Some students have filed a complaint to the FCC, under the reasoning that Georgia Tech's policy interferes with licensed Amateur Radio (part 97) operations. (Amateurs are licensed users of the ISM bands, and the FCC tends to get upset when third parties interfere with their licensees.)
I don't think any sort of ruling has come down from the FCC yet, but they did express interest in the situation.
Note that 200 mph is on the rather high end of personal aircraft.
Typical performance is 130-140 mph for a light single engine plane. A Cessna 172 generally carries about 4-5 hours of fuel depending on the tanks.
I'm a little worried about this new license. I think it's great that more people will have access to airplanes; this will be very good for general aviation in terms of numbers. My main concern is that the training for the private pilot license (40 hours minimum with various other requirements) is just barely enough to produce a reasonably safe pilot, even for a lowly Cessna 152. Even around the 100 hour mark I was still scaring myself from time to time, wih poorly executed landings, weather run-ins, and so forth. (I'm now at 230 hours with an instrument rating, so things are somewhat better; but that's a lot of time, and I'm still keenly aware of the possibility for things to go wrong.)
It's true that a light sport plane can't do much damage to its surroundings; in most cases, a crash would have no more damage potential than a car accident. I'm sure that many pilots will get this license and enjoy years of safe flying. I'm equally sure that a lot of people who probably shouldn't be flying will get this license and attempt to push the limits of these planes, occasionally with fatal results.
The Dreamcast contains a Hitachi SuperH 4 CPU and a graphics processor developed by PowerVR. The SH4 has many similarities to the ARM, but has very a strong floating point unit (for instance, it's possible to combine blocks of floating point registers for very efficient matrix operations).
Yes, martial arts classes help. As a student of kung fu for about half a year, I feel much safer when I walk around Los Angeles.
But it has nothing to do with fighting. If I were attacked, I really don't think I'd be in any state of mind to actually fight the attacker. If you get in a fight (or get mugged) in the first place, you've already lost the fight to a large degree.
I feel safer because I'm much stronger, have better posture, and am more alert than I was before I started. As a result, I am less likely to be mugged in the first place.
Unless you're a very experienced martial artist, to the point that strikes and blocks are a subconscious reflex, you are NOT going to be able to win against a group of random attackers. That is a very dangerous illusion that is likely to result in much greater injury than just giving the muggers what they want and taking a minor beating. Forget about heroism, unless you want to die.
You're absolutely right that this isn't a flaw in the STL. My point is simply that it's extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot like this with C++. There are lots of things you absolutely shouldn't do (assume references remain valid after certain events), but unfortunately a lot of them are rather convenient and won't cause a noticeable failure 99% of the time. And when it does happen, the source of the problem may be extremely difficult to trace.
C++ is a powerful language with many useful features, but I'll be dancing on the rooftop when something better comes along. It is a mound of progressive hacks (vis: the fact that the 'typename' keyword exists) that has gained a certain level of maturity but also a significant, and not always completely necessary, amount of complexity.
STL has definitely made C++ more useful, and it's currently the language I used for work as well as my hacking on the side. Unfortunately, I don't believe C++ can realistically be as safe as C#, Java, or ML.
assert( &farkle != NULL );// see, it's valid! farkle.do_something();
*boom*
In the actual situation, it was a pointer to an object in the vector, not a reference, and the vector was being added to throughout a large chunk of code. The reference makes the bug even more subtle.
(The reason this is bad is that pushing objects onto a vector causes the vector to reallocate. This took a long time to track down because it was not initially obvious that I had a pointer to an object stored in a vector, and I had no idea why my object was slowly being trashed as the memory was randomly reused.)
The pilot was not wrong. The presence of a system that would shoot down passenger aircraft facing a legitimate emergency is absolutely intolerable. Any large aircraft flying near that protected area is on radar with a uniquely identifiable transponder code and a filed flight plan.
Pilots *have* to be able to make arbitrary decisions in the interest of safety at the last minute without fear of being second guessed by anyone. (Of course the FAA might ask for an explanation on the ground.) One several instances I've broken off approaches that I considered unsafe, and if anything had interfered with my choice of heading or altitude, I could very easily be dead. Trying to think ahead of the aircraft doesn't work too well if the aircraft suddenly decides it doesn't like where you're going and refuses to obey.
Even flying with an ordinary autopilot can be kind of strange sometimes, and that does nothing but fly pre-determined headings and hold altitude. A nice tool, but very importantly one that is easy to disable in an instant.
I'm afraid that such a system would make pilots more hesitant to respond to emergencies during takeoff and landing, for fear of making the problem worse by getting in a battle with the computer. Until you've been in a tense situation involving aircraft control, you have no idea of what it's like and just how far you have to push yourself. Thankfully I haven't been in many, but I've seen enough that there's no chance in hell I'm getting on an airplane with this kind of system, as pilot or as passenger.
They started blocking port 25 a few weeks ago, with no notice. I had to scramble to find a new host for my mail server. (I insist on running my own, period.)
Tech support was unhelpful. They told me that I was violating their terms of service by running even a personal mail server, and that the port block was likely to be permanent. Although I had a strong urge to scream obscenities into the phone and cancel my account, I don't have many other options for fast Internet access.
Speakeasy DSL would be great, but I would have to pay for a phone line in addition to Speakeasy's service, which would come out over $100/month.
Recently I've learned to write 3ds max plugins, and a good 3/4 of the time I spend is just trying to get around in max. The actual 3d handling code (C++) is really simple to deal with.
Point being, 3d modelling is Hard, and I would expect any reasonably capable 3d modeller to be difficult to learn, even with a well designed UI.
Blender doesn't necessarily have a horrible UI. It's just a targetted one, meant for power users who need fast access to a lot of functionality. Not to say it couldn't be improved.
I really don't think CW will ever leave the air. There is something amazing and compelling about two people thousands of miles away communicating at a fairly decent speed using only simple switches and a very small amount of power.
I only wish my Morse skills were better, but I'm working on it.
The concept of "pilot in command" is extremely important in the FAA's rulebook, and is hard set in aviation culture. It's very simple; one person in the cockpit is the pilot in command (PIC), and he or she is directly, completely, and personally responsible for anything that happens to that plane while it is in the air.
The FAA's rules also clearly state that, in an emergency, the PIC is authorized to do anything necessary to take care of the emergency, even if it breaks every other rule in the book. For instance, if my engine failed and there was no civilian airport in range, I could legally land on a city street or a military airstrip, fly through restricted airspace, override ATC commands, etc.
So what happens if my engine fails, I need to get to an airport on the other side of a major city, and that city is "protected"? Suppose I have just enough altitude to get there at my best glide rate. Will the airplane override my inputs and resist my approach over the city?
What happens if "soft barriers" prevents the pilot from safely responding to a systems malfunction? A lot of flight does occur over dense urban areas (the final approach to Santa Monica airport passes just a few hundred feet over some downtown towers). Who is responsible for the non-optimal response: the pilot in command, or the soft barriers system?
"Oh, but that'll never happen," one might respond. Go to the NTSB's aircraft accident report site and read some reports. Aircraft are complex mechanical devices, and they can and do fail all the time, often in subtle and bizarre ways.
As a pilot, I won't get anywhere near a plane with "soft barriers", even as a passenger.
Transcoding (AAC -> OGG, for instance) is lossy. Whether or not it is acceptably lossy is a matter of personal taste. However, it is ridiculous that there should be *any* loss at all; I've paid for the music, so I should be able to listen to it with any software I choose, without losing quality.
Besides, burning to CD and re-importing is a pain. Is there a good, technological reason why I shouldn't be able to download music directly into my server's/usr/local/media tree? I'm an engineer. That sort of artificial inefficiency bugs me, especially when it doesn't even accomplish its intended purpose.
That analogy is flawed. DRM is more like Best Buy sending a security guard home with you to make sure you don't use the products you buy in any way they don't approve of. For instance, I can play CD's I purchase in any number of players, copy them to my various computers, enjoy them on my portable player, and so forth. My music server is a Linux box, though; I cannot use it to play DRM-encumbered music, because Apple has not chosen to make Linux software available for their protection scheme. That's their prerogative, but it means that their music isn't terribly useful to me.
I applaud Apple's effort to be reasonable, but DRM is still unacceptable. I wrote a short essay on why I believe this; it's on my site.
Furthermore, sharing is a fundamental part of experiencing music. I believe that noncommercial song swapping should be fully protected under copyright law.
Aircraft sometimes use AM radio stations as navigation beacons (ADF). This is one of the reasons radio stations are required to identify themselves on a regular basis. ADF could very easily be thrown off by a nearby oscillator, such as that in a portable AM receiver. Even though the signal emitted by the receiver is weak, it is much closer to the aircraft's antenna than the station on the ground, and can therefore cause a considerable amount of interference. Not good, especially if you're in instrument conditions and can't navigate by visual references!
See the timeline on one of the mirrors of Acidus' site. He has had extensive discussions with the university, and was mostly blown off. The director of the BuzzCard network was afraid for his job, and tried to discredit Acidus.
I ported ROTT to Mac OS X after icculus and relnev got it up and running on Linux. OS X itself was not a problem; byte order proved to be a huge headache, since many of the game's data structures were stored directly in the WAD file in little endian (Intel) format.
It can and probably will be done, but it'll take some effort.
Is there much a determined radio amateur couldn't jam?
It rarely happens on purpose. Causing intentional harmful interference is a big no-no in amateur radio. It's against the spirit of the hobby, and quite illegal in most places. Among other things, the amateur radio rules require a specific receiving party; you can't just transmit garbage for no reason.
That said, part 15 devices must accept harmful interference from properly licensed non-15 devices. If a receiver can't handle a nearby signal from a device operated legally under part 97 (with proper identification, power output, receiving end, etc), too bad. Get a better receiver or petition the FCC to open up more frequency space to unlicensed low-power devices. I think that's the real solution.
The problem is that Microsoft refuses to honor the part of their own EULA that says customers are entitled to a refund for the OS if they do not agree to the terms of the license.
Time synchronizing FHSS transmitters to use the entire spectrum also happens to defeat one of the main purposes of FHSS, which is to reduce multipath problems by changing frequencies before a second path reaches the receiver. I would expect that technique to result in a lot of interference.
What good is music if you can't get random bits of it stuck in your head, or select a track from your library to lighten your mood after a lousy day? And how can you possibly do that if there is a time limit on a CD? The same argument applies to movies.
I can see how this might be useful for DVD rentals (but still rather wasteful, error-prone, and inflexible), but otherwise there's no way I'd ever spend money on a time-limited disc.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think any sort of ruling has come down from the FCC yet, but they did express interest in the situation.
-John
Note that 200 mph is on the rather high end of personal aircraft.
Typical performance is 130-140 mph for a light single engine plane. A Cessna 172 generally carries about 4-5 hours of fuel depending on the tanks.
I'm a little worried about this new license. I think it's great that more people will have access to airplanes; this will be very good for general aviation in terms of numbers. My main concern is that the training for the private pilot license (40 hours minimum with various other requirements) is just barely enough to produce a reasonably safe pilot, even for a lowly Cessna 152. Even around the 100 hour mark I was still scaring myself from time to time, wih poorly executed landings, weather run-ins, and so forth. (I'm now at 230 hours with an instrument rating, so things are somewhat better; but that's a lot of time, and I'm still keenly aware of the possibility for things to go wrong.)
It's true that a light sport plane can't do much damage to its surroundings; in most cases, a crash would have no more damage potential than a car accident. I'm sure that many pilots will get this license and enjoy years of safe flying. I'm equally sure that a lot of people who probably shouldn't be flying will get this license and attempt to push the limits of these planes, occasionally with fatal results.
-John
The Dreamcast contains a Hitachi SuperH 4 CPU and a graphics processor developed by PowerVR. The SH4 has many similarities to the ARM, but has very a strong floating point unit (for instance, it's possible to combine blocks of floating point registers for very efficient matrix operations).
-John
Yes, martial arts classes help. As a student of kung fu for about half a year, I feel much safer when I walk around Los Angeles.
But it has nothing to do with fighting. If I were attacked, I really don't think I'd be in any state of mind to actually fight the attacker. If you get in a fight (or get mugged) in the first place, you've already lost the fight to a large degree.
I feel safer because I'm much stronger, have better posture, and am more alert than I was before I started. As a result, I am less likely to be mugged in the first place.
Unless you're a very experienced martial artist, to the point that strikes and blocks are a subconscious reflex, you are NOT going to be able to win against a group of random attackers. That is a very dangerous illusion that is likely to result in much greater injury than just giving the muggers what they want and taking a minor beating. Forget about heroism, unless you want to die.
-John
You're absolutely right that this isn't a flaw in the STL. My point is simply that it's extremely easy to shoot yourself in the foot like this with C++. There are lots of things you absolutely shouldn't do (assume references remain valid after certain events), but unfortunately a lot of them are rather convenient and won't cause a noticeable failure 99% of the time. And when it does happen, the source of the problem may be extremely difficult to trace.
C++ is a powerful language with many useful features, but I'll be dancing on the rooftop when something better comes along. It is a mound of progressive hacks (vis: the fact that the 'typename' keyword exists) that has gained a certain level of maturity but also a significant, and not always completely necessary, amount of complexity.
-John
Grrr, /. stripped out the template type on the vector.
STL has definitely made C++ more useful, and it's currently the language I used for work as well as my hacking on the side. Unfortunately, I don't believe C++ can realistically be as safe as C#, Java, or ML.
// see, it's valid!
Here's an example that bit me badly a while back:
vector foo;
foo.push_back( baz );
foo.push_back( qux );
obj& farkle = foo.back();
foo.push_back( cwert );
foo.push_back( spqr );
assert( &farkle != NULL );
farkle.do_something();
*boom*
In the actual situation, it was a pointer to an object in the vector, not a reference, and the vector was being added to throughout a large chunk of code. The reference makes the bug even more subtle.
(The reason this is bad is that pushing objects onto a vector causes the vector to reallocate. This took a long time to track down because it was not initially obvious that I had a pointer to an object stored in a vector, and I had no idea why my object was slowly being trashed as the memory was randomly reused.)
-John
Why?
The pilot was not wrong. The presence of a system that would shoot down passenger aircraft facing a legitimate emergency is absolutely intolerable. Any large aircraft flying near that protected area is on radar with a uniquely identifiable transponder code and a filed flight plan.
Pilots *have* to be able to make arbitrary decisions in the interest of safety at the last minute without fear of being second guessed by anyone. (Of course the FAA might ask for an explanation on the ground.) One several instances I've broken off approaches that I considered unsafe, and if anything had interfered with my choice of heading or altitude, I could very easily be dead. Trying to think ahead of the aircraft doesn't work too well if the aircraft suddenly decides it doesn't like where you're going and refuses to obey.
Even flying with an ordinary autopilot can be kind of strange sometimes, and that does nothing but fly pre-determined headings and hold altitude. A nice tool, but very importantly one that is easy to disable in an instant.
I'm afraid that such a system would make pilots more hesitant to respond to emergencies during takeoff and landing, for fear of making the problem worse by getting in a battle with the computer. Until you've been in a tense situation involving aircraft control, you have no idea of what it's like and just how far you have to push yourself. Thankfully I haven't been in many, but I've seen enough that there's no chance in hell I'm getting on an airplane with this kind of system, as pilot or as passenger.
-John
(yes, IAAP)
Amen.
They started blocking port 25 a few weeks ago, with no notice. I had to scramble to find a new host for my mail server. (I insist on running my own, period.)
Tech support was unhelpful. They told me that I was violating their terms of service by running even a personal mail server, and that the port block was likely to be permanent. Although I had a strong urge to scream obscenities into the phone and cancel my account, I don't have many other options for fast Internet access.
Speakeasy DSL would be great, but I would have to pay for a phone line in addition to Speakeasy's service, which would come out over $100/month.
-John
Recently I've learned to write 3ds max plugins, and a good 3/4 of the time I spend is just trying to get around in max. The actual 3d handling code (C++) is really simple to deal with.
Point being, 3d modelling is Hard, and I would expect any reasonably capable 3d modeller to be difficult to learn, even with a well designed UI.
Blender doesn't necessarily have a horrible UI. It's just a targetted one, meant for power users who need fast access to a lot of functionality.
Not to say it couldn't be improved.
-John
I really don't think CW will ever leave the air. There is something amazing and compelling about two people thousands of miles away communicating at a fairly decent speed using only simple switches and a very small amount of power.
I only wish my Morse skills were better, but I'm working on it.
-John
This is an absolutely dangerous idea.
The concept of "pilot in command" is extremely important in the FAA's rulebook, and is hard set in aviation culture. It's very simple; one person in the cockpit is the pilot in command (PIC), and he or she is directly, completely, and personally responsible for anything that happens to that plane while it is in the air.
The FAA's rules also clearly state that, in an emergency, the PIC is authorized to do anything necessary to take care of the emergency, even if it breaks every other rule in the book. For instance, if my engine failed and there was no civilian airport in range, I could legally land on a city street or a military airstrip, fly through restricted airspace, override ATC commands, etc.
So what happens if my engine fails, I need to get to an airport on the other side of a major city, and that city is "protected"? Suppose I have just enough altitude to get there at my best glide rate. Will the airplane override my inputs and resist my approach over the city?
What happens if "soft barriers" prevents the pilot from safely responding to a systems malfunction? A lot of flight does occur over dense urban areas (the final approach to Santa Monica airport passes just a few hundred feet over some downtown towers). Who is responsible for the non-optimal response: the pilot in command, or the soft barriers system?
"Oh, but that'll never happen," one might respond. Go to the NTSB's aircraft accident report site and read some reports. Aircraft are complex mechanical devices, and they can and do fail all the time, often in subtle and bizarre ways.
As a pilot, I won't get anywhere near a plane with "soft barriers", even as a passenger.
-John
Transcoding (AAC -> OGG, for instance) is lossy. Whether or not it is acceptably lossy is a matter of personal taste. However, it is ridiculous that there should be *any* loss at all; I've paid for the music, so I should be able to listen to it with any software I choose, without losing quality.
/usr/local/media tree? I'm an engineer. That sort of artificial inefficiency bugs me, especially when it doesn't even accomplish its intended purpose.
Besides, burning to CD and re-importing is a pain. Is there a good, technological reason why I shouldn't be able to download music directly into my server's
-John
That analogy is flawed. DRM is more like Best Buy sending a security guard home with you to make sure you don't use the products you buy in any way they don't approve of. For instance, I can play CD's I purchase in any number of players, copy them to my various computers, enjoy them on my portable player, and so forth. My music server is a Linux box, though; I cannot use it to play DRM-encumbered music, because Apple has not chosen to make Linux software available for their protection scheme. That's their prerogative, but it means that their music isn't terribly useful to me.
I applaud Apple's effort to be reasonable, but DRM is still unacceptable. I wrote a short essay on why I believe this; it's on my site.
Furthermore, sharing is a fundamental part of experiencing music. I believe that noncommercial song swapping should be fully protected under copyright law.
-John
Aircraft sometimes use AM radio stations as navigation beacons (ADF). This is one of the reasons radio stations are required to identify themselves on a regular basis. ADF could very easily be thrown off by a nearby oscillator, such as that in a portable AM receiver. Even though the signal emitted by the receiver is weak, it is much closer to the aircraft's antenna than the station on the ground, and can therefore cause a considerable amount of interference. Not good, especially if you're in instrument conditions and can't navigate by visual references!
-John
See the timeline on one of the mirrors of Acidus' site. He has had extensive discussions with the university, and was mostly blown off. The director of the BuzzCard network was afraid for his job, and tried to discredit Acidus.
I ported ROTT to Mac OS X after icculus and relnev got it up and running on Linux. OS X itself was not a problem; byte order proved to be a huge headache, since many of the game's data structures were stored directly in the WAD file in little endian (Intel) format.
It can and probably will be done, but it'll take some effort.
-John
Is there much a determined radio amateur couldn't jam?
It rarely happens on purpose. Causing intentional harmful interference is a big no-no in amateur radio. It's against the spirit of the hobby, and quite illegal in most places. Among other things, the amateur radio rules require a specific receiving party; you can't just transmit garbage for no reason.
That said, part 15 devices must accept harmful interference from properly licensed non-15 devices. If a receiver can't handle a nearby signal from a device operated legally under part 97 (with proper identification, power output, receiving end, etc), too bad. Get a better receiver or petition the FCC to open up more frequency space to unlicensed low-power devices. I think that's the real solution.
-John, KG4RUO
Except, for, oh... Apple's C compiler?
The problem is that Microsoft refuses to honor the part of their own EULA that says customers are entitled to a refund for the OS if they do not agree to the terms of the license.
-John
Though really it's less of a crime. When you don't stop at a stop sign, you endanger the lives of others. MP3 trading never killed anybody.
Just don't call it "unlimited internet", or it's false advertising.
-John
Time synchronizing FHSS transmitters to use the entire spectrum also happens to defeat one of the main purposes of FHSS, which is to reduce multipath problems by changing frequencies before a second path reaches the receiver. I would expect that technique to result in a lot of interference.
-John
What good is music if you can't get random bits of it stuck in your head, or select a track from your library to lighten your mood after a lousy day? And how can you possibly do that if there is a time limit on a CD? The same argument applies to movies.
I can see how this might be useful for DVD rentals (but still rather wasteful, error-prone, and inflexible), but otherwise there's no way I'd ever spend money on a time-limited disc.
-John