I thought it was an interesting retelling, but every few seconds my mind was switching back and forth between "I'm watching a cartoon" and "I'm watching actors". It was too close to the human/non-human line for me, and I found it vaguely disturbing. In the end, it made it a far less enjoyable experience than if they had just gone with cartoon characters.
I think Beowulf nailed the deepest part of the "uncanny valley" almost perfectly.
True. A lot of it depends on how excited the developers can get their prospective customers without a demo. On a sequel to an already successful franchise (a few examples from over the years are Unreal, Myst, Civilization, Half Life, MOH, Descent, some of the EA Sports games), you're almost guaranteed some sales as long as you can get a working copy into the hands of a few respected reviewers before release date. And sometimes you don't even need that.
With a totally new franchise, or a major change to an existing one (Myst3D), you really need a demo out there to get people trying it. With a new franchise usually comes a new engine, new controls, a new look, new types of gameplay, etc. There's nothing like getting your fingers on a controller to see if the game is "right" for you. And there are a lot of people who won't drop $60 on a game without knowing how it feels. I think with a new franchise you'll get more sales from the demo than you'll lose.
The nice thing about the Humble Bundle is that you can buy it for some really low amount then try the games out. If you think they are worth it, you can buy it again for a more reasonable price. If you don't, you delete it and you're out a buck or two. And, let's face it, paying $8 and getting both bundles makes it pretty likely you'll enjoy at least one of the games for a few hours.
But, yeah, I miss demos. Especially of games that are asking me to drop $60 or more. For that, I want a very well-crafted game that will give me at least a few weeks of quality play. But I've gone through a lot of demos where the demo represented too much of the effort that went into the game. Demo is Level One, and it's awesome, but the developers gave up after that and the other levels blow steaming monkey chunks, are incomplete, etc.
True, but I think you'd want to design the user interface to take somewhat more subtle cues than the doctor jumping on the patient and dancing the funky chicken. Like, for example, he raises one hand a few inches over the surgical area. Tilting the hand pans the image around, clenched fist zooms in, outstretched fingers zoom out. Something that doesn't involve painting the walls with O-Negative.
No, it states that we are where we are. It doesn't imply anything. We did what we did, and we are where we are.
I don't know about you, but my time machine is in the shop, so changing the state of things requires moving forward from where we currently are. Not where we might be had the infrastructure somehow developed in a different manner.
Right now, the only practical wireline alternative is the poles we've got, because no one is going to be able to plant new poles without frightening eminent domain powers.
Wireless has a similar problem in terms of getting towers in, and the government-enforced monopoly on the frequencies available.
They haven't allowed it, they've encouraged it. The government put up the poles using eminent domain. Because no one wanted the government to own the wires, but someone had to spend the bucketloads of money necessary to run all those wires, the government sponsored a single company to run all the wiring. The government offered part of the costs necessary to install the wires, and a monopoly on the use of those wires.
If you want a free market, the government has to buy those wires back from the company that built them, and allow everyone to access the wires freely at the same cost, and they also have to allow anyone to hang whatever wires they want to on Government poles at a reasonable cost so someone who thinks they can do it better than copper has the ability to do so.
And any reimbursement of the cost of the lines to the private company that installed them is going to be nailed by the Democrats as "corporate welfare" even though the resulting free market would give the consumer exactly the freedoms they want - find a plan that fits your needs and buy the thing. But the Democrats like regulation too much, and that'll never ever fly.
And any concept that includes the government owning the poles outright is going to be nailed by the Republicans as "government monopoly" even though the resulting free market is exactly what they claim they want. As opposed to an unregulated monopoly, which is what "free market" seems to be a short cut for now and what they seem to really want.
Great. Then the government needs to open up the rights-of-way so anyone who wants to can hang wires on any pole they want to.
The problem with freeing ISPs from regulation is that they are a natural monopoly. It takes an assload of money to run wires to a lot of houses. It also takes a lot of power in the form of eminent domain to access all the land necessary to run those wires. The government only got the wires to your house by using eminent domain and subsidizing someone to run the wires there, and granting them a monopoly to use those wires and a guarantee that no one else can run wires that compete with theirs. But the power and communications infrastructure was considered a "greater good".
If you want to be free of regulation, you need to be free of monopoly/oligopoly so the free market can take its place. We're not anywhere close to that.
And that's fine, there's nothing in "Network Neutrality" that prevents a provider from capping your bandwidth and/or charging you for extremely heavy Internet use. That's fair, and is as it should be. Though I'd say it's equally fair that providers should disclose VERY clearly if their plans have some form of monthly cap, and what the costs and consequences are if you want more bandwidth than your cap.
The problem is that providers are choosing which services you can access, not how much bandwidth you can gobble down. So Netflix might reach an agreement with Comcast that they get "premium" bandwidth, as long as Comcast agrees to throttle traffic from all other movie sites. Or Comcast decides that, since they have their own digital phone service, that the latency to Vonage's servers should be increased and/or all traffic to and from Vonage should start suffering severe packet loss (*).
If I'm paying for 250GB a month of bandwidth (my current Comcast cap), then I should be able to choose for myself what I use my 250GB for.
That's great, where you have a competitor. That's the problem with a free market, it really doesn't exist in the case of a natural monopoly like power (or at least power transmission in deregulated markets), wireline phone, cable TV, natural gas, or sewer. And in many markets, wireline Internet means dealing with a monopoly (wireless can't compete - it's too expensive and the caps are too low), or a oligopoly where there may be one or two choices.
The government grants them a monopoly mandate because that's the only practical way to run the wires to every house. The government sponsored putting up a lot of those poles and running a lot of those wires, used government powers of eminent domain to get the land to run them on, and granted a monopoly to someone in return for their portion of building and maintaining them.
If you want to talk about "free market" economics, you have to have a free market for it to operate in.
If the companies want complete freedom from regulation, then the answer is really simple - the government should take over the wires and poles and let everyone use them at a fixed rate (per customer or per gigabyte, whatever works best) that covers maintenance to the infrastructure, then the free market can decide who can provide the best plan to each consumer.
As long as a single company or a small oligopoly are the only ones who can use the wires and the poles, government regulation must take the place of the competitive market.
That does raise an interesting point. Will everyone be choosing their own car noises in the future?
Great, so now you pick a "cartone" that's the same as my cell's ringtone and I walk out in front of you because I'm distracted by what I think is my phone ringing when it's actually your electric car trying to let me know I'm about to become road paste.
But isn't there a difference between someone seeing what you do, and someone seeing what you do, capturing it digitally, and distributing it to everyone else in the world who didn't see it at the time that it happened?
Sure there is. But I'm seeing more and more people carrying cameras all the time, quite often built into their cellphones, and taking a lot of photographs and sharing them online. The privacy violation you upload might not be the intended subject of your photograph.
Just to take a quick stab at some of the issues you bring up, I'd suggest that, morally (legally is a whole other matter), it should probably be considered okay to take a picture in a public space that happens to capture, for example, some other person in their private backyard. But maybe it should not be considered okay to put that image on the Internet without that person's permission.
OK, I can understand that. However, in the act of photographing many public places, anyone taking photos will be including some level of photography of private spaces (balconies, through open apartment windows, etc).
As resolutions increase and more and more people carry cameras, the accidental violation of privacy becomes more and more likely.
Likewise, as the use of social media increases, the accidental release of that violation becomes more and more likely.
Plus, there's the issue of privacy versus free speech, at least in many countries. If I'm in a public place recording stuff that can only be seen from a public place, why can my rights to share what I've seen be infringed upon?
I'm not saying I know the answer. I honestly don't know the "right" answer, because one fundamental right is colliding directly with another fundamental right. And any solution is going to infringe on one right or the other.
They are very important arguments, but not easy ones to resolve. In fact, that same "accessible from a public spot" is also relevant to other technical issues, like open Wifi access points. And it's not a new problem - people have been photographing things on private property and publishing them in newspapers for years (the basis for the "Streisand Effect", for one, and a lot of grainy shots of various actors or sports stars at home taken with long lenses). "Peeping Tom" laws have been on the books for a lot longer than photography was invented.
On the one hand, anything I do in the privacy of my own home or my own (owned or rented) property should be private. I grok that concept, and I think it's important. It's my space, and I should have some privacy there.
But it's not at all easy to make sure the rest of the human race always respects that privacy, especially if you choose to live somewhere that your property can be seen easily. It's a HUGE undertaking to make everyone around you being liable for that privacy, despite the fact that they can see something and you have no way of communicating that you don't want it seen except for hiding it (which may not be possible).
And, of course (even though this isn't really an excuse, but it is a practical matter), how do I keep track of the laws in each place I go? If and when I ever do my European tour and travel to two dozen cities in a dozen countries most of them speaking languages I don't, how do I know if my casual photo of (or from) the Eiffel Tower contains something that someone else might consider inappropriate?
Google has struck a compromise, albeit a deeply imperfect and very uncomfortable one to a lot of people (a position I respect and understand). They allow you to take any Street View photo and mark it as inappropriate. In this case, the woman's best recourse upon noticing the photo would have been to report the image as a problem, and Google could have fuzzed out that portion of the photo for her, and it's very likely no one would have even seen it before the photo went away. Instead, she invoked the Streisand Effect, ensuring that thousands or hundreds of thousands of people have seen her undies hanging on a clothesline. This is an unfortunate circumstance which she shares some (but certainly not all) responsibility for. It's arguably rude to have taken the photograph, but that would mean that every vacationer taking a photo of a stranger's private space is guilty of the same rudeness, albeit on a smaller scale.
And, of course, that compromise means that you have to be aware of Google Street View photographs of you and your private property, and you may or may not be aware that they even exist.
So where will the debate end? Does my right to privacy mean you can't take a picture that includes my property from a public space without knocking on the door of every living space in the span of your photograph and obtaining permission to publish a photo that includes their private property? Do I have to use my own judgment as to whether someone might be offended by the contents of the photo, and what if my judgment is different from theirs "my house was only half-painted in that photo, so you made me look like a slob! I'm suing!" "I had that rusty car hauled away the next day, so your photo reduced my property value by showing it still there!"
What about satellite imagery? Cartographer's aerial photography? Webcams? Those all take pictures that include both public and private spaces. We've already seen debates about Google Earth satellite photography being used to see if people have swimming pools in their yards without a permit and safety inspection, and going to the houses that show a pool in the photo to inspect them. Does the fact that the image was taken invalidate the fact that the people were in violation of ordinances, or is using the freely-available imagery to find these people morally wrong?
It's not an easy debate, but the fact is that if you live in an area where everyone can see w
No, it was submerged and came to the surface. It was suspected to be a floating city for at least the first season or two, then they discovered it was a spaceship as a "wow, we're running out of stuff to write about on this planet" plot device.
Wow, is that math wrong. Avgas for private flights is about $5 per gallon at the moment and the tax rate on that gas is WWWWAAAAYYY over 7.5% (closer to 40%), and damned near every airport I've ever been to requires that you either buy fuel there so they get the profits from selling the fuel to you, or pay a landing fee, because the FBO is a private (not federal) enterprise and they gotta eat, too.
Far fewer of your tax dollars than you seem to think go into GA airports, and you get benefits from them whether you realize it or not. The federal taxes on avgas are over $3 per engine hour even on a 2-seater.
And the net effect is that most GA airports serve as "congestion relief" for the big airports. In order to have commercial pilots, you have to have a lot of GA pilots - General Aviation is the training ground for commercial pilots, and not everyone makes the cut. Each pilot wanting to fly commercially has to earn their wings in a small plane, then work their way up to commercial planes. Those pilots have to train somewhere, and it takes years to work your way up and get proficient enough to be trusted with something big. If all of those trainees used commercial airports, they would get horribly congested and you'd have awful delays on your vacation and business flights, but if you don't let them get lots of training time you'll run out of pilots in about 15 years.
By and large, GA airports are paid for by federal dollars, but the federal dollars come from tax revenue on aviation gasoline, in other words they are paid for by tax dollars from the pilots who fly out of them and rent/taxes from the businesses who use them (there are a lot of small businesses located at airports so their supplies can be flown in on small planes). The local subsidies are because local businesses locate there, and airports tend to be good tax revenue generators.
And, yes, private pilots occasionally do get to use the ATC system, except we don't get priority in that system, and avgas tax revenues still help pay for that system. I'd happily pay-per-use if it meant I only paid when I used it, because I very rarely use ATC except the towers at local airports (and most of those guys in the tower are training to be controllers at larger airports, and they need training facilities too).
GA is the training ground for the commercial pilots you rely on to carry your packages (UPS, FedEx, etc), and fly your ass to your business trips or vacations. The majority of GA pilots are working toward becoming commercial pilots, and the decline of them should concern you if you enjoy the benefits of commercial aviation.
Most of the rest of us who do it for fun are working stiffs with day jobs, and treat our flights like a special treat, because we can't afford to do it a lot.
Cursing speed for light aircraft is somewhere around the 190kts range.
No, I assure you, I've been up with instructors who can curse a LOT faster than that. Just make a bad approach to a bone-crusher of a landing a few times, you'll see.
You know that hilarious VW commercial with the terrorist driving up to a busy restaurant in his VW and yelling some prayer, then triggering the bomb strapped around his chest, and all the restaurant patrons 10 feet away saw was a flash and heard a bang? Yeah, a terrorist attack with a Cessna-172 would be about like that.
A GA airplane is relatively trivial to acquire, but hard to take off with unnoticed, hard to travel any distance unnoticed, slow and easy to shoot down, hard to hit a specific target accurately without some training, and has a very small payload. You might get 400 pounds of explosive on board if you take off on fumes and have a lightweight pilot. If you have access to explosives powerful enough that 400 pounds of it is worth shit from a terrorist perspective, you can do a lot more damage with 400 1-pound backpack bombs and some nails you can get at any hardware store. If you want to do damage to a building, a rental truck is far easier to acquire, easier to operate, can hit nearly as many targets, and you can carry TONS of fuel so you could use ammonium nitrate and Diesel a' la McVeigh/Murrah Federal Building.
If McVeigh had used an airplane to its maximum capacity, he might have taken out 4-5 offices, tops, and scorched the paint of the building.
This is why few people get their panties in a bunch about GA. They're not a real threat.
I would say that SGU was at least something different from Atlantis, but it also looped back on itself. It's a closed environment that is hard to develop.
Yes, at least Atlantis wasn't a starship. Oh, wait... were there any sharks in the water when it took off the first time, and would a vertical launch be considered "jumping" them?
Ah, well. At least they had the brains not to come right out and call it "Stargate: Voyager"
The show certainly has its moments, but I basically watch it because there aren't really any better science fiction series running at the moment. When Universe became my favorite currently-running science fiction series, I died a little inside.
Can't we get something original again? BSG was at least an inventive retelling of the original, even though it was a spinoff. Caprica read like a soap opera. Universe took the same path, although it was markedly better than Caprica.
I'd love to see something in the spirit of Farscape or Babylon 5 come back, though. Something totally off the wall and not based on rehashes of franchises I was watching before I was old enough to drink (and drinking age was 18 back then!). The problem is, if it's not based an an already-successful franchise, it's hard to justify taking a risk.
You've already taken a severe karma hit from your original post (which, by the way, was an excellent example of sarcasm and I applaud you for it). Do you really want to go for two?
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I want to mod you funny and kill you at the same time? Is that a sign of good humor, or bad? :)
Precisely.
I thought it was an interesting retelling, but every few seconds my mind was switching back and forth between "I'm watching a cartoon" and "I'm watching actors". It was too close to the human/non-human line for me, and I found it vaguely disturbing. In the end, it made it a far less enjoyable experience than if they had just gone with cartoon characters.
I think Beowulf nailed the deepest part of the "uncanny valley" almost perfectly.
So? Money is going into developer's hands. If you want a demo, that's one way to do it.
True. A lot of it depends on how excited the developers can get their prospective customers without a demo. On a sequel to an already successful franchise (a few examples from over the years are Unreal, Myst, Civilization, Half Life, MOH, Descent, some of the EA Sports games), you're almost guaranteed some sales as long as you can get a working copy into the hands of a few respected reviewers before release date. And sometimes you don't even need that.
With a totally new franchise, or a major change to an existing one (Myst3D), you really need a demo out there to get people trying it. With a new franchise usually comes a new engine, new controls, a new look, new types of gameplay, etc. There's nothing like getting your fingers on a controller to see if the game is "right" for you. And there are a lot of people who won't drop $60 on a game without knowing how it feels. I think with a new franchise you'll get more sales from the demo than you'll lose.
True.
The nice thing about the Humble Bundle is that you can buy it for some really low amount then try the games out. If you think they are worth it, you can buy it again for a more reasonable price. If you don't, you delete it and you're out a buck or two. And, let's face it, paying $8 and getting both bundles makes it pretty likely you'll enjoy at least one of the games for a few hours.
But, yeah, I miss demos. Especially of games that are asking me to drop $60 or more. For that, I want a very well-crafted game that will give me at least a few weeks of quality play. But I've gone through a lot of demos where the demo represented too much of the effort that went into the game. Demo is Level One, and it's awesome, but the developers gave up after that and the other levels blow steaming monkey chunks, are incomplete, etc.
True, but I think you'd want to design the user interface to take somewhat more subtle cues than the doctor jumping on the patient and dancing the funky chicken. Like, for example, he raises one hand a few inches over the surgical area. Tilting the hand pans the image around, clenched fist zooms in, outstretched fingers zoom out. Something that doesn't involve painting the walls with O-Negative.
Or "year end" reviews could be written in early January so they, you know, include the year end. :)
But, yeah, doing an annual summary before the year is over is silly.
However, it's at least one of the first times when the Slashdot news isn't old. This is so fresh, it's not even ripe.
No, it states that we are where we are. It doesn't imply anything. We did what we did, and we are where we are.
I don't know about you, but my time machine is in the shop, so changing the state of things requires moving forward from where we currently are. Not where we might be had the infrastructure somehow developed in a different manner.
Right now, the only practical wireline alternative is the poles we've got, because no one is going to be able to plant new poles without frightening eminent domain powers.
Wireless has a similar problem in terms of getting towers in, and the government-enforced monopoly on the frequencies available.
They haven't allowed it, they've encouraged it. The government put up the poles using eminent domain. Because no one wanted the government to own the wires, but someone had to spend the bucketloads of money necessary to run all those wires, the government sponsored a single company to run all the wiring. The government offered part of the costs necessary to install the wires, and a monopoly on the use of those wires.
If you want a free market, the government has to buy those wires back from the company that built them, and allow everyone to access the wires freely at the same cost, and they also have to allow anyone to hang whatever wires they want to on Government poles at a reasonable cost so someone who thinks they can do it better than copper has the ability to do so.
And any reimbursement of the cost of the lines to the private company that installed them is going to be nailed by the Democrats as "corporate welfare" even though the resulting free market would give the consumer exactly the freedoms they want - find a plan that fits your needs and buy the thing. But the Democrats like regulation too much, and that'll never ever fly.
And any concept that includes the government owning the poles outright is going to be nailed by the Republicans as "government monopoly" even though the resulting free market is exactly what they claim they want. As opposed to an unregulated monopoly, which is what "free market" seems to be a short cut for now and what they seem to really want.
Great. Then the government needs to open up the rights-of-way so anyone who wants to can hang wires on any pole they want to.
The problem with freeing ISPs from regulation is that they are a natural monopoly. It takes an assload of money to run wires to a lot of houses. It also takes a lot of power in the form of eminent domain to access all the land necessary to run those wires. The government only got the wires to your house by using eminent domain and subsidizing someone to run the wires there, and granting them a monopoly to use those wires and a guarantee that no one else can run wires that compete with theirs. But the power and communications infrastructure was considered a "greater good".
If you want to be free of regulation, you need to be free of monopoly/oligopoly so the free market can take its place. We're not anywhere close to that.
And that's fine, there's nothing in "Network Neutrality" that prevents a provider from capping your bandwidth and/or charging you for extremely heavy Internet use. That's fair, and is as it should be. Though I'd say it's equally fair that providers should disclose VERY clearly if their plans have some form of monthly cap, and what the costs and consequences are if you want more bandwidth than your cap.
The problem is that providers are choosing which services you can access, not how much bandwidth you can gobble down. So Netflix might reach an agreement with Comcast that they get "premium" bandwidth, as long as Comcast agrees to throttle traffic from all other movie sites. Or Comcast decides that, since they have their own digital phone service, that the latency to Vonage's servers should be increased and/or all traffic to and from Vonage should start suffering severe packet loss (*).
If I'm paying for 250GB a month of bandwidth (my current Comcast cap), then I should be able to choose for myself what I use my 250GB for.
(*) this really happened.
That's great, where you have a competitor. That's the problem with a free market, it really doesn't exist in the case of a natural monopoly like power (or at least power transmission in deregulated markets), wireline phone, cable TV, natural gas, or sewer. And in many markets, wireline Internet means dealing with a monopoly (wireless can't compete - it's too expensive and the caps are too low), or a oligopoly where there may be one or two choices.
The government grants them a monopoly mandate because that's the only practical way to run the wires to every house. The government sponsored putting up a lot of those poles and running a lot of those wires, used government powers of eminent domain to get the land to run them on, and granted a monopoly to someone in return for their portion of building and maintaining them.
If you want to talk about "free market" economics, you have to have a free market for it to operate in.
If the companies want complete freedom from regulation, then the answer is really simple - the government should take over the wires and poles and let everyone use them at a fixed rate (per customer or per gigabyte, whatever works best) that covers maintenance to the infrastructure, then the free market can decide who can provide the best plan to each consumer.
As long as a single company or a small oligopoly are the only ones who can use the wires and the poles, government regulation must take the place of the competitive market.
That does raise an interesting point. Will everyone be choosing their own car noises in the future?
Great, so now you pick a "cartone" that's the same as my cell's ringtone and I walk out in front of you because I'm distracted by what I think is my phone ringing when it's actually your electric car trying to let me know I'm about to become road paste.
There's a substantial penalty for early withdrawal, though.
But isn't there a difference between someone seeing what you do, and someone seeing what you do, capturing it digitally, and distributing it to everyone else in the world who didn't see it at the time that it happened?
Sure there is. But I'm seeing more and more people carrying cameras all the time, quite often built into their cellphones, and taking a lot of photographs and sharing them online. The privacy violation you upload might not be the intended subject of your photograph.
Just to take a quick stab at some of the issues you bring up, I'd suggest that, morally (legally is a whole other matter), it should probably be considered okay to take a picture in a public space that happens to capture, for example, some other person in their private backyard. But maybe it should not be considered okay to put that image on the Internet without that person's permission.
OK, I can understand that. However, in the act of photographing many public places, anyone taking photos will be including some level of photography of private spaces (balconies, through open apartment windows, etc).
As resolutions increase and more and more people carry cameras, the accidental violation of privacy becomes more and more likely.
Likewise, as the use of social media increases, the accidental release of that violation becomes more and more likely.
Plus, there's the issue of privacy versus free speech, at least in many countries. If I'm in a public place recording stuff that can only be seen from a public place, why can my rights to share what I've seen be infringed upon?
I'm not saying I know the answer. I honestly don't know the "right" answer, because one fundamental right is colliding directly with another fundamental right. And any solution is going to infringe on one right or the other.
They are very important arguments, but not easy ones to resolve. In fact, that same "accessible from a public spot" is also relevant to other technical issues, like open Wifi access points. And it's not a new problem - people have been photographing things on private property and publishing them in newspapers for years (the basis for the "Streisand Effect", for one, and a lot of grainy shots of various actors or sports stars at home taken with long lenses). "Peeping Tom" laws have been on the books for a lot longer than photography was invented.
On the one hand, anything I do in the privacy of my own home or my own (owned or rented) property should be private. I grok that concept, and I think it's important. It's my space, and I should have some privacy there.
But it's not at all easy to make sure the rest of the human race always respects that privacy, especially if you choose to live somewhere that your property can be seen easily. It's a HUGE undertaking to make everyone around you being liable for that privacy, despite the fact that they can see something and you have no way of communicating that you don't want it seen except for hiding it (which may not be possible).
And, of course (even though this isn't really an excuse, but it is a practical matter), how do I keep track of the laws in each place I go? If and when I ever do my European tour and travel to two dozen cities in a dozen countries most of them speaking languages I don't, how do I know if my casual photo of (or from) the Eiffel Tower contains something that someone else might consider inappropriate?
Google has struck a compromise, albeit a deeply imperfect and very uncomfortable one to a lot of people (a position I respect and understand). They allow you to take any Street View photo and mark it as inappropriate. In this case, the woman's best recourse upon noticing the photo would have been to report the image as a problem, and Google could have fuzzed out that portion of the photo for her, and it's very likely no one would have even seen it before the photo went away. Instead, she invoked the Streisand Effect, ensuring that thousands or hundreds of thousands of people have seen her undies hanging on a clothesline. This is an unfortunate circumstance which she shares some (but certainly not all) responsibility for. It's arguably rude to have taken the photograph, but that would mean that every vacationer taking a photo of a stranger's private space is guilty of the same rudeness, albeit on a smaller scale.
And, of course, that compromise means that you have to be aware of Google Street View photographs of you and your private property, and you may or may not be aware that they even exist.
So where will the debate end? Does my right to privacy mean you can't take a picture that includes my property from a public space without knocking on the door of every living space in the span of your photograph and obtaining permission to publish a photo that includes their private property? Do I have to use my own judgment as to whether someone might be offended by the contents of the photo, and what if my judgment is different from theirs "my house was only half-painted in that photo, so you made me look like a slob! I'm suing!" "I had that rusty car hauled away the next day, so your photo reduced my property value by showing it still there!"
What about satellite imagery? Cartographer's aerial photography? Webcams? Those all take pictures that include both public and private spaces. We've already seen debates about Google Earth satellite photography being used to see if people have swimming pools in their yards without a permit and safety inspection, and going to the houses that show a pool in the photo to inspect them. Does the fact that the image was taken invalidate the fact that the people were in violation of ordinances, or is using the freely-available imagery to find these people morally wrong?
It's not an easy debate, but the fact is that if you live in an area where everyone can see w
Of course. All of my code works... in theory.
No, it was submerged and came to the surface. It was suspected to be a floating city for at least the first season or two, then they discovered it was a spaceship as a "wow, we're running out of stuff to write about on this planet" plot device.
Wow, is that math wrong. Avgas for private flights is about $5 per gallon at the moment and the tax rate on that gas is WWWWAAAAYYY over 7.5% (closer to 40%), and damned near every airport I've ever been to requires that you either buy fuel there so they get the profits from selling the fuel to you, or pay a landing fee, because the FBO is a private (not federal) enterprise and they gotta eat, too.
Far fewer of your tax dollars than you seem to think go into GA airports, and you get benefits from them whether you realize it or not. The federal taxes on avgas are over $3 per engine hour even on a 2-seater.
And the net effect is that most GA airports serve as "congestion relief" for the big airports. In order to have commercial pilots, you have to have a lot of GA pilots - General Aviation is the training ground for commercial pilots, and not everyone makes the cut. Each pilot wanting to fly commercially has to earn their wings in a small plane, then work their way up to commercial planes. Those pilots have to train somewhere, and it takes years to work your way up and get proficient enough to be trusted with something big. If all of those trainees used commercial airports, they would get horribly congested and you'd have awful delays on your vacation and business flights, but if you don't let them get lots of training time you'll run out of pilots in about 15 years.
By and large, GA airports are paid for by federal dollars, but the federal dollars come from tax revenue on aviation gasoline, in other words they are paid for by tax dollars from the pilots who fly out of them and rent/taxes from the businesses who use them (there are a lot of small businesses located at airports so their supplies can be flown in on small planes). The local subsidies are because local businesses locate there, and airports tend to be good tax revenue generators.
And, yes, private pilots occasionally do get to use the ATC system, except we don't get priority in that system, and avgas tax revenues still help pay for that system. I'd happily pay-per-use if it meant I only paid when I used it, because I very rarely use ATC except the towers at local airports (and most of those guys in the tower are training to be controllers at larger airports, and they need training facilities too).
GA is the training ground for the commercial pilots you rely on to carry your packages (UPS, FedEx, etc), and fly your ass to your business trips or vacations. The majority of GA pilots are working toward becoming commercial pilots, and the decline of them should concern you if you enjoy the benefits of commercial aviation.
Most of the rest of us who do it for fun are working stiffs with day jobs, and treat our flights like a special treat, because we can't afford to do it a lot.
However, it's cheaper than golf.
Cursing speed for light aircraft is somewhere around the 190kts range.
No, I assure you, I've been up with instructors who can curse a LOT faster than that. Just make a bad approach to a bone-crusher of a landing a few times, you'll see.
You know that hilarious VW commercial with the terrorist driving up to a busy restaurant in his VW and yelling some prayer, then triggering the bomb strapped around his chest, and all the restaurant patrons 10 feet away saw was a flash and heard a bang? Yeah, a terrorist attack with a Cessna-172 would be about like that.
A GA airplane is relatively trivial to acquire, but hard to take off with unnoticed, hard to travel any distance unnoticed, slow and easy to shoot down, hard to hit a specific target accurately without some training, and has a very small payload. You might get 400 pounds of explosive on board if you take off on fumes and have a lightweight pilot. If you have access to explosives powerful enough that 400 pounds of it is worth shit from a terrorist perspective, you can do a lot more damage with 400 1-pound backpack bombs and some nails you can get at any hardware store. If you want to do damage to a building, a rental truck is far easier to acquire, easier to operate, can hit nearly as many targets, and you can carry TONS of fuel so you could use ammonium nitrate and Diesel a' la McVeigh/Murrah Federal Building.
If McVeigh had used an airplane to its maximum capacity, he might have taken out 4-5 offices, tops, and scorched the paint of the building.
This is why few people get their panties in a bunch about GA. They're not a real threat.
I would say that SGU was at least something different from Atlantis, but it also looped back on itself. It's a closed environment that is hard to develop.
Yes, at least Atlantis wasn't a starship. Oh, wait... were there any sharks in the water when it took off the first time, and would a vertical launch be considered "jumping" them?
Ah, well. At least they had the brains not to come right out and call it "Stargate: Voyager"
The show certainly has its moments, but I basically watch it because there aren't really any better science fiction series running at the moment. When Universe became my favorite currently-running science fiction series, I died a little inside.
Can't we get something original again? BSG was at least an inventive retelling of the original, even though it was a spinoff. Caprica read like a soap opera. Universe took the same path, although it was markedly better than Caprica.
I'd love to see something in the spirit of Farscape or Babylon 5 come back, though. Something totally off the wall and not based on rehashes of franchises I was watching before I was old enough to drink (and drinking age was 18 back then!). The problem is, if it's not based an an already-successful franchise, it's hard to justify taking a risk.
You've already taken a severe karma hit from your original post (which, by the way, was an excellent example of sarcasm and I applaud you for it). Do you really want to go for two?
Sorry, "dos"?
Interesting. How do you say "Whoosh" in Spanish, by the way?