Here's some pics that I should have linked to in above post. 30 years ago these things were the size of a car. Now they look like overgrown weather stations.
I have a completely different plan to crowdsource the DPW.
"Welcome, welcome to the intersection of Cedar and Ash streets. Thank you all for responding to my tweet about giving away a new Apple iPad. There is of course a little catch, before the giveaway." (... Hands out the shovels...)
The weird part is, that when you account for full lifetime pensions after 20 years, having three guys watch one guy dig, and govt wages far higher than private wages, its probably cheaper to give away Apple products than to pay DPW to do it for you...
I figured it would be a single board computer smaller than a gumstix running linux. You know, like the size of a dime. That should be just barely big enough for one SOIC chip.
Every cell phone switches the sensor on randomly, maybe once a month for three or four hours.
Most heated oxide detectors give out weird results unless baked out for 24 hours, because the oxide absorbs all kinds of junk from the air when its not operating, making it look worse than it really is...
Even just 4 hours running at 200 mA is a bit less than one amp-hour which is a substantial capacity.
Now what could work, possibly, is baking out the detector whenever its plugged in / in the cradle.
One other problem... Lets say your average car exhaust O2 detector (vaguely same technology) lives for 120K miles. Lets say your average car speed while operating, including idle, etc, is maybe 30 mph. That means a heated oxide O2 detector in a car lives for about 120K/30 = 4K hours. Lets furthermore estimate that a house CO detector with no/careful handling, and only one or two heat/cool cycles, might last 5 times longer than a similar technology O2 sensor in a car. So it seems very reasonable that a carbon monoxide gas detector could operate for 20K hours in a house. That fits in pretty well with my experience, CO detectors live "around two years" before breaking. So, my estimation ability seems proven "OK".
Now realistically, a phone that turns it on and off, and bounces around in pockets all day, etc, is only going to live as long as an automotive heated oxide detector, maybe 4K hours. That's only six months...
They're going to have to do a different technology than heated oxide.
This used to be ok, but nowadays studios want films to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Which, incidentally, is also why so many films that could have been amazing end up being pretty terrible.
Missing the point. The broad audience likes terrible movies. A boy meets girl, with a car chase, as a "screensaver" while the kids text on their cellphones, make out, or eat junk food while baked.
Some of these 3 letter agencies may or may not have even approached Mr Taco (and others) for permission to graft certain articles along with their comments such that they are visible 'on the other side of the air gap' so to speak.
As it says at the bottom, "Comments are owned by the Poster."
So I checked my Slashdot Achievements list and right in between "Got a score 5 comment" and "Days metamoderated in a row" I see "NSA hall of fame" they need to ask me for permission not Cmdr Taco. Note to Cmdr Taco -> A good achievement for 4/1/2011
No idea what the NSA wants with articles like "Help Me Get My Math Back?" or "Hollywood's Growing Obsession With Philip K. Dick" (which would have been much funnier without the first and middle names)
If these chips are so wonderful, why not make them into self-contained modules and locate them throughout our cities
The EPA has planted those for DECADES as revenue generators. Essentially the chemical plant equivalent of a red light camera. Go to your nearest chemical plant, look to prevailing downwind direction (assuming there is a prevailing wind direction in your geography) and locate a "one car sized" separately fenced in area with a pickup truck load of sensing gear, and power and phone lines feeding it, and plenty of no trespassing signs and locks. Also if you search 2600 or maybe Phrack from the 80s, you'll find an ancient article on dialing in and reading the results. This is old stuff, very old.
Awesome now another chip in my phone to help trim away my already bad phone battery life!
Most broad spectrum gas detection sensors generally work by heating up a strange oxide catalyst and measuring a resistance change. Not entirely unlike an O2 sensor in a car exhaust system.
You can buy a gas sensor off the shelf from boutique online stores for about $5 each, so $1 in bulk wholesale is believable, or at least possible.
The problem is power consumption. Check out a MQ-4, at a whopping 750 mW heater power. Thats probably more than the entire rest of the phone at peak. And the heater has to preheat for a minimum of 24 hours to provide good data, this is not something that "goes to sleep mode". Thats 3/4 of a watt, all day, every day. It will literally make a poor hand warmer in ones pocket.
The parts in the sensor are not cheap. The manufacturer is already highly motivated to make it as small and light as possible, which would incidentally make it low powered. At this time, thats the best "we" can do with current technology. Its not like I cherry picked the highest power unit available. However, higher power would imply bigger would imply more durable, so I'd think a cell phone model might actually be worse.
My very-much-non-smartphone uses a 3.7V lithium battery and runs "several days" between charges. Lets claim 4 days. So, 5 volts / 33 ohms = 150 ma times 5/3.7 (voltage upconverter) means 200 ma continuous draw from my 3.7V battery. 200 ma times 24 hours/day times 4 days, equals about 19 AMP-HOURS just to run the gas sensor. We'll add another amp-hour to run the phone itself, and round up to 20 AH.
Batteryspace sells a nice 20 AH lead acid battery... 14 pounds, 7 inches by 3 inches by 7 inches. Rechargeable lithium, maybe half that size and weight. We are looking at the revival of the "bag phone" circa 1980s.
I'm more interested in the effects on innocent bystanders. The cost would be staggeringly lower (assuming no stupid tax ideas) so burglary, theft, etc goes to zero. I like that! There are relatively few shootouts in schoolyards between competing liquor store owners, unlike, say, crack dealers. I like that too! So, as an innocent bystander, other than having safe streets and safe school yards, etc, whats the downside for me?
That is a huge downside for the govt, aside from the neo-puritans freaking out.. Keep them scared, to keep them controlled, is the American way.
I'm not too much of an idealist to believe military states don't also have their usefulness.
You know how some people "just don't get it" that in the USA, corporations and the government have merged?
Well, in.mx, drug cartels and govt/military have merged, and some folks just don't get it.
I fail to see how the average peasant benefits by giving the milgov/cartels access to their phone records, although it probably makes kidnapping/extortion marginally easier. Just find a peasant with some money, then use the phone records to find their closest young relative, or closest female relative, etc, etc.
In "about three years" by yer own figures, the oldest is going to be utterly and completely totally free, at college or whatever. In less than a year, total freedom for limited time periods behind the wheel, visiting stores and other peoples houses, etc.
Building a better cage is not going to help the kids relate, when they're finally released/paroled into society.
Which kids have the biggest problems at 14? The kids of "anything goes" parents. Which kids have the biggest problems at 19? The kids of overprotective parents. On average, 14 year olds can get into less trouble than 19 year olds. So, teach them responsibilities of freedom at 14 with your guidance, not 19 and alone.
The problem is when you cross correlate 100 or 1000 pulsars or atomic clocks to see how well these "measuring sticks" match each other.
Turns out pocket watches are pretty cruddy, pulsars are OK although they assumed they'd be the best (oops), various atomic standards are best although some are better than others.
I didn't see anything that said why the pulsars are noisy
They're hot, and hot things are electrically noisy. Once they cool to say 20K they'll be quiet, but too cool to detect. They do not transmit a perfect carrier wave with zero phase noise. Heck that's pretty hard for us on the earth to do a "good enough" job much less make a signal cleaner than can be measured.
They're electromagnetically active, and theres junk surrounding them that messes with them. aka "unknown localized source"
There's a lot of "stuff" in space between us and them moving at different directions, speeds, and densities to refract thru, and its constantly changing over time. AKA "scattering medium with variable optical depth"
Our ionosphere totally screws with RF, but I assume they're correcting for that.
There's at least 20 years of interesting scientific papers out there.
Usually that means Mom is closer to one decade older than her kids, rather than two or three decades. Mom is still being raised by Grandma, still a teenager. Its not unusual to see 25 year old grandmas. That's actually a pretty good age to be raising kids, even if they're grand-kids...
Best advice is acorns don't fall far from the tree. You may want to limit your kids contact with those kids, etc etc.
The plane stayed aloft for 87 minutes, performing test maneuvers as well as completing a successful takeoff and landing.
I assumed the editor knows nothing about what the journalist is writing about. Usually, this is a correct assumption. In fact usually journalists know nothing about what they are writing about. He probably "corrected" it from "successful landing and takeoff" to make it sound better. What they were dancing around was:
Slashdot Mirror
Here's some pics that I should have linked to in above post. 30 years ago these things were the size of a car. Now they look like overgrown weather stations.
http://www.epa.gov/ttnamti1/
I have a completely different plan to crowdsource the DPW.
"Welcome, welcome to the intersection of Cedar and Ash streets. Thank you all for responding to my tweet about giving away a new Apple iPad. There is of course a little catch, before the giveaway." (... Hands out the shovels ...)
The weird part is, that when you account for full lifetime pensions after 20 years, having three guys watch one guy dig, and govt wages far higher than private wages, its probably cheaper to give away Apple products than to pay DPW to do it for you...
Well, that wasn't what I was expecting.
I figured it would be a single board computer smaller than a gumstix running linux. You know, like the size of a dime. That should be just barely big enough for one SOIC chip.
Every cell phone switches the sensor on randomly, maybe once a month for three or four hours.
Most heated oxide detectors give out weird results unless baked out for 24 hours, because the oxide absorbs all kinds of junk from the air when its not operating, making it look worse than it really is...
Even just 4 hours running at 200 mA is a bit less than one amp-hour which is a substantial capacity.
Now what could work, possibly, is baking out the detector whenever its plugged in / in the cradle.
One other problem... Lets say your average car exhaust O2 detector (vaguely same technology) lives for 120K miles. Lets say your average car speed while operating, including idle, etc, is maybe 30 mph. That means a heated oxide O2 detector in a car lives for about 120K/30 = 4K hours. Lets furthermore estimate that a house CO detector with no/careful handling, and only one or two heat/cool cycles, might last 5 times longer than a similar technology O2 sensor in a car. So it seems very reasonable that a carbon monoxide gas detector could operate for 20K hours in a house. That fits in pretty well with my experience, CO detectors live "around two years" before breaking. So, my estimation ability seems proven "OK".
Now realistically, a phone that turns it on and off, and bounces around in pockets all day, etc, is only going to live as long as an automotive heated oxide detector, maybe 4K hours. That's only six months...
They're going to have to do a different technology than heated oxide.
This used to be ok, but nowadays studios want films to appeal to as broad an audience as possible. Which, incidentally, is also why so many films that could have been amazing end up being pretty terrible.
Missing the point. The broad audience likes terrible movies. A boy meets girl, with a car chase, as a "screensaver" while the kids text on their cellphones, make out, or eat junk food while baked.
Entertainment: Hollywood's Growing Obsession With Philip K. Dick
Would have been a much funnier headline without first and middle names.
Some of these 3 letter agencies may or may not have even approached Mr Taco (and others) for permission to graft certain articles along with their comments such that they are visible 'on the other side of the air gap' so to speak.
As it says at the bottom, "Comments are owned by the Poster."
So I checked my Slashdot Achievements list and right in between "Got a score 5 comment" and "Days metamoderated in a row" I see "NSA hall of fame" they need to ask me for permission not Cmdr Taco. Note to Cmdr Taco -> A good achievement for 4/1/2011
No idea what the NSA wants with articles like "Help Me Get My Math Back?" or "Hollywood's Growing Obsession With Philip K. Dick" (which would have been much funnier without the first and middle names)
Forgot the third option, the whole thing could be purified refined vaporware, or some kind of FUD attack.
I mean, it could be that these folks are just complete dolts, but...
Dude, a "manager" at "department of homeland security"?
If these chips are so wonderful, why not make them into self-contained modules and locate them throughout our cities
The EPA has planted those for DECADES as revenue generators. Essentially the chemical plant equivalent of a red light camera. Go to your nearest chemical plant, look to prevailing downwind direction (assuming there is a prevailing wind direction in your geography) and locate a "one car sized" separately fenced in area with a pickup truck load of sensing gear, and power and phone lines feeding it, and plenty of no trespassing signs and locks. Also if you search 2600 or maybe Phrack from the 80s, you'll find an ancient article on dialing in and reading the results. This is old stuff, very old.
Even worse, imagine a guy with a job as a house painter / floor refinisher / furniture refinisher.
Car mechanics will also have an interesting false alarm profile.
I want flashing red-on-yellow big letters that say, RUN FOR YOUR LIFE!
Run which direction?
Awesome now another chip in my phone to help trim away my already bad phone battery life!
Most broad spectrum gas detection sensors generally work by heating up a strange oxide catalyst and measuring a resistance change. Not entirely unlike an O2 sensor in a car exhaust system.
You can buy a gas sensor off the shelf from boutique online stores for about $5 each, so $1 in bulk wholesale is believable, or at least possible.
The problem is power consumption. Check out a MQ-4, at a whopping 750 mW heater power. Thats probably more than the entire rest of the phone at peak. And the heater has to preheat for a minimum of 24 hours to provide good data, this is not something that "goes to sleep mode". Thats 3/4 of a watt, all day, every day. It will literally make a poor hand warmer in ones pocket.
http://www.sparkfun.com/commerce/product_info.php?products_id=9404
http://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/Sensors/Biometric/MQ-4.pdf
The parts in the sensor are not cheap. The manufacturer is already highly motivated to make it as small and light as possible, which would incidentally make it low powered. At this time, thats the best "we" can do with current technology. Its not like I cherry picked the highest power unit available. However, higher power would imply bigger would imply more durable, so I'd think a cell phone model might actually be worse.
My very-much-non-smartphone uses a 3.7V lithium battery and runs "several days" between charges. Lets claim 4 days. So, 5 volts / 33 ohms = 150 ma times 5/3.7 (voltage upconverter) means 200 ma continuous draw from my 3.7V battery. 200 ma times 24 hours/day times 4 days, equals about 19 AMP-HOURS just to run the gas sensor. We'll add another amp-hour to run the phone itself, and round up to 20 AH.
Batteryspace sells a nice 20 AH lead acid battery... 14 pounds, 7 inches by 3 inches by 7 inches. Rechargeable lithium, maybe half that size and weight. We are looking at the revival of the "bag phone" circa 1980s.
http://www.batteryspace.com/sealedleadacidbattery12v20ah240whs.aspx
I would qualify this idea as an epic fail.
Yet they get a free pass.
I'm more interested in the effects on innocent bystanders. The cost would be staggeringly lower (assuming no stupid tax ideas) so burglary, theft, etc goes to zero. I like that! There are relatively few shootouts in schoolyards between competing liquor store owners, unlike, say, crack dealers. I like that too! So, as an innocent bystander, other than having safe streets and safe school yards, etc, whats the downside for me?
That is a huge downside for the govt, aside from the neo-puritans freaking out.. Keep them scared, to keep them controlled, is the American way.
How do you reconcile these two:
There's no such merge and I challenge you to prove it otherwise.
Corruption in the other hand, is a cancer that no country can say it's free of.
The difference between "massive corruption" and a "merge" is ... what ... irrelevant marketing?
It will become another pointless government bureaucracy.
What if the point is to open a new market in fake-id cellphones? I think this HIGHLY likely.
Both govt and criminal orgs benefit, and coincidentally they have merged to run .MX. So the folks that run .mx will make money. No surprise?
What about the 10 million tourist phones?
The antics of the drug cartels are rapidly eliminating that "problem".
I'm not too much of an idealist to believe military states don't also have their usefulness.
You know how some people "just don't get it" that in the USA, corporations and the government have merged?
Well, in .mx, drug cartels and govt/military have merged, and some folks just don't get it.
I fail to see how the average peasant benefits by giving the milgov/cartels access to their phone records, although it probably makes kidnapping/extortion marginally easier. Just find a peasant with some money, then use the phone records to find their closest young relative, or closest female relative, etc, etc.
Number one priority is figure out the exit plan.
In "about three years" by yer own figures, the oldest is going to be utterly and completely totally free, at college or whatever. In less than a year, total freedom for limited time periods behind the wheel, visiting stores and other peoples houses, etc.
Building a better cage is not going to help the kids relate, when they're finally released/paroled into society.
Which kids have the biggest problems at 14? The kids of "anything goes" parents. Which kids have the biggest problems at 19? The kids of overprotective parents. On average, 14 year olds can get into less trouble than 19 year olds. So, teach them responsibilities of freedom at 14 with your guidance, not 19 and alone.
The problem is when you cross correlate 100 or 1000 pulsars or atomic clocks to see how well these "measuring sticks" match each other.
Turns out pocket watches are pretty cruddy, pulsars are OK although they assumed they'd be the best (oops), various atomic standards are best although some are better than others.
Look at how NTP works and select clocks.
I didn't see anything that said why the pulsars are noisy
They're hot, and hot things are electrically noisy. Once they cool to say 20K they'll be quiet, but too cool to detect. They do not transmit a perfect carrier wave with zero phase noise. Heck that's pretty hard for us on the earth to do a "good enough" job much less make a signal cleaner than can be measured.
They're electromagnetically active, and theres junk surrounding them that messes with them. aka "unknown localized source"
There's a lot of "stuff" in space between us and them moving at different directions, speeds, and densities to refract thru, and its constantly changing over time. AKA "scattering medium with variable optical depth"
Our ionosphere totally screws with RF, but I assume they're correcting for that.
There's at least 20 years of interesting scientific papers out there.
While telling everyone as loudly as you can, that you had to decrypt it, to cover for the guy whom decrypted it for you.
I very much doubt that military encryption works that way.
You are probably thinking of an AN/PYQ-10 or for the old timers (?) a AN/CYZ-10 or a truly ancient KYK-13
Generally end users are not trusted to properly enter the keys, although some devices allow manual rekeying.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:National_Security_Agency_encryption_devices
Usually that means Mom is closer to one decade older than her kids, rather than two or three decades. Mom is still being raised by Grandma, still a teenager. Its not unusual to see 25 year old grandmas. That's actually a pretty good age to be raising kids, even if they're grand-kids...
Best advice is acorns don't fall far from the tree. You may want to limit your kids contact with those kids, etc etc.
I think a lot of these ideas have been around for a very long time
Ya think so? At least since 1972? And VM is still in active use and under development?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VM_(operating_system)
Of course you have to violate 104 IBM patents to run it on an emulator, but still...
The plane stayed aloft for 87 minutes, performing test maneuvers as well as completing a successful takeoff and landing.
I assumed the editor knows nothing about what the journalist is writing about. Usually, this is a correct assumption. In fact usually journalists know nothing about what they are writing about. He probably "corrected" it from "successful landing and takeoff" to make it sound better. What they were dancing around was:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Touch-and-go_landing