Errrr.... this is more or less exactly what I was saying :)

You know, I'd be curious to see what a high-end antenna design CAD package would do if you asked it to create a patch antenna for the FM band, or even better for the AM band. You could likely use it as a thermal blanket to keep warm around the paraffin lamp during the putative emergency situation we've been discussing.

Uh huh. And look at the VOLUME of that AM antenna. Also observe that that antenna design doesn't scale well for FM (1MHz vs 100MHz), which is why AM/FM radios have a rabbit ear (or ears) for FM in addition to the internal ferrite+coil AM antenna. MEH.

The antenna matching is obviously crude, but what it amounts to is a butterfly net to catch the signal instead of just holding out your hand and saying "here, butterfly". My comment about antennas was more related to the earlier poster's talk about how you'd have to degrade the cell antenna to enable FM reception. You wouldn't use a single antenna for this anyway, cellphones have multiple antennas properly matched for Bluetooth, GPS/GLONASS, WiFi and cellular (often more than one cellular antenna too). So IF you were going to enable FM reception, you'd add an antenna, BUT that antenna would be almost useless which is why approximately nobody does it. (If you override the app warning with some tweakery, you can sometimes pick up extremely strong stations just with leakage into the frontend, no actual antenna. But it's basically useless).

Even phones that have the FM feature enabled don't have an internal antenna, because it would be too small to be useful. FM band is very roughly 100MHz (actually below that). Do the math of what a quarter wave antenna looks like at that frequency. That's why phones that support FM require you to have earphones attached;-they use the cable as the FM antenna. Ironic that this story surfaces at the same time as Norway announces an analog FM sunset date. Probably in ten years there won't be any FM stations in first world countries at all.

Mount it where you need your "webcam". There are free webcam apps for Android (and probably for iOS - none, that are any use anyway, for Windows Phone). As long as you don't need PTZ, these are actually really good. You can port forward through your router and remote control them too - turn flash off and on, etc. And they do support uploading JPEGs. I have an old Galaxy S3 keeping an eye on my back yard.

Assuming this was actually a problem, a spring-loaded net gun would be a cheaper, easier, unregulated solution to the whole problem. You don't need much of a net, either - just some monofilament to tangle the drones' rotors.

... because there's a group advertising that it's launching an open-source home automation control platform/protocol/widget. And naturally this is going to be the One Protocol To Bind Them All, there will be a grand unification (about as likely as North and South Korea unifying tomorrow, by the way). The world does not lack "universal" or "open source" HA control protocols and products, it lacks manufacturers willing to support them, or even open their own control systems to support them. If there was such a thing as a truly universal protocol implemented by everybody, then manufacturers of hardware would be totally commoditized and competing solely on price/feature points. As things stand today, manufacturers profit by locking their hardware and software to work only with overpriced accessories and licensed "friend companies", and also by selling compulsory monthly service fees. Oh, and that's not even counting the fact that approximately five people (and all hipsters, at that) actually care about home automation. Home automation is, always has been, and always shall be just five to ten years before going truly mainstream.

The PhDs I worked with didn't know how to do what they were hired to do, because they lied about their abilities to actually do anything practical. Let me take one really simple example: PhD is tasked with implementing over-the-air firmware downloads for a product (there's complexity there, I know it sounds like an intern job, but there really was work to do). Said PhD was told to verify the CRC of the downloaded file for integrity purposes before attempting to flash the device. How did she do this? She downloaded the file (note: said download included, free of charge, a meta-file including a CRC of the known-good data on the server). She CRC'd the data she'd downloade, then CRC'd it again, and proceeded if those two CRCs matched. This is the kind of bullshit I've had to deal with when working with PhDs. Everything practical is left as an exercise for the reader - the PhD is focused on his/her higher calling, or whatever. As a manager of a team that needs to deliver practical implementations of well-understood technology, I don't need that. See also: Dunning-Kruger effect, which I have seen vigorously at work in the minds of PhDs.

I can't agree more with this commenter. After having to live with bad hiring decisions, and then making a couple of my own, I have made a firm resolution not even to consider a candidate with a PhD. That's an instant decline, right there. *EVERY* single PhD I've worked with has been an insufferably bad organizational fit, and almost all of them have ultimately been terminated (after being on a PIP). The remainder have been moved out into satellite offices to work on sinecure projects. In fact, I was musing about this just the other day after another incident, to the point where I was going to post to my social media accounts a call for someone - anyone - who works in a real job (i.e. making a product for profit, not working at an academic institution) - to pipe up and tell me that they have a PhD on their team who is useful and effective. As for your comment about your PhD being in an esoteric and useless field - this is essentially a tautology.

Only applicable to the IRS.

Better still, web-based companies with datacenters in many jurisdictions could store your data in a completely distributed fashion, where it isn't possible to retrieve the original without access to all (or at least several) of the servers. So they could subpoena all the data held in the US, and the UK, and Australia, and all the other surveillance states, but without a copy of the complementary data in Switzerland and Belize and on a pirate barge in the middle of the Pacific, they won't be able to reconstruct what you actually have stored up there. Better yet, if they contract with third-party storage providers wholly resident in those other countries, the US (for example) would have zero basis to subpoena those other companies - they are not "doing business" in the United States.

In an ideal world, the same chip would be able to report STD status. It's the 21st century version of toothing.

And if it causes fearsome rashes and a 50/50 shot of adrenal destruction, would you still feel the same way?

Off-label use of a drug currently approved for a given clinical use is very easy to achieve. However, looking at the side effects of this pharmafossil, it's looking like the side effects are worse than the condition it is being proposed to treat. I can't see an adult consenting to take it. Parents could force their children to be dosed with it, I guess.