines connected to hubs having dedicated point-to-point links to other hubs. When a link went down, control messages were sent announcing the problem to other hubs, and paid messages were re-routed.
The ARRL National Traffic System, an amateur radiotelegraph network established in 1949, has many, many features "rediscovered" in modern wireless data networks, including:
-A hierarchical network structure (a "network of networks")
-A master-slave structure in each network, with a beaconing master (the "net control station", or NCS)
-RTS/CTS channel access
-Multicast messaging ("book" messages)
Some of its other features, including the separation of control and data functions into separate logical channels (data is exchanged between hierarchical levels by designated representatives, not by the NCS, which controls each network), could still find application in wireless data networks today.
What's "every larger"? Can I get one, too?
The US Federal Aviation Administration rules relevant to unmanned rocketry are in CFR Title 14, 101.21 to 101.27. In 101.22 one finds the definitions of "Model Rocket", "High-Power Rocket", and "Advanced High-Power Rocket" relevant in the United States:
So according to this taxonomy, Mr. Eves' rocket is an advanced high-power rocket, and is not a model rocket.
Sorry, no -- you're mixing up about three things here.
Conventional Stereo Sound
Conventional stereo sound works because the sources (the two speakers) have a controllable relative phase and amplitude relationship, and because the directivity of the receiving system (that'd be the head and ears of the listener) is poor: Regardless of the orientation of your head, you hear sound from both speakers at all times. Stereo sound systems use these facts to produce sound that can seem to be located at any position between the two speakers -- you can't make sound seem to come from "outside the room." Adding additional speakers enables one to produce sound that can seem to originate from any point within the perimeter of the speakers -- so-called "surround sound" or, if you're old enough, "quadraphonic." Recent systems also add psychoacoustic clues to add realism.
Radio systems can and do use the concept of controlled amplitude and phase; see phased arrays, just to start. However, there are a couple of problems in using them in the manner you suggest.
First, it's practically very difficult to control the relative phase and amplitude of microwave sources over the large areas required to survive multiple ARM strikes, because the wavelength is so small -- centimeters or less -- and the required separation of the sources so large -- hundreds of meters or more. Maintaining a phase accuracy of a few degrees, say even ten degrees (1/36 wavelength), means that the maybe 100-meter-long transmission lines (or whatever is used to establish the phase reference) must be constant to millimeter precision, over temperature variations and mechanical stress, not to mention other wartime hazards.
Second, and more importantly, the enemy you're trying to fool has a phased-array antenna on his own receiver, with excellent directivity (i.e., a narrow beam), and is using it to scan for your transmitter(s). Remember that this trick depends upon the receiver being able to hear all sources simultaneously. In this case, however, it is very unlikely that he will be able to hear all of your transmitters simultaneously, unless he is so far away that they all appear as single point source and your subterfuge is meaningless. Instead, he'll scan across one of your transmitters, hear it, launch ARM 1, restart scanning, scan across another, hear it, launch ARM 2, etc., until all are gone.
"HyperSonic Sound(tm)"
Sound is a pressure wave in a supporting medium -- in this case, air. The audio technique to which you refer (I think) depends on the (slightly) nonlinear properties of air; two very strong ultrasonic sound beams, generated by conventional transducers, cross in the air, and an intermodulation product -- the frequency difference between the two beams -- is produced. (There's also the frequency sum of the two beams produced, but it's not used in this application.) If the frequency difference is in the audible range, it will be heard by an observer. If that observer moves out of one or more of the beams, so that the difference product is not made where he is, he will hear nothing. Note that, since the ultrasonic sound can be of very short wavelength, the beams can be quite narrow and the volume of air in both beams quite small. Also note that, since the intersection of two beams is the critical feature, it is possible to achieve this effect "outside the room."
However, this effect is entirely determined by the pressure nonlinearity of the air. Electromagnetic radiation is unaffected by this property (at least up to the point of molecular breakdown), so it is absolutely impossible to generate false radio locations by this means. The o
What you are looking for is a defensive publication that patent examiners are likely to search when reviewing a patent application. One candidate is The IP.com Journal, part of the prior-art database maintained at ip.com. The ip.com prior-art database is accessible on-line; in addition, physical copies of the journal are distributed to patent offices and libraries worldwide.
ip.com has many well-known corporations as clients, entities most likely to need the services provided by an effective defensive publication. The cost of electronic publication for an individual invention, $200 (plus $40 if you want the entire disclosure, not just an abstract and reference to the online version, to be in the printed edition), is much less than a patent application.
[Disclaimer: I have no association with ip.com, other than as a satisfied user: They have published several of my inventions, none of which I have ever seen patented elsewhere.]