Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:would love to visit (Score 3, Informative) 48

There are two ways anyone can visit PARC:
1. PARC Forum every Thursday http://www.parc.com/events/forum.html
      Not a guided tour, but you get to ask questions. And the talks are available for viewing afterward.
      I've asked questions of Guido van Rossum (a famous Dutchman no doubt you know) and Jill Tarter (SETI), and dozens of others.
2. Art exhibits
      There are art exhibits occasionally and they have guided tours of the art on specified days.
      You don't get to ask any questions; it's just an art exhibit space.

Intel has a small museum you can visit, and the Computer History Museum in Mountain View is a must-see.
The Tech computer museum in San Jose is iffy even if you have kids (exhibits aren't well maintained) though the imax theatre there is nice.

Now, what can I see in Amsterdam ;-)

Comment Re:Nothing to see here (Score 2) 84

I'm totally lost here; want to try again?

Uh. Yeah. I think FCC rules prohibit encryption.

They do not.

And we are talking about radio, not wired communications.

Security issues in radio and wired communications are almost the same unless you can guarantee no physical access to your wire.

You want privacy? Use a phone.

Phones are radios.

Comment Re:I'm still Calling BS (Score 1) 212

Guys, I was illustrating flawed thinking - my whole post was about flaws. I was not asserting that UV cannot deliver enough energy to break bonds. Of course it can.

I'm still kinda lost but I'm willing to believe you're saying something. Want to try again?

As far as your other points about density of cell towers, going from an area with a single distant tower to an area with great cell coverage (i.e. an increase in cell tower density) would cause a decrease in phone transmit power at the phone of tens of dB, and a decrease in absolute power of at least several hundred milliwatts, which would result in a drastically decreased SAR. The increase in power from the surrounding cell towers received in the area with higher tower density would be in the nanowatt range. Receive threshold for a cell phone is in the roughly -100dBm range, or 10^-10 milliwatt or 10^-13 watt. If you had poor cell coverage, that's what the signal strength would be at your phone. If you have two cell towers which give you that same amount of received power, the total power received would be -97dBm, or in round terms, still about 10^-10 milliwatt. If you had ten towers nearby each was -90dBm (i.e. ten times as strong) that's 20dB difference or a signal strength of -80dBm total or about 10^-8 milliwatt. So the increase in power at your point is in the nanowatt range.

So going from one barely usable cell tower to ten strong ones gives you an increase in received power of a nanowatt, and yet your phone transmit power goes down from 1 watt to 20dB less or 10 milliwatts. So total, you transmit 990 mw less and receive 1 nanowatt more. The nanowatt is clearly so small that you can ignore it.

TL;DR: If there are more cell towers, the absolute only thing that matters is your phone transmit power is now drastically lower when the cell coverage is better.

Comment Re:Cancer is a fungus, known prior as Consumption. (Score 1) 212

The nature of EMF from transmitters is that most communications and food preparation equipment are operating at near the resoant frequency of water:

No, that's wrong. Dipole resonance of water molecules is around 20 GHz. Microwave ovens are 2.5 GHz and 915 MHz. Those frequencies are allocated as ISM bands. All RF causes heating by absorption, even light.

cell phones and WIFI are operating near the resonant frequency of water to improve their line-of-sight communications through the atmosphere, while microwave ovens actuallty agitate the water molecules in edible food

No, that's wrong. If something absorbs RF and turns it into heat, it's not going to pass it through without loss as well. You're claiming two contradictory things in the same sentence.

to generate heat that supposedly cooks the food if not change the chemical structure of it to something worse.

Yes, you're right. Heat does cook food. Cooking food changes the chemical structure. That's why we cook it. It's done by heat. A 2000 watt Infrared lamp in a stove can cook food because of heat, but it doesn't cause cancer. A 2000 watt microwave oven can cook food because of heat. A fire can cook food because of heat. A lens can concentrate the electromagnetic radiation from the sun and cook a hot dog or kill an ant. If you look at the sun, the lens in your eye will concentrate the energy on a sensitive part of your anatomy and you will go blind. A 2000 watt radio transmitter can cook you because of heat, and you would not want that, so you should avoid being near concentrated electromagnetic energy, because it will induce heat into the soft tissues of your body just as it does chicken breast, and you will get cooked.

In the matter of Cell Phones, wherever region that transmitter is held on the body is where it impugns the Immune System from fuctioning

So what is your proposed mechanism by which some frequencies you have picked ("cell phones", "wi fi") cause immune system suppression now that you know that the special distinction you supposed for these frequencies (by exciting water molecules at resonance) isn't true? How do you propose to decide that heat energy induced in the body by cell phones is more dangerous that heat energy induced by the heat lamp in the bathroom ceiling, or the heat you get from sitting in the sunny part of the yard instead of the shady part?

You want to read about microwave ovens? Go to wikipedia.

Comment Re:OXCOs are cheap and common right now (Score 1) 134

For those of us who need accurate clocks and don't have $1500 to spend, highly stable temp controlled oscillator chips are cheap and common right now. (Search eBay for OXCO)

For example, this one (which I'm using) is accurate in the PPB range:

An OXCO has excellent phase noise and short term stability, but drifts. A Cs reference has better long term stability. An Rb device has pretty good long term stability once you factor out the linear "aging" (i.e., a constant change). GPS-DO combine GPS receivers with firmware and discipline another oscillator, usually a quartz crystal because of the low phase noise.

So the right way to compare these various references is with an Allan deviation plot, which rates the stability across different time scales.

For this new Symmetricom product, they list the following Stability in their Allan deviation chart (no plot, hmmm):
Tau = 1s ADEV = 2e-10
Tau = 10s ADEV = 7e-11
Tau = 100s ADEV = 2e-11
Tau = 1000s ADEV = 7e-12

They similarly give phase noise, aging, initial calibration accuracy, etc.

FEI's 5680A Rb product at http://freqelec.com/rb_osc_fe5680a.html shows their ADEV plot, so I squinted at it and read these values:
Tau = 1s ADEV ~ 3e-11
Tau = 10s ADEV ~ 3e-12
Tau = 100s ADEV ~ 7e-13
Tau = 1000S ADEV ~ 3e-13

Further than that (days) and you start running into aging corrections.

An Rb unit you buy off eBay isn't likely to perform like this; you'd need a temperature-controlled room, and need to keep it away from 60Hz fields (the magnetic field is used to "tune" the transition, I think due to the anomalous Zeeman effect, but I could be wrong). Also, a NIST scientist told me that gravity effects are strong as well, so it must be calibrated at the same altitude as use to get these 10^-12 and better numbers.

Still, for about $100 for either an Rb or a GPS-DO, they're pretty good. The OXCO is pretty good too, but beats the Rb or GPS-DO only in phase noise. (Oh, and cost and power consumption.)

Comment Re:And? (Score 1) 188

Standard atomic clocks are a Cesium or Rubidium based standard.

Rb oscillators aren't used for primary standards, only Cs. Rb oscillators can be set from a primary standard and retain that calibration exceedingly well, but they aren't primary standards themselves. (I have three of them, and they didn't agree until I adjusted them.)

Comment Re:50hz vs 60hz (Score 4, Interesting) 286

I wonder how much of the power capacity issues is due to Japan using a combination of 50Hz and 60Hz power preventing them from easily sending power between the two systems?

We have essentially 3 separate grids in the US, roughly East, West, and Texas. (Most of Texas is pretty much on its own.) Plus we have some long-distance high-voltage DC runs, both from Canada and up one down through Central California. NPR has a nice graphic, but in Flash: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=110997398

The 50/60 Hz 100/90v division line in Japan dates to the year 1600 and the battle of Seki-ga-hara

Slashdot Top Deals

You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all alike.

Working...