Receivers and Other Radios

The topic of communications or general purpose receivers comes up a lot in our community.  On a couple of occasions, I've had readers drop me an email about radio receivers; either selecting one, or occasionally helping them with one that's not behaving the way they expect it to.  Since I've been designing receivers for most of my career, for everything from satellites and commercial aircraft to my home ham station, I have some experience that I'd hope would be helpful to folks.  I thought I'd put some of it down. 

Let's start with a couple of broad questions:  should you get one jack-of-all-trades receiver, or maybe one specialized, good, receiver and one that's more "general purpose"?  How do you even choose one to buy?  If you're not just picking the nicest looking front panel, or the one with price and features you think you need, you're reading specifications, right?

In your mind, you can easily turn that question into another one we always hear: one gun to do everything or a couple of specialized guns, right?  It's the same problem in several ways.  Naturally, opinions would vary, but I lean toward a couple of different radios and a couple of different guns.  Just like you may choose HF for cross-country (or around the world) comm. links, and a VHF for your local AO, you might have a "serious" transceiver and a small, innocuous radio for simple things, like a short power outage.  

What about specifications?  In my earliest days of studying receivers, back in the late 60s/early 70s, the criteria that people cared about were "the two S" characteristics of Sensitivity, and Selectivity.  Sensitivity refers to the receiver being able to hear the weakest, just-above-the-noise signals on frequency while selectivity refers to being able to reject undesired signals.  Today, we'd add a third S: strong-signal handling. 

For the last 30 years or more, sensitivity has rarely been an issue.  For one thing, to be blunt, we've gotten better at designing these things.  For another, and it's the main advancement in the field, it's easier to get lots of gain at low prices (gain is the term for amplifying; making small signals bigger).  Although Moore's Law hasn't really applied to radio circuitry in terms of increasing the number of functions in a part, the improvement in transistor performance that arguably comes from Moore's Law is one of the drivers in the producing this availability of gain.  The saying is that "gain is cheap" and it has revolutionized design.  Suffice it to say you really don't need to worry about sensitivity in radios designed since the 1970s. You'll have to go back to vacuum tube radios from the 60s and before - and cheap ones to boot - to find radios that need an external preamplifier to be sensitive enough.  

Sensitivity is usually reported as some number of microvolts (millionths of a volt) of signal for a specific signal to noise ratio (SNR), but you'll only see that specified on radios with an antenna connector.  For a portable with a whip antenna here's a simple test you can do:  tune it to an unused frequency or a weak station in the shortwave band you're interested in.  Now simply grab the antenna.  If the signal gets better (lower noise, usually louder) the radio isn't optimized.  If the signal gets weaker, the radio is well-designed.  Ever seen people hang a wire off the whip antenna on a portable?  That's a sign of bad design.

Selectivity remains a concern, and hasn't advanced as much as sensitivity - especially in ultra-small, portable radios.  The reason is that selectivity depends on filter technology and there haven't been any major advances in that area over the years.  The cliche here is that filtering comes by the cubic yard. To make filters narrower or to get better rejection of nearby frequencies requires either more parts, or higher quality factor ("Q") parts, and both of those mean "bigger".  For sure, today's continually-shrinking electronics have given us smaller parts to make filters with, but to get a given ratio of bandwidth that the filter is passing to the bandwidth it's rejecting (called its shape factor) requires a number of components that's set by physics, not by fancy design tricks. 

Strong signal handling didn't really start being talked about until the early 70s.  Whether it was because of the change over to transistors from vacuum tubes going on around then, or whether it was because of the growing crowding in the RF spectrum, or some other factor, I can't really say.  A lot of factors go into determining the strong-signal performance of a receiver, but the ultimate answer is to make the signal voltages (or currents) small compared to the voltages (or currents) powering all of the circuits, so it's possible that the higher voltages of vacuum tube circuits helped the problem, but it still might be that the denser packing of users is what caused it. 

Strong signal handling is sometimes called "Dynamic Range", but that's a term that I don't like to use because it's used for a lot of different things, and that causes confusion.  Because the terms aren't as standardized as pure sensitivity or selectivity, it also means you can be comparing two different radios and find different numbers for their strong signal handling, and that can mislead you into picking the wrong one.  (I prefer to rank by the output third order intercept (OIP3), but I'm not going to explain what it is.  For now.  It could take a post of its own.) 

In your everyday use, I'd argue the two most important characteristics are selectivity and strong signal handling.  Improving the first makes the radio bigger while improving the second makes it harder on batteries.  Clearly, pocket-sized, battery-powered receivers are at a disadvantage. 

Welcome to engineering, where everything is a compromise.  There are no perfect solutions.  If there were a perfect solution, everybody would be doing it that way and you wouldn't need to choose one.  

Where is all this blather going?  There are many good little amateur radios with a broadband receiver in them.  I've mentioned before that my "EDC radio" is a Yaesu VX-6R, a handheld VHF/UHF ham transceiver that transmits on the 144, 222 and 440 MHz bands, using narrowband FM.  It also features a wideband receiver that tunes 0.500 MHz (below the standard AM broadcast band) to almost 1000 MHz (1.000 GHz) (the last few MHz below 1000 are blocked out due to being a US cellular phone band).  If you use the little antenna that comes with this handheld, you'll think it doesn't receive anything below the FM broadcast band.  The antenna isn't optimized for the receiver, it's to work with the transmitter, which is fussier about the antenna.  The receive side is just a broadband input.  If you give it a good antenna, it's fine, but good broadband antennas aren't at all trivial to build and I think any attempt to cover 500 kHz to 1000 MHz would require a few antennas.  Bottom line is that these little radios aren't going to be useful if you need to hear shortwave or below without building antennas.

As an alternative, you can grab something like this: a Kaito WRX-911.  This little, sub-$20 shirt pocket shortwave radio will get AM/FM broadcasts and nine shortwave broadcast bands.  It passes my antenna test: touch the antenna and signals get weaker.  It's not very good at strong signal handling, but neither are handhelds like my VX-6R or its cousins.  That means that if you're in an area with lots of strong local stations, you might not hear anything but them. 

Sometimes a simple radio has its advantages. 

I Bet This Doesn't Happen Where You Live

Why Florida isn't like where you live - (part 1 here).  Unless you're one of the guys from South Florida I link to, Miquel or Mike, you probably don't run into 9 foot long anacondas very often.

State wildlife officers shot and killed a 9-foot-long green anaconda Monday near the St. Johns River at the Brevard – Orange county line.

A concerned citizen and an airboater had called the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission around 5 p.m. Monday. FWC responded and found a large snake on the embankment of the Midway Airboat Rides off of State 50 in north Brevard, said Lenny Salberg, an FWC spokesman.

 

And I'll bet if they found an Anaconda where you live, they wouldn't check to see if it was someone's pet with an ID chip inside, because nobody owns a freakin' pet anaconda where you live!

For the record, this isn't exactly my neighborhood; it's about 40 miles from here.  But I can just imagine an anaconda of that size crossing the boat ramp just about anyplace I go.  Imagine backing down the trailer and suddenly hitting a speed bump.

In an unrelated but somehow appropriate event, I was going to print out my forms for the Remington Black Friday rebates and the printer kept jamming on the paper feed.  This is ordinarily pretty reliable, so we opened it up and found a fried and dehydrated little lizard caught in the rollers.  The printer is close to the back doors that open onto our porch/courtyard.

AG Lynch: San Bernardino Terror Attack "Wonderful Opportunity"

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year! 

There'll be Christians for Shooting 

And Throats good for Booting
Bringing Muslims Good Cheer!

It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year!

Attorney General Loretta Lynch hit a new low, even in the sordid history of this administration, by saying about the San Bernardino Christmas Party Massacre:

“We’re at the point where these issues have come together really like never before in law enforcement thought and in our nation’s history and it gives us a wonderful opportunity and a wonderful moment to really make significant change.”  [emphasis added: SiG]

Honestly, to look at a horrific terrorist attack on the US homeland; Islamic terrorists attacking and killing a group of people having an office Christmas party, and to call it wonderful in any way is beyond tone deaf to outright evil.  Rahm Emanuel saying, "you never want to let a good crisis go to waste" is tone deaf.  This is way beyond that.

But instead of condemning the terrorist attack, the Attorney General said she was more concerned about "anti-Muslim rhetoric".  Because, you know, something like 1 Muslim is inconvenienced for every 10 or 20,000 people they kill.  Speaking at a Muslim Advocates dinner

...Lynch said since the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, she is increasingly concerned with the “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric … that fear is my greatest fear.”

The fear that you have just mentioned is in fact my greatest fear as a prosecutor, as someone who is sworn to the protection of all of the American people, which is that the rhetoric will be accompanied by acts of violence. My message to not just the Muslim community but to the entire American community is: we cannot give in to the fear that these backlashes are really based on.

Lynch made it clear that she shares those concerns, but vowed to use the DOJ to protect Muslims from discrimination and violence. Noting the rise in violence against Muslims and mosques in the wake of the Paris attacks, Lynch added that, “When we talk about the First amendment we [must] make it clear that actions predicated on violent talk are not American. They are not who we are, they are not what we do, and they will be prosecuted.”

Just like the anti-gun groups who figuratively dance in the blood of every shooting , especially if there are photogenic children involved, Lynch and her pals see the murder of 14 party-goers as a wonderful thing.  They can push harder on their agenda, beat the dead horse of "anti-Muslim" crimes that never seem to materialize.  Repeat the useless cries of "universal background checks" or "terror watch list" until a few more idiots go "golly! that might work!".

Suddenly "see something, say something" added a new phrase, morphing into "See something, Say something, Get prosecuted".

Attorney General Lynch - Keith Lane/Getty Images

Europe Increases QE and Confiscation Of Bank Deposits

The DJIA was down over 250 bucks today as the European Central Bank announced more attempts at "fiscal stimulus".  They've completely ruled out an interest rate increase in 2016 and probably not until mid '17.  In reality, I wouldn't be surprised to see Europe collapse or break out into open wars before then under the incredible social pressures of the "refugee crisis". 

The European Central Bank will extend its asset purchase program through March 2017 in an effort to boost inflation back toward its target of near but just below 2%, ECB President Mario Draghi announced Thursday. The ECB had previously planned to end the program in September 2016. Draghi said the program could be extended further beyond March if needed. The ECB will also include purchases of regional government bonds in the program, Draghi said. Earlier, the ECB further lowered the deposit rate it pays on money parked at the central bank to minus 0.3% from minus 0.2%.

In this case, the confiscatory negative interest rate of -0.3% is intended to be a way for the ECB to charge the big banks for the cash they store in the ECB, but there's apparently nothing to stop those banks from passing the cost onto their customers.  I say apparently because the Alternative Bank Schweiz has just done exactly that.

The Alternative Bank Schweiz (ABS) caused shockwaves with a letter sent to all clients in mid-October informing them that it would begin imposing interest charges on deposits in 2016.

For current accounts, the bank said it would impose a -0.125-percent rate, while slapping a -0.75-percent rate on client deposits higher than 100,000 Swiss francs ($98,650, 92,420 euros).

Admittedly, 1/8 of 1% isn't a big charge; if you've got the equivalent of just below that 100,000 Swiss franc line, I'll use $90,000 instead of $98,650, it's only $112.50.  On the other hand, if you don't use that money and leave it in the bank, it will slowly evaporate away.   

Let's pause for a little banking refresher lesson, for those who don't think this way.  Just like "It's a Wonderful Life" (and just in time for the analogy), when you deposit cash in the bank, it doesn't stay there.  You give the bank a debt; an obligation to pay you back the same amount on demand, and in exchange for you loaning the bank that money, they pay you interest.  At least they used to pay you interest.  Should the bank go belly-up, you stand in line with everyone else that they owe money to in order to get your share. 

With negative interest rates, you're paying them for the privilege of loaning them money.  Which they then loan to others, and back when the economy used to work, they loaned it to someone else at higher interest than they paid savers, making enough to stay in business on the difference between those two interest rates.  The root problem is that the central banks have lowered interest rates so much, the bank you loaned to doesn't make enough money on the interest they charge to pay you anything.

The central banks are destroying the world's financial systems.  Look, if Quantitative Easing hasn't helped Japan in the last 20 years, with all the QE the Bank of Japan has done, why would anyone think it's going to help anywhere?  Draghi, Yellen, Kuroda, and all the rest are either idiots or criminals.  All they're doing is taking money from lower incomes and transferring it to their cronies.    

If you're loaning money to the bank at a loss by depositing it there, why would you willingly do that?  Bill Bonner points out the obvious "bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" corollary:

Money today is inherently worth more than the same amount of money a year from now. Because something could happen in the intervening period. Someone else could buy the house you wanted. The borrower might die and not pay you back. Or you might die, without ever seeing your money again.

There's risk in loaning money the moment it leaves your hands.  If you're assuming the risk of loaning the money to the bank, which seems to have gotten riskier, shouldn't they should be paying you more, not making you pay them to use your money?  

(image source) 

We'll Always Have Paris

Maybe you had to have grown up in Florida to appreciate this, but Michael Ramirez' cartoon had me giggling uncontrollably for a while yesterday.

The referred Coppertone billboard ad was a regular feature of my childhood, going across the MacArthur Causeway to the beach.  Mrs. Graybeard recalls that as a little girl, as in 3 or 4, she was afraid to go to the beach, thinking bands of roaming dogs would this to her. 

Techy Tuesday - 3D Printing is Growing Up

3D Printers have been riding high on the Gartner Hype Cycle for a while.  At least once a month, the engineering trade magazines have an update on The Latest Thing in the field.  Gartner themselves posted that 3D printing hit the hype cycle peak in 2012.  That puts the technology today closer to the "Trough of Disillusionment" than the Peak of Inflated Expectations today.

Of course this is a bit misleading.  3D printing is in day-to-day use in industry and has been for a quite a while.  As a field, the term 3D printing can be applied to the Stratasys printers that produced the first 3D printed, all metal 1911, the giant machines used to print concrete houses, or it can be applied to small desktop printers. The field is growing and new approaches are coming online regularly.

Design News presents a feature on some new technologies coming into this growing field, with 10 new printers to look through.  They feature a way to print silicone like Room Temperature Vulcanizing (RTV) compounds, new UV cured resins, filled plastics, ceramics and more.  One printer, the Cybot 330 Pro 3D printer from Vancouver-based Cybot 3D can print 95% of filament types available, such as PETG (polyethyelene terephthalate glycol-modified), carbon fiber PLA (polylactic acid), NinjaFlex, PC-ABS (polycarbonate-acrylonitrile butadiene styrene), wood fill, copper fill, aluminum PLA, and stainless-steel PLA. Another printer head produces material with properties that vary around the print area.

A far out-there development that you probably won't see on the market any time soon, the Wyss Institute designed a new multimaterial printhead based on active, rather than passive, microfluidic mixing of a wide variety of materials to produce gradient architectures. Materials like silicone rubber can be printed in gradient architectures composed of soft and rigid regions. The team has also demonstrated the ability to mix and print reactive materials, such as two-part epoxies, with this printhead and to mix conductive and resistive inks on demand for embedding electrical circuitry inside 3D-printed objects.  (The Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering is part of Harvard University aimed at creating materials and devices to solve critical medical problems).

Not quite as far out is the four printhead printer from Cultivate3D with a print volume large enough to print a toddler.  It's more like the conventional home printer, only really big.

(The Beast from Cultivate3D).

IMF Grants China Reserve Asset Status

The news came out on Monday in the orient that China had been granted a coveted "reserve status" by the International Monetary Fund.  This is putting the yuan on par with the dollar and Euro as part of the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) currency the IMF controls.

The decision to add the yuan, also known as the renminbi, to the Special Drawing Rights (SDR) basket alongside the dollar, euro, pound sterling and yen, is an important milestone in China's integration into global finances and a nod to the progress it has made with reforms.
...
The yuan CNH= CNY= will have a 10.92 percent share, in line with expectations, after a review of the weightings formula for the SDR which also cut the euro's share by more than 6 percentage points.

To be included in the SDR basket, the yuan had to meet the criteria to be "freely usable," or widely used to make international payments and widely traded in foreign exchange markets -- a yardstick it missed at the last review in 2010.

The yuan's inclusion in the basket from October 2016 is a largely symbolic move with few immediate implications for financial markets. But it is the first time an additional currency has been added to the SDR basket, which determines which currencies countries can receive as part of IMF loans.

Since the makeup of the basket of currencies can only add up to 100%, the yuan's inclusion is at the expense of other currencies.  The euro's share will be cut from 37.4 percent to 30.93 percent, the British sterling and Japanese yen, will drop to 8.09 percent and 8.33 percent respectively, while the dollar remains broadly unchanged at 41.73 percent.  In this sense, the IMF is giving a nod to the importance of the yuan in the world economy, symbolically pushing the other currencies into diminished roles.

This is all part of a scenario that Jim Rickards was talking about (and I quoted) last May.  The financial world is realigning and the era of the dollar as the world's reserve currency is ending.  This doesn't mean that trouble is coming tomorrow or next year (which is just a few weeks away), but it does tilt the slippery slope in that direction.

He'll be among the first to tell you that financial collapse could happen this week or in a decade.  It's impossible to tell.  In many ways, it's like an avalanche: it's impossible to blame the avalanche on any particular snowflake, but any one of the continuing snowflakes could cause it.  What's it look like?  The only "bank" with any solvency left is the International Monetary Fund.  The IMF has Special Drawing Rights, SDRs, that would allow it to prop up the world when the collapse happens.  His most likely scenario would be that all banks around the world, all banks, would be shuttered.  After some time, perhaps a few days, perhaps a week, everyone would be able to withdraw 250 or $300 a day for food and energy expenses.  

This is the nightmare situation; the kind of situation where, like Greece, the states in the IMF could impose a "Greek haircut"; that is, they could confiscate some portion - half? - of every bank deposit in the world.  The world today seems to be a notch closer to Rickards' scenario.

To me, a key in the IMF statement/analysis is that phrase, "the dollar remains broadly unchanged at 41.73 percent".  That's acknowledging that, for now, the dollar is still the dominant currency in the world.  If that should start to drop, it's a warning sign.  If the dollar should go into a collapse, you would see explosive price inflation as dollars are sold off at a loss to avoid further loss.  I've seen estimates that there are three times as many dollars held overseas as in circulation in the US.  If they flooded back, instantly quadrupling the total number of dollars available, I could see the price on everything jumping that amount or more.  This would truly be the SHTF.  

Modern Day Pilgrims, I Tells Ya

So says the POS POTUS:

From IOwnTheWorld, via a friend's email.

It's amazingly historically naive, but what can you expect from someone who is so obviously not familiar with American culture? 

There are organizations dedicated to helping the persecuted Christian minorities away from Daesh*, and I'd much rather see those people in America than the many refugees we see in Hungary and everywhere else video comes from.  Why?  Tell me how many Christians are in Daesh?   Yeah, zero point zero.   I feel much safer with that population.  Or the Yazidis. 

*Daesh is a new term being used for the Islamic State/ISIS/ISIL.  They consider it derogatory - which is a good enough reason to use the name for me.

Happy Conspicuous Consumption Days!

A belated Happy Thanksgiving and Happy Black Friday, dear readers. 

As is our tradition, we spent yesterday with my brother and his in-laws.  It's a 290 mile round trip drive for us, but by all means the distance champion was his father-in-law, a WWII veteran who (at 93) drove the hundred miles from where he lives to brothers', spent the night, than drove 120 miles across the state to pick up his sister and drove back, then drove the hundred miles home.  All together about 400 miles of driving.  I hope to be as sharp as he is, should I make it to 94.  He's a Navy veteran from the PT boat service in the South Pacific.  

After celebrating Thanksgivings there for the last fifteen years or so, it's a good reunion.  The fact that it's a bit smaller every year or two makes each get together that much more special.  Normalcy bias can be pleasant.

I don't do the Black Friday early morning competition stuff, but may pick up something or two online if the prices are right.  It's not holiday shopping, just keeping my eyes open for things we could use. 

Like every time you go shopping, it's a good idea to know what things should cost.  Retailers often raise prices before today or have products at prices that aren't really a deal or raised prices beforehand to make a better-sounding deal.  And, of course, they sometimes cut prices well in advance of today, too. 

My takeaway is that (1) I don't need anything so badly that I'd wait in line or get into a fight for a few bucks off on it, so (2) there's no reason to get wound up about today. 

Today, we have a turkey in the smoker and threw in a package of bacon for a couple of hours.  We'll just have a quieter, lower-key day, and have some turkey left overs, too. 

As We Enter "The Holiday Season"

With Hat Tip to Michael Bane's blog:

The words to listen to in the political gobbledygook going by are "Article 5" especially if those words are accompanied by the word NATO.   Article 5 of the NATO treaty is the "collective defense" article; the one that says an attack on any NATO member is viewed as an attack on them all.  You can be sure that Putin is aware of that and it's being figured into his gaming.  If there were any Warsaw pact left to counter it, they might well have thought the same of Turkey's action.  To quote from Tam:

• This has the potential to spin right the f*** out of control before anybody involved realizes what they're doing.

To the suggestion that Russia would just continue to punk NATO with no response:

• Yeah, see, sooner or later some individual fighter pilot or other trigger puller isn't going to understand that he's supposed to be punked.

There are a lot of people saying we're in the early days of WWIII, we just don't know it.  I think we'll be finding out.  I don't think that Russia has the military strength to go down the road of pushing NATO.  Strategy Page noted this weakness in numbers the other day (H/T to BRM)

The Russian intervention in Syria involves some 4,000 troops and about fifty warplanes and helicopters. The small size of this force exposes a sad fact of post-Cold War Russia; the military no longer has much in the way of combat capability and few post-Cold War weapons. Thus Russia has few smart bombs and is mostly relying on unguided bombs built in the 1980s,  ...  The Russian air force and navy are now less than ten percent of their Cold War strength and the army has fewer combat brigades than it did armies during the Cold War.

So they'll likely do something more subtle to hit Turkey, perhaps something like Col. Ralph Peters suggests in this video. 

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

Enjoy your Thanksgiving, folks!

Techy Tuesday - Space Tourism Getting Closer

Yesterday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos' spaceflight company Blue Origin successfully ran a rocket into space, returning the capsule under parachute, but landing the separated launch vehicle on nearby target at a gentle 4.4 mph.

The Blue Origin launch vehicle New Shepard, consisting of a BE-3 rocket and crew capsule, lifted off from the west Texas sands, traveled to the legally defined limit of space of 100 km (62 miles) and returned.

Bezos boasted that the BE-3 is "now safely tucked away at our launch site in West Texas, [and] is the rarest of beasts—a used rocket." He added that "it flew a flawless mission -- soaring to 329,839 feet and then returning through 199-mph high-altitude crosswinds to make a gentle, controlled landing just four-and-a-half feet from the center of the pad." In the video below, you can see the rocket approaching the ground at dramatically high speeds, then slowing rapidly with a final rocket thrust as the landing gear deploys. Meanwhile, the drogue parachutes on the capsule unfurled at 20,045 feet, helping the crew craft make a (fairly) gentle desert "splashdown."

I'll embed this one.



The main purpose of this rocket, at least if you poke around their website, appears to be space tourism. They will take six people up at a time, once this gets going, for four minutes of weightlessness and the "biggest windows in space".  They also advertise:

Designed with researchers in mind

With approximately three minutes in a high-quality microgravity environment, an apogee of over 100 km, and a comfortable shirt-sleeve cabin environment, our New Shepard system is ideal for microgravity physics, gravitational biology, technology demonstrations, and educational programs. You’ll also have the opportunity for Earth, atmospheric, and space science research.

Given that, I think the Engadget article headline, "Jeff Bezos beats Elon Musk's SpaceX in the reusable rocket race" is not just misleading, it's wrong.  SpaceX made a landing of a suborbital rocket on ground over a year ago, and did it with their Grasshopper technology demonstrator in 2012.  SpaceX has failed so far to land a Falcon 9 booster on small, moving ship at sea, dropping from a greater height.  I think that's at least marginally harder due to coming from a higher starting point.  Blue Origin is catching up with SpaceX. 

More competition is good, and kudos to Blue Origin for accomplishing this.  A healthy private space program is a good thing. 

The Next Frontier for Robots? Grocery Stores

We've been talking about robotic hamburger machines for years now, but now comes word that the next frontier is your grocery store.  Meet the Simbe Robotics autonomous robot, Tally.

Simbe Robotics developed the robot in response to the billions of dollars retailers lose annually as a result of out-of-stock items, empty shelves, and other in-store inconsistencies. Currently retailers rely on their IT systems and manual labor to account for product availability which has proved to be costly and inaccurate.

The mobile robot autonomously scans large retail environments to capture, report, and analyze the state and availability of merchandise and help ensure compliance standard placement of products on shelves in order to maximize sales. Tally performs the repetitive tasks of auditing shelves for out-of-stock items, low stock items, misplaced items, and pricing errors, in an attempt to make sure customers leave satisfied and the company doesn’t lose money.

They have a video of the small robot  (about 38" tall and 30 pounds) patrolling the store on the Simbe Robotics website.  As it rolls down the aisle, it examines every item noting those needed restock, items in the wrong place, or those that need a price correction.  Tally then sends the data to "the cloud".  You know from your own experience that when you go looking for an item in the store and it's not on the shelves, you usually don't linger around trying to find one, you move on.  That's a lost opportunity for the store.  With a small, nimble robot constantly on patrol, they can direct humans to do the tasks requiring hands.  The robot is autonomous and can navigate the store on its own, then find its way back to its charging station when its batteries are getting low. 

In my mind, the big question is why do the stores need Tally?  If everything coming into stock is ID'ed when it left the warehouse, and the ID tracked from the receiving deck (to rule out theft off the truck) to the shelf, and then ID'ed when the checkout robot scans it, shouldn't the stores know the contents of everything at all times?   Or is this too idealized?

A Little Followup on the Long Range Strike Bomber

Friday, Bayou Renaissance Man ran a piece on the contract conflict over the Long Range Strike Bomber (LRS-B).   Briefly, the contract was awarded to Northrup Grumman, and Boeing/Lockheed Martin who lost are suing over improper handling of some aspects.   Quoting:

Not surprisingly, the Long-Range Strike Bomber protest is on. Boeing and Lockheed Martin claim the Air Force’s selection of Northrop Grumman for the development and early production work – worth $23.5 billion – was bungled. The service failed to conduct a proper assessment of the risk for both teams to execute the work and neglected to account for modern advances in manufacturing and life-cycle maintenance, all of which would reduce the cost of such a program, according to Loren Thompson, a Washington DC-based analyst. Thompson’s think-tank receives funding from both Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and the latter employs him as a consultant; he publicly endorsed the Boeing/Lockheed Martin bid despite the requirements and source-selection criteria being classified. Thompson receives no funding from Northrop Grumman.

The losers filed their protest with the Government Accountability Office Nov. 6 after receiving their debrief Oct. 30 from the Air Force.

And, not surprisingly, the other protest is on. You see, in Washington, there’s the protest – filed with GAO and subject to a 100-day audit – and there’s the Protest – the political campaign to disparage the agency that made the alleged flawed choice and its entire strategy. The latter is designed as an end run to whatever the GAO may rule. By undercutting the agency and its strategy at the knees in Congress, pressure can force an agency into submission regardless of a GAO ruling.

The company I work for is not involved in this contract (well, I suspect - but don't know - we'll subcontract to the ultimate winner for some of the avionics), so I don't have a dog in this fight, but I have friends that have left to go work on this contract. 

Contesting the award seems to be the norm in these mega-contracts.  Do you remember the Boeing/Airbus tanker scandal a few years ago?  The contract for the next generation Air Force tanker was awarded to a joint venture between Airbus and Northrup Grumman; Airbus had built a plant in Mobile, Alabama to build the A-330 based tanker, but after a messy set of investigations, the contract was taken from Airbus and given to Boeing.  The Airbus tanker was to be built mostly in France, with final assembly in Mobile, probably as a political move to appease lawmakers' concerns of giving jobs to France.  Today, Airbus is building the biggest selling aircraft in their fleet, the A320 models, in that Mobile facility.   Boeing is building the KC-46A Tanker in its Seattle-area facilities. 

That was a $35B contract.  The first LRS-B contract is for $23.5B and while the Air Force inflated both contractors bids to try factor in how these contracts always go over cost, it seems a safe bet it will go beyond that.  Do you think that whichever side won the contract the other guys are not going to go sue and do everything they can to get that contract?  A contract this size, while probably not life or death for the companies involved, is going to be devastating loss for the loser and great benefit for the winner.  Lots of good details in the story at Aviation Week. 

This is the way things are done these days.  When the government gets so gargantuan that they call the shots on everything, industry works by lawsuits and counter suits.  

There are no official concept sketches of what this bomber is going to look like, but this is a concept illustration from industry insiders at Aviation Week and Space Technology magazine (often referred to in the biz as "Aviation Leak".  Published here.  

Tab Clearing

Things I've been meaning to pass on: Miscellaneous edition:

Back in August, I wrote about the non-recall recall that Taurus has on a few models of pistols they sell. These are the PT-111, PT-132, PT-138, PT-140, PT-145 and PT-745 Millennium models (all of these are Millenium models), the PT-609, PT-640, and PT-24/7.  I returned my PT-145 in August, received confirmation it was there, and sat back for the 6 to 8 week turnaround.   Around the end of October, the 8 weeks were up and I checked online to see the status.  They said it had been repaired, but had not been shipped.  This was a Sunday night (probably 11/1) so I figured I'd have it soon.  After another couple of weeks, I checked the status and it said the same thing, so I used the online chat feature to ask about it.

I was told they're going to replace my PT-145 with a new pistol of my choice, out of a few models they offered me.  Of course, this has to go to an FFL and I need to set up a few things, but they offered me a choice between the PT845 or 24/7 45 g2/or 24/7 45 Compact.  Since my original was most like the 24/7 Compact, I'll probably get one of these.  They're saying "4-6 months" which I'm assuming means I'll get the replacement next August - 9 months from now and a full year from sending the gun away. 

When I play an electric guitar I use a solid state modeling amplifier made by Fender called the Mustang 1.  What's a modeling amplifier?  In the world of guitar players, an amp is not an amp is not an amp by any stretch of imagination.  What a modeling amplifier does is model the sound of a number of "classic" amplifiers sought out for their unique tones.  In modern music the amplifier is played like another instrument, and the guitarist usually has a pedal board (example) with some number of different effects that can be chosen by switching them in and out.  The modeling amplifier allows me to choose 24 different sets of effects, emulating the sound of 24 different classic amplifiers.  It also allows me to download more settings from a user community (FUSE) that other users have designed, or post those settings I've come up with.

Cool, right?  Not to a very large number of users who say unless it's the exact right vacuum tube-based amplifier with the exact right effects pedals, it's Just Not Good Enough.  I mean, seriously, there are guys who agonize over the difference between identical part (industry part numbers) made by different companies, and make demo recordings of them. That's a couple of minutes of a guy comparing operational amplifiers that are sold as identical to each other by their manufacturers.  Even worse in my mind (as a soon-to-be-retiring, grizzled, old engineer) is that they're agonizing over parts that I consider jelly bean parts; parts used in non-critical places, where anybody's part would be good enough. 

A lot of folks have tried to get to the bottom of the complexity of the tube vs. solid state amplifier clash and a web site I've recently come across called Tone Lizard tries to break down the legend and lore of this sort of stuff.  I've only just started wading through it, but I like his approach.  In a case like the op amp tests just referred to, he'd try to do objective tests with sensitive instruments to see what the differences really are. 

While I am not the most gifted engineer, I still have enough horse sense to figure out that whether my cabinets are made of pine or poplar would have little bearing towards the tone of my amplifier. For some players though, because they read an article in a guitar magazine or on the Internet stating it does affect the tone, it must be true. Therefore, how could any guitar player shell out $$$ for my amplifier, when I refuse to house it in a pine cabinet? My thoughts raced towards a common question or two; ‘Is this true? Why didn’t I know about this?’ So, I’ve decided to investigate these stories for myself. I have discovered that since these guitar players seemed to be neurotic and gullible, it was very easy to spread all sorts of rumors in today’s information age.

After emphasizing the point that the "Leo" he's referring to in this piece is not intended to be Leo Fender, he writes:

• Leo was not in business to make amplifiers; he was in business to make money.
• Leo made money by mass-producing ‘affordable’ musical equipment.
• Regardless of what you may hear or read, Leo had to make his chassis with standard sheet metal procedures. No ‘cutting-edge’ technology here, such as using copper, or billeting the chassis from a single piece of aluminum. Leo was an old radio man, and his chassis reflected that.
• Regardless of what you may hear or read, Leo had to make his cabinet with basic woodworking philosophies, and common woods. I haven’t seen nor heard of a tweed Bassman made from Wenge, Parawood, or Eucalyptus.
• Regardless of what you may hear or read, Leo had to use ‘standard’ parts. No manufacturer I spoke with mentioned ‘auditioning’ tube sockets or wire. They bought what they could locally, and in quantities. Leo did not ‘invent’ speakers to use with his amplifiers; he bought common speakers available to him at that time. Importing Celestion speakers was simply out of the question.
• Regardless of what you may hear or read, Leo was just as swayed by advertising as everyone else. If he could read about a new speaker line, and the price looked good, he’d try it. Can you honestly say Leo ‘auditioned’ Oxford speakers, and said…. “Hey! These are way better than those flimsy Jensen speakers we’ve been using; let’s switch right away, Freddie!”? If you answered ‘Yes!’, you need professional help, and this web site cannot offer that kind of salvation.

If you're even the least bit interested in this sort of thing, check it out.

A Good Capitalist Story

Good capitalist figures are hard to find stories about because they tend to be quiet folks who just do what they do.  They're generally not attention whores, they're more often the quiet ones that don't get noticed.

Meet Manaj Bhargava.  Chances are, you've never heard of him, but you've heard of his invention that made him rich, those ubiquitous red and yellow bottles of 5 Hour Energy.  Bhargava says he was surprised at the rapid acceptance of his invention, but from that first story link, a February 2012 issue of Forbes:

In one corner of Manoj Bhargava’s office is a cemetery of sorts. It’s a Formica bookcase, its shelves lined with hundreds of garishly colored screw-top plastic bottles not much taller than shot glasses. Front and center is a Cadillac-red bottle of 5-Hour Energy, the two-ounce caffeine and vitamin elixir that purports to keep you alert without crashing. In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone’s 2010 sequel to Wall Street. So do hungover ­students. It’s $3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava a fortune.

It has brought him to Forbes list of the richest people, with a net worth estimated at $4B.  The 62 year old now is in the enviable position to be able to live on 10% of his income and donate the other 90% to his personal charity, Stage 2 Innovations lab in Farmington, Michigan.  It's here where he's likely to do the most good.

The Stage 2 team consists of more than 100 engineers of all different backgrounds. The main focus of the project is to adopt ideas and concepts that have been around for centuries, but have not advanced due to perceived impracticality or inefficiency. Bhargava offers the team funding, plus as much 5 Hour Energy as they need in order to bring these ideas into fruition, designing efficient machines that can be manufactured on a large scale.

If you were to try to address the two largest needs in the third world, you'd probably end up pretty quickly focusing on energy and clean water with energy first because if you have energy you can purify water.

Free Electric exercise bike/generator: With a single hour of operation, this stationary exercise bike is claimed to generate enough electricity to power small household appliances, including lamps, toaster ovens, and cell phones. Pedaling turns a turbine that generates electricity and stores it in a battery for use throughout the day. This device allows for a clean energy source that can easily be used in homes. Bhargava plans to distribute 10,000 of these bikes in India next year, claiming that the bike could be made for less than $100. He expects that a community may share a bike to power numerous batteries for several households. 

Bhargava rides a prototype at Stage 2 Innovations.  Video here.

Mandatory nerd stuff.  Note that they talk about pedaling the bike for an hour and using the electricity throughout the day.  It doesn't say that it will last all day; that depends on how much energy is stored vs how much is removed.  Some numbers might help.  A professional road cyclist can put out amazing amounts of power - for a little while.  I've read that British sprinter Mark Cavendish puts out almost 1600 watts, but only for a few seconds.  For sustained power output, good riders can put out "a few hundred", like 300-400 watts, maybe 500.  But after an hour, that's still only 300-400 watt-hours.  It's highly unlikely an untrained villager will put out more than the low end of those numbers.  In (what looks like) a 12V battery, 240 Watts is 20 amps, though.  (I have a 35 amp hour battery I could fill in under two hours with one of these - assuming I could still put out 240 watts continuously for two hours.)   Finally, there's no free energy here.  That 240 watts the villager is providing will have to be supplied to the villager as food.

My point here, though, is that this is the story of a good man who made it big through innovation and creating a product (actually, he pretty much created the "energy shot" market).  Now his goal is to help others.  Voluntarily.  No government or NGO is taking 90% of his wealth; he's giving it.  There others out there that we never hear about.   
 

80% Polymer Pistol - Here's A Fun Project

It seems that the good guys at Polymer80 are introducing an 80% "Glock" lower.  Just add a drill press and bit of skill and you have "ghost Glock"  (say that 5 times really fast!)  H/T to ENDO for the lead. 

Of course, they don't actually call it a Glock!  Trademarks and all.  Plus, Gaston would probably have their kneecaps broken.  Instead, they call it the Spectre, as in the Spectre that haunts the dreams of freaks like Kevin De Leon.  So why do I call it a Glock?  Because it can be finished by using standard Glock parts.

This compatibility chart from their web page shows you the options of making one of three calibers from this lower.  Just add the appropriate slide and barrel, and you've got a 9mm, 40 S&W or .357 Sig pistol.  You can make your 9mm  24,  17 or 17L length, after the appropriately named Glock model; likewise you can make your 40S&W 24, 22, or 35 length.  You can make up your list of appropriate parts and go shopping from this chart.

(Standard disclaimer: I get no payback from either Polymer80 or Brownells.  My only relation to Brownells is as a customer who paid my own money for things.  I have no relationship to Polymer 80, although I might just trade some green for some black plastic.)

Personally, I think this is a great idea.  Glocks are so widely used in the market that there's a ton of parts available.  The Glock armorer's class is so widely held, I wouldn't be surprised to find they offer it in the women's ministry where I go to church.  That means there's someone in every town that knows how to strip a Glock to metal bits and rebuild it.  You can probably substitute "group" for "town".  Polymer handguns are old tech these days, and the principles of designing them are pretty well understood.  I've heard Polymer80 had some issues with their first AR lowers, but the company was good as gold and made everything right.  I'd be confident buying one.  Just note this is a sale but also the first lot they'll produce for sale.  They expect to ship late January, so don't expect to put it under the tree.

Headline of the Day

From Reuters:  Honduras detains 5 Syrians heading for U.S. with stolen Greek passports-police 

The report in its entirety says:

Honduran authorities have detained five Syrian nationals who were trying to reach the United States using stolen Greek passports, but there are no signs of any links to last week's attacks in Paris, police said.

The group of Syrian men was held late on Tuesday in the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa on arrival from Costa Rica and they were planning to head to the border with neighboring Guatemala. The passports had been doctored to replace the photographs with those of the Syrians, police said.

The men later told the police they had planned to cross Guatemala after exiting Honduras, then Mexico before crossing the southern border in the US.  Unlike the US, the countries of Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras all have genuine border security and caught the five Syrians.  Plus, they consider crossing with invalid passports to be a crime.  Their journey will be interrupted at least a little while.

Don't worry; I'm sure they were coming to audition for a church choir somewhere.  Maybe the Mormon Tabernacle?  One of the big Texas mega-churches? No?

In other news, president Obama is right: ISIS has been contained.  There has not been one single ISIS attack on the moon or another planet.  They have been contained to Earth, where they're pretty much like cockroaches and are found everywhere.   

 (US Border Patrol agent)

Techy Tuesday - Yet Another Smartphone Privacy Threat

Ars Technica reports on a new smartphone privacy threat that bares thinking about: it uses inaudible, ultrasonic sounds to surreptitiously track a person's online behavior across a range of devices, including phones, TVs, tablets, and computers.  These sounds, above the range of human hearing, are embedded into TV commercials or are played when a user encounters an ad displayed in a computer browser.  While you can't hear the sound, nearby tablets and smartphones can detect it.  When they do, browser cookies can now pair a single user to multiple devices and keep track of what TV commercials the person sees, how long the person watches the ads, and whether the person acts on the ads by doing a Web search or buying a product.  Of course, they also know the location of all those appliances, too.  The Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT) raised the privacy concerns with the Federal Trade Commission (pdf warning) for a meeting yesterday (Monday, the 16th). 

Often, people use as many as five connected devices throughout a given day—a phone, computer, tablet, wearable health device, and an RFID-enabled access fob. Until now, there hasn't been an easy way to track activity on one and tie it to another.

"As a person goes about her business, her activity on each device generates different data streams about her preferences and behavior that are siloed in these devices and services that mediate them," CDT officials wrote. "Cross-device tracking allows marketers to combine these streams by linking them to the same individual, enhancing the granularity of what they know about that person."

It turns out this not only isn't forbidden or illegal in any way, although it seems awfully virus-like to me, one of the companies that writes and sells the software that manages this, SilverPush, reported news that it received $1.25 million in venture capital.  Apparently tracking "everything you think, do, or say" is a growth industry.  The Indian news source in that link says:

At present, SilverPush is growing at a rate of 50 per cent quarter on quarter. In the last fiscal year, the startup had earned a revenue of USD 1.25 million. And for 2015-16, it is expected to touch USD five million.

The CDT reports "As of April of 2015, SilverPush’s software is used by 67 apps and the company monitors 18 million smartphones."  SilverPush is aware that some of us will find their approach ... unappealing. 

I pointed out that this could be pretty creepy, since it sounds like there’s an app listening in the background on your phone or tablet. Chawla acknowledged that there’s a risk of negative public perception, but he said that SilverPush isn’t receiving any actual audio data — once a match has been made, the only thing that gets sent back to the company is the identification code linking the devices. Chawla also said he’s working with the Mobile Marketing Association to develop guidelines around using this technology in a way that respects users’ privacy.

I don't know about you, but I don't find the fact that "the only thing that gets sent back to the company is the identification code linking the devices" particularly helps.  I don't like the idea of being watched, listened to or tracked at all, and I don't particularly like the idea of ads being shoved in my face all the time.  It reminds me of that scene in Minority Report where Tom Cruise's character is walking into a store and the ads are calling him by name - everything targeted at him.  That move is increasingly prophetic.  I don't see any mention of how to avoid it or turn it off, except possibly by putting something over the microphone so that phone can't hear the TV (or vice versa).  

(Jimmy Margulies)

Spectre

Yesterday afternoon, Mrs. Graybeard and I went to one of the local multiplex theaters to see Spectre, the latest film in the James Bond series.

It's an entertaining movie in the sense of lots of action, lots of chases, lots of splosions, lots of your typical James Bond movie stuff: Bond can do anything; survive just about any fall, or any attack, and jump into any handy, random aircraft and fly it.  What no one I've seen has talked about is that it has a strong libertarian theme: at its core it's about the overreaching surveillance state.  They never mention SPECTRE exactly in the context of the old movies, as the Special Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion, but the last few Bond movies have been a total reboot of the 60s movies. We met the new Moneypenny, M, Q, and the whole crew in Skyfall.  It's the 60s reimagined in the 21st century.  I think what this means is that by the time they set Bond's whole world up again, Daniel Craig will be too old to play him! 

Which is probably OK, since Craig thinks Bond is a jerk, and is always implying he doesn't like playing the character.  And, of course, he's one of the hypocritical Hollywood types who openly hates guns yet has to make so very, very much money pretending to use one.  Hate to make you do an unpleasant dance as we shower you in money, little dancing monkey.  Considering that he was credited as a producer, he probably isn't doing these little tantrums to bargain for more money from the next film. 

Short version: the British government is moving to eliminate the "00 program" and fold it into other surveillance systems.  The new administrator, "C", wants to do everything via the omnipresent surveillance systems and drones instead of field agents.  Spectre is behind that, and uses that data to do their moneymaking businesses: prostitution, sex slavery, smuggling, counterfeit drugs, and so on.   As counterpoint "M", the head of the program is fighting for the judgement of field agents like 007 to make the life or death decisions instead of computer systems.  A pivotal scene is Spectre running a false flag terrorism operation to get that nation to join the worldwide linking of all intelligence streams.  C mocks the idea of democracy several times, and gives the usual leftist views that only the enlightened geniuses like him should run everything. 

Surprisingly libertarian or conservative views for Hollywood.  I wonder if it was accidental?

What ISIS Really Wants

In March of this year, the Atlantic magazine published a fascinating, in-depth article by that name, on the real nature of ISIS and what we can really expect the organization to try to do.  Hat Tip to Self Sufficient Mountain Living who says a British friend mailed it to him.

It's easy for Western minds to dismiss these radical Islamists as insane, trying to establish conditions exactly the way their prophet ordered it in the Koran.  They are far from insane; they're methodically reconstructing the seventh century world as they believe they're commanded to.  They are perfect Muslims in their minds and attack anyone who believes in anything their spiritual leaders say is wrong.  In short, in the words of the subtitle of that piece:

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse.

I've stated before in various places that Islam is Satanic.  I realize that probably sounds inflammatory, especially to non-evangelicals, but all it means is that it follows tenets that are anti-Christian. Among those beliefs is that phrase "...it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse".  Christians don't believe God requires us to create the apocalypse.  God could end the world in an instant if He desired.  If you compare the biblical book Revelations to Islamic stories of the return of the 12th Imam - the Mahdi - from a well in Iran, I think it can easily be envisioned that they're talking about a similar story but from opposite sides.  Unlike the Christian end-times talk, Muslims who follow this theology believe they need to go on such a killing spree as to wash the world in blood before their leader will return.  

I'll be honest: I haven't finished the article, but I think it's worthwhile reading - if not mandatory for understanding the world in 2015.  I'll excerpt some pieces here that particularly made me take notice:

• Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of—and headline player in—the imminent end of the world. 
• In fact, much of what the group does looks nonsensical except in light of a sincere, carefully considered commitment to returning civilization to a seventh-century legal environment, and ultimately to bringing about the apocalypse.
• The reality is that the Islamic State is Islamic. Very Islamic. Yes, it has attracted psychopaths and adventure seekers, drawn largely from the disaffected populations of the Middle East and Europe. But the religion preached by its most ardent followers derives from coherent and even learned interpretations of Islam.
  ...
  Virtually every major decision and law promulgated by the Islamic State adheres to what it calls, in its press and pronouncements, and on its billboards, license plates, stationery, and coins, “the Prophetic methodology,” which means following the prophecy and example of Muhammad, in punctilious detail. Muslims can reject the Islamic State; nearly all do. But pretending that it isn’t actually a religious, millenarian group, with theology that must be understood to be combatted, has already led the United States to underestimate it and back foolish schemes to counter it.
• Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks. Muslim “apostates” are the most common victims. Exempted from automatic execution, it appears, are Christians who do not resist their new government. Baghdadi permits them to live, as long as they pay a special tax, known as the jizya, and acknowledge their subjugation. The Koranic authority for this practice is not in dispute.
• According to Haykel, the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as ‘Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”
• The Koran specifies crucifixion as one of the only punishments permitted for enemies of Islam. ... Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”
• If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery [including sex slavery - SiG] and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”
• The biggest proponent of an American invasion is the Islamic State itself. The provocative videos, in which a black-hooded executioner addresses President Obama by name, are clearly made to draw America into the fight. An invasion would be a huge propaganda victory for jihadists worldwide: irrespective of whether they have given baya’a to the caliph, they all believe that the United States wants to embark on a modern-day Crusade and kill Muslims.
• Properly contained, the Islamic State is likely to be its own undoing. No country is its ally, and its ideology ensures that this will remain the case. The land it controls, while expansive, is mostly uninhabited and poor. As it stagnates or slowly shrinks, its claim that it is the engine of God’s will and the agent of apocalypse will weaken, and fewer believers will arrive. And as more reports of misery within it leak out, radical Islamist movements elsewhere will be discredited: No one has tried harder to implement strict Sharia by violence. This is what it looks like.
• The Islamic State awaits the army of “Rome,” whose defeat at Dabiq, Syria, will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse. [All bold emphasis added - SiG]

That's probably too much to have excerpted here, but these are important pulls.  There is no negotiation with the Islamic State.  All you have to look at is their imagery: the crucified men and children; the beheaded prisoners, including little girls barely beyond toddler age; prisoners drowned en masse, burned to death, or beheaded in lines along the beaches.  Then we find their own doctrine forbids negotiation or making peace in any way.  No, their doctrine ensures that the only response proper for the Islamic State is the same as for an invasive cancer.   Every single cell must be killed.  The author of that piece offers as one of his conclusions that a slow, continuous bleeding of ISIS might be the best of the bad solutions to dealing with them.

(by Scott Stantis)