Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further." If these elements are breaking down into other elements..wtf?
By that definition, there are no elements other than hydrogen. Any atom can be split, given enough energy, into atoms of other elements, except for the proton, which can be pulverized, but the products are not another element.
Otherwise, I would agree. Any element with a half-life so short should be considered an intermediate reaction product, not an element.
which is right where a bunch of the little hand held ham radio units operate.
And a bunch of medium sized mobile units and a bunch of larger sized base units, and a whole passle of big repeater units.
What an interesting irony: I have a 600W ERP 440MHz repeater installed on the top of the local hospital. It will be amazing, 83 people going into epileptic fits every time someone pushes the PTT button...
In other words, the medical devices cannot interfere with the radios,
This is about the most dishonest way of allowing intruding devices into an existing band. Since these are spread spectrum emitters, it is very unlikely that any one of them will directly interfere with anything. When you get 100 or 1000 of these all going at the same time, however, you'll be raising the noise floor for the entire band. That makes it much harder to communicate overall, but you cannot pin the interference to any specific device, or even detect the interference until the devices become common enough that removing them would be impossible.
This is the same kind of problem that BPL has. One test site doesn't do too much damage. Wide scale implementation will make it impossible to talk more than a mile or two due to noise.
As for ever being able to identify the interference, how many doctors do you know would think "this device isn't working because of the ham transmitter on the next hilltop over", and how many hams are going to be able to identify that intermittent noise on the input of their repeater as being from some wired person standing nearby?
Composting being mandatory is a good thing. Our landfills are filling up quickly and something has to be done about it -
Yes! Yes! It is SO much better for there to be ten thousand rotting piles of garbage spread about a city attracting and feeding rats and other vermin (how many people have seen a nutria? Raise your hands...) than for there to be a central facility somewhere the rats and other vermin won't be a problem. Yes. Absolutely.
It minimizes pests on landfills, as compostable material won't be available to grow the pest population.
And I thought for a minute you hadn't considered the pest problem. You have. You really do think it is better for the pests to be in people's backyards than to be at the landfill. Amazing.
Compost can be sold to farms to help grow crops, which gives money back to the government...
Screw that. If I'm selling the rotten garbage out of my back yard, I am keeping the money. I ain't giving it to the damn government.
Maybe this county or city near Boston had some kind of high-price disposal service that does the separation for them? *shrugs*
No, it's a very low price service. Just put the pop cans and bottles in the regular trash and half a dozen homeless people will come by over the next few hours to sort it out for you.
This is utter nonsense. Anyone with a decent understanding of scientific method and the ability to read research papers is fully qualified to make judgements about the drugs they should take. It boggles my mind that people will go in to their mechanic and question whether a proposed treatment is the right one but will give over care of the only body they ever get to someone else.
Oh, for mod points...
You don't even need to be able to read research papers. All you need to do is talk to the doctor and pharmacist and listen to what they tell you.
I was put on one blood pressure med a few months ago. I was told "these are potential side effects...". It was MY responsibility to watch out for those, and my responsibility to say "stop" if any of them showed up.
I'm also responsible for letting my doctor know all of the meds and supplements I'm taking. "The words are too big, I don't understand" isn't an excuse.
I used to think the part in the ads where they say "tell your doctor if you have kidney disease or liver problems before taking this drug..." was a laugh. Isn't the doctor supposed to tell YOU if you have kidney disease? I'm now seeing three doctors and what one knows doesn't always get to the other two. And the one I saw a year ago who isn't around anymore told me things that weren't passed on to his colleagues at all.
I do have conversations with doctors over treatments. I ask why they recommend a particular treatment, what alternatives exist, etc, and I research them.
Absolutely. And I question them about the implications for flight medicals and FAA regulations, which almost none of them have ever known anything about. Guess who gets to do the research on that?
But those agreements mentioned in TFS, where pharmacies must only prescribe their offering - that sounds rather anti-competitive to me.
Pharmacies don't prescribe drugs, doctors do. If a doctor says "generic ok", then the pharmacy has no say in the matter.
Insurance companies aren't going to eat into their profits by demanding name brands instead of generics, since they'd be paying more for the name brand along with the patient. And if the generic costs less than the copay for a name brand, the patient is going to buy that anyway.
If Pfizer still has a big profit margin after the patent has expired, why wouldn't they have invented anyway?
Because the costs of manufacturing a drug once it has been created and approved are much less than the costs of developing one. They will still have a good profit margin TODAY because the costs of designing and testing the hundreds of potential candidates they went through to get to a final, working drug were paid off during the patent period.
They wouldn't have a profit margin if they had to sell the drug from day one at the same price as those people who are going to manufacture the generics now.
Developing drugs is a risk. You can get all the way to trials and then find out that your fancy new LDL drug gives 50% of the people who take it the hives or only works in 3% of the users. All the money you spent getting there is gone. People who fund that kind of risk deserve to get paid back for taking the risk, mostly because they won't take the risk unless they do.
but the 100 other widgets in my house could plug in DC.
That's 100A of 12V. From here, you'd need at least number 2 or number 1 wire to carry that current. Ballpark figure.
Same reference, you lose 3 volts for every ten feet of 12 gage at that current (one wire for supply, one for return.) Can your 12V device run happily on 9V?
Sure, the TV and PC would still convert AC power,
The costs of running two power systems in a house would swamp any savings you think you'd make by using DC.
What bothers me is all the new LED bulbs that have transformers in them (guessing, because they get hot!... feels like wasted energy)
High power LEDs get hot because you are running good amounts of current through them, not because there is a transformer. Transformers are pretty much useless with the DC current that runs LEDs.
I'd think it would be more efficient to run DC to lighting and certain outlets like those where small devices would sit...
The problem comes in deciding what voltage to use. 12V means you need rather hefty wires to get the required current for some devices. A 6W LED needs half an amp at 12V. If you use a voltage that makes the current resonable, then you need to convert that voltage to what your device needs, every place you have a device.
Sending 380V means you can use the same or smaller wires than you'd use for 120V systems, but you'll be busy converting that 380V DC to 12V DC or 5V DC or 1.2V DC -- and while DC-DC conversion has gotten a lot better, it is still more complicated than a simple transformer.
I'd propose that they do hold the dictators and governments back by having their representatives sit around and talk and talk and talk and do nothing else.
I'm not clear from the way you said this whether you are proposing that they do this in the future, or that you are proposing that the idea is they are doing this already.
Either way, having representatives sit around and talk and talk and talk does absolutely nothing to stop a dictator or other government from doing anything. The representatives of dicatators only job is to sit around and talk and talk and talk trying to delay any action against the dictator, which frees the bad guys up to do what they want while the UN fiddles.
Sure, that means that the UN itself isn't taking action, but if that's the price we pay to not have a nuclear war, I'm absolutely good with paying it.
You assume that the UN is a price we have to pay to prevent nuclear war, something that is far from a reasonable assumption. As I recall, the UN talked and talked and talked the entire time every country (who has done so since the UN was created) developed their nuclear arsenals.
There are lots and lots of frequencies you can transmit video on, you can even put it spread spectrum across the police tactical frequencies -
It is really really hard to put a full framerate video stream through a 7.5kHz pipe, even using "spread spectrum" or a digital voice mode.
The last new video streaming device for cops and fire had to get a waiver from the FCC so they could use amateur frequencies in the 70cm band. They couldn't find anyplace else to send the video back. Well, they could, but they'd have to redesign the hardware to use a different frequency and that would be Too Hard For Human Engineers. (google: recon robotics).
Thus eviscerating the decades old policy of "see and avoid" as the bedrock of flight in this country. And the rest of the world.
Drones are both too small to see easily and have no pilot on board that can see any conflicting traffic.
Anyone want to open a pool to bet on how soon a drone gets sucked into a major airliner's jet intake and causes a crash? Yeah, big jets fly really high -- unless they are landing or taking off or approaching an airport. Drones fly really low -- right where the GA small-aircraft fly.
tax payer dollars are being used to protect the profits of companies
They are also being used to protect the people who don't realize that the "Guchi" handbag they are buying isn't a real Gucci. While I would agree that someone who buys a "Guchi" bag probably ought to know better, I'd say that someone who buys a counterfeit "Gucci" has no reason to expect it to be a counterfeit and thus an expectation that they are not being ripped off. Someone who is selling counterfeit goods is banking on the name of the product and not the quality, so while the victim does get something with a "Gucci" label, the quality is not what they paid extra for.
this is a problem between stupid electorate continually rel-electing politicians who do not represent the people and are easily bought out.
I think your view is the one that isn't quite representative of the people. People who don't want to buy, e.g., Gucci, are still free to do so, and nobody is stopping them. Nobody is stopping someone from selling handbags that are quite nice but don't pretend to be Gucci. This is not an issue of stopping someone from selling a bag that looks like a Gucci but is clearly identified as not being one ("counterfeit" is not the same as "knock off".) I think most people are quite happy that someone in charge is trying to get rid of places and people that are selling counterfeit goods, and not just because those counterfeit goods harm the authentic manufacturer. They also harm the consumer, who has spent good money on a poor product, which means they aren't spending that money on anything else.
but to boil it down this story is just icing on the turd-cake that will be served to future historians who write about the downfall of America.
You have it backwards. To do nothing about counterfeit goods is antithetical to what the US is based on. To do nothing is what would help the downfall. "Property rights" is firmly established in US law and history, and is why we prospered as a nation to start with. "Here's a plot of land, homesteader, work hard and it is yours." Contrast that with "here's a community plot of land, occupant. Show up occasionally and you'll get a share of the food it produces."
"Pretend your product is made by someone else who has built a reputation for quality and profit at the expense of them and the consumer" is more like the latter than the former. I have no problem with the legal system going after counterfeiters. None at all. They have no right to use the trademarks and names of reputable companies. When I go into a restaurant and buy a "Coke", I expect that it will BE a product of the Coca Cola company, not "Bob's Coke" or even "Coak". That position doesn't have anything to do with IP or patents or copyrights, just with fraud.
Sheesh, of course I've seen things on the preflight list for checking fuel and fuel leaks. I would never lump that kind of thing under some generic "flammable objects" checklist item.
Point remains, small aircraft checklists are a poor reference when trying to determine level of hazards on commercial airliners. What can be a critical hazard for a single pilot in a tiny plane might be trivially handled on a 747 by a professional flight crew. A "bee in the cockpit" can cause a small aircraft crash; hardly worth reporting in a 747. An "oil leak in the engine" ditto. When you've got half a dozen trained pros ready to handle things, and multiple engines, what you call a critical hazard might not be the same. I think perhaps it is you that needs a viewpoint expansion.
There is a reason that freedom of the press is so important and nobody should have to explain why its needed.
I'm sorry, but "broadcast to everyone that the body of Joe Smith of 123 Main Street has just been located at the bottom of Lake BooHoo" is not one of the reasons that the first amendment is important. There is no compelling reason that this information cannot wait until it has been officially released following the notification of his family by professionals. It is not an "oversite" matter keeping "the other three" in check here, it is a simple matter of how family members find out that their loved one is dead.
And, I hate to have to tell you this, too, but there is no compelling reason for the press to be tramping around getting in the way of a rescue effort that they've just hear about on their scanner. If you don't think they'd be doing that if there weren't active measures taken to prevent it, then you've never been to a major search scene.
The press isn't interested, in this modern day, in "keeping in check" anything. They want eyes and ears watching and listening to their advertiser-supported broadcasts. They get that by being first to the scene, by having the gory details and live video. Fuck the family involved in a lost hiker search, they want the status of being first on the scene and first with the pictures.
I used to think like you did. Then one night there was a major snow storm in the city where I lived. Everyone knew it was snowing. Everyone knew it was heavy. The local TV news station risked the lives of the entire news crew racing through the snow to set up outside the local hospital, just so they could have an "actuality" -- thirty seconds of video live from outside the hospital showing how bad it was snowing. This wasn't a leisurely drive planned well in advance. It was a "you have five minutes to get there and get set up if you want to be the lead" situation. (Yes, listening to the news coordination channels on the scanner is an important capability for the public to keep track of the news activities, too.) They couldn't settle for someone reading a script in the studio saying "it is snowing bad, don't go if you don't have to". They couldn't point a camera out the window showing the snow coming down. They had to have a crew with a live feed. For ratings.
I also remember the media circus when the New Carrisa ran aground on the Oregon coast. The news media had a continuous watch from circling helicopters, often three or more at a time, circling overhead. This made it difficult for the Coast Guard to do their jobs, even with the TFR in place to limit the newsies. I would listen to the air to air chatter and hear about the near mid-airs every day. All so they could keep the viewers up to the second on what was going on. No "keep the other three in check" involved there, either.
You can wave the first amendment around as a shield, but often it is used to shield activity that has no importance and no reason for being, other than for the press to make money.
Khyber, as someone who is not yet a pilot might want to realize, there is a world of difference between the Cessna or whatever LSA you're learning to fly in and a commercial jet airliner when it comes to what kinds of things might be dangerous and what might be a hazard that can be managed.
For example, if your iPhone you've stored in your flight bag in the back seat spontaneously combusts while you are flying solo:
YOU are the only person available to deal with it.
Distracting YOU, the pilot, while flying, is a huge detriment to the safety of flight.
The back seat was probably manufactured with flame retardant, but through multiple cleanings has lost much of that capability, and will probably burst into flames, too.
The noxious vapors from the back seat burning will quickly incapacitate the only person on the plane who is able to fly it.
That burning back seat is about three feet away from the gas tanks.
The only fire extenquisher on the plane is strapped to the floor between the front seats, and you've got to get it unstrapped, unpinned, and pointed at the fire while using one hand to fly and one hand to do all the rest.
Unless you are learning to fly in a corporate jet or turbocharged multi, you probably don't have an oxygen supply, and certainly wouldn't have much training in how to don and use it quickly.
Now, think about an iPhone starting to combust in some passenger's pocket on a 737.
As it starts to get warm, the pax will feel it, pull it from his pocket, and start yelling, long before flames start.
One of the several trained, non-flying crew members will react to the cries and will be able to focus her efforts on locating the fire extinguishers and using them to put the flames out. Something they are trained to do before they are allowed to be crew members, and which they get recurrent training in.
The flying pilot, after being notified of a potential problem with onboard fire, will quickly don an oxygen mask and continue to fly the aircraft.
The PNF (non flying pilot) will also don a mask and begin concentrating on the full "in flight fire" checklist, which you might have seen a few times in your POH but have probably never had to go through in real life, much less in a fully featured simulator with an evaluator grading you on how well you do.
So, yes, it is interesting for you to keep saying that "it's a checklist item". but not really relevant. I've also never seen it in any small aircraft checklist I've been through. Are you referring to checking the engine compartment for bird's nests and the like? And what does your checklist say to do about "flammable objects"? I know that I personally carry a lot of flammable objects every time I fly. Those sectional charts are printed on paper, you know. That book of approach plates? The batteries in MY cellphone, and the ones in my aviation handheld radios. Until they changed the certificates, those pilot certs you are required to carry used to be printed on some pretty easily ignited paper. Now they are flammable plastic, but the medical cert is still on paper.
Do you remove all flammable clothing when you fly and fly only in Nomex?
Anyone want to guess if US government goes with standard system or decides to spend few hundred million to reinvent the wheel?
Google for "APCO P25". Standard already invented. The rest of the world went with their version. You could change the word "TETRA" in the wiki quote to "P25" and it would be just as correct. It is a bit dishonest to wave the TETRA flag around as if the US wasn't already using a standard and TETRA should be what we decide to adopt now.
The issue now is that the FCC is permitting TETRA in the US, but only for commercial and business use. So, we'll have TWO standards in the same place. No, Add MotoTrbo -- three "standards", of which one is a proprietary version intended solely to lock people into a specific vendor's radios and systems. As if the same vendor didn't have proprietary extensions that try to lock users into their radios and systems already.
This has nothing to do with safety, this is to mute the press. The press follows the scanner conversations to report on all accidents and incidents. With police hiding records and conversations due to lawsuits, we dont need more "hidden" police communications, we them open to keep them honest.
As someone who works in SAR, I can tell you that muting the press is a valuable and useful goal, for two reasons. First, if we find something or someone, it would be very nice if eighty reporters and cameramen didn't descend upon the scene and get in the way of trying to save a life or even just preserve evidence at a crime scene. And second, family members of the person we are looking for are better served learning about the results of a search from an in-person discussion with a trained professional than a news flash on the radio.
Well this of course could easily be solved by national standards dictated from Washington tied to various financial incentives. We couldn't do that during the Bush administration because "we don't want the government picking winners and losers" so instead we had 11 years of no progress. Now we could just pick a good solution and go with it.
And that is, of course, why the APCO P25 digital standard wasn't developed during the Bush years and didn't become a standard required by federal funding agencies for new purchases.
And that is why, in this modern, standards-friendly administration, we are now adding MotoTrbo and Tetra as alternative (non-interoperable) digital standards.
This issue is not new, and it is not surprising. Not to anyone who actually has to deal with it. Everyone talks about "interoperability" and how great it is, but then we push for ever-fancier technology which is inherantly NOT interoperable, or interoperable only at a huge price.
For example, moving from 150MHz VHF to 700MHz. Under 150MHz VHF analog (or even digital) I can bring MY radio to an incident, and as long as I have the right frequency and digital "squelch" programmed in, I can participate. With 700MHz, my radio might not even have the right digital format, and it will not talk to the existing system because the system will lock it out. Not to mention that if I want to talk to my people there, I will have to have my 150MHz radio, and then a 700MHz radio to talk to other people. Two radios.
Yes, there is movement towards multi-band public service radios, but that's the "huge price" I'm referring to. A digital single-band radio will run about $1500 for a reasonable version. A multi-band starts at $5k and goes up. That's not to say a high-feature single band is cheap -- the latest handhelds CAP distributed are list price $4500 or more.
Interoperability used to mean "everyone can talk to each other" directly. Now it means "everyone might be able to find someone they can talk to that can also talk to someone else", or at best, "someone will have a portable linking system that will link two systems together." It's more of a nightmare now than it was ten years ago.
Er, no.... on my own equipment my voice drives the phase modulator directly. At no point is it digital,
And thus you are not using a digital radio system. And thus you will not have available the modern digital encryption methods.
Modern encryption uses modern algorythms on the digital data produced by digitizing the voice analog signal. The voice becomes data upon which DES or AES or whatever encoding is applied.
Donald duck is what you hear when you are listening to the wrong sideband, or are "off center" of the sideband. That's not anything to do with scramblers,
Yes, actually, it is. In a frequency-inversion analog system, you mix the voice signal with another fixed frequency, inverting the frequency content of the voice. E.g., a 3kHz tone in voice will move to 300 Hz and vice versa. This is EXACTLY the same as listening to "the wrong sideband" in single sideband radio, and that's exactly what the process is supposed to create.
The point is that we're talking about a de-facto high(er) speed quasi-digital mode being used by someone with a 1990 5wpm-code Technician-Class license who's officially authorized to do "CW", relying on a very questionable and loose interpretation of CW's old definition (turning a single carrier on and off) to achieve it in ways the original rulemakers never would have thought possible, let alone anticipated.
You're wrong. It isn't "quasi-digital", it is digital. On and off. There was no rule about the speed, so "higher" or "lower" is meaningless. The "5wpm-code Tech license" wasn't an upper speed limit and nobody ever thought it was. Five wpm was the LOW limit on how fast you needed to be able to COPY code by hand to get the license. There was no rule prohibiting computer copying or sending of CW at any higher speeds, and there still isn't.
As for "never thought possible", that's just ridiculous. Tape-based CW senders were routine long before the technician class license was created.
There was no "questionable" definition of CW involved. CW is the modulation of a carrier by turning it on and off. Period. How fast you turn it on and off is up to you. There wasn't even a rule that you had to do more than 5 wpm on the air -- you only had to demonstrate the ability to copy by hand at that speed to get the license, and then you could be a total lid and run at 1 wpm if you found someone willing to talk to you at that speed. Or rather, listen to you. The coding you are required to use is international Morse code. It may be thrilling to pretend that you or the other guy were doing something really clandestine and black-hat, but you're fooling only yourself.
As for 200wpm... well, that pretty much the absolute experimental frontier of what you can make meaningfully work if you're transmitting by opening and closing a relay pretending to be a straight key connected to a HF rig,
There never has been, and there still it not, any rule that says that CW must be sent using a relay-based switching system that "pretends" to be a straight key. Experimental frontier? Oh, please. Computer and tape based automated senders have been in use for decades, well before the 1990's. I had a program for sending and receiving on my VIC 20, and that came out in the 80's.
you're looking at the equivalent of ~500 baud.
Five hundred state changes per second? Your calculation is interesting, but hardly accurate. I could easily claim that a 1 Hz square wave is the equivalent of 1000 bits by defining a bit to be 1 millisecond long, and then I'd have, by your reconing, a 1000 baud signal. That's not how baud is calculated. I already did the calculations, and it just isn't that fast. And it doesn't matter anyway, because there was and is no limit.
Posting only to un-do a faulty mod. But seriously I didn't click-slip, there's some bug than turned my intended mod into flamebait.
There is a setting that changes the "oops I didn't mean that" kind of "once you select the moderation status for an article it happens and you can't undo it" mode into "select all the moderations and then do them at the end" mode. I can't tell you what it is, but I got so tired of the instant moderation setting that I searched for it and changed whatever I could until it went back to normal.
By the way, "200 wpm" sounds really fast, but let's do some math. 200 wpm is 1000 cpm (characters per minute). Each character is two to ten state changes, average 6 or so.
6000 "state changes per minute" sounds like a lot, but that's only 100 per second. Or, all told, about 50 Hz.
Even if you send nothing but numbers (5 dits or dahs each, 10 state changes), you'll be using 10,000 states/min, or 84 Hz.
The FCC requirement was more of a treaty obligation. A demonstration of proficiency in CW was an ITU requirement for access to the HF bands worldwide.That's probably because CW is a mode that lets people with no abilitites muck up a frequency on a world-wide basis with very little power, depending on the propogation at the time.
When the ITU requirement went away, the FCC requirement followed.
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Growing up, and being taught in school "elements cannot be broken down any further." If these elements are breaking down into other elements..wtf?
By that definition, there are no elements other than hydrogen. Any atom can be split, given enough energy, into atoms of other elements, except for the proton, which can be pulverized, but the products are not another element.
Otherwise, I would agree. Any element with a half-life so short should be considered an intermediate reaction product, not an element.
which is right where a bunch of the little hand held ham radio units operate.
And a bunch of medium sized mobile units and a bunch of larger sized base units, and a whole passle of big repeater units.
What an interesting irony: I have a 600W ERP 440MHz repeater installed on the top of the local hospital. It will be amazing, 83 people going into epileptic fits every time someone pushes the PTT button...
In other words, the medical devices cannot interfere with the radios,
This is about the most dishonest way of allowing intruding devices into an existing band. Since these are spread spectrum emitters, it is very unlikely that any one of them will directly interfere with anything. When you get 100 or 1000 of these all going at the same time, however, you'll be raising the noise floor for the entire band. That makes it much harder to communicate overall, but you cannot pin the interference to any specific device, or even detect the interference until the devices become common enough that removing them would be impossible.
This is the same kind of problem that BPL has. One test site doesn't do too much damage. Wide scale implementation will make it impossible to talk more than a mile or two due to noise.
As for ever being able to identify the interference, how many doctors do you know would think "this device isn't working because of the ham transmitter on the next hilltop over", and how many hams are going to be able to identify that intermittent noise on the input of their repeater as being from some wired person standing nearby?
Composting being mandatory is a good thing. Our landfills are filling up quickly and something has to be done about it -
Yes! Yes! It is SO much better for there to be ten thousand rotting piles of garbage spread about a city attracting and feeding rats and other vermin (how many people have seen a nutria? Raise your hands...) than for there to be a central facility somewhere the rats and other vermin won't be a problem. Yes. Absolutely.
It minimizes pests on landfills, as compostable material won't be available to grow the pest population.
And I thought for a minute you hadn't considered the pest problem. You have. You really do think it is better for the pests to be in people's backyards than to be at the landfill. Amazing.
Compost can be sold to farms to help grow crops, which gives money back to the government ...
Screw that. If I'm selling the rotten garbage out of my back yard, I am keeping the money. I ain't giving it to the damn government.
Maybe this county or city near Boston had some kind of high-price disposal service that does the separation for them? *shrugs*
No, it's a very low price service. Just put the pop cans and bottles in the regular trash and half a dozen homeless people will come by over the next few hours to sort it out for you.
This is utter nonsense. Anyone with a decent understanding of scientific method and the ability to read research papers is fully qualified to make judgements about the drugs they should take. It boggles my mind that people will go in to their mechanic and question whether a proposed treatment is the right one but will give over care of the only body they ever get to someone else.
Oh, for mod points...
You don't even need to be able to read research papers. All you need to do is talk to the doctor and pharmacist and listen to what they tell you.
I was put on one blood pressure med a few months ago. I was told "these are potential side effects...". It was MY responsibility to watch out for those, and my responsibility to say "stop" if any of them showed up.
I'm also responsible for letting my doctor know all of the meds and supplements I'm taking. "The words are too big, I don't understand" isn't an excuse.
I used to think the part in the ads where they say "tell your doctor if you have kidney disease or liver problems before taking this drug..." was a laugh. Isn't the doctor supposed to tell YOU if you have kidney disease? I'm now seeing three doctors and what one knows doesn't always get to the other two. And the one I saw a year ago who isn't around anymore told me things that weren't passed on to his colleagues at all.
I do have conversations with doctors over treatments. I ask why they recommend a particular treatment, what alternatives exist, etc, and I research them.
Absolutely. And I question them about the implications for flight medicals and FAA regulations, which almost none of them have ever known anything about. Guess who gets to do the research on that?
But those agreements mentioned in TFS, where pharmacies must only prescribe their offering - that sounds rather anti-competitive to me.
Pharmacies don't prescribe drugs, doctors do. If a doctor says "generic ok", then the pharmacy has no say in the matter.
Insurance companies aren't going to eat into their profits by demanding name brands instead of generics, since they'd be paying more for the name brand along with the patient. And if the generic costs less than the copay for a name brand, the patient is going to buy that anyway.
If Pfizer still has a big profit margin after the patent has expired, why wouldn't they have invented anyway?
Because the costs of manufacturing a drug once it has been created and approved are much less than the costs of developing one. They will still have a good profit margin TODAY because the costs of designing and testing the hundreds of potential candidates they went through to get to a final, working drug were paid off during the patent period.
They wouldn't have a profit margin if they had to sell the drug from day one at the same price as those people who are going to manufacture the generics now.
Developing drugs is a risk. You can get all the way to trials and then find out that your fancy new LDL drug gives 50% of the people who take it the hives or only works in 3% of the users. All the money you spent getting there is gone. People who fund that kind of risk deserve to get paid back for taking the risk, mostly because they won't take the risk unless they do.
but the 100 other widgets in my house could plug in DC.
That's 100A of 12V. From here, you'd need at least number 2 or number 1 wire to carry that current. Ballpark figure.
Same reference, you lose 3 volts for every ten feet of 12 gage at that current (one wire for supply, one for return.) Can your 12V device run happily on 9V?
Sure, the TV and PC would still convert AC power,
The costs of running two power systems in a house would swamp any savings you think you'd make by using DC.
What bothers me is all the new LED bulbs that have transformers in them (guessing, because they get hot! ... feels like wasted energy)
High power LEDs get hot because you are running good amounts of current through them, not because there is a transformer. Transformers are pretty much useless with the DC current that runs LEDs.
I'd think it would be more efficient to run DC to lighting and certain outlets like those where small devices would sit ...
The problem comes in deciding what voltage to use. 12V means you need rather hefty wires to get the required current for some devices. A 6W LED needs half an amp at 12V. If you use a voltage that makes the current resonable, then you need to convert that voltage to what your device needs, every place you have a device.
Sending 380V means you can use the same or smaller wires than you'd use for 120V systems, but you'll be busy converting that 380V DC to 12V DC or 5V DC or 1.2V DC -- and while DC-DC conversion has gotten a lot better, it is still more complicated than a simple transformer.
I'd propose that they do hold the dictators and governments back by having their representatives sit around and talk and talk and talk and do nothing else.
I'm not clear from the way you said this whether you are proposing that they do this in the future, or that you are proposing that the idea is they are doing this already.
Either way, having representatives sit around and talk and talk and talk does absolutely nothing to stop a dictator or other government from doing anything. The representatives of dicatators only job is to sit around and talk and talk and talk trying to delay any action against the dictator, which frees the bad guys up to do what they want while the UN fiddles.
Sure, that means that the UN itself isn't taking action, but if that's the price we pay to not have a nuclear war, I'm absolutely good with paying it.
You assume that the UN is a price we have to pay to prevent nuclear war, something that is far from a reasonable assumption. As I recall, the UN talked and talked and talked the entire time every country (who has done so since the UN was created) developed their nuclear arsenals.
There are lots and lots of frequencies you can transmit video on, you can even put it spread spectrum across the police tactical frequencies -
It is really really hard to put a full framerate video stream through a 7.5kHz pipe, even using "spread spectrum" or a digital voice mode.
The last new video streaming device for cops and fire had to get a waiver from the FCC so they could use amateur frequencies in the 70cm band. They couldn't find anyplace else to send the video back. Well, they could, but they'd have to redesign the hardware to use a different frequency and that would be Too Hard For Human Engineers. (google: recon robotics).
TCAS is not installed on many, if not most, of the GA fleet. And TCAS is an add-on to "see and avoid", not a replacement.
Drones are both too small to see easily and have no pilot on board that can see any conflicting traffic.
Anyone want to open a pool to bet on how soon a drone gets sucked into a major airliner's jet intake and causes a crash? Yeah, big jets fly really high -- unless they are landing or taking off or approaching an airport. Drones fly really low -- right where the GA small-aircraft fly.
tax payer dollars are being used to protect the profits of companies
They are also being used to protect the people who don't realize that the "Guchi" handbag they are buying isn't a real Gucci. While I would agree that someone who buys a "Guchi" bag probably ought to know better, I'd say that someone who buys a counterfeit "Gucci" has no reason to expect it to be a counterfeit and thus an expectation that they are not being ripped off. Someone who is selling counterfeit goods is banking on the name of the product and not the quality, so while the victim does get something with a "Gucci" label, the quality is not what they paid extra for.
this is a problem between stupid electorate continually rel-electing politicians who do not represent the people and are easily bought out.
I think your view is the one that isn't quite representative of the people. People who don't want to buy, e.g., Gucci, are still free to do so, and nobody is stopping them. Nobody is stopping someone from selling handbags that are quite nice but don't pretend to be Gucci. This is not an issue of stopping someone from selling a bag that looks like a Gucci but is clearly identified as not being one ("counterfeit" is not the same as "knock off".) I think most people are quite happy that someone in charge is trying to get rid of places and people that are selling counterfeit goods, and not just because those counterfeit goods harm the authentic manufacturer. They also harm the consumer, who has spent good money on a poor product, which means they aren't spending that money on anything else.
but to boil it down this story is just icing on the turd-cake that will be served to future historians who write about the downfall of America.
You have it backwards. To do nothing about counterfeit goods is antithetical to what the US is based on. To do nothing is what would help the downfall. "Property rights" is firmly established in US law and history, and is why we prospered as a nation to start with. "Here's a plot of land, homesteader, work hard and it is yours." Contrast that with "here's a community plot of land, occupant. Show up occasionally and you'll get a share of the food it produces."
"Pretend your product is made by someone else who has built a reputation for quality and profit at the expense of them and the consumer" is more like the latter than the former. I have no problem with the legal system going after counterfeiters. None at all. They have no right to use the trademarks and names of reputable companies. When I go into a restaurant and buy a "Coke", I expect that it will BE a product of the Coca Cola company, not "Bob's Coke" or even "Coak". That position doesn't have anything to do with IP or patents or copyrights, just with fraud.
Point remains, small aircraft checklists are a poor reference when trying to determine level of hazards on commercial airliners. What can be a critical hazard for a single pilot in a tiny plane might be trivially handled on a 747 by a professional flight crew. A "bee in the cockpit" can cause a small aircraft crash; hardly worth reporting in a 747. An "oil leak in the engine" ditto. When you've got half a dozen trained pros ready to handle things, and multiple engines, what you call a critical hazard might not be the same. I think perhaps it is you that needs a viewpoint expansion.
There is a reason that freedom of the press is so important and nobody should have to explain why its needed.
I'm sorry, but "broadcast to everyone that the body of Joe Smith of 123 Main Street has just been located at the bottom of Lake BooHoo" is not one of the reasons that the first amendment is important. There is no compelling reason that this information cannot wait until it has been officially released following the notification of his family by professionals. It is not an "oversite" matter keeping "the other three" in check here, it is a simple matter of how family members find out that their loved one is dead.
And, I hate to have to tell you this, too, but there is no compelling reason for the press to be tramping around getting in the way of a rescue effort that they've just hear about on their scanner. If you don't think they'd be doing that if there weren't active measures taken to prevent it, then you've never been to a major search scene.
The press isn't interested, in this modern day, in "keeping in check" anything. They want eyes and ears watching and listening to their advertiser-supported broadcasts. They get that by being first to the scene, by having the gory details and live video. Fuck the family involved in a lost hiker search, they want the status of being first on the scene and first with the pictures.
I used to think like you did. Then one night there was a major snow storm in the city where I lived. Everyone knew it was snowing. Everyone knew it was heavy. The local TV news station risked the lives of the entire news crew racing through the snow to set up outside the local hospital, just so they could have an "actuality" -- thirty seconds of video live from outside the hospital showing how bad it was snowing. This wasn't a leisurely drive planned well in advance. It was a "you have five minutes to get there and get set up if you want to be the lead" situation. (Yes, listening to the news coordination channels on the scanner is an important capability for the public to keep track of the news activities, too.) They couldn't settle for someone reading a script in the studio saying "it is snowing bad, don't go if you don't have to". They couldn't point a camera out the window showing the snow coming down. They had to have a crew with a live feed. For ratings.
I also remember the media circus when the New Carrisa ran aground on the Oregon coast. The news media had a continuous watch from circling helicopters, often three or more at a time, circling overhead. This made it difficult for the Coast Guard to do their jobs, even with the TFR in place to limit the newsies. I would listen to the air to air chatter and hear about the near mid-airs every day. All so they could keep the viewers up to the second on what was going on. No "keep the other three in check" involved there, either.
You can wave the first amendment around as a shield, but often it is used to shield activity that has no importance and no reason for being, other than for the press to make money.
For example, if your iPhone you've stored in your flight bag in the back seat spontaneously combusts while you are flying solo:
Now, think about an iPhone starting to combust in some passenger's pocket on a 737.
So, yes, it is interesting for you to keep saying that "it's a checklist item". but not really relevant. I've also never seen it in any small aircraft checklist I've been through. Are you referring to checking the engine compartment for bird's nests and the like? And what does your checklist say to do about "flammable objects"? I know that I personally carry a lot of flammable objects every time I fly. Those sectional charts are printed on paper, you know. That book of approach plates? The batteries in MY cellphone, and the ones in my aviation handheld radios. Until they changed the certificates, those pilot certs you are required to carry used to be printed on some pretty easily ignited paper. Now they are flammable plastic, but the medical cert is still on paper.
Do you remove all flammable clothing when you fly and fly only in Nomex?
Anyone want to guess if US government goes with standard system or decides to spend few hundred million to reinvent the wheel?
Google for "APCO P25". Standard already invented. The rest of the world went with their version. You could change the word "TETRA" in the wiki quote to "P25" and it would be just as correct. It is a bit dishonest to wave the TETRA flag around as if the US wasn't already using a standard and TETRA should be what we decide to adopt now.
The issue now is that the FCC is permitting TETRA in the US, but only for commercial and business use. So, we'll have TWO standards in the same place. No, Add MotoTrbo -- three "standards", of which one is a proprietary version intended solely to lock people into a specific vendor's radios and systems. As if the same vendor didn't have proprietary extensions that try to lock users into their radios and systems already.
This has nothing to do with safety, this is to mute the press. The press follows the scanner conversations to report on all accidents and incidents. With police hiding records and conversations due to lawsuits, we dont need more "hidden" police communications, we them open to keep them honest.
As someone who works in SAR, I can tell you that muting the press is a valuable and useful goal, for two reasons. First, if we find something or someone, it would be very nice if eighty reporters and cameramen didn't descend upon the scene and get in the way of trying to save a life or even just preserve evidence at a crime scene. And second, family members of the person we are looking for are better served learning about the results of a search from an in-person discussion with a trained professional than a news flash on the radio.
Well this of course could easily be solved by national standards dictated from Washington tied to various financial incentives. We couldn't do that during the Bush administration because "we don't want the government picking winners and losers" so instead we had 11 years of no progress. Now we could just pick a good solution and go with it.
And that is, of course, why the APCO P25 digital standard wasn't developed during the Bush years and didn't become a standard required by federal funding agencies for new purchases.
And that is why, in this modern, standards-friendly administration, we are now adding MotoTrbo and Tetra as alternative (non-interoperable) digital standards.
This issue is not new, and it is not surprising. Not to anyone who actually has to deal with it. Everyone talks about "interoperability" and how great it is, but then we push for ever-fancier technology which is inherantly NOT interoperable, or interoperable only at a huge price.
For example, moving from 150MHz VHF to 700MHz. Under 150MHz VHF analog (or even digital) I can bring MY radio to an incident, and as long as I have the right frequency and digital "squelch" programmed in, I can participate. With 700MHz, my radio might not even have the right digital format, and it will not talk to the existing system because the system will lock it out. Not to mention that if I want to talk to my people there, I will have to have my 150MHz radio, and then a 700MHz radio to talk to other people. Two radios.
Yes, there is movement towards multi-band public service radios, but that's the "huge price" I'm referring to. A digital single-band radio will run about $1500 for a reasonable version. A multi-band starts at $5k and goes up. That's not to say a high-feature single band is cheap -- the latest handhelds CAP distributed are list price $4500 or more.
Interoperability used to mean "everyone can talk to each other" directly. Now it means "everyone might be able to find someone they can talk to that can also talk to someone else", or at best, "someone will have a portable linking system that will link two systems together." It's more of a nightmare now than it was ten years ago.
Er, no.... on my own equipment my voice drives the phase modulator directly. At no point is it digital,
And thus you are not using a digital radio system. And thus you will not have available the modern digital encryption methods.
Modern encryption uses modern algorythms on the digital data produced by digitizing the voice analog signal. The voice becomes data upon which DES or AES or whatever encoding is applied.
Donald duck is what you hear when you are listening to the wrong sideband, or are "off center" of the sideband. That's not anything to do with scramblers,
Yes, actually, it is. In a frequency-inversion analog system, you mix the voice signal with another fixed frequency, inverting the frequency content of the voice. E.g., a 3kHz tone in voice will move to 300 Hz and vice versa. This is EXACTLY the same as listening to "the wrong sideband" in single sideband radio, and that's exactly what the process is supposed to create.
The point is that we're talking about a de-facto high(er) speed quasi-digital mode being used by someone with a 1990 5wpm-code Technician-Class license who's officially authorized to do "CW", relying on a very questionable and loose interpretation of CW's old definition (turning a single carrier on and off) to achieve it in ways the original rulemakers never would have thought possible, let alone anticipated.
You're wrong. It isn't "quasi-digital", it is digital. On and off. There was no rule about the speed, so "higher" or "lower" is meaningless. The "5wpm-code Tech license" wasn't an upper speed limit and nobody ever thought it was. Five wpm was the LOW limit on how fast you needed to be able to COPY code by hand to get the license. There was no rule prohibiting computer copying or sending of CW at any higher speeds, and there still isn't.
As for "never thought possible", that's just ridiculous. Tape-based CW senders were routine long before the technician class license was created.
There was no "questionable" definition of CW involved. CW is the modulation of a carrier by turning it on and off. Period. How fast you turn it on and off is up to you. There wasn't even a rule that you had to do more than 5 wpm on the air -- you only had to demonstrate the ability to copy by hand at that speed to get the license, and then you could be a total lid and run at 1 wpm if you found someone willing to talk to you at that speed. Or rather, listen to you. The coding you are required to use is international Morse code. It may be thrilling to pretend that you or the other guy were doing something really clandestine and black-hat, but you're fooling only yourself.
As for 200wpm... well, that pretty much the absolute experimental frontier of what you can make meaningfully work if you're transmitting by opening and closing a relay pretending to be a straight key connected to a HF rig,
There never has been, and there still it not, any rule that says that CW must be sent using a relay-based switching system that "pretends" to be a straight key. Experimental frontier? Oh, please. Computer and tape based automated senders have been in use for decades, well before the 1990's. I had a program for sending and receiving on my VIC 20, and that came out in the 80's.
you're looking at the equivalent of ~500 baud.
Five hundred state changes per second? Your calculation is interesting, but hardly accurate. I could easily claim that a 1 Hz square wave is the equivalent of 1000 bits by defining a bit to be 1 millisecond long, and then I'd have, by your reconing, a 1000 baud signal. That's not how baud is calculated. I already did the calculations, and it just isn't that fast. And it doesn't matter anyway, because there was and is no limit.
Posting only to un-do a faulty mod. But seriously I didn't click-slip, there's some bug than turned my intended mod into flamebait.
There is a setting that changes the "oops I didn't mean that" kind of "once you select the moderation status for an article it happens and you can't undo it" mode into "select all the moderations and then do them at the end" mode. I can't tell you what it is, but I got so tired of the instant moderation setting that I searched for it and changed whatever I could until it went back to normal.
6000 "state changes per minute" sounds like a lot, but that's only 100 per second. Or, all told, about 50 Hz.
Even if you send nothing but numbers (5 dits or dahs each, 10 state changes), you'll be using 10,000 states/min, or 84 Hz.
That's not much.
When the ITU requirement went away, the FCC requirement followed.