While this is interesting work, I would say it's going into the wrong direction. It is simplifying the devices at the cost of less efficient use of the already crowded radio spectrum (the plugged-in device must transmit the carrier wave and the reflections from passive devices consume twice the spectrum due to mirror frequencies) Everyone else is going the other way: complicating devices to achieve higher spectrum efficiency. This approach might be sustainable for spy agencies, but I don't see how it could scale to mass deployment (especially with device densities predicted by IoT pundits these days).
Shouldn't since the passive devices build the packets the MAC is probably the same because it's they just copied the same exact fpga code on both devices.
What wasn't clear and should be mentioned is that the active device doesn't have to transmit wifi at all it's just a source of random rf radiation at compatible frequencies since you craft packets by selective reflecting the signal.
That's a pretty simple special case of English language: if a reduction is indicated by a multiplicator greater one, the result is the same as multiplying by the multiplicative inverse of the number.
So 10 reduced by factor 10,000 is clearly 10 * 1/10000 = 0.001.
In particular, your page of drivel goes wrong here:
> "smaller than", "less than" etc. indicate subtraction, as in: 2 less than 10 is 8.
Believe it or not, "smaller than" and "less than" are also used to refer to being smaller or lesser (go figure) in size or amount, as in "2 is less than 10".
> The poster was only asking for something that would improve clarity.
This is not true. There is no issue of clarity if I say "the effect of losing a leg on quality-adjusted life years is four times smaller than the effect of smoking", or at least, no ambiguity about how the two numbers I'm thinking of relate to each other (numbers wholly invented). The poster was asking us to conform to his personal peeves.
