...Oh, you mean married to each other! Hah hah, how silly of me.
Legally the judge would have to recuse himself for clear conflict of interest. Of course, since we (people in various/. comments, that is) are already asserting that the judge is either corrupt or incompetent, it might not happen anyway.
I just drop-kicked my AT&T DSL for Comcast cable. Sort of like leaving Lucifer to deal with Beelzebub, but at least I don't get 30-second delays on every web page and 4+ disconnections every night.
A lot of the conversions (inside Imperial) go by 2s and 3s, which is a natural sort of progression. Halving, doubling, and tripling, certainly. Decimal? Great for a lot of things, but not intuitive for, say, cooking. Tool sizes? It's all about splitting differences. (3/8 is halfway between 1/4 and 1/2, for instance.) Dividing by 10 isn't natural, no matter how many fingers you have. Dividing by 2 is.
Ever cut a piece of rope? OK, you cut yours into 5 even pieces, I'll cut mine into 4. OK, be fair, I'll cut mine into 8. We'll see who finishes first.:) Because you'll have to measure carefully but I just have to double it and cut at the bend, then repeat. (Of course maybe it's not the length or number of pieces you need, it's just an illustration of how natural dividing by 2 is.)
12 inches to a foot isn't psychotic. It's 6 twos or 4 threes or 3 fours. (Think about it. 10 is evenly divisible by two numbers -- 12 is by four numbers. That's twice as good!:) Then three feet to a yard. 5280 inches to a mile... you got me there. I think it just sorta worked out that way, the mile was doubtless based on another measurement. The good news is that all our standard length measurements can at least divide it evenly (1760 yards to a mile). Honestly I don't know where the mile came from and too lazy to look it up.
3 teaspoons to a tablespoon, 2 tbsp to an ounce, 8 oz to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon. All multiples of 2 except the teaspoons. Easy every-day stuff to work with.
Celsius? It makes a lot more sense than Fahrenheit -- when you're measuring pure water at sea level. But otherwise it seems to me that any scale will do.
Not saying we shouldn't convert. Just saying... while it has its flaws, Imperial might make more sense than you realize. The argument that it makes NO sense is, I believe, very common and just as untrue.
Of course, the amount of inertia is staggering. People can claim laziness all they want, but learning to think in different units is hard work, and the older you are, the harder to change. But even that isn't the real problem. You have to change EVERY traffic sign in the US. OK, maybe not the "no turn on red" signs, but every speed limit, every sign with mileage. Most might have to have two sets of numbers (or two sets of signs) while we learn, but how about exit numbers? A lot of places have changed to using the number of miles from one end as their exit numbers... and we'll have to change all those signs AGAIN. (Or decide that For Just This One Thing we'll keep using miles. Hah.) So... double up on most signs, change others. Signs aren't cheap!
And then there's the money. Oh wait, we've had a decimal money system almost forever.:) (Unless you want to go postal over the fact that we've got four quarters to a dollar. There's that multiple-of-2 thing going on again.)
Grandma's pickle recipe will never be the same converted to metric... and millions of recipe books are obsolete overnight as people are forced at gunpoint to throw away their kitchen equipment and buy everything in metric. All the food manufacturers will have to re-tool. People will have to throw their cars away because tire sizes now only come in metric. And bicycle wheels! Printers! Paper! Tools! Wood! Screws! Nails!
No, seriously. OK, I was a bit silly with the Metric Police stuff, but just think about a whole country retooling like that. It's easy to say "Oh, we should just convert to metric" and "we've just been too lazy" but if you think about the absolutely incredible amount of work, it's staggering. Especially given the size of the country. (And the number of old people.)
On the other hand... a lot has already been done. I mentioned the food manufacturers? A lot of stuff is labels in both systems, and more every day. Not all of it is in even numbers Imperial, either.
I'll stick to my inches, thanks very much. It's not ideal but it's what I'm comfortable with. I can do a few quick conver
Heh. I remember translating a phone conversation for my colleague (a French expatriate) who was calling a contractor (a German expatriate). Their only common language was English.
Neither could understand a word of each other's speech.:)
As a compromise, consider capturing the return address in a timer interrupt and stuffing into a DAC or two. Of course that requires that you have an unused DAC (or two) on board, a timer, and processing time available in the interrupt, and the result probably won't be as smooth as the DAC directly on the bus. Still, if you can do it it's better than nothing.
If you can't, perhaps you can use a different peripheral and some external logic. SPI to a shift register, perhaps? Or I can see having a second processor and sending it serially, then the second processor outputs the DAC.
Anyway, I can see using variations of this technique on some of my projects. Pretty cool idea, really.
I haven't quite had the depth of experience you have, but I've experienced some problems as well. From inconvenience to theft and property damage. Not to mention cockroaches.
My take on this is that yes, there's a problem, but I don't think that throwing a few people in cages for missing paperwork is going to solve it. I mean, think about it -- that's how we're treating the drug problem, by throwing people in cages. We're putting more and more people into cages and the problem is still getting worse.
People will do something they REALLY want to no matter how illegal you make it. The secret isn't to make it illegal; that just drives people underground and fosters a black market. If you really want people not to do something, make it unnecessary. Or undesirable.
(And don't say that throwing people in cages makes it undesirable. Artificial consequences aren't the answer. Hell, REAL consequences don't stop them. How many people do you know still smoke tobacco? I mean that you need to make it so people won't want to do it in the first place.)
And that requires social engineering, which requires real work. So nobody wants to do it except a few old hippie malcontents like me. Much easier to make rules against it that throw people into cages if they ignore them. And then when the cages get full, vote against building new ones in our back yards, because we sure as hell don't want the consequences of our decisions making OUR lives uncomfortable.
OK, this is starting to turn into a rant, and I didn't want to do that. And I don't mean to pick on you personally, this is a pet peeve of mine, as you can probably see. I just think the answer lies somewhere else. Laws like this may do some good in a few individual cases, but I think the potential for abuse is too high.
I don't have papers. The only paper I have to prove I'm a citizen is my birth certificate, and I'm not in the habit of carrying it around. There's no law that says I have to.
So what that means (in case the point isn't clear) is that if an officer gets it into his head that I'm an illegal alien -- or if he just wants to hassle me -- he can incarcerate me without probable cause, but just based on suspicion.
I'll grant you that in my case personally that's pretty darned unlikely, I look and sound about as American as you can get. But you know, it's not my personal rights I'm worried about here -- at least, not directly. (Indirectly I'm worried about ALL our rights.)
I've had excellent luck with Steam. Not perfect, but I very, very rarely have problems with their protection scheme. I get more game crashes than DRM problems. If I lose my connection to Steam the game lets me keep playing in multiplayer mode, I just might be missing some features (TF2 loadout), and it re-synchronizes after I reconnect and gives me credit for whatever I've accomplished.
I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of the community but I hear very little about their awful DRM scheme.
You didn't specify if your bad experience was with Steam or with COD. If you didn't like the game, or had particular problems with it, can't answer for that, sorry. Never played it myself. If you had problems with Steam I'd say you're in the minority.
I can't really get from one person having problems with the platform to everybody leaving en mass. If anything Valve seems to have found a very good balance between copy protection and user experience. I can't speak for everybody, but to me it's transparent enough that I can live with the occasional glitch. I tolerate it because it's tolerable. MHO, YMMV.
My reaction was somewhere between, about like yours. Lots of potential for problems, most of them could be resolved with a bit of work, some would require a lot of work. Most results (of failing to fix problems) would be anywhere from trivial to expensive but not life-threatening. Most of the disaster scenarios gleefully painted by the press were way overblown....And on the flip side, most companies were working like mad to fix the problems, so very few would manifest anyway.
And were I in charge of the airplanes I probably would have grounded them too, just to be safe. On infrastructure, I would have had a full crew on hand for the power plants and so on, with another on standby, and my best trouble-shooters available.
Of course as a software engineer I actually had some idea of the real of the magnitude of the problem. And when people asked me what I thought I said your car will still run, your microwave will still heat food, and your toaster oven will not suddenly try to take over the world. If there are any interruptions in services it will be short. Make sure your batteries are fresh and your larder is stocked and your tanks are full and get on with your life.
And of course ten years later it's easy to say all that.:)
My bosses never looked on us with suspicion afterwards. Partly because we were completely honest, partly because they were pretty technical themselves and realistic about it.
No, I wasn't trying to say it was no big deal; just trying to say that yes, there was potential for problems, but no, the airplanes wouldn't Just Stop Working And Fall Out Of The Sky. I was trying to explain why, not just pat people on the head and say "There, there, the boogie man won't hurt you.":) I find people usually work better when they understand the Why and not just the What. And most people don't like to think they're being patronized.
What seems to be happening here is that I'm saying "I don't think GPS failure due to Y2K is likely, and if it does happen it's not going to be any worse than any other equipment failure. Planes aren't going to start falling out of the sky like dead birds. There will be no mass disaster." Whereas you're taking it as meaning "Oh, Y2K failure cannot possibly cause a plane to crash." No matter what I respond you can come up with a scenario where it can happen. No, I do not guarantee that a Y2K failure cannot cause an airplane accident. I would never make such a claim. I'm just saying that "planes will start falling out of the sky" is hype and panic, and at most you'll have an equipment failure with the same likelihood of disaster as any other equipment failure.
Anything that measures speed also uses time (delta in position over time = speed), and when you deal with time you tend to have a date in there as well, somewhere around 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. It may not strictly speaking be needed, but can you guarantee that it is never done like that? On all airplanes, including some quite old ones, with all versions over all manufacturers of all devices to measure speed on airplanes?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying -- I'm omniscient, nothing can ever go wrong....Good God, man, of COURSE I can't say that. Are you saying that the Y2K bug is going to crash every airplane, stop every car, disable every microwave?
I'm reminded of a Carlin piece (Carlin on Campus? Live at Carnegie? I forget) where he talks about practicing for rain dancing.
If you don't practice, how do you know you've got it right? If it doesn't rain when you practice, doesn't that mean you're doing it wrong? If it does rain when you practice, why have the dance? When you need rain, just hold practice!
OK, I have no idea why I thought of that.
How about this, then: I carry elephant repellent. How do I know it works? Well, do you see any elephants?
Not sure about that one either. I'm here all week, folks!
The fact is that nobody knows if you've staved off disaster because the disaster never happened. And if the disaster does happen, you've failed. What you need is a time rewinder so you can wait for the disaster to happen, say "See? I told you so!" and then go back in time and fix it.
Huh? It was the old software, not the new, that was performing this trick. They just didn't realize it until the system failed. They weren't ready because they didn't expect problems for another month. He was just explaining why the problem occurred a month earlier than expected.
If I'm not mistaken, the GPS is the only control in an airplane that depends on the date. If the GPS fails you're dependent on charts, landmarks, and backup instruments to navigate, ground radar and radio, and the rest of your avionics if you have them. That gives you a bunch of other ground-based radio beacons and so on. A commercial jet is going to have backups of everything. Your average puddle jumper may not even HAVE a GPS. And it's possible for a GPS to fail in other ways -- losing track of the date is only one (unlikely) possible failure, and pilots are trained to use all the instruments in the plane, not just the most convenient one.
No. If an airplane falls out of the sky solely due to a GPS failure then it was flying with a bad crew.
Note: I speak not as an aviator or an expert but as somebody who makes realistic simulator equipment.
Indeed. Most of the products people were afraid would die didn't even have date clocks.
I was one of the lucky ones. There's only one product I was associated with that even had a time/date clock, an early paperless chart recorder. After reviewing the design and code I determined that it was good until 2039, sometime in February (I used to know the exact day).
The product was abandoned. The company doesn't exist any more as such. (Bought out by...a certain very large German international company... with many promises of a bright future and then gutted.)
Your average microwave doesn't know and doesn't care what the date is. Your average automobile probably doesn't keep track of the date either -- how would it check? What method do you have for setting it after power has been removed? It keeps track of elapsed time for various reasons, but that's not the same thing.
I write firmware for airplane simulator hardware these days. That doesn't make me an expert in avionics, but I think I have a pretty good idea how things really are. The only part of an airplane I can imagine giving a tinker's damn about the date is a GPS, which synchronizes with the satellites and probably would correct its date anyway. And if the GPS of an airplane suddenly goes wonky? Gosh, the pilot just might have to use the charts and backup instruments he was trained on.... Just like if the GPS failed for some other reason. If the airplane falls out of the sky solely due to a GPS failure then there's something seriously wrong with the crew.
My wife and I put by a small stash of supplies just in case, but we really didn't expect even temporary interruption of services. We certainly didn't think civilization would end.
Oh, you get a mix, just like any other game. For the most part I like the other players.
I'm old and slow and not very good, and most of them don't really care. (Even the ones on my team.:) It's all about having fun.
I want to add to the description: one unrealistic aspect is that you can give each other health. In Action Quake 2 -- very similar in spirit, sadly abandoned -- once you lost health it was gone until you respawned. But UrT is close enough, I like it. I have a few nitpicks like that but nothing worth talking about.
It's worth trying out. If you don't like it, all it will cost you is time and a bit of bandwidth.
What's odd, though, is that you accepted his correction of the parent's humorous spoof, but not my correction of the corrector's spelling. You seem rather selective about whose corrections you deem acceptable.
Slashdot Mirror
Galas are good but I think a Cameo for me.
They probably both are married.
beat
Legally the judge would have to recuse himself for clear conflict of interest. Of course, since we (people in various /. comments, that is) are already asserting that the judge is either corrupt or incompetent, it might not happen anyway.
*snerk*
I just drop-kicked my AT&T DSL for Comcast cable. Sort of like leaving Lucifer to deal with Beelzebub, but at least I don't get 30-second delays on every web page and 4+ disconnections every night.
"Or build more rails...?"
Whoa! Dangerous, you could end up bending space/time! http://www.iblist.com/book12352.htm
A lot of the conversions (inside Imperial) go by 2s and 3s, which is a natural sort of progression. Halving, doubling, and tripling, certainly. Decimal? Great for a lot of things, but not intuitive for, say, cooking. Tool sizes? It's all about splitting differences. (3/8 is halfway between 1/4 and 1/2, for instance.) Dividing by 10 isn't natural, no matter how many fingers you have. Dividing by 2 is.
Ever cut a piece of rope? OK, you cut yours into 5 even pieces, I'll cut mine into 4. OK, be fair, I'll cut mine into 8. We'll see who finishes first. :) Because you'll have to measure carefully but I just have to double it and cut at the bend, then repeat. (Of course maybe it's not the length or number of pieces you need, it's just an illustration of how natural dividing by 2 is.)
12 inches to a foot isn't psychotic. It's 6 twos or 4 threes or 3 fours. (Think about it. 10 is evenly divisible by two numbers -- 12 is by four numbers. That's twice as good! :) Then three feet to a yard. 5280 inches to a mile... you got me there. I think it just sorta worked out that way, the mile was doubtless based on another measurement. The good news is that all our standard length measurements can at least divide it evenly (1760 yards to a mile). Honestly I don't know where the mile came from and too lazy to look it up.
3 teaspoons to a tablespoon, 2 tbsp to an ounce, 8 oz to a cup, 2 cups to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon. All multiples of 2 except the teaspoons. Easy every-day stuff to work with.
Celsius? It makes a lot more sense than Fahrenheit -- when you're measuring pure water at sea level. But otherwise it seems to me that any scale will do.
Not saying we shouldn't convert. Just saying... while it has its flaws, Imperial might make more sense than you realize. The argument that it makes NO sense is, I believe, very common and just as untrue.
Of course, the amount of inertia is staggering. People can claim laziness all they want, but learning to think in different units is hard work, and the older you are, the harder to change. But even that isn't the real problem. You have to change EVERY traffic sign in the US. OK, maybe not the "no turn on red" signs, but every speed limit, every sign with mileage. Most might have to have two sets of numbers (or two sets of signs) while we learn, but how about exit numbers? A lot of places have changed to using the number of miles from one end as their exit numbers... and we'll have to change all those signs AGAIN. (Or decide that For Just This One Thing we'll keep using miles. Hah.) So... double up on most signs, change others. Signs aren't cheap!
And then there's the money. Oh wait, we've had a decimal money system almost forever. :) (Unless you want to go postal over the fact that we've got four quarters to a dollar. There's that multiple-of-2 thing going on again.)
Grandma's pickle recipe will never be the same converted to metric... and millions of recipe books are obsolete overnight as people are forced at gunpoint to throw away their kitchen equipment and buy everything in metric. All the food manufacturers will have to re-tool. People will have to throw their cars away because tire sizes now only come in metric. And bicycle wheels! Printers! Paper! Tools! Wood! Screws! Nails!
No, seriously. OK, I was a bit silly with the Metric Police stuff, but just think about a whole country retooling like that. It's easy to say "Oh, we should just convert to metric" and "we've just been too lazy" but if you think about the absolutely incredible amount of work, it's staggering. Especially given the size of the country. (And the number of old people.)
On the other hand... a lot has already been done. I mentioned the food manufacturers? A lot of stuff is labels in both systems, and more every day. Not all of it is in even numbers Imperial, either.
I'll stick to my inches, thanks very much. It's not ideal but it's what I'm comfortable with. I can do a few quick conver
...when you choose an action, you choose the consequences of that action.
The question was whether there was a moral difference, not a popular culture difference.
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/throes
It's not my intention to pick on you and I freely admit I'm being a spelling nazi.
This has happened to me. I slipped a blatant lie past the polygraph in the same session that it took a true statement for a lie.
They're total hogwash.
Heh. I remember translating a phone conversation for my colleague (a French expatriate) who was calling a contractor (a German expatriate). Their only common language was English.
Neither could understand a word of each other's speech. :)
As a compromise, consider capturing the return address in a timer interrupt and stuffing into a DAC or two. Of course that requires that you have an unused DAC (or two) on board, a timer, and processing time available in the interrupt, and the result probably won't be as smooth as the DAC directly on the bus. Still, if you can do it it's better than nothing.
If you can't, perhaps you can use a different peripheral and some external logic. SPI to a shift register, perhaps? Or I can see having a second processor and sending it serially, then the second processor outputs the DAC.
Anyway, I can see using variations of this technique on some of my projects. Pretty cool idea, really.
I haven't quite had the depth of experience you have, but I've experienced some problems as well. From inconvenience to theft and property damage. Not to mention cockroaches.
My take on this is that yes, there's a problem, but I don't think that throwing a few people in cages for missing paperwork is going to solve it. I mean, think about it -- that's how we're treating the drug problem, by throwing people in cages. We're putting more and more people into cages and the problem is still getting worse.
People will do something they REALLY want to no matter how illegal you make it. The secret isn't to make it illegal; that just drives people underground and fosters a black market. If you really want people not to do something, make it unnecessary. Or undesirable.
(And don't say that throwing people in cages makes it undesirable. Artificial consequences aren't the answer. Hell, REAL consequences don't stop them. How many people do you know still smoke tobacco? I mean that you need to make it so people won't want to do it in the first place.)
And that requires social engineering, which requires real work. So nobody wants to do it except a few old hippie malcontents like me. Much easier to make rules against it that throw people into cages if they ignore them. And then when the cages get full, vote against building new ones in our back yards, because we sure as hell don't want the consequences of our decisions making OUR lives uncomfortable.
OK, this is starting to turn into a rant, and I didn't want to do that. And I don't mean to pick on you personally, this is a pet peeve of mine, as you can probably see. I just think the answer lies somewhere else. Laws like this may do some good in a few individual cases, but I think the potential for abuse is too high.
Well, what about me?
I don't have papers. The only paper I have to prove I'm a citizen is my birth certificate, and I'm not in the habit of carrying it around. There's no law that says I have to.
So what that means (in case the point isn't clear) is that if an officer gets it into his head that I'm an illegal alien -- or if he just wants to hassle me -- he can incarcerate me without probable cause, but just based on suspicion.
I'll grant you that in my case personally that's pretty darned unlikely, I look and sound about as American as you can get. But you know, it's not my personal rights I'm worried about here -- at least, not directly. (Indirectly I'm worried about ALL our rights.)
I actually remember when it was funny... Jane Curtin, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Garrett Morris, Laraine Newman, Gilda Radner...
The evil laughter is necessary, too. Without that it's mere boyish high spirits.
*scratches head*
I've had excellent luck with Steam. Not perfect, but I very, very rarely have problems with their protection scheme. I get more game crashes than DRM problems. If I lose my connection to Steam the game lets me keep playing in multiplayer mode, I just might be missing some features (TF2 loadout), and it re-synchronizes after I reconnect and gives me credit for whatever I've accomplished.
I don't exactly have my finger on the pulse of the community but I hear very little about their awful DRM scheme.
You didn't specify if your bad experience was with Steam or with COD. If you didn't like the game, or had particular problems with it, can't answer for that, sorry. Never played it myself. If you had problems with Steam I'd say you're in the minority.
I can't really get from one person having problems with the platform to everybody leaving en mass. If anything Valve seems to have found a very good balance between copy protection and user experience. I can't speak for everybody, but to me it's transparent enough that I can live with the occasional glitch. I tolerate it because it's tolerable. MHO, YMMV.
If it's injected via a needle, it must be a drug.
Expect to see salt water on the controlled substances list soon.
My reaction was somewhere between, about like yours. Lots of potential for problems, most of them could be resolved with a bit of work, some would require a lot of work. Most results (of failing to fix problems) would be anywhere from trivial to expensive but not life-threatening. Most of the disaster scenarios gleefully painted by the press were way overblown. ...And on the flip side, most companies were working like mad to fix the problems, so very few would manifest anyway.
And were I in charge of the airplanes I probably would have grounded them too, just to be safe. On infrastructure, I would have had a full crew on hand for the power plants and so on, with another on standby, and my best trouble-shooters available.
Of course as a software engineer I actually had some idea of the real of the magnitude of the problem. And when people asked me what I thought I said your car will still run, your microwave will still heat food, and your toaster oven will not suddenly try to take over the world. If there are any interruptions in services it will be short. Make sure your batteries are fresh and your larder is stocked and your tanks are full and get on with your life.
And of course ten years later it's easy to say all that. :)
My bosses never looked on us with suspicion afterwards. Partly because we were completely honest, partly because they were pretty technical themselves and realistic about it.
No, I wasn't trying to say it was no big deal; just trying to say that yes, there was potential for problems, but no, the airplanes wouldn't Just Stop Working And Fall Out Of The Sky. I was trying to explain why, not just pat people on the head and say "There, there, the boogie man won't hurt you." :) I find people usually work better when they understand the Why and not just the What. And most people don't like to think they're being patronized.
What seems to be happening here is that I'm saying "I don't think GPS failure due to Y2K is likely, and if it does happen it's not going to be any worse than any other equipment failure. Planes aren't going to start falling out of the sky like dead birds. There will be no mass disaster." Whereas you're taking it as meaning "Oh, Y2K failure cannot possibly cause a plane to crash." No matter what I respond you can come up with a scenario where it can happen. No, I do not guarantee that a Y2K failure cannot cause an airplane accident. I would never make such a claim. I'm just saying that "planes will start falling out of the sky" is hype and panic, and at most you'll have an equipment failure with the same likelihood of disaster as any other equipment failure.
Anything that measures speed also uses time (delta in position over time = speed), and when you deal with time you tend to have a date in there as well, somewhere around 23:59:59 and 00:00:00. It may not strictly speaking be needed, but can you guarantee that it is never done like that? On all airplanes, including some quite old ones, with all versions over all manufacturers of all devices to measure speed on airplanes?
Yes, that's exactly what I'm saying -- I'm omniscient, nothing can ever go wrong. ...Good God, man, of COURSE I can't say that. Are you saying that the Y2K bug is going to crash every airplane, stop every car, disable every microwave?
I'm reminded of a Carlin piece (Carlin on Campus? Live at Carnegie? I forget) where he talks about practicing for rain dancing.
If you don't practice, how do you know you've got it right?
If it doesn't rain when you practice, doesn't that mean you're doing it wrong?
If it does rain when you practice, why have the dance? When you need rain, just hold practice!
OK, I have no idea why I thought of that.
How about this, then: I carry elephant repellent. How do I know it works? Well, do you see any elephants?
Not sure about that one either. I'm here all week, folks!
The fact is that nobody knows if you've staved off disaster because the disaster never happened. And if the disaster does happen, you've failed. What you need is a time rewinder so you can wait for the disaster to happen, say "See? I told you so!" and then go back in time and fix it.
Huh? It was the old software, not the new, that was performing this trick. They just didn't realize it until the system failed. They weren't ready because they didn't expect problems for another month. He was just explaining why the problem occurred a month earlier than expected.
Your comment doesn't make any sense to me.
If I'm not mistaken, the GPS is the only control in an airplane that depends on the date. If the GPS fails you're dependent on charts, landmarks, and backup instruments to navigate, ground radar and radio, and the rest of your avionics if you have them. That gives you a bunch of other ground-based radio beacons and so on. A commercial jet is going to have backups of everything. Your average puddle jumper may not even HAVE a GPS. And it's possible for a GPS to fail in other ways -- losing track of the date is only one (unlikely) possible failure, and pilots are trained to use all the instruments in the plane, not just the most convenient one.
No. If an airplane falls out of the sky solely due to a GPS failure then it was flying with a bad crew.
Note: I speak not as an aviator or an expert but as somebody who makes realistic simulator equipment.
Indeed. Most of the products people were afraid would die didn't even have date clocks.
I was one of the lucky ones. There's only one product I was associated with that even had a time/date clock, an early paperless chart recorder. After reviewing the design and code I determined that it was good until 2039, sometime in February (I used to know the exact day).
The product was abandoned. The company doesn't exist any more as such. (Bought out by ...a certain very large German international company... with many promises of a bright future and then gutted.)
Your average microwave doesn't know and doesn't care what the date is. Your average automobile probably doesn't keep track of the date either -- how would it check? What method do you have for setting it after power has been removed? It keeps track of elapsed time for various reasons, but that's not the same thing.
I write firmware for airplane simulator hardware these days. That doesn't make me an expert in avionics, but I think I have a pretty good idea how things really are. The only part of an airplane I can imagine giving a tinker's damn about the date is a GPS, which synchronizes with the satellites and probably would correct its date anyway. And if the GPS of an airplane suddenly goes wonky? Gosh, the pilot just might have to use the charts and backup instruments he was trained on. ... Just like if the GPS failed for some other reason. If the airplane falls out of the sky solely due to a GPS failure then there's something seriously wrong with the crew.
My wife and I put by a small stash of supplies just in case, but we really didn't expect even temporary interruption of services. We certainly didn't think civilization would end.
Oh, you get a mix, just like any other game. For the most part I like the other players.
I'm old and slow and not very good, and most of them don't really care. (Even the ones on my team. :) It's all about having fun.
I want to add to the description: one unrealistic aspect is that you can give each other health. In Action Quake 2 -- very similar in spirit, sadly abandoned -- once you lost health it was gone until you respawned. But UrT is close enough, I like it. I have a few nitpicks like that but nothing worth talking about.
It's worth trying out. If you don't like it, all it will cost you is time and a bit of bandwidth.
See you there.
What's odd, though, is that you accepted his correction of the parent's humorous spoof, but not my correction of the corrector's spelling. You seem rather selective about whose corrections you deem acceptable.