The problem is even if you win your case, you have to pay lots of fees to your lawyers. A large and powerful organization can afford the lawyer fees even on a case they are sure to lose. The defendants - a bunch of students - will be seriously out of pocket even if they win.
When I was a student, finding the money for the next meal or my rent was often a problem. Spending money on lawyers would be totally out of the question.
Seattle Vet Center, specifically towards its Homeless Vet Program
I didn't know there was a big homeless problem amongst vetinary surgeons...
Seriously: the word 'vet' over here means animal doctor. When I was living in the US, I thought "WTF?" when I saw a bumper sticker saying "If you value your freedom, thank a vet". I wondered what animal doctors had to do with freedom in particular.
Of course, it twigged that they meant veteran, but it's just one of those 'two peoples separated by a common language' things I guess.
It's impractical to use much of this storage unless you have an OC-45 to hand. The vast majority of people have internet connections with pathetic upstream bandwidth (128K, 256K - occasionally 512K - and very rarely more than that). It'll be fabulous for storing small files you want easy access to from anywhere, but pretty useless for storing large files or large quantities of small files simply due to the time it'll take to upload/download the files.
Dead wrong? Hardly. I've seen the results of many gear up landings, and the damage is generally repairable. Gear *collapses* are a different matter because often the plane may be at least part-way out of control already. But an in-control, wheels-up landing will usually result in a repairable aircraft. I didn't claim it'd be CHEAP to repair (it usually isn't). The instances where the plane catches fire are pretty rare.
Most gear up landings don't even result in an NTSB report (certainly in the GA world).
The thing is economies kind of exist in a homeostatis. If the US dollar falls, it gives US manufacturing and US-based services a competitive edge - so in many quarters, the weakening of the US dollar is in fact welcomed.
As for your comment about a nose down command, according to the captain he was requesting up elevator, presumably to gain height.
It comes back to the "Pull the stick back to make the houses get smaller, push it forwads to make the houses get bigger. If you want the houses to get smaller then bigger really really quickly, keep pulling back"
Heavy airliners flying close to stall angle of attack (stall is conditional entirely on AoA only - you can stall in any attitude, at any airspeed just as soon as the critical AoA is exceeded) are very draggy. It doesn't matter what the engines are doing - at his AoA, increasing the AoA any more - by nose up elevator for instance - will quickly result in a stall. In something like a B727, at this point the stick pusher commands nose-down elevator by physically pushing the whole yoke forwards. In a sidestick-controlled FBW Airbus, the stick ain't going anywhere even if the elevators do start to command nose down to prevent the stall. (Crashing from even 30 feet stalled is far worse than crashing unstalled - the rate of descent is likely to be less if you crash unstalled).
A heavy airliner operating at a high AoA (i.e. very high drag - the Airbus possibly flying in a higher drag configuration than it ever would under normal flight conditions) will take a long time to accelerate and start climbing. The only thing the Captain could do in his situation is wait for more airspeed as IIRC he was pretty much nibbling critical AoA anyway, and any more nose-up attitude would actually decrease the amount of lift. But at 30 ft AGL with trees in front of you, it would be extremely difficult psychologically to do anything other than haul back harder on the stick, even if your training is screaming at you about stalling. (A friend of mine managed to stall the top wing of her Starduster Too at 50 feet AGL, and she said the most difficult thing she's ever done is actually lower the nose at 50ft AGL with the plane threatening to drop out of the sky. It must be said a 2-seat biplane that weighs under one tonne will recover and accelerate much faster than an A320).
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.
However, a nose down elevator command is also something to prevent a stall, and airliners have had stick shakers and stick pushers for decades to lower the nose before an actual stall happens (in some airliners, stalls can easily become totally unrecoverable). Nothing I've seen about the accident indicates that a nose-down elevator command wasn't the reaction of the flight control system to prevent the aircraft stalling; in a Jurassic jet like a Boeing 727, under similar conditions the stick pusher may have activated to prevent a stall.
By complete coincidence, the plane that landed immediately before the Apache I was gonna do my flight test in was a Cessna 172RG...and it landed with the wheels up! Instead of completing my oral (because the examiner was still flying in the Apache waiting for the mess to be cleared), I was helping our local engineer jack the hapless aircraft up so we could pull the wheels out and push it off the runway.
The instructor in the C172RG was performing practise engine-out landings with a student, and claims to have been distracted by a red bi-plane taking off in the opposite direction. However, I think he was more distracted by his abundantly-female student's...erm...'forward centre of gravity problem'.
The aircraft did give the pilot TOGA power (take off/go around power), but the aircraft was ALREADY so far behind the "power curve" (i.e. in the region of the flight envelope where slowing down actually induces MORE drag - if you want to find out more google for a drag/airspeed diagram - unlike ground vehicles, the curve has a "back side" for aircraft where induced drag increases as speed decreases) that it was simply against the laws of physics for the pilot to extricate himself from the pickle he'd put himself in.
It takes several seconds for a turbofan engine to "spool up". Unlike a small piston engine which can go from idle to maximum rated power almost instantly, a turbofan engine takes several seconds to go from a low power setting to takeoff power. There's an awful lot of inertia in the many turbine and compressor discs. (Modern jet engines are much better than the first generation ones, but they still take time to get up to speed).
The pilot did ask for takeoff thrust. However, by the time the engines did reach takeoff thrust (they actually performed slightly better than spec) the tail of the aircraft - which was already in a nose-high attitude because of the angle of attack needed to fly as slowly as he was flying - was already striking the trees at the end of the airfield. The additional drag of pulling the empennage through the trees overcame the thrust of the engines, and the plane slowed further causing it to impact more trees, adding more drag, slowing the plane further, until the final impact with terrain.
The pilot was ENTIRELY at fault. The same thing would have happened if he was flying a Boeing 727 ('Jurassic Jet') with the same kind of flight profile. He tried to violate the laws of physics and lost. The overall record of the Airbus A320 series shows that calling it "die by wire" is pure, unadulterated inaccurate hyperbole.
However well you train someone, they can make mistakes. CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) is still a common killer - it usually occurs when a pilot is mistaken about their position relative to high ground whilst flying in the clouds.
An "oh shit" moment could quite easily put a pilot a bit closer to cumulogranite than he wanted to be. A design that then prevents him from getting out of that situation is broken.
I don't believe that story for a second. Firstly, "squat switches" (anti-retraction switches) have been standard equipment on even light planes for decades before fly by wire. The ancient Piper Apache (built in the late 50s) that I did my multiengine rating in has a simple hydraulic valve for the sole purpose of preventing accidental gear retraction on the ground.
Secondly, "gearing up" a plane will not total it - even landing a plane and forgetting to put the wheels down. It does surprisingly little damage (belly skins, bent props and flaps - but not much else). A brand new plane would be repaired. Even old planes that are accidentally landed with the wheels up are repaired.
Actually, it's not the sudden opening of the throttle that would result in unburned fuel.
In the old school carb, if the throttle (a simple metal plate) opens wide rapidly, it will result in greatly increased airflow without much of an increase in fuel flow - and the engine will tend to 'lean cut' - not enough fuel and far too much air for combustion.
The solution to that was to add accelerator pumps to the carb. When the driver boots the throttle, the mechanical linkage also activates one or more accelerator pumps which squirt a bunch of additional fuel into the mix. Naturally, this isn't metered particularly accurately, but it'll ensure that the mixture is more or less right (probably well on the rich side) so the engine doesn't lean cut.
Modern electronic fuel injection is a completely different kettle of fish. Cars without pure throttle by wire will still meet requirements because the EFI system won't just dump a bunch of raw fuel into the incoming air like the accelerator pump, it'll be metered. In many cars, the linkage to the throttle butterfly is still just a cable - but pure throttle by wire (where the only connection between your right foot and the throttle body) is better still as when the engine control computer (known as a FADEC - Full Authority Digital Engine Control - in aviation) has control over the entire process instead of reacting to the throttle butterfly suddenly going wide open.
Sure you don't know the originator with one of these schemes - but this is probably how it'll work:
1. BPI/RIAA (etc) install the software, and modify the software so it identifies which IP address the song or fragments of the song (rather than just search results) were transferred from 2. BPI/RIAA sues each person behind the IP address in question - because even if they weren't sharing the file themselves, they were aiding and abetting.
You can't have complete anonymity on an internet protocol network - at some stage something has to connect to an IP address and make the transfer. It doesn't matter who's hard disk the data originally came off - the immediate peer is *also* guilty of copyright violation by transferring the data too.
Many homosexuals have been married and had children out of societal pressures. Also, as another poster pointed out, it could be a recessive gene and as such a straight-as-an-arrow heterosexual could still be carrying it.
I think the truth lies in a more complex set of factors - partly rooted in genetics, and partly rooted in environmental and developmental factors. I think very little lies in "lifestyle choice".
I used to drive my parents mad taking stuff apart. "He's so destructive," they used to lament. I couldn't work out why they said that - I had no intention of destroying whatever it was I was taking apart, I wanted to see what was inside, and then I would (attempt) to put it back together.
I'm much better at putting stuff back together these days (which is a good thing), and I still love taking stuff apart. I have a broken hard disk on my desk which is the next candidate...
I was saved by a BOFH known as 'troot' (Tom Johnson's Root Account - for some reason at my university, they had many accounts with uid=0). I was running a MUD - an lpmud. A friend wrote a bit of LPC which went apeshit and filled the entire filesystem.
The BOFH discovered this when people whined about 'no space left on device'. My account got locked, and I had to wipe the game from my homedir. This forced me (with nothing else to do on the weekend) to actually finish the university assignment due Monday - and probably saved several future assignments yet to have been set.
Although I was pissed at the guy at the time for being such a killjoy, I truly thank him now.
I'm a sort of skinny geek (at the time I weighed 140lbs, I don't weigh much more now). I had a Ram 150 - an old one - but when the engine quit one day, I could still steer it with the inoperative pump and pull into a gas station to try for a restart. The steering was pretty heavy, but not so much that I couldn't maintain adequate control.
I don't think it's as much as a factor of 10 in the US (when I lived there, probably at least 1/3rd of the people I knew had manual transmission in their cars). In Europe, virtually no one has an automatic - for some reason, people just don't go for automatics. I only know one person here who has an automatic car.
Disconnecting the battery probably won't stop it, given that the field coil on the alternator would remain energised. Pulling off the spark plug leads would though (unless diesel - in which case, block the air intake).
Do lorries not have manual transmissions and clutches? (the biggest I've driven is a fixed-body Leyland Roadrunner which in any case was incapable of more than 45mph because it had a low-ratio final drive - had the throttle stuck open on it, I'd have just pushed the clutch down and braked to a halt).
Personally, given the choice between a fiery death and blowing the engine up, I'd choose blowing the engine up every time. If I was ever in a 'stuck gas pedal' situation, the car now belongs to the insurance company (or the scrapman) - I'm gonna do what it takes to not crash even if it means putting a rod through the case.
Not in the slightest. Occasionally, I have to fix a machine remotely - when all I have at my disposal is a small GPRS enabled mobile phone.
Without the command line, this would be impossible. The command line (with the very brief Unix commands, lacking syntactic sugar) is really the only practical way I can do some emergency sysadministration with my little Nokia. Since I don't want a vast XDA-style mobile phone, a GUI will never be practical for this - not now, not in 30 years time.
The lack of syntactic sugar in the Unix commands is still very useful, even if those old TTYs have long since disappeared.
I have a mobile phone with GPRS. It has an SSH client. The short Unix commands mean my phone is a useful tool if I have to try and fix a box when I'm on the move. Excessively verbose commands would suck on that tiny keyboard and display.
1. The brakes will overpower the engine anyway. Just press on the brakes hard. 2. Put the car in neutral. 3. If the car has manual transmission, simply press the clutch pedal down.
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The problem is even if you win your case, you have to pay lots of fees to your lawyers. A large and powerful organization can afford the lawyer fees even on a case they are sure to lose. The defendants - a bunch of students - will be seriously out of pocket even if they win.
When I was a student, finding the money for the next meal or my rent was often a problem. Spending money on lawyers would be totally out of the question.
I didn't know there was a big homeless problem amongst vetinary surgeons...
Seriously: the word 'vet' over here means animal doctor. When I was living in the US, I thought "WTF?" when I saw a bumper sticker saying "If you value your freedom, thank a vet". I wondered what animal doctors had to do with freedom in particular.
Of course, it twigged that they meant veteran, but it's just one of those 'two peoples separated by a common language' things I guess.
It'll last plenty of time.
It's impractical to use much of this storage unless you have an OC-45 to hand. The vast majority of people have internet connections with pathetic upstream bandwidth (128K, 256K - occasionally 512K - and very rarely more than that). It'll be fabulous for storing small files you want easy access to from anywhere, but pretty useless for storing large files or large quantities of small files simply due to the time it'll take to upload/download the files.
Dead wrong? Hardly. I've seen the results of many gear up landings, and the damage is generally repairable. Gear *collapses* are a different matter because often the plane may be at least part-way out of control already. But an in-control, wheels-up landing will usually result in a repairable aircraft. I didn't claim it'd be CHEAP to repair (it usually isn't). The instances where the plane catches fire are pretty rare.
Most gear up landings don't even result in an NTSB report (certainly in the GA world).
The thing is economies kind of exist in a homeostatis. If the US dollar falls, it gives US manufacturing and US-based services a competitive edge - so in many quarters, the weakening of the US dollar is in fact welcomed.
It comes back to the "Pull the stick back to make the houses get smaller, push it forwads to make the houses get bigger. If you want the houses to get smaller then bigger really really quickly, keep pulling back"
Heavy airliners flying close to stall angle of attack (stall is conditional entirely on AoA only - you can stall in any attitude, at any airspeed just as soon as the critical AoA is exceeded) are very draggy. It doesn't matter what the engines are doing - at his AoA, increasing the AoA any more - by nose up elevator for instance - will quickly result in a stall. In something like a B727, at this point the stick pusher commands nose-down elevator by physically pushing the whole yoke forwards. In a sidestick-controlled FBW Airbus, the stick ain't going anywhere even if the elevators do start to command nose down to prevent the stall. (Crashing from even 30 feet stalled is far worse than crashing unstalled - the rate of descent is likely to be less if you crash unstalled).
A heavy airliner operating at a high AoA (i.e. very high drag - the Airbus possibly flying in a higher drag configuration than it ever would under normal flight conditions) will take a long time to accelerate and start climbing. The only thing the Captain could do in his situation is wait for more airspeed as IIRC he was pretty much nibbling critical AoA anyway, and any more nose-up attitude would actually decrease the amount of lift. But at 30 ft AGL with trees in front of you, it would be extremely difficult psychologically to do anything other than haul back harder on the stick, even if your training is screaming at you about stalling. (A friend of mine managed to stall the top wing of her Starduster Too at 50 feet AGL, and she said the most difficult thing she's ever done is actually lower the nose at 50ft AGL with the plane threatening to drop out of the sky. It must be said a 2-seat biplane that weighs under one tonne will recover and accelerate much faster than an A320).
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.
However, a nose down elevator command is also something to prevent a stall, and airliners have had stick shakers and stick pushers for decades to lower the nose before an actual stall happens (in some airliners, stalls can easily become totally unrecoverable). Nothing I've seen about the accident indicates that a nose-down elevator command wasn't the reaction of the flight control system to prevent the aircraft stalling; in a Jurassic jet like a Boeing 727, under similar conditions the stick pusher may have activated to prevent a stall.
By complete coincidence, the plane that landed immediately before the Apache I was gonna do my flight test in was a Cessna 172RG...and it landed with the wheels up! Instead of completing my oral (because the examiner was still flying in the Apache waiting for the mess to be cleared), I was helping our local engineer jack the hapless aircraft up so we could pull the wheels out and push it off the runway.
The instructor in the C172RG was performing practise engine-out landings with a student, and claims to have been distracted by a red bi-plane taking off in the opposite direction. However, I think he was more distracted by his abundantly-female student's...erm...'forward centre of gravity problem'.
Actually, that's completely incorrect.
The aircraft did give the pilot TOGA power (take off/go around power), but the aircraft was ALREADY so far behind the "power curve" (i.e. in the region of the flight envelope where slowing down actually induces MORE drag - if you want to find out more google for a drag/airspeed diagram - unlike ground vehicles, the curve has a "back side" for aircraft where induced drag increases as speed decreases) that it was simply against the laws of physics for the pilot to extricate himself from the pickle he'd put himself in.
It takes several seconds for a turbofan engine to "spool up". Unlike a small piston engine which can go from idle to maximum rated power almost instantly, a turbofan engine takes several seconds to go from a low power setting to takeoff power. There's an awful lot of inertia in the many turbine and compressor discs. (Modern jet engines are much better than the first generation ones, but they still take time to get up to speed).
The pilot did ask for takeoff thrust. However, by the time the engines did reach takeoff thrust (they actually performed slightly better than spec) the tail of the aircraft - which was already in a nose-high attitude because of the angle of attack needed to fly as slowly as he was flying - was already striking the trees at the end of the airfield. The additional drag of pulling the empennage through the trees overcame the thrust of the engines, and the plane slowed further causing it to impact more trees, adding more drag, slowing the plane further, until the final impact with terrain.
The pilot was ENTIRELY at fault. The same thing would have happened if he was flying a Boeing 727 ('Jurassic Jet') with the same kind of flight profile. He tried to violate the laws of physics and lost. The overall record of the Airbus A320 series shows that calling it "die by wire" is pure, unadulterated inaccurate hyperbole.
However well you train someone, they can make mistakes. CFIT (controlled flight into terrain) is still a common killer - it usually occurs when a pilot is mistaken about their position relative to high ground whilst flying in the clouds.
An "oh shit" moment could quite easily put a pilot a bit closer to cumulogranite than he wanted to be. A design that then prevents him from getting out of that situation is broken.
I don't believe that story for a second. Firstly, "squat switches" (anti-retraction switches) have been standard equipment on even light planes for decades before fly by wire. The ancient Piper Apache (built in the late 50s) that I did my multiengine rating in has a simple hydraulic valve for the sole purpose of preventing accidental gear retraction on the ground.
Secondly, "gearing up" a plane will not total it - even landing a plane and forgetting to put the wheels down. It does surprisingly little damage (belly skins, bent props and flaps - but not much else). A brand new plane would be repaired. Even old planes that are accidentally landed with the wheels up are repaired.
Actually, it's not the sudden opening of the throttle that would result in unburned fuel.
In the old school carb, if the throttle (a simple metal plate) opens wide rapidly, it will result in greatly increased airflow without much of an increase in fuel flow - and the engine will tend to 'lean cut' - not enough fuel and far too much air for combustion.
The solution to that was to add accelerator pumps to the carb. When the driver boots the throttle, the mechanical linkage also activates one or more accelerator pumps which squirt a bunch of additional fuel into the mix. Naturally, this isn't metered particularly accurately, but it'll ensure that the mixture is more or less right (probably well on the rich side) so the engine doesn't lean cut.
Modern electronic fuel injection is a completely different kettle of fish. Cars without pure throttle by wire will still meet requirements because the EFI system won't just dump a bunch of raw fuel into the incoming air like the accelerator pump, it'll be metered. In many cars, the linkage to the throttle butterfly is still just a cable - but pure throttle by wire (where the only connection between your right foot and the throttle body) is better still as when the engine control computer (known as a FADEC - Full Authority Digital Engine Control - in aviation) has control over the entire process instead of reacting to the throttle butterfly suddenly going wide open.
Sure you don't know the originator with one of these schemes - but this is probably how it'll work:
1. BPI/RIAA (etc) install the software, and modify the software so it identifies which IP address the song or fragments of the song (rather than just search results) were transferred from
2. BPI/RIAA sues each person behind the IP address in question - because even if they weren't sharing the file themselves, they were aiding and abetting.
You can't have complete anonymity on an internet protocol network - at some stage something has to connect to an IP address and make the transfer. It doesn't matter who's hard disk the data originally came off - the immediate peer is *also* guilty of copyright violation by transferring the data too.
Well, that's not quite true.
Many homosexuals have been married and had children out of societal pressures. Also, as another poster pointed out, it could be a recessive gene and as such a straight-as-an-arrow heterosexual could still be carrying it.
I think the truth lies in a more complex set of factors - partly rooted in genetics, and partly rooted in environmental and developmental factors. I think very little lies in "lifestyle choice".
I used to drive my parents mad taking stuff apart. "He's so destructive," they used to lament. I couldn't work out why they said that - I had no intention of destroying whatever it was I was taking apart, I wanted to see what was inside, and then I would (attempt) to put it back together.
I'm much better at putting stuff back together these days (which is a good thing), and I still love taking stuff apart. I have a broken hard disk on my desk which is the next candidate...
I was saved by a BOFH known as 'troot' (Tom Johnson's Root Account - for some reason at my university, they had many accounts with uid=0). I was running a MUD - an lpmud. A friend wrote a bit of LPC which went apeshit and filled the entire filesystem.
The BOFH discovered this when people whined about 'no space left on device'. My account got locked, and I had to wipe the game from my homedir. This forced me (with nothing else to do on the weekend) to actually finish the university assignment due Monday - and probably saved several future assignments yet to have been set.
Although I was pissed at the guy at the time for being such a killjoy, I truly thank him now.
I'm a sort of skinny geek (at the time I weighed 140lbs, I don't weigh much more now). I had a Ram 150 - an old one - but when the engine quit one day, I could still steer it with the inoperative pump and pull into a gas station to try for a restart. The steering was pretty heavy, but not so much that I couldn't maintain adequate control.
I don't think it's as much as a factor of 10 in the US (when I lived there, probably at least 1/3rd of the people I knew had manual transmission in their cars). In Europe, virtually no one has an automatic - for some reason, people just don't go for automatics. I only know one person here who has an automatic car.
Disconnecting the battery probably won't stop it, given that the field coil on the alternator would remain energised. Pulling off the spark plug leads would though (unless diesel - in which case, block the air intake).
Do lorries not have manual transmissions and clutches? (the biggest I've driven is a fixed-body Leyland Roadrunner which in any case was incapable of more than 45mph because it had a low-ratio final drive - had the throttle stuck open on it, I'd have just pushed the clutch down and braked to a halt).
Personally, given the choice between a fiery death and blowing the engine up, I'd choose blowing the engine up every time. If I was ever in a 'stuck gas pedal' situation, the car now belongs to the insurance company (or the scrapman) - I'm gonna do what it takes to not crash even if it means putting a rod through the case.
Not in the slightest. Occasionally, I have to fix a machine remotely - when all I have at my disposal is a small GPRS enabled mobile phone.
Without the command line, this would be impossible. The command line (with the very brief Unix commands, lacking syntactic sugar) is really the only practical way I can do some emergency sysadministration with my little Nokia. Since I don't want a vast XDA-style mobile phone, a GUI will never be practical for this - not now, not in 30 years time.
The lack of syntactic sugar in the Unix commands is still very useful, even if those old TTYs have long since disappeared.
I have a mobile phone with GPRS. It has an SSH client. The short Unix commands mean my phone is a useful tool if I have to try and fix a box when I'm on the move. Excessively verbose commands would suck on that tiny keyboard and display.
It isn't needed. The solutions are:
1. The brakes will overpower the engine anyway. Just press on the brakes hard.
2. Put the car in neutral.
3. If the car has manual transmission, simply press the clutch pedal down.
It wouldn't do even that - it'd hit the rev limiter and not go any higher. I'm extremely skeptical that this story is true.