As someone who spends a lot of time up in the White Mountains, practically every group of hikers carries a FRS radio. Practically every channel and subchannel is busy with chatter. You hear lots of conversations that go something like:
"Hey, everybody in hiking group X, switch to channel 4, subchannel 5" and then you'll hear "Nope, we're on 4.5, try 10.2"
I've come to the conclusion this guy's a nitwit. Though considering the lobby that the defence contractors have in Washington, this proposal will get no where.
Well said.
A technical correction for you: in FRS and GMRS, what you are calling subchannels are actually selectable subaudible tones. They are called CTCSS and DCS as you know. They are two very similar ways of adding a low-frequency (~50 to ~250) audio tone to your transmission. The tone serves to open the squelch of the receiver. It is not encryption or some kind of extra bandwidth or time-slicing or multiplexing. All it does is defeat the other guy's squelch so that his walkie-talkie will activate.
It won't allow multiple groups to simultaneously use the same channel: a transmission from group A will not activate a handset in group B, but it will nevertheless stomp on any transmission within group B. Even so, that is good enough for two groups that have only intermittent conversations.
With a real ham rig that has an adjustable squelch, turning off the squelch allows all FRS and GMRS transmissions to be received.
"This device complies with Part 15 of the FCC rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) this device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation."
So you can't get certified in that case, I think, if you make the device tolerant of interference.
The real purpose behind the wording of that rule is to clarify who shoulders the burden of resolving RF interference. This is relevant when your neighbor operates a ham radio and it interferes with your telephone. If he is prudent then he will offer you advice and maybe some ferrites in order to clear up the problem, but the problem is legally your responsibility to resolve, not his.
indeed *yawn*, homemade handheld xenon flash tube pulsed lasers with much more power output were made decades ago, and energy is only a meaningful metric for continuous beam lasers.
An continuous beam argon laser of a few watts is something to point at a steak, but this toy wouldn't do much.
You mean wattage is only a meaningful metric for continuous beam lasers.
For pulsed lasers like the one in TFA, it's much more important to know the energy (in this case ~0.1J), and then to know the pulse duration or wattage. But judging by the comments in TFA, few people understand this distinction.
The headline "DIY Laser Pistol Shoots 1MW Blasts" is like saying "Rhode Island is Teh Safest State!!1!" because it has the smallest gross number of car crashes. The per-capita figure is far more informative in that context.
Actually, Mercycorps (http://www.mercycorps.org/gifts) provides affordable "kits" that allow you to do just that. You can do anything from buying a chicken for an impoverished family for $35 up to digging a well for a drought struck village for $3000. My favorite kit is the goat. For $70 a family gets a goat they can turn out on the scrub around their house and get valuable wool, milk and eventually meat from.
These kits make great gifts for that person who "has everything". Well, does he have a rural third world classroom built in his honor ($125)? Maybe instead of that iPad for that special someone, you could pay for the education of five girls at $100 apiece; provide a dozen vaccinations to children at $45; or teach ten women to read at $50 apiece. You can reintegrate eight child soldiers to their community through education and apprenticeship programs for only $58 each.
I was excited about that website until I read the fine print:
These gifts are examples of what Mercy Corps does to save and improve lives in the world's toughest places. To help deliver the most effective solutions to the greatest number of people, your donation will be combined with other funds and used as it is most needed, not necessarily to purchase or distribute the actual item shown.
Meh. It's general-purpose charity with a fashionable front-end.
Doing this On the same frequency is remarkable. but the gains they are claiming can be had right now by using TWO frequencies. Transmit on channel 1 receive on channel 12.. the other end does the opposite.
That only works when the conversation contains exactly 2 nodes. Node A transmits at freq 1 and receives at freq 2, whereas node B transmits at freq 2 and receives at freq 1. That CANNOT extended to a third node... hence, aviation conversations all use one frequency and everyone must take turns.
With this new breakthrough, everyone can be on the same frequency AND can be talking and listening at the same time.
None of this applies to ethernet because ethernet hubs/switches are built so as to separate every node into a private 2-party conversation with the hub/switch. Anything said in such a conversation is then relayed to the other nodes. The relay of messages is performed either scattergun (hub) or intelligently (switch).
Personally, I think I'm done with Sony products. After the rootkit installing CDs and there other antics with the PS3, I don't feel like they actually want to keep me as a customer.
Me too. I have not purchased a single Sony product, EVER, since seeing a list that somebody posted of their many attempts to lock the world into another wacky Sony proprietary format. Starting all the way back with BetaMax, then DAT, minidisc, ATRAC, MemoryStick, UMD, etc.
And that is ON TOP OF the evil connector conspiracy that Sony has naturally been a part of. Sorry Sony, I'm done with you... I'll give you another try in my next lifetime.
The greatest moment in my FPS career occurred in Half-Life 1. About 15% through the game, there is a level that contains many heavy blast doors. A sensor near the door responds to fire and explosions by lowering the door, with accompanying sirens and flashing lights. Once the door comes down, it stays down, forever. Even if that means the player is stuck on the wrong side of it with no other way to proceed.
When I realized all this, triggering a blast door became a heart-pounding moment.
Eventually I figured out I could use the doors tactically, by triggering them as I came near, and slipping under just in time, such that the enemies chasing me couldn't follow.
Years later I ended up dating a videogame level designer. In his group it is a sin for a level to contain any "player cannot progress" situations like those blast doors. I patiently explained over and over to him (without success) that such a thing actually improves a videogame, because it makes it feel more real and less like a ride on a monorail train.
Because in the same society in which women were presumed so inferior as to not be fit to own property, naturally no employer considered them to be equally productive even if it was demonstrably the case.
The point is, you propose that society of the time was so broken that everyone preferred the collective error ("her work is worth less") at the cost of high profits ("her work is equal, and much cheaper"). That is an extraordinary claim in light of humans' well-documented nature as greedy moneygrubbers. So, your evidence to back this claim is...?
Of course in this same society, the supply of women trying to enter the job pool was drastically lower as a woman's place was in the home. It wasn't until the 1940s that women entered the workforce in large numbers, and latter than that when dual-income homes became common. So even if a particular employer had realized this reduction in labor cost, there simply weren't enough women seeking employment for it to apply globally.
In a job where women have equal output (all things considered), the economic advantage of realizing it would be a game-changer in any market where it occurred. It is very hard to claim that a) nobody realized it even though business owners spend all day thinking about how to cut costs, or b) perhaps a few did realize it but their competitors didn't catch on.
Granted, the further back we go the smaller the fraction of total costs is the labor cost; however, labor has always been a significant fraction (hugely so today) and even 5% savings is a BIG edge to have over one's competitors. You propose that business have spent a century ignoring a major legal avenue of cost savings, and so again I wonder where your data is to back this remarkable claim.
For myself, I suspect that women are paid less because they carry hidden long-term costs. I am a woman and I am well aware of the ways that I will cost my employer more over the long term... not least of which is the fact that I will probably quit working after a few years in order to stay home with my kids. Poof, there goes all that investment they made in me.
Rand claimed on the one hand to reject these alternatives, but then argued strongly that there was exactly one correct way because "reality really is that way", which is obviously nonsense: even within physics there are frequently several equally correct ways of conceptualizing the same phenomena (Newtonian vs classical physics, for example, which give quite different accounts of the cause of motion, one based on force, one based on the principle of least action or similar.)
Know how I know that you do not understand what Rand said?
Rand would have said that there is only one way to conceptualize reality ONLY IF we already know everything in a single heirarchy of knowledge. When there are so many missing pieces, then there will be competing inductions that vie to have the best predictive power.
Definitions, meanwhile, serve only to separate each concept from its neighbors, and so definitions change whenever new concepts are formed.
In even earlier (bust still recent) history, say prior to the 1900's, women were not allowed to vote or own property in a marriage, and they were usually not able to live on their own due to the fact that few people would hire them for any job, and without anti-discrimination laws in place employers were free to systematically deny women employment, or even to pay them a lower wage just because they were female.
You had me until the "lower wage for the same work" rant.
If that rant was true, why would anyone hire a male? If females have the same productivity, yet 25-50% less labor cost... greedy money-grubbing capitalists will eschew males, not females. And since labor costs are such a large part of total costs, a 25% savings in labor can triple the profit margin... and so greedy money-grubbing shareholders will get into the act too.
Except that isn't happening. Hmmm. Must be a giant worldwide conspiracy to drastically cut profit margins. Yeah, that's it.
Mars is the future for post-humans. Mars is already just perfect for them because they -- being inorganic -- will absolutely adore the cold dry oxygenless environment.
And never mind the possibilities of moving en masse into cyberspace, leaving our bodies in tiny nutrient vats which take up almost no space at all, etc. etc.
[People in Star Trek] have also a different work motivation. The[y] work to improve them selves and to better society. This is a very altruistic approach and it is totally anti-capitalistic. And I personally do not see any development in that direction. Even more it looks like that there is no lesson learned from the last economic disaster as we did not add any real regulation on the finance market.
Have you ever wondered how Star Trek society divvies up scarce resources, like, oh, say, science posts on the big starships? Or personal services like tutoring or massages? Or land? Or transportation someplace? Or energy?
I'm sure you'd consider barter to be impolite. And without money, the only currency remaining in their society is... political pull.
Yeah, what a swell society THAT would be to live in.
In summary: People have a right to know what their government is doing, government has no right to know what its people are doing other than what affects other people under the government.
Yep. Except everybody already agrees with this statement. You have merely squished the whole politics problem into the definition of 'affects'.
Similar contortions can be observed in congress and in the SCOTUS, where they squeezes enormous government activities through the small interstate commerce clause loophole. After all, is there any human activity which does not have some effect upon commerce?
This provides an interesting physiological backstory to the evolutionary equilibrium between R versus K mating behavior.
R == cuckoo behavior, impregnate as many females as possible; K == hang around and diligently raise your (or the cuckoo's) young. It is a biological free-rider problem.
After the disaster in 1986, everyone knew about the role of Utah's senators in the disaster - but as you say, it's hard to find now. Between the fact that much data from that era was never put online, and possibly some gaming of search results to steer searchers elsewhere, I don't see anything now. I imagine that certain rocket companies in Utah would prefer that no one knew about that.
Summary: Thiokol copied the successful Titan segmented design, won the contract due to the low cost, redesigned the seal in a way that eliminated the redundancy (now relying only on an o-ring and asbestos putty), told NASA to launch only at 53F and above, warned NASA again, got ignored by NASA, boom.
Unless and until we switch over to electric cars en masse, street lights are NOT wasting electricity.
One of the two primary purposes of street lights is to consume the power generated by base-load powerplants that mu$t spin 24/7. Without our vast numbers of street lights, night-time voltages would rise above 130 and start frying your appliances.
Ever wondered why the electric company does not charge money, if you ask them to add a street light to the pole near your house? That's the reason.
Despite what may seem obvious, it wasn't so much the heat coming from the computer that was doing it. When you think about it, the hot parts of a laptop are a good distance away from your scrotum (or, at least, they should be if you're not doin' it wrong). The researchers found that it was the leg position used to keep the computer on the lap - i.e., legs closed together - that was the source of the problem.
Indeed.
Everyone is wringing their hands about the worldwide drop in sperm counts... I wonder how much of that is due to the current fashionable explanation (we live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of manmade xenoestrogens), versus how much of that is due to simply sitting all day long.
It is only recently, historically speaking, that we've all started to sit for a living. And since we've also been taught to fear the sun ("OMG teh UV rays!!11!"), we move around even less.
When I buy a car, I'll still come up with a price I'm willing to pay, the features I need, find every model that matches those requirements then pick something from there.
What determines how much you are willing to pay? How do you determine which features are must-have? If you think those decisions are not being constantly manipulated by others, guess again.
If the US Army replaced their fuel guzzling M1 tank turbines with modern diesel engines like the MTU engine used in the Leopard they would spend a lot less fuel to begin with. The same applies to the HMMWV.
If they switched to diesel-electric, the vehicles would spend even less power.
Leaving aside the energy cost to actually build the MTU engines, to redesign the M1's transmission, to ship the new engines to the repair yards, to pull the old engines from the M1s and dispose of them, to install the new engines, to adjust our supply lines to insure that diesel fuel is always available (gas turbines are able to burn other fuels), and to adjust the M1's chassis for the extra weight of the engine.
Yeah, leaving aside all of THAT cost, they would definitely spend a lot less fuel to begin with.
Any other brilliant, simple, easy ideas you'd like to share with us morons?
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As someone who spends a lot of time up in the White Mountains, practically every group of hikers carries a FRS radio. Practically every channel and subchannel is busy with chatter. You hear lots of conversations that go something like: "Hey, everybody in hiking group X, switch to channel 4, subchannel 5" and then you'll hear "Nope, we're on 4.5, try 10.2" I've come to the conclusion this guy's a nitwit. Though considering the lobby that the defence contractors have in Washington, this proposal will get no where.
Well said.
A technical correction for you: in FRS and GMRS, what you are calling subchannels are actually selectable subaudible tones. They are called CTCSS and DCS as you know. They are two very similar ways of adding a low-frequency (~50 to ~250) audio tone to your transmission. The tone serves to open the squelch of the receiver. It is not encryption or some kind of extra bandwidth or time-slicing or multiplexing. All it does is defeat the other guy's squelch so that his walkie-talkie will activate.
It won't allow multiple groups to simultaneously use the same channel: a transmission from group A will not activate a handset in group B, but it will nevertheless stomp on any transmission within group B. Even so, that is good enough for two groups that have only intermittent conversations.
With a real ham rig that has an adjustable squelch, turning off the squelch allows all FRS and GMRS transmissions to be received.
FCC part 15:
"This device complies with Part 15 of the FCC rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions: (1) this device may not cause harmful interference, and (2) this device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation."
So you can't get certified in that case, I think, if you make the device tolerant of interference.
The real purpose behind the wording of that rule is to clarify who shoulders the burden of resolving RF interference. This is relevant when your neighbor operates a ham radio and it interferes with your telephone. If he is prudent then he will offer you advice and maybe some ferrites in order to clear up the problem, but the problem is legally your responsibility to resolve, not his.
indeed *yawn*, homemade handheld xenon flash tube pulsed lasers with much more power output were made decades ago, and energy is only a meaningful metric for continuous beam lasers.
An continuous beam argon laser of a few watts is something to point at a steak, but this toy wouldn't do much.
You mean wattage is only a meaningful metric for continuous beam lasers.
For pulsed lasers like the one in TFA, it's much more important to know the energy (in this case ~0.1J), and then to know the pulse duration or wattage. But judging by the comments in TFA, few people understand this distinction.
The headline "DIY Laser Pistol Shoots 1MW Blasts" is like saying "Rhode Island is Teh Safest State!!1!" because it has the smallest gross number of car crashes. The per-capita figure is far more informative in that context.
Actually, Mercycorps (http://www.mercycorps.org/gifts) provides affordable "kits" that allow you to do just that. You can do anything from buying a chicken for an impoverished family for $35 up to digging a well for a drought struck village for $3000. My favorite kit is the goat. For $70 a family gets a goat they can turn out on the scrub around their house and get valuable wool, milk and eventually meat from.
These kits make great gifts for that person who "has everything". Well, does he have a rural third world classroom built in his honor ($125)? Maybe instead of that iPad for that special someone, you could pay for the education of five girls at $100 apiece; provide a dozen vaccinations to children at $45; or teach ten women to read at $50 apiece. You can reintegrate eight child soldiers to their community through education and apprenticeship programs for only $58 each.
I was excited about that website until I read the fine print:
Meh. It's general-purpose charity with a fashionable front-end.
Doing this On the same frequency is remarkable. but the gains they are claiming can be had right now by using TWO frequencies. Transmit on channel 1 receive on channel 12.. the other end does the opposite.
That only works when the conversation contains exactly 2 nodes. Node A transmits at freq 1 and receives at freq 2, whereas node B transmits at freq 2 and receives at freq 1. That CANNOT extended to a third node... hence, aviation conversations all use one frequency and everyone must take turns.
With this new breakthrough, everyone can be on the same frequency AND can be talking and listening at the same time.
None of this applies to ethernet because ethernet hubs/switches are built so as to separate every node into a private 2-party conversation with the hub/switch. Anything said in such a conversation is then relayed to the other nodes. The relay of messages is performed either scattergun (hub) or intelligently (switch).
Personally, I think I'm done with Sony products. After the rootkit installing CDs and there other antics with the PS3, I don't feel like they actually want to keep me as a customer.
Me too. I have not purchased a single Sony product, EVER, since seeing a list that somebody posted of their many attempts to lock the world into another wacky Sony proprietary format. Starting all the way back with BetaMax, then DAT, minidisc, ATRAC, MemoryStick, UMD, etc.
And that is ON TOP OF the evil connector conspiracy that Sony has naturally been a part of. Sorry Sony, I'm done with you... I'll give you another try in my next lifetime.
All it means is that you are a pussy. Seriously.
Indeed.
The greatest moment in my FPS career occurred in Half-Life 1. About 15% through the game, there is a level that contains many heavy blast doors. A sensor near the door responds to fire and explosions by lowering the door, with accompanying sirens and flashing lights. Once the door comes down, it stays down, forever. Even if that means the player is stuck on the wrong side of it with no other way to proceed.
When I realized all this, triggering a blast door became a heart-pounding moment.
Eventually I figured out I could use the doors tactically, by triggering them as I came near, and slipping under just in time, such that the enemies chasing me couldn't follow.
Years later I ended up dating a videogame level designer. In his group it is a sin for a level to contain any "player cannot progress" situations like those blast doors. I patiently explained over and over to him (without success) that such a thing actually improves a videogame, because it makes it feel more real and less like a ride on a monorail train.
We aren't dating any more.
I guess the same reason we didn't serve blacks in restaurants a few decades ago. I mean, who would give up their money? They have the same US Dollars!
Except that they'd then lose their white clientele.
The point is, you propose that society of the time was so broken that everyone preferred the collective error ("her work is worth less") at the cost of high profits ("her work is equal, and much cheaper"). That is an extraordinary claim in light of humans' well-documented nature as greedy moneygrubbers. So, your evidence to back this claim is...?
In a job where women have equal output (all things considered), the economic advantage of realizing it would be a game-changer in any market where it occurred. It is very hard to claim that a) nobody realized it even though business owners spend all day thinking about how to cut costs, or b) perhaps a few did realize it but their competitors didn't catch on.
Granted, the further back we go the smaller the fraction of total costs is the labor cost; however, labor has always been a significant fraction (hugely so today) and even 5% savings is a BIG edge to have over one's competitors. You propose that business have spent a century ignoring a major legal avenue of cost savings, and so again I wonder where your data is to back this remarkable claim.
For myself, I suspect that women are paid less because they carry hidden long-term costs. I am a woman and I am well aware of the ways that I will cost my employer more over the long term... not least of which is the fact that I will probably quit working after a few years in order to stay home with my kids. Poof, there goes all that investment they made in me.
Know how I know that you do not understand what Rand said?
Rand would have said that there is only one way to conceptualize reality ONLY IF we already know everything in a single heirarchy of knowledge. When there are so many missing pieces, then there will be competing inductions that vie to have the best predictive power.
Definitions, meanwhile, serve only to separate each concept from its neighbors, and so definitions change whenever new concepts are formed.
You had me until the "lower wage for the same work" rant.
If that rant was true, why would anyone hire a male? If females have the same productivity, yet 25-50% less labor cost... greedy money-grubbing capitalists will eschew males, not females. And since labor costs are such a large part of total costs, a 25% savings in labor can triple the profit margin... and so greedy money-grubbing shareholders will get into the act too.
Except that isn't happening. Hmmm. Must be a giant worldwide conspiracy to drastically cut profit margins. Yeah, that's it.
Yes. The future for organic humans, anyway.
Mars is the future for post-humans. Mars is already just perfect for them because they -- being inorganic -- will absolutely adore the cold dry oxygenless environment.
And never mind the possibilities of moving en masse into cyberspace, leaving our bodies in tiny nutrient vats which take up almost no space at all, etc. etc.
The app is free but the Spanish-to-English functionality costs $5.
It is totally helpless vs. handwriting.
When viewing nice clean computer text on my screen, and when the phone is held very still, it produces the usual clunky translation.
It would be very much better than nothing when attempting rapid translations in a foreign culture.
[People in Star Trek] have also a different work motivation. The[y] work to improve them selves and to better society. This is a very altruistic approach and it is totally anti-capitalistic. And I personally do not see any development in that direction. Even more it looks like that there is no lesson learned from the last economic disaster as we did not add any real regulation on the finance market.
Have you ever wondered how Star Trek society divvies up scarce resources, like, oh, say, science posts on the big starships? Or personal services like tutoring or massages? Or land? Or transportation someplace? Or energy?
I'm sure you'd consider barter to be impolite. And without money, the only currency remaining in their society is... political pull.
Yeah, what a swell society THAT would be to live in.
In summary: People have a right to know what their government is doing, government has no right to know what its people are doing other than what affects other people under the government.
Yep. Except everybody already agrees with this statement. You have merely squished the whole politics problem into the definition of 'affects'.
Similar contortions can be observed in congress and in the SCOTUS, where they squeezes enormous government activities through the small interstate commerce clause loophole. After all, is there any human activity which does not have some effect upon commerce?
This provides an interesting physiological backstory to the evolutionary equilibrium between R versus K mating behavior.
R == cuckoo behavior, impregnate as many females as possible; K == hang around and diligently raise your (or the cuckoo's) young. It is a biological free-rider problem.
And after you have cancelled all outstanding orders, close your account to drive home the point.
I did exactly that. It felt good. Some things are still sacred.
Apocryphal. Here's the lowdown: Chapter VI: An Accident Rooted in History from the Report of the PRESIDENTIAL COMMISSION on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.
Summary: Thiokol copied the successful Titan segmented design, won the contract due to the low cost, redesigned the seal in a way that eliminated the redundancy (now relying only on an o-ring and asbestos putty), told NASA to launch only at 53F and above, warned NASA again, got ignored by NASA, boom.
I learned that as a yute in the early 80s. At the time it was called 'Chisanbop'. I still use it today.
Once you see the power that incentives have on our behavior, you'll understand why "it sucks to be poor" creates efficient societies.
That is the best case. Those things are expensive to build, and can't be built just anywhere.
Unless and until we switch over to electric cars en masse, street lights are NOT wasting electricity.
One of the two primary purposes of street lights is to consume the power generated by base-load powerplants that mu$t spin 24/7. Without our vast numbers of street lights, night-time voltages would rise above 130 and start frying your appliances.
Ever wondered why the electric company does not charge money, if you ask them to add a street light to the pole near your house? That's the reason.
Indeed.
Everyone is wringing their hands about the worldwide drop in sperm counts... I wonder how much of that is due to the current fashionable explanation (we live submerged at the bottom of an ocean of manmade xenoestrogens), versus how much of that is due to simply sitting all day long.
It is only recently, historically speaking, that we've all started to sit for a living. And since we've also been taught to fear the sun ("OMG teh UV rays!!11!"), we move around even less.
What determines how much you are willing to pay? How do you determine which features are must-have? If you think those decisions are not being constantly manipulated by others, guess again.
Leaving aside the energy cost to actually build the MTU engines, to redesign the M1's transmission, to ship the new engines to the repair yards, to pull the old engines from the M1s and dispose of them, to install the new engines, to adjust our supply lines to insure that diesel fuel is always available (gas turbines are able to burn other fuels), and to adjust the M1's chassis for the extra weight of the engine.
Yeah, leaving aside all of THAT cost, they would definitely spend a lot less fuel to begin with.
Any other brilliant, simple, easy ideas you'd like to share with us morons?