Slashdot Mirror
FAA Using Webcams to Aid Alaskan Pilots
Isthistakenyet? writes "CNN is running a story about a series of FAA webcams designed to give fliers in Alaska pictures of current weather conditions around the state. I can even get current conditions near where I used to live - check out the 'Clear Day Image' :)" Hopefully the slashdotting won't keep a legit pilot from checking conditions.
...ya know
SPAM
A first AC FP?
Is there going to be a 'Female Cabin Attendant' jug-o-rama cam?
drew.corrupt.net
this is slashdot, so who cares if an innocent server is forced to shut down? Stop being "Hopeful" and start being responsible.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
the next time i go with gf in to the wild to have a romantic weekend when noone is looking... it may not be so simple anymore. damn your FAA! i want my freedom of ... ... back!
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Hopefully the slashdotting won't keep a legit pilot from checking conditions.
Tragically, the Slashdotting has kept me and my pilot's license from checking out the weather conditions in Bumfuck, Alaska.
Fortunately, I've never flown within a few thousand kilometers of Alaska.
Alaska averages an aviation accident a day and a fatal crash every 10 days.
So how many Alaska pilots * still * alive?
They could add some logic in there, which would automatically calculate whether the sun has already risen or not. There's not much point in sending gigabytes of data to just show and convince people that: 'Yes, it's black'. Or atleast they could optimize the image and save some bandwidth, a black-only image does not take many bytes, now it takes 7 kB. Well, I could mail this to them as well.
When reading about the latest Mars in Antarctica mission at the Flashline Station, Robert Zubrin wrote that at one point a cargo plane scheduled to come and pick up the staff was told to reschedule by one of the scientists at the campsite. He asks why, and they point at their computer monitor and say that according to the webcams outside, it's very overcast.
He pokes his head out of the shelter and sees that the skies are clear, but the scientists INSIST that the webcam shows that they are very overcast.
The funniest part was that no matter what he did, he could not convince them to just look out a window or come outside because they were so certain about what the webcam was showing them that they saw no need.
Todays technology seems most effective when it supplements or enhances something, not when it absolutely replaces it.
Does the responsibility lie with the poster who submitted the story?
With the editor who let it pass?
Or the readers who know they will kill the box?
So I am saying we are all responsible for killing some box that is out there to help pilots. Not a Kewl view of the Alaskan landscape.
A little social responsibility is needed. You CAN be your brothers keeper by proxy.
Puto
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised
And please, if its alright with everyone I think we should abstain from using any puns involving "crashing" and airline websites...oops, too late.
How can I prevent coming the moment I enter a child's anus?
--Michael (michael@s...)
Dear Michael,
You can try one of the sprays or creams to deaden sensation, but be sure they don't have oils that can ruin a condom (many do). Also try and ejaculate one time before you attempt anal sex. That should prolong the amount of time it takes you to do it again. If all this fails you can try the desensitizing techniques outlined in my book or take medications that decrease premature ejaculation.
They'll use their webcams on pinguins....
If your slashdoted this is what I see: Image Capture
:-D?
Does anyone else see this
I'm whore.. So Kill me...
My beloved son Arik, my own flesh and blood, was murdered by Palestinians. My tall, blue-eyed, golden-haired son who was always smiling with the innocence of a child and the understanding of an adult. My son. If to hit his killers, innocent Palestinian children and other civilians would have to be killed, I would ask the security forces to wait for another opportunity.
My beloved son Arik was murdered by a Palestinian. Should the security forces have information of this murderer's whereabouts, and should it turn out that he was surrounded by innocent children and other Palestinian civilians, then - even if the security forces knew that the killer was planning another murderous attack and they now had the choice of curbing a terror attack that would kill innocent Israeli civilians, but at the cost of hitting innocent Palestinians, I would tell the security forces not to seek revenge.
I would rather have the finger that pushes the trigger or the button that drops the bomb tremble before it kills my son's murderer, than for innocent civilians to be killed. I would say to the security forces: do not kill the killer. Rather, bring him before an Israeli court. You are not the judiciary. Your only motivation should not be vengeance, but the prevention of any injury to innocent civilians.
Ethics are not black and white - they are all white. Ethics have to be free of vengefulness and rashness. Every act must be carefully weighed before a decision is made to see whether it meets strict ethical criteria. Our ethics are hanging by a thread, at the mercy of every soldier and politician.
It is unethical to kill innocent Israeli or Palestinian women and children. It is also unethical to control another nation and to lead it to lose its humaneness. It is patently unethical to drop a bomb that kills innocent Palestinians. It is blatantly unethical to wreak vengeance upon innocent bystanders.
It is, on the other hand, supremely ethical to prevent the death of any human being. But if such prevention causes the futile death of others, the ethical foundation for such prevention is lost. A nation that cannot draw the line is doomed eventually to apply unethical measures against its own people. The worst in my mind is not what has already happened but what I am sure one day will. And it will - because the political and military leadership does not even have the most basic integrity to say: "we are sorry". We lost sight of our ethics long before the suicide bombings. The breaking point was when we started to control another nation.
My son Arik was born into a democracy with a chance for a decent, settled life. Arik's killer was born into an appalling occupation, into an ethical chaos. Had my son been born in his stead, he may have ended up doing the same. Had I myself been born into the political and ethical chaos that is the Palestinians' daily reality, I would certainly have tried to kill and hurt the occupier; had I not, I would have betrayed my essence as a free man. Let all the self-righteous who speak of ruthless Palestinian murderers take a hard look in the mirror and ask themselves what they would have done had they been the ones living under occupation. I can say for myself that I, Yitzhak Frankenthal, would have undoubtedly become a freedom fighter and would have killed as many on the other side as I possibly could. It is this depraved hypocrisy that pushes the Palestinians to fight us relentlessly - our double standard that allows us to boast the highest military ethics, while the same military slays innocent children. This lack of ethics is bound to corrupt us.
My son Arik was murdered when he was a soldier by Palestinian fighters who believed in the ethical basis of their struggle against the occupation. My son Arik was not murdered because he was Jewish but because he is part of the nation that occupies the territory of another. I know these are concepts that are unpalatable, but I must voice them loud and clear, because they come from my heart - the heart of a father whose son did not get to live because his people were blinded with power.
As much as I would like to do so, I cannot say that the Palestinians are to blame for my son's death. That would be the easy way out, but it is we, Israelis, who are to blame because of the occupation. Anyone who refuses to heed this awful truth will eventually lead to our destruction.
The Palestinians cannot drive us away - they have long acknowledged our existence. They have been ready to make peace with us; it is we who are unwilling to make peace with them. It is we who insist on maintaining our control over them; it is we who escalate the situation in the region and feed the cycle of bloodshed. I regret to say it, but the blame is entirely ours.
I do not mean to absolve the Palestinians and by no means justify attacks against Israeli civilians. No attack against civilians can be condoned. But as an occupation force it is we who trample over human dignity, it is we who crush the liberty of Palestinians and it is we who push an entire nation to crazy acts of despair.
...for the latest conditions.
The Day Today - Game Warden to the Events Rhino
By stating "Hopefully the slashdotting won't keep a legit pilot from checking" the poster is admitting foreknowledge of possibile DOS.
This story should be pulled.
"Hopefully" readers will have more sense than the poster and not view this webcam.
Beal
bamph
My guess is that the 'webcam' method is an attempt to limit government liability.
Typically, automated weather comes from a series of ASOS and AWOS sensor stations typically located at airports. These probably cost in the area of a few tens of thousands of dollars each to install. Even many pilots dont know this, but it is even possible to phone many AWOSs/ASOSs directly, and hear their automated robot guy tell you about current conditions.
AWOSs/ASOSs are industrial-strength weather sensing. They occasionally get confused (especially when there are multiple cloud layers), but in general they're good to get a good picture of what is going on.
So, the question is: why doesn't the government just put ASOSs/AWOSs wherever in alaska they're setting up webcams?
Ok, the answer to that one is probably cost and intrusiveness. A webcam uses next to zero space.
But is there an inbetween alternative? Why not put together a thousand dollar sensor station that does things like compute windspeed and take a good guess at ceilings?
Ah--because even though that data would likely be better than the meager stuff that a webcam provides. What does a webcam do for weather? Possibly less than a weather rock.
If it takes pictures of the ground, I can't tell how deep the snow is. If it takespictures of teh air, I can't tell how high the clouds are. I dont know what the windspeed is. I dont know if the visibility is terrestrial radiation crud or something more substantial.
So why not a mini weather station? becuse the quantified, interpreted data provided by them is not reliable. webcams force the pilot to do the interpretation him/herself. Less liability.
Also, perhaps, less safety.
- FAA Certified Gold Seal Flight Instructor
As a pilot (well, a pilot in training) I'd just like to say how fucking irresponsible putting this on /. has been.
The article says:-
The agency is cautious in promoting the system because of the need to ensure reliability, said Joette Storm, an FAA spokeswoman in Alaska.
So please - DO NOT go to the FAA site looking for this because you think it's cool to look at the pictures or something. Leave the FAA site to the people who actually need it, OK?
At least CNN had more sense than to give a link through...
"Information wants to be paid"
current time is 1:45am PST
Number of views of the Level Island Test Site (the one linked to): 1032, and growing by about 10 hits every few seconds.
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Come on folks, it's not like slashdotting a picture of black sky in alaska is going to cause a freakin' plane crash! So many posters bitching about slashdot's responsibility for slashdotting servers, and now here's a post advocating censorship. First of all, web links were made to be clicked. And as much as many of us like to inflate our self-importance as we confidently click our mice, a slashdotting is hardly a DOS attack, any more than a link showing up on nytimes.com would be considered an attack. Also, "legitimate pilots" includes anyone with a pilot license; not just people actually in the process of flying a plane, or about to fly a plane. Finally, if someone actually flying a plane is relying on a freakin' webcam to land, we're all in trouble. Quit acting like this is some huge air safety issue; it's just a webserver ferchrissakes. Sometimes webservers have to reboot; life goes on.
and why should I care about his customer or his data?
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
Well, I wouldn't be so quick. I recently testified in a federal case in which the defendant was accused of nothing more than sending email. The server he was sending mail to had an absolutely awful design, it crashed due to the small volume, and the defendant found himself in court accused of "accessing a remote system to do damage", a 5-year rap. It seems but a small step from sending email to sending hits.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
It's just a webserver. It's not the control tower at the airport. And as I pointed out below, it's only arrogance that makes us think a slashdotting is different from a link appearing on the New York Times website or salon.com. And there is no information on the webserver that a pilot wouldn't be able to learn by looking out the window or making a phone call. Don't act like planes are going to start blowing to pieces and careening out of control all over Alaska if the server goes down for a couple hours.
If the ROCK is WET - It's RAINING
If the ROCK is MOVING - It's WINDY
If the ROCK is HOT - It's SUNNY
If the ROCK is COOL - It's OVERCAST
If the ROCK is WHITE - It's SNOWING
If the ROCK is BLUE - It's COLD
If the ROCK is SHAKING - EARTHQUAKE
If the ROCK is GONE - TORNADO
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
.. nice cams around. But no good pictures today. In the midst of summer the only thing is for sure that this week is, that it's is raining (?!?!): Vienna Cams (German)
Some time ago there's was radio cam installiert in the Donauturm (sp?) which you were able to control via a java applet. Unfortunately I can't find the link again (maybe it doesn't exist anymoer), but if someone knows.
Heh, all that said, I'd like to see them try it. What would be really interesting would be if the webserver actually was on the same computer as some other critical system, and the person who sent the link to slashdot actually had reason to know that fact; then you'd actually have a case that made a little bit of sense.
This is the first slashdotting that could cost lives.
Someday, a pilot that should have checked the cam will not because he belives the service is unreliable because it was down today.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
But check this out from the article: Flying into bad weather is the leading cause of fatal accidents among Alaska's commuter airlines and air taxis. Alaska averages an aviation accident a day and a fatal crash every 10 days.
I can't be the only one who has a problem with this statistic; whatever happened to "seat of the pants" decisions - where the pilot (or driver or captain, depending on the craft they have control of) has to make the call to turn back and return to safety instead of flying (or driving or sailing) into bad weather?
IMHO, this is a good use of now-common technology to provide extra knowledge, but not meant to be a navigational aid.
db
Cig:
ôô
So there's a bunch of webcams with hot college girls undressing : How does that help the pilots out?
Server: Apache/1.3.22 (Win32) .22 .. on windows .. hmm
?
How would clicking on this link be bringing on some terrible consequences? If you'll notice in the URL, theres a public in there. Slashdot=Public. I don't think this is going to bring down any planes.
Last time I checked, cnn.com gets more traffic than Slashdot. And the article first appeared on CNN. Having survived both a partial Slashdotting (link off a +5 comment), and a CNNing (main link off a sub-section) I can tell you that a CNNing hurts more. So, even though getting "DoS"d by interested parties sucks, Slashdot does nothing worse in this case than CNN.
sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
It seems a plane was hijacked and it nearly run into the sears tower. Experts blame the near-hit on poor weather conditions.
Sometimes I feel like they get headline ideas out of that random Slashdot headline generator I found once..
slashdot!=valid HTML
Stop reading slashdot in work time. You're fired.
Anyway, you're flying in Scotland. The weather there is always "pissing it down with lots of cloud", what difference would it make?
The dead ones aren't pilots any more...
Infuriate left and right
Alaska used to have flight service stations all over. Budget cuts forced many to close. Keep in mind how vast the state of Alaska is (yes, it's bigger than Texas!). They can easily have entire weather systems contained in one corner of the state. And as sparsely populated as this state is, it's not hard for those weather systems to go almost unnoticed.
Further, in mountains, you have weather that can go from CAVU (Ceiling And Visibility Unlimited) to 0/0 in just an hour or two. Current and reliable weather information is not just a convenince, it's survival.
For those of you who are wondering why the readings are often misleading, an AWOS reports from a ceiliometer that tells you what's directly above the station. When it says 3000 scattered, it may be seeing the edge of a thunderstorm or it may be a few harmless stratus clouds.
Sometimes these stations read gloom and doom when everything is fine. Insects frequently make their homes in the ceiliometer and visibility instruments and often make the station indicate readings which are much worse than they really are.
How can you tell what's what? Until now, we had no cross check. That's what the web cam is for. Some day maybe someone will find a way to get that data directly to the aircraft in an economical fashion.
Anyhow, I think this is a very good idea. And for you who doubt this, keep in mind that even pilots like me who fly the lower 48 states take the AWOS and ASOS readings with a healthy dose of doubt. Thankfully, its unusual when those are the only sources of weather information at the destination. In Alaska, they often don't have that luxury.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Mr. FAA Certified Gold Seal Flight Instructor, have you NEVER encountered a malfunctioning AWOS or ASOS? When you get an AWOS reporting 3000 scattered, did it ever tell you WHAT that 3000 scattered was?
I've never met a pilot I was willing to fly with who thought those things were reliable. A web cam may not tell you much, but it can provide a valuable cross check to verify that the ASOS or AWOS are giving realistic readings.
If that's not worthwhile then I don't suppose you think cross checking instruments is worthwhile, either.
Don't expect me to let you act as Pilot In Command of anything I fly.
Nearly fifty percent of all graduates come from the bottom half of the class!
Here's the press release the FBI issued. As you would expect from the FBI, the release is riddled with inaccuracies. The company pulled the $350,000 number out of thin air...outages were extremely common. They also say he gained unauthorized access, which is a total lie. The case can be looked up at the usual places, for those interested in more.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Yeah it looks like this guy is getting screwed; and it looks like the company was just getting back at him for sending thousands of "disparaging" emails. Did the guy actually go to jail or is the trial still in progress? This definitely sucks but I'm not going to let it stop me from sending email and I don't think slashdot (or CNN) should let it stop them from posting news. But that trial is interesting and worth discussion in its own right since it's another example of how the fear of "hackers" has led to injustices that often make no sense whatsoever.
I live in Alaska, and I think that these webcams are helpful, but the pilots know the limitations. If they can't get to the site for a few hours, they are not going to hop in the plane and take-off, just hoping that the weather is good. The weather is too fickle here for that.
I am not surprised that AK was the first to utilize the webcam for this purpose. We have a 1/2 hour daily weather program on the Alaska channel (that's right our one channel if you don't live in one of the bigger cities or have a sat. dish) and a large portion of this show is aviation weather. But as always, a good pilot always double-checks and files a flight plan before they take-off.
I am waiting for the Aleutian Islands to be covered, that's where the really bad weather is. Most of the pilots I know go to the school websites there, they have been using webcams for about 2 years now.