Probably a fibre-optic tube. One would think those electromagnets would play holy hell with a CCD.

We can't tell what kind of drone it is, nor its size. The broken prop in the frame at the end is cracked like it's carbon fibre, not GFRP or straight plastic. Have you ever been struck by a drone prop? I have. It hurts. I had stitches. I still have scars.

Unfortunately, not uncommon in the slightest. I've done two jobs like this (at a previous employer and at my current job when we tore down the server room to install proper heat tunnels as our 1990's vintage air con wasn't keeping our server room under 35 deg cel).

People don't fix lazy patches (and it's not really advisable to pull cables during production because wackiness ensues), so eventually you end up with an awful mess. When someone does decide to clean it up, you have so many systems (and associated downtime) that management baulks at committing, reasoning that "if it's working, don't fuck with it". Then you reach the inevitable disaster point where you lose a vital system and cannot fix it because you lost a cable in the mess.

Longer patches get used to go around the monstrous mess created and eventually get buried as more and more are added, or repatching is done. Or it's the only cable they had on hand. Or they can't be bothered getting a more sensibly sized patch. ; )

It also looks like they were fixing up the fibre channel patches at the same time.

@ CharlieM, 3 days according to the white time stamp in the top left corner ; ).

someone should introduce these guys to fibre-optics...

Also, I don't see them wearing any ear protection at all - those guys who live on site will be deaf by the time they're 30. (if the company lasts that long)

Does the electricity provider accept Bitcoin as payment?

Hopefully nobody tells the Chinese government that Bitcoins are often used for illegal activities...

Coxswains are typically chosen for size more so than anything else. I recall the crew team at my school went through a few because they kept crashing into bridges and damaging the none-too-cheap carbon fibre boats.

edit: Oh, also coxswaining (awesome verb, that) is apparently extremely difficult. Basically, all my knowledge of crew comes from a friend of mine who rowed and did pretty much nothing but bitch about the coxswain.

Just tap into the undersea fibre, there are repeaters every few miles.

Seriously though, I never thought about it. My guess would be not very well, and after a quick search I found this video - http://youtu.be/49K2hjV9OOY ("How to make your GoPro WiFi working underwater"), so there wouldn't be a need for such an "antenna extender" if WiFi did work well enough under water.

Any submarine experts on the sift??
I suspect that very low frequencies could work, but there is probably a max depth below which they couldn't communicate well.

Clearly it works with other fibres too, even if it's mostly aimed at carbon fibre.

I remember this guy.

Kicked out of Tulane university for one of the worst research papers in its history. This is the guy that doesn't even believe in how our eyes function:

"There is in fact no evidence at all that having this layer of nerve fibres (which are largely transparent) in front of the receptors significantly blocks, distorts or diffracts the incoming light in any way."

Total ripoff artist.

If you believe he was ever an Atheist, then I have a secret to tell you.

I am the Batman.

You are thinking about QAM, Quadrature Amplitude Modulation. Thats an interesting question because QAM essentially produces the same results that the prof talks about in this video. By using interesting ways to change the beat and phase of a single carrier, one can represent a whole array of numbers greater than just a 1 or a zero with a single pulse, case in point.

In QAM, lets just use the easy example of QAM, QPSK (4QAM), where there are 4 possible binary positions for any given 'carrier' signal at a known frequency.

By shifting both phase and amplitude, you can get a 0, 1, 2 or 3, where each position represents a power of 2, up to a total value of 16 unique numbers.

Rather than just a 0 or a 1, you can have 0 through to 15. However doing this requires both a timeslot, and a known carrier window.

The fastest the QAM transmitter can encode onto a carrier is limited by the nyquist rate, that is, less than half the frequency which the receiver can sample at its fastest rate (on the remote end). As you increase the speed of the encoding, you also increase the error rate, and introduce more noise into the base carrier signal, in turn, reducing your effective available bandwidth.

So it then becomes a balancing act, do I want to encode faster, or do I want to increase my constellation density? The obvious answer is the one we went with, increase in constellation density.

There are much more dense variants, I think the highest ive heard of was 1024 QAM, where a single carrier of 8MHz wide could represent 1024 bits (1,050,625 unique values for a given 'pulse' within a carrier).

I actually had a lot more typed out here, but the maths that goes into this gets very ugly, and you have to account for noise products that are introduced as you increase both your transmission speed, and your receiver sensitivty, thus lowering your SNR, reducing your effective bandwidth for a given QAM scheme.

So rather than bore you with the details, the Shannon Hartley theorem is the hard wired physical limitation.

Think of it as an asymptote, that QAM is one method of trying to milk the available space of.

You can send encoded pulses very fast, but you are limited by nyquist, and your receivers ability to determine noise from signal.

The faster you encode, the more noise, the less effective bandwidth....and so begins the ritule of increasing constellation density, and receivers that can decode them....etc....

There is also the aspect of having carriers too close to one another that you must consider. If you do not have enough of a dead band between your receivers cut off for top end, and the NEXT carrier alongs cutoff for deadband at its LOW end, you can induce what is known as a heterodyne. These are nasty, especially so when talking about fibre, as the wavelengths used can cause a WIDE BAND noise product that results in your effective RF noise floor to jump SUBSTANTIALLY, destroying your entire network in the process.

So not only can you not have a contiguous RF bandwidth of carriers, one directly after another...if you try and get them close, you end up ruining everyones day.

I am sure there will be newer more fancy ways to fill that spectrum with useable numbers, but I seriously doubt they will ever go faster than the limit I proposed earlier (unless they can get better SNR, again that was just a stab in the dark).

It gives you a good idea of how it works though.

If you want to read more on this, I suggest checking wikipedia for the following;

Shannon Hartley theorem.
Nyquist Rate
Quadrature Phase Shift Key
Quadrature Amplitude Modulation
Fibre Optic Communication Wavelengths
Stimulated Brillouin Scattering
Ebrium Doped Fibre Amplifiers

Fibre can go a pretty long distance before it affects the signal though...

Fibre is comprised mainly of silicone, the more pure the fibre, the less dispersion issues occur at or around 1550nm (one of the main wavelengths used for long distance transmission, as we can easily and cheaply amplify this using ebrium doped segments and some pumps!)

Any impurities in the fibre will absorb the 1550 at a greater rate than other wavelengths, causing linear distortions in the received carrier along greater distances. This is called Brillouin scattering.

In the context of the above video, consider a paralell cable sending data over 100m. If one of those lines is 98m, then every bit that is sent down that line, will be out of order.

Same deal with Brillouin scattering, only on the optical level. Thats one of the main issues we gotta deal with at distance, however it only ever occurs at or around 1550nm, and only ever when you are driving that carrier at high powers (i.e. launching into the fibre directy from an ebrium doped amplifier at +15 dBm)

Theres some fancy ways of getting around that, but its not cheap.

Anywhere from say around 1260 to 1675nm is the typical bandwidth window we use today.

So, say 415nm of available bandwidth.
If we want that in frequency to figure out the theoritcal bits/sec value from the shannon-hartley theory, then we just take the inverse of the wavelength and times it by the speed of light.

7.2239e+14 hz is the available spectrum.

...thats 7.2239e+5 terahertz....

Assume typical signal to noise on fibre carrier of +6dB (haha, not a chance in hell it would be this good across this much bandwidth, but whatever..)

For a single fibre you would be looking at an average peak bandwidth of around 20280051221451.9 mbps.

Thats 19,340,564 Terabits per second, or 18,887.3 Petabits per second.

You can fudge that +/- a couple of million Tbps based on what the actual SnR would be, but thats your average figure.....thats a lot of Terabits.

On one fibre.

Source: Im a telecoms engineer

Very interesting video, but a pity he went in to all that detail to end with a figure as vague as "1 terabyte in a few hundredths of a second".

If "a few" is 5 we'd get 20 Tbytes/s, if a few is 50 we'd get 2 Tbytes/s.

From wikipedia it seems optical fibre bandwidth is also limited by distance, due to dispersion, but current experimental research results are approaching 100 Terabit/s over a single channel.
(26Tbit/s in 2011, 73.7 Tbit/s in 2013)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiber-optic_communication#Parameters

100 Terabit/s is 12.5 Terabyte/s, which is 1 Terabyte in 0.08 seconds.

So while it still doesn't tell us what the theoretical limit is, for our currently achievable maximum speeds "a few" is 8.

The European Parliament's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs had a hearing about NSA/PRISM/etc yesterday, with Jacob Applebaum and Alan Rusbridger amongst others. Greenwald was supposed to be videoconferenced in, but it didn't work for reasons unknown to me.

Two interesting bits of information:

1) Sweden is closely involved in the Fives Eyes program. They have an installation to monitor satellite communications and access to fibre optic cables that the members of Five Eyes don't have access to. No specifics were mentioned, but a quick glance at a map of long distance cables indicates to me that it's Russian communications they are interested in -- those run through Sweden.

2) Nations with access to PRISM/ECHELON besides the Five Eyes: France, Israel and Sweden. Likely to have access, though probably limited: Germany. Potential access, but unconfirmed: a total of thirty nations.

And, as a special bonus, the former chair of the special committee that authored the 2001 report on ECHELON said the following, paraphrased by me:

"If rentention of domestic communications meta data is deemed neccessary, the acquired data should not be stored outside of the respective nation. Normally, I'd say outside of the EU, but that just brings us back to the problem of GB and the GCHQ."

That's a high ranking EU official stating, on record, that GB cannot be trusted.

Hes our current prime minister (president...if you will).
I want him to win, cause we will all get fibre to the home....but he wont...:'(

Actually there's some pretty decent evidence to suggest that "juicing" is not a good idea at all.

You're essentially ruining perfectly good fruits and vegetables and ingesting more calories quicker. Plus, you don't get the same fibre content.

That said, cutting out processed food can only be good for you. The paleo diet is a good example of this.

Personally, I've stopped drinking soda and fruit juice, as they essentially just fructose in water and fructose is bad. I try not to buy any sauces or packaged foods and pretty much make as much as I can from scratch. It's better for you and there's more satisfaction from it.

And honestly I don't miss sugar at all.

But then there is my weakness, my kryptonite, my Achilles heel if you will. I do love me some ethanol.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Needs your vote Ant - everyone deserves fibre to the premises at a reasonable price.

That sounds pretty elite, first-world-problemish, I know, I know. Buy I believe in the Internet as a great equaliser.