Many sources are reporting that researchers have created the world's smallest laser since the inception of lasers almost a half-century ago.
How necessary is the end of that statement? Were they worried someone might assume a smaller laser had been created before the inception of lasers?
That formulation parses and functions for me.
It's a compact way of saying:
- Lasers were invented almost a century ago.
- Since then there has been a continuing series of inventions of progressively smaller lasers.
- And with each of these inventions the inventor and/or the media went into a hype frenzy about the latest "world's smallest laser"
- But there's something special about this one...
And there is: It's the first one where the resonator (a size-limiting component) is MUCH smaller than a quarter-wavelength of the resonant frequency light.
And, as somebody who worked in a laser lab back in the late '60s and with cutting-edge semiconductors these days, I can attest that this little device is a BIG DEAL (TM).
I expect the next step - an electrically-pumped version - in a year or less. Followed by one that can be grown epitaxially on a wafer and hooked to a waveguide that's also built by stock chip manufacturing techniques. And that's the point where you switch to optics - first for getting signals on and off the chip (a BIG power eater), eventually maybe for getting signals around the chip.
Unless something BETTER comes along before then. (Which is the REAL reason most of these breakthroughs never make production.)
You are missing a smiley here:-) It is definitely cheaper to launch stuff from the Moon if you have a cat-a-pult already. But where do you see metal ores on the Moon?
Scrape up the dirt: Based on the moon rocks collected from the Apollo landing sites it's about four types of minerals and composed primarily of:
Some refining processes require amazing quantities of energy, water, oxygen and other very specific ingredients that I'd be amazed if they just sit on the surface.
You've got all the direct sunlight and hard vacuum you want for free.
Refining the above consists mainly of heating them enough to drive off the oxygen. (Not sure if the Aluminum needs electrolytic processing but power is not an issue.)
Building solar furnaces consists of:
- inflating a balloon of the correct shape.
- vaporizing a little aluminum to condense onto it to make it conductive (or start with a balloon that's pre-aluminized.
- Hooking a few kilovolt power supply between the balloon and the aluminum vapor source.
- Vaporizing more aluminum, with the voltage sucking it onto the balloon like electro-spray painting, until the aluminum is thick enough to hold its shape against its weight (with a minor tweak to add some ribs for strength and mounting lugs).
Aluminum makes great wire. Iron and silicon make "silicon steel" for electromagnet core laminations. Iron and any of several impurities makes steel for structures.
Silicon plus impurities and aluminum "wiring" makes solar cells. The hardest part of making them is keeping the vacuum clean. You don't have to passivate them or protect them from water in a lunar (or space) environment, which greatly simplifies manufacture of cells and assemblies.
As for steel mills, have you SEEN the technology involved? It's almost medieval. Ceramic buckets. Hammers. Highest tech is controls and things like rolling mills - for which you can ship a few components to assemble on site. Water is for cooling and washing off oxides - not an issue with vacuum-refined steel. Oxygen is for burning out carbon from pig iron - not an issue when you've got iron ore with no carbon in it that is vacuum-refined.
And how do you "spiral out" a construction of a steel mill that weighs a few million tons and measures power in gigawatts? It can't be built without all the supporting industries being already in place.
You ship a few critical parts for a starter mill and bootstrap from there.
All the talk about cybernetic mining machines is just talk...
Who said anything about cybernetic mining machines? We're talking devices about the equivalent of a lunar-environment road grader and a frontloader or backhoe. Scrape up the dirt and dump it in a hopper. Do it by remote control using operators ON THE MOON and you only need to go out in a suit if something breaks that you can't deal with using waldoes.
Now you might use as much cybernetics as possible on the machinery. Like the stuff that's used on farm equipment. Just because the on-site personnel are pricey so you want as much done automatically as possible. But you won't be dependent on the machines to operate automatically or unattended.
Why exactly are we going to the moon again?... How about we use that other launch platform we have.. you know, earth
Because the moon is a very large bunch of ore in a MUCH shallower gravity well. For any construction for use in space that is of sufficient mass to make building and operating mines, some processing facilities, and a catapult on the moon cost-effective for a step in manufacturing its compaonents, it's the logical way to cut costs and/or boost profits.
Once there is a significant private presence in near-earth orbit you can expect to see development of the moon with private funding.
For starters, it's a LOT cheaper to mine, refine, and launch material for space-based industry on the Moon than on the Earth. The gravity well is MUCH shallower, even with significant industrial outgassing the atmosphere will remain thin enough that electric catapults can provide most of the delta-v to orbit payloads, solar power is much more economical with no atmospheric attenuation and full sunlight whenever you need the power for a launch, and hard vacuum simplifies the construction of solar panels.
... which includes aiding, rather than usurping and suppressing, the development of PRIVATE spaceflight technology and business, the way they historically aided (somewhat) private air flight.
... we have a setup where data maintenance and system maintenance are separate due to encryption.
To do filesystem client maintenance they need root/administrator access on the clients and access while the client is mounting, or attempting to mount, the encrypted filesystems. This gives them access to the content of encrypted filesystems through the client.
Even for data encrypted at the application level the root/administrator access on the client gives them access that can be parleyed into access to the clear data in a number of ways.
You might have SOME chance with an OS that has a security model like that of Multics (though I wouldn't bet on it). But for Commercial stuff, including Windows, Unixes, Linux, etc., forget it. Got root means got everything.
Either you trust your outsourcing company to do what they do how they do it, or you hire an admin to be on site.
And trust the administrator. (Or hire someone you DO trust to look over his shoulder and monitor his keystrokes - and the guy who replaces him when he quits after a week, ad infinitum.)
To maintain your file server they need total control over it. To do a good job they also need root/administrator access to its clients. Goes with the territory.
You have to pick one: Trust an outside contractor with the CONTENT of your file system, or don't trust an outside contractor with the ADMINISTRATION of your file system.
I remember one textbook I had as a child argued that the reason that Lowland Scots prospered in comparison with Highland Scots was due the Protestant work ethic bestowed upon them through Prebyterianism - in comparison, the Highlanders succumbed to their lethargic Catholic proclivities. Hilarious in hindsight, but slightly disturbing as real teaching.
A guitarist friend of mine cut his left arm nearly completely off, and the doctors told him he'd never be able to play again.... I told him to play anyway, and the guitar playing was actually a good therapy. He's not the guitarist he was before going throgh the plate glass window, but he's not all that bad, either.
And then there was Tony Iommi, a left-handed guitarist who lost the tips of some of his right-hand (fretting) fingers in an industrial accident at his day job. After trying unsuccessfully to play right-handed, he restrung his guitar with extra-light (banjo) strings, improvised prosthetic fingertips, and got good again.
Very good.
He went on to be a founder of Black Sabbath and is recognized as one of the two primary creators of the Heavy Metal style.
To bad it's scanned and not digitally blacked out like those documents the government released before that could be easily be read...
The "original PDF" at the link is not scanned. I could switch to the I-beam cursor and cut-and-paste the text.
Cutting text across a blackout didn't show any of the text under the blackout. Perhaps it was removed from the pdf file when the blackout was put in, perhaps the cut-and-paste function honors the blackout. Don't know. Perhaps someone with more time and more knowledge of the PDF format can check.
If the two towers measure and report your distance (using turnaround time adjustments to your cellphone to fit it into the Rx time slot) they can put you on one of two points - one of which can be eliminated by antenna pattern.
If the two towers can't accurately measure your distance but CAN agree on timing for measuring the moment of their reception of your signal, they can put you on a constant-distance-difference hyperbola between them, ala classic LORAN.
I think the ones typically deployed these days can do both, putting you on a fuzzy dot on a hyperbola using only two towers.
You may already realize this, but for clarity's sake: GPS isn't needed to track phones. They can be tracked simply from their signal as long as there are multiple towers within range to receive it.
With with only one tower in range you can (of course) be located as being in its service area and which "pie wedge" you're in. If it exports the distance from the timing handshake (and you're not in a signal shadow and communicating using a reflection) that can be narrowed to an arc around it.
Look at the testing yourself and see the potential loopholes. There's no reason to guess here. The information is available.
But it isn't available directly at that link, which is the top of their documentation publication page. And about 10 minutes of following likely links and searching for things like "electric" did not turn up the algorithm for rating MPG on cars that get some or all of their power from the wall.
Could you (or anyone else who finds that) please post a deeper link here - at least to the document in question if you can't link to the passage? Thanks.
Like the heater in a fuel-powered car, the air can be heated by the heat of losses.
The motor, electronics package, and batteries will be losing a non-trivial percentage of the power consumed as heat, dumping it to the surrounding air. If the "surrounding air" is routed through the cabin you'll have all the heat you need (except maybe when waiting at a very long light.) Similarly, if part or all are water cooled (for compactness, with the water routed to a radiator) the water can be routed to a heater core instead.
Meanwhile, while plugged in, the car can preheat or precool on line power while the batteries remain (or are being) topped up.
Finally: You'll notice that the new Prius is advertising how it uses solar panels to power the ventilation system. This is because Prius was being dinged by new mileage calculations that required it to run its HVAC, and that sucks a bunch of power from the hybrid's battery to run the fan. So they unhooked the fan from the regular electrical system and ran it off a solar panel to get the MPG back up. A solar panel is even better at collecting heat than it is at collecting electricity - by a factor of about four. The volt could do the same. That heat can be circulated through the car when needed, or dumped into the environment when it is to be avoided.
And if having a policy with USAA itself, rather than USAA-CIC, is one of the requirements for using the scanned-check deposit service, then this subtle nuance also applies to this service: It would be limited to current and former officers and NCOs (and their spouses)
Then again, the enlisted are also "associate members" and the service is particularly useful for deployed military. So perhaps limiting the iPhone app to current/ex officers/NCOs (and their spouses) is not what the restriction is about.
I am married to a dependent of a USAA member and I have insurance (auto and homeowners), mortgage, credit, brokerage, IRAs and banking through them.
Are you sure it's not with USAA-CIC?
From Wikipedia:
One of the characteristics that allows USAA to operate differently than almost every other Fortune 500 company is that it is not a corporation. The parent company, United Services Automobile Association is an inter-insurance exchange, the establishment of which is provided for under the Texas Insurance Code.[17] This insurance exchange is made up of current and former military officers and NCOs who have taken out P&C policies with USAA; thus they simultaneously are insured by each other and, as a group, own USAA's assets....
Other insurance services are provided by a variety of wholly-owned subsidiaries. Adult children of USAA members and U.S. military junior enlisted personnel make up a group known at USAA as "associate members" insured through a subsidiary called USAA-Casualty Insurance Company (USAA-CIC). USAA-CIC is not an insurance exchange but rather a Delaware Insurance Corporation. This is a subtle nuance but is important concerning the return of profit...
And if having a policy with USAA itself, rather than USAA-CIC, is one of the requirements for using the scanned-check deposit service, then this subtle nuance also applies to this service: It would be limited to current and former officers and NCOs (and their spouses). (I suspect their minor children would not be eligible due to being minors. B-) )
The name is United SERVICES Automobile Association. It is an inter-insurance exchange under Texas law.
The business is insurance and financial services for Army service personnel and their dependents. Army officer & NCO personnel are insured by USAA proper, enlisted, dependants, and other "associate members" by subsidiaries. So if you have to "have some sort of insurance from USAA" (itself) and "approximately 60% of USAA's customers qualify" it means you are a current or former US army OFFICER or NCO.
Because of their unusual customer base, USAA is at much less risk for fraud on the part of the customers than other financial institutions.
They're also less risk of things like missed or late payments: Military officers are used to being punctual, accurate, and responsible when it comes to keeping their commitments: Their lives and those of their subordinates, friends, and countrymen often depend on it, as does their continued employment and career advancement - being this way is their JOB. That translates into drastically lower interest rates on loans and insurance and higher rates on savings. (Doesn't hurt that the "bank"(s) are a federal thrift and a credit union, either.)
In addition to morse, hams are under the government's requirement not to use any sort of encryption - including coding schemes that aren't encryption at all but just something that the FCC doesn't yet have equipment to read.
For instance: Back in the '50s or so ASCII teletype machines at 110 bps were coming on the surplus market - but the hams were still limited to the WW II vintage 5-bit badot code at 60 bps. "American National Code for Information Interchange" - but the hams, who were supposed to be experimenters at the cutting edge weren't allowed to use it. (Apparently the FCC didn't want to buy new teletypes so they weren't interested in adopting the ham proposals to allow the code.)
What finally broke the ice: Irv Hoff and one of his buddies built (in the days of soldering discrete transistors together to make logic) a device to convert ASCII to and from morse (which had no speed limit) and transmitted it using FSK at some hysterical speed. Of course the FCC came after them for using an illegal coding - and they said "Illegal? It's MORSE! Just tape it and slow it down." (Which they did, and were able to read it.)
The rules were changed to allow ASCII at reasonable speeds shortly after.
In addition to coding rules, there are (or were) bans on any commercial traffic, limits on "obscene" language, limits on talking with people in certain countries, and requirements that an operator be managing and monitoring the traffic with limited exceptions for automated radios. (Where's the first amendment when you need it?)
This stuff makes it really hard to do things like forward internet traffic over ham radio: Any given packet might violate one or more of those rules. Encryption, at least for digital signatures, is required these days for authentication and other defenses against identity theft. Any new protocol constitutes a new coding. Etc.
Why should a hobbiest bust his butt to obtain a license to communicate under such draconian rules, when the internet and unlicensed-band wireless systems like WiFi serve most of the purposes so much better and with these limitations?
Kissing? Hell if I know, maybe a delaying tactic developed by females to see just how committed and patient a male was.
From a "psychology of language acquisition" course I took back in the early '70s:
Apes and (some?) monkeys have a social signal called "pout face": It consists of puckering/pursing the lips in the direction of another individual, and signals that the sender is attempting to be friendly. It looks very much like a human's extreme solicitation for the other individual to kiss the sender (though it is not).
Perhaps kissing in humans as early pair-bonding and sexual foreplay evolved from this "Hi! Be my friend?" signal of our primate ancestors?
Alternatively: Some herd herbivores, such as camels, do kiss - to share saliva containing necessary digestive bacteria with other members of the herd, in order to help each other build and maintain a healthy digestive tract. This is especially necessary for getting cultures established in the newborn, to enable digestion of forage and thus weaning. Perhaps kissing babies performs a similar function for humans. If so: Courtship behavior often contains elements of treating the potential partner as one would a child, to show the partner that you'd be a good parent. Thus kissing as courtship would follow from kissing as a good child-care action.
A third possibility: Some diseases have different outcomes depending on what tissue receives the initial infection. Example: Smallpox. Before "vaccination" (injection of the related "vaccinia" (cowpox) live virus, which doesn't generally kill people and confers cross-immunity) was developed, "innoculation" with live smallpox virus insured that the infection started in the skin (usually survivable) rather than the lungs (usually fatal). The mouth has a VERY active branch of the immune system, as a defense against food-borne pathogens. Perhaps, when one is starting to come down with some infections, giving the other members of the family their initial infection in the mouth, rather than risking it take root in the lungs, increases their chance of survival.
Slashdot Mirror
That formulation parses and functions for me.
It's a compact way of saying: ...
- Lasers were invented almost a century ago.
- Since then there has been a continuing series of inventions of progressively smaller lasers.
- And with each of these inventions the inventor and/or the media went into a hype frenzy about the latest "world's smallest laser"
- But there's something special about this one
And there is: It's the first one where the resonator (a size-limiting component) is MUCH smaller than a quarter-wavelength of the resonant frequency light.
And, as somebody who worked in a laser lab back in the late '60s and with cutting-edge semiconductors these days, I can attest that this little device is a BIG DEAL (TM).
I expect the next step - an electrically-pumped version - in a year or less. Followed by one that can be grown epitaxially on a wafer and hooked to a waveguide that's also built by stock chip manufacturing techniques. And that's the point where you switch to optics - first for getting signals on and off the chip (a BIG power eater), eventually maybe for getting signals around the chip.
Unless something BETTER comes along before then. (Which is the REAL reason most of these breakthroughs never make production.)
You are missing a smiley here :-) It is definitely cheaper to launch stuff from the Moon if you have a cat-a-pult already. But where do you see metal ores on the Moon?
Scrape up the dirt: Based on the moon rocks collected from the Apollo landing sites it's about four types of minerals and composed primarily of:
- Oxygen
- Calcium
- Iron
- Aluminum
- Silicon
- Titanium
Some refining processes require amazing quantities of energy, water, oxygen and other very specific ingredients that I'd be amazed if they just sit on the surface.
You've got all the direct sunlight and hard vacuum you want for free.
Refining the above consists mainly of heating them enough to drive off the oxygen. (Not sure if the Aluminum needs electrolytic processing but power is not an issue.)
Building solar furnaces consists of:
- inflating a balloon of the correct shape.
- vaporizing a little aluminum to condense onto it to make it conductive (or start with a balloon that's pre-aluminized.
- Hooking a few kilovolt power supply between the balloon and the aluminum vapor source.
- Vaporizing more aluminum, with the voltage sucking it onto the balloon like electro-spray painting, until the aluminum is thick enough to hold its shape against its weight (with a minor tweak to add some ribs for strength and mounting lugs).
Aluminum makes great wire. Iron and silicon make "silicon steel" for electromagnet core laminations. Iron and any of several impurities makes steel for structures.
Silicon plus impurities and aluminum "wiring" makes solar cells. The hardest part of making them is keeping the vacuum clean. You don't have to passivate them or protect them from water in a lunar (or space) environment, which greatly simplifies manufacture of cells and assemblies.
As for steel mills, have you SEEN the technology involved? It's almost medieval. Ceramic buckets. Hammers. Highest tech is controls and things like rolling mills - for which you can ship a few components to assemble on site. Water is for cooling and washing off oxides - not an issue with vacuum-refined steel. Oxygen is for burning out carbon from pig iron - not an issue when you've got iron ore with no carbon in it that is vacuum-refined.
And how do you "spiral out" a construction of a steel mill that weighs a few million tons and measures power in gigawatts? It can't be built without all the supporting industries being already in place.
You ship a few critical parts for a starter mill and bootstrap from there.
All the talk about cybernetic mining machines is just talk ...
Who said anything about cybernetic mining machines? We're talking devices about the equivalent of a lunar-environment road grader and a frontloader or backhoe. Scrape up the dirt and dump it in a hopper. Do it by remote control using operators ON THE MOON and you only need to go out in a suit if something breaks that you can't deal with using waldoes.
Now you might use as much cybernetics as possible on the machinery. Like the stuff that's used on farm equipment. Just because the on-site personnel are pricey so you want as much done automatically as possible. But you won't be dependent on the machines to operate automatically or unattended.
As was predicted in the last panel.
Why exactly are we going to the moon again? ... How about we use that other launch platform we have.. you know, earth
Because the moon is a very large bunch of ore in a MUCH shallower gravity well. For any construction for use in space that is of sufficient mass to make building and operating mines, some processing facilities, and a catapult on the moon cost-effective for a step in manufacturing its compaonents, it's the logical way to cut costs and/or boost profits.
For just 900 empty jars.
BurmaShave
Look around. Do you see private companies lining up to fund Moon travel?
Why, yes, I do.
Virgin Galactic comes to mind immediately.
Once there is a significant private presence in near-earth orbit you can expect to see development of the moon with private funding.
For starters, it's a LOT cheaper to mine, refine, and launch material for space-based industry on the Moon than on the Earth. The gravity well is MUCH shallower, even with significant industrial outgassing the atmosphere will remain thin enough that electric catapults can provide most of the delta-v to orbit payloads, solar power is much more economical with no atmospheric attenuation and full sunlight whenever you need the power for a launch, and hard vacuum simplifies the construction of solar panels.
... which includes aiding, rather than usurping and suppressing, the development of PRIVATE spaceflight technology and business, the way they historically aided (somewhat) private air flight.
... we have a setup where data maintenance and system maintenance are separate due to encryption.
To do filesystem client maintenance they need root/administrator access on the clients and access while the client is mounting, or attempting to mount, the encrypted filesystems. This gives them access to the content of encrypted filesystems through the client.
Even for data encrypted at the application level the root/administrator access on the client gives them access that can be parleyed into access to the clear data in a number of ways.
You might have SOME chance with an OS that has a security model like that of Multics (though I wouldn't bet on it). But for Commercial stuff, including Windows, Unixes, Linux, etc., forget it. Got root means got everything.
Either you trust your outsourcing company to do what they do how they do it, or you hire an admin to be on site.
And trust the administrator. (Or hire someone you DO trust to look over his shoulder and monitor his keystrokes - and the guy who replaces him when he quits after a week, ad infinitum.)
To maintain your file server they need total control over it. To do a good job they also need root/administrator access to its clients. Goes with the territory.
You have to pick one: Trust an outside contractor with the CONTENT of your file system, or don't trust an outside contractor with the ADMINISTRATION of your file system.
No middle ground.
I remember one textbook I had as a child argued that the reason that Lowland Scots prospered in comparison with Highland Scots was due the Protestant work ethic bestowed upon them through Prebyterianism - in comparison, the Highlanders succumbed to their lethargic Catholic proclivities. Hilarious in hindsight, but slightly disturbing as real teaching.
You mean that WASN'T it? Hoot, mon!
A guitarist friend of mine cut his left arm nearly completely off, and the doctors told him he'd never be able to play again. ... I told him to play anyway, and the guitar playing was actually a good therapy. He's not the guitarist he was before going throgh the plate glass window, but he's not all that bad, either.
And then there was Tony Iommi, a left-handed guitarist who lost the tips of some of his right-hand (fretting) fingers in an industrial accident at his day job. After trying unsuccessfully to play right-handed, he restrung his guitar with extra-light (banjo) strings, improvised prosthetic fingertips, and got good again.
Very good.
He went on to be a founder of Black Sabbath and is recognized as one of the two primary creators of the Heavy Metal style.
Make that "Hear, hear!" (as in "pay attention to this thing I agree with")
Of course in Les Paul's case, the correct spelling is doubly appropriate.
To bad it's scanned and not digitally blacked out like those documents the government released before that could be easily be read...
The "original PDF" at the link is not scanned. I could switch to the I-beam cursor and cut-and-paste the text.
Cutting text across a blackout didn't show any of the text under the blackout. Perhaps it was removed from the pdf file when the blackout was put in, perhaps the cut-and-paste function honors the blackout. Don't know. Perhaps someone with more time and more knowledge of the PDF format can check.
These unmanned planes are especially dangerous to people attending a wedding or a funeral.
Especially when the guests are firing into the air in celebration or salute.
I like the comforting feeling of knowing there's a pilot in the cockpit.
I like the comforting feeling of knowing there's a pilot in the cockpit of the planes flying OVER me when I'm down here on the ground.
If the two towers measure and report your distance (using turnaround time adjustments to your cellphone to fit it into the Rx time slot) they can put you on one of two points - one of which can be eliminated by antenna pattern.
If the two towers can't accurately measure your distance but CAN agree on timing for measuring the moment of their reception of your signal, they can put you on a constant-distance-difference hyperbola between them, ala classic LORAN.
I think the ones typically deployed these days can do both, putting you on a fuzzy dot on a hyperbola using only two towers.
You may already realize this, but for clarity's sake: GPS isn't needed to track phones. They can be tracked simply from their signal as long as there are multiple towers within range to receive it.
With with only one tower in range you can (of course) be located as being in its service area and which "pie wedge" you're in. If it exports the distance from the timing handshake (and you're not in a signal shadow and communicating using a reflection) that can be narrowed to an arc around it.
Look at the testing yourself and see the potential loopholes. There's no reason to guess here. The information is available.
But it isn't available directly at that link, which is the top of their documentation publication page. And about 10 minutes of following likely links and searching for things like "electric" did not turn up the algorithm for rating MPG on cars that get some or all of their power from the wall.
Could you (or anyone else who finds that) please post a deeper link here - at least to the document in question if you can't link to the passage? Thanks.
Don't know if this is what they're doing, but:
Like the heater in a fuel-powered car, the air can be heated by the heat of losses.
The motor, electronics package, and batteries will be losing a non-trivial percentage of the power consumed as heat, dumping it to the surrounding air. If the "surrounding air" is routed through the cabin you'll have all the heat you need (except maybe when waiting at a very long light.) Similarly, if part or all are water cooled (for compactness, with the water routed to a radiator) the water can be routed to a heater core instead.
Meanwhile, while plugged in, the car can preheat or precool on line power while the batteries remain (or are being) topped up.
Finally: You'll notice that the new Prius is advertising how it uses solar panels to power the ventilation system. This is because Prius was being dinged by new mileage calculations that required it to run its HVAC, and that sucks a bunch of power from the hybrid's battery to run the fan. So they unhooked the fan from the regular electrical system and ran it off a solar panel to get the MPG back up. A solar panel is even better at collecting heat than it is at collecting electricity - by a factor of about four. The volt could do the same. That heat can be circulated through the car when needed, or dumped into the environment when it is to be avoided.
And if having a policy with USAA itself, rather than USAA-CIC, is one of the requirements for using the scanned-check deposit service, then this subtle nuance also applies to this service: It would be limited to current and former officers and NCOs (and their spouses)
Then again, the enlisted are also "associate members" and the service is particularly useful for deployed military. So perhaps limiting the iPhone app to current/ex officers/NCOs (and their spouses) is not what the restriction is about.
I am married to a dependent of a USAA member and I have insurance (auto and homeowners), mortgage, credit, brokerage, IRAs and banking through them.
Are you sure it's not with USAA-CIC?
From Wikipedia:
And if having a policy with USAA itself, rather than USAA-CIC, is one of the requirements for using the scanned-check deposit service, then this subtle nuance also applies to this service: It would be limited to current and former officers and NCOs (and their spouses). (I suspect their minor children would not be eligible due to being minors. B-) )
For "army" read "military service". Was started by army officers but now covers the other services - including the reserves.
You're both right:
The name is United SERVICES Automobile Association. It is an inter-insurance exchange under Texas law.
The business is insurance and financial services for Army service personnel and their dependents. Army officer & NCO personnel are insured by USAA proper, enlisted, dependants, and other "associate members" by subsidiaries. So if you have to "have some sort of insurance from USAA" (itself) and "approximately 60% of USAA's customers qualify" it means you are a current or former US army OFFICER or NCO.
Because of their unusual customer base, USAA is at much less risk for fraud on the part of the customers than other financial institutions.
They're also less risk of things like missed or late payments: Military officers are used to being punctual, accurate, and responsible when it comes to keeping their commitments: Their lives and those of their subordinates, friends, and countrymen often depend on it, as does their continued employment and career advancement - being this way is their JOB. That translates into drastically lower interest rates on loans and insurance and higher rates on savings. (Doesn't hurt that the "bank"(s) are a federal thrift and a credit union, either.)
In addition to morse, hams are under the government's requirement not to use any sort of encryption - including coding schemes that aren't encryption at all but just something that the FCC doesn't yet have equipment to read.
For instance: Back in the '50s or so ASCII teletype machines at 110 bps were coming on the surplus market - but the hams were still limited to the WW II vintage 5-bit badot code at 60 bps. "American National Code for Information Interchange" - but the hams, who were supposed to be experimenters at the cutting edge weren't allowed to use it. (Apparently the FCC didn't want to buy new teletypes so they weren't interested in adopting the ham proposals to allow the code.)
What finally broke the ice: Irv Hoff and one of his buddies built (in the days of soldering discrete transistors together to make logic) a device to convert ASCII to and from morse (which had no speed limit) and transmitted it using FSK at some hysterical speed. Of course the FCC came after them for using an illegal coding - and they said "Illegal? It's MORSE! Just tape it and slow it down." (Which they did, and were able to read it.)
The rules were changed to allow ASCII at reasonable speeds shortly after.
In addition to coding rules, there are (or were) bans on any commercial traffic, limits on "obscene" language, limits on talking with people in certain countries, and requirements that an operator be managing and monitoring the traffic with limited exceptions for automated radios. (Where's the first amendment when you need it?)
This stuff makes it really hard to do things like forward internet traffic over ham radio: Any given packet might violate one or more of those rules. Encryption, at least for digital signatures, is required these days for authentication and other defenses against identity theft. Any new protocol constitutes a new coding. Etc.
Why should a hobbiest bust his butt to obtain a license to communicate under such draconian rules, when the internet and unlicensed-band wireless systems like WiFi serve most of the purposes so much better and with these limitations?
Kissing? Hell if I know, maybe a delaying tactic developed by females to see just how committed and patient a male was.
From a "psychology of language acquisition" course I took back in the early '70s:
Apes and (some?) monkeys have a social signal called "pout face": It consists of puckering/pursing the lips in the direction of another individual, and signals that the sender is attempting to be friendly. It looks very much like a human's extreme solicitation for the other individual to kiss the sender (though it is not).
Perhaps kissing in humans as early pair-bonding and sexual foreplay evolved from this "Hi! Be my friend?" signal of our primate ancestors?
Alternatively: Some herd herbivores, such as camels, do kiss - to share saliva containing necessary digestive bacteria with other members of the herd, in order to help each other build and maintain a healthy digestive tract. This is especially necessary for getting cultures established in the newborn, to enable digestion of forage and thus weaning. Perhaps kissing babies performs a similar function for humans. If so: Courtship behavior often contains elements of treating the potential partner as one would a child, to show the partner that you'd be a good parent. Thus kissing as courtship would follow from kissing as a good child-care action.
A third possibility: Some diseases have different outcomes depending on what tissue receives the initial infection. Example: Smallpox. Before "vaccination" (injection of the related "vaccinia" (cowpox) live virus, which doesn't generally kill people and confers cross-immunity) was developed, "innoculation" with live smallpox virus insured that the infection started in the skin (usually survivable) rather than the lungs (usually fatal). The mouth has a VERY active branch of the immune system, as a defense against food-borne pathogens. Perhaps, when one is starting to come down with some infections, giving the other members of the family their initial infection in the mouth, rather than risking it take root in the lungs, increases their chance of survival.