That will keep working until smart antenna arrays become norm for cellphones. It is fairly logical - no need to send RF energy to all directions when a small fraction of the power can be sent just in the direction of the cell tower, and the same applies to the received signal which then stands out of noise (including jammers) much better.
What about people unable to recognize faces/expressions on their own? Such toy can be an equivalent of a physical handicap prosthetics. Or do you want to be an asshole and oppress the neurologically disadvantaged?
My natural face-recognition skills are strongly inferior even to moderately obsolete computer algorithms. Such thing would work as a neural prosthesis for me, a social-interaction equivalent of a peg leg. Would you want to relieve me and others of such aid?
For the record, I'd strongly prefer if such functionality operated offline, without cloud connection...
Yes. Because there is something called principles. Because freedom is not free. Because there are friends that will ask for help with the same. And because then you can publish/validate the approaches that worked so others would not have to go through the blind alleys. Hardware is cheap these days, and if you get a good deal on a stereomicroscope the soldering of even tiny SMD parts is about as easy as it can get.
That mass of JSTOR data on the Pirate Bay is practically worthless. Unless someone goes to the effort of indexing it and creating a search engine for it, it's essentially useless. And if anyone does do that, they'll be doing nothing but re-inventing what JSTOR has already built.
You mean, like, ummm, running some of the widely available fulltext-search indexing software, e.g. the Apache Solr?
The basic problem with your premise is that fully rational, well-adjusted people are so rare their existence borders on mythology. People in general tend to be fairly easy to manipulate and to follow the group they are in (peer-rejection/accetance is a powerful force), or to seek belonging in a group if they aren't in any. In proper context, my conservative guess is that a good half of people will be vulnerable.
A timer can be made from a leaky bag of water. As we talk about airplanes, a barometric trigger can be made from a bag of chips, or that little single-dose cup of coffee cream (notice how they inflate when at altitude).
That too (but mind that not everybody has one, and not everybody has one able to significantly help when the going gets too tough).
I mean the one that, at least in developed countries, would let you not have to choice between a surgery for your father and education for your children.
Give the test and autoconfig feature away as a free, preferably open-source, computer software. Give the iphone app the ability to read the presets via QR-code, generated by the PC app.
Good luck regulating free software hosted on offshore servers. The commercial apps then can retain the functionality by splitting off the regulated functions away to the unregulatable noncommercial offshore platforms.
You will think otherwise once you get older and your so-far presumably fairly perfect health will start deteriorating. Or when some hidden timebomb in your genetic code starts acting up.
And before you start babbling about financial responsibility and saving money and so on, mind that you, like everybody else, are just one instance of bad luck away from bankruptcy.
Be glad for the welfare safety net under you. You don't know when you will need it; and it is when, not if.
Is any of these requirements something that can not be implemented in an open-source way on e.g. a cheap dsPIC chip? The water-resistance and ESD-robustness are also nothing special; from a water-tight housing, conformal coating and a Li-poly battery to an industry standard ESD protection.
I still don't see the reasons for such high costs.
Even the FDA can be worked around; just sell the thing as something else non-medical and allow an user-end reflashing of the firmware that will add the "regulated" functions.
I can imagine the sound-processing core being sold as a naked board by SparkFun for $30, with printable housings available from Thingiverse and user-customizable with Sugru.
Maybe it's a high time for opensource software and electronics hobbyists to enter the field of health-care technology, and put some squeeze from the Great Distributed Bottom onto the overregulated market. Maybe a HAM-radio club equivalent for hearing aids? There must be a lot of retired engineers with bad hearing, certainly enough to come up with something.
It is not a "photo frame". It is a full-featured, though weak, embedded computer with a LCD display. Just because it has a limited firmware and marketers call it a "photo frame" does not take away from its inherent nature.
What's it with people these days that they let themselves be limited with how things are named?
When the DRM is stripped, the files can be multiplied for all the friends/families who care to have them. The legal system does not have to be told about files on a computer, only about the computer itself. Assuming no ill will within the family, the issues can be resolved later after the possession of the physical hardware is resolved.
Possession is 99% of ownership, and with digital goods there are couple more nines there. Repairing the file (DRM can be considered a design fault) may be illegal, but then it just becomes an issue of not getting caught.
Collective punishment. And that's exactly why such laws should be ignored. Everybody can do even just as little as looking another way; if enough people realize it is just a geopolitical dick-size comparing and that the rank-and-file people on the "enemy side" are more similar to them than the members of their own government, despite being demonized by said government, the world will become a notch better. Even just as little as a plausibly deniable "not paying attention" is often enough.
Maybe it's the experience of being behind the Iron Curtain (and the subsequent change of geopolitical alliances and the friend-foe labels) that leads me to this opinion, but I strongly disagree that sanctions should hurt students and farmers. I don't care the least about government will, on either side, I just support the free and open market, and free access to consumer technology for everybody, even if it includes technology smuggling and violating of laws. Especially if said technology is common off-the-shelf stuff.
Some philosophers consider obeying a bad law to be unethical. This is one of the more clear-cut cases of such.
Coding (and sysadminning) and alcohol aren't mutually exclusive; the dose is the key here. When the technician is too afraid to make a bug, or to screw up, a small dose of alcohol can relax him enough to be willing to perform the task (it must be low enough to not significantly impair his job performance; slowly(!) drinking something tasty until one feels the courage for the task does the job well).
In the age of global computer networks, transnational corporations, and culture that ignores borders, can the stubborn clinging to market partitioning by the outdated concept of nation-states still be considered "legitimate"?
Why should someone do without something that can be easily available just because some asshole in a suit'n'tie keeps thinking in terms of countries? (This applies to everything from said music market partitioning to export/import restrictions on technology.)
The ones with money can buy laws, can shuttle the production and hosting around the world as they please. Why shouldn't the consumers do the same, even if it means (oh horror!) breaking a law or three?
At least the geolocation crap can be worked around in quite many cases, using VPNs, proxies, and friends. Don't piss off geeks!
What about less-direct legal order circumventions, the ones that aren't about specific addresses but provide workarounds for entire enforcement methods (e.g. the Mozilla anti-DNS-block add-on)?
Something tells me we will see more and more of these. While whack-a-mole is certainly fun, a class-break that is done once and handles every case of the given class is more efficient.
Could such groups be approached, by force if necessary, by the protesters, their face masks removed, their faces photographed and published, and then their identities crowdsourced?
Do it a couple times and the police runs out of willing unknown provocateurs.
A standard thermal imager will do a good job here. Common smokes do not contain particles large enough to absorb/scatter 4-12 um infrared. (There are special obscurant smoke compositions against thermal imagers, but these are pretty difficult to keep in the air.) But the imagers are (so far) costly.
Do not use visible lasers; they are too easy to track to the house they shoot from.
For blinding the drones (and not blinding live pilots) an infrared laser could be good.
Taken to higher power, a CO2 laser for a laser engraver can reach couple dozen watts fairly easily. With good focus and dwell time, perhaps could even cause structural failure of some plastic parts on the drone.
Yet another possibility is in the realm of microwaves. A sufficiently focused (perhaps from several houses, networked in an aerial defense grid) microwave beam could confuse the drone's electronics or perhaps even force internal overheat.
A guided model rocket with a suitable payload (or even just as a dumb kinetic projectile) could also do a good job. Such devices can even be unmanned and placed out as "mines", ready to be triggered by an overpassing drone. Suitable sizing of the rocket can ensure that only light, non-fatal damage will be inflicted to large manned aircraft (if hit by a mistake) while the damage to a lightweight drone will be much more extensive.
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That will keep working until smart antenna arrays become norm for cellphones. It is fairly logical - no need to send RF energy to all directions when a small fraction of the power can be sent just in the direction of the cell tower, and the same applies to the received signal which then stands out of noise (including jammers) much better.
What about people unable to recognize faces/expressions on their own? Such toy can be an equivalent of a physical handicap prosthetics. Or do you want to be an asshole and oppress the neurologically disadvantaged?
My natural face-recognition skills are strongly inferior even to moderately obsolete computer algorithms. Such thing would work as a neural prosthesis for me, a social-interaction equivalent of a peg leg. Would you want to relieve me and others of such aid?
For the record, I'd strongly prefer if such functionality operated offline, without cloud connection...
Yes. Because there is something called principles. Because freedom is not free. Because there are friends that will ask for help with the same. And because then you can publish/validate the approaches that worked so others would not have to go through the blind alleys.
Hardware is cheap these days, and if you get a good deal on a stereomicroscope the soldering of even tiny SMD parts is about as easy as it can get.
You mean, like, ummm, running some of the widely available fulltext-search indexing software, e.g. the Apache Solr?
Beware of CCHR. It is a well-known anti-psychiatry arm of the Scientology "church". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Commission_on_Human_Rights
The basic problem with your premise is that fully rational, well-adjusted people are so rare their existence borders on mythology. People in general tend to be fairly easy to manipulate and to follow the group they are in (peer-rejection/accetance is a powerful force), or to seek belonging in a group if they aren't in any. In proper context, my conservative guess is that a good half of people will be vulnerable.
A timer can be made from a leaky bag of water. As we talk about airplanes, a barometric trigger can be made from a bag of chips, or that little single-dose cup of coffee cream (notice how they inflate when at altitude).
Smuggling is not a crime. Import duties are!
That too (but mind that not everybody has one, and not everybody has one able to significantly help when the going gets too tough).
I mean the one that, at least in developed countries, would let you not have to choice between a surgery for your father and education for your children.
Give the test and autoconfig feature away as a free, preferably open-source, computer software. Give the iphone app the ability to read the presets via QR-code, generated by the PC app. Good luck regulating free software hosted on offshore servers. The commercial apps then can retain the functionality by splitting off the regulated functions away to the unregulatable noncommercial offshore platforms.
You will think otherwise once you get older and your so-far presumably fairly perfect health will start deteriorating. Or when some hidden timebomb in your genetic code starts acting up. And before you start babbling about financial responsibility and saving money and so on, mind that you, like everybody else, are just one instance of bad luck away from bankruptcy. Be glad for the welfare safety net under you. You don't know when you will need it; and it is when, not if.
Is any of these requirements something that can not be implemented in an open-source way on e.g. a cheap dsPIC chip? The water-resistance and ESD-robustness are also nothing special; from a water-tight housing, conformal coating and a Li-poly battery to an industry standard ESD protection.
I still don't see the reasons for such high costs.
Even the FDA can be worked around; just sell the thing as something else non-medical and allow an user-end reflashing of the firmware that will add the "regulated" functions.
I can imagine the sound-processing core being sold as a naked board by SparkFun for $30, with printable housings available from Thingiverse and user-customizable with Sugru.
Maybe it's a high time for opensource software and electronics hobbyists to enter the field of health-care technology, and put some squeeze from the Great Distributed Bottom onto the overregulated market. Maybe a HAM-radio club equivalent for hearing aids? There must be a lot of retired engineers with bad hearing, certainly enough to come up with something.
It is not a "photo frame". It is a full-featured, though weak, embedded computer with a LCD display. Just because it has a limited firmware and marketers call it a "photo frame" does not take away from its inherent nature.
What's it with people these days that they let themselves be limited with how things are named?
When the DRM is stripped, the files can be multiplied for all the friends/families who care to have them. The legal system does not have to be told about files on a computer, only about the computer itself. Assuming no ill will within the family, the issues can be resolved later after the possession of the physical hardware is resolved.
Possession is 99% of ownership, and with digital goods there are couple more nines there. Repairing the file (DRM can be considered a design fault) may be illegal, but then it just becomes an issue of not getting caught.
Why didn't you ask a friend to buy it for you, or bought it on ebay or over the internet, or even built it yourself?
Collective punishment. And that's exactly why such laws should be ignored. Everybody can do even just as little as looking another way; if enough people realize it is just a geopolitical dick-size comparing and that the rank-and-file people on the "enemy side" are more similar to them than the members of their own government, despite being demonized by said government, the world will become a notch better. Even just as little as a plausibly deniable "not paying attention" is often enough.
Maybe it's the experience of being behind the Iron Curtain (and the subsequent change of geopolitical alliances and the friend-foe labels) that leads me to this opinion, but I strongly disagree that sanctions should hurt students and farmers. I don't care the least about government will, on either side, I just support the free and open market, and free access to consumer technology for everybody, even if it includes technology smuggling and violating of laws. Especially if said technology is common off-the-shelf stuff.
Some philosophers consider obeying a bad law to be unethical. This is one of the more clear-cut cases of such.
Coding (and sysadminning) and alcohol aren't mutually exclusive; the dose is the key here. When the technician is too afraid to make a bug, or to screw up, a small dose of alcohol can relax him enough to be willing to perform the task (it must be low enough to not significantly impair his job performance; slowly(!) drinking something tasty until one feels the courage for the task does the job well).
In the age of global computer networks, transnational corporations, and culture that ignores borders, can the stubborn clinging to market partitioning by the outdated concept of nation-states still be considered "legitimate"?
Why should someone do without something that can be easily available just because some asshole in a suit'n'tie keeps thinking in terms of countries? (This applies to everything from said music market partitioning to export/import restrictions on technology.)
The ones with money can buy laws, can shuttle the production and hosting around the world as they please. Why shouldn't the consumers do the same, even if it means (oh horror!) breaking a law or three?
At least the geolocation crap can be worked around in quite many cases, using VPNs, proxies, and friends. Don't piss off geeks!
What about less-direct legal order circumventions, the ones that aren't about specific addresses but provide workarounds for entire enforcement methods (e.g. the Mozilla anti-DNS-block add-on)?
Something tells me we will see more and more of these. While whack-a-mole is certainly fun, a class-break that is done once and handles every case of the given class is more efficient.
Could such groups be approached, by force if necessary, by the protesters, their face masks removed, their faces photographed and published, and then their identities crowdsourced?
Do it a couple times and the police runs out of willing unknown provocateurs.
On Facebook you can block people.
In real life, you can Glock people.
The shooting rampages are Darwin's answer to bullies.
A standard thermal imager will do a good job here. Common smokes do not contain particles large enough to absorb/scatter 4-12 um infrared. (There are special obscurant smoke compositions against thermal imagers, but these are pretty difficult to keep in the air.) But the imagers are (so far) costly.
Do not use visible lasers; they are too easy to track to the house they shoot from.
For blinding the drones (and not blinding live pilots) an infrared laser could be good.
Taken to higher power, a CO2 laser for a laser engraver can reach couple dozen watts fairly easily. With good focus and dwell time, perhaps could even cause structural failure of some plastic parts on the drone.
Yet another possibility is in the realm of microwaves. A sufficiently focused (perhaps from several houses, networked in an aerial defense grid) microwave beam could confuse the drone's electronics or perhaps even force internal overheat.
A guided model rocket with a suitable payload (or even just as a dumb kinetic projectile) could also do a good job. Such devices can even be unmanned and placed out as "mines", ready to be triggered by an overpassing drone. Suitable sizing of the rocket can ensure that only light, non-fatal damage will be inflicted to large manned aircraft (if hit by a mistake) while the damage to a lightweight drone will be much more extensive.