A laptop is its own UPS and surge protector.

The first paragraph of your comment makes a bit of sense. The second one is out there in la-la land. Your "SJW type" sounds like a straw man. Do you honestly think that people who receive rape and death threats, then publicize these threats, are doing it for the "attention, money, or political power"?

I believe he's referring to displays that cost less than the Pi... from thrift stores. Spending $200 on a screen for a $25 computer is a bit silly. (I know that some folks use the Pi as a $25 computer for the $200 display they already have, but...)

This is achieved by having a really big aperture. In this case, the array is spread out over 15 km, so the aperture is effectively that size. Try putting a 15 km array of telescopes in space! The information processing is necessary to combine the signals, as a 15 km single-dish antenna would be a bit tricky to set up.

One number that's woefully missing from the news stories is the wavelength (frequency) at which the observation was made. NRAO has made two sets of receivers, at 3 mm and 1.3 mm wavelengths, for this array. Other countries have made different receivers, but I don't know if any of those are being used right now. Ned more information!

This image is the result of a 25 year project to build a big interferometric array of millimeter-wave radio telescopes in Chile. The ALMA array is a mind-bogglingly complex system of 60+ telescopes, a correlator to combine all the signals, some bleeding-edge technology to maintain phase coherence of gigahertz signals traveling over many kilometers of optical fibers, and a bunch of other feats of engineering. I am awed by the results, and amazed that it was possible to get the whole thing to work.

I'm privileged to get to work on a prototype antenna for this project, which was just installed on Kitt Peak and commissioned today.

I met one of the guys who did this work at JPL, Jim Blinn, 30 years ago. He was quite a knowledgeable astronomy guy in addition to being a first-rate computer animator.

We don't celebrate DST in Tucson, but all my distant suppliers etc. do, so I have to adjust my mental clock to deal with their different offsets.

3D printing is useless at these frequencies. The metal blocks that the waveguides and mixers live in are machined with a milling machine capable of one micron precision. The dimensions are that critical.

I work in submillimeter wave astronomy, where we would be happy to have a terahertz preamplifier for our receivers. We currently use miers mixer that work at that frequency, but the mixer has to be made with superconducting waveguide to have good performance. There are about five places in the world that know how to make that sort of chip.

I don't think it's all that wise to use the phones you got from your customers, as they are probably "interesting characters" as well.

Yes, it's reasonable to assume that your cellphone is betraying your every move, if it's on you. The cops ignore the laws anyways - we have to deal with it somehow. The bet way is to not make it easy for them, by using other ways of communicating that don't trigger the cop spying machinery.

Carrying a tracking device is not a good idea if you don't want to be tracked. Cellphones are basically tracking devices that also place phone calls and take photos of incriminating evidence.

Leave your phone at home when doing naughty things - it will give you an alibi!

...or they aren't measuring the output power correctly. That test setup is way too skimpy to actually measure output power accurately.

Your item #4 is intriguing. I was surprised to see the thing sitting in a shelf in the open with nary a test probe in sight. How *are* they measuring the emitted power?

I want to see a detailed writeup on the experiment!

My nephew showed up with a clean, original model M at robotics meting the other day. He might have gotten it from his dad, my twin brother, a fellow with way too many ancient IBM PCs. Like these.