Schedule I drugs are illegal, period, because the government feels that there's no legitimate reason you should be using them. They consider any use of a Schedule I substance a "recreational" use, because in their opinion, you couldn't possibly be using that substance to treat any illness or condition.
Which brings up the questions:
- What is illegitimate about recreation? and more importantly:
- Where does the government claim to find constitutional authorization to ban particular recreations?
Of course since the RICO laws reestablished the financial incentive structure that drove the Spanish Inquisition you'll have a hard time getting support to strike down the drug laws from those who benefit in government and law enforcement.
The URL was meant to be unpronounceable by anyone -- a joke ultimately that has backfired on me countless times when I'm called and asked what the URL is to the damn thing.
Backfired another way, too.
I was told about Slashdot by Hugh Daniels (verbally) during a busy time, when I had GAFIAted from conferencing systems but might have picked up participating again for a good one. Thanks to the confusing and unpronouncable name I didn't end up getting around to joining it for some time (couple years?) after. (Thus my five-digit user number.)
Now perhaps there are some (like my "freaks") who don't think that was a backfire. B-) But I suspect there are a lot of others, many valuable, who didn't find and start participating until much later than if the site had been named differently.
By "simultaneous", do you mean that, say, 10 antenna elements can be sending 10 different packets to 10 receivers at once,
Yes.
If it's the former, how does that work?
Like I said: Look up "steerable null".
You compute the strengths and phases for each of the N antennas to create a pattern that has a null at the angles toward stations 2 through N but not on station one. You modulate that with the information you want to send to station 1.
You also compute another set of strengths and phases to put nulls on stations 1 and 3 through N but not on station 2 and modulate that with the information you want to send to station 2.
Ditto for stations 3 through N.
Then for each antenna you sum the N modulated streams, convert them D-to-A, and THAT's what you send up the feed line. (Actually you send a lower-frequency IF: N pairs of signals, in quadrature, one pair for each antenna. Up by the antenna you up-convert it using a common local oscillator for all the antennas so it stays coherent.)
All this pattern forming is done in a DSP with an NxN matrix multiplication in complex numbers. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the inverse-FFT computation it's doing to construct the modulation.
In the receive direction you down-convert with a common local oscillator to get N sets of quadrature signal pairs, digitize them, and multiply by the inverse matrix. This resolves the signals from the N antennas into N signals equivalent to N separate complete sets of antennas with the same N "nulls on all but MY guy" patterns as with the transmitters.
Of course just as the local oscilators had to be common across all the component antennas' transmitters and receivers, the D-to-A converters have to share a clocking reference, and the A-to-D converters ditto.
On top of all that the individual antennas of the array have a pattern of their own which defines the sector - typically a 120-degree (plus a tad) fan, breaking the coverage area up into three chunks, each with its own set of N antennas. The total pattern is the product of this fan pattern with the patterns computed for the steerable-nulls.
Nice thing about it is that you can command one of the station transmitter to send you a test pattern in one of the (many) frequency slots of the orthogonal-frequency-division-modulation - one which you reserved for signaling - while you're commanding the rest of 'em to shut up. The signal strengths and phases you get from doing this for each of the remote stations lets you construct your pattern matrices.
You actually end up constructing patterns that turn multipath to your advantage, so the direct signal and the reflections sum up to a better-than-single-path signal on the target station while the multiple paths to the other stations sum up to a good null.
It appears to be a type of glass threw connection over a single strand for hundreds of households. It is prone to dB loss and don't even think about pulling the specs for the splices and couplers that they are using. It is a great idea and a very telco like implementation.
Sounds like a PON (Passive Optical Network). If it's the one I saw at a tradeshow a couple years back it has:
- Curb to houses on one of the two common infrared frequencies.
- Houses to curb on the other.
- Optical splitters (like a cable network's coaxial splitters) to distribute the outgoing and collect the incoming light.
- The protocol is essentially ethernet, with an inbound scheduling add-on, and the chip is a hardcoded for 256 MAC addresses (which allows for, I think, a max of 254 drops).
I fully understand running more than one user on a single strand of fiber however they are running hundreds with high db loss and compensating with repeaters. I guess if I was going to do it I would have simply ran a larger bundle of fibers to a neighborhood and broke it apart there.
Even if you were close enough to the CO that you didn't need a repeater (which probably means using more expensive single-mode fiber - which in turn would mean using it everywhere due to inventory issues) you'd still need two transceivers per customer, along with a transceiver slot in a line card in a VERY expensive box in VERY expensive rack space.
With a PON you need one transceiver per subscriber, plus three per neighborhood of up to 250 or so subscribers. (Optical splitters are basically a funny splice to fibers, done in a factory, so they're a heck of a lot cheaper than transceivers and active logic to route or switch packets between them.) You also only need one transceiver and the associated panel area at the CO for a neighborhood (or one for many "250ish customer neighborhoods" if there's other routing hardware at the local box where the "neighborhood" headend(s) lives.) And the distances are small enough that cheaper multimode fibers and short-range transceivers are just fine.
Signal strength losses aren't an issue. This is a digital signal, so as long as the strength is adequate for detection it's error free despite a lot of loss. A set of ideal balanced splitters doing a 1->256 split is only about 24db attenuation and real ones aren't that much worse. Drop in the bucket.
Specifically, elements a few wavelengths apart are as directional as a telephoto lens which is one or two micrometers across (a few wavelengths of visible light).
OK, so I overstated it. (A lot. B-) )
Nevertheless, with even a rather small angular separation between remote stations, it's entirely adequate for N antennas to synthesize N separate, simultaneous, coverage patterns, each with N-1 solid nulls on the N-1 stations that aren't intended to be sent to or received from by the pattern in question, giving each the full benefit of the channel bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio.
Stations on precisely the same bearing, of course, will get stuck with sharing the bandwidth, and those with multiple antennas that aren't sufficiently separated also won't get the full benefit of MIMO channel multiplication
Receiver quieting (due to strong nearby stations blanketing weaker, more distant ones) shows up as roundoff error in the A-D converters. It can be mitigated by commanding the nearer stations to reduce output power.
Islam has some major issues because the entire religion is controlled by very corrupt demagogues.
Actually (as with current Christianity) it's only a small percentage that are followers of the, shall we say, "interpretations of Islam" in question. (Of course with somewhat more than a fifth of the Earth's population following some form of Islam it doesn't take a very large fraction to raise a sizable army.)
The bulk of Muslims are followers of juristic schools that forbid -or reserve for situations that aren't currently met (such as attacks on Islam itself) - essentially all of the activities of these factions. By their rules these factions are heretical.
The problem is that Islam has a rule about not calling other Muslims heretics. ("If one man calls another man a non-Muslim, one of them is not a Muslim.") This is apparently directed at avoiding faction fights. But it has the side-effect that most Muslims avoid criticizing other people who claim to be Muslim, for fear of sinning themselves.
Some of them DO criticize the troublesome factions as "brigands" - murderous criminals for whom the death penalty is actually required (and the various forms of avoiding imposing it for virtually any other offense are forbidden). But most won't call them heretics or point out how the things they're doing are not what (their own version of) Islam requires or permits.
Meanwhile the troublesome factions have no problem at all loudly proclaiming their version is the only true Islam, calling anybody who doesn't exactly match their interpretation a non-Muslim or (even worse) an apostate, and killing (or "force-converting") them whenever convenient.
This has the unfortunate result of making it difficult to judge how many Muslims actually oppose these factions. The media doesn't pick up on the "brigandage" criticism and the very few Muslims willing to call the factions heretics - but is perfectly willing to propagate the factions' claims of having the one true Islam and characterize their ideology as "Fundamentalist" - implying they have the real article and the non-rabid-Jihadists are just lazy or backsliders. So to non-Muslim eyes, the entire Islamic population appears to be at least quietly supporting these factions and to consider them legitimate practitioners of the faith.
(This also makes it hard on those individual Muslims who are being pressured by these factions to resist them, since they don't have outspoken social support from the other Muslims.)
Or if a customer is close enough and his own M (= N) antennas are separated enough you can give him M separate channels with the data smeared across them for M times the bandwidth.
Arrgh. Should have previewed. The HTML formatting ate the "less than" sign.
I was talking about the amount of bandwidth a single customer could potentially receive.
Look into "MIMO". Multiply the bandwidth by the base-2 log of the signal to noise ratio by the number of coordinated antennas on the end with fewer coordinated antennas.
Also, I believe the cellular companies are transmitting on non-overlapping channels with each sector antenna (at UHF and microwave frequencies, they are not directional enough to prevent overloading the other antennas/radios a few feet away), and they separate uplink/downlink frequencies quite a bit to help with this too.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on whether the cell site is busy enough to be worth putting in the added equipment.
Look into "steerable null", a form of synthetic aperture. At UHF and microwave frequencies the beams are about as directional as a telephoto lens when the component antennas at the cell site are separated by several feet. You can use that with N separate antennas to get separate single channels to N customers. Or if a customer is close enough and his own M (= N) antennas are separated enough you can give him M separate channels with the data smeared across them for M times the bandwidth.
Note that with synthetic aperture the beamwidth of the individual antennas has little to do with the beam width of the synthesized antennas. Instead what it determines is the range of angles the array can work with (and must accept non-nulled-out interference from).
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But my question is how are you going to have "commerce" run the government as a good thing?...
I didn't say *I* thought it was a good idea. I said "a free-marketer would still consider the Russian version to be corrupt and the American version not."
Ask one of them. B-)
(Personally I think that free markets are great and we ought to try them some time, but that when the values go negative they tend to break down and you need something additional. Like some minimal government. Or and armed population with a serious commitment to "Never start a fight, always finish one." along with some common idea of what constitutes "a fight", i.e. impermissible force, fraud, or threat. And there are lots of other possibilities.)
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I've re-read it, still not getting it. The "invisible hand" of economic pressure can control commerce and have it be a free market and a good thing, but what does it look like when the "invisible hand" of economic pressure controls the federal government?
Prohibition leading to increased alcohol consumption, formation of gangs, gang wars, shooting wars between gangs and law enforcement, poisonous booze, etc. Similarly with the "drug war".
Gun restrictions leading to increased crime - including increased shootings.
Anti-poverty programs leading to an increasing fraction of the population permanently supported by such charity.
Price controls leading to alternation of shortages (i.e. gas lines) and further price increases.
Federal aid to and meddling with school systems leading to drastic reduction of the quality of public education - until some public schools are literally graduating more illiterates than readers.
I could go on.
Individuals in the government should not be making decisions based on their own personal economic gain.
The individuals I'm talking about are the citizens. The invisible hand works in more ways than via money.
Meanwhile, the government deals in the economy of negative values (such as the use of force, theft, imprisonment, and killing). Some of the same "invisible hand" analysis can be applied to such values and the "market reaction" of the people these are applied to. But their reaction to the negative sign on the "value" causes higher-order effects to be stronger than first-order, leading to explosions of unintended consequences. So the design and application of law is not straightforward.
One of the differences between the capital-letter "Progressive" and "(classic, non-Neo) Conservative" sides of the culture war is that the Progressive side acts as if the first-order ("intended") consequences of the laws are their only effect - leading to an explosion of trying harder and making it still worse when the effect is the opposite of what is expected. Classic Conservatives take into account the second-order effects - which makes them look insane to those who don't understand what they're doing (and won't listen to, or won't believe, their explanations, or will reject them because they're not "nice".)
It's not immediately obvious, for instance, that fewer guns means more crime or that selfish motives can lead to good long-term effects for others and altruistic motives to bad ones.
Re:I think someone has a sig relevant to this news
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I'm quite aware of that, and it's exactly what I'm addressing:
There are some people who think that "commerce controlling the government" might be a GOOD thing. (Presuming, of course, that it ISN'T just outright bribery by an elite, which is what the original poster was joking about.)
Blue materials (generally) are newer as they are harder to get (it is easier to red-shift emission, that is just throwing away energy - it is harder to blue-shift things, that is having to force a higher energy out) - hence development on blue materials is a few years behind red and green.
I was under the impression that the problem with blue was exactly that energy issue. The per-photon energy of blue light is large enough to put serious stress on molecular bonds - more than enough to bleach out most organic dyes. So they have to hunt for more stable light-emitting compounds for the blue pixels.
When will people learn that corporations do not have feelings? They are mandated to make profit, nothing more. And everything they do is for the purpose of maximizing shareholder equity. It is the law.
The original poster is displaying his callowness. He wants the right things to be done only for "nice" reasons, and the world to be all rainbows and pink ponies.
If he ever grows up he'll get it. About unintended consequences, second-order effects overwhelming first-order effects, and the way both economic forces and (if properly adjusted) the law can make people do well by doing good - and thus do more and more good as they smile all the way to the bank.
Unfortunately, these days a lot of people are emulating Peter Pan even into retirement age.
While this is to be applauded, it'd be better if companies like this opened their products because they truly believed in openness, rather than to beat the competition over the head.
What makes altruism in this case "better"? Innovation is born from necessity and competition.
I'd rater "The Invisible Hand" in the spiked gauntlet dragged them kicking and screaming into truly opening their products (because the least bit of lock-in bites them big time on the bottom line), while their competitors beat them over the head and shoulders all along the way, than that the opened their systems out of the goodness of their heart.
If they do it for a solid business reason that they can understand, it will stick. (And the stockholders will replace them if it comes unstuck.) If they do it for ideology it will last until the first financial crunch, executive training seminar, or mood swing.
Then:
- Multiply by the number of cells.
- Multiply that by the number of directaional-antenna sectors in each cell.
- And multiply yet again by the number of antennas in the steerable-null array in each sector. Which is presuming you're even using a single-base-multiple-remote model, rather than an adaptive mesh network where the users also forward packets to other users who can't (or shouldn't) hit the landline bridge directly.
Remember: We're talking cellular technology here. Unlike TV, it's not one big high-power site blanketing an entire region. Instead it can be sub-divided as fine as you like, with big cells at startup being broken into smaller cells as more subscribers sign up (and provide revenue to finance the cells). Repeat fractally.
Re:I think someone has a sig relevant to this news
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The GGP post reverses this, having the Russian thing make sense and the American be corrupt.
Depends on what you mean by "Commerce".
If you're talking "The Invisible Hand" of economic pressure originating with the desires and choices of masses of individuals, rather than bribery of officials by corporations or wealthy individuals, a free-marketer would still consider the Russian version to be corrupt and the American version not. B-)
Huh? Most scholarships from the government are for us citizens only. Maybe for an undergrad department a school will pay for a few international students to make their stats look good, but not an entire department worth!
We're not talking "scholarships" and we're not talking "undergrad". We're talking "teaching assistantships" and "grad school".
And if you'll reread my posting you'll see that the students I said "feel responsible for... debt" are US students who feel responsible for their OWN debts - i.e. the student loans that are all they can get - and thus minimize their size and start paying them off sooner by dropping out at Bachelors' and going to work, rather than going on to grad school.
You've got most of the answer. Here's the missing piece:
At many universities, when it comes to handing out financial aid, the grants, research and teaching assistantships are only given to foreign students and the US citizens can only get loans.
This is apparently because the faculty administering the departments have a set idea of people from other countries as poor and the US citizens as rich. They hold to this fixed idea even when the US citizens applying are actually living hand-to-mouth with no help from the family while the foreign applicants are the children of the the upper classes (especially the royals or the dictators' inner circle and the owners of the major industries - often the same families). The latter may be wearing rolexes and driving sports cars. Yet they get the paid positions, while the US citizens who aren't already independently wealthy must accumulate a crushing debt load - to be paid off, with interest, once they've left school and found a job.
The result is that such US students tend to leave school once they have enough credentials to start paying off the loans, rather than stay for grad school and accumulate more debt.
The issue is particularly accute in engineering schools. Students rich enough to afford to pay their own way gravitate to law, medicine, and business. Those in engineering tend to come from middle and lower income backgrounds.
Phil: You might want to check whether your school is one of those with such informal discrimination in hiring.
Further, engineering students tend to come from families with certain cultural biases. These often lead the parents to expect the children to work their way through college - which means they may not provide much support even if they could. Financial aid qualifications take into account how much the parents COULD pay, not how much they WILL. So they get little or no aid from the parents, yet are ineligible for most aid programs.
Meanwhile the children tend to feel responsible for their debts, which means they avoid accumulating them and try to pay them off as soon as possible.
So it's hardly surprising to find an engineering school where the graduate student population is composed almost entirely of foreign students.
Blevins, who trademarked "pops-right" and invented the "presto-pop" prepackaged ready-to-pop popcorn/oil/aluminum popping pan, for decades ran the "popcorn poll" on presidential races.
Moviegoers could request their popcorn in a Democrat or Republican styled box. Starting with Truman/Dewey upset election and running for 20 years he successfully predicted the outcome of six consecutive presidential races.
The solution is obviously to get rid of all the children.
Kick them off the net? Or "Send your kid to Kamp"? B-)
Seriously, though: The internet was created by adults for adults. As such it has its share of "neighborhoods" that are "not safe for minors". They're the virtual equivalent of singles bars, strip-joints, adult bookstores, red-light districts, criminal and gang hangouts, etc.
What parent would let their child go unescorted to such places in the real world? Why should parental responsibility end when the world is virtual?
Many of these adult activities are legally protected in the real world. The government may not eliminate them in order to make the entire world a safe playground for the kiddies. It's good to see that the courts agree the same principle applies to the virtual world.
Here's a breakdown of users hitting Google by age group:
I presume that's generated from the birth dates given when signing up for google services. If so, seems to me there are a number of sources of selection bias and other corruption, notably:
- It's only people who use google.
- It's only those who signed up.
- It counts every ID they sign up for as a distinct user.
- It's using the CLAIMED age.
Failure [of the carriers] to [select who may use bulk text messaging] will clearly result in text messaging being used for advertising.
You misunderstand what is at issue.
The issue is not whether the carriers may chose to block bulk text messages. They may block:
- Nobody,
- Everybody, or
- Everybody but who their customer opts-in to.
The issue is whether, once the carriers set up a system where their customers can opt-in to bulk-message broadcasters, they can then arbitrarily accept SOME broadcasters for the the opt-in list and reject others.
If the carrier treats all such broadcasters equally, making them available to their customers for opt-in if they request (and meet technical requirements unrelated to content, politics, or other extraneous factors), it's a common carrier.
If it allows some opt-in broadcasters and rejects others, it loses its common-carrier status.
Advertising/junkmail isn't an issue: You don't get it unless you deliberately subscribe to it, and you can unsubscribe if you change your mind.
The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.
Then that needs to change
As I understand it (IANAL).
The status of common carrier does not require explicit legislation. It helps. But it comes into US law via English Common Law as well as by explicit legislation. As such, they have a choice:
- They can pick and chose what messages to carry and/or what customers to serve - and be liable for the messages they carry and the actions of those customers (as an "accessory" and possibly a "co-conspirator") whenever messages carried over their network are involved. Or:
- They can claim "common carrier" status for carrying messages - at which point they must serve all customers on the same terms and carry all messages without regard to content, except as explicitly prohibited by law.
Explicit legislation setting the requirements and limits on a particular form of common carrier status simply clarifies the rules for that form. In its absence the common law rules. Common law is based on court precedent, so the rules are a bit less clear to non-judges (at least in situations that hadn't come up before). But it's no less binding.
Slashdot Mirror
Schedule I drugs are illegal, period, because the government feels that there's no legitimate reason you should be using them. They consider any use of a Schedule I substance a "recreational" use, because in their opinion, you couldn't possibly be using that substance to treat any illness or condition.
Which brings up the questions:
- What is illegitimate about recreation?
and more importantly:
- Where does the government claim to find constitutional authorization to ban particular recreations?
Of course since the RICO laws reestablished the financial incentive structure that drove the Spanish Inquisition you'll have a hard time getting support to strike down the drug laws from those who benefit in government and law enforcement.
The URL was meant to be unpronounceable by anyone -- a joke ultimately that has backfired on me countless times when I'm called and asked what the URL is to the damn thing.
Backfired another way, too.
I was told about Slashdot by Hugh Daniels (verbally) during a busy time, when I had GAFIAted from conferencing systems but might have picked up participating again for a good one. Thanks to the confusing and unpronouncable name I didn't end up getting around to joining it for some time (couple years?) after. (Thus my five-digit user number.)
Now perhaps there are some (like my "freaks") who don't think that was a backfire. B-) But I suspect there are a lot of others, many valuable, who didn't find and start participating until much later than if the site had been named differently.
Or who never participated at all. B-(
By "simultaneous", do you mean that, say, 10 antenna elements can be sending 10 different packets to 10 receivers at once,
Yes.
If it's the former, how does that work?
Like I said: Look up "steerable null".
You compute the strengths and phases for each of the N antennas to create a pattern that has a null at the angles toward stations 2 through N but not on station one. You modulate that with the information you want to send to station 1.
You also compute another set of strengths and phases to put nulls on stations 1 and 3 through N but not on station 2 and modulate that with the information you want to send to station 2.
Ditto for stations 3 through N.
Then for each antenna you sum the N modulated streams, convert them D-to-A, and THAT's what you send up the feed line. (Actually you send a lower-frequency IF: N pairs of signals, in quadrature, one pair for each antenna. Up by the antenna you up-convert it using a common local oscillator for all the antennas so it stays coherent.)
All this pattern forming is done in a DSP with an NxN matrix multiplication in complex numbers. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the inverse-FFT computation it's doing to construct the modulation.
In the receive direction you down-convert with a common local oscillator to get N sets of quadrature signal pairs, digitize them, and multiply by the inverse matrix. This resolves the signals from the N antennas into N signals equivalent to N separate complete sets of antennas with the same N "nulls on all but MY guy" patterns as with the transmitters.
Of course just as the local oscilators had to be common across all the component antennas' transmitters and receivers, the D-to-A converters have to share a clocking reference, and the A-to-D converters ditto.
On top of all that the individual antennas of the array have a pattern of their own which defines the sector - typically a 120-degree (plus a tad) fan, breaking the coverage area up into three chunks, each with its own set of N antennas. The total pattern is the product of this fan pattern with the patterns computed for the steerable-nulls.
Nice thing about it is that you can command one of the station transmitter to send you a test pattern in one of the (many) frequency slots of the orthogonal-frequency-division-modulation - one which you reserved for signaling - while you're commanding the rest of 'em to shut up. The signal strengths and phases you get from doing this for each of the remote stations lets you construct your pattern matrices.
You actually end up constructing patterns that turn multipath to your advantage, so the direct signal and the reflections sum up to a better-than-single-path signal on the target station while the multiple paths to the other stations sum up to a good null.
It appears to be a type of glass threw connection over a single strand for hundreds of households. It is prone to dB loss and don't even think about pulling the specs for the splices and couplers that they are using. It is a great idea and a very telco like implementation.
Sounds like a PON (Passive Optical Network). If it's the one I saw at a tradeshow a couple years back it has:
- Curb to houses on one of the two common infrared frequencies.
- Houses to curb on the other.
- Optical splitters (like a cable network's coaxial splitters) to distribute the outgoing and collect the incoming light.
- The protocol is essentially ethernet, with an inbound scheduling add-on, and the chip is a hardcoded for 256 MAC addresses (which allows for, I think, a max of 254 drops).
I fully understand running more than one user on a single strand of fiber however they are running hundreds with high db loss and compensating with repeaters. I guess if I was going to do it I would have simply ran a larger bundle of fibers to a neighborhood and broke it apart there.
Even if you were close enough to the CO that you didn't need a repeater (which probably means using more expensive single-mode fiber - which in turn would mean using it everywhere due to inventory issues) you'd still need two transceivers per customer, along with a transceiver slot in a line card in a VERY expensive box in VERY expensive rack space.
With a PON you need one transceiver per subscriber, plus three per neighborhood of up to 250 or so subscribers. (Optical splitters are basically a funny splice to fibers, done in a factory, so they're a heck of a lot cheaper than transceivers and active logic to route or switch packets between them.) You also only need one transceiver and the associated panel area at the CO for a neighborhood (or one for many "250ish customer neighborhoods" if there's other routing hardware at the local box where the "neighborhood" headend(s) lives.) And the distances are small enough that cheaper multimode fibers and short-range transceivers are just fine.
Signal strength losses aren't an issue. This is a digital signal, so as long as the strength is adequate for detection it's error free despite a lot of loss. A set of ideal balanced splitters doing a 1->256 split is only about 24db attenuation and real ones aren't that much worse. Drop in the bucket.
Specifically, elements a few wavelengths apart are as directional as a telephoto lens which is one or two micrometers across (a few wavelengths of visible light).
OK, so I overstated it. (A lot. B-) )
Nevertheless, with even a rather small angular separation between remote stations, it's entirely adequate for N antennas to synthesize N separate, simultaneous, coverage patterns, each with N-1 solid nulls on the N-1 stations that aren't intended to be sent to or received from by the pattern in question, giving each the full benefit of the channel bandwidth and signal-to-noise ratio.
Stations on precisely the same bearing, of course, will get stuck with sharing the bandwidth, and those with multiple antennas that aren't sufficiently separated also won't get the full benefit of MIMO channel multiplication
Receiver quieting (due to strong nearby stations blanketing weaker, more distant ones) shows up as roundoff error in the A-D converters. It can be mitigated by commanding the nearer stations to reduce output power.
Islam has some major issues because the entire religion is controlled by very corrupt demagogues.
Actually (as with current Christianity) it's only a small percentage that are followers of the, shall we say, "interpretations of Islam" in question. (Of course with somewhat more than a fifth of the Earth's population following some form of Islam it doesn't take a very large fraction to raise a sizable army.)
The bulk of Muslims are followers of juristic schools that forbid -or reserve for situations that aren't currently met (such as attacks on Islam itself) - essentially all of the activities of these factions. By their rules these factions are heretical.
The problem is that Islam has a rule about not calling other Muslims heretics. ("If one man calls another man a non-Muslim, one of them is not a Muslim.") This is apparently directed at avoiding faction fights. But it has the side-effect that most Muslims avoid criticizing other people who claim to be Muslim, for fear of sinning themselves.
Some of them DO criticize the troublesome factions as "brigands" - murderous criminals for whom the death penalty is actually required (and the various forms of avoiding imposing it for virtually any other offense are forbidden). But most won't call them heretics or point out how the things they're doing are not what (their own version of) Islam requires or permits.
Meanwhile the troublesome factions have no problem at all loudly proclaiming their version is the only true Islam, calling anybody who doesn't exactly match their interpretation a non-Muslim or (even worse) an apostate, and killing (or "force-converting") them whenever convenient.
This has the unfortunate result of making it difficult to judge how many Muslims actually oppose these factions. The media doesn't pick up on the "brigandage" criticism and the very few Muslims willing to call the factions heretics - but is perfectly willing to propagate the factions' claims of having the one true Islam and characterize their ideology as "Fundamentalist" - implying they have the real article and the non-rabid-Jihadists are just lazy or backsliders. So to non-Muslim eyes, the entire Islamic population appears to be at least quietly supporting these factions and to consider them legitimate practitioners of the faith.
(This also makes it hard on those individual Muslims who are being pressured by these factions to resist them, since they don't have outspoken social support from the other Muslims.)
Or if a customer is close enough and his own M (= N) antennas are separated enough you can give him M separate channels with the data smeared across them for M times the bandwidth.
Arrgh. Should have previewed. The HTML formatting ate the "less than" sign.
Make that "M (less-than-or-equal-to N)"
I was talking about the amount of bandwidth a single customer could potentially receive.
Look into "MIMO". Multiply the bandwidth by the base-2 log of the signal to noise ratio by the number of coordinated antennas on the end with fewer coordinated antennas.
Also, I believe the cellular companies are transmitting on non-overlapping channels with each sector antenna (at UHF and microwave frequencies, they are not directional enough to prevent overloading the other antennas/radios a few feet away), and they separate uplink/downlink frequencies quite a bit to help with this too.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Depends on whether the cell site is busy enough to be worth putting in the added equipment.
Look into "steerable null", a form of synthetic aperture. At UHF and microwave frequencies the beams are about as directional as a telephoto lens when the component antennas at the cell site are separated by several feet. You can use that with N separate antennas to get separate single channels to N customers. Or if a customer is close enough and his own M (= N) antennas are separated enough you can give him M separate channels with the data smeared across them for M times the bandwidth.
Note that with synthetic aperture the beamwidth of the individual antennas has little to do with the beam width of the synthesized antennas. Instead what it determines is the range of angles the array can work with (and must accept non-nulled-out interference from).
But my question is how are you going to have "commerce" run the government as a good thing? ...
I didn't say *I* thought it was a good idea. I said "a free-marketer would still consider the Russian version to be corrupt and the American version not."
Ask one of them. B-)
(Personally I think that free markets are great and we ought to try them some time, but that when the values go negative they tend to break down and you need something additional. Like some minimal government. Or and armed population with a serious commitment to "Never start a fight, always finish one." along with some common idea of what constitutes "a fight", i.e. impermissible force, fraud, or threat. And there are lots of other possibilities.)
I've re-read it, still not getting it. The "invisible hand" of economic pressure can control commerce and have it be a free market and a good thing, but what does it look like when the "invisible hand" of economic pressure controls the federal government?
Prohibition leading to increased alcohol consumption, formation of gangs, gang wars, shooting wars between gangs and law enforcement, poisonous booze, etc. Similarly with the "drug war".
Gun restrictions leading to increased crime - including increased shootings.
Anti-poverty programs leading to an increasing fraction of the population permanently supported by such charity.
Price controls leading to alternation of shortages (i.e. gas lines) and further price increases.
Federal aid to and meddling with school systems leading to drastic reduction of the quality of public education - until some public schools are literally graduating more illiterates than readers.
I could go on.
Individuals in the government should not be making decisions based on their own personal economic gain.
The individuals I'm talking about are the citizens. The invisible hand works in more ways than via money.
Meanwhile, the government deals in the economy of negative values (such as the use of force, theft, imprisonment, and killing). Some of the same "invisible hand" analysis can be applied to such values and the "market reaction" of the people these are applied to. But their reaction to the negative sign on the "value" causes higher-order effects to be stronger than first-order, leading to explosions of unintended consequences. So the design and application of law is not straightforward.
One of the differences between the capital-letter "Progressive" and "(classic, non-Neo) Conservative" sides of the culture war is that the Progressive side acts as if the first-order ("intended") consequences of the laws are their only effect - leading to an explosion of trying harder and making it still worse when the effect is the opposite of what is expected. Classic Conservatives take into account the second-order effects - which makes them look insane to those who don't understand what they're doing (and won't listen to, or won't believe, their explanations, or will reject them because they're not "nice".)
It's not immediately obvious, for instance, that fewer guns means more crime or that selfish motives can lead to good long-term effects for others and altruistic motives to bad ones.
I'm quite aware of that, and it's exactly what I'm addressing:
There are some people who think that "commerce controlling the government" might be a GOOD thing. (Presuming, of course, that it ISN'T just outright bribery by an elite, which is what the original poster was joking about.)
Please re-read the post.
Blue materials (generally) are newer as they are harder to get (it is easier to red-shift emission, that is just throwing away energy - it is harder to blue-shift things, that is having to force a higher energy out) - hence development on blue materials is a few years behind red and green.
I was under the impression that the problem with blue was exactly that energy issue. The per-photon energy of blue light is large enough to put serious stress on molecular bonds - more than enough to bleach out most organic dyes. So they have to hunt for more stable light-emitting compounds for the blue pixels.
When will people learn that corporations do not have feelings? They are mandated to make profit, nothing more. And everything they do is for the purpose of maximizing shareholder equity. It is the law.
The original poster is displaying his callowness. He wants the right things to be done only for "nice" reasons, and the world to be all rainbows and pink ponies.
If he ever grows up he'll get it. About unintended consequences, second-order effects overwhelming first-order effects, and the way both economic forces and (if properly adjusted) the law can make people do well by doing good - and thus do more and more good as they smile all the way to the bank.
Unfortunately, these days a lot of people are emulating Peter Pan even into retirement age.
While this is to be applauded, it'd be better if companies like this opened their products because they truly believed in openness, rather than to beat the competition over the head.
What makes altruism in this case "better"? Innovation is born from necessity and competition.
I'd rater "The Invisible Hand" in the spiked gauntlet dragged them kicking and screaming into truly opening their products (because the least bit of lock-in bites them big time on the bottom line), while their competitors beat them over the head and shoulders all along the way, than that the opened their systems out of the goodness of their heart.
If they do it for a solid business reason that they can understand, it will stick. (And the stockholders will replace them if it comes unstuck.) If they do it for ideology it will last until the first financial crunch, executive training seminar, or mood swing.
Then:
- Multiply by the number of cells.
- Multiply that by the number of directaional-antenna sectors in each cell.
- And multiply yet again by the number of antennas in the steerable-null array in each sector.
Which is presuming you're even using a single-base-multiple-remote model, rather than an adaptive mesh network where the users also forward packets to other users who can't (or shouldn't) hit the landline bridge directly.
Remember: We're talking cellular technology here. Unlike TV, it's not one big high-power site blanketing an entire region. Instead it can be sub-divided as fine as you like, with big cells at startup being broken into smaller cells as more subscribers sign up (and provide revenue to finance the cells). Repeat fractally.
The GGP post reverses this, having the Russian thing make sense and the American be corrupt.
Depends on what you mean by "Commerce".
If you're talking "The Invisible Hand" of economic pressure originating with the desires and choices of masses of individuals, rather than bribery of officials by corporations or wealthy individuals, a free-marketer would still consider the Russian version to be corrupt and the American version not. B-)
Huh? Most scholarships from the government are for us citizens only. Maybe for an undergrad department a school will pay for a few international students to make their stats look good, but not an entire department worth!
... debt" are US students who feel responsible for their OWN debts - i.e. the student loans that are all they can get - and thus minimize their size and start paying them off sooner by dropping out at Bachelors' and going to work, rather than going on to grad school.
We're not talking "scholarships" and we're not talking "undergrad". We're talking "teaching assistantships" and "grad school".
And if you'll reread my posting you'll see that the students I said "feel responsible for
You've got most of the answer. Here's the missing piece:
At many universities, when it comes to handing out financial aid, the grants, research and teaching assistantships are only given to foreign students and the US citizens can only get loans.
This is apparently because the faculty administering the departments have a set idea of people from other countries as poor and the US citizens as rich. They hold to this fixed idea even when the US citizens applying are actually living hand-to-mouth with no help from the family while the foreign applicants are the children of the the upper classes (especially the royals or the dictators' inner circle and the owners of the major industries - often the same families). The latter may be wearing rolexes and driving sports cars. Yet they get the paid positions, while the US citizens who aren't already independently wealthy must accumulate a crushing debt load - to be paid off, with interest, once they've left school and found a job.
The result is that such US students tend to leave school once they have enough credentials to start paying off the loans, rather than stay for grad school and accumulate more debt.
The issue is particularly accute in engineering schools. Students rich enough to afford to pay their own way gravitate to law, medicine, and business. Those in engineering tend to come from middle and lower income backgrounds.
Phil: You might want to check whether your school is one of those with such informal discrimination in hiring.
Further, engineering students tend to come from families with certain cultural biases. These often lead the parents to expect the children to work their way through college - which means they may not provide much support even if they could. Financial aid qualifications take into account how much the parents COULD pay, not how much they WILL. So they get little or no aid from the parents, yet are ineligible for most aid programs.
Meanwhile the children tend to feel responsible for their debts, which means they avoid accumulating them and try to pay them off as soon as possible.
So it's hardly surprising to find an engineering school where the graduate student population is composed almost entirely of foreign students.
It would be nice to see the satellite pictures in question.
But so far all the articles I've seen on this either have no pictures or other pictures (such as the smuggled cellphone images of the marching monks).
Blevins, who trademarked "pops-right" and invented the "presto-pop" prepackaged ready-to-pop popcorn/oil/aluminum popping pan, for decades ran the "popcorn poll" on presidential races.
Moviegoers could request their popcorn in a Democrat or Republican styled box. Starting with Truman/Dewey upset election and running for 20 years he successfully predicted the outcome of six consecutive presidential races.
Or are the owners shipping them in for replacement or hanging on for a fix?
The solution is obviously to get rid of all the children.
Kick them off the net? Or "Send your kid to Kamp"? B-)
Seriously, though: The internet was created by adults for adults. As such it has its share of "neighborhoods" that are "not safe for minors". They're the virtual equivalent of singles bars, strip-joints, adult bookstores, red-light districts, criminal and gang hangouts, etc.
What parent would let their child go unescorted to such places in the real world? Why should parental responsibility end when the world is virtual?
Many of these adult activities are legally protected in the real world. The government may not eliminate them in order to make the entire world a safe playground for the kiddies. It's good to see that the courts agree the same principle applies to the virtual world.
Here's a breakdown of users hitting Google by age group:
I presume that's generated from the birth dates given when signing up for google services. If so, seems to me there are a number of sources of selection bias and other corruption, notably:
- It's only people who use google.
- It's only those who signed up.
- It counts every ID they sign up for as a distinct user.
- It's using the CLAIMED age.
Failure [of the carriers] to [select who may use bulk text messaging] will clearly result in text messaging being used for advertising.
You misunderstand what is at issue.
The issue is not whether the carriers may chose to block bulk text messages. They may block:
- Nobody,
- Everybody, or
- Everybody but who their customer opts-in to.
The issue is whether, once the carriers set up a system where their customers can opt-in to bulk-message broadcasters, they can then arbitrarily accept SOME broadcasters for the the opt-in list and reject others.
If the carrier treats all such broadcasters equally, making them available to their customers for opt-in if they request (and meet technical requirements unrelated to content, politics, or other extraneous factors), it's a common carrier.
If it allows some opt-in broadcasters and rejects others, it loses its common-carrier status.
Advertising/junkmail isn't an issue: You don't get it unless you deliberately subscribe to it, and you can unsubscribe if you change your mind.
The laws that forbid common carriers from interfering with voice transmissions on ordinary phone lines do not apply to text messages.
Then that needs to change
As I understand it (IANAL).
The status of common carrier does not require explicit legislation. It helps. But it comes into US law via English Common Law as well as by explicit legislation. As such, they have a choice:
- They can pick and chose what messages to carry and/or what customers to serve - and be liable for the messages they carry and the actions of those customers (as an "accessory" and possibly a "co-conspirator") whenever messages carried over their network are involved. Or:
- They can claim "common carrier" status for carrying messages - at which point they must serve all customers on the same terms and carry all messages without regard to content, except as explicitly prohibited by law.
Explicit legislation setting the requirements and limits on a particular form of common carrier status simply clarifies the rules for that form. In its absence the common law rules. Common law is based on court precedent, so the rules are a bit less clear to non-judges (at least in situations that hadn't come up before). But it's no less binding.