You're absolutely right - you don't need a handheld laser, and a larger unit of the same power is almost always a better choice due to the longer coherence length and more stable wavelength (color). Having said that, a 1 watt green or blue (even if it's a cheap argon-ion unit) laser will almost certainly cost more than the $400.00 these little handhelds cost, and the average 15 amp wall outlet won't provide enough power to run the laser, water pump, and other required gear.
The 1W laser will, I figure operate at 1W for the large portion of it's operational charge, and is thus always dangerous.
I can't speak to Wicked's product line, but diode lasers can quite easily have their average power reduced by using them in a pulsed mode in the same manner that LEDs can be dimmed via pulse width modulation. Pulsing doesn't lower the instantaneous power when the laser is actually on, but it most definitely lowers the amount of energy available to be absorbed by whatever it hits. The same is true of DPSS lasers, but unlike most diode lasers, one can also *increase* the instantaneous power level substantially by careful selection of the pulse frequency and duty cycle.
Holography, for one. The stronger the laser you use, the shorter the required exposure time will be and the easier it will be to produce a decent image. Having said that, the coherence length of most diode lasers isn't long enough to make really good holograms. The green handheld DPSS lasers are a bit better in that regard, but still not ideal.
My response to the question of "who needs a 1W laser?" would probably be along the lines of "the same person that needs a 200 mph Hayabusa or Corvette".
The legitimacy of her case may still be intact, but the willingness of people to listen to her certainly isn't. If you cry wolf enough times, no one will pay attention to you, and you end up hurting your own cause.
In the real world, cops have to cut corners a bit from time to time, not only to protect themselves but to protect the public
I'm in agreement with you as regards the soldier that may have to pre-emptively take action on a surrendering insurgent that has at least an even chance of being booby-trapped or bait for an ambush. There's a non-trivial chance of that happening, and odds are that the guy was actively trying to kill that soldier just a few minutes before. Also, it's during a time of war, and the situation is *substantially* different because of that. However, a cop that has to cut corners is either incompetent, or doesn't have the proper respect for the laws he's supposed to be enforcing, plain and simple. "Protecting the public" doesn't mean anything, as the police don't have a legal duty to do that anyway, as has been reinforced time and again by the courts.
So grow up and try thinking for yourself instead of ignorantly parroting some rot about due process.
That "rot" is what keeps the government in check, and you'd do well to be careful about telling people to "grow up" along with the insinuations that people don't know what LEOs experience. There are plenty of us that have family and friends that are cops or otherwise know cops personally, and talk about some of this stuff with them on a regular basis, etc. Being a cop is certainly a difficult job at times, but it's also not worthy of the awe and worship that a lot of folks seem to place on them, particularly when they're not held to anything resembling the same standards as everyday citizens regarding adherence to the law. If following the law they're sworn to enforce makes an officer's job too difficult, that's just too bad. If he can't work within those confines, perhaps another occupation would suit him better.
This brings up an interesting topic - why is it that banks don't/won't show a persistent record of the authorizations against credit/debit cards on your monthly statement? I can see the authorizations when they're active, but as soon as they time out, they're gone from my online statement and never show up anywhere else. It would certainly be nice to be able to easily reconcile authorizations against the actual charges without having to do a lot of extra record-keeping.
It should be possible for a TOR exit node to register as a relay so that the police can look it up in a database and send a court order when evidence is needed.
And again, you pass judgment by the use of the word "waste". You have no logical basis to assume that's how the parent poster spends their down time to begin with, yet you say you're "sure" that's how he spends his time and adopt a derogatory tone simply because you don't agree with his statement. That's very telling.
1) Unlike medics and civil engineers, there usually is no responsibility for failure
To be fair, medics and civil engineers generally aren't expected to re-learn the basic ways of doing their job on a regular basis either. Setting a broken arm or designing a bridge are done in a substantially similar manner to what they were 20 years ago, whereas software developers are constantly having to learn the latest programming paradigm/language/application framework (i.e. re-invention of the wheel) or risk being perceived as out-of-date and irrelevant, and thus unemployable.
It's because most of the folks promoting these ideas really don't understand how the patent system works. Having said that, I have seen interesting results first-hand with one of the vapor carburetor designs on my dad's '79 Suburban. He was ultimately able to get it to peak at about 45 mpg on the highway, but it was pretty finicky and he had to install some extra plumbing to allow the truck to use the OEM hardware when the engine was cold and at low speeds, as the high-efficiency design simply didn't work under those conditions. It was cool as a novelty, but he concluded that it just wasn't practical for day-to-day use.
What connector transition has Apple made since USB?
It's not strictly a data connector, but there was the switch from ADC to DVI in the early 2000's. Apple made a really nice (and expensive) 17" CRT that's now totally useless with anything other than an early 2000's Mac unless you want to spend a fortune in adapters/power supplies. It would have been a lot nicer if they'd simply used DVI with a standard DVI connector, along with a standard power connector. And of course, there's Apple's penchant for using proprietary power supplies with non-standard connectors in their desktop machines that are quite expensive to replace and change with each generation of hardware, when a standard off-the-shelf PC power supply would work just as well, and in my experience are more reliable.
Depending on what he needs, even $40 may be way too much to spend - decent VPS packages from reputable providers can be had for $15/month, depending on how much RAM/disk space is needed. In any event, the VPS will likely have a symmetric 100 megabit connection to the outside world, and live in a real data center where it's likely to have much better uptime than something hanging off a cable or DSL line. Plus, additional IPs are usually available for little to no cost as needed with justification, and there's usually no headache with getting RDNS taken care of either.
Likewise, when I worked for a Navy contractor about 20 years ago, they were tasked to provide custom anti-static cases for some boards that were part of an on-board repair kit. Our guys gave them some proposed specs, including what kind of plastic to make everything out of. The Navy engineers thought they knew better, and decided on a different plastic that we knew wasn't going to work in the molds. They molded a set of three cases, and all three failed in the molds exactly as our guys said they would. The deformed case shells were returned to us, and by that time the Navy had spent $30K on that little adventure, so the useless shells were pressed into service at our office, with "$10,000 Trash Can" and the applicable contract/task number printed on each.
Even more fun was the time that the Navy stirred up a bunch of crap with our shipping guys because they sent a single 1149 for a shipment of a couple thousand CDs which spanned a number of boxes instead of one invoice form for each box. For the next delivery, the guys made sure there was an 1149 for each of the 600 CDs in that shipment.:-)
after a bit of shrewd business dealings were able to get a CEO of a major entertainment company fired (Michale Eisner) and take over a sizable chunk of the Walt Disney Corporation in the process of merely "demonstrating" their technical capabilities
Pixar actually played a fairly minor role in Eisner's ouster, which had been building since not long after Frank Wells died in 1994. There were a number of political issues within the company and a number of critical blunders that Eisner had made since Wells' death that were the main contributors to the staggering vote of no confidence he received at the 2004 shareholders' meeting, which in turn was the prime cause of his departure. The pissing contest he chose to get into with Steve Jobs over the Pixar distribution deal was merely the straw that broke the shareholders' back, and regardless of the outcome he likely would have been forced out within the year anyway. Even Roy Disney was actively calling for Eisner's departure at the time.
The other key thing to remember about the Pixar/Disney relationship and the influence over Disney that Pixar acquired is that it's largely due to one man - John Lasseter, who was formerly a Disney animator, truly understands the Disney corporate culture, and frankly is on the level of Walt Disney himself when it comes to storytelling and having an innate understanding of what people will respond to. Pixar's technical prowess likely wouldn't have meant much without Lasseter's raw talent to guide it, IMO.
Agreed - even works with a much more subdued palette like "Arrangement in Gray and Black: The Artist's Mother" by Whistler represent a totally different experience when seen directly. Most of the other more colorful Impressionist stuff just blows me away.
I would suggest first reading up on 47 USC in general, and then come back and talk to us about the "permit applications and waivers" that you saw mentioned in an uncited paragraph on Wiki. Hint: there's a distinction between "jamming" and "blocking".
Well, I am not sure that this is the right approach but there seems to be plenty of jamming devices around that you could use during exams.
As long as you don't mind the possibility of spending a year in federal prison and a $10K fine for each of the several violations you'd be guilty of by using them, assuming you're in the U.S....
Today they use a rubber membrane with conductive, springy pads directly on top of the PCB.
This is true for some of them - others simply have a set of closely spaced intertwined traces on the PCB where the button is located, and the rubber button that the user touches is backed with a small carbon puck that shorts the traces together, with no intervening membrane between the button and the PCB.
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You're absolutely right - you don't need a handheld laser, and a larger unit of the same power is almost always a better choice due to the longer coherence length and more stable wavelength (color). Having said that, a 1 watt green or blue (even if it's a cheap argon-ion unit) laser will almost certainly cost more than the $400.00 these little handhelds cost, and the average 15 amp wall outlet won't provide enough power to run the laser, water pump, and other required gear.
The 1W laser will, I figure operate at 1W for the large portion of it's operational charge, and is thus always dangerous.
I can't speak to Wicked's product line, but diode lasers can quite easily have their average power reduced by using them in a pulsed mode in the same manner that LEDs can be dimmed via pulse width modulation. Pulsing doesn't lower the instantaneous power when the laser is actually on, but it most definitely lowers the amount of energy available to be absorbed by whatever it hits. The same is true of DPSS lasers, but unlike most diode lasers, one can also *increase* the instantaneous power level substantially by careful selection of the pulse frequency and duty cycle.
Holography, for one. The stronger the laser you use, the shorter the required exposure time will be and the easier it will be to produce a decent image. Having said that, the coherence length of most diode lasers isn't long enough to make really good holograms. The green handheld DPSS lasers are a bit better in that regard, but still not ideal.
My response to the question of "who needs a 1W laser?" would probably be along the lines of "the same person that needs a 200 mph Hayabusa or Corvette".
I'm voting for General Zod myself.
"How many bass players does it take to change a light bulb? One, but the guitar player has to show him how to do it. "
And the corollary:
"How many lead guitarists does it take to change a light bulb?"
"Just one. He holds the bulb in place and the world revolves around him."
I wasn't suggesting she was lying, merely that she was pursuing causes that most people would find trivial.
Why, I'm not sure - any good cops want to weigh in on that problem?
Ask Frank Serpico.
The legitimacy of her case may still be intact, but the willingness of people to listen to her certainly isn't. If you cry wolf enough times, no one will pay attention to you, and you end up hurting your own cause.
In the real world, cops have to cut corners a bit from time to time, not only to protect themselves but to protect the public
I'm in agreement with you as regards the soldier that may have to pre-emptively take action on a surrendering insurgent that has at least an even chance of being booby-trapped or bait for an ambush. There's a non-trivial chance of that happening, and odds are that the guy was actively trying to kill that soldier just a few minutes before. Also, it's during a time of war, and the situation is *substantially* different because of that. However, a cop that has to cut corners is either incompetent, or doesn't have the proper respect for the laws he's supposed to be enforcing, plain and simple. "Protecting the public" doesn't mean anything, as the police don't have a legal duty to do that anyway, as has been reinforced time and again by the courts.
So grow up and try thinking for yourself instead of ignorantly parroting some rot about due process.
That "rot" is what keeps the government in check, and you'd do well to be careful about telling people to "grow up" along with the insinuations that people don't know what LEOs experience. There are plenty of us that have family and friends that are cops or otherwise know cops personally, and talk about some of this stuff with them on a regular basis, etc. Being a cop is certainly a difficult job at times, but it's also not worthy of the awe and worship that a lot of folks seem to place on them, particularly when they're not held to anything resembling the same standards as everyday citizens regarding adherence to the law. If following the law they're sworn to enforce makes an officer's job too difficult, that's just too bad. If he can't work within those confines, perhaps another occupation would suit him better.
This brings up an interesting topic - why is it that banks don't/won't show a persistent record of the authorizations against credit/debit cards on your monthly statement? I can see the authorizations when they're active, but as soon as they time out, they're gone from my online statement and never show up anywhere else. It would certainly be nice to be able to easily reconcile authorizations against the actual charges without having to do a lot of extra record-keeping.
It should be possible for a TOR exit node to register as a relay so that the police can look it up in a database and send a court order when evidence is needed.
Does that not largely defeat the purpose of Tor?
And again, you pass judgment by the use of the word "waste". You have no logical basis to assume that's how the parent poster spends their down time to begin with, yet you say you're "sure" that's how he spends his time and adopt a derogatory tone simply because you don't agree with his statement. That's very telling.
I'm sure your "family time" is spent watching TV or drinking beer.
And what if it is? Who are you to pass judgment on how someone else uses their own spare time?
1) Unlike medics and civil engineers, there usually is no responsibility for failure
To be fair, medics and civil engineers generally aren't expected to re-learn the basic ways of doing their job on a regular basis either. Setting a broken arm or designing a bridge are done in a substantially similar manner to what they were 20 years ago, whereas software developers are constantly having to learn the latest programming paradigm/language/application framework (i.e. re-invention of the wheel) or risk being perceived as out-of-date and irrelevant, and thus unemployable.
It's because most of the folks promoting these ideas really don't understand how the patent system works. Having said that, I have seen interesting results first-hand with one of the vapor carburetor designs on my dad's '79 Suburban. He was ultimately able to get it to peak at about 45 mpg on the highway, but it was pretty finicky and he had to install some extra plumbing to allow the truck to use the OEM hardware when the engine was cold and at low speeds, as the high-efficiency design simply didn't work under those conditions. It was cool as a novelty, but he concluded that it just wasn't practical for day-to-day use.
What connector transition has Apple made since USB?
It's not strictly a data connector, but there was the switch from ADC to DVI in the early 2000's. Apple made a really nice (and expensive) 17" CRT that's now totally useless with anything other than an early 2000's Mac unless you want to spend a fortune in adapters/power supplies. It would have been a lot nicer if they'd simply used DVI with a standard DVI connector, along with a standard power connector. And of course, there's Apple's penchant for using proprietary power supplies with non-standard connectors in their desktop machines that are quite expensive to replace and change with each generation of hardware, when a standard off-the-shelf PC power supply would work just as well, and in my experience are more reliable.
Depending on what he needs, even $40 may be way too much to spend - decent VPS packages from reputable providers can be had for $15/month, depending on how much RAM/disk space is needed. In any event, the VPS will likely have a symmetric 100 megabit connection to the outside world, and live in a real data center where it's likely to have much better uptime than something hanging off a cable or DSL line. Plus, additional IPs are usually available for little to no cost as needed with justification, and there's usually no headache with getting RDNS taken care of either.
Likewise, when I worked for a Navy contractor about 20 years ago, they were tasked to provide custom anti-static cases for some boards that were part of an on-board repair kit. Our guys gave them some proposed specs, including what kind of plastic to make everything out of. The Navy engineers thought they knew better, and decided on a different plastic that we knew wasn't going to work in the molds. They molded a set of three cases, and all three failed in the molds exactly as our guys said they would. The deformed case shells were returned to us, and by that time the Navy had spent $30K on that little adventure, so the useless shells were pressed into service at our office, with "$10,000 Trash Can" and the applicable contract/task number printed on each.
:-)
Even more fun was the time that the Navy stirred up a bunch of crap with our shipping guys because they sent a single 1149 for a shipment of a couple thousand CDs which spanned a number of boxes instead of one invoice form for each box. For the next delivery, the guys made sure there was an 1149 for each of the 600 CDs in that shipment.
Agreed on all points. :-)
after a bit of shrewd business dealings were able to get a CEO of a major entertainment company fired (Michale Eisner) and take over a sizable chunk of the Walt Disney Corporation in the process of merely "demonstrating" their technical capabilities
Pixar actually played a fairly minor role in Eisner's ouster, which had been building since not long after Frank Wells died in 1994. There were a number of political issues within the company and a number of critical blunders that Eisner had made since Wells' death that were the main contributors to the staggering vote of no confidence he received at the 2004 shareholders' meeting, which in turn was the prime cause of his departure. The pissing contest he chose to get into with Steve Jobs over the Pixar distribution deal was merely the straw that broke the shareholders' back, and regardless of the outcome he likely would have been forced out within the year anyway. Even Roy Disney was actively calling for Eisner's departure at the time.
The other key thing to remember about the Pixar/Disney relationship and the influence over Disney that Pixar acquired is that it's largely due to one man - John Lasseter, who was formerly a Disney animator, truly understands the Disney corporate culture, and frankly is on the level of Walt Disney himself when it comes to storytelling and having an innate understanding of what people will respond to. Pixar's technical prowess likely wouldn't have meant much without Lasseter's raw talent to guide it, IMO.
Agreed - even works with a much more subdued palette like "Arrangement in Gray and Black: The Artist's Mother" by Whistler represent a totally different experience when seen directly. Most of the other more colorful Impressionist stuff just blows me away.
I think he's talking about the red, green, and blue subpixels that make up each addressable display pixel. which is in fact a kind of dithering.
I would suggest first reading up on 47 USC in general, and then come back and talk to us about the "permit applications and waivers" that you saw mentioned in an uncited paragraph on Wiki. Hint: there's a distinction between "jamming" and "blocking".
Well, I am not sure that this is the right approach but there seems to be plenty of jamming devices around that you could use during exams.
As long as you don't mind the possibility of spending a year in federal prison and a $10K fine for each of the several violations you'd be guilty of by using them, assuming you're in the U.S....
Today they use a rubber membrane with conductive, springy pads directly on top of the PCB.
This is true for some of them - others simply have a set of closely spaced intertwined traces on the PCB where the button is located, and the rubber button that the user touches is backed with a small carbon puck that shorts the traces together, with no intervening membrane between the button and the PCB.