I'll promise that the airport was there BEFORE some developer bought the farmland and built your subdivision full of McMansions on it. He got a spanking deal on the land because it's near an airport and you didn't do your homework.
How about, instead of chastising the airport and pilots for your mistakes, DO YOUR HOMEWORK THE NEXT TIME YOU BUY A HOUSE.
There was a much reported incident (within the industry, at least) in the UK where somebody tried that argument on somebody complaining about aircraft noise, and they got a response along the lines of "This house has been in my family since the eighteenth century. Your move."
Why don't they have cockpit windows that are specifically tinted to diffuse the laser light colors that most affect them (red and green). Similar to the glue on tints they have in cars. If it's tailored to specifically diffuse red and green it won't even have a huge affect on what the pilots can see.
Or the pilots could wear special glasses when landing that diffuse / absorb the light. Either way, both are potential solutions to this problem.
Until they try to land using VASI or PAPI. Pilots need colour vision.
Do the one's from Dealextreme work? When I bought a cellphone from them it didn't. When I complained they refused to do anything about it. My brother-in-law lives close to their returns address in Hong Kong, and when he went there to complain they didn't have an office there and nobody had heard of the company. US$80 down to experience and I will not be using them again or recommending them to any of my friends.
Unless you are shooting a landing into damn near zero / zero conditions ( and only a very few airports are equipped to do that ( no GPS does not do that ) the plane is most assuredly NOT on auto pilot there are people flying those planes.
This seems to be the direction in which the solution should be sought. If your sight is sometimes going to be under attack and preventing that is almost always impossible, then technical solution must allow a plane to land in zero visibility, and zero visibility must be enforced (transparent LCD dimming) upon cockpit windows to prevent attacks. I would be very surprised if military aviation doesn't have solution for that already.
There has been lots of effort put into this over the years, but the main problem is that the systems introduce new risks which can be as bad as or worse than those of having a human doing the landing, and the cost of managing those risks rockets the further along the landing/rollout/taxiing you try to safely automate. It may come, but it won't be for many years and the problem exists now.
Don't pilots usually fly blind these days? Are they really looking out the window constantly when they're up int he sky? [I truly don't know]
At twenty thousand feet, yes, they mostly fly blind, and most of the time the autopilot does the flying. The pilot is there in case something goes wrong, and a couple of seconds of not being able to see the instruments is unlikely to be a problem. But hardly any countries let the autopilot land the aircraft (and last thing I heard -- a few years ago now) the USA is not one of them, so for all flights it's the pilot looking out of the window who takes it down the last fifty feet (and for most aircraft it's for considerably more of the descent). Unfortunately, that's exactly when a) the aircraft is most vulnerable to laser pointer attacks, and b) the pilot losing control for a couple of seconds is most likely to cause an accident.
A tolerable rate would be something like one in a billion events leading to loss of life (one in ten million as the tolerable rate of serious aircraft accidents, factored by a finger-in-the-air one hundred possible causes). By the time you are able to count incidents resulting in permanent harm or loss of life it is many orders of magnitude higher risk than is tolerable. In aviation safety we try to prevent people being killed before it happens.
It assumes that individuals [1] act to maximise personal gain, and rejects anything done, for example, for the benefit of one's community.
No, sometimes your personal gain also benefits the community.
If it does then the standard economic model will see it as rational because of the personal gain.
Plus, there are always altruists who get a warm fuzzy (personal gain) from doing good (helping the community).
Yes, and I consider that to be rational, or at least possibly rational. The standard model of human behaviour used by economists, on the other hand, judges that to be irrational behaviour. That's my point: economists use a specific definition of "rational" that doesn't match very well to everyone else's.
But, in large, it's fairly safe to say that everyone is more interested in things that IMMEDIATELY benefit them than they are in things that IMMEDIATELY harm them but benefit others. Hence our general aversion to taxes, tariffs, etc.
Not as safe as you might think. At very least, you can't limit it to material benefits. Research has shown pretty consistently that (in market-based cultures) most people are willing to take a modest financial "hit" on a transaction in order to spite somebody who has treated them badly. Economically that is described as "irrational" behaviour, but all it actually means is that spiting the offender has value. What's more, that behaviour can be shown to be adaptive at the group level, because punishing "bad" behaviour discourages such behaviour, which is to the benefit of the overall community even if those two individuals never do business again.
But the economic view of "rational" and "irrational" is very narrow. It assumes that individuals [1] act to maximise personal gain, and rejects anything done, for example, for the benefit of one's community. "Rational" and "irrational" are of limited use (not no use, but limited use) in setting objectives without falling into the naturalistic fallacy, but a degree of concern for one's community can certainly be evolutionarily adaptive. So yes, the economic models fail when people behave in irrational ways, but they also fail when people behave perfectly rationally but seek objectives that differ from the ones the economists think they should seek. William Poundstone's Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) describes this very clearly and in reasonable detail, and also describes the ways in which most major companies nowadays reject the standard economic model when setting prices.
[1] Actually, "economic units", so the definition can stretch to include the nuclear family but not much further.
Out of the box my satnav (not Garmin) offers a choice of male voice or female voice (extra voices available for a cost). I use the female voice because it's clearer against low-frequency background noise.
They would only have to respond if they got a complaint. Which they already have to do. The site is already (jointly) liable for postings, and if postings are anonymous it will be the site that complainants go after (and at present removing posts might not get the complainant and the law off their back). The proposed legislation makes it safer for sites to host anonymous comments.
You clearly have a very naive view of free speech. Presumably you think the libel laws are already a breach of your right to free speech. Anyway, anonymity is not a pre-requisite of free speech, and there is no human right to the internet, so the idea that there is a human right to anonymity on the internet is a nonsense.
Could it be? And if so.. what is exactly being enforced. Things like this are so gray.
Suppose anonymous posting were illegal in the UK. Then suppose I called up a friend in the US, where it is not illegal. I said to him, "Hey, go to this site with your anonymous account, and post this: 'I saw John Graham smoking a big fat dooby"? Would it be illegal for me to call my friend and request this? Maybe that still counts as slander... I mean, unless it were true.
Suppose I post on a website with my full name, but that website decides one day to anonymize all posts? Maybe by simply removing the user name for aesthetic reasons. Is it my responsibility to know this and withdraw the post?
Then we get into the question of "what does it mean to post". Suppose I visit a search engine that shows all recent searches in real time. Then, I search for "Jonathan Graham is a monkey humper".... I was just searching after all. Was that a post?
I know this is/. so nobody reads the articles, but you might at least read the summary. Nobody is proposing making anonymous posting illegal.
Then if I run away without paying the debt I am not shoplifting, I have defaulted on a debt. As I understand it, that's a much less serious matter (in the UK it would be a civil offence, not a criminal one).
The decision on which system to use for Galileo was apparently taken in 1999 -- I was already out of the loop by then -- but the three candidate systems at that point hadn't come out of nowhere. Yes, it took another few years before funding was approved to actually build Galileo (2003 as you say) but of course the ESA isn't an EU body -- it's an intergovernmental organisation independent of the EU with its own funding from member governments -- so there was European government money being spent on Galileo before the EU spent any.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a better idea:
I'll promise that the airport was there BEFORE some developer bought the farmland and built your subdivision full of McMansions on it. He got a spanking deal on the land because it's near an airport and you didn't do your homework.
How about, instead of chastising the airport and pilots for your mistakes, DO YOUR HOMEWORK THE NEXT TIME YOU BUY A HOUSE.
There was a much reported incident (within the industry, at least) in the UK where somebody tried that argument on somebody complaining about aircraft noise, and they got a response along the lines of "This house has been in my family since the eighteenth century. Your move."
Why don't they have cockpit windows that are specifically tinted to diffuse the laser light colors that most affect them (red and green). Similar to the glue on tints they have in cars. If it's tailored to specifically diffuse red and green it won't even have a huge affect on what the pilots can see.
Or the pilots could wear special glasses when landing that diffuse / absorb the light. Either way, both are potential solutions to this problem.
Until they try to land using VASI or PAPI. Pilots need colour vision.
See the BBC article somebody linked to further up the page.
Do the one's from Dealextreme work? When I bought a cellphone from them it didn't. When I complained they refused to do anything about it. My brother-in-law lives close to their returns address in Hong Kong, and when he went there to complain they didn't have an office there and nobody had heard of the company. US$80 down to experience and I will not be using them again or recommending them to any of my friends.
Unless you are shooting a landing into damn near zero / zero conditions ( and only a very few airports are equipped to do that ( no GPS does not do that ) the plane is most assuredly NOT on auto pilot there are people flying those planes.
This seems to be the direction in which the solution should be sought. If your sight is sometimes going to be under attack and preventing that is almost always impossible, then technical solution must allow a plane to land in zero visibility, and zero visibility must be enforced (transparent LCD dimming) upon cockpit windows to prevent attacks. I would be very surprised if military aviation doesn't have solution for that already.
There has been lots of effort put into this over the years, but the main problem is that the systems introduce new risks which can be as bad as or worse than those of having a human doing the landing, and the cost of managing those risks rockets the further along the landing/rollout/taxiing you try to safely automate. It may come, but it won't be for many years and the problem exists now.
Don't pilots usually fly blind these days? Are they really looking out the window constantly when they're up int he sky? [I truly don't know]
At twenty thousand feet, yes, they mostly fly blind, and most of the time the autopilot does the flying. The pilot is there in case something goes wrong, and a couple of seconds of not being able to see the instruments is unlikely to be a problem. But hardly any countries let the autopilot land the aircraft (and last thing I heard -- a few years ago now) the USA is not one of them, so for all flights it's the pilot looking out of the window who takes it down the last fifty feet (and for most aircraft it's for considerably more of the descent). Unfortunately, that's exactly when a) the aircraft is most vulnerable to laser pointer attacks, and b) the pilot losing control for a couple of seconds is most likely to cause an accident.
A tolerable rate would be something like one in a billion events leading to loss of life (one in ten million as the tolerable rate of serious aircraft accidents, factored by a finger-in-the-air one hundred possible causes). By the time you are able to count incidents resulting in permanent harm or loss of life it is many orders of magnitude higher risk than is tolerable. In aviation safety we try to prevent people being killed before it happens.
British ones don't.
No, sometimes your personal gain also benefits the community.
If it does then the standard economic model will see it as rational because of the personal gain.
Plus, there are always altruists who get a warm fuzzy (personal gain) from doing good (helping the community).
Yes, and I consider that to be rational, or at least possibly rational. The standard model of human behaviour used by economists, on the other hand, judges that to be irrational behaviour. That's my point: economists use a specific definition of "rational" that doesn't match very well to everyone else's.
But, in large, it's fairly safe to say that everyone is more interested in things that IMMEDIATELY benefit them than they are in things that IMMEDIATELY harm them but benefit others. Hence our general aversion to taxes, tariffs, etc.
Not as safe as you might think. At very least, you can't limit it to material benefits. Research has shown pretty consistently that (in market-based cultures) most people are willing to take a modest financial "hit" on a transaction in order to spite somebody who has treated them badly. Economically that is described as "irrational" behaviour, but all it actually means is that spiting the offender has value. What's more, that behaviour can be shown to be adaptive at the group level, because punishing "bad" behaviour discourages such behaviour, which is to the benefit of the overall community even if those two individuals never do business again.
But the economic view of "rational" and "irrational" is very narrow. It assumes that individuals [1] act to maximise personal gain, and rejects anything done, for example, for the benefit of one's community. "Rational" and "irrational" are of limited use (not no use, but limited use) in setting objectives without falling into the naturalistic fallacy, but a degree of concern for one's community can certainly be evolutionarily adaptive. So yes, the economic models fail when people behave in irrational ways, but they also fail when people behave perfectly rationally but seek objectives that differ from the ones the economists think they should seek. William Poundstone's Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value (and How to Take Advantage of It) describes this very clearly and in reasonable detail, and also describes the ways in which most major companies nowadays reject the standard economic model when setting prices.
[1] Actually, "economic units", so the definition can stretch to include the nuclear family but not much further.
Out of the box my satnav (not Garmin) offers a choice of male voice or female voice (extra voices available for a cost). I use the female voice because it's clearer against low-frequency background noise.
He was probably the only person they could find who spoke Welsh.
The UK does not produce anything except some biscuits and cereals (biscuits = cookies).
They are way down on the list of things we make; our pharmaceutical, engineering, chemical and booze industries are much bigger. Here's a moderately recent list of UK exports.
Doubt it. There are plenty of other tools for spammers to use.
Nope, RTFA. Your tax dollars are being used to subsidise US jobs, the $529M isn't going outside the country.
But the "unjust authority" won't respect human rights, so the human rights issue is irrelevant.
They would only have to respond if they got a complaint. Which they already have to do. The site is already (jointly) liable for postings, and if postings are anonymous it will be the site that complainants go after (and at present removing posts might not get the complainant and the law off their back). The proposed legislation makes it safer for sites to host anonymous comments.
Why would all British sites ban anonymous posting? Allowing anonymous postings would be perfectly legal under the proposed law.
You clearly have a very naive view of free speech. Presumably you think the libel laws are already a breach of your right to free speech. Anyway, anonymity is not a pre-requisite of free speech, and there is no human right to the internet, so the idea that there is a human right to anonymity on the internet is a nonsense.
Could it be? And if so.. what is exactly being enforced. Things like this are so gray.
Suppose anonymous posting were illegal in the UK. Then suppose I called up a friend in the US, where it is not illegal. I said to him, "Hey, go to this site with your anonymous account, and post this: 'I saw John Graham smoking a big fat dooby"? Would it be illegal for me to call my friend and request this? Maybe that still counts as slander... I mean, unless it were true.
Suppose I post on a website with my full name, but that website decides one day to anonymize all posts? Maybe by simply removing the user name for aesthetic reasons. Is it my responsibility to know this and withdraw the post?
Then we get into the question of "what does it mean to post". Suppose I visit a search engine that shows all recent searches in real time. Then, I search for "Jonathan Graham is a monkey humper".... I was just searching after all. Was that a post?
I know this is /. so nobody reads the articles, but you might at least read the summary. Nobody is proposing making anonymous posting illegal.
You have a human right to anonymously post true information.
Who says? I don't remember that clause in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
What the hell is wrong with Top Gear USA?
Top Gear UK sucked until oh, season 4
That would be about 1980? I think you have to come to something far more recent.
No.
Then if I run away without paying the debt I am not shoplifting, I have defaulted on a debt. As I understand it, that's a much less serious matter (in the UK it would be a civil offence, not a criminal one).
The decision on which system to use for Galileo was apparently taken in 1999 -- I was already out of the loop by then -- but the three candidate systems at that point hadn't come out of nowhere. Yes, it took another few years before funding was approved to actually build Galileo (2003 as you say) but of course the ESA isn't an EU body -- it's an intergovernmental organisation independent of the EU with its own funding from member governments -- so there was European government money being spent on Galileo before the EU spent any.