Make that absolutely certain.

I'm fairly certain that you are incorrect. There's no difference between retiming signals going to multiple antennas and retiming signals coming from multiple antennas except in terms of the hardware used to do it.

Sure there is. Phased arrays let you effectively point an antenna in a specific direction so that the vast majority of the signal comes from or goes towards that direction, and all other directions are weak by comparison. Use multiple antennas. "Point" one antenna towards the interference source. Invert the phase. "Point" other antennas towards the desired sources. Sum a portion of the inverted signal with that, calculating the correct amplitude based on the expected off-axis rejection of the other antennas.

Now it is certainly possible that the jamming signal could be so strong that you exceed the ability of the analog hardware to invert and sum the signal, but realistically, probably not with a directional antenna on top of an airplane unless the jamming is coming from above you, in which case they can just shoot you down instead.

At the very least, that sort of approach would make jamming considerably harder, more expensive, and require considerably more power.

Sorry. I edited that paragraph too many times and screwed it up pretty badly. Fixed above.

The GP was almost correct, but got the word wrong. To be fair, though, in common parlance, the term triangulation is frequently used.

But you're right that the correct term is trilateration. Trilateration uses the distance from three (or more) fixed points to compute the position of something. Triangulation uses a combination of angles and distances to compute the position using only two fixed points.

For a triangulation example, if you look at the skyline of NYC and you compute the exact angle to the Empire State Building and the Chrysler building and you know the exact angles to both of them, you can accurately compute your location to one of two possible points even without knowing the distance to either of them by using trig, because you know how far apart the two buildings are.

With satellites, of course, the fact that GPS satellites are moving makes this problematic, and making any knowledge of the distance between the satellites even more problematic. And of course, GPS receivers tend not to be stationary, which makes measuring the angles way harder.

I have this vague memory that in an early design for GPS or one of the competing systems, they were going to have a small number of geostationary satellites, which could place you at one of two spots in the world even if the LEO birds all failed (as long as you're below about 81 degrees of latitude, which is to say not on Antarctica or in the Arctic Ocean, give or take), but I can't find any information about it, so maybe I'm imagining things.

But if you hypothetically did that, you could use triangulation more plausibly because of the fixed location of the satellites. Any vehicle crossing the equator would, of course, have a very bad time without a secondary frame of reference, such as a compass heading.

As an added advantage, you could make the antennas for a geostationary GPS alternative be highly directional (based on your last known location, the current time, and your compass heading, which can be supplemented with gyros for additional accuracy). That should make them much harder to jam.

Instead of a unidirectional signal, use something bidirectional like Starlink satellites. Use beamforming across multiple satellites to punch through any interference. Configure the satellites to aggressively crank up the transmission gain and the number of satellites participating in the beamforming if it loses the signal from an in-motion airplane until it is able to get confirmation that the aircraft is receiving the signal. Provide a switch to keep that feature enabled while on the ground if you're in a dangerous part of the world.

Combine that with a computer-controlled diversity antenna system on the airplane itself to recognize unexpected signals and cancel them out so that the receiver hardware never sees much of the jamming signal.

Distinguishing a real signal from the satellites from a signal made to look like it could be a signal from the satellites is left as an exercise for the reader, but might involve strong crypto with a very exacting time-based one-time pad derived from the initial key exchange — possibly even in the analog domain (e.g. using the OTP values to control the phase of the signal in real time).

I mean, no disagreement, but I couldn't help but bring up the elephant in the room. And suddenly, that idiom takes on a bit of double entendre.

It is when one party is significantly more likely to fall prey to disinformation.

Are you joking about that first one? HP's laser printers have a reputation for producing very nearly the worst print quality of any printers on the market.

I did side-by-side comparison of several brands' laser printers before buying mine.

• Samsung was a horrific, muddy mess.
• HP was fairly decent at color reproduction, but banding problems made gradients look like ass.
• Brother was too bold, but that's probably fixable with good ColorSync profiles.
• Canon was solid.
• Konica Minolta was downright amazing.

Only Konica Minolta had the guts to use a photograph of a person with skin tones as their demo. So I bought their printer without the slightest hesitation. And out of the five, only Brother, Canon, and KM were even in the running, because the HP and Samsung printers' output was so awful.

Companies like HP and Ricoh are used because they have a reputation for having easy service subscriptions, so business can just call someone and get bad hardware fixed or swapped out with minimal effort on the part of the business. Quality and cost are of lower concern than minimizing effort when things go wrong.

That is, of course, entirely different from what consumers care about, because they aren't generally spending tens of thousands of dollars per year for service contracts on a thousand printers or copiers.

And yet, there are a number of examples of open hardware that have been successful.

For that matter, you're also ignoring one big difference between software and hardware, which is the difference in duration of legal protection. At this point, the patents for reasonably good color laser printer hardware have expired, so there's nothing preventing some random company in China from building an exact copy of any hardware sold prior to 2005.

So the R&D cost could be basically zero beyond the cost of designing a new, modern control board using silicon that's still available. And you could probably do most of this with existing off-the shelf hardware, such as a Raspberry Pi, leaving you with only a tiny bit of custom hardware.

This is also easy. There are a lot of toner and ink manufacturers out there. You would have to have a long-term supply for drums (laser) or print heads (inkjet), because those eventually have to be replaced, but that's part of the hardware.

Ideally, you would program the printer to allow you to specify the characteristics of the ink or toner so that you can pick the cheapest ink/toner manufacturer and still get the color right. That's the main reason people buy toner from the printer vendor; different toner makers produce slightly different colors of magenta, yellow, and cyan.

So a more open hardware platform would largely make the consumables problem moot, with the exception of the actual parts (print heads and drums).

People buy secondhand printers? Yikes. That's like buying secondhand shoes. :-D

Nanoparticle RFID tags.

But who would pay for it?

86% of Firefox's revenue comes from Google's default search engine placement. The government wants to stop that. Firefox would likely basically die at that point.

And $18 billion of the budget for the Safari team comes from Google for the same reason. Assuming there are two or three hundred employees working on Safari, that means that 100% of Safari's O($300M) budget and $17.7B of Apple's non-Safari R&D budget comes from Google, so Apple's annual profits would instantly drop by almost 20%, which could lead to price increases, decreased market share, and Android becoming even more dominant.

Without a similarly large funding arrangement, a Chrome nonprofit would also probably die unless it starts out with a huge endowment. If the FireFox team needs $500 million per year to operate, you can probablly assume that the Chrome team would at least a billion to operate as a fully independent company, which means a minimum of $20 billion in the endowment, and that guess may be wildly optimistic.

In theory, yes, you're absolutely right that it would be better as an independent nonprofit, but I think it's a stretch to imagine such a nonprofit being viable without ongoing revenue from Google. And the problems caused by the DOJ's other proposals with regards to Firefox and Safari would still exist even if they infused an independent Chrome organization with so much cash that it could survive without revenue.

Simple? Hardly.

YouTube could survive on its own, because it serves ads, and thus can presumably pay for itself through ad revenue, subscriptions to its premium service, etc., though it would need to take a chunk of the ad sales team and infrastructure (both ad and serving) along with it. Splitting it off would probably be a huge nightmare logistically, but it is at least possible. Unfortunately, that's the only one on your list that would be.

Android is paid for by phone vendors paying money to use the various Google apps, including the Play Store. Without those Google apps, there's no revenue stream. So Android dies in your plan unless it finds a new revenue stream, and it isn't clear how that would be possible with an open source OS. So for the same reason Linux never succeeded on the desktop, Android would likely die of resource starvation under your plan.

Fiber is basically being operated like an independent company anyway, with its own C-Suite, so that division probably could be split off, but given that they are both fairly small and fairly independent, doing so probably wouldn't really do much other than preventing Alphabet's board from replacing the Fiber CEO (assuming that subsidiary doesn't have an independent board — a quick Google search didn't reveal any information for or against that assumption). Also, the complaints from the DOJ don't relate to Fiber at all, if memory serves, making that a rather odd suggestion.

As far as I know, Gmail is paid for entirely by ad revenue from other Google properties such as Search. And the basic free storage for Gmail (which is usually enough for most users) is also paid for in that way. So they would have to find a new funding source if they split off from Google. Short of Gmail getting bought by another company with deep pockets (which just makes one big company smaller and another big company bigger), the only other options would be either monetizing your private email messages (very bad) or charging money for the service (also very bad). So your choice would be between a privacy disaster for consumers or the near complete destruction of the service (because most accounts would probably be closed if the owners had to pay money for them).

Chrome is also paid for entirely by ad revenue from other Google properties. It does not inject its own ads or sell your personal data. So without the backing of a large corporation, it could not exist.

Additionally, without the majority of Chrome's code, the Android os would be hopelessly broken. I can't think of a feasible model for funding a standalone Chrome. Even if you tried to make it go with Android, it would be challenging, because funding Android independently would be challenging.

Worse, Firefox and Safari are *also* funded largely by money paid to those browsers in exchange for Google Search being the default search engine, with 86% of Firefox's revenue coming from that agreement. If part of the DOJ settlement involves Google not being allowed to do this, there's a good chance that web browser development will come to a screeching halt across the entire industry. And if the decision doesn't prevent that, then you would end up with Chrome development being paid for by Google, so you would likely gain almost nothing from the split.

In other words, I don't think you've thought through what you're asking for. I just can't see any way that any of the splits you suggest would result in healthy, stable corporations as an end result, with the possible exception of YouTube, because the funding model just doesn't work. But maybe I'm missing something.

I've seen this one. Neo takes the red pill.

Inkjet printers are the second mistake. :-)

An average inkjet printer lasts 3 to 5 years. There are just too many moving parts in the former, plus you either pay way more for cartridges that have print heads built into the cartridges or you end up replacing the print head every time it dries out. And you have to waste ink to keep the head clean. And you have the waste ink sponge and unless you know how to hack the firmware, when it thinks the sponge is "full", your printer bricks itself.

A good color laser printer lasts decades. My Konica Minolta 7450 II grafx is going on fifteen years, and apart from maybe needing to eventually replace the internal 40 gigabyte SATA hard drive if it dies, I fully expect it to outlive me. :-D

The only plausible reason to get an inkjet is if you want full-gloss photos, because toner isn't as glossy as photo paper, but even then, laser printer photos, at least from Canon and Konica Minolta laser printers, look pretty darn good. Brother is a little bit bold, at least from my limited experience (looking at sample prints), though not bad, but given the games they're playing with their inkjet printers, I'd be reluctant to buy their hardware now, even though I do own a black-and-white Brother printer (which I've stopped using because the print quality is very light even with a new toner cartridge, so I have no idea what's happening, and it isn't worth fixing a $100 single-sided black-and-white printer when I have a ~$3,500 wide-format color laser with two paper trays and duplexing at my disposal).