You can get plenty of non-hot-dog type food in the US. Your argument is bogus... you can get vegetarian meals here too.
I'm sure you can..but from what I saw of Orlando, it's not one of those places..
To all the rest of the posters - yes I know Florida is not representative and the US is a diverse country. BUT...I still stand by what I saw and experienced.
p.s. everyone disagrees with my comments about the food, but no-one has argued with those about the women !
p.p.s. I did a quick straw poll of my colleagues who have recently been to the US - all had horror stories about US immigration staff.
I've just come back from a two week holiday in the US - one week in Key Largo/Florida Keys and one week in Orlando. As a Subject of Her Majesty, let me make the following observations :
Food - rubbish. Trying to get anything that isn't a burger/hot dog/steak/fried chicken is impossible. God help you if you are a vegetarian. Listen, fresh vegetables are GOOD for you.
Women - seriously overweight/ugly. Ok nice teeth, but as for the rest...also, American woman : please read a fashion magazine now and then. There ARE other clothes apart from jeans/denim skirts.
Weather - ok, I'll give you this one.
People - on the whole friendly, except for the following : immigration staff [you CAN smile you know] and fast-food workers.
Ok, I enjoyed myself, but you have got to do something about the welcome [not] you receive when people visit the US on holiday. There are a lot of adverts running on TV in the UK at the moment persuading people to come to the US. Funny how they don't mention the 3 hour queues at immigration...
If any pilot takes off without obtaining accurate and timely weather information for his route and destination, he might as well spin the chambers of a loaded gun and take his chances.
Having to pay for good information is wrong, BUT, flying is expensive anyway - why not grumble and for the moment pay the extra ? - it may well be the difference between life and death.
Agreed - the main BBC news bulletins are getting 'fluffier' as the years go buy. ITN News is a shadow of its former self, and Five News is a joke.
At least with the Channel 4 News (50 mins at 7:00pm - how's that for brave scheduling ?), you will not be treated like a retarded 5 year old and the editor and presenters assume that the audience actually have a brain.
p.s. I do find the Channel 4 News a little bit too 'pro-Guardian viewpoint' but its still the best by a country mile.
To be pedantic, Branson doesn't pony up for those jets. A leasing company actually buys the jets from Airbus, via bank funding. The leasing company then leases the jets to Virgin Atlantic for a set time. Virgin doesn't actually own any of its aircraft.
If this is the same NHS that wastes money on novacaine 'shots' for people donating blood
I've given blood quite a few times over the years and I've NEVER heard of this, neither has my wife who is a experienced Nurse. Sometimes I think they put some anasthetic gel on the skin to eliminate some of the pain but that certainly isn't a shot.
p.s. 'shot' is an American phrase for an injection - in the UK I thought everyone called it a 'jab' or a injection.
When you are tired from working all day, and your little precious decides to run around the house rather than put her jammies on and go to bed, ANYTHING that will cause her to stop and calm down for 10-15 minutes is a god-send.
Hmmm...you mean like the Torpedo's in the Kursk, which used a technology the Navy stopped using as the risk of explosion of the propulsion system was too great ?
As for the sub fire, there is no final cause released yet, although there is some evidence of a second fire being caused by an oxygen canister igniting.
If you want to build a high-traffic web site application, you'll almost certainly need loads of money and time.
At the company I work for, we have re-built our entire web site system and internal systems over the last couple of years. We've gone from single processor compaq server with webapp and DB on one to a load-balanced multi-application server [all dual processor] with primary and backup oracle databases. Why - because our traffic [both paying and just visiting] was expanding dramatically all the time. At least now we have loads of headroom in the system to allow a decent level of growth and we can just drop in additional servers if required.
The only was to design this stuff is partially by planning and mainly testing. Ensure your application is lean. Ensure it will scale from one server to ten without any problems for users. Load-test the hell out of it. We used a bank of PC's running Grinder in the end and after a lot of effort, we found the major bottleneck. It required the ADDITIONAL investment of two VERY expensive XML/XLS->XML applications boxes to get round it.
To get back to my first comment, if you are going to do it properly, it is going to cost a lot of money [and save the usual open-source-is-free comments - if you are going to need some serious database capability for example, you are going to pay some serious money]. So if you're budget is insufficient, walk away from it.
In the UK, the EU Working Time Directive applies as follows:
a limit of an average of 48 hours a week which a worker can be required to work (though workers can choose to work more if they want to).
a limit of an average of 8 hours work in 24 which nightworkers can be required to work.
a right for night workers to receive free health assessments.
a right to 11 hours rest a day.
a right to a day off each week.
a right to an in-work rest break if the working day is longer than 6 hours.
a right to 4 weeks paid leave per year.
You can, if you wish, opt-out of this with your employer. In IT, there are occasions when you may have to work longer hours for some reason, so I agreed to opt-out. I don't mind doing some extra time now and then and anything more than a couple of hours at a stretch is rewarded with time off in lieu and free pizza.
If an employer tried to force people to work the hours EA Games allegedly does, they would soon find themselves under a blizzard of wrongful dismissal actions or worse.
I always remember going on a project management course, and the message that was drummed in was "If you have to schedule overtime into a project, you've already lost." If someone works 8 hours per day, maybe 5 of those are 100% productive time. If someone works for 12 hours, maybe only 7/8 are productive - so the overall productivity over time drops.
That article doesn't indicate that people are leaving to go to the Private Sector, althought I won't argue with the fact that they are leaving. Most I know of are just getting out of the NHS period.
As for your friend, she sounds incredibly lucky for a middle manager. My wife can't even get her Trust to recompensate her for the petrol she has to use to drive to the other Trusts Hospital location [ which is through mad traffic 10 miles away ] on a regular basis.
As for the choice of running Windows, thats what people are familiar with ! Why rip it out and put in Linux etc ? The money you would save would quickly be swallowed by horrendous training and maintenance costs. Also, remember that until the people are training up in the new apps, their productivity will nosedive, so their is a cost element also.
Believe me, I'm not happy that any of the money goes to Microsoft either, but its the only realistic choice.
p.s. As for your comment about hospital cleanliness, my wife read the new 'Matrons Charter'. It waffles on about hospital cleanliness but it means zip. Cleaning contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, normally a massive company. They supply the minimum of staff to the job and don't supervise the results. You can complain about cleaning standards, but you have no weapon; financial or personal, to effect change. The BEST thing to do would be to take cleaning in-house [no outsourcing] and provide proper staffing to do the job properly - the cleaners matter as much as any nurse/doctor/consultant etc - an important point which seems to have been lost by the new layers of management in the NHS.
>>GPs and other health workers that are leaving the NHS in their droves for the private health sector.
Where's your research for this statement? My wife is a Surgical Matron at a hospital with responsbility for four wards and a lot of staff. She hasn't lost ONE member of staff to the private sector.
The private sector is not everything is cracked up to be for medical professionals. The management is often poor, and professional development may be limited for Nursing Staff [not much point in specialising in A&E in a Private Hospital - there isnt any]. Consultants are invariably employed by the NHS and top-up their income with private work. Their is no way their is enough private work in the UK to pay the salaries of all the consultants.
My wife only got her own desktop pc in the last year. For the last 5 years before that she has had to ALL of her paperwork on our pc at home or else beg or borrow access to someone else's at work - and she STILL spent three hours on paperwork at home last night.
The NHS IT infrastructure has been neglected on a national level for years - at last something is [hopefully] being done to correct that failing.
Agreed - whilst the mission profiles are ultimately the same [launch, cruise, land/orbit, take measurements], there is a world of difference between a relatively short trip to mars with its known atmosphere/surface, and a trip to the outer gas giants, with multiple gravitational slingshots on the way, a seven year cruise, orbital insertion and then deploying a probe/lander into an almost unknown environment.
Re:I dont want to steal their thunder..
on
Titan's Alien Thunder
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I was under the impression that the camera package on Cassini has two cameras - one very long focal length [very small field of view] and one wider focal length with 10x the field of view of the other camera.
Yes, they are 1 megapixel chips, but you have to remember, the design for this started in 1990 and it was launched in 1997, so its not going to be up-to-the minute technology.
Also, if you are going to send a probe all of the way to Saturn, you want to cram as much instrumentation on board as you can whilst being constrained by weight, size, payload, fuel, electrical power etc. Sure Cassini is massive, but when is the next time we will send a probe to Saturn - 20 or 30 years in the future ? As for using ION Propulsion, Deep Space 1 wasn't launched until Oct 24th 1998 - that's a year after Cassini. I'm not an expert on this, but I always through Ion propulsion was for slow acceleration up to speed - Cassini needs manouvering and I presume slowing down to insert itself into orbit around Saturn - can ion propulsion produce such deacceleration ?
Finally, as for Huygens staying around on Titan, is the knowledge about the atmosphere pressure/density/temperature/wind speed or surface composition sufficient to plan for an extended stay ? If not, then surely plan for an exciting but short lifespan for the probe. If the atmosphere or surface is more benign than was thought, then future missions could be planned to stay longer.
Television programme 9-10 years ago
on
Titan's Alien Thunder
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I remember watching a television programme about 10 years ago in the UK about an Open University academic who was designing a penetrator for I think the Huygens probe. I remember that it was a probe to determine if they hit liquid or semi-liquid ground on the surface. The person in question was interviewed as hoping that it would get on the probe etc, be launched ok etc.
Sure enough, 10 odd-years later, that probe is now on the bottom [see ref ACC-E] of Huygens and may well be the first part of the spacecraft to touch the surface of Titan later this year.
I can't imagine the dedication involved in working on something that looks simple [but I am sure is not] and then waiting seven or more years to see if it ever works.
The lead on the team is a Professor John Zarnecki - I wonder if he remembers being interviewed [if it was him] by the BBC 10 years ago ?.
Central heating systems in the UK tend to use a gas boiler, fed from the main of a big bastard propane tank outside, to heat water to go either round the house and through radiators and/or heat up hot water via a heat exchanger.
The things you have to power would be the boiler itself [which will have valves etc and possibly an extractor fan], the pump for the heating circuit and valves for the heating circuit. Plus the control box.
The load isnt huge, but its not small either and nicely inductive.
In the UK, some hospital trusts cover the cost, some don't. Our local hospital wouldnt as my wife was over 35. Fair enough, its not a 'life-saving' treatment. So we paid 1200 pounds for the drugs and each attempt at IVF would have cost approx 3000 pounds. I was told that there was no profit in this for the hospital as such, it just covered the costs of the treatment and the people involved [all the money is paid back to the NHS in reality].
In the end, we were very lucky as my wife fell pregnant a week before she was due to start on the drug course - my 2 year old daughter is now playing in the next room.
My point ? I live in a country that HAS a Universal Medical System, paid for out of your taxes. IVF is available free of charge in some instances - I suppose one of the arguments for providing the service is that it assists in keeping the population growth up; it promotes research and development in the field of assisted conception and finally - for many childless couples it means an [albeit not guaranteed in any way] answer to their prayers.
Should IVF be available on insurance etc ? No I don't think so. Its a hard choice, but there is only a limited pot of money to go round, and IVF treatment is surely not a high priority for those funds.
One thing - $15,000 dollars for each IVF procedure, knowing that you may have to go through 3 or 4 ? Someone in making some SERIOUS money on this ! That kind of price makes DAMN sure that only the rich can have IVF - sickening.
The captain himself cited "too much faith" in technology (along with various other links in the accident chain) in some of his writings. There is still much controversy over the accident.
I'd certainly agree with that sentiment - whilst I do think the captain must accept some of the blame [his preparation appears to have been poor and legally he is in command and responsible for the aircraft and its passengers], the question of the aircrafts response to his control inputs hangs in the air. Having said that, I still think the post-crash environment ensured that his failings were highlighted whilst any supposed flight-control system failings were not given their due prominence.
As for your comment about a nose down command, according to the captain he was requesting up elevator, presumably to gain height. I don't have the information about whether he had sufficient engine thrust at the time to gain height with an increased angle of attack - it is possible that the flight systems countermanded his command and held the elevator position until the engine thrust/airspeed components were sufficient to allow the elevators to move upwards without a stall occurring - in that instance its hard to fault the software, its just protecting the aircraft from an unsafe condition. In a manual system, the stick-shaker is to advise of an imminent stall, but it doesn't prevent it. [I can remember doing stall-training in a piper cherokee - even in something that docile its amazing how fast the stall comes after the controls start to get mushy].
I'm not an expert in flight-control systems, they no doubt make aircraft safer, more fuel-efficient etc [for passenger aircraft anyway], but that accident may show an instance when fly-by-wire systems 'cautioness' may actively prevent getting out of trouble - after all the line between diaster and escape is often very thin. The A320's system is an incredible piece of engineering, but perhaps it tended to provide a security blanket - I would imagine any pilot flying that low and slow in a non fly-by-wire would be sweating buckets [if it were possible, which I doubt].
p.s. Thanks for a great discussion - very involving !
This points to an analysis of the findings of the crash investigation, the Captains version of events and subsequent independent investigations of the crash records and FDR information.
This analysis comments :
The official report clearly states that the engines performed to
specification. Asseline [Pilot-in-command] states that he did not get power as quickly as he
expected it, following the selection of TOGA thrust. According to
Asseline's timings, 9 seconds elapsed between the TOGA command and the
spool-up of the engines, instead of the 5 seconds that the engines are
physically capable of (and that the official report claimed). In addition,
the pitch control did not follow the pilot's commands.
and also this comment:
The controls were not following the commands of the pilot throughout
the flight, but during the last few seconds, the elevators moved towards a
position corresponding to nose down, although the captain was holding the
stick back.
was the one I picked up on originally.
There can be no doubt that the Captain was flying towards the edge of the flight envelope. However, there are still question marks over this accident and the investigation. Bear in mind that a conclusion that there may have been problems with the fly-by-wire software would have cost Airbus serious amounts of money in redesign, testing etc, not to mention possible loss of revenue. Also, Airbus is a standard-bearer for the industrial might of France - the possibility of pressure for a more 'favourable' intrepretation of events cannot be ruled out.
In the end, the whole incident may simply come down to too much faith in technology by everyone involved - a least some lessons will have learned from this incident.
I recall seeing a documentary on this a few years ago. They looked at the FDR outputs and comapared the time-lag between the pilots inputs and the control response.
Once the pilot realised he was making an arse of it [he was low and slow, even for a demo - he has passengers for god's sake], he requested TOGA [To-Go-Around if I'm correct] power from the engines and put some back pressure on the side-controller. The engines started to spool up [you can hear it on the video of the crash], but the elevators refused to respond for a number of seconds - the flight computers were in landing mode and as far as they concerned they saw an unsafe input. So they said 'Non'. By the time the elevators started to respond to the pilot input, he was in the trees and sadly, people died.
The best thing you can buy is a combined baby monitor/breathing alarm. I bought one the day my daughter was born and it paid for itself in no time, as it meant my wife and could sleep (when my daughter let us) without waking up to check on her every 10 mins. Try this company. Ok, its not a professional monitor, but it just might be the best money you have ever spent.
You will be too knackered anyway to so much as look at a computer, and your wife will take one look at your heath-robinson lash-up and demand you go and buy something that actually works.
I honestly don't know if those American plans still fly in the Iranian Air Force or not...
I didn't either, but this article would tend to indicate that they are indeed still flying.
After a bit of googling, I found some more material that, whilst not a subjective analysis, may indicate that some may still be combat effective. I presume the Iranian military wouldn't like to advertise the fact they are still operational, as I'm sure if hostilities commence between the US and Iran, those aircraft will be high-priority targets.
I'm sure however, that the U.S. Military knows EXACTLY how many are still flying and where they are.
Luckily [perhaps] that those various 'F's' will no longer be of any use, as the Iranians would not have been able to keep them running eventually due the lack of spares etc from the original manufacturers. An F-14 is less use than a pointed stick if its grounded due to a dead engine.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure you can..but from what I saw of Orlando, it's not one of those places..
To all the rest of the posters - yes I know Florida is not representative and the US is a diverse country. BUT...I still stand by what I saw and experienced.
p.s. everyone disagrees with my comments about the food, but no-one has argued with those about the women !
p.p.s. I did a quick straw poll of my colleagues who have recently been to the US - all had horror stories about US immigration staff.
Ok, I enjoyed myself, but you have got to do something about the welcome [not] you receive when people visit the US on holiday. There are a lot of adverts running on TV in the UK at the moment persuading people to come to the US. Funny how they don't mention the 3 hour queues at immigration...
If any pilot takes off without obtaining accurate and timely weather information for his route and destination, he might as well spin the chambers of a loaded gun and take his chances.
Having to pay for good information is wrong, BUT, flying is expensive anyway - why not grumble and for the moment pay the extra ? - it may well be the difference between life and death.
Agreed - the main BBC news bulletins are getting 'fluffier' as the years go buy. ITN News is a shadow of its former self, and Five News is a joke.
At least with the Channel 4 News (50 mins at 7:00pm - how's that for brave scheduling ?), you will not be treated like a retarded 5 year old and the editor and presenters assume that the audience actually have a brain.
p.s. I do find the Channel 4 News a little bit too 'pro-Guardian viewpoint' but its still the best by a country mile.
To be pedantic, Branson doesn't pony up for those jets. A leasing company actually buys the jets from Airbus, via bank funding. The leasing company then leases the jets to Virgin Atlantic for a set time. Virgin doesn't actually own any of its aircraft.
If this is the same NHS that wastes money on novacaine 'shots' for people donating blood
I've given blood quite a few times over the years and I've NEVER heard of this, neither has my wife who is a experienced Nurse. Sometimes I think they put some anasthetic gel on the skin to eliminate some of the pain but that certainly isn't a shot.
p.s. 'shot' is an American phrase for an injection - in the UK I thought everyone called it a 'jab' or a injection.
You obviously don't have any children then.
When you are tired from working all day, and your little precious decides to run around the house rather than put her jammies on and go to bed, ANYTHING that will cause her to stop and calm down for 10-15 minutes is a god-send.
would buy only German or Russian weaponry
Hmmm...you mean like the Torpedo's in the Kursk, which used a technology the Navy stopped using as the risk of explosion of the propulsion system was too great ?
As for the sub fire, there is no final cause released yet, although there is some evidence of a second fire being caused by an oxygen canister igniting.
At the company I work for, we have re-built our entire web site system and internal systems over the last couple of years. We've gone from single processor compaq server with webapp and DB on one to a load-balanced multi-application server [all dual processor] with primary and backup oracle databases. Why - because our traffic [both paying and just visiting] was expanding dramatically all the time. At least now we have loads of headroom in the system to allow a decent level of growth and we can just drop in additional servers if required.
The only was to design this stuff is partially by planning and mainly testing. Ensure your application is lean. Ensure it will scale from one server to ten without any problems for users. Load-test the hell out of it. We used a bank of PC's running Grinder in the end and after a lot of effort, we found the major bottleneck. It required the ADDITIONAL investment of two VERY expensive XML/XLS->XML applications boxes to get round it.
To get back to my first comment, if you are going to do it properly, it is going to cost a lot of money [and save the usual open-source-is-free comments - if you are going to need some serious database capability for example, you are going to pay some serious money]. So if you're budget is insufficient, walk away from it.
In the UK, the EU Working Time Directive applies as follows :
You can, if you wish, opt-out of this with your employer. In IT, there are occasions when you may have to work longer hours for some reason, so I agreed to opt-out. I don't mind doing some extra time now and then and anything more than a couple of hours at a stretch is rewarded with time off in lieu and free pizza.
If an employer tried to force people to work the hours EA Games allegedly does, they would soon find themselves under a blizzard of wrongful dismissal actions or worse.
I always remember going on a project management course, and the message that was drummed in was "If you have to schedule overtime into a project, you've already lost." If someone works 8 hours per day, maybe 5 of those are 100% productive time. If someone works for 12 hours, maybe only 7/8 are productive - so the overall productivity over time drops.
That article doesn't indicate that people are leaving to go to the Private Sector, althought I won't argue with the fact that they are leaving. Most I know of are just getting out of the NHS period.
As for your friend, she sounds incredibly lucky for a middle manager. My wife can't even get her Trust to recompensate her for the petrol she has to use to drive to the other Trusts Hospital location [ which is through mad traffic 10 miles away ] on a regular basis.
As for the choice of running Windows, thats what people are familiar with ! Why rip it out and put in Linux etc ? The money you would save would quickly be swallowed by horrendous training and maintenance costs. Also, remember that until the people are training up in the new apps, their productivity will nosedive, so their is a cost element also.
Believe me, I'm not happy that any of the money goes to Microsoft either, but its the only realistic choice.
p.s. As for your comment about hospital cleanliness, my wife read the new 'Matrons Charter'. It waffles on about hospital cleanliness but it means zip. Cleaning contracts are awarded to the lowest bidder, normally a massive company. They supply the minimum of staff to the job and don't supervise the results. You can complain about cleaning standards, but you have no weapon; financial or personal, to effect change. The BEST thing to do would be to take cleaning in-house [no outsourcing] and provide proper staffing to do the job properly - the cleaners matter as much as any nurse/doctor/consultant etc - an important point which seems to have been lost by the new layers of management in the NHS.
>>GPs and other health workers that are leaving the NHS in their droves for the private health sector.
Where's your research for this statement? My wife is a Surgical Matron at a hospital with responsbility for four wards and a lot of staff. She hasn't lost ONE member of staff to the private sector.
The private sector is not everything is cracked up to be for medical professionals. The management is often poor, and professional development may be limited for Nursing Staff [not much point in specialising in A&E in a Private Hospital - there isnt any]. Consultants are invariably employed by the NHS and top-up their income with private work. Their is no way their is enough private work in the UK to pay the salaries of all the consultants.My wife only got her own desktop pc in the last year. For the last 5 years before that she has had to ALL of her paperwork on our pc at home or else beg or borrow access to someone else's at work - and she STILL spent three hours on paperwork at home last night.
The NHS IT infrastructure has been neglected on a national level for years - at last something is [hopefully] being done to correct that failing.
Agreed - whilst the mission profiles are ultimately the same [launch, cruise, land/orbit, take measurements], there is a world of difference between a relatively short trip to mars with its known atmosphere/surface, and a trip to the outer gas giants, with multiple gravitational slingshots on the way, a seven year cruise, orbital insertion and then deploying a probe/lander into an almost unknown environment.
I was under the impression that the camera package on Cassini has two cameras - one very long focal length [very small field of view] and one wider focal length with 10x the field of view of the other camera.
Yes, they are 1 megapixel chips, but you have to remember, the design for this started in 1990 and it was launched in 1997, so its not going to be up-to-the minute technology.
Also, if you are going to send a probe all of the way to Saturn, you want to cram as much instrumentation on board as you can whilst being constrained by weight, size, payload, fuel, electrical power etc. Sure Cassini is massive, but when is the next time we will send a probe to Saturn - 20 or 30 years in the future ? As for using ION Propulsion, Deep Space 1 wasn't launched until Oct 24th 1998 - that's a year after Cassini. I'm not an expert on this, but I always through Ion propulsion was for slow acceleration up to speed - Cassini needs manouvering and I presume slowing down to insert itself into orbit around Saturn - can ion propulsion produce such deacceleration ?
Finally, as for Huygens staying around on Titan, is the knowledge about the atmosphere pressure/density/temperature/wind speed or surface composition sufficient to plan for an extended stay ? If not, then surely plan for an exciting but short lifespan for the probe. If the atmosphere or surface is more benign than was thought, then future missions could be planned to stay longer.
I remember watching a television programme about 10 years ago in the UK about an Open University academic who was designing a penetrator for I think the Huygens probe. I remember that it was a probe to determine if they hit liquid or semi-liquid ground on the surface. The person in question was interviewed as hoping that it would get on the probe etc, be launched ok etc.
Sure enough, 10 odd-years later, that probe is now on the bottom [see ref ACC-E] of Huygens and may well be the first part of the spacecraft to touch the surface of Titan later this year.
I can't imagine the dedication involved in working on something that looks simple [but I am sure is not] and then waiting seven or more years to see if it ever works.
The lead on the team is a Professor John Zarnecki - I wonder if he remembers being interviewed [if it was him] by the BBC 10 years ago ?.
Another email address : madhi_ray@hotmail.com
Warning : This MAY NOT be the right person...
Central heating systems in the UK tend to use a gas boiler, fed from the main of a big bastard propane tank outside, to heat water to go either round the house and through radiators and/or heat up hot water via a heat exchanger.
The things you have to power would be the boiler itself [which will have valves etc and possibly an extractor fan], the pump for the heating circuit and valves for the heating circuit. Plus the control box.
The load isnt huge, but its not small either and nicely inductive.
In the UK, some hospital trusts cover the cost, some don't. Our local hospital wouldnt as my wife was over 35. Fair enough, its not a 'life-saving' treatment. So we paid 1200 pounds for the drugs and each attempt at IVF would have cost approx 3000 pounds. I was told that there was no profit in this for the hospital as such, it just covered the costs of the treatment and the people involved [all the money is paid back to the NHS in reality].
In the end, we were very lucky as my wife fell pregnant a week before she was due to start on the drug course - my 2 year old daughter is now playing in the next room. My point ? I live in a country that HAS a Universal Medical System, paid for out of your taxes. IVF is available free of charge in some instances - I suppose one of the arguments for providing the service is that it assists in keeping the population growth up; it promotes research and development in the field of assisted conception and finally - for many childless couples it means an [albeit not guaranteed in any way] answer to their prayers.
Should IVF be available on insurance etc ? No I don't think so. Its a hard choice, but there is only a limited pot of money to go round, and IVF treatment is surely not a high priority for those funds.
One thing - $15,000 dollars for each IVF procedure, knowing that you may have to go through 3 or 4 ? Someone in making some SERIOUS money on this ! That kind of price makes DAMN sure that only the rich can have IVF - sickening.
I'd certainly agree with that sentiment - whilst I do think the captain must accept some of the blame [his preparation appears to have been poor and legally he is in command and responsible for the aircraft and its passengers], the question of the aircrafts response to his control inputs hangs in the air. Having said that, I still think the post-crash environment ensured that his failings were highlighted whilst any supposed flight-control system failings were not given their due prominence.
As for your comment about a nose down command, according to the captain he was requesting up elevator, presumably to gain height. I don't have the information about whether he had sufficient engine thrust at the time to gain height with an increased angle of attack - it is possible that the flight systems countermanded his command and held the elevator position until the engine thrust/airspeed components were sufficient to allow the elevators to move upwards without a stall occurring - in that instance its hard to fault the software, its just protecting the aircraft from an unsafe condition. In a manual system, the stick-shaker is to advise of an imminent stall, but it doesn't prevent it. [I can remember doing stall-training in a piper cherokee - even in something that docile its amazing how fast the stall comes after the controls start to get mushy].
I'm not an expert in flight-control systems, they no doubt make aircraft safer, more fuel-efficient etc [for passenger aircraft anyway], but that accident may show an instance when fly-by-wire systems 'cautioness' may actively prevent getting out of trouble - after all the line between diaster and escape is often very thin. The A320's system is an incredible piece of engineering, but perhaps it tended to provide a security blanket - I would imagine any pilot flying that low and slow in a non fly-by-wire would be sweating buckets [if it were possible, which I doubt].
p.s. Thanks for a great discussion - very involving !
This points to an analysis of the findings of the crash investigation, the Captains version of events and subsequent independent investigations of the crash records and FDR information.
This analysis comments :
and also this comment :
was the one I picked up on originally.There can be no doubt that the Captain was flying towards the edge of the flight envelope. However, there are still question marks over this accident and the investigation. Bear in mind that a conclusion that there may have been problems with the fly-by-wire software would have cost Airbus serious amounts of money in redesign, testing etc, not to mention possible loss of revenue. Also, Airbus is a standard-bearer for the industrial might of France - the possibility of pressure for a more 'favourable' intrepretation of events cannot be ruled out.
In the end, the whole incident may simply come down to too much faith in technology by everyone involved - a least some lessons will have learned from this incident.
Sorry yes, asleep on the job again.
I recall seeing a documentary on this a few years ago. They looked at the FDR outputs and comapared the time-lag between the pilots inputs and the control response.
Once the pilot realised he was making an arse of it [he was low and slow, even for a demo - he has passengers for god's sake], he requested TOGA [To-Go-Around if I'm correct] power from the engines and put some back pressure on the side-controller. The engines started to spool up [you can hear it on the video of the crash], but the elevators refused to respond for a number of seconds - the flight computers were in landing mode and as far as they concerned they saw an unsafe input. So they said 'Non'. By the time the elevators started to respond to the pilot input, he was in the trees and sadly, people died.
You can forget all of these pretty geek toys.
The best thing you can buy is a combined baby monitor/breathing alarm. I bought one the day my daughter was born and it paid for itself in no time, as it meant my wife and could sleep (when my daughter let us) without waking up to check on her every 10 mins. Try this company. Ok, its not a professional monitor, but it just might be the best money you have ever spent.
You will be too knackered anyway to so much as look at a computer, and your wife will take one look at your heath-robinson lash-up and demand you go and buy something that actually works.
I didn't either, but this article would tend to indicate that they are indeed still flying.
After a bit of googling, I found some more material that, whilst not a subjective analysis, may indicate that some may still be combat effective. I presume the Iranian military wouldn't like to advertise the fact they are still operational, as I'm sure if hostilities commence between the US and Iran, those aircraft will be high-priority targets.
I'm sure however, that the U.S. Military knows EXACTLY how many are still flying and where they are.
Luckily [perhaps] that those various 'F's' will no longer be of any use, as the Iranians would not have been able to keep them running eventually due the lack of spares etc from the original manufacturers. An F-14 is less use than a pointed stick if its grounded due to a dead engine.