Oracle's licensing is particularly pathological. The problem is you ask five Oracle resellers for a quote, giving them identical hardware specs and requirements, and you'll get five different prices for licensing starting from eyewateringly expensive to absurd.
The trouble is if you pick the wrong one, Oracle will turn around and sue you later. Now most vendors won't sue their customers because it makes for bad business, but in the case of Oracle this isn't so. If you're going to spend the money on Oracle, your developers aren't just going to use what's merely in the SQL standard, to make full use of this very expensive asset they are going to have to use many Oracle-specific features. This results in a level of lock-in that exceeds Microsoft's wildest dreams. So Oracle can decide you're not licensed properly then sue you knowing you can't say "Well fine, we'll switch to some other database", and that you'll have to pay the penalties then the new seemingly arbitrary price that Oracle demands. Your only option is to try and sue the VAR who sold you the licensing scheme and said it was correct. (This just happened recently to an organization here).
We narrowly avoided needing Oracle (a dependency a project had thanks to some 3rd party software). I think the fact that Oracle was suing this other organization helped make the finance people listen to reason and kill the project.
Firstly, avionics were excluded from RoHS. Secondly, I've seen dozens of cracked solder joints on boards made with leaded solder. Any boards subjected to heating and cooling are prone to it (power supplies are an obvious candidate, I've lost count on how many pre-RoHS power supplies I've repaired due to cracked solder joints). I've yet to have to fix a cracked solder joint on a RoHS compliant board, but this is probably merely a function of all RoHS based stuff being much newer.
It's not the lead, it's the octane rating. Most aviation engines can already run on 91UL avgas and the manufacturer has approved 91UL for them. (For many smaller Lycoming/Continentals, 100LL has far too much lead and actually causes problems for these engines). However, there is a small percentage that needs the 100LL (certain geared and turbocharged engines) to prevent detonation. While these engines only make up a small percentage of the GA fleet, they fly a LOT of hours and are thirsty. Airfield operators generally don't want to supply two grades of fuel, so they stick with the one they can sell to everyone, that's 100LL.
The other problem is approvals. Any fuel additive would have to be approved by the regulator (FAA/CAA etc) and also the engine manufacturer. There's nothing in it for the engine maker while 100LL is still available, so the engine maker is pretty unwilling to spend money on it. A pilot getting caught using fuel not approved for their aircraft will be prosecuted, so most won't do it. This isn't so with cars.
Nearly all aircraft engines will run just fine on 91UL avgas (and certainly in the case of Lycoming, most of them are approved). The problem is that there are certain large turbocharged and/or geared engines that will detonate on anything less than 100LL, and while these make a very small percentage of the fleet they actually burn a disproportionate amount of the avgas (they fly a lot of hours since they tend to be more likely used for business/commercial use, and they are thirsty). Airfield operators are often unwilling to have two grades of avgas, so they stick with the one they know everyone can use.
Actually pilots DO care. Without even getting to the poisonous nature of TEL, it's not even good for my engine.
The trouble is that there is *no* other avgas available to me than 100LL, and since they started putting ethanol in petrol (gasoline) I can't use normal car fuel any more. (They don't even label ethanol-tainted fuel here).
91UL is available by try to find an airfield that sells it.
A friend of mine recently went through the BA (i.e. in the EU) ab-initio pilot training scheme. The training involved quite a lot of light aircraft hours (single and multiengine). About a year was spent flying light aircraft, including quite an intensive session in Arizona because the weather is reliable enough that you can pretty much guarantee to get several hours a day in a Piper Seminole without being grounded by icing or convective activity.
Aviation (and industrial, and marine) accidents are pretty much always an "accident chain" - and if any link in the chain is broken, the accident is prevented. This is why accident investigations don't just end at "Oh it was a cracked solder joint case closed", or "Oh the pilot stalled it what a dumbass case closed". This accident is no different - there will be a long chain of events, any one of them being stopped would break the accident chain and result in the aircraft reaching an airfield and being grounded until an engineer can come and fix the problem.
So a factor was equipment failure, but it's not the cause. The cause is all the factors in the whole accident chain which may include poor procedures, inadequate training, over-reliance on automation and that kind of thing.
They've been saying this since the 1970s, with all sorts of forecasts of 15 hour weeks. Yet there are many millions now in work compared to the 1970s and everyone's working longer hours than ever.
No, not at all. The Space Shuttle had to be substantially overhauled after *every single flight*. Airplanes don't. EasyJet for instance turns around a flight in under 30 minutes, which simply wouldn't be possible if it required more than a visual walk around by the crew between flights. I own an aircraft, and typically we only have to take things apart twice a year (and this is for an antique aircraft, too).
The Space Shuttle was not like this at all. It needed a full engine overhaul after every flight. The turbines on modern widebody twin engine aircraft will go thousands of cycles and tens of thousands of hours before requiring an overhaul - not a single cycle and single flight like the Shuttle.
They aren't trying to save money on not needing as much LOX, the aim of taking a whole lot less LOX is that this can translate into increased payload and decreased vehicle weight.
I remember (seemingly back in the dark ages) having a debate with an academic about the truly awful state of UK university networking (at the time JANET was strictly X.25 and forbade IP traffic, the tools were terrible, the writing already had been on the wall for a couple of years that IP was the future, but this lot had a severe case of 'not invented here' syndrome and were pushing hard for an ISO-OSI model network instead of the "anarchy" of TCP/IP, think all the X.something standards designed by committee). He blustered "well JANET is an academic network for academics".
I wondered aloud where the academics and their wonderful X.25 network would be if there were no students (who needed to use the network to actually find stuff out, learn things, and get things done - normally through a painful and very restrictive and incredibly slow off-site gateway to the real internet - instead of pontificating in some ivory tower)
Fortunately a few months after this debate JANET finally admitted that TCP/IP wouldn't break the network, and as soon as they allowed IP, IP traffic handily exceeded X.25 traffic immediately. Computer science departments gladly and with great relief threw out all the "coloured book" standards and forgot about them.
Many private citizens need them. Lots of people go on vacation to different European countries. Many people in the EU live close to a border. You don't have to go halfway across the continent to be stung with extortionate roaming charges (often from the same company your contract is with - e.g. O2 Ireland charging O2 UK people huge roaming charges because they went 2 miles over the border).
Basic cell coverage will remain inexpensive due to competition, which will actually increase. Live in France and don't like the selection of French providers? Well you can use a German one or a Spanish one or an Italian one at no penalty because of the abolition of in-EU roaming charges.
Right now people have to carry multiple SIM cards to get around roaming charges which is awkward.
The trend is for everything to become encrypted, anyway - so the whole thing will be moot.
Even our company's website defaults to https and we're not even a tech company. YouTube defaults to https. Google. Farcebook, Reddit. (Slashdot seems to be one of the few that don't).
If they start throttling a protocol, people will start making it look like https to work around the throttling - use port 443 and TLS 1.2.
He's not wrong - shill or not - OpenSSL is a disaster. That's why the OpenBSD group forked it and started LibreSSL, to clean up the mess. The heartbleed vulnerability was one such consequence of OpenSSL's spaghetti-like design.
It makes the USA not at all insolvent. You're comparing apples to oranges. The USA has the ability to pay, Spain, not so much. The USA has positive growth. Spain is lurching in and out of economic contraction (and suffering some brain drain as the people leaving university go elsewhere in Europe rather than facing 50% unemployment, with the only jobs for graduates being mostly waiters). By contrast many people are trying to get *into* the US.
Spain also does not have its own currency. Its debt is more like your household debt than typical sovereign debt - it lacks the usual controls a government has. Spain can't set its own interest rates. The USA can set its own interest rates. Also since lenders money is also sloshing towards Germany (because Germany is much safer), the rate on Spanish bonds has to be very high to attract anyone at all to lend to Spain. On the other hand, the USA effectively pays a negative yield to its bond holders. Also, because the USA has its own currency, if people start fleeing US bonds they are effectively selling dollars which will have a stabilizing negative feedback effect (it will lower the cost of the dollar).
You can't simply compare debt to GDP and niaevely say "USA is worse off than Spain".
This is a big "if". I live in an area well served by public transport - the frequency is good, but due to geography it is very slow. The bus meanders around every tiny village, and although there is a bus stop 50m from my house, the nearest it gets to my work place is about 10 minutes walk away. It would take me an hour to go the 12.5 miles to work by bus plus the walk at the end.
If the weather's nice I ride my bike to work. It's 12.5 hilly miles each way. I'm not Lance Armstrong, I never even wear lycra, but I can actually beat the bus on my bicycle, the bus journey is so slow. In fact I can not only beat the bus, but I have enough time to take a shower and still arrive at my desk before I would had I caught the bus.
By car it's barely a 20 minute drive.
The thing is once you own a car, much of the cost is fixed and you'll pay it whether you drive or not, so it becomes uneconomical not to drive once you've sunk all that money into the annual fixed costs, so the additional cost of driving once you've paid everything else is basically fuel and a little bit for wear. Public transport you have to cover the fixed cost pro-rated into your journey so it ends up being more expensive than the incremental cost of driving.
The upshot is that I only take the bus if I'm intending to go out drinking in town and won't be in a fit state to drive home, or if I'm going to the airport.
Lithium batteries don't explode, they burn. Quite vigorously, but not an explosion or anything near being an explosion.
The main difference between a bird flying near aircraft and a drone is that birds are actually pretty good at avoiding collisions (especially with aircraft doing less than 90 knots or so, in other words a typical GA aircraft taking off or landing). Despite the colossal numbers of birds, it's rare that they collide with aircraft. Drones on the other hand don't have this ability right now - FPV systems have very narrow fields of view and poor resolution, and there's no sound.
I don't think registration is the solution, though. Geofencing would be much better on any RTF or ARF drone (and those who can build their own non-geofenced model aircraft are almost always the people who have thought about it and would operate responsibly anyway).
Surely exactly the same thing applies to deflation? Deflation won't stop people buying something because they need it now, even though they know it might be cheaper in a year's time. So yes - it does disprove the claim (barring extreme levels of deflation). People aren't going to stop buying food or fuel or shelter because they either want it or need it now. The willingness for people to go into significant debt for things they don't really need shows that people don't really think about deflation, inflation or the value of money when they make a decision to buy something. If they did there wouldn't be so many people making minimum payments on their huge credit card debt.
I think deflation is oversimplified. Deflation is just a symptom - what's the underlying cause? For example, we have some deflation now, but the underlying cause was a massive oversupply in raw materials, so for everyone (except the miners and oilies) deflation isn't a bad thing. We've not got deflation because people are hoarding money, but because there was a glut of raw materials. Temporarily, while this is going on, we have more spending power (and of course as demand starts to go up again, it corrects).
The positive feedback loop of deflation can't really grow much. We can't stop buying food, electricity, fuel or the other day to day stuff. Also I don't think inflation/deflation (disregarding extreme levels of either) really figures into people's day to day buying decisions. Deflation would have to be pretty damned high to exceed the opportunity cost of waiting to buy something, especially essential goods.
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Oracle's licensing is particularly pathological. The problem is you ask five Oracle resellers for a quote, giving them identical hardware specs and requirements, and you'll get five different prices for licensing starting from eyewateringly expensive to absurd.
The trouble is if you pick the wrong one, Oracle will turn around and sue you later. Now most vendors won't sue their customers because it makes for bad business, but in the case of Oracle this isn't so. If you're going to spend the money on Oracle, your developers aren't just going to use what's merely in the SQL standard, to make full use of this very expensive asset they are going to have to use many Oracle-specific features. This results in a level of lock-in that exceeds Microsoft's wildest dreams. So Oracle can decide you're not licensed properly then sue you knowing you can't say "Well fine, we'll switch to some other database", and that you'll have to pay the penalties then the new seemingly arbitrary price that Oracle demands. Your only option is to try and sue the VAR who sold you the licensing scheme and said it was correct. (This just happened recently to an organization here).
We narrowly avoided needing Oracle (a dependency a project had thanks to some 3rd party software). I think the fact that Oracle was suing this other organization helped make the finance people listen to reason and kill the project.
This has nothing to do with RoHS.
Firstly, avionics were excluded from RoHS.
Secondly, I've seen dozens of cracked solder joints on boards made with leaded solder. Any boards subjected to heating and cooling are prone to it (power supplies are an obvious candidate, I've lost count on how many pre-RoHS power supplies I've repaired due to cracked solder joints). I've yet to have to fix a cracked solder joint on a RoHS compliant board, but this is probably merely a function of all RoHS based stuff being much newer.
It's not the lead, it's the octane rating. Most aviation engines can already run on 91UL avgas and the manufacturer has approved 91UL for them. (For many smaller Lycoming/Continentals, 100LL has far too much lead and actually causes problems for these engines). However, there is a small percentage that needs the 100LL (certain geared and turbocharged engines) to prevent detonation. While these engines only make up a small percentage of the GA fleet, they fly a LOT of hours and are thirsty. Airfield operators generally don't want to supply two grades of fuel, so they stick with the one they can sell to everyone, that's 100LL.
The other problem is approvals. Any fuel additive would have to be approved by the regulator (FAA/CAA etc) and also the engine manufacturer. There's nothing in it for the engine maker while 100LL is still available, so the engine maker is pretty unwilling to spend money on it. A pilot getting caught using fuel not approved for their aircraft will be prosecuted, so most won't do it. This isn't so with cars.
Nearly all aircraft engines will run just fine on 91UL avgas (and certainly in the case of Lycoming, most of them are approved). The problem is that there are certain large turbocharged and/or geared engines that will detonate on anything less than 100LL, and while these make a very small percentage of the fleet they actually burn a disproportionate amount of the avgas (they fly a lot of hours since they tend to be more likely used for business/commercial use, and they are thirsty). Airfield operators are often unwilling to have two grades of avgas, so they stick with the one they know everyone can use.
Actually pilots DO care. Without even getting to the poisonous nature of TEL, it's not even good for my engine.
The trouble is that there is *no* other avgas available to me than 100LL, and since they started putting ethanol in petrol (gasoline) I can't use normal car fuel any more. (They don't even label ethanol-tainted fuel here).
91UL is available by try to find an airfield that sells it.
A friend of mine recently went through the BA (i.e. in the EU) ab-initio pilot training scheme. The training involved quite a lot of light aircraft hours (single and multiengine). About a year was spent flying light aircraft, including quite an intensive session in Arizona because the weather is reliable enough that you can pretty much guarantee to get several hours a day in a Piper Seminole without being grounded by icing or convective activity.
Aviation (and industrial, and marine) accidents are pretty much always an "accident chain" - and if any link in the chain is broken, the accident is prevented. This is why accident investigations don't just end at "Oh it was a cracked solder joint case closed", or "Oh the pilot stalled it what a dumbass case closed". This accident is no different - there will be a long chain of events, any one of them being stopped would break the accident chain and result in the aircraft reaching an airfield and being grounded until an engineer can come and fix the problem.
So a factor was equipment failure, but it's not the cause. The cause is all the factors in the whole accident chain which may include poor procedures, inadequate training, over-reliance on automation and that kind of thing.
It's been done in Britain before. The Gatwick Express used to be hauled by electrodiesel locomotives for a good couple of decades.
They've been saying this since the 1970s, with all sorts of forecasts of 15 hour weeks. Yet there are many millions now in work compared to the 1970s and everyone's working longer hours than ever.
CEO of one company says product of competitor is somehow inferior. Why is this news?
No we weren't. The "coming ice age" thing was an article written in the popular press and was never supported by climate science.
In reality, climate science was already talking about anthropogenic global warming way back in the 1970s.
No, not at all. The Space Shuttle had to be substantially overhauled after *every single flight*. Airplanes don't. EasyJet for instance turns around a flight in under 30 minutes, which simply wouldn't be possible if it required more than a visual walk around by the crew between flights. I own an aircraft, and typically we only have to take things apart twice a year (and this is for an antique aircraft, too).
The Space Shuttle was not like this at all. It needed a full engine overhaul after every flight. The turbines on modern widebody twin engine aircraft will go thousands of cycles and tens of thousands of hours before requiring an overhaul - not a single cycle and single flight like the Shuttle.
They aren't trying to save money on not needing as much LOX, the aim of taking a whole lot less LOX is that this can translate into increased payload and decreased vehicle weight.
Apple's phones do Bluetooth and USB tethering perfectly acceptably.
This isn't unusual.
I remember (seemingly back in the dark ages) having a debate with an academic about the truly awful state of UK university networking (at the time JANET was strictly X.25 and forbade IP traffic, the tools were terrible, the writing already had been on the wall for a couple of years that IP was the future, but this lot had a severe case of 'not invented here' syndrome and were pushing hard for an ISO-OSI model network instead of the "anarchy" of TCP/IP, think all the X.something standards designed by committee). He blustered "well JANET is an academic network for academics".
I wondered aloud where the academics and their wonderful X.25 network would be if there were no students (who needed to use the network to actually find stuff out, learn things, and get things done - normally through a painful and very restrictive and incredibly slow off-site gateway to the real internet - instead of pontificating in some ivory tower)
Fortunately a few months after this debate JANET finally admitted that TCP/IP wouldn't break the network, and as soon as they allowed IP, IP traffic handily exceeded X.25 traffic immediately. Computer science departments gladly and with great relief threw out all the "coloured book" standards and forgot about them.
If they are maths students, they should be capable of thinking of it.
Many private citizens need them. Lots of people go on vacation to different European countries. Many people in the EU live close to a border. You don't have to go halfway across the continent to be stung with extortionate roaming charges (often from the same company your contract is with - e.g. O2 Ireland charging O2 UK people huge roaming charges because they went 2 miles over the border).
Basic cell coverage will remain inexpensive due to competition, which will actually increase. Live in France and don't like the selection of French providers? Well you can use a German one or a Spanish one or an Italian one at no penalty because of the abolition of in-EU roaming charges.
Right now people have to carry multiple SIM cards to get around roaming charges which is awkward.
Which would be a CCGT and not a coal power station. Coal (like nuclear) is usually base load.
The trend is for everything to become encrypted, anyway - so the whole thing will be moot.
Even our company's website defaults to https and we're not even a tech company. YouTube defaults to https. Google. Farcebook, Reddit. (Slashdot seems to be one of the few that don't).
If they start throttling a protocol, people will start making it look like https to work around the throttling - use port 443 and TLS 1.2.
He's not wrong - shill or not - OpenSSL is a disaster. That's why the OpenBSD group forked it and started LibreSSL, to clean up the mess. The heartbleed vulnerability was one such consequence of OpenSSL's spaghetti-like design.
It makes the USA not at all insolvent. You're comparing apples to oranges. The USA has the ability to pay, Spain, not so much. The USA has positive growth. Spain is lurching in and out of economic contraction (and suffering some brain drain as the people leaving university go elsewhere in Europe rather than facing 50% unemployment, with the only jobs for graduates being mostly waiters). By contrast many people are trying to get *into* the US.
Spain also does not have its own currency. Its debt is more like your household debt than typical sovereign debt - it lacks the usual controls a government has. Spain can't set its own interest rates. The USA can set its own interest rates. Also since lenders money is also sloshing towards Germany (because Germany is much safer), the rate on Spanish bonds has to be very high to attract anyone at all to lend to Spain. On the other hand, the USA effectively pays a negative yield to its bond holders. Also, because the USA has its own currency, if people start fleeing US bonds they are effectively selling dollars which will have a stabilizing negative feedback effect (it will lower the cost of the dollar).
You can't simply compare debt to GDP and niaevely say "USA is worse off than Spain".
This is a big "if". I live in an area well served by public transport - the frequency is good, but due to geography it is very slow. The bus meanders around every tiny village, and although there is a bus stop 50m from my house, the nearest it gets to my work place is about 10 minutes walk away. It would take me an hour to go the 12.5 miles to work by bus plus the walk at the end.
If the weather's nice I ride my bike to work. It's 12.5 hilly miles each way. I'm not Lance Armstrong, I never even wear lycra, but I can actually beat the bus on my bicycle, the bus journey is so slow. In fact I can not only beat the bus, but I have enough time to take a shower and still arrive at my desk before I would had I caught the bus.
By car it's barely a 20 minute drive.
The thing is once you own a car, much of the cost is fixed and you'll pay it whether you drive or not, so it becomes uneconomical not to drive once you've sunk all that money into the annual fixed costs, so the additional cost of driving once you've paid everything else is basically fuel and a little bit for wear. Public transport you have to cover the fixed cost pro-rated into your journey so it ends up being more expensive than the incremental cost of driving.
The upshot is that I only take the bus if I'm intending to go out drinking in town and won't be in a fit state to drive home, or if I'm going to the airport.
Lithium batteries don't explode, they burn. Quite vigorously, but not an explosion or anything near being an explosion.
The main difference between a bird flying near aircraft and a drone is that birds are actually pretty good at avoiding collisions (especially with aircraft doing less than 90 knots or so, in other words a typical GA aircraft taking off or landing). Despite the colossal numbers of birds, it's rare that they collide with aircraft. Drones on the other hand don't have this ability right now - FPV systems have very narrow fields of view and poor resolution, and there's no sound.
I don't think registration is the solution, though. Geofencing would be much better on any RTF or ARF drone (and those who can build their own non-geofenced model aircraft are almost always the people who have thought about it and would operate responsibly anyway).
Surely exactly the same thing applies to deflation? Deflation won't stop people buying something because they need it now, even though they know it might be cheaper in a year's time. So yes - it does disprove the claim (barring extreme levels of deflation). People aren't going to stop buying food or fuel or shelter because they either want it or need it now. The willingness for people to go into significant debt for things they don't really need shows that people don't really think about deflation, inflation or the value of money when they make a decision to buy something. If they did there wouldn't be so many people making minimum payments on their huge credit card debt.
I think deflation is oversimplified. Deflation is just a symptom - what's the underlying cause? For example, we have some deflation now, but the underlying cause was a massive oversupply in raw materials, so for everyone (except the miners and oilies) deflation isn't a bad thing. We've not got deflation because people are hoarding money, but because there was a glut of raw materials. Temporarily, while this is going on, we have more spending power (and of course as demand starts to go up again, it corrects).
The positive feedback loop of deflation can't really grow much. We can't stop buying food, electricity, fuel or the other day to day stuff. Also I don't think inflation/deflation (disregarding extreme levels of either) really figures into people's day to day buying decisions. Deflation would have to be pretty damned high to exceed the opportunity cost of waiting to buy something, especially essential goods.