Yes, I knew most of this, since I wrote avionics software for Airbus; the comments were meant to be semi-humorous.
I didn't know the ILS frequencies though; 115MHz is uncomofortably close to a lot of the clock signals generated in a PC and other electronic equipment, which probably explains why airlines are more paranoid on take-off and landing.
When you use a cell phone at 25000 feet, your phone can connect to multiple cell towers at the same time This is not a problem if you think about it; if it were handover between adjacent cells of a cellular network would not be possible.
There are problems with cellphone usage at high altitude and in aircraft. Some of them are:
a) landbased cellphone technology may not be able to handle dopper of 500+ miles per hour
b) Each cell of a ground based network is typically only 5-15miles across, handover events would occur pretty damn regularly.
c) I also believe that when you phone from 25000' you effectively have a 25000' aerial on your phone, and your signal is out of range of what is normally expected.[dunno if this is true or not]
There is an Aircraft cellular system (TFTS), which is what normal aircraft telephony uses, but the cells for these are 50-150 miles across.
Wouldn't it be easier to just add a RJ-45 jack next to the headphone jacks on all the seats?
The problem with RJ-45 sockets (or any physical connection for that matter) is that they wear, get damaged and require maintenance/ replacement constantly; especially in a location where constant insertion/ removal is envisaged. Imagine having a 747 with 300-500 such RJ45 sockets, each connected to a hub by an 8-core wire, and the potential for problems is immense. They have enough problems with the current wiring on an aircraft.
Wireless LANs on the other hand, have no parts subject to wear and abuse, only have a small number of components and the standard LRU/SRU repair procedure easy to implement.
..the network uses traffic shaping to leave enough bandwidth for the flight control computers to talk amongst themselves!
Also, firewalls are possibly a good idea, to prevent some haX0r breaking into the main flight control system.
On a more serious note, there used to be a fair amount of paranoia about using laptops on aircraft, and a recent study found that the avionics bays of older aircraft weren't protected heavily enough against RF to allow you to operate your laptop safely. (URL anyone?), so I hope that this only applies to new SAS aircraft.
Are we likely to detect alien races using optical technology? For one thing most lasers are fired down itty bitty pieces of cable, not out to space, and for another, I can hardly imagine being able to detect an alien laser pen at a distance of over 4 light years.
One argument for the unsuccessful detection of radio using aliens has been that this technoly has such a short lifespan in comparison to that of a civilisation e.g. we started using radio about 100 years ago, and we're likely to stop within 30 or so years due to optical technology supplanting it.
The question is what is the likely lifespan of laser technology in the lifespan of a civilisation? How long will it be till we discover something other than coherent light to transmit messages etc ?
How is the Chief Technologist chosen ?
Is the position subject to political bias ?
What differences are we likely to see in FCC policies as a result of the change of Government ?
I don't regard him as the arch villain, since public and private key cryptography has such a wide spectrum of uses. I also believe that RSA deserved a patent, since it was such a groundbreaking idea (even if the British Secret Service claims to have come up with it earlier). I don't like the 20 year or so duration of software related patents, or the apparent ease with which they seem to be secured due to the fact there appears to be little peer review before a software patent is granted.
You have to bear in mind that copyright is a right granted to the producers of a product to encourage distribution of ideas, and this right has taken away the right of other people the right to make copies of anything they buy.
If you buy a lamp, for example, there is nothing preventing you from making thousands of other lamps just like it provided you can do so [and you don't pretend your lamp is made by anyone but yourself]. All you have to do is sort out and buy the materials to build one. In any other field, the ability to buy an object and make a cheaper copy of it is called Competition, not Piracy, which incidentally is something involving bloodshed, which Duplication (normally) doesn't. If copyright did not exist, prices would be forced down, not up, since an author would soon be priced out of the market by his copiers. Incidentally this would create jobs, not kill them, although it is arguable whether such jobs would be so rewarding
Note that I am not denying that copyright should exist - its purpose is to ensure that authors, publishers etc receive a decent return on their investment of time effort and money, and I have no quibble with that. I do however quibble with how long that copyright lasts (up to 95 years!! well after the author has shuffled off his mortal coil).
However the dividing line is that most people on 'our' side of the fence believe that providing we have bought a legal product, we should be free to do anything we like with that product short of distributing it to anyone else. For example, if I have bought a DVD, I should be free to put the music from that DVD onto my In-Car MP3 player, or edit the movie/contents for personal use in any way I see fit on my PC.
Next thing the free software guys will be trying to tell me that I can't put a chain on my bike!
We have no problems with you putting a chain to protect your bike, it's when you put a chain on our bike we start to get Bolshy (in the non-Communist sense of the word!). We are perhaps far more right wing than you in the sense we want more individual freedom and less corporate rights, since that is where copyright normally ends up.
You also have to remember that copyright has long been used as a bludgeon to prevent new technologies and ideas; exactly the opposite of what copyright is supposed to foster. Cassette tapes had a long battle with the recording industry (which still ain't over) and DAT effectively died because, amongst other reasons, the industry didn't want a media which made perfect personal copies 'out there'. 'Just use some other way' is not the point; if the industry had their way their would be no other way. MP3 players and other non-media recorders would not exist unless Diamond had the balls to stand up to the industry.
[If you think this should be modded up, then mod the parent post up too - I think the points made in the parent post are why many people don't see our point of view]
Whoever decided not to fortify the border with Belgium was as much of a twit as Petain was.
Actually the border with Belgium was fortified, but those cunning Jerries used paratroops to drop on and bypass the fortifications (Fort Eben Emael)
Secondly the Belgian army lasted about 3 weeks, a remarkably long time considering it fought against overwhelming superiority of both numbers and equipment. IIRC, Belgium and Holland were neutral, as they were at the start of the First World War, but the Germans didn't let a little thing like that spoil a good plan.
Technically, the attack on Belgium and Netherlands was a decoy, intended (successfully) to draw the Allied forces forward, so that the main attack through the Ardennes forest to the south would meet with little opposition and encircle most of the Allied forces.
The main problems with the Allied defence was
a) the Maginot line was only very partially complete in the area of the Ardennes forest.
b) Static forward defences don't really work that well nowadays against a mobile opponent. You need to defend in depth, and be willing to trade ground for good ambush points.
c) the German forces were battle hardened and tested with recent wars and campaigns against inexperienced and largely outdated Allied forces.
Anyway fortifying borders is incredibly difficult, time consuming and expensive, something the Allies were incredibly grateful for when payback time came round in the form of D-Day. If it wasn't for the fact that the Normandy beaches were (relatively) lightly fortified, we'd probably still be trying to work out how to invade Occupied France today.
Not so clueless, it is not terribly difficult doing distributed processing. It is easy to implement a basic algorithm as follows:
a) Client registers with server
b) Server sends client section of problem to process
c) Client responds with (succes/fail) for that section in a reasonable time or server times out and reallocates section
d) if success response from client, server checks the section itself - (to avoid server being spoofed)
e) repeat until server reports success
Anyway, I'm not just a Linux user, I'm a Unix/ real-time software engineer. And I do use Windows systems [since Diablo II isn't available for Linux]:-)
..actually it looks as though the person who was researching this could have done with a bit of distributed computing a la SETI screensaver et al.
Apparently it took Dolan several years of processing the data from Hubble (1 billion data points) to find two examples of the pulse train he was looking for. If he'd knocked up a decent screensaver and distributed the processing he'd have got the answer in a couple of weeks....
From the article:
Toysmart is majority owned by Disney
Dunno if they were owned by Disney before they had problems, in which case you had already sort of registered with Disney anyway, or not, but the transaction (selling the database to another subsidiary of Disney) is a dummy transaction which keeps the federal bankrupty court happy in assigning a value to the database, whilst avoiding the need for a long expensive legal argument. This way both the bankrupty court is happy 'cos Toysmart obtained value for an asset, and Toysmart get to keep their no disclosure promise.....
OK so you submitted an article about this before one that got accepted. So what ? The other guy could obviously get the concepts and interesting ideas across to the editors better than you did.
The editorial staff may have received 20 or 30 articles like yours, but at the end of the day they have to decide on one, and it just wasn't your lucky day.
And yes, I have had articles both accepted and rejected. And I'm brave enough to not post anonymously.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I knew most of this, since I wrote avionics software for Airbus; the comments were meant to be semi-humorous.
I didn't know the ILS frequencies though; 115MHz is uncomofortably close to a lot of the clock signals generated in a PC and other electronic equipment, which probably explains why airlines are more paranoid on take-off and landing.
OK, I confess, I laughed like a drain when Kenny got flattened.
Reply to email address.
1) Join the Mile High Club and live webcast it using your laptop WebCam!
[other ideas?]
When you use a cell phone at 25000 feet, your phone can connect to multiple cell towers at the same time
This is not a problem if you think about it; if it were handover between adjacent cells of a cellular network would not be possible.
There are problems with cellphone usage at high altitude and in aircraft. Some of them are:
a) landbased cellphone technology may not be able to handle dopper of 500+ miles per hour
b) Each cell of a ground based network is typically only 5-15miles across, handover events would occur pretty damn regularly.
c) I also believe that when you phone from 25000' you effectively have a 25000' aerial on your phone, and your signal is out of range of what is normally expected.[dunno if this is true or not]
There is an Aircraft cellular system (TFTS), which is what normal aircraft telephony uses, but the cells for these are 50-150 miles across.
Wouldn't it be easier to just add a RJ-45 jack next to the headphone jacks on all the seats?
The problem with RJ-45 sockets (or any physical connection for that matter) is that they wear, get damaged and require maintenance/ replacement constantly; especially in a location where constant insertion/ removal is envisaged. Imagine having a 747 with 300-500 such RJ45 sockets, each connected to a hub by an 8-core wire, and the potential for problems is immense. They have enough problems with the current wiring on an aircraft.
Wireless LANs on the other hand, have no parts subject to wear and abuse, only have a small number of components and the standard LRU/SRU repair procedure easy to implement.
..the network uses traffic shaping to leave enough bandwidth for the flight control computers to talk amongst themselves!
Also, firewalls are possibly a good idea, to prevent some haX0r breaking into the main flight control system.
On a more serious note, there used to be a fair amount of paranoia about using laptops on aircraft, and a recent study found that the avionics bays of older aircraft weren't protected heavily enough against RF to allow you to operate your laptop safely. (URL anyone?), so I hope that this only applies to new SAS aircraft.
Yes, I was expecting this line from the moment we were told what the gerbils name was...
Patents are granted for inventions and new methods of doing things, not just because its a pretty shape; that pretty shape has to do something useful.
IIRC, however, copyright may exist on the actual design, so you may have to make your lamp look slightly different.
..why do the authors not want to put this on their mainstream systems to keep all the nasty script kiddies out ?
Sounds like they're choosing to keep a firewall full of holes just because its stable(r). However if someone breaks in, what price stability ?
Are we likely to detect alien races using optical technology? For one thing most lasers are fired down itty bitty pieces of cable, not out to space, and for another, I can hardly imagine being able to detect an alien laser pen at a distance of over 4 light years.
One argument for the unsuccessful detection of radio using aliens has been that this technoly has such a short lifespan in comparison to that of a civilisation e.g. we started using radio about 100 years ago, and we're likely to stop within 30 or so years due to optical technology supplanting it.
The question is what is the likely lifespan of laser technology in the lifespan of a civilisation? How long will it be till we discover something other than coherent light to transmit messages etc ?
How is the Chief Technologist chosen ?
Is the position subject to political bias ?
What differences are we likely to see in FCC policies as a result of the change of Government ?
I don't regard him as the arch villain, since public and private key cryptography has such a wide spectrum of uses. I also believe that RSA deserved a patent, since it was such a groundbreaking idea (even if the British Secret Service claims to have come up with it earlier). I don't like the 20 year or so duration of software related patents, or the apparent ease with which they seem to be secured due to the fact there appears to be little peer review before a software patent is granted.
You have to bear in mind that copyright is a right granted to the producers of a product to encourage distribution of ideas, and this right has taken away the right of other people the right to make copies of anything they buy.
If you buy a lamp, for example, there is nothing preventing you from making thousands of other lamps just like it provided you can do so [and you don't pretend your lamp is made by anyone but yourself]. All you have to do is sort out and buy the materials to build one. In any other field, the ability to buy an object and make a cheaper copy of it is called Competition, not Piracy, which incidentally is something involving bloodshed, which Duplication (normally) doesn't. If copyright did not exist, prices would be forced down, not up, since an author would soon be priced out of the market by his copiers. Incidentally this would create jobs, not kill them, although it is arguable whether such jobs would be so rewarding
Note that I am not denying that copyright should exist - its purpose is to ensure that authors, publishers etc receive a decent return on their investment of time effort and money, and I have no quibble with that. I do however quibble with how long that copyright lasts (up to 95 years!! well after the author has shuffled off his mortal coil).
However the dividing line is that most people on 'our' side of the fence believe that providing we have bought a legal product, we should be free to do anything we like with that product short of distributing it to anyone else. For example, if I have bought a DVD, I should be free to put the music from that DVD onto my In-Car MP3 player, or edit the movie/contents for personal use in any way I see fit on my PC.
Next thing the free software guys will be trying to tell me that I can't put a chain on my bike!
We have no problems with you putting a chain to protect your bike, it's when you put a chain on our bike we start to get Bolshy (in the non-Communist sense of the word!). We are perhaps far more right wing than you in the sense we want more individual freedom and less corporate rights, since that is where copyright normally ends up.
You also have to remember that copyright has long been used as a bludgeon to prevent new technologies and ideas; exactly the opposite of what copyright is supposed to foster. Cassette tapes had a long battle with the recording industry (which still ain't over) and DAT effectively died because, amongst other reasons, the industry didn't want a media which made perfect personal copies 'out there'. 'Just use some other way' is not the point; if the industry had their way their would be no other way. MP3 players and other non-media recorders would not exist unless Diamond had the balls to stand up to the industry.
[If you think this should be modded up, then mod the parent post up too - I think the points made in the parent post are why many people don't see our point of view]
Is the Ron Rivest mentioned in the email/ article the same as the one in the RSA (Rivest Shamir Adelman (n?) ) algorithms/ company ?
Be nice if this persuaded him and others to keep away from 'Dark Side' uses of encryption...
:-)
1) Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels
A gangster movie
2) Snatch
A gangster movie
3) Sexy Beast
A gangster movie
Errr...thats it!!
Tongue Firmly in Cheek
Whoever decided not to fortify the border with Belgium was as much of a twit as Petain was.
Actually the border with Belgium was fortified, but those cunning Jerries used paratroops to drop on and bypass the fortifications (Fort Eben Emael)
Secondly the Belgian army lasted about 3 weeks, a remarkably long time considering it fought against overwhelming superiority of both numbers and equipment. IIRC, Belgium and Holland were neutral, as they were at the start of the First World War, but the Germans didn't let a little thing like that spoil a good plan.
Technically, the attack on Belgium and Netherlands was a decoy, intended (successfully) to draw the Allied forces forward, so that the main attack through the Ardennes forest to the south would meet with little opposition and encircle most of the Allied forces.
The main problems with the Allied defence was
a) the Maginot line was only very partially complete in the area of the Ardennes forest.
b) Static forward defences don't really work that well nowadays against a mobile opponent. You need to defend in depth, and be willing to trade ground for good ambush points.
c) the German forces were battle hardened and tested with recent wars and campaigns against inexperienced and largely outdated Allied forces.
Anyway fortifying borders is incredibly difficult, time consuming and expensive, something the Allies were incredibly grateful for when payback time came round in the form of D-Day. If it wasn't for the fact that the Normandy beaches were (relatively) lightly fortified, we'd probably still be trying to work out how to invade Occupied France today.
Not so clueless, it is not terribly difficult doing distributed processing. It is easy to implement a basic algorithm as follows:
:-)
a) Client registers with server
b) Server sends client section of problem to process
c) Client responds with (succes/fail) for that section in a reasonable time or server times out and reallocates section
d) if success response from client, server checks the section itself - (to avoid server being spoofed)
e) repeat until server reports success
Anyway, I'm not just a Linux user, I'm a Unix/ real-time software engineer. And I do use Windows systems [since Diablo II isn't available for Linux]
Yes, and you can read my other comment about the artists concept here
Set your user preferences to 'Browse at +1' and you'll be amazed at how much crap disappears....
..actually I like some of the AC posts, even the silly ones, but I do wish for a little more imagination and less repetition.
..I like the Artists concept of a black hole.
Its just so.......black!!
:-)
..actually it looks as though the person who was researching this could have done with a bit of distributed computing a la SETI screensaver et al.
Apparently it took Dolan several years of processing the data from Hubble (1 billion data points) to find two examples of the pulse train he was looking for. If he'd knocked up a decent screensaver and distributed the processing he'd have got the answer in a couple of weeks....
..merely more indirect evidence....
From the article:
Toysmart is majority owned by Disney
Dunno if they were owned by Disney before they had problems, in which case you had already sort of registered with Disney anyway, or not, but the transaction (selling the database to another subsidiary of Disney) is a dummy transaction which keeps the federal bankrupty court happy in assigning a value to the database, whilst avoiding the need for a long expensive legal argument. This way both the bankrupty court is happy 'cos Toysmart obtained value for an asset, and Toysmart get to keep their no disclosure promise.....
..for two reasons
a) playing Games
b) running Office
Hopefully now KOffice is taking shape I will have no reason to run Windows for b).
Now can someone pleeeeze get Diablo I/II running on Linux so I can remove a) also ?
:-)
OK so you submitted an article about this before one that got accepted. So what ? The other guy could obviously get the concepts and interesting ideas across to the editors better than you did.
The editorial staff may have received 20 or 30 articles like yours, but at the end of the day they have to decide on one, and it just wasn't your lucky day.
And yes, I have had articles both accepted and rejected. And I'm brave enough to not post anonymously.