For example, they said, security testing would not be banned, because prosecutors must show there was intent to commit an illegal act.
If this can trump the DMCA, then DeCSS can't itself be illegal. Only if you can prove a user was going to use it for illegal purposes could you prosecute - and then that user only. But you couldn't stop, say, DeCSS being part of an Open Source DVD player, because the intent there is clearly not criminal: the intent is to be able to watch the DVDs you purchased on your computer.
However, even though the USA Today article probably only skims the surface (and like everything in the popular press, is probably fairly inaccurate), there were some deeply worrying things in that article. Still - there's always Sealand!
The insane hours demanded by some deadlines are actually counterproductive. I've been there/done that.
Not very long ago, I was just out of college, in my new job. We had to get this demo up and going quickly to win some business. The goals were unrealistically high, and we ended up working 90+ hour weeks for three months.
I am being completely serious when I say we would have got more and better quality work done if we had done 40 hour weeks.
Once you start working 12-hour-plus days you get into negative productivity. After a while we were all so freakin' tired that we would add more bugs than actual good code. Negative productivity. The trouble is, the negative productivity forces you to work even longer hours as deadlines are missed, leading to more negative productivity - a vicious circle. And manglement, sorry management, don't seem to understand this!
Just before one of our big demos, we were doing some last-minute stuff (like at 3 am). I made a really really dumb mistake due to tiredness - something simple like '=' instead of '==' in an if statement. Too tired to stay awake, I went home. Two guys were just finishing up when they ran into the resultant bug. They were so tired that it took them another three hours to find the problem - if they had been normally wakeful, it would have been something they found in five or ten minutes!
Well, at least we could have an ice cream break at 2:30 am when the CMVC server went down for a backup!
A recent study has also shown that lack of sleep actually has a greater effect than a couple or three beers on reaction times. When these exhausted IT workers drive home, they are effectively driving intoxicated.
What did I learn from this episode?
I will now take all my vacation in the vacation year. If management tell me I can't, I leave. I have told them this. My manager is actually very non-pointy haired, and accepts and agrees with this! I'm very lucky to have a good manager.
I refuse to work excessive overtime. Some overtime here and there is to be expected - but it shoudn't be a regular and/or excessive thing. If I'm getting too tired, the overtime gets cut back. If management whine, I look for a new job. My manager is an ex-developer who was forced into excessive overtime. She understands this too.
I know someone (via the newsgroups) who had one of these "pay for clickthrough" deals at his site. So like any good script kiddie, he wrote a VB app to do lots of clickthroughs to get paid.
He got caught. He deserved to be caught. I thought it was damned hilarious!
Basically, he had just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to make his hits look like real, unique hits. The best thing about it is the guy has a massive ego and it took a huge deflationary hit;-)
When I was just a wee kid with my Sinclair Spectrum, games companies tried to do all sort of weird copy protection schemes. Being a proto-geek equipped with a Z80 disassembler, I could crack those myself. Then, just a few years ago, when the Amiga was a popular games machine, all the games companies tried to copy protect their games once again. Did they learn from their Spectrum experience? It never, ever worked. More and more elaborate schemes were dreamed up at the expense of making a playable game - and these schemes were cracked within days of the game's release.
I knew as soon as DVD (and CSS) came out that it would be cracked. Not because I'm a genius in precognition - it was just obvious. Sooner or later, someone would reverse-engineer a player. And what do you know, along comes DeCSS. All this DMCA stuff won't supress it either, however hard they try.
Any audio encryption scheme is doomed to failure. DMCA or not, someone will still crack it fairly quickly. And even if not - well, good old Line Out to another computer's Line In will work, and will render an almost perfect copy (with the right equipment, you won't be able to tell the difference.)
Despite all of this, I think the RIAA's real fear is not piracy, but competition. The MP3 format, and even better - Ogg Vorbis - allows artists to sell direct. This is scaring them witless. They are desperately trying to prevent people from being able to publicize their music without them.
Perhaps I should be arrested as a circumvention device since I can play the piano reasonably well by ear. I'm waiting for the RIAA lawyers to come busting down the door:-)
This system simply requires a GPS, a radio, and a display (and a computer, but embedded computers are cheap).
FAA Approved (which it would HAVE to be) computers are NOT cheap. Do not get any illusions of this technology making avionics stacks cheaper.
For example, the Garmin GNS 430 costs around $8000. It's an IFR-approved navigator. By the time you add installation, you're talking $10,000. On the other hand, the non-certified Garmin GPS 295 ( a handheld with the same display, and most of the features of the -430) costs $1400. And even that's expensive for what it is.
Cheap and airplanes don't go together. That's why the avionics stacks of most light planes are full of old radios without even simple 7-segment digital displays: the owners can't afford to buy the latest whizzbang radio and the old ones still work very well. There are a lot of old mechanical tuned King KX-170Bs out there. And it's not surprising when you consider the cost to upgrade your stack to what new Cessna 172s coming out the factory is around $40,000. And $40,000 is greater than the value of a lot of light planes out on the ramp today!
If it's FAA-certified, it's expensive - often prohibitively so.
Firstly, it's going to be years before a move to a system like this really happens. Already, the lifespan of LORAN has been extended because the FAA admitted it needed to keep a backup in place. Also, LAAS/WAAS has been delayed quite a bit.
To start with, GPS isn't accurate enough for precision approaches (mainly altitude), so LAAS (local area augmentation system) is needed. It's differential GPS. This gets the accuracy very high indeed - but it's implementation is delayed. So the ILS approach is going to be in use for some time. (ILS was designed many years ago. It works very well. It consists of two parts - a glideslope transmitter abeam the touchdown point, and a localizer, set at the far end of the runway, giving horizontal navigation. A receiver on the plane displays the aircraft's position on the loc/gs.) And if the ILS fails at the airport you're going to, you can fly to your alternate. I don't know what the probability of GPS failing is, but you lose it, and it's all gone. Something I wouldn't like to happen if the cloudbases are at 200 feet if I'm relying on it.
GPS also has a bit of a single point of failure - it can be jammed quite easily. I know GPS jamming trials have occured in the US and UK. The beauty of the current VOR/DME system (which has been around since the 1950s) is that it's distributed. There are thousands of VOR (VHF Omnidirectional Ranges) around the country. If one fails, it's not such a big deal).
The DieHard II Scenario: With IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) approved GPS receivers, malicious modification of the signals will not have pilots flying their planes into the ground. All IFR approved GPS receivers have something called RAIM: Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring. The receiver can tell if it's getting bad data, and flag it. (Handheld GPS units do not have RAIM and will merrily display bad data - this is just one reason why they are not approved as a primary IFR navigator. You can use them as a backup to good old VOR/DME though).
The other thing phoney about the DieHard II scenario is that instrument-rated pilots have been taught to cross-check. Basically - never trust a single source whether it's a NAV radio or a gyro. For example, when flying straight and level, you don't just stare at the attitude indicator (artificial horizon), you check it against other instruments. If the attitude indicator is showing straight and level, but the altimeter is unwinding, the turn co-ordinator is showing a turn, the DG and compass are turning, and the airspeed is increasing...you know you have a bad AI. If you're just staring at the AI and it quits, you'll wrap up in a spiral dive and do a JFK Junior. This is why sole-reliance on GPS is so abhorrent to virtually every pilot out there - relying on a single source goes against everything they have been taught about instrument flying.
Expense: The cost of one GPS satellite is greater than the cost of keeping all the ground-based NAVAIDs (VOR/DME, ILS, NDB, LORAN) working for several years.
Finally, I don't see ADS-B getting rid of at least secondary (Mode-C transponder based) radar. ADS-B is likely to be something that at least in the near term, only airlines can afford. There are approximately 10 times more light aircraft than airliners, and generally, the owners of the light aircraft fleet can't afford things like this until they have come down in price. At the moment, a decent panel-mount IFR-approved GPS costs $10,000 installed (Garmin GNS-430). Even the cheapest IFR-approved GPS receivers cost at least $4,000, and that money buys a hell of a lot of Avgas.
Also, it is not trivial at all to make the National Airspace System work without the intelligence of a human (the air traffic controller) keeping it all together. Just start thinking of the issues of all those aircraft - and you'll see why they are trialling this sort of thing in Alaska where virtually no-one lives.
And air traffic control instructions are hardly cryptic! It's pretty much in plain language;-)
"Bonanza four five Uniform, cleared to Angleton via radar vectors, climb maintain 3,000, departure frequency 134.45, squawk 4135, you're released"
Especially since:
* The ILS glideslope CANNOT be moved like they did in the movie.
* All the planes would just fly to their alternates anyway.
* The first officer of the plane that crashed would be reading the radar altimeter, if the GPWS wasn't doing it already.
Diehard II was so unrealistic it was unwatchable.
Is there any truth to the "never look directly at the sun" maxim? Or is this just another old wives' tale, like eating carrots to improve your vision or not watching TV while the lights are off?
I suspect the TV one is an OWT (Old Wives Tale), but the thing about the sun is certainly not an OWT.
After any solar eclipse, eye doctors see dozens of solar retinopathy cases where people have done permanent retina damage by staring at the sun. And this is with the Moon in the way!
The eye can probably cope just fine with the odd glance at the sun. It'd be pretty crap if it couldn't since it's there in the sky, and there's sometimes you can't help but have it somewhere in your field of vision.
Remember that the lens focuses the sun. Now get a lens, and focus the sun on a piece of plastic. Watch it melt. Think of your retina!
About the carrots: carrots do contain nutrients which help night vision.
Why would mobile phones damp down creativity - or the internet as a whole? Surely the interaction - the ability to publish your *own* thoughts enhances creativity?
It is TV and the RIAA/MPAA controlled entities that damp down creativity - people are just content to sit in front of the tv and be "spoon fed". No interactivity. The sheeple watch the Fox News and just believe it with no skepticism at all.
The Internet, as a whole, has allowed people to be creative and get their ideas out instead of just sitting in front of the TV. For example, if I choose to write some fiction, it has never been easier or cheaper in the history of humankind for me to publish it far and wide to anyone who wants to read. I just put it on a web page. I derive a lot of fun from my hobby websites - and if it wasn't for the internet, I would have probably not done any creative writing since leaving high school.
The real issue with these mobile devices (at the moment) is not that they stifle creativity, it's that they are bloody useless. They are just too damned small or awkward to use. Besides, I just don't have a use for them. Occasionally, I like to get away from all the beeping, chittering devices.
Who said anything about nanotechnology without ethics?
As with ANY technology - it's just a tool, and it can be used for good or bad. Consider:
Cars: good uses - they can be used to transport us to fun events, bad uses - can be used as a getaway in a bank robbery The Internet: good uses - Slashdot, Open Source, information transfer, bad uses - promoting paediophilia. MP3 files: good uses - Frees musicians from the RIAA, bad uses - can be used for broadcasting hatred. Airplanes: good uses - travelling to fun places, bad uses - Saddam Hussein using them to bomb the Kurds. MySQL opensource database: good uses - storing messages for a web-board, bad uses - storing a hitman's target list.
Should we shun all these technologies because it is possible to use them for something bad?
Consider that instead of the company firing you because you have a gene for a certain disease, the technology can be used to CURE the disease before it even becomes a problem!
Why is it so surprising that most people don't "connect" with their work organization etc. and play on the softball team etc.?
I think it's because most of us work for our company to live not live to work for our company. I enjoy my work, the company I work for has good working conditions - but let's face it, I really don't want to spend any more time there than necessary - especially doing sports that I find boring!
Management does occasionally forget that, and you get the "not a team player" etc. comments. However, with the difficulty in hiring people in our industry at the moment, it's easy to remind management you work here to live, not live to work here - by reminding them you can quit if they make you work any more unpaid overtime.
Now if we had a bowling team in our department, yes - I would do that, but that's because it's something I enjoy and I can drink beer whilst doing it;-)
The Time Warner/AOL pseudo-merger is probably like any other merger today.
Companies use the word "merger", I think, to make it look like a nice marriage. But one thing I've noticed about all these "mergers" (which used to be called "takeovers" or in extreme cases, "hostile takeovers"), they really are still takeovers. In the AOL/TW thing, who is taking over who?
Look at other so-called mergers: Amoco and BP. It was really a takeover of Amoco by BP. Boeing and McDonnell Douglas was touted as a merger - but it was really a hostile takeover by Boeing (notice how Boeing asset-stripped MD and ceased production of all MD designs, except the MD-95 which got renamed the Boeing 717...and production of this aircraft will be short-lived).
Why can't corporations be honest and call these moves by their proper name - a takeover? Perhaps because the sheeple^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople out there will realise that the number of players has gone down by one...competition has gone down...and these companies are striving to eat all the others up until there is only one big company. Like my Dad always tells me: there are no marriages in businesses, only rapes.
Roll on Microsoft-Boeing-BP/Amoco-AOL-TimeWarner-TotalFina Elf-United-American-Verizon-AT&T-Sony. Perhaps the legislators might take notice when the company name gets so long it takes three lines just to type it out;-)
How big is your website? How many visitors? A hundred a day? Thousands? Slashdot sized traffic?
I have a couple of websites myself which I do just for my enjoyment (it's what I do instead of watching TV), including one with a web-board where anyone can post. However, since my traffic is only about 60-100 visitors per day, I think the risk of lawyer attacks is too miniscule to justify the expense of seeking legal advice or getting insurance. (Also, my sites aren't about anything controversial anyway, so that lessens the exposure so it's so tiny it's lost in the noise. They are just something I do for fun).
Think hard about your risk exposure - is it great, or is it small? If you are a hobbyist, your risk is probably pretty tiny, particularly if you're not winning awards for "Most Visited Site", so it might be worth just putting on some boilerplate (like Slashdot has), and not worrying about it disproportionately.
I noticed a lot of people have jumped on IBM about this patent issue. It's nothing to do with IBM - the link is to a database of all US patents that just happens to be hosted by IBM.
For example of what's in the database that IBM couldn't have possibly had *anything* to do with, check this patent out. Do you really think IBM patented this one?;-)
Maybe Cisco patented it, after all, they are a bunch of w@nkers;-)
I don't think this is the case. I remember hearing about the asteroid threat a couple of years before the Hollywood movies. I distinctly remember one article pointing out that if you actually work out the probabilities, you are more likely to be killed by an asteroid [0] than in a plane crash. Perhaps we should be spending less money on air safety and more on meteor tracking?
However, the articles were never in the popular press. They were always in the specialist press. Your statement would have been more accurate if you had said "Hollywood releases a few movies, and now the popular press is freaked out about asteroids destroying the earth"
[0] Of course, the odds of the humanity-destroying asteroid are small, but if you multiply that by all the people it would kill, that's where you get that asteroid-vs-plane crash statistic.
Heheheh...that brings back memories, being booted off the 'net.
Except I got booted off the network for running a MUD on the University's servers. Apparently, they didn't like games! I was busted when a friend's LPC program (some item in the game) started spewing and filled the entire filesystem.
I was hauled up in front of the Bastard Operator From Hell who quietly harangued me for the 'crime'. We traded several hate-emails after that.
I got back in favour with root when a friend and myself found a bug in Sun's PAD software (X.25 communication - bit like Telnet for X.25 I suppose) which would give you a root prompt. We decided to tell root about it instead of exploit it. The 'quid pro quo' was clear, and root decided to like us again;-)
Sun came and fixed it, and we found another one in the same software!
If you don't like TV, don't watch it. Vote with your feet.
I gave up on TV about three years ago. Let's face it - it sucks - the news is sensationalized and devoid of real facts. If you think the news gets it wrong about computer issues - think about what they get wrong in other issues! I know they are completely incapable of getting the facts right about aviation for a start.
Even the good programs on TV are so advertisment-filled that it's become annoying to watch them. The only channel that's not annoying to watch is PBS. (They have Red Dwarf on Saturday nights here!)
The real problem is that the vast majority of people aren't people at all - they are sheeple who just lap up and follow whatever the marketing suits and talking heads on the news say. Don't be a sheeple; kick the TV habit and do something more intelligent - learn a new language, ride your bike, get outdoors or whatever!
You have the schematic for a B737? Where the hell did you get those?!
From United Airlines' B737 ATOP course. They are more of a block diagram than a full schematic. If you've ever seen a B737 taken apart for a "D" check you'll realise that the full schematic would be rather large (especially for the electrical system. There are large bundles of cables everywhere).
I'm glad I'm the one who doesn't have to hunt down a break or short in any of those miles of wiring!
All three generators on the B737-200 or -300 has a load limit of 125 amps. Nominally, that's 15kW (125 amps * 120 volts) per generator, and under normal operations, two are in use.
I can't find the information on how much the bleed air off the APU gives you - but there's a limitation on usage of 10,000 feet if you're taking bleed air and electrical power off the APU, or 17,000' for just bleed air, so it probably isn't too much. The schematic of the pneumatic system just shows lines coming off the APU and going to the main engines for starting (plus a few valves along the way). The main engines have pneumatic starters that spin up the N2 stage. Additionally, the APU can only operate one PACK at at time. The APU is additionally not powerful enough to provide wing anti-icing (another use of bleed air). Main engine bleed air is taken from the 8th and 13th stages of the N2 compressor (-200 series, P&W JT8D engines - the long, skinny ones), and you can use the bleed air off one engine to start the other.
The constant speed drives that run the generators off the engines are hydromechanical units - internal oil used as an operating fluid and for cooling. The APU doesn't have a CSD since the turbine is designed to operate at a constant speed.
What I don't know is if instrument and cabin power are automatically isolated by a low-voltage trip. There are lots of different voltages on aircraft, and I would expect breakers to isolate critical systems. But TWA800 747 was brought down by a disgusting electrical fault, so I'm not sure.
There are thousands of breakers on an aircraft. The wall behind the captain and copilot is literally covered with circuit breakers.
There are only two different voltages used on an airliner - 120VAC at 400Hz, and 28VDC.
If you think that's bad, on a recent AA flight (IIRC, might have been Continental) to the UK, I looked up the charges to use their phone outside of US airspace.
It was $15 to be connected, then $10/minute.
That is $615 per hour. For that price, I could:
- pay for a Bell 206 helicopter AND pilot for an hour.
- pay the direct costs of a one hour flight in a Lear 35 bizjet.
- fly a Beechcraft Bonanza for six hours.
- fly our Cessna 140 for 30 hours (which is plenty of time to get across the Atlantic and back if you don't mind doing it single-engine at 85 knots)
OK, let's take the good 'ol Boeing 737-200 or -300.
The plane has three identical generators - two driven off the main engines, and one driven by a small turbine in the tail (the APU).
The generators are connected to the engines by a CSD (Constant speed drive) that...well, runs the gennies at a constant speed. The CSD is basically just a mechanical transmission. They generate 120 volts at 400Hz. (Incidentally, that's what that 'whine' is on the audio channels that you can hear - it's the 400Hz bleeding over). DC power for the stuff that runs on DC is 28vdc. It is either provided by the battery, or by the T/R (transformer/rectifier) units from the 120VAC supply.
Normally, in flight, the APU gets shut down, and power is provided by the engine-driven generators. This energy isn't free of course - if everyone turned their laptops on, the Captain would have to push the thrust levers a little bit more forward. I don't remember what the ratings of the generators are (but if you're really interested, email, and I'll look it up).
The generators cannot supply the same bus at the same time (there's a left and right bus) because if they are out of phase, all hell breaks loose. (The B727, so I am told, can run more than one generator on a single bus, but the B727 has a flight engineer to make sure everything is in phase)
Other aircraft services, such as pressurization and airconditioning are NOT electrical (although they are controlled electrically!). The air you breathe in a plane comes out of the engines off some of the high-pressure compressor stages (the compressor is *before* the combustion chambers). This extremely hot air goes through the PACKs (pressurization and airconditioning kit) so that it reaches you at the right temperature. Incidentally this is why you sometimes get smoke in the cabin when that engine all the way out there on the wing croaks.
Have you ever wondered why the lights flicker just after engine start? Well, on the B737 at least, Boeing employs "break before make" switches when the two power buses are switched from the APU's generator to the engine driven generators, hence there's a brief power outage when one of the pilots reaches up to the overhead panel and throws the switch.
Also...the engines on the B737 are not started by electricity! They are started by compressed air. To get the engines going, first you have to crank up the APU and use its compressor bleed air to start the engines. Smaller jets have electrically started engines though (bizjets like Lears, Citations etc.)
As for interchangeable lenses, the Nikon D1 uses any of the Nikon AF lenses that are available. You will be able to use your N-60 lenses with the D1. Virtually ANY F-Mount lens ou can find, or so they say.
That camera looks very nice - and indeed, it would answer most of my gripes about digital cameras.
The only problem is that the Nikon D1's list price is over $5,000. My Nikon N-60 cost less than a tenth of that. For $5,000 I could buy a very nice medium format camera from which the image quality is probably an order of magnitude better.
In summary - digital cameras are still too expensive if you want good quality when compared with a 35mm SLR. I have an inexpensive second-hand digital camera for snapshots - but any photos I want to keep, I use my N-60.
IF this works out all what it's cracked up to be, then it may be great.
However, I continue to use 35mm because:
The image quality is subjectively nicer, ignoring pixel counts. Digital photographs all seem to have artefacts - the photos all look slightly smudged.
I have not seen a digital camera that has interchangable lenses.
My Nikon N-60 with a couple of good lenses was cheaper to buy than most digital cameras.
Even if digital cameras become better than a reasonable SLR film camera, you still have the question of output. My inkjet printer cannot come close to matching a color print. That holds true regardless of the resolution of the digital camera.
Where digital cameras win out is when you don't actually ever want to print the photo - you want to use it on your website or email it to friends. You don't have to mess around with a scanner that way. But then, the sort of resolution they are talking about is kind of moot anyway!
Digital cameras will probably eventually supercede 35mm - but it will be a while yet. I've not seen an affordable printer that will print photos with the quality of a real photograph. And of course, if you compare this to medium format...well, there's no comparison!
If direct experiments on tissue involving microwaves are difficult to perform because the microwaves interfere with the delicate measuring devices used in the experiments, why would anyone think that the same microwaves would have no effect on neurons - which are themselves delicate electrical measuring devices?
The way nerve tissue works is quite different to the way current flows down a wire. You can't compare the two.
Impusles are transmitted down nerve tissue by a series of depolarizations across the width of the axon (if I remember my school biology correctly, please bear with me and add detail to anything I've got wrong or missed...). It's an electrochemical effect - not at all like current down a wire. Unlike current down a wire, nerve impulses travel a lot slower than the speed of light - IIRC, less than 100 mph.
Slashdot Mirror
For example, they said, security testing would not be banned, because prosecutors must show there was intent to commit an illegal act.
If this can trump the DMCA, then DeCSS can't itself be illegal. Only if you can prove a user was going to use it for illegal purposes could you prosecute - and then that user only. But you couldn't stop, say, DeCSS being part of an Open Source DVD player, because the intent there is clearly not criminal: the intent is to be able to watch the DVDs you purchased on your computer.
However, even though the USA Today article probably only skims the surface (and like everything in the popular press, is probably fairly inaccurate), there were some deeply worrying things in that article. Still - there's always Sealand!
Not very long ago, I was just out of college, in my new job. We had to get this demo up and going quickly to win some business. The goals were unrealistically high, and we ended up working 90+ hour weeks for three months.
I am being completely serious when I say we would have got more and better quality work done if we had done 40 hour weeks.
Once you start working 12-hour-plus days you get into negative productivity. After a while we were all so freakin' tired that we would add more bugs than actual good code. Negative productivity. The trouble is, the negative productivity forces you to work even longer hours as deadlines are missed, leading to more negative productivity - a vicious circle. And manglement, sorry management, don't seem to understand this!
Just before one of our big demos, we were doing some last-minute stuff (like at 3 am). I made a really really dumb mistake due to tiredness - something simple like '=' instead of '==' in an if statement. Too tired to stay awake, I went home. Two guys were just finishing up when they ran into the resultant bug. They were so tired that it took them another three hours to find the problem - if they had been normally wakeful, it would have been something they found in five or ten minutes!
Well, at least we could have an ice cream break at 2:30 am when the CMVC server went down for a backup!
A recent study has also shown that lack of sleep actually has a greater effect than a couple or three beers on reaction times. When these exhausted IT workers drive home, they are effectively driving intoxicated.
What did I learn from this episode?
I will now take all my vacation in the vacation year. If management tell me I can't, I leave. I have told them this. My manager is actually very non-pointy haired, and accepts and agrees with this! I'm very lucky to have a good manager.
I refuse to work excessive overtime. Some overtime here and there is to be expected - but it shoudn't be a regular and/or excessive thing. If I'm getting too tired, the overtime gets cut back. If management whine, I look for a new job. My manager is an ex-developer who was forced into excessive overtime. She understands this too.
He got caught. He deserved to be caught. I thought it was damned hilarious!
Basically, he had just enough knowledge to be dangerous, but not enough to make his hits look like real, unique hits. The best thing about it is the guy has a massive ego and it took a huge deflationary hit ;-)
I knew as soon as DVD (and CSS) came out that it would be cracked. Not because I'm a genius in precognition - it was just obvious. Sooner or later, someone would reverse-engineer a player. And what do you know, along comes DeCSS. All this DMCA stuff won't supress it either, however hard they try.
Any audio encryption scheme is doomed to failure. DMCA or not, someone will still crack it fairly quickly. And even if not - well, good old Line Out to another computer's Line In will work, and will render an almost perfect copy (with the right equipment, you won't be able to tell the difference.)
Despite all of this, I think the RIAA's real fear is not piracy, but competition. The MP3 format, and even better - Ogg Vorbis - allows artists to sell direct. This is scaring them witless. They are desperately trying to prevent people from being able to publicize their music without them.
Perhaps I should be arrested as a circumvention device since I can play the piano reasonably well by ear. I'm waiting for the RIAA lawyers to come busting down the door :-)
FAA Approved (which it would HAVE to be) computers are NOT cheap. Do not get any illusions of this technology making avionics stacks cheaper.
For example, the Garmin GNS 430 costs around $8000. It's an IFR-approved navigator. By the time you add installation, you're talking $10,000. On the other hand, the non-certified Garmin GPS 295 ( a handheld with the same display, and most of the features of the -430) costs $1400. And even that's expensive for what it is.
Cheap and airplanes don't go together. That's why the avionics stacks of most light planes are full of old radios without even simple 7-segment digital displays: the owners can't afford to buy the latest whizzbang radio and the old ones still work very well. There are a lot of old mechanical tuned King KX-170Bs out there. And it's not surprising when you consider the cost to upgrade your stack to what new Cessna 172s coming out the factory is around $40,000. And $40,000 is greater than the value of a lot of light planes out on the ramp today!
If it's FAA-certified, it's expensive - often prohibitively so.
To start with, GPS isn't accurate enough for precision approaches (mainly altitude), so LAAS (local area augmentation system) is needed. It's differential GPS. This gets the accuracy very high indeed - but it's implementation is delayed. So the ILS approach is going to be in use for some time. (ILS was designed many years ago. It works very well. It consists of two parts - a glideslope transmitter abeam the touchdown point, and a localizer, set at the far end of the runway, giving horizontal navigation. A receiver on the plane displays the aircraft's position on the loc/gs.) And if the ILS fails at the airport you're going to, you can fly to your alternate. I don't know what the probability of GPS failing is, but you lose it, and it's all gone. Something I wouldn't like to happen if the cloudbases are at 200 feet if I'm relying on it.
GPS also has a bit of a single point of failure - it can be jammed quite easily. I know GPS jamming trials have occured in the US and UK. The beauty of the current VOR/DME system (which has been around since the 1950s) is that it's distributed. There are thousands of VOR (VHF Omnidirectional Ranges) around the country. If one fails, it's not such a big deal).
The DieHard II Scenario: With IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) approved GPS receivers, malicious modification of the signals will not have pilots flying their planes into the ground. All IFR approved GPS receivers have something called RAIM: Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring. The receiver can tell if it's getting bad data, and flag it. (Handheld GPS units do not have RAIM and will merrily display bad data - this is just one reason why they are not approved as a primary IFR navigator. You can use them as a backup to good old VOR/DME though).
The other thing phoney about the DieHard II scenario is that instrument-rated pilots have been taught to cross-check. Basically - never trust a single source whether it's a NAV radio or a gyro. For example, when flying straight and level, you don't just stare at the attitude indicator (artificial horizon), you check it against other instruments. If the attitude indicator is showing straight and level, but the altimeter is unwinding, the turn co-ordinator is showing a turn, the DG and compass are turning, and the airspeed is increasing...you know you have a bad AI. If you're just staring at the AI and it quits, you'll wrap up in a spiral dive and do a JFK Junior. This is why sole-reliance on GPS is so abhorrent to virtually every pilot out there - relying on a single source goes against everything they have been taught about instrument flying.
Expense: The cost of one GPS satellite is greater than the cost of keeping all the ground-based NAVAIDs (VOR/DME, ILS, NDB, LORAN) working for several years.
Finally, I don't see ADS-B getting rid of at least secondary (Mode-C transponder based) radar. ADS-B is likely to be something that at least in the near term, only airlines can afford. There are approximately 10 times more light aircraft than airliners, and generally, the owners of the light aircraft fleet can't afford things like this until they have come down in price. At the moment, a decent panel-mount IFR-approved GPS costs $10,000 installed (Garmin GNS-430). Even the cheapest IFR-approved GPS receivers cost at least $4,000, and that money buys a hell of a lot of Avgas.
Also, it is not trivial at all to make the National Airspace System work without the intelligence of a human (the air traffic controller) keeping it all together. Just start thinking of the issues of all those aircraft - and you'll see why they are trialling this sort of thing in Alaska where virtually no-one lives.
And air traffic control instructions are hardly cryptic! It's pretty much in plain language ;-)
"Bonanza four five Uniform, cleared to Angleton via radar vectors, climb maintain 3,000, departure frequency 134.45, squawk 4135, you're released"
Especially since: * The ILS glideslope CANNOT be moved like they did in the movie. * All the planes would just fly to their alternates anyway. * The first officer of the plane that crashed would be reading the radar altimeter, if the GPWS wasn't doing it already. Diehard II was so unrealistic it was unwatchable.
I suspect the TV one is an OWT (Old Wives Tale), but the thing about the sun is certainly not an OWT.
After any solar eclipse, eye doctors see dozens of solar retinopathy cases where people have done permanent retina damage by staring at the sun. And this is with the Moon in the way!
The eye can probably cope just fine with the odd glance at the sun. It'd be pretty crap if it couldn't since it's there in the sky, and there's sometimes you can't help but have it somewhere in your field of vision.
Remember that the lens focuses the sun. Now get a lens, and focus the sun on a piece of plastic. Watch it melt. Think of your retina!
About the carrots: carrots do contain nutrients which help night vision.
It is TV and the RIAA/MPAA controlled entities that damp down creativity - people are just content to sit in front of the tv and be "spoon fed". No interactivity. The sheeple watch the Fox News and just believe it with no skepticism at all.
The Internet, as a whole, has allowed people to be creative and get their ideas out instead of just sitting in front of the TV. For example, if I choose to write some fiction, it has never been easier or cheaper in the history of humankind for me to publish it far and wide to anyone who wants to read. I just put it on a web page. I derive a lot of fun from my hobby websites - and if it wasn't for the internet, I would have probably not done any creative writing since leaving high school.
The real issue with these mobile devices (at the moment) is not that they stifle creativity, it's that they are bloody useless. They are just too damned small or awkward to use. Besides, I just don't have a use for them. Occasionally, I like to get away from all the beeping, chittering devices.
As with ANY technology - it's just a tool, and it can be used for good or bad. Consider:
Cars: good uses - they can be used to transport us to fun events, bad uses - can be used as a getaway in a bank robbery
The Internet: good uses - Slashdot, Open Source, information transfer, bad uses - promoting paediophilia.
MP3 files: good uses - Frees musicians from the RIAA, bad uses - can be used for broadcasting hatred.
Airplanes: good uses - travelling to fun places, bad uses - Saddam Hussein using them to bomb the Kurds.
MySQL opensource database: good uses - storing messages for a web-board, bad uses - storing a hitman's target list.
Should we shun all these technologies because it is possible to use them for something bad?
Consider that instead of the company firing you because you have a gene for a certain disease, the technology can be used to CURE the disease before it even becomes a problem!
I think it's because most of us work for our company to live not live to work for our company. I enjoy my work, the company I work for has good working conditions - but let's face it, I really don't want to spend any more time there than necessary - especially doing sports that I find boring!
Management does occasionally forget that, and you get the "not a team player" etc. comments. However, with the difficulty in hiring people in our industry at the moment, it's easy to remind management you work here to live, not live to work here - by reminding them you can quit if they make you work any more unpaid overtime.
Now if we had a bowling team in our department, yes - I would do that, but that's because it's something I enjoy and I can drink beer whilst doing it ;-)
Companies use the word "merger", I think, to make it look like a nice marriage. But one thing I've noticed about all these "mergers" (which used to be called "takeovers" or in extreme cases, "hostile takeovers"), they really are still takeovers. In the AOL/TW thing, who is taking over who?
Look at other so-called mergers: Amoco and BP. It was really a takeover of Amoco by BP. Boeing and McDonnell Douglas was touted as a merger - but it was really a hostile takeover by Boeing (notice how Boeing asset-stripped MD and ceased production of all MD designs, except the MD-95 which got renamed the Boeing 717...and production of this aircraft will be short-lived).
Why can't corporations be honest and call these moves by their proper name - a takeover? Perhaps because the sheeple^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hpeople out there will realise that the number of players has gone down by one...competition has gone down...and these companies are striving to eat all the others up until there is only one big company. Like my Dad always tells me: there are no marriages in businesses, only rapes.
Roll on Microsoft-Boeing-BP/Amoco-AOL-TimeWarner-TotalFina Elf-United-American-Verizon-AT&T-Sony. Perhaps the legislators might take notice when the company name gets so long it takes three lines just to type it out ;-)
I have a couple of websites myself which I do just for my enjoyment (it's what I do instead of watching TV), including one with a web-board where anyone can post. However, since my traffic is only about 60-100 visitors per day, I think the risk of lawyer attacks is too miniscule to justify the expense of seeking legal advice or getting insurance. (Also, my sites aren't about anything controversial anyway, so that lessens the exposure so it's so tiny it's lost in the noise. They are just something I do for fun).
Think hard about your risk exposure - is it great, or is it small? If you are a hobbyist, your risk is probably pretty tiny, particularly if you're not winning awards for "Most Visited Site", so it might be worth just putting on some boilerplate (like Slashdot has), and not worrying about it disproportionately.
For example of what's in the database that IBM couldn't have possibly had *anything* to do with, check this patent out. Do you really think IBM patented this one? ;-)
Maybe Cisco patented it, after all, they are a bunch of w@nkers ;-)
However, the articles were never in the popular press. They were always in the specialist press. Your statement would have been more accurate if you had said "Hollywood releases a few movies, and now the popular press is freaked out about asteroids destroying the earth"
[0] Of course, the odds of the humanity-destroying asteroid are small, but if you multiply that by all the people it would kill, that's where you get that asteroid-vs-plane crash statistic.
Except I got booted off the network for running a MUD on the University's servers. Apparently, they didn't like games! I was busted when a friend's LPC program (some item in the game) started spewing and filled the entire filesystem.
I was hauled up in front of the Bastard Operator From Hell who quietly harangued me for the 'crime'. We traded several hate-emails after that.
I got back in favour with root when a friend and myself found a bug in Sun's PAD software (X.25 communication - bit like Telnet for X.25 I suppose) which would give you a root prompt. We decided to tell root about it instead of exploit it. The 'quid pro quo' was clear, and root decided to like us again ;-)
Sun came and fixed it, and we found another one in the same software!
I gave up on TV about three years ago. Let's face it - it sucks - the news is sensationalized and devoid of real facts. If you think the news gets it wrong about computer issues - think about what they get wrong in other issues! I know they are completely incapable of getting the facts right about aviation for a start.
Even the good programs on TV are so advertisment-filled that it's become annoying to watch them. The only channel that's not annoying to watch is PBS. (They have Red Dwarf on Saturday nights here!)
The real problem is that the vast majority of people aren't people at all - they are sheeple who just lap up and follow whatever the marketing suits and talking heads on the news say. Don't be a sheeple; kick the TV habit and do something more intelligent - learn a new language, ride your bike, get outdoors or whatever!
From United Airlines' B737 ATOP course. They are more of a block diagram than a full schematic. If you've ever seen a B737 taken apart for a "D" check you'll realise that the full schematic would be rather large (especially for the electrical system. There are large bundles of cables everywhere).
I'm glad I'm the one who doesn't have to hunt down a break or short in any of those miles of wiring!
I can't find the information on how much the bleed air off the APU gives you - but there's a limitation on usage of 10,000 feet if you're taking bleed air and electrical power off the APU, or 17,000' for just bleed air, so it probably isn't too much. The schematic of the pneumatic system just shows lines coming off the APU and going to the main engines for starting (plus a few valves along the way). The main engines have pneumatic starters that spin up the N2 stage. Additionally, the APU can only operate one PACK at at time. The APU is additionally not powerful enough to provide wing anti-icing (another use of bleed air). Main engine bleed air is taken from the 8th and 13th stages of the N2 compressor (-200 series, P&W JT8D engines - the long, skinny ones), and you can use the bleed air off one engine to start the other.
The constant speed drives that run the generators off the engines are hydromechanical units - internal oil used as an operating fluid and for cooling. The APU doesn't have a CSD since the turbine is designed to operate at a constant speed.
What I don't know is if instrument and cabin power are automatically isolated by a low-voltage trip. There are lots of different voltages on aircraft, and I would expect breakers to isolate critical systems. But TWA800 747 was brought down by a disgusting electrical fault, so I'm not sure.
There are thousands of breakers on an aircraft. The wall behind the captain and copilot is literally covered with circuit breakers.
There are only two different voltages used on an airliner - 120VAC at 400Hz, and 28VDC.
It was $15 to be connected, then $10/minute.
That is $615 per hour. For that price, I could:
- pay for a Bell 206 helicopter AND pilot for an hour.
- pay the direct costs of a one hour flight in a Lear 35 bizjet.
- fly a Beechcraft Bonanza for six hours.
- fly our Cessna 140 for 30 hours (which is plenty of time to get across the Atlantic and back if you don't mind doing it single-engine at 85 knots)
The plane has three identical generators - two driven off the main engines, and one driven by a small turbine in the tail (the APU).
The generators are connected to the engines by a CSD (Constant speed drive) that...well, runs the gennies at a constant speed. The CSD is basically just a mechanical transmission. They generate 120 volts at 400Hz. (Incidentally, that's what that 'whine' is on the audio channels that you can hear - it's the 400Hz bleeding over). DC power for the stuff that runs on DC is 28vdc. It is either provided by the battery, or by the T/R (transformer/rectifier) units from the 120VAC supply.
Normally, in flight, the APU gets shut down, and power is provided by the engine-driven generators. This energy isn't free of course - if everyone turned their laptops on, the Captain would have to push the thrust levers a little bit more forward. I don't remember what the ratings of the generators are (but if you're really interested, email, and I'll look it up).
The generators cannot supply the same bus at the same time (there's a left and right bus) because if they are out of phase, all hell breaks loose. (The B727, so I am told, can run more than one generator on a single bus, but the B727 has a flight engineer to make sure everything is in phase)
Other aircraft services, such as pressurization and airconditioning are NOT electrical (although they are controlled electrically!). The air you breathe in a plane comes out of the engines off some of the high-pressure compressor stages (the compressor is *before* the combustion chambers). This extremely hot air goes through the PACKs (pressurization and airconditioning kit) so that it reaches you at the right temperature. Incidentally this is why you sometimes get smoke in the cabin when that engine all the way out there on the wing croaks.
Have you ever wondered why the lights flicker just after engine start? Well, on the B737 at least, Boeing employs "break before make" switches when the two power buses are switched from the APU's generator to the engine driven generators, hence there's a brief power outage when one of the pilots reaches up to the overhead panel and throws the switch.
Also...the engines on the B737 are not started by electricity! They are started by compressed air. To get the engines going, first you have to crank up the APU and use its compressor bleed air to start the engines. Smaller jets have electrically started engines though (bizjets like Lears, Citations etc.)
As for interchangeable lenses, the Nikon D1 uses any of the Nikon AF lenses that are available. You will be able to use your N-60 lenses with the D1. Virtually ANY F-Mount lens ou can find, or so they say.
That camera looks very nice - and indeed, it would answer most of my gripes about digital cameras.
The only problem is that the Nikon D1's list price is over $5,000. My Nikon N-60 cost less than a tenth of that. For $5,000 I could buy a very nice medium format camera from which the image quality is probably an order of magnitude better.
In summary - digital cameras are still too expensive if you want good quality when compared with a 35mm SLR. I have an inexpensive second-hand digital camera for snapshots - but any photos I want to keep, I use my N-60.
However, I continue to use 35mm because:
The image quality is subjectively nicer, ignoring pixel counts. Digital photographs all seem to have artefacts - the photos all look slightly smudged.
I have not seen a digital camera that has interchangable lenses.
My Nikon N-60 with a couple of good lenses was cheaper to buy than most digital cameras.
Even if digital cameras become better than a reasonable SLR film camera, you still have the question of output. My inkjet printer cannot come close to matching a color print. That holds true regardless of the resolution of the digital camera.
Where digital cameras win out is when you don't actually ever want to print the photo - you want to use it on your website or email it to friends. You don't have to mess around with a scanner that way. But then, the sort of resolution they are talking about is kind of moot anyway!
Digital cameras will probably eventually supercede 35mm - but it will be a while yet. I've not seen an affordable printer that will print photos with the quality of a real photograph. And of course, if you compare this to medium format...well, there's no comparison!
If direct experiments on tissue involving microwaves are difficult to perform because the microwaves interfere with the delicate measuring devices used in the experiments, why would anyone think that the same microwaves would have no effect on neurons - which are themselves delicate electrical measuring devices?
The way nerve tissue works is quite different to the way current flows down a wire. You can't compare the two.
Impusles are transmitted down nerve tissue by a series of depolarizations across the width of the axon (if I remember my school biology correctly, please bear with me and add detail to anything I've got wrong or missed...). It's an electrochemical effect - not at all like current down a wire. Unlike current down a wire, nerve impulses travel a lot slower than the speed of light - IIRC, less than 100 mph.