On one hand, I'm personally really excited about Sport Pilot because I'd like to fly a LSA-sized aircraft.
On the other hand, I can see about why the hang-gliding and ultralight folks are a tad bothered. Sport Pilot started out as an attempt for them to be able to legitimize their fat and 2 person ultralights and operate on something that's not a temporary permission, but was later hijacked by the EAA and AOPA to serve their own goals as well.
I think you are mildly mistaken, however. Part 103 still holds, so "true" ultralights that conform to Part 103 are still OK.
Of course, the ultralight and hang-glider folks are still going to have to be watchful about future attempts to destroy Part 103. On the other hand, there's still room to later on, let slightly fatter ultralights in to Part 103. And the big slap on the face is that the more legitimately excepted stuff -- the training and towing aircraft -- are the ones that got the least respect.
However, the one thing that they do have going for them is that they've been quite safe so far. Which does count for something...
Future changes pretty much depend on how much folks abuse the current rules.
i.e. too many folks fly when they shouldn't, there might be newer, more restrictive rules. On the other hand, if it works out well, they may loosen some of the restrictions in a variety of ways, some of them not even connected to the sport pilot license.
For example, if creating consensus standards for light sport aircraft works well, they may extend that to non-LSA aircraft as well and have already been talking about LSA in terms of a grand experiment.
A full license doesn't "require" instrument training, either. An Instrument Rating is an add-on to a normal pilot's certificate. Under no account is a private pilot without an instrument rating allowed to fly in a situation where instruments are required.
The same thing that makes most private pilots take more than 40 hours is at play with sport pilot. You need to pass a flight test before you get your certificate and you need to have your instructor say you are ready to solo. Everybody's assuming that you will take 40-50 hours instead of 20 hours to get your sport pilot certificate.
I don't think this is going to do that much to the accident rate, really. Throughout the whole rule, the FAA explains that the goal is to have aircraft with docile flying characteristics, simple equipment, and, in the worst case, have aircraft that only have enough energy to make an unimpressive splat on the ground.
Furthermore, they either needed a vehicle with *all* of the capabilities of the shuttle to fulfill all of the future missions planned (mainly the massive assembly of the ISS) or they needed to keep the shuttle going at the same time as it's replacement until all of the missions had been completed. And they didn't have the money for two different spacecraft being operated at the same time.
I think the real problem is they simply don't *know* what the lifetime of a shuttle is. They were designed for 100 or so uses, but with a launch every week or two. And none of the real problems with the shuttle are actually things failing because of age, it's either disaster creeping up on them or a continuing increase in maintenence costs.
That's an awfully big chunk of technology that may take centuries and alot of money to develop. Most smart folks aren't going to try for it yet because they have no real idea about where to start.
What you want is prizes that are just barely feasable in a reasonable span of time. And they need to be big enough that they are worth something, but not big enough to make it a reasonable big-company gamble. You want to get college students, crazy millionares (John Carmack, for example), and tinkerers to build it, because they will question assumptions more.
SpaceShipOne isn't very useful for going anywhere, without major mods.
Which is OK. SpaceShipOne and the X-prize was mostly there to show that it was possible, not necessarily to actually build the production vehicle.
After SpaceShipOne flies some number of missions, they will probably have a pretty good idea for what the cost of a production space vehicle, operated like an airplane, would cost, so that folks can write up believable business plans to attract investors and not come off looking like pie-in-the-sky whackos.
Well, you would love the SpaceX Falcon then. Reusable first stage. And, to their credit, the initial cut-rate launch costs are based on the assumption that the recovery parachute doesn't work, instead of assuming that everything works perfectly.
Actually, the whole point is that these aren't even enough for big corporations.
The whole point of such prizes is to get college teams, small startups, and millionare h4x04z like John Carmack to work on them. Because they'll probably be questioning assumptions the whole way.
It's also a cost-multiplier effect. For every dollar spent by NASA, severl more dollars will be spent by financial backers, losing teams, etc.
And the big thing is, for normal projects, to get it going, you just need to be good at powerpoint. For this one, no success = no money. So it really prevents folks from blowing money because they've got it. Or assuring NASA that the breakthrough technology that's needed to make the design work will be ready shortly (a la the X-33's lumpy composite fuel tanks that didn't actually work)
Beat NASA to the Moon. As a "Friendly" competition, the goal would be to beam back pictures of a NASA lunar probe as it lands.
They've got some good stuff there. A lot of "solve problems that have dogged NASA for a while" sort of things -- lightweight radiation shielding, tanks that can be used for long-term storage in space without the contents boiling off, stuff like that. There's a few big X-prize-ish challenges, like an orbital x-prize mission, a better sub-orbital mission, etc.
And there's even some talk about some projects oriented at the hobyist or student, most specifically a space suit glove. They were seriosuly considering either lending out vacum chambers or providing the plans so that you could build one for around $300. Which I thought was especially good.
The ISS is actually pretty crummy, as-is, for a launch point outside of Earth orbit. American boosters lose performance hitting it, and the high inclanation means that it's a poor parking orbit for launching to anything in the solar system.
The thing about humans is they are great in a pinch in ways that computers can't match. Mike "Balls of steel" Melvill, pilot of SpaceShip One, was able to reboot the computer and hand-fly it on one flight, and then deal with a guidance problem on the record-breaking flight. Well, that, and they can be manufactured with unskilled labor and readily available materials.;)
See, the real problem is that they should have tabled the space station for 5-10 years after the Challenger blew up, to give them time to develop something with a better cost per pound to orbit than the shuttle has. Most of the problems of space travel would be far easier if not for the simple economics that it costs thousands of dollars per pound to get to orbit.
See, it was a dumb idea, but I hafta admire what they pulled.
Not only did they get what they wanted, kinda, but, in return, we got the Russians to blow a bunch of their own money on their own shuttle, just so that they would be able to pull the same stunts with Buran that we were going to pull with the shuttle.
That, and SDI. We kinda won the cold war because we were better able to pour money down the toilet.;)
The problem, of course, is that NASA's earlier idea would have probably worked out much better and be much simpler, but in needing to work with the military, they ended up making it the complicated, flawed, albeit quite beautiful, beast it is.
The problem is, sure they made some great stuff, but they rarely get a chance to flight test it. All of the stuff they made for the X-33 (better heat shielding, aerospike engines, etc) never actually flew. Sure the aerospike engine worked on the stand, but there could be interesting stuff that happens at high altitude. How long did it take them to move ion engines from the lab to DS1 to actually test it?
The problem is, most of the budget goes towards an army of NASA employees and contractors, to keep the Shuttle and ISS going. The real revolution in space travel is getting stuff to orbit inexpensively, and NASA hasn't done much for that lately because they went from one expensive expendable booster that could manage a few flights per year (Saturn V) to a psuedo-reusable booster that could manage a few flights per year (Shuttle), except that the Shuttle carries less payload per flight and blows up more often, without actually reducing the cost to orbit any.
The only good part about this is, generally by playing different branches of the government off of each other and with the funding of a few folk who made a mint on computers who watched too much Star Trek, some pieces of private industry have been able to do things that NASA has not -- bring down the cost to launch.
And, while Burt Rutan / Paul Allen in the news right now, there's also John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace (paid for by Doom and Quake) and SpaceX (Paid for by Paypal) waiting in the wings, too.
You forget, however, that somebody making their own voting slips requires an agent in each precinct and also requires the collusion of all of the election judges at said precinct to submit a large number of loaded cards.
Whereas a modified OS, BIOS, or software can be done once, from a central location, with much less likelyhood of being observed.
With mark-sense, you've got one machine per precinct. The voting booth is a table with a privacy shield and a pen.
As compared to a computer in each voting booth, with a printer, and all of the associated ballot-handling machinery to make sure that the person can't tamper with the now-submitted ballot.
Somehow, I still don't think that, even with OSS and commodity components, it's going to be a good deal to have a computer at each booth.
You forget that, really, any voting system is unfair and ends up ruining it for somebody. Well, that, and it would require a constitutional amendment to make it happen.
The real, easy, workable solution is a sanity check at vote-time. They do this out where I live. Once you fill out your large-print paper ballot, they put your ballot in the machine. The machine scans your ballot and lets you know if something's wrong. However, you still have real paper ballots that can be checked for accuracy to make sure that none of the machines have been tampered with.
You are under the mistaken assumption that a good Internet voting mechanism is possible and a good idea.
Right now, it probably isn't. Would you want your average PC to be controlling your life support system, where if it dies, you do? The wrong guy in the white house could unleash a nuclear holocaust upon us all; is that any less important?
Really, I'm not sure that it's worth it to do electronic voting anyways. A properly designed machine-assisted paper voting system (big ballots in your choice of languages, mark-sense sense system with no chad, etc) is pretty economical and reasonably hard to mess with -- especially because its functioning and potential for fraud is easier to perceive.
My point is, do you really want to find out what happens with a beaten-up power source, with droplets of water in it, etc? That's pretty far into the category of risks that don't have any particularly good reward at the end.
Avoid lasers. The laser-tag-ish games with leagues forbid lasers of any sort because the eye-risk is just too high, especially with magnifying lenses on the sight. Just use an IR LED with better optics and a thinner beam.
I'd say that the big thing is that you want to preserve the notion of combat. So you really need sensors in many places around the body, so that you can run and duck and hide and still get a head shot off.
I'm betting that some fun could be had with a "suicide bomb" option, where you kill yourself and anybody in range.;)
See, I think there's a split in the combat-games folks.
On one side you've got the SCA, paintball folks, etc, where you have pain.
On the other side, you've got padded-weapon combat, laser tag, etc. to avoid pain.
It seems like most folks fit into one or the other, but rarely both. Padded weaponry folks need to really whack SCA folks when they compete because otherwise the SCA person won't acknowlage that they've been hit.
In any case, I don't know if electrodes in the vest is an especially good idea. The problem is that your skin conductivity changes as it gets wet, increasing the risk that you'd accidentally give somebody too much amperage across the heart. And it gets awfully bulky.
I think you really need to just accept that laser tag does not involve pain and leave it at that. The real problem is the programming and rules of the particular game you were playing. Even if it's just inconvenient (have to work your way back through the field to the "hospital" if you are killed or some variant) to die, people will be more scared.
I was thinking about that this morning, mostly in the server case.
Really, certificates "should" just have been stuffed into DNS records because you need to prove some set of information and otherwise protect your records there. However, the DNS protocol isn't encrypted and sometimes DNS gets things wrong.
This CA is mildly more secure than DNS simply because it's defense in depth. It trusts the DNS contact information to hand out server contact info properly, however only at the time reqeuested. Plus, your certificate has been signed by CACert, which is harder to mess with than DNS. Verisign requires a seperate thread of authentication entirely, so it could perhaps be represented as even more security.
Really, the problem is that nobody who wrote SSL/TLS thought to include an in-between level of security, a.k.a. "semitrusted". If a certificate was "semitrusted", you wouldn't get a little key icon, but you wouldn't get a warning, either (i thought of making a different key icon, but that is too complicated without explanation) so that you'd benefit from some level of universal encryption, but there is still a system of really-secure certificates for things like shopping carts and online banking, where the standard of security is higher.
Actually, if you want to get your certificate authenticated by anybody, so as to have your own name on the cert, you need to provide a valid government ID number.
But you can get a server cert without needing to authenticate, as long as your info matches DNS.
Your sentence makes no sense. The cognitive dissonance from seeing the phrase "legitimate businessman" and "bulk email industry" coupled with an "in the" is too much. What were you trying to say?
True, but if ROSKO is to be believed, there aren't actually that many spammers out there.
My point is, if you can better establish a link between spammers and virus writers, you increase the likelyhood of being able to actually raid spamhausen for widespread computer crime.
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I'm kinda on the fence about this one..
On one hand, I'm personally really excited about Sport Pilot because I'd like to fly a LSA-sized aircraft.
On the other hand, I can see about why the hang-gliding and ultralight folks are a tad bothered. Sport Pilot started out as an attempt for them to be able to legitimize their fat and 2 person ultralights and operate on something that's not a temporary permission, but was later hijacked by the EAA and AOPA to serve their own goals as well.
I think you are mildly mistaken, however. Part 103 still holds, so "true" ultralights that conform to Part 103 are still OK.
Of course, the ultralight and hang-glider folks are still going to have to be watchful about future attempts to destroy Part 103. On the other hand, there's still room to later on, let slightly fatter ultralights in to Part 103. And the big slap on the face is that the more legitimately excepted stuff -- the training and towing aircraft -- are the ones that got the least respect.
However, the one thing that they do have going for them is that they've been quite safe so far. Which does count for something...
Future changes pretty much depend on how much folks abuse the current rules.
i.e. too many folks fly when they shouldn't, there might be newer, more restrictive rules. On the other hand, if it works out well, they may loosen some of the restrictions in a variety of ways, some of them not even connected to the sport pilot license.
For example, if creating consensus standards for light sport aircraft works well, they may extend that to non-LSA aircraft as well and have already been talking about LSA in terms of a grand experiment.
A full license doesn't "require" instrument training, either. An Instrument Rating is an add-on to a normal pilot's certificate. Under no account is a private pilot without an instrument rating allowed to fly in a situation where instruments are required.
The same thing that makes most private pilots take more than 40 hours is at play with sport pilot. You need to pass a flight test before you get your certificate and you need to have your instructor say you are ready to solo. Everybody's assuming that you will take 40-50 hours instead of 20 hours to get your sport pilot certificate.
I don't think this is going to do that much to the accident rate, really. Throughout the whole rule, the FAA explains that the goal is to have aircraft with docile flying characteristics, simple equipment, and, in the worst case, have aircraft that only have enough energy to make an unimpressive splat on the ground.
Furthermore, they either needed a vehicle with *all* of the capabilities of the shuttle to fulfill all of the future missions planned (mainly the massive assembly of the ISS) or they needed to keep the shuttle going at the same time as it's replacement until all of the missions had been completed. And they didn't have the money for two different spacecraft being operated at the same time.
I think the real problem is they simply don't *know* what the lifetime of a shuttle is. They were designed for 100 or so uses, but with a launch every week or two. And none of the real problems with the shuttle are actually things failing because of age, it's either disaster creeping up on them or a continuing increase in maintenence costs.
Not necessarily.
That's an awfully big chunk of technology that may take centuries and alot of money to develop. Most smart folks aren't going to try for it yet because they have no real idea about where to start.
What you want is prizes that are just barely feasable in a reasonable span of time. And they need to be big enough that they are worth something, but not big enough to make it a reasonable big-company gamble. You want to get college students, crazy millionares (John Carmack, for example), and tinkerers to build it, because they will question assumptions more.
SpaceShipOne isn't very useful for going anywhere, without major mods.
Which is OK. SpaceShipOne and the X-prize was mostly there to show that it was possible, not necessarily to actually build the production vehicle.
After SpaceShipOne flies some number of missions, they will probably have a pretty good idea for what the cost of a production space vehicle, operated like an airplane, would cost, so that folks can write up believable business plans to attract investors and not come off looking like pie-in-the-sky whackos.
Well, you would love the SpaceX Falcon then. Reusable first stage. And, to their credit, the initial cut-rate launch costs are based on the assumption that the recovery parachute doesn't work, instead of assuming that everything works perfectly.
Actually, the whole point is that these aren't even enough for big corporations.
The whole point of such prizes is to get college teams, small startups, and millionare h4x04z like John Carmack to work on them. Because they'll probably be questioning assumptions the whole way.
It's also a cost-multiplier effect. For every dollar spent by NASA, severl more dollars will be spent by financial backers, losing teams, etc.
And the big thing is, for normal projects, to get it going, you just need to be good at powerpoint. For this one, no success = no money. So it really prevents folks from blowing money because they've got it. Or assuring NASA that the breakthrough technology that's needed to make the design work will be ready shortly (a la the X-33's lumpy composite fuel tanks that didn't actually work)
Beat NASA to the Moon. As a "Friendly" competition, the goal would be to beam back pictures of a NASA lunar probe as it lands.
They've got some good stuff there. A lot of "solve problems that have dogged NASA for a while" sort of things -- lightweight radiation shielding, tanks that can be used for long-term storage in space without the contents boiling off, stuff like that. There's a few big X-prize-ish challenges, like an orbital x-prize mission, a better sub-orbital mission, etc.
And there's even some talk about some projects oriented at the hobyist or student, most specifically a space suit glove. They were seriosuly considering either lending out vacum chambers or providing the plans so that you could build one for around $300. Which I thought was especially good.
You wish.
;)
The ISS is actually pretty crummy, as-is, for a launch point outside of Earth orbit. American boosters lose performance hitting it, and the high inclanation means that it's a poor parking orbit for launching to anything in the solar system.
The thing about humans is they are great in a pinch in ways that computers can't match. Mike "Balls of steel" Melvill, pilot of SpaceShip One, was able to reboot the computer and hand-fly it on one flight, and then deal with a guidance problem on the record-breaking flight. Well, that, and they can be manufactured with unskilled labor and readily available materials.
See, the real problem is that they should have tabled the space station for 5-10 years after the Challenger blew up, to give them time to develop something with a better cost per pound to orbit than the shuttle has. Most of the problems of space travel would be far easier if not for the simple economics that it costs thousands of dollars per pound to get to orbit.
See, it was a dumb idea, but I hafta admire what they pulled.
;)
Not only did they get what they wanted, kinda, but, in return, we got the Russians to blow a bunch of their own money on their own shuttle, just so that they would be able to pull the same stunts with Buran that we were going to pull with the shuttle.
That, and SDI. We kinda won the cold war because we were better able to pour money down the toilet.
The problem, of course, is that NASA's earlier idea would have probably worked out much better and be much simpler, but in needing to work with the military, they ended up making it the complicated, flawed, albeit quite beautiful, beast it is.
The problem is, sure they made some great stuff, but they rarely get a chance to flight test it. All of the stuff they made for the X-33 (better heat shielding, aerospike engines, etc) never actually flew. Sure the aerospike engine worked on the stand, but there could be interesting stuff that happens at high altitude. How long did it take them to move ion engines from the lab to DS1 to actually test it?
The problem is, most of the budget goes towards an army of NASA employees and contractors, to keep the Shuttle and ISS going. The real revolution in space travel is getting stuff to orbit inexpensively, and NASA hasn't done much for that lately because they went from one expensive expendable booster that could manage a few flights per year (Saturn V) to a psuedo-reusable booster that could manage a few flights per year (Shuttle), except that the Shuttle carries less payload per flight and blows up more often, without actually reducing the cost to orbit any.
The only good part about this is, generally by playing different branches of the government off of each other and with the funding of a few folk who made a mint on computers who watched too much Star Trek, some pieces of private industry have been able to do things that NASA has not -- bring down the cost to launch.
And, while Burt Rutan / Paul Allen in the news right now, there's also John Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace (paid for by Doom and Quake) and SpaceX (Paid for by Paypal) waiting in the wings, too.
How would you detect that the hardware had been tampered with?
You forget, however, that somebody making their own voting slips requires an agent in each precinct and also requires the collusion of all of the election judges at said precinct to submit a large number of loaded cards.
Whereas a modified OS, BIOS, or software can be done once, from a central location, with much less likelyhood of being observed.
I'm not so sure about that one.
With mark-sense, you've got one machine per precinct. The voting booth is a table with a privacy shield and a pen.
As compared to a computer in each voting booth, with a printer, and all of the associated ballot-handling machinery to make sure that the person can't tamper with the now-submitted ballot.
Somehow, I still don't think that, even with OSS and commodity components, it's going to be a good deal to have a computer at each booth.
So?
At least you can do a recount on a mark-sense based election by hand and make sure that the scanner is working properly.
Your CD-ROM can still be tampered with. You just need to re-flash the controller (or the system BIOS) to modify a select number of votes.
The paper trail still works better because it gives you the option of seeing the record, requiring nothing but your eyes.
You forget that, really, any voting system is unfair and ends up ruining it for somebody. Well, that, and it would require a constitutional amendment to make it happen.
The real, easy, workable solution is a sanity check at vote-time. They do this out where I live. Once you fill out your large-print paper ballot, they put your ballot in the machine. The machine scans your ballot and lets you know if something's wrong. However, you still have real paper ballots that can be checked for accuracy to make sure that none of the machines have been tampered with.
You are under the mistaken assumption that a good Internet voting mechanism is possible and a good idea.
Right now, it probably isn't. Would you want your average PC to be controlling your life support system, where if it dies, you do? The wrong guy in the white house could unleash a nuclear holocaust upon us all; is that any less important?
Really, I'm not sure that it's worth it to do electronic voting anyways. A properly designed machine-assisted paper voting system (big ballots in your choice of languages, mark-sense sense system with no chad, etc) is pretty economical and reasonably hard to mess with -- especially because its functioning and potential for fraud is easier to perceive.
Yeah, I know that.
My point is, do you really want to find out what happens with a beaten-up power source, with droplets of water in it, etc? That's pretty far into the category of risks that don't have any particularly good reward at the end.
Avoid lasers. The laser-tag-ish games with leagues forbid lasers of any sort because the eye-risk is just too high, especially with magnifying lenses on the sight. Just use an IR LED with better optics and a thinner beam.
;)
I'd say that the big thing is that you want to preserve the notion of combat. So you really need sensors in many places around the body, so that you can run and duck and hide and still get a head shot off.
I'm betting that some fun could be had with a "suicide bomb" option, where you kill yourself and anybody in range.
See, I think there's a split in the combat-games folks.
On one side you've got the SCA, paintball folks, etc, where you have pain.
On the other side, you've got padded-weapon combat, laser tag, etc. to avoid pain.
It seems like most folks fit into one or the other, but rarely both. Padded weaponry folks need to really whack SCA folks when they compete because otherwise the SCA person won't acknowlage that they've been hit.
In any case, I don't know if electrodes in the vest is an especially good idea. The problem is that your skin conductivity changes as it gets wet, increasing the risk that you'd accidentally give somebody too much amperage across the heart. And it gets awfully bulky.
I think you really need to just accept that laser tag does not involve pain and leave it at that. The real problem is the programming and rules of the particular game you were playing. Even if it's just inconvenient (have to work your way back through the field to the "hospital" if you are killed or some variant) to die, people will be more scared.
I was thinking about that this morning, mostly in the server case.
Really, certificates "should" just have been stuffed into DNS records because you need to prove some set of information and otherwise protect your records there. However, the DNS protocol isn't encrypted and sometimes DNS gets things wrong.
This CA is mildly more secure than DNS simply because it's defense in depth. It trusts the DNS contact information to hand out server contact info properly, however only at the time reqeuested. Plus, your certificate has been signed by CACert, which is harder to mess with than DNS. Verisign requires a seperate thread of authentication entirely, so it could perhaps be represented as even more security.
Really, the problem is that nobody who wrote SSL/TLS thought to include an in-between level of security, a.k.a. "semitrusted". If a certificate was "semitrusted", you wouldn't get a little key icon, but you wouldn't get a warning, either (i thought of making a different key icon, but that is too complicated without explanation) so that you'd benefit from some level of universal encryption, but there is still a system of really-secure certificates for things like shopping carts and online banking, where the standard of security is higher.
Actually, if you want to get your certificate authenticated by anybody, so as to have your own name on the cert, you need to provide a valid government ID number.
But you can get a server cert without needing to authenticate, as long as your info matches DNS.
Your sentence makes no sense. The cognitive dissonance from seeing the phrase "legitimate businessman" and "bulk email industry" coupled with an "in the" is too much. What were you trying to say?
True, but if ROSKO is to be believed, there aren't actually that many spammers out there.
My point is, if you can better establish a link between spammers and virus writers, you increase the likelyhood of being able to actually raid spamhausen for widespread computer crime.