Indeed, responsible parties should be incredibly safety concious.
But what I've seen of the skydiving community (being a dangerous sport and all that) is that safety doesn't come first (or they wouldn't do it). It is the norm for skydive jumpships to be tatty, and quite frequently skydive jumpships are accidents looking for a grid reference. Add to that, dropping skydivers is often a low-time pilot occupation - and it's not unusual for the pilots to be risk-takers too, the accidents are sadly inevitable.
And that's exactly where the joke about the plane being scary enough the skydivers won't ride it down comes from. It is incredibly common at skydive operations. Most of them are run on a shoestring budget too, which doesn't help. Having owned an aircraft (and a simple one at that - a Cessna 140), I know how expensive it is to keep one in top condition.
IMHO, the hoax (and how he did the hoax) is actually more entertaining than if it had been the real thing. It's interesting to see his attention to detail (right down to fiddling with EXIF headers to make it look like it was generated by a webcam, rather than photos he took earlier).
No, single seater, Isle of Man, but I'd give you a ride in it if I could:-)
You can probably find a few glider clubs in your area. I would imagine that despite the Seattle weather (which is no worse than ours) there will be awesome gliding conditions in the mountainous bits surrounding Seattle. Start with Google or the SSA website and work your way out from there!
Reduced to absurdity, everything is a problem with people. Equipment and people are no more separable than space time or matter energy.
But that's not the point - jump ships are never perfect because they are almost always poorly maintained, high hour aiframes or both. Or have been abused (some of the bolt holes in a C182 at a jump school that will remain nameless were found to be elongated - because the jump pilots were doing aerobatics in it).
All equipment failures are a failure of people. But that still doesn't remove the fact that there's no such thing as a perfectly functioning jumpship!
Underrated/Overrated moderations don't get metamoderated. This results them being used as "+1 Popular" and "-1 Unpopular" mods where the moderators know it wouldn't stand up to metamoderation.
Surely if this is human flight (as the Slashdot headline surmises), then hang gliding and paragliding is too? At least with a hang-glider you can soar.
If you've ever seen a skydiver's jump ship (the plane that takes them up) you'll realise that there's no way you'd ever describe it as "perfectly functioning". The old joke is they make the jump ship scary enough that the skydivers would rather jump out than land with it, but not so scary that the pilot wants to do the same.
The other joke is: "What's the difference between skydiving and golf?
In one you go "Whack! Uh oh!" and in the other you go "Uh oh! Whack!"
I have a set of wings and no engine - it's called a GLIDER. It's a lot easier to recover from nasty situations (spins, stalls etc. and landing in unprepared fields) than powered aircraft. An engine doesn't necessarily make something inherently more controllable.
I'll reply in the vain hope an AC re-reads threads he's posted to, but there are a few certified planes with unrecoverable spin modes (take the Cessna 310 for example). Certification for Normal category (IIRC) only demands the demonstration of a recovery from at most a single turn in a spin.
I'd not have a Mooney or a 182 - give me a Bonanza any day. But given the money for a Cirrus, it'd have to be a serious contender.
A friend of mine made the mistake of signing up to AOL with his debit card. I watched him at work make dozens of phone calls to try and get AOL to stop billing him. Eventually he got frustrated enough he went to his bank and threatened to close his account if they didn't stop it.
I think he did eventually get AOL to cancel - but the moral is, if you must sign up to AOL, use a credit card rather than a debit card. (Generally, it's also less hassle to cancel a credit card rather than close your bank account and change billing/direct debit instructions for all your bills to a new account)
Well, Cirrus have had these full airframe parachutes for at least 4 years, and Slashdot is only just picking up on the story!
The problem with the parachutes is like going from a twin engine plane from a single - they aren't a panacea.
At first glance, the uninitiated may think that the parachutes solve everything. But it's easy for the parachute to actually make things worse, not better. Why:
1. You are no longer pilot in command once you deploy it. You go where the wind blows you. That might be an open field, but it also might be a school yard at playtime, a busy motorway/freeway (depending on what country you're in), the top of a tall building, the top of a tree, in power lines, the edge of a cliff etc. These are things a pilot can avoid if they are still flying the plane, even in a state of distress. 2. The landing isn't exactly smooth. It is designed to let you walk away afterwards (even if you do have a bad back from the impact). Specificially, the aircraft's structure is used to absorb the impact.
I'm a private pilot (single/multi engine, IFR - or in US FAA speak, ASMEL/IA) and if I were wealthy enough to own a Cirrus, the only time I'd use the chute is if the aicraft had suffered structural failure and was now uncontrollable. If it's still controllable, I'm still flying it.
It is not even technically part of the UK. It is a self-governing British crown dependency. I have a Manx passport ("British Islands: Isle of Man" is what's printed on the front and inside - otherwise, it's pretty similar to a UK one, and conveys pretty much the same meaning, for example, I can travel on the US Visa Waiver program to the United States).
It's cataloging it and making it searchable. The vast majority of most people's lives aren't going to be something they are going to want to sit down and watch again later. Things, such as your daily drive into work, cleaning your teeth, unblocking a drain etc.
In this vast morass of data, there has to be a way of searching for things you actually want. Video search at the moment is practically unusable unless you want to enter loads of metadata by hand. Same goes for photo search.
It'll be a long time before that portable terabyte of storage is actually useful for recording your entire life, even if it'll be possible within the next couple of years.
Why do they have to release this stuff JUST BEFORE we actually get time off? Are they deliberately being bastards to us Bastards who have to herd Redmondware amongst the other less sucky things?
At least I won't have to spend Christmas removing viruses, trojans and spyware from my Dad's computer. I bought him a Mac. Worth every penny in reduced aggro.
Because Xen (or UML or coLinux) is not the same thing. They all require a host operating system. This will do it *without* a host OS, just like IBM mainframes have for decades.
Two toys I always wanted (but never had) were Tonka trucks and the Raleigh Chopper (the bike pictured). Fortunately, my friends always let me play with theirs. I remember one memorable winter doing construction outdoors in the snow using Tonka bulldozers and quarry trucks.
The Chopper was a fantastic bike. No, it was THE bike.
This list being British, it was the ZX81 and then the Spectrum which was THE home computer. The Trash-80 was available in Britain, but no one had them.
North America might not be the whole world - but think. What proportion of North Americans have a computer and is online, compared to the proportion of Indians? Despite India having a population of 1bn, it wouldn't surprise me if New England alone had more people online than the whole of India.
Google can't study the results of the vast majority of Indian cricket fans that aren't online.
What about Debian, in the US you cannot use a certain encryption, you can in Europe. It's still the same OS!
Which is EXACTLY WHAT EUROPE IS ORDERING! Windows will be the same OS in Europe too, except OEMs will be able to buy it without Media Player. That's exactly like Debian having a non-US mirror.
So, Europe says you must break up - but they can only enforce it in Europe. Guess what - all the software that we're talking about is written in the United States. In the United States, the company will still be a single company (it's only been broken up in Europe because that's where the jurisdiction is). So net effect = zero. The only people who can EFFECTIVELY break up Microsoft (i.e. break applications from the desktop OS, and the desktop OS from the server OS) is the US DOJ because the US is where all the things of consequence (Windows, Office, server products) happen.
The EU simply doesn't have the power to take any other remedy. They can't order that Microsoft be broken up because Microsoft is not a European company. Only the US can do that, and they haven't.
The best the EU can do is fine MS and order them to unbundle software. Personally, I'd like MS to have to unbundle *everything*, including Notepad, and leave it up to the OEM to decide what MS software to add (on an a la carte basis to the OEM) to their basic software load. So, for example, HP in Europe would be within their rights to install barebones Windows XP plus Firefox as the browser, but take the Microsoft components for other things - instead of being forced to bundle the entire lot as they are now.
RedHat is not a monopoly. Apple is not a monopoly. Microsoft, however, are a convicted monopolist. When you're a monopoly, the rules are different and you can't use your monopoly desktop to legally "shut off the air supply" to competing vendors.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, responsible parties should be incredibly safety concious.
But what I've seen of the skydiving community (being a dangerous sport and all that) is that safety doesn't come first (or they wouldn't do it). It is the norm for skydive jumpships to be tatty, and quite frequently skydive jumpships are accidents looking for a grid reference. Add to that, dropping skydivers is often a low-time pilot occupation - and it's not unusual for the pilots to be risk-takers too, the accidents are sadly inevitable.
And that's exactly where the joke about the plane being scary enough the skydivers won't ride it down comes from. It is incredibly common at skydive operations. Most of them are run on a shoestring budget too, which doesn't help. Having owned an aircraft (and a simple one at that - a Cessna 140), I know how expensive it is to keep one in top condition.
IMHO, the hoax (and how he did the hoax) is actually more entertaining than if it had been the real thing. It's interesting to see his attention to detail (right down to fiddling with EXIF headers to make it look like it was generated by a webcam, rather than photos he took earlier).
No, single seater, Isle of Man, but I'd give you a ride in it if I could :-)
You can probably find a few glider clubs in your area. I would imagine that despite the Seattle weather (which is no worse than ours) there will be awesome gliding conditions in the mountainous bits surrounding Seattle. Start with Google or the SSA website and work your way out from there!
Reduced to absurdity, everything is a problem with people. Equipment and people are no more separable than space time or matter energy.
But that's not the point - jump ships are never perfect because they are almost always poorly maintained, high hour aiframes or both. Or have been abused (some of the bolt holes in a C182 at a jump school that will remain nameless were found to be elongated - because the jump pilots were doing aerobatics in it).
All equipment failures are a failure of people. But that still doesn't remove the fact that there's no such thing as a perfectly functioning jumpship!
Not if they mod down with "Overrated".
Underrated/Overrated moderations don't get metamoderated. This results them being used as "+1 Popular" and "-1 Unpopular" mods where the moderators know it wouldn't stand up to metamoderation.
Surely if this is human flight (as the Slashdot headline surmises), then hang gliding and paragliding is too? At least with a hang-glider you can soar.
If you've ever seen a skydiver's jump ship (the plane that takes them up) you'll realise that there's no way you'd ever describe it as "perfectly functioning". The old joke is they make the jump ship scary enough that the skydivers would rather jump out than land with it, but not so scary that the pilot wants to do the same.
The other joke is:
"What's the difference between skydiving and golf?
In one you go "Whack! Uh oh!" and in the other you go "Uh oh! Whack!"
I have a set of wings and no engine - it's called a GLIDER. It's a lot easier to recover from nasty situations (spins, stalls etc. and landing in unprepared fields) than powered aircraft. An engine doesn't necessarily make something inherently more controllable.
I'll reply in the vain hope an AC re-reads threads he's posted to, but there are a few certified planes with unrecoverable spin modes (take the Cessna 310 for example). Certification for Normal category (IIRC) only demands the demonstration of a recovery from at most a single turn in a spin.
I'd not have a Mooney or a 182 - give me a Bonanza any day. But given the money for a Cirrus, it'd have to be a serious contender.
A friend of mine made the mistake of signing up to AOL with his debit card. I watched him at work make dozens of phone calls to try and get AOL to stop billing him. Eventually he got frustrated enough he went to his bank and threatened to close his account if they didn't stop it.
I think he did eventually get AOL to cancel - but the moral is, if you must sign up to AOL, use a credit card rather than a debit card. (Generally, it's also less hassle to cancel a credit card rather than close your bank account and change billing/direct debit instructions for all your bills to a new account)
Well, Cirrus have had these full airframe parachutes for at least 4 years, and Slashdot is only just picking up on the story!
The problem with the parachutes is like going from a twin engine plane from a single - they aren't a panacea.
At first glance, the uninitiated may think that the parachutes solve everything. But it's easy for the parachute to actually make things worse, not better. Why:
1. You are no longer pilot in command once you deploy it. You go where the wind blows you. That might be an open field, but it also might be a school yard at playtime, a busy motorway/freeway (depending on what country you're in), the top of a tall building, the top of a tree, in power lines, the edge of a cliff etc. These are things a pilot can avoid if they are still flying the plane, even in a state of distress.
2. The landing isn't exactly smooth. It is designed to let you walk away afterwards (even if you do have a bad back from the impact). Specificially, the aircraft's structure is used to absorb the impact.
I'm a private pilot (single/multi engine, IFR - or in US FAA speak, ASMEL/IA) and if I were wealthy enough to own a Cirrus, the only time I'd use the chute is if the aicraft had suffered structural failure and was now uncontrollable. If it's still controllable, I'm still flying it.
It is not even technically part of the UK. It is a self-governing British crown dependency. I have a Manx passport ("British Islands: Isle of Man" is what's printed on the front and inside - otherwise, it's pretty similar to a UK one, and conveys pretty much the same meaning, for example, I can travel on the US Visa Waiver program to the United States).
The trouble isn't recording it.
It's cataloging it and making it searchable. The vast majority of most people's lives aren't going to be something they are going to want to sit down and watch again later. Things, such as your daily drive into work, cleaning your teeth, unblocking a drain etc.
In this vast morass of data, there has to be a way of searching for things you actually want. Video search at the moment is practically unusable unless you want to enter loads of metadata by hand. Same goes for photo search.
It'll be a long time before that portable terabyte of storage is actually useful for recording your entire life, even if it'll be possible within the next couple of years.
Ah, so you're also enjoying the wind that was trying to rip the slates off my roof last night then :-)
King William's college is NOT in the UK! It's in the Isle of Man, which is neither part of the UK nor part of the European Union.
Since we're talking about my home (and a general knowledge quiz that eminates from there) I thought I ought to point this out.
Why do they have to release this stuff JUST BEFORE we actually get time off? Are they deliberately being bastards to us Bastards who have to herd Redmondware amongst the other less sucky things?
At least I won't have to spend Christmas removing viruses, trojans and spyware from my Dad's computer. I bought him a Mac. Worth every penny in reduced aggro.
Instead of:you haveeliminating the resources taken up by the host OS.
Because Xen (or UML or coLinux) is not the same thing. They all require a host operating system. This will do it *without* a host OS, just like IBM mainframes have for decades.
Two toys I always wanted (but never had) were Tonka trucks and the Raleigh Chopper (the bike pictured). Fortunately, my friends always let me play with theirs. I remember one memorable winter doing construction outdoors in the snow using Tonka bulldozers and quarry trucks.
The Chopper was a fantastic bike. No, it was THE bike.
This list being British, it was the ZX81 and then the Spectrum which was THE home computer. The Trash-80 was available in Britain, but no one had them.
North America might not be the whole world - but think. What proportion of North Americans have a computer and is online, compared to the proportion of Indians? Despite India having a population of 1bn, it wouldn't surprise me if New England alone had more people online than the whole of India.
Google can't study the results of the vast majority of Indian cricket fans that aren't online.
Which is EXACTLY WHAT EUROPE IS ORDERING! Windows will be the same OS in Europe too, except OEMs will be able to buy it without Media Player. That's exactly like Debian having a non-US mirror.
Nice straw-man argument.
So, Europe says you must break up - but they can only enforce it in Europe. Guess what - all the software that we're talking about is written in the United States. In the United States, the company will still be a single company (it's only been broken up in Europe because that's where the jurisdiction is). So net effect = zero. The only people who can EFFECTIVELY break up Microsoft (i.e. break applications from the desktop OS, and the desktop OS from the server OS) is the US DOJ because the US is where all the things of consequence (Windows, Office, server products) happen.
The EU simply doesn't have the power to take any other remedy. They can't order that Microsoft be broken up because Microsoft is not a European company. Only the US can do that, and they haven't.
The best the EU can do is fine MS and order them to unbundle software. Personally, I'd like MS to have to unbundle *everything*, including Notepad, and leave it up to the OEM to decide what MS software to add (on an a la carte basis to the OEM) to their basic software load. So, for example, HP in Europe would be within their rights to install barebones Windows XP plus Firefox as the browser, but take the Microsoft components for other things - instead of being forced to bundle the entire lot as they are now.
RedHat is not a monopoly.
Apple is not a monopoly.
Microsoft, however, are a convicted monopolist. When you're a monopoly, the rules are different and you can't use your monopoly desktop to legally "shut off the air supply" to competing vendors.