There is real people who have real concerns that if they accidentally pass thought the beam of power then they will be cooked.
If the safety of you technology is based on it being installed in such a way that no one would accidentally pass through the beam then you need to explain how that is done.
if the safety is because it is just not dangerous to pass through the beam then you need to explain why that is and if there is a time limit on how long it is safe to stay in the beam.
If you are incapable of addressing safety concerns to a technical crowd like hacker news then I don't see how you would convince the general public to be cool with this.
Just to keep beating a dead horse, stating something is safe because "science and engineering" is pretty much the modern day way of saying because "magic".
Agreed. I have significant experience in this field and I’m having difficulty making heads or tails of half of the company’s explanations here. I can’t tell if it’s an attempt at watered-down explanations assuming a non-technical audience, or if they’re simply trying to change the subject whenever the difficult questions come up.
Now that they’re resorting to ad-hominem (“lazy” comments to legitimate questions without even attempting to answer the questions) I’m becoming even more skeptical.
I guess this goes into the same bucket I have had for new battery/energy storage technologies for the last 10 years: until there is an actual, working prototype fulfilling ALL of the promised features, it doesn't exist for me.
Having been working with IoT hardware for over a decade, I used to get so excited that new advances in energy storage would solve some of the problems. Yeah, I'm still waiting :)
There's nothing wrong with creating an account to post a comment about a situation you have some personal connection to. On the contrary, we want people to post about what they know—and if they wait for a topic they know something about, so much the better for the rest of us.
I think this is the case. The founder, or whatever PR employee is handling these comments, has misjudged hackernews and assumed that it is used by the same nontechnical crowd as facebook or twitter.
Pretty sure lots of top researchers use this forum. Talking down to them with a "It works using science and engineering :)" won't go down well.
That's not really fair. High powered microwave transmission is dangerous.
You're claiming near field, non radiating, and so, safe.
Fair enough, but you're also claiming long distance. That requires a little more explanation. They call it "near field" for a reason, right?
So it says something that even I can tell that this poor guy is out of his depth. He shows up to HN (a community of smart people who are willing to listen to the unorthodox), solicits questions, and gets defensive when people ... ask him questions.
This won't end well. I'll get some popcorn.
PS: brother, it's "line of sight". I know spelling well doesn't change the world but sheesh.
(Though I don't think you have to be a subject-matter expert to judge human interactions. Just wanted to point out the invalid line of reasoning.)
When someone says "I'm not an expert and even I can see that...", they are presumably implying that even without the technical knowledge required to spot an obvious 'fake' or 'quack', perhaps an impostor, they can still identify said impostor.
In this case that seems to me to be a valid statement. Albeit one of relatively low value, since nothing much has been added to the discussion. All we now know, is, that the impostor has overreached and even laypeople can call their bluff (and an additional audience member has confirmed this to us). But that's it.
I want to see how this is often the preface of someone missing something non-obvious though? What is the non-obvious thing in this case, that the parent commenter is missing?
So even if the conclusion is right, the fact that the person drawing it is uneducated is not a justification for it. After all, the same justification could be given in a case in which that conclusion did not hold.
So, if I am getting this right, we have the following factors: Person A makes a statement (this could be an impostor or not-impostor), Person B observes that there is an impostor at work (or not) and Person B could either be educated or not and lastly, whether they agree or not.
So we have the following possibilities:
1.) A -> non-impostor -> B educated (B trusts A based on shared knowledge, easy)
2.) A -> non-impostor -> B uneducated (B has to trust A, A made argument well enough to convince B, but B has nothing but a 'feeling' to rely on)
3.) A -> impostor -> B educated (B immediately figures out A is a sharlatan based on knowledge, argument ensues...or it's just obvious A is no good)
4.) A -> impostor -> B uneducated (B has figured out A is an impostor, but that could be for who-knows-what reasons and is therefore less valid)
And the conclusion here is that in case 4.), the person has used their lack of education about the subject matter as a way to add weight to their statement (or to embarrass the impostor further), when, in actuality their lack of education just indicates that they have little reason to participate in the discussion in the first place.
Am I now kind of getting it? I feel I'm being slow today, but it bugs me when I don't understand something.
There are two relevant cases:
1. A is a non-impostor, B uneducated -> B has to trust A, but A's argument seems flawed because B doesn't know of the non-obvious feature that fixes the apparent obvious flaw in their argument.
2. A is an impostor, B uneducated -> B has to trust A, but A's argument seems flawed because their is an obvious flaw in their argument that even B can spot.
From the point of view of B, there is no way to distinguish between these two situations, and so their being uneducated doesn't help them spot the impostor.
That sounds major alarm bells to me of either serious technical issues or, perhaps more likely, fraud.
If the tech IS actually working and safe, a proposition which grows increasingly doubtful with every comment you make, you are NOT the right person to be running this thread, and you are doing serious damage to Emrod's PR.
How is this being handled?
See: http://gsp.humboldt.edu/OLM/Courses/GSP_216_Online/lesson2-1...
And, do you know for certain that it won't interfere with your laser safety system?
Presumably there would be forward scatter and back scatter to deal with I don't see how you could avoid that.
Furthermore, comments about beamforming and that it uses a phased array isn't surprising with regards to the application but you will still have sidelobes, even with a very tight beamwidth / high gain.
And then you have path loss etc, I have no idea how this would actually work - it sounds unfeasible on many fronts.
The distances we are looking at are progressive from a few hundred meters to a few kilometres. Range is only limited by line of site and an antenna size which is practical. Mind you, we can reduce antenna size and increase range by using passive relays.
At the moment we are working with about 60% end to end efficiency. This is not influenced by weather as we are using near-field atmospherically agnostic frequencies.