junkcollector

Nanowatts are -60 dBm or what you would expect to receive on your cellphone when you have decent but not great signal. Many radios operate down to the -110 dBm/MHz PSD or lower ranges for high performance stuff. So you could use hits those power levels with energy harvesting on radio waves but only if you were in the right location, on the right band, and it would possibly cause problems for the systems that are trying to use those signals for their intended purposes.

Going to be a bit pedantic here but you absolutely can have 0 Voltage. Voltage is the potential energy created by a difference in charge between 2 points. If you have a mass with sufficient free mobile charge, when you inject additional charge into it, it will rearrange the charge within itself to cancel out in injected charge resulting in 0 Volts of potential. This is the principal that a ground connection works on and why you don't have voltage inside of metal conductors, just on the surface.

You shouldn't remove it because it was a retweet, you should have removed it because it clearly meant the opposite of what you were implying it meant. Plenty often people get lampooned for statements that are later divorced from content but you are taking a single word and divorcing it from the content of the sentence it's in.

It's probably the politics that led to the roughly 50% rise in cost of living across the state in the last decade.

There is little comfort to be had when you're losing your home and car because someone tells you that at least the homeless shelters and public transit are much better now.

They hate you, because they see you as a giant economic jackboot stepping on the face of the poor forever.

Conceptually, pattern matching isn't wrong. It's the implementation, presentation, and gross exaggeration of efficacy that is the real problem. DNA matching is still often pseudoscience voodoo the way it is used in courts for many of the same reasons that tooling marking is. Just look at Massachusetts, where they are having to retry 10's of thousands of cases because tests were botched by an malicious technician and then passed off in courts as foolproof even when the prosecution knew them to be suspect.

I think you misunderstand. When maintenance is being done on the machine itself, yes you are going to do a lock-out tag-out routine. On the flipside, if you remote push the update and it contains for instance, a register read error on the rate controller that shifts the bits by 1, the operator's first notice us going to be when he loads it up and the ensuing chatter violently throws the work piece.

Or something dumber, maybe they pushed a temp variable to the wrong type of memory (say flash eeprom) that updates every cycle of the control loop, and then did a push to an entire line of manufacturing equipment. Congratulations, all of those are going to brick in an hour or so when the memory hits it's maximum write cycle lifetime and you'll have to get new boards shipped in while your entire line is down.

Remote pushing needs to be handled very carefully when controlling real world equipment.

To touch on this a bit. To be a good controls guy that does PLC programming you need to have some mechanical background to understand the equipment you are controlling, you need to know enough electrical to do the wiring and parse what your sensors are telling you and you need to be a fair shake at programming/comm protocols/logic. Oh, and most control loop implementations are actually sets of differential equations with DSP inputs so having a knowledge in that stuff helps a lot when you get into the precision stuff.

If you go look at the current postings for these roles you'll find that the average salary is between $15-$25/hr, you'll be on call 24/7, and you have to work physically demanding jobs in relatively harsh environments. I've seen a few outfits that don't even offer to pay their employees for commuting time between sites, only for when they are actually sitting down and working on the boards.

I would argue that air gaps are critical in ICS networks and PLCs because it is an extreme safety risk to push a potentially bad update from offsite without clearing the operator. The major issue will be pushing back against cost pressure from management.

This is already turning into a major problem with IOT devices from supposedly reputable companies i.e. home thermostats that let pipes burst because of a bad or incorrectly pushed update. Now consider if that bad update could instead kill someone.

Neuralink is certainly on my radar as a company to watch but I thought it was more in an invite only Ph.D heavy theory stage than a hire and build board stage. The idea to use an acoustic radio for transmission in a mostly water media is very clever even if I worry about the safety margins of the power density involved with transmitting that much data.

Can you provide any technical detail about what is unique or novel about what your company does? Neither the wired article nor your company webpage has any useful information on what might differentiate you from the countless EMG devices out and hobbyist setups there.

TI makes some MEMS devices for automotive applications, but I don't know of anything in automotive with the type of complexity involved in a DLP. Their mixed signal integrated controls are pretty nuts but not mechanical.

The reason I'm not to worried about reliability is more or less as follows. The fact that TI makes other automotive parts is important because they know exactly what kind of environment these parts will be subjected to, they know how they will be handled when they are assembled from the chips TI ships into automotive boards, and what corners will be cut when those boards are sold and turned into assemblies which are sold and turned into cars. They have plenty of experience in determining what kind of reliability intervals will be required. TI built their first DLPs back in the 80s. They made their first commercial ones in the mid 90's. They probably never turned a profit on DLP until the mid 2000's which is about when they first demonstrated working prototype DLP headlights. They then spent 10 years refining them before taking them to market. TI isn't Facebook, they don't move fast and break things, they are an old school technology company that moves slow and reliable. If they get a reputation for poor reliability they stand to lose decades of investment and future revenue and they know it.

Another thing a lot of people probably don't know is that every TI part that fails in an automotive application gets returned to TI where a team of engineers meticulously dismantle it until they determine the exact cause of failure. They are legally obligated to do this from contracts with auto manufacturers but the net results for TI has been the development of one of the worlds most sophisticated semi-conductor reverse engineering capabilities.

I got a demo of this technology close to about 10 years ago from TI. Their "killer app" in the lab was a pairing of the DLP with their DSPs to track rain while driving and reduce illumination of rain drops such that glare to the driver was substantially reduced. It was in a lab, but it worked surprisingly well.

Another thing that many people don't realize is that TI makes a huge number of automotive parts currently with extremely tight reliability controls in place for customers like Toyota, as well as established supply chains from silicon to road via companies like Temic automotive.

Personally, I hope TI continues to develop DLP into new markets. The tech is really cool, their miniaturized projectors using laser sources for embedding into smartphones is another demo I saw that would be really interesting if it ever hits market.

There is also the fact that the renewal vote happens on an election cycle. If the republicans hold the house, the tax cuts will be renewed. If the democrats take control, they will be forced to expire the cuts since they are planning to campaign heavily on the tax bills as bad for the public. This means that if the GOP loses control, the following year taxes will go up on most voters and help reinforce the GOP narrative of the Democrats as the party of taxation.

I used FEKO for some time and it had the best interface for doing optimization out of the EM solvers in my opinion. The development team out of South Africa was also excellent in the brief times I got to work with them directly. Unfortunately after the company was acquired the new monetization scheme didn't work out with my office and we largely switched to CST.

Most discussions centered on environmental concerns boil down to accepting a massive quality of life reduction for most of the world's population. It is usually colored by someone who thinks it wouldn't impact themselves much and that the world would be better if more people just lived like them i.e. in dense urban environments. This argument at least is not predicated on the need to kill a bunch of people such as you commonly hear in biotech or agriculture discussions.