Come up with a new thing to wardrive for. Use a short range antenna to look for outgoing GPS datastreams. Instead of Geocaching, play hunt the transmitting GPS.
You're not thinking this very well through. There's no need to use a short range antenna -- use a long range antenna, and decode the transmitted signal. Then you can see where every car so-bugged (using the same transmitters and frequency) in town is. Just like ham radio APRS.
It could get interesting though -- if you knew that a specifc car was so bugged, you could go up to it, search it, find the bug, take it apart and find the frequency (or just use a frequency counter), and then start listening on that and similar frequencies. Assuming that the signal isn't strongly encrypted, you could then find every car so tracked in the entire city. In real time.
So if she had "no reasonable expectation of privacy when driving her car in public", what the heck was he convicted of ?
Remember, Colorado and New York are different states. Different laws apply. Though the ruling was made by a federal judge, so I'm not sure if it qualifies as precedent or not. (Alas, I'm not a lawyer or even remotely qualified to play on on TV.)
I think I read that article about the Colorado man, but it's been a while, and I forget the details. In any event, the man could have been convicted for stalking.
Beyond that, if he owned the car (it was in his name, or both their names), I'd expect it to be perfectly legal for him to place a tracking device on it, even if his wife (at least until the divorce is complete) was currently using it. But once the divorce was final, and he didn't own the car anymore, that doesn't sound legal anymore...
May question is why do the police have the right to tamper with someones car?
Let's flip it around a bit...
It's certainly legal for an individual to follow a police car around, as long as they don't break any other laws. (Speeding, possibly stalking, though that would require other things as well.)
But would it be legal for Joe Citizen to put a tracking bug like this on a cop car?
It could certainly make for an interesting legal situation if a person were to go up to a cop, say `I'm going to put this tracking bug on your car', and then proceed to do so. The cop would probably say `you can't do that', then arrest him when he tries to do so anyways...
This ruling really needs to be appealed, and soon.
Most Linux groups are either in IRC or discussion forums.
I'm not sure why you brought up Linux groups, but sure -- there are more non-Usenet Linux discussion groups than there are Usenet Linux discussion groups. (There's about 20 comp.os.linux.* groups, and probably thousands of other online Linux forums and discussion groups.)
I'm also a regular on rec.models.rc.air -- one group, yet there's now dozens of other online discussion boards related to R/C planes now.
But Usenet is useful.
It goes back over 20 years, and I can search all of that thanks to google (and before that Dejanews.) The interface to Usenet (NNTP) is exactly as I want it, and doesn't change from group to group. I can do everything without a mouse. I can save articles easily, and I know that my posts won't be removed by some overzealous moderator. And they won't be lost just because some site forgot to make backups. I don't need to register on 15 different sites and keep track of all of that -- Usenet is Usenet.
The clue level on the comp.* groups generally seems higher than that on the web forums, probably because most Usenet users are a bit more cluefull than your average `web' user.
comp.* and rec.* do have some spam, but it's not that bad. Anybody who claims that Usenet is overrun with spam either 1) isn't looking outside of alt.*, 2) is reading a `dead' group (how much discussion of the Apple II is there today?) or 3) isn't reading Usenet at all. A bigger problem is off topic posts, where the regulars have no problems with discussing political issues (for examples) on their favorite groups. But even this isn't too bad.
I imagine that web forums are now more popular than Usenet simply because they require less thought to use -- you don't need to find your NNTP server, for example. Having moderators who can clamp the spam down to _zero_ (except for the obligatory advertising, which is at least usually on-topic) is also a good thing, and people do like their cutesy blinking avatar icons.
But maybe google IS trying to kill Usenet. They're certainly trying to make it look like a web forum -- they're adding the worst features of them to their groups stuff, when it all worked very well before. They're hiding email addresses, confusing people all over Usenet, especially those who think that groups.google.com IS Usenet. Presumably this is done to stop spam, but what if I want to email somebody? Blech.
Google paid good money for Usenet. (Or, more specifically, for the archive from Dejanews.)
Granted, they seem to be doing bad things with it (the groups-beta thing really kinda bites), but I don't see them ditching it -- it fits in very well with their key business (searching), and I doubt it costs them much money (compared to their web search, for example) to keep going.
And it's useful -- when looking for answers to technical issues (like `I got *this* error. How do I fix it?', searching Usenet is often more useful than the web.
Granted, much of the increase is due to better medical care, but much of it's due to knowing things about hygene and the like that we didn't know back then. At one point, plates and the like had lots of lead in them, and people ingested lots of lead from this and it caused them to live shorter lives.
But now that I know about the tin whiskers, I want lead in my electronic circuits! I wonder which is worse for the environment -- a stereo with no lead that gets thrown in the landfill after breaking after 10 years, or a stereo with some lead in it that lasts 20 years before breaking and getting thrown away...
I'll take a break from Linux and boot into WinXP Home
...
It's not all or nothing. Windows is great for stuff like this.
Eh? I'm sure Windows runs Turbo Tax just fine -- that's what it's designed to run under, after all.
I don't understand your `all or nothing' comment at all. What's all or nothing?
In the past, Tax Cut and Turbo Tax have run fine on Wine. As long as they aren't trying to do some really stupid low-level DRM stuff (like Turbo Tax did last year) I'd expect it to still work fine under Wine.
IIRC, Win9x, since it ran on top of DOS, did in fact use DOS and BIOS services to access the disk.
No, it didn't, not unless it had no other choice. Don't you remember loading IDE drivers for new chipsets under Win 9x? That's what you were loading -- a driver for talking to the hard drive without going through the BIOS. Win 9x came with native (not BIOS, Int 13h) drivers for most stuff that was out when it came out, but new motherboards often weren't supported, and then it had to go to BIOS, and the performance suffered *greatly* as a result.
And you're going to argue as to whether the light bulb or the very short feedline (even with a balun!) or the radio itself contriubted more to the process?
Yes. I'm glad you finally understand my reservations. (Personally, I suspect that the balun probably improved the radiating efficiency of the entire arrangement rather helping to restrict it to the bulb. But as I've mentioned, details are scarce without the QST article.)
That balun itself probably did more RF radiating than the bulb. (Unless it was, as I suggested, a very long bulb.)
And you think that "I didn't read the article" helps you, even when someone else gives you a link to the FA?
Um, that was me that gave me the link. To myself, apparantly. Except it wasn't to the QST article, but another, less reliable (i.e. few details), writeup.
But please, do, give me a link to the QST article. I'd love to read it. Or if you have the magazine, copy the article and send me a copy. Or scan it and email the pages to me. I've already given you (or did I give it to myself? I get so confused) the exact issue and author.
Or are you just trying to cover up your embarassment at being flat out wrong?
I have no problems with admitting when I'm wrong. In this case, I have not been convinced that I am wrong. And I rarely find learning that I was wrong to be embarrassing -- it's usually more of a learning experience. But maybe that's just me.
Sorry, but if you're claiming `WAC with a dummy load (light bulb)', I'll question the accuracy of your claim. If you don't like it, ignore me, that's fine, but you're not going to convince me until that light bulb is mounted to the back of your rig, minimal transmission line (i.e. one or two inches), and your rig (minus the antenna) is as fully shielded as is practical, that the bulb did most of the radiating and receiving. (Unless it's some wierd bulb that's a few feet long, of course.)
I'm pretty sure Linux does have to hit the BIOS for a few things -- power management on a laptop comes to mind. But it's not done often, because while you're doing so you're not multitasking anymore.
but for its own bootloader I'm pretty sure it has to use BIOS callbacks.
Oh, Linux needs BIOS help to get booted too. lilo and grub and whatever else basically just use the BIOS functions to get the kernel loaded off the disk. Once the kernel (and any initrd modules that are needed) is loaded, it doesn't need the BIOS for disk access anymore. But it's certainly needed for a little while. This is why you may be able to use a huge disk under Linux but not be able to boot off it, or only able to boot off the first 500 MB or 8 GB of the disk.
Bruce *is* licensed, and in the article, he specifically mentions that he took care to use something that WOULDN'T cause him to lose his license.
A ham radio license gives you no special rights outside of the ham bands. (And yes, I have one too.) Last I checked, the FM broadcast band (88-108 mHz) is outside the ham bands.
even if he were using the ham bands, it's illegal to broadcast music over them, unless it happens to be incidental music from a rebroadcast from the Space Shuttle (yes, the regulations are that specific:)
The (part 15) rules do permit low power transmitters on the FM broadcast band, but they're based on effective radiated power (i.e. in the direction with the strongest signal), not total radiated power.
Specific regulations here. If your signal can be picked up in your entire neighborhood, you're obviously exceeding the power limit.
he specifically mentions that he took care to use something that WOULDN'T cause him to lose his license.
Sounds like Bruce doesn't understand the regulations very well. He may not be abusing the ham bands, but the FCC can certainly take away his ham license for it. They probably won't for a first offense, but the odds are very good that this article will be all that's needed to get *somebody* to send in a complaint, and the FCC is likely to send him a nasty letter and require him to respond (that's how they do things.)
From the article --
I used a menu setting to turn it down to 100 mW. But then I found that 100 mW is no longer the FCC limit - it's 250 milivolts per meter radiated emissions, measured 3 meters from the antenna. This is probably a good deal under 100 mW power.
He's right -- that's probably a good deal under 100 mW of power, especially with his good antenna. So if he's only turned it down to 100 mW, he's violating the law. But maybe he mispoke...
This leaves an audiodump.wav file that can be converted via lame.
That's nasty in that you're taking an ogg/mp3 stream, decoding it, saving it decoded, then re-encoding it later. You'll lose some quality and waste lots of CPU.
Ideally you'd just save the stream that's downloaded. Sounds like that should be almost trivial to write up in perl, or you could use something like
StreamRipper rather than mplayer.
If the OS does not explicitly use it, it has NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on the function of the machine.
Now, that's not entirely true. If the BIOS sets up the hardware in some way before passing control to your OS, and the OS doesn't reset things, then the BIOS does have some effect on how things work after booting.
But beyond that, Martin's right. Modern OSs do not use BIOS routines for disk access, or for anything else that they do often. x86 protected mode and the BIOS routines do not play well together. It's possible to access the disk via the BIOS routines, but you have to drop out of protected mode, hit the disk, then go back into protected mode, rinse, lather, repeat -- not nice for a multitasking OS.
Even Windows doesn't do this, though it wouldn't suprise me if it has the capability of doing it if _everything_ else fails. But the system would crawl...
Using a modern computer and a modern OS (i.e. Windows 2000, XP, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.), the BIOS is only used at bootup and possibly for some power management stuff. Beyond that, once the OS is loaded, the BIOS isn't touched anymore. (It's possible that I've missed some more exceptions, but either way -- they're exceptions, not the norm.)
I had an AOpen AX58Pro, and when I put a 60GB drive in, it wouldn't even get through POST. Until I got the BIOS upgrade, and then it was fine.
Ugh. Linux will see the drive even if the BIOS doesn't know about it, so you could just not configure the drive at all in BIOS (tell it `Not Installed'), and still use it in Linux. Unless you needed to boot off of it...
Or configure it in BIOS manually, to the correct number of heads and sectors, but only 1023 tracks. Then make sure your boot partition is in that first bit of the drive. Windows will only see that first part of the drive, but Linux will see the whole thing.
Either way, this isn't a problem with the hardware. It's the BIOS, the firmware. And not a good reason to replace the motherboard, as there's several ways around it.
Or I could have used the capacity limiting jumper, but that just sucks to have to do.
Never had to use one of those jumpers before. Sounds painful, to drop a 60GB disk to less than 8GB.:)
This is the maximum they can address. Some BIOSes are happy to hand addressing off to the OS, some arent
Once you get booted up, it's not up to the BIOS anymore, unless you're using an old OS that uses the BIOS for disk access.
By old, I mean DOS old -- I don't even think Windows 95 uses the BIOS for disk access once booted up unless it has no other choice. OS/2 had an int 13h driver that it could use if there was no other option -- but you certainly didn't want to use it unless you had to, because the performance sucked.
The problem is that Windows blindly trusts what the BIOS returns for the drive parameters. A smart OS can ignore the BIOS settings if they don't match what the drive itself returns. It can also look at the partition table and use those settings instead of what the BIOS reports, if that makes more sense.
so your point of getting the kernel in the lower boundry is a little bit pointless when you want to dual boot.
I said OS issue. I meant it.
Dont assume that just because you havent come across it it must not exist, because it does and its a pain.
Oh, I've come across it. And I know it's a pain. But I certainly wouldn't replace a motherboard for it -- I'd either 1) update the BIOS (if an update available), 2) add an external IDE card (which has it's own BIOS), or 3) or pick an OS that can handle the BIOS issue better. Another option might be one of those `boot managers' that comes with the large drives as well -- they add a little bit of code that fools Windows into seeing the correct drive parameters instead of what the BIOS returns.
But if my P120 box can read a 200 GB disk with it's internal controller, I'm guessing that almost anything can. But the BIOS on that computer can't handle anything over 8 GB properly, so Windows would be out of the question.
Maybe this one won't require a new motherboard to use. I think I've replaced more mobo's to handle larger drives than I have to support faster CPUs.
Sounds like an OS issue. Linux handles 200+ GB drives just fine on my p3 box with ATA/33 controllers.
Seriously, as long as you get the kernel in the part of the disk that your motherboard supports, (or don't boot off that disk at all), Linux will work with it, no matter what motherboard you've got. No 128GB limit to worry about, even if you don't have ATA/100 (or is it ATA/133 that is supposedly required to support 128GB+ drives?)
I've even read those 200+ GB disks on a Pentium 120 Dell's onboard controllers on Linux. No problem -- Linux knew to ignore the BIOS settings on the drive and just made it work.
[has] a sufficiently large display to take down an overhead aircraft!
You could have at least picked an _attractive_ example...
Seriously though, anything that can distract the pilot at the wrong time could cause a crash, though a good pilot should avoid being distracted and stay on the task at hand.
And it doesn't have to be a plane. Car crashes have been caused by flashing women before.
Pilots dont need to look out the window to fly the plane
Eh? Sure, an IFR rated pilot and plane could fly without looking out the window, but if it's a nice clear day out, you don't do it that way -- you look out the window. If you suddenly lost visibilty, you might not have time to switch to IFR flight if you're landing. And if you were blinded, you won't be able to see your instruments either.
(Not that a standard laser pointer will blind you from hundreds of feet away, but...)
else they would never leave the ground at night.
Bull. Pilots and planes not equipped for IFR flight do night flights all the time. It's even part of the training program -- you need so many hours of night flight to get your private pilot's license.
It's no big deal -- you can see around you quite well.
the detection of the 10 watt (mostly) non-directional radio transmitter atop the Huygens probe
I was thinking the same sort of thing, but I was thinking even further out --- specifically, Voyager.
This article gives more details. And note that the date for that post is 1989 -- I don't know when (or even if) we finally lost contact with it.
And according to this page, we're still picking up signals from Voyager 1 and 2 (and recently lost Pioneer) as of 2001, with the distance of Pioneer 1 being almost 12 billion miles as of the time of the article. Most of these problems have transmitters that transmit at around 10 watts.
A few years ago, a guy used a light bulb as an antenna and was able to work contacts on all 6 continents.
Um you can easily get a lightbulb to radiate RF
Well, duh. Every lightbulb in your house, if powered with AC power, radiates RF energy. No HF rig required.
But can you get it to transmit and receive enough RF to talk to somebody on *every other continent* (except for Antarctica?) Sure, doing a QSO a few miles away, or even a few hundred miles away with this dummy load isn't hard. But talking to every single continent with it, that's not so easy.
I haven't read the original article (don't have it), but I still suspect that the transmission line (and matching system and radio itself) did more radiating and receiving than the light bulb itself did. (Unless he picked some light bulb that's much longer than your standard 100 watt bulb, I guess.)
You don't have to believe me. However, it was a *cover article* for QST magazine in the late '90's.
To be more specific, it's the July 2000 issue of QST. The author is N6BT.
I don't have that issue of QST, and I can't find the article online, so I can't say what exactly is in it. I don't doubt that QSOs can be made on a dummy load -- no matter what you do, there's going to be some leakage. What I really doubt is that he worked six continents with this antenna.
Ahh, found it. This link tells the story as you've heard it. I still have my doubts -- I'll bet the feed lines, coax and balun notwithstanding -- did more of the radiating and receiving than the bulb did itself.
Were the bulb screwed directly into the antenna socket of the radio I'd be a lot more convinced.
Slashdot Mirror
It could get interesting though -- if you knew that a specifc car was so bugged, you could go up to it, search it, find the bug, take it apart and find the frequency (or just use a frequency counter), and then start listening on that and similar frequencies. Assuming that the signal isn't strongly encrypted, you could then find every car so tracked in the entire city. In real time.
I think I read that article about the Colorado man, but it's been a while, and I forget the details. In any event, the man could have been convicted for stalking.
Beyond that, if he owned the car (it was in his name, or both their names), I'd expect it to be perfectly legal for him to place a tracking device on it, even if his wife (at least until the divorce is complete) was currently using it. But once the divorce was final, and he didn't own the car anymore, that doesn't sound legal anymore ...
It's certainly legal for an individual to follow a police car around, as long as they don't break any other laws. (Speeding, possibly stalking, though that would require other things as well.)
But would it be legal for Joe Citizen to put a tracking bug like this on a cop car?
It could certainly make for an interesting legal situation if a person were to go up to a cop, say `I'm going to put this tracking bug on your car', and then proceed to do so. The cop would probably say `you can't do that', then arrest him when he tries to do so anyways ...
This ruling really needs to be appealed, and soon.
I'm also a regular on rec.models.rc.air -- one group, yet there's now dozens of other online discussion boards related to R/C planes now.
But Usenet is useful.
It goes back over 20 years, and I can search all of that thanks to google (and before that Dejanews.) The interface to Usenet (NNTP) is exactly as I want it, and doesn't change from group to group. I can do everything without a mouse. I can save articles easily, and I know that my posts won't be removed by some overzealous moderator. And they won't be lost just because some site forgot to make backups. I don't need to register on 15 different sites and keep track of all of that -- Usenet is Usenet.
The clue level on the comp.* groups generally seems higher than that on the web forums, probably because most Usenet users are a bit more cluefull than your average `web' user.
comp.* and rec.* do have some spam, but it's not that bad. Anybody who claims that Usenet is overrun with spam either 1) isn't looking outside of alt.*, 2) is reading a `dead' group (how much discussion of the Apple II is there today?) or 3) isn't reading Usenet at all. A bigger problem is off topic posts, where the regulars have no problems with discussing political issues (for examples) on their favorite groups. But even this isn't too bad.
I imagine that web forums are now more popular than Usenet simply because they require less thought to use -- you don't need to find your NNTP server, for example. Having moderators who can clamp the spam down to _zero_ (except for the obligatory advertising, which is at least usually on-topic) is also a good thing, and people do like their cutesy blinking avatar icons.
But maybe google IS trying to kill Usenet. They're certainly trying to make it look like a web forum -- they're adding the worst features of them to their groups stuff, when it all worked very well before. They're hiding email addresses, confusing people all over Usenet, especially those who think that groups.google.com IS Usenet. Presumably this is done to stop spam, but what if I want to email somebody? Blech.
Granted, they seem to be doing bad things with it (the groups-beta thing really kinda bites), but I don't see them ditching it -- it fits in very well with their key business (searching), and I doubt it costs them much money (compared to their web search, for example) to keep going.
And it's useful -- when looking for answers to technical issues (like `I got *this* error. How do I fix it?', searching Usenet is often more useful than the web.
Granted, much of the increase is due to better medical care, but much of it's due to knowing things about hygene and the like that we didn't know back then. At one point, plates and the like had lots of lead in them, and people ingested lots of lead from this and it caused them to live shorter lives.
But now that I know about the tin whiskers, I want lead in my electronic circuits! I wonder which is worse for the environment -- a stereo with no lead that gets thrown in the landfill after breaking after 10 years, or a stereo with some lead in it that lasts 20 years before breaking and getting thrown away ...
I don't understand your `all or nothing' comment at all. What's all or nothing?
In the past, Tax Cut and Turbo Tax have run fine on Wine. As long as they aren't trying to do some really stupid low-level DRM stuff (like Turbo Tax did last year) I'd expect it to still work fine under Wine.
That balun itself probably did more RF radiating than the bulb. (Unless it was, as I suggested, a very long bulb.)
Um, that was me that gave me the link. To myself, apparantly. Except it wasn't to the QST article, but another, less reliable (i.e. few details), writeup.But please, do, give me a link to the QST article. I'd love to read it. Or if you have the magazine, copy the article and send me a copy. Or scan it and email the pages to me. I've already given you (or did I give it to myself? I get so confused) the exact issue and author.
I have no problems with admitting when I'm wrong. In this case, I have not been convinced that I am wrong. And I rarely find learning that I was wrong to be embarrassing -- it's usually more of a learning experience. But maybe that's just me.Sorry, but if you're claiming `WAC with a dummy load (light bulb)', I'll question the accuracy of your claim. If you don't like it, ignore me, that's fine, but you're not going to convince me until that light bulb is mounted to the back of your rig, minimal transmission line (i.e. one or two inches), and your rig (minus the antenna) is as fully shielded as is practical, that the bulb did most of the radiating and receiving. (Unless it's some wierd bulb that's a few feet long, of course.)
A ham radio license gives you no special rights outside of the ham bands. (And yes, I have one too.) Last I checked, the FM broadcast band (88-108 mHz) is outside the ham bands.
even if he were using the ham bands, it's illegal to broadcast music over them, unless it happens to be incidental music from a rebroadcast from the Space Shuttle (yes, the regulations are that specific :)
The (part 15) rules do permit low power transmitters on the FM broadcast band, but they're based on effective radiated power (i.e. in the direction with the strongest signal), not total radiated power. Specific regulations here. If your signal can be picked up in your entire neighborhood, you're obviously exceeding the power limit.
Sounds like Bruce doesn't understand the regulations very well. He may not be abusing the ham bands, but the FCC can certainly take away his ham license for it. They probably won't for a first offense, but the odds are very good that this article will be all that's needed to get *somebody* to send in a complaint, and the FCC is likely to send him a nasty letter and require him to respond (that's how they do things.)From the article --
He's right -- that's probably a good deal under 100 mW of power, especially with his good antenna. So if he's only turned it down to 100 mW, he's violating the law. But maybe he mispokeIdeally you'd just save the stream that's downloaded. Sounds like that should be almost trivial to write up in perl, or you could use something like StreamRipper rather than mplayer.
But beyond that, Martin's right. Modern OSs do not use BIOS routines for disk access, or for anything else that they do often. x86 protected mode and the BIOS routines do not play well together. It's possible to access the disk via the BIOS routines, but you have to drop out of protected mode, hit the disk, then go back into protected mode, rinse, lather, repeat -- not nice for a multitasking OS.
Even Windows doesn't do this, though it wouldn't suprise me if it has the capability of doing it if _everything_ else fails. But the system would crawl ...
Using a modern computer and a modern OS (i.e. Windows 2000, XP, Linux, FreeBSD, etc.), the BIOS is only used at bootup and possibly for some power management stuff. Beyond that, once the OS is loaded, the BIOS isn't touched anymore. (It's possible that I've missed some more exceptions, but either way -- they're exceptions, not the norm.)
Or configure it in BIOS manually, to the correct number of heads and sectors, but only 1023 tracks. Then make sure your boot partition is in that first bit of the drive. Windows will only see that first part of the drive, but Linux will see the whole thing.
Either way, this isn't a problem with the hardware. It's the BIOS, the firmware. And not a good reason to replace the motherboard, as there's several ways around it.
Never had to use one of those jumpers before. Sounds painful, to drop a 60GB disk to less than 8GB.By old, I mean DOS old -- I don't even think Windows 95 uses the BIOS for disk access once booted up unless it has no other choice. OS/2 had an int 13h driver that it could use if there was no other option -- but you certainly didn't want to use it unless you had to, because the performance sucked.
The problem is that Windows blindly trusts what the BIOS returns for the drive parameters. A smart OS can ignore the BIOS settings if they don't match what the drive itself returns. It can also look at the partition table and use those settings instead of what the BIOS reports, if that makes more sense.
I said OS issue. I meant it. Oh, I've come across it. And I know it's a pain. But I certainly wouldn't replace a motherboard for it -- I'd either 1) update the BIOS (if an update available), 2) add an external IDE card (which has it's own BIOS), or 3) or pick an OS that can handle the BIOS issue better. Another option might be one of those `boot managers' that comes with the large drives as well -- they add a little bit of code that fools Windows into seeing the correct drive parameters instead of what the BIOS returns.But if my P120 box can read a 200 GB disk with it's internal controller, I'm guessing that almost anything can. But the BIOS on that computer can't handle anything over 8 GB properly, so Windows would be out of the question.
Seriously, as long as you get the kernel in the part of the disk that your motherboard supports, (or don't boot off that disk at all), Linux will work with it, no matter what motherboard you've got. No 128GB limit to worry about, even if you don't have ATA/100 (or is it ATA/133 that is supposedly required to support 128GB+ drives?)
I've even read those 200+ GB disks on a Pentium 120 Dell's onboard controllers on Linux. No problem -- Linux knew to ignore the BIOS settings on the drive and just made it work.
Seriously though, anything that can distract the pilot at the wrong time could cause a crash, though a good pilot should avoid being distracted and stay on the task at hand.
And it doesn't have to be a plane. Car crashes have been caused by flashing women before.
(Not that a standard laser pointer will blind you from hundreds of feet away, but ...)
Bull. Pilots and planes not equipped for IFR flight do night flights all the time. It's even part of the training program -- you need so many hours of night flight to get your private pilot's license.It's no big deal -- you can see around you quite well.
And according to this page, we're still picking up signals from Voyager 1 and 2 (and recently lost Pioneer) as of 2001, with the distance of Pioneer 1 being almost 12 billion miles as of the time of the article. Most of these problems have transmitters that transmit at around 10 watts.
Granted, a searchlight aimed at the plane or even a sufficiently large display of BOOBIES might have the same effect ...
Probably not even that. He was probably just amused that he could see his laser pointer spot on the plane. But he's probably regretting it nowBut can you get it to transmit and receive enough RF to talk to somebody on *every other continent* (except for Antarctica?) Sure, doing a QSO a few miles away, or even a few hundred miles away with this dummy load isn't hard. But talking to every single continent with it, that's not so easy.
I haven't read the original article (don't have it), but I still suspect that the transmission line (and matching system and radio itself) did more radiating and receiving than the light bulb itself did. (Unless he picked some light bulb that's much longer than your standard 100 watt bulb, I guess.)
I don't have that issue of QST, and I can't find the article online, so I can't say what exactly is in it. I don't doubt that QSOs can be made on a dummy load -- no matter what you do, there's going to be some leakage. What I really doubt is that he worked six continents with this antenna.
Ahh, found it. This link tells the story as you've heard it. I still have my doubts -- I'll bet the feed lines, coax and balun notwithstanding -- did more of the radiating and receiving than the bulb did itself.
Were the bulb screwed directly into the antenna socket of the radio I'd be a lot more convinced.