Wondering why this is better than a diode detector, I tracked down some actually relevant info

"The Rydberg atoms convert an RF amplitude measurement into an optical frequency measurement, which is directly proportional to the strength of the field through Planck’s constant. This technique allows for self calibrated, directly SI-traceable E-field measurements over a large range of frequencies, from 0.1 1000 GHz. The spatial resolution of these measurements can be much smaller than the RF wavelength. This allows us to measure the field distribution inside a waveguide and determine the maximum field."

Source: https://tsapps.nist.gov/public...

Like the increased accuracy of atomic clocks, the ability to tie power level calibrations back to fundamental physical units is useful, to be sure. It doesn't even hint at this in the original story.

AMEN!

I was deplatformed by Cory and the crew at BoingBoing about two years go, without recourse or appeal, it sucked.

Try to inject a view that isn't flaming liberal, or crazy alt-right, and they have an immune reaction, and kick you off their platform.

The walled gardens let you do some things you can't easily do on the public internet, like, retweet, reply, limit your audience, etc. The obvious downsides are advertising, and arbitrary decisions of corporations.

Contrast this to blogs and RSS feeds. If you pay for hosting, and stay within the confines of your agreement, you're likely to be able to say almost anything that is legal, and never have to worry about censorship or moderation, because you end up censoring yourself. You directly face the consequences of your speech, which is much closer to the way things should be.

So.. you write a blog... how do you know if someone liked or reposted your content? Google and other search engines provided a feedback loop, but that took time, and created additional worries, such as a dependence on Google RSS feeds help, once you have discovered someone, you can use it to keep track of their future posts.

Likes and reposts, replies, etc.. either had to be dealt with on a per blog basis, or by migrating to one of the walled gardens.

I propose that we make reads, likes, etc. public, or encrypted and public, and self hosted. For each blog, there should be a standard way to post reply URLs (and only the URL)... now spam is an issue, and I've got ideas on how to deal with that... but if we break up the functionality (ALL of the functionality) of Facebook, Twitter, etc so that every piece of data they collected is owned by, and managed by us... wouldn't that be a good thing?

A standard blog would have
    A> a standard way to submit a "reply URL"...
    B> a creative commons license that allowed republishing with attribution.

You would read my post, and your reader would then allow you to inform me you read it, liked it, commented on it, reposted it, etc... it would do so by first posting the reply to YOUR blog, then sending the URL of that post to the "reply URL" bot.

Once the URL was received, it could be retrieved, validated, etc... and used to count reads, likes, etc.

Absolutely no involvement of any search engine would be required to post and get replies, thus feedback could be *almost* as fast as on twitter, facebook, etc.

With DRM, we no longer control what is executed on our own machines. With HTTPS everywhere, it becomes almost impossible to monitor traffic to/from our devices, which we don't control, and increasingly don't own. Hiding DNS just adds to the difficulty.

We are one enabling event away from the end of legal general purpose computing for the masses.

The introduction makes a vague claim that matter and energy are one and the same... we already know that. The real guts of the theory are behind a $140 paywall.

All the answers are non-zero, thus the true answer is missing.

A fast factorization algorithm will be disclosed mid-summer 2021, but before this fact, an unknown quantity of wallets will have been drained, starting from 2018 until that time, using said method. The resulting chaos will erase all confidence in Bitcoin. A solution will be a compromise which re-issues balances in a new currency bearing the same name. The "classic bitcoin" will be worthless after that point.

That was an interesting first challenge... I did it in Pascal... but the SQL entry seems to be the most oddball so far.

So there is now effectively a group conspiring to push their view of reality on everyone. Nobody involved has the self awareness to consider this might backfire horribly?

You have to have a well developed attention to detail of you want to be a machinist. The days of manual lathe and mill operation are coming to an end. If you can't handle CNC machines, and the inherent risk of trashing thousands of dollars of tooling every time you hit GO... it's not for you.

You'll be responsible for taking large heavy expensive pieces of material, and removing just the right amount of chips to get all the required dimensions within tolerances that can range down to 1/40th the thickness of a human hair. (Usually it's a lot looser... you can be a hair off).

It's amazing what can be done, if you're careful, and skilled at your craft, and you keep your tools and machines in good order.

Also remember that the machines can kill you, or far far worse... and never should you google degloved to see what I mean.

Something like 80% of people who have had Covid have long term health effects, even if they were asymptomatic. Let's assume, in a way similar to smoking, we estimate it takes 5 years off your life, on average.. We're at 10,000,000 cases here, give or take... that means we've lost about 5,000,000 years of human experience... if we let it keep going until everyone in the US has it, we're talking about 1.5 BILLION years of life lost.

Manufacturers decided that removable batteries make it too easy to keep old stuff alive, so they seal them in.

This leaves the consumer with a brick which MIGHT still have secrets on it.
This forces the consumer to keep it as far away from recyclers, or anyone else who might be able to retrieve those secrets as possible.

Thus, it ends up in a pile somewhere, or gets secretly tossed along with the cat litter, etc.

Apple and its kin are directly responsible for this mess.

First we need to build a mine/factory that can replicate itself, no matter how crudely. If we can mine enough materials to make enough stock to build a second mine and machine shop, and power source, we're set.

Once that's up and running, I'll decide what to pack.

I suspect a yagi would work just fine. You never have to rotate it, just aim it at the earth, and you're done. (The moon is tidally locked to facing the earth) You aren't trying to receive a reflection, just a direct line of sight, so the losses are MUCH lower. The transmitters on the Apollo experiments were 1 watt, and did just fine.

I wrote a system in then 1980s using Turbo Pascal, under MS-DOS to control water meter calibration. It has graphics and multi-tasking (I rolled my own cooperative multi-tasking and open-sourced it back then).. There were no Y2K problems. It last required attention in 2004 because an IO board had to be replaced, and they accidentally swapped the cables when they did it.... swapping them back fixed it. 8)
As far as I know it will outlive me because it does the job, and there's no reason to replace it.