The vast majority of people who have 0wned machines are in that state because they did something they shouldn't have. There's no coding around that, I think. Unless we deny users the right to use their computers... or educate them.
BBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTT!!!!
Sorry, Charlie. You got this one wrong!
True or false: Some places are more secure places to keep your money.
True or false: Some cars are safer during a crash than others.
True or false: Some airports are safer/more efficient than others.
Now for the kicker:
True or false: Some software is more secure/better designed than others.
The truth is that my wonderful Mother in Law had her computer infected by merely clicking the subject line of an email on her otherwise patched computer with antivirus and a hardware firewall on a DSL connection. What did she do that she shouldn't have?
People sometimes do stupid things, and even reasonable things in cars and get into accidents. But even so, a car that's well designed will protects its occupants better, and frequently makes the difference between injury and death. You get into an auto accident on the freeway, which would YOU rather be in: A Yugo or a Mercedes? I know which one I'D pick...
People *do* make mistakes, and they *do* things that are stupid. If using a computer requires perfect behavior in order to work, then they won't work.
It's not as simple as that. Contracts are individual. Some contracts have renewal stipulations and terms. Some don't. Some are renewable. Some aren't. You speak of these as though they are all the same - they aren't.
But honestly, if I bought a 100 year lease to a vacation property, I wouldn't give a rat's ass about the terms after 100 years... I'll be dead in any event! Enjoy la casa, senior!
The doom and gloom Internet bandwidth projections I've read assume that many of us start sharing videos and watch on-demand HD, not cached locally with our service providers, but downloaded at random. That's a bunch of crock. Our ISPs will be quite happy to cache this data locally, easing the burden on the backbone.
You mean, like newsgroups?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but come on, man! This is NOT A DIFFICULT PROBLEM. It was thoroughly solved well over a decade ago. The only reason we aren't using it more is because of legal considerations. Newsgroups solved the problem of distributing large amounts of content over slow connections and caching the data on an as-needed basis. Your "NetFS" struggles (and fails) to be anywhere near as efficient.
But if your ISP took the top 50 movies and cached them in a cheap-ass 1U newsgroup server at your neighborhood head-end equipment, the top 500 movies in 4U at your city colo, and the top 50,000 in a nice rack at their datacenter, with one superglobalworldwide archive with everything ever made, they'd have a system that would be incredibly efficient. Build each tier to failover to the one above, and you'd have incredible reliability. Even if the superglobalworldwide data center went down for an afternoon, only maybe 5% of everybody would even notice. And the superglobalworldwide datacenter might only cost a few million. Peanuts!
See, half of everybody wants the top 10 movies. Half of what's left wants something released within the last year or so. The next 20% or so gets pretty tough to cache, and the last 5% is just impossible - some artsy film from 1948 filmed in southern France.
With very little expense, your ISP could serve basically every movie ever made.
China's also opened up so that foreigners can now outright own houses or apartments, something even Mexico doesn't allow...
You're kidding, right?
I mean, it's practically a fad fashion to own a winter home in Mexi among wealthy Californians. I know several people who have them - entire neighborhoods of middle-class homes with tiled patios and year-round, clean, clear pools that are empty 90% of the time. It's downright weird, if you've ever visited one of these neighborhoods - so silent!
There may be some *legal* restriction, but whatever that is, it has little/no effect on *reality*.
People generally evaluate risk on largely emotional terms. For this reason, we frequently make gross errors in risk assessment.
1) When we think there's somebody out to get us, we evaluate that risk very highly, even when there are more immediate but "random" risks clearly at hand. For example, a "terrorist" is a bogey-man, it's somebody out to get you. But hunger has no bad guy, and neither do disease, auto accidents, and lightning.
2) We evaluate as "risky" situations where we are not in immediate control, even if they are carefully situated to protect us. For example, riding a horse is far more risky than flying, even in the most dangerous category of flying, single-engine piston planes. Yet people routinely are more concerned about the "motor stalling" in a carefully watched and maintained airplane than they are about their kids riding around without protection on a champion racing horse.
3) Because of our intense pattern-matching, our ability to relate to other people, and our social nature, we routinely underrate risks that are impersonal - the flip-side of #1 above. For example, auto accidents are seen as a "way of life" and "can't be changed" by most, but freak out when the local high-school is held up for a few hours when some teenie gets involved in a love triangle and holds a SINGLE person "hostage" with a pocket knife. Look at the dichotomy - people who don't attend school drive right by a smashed up car on the way to work, tisking as they go, but sit glued to the telly when something happens at the High School.
It's reality. Get used to it. And no, it doesn't make sense.
My buddy is a engineer who does a lot of CAD stuff, and guess what? The software he learned to use at school (Cal Poly Pomona) and now uses at work doesn't work on his Vista notebook his GF bought for him.Hahaha ooops I mean it's not funny.
But does your buddy's software work with WINE? WINE is getting good enough that even apps like IE work well with it, and it's nearing a "1.0" release, effectively a release of Windows XP-ish. I suspect that WINE may well become the "default" Windows in a decade or so. I don't believe that Microsoft can truly grow beyond the Win32 API. Here's why...
If you go inside a cave that's been at constant 55F for a thousand years and you suddenly heat it with 50 kilowatts of power from your data center the temperature will settle at 255F in a hurry.
1) We don't have any technology that will last more than a couple of hundred years. Nuclear waste lasts for millions of years. We simply can't contain it.
The only reason this is a problem is because we are generating so fricken much nuclear waste, 95% of which is usable nuclear fuel. We can reprocess this nuclear waste and recover nearly all of it, reducing the amount of waste by 95%. But the USA won't do that because there's been a ban on on reprocessing since the 1970s.
2) Forgetting point 1 for a second, WHO exactly is responsible for the waste? A corporation like Enron? Do you realise that ALL corporations are like Enron, or at least similar enough not to matter? The waste will be around LONG after the corporations that profited from the mining and power conversion have closed up shop and left the country. This means that the responsibility will then fall back onto ordinary people. We'll have to pay taxes for MILLIONS of years to maintain the containment of waste which most people never benefited from, because they weren't around then. In particular, they weren't around then to MAKE THE DECISION, so why should they be responsible?
If reprocessing were allowed, the question would not be "who is responsible" and would become "who do we allow to reprocess" the waste. Suddenly, what's now a tremendous liability becomes a veritable goldmine of nuclear fuel that could power all of today's reactors for a hundred or more years, at a strong profit margin.
It just becomes an issue of oversight...
That pretty much sums up the problems with nuclear
I agree. Writing clear, maintainable, easily understood software is an art form and should be encouraged wherever possible.
Just imagine how much better technology/software in general would be if everyone still had the mentality we used to have 10-15 years ago when we only had a few hundred k RAM and a processor without a marketing logo attached to it's name.
Wait a minute. Uh, didn't I say "clear, maintainable, easily understood"? But you want to mentally "go back" to 10-15 years ago?
You mean *BEFORE* the advent of scripting languages allowed developers to solve problems in mere hours that previously might have taken days or weeks?
Or do you mean *BEFORE* OOP made life easier with inheritance and namespaces? (and lots of methods compiled that are never used)
Or did you mean *BEFORE* the advent of the standardized compiler, where everything was written in assembler and was machine specific? (Or do you remember the days when "c" was considered a HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGE?)
Each of these is another step *away* from my goal of "clear, maintainable, easily understood" and represents the opposite of the general direction of the industry. Sorry you consider these major improvements to be BLOAT. Without these major advancements, you easily COULD run your average application in a few hundred K of memory. And the applications sucked. They didn't "integrate". They weren't Internet-capable. They were non-graphical. They were hideously expensive. They were a royal !@# to write.
But they sure were resource efficient!
Is that what you meant? Perhaps YOU should be the one leaving IT?
Why would a development system be any less likely to facilitate the spread of a worm than a production one? Other than the reduced risk of a negative data breach, what's the difference?
But furthermore, how many of those development servers contain slightly-stale copies of "real" production data?
The companies' logic is that programmer cost a lot. It's actually much cheaper, they think, to throw some money in buying more hardware to make up for the lack of optimisations in the code, than to waster the precious ( = expensive in terms of salary ) programmer's time.
I run such a company. Our flagship product requires 400 MB of disk space for install on Windows, and (if you include the X11 and XCode libraries on Mac OS) about 1.5 GB on Macintosh.
I realize that this is a fair amount of disk space. I also really don't care. 1 GB of disk space represents a net user cost of about 25 cents.
A quarter.
And the software generally runs quite well on a P3 1 Ghz system that can be readily had for $50 on the used computer marketplace, even though its written in a lazy, inefficient, interpreted scripting language.
Yes, $50.
How much time do you think I spend worrying about this? None at all. Let me assure you, my clients spend much more than a quarter to buy the use of our software! How much crying would YOU do over this?
Lead in toys is bad, but the fact that this is happening indicates how little control we have over stuff manufactured over there. Intentional? Perhaps, but if so, it's quite stupid on the part of the Chinese. They should continue to produce quality crap for rock-bottom prices so that we trust their stuff, rather than the state of near-paranoia we're in now. Their goods are scrutinized more than ever, and the rapidly falling dollar means that we are becoming more and more competitive on the open marketplace internationally.
Really, the problem here is that the United States has bought the "free trade" Kool-aide, but the Chinese haven't - and have locked their currency to ours. As long as this is the case, we're really dealing with an unleveled playing field.
Personally, I'd leave, but your situation is up to you.
Any company that would try to get these kinds of agreements from you is only interested in you in a predatory way. Either you are OK with taking it up the backside, or you need to bail. This kind of action can only really serve to generate ill-will between the company and its staff, and will cost the company far more than it would ever "save" by doing this.
Again, I'd bail - sounds like your company is beginning to eat its own young, and that spells for long term danger. At the very least, it's not an environment where YOU will be trusted, respected, and appreciated. It's up to you what these things are worth.
Broken cars stop. Broken aircraft drop. Flying cars are going to require safety standards far beyond what we are used to for ground cars.
Common misconception. Most people think of a "stall" like a car, where the motor dies. But in a plane, a "stall" has almost nothing to do with the engine, it has to do with the "angle of attack" and the airspeed, and simply means that your wings have stopped lifting the plane. Recovering from a stall is so easy that if you simply let go of the yoke, the plane will almost always right itself and recover automatically.
Most people picture the plane in an engine dying and then it sinks like a brick, like Wile E. Coyote 3 seconds after running off the edge of the cliff. But that's simply not how it is.
When a car motor dies on the freeway your car coasts to a stop. Similarly, when the motor in a plane dies, it glides downward. You have a surprising amount of options below you almost everywhere (except very mountainous areas) that are quite safe to put down a "dead" plane.
Safety note: 8 of 10 reported aircraft incidents involving power failure result in no injuries at all and that doesn't include the accidents involving power failure where no report was made. As a pilot, one of the things you train for is how to keep your head, glide with maximum efficiency (so you have the most time in the air) and safely put the plane down without engine power.
I practiced this maneuver probably 40 times until I was landing spot-on every time before I went for my private pilots' license.
And yes, I'd practically sell my grandmother to get one of these conversion planes if it actually worked...
Legally, unless you are within 5 miles of a airport with controlled airspace (generally, those with a tower) the lowest 1,200 feet above the ground is "Class G" airspace. Meaning, that there is *technically* no speed limit. Not saying I'd try to bust 300 knots at 1000' above the ground, since I have some desire for self-preservation, but AFAIK it's technically legal.
Above 10,000 feet there is no speed limit, and below 10k it's 250 knots. (about 300 MPH)
So why would I get "road rage" if I was in the sky? Or are you talking about taking off from the freeway?
In all, I see this as a largely impractical vehicle. I would have a good laugh if I saw a car with wings folded vertically going down the highway.
You are, eh, kidding... right? This (for me) would be the PERFECT business vehicle... I frequently travel on mid-range hops. Typical trip is around 200-500 miles. Just far enough that I spend *alot* of time driving, and where taking a plane (Hello, SouthWest!) along with the hotel expenses, rental car, etc. is only marginally better than driving.
So, I got my pilots license, thinking that a private plane would be better. And in many cases, it is. But the bugger is that even though flying a small plane is about 2.5-3x faster than driving (~ 2x the speed, and the trip is straight instead of following some road that rarely goes "straight" from A to B) the bugger is that any bad weather makes it pretty much a non-starter.
Additional training would make me an instrument-only capable pilot (called IFR for "Instrument Flight Rules") but even then, there are plenty of storms you just don't want to fly in, even though driving would be fine.
This car would be the best of both worlds. I could fly anytime there's an airport nearby (and there ALWAYS is) and still have a backup plan when the weather goes south.
Lets get real, I've seen plenty of "licensed" drivers, lawyers and doctors who do NOTHING like what one would expect from the magical, mystical papers called "diplomas" and "licenses".
Sorry if I don't agree even though I agree.
A license is not a guarantee of competence. It's a promise of having at least a decent chance at success. I mean, just because somebody screws up after getting a license doesn't mean that the license did no good - it just means that the state has intervened enough to have a reasonable assurance that you *could* succeed.
As a private pilot myself, I think that the requirements for being a pilot are, if anything, not severe enough. When you factor in the enormity of the sky, landing an airplane at a smaller airport is a very, VERY precise maneuver, even with a fairly inefficient spam-can like a Cessna 172. You have maybe 50 feet of vertical space that you have to be dead-on-the-money within, or you'll either go around or die trying. And you'd better know what you're doing well enough to recognize when things aren't going right and get out of there for a go-around.
Yes, it can be quite dangerous (lethal!) unless you know WTF you are doing. Yes, it's intense.
And yes, it's a hell of a lotta fun! =)
But don't think even for a minute that the license does no good. I initially was skeptical of all the information I was pumped with, but about 2/3 of the way through to getting my private, it dawned on me that this wasn't about remembering some facts for a test, it's about saving my silly neck from certain death.
Obvious to us, with our incredibly powerful pattern-matching brains. But while it's easy to write a program to look for this specific example, programming a machine to recognize this without some kind of advance programming/configuration is nothing less than AI.
It will, I'm sure, be done/possible eventually. But based on my understanding of the field, we aren't there, yet.
I see. So SETI should be SETITBRJLWD. (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence That Builds Radios Just Like We do)
Seems kinda limiting. Maybe you should be looking for a broader view of the Universe? Kinda silly when intelligent life just a few thousand miles away are incomprehensible, but you're ignoring that and looking for life billions of light-years away...
Maybe SETI should be called SETITBCTC? (Search for Extera-Terrestrial Intelligence That Builds Complex Technical Devices?
Assume a life form that bridges the gab between biology and today's technology, where the life forms are evolving themselves individually. Where does that put you? There are no devices, yet they are modding themselves like we mod 1990s Honda CRXs.
Sorry. We need to talk with dolphins first. It's stupid otherwise.
God, I wish I had mod points. I did, a day or so ago.
Kudos!
Anybody who thinks that the O/S has nothing to do with it might also think that:
1) all forms of transportation are equally safe. (EG: a motorcycle is just as safe as a passenger sedan - it isn't)
2) all forms of birth control are equally effective. (EG: A condom is just as effective as sterilization - it isn't)
3) all forms of shopping are equally inexpensive. (EG: socks at Wal-Mart cost about as much as socks at Nordstroms - they don't)
For some reason, when talking O/S's, something that's painfully obvious in most contexts is frequently challenged. I don't get it. Are they just dumb? Or are they paid to act that way?
Slashdot Mirror
BBBBBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZTTTTT!!!!
Sorry, Charlie. You got this one wrong!
True or false: Some places are more secure places to keep your money.
True or false: Some cars are safer during a crash than others.
True or false: Some airports are safer/more efficient than others.
Now for the kicker:
True or false: Some software is more secure/better designed than others.
The truth is that my wonderful Mother in Law had her computer infected by merely clicking the subject line of an email on her otherwise patched computer with antivirus and a hardware firewall on a DSL connection. What did she do that she shouldn't have?
People sometimes do stupid things, and even reasonable things in cars and get into accidents. But even so, a car that's well designed will protects its occupants better, and frequently makes the difference between injury and death. You get into an auto accident on the freeway, which would YOU rather be in: A Yugo or a Mercedes? I know which one I'D pick...
People *do* make mistakes, and they *do* things that are stupid. If using a computer requires perfect behavior in order to work, then they won't work.
It's not as simple as that. Contracts are individual. Some contracts have renewal stipulations and terms. Some don't. Some are renewable. Some aren't. You speak of these as though they are all the same - they aren't.
But honestly, if I bought a 100 year lease to a vacation property, I wouldn't give a rat's ass about the terms after 100 years... I'll be dead in any event! Enjoy la casa, senior!
Funny - as CTO of my company, I sent a link to this just the other day to all staff in our company.
Yes, we take security seriously. And yes, we have fun doing it!
The doom and gloom Internet bandwidth projections I've read assume that many of us start sharing videos and watch on-demand HD, not cached locally with our service providers, but downloaded at random. That's a bunch of crock. Our ISPs will be quite happy to cache this data locally, easing the burden on the backbone.
You mean, like newsgroups?
Sorry to burst your bubble, but come on, man! This is NOT A DIFFICULT PROBLEM. It was thoroughly solved well over a decade ago. The only reason we aren't using it more is because of legal considerations. Newsgroups solved the problem of distributing large amounts of content over slow connections and caching the data on an as-needed basis. Your "NetFS" struggles (and fails) to be anywhere near as efficient.
But if your ISP took the top 50 movies and cached them in a cheap-ass 1U newsgroup server at your neighborhood head-end equipment, the top 500 movies in 4U at your city colo, and the top 50,000 in a nice rack at their datacenter, with one superglobalworldwide archive with everything ever made, they'd have a system that would be incredibly efficient. Build each tier to failover to the one above, and you'd have incredible reliability. Even if the superglobalworldwide data center went down for an afternoon, only maybe 5% of everybody would even notice. And the superglobalworldwide datacenter might only cost a few million. Peanuts!
See, half of everybody wants the top 10 movies. Half of what's left wants something released within the last year or so. The next 20% or so gets pretty tough to cache, and the last 5% is just impossible - some artsy film from 1948 filmed in southern France.
With very little expense, your ISP could serve basically every movie ever made.
So, every 100 years a family member has to sell the house to a sibling?
Doesn't sound like much of a restriction...
i think the USA should pull the plug on them, (physically remove their intertubes from connecting to the US intertubes)...
.cn domain. Saw a dramatic drop in SPAM, too...
Already done. As a mailserver admin, I routinely block email from anything in the
China's also opened up so that foreigners can now outright own houses or apartments, something even Mexico doesn't allow...
You're kidding, right?
I mean, it's practically a fad fashion to own a winter home in Mexi among wealthy Californians. I know several people who have them - entire neighborhoods of middle-class homes with tiled patios and year-round, clean, clear pools that are empty 90% of the time. It's downright weird, if you've ever visited one of these neighborhoods - so silent!
There may be some *legal* restriction, but whatever that is, it has little/no effect on *reality*.
People generally evaluate risk on largely emotional terms. For this reason, we frequently make gross errors in risk assessment.
1) When we think there's somebody out to get us, we evaluate that risk very highly, even when there are more immediate but "random" risks clearly at hand. For example, a "terrorist" is a bogey-man, it's somebody out to get you. But hunger has no bad guy, and neither do disease, auto accidents, and lightning.
2) We evaluate as "risky" situations where we are not in immediate control, even if they are carefully situated to protect us. For example, riding a horse is far more risky than flying, even in the most dangerous category of flying, single-engine piston planes. Yet people routinely are more concerned about the "motor stalling" in a carefully watched and maintained airplane than they are about their kids riding around without protection on a champion racing horse.
3) Because of our intense pattern-matching, our ability to relate to other people, and our social nature, we routinely underrate risks that are impersonal - the flip-side of #1 above. For example, auto accidents are seen as a "way of life" and "can't be changed" by most, but freak out when the local high-school is held up for a few hours when some teenie gets involved in a love triangle and holds a SINGLE person "hostage" with a pocket knife. Look at the dichotomy - people who don't attend school drive right by a smashed up car on the way to work, tisking as they go, but sit glued to the telly when something happens at the High School.
It's reality. Get used to it. And no, it doesn't make sense.
Not that it would take much, as you can silently hijack any ssl connection with a single cracked verisign/thawte key.
Care to substantiate this?
My buddy is a engineer who does a lot of CAD stuff, and guess what? The software he learned to use at school (Cal Poly Pomona) and now uses at work doesn't work on his Vista notebook his GF bought for him. Hahaha ooops I mean it's not funny.
But does your buddy's software work with WINE? WINE is getting good enough that even apps like IE work well with it, and it's nearing a "1.0" release, effectively a release of Windows XP-ish. I suspect that WINE may well become the "default" Windows in a decade or so. I don't believe that Microsoft can truly grow beyond the Win32 API. Here's why...
If you go inside a cave that's been at constant 55F for a thousand years and you suddenly heat it with 50 kilowatts of power from your data center the temperature will settle at 255F in a hurry.
But why 255F particularly?
1) We don't have any technology that will last more than a couple of hundred years. Nuclear waste lasts for millions of years. We simply can't contain it.
The only reason this is a problem is because we are generating so fricken much nuclear waste, 95% of which is usable nuclear fuel. We can reprocess this nuclear waste and recover nearly all of it, reducing the amount of waste by 95%. But the USA won't do that because there's been a ban on on reprocessing since the 1970s.
2) Forgetting point 1 for a second, WHO exactly is responsible for the waste? A corporation like Enron? Do you realise that ALL corporations are like Enron, or at least similar enough not to matter? The waste will be around LONG after the corporations that profited from the mining and power conversion have closed up shop and left the country. This means that the responsibility will then fall back onto ordinary people. We'll have to pay taxes for MILLIONS of years to maintain the containment of waste which most people never benefited from, because they weren't around then. In particular, they weren't around then to MAKE THE DECISION, so why should they be responsible?
If reprocessing were allowed, the question would not be "who is responsible" and would become "who do we allow to reprocess" the waste. Suddenly, what's now a tremendous liability becomes a veritable goldmine of nuclear fuel that could power all of today's reactors for a hundred or more years, at a strong profit margin.
It just becomes an issue of oversight...
That pretty much sums up the problems with nuclear
Which problems are, again?
Making software is an art form.
I agree. Writing clear, maintainable, easily understood software is an art form and should be encouraged wherever possible.
Just imagine how much better technology/software in general would be if everyone still had the mentality we used to have 10-15 years ago when we only had a few hundred k RAM and a processor without a marketing logo attached to it's name.
Wait a minute. Uh, didn't I say "clear, maintainable, easily understood"? But you want to mentally "go back" to 10-15 years ago?
You mean *BEFORE* the advent of scripting languages allowed developers to solve problems in mere hours that previously might have taken days or weeks?
Or do you mean *BEFORE* OOP made life easier with inheritance and namespaces? (and lots of methods compiled that are never used)
Or did you mean *BEFORE* the advent of the standardized compiler, where everything was written in assembler and was machine specific? (Or do you remember the days when "c" was considered a HIGH LEVEL LANGUAGE?)
Each of these is another step *away* from my goal of "clear, maintainable, easily understood" and represents the opposite of the general direction of the industry. Sorry you consider these major improvements to be BLOAT. Without these major advancements, you easily COULD run your average application in a few hundred K of memory. And the applications sucked. They didn't "integrate". They weren't Internet-capable. They were non-graphical. They were hideously expensive. They were a royal !@# to write.
But they sure were resource efficient!
Is that what you meant? Perhaps YOU should be the one leaving IT?
As they were chasing the bad guy (girl?) through the 2nd Life game, the CSI lab was hacked. Choice quote:
"We're under attack! Get that firewall UP NOW!"
I mean, yes, it's CSI and nobody expects perfection, but that's representative of the way people often see things...
Why would a development system be any less likely to facilitate the spread of a worm than a production one? Other than the reduced risk of a negative data breach, what's the difference?
But furthermore, how many of those development servers contain slightly-stale copies of "real" production data?
The companies' logic is that programmer cost a lot. It's actually much cheaper, they think, to throw some money in buying more hardware to make up for the lack of optimisations in the code, than to waster the precious ( = expensive in terms of salary ) programmer's time.
I run such a company. Our flagship product requires 400 MB of disk space for install on Windows, and (if you include the X11 and XCode libraries on Mac OS) about 1.5 GB on Macintosh.
I realize that this is a fair amount of disk space. I also really don't care. 1 GB of disk space represents a net user cost of about 25 cents.
A quarter.
And the software generally runs quite well on a P3 1 Ghz system that can be readily had for $50 on the used computer marketplace, even though its written in a lazy, inefficient, interpreted scripting language.
Yes, $50.
How much time do you think I spend worrying about this? None at all. Let me assure you, my clients spend much more than a quarter to buy the use of our software! How much crying would YOU do over this?
Somehow, I think alot of manufacturing that's been moved over to China is about to be brought back home. As I indicated the other day in my post here, over-reliance on China is less of an economic issue and more one of national security.
Lead in toys is bad, but the fact that this is happening indicates how little control we have over stuff manufactured over there. Intentional? Perhaps, but if so, it's quite stupid on the part of the Chinese. They should continue to produce quality crap for rock-bottom prices so that we trust their stuff, rather than the state of near-paranoia we're in now. Their goods are scrutinized more than ever, and the rapidly falling dollar means that we are becoming more and more competitive on the open marketplace internationally.
Really, the problem here is that the United States has bought the "free trade" Kool-aide, but the Chinese haven't - and have locked their currency to ours. As long as this is the case, we're really dealing with an unleveled playing field.
Personally, I'd leave, but your situation is up to you.
Any company that would try to get these kinds of agreements from you is only interested in you in a predatory way. Either you are OK with taking it up the backside, or you need to bail. This kind of action can only really serve to generate ill-will between the company and its staff, and will cost the company far more than it would ever "save" by doing this.
Again, I'd bail - sounds like your company is beginning to eat its own young, and that spells for long term danger. At the very least, it's not an environment where YOU will be trusted, respected, and appreciated. It's up to you what these things are worth.
Broken cars stop. Broken aircraft drop. Flying cars are going to require safety standards far beyond what we are used to for ground cars.
Common misconception. Most people think of a "stall" like a car, where the motor dies. But in a plane, a "stall" has almost nothing to do with the engine, it has to do with the "angle of attack" and the airspeed, and simply means that your wings have stopped lifting the plane. Recovering from a stall is so easy that if you simply let go of the yoke, the plane will almost always right itself and recover automatically.
Most people picture the plane in an engine dying and then it sinks like a brick, like Wile E. Coyote 3 seconds after running off the edge of the cliff. But that's simply not how it is.
When a car motor dies on the freeway your car coasts to a stop. Similarly, when the motor in a plane dies, it glides downward. You have a surprising amount of options below you almost everywhere (except very mountainous areas) that are quite safe to put down a "dead" plane.
Safety note: 8 of 10 reported aircraft incidents involving power failure result in no injuries at all and that doesn't include the accidents involving power failure where no report was made. As a pilot, one of the things you train for is how to keep your head, glide with maximum efficiency (so you have the most time in the air) and safely put the plane down without engine power.
I practiced this maneuver probably 40 times until I was landing spot-on every time before I went for my private pilots' license.
And yes, I'd practically sell my grandmother to get one of these conversion planes if it actually worked...
Legally, unless you are within 5 miles of a airport with controlled airspace (generally, those with a tower) the lowest 1,200 feet above the ground is "Class G" airspace. Meaning, that there is *technically* no speed limit. Not saying I'd try to bust 300 knots at 1000' above the ground, since I have some desire for self-preservation, but AFAIK it's technically legal.
Above 10,000 feet there is no speed limit, and below 10k it's 250 knots. (about 300 MPH)
So why would I get "road rage" if I was in the sky? Or are you talking about taking off from the freeway?
In all, I see this as a largely impractical vehicle. I would have a good laugh if I saw a car with wings folded vertically going down the highway.
You are, eh, kidding... right? This (for me) would be the PERFECT business vehicle... I frequently travel on mid-range hops. Typical trip is around 200-500 miles. Just far enough that I spend *alot* of time driving, and where taking a plane (Hello, SouthWest!) along with the hotel expenses, rental car, etc. is only marginally better than driving.
So, I got my pilots license, thinking that a private plane would be better. And in many cases, it is. But the bugger is that even though flying a small plane is about 2.5-3x faster than driving (~ 2x the speed, and the trip is straight instead of following some road that rarely goes "straight" from A to B) the bugger is that any bad weather makes it pretty much a non-starter.
Additional training would make me an instrument-only capable pilot (called IFR for "Instrument Flight Rules") but even then, there are plenty of storms you just don't want to fly in, even though driving would be fine.
This car would be the best of both worlds. I could fly anytime there's an airport nearby (and there ALWAYS is) and still have a backup plan when the weather goes south.
I WANT I WANT I WANT I WANT I WANT...
Lets get real, I've seen plenty of "licensed" drivers, lawyers and doctors who do NOTHING like what one would expect from the magical, mystical papers called "diplomas" and "licenses".
Sorry if I don't agree even though I agree.
A license is not a guarantee of competence. It's a promise of having at least a decent chance at success. I mean, just because somebody screws up after getting a license doesn't mean that the license did no good - it just means that the state has intervened enough to have a reasonable assurance that you *could* succeed.
As a private pilot myself, I think that the requirements for being a pilot are, if anything, not severe enough. When you factor in the enormity of the sky, landing an airplane at a smaller airport is a very, VERY precise maneuver, even with a fairly inefficient spam-can like a Cessna 172. You have maybe 50 feet of vertical space that you have to be dead-on-the-money within, or you'll either go around or die trying. And you'd better know what you're doing well enough to recognize when things aren't going right and get out of there for a go-around.
Yes, it can be quite dangerous (lethal!) unless you know WTF you are doing. Yes, it's intense.
And yes, it's a hell of a lotta fun! =)
But don't think even for a minute that the license does no good. I initially was skeptical of all the information I was pumped with, but about 2/3 of the way through to getting my private, it dawned on me that this wasn't about remembering some facts for a test, it's about saving my silly neck from certain death.
Obvious to us, with our incredibly powerful pattern-matching brains. But while it's easy to write a program to look for this specific example, programming a machine to recognize this without some kind of advance programming/configuration is nothing less than AI.
It will, I'm sure, be done/possible eventually. But based on my understanding of the field, we aren't there, yet.
I see. So SETI should be SETITBRJLWD. (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence That Builds Radios Just Like We do)
Seems kinda limiting. Maybe you should be looking for a broader view of the Universe? Kinda silly when intelligent life just a few thousand miles away are incomprehensible, but you're ignoring that and looking for life billions of light-years away...
Maybe SETI should be called SETITBCTC? (Search for Extera-Terrestrial Intelligence That Builds Complex Technical Devices?
Assume a life form that bridges the gab between biology and today's technology, where the life forms are evolving themselves individually. Where does that put you? There are no devices, yet they are modding themselves like we mod 1990s Honda CRXs.
Sorry. We need to talk with dolphins first. It's stupid otherwise.
God, I wish I had mod points. I did, a day or so ago.
Kudos!
Anybody who thinks that the O/S has nothing to do with it might also think that:
1) all forms of transportation are equally safe. (EG: a motorcycle is just as safe as a passenger sedan - it isn't)
2) all forms of birth control are equally effective. (EG: A condom is just as effective as sterilization - it isn't)
3) all forms of shopping are equally inexpensive. (EG: socks at Wal-Mart cost about as much as socks at Nordstroms - they don't)
For some reason, when talking O/S's, something that's painfully obvious in most contexts is frequently challenged. I don't get it. Are they just dumb? Or are they paid to act that way?