While it is sometimes possible to get out of it, it's hard to think of very many copyright cases that weren't committed with the intent to cause harm. So-called "innocent infringement" is the exception, not the norm---things like someone's song sounding too much like somebody else's song inadvertently. Actual copying, at least in my mind, generally shows clear intent to get something without paying for it, and thus, intent to deprive the copyright holder of income. Thus, it generally cannot be set aside as part of a bankruptcy filing.
An "innocent infringement" argument is pretty hard to prove. If somehow she could show that she didn't actually intend to redistribute it---if she can convince a judge that she didn't know that downloading caused seeding... maybe, but if she was actually putting her own rips in a downloads folder, then I think the "innocent infringement" argument would be laughed out of court. At best, they'd be walking on legal thin ice, IMHO.
It would probably be far easier to argue that this occurred on Native American lands, and argue that they are not a signatory to the Berne convention, argue that the lower courts don't have jurisdiction, etc. And even that is probably something of a long shot.
Good point. That caught my attention earlier when wondering if this occurred on tribal land and whether she could challenge the court's jurisdiction, but I didn't even think about it from the angle of evading the judgment.
There's a serious liability problem involved if you allow someone to walk away with that much money in cash in a single transaction. If someone gets mugged at the ATM, guess who he/she sues? For this reason and to combat fraud, most U.S. banks have a maximum withdrawal limit of about $500 per day. The most I've ever seen is $1,000 from some of the online banks. I can't imagine any bank authorizing a $5,000 ATM withdrawal.
If you are setting up an ATM with four hoppers and you use one for $100 bills, one for $50 bills, and two for $20 bills, given that the average amount of cash taken out at an ATM is about $40, you'd end up refilling the machine roughly twice as often as if you dispensed everything in quantities of $20. In an airport, I could see them using $50 bills, but even there, $100 bills don't make sense. The number of people who take out hundreds of dollars at an airport is pretty small. Also, most businesses won't take $100 bills, including many currency exchange houses, due to the high incidence of counterfeiting. As such, dispensing $100 bills would be a terrible thing to do. In all my life, I've only seen one ATM that dispensed $50 bills, and zero that dispensed $100 bills. I'm told that $100 ATM machines do exist in a few casinos, but such configurations are exceptionally rare.
No, the grey area is in regards to weapons whose sole usefulness is in harming other people, and as such is closer to saying that the first amendment doesn't protect against suits over slander. It doesn't.
I'm not saying that this argument is necessarily what was originally intended by the second amendment, mind you---there's plenty of reason to believe that at least some of the founding fathers believed in the right to violently overthrow your government once in a while---but limits on certain extreme uses of one's freedom exist to prevent descent into anarchy. Things like bans on fully automatic rifles fall into that category. Since this country was founded (or a few might say "since the Civil War"), we have never seen a single situation in which an assault rifle was legitimately necessary to defend against foreign invasion or tyranny. Therefore, the odds of it happening tomorrow are slim. Thus, people who feel the need to defend themselves with such hardware are pretty much guaranteed to be delusional, and as such, should almost certainly not be allowed to do so.
The NRA certainly serves a purpose---as a foil to legislators who tend to exaggerate the benefits of reducing the number of guns out there---but on many gun issues, their positions border on absurd. They are to guns what the Christian Coalition is to Christian values---the most extreme of the extremes. Because of that, I find it rather hard to take them seriously, frankly.
No, she can't. As I understand it, the amount is too large for her to be eligible for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Further, this type of civil damages generally cannot be waived through Chapter 7, but even if it could be, a Chapter 7 would mean liquidating her assets. She would literally walk away with nothing but the clothes on her back.
Short of somehow convincing a judge to allow her to dismiss this debt by filing Chapter 7, her only option, AFAIK, is to let the RIAA garnish her wages to the maximum extent allowable by law (25% of her income) for the rest of her life, then take all of her assets upon her death. In effect, she would be reduced to near indentured servitude by this verdict. We might as well have debtors' prisons. There's really little difference when faced with a civil judgment of this magnitude.
Depending on the union, you may just be exchanging one set of meaningless crap for another... like the union person at a conference I attended recently in which he couldn't leave the side of the computer unlocked so that people could plug cards in for testing purposes. He had to stand around for an hour and a half just in case he needed to unlock it. Or the TV unions in which you have your job and if you even touch a piece of equipment that's not on your list---even outside of work hours to lean how to use it---instant union grievance. Of course, the people who aren't jackasses poke fun at this and laugh about it, but there are enough people who take it seriously and crack the whip that it can make life for the workers genuinely unpleasant. And so on.
If unions were solely about collective bargaining, were entirely run by regular full-time workers (without significant time off for being the union boss or whatever), and were not designed around bizarre apprenticeship models dating back to the middle ages, there's no question but what unions would be great for workers. Unfortunately, enough unions stray far enough outside those lines that in many cases they are a worse taskmaster than the companies from which they are supposedly trying to protect you.
Things have changed a lot in four years. Since 2005, hard drives have only increased from 500 GB to 2 TB---a factor of 4. In that same time, Compact Flash cards increased from 8GB to 128 GB---a factor of 16. Flash density increases are severely outpacing hard drive density increases, and unlike hard drives, flash storage isn't rapidly becoming less reliable as the density increases....
If I stayed home every time I had a runny nose or a sore throat that might be a cold, I would only go to work about half the year, and I would not have gone to Italy at all in spite of not actually being sick. Bad allergies are almost indistinguishable from colds, and if you are prone to sinus infections as I am, this is doubly problematic. About the only reliable way to say whether something is a cold, an allergy, or a sinus infection (apart from going to a different place where the allergen is not present) is to wait it out. If it is a cold or flu, it will be gone within a couple of weeks. If it is an allergy, it won't. If it is a sinus infection, it will probably come and go repeatedly. Only one of those three categories is likely to get spread to others. I'll give you three guesses which, and the first two don't count.
Needless to say, waiting out every sniffle for two weeks isn't feasible in any sane universe, at least not if you want to keep your job, your friends, or any semblance of a normal life.... Not to mention that an allergy can mask the onset of cold or flu symptoms, making it absolutely impossible to say for sure that you are not infectious, though if symptoms get really bad, you can be fairly certain that you are....
Actually, if you're in a group, the risk of spreading the infection is lower by flying home. Most illnesses are not significantly airborne. The only people at significant risk of infection are pretty much the people on either side of you, and if you are in a group, those are likely to be people from your group who are already exposed by that point anyway. To a lesser degree, you might also pass it to the people who sit in those seats on the following flight. After that, the chances of infection fall off pretty rapidly.
By contrast, if you end up staying at a hotel, you are probably exposing a different group of two housekeeping people every day for a week or more. That's several times the number of new exposures you would have likely caused by just flying home.
And heinously buggy. Most of the crashes I've seen in Safari have Flash in the backtrace (and usually Flash_EnforceLocalSecurity()). Some flash sites crash browsers with such ease and regularity that it borders on painful to visit them at all---particularly some of those flash games that display random flash ads before you can play them. Those crash Safari and FireFox about 50% of the time.
From a quick skim of the 'net, I see reports that it is not only the #1 cause of crashes in Safari, but also in FireFox (both on the Mac and in Linux). It is probably the #1 cause of IE and FireFox crashes on Windows, too, if I were guessing. To describe Flash as an abomination is an insult to abominations.
To all those defending those who traveled while sick: I'm sorry, but if there is a travel ban because of a well publicized disease that is killing people, and you don't feel well, sit your selfish ass down in bed where it belongs. My parents raised me to stay home if I was sick, because it's beyond rude to make those around you sick. The regular flu kills kids and the elderly all the time. This one is much nastier.
There are several very fundamental problems with your logic:
You are forgetting that most major airlines refuse to allow people to change economy flights on account of illness. The result is that people fly when their tickets say they have to fly. Blame the airlines for their ridiculous flight change policies. Until they change those policies, this entire discussion is moot.
Even if the airline were willing to change the flight date or the passenger had the money to buy a new ticket, you are still assuming that the passenger would be able to get another flight at a later date. Given how full most flights are, this is not a given.
You are assuming that people are deliberately trying to avoid getting caught. People who have fevers take cold medicine to make them feel better, not to evade thermal scans. Most people don't even know that they do such things at some airports.
You are assuming that sick people are always flying from their home to somewhere else. If you get sick while on vacation thousands of miles from home, staying home isn't an option. Your choices are: A. fly back or B. spend potentially several thousand dollars for a last-second hotel room so that you can avoid traveling while sick. Even if you choose to book additional nights at a hotel, you are still risking infecting the housekeeping staff who could spread it to other hotel guests, infecting the restaurant staff while getting meals, infecting the cab driver who has to take you to get medical care because you have no car or other means of transportation, etc.
You are assuming that the people were sick when they left on the first leg of their flight. This is also not always the case. Illness can come on quite suddenly.
I've been there back in summer of 2005---sick in Italy on the last day of a two week trip---and let me tell you that it isn't fun. I started out the first leg (from Italy to Heathrow) not feeling great but not terrible. It felt like a cold. By the time I left Heathrow, I was feeling miserable. By the time I got to California, it was a good thing my parents were in town visiting and could pick me up where the bus dropped me off. I would not have been able to roll my luggage the three blocks from where the bus dropped me off back to my house. Staying behind, however, was clearly not an option. I was sick for almost two weeks after that, and would have ended up spending upwards of $4,000 to postpone my return that far, not to mention the problem of getting to medical care without anyone there to drive me, the problem of getting food, etc.
While it's a nice idea (in theory) to avoid traveling while sick, in practice, it is a rather naive notion that doesn't take into account the practicality of doing so. One cannot "stay home" if one gets sick while already away from home.
Actually, there are a number of species of geese that have been observed flying long distances at over 30,000 feet. Granted, not many birds are likely to be dumb enough to fly headfirst into a kite....
In the most direct law, yes, the system will still not allow you to do things like rip the rudder off the airplane (A300 was not FBW) or clearly overstress the aircraft and destroy the wings.
AFAIK, in direct law on an Airbus plane, the computer systems give audible warning if you exceed safety thresholds, but they do not prevent you from doing so. It is entirely possible to rip the plane apart in direct law. Of course, in practice, you'll almost never get into direct law, which is the subject of debate.
Unless you're saying that the rudder can't physically move that far because of the way the hydraulics are set up or something....
Indeed it does mean something different. The word "of" is a recently introduced slang verb that means "to act as though hopped up on meth." It leads to fun constructions like this:
I of when I'm with you.
The "er" form is irregular; offer is a noun already, so instead you redefine the word "over".
That stupid over wouldn't know how to of if someone gave him an oving.
Also notice the other noun form at the end of that example---oving, meaning the act of behaving as though hopped up on meth. The word "of" used as a noun similarly means behavior befitting a meth addict. For example:
That's a bunch of of.
A similar ov- irregular form applies to some the various verb forms:
I oved tonight. I will of tomorrow. I would of if you ask me.
One of the most critical irregular forms is that of the subjunctive. This verb takes an irregular subjunctive in that the word "have" prior to it is optional. Thus, instead of writing, I would've of, you simply write I would of. For example:
I would of if you had asked me.
Finally, the word "of" can be used as either an interjection or as an intensifier. For example:
Of! I just oving hat this.
(Note that hat is also a new verb that means to adore.) When used as an intensifier in its base form, the word "of" implies the word "have" much as it does in the subjunctive form. For example:
It seems to of gone as expected means "it seems to have gone as expected, in a manner similar to that of someone hopped up on meth."
I hope this clears up any confusion the article might of caused, and I hope this oving makes you hat FaceBook comments all the oving more. If not, of off.
Very true, but if your alternative is redesigning your hardware for different core silicon, I know which one I'd choose every time. I've ported Linux to unsupported hardware from pretty crude specs, and even with custom interrupt controller logic and lots of other really awful hardware, it only took a couple of weeks for me to do a mostly functional basic bring-up (with no custom drivers). That was doing it as a spare time project, BTW.
Yes, board bring-up takes time, particularly if you have a headless embedded device (or worse, are having to debug by blitting bursts of garbage to the screen because the kernel is crashing before it gets the video or serial ports initialized), but JTAG is your friend. Alternatively, there are plenty of good companies out there who will do that for you if you want. (Full disclosure: I worked for MontaVista around the turn of the century.)
And yes, rewriting drivers for a different kernel takes time. That said, if you have a stable piece of hardware that works, the porting time pales in comparison with having to design new hardware, have it built, do a new bring-up of completely different hardware, find a dozen bugs in the new hardware, do reworks and/or have a new rev build, repeating until you have something that can POST....
And if you're just using reference hardware designs, sure, a hardware change is a minor inconvenience, but then again, odds are other OSes will already support that reference hardware out of the box, so an OS change is also a relatively minor inconvenience. At that point, it's a toss-up. Most embedded vendors don't stick with a stock reference board very much past the first rev, though, at least if they want to make a profit....:-) Too much extra unnecessary hardware.
Either way, so much stuff is done with PCI/PCIe, USB, FireWire, and other industry-standard, easily probed busses these days that bring-up isn't nearly as bad as it would be with truly custom hardware.
The shuttle's tiles are extremely fragile. They are basically made of what amounts to blown glass, with 95% empty space (air) by volume. It doesn't take much to damage them. Judging by how fragile they felt last time I held one, I'm guessing I could snap one in two with the fingertips on one hand. Aircraft skin is a LOT stronger....
Don't get me wrong, I did find one case of a DC-9 crashing from hail, but it encountered it at only 14,000 feet. If there was enough hail at FL350 to bring an airplane down without anyone having time to radio a distress call, that's probably a once-per-millenium event at most.
I could speculate on the cause of the crash, but I won't. The ACARS data is still too incomplete and the lack of FDR/CVR make it somewhat premature. From what I've seen thus far, I have serious doubts that weather caused whatever in-flight event led to the crash, though it may well have contributed to the crew's inability to regain control of the aircraft afterwards.
Depends on the market. Anybody using VxWorks at solely the POSIX layer is almost guaranteed to just dump it and switch to Linux. The only ones who I think might be likely to change their hardware rather than rewriting their software would be hard RT customers, and I doubt that makes up a large enough percentage of their installed base for VxWorks to remain profitable in the absence of their other customers. Just a gut feeling.
Aircraft doors have to open inwards first before they swing out. The outward pressure on the cabin door of a plane pressurized to 8,000 feet while flying at 35,000 feet is about 7.44 PSI. The A330's cabin door measures approximately 141" x 101". Multiply it out and you get approximately 106,000 pounds of force. I don't know anyone who is that strong. I don't know of very many machines that are that strong. This is equivalent to lifting 1.5 of the empty external tanks on the space shuttle. That's 1/3rd the thrust of a single shuttle main engine. That's close to the total thrust for both A330 engines put together.
In other words, it's not going to happen. The only way a cabin door could open mid-flight would be if its hinges and/or a substantial part of the door/frame were physically destroyed, which would require a massive structural failure. Basically, short of someone detonating a pretty big bomb, it borders on absurd to consider the possibility of someone opening the cabin door while the plane is at altitude.
Some pilots on PPRuNe suggested that it is very unlikely to find any hail of significant size at FL350 (35,000 feet), and that if you find any at all, it was blown up there from a lower altitude (i.e. relatively low speed). Besides, there's no reason to believe a hail ding is going to bring down something the size of an A330.... That said, anything is possible, I suppose, particularly given the amount of composite material involved.
A lot of mass-pirated discs are stamped media. Sniffing for DVD-Rs might catch the small-time pirates---maybe even the medium ones---but those folks aren't likely to be storing tens of thousands of discs for sale; they're likely burning a few dozen copies of each title per week in the back room of their home or business. If you're talking about a cache of 35,000 discs, I suspect you're almost certainly well into the stamped media large-scale commercial pirate territory.
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While it is sometimes possible to get out of it, it's hard to think of very many copyright cases that weren't committed with the intent to cause harm. So-called "innocent infringement" is the exception, not the norm---things like someone's song sounding too much like somebody else's song inadvertently. Actual copying, at least in my mind, generally shows clear intent to get something without paying for it, and thus, intent to deprive the copyright holder of income. Thus, it generally cannot be set aside as part of a bankruptcy filing.
An "innocent infringement" argument is pretty hard to prove. If somehow she could show that she didn't actually intend to redistribute it---if she can convince a judge that she didn't know that downloading caused seeding... maybe, but if she was actually putting her own rips in a downloads folder, then I think the "innocent infringement" argument would be laughed out of court. At best, they'd be walking on legal thin ice, IMHO.
It would probably be far easier to argue that this occurred on Native American lands, and argue that they are not a signatory to the Berne convention, argue that the lower courts don't have jurisdiction, etc. And even that is probably something of a long shot.
Good point. That caught my attention earlier when wondering if this occurred on tribal land and whether she could challenge the court's jurisdiction, but I didn't even think about it from the angle of evading the judgment.
Does it matter? Either way, it stinks.
Seems very unlikely for two reasons:
No, the grey area is in regards to weapons whose sole usefulness is in harming other people, and as such is closer to saying that the first amendment doesn't protect against suits over slander. It doesn't.
I'm not saying that this argument is necessarily what was originally intended by the second amendment, mind you---there's plenty of reason to believe that at least some of the founding fathers believed in the right to violently overthrow your government once in a while---but limits on certain extreme uses of one's freedom exist to prevent descent into anarchy. Things like bans on fully automatic rifles fall into that category. Since this country was founded (or a few might say "since the Civil War"), we have never seen a single situation in which an assault rifle was legitimately necessary to defend against foreign invasion or tyranny. Therefore, the odds of it happening tomorrow are slim. Thus, people who feel the need to defend themselves with such hardware are pretty much guaranteed to be delusional, and as such, should almost certainly not be allowed to do so.
The NRA certainly serves a purpose---as a foil to legislators who tend to exaggerate the benefits of reducing the number of guns out there---but on many gun issues, their positions border on absurd. They are to guns what the Christian Coalition is to Christian values---the most extreme of the extremes. Because of that, I find it rather hard to take them seriously, frankly.
No, she can't. As I understand it, the amount is too large for her to be eligible for Chapter 13 bankruptcy. Further, this type of civil damages generally cannot be waived through Chapter 7, but even if it could be, a Chapter 7 would mean liquidating her assets. She would literally walk away with nothing but the clothes on her back.
Short of somehow convincing a judge to allow her to dismiss this debt by filing Chapter 7, her only option, AFAIK, is to let the RIAA garnish her wages to the maximum extent allowable by law (25% of her income) for the rest of her life, then take all of her assets upon her death. In effect, she would be reduced to near indentured servitude by this verdict. We might as well have debtors' prisons. There's really little difference when faced with a civil judgment of this magnitude.
In the southern hemisphere, a great many. Why do you ask?
Depending on the union, you may just be exchanging one set of meaningless crap for another... like the union person at a conference I attended recently in which he couldn't leave the side of the computer unlocked so that people could plug cards in for testing purposes. He had to stand around for an hour and a half just in case he needed to unlock it. Or the TV unions in which you have your job and if you even touch a piece of equipment that's not on your list---even outside of work hours to lean how to use it---instant union grievance. Of course, the people who aren't jackasses poke fun at this and laugh about it, but there are enough people who take it seriously and crack the whip that it can make life for the workers genuinely unpleasant. And so on.
If unions were solely about collective bargaining, were entirely run by regular full-time workers (without significant time off for being the union boss or whatever), and were not designed around bizarre apprenticeship models dating back to the middle ages, there's no question but what unions would be great for workers. Unfortunately, enough unions stray far enough outside those lines that in many cases they are a worse taskmaster than the companies from which they are supposedly trying to protect you.
Things have changed a lot in four years. Since 2005, hard drives have only increased from 500 GB to 2 TB---a factor of 4. In that same time, Compact Flash cards increased from 8GB to 128 GB---a factor of 16. Flash density increases are severely outpacing hard drive density increases, and unlike hard drives, flash storage isn't rapidly becoming less reliable as the density increases....
Apply pressure on Syria, Turkey, and Iraq to deny Lebanese Hezbollah passage to Iran through their countries.
I agree with you about arming the revolutionaries. Historically, that has usually resulted in worse problems, e.g. Al-Qaeda.
If I stayed home every time I had a runny nose or a sore throat that might be a cold, I would only go to work about half the year, and I would not have gone to Italy at all in spite of not actually being sick. Bad allergies are almost indistinguishable from colds, and if you are prone to sinus infections as I am, this is doubly problematic. About the only reliable way to say whether something is a cold, an allergy, or a sinus infection (apart from going to a different place where the allergen is not present) is to wait it out. If it is a cold or flu, it will be gone within a couple of weeks. If it is an allergy, it won't. If it is a sinus infection, it will probably come and go repeatedly. Only one of those three categories is likely to get spread to others. I'll give you three guesses which, and the first two don't count.
Needless to say, waiting out every sniffle for two weeks isn't feasible in any sane universe, at least not if you want to keep your job, your friends, or any semblance of a normal life.... Not to mention that an allergy can mask the onset of cold or flu symptoms, making it absolutely impossible to say for sure that you are not infectious, though if symptoms get really bad, you can be fairly certain that you are....
Actually, if you're in a group, the risk of spreading the infection is lower by flying home. Most illnesses are not significantly airborne. The only people at significant risk of infection are pretty much the people on either side of you, and if you are in a group, those are likely to be people from your group who are already exposed by that point anyway. To a lesser degree, you might also pass it to the people who sit in those seats on the following flight. After that, the chances of infection fall off pretty rapidly.
By contrast, if you end up staying at a hotel, you are probably exposing a different group of two housekeeping people every day for a week or more. That's several times the number of new exposures you would have likely caused by just flying home.
And heinously buggy. Most of the crashes I've seen in Safari have Flash in the backtrace (and usually Flash_EnforceLocalSecurity()). Some flash sites crash browsers with such ease and regularity that it borders on painful to visit them at all---particularly some of those flash games that display random flash ads before you can play them. Those crash Safari and FireFox about 50% of the time.
From a quick skim of the 'net, I see reports that it is not only the #1 cause of crashes in Safari, but also in FireFox (both on the Mac and in Linux). It is probably the #1 cause of IE and FireFox crashes on Windows, too, if I were guessing. To describe Flash as an abomination is an insult to abominations.
There are several very fundamental problems with your logic:
I've been there back in summer of 2005---sick in Italy on the last day of a two week trip---and let me tell you that it isn't fun. I started out the first leg (from Italy to Heathrow) not feeling great but not terrible. It felt like a cold. By the time I left Heathrow, I was feeling miserable. By the time I got to California, it was a good thing my parents were in town visiting and could pick me up where the bus dropped me off. I would not have been able to roll my luggage the three blocks from where the bus dropped me off back to my house. Staying behind, however, was clearly not an option. I was sick for almost two weeks after that, and would have ended up spending upwards of $4,000 to postpone my return that far, not to mention the problem of getting to medical care without anyone there to drive me, the problem of getting food, etc.
While it's a nice idea (in theory) to avoid traveling while sick, in practice, it is a rather naive notion that doesn't take into account the practicality of doing so. One cannot "stay home" if one gets sick while already away from home.
Actually, there are a number of species of geese that have been observed flying long distances at over 30,000 feet. Granted, not many birds are likely to be dumb enough to fly headfirst into a kite....
AFAIK, in direct law on an Airbus plane, the computer systems give audible warning if you exceed safety thresholds, but they do not prevent you from doing so. It is entirely possible to rip the plane apart in direct law. Of course, in practice, you'll almost never get into direct law, which is the subject of debate.
Unless you're saying that the rudder can't physically move that far because of the way the hydraulics are set up or something....
Indeed it does mean something different. The word "of" is a recently introduced slang verb that means "to act as though hopped up on meth." It leads to fun constructions like this:
I of when I'm with you.
The "er" form is irregular; offer is a noun already, so instead you redefine the word "over".
That stupid over wouldn't know how to of if someone gave him an oving.
Also notice the other noun form at the end of that example---oving, meaning the act of behaving as though hopped up on meth. The word "of" used as a noun similarly means behavior befitting a meth addict. For example:
That's a bunch of of.
A similar ov- irregular form applies to some the various verb forms:
I oved tonight. I will of tomorrow. I would of if you ask me.
One of the most critical irregular forms is that of the subjunctive. This verb takes an irregular subjunctive in that the word "have" prior to it is optional. Thus, instead of writing, I would've of, you simply write I would of. For example:
I would of if you had asked me.
Finally, the word "of" can be used as either an interjection or as an intensifier. For example:
Of! I just oving hat this.
(Note that hat is also a new verb that means to adore.) When used as an intensifier in its base form, the word "of" implies the word "have" much as it does in the subjunctive form. For example:
It seems to of gone as expected means "it seems to have gone as expected, in a manner similar to that of someone hopped up on meth."
I hope this clears up any confusion the article might of caused, and I hope this oving makes you hat FaceBook comments all the oving more. If not, of off.
Very true, but if your alternative is redesigning your hardware for different core silicon, I know which one I'd choose every time. I've ported Linux to unsupported hardware from pretty crude specs, and even with custom interrupt controller logic and lots of other really awful hardware, it only took a couple of weeks for me to do a mostly functional basic bring-up (with no custom drivers). That was doing it as a spare time project, BTW.
Yes, board bring-up takes time, particularly if you have a headless embedded device (or worse, are having to debug by blitting bursts of garbage to the screen because the kernel is crashing before it gets the video or serial ports initialized), but JTAG is your friend. Alternatively, there are plenty of good companies out there who will do that for you if you want. (Full disclosure: I worked for MontaVista around the turn of the century.)
And yes, rewriting drivers for a different kernel takes time. That said, if you have a stable piece of hardware that works, the porting time pales in comparison with having to design new hardware, have it built, do a new bring-up of completely different hardware, find a dozen bugs in the new hardware, do reworks and/or have a new rev build, repeating until you have something that can POST....
And if you're just using reference hardware designs, sure, a hardware change is a minor inconvenience, but then again, odds are other OSes will already support that reference hardware out of the box, so an OS change is also a relatively minor inconvenience. At that point, it's a toss-up. Most embedded vendors don't stick with a stock reference board very much past the first rev, though, at least if they want to make a profit.... :-) Too much extra unnecessary hardware.
Either way, so much stuff is done with PCI/PCIe, USB, FireWire, and other industry-standard, easily probed busses these days that bring-up isn't nearly as bad as it would be with truly custom hardware.
The shuttle's tiles are extremely fragile. They are basically made of what amounts to blown glass, with 95% empty space (air) by volume. It doesn't take much to damage them. Judging by how fragile they felt last time I held one, I'm guessing I could snap one in two with the fingertips on one hand. Aircraft skin is a LOT stronger....
Don't get me wrong, I did find one case of a DC-9 crashing from hail, but it encountered it at only 14,000 feet. If there was enough hail at FL350 to bring an airplane down without anyone having time to radio a distress call, that's probably a once-per-millenium event at most.
I could speculate on the cause of the crash, but I won't. The ACARS data is still too incomplete and the lack of FDR/CVR make it somewhat premature. From what I've seen thus far, I have serious doubts that weather caused whatever in-flight event led to the crash, though it may well have contributed to the crew's inability to regain control of the aircraft afterwards.
Depends on the market. Anybody using VxWorks at solely the POSIX layer is almost guaranteed to just dump it and switch to Linux. The only ones who I think might be likely to change their hardware rather than rewriting their software would be hard RT customers, and I doubt that makes up a large enough percentage of their installed base for VxWorks to remain profitable in the absence of their other customers. Just a gut feeling.
Aircraft doors have to open inwards first before they swing out. The outward pressure on the cabin door of a plane pressurized to 8,000 feet while flying at 35,000 feet is about 7.44 PSI. The A330's cabin door measures approximately 141" x 101". Multiply it out and you get approximately 106,000 pounds of force. I don't know anyone who is that strong. I don't know of very many machines that are that strong. This is equivalent to lifting 1.5 of the empty external tanks on the space shuttle. That's 1/3rd the thrust of a single shuttle main engine. That's close to the total thrust for both A330 engines put together.
In other words, it's not going to happen. The only way a cabin door could open mid-flight would be if its hinges and/or a substantial part of the door/frame were physically destroyed, which would require a massive structural failure. Basically, short of someone detonating a pretty big bomb, it borders on absurd to consider the possibility of someone opening the cabin door while the plane is at altitude.
Yeah. It's possible I have four arms and four legs and go by the name Hubert Farnsworth.
Some pilots on PPRuNe suggested that it is very unlikely to find any hail of significant size at FL350 (35,000 feet), and that if you find any at all, it was blown up there from a lower altitude (i.e. relatively low speed). Besides, there's no reason to believe a hail ding is going to bring down something the size of an A330.... That said, anything is possible, I suppose, particularly given the amount of composite material involved.
A lot of mass-pirated discs are stamped media. Sniffing for DVD-Rs might catch the small-time pirates---maybe even the medium ones---but those folks aren't likely to be storing tens of thousands of discs for sale; they're likely burning a few dozen copies of each title per week in the back room of their home or business. If you're talking about a cache of 35,000 discs, I suspect you're almost certainly well into the stamped media large-scale commercial pirate territory.
Read that number again. There were 35,000 discs. Nobody buys 35,000 DVD-Rs for backups, or at least nobody remotely sane....