Touche, AC, and I agree with you, but as you point out (and I neglected to) the interaction between the RF generated by a microwave and water is a thermal reaction.

How is a signal with a wavelength of 5" (wifi is around 2.4 GHz, 2.4E9/3E8*39.37in/m=4.9") supposed to interact with a human sperm, which, according to wikipedia, is comprised of a head 5 um long and a tail 41 um long, all of which total 0.002 inches. These arguments never ever make any sense to me.

Parent is exactly right. In the defense-sciencey world, there is a whole class of problems often called DARPA-hard. I think the term is one DARPA itself uses. My company recently missed out on an opportunity to bid a project for DARPA because we had an approach based on current technology which could be fielded very quickly. DARPA doesn't do that. DARPA does crazy, hard projects with the goal of advancing technology. This is definitely an area ripe for DARPA - it is a high risk, high payoff application.

Suppose this works - the cost of putting a new bird in orbit drops significantly. Rather than destroying a satellite that isn't working quite right, you could salvage it for parts the way we do a car. So first, you haven't wasted these space-qualified and tested components, but even better, you don't have to fly new ones up there. That's not just money, it's also time. You might be able to extend the effective lifetimes of various satellite constellations, such as GPS, Iridium and GLONASS, and thus improve reliability of such systems.

There's a fairly obvious flipside, as well - I don't know if there is international law on satellite ownership, but the law of salvaging seagoing vessels is quite clear - finders keepers. You sink a boat and I find it first, it's mine to sell - including its cargo. I don't know how this applies to space, but there is a pretty obvious (to me) parallel between a sunk boat and a grossly nonfunctional satellite. To clearly state my point: suppose a Russian spy satellite breaks, and we have this capability - we could take it and break it apart and do as we like to it. Of course if not done covertly the Russians would simply destroy one of ours, but it is interesting to consider the possibilities.

Most dishwashers are held in place with exactly two screws. Wood screws are nicer than typical - most of the time I see drywall screws.

Otherwise you're absolutely right, you get exactly what you pay for. If you don't know enough to assess the property on your own, or you don't pay a qualified inspector (and even more rare - an honest and knowledgeable one) to tell you about the house and heed his warnings, you're stupid. Quality of materials and workmanship is not that hard to inspect by eye.

I don't think it's the cost of the materials to perform degaussing - a bunch of wire, a rectifier and a variac along with a field sensor ought to be sufficient. It's the knowledge of what you have to do, which most people don't have (present readers possibly excluded from the definition of "most"). More importantly it's the damage you might have to do to the house to get access to the beam. Suppose the beam is in a finished area? No way you can pay a contractor to open the entire length of the house and then close it back up for less than 5k, plus you may not be able to live in the house at the time. If you want to replace the beam that's easily another 10-20k, depending on way more factors than I am aware of.

If I remember correctly the palladium irreversably changes phase when you cram enough hydrogen into it. Palladium hydride has an alpha phase at room temperature and low hydrogen content. When sufficient hydrogen is absorbed by the palladium the crystal structure is permanently distorted. So you could detect that the palladium had been preloaded with hydrogen you ought to be able to detect it by measuring the resistance of the palladium after the test.

When I have signed contracts to purchase things, I have had to sign waivers limiting liability. Those waivers certainly covered reasonable expectations and disclaimed certain possible defects. This is a terrible problem for both sides, because it is just completely unexpected. I have never before heard of a steel beam's magnetization causing such difficulty. TFA is pretty slim on the real effects they are experiencing. I wonder if this is just one of those pseudo-scientific problems (magnetism = evil?) or if it is a real problem, or if it's just my reading comprehension. It would be interesting to see what the field measurements actually looked like. You'd need a very strong magnet to affect a TV from any significant distance.

At least with smaller pieces of metal you can whack them a few times to re-randomize the magnetic domains. I don't know if that actually works for something large enough to support a building (you might have to hit it hard enough to damage it or the structure it supports). Depending on the alignment of the magnetic field it might be possible to form an electromagnet to cancel its field ("degauss" it). Or the structural members can be replaced and removed (I've done this in my house). Most of these options are pretty expensive (except for the first one where you hit it a lot with a hammer).

It seems unfair for me, as a homebuyer, to get stuck dealing with a house which was built with nonstandard components (in the form of a magnetic structural support). From the builder's perspective it seems like this would be something that they would have to eat and then go after the material seller for their losses, if they can prove when the magnetization occurred.

In answer to OP's question, I suspect that the movie mafia are going after downloaders at large ISPs because the payoff is bigger - they get one process going through one legal department, and a number of names and addresses of suspected downloaders is produced, after which they send out ransom letters. At smaller ISPs, there are fewer targets to send letters to, so the cost is proportionally higher per target.

So in a sense, you could say that customers at smaller ISPs are safer, depending on the movie organizations' intent - if they want to make money off people and get a lot of big settlements to make news, they would focus on large ISPs and their customers. If they want to thoroughly scare people, they'll go after everyone, independent of the cost of doing so.

As of right now the largest FLASH I can find is a 512 Gb unit from Micron (MT29F512G08CUCABH3-12) in a 100 ball LBGA. Couldn't find that package description but maybe a similar one is 9x15.5mm dimension. You'll need more than 32 of these to get to 2 TB, plus a couple of controller ICs.

In short, with tomorrow's technology (what Micron is still developing), you will need a 6" long stick, covered with ICs on both sides. This will not be an inexpensive device for at least a few years.

Hi Kurtis - or anyone else who has spent more time looking -

Is there a schematic or parts list available for the hardware? I looked over the paper but it was pretty high level. I've been wanting to play with exactly this sort of thing for some time. Sorry if I haven't googled enough...

I've been to a few smaller PCB fabs a few years ago, before the days of 4PCB and PCBExpress and the like - mail order, nearly overnight, you fit it into their process flow shops. Anyway, this is back when a 4 layer board run was a $2k/2 week kind of deal rather than the $500 or so you can get now (or cheaper if you can wait). Those places were FILTHY and smelled like all kinds of hell. Nasty business. It's amazing how far these guys have come.

The value is so much better now too. Ten years ago, to get an overnight board we used to mill out two layer boards using a piece of prepreg with copper on either side. A guy would machine off all the copper we didn't want, then drill holes where we needed vias to connect from one side or the other. Then I had to fill the vias with little pieces of wire and solder each side, then stuff the board, then test and debug it; over repeated rework cycles the board would start to peel apart. On top of that, if you get the board hot enough, the vias (wires) would fall out and that was pretty hard to figure out. It was gravity assisted current limit.

Now, you finish your board design and ship it off to one of these guys. During the time you used to spend getting to square 1 with the milled board, you could order parts and then the board shows up from one of these guys like 4PCB here. A 2 day turn on a 4 layer board is no problem and just a few hundred bucks. The time I spent soldering vias into the milled board cost more than the real PCB I can get now. It's amazing. The way they get the price down is a combination of two things - first, you fit into their process flow, as I mentioned earlier. That means that they don't look at your board, they don't think about your board, they just cram it on a panel with some other guys' boards. If you want slots made in the board, you don't get 'em; if you want internal routs cut out of your board you don't get 'em. You get what their process says it does, and so does everyone else. This leads to the second way they get price down - volume. Lots of guys now order from a couple big shops, rather than these little (pretty dirty, as I mentioned) little mom-n-pop PCB houses. And we all order the same process.

It's amazing to see how some of these basic market principals have worked in the past ten years, and it has made a huge change in the R&D industry. It's much easier to do a pilot run of a board, it's much easier and cheaper to make a limited run, and since you are risking less you can order more and try things out. Truly awesome for an electrical guy.

Man, I am so bummed right now. These guys were some of the greatest in the field. Both were very well known in industry and had done a lot in their time to advance the state of the art. I always figured that if I ever got back into the semiconductor industry I'd try to work wherever they were - of course, I don't want to move to California very much, and Pease had sort of retired, but still.

I had no idea Jim Williams had died either. Williams' app notes were both clever and clear, just masterpieces of design and communications. One of my favorites was his AN45, which he worked on while up late with a baby; each circuit was preceded by a number of baby bottles indicating how many bottles he fed his son while working on the circuit. One of them - a CCFL supply built around a Royer oscillator - took more than 30 bottles, drawn lined up three rows deep, convinced me not to use that design in a related project. Just a few months ago Electronic Design or EDN published a paper by Williams describing how to build an ultrasonic thermometer - a technique for measuring temperature using the speed of sound in an olive jar full of dry air. Just neat stuff.

Pease was an interesting guy who I felt I knew better. You could call him up when he was at National and ask him questions - if you had a hard enough question. He had some crafty designs for VFC's and references, but I really remember him for his magazine articles. He once described a proposed highway as a mistake and showed a circuit model for traffic to describe how its construction would make things worse overall. Pease was a neat guy who I knew only through his articles and app notes, and boy would I have liked to go for a ride with him in his old VW. Course, I would have worn a seatbelt (did his car even have them?).

Man am I bummed right now! What a loss.

One of the commenters on the FF extension suggested that the extension introduces a serious vulnerability into your browser - by downloading the XML file containing the list of sites to be redirected, you are basically offering that website the ability to redirect "youtube.com" to "nastysexxxxxychix.com" or whatever. Certainly this would be unpleasant on a work computer, but it could also be used to send you to a malicious site. He also pointed out that every 15 times the extension is actually called you are sent to a "Help Us" page where they probably ask for donations.

The same commenter forked the extension to another called FireIce which has a hardcoded list of sites. I think the ideal way would be with a user-configurable list which the user can easily update from a website as desired, rather than automatically downloading an XML file without user input.

This other extension - which I haven't tried and cannot endorse - is at https://addons.mozilla.org/da/firefox/addon/fireice/

I think your tin foil hat is too thick.

What you are saying is that you shouldn't trust people who know the field best. Certainly it makes sense to keep in mind that the people on there may have hidden agendas, and you should use your brain. A forum populated by people informed on the topic because they actually work in the field is the place I want to go to become informed. These are guys who will present or point you towards raw data and help you learn to interpret it yourself. It is possible to work in a field yet retain integrity and ethics.

I agree with your final point - anything you read on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt.

I don't think the point is quite so simple as that. The marketing people are increasing the perceived value of a product by bundling things together and selling for a higher price. The inherent value of the goods is only what consumers are willing to pay. In this case, consumers (at least one consumer, the parent poster) want to buy the unbundled product without all the extra fixings. Normally the invisible hand of the free market will serve up the product I actually desire, but since we're not dealing with fungible goods here like gasoline or apples, only one vendor sells the product and he can sell it however he wants to. And so the parent poster does not purchase the product.

I find this quite frustrating as well. Sometimes I only want two peppers but they come in a pack of three. Dang.