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.

RISC-V is fairly interesting and, on the whole, I'm happy to see it getting more traction.

But it's important to remember that, while the core of RISC-V is Open Source, it also expressly provides for extensions -- the ability to add custom instructions and silicon to help optimize whatever application they're designing for. A media-focused RISC-V SoC could have custom instructions to, for example, take apart DCT macroblocks.

RISC-V implementers are not required to Open Source, or even disclose the existence of, their extensions.

Think about the implications of this, and how it could be abused by hostile entities.

"Intel already does something like this with their IME." Yeah, but RISC-V expressly supports adding new, private instructions to the main fetch/execution unit. That stack-smashing bug that branches off into what looks like random data and should crash could now be undocumented instructions you have no hope of tracing. And if that seems unlikely to you, then go watch a video explaining the details of the XZ utils backdoor, and consider the vast amount of work, both in social engineering and in code, it took to get it as far as it got.

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).

And hundreds of millions of refugees fleeing for safe places with food and water.

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

Sure, as of now. Give it a few years.

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.