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Comment Geekhack and Deskthority. (Score 1) 452

You should be aiming this question at forums where people do nothing but ponder keyboards all day, such as the above mentioned Geekhack and Deskthority.

I personally use a Cherry G86 series keyboard. It's pretty nice as rubber domes go, has a width equal to or less than that of any tenkeyless (without actually having to be tenkeyless), and has loads of programmable keys.

If you want something with a nice tactile feel that isn't loud, turn your eye toward something with Topre switches, such as Realforce. They don't come cheap, but they have garnered praise from many keyboard snobs. Basically they're about as good as rubber domes get, which is why you'll pay a mechanical keyboard price for them. I believe Cooler Master even offers a version with Cherry MX compatible stems, if you're into customizing your keys.

Comment Re:Do it like the homestead act (Score 2) 115

First, under 30 MHz, waves can propagate out of an area somewhat erratically, so it's never just a regional thing. I'm inclined to agree with you re: UHF and beyond, though.

Second, once you got spectrum, how long do you have to deploy or lose it? You might not be in a position to jump into use of spectrum you weren't assured of getting, and may need time to alter equipment (and put up matching antennas) if you end up with a second-choice allocation, even if you did buy in advance.

Third, bandplans are regulated internationally, not just nationally, and this places restrictions on what the FCC can afford to do. For example, the 70 cm ham band is 420-450 MHz in the U.S., but only 430-450 in Canada, so use of 420-430 is not allowed in regions close to the border.

Comment Is that really a lot? (Score 5, Insightful) 280

Let's assume for a moment that they're serious about deporting people.

What's the cost if they get through, and have to be tracked down by traditional methods? What's the cost of putting more people there to achieve the same level of effectiveness? What's the cost of flying conventional aircraft to do the job?

When pitted against those methods by comparison, $28,000 might actually not be all that bad.

Comment Re:Technology can NOT eliminate work. (Score 1) 389

But barring brain trauma or breaking their necks or something, that time element means these athletes have time to transition into other careers. Some do, and not all of them go into sports media or coaching (although many do). Some buy car dealerships or other ordinary businesses, with greater or lesser degrees of success. Others may found ill-fated video game companies with large government loans, and crater after a couple years. The point is that the smart ones will use the money gained during their athletic careers to bootstrap something even bigger afterward -- or something just big enough to keep them happy without having to go back to crab fishing or herding sheep or whatever it is their family did before they got lucky.

Comment Re: Potential problem (Score 2) 106

Maybe TFA is bad at conveying what they're doing then, because the impression I got from it was "we have a way to electroplate multiple metals selectively by adjusting the voltage. Doing this enough times can make the bulk material much stronger." If laying down a plating layer nanometers thick is now "manipulating materials on a molecular level", then I can do that in my kitchen with less than $100 in equipment. I believe the thickness of the plating I typically lay down in a single pass is on the scale of four or five atoms, but I make hundreds of small passes, stop, clean, and make hundreds more. If I tank plate rather than brush plate, I don't have as much control, but it could still be done if I had an assistant (robot) to move the parts around for me.

Even if I grant both possibilities in full, how does this make them integral to each other? They could electroplate thousands of thin layers before, it just required moving parts between vats. This is obviously impractical from a human labor perspective, but it may not be substantial at all with machine labor, so it seems they have reduced a cost. They haven't solved a fundamental problem. Would you care to explain, with citations from TFA, how exactly I am clueless?

I know perfectly well how the metal ions deplete from the solution, changing the voltage and time required to get an effective coat. Once they drop below a certain level, it just stops working and throwing more power at it doesn't help. The mixture of solutes would have to be carefully monitored and controlled to prevent this from becoming an issue, at which point it seems simpler to me to use one bath per metal. You can recharge the solutions on a pretty regular basis that way, and not have to do much monitoring at all. You can step up voltage (to a point) to accommodate a weaker solution, without fearing that you're going to attract a different metal. Possibly most important for economy of scale, you can more easily recover the residuals of the spent solution for reprocessing if they haven't all been mixed together.

Comment Potential problem (Score 1) 106

Having done electroplating myself, though only on a small scale, I have noticed that sometimes applying an excessively high voltage doesn't make the solute metal ions stop attaching, it just makes them bring along some "scum" along with them. Most notably, throwing too much voltage at silver solution produces a black scum which must be cleaned off before anything else (including more silver) will stick. I have to imagine other metals have the same problem.

If one ion truly prefers a given voltage and sticks to the surface preferentially, this might block other ions that want to form the "scum", but I still think this would significantly limit the number and type of ions they can have in any given solution.

It also seems that the technology to do this is simpler than they are billing it -- pull the parts and dip them in each bath as needed. Rinse in between. We have robots to do this now, it's not like someone has to stand there and watch.

Comment Re:It has its places (Score 1) 64

Another upside: nobody is going to bitch about being "exposed to radiation" from such devices. If it's in a visible part of the spectrum, it doesn't count as Deadly Radiation.

That's what I meant when I said the safety profile is well known. Some people are hypersensitive to light, whether it's their eyes or their skin. They already know it, so this won't sneak up on them. For everyone else, it's not going to hurt them to have a high frequency signal modulated onto their light bulbs.

Comment It has its places (Score 3, Informative) 64

Upsides: Unlicensed spectrum. Pretty much unenforceable even if it was licensed. Little or no bleeding over from desired coverage areas, at least indoors. Plenty of bandwidth to go around. We know the safety profile of this sort of radiation quite well also.

Downsides: Line-of-sight only, so an AP in every room would pretty much be required (or equivalently, fiber from a central AP to every room). Probably can be degraded by "noisy" light-emitting devices, but spread-spectrum will probably get around that pretty well.

It sounds a little like using fiber optics for the last-mile problem, only in this case it's the last-meter problem and possibly without a fiber.

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