Once again, some fool with too much time on their hands decided to mod five of my comments as either Overrated, Redundant (when it wasn't), or Offtopic (again, when it wasn't), all at once. It makes me feel sad for these people, who have nothing better to do than try to silence people with whom they disagree. Can't they focus on lifting up conversations, instead of trying to censor everyone they don't like?
Thanks to several instances of getting five '-1, Overrated' mods on various posts of mine within a few minutes of each other (even when the posts in question occur days apart from each other), I've decided to fight fire with fire: whenever I get mod points, I systematically go through my friends and fans, find people who have either been modded down or don't get a karma bonus, and mod up whatever I can with '+1, Underrated'.
I call this method the "Share Your Voices" method of moderation. If you're reading this, please consider joining me in this effort to ensure that libertarian and conservative voices are not shut out by the censoring whores of the left on this site.
As for wasting my points on marking things as Overrated, I'll leave it to the leftists on Slashdot to hurt people, I'd rather try to help my friends than stifle my enemies.
I tried submitting this item yesterday, and, surprise!, it was rejected. (I even submitted the link to the original article, not the one to Hot Air.)
Suffice to say, we all know Slashdot editors are idiot liberals, and anything that challenges their world view is verboten. But at least they provide journals so people can share news not deemed fit for the pages of
The summary of the article is that Neptune is experiencing global warming, and aside from the number of SUVs the Neptunians drive the only thing our two planets have in common is a common sun. So while I'm sure George Bush is still at fault, it looks like the sun is causing global warming, not "carbon emissions".
[A while ago I mentioned the ClearCom brand of headset intercoms in a post. These are commonly used in theaters and TV studios, in order to let everyone backstage / in the control room talk to everyone else. They're a pretty simple "party line" system (at least the 3-pin XLR type most commonly encountered) but are, IMO, a neat application of analog electronics. I got a few emails about the post, asking for more information on how they worked, and in responding to them I ended up typing out a fairly long document based on my best understanding.
In particular, people seemed curious about a feature of the ClearCom system, which allows the person at the "master box" (in a theater, it's usually the Stage Manager or their Assistant) to remotely unlock the PTT switches of everyone else on the line. This is nice if someone else has locked their mic on and is breathing into it, or if you have people whose hands are too full to unlock their own mic, or you don't want to bother them while they're doing something critical -- e.g., camera operators, stagehands, etc.
Don't assume anything I describe here is correct. It's been a few years since I've worked with any ClearCom gear, and I'm not an EE by trade anyway. I'm about 75% certain that the general principles described below are correct, but I wouldn't swear by any of it. Okay?]
The unlock feature isn't really a hack, it's an actual feature of the ClearCom system, by design.
I'll try to describe what I know about the ClearComs, but really the best explanation I've ever seen, and where I learned most of this, is from this page:
http://www.rcrowley.com/comclone/Project.htm
http://www.rcrowley.com/comclone/CircuitDesc.htm
http://www.rcrowley.com/comclone/default.htmBasically it's a page on how to construct ClearCom-compatible (he calls them "ComClone") intercoms.
Basically
... it works something like this. The ClearComs use three-pin XLR (balanced audio microphone cable) as a physical medium. There is one master box, which plugs into the wall, and then there are many portable beltpacks, which you daisy-chain off of the master. In terms of topology it's kinda similar to old coax-based ethernet, only in addition to the shared-medium data line, you also have a Vcc and Gnd wire. But instead of coax, you're using balanced audio cable, so you have two signal wires and then a shield wire running around them. One of the signal wires is used in the clearcom setup for power, another is used for (unbalanced!) audio, and then ground is used for a shared power/signal ground.
The master box feeds DC onto the power wire, and this is how all the devices on the system get power -- this way the belt packs don't need batteries. I think it's like 24VDC or so. The master box also terminates the audio signal wire, with some fixed resistance. I think it's like 600 ohms or something (don't quote me on that, though). And it grounds the third (ground) pin.
Each beltpack transmits audio onto the signal wire, by acting as a variable AC CURRENT source (not a variable voltage source, as you might suspect). Remember that the audio line is terminated at one point, back at the master console. So V = IR, with a fixed R (the termination resistor), means there's a fluctuating voltage signal.
In order to receive audio, each beltpack acts as some very very high resistance in between the audio signal and ground, and basically measures the voltage change. Since each beltpack acts as some really high impedance (up in the megohm range, I think), and the audio is transmitted as a fluctuating current through the terminating resistor, which is much, much smaller than the internal impedance of the beltpack receivers, you can put a lot of beltpacks on a circuit without diminishing the audio signal. The audio is basically right around "line level" (few hundred mV).
Also, and this is fairly important -- all the audio parts of the transmitters and receivers (which I think are opamps) are AC coupled; they're isolated with capacitors. This is important, because the system imposes a DC bias on the audio wire in order to send signals.
There are two types of control signals that the system allows for. One is the "attention" signal, which makes a light flash on the beltpacks, so that you can wake up someone who might have their headset off and get them to come on line. The other signal is the "hangup" signal, which causes the PTT switch on the remote stations to release.
Both of these functions can only be initiated from the master console (the one with the power supply in it). Basically, when you want to send 'attention,' you press a button, and the box imposes a DC bias equal to about half of the supply voltage on the signal line. The belt packs have a bright LED that goes on in response to this. I don't know exactly how it's triggered but there are a lot of ways you could do it (zeners, etc.)
For the other signal, the hangup signal, there's an even higher DC bias imposed, I think. (Maybe just Vcc, assuming that the attention signal is Vcc/2?) It could conceivably be a negative DC bias with respect to ground, or something else (I've never actually measured it), but it's some other kind of DC bias on the signal line.
The beltpacks all have PTT switches on them that are non-mechanical. When you press and hold one, it works like a PTT. When you press it twice, quickly, it "locks" and you can talk without holding it down. They are designed so that if the person at the master console presses the unlock button, the belt packs will unlock the PTT in response to the signal. Honestly I'm not sure exactly how the beltpacks accomplish this, since I've never reverse-engineered one; I'm pretty sure though that the home-made ComClones *won't* do it, so I think it's a fairly complex analog circuit. (The easiest way would be with a latching relay, but I'm pretty sure that this is not how the beltpacks work, I think it's all solid-state.)
Since the audio signal and these DC signaling pulses are on the same wire, whenever the person at the master console uses one of these features -- attention or unlock -- you can hear it in the headset as a "clunking" sound.
That's about all there is to them. There are a few competing designs for simple party-line intercoms to ClearCom's; Telex is the biggest alternative, and I think they may do something that allows for balanced audio (the ClearComs will hum if you get them too close to a power line, which is a problem in the theater where you're using them alongside horrifically noisy SCR-based lighting dimmers) but they're essentially the same idea.
They also make two-channel versions that use 4-pin XLR cable, and basically just have two signal lines, so you can have two "subnets" (say, you can put all your backstage crew on channel A, and all your front-of-house crew on chan B, so the FOH people don't hear the backstage chatter if they don't want to, but the stage manager, sitting at the master console, can talk to everyone or even bridge the two groups if he/she wants).
More modern systems made in the last 5-10 years are digital and/or allow for multiple channels on top of each other by using frequency modulation techniques; wireless ones are also big. However, the 2-wire (plus ground) ClearCom system is the de facto standard in many theaters and production facilities, and in many cases the buildings have been wired for them (plus you can run them through unused channels in XLR "snakes", etc.).
Anyway hope this made sense. I'll probably copy this email and put it in my
/. journal, and perhaps some other knowledgeable folks will correct any mistakes I've made. --
The body of the above message, excepting material quoted or reproduced from other sources, and specifically excluding any and all attachments unless specifically noted, is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.2, with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts an no Back-Cover Texts, and may be copied, distributed and/or modified subject to the terms of the License at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt
If anyone sees anything in this description that's wrong, please feel free to correct me. Back when I worked in theaters more frequently, I had a variety of little interface boxes, that would convert from ClearCom intercom connections, to balanced line-level audio. My favorite use of these was to record a performance, keeping the backstage headset audio as an alternate audio track. (Generally I'd record them to the linear audio tracks on a VHS tape, and put the house-reinforcement audio onto the HiFi tracks; then I could dub people whichever version they wanted -- the actors could get one of their show, the technical people one of 'theirs.' Today I suppose you could do the same thing with multiple audio tracks on MiniDV.) I've also seen projects for interfacing audio+ClearCom systems together, so that you can hear the house sound as background on your headset, behind the backstage chatter.
Anyway, point is, from a geek's perspective, the ClearCom is a great system, because the hacking potential is limitless and pretty easy.
In a comment earlier today, I responded to a comment regarding inheritance taxes. As I find the topic interesting, I decided to expand on it. Consider this a work-in-progress.
Inheritance taxes are frequently put forward as a sort of anti-aristocratic tool; a way to somehow prevent families from passing large sums of money -- and consequently, power -- down from one generation to another and perpetuating themselves without any real 'work.'
I believe this is wrong, in multiple senses. First, it is wrong in the moral sense, since I believe that it is a violation of any reasonable definition of human rights which allow for the free and independent action of individuals to exercise control over their property as they see fit. (I am aware that there are some people who do not believe in such rights, but frankly I'm not interested in arguing with them -- I'm also aware that there are people who believe that the Earth is flat, or that God created the world 5,000 years ago in about a week; there's a certain point where I'm willing to just write people off as wrong and save my breath. Suffice it to say that if you don't believe in, or are unwilling to take the concept of physical property as a premise, I have very little else to say to you.)
Leaving aside the moral wrongness of inheritance taxes, I also think that they clearly fail at what's often put forward as their chief purpose: preventing the creation of a capitalist aristocracy. Far from this, they actually perpetuate and protect a very particular kind of non-meritocratic aristocracy: the aristocracy not of money, but of political and social power and connections.
Inheritance taxes punish hardest those people who are highly successful in the financial sense, but unsuccessful in the political or social realms; when they die, they leave their children mostly money, which is then pillaged by the government. In contrast, someone else who took the majority of their financial wealth and skillfully converted it to political power (a basically straightforward transaction, for someone raised in the right environment), could easily pass these connections onto their children, entirely untaxed and unfettered.
Thus, the true aristocracy escapes the inheritance taxes and manage to perpetuate their power, because their biggest assets are not necessarily in their bank accounts or even in their investments, they are in their social networks and contacts; they are in the people that they can get their children in to meet; the schools they can get them into; in some cases, simply their names themselves.
Rather than being hurt by inheritance taxes, the true aristocracy realizes that wealth is more than just money, and doesn't seem too worried by them; you rarely hear the Rockefellers or the Kennedys whining, for instance. And why should they -- in fact, inheritance taxes are the best form of protectionism for the truly powerful, because it provides a barrier to entry, keeping the nouveau riche from ever pushing themselves into the very top echelon. The nature of true power is that it takes time to accrue, and by levying punishing taxes on those who have recently acquired power (and still have it in cash, rather than in the more nebulous social connections of "old money") they can keep them down and the playing field sparse.
In short, inheritance taxes protect and encourage those who play 'by the rules' -- rules written by the very powerful. Buy into the system, take your money and pour it into quasi-philanthropy, skillful investment, and political contributions, and you can create power that will last through generations; try to keep it in the bank, and it'll be decimated before your children can use it.
(I got a fair bit of email about this so I'm putting it here just for convenience and so I don't have to keep digging for the original comment. I was asked about redistribution rights -- you may consider it licensed under the GFDL, although I would appreciate attribution via a link to this page or the original comment if possible.)
Original URL: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233075&cid=18952399
Parent: http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=233075&cid=18951709
I think the answer is staring you in the face: as a nation, the U.S. imports a lot of physical goods, but exports a lot of intellectual property. Therefore, we reward companies who chisel their foreign suppliers into squeezing their employees, because this results in cheap imports here in the States. Likewise, we punish IP 'theft,' because IP is one of the last things that we seem to be able to produce and sell.
Now, I'm no fan of the DMCA, because I think it causes more damage and economic loss, here in the U.S., than it can or will ever possibly create in new IP-export revenue. But the logic driving it, when you separate it from the implementation, isn't that hard to understand, at least from a certain point of view. Allow me to illustrate how I think many people see the problem:
When we set aside irrational feelings of American exceptionalism -- those warm feelings that politicians always play to, when they talk about the "American worker" being the "best in the world" as if it was self-evident -- it is not immediately clear exactly how our previous success over the past century [1], necessarily translates into continued success in the future. In short, although everyone likes to say reassuring things like "Americans have always been at the forefront of innovation!", those words ring pretty hollow -- it's not clear why we would continue to be. We're not smarter than everyone else, our education system basically sucks, and we have a culture that's increasingly anti-intellectual and in some cases bordering on non-secular.
What this boils down to is: in a fully globalized economy, it's not clear what areas the U.S. will have a comparative advantage in. We'll probably always be able to export some agricultural products, but agricultural products do not a first-world civilization pay for. Same with natural resources like coal and timber but we'll need them here eventually, so we'd just be selling ourselves down the river. So what do you have left, when you've outsourced everything that can be outsourced to lower-cost second- and third-world areas? I think Neal Stephenson was onto something: music, movies, microcode, and pizza delivery.
'Pizza delivery' is the remaining service-sector crap that can't be outsourced. Music and movies are 'cultural exports,' things that for whatever reason, have a certain cachet in the rest of the world, and so don't really fall victim to direct price competition with foreign competitors. And microcode [1A] -- even if we're not the best at that, either, we'll use our monopoly to milk the rest of the world pretty good for as long as we can. But we can only do that if we can get them to buy into the legal framework which lets you sell IP as if it were physical goods. Hence, the DMCA and other 'strong IP' laws.
All of this is just my rather long-winded way of trying to explain why so many people (people in government in particular) are hooked on strong IP law (including the DMCA, DRM, and anti-circumvention), and proprietary software: they see it as a way to ensure that the U.S. can still make money doing the only thing that we seem to be good at. It may not seem at first glance to make a whole lot of sense, particularly to non-Americans, but I've met a lot of fairly powerful people who are very, very nervous about where the New/Global Economy is headed, and how the U.S. is going to maintain its standard of living [2] in the future. If you're looking for a near-magic solution, which you are if you're a politician, grabbing onto intellectual property as the salvation of high-cost Western society probably isn't the stupidest thing you'll do all day.
### Footnotes: ###
[1] Much of which is attributable to having had the good luck not to get involved in any home-turf land wars (like Europe, which got flattened, some of it twice) and getting on board the capitalism bus early (unlike Asia, which is just coming around to this whole market-economy business).
[1A] I'm using "microcode" here to represent basically all IP-derived exports, which includes most pharmaceuticals, since they're more of an information product than a physical good, even if they're generally distributed only in a 'compiled' form (pills).
[2] To say nothing of its political dominance (which is driven by economic dominance) and which a fair number of conservative people see as essential to keep the world from being overrun by Communists/Islamists/Huns/whatever.
In case this doesn't get accepted, here's a submission I just put into the queue:
From the National Geographic Society comes a(nother) report that Mars is warming at a similar pace as the earth, pointing to a solar, not a human, cause of both. Obviously, the Society is pandering to Big Oil....
Michelle Malkin has a follow-up piece about the barking moonbat in VA who attacked some college Republicans in their own home.
Turns out, the crazy man got the Republican's address from Facebook (where crazy man was busy making all kind of hateful posts about Republicans and Jews, and actively supporting Iran nuking the US...but he's not a traitor).
The long and the short of it is, this guy seems to be one of those leftists who believe that if you support the war, you should be in the military. And if you aren't/weren't in the military, you can't support the war.
Well, my friends, the logical conclusion to that is, unless you served in the military, you can't vote, you don't have freedom of speech, and you can't serve in elective office. In other words, they want a military dictatorship.
Somehow I don't think they'd be all that happy if they got what they seem to wish for.
Chavez has done it, he's beat Bush* in the race to become a dictator.
The Congress of Venezuela has granted Hugo Chavez the kind of authority that liberals in American think George Bush desperately desires: the ability to rule by decree. Who wants to take bets on how many liberals denounce this action and start calling Chavez a bloody tyrant the way they do Bush?
*I don't think Bush wants to be a dictator. Hell, I'm not convinced he wants to be a President!
One of the better AC comments I've read in a while:
Actually, capitalism is entirely neutral.
The officers of a company are not obligated to worry about stock values. They are obligated to act in the interest of the stockholders. If the stockholders value stock value above all else, then the officers of the company must act in a way which maximizes stock value. However, stockholders may hold core ethical values (e.g. environmentalism) above profit, in which case the officers of the company must act accordingly.
Yes, on the surface, it looks like capitalism favors efficiency above all else. A company which inefficiently uses environmentally sound manufacturing practices has a competitive disadvantage against a polluting, but more efficient competitor. However, the reality is that this simply reflects the values of consumers. As long as consumers value a lower price over environmentally sound manufacturing processes (for instance), corporations will act accordingly or die. It is survival of the fittest - and the consumers create the environment.
So, who is really to blame? Well, the officers are not directly to blame. But their only defense is that they were "just following orders". So there is absolutely nothing wrong with denigrating them. (They could, after all, go find work elsewhere.) Likewise, the stockholders are not responsible for the environment they find their business in, but they are responsible for its actions. So it is perfectly acceptable to denigrate them as well.
However, only consumers who refuse to use such products have any right to denigrate the companies which provide them! Consumers who use these products and do not demand companies meet their own core values are the ultimate cause here. They've created the environment in which these corporations must survive. To denigrate the corporation for trying to survive in this environment while simultaneous actively creating such an environment is hypocrisy.
I just learned about this file, hosted on the New York Times website:
http://www.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/international/20060107_ARMOR_TEXT.pdf
It compiles data from a classified report, detailing the weak spots in the body armor worn by US soldiers in Iraq. It even has complete diagrams, showing where to shoot to ensure a kill.
In other words, this is the perfect training manual for Iraqi snipers.
This is more evidence of the treason that runs rampant on the left these days. And because the assholes in the Bush administration refuse to do anything about it, it's more proof that the powers-that-be on the right don't give a rat's ass about our country any more than the ones on the left do.
Now excuse me, I have to go vomit.
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,246519,00.html
Blue Cross Blue Shield of Tennessee is now requiring fatties who want to get gastric bypass to take an IQ test before they'll pay for the surgery, to make sure the patients understand that afterwards they'll have to eat not so much and exercise. But if you're smart enough to eat right and exercise, would you really need to have your stomach stapled in the first place?
[I wrote this up as a story but was late in submitting it (not that there was anything wrong with the one that went through)
In a surprise announcement last month, the U.S. FCC announced a Report and Order that effectively eliminates the Morse Code requirement for all classes of Amateur Radio licenses in the U.S. In the past, although an applicant could become a "Technician" and gain access to VHF frequencies without being able to use Morse, the second-tier "General" license and the long-distance HF bands required it. The move, which will take effect sometime in mid-Feb, means that only two short written tests stand between prospective Hams and across-the-globe radio communication.
HELP!!!! I'm being held prisoner in /usr/games/lib!
