Off topic, but How? Why? That stuff is absolute shit. Sure, it might be cheap, but it won't remain cheap the third or fourth time it breaks down.
Lets say you want to restore an ancient and abused classic South Bend 9 for your basement bench metal lathe as many have done in the (distant) past.
But there's no SB9's on the surplus market in your area, or.. whatever.
Hmm... Here's this Chinese knockoff thats about the same size and has zero wear, although it was put together incredibly poorly...
Its not like you're going to buy american, we don't make "medium size" manual lathes anymore, so its an old surplus model that needs intensive restoration or a new Chinese model that was probably put together wrong.
There are American made Sherline lathes/mills and they're fantastic, but micro size small. There exist manual medium sized lathes from some place in Germany that only cost 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more than the Chinese clone.. like a nice new pickup truck price instead of a monthly mortgage payment or so.
Thats the market for medium manual bench metal lathes... A $500 antique that needs rebuilding, a $750 Chinese POS that although new needs rebuilding, a $50000 miracle of precision engineering from the black forest gnomes, and... nothing else. There are $600 tiny little watchmaker and model builder size lathes made in the USA from Sherline and Taig, awesome, legendary build quality but if you need 9 inches of swing on the lathe thats not gonna do it. There are some medium size CNC lathes in the "used car" price range..
Doctrine is to believe the "free market" has something for everyone at every price range, but the further you get from stereotypical consumer-land, the less its true. There's just not much out there but Chinese junk, in that particular marketplace. You want another good example? Find me some apple juice not made with Chinese apples in very small print. Weird but true.
I believe reflectivity is frequency-dependent. A material that highly reflects light might barely reflect milimeter waves, and vice-versa. So you'd need to asses whether or not the boat-store versions would do the trick.
It'll work. Marine X band radar is around 9.5 GHz and this torture device is about 10 times higher which is not appreciable different. So they'll be some weird sidelobes or it won't be a "perfect" retroreflector... it'll still be close enough for "fun".
If you've dropped your marine retro-reflector off the mast so many times its all dented up and no longer works, then it's not going to magically start working at a higher frequency.
What does not work is using microwave RF gear at lower freqs. A retroreflector is inherently high pass so to speak... if it was shiny it would reflect back light... but its not gonna reflect something like AM radio or CB backwards...
Good luck finding caps with a low enough leakage current to make a 16 hour charge cycle believable. Not saying they don't exist in a lab, once. Am saying they don't exist in a deployed weapons system or pretty much anywhere else in production.
Those vacuum tubes were instant on in comparison to the way integrated circuits need to "warm" up now.
My LCD tv starts up about 50% slower than the CRT it replaced.
My DVD player takes at least 5 minutes longer to start than the VCR it replaced (or so it seems due to prohibited user ops, strange boot time (why if the power is applied does it take 10 seconds to respond to the door open button, that is just bizarre slow)
TRS-80 color computer boot up time in 1981, about 1 second. Windows XP in 2012, about 1 minute.
Ma Bell 2600 model/series analog telephone boot up time in 1992, zero (boot up time, whats that?) 5 GHz cordless spread spectrum phone boot up time two minutes from a dead start of base and handset.
Very first cell phone I ever saw, a Radio Shack analog AMPS bag phone from the mid 80s-ish, power on to making calls seemed to be at most a couple seconds. Android cellphone now takes "around a minute".
The newer it is, the slower it works. Weird but almost always true. Find me something in 2012 with a lower latency UI than 1982. Bet you cannot.
This is CW Microwave at 95ghz so I'd imagine it takes that long for everything to charge and come into spec frequency-wise, since all of the waveguides and antenna would be very sensitive to SWR if the frequency drifts too badly.. probably to the point of destruction at 100kw PEP.
Close not exactly. The highest freq amps I've worked on are just above Ku band and the highest power is a KW or so, so I'm about a factor of 4 low in freq (which in microwave work is practically in their backyard) and low by a factor of 100 in power (which is a big difference).
Waveguide and antenna for microwave work are pretty much inherently broadband. Unless you're doing it wrong or weird darn near 2:1 is normal. Its not the antenna and waveguide. Combining networks are pretty precise... wavelength at 100 ghz is what 3 mm or so, so you'd like to build them to a hundredth or better of that, or about 0.03 mm accuracy which isn't all that taxing for a machinist. The point being that its probably not realistic to build something that requires 12 sig figs of freq accuracy if you can't build anything to more than maybe 5 or 6 sig figs of wavelength accuracy even in theory.
I can purchase off the shelf GPSDO with frequency accuracy better than 10e-11, even better than 10e-12 on a good day, also rubidium oscillators are not that bad. You can build one that takes "16 hours" or whatever to stabilize. Like I figured out above, you can't build an antenna that depends on 11 sig figs of freq stability (this is required for comm purposes, not required to just blast watts downrange to torture people).
A normal person would engineer in a really good quartz crystal oscillator probably a TXCO which unlike the non-temperature stabilized dip oscilator in you PC that wanders 50 ppm or so, the txco is probably pretty stable to 0.1 or so ppm, or 10e-7, which is better than you can build your wavelength dependent components, so.. also it "boots up" in less than a second.
The puzzler for me is at 100 GHZ you're gonna use WR8 or WR10 and those do not tolerate more than 10 KW or so before arcing over. High freq = small wavelength = small waveguide = short distance for arc to zap across. My guess is they're using an array of like 10x10 or 100 little 1 KW blasters. Some brave OWS protestor or Ron Paul supporter should walk in front of the beam and see if its got the beamwidth characteristics of an antenna a tenth the size.
From having been in the Army reserves two decades ago I can guarantee that the army tech manual for my unisys strange btos minicomputer thingy for ammo accounting probably said it can be unpacked, hooked up, restored from backup, tested, blah blah in 16 hours, but in practice, in sane and normal weather and sane and normal conditions we could set up in like one hour or less including running comm cabling for the remote terminals and test suites and everything. But, yes, airdropped into Antarctica with new/untested/not-pre-setup gear and all noob staff doing it the first time "for real" outside of AIT I could see Fing around for 16 hours. I remember at AIT having to do this one inventory operation that was pretty tricky and they gave us 4 hours and I did it in about 45 minutes because I knew what I was doing, but some hopeless cases took darn near the whole 4 hours.
Maybe it is just the articles I read, but I have to disagree on having instructables.com in the 2nd group.
OK you called me out and I was partially wrong. I was basing that on historical experience of seeing idiot comments, maybe a year or so ago. Today I went to the front page, clicked a bunch of the instructables, did not see any trash talking, did not see any safety idiots, did not see any masters of the obvious, did not see any spammers or apparently drunken morons, its improved quite a bit in the last year or so since I gave it up.
I'll rephrase what I wrote to "instructables in the bad old days before they cleaned it up"
Most of the articles I've read have useful feedback from users who are either showing off what they built, or giving other ways in which it could be done with similar results
Oh I wouldn't go that far or at least I'd say I need more data. Most of the comments I saw were admittedly short one liners in "txt speak" of a generic positive nature "I love it post more" "gr8 job". Yeah thats... nice in a golf clap and participation trophy way, but not really useful to anyone. True, I saw some good comments on the front page instructables. The "magnetic carabiner" had at least some interesting comments... the girls homemade fencing shirt thingy and the rest that I looked at didn't have much, which is too bad. That weird steampunk steam tub lavalamp like thing is visually stunning but the comments were "eh".
The "new instructables" comments remind me a lot of deviantart. Lots of cool posts with comments mostly being a "i love you" worship fest, but not much "discussion" in the comments.
Both sites need a "comments only visible to author" or "comments visible to public" and some sort of downvoting to flush improperly categorized comments. "nice pictures" well send that to the author no one else wants to see that. "The magnetic field of the catch latch depends on the strength of the magnet and field gap, how strong of a magnet does this require" seems to be an actual discussion worthy public comment.
I'll probably be visiting instructibles a lot more in the future, as I always liked the idea, but not so much the comments.
How do the paid astroturfers fit into your analogy? I think my local newspaper is exclusively political astroturfers. I guess your analogy would be they're something like that awkward moment when your real life friends join a MLM scheme and invite you for a sales meeting?
Maybe the fact stories do not have like or dislike buttons so that people can say "314 people like Microsoft" or "21 people work for Apple"?
For pointless numerology we have our UID wars. Obviously as a 5 digit UID, my posts are going to be more insightful than your 7 digit UID post (hint hint mods you know what to click here).
True but, the internet is full of Different echo chambers... you can learn a lot from listening to the ZH echo chamber and comparing it to the similar although different HBB echo chamber (HBB was much more interesting pre-bubble burst than post-bubble burst although still occasionally interesting)
For example the machinist page I mentioned has a groupthink in love with cheap Chinese metalworking machinery (lathes and mills) but you go to practicalmachinist or PM or whatever its called and the mods there hate Chinese iron and will not tolerate its discussion.
I donno if its possible to not have a groupthink where there are like minded people if whenever a splinter group wants to, they can just... splinter.
...The user should be able to set up their own web of trust where they can rank certain users higher...
Sounds like the short version of what you want, is if I circle you on G+ then I see you voted up also on/. With the G+ sliders system that already exists, I suppose that takes care of "ranking some users higher".
I've often thought you could make a/. like discussion group on G+ by just posting/. like stories and having people post comments. That is basically a one line summary of a guy I've circled on G+named "Dan McDermott". Of course his readership and comment levels are about 100th the size of/., maybe smaller, but the general idea holds.
There's always OpenID, and becoming your own provider.
I looked into that years ago, and back then, everyone wanted to be an openid provider to anyone else, but no one wanted to accept openid from anyone other than themselves. Has the scene changed any, over the years?
Only works if you can get Usenet access somewhere. Most of the ISP's are shutting that down; Google Groups "usenet" is pretty much unusable.
Welcome to this www.google.com thing.
If you wanna pay there's easynews.com and I can personally guarantee that in the six years I've been a member I've not had a single complaint. Just freaking works. That's all there is to say.
I haven't set it up but eternal-september.org supposedly is a good free text only provider.
I know my way around a INN and even ye olden cnews and I guess for decades now I've been thinking about creating something like a usenet 2.0 using off the shelf software to shove articles around and all articles would be signed in a WoT to keep the spammers away (and probably inadvertently keep the alt.binaries. people away). A new hierarchy from the very start ordered by posted language at the top level. Various standards to be upheld to a somewhat higher level than old fashioned usenet. Oh, all kinds of interesting ideas. In my infinite spare time...
Maybe Gawker, et al, need to come to grips with the terrifying possibility that online comments absolutely do capture the intelligence of the readership.
Strongly agreed. I'd never visited any of the listed sites. Hmm, wonder why? Well OK I'll go look today for the first time, I'm going in cold, no preconceived assumptions about content or quality or anything. Just here's a list of URLs and here's my first 10 second introduction to each site.
www.gawker.com - > title is "Todays gossip is tomorrows news" except its yesterdays news about afghanistan gunman. Then there's just flim flam trash filler like "Your Morning Cry: Dad Comes Home From Afghanistan and Surprises His Daughter" and "The Perfect New York Times Magazine ‘Lives’ Essay" Who reads this mental chewing gum, and how intelligent can their commentary be?
www.jezebel.com -> title is "Celebrity sex and fashion for women" well that explains why I never went there, although I should enjoy the second topic. Lets examine the deep intellectual discourse of the site. Hmm... "Bobbi Kristina Is Lovingly Haunted by the Ghost of Whitney Houston", OK BZZZZT next!
www.gizmodo.com -> "the gadget guide". OK sounds interesting, maybe I'll like it, but the field is absolutely flooded with astroturf gadget news/blogs so I donno if I need another. Lets scan the gadget guide's headlines "The Plaid Shirt: Rebellion, Grunge and a Touch Flamboyance" "Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco Lightning Review: Love and Vomit (Updated)" "Faux Loko: The DIY Drink I Shouldn't Be Telling You About" WTF is this and how is any of it gadget? Maybe the word gadget has changed in my old age, from interesting expensive luxury in my youth, to boring stuff that sucks in my old age. Let me know when they redefine "nerd" because if it gets changed to mean male pr0n star its going to be awkward if you don't warn me first.
I lost interest about there. Does the list of URLs get any better? Did anyone else do field research like I did?
Its kind of like putting up a pr0n site exclusively containing pics of sheep rear views (I'm talking species Ovis Aries not sheep as in psychologically, like, American Women) and THEN noticing your audience is nothing but weirdos, and finally publicly complaining that "The Internet is full of nothing but weirdos". No, sir, try posting something other than pictures of sheep behinds and get back to us, OK?
When you get the diverse public with dissimilar views and often a very surface understanding of the topic.. you get the type of shit we see on this guy’s collection of sites and on youtube and so on.
Examples: instructables.com "Every freaking website for a local newspaper I've ever seen that is exclusively populated by paid political astroturfers sniping at each other"
Although it doesn't really matter -- I would have bigger things to worry about than housing insurance in that case.
Strong disagree... I live 1000s of miles downwind of LA. No direct biological effect on me or mine if "they" pop the port of LA with something inside a shipping container, but its basically a dirty bomb attack on me for resale value, or maybe govt certified verified licensed decon, etc.
There's a uniquely American fixation that any nuclear attack means the fireball must be directly over their head because the world revolves around them. More likely it'll happen 2000 miles away.
or dumb enough. Even expressing (i.e. with some sort of "none of the above") that none of the options is good for you is a powerful message if in large enough numbers. Is not an "is ok what chooses everyone else", nor "anyway will win candidate x, no matter what i vote". Is not the same a president backed by 51% of the population of a country than one backed by the 26% because only 50% of potential voters cared about it (and in those people could have something rigging the sample, like some interest, or pressure, or getting some benefit, or, well, not being resistant/intelligent enough to empty political speech)
Have to find another example for "dumb" because "everyone knows" your description above is a waste of time in an entrenched two party system.
I'm not saying there exists no dumb reason not to vote, but your specific argument really didn't do it for me.
My insurance policy says I'm covered for "acts of God".
Not to completely hijack the thread, but I've always wondered how that kind of clause works out with atheists or more generally speaking people of non-evangelical christian religions.
You're disenfranchising their efforts from your personal list of "efforts".
On the other hand it is not intuitively obvious that Romney is a Mormon therefore X% of the population has been brainwashed as childred to hate him for his religion.
I suppose if you know the "modern google definition" of the frothy secretion known as Santorum, then I give you credit that it Could be Intuitively obvious that Santorum has serious issues wrt that whole subject.
It takes at least some minimal effort to figure out what political party Dad votes for and more effort to decide if you're of the proper age to be in or out of parental rebellion.
Self contemplation, for the masses, is actually pretty hard. That whole "rather die than think" thing that is so idolized.
I think you're excluding their actions from the category of effort, I don't see the point. They might be doing something dumb that has historically brought bad results, but that doesn't mean they're doing nothing...
Easier to couple into the fiber. LED is a huge optical PITA to properly couple into a fiber. Yes LEDs are more mass produced and are cents instead of bucks but the coupling apparatus is bulky and "expensive" and generally a PITA, and by the time you spend a couple bucks on some fancy package and/or connector and focusing optics why not spend a buck on a bright laser instead of the dimness you'd get from a 10 cent LED? Now with superbright LEDs this argument is probably going away in the future, but not quite yet.
Most of the energy going into a LED turns into heat, then most of the LED light isn't going to couple into the fiber. Laser still fails step 1, but it passes step 2.
There are other reasons in the telecom business why we're likely sticking with lasers for awhile, monochromatic spectrum / group phase delay, and also relative ease of frequency shifts for DWDM (like old fashioned RF FDM but for light).
I donno why, but the wikipedia article carefully misses the most important reason to force all citizens to vote... If the government later does something you don't like, then you should not protest or riot or even complain about it in public, because being anything other than a perfect sheep makes you a sore loser and you should just vote for someone else next time. There is no excuse that you're "not being represented" because you were forced to vote, just like everyone else, so theoretically you selected your representation, right?
Also it is good PR for the only legitimate regime change being scheduled and carefully controlled elections, absolutely not alternatives ranging from recall petitions and calls for impeachment all the way up to armed rebellion. Its kind of cheesy at this goal and traditionally does not work, at least in the 3rd world.
A side issue also carefully not discussed is I am not bound by the US Constitution, despite my very low/. UID I certainly never signed it, that's for sure. I'm not saying I hate it or its icky, I actually kind of like it, mostly, just that it has no moral or ethical jurisdiction over me because I never agreed to it. This worldview gets some statist types all wound up, who gave me permission to have an open mind, etc etc. Putting some mandatory voting amendment into it with traditionally draconian punishments which I would probably have to follow for pragmatic reasons, legitimatizes the rest of my relationship to the Constitution, because most of the rest of the Constitution I can frankly ignore, I'm probably never going to be a government agent with a moral responsibility to follow the 1st amendment, blah blah blah, but an amendment forcing me to vote would certainly be a kick in the pants every two years or so (assuming it would be federal elections only, not my local dogcatcher election).
Profit is obvious. Courtroom drama is the perp must be guilty because the cops felt like sending 25 cops in riot gear and smashed all the house windows... If the cops just called his lawyer and asked him to talk, he must not be an absolutely guilty supercriminal.
Had a SWAT callout 5 houses to the west of mine some months ago... parole violator got drunk (thats a no no for a multi-time DUI guy) went to friends house, passed out alcohol intoxication. Friend owns a deer hunting rifle and was dumb enough to tell the cops looking for the drunk about it, so we get full swat team callout, smash all the windows and stick cameras in, including one of those tossed ball camera things. Streets blocked off, TV news told BS story about man barricaded in house with gun so we've got newsies crawiling everywhere. The cops got to do the judge jury executioner thing by tasing an semi-conscious drunk guy. This is all OK because "we're tough on crime in this rich suburban city". Lots of people made a lot of money, and the parole violator is back in a for profit prison again, the families (especially children like mine) were terrified, so its all good all around. Seriously SWAT doesn't mean anything anymore.
The effort in voting is not getting off the couch and hauling you fat, lazy ass to a polling station. Rather it is in educating yourself on issues, forming your own opinions on those issues, examining the candidates opinions of those issues, and then communicating with those candidates both by voting for your preferences and by maintaining a dialog with those actually elected to office.
You've gotta be kidding. Its all about who looks better on TV, who is a better public speaker, who tells better lies, which 1%er passes himself off more like a 99%er, which candidate is compatible with my personal selection of imaginary man in the sky, and by far the most significant reason is to vote for the party your male ancestors supported, or depending on family dynamic and youthful rebelliousness, vote for the party your male ancestors did not support.
The other part is 90% of the population blindly follows either party right into hell, only the votes and beliefs of about 10% "swing voters" matter. So you've gotta be crazy enough to get the 45% of your party to nominate you (Palin, Santorum, heck practically every R after Reagan in my opinion) yet be normal enough to get the sane 10% swing voters fooled into voting for you. So its a multiple personality contest, the winner is the one who acts the nuttiest of the nuts to the 45% while simultaneously appearing normal to the 10%. That's about it.
Finally there's a large fraction of the sway voters who simply vote pocketbook... Am I happy today (got some from the wife, sports team won last night, etc) well then the incumbent wins. Am I unhappy today (wife made me sleep on couch, sports team lost last night, etc) well then the challenger wins. Probably 9% of the swing voters vote this way. Smart idea for the R to oppose contraception, no pill = no sex = unhappy 9% swing voters = incumbent fail
In the USA, we are lucky if a simple majority of people vote at all. Internet based voting might help with that, since it takes some of the effort out of voting.
Actually that's a bug not a feature. Billions of dollars spent on election advertising (by people expecting to be rewarded after the election) and half the population is resistant enough (or intelligent enough) to not bother voting. I can't imagine the politicals being happy about those people being enfranchised, why instead of simple minded TV commercials they'd actually have to win them over using logic, or purchase their votes with programs, or... How exactly do you control people without simpleminded emotional arguments anyway?
No the real feature is the death of democracy and replacement with feudalism. A "Large Enough" fraction of the population will be doing this online voting under the close eye of their supervisor at work, or their church pastor, or their professor at school, or maybe the landlord's office, or probation officer's office, or their spouse... It's kind of a stealth poll tax such that "the more important people" will be enforcing who votes for who.
Sure, it is true, that technically you can vote for anyone you want, with this new internet voting... all you need is no job or independently wealthy, atheist, non-student, property owner (as opposed to renter), clean criminal justice record, and be an orphan with no immediate family or friends. Everyone else has to vote for who the local alpha male says to vote for.
I can't say as its really going to change anything, because both parties are two sides of the same coin with different marketing messages.
Too Long Didn't Watch; I don't watch video in general. People who can't express themselves in words certainly can't express themselves in video either.
I would assume a much simpler and cheaper and safer way to corrupt internet voting is to internet vote under the watchful eye of your supervisor at work, or the watchful eye of your head of household at home, or maybe your local church could provide internet access to vote, or... You could work around that bug by bringing internet access to the local elementary school gymnasium (they've probably already got wifi like our schools), placing some superannuated citizens in charge of what to them is incomprehendible technology (in other words anything newer than IBM unit record apparatus from pre-1930), maybe replacing those complicated internet kiosks with a simple paper form and pencils and an instantly reading/verifying optical scanner.. oh wait thats exactly what we have now where I live. Hmm. Sounds like a big waste of money for everyone except the people getting the money... who happen to be campaign donors.. Oh, I see whats happening here.
Slashdot Mirror
What if Internet access becomes a constitutional right?
So your Amish pastor can watch over your shoulder while you vote for the "correct" guy. Not seeing how thats helping.
Off topic, but How? Why? That stuff is absolute shit. Sure, it might be cheap, but it won't remain cheap the third or fourth time it breaks down.
Lets say you want to restore an ancient and abused classic South Bend 9 for your basement bench metal lathe as many have done in the (distant) past.
But there's no SB9's on the surplus market in your area, or .. whatever.
Hmm... Here's this Chinese knockoff thats about the same size and has zero wear, although it was put together incredibly poorly...
Its not like you're going to buy american, we don't make "medium size" manual lathes anymore, so its an old surplus model that needs intensive restoration or a new Chinese model that was probably put together wrong.
There are American made Sherline lathes/mills and they're fantastic, but micro size small. There exist manual medium sized lathes from some place in Germany that only cost 1 to 2 orders of magnitude more than the Chinese clone.. like a nice new pickup truck price instead of a monthly mortgage payment or so.
Thats the market for medium manual bench metal lathes ... A $500 antique that needs rebuilding, a $750 Chinese POS that although new needs rebuilding, a $50000 miracle of precision engineering from the black forest gnomes, and ... nothing else. There are $600 tiny little watchmaker and model builder size lathes made in the USA from Sherline and Taig, awesome, legendary build quality but if you need 9 inches of swing on the lathe thats not gonna do it. There are some medium size CNC lathes in the "used car" price range..
Doctrine is to believe the "free market" has something for everyone at every price range, but the further you get from stereotypical consumer-land, the less its true. There's just not much out there but Chinese junk, in that particular marketplace. You want another good example? Find me some apple juice not made with Chinese apples in very small print. Weird but true.
I believe reflectivity is frequency-dependent. A material that highly reflects light might barely reflect milimeter waves, and vice-versa. So you'd need to asses whether or not the boat-store versions would do the trick.
It'll work. Marine X band radar is around 9.5 GHz and this torture device is about 10 times higher which is not appreciable different. So they'll be some weird sidelobes or it won't be a "perfect" retroreflector... it'll still be close enough for "fun".
If you've dropped your marine retro-reflector off the mast so many times its all dented up and no longer works, then it's not going to magically start working at a higher frequency.
What does not work is using microwave RF gear at lower freqs. A retroreflector is inherently high pass so to speak... if it was shiny it would reflect back light... but its not gonna reflect something like AM radio or CB backwards...
Good luck finding caps with a low enough leakage current to make a 16 hour charge cycle believable.
Not saying they don't exist in a lab, once. Am saying they don't exist in a deployed weapons system or pretty much anywhere else in production.
Those vacuum tubes were instant on in comparison to the way integrated circuits need to "warm" up now.
My LCD tv starts up about 50% slower than the CRT it replaced.
My DVD player takes at least 5 minutes longer to start than the VCR it replaced (or so it seems due to prohibited user ops, strange boot time (why if the power is applied does it take 10 seconds to respond to the door open button, that is just bizarre slow)
TRS-80 color computer boot up time in 1981, about 1 second. Windows XP in 2012, about 1 minute.
Ma Bell 2600 model/series analog telephone boot up time in 1992, zero (boot up time, whats that?) 5 GHz cordless spread spectrum phone boot up time two minutes from a dead start of base and handset.
Very first cell phone I ever saw, a Radio Shack analog AMPS bag phone from the mid 80s-ish, power on to making calls seemed to be at most a couple seconds. Android cellphone now takes "around a minute".
The newer it is, the slower it works. Weird but almost always true. Find me something in 2012 with a lower latency UI than 1982. Bet you cannot.
This is CW Microwave at 95ghz so I'd imagine it takes that long for everything to charge and come into spec frequency-wise, since all of the waveguides and antenna would be very sensitive to SWR if the frequency drifts too badly .. probably to the point of destruction at 100kw PEP.
Close not exactly. The highest freq amps I've worked on are just above Ku band and the highest power is a KW or so, so I'm about a factor of 4 low in freq (which in microwave work is practically in their backyard) and low by a factor of 100 in power (which is a big difference).
Waveguide and antenna for microwave work are pretty much inherently broadband. Unless you're doing it wrong or weird darn near 2:1 is normal. Its not the antenna and waveguide. Combining networks are pretty precise ... wavelength at 100 ghz is what 3 mm or so, so you'd like to build them to a hundredth or better of that, or about 0.03 mm accuracy which isn't all that taxing for a machinist. The point being that its probably not realistic to build something that requires 12 sig figs of freq accuracy if you can't build anything to more than maybe 5 or 6 sig figs of wavelength accuracy even in theory.
I can purchase off the shelf GPSDO with frequency accuracy better than 10e-11, even better than 10e-12 on a good day, also rubidium oscillators are not that bad. You can build one that takes "16 hours" or whatever to stabilize. Like I figured out above, you can't build an antenna that depends on 11 sig figs of freq stability (this is required for comm purposes, not required to just blast watts downrange to torture people).
A normal person would engineer in a really good quartz crystal oscillator probably a TXCO which unlike the non-temperature stabilized dip oscilator in you PC that wanders 50 ppm or so, the txco is probably pretty stable to 0.1 or so ppm, or 10e-7, which is better than you can build your wavelength dependent components, so.. also it "boots up" in less than a second.
The puzzler for me is at 100 GHZ you're gonna use WR8 or WR10 and those do not tolerate more than 10 KW or so before arcing over. High freq = small wavelength = small waveguide = short distance for arc to zap across. My guess is they're using an array of like 10x10 or 100 little 1 KW blasters. Some brave OWS protestor or Ron Paul supporter should walk in front of the beam and see if its got the beamwidth characteristics of an antenna a tenth the size.
From having been in the Army reserves two decades ago I can guarantee that the army tech manual for my unisys strange btos minicomputer thingy for ammo accounting probably said it can be unpacked, hooked up, restored from backup, tested, blah blah in 16 hours, but in practice, in sane and normal weather and sane and normal conditions we could set up in like one hour or less including running comm cabling for the remote terminals and test suites and everything. But, yes, airdropped into Antarctica with new/untested/not-pre-setup gear and all noob staff doing it the first time "for real" outside of AIT I could see Fing around for 16 hours. I remember at AIT having to do this one inventory operation that was pretty tricky and they gave us 4 hours and I did it in about 45 minutes because I knew what I was doing, but some hopeless cases took darn near the whole 4 hours.
Maybe it is just the articles I read, but I have to disagree on having instructables.com in the 2nd group.
OK you called me out and I was partially wrong. I was basing that on historical experience of seeing idiot comments, maybe a year or so ago. Today I went to the front page, clicked a bunch of the instructables, did not see any trash talking, did not see any safety idiots, did not see any masters of the obvious, did not see any spammers or apparently drunken morons, its improved quite a bit in the last year or so since I gave it up.
I'll rephrase what I wrote to "instructables in the bad old days before they cleaned it up"
Most of the articles I've read have useful feedback from users who are either showing off what they built, or giving other ways in which it could be done with similar results
Oh I wouldn't go that far or at least I'd say I need more data. Most of the comments I saw were admittedly short one liners in "txt speak" of a generic positive nature "I love it post more" "gr8 job". Yeah thats... nice in a golf clap and participation trophy way, but not really useful to anyone. True, I saw some good comments on the front page instructables. The "magnetic carabiner" had at least some interesting comments ... the girls homemade fencing shirt thingy and the rest that I looked at didn't have much, which is too bad. That weird steampunk steam tub lavalamp like thing is visually stunning but the comments were "eh".
The "new instructables" comments remind me a lot of deviantart. Lots of cool posts with comments mostly being a "i love you" worship fest, but not much "discussion" in the comments.
Both sites need a "comments only visible to author" or "comments visible to public" and some sort of downvoting to flush improperly categorized comments. "nice pictures" well send that to the author no one else wants to see that. "The magnetic field of the catch latch depends on the strength of the magnet and field gap, how strong of a magnet does this require" seems to be an actual discussion worthy public comment.
I'll probably be visiting instructibles a lot more in the future, as I always liked the idea, but not so much the comments.
How do the paid astroturfers fit into your analogy? I think my local newspaper is exclusively political astroturfers. I guess your analogy would be they're something like that awkward moment when your real life friends join a MLM scheme and invite you for a sales meeting?
Maybe the fact stories do not have like or dislike buttons so that people can say "314 people like Microsoft" or "21 people work for Apple"?
For pointless numerology we have our UID wars. Obviously as a 5 digit UID, my posts are going to be more insightful than your 7 digit UID post (hint hint mods you know what to click here).
True but, the internet is full of Different echo chambers... you can learn a lot from listening to the ZH echo chamber and comparing it to the similar although different HBB echo chamber (HBB was much more interesting pre-bubble burst than post-bubble burst although still occasionally interesting)
For example the machinist page I mentioned has a groupthink in love with cheap Chinese metalworking machinery (lathes and mills) but you go to practicalmachinist or PM or whatever its called and the mods there hate Chinese iron and will not tolerate its discussion.
I donno if its possible to not have a groupthink where there are like minded people if whenever a splinter group wants to, they can just ... splinter.
...The user should be able to set up their own web of trust where they can rank certain users higher...
Sounds like the short version of what you want, is if I circle you on G+ then I see you voted up also on /.
With the G+ sliders system that already exists, I suppose that takes care of "ranking some users higher".
I've often thought you could make a /. like discussion group on G+ by just posting /. like stories and having people post comments. That is basically a one line summary of a guy I've circled on G+named "Dan McDermott". Of course his readership and comment levels are about 100th the size of /., maybe smaller, but the general idea holds.
There's always OpenID, and becoming your own provider.
I looked into that years ago, and back then, everyone wanted to be an openid provider to anyone else, but no one wanted to accept openid from anyone other than themselves. Has the scene changed any, over the years?
Only works if you can get Usenet access somewhere. Most of the ISP's are shutting that down; Google Groups "usenet" is pretty much unusable.
Welcome to this www.google.com thing.
If you wanna pay there's easynews.com and I can personally guarantee that in the six years I've been a member I've not had a single complaint. Just freaking works. That's all there is to say.
I haven't set it up but eternal-september.org supposedly is a good free text only provider.
I know my way around a INN and even ye olden cnews and I guess for decades now I've been thinking about creating something like a usenet 2.0 using off the shelf software to shove articles around and all articles would be signed in a WoT to keep the spammers away (and probably inadvertently keep the alt.binaries. people away). A new hierarchy from the very start ordered by posted language at the top level. Various standards to be upheld to a somewhat higher level than old fashioned usenet. Oh, all kinds of interesting ideas. In my infinite spare time...
Maybe Gawker, et al, need to come to grips with the terrifying possibility that online comments absolutely do capture the intelligence of the readership.
Strongly agreed. I'd never visited any of the listed sites. Hmm, wonder why? Well OK I'll go look today for the first time, I'm going in cold, no preconceived assumptions about content or quality or anything. Just here's a list of URLs and here's my first 10 second introduction to each site.
www.gawker.com - > title is "Todays gossip is tomorrows news" except its yesterdays news about afghanistan gunman. Then there's just flim flam trash filler like "Your Morning Cry: Dad Comes Home From Afghanistan and Surprises His Daughter" and "The Perfect New York Times Magazine ‘Lives’ Essay" Who reads this mental chewing gum, and how intelligent can their commentary be?
www.jezebel.com -> title is "Celebrity sex and fashion for women" well that explains why I never went there, although I should enjoy the second topic. Lets examine the deep intellectual discourse of the site. Hmm... "Bobbi Kristina Is Lovingly Haunted by the Ghost of Whitney Houston", OK BZZZZT next!
www.gizmodo.com -> "the gadget guide". OK sounds interesting, maybe I'll like it, but the field is absolutely flooded with astroturf gadget news/blogs so I donno if I need another. Lets scan the gadget guide's headlines "The Plaid Shirt: Rebellion, Grunge and a Touch Flamboyance" "Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco Lightning Review: Love and Vomit (Updated)" "Faux Loko: The DIY Drink I Shouldn't Be Telling You About" WTF is this and how is any of it gadget? Maybe the word gadget has changed in my old age, from interesting expensive luxury in my youth, to boring stuff that sucks in my old age. Let me know when they redefine "nerd" because if it gets changed to mean male pr0n star its going to be awkward if you don't warn me first.
I lost interest about there. Does the list of URLs get any better? Did anyone else do field research like I did?
Its kind of like putting up a pr0n site exclusively containing pics of sheep rear views (I'm talking species Ovis Aries not sheep as in psychologically, like, American Women) and THEN noticing your audience is nothing but weirdos, and finally publicly complaining that "The Internet is full of nothing but weirdos". No, sir, try posting something other than pictures of sheep behinds and get back to us, OK?
When you have a small group of generally like minded people with a certain amount of pre-existing knowledge in the topic .. you get a good discussion.
Examples: thehousingbubbleblog.com bbs.homeshopmachinist.net zerohedge.com
When you get the diverse public with dissimilar views and often a very surface understanding of the topic.. you get the type of shit we see on this guy’s collection of sites and on youtube and so on.
Examples: instructables.com "Every freaking website for a local newspaper I've ever seen that is exclusively populated by paid political astroturfers sniping at each other"
Although it doesn't really matter -- I would have bigger things to worry about than housing insurance in that case.
Strong disagree... I live 1000s of miles downwind of LA. No direct biological effect on me or mine if "they" pop the port of LA with something inside a shipping container, but its basically a dirty bomb attack on me for resale value, or maybe govt certified verified licensed decon, etc.
There's a uniquely American fixation that any nuclear attack means the fireball must be directly over their head because the world revolves around them. More likely it'll happen 2000 miles away.
or dumb enough. Even expressing (i.e. with some sort of "none of the above") that none of the options is good for you is a powerful message if in large enough numbers. Is not an "is ok what chooses everyone else", nor "anyway will win candidate x, no matter what i vote". Is not the same a president backed by 51% of the population of a country than one backed by the 26% because only 50% of potential voters cared about it (and in those people could have something rigging the sample, like some interest, or pressure, or getting some benefit, or, well, not being resistant/intelligent enough to empty political speech)
Have to find another example for "dumb" because "everyone knows" your description above is a waste of time in an entrenched two party system.
I'm not saying there exists no dumb reason not to vote, but your specific argument really didn't do it for me.
My insurance policy says I'm covered for "acts of God".
Not to completely hijack the thread, but I've always wondered how that kind of clause works out with atheists or more generally speaking people of non-evangelical christian religions.
I believe most people put no effort into voting
You're disenfranchising their efforts from your personal list of "efforts".
On the other hand it is not intuitively obvious that Romney is a Mormon therefore X% of the population has been brainwashed as childred to hate him for his religion.
I suppose if you know the "modern google definition" of the frothy secretion known as Santorum, then I give you credit that it Could be Intuitively obvious that Santorum has serious issues wrt that whole subject.
It takes at least some minimal effort to figure out what political party Dad votes for and more effort to decide if you're of the proper age to be in or out of parental rebellion.
Self contemplation, for the masses, is actually pretty hard. That whole "rather die than think" thing that is so idolized.
I think you're excluding their actions from the category of effort, I don't see the point. They might be doing something dumb that has historically brought bad results, but that doesn't mean they're doing nothing...
and why use lasers if it sn't?
Easier to couple into the fiber. LED is a huge optical PITA to properly couple into a fiber. Yes LEDs are more mass produced and are cents instead of bucks but the coupling apparatus is bulky and "expensive" and generally a PITA, and by the time you spend a couple bucks on some fancy package and/or connector and focusing optics why not spend a buck on a bright laser instead of the dimness you'd get from a 10 cent LED? Now with superbright LEDs this argument is probably going away in the future, but not quite yet.
Most of the energy going into a LED turns into heat, then most of the LED light isn't going to couple into the fiber. Laser still fails step 1, but it passes step 2.
There are other reasons in the telecom business why we're likely sticking with lasers for awhile, monochromatic spectrum / group phase delay, and also relative ease of frequency shifts for DWDM (like old fashioned RF FDM but for light).
I donno why, but the wikipedia article carefully misses the most important reason to force all citizens to vote... If the government later does something you don't like, then you should not protest or riot or even complain about it in public, because being anything other than a perfect sheep makes you a sore loser and you should just vote for someone else next time. There is no excuse that you're "not being represented" because you were forced to vote, just like everyone else, so theoretically you selected your representation, right?
Also it is good PR for the only legitimate regime change being scheduled and carefully controlled elections, absolutely not alternatives ranging from recall petitions and calls for impeachment all the way up to armed rebellion. Its kind of cheesy at this goal and traditionally does not work, at least in the 3rd world.
A side issue also carefully not discussed is I am not bound by the US Constitution, despite my very low /. UID I certainly never signed it, that's for sure. I'm not saying I hate it or its icky, I actually kind of like it, mostly, just that it has no moral or ethical jurisdiction over me because I never agreed to it. This worldview gets some statist types all wound up, who gave me permission to have an open mind, etc etc. Putting some mandatory voting amendment into it with traditionally draconian punishments which I would probably have to follow for pragmatic reasons, legitimatizes the rest of my relationship to the Constitution, because most of the rest of the Constitution I can frankly ignore, I'm probably never going to be a government agent with a moral responsibility to follow the 1st amendment, blah blah blah, but an amendment forcing me to vote would certainly be a kick in the pants every two years or so (assuming it would be federal elections only, not my local dogcatcher election).
Don't forget profit and courtroom drama.
Profit is obvious. Courtroom drama is the perp must be guilty because the cops felt like sending 25 cops in riot gear and smashed all the house windows... If the cops just called his lawyer and asked him to talk, he must not be an absolutely guilty supercriminal.
Had a SWAT callout 5 houses to the west of mine some months ago... parole violator got drunk (thats a no no for a multi-time DUI guy) went to friends house, passed out alcohol intoxication. Friend owns a deer hunting rifle and was dumb enough to tell the cops looking for the drunk about it, so we get full swat team callout, smash all the windows and stick cameras in, including one of those tossed ball camera things. Streets blocked off, TV news told BS story about man barricaded in house with gun so we've got newsies crawiling everywhere. The cops got to do the judge jury executioner thing by tasing an semi-conscious drunk guy. This is all OK because "we're tough on crime in this rich suburban city". Lots of people made a lot of money, and the parole violator is back in a for profit prison again, the families (especially children like mine) were terrified, so its all good all around. Seriously SWAT doesn't mean anything anymore.
The effort in voting is not getting off the couch and hauling you fat, lazy ass to a polling station. Rather it is in educating yourself on issues, forming your own opinions on those issues, examining the candidates opinions of those issues, and then communicating with those candidates both by voting for your preferences and by maintaining a dialog with those actually elected to office.
You've gotta be kidding. Its all about who looks better on TV, who is a better public speaker, who tells better lies, which 1%er passes himself off more like a 99%er, which candidate is compatible with my personal selection of imaginary man in the sky, and by far the most significant reason is to vote for the party your male ancestors supported, or depending on family dynamic and youthful rebelliousness, vote for the party your male ancestors did not support.
The other part is 90% of the population blindly follows either party right into hell, only the votes and beliefs of about 10% "swing voters" matter. So you've gotta be crazy enough to get the 45% of your party to nominate you (Palin, Santorum, heck practically every R after Reagan in my opinion) yet be normal enough to get the sane 10% swing voters fooled into voting for you. So its a multiple personality contest, the winner is the one who acts the nuttiest of the nuts to the 45% while simultaneously appearing normal to the 10%. That's about it.
Finally there's a large fraction of the sway voters who simply vote pocketbook... Am I happy today (got some from the wife, sports team won last night, etc) well then the incumbent wins. Am I unhappy today (wife made me sleep on couch, sports team lost last night, etc) well then the challenger wins. Probably 9% of the swing voters vote this way. Smart idea for the R to oppose contraception, no pill = no sex = unhappy 9% swing voters = incumbent fail
In the USA, we are lucky if a simple majority of people vote at all. Internet based voting might help with that, since it takes some of the effort out of voting.
Actually that's a bug not a feature. Billions of dollars spent on election advertising (by people expecting to be rewarded after the election) and half the population is resistant enough (or intelligent enough) to not bother voting. I can't imagine the politicals being happy about those people being enfranchised, why instead of simple minded TV commercials they'd actually have to win them over using logic, or purchase their votes with programs, or ... How exactly do you control people without simpleminded emotional arguments anyway?
No the real feature is the death of democracy and replacement with feudalism. A "Large Enough" fraction of the population will be doing this online voting under the close eye of their supervisor at work, or their church pastor, or their professor at school, or maybe the landlord's office, or probation officer's office, or their spouse... It's kind of a stealth poll tax such that "the more important people" will be enforcing who votes for who.
Sure, it is true, that technically you can vote for anyone you want, with this new internet voting... all you need is no job or independently wealthy, atheist, non-student, property owner (as opposed to renter), clean criminal justice record, and be an orphan with no immediate family or friends. Everyone else has to vote for who the local alpha male says to vote for.
I can't say as its really going to change anything, because both parties are two sides of the same coin with different marketing messages.
Too Long Didn't Watch; I don't watch video in general. People who can't express themselves in words certainly can't express themselves in video either.
I would assume a much simpler and cheaper and safer way to corrupt internet voting is to internet vote under the watchful eye of your supervisor at work, or the watchful eye of your head of household at home, or maybe your local church could provide internet access to vote, or ... You could work around that bug by bringing internet access to the local elementary school gymnasium (they've probably already got wifi like our schools), placing some superannuated citizens in charge of what to them is incomprehendible technology (in other words anything newer than IBM unit record apparatus from pre-1930), maybe replacing those complicated internet kiosks with a simple paper form and pencils and an instantly reading/verifying optical scanner.. oh wait thats exactly what we have now where I live. Hmm. Sounds like a big waste of money for everyone except the people getting the money... who happen to be campaign donors.. Oh, I see whats happening here.