The goal of national security is stability, not freedom. Stability allows the economy to prosper, and the industrial complex to make money. If at any point we see freedom getting in the way of an optimized market, that is when those freedoms are lost.
Remember, money is speech, thus the captains of capitol and their desire for money-making stability are the main voice in this capitalist society. The voice of the people and their desire for freedom and privacy are a distant second.
I, for one, want to live in a more open and more dangerous society. The Daily reality of our soft freedom loving exposed underbelly would drive radically different policies on a wider range of topics, foreign , and domestic.
But transparency and freedom are not in the best interest of those on top making all the money, thus we live in a society that is slowly morphing into a corporation.
Just to make sure that everybody is up to speed on that stated power, Let me Clarify something about antenna radiation. What was quoted was 4 billion watts ERP. The term ERP means Effective Radiated Power compared to that of a simple dipole antenna. This is a sort of measure of power density, not absolute power. Power stated as ERP is a measure of the power radiated and how narrow the radiation beam is. High ERP power is very much like looking at a narrow laser beam from a great distance. The beam looks bright, so if you think that the light is coming from a source that is shining in all directions, then it is as if the light source is shining with megawatts of power. Although the beam is bright, it is very narrow in extent, thus the real power radiated is small. For antennas, the beam width is proportional to a measure called antenna Gain. Large arrays of antennas like the HAARP antenna farm have VERY high gains, thus very directional radiation beams. IT is more likely that HAARP antenna array has a collective gain near 1000, thus the real power is more like 4 megawatts, not gigawatts (something that can be supplied by on base generators).
Megawatts of RF power is big, but not big enough to knock down ICBMs. The Idea with HAARP is to use the RF power to heat the Ionosphere in the northern latitudes where there are enormous currents induced by the Aurora. The power sloshing around in the upper Ionosphere is of the order of Terawatts. They hope to modulate these rivers of currents by locally heating small spots in the ionosphere plasma, thus radiating gigawatts of power at ultra low frequencies ( 1 to 100 Hz)... a very cool Mad scientist Idea... Very evil..
The latest long-range RFID tags DO in fact have an ON/Off switch of sorts
It is called the KILL command. You send the Kill command and the tag is permanently disabled.
We the developers of RFID tags neither want to be tracked ourselves, or have people boycott RFID tagged products in mass because of privacy concerns. The Kill function was placed into the protocol back almost 2 years ago. You can have the tags killed at the point of sale, or you can even kill them personally with a home RFID reader, and there is always the hammer or scissors method.
RFID Technology is by no means robust. Brittle is a better characterization. There are more ways to easily defeat cheap passive RFID than there are ways to keep it working. I am not worried
By the way... Microwav-ing will not kill most of the latest UHF RFID tags, short of just melting the metal antenna of course.... We makeem tough.
I hate to be picky, but I think everybody is using the word bandwidth to mean data rate. Bandwidth has units of Hz and data rate has units of bits/sec. True that increasing the bandwidth of a signal can increase the data rate, but the reverse need no be the case. In fact if you read the article they tell us that the increased data rate will be accomplished through changes in the data modulation (most likely by moving from binary phase shift keying, to quadrature phase shift keying, or higher).
What does First Mean?... First occurrence in the descending significance sequence of digits in E, or first in the ascending sequence of 10 digit prime numbers?
I also tried www.0000000010.com (the same in base 2)
The base of the number system is not specified. There are no numbers in the billboard.
The number of 10 digit prime numbers in base 2 is much smaller than those in base 10. The search will be smaller, and the probability of finding a match earlier in the digits of E is much higher for base 2 than base 10...
In fact the solution to this problem in base 2, assuming the MSB bit is 1, (no left padding with 0s) is 1011000101
which is 709 in base 10,the 127th prime number, which appears in E at position 24 (24 binary digits to the left of the binary point).
E, in base 2, out to this first 10 digit prime sequence is
10.101101111110000101010001011000101
Top that for early occurring match!!
I like the 0000000002 solution...
The question is... where in the E Digit sequence does this first occur?
The base two answer...
0000000010 hits at E digit position 1716
Mathematica is a wonderful Time Waster.
Dr. Null
What Base?... base 2 has a match 24 places in
on
Google's Math Puzzle
·
· Score: 1
In base 2, the first 10 digit prime to appear as consecutive digits of the natural log base is
1011000101
which is 709 in base 10,the 127th prime number which appears in E at position 2^-24 (24 binary digits to the left of the binary point)
E in base 2 out to this first 10 digit prime sequence is
10.101101111110000101010001011000101
Top that for early occurring match!!
There is not god dam web page at
www.1011000101.com
Dr. Null
Where did you see discussions about an Intermec blunder?, or is this your personal insight into this little drama?... I really would like to know...
Your post is a +5 interesting to me
Leet giberish wrote:
"Patents themselves are held in secret until granted. That's the whole "protecting good ideas from being ripped off" spirit of the process."
Not any more.
Patent applications are now published in a searchable database.
go to www.uspto.gov and look.
Do a search in the applications for "RFID", and prepare your bladder for imminent release!
This is yet another fine example of patenting the obvious. Most of the patent is important sounding (or not) filler. I love lines like "The editing module is communicatively connected to the event capture module."
This reminds me of a patent from a competitor. They submitted an application for a ridiculously broad and simple idea. As compensation for the idiocy of the patent body, they stuck the word unique into almost every sentence i.e. "This is a Unique idea that communicates Unique data between a base station and a number of Unique Transponder..." (It goes on like that)
A Patent is NOTHING more than a lenience to sue, that you buy from the government. As we have seen so many times lately, for a large company like Clear channel, the threat of a long legal battle is all they need to put a big dent in the competition. For any person or company that can't afford a 1 to10 million dollar legal bill, the validity of their, or the other guys patent is immaterial.
It is very disheartening
Dr. Null
This is already out there (and maybe better)
on
RFID MasterCard
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
In Hong Kong, I was at the local equivalent of the 7-11 where I saw the people where just waving their wallets in front of a panel by the cash register. It turns out that they have something called the Octopus card. This is a short range RFID cash card that works much like a prepaid phone card. You go to a ATM like station where you can purchase the card and/or add money to the card. If the card gets stolen, you loose the money on the card. Lots of people had it, and it made the line at the store FLY. It must have been 3 time as fast as "normal"
The possibility of electronic pick pocketing is interesting, but at some point you have to convert the codes into money. A criminal would look very suspicious then. (unless they also owned a 7-11.... HMMMM)
This technology has been known for years. The problem is noise from the plasma and self-modulation. It is true that Plasma is conducting, and can reflect Electromagnetic waves below the "plasma frequency". The problem is that the plasma frequency cutoff is proportional to the electron density in the plasma and Boy do you have to have a lot of electrons to be a good reflector at modern communications frequencies. Every one knows that the Ionosphere makes HF radio skip over long distances, but you do not worry about skips for TV, or WIFI. That is because you need very high-density plasma to reflect these frequencies. The electron density in a Neon tube, or Fluorescent tube is relatively low ( a good thing). You can get some reflections all the way up into the GHz but it is small (back in college I tried to make a passive police radar scrambler with Xenon Flash Tubes... not good enough).On top of this, the low-density plasma is HOT.... thousands of deg C. Good thing there is not much to it. As was pointed out in other posts, the hot plasma radiates its own radio noise. In addition to radiated noise (here is the kicker), the statistical fluctuations in the plasma density will "AM Modulate" the reflected radio waves. This is just from the thermal fluctuations in the plasma; run the plasma off 60 Hz AC (like a Neon sign transformer) and you will AM modulate all reflected waves with 120Hz. The New switching Fluorescent light ballasts chop the line AC at 40 kHz to generate the ignition voltage and control the bulb current. If you look on a spectrum Analyzer you can see Ambient RF sources (radio, TV, Cell sites) modulated at 44 kHz and all the odd harmonics up to about 700 KHz away from the source center frequency. This is the basic Idea behind RFID; why bother emitting your own energy when you can modulate some existing energy. As for Electrically controlled reflectors and phased arrays.... there are plenty of better ways to do this... do a Google search for FSS and MUNK..one of the fathers of stealth technolog.
This system is for producing high-resolution master disks to be used for high volume Blue laser DVD "stamping". The point is to make the master at a much higher resolution than the wavelength of light used to read that data. If you are going to use a Blue laser to read that data, then you need to use deep UV laser to generate the master (difficult). Instead of short wavelength light, they are using an electron beam, which can easily be focused to a nanometer sized spot using well known E beam write technology. This technique is slow, but you only have to produce one master disk to run off millions of stamped copies.
Note also that the master disk must be written in a hard vacuum (~10^-7 Torr). I suspect the system is actually a modified electron microscope, similar to widely available Focused Ion Beam (FIB) semiconductor processing equipment.
Dr. Null
Rad Hard Bugs, they don't care
on
Melting Europa
·
· Score: 1
The Author, Michael, worries about poisoning the Europa biosphere with radioactive elements form the space probe power source.
It should be noted that the high energy particles from the Jovian radiation belts give a radiation dose that would be well in excess of anything except spots within the Radio Thermal generator itself.
Like the bacteria found growing on spent reactor fuel rods, I bet any life form on Europa thinks lethal radiation for us is just a tickle.
Dr. Null
The work required to pump all the air out of the ship to make it buoyant and rise to some height is more than the work required to just lift the ship that distance. Drag and any forward kinetic energy given to the plane implies that the energy recovered by the turbines during fall is not sufficient to pump all the air out of the ship again to once again make it rise, thus you will have to carry along fuel to run an engine to drive the pump that changes your buoyancy. If you use external power to evacuate the buoyancy chambers on the ground, then it can be said that the pressure differential represent stored energy. As the ship rises, gas pressure potential energy is traded for gravitational potential energy (altitude) and kinetic energy (forward motion)....
So both the compressed helium and the evacuated chamber represent stored energy which must be loaded onto the ship while on the ground, thus this ship requires fuel like any other ship. Not only this but the inefficiencies in recovering kinetic and gravitational potential energy demand that the ship carry much more stored energy that that required to lift the ship through one up and down cycle.... So you may not hear the phrase "filler up" that the air park, but "emptier out" if effectively the same thing
DN
I am not aware of any of any instance of a large molecule whose structure was deduced from a scanning tunneling microscope. Things like proteins, enzymes, and viral particles are most generally probed by growing them into crystals and a analyzing their x-ray diffraction patterns. The big problem with this technique is that big molecules are hard o grow into crystals (thus all the grow protein crystals in the micro gravity of orbit effort)
Nonetheless, a Scanning tunneling microscope is VERY COOL, and within the engineering capabilities of a dedicated hobbyist. Heck, you can now buy a complete Scanning tunneling microscopes for 20K; pretty cheap for a high-end piece of laboratory equipment.
The real trick is to get the stage into a hard vacuum at cryogenic temperatures.
Who will be the first person to spell out LINUX in Xenon atoms on a nickel substrate? I will donate money to that cause
By the way, in college I used to produce atomically sharp needles for field emission ion sources just by burning tungsten wire in a propane torch. That should be an easy way to make probe tips
Slashdot Mirror
You need HomeSaver See http://www.qsystemsengineering.com/ Dr. Null
The goal of national security is stability, not freedom. Stability allows the economy to prosper, and the industrial complex to make money. If at any point we see freedom getting in the way of an optimized market, that is when those freedoms are lost.
Remember, money is speech, thus the captains of capitol and their desire for money-making stability are the main voice in this capitalist society. The voice of the people and their desire for freedom and privacy are a distant second.
I, for one, want to live in a more open and more dangerous society. The Daily reality of
our soft freedom loving exposed underbelly would drive radically different policies on a wider range of topics, foreign , and domestic.
But transparency and freedom are not in the best interest of those on top making all the money, thus we live in a society that is slowly morphing into a corporation.
Dr. Null
Just to make sure that everybody is up to speed on that stated power, Let me Clarify something about antenna radiation. What was quoted was 4 billion watts ERP. The term ERP means Effective Radiated Power compared to that of a simple dipole antenna. This is a sort of measure of power density, not absolute power. Power stated as ERP is a measure of the power radiated and how narrow the radiation beam is. High ERP power is very much like looking at a narrow laser beam from a great distance. The beam looks bright, so if you think that the light is coming from a source that is shining in all directions, then it is as if the light source is shining with megawatts of power. Although the beam is bright, it is very narrow in extent, thus the real power radiated is small. For antennas, the beam width is proportional to a measure called antenna Gain. Large arrays of antennas like the HAARP antenna farm have VERY high gains, thus very directional radiation beams. IT is more likely that HAARP antenna array has a collective gain near 1000, thus the real power is more like 4 megawatts, not gigawatts (something that can be supplied by on base generators).
Megawatts of RF power is big, but not big enough to knock down ICBMs. The Idea with HAARP is to use the RF power to heat the Ionosphere in the northern latitudes where there are enormous currents induced by the Aurora. The power sloshing around in the upper Ionosphere is of the order of Terawatts. They hope to modulate these rivers of currents by locally heating small spots in the ionosphere plasma, thus radiating gigawatts of power at ultra low frequencies ( 1 to 100 Hz)... a very cool Mad scientist Idea... Very evil..
DR. Null
The latest long-range RFID tags DO in fact have an ON/Off switch of sorts
It is called the KILL command. You send the Kill command and the tag is permanently disabled.
We the developers of RFID tags neither want to be tracked ourselves, or have people boycott RFID tagged products in mass because of privacy concerns. The Kill function was placed into the protocol back almost 2 years ago. You can have the tags killed at the point of sale, or you can even kill them personally with a home RFID reader, and there is always the hammer or scissors method.
RFID Technology is by no means robust. Brittle is a better characterization. There are more ways to easily defeat cheap passive RFID than there are ways to keep it working. I am not worried
By the way... Microwav-ing will not kill most of the latest UHF RFID tags, short of just melting the metal antenna of course.... We makeem tough.
Dr. Null
I hate to be picky, but I think everybody is using the word bandwidth to mean data rate.
Bandwidth has units of Hz and data rate has units of bits/sec. True that increasing the bandwidth of a signal can increase the data rate, but the reverse need no be the case.
In fact if you read the article they tell us that the increased data rate will be accomplished through changes in the data modulation (most likely by moving from binary phase shift keying, to quadrature phase shift keying, or higher).
DR. Null
Excelent!
I tried this too...
What does First Mean?... First occurrence in the descending significance sequence of digits in E, or first in the ascending sequence of 10 digit prime numbers?
I also tried www.0000000010.com (the same in base 2)
The base of the number system is not specified. There are no numbers in the billboard.
The number of 10 digit prime numbers in base 2 is much smaller than those in base 10. The search will be smaller, and the probability of finding a match earlier in the digits of E is much higher for base 2 than base 10...
In fact the solution to this problem in base 2, assuming the MSB bit is 1, (no left padding with 0s) is 1011000101
which is 709 in base 10,the 127th prime number, which appears in E at position 24 (24 binary digits to the left of the binary point).
E, in base 2, out to this first 10 digit prime sequence is
10.101101111110000101010001011000101
Top that for early occurring match!!
I like the 0000000002 solution...
The question is... where in the E Digit sequence does this first occur?
The base two answer...
0000000010 hits at E digit position 1716
Mathematica is a wonderful Time Waster.
Dr. Null
In base 2, the first 10 digit prime to appear as consecutive digits of the natural log base is
1011000101
which is 709 in base 10,the 127th prime number which appears in E at position 2^-24 (24 binary digits to the left of the binary point)
E in base 2 out to this first 10 digit prime sequence is
10.101101111110000101010001011000101
Top that for early occurring match!!
There is not god dam web page at www.1011000101.com
Dr. Null
Where did you see discussions about an Intermec blunder?, or is this your personal insight into this little drama?... I really would like to know... Your post is a +5 interesting to me
Dr. Null
Leet giberish wrote:
"Patents themselves are held in secret until granted. That's the whole "protecting good ideas from being ripped off" spirit of the process."
Not any more. Patent applications are now published in a searchable database.
go to www.uspto.gov and look.
Do a search in the applications for "RFID", and prepare your bladder for imminent release!
Dr Null
to some one skilled in the art.
This is yet another fine example of patenting the obvious. Most of the patent is important sounding (or not) filler. I love lines like "The editing module is communicatively connected to the event capture module."
This reminds me of a patent from a competitor. They submitted an application for a ridiculously broad and simple idea. As compensation for the idiocy of the patent body, they stuck the word unique into almost every sentence i.e. "This is a Unique idea that communicates Unique data between a base station and a number of Unique Transponder..." (It goes on like that)
A Patent is NOTHING more than a lenience to sue, that you buy from the government. As we have seen so many times lately, for a large company like Clear channel, the threat of a long legal battle is all they need to put a big dent in the competition. For any person or company that can't afford a 1 to10 million dollar legal bill, the validity of their, or the other guys patent is immaterial.
It is very disheartening Dr. Null
In Hong Kong, I was at the local equivalent of the 7-11 where I saw the people where just waving their wallets in front of a panel by the cash register. It turns out that they have something called the Octopus card. This is a short range RFID cash card that works much like a prepaid phone card. You go to a ATM like station where you can purchase the card and/or add money to the card. If the card gets stolen, you loose the money on the card. Lots of people had it, and it made the line at the store FLY. It must have been 3 time as fast as "normal"
The possibility of electronic pick pocketing is interesting, but at some point you have to convert the codes into money. A criminal would look very suspicious then. (unless they also owned a 7-11.... HMMMM)
Dr. Null
Medium to midland Awesome.
.On top of this, the low-density plasma is HOT.... thousands of deg C. Good thing there is not much to it. As was pointed out in other posts, the hot plasma radiates its own radio noise. In addition to radiated noise (here is the kicker), the statistical fluctuations in the plasma density will "AM Modulate" the reflected radio waves. This is just from the thermal fluctuations in the plasma; run the plasma off 60 Hz AC (like a Neon sign transformer) and you will AM modulate all reflected waves with 120Hz. The New switching Fluorescent light ballasts chop the line AC at 40 kHz to generate the ignition voltage and control the bulb current. If you look on a spectrum Analyzer you can see Ambient RF sources (radio, TV, Cell sites) modulated at 44 kHz and all the odd harmonics up to about 700 KHz away from the source center frequency. This is the basic Idea behind RFID; why bother emitting your own energy when you can modulate some existing energy. As for Electrically controlled reflectors and phased arrays.... there are plenty of better ways to do this... do a Google search for FSS and MUNK..one of the fathers of stealth technolog.
This technology has been known for years. The problem is noise from the plasma and self-modulation. It is true that Plasma is conducting, and can reflect Electromagnetic waves below the "plasma frequency". The problem is that the plasma frequency cutoff is proportional to the electron density in the plasma and Boy do you have to have a lot of electrons to be a good reflector at modern communications frequencies. Every one knows that the Ionosphere makes HF radio skip over long distances, but you do not worry about skips for TV, or WIFI. That is because you need very high-density plasma to reflect these frequencies. The electron density in a Neon tube, or Fluorescent tube is relatively low ( a good thing). You can get some reflections all the way up into the GHz but it is small (back in college I tried to make a passive police radar scrambler with Xenon Flash Tubes... not good enough)
Dr. Null
This system is for producing high-resolution master disks to be used for high volume Blue laser DVD "stamping". The point is to make the master at a much higher resolution than the wavelength of light used to read that data. If you are going to use a Blue laser to read that data, then you need to use deep UV laser to generate the master (difficult). Instead of short wavelength light, they are using an electron beam, which can easily be focused to a nanometer sized spot using well known E beam write technology. This technique is slow, but you only have to produce one master disk to run off millions of stamped copies.
Note also that the master disk must be written in a hard vacuum (~10^-7 Torr). I suspect the system is actually a modified electron microscope, similar to widely available Focused Ion Beam (FIB) semiconductor processing equipment.
Dr. Null
The Author, Michael, worries about poisoning the Europa biosphere with radioactive elements form the space probe power source.
It should be noted that the high energy particles from the Jovian radiation belts give a radiation dose that would be well in excess of anything except spots within the Radio Thermal generator itself. Like the bacteria found growing on spent reactor fuel rods, I bet any life form on Europa thinks lethal radiation for us is just a tickle. Dr. Null
The work required to pump all the air out of the ship to make it buoyant and rise to some height is more than the work required to just lift the ship that distance. Drag and any forward kinetic energy given to the plane implies that the energy recovered by the turbines during fall is not sufficient to pump all the air out of the ship again to once again make it rise, thus you will have to carry along fuel to run an engine to drive the pump that changes your buoyancy. If you use external power to evacuate the buoyancy chambers on the ground, then it can be said that the pressure differential represent stored energy. As the ship rises, gas pressure potential energy is traded for gravitational potential energy (altitude) and kinetic energy (forward motion).... So both the compressed helium and the evacuated chamber represent stored energy which must be loaded onto the ship while on the ground, thus this ship requires fuel like any other ship. Not only this but the inefficiencies in recovering kinetic and gravitational potential energy demand that the ship carry much more stored energy that that required to lift the ship through one up and down cycle.... So you may not hear the phrase "filler up" that the air park, but "emptier out" if effectively the same thing DN
I am not aware of any of any instance of a large molecule whose structure was deduced from a scanning tunneling microscope. Things like proteins, enzymes, and viral particles are most generally probed by growing them into crystals and a analyzing their x-ray diffraction patterns. The big problem with this technique is that big molecules are hard o grow into crystals (thus all the grow protein crystals in the micro gravity of orbit effort) Nonetheless, a Scanning tunneling microscope is VERY COOL, and within the engineering capabilities of a dedicated hobbyist. Heck, you can now buy a complete Scanning tunneling microscopes for 20K; pretty cheap for a high-end piece of laboratory equipment. The real trick is to get the stage into a hard vacuum at cryogenic temperatures. Who will be the first person to spell out LINUX in Xenon atoms on a nickel substrate? I will donate money to that cause By the way, in college I used to produce atomically sharp needles for field emission ion sources just by burning tungsten wire in a propane torch. That should be an easy way to make probe tips