That is a really clever idea, but if you are doing this at radar frequencies (for spatial resolution) wouldn't the harmonics be difficult to detect? Would the semiconductor junctions of the size used in current semiconductor devices be sufficiently efficient radiators at the harmonic frequency?

On the other hand, perhaps you don't need the spatial resolution of radar for the applications mentioned in the article.

I am not an EE, as is probably obvious.
 

I am being serially dumb here. I see now that the animal vectors allow the disease to spread at the rate of asymptomatic travelers.

Good point - I had overlooked that possibility.

While I don't disagree with anything you say, I am not sure that animal vectors make a difference to this particular study. The question I have is, did the animals spread the disease across the continent independently, i.e. other than by being transported by humans, to any significant extent? If so, then we can only say that the data give an upper bound on the rate of spread by humans. While this would raise the possibility that this rate was lower than that calculated by the authors, it does not provide any evidence that it was. Conversely, if the spread by animals depended largely on them being transported by humans, their involvement in the process is immaterial to the use of the data in estimating human mobility. This estimation must be based on the average rate, not on relatively infrequent worst-case or corner-case scenarios.

Right. The authors have overlooked the fact, as shown by their own map, that, in 1347, the plague moved into Europe along a broad front: the Mediterranean coastline. I imagine that it spread along that front by ship, a good deal faster than the inland spread that the authors base their thesis on.

Furthermore, the authors summarily dismiss the effect of the disease on its spread. It was very debilitating, and a traveller on land who fell sick would be unlikely to continue his journey. The authors exaggerate the distance a sick traveller would be likey to spread the disease.

Add to this the failure of the authors to recognize that almost all land travel would be by foot (with what animals were being used for transport mostly being used to carry the baggage of foot travellers) and you have three strikes against their argument. I don't doubt that the world was less connected than than it is now, but the authors overstate their case. By overestimating the rate at which land travel would, in practice, spread the diseease, they have underestimated the amount of travel.

In the case of lightweight elements, the energy released by two fusing nuclei is less than the kinetic energy smashing them together, but only a small fraction of the nuclei in a pellet fuse, and most of the energy absorbed by the pellet goes into heating and ionizing the atoms that don't undergo fusion.

"Lalueza-Fox was able to isolate a small amount of Y chromosome from the inner part of the head, which is transmitted from male to male each generation."

Well, maybe. But I don't believe a chic bullshit detector is a logical possibility.

I recall it looking that way at the time, too. Of course, in each case, there was a lag between when the train left the station and when Microsoft realized it needed to be on it, and in that interval, it was preoccupied with the things you describe.

The tablet/touch part must hurt because, for once, they were pioneers of the software technology (albeit on a mainframe-sized surface), but then they repeated Xerox' canonical mistake (that's definitely a retrospective view - I didn't see it coming at the time. I am a curmudgeon in these matters, and for most purposes, I still find a mouse to be superior to any of its supposed replacements, including touch - Englebart was a genius.)

In my reading of its history, Microsoft has spent a good deal of its existence catching up with one train or another. Two notable examples: GUIs and the internet.

I'm amused by the ironic juxtaposition of your post and your sig.

You must be a philosopher, because your analysis, and the course of action that you derive from it, is only valid in a possible world that we don't live in. In the real world, society incurs expenses all the time to protect itself from malicious parties. Last time I bought a car, they were still putting locks on them. If you want to get worked up over this, you should start with the defense budget of the nation you live in.

Your response targets someone who is arguably being exploited by the scheme, rather than those who instigated and profit from it.

I agree with Dishevel, and I do also use the 'please hold' response - maybe it will get me flagged as 'waste of time'. If there was an easy way to be more than a trivial inconvenience to them, I would do it.

Agreed, and I wonder if the judges are thinking of situations such as where a company texts one of their drivers while she is on the road, especially if the company has created an environment where the driver is under pressure to respond immediately.

On the other hand, this is mainly just another revenue stream for lawyers, because you know it is going to be pursued in every case, regardless of whether it is plausible the sender knew, and the sender will have to defend against it.

The only abuse here is the cold-calling (I am, of course, writing from an ethics point of view, which should not be confused with the legal or telco views.)