This exists, it's called the SIPRnet. You can only access it from secure workstations in secure facilities, and in theory all the network hardware is also secure, etc., etc.

AFAIK, the only recent SIPRnet compromise was Bradley Manning, and that was more of a social exploit than a technical one.

The only reason the UN was even minimally effective was because it provided a venue for the nuclear powers -- who almost exclusively make up the Security Council -- to hash out problems diplomatically. Without the constant threat of nuclear war to bring those parties to the table, literally and figuratively, there's no reason to think that the UN would have been any more effective than the League of Nations.

And the League, as you'll recall, was also set up in the aftermath of a staggeringly destructive war, by a great number of very committed people, and it couldn't and didn't do the job. In other words, the memory of the utter hell that was the Great War wasn't enough, even among people who had lived through it, to keep the peace through diplomatic methods alone. However, the threat of total global annihilation has kept things in check for more than three generations now.

Given how close the Cold War came to going 'hot' even with nuclear weapons making it into a no-win situation, it's laughable to suggest that we wouldn't have gone there in their absence -- when either side could have talked themselves into believing that they could have obtained a real advantage by fighting.

The horrors of conventional war have never been enough to keep people from deluding themselves into thinking that it can be won (because, bluntly, it can be); nuclear war is unique in that it is quite obvious that there can be no winner, and it is to everyone's advantage to avoid, all the time.

Entirely plausible that the place where the Al is smelted isn't the same place it's worked into finished products... but letting it cool down would just waste huge amounts of energy, since it would then have to be reheated.

In Homestead, PA, there used to be an iron smelter on one side of the river and a steel foundry on the other. They'd smelt the iron and pour it directly out of the blast furnaces into waiting rail cars, then haul it over a bridge to the other side, still molten hot, where it would be made into steel. I'm not sure why they didn't put both facilities on the same side of the river... but I assume it must have been something to do with a shortage of riverfront property on either side causing the split.

This all ended in the late 70s, but I've talked to locals who said that it caused quite a show; the rail cars had open tops and you could see the glowing iron inside as the cars went across the bridge. (The bridge, incidentally, still exists; most of the factory infrastructure is gone.)

Agree with the first part but disagree with the second.

If you get your license and join a local club, and you're not totally unpleasant to be around, my experience is that you'll probably find someone willing to loan you (or just give you outright) enough gear to get started. My local club has an assortment of starter gear that they lend out to new hams, on a sort of indefinite 'gentlemans agreement' that once you get your own rig set up you'll return it to the club or pass it along to another new Ham. There's always someone willing to lend expensive stuff that you only need to use occasionally, too, like TDRs or antenna analyzers.

I'd definitely recommend that anyone new to the hobby join a local club -- if possible more than one, or at least 'shop around' a little and find one that has other members that match your interests. It can dramatically decrease the cost of getting set up.

If you can, you should investigate using some sort of ladder line rather than coax; even if you are using an antenna design that would require a balun, you will probably still do better in terms of signal loss with a 100 foot run. Of course, the tradeoff is that it'd be HF only, but it sounds like you probably already have a VHF/UHF antenna. (Also you can use an antenna, like a G5RV, that's optimized for feeding by ladder line.)

I've also seen some very clever homebrew arrangements where you can basically make your own heavy-duty ladder line by stretching THHN wire from 2x4 posts sunk at intervals into the ground. Similar to old knob-and-tube wiring almost. It's quite elegant looking when done right.

And this is a problem ... why?

Imagine if we actually required the sort of test that some old farts seem to advocate for. Very few people would pass, new licenses would dry up, and eventually the cellcos and the other usual greedy suspects would steamroll whatever was left of the ARRL and have the spectrum reallocated. End of story.

Those "appliance operators" you speak so disparagingly of are, just by virtue of using the spectrum allocated to the Amateur service and perhaps being active in a local club or sending a few bucks to the ARRL, what keeps the hobby possible.

Frankly, I'm all for lowering the bar further, down to a nominal fee and a test that only covers the legal aspects and RF safety. Not because I don't think the electronics are important, but it's a hell of a lot easier to interest people in the electronics once they've already started to play around a bit and see the applied side of things, and we need the warm bodies if we want to hang onto the spectrum.

Also, there are valid aspects of Amateur Radio that really don't rely on or require much electronics knowledge. For some people, Amateur Radio is more of a means to some other end, or an accompaniment to some other interest/hobby. There are a significant number of people in my local club who are Red Cross volunteers or paid employees, and maintain Ham licenses in order to do EmComm stuff. That's a totally valid use of Amateur Radio, but it doesn't require much theoretical knowledge of radio, just the actual practical radio-operation skills to get the messages across.

The ARRL is slowly taking more of a "big tent" philosophy, and it's time for the rest of the community to be a bit more welcoming if we want to have any hope of surviving for a few more decades.

Also, I doubt that exterior paint is a fraction of the paint sold; most is probably interior paint.

In my house, based just on the layers of paint on windowsills and baseboards, there have been at least 4-5 complete interior paint jobs. (Corresponding to each time the house has been sold.) There's been only one done outside in the same period. It may be a slightly more extreme than usual case, but I suspect most houses are similar. I'd bet the interior of a house has more paintable surface area, too (think about ceilings!).

It's a whole lot easier to just have someone come in and blow fiberglass insulation into the attic than change the pitch of the roof. Engineer the roof for the snow/wind load, then insulate the living spaces below.

In a modern, well-insulated house, the attic isn't part of the heated living space anyway. If you're heating or cooling your attic, you're doing a lot of things wrong.

They're talking about flat roofs, which you normally find in cities, on large buildings, and can't see from the street, not pitched roofs like you find on SFHs in the sub/exurbs.

For houses there are "high albedo" shingles in traditional colors that you can buy. They look fairly normal but reflect back a larger percentage of infrared insolation than a traditional asphalt shingle. Light grey also works better than black.

Nobody is really suggesting that you go painting a shingled roof white.

and have not been produced in mass since the 80's

You wanna provide a cite for that? No? I kinda doubt it, because I have an alarm clock sitting right next to me which I know from experience drifts like crazy when it's not connected to AC power, kinda indicative that it's not using the same timebase all the time, and it's only a few years old. Lots of clocks (alarm clocks especially) only use internal oscillators as a backup when running on battery, and they often don't do a very good job. And this is a Sony; the cheap ones like you'll find in millions of hotel rooms are probably even cheaper -- it wouldn't surprise me if they have no battery or internal oscillator at all.

I don't doubt that the circuits inside most of them were designed in the 80s, but that doesn't mean much.

Says the person who has never tried to run a Mr Coffee off of a shitty generator. Let me tell you, it won't work. Freaked the fuck out. (Only the timer/clock part -- luckily the heater part still ran OK, or we all would have been doomed.)

Lots of people in this discussion are seriously underestimating the number of things that use line frequency as a reference, and overestimating the number that use quartz crystals in anything except a backup. Many alarm clocks do have crystals, but use them only when running on batteries. My alarm clock that's sitting right next to me -- a Sony that you can buy at WalMart right now if you want -- is like this. When the power goes out it runs on the battery (if you have one installed and it actually has any juice), but in this mode it will lose time like crazy. After an all-night power outage this winter it was off by a good 10 minutes or so. I've noticed the same behavior with other clocks, too. (My oven does the same thing except I never have the backup battery in it anyway.)

Yeah I don't really see this catching on in the short term; there aren't that many use cases where you need the the anonymity of cash, but where you can't just use cash. Buying grey- or black-market stuff online seems to be the major one, and if that's the only market you can be sure the regulators are going to come after them.

Eventually -- maybe in my lifetime, maybe not -- I think governments are going to try and get rid of cash. We think of cash as being a frictionless medium for exchange, and it's certainly better than barter or carrying around large amounts of metallic coinage, but it's not that easy to manage. Cash has to be physically moved from one place to another (e.g. a merchant has to physically make a deposit at the end of the business day, banks have to physically return worn bills to the Federal Reserve and get new ones, etc.) and that involves a lot of trouble and expense.

I wouldn't be surprised to see some sort of system that allowed banks -- and eventually, merchants -- to deposit bills into the Federal Reserve by scanning them and then shredding the paper. You'd probably have to add additional information onto the bills on top of the serial numbers that are there right now, maybe some sort of electronic signature in 2D barcode form, but I don't think it's totally impractical. From there you could start phasing out cash in favor of some sort of debit system.

Like I said, I don't think it's imminent, but it wouldn't surprise me if it started to happen in my lifetime.

Erm, what? Gold is pretty useful stuff. At the end of the day, aside from just looking pretty, it's useful as an electrical conductor, in many chemical processes, and you can hammer it out into a sheet only a few atoms thick if you're really motivated. Pretty neat stuff really.

By using it as currency we probably keep the price several times higher than it would otherwise be as a purely industrial metal, but the value would not be zero. Same with silver, platinum, iridium, and other metals that are used both industrially and traded as currency or as investments. Part of the reason they're used as currency is because their value is backstopped by their industrial uses. (Especially true of platinum-group metals.)

Now if you want an example of something that's almost totally worthless ... large diamonds. Small diamonds are handy, mostly as abrasives, but large ones? Nothing to them but "teh shiny" and a lot of advertising. Diamonds, when you get right down to it, are basically a sort of voluntary fiat currency where people agree that they're valuable not because any government says they're valuable, but because other people think so. If everyone decided at once that they weren't, and that they weren't willing to pay lots of money to put them on jewelry, they'd be good for nothing but crushing up to make tile-saw blades.

There are many people who would argue that we'd be better off going to half or even a tenth of that resolution (nickel or dime resolution, respectively). I think it might cause some issues when doing transactions that involve multiplying a unit price across many units, e.g., imagine a data connection priced in kB or MB, but you could always do the computation at some higher resolution and then round using a standard algorithm to nickels or dimes for payment. We already do that at the gas pump (where the price is calculated to the tenth of a cent but rounded to the nearest cent for payment) so it wouldn't be that much of a stretch.

Only argument against this tends to be that retailers would do shady things with the rounding if the amount became even remotely significant. You could probably fix that legislatively, though.