Well, just as an example... I often have something like the documentation to three to five Qt objects open at once, as well as some Qt forum or code example, as well as the OpenSceneGraph and Boost documentation for 1-N libraries, Gmail, our internal e-mail, Google Docs, 1-3 of our internal ticket tracking pages (depending on which projects I'm working on/using at the time), probably a few scattered tabs to mailing list archives to try and understand how a specific piece of code I'm using is SUPPOSED to work, one or two tabs for Slashdot, one or two tabs for Wikipedia... I can keep going.
Some of us don't just use our web browsers "to read content," some of us are doing actual work.:)
How does this guy get marked INSIGHTFUL for this comment and everyone who points out how he doesn't know what he's talking about gets marked troll? I've seen some wonky moderation before, but seriously, wtf?
Raises an interesting question, am I the only one who thinks we'd be better of as a world if the UN Bill of Rights was as absolute in it's protections as particular clauses in some of our constitutions (like the first in America for example) and ALL U.N. member states were REQUIRED to implement it as part of their own constitutions (and where no constitution exists as in Britain be required to create one and make said bill of rights the entirey there-off ?)
I'm sure you're not the only one, but I hope you're in a very small minority.
The UN cannot be trusted to do anything right. It is also populated mostly by officials from tyrannical regimes. If the UN suddenly claimed the power to force member states to pass laws on their citizens, the "US out of UN" movement would probably quintuple in size overnight and they'd be looking for new office space to lease.
The really great part about this, to me, is that Blizzard is still going to blaze forward with a depraved interbreeding of their games with Facebook.
"Hey guys, I've got a great idea! Let's hitch our wagon to the service with the second-lowest customer satisfaction on the Internet! It's so crazy, it just might work!"
Actually, the Unabomber wasn't the onlyshow in town. Considering how much more spectacular 9/11 was, it's natural to forget that the WTC was previously a target for terrorists, as well.
Also there were still examples of terrorists trying to blow us up. You also missed a few otherhome grown attacks.
That's just a random sample after a couple minutes of searching. Terrorism on US soil did exist before 9/11, it's just that it's hard to remember it with such a major event dominating everyone's memory.
Now I'm not disagreeing with your thesis that all this security theatre is wrong and counter-productive, I'm with you there, I just find it annoying when people conveniently forget the history of terrorism preceding 9/11 (especially the WTC bombings).
Now I'm not a system programmer, so I may be completely off base, but that looks like a system call for supporting ELF binaries. Meaning it's an implementation of a public standard. Meaning there's a very limited number of correct ways of doing this. Possibly only one correct way of doing this. Every file I've randomly selected has been like this; either references to the ELF format (which is a public standard), or ABI type stuff (which is also a public standard). That's what was rumored to be SCO's "copying evidence" like six or so years ago... And now we've found out it's the truth.
They are either insane or they are "dumb like a fox," because anyone who knows anything about UNIX system development could tell you that this isn't stuff you could sue over.
You really don't know what you're talking about...
NASA had a solar powered craft at 96,000ft in 2001. Reality disagrees with your theories. High altitude currents are not a problem as they generally ARE stable, as in moving in the same direction and same speed pretty consistently. The problem for a UAS is low altitude winds, which can change direction and intensity very rapidly and lead to loss of control or even breakup. NASA's Helios (the one that flew at 96,000 ft) had no problems whatsoever at altitude. Where it was ripped apart was at 2,800 feet and it was destroyed by turbulence, NOT a fast constant wind current.
They already do this sort of stuff with helicopters and aircraft for law enforcement purposes--at least UASes are a cheaper way to do it with less risk to human life. If a UAS crashes oh well we're out some money, if a police chopper smashes into a news chopper, it's bad times all around... Never mind the law enforcement implications, the immense benefit for things like tracking/coordinating responses to wildfires, cataloguing herds of wildlife, providing communication to remote settlements... Isn't Slashdot the home of 'just because it can be used for something bad doesn't make it wrong!' type arguments?:)
Um, maybe not. Huge wing span and slow? Perfect target. Not a useful payload. Hugh amounts of electronics needed by a drone and....the military doesn't care about the costs of fuel or operation. Land it. Fuel it up. Send it out again. This is not a military technology.
Disclaimer: I work with the FAA on UAS system integration into the NAS, so my opinions are a bit coloured by my experiences.
I don't think you're imaginative enough about the types of missions our military wants to fly. Yes, a slow moving large UAS is not useful for low altitude fast turnaround tactical type missions, but that's what a Raven is for.
Something like this, though, would be invaluable for long duration surveillance type missions, like monitoring borders in Iraq and Afghanistan for weapons smuggling. Stick something like this at high altitudes to do autonomous surveillance and deploy more agile solutions on an as-needed basis to check out potential targets the high altitude UAS detects. The plans for UAS systems are very layered approaches, with room for little soldier-deployable RC craft, short ranged attack/reconnaissance craft, and high altitude, long-range, long duration surveillance craft.
You might think that the military will just "land and refuel" a UAS when necessary because money is no object, but that implies the existence of established airbases in the theater the UAS will be operating in, or long travel times to and from its mission which further reduce their loiter time. So, no, it's not as simple as "money is no object".
Honestly, the period that UASes are most at risk is on landing and take-off, both from hostile ground fire and just simple things like wind gusts dashing them against the ground or knocking them over. Having a UAS system that rarely has to land and take off would immensely improve their reliability and life expectancy.
So in summary, yeah, I think the military would be very interested in this type of technology.
The law should not give you the right to tell a business owner he cannot cater to smokers. No one is forcing you to be in an establishment that allows smokers. Go elsewhere. Even before these "indoor smoking bans" were passed there were no shortage of places that did not allow smoking.
People have been looking at me like I grew a second head for years now when I told them at my previous job we were experiencing 50% or worse DOAs on Dell systems. They were mostly GX270s! It happened to other people! I'm not crazy! HAHAHAHA!
- The current BP leak is a fine example, BP is being held to higher standards than the US companies that are responsible for Exxon Valdez sized leaks every single year in Nigeria, and well, Bhopal is a fine example of US environmental hypocrisy too
No it's not. BP spilled oil in American territory. That's why they're being held to a higher standard. Has nothing to do with their foreign/domestic status. If anything, their near and dear ties to Britain has caused us to temper our condemnation of them considerably.
- BAE was fined by the US over a bribery scandal in the Saudi Eurofighter deal, yet US companies do this exact same thing all the time
No we don't. I happen to work for a wholly owned subsidiary of the company that currently holds the record for the largest fine ever levied for corruption. Our punishment of bribery if anything makes us less competitive. Germany, for instance, allows German companies to claim tax deductions for bribes to foreign firms (just a cost of doing business). Makes it harder for US contractors to compete with German ones for business.
- Boeing was given massively unfair advantage in the next generation tanker deal
Alleged. Also, this is completely apples vs. oranges. The only way this would be comparable is if the US government required Airbus or Dassault to partner with Boeing/Lockheed Martin as a prerequisite for selling tankers in the US.
Other examples where the US has acted illegaly in a similar respect include lumber (Complainant: Canada), cotton (Complainant: Brazil), steel (Complainant: Britain), online gambling (Complainant: Antigua).
And none of these involved forcing foreign firms to partner with local firms to enable espionage.
It's a bit rich for an American company to complain about an overseas company bending the law to favour local companies when the US is one of the worst offenders internationally for this sort of thing.
I didn't see Google complaining about it? They just noted they won't be able to be certified in China.
It's hard to look badly at China when they do this- at least they're open and honest about it,
They're open and honest about wanting to steal foreign companies secrets and technology? Since when?
which is more than can be said about the US' hush hush attitude to turning a blind eye to corrupt practices for local companies,
I don't think you are at all familiar with corrupt practicies of US companies and how they're dealt with. Heck, here's an example from just this week. The US government very much does not turn a blind eye to espionage and corruption of local companies. Sure, you can find individual examples of it happening, but it's not systemic and it's not accepted policy.
and the environmental irresponsibility of US companies overseas.
That has nothing to do with this conversation whatsoever. You seem to have something of a complex.
It's hard to even blame China when they look across the Pacific and see the US doing exactly the same sort of thing.
What's sad is that you might even believe the US government and Chinese government are even remotely comparable. That implies such a disconnect with reality and rational thought so massive as to be insurmountable.
The Eclipse plugin for SVN is one of the most godawful pieces of crap I've ever seen, though. When we moved from CVS to SVN I couldn't understand why the other developers in our shop were complaining that "Subversion is slow!" when I always found it blazingly fast. They were using the Eclipse plugin, while I was using the command line tools. Yech.
Finally, I'm personally fine with limiting the ability of ad providers to provide user analytics to 3rd parties. I'm not electing to do business with those 3rd parties, so I'd prefer that they not profit off me.
Then don't download the ad-supported app and you won't have any problems.
I guess I'm a little biased since my shop specializes in simulating radar data to drive controller displays in test environments, so I'm more interested in the sensors in that regard.:)
Why do people keep calling ADS-B "satellite-based?" The only satellite part that is a key component of the system is GPS, which is used as a primary source of position information.
The same reason someone would call Common ARTS "radar based". Of course the systems can work w/o their primary surveillance source.
I don't agree with your assessment that telling the general public ADS-B is satellite-based is wrong or misleading or leads to a misunderstanding; most people understand that the GPS system uses satellites to determine position... Would you feel better if I said ADS-B was 'GPS based'?
Isn't, as far as the public is concerned, the important difference that the aircraft are primarily using satellites to determine their position as opposed to a radar being used to track them?
The UAVs must be flown on instrument flight plans, because they are severely lacking in the "see and avoid" capability that's required for VFR flight.
Even on an IFR flight plan, it's my understanding that a pilot is expected to at least maintain some situational awareness, and the ability to respond rapidly to developing situations... Which a UAS operator probably can't do. Yeah they can follow the airway, but what about separation standards? Five miles en-route is based on the ability to accurately track the position of the aircraft and the pilot's ability to respond quickly. Last I heard they were separating the Global Hawk by like 50 miles from any other traffic... That's sub-optimal and probably impossible in the future.
Also restricting them to Airways significantly restricts their usefulness. For instance, a UAS patrolling California to look for/track forest fires probably need to fly a more circuitous route. Yeah, if they're not in controlled airspace they're not exactly ATC's problem, but maybe there should be a method to warn GAs that there's a UAS in the area and to keep an eye out? And/or a way to warn the UAS operator that GAs are in the area, so he or she needs to try and be as predictable and noticeable as possible?
Let me preface my comments by saying I'm actually on one of the teams working on this problem at the FAA Tech Center, and that I was actually there during the signing ceremony yesterday (though I was mostly just annoyed by the loud music coming from the lobby interrupting my work and turned down the opportunity to take a bus ride to go see the ScanEagle fly). While we're excited they're loaning us two ScanEagles, we're already pretty deep into studying this problem. My group is on our third (or is it fourth?) simulation study right now, and we're ramping up for a gigantic one that will study a mix of GA, Commercial and about four to six UAS systems in a mixed-use airspace around the January timeframe. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'd like to address some of your comments.:)
Theoretically, nothing stops ATC from controlling these aircraft like any other, as long as there is a human pilot somewhere who can be told what to do. Use the aircraft itself as a radio relay between ground-based pilot and ATC.
Actually there are significant differences between controlling a UAS and a normal aircraft for an ATC. First and foremost is that it's a pilot's responsibility to see after the safety of his or her plane at all times, even if that means disobeying a directive from ATC. UAS pilots just aren't capable of this. They literally can't look out the window and see if they're going to run into someone or something. They also may be controlling more than one system at a time, which is something you never have to worry about in a "normal" ATC scenario. On top of this it seems that UAS operators may or may not be instrumented rated, which means they're not always trained for flying in controlled civilian airspace.
Oh and then there's the fact there are still many areas in US Airspace that have no radar coverage whatsoever. Yes, I'm serious. ATC depends on pilot reports in those areas. In the future we'll be practically eliminating radar for en-route ATC environments in favor of a satellite based solution like ADS-B.
And the final difference which the article actually touches on is that what we're simulating is a future airspace: one where we've moved on to trajectory-based operations. Currently an aircraft in controlled airspace moves along airways (or jetways), which are like one-lane highways that go from one point to another. This is why some people always see a lot of flights over their house, there's one or more airways crossing over it. Air traffic control's main responsibility is to make sure no aircraft comes within a certain distance of any other aircraft along these airways (usually five miles in an en-route environment, though that can vary based on conditions and aircraft types). At the traffic levels we're expecting in 10-25 years, this system breaks down.
In the future, aircraft will fly more direct routes to their destination (instead of navigating a graph of nodes via one-way connections), and ATC will be modeling their trajectories in four dimensions to make sure those safety bubbles are magically maintained. We haven't even finished figuring out how this will work for manned aircraft, much less when you add UAS to the mix (though a UAS will probably keep to their plotted flight plan better than a manned aircraft, but I digress). That many UASes and manned aircraft sharing airspace and traveling in all different directions is a scary thought right now, but that's why we're being so serious about simulating these things and developing very strict procedures for how it will be run.
Modern fly-by-wire is essentially a remote control system anyway. All we are talking about is a wireless control link, along with video and flight data -- a full scale flight simulator (without the simulator).
In most cases, though, with a modern fly-by-wire system the pilot has significantly better situational awareness, response time, and contro
I'm rather annoyed that this alarmist article doesn't mention exactly which satellites they're referring to. I'm willing to bet the majority (if not all) of them do not have "monitor climate change" as a primary mission, and therefore belief or disbelief in AGW had nothing to do with the lack of interest in funding them. In particular, the GOES are weather satellites first and foremost. GOES only requires 2-3 active satellites, and there's currently 4 in orbit (two active, two spares in "storage orbits"), so if the report is including GOES-11 through GOES-14 as satellites we're in danger of losing, it's being disingenuous. GOES-R has been scaled back due to cost overruns, and NPOESS has been split into two separate satellite packages for the same reason. Note NPOESS was split up THIS year, not during the Bush administration, so this again has nothing to do with "I don't believe in AGW".
Also, as others have pointed out, the President does not control the budget, Congress does. He can list priorities and he can veto a budget he doesn't agree with, but Congress decides what gets funded. So yeah, BOTH parties are guilty of not funding earth sciences. This has nothing to do with their belief in climate change and everything to do with the fact that things only get funded if a) Congressmen can use it to get votes/money or b) it's an emergency. I work with the FAA. Did you know the majority of terminals in the US run on systems designed in the 70s and 80s? And that a replacement was built in the early 90s, but Congress doesn't want to fund its deployment?
Not funding replacements for systems that should be replaced but are working "good enough" for the time being is not unique to earth-sensing satellites. It's standard operating procedure. Why do you think Congress never replaced the Category III flood protection in New Orleans with Category V protection? Because the Category III hadn't failed yet.:)
1) That's not the post I was responding to. Had you actually read my response you'd of noticed the quotes didn't match the post you are referring to. 2) That link in no way disagrees with my thesis, as whether or not Bush suggested funding cuts, Congress is actually in charge of the purse strings, so any deficiencies in funding of these satellites is the fault of BOTH PARTIES. At least learn grade school civics, please, if you're going to attempt to be a productive member of society.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, just as an example... I often have something like the documentation to three to five Qt objects open at once, as well as some Qt forum or code example, as well as the OpenSceneGraph and Boost documentation for 1-N libraries, Gmail, our internal e-mail, Google Docs, 1-3 of our internal ticket tracking pages (depending on which projects I'm working on/using at the time), probably a few scattered tabs to mailing list archives to try and understand how a specific piece of code I'm using is SUPPOSED to work, one or two tabs for Slashdot, one or two tabs for Wikipedia... I can keep going.
Some of us don't just use our web browsers "to read content," some of us are doing actual work. :)
How does this guy get marked INSIGHTFUL for this comment and everyone who points out how he doesn't know what he's talking about gets marked troll? I've seen some wonky moderation before, but seriously, wtf?
I'm sure you're not the only one, but I hope you're in a very small minority.
The UN cannot be trusted to do anything right. It is also populated mostly by officials from tyrannical regimes. If the UN suddenly claimed the power to force member states to pass laws on their citizens, the "US out of UN" movement would probably quintuple in size overnight and they'd be looking for new office space to lease.
The really great part about this, to me, is that Blizzard is still going to blaze forward with a depraved interbreeding of their games with Facebook.
"Hey guys, I've got a great idea! Let's hitch our wagon to the service with the second-lowest customer satisfaction on the Internet! It's so crazy, it just might work!"
Actually, the Unabomber wasn't the only show in town. Considering how much more spectacular 9/11 was, it's natural to forget that the WTC was previously a target for terrorists, as well.
Also there were still examples of terrorists trying to blow us up. You also missed a few other home grown attacks.
That's just a random sample after a couple minutes of searching. Terrorism on US soil did exist before 9/11, it's just that it's hard to remember it with such a major event dominating everyone's memory.
Now I'm not disagreeing with your thesis that all this security theatre is wrong and counter-productive, I'm with you there, I just find it annoying when people conveniently forget the history of terrorism preceding 9/11 (especially the WTC bombings).
Now I'm not a system programmer, so I may be completely off base, but that looks like a system call for supporting ELF binaries. Meaning it's an implementation of a public standard. Meaning there's a very limited number of correct ways of doing this. Possibly only one correct way of doing this.
Every file I've randomly selected has been like this; either references to the ELF format (which is a public standard), or ABI type stuff (which is also a public standard). That's what was rumored to be SCO's "copying evidence" like six or so years ago... And now we've found out it's the truth.
They are either insane or they are "dumb like a fox," because anyone who knows anything about UNIX system development could tell you that this isn't stuff you could sue over.
You really don't know what you're talking about...
NASA had a solar powered craft at 96,000ft in 2001. Reality disagrees with your theories. High altitude currents are not a problem as they generally ARE stable, as in moving in the same direction and same speed pretty consistently. The problem for a UAS is low altitude winds, which can change direction and intensity very rapidly and lead to loss of control or even breakup. NASA's Helios (the one that flew at 96,000 ft) had no problems whatsoever at altitude. Where it was ripped apart was at 2,800 feet and it was destroyed by turbulence, NOT a fast constant wind current.
As opposed to a manned aircraft that is orders of magnitude heavier and full of highly flammable fuel?
They already do this sort of stuff with helicopters and aircraft for law enforcement purposes--at least UASes are a cheaper way to do it with less risk to human life. If a UAS crashes oh well we're out some money, if a police chopper smashes into a news chopper, it's bad times all around... :)
Never mind the law enforcement implications, the immense benefit for things like tracking/coordinating responses to wildfires, cataloguing herds of wildlife, providing communication to remote settlements... Isn't Slashdot the home of 'just because it can be used for something bad doesn't make it wrong!' type arguments?
Disclaimer: I work with the FAA on UAS system integration into the NAS, so my opinions are a bit coloured by my experiences.
I don't think you're imaginative enough about the types of missions our military wants to fly. Yes, a slow moving large UAS is not useful for low altitude fast turnaround tactical type missions, but that's what a Raven is for.
Something like this, though, would be invaluable for long duration surveillance type missions, like monitoring borders in Iraq and Afghanistan for weapons smuggling. Stick something like this at high altitudes to do autonomous surveillance and deploy more agile solutions on an as-needed basis to check out potential targets the high altitude UAS detects. The plans for UAS systems are very layered approaches, with room for little soldier-deployable RC craft, short ranged attack/reconnaissance craft, and high altitude, long-range, long duration surveillance craft.
You might think that the military will just "land and refuel" a UAS when necessary because money is no object, but that implies the existence of established airbases in the theater the UAS will be operating in, or long travel times to and from its mission which further reduce their loiter time. So, no, it's not as simple as "money is no object".
Honestly, the period that UASes are most at risk is on landing and take-off, both from hostile ground fire and just simple things like wind gusts dashing them against the ground or knocking them over. Having a UAS system that rarely has to land and take off would immensely improve their reliability and life expectancy.
So in summary, yeah, I think the military would be very interested in this type of technology.
The law should not give you the right to tell a business owner he cannot cater to smokers. No one is forcing you to be in an establishment that allows smokers. Go elsewhere. Even before these "indoor smoking bans" were passed there were no shortage of places that did not allow smoking.
People have been looking at me like I grew a second head for years now when I told them at my previous job we were experiencing 50% or worse DOAs on Dell systems. They were mostly GX270s! It happened to other people! I'm not crazy! HAHAHAHA!
No it's not. BP spilled oil in American territory. That's why they're being held to a higher standard. Has nothing to do with their foreign/domestic status. If anything, their near and dear ties to Britain has caused us to temper our condemnation of them considerably.
No we don't. I happen to work for a wholly owned subsidiary of the company that currently holds the record for the largest fine ever levied for corruption. Our punishment of bribery if anything makes us less competitive. Germany, for instance, allows German companies to claim tax deductions for bribes to foreign firms (just a cost of doing business). Makes it harder for US contractors to compete with German ones for business.
Alleged. Also, this is completely apples vs. oranges. The only way this would be comparable is if the US government required Airbus or Dassault to partner with Boeing/Lockheed Martin as a prerequisite for selling tankers in the US.
And none of these involved forcing foreign firms to partner with local firms to enable espionage.
I didn't see Google complaining about it? They just noted they won't be able to be certified in China.
They're open and honest about wanting to steal foreign companies secrets and technology? Since when?
I don't think you are at all familiar with corrupt practicies of US companies and how they're dealt with. Heck, here's an example from just this week. The US government very much does not turn a blind eye to espionage and corruption of local companies. Sure, you can find individual examples of it happening, but it's not systemic and it's not accepted policy.
That has nothing to do with this conversation whatsoever. You seem to have something of a complex.
What's sad is that you might even believe the US government and Chinese government are even remotely comparable. That implies such a disconnect with reality and rational thought so massive as to be insurmountable.
The Eclipse plugin for SVN is one of the most godawful pieces of crap I've ever seen, though. When we moved from CVS to SVN I couldn't understand why the other developers in our shop were complaining that "Subversion is slow!" when I always found it blazingly fast. They were using the Eclipse plugin, while I was using the command line tools. Yech.
And there's nothing stopping Apple from writing an iAd framework for Android, either.
Then don't download the ad-supported app and you won't have any problems.
Okay, fair enough. I yield to your point. :)
I guess I'm a little biased since my shop specializes in simulating radar data to drive controller displays in test environments, so I'm more interested in the sensors in that regard. :)
The same reason someone would call Common ARTS "radar based". Of course the systems can work w/o their primary surveillance source.
I don't agree with your assessment that telling the general public ADS-B is satellite-based is wrong or misleading or leads to a misunderstanding; most people understand that the GPS system uses satellites to determine position... Would you feel better if I said ADS-B was 'GPS based'?
Isn't, as far as the public is concerned, the important difference that the aircraft are primarily using satellites to determine their position as opposed to a radar being used to track them?
Even on an IFR flight plan, it's my understanding that a pilot is expected to at least maintain some situational awareness, and the ability to respond rapidly to developing situations... Which a UAS operator probably can't do. Yeah they can follow the airway, but what about separation standards? Five miles en-route is based on the ability to accurately track the position of the aircraft and the pilot's ability to respond quickly. Last I heard they were separating the Global Hawk by like 50 miles from any other traffic... That's sub-optimal and probably impossible in the future.
Also restricting them to Airways significantly restricts their usefulness. For instance, a UAS patrolling California to look for/track forest fires probably need to fly a more circuitous route. Yeah, if they're not in controlled airspace they're not exactly ATC's problem, but maybe there should be a method to warn GAs that there's a UAS in the area and to keep an eye out? And/or a way to warn the UAS operator that GAs are in the area, so he or she needs to try and be as predictable and noticeable as possible?
Choose your own snarky response!
1) I dunno, one of my first cars was a 70-something Lebaron, and that thing was DEFINITELY a tank!
2) Have you ever ridden in a Hummer?
3) Well, you can in England... :)
Sorry, couldn't resist. But I actually do agree with you, I think...
Wow, I almost wish I hadn't posted in this thread so I could mod you up. Thanks for putting that AC in his place. :)
Let me preface my comments by saying I'm actually on one of the teams working on this problem at the FAA Tech Center, and that I was actually there during the signing ceremony yesterday (though I was mostly just annoyed by the loud music coming from the lobby interrupting my work and turned down the opportunity to take a bus ride to go see the ScanEagle fly). While we're excited they're loaning us two ScanEagles, we're already pretty deep into studying this problem. My group is on our third (or is it fourth?) simulation study right now, and we're ramping up for a gigantic one that will study a mix of GA, Commercial and about four to six UAS systems in a mixed-use airspace around the January timeframe. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'd like to address some of your comments. :)
Actually there are significant differences between controlling a UAS and a normal aircraft for an ATC. First and foremost is that it's a pilot's responsibility to see after the safety of his or her plane at all times, even if that means disobeying a directive from ATC. UAS pilots just aren't capable of this. They literally can't look out the window and see if they're going to run into someone or something. They also may be controlling more than one system at a time, which is something you never have to worry about in a "normal" ATC scenario. On top of this it seems that UAS operators may or may not be instrumented rated, which means they're not always trained for flying in controlled civilian airspace.
Oh and then there's the fact there are still many areas in US Airspace that have no radar coverage whatsoever. Yes, I'm serious. ATC depends on pilot reports in those areas. In the future we'll be practically eliminating radar for en-route ATC environments in favor of a satellite based solution like ADS-B.
And the final difference which the article actually touches on is that what we're simulating is a future airspace: one where we've moved on to trajectory-based operations. Currently an aircraft in controlled airspace moves along airways (or jetways), which are like one-lane highways that go from one point to another. This is why some people always see a lot of flights over their house, there's one or more airways crossing over it. Air traffic control's main responsibility is to make sure no aircraft comes within a certain distance of any other aircraft along these airways (usually five miles in an en-route environment, though that can vary based on conditions and aircraft types). At the traffic levels we're expecting in 10-25 years, this system breaks down.
In the future, aircraft will fly more direct routes to their destination (instead of navigating a graph of nodes via one-way connections), and ATC will be modeling their trajectories in four dimensions to make sure those safety bubbles are magically maintained. We haven't even finished figuring out how this will work for manned aircraft, much less when you add UAS to the mix (though a UAS will probably keep to their plotted flight plan better than a manned aircraft, but I digress). That many UASes and manned aircraft sharing airspace and traveling in all different directions is a scary thought right now, but that's why we're being so serious about simulating these things and developing very strict procedures for how it will be run.
In most cases, though, with a modern fly-by-wire system the pilot has significantly better situational awareness, response time, and contro
I'm rather annoyed that this alarmist article doesn't mention exactly which satellites they're referring to. I'm willing to bet the majority (if not all) of them do not have "monitor climate change" as a primary mission, and therefore belief or disbelief in AGW had nothing to do with the lack of interest in funding them. In particular, the GOES are weather satellites first and foremost. GOES only requires 2-3 active satellites, and there's currently 4 in orbit (two active, two spares in "storage orbits"), so if the report is including GOES-11 through GOES-14 as satellites we're in danger of losing, it's being disingenuous. GOES-R has been scaled back due to cost overruns, and NPOESS has been split into two separate satellite packages for the same reason. Note NPOESS was split up THIS year, not during the Bush administration, so this again has nothing to do with "I don't believe in AGW".
Also, as others have pointed out, the President does not control the budget, Congress does. He can list priorities and he can veto a budget he doesn't agree with, but Congress decides what gets funded. So yeah, BOTH parties are guilty of not funding earth sciences. This has nothing to do with their belief in climate change and everything to do with the fact that things only get funded if a) Congressmen can use it to get votes/money or b) it's an emergency. I work with the FAA. Did you know the majority of terminals in the US run on systems designed in the 70s and 80s? And that a replacement was built in the early 90s, but Congress doesn't want to fund its deployment?
Not funding replacements for systems that should be replaced but are working "good enough" for the time being is not unique to earth-sensing satellites. It's standard operating procedure. Why do you think Congress never replaced the Category III flood protection in New Orleans with Category V protection? Because the Category III hadn't failed yet. :)
Wow, epic fail.
1) That's not the post I was responding to. Had you actually read my response you'd of noticed the quotes didn't match the post you are referring to.
2) That link in no way disagrees with my thesis, as whether or not Bush suggested funding cuts, Congress is actually in charge of the purse strings, so any deficiencies in funding of these satellites is the fault of BOTH PARTIES. At least learn grade school civics, please, if you're going to attempt to be a productive member of society.
Ah bigotry, the game the whole family can play.
Why don't you tell me where I'm wrong, then?