No war is "comfortable", it's a distaster for all involved participants—even the victors.

My rules are simple, when asked for a phone number I usually either say I do not have a phone or refuse to give it—even if it greatly inconveniences me. Second, I never answer calls unless I know the person who is calling.

If scammers can't reach one then one can't be scammed (at least not by phone).

Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

The hate will remain but it'll now be hidden. These laws will likely make things worse.

Right. The West's not seen anything like this since the Reich's march into the Sudetenland.

One can only hope Europe has enough gumption to confront the bully long enough for US citizens to awake and correct the situation.

The last thing we need now is gutless Appeasement from European states à la Chamberlain.

The real danger might still be within the US itself - what happens if he loses and doesn't want to accept it. Civil war?

I grew up some 30 years later in the '50s and '60s and had all those freedoms. Walking to school by myself at age six, traveling by train a 100 km and changing connections midway without supervision at age ten, roaming down valleys and through rugged bushland with my only dog, and so on.

What's more, I had a mother who for the time was very overprotective compared with those of other kids yet she never would have restricted those activities or considered them things we kids should not do—it was just not done. It would have been considered very abnormal if she'd put restrictions on our movements, instead she warned us to be careful.

I can hardy imagine how much poorer my childhood would havd been without those freedoms. I feel terribly sorry for today's overly-protected kids.

Feed any (slow) pulse generator into the diode and make it switch. Tunnel diodes can have sub-nanosecond switching times.

We also used this technique to check/measure the rise times of our oscilloscopes.

One day the engineer explained the switching between transmit and receive and the need for it to be very accurate - blasting the receive coil with the massive transmit coil when the receive coil expects a minuscule signal would be bad.

It’s timed in picoseconds. It’s so impressive.

Seems to me we not only have ultra fast picosecond switching involved but also the transmit signal would have be attenuated many orders of magnitude around the receiver to stop it 'frying'. That's very impressive at that switching speed.

When I was a kid, I used to rat old disposals WWII radar equipment for parts to build hobby projects and what truly impressed me perhaps more so than the magnetrons was how the delicate receiver circuit was protected from damage during the transmit cycle which reached a pulse power of over 50kW (in some units power could be as high as 1MW).

In those days the only receiver electronics that would work at the then almost unheard of frequency of 10GHz (3cm wavelength) was a tiny point contact (cat's whisker) silicon diode used as a mixer which was very fragile—even a tiny proportion of 50kW would annihilate it in a fraction of a second.

The solution to protecting the diode was the gas-filled T/R switch, it was not only brilliant in conception but truly eloquent in its simplicity (even nowadays this is greatly underappreciated).

The same waveguide was used for transmission and reception but during the transmit cycle the T/R switch isolated the receiver by effectively short circuiting the signal path to the receiver by utilizing a small fraction of the transmitter powet to ionize its gas. Moreover, the ionization had to strike almost instantaneously—essentially on the leading edge of the 10GHz pulse (I'm unsure of the exact time but at that frequency the first 1/4-cycle (voltage maximum) occurs in 250 picoseconds). During reception the ionization would quench thus opening the signal path to the diode. No other circuitry was necessary although some devices had a bias voltage applied to aid striking.

Here's a photo of a CV-115 type T/R switch from WWII (it does not use a bias voltage). You'll note the circular resonant circuits, they increase the voltage across the spark gap thus aid striking).

I still own one of these switches which sits on a mantelpiece, I often ask visiting techies what it is and most haven't a clue: https://www.radiomuseum.org/tubes/tube_cv115.html

Edit: here's a photo of the 1N23 diode, it's about 2cm long: https://www.ase-museoedelpro.org/Museo_Edelpro/Catalogo/tube...

Ha! The Sharp color TV here in the kitchen is now nearly 48 years old (bought in 1978) and still functions well but with the addition of a set top box/PVR although its remote control has been repaired many times (but the TV itself has never needed maintenance).

Other flat screen TVs have no internet access or are used monitor style with separate STBs/PVRs. As I mentioned on HN some weeks ago, if the trend continues and manufacturers booby-trap sets into planned obsolescence, I'll buy only monitors and connect them via HDMI to a TV feed.

My ancient Sharp TV shouts at me that these days there's something terribly wrong with domestic electronic appliances.

No doubt you're correct but it only takes one compound in trace amounts whose odor can be detected in parts per million to throw out a seemingly identical comparison done with spectroscopy.

Right, calibration is everything but sometimes that's damn hard to achieve. Also, here we're dealing with natural substances (at least some are like cola leaves). It's not hard to imagine there'd be thousands of organic molecules involved albeit most of them in minute amounts.

It's an odd combination, I think colas are the only instance where a mineral acid is used synergistically with another ingredient to enhance flavor.

Someone with greater knowledge may wish to expand on this.