Have lately been reading everything I can find on Tesla, hoping to find a rational scientific explanation of his "discoveries".
Unfortunately everything so far has been utter balderdash. Just an endless stream of hype.

I had hoped that "Man Out of Time would be better, but sadly it is not.
Cheney seems to be yet another author who has drunk the Tesla Cool Aid.

We hear repeatedly about "Powerful Vacuum Tubes" which turn out to be Geissler tubes,
and how Tesla would "let 100,000 volts harmlessly pass through his body" (no mention that it's high-impedance, and that nerves don't respond to H.F.)
And talk about his secret "High Power Oscillator", which was just a steam-driven linear generator.
Over and over we are told that "Scientists to this day don't know how this was done" when obviously most of it is third rate stage magic.

Hopefully one day a technically literate author will write a book which describes Telsa's work, but without all the hype and misdirection.

Sorry, but NO.

Animals (and people) don't have complex impedances.

They are purely resistive (to all practical purposes)

I forgot.

The question is: Will it work if you are out of range of the towers, or does it need the network to do the handshaking?

Once there was private peer-to-peer radio. It was called "Ham Radio". But the companies couldn't charge for it, so they made the radios always work through their base stations and called it "Cellular Radio". And of course they removed the peer-to-peer function.

But wait, now it's back! (in a way that can be monetised of course).

Likewise I started with a KIM-1 !

Also a SYM-1 and then a Rockwell AIM-65.
Then built my own version with a 6502 and a MM57109.

Then the Apple II came along...

Any kind of Multiplexing requires additional bandwidth.
TANSTAAFL.

If there's no change, there's no data encoded.

It's still modulation, modulation creates sidebands, and sidebands require bandwidth.

Nothing has changed, the Shannon–Hartley theorem still rules.

It depends on the country, but in general it's OK to encrypt control codes, but not OK to encrypt data. Although shared keys probably fix the problem.

BTW, encryption is already permitted (in the ham bands) in many countries. The only catch is that the encryption must be via a publicly disclosed method.
There are many encrypted ham standards, PSK31 WSPR, WSJT, MAP65, Hellscriber, etc, etc.

The main reason (for public methods) is to prevent commercial organisations taking advantage of the generous Amateur Radio provisions.

You can now. Just stick to the allocated ISM bands (eg WiFi).

What you can't do now is build your own transmitter without a ham license. This obviously is to prevent interference to other services.

The philosophy is simple. License the Radio or License the Operator. The Amateur Operator has passed sufficient technical barrier to ensure that they won't do stupid things and cause interference.

There is one catch however. The Amateur License excluded commercial operations. To do that you need a commercial license.

The amateur license is primarily for self education.

What a lousy article.

I've read that a vacuum sucks the fish into the tube, and then air pressure propels them along the tube, but how the hell is that achieved?

How do you get a vacuum at the start and then pressure all the way up?

I think it's the exactly opposite.
The modern programming environment is trying hard to lock the programmer into a box where he can't do much harm...

No one has more control over the computer than an Assembler language programmer.

And there's still lots of Assembly programming going on today.

Some further info on Side Wicki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...

"A good substitute could be the Google Chrome Extension: "Plus Comments" or "Site Comments":

Likewise I have been trying to find or remember this tool.

I though it a very interesting idea. What happened to it?

My problem with the Kindle Touch that changing pages frequently invokes some unwanted function. It is infuriating to change page and get the Change Font, or Annotate, or Save Clipping dialogs. I understand that some users like these functions. I don't, I hate them. I wish I could switch them off.