Excellent book by the way. After reading it, you'll never look at computer security the same way again, and may very well just switch to an Abacus with a box of crayons on top.
-As the google map flies, it's 289 miles from the D to the Big Mac. It's about 600 to NYC. (Although it is about the same distance from Detroit to Ironwood, MI, which sits on the Michigan / Wisconsin border. )
-Consumers Power handles most of the non-DTE grid space. DTE's western border is about 20 miles from Ann Arbor's west side
-During the Northeast blackout, plenty of (I dare say most of) the DTE grid went down. The cutoff was where the grids switched over in either Flint of Jackson. We were back online a little faster than most places, but we were down for 24+ hours.
The old screen saver became a breeding ground for people gaming the system in the name of cranking up their work unit totals. Their scientific vision suffered. The pretty screen saver was replaced by a framework that has been adopted by dozens of other projects that didn't have the wherewithal to create such a process on their own.
In terms of the ever famous slashdot-brand car analogy; You won't buy another Ford until they bring back the Pinto.
I remember reading (Apocryphal story alert.) that the Postmaster General (or Secretary of Veterans Affairs) was usually selected for this job, and they loved it. Usually it was an excuse to have a nice party offsite for the staff, but occasionally it meant a trip on Air Force One.
There was a great exchange (usually attributed to Hack Wilson) between a batter and umpire that eloquently describes the umpire's role in calling balls and strikes.
Wilson stepped to the plate and waited on the first pitch. He didn't swing, and the umpire called "strike." Wilson stepped back and said "That's a strike? Boy, you sure missed that one." The umpire didn't miss a beat and replied "I wouldn't have if I had your bat, Hack."
The strike zone is generally described as being the belt to the knees. When Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson broke into the majors, he brought an unorthodox batting stance that minimized the size of that space. (Picture a man standing in the batters box trying to touch his nipples to his knees, while simultaneously trying to scratch his butt by holding the bat over his shoulder.) Henderson's batting stance was so unorthodox and frustrating to some pitches that one major league pitcher threw his first pitch behind Henderson and barked at the umpire to "tell him to stand in there like a man."
The rules of baseball define the strike zone reasonably well. The practical interpretation is another matter...
There's medical research, then there's stem cell research. "Medical Research" into the next generation of viagra or lipitor is easy as pie to get funded. Drugs like that solve profitable problems, and don't piss off people with the "My Jesus is better than your Jesus" agenda.
I work for a top five engineering university. Our Biomed Engineering programs (which tend to lean more towards the "Med" side rather than the "engineering" side, but there's definite overlap) are having problems because the state politicians have decided to go sticking their noses into how research dollars can be spent re: stem cells. Prospective faculty are looking elsewhere, and existing research is having to walk a very fine line with the research they can do out of the very real fears that they'll have their funding pulled (or worse). It's a hamstring-ing that we didn't need.
I'm pretty convinced that if you could find a stem-cell based method of getting a 68 year old state senator a extra two inches of cock, or at least a regular hard-on, we'd have solid gold toilets and flying cars to carry us around campus by the end of the week. Instead we get bible thumpers that represent 500 people from West-Buttfuckia who pool together with like-lettered pals and get themselves convinced that unless they bravely throw themselves in front of us, we'll be shoving babies into blenders. Facts? Who needs them? My major donor's friend's pastor heard that stem cell research causes abortion rates to go up 783%!
At least some of those regulations, as they pertain to stem cell research, are put in place by a cadre of puppet^H^H^H bureaucrats who have been ordered to believe by their cash handler^H^H^H 'constituents' (wink wink) that STEM CELLS == MOAR ABORTIONS.
You're right about the heavy part. The problem is, 35kts is a heck of a gust, not a sustained wind. Even if they were correcting to one side or the other, when a strong wind gets that much mass moving in one direction, there's not much you're gonna do. It has been proven time and again that Newton's laws > an infinite number of "oh shit oh shit oh shit" utterances.
After looking at the pictures, it's not like the Brooklyn bridge just jumped out in front of the barge carrying the shuttle. It was transiting a fairly narrow bridge. The wingspan on the shuttle is 78 feet, and a google map distance measurement of where the shuttle clipped the bridge says the space they had to work with was about 100 feet, give or take. That means if you absolutely threaded the needle, you should have had 11 feet (That's about 3.3 meters for you folks unfamiliar with a proper unit of measurement =) ) to work with on either side of the bird. That seems like a lot, but on a windy day.....very touchy.
(if the link is jacked up, just go to JFK and work your way south east)
It looks like, from the pictures upthread, the shuttle hit the railroad bridge that sits between Cross Bay Blvd and JFK airport. I've ground handled large aircraft on the tarmac, and 11 feet is too close for comfort in my book. I don't envy the guys who had to try and make that work.
TL;DR The dirty bomb scanners at the port of Naples went ape shit over a container from Saudi Arabia. Turns out it was a container of scrap metal that an old radioactive element from a medical scanner had found its way into. Good times.
The apocryphal story is that of my old boss. When he started with my old employer (a medical testing lab) he was in the x-ray lab, and as such had to wear a radiation badge. After a while he began forgetting to take the badge off when he left for the day, and his walk home (always the same route) tended to take him past a couple of the busier streets. No big deal, since he'd just swap out his badge in the morning before starting a new shift. One morning he comes in and the lab is shut down, and everyone has their serious faces on.
Turns out the badge he'd turned in from the day before had come back as hot. Not the "bad badge" type of hot, but the "you were definitely exposed to a pretty solid dose of radiation" type of hot. Per protocol everything had to be shut down, tested, procedures reviewed, yadda yadda. In the end, everything in the lab tested fine, and his was the only bad badge found. Best guess was that a truck that went past him on his walk home that day was (knowingly or unknowingly) carrying something nasty.
There's a lot of pretty foul stuff out there. The boy scout who build his breeder reactor a few years ago used radium paint that he found when his gieger counter tripped when driving past an antiques store. One of the post Fukushima radioactivity scares in Tokyo was caused by stored bottles of radium paint that had been forgotten decades ago. We'll probably see more stories like this, and I don't feel that's a bad thing. When it comes to stuff like this, stuff that causes cancer (actually causes cancer. Not like Cell Phones or wifi.), fuck your civil liberties. Public health & safety wins, even if its getting bought in the name of fighting "the terrrrrer"
That is by far my favorite design. Great for letting loose in the office, and it's easily customizable. You can easily add ailerons with just a couple of scissor snips.
This is the best possible news for freedom in the here in the US. What? You want to cut off parts of the internet, why that would make us just like Iran! We can't have that! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph!
There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.
Grandparent has a decent point, but the fact that he whiffed on several key points detracts from his argument. No, the army doesn't have fighters. Also, No, the president can't declare war. You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect. Just as the president using the military as his personal pop-gun squad without the approval of the people (or more accurately, their elected representatives.) is incorrect. It's not that hard to double check something, especially here on ye olde intertubes. Doing so kinda fits with that whole "Do it right the first time" ethic that has died off in society these days.
If you want to make your point heard, don't run around screaming half-assed, half remembered sound bites. Make a simple, well thought out, perhaps even slightly researched point. It's harder to refute. You also find out interesting things like the fact that it costs a mere $2.5 million dollars per year to run the Allen Seti array (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/10/success-seti-array-back-on-track/), and that the government accounting office was estimating a cost of $412 million per unit for the F-22 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor#Production_and_procurement). So you could run the array for about 165 years on the cost of "one army fighter." 165 years vs. 1 year? Gosh, that argument just gained some interesting new perspective, and I did it without sounding like your drunk uncle who spent thanksgiving bleating out Rush Limbaugh's fascinating rhetoric and explaining how liberals are ruining the country.
Right, but you get the idea. Airlines would blame safety limits imposed by the FAA, when they had no intention of following the rule in the first place. It was a dodge.
They *need* to pad the time. For many years, airlines didn't have to report (or weren't affected by. I'm going totally apocryphal here so forgive the lack of citations) delays that were the fault of the airport / FAA. So, if a particular field could only handle 60 takeoffs per hour and they airline scheduled 75 (as was legal), those 15 flights that left "late" didn't get counted against on time performance, since it wasn't the airline that dictated how many aircraft could leave in a given window, it was the FAA. Neither did the 30 flights that left late the next hour, or the 60 after that, and so on.
I believe this game finally got stopped with the recent overhaul of rules regarding time spent on the tarmac. The New York airports were supposedly notorious for overbooking runway capacity. This would cause cascade effects throughout the system, since short haul flights would leave New York late ("not our fault") and get to say, Pittsburgh, late. They'd be late getting out of Pittsburgh ("again, not our fault"), and arrive in Chicago, late. So on and so forth until you had one flight that was late five times as it skipped across the nation. But it wasn't the airlines fault the plane was late. It was those mean old fuddy duddies at the FAA that made it a rule that an A310 can't take off 10 seconds after a 747 leaves La Guardia. *shrug* "Rules are rules."
Trendnet has a good supply of cameras as well. They're cheap, but I can say from experience the 110w, 121w, and 312w all do a perfectly decent job. They're not the best thing in the world, but they just work. Trendnet's "monitoring software" is crap however.
640 x 480 cameras don't get good faces. Even megapixel shots from any more than a couple feet away aren't that great. A better bet is to cover vehicle approaches. No one is going to steal your TV on foot, no one is going to loot ten minutes worth of your stuff on foot, and cops have a much better chance of spotting "Two white males 1998 red ford ranger with a dent on the left side of the bed" than they have of spotting "black male with a mustache and an earring in his left ear wearing a blue shirt." The guy in the shirt will have a chance to change shirts before the cops even show up at your door. The guys in the truck are going to use that truck in another break in.
In my experience, the two guys doing home invasions (one guy goes in, one guy keeps the car running and sits on lookout.) will hit a neighborhood a few times before things get hot. If you can ID the car, cops will have a *MUCH* better chance at nabbing the perps. I passed a couple frames I managed to get of a car that was involved at a break in near my home to the county sheriff. The cops were thrilled to have that more than a description, as it gave them a much narrower focus.
My beef with ZM was that it didn't support my cameras. Kinda my fault (and trendnet's for messing with mjpeg headers. I'm itching to upgrade to some AXIS cams soon), but I wasn't that impressed.
Motion capture is nice, but that seems to be a sticking point between cameras. Some of them do a great job, some of them really suck. They either trigger too late, too early, or the buffering gets the right thing at the wrong time. My trendnet cams support multiple profiles, so I do both on some cameras. 24/7 motion + scheduled during daylight hours. The motion trigger combined with a motion triggered flood light does a great job of snapping pictures of the neighbors cat.
My experience is mostly with the cameras. I've got a home "peek in" setup using cheap trendnet cameras. They've got some nice upside. The mjpeg image stream is easy to break out and put into a quick HTML page, they're cheap, they're reasonably reliable. The downsides are they're activex heavy for things like motion capture, and they're only 640 x 480. The overall trend with netcams seems to be cheap = 640 x 480, if you want megapixel, you're going to have to overpay.
In my setups, i completely ignore the prepackaged multi-camera monitoring software. It's crap from trendnet, and it's crap from most anyone else. I've tried Zoneminder, but it didn't like my cameras or the low horsepower box i gave it to run on. YMMV. For me, I say break out the java / whatever applet with a little HTML copy and paste and roll your own look-in. For monitoring I do scheduled records and motion triggered FTP uploads. Any NAS you buy will have an FTP server, and you can put the NAS wherever you want. One nice thing with the netcams is that you can usually turn the status LED on or off manually. Some of my cameras are off, but the ones covering entry points I make sure to leave on and blinking. I figure your eyes are drawn to light and motion. Someone sees the light, then sees camera and decides "mmmmmaybe the house next door is a better option....."
For the "real" security system, just buy one. It's easier to explain to your homeowners insurance, and you really have to balance out the whole "your time and effort vs. paying for a service" metric. You can roll your own, but the over the counter solutions and monitoring with a name brand can trump the solution you put together. There's nothing that says you *have* to buy their camera system, or put *their* monitors on all of your doors.
For your stuff (computer related anyway), PREY is the bomb. Easy to install, configure, runs on any desktop or most any handheld OS, and it's FOSS.
But at the end of the day, your stuff's still gone. Sorry. Your security system, at best, might help catch the assholes before they hit someone else. The MO, In our neighborhood anyway, seems to be that a couple guys come in from out of town. They stay with friends for a month or so, and stake out neighborhoods. They hit a few houses in a couple different neighborhoods over a couple weeks then *poof*. Back from whence they came, ready to fence stuff a couple hundred miles away that's already fallen off the local cops radar.
No, the shuttle shows us that government procured hardware is the most expensive imaginable. After all, when assembling components for the shuttle, the order of business seemed to be 1. Find congressional district where reusable components could be built 2. build them there 3. figure out how to get the stuff where it actually needed to be in the first place. 4. Jobs! I mean Re-election! Er.....Profit!
Musk is almost certainly talking out of his ass. I'll plunk down 500 grand to go to mars right after my Phantom game console shows up. That being said, of all the people trying to make space flight more of a private endevour that it has been in the past, Musk has his name on the very short list of people in the "put up" rather than "shut up" category. He's putting real shit into real orbit, not not dragging tourists up for glorified X-15 flights (no slight to the Virgin / Scaled composites gang, but they're not doing heavy lift at the moment, but what they're doing is Steerman bi-plane rides on a much more awesome scale.)
That particular run goes reasonably close to my house. The totally apocryphal explanation for those "tracks" was that Norfolk Southern, or whatever the iteration of the railroad was named at the time the development was planned, bought the rights to that land with the plan of bridging Ford Lake (why they would I have no idea. That'd be an expensive bridge at that point) and connecting to the auto plants (at the time GM Hydramatic and GM Willow Run Assembly), the Airport (Willow Run, with the idea of being a sort of intermodal hub) and the NS line just north of the airport that runs East - West.
In the end they backed out on cost and opted to serve both plants from the East - West line, even though it necessitated a longer trip to connect. (Incidentally, Amtrak will eventually own that stretch of line all the way from K-zoo to Detroit, adding to their longest continuous track track section outside of the Northeast corridor.) That ghost trail was also part of the line that crossed US-23. Not under, crossed. A two lane divided highway that at one point had a live rail crossing.
Interestingly, the http://www.historicaerials.com/ images don't show the 'ghost' trail until 1963. The 1955 images don't show anything. NS also owns property much closer to bridge road (take Textile west from Bridge, look to the right. You'll see a large section of land with NS branded 'no trespassing' signs).
I've always looked at the policies as a hedge against the *really* crappy knock-off electronic devices that spring up. Sure, the wifi on that super cheap android knock-off tablet is under 100mw....sure....
But for the most part, the FAA is in the business of blaming *someone* when something goes wrong. A reversal of the no electronic devices could someday potentially conceivable maybe result in them getting some share of the blame for an incident.
In the end, I just wish more people would act like adults when it comes to the policy. Yeah, it's kinda bunk, but there's a kernel of common sense in there. Seriously. Just shut your fucking iPad off for five minutes. Or your phone. Grow up, pay attention to your surroundings for fifteen minutes (The HORROR!) then go about your day. Quit acting like the NRA Lifers that think Obama is going to personally show up that their house to take away their guns when it comes to your damn cell phone.
Not to get too Apple fan boy-y, but Microsoft's investment wasn't *that* big.
It'd be like me covering rent for you and your girlfriend for a couple months, then fifteen years later saying I should be the godfather to your kids, because I'm the reason you got married and had kids. I may have helped at a critical point, but there's been a lot that's happened in the interim.
Slashdot Mirror
This technique is discussed in "Metasploit - The penetration testers guide" ( http://shop.oreilly.com/product/9781593272883.do )
Excellent book by the way. After reading it, you'll never look at computer security the same way again, and may very well just switch to an Abacus with a box of crayons on top.
Let's start with all the stuff you missed:
-As the google map flies, it's 289 miles from the D to the Big Mac. It's about 600 to NYC. (Although it is about the same distance from Detroit to Ironwood, MI, which sits on the Michigan / Wisconsin border. )
-Consumers Power handles most of the non-DTE grid space. DTE's western border is about 20 miles from Ann Arbor's west side
-During the Northeast blackout, plenty of (I dare say most of) the DTE grid went down. The cutoff was where the grids switched over in either Flint of Jackson. We were back online a little faster than most places, but we were down for 24+ hours.
The old screen saver became a breeding ground for people gaming the system in the name of cranking up their work unit totals. Their scientific vision suffered. The pretty screen saver was replaced by a framework that has been adopted by dozens of other projects that didn't have the wherewithal to create such a process on their own.
In terms of the ever famous slashdot-brand car analogy; You won't buy another Ford until they bring back the Pinto.
I remember reading (Apocryphal story alert.) that the Postmaster General (or Secretary of Veterans Affairs) was usually selected for this job, and they loved it. Usually it was an excuse to have a nice party offsite for the staff, but occasionally it meant a trip on Air Force One.
There was a great exchange (usually attributed to Hack Wilson) between a batter and umpire that eloquently describes the umpire's role in calling balls and strikes.
Wilson stepped to the plate and waited on the first pitch. He didn't swing, and the umpire called "strike." Wilson stepped back and said "That's a strike? Boy, you sure missed that one." The umpire didn't miss a beat and replied "I wouldn't have if I had your bat, Hack."
The strike zone is generally described as being the belt to the knees. When Hall of Famer Rickey Henderson broke into the majors, he brought an unorthodox batting stance that minimized the size of that space. (Picture a man standing in the batters box trying to touch his nipples to his knees, while simultaneously trying to scratch his butt by holding the bat over his shoulder.) Henderson's batting stance was so unorthodox and frustrating to some pitches that one major league pitcher threw his first pitch behind Henderson and barked at the umpire to "tell him to stand in there like a man."
The rules of baseball define the strike zone reasonably well. The practical interpretation is another matter...
There's medical research, then there's stem cell research. "Medical Research" into the next generation of viagra or lipitor is easy as pie to get funded. Drugs like that solve profitable problems, and don't piss off people with the "My Jesus is better than your Jesus" agenda.
I work for a top five engineering university. Our Biomed Engineering programs (which tend to lean more towards the "Med" side rather than the "engineering" side, but there's definite overlap) are having problems because the state politicians have decided to go sticking their noses into how research dollars can be spent re: stem cells. Prospective faculty are looking elsewhere, and existing research is having to walk a very fine line with the research they can do out of the very real fears that they'll have their funding pulled (or worse). It's a hamstring-ing that we didn't need.
I'm pretty convinced that if you could find a stem-cell based method of getting a 68 year old state senator a extra two inches of cock, or at least a regular hard-on, we'd have solid gold toilets and flying cars to carry us around campus by the end of the week. Instead we get bible thumpers that represent 500 people from West-Buttfuckia who pool together with like-lettered pals and get themselves convinced that unless they bravely throw themselves in front of us, we'll be shoving babies into blenders. Facts? Who needs them? My major donor's friend's pastor heard that stem cell research causes abortion rates to go up 783%!
Yeah, I'm bitter.
At least some of those regulations, as they pertain to stem cell research, are put in place by a cadre of puppet^H^H^H bureaucrats who have been ordered to believe by their cash handler^H^H^H 'constituents' (wink wink) that STEM CELLS == MOAR ABORTIONS.
You're right about the heavy part. The problem is, 35kts is a heck of a gust, not a sustained wind. Even if they were correcting to one side or the other, when a strong wind gets that much mass moving in one direction, there's not much you're gonna do. It has been proven time and again that Newton's laws > an infinite number of "oh shit oh shit oh shit" utterances.
After looking at the pictures, it's not like the Brooklyn bridge just jumped out in front of the barge carrying the shuttle. It was transiting a fairly narrow bridge. The wingspan on the shuttle is 78 feet, and a google map distance measurement of where the shuttle clipped the bridge says the space they had to work with was about 100 feet, give or take. That means if you absolutely threaded the needle, you should have had 11 feet (That's about 3.3 meters for you folks unfamiliar with a proper unit of measurement =) ) to work with on either side of the bird. That seems like a lot, but on a windy day.....very touchy.
https://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&geocode=&q=J+F+K+Airport,+New+York,+NY&aq=0&oq=JFK+&sll=40.639749,-73.824348&sspn=0.097239,0.057421&vpsrc=0&t=h&ie=UTF8&hq=J+F+K+Airport,+New+York,+NY&z=13&cid=17028024512003641840&iwloc=A
(if the link is jacked up, just go to JFK and work your way south east)
It looks like, from the pictures upthread, the shuttle hit the railroad bridge that sits between Cross Bay Blvd and JFK airport. I've ground handled large aircraft on the tarmac, and 11 feet is too close for comfort in my book. I don't envy the guys who had to try and make that work.
This made me think of think of a recent wired article
http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/10/ff_radioactivecargo/all/1
TL;DR The dirty bomb scanners at the port of Naples went ape shit over a container from Saudi Arabia. Turns out it was a container of scrap metal that an old radioactive element from a medical scanner had found its way into. Good times.
The apocryphal story is that of my old boss. When he started with my old employer (a medical testing lab) he was in the x-ray lab, and as such had to wear a radiation badge. After a while he began forgetting to take the badge off when he left for the day, and his walk home (always the same route) tended to take him past a couple of the busier streets. No big deal, since he'd just swap out his badge in the morning before starting a new shift. One morning he comes in and the lab is shut down, and everyone has their serious faces on.
Turns out the badge he'd turned in from the day before had come back as hot. Not the "bad badge" type of hot, but the "you were definitely exposed to a pretty solid dose of radiation" type of hot. Per protocol everything had to be shut down, tested, procedures reviewed, yadda yadda. In the end, everything in the lab tested fine, and his was the only bad badge found. Best guess was that a truck that went past him on his walk home that day was (knowingly or unknowingly) carrying something nasty.
There's a lot of pretty foul stuff out there. The boy scout who build his breeder reactor a few years ago used radium paint that he found when his gieger counter tripped when driving past an antiques store. One of the post Fukushima radioactivity scares in Tokyo was caused by stored bottles of radium paint that had been forgotten decades ago. We'll probably see more stories like this, and I don't feel that's a bad thing. When it comes to stuff like this, stuff that causes cancer (actually causes cancer. Not like Cell Phones or wifi.), fuck your civil liberties. Public health & safety wins, even if its getting bought in the name of fighting "the terrrrrer"
"Sad, sad world. Where's the next Steve Wozniak?"
Watching video's like this and saying to him or herself "I can do better than that!" then heading down to their work space and doing so.
That is by far my favorite design. Great for letting loose in the office, and it's easily customizable. You can easily add ailerons with just a couple of scissor snips.
This is the best possible news for freedom in the here in the US. What? You want to cut off parts of the internet, why that would make us just like Iran! We can't have that! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph! Harumph!
There's a fine line between "these pedantic assholes who get off on correcting people" and people who disagree with you and are therefore wrong.
Grandparent has a decent point, but the fact that he whiffed on several key points detracts from his argument. No, the army doesn't have fighters. Also, No, the president can't declare war. You might call it a pendantic asshole point when I say that we haven't gone to "war" in 70 years. But, calling every military action a "war" is incorrect. Just as the president using the military as his personal pop-gun squad without the approval of the people (or more accurately, their elected representatives.) is incorrect. It's not that hard to double check something, especially here on ye olde intertubes. Doing so kinda fits with that whole "Do it right the first time" ethic that has died off in society these days.
If you want to make your point heard, don't run around screaming half-assed, half remembered sound bites. Make a simple, well thought out, perhaps even slightly researched point. It's harder to refute. You also find out interesting things like the fact that it costs a mere $2.5 million dollars per year to run the Allen Seti array (http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/08/10/success-seti-array-back-on-track/), and that the government accounting office was estimating a cost of $412 million per unit for the F-22 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F-22_Raptor#Production_and_procurement). So you could run the array for about 165 years on the cost of "one army fighter." 165 years vs. 1 year? Gosh, that argument just gained some interesting new perspective, and I did it without sounding like your drunk uncle who spent thanksgiving bleating out Rush Limbaugh's fascinating rhetoric and explaining how liberals are ruining the country.
Right, but you get the idea. Airlines would blame safety limits imposed by the FAA, when they had no intention of following the rule in the first place. It was a dodge.
They *need* to pad the time. For many years, airlines didn't have to report (or weren't affected by. I'm going totally apocryphal here so forgive the lack of citations) delays that were the fault of the airport / FAA. So, if a particular field could only handle 60 takeoffs per hour and they airline scheduled 75 (as was legal), those 15 flights that left "late" didn't get counted against on time performance, since it wasn't the airline that dictated how many aircraft could leave in a given window, it was the FAA. Neither did the 30 flights that left late the next hour, or the 60 after that, and so on.
I believe this game finally got stopped with the recent overhaul of rules regarding time spent on the tarmac. The New York airports were supposedly notorious for overbooking runway capacity. This would cause cascade effects throughout the system, since short haul flights would leave New York late ("not our fault") and get to say, Pittsburgh, late. They'd be late getting out of Pittsburgh ("again, not our fault"), and arrive in Chicago, late. So on and so forth until you had one flight that was late five times as it skipped across the nation. But it wasn't the airlines fault the plane was late. It was those mean old fuddy duddies at the FAA that made it a rule that an A310 can't take off 10 seconds after a 747 leaves La Guardia. *shrug* "Rules are rules."
Out side of fuel bowsers, very little on the tarmac burns diesel. You're also in a heavily filtered aluminum tube. The air is cleaner inside than out.
On the plus side, once you're airborne, you get a higher dose of radiation, courtesy of the sun and a less effective magnetosphere.
Trendnet has a good supply of cameras as well. They're cheap, but I can say from experience the 110w, 121w, and 312w all do a perfectly decent job. They're not the best thing in the world, but they just work. Trendnet's "monitoring software" is crap however.
640 x 480 cameras don't get good faces. Even megapixel shots from any more than a couple feet away aren't that great. A better bet is to cover vehicle approaches. No one is going to steal your TV on foot, no one is going to loot ten minutes worth of your stuff on foot, and cops have a much better chance of spotting "Two white males 1998 red ford ranger with a dent on the left side of the bed" than they have of spotting "black male with a mustache and an earring in his left ear wearing a blue shirt." The guy in the shirt will have a chance to change shirts before the cops even show up at your door. The guys in the truck are going to use that truck in another break in.
In my experience, the two guys doing home invasions (one guy goes in, one guy keeps the car running and sits on lookout.) will hit a neighborhood a few times before things get hot. If you can ID the car, cops will have a *MUCH* better chance at nabbing the perps. I passed a couple frames I managed to get of a car that was involved at a break in near my home to the county sheriff. The cops were thrilled to have that more than a description, as it gave them a much narrower focus.
My beef with ZM was that it didn't support my cameras. Kinda my fault (and trendnet's for messing with mjpeg headers. I'm itching to upgrade to some AXIS cams soon), but I wasn't that impressed.
Motion capture is nice, but that seems to be a sticking point between cameras. Some of them do a great job, some of them really suck. They either trigger too late, too early, or the buffering gets the right thing at the wrong time. My trendnet cams support multiple profiles, so I do both on some cameras. 24/7 motion + scheduled during daylight hours. The motion trigger combined with a motion triggered flood light does a great job of snapping pictures of the neighbors cat.
My experience is mostly with the cameras. I've got a home "peek in" setup using cheap trendnet cameras. They've got some nice upside. The mjpeg image stream is easy to break out and put into a quick HTML page, they're cheap, they're reasonably reliable. The downsides are they're activex heavy for things like motion capture, and they're only 640 x 480. The overall trend with netcams seems to be cheap = 640 x 480, if you want megapixel, you're going to have to overpay.
In my setups, i completely ignore the prepackaged multi-camera monitoring software. It's crap from trendnet, and it's crap from most anyone else. I've tried Zoneminder, but it didn't like my cameras or the low horsepower box i gave it to run on. YMMV. For me, I say break out the java / whatever applet with a little HTML copy and paste and roll your own look-in. For monitoring I do scheduled records and motion triggered FTP uploads. Any NAS you buy will have an FTP server, and you can put the NAS wherever you want. One nice thing with the netcams is that you can usually turn the status LED on or off manually. Some of my cameras are off, but the ones covering entry points I make sure to leave on and blinking. I figure your eyes are drawn to light and motion. Someone sees the light, then sees camera and decides "mmmmmaybe the house next door is a better option....."
For the "real" security system, just buy one. It's easier to explain to your homeowners insurance, and you really have to balance out the whole "your time and effort vs. paying for a service" metric. You can roll your own, but the over the counter solutions and monitoring with a name brand can trump the solution you put together. There's nothing that says you *have* to buy their camera system, or put *their* monitors on all of your doors.
For your stuff (computer related anyway), PREY is the bomb. Easy to install, configure, runs on any desktop or most any handheld OS, and it's FOSS.
But at the end of the day, your stuff's still gone. Sorry. Your security system, at best, might help catch the assholes before they hit someone else. The MO, In our neighborhood anyway, seems to be that a couple guys come in from out of town. They stay with friends for a month or so, and stake out neighborhoods. They hit a few houses in a couple different neighborhoods over a couple weeks then *poof*. Back from whence they came, ready to fence stuff a couple hundred miles away that's already fallen off the local cops radar.
No, the shuttle shows us that government procured hardware is the most expensive imaginable. After all, when assembling components for the shuttle, the order of business seemed to be 1. Find congressional district where reusable components could be built 2. build them there 3. figure out how to get the stuff where it actually needed to be in the first place. 4. Jobs! I mean Re-election! Er.....Profit!
Musk is almost certainly talking out of his ass. I'll plunk down 500 grand to go to mars right after my Phantom game console shows up. That being said, of all the people trying to make space flight more of a private endevour that it has been in the past, Musk has his name on the very short list of people in the "put up" rather than "shut up" category. He's putting real shit into real orbit, not not dragging tourists up for glorified X-15 flights (no slight to the Virgin / Scaled composites gang, but they're not doing heavy lift at the moment, but what they're doing is Steerman bi-plane rides on a much more awesome scale.)
That particular run goes reasonably close to my house. The totally apocryphal explanation for those "tracks" was that Norfolk Southern, or whatever the iteration of the railroad was named at the time the development was planned, bought the rights to that land with the plan of bridging Ford Lake (why they would I have no idea. That'd be an expensive bridge at that point) and connecting to the auto plants (at the time GM Hydramatic and GM Willow Run Assembly), the Airport (Willow Run, with the idea of being a sort of intermodal hub) and the NS line just north of the airport that runs East - West.
In the end they backed out on cost and opted to serve both plants from the East - West line, even though it necessitated a longer trip to connect. (Incidentally, Amtrak will eventually own that stretch of line all the way from K-zoo to Detroit, adding to their longest continuous track track section outside of the Northeast corridor.) That ghost trail was also part of the line that crossed US-23. Not under, crossed. A two lane divided highway that at one point had a live rail crossing.
Interestingly, the http://www.historicaerials.com/ images don't show the 'ghost' trail until 1963. The 1955 images don't show anything. NS also owns property much closer to bridge road (take Textile west from Bridge, look to the right. You'll see a large section of land with NS branded 'no trespassing' signs).
I've always looked at the policies as a hedge against the *really* crappy knock-off electronic devices that spring up. Sure, the wifi on that super cheap android knock-off tablet is under 100mw....sure....
But for the most part, the FAA is in the business of blaming *someone* when something goes wrong. A reversal of the no electronic devices could someday potentially conceivable maybe result in them getting some share of the blame for an incident.
In the end, I just wish more people would act like adults when it comes to the policy. Yeah, it's kinda bunk, but there's a kernel of common sense in there. Seriously. Just shut your fucking iPad off for five minutes. Or your phone. Grow up, pay attention to your surroundings for fifteen minutes (The HORROR!) then go about your day. Quit acting like the NRA Lifers that think Obama is going to personally show up that their house to take away their guns when it comes to your damn cell phone.
Nope, Intel (rimshot)
Not to get too Apple fan boy-y, but Microsoft's investment wasn't *that* big.
It'd be like me covering rent for you and your girlfriend for a couple months, then fifteen years later saying I should be the godfather to your kids, because I'm the reason you got married and had kids. I may have helped at a critical point, but there's been a lot that's happened in the interim.