These kids did not build their own radio. The bought an Icom Ic-V8000 radio and a Yaesu G-5500 rotator and built their own antenna. One of the kids got a ham license and they were able to get some time with the IIS.
The only thing they did was build an antenna basically. I'm happy for them (we could use more kids getting into Ham radio) but this story is sensationalizes on something that many people have done before.
Yeah, but that reporter had never heard of it before (and obviously can't be bothered to do any research that might spoil their headline.)
It's getting relatively hard to advance the art after so many decades of development. Today's ham spirit lives on in P2P network protocols and similar experiments on the global network.
Contacting a receiver that's only 200-300 miles away with clear line of sight is not a major feat, nor does it require "dangerous" levels of power. There's a little doppler-shift trickery if you want to be slick about it, but the ISS is a relatively easy target for a radio signal.
And, yeah, if they didn't have permission no one would know about it because the receiver would have ignored them.
I think the emphasis was "with a radio system they designed and built themselves".
Define "designed and built themselves"... did they mine the copper ore using handbuilt tools and smelt it into wire using fire struck from flint? Was the design derived in a "clean" environment from first principles?
When US history is taught, the Hessian mercenaries are deeply maligned. Funny thing is, an objective look at the present "all volunteer" US army doesn't show a lot of difference in troop motivation from the mercenaries.
At least conscripts include a broad cross section of the population (you know, anyone they can round up on the street while driving by in a truck...), mercenaries are in it because society doesn't give them any choices that are more attractive to them.
It would take a damn heavy container to shield stray radiation from Fat Man, but, yeah, you could probably ship Fat Man to any US port via common carrier and use a Garmin GPS as the trigger.
Iraq: Invaded another country, didn't have powerful friends.
Do you think that invasion of another country matters? IIRC, that invasion was GWI, GWII didn't even have such a pretense. And, I'm not sure how tight they were, but Russia and India were plenty upset at the onset of GWII, I'd count them as reasonably powerful on the world stage.
What was the scientifically educated population of the United States when we developed the first ICBM?
Did our scientists have the advantage of being able to learn from MIT-Online? Were they able to copy existing tech, study photos and even blueprints of designs known to work? Did Jane's Weapons publish capabilities of other ICBM systems for them to aspire to? Could they buy digital computers capable of performing on-the-fly trajectory calculations for the price of a BigMac?
I'd say that, in today's world, it's about 5 years for a well funded national development program between launch of a multi-orbit satellite and the ability to target an ICBM in a 10 mile radius.
Yeah, regardless of how good the keyboard is or isn't on a notebook, I usually get a "real" keyboard to use when I'm at my desk. You can peck out an e-mail on almost anything (including a 9 key cellphone pad if you have to), but real typing demands one of those luxury keyboards from a specialized vendor - like a $20 wireless unit from Logitech, with mouse.
It wasn't that long ago that 1920x1080 was beyond the reach of most "specialized" monitors - TV has finally gotten up to a decent standard after only 20 years of trying.
Zero - Zero - Zero, that's the DARPA mantra, zero weight, zero size, zero power consumption. Anything more is missing the ideal. I carry a "real" Motorola flip phone from 2 years ago, it's acceptable, but feels like a monster compared to the RAZR, and the RAZR is still a monster compared to a bluetooth headset - why don't we have all of our functionality in a 2 gram OLED flex screen and earpiece yet?
I concur with the screen resolution observation - I don't really care if the screen is 7", 9", or 15" - what I really want is a full 1920x1080 resolution on it - I can always move it closer to my face if it's too small to see.
OLPC identified the western market price point as somewhere north of $300 - thus the B1G1 program... Any company would be foolish to sell product for less than the market will bear. Maybe if the recession continues for 10 more years we'll get netbooks down to the price of 20 McDonalds' meal-deals, but for now most people are willing to pay more to get a "real" machine rather than less for a "toy."
It's a good thought, and the W700 plus a used MacMini would fill my needs - but if I can only have one, I think I'm still in line for the MBP....
There's an app or three that I'm kind of hung up on using on the Macs, I'm sure there are PC alternatives, but this is the devil whose face I currently know....
Ugh! Adware... I can see why he didn't, but if it were my company, I'd probably have done something limited and "tasteful" before letting the operation go down the tubes the way he has.
Nor do they pass safety regulations anywhere else. Sure its cheap. Its a shell around a motorcycle with two extra wheels for balance.
... and that works for India, good for them. If the US would get it's head out of the SUV, we could save ridiculous quantities of oil, but that's not the way we roll...
Putin seems to be playing up to the state-owned press in Russia which lionizes everything he does.
Does anyone realize this guy is a politician? Of course he's playing up to the press, that's his job, just like M. Dell's job is to hawk hardware sales.
Sounded like a clumsy translation more than anything... that translator is working on the fly in a literal word-for-word sense. Get a spin-meister on the transcript and you'll get something out like "Thank you for your generous offer Mr. Dell, however, Russia is a proud and self-sufficient nation who can provide for her own IT needs."
This is along the line of the Tata car that was announced for some inconceivably low price to the consumer - it works in the Indian economy, but not on the world market.
If India could get serious and produce these things with world-competitive quality in volume, they could have a strong export market. Unfortunately, the products don't currently appeal to anyone outside India, at least not anyone who can afford to pay the freight to ship them.
Conceivably, he could inflate the bladders and glide forward as he ascends, then deflate the bladders and glide forward as he descends - with a support boat supplying fresh compressed air every night.....
Developing content is much more labor (capital) intensive than developing a single hardware design and building a million copies.
As far as I can see "Sugar" is a really good name for the OLPC software project since it's just "Sugar coating" existing software, no original content there.
What would be really cool would be for OLPC / SugarLabs to align with some of the free education content thats coming out - but most of that free content is aimed at high school and above, while the OLPC hardware seems to be aimed at kindergarten through 5th grade.
You make some good points but I am a bit frightened about your hypothesis that paying people a good salary to do a job they love is risky, and if you only pay people a poor salary then you'll gte higher quality staff as only the highly passionate will apply to do it.
People talked about the Google stock option effect not too long ago, and this is a weak analogy to that.
Another problem with paying good money to teachers is that there are too many of them - if they all made good money it would amount to inflation and everyone's cost of living would go up;-)
Seriously, though, teachers should be higher on the relative payscale than they are, when you can make more money as an average receptionist or secretary than as a teacher, something is seriously messed up.
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These kids did not build their own radio. The bought an Icom Ic-V8000 radio and a Yaesu G-5500 rotator and built their own antenna. One of the kids got a ham license and they were able to get some time with the IIS.
http://www.operationfirstcontact.com/blog/episode16.htm
The only thing they did was build an antenna basically. I'm happy for them (we could use more kids getting into Ham radio) but this story is sensationalizes on something that many people have done before.
Yeah, but that reporter had never heard of it before (and obviously can't be bothered to do any research that might spoil their headline.)
It's getting relatively hard to advance the art after so many decades of development. Today's ham spirit lives on in P2P network protocols and similar experiments on the global network.
Contacting a receiver that's only 200-300 miles away with clear line of sight is not a major feat, nor does it require "dangerous" levels of power. There's a little doppler-shift trickery if you want to be slick about it, but the ISS is a relatively easy target for a radio signal.
And, yeah, if they didn't have permission no one would know about it because the receiver would have ignored them.
I think the emphasis was "with a radio system they designed and built themselves".
Define "designed and built themselves"... did they mine the copper ore using handbuilt tools and smelt it into wire using fire struck from flint? Was the design derived in a "clean" environment from first principles?
I thought not... posers ;-)
When US history is taught, the Hessian mercenaries are deeply maligned. Funny thing is, an objective look at the present "all volunteer" US army doesn't show a lot of difference in troop motivation from the mercenaries.
At least conscripts include a broad cross section of the population (you know, anyone they can round up on the street while driving by in a truck...), mercenaries are in it because society doesn't give them any choices that are more attractive to them.
It would take a damn heavy container to shield stray radiation from Fat Man, but, yeah, you could probably ship Fat Man to any US port via common carrier and use a Garmin GPS as the trigger.
I'd say that Iran 2009 isn't too different from Israel 1988.
Iraq: Invaded another country, didn't have powerful friends.
Do you think that invasion of another country matters? IIRC, that invasion was GWI, GWII didn't even have such a pretense. And, I'm not sure how tight they were, but Russia and India were plenty upset at the onset of GWII, I'd count them as reasonably powerful on the world stage.
What was the scientifically educated population of the United States when we developed the first ICBM?
Did our scientists have the advantage of being able to learn from MIT-Online? Were they able to copy existing tech, study photos and even blueprints of designs known to work? Did Jane's Weapons publish capabilities of other ICBM systems for them to aspire to? Could they buy digital computers capable of performing on-the-fly trajectory calculations for the price of a BigMac?
I'd say that, in today's world, it's about 5 years for a well funded national development program between launch of a multi-orbit satellite and the ability to target an ICBM in a 10 mile radius.
Yeah, regardless of how good the keyboard is or isn't on a notebook, I usually get a "real" keyboard to use when I'm at my desk. You can peck out an e-mail on almost anything (including a 9 key cellphone pad if you have to), but real typing demands one of those luxury keyboards from a specialized vendor - like a $20 wireless unit from Logitech, with mouse.
It wasn't that long ago that 1920x1080 was beyond the reach of most "specialized" monitors - TV has finally gotten up to a decent standard after only 20 years of trying.
Zero - Zero - Zero, that's the DARPA mantra, zero weight, zero size, zero power consumption. Anything more is missing the ideal. I carry a "real" Motorola flip phone from 2 years ago, it's acceptable, but feels like a monster compared to the RAZR, and the RAZR is still a monster compared to a bluetooth headset - why don't we have all of our functionality in a 2 gram OLED flex screen and earpiece yet?
I concur with the screen resolution observation - I don't really care if the screen is 7", 9", or 15" - what I really want is a full 1920x1080 resolution on it - I can always move it closer to my face if it's too small to see.
OLPC identified the western market price point as somewhere north of $300 - thus the B1G1 program... Any company would be foolish to sell product for less than the market will bear. Maybe if the recession continues for 10 more years we'll get netbooks down to the price of 20 McDonalds' meal-deals, but for now most people are willing to pay more to get a "real" machine rather than less for a "toy."
It's a good thought, and the W700 plus a used MacMini would fill my needs - but if I can only have one, I think I'm still in line for the MBP....
There's an app or three that I'm kind of hung up on using on the Macs, I'm sure there are PC alternatives, but this is the devil whose face I currently know....
Ugh! Adware... I can see why he didn't, but if it were my company, I'd probably have done something limited and "tasteful" before letting the operation go down the tubes the way he has.
Nor do they pass safety regulations anywhere else. Sure its cheap. Its a shell around a motorcycle with two extra wheels for balance.
... and that works for India, good for them. If the US would get it's head out of the SUV, we could save ridiculous quantities of oil, but that's not the way we roll...
Putin seems to be playing up to the state-owned press in Russia which lionizes everything he does.
Does anyone realize this guy is a politician? Of course he's playing up to the press, that's his job, just like M. Dell's job is to hawk hardware sales.
Sounded like a clumsy translation more than anything... that translator is working on the fly in a literal word-for-word sense. Get a spin-meister on the transcript and you'll get something out like "Thank you for your generous offer Mr. Dell, however, Russia is a proud and self-sufficient nation who can provide for her own IT needs."
This is along the line of the Tata car that was announced for some inconceivably low price to the consumer - it works in the Indian economy, but not on the world market.
If India could get serious and produce these things with world-competitive quality in volume, they could have a strong export market. Unfortunately, the products don't currently appeal to anyone outside India, at least not anyone who can afford to pay the freight to ship them.
Conceivably, he could inflate the bladders and glide forward as he ascends, then deflate the bladders and glide forward as he descends - with a support boat supplying fresh compressed air every night.....
Low density rural life is much less appalling than high density cities, regardless of whether you are in the 1st or 3rd world.
Developing content is much more labor (capital) intensive than developing a single hardware design and building a million copies.
As far as I can see "Sugar" is a really good name for the OLPC software project since it's just "Sugar coating" existing software, no original content there.
What would be really cool would be for OLPC / SugarLabs to align with some of the free education content thats coming out - but most of that free content is aimed at high school and above, while the OLPC hardware seems to be aimed at kindergarten through 5th grade.
You make some good points but I am a bit frightened about your hypothesis that paying people a good salary to do a job they love is risky, and if you only pay people a poor salary then you'll gte higher quality staff as only the highly passionate will apply to do it.
People talked about the Google stock option effect not too long ago, and this is a weak analogy to that.
Another problem with paying good money to teachers is that there are too many of them - if they all made good money it would amount to inflation and everyone's cost of living would go up ;-)
Seriously, though, teachers should be higher on the relative payscale than they are, when you can make more money as an average receptionist or secretary than as a teacher, something is seriously messed up.
Yeah, our son has a "highly educated" teacher straight out of her internship - the most insecure, ineffective, clueless witch I've met in a long time.