I'd rather say, thank-god-i'm-not-in-china! But I am in China! Admittedly I'm not staying, I'm over 18, and I'm spending far too much time on/. to get any gaming done...
The old BBC B game "Frac" had a few things hidden in its copy protection. As you peeled away the layers of assembly code you found messages like "Does your mother know you do this", and even some code that played a neat version of "The Trumpet Hornpipe" (which was the theme to Captain Pugwash.
However, I stand by the assertion that GPS is superior to VOR and that reliance on VOR is rapidly diminishing. If I had to choose between having only VOR or only GPS, it would be an easy choice in favor of GPS. I am a little confused by your reference to augmentation (VLF?). By "augmentation" I was referring to services that give you a status indication in case anything goes wrong with the GPS signal. Neither the GPS internal monitoring nor in-receiver monitoring is up to the task ("system level integrity monitoring is not adequate for
aviation", "user level integrity monitoring through RAIM is not sufficient to meet the RNP"; "[i]n particular, there is no specification placed on integrity. In fact, the
GPS SPS performance standard document states that GPS SPS performance is not
currently monitored in real time"). If the FMS is checking VOR and/or DME navigation too then of course that will help pick up anomolies, as will augmentation services such as WAAS (and possibly GPS block III when it comes along, although outside the USA we're a bit sensitive about "GPS III, will give new navigation warfare (NAVWAR) capabilities to shut off GPS service to a limited geographical location while providing GPS to US and allied forces" -- another Balkan crisis could leave a chunk of Italy with no GPS, for instance).
GPS exists in parallel with VOR and is more reliable, making the loss of VOR a nuisance, not catastrophic But it's not (yet) good enough to go it alone. If you have a WAAS capable receiver it may be good enough. How common are they? And that's only good for the Americas -- head across the Atlantic and EGNOS isn't ready yet so GPS certainly can't go it alone, and the restriction on cellphone use isn't just a US issue -- the FAA and the airlines are complying with an international recommendation on the matter (the URL points to a working paper that references the existing recommendation, and also mentions the crowd control issue).
Every day thousands of phones are left powered on during flights without incident I've dealt with that one elsewhere. Under fairly general assumptions, you'd need about 400 years data with zero incidents to base a claim that mobile phone use meets commercial aviation safety standards on the evidence of unauthorised use.
If airlines wanted to allow passengers to use their phones during flight it would take more than simply telling them it is OK. Everyone would quickly discover that there is no cellular service at 45,000 feet. Or in oceanic airspace or over wasteland at any altitude, though you're probably going to want to be be at high altitude there anyway.
I was trying, perhaps unsuccessfully, to point out that the whole VOR interference argument has very little to do with it. I think it will come to have little to do with it; we're not there yet.
My point is that we are banning cell phones and some other electrical devices because of unshielded airplane systems. But as a pilot has pointed out elsewhere, those systems are communicating between the plane and the outside world, and so are the cellphones. Where do you plan to put the shielding so that the aircraft systems and the cellphone systems still work?
Let's look at the data collection issue. You don't need to collect 400 years of data to see what the EM spectrum on a plane looks like or the variety of noise that can be produced by cellular phones. Agreed. My 400 years figure related to the "people are already doing it and it doesn't matter" argument, not to a proper study.
Then there's the matter of terrorism and warfare which is my real concern here. For whatever reasons, it appears no one has bothered to smuggle an EMP device on a plane or use one near an airport. But how big would such a system need to be in order to burn out airplane systems? The irony is that I probably could singlehandedly change FAA policy (and pick up an incredible amount of jail time) merely by trying to set off an EMP device. Yes, you could get headlines and a jail term, but you almost certainly won't cause a crash. There are already procedures in place for comms/navigation failure. Some systems would be more significant than others, but as long as the flight controls are still working (and fly-by-wire elements can be shielded) the plane can still be flown, and the chance of hitting another aircraft (even if that aircraft has lost all its comms and nav too, and they're both in cloud) is still pretty slim.
Further, the US as a whole is vulnerable to EMP generated from high altitude nuclear explosions. Well, if you're talking about what amounts to a nuclear strike on the USA then you're in a different league to what civilian passengers might carry on board an aircraft! Heck, if they can get it close enough to cause that sort of EMP problem they might as well go all the way and drop it on a city so they cause the blast and radiation damage too. .
A reasonable solution is to have a local transmitter on the plane and charge a fee for access. That's not much different to what we have at the moment, except you have to use the plane's kit (which has been tested for safety) rather than your own (which hasn't, and even when it has cabin crew won't know).
In North America, cellphone providers usually sell per-month plans that include a number of usage minutes. Every minute that is spent on the phone costs the carrier money, until the user runs out of minutes, then the user begins to pay for each minute. Plans are designed to target an amount of usage that is uncommon, so customers will buy the next-higher plan to ensure they won't run out. That's also the usual UK model, but I think the rest of Western Europe is as you say.
It seems that the European model of mobile phone usage is better for the consumer, as it might lead to better coverage. I'm not sure. The European model has different service providers for each country, which charge massive "roaming charges" if you call from a different county (although this is under challenge). I think they'd have to get that sorted out before using the cellphone from an aircraft would be significantly cheaper than using the airline provided handset. Until they do, I'm not sure there's a business model in Europe for making in-flight cellphone calls available (but there are lots of political models!)
I need to point out that VOR navigation has gone the way of the DoDo bird. I cannot imagine anyone in a modern aircraft spending the time to fiddle around with triangulating VOR's when the GPS is sitting there telling the pilot the current position within 10 meters, current groundspeed, and the exact distance to any point on the planet (within 10 meters). The nav radios are now used as a backup to the GPS, if at all. (Autopilots rely solely on GPS.) If the autopilot relies solely on GPS it won't be certified for use, at least not for worldwide use (you need augmentation to the GPS to get the integrity good enough, and that augmentation isn't yet available in most of the world). I think you're being misled by the fact that a modern flight management system does all the VOR and DME calculations for you, along with all the stuff from your inertial system and yes, the GPS information, so all you see is a position, that looks just like a GPS position. It isn't just a GPS position, though. It's using VOR just like you used to, you just don't see it any more. FMS != GPS.
Planes are not "safe" or "unsafe"; there's a contunuum of risk, the risk is never zero, and different people will tolerate different levels of risk. The regulators have the job of mediating between those different tolerances, presumably taking a steer from the respective governments and certainly taking a steer from international treaties particularly those relating to ICAO.
The upshot is that apparently the FAA considers the risk of uncontrolled cellphone use too high, but that the ban on the use brings that risk down to a tolerable level. The fact that the occasional phone will be left on is factored into that risk.
Look at the reasons the article gave for banning phones:
"The airlines fear "crowd control" problems" (no evidence given)
"Cell phone and tower designs are based on the assumption that at any given time, only a few cell towers will be close to any specific phone" (which, as the article says, would cost. Who will pay?)
"If it's determined that some devices do cause problems, all gadgets would have to do extra certification testing" (and cabin crew would presumably have to check the certification of every device that passengers want to use, because there are a lot of devices already out there).
No FCC or FAA chairman wants to sign off a change in the rules because if a cell phone does cause either an airplane crash or a cell tower computer system crash, they don't want to be blamed (though this is within the normal scope of their risk management responsibilities, so if the evidence were there they'd surely do it just like they do for everything else. Who's going to pay to get the evidence?)
"If just 1% of these passengers accidentally or deliberately leaves their cell phones on, that means some 20,000 cell phones remain on during flights every single day. Despite this, no crash has ever been definitively attributed to cell phone or gadget interference." Well, if cellphones were the only possible cause of an accident for the entire flight, and you could reverse the claim "no crash has ever been definitively attributed to cell phone or gadget interference" (in safety managemanet the onus of proof is on those who introduce a new risk to show that it's tolerable), and if you're content with the international minimum safety standards (most western states are not), and if you know that the risk of cellphone use is linear with the number of cellphones used (the effect on the avionics of having 200 cellphones turned on is 200 times the risk of having one cellphone turned on) then you could have 95% confidence that use of cellphones is tolerably safe in just over 4 years. If we make just one of those assumptions more realistic -- that the risk due to cellphones would be one of, say, 100 possible causes, then you need 400 years data to make an argument. Outsiders to the field don't realise the significance of the small numbers we deal with in aviation safety; "It's been done and didn't cause an accident" just doesn't cut it.
"Interference problems could be overcome with well-understood techniques of shielding, reprogramming and other technology designed to facilitate safe calls." Sure. Who's going to pay? That shielding weighs, so it's not just a one-off cost.
"Either phones and other gadgets can crash airplanes or they can't." Oh, please. This is pure sensationalism from somebody who appears to be clueless about safety management. Nothing, I repeat nothing has zero risk. Any activity on a plane has the possibility of causing an accident given a sufficiently bizarre scenario. Safety management is about managing risk, not completely eliminating it.
"What's to stop terrorists from testing various gadgets, finding the ones with the highest levels of interferences, then turning on dozens of them at some crucial phase of flight, such as during a landing in bad weather?" And maybe increase the risk of an accident from one in ten million (the ICAO target level of safety) to one in a million? Yeah, sure. I'm quaki
Access, the company now stifling innovation with the dormant BeOS code, is also the Japanese mobile phone corporate giant that bought out PalmOS, lying about offering a smartphone running Linux with a PalmOS GUI/compatibility layer. Well, they at least appear to have released an SDK for one (http://www.access-company.com/news/press/ACCESS/2 007/20070212d_alp_pdk.html), which AFAICS is as close as they were ever going to get because they don't seem to be in the hardware business.
Guns in Japan are difficult to find, and crime rates are pretty low. But at the same time Nearly everyone in Switzerland has a gun, and crime rates are also low. I think culture, and expectations of the government hold a large part in what the public of an area need or want censorship wise. I always put it down to the chocolate.
Well, I'm an English major (in the academic, not military, sense), and although I have a high ID I am over 50. It's called adult learning (and yes, I am doing it for the fun of it; my electronics and computing degrees pay the bills).
Getoutahere. When did this happen? I didn't see the memo. Memo? Hey, that's so old technology. The message came through on our telepathy implants. You do have telepathy implants over there, don't you?
As you should. We're not a bunch of panty wastes. If you don't welcome us properly we'll get in our longships and row our tall, blond asses over there and.... um.... call someone on our cellphones. Hah! You'll be in the US cellphone coverage then, and will have to communicate on their terms!
but then I always return the laptop without the hard drive I tried that with my Mesh desktop. It came back still with the original problem (random power cycling), but now I have no PCI drivers for the new motherboard and SLI no longer works (I bet one of the video cards is incorrectly fitted, but I've not looked yet). To add insult to injury, when I called to get it fixed (it's still under warranty) they told me to go away because it was taking too long.
The blogs and comments posted threatening Kathy are unacceptable, and look to
be very illegal. Agreed unreservedly on the first part. Not sure about the second part. Illegal where? Where Kathy is? Where the posters of the offensive material are? Where the owners of the blogs are? Where the blogs are hosted? Anywhere that the posts might be read?
If you buy the Chevy with public funds and Ford can show that they offered better value for money for your requirements, yes, I think they can. Or possibly if you buy lots of Chevys -- there's sometimes a value below which the competitive tendering process doesn't apply, but I don't know the situation where you are.
Diebold is after two things: to find out HOW the criteria were evaluated and to appeal the contract award.
In other words, Diebold wants to see the proprietary scoring format used to judge who should be awarded the contract.
Why does that sound familiar?
In the EU that sounds familiar because it's routine for any substantial contract paid for by public money, and based on the stuff in the article about open processes it sounds as if it is there, too. It's also usual for losing bidders to get a debrief on why they lost, if they want it, without having to go to court. Of course, court remains an option if they don't like what they hear in the debrief.
But is this finding just a gender stereotype?" Of course it isn't. But their explanation of the finding might be. I wish people would learn the difference.
Yeah, one-off is no biggie. My worry, as I've said elsewhere, is that we end up getting every democratic anomoly or abuse reported here, swamping the news for nerds. Nip it in the bud!
Why not just set your prefs to not put politics stories on the front page? That's what the prefs are for. Some people do want to know about this, some don't, so it's easier to err on the side of being informative and make it possible to remove the stories. Because I'd miss all the stuff about politics that is relevant to Slashdot -- DRM, new internet domains, government policies on software houses have all come up recently.
We know but it's irrelevant./. is unabashedly a US based and US-centric site. When/. changes that tag at the top of the page to "News for US nerds. Stuff that matters to the USA" you'll have a point./. is worldwide, it's just that a few folks in the USA don't realise that they're not the whole world.
Yes it does matter -- as I said, no man is an island. But if every voting irregularity worldwide gets posted on/. it will become unusable. I follow other newsfeeds for that stuff.
That is to say that our government is not listening to us, and THAT is something that matters!... unless of course, you are only 12 and reading/. from your mom's basement? I already knew that your government wasn't listening to me, because I'm not a US citizen. Lots of people on/. aren't, you know. Yes, sure it matters -- no man is an island and all that -- but it matters a whole lot less to some of us than you seem to think.
That was decisive for me -- until I tried playing it. The keyboard handling is broken. Why bother porting games, they ask? Because that way they work. Neat idea, premature release.
Slashdot Mirror
The old BBC B game "Frac" had a few things hidden in its copy protection. As you peeled away the layers of assembly code you found messages like "Does your mother know you do this", and even some code that played a neat version of "The Trumpet Hornpipe" (which was the theme to Captain Pugwash.
Planes are not "safe" or "unsafe"; there's a contunuum of risk, the risk is never zero, and different people will tolerate different levels of risk. The regulators have the job of mediating between those different tolerances, presumably taking a steer from the respective governments and certainly taking a steer from international treaties particularly those relating to ICAO.
The upshot is that apparently the FAA considers the risk of uncontrolled cellphone use too high, but that the ban on the use brings that risk down to a tolerable level. The fact that the occasional phone will be left on is factored into that risk.
Look at the reasons the article gave for banning phones:
Well, I'm an English major (in the academic, not military, sense), and although I have a high ID I am over 50. It's called adult learning (and yes, I am doing it for the fun of it; my electronics and computing degrees pay the bills).
An obscure Ariane 5 reference?
If you buy the Chevy with public funds and Ford can show that they offered better value for money for your requirements, yes, I think they can. Or possibly if you buy lots of Chevys -- there's sometimes a value below which the competitive tendering process doesn't apply, but I don't know the situation where you are.
In other words, Diebold wants to see the proprietary scoring format used to judge who should be awarded the contract.
Why does that sound familiar?
In the EU that sounds familiar because it's routine for any substantial contract paid for by public money, and based on the stuff in the article about open processes it sounds as if it is there, too. It's also usual for losing bidders to get a debrief on why they lost, if they want it, without having to go to court. Of course, court remains an option if they don't like what they hear in the debrief.Yeah, one-off is no biggie. My worry, as I've said elsewhere, is that we end up getting every democratic anomoly or abuse reported here, swamping the news for nerds. Nip it in the bud!
Yes it does matter -- as I said, no man is an island. But if every voting irregularity worldwide gets posted on /. it will become unusable. I follow other newsfeeds for that stuff.
That was decisive for me -- until I tried playing it. The keyboard handling is broken. Why bother porting games, they ask? Because that way they work. Neat idea, premature release.