The high-power laser systems I've worked with weren't anywhere nearly as intense as this beam, obviously, but the beam dump still cost a fair bit since it was consumable, so we went with cheap. We used a brick set at a very low angle to maximize the surface area exposed to the beam. We'd go through (in a couple meanings of 'go through') a brick a day. Still, cheaper than copper or graphite.
In addition to other reply's 'black spray paint' -- a laser pointer, through the optics systems of many digital cameras, is sufficient to injure the camera's sensor. Nice because you don't have to get up there with a stepladder and spraypaint.
I agree with what you're saying. But what they could be talking about -- something that's actually a useful metric -- is whether the energy source can get energy into a material faster than it can conduct the heat away. It's comparatively easy to drill a hole in a thermally insulative material with a laser, but much harder with copper. So if they want to make an impressive statement, they probably should make it clear (to those of us who care) that this thing can dump energy in, faster than any material can get rid of it, meaning you are guaranteed to vaporize a hole in the material.
Two of my workmates have 50 caliber rifles worth over $15,000, that they're unlikely to use for casual home defense. They have much smaller, much cheaper pistols intended for burglars, and the extremely expensive rifles stay in the gun safes.
They found what she'd put in there in the last two weeks, yeah. The rest of the loot we'd put in a shopping bag and taken to a local bank (without her knowledge) and invested. It paid for three years of her nursing home care.
A lot of jewelers use small safes because their valuables take up so little space. A one-cubic-foot safe could hold five years' worth of diamonds for a reasonably active custom jeweler.
I'm not saying it's *smart*, just that it's what I've seen jewelers I've worked with do.
People who have gun safes tend to be more likely to rigidly attach them to the premises, with concrete and steel.
>And it's easy to case the joint as the Gas meter reading guy.
I have a story about that. My grandmother was very old, living alone, and didn't believe in banks. When she started to go blind, we started cleaning her house out, throwing away all the junk she'd accumulated, so she didn't break her neck tripping over some horrible thing she'd found in an alley 20 years earlier and saved because she thought she could fix it up. Anyway, one thing we cleaned out was her bedroom, and when we told her, she said we should clean under the bed because she'd stuck some money under there and she wanted to make sure we didn't throw it away. So we removed it and counted it, and I'm just going to say it was, by an order of magnitude, more cash than I've ever seen in my life. Two weeks later, a guy came to the front door, saying he was from the city water department, and asked her if she could tell him where the water line was, beneath her garden, so she walked out, largely by memory, and pointed out where the water meter pit was, and went back to her house... and found a bunch of things moved. She called the water dept and they said they hadn't sent anyone over. Having someone lure you away from the house while someone else goes in quickly and burglarizes it is a pretty effective scam. Apparently they hit a bunch of houses in the area doing that.
I think I agree with Gladwell's conclusion: conservatives will hate the idea of giving stuff to people who don't deserve it, liberals will hate the idea of only supporting a few people to save money, rather than supporting all the people who are in trouble. It's one of those ideas that's right but completely politically untenable.
I'm kind of an in-the-middle guy myself, but as I get older I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that in many cases, the compromise position between two bitterly-defended poles can be much worse for everyone involved than either of the two poles, which sort of sucks for the entire process of politics.
There's a famous Charles Addams cartoon that shows a field of pumpkins, with one in the foreground being carved from the inside: just a knife blade sticking out, busily cutting away... Alas, I can't find a pic online.
To sum up a long article, "Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It's simply about efficiency."
If you want to live in a society where we don't let people die in the streets, it is far more cost-effective for society as a whole to provide handouts for people who choose not to work.
I don't think people care about instant returns vs. returns 2 hours after the final polls close.
You know who does care? The people who make electronic voting systems. And with all the money they expect to make selling them to governments, they do an awful lot of lobbying to have those machines installed everywhere.
You can look at the will of the people, or you can follow the money. Usually money speaks more loudly.
The most recent New Yorker magazine had a really good article about that, specifically talking about Bob Barr. (It made me less scared of him, which isn't saying much.) But the thrust of the article was that third parties aren't running for president, they're running to get their ideas discussed, and as such, they tend towards the extreme, to make the most news, rather than towards the center as far as possible, the way the Republicrats do. You'll notice that the Greens are running a black woman as their presidential candidate.
You use an interesting version of that quote. I've typically seen it written, "Age and treachery will overcome youth and skill" -- and I think that's both more true and more inspiring. But guile certainly sounds nicer...
I don't know what your bandwidth needs are. Our department has 20 scopes across several brands, and I have a few more myself. The Tektronix 3000 series is the most common thing out there. It's nearly a standard. One of the many things I like about them is they're not Windows-based -- at least none of ours are -- so you don't have anywhere nearly the same problems getting them as network-secured as the IT staff wants them. (Many windows-based scopes are not easily software-upgradeable, because the custom hardware they have. It cost us about $10,000 to go from W2K to WXP on one of our Tek 5000-series.) The Tek 7000-series is lovely but requires a lot of learning and active (read: $$$) probes. You can't just throw a standard old probe on there and use it at reduced bandwidth. I like LeCroy because they're comparatively easy to repair and reasonably easy to use. I have a 350mhz lecroy at home and have had it apart, replaced input buffers on it, stuff like that. (It was beat up when I bought it, used.) They have a reasonably intuitive user interface. It's harder to get support because they're not US-based. I worked for HP/Agilent in their instruments division, so I *should* like their scopes, and I have two old Agilent analogs at home. But I don't like the new ones. Shrug. The engineering's still good: they look good internally.
I will say, although you didn't mention it, that Yokogawa scopes are *very* nice, especially if you're doing any work with serial communications, but the interface is really, really strange. I honestly wonder if there's a fundamental difference in the designer mindset.
With all that said, the single scope I like the best is the TDS3000 series, for one reason: it has an internal webserver. You don't have to load any software on anything: you just plug it in, it runs DHCP, and you can control it and get results from it from any computer on the network, using a browser. That's really convenient. Difficult to get past IT because it's not a Windows machine and there's no hint of what sort of vulnerabilities it might have. But they're easy to use, if their bandwidth limitations are acceptable.
>My last point is this. DRM doesn't prevent piracy.
>again...let me repeat that for the industry folks who are a little slow. DRM DOESN'T PREVENT PIRACY.
DRM isn't really intended to prevent piracy. It's intended to make us buy media more often by reducing our ability to play $file on devices A, B and C, in the hopes we'll have to buy more files.
In other words, it is to the advantage of the media makers that the electronics manufacturers cannot and do not make interoperable devices, because that means consumers will be likely to buy more copies of the media.
Reducing piracy is a nice side-effect, from their standpoint, but many people who pirate wouldn't buy anyway so that's stopping a leak that's above waterline, in a manner of speaking. In contrast, people who have already purchased something once, are more likely to purchase it again, because they feel like they own it and if they can't use it they feel like they've lost something. Some people will get mad and will refuse to participate at all, but a lot of people will just shrug, and at the nagging of their kids or whatever, will buy another copy that *does* work on the device in question.
Well, it's not clear to me that they should've done anything else. In most states, it's completely legal to carry rifles and shotguns *openly*. It's when you conceal them that it's a problem. And if the bikers weren't actually breaking laws, why would the cops have any business hassling them?
Sure, we'd all like the bad guys to get in trouble. But until they're doing something bad, they're not bad guys, and until they're breaking the law, the cops should treat them like everyone else: presumed innocent.
Ya know, I have to say, of all the places I've ever hung out: bars, rock concerts, bike races, SecondLife, IRC, MySpace -- MUDs were the places that most reliably turned acquaintences into lovers. Dunno what it was about that social space but it seemed like all you had to do was sit there and type long into the night and eventually you'd end up negotiating where and when you were going to meet. I'm not saying *easiest* -- there are lots more people on SecondLife, and a lot stupider people on MySpace. I'm saying the most *reliable*. And the best part is that, unlike people I've met through other places, I'm still friends with a lot of the people I met through MUDs. There was just an energetic dynamic going on there.
Most large hardware stores and home improvement stores sell isopropyl by the gallon in the paint department, for much cheaper than you would get it at a pharmacy or chem supply company.
I use it as fuel for homebuilt pulsejets so I go through a lot, and Home Depot is the cheapest source I've found.
For the record, you can fit two standard bicycles in the back of a 152 if you pull the wheels off. I've flown from the front range of Colorado to the airstrip nearest Moab, Utah, ridden into town, spent two days riding the local trails, then ridden back to the airport and flown back home.
The big brother of this approach is Martin Hollman's Stallion homebuilt aircraft, which can either fit six people, or him and his wife and a Honda Goldwing motorcycle, wheeled up the tailramp. Now *that* is the way to travel.
Anyone else remember the Dr. Who episodes about The Autons? Creepy creatures that were plastic and were trying to take over the Earth by running plastic injection molding companies that were actually cranking out millions of Autons and selling them as clothing store dummies, telephone cords, baby dolls, and most critically, decorative plastic flowers? Those episodes got the producers in trouble with the British Government, as I recall, because they scared kids so badly that parents were out in the streets protesting. I can see why, too: the scenes where the baby dolls came alive and were strangling people, the flowers were blowing plastic gunk over people's faces that asphyxiated them, and particularly the one where all the showroom dummies on Bond Street busted out through the showroom windows and started gunning everyone down in the middle of the street, were as good as any horror movie.
Plastic flowers *still* give me the creeps, 30 years after I saw those episodes.
You're talking about the difference between fundamentalists and progressives -- and I mean those in their useful definitions, not the modern, hijacked definitions. A fundamentalist believes that people are fundamentally unchanging. To a fundamentalist, short prison terms and rehabilitation programs are completely pointless, like trying to train a donkey to be an elephant. A progressive believes that people can change if they want, or if they're forced to do so. To a progressive, execution or lifetime imprisonment are horrible miscarriages of justice because there is a possibility of fixing the person, making the person into a productive member of society. This basic difference in opinion has driven our justice/prison system's schizophrenic behavior since... well, the 1500's, at the very least, quite likely since the beginning of civilization.
That's a hard question and I'd need to be smarter than I am to answer it. Pressure drops off exponentially with altitude. (P(x) = P(sealevel)*e^(RT/gx), as I recall, where R's the gas constant, x is elevation, g the accelleration of gravity)) So your coolling fluid volume drops off slower as you rise -- so, you lose lots of cooling power as you move from Florida to New Mexico, and less (proportionately) as you move from NM to Colorado. Heat transfer is, again as I recall, a function of the fourth power of the difference between the heatsource and the heatsink. I don't have the math background to even begin to solve that, but anything involving fourth powers will probably swamp mere exponentials -- so, yeah, probably it's better to get cooler air at higher altitude.
Slashdot Mirror
The high-power laser systems I've worked with weren't anywhere nearly as intense as this beam, obviously, but the beam dump still cost a fair bit since it was consumable, so we went with cheap. We used a brick set at a very low angle to maximize the surface area exposed to the beam. We'd go through (in a couple meanings of 'go through') a brick a day. Still, cheaper than copper or graphite.
In addition to other reply's 'black spray paint' -- a laser pointer, through the optics systems of many digital cameras, is sufficient to injure the camera's sensor. Nice because you don't have to get up there with a stepladder and spraypaint.
I agree with what you're saying.
But what they could be talking about -- something that's actually a useful metric -- is whether the energy source can get energy into a material faster than it can conduct the heat away. It's comparatively easy to drill a hole in a thermally insulative material with a laser, but much harder with copper. So if they want to make an impressive statement, they probably should make it clear (to those of us who care) that this thing can dump energy in, faster than any material can get rid of it, meaning you are guaranteed to vaporize a hole in the material.
Two of my workmates have 50 caliber rifles worth over $15,000, that they're unlikely to use for casual home defense. They have much smaller, much cheaper pistols intended for burglars, and the extremely expensive rifles stay in the gun safes.
They found what she'd put in there in the last two weeks, yeah. The rest of the loot we'd put in a shopping bag and taken to a local bank (without her knowledge) and invested. It paid for three years of her nursing home care.
A lot of jewelers use small safes because their valuables take up so little space. A one-cubic-foot safe could hold five years' worth of diamonds for a reasonably active custom jeweler.
I'm not saying it's *smart*, just that it's what I've seen jewelers I've worked with do.
People who have gun safes tend to be more likely to rigidly attach them to the premises, with concrete and steel.
>And it's easy to case the joint as the Gas meter reading guy.
I have a story about that. My grandmother was very old, living alone, and didn't believe in banks. When she started to go blind, we started cleaning her house out, throwing away all the junk she'd accumulated, so she didn't break her neck tripping over some horrible thing she'd found in an alley 20 years earlier and saved because she thought she could fix it up. Anyway, one thing we cleaned out was her bedroom, and when we told her, she said we should clean under the bed because she'd stuck some money under there and she wanted to make sure we didn't throw it away. So we removed it and counted it, and I'm just going to say it was, by an order of magnitude, more cash than I've ever seen in my life.
Two weeks later, a guy came to the front door, saying he was from the city water department, and asked her if she could tell him where the water line was, beneath her garden, so she walked out, largely by memory, and pointed out where the water meter pit was, and went back to her house... and found a bunch of things moved. She called the water dept and they said they hadn't sent anyone over.
Having someone lure you away from the house while someone else goes in quickly and burglarizes it is a pretty effective scam. Apparently they hit a bunch of houses in the area doing that.
I think I agree with Gladwell's conclusion: conservatives will hate the idea of giving stuff to people who don't deserve it, liberals will hate the idea of only supporting a few people to save money, rather than supporting all the people who are in trouble. It's one of those ideas that's right but completely politically untenable.
I'm kind of an in-the-middle guy myself, but as I get older I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that in many cases, the compromise position between two bitterly-defended poles can be much worse for everyone involved than either of the two poles, which sort of sucks for the entire process of politics.
There's a famous Charles Addams cartoon that shows a field of pumpkins, with one in the foreground being carved from the inside: just a knife blade sticking out, busily cutting away...
Alas, I can't find a pic online.
>There's no reason to support freeloading for those who could work.
Yes, there is.
To sum up a long article, "Social benefits are supposed to have some kind of moral justification. We give them to widows and disabled veterans and poor mothers with small children. Giving the homeless guy passed out on the sidewalk an apartment has a different rationale. It's simply about efficiency."
If you want to live in a society where we don't let people die in the streets, it is far more cost-effective for society as a whole to provide handouts for people who choose not to work.
>Why is it that tax cuts targeted on big businesses and the wealthy never get labeled as redistribution of wealth?
"The only acceptable form of socialism in America is socialism for the rich." -- J. K. Galbraith.
I don't think people care about instant returns vs. returns 2 hours after the final polls close.
You know who does care?
The people who make electronic voting systems. And with all the money they expect to make selling them to governments, they do an awful lot of lobbying to have those machines installed everywhere.
You can look at the will of the people, or you can follow the money. Usually money speaks more loudly.
The most recent New Yorker magazine had a really good article about that, specifically talking about Bob Barr. (It made me less scared of him, which isn't saying much.) But the thrust of the article was that third parties aren't running for president, they're running to get their ideas discussed, and as such, they tend towards the extreme, to make the most news, rather than towards the center as far as possible, the way the Republicrats do.
You'll notice that the Greens are running a black woman as their presidential candidate.
You use an interesting version of that quote. I've typically seen it written, "Age and treachery will overcome youth and skill" -- and I think that's both more true and more inspiring. But guile certainly sounds nicer...
It was Dwight Eisenhower: "We will bankrupt ourselves in the vain search for absolute security."
The last of the great Republicans...
I don't know what your bandwidth needs are.
Our department has 20 scopes across several brands, and I have a few more myself.
The Tektronix 3000 series is the most common thing out there. It's nearly a standard. One of the many things I like about them is they're not Windows-based -- at least none of ours are -- so you don't have anywhere nearly the same problems getting them as network-secured as the IT staff wants them. (Many windows-based scopes are not easily software-upgradeable, because the custom hardware they have. It cost us about $10,000 to go from W2K to WXP on one of our Tek 5000-series.)
The Tek 7000-series is lovely but requires a lot of learning and active (read: $$$) probes. You can't just throw a standard old probe on there and use it at reduced bandwidth.
I like LeCroy because they're comparatively easy to repair and reasonably easy to use. I have a 350mhz lecroy at home and have had it apart, replaced input buffers on it, stuff like that. (It was beat up when I bought it, used.) They have a reasonably intuitive user interface. It's harder to get support because they're not US-based.
I worked for HP/Agilent in their instruments division, so I *should* like their scopes, and I have two old Agilent analogs at home. But I don't like the new ones. Shrug. The engineering's still good: they look good internally.
I will say, although you didn't mention it, that Yokogawa scopes are *very* nice, especially if you're doing any work with serial communications, but the interface is really, really strange. I honestly wonder if there's a fundamental difference in the designer mindset.
With all that said, the single scope I like the best is the TDS3000 series, for one reason: it has an internal webserver. You don't have to load any software on anything: you just plug it in, it runs DHCP, and you can control it and get results from it from any computer on the network, using a browser. That's really convenient. Difficult to get past IT because it's not a Windows machine and there's no hint of what sort of vulnerabilities it might have. But they're easy to use, if their bandwidth limitations are acceptable.
>My last point is this. DRM doesn't prevent piracy.
>again...let me repeat that for the industry folks who are a little slow. DRM DOESN'T PREVENT PIRACY.
DRM isn't really intended to prevent piracy. It's intended to make us buy media more often by reducing our ability to play $file on devices A, B and C, in the hopes we'll have to buy more files.
In other words, it is to the advantage of the media makers that the electronics manufacturers cannot and do not make interoperable devices, because that means consumers will be likely to buy more copies of the media.
Reducing piracy is a nice side-effect, from their standpoint, but many people who pirate wouldn't buy anyway so that's stopping a leak that's above waterline, in a manner of speaking. In contrast, people who have already purchased something once, are more likely to purchase it again, because they feel like they own it and if they can't use it they feel like they've lost something. Some people will get mad and will refuse to participate at all, but a lot of people will just shrug, and at the nagging of their kids or whatever, will buy another copy that *does* work on the device in question.
Well, it's not clear to me that they should've done anything else.
In most states, it's completely legal to carry rifles and shotguns *openly*. It's when you conceal them that it's a problem.
And if the bikers weren't actually breaking laws, why would the cops have any business hassling them?
Sure, we'd all like the bad guys to get in trouble. But until they're doing something bad, they're not bad guys, and until they're breaking the law, the cops should treat them like everyone else: presumed innocent.
Ya know, I have to say, of all the places I've ever hung out: bars, rock concerts, bike races, SecondLife, IRC, MySpace -- MUDs were the places that most reliably turned acquaintences into lovers. Dunno what it was about that social space but it seemed like all you had to do was sit there and type long into the night and eventually you'd end up negotiating where and when you were going to meet.
I'm not saying *easiest* -- there are lots more people on SecondLife, and a lot stupider people on MySpace. I'm saying the most *reliable*.
And the best part is that, unlike people I've met through other places, I'm still friends with a lot of the people I met through MUDs.
There was just an energetic dynamic going on there.
Most large hardware stores and home improvement stores sell isopropyl by the gallon in the paint department, for much cheaper than you would get it at a pharmacy or chem supply company.
I use it as fuel for homebuilt pulsejets so I go through a lot, and Home Depot is the cheapest source I've found.
For the record, you can fit two standard bicycles in the back of a 152 if you pull the wheels off. I've flown from the front range of Colorado to the airstrip nearest Moab, Utah, ridden into town, spent two days riding the local trails, then ridden back to the airport and flown back home.
The big brother of this approach is Martin Hollman's Stallion homebuilt aircraft, which can either fit six people, or him and his wife and a Honda Goldwing motorcycle, wheeled up the tailramp.
Now *that* is the way to travel.
Anyone else remember the Dr. Who episodes about The Autons? Creepy creatures that were plastic and were trying to take over the Earth by running plastic injection molding companies that were actually cranking out millions of Autons and selling them as clothing store dummies, telephone cords, baby dolls, and most critically, decorative plastic flowers?
Those episodes got the producers in trouble with the British Government, as I recall, because they scared kids so badly that parents were out in the streets protesting. I can see why, too: the scenes where the baby dolls came alive and were strangling people, the flowers were blowing plastic gunk over people's faces that asphyxiated them, and particularly the one where all the showroom dummies on Bond Street busted out through the showroom windows and started gunning everyone down in the middle of the street, were as good as any horror movie.
Plastic flowers *still* give me the creeps, 30 years after I saw those episodes.
You're talking about the difference between fundamentalists and progressives -- and I mean those in their useful definitions, not the modern, hijacked definitions.
A fundamentalist believes that people are fundamentally unchanging. To a fundamentalist, short prison terms and rehabilitation programs are completely pointless, like trying to train a donkey to be an elephant.
A progressive believes that people can change if they want, or if they're forced to do so. To a progressive, execution or lifetime imprisonment are horrible miscarriages of justice because there is a possibility of fixing the person, making the person into a productive member of society.
This basic difference in opinion has driven our justice/prison system's schizophrenic behavior since... well, the 1500's, at the very least, quite likely since the beginning of civilization.
That's a hard question and I'd need to be smarter than I am to answer it.
Pressure drops off exponentially with altitude. (P(x) = P(sealevel)*e^(RT/gx), as I recall, where R's the gas constant, x is elevation, g the accelleration of gravity)) So your coolling fluid volume drops off slower as you rise -- so, you lose lots of cooling power as you move from Florida to New Mexico, and less (proportionately) as you move from NM to Colorado.
Heat transfer is, again as I recall, a function of the fourth power of the difference between the heatsource and the heatsink.
I don't have the math background to even begin to solve that, but anything involving fourth powers will probably swamp mere exponentials -- so, yeah, probably it's better to get cooler air at higher altitude.
Cthulhu/FSM '08
More Tentacles, Less Whining.