I consider myself spiritual, yet my concept of God is thus:
God created the Universe, Earth, and everything in it.
"Science" is the word we use to describe the Study of God's Creation. Hence, science is the study of God himself by witness of His Creation.
I will NOT tell you who God is. Or what He wants. I do not know. And it is my firmest belief no one else does either.
We are trying to understand how we came to be.
I have to take as a given that if I was created with a sense of curiousity, my Creator intended me to use it to try to find Him, wherever and whatever He is.
He may even be another set of completely natural processes following laws of probablity... how am I to know until we study, contemplate, and hopefully finally understand?
I believe the the worst we can do is to do nothing.
If God had wanted Sheep, he would have left it at that.
Our Creator has already also provided us with all sorts of tools we can adapt and use as we see fit. We have already known about the atoms that make us up for some time... now we are learning more about actually how to assemble them in other ways. How is this any more wrong learning how to ignite wood so we can warm ourselves on a cold night?
To sum up, from all I have seen and understand, Science is the truest study of God possible, as the basic tenents of the Scientific Methods rely on observations and reproducible phenomena, not hearsay. This observable phenomena was authored by God himself, using God's laws ( aka "Laws of Physics" ) that no man can put asunder.
I will not say I am "religious" because I believe "religion" is the word we use to describe how Man creates God in his image.
It is my strongest belief that Religion has very little to do with God and a helluva lot to do with maintaining hierarchical authority and obedience in the religious organization.
In those cases, a God was created to give an illusion of authority so the "middlemen" who know how to play the game can use their God to claim authority over the masses.
Read Stanley Milgram's research on "Obedience to Authority" if you need any reason to question just how prone to subordination we are. It all goes back to basic economics, as it requires a lot less effort on our part to follow than to lead, but if you can get enough followers, its worth your while to lead.
He's that Yale psychology researcher which did that study to see just how far people would obey him when he ordered them to painfully electrocute someone else.
I am sure damn near all of them will say the same thing.
The answer is so obvious it does not need special funding to solve.
Science/Engineering/Technical stuff requires a LOT of study to get it right.
In my case, engineering school only taught me enough vocabulary to talk to the real wizards... it took around 30 years of working along wizards before I had encugh experience I finally felt comfortable working with this stuff.
In the case of computer stuff, your learned skills are often obsolete before you even graduate - even worse now that a lot of the lower-level jobs where one would learn on-the-job are now outsourced.
With the low level stuff now outsourced, just where does one go to get experienced to enter the high level arena?
By our economics, we have told our younger people to stay out of arcane specialized technical stuff , just as we have told the earlier generation not to go into factory assembly-line kinds of work - there's no jobs assembling washing machines or televisions in this country anymore. My generation has been told we don't design stuff here anymore either. We sell stuff. We make money. We dont DO stuff, instead we deal in rights so we can sell permission for a fee to permit someone else to do stuff.
Who cares whether or not this country can feed its own materialistic appetite as long as we can finance our way in the world with borrowed dollars.
When a farmer is serious about getting water into his field, I see him install pumps and lay pipe and trench his area so the water will flow to his plants.
When I see our government getting serious about growing technology in this country, I will see them easing the way, removing restrictions, rewriting IP laws, easing employment laws, doing what they can to enable those of us who still know how to bring a product up to form small companies and hire others and begin producing product again in the USA.
Yes, there are quite a few of us in this country who have the skills to bring products to production, but many of us are dormant, held down mostly by legal and taxation means.
When the government takes their foot of the taxation and IP liability brakes, the car will start moving again - and go even faster if they goose the accelerator.
But, for now, government has given all indications to me they are quite content to sit on the side of the freeway and watch the rest of the cars whoosh by.
I have noted that any amount of "formal education" was completely meaningless unless the person had just ONE thing going for him...
He HAD to have a passion for his work.
No if, ands, or butts. Just that one thing has been the ONLY thing that I have seen that made a difference.
And its a HUGE difference.
This paradigm works in ANY field. Not just programmers.
If you are not passionate about your work, you are in the wrong line of work.
That is why I consider it SOOOOO important to find something to do that you LOVE doing it, even if you don't get paid... as its not long before others find out you do this, and want you to do it for them, and they will pay handsomely for it.
You think IT guys have it tricky? Try Auto Mechanics. That stuff has gotten so complicated lately that few people can get it to work if anything goes amiss thats not a drop-in/out replacement item, often leading to thousands of dollars worth of needless replacements billed to the hapless car owner.
Thats one of the things I am getting into. I don't need to actually fix the thing, I hook up a lot of homemade test equipment and find out why the car is not behaving the way it should, then let them make the decision of who lifts the wrench.
I don't have tools, facilities, or the mechanical inclination to get into engines, but I can hook up to OBD-II ports, coil ( timing ), and watch realtime engine vacuum, exhaust pressure, crankcase pressure, fuel rail pressure, exhaust spectra ( HC, CO, CO2, NOx, O2 ), engine radial acceleration, and engine temperatures with a thermal camera... and get a damned good idea of whats not right in the engine without ever cracking it open.
Right now, I am playing. The local community college just about lets me have run of the auto lab as my playground. For me, this is fun.
Right now, I don't get paid. I am just seeing if what I wanna do is doable.
When I get good at this, money will follow... but if I am gonna do it, its gotta be fun.
Here's another one I'd love to clone myself off to go play around with... Bodine/Lynx/Kinetic Art and Technology are just releasing a really neat motor design called a Segmented Electromagnetic Array motor. It works just like the voice coil positioner in our disk drives, but this one is laid out to work full circle. I wanna play around with one of these sooooo bad! Try driving a refrigeration scroll compressor just to see how efficient I can make a refrigeration process run if I can get full control of motor RPM and expansion valve using AVR microprocessors as controllers. Play around with R410/water heat exchangers to interlink irrigation water to dissipate heat. The way this thing is made, once I assemble such a thing, it should run damn near indefinitely, as well as maxing out its efficiency for all ambient and load conditions.
Or use it as a replacement for the flywheel, starter, alternator, and much of the brake in a car, leaving the mechanical brakes intact only for emergency backup. Brake shoes and belts wear out... magnetic fields don't. These are a flat pancake motor design...oughta make way for a really elegant engine design.
Yeh, maybe I consider myself to be pretty good. But I LIKE what I do.
I only have a BSEE. I don't have near the "documented" qualifications most "big company" types are looking for. But by golly, nothing in the electronic design arena scares me... I am in hog heaven with my test equipment and CAD systems, however "obsolete" the corporate types consider it to be. I know my tools like the back of my hand, even to things like knowing how much current my Triplett 630 sources when I take ohm measurements, or how my older Tektronix scopes are gonna load or distort the signals.
I find out I can "mentor" someone forever, but if he can't wait for quitting time so he can go play videogames, there is nothing I can do to pour any insight into the guy.
I remain firmly convinced the Patriot Act has very little to do with Iraq and a helluva lot to do with making sure there will never be another Boston Tea Party.
If Britain had a strong functional Patriot Act, George Washington, Paul Revere, and all those other 'terrorists' to the Crown could have been dealt with and America as we know it would have never been.
The powers that be will need the Powers of the Act to maintain control once the masses figure out what happened. I think most of us on Slashdot already know, but so far theres not enough of us to statistically throw an election.
Which is why I believe why some powers that be seem so determined to replace our verifiable paper voting systems with something that can not be verified.
Even simple narrow ones like mine are running in the thousands of dollars.
Mine mostly claim I have the right to make what I designed.
I'm afraid if I don't at least send it in, someone else will simply get my product, disassemble it to see how it works, then patent it, then sue me for making it.
I think its the same thing thats driving large companies like Microsoft to patent everything in sight, so no one else will do so just so they can come back and bite them.
We are weaving a helluva nasty web of litigation... I have no idea how to communicate to the common voter just how urgent it is for all of us to get Congressmen who see this mess for what it is elected.
Problem is with the new electronic voting, I am not so sure people's votes really count anymore - seeing just how obscure and unaccountable the powers-that-be have made the election systems.
Some call me paranoid. I have seen over and over and over again how people pull the wool over my eyes to get what they want - at my expense... and from all I can see, they are doing it again.
I still remember having to ask Dad's permission to do anything... and it looks like we will all find ourselves in that predicament soon.
Thats assuming the mega-worldwide-super-uber-dooper big ass company has hired you.
With this current trend in outsourcing, while leaving all sorts of highly trained people adrift in the wake to fend for themselves, how long will it be before even the super big corporations end up tripping over the very laws they had lobbied to have passed?
I know in my case, I used to work for an aerospace company. Laid off. Now working for myself, and have several patents in the mill.
I realize companies are unwittingly making huge "and" gates which control whether or not production can function. In days past, mostly one had to have mainly skills and financial resources in order to begin production of a salable product. Now, one has to have increasing arrays of permissions as well to run production.
Like a huge engine can be disabled for lack of one bolt, a huge industrial production process can be disabled by lack of one permission of rightsholder.
Yes, there is a problem of 'eminent domain' where we have already seen Connecticut landowners stripped of their property because a business wanted it. I believe this will happen in patent law too.
I will quote something taught to me as a kid...
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. One Nation, under God, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All."
If the last three words are not valid, I guess the first three words aren't valid either.
If we landmine our intellectual property landscape, we all will get blown up; the only secure job is that of the morticians.
Yes... and you never know when, like the Circuit City DIVX disks, the server granting permission for the DRM-encumbered systems gets shut down, rendering everthting needing its permission to continue to function - useless.
Just one little phrase in the EULA holds the software company who coded that DRM harmless, yet even in the case of abandonware, current DMCA law still considers one trying to salvage his investment to be a criminal.
We little guys best stay out of this and leave this kinda stuff for the big guys who can afford to finance the proper legal teams, as DMCA law forbids solving the problem on the technical level.
Well, imagine you hired somebody and you told him to do something. You want him to do it.... NOW!
Now, imagine you hired somebody and you told him to do something, but now, instead of just doing it, he insists on getting permission from someone else before he will do what you tell him to do. This leaves someone else in complete power of whether or not you can get this guy to do what you hired him to do in the first place...
Its yet another layer ( possibly dozens of layers ) of additional negotiation that has to be played out before things can happen.
There are many businesses out there who are running on razor-thin profit margins as they try to remain economically competitive. Adding yet more layers of nonproductive negotiation will require cutting finances somewhere else, and often nothing is left but salary and benefits.
On top of that, DRM enables somebody else to control whether or not the infrastructure you already paid for and installed will be permitted to continue to function. Would you want a toilet which insisted on "phoning home" and getting permission to accept a load?
Believe it or not, there are many people out there which have a so-called "business" education that are completely unaware of the business risks of having somebody else at the switch which controls whether or not the business can function.
We are trying our damndest to protect their ass.
Its like trying to make sure your neighbors don't erect highly flammable houses in fireprone areas. Just as firemen know a fire in a neighborhood threatens all the houses, this DRM thing can easily get out of control and threaten all of us.
There are some of us who know there is no reason at all to pay someone else over and over and over again for work that's already been done. But we also realize using DRM to enforce that paradigm is quite doable, and there are a helluva lot of people out there which will jump at the chance to lure us all into this cat trap.
Me and a lot of other people here have been trapped before, and know what this kind of cat trap looks like and what it does.
Once that door slams shut behind you... err, well forget about a lot of stuff you used to take for granted.
The cost of the special transistors will come down as the quantity goes up. That Toshiba link and other posts in this thread show it has been done, albeit in a somewhat experimental prototype manner.
Yes, I have disassembled many a PC power supply ( and found many by various manufacturers to be almost the exact same basic design ). Just about all of them use a variant of the TL494 PWM switching regulator driving a 300-volt totem-pole half-bridge. There are quite a few "house numbers" they coined for the TL494, like KA7500 and MB3792 - and I there were others... but they all appeared to be just renumbered TL494.
I am quite intrigued by the elegance of the basic design... so simple, self-starting, and just plain robust.
I am seeing this same 300 volt totem-pole design showing up in 3-phase PWM motor drivers for things like refrigeration compressors and appliances. This is happening for the same reasons the PWM circuit design became the standard for PC power supplies.
I don't have any speculation yet on how long - if ever - DC will unseat 3-phase AC power transmission, as you see as well as I how efficient 3-phase AC is. Trying to unseat that will be a tough row to hoe.
What I can see eventually happening is distribution of DC in lieu of single phase AC. My guess is the DC will be generated "at the pole" by much smaller converters which replace the "pole pigs", have 3-phase AC input, and probably something on the order of +/- 150 volt DC out.
But I don't see it happening anytime soon. Way too much legacy stuff still in use requires AC, and will promptly burst into flames if given DC. Such as your simple wall-warts, doorbell transformer, all legacy induction motors, and most appliances.
Nice car analogy... my car is 30 years old... runs great... and if it wasn't for trying to pass the visual part of the California Smog Check, I would put on an aftermarket fuel injection system not only to further drop emissions but get even better driveability and mileage than I get now... and what I get now ain't all that bad ( about 29MPG ).
I resent being forced to change my computer systems which support a heck of a lot of my legacy work on the whims of a certain large company who can't standardize on a common file format. The physical limitations of my machine are quite adequate for what I do ( mostly schematic capture and PCB layout ). And I cross-compile code for embedded microprocessors. It doesn't take a gamer's quality blazing fast machine to do what I do.
I have seen business after business go under as overhead costs pushed them into the grave. I see technological infrastructure much like building infrastructures, and view a company who renders their own products obsolete in a few years much in the same light as I would view a concrete contractor who deliberately designed his product to crumble in a few years, or copper pipe manufacturers who deliberately alloy their pipe so as to corrode and render it useless in a couple of years, rendering the business-man who failed to understand the nature of the company he was dealing with - with the problem of constantly replacing his infrastructures.
Yes, my machine is not the latest whiz-bang model, but it is perfectly capable of playing movies... just not Microsoft movies, due to a completely synthetic restriction designed by Microsoft themselves.
I am not the type to go out and buy all sorts of stuff I don't need. I consider that mostly the domain of cash-rich people and businesses.
Consider yourself fortunate for maintaining employment that has sufficient excesses to subsidize continual replacement of still functioning infrastructure.
Somehow, I am thinking of the type of hat which has the little strap under the chin that keeps it from blowing off, and along part of the strap is the piece which is for the ear. Maybe incorporate some of the noise canceling technology used by those noise cancelling headsets while you are at it.
This idea is now posted on Slashdot...! Its now Prior Technology posted in a Public Forum... with time stamp.
I would be pretty sure that in several years, ogg files will still play.
I have no confidence that wma files will play, as Microsoft can, has, and will change the file formats from time to time.
I see wma compatibility as useless advertising fluff trying to ride Microsoft's gravy train.
How can one possibly code anything to last if one has no confidence the file format owner will hold steadfast to his format? Compound this with the file format owners' tendency to toss lawsuits at those trying to make the file formats usable?
I even have a Windows Media Player ( ver 6.4, ), yet I cannot see movie clips in the Windows Media formats, yet easily see them in.mpg,.avi ( including DivX).
So, my interest in the player is strictly if the FM radio and MP3 capabilities, which I think are quite impressive.
I think George Westinghouse was also in the fray with his three-phase AC.
I failed to see why there was even much of a war on it - as it seemed extremely obvious to me that the Westinghouse system was definitely the way to go, given the technology of the day and how continuous power delivery, as well as rotation info, is neatly delivered over three phase power... not only that, its voltage is easily transformed without requiring an intermediate mechanical stage, as was required to do for DC given the technology of the day.
But Edison fought him tooth and nail. In my mind, that made Edison more of a patent-monger in my mind rather than the technology visionary I try to make him out to be.
The problem as I knew it with DC was exactly what you say... it doesn't "travel" well, because in order to get the power from one place to another, you need to get the voltage up quite high so the line resistance does not eat up your energy... but to do so, the technology of the day required terribly inefficient and unreliable ( brushes and commutators ) DC motor-generators.
Given the technology to transform DC efficiently, I believe DC would "travel" much better than AC as there is no "skin" effects, line "dead time" ( during polarity reversals ), and "reactive power losses" ( power factor VARS ) to concern ourselves with. We are just now developing the solid state technology we need to build the switches for dealing with DC, because even with all the DC stuff on both sides, inside of every DC power converter I have seen is an AC switching circuit, and the actual power conversion is still done in an AC circuit, and I have not seen a single true DC transformer yet, even in theory.
I didn't know about the smog being so much gases.. I figured as opaque as it appears to be, it was mostly microscopic particulate stuff floating around in the air, like some sort of tiny greasy particles similar to that stuff I clean off of fan blades.
When looking up and seeing all these power transmission lines criss-crossing my city, I could not help but wonder what would happen if there was a high negative DC voltage on those, causing the air around them to be charged like what happens in a thunderstorm. Add a little breeze, and I figured the airborne dirt would be charged and electrostatically attracted to ground.
I am also wondering about household power of the future, as its easy to convert three phase power to "relatively" clean DC, but trying to convert single phase power to DC requires an energy storage component to "ride" through the powerless area when the polarity inverts. I was figuring the power distribution company may run something of the order of 3KV three-phase AC and drop it to something like 300 volts DC center-tapped for residential. I am seeing a heckuva lot of new motor designs for air conditioning compressors, refrigeration, washing machines, whatever, using 300 volt DC rails to form PWM 3-phase variable frequency designs. Just a bigger version of the tiny motors that have spun our disk drives for years.
The advantages are that all the energy is directly controllable by the appliance's embedded microcontroller, giving it the ability to meter out the precise amount of energy required for the job.... kinda like that thing NASA developed a couple of decades ago where they dropped the power supplied to induction motors when they are lightly loaded which resulted in no RPM change, but a helluva difference in motor efficiency.
I looked at my washing machine and there were all sorts of extra components hanging off the motor to control its speed and direction, as well as "start switches" and "run capacitors", and the motor still had to be set the same no matter how much load it had... it got supplied the same energy to simply drain the tub, or the heavy load of trying to spin a basket of wet wash. All that stuff could be replaced by one three-phase inverter and a current sense coil.
Somehow, I keep thinking how simple that washing machine could be made by having a tub on top of a "pancake" motor, with maybe a spring I could engage to store mechanical energy to assist in agitation.
I also wonder how more efficient my refrigeration compressors would be if they were of a scroll design and had integral 3-phase variable speed drive. I could then tailor from minute to minute the exact refrigerant flow needed so that the vaporization and condensation of the refrigerant occured at optimal places in the heat exchangers.
And do this over the entire range of temperatures the system may experience.
These are "pipe dreams", as I know there is a helluva lot of legacy stuff out there that requires AC to run... so I consider these musings as speculative dreaming...
Could be my ignorance showing through.. as I have not done any power engineering at that level, and others have pointed out the ozone problem.
I am mainly going on snippets I had seen in the newsletters speculating on the possible return of DC power and was also thinking my air ionizer uses a tiny high voltage DC source and it will clear a room in minutes. Its uncanny how fast it will charge airborne particles and cause them to head post-haste for walls, curtains, furniture, whatever, and adhere there. Then here comes this article on Slashdot about smog eating paint...
Another thing I am seeing is the trend for everything to run DC inside... the first thing switching power supplies do is get a DC rail to switch from. I am seeing even appliance motors gravitating to three-phase power derived from switching supplies so they can very accurately meter the energy to the motor during various speed and load scenarios. Again, the first thing the power supply has to do is convert the incoming AC to DC. If all this point-of-load stuff wants to see DC, then it may behoove us to start considering DC distribution again. Eliminate a heckuva lot of filter electrolytics and their associated inrush current and PFC problems. Even these little fluorescent tubes all the rage these days run from a DC supply... tear one open and the first thing you see is a diode circuit feeding electrolytic capacitors.... and so far every one of these things (3) I have torn apart to see why they died had died of electrolytic capacitor failure.
I was of the understanding that DC was actually more efficient to transfer, but was very difficult to transform its voltage by conventional means until the advent of modern high-speed high-voltage solid state switches ( SCR, IGBT , and similar ).
I admit for constant-speed rotating machinery, its damn hard to beat 3-phase AC.
I have noted several companies are now investigating DC again as new devices are becoming available which will make high-power DC-DC converters economically do-able. Here's an example of Toshiba's work in this arena.
They are trying to get around various things, AC losses, Power factor corrections, and a few other quirks of AC transmission.
I am noting too that if the high voltage DC is exposed to air, yes it will set up a small current. So does AC. We call it "corona discharge", but in the case of AC, this leakage consists of roughly equal amounts of positive and negative ions and they cancel without doing anything useful. If we are going to lose the energy anyway, might as well have it do some useful work and clean the air.
I am hoping by posting this onto Slashdot, maybe another power engineer out there will see it post back some comments. I don't deal with power engineering at this level, but I have seen some of the big guys reports detailing advances in solid state switches driving megawatt-scale power conversion for use in DC transmission lines and superconductor transmission lines.
If there is a cute little trick we can pull off to build a big air purifier for Los Angeles, I would sure like to see it started.
Now, that high power solid-state switches ( hence, power converters ) are becoming do-able, is there any way we can start putting high-voltage DC on our power grids?
The rationale here being the DC will ionize the air, charging the impurities, thereby encouraging them to head for and adhere to these pollution-destroying buildings.
Incidentally, ionizing the air is NOT a new concept. Its been happening in nature since Earth began... especially during thunderstorms when the air is so charged it breaks down - we call it lightning.
I have often wondered if dirgibles, charged from being moored to the business end of a large vandergraff generator ( several stories tall ) would do the trick.
If a small electrostatic generator drops the crap out of the air in a room, would a bigger one clear stagnant air over an entire city... such as the Los Angeles basin?
I like how you cut through the fluff and went straight to the bottom line...
Some of the most valuable software I have is a schematic capture program, a printed circuit board layout program, and my Borland C++ compiler.
These run in DOS. I still run them today. The total outlay for the whole shebang was in the order of $5000 ( just the software ). In the twenty years I have been using it, I have fulfilled over a million dollars in contracts.
I am still fulfillingo contracts TODAY using the same tools!!! ( Actually, a lot of my present stuff involves changing, modifying, doing something similar to, etc. things from earlier contracts. Since I already have all the files in my machines, its quite easy for me to load my old design files and launch the new work from the benefit of the work already done. It makes things a helluva lot easier on me, as well as saves a heckuva lot of time.
I was careful when I first bought these tools that they were "clean" tools, not requiring continuous maintenance contracts or remote permission-granting authorizations. Two of the companies which coded the programs I use no longer exist... but then I knew that when I first bought the tools, that *good* tools do not need support... they just work.
Bad tools aren't worth the download, much less the install, no matter what you paid of them, if anything. Good tools are "worth their weight in Gold".
In a way, it pains me greatly to see today what passes for "design tools", as they are so restricted with DRM and "customer lock-in" technologies as to render them a constant maintenance nightmare. But in another way, it is pleasing to me to see my competitors strapped to such tools. I know I can freely see my designs in any format I want and not be worrying about some proprietary protocol thats gonna be extinct and unsupported in the next release, and be left wondering how I am gonna support a relationship I have had with some clients going back over twenty years.
So more of the weapon's energy can be concentrated on the target...
It wasn't designed to boil water or pop corn... it probably has to dwell on you a helluva long time before anything gets that hot.. but you will become extremely uncomfortable in a few seconds.
My big concern is the "vitreous humor" within the eye. The clear fluid inside the eye has no blood circulation, thereby no way to dissipate heat other than plain conduction... from what I understand, it has a tendency, like egg albumin, to congeal in a white gelatinous mass when heated.
Not looking into the beam doesn't help much.
My guess is they are generating the microwaves with a small magnetron at 95 GHz. By comparison, your home microwave oven is 2.450 GHz. The magnetron for home use is roughly the size of a brick, and about as heavy, and uses about 3 kilovolts at a couple hundred mA current. It works almost like an air whistle, but instead of blowing air, confined by metal walls, past a tuned cavity, it works by "blowing" electrons, confined to a circular path by a magnetic field, past tuned cavities resonant at the frequency the magnetron was designed for.
James Doohan was one of my primary role models coaxing me into electrical engineering as well. Leonard Nimoy was the other. NASA helped a lot too, sponsoring the award of a trip to Melbourne, Florida, to see the Space Program close-up, in the Science Fairs.
I was born in the early 50's, and quite an impressionable teen during the Moon missions and Star Trek TOS.
Damn, those 60's were interesting times. I loved the thrill of technological stuff. The very first transistors. I was so excited over getting some Raytheon CK722 and GE 2N107 Germanium PNP.
They were first barely making their way to where I could get some with the pay I could get mowing lawns.
I couldn't get enough of the thrill with tinkering with electronics, rewiring old TV sets so I could display crude lissajous patterns on the screens and that kinda stuff, dreaming of the things I would see Scotty and Spock do with their stuff. Scotty's transporter and the food replicator fascinated the hell out of me. I wanted in the worst way just to talk to Scotty a bit about how that damn thing worked!!!!
James made the world of Physics and Engineering a very interesting place for a lot of us. In all the years of my life, I have never seen yet anyone who could do it with the aplomb James could. In my mind, he is *the* engineer.
Without you, James, physics and engineering would have been about as interesting to me as studying IP law, and I would have gotten it only for the money, not for thrill of doing it. You brought a thrill of accomplishment to a mundane world of physical laws.
Thanks, James. May you enjoy Eternity with God, and get to see for real the things the things we could only imagine here on Earth.
Whatever party the politicians associate with, their actions are accountable to the public, not special interests.
I don't place the blame on politicians. I place it squarely on *us*, for not *holding* them accountable.
Want a good example of holding one accountable for their actions? Go to a local shopping mall and start causing trouble. See how fast the Merchants call Mall Security and have you removed.
We should be like those merchants, who have a vested interest in the smooth running operations of the mall at large, but we are asleep on our watch, letting hoodlums run the place.
What Congress could have ignored the pleas of those Connecticut homeowners facing eminent domain by a special interest, if they knew there would be all sorts of public meetings they would now have to attend where they have to mount the dais, stand behind the podium with more microphones than you can count, look the spotlight and camera in the face, and explain to the public why he interpreted the words "justice for all" in our "Pledge Allegiance to the Flag" this way. How would a politician stand up to the public and say that those words are bullshit - the rights of the Special Interest supercede the lawful rights of the property owner. And think he has a job in Government anymore? But we don't do that. We let politicians run slipshod all over the place, signing in law that benefit few while costing many.
( Incidentally, if the reasoning behind "Eminent Domain" is more people are served by the flat downright confiscation of one's private property, why in the hell do we honor patents or copyright? )
When we hold our Congress just as accountable for their actions as even the merchants at a shopping mall hold us accountable for our behaviour in the mall, we *will* see big change in our government....
Slashdot Mirror
God created the Universe, Earth, and everything in it.
"Science" is the word we use to describe the Study of God's Creation. Hence, science is the study of God himself by witness of His Creation.
I will NOT tell you who God is. Or what He wants. I do not know. And it is my firmest belief no one else does either.
We are trying to understand how we came to be.
I have to take as a given that if I was created with a sense of curiousity, my Creator intended me to use it to try to find Him, wherever and whatever He is.
He may even be another set of completely natural processes following laws of probablity... how am I to know until we study, contemplate, and hopefully finally understand?
I believe the the worst we can do is to do nothing.
If God had wanted Sheep, he would have left it at that.
Our Creator has already also provided us with all sorts of tools we can adapt and use as we see fit. We have already known about the atoms that make us up for some time... now we are learning more about actually how to assemble them in other ways. How is this any more wrong learning how to ignite wood so we can warm ourselves on a cold night?
To sum up, from all I have seen and understand, Science is the truest study of God possible, as the basic tenents of the Scientific Methods rely on observations and reproducible phenomena, not hearsay. This observable phenomena was authored by God himself, using God's laws ( aka "Laws of Physics" ) that no man can put asunder.
I will not say I am "religious" because I believe "religion" is the word we use to describe how Man creates God in his image.
It is my strongest belief that Religion has very little to do with God and a helluva lot to do with maintaining hierarchical authority and obedience in the religious organization.
In those cases, a God was created to give an illusion of authority so the "middlemen" who know how to play the game can use their God to claim authority over the masses.
Read Stanley Milgram's research on "Obedience to Authority" if you need any reason to question just how prone to subordination we are. It all goes back to basic economics, as it requires a lot less effort on our part to follow than to lead, but if you can get enough followers, its worth your while to lead.
If I am wrong, may God have mercy on my soul.
Ever read Obedience to Authority by Stanley Milgram?
Wiki
He's that Yale psychology researcher which did that study to see just how far people would obey him when he ordered them to painfully electrocute someone else.
See where that got him?
There are darned near 600 posts already here.
I am sure damn near all of them will say the same thing.
The answer is so obvious it does not need special funding to solve.
Science/Engineering/Technical stuff requires a LOT of study to get it right.
In my case, engineering school only taught me enough vocabulary to talk to the real wizards... it took around 30 years of working along wizards before I had encugh experience I finally felt comfortable working with this stuff.
In the case of computer stuff, your learned skills are often obsolete before you even graduate - even worse now that a lot of the lower-level jobs where one would learn on-the-job are now outsourced.
With the low level stuff now outsourced, just where does one go to get experienced to enter the high level arena?
By our economics, we have told our younger people to stay out of arcane specialized technical stuff , just as we have told the earlier generation not to go into factory assembly-line kinds of work - there's no jobs assembling washing machines or televisions in this country anymore. My generation has been told we don't design stuff here anymore either. We sell stuff. We make money. We dont DO stuff, instead we deal in rights so we can sell permission for a fee to permit someone else to do stuff.
Who cares whether or not this country can feed its own materialistic appetite as long as we can finance our way in the world with borrowed dollars.
When a farmer is serious about getting water into his field, I see him install pumps and lay pipe and trench his area so the water will flow to his plants.
When I see our government getting serious about growing technology in this country, I will see them easing the way, removing restrictions, rewriting IP laws, easing employment laws, doing what they can to enable those of us who still know how to bring a product up to form small companies and hire others and begin producing product again in the USA.
Yes, there are quite a few of us in this country who have the skills to bring products to production, but many of us are dormant, held down mostly by legal and taxation means.
When the government takes their foot of the taxation and IP liability brakes, the car will start moving again - and go even faster if they goose the accelerator.
But, for now, government has given all indications to me they are quite content to sit on the side of the freeway and watch the rest of the cars whoosh by.
He HAD to have a passion for his work.
No if, ands, or butts. Just that one thing has been the ONLY thing that I have seen that made a difference.
And its a HUGE difference.
This paradigm works in ANY field. Not just programmers.
If you are not passionate about your work, you are in the wrong line of work.
That is why I consider it SOOOOO important to find something to do that you LOVE doing it, even if you don't get paid... as its not long before others find out you do this, and want you to do it for them, and they will pay handsomely for it.
You think IT guys have it tricky? Try Auto Mechanics. That stuff has gotten so complicated lately that few people can get it to work if anything goes amiss thats not a drop-in/out replacement item, often leading to thousands of dollars worth of needless replacements billed to the hapless car owner.
Thats one of the things I am getting into. I don't need to actually fix the thing, I hook up a lot of homemade test equipment and find out why the car is not behaving the way it should, then let them make the decision of who lifts the wrench.
I don't have tools, facilities, or the mechanical inclination to get into engines, but I can hook up to OBD-II ports, coil ( timing ), and watch realtime engine vacuum, exhaust pressure, crankcase pressure, fuel rail pressure, exhaust spectra ( HC, CO, CO2, NOx, O2 ), engine radial acceleration, and engine temperatures with a thermal camera... and get a damned good idea of whats not right in the engine without ever cracking it open.
Right now, I am playing. The local community college just about lets me have run of the auto lab as my playground. For me, this is fun.
Right now, I don't get paid. I am just seeing if what I wanna do is doable.
When I get good at this, money will follow... but if I am gonna do it, its gotta be fun.
Here's another one I'd love to clone myself off to go play around with... Bodine/Lynx/Kinetic Art and Technology are just releasing a really neat motor design called a Segmented Electromagnetic Array motor. It works just like the voice coil positioner in our disk drives, but this one is laid out to work full circle. I wanna play around with one of these sooooo bad! Try driving a refrigeration scroll compressor just to see how efficient I can make a refrigeration process run if I can get full control of motor RPM and expansion valve using AVR microprocessors as controllers. Play around with R410/water heat exchangers to interlink irrigation water to dissipate heat. The way this thing is made, once I assemble such a thing, it should run damn near indefinitely, as well as maxing out its efficiency for all ambient and load conditions.
Or use it as a replacement for the flywheel, starter, alternator, and much of the brake in a car, leaving the mechanical brakes intact only for emergency backup. Brake shoes and belts wear out... magnetic fields don't. These are a flat pancake motor design...oughta make way for a really elegant engine design.
Yeh, maybe I consider myself to be pretty good. But I LIKE what I do.
I only have a BSEE. I don't have near the "documented" qualifications most "big company" types are looking for. But by golly, nothing in the electronic design arena scares me... I am in hog heaven with my test equipment and CAD systems, however "obsolete" the corporate types consider it to be. I know my tools like the back of my hand, even to things like knowing how much current my Triplett 630 sources when I take ohm measurements, or how my older Tektronix scopes are gonna load or distort the signals.
I find out I can "mentor" someone forever, but if he can't wait for quitting time so he can go play videogames, there is nothing I can do to pour any insight into the guy.
How does one find these kind o
I remain firmly convinced the Patriot Act has very little to do with Iraq and a helluva lot to do with making sure there will never be another Boston Tea Party.
If Britain had a strong functional Patriot Act, George Washington, Paul Revere, and all those other 'terrorists' to the Crown could have been dealt with and America as we know it would have never been.
The powers that be will need the Powers of the Act to maintain control once the masses figure out what happened. I think most of us on Slashdot already know, but so far theres not enough of us to statistically throw an election.
Which is why I believe why some powers that be seem so determined to replace our verifiable paper voting systems with something that can not be verified.
Should I take my tinfoil hat off yet?
Even simple narrow ones like mine are running in the thousands of dollars.
Mine mostly claim I have the right to make what I designed.
I'm afraid if I don't at least send it in, someone else will simply get my product, disassemble it to see how it works, then patent it, then sue me for making it.
I think its the same thing thats driving large companies like Microsoft to patent everything in sight, so no one else will do so just so they can come back and bite them.
We are weaving a helluva nasty web of litigation... I have no idea how to communicate to the common voter just how urgent it is for all of us to get Congressmen who see this mess for what it is elected.
Problem is with the new electronic voting, I am not so sure people's votes really count anymore - seeing just how obscure and unaccountable the powers-that-be have made the election systems.
Some call me paranoid. I have seen over and over and over again how people pull the wool over my eyes to get what they want - at my expense... and from all I can see, they are doing it again.
I still remember having to ask Dad's permission to do anything... and it looks like we will all find ourselves in that predicament soon.
I never did take much to being a beggar.
With this current trend in outsourcing, while leaving all sorts of highly trained people adrift in the wake to fend for themselves, how long will it be before even the super big corporations end up tripping over the very laws they had lobbied to have passed?
I know in my case, I used to work for an aerospace company. Laid off. Now working for myself, and have several patents in the mill.
I realize companies are unwittingly making huge "and" gates which control whether or not production can function. In days past, mostly one had to have mainly skills and financial resources in order to begin production of a salable product. Now, one has to have increasing arrays of permissions as well to run production.
Like a huge engine can be disabled for lack of one bolt, a huge industrial production process can be disabled by lack of one permission of rightsholder.
Yes, there is a problem of 'eminent domain' where we have already seen Connecticut landowners stripped of their property because a business wanted it. I believe this will happen in patent law too.
I will quote something taught to me as a kid...
"I pledge allegiance to the Flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands. One Nation, under God, Indivisible, With Liberty and Justice for All."
If the last three words are not valid, I guess the first three words aren't valid either.
If we landmine our intellectual property landscape, we all will get blown up; the only secure job is that of the morticians.
If someone you like does it, they are much more apt to get away without you making a federal issue out of it than if someone you didn't like does it!
I think that is one of the main reasons smart companies have an effective PR program in place.
Just one little phrase in the EULA holds the software company who coded that DRM harmless, yet even in the case of abandonware, current DMCA law still considers one trying to salvage his investment to be a criminal.
We little guys best stay out of this and leave this kinda stuff for the big guys who can afford to finance the proper legal teams, as DMCA law forbids solving the problem on the technical level.
Now, imagine you hired somebody and you told him to do something, but now, instead of just doing it, he insists on getting permission from someone else before he will do what you tell him to do. This leaves someone else in complete power of whether or not you can get this guy to do what you hired him to do in the first place...
Its yet another layer ( possibly dozens of layers ) of additional negotiation that has to be played out before things can happen.
There are many businesses out there who are running on razor-thin profit margins as they try to remain economically competitive. Adding yet more layers of nonproductive negotiation will require cutting finances somewhere else, and often nothing is left but salary and benefits.
On top of that, DRM enables somebody else to control whether or not the infrastructure you already paid for and installed will be permitted to continue to function. Would you want a toilet which insisted on "phoning home" and getting permission to accept a load?
Believe it or not, there are many people out there which have a so-called "business" education that are completely unaware of the business risks of having somebody else at the switch which controls whether or not the business can function.
We are trying our damndest to protect their ass.
Its like trying to make sure your neighbors don't erect highly flammable houses in fireprone areas. Just as firemen know a fire in a neighborhood threatens all the houses, this DRM thing can easily get out of control and threaten all of us.
There are some of us who know there is no reason at all to pay someone else over and over and over again for work that's already been done. But we also realize using DRM to enforce that paradigm is quite doable, and there are a helluva lot of people out there which will jump at the chance to lure us all into this cat trap.
Me and a lot of other people here have been trapped before, and know what this kind of cat trap looks like and what it does.
Once that door slams shut behind you... err, well forget about a lot of stuff you used to take for granted.
Yes, I have disassembled many a PC power supply ( and found many by various manufacturers to be almost the exact same basic design ). Just about all of them use a variant of the TL494 PWM switching regulator driving a 300-volt totem-pole half-bridge. There are quite a few "house numbers" they coined for the TL494, like KA7500 and MB3792 - and I there were others... but they all appeared to be just renumbered TL494.
I am quite intrigued by the elegance of the basic design... so simple, self-starting, and just plain robust.
I am seeing this same 300 volt totem-pole design showing up in 3-phase PWM motor drivers for things like refrigeration compressors and appliances. This is happening for the same reasons the PWM circuit design became the standard for PC power supplies.
I don't have any speculation yet on how long - if ever - DC will unseat 3-phase AC power transmission, as you see as well as I how efficient 3-phase AC is. Trying to unseat that will be a tough row to hoe.
What I can see eventually happening is distribution of DC in lieu of single phase AC. My guess is the DC will be generated "at the pole" by much smaller converters which replace the "pole pigs", have 3-phase AC input, and probably something on the order of +/- 150 volt DC out.
But I don't see it happening anytime soon. Way too much legacy stuff still in use requires AC, and will promptly burst into flames if given DC. Such as your simple wall-warts, doorbell transformer, all legacy induction motors, and most appliances.
Maybe, and I mean maybe, in a hundred years.
I resent being forced to change my computer systems which support a heck of a lot of my legacy work on the whims of a certain large company who can't standardize on a common file format. The physical limitations of my machine are quite adequate for what I do ( mostly schematic capture and PCB layout ). And I cross-compile code for embedded microprocessors. It doesn't take a gamer's quality blazing fast machine to do what I do.
I have seen business after business go under as overhead costs pushed them into the grave. I see technological infrastructure much like building infrastructures, and view a company who renders their own products obsolete in a few years much in the same light as I would view a concrete contractor who deliberately designed his product to crumble in a few years, or copper pipe manufacturers who deliberately alloy their pipe so as to corrode and render it useless in a couple of years, rendering the business-man who failed to understand the nature of the company he was dealing with - with the problem of constantly replacing his infrastructures.
Yes, my machine is not the latest whiz-bang model, but it is perfectly capable of playing movies... just not Microsoft movies, due to a completely synthetic restriction designed by Microsoft themselves.
I am not the type to go out and buy all sorts of stuff I don't need. I consider that mostly the domain of cash-rich people and businesses.
Consider yourself fortunate for maintaining employment that has sufficient excesses to subsidize continual replacement of still functioning infrastructure.
Somehow, I am thinking of the type of hat which has the little strap under the chin that keeps it from blowing off, and along part of the strap is the piece which is for the ear. Maybe incorporate some of the noise canceling technology used by those noise cancelling headsets while you are at it.
This idea is now posted on Slashdot...! Its now Prior Technology posted in a Public Forum... with time stamp.
But I would much rather see ogg support than wma.
I would be pretty sure that in several years, ogg files will still play.
I have no confidence that wma files will play, as Microsoft can, has, and will change the file formats from time to time.
I see wma compatibility as useless advertising fluff trying to ride Microsoft's gravy train.
How can one possibly code anything to last if one has no confidence the file format owner will hold steadfast to his format? Compound this with the file format owners' tendency to toss lawsuits at those trying to make the file formats usable?
I even have a Windows Media Player ( ver 6.4, ), yet I cannot see movie clips in the Windows Media formats, yet easily see them in .mpg, .avi ( including DivX).
So, my interest in the player is strictly if the FM radio and MP3 capabilities, which I think are quite impressive.
I failed to see why there was even much of a war on it - as it seemed extremely obvious to me that the Westinghouse system was definitely the way to go, given the technology of the day and how continuous power delivery, as well as rotation info, is neatly delivered over three phase power... not only that, its voltage is easily transformed without requiring an intermediate mechanical stage, as was required to do for DC given the technology of the day.
But Edison fought him tooth and nail. In my mind, that made Edison more of a patent-monger in my mind rather than the technology visionary I try to make him out to be.
The problem as I knew it with DC was exactly what you say... it doesn't "travel" well, because in order to get the power from one place to another, you need to get the voltage up quite high so the line resistance does not eat up your energy... but to do so, the technology of the day required terribly inefficient and unreliable ( brushes and commutators ) DC motor-generators.
Given the technology to transform DC efficiently, I believe DC would "travel" much better than AC as there is no "skin" effects, line "dead time" ( during polarity reversals ), and "reactive power losses" ( power factor VARS ) to concern ourselves with. We are just now developing the solid state technology we need to build the switches for dealing with DC, because even with all the DC stuff on both sides, inside of every DC power converter I have seen is an AC switching circuit, and the actual power conversion is still done in an AC circuit, and I have not seen a single true DC transformer yet, even in theory.
Your reply is +5 informative to me.
I didn't know about the smog being so much gases.. I figured as opaque as it appears to be, it was mostly microscopic particulate stuff floating around in the air, like some sort of tiny greasy particles similar to that stuff I clean off of fan blades.
When looking up and seeing all these power transmission lines criss-crossing my city, I could not help but wonder what would happen if there was a high negative DC voltage on those, causing the air around them to be charged like what happens in a thunderstorm. Add a little breeze, and I figured the airborne dirt would be charged and electrostatically attracted to ground.
I am also wondering about household power of the future, as its easy to convert three phase power to "relatively" clean DC, but trying to convert single phase power to DC requires an energy storage component to "ride" through the powerless area when the polarity inverts. I was figuring the power distribution company may run something of the order of 3KV three-phase AC and drop it to something like 300 volts DC center-tapped for residential. I am seeing a heckuva lot of new motor designs for air conditioning compressors, refrigeration, washing machines, whatever, using 300 volt DC rails to form PWM 3-phase variable frequency designs. Just a bigger version of the tiny motors that have spun our disk drives for years.
The advantages are that all the energy is directly controllable by the appliance's embedded microcontroller, giving it the ability to meter out the precise amount of energy required for the job.... kinda like that thing NASA developed a couple of decades ago where they dropped the power supplied to induction motors when they are lightly loaded which resulted in no RPM change, but a helluva difference in motor efficiency.
I looked at my washing machine and there were all sorts of extra components hanging off the motor to control its speed and direction, as well as "start switches" and "run capacitors", and the motor still had to be set the same no matter how much load it had... it got supplied the same energy to simply drain the tub, or the heavy load of trying to spin a basket of wet wash. All that stuff could be replaced by one three-phase inverter and a current sense coil.
Somehow, I keep thinking how simple that washing machine could be made by having a tub on top of a "pancake" motor, with maybe a spring I could engage to store mechanical energy to assist in agitation.
I also wonder how more efficient my refrigeration compressors would be if they were of a scroll design and had integral 3-phase variable speed drive. I could then tailor from minute to minute the exact refrigerant flow needed so that the vaporization and condensation of the refrigerant occured at optimal places in the heat exchangers. And do this over the entire range of temperatures the system may experience.
These are "pipe dreams", as I know there is a helluva lot of legacy stuff out there that requires AC to run... so I consider these musings as speculative dreaming...
Then I saw others came by and dug me out. ;)
Could be my ignorance showing through.. as I have not done any power engineering at that level, and others have pointed out the ozone problem.
I am mainly going on snippets I had seen in the newsletters speculating on the possible return of DC power and was also thinking my air ionizer uses a tiny high voltage DC source and it will clear a room in minutes. Its uncanny how fast it will charge airborne particles and cause them to head post-haste for walls, curtains, furniture, whatever, and adhere there. Then here comes this article on Slashdot about smog eating paint...
Another thing I am seeing is the trend for everything to run DC inside... the first thing switching power supplies do is get a DC rail to switch from. I am seeing even appliance motors gravitating to three-phase power derived from switching supplies so they can very accurately meter the energy to the motor during various speed and load scenarios. Again, the first thing the power supply has to do is convert the incoming AC to DC. If all this point-of-load stuff wants to see DC, then it may behoove us to start considering DC distribution again. Eliminate a heckuva lot of filter electrolytics and their associated inrush current and PFC problems. Even these little fluorescent tubes all the rage these days run from a DC supply... tear one open and the first thing you see is a diode circuit feeding electrolytic capacitors.... and so far every one of these things (3) I have torn apart to see why they died had died of electrolytic capacitor failure.
I admit for constant-speed rotating machinery, its damn hard to beat 3-phase AC.
I have noted several companies are now investigating DC again as new devices are becoming available which will make high-power DC-DC converters economically do-able. Here's an example of Toshiba's work in this arena.
They are trying to get around various things, AC losses, Power factor corrections, and a few other quirks of AC transmission.
I am noting too that if the high voltage DC is exposed to air, yes it will set up a small current. So does AC. We call it "corona discharge", but in the case of AC, this leakage consists of roughly equal amounts of positive and negative ions and they cancel without doing anything useful. If we are going to lose the energy anyway, might as well have it do some useful work and clean the air.
I am hoping by posting this onto Slashdot, maybe another power engineer out there will see it post back some comments. I don't deal with power engineering at this level, but I have seen some of the big guys reports detailing advances in solid state switches driving megawatt-scale power conversion for use in DC transmission lines and superconductor transmission lines.
If there is a cute little trick we can pull off to build a big air purifier for Los Angeles, I would sure like to see it started.
The rationale here being the DC will ionize the air, charging the impurities, thereby encouraging them to head for and adhere to these pollution-destroying buildings.
Incidentally, ionizing the air is NOT a new concept. Its been happening in nature since Earth began... especially during thunderstorms when the air is so charged it breaks down - we call it lightning.
I have often wondered if dirgibles, charged from being moored to the business end of a large vandergraff generator ( several stories tall ) would do the trick.
If a small electrostatic generator drops the crap out of the air in a room, would a bigger one clear stagnant air over an entire city... such as the Los Angeles basin?
Some of the most valuable software I have is a schematic capture program, a printed circuit board layout program, and my Borland C++ compiler.
These run in DOS. I still run them today. The total outlay for the whole shebang was in the order of $5000 ( just the software ). In the twenty years I have been using it, I have fulfilled over a million dollars in contracts.
I am still fulfillingo contracts TODAY using the same tools!!! ( Actually, a lot of my present stuff involves changing, modifying, doing something similar to, etc. things from earlier contracts. Since I already have all the files in my machines, its quite easy for me to load my old design files and launch the new work from the benefit of the work already done. It makes things a helluva lot easier on me, as well as saves a heckuva lot of time.
I was careful when I first bought these tools that they were "clean" tools, not requiring continuous maintenance contracts or remote permission-granting authorizations. Two of the companies which coded the programs I use no longer exist... but then I knew that when I first bought the tools, that *good* tools do not need support... they just work.
Bad tools aren't worth the download, much less the install, no matter what you paid of them, if anything. Good tools are "worth their weight in Gold".
In a way, it pains me greatly to see today what passes for "design tools", as they are so restricted with DRM and "customer lock-in" technologies as to render them a constant maintenance nightmare. But in another way, it is pleasing to me to see my competitors strapped to such tools. I know I can freely see my designs in any format I want and not be worrying about some proprietary protocol thats gonna be extinct and unsupported in the next release, and be left wondering how I am gonna support a relationship I have had with some clients going back over twenty years.
So more of the weapon's energy can be concentrated on the target...
It wasn't designed to boil water or pop corn... it probably has to dwell on you a helluva long time before anything gets that hot.. but you will become extremely uncomfortable in a few seconds.
My big concern is the "vitreous humor" within the eye. The clear fluid inside the eye has no blood circulation, thereby no way to dissipate heat other than plain conduction... from what I understand, it has a tendency, like egg albumin, to congeal in a white gelatinous mass when heated.
Not looking into the beam doesn't help much.
My guess is they are generating the microwaves with a small magnetron at 95 GHz. By comparison, your home microwave oven is 2.450 GHz. The magnetron for home use is roughly the size of a brick, and about as heavy, and uses about 3 kilovolts at a couple hundred mA current. It works almost like an air whistle, but instead of blowing air, confined by metal walls, past a tuned cavity, it works by "blowing" electrons, confined to a circular path by a magnetic field, past tuned cavities resonant at the frequency the magnetron was designed for.
I know what microwave beams are, and I find the idea of deliberately aiming them at others repulsive to the n^th degree.
The scenario you describe is even worse.
War is *not* a good thing.
I was born in the early 50's, and quite an impressionable teen during the Moon missions and Star Trek TOS.
Damn, those 60's were interesting times. I loved the thrill of technological stuff. The very first transistors. I was so excited over getting some Raytheon CK722 and GE 2N107 Germanium PNP. They were first barely making their way to where I could get some with the pay I could get mowing lawns.
I couldn't get enough of the thrill with tinkering with electronics, rewiring old TV sets so I could display crude lissajous patterns on the screens and that kinda stuff, dreaming of the things I would see Scotty and Spock do with their stuff. Scotty's transporter and the food replicator fascinated the hell out of me. I wanted in the worst way just to talk to Scotty a bit about how that damn thing worked!!!!
James made the world of Physics and Engineering a very interesting place for a lot of us. In all the years of my life, I have never seen yet anyone who could do it with the aplomb James could. In my mind, he is *the* engineer.
Without you, James, physics and engineering would have been about as interesting to me as studying IP law, and I would have gotten it only for the money, not for thrill of doing it. You brought a thrill of accomplishment to a mundane world of physical laws.
Thanks, James. May you enjoy Eternity with God, and get to see for real the things the things we could only imagine here on Earth.
I don't place the blame on politicians. I place it squarely on *us*, for not *holding* them accountable.
Want a good example of holding one accountable for their actions? Go to a local shopping mall and start causing trouble. See how fast the Merchants call Mall Security and have you removed.
We should be like those merchants, who have a vested interest in the smooth running operations of the mall at large, but we are asleep on our watch, letting hoodlums run the place.
What Congress could have ignored the pleas of those Connecticut homeowners facing eminent domain by a special interest, if they knew there would be all sorts of public meetings they would now have to attend where they have to mount the dais, stand behind the podium with more microphones than you can count, look the spotlight and camera in the face, and explain to the public why he interpreted the words "justice for all" in our "Pledge Allegiance to the Flag" this way. How would a politician stand up to the public and say that those words are bullshit - the rights of the Special Interest supercede the lawful rights of the property owner. And think he has a job in Government anymore? But we don't do that. We let politicians run slipshod all over the place, signing in law that benefit few while costing many.
( Incidentally, if the reasoning behind "Eminent Domain" is more people are served by the flat downright confiscation of one's private property, why in the hell do we honor patents or copyright? )
When we hold our Congress just as accountable for their actions as even the merchants at a shopping mall hold us accountable for our behaviour in the mall, we *will* see big change in our government....