I say we build so many nuke plants in 'trustworthy'(IE already nuclear) countries that we're buying all the fuel just to feed all the darn things.;)
A good idea, except that building more nuclear power plants won't have a significant impact on our use of imported oil. Most of the oil the U.S. imports goes to gasoline. Power plants use coal and natural gas primarily, which are both widely available in the U.S. at low cost.
That's not to say that someday the availability of vast amounts of electric energy won't help us move away from gasoline-using transportation. The point is that most of the oil imported to the U.S. is for transportation, not electricity production, and about the only thing nuclear energy is being used for is electricity production.
That said, I am still gung-ho for nuclear power. I can't wait for the day when I have my 100% electric-drive car! And maybe someday we'll have direct nuclear to electric generators that bypass the steam turbine and are small enough to load into a vehicle...
Radio waves don't travel too well through rock/soil. The very long wavelength (hence low frequency) of this proposed product would theoretically be less absorbed/reflected by the rock and soil, but I can't imagine it being any significant amount more effective than existing VHF/UHF radio systems.
In my opinion, the most effective and also the cheapest way to communicate with miners is with copper. I mean, if you can get people down there, you can certainly get a cable down there, too. Right? The telephone system has proven the effectiveness of "landline" communications.
A few years ago my company was organizing a speech/audio engineers' conference (ICASSP) in Orlando. Mr. Moorer was one of the keynote speakers. His topic wasn't the THX sound, but he did talk about it. His story matches TFA, so I guess it's legit;-)
I ended up playing his sound samples for his talk through the auditorium sound system. I didn't know he was involved with the THX sound, and when he mentioned it, I realized I now had an interesting (somewhat) story. "I ran sound effects for the guy who invented the THX sound." It impressed me, anyway.
But GPS has nothing to do with bad maps. The "Global Positioning System" just calculates where it's antenna is. That is all.
Anything like poor directions, leading you down bad roads, etc. has everything to do with the quality of maps and choice of the proper graph traversal algorithms (but mostly the quality of the maps) and nothing to do with the GPS Receiver.
"GPS" doesn't lead you anywhere. GPS tells the rest of the device (or yourself) where it is. That is all. Do not blame the GPS on something that has nothing to do with the GPS infrastructure.
Yes, the GPS receiver can fail, but if it does, it is highly unlikely it will report a valid position anywhere other than where it is. If the system fails, the receiver reports no valid position.
Systems with the gyro (or other inertial sensors) use them to "fill in the gaps" when GPS is not a viable solution, but only for relatively short times. Variations in movement and inaccuracies or manufacturing differences mean that inertial tracking systems will drift "off course" over time, but not in so much time that it won't get lost while going through a tunnel or under a highway overpass, etc. Once GPS (which is an absolution positioning tool) again becomes viable, the inertial track (which is a relative positioning tool) is corrected to the true absolute location.
Laws don't prevent anything from happening. They just give us a method of recourse that fits within our societal structure (rule of law). If murder is illegal, a law doesn't stop someone from dying when shot in the face. But does allow a regular structure for dealing with someone who commits murder.
A case can be made that laws can have a deterrent effect, but it still doesn't change the fact that a law (words on paper) has zero physical power over anyone in real time.
Remember, enrichment seperates U-235 from U-238. That's easy -- three atomic numbers apart. Seperating Pu-239 and Pu-240 is hard because that's one atomic nubmer apart.
Those aren't the atomic numbers, they're the atomic weights. U has an atomic number of 92, Pu is 94.
You're correct, though, that the difficulty in separating isotopes of the same element (same atomic number, different weight) increases with decreasing atomic weight differences. It's like buoyancy: oil and vinegar separate more readily than vinegar and water because the densities of oil and vinegar are more different than the densities of vinegar and water.
I've been reading slashdot for quite a few years now, at least since accounts came into existence.
I agree that changing what you, the creator, of the site feel is a fundamental aspect of it is a difficult decision.
As stated in another post here, many of the negativity associated with the high-poster-of-the-month is that the URL linked to is either useless or potentially lucrative for the poster (what's wrong with that anyway?)
Why not change the link from whatever the submitter chooses to their user info page on slashdot? The user can post anything they like in their journal, folks can see past posts they've made and make a judgement on their own opinion based on the user's real contribution to slashdot.
But an antenna is just a piece of wire (fundamentally). It can't convert anything to anything else. It captures energy from space (not limited to "outer" space) and that's it.
In fact, the "digital TV" signals that your antenna captures are analog. All RF is analog. (All signals in general are analog, though many are used to represent digital data.)
If you make an "antenna" that presents to the TV an standard analog NTSC signal, regardless of what energy is captured by the "wire", you effectively have renamed the "set top box". So what's the difference between a set top box and such an antenna?
As you said, "not very different". So why not call a spade a spade?
Okay. I thought what you heard on NPR might have been the "rebanding" thing. And I think I was also wrong -- iDEN isn't mixed in with cellular, it's mixed in with public-safety (fire, police) frequencies.
The NPR story you linked to is a result of the Sprint/Nextel merger and the fact that rather than maintain two different cellular technologies (iDEN, CDMA), Sprint/Nextel decided to eventually pick one -- and when they get all the civilian users off of iDEN by making them buy new handsets, they can then sell iDEN handsets only to federal users who have their own set of needs that are difficult to meet with a mixed-use network.
The iDEN/Nextel stuff was a kind of "cleaning up" of the spectrul allocation. Nextel's long history meant that it had a lot of little slices of allocations throughout the nation, which happened to be kind of mixed in with cellular stuff. (The cellular came later, and just worked around the Nextel stuff on a regional basis.)
Rather than keep up the "which frequencies do we have to not use because of Nextel in THIS city?" nonsense, and because the cellular and iDEN operators were not leaving much space between their uses, meant there was potential for interference.
So Nextel, in cooperation/coercion with the FCC traded it's little slices around the nation for a contiguous slice elswhere, and then the FCC arranged to trade that to the cellular providers for some cash.
Details in the above story may not be correct, but that what I understand of the situation.
The problem of emergency responder and public safety radio system (non)interoperability grows out of the history of growth of the systems.
In the beginning, each agency had one or a few dedicated frequencies for communcation. The fire department might have 3 channels labeled "Primary", "Secondary", and "Tactical". Each of those would correspond to a pair of frequencies known as a "repeater pair". One frequency is the "input" to the repeater, and the other, the "output". In "idle", each radio is listening to the "output" frequency. When a fireman transmits on the radio, it transmits on the "input". The repeater listens to the input constantly. When it senses someone transmitting on the input frequency, it fires up it's transmitter on the output frequency and passes the audio from the input receiver to the output transmitter.
(Not much has changed since then)
Each agency (police, fire, waste, roads & bridges, etc.) of a city, plus county(parish), state, and federal agengies was in direct administrative control over their frequencies (an therefore channels). The fire department would apply with the FCC for a license for 3 repeater pairs, and the FCC would say, you can use pairs X, Y, and Z at no more than P Watts of power. The FCC determined this by ensuring that pairs X, Y, and Z were not used elsewhere in a geographical proximity that would likely be breached by a transmitter at the fire department's location based on RF propogation models at the given frequencies and terrain.
Now, in a bigger sense, the FCC also defined the allocation of the RF spectrum for the entire radio electromagnetic radation spectrum. Not on an individual basis, but on a functional basis. Like, 150MHz - 158MHz is allocated for public safety use, and therefore frequency pairs in that "band" would be available for individual licensing to any public safety agency (police, fire, EMS, etc.) Great amounts of spectrum are currently allocated for "federal" use. Note that not all RF use is for voice communication. Some is set aside for radioastronomy: no licenses are given to allow transmitting there, so radioastronomers can be certain that if they listen in that band, there will be less human interference than if they just picked any arbitrary frequency band to monitor.
As the technology improved and became cheaper, it became possible to utilize higher and higher frequencies. As such, whenever a band seemed "crowded", and the FCC opened up a higher band for the same purpose, it opened up a wider band. Wider bands means the same number of available channelized frequencies in the pool could be wider, and therefore carry better sound quality. Alternatively, the same quality could result with a higher count of "channels" in a band.
Public safety and city maintenance radio systems used to operate around 30MHz and 50MHz (about 10meter and 6meter wavelenths). Those gave good range -- the radio energy from the repeater and mobile radios was not attenuated by the atmosphere too much. As the frequency increases, though, the attenuation (lessening) of the signal strength by the various components of the air increases. At the same time, there is less "other" RF energy floating around from such things as the sun and lightning in storms, so the end result was to have slightly increased power requirements on transmitters and vastly increased voice quality and vastly increased equipment maintainability. Much of RF engineering has to do with the real wavelength, so as you go shorter in wavelenth, some of your filtering hardware can get smaller and more compact.
Eventually, every little city had a dozen or so frequencies allocated to various agencies within. It was a very inefficient use of the scarce resource of RF spectrum. If the fire department of Podunk, WV had 3 frequencies allocated to it, no other agency within, say, 100 miles could be allocated those frequencies. And you have to realize also that an FM-modulated voice signal has a real "bandwidth", and so you had to space out the "channels" of available frequenc
The announcement is most likely not written by the good professor himself.
You're correct; the article was written by an employee of the communications department of the TAMU engineering program. The article was written for the "general public" audience. Also, the reporter him/herself is unlikely familiar with secure communication and quantum cryptography principles. The professor was interviewed by the reporter. He likely, either by choice or necessity, had to describe his paper in a context outside the normal EE academic research community for this type of research.
The resulting article is a result of both the professor simplifying his research and the reporter further simplifying it. We have someone who is not a professional communicator; he has to get the idea of his research across. (Not to mention the attempts to link to everyday-use applications that tend to garner interested readers and funding.) The reporter is a professional communicator who had to distill the professor's explanation down to the components of a good article (a catchy lead--James Bond, a hook--secure communication, etc.) The end result is something that most people can at least relate to; A TAMU professor has an idea about an easier way to have secure communications. However, those familiar with the topic, however in-depth or not, are left wanting to ask more questions.
Such is the life of an engineer/geek reading news articles.
But, as you (the Parent poster) say, the fact that one might be left wanting more answers does not mean that the professor's idea or research is bogus. Remember that there's a reason we have professional communicators -- they know what most people will understand and relate to.
Disclaimer: My wife works with the reporter who wrote this article.
Actually, the four horsemen do not come from the ground, though I guess it could be interpreted that way. According to Revelation 6, the horsemen "appear", presumably from Heaven.
Smoke and locusts come from "The Abyss"
Revelation 9
why does my private information need to become public just because I register a domain?
Do you have a driver's license in the U.S.? If so, then your name and address is public. Do you own real estate? Ditto.
Is there a difference between, say, driver's license data and domain name data?
Are you equally outraged (or whatever emotion suits you) over the fakeable domain name data versus non-fakeable public data due to government records?
I'm not trying to be antagonistic. Is there something odd, perhaps, if you do not want your address in a public database for a domain name yet do not care about it being in other public databases?
What would it take for all of us to realize just how "private" information about ourselves is? And is there a difference once the cat is out of the bag?
The media companies cannot resell their little slice of the RF spectrum for any use other than FM broadcast. They do not own the frequencies, they only have a license that allows them to use it for a specific purpose.
They can transfer their license to another entity, but that entity must transmit the wide FM RF that the license allows for. Not many alternate uses.
So if the FM broadcast spectrum gets "repurposed", it most definitely will go back to the FCC first and be re-auctioned (if the new purpose is still commercial).
Speaking of which, I am wondering what the heck those things on the antenna array are.
Those *are* the antennas. See the spiral bits on both kinds? That's a conductive strip. It's a helical antenna -- common on satellites. The body that looks like the main bulk is just to give the thin metal something to hold shape.
It kind of sucks then that CNN's article did not mention that with this historically-active region becoming earth-facing, we might see more of these in the near future.
I'm basically fed up with news these days... I would wonder if CNN has any space geeks on their payroll whose job it is to say "hey, this doesn't say what happened in the most accurate way." It matters to some...
So these flares cause electromagnetic activity that occurs pretty quickly. According to the cnn.com article, their source was NOAA's Space Environment Center, and they handily included a link to said department.
According to the information at NOAA, the effects from this event will end by the morning of Sept 8. In other words, it's all over now, if you wanted to prepare.
Now, along with these often comes CME (coronal mass ejections), but this event wasn't facing Earth, so there won't be any of that material heading our way.
I have to ask what good it does for CNN to post this information as though it is an alert to prepare, rather than as an after-the-fact notice?
Communication takes two parts: the sender and the receiver. If the s/n ratio falls below what is necessary for the reciever, the only alternative is to increase the [effective] transmitter power (which includes antenna gain and directivity, etc.)
Yes, if you are trying to hear a weak SSB signal and cannot (due to etiquette or engineering) contact the transmitter's operator, there is no way that the operator will know that he/she needs to increase transmitter power.
My opinion is that BPL is *only* good *if* it is designed with good engineering. So far, most all of it is not engineered well with respect to unintended radiation. However, on a practial outlook, we must realize that engineering often takes a back seat to management and [perceived] profit.
Will ham radio operators continue to operate, with higher transmitter powers or will they just stop transmitting and complain on the Internet all the time? *That* will be what kills or maintains (or even revives) ham radio!
Slashdot Mirror
A good idea, except that building more nuclear power plants won't have a significant impact on our use of imported oil. Most of the oil the U.S. imports goes to gasoline. Power plants use coal and natural gas primarily, which are both widely available in the U.S. at low cost.
That's not to say that someday the availability of vast amounts of electric energy won't help us move away from gasoline-using transportation. The point is that most of the oil imported to the U.S. is for transportation, not electricity production, and about the only thing nuclear energy is being used for is electricity production.
That said, I am still gung-ho for nuclear power. I can't wait for the day when I have my 100% electric-drive car! And maybe someday we'll have direct nuclear to electric generators that bypass the steam turbine and are small enough to load into a vehicle...
Radio waves don't travel too well through rock/soil. The very long wavelength (hence low frequency) of this proposed product would theoretically be less absorbed/reflected by the rock and soil, but I can't imagine it being any significant amount more effective than existing VHF/UHF radio systems.
In my opinion, the most effective and also the cheapest way to communicate with miners is with copper. I mean, if you can get people down there, you can certainly get a cable down there, too. Right? The telephone system has proven the effectiveness of "landline" communications.
Props to Myst/Riven ;-)
Have you read the D'ni books? Can't say they were great, but were ceraintly captivating.
A few years ago my company was organizing a speech/audio engineers' conference (ICASSP) in Orlando. Mr. Moorer was one of the keynote speakers. His topic wasn't the THX sound, but he did talk about it. His story matches TFA, so I guess it's legit ;-)
I ended up playing his sound samples for his talk through the auditorium sound system. I didn't know he was involved with the THX sound, and when he mentioned it, I realized I now had an interesting (somewhat) story. "I ran sound effects for the guy who invented the THX sound." It impressed me, anyway.
But GPS has nothing to do with bad maps. The "Global Positioning System" just calculates where it's antenna is. That is all.
Anything like poor directions, leading you down bad roads, etc. has everything to do with the quality of maps and choice of the proper graph traversal algorithms (but mostly the quality of the maps) and nothing to do with the GPS Receiver.
"GPS" doesn't lead you anywhere. GPS tells the rest of the device (or yourself) where it is. That is all. Do not blame the GPS on something that has nothing to do with the GPS infrastructure.
Yes, the GPS receiver can fail, but if it does, it is highly unlikely it will report a valid position anywhere other than where it is. If the system fails, the receiver reports no valid position.
Systems with the gyro (or other inertial sensors) use them to "fill in the gaps" when GPS is not a viable solution, but only for relatively short times. Variations in movement and inaccuracies or manufacturing differences mean that inertial tracking systems will drift "off course" over time, but not in so much time that it won't get lost while going through a tunnel or under a highway overpass, etc. Once GPS (which is an absolution positioning tool) again becomes viable, the inertial track (which is a relative positioning tool) is corrected to the true absolute location.
But having accurate map data is essential.
Laws don't prevent anything from happening. They just give us a method of recourse that fits within our societal structure (rule of law). If murder is illegal, a law doesn't stop someone from dying when shot in the face. But does allow a regular structure for dealing with someone who commits murder.
A case can be made that laws can have a deterrent effect, but it still doesn't change the fact that a law (words on paper) has zero physical power over anyone in real time.
Those aren't the atomic numbers, they're the atomic weights. U has an atomic number of 92, Pu is 94.
You're correct, though, that the difficulty in separating isotopes of the same element (same atomic number, different weight) increases with decreasing atomic weight differences. It's like buoyancy: oil and vinegar separate more readily than vinegar and water because the densities of oil and vinegar are more different than the densities of vinegar and water.
I've been reading slashdot for quite a few years now, at least since accounts came into existence.
I agree that changing what you, the creator, of the site feel is a fundamental aspect of it is a difficult decision.
As stated in another post here, many of the negativity associated with the high-poster-of-the-month is that the URL linked to is either useless or potentially lucrative for the poster (what's wrong with that anyway?)
Why not change the link from whatever the submitter chooses to their user info page on slashdot? The user can post anything they like in their journal, folks can see past posts they've made and make a judgement on their own opinion based on the user's real contribution to slashdot.
But an antenna is just a piece of wire (fundamentally). It can't convert anything to anything else. It captures energy from space (not limited to "outer" space) and that's it.
In fact, the "digital TV" signals that your antenna captures are analog. All RF is analog. (All signals in general are analog, though many are used to represent digital data.)
If you make an "antenna" that presents to the TV an standard analog NTSC signal, regardless of what energy is captured by the "wire", you effectively have renamed the "set top box". So what's the difference between a set top box and such an antenna?
As you said, "not very different". So why not call a spade a spade?
Do with it what you like. It's what I understand, but I can't guarantee 100% accuracy.
Okay. I thought what you heard on NPR might have been the "rebanding" thing. And I think I was also wrong -- iDEN isn't mixed in with cellular, it's mixed in with public-safety (fire, police) frequencies.
The NPR story you linked to is a result of the Sprint/Nextel merger and the fact that rather than maintain two different cellular technologies (iDEN, CDMA), Sprint/Nextel decided to eventually pick one -- and when they get all the civilian users off of iDEN by making them buy new handsets, they can then sell iDEN handsets only to federal users who have their own set of needs that are difficult to meet with a mixed-use network.
The iDEN/Nextel stuff was a kind of "cleaning up" of the spectrul allocation. Nextel's long history meant that it had a lot of little slices of allocations throughout the nation, which happened to be kind of mixed in with cellular stuff. (The cellular came later, and just worked around the Nextel stuff on a regional basis.)
Rather than keep up the "which frequencies do we have to not use because of Nextel in THIS city?" nonsense, and because the cellular and iDEN operators were not leaving much space between their uses, meant there was potential for interference.
So Nextel, in cooperation/coercion with the FCC traded it's little slices around the nation for a contiguous slice elswhere, and then the FCC arranged to trade that to the cellular providers for some cash.
Details in the above story may not be correct, but that what I understand of the situation.
The problem of emergency responder and public safety radio system (non)interoperability grows out of the history of growth of the systems.
In the beginning, each agency had one or a few dedicated frequencies for communcation. The fire department might have 3 channels labeled "Primary", "Secondary", and "Tactical". Each of those would correspond to a pair of frequencies known as a "repeater pair". One frequency is the "input" to the repeater, and the other, the "output". In "idle", each radio is listening to the "output" frequency. When a fireman transmits on the radio, it transmits on the "input". The repeater listens to the input constantly. When it senses someone transmitting on the input frequency, it fires up it's transmitter on the output frequency and passes the audio from the input receiver to the output transmitter.
(Not much has changed since then)
Each agency (police, fire, waste, roads & bridges, etc.) of a city, plus county(parish), state, and federal agengies was in direct administrative control over their frequencies (an therefore channels). The fire department would apply with the FCC for a license for 3 repeater pairs, and the FCC would say, you can use pairs X, Y, and Z at no more than P Watts of power. The FCC determined this by ensuring that pairs X, Y, and Z were not used elsewhere in a geographical proximity that would likely be breached by a transmitter at the fire department's location based on RF propogation models at the given frequencies and terrain.
Now, in a bigger sense, the FCC also defined the allocation of the RF spectrum for the entire radio electromagnetic radation spectrum. Not on an individual basis, but on a functional basis. Like, 150MHz - 158MHz is allocated for public safety use, and therefore frequency pairs in that "band" would be available for individual licensing to any public safety agency (police, fire, EMS, etc.) Great amounts of spectrum are currently allocated for "federal" use. Note that not all RF use is for voice communication. Some is set aside for radioastronomy: no licenses are given to allow transmitting there, so radioastronomers can be certain that if they listen in that band, there will be less human interference than if they just picked any arbitrary frequency band to monitor.
As the technology improved and became cheaper, it became possible to utilize higher and higher frequencies. As such, whenever a band seemed "crowded", and the FCC opened up a higher band for the same purpose, it opened up a wider band. Wider bands means the same number of available channelized frequencies in the pool could be wider, and therefore carry better sound quality. Alternatively, the same quality could result with a higher count of "channels" in a band.
Public safety and city maintenance radio systems used to operate around 30MHz and 50MHz (about 10meter and 6meter wavelenths). Those gave good range -- the radio energy from the repeater and mobile radios was not attenuated by the atmosphere too much. As the frequency increases, though, the attenuation (lessening) of the signal strength by the various components of the air increases. At the same time, there is less "other" RF energy floating around from such things as the sun and lightning in storms, so the end result was to have slightly increased power requirements on transmitters and vastly increased voice quality and vastly increased equipment maintainability. Much of RF engineering has to do with the real wavelength, so as you go shorter in wavelenth, some of your filtering hardware can get smaller and more compact.
Eventually, every little city had a dozen or so frequencies allocated to various agencies within. It was a very inefficient use of the scarce resource of RF spectrum. If the fire department of Podunk, WV had 3 frequencies allocated to it, no other agency within, say, 100 miles could be allocated those frequencies. And you have to realize also that an FM-modulated voice signal has a real "bandwidth", and so you had to space out the "channels" of available frequenc
You're correct; the article was written by an employee of the communications department of the TAMU engineering program. The article was written for the "general public" audience. Also, the reporter him/herself is unlikely familiar with secure communication and quantum cryptography principles. The professor was interviewed by the reporter. He likely, either by choice or necessity, had to describe his paper in a context outside the normal EE academic research community for this type of research.
The resulting article is a result of both the professor simplifying his research and the reporter further simplifying it. We have someone who is not a professional communicator; he has to get the idea of his research across. (Not to mention the attempts to link to everyday-use applications that tend to garner interested readers and funding.) The reporter is a professional communicator who had to distill the professor's explanation down to the components of a good article (a catchy lead--James Bond, a hook--secure communication, etc.) The end result is something that most people can at least relate to; A TAMU professor has an idea about an easier way to have secure communications. However, those familiar with the topic, however in-depth or not, are left wanting to ask more questions.
Such is the life of an engineer/geek reading news articles.
But, as you (the Parent poster) say, the fact that one might be left wanting more answers does not mean that the professor's idea or research is bogus. Remember that there's a reason we have professional communicators -- they know what most people will understand and relate to.
Disclaimer: My wife works with the reporter who wrote this article.
Actually, the four horsemen do not come from the ground, though I guess it could be interpreted that way. According to Revelation 6, the horsemen "appear", presumably from Heaven.
Smoke and locusts come from "The Abyss" Revelation 9
Your mileage may vary :-)
Because the mandate is not to switch over to High Definition television, but to digital television.
There is a difference. Not all digital is HD, not all HD is digital.
Do you have a driver's license in the U.S.? If so, then your name and address is public. Do you own real estate? Ditto.
Is there a difference between, say, driver's license data and domain name data?
Are you equally outraged (or whatever emotion suits you) over the fakeable domain name data versus non-fakeable public data due to government records?
I'm not trying to be antagonistic. Is there something odd, perhaps, if you do not want your address in a public database for a domain name yet do not care about it being in other public databases?
What would it take for all of us to realize just how "private" information about ourselves is? And is there a difference once the cat is out of the bag?
The media companies cannot resell their little slice of the RF spectrum for any use other than FM broadcast. They do not own the frequencies, they only have a license that allows them to use it for a specific purpose.
They can transfer their license to another entity, but that entity must transmit the wide FM RF that the license allows for. Not many alternate uses.
So if the FM broadcast spectrum gets "repurposed", it most definitely will go back to the FCC first and be re-auctioned (if the new purpose is still commercial).
Remember also that a domain name doesn't always mean a web site.
It's just a mapping of text to a number and there are many services that can run on the computer identified by that number.
Those *are* the antennas. See the spiral bits on both kinds? That's a conductive strip. It's a helical antenna -- common on satellites. The body that looks like the main bulk is just to give the thin metal something to hold shape.
Nevermind. I'm a dope. The short article does mention future activity to be on the lookout for.
It kind of sucks then that CNN's article did not mention that with this historically-active region becoming earth-facing, we might see more of these in the near future.
I'm basically fed up with news these days...
I would wonder if CNN has any space geeks on their payroll whose job it is to say "hey, this doesn't say what happened in the most accurate way." It matters to some...
So these flares cause electromagnetic activity that occurs pretty quickly. According to the cnn.com article, their source was NOAA's Space Environment Center, and they handily included a link to said department.
According to the information at NOAA, the effects from this event will end by the morning of Sept 8. In other words, it's all over now, if you wanted to prepare.
Now, along with these often comes CME (coronal mass ejections), but this event wasn't facing Earth, so there won't be any of that material heading our way.
I have to ask what good it does for CNN to post this information as though it is an alert to prepare, rather than as an after-the-fact notice?
"Security stickers" don't prevent tampering, they only indicate possible tampering.
Communication takes two parts: the sender and the receiver. If the s/n ratio falls below what is necessary for the reciever, the only alternative is to increase the [effective] transmitter power (which includes antenna gain and directivity, etc.)
Yes, if you are trying to hear a weak SSB signal and cannot (due to etiquette or engineering) contact the transmitter's operator, there is no way that the operator will know that he/she needs to increase transmitter power.
My opinion is that BPL is *only* good *if* it is designed with good engineering. So far, most all of it is not engineered well with respect to unintended radiation. However, on a practial outlook, we must realize that engineering often takes a back seat to management and [perceived] profit.
Will ham radio operators continue to operate, with higher transmitter powers or will they just stop transmitting and complain on the Internet all the time? *That* will be what kills or maintains (or even revives) ham radio!