Whoops epic fail on my part, you have an endgame plan for the old machines, you are imaging their drives and wiping them, like today, or whenever you get off slashdot. That's just ducky.
Now, what's your endgame plan for the images. Keep them forever? Or just next financial quarter/year? Or whatever the IRS interval is (7 years, I think?) Does the NAS / RAID / external USB drive holding them need to get copied and wiped? If you're doing the geographic diversity thing, who's securely disposing of the offsite backups?
Looks like you forgot the verify step. md5 the hardware drive, md5 the image, they better match (bet they occasionally don't!). Also if you're taking a bare image, you don't mount the drive, you just copy the raw partition. If you mount the partition, then you have "issues" if the filesystem is semi-corrupt, was powered down while active, etc.
Also you forgot your exception process/monitor/procedure/whatever. At least some of these "hundreds" are not gonna spin up, are gonna barf out read errors on obscure corners of the FS... How much is management willing to spend to "recover" the data? There are places out there willing to take 5 figures to recover bad drives, and their success rate is not 100% so you need a plan for that too.
Everyone else (anyone else?) will answer the automation question, but if you're ever done a PXE based linux install, you're about 99% of the way there.
The mystery I have, is where are you going to store "several hundred" drives worth of backups? And who or what is going to back up and maintain and store and recover the backups?
I'm guessing the best answer is open all the boxes, remove the drives, install new blank drives, all done? Given the cost of storage and admin time, this might even be the cheapest solution.
If this is a forensics issue, its a heck of a lot simpler legally to stuff THE drive in a evidence bag and buy a new one, rather than try to explain how your image is a true image crypto signed so it wasn't altered after it was signed, except how do you prove it wasn't altered before it was signed, blah blah blah.
Are you talking about backups where you only store relevant user "my documents" type data which might be practically nothing, or merely all files on a stereotypically mostly empty drive which would be at most a couple gigs, or a full bit for bit forensics dump of hundreds of 1 TB drives?
There's a big difference between "it all fits on a single USB attached consumer grade 1 TB drive" and "We're gonna need multiple racks of multimillion dollar NAS to hold all the images".
How valuable is the data? If it leaked would you lose PCI / CC / HIPPA / SOX stuff and its the end of the world or at least your corporation and job, or is it just a university computer lab and the most valuable/sensitive thing is a couple rickroll videos and some lolcats?
What do you intend to do, if anything, with the backups? The simplest / cheapest / most efficient way to store backups might involve just throwing the machines in a rented storage room. Climate controlled if possible. You can rent a heck of a lot of storage space for a long time for the cost of a couple hundred hours of admin time.
Finally whats your liability? If for example, one doesn't boot due to hard drive failure or whatever, are you shipping it to one of those $10K data recovery places, in other words you actually care, or if you lose some, eh, whatever, it was just a "nice to have"? If you can lose one, can you lose all of them with the same "eh" attitude? If your liability is significantly lower than your costs, your best plan might be to skip the backup and destroy the drives.
In summary the problem isn't how to "transfer" a couple hundred terabytes, that is a long solved question, no big deal. The unsolved problem is how to store / collate / search / backup / distribute / secure a couple hundred terabytes.
but the fact that on their internal network there's people and/or machines sending spam.
Spam = unsolicited bulk commercial email. Yeah we've got some heavy spam senders here.
Hmm, boss thinks I'm slacking, I'll show him, plus I hate that guy in engineering... I know I'll send automatic hourly ticket status updates to the entire engineering distribution list, and when their manager complains, I'll do some superiority games to prove how important and hard working I am. Who cares if the entire department sets up email rules to autodelete the incoming spam, I've WON!
Now repeat that about 50 times over (no kidding) and you'll see why my trash folder is full.
Aside from internal warfare, it also shows up in the electronic equivalent of "hoarding". You know the guy who still has every grocery store bag he has ever received, just in case he might need one some day, in a closet packed so tight the mice can't even get in? He's got a brother who thinks it best that the entire company get UPS status notifications, on the off chance that a secretary in an offshore office might need to know the incoming line frequency is 0.0001 Hz lower today than yesterday... Sure its probably useless, but WHAT IF, and who will be brave enough to take the fall for not sending it to everyone and making everyone responsible (aka, no one responsible) for knowing the charging current today for battery cell #3 ?
There's a good idea. Let's run our business like a bunch of 11 year-olds.
The only good part about that brilliant strategy is the dress code, no more suit and tie... Not only is business casual too formal, casual casual is still too formal.
We do everything on your list with a ticketing system (used to be RT, moved to a proprietary expensive self developed featureless abomination, will probably move back to RT eventually)
Everything from lightbulb replacement and clogged plumbing, to software feature requests. If its a project or task, its in the ticketing system.
The biggest problem is ass clowns who use email instead of the existing ticket, mostly when they're doing / writing something inappropriate or stupid. They get cut and pasted into the ticket, then the squealing starts.
There have been periodic threats to install a bloggy software type of thing, but it never goes anywhere.
We used IM for awhile, but it got to the point that only weasels and morons were using it so as a group we all disabled it / logged out / whatever. Too bad, its an interesting technology.
The biggest problem with tabletop games (especially obscure or new ones) is that it can be hard to track down people to actually play with.
Let me summarize my university years experience with DnD for you:
"Wanna come over and play DnD? Uh, I gotta study for a test, or do laundry or trim my ear hairs or something"
vs
"Wanna drink a couple cases of beer, eat some pizza, and play DnD? F yeah, can I come over and start right now?"
The downside is the DM needs to be at least somewhat sober, which makes the DM really pissed off when the players are falling down drunk.
Hint Hint, almost exactly one month from right now, too old to party types like myself, are going to be looking for something to do on new years eve... I suspect there will be a lot of google hangouts and skype and even IRC DnD games out there that night. If you don't want to be an alt.drunken.bastard there is not much else to do that night.
Then, for the handful that remain, we pay them next to nothing. I've talked to starting teachers who, upon finishing their masters, get jobs paying $30k or $40k a year. Compare that with engineers who can earn double that right after getting their BS. Why would any technically minded person choose to teach?
I'm related to several teachers. The market is staggeringly different than the tech market. Where I live:
Tech salary for constant work, is constant, plus maybe a percent or two or maybe three for truly heroic effort, Unless you progress up the ladder, up an extremely narrow pyramid where virtually all workers will never attain the peak, or frankly never get to advance at all. Oh, that percent or two pay raise is less than inflation? Too f-ing bad, someone from India would love to take your job for half your pay so STFU and work harder (ha ha ha). In comparison, teaching is gone into with the knowledge from reading the union contract and decades of tradition, that you start extremely low, then every year you get inflation PLUS 5 percent. So the noobs get practically nothing, if they stick around they advance into the middle class in a decade or so, and frankly are rolling in cash by retirement. I knew for a fact, my elderly H.S. calculus teacher, per the union contract with his PHD and 30 years teaching, was hauling down low 6 figures in the 1980s in an area and era where the average blue collar guy was getting maybe $25K/yr. God only knows what they top out at now. That trend remains, my sister in law's standard of living over the past decades has moved from "rent a room in a shared slumlord house with few working appliances", to owning a pretty decent house, to pretty much living large with elaborate vacations and shopping trips...
Writing "space invaders" has little skill involved (hit-boxes and timers mostly), while writing a multiplayer racing game contains physics, graphics, networking, synchronization, security (anti-cheat), and possibly even AI (racing is particularly difficult to do well with AI).
With all due respect, you are correct that writing an exact clone of Atari 2600 space invaders is pretty easy/boring, but there is exactly zero reason why a "space invaders like" game could not have realistic projectile physics and realistic target maneuverability, 3-d graphics, synchronized networked multi-player, some psuedo-security anti-cheat (you do realize those are almost universally snakeoil, right? and part of the class could be having the kids break each others snakeoil...) and some AI so the last space invader sees how you got the first and tries to evade you (hmm, he always shoots down aliens at the edges of the screen, or maybe the center, or maybe he always gets them at a certain altitude, perhaps I will avoid those areas of the screen?)
Its kind of like claiming Wii sports table tennis is no more difficult to write than the original "Pong" game, because after all, they both are just paddles and a ball...
That's just the high level stuff. If you do low level, you've got video signal theory vs practice, interrupt routines, keyboard scan routines, hardware timer usage, switch debouncing, and A/D converter use and abuse. The way we did this in microcontroller class was infinitely more boring than writing a space invaders clone, or a game of any sort.
Something I noticed was the MC class was much easier for my fellow students than CS classes... There's something about having a physical matrix of keyswitches that makes it "more obvious" than a CS class iterating thru an array... I think it fair to say you're far better off starting kids off with a microcontroller than with a classic CS curriculum or even with logo.
And if they are using some high-harmonic mixing with that diode then they're probably not going to meet regulatory emission requirements
subharmonic mixing is probably an analogy for what you're talking about, and yeah its a struggle to make that work. If you play games with waveguide between the mixer diodes and the antenna, which is a pretty decent high pass filter, and use some stubs, you can get great attenuation of the LO signal, but good luck cleaning up the images unless your IF is like 10 gigs.
Also like you said the power thing... subharmonic mixing is not known for efficiency, even with a crazy elaborate design covered with stub sections, still at least 10 dB loss.. Sensitive to drive level too.
LOL... at "sub millimeter wavelengths" 2 cm is practically a longwire or a beverage antenna... 20, 30, 40 wavelengths long. Whatever they're doing, its pretty directive, and its never going to shrink, a 30 wavelength long sub millimeter band antenna is always going to be around 2 cm or so.
The only microscopically more intelligent metric of executable file length at the output of the optimizing compiler can also be successfully gamed... Let me write my own implementation of Quicksort, my own implementation of AES, etc.
Yes, and our roads will be awesome when any asshole can just hop into a car and put the pedal on the floor....
What stops them now? Absolutely nothing? No problemo then, I guess.
Please, explain how the free market regulates people that don't know how to drive without causing millions of people to lose their lives in accidents. I would love to hear it.
If the manufacturer and/or seller of a gun is liable for what the new owner does with it, or a bartender is liable for what a patron does after purchasing booze, or I get in trouble for selling you a class 4 laser and you do something dumb, I see no reason why Ford can't be legally liable for handing over the keys to someone who didn't pass a vehicle test, or a parent can't be legally liable for loaning the keys to a teenager. Thats how it works in private aviation, anytime anyone crashes for any reason, the vehicle manufacturer gets sued, because that's where the money is.
There is a mass confusion about free markets, in that they like to say there is one in the USA, but everyone knows how the market works in the USA is the big and powerful have no rules, therefore a "free-er" market must mean there would be no rules for anyone at all, other than might makes right. Not so. All it means is the govt is not a counterparty to every agreement and activity, that's all. It doesn't mean no laws could ever exist, or no judicial system could ever exist, or no civil courts could ever exist.
No DMV (and no vehicle registrations, or safety regulations, or license plates, or insurance?)
The following licenses I have, or previously held, none of which are "IDs" requiring SS number: ham radio license GROL former private pilot license (maybe this has changed to photo now?) former fishing license several former military operators licenses including really weird stuff like immersion heater (I kid you not) and RTFL rough terrain forklift my library card is functionally a license as opposed to an ID card my old non-photo college ID card (I guess those are mostly photo "real forms of ID" now?). It was mainly used at the library and to pay for photocopies. My temp drivers license when I was 15 until I passed my formal DL test had no "id" properties, it just gave me permission to drive with a parent in the car supervising me.
Functionally American drivers license functionality is merged with ID card functionality, as if any separation is impossible, but its certainly not required. None of the stuff you listed requires ID directly, although registration title transfer is gonna require the services of a notary, and the notary will demand an ID, or the DMV personnel could operate as notaries, ending up right where we started...
How does providing a SSN verify that the DL requester is who they say they are?
My father did occasional DB consulting work for a collections agency in the 90s, so this is at best hearsay, non the less:
Places that accept personal checks, like to take either the DL number directly or a pointer to the DL such as a grocery store loyalty card. The DL number points to a theoretically valid SS number.
So, if a guy bounces a check, standard procedure if he completely fell off the face of the earth, with the assistance of the judge, was to ask the bank for money from other accounts owned by the same SS number (presumably the guys savings acct or a CD), garnish the wages based on SS number, etc. Traditionally this was the step where they discovered identity theft (WTF you mean, I live in WI but I bought a used truck in AZ with a personal check that bounced etc etc).
I guess, depending on the state, its possible for a judge to put a hold on a drivers license renewal if a rubber stamped court judgment isn't paid. Also if criminal charges are filed, it can follow the DL number.
What would make a lot more sense is for banks and credit agencies to stop using the SSN as a master password. That's not what it was ever designed for.
They "need" it to tell the IRS who made interest income so they can cross check automatically against tax returns. You'd need an alternative solution, such as possibly, stop charging income tax on interest.
Fissile enriched U is much easier to detect than non-fissile Pu-238.
Also, I don't think there was or is any consensus on what capsule if any was loaded into the casing. Lots of coverup and secret secret BS activity and falsified stories and documents. At this point, I donno if anyone really knows for sure what was lost.
The Plutonium 238 is suitable for RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) but not for bombs.
Maybe this info will spare us most "nuke" posts (terrorist jokes, etc).
No, the purpose of the whole subject is to scare us, thus control us. Keep them anxious!
Actually 238 would make a halfway decent "dirty bomb" mostly because of the fear of plutonium, the general public thinks there is only one isotope of Pu, if they do any thinking at all beyond "radiation = bad"
Run it by a RF EE next time, or at least an advanced ham radio guy.
using a chip and antenna that's just two centimeters long
a stark comparison to current terahertz gear that's both large and expensive.
with a submillimeter wavelength
First of all its hard from a RF perspective to make stuff thats more than a 1/4 wavelength long. Obviously possible, but much harder. For example, I'm working on a K band transverter and one nightmare is standard SMA connectors resonate at 18 GHz or so, making them quite exciting to use. Yes I already know about the expensive and complicated and almost but not quite SMA compatible connectors I can use. Aside from connector and feedline issues, Its actually EASIER to make small stuff than large stuff at high frequencies / small wavelengths. Cable attenuation makes you put the whole RF works at the dish feedpoint above 50 GHz or so, if you want decent performance. The smaller it is, the lighter it is, more or less, making the mechanical engineering job simpler. Its not like 50 GHz amplifier dies are currently the size of dinner plates and will someday be the size of rice grains... they're already tiny. Ditto this chip. Also the silicon is cheap, the tools are expensive. A new ultrasonic wirebond machine must be worth, i donno, tens to hundreds of thousands of cheap MMIC dies? When you buy MMIC dies, its not like they're blowing lots of money on packaging... And thats before you hire the rare skilled labor to set up and operate and maintain the already expensive wire bonder. Wirebonding zero ohm resistors wouldn't really change the overall cost vs wirebonding some fancy dies because of the huge fixed and variable costs of the technology, so changing the die cost from ten dollars to ten cents isn't gonna help if the overall project cost due to R+D and manufacturing and test gear averages out to ten grand per active device...
Secondly complete THZ systems are large and remain large and will probably always be "large". The internal chips are already small, and, frankly, relatively cheap. Antenna cannot be magically shrunk for same performance. Support gear like bias and main power regulators don't "know" they're powering microwave gear and should therefore be shrinking at a microwave pace. DSP processors don't "know" they're connected to a shrinking MMIC die and therefore they should be shrinking at a microwave pace. Support gear does shrink over time at the rate of normal support gear shrinkage, which isn't that fast. For example, not much has changed in the world of linear voltage regulators in the last 30 years... somewhat lower current references, MOS pass transistors instead of bipolar means lower voltage drop, um... thats about it?
Inefficient. Rather than making it harder to look at the screen, make viewers not want to look at the screen to begin with. Make the background image goatse. Also provides an interesting location to place the stereotypical "GUI trash can".
Slashdot Mirror
Whoops epic fail on my part, you have an endgame plan for the old machines, you are imaging their drives and wiping them, like today, or whenever you get off slashdot. That's just ducky.
Now, what's your endgame plan for the images. Keep them forever? Or just next financial quarter/year? Or whatever the IRS interval is (7 years, I think?) Does the NAS / RAID / external USB drive holding them need to get copied and wiped? If you're doing the geographic diversity thing, who's securely disposing of the offsite backups?
Looks like you forgot the verify step. md5 the hardware drive, md5 the image, they better match (bet they occasionally don't!). Also if you're taking a bare image, you don't mount the drive, you just copy the raw partition. If you mount the partition, then you have "issues" if the filesystem is semi-corrupt, was powered down while active, etc.
Also you forgot your exception process/monitor/procedure/whatever. At least some of these "hundreds" are not gonna spin up, are gonna barf out read errors on obscure corners of the FS... How much is management willing to spend to "recover" the data? There are places out there willing to take 5 figures to recover bad drives, and their success rate is not 100% so you need a plan for that too.
Everyone else (anyone else?) will answer the automation question, but if you're ever done a PXE based linux install, you're about 99% of the way there.
The mystery I have, is where are you going to store "several hundred" drives worth of backups? And who or what is going to back up and maintain and store and recover the backups?
I'm guessing the best answer is open all the boxes, remove the drives, install new blank drives, all done? Given the cost of storage and admin time, this might even be the cheapest solution.
If this is a forensics issue, its a heck of a lot simpler legally to stuff THE drive in a evidence bag and buy a new one, rather than try to explain how your image is a true image crypto signed so it wasn't altered after it was signed, except how do you prove it wasn't altered before it was signed, blah blah blah.
Are you talking about backups where you only store relevant user "my documents" type data which might be practically nothing, or merely all files on a stereotypically mostly empty drive which would be at most a couple gigs, or a full bit for bit forensics dump of hundreds of 1 TB drives?
There's a big difference between "it all fits on a single USB attached consumer grade 1 TB drive" and "We're gonna need multiple racks of multimillion dollar NAS to hold all the images".
How valuable is the data? If it leaked would you lose PCI / CC / HIPPA / SOX stuff and its the end of the world or at least your corporation and job, or is it just a university computer lab and the most valuable/sensitive thing is a couple rickroll videos and some lolcats?
What do you intend to do, if anything, with the backups? The simplest / cheapest / most efficient way to store backups might involve just throwing the machines in a rented storage room. Climate controlled if possible. You can rent a heck of a lot of storage space for a long time for the cost of a couple hundred hours of admin time.
Finally whats your liability? If for example, one doesn't boot due to hard drive failure or whatever, are you shipping it to one of those $10K data recovery places, in other words you actually care, or if you lose some, eh, whatever, it was just a "nice to have"? If you can lose one, can you lose all of them with the same "eh" attitude? If your liability is significantly lower than your costs, your best plan might be to skip the backup and destroy the drives.
In summary the problem isn't how to "transfer" a couple hundred terabytes, that is a long solved question, no big deal. The unsolved problem is how to store / collate / search / backup / distribute / secure a couple hundred terabytes.
but the fact that on their internal network there's people and/or machines sending spam.
Spam = unsolicited bulk commercial email. Yeah we've got some heavy spam senders here.
Hmm, boss thinks I'm slacking, I'll show him, plus I hate that guy in engineering... I know I'll send automatic hourly ticket status updates to the entire engineering distribution list, and when their manager complains, I'll do some superiority games to prove how important and hard working I am. Who cares if the entire department sets up email rules to autodelete the incoming spam, I've WON!
Now repeat that about 50 times over (no kidding) and you'll see why my trash folder is full.
Aside from internal warfare, it also shows up in the electronic equivalent of "hoarding". You know the guy who still has every grocery store bag he has ever received, just in case he might need one some day, in a closet packed so tight the mice can't even get in? He's got a brother who thinks it best that the entire company get UPS status notifications, on the off chance that a secretary in an offshore office might need to know the incoming line frequency is 0.0001 Hz lower today than yesterday... Sure its probably useless, but WHAT IF, and who will be brave enough to take the fall for not sending it to everyone and making everyone responsible (aka, no one responsible) for knowing the charging current today for battery cell #3 ?
How do you nearly instantly grep a skype video/audio call?
There's a good idea. Let's run our business like a bunch of 11 year-olds.
The only good part about that brilliant strategy is the dress code, no more suit and tie... Not only is business casual too formal, casual casual is still too formal.
I did try to get my wife to start sending grocery lists SMS
Geeze dude, for what they charge for SMS around here, the phone bill must have ended up greater than the food bill...
We do everything on your list with a ticketing system (used to be RT, moved to a proprietary expensive self developed featureless abomination, will probably move back to RT eventually)
Everything from lightbulb replacement and clogged plumbing, to software feature requests. If its a project or task, its in the ticketing system.
The biggest problem is ass clowns who use email instead of the existing ticket, mostly when they're doing / writing something inappropriate or stupid. They get cut and pasted into the ticket, then the squealing starts.
There have been periodic threats to install a bloggy software type of thing, but it never goes anywhere.
We used IM for awhile, but it got to the point that only weasels and morons were using it so as a group we all disabled it / logged out / whatever. Too bad, its an interesting technology.
The biggest problem with tabletop games (especially obscure or new ones) is that it can be hard to track down people to actually play with.
Let me summarize my university years experience with DnD for you:
"Wanna come over and play DnD? Uh, I gotta study for a test, or do laundry or trim my ear hairs or something"
vs
"Wanna drink a couple cases of beer, eat some pizza, and play DnD? F yeah, can I come over and start right now?"
The downside is the DM needs to be at least somewhat sober, which makes the DM really pissed off when the players are falling down drunk.
Hint Hint, almost exactly one month from right now, too old to party types like myself, are going to be looking for something to do on new years eve... I suspect there will be a lot of google hangouts and skype and even IRC DnD games out there that night. If you don't want to be an alt.drunken.bastard there is not much else to do that night.
Health benefits are FAR above what the average citizen sees
Not because the teachers has gone up, but because ours has gone down. That's a fact.
Some of that is changing now, though. There has been something of rebound effect. People are getting very pissed off.
Like crabs in a crab pot trying to pull any escapees back into the pot if they try to climb out. Yea team!
Then, for the handful that remain, we pay them next to nothing. I've talked to starting teachers who, upon finishing their masters, get jobs paying $30k or $40k a year. Compare that with engineers who can earn double that right after getting their BS. Why would any technically minded person choose to teach?
I'm related to several teachers. The market is staggeringly different than the tech market. Where I live:
Tech salary for constant work, is constant, plus maybe a percent or two or maybe three for truly heroic effort, Unless you progress up the ladder, up an extremely narrow pyramid where virtually all workers will never attain the peak, or frankly never get to advance at all. Oh, that percent or two pay raise is less than inflation? Too f-ing bad, someone from India would love to take your job for half your pay so STFU and work harder (ha ha ha). In comparison, teaching is gone into with the knowledge from reading the union contract and decades of tradition, that you start extremely low, then every year you get inflation PLUS 5 percent. So the noobs get practically nothing, if they stick around they advance into the middle class in a decade or so, and frankly are rolling in cash by retirement. I knew for a fact, my elderly H.S. calculus teacher, per the union contract with his PHD and 30 years teaching, was hauling down low 6 figures in the 1980s in an area and era where the average blue collar guy was getting maybe $25K/yr. God only knows what they top out at now. That trend remains, my sister in law's standard of living over the past decades has moved from "rent a room in a shared slumlord house with few working appliances", to owning a pretty decent house, to pretty much living large with elaborate vacations and shopping trips...
Writing "space invaders" has little skill involved (hit-boxes and timers mostly), while writing a multiplayer racing game contains physics, graphics, networking, synchronization, security (anti-cheat), and possibly even AI (racing is particularly difficult to do well with AI).
With all due respect, you are correct that writing an exact clone of Atari 2600 space invaders is pretty easy/boring, but there is exactly zero reason why a "space invaders like" game could not have realistic projectile physics and realistic target maneuverability, 3-d graphics, synchronized networked multi-player, some psuedo-security anti-cheat (you do realize those are almost universally snakeoil, right? and part of the class could be having the kids break each others snakeoil...) and some AI so the last space invader sees how you got the first and tries to evade you (hmm, he always shoots down aliens at the edges of the screen, or maybe the center, or maybe he always gets them at a certain altitude, perhaps I will avoid those areas of the screen?)
Its kind of like claiming Wii sports table tennis is no more difficult to write than the original "Pong" game, because after all, they both are just paddles and a ball...
That's just the high level stuff. If you do low level, you've got video signal theory vs practice, interrupt routines, keyboard scan routines, hardware timer usage, switch debouncing, and A/D converter use and abuse. The way we did this in microcontroller class was infinitely more boring than writing a space invaders clone, or a game of any sort.
Something I noticed was the MC class was much easier for my fellow students than CS classes... There's something about having a physical matrix of keyswitches that makes it "more obvious" than a CS class iterating thru an array... I think it fair to say you're far better off starting kids off with a microcontroller than with a classic CS curriculum or even with logo.
And if they are using some high-harmonic mixing with that diode then they're probably not going to meet regulatory emission requirements
subharmonic mixing is probably an analogy for what you're talking about, and yeah its a struggle to make that work. If you play games with waveguide between the mixer diodes and the antenna, which is a pretty decent high pass filter, and use some stubs, you can get great attenuation of the LO signal, but good luck cleaning up the images unless your IF is like 10 gigs.
Also like you said the power thing... subharmonic mixing is not known for efficiency, even with a crazy elaborate design covered with stub sections, still at least 10 dB loss.. Sensitive to drive level too.
LOL... at "sub millimeter wavelengths" 2 cm is practically a longwire or a beverage antenna... 20, 30, 40 wavelengths long. Whatever they're doing, its pretty directive, and its never going to shrink, a 30 wavelength long sub millimeter band antenna is always going to be around 2 cm or so.
The only microscopically more intelligent metric of executable file length at the output of the optimizing compiler can also be successfully gamed... Let me write my own implementation of Quicksort, my own implementation of AES, etc.
Yes, and our roads will be awesome when any asshole can just hop into a car and put the pedal on the floor....
What stops them now? Absolutely nothing? No problemo then, I guess.
Please, explain how the free market regulates people that don't know how to drive without causing millions of people to lose their lives in accidents. I would love to hear it.
If the manufacturer and/or seller of a gun is liable for what the new owner does with it, or a bartender is liable for what a patron does after purchasing booze, or I get in trouble for selling you a class 4 laser and you do something dumb, I see no reason why Ford can't be legally liable for handing over the keys to someone who didn't pass a vehicle test, or a parent can't be legally liable for loaning the keys to a teenager. Thats how it works in private aviation, anytime anyone crashes for any reason, the vehicle manufacturer gets sued, because that's where the money is.
There is a mass confusion about free markets, in that they like to say there is one in the USA, but everyone knows how the market works in the USA is the big and powerful have no rules, therefore a "free-er" market must mean there would be no rules for anyone at all, other than might makes right. Not so. All it means is the govt is not a counterparty to every agreement and activity, that's all. It doesn't mean no laws could ever exist, or no judicial system could ever exist, or no civil courts could ever exist.
No DMV (and no vehicle registrations, or safety regulations, or license plates, or insurance?)
The following licenses I have, or previously held, none of which are "IDs" requiring SS number:
ham radio license
GROL
former private pilot license (maybe this has changed to photo now?)
former fishing license
several former military operators licenses including really weird stuff like immersion heater (I kid you not) and RTFL rough terrain forklift
my library card is functionally a license as opposed to an ID card
my old non-photo college ID card (I guess those are mostly photo "real forms of ID" now?). It was mainly used at the library and to pay for photocopies.
My temp drivers license when I was 15 until I passed my formal DL test had no "id" properties, it just gave me permission to drive with a parent in the car supervising me.
Functionally American drivers license functionality is merged with ID card functionality, as if any separation is impossible, but its certainly not required. None of the stuff you listed requires ID directly, although registration title transfer is gonna require the services of a notary, and the notary will demand an ID, or the DMV personnel could operate as notaries, ending up right where we started...
How does providing a SSN verify that the DL requester is who they say they are?
My father did occasional DB consulting work for a collections agency in the 90s, so this is at best hearsay, non the less:
Places that accept personal checks, like to take either the DL number directly or a pointer to the DL such as a grocery store loyalty card.
The DL number points to a theoretically valid SS number.
So, if a guy bounces a check, standard procedure if he completely fell off the face of the earth, with the assistance of the judge, was to ask the bank for money from other accounts owned by the same SS number (presumably the guys savings acct or a CD), garnish the wages based on SS number, etc. Traditionally this was the step where they discovered identity theft (WTF you mean, I live in WI but I bought a used truck in AZ with a personal check that bounced etc etc).
I guess, depending on the state, its possible for a judge to put a hold on a drivers license renewal if a rubber stamped court judgment isn't paid. Also if criminal charges are filed, it can follow the DL number.
What would make a lot more sense is for banks and credit agencies to stop using the SSN as a master password. That's not what it was ever designed for.
They "need" it to tell the IRS who made interest income so they can cross check automatically against tax returns. You'd need an alternative solution, such as possibly, stop charging income tax on interest.
find that Mark 15 H-Bomb they misplaced somewhere near the coast of Georgia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1958_Tybee_Island_mid-air_collision
Fissile enriched U is much easier to detect than non-fissile Pu-238.
Also, I don't think there was or is any consensus on what capsule if any was loaded into the casing. Lots of coverup and secret secret BS activity and falsified stories and documents. At this point, I donno if anyone really knows for sure what was lost.
At the rate things are going, that might be cheaper and easier than procuring it from Russia.
At the rate things are decaying, its gonna be about half U234 anyway, so they've got a substantial purification job up ahead if they wanna reuse it.
The Plutonium 238 is suitable for RTG (radioisotope thermoelectric generator) but not for bombs.
Maybe this info will spare us most "nuke" posts (terrorist jokes, etc).
No, the purpose of the whole subject is to scare us, thus control us. Keep them anxious!
Actually 238 would make a halfway decent "dirty bomb" mostly because of the fear of plutonium, the general public thinks there is only one isotope of Pu, if they do any thinking at all beyond "radiation = bad"
Run it by a RF EE next time, or at least an advanced ham radio guy.
using a chip and antenna that's just two centimeters long
a stark comparison to current terahertz gear that's both large and expensive.
with a submillimeter wavelength
First of all its hard from a RF perspective to make stuff thats more than a 1/4 wavelength long. Obviously possible, but much harder. For example, I'm working on a K band transverter and one nightmare is standard SMA connectors resonate at 18 GHz or so, making them quite exciting to use. Yes I already know about the expensive and complicated and almost but not quite SMA compatible connectors I can use. Aside from connector and feedline issues, Its actually EASIER to make small stuff than large stuff at high frequencies / small wavelengths. Cable attenuation makes you put the whole RF works at the dish feedpoint above 50 GHz or so, if you want decent performance. The smaller it is, the lighter it is, more or less, making the mechanical engineering job simpler. Its not like 50 GHz amplifier dies are currently the size of dinner plates and will someday be the size of rice grains... they're already tiny. Ditto this chip. Also the silicon is cheap, the tools are expensive. A new ultrasonic wirebond machine must be worth, i donno, tens to hundreds of thousands of cheap MMIC dies? When you buy MMIC dies, its not like they're blowing lots of money on packaging... And thats before you hire the rare skilled labor to set up and operate and maintain the already expensive wire bonder. Wirebonding zero ohm resistors wouldn't really change the overall cost vs wirebonding some fancy dies because of the huge fixed and variable costs of the technology, so changing the die cost from ten dollars to ten cents isn't gonna help if the overall project cost due to R+D and manufacturing and test gear averages out to ten grand per active device...
Secondly complete THZ systems are large and remain large and will probably always be "large". The internal chips are already small, and, frankly, relatively cheap. Antenna cannot be magically shrunk for same performance. Support gear like bias and main power regulators don't "know" they're powering microwave gear and should therefore be shrinking at a microwave pace. DSP processors don't "know" they're connected to a shrinking MMIC die and therefore they should be shrinking at a microwave pace. Support gear does shrink over time at the rate of normal support gear shrinkage, which isn't that fast. For example, not much has changed in the world of linear voltage regulators in the last 30 years... somewhat lower current references, MOS pass transistors instead of bipolar means lower voltage drop, um... thats about it?
Inefficient. Rather than making it harder to look at the screen, make viewers not want to look at the screen to begin with. Make the background image goatse. Also provides an interesting location to place the stereotypical "GUI trash can".