What about illegitimate uses? Those are the only kind that domestic extremists like myself care about.
If you were discussing something that were merely private that you didn't want anyone to ever know you'd have to convince the other person to install the app as well.
This would seem to be the case for every form of private communication. Is there any way to communicate securely with someone who doesn't care about private communication?
Hey Dave, I have a secret I would like to share with you, but only if you install this app...
I had this problem with my defense attorney. I wanted to discuss some aspects of my case with him via email, which I rightfully didn't trust. So I asked him if he would be willing to install and use gpg4win or at least sign up for Hushmail, but that went over like a lead balloon. So in the end I had to wait to discuss the case with him in person.
I personally couldn't imagine having to wear a helmet every time I rode a bike as a kid.
That's the sort of risk miitigation that I think makes sense. All it takes is one fall where your head hits the pavement to drop your IQ 50 points. I would think that geeks would be especially concerned with mitigating that risk. We should all really wear helmets driving cars as well. And we should improve the design of helmets to reduce the G force from minor accidents. That bag of jello in our skulls is pretty easy to damage and most of the time that damage is permanent. The fact that people wear helmets while cycling and skiing far more than they used to is progress, not unwarranted paranoia.
Eventually, people will understand that to avoid risks originating from the poorest countries, the final solution is to just eradicate those countries.
While it may be possible to nuke a country so thoroughly into a lunar landscape analogue that not even cockroaches will remain there will inevitably be domestic terrorists/extremists and they cannot start nuking their own cities. So there really is no end to their justification for an increasingly strict police state where everthing is sacrificed on the grand altar of the God of Safety.
While you and I may not want to live in such a society there are those who would like nothing better. Many of them fancy themselves as the enforcers in such a regime, a chance to be a master instead of one of the many slaves. For people who live to control others every unjust law that makes life unbearable for the rest is yet another opportunity for them to exert their authority and feel that blissful, euphoric sense of power that is for them the ultimate drug.
I tend to agree that we want small companies and small government to avoid the problem of having one entity that overpowers the rest.
My point was not about one group overpowering others. It was a more basic one about human psychology. The larger the group the more people seem to drop their own moral compass and substitute that of the group. The larger the group the worse the individuals in it tend to behave. At least that is what I have observed.
As far as society needing large companies for certain things I do agree. My point is that it would be nice if we could figure out a way to avoid such concentrations of (economic) power. I don't think there is truly a practical way to do so however. The best we can hope for is to at least not grant such organizations any special privileges or special status. It is a group of individuals nothing more. It should be treated as such.
I'm guessing that you are a Republican. Am I right? You clearly do not have the first clue about what Libertarianism actually is. First you have to learn to think in terms of principles. Then learn what 'voluntarism' means. Then note that Libertarianism is not about class warfare. Corporations behave like sociopaths. That sort of behavior is not good for society. The government helps and encourages them in this with the special privileges it grants them. The thing I hate most about Republicans is their anti-intellectualism and their militant pragmatism. Ideas are important. This country was founded on them.
One reason for that is McDonalds doesn't give a shit about their shitty product. The company itself has no pride. How can you expect individual employees to care? Profit sharing plans won't help when no one at the company cares about the quality of the product they make.I don't see the existence of companies which we all would be better off without as a failure of capitalism, but as a failure of humanity as a species. Unfortunately greedy, unprincipled members of our species will probably always exist. It would be nice if a better species overtook us just as we overtook Neanderthals. Perhaps one day sentient machines will do exactly that. If/when we reach the singularity none of this will matter.
I'm a Libertarian who thinks corporations should be outlawed in current societies and denied any form of special privileges like limited liability or any form of personhood in a utopian free society. What were you saying again about grossly overpaid CEOs? I agree that they are grossly overpaid. I suspect that most of them could be replaced with someone who makes less than 100k per year no problem.
Even if the company made a little bit less money it would be good for the morale of everyone else if one person were not so ridiculously overpaid.
I think you have to be blind to not see that a corporation represents an unhealthy concentration of power in the hands of a few. Power corrupts. Also the behavior of a corporation is indistinguishable from that of an individual sociopath. The last thing we need is more sociopaths in our or any society. We certainly should not be encouraging them as we do now.
Companies, as in groups of individuals working toward a common goal, which should not be to make a pile of money in any way they can, but to produce a product or service they can be proud of, while hopefully at the same time earning enough to live comfortably, are themselves necessary evils because when they grow large they grow powerful even without limited liability or legal personhood, but there is simply no alternative that actually works. Human beings have to work together in groups to produce useful things. Government owned corporations are no better than privately owned ones. In fact they are usually worse.
You know what else is a necessary evil? Governments. That's why we Libertarians like to keep them as small as possible. In general I'd also like to keep companies as small as possible, but large companies also have advantages in terms of more affordable goods and services for poor people. Human beings simply don't behave as well in groups, especially in large groups, but I don't think artificially limiting their size makes sense in the way it does for governments. The economic advantages for the poorest members of society are simply too great. Nevertheless I think it would have great non-monetary benefits on society as a whole if all companies or organized groups of any kind were limited to no more than 100 people.
Are you sure you weren't thinking of a Republican. Some of you pro-government types get us confused so easily but we actually have very little in common. Some very minor common ground in economic theory with a small minority of them, probably the ones who call themselves tea partiers, and that's all.
However, the organisms can only take hold in new areas if the conditions are suitable, and the researchers believe that warming temperatures have enabled the creature to survive at higher latitudes.
I see. So the researchers believe something. How inspiring.
Dr Bebber said: "The most convincing hypothesis is that global warming has caused this shift.
Dr. Bebber finds the AGW hypothesis (his words) the most convincing explanation. Why don't I find his speculations more convincing? There can only be one reason. Nothing else makes sense. The oil companies must be paying me thousands of dollars to post this. No honest person could doubt such clear evidence as this.
Also what makes 1960 such a special year for combustion? Was it the start of the industrial revolution? It is certainly possible that human beings are solely responsible for the CO2 increase in our atmosphere during the past century and that this increase has been substantial enough to increase the average surface temperatures on the entire planet, but this study does not prove it. It doesn't even establish the ground work for doing so. At the very least I'd like to see evidence that such a spread is unprecedented and that it did not take place before the industrial revolution. After that it would be nice to see proof that temperature changes are the only possible explanation for certain species of insects spreading.
The researchers said that better information about where the pests and pathogens were and where they were moving was needed to fully assess the scale of the problem.
Sounds to me like they need some more money for further insect population studies and that if they don't get it we are all going to die and soon. Why direct surface temperature measurements are not sufficient to demonstrate increased surface temperatures is not explained. Did we uninvent thermometers and now require insects to tell us the temperature?
The majority of Americans and probably even American scientists believe in a supernatural all powerful entity for which there is no evidence at all. Just because a majority of people believe in something does not make it true.
Evidence is what convinces me. Not opinion polls. Opinion polls are most definitely not a part of the scientific method. Once a large enough majority believes in a thing it becomes difficult for many people to disbelieve it. Just show me the raw data and I will draw my own conclusions. I don't need to be told what to think. Scientists are just as capable of being irrational as anyone else. Just because a scientist believes in a thing doesn't make it true.
Because it is no big deal. The DEA had proper judicial oversight, and only saw records of specific individuals, and only when they had sufficient probable cause to get a subpoena. It is the way the system is supposed to work, and is the way it should have worked with the NSA.
From the article:
Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called "administrative subpoenas," those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.
So the DEA issues their own "warrants" making a mockery of the whole idea.
So you pretty much need 175kW average power in X-band.
Actually I don't think the average power is really the limiting factor here. Rather I think it's the maximum pulse width before the device fails due to excess heat. I could wait minutes between pulses if necessary. But I'd prefer to keep the pauses under 30 seconds.
Your 5uS pulse of >20GW alternative is well beyond anyone's state of the art. How much money you got anyway?
Hehe. Yeah I think gigawatts is a bit too ambitious. But that means that I need long pulses, getting pretty close to CW. As far as a budget the answer is not nearly enough for an actual device, probably not even off the shelf, but maybe enough for some consulting time with an expert or even a fair price to have a physicist design one for me. The actual construction of the device would be a separate problem. The actual amount I have to throw at the problem is somewhere between a BMW and a small house.
Also, why won't L3 sell you anything?
Well I don't think it was that they wouldn't sell me anything per se. They just wouldn't sell me the PM-2000X 9.3 Ghz, 2 MW, 0.0002 duty cycle, 4 uS pulse width, coaxial magnetron that I was inquiring about at the time. I think they were only supposed to sell it to US government agencies or something like that. It was a couple of years ago when I last looked into it. Even if L3 would have sold that to me and even if I had had enough money that 0.0002 duty cycle and 4 uS maximum pulse length are big problems. If L3 could have increased the pulse length without destroying the device I'm assuming they would have done so. Its not actually the short pulse length that is the problem directly. It's the high bandwidth that results from it. Without gigawatts of output power the bandwidth kills the link budget.
Well I did notice that most of those magnetrons are listed as only requiring air cooling. With water or liquid nitrogen/helium phase change cooling it might well be possible to increase the pulse length, but it's a risky endeavour due to the very high cost of the device. It may be possible for me to repair/modify the thing when I melt whatever melts at longer pulse lengths, but the whole device may need a complete redesign to reach the pulse lengths I need. I think only the coaxial magnetrons would have sufficient frequency stability. The L-4666 coaxial magnetron is rated for 350 kW. If it can do a 1/3 or 1/2 second pulse without melting down that means I could turn it on as often as every 8.5 minutes (for a 1/2 second pulse). That is if only the duty cycle matters and not the actual pulse length. I suspect that the actual data sheet will list a maximum pulse length that trumps the duty cycle. By going with water or phase change cooling I should be able to increase the pulse length but probably not to the near CW lengths I need. I'm going to try to get the data sheet for that though.
Or is the moderate amount of noise you get from magnetrons too much for you?
That's actually a possibility I hadn't considered. I was more worried about the frequency stability which for a standard magnetron would be more than enough to screw things up. A coaxial magnetron may be sufficiently stable however.
And actually I just peeked at L3's klystrons, how about the bottom one on this list? http://www2.l-3com
I didn't mean to imply that it was impossible. It's just not practical without automating the system through the use of speed cameras. Luckily we just don't do that in the US. At least not yet. The British have the same awful system as the Dutch one you mention. Average speed cameras. A truly awful idea, but it's obviously an effective method of forcing people to drive at a certain speed.
Sorry. I didn't mean to knock the utility of ion chambers in general as radiation detection devices. But those particular ion chamber based Victoreen meters that can be scored on Ebay for such low prices are only useful for confirming that you have only a few hours to live. They do not demonstrate the example that the OP intended. Detecting radiation is not the same sort of straightforward process that measuring voltage is. Of course there may be modern meters that demonstrate that useful multiranged meters can be made, but the $5 meter in the example would not demonstrate that.
Sweet! I'll drive around blindfolded in a tank during rush hour because driving is a right. Anyone got a problem with that?
That would depend on whether you injured anyone, damaged the road, or damaged anyone's property.
You can't take my license away because I pancaked a dozen school buses! I had a right!
What license? In a free society you wouldn't need a license to exercise the basic human right to move about with more than just your own two legs.
A right is something you can excercise at any time.
Whether or not you can engage in an action at any time is unrelated to whether it can be seen as a human right. Think more in terms of the basic equality of all human beings or in a wider sense all sentient life. What right does someone else have to stop you from doing something? That is how the concept of rights arose.
Does someone have the right to prevent you from walking down a street and if so, what gives them that right? If they do not have that right, then what about if you are driving in an electric wheelchair? A bicycle? A bicycle with an electric motor to assist on hills? And yes eventually you get to mopeds, motorcycles, and cars. Maybe even flying cars someday. The way I see it no group has the right to prevent someone else from moving around freely as long as the property is not privately owned. If someone is harmed then that is different of course. They should be held responsible for such harm.
Driving is not something we want that for -- there are people who are old, blind, retarded, narcoleptic
Once you require government permission before you can do something that is a basic requirement of human life then you are no more than a slave. You become someone's property.
Very few blind people are going to attempt to drive a car. That is a non-problem. IQ is not even something currently tested to receive a license. Another non-problem. Admittedly old/senile people are a problem in Florida, but it is not a simple problem to solve even with the current system because it is not always easy to show that someone is dangerous to others and stranding everyone who might be dangerous in their homes is really a kind of imprisonment. We don't currently have a system for weeding out narcoleptics or insomniacs either and somehow our system of roads seems to mostly work.
Same with speeding -- there is no "right" to speed because speed kills.
You cannot prove that 'speed kills'. Yes, I'm familiar with 1/2mV^2 and a collision at higher speed will result in a greater release of energy, but to say that 'speed kills' is no more accurate than to say that mass kills. The truth is that people kill when they make mistakes with dangerous machines and there is not much that can be done about it. Reducing speed is no more reasonable than reducing mass.
Every person seems to have their own idea of what a reasonable speed is for a given road and a given set of conditions. So who gets to decide what is a safe and reasonable speed for everyone else? I've been driving for more than 25 years and for all of that time I have been routinely ignoring speed limits to the point that I once nearly had my license suspended for 5 years. I probably drive faster than 90% of Americans (probably about as fast as an average European) and yet I have not been responsible for injuring or killing a single person ever and on average I haven't been in any more accidents than slow drivers.
It doesn't sound like a causal connection between speed and hurting other people has been established at all. In fact I could make the opposite argument: that slow drivers are responsible for more accidents than fast ones. They interfere with the natural flow of traffic on highways and on back roads their selfish, antisocial behavior results in faster drivers passing them in unsafe situations resulting in head-on collisions in the opposite lane. You can bla
Those CDV-715 victoreen meters are considered a joke. They don't use Geiger tubes. They use Ion Chambers which are only useful at levels that would be fatal to a human within hours. If it detects anything then you are dead. So that was not a particularly good example and that $5 meter won't be particularly useful unless someone nukes your front yard and I think at that point you wouldn't need the radiation meter to tell you to run, not walk, away. Victoreen did make one meter that was a Geiger counter: the CDV-700. Those can be somewhat useful if they are properly calibrated but such calibration is not cheap.
Almost every seller on Ebay is now listing their CDV-715's as Geiger counters and fooling people into buying them. The CDV-715, 710, 720, and all others that ARE NOT the 700, are survey meters for VERY high levels of radiation that would be lethal within hours, produced from a nuclear bomb. THESE ARE TOO HIGH EVEN TO DETECT THE RADIATION DIRECTLY OFF THE REACTOR IN JAPAN! Buy these as cool collectables or as a preventitive measure in case we get nuked. Never pay more than $40 for one unless it's a rare collectable model.
According to the Spanish general traffic department (DGT), excessive speed was a factor in 37%
Would that be the very same department which benefits from lower speed limits in the form of greater revenue from fines? Very credible source you've got there. In Montana when they got rid of speed limits for a while highway deaths actually went down.
From a human rights perspective driving is a right not a privilege. And speeding is relative. Everyone has their own sense of what "too fast" is. There will always be people who feel safe driving at higher speeds than you and people who don't feel safe unless they are driving much slower than you are. This might not even be fixed in a given individual. Their idea of a safe speed at 17 would likely differ from when they are 95. So who gets to decide how slow is "safe" enough?
What about the ones who pass you and then drive much slower than your cruise control setting right in front of you? I love doing that. Everyone has their own idea of painfully slow. The trick is not to drive so slowly that it makes it easy for them to pass. Over time I have refined that slowest possible speed. Of course on a windy road with blind curves there really is no slowest speed. I notice that slowpokes don't like it when the tables are turned and they are forced to drive too slow because of some selfish dick in front of them. In general this tends to be the only time that I consider it worth the risk of passing on blind curves because fucking with painfully slow drivers is so satisfying. I don't mind slow drivers who pull over to let the massive line of cars pass, but very few actually do that. The rest need to be taught a lesson.
Under the current system, pretty much all drivers ignore the speed limit and the police mostly just ding the ones who are driving REALLY unsafely.
Since you use the term 'interstate' I assume you are talking about the US, but it appears that you have never actually driven here. Cops here will pretty much ticket anyone who exceeds the speed limit by 7-10 mph. They just cannot ticket everyone who exceeds the speed limit because a large fraction of the public routinely does just that. Where I live at least 80% of the drivers routinely exceed speed limits, although that is probably only because the enforcement is sporadic. Photo radar machines that automatically sent tickets to every single speeder would I think reduce that percentage by quite a bit.
This EU proposal might not be so bad if the speed limits were raised significantly. Perhaps to 120-150 mph at the top end. 70 mph is ridiculous. You may as well just ban cars and go back to horse drawn carriages. This debate is yet another example of the safety vs. freedom argument.
Thanks for the suggestions, but how do I actually find someone willing to help me? Finding an L3 scientist would be the ultimate, but according to a dealer they wouldn't even sell me something off the shelf. Not that they really have anything that would meet my requirements.
The requirements are 9-12 Ghz frequency (X band) with decent stability, long pulse ( 0.25 - 0.5 seconds), 350 kW minimum output power. Or alternatively short pulse with a 5 uS or greater pulse length with power output of at least 20 gigawatts. Whichever is easier or cheaper to design/build.
For X band a sufficiently stable coaxial magnetron might suffice, but a klystron or gyrotron would be ideal. For a gyrotron, another frequency option would be 77-80 Ghz. I wouldn't be looking for someone to build one for me. Just to design one.
I wonder if this law also prohibits foreigners in Vietnam from posting information about current events (like this new law for instance). I also wonder what kinds of things they will interpret as reducing "national security". Are they going to start shutting down internet cafes now or just require ID in order to use a computer there and introduce mandatory video surveillance etc? It really is too bad that America lost the war there. America had no business being there in the first place but this sort of thing is ugly.
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I just don't see that many legitimate uses.
What about illegitimate uses? Those are the only kind that domestic extremists like myself care about.
If you were discussing something that were merely private that you didn't want anyone to ever know you'd have to convince the other person to install the app as well.
This would seem to be the case for every form of private communication. Is there any way to communicate securely with someone who doesn't care about private communication?
Hey Dave, I have a secret I would like to share with you, but only if you install this app...
I had this problem with my defense attorney. I wanted to discuss some aspects of my case with him via email, which I rightfully didn't trust. So I asked him if he would be willing to install and use gpg4win or at least sign up for Hushmail, but that went over like a lead balloon. So in the end I had to wait to discuss the case with him in person.
I personally couldn't imagine having to wear a helmet every time I rode a bike as a kid.
That's the sort of risk miitigation that I think makes sense. All it takes is one fall where your head hits the pavement to drop your IQ 50 points. I would think that geeks would be especially concerned with mitigating that risk. We should all really wear helmets driving cars as well. And we should improve the design of helmets to reduce the G force from minor accidents. That bag of jello in our skulls is pretty easy to damage and most of the time that damage is permanent. The fact that people wear helmets while cycling and skiing far more than they used to is progress, not unwarranted paranoia.
Eventually, people will understand that to avoid risks originating from the poorest countries, the final solution is to just eradicate those countries.
While it may be possible to nuke a country so thoroughly into a lunar landscape analogue that not even cockroaches will remain there will inevitably be domestic terrorists/extremists and they cannot start nuking their own cities. So there really is no end to their justification for an increasingly strict police state where everthing is sacrificed on the grand altar of the God of Safety.
While you and I may not want to live in such a society there are those who would like nothing better. Many of them fancy themselves as the enforcers in such a regime, a chance to be a master instead of one of the many slaves. For people who live to control others every unjust law that makes life unbearable for the rest is yet another opportunity for them to exert their authority and feel that blissful, euphoric sense of power that is for them the ultimate drug.
I tend to agree that we want small companies and small government to avoid the problem of having one entity that overpowers the rest.
My point was not about one group overpowering others. It was a more basic one about human psychology. The larger the group the more people seem to drop their own moral compass and substitute that of the group. The larger the group the worse the individuals in it tend to behave. At least that is what I have observed.
As far as society needing large companies for certain things I do agree. My point is that it would be nice if we could figure out a way to avoid such concentrations of (economic) power. I don't think there is truly a practical way to do so however. The best we can hope for is to at least not grant such organizations any special privileges or special status. It is a group of individuals nothing more. It should be treated as such.
I'm guessing that you are a Republican. Am I right? You clearly do not have the first clue about what Libertarianism actually is. First you have to learn to think in terms of principles. Then learn what 'voluntarism' means. Then note that Libertarianism is not about class warfare. Corporations behave like sociopaths. That sort of behavior is not good for society. The government helps and encourages them in this with the special privileges it grants them. The thing I hate most about Republicans is their anti-intellectualism and their militant pragmatism. Ideas are important. This country was founded on them.
One reason for that is McDonalds doesn't give a shit about their shitty product. The company itself has no pride. How can you expect individual employees to care? Profit sharing plans won't help when no one at the company cares about the quality of the product they make.I don't see the existence of companies which we all would be better off without as a failure of capitalism, but as a failure of humanity as a species. Unfortunately greedy, unprincipled members of our species will probably always exist. It would be nice if a better species overtook us just as we overtook Neanderthals. Perhaps one day sentient machines will do exactly that. If/when we reach the singularity none of this will matter.
I'm a Libertarian who thinks corporations should be outlawed in current societies and denied any form of special privileges like limited liability or any form of personhood in a utopian free society. What were you saying again about grossly overpaid CEOs? I agree that they are grossly overpaid. I suspect that most of them could be replaced with someone who makes less than 100k per year no problem.
Even if the company made a little bit less money it would be good for the morale of everyone else if one person were not so ridiculously overpaid.
I think you have to be blind to not see that a corporation represents an unhealthy concentration of power in the hands of a few. Power corrupts. Also the behavior of a corporation is indistinguishable from that of an individual sociopath. The last thing we need is more sociopaths in our or any society. We certainly should not be encouraging them as we do now.
Companies, as in groups of individuals working toward a common goal, which should not be to make a pile of money in any way they can, but to produce a product or service they can be proud of, while hopefully at the same time earning enough to live comfortably, are themselves necessary evils because when they grow large they grow powerful even without limited liability or legal personhood, but there is simply no alternative that actually works. Human beings have to work together in groups to produce useful things. Government owned corporations are no better than privately owned ones. In fact they are usually worse.
You know what else is a necessary evil? Governments. That's why we Libertarians like to keep them as small as possible. In general I'd also like to keep companies as small as possible, but large companies also have advantages in terms of more affordable goods and services for poor people. Human beings simply don't behave as well in groups, especially in large groups, but I don't think artificially limiting their size makes sense in the way it does for governments. The economic advantages for the poorest members of society are simply too great. Nevertheless I think it would have great non-monetary benefits on society as a whole if all companies or organized groups of any kind were limited to no more than 100 people.
Are you sure you weren't thinking of a Republican. Some of you pro-government types get us confused so easily but we actually have very little in common. Some very minor common ground in economic theory with a small minority of them, probably the ones who call themselves tea partiers, and that's all.
Why would someone who didn't believe in AGW become a climate scientist? It just isn't going to happen. Or almost never. Does that really surprise you?
And every Godologist (priest) believes in his God. The fact that there aren't any atheist priests prove that He exists.
However, the organisms can only take hold in new areas if the conditions are suitable, and the researchers believe that warming temperatures have enabled the creature to survive at higher latitudes.
I see. So the researchers believe something. How inspiring.
Dr Bebber said: "The most convincing hypothesis is that global warming has caused this shift.
Dr. Bebber finds the AGW hypothesis (his words) the most convincing explanation. Why don't I find his speculations more convincing? There can only be one reason. Nothing else makes sense. The oil companies must be paying me thousands of dollars to post this. No honest person could doubt such clear evidence as this.
Also what makes 1960 such a special year for combustion? Was it the start of the industrial revolution? It is certainly possible that human beings are solely responsible for the CO2 increase in our atmosphere during the past century and that this increase has been substantial enough to increase the average surface temperatures on the entire planet, but this study does not prove it. It doesn't even establish the ground work for doing so. At the very least I'd like to see evidence that such a spread is unprecedented and that it did not take place before the industrial revolution. After that it would be nice to see proof that temperature changes are the only possible explanation for certain species of insects spreading.
The researchers said that better information about where the pests and pathogens were and where they were moving was needed to fully assess the scale of the problem.
Sounds to me like they need some more money for further insect population studies and that if they don't get it we are all going to die and soon. Why direct surface temperature measurements are not sufficient to demonstrate increased surface temperatures is not explained. Did we uninvent thermometers and now require insects to tell us the temperature?
The majority of Americans and probably even American scientists believe in a supernatural all powerful entity for which there is no evidence at all. Just because a majority of people believe in something does not make it true.
Evidence is what convinces me. Not opinion polls. Opinion polls are most definitely not a part of the scientific method. Once a large enough majority believes in a thing it becomes difficult for many people to disbelieve it. Just show me the raw data and I will draw my own conclusions. I don't need to be told what to think. Scientists are just as capable of being irrational as anyone else. Just because a scientist believes in a thing doesn't make it true.
Because it is no big deal. The DEA had proper judicial oversight, and only saw records of specific individuals, and only when they had sufficient probable cause to get a subpoena. It is the way the system is supposed to work, and is the way it should have worked with the NSA.
From the article:
Crucially, they said, the phone data is stored by AT&T, and not by the government as in the N.S.A. program. It is queried for phone numbers of interest mainly using what are called "administrative subpoenas," those issued not by a grand jury or a judge but by a federal agency, in this case the D.E.A.
So the DEA issues their own "warrants" making a mockery of the whole idea.
So you pretty much need 175kW average power in X-band.
Actually I don't think the average power is really the limiting factor here. Rather I think it's the maximum pulse width before the device fails due to excess heat. I could wait minutes between pulses if necessary. But I'd prefer to keep the pauses under 30 seconds.
Your 5uS pulse of >20GW alternative is well beyond anyone's state of the art. How much money you got anyway?
Hehe. Yeah I think gigawatts is a bit too ambitious. But that means that I need long pulses, getting pretty close to CW. As far as a budget the answer is not nearly enough for an actual device, probably not even off the shelf, but maybe enough for some consulting time with an expert or even a fair price to have a physicist design one for me. The actual construction of the device would be a separate problem. The actual amount I have to throw at the problem is somewhere between a BMW and a small house.
Also, why won't L3 sell you anything?
Well I don't think it was that they wouldn't sell me anything per se. They just wouldn't sell me the PM-2000X 9.3 Ghz, 2 MW, 0.0002 duty cycle, 4 uS pulse width, coaxial magnetron that I was inquiring about at the time. I think they were only supposed to sell it to US government agencies or something like that. It was a couple of years ago when I last looked into it. Even if L3 would have sold that to me and even if I had had enough money that 0.0002 duty cycle and 4 uS maximum pulse length are big problems. If L3 could have increased the pulse length without destroying the device I'm assuming they would have done so. Its not actually the short pulse length that is the problem directly. It's the high bandwidth that results from it. Without gigawatts of output power the bandwidth kills the link budget.
Maybe you could pick one of the higher power of the X-band magnetrons here: .001 to something which works?
http://www2.l-3com.com/edd/magnetrons_vsm.htm
or here
http://www2.l-3com.com/edd/magnetrons_cm.htm
and modify it with heroic cooling to raise the duty cycle from
Well I did notice that most of those magnetrons are listed as only requiring air cooling. With water or liquid nitrogen/helium phase change cooling it might well be possible to increase the pulse length, but it's a risky endeavour due to the very high cost of the device. It may be possible for me to repair/modify the thing when I melt whatever melts at longer pulse lengths, but the whole device may need a complete redesign to reach the pulse lengths I need. I think only the coaxial magnetrons would have sufficient frequency stability. The L-4666 coaxial magnetron is rated for 350 kW. If it can do a 1/3 or 1/2 second pulse without melting down that means I could turn it on as often as every 8.5 minutes (for a 1/2 second pulse). That is if only the duty cycle matters and not the actual pulse length. I suspect that the actual data sheet will list a maximum pulse length that trumps the duty cycle. By going with water or phase change cooling I should be able to increase the pulse length but probably not to the near CW lengths I need. I'm going to try to get the data sheet for that though.
Or is the moderate amount of noise you get from magnetrons too much for you?
That's actually a possibility I hadn't considered. I was more worried about the frequency stability which for a standard magnetron would be more than enough to screw things up. A coaxial magnetron may be sufficiently stable however.
And actually I just peeked at L3's klystrons, how about the bottom one on this list?
http://www2.l-3com
I didn't mean to imply that it was impossible. It's just not practical without automating the system through the use of speed cameras. Luckily we just don't do that in the US. At least not yet. The British have the same awful system as the Dutch one you mention. Average speed cameras. A truly awful idea, but it's obviously an effective method of forcing people to drive at a certain speed.
Sorry. I didn't mean to knock the utility of ion chambers in general as radiation detection devices. But those particular ion chamber based Victoreen meters that can be scored on Ebay for such low prices are only useful for confirming that you have only a few hours to live. They do not demonstrate the example that the OP intended. Detecting radiation is not the same sort of straightforward process that measuring voltage is. Of course there may be modern meters that demonstrate that useful multiranged meters can be made, but the $5 meter in the example would not demonstrate that.
Sweet! I'll drive around blindfolded in a tank during rush hour because driving is a right. Anyone got a problem with that?
That would depend on whether you injured anyone, damaged the road, or damaged anyone's property.
You can't take my license away because I pancaked a dozen school buses! I had a right!
What license? In a free society you wouldn't need a license to exercise the basic human right to move about with more than just your own two legs.
A right is something you can excercise at any time.
Whether or not you can engage in an action at any time is unrelated to whether it can be seen as a human right. Think more in terms of the basic equality of all human beings or in a wider sense all sentient life. What right does someone else have to stop you from doing something? That is how the concept of rights arose.
Does someone have the right to prevent you from walking down a street and if so, what gives them that right? If they do not have that right, then what about if you are driving in an electric wheelchair? A bicycle? A bicycle with an electric motor to assist on hills? And yes eventually you get to mopeds, motorcycles, and cars. Maybe even flying cars someday. The way I see it no group has the right to prevent someone else from moving around freely as long as the property is not privately owned. If someone is harmed then that is different of course. They should be held responsible for such harm.
Driving is not something we want that for -- there are people who are old, blind, retarded, narcoleptic
Once you require government permission before you can do something that is a basic requirement of human life then you are no more than a slave. You become someone's property.
Very few blind people are going to attempt to drive a car. That is a non-problem. IQ is not even something currently tested to receive a license. Another non-problem. Admittedly old/senile people are a problem in Florida, but it is not a simple problem to solve even with the current system because it is not always easy to show that someone is dangerous to others and stranding everyone who might be dangerous in their homes is really a kind of imprisonment. We don't currently have a system for weeding out narcoleptics or insomniacs either and somehow our system of roads seems to mostly work.
Same with speeding -- there is no "right" to speed because speed kills.
You cannot prove that 'speed kills'. Yes, I'm familiar with 1/2mV^2 and a collision at higher speed will result in a greater release of energy, but to say that 'speed kills' is no more accurate than to say that mass kills. The truth is that people kill when they make mistakes with dangerous machines and there is not much that can be done about it. Reducing speed is no more reasonable than reducing mass.
Every person seems to have their own idea of what a reasonable speed is for a given road and a given set of conditions. So who gets to decide what is a safe and reasonable speed for everyone else? I've been driving for more than 25 years and for all of that time I have been routinely ignoring speed limits to the point that I once nearly had my license suspended for 5 years. I probably drive faster than 90% of Americans (probably about as fast as an average European) and yet I have not been responsible for injuring or killing a single person ever and on average I haven't been in any more accidents than slow drivers.
It doesn't sound like a causal connection between speed and hurting other people has been established at all. In fact I could make the opposite argument: that slow drivers are responsible for more accidents than fast ones. They interfere with the natural flow of traffic on highways and on back roads their selfish, antisocial behavior results in faster drivers passing them in unsafe situations resulting in head-on collisions in the opposite lane. You can bla
Those CDV-715 victoreen meters are considered a joke. They don't use Geiger tubes. They use Ion Chambers which are only useful at levels that would be fatal to a human within hours. If it detects anything then you are dead. So that was not a particularly good example and that $5 meter won't be particularly useful unless someone nukes your front yard and I think at that point you wouldn't need the radiation meter to tell you to run, not walk, away. Victoreen did make one meter that was a Geiger counter: the CDV-700. Those can be somewhat useful if they are properly calibrated but such calibration is not cheap.
http://www.ebay.com/gds/What-Geiger-counter-is-best-for-your-needs-/10000000103552954/g.html
Almost every seller on Ebay is now listing their CDV-715's as Geiger counters and fooling people into buying them. The CDV-715, 710, 720, and all others that ARE NOT the 700, are survey meters for VERY high levels of radiation that would be lethal within hours, produced from a nuclear bomb. THESE ARE TOO HIGH EVEN TO DETECT THE RADIATION DIRECTLY OFF THE REACTOR IN JAPAN! Buy these as cool collectables or as a preventitive measure in case we get nuked. Never pay more than $40 for one unless it's a rare collectable model.
According to the Spanish general traffic department (DGT), excessive speed was a factor in 37%
Would that be the very same department which benefits from lower speed limits in the form of greater revenue from fines? Very credible source you've got there. In Montana when they got rid of speed limits for a while highway deaths actually went down.
From a human rights perspective driving is a right not a privilege. And speeding is relative. Everyone has their own sense of what "too fast" is. There will always be people who feel safe driving at higher speeds than you and people who don't feel safe unless they are driving much slower than you are. This might not even be fixed in a given individual. Their idea of a safe speed at 17 would likely differ from when they are 95. So who gets to decide how slow is "safe" enough?
What about the ones who pass you and then drive much slower than your cruise control setting right in front of you? I love doing that. Everyone has their own idea of painfully slow. The trick is not to drive so slowly that it makes it easy for them to pass. Over time I have refined that slowest possible speed. Of course on a windy road with blind curves there really is no slowest speed. I notice that slowpokes don't like it when the tables are turned and they are forced to drive too slow because of some selfish dick in front of them. In general this tends to be the only time that I consider it worth the risk of passing on blind curves because fucking with painfully slow drivers is so satisfying. I don't mind slow drivers who pull over to let the massive line of cars pass, but very few actually do that. The rest need to be taught a lesson.
In France, a lot of highways have a speed limit of 130 (in modern units) and 110 when it is raining or the road is wet.
So exaparsecs per tatum or light fortnights per jiffy?
Under the current system, pretty much all drivers ignore the speed limit and the police mostly just ding the ones who are driving REALLY unsafely.
Since you use the term 'interstate' I assume you are talking about the US, but it appears that you have never actually driven here. Cops here will pretty much ticket anyone who exceeds the speed limit by 7-10 mph. They just cannot ticket everyone who exceeds the speed limit because a large fraction of the public routinely does just that. Where I live at least 80% of the drivers routinely exceed speed limits, although that is probably only because the enforcement is sporadic. Photo radar machines that automatically sent tickets to every single speeder would I think reduce that percentage by quite a bit.
This EU proposal might not be so bad if the speed limits were raised significantly. Perhaps to 120-150 mph at the top end. 70 mph is ridiculous. You may as well just ban cars and go back to horse drawn carriages. This debate is yet another example of the safety vs. freedom argument.
Thanks for the suggestions, but how do I actually find someone willing to help me? Finding an L3 scientist would be the ultimate, but according to a dealer they wouldn't even sell me something off the shelf. Not that they really have anything that would meet my requirements.
The requirements are 9-12 Ghz frequency (X band) with decent stability, long pulse ( 0.25 - 0.5 seconds), 350 kW minimum output power. Or alternatively short pulse with a 5 uS or greater pulse length with power output of at least 20 gigawatts. Whichever is easier or cheaper to design/build.
For X band a sufficiently stable coaxial magnetron might suffice, but a klystron or gyrotron would be ideal. For a gyrotron, another frequency option would be 77-80 Ghz. I wouldn't be looking for someone to build one for me. Just to design one.
I wonder if this law also prohibits foreigners in Vietnam from posting information about current events (like this new law for instance). I also wonder what kinds of things they will interpret as reducing "national security". Are they going to start shutting down internet cafes now or just require ID in order to use a computer there and introduce mandatory video surveillance etc? It really is too bad that America lost the war there. America had no business being there in the first place but this sort of thing is ugly.