Even if you're just changing focus rather than the direction your eyes are pointing, you're looking away. There's very little information while driving which is so essential you can't flick your gaze away for a fraction of a second (you'd better be doing that anyway to check your mirrors). If traffic is that tight, you don't need to be looking at your speed, just stay with the flow. Your fuel gauge isn't going to suddenly leap from half-full to empty (if it does, you have other problems).
That said, a blinky light on the side mirror as a blind spot warning can't hurt, and maybe an unobtrusive but visible "master caution and warning" light could light up at the bottom of the windshield if some other instrument needs attention.
That said, for a fighter (or other high-performance aircraft) pilot who has to track multiple things simultaneously (where's the enemy? which weapons are armed, do they have a lock? what's my attitude after all this dogfighting?), a HUD is invaluable -- and said pilots are carefully selected and undergo a hell of lot of flight training and then a hell of a lot of training in using the HUD (and there's also an auditory component to that).
I used to think that a hands-free phone should be fine when driving, since I was used to a fair bit of radio chatter while flying a plane.
But there are significant differences: radio chatter while flying is about the flying -- you're giving or getting info about your flight from ATC, if you're in formation you're discussing with the other aircraft where everyone is relative to each other and what your about to do, etc. You're not having a discussion about Junior's day in school or what John and Mary are up to or the latest server crash at work. One keeps your attention focussed on flying, the other distracts you from proper driving: where's your head at?
The other thing is that driving in typical traffic you should be paying as close attention to what the other vehicles are doing as if you're flying in close formation with a bunch of other planes. The latter is unlikely except for a very few pilots under special circumstances, most of the time in a plane you're at least many seconds (or minutes) away from other aircraft or obstacles (except landing or takeoff -- and you're generally not talking to anyone outside the cockpit at that point unless they're feeding you info about it.)
The latter is why we've had autopilots on aircraft for decades but nothing much better than cruise control (about equivalent to a wing leveller in terms of percentage control) on cars -- most of the time planes are in a much simpler environment.
If you're driving a car under IFR rules there's something seriously wrong with you.
Sure, every pilot with some instrument training knows to trust the instruments when he can't see anything out the windows -- he also knows he's got ATC tracking him, helping him navigate and warning of other traffic or potential trouble (like t-storms).
If you're driving a car when you can't see out the windows you're a fucking loony, and a danger to everyone else out there. If you're relying on looking at the instruments (and hey, a GPS will work just fine in thick fog) instead of out the window, well, I just hope you run off the road quickly (oops, map was out of date) before you hit somebody else.
Original poster wasn't talking about IFR -- obviously there's no point looking out the window in that case (if you're in cloud, you couldn't even see the wingtip).
But you're not going to get a new pilot flying IFR, because it takes a while to get the training and experience needed for that rating. Thing is, because a new pilot doesn't have the experience to know what attitudes look like (where's the horizon on the window? which way is it tilted? what sound is the engine making? etc), he's tempted to keep checking the instruments... except that he hasn't figured out (at an intuitive level) all the interrelationships yet. He's looking at the attitude indicator to figure out if he's going up or down -- when he should be paying attention to the airspeed. He's focusing on "stepping on the ball" to coordinate his turns instead of looking out the window for that traffic he might be turning into and what the horizon is doing relative to the bug smear on the windshield.
Sure, you should be checking the panel periodically -- just like you should be checking the instrument panel periodically while driving -- but if you're VFR (and all driving is VFR, although with different minimums) you should be focussed on what the vehicle (and the others around it) is doing now (and about to do), not what the instruments are telling you it did a little while ago.
Mind, I was about ten at the time; it was being broadcast on CBC I think the year after it first aired on BBC.
About all I remember from it is a scene where they're crossing the desert, the TARDIS being carried in a wagon, and The Doctor supplies water to the party "collected from condensation on the inside walls", and the incredulity of the others who aren't aware that the TARDIS is smaller on the outside.
Also saw the first Dalek episodes when originally aired on CBC. Probably others too, but not as well remembered.
I kept wondering what geologic processes could produce such an even change in elevation.
It (along with eastern Colorado and much of the other great plains states/provinces) is an old sea bed, the floor of the central inland waterway in the mid/late Cretaceous. Flat from millions of years of sediments, tilted slightly from being pushed up as the continent drifts westward. (Dramatically so at the Rockies). The foothills of the Colorado Rockies do not "end just short of the border" at least not anywhere near I-70; it's pretty much flat east of Limon.
Florida probably is flatter, but the trees hide it. Kansas is mostly grassland (well, where it's not farms), so you have longer sight lines.
Telenet was a dial-up access packet-switched network (think X.25) back before internet access was a common thing, similar to rival company Tymnet. I spent many, many hours on Telenet back in the day, logged into BIX.
You probably meant telnet, the *nix app which has been around even longer. When internet access became publicly available, I'd telnet into BIX (while it lasted, sigh).
I guess it's time we forbid anyone under 25 to drive a car,
Car rental companies do exactly that.
Just because you were lucky enough to have hyperdeveloped frontal lobes at age 10 doesn't mean that most, or even on average, people do. Apparently you haven't quite reached the stage of not overgeneralizing from personal anecdote.
Heck, if IFR (I Follow Roads) is good enough for me, it should be good enough for anyone, right?
(One thing that struck me about several of the old Soviet Aeroflot planes I saw -- and flew on -- in Russia was the bomber-like downward looking windows in the cockpit. I don't know if that reflected the aircraft's original bomber roots or the fact that sometimes they did follow roads. My flight to Krasnoyarsk was diverted because of fog, for example. What, no autoland?)
Over and above all that, there are plenty of other components which relate to Air Traffic Control system, such as various navaids (VORs and such, although they're slowly losing favor to GPS), ATIS and D-ATIS info updates, ACARS messaging, METAR info, etc. Again, these may not be under the control of the current new system, but they should certainly be considered in any design for the future.
First, it has to get the data -- which covers everything from radar skin-paints if the aircraft transponder isn't operating, to unpacking the data that that transponder is sending (which could include anything from a simple 4-digit number to altitude, airspeed, heading, etc, etc.). Oh, and it has to raise appropriate alerts if that 4-digit number happens to be one of several special codes (indicating anything from voice-radio outage to a hijacking). There are plenty of other sources these days of location data too, (aircraft position/speed info relayed via satellite, for example) I don't know how many are integrated into this new system.
It has to present subsets of that data to particular controllers' displays, not every controller sees everything, even in a given range. That would be crazy-making. And controllers have to be able to hand off flights from one to another, so there's the whole UI, authentication, confirmation, etc, etc, there.
Naturally everything has to be recorded and logged, and queryable.
It has to project flight paths, and then analyze all that for possible intersections and raise appropriate warnings.
It also needs to be aware of airspace limitations -- which are frequently updated -- so that information can be displayed to controllers too. So there's another UI, to input those changes, along with the authorization, authentication, etc for that. Ditto with severe weather -- so it needs input from weather radars, etc.
It has to be able to cope with sudden changes to the system, like if an airport or ATC center suddenly drops out for some reason. (Weather, power failure, earthquake, terrorist, whatever.)
The distributed nodes in the system (airports and flight control centers) have to be able to communicate with each other with minimal latency and despite node failures, cable cuts, microwave tower outages, etc, etc.
The finished system has to be deployed across hundreds (thousands?) of flight centers and airports big and small (basically, almost anyplace with a tower) across the country in a way that it all works with the in-place systems everywhere else. There has to be room in those airports and flight control centers (most flight control centers are not in airports, BTW, there's no need for them to be. The controllers aren't looking out the windows. Airport ground control (the guys controlling aircraft taxiing) and approach/departure control is.)
No, this is not just a souped-up iPhone track-your-flight app. It's something responsible for the lives of millions of air travellers (not to mention air cargo flights) a year.
This is actually a little-known third experiment that's part of the launches. They're perfecting the material to make Elon Musk's super-villain lair out of.
All the engines on the Falcon 9 (and just about every other multiengine* rocket stage) are fed from the same propellant and oxidizer tanks. Giving them separate tankage just adds weight and plumbing complexity.
In the Falcon Heavy, there is a cross-feed mechanism from the outrigger 9s to the core so that the core can keep burning when the outriggers jettison (saving weight).
*(except multiengine solids, where the engine is the fuel tank.)
DC-X also did it, several times -- but then DC-X wasn't trying to make even a fraction of orbit, it was proving the vertical takeoff and landing principle. Its engines (modified Pratt & Whitney RL-10s) could be more deeply throttled than the Falcon's Merlin, and it (the DC-X) was built fairly heavy to start with, since was designed as a test vehicle rather than a launcher (fully-fueled the legs couldn't hold its weight, it needed a support structure for takeoff -- and in an abort (happened once) it had to hover until it had burned off enough fuel to land).
Since then a number of small-company-built test vehicles have done the same, although not (afaik) to the tens of thousands of feet altitudes that the latter DC-X flights made.
One would think that if they didn't know that the shuttle's boosters are made of inch-or-more-thick steel, while the Falcon's tanks are millimeter thick aluminum-lithium. And that the booster splashdown still tended to leave the boosters slightly out of round (which contributed to the problem Challenger had).
The extra fuel almost certainly weighs less than the necessary parachutes would.
"Memory architecture" -- you mean data structures?
As the title of my old intro CS text put it, "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". Yep, one is clearly going to influence the other, and sometimes a minor tweak in one will vastly simplify (or complicate, if you do it wrong) the other.
Refactoring isn't merely reformatting -- a prettyprinter can do that -- but it can help give you insight into the code. After getting the code right I like to refactor to see how much code or useless variables I can get rid of, but that's partly a hangover from my old APL one-liner days. (grin)
I could believe 10 kloc (kilo lines of code) functions being created by some front-end automated code generator (like a gui builder or parser generator, etc). If anyone is hand-coding 10 kloc functions they should be taken out and shot, or at least have their fingers broken so they don't do it again.
And while a multi-million-line class certainly seems excessive, that says nothing about how it's broken down into members and methods and inner classes.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess there's no chance in hell of him ever being nominated to the Supreme Court.
*sigh*
Even if you're just changing focus rather than the direction your eyes are pointing, you're looking away. There's very little information while driving which is so essential you can't flick your gaze away for a fraction of a second (you'd better be doing that anyway to check your mirrors). If traffic is that tight, you don't need to be looking at your speed, just stay with the flow. Your fuel gauge isn't going to suddenly leap from half-full to empty (if it does, you have other problems).
That said, a blinky light on the side mirror as a blind spot warning can't hurt, and maybe an unobtrusive but visible "master caution and warning" light could light up at the bottom of the windshield if some other instrument needs attention.
That said, for a fighter (or other high-performance aircraft) pilot who has to track multiple things simultaneously (where's the enemy? which weapons are armed, do they have a lock? what's my attitude after all this dogfighting?), a HUD is invaluable -- and said pilots are carefully selected and undergo a hell of lot of flight training and then a hell of a lot of training in using the HUD (and there's also an auditory component to that).
I used to think that a hands-free phone should be fine when driving, since I was used to a fair bit of radio chatter while flying a plane.
But there are significant differences: radio chatter while flying is about the flying -- you're giving or getting info about your flight from ATC, if you're in formation you're discussing with the other aircraft where everyone is relative to each other and what your about to do, etc. You're not having a discussion about Junior's day in school or what John and Mary are up to or the latest server crash at work. One keeps your attention focussed on flying, the other distracts you from proper driving: where's your head at?
The other thing is that driving in typical traffic you should be paying as close attention to what the other vehicles are doing as if you're flying in close formation with a bunch of other planes. The latter is unlikely except for a very few pilots under special circumstances, most of the time in a plane you're at least many seconds (or minutes) away from other aircraft or obstacles (except landing or takeoff -- and you're generally not talking to anyone outside the cockpit at that point unless they're feeding you info about it.)
The latter is why we've had autopilots on aircraft for decades but nothing much better than cruise control (about equivalent to a wing leveller in terms of percentage control) on cars -- most of the time planes are in a much simpler environment.
If you're driving a car under IFR rules there's something seriously wrong with you.
Sure, every pilot with some instrument training knows to trust the instruments when he can't see anything out the windows -- he also knows he's got ATC tracking him, helping him navigate and warning of other traffic or potential trouble (like t-storms).
If you're driving a car when you can't see out the windows you're a fucking loony, and a danger to everyone else out there. If you're relying on looking at the instruments (and hey, a GPS will work just fine in thick fog) instead of out the window, well, I just hope you run off the road quickly (oops, map was out of date) before you hit somebody else.
Original poster wasn't talking about IFR -- obviously there's no point looking out the window in that case (if you're in cloud, you couldn't even see the wingtip).
But you're not going to get a new pilot flying IFR, because it takes a while to get the training and experience needed for that rating. Thing is, because a new pilot doesn't have the experience to know what attitudes look like (where's the horizon on the window? which way is it tilted? what sound is the engine making? etc), he's tempted to keep checking the instruments ... except that he hasn't figured out (at an intuitive level) all the interrelationships yet. He's looking at the attitude indicator to figure out if he's going up or down -- when he should be paying attention to the airspeed. He's focusing on "stepping on the ball" to coordinate his turns instead of looking out the window for that traffic he might be turning into and what the horizon is doing relative to the bug smear on the windshield.
Sure, you should be checking the panel periodically -- just like you should be checking the instrument panel periodically while driving -- but if you're VFR (and all driving is VFR, although with different minimums) you should be focussed on what the vehicle (and the others around it) is doing now (and about to do), not what the instruments are telling you it did a little while ago.
Things have to get worse before they can get truly better, and who better to do that than the GOP?
Jimmy Carter is still alive, and eligible to run again.
How is a third party vote "wasted"?
If you voted for the person who won, you wasted your vote -- they would have won without it, and you didn't send them any messages.
If you voted for the major party candidate who lost, you wasted your vote because he lost, and again you didn't send any message.
Voting third party is the only way not to waste your vote.
Ha, I've seen the Marco Polo serial.
Mind, I was about ten at the time; it was being broadcast on CBC I think the year after it first aired on BBC.
About all I remember from it is a scene where they're crossing the desert, the TARDIS being carried in a wagon, and The Doctor supplies water to the party "collected from condensation on the inside walls", and the incredulity of the others who aren't aware that the TARDIS is smaller on the outside.
Also saw the first Dalek episodes when originally aired on CBC. Probably others too, but not as well remembered.
Treason has a certain specific legal definition, which this doesn't quite meet.
What it does meet is a failure to uphold their oathes of office, about defending the constitution.
Considering that birds are considered avian dinosaurs (the non-avian dinosaurs went extinct), it's a good bet that they (dinos) do taste like chicken.
But you're going to need two strong arms to lift that drumstick!
Also for sterilizing stuff. Cheap autoclave.
Of course it's all pre-sterilized disposables these days. Can you even buy glass Petri dishes ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H baby bottles any more?
I kept wondering what geologic processes could produce such an even change in elevation.
It (along with eastern Colorado and much of the other great plains states/provinces) is an old sea bed, the floor of the central inland waterway in the mid/late Cretaceous. Flat from millions of years of sediments, tilted slightly from being pushed up as the continent drifts westward. (Dramatically so at the Rockies). The foothills of the Colorado Rockies do not "end just short of the border" at least not anywhere near I-70; it's pretty much flat east of Limon.
Florida probably is flatter, but the trees hide it. Kansas is mostly grassland (well, where it's not farms), so you have longer sight lines.
Telenet was a dial-up access packet-switched network (think X.25) back before internet access was a common thing, similar to rival company Tymnet. I spent many, many hours on Telenet back in the day, logged into BIX.
You probably meant telnet, the *nix app which has been around even longer. When internet access became publicly available, I'd telnet into BIX (while it lasted, sigh).
I guess it's time we forbid anyone under 25 to drive a car,
Car rental companies do exactly that.
Just because you were lucky enough to have hyperdeveloped frontal lobes at age 10 doesn't mean that most, or even on average, people do. Apparently you haven't quite reached the stage of not overgeneralizing from personal anecdote.
Heck, if IFR (I Follow Roads) is good enough for me, it should be good enough for anyone, right?
(One thing that struck me about several of the old Soviet Aeroflot planes I saw -- and flew on -- in Russia was the bomber-like downward looking windows in the cockpit. I don't know if that reflected the aircraft's original bomber roots or the fact that sometimes they did follow roads. My flight to Krasnoyarsk was diverted because of fog, for example. What, no autoland?)
Over and above all that, there are plenty of other components which relate to Air Traffic Control system, such as various navaids (VORs and such, although they're slowly losing favor to GPS), ATIS and D-ATIS info updates, ACARS messaging, METAR info, etc. Again, these may not be under the control of the current new system, but they should certainly be considered in any design for the future.
First, it has to get the data -- which covers everything from radar skin-paints if the aircraft transponder isn't operating, to unpacking the data that that transponder is sending (which could include anything from a simple 4-digit number to altitude, airspeed, heading, etc, etc.). Oh, and it has to raise appropriate alerts if that 4-digit number happens to be one of several special codes (indicating anything from voice-radio outage to a hijacking). There are plenty of other sources these days of location data too, (aircraft position/speed info relayed via satellite, for example) I don't know how many are integrated into this new system.
It has to present subsets of that data to particular controllers' displays, not every controller sees everything, even in a given range. That would be crazy-making. And controllers have to be able to hand off flights from one to another, so there's the whole UI, authentication, confirmation, etc, etc, there.
Naturally everything has to be recorded and logged, and queryable.
It has to project flight paths, and then analyze all that for possible intersections and raise appropriate warnings.
It also needs to be aware of airspace limitations -- which are frequently updated -- so that information can be displayed to controllers too. So there's another UI, to input those changes, along with the authorization, authentication, etc for that. Ditto with severe weather -- so it needs input from weather radars, etc.
It has to be able to cope with sudden changes to the system, like if an airport or ATC center suddenly drops out for some reason. (Weather, power failure, earthquake, terrorist, whatever.)
The distributed nodes in the system (airports and flight control centers) have to be able to communicate with each other with minimal latency and despite node failures, cable cuts, microwave tower outages, etc, etc.
The finished system has to be deployed across hundreds (thousands?) of flight centers and airports big and small (basically, almost anyplace with a tower) across the country in a way that it all works with the in-place systems everywhere else. There has to be room in those airports and flight control centers (most flight control centers are not in airports, BTW, there's no need for them to be. The controllers aren't looking out the windows. Airport ground control (the guys controlling aircraft taxiing) and approach/departure control is.)
No, this is not just a souped-up iPhone track-your-flight app. It's something responsible for the lives of millions of air travellers (not to mention air cargo flights) a year.
This is actually a little-known third experiment that's part of the launches. They're perfecting the material to make Elon Musk's super-villain lair out of.
All the engines on the Falcon 9 (and just about every other multiengine* rocket stage) are fed from the same propellant and oxidizer tanks. Giving them separate tankage just adds weight and plumbing complexity.
In the Falcon Heavy, there is a cross-feed mechanism from the outrigger 9s to the core so that the core can keep burning when the outriggers jettison (saving weight).
*(except multiengine solids, where the engine is the fuel tank.)
DC-X also did it, several times -- but then DC-X wasn't trying to make even a fraction of orbit, it was proving the vertical takeoff and landing principle. Its engines (modified Pratt & Whitney RL-10s) could be more deeply throttled than the Falcon's Merlin, and it (the DC-X) was built fairly heavy to start with, since was designed as a test vehicle rather than a launcher (fully-fueled the legs couldn't hold its weight, it needed a support structure for takeoff -- and in an abort (happened once) it had to hover until it had burned off enough fuel to land).
Since then a number of small-company-built test vehicles have done the same, although not (afaik) to the tens of thousands of feet altitudes that the latter DC-X flights made.
One would think that if they didn't know that the shuttle's boosters are made of inch-or-more-thick steel, while the Falcon's tanks are millimeter thick aluminum-lithium. And that the booster splashdown still tended to leave the boosters slightly out of round (which contributed to the problem Challenger had).
The extra fuel almost certainly weighs less than the necessary parachutes would.
"Bad smell" is a (silly, I'd agree) term of art. You know it when you look at code, wrinkle up your nose and go "eww".
I just call it ugly code.
Hence the title of Wirth's book, Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. I think it was my second semester CS text (nigh on nearly forty years ago).
"Memory architecture" -- you mean data structures?
As the title of my old intro CS text put it, "Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs". Yep, one is clearly going to influence the other, and sometimes a minor tweak in one will vastly simplify (or complicate, if you do it wrong) the other.
Refactoring isn't merely reformatting -- a prettyprinter can do that -- but it can help give you insight into the code. After getting the code right I like to refactor to see how much code or useless variables I can get rid of, but that's partly a hangover from my old APL one-liner days. (grin)
I could believe 10 kloc (kilo lines of code) functions being created by some front-end automated code generator (like a gui builder or parser generator, etc). If anyone is hand-coding 10 kloc functions they should be taken out and shot, or at least have their fingers broken so they don't do it again.
And while a multi-million-line class certainly seems excessive, that says nothing about how it's broken down into members and methods and inner classes.