The point here is that the former employee is now an independent contractor, and his customer (former employer) offered him an hourly rate to do the same job he was doing for salary + bennies. What was apparently not made clear between the two is that the hourly rate was for 40 hours in the office and on-call duties were to be included as a free extra.
Our newly-minted independent contractor now has to make the decision any vendor has to make when dealing with a customer who isn't paying as much as they'd like. He has to go to his customer and ask for a rate increase or a change to the agreement so he gets paid for on-call duties. The customer is free to open negotiations or find another vendor if they choose.
So the former-employee-now-contractor has to ask himself, "are you feeling lucky?"
This could be a valuable life lesson, rather cheaply learned, about the difference between being an employee and being a contractor.
Now, this could be troublesome for the customer/former-employer if it turns out they offered him an independent gig then made the working conditions untenable so he would quit, for the purposes of getting out of any severance obligations or to avoid unemployment insurance kicking in.
On-call is a negotiated part of the salary at my current job, and it is made VERY clear during any salary negotiations (I talked to at least three people and signed 2 pieces of paper acknowledging that my base salary included me being on call 24/7). In reality, I am on call one week out of five, but my salary was negotiated based on a statement that I MIGHT be on call 24/7. All the companies I've worked for have made it pretty clear that "on call" was part of the negotiated base salary.
The one hourly IT job I had paid for on-call at my hourly rate ONLY if I got a call, with a minimum of one paid hour per call (minimum three hours if I had to drive in to work to fix it). If the pager didn't go off, I didn't get paid for being on call. And since I was the only person in their IT department, I was on call 24/7/365, even while on vacation. But that was all clearly laid out to me and I asked for money accordingly, and got it.
We did have a layoff last year, and a number of people in large rotations suddenly ended up being one of two or three people in a pager rotation, so the company now gives a day or two a year off with pay for those in "excessive" rotations (on call for more than one week out of five). That was a no-cost, low-impact benefit that made excessive rotations a little easier to swallow and was a nice perk, especially since the company wasn't obligated to offer it.
Employers can also offer other alternative benefits, like company-issued smartphones with unlimited voice/data plans (which are cheaper than paying overtime, but an attractive benefit to technical employees, and have the side effect of making the employee easier to reach when they do need to be on call). My company did that for everyone on call last year, and it was generally a popular move. As a side benefit to the company, they were Blackberries tied to corporate email, so most of us tend to check our email fairly regularly. I know I've answered a bunch of casual questions while on vacation/whatever and it's no big deal.
"Independent Contractor". No such thing as a base salary.
The trouble ensued when he was about to be laid off and his employer decided (instead of letting him go) to offer him a position as an independent contractor, paid at a rate of 40 hours a week in the office. He didn't realize that the position included being on call 24/7 with no compensation, even though his old salaried position had the same on-call responsibilities, and he signed up to do "the exact same job as before, only paid by the hour instead of on salary, with no benefits."
The difficulty lies in the difference between an employer and a customer. As an independent contractor, his customer is not bound by the same labor laws as they were when he was an actual employee of theirs.
His former employer is now his customer. The customer doesn't "have" to pay him jack for anything. They "have" to pay him what the contract between the two of them states. And in the absence of a written contract, if the conversation never came up about overtime or even straight-time pay for being on call or even handling calls, the customer is not liable for anything. They are paying for office time at 40 hours and he's giving them any additional time out of the office as part of the contract.
His best bet, if he really wants to be paid for on-call, is to go and ask for the terms of his contract to be clarified/changed, at which point his customer will either negotiate with him to find an equitable arrangement, or they can also terminate his contract if they so choose.
The question is not whether he's entitled to overtime for oncall duties. He's not. Sorry. He's offering a service at a set price and if he wants to change that he needs to work it out with his customer.
The real question is whether it's worth the risk to him to renegotiate with his only customer in this sucky economy, because his customer might decide he's not the best vendor after all.
If his skills are truly unique, he can probably work something out. If he's just monitoring a web server and doing things that can be done remotely, his customer might decide that it's cheaper to move the website into a monitored hosting provider.
Or, even simpler, use NoScript and AdBlock (with the auto-update list) in Firefox. Editing hosts is simple, I'm not arguing that. It's also free and relatively effective. With one change, your tip even works in Windows.
But NoScript and AdBlock are far more effective and even simpler to use and maintain.
hosts doesn't let you know when a new site wants to "get through", you have to see the ad and block it. It also allows everything you don't explicitly block. And it requires a complete match on the URL. I played the game for quite some time, then decided the few little scraps of my sanity that were left weren't worth ditching over ads.
AdBlock has a predefined list that gets updated if you ask it to, so once you've installed it they are pretty good about catching "www432.adserver.com" and other constantly morphing URLs (plus you can use wildcards to block "*.adserver.com" and not have to worry when they add the www433 subdomain).
NoScript defaults to "no permissions" and forces you to ALLOW things you want, so it's a "positive confirmation" security. It's a bit of a pain the first time you visit a site that needs of scripts, but with a good number of them I also decide "you know what, the content isn't important to me to run 238 scripts from 19 sites just to read a news article" and move on.
Flashblock is also great if you want to allow companies to show ads, but you are concerned about "webilepsy" (the sudden and acute onset of epileptic symptoms caused by flash ads).
Probably could, and that's an excellent point, but I make most of my calls on my cell phone anyway. I have about 4,000 rollover minutes by now, so it's not a huge deal.:)
I tend to answer the Gizmo line on incoming GV calls.
I have Gizmo5 working just fine with my Linksys ATA. There are even instructions on the Gizmo home page on how to set it up.
Gizmo5 + my ATA + Google Voice means I now have a spare phone line that allows me free unlimited calling on a normal telephone (though I do have to initiate calls from my web browser). My primary phone is my Blackberry, but it's nice having a spare line with unlimited minutes.
Good point. What I would expect is that Google would use searches you are doing to determine what you are trying to do, then use your profile information and that extrapolated from members of their "total information awareness" group who carry the Netbooks to determine what sort of car you're going to end up buying.
Then they'll save you the search.
You Google "prices Ford Mondeo"
Google replies:
[Click here if you aren't actually in the market for a new car (takes you to Google Search page on the Mondeo).]
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Voice=Clippy: It looks like you're searching for a new car! Congratulations! I can help you with that if you like.
We have found 1,321,452 people whose habits correlate to yours by more than 85% and who live in similar climates, are of similar height and build, and have purchased new cars in the last year. Based on feedback they have placed on their cars, there is a 97.45% chance you will be thrilled with the car I've chosen for you.
The car will be available to test drive tomorrow at your local dealer, and your schedule has an opening at 11:00AM so I've put it on your calendar. Click here to see the model we've chosen and to choose your preferred car color."
And Google will, 90% of the time, be completely correct about the model that's right for you. About 85% of the time they'll be equally unsurprised at your choice of color.
Make that 95% on both if you carry one of their netbooks.:)
Yes, it was a (hopefully) humorous exaggeration. But I can see them building a pretty darned accurate profile of people in general, and people similar to you in specific, if they get a few tens of thousands of people carrying a "free" GoogleBook. Marketers have been looking for this sort of data for, well, since marketing existed. Some of the databases are scary accurate, but nothing compares to people letting you into their daily lives for months or years on end. And that's never been practical, but it might be with something like this.
It'll make advertising more efficient, meaning Google gets paid more per transaction but when they get paid they really add value. This could even reduce prices in the end, since companies won't have to spend millions on scattershot advertising. If I was a car dealer, and I knew you could get a consumer's arse in one of my cars, I'd pay you good money per completed sale.
It'll make advertising less annoying, since you will generally see ads that are very specific to your tastes.
And Google would know everything about you. Life would be more convenient, and somehow, less interesting, I suppose. LOL.
With a really good glide ratio, some of the "stored power" could be altitude. Maybe not all of it, but if you can accept a drop of 10,000 feet over the course of the night and plan on climbing back up during the day, you could reduce your need for stored power (and therefore batteries / weight) considerably. Just have enough power on tap to reduce the descent rate, not enough to actually fly level or climb during the night. And, of course, your minimum altitude should still be above the cloud deck so you have sun in the morning to do the climbing, or it has to be able to land for a quick recharge if it gets caught in the clouds.
Something like this could be useful for traffic reporting, weather observation, aerial photography, surveillance, and even communications, provided whatever onboard gear is needed is light enough and low-powered enough. It'd be a damned sight cheaper and more easily replaced than satellites, and with a considerably lower delay. "Flying Internet Access Points", anyone? (note, Internet access speeds much lower after sunset)
I'm not convinced something like this would be terribly useful for manned flight. If you want to fly, you'll get far better lift/mass ratios out of a fuel or battery than you will a solar panel. Dragging the solar panels along on the airframe will add far more weight than the amount of electricity generated in-flight could compensate for. You rapidly run into a zero-sum game of adding more panels to get more power which means more weight and surface area so you need more engine which means you need more power. Something the size of a 747 made out of thin aluminum might get 20 passengers in the air until the first breeze tears the whole thing to shreds.
However, you could use an efficient battery or Hydrogen fuel cell or something, coupled with ground-based solar collectors for charging/fueling, to make it feasible for manned round-trip flights. Flightseeing would be a great application, or recreational aviation. It could also be scaled up for larger aviation, but basically as an alternative fuel to Jet-A with an engine designed to run it.
I imagine there WILL be a GPS in this unit. It wouldn't make sense at the price NOT to put one in, and it would make the unit more useful to carry around with you, and therefore you will. In fact, I think instead of a netbook they should make it a subsidized smart phone that you can hook a monitor and keyboard up to, and still use it independently.
They will turn a significant number of people into information-gathering machines for the Google Hegemony. Hmm, what would be an appropriate name? "Robot"? No, not really. Hmmm... What do they call mobile robots in human form again? Oh, yeah. Androids.
In return for "all your movements are belong to us", you'll get all sorts of free and convenient benefits, over and above the subsidy on the phone and maybe even a subsidy on service fees.
Example: If the GPS is on and you are being tracked, they can also track whether you are on the highway and, if so, if you are moving or stopped. In other words, once they reach saturation, they can gather realtime traffic data and route you around jams efficiently. Then, if you get caught in a traffic jam, they can determine how long the wait will be and offer you a nice inexpensive streaming movie to watch while you sit in traffic.;)
Seriously, Google is already talking about this with Latitude.
>>>I don't want to get too far off topic so I'll ask this question: When did we turn the corner of being Anti-Spyware to being Pro-Spyware?
Hmm, that opens up a can of worms on the definition. Not to get all Clinton on you, but if you volunteer to be tracked, are offered specific benefits in return for the tracking, knowingly accept the tracking in return for the benefits, is it really "SPY"Ware?
Am I spying on you if I follow you around with a camera while wearing a bright orange suit to make it obvious I'm there, asking your permission each morning to follow you, and handing you a $5 bill every day you say "yes"? Sure, I'm completely destroying every modicum of privacy you have, but I'm not spying on you. Spying implies some sort of surreptitiousness or concealment, and Google's pretty open about what they collect and what they do with it, and what you get in return.
Americans have come to expect a right to privacy in their personal lives, and that's good. When that right is violated against our will, we get all honked off and protest in righteous moral indignation, and that's also good. But when that right is knowingly sold by an individual, well, that's a really grey area. And we all know that the nature of the Internet assures that everything delivered to you is tracked back to the destination (or it couldn't be delivered), so I think we as a nation are becoming more aware that the whole "privacy on the Internet" thing was a comfortable lie we told ourselves.
Google is a for-profit company, with one goal. To make money. In order to make money, they want you to sell them your privacy in return for nifty tools. Some people are taking the stance (right or wrong) that their privacy on the Internet is largely being taken from them anyway, so they might as well get something in return.
"And if I'm going to have my privacy violated, dammit, I might as well get a share of the profits."
Is this noble and just and the American Way? I dunno. I know the tools are handy, and I know what kind of data I'm coughing up to get them. I'm relatively comfortable with the arrangement. For now.
If you get someone to use this as their daily computer and load something that can track their every move (not just on the Web, but how much time they spend in a spreadsheet, on Thunderbird, on IM, etc), you can build a really valuable profile on them that goes FAR beyond simple google-analytics tracking or web ad responses.
You can start building predictable behavior models for a significantly large population.
That is data you simply cannot buy today.
Experiments like this have been tried in the past, all to end in failure, but that's because something like this requires REALLY cheap hardware (the costs model being so low that you don't care that half of your freebie customers are hacking the hardware and taking out your stuff or using it as a specific-purpose machine, because the remaining half are using the systems for everything exactly as you intended). The data, if it can be gathered successfully, makes the hardware cost look cheap by comparison.
Armed with this data, Google could start predicting with pretty creepy accuracy what the response rate is going to be to a particular campaign. Then they can start charging a higher CPM for ALL of their advertising, because they can do what no one else in the industry is able to do. Guarantee a specific response rate based on a carefully-crafted campaign, that is crafted based on good models of how people act in real life.
Under the current model, an advertiser approaches Google and says "we want to advertise this new vehicle". Google gets info on the vehicle and charges a CPM for sending hopefully relevant clicks through to the automaker's page.
With the new data model in place and populated, the advertiser approaches Google and says "we want to sell 5,000 automobiles". Google can charge a flat rate per actual sale, which they can predict based on these models. They'll not only be able to predict clickthrough rates, but have a fair shot at actual sales.
And this is not only the people who participated - they would in theory use google-analytics surfing data for the entire websurfing population combined with the models they've build based on the people they track to predict behavior for a much larger population.
So, for example, they come out with a new ad for the "Ford Monopole", a hypothetical electric car. The looks appeal to a subset of their tracked population that are into certain TV shows, search for certain movies on IMDB, and get emails from people who are into similar things. Use the analytics data from those TV shows' web sites to determine fans of the show/movie, and you can target campaigns to those people.
Yes, advertisers do this today, but this could bring it to a whole new level, because they'll know which cars their tracked population actually bought and what factors led up to that decision. Then they can extrapolate that out to the larger population for which they have less complete data.
So you get one of these, use it just for Gmail, and block Google from even being accessed on your main machine(s). What the hell, it's free.:)
I don't know if it would be a profitable proposition for Google, but I'd get one of these little buggers in a second. I'd do my Gmail, my Google Earth, my Google Voice, my Facebook, etc on it. Then I'd have a REAL machine that I'd do my finances and other sensitive stuff on.
The government buries wires, and someone comes along and says "I want to lay my own wires at my expense but using your negotiated right-of-way. I will pay a monthly fee for access to the right-of-way, and I will pay for the installation and upkeep of the wires."
Example: I work for a company that has 5 buildings in a modest-sized town. We cannot run our own cable between our buildings because we don't own the contiguous land between the buildings. The local telco refuses to sell or even rent us dark fiber. So we pay for bandwidth, to the tune of many thousands of dollars a month.
If the government owned the rights-of-way, we could simply negotiate to run the ~15 miles of dark fiber we needed right on the existing poles, and they'd be ours, and we'd have all the bandwidth we could possibly want.
Another example: If I want to start an ISP, I could rent time on the government's wire as I start up, then if I get big enough I could simply rent space in the government's right-of-way. Or if I found a better way to reach my customers (wireless, whatever) I'd simply move on.
Rights-of-way are one of those things that a government is good at, and can be considered a public good. Making a private partnership where the private company owns and profits from the wires and the government subsidizes and lines and controls the amount of profit is sort of the worst of both worlds. It's not privatized, it's a regulated monopoly.
Currently taxpayers have already paid for this, sometimes multiple times over, and the money ends up vanishing along with the latest snake oil salesman company that takes the money then spins the responsibilities off.
If the government does it directly, they can at least bid the work out and know they are paying the lowest possible cost to get stuff done.
And, yes, I know that there is graft in the bidding process, etc etc. But we have that today, and we depend on the government to regulate a monopoly who owns the assets by proxy.
If the government owns the lines, we have competition on what can be sent over those lines, with a fixed cost model for any competitors that ensures the infrastructure is maintained and improved, rather than paying a company to promise to deliver and walking away with the money.
And if some clever lad or lass comes up with a better way to get the information where it needs to go, there's no need to talk about interfering with the regulated monopoly. Because there isn't one. If you want to use the wires, you pay to use the wires. If you find a better way, you use a better way.
Sure, it's a crime. But the whole difference between "person as a person" and "corporation as a person" is that a corporation can change bodies and still live.
If a company wants to use the government poles and easements, they could theoretically pay the government for them - at a much lower cost than they'd pay to use the government's own wires.
I mean, that's basically what we're doing today by subsidizing private companies to do it, except we're generally not getting what we are paying for.
The government isn't the most efficient vehicle by far for getting tasks done, but to accomplish a common good that has already been paid for multiple times with no delivery, I think it's high time to try a different approach. Continuing to pay private companies then have the company spin the responsibilities off to a paperco to die once they've spent the money on something else is getting old. And expensive. And frustrating.
Or sell the division to a sucker who can't figure out that they will fail, like the recent sale of the landlines in New England to FairPoint.
Though, in this case, FairPoint was so obviously unprepared, it showed in their business plan as submitted to the PUC (fuel and labor costs won't go up for 5 years, yet you haven't prepurchased fuel nor have you finished negotiations with the Union. They won't go up. Really?).
But, point taken. Verizon got a LOT of money to put better phone lines and Internet access in to rural areas. None of it ever happened. FairPoint walks in, agrees to all of the conditions Verizon was paid for, submits a business plan based on some alternate reality where money is free and Internet connections grow like marshmallows on magical faerie trees, and declares Chap 11 within a year. Wow, surprise surprise!
The subsidies should be paid after the services are available, not before, and should be paid to the people who managed to turn it on. Once subsidies are involved then everyone should be able to use the connection, with the telco allowed to reclaim their costs and make a reasonable profit on those portions of the infrastructure that were not covered under subsidy (company can accept a 50% subsidy, for example, and is allowed to charge competitors a higher rate based on the fact that the company paid for half of the wiring, but once you accept subsidies you must also accept competition).
Or we need a "public option" for Internet access. Instead of the government paying private companies to put in lines then forcing those private companies to allow access to the wires, simply have the government put in the wires and charge anyone who wants to use them. Then if a company thinks they can put in their own wires more cheaply, let 'em, and the company can do with those wires as they wish since no government money went into them. As long as the government has wires everywhere, competition will be available and no one can declare a monopoly, but if a company can do it cheaper than the government they are free to do so.
You had me right up until "just to discredit them".
Microsoft clearly was concerned that Frame would add to the possible attack vectors into IE. They've certainly said as much. And that is a valid concern, frankly. Due to that concern, they had their research team test for security vulnerabilities in Frame, obviously with particular focus on ones that could compromise a Windows system.
And, whaddya know, they found one.
Now, if they were trying to discredit Google, the first place they'd go is (MS)NBC and put out headlines "Google Chrome Frame Has a security breach! Look at those losers!"
Instead, we see an announcement from Google that they have a patch for the defect, and acknowledging Microsoft as having found the bug and reported it to them.
Sounds to me like Microsoft was acting out of enlightened self-interest, and is demonstrating good team-playing skills by telling Google about it in enough detail for Google to come out with a fast fix.
Kudos to Microsoft for extending their security research beyond their own software and to external sources they might consider a threat. Further kudos to Microsoft for reporting the issue to Google with enough detail to make a fix possible, without exposing it to the black hats so this never became a zero-day attack.
Kudos to Google for getting a fix out there quickly. Further kudos to Google for having the respect to acknowledge Microsoft's contribution.
I'd say this is a perfect example of vendors being good players in the security arena, and respectful competitors.
To clarify, I was responding to this point of yours:
"See I could tell you to take off runway 7, which in itself would be harmless, however , the glitch comes from the same software that told the other air traffic controller that it was ok to use runway 7 to land"
If you told me to take off on RWY7, you would be an Air Traffic Controller. Your software (if you used any) would be contained within the tower. It is not Flight Planning software, it is Flight Operations software.
The article make absolutely no mention of a failure of Flight Operations software.
A failure of Flight Operations software could be a safety issue, I agree, but that's not what the article said went wrong.
If you want to change the subject to Flight Ops software, fair enough, let's go through those procedures if you're interested in learning how it works.
OK, so say the Flight Ops software went out.
The traffic pattern is set in such a way that controllers can predict where the airplanes will be and can track them on RADAR. They'll also immediately withdraw any takeoff clearances to reduce their workload, and call Flight Services and tell them to divert every inbound flight to their alternate airports.
If RADAR goes out, they'll use binoculars and the radio to control landing traffic. Pilots know they need to fly at 500 foot increments in a series in the pattern and work their way down the stack. Again, you've got a stack of planes all in predetermined flying ovals, so you can take the bottom planes in the stack (those at Traffic Pattern Altitude), land that queue in order, then tell everyone to slowly move down a rung in the ladder. Lather, rinse, repeat until no planes are in the air.
If the radio goes out, they have handheld directional bright lights they can use to signal the aircraft what to do. Any incoming aircraft will not get a response from ATC and get back on the horn with Flight Services for a priority divert to another airport. Any planes above the lowest rung will contact Flight Services for departure instructions and will continue to fly in predictable circles at a set altitude until they get instructions.
If the batteries on the lights go out, the pilots in the lowest rung will fly over the runway at traffic pattern altitude, and exit the tower control area safely so they can get back in touch with Flight Services for a priority divert to an airport that is working.
Pilots spend a crapload of time learning all this stuff. If Air Traffic Control goes away completely, we know to stay in predictable patterns and what those patterns look like.
No, if you read some of my other posts I already stated that this outage did NOT mean Flight Planning was down. It meant that flight plans could not be submitted automatically.
Flight Planning was not, in fact, down during this incident. It was severely delayed because the Flight Plans could not be submitted automatically and the manual process takes longer. However, I was making the point that Flight Planning is NOT involved in Flight Operations (Air Traffic Control, and Flight Services) and a theoretical failure in Flight Planning could not, in any way, impact the safety of Operations.
You may believe as you wish, but if you aren't even going to read an explanation of how the aviation system works as explained by a licensed pilot, then, well, you can remain ignorant. Makes no difference to me.
PS: You are confusing "Air Traffic Control" and "Flight Services" with "Flight Planning". They are three separate entities.
An "Air Traffic Controller" is a person (or multiple people) sitting in a tower or other control area. They have one primary job - to make sure planes don't smack into each other while in their domain. They sequence takeoffs and landings, taxiing, etc.
ATC has absolute and utter control within their domain. If a Controller tells you to jump, you start jumping then ask "how high?" on the way up. Any aircraft wishing to enter their little fiefdom has to ask permissions.
"Flight Services" controls flights that are at altitude and flying outside an ATC area. They are basically a Controller, but without landing and takeoff responsibilities.
A Controller is not told by Flight Services to allocate a runway to a flight. If a Flight Services agent called from 1000 miles away and tried to tell a Controller what runway to use, that Controller would undoubtedly (and rightfully) hang up on the Flight Services agent, probably after offering a few choice expletives. There is nothing Flight Services can say to a Controller that could affect operations at that Control Tower in any way.
In the same way, Flight Services is not told exactly where a plane should fly by Flight Planning. They are advised which way the plane WANTS to go, but they decide where the plane ACTUALLY goes, and they can tell a pilot to deviate from a flight plan any time they please to maintain separation and safety.
The reason I can't imagine a failure in Flight Services affecting the safety in Control or Services is simple - there isn't any way it could. Flight Planning does not include any traffic separation services. That's the responsibility of the people with the RADAR screens and radios in front of them, in Control and Services.
Planning is only there as a "gatekeeper" to help prevent the skies from getting too crowded, and if they get delayed planes don't take off until they can coordinate the flights properly.
A failure in Planning doesn't mean all planes will suddenly get clearance, a failure means planes stay safely on the ground.
1. Pilot works with Ground or calls Flight Services and files a Flight Plan. Flight Plan includes:
- Airport you are taking off from (A).
- Airport you intend to land at (B).
- Airports you will use as a "contingency" if things go badly (C,D,etc).
- What routes you intend to use to get from A to B.
This allows Flight Services to figure out how many airplanes will be at altitide in different areas at any given time so they can control congestion enroute, and also attempt to control congestion at destinations (so 200 planes aren't approaching Atlanta all at once).
If Flight Planning is down, Flight Plans cannot be filed.
2. Pilot contacts Tower for clearance, and if the flight requires a Flight Plan the Tower checks to make sure the Flight Plan is approved before deciding to allocate a runway to the flight.
The Flight Plan is only a "deny" reason for a takeoff. The Tower can sometimes use it to decide from multiple runways if they have space (more efficient for the plane to take off in a direction that resembles its final course) but that is at the discretion of the controller. The controller is coordinating all takeoffs and landings, and will not give takeoff clearance without a flight plan if one is needed (for a lot of flights, flight plans are not required). They will deny takeoff clearance for a lot of other reasons, including delaying it if the runway is in use.
So, again, if Flight Planning is down, flight plans cannot be filed therefore flight plans cannot be approved therefore takeoff clearance is not granted.
3. The pilot takes off under Tower Control. They fly at a given course designed to maintain separation until they can turn and get on their route. At all times, a controller is directing their operations, and that controller is responsible for separation and safety. The Flight Plan is only used at that time to determine what direction the plane is headed when they leave the Tower Controlled area.
Again, if a Flight Planning is down the takeoff that led to this never happened.
4. Once the airplane leaves the Tower Control area, the Tower hands them off to Flight Services. Flight Services is aware of the flight plan, but doesn't really need it. They use RADAR and the defined airways to maintain positive control and separation of aircraft. The plan is handy, as it allows them to predict which way a plane will turn once it reaches a certain point, but they'd know this by talking to the pilot anyway.
5. As the plane approaches their destination, Flight Services hands them off to the Tower and usually closes their flight plan at that time. The Tower in the destination airport, just like the Tower in the originating airport, is an independent entity that accepts the aircraft under their control and puts them in queue for landing.
At no point does the Flight Plan become relevant in assigning runways for takeoff or landing, nor is it ever relevant (except for helpful supplemental information) in traffic separation.
And even if it was, if Flight Planning suffered a complete failure, NO PLANES WOULD TAKE OFF. You can't have a midair collision when no planes are, well, in the air.
Agreed, if you're inside a structure all bets are off, and also agreed that AT&T's maps are far from perfect. Never claimed they were. Heck, given the relative quality of phones (antenna effectiveness, radio quality, etc), they couldn't possibly be.
My point is that the maps are based on completely different criteria. AT&T is at least making the attempt to say "this area should have working signal", and not "I have towers in this general area" like Verizon does.
But Verizon's maps clearly show "coverage" in very large areas where the nearest tower is many miles out of range and signal is simply impossible. So it's disingenuous to compare even just the 3G maps, they are based on different data.
You can add the term "outdoors under decent conditions" to a caveat on AT&T's map, that's perfectly reasonable. I don't think AT&T would actually be expected to go into every individual building to verify coverage. I think if they did they'd probably be arrested.
I expect they are simply extrapolating signal based on tower height and surrounding terrain. Imperfect, but more accurate than splashing red over an entire county because you have a tower there.
Personally, I live in a house with aluminum siding, so no cell phones of any kind work inside my house, ever. Well, maybe if you get near a window. Nice 3-4 bar signal outside, but to use the phones inside I needed to get a repeater.
I also work in a very large warehouse building, and I have line-of-sight to a window but very low/unusable signal (so do the Verizon phones). Our building is covered in both maps, because there's good 5-bar signal outside with both companies. We just need to repeat it indoors. Someday...
In any case, actual coverage depends on the specific area you're in. AT&T is pretty good around here, though they have a few more dead zones than Verizon does. They even have 3G at my house, which is relatively rural - not that I really care since I have an EDGE phone.
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The point here is that the former employee is now an independent contractor, and his customer (former employer) offered him an hourly rate to do the same job he was doing for salary + bennies. What was apparently not made clear between the two is that the hourly rate was for 40 hours in the office and on-call duties were to be included as a free extra.
Our newly-minted independent contractor now has to make the decision any vendor has to make when dealing with a customer who isn't paying as much as they'd like. He has to go to his customer and ask for a rate increase or a change to the agreement so he gets paid for on-call duties. The customer is free to open negotiations or find another vendor if they choose.
So the former-employee-now-contractor has to ask himself, "are you feeling lucky?"
This could be a valuable life lesson, rather cheaply learned, about the difference between being an employee and being a contractor.
Now, this could be troublesome for the customer/former-employer if it turns out they offered him an independent gig then made the working conditions untenable so he would quit, for the purposes of getting out of any severance obligations or to avoid unemployment insurance kicking in.
On-call is a negotiated part of the salary at my current job, and it is made VERY clear during any salary negotiations (I talked to at least three people and signed 2 pieces of paper acknowledging that my base salary included me being on call 24/7). In reality, I am on call one week out of five, but my salary was negotiated based on a statement that I MIGHT be on call 24/7. All the companies I've worked for have made it pretty clear that "on call" was part of the negotiated base salary.
The one hourly IT job I had paid for on-call at my hourly rate ONLY if I got a call, with a minimum of one paid hour per call (minimum three hours if I had to drive in to work to fix it). If the pager didn't go off, I didn't get paid for being on call. And since I was the only person in their IT department, I was on call 24/7/365, even while on vacation. But that was all clearly laid out to me and I asked for money accordingly, and got it.
We did have a layoff last year, and a number of people in large rotations suddenly ended up being one of two or three people in a pager rotation, so the company now gives a day or two a year off with pay for those in "excessive" rotations (on call for more than one week out of five). That was a no-cost, low-impact benefit that made excessive rotations a little easier to swallow and was a nice perk, especially since the company wasn't obligated to offer it.
Employers can also offer other alternative benefits, like company-issued smartphones with unlimited voice/data plans (which are cheaper than paying overtime, but an attractive benefit to technical employees, and have the side effect of making the employee easier to reach when they do need to be on call). My company did that for everyone on call last year, and it was generally a popular move. As a side benefit to the company, they were Blackberries tied to corporate email, so most of us tend to check our email fairly regularly. I know I've answered a bunch of casual questions while on vacation/whatever and it's no big deal.
"Independent Contractor". No such thing as a base salary.
The trouble ensued when he was about to be laid off and his employer decided (instead of letting him go) to offer him a position as an independent contractor, paid at a rate of 40 hours a week in the office. He didn't realize that the position included being on call 24/7 with no compensation, even though his old salaried position had the same on-call responsibilities, and he signed up to do "the exact same job as before, only paid by the hour instead of on salary, with no benefits."
The difficulty lies in the difference between an employer and a customer. As an independent contractor, his customer is not bound by the same labor laws as they were when he was an actual employee of theirs.
His former employer is now his customer. The customer doesn't "have" to pay him jack for anything. They "have" to pay him what the contract between the two of them states. And in the absence of a written contract, if the conversation never came up about overtime or even straight-time pay for being on call or even handling calls, the customer is not liable for anything. They are paying for office time at 40 hours and he's giving them any additional time out of the office as part of the contract.
His best bet, if he really wants to be paid for on-call, is to go and ask for the terms of his contract to be clarified/changed, at which point his customer will either negotiate with him to find an equitable arrangement, or they can also terminate his contract if they so choose.
The question is not whether he's entitled to overtime for oncall duties. He's not. Sorry. He's offering a service at a set price and if he wants to change that he needs to work it out with his customer.
The real question is whether it's worth the risk to him to renegotiate with his only customer in this sucky economy, because his customer might decide he's not the best vendor after all.
If his skills are truly unique, he can probably work something out. If he's just monitoring a web server and doing things that can be done remotely, his customer might decide that it's cheaper to move the website into a monitored hosting provider.
Or, even simpler, use NoScript and AdBlock (with the auto-update list) in Firefox. Editing hosts is simple, I'm not arguing that. It's also free and relatively effective. With one change, your tip even works in Windows.
But NoScript and AdBlock are far more effective and even simpler to use and maintain.
hosts doesn't let you know when a new site wants to "get through", you have to see the ad and block it. It also allows everything you don't explicitly block. And it requires a complete match on the URL. I played the game for quite some time, then decided the few little scraps of my sanity that were left weren't worth ditching over ads.
AdBlock has a predefined list that gets updated if you ask it to, so once you've installed it they are pretty good about catching "www432.adserver.com" and other constantly morphing URLs (plus you can use wildcards to block "*.adserver.com" and not have to worry when they add the www433 subdomain).
NoScript defaults to "no permissions" and forces you to ALLOW things you want, so it's a "positive confirmation" security. It's a bit of a pain the first time you visit a site that needs of scripts, but with a good number of them I also decide "you know what, the content isn't important to me to run 238 scripts from 19 sites just to read a news article" and move on.
Flashblock is also great if you want to allow companies to show ads, but you are concerned about "webilepsy" (the sudden and acute onset of epileptic symptoms caused by flash ads).
Probably could, and that's an excellent point, but I make most of my calls on my cell phone anyway. I have about 4,000 rollover minutes by now, so it's not a huge deal. :)
I tend to answer the Gizmo line on incoming GV calls.
I have Gizmo5 working just fine with my Linksys ATA. There are even instructions on the Gizmo home page on how to set it up.
Gizmo5 + my ATA + Google Voice means I now have a spare phone line that allows me free unlimited calling on a normal telephone (though I do have to initiate calls from my web browser). My primary phone is my Blackberry, but it's nice having a spare line with unlimited minutes.
Good point. What I would expect is that Google would use searches you are doing to determine what you are trying to do, then use your profile information and that extrapolated from members of their "total information awareness" group who carry the Netbooks to determine what sort of car you're going to end up buying.
Then they'll save you the search.
You Google "prices Ford Mondeo"
Google replies:
[Click here if you aren't actually in the market for a new car (takes you to Google Search page on the Mondeo).]
IMPORTANT NOTICE:
Voice=Clippy: It looks like you're searching for a new car! Congratulations! I can help you with that if you like.
We have found 1,321,452 people whose habits correlate to yours by more than 85% and who live in similar climates, are of similar height and build, and have purchased new cars in the last year. Based on feedback they have placed on their cars, there is a 97.45% chance you will be thrilled with the car I've chosen for you.
The car will be available to test drive tomorrow at your local dealer, and your schedule has an opening at 11:00AM so I've put it on your calendar. Click here to see the model we've chosen and to choose your preferred car color."
And Google will, 90% of the time, be completely correct about the model that's right for you. About 85% of the time they'll be equally unsurprised at your choice of color.
Make that 95% on both if you carry one of their netbooks. :)
Yes, it was a (hopefully) humorous exaggeration. But I can see them building a pretty darned accurate profile of people in general, and people similar to you in specific, if they get a few tens of thousands of people carrying a "free" GoogleBook. Marketers have been looking for this sort of data for, well, since marketing existed. Some of the databases are scary accurate, but nothing compares to people letting you into their daily lives for months or years on end. And that's never been practical, but it might be with something like this.
It'll make advertising more efficient, meaning Google gets paid more per transaction but when they get paid they really add value. This could even reduce prices in the end, since companies won't have to spend millions on scattershot advertising. If I was a car dealer, and I knew you could get a consumer's arse in one of my cars, I'd pay you good money per completed sale.
It'll make advertising less annoying, since you will generally see ads that are very specific to your tastes.
And Google would know everything about you. Life would be more convenient, and somehow, less interesting, I suppose. LOL.
With a really good glide ratio, some of the "stored power" could be altitude. Maybe not all of it, but if you can accept a drop of 10,000 feet over the course of the night and plan on climbing back up during the day, you could reduce your need for stored power (and therefore batteries / weight) considerably. Just have enough power on tap to reduce the descent rate, not enough to actually fly level or climb during the night. And, of course, your minimum altitude should still be above the cloud deck so you have sun in the morning to do the climbing, or it has to be able to land for a quick recharge if it gets caught in the clouds.
Something like this could be useful for traffic reporting, weather observation, aerial photography, surveillance, and even communications, provided whatever onboard gear is needed is light enough and low-powered enough. It'd be a damned sight cheaper and more easily replaced than satellites, and with a considerably lower delay. "Flying Internet Access Points", anyone? (note, Internet access speeds much lower after sunset)
I'm not convinced something like this would be terribly useful for manned flight. If you want to fly, you'll get far better lift/mass ratios out of a fuel or battery than you will a solar panel. Dragging the solar panels along on the airframe will add far more weight than the amount of electricity generated in-flight could compensate for. You rapidly run into a zero-sum game of adding more panels to get more power which means more weight and surface area so you need more engine which means you need more power. Something the size of a 747 made out of thin aluminum might get 20 passengers in the air until the first breeze tears the whole thing to shreds.
However, you could use an efficient battery or Hydrogen fuel cell or something, coupled with ground-based solar collectors for charging/fueling, to make it feasible for manned round-trip flights. Flightseeing would be a great application, or recreational aviation. It could also be scaled up for larger aviation, but basically as an alternative fuel to Jet-A with an engine designed to run it.
But how would the pilot grip it? By the hull?
I imagine there WILL be a GPS in this unit. It wouldn't make sense at the price NOT to put one in, and it would make the unit more useful to carry around with you, and therefore you will. In fact, I think instead of a netbook they should make it a subsidized smart phone that you can hook a monitor and keyboard up to, and still use it independently.
They will turn a significant number of people into information-gathering machines for the Google Hegemony. Hmm, what would be an appropriate name? "Robot"? No, not really. Hmmm... What do they call mobile robots in human form again? Oh, yeah. Androids.
In return for "all your movements are belong to us", you'll get all sorts of free and convenient benefits, over and above the subsidy on the phone and maybe even a subsidy on service fees.
Example: If the GPS is on and you are being tracked, they can also track whether you are on the highway and, if so, if you are moving or stopped. In other words, once they reach saturation, they can gather realtime traffic data and route you around jams efficiently. Then, if you get caught in a traffic jam, they can determine how long the wait will be and offer you a nice inexpensive streaming movie to watch while you sit in traffic. ;)
Seriously, Google is already talking about this with Latitude.
>>>I don't want to get too far off topic so I'll ask this question: When did we turn the corner of being Anti-Spyware to being Pro-Spyware?
Hmm, that opens up a can of worms on the definition. Not to get all Clinton on you, but if you volunteer to be tracked, are offered specific benefits in return for the tracking, knowingly accept the tracking in return for the benefits, is it really "SPY"Ware?
Am I spying on you if I follow you around with a camera while wearing a bright orange suit to make it obvious I'm there, asking your permission each morning to follow you, and handing you a $5 bill every day you say "yes"? Sure, I'm completely destroying every modicum of privacy you have, but I'm not spying on you. Spying implies some sort of surreptitiousness or concealment, and Google's pretty open about what they collect and what they do with it, and what you get in return.
Americans have come to expect a right to privacy in their personal lives, and that's good. When that right is violated against our will, we get all honked off and protest in righteous moral indignation, and that's also good. But when that right is knowingly sold by an individual, well, that's a really grey area. And we all know that the nature of the Internet assures that everything delivered to you is tracked back to the destination (or it couldn't be delivered), so I think we as a nation are becoming more aware that the whole "privacy on the Internet" thing was a comfortable lie we told ourselves.
Google is a for-profit company, with one goal. To make money. In order to make money, they want you to sell them your privacy in return for nifty tools. Some people are taking the stance (right or wrong) that their privacy on the Internet is largely being taken from them anyway, so they might as well get something in return.
"And if I'm going to have my privacy violated, dammit, I might as well get a share of the profits."
Is this noble and just and the American Way? I dunno. I know the tools are handy, and I know what kind of data I'm coughing up to get them. I'm relatively comfortable with the arrangement. For now.
I think the issue goes deeper than CPM.
If you get someone to use this as their daily computer and load something that can track their every move (not just on the Web, but how much time they spend in a spreadsheet, on Thunderbird, on IM, etc), you can build a really valuable profile on them that goes FAR beyond simple google-analytics tracking or web ad responses.
You can start building predictable behavior models for a significantly large population.
That is data you simply cannot buy today.
Experiments like this have been tried in the past, all to end in failure, but that's because something like this requires REALLY cheap hardware (the costs model being so low that you don't care that half of your freebie customers are hacking the hardware and taking out your stuff or using it as a specific-purpose machine, because the remaining half are using the systems for everything exactly as you intended). The data, if it can be gathered successfully, makes the hardware cost look cheap by comparison.
Armed with this data, Google could start predicting with pretty creepy accuracy what the response rate is going to be to a particular campaign. Then they can start charging a higher CPM for ALL of their advertising, because they can do what no one else in the industry is able to do. Guarantee a specific response rate based on a carefully-crafted campaign, that is crafted based on good models of how people act in real life.
Under the current model, an advertiser approaches Google and says "we want to advertise this new vehicle". Google gets info on the vehicle and charges a CPM for sending hopefully relevant clicks through to the automaker's page.
With the new data model in place and populated, the advertiser approaches Google and says "we want to sell 5,000 automobiles". Google can charge a flat rate per actual sale, which they can predict based on these models. They'll not only be able to predict clickthrough rates, but have a fair shot at actual sales.
And this is not only the people who participated - they would in theory use google-analytics surfing data for the entire websurfing population combined with the models they've build based on the people they track to predict behavior for a much larger population.
So, for example, they come out with a new ad for the "Ford Monopole", a hypothetical electric car. The looks appeal to a subset of their tracked population that are into certain TV shows, search for certain movies on IMDB, and get emails from people who are into similar things. Use the analytics data from those TV shows' web sites to determine fans of the show/movie, and you can target campaigns to those people.
Yes, advertisers do this today, but this could bring it to a whole new level, because they'll know which cars their tracked population actually bought and what factors led up to that decision. Then they can extrapolate that out to the larger population for which they have less complete data.
Creeped out yet?
So you get one of these, use it just for Gmail, and block Google from even being accessed on your main machine(s). What the hell, it's free. :)
I don't know if it would be a profitable proposition for Google, but I'd get one of these little buggers in a second. I'd do my Gmail, my Google Earth, my Google Voice, my Facebook, etc on it. Then I'd have a REAL machine that I'd do my finances and other sensitive stuff on.
Money?
The government buries wires, and someone comes along and says "I want to lay my own wires at my expense but using your negotiated right-of-way. I will pay a monthly fee for access to the right-of-way, and I will pay for the installation and upkeep of the wires."
Example: I work for a company that has 5 buildings in a modest-sized town. We cannot run our own cable between our buildings because we don't own the contiguous land between the buildings. The local telco refuses to sell or even rent us dark fiber. So we pay for bandwidth, to the tune of many thousands of dollars a month.
If the government owned the rights-of-way, we could simply negotiate to run the ~15 miles of dark fiber we needed right on the existing poles, and they'd be ours, and we'd have all the bandwidth we could possibly want.
Another example: If I want to start an ISP, I could rent time on the government's wire as I start up, then if I get big enough I could simply rent space in the government's right-of-way. Or if I found a better way to reach my customers (wireless, whatever) I'd simply move on.
Rights-of-way are one of those things that a government is good at, and can be considered a public good. Making a private partnership where the private company owns and profits from the wires and the government subsidizes and lines and controls the amount of profit is sort of the worst of both worlds. It's not privatized, it's a regulated monopoly.
Currently taxpayers have already paid for this, sometimes multiple times over, and the money ends up vanishing along with the latest snake oil salesman company that takes the money then spins the responsibilities off.
If the government does it directly, they can at least bid the work out and know they are paying the lowest possible cost to get stuff done.
And, yes, I know that there is graft in the bidding process, etc etc. But we have that today, and we depend on the government to regulate a monopoly who owns the assets by proxy.
If the government owns the lines, we have competition on what can be sent over those lines, with a fixed cost model for any competitors that ensures the infrastructure is maintained and improved, rather than paying a company to promise to deliver and walking away with the money.
And if some clever lad or lass comes up with a better way to get the information where it needs to go, there's no need to talk about interfering with the regulated monopoly. Because there isn't one. If you want to use the wires, you pay to use the wires. If you find a better way, you use a better way.
Sure, it's a crime. But the whole difference between "person as a person" and "corporation as a person" is that a corporation can change bodies and still live.
If a company wants to use the government poles and easements, they could theoretically pay the government for them - at a much lower cost than they'd pay to use the government's own wires.
I mean, that's basically what we're doing today by subsidizing private companies to do it, except we're generally not getting what we are paying for.
The government isn't the most efficient vehicle by far for getting tasks done, but to accomplish a common good that has already been paid for multiple times with no delivery, I think it's high time to try a different approach. Continuing to pay private companies then have the company spin the responsibilities off to a paperco to die once they've spent the money on something else is getting old. And expensive. And frustrating.
Or sell the division to a sucker who can't figure out that they will fail, like the recent sale of the landlines in New England to FairPoint.
Though, in this case, FairPoint was so obviously unprepared, it showed in their business plan as submitted to the PUC (fuel and labor costs won't go up for 5 years, yet you haven't prepurchased fuel nor have you finished negotiations with the Union. They won't go up. Really?).
But, point taken. Verizon got a LOT of money to put better phone lines and Internet access in to rural areas. None of it ever happened. FairPoint walks in, agrees to all of the conditions Verizon was paid for, submits a business plan based on some alternate reality where money is free and Internet connections grow like marshmallows on magical faerie trees, and declares Chap 11 within a year. Wow, surprise surprise!
The subsidies should be paid after the services are available, not before, and should be paid to the people who managed to turn it on. Once subsidies are involved then everyone should be able to use the connection, with the telco allowed to reclaim their costs and make a reasonable profit on those portions of the infrastructure that were not covered under subsidy (company can accept a 50% subsidy, for example, and is allowed to charge competitors a higher rate based on the fact that the company paid for half of the wiring, but once you accept subsidies you must also accept competition).
Or we need a "public option" for Internet access. Instead of the government paying private companies to put in lines then forcing those private companies to allow access to the wires, simply have the government put in the wires and charge anyone who wants to use them. Then if a company thinks they can put in their own wires more cheaply, let 'em, and the company can do with those wires as they wish since no government money went into them. As long as the government has wires everywhere, competition will be available and no one can declare a monopoly, but if a company can do it cheaper than the government they are free to do so.
Does that mean nukes will now have a new label on them?
"Best if used to initiate Global Armageddon by December 12, 2054"
You had me right up until "just to discredit them".
Microsoft clearly was concerned that Frame would add to the possible attack vectors into IE. They've certainly said as much. And that is a valid concern, frankly. Due to that concern, they had their research team test for security vulnerabilities in Frame, obviously with particular focus on ones that could compromise a Windows system.
And, whaddya know, they found one.
Now, if they were trying to discredit Google, the first place they'd go is (MS)NBC and put out headlines "Google Chrome Frame Has a security breach! Look at those losers!"
Instead, we see an announcement from Google that they have a patch for the defect, and acknowledging Microsoft as having found the bug and reported it to them.
Sounds to me like Microsoft was acting out of enlightened self-interest, and is demonstrating good team-playing skills by telling Google about it in enough detail for Google to come out with a fast fix.
Kudos to Microsoft for extending their security research beyond their own software and to external sources they might consider a threat. Further kudos to Microsoft for reporting the issue to Google with enough detail to make a fix possible, without exposing it to the black hats so this never became a zero-day attack.
Kudos to Google for getting a fix out there quickly. Further kudos to Google for having the respect to acknowledge Microsoft's contribution.
I'd say this is a perfect example of vendors being good players in the security arena, and respectful competitors.
To clarify, I was responding to this point of yours:
"See I could tell you to take off runway 7, which in itself would be harmless, however , the glitch comes from the same software that told the other air traffic controller that it was ok to use runway 7 to land"
If you told me to take off on RWY7, you would be an Air Traffic Controller. Your software (if you used any) would be contained within the tower. It is not Flight Planning software, it is Flight Operations software.
The article make absolutely no mention of a failure of Flight Operations software.
A failure of Flight Operations software could be a safety issue, I agree, but that's not what the article said went wrong.
If you want to change the subject to Flight Ops software, fair enough, let's go through those procedures if you're interested in learning how it works.
OK, so say the Flight Ops software went out.
The traffic pattern is set in such a way that controllers can predict where the airplanes will be and can track them on RADAR. They'll also immediately withdraw any takeoff clearances to reduce their workload, and call Flight Services and tell them to divert every inbound flight to their alternate airports.
If RADAR goes out, they'll use binoculars and the radio to control landing traffic. Pilots know they need to fly at 500 foot increments in a series in the pattern and work their way down the stack. Again, you've got a stack of planes all in predetermined flying ovals, so you can take the bottom planes in the stack (those at Traffic Pattern Altitude), land that queue in order, then tell everyone to slowly move down a rung in the ladder. Lather, rinse, repeat until no planes are in the air.
If the radio goes out, they have handheld directional bright lights they can use to signal the aircraft what to do. Any incoming aircraft will not get a response from ATC and get back on the horn with Flight Services for a priority divert to another airport. Any planes above the lowest rung will contact Flight Services for departure instructions and will continue to fly in predictable circles at a set altitude until they get instructions.
If the batteries on the lights go out, the pilots in the lowest rung will fly over the runway at traffic pattern altitude, and exit the tower control area safely so they can get back in touch with Flight Services for a priority divert to an airport that is working.
Pilots spend a crapload of time learning all this stuff. If Air Traffic Control goes away completely, we know to stay in predictable patterns and what those patterns look like.
No, if you read some of my other posts I already stated that this outage did NOT mean Flight Planning was down. It meant that flight plans could not be submitted automatically.
Flight Planning was not, in fact, down during this incident. It was severely delayed because the Flight Plans could not be submitted automatically and the manual process takes longer. However, I was making the point that Flight Planning is NOT involved in Flight Operations (Air Traffic Control, and Flight Services) and a theoretical failure in Flight Planning could not, in any way, impact the safety of Operations.
You may believe as you wish, but if you aren't even going to read an explanation of how the aviation system works as explained by a licensed pilot, then, well, you can remain ignorant. Makes no difference to me.
PS: You are confusing "Air Traffic Control" and "Flight Services" with "Flight Planning". They are three separate entities.
An "Air Traffic Controller" is a person (or multiple people) sitting in a tower or other control area. They have one primary job - to make sure planes don't smack into each other while in their domain. They sequence takeoffs and landings, taxiing, etc.
ATC has absolute and utter control within their domain. If a Controller tells you to jump, you start jumping then ask "how high?" on the way up. Any aircraft wishing to enter their little fiefdom has to ask permissions.
"Flight Services" controls flights that are at altitude and flying outside an ATC area. They are basically a Controller, but without landing and takeoff responsibilities.
A Controller is not told by Flight Services to allocate a runway to a flight. If a Flight Services agent called from 1000 miles away and tried to tell a Controller what runway to use, that Controller would undoubtedly (and rightfully) hang up on the Flight Services agent, probably after offering a few choice expletives. There is nothing Flight Services can say to a Controller that could affect operations at that Control Tower in any way.
In the same way, Flight Services is not told exactly where a plane should fly by Flight Planning. They are advised which way the plane WANTS to go, but they decide where the plane ACTUALLY goes, and they can tell a pilot to deviate from a flight plan any time they please to maintain separation and safety.
The reason I can't imagine a failure in Flight Services affecting the safety in Control or Services is simple - there isn't any way it could. Flight Planning does not include any traffic separation services. That's the responsibility of the people with the RADAR screens and radios in front of them, in Control and Services.
Planning is only there as a "gatekeeper" to help prevent the skies from getting too crowded, and if they get delayed planes don't take off until they can coordinate the flights properly.
A failure in Planning doesn't mean all planes will suddenly get clearance, a failure means planes stay safely on the ground.
The system works like this:
1. Pilot works with Ground or calls Flight Services and files a Flight Plan. Flight Plan includes:
- Airport you are taking off from (A).
- Airport you intend to land at (B).
- Airports you will use as a "contingency" if things go badly (C,D,etc).
- What routes you intend to use to get from A to B.
This allows Flight Services to figure out how many airplanes will be at altitide in different areas at any given time so they can control congestion enroute, and also attempt to control congestion at destinations (so 200 planes aren't approaching Atlanta all at once).
If Flight Planning is down, Flight Plans cannot be filed.
2. Pilot contacts Tower for clearance, and if the flight requires a Flight Plan the Tower checks to make sure the Flight Plan is approved before deciding to allocate a runway to the flight.
The Flight Plan is only a "deny" reason for a takeoff. The Tower can sometimes use it to decide from multiple runways if they have space (more efficient for the plane to take off in a direction that resembles its final course) but that is at the discretion of the controller. The controller is coordinating all takeoffs and landings, and will not give takeoff clearance without a flight plan if one is needed (for a lot of flights, flight plans are not required). They will deny takeoff clearance for a lot of other reasons, including delaying it if the runway is in use.
So, again, if Flight Planning is down, flight plans cannot be filed therefore flight plans cannot be approved therefore takeoff clearance is not granted.
3. The pilot takes off under Tower Control. They fly at a given course designed to maintain separation until they can turn and get on their route. At all times, a controller is directing their operations, and that controller is responsible for separation and safety. The Flight Plan is only used at that time to determine what direction the plane is headed when they leave the Tower Controlled area.
Again, if a Flight Planning is down the takeoff that led to this never happened.
4. Once the airplane leaves the Tower Control area, the Tower hands them off to Flight Services. Flight Services is aware of the flight plan, but doesn't really need it. They use RADAR and the defined airways to maintain positive control and separation of aircraft. The plan is handy, as it allows them to predict which way a plane will turn once it reaches a certain point, but they'd know this by talking to the pilot anyway.
5. As the plane approaches their destination, Flight Services hands them off to the Tower and usually closes their flight plan at that time. The Tower in the destination airport, just like the Tower in the originating airport, is an independent entity that accepts the aircraft under their control and puts them in queue for landing.
At no point does the Flight Plan become relevant in assigning runways for takeoff or landing, nor is it ever relevant (except for helpful supplemental information) in traffic separation.
And even if it was, if Flight Planning suffered a complete failure, NO PLANES WOULD TAKE OFF. You can't have a midair collision when no planes are, well, in the air.
LOL, good point.
Let me refine that: Not an FAA safety issue.
FTFM (Fixed That For Myself).
The TSA, on the other hand, might consider it a wee bit of a safety issue.
Agreed, if you're inside a structure all bets are off, and also agreed that AT&T's maps are far from perfect. Never claimed they were. Heck, given the relative quality of phones (antenna effectiveness, radio quality, etc), they couldn't possibly be.
My point is that the maps are based on completely different criteria. AT&T is at least making the attempt to say "this area should have working signal", and not "I have towers in this general area" like Verizon does.
But Verizon's maps clearly show "coverage" in very large areas where the nearest tower is many miles out of range and signal is simply impossible. So it's disingenuous to compare even just the 3G maps, they are based on different data.
You can add the term "outdoors under decent conditions" to a caveat on AT&T's map, that's perfectly reasonable. I don't think AT&T would actually be expected to go into every individual building to verify coverage. I think if they did they'd probably be arrested.
I expect they are simply extrapolating signal based on tower height and surrounding terrain. Imperfect, but more accurate than splashing red over an entire county because you have a tower there.
Personally, I live in a house with aluminum siding, so no cell phones of any kind work inside my house, ever. Well, maybe if you get near a window. Nice 3-4 bar signal outside, but to use the phones inside I needed to get a repeater.
I also work in a very large warehouse building, and I have line-of-sight to a window but very low/unusable signal (so do the Verizon phones). Our building is covered in both maps, because there's good 5-bar signal outside with both companies. We just need to repeat it indoors. Someday...
In any case, actual coverage depends on the specific area you're in. AT&T is pretty good around here, though they have a few more dead zones than Verizon does. They even have 3G at my house, which is relatively rural - not that I really care since I have an EDGE phone.