Here's some of the reasons I prefer my mailing lists to forums:
* I don't have to remember to go there; it comes to me.
I was going to make this comment in computer-ish terms. It's called "push content" versus "pull content". Mailing lists PUSH the content to the user. Web fora require the user to PULL the content.
PUSH is much better for important information. PULL is better for information that is not critical.
My cell provider has an email to SMS gateway (and did the same thing prior to such gateways being common.) They also have "internet access" I could pay for that allows me to access POP/IMAP mail servers and web sites. The former is PUSH, the latter is PULL. When my server is dying, I want PUSH data telling me that. If my house goes below freezing, I want PUSH data telling me that. When I want to discuss hobbies, I mostly want PULL so I control when I read the information. If I want to know the temps in my house (other than extremes) I want PULL so I can control how often I am told.
One reason you didn't mention is that, for Unix users, at least, it is absolutely trivial to set up an email alias ("mailing list") using nothing other than standard email tools, where a web forum requires running a web server and the forum tools. I do both -- I have aliases for meeting notices and I have a Drupal wiki for online discussions. The aliases were so much easier and take so much fewer resources.
This. My local NBC affiliate has been running a nearly-unused digital broadcast for years.
What do you mean "unused"? They're running a digital signal because they are getting ready for the federally-mandated switchover. If they didn't run digital, they'd lose the viewers who got their boxes already or have digital TVs.
They're also running an analog signal to keep the viewers who haven't acted. They're paying for two transmitters right now. They're wasting electricity because people are dawdling.
Most people I know... Slashdot is full of examples of people...
I hate to point out how limited a set you are basing your claims on. Most people _I_ know don't have cellular broadband simply because where I live is not where the carriers care. Slashdot is hardly a representative sample of the population. It is a very self-selected low-volume group of techies.
Unless you have AT&Ts/T-Mobile's Edge service you get broadband speeds even on your cell phone.
I have neither broadband nor Edge on my cellphone. I feel no need to have broadband on my phone. At times, I seriously debate the need for it at home. Yes, I'm at the edge of the bell curve for/. readers, but I don't think I'm anywhere close to the edge for the population as a whole.
To use a famous car analogy you're basically saying no one needs a car that can go faster than 20mph...
No, I'm not the one trying to say what people need and don't need, you are. I'm saying that people who decide they don't need a car that goes faster than 20MPH aren't ignorant and have the right to make that choice for themselves, instead of having someone tell them how stupid they are for not wanting every latest technical geegaw and gadget.
The same goes for the academic community which gains nothing by staying at slow speeds...
The "academic community", for the most part, has broadband access at work. Why do you think they need it at home, too? Their decision not to spend more money just so they can spend more time working at home is THEIR RIGHT and doesn't make them ignorant or stupid.
Ever try using a webcam with audio on dial-up?
Nope. Never tried a webcam with audio period. I've never needed it to collaborate on anything. I've done just fine using email and some newfangled thing they call the telephone.
The people that say they don't want broadband even if it is cheaper than dialup are indeed ignorant people as you gain nothing and lose a lot.
Well now, adding a bit to the story, aren't we? I don't think "cheaper than dialup" was included. I've never found it cheaper than dialup.
As for your insulting attitude, well, people who know what they are doing and make choices that differ from yours are not ignorant. Some people may decide that they lose nothing at all by not having broadband access (like _I_ know I lose nothing by not spending $25/month for cellphone broadband), and some people may understand that their time lost surfing the web is worth more doing something else. Personally, I'd be a lot richer (both in money and knowledge) had I not spent the $50/month (a lot more than dialup, BTW) for broadband at home and all the hours on the web that it has sucked out of me.
But then, I'm just ignorant because I don't have the same values you do, right?
Parent specifically mentioned academic researchers not the whole 2/3rds of the populous and that was what I was replying to.
And I pointed out that there is already a database they can use without requiring broadband at home.
There is no question that people are missing out, whether or not it is worth it to them is something they can't judge unless they try it.
Yes, there is a question whether people are "missing out" or not. "Missing out" implies they are missing something worthwhile. As for having to try it to know, first, there are many things I don't need to try to know that I'm not missing out in the least. Meth amphetamine, for example. And second, dialup is a "try out". If dialup is fast enough for what people want, it's quite intelligent of them to know they don't need broadband. They aren't ignorant just because they don't value the same things you do.
... I have the Internet on my cell phone...
That's nice, but that's not what the article is about. Broadband is not just "internet on your cell phone. Most people don't have broadband on their cellphone, and most people probably don't need broadband on their cellphone.
Yes we should call them ignorant.... Take an average news site like CNN.
I don't need an "average news site like CNN". I have broadband, and I don't remember the last time I went to CNN.com. I have no need to go there. I can live quite happily without CNN's idea of what the latest breaking news is. I can hear it a half an hour later on the radio and it will be just as meaningful.
Now, go to searching for phone numbers online,...
I don't need to do that, either. I have this book that shows up on my front step every year (actually, two different ones) that contains all the numbers in my area, with names, too. The yellow parts of the books have ads for businesses I might want to visit, all nicely sorted by kind of business. What's really cool is I can still use that book to look up "Pacific Power" for the number to call when the power is off.
Even getting directions and maps are a pain in the ass with dial-up.
Yes, unfolding that darn map and folding it back up is such a pain in the ass, but then, I can take the map with me in the car and look at it while I'm travelling, without having to find a local hotspot or open NAP.
Streaming TV, radio, movies all for free instead of paying ridiculous amounts on satellite TV...
"Streaming TV" and radio comes right into my home for free. I don't have to pay anything for either one. In fact, before one of the local radio stations moved their antenna site, I used to get "streaming radio" on my telephone.
Academic types that don't cross-reference their research over the Internet are also not doing their jobs very well as they are likely missing huge pieces of information which would take significantly longer to find using dial-up.
It's called Science Scitation Index.
I can live without the Internet no problem but I am definitely missing out on a lot when I do.
Well, the question is not "are you missing out on anything", but "is what you are missing worth anything to you"? Those 2/3 of the people who don't want broadband are able to make that decision for themselves, I think, without you calling them ignorant.
Older people are generally smarter about what they need and don't need, and able to
decide for themselves. They've lived a lot longer than youngsters, seen a lot more, and figured out what's important and what isn't. They don't need flash animations or bittorrent feeds of last night's TV program to entertain themselves, and can actually read the newspaper when it is printed on paper.
I can fully believe that 2/3 of the people who don't have broadband don't want it. I can also believe that Obama thinks he knows better about what they want than they do, and will act on that belief using taxpayer dollars.
This is, of course, bullshit, at least in my experience.
And it is gospel truth, in my experience.
I get many analog signals here with just a simple whip antenna.
I get exactly ONE digital station.
... I just attached a little 2" stub antenna with a coax fitting directly to the box. While it certainly didn't pick up as many channels as the rabbit ears, it picked up all the main network digital channels without a problem.
And I get exactly one station even when using an outdoor broadband amplified antenna.
... but there's no "graceful" to the way an analog signal would have degraded by that point.
A snowy analog signal provides a lot more information and is a lot more viewable than a black screen showing only "no signal" in tiny white letters. I'd call that a lot more graceful.
The last episode of BG will come and go and TV will still be the same. The "moral dilemmas" that are easy to find parallels in real life politics are easy to find because you want to find them.
When Dan Quayle spoke about the negative impacts on society when Murphy Brown deliberately became a single parent, everyone was falling all over themselves claiming
"it's just a TV show" and claiming that Quayle was an idiot for even suggesting that TV might have some relevance to real life. When they find deep, meaningful parallels to real life, "TV will never be the same". Please, pick one and stick with it.
Cops don't generally do this unless they suspect the vehicle may be stolen. Nice try, though.
Around here, cops typically call in a request for a 10 and 20 (registration and owner check) before they call the 7 (traffic stop). It's a matter of safety. If the 10 comes back to Guido The Enforcer you call for backup before you make the stop. If it's Gramma Squeekyclean Driving Record, you do only the normal felony stop.
Once a photon is absorbed by a material, the information about what direction it was going is lost lost lost. The electron moves to a higher orbit, or the bond starts vibrating slightly faster or whatever. What comes out goes whatever direction it happens to go.
The only exception to this is in a high-field condition that caused stimulated emission.
A changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field, which produces a changing electric field, which produces a changing magnetic field, and so on, and so on, forever, until something interrupts this process.
I have not heard it described in that way, and I do not believe that is correct. I know it is possible to work with systems where the E and M fields are separate -- where the same input results in different field strengths depending on the shape and kind of an antenna, for example. If one field created the other and vice versa, then a strong E would always have a strong M component, and I don't think this is necessarily true. I'm not a theoretical physicist, however, just a ham and an analytical chemist, so I deal with practical results and not always the underlying physics.
If so, then what causes this propogation to occur at a different rate in a medium?
The short answer is "mass". I don't have a good explanation. For this you will need a real physicist.
I mean, if I have a diamond the size of Jupiter, why does its effect on the speed of light only start the moment that light crosses the 'surface' of the medium?
Well, the MASS of the object does cause curvature of space in the vicinity -- a gravitational effect that has been observed when stars are occulted by the sun, so there is some effect before it crosses the surface. I think the rest of the answer probably involves the difference between strong and weak forces.
Mirrors don't scatter the radiation in all directions.
Mirrors don't absorb, they reflect. Reflection is different than absorption/re-emission.
If you want a demonstration of what absorption/re-emission would look like were it the method of propagation of an EM wave in a medium, look at milk. Milk is actually a scattering system, but it looks the same. Similarly, fog.
Air is a medium. If light was absorbed and re-emitted as the means of moving through air, then we'd be living in a perpetual dense fog. We'd be able to see nothing, not even our hand in front of our face.
And in medium, light is propogated by the absorption and re-emission of these electromagnetic waves by the atoms making up the medium, isn't it?
No. Were this true, there could never be a sunbeam. Or an image in a camera. Or transparent glass. When a photon is absorbed by an atom and then re-emitted, it can be going any direction. Random. (Under high-field conditions, like a ruby laser, that's no longer true.) If every photon (or all EM radiation) were absorbed by the medium and then re-emitted, the very first entry into a medium would result in a complete scattering of the radiation in all directions.
Now, SOME light is absorbed and some is re-emitted. There's a whole field of analytical chemistry dealing with both atomic and molecular absorption. Helium was discovered by, umm, forget his name, noticing that there were missing spots in the spectrum produced by a prism. This missing light either is scattered (by re-emission other directions) or lost (stays as higher energy atom or re-emits at other
wavelengths).
What IS absorbed depends on the energy of specific electron transitions in the medium, or on vibrational/rotational states of a molecule.
So no, light does not "remain at c" when traveling through a medium. It slows to the speed of light, and of all electromagnetic radiation (including radio) in that medium. And no, speed of light in a vacuum and speed of light in a medium are not two different concepts.
But light doesn't have its velocity increased... it starts off at the speed of light already.
That's like saying that a car can't have it's velocity increase because it always travels at "the speed of car". The "speed of light" is not a constant. The "speed of light in a vacuum" is.
The speed of light varying in a medium is one expression of the refractive index. The larger the refractive index, the slower the speed of light. Light travels slower in a medium with a higher refractive index.
So advocating "Change", means advocating all change, even random, destructive, change?
Oh, please. This digital changeover is hardly random and hardly destructive. It's been planned for years.
Trying to delay a change by four months until a support infrastructure is in place means wanting "the status quo"?
I don't know what the hell you mean by "a support infrastructure" that isn't covered by the existing support infrastructure. What YOU want is just more money to be handed out because some people decided to wait until the end of a free handout, when it was known ahead of time that there probably wasn't going to be enough money to hand out to everyone.
What a strange and wonderful world you live in!
Yes, I live in a world where people take responsibility for themselves and don't demand that everybody else hold on until they catch up to a change that has been announced for years. Where people who have been told exactly what they need to do for months don't suddenly claim they need more time to do what almost everyone else has already gotten done. Yes, that is a world that a/.er might find strange and wonderful.
Her VCR is about to become a brick, for just the reason you told her. Each converter box outputs only the channel it is tuned to. If you want to record different channels using the VCR timer, you are hosed.
She's also hosed because VHS is becoming a dead format.
Her best option is to find (with your help) a DVR that records to DVD-RAM and has an ATSC tuner. ATSC and DVD-RAM are the keywords. I know they exist, I have one. It has clearQAM and ATSC and analog and VHS and DVD+-R[AM]. I just don't remember who makes it. I found it with a search of the web a year ago.
Not only that, but he's had a YEAR to get his coupons and decided to do nothing. No, I'm not too sorry for him.
The date's been set for years, the broadcasters have been forced to buy new transmitters and antennas and pay for powering both systems until Feb, it's time to just do it.
I know one station that is digital only. Their analog transmitter blew up and they decided not to spend the money on repairing what they knew they would just be turning off in a few months anyway. So yeah, let's move the date off by another year so people can delay for another year.
Translators are NOT covered by the Feb switch date. Translators and low power TV are allowed to continue analog transmission, until somebody figures out where the money is coming from to pay for that changeover.
In Oregon, there are very few population centers that have broadcast stations -- but a lot of translators to get the signals out into the vast wasteland I call home. And "home" for me is a city of 50,000 people.
This translator issue is why it was particularly stupid for the government not to include analog passthrough in the eligible converter design until recently. The boxes I could get with MY $40 handouts did not have it; the ones my Mom got do.
She's in an area without translators that gets all the networks in digital fine. I'm in an area where I get ONE station (PBS), even with an inside amplified antenna, but lots of translator stations in analog.
I have been predicting that something was going to stop the switch. I didn't even consider The Man of Change would want the status quo!
2. They aren't talking about tracking vehicles with GPS, just using GPS based odometers if manufactureers start offering them:
There more active participation than that. They aren't just hoping, they are working with the manufacturers to develop this capability.
3. It's an alternative to the tax, not a replacement.
Ummm, if you pay that tax instead of the gas tax, it's a replacement.
The concept requires no transmission of vehicle travel locations, either in real time or of travel history," the report said. "Accordingly, no travel location points are stored within the vehicle or transmitted elsewhere. Thus there can be no 'tracking' of vehicle movements."
That's patent fiction. The plan is to charge more per mile for high-traffic periods and on certain roads. That was part of the feasibility study. You can't do that without "tracking" the vehicle with stored location and time data. You MIGHT get away with claiming that the data is passed to the computer at the pump to calculate the tax and then deleted, but it certainly IS going to be stored in the car and CAN be extracted the first time the police get a court order for it. Just wait for the first case involving a child in some way and the privacy activists will fall all over themselves helping the cops get the data.
Also, the report said, under the Oregon concept of the program, "ODOT would have no involvement in developing the on-vehicle devices, installing them in vehicles, maintaining them or having any other access to them except, perhaps, in situations involving tampering or similar fee evasion activities.
Of course ODOT isn't going to install or design or maintain these things. So what? There will be laws putting the responsibility for maintenance on the user. To detect "fee evasion", you have to log the GPS data to detect dropouts when there shouldn't have been.
"Why is there a three hour period of time when there were 0 satellites in view, that started while you were driving into Portland and ended as you left?"
"I was parked in a garage."
"Your car, while you claim it was parked, went from the parking lot of Fry's in Wilsonville to the parking lot of the Factory Outlet Stores in Woodburn. Both have clear views of the sky."
As others have stated - so they can charge you different taxes based on where you are/went. In the case of the USA, that might be state-wise. In the case of NL (where they intend to launch this starting 2012), it's so they can charge you more if you drive during rush hour, more if you take the busy roads, more if you're down town (when you could have parked at the edge and taken a shuttle bus instead), etc.
I know someone at the Uni who was involved in the initial testing for this system. What you say is the main reason why GPS instead of odometer. If you drive in downtown Portland during peak hours, you will pay through the nose. If you drive all your miles in Valley Junction, you will pay a lot less. Also, off-road use is supposed to be tax-free, and currently you have to file for a rebate of those taxes to get your money back at the end of the year.
My friend could simply not understand that paying rates based on time/location means logging driving times and locations as well as miles, and that this data could easily be used to track people and be used against them for all sorts of things. Insurance companies would love this, as well as cops and all sorts of other investigators. "Well, well, Mrs. Lincoln, we see the GPS in your car shows you meeting with a Mr. Booth..."
ODOT, of course, is denying that any logging will take place. Flat out. Won't happen. They know what chance this has of working of they admit the obvious, and too many people don't understand technology well enough to know what has to happen for the magic to take place. Even my friend, an otherwise very smart engineer and all around nice woman, doesn't get it. Why would Joe Smith?
You're accusing the salt companies of being somewhat false in their advertising, but you're giving your mom bottles of isopropyl alcohol instead of perfume?
So you admit that you don't understand the difference between a joke between two family members that costs nobody any money, and deliberate misinformation intended to get people to spend extra money for a product that really is no different than normal?
Slashdot Mirror
I was going to make this comment in computer-ish terms. It's called "push content" versus "pull content". Mailing lists PUSH the content to the user. Web fora require the user to PULL the content.
PUSH is much better for important information. PULL is better for information that is not critical.
My cell provider has an email to SMS gateway (and did the same thing prior to such gateways being common.) They also have "internet access" I could pay for that allows me to access POP/IMAP mail servers and web sites. The former is PUSH, the latter is PULL. When my server is dying, I want PUSH data telling me that. If my house goes below freezing, I want PUSH data telling me that. When I want to discuss hobbies, I mostly want PULL so I control when I read the information. If I want to know the temps in my house (other than extremes) I want PULL so I can control how often I am told.
One reason you didn't mention is that, for Unix users, at least, it is absolutely trivial to set up an email alias ("mailing list") using nothing other than standard email tools, where a web forum requires running a web server and the forum tools. I do both -- I have aliases for meeting notices and I have a Drupal wiki for online discussions. The aliases were so much easier and take so much fewer resources.
What do you mean "unused"? They're running a digital signal because they are getting ready for the federally-mandated switchover. If they didn't run digital, they'd lose the viewers who got their boxes already or have digital TVs.
They're also running an analog signal to keep the viewers who haven't acted. They're paying for two transmitters right now. They're wasting electricity because people are dawdling.
Sorry. Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) beat you to the punch. It's part of the el Nino /la Nina cycle.
I hate to point out how limited a set you are basing your claims on. Most people _I_ know don't have cellular broadband simply because where I live is not where the carriers care. Slashdot is hardly a representative sample of the population. It is a very self-selected low-volume group of techies.
Unless you have AT&Ts/T-Mobile's Edge service you get broadband speeds even on your cell phone.
I have neither broadband nor Edge on my cellphone. I feel no need to have broadband on my phone. At times, I seriously debate the need for it at home. Yes, I'm at the edge of the bell curve for /. readers, but I don't think I'm anywhere close to the edge for the population as a whole.
To use a famous car analogy you're basically saying no one needs a car that can go faster than 20mph ...
No, I'm not the one trying to say what people need and don't need, you are. I'm saying that people who decide they don't need a car that goes faster than 20MPH aren't ignorant and have the right to make that choice for themselves, instead of having someone tell them how stupid they are for not wanting every latest technical geegaw and gadget.
The same goes for the academic community which gains nothing by staying at slow speeds ...
The "academic community", for the most part, has broadband access at work. Why do you think they need it at home, too? Their decision not to spend more money just so they can spend more time working at home is THEIR RIGHT and doesn't make them ignorant or stupid.
Ever try using a webcam with audio on dial-up?
Nope. Never tried a webcam with audio period. I've never needed it to collaborate on anything. I've done just fine using email and some newfangled thing they call the telephone.
The people that say they don't want broadband even if it is cheaper than dialup are indeed ignorant people as you gain nothing and lose a lot.
Well now, adding a bit to the story, aren't we? I don't think "cheaper than dialup" was included. I've never found it cheaper than dialup.
As for your insulting attitude, well, people who know what they are doing and make choices that differ from yours are not ignorant. Some people may decide that they lose nothing at all by not having broadband access (like _I_ know I lose nothing by not spending $25/month for cellphone broadband), and some people may understand that their time lost surfing the web is worth more doing something else. Personally, I'd be a lot richer (both in money and knowledge) had I not spent the $50/month (a lot more than dialup, BTW) for broadband at home and all the hours on the web that it has sucked out of me.
But then, I'm just ignorant because I don't have the same values you do, right?
And I pointed out that there is already a database they can use without requiring broadband at home.
There is no question that people are missing out, whether or not it is worth it to them is something they can't judge unless they try it.
Yes, there is a question whether people are "missing out" or not. "Missing out" implies they are missing something worthwhile. As for having to try it to know, first, there are many things I don't need to try to know that I'm not missing out in the least. Meth amphetamine, for example. And second, dialup is a "try out". If dialup is fast enough for what people want, it's quite intelligent of them to know they don't need broadband. They aren't ignorant just because they don't value the same things you do.
That's nice, but that's not what the article is about. Broadband is not just "internet on your cell phone. Most people don't have broadband on their cellphone, and most people probably don't need broadband on their cellphone.
I don't need an "average news site like CNN". I have broadband, and I don't remember the last time I went to CNN.com. I have no need to go there. I can live quite happily without CNN's idea of what the latest breaking news is. I can hear it a half an hour later on the radio and it will be just as meaningful.
Now, go to searching for phone numbers online, ...
I don't need to do that, either. I have this book that shows up on my front step every year (actually, two different ones) that contains all the numbers in my area, with names, too. The yellow parts of the books have ads for businesses I might want to visit, all nicely sorted by kind of business. What's really cool is I can still use that book to look up "Pacific Power" for the number to call when the power is off.
Even getting directions and maps are a pain in the ass with dial-up.
Yes, unfolding that darn map and folding it back up is such a pain in the ass, but then, I can take the map with me in the car and look at it while I'm travelling, without having to find a local hotspot or open NAP.
Streaming TV, radio, movies all for free instead of paying ridiculous amounts on satellite TV ...
"Streaming TV" and radio comes right into my home for free. I don't have to pay anything for either one. In fact, before one of the local radio stations moved their antenna site, I used to get "streaming radio" on my telephone.
Academic types that don't cross-reference their research over the Internet are also not doing their jobs very well as they are likely missing huge pieces of information which would take significantly longer to find using dial-up.
It's called Science Scitation Index.
I can live without the Internet no problem but I am definitely missing out on a lot when I do.
Well, the question is not "are you missing out on anything", but "is what you are missing worth anything to you"? Those 2/3 of the people who don't want broadband are able to make that decision for themselves, I think, without you calling them ignorant.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you -1, Insulting.
Older people are generally smarter about what they need and don't need, and able to decide for themselves. They've lived a lot longer than youngsters, seen a lot more, and figured out what's important and what isn't. They don't need flash animations or bittorrent feeds of last night's TV program to entertain themselves, and can actually read the newspaper when it is printed on paper.
I can fully believe that 2/3 of the people who don't have broadband don't want it. I can also believe that Obama thinks he knows better about what they want than they do, and will act on that belief using taxpayer dollars.
And it is gospel truth, in my experience.
I get many analog signals here with just a simple whip antenna.
I get exactly ONE digital station.
And I get exactly one station even when using an outdoor broadband amplified antenna.
A snowy analog signal provides a lot more information and is a lot more viewable than a black screen showing only "no signal" in tiny white letters. I'd call that a lot more graceful.
Instead of "who shot JR" (and who cared anyway?) it's now "who is number 11"?
"I am not a number 11, I am a pers.... ummm, never mind."
Which part of "unimplemented" is confusing?
The last episode of BG will come and go and TV will still be the same. The "moral dilemmas" that are easy to find parallels in real life politics are easy to find because you want to find them.
When Dan Quayle spoke about the negative impacts on society when Murphy Brown deliberately became a single parent, everyone was falling all over themselves claiming "it's just a TV show" and claiming that Quayle was an idiot for even suggesting that TV might have some relevance to real life. When they find deep, meaningful parallels to real life, "TV will never be the same". Please, pick one and stick with it.
Around here, cops typically call in a request for a 10 and 20 (registration and owner check) before they call the 7 (traffic stop). It's a matter of safety. If the 10 comes back to Guido The Enforcer you call for backup before you make the stop. If it's Gramma Squeekyclean Driving Record, you do only the normal felony stop.
Once a photon is absorbed by a material, the information about what direction it was going is lost lost lost. The electron moves to a higher orbit, or the bond starts vibrating slightly faster or whatever. What comes out goes whatever direction it happens to go.
The only exception to this is in a high-field condition that caused stimulated emission.
I have not heard it described in that way, and I do not believe that is correct. I know it is possible to work with systems where the E and M fields are separate -- where the same input results in different field strengths depending on the shape and kind of an antenna, for example. If one field created the other and vice versa, then a strong E would always have a strong M component, and I don't think this is necessarily true. I'm not a theoretical physicist, however, just a ham and an analytical chemist, so I deal with practical results and not always the underlying physics.
If so, then what causes this propogation to occur at a different rate in a medium?
The short answer is "mass". I don't have a good explanation. For this you will need a real physicist.
I mean, if I have a diamond the size of Jupiter, why does its effect on the speed of light only start the moment that light crosses the 'surface' of the medium?
Well, the MASS of the object does cause curvature of space in the vicinity -- a gravitational effect that has been observed when stars are occulted by the sun, so there is some effect before it crosses the surface. I think the rest of the answer probably involves the difference between strong and weak forces.
Mirrors don't absorb, they reflect. Reflection is different than absorption/re-emission.
If you want a demonstration of what absorption/re-emission would look like were it the method of propagation of an EM wave in a medium, look at milk. Milk is actually a scattering system, but it looks the same. Similarly, fog.
Air is a medium. If light was absorbed and re-emitted as the means of moving through air, then we'd be living in a perpetual dense fog. We'd be able to see nothing, not even our hand in front of our face.
No. Were this true, there could never be a sunbeam. Or an image in a camera. Or transparent glass. When a photon is absorbed by an atom and then re-emitted, it can be going any direction. Random. (Under high-field conditions, like a ruby laser, that's no longer true.) If every photon (or all EM radiation) were absorbed by the medium and then re-emitted, the very first entry into a medium would result in a complete scattering of the radiation in all directions.
Now, SOME light is absorbed and some is re-emitted. There's a whole field of analytical chemistry dealing with both atomic and molecular absorption. Helium was discovered by, umm, forget his name, noticing that there were missing spots in the spectrum produced by a prism. This missing light either is scattered (by re-emission other directions) or lost (stays as higher energy atom or re-emits at other wavelengths).
What IS absorbed depends on the energy of specific electron transitions in the medium, or on vibrational/rotational states of a molecule.
So no, light does not "remain at c" when traveling through a medium. It slows to the speed of light, and of all electromagnetic radiation (including radio) in that medium. And no, speed of light in a vacuum and speed of light in a medium are not two different concepts.
That's like saying that a car can't have it's velocity increase because it always travels at "the speed of car". The "speed of light" is not a constant. The "speed of light in a vacuum" is.
The speed of light varying in a medium is one expression of the refractive index. The larger the refractive index, the slower the speed of light. Light travels slower in a medium with a higher refractive index.
And some people, like me, pronounce it with both a hard 'g' and a soft 'g'.
Oh, please. This digital changeover is hardly random and hardly destructive. It's been planned for years.
Trying to delay a change by four months until a support infrastructure is in place means wanting "the status quo"?
I don't know what the hell you mean by "a support infrastructure" that isn't covered by the existing support infrastructure. What YOU want is just more money to be handed out because some people decided to wait until the end of a free handout, when it was known ahead of time that there probably wasn't going to be enough money to hand out to everyone.
What a strange and wonderful world you live in!
Yes, I live in a world where people take responsibility for themselves and don't demand that everybody else hold on until they catch up to a change that has been announced for years. Where people who have been told exactly what they need to do for months don't suddenly claim they need more time to do what almost everyone else has already gotten done. Yes, that is a world that a /.er might find strange and wonderful.
Her VCR is about to become a brick, for just the reason you told her. Each converter box outputs only the channel it is tuned to. If you want to record different channels using the VCR timer, you are hosed.
She's also hosed because VHS is becoming a dead format.
Her best option is to find (with your help) a DVR that records to DVD-RAM and has an ATSC tuner. ATSC and DVD-RAM are the keywords. I know they exist, I have one. It has clearQAM and ATSC and analog and VHS and DVD+-R[AM]. I just don't remember who makes it. I found it with a search of the web a year ago.
The date's been set for years, the broadcasters have been forced to buy new transmitters and antennas and pay for powering both systems until Feb, it's time to just do it.
I know one station that is digital only. Their analog transmitter blew up and they decided not to spend the money on repairing what they knew they would just be turning off in a few months anyway. So yeah, let's move the date off by another year so people can delay for another year.
In Oregon, there are very few population centers that have broadcast stations -- but a lot of translators to get the signals out into the vast wasteland I call home. And "home" for me is a city of 50,000 people.
This translator issue is why it was particularly stupid for the government not to include analog passthrough in the eligible converter design until recently. The boxes I could get with MY $40 handouts did not have it; the ones my Mom got do.
She's in an area without translators that gets all the networks in digital fine. I'm in an area where I get ONE station (PBS), even with an inside amplified antenna, but lots of translator stations in analog.
I have been predicting that something was going to stop the switch. I didn't even consider The Man of Change would want the status quo!
There more active participation than that. They aren't just hoping, they are working with the manufacturers to develop this capability.
3. It's an alternative to the tax, not a replacement.
Ummm, if you pay that tax instead of the gas tax, it's a replacement.
The concept requires no transmission of vehicle travel locations, either in real time or of travel history," the report said. "Accordingly, no travel location points are stored within the vehicle or transmitted elsewhere. Thus there can be no 'tracking' of vehicle movements."
That's patent fiction. The plan is to charge more per mile for high-traffic periods and on certain roads. That was part of the feasibility study. You can't do that without "tracking" the vehicle with stored location and time data. You MIGHT get away with claiming that the data is passed to the computer at the pump to calculate the tax and then deleted, but it certainly IS going to be stored in the car and CAN be extracted the first time the police get a court order for it. Just wait for the first case involving a child in some way and the privacy activists will fall all over themselves helping the cops get the data.
Also, the report said, under the Oregon concept of the program, "ODOT would have no involvement in developing the on-vehicle devices, installing them in vehicles, maintaining them or having any other access to them except, perhaps, in situations involving tampering or similar fee evasion activities.
Of course ODOT isn't going to install or design or maintain these things. So what? There will be laws putting the responsibility for maintenance on the user. To detect "fee evasion", you have to log the GPS data to detect dropouts when there shouldn't have been.
"Why is there a three hour period of time when there were 0 satellites in view, that started while you were driving into Portland and ended as you left?"
"I was parked in a garage."
"Your car, while you claim it was parked, went from the parking lot of Fry's in Wilsonville to the parking lot of the Factory Outlet Stores in Woodburn. Both have clear views of the sky."
"Ummm, I had it towed inside a metal trailer?"
I know someone at the Uni who was involved in the initial testing for this system. What you say is the main reason why GPS instead of odometer. If you drive in downtown Portland during peak hours, you will pay through the nose. If you drive all your miles in Valley Junction, you will pay a lot less. Also, off-road use is supposed to be tax-free, and currently you have to file for a rebate of those taxes to get your money back at the end of the year.
My friend could simply not understand that paying rates based on time/location means logging driving times and locations as well as miles, and that this data could easily be used to track people and be used against them for all sorts of things. Insurance companies would love this, as well as cops and all sorts of other investigators. "Well, well, Mrs. Lincoln, we see the GPS in your car shows you meeting with a Mr. Booth ..."
ODOT, of course, is denying that any logging will take place. Flat out. Won't happen. They know what chance this has of working of they admit the obvious, and too many people don't understand technology well enough to know what has to happen for the magic to take place. Even my friend, an otherwise very smart engineer and all around nice woman, doesn't get it. Why would Joe Smith?
So you admit that you don't understand the difference between a joke between two family members that costs nobody any money, and deliberate misinformation intended to get people to spend extra money for a product that really is no different than normal?