Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.

If you can afford it, something from Ettus would better suit your application.

Here in the UK it varies between unwise for commercial businesses to use US data storage through against internal rules for many government organisations to straight illegal for anything that has personal information like hospitals and police.

Well, yeah ... and this has been true since the PATRIOT Act was passed.

The US is now an inherently untrustworthy nation as far as data and technology goes.

You can't say it's your right to spy on everybody and then be surprised when the rest of the world tells you to piss off.

I should think US firms would be becoming pariahs around the world -- because the only rational thing you can do is to assume that any US company which has access to your data is being forced to spy on you. Because, they pretty much are.

The amazing thing is Americans might start to act like whiny bitches who say "but that's not fair to stop buying our stuff because we're spying on you", and wouldn't understand why there is no way they can be trusted.

So, congratulations, America. You've shot yourselves in the foot. And all of a sudden no sane person outside of the US can trust you with data. Don't act all surprised.

At some point, I'm expecting some aggressive whining about trade agreements to try to force people to buy products which will spy on them as the government throws a tantrum protesting the logical outcomes of their own policy.

Having billions of dollars in exports disappear is pretty much what the US should expect.

LOL ... since when do chefs have time to hang out on Slashdot? (Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

More on topic, I don't see how 3D printing pasta is going to work, for example. You're going to probably end up with some slime which comes apart when you cook it.

It won't be an actual dough, it's going to be ... well, I don't know what exactly. I just don't see this retaining the properties of dough.

I can see some of the molecular wizards like Wylie Dufresne or poeople like that, doing wacky things .. but the example of ravioli just seems like this wouldn't work at all.

This sounds more like the domain of crap food made at commercial scales, than actual good food prepared by chefs.

You want to play 'semantic games'?

When 'opsec' is outlawed, only outlaws will have opsec.

In other words: if you're employing opsec, you will be construed as a terrorist, and the NSA et al will use even more secret laws to fuck you over even more.

There is no scenario in this security paranoid world in which being secretive about your actions isn't red flags.

Which is precisely why these 'intelligence' outfits need to have much shorter leashes. Quite possibly suspended from trees high enough to keep their feet off the ground.

In this opsec boils down to "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear", and the fucking fascists have won. It is now illegal to make it difficult for the government to spy on you when it wishes to.

and that's not even getting into the financial and executive parts of things

Yeah, and tell us, what is the track record of the financial and executive teams ability to prognosticate?

Yes, you need to be able to estimate to run the business.

But let's not pretend the average CEO, sales wanker, or marketing idiot has ANY better track record at making guesses about the future. In fact, in my experience, they're overly optimistic, not founded in anything real, and mostly pulled out of their ass of based on what Gartner tells them.

We can give you an estimate, but people have to understand that an estimate inherently carries uncertainty, and that they're equally inept over the long run of estimating the parts they're responsible for.

I've lost track of the times I've rolled by eyes when a CEO tells us what six months down the road will be ... and they have the ability waste far more money on fools errands and bad predictions.

We're not dissociated from reality ... we're the ones trying to explain reality to people who live in fantasy land.

But don't act for a minute like our estimates carry any more risk than those bullshit sales figures the idiots at the top are making.

On the one hand, it's pretty much impossible to do any project planning with no estimates.

On the other hand, some things are impossible to estimate until you do them.

Years ago I worked with a manager who kept repeating that bad estimates were a project risk and we should give good estimates. We kept telling him that an estimate is, by definition, based on incomplete knowledge and before you have done the work and that if he had a time machine we could give him better estimates.

If I knew exactly how long it would take, and what unforseen things I'd be running into ... it wouldn't be a frickin' estimate, now would it?

People treat estimates like you're expected to have perfect knowledge of the future, and then build their world around those estimates.

I have seen a tremendous amount of bullshit and stupidity from people who do not understand what an estimate is, and how it's done.

I don't think you can get rid of estimates entirely ... but management needs to stop being so stupid about how they interpret them.

If we could tell you for a fact exactly how long it would take, it wouldn't be a fucking estimate.

I rank how people do estimates right up there with how some PMs want you to track your time ... once had a PM say he wanted me to account for my time in 5 minute increments. And I told him in no uncertain terms that would mean 2 out of every 5 minutes would be spent documenting what I'd done the last two minutes, and there would be an additional 1 minute of lost time in each 5 minute increment doing to context switch back to what I was working, and that effectively 60% of my time would be wasted on his stupidity.

And then I told him to piss off.

We think after we build this new PCB we can go for the croudfunded manufacturing run. It's mostly surface-mount, and we expect to sell assembled boards in this run, and then the next version will be fully-packaged radios.

Hi AC,

Matt Ettus has a story about a Chinese cloner of the USRP. The guy tells Chinese customers that it is illegal for them to buy from Ettus, they must buy from the cloner instead. Then, when they have problems and require serivce, he tells them to get it from Ettus. Who of course made nothing from their device sales and can not afford to service them.

This is not following the rules of Open anything. It's counterfeiting.

So, sometimes it is necessary to change the license a little so that you will not be a chump. I discussed the fact that the hardware is fully disclosed but not Open Hardware licensed with RMS, the software is 100% Free Software, and there is a regulatory chip you can't write. We can go for Respects Your Freedom certification that way..

I've paid my dues as far as "Open" is concerned, and Chris has too. This is all we can give you this time.

The case selection was so that we'd have at least one case that would work. We did not take much time on it. We'd be happy to have other people designing and selling cases.

The version after this one requires cases that look like real radios. That is going to be a bigger problem. We don't yet have a mold-design partner, etc.

We implement it as a chip that intercepts the serial bus to the VFO chip, and disallows certain frequencies. On FCC-certified equipment we might have to make that chip and the VFO chip physically difficult to get at by potting them or something. This first unit is test-equipment and does not have the limitation.

Anyone who is good at electronics can get around regulatory lockouts. We're not allowed to make it easy. But nor are we technically able to make it impossible.

U.S. regulation only allows Part 95 certified radios to be used on GMRS, and Part 95 requires that the radio be pretty well locked down. But all of those Asian imports are certified for Part 90 and there are lots of users putting them on both Amateur and GMRS. If FCC wanted to push the issue with any particular licensee, they could.

The D-STAR issue is not really ICOM's fault. JARL designed D-STAR (not ICOM) and put the AMBE codec in it because nobody believed that you could have a good open codec at the time. We now have Codec2 (a project I evangelized and recruited the developer) which is fully open. And we do have a software AMBE decoder in Open Source, although the patents won't let us use it. That is why I am working on the patent issue (as noted in the last slide of the presentation).

I know about the counterfeit FTDI chips, and Matt Ettus told me what has happened with the Chinese clone of USRP. We know what to do.

And it's because of No-Code. We looked at the licensing statistics and thought we'd preside over the end of Amateur Radio in our own lifetimes. That's the main reason I worked on no-code. There was really strong opposition among the old contingent, and ARRL fought to preserve the code for as long as they could. Someone even asked me to let Amateur Radio die with dignity rather than sully it with no-code hams. Gee, I am glad that fight is over.

Though a nice compromise might be to allow such things in certain bands only.

That is why there are different radio services. Hams really only have a few corners here and there of the radio spectrum. There really is a service for everyone, although you should be aware that the entire HF spectrum would fit in a few WiFi channels, and all of the Amateur HF spectrum would fit in one. So, we don't really have the bandwidth at all. And people who want the bandwidth on UHF already have WiFi and the various sorts of RF links, etc.

The internet really sucks and we don't want another one on ham radio. Nor could we possibly have the bandwidth to support one. The entire HF spectrum fits in just a few WiFi channels.

To satisfy the demands of the "it should be anything goes" crowd, we have CB radio. And there are all of the common carriers, etc.

So, I can't sympathize, and even if I did, there are not the technical resources there.

Sorry.