Journal Journal: OMG 7
I havent been here for years!
Whassup?
I havent been here for years!
Whassup?
It would be cool if we could track the trackers, and post their location on maps in real time; showing where they troll for cars, where they park at night, what donut stores they frequent. After all, the license plate trackers are plainly visible, anybody could see them and remember where and and when they did.
....find another client.
The real value here is it enables much more granular logging.
I object to this article, however, on grounds that this is not news. It's a press release, and crap like this is why I only visit slashdot every few months any more.
Yes. I understand that they have built these arrays of so-called microantennas. I believe that they are props, fakes, shiny objects to distract from what is really happening.
Those antennae are tiny, too small to pick up the relatively long wavelengths of current transmissions. The are packed together so tightly that they would be shielding one another from the signals. Running analog signals from those antennae to tens of thousands of separate tuners? Come on, really?
Thad
Does anybody really think that there is actually one antenna per customer? And that that antenna is hooked up to a particular DVR? And that that antenna and DVR are connected to just one customer?
I just can't and don't believe it. The 'antenna array' is surely a prop, and the DVR has to be a rack of shared servers.
I did visual effects for the first four Fast and Furious movies. We did a lot of the car photography on a green-screen stage, and comped in backgrounds shot driving down streets. We used arrays of film cameras, usually Arri 435s (on Fast 2 we also used VistaVision cameras.)
These would be much simpler, cheaper, and more rugged.
There are similar cameras from Point Grey [ptgrey.com]. These have been out for quite some time. The Point Grey cameras are an order of magnitude more expensive than these vaporware cameras, though.
Thad
Curiously, in my youth in the 60's, we referred to Luna-9 as a "hard landing", and the first "soft landing" was Surveyor 1 three months later. Now, it's clear that the Luna 9 lander really was a soft landing (similar to the landings of the Mars Pathfinder and Spirit/Opportunity rovers) and we were just ragging on the Soviets.
Sending a neutrino beam through the earth will be faster than taking the great-circle route across the surface of the earth.
Of course, one would have to send a ridiculously large number of neutrinos to be sure to have them detected, but that's just an engineering problem.
I don't think any of the designs will get up to mach 10 in the atmosphere, there's little point. Staging out of the atmosphere is a lot easier. And once you're in space, it's probably easier to kick yourself along (a boosted skip-glide) around the world to get back to the launch point.
With fiber optics...I don't think it's very easy. Especially with the new doped fibers that do their own recharging.
It used to be that there had to be transceivers every so often along the fiber, to turn the optical signals back into electronic signals, then generate new laser pulses. The new cables basically build lasers into the fiber, allow it to refresh the signal without going through that process.
Among the many problems with hyperloop is elevation changes. If you're going even 1000 miles per hour, the minimum turning radius to stay less than half a g is 25 miles. There are 4000 ft mountains between LA and SF, and either you have to build a 80 mile long tunnel through them (pretty expensive) or build a viaduct that is 2000 ft high and 100 miles long. Going around the mountains might make more sense, but you're going to end up way out to sea.
The difference between a rocket engine and an explosive shell is almost nil. People have been using explosive shells in cannons with similar g forces for 100 years.
If the mountain is a 2km away the reflection from the mirror is going to be very broad indeed. The sun is a half-degree across, and half-degree times 2km means that the edges of the mirror beam will be about 20 meters wide, nice soft edges and not the harsh ellipse shown. The ends of the ellipse will have edges more like 100 meters wide.
Wish this had made the real news. We know this sort of thing happens, but airline industries are highly effective at having this never reach public discussion.
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce