Thank you for saying that! I am a native, but have lived up north and did learn to drive in snow and had no problems once I did, but down here again I just stay off the roads until the slipping and sliding is over. It is just not the same.
I am a rare breed. I was born in Atlanta and lived here much of my life. However, I did live up in the snow belt for several years, and I can assure you that, while I wouldn't think twice about driving in snow in Ohio, I try to avoid it if at all possible here. It IS different. One thing that Atlanta has that most northern snow belt areas lack is an abundance of hills. These do make a difference. Atlanta has always had problems with winter weather, but the other thing about Atlanta and this area in general is that the weather changes very quickly. It was 11 degrees here this morning and this afternoon it may be in the mid 40's. By Sunday the mid 60's are forecast. The cost of providing for extensive snow or ice removal is just not worth it.
Those not familiar with the region don't understand that Atlanta is in Georgia and those might as well be two different countries. After a 2011 snow event the CITY of Atlanta did invest in snow removal equipment and did have a better plan to deal with it this time. From what I have seen and heard the CITY really did handle it better than it has ever been handled in the past. That said, most of the traffic problems and grid lock seen around the world was NOT on Atlanta city streets, but on Interstate highways and State roads. These thread all though Atlanta and they are maintained EXCLUSIVELY by the State. This is where the politics and incompetence comes in.
State government here has been on a mission to downsize itself and transform itself into a jobs program for friends of well connected state politicians since about the year 2000 or earlier. The state highway department which is the organization that is responsible for all of the STATE roads, whether in Atlanta or not, has shrunk from over 7,000 employees to just over 4,000 just in the last few years. Many of the departures were by experienced people who left for the private sector or to county and municipal employers who now provide better compensation and benefits than does the State of Georgia. The head of the State Highway department, has traditionally been an engineer with experience. The current head is a political appointee who has no engineering degree and no experience in this area at all. This is just one example, but throughout the state, for well over a decade, there has been an erosion of competence in providing the services that the state is responsible for providing. This is not due to the remaining employees, who do the actual work, but due to poor planing, incompetent management and complete lack of understanding by the elected officials of what is required to run the largest state East of the Mississippi river.
Wow, I have wanted something like this since the mid 1960's when we visited my uncle in Orlando and I was amazed at how comfortable his house was all the time. He was in HVAC, mostly for commercial sites during the big AC boom in Florida in the 1950's and 1960's, and he told me that the trick was to control the humidity as well as the temperature. He had done his own system at home and I think it even had outdoor sensors for temperature and humidity even way back then to anticipate changes in the weather.
I have also thought that having one thermostat or temperature sensor in a house or on a floor was not the way to go. I have several digital thermometers scattered around the house and winter the digital thermostat always reads the highest temperature and in summer the lowest. Thermostats are mostly pretty dumb, and it is getting to where it would be economically feasible to have sensors for temperature and/or humidity in several locations around a house and the control unit for the HVAC at heating/AC equipment. I know there are zoned systems kind of like this in large homes, but I think a simple system that might be enough in a normal house.
How do you make a radio signal hidden of covert? Yes, some spread spectrum techniques make it appear to be just noise, but even so if you sweep in the near field you should be able to detect that something is going on. This might work for soft targets, but for any really secure location it should be detectable pretty easily.
Forty years ago I worked in a secure facility that was subject to random TEMPEST sweeps at frequent intervals. Even though I was never told what they were doing one look at the equipment they were using, especially the antennas, seemed to indicate that they were looking for any signals from D.C. to Daylight.
SCADA systems are bad enough, but the push to "THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING" should make it far more interesting for everyone.
I remember, far back in the late 1960s, when a popular DJ on a local radio station joked for everyone on a particular Interstate leading into the city to "CHANGE LANES". I was on that road and an amazing number of people did. With TIOE the cars can just do the lane change without having to tell the drivers to do it! Of course most of the drivers did make sure that the lane they were moving to had room for them. I doubt that will be the case next time.
Down here it is usually enough to just leave a sign on the door that says something like this.
Hay Bubba, better wait on tha porch till I geet back. Jest run to the store for more ammo. I ain't fed the dogs yet and them are locked inside and hungry so u better stay on the porch.
You covered most of what I was going to say except that in my younger days I could almost always hear the flyback whine from any CRT raster scan device be it TV or monitor. I think those generally operated in about the same frequency range as this technique does so many younger people should be able to HEAR the stealth transmissions just fine.
On another note our Ham Radio club used HSMM routers during field day this year to connect the operating positions around the large field with the logging computer and it worked far better than expected, and better than straight Wi-Fi had in previous years. 73 OM
Whether or not you NEED a scope for your every day work in electronics may not matter as much as the insight it gives you to see the theory you learned played out on a scope trace. An analog scope is best for really getting an insight into the fact that all the theory and math actually does something in the real world.
I am an old geezer and have been doing electronics from the days of vacuum tubes and point to point wiring to the current world of processors, ASIC's, and FPGA's and any time the analog world meets the digital I wouldn't trust any instrument more than a good scope. Your mileage may vary.
I got my BS in engineering in 1970 and except for shared Wang calculators for statistics and probability courses everything was slide rule. In 1973 I audited a graduate course at a different institution and the only two people in the class with slide rules were me and the professor. When the parameters in are only good to one or two significant figures, which is most often the case, a slide rule is more than accurate enough and since you have to keep track of the exponents you do get a much better feel for what is "right" and what is not. I still have my old K&E in its orange leather case and have actually bough a few others at yard sales and such over the years.
Consider the WSJ position on an issue and do the opposite. You will then more likely be closer to the truth and if money is involved it will be more profitable. It has for me.
Learning some calculus can give you insight into how the world works better than many other areas of mathematics.
Herman Wouk wrote a short book called The Language God Talks. The title came from a statement made to him by Richard Feynman when Wouk was interviewing him for some background on the Manhattan Project for Wouk's two books on World War II. In their first meeting Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus and Wouk said no. Feynman told him that he should learn it since, "It is the language God talks."
I am an engineer and while I didn't actually USE much calculus on a daily basis, it did help me understand the relationships and equations that I did use every day.
Perhaps if we could organize a nation wide NO FLY MONTH to disband the TSA, then the Airlines would pull the strings on their congresscritters to get some of this crap to stop.
Does anyone else remember this same kind of thing being said about Tunnel Diodes several decades ago? There were very few things actually sold with Tunnel Diodes in them. The only one I have is a very old Heathkit dip meter which never did work very well. Negative Resistance devices seem to keep popping up from time to time, but they also seem to be very difficult to get to work in a real circuit.
I was dragged kicking and screaming onto a HIPAA technical implementation task force for a state government about a decade or so ago when HIPAA was first being proposed. We looked at every possible way to encrypt and secure email, both for Data In Transit and for Data at Rest, and the Data In Transit part was intractable. For the situation we had, which was pretty much open with dozens or hundreds of networks sorta kinda on a shared backbone. Too much turf owned by too many players and each went their own way. Most just decided NOT to use email for PHI.
As a 66 year old life long geek I actually saw many of the things I worked with decades ago reinvented numerous times under a variety of names, but there is one thing I used extensively on IBM OS/360 that I have never seen in the PC world that was a very useful item to have in my tool kit. The Generation Data Set and by extension the Generation Data Group were a mainstay of mainframe computing on that platform the entire time I worked on it. When I moved on to Unix and networks in the last few decades of my career I looked for something similar, and never found anything quite as simple and elegant (in the engineering sense of the word) as the Generation Data Set was. Oh, you can build the same functionality in any program, but this was built into the OS and used extensively. If anyone has seen a similar feature in Unix or Linux I would love to know about it.
I wonder what the implications would be if very very large numbers of people began sending each other email that looked like encryption but were just blocks of random characters formatted in groups of five characters each? The same goes for text messages, pages on web sites that may or may not have links to them etc.
Of course really encrypting email would be better and the FBI is already wanting back doors to that.
This appears to be what has happened to the systems I worked on back in 1972-1973 while in the Air Force in Thailand. Back then the "ground sensors" were air dropped (mostly) devices that had seismic sensors to detect movement on the Ho Chi Minh trail. There were also types that sensed audio and some other types too, but the majority were ADSIDS which were seismic. They were built with discrete components and some RTL IC technology. There were no microprocessors then and the computer that received the output was a big iron IBM 360. The exact location of the sensors were never known since they were dropped from an F4 doing about 500 Mph. The position error at best was maybe a 50 meter radius. Having GPS tell you were the sensor really is would have been a great advantage, and also having some basic telemetry about the battery status and overall operation would have helped. We only knew when the batteries went dead when the sensor went silent for a long time -- of course that could have been because they changed the route of the trail too -- something that happened often.
Although I have seen some articles on what we did on the web, they are not always completely accurate or complete. For one thing the communications techniques used by the sensors on VHF frequencies were very similar to what latter became ethernet. Something that really gave me deja vu when ethernet came along.
Back when the Internet was a new thing, I remember the cartoon of the dogs on a computer with the caption, On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.
Unfortunately, this is not true any more. The hive mind of the Internet never seems to forget and this may have consequences we can not even imagine yet. I am now in my mid sixties and have seen the world change from where the mistakes of youth did not come back to haunt you in latter life. I doubt that this will be true for anyone growing up now.
One of the things not often appreciated is just how much my country, The United States, owes to people who came here in order to leave their past behind and start over. Even in our country, until very recently, it was possible to begin anew and leave the past behind. Yes, there were some negative aspects of this. I am sure that there are unsolved crimes committed by the ones that "got away". One of the popular genres of TV shows is that of solving cold cases. However, the benefit of being able to "start over" seems to outweigh the risk of those that get away. Even in law there are Statute of Limitations for most crimes and sometimes I think the Internet needs a statute of limitations on how long it "remembers" some things.
Making mistakes is a part of learning and growing up. A person in their teens is not the same person in their late twenties, and by the time they are in their fifties or beyond they have probably changed again. Giving people the room and freedom to grow and start over is as important to society as almost anything.
As the engineers I used to work with often said about a failed rocket launch, "we learn the most from our mistakes - they blow up."
For those of us who worked on some of the old "Big Iron" mainframe systems we can remember that most forms of storage required specifying a retention date or retention period. After which time the data would be deleted. If one needed the data the owner could change the date before it was deleted. I think that some sort of retention period should be applied to all social media sites, and other sites that hold personal information. Perhaps we should start a Give the Internet Amnesia movement!
Uh, lets see. Computers are pretty much a practical implementation of a Universal Turing Machine which Turing proved could compute any computable problem. Therefore a computer is, in effect, a universal machine. Since changing the software on what is already a universal machine doesn't really change the fact that it is still a universal machine then it seems that no software for any computer should be patentable.
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Thank you for saying that! I am a native, but have lived up north and did learn to drive in snow and had no problems once I did, but down here again I just stay off the roads until the slipping and sliding is over. It is just not the same.
I am a rare breed. I was born in Atlanta and lived here much of my life. However, I did live up in the snow belt for several years, and I can assure you that, while I wouldn't think twice about driving in snow in Ohio, I try to avoid it if at all possible here. It IS different. One thing that Atlanta has that most northern snow belt areas lack is an abundance of hills. These do make a difference. Atlanta has always had problems with winter weather, but the other thing about Atlanta and this area in general is that the weather changes very quickly. It was 11 degrees here this morning and this afternoon it may be in the mid 40's. By Sunday the mid 60's are forecast. The cost of providing for extensive snow or ice removal is just not worth it.
Those not familiar with the region don't understand that Atlanta is in Georgia and those might as well be two different countries. After a 2011 snow event the CITY of Atlanta did invest in snow removal equipment and did have a better plan to deal with it this time. From what I have seen and heard the CITY really did handle it better than it has ever been handled in the past. That said, most of the traffic problems and grid lock seen around the world was NOT on Atlanta city streets, but on Interstate highways and State roads. These thread all though Atlanta and they are maintained EXCLUSIVELY by the State. This is where the politics and incompetence comes in.
State government here has been on a mission to downsize itself and transform itself into a jobs program for friends of well connected state politicians since about the year 2000 or earlier. The state highway department which is the organization that is responsible for all of the STATE roads, whether in Atlanta or not, has shrunk from over 7,000 employees to just over 4,000 just in the last few years. Many of the departures were by experienced people who left for the private sector or to county and municipal employers who now provide better compensation and benefits than does the State of Georgia. The head of the State Highway department, has traditionally been an engineer with experience. The current head is a political appointee who has no engineering degree and no experience in this area at all. This is just one example, but throughout the state, for well over a decade, there has been an erosion of competence in providing the services that the state is responsible for providing. This is not due to the remaining employees, who do the actual work, but due to poor planing, incompetent management and complete lack of understanding by the elected officials of what is required to run the largest state East of the Mississippi river.
Wow, I have wanted something like this since the mid 1960's when we visited my uncle in Orlando and I was amazed at how comfortable his house was all the time. He was in HVAC, mostly for commercial sites during the big AC boom in Florida in the 1950's and 1960's, and he told me that the trick was to control the humidity as well as the temperature. He had done his own system at home and I think it even had outdoor sensors for temperature and humidity even way back then to anticipate changes in the weather.
I have also thought that having one thermostat or temperature sensor in a house or on a floor was not the way to go. I have several digital thermometers scattered around the house and winter the digital thermostat always reads the highest temperature and in summer the lowest. Thermostats are mostly pretty dumb, and it is getting to where it would be economically feasible to have sensors for temperature and/or humidity in several locations around a house and the control unit for the HVAC at heating/AC equipment. I know there are zoned systems kind of like this in large homes, but I think a simple system that might be enough in a normal house.
How do you make a radio signal hidden of covert? Yes, some spread spectrum techniques make it appear to be just noise, but even so if you sweep in the near field you should be able to detect that something is going on. This might work for soft targets, but for any really secure location it should be detectable pretty easily.
Forty years ago I worked in a secure facility that was subject to random TEMPEST sweeps at frequent intervals. Even though I was never told what they were doing one look at the equipment they were using, especially the antennas, seemed to indicate that they were looking for any signals from D.C. to Daylight.
Good point. The soft undefended target is the ripe target.
Another Tao of math: For Electrical Engineers imaginary numbers are real.
SCADA systems are bad enough, but the push to "THE INTERNET OF EVERYTHING" should make it far more interesting for everyone.
I remember, far back in the late 1960s, when a popular DJ on a local radio station joked for everyone on a particular Interstate leading into the city to "CHANGE LANES". I was on that road and an amazing number of people did. With TIOE the cars can just do the lane change without having to tell the drivers to do it! Of course most of the drivers did make sure that the lane they were moving to had room for them. I doubt that will be the case next time.
Down here it is usually enough to just leave a sign on the door that says something like this.
Hay Bubba, better wait on tha porch till I geet back. Jest run to the store for more ammo. I ain't fed the dogs yet and them are locked inside and hungry so u better stay on the porch.
WOULD YOU WANT TO GO IN AFTER READING THAT?
You covered most of what I was going to say except that in my younger days I could almost always hear the flyback whine from any CRT raster scan device be it TV or monitor. I think those generally operated in about the same frequency range as this technique does so many younger people should be able to HEAR the stealth transmissions just fine. On another note our Ham Radio club used HSMM routers during field day this year to connect the operating positions around the large field with the logging computer and it worked far better than expected, and better than straight Wi-Fi had in previous years. 73 OM
I think what Richard Feynman said at then end of the appendix to the report on the Space Shuttle Challenger failure may also apply in this situation.
For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled. --Richard Feynman
Whether or not you NEED a scope for your every day work in electronics may not matter as much as the insight it gives you to see the theory you learned played out on a scope trace. An analog scope is best for really getting an insight into the fact that all the theory and math actually does something in the real world.
I am an old geezer and have been doing electronics from the days of vacuum tubes and point to point wiring to the current world of processors, ASIC's, and FPGA's and any time the analog world meets the digital I wouldn't trust any instrument more than a good scope. Your mileage may vary.
I got my BS in engineering in 1970 and except for shared Wang calculators for statistics and probability courses everything was slide rule. In 1973 I audited a graduate course at a different institution and the only two people in the class with slide rules were me and the professor. When the parameters in are only good to one or two significant figures, which is most often the case, a slide rule is more than accurate enough and since you have to keep track of the exponents you do get a much better feel for what is "right" and what is not. I still have my old K&E in its orange leather case and have actually bough a few others at yard sales and such over the years.
Consider the WSJ position on an issue and do the opposite. You will then more likely be closer to the truth and if money is involved it will be more profitable. It has for me.
Learning some calculus can give you insight into how the world works better than many other areas of mathematics.
Herman Wouk wrote a short book called The Language God Talks. The title came from a statement made to him by Richard Feynman when Wouk was interviewing him for some background on the Manhattan Project for Wouk's two books on World War II. In their first meeting Feynman asked Wouk if he knew calculus and Wouk said no. Feynman told him that he should learn it since, "It is the language God talks."
I am an engineer and while I didn't actually USE much calculus on a daily basis, it did help me understand the relationships and equations that I did use every day.
Does not work in Firefox 11.0
This just seems to be a bigger and fancier version of the seismic sensors that looked like dog droppings and were used during the Vietnam war.
It seems that they are already doing that.
Perhaps if we could organize a nation wide NO FLY MONTH to disband the TSA, then the Airlines would pull the strings on their congresscritters to get some of this crap to stop.
Does anyone else remember this same kind of thing being said about Tunnel Diodes several decades ago? There were very few things actually sold with Tunnel Diodes in them. The only one I have is a very old Heathkit dip meter which never did work very well. Negative Resistance devices seem to keep popping up from time to time, but they also seem to be very difficult to get to work in a real circuit.
It is too late for Mozilla to hijack the Internet. NSA beat them too it.
I was dragged kicking and screaming onto a HIPAA technical implementation task force for a state government about a decade or so ago when HIPAA was first being proposed. We looked at every possible way to encrypt and secure email, both for Data In Transit and for Data at Rest, and the Data In Transit part was intractable. For the situation we had, which was pretty much open with dozens or hundreds of networks sorta kinda on a shared backbone. Too much turf owned by too many players and each went their own way. Most just decided NOT to use email for PHI.
As a 66 year old life long geek I actually saw many of the things I worked with decades ago reinvented numerous times under a variety of names, but there is one thing I used extensively on IBM OS/360 that I have never seen in the PC world that was a very useful item to have in my tool kit. The Generation Data Set and by extension the Generation Data Group were a mainstay of mainframe computing on that platform the entire time I worked on it. When I moved on to Unix and networks in the last few decades of my career I looked for something similar, and never found anything quite as simple and elegant (in the engineering sense of the word) as the Generation Data Set was. Oh, you can build the same functionality in any program, but this was built into the OS and used extensively. If anyone has seen a similar feature in Unix or Linux I would love to know about it.
I wonder what the implications would be if very very large numbers of people began sending each other email that looked like encryption but were just blocks of random characters formatted in groups of five characters each? The same goes for text messages, pages on web sites that may or may not have links to them etc. Of course really encrypting email would be better and the FBI is already wanting back doors to that.
This appears to be what has happened to the systems I worked on back in 1972-1973 while in the Air Force in Thailand. Back then the "ground sensors" were air dropped (mostly) devices that had seismic sensors to detect movement on the Ho Chi Minh trail. There were also types that sensed audio and some other types too, but the majority were ADSIDS which were seismic. They were built with discrete components and some RTL IC technology. There were no microprocessors then and the computer that received the output was a big iron IBM 360. The exact location of the sensors were never known since they were dropped from an F4 doing about 500 Mph. The position error at best was maybe a 50 meter radius. Having GPS tell you were the sensor really is would have been a great advantage, and also having some basic telemetry about the battery status and overall operation would have helped. We only knew when the batteries went dead when the sensor went silent for a long time -- of course that could have been because they changed the route of the trail too -- something that happened often.
Although I have seen some articles on what we did on the web, they are not always completely accurate or complete. For one thing the communications techniques used by the sensors on VHF frequencies were very similar to what latter became ethernet. Something that really gave me deja vu when ethernet came along.
Back when the Internet was a new thing, I remember the cartoon of the dogs on a computer with the caption, On the Internet, no one knows you are a dog.
Unfortunately, this is not true any more. The hive mind of the Internet never seems to forget and this may have consequences we can not even imagine yet. I am now in my mid sixties and have seen the world change from where the mistakes of youth did not come back to haunt you in latter life. I doubt that this will be true for anyone growing up now.
One of the things not often appreciated is just how much my country, The United States, owes to people who came here in order to leave their past behind and start over. Even in our country, until very recently, it was possible to begin anew and leave the past behind. Yes, there were some negative aspects of this. I am sure that there are unsolved crimes committed by the ones that "got away". One of the popular genres of TV shows is that of solving cold cases. However, the benefit of being able to "start over" seems to outweigh the risk of those that get away. Even in law there are Statute of Limitations for most crimes and sometimes I think the Internet needs a statute of limitations on how long it "remembers" some things.
Making mistakes is a part of learning and growing up. A person in their teens is not the same person in their late twenties, and by the time they are in their fifties or beyond they have probably changed again. Giving people the room and freedom to grow and start over is as important to society as almost anything.
As the engineers I used to work with often said about a failed rocket launch, "we learn the most from our mistakes - they blow up."
For those of us who worked on some of the old "Big Iron" mainframe systems we can remember that most forms of storage required specifying a retention date or retention period. After which time the data would be deleted. If one needed the data the owner could change the date before it was deleted. I think that some sort of retention period should be applied to all social media sites, and other sites that hold personal information. Perhaps we should start a Give the Internet Amnesia movement!
Uh, lets see. Computers are pretty much a practical implementation of a Universal Turing Machine which Turing proved could compute any computable problem. Therefore a computer is, in effect, a universal machine. Since changing the software on what is already a universal machine doesn't really change the fact that it is still a universal machine then it seems that no software for any computer should be patentable.