Next "eco discovery" reported will be titanium refining and distribution is worse for the environment than trace concentrations of mixed nitrogen oxides.
There is probably a catalyst poisoning effect, just like every other catalyst out there. Just because the stuff works when its fresh doesn't mean it'll work in 25 years. But the environmental costs of producing and disposing of it are "forever", vs the gains of removing a small amount of oxides for a small number of years.
the need for crazy expensive accurate timing devices, the time it takes to fine tune them and some crazy ass person (like myself) with a fetish for time keeping to stay on top of it. Instead of buying ridiculously expensive time keeping appliances
Thats a heck of a lot of effort and money to get around opening port 123 on the firewall. Or implementing a "layer 7 firewall machine" that runs nothing but ntp, with one leg in the private net and one on the public internet.
Also in the olden days, like a decade or two ago, I was brought up that GPS units / radio clocks in general cost tens of thousands of dollars. Not so much anymore.
Its gone thru a pretty severe journalist / PR filter.
"RTT under a microsecond" doesn't mean TCP RTT, it means the "delay" column on the equivalent of the peers command in the ntpq program for this new thing displays more than 3 decimals of milliseconds.
And the connectivity lost over a week means the "poll" interval column on the equivalent of the peers command in the ntpq program can go in excess of a week,
For example, I'm syncing to several clocks at home, one of which is ntp.sixxs.net. My delay is 130.768 mS and I'm polling every 128 seconds. All they mean is their monitoring system displays more decimal places on it's generic display, and polling intervals can be a wee bit higher.
I'm not sure as a debugging tool how useful it is to see more decimal places. Changing a printf format string for ntpq is probably simpler than implementing a new system.
How well a long polling interval will detect/correct for short term clock wander/errors is a mystery to me. Probably doesn't work too well. Or maybe the goal is, instead of syncing to small numbers of good clocks often, like stereotypical ntp, sync very occasionally to a huge number of clocks. Which you could do with ntp, although I suspect it would not work any better. Apparently the new guys disagree.
if a computer's clock only has microsecond resolution, then it stands to reason that you can only synch the computer to within 1 microsecond of accuracy, no?
No. You can sync up to fractions of a clock cycle fairly easily. On average you can only report the time at any instant with around 0.5 uS accuracy, but you can set the edge where it cuts over from one uS to the next as accurately as you want, given enough time to sync...
Slashdot car analogy is I change my oil 4 times a year, so you're saying I can't tell you when I change my oil with any accuracy higher than a whopping 3 months. Yet I assure you, if sufficiently motivated, I can "sync up" such that I change the oil precisely at midnight on the 1st of every third month, with a reportable accuracy of like an hour or so.
Ahhh, but its "intended to obscure the meaning thereof" not just obscure it.
I think we both agree the only reason the manufacturer of the codec chip (ABME?) has not released the specs, is because they "intend to make fat stacks of cash".
Also only voice passes thru the codec. You can do inet access / text message-y stuff / APRS-like stuff / file transfer apps all totally wide open.
Its rather like talking in Japanese on the radio. Perfectly OK as long as I follow all the other laws, especially including identifying in English. If you are unable to ever be able to understand Japanese, that has no impact at all on my part 97 legality.
You can buy a phone and pre-paid minutes in the US for cash.
Without any ID whatsoever?
Yes. Walk right into walmart / walgreens / target, pick up a prepaid phone, and a prepaid balance card, pay cash, walk out.
I have a prepaid phone, I could do this if I cared to. I use a CC online to "top up" but I am well aware of the marketplace and whats available.
Previous attempts to get rid of this have been blocked by our extremely large illegal alien community as being discriminatory against them. You see, if someone's here illegally either they won't be able to get a contract phone due to complete lack of records, or they'll steal someone elses credit info to get one.
Be thankful it is how it is. If commercial interests got access to the amateur bands, they'd push individual "amateurs" out. Just imagine if the bands were crowded with business traffic, with powerful stations paid for by commercial interests. The regular Joe would never be able to get through the din.
Yeah, like winlink on 20M HF (ducks from the flames while running). Seriously funny how well your description matches winlink, which in my opinion spends most (all?) of its time dangerously close to breaking the law.
Also your quotes apply to the semi-professional affiliated emcomm types pretty well, too. Pretty much any emcomm involving "memorandum of understanding" and florescent orange safety vests.
Which is probably why those two groups are so... strongly debated, in some circles. But dstar is not debated so much. Odd.
It's quite possible these guys didn't pay the proper bribes, protection money, "donations", etc, and the ban is the response.
Icom has been "big" in the field for decades. This would be like banning, say, mac computers, in comparison to merely blocking a tiny month old startup. Which certainly makes it newsworthy.
I have some dstar gear. Note that there isn't "A" dstar mode. Its more of a family of related modulations and operations, kind of like ISDN was. I'd be interested in knowing which specific modes and types of operation are banned. Or perhaps they all are, under different rules/interpretations.
There's two types of "connect to internet" that dstar gear can do.
1) The numerous VHF/UHF radio repeaters Usually (but not always) are set up connected to the internet to carry voice. There are several competitors that do almost exactly the same thing. Echolink, IRLP, Yaesu's WIREs thing, probably others. If France has banned Echolink, IRLP, etc, then this is the reason. I have an IC-92AD and a IC-800.
2) There is ONE radio ID-1 operating on the 1296 MHz band that, in addition to doing voice, can additionally do a medium speed/medium range IP network. Again, usually connected to the internet at the repeater side, although certainly not always.
Maybe for the Knuth story, instead of this one. This one seems more evolutionary, another instrument has confirmed something that everyone figured was true, all right. But Knuth's announcement of the MMIX app store via financing from the "Bank of San Seriffe" is likely to he revolutionary.
What's the best software out there to use to capture the video streamed by this service so that it can be released on bittorrent? (I suppose skipping over the ads would be too much to ask for.)
The problem is that torrents are often/usually higher quality, with filenames that are (usually) correct, and already bundled into "seasons" and "series" packages. So it would be a huge PITA and lots of manual labor for lower quality.
The only people whom don't "plan their watching ahead of time" are teens and the unemployed (maybe retired, I don't know yet).
I admit I suffered thru an addiction to BSG, SG:U (Embarassing, I should have posted this AC), Breaking Bad, and a couple other shows, and I only have certain very clearly defined times that I can sit in front of a TV and veg out.
As far as movies go, I can quite easily collect movies that catch my eye faster than I can watch them. I have quite a backlog to catch up on.
Why do people just burn stuff they don't need anymore? It create unnecessary pollution.
Everything that doesn't dissolve, burns eventually, even if it takes a billion years to enter a subduction zone. Ask a geologist.
Someone not burning an iphone in front of you does not resolve you of your guilt over pollution. Its going to end up in the air/water regardless of pageviews.
And even when it doesn't explode, inhaling Lithium vapour is certainly a real danger.
A pharmacological dose, probably of a salt not pure metal, would be about 20 mg/Kg. So, 100% complete consumption of less than 2 grams of Li metal would seem to be borderline safe for me. An entire iphone weighs about 100 grams, and what matters is not the weight of the phone, or even the weight of the battery, but the weight of the lithium metal inside the battery.
Depending on exactly how stored, batteries are allowed on passenger aircraft from 8 to 25 grams of Li content, and air circulation inside a plane is far worse than outdoors. So if 1/4 the weight of an iphone were pure Li (unlikely) and you ignited it in an enclosed area and breathed it for hours (unlikely) the FAA thinks you probably won't kill or severely injure passengers. Outside I would assume you could survive a large multiple of 25 grams, maybe 250, maybe 2500 grams. Which would be quite a few iphones worth.
It would be interesting to calculate if the burning plastic fumes would kill you before the battery fumes. I'm thinking the plastic fumes will kill you before lithium toxicity sets in.
Very few solar rays of death are operated indoors in confined unventilated spaces, I find it highly unlikely you could inhale or swallow even 1% of the total released lithium without using a crack pipe or similar apparatus. Stand upwind and dose rates probably drop to zero.
In summary, the danger of lithium poisoning would be far lower, than, say, permanent blindness from the light, or burning plastic toxicity, lacerations from the cracked screen, or even simple skin burns.
Its possible that you don't have a wireless ISP in your area, in which case you're screwed. I'm not talking about cellphone contract 3G ripoffs, but wireless ISP service.
Maybe a better way to phrase it is rural is ideal for wireless. Much less multipath from skyscrapers. Less than 1000 microwave ovens per sq km. Almost no one cares about antennas, but everyone knows that all OTHER suburban residents supposedly hate antennas (the "beige" problem), so its hard to put a wireless antenna up high in the suburbs, at least compared to rural. It would be a hard task to find a better place to deploy a wireless ISP than a rural area.
Massive channel shuffling happened as part of the NTSC to ATSC conversion. The "Channel marketing name" has little relationship to the RF carrier frequency now.
Basically UHF 70-83 disappeared in the 80s, UHF 52 to 69 just disappeared.
The article is probably either a journalist just noticing 52 to 69 disappeared 13 months ago, or maybe a new plan to get rid of VHF-Lo channels 2-6 and VHF-Hi 8-12.
Wouldn't be much of a loss. You have to realize that outside of NYC or LA, there is plenty of open spectrum.
I actually heard once that people with amateur radio licenses, if they can broadcast their callsign, such as in the SSID, are allowed to use the higher power outputs allowed to them than to those using simply the unlicensed spectrum. Has anyone else ever heard of this?
The term you need to google for is HSMM.
There are many other limitations to FCC part 97 operations, way beyond the scope of a slashdot post. Its not as simple as "change your SSID and its all good".
One other feature of OTA that is little appreciated is the market fragmentation it causes. Which is good for endusers.
Media and broadcasting is inherently a business that tends toward monopolies, and we need whatever little diversity we can get by having OTA channels owned by some company other than the regional cableco or the national satellite company.
So everyone benefits from OTA, not just poor/cheap people.
If we're going to go all topological here, maybe a Klein Bottle on the "Little mr laser pointer" would be an effective form of birth control, in more ways than one?
Slashdot Mirror
Next "eco discovery" reported will be titanium refining and distribution is worse for the environment than trace concentrations of mixed nitrogen oxides.
There is probably a catalyst poisoning effect, just like every other catalyst out there. Just because the stuff works when its fresh doesn't mean it'll work in 25 years. But the environmental costs of producing and disposing of it are "forever", vs the gains of removing a small amount of oxides for a small number of years.
the need for crazy expensive accurate timing devices, the time it takes to fine tune them and some crazy ass person (like myself) with a fetish for time keeping to stay on top of it. Instead of buying ridiculously expensive time keeping appliances
Thats a heck of a lot of effort and money to get around opening port 123 on the firewall. Or implementing a "layer 7 firewall machine" that runs nothing but ntp, with one leg in the private net and one on the public internet.
Also in the olden days, like a decade or two ago, I was brought up that GPS units / radio clocks in general cost tens of thousands of dollars. Not so much anymore.
Its gone thru a pretty severe journalist / PR filter.
"RTT under a microsecond" doesn't mean TCP RTT, it means the "delay" column on the equivalent of the peers command in the ntpq program for this new thing displays more than 3 decimals of milliseconds.
And the connectivity lost over a week means the "poll" interval column on the equivalent of the peers command in the ntpq program can go in excess of a week,
For example, I'm syncing to several clocks at home, one of which is ntp.sixxs.net. My delay is 130.768 mS and I'm polling every 128 seconds. All they mean is their monitoring system displays more decimal places on it's generic display, and polling intervals can be a wee bit higher.
I'm not sure as a debugging tool how useful it is to see more decimal places. Changing a printf format string for ntpq is probably simpler than implementing a new system.
How well a long polling interval will detect/correct for short term clock wander/errors is a mystery to me. Probably doesn't work too well. Or maybe the goal is, instead of syncing to small numbers of good clocks often, like stereotypical ntp, sync very occasionally to a huge number of clocks. Which you could do with ntp, although I suspect it would not work any better. Apparently the new guys disagree.
if a computer's clock only has microsecond resolution, then it stands to reason that you can only synch the computer to within 1 microsecond of accuracy, no?
No. You can sync up to fractions of a clock cycle fairly easily. On average you can only report the time at any instant with around 0.5 uS accuracy, but you can set the edge where it cuts over from one uS to the next as accurately as you want, given enough time to sync...
Slashdot car analogy is I change my oil 4 times a year, so you're saying I can't tell you when I change my oil with any accuracy higher than a whopping 3 months. Yet I assure you, if sufficiently motivated, I can "sync up" such that I change the oil precisely at midnight on the 1st of every third month, with a reportable accuracy of like an hour or so.
Want to try your hand as sysadmin work?
Work-Needing and Prospective Packages
http://www.debian.org/devel/wnpp/
Ahhh, but its "intended to obscure the meaning thereof" not just obscure it.
I think we both agree the only reason the manufacturer of the codec chip (ABME?) has not released the specs, is because they "intend to make fat stacks of cash".
Also only voice passes thru the codec. You can do inet access / text message-y stuff / APRS-like stuff / file transfer apps all totally wide open.
Its rather like talking in Japanese on the radio. Perfectly OK as long as I follow all the other laws, especially including identifying in English. If you are unable to ever be able to understand Japanese, that has no impact at all on my part 97 legality.
You can buy a phone and pre-paid minutes in the US for cash.
Without any ID whatsoever?
Yes. Walk right into walmart / walgreens / target, pick up a prepaid phone, and a prepaid balance card, pay cash, walk out.
I have a prepaid phone, I could do this if I cared to. I use a CC online to "top up" but I am well aware of the marketplace and whats available.
Previous attempts to get rid of this have been blocked by our extremely large illegal alien community as being discriminatory against them. You see, if someone's here illegally either they won't be able to get a contract phone due to complete lack of records, or they'll steal someone elses credit info to get one.
Using PSK-31 is an attempt to obscure the meaning of the communication from anyone that doesn't buy a computer sound card interface?
Its going to be an uphill battle, like trying to use 97.113(f) as a stick to get rid of packet radio digipeaters/nodes.
D-Star concept is fine, but using a patent encumbered codec definitely goes against the spirit of ham radio.
SSB US patent 1449382
Armstrongs Superregen RX patent 1342885
I was never totally clear if Armstrong patented the concept of FM.
Just saying that the "spirit of ham radio" certainly has never excluded patented modes or gear in the past.
Be thankful it is how it is. If commercial interests got access to the amateur bands, they'd push individual "amateurs" out. Just imagine if the bands were crowded with business traffic, with powerful stations paid for by commercial interests. The regular Joe would never be able to get through the din.
Yeah, like winlink on 20M HF (ducks from the flames while running). Seriously funny how well your description matches winlink, which in my opinion spends most (all?) of its time dangerously close to breaking the law.
Also your quotes apply to the semi-professional affiliated emcomm types pretty well, too. Pretty much any emcomm involving "memorandum of understanding" and florescent orange safety vests.
Which is probably why those two groups are so ... strongly debated, in some circles. But dstar is not debated so much. Odd.
Follow the money. Anybody in power in France have a financial interest in not allowing this mode of communication?
Or, possibly follow the lack of money.
All the dstar equipment is made by icom inc, a Japanese multinational with an office in France:
http://www.icom-france.com/a-propos-d-icom.php
It's quite possible these guys didn't pay the proper bribes, protection money, "donations", etc, and the ban is the response.
Icom has been "big" in the field for decades. This would be like banning, say, mac computers, in comparison to merely blocking a tiny month old startup. Which certainly makes it newsworthy.
I have some dstar gear. Note that there isn't "A" dstar mode. Its more of a family of related modulations and operations, kind of like ISDN was. I'd be interested in knowing which specific modes and types of operation are banned. Or perhaps they all are, under different rules/interpretations.
There's two types of "connect to internet" that dstar gear can do.
1) The numerous VHF/UHF radio repeaters Usually (but not always) are set up connected to the internet to carry voice. There are several competitors that do almost exactly the same thing. Echolink, IRLP, Yaesu's WIREs thing, probably others. If France has banned Echolink, IRLP, etc, then this is the reason. I have an IC-92AD and a IC-800.
2) There is ONE radio ID-1 operating on the 1296 MHz band that, in addition to doing voice, can additionally do a medium speed/medium range IP network. Again, usually connected to the internet at the repeater side, although certainly not always.
Maybe for the Knuth story, instead of this one. This one seems more evolutionary, another instrument has confirmed something that everyone figured was true, all right. But Knuth's announcement of the MMIX app store via financing from the "Bank of San Seriffe" is likely to he revolutionary.
http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/06/29/2233219/Knuth-Plans-Earthshaking-Announcement-Wednesday
Knuth app store, paid for by the Bank of San Seriffe.
What's the best software out there to use to capture the video streamed by this service so that it can be released on bittorrent? (I suppose skipping over the ads would be too much to ask for.)
The problem is that torrents are often/usually higher quality, with filenames that are (usually) correct, and already bundled into "seasons" and "series" packages. So it would be a huge PITA and lots of manual labor for lower quality.
plan your watching ahead of time
The only people whom don't "plan their watching ahead of time" are teens and the unemployed (maybe retired, I don't know yet).
I admit I suffered thru an addiction to BSG, SG:U (Embarassing, I should have posted this AC), Breaking Bad, and a couple other shows, and I only have certain very clearly defined times that I can sit in front of a TV and veg out.
As far as movies go, I can quite easily collect movies that catch my eye faster than I can watch them. I have quite a backlog to catch up on.
Its just not an issue.
Why do people just burn stuff they don't need anymore? It create unnecessary pollution.
Everything that doesn't dissolve, burns eventually, even if it takes a billion years to enter a subduction zone. Ask a geologist.
Someone not burning an iphone in front of you does not resolve you of your guilt over pollution. Its going to end up in the air/water regardless of pageviews.
And even when it doesn't explode, inhaling Lithium vapour is certainly a real danger.
A pharmacological dose, probably of a salt not pure metal, would be about 20 mg/Kg. So, 100% complete consumption of less than 2 grams of Li metal would seem to be borderline safe for me. An entire iphone weighs about 100 grams, and what matters is not the weight of the phone, or even the weight of the battery, but the weight of the lithium metal inside the battery.
Depending on exactly how stored, batteries are allowed on passenger aircraft from 8 to 25 grams of Li content, and air circulation inside a plane is far worse than outdoors. So if 1/4 the weight of an iphone were pure Li (unlikely) and you ignited it in an enclosed area and breathed it for hours (unlikely) the FAA thinks you probably won't kill or severely injure passengers. Outside I would assume you could survive a large multiple of 25 grams, maybe 250, maybe 2500 grams. Which would be quite a few iphones worth.
It would be interesting to calculate if the burning plastic fumes would kill you before the battery fumes. I'm thinking the plastic fumes will kill you before lithium toxicity sets in.
Very few solar rays of death are operated indoors in confined unventilated spaces, I find it highly unlikely you could inhale or swallow even 1% of the total released lithium without using a crack pipe or similar apparatus. Stand upwind and dose rates probably drop to zero.
In summary, the danger of lithium poisoning would be far lower, than, say, permanent blindness from the light, or burning plastic toxicity, lacerations from the cracked screen, or even simple skin burns.
I'd rather have a trackball. Faster, more precise, cleaner desk.
Its possible that you don't have a wireless ISP in your area, in which case you're screwed. I'm not talking about cellphone contract 3G ripoffs, but wireless ISP service.
Maybe a better way to phrase it is rural is ideal for wireless. Much less multipath from skyscrapers. Less than 1000 microwave ovens per sq km. Almost no one cares about antennas, but everyone knows that all OTHER suburban residents supposedly hate antennas (the "beige" problem), so its hard to put a wireless antenna up high in the suburbs, at least compared to rural. It would be a hard task to find a better place to deploy a wireless ISP than a rural area.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_American_broadcast_television_frequencies
Massive channel shuffling happened as part of the NTSC to ATSC conversion. The "Channel marketing name" has little relationship to the RF carrier frequency now.
Basically UHF 70-83 disappeared in the 80s, UHF 52 to 69 just disappeared.
The article is probably either a journalist just noticing 52 to 69 disappeared 13 months ago, or maybe a new plan to get rid of VHF-Lo channels 2-6 and VHF-Hi 8-12.
Wouldn't be much of a loss. You have to realize that outside of NYC or LA, there is plenty of open spectrum.
I actually heard once that people with amateur radio licenses, if they can broadcast their callsign, such as in the SSID, are allowed to use the higher power outputs allowed to them than to those using simply the unlicensed spectrum. Has anyone else ever heard of this?
The term you need to google for is HSMM.
There are many other limitations to FCC part 97 operations, way beyond the scope of a slashdot post. Its not as simple as "change your SSID and its all good".
I assume this is for the people in rural area's that don't have any internet to speak of.
Plenty of areas with no cablemodems. Rural countryside is great for wireless ISP service.
But wireless ISP service, to the best of my knowledge, is not running out of RF bandwidth.
So, at least for them, more bandwidth is a solution in search of a problem?
One other feature of OTA that is little appreciated is the market fragmentation it causes. Which is good for endusers.
Media and broadcasting is inherently a business that tends toward monopolies, and we need whatever little diversity we can get by having OTA channels owned by some company other than the regional cableco or the national satellite company.
So everyone benefits from OTA, not just poor/cheap people.
If we're going to go all topological here, maybe a Klein Bottle on the "Little mr laser pointer" would be an effective form of birth control, in more ways than one?