No, actually that's evidence that he's NOT an American. If he were an American he'd be used to expensive crap beer. (Or if he drank Sam Adams, expensive but quite decent beer.)
Another choice is "How is a country full of people that believe nonsense going to survive the 21st Century?"
What makes you think that medicine isn't going to advance sufficiently that the common (say, 20% of the population) man on the Clapham Omnibus today, reading his obituary in the horoscope (or whatever they do with horoscopes), isn't going to live into the 22nd century?
There was a "Ha ha, but serious" article I read a few years ago, which proposed that the first person to live to the age of 1000 has already been born.
Then again, it's as plausible that the last human being to die has already been born, and I'm not postulating an increased average lifespan in that idea.
He thought life came from space via viruses and evolution happened subsequently.
How did he think the viruses came about?
Strangely, most people who actually think about these things, are of the opinion that virii are relatively derived parasites, descended from more complex forms of life which learned how to chop unnecessary parts of their metabolism out, for a leaner, meaner reproducing machine.
Hoyle was a damned good example of why physicists should be bloody careful about making pronouncements about biology.
Why invent beard-chewing squirrels? Women have been pulling their private and semi-public hairs our by the roots for decades, so what is there to stop a man pulling his own beard out, one hair at a time?
Why do companies like this set themselves up in the US. Set up in a country which doesn't have such stupid laws, then when the "cease and desist" letters arrive, wipe them in shit and send them back.
Hey, wind back a bit there. FTFS, I see that the geologists were doing the right thing there. They were saying "this is dangerous ; this is not a safe place to live".
People chose to ignore them. That's not incompetent geology. That's incompetent town planners (maybe), corruption (between developers and town planners), and also incompetence on the behalf of the home owners who didn't do their homework before buying.
I am a geologist. I routinely get asked by people "is this area safe from flooding?", "is the ground stable in this area?" (not that building is my actual professional bag). And I give them my advice. And then they ignore me.
That doesn't make me incompetent : that makes them stupid.
We have a saying in Britain : you don't buy a dog and then bark for yourself. Unfortunately, people do.
I used to do consulting for Xerox, it was fairly typical for hospitals to depreciate hardware (such as beds, autoclaves, photocopiers) over 20 years.
One of my friends works in infrastructure maintenance. His typical equipment lifetime is expected to have a mean lifetime of about 50 years, otherwise they get very, very pissed off.
im sorry but it seems that when i quoted you as parent i must have done something wrong
[SHRUG]
It sounds as if you got some previous supervisors who had useless used-asswipe degrees. Were they, by any chance, MBAs?
I'm fortunate in that I can generally ignore the MBAs that we do have at work. They know that I can do my job far better than they can, and that they'll severely struggle to replace me. So they keep out of my way, except when declining my expenses claims.
Outside the WOMBAT (Waste Of Money Brains And Time) that comprises the office, the people that we need in the field have a good understanding of their degree field, plus a good understanding of physics, of chemistry, of electronics and signal processing, of computing, plus the ability to think on their feet and communicate the results of these skills in real time to engineers and mechanics who themselves have little respect for wankers with MBAs. (We accept an 80% drop out rate. Good people are hard to find.)
I'm pretty dubious about the utility of "humanities" degrees in general, but having had very little to do with people who admit to holding such degrees, I don't know that the majority of such people are useless wank-stains. MBAs, however, do impinge upon my life often enough to have removed most doubt. I remain open to the concept that there is an MBA out there who isn't useless, but the odds are against finding such. Science degrees on the other hand, generally mean that someone has to have at least a nodding acquaintance with reality (a degree in cosmology being a mild exception - but even cosmologists need to know what reality is, in order to avoid it).
Sounds like you did the right thing getting out of that company. The arrival of MBAs in positions of power is a bad sign. They're afraid of competent people, so they recruit more useless wankers and drive away the competent, until they've dragged the company down to their level. I view the impending retirement of the engineers and geologists who set up my employer with gloom, as there is a tier of MBA material looming in the future. Which would be about the only thing I can envisage that would force me out to run my own company.
On the other hand... when I've used satellite phones from remote locations (Siberia, the Indian Ocean coast near the Tanzania-Mozambique border, Scottish Highlands) having the call drop out on me after a couple of minutes, and taking 4 or 5 attempts to get a connection... they were normal parts of the experience.
It is possible - and a part of the design of the Iridium constellation - to enhance coverage in one area over another. For starters, "polar" orbits don't necessarily go over the pole (I think "polar" is any orbit with a ground trace that goes north of 60 degrees or so) ; so why would you put your main assets where relatively few of your customers are? Most people, and most ships, are not in the Arctic, or in the middle of the ocean. There are possibly as many ships in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean (~10% of the Earth's surface) as in the whole of the Pacific (50% of the surface). So where do you concentrate your high-bandwidth resources?
The experience that you get from an Iridium phone (the ones I've seen are comparable to an early 1990's mobile phone - they need chunky batteries for a lot of transmission power!) in continental North America is not going to be typical or average.
Surely if voice is 'easy', then an at-least-56k-dial-up-speed Internet link should be no problem,
In Siberia, using Iridium rack-mounted units, we'd count ourselves lucky to get 9k6. And no, we didn't use it for an "internet link" It was strictly for dialling into a mail server with an offline reader. At (IIRC) $7/ minute, you did not spend one second longer than necessary on that link. Part of the daily mail package to the Boss was a second-by-second justification for the previous day's Iridium usage, and if I wanted to use the link (as a sub-contractor to the company with the Iridium), I had to sign a printed receipt for the line usage every time I needed to call our (mutual) Boss.
It was easy to run up a $200 bill on the phone in one day. We didn't bitch about the associated paperwork. And woe betide the person who received a personal email on the work's account with a megabyte photo attached to it. I'd send photos of rock specimens etc - part of my job - but you choose them *very* carefully.
We could, I suppose, have got a land line run to the site. It was 85km to the nearest phone exchange, which served about 30 houses and a pipeline pumping station, and the line would have cost... tens of thousands of dollars to build, and possibly lives to maintain in the winter (it hit -50degC for weeks during the rig up of that camp). And we'd have been lucky to get 2k4 over a line like that.
Most people don't understand the meaning of "remote location". A couple of jobs ago we had a guy break a leg quite badly. It took 13 hours to get him to a hospital, using an air ambulance. We don't rush so much over equipment.
Well, if your lost item is sitting on an unobstructed seabed abyssal plain, with a direct line of sight between transmitter and receiver, then you may have just tens of miles.
But... the search areas include the "90-East ridge", an undersea mountain range with foot hills (and "foot canyons") stretching a thousand or so kilometres to either side. So you can't be sure of a direct line of sight. Every reflection is going to drop your signal power by a factor of (optimistically) 50%, so it'll reduce your detection range by 30-odd % (1-sq.rt2)
The seabed is 3 to 6km below surface. That's going to reduce the detection radius of the surface vessels, but only by a small amount.
There are combinations of temperature and pressure of the water which can result in bounded reflection "corridors" in depth which can conduct a part of the signal and channel it for considerable distances. Which could be tens of kilometres, or if you're listening to whale farts, hundreds or thousands of kilometres.
There is a reason that it took several years to find the plane that disappeared from Brazil to France a few years ago - it's not an easy task.
I've spent the last couple of months working on a vessel in 3km of water ; we dropped an 80-ton SWL shackle from one of the cranes while an ROV was on bottom. We still haven't found it, and have been looking for weeks (when not using the ROV for it's routine operations at depth). Finding things in the depths is not easy.
I think the value of a bachelors degree is that it's in fact hard to get and requires investment in time and money.
A large part of the point of a degree - particularly a batchelors - is that it requires you to think, and to work outside the area that you're comfortable with. If you're looking for a qualification that only requires time and money, then you are looking at something more akin to an apprenticeship or a work placement. Which the OP seems to have done already, with his years of successful employment in the field.
If he's just looking for something to puff up his CV and justify a higher ticket price... then one avenue that he could consider is volunteer teaching in CS at $LocalCommunityCollege$. (Or, as my father has done since I was a teenager, at the workers Education Association. But if the OP is in America, that would probably get him a holiday in Guantanamo or something equally desirable.)
That sort of thing looks great on a CV ; it speaks highly of one's communication skills ; it's a sign of a well-rounded and grounded personality, rather than a spotty-faced youth who'll leave the project half-way through for a higher-ticket job. And it only costs the investment of time and money (at least, as an opportunity cost).
Of course, there's always the possibility that it'll expose areas where the OP's practical experience in programming doesn't give him the theoretical background to carry the teaching load. Which itself would be useful knowledge to the OP, allowing him to target his learning more closely.
Gentlemen! We have found the state sponsor responsible for the terrorist attack on MH370. We start bombing in five minutes.
That sounds like a good reason to get out of Seattle!
(Seattle is the capitol city of Washington state, isn't it? Not my country, nor my continent. And I can't even remember when I last noticed that I was flying on a Boeing.)
The only value of a lunar base would be as an intermediate port for assembling large ships for longer journeys
So, no use at all then.
If you want to build a (marine) ship for a long journey, you don't normally build it so that you have to lift it over several miles of busy roads to get it to the sea. Nor do you normally build it where you then need to cut it into pieces and DHL it to the assembly yard. You build it where it can sail out of it's building dock on the engines that it's going to use for the rest of it's life.
A ship for deep space transport, you build in deep space, not at the bottom of a gravitational hole, like on the Moon. (Yes, the Moon is a shallower gravitational hole than the Earth. But it's still a hole of 2.4km/s depth of escape speed, which you don't need to go down into if you can do your building in Lunar orbit and only 1.4km into the Earth's hole of escape speed.)
That said, you might have a basis for building a Mars lander/ take off unit on the Moon. Then you can test if it works by flying it on auto pilot before you commit a crew to it. Meanwhile, your transit vessel (you know - the one with the elbow room and radiation shielding) which you've built in space is proving it's reliability by shunting material from Earth-Moon orbit to Mars orbit. Lose a load of equipment to a hardware failure and you'll sing "Oh Wailey, wailey!" ; lose a crew of areonauts to an under-tested vehicle and you've got a much bigger problem.
Truly fascinates me how atheists assume they are the authority on Scripture.
Speaking as an atheist, much used to kicking monotheist god-squaddies in the mental nuts (*), I don't claim to be the authority on scripture. I just claim to be no less an authority on scripture than you are, and one who doesn't blind myself to it's wickedenesses, contradictions and stupidities.
(*) Don't worry ; I use good industrial boots with a protective steel toecap. So I don't hurt myself, or get too much contamination from the contact. Just being reassuring.
I want to enter the sequence of keys I press to get money without having to follow the rules on the screen that I have seen hundreds of times before.
You are free to want what you want. However, the bank is free to sell your eye-ball seconds to whomever it wants.
Feel free to change banks if you don't like this. If you don't like the terms and conditions of the new bank's service, feel free to not be able to cash your pay cheque or pay your mortgage due to not having a bank account. Or, you could try lubrication? But you're going to get fucked nonetheless.
An Iridium phone will set you back about a thousand dollars. Why should an airline company should care about a mere thousand dollars per aircraft?
(1) consumer grade Iridium phones are not rated for airline use. You're not talking about something in the pocket of the pilot, you're talking about a device that's a fixed installation on the aeroplane. Just the process of puncturing the skin to run the antenna through is going to set you back much more than a thousand of your currency of choice.
I suppose you could try to use a hand-held phone. Enjoy opening the window to get out of the plane's Faraday cage.
Then add on the call charges. Do you design your system around call initiation, call expected, or call terminated? i.e., when an event occurs, do you initiate a call (hopefully before the plane hits the ground) ; or do you make a call every 15 minutes (for example) to say "reached flight plan step X" (this is the system that my normal transport - UK marine rated helicopters - uses ; a call every 10 minutes), and if your plane drops out of the sky, then your last position and status update constrains your location ; or do you have a call going continually, with either data transmitting, or "watchdog" messages being sent (apparently what the engines were using on the missing plane). These have different levels of charges which will dwarf the purchase price of the hardware (Iridium is, of course, a service ; it is the nature of services to demand a continual income stream).
Are you Slashdotting at sea? How long does it take to load a page?
Yes ; it varies from a few seconds to a few hours. I essentially couldn't get through yesterday.
We have a 4MBPS satellite link, with 2MBPS assigned to equipment messages (so town can look at what we're doing and not understand it), 1MBPS assigned to 14 phone lines, and 1MBPS to be shared between 50~60 people on duty (doing email, and other work) and another 100 off-duty (Including Slashdotting ; incidentally, being on 24x7x51 cover, I don't bother about dividing my time between duty and leisure). Including all smart phones. The connection goes down every couple of hours on a good day - requiring a network tech on board, at around $2000/ day costs
We could put in another satellite dish and double the bandwidth. The dish and router would cost a few tens of thousand ; building a pedestal for it another 30-40 thousand dollars (plus 10 thousand accommodation costs for the welders and electrical technicians - or 5 million lost duty time if we went into harbour for a couple of days to do it). Then we'd have to get the airport re-certified, since the new satellite dish would, of necessity, be within the pilots sight lines. Rather like fitting an Iridium to an aeroplane in fact - it's not going to be cheap.
GPL Sounds reasonable. In order to receive organs from other donors, you must also consent to be a donor.
That would be gamed.
If such a system is going to have a reasonable chance of working, then the system would need to be more on the form "if you need a transplant AND you were on the database as a registered organ donor MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, then [go onto other steps in arranging an organ transplant, like locating a donor]"
In short, if you don't volunteer your organs, you don't get to benefit from other people who volunteer their organs.
When you speak of scientific mavericks, you might look directly at Improbable Research's annual Ig Nobel awards which recognize the arguably leading edge of maverick scientific work
If you're going to make that argument, then you've plainly never spent more than a few femtoseconds reading IR's documents. They're all about the strangenesses of normal science - in their own words, research that first makes you laugh then makes you think.
They're not about "scientific mavericks", whatever they are,
You'll note that there's at least one holder of both a Nobel and an Ignobel Prize. He didn't get either for being a maverick, but for pursuing interesting research avenues.
This is in the UK, maybe Fluke kit is just less common here
(UK too here.) I wouldn't say that Fluke gear is exactly common, but it's nothing unusual to me. It wasn't something that I'd see 20 years ago, but they've definitely become more common over the last few decades. They're quality kit - you don't need to buy a new one every few years.
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually that's evidence that he's NOT an American. If he were an American he'd be used to expensive crap beer. (Or if he drank Sam Adams, expensive but quite decent beer.)
What makes you think that medicine isn't going to advance sufficiently that the common (say, 20% of the population) man on the Clapham Omnibus today, reading his obituary in the horoscope (or whatever they do with horoscopes), isn't going to live into the 22nd century?
There was a "Ha ha, but serious" article I read a few years ago, which proposed that the first person to live to the age of 1000 has already been born.
Then again, it's as plausible that the last human being to die has already been born, and I'm not postulating an increased average lifespan in that idea.
Strangely, most people who actually think about these things, are of the opinion that virii are relatively derived parasites, descended from more complex forms of life which learned how to chop unnecessary parts of their metabolism out, for a leaner, meaner reproducing machine.
Hoyle was a damned good example of why physicists should be bloody careful about making pronouncements about biology.
Why invent beard-chewing squirrels? Women have been pulling their private and semi-public hairs our by the roots for decades, so what is there to stop a man pulling his own beard out, one hair at a time?
For everything else, they've got "goddidit"
Why do companies like this set themselves up in the US. Set up in a country which doesn't have such stupid laws, then when the "cease and desist" letters arrive, wipe them in shit and send them back.
Hey, wind back a bit there. FTFS, I see that the geologists were doing the right thing there. They were saying "this is dangerous ; this is not a safe place to live".
People chose to ignore them. That's not incompetent geology. That's incompetent town planners (maybe), corruption (between developers and town planners), and also incompetence on the behalf of the home owners who didn't do their homework before buying.
I am a geologist. I routinely get asked by people "is this area safe from flooding?", "is the ground stable in this area?" (not that building is my actual professional bag). And I give them my advice. And then they ignore me.
That doesn't make me incompetent : that makes them stupid.
We have a saying in Britain : you don't buy a dog and then bark for yourself. Unfortunately, people do.
One of my friends works in infrastructure maintenance. His typical equipment lifetime is expected to have a mean lifetime of about 50 years, otherwise they get very, very pissed off.
It's not very computerised equipment though.
[SHRUG]
It sounds as if you got some previous supervisors who had useless used-asswipe degrees. Were they, by any chance, MBAs?
I'm fortunate in that I can generally ignore the MBAs that we do have at work. They know that I can do my job far better than they can, and that they'll severely struggle to replace me. So they keep out of my way, except when declining my expenses claims.
Outside the WOMBAT (Waste Of Money Brains And Time) that comprises the office, the people that we need in the field have a good understanding of their degree field, plus a good understanding of physics, of chemistry, of electronics and signal processing, of computing, plus the ability to think on their feet and communicate the results of these skills in real time to engineers and mechanics who themselves have little respect for wankers with MBAs. (We accept an 80% drop out rate. Good people are hard to find.)
I'm pretty dubious about the utility of "humanities" degrees in general, but having had very little to do with people who admit to holding such degrees, I don't know that the majority of such people are useless wank-stains. MBAs, however, do impinge upon my life often enough to have removed most doubt. I remain open to the concept that there is an MBA out there who isn't useless, but the odds are against finding such. Science degrees on the other hand, generally mean that someone has to have at least a nodding acquaintance with reality (a degree in cosmology being a mild exception - but even cosmologists need to know what reality is, in order to avoid it).
Sounds like you did the right thing getting out of that company. The arrival of MBAs in positions of power is a bad sign. They're afraid of competent people, so they recruit more useless wankers and drive away the competent, until they've dragged the company down to their level. I view the impending retirement of the engineers and geologists who set up my employer with gloom, as there is a tier of MBA material looming in the future. Which would be about the only thing I can envisage that would force me out to run my own company.
On the other hand ... when I've used satellite phones from remote locations (Siberia, the Indian Ocean coast near the Tanzania-Mozambique border, Scottish Highlands) having the call drop out on me after a couple of minutes, and taking 4 or 5 attempts to get a connection ... they were normal parts of the experience.
It is possible - and a part of the design of the Iridium constellation - to enhance coverage in one area over another. For starters, "polar" orbits don't necessarily go over the pole (I think "polar" is any orbit with a ground trace that goes north of 60 degrees or so) ; so why would you put your main assets where relatively few of your customers are? Most people, and most ships, are not in the Arctic, or in the middle of the ocean. There are possibly as many ships in the North Atlantic and Mediterranean (~10% of the Earth's surface) as in the whole of the Pacific (50% of the surface). So where do you concentrate your high-bandwidth resources?
The experience that you get from an Iridium phone (the ones I've seen are comparable to an early 1990's mobile phone - they need chunky batteries for a lot of transmission power!) in continental North America is not going to be typical or average.
In Siberia, using Iridium rack-mounted units, we'd count ourselves lucky to get 9k6. And no, we didn't use it for an "internet link" It was strictly for dialling into a mail server with an offline reader. At (IIRC) $7/ minute, you did not spend one second longer than necessary on that link. Part of the daily mail package to the Boss was a second-by-second justification for the previous day's Iridium usage, and if I wanted to use the link (as a sub-contractor to the company with the Iridium), I had to sign a printed receipt for the line usage every time I needed to call our (mutual) Boss.
It was easy to run up a $200 bill on the phone in one day. We didn't bitch about the associated paperwork. And woe betide the person who received a personal email on the work's account with a megabyte photo attached to it. I'd send photos of rock specimens etc - part of my job - but you choose them *very* carefully.
We could, I suppose, have got a land line run to the site. It was 85km to the nearest phone exchange, which served about 30 houses and a pipeline pumping station, and the line would have cost ... tens of thousands of dollars to build, and possibly lives to maintain in the winter (it hit -50degC for weeks during the rig up of that camp). And we'd have been lucky to get 2k4 over a line like that.
Most people don't understand the meaning of "remote location". A couple of jobs ago we had a guy break a leg quite badly. It took 13 hours to get him to a hospital, using an air ambulance. We don't rush so much over equipment.
But ... the search areas include the "90-East ridge", an undersea mountain range with foot hills (and "foot canyons") stretching a thousand or so kilometres to either side. So you can't be sure of a direct line of sight. Every reflection is going to drop your signal power by a factor of (optimistically) 50%, so it'll reduce your detection range by 30-odd % (1-sq.rt2)
The seabed is 3 to 6km below surface. That's going to reduce the detection radius of the surface vessels, but only by a small amount.
There are combinations of temperature and pressure of the water which can result in bounded reflection "corridors" in depth which can conduct a part of the signal and channel it for considerable distances. Which could be tens of kilometres, or if you're listening to whale farts, hundreds or thousands of kilometres.
There is a reason that it took several years to find the plane that disappeared from Brazil to France a few years ago - it's not an easy task.
I've spent the last couple of months working on a vessel in 3km of water ; we dropped an 80-ton SWL shackle from one of the cranes while an ROV was on bottom. We still haven't found it, and have been looking for weeks (when not using the ROV for it's routine operations at depth). Finding things in the depths is not easy.
This is a very old argument.
You're wrong ; amoreson is right. Live with it.
A large part of the point of a degree - particularly a batchelors - is that it requires you to think, and to work outside the area that you're comfortable with. If you're looking for a qualification that only requires time and money, then you are looking at something more akin to an apprenticeship or a work placement. Which the OP seems to have done already, with his years of successful employment in the field.
If he's just looking for something to puff up his CV and justify a higher ticket price ... then one avenue that he could consider is volunteer teaching in CS at $LocalCommunityCollege$. (Or, as my father has done since I was a teenager, at the workers Education Association. But if the OP is in America, that would probably get him a holiday in Guantanamo or something equally desirable.)
That sort of thing looks great on a CV ; it speaks highly of one's communication skills ; it's a sign of a well-rounded and grounded personality, rather than a spotty-faced youth who'll leave the project half-way through for a higher-ticket job. And it only costs the investment of time and money (at least, as an opportunity cost).
Of course, there's always the possibility that it'll expose areas where the OP's practical experience in programming doesn't give him the theoretical background to carry the teaching load. Which itself would be useful knowledge to the OP, allowing him to target his learning more closely.
Well, that's golf struck off the list of sports for when I retire. If it's true. Which I doubt. And enforceable. Which it's not.
Then why were they arrested, tell me that. Citizen? ...?
Citizen, named
I'm waiting.
I'm still waiting.
OK ; resisting arrest. Taze him and get him down to the station.
Successful criminals who do not want competition in their continuing criminal careers.
That sounds like a good reason to get out of Seattle!
(Seattle is the capitol city of Washington state, isn't it? Not my country, nor my continent. And I can't even remember when I last noticed that I was flying on a Boeing.)
So, no use at all then.
If you want to build a (marine) ship for a long journey, you don't normally build it so that you have to lift it over several miles of busy roads to get it to the sea. Nor do you normally build it where you then need to cut it into pieces and DHL it to the assembly yard. You build it where it can sail out of it's building dock on the engines that it's going to use for the rest of it's life.
A ship for deep space transport, you build in deep space, not at the bottom of a gravitational hole, like on the Moon. (Yes, the Moon is a shallower gravitational hole than the Earth. But it's still a hole of 2.4km/s depth of escape speed, which you don't need to go down into if you can do your building in Lunar orbit and only 1.4km into the Earth's hole of escape speed.)
That said, you might have a basis for building a Mars lander/ take off unit on the Moon. Then you can test if it works by flying it on auto pilot before you commit a crew to it. Meanwhile, your transit vessel (you know - the one with the elbow room and radiation shielding) which you've built in space is proving it's reliability by shunting material from Earth-Moon orbit to Mars orbit. Lose a load of equipment to a hardware failure and you'll sing "Oh Wailey, wailey!" ; lose a crew of areonauts to an under-tested vehicle and you've got a much bigger problem.
Speaking as an atheist, much used to kicking monotheist god-squaddies in the mental nuts (*), I don't claim to be the authority on scripture. I just claim to be no less an authority on scripture than you are, and one who doesn't blind myself to it's wickedenesses, contradictions and stupidities.
(*) Don't worry ; I use good industrial boots with a protective steel toecap. So I don't hurt myself, or get too much contamination from the contact. Just being reassuring.
You are free to want what you want. However, the bank is free to sell your eye-ball seconds to whomever it wants.
Feel free to change banks if you don't like this. If you don't like the terms and conditions of the new bank's service, feel free to not be able to cash your pay cheque or pay your mortgage due to not having a bank account. Or, you could try lubrication? But you're going to get fucked nonetheless.
(1) consumer grade Iridium phones are not rated for airline use. You're not talking about something in the pocket of the pilot, you're talking about a device that's a fixed installation on the aeroplane. Just the process of puncturing the skin to run the antenna through is going to set you back much more than a thousand of your currency of choice.
I suppose you could try to use a hand-held phone. Enjoy opening the window to get out of the plane's Faraday cage.
Then add on the call charges. Do you design your system around call initiation, call expected, or call terminated? i.e., when an event occurs, do you initiate a call (hopefully before the plane hits the ground) ; or do you make a call every 15 minutes (for example) to say "reached flight plan step X" (this is the system that my normal transport - UK marine rated helicopters - uses ; a call every 10 minutes), and if your plane drops out of the sky, then your last position and status update constrains your location ; or do you have a call going continually, with either data transmitting, or "watchdog" messages being sent (apparently what the engines were using on the missing plane). These have different levels of charges which will dwarf the purchase price of the hardware (Iridium is, of course, a service ; it is the nature of services to demand a continual income stream).
Yes ; it varies from a few seconds to a few hours. I essentially couldn't get through yesterday.
We have a 4MBPS satellite link, with 2MBPS assigned to equipment messages (so town can look at what we're doing and not understand it), 1MBPS assigned to 14 phone lines, and 1MBPS to be shared between 50~60 people on duty (doing email, and other work) and another 100 off-duty (Including Slashdotting ; incidentally, being on 24x7x51 cover, I don't bother about dividing my time between duty and leisure). Including all smart phones. The connection goes down every couple of hours on a good day - requiring a network tech on board, at around $2000/ day costs
We could put in another satellite dish and double the bandwidth. The dish and router would cost a few tens of thousand ; building a pedestal for it another 30-40 thousand dollars (plus 10 thousand accommodation costs for the welders and electrical technicians - or 5 million lost duty time if we went into harbour for a couple of days to do it). Then we'd have to get the airport re-certified, since the new satellite dish would, of necessity, be within the pilots sight lines. Rather like fitting an Iridium to an aeroplane in fact - it's not going to be cheap.
That would be gamed.
If such a system is going to have a reasonable chance of working, then the system would need to be more on the form "if you need a transplant AND you were on the database as a registered organ donor MORE THAN A YEAR AGO, then [go onto other steps in arranging an organ transplant, like locating a donor]"
In short, if you don't volunteer your organs, you don't get to benefit from other people who volunteer their organs.
It's either that, or assumed consent.
If you're going to make that argument, then you've plainly never spent more than a few femtoseconds reading IR's documents. They're all about the strangenesses of normal science - in their own words, research that first makes you laugh then makes you think.
They're not about "scientific mavericks", whatever they are,
You'll note that there's at least one holder of both a Nobel and an Ignobel Prize. He didn't get either for being a maverick, but for pursuing interesting research avenues.
(UK too here.) I wouldn't say that Fluke gear is exactly common, but it's nothing unusual to me. It wasn't something that I'd see 20 years ago, but they've definitely become more common over the last few decades. They're quality kit - you don't need to buy a new one every few years.
But colour, schmolour.
Oh the joy of hearing more Americans planning on fighting another world war in Europe.