Sure, we can't do this now, but why isn't it forseeable?
There are technologies NOW that would prevent drunk drivers from starting their cars. But you will never see them installed in cars, because as well as preventing drunks from killing people with their cars, it would also inconvenience a few powerful people. If society isn't willing to hand off that much control over something that kills thousands of people every year to a simple go-no go device, what makes you think we're going to blithely hand over control over three dimensional navigation to a technology that
doesn't exist yet
would take away the freedom of real pilots to make real judgements and fly closer to thunderstorms that would be safe for a non-pilot
wouldn't prevent thousands of idiots from flying into trouble anyway. Thunderstorms and freezing rain can spring up quickly and without warning, even if you had sensors blanketting the entire atmosphere.
?
Like I said earlier, people today drive their cars on frivolous and unnecessary trips during blizzards while the State Police are telling people to stay off the streets. If the State Police had a remote control kill switch that they could turn on in emergencies to keep you from starting your car unless you called them up and explained why your trip was necessary, it would probably save hundreds of lives every year. But the masses won't cede that sort of power over their "right" to travel. What you're proposing is ceding far more power and it will never happen in a million years.
If that means untrained people taking off into thunderstorms and icing conditions, then yes, it will change aviation. It will kill it.
There is no technology available now or forseeable in the future that will make it safe to fly a personal plane into a thunderstorm or into ice. There is no technology that will take away your ability to fly into them. The only technology that can do that is technology that keeps you on ground, always.
It's not arrogance to recognize that flying requires training. It's arrogance to think that all the judgement and training could be condensed down into a microchip.
Truth be told, nearly everything you say applies just as well to cars as it does to planes.
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. People (including me) drive in conditions every day that would kill you in a private plane. People expect to and do drive in snow storms, freezing rain, harsh winds, thunderstorms, etc etc etc. People drive to freaking Starbucks when the State Police are going on the radio to say "Stay home unless you absolutely have to because we need the roads clear for emergency vehicles." You try that stuff even once in a flying machine, and you probably will die. Maybe the first time you'll get lucky, but on the second or third, you'll die. Not "stuck in a snow bank waiting for AAA" - dead.
Any problems with uncontrolled/stupid flight or equipment failure can be solved with a ballistic recovery system
Bullshit again. Read "I Rode The Thunder" for a description of what it's like to be under a parachute in a thunderstorm. The guy was trapped in one for over an hour, got the shit beaten out of him by the hail and the wind, and major frostbite.
Just for reference, I've had about twenty-five hours of instruction.
Lose the arrogance and the ignorance, or quit flying before you kill somebody. I've lost a couple of friends because one of them got away with flying in clouds with ice in them the first couple of times, and didn't get away with it the last time. I also lost my Aviation Medical Examiner because he took off in fog without an instrument rating and flew into a hillside. I guess he figured his hand-held GPS with an obstruction database would show him the hills.
A polyanna "technology will take care of it" attitude has no place in aviation. Pilots live or die on the strength of the go-no go decisions they make on the ground, and the vast majority of the non-flying public is neither equipped to make those decisions, nor do they have the patience or time to learn to make those decisions.
About 20 years ago, a friend of my Dad's made a couple of million dollars selling specialized hardware devices to accupuncture quacks^Wdoctors. Most of these devices were dead simple electronically, and this guy approached my Dad to get some ideas on how to make the guts all fall to pieces if anybody tried to take the box apart. Mostly he did it with fake circuits and real ones expoxied to one surface of the box wired to other fake circuits or real ones on other surfaces of the box so that if you took the box apart, both the fake circuits and the real ones would have wires rip out, making it harder to see which circuits were real.
I had a bunch of cool stuff on my Visor, until I noticed that it was freezing up and had to be reset more frequently than NT with an odd numbered service pack. So I uninstalled all but the built in stuff and I'm slowly installing things one at a time and leaving out anything that I don't absolutely need. So no more games, no more Launcher III (although I hope to get that back soon), no Jot (I might try it again some day). Right now, besides the built-ins I've got:
MiniCalc, a small spreadsheet
AvLogbook, a log book for my flying
CoPilot, probably the best flight planning application ever written, and it's free.
AvantGo, in order to have a copy of Suck and Slashdot to read in the can.
BEFH, the Bastard Excuse From Hell
BigClock, a cool alarm and timer application.
QDraw and QPaint for sketches
IPilot for practising for my Instrument Flight Rules test.
One of these days I'll probably replace AvantGo with Sitescooper and/or Plucker, but right now I can't be bothered.
I've bought two machines in the last three years, and both were pretty darn good machines, not bleeding edge but close. Both of them cost about $1200. The first one was bought as a gaming machine, and had a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz, 128Mb of RAM, 10Gb HD, Diamond Viper V550 and SBLive. At the time, one of the gamer web sites(Tom's, I think) called that a "high end gamer machine" (a year later it would have needed a Viper V770 to equal a "low end gamer machine" - that's life). The second one was a replacement for my poor old Alpha UDB web/mail/news server, and it was a 450MHz K6-3, 256Mb RAM, 2x10Gb HD, crap video card, no sound, and a SCSI card so I could plug in tape backup. At the time, a 600-650MHz P-III would have been bleeding edge, but cost twice as much for bugger all increase in performance. Do I really care if kernel compiles take 15 minutes instead of 12? No. Not while I've got minivan payments and my daughter's college education to save for.
Because I said "on my desk", not "on the desk of somebody who can offord to pay $2500 for a machine".
These days I buy slightly behind the bleeding edge, and replace my machines more often. It works out cheaper and keeps my performance levels up better than buying bleeding edge every 5 years.
My Handspring Visor has 8Mb of RAM and cost about $250. My 1983 computer had a 10Mb hard drive and cost $4000. My current home computer has 256Mb of RAM and cost about $1300. My 1992 computer had a 220Mb hard drive and cost about $3000.
I like this trend. I expect to see a computer with gigabytes of ram on my desk in a few years.
I just want to ask all the people who think the politicians are stupid for not knowing that 602P
is not a real bill to please inform me off the top of their heads what the titles of the following
RFCs are: 1999, 2012, 3002, and 6521
The difference is that bills in Congress aren't numbered that way. A legitimate bill in the house would be numbered HR-something and a legitimate bill in the Senate would be numbered S-something.
I find it absolutely incredible that a sitting congressman doesn't even know the numbering scheme used for bills. Just how stupid do you have to be not to know that? I'm a Canadian and I know that.
I'm with Jason on this. I've been using Netscape on Linux since 1994 or so, and I've never had it wedge so tight that I couldn't switch to a VC or telnet in or login on the vt220 terminal and do a 'killall netscape-communicator; killall -9 netscape-communicator' and have everything fine again.
However, Netscape has a really nasty habit of not going away when my kids log out of their gnome sessions (I'm old fashioned enough to use WindowMaker rather than gnome or kde), which is why I have a cron job looking for netscapes belonging to people who aren't logged in and killing them.
The problem with that is that traders, day traders and most on-line stock quote web sites don't get their data from the nasdaq.com web site, they get it from the NASDAQ data feed. So even if you put phoney stock quotes on nasdaq.com, people would see the real quotes once they logged into etrade or ameritrade or dljdirect to do the trade.
And like I said before, you're not going to get to the source of the quotes (the NASDAQ feed) through the internet - you're going to have to tap into a leased line to one of the Service Delivery Points and impersonate a Market Maker trader.
Speaking as somebody who works for a company that writes software that connects to the NASDAQ servers, I can state categorically that the NASDAQ servers don't connect to the Internet. Period. Market Makers get their data feeds through a leased line from NASDAQ to a Service Delivery Point (SDP) which they lease from NASD.
I don't rule out the possibility that some of the market makers might have their NWII (Nasdaq Workstation II) or similar systems running on Internet connected boxen, but they're not supposed to.
It's been 15 years since I've used VMS, but ISTR that the system account was called "SYSTEM", and DEC's default password for the account was "MANAGER", which was commonly reset to "MANGLER". Likewise, there was another account called "FIELD" with the password "SERVICE" which was commonly reset to "CIRCUS".
Perhaps I'm being obtuse here, but why would a weak power supply bork Windows and not Linux
Perhaps you are. I refer you to a line in the post you are replying to:
Evidently Windows *still* doesn't idle the processor when nothing is going on, the way Linux does, so it uses a lot more power and runs hotter.
That's probably not the whole reason. I'm trying to remember the whole sequence of events when my former cow orker had these problems. I seem to recall that another problem was that Windows was powering up his high draw graphics and sound cards simultaneously while Linux was staggering them.
I don't own an Athlon, but a friend of mine had a very similar problem with his Atlhon. He kept taking it back to the shop (and fortunately they were local and they knew what they were doing), and eventually they figured out that he needed a better (and bigger) power supply. Evidently Windows *still* doesn't idle the processor when nothing is going on, the way Linux does, so it uses a lot more power and runs hotter.
First, way to go jamie. Too bad you didn't apply for a patent.:)
Nice try, but according to the referenced article:
The concept of LMTs can be mapped back to the 18th century. Experiments that utilized the concept were conducted in the 1800s and the early 1900s, but the results were disappointing.
A little hard to patent a technology that is dead obvious (yes, I thought of the same idea when I was a kid too) and has been experimented with since long before you were born. Unless it's software rather than technology, in which case the patent office will grant you a patent immediately.:-)
I don't know how they determined these were the top 10
They're a commercial company. They sell satellite pictures. How the hell do you think they figured out which were their top ten sellers? Maybe they looked at their own sales figures? Nah, too easy.
As for the guy thinking about crime scene tools - the satellites don't cover the entire world every 15 minutes you know. What good is a picture of the crime scene if the last time it was covered by a satellite and there wasn't a cloud cover was 6 months ago?
I'm a 250 hour private pilot, and I have over 600 real landings of real airplanes in my log book. But I've never managed to make a good, on-the-runway soft landing in either Microsoft Flight Simulator or any of the other flight sims I've tried. It's just not the same thing.
BTW: Next summer I'm planning a trip to Meigs Field (the default starting place on MS Flight Simulator) just to prove it can be done. It's also going to be saying goodbye to a very nice airfield before that scumbag Richard Daley closes it for good.
I think it would be useful to blackhole any attempt to get robots.txt from anybody who doesn't give a referrer string. Not just give them a 404, but just don't respond at all to the request. Is this possible in Apache?
Slashdot Mirror
There are technologies NOW that would prevent drunk drivers from starting their cars. But you will never see them installed in cars, because as well as preventing drunks from killing people with their cars, it would also inconvenience a few powerful people. If society isn't willing to hand off that much control over something that kills thousands of people every year to a simple go-no go device, what makes you think we're going to blithely hand over control over three dimensional navigation to a technology that
?
Like I said earlier, people today drive their cars on frivolous and unnecessary trips during blizzards while the State Police are telling people to stay off the streets. If the State Police had a remote control kill switch that they could turn on in emergencies to keep you from starting your car unless you called them up and explained why your trip was necessary, it would probably save hundreds of lives every year. But the masses won't cede that sort of power over their "right" to travel. What you're proposing is ceding far more power and it will never happen in a million years.
Like it or not technology will change avation.
If that means untrained people taking off into thunderstorms and icing conditions, then yes, it will change aviation. It will kill it.
There is no technology available now or forseeable in the future that will make it safe to fly a personal plane into a thunderstorm or into ice. There is no technology that will take away your ability to fly into them. The only technology that can do that is technology that keeps you on ground, always.
It's not arrogance to recognize that flying requires training. It's arrogance to think that all the judgement and training could be condensed down into a microchip.
Truth be told, nearly everything you say applies just as well to cars as it does to planes.
Bullshit. Bullshit bullshit bullshit. People (including me) drive in conditions every day that would kill you in a private plane. People expect to and do drive in snow storms, freezing rain, harsh winds, thunderstorms, etc etc etc. People drive to freaking Starbucks when the State Police are going on the radio to say "Stay home unless you absolutely have to because we need the roads clear for emergency vehicles." You try that stuff even once in a flying machine, and you probably will die. Maybe the first time you'll get lucky, but on the second or third, you'll die. Not "stuck in a snow bank waiting for AAA" - dead.
Any problems with uncontrolled/stupid flight or equipment failure can be solved with a ballistic recovery system
Bullshit again. Read "I Rode The Thunder" for a description of what it's like to be under a parachute in a thunderstorm. The guy was trapped in one for over an hour, got the shit beaten out of him by the hail and the wind, and major frostbite.
Just for reference, I've had about twenty-five hours of instruction.
Lose the arrogance and the ignorance, or quit flying before you kill somebody. I've lost a couple of friends because one of them got away with flying in clouds with ice in them the first couple of times, and didn't get away with it the last time. I also lost my Aviation Medical Examiner because he took off in fog without an instrument rating and flew into a hillside. I guess he figured his hand-held GPS with an obstruction database would show him the hills.
A polyanna "technology will take care of it" attitude has no place in aviation. Pilots live or die on the strength of the go-no go decisions they make on the ground, and the vast majority of the non-flying public is neither equipped to make those decisions, nor do they have the patience or time to learn to make those decisions.
About 20 years ago, a friend of my Dad's made a couple of million dollars selling specialized hardware devices to accupuncture quacks^Wdoctors. Most of these devices were dead simple electronically, and this guy approached my Dad to get some ideas on how to make the guts all fall to pieces if anybody tried to take the box apart. Mostly he did it with fake circuits and real ones expoxied to one surface of the box wired to other fake circuits or real ones on other surfaces of the box so that if you took the box apart, both the fake circuits and the real ones would have wires rip out, making it harder to see which circuits were real.
One of these days I'll probably replace AvantGo with Sitescooper and/or Plucker, but right now I can't be bothered.
I've bought two machines in the last three years, and both were pretty darn good machines, not bleeding edge but close. Both of them cost about $1200. The first one was bought as a gaming machine, and had a Celeron 300A overclocked to 450MHz, 128Mb of RAM, 10Gb HD, Diamond Viper V550 and SBLive. At the time, one of the gamer web sites(Tom's, I think) called that a "high end gamer machine" (a year later it would have needed a Viper V770 to equal a "low end gamer machine" - that's life). The second one was a replacement for my poor old Alpha UDB web/mail/news server, and it was a 450MHz K6-3, 256Mb RAM, 2x10Gb HD, crap video card, no sound, and a SCSI card so I could plug in tape backup. At the time, a 600-650MHz P-III would have been bleeding edge, but cost twice as much for bugger all increase in performance. Do I really care if kernel compiles take 15 minutes instead of 12? No. Not while I've got minivan payments and my daughter's college education to save for.
What?!? In a few years? How about today?
Because I said "on my desk", not "on the desk of somebody who can offord to pay $2500 for a machine".
These days I buy slightly behind the bleeding edge, and replace my machines more often. It works out cheaper and keeps my performance levels up better than buying bleeding edge every 5 years.
My Handspring Visor has 8Mb of RAM and cost about $250. My 1983 computer had a 10Mb hard drive and cost $4000. My current home computer has 256Mb of RAM and cost about $1300. My 1992 computer had a 220Mb hard drive and cost about $3000.
I like this trend. I expect to see a computer with gigabytes of ram on my desk in a few years.
I just want to ask all the people who think the politicians are stupid for not knowing that 602P
is not a real bill to please inform me off the top of their heads what the titles of the following
RFCs are: 1999, 2012, 3002, and 6521
The difference is that bills in Congress aren't numbered that way. A legitimate bill in the house would be numbered HR-something and a legitimate bill in the Senate would be numbered S-something.
I find it absolutely incredible that a sitting congressman doesn't even know the numbering scheme used for bills. Just how stupid do you have to be not to know that? I'm a Canadian and I know that.
I'm with Jason on this. I've been using Netscape on Linux since 1994 or so, and I've never had it wedge so tight that I couldn't switch to a VC or telnet in or login on the vt220 terminal and do a 'killall netscape-communicator; killall -9 netscape-communicator' and have everything fine again.
However, Netscape has a really nasty habit of not going away when my kids log out of their gnome sessions (I'm old fashioned enough to use WindowMaker rather than gnome or kde), which is why I have a cron job looking for netscapes belonging to people who aren't logged in and killing them.
The problem with that is that traders, day traders and most on-line stock quote web sites don't get their data from the nasdaq.com web site, they get it from the NASDAQ data feed. So even if you put phoney stock quotes on nasdaq.com, people would see the real quotes once they logged into etrade or ameritrade or dljdirect to do the trade.
And like I said before, you're not going to get to the source of the quotes (the NASDAQ feed) through the internet - you're going to have to tap into a leased line to one of the Service Delivery Points and impersonate a Market Maker trader.
Speaking as somebody who works for a company that writes software that connects to the NASDAQ servers, I can state categorically that the NASDAQ servers don't connect to the Internet. Period. Market Makers get their data feeds through a leased line from NASDAQ to a Service Delivery Point (SDP) which they lease from NASD.
I don't rule out the possibility that some of the market makers might have their NWII (Nasdaq Workstation II) or similar systems running on Internet connected boxen, but they're not supposed to.
Yes, I know, but dot@dotat.at is already gone. So is atdotcom@dotcomat.com.
I vote we give Jon Katz a one way ticket.
I want atdotdot@dotdotat.dot
No name perfume which costs you $1.99, such as Eu de Toilet, which actually smells like ... a $10 whore
My wife doesn't know what a $10 whore smells like. If yours does, ask her how she knows.
I'd rather have a Pilatus PC-12. Better range, better load, better avionics, slightly slower, way cheaper, and can get into smaller airports.
In the higher end:
See, I don't want much.
It's been 15 years since I've used VMS, but ISTR that the system account was called "SYSTEM", and DEC's default password for the account was "MANAGER", which was commonly reset to "MANGLER". Likewise, there was another account called "FIELD" with the password "SERVICE" which was commonly reset to "CIRCUS".
Perhaps I'm being obtuse here, but why would a weak power supply bork Windows and not Linux
Perhaps you are. I refer you to a line in the post you are replying to:
Evidently Windows *still* doesn't idle the processor when nothing is going on, the way Linux does, so it uses a lot more power and runs hotter.
That's probably not the whole reason. I'm trying to remember the whole sequence of events when my former cow orker had these problems. I seem to recall that another problem was that Windows was powering up his high draw graphics and sound cards simultaneously while Linux was staggering them.
I don't own an Athlon, but a friend of mine had a very similar problem with his Atlhon. He kept taking it back to the shop (and fortunately they were local and they knew what they were doing), and eventually they figured out that he needed a better (and bigger) power supply. Evidently Windows *still* doesn't idle the processor when nothing is going on, the way Linux does, so it uses a lot more power and runs hotter.
First, way to go jamie. Too bad you didn't apply for a patent. :)
:-)
Nice try, but according to the referenced article:
The concept of LMTs can be mapped back to the 18th century. Experiments that utilized the concept were conducted in the 1800s and the early 1900s, but the results were disappointing.
A little hard to patent a technology that is dead obvious (yes, I thought of the same idea when I was a kid too) and has been experimented with since long before you were born. Unless it's software rather than technology, in which case the patent office will grant you a patent immediately.
I don't know how they determined these were the top 10
They're a commercial company. They sell satellite pictures. How the hell do you think they figured out which were their top ten sellers? Maybe they looked at their own sales figures? Nah, too easy.
As for the guy thinking about crime scene tools - the satellites don't cover the entire world every 15 minutes you know. What good is a picture of the crime scene if the last time it was covered by a satellite and there wasn't a cloud cover was 6 months ago?
I'm a 250 hour private pilot, and I have over 600 real landings of real airplanes in my log book. But I've never managed to make a good, on-the-runway soft landing in either Microsoft Flight Simulator or any of the other flight sims I've tried. It's just not the same thing.
BTW: Next summer I'm planning a trip to Meigs Field (the default starting place on MS Flight Simulator) just to prove it can be done. It's also going to be saying goodbye to a very nice airfield before that scumbag Richard Daley closes it for good.
I've got the same damn thing: /robots.txt HTTP/1.0" 404 278 "-" "Mercator-1.0"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/robots.txt" 404 - "-" "-"
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:204.123.28.10 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:10:05 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:208.47.242.41 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:12.27.166.41 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:206.229.153.41 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:206.98.113.41 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:4.20.90.41 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:206.64.105.41 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:216.52.254.37 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:216.52.254.37 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:208.47.242.41 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
/var/log/httpd/access_log.4:207.95.133.41 - - [20/Sep/2000:02:23:02 -0400] "GET
I think it would be useful to blackhole any attempt to get robots.txt from anybody who doesn't give a referrer string. Not just give them a 404, but just don't respond at all to the request. Is this possible in Apache?