I am a tax payer and I am not an avid boater. I have no reason to save you at all costs. Only as long as rescue costs are reasonable, it will be funded. If the cost becomes too much, we would yank the entire rescue service.
That would be a gross violation of over 1000 years of jurisprudence and legal precedence, not to mention the violation of any number of modern international agreements and treaties. Every seafaring nation has a duty of care for the waters they border, and every mariner be they recreational or commercial, is part of the system. This is the cost of being a nation, and of engaging in maritime trade.
Now, that said, most distress situations are only coordinated by the coastguard rather than run by them. I've responded to a couple of distress situations over the years while out sailing. In one case it was a stranded kitesurfer, in the other case a motorboat with a dead engine. In the kitesurfer, he was a mile off the beach, with a flooded kite and cold. I took him onboard, gathered up the kite, and took him to the nearest dock. In the case of the motorboat I tossed them a line, and held them off the rocks until the local tow service (commercial operation) got out there to haul him into the dock. In both cases I would never expect compensation beyond a thank-you; I just expect that the same consideration would be given to me in return should I ever run into trouble.
an EPIRB doesn't summon the boat half a mile away from you to come and help. EPIRBs are a godsend offshore, or in truly isolated areas, but they're not a substitute for making that call over the radio. On the water, everyone be they coastguard or not, is expected to respond to a distress call if feasible and safe to do so. One of the "good" things about being a slow sailboat is that we're rarely in a position to respond, but over the years I've done so twice. In one case, it was to bring in a disabled runabout that was lost in a fog bank with a disabled engine (we just happened onto him), and the other was picking up a kite surfer who was stranded a mile offshore with his lines all in tangles and kite under water.
Basically, it's not just the coast guard who responds, but any available boat or mariner. If I ever wind up in trouble, I hope that someone else will come and give me a hand.
Unfortunately there is no universal caller ID on VHF radios. Some of the newer ones will automatically identify your vessel and/or provide your location, but most VHF radios used by recreational boaters are old analog units which simply broadcast only what you say into them. So the only thing the USCG frequently gets is a voice in the RF ether claiming people are in danger of dying.
DSC has been required on all fixed-mount VHF radios sold for at least the past decade, if not longer. The issue is that many of them are not connected to GPS (including mine... hides face), their MMSI isn't configured properly, or the contact information associated with the MMSI isn't up to date. We just moved my boat to Canada from the US, and as such we need to program the radio with our new MMSI. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people dont' do this.
With the exception of the latest radios, most DSC equipped marine VHF radios do not have an integrated GPS unit. Instead, they rely on being wired to the vessel's GPS. The reality is that i'd wager that most radios aren't connected to GPS. (For the moment, mine isn't since my old ship's GPS broke and I use an iPad for charting purposes).
The other issue is that the MMSI follows the boat, so if you sell or buy the boat, you need to modify the database with the new contact info and so forth. It's even wierder in the US, as there are two MMSI registries, the BoatUS one, and the FCC one. The coasties have access to both databases, but the BoatUS one isn't in the global database, so if you take your boat offshore (or up to Canada), no one will have your contact info.
Thirdly, I'd like to see the addition of a second non-mayday help button... Think the onstar buttons in some vehicles. Far too many times I've been out sailing, and the distress alarm comes on, only to discover that it's someone who's run out of fuel, got scared in the dark, or who's engine has failed but isn't in immediate danger. This could be alleviated by having a pan-pan button or whatever that would alert Towboat US or whatever other equivalent operators, and not bother the rest of us.
Lastly, most radios can only have the MMSI programmed twice. After that, they need to be sent back to the manufacturer to be reset, or you need to find the fancy/secret software to do so. This is to prevent spoofing, which is laudible, but also problematic.
Anyhow, could the system be improved? absolutely, it's just a matter of how to go about it.
Precisely. "Pranksters" should get long prison sentences. This isn't something that can be solved with spam filters.
On the flip side, sometimes it's hard to tell the pranksters from those who are just incompetent. Due to ancient history, there's no licensing, training, or testing requirements for those going out on the water in many nations. In Canada we have the PCOC (Pleasure Craft Operator's Certificate), but it's a pretty low bar to cross.
Anyhow, a year ago I was sailing off the coast of southern California last summer, and this guy punches his distress button because he wrapped one of his dock lines around both propellers on his boat, and was drifting out towards San Clemente island. Big boat, quiet seas. Guy didn't know how to operate his radio, change channels, and kept giving his coordinates as somewhere on land in East Los Angeles. Turns out the coordinates he was reading off were those of where the cursor on his chart plotter was, not what his GPS was reading. The guy was a moron, and didn't want to pay the $1900 bill for sea tow to haul his ass back to port. It went on for hours, and definitely wasn't a mayday situation (yet). He was fine, the boat was in no danger of sinking, he was just disabled and was too cheap to pay for a tow, or to ahve paid for towing insurance.
There are other ways they could accomplish the same thing, not just through analyzing the audio though. The coastguard has a large network of radio receivers and transmitters to monitor their various channels. It always surprises me that they don't have directionfinding capabilities associated with that. The cutters and other larger vessels usually do, but the terrestrial network usually doesn't seem to. When someone keys up a radio and makes a call, they should be able to get a line on them pretty much instantly.
Sure most calls would be from the boats radio, but increasingly it may be from a cell phone (If in range of a tower)
No competent mariner/boater would make a distress call via a cell phone. One of the basic rules of being on the water is that, with a few exceptions, everyone is monitoring VHF 16, and all modern radios are also monitoring DSC. The water, even inshore ocean or lakes, is an unforgiving place, if you're in real trouble you want the closest person to respond, and in turn if you're the closest person, you respond. You can't do that if the distress was made over a cell phone. On two occasions, even in my 27' sailboat with a 9hp motor, I've put other boats under tow, or at least stood by, when they're in trouble.
On the other hand, while I would never condone prank/improper calls, in many situations they effectively serve as impromptu training for the coasties.
I'm a recreational keelboat sailor in the south-west coast of Canada/PNW USA, and it's both hilarious and frustrating to listen to VHF 16 on summer weekends. The number of ill-prepared people, those who don't know proper radio procedure, etc... is mind blowing. It's like what September was back in the golden era of Usenet. I much prefer sailing in the winter; the winds are better, and there are fewer idiots on the water.
Actually no, the turbines are independent of line frequency. Unless there's something modifying things, they will spin at the optimal speed to extract the maximum amount of energy out of the wind.
The trick here is that the power goes through a high voltage DC step (and in this case, I presume the transmission to shore will be done using HVDC) then back through utility-scale inverters and into the AC used on the grid. The reason why you see them all spinning at the same speed is that the ones in shot are in similar wind conditions, so will be turning at the same speed (or at their max speed, whichever is lower).
RFC 2782 talks about SRV records, which are a different beast than A or AAAA records. SRV records deliberately use the underscore character to emphasize that they should not be resolved by the normal DNS resolution libraries. As per the RFC:
An underscore (_) is prepended to the service identifier to avoid collisions with DNS labels that occur in nature.
RFC 2181 talks about other record types (MX, SOA, NS, PTR, CNAME, and so forth), and just says that the DNS server shouldn't prohibit those types of records.
Any explanation for this piece of shit problem, asshole?
Because he's technically correct, which is the best kind of correct... The DNS specification expressly prohibits the use of the underscore character in domain names. It's netflix that's at fault here, more than anything else.
Well, the most effective way of stopping the missiles is to prevent them from being built in the first place... The reduction int he strategic arsenals of the major super powers has dramatically improved world security.
To quote Dr Strangelove: "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH? "
Keeping the existence and capabilities of your weapon systems a secret doesn't work very well to deter your enemies. By letting your enemies know you have it, you force them to spend significant resources countering your own system.
When it all comes down to it, war is kinetic economics.
I know you're joking, but the laser would just burn a hole through the mirror. Even if your mirror was 99% efficient (which most aren't), the mirror would be absorbing 300W within a few square inches, which would cause it to heat up rapidly, becoming less reflective, and very quickly you have a hole in it.
Once a warhead is into its reentry phase, your goose is pretty much cooked. You could theoretically stop them with a kinetic kill, but the probability of intercept extremely low. Warheads also tend to be extremely rugged, dense objects (given the Uranium casing and all that), and so aren't a good candidate for LASER weapons.
Where a LASER really shines (if you'll pardon the pun) is destroying the launcher during the boost phase, or in the case of what's on the USS Ponce, also dealing with cruise missiles and the like. In order to maximize their throw weight (how big of a warhead and/or how far), missiles tend to be built as lightly as possible. During the boost phase of a ballistic missile, all you need to do is weaken its structure enough that the launch forces cause it to fall apart. You don't need to burn a hole through it, you don't need to melt it, you just need to weaken it enough that it buckles under the g-forces. It's a similar thing with the cruise missiles that would be affecting a warship, you just need to compromise them structurally.
Eh, a well placed round out of a.50 rifle will stop any vehicle quite effectively, without targeting the occupants. Just put it through the engine block.
The issue is with people who use SMS as part of their 2FA, among others.
In the bank account thing, the attackers were able to breach the victim's computer to gain the initial credentials. They then used a compromise of the SS7 signalling to intercept the SMS message from the bank, obstensibly to the victim, to get the password to unlock the account. In effect, the Bank's 2FA wasn't proper, because they trusted the network to do the right thing, and didn't ensure that the password went to the account holder's device.
"correct horse battery staple" would like to disagree with you. The reality is that putting in special characters, mixed case, and numbers doesn't do nearly as much to increase password complexity compared to simply making them longer. For the network I operate, I now just have a policy of a minimum of 12 characters. I tell my users to make up a silly little rhyme or ditty that they can remember, and use that as their password. Easy to remember, hard to crack, and easy to type.
I've been building computers for myself for close to 25 years (starting when I used to drool over 286 motherboards with 1MB of RAM!) and I've come to realize that the last computer I built (a good 6 years ago now) is probably the last one I'll ever build. It's still running, and running well, and is more than fast enough for my needs. All I've done to it over the past half decade is replace/upgrade its storage. An i7-930 with 24GiB of RAM is a pretty quick little beast for any day to day operations.
Robotic exploration is absolutely the right tasks for this bit of exploration, if only due to the radiation environment around Jupiter. I don't think anyone argues that robotic missions don't have value.
As a comparison, lets look at the Curiosity rover on mars. As of Late January this year, it had driven a total of 15km on Mars in roughly 1700 days. It's done a lot of really great work, but it's slow, painstaking, and somewhat limited. If you were to put a human field geologist on Mars, with an appropriate quad-bike type vehicle, she or he would likely be able to cover the same distance within a matter of hours. Also, having that brain behind the Mk-1 eyeball, would allow them to quickly sort out and spot relevant bits of geology. In terms of pure science, putting a team of humans there with appropriate training would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
The reality, though, is that for these kinds of things, science isn't the point of the mission, it's just what you do when you get there. The United States didn't fund the Apollo mission to collect science data on the moon, they did it to beat the Russians. It was an exercise in applied politics. Once they were on the moon, of course, the thing to do was science, but the US didn't pour billions of dollars into Apollo to increase scientific knowledge.
It's the same thing with Mars. Elon Musk and his dreams notwithstanding, IMHO the only time humans will ever set foot on Mars will be when there is a political imperative to do so. Until then, we'll have to content ourselves with sending avatars, of a kind, there in our place and doing what science we can with them.
Actually it could. It's one of the things that Astronauts need to deal with as part of the preparation for a spacewalk. The ISS operates using an earth-normal gas mix and pressure (1 bar, 20% O2, 80% nitrogen). When they're spacewalking, the spacesuit is only pressurized to 1/3 bar (5psi), and runs on 100% O2. That pressure change definitely has the possibility of causing "The Bends" in the astronauts if they were to do it too quickly.
Instead, they go through a whole protocol prior to the spacewalk of exercising vigorously while breathing pure O2 and/or camping out in the airlock (also breathing pure O2) in order to shed the nitrogen that's otherwise saturated within their systems.
If the pod were to rupture, the most likely scenario would be to have the capsule come to a stop rapidly, slam bulkheads on either side of it, and vent the section of tube to the atmosphere.
Actually, modern airliners are moving away from using bleed air for pressurization and the like. The problem with bleed air is that it's hot, dry, and potentially contains atomized lubricants and other things from the engine. (Also why you occasionally get a whiff of jet exhaust as the engines start up). The equipment to process the bleed air into breathable air for the cabin adds significant weight (and thus inefficiency), and the process itself costs engine performance.
On the Dreamliner, Boeing has switched to using an electrical pressurization system. It's lighter weight than the bleed air systems, easier to maintain, and more efficient. Airbus is likely doing the same thing on their new airliners.
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I am a tax payer and I am not an avid boater. I have no reason to save you at all costs. Only as long as rescue costs are reasonable, it will be funded. If the cost becomes too much, we would yank the entire rescue service.
That would be a gross violation of over 1000 years of jurisprudence and legal precedence, not to mention the violation of any number of modern international agreements and treaties. Every seafaring nation has a duty of care for the waters they border, and every mariner be they recreational or commercial, is part of the system. This is the cost of being a nation, and of engaging in maritime trade.
Now, that said, most distress situations are only coordinated by the coastguard rather than run by them. I've responded to a couple of distress situations over the years while out sailing. In one case it was a stranded kitesurfer, in the other case a motorboat with a dead engine. In the kitesurfer, he was a mile off the beach, with a flooded kite and cold. I took him onboard, gathered up the kite, and took him to the nearest dock. In the case of the motorboat I tossed them a line, and held them off the rocks until the local tow service (commercial operation) got out there to haul him into the dock. In both cases I would never expect compensation beyond a thank-you; I just expect that the same consideration would be given to me in return should I ever run into trouble.
an EPIRB doesn't summon the boat half a mile away from you to come and help. EPIRBs are a godsend offshore, or in truly isolated areas, but they're not a substitute for making that call over the radio. On the water, everyone be they coastguard or not, is expected to respond to a distress call if feasible and safe to do so. One of the "good" things about being a slow sailboat is that we're rarely in a position to respond, but over the years I've done so twice. In one case, it was to bring in a disabled runabout that was lost in a fog bank with a disabled engine (we just happened onto him), and the other was picking up a kite surfer who was stranded a mile offshore with his lines all in tangles and kite under water.
Basically, it's not just the coast guard who responds, but any available boat or mariner. If I ever wind up in trouble, I hope that someone else will come and give me a hand.
Unfortunately there is no universal caller ID on VHF radios. Some of the newer ones will automatically identify your vessel and/or provide your location, but most VHF radios used by recreational boaters are old analog units which simply broadcast only what you say into them. So the only thing the USCG frequently gets is a voice in the RF ether claiming people are in danger of dying.
DSC has been required on all fixed-mount VHF radios sold for at least the past decade, if not longer. The issue is that many of them are not connected to GPS (including mine... hides face), their MMSI isn't configured properly, or the contact information associated with the MMSI isn't up to date. We just moved my boat to Canada from the US, and as such we need to program the radio with our new MMSI. I'd be willing to bet that a lot of people dont' do this.
With the exception of the latest radios, most DSC equipped marine VHF radios do not have an integrated GPS unit. Instead, they rely on being wired to the vessel's GPS. The reality is that i'd wager that most radios aren't connected to GPS. (For the moment, mine isn't since my old ship's GPS broke and I use an iPad for charting purposes).
The other issue is that the MMSI follows the boat, so if you sell or buy the boat, you need to modify the database with the new contact info and so forth. It's even wierder in the US, as there are two MMSI registries, the BoatUS one, and the FCC one. The coasties have access to both databases, but the BoatUS one isn't in the global database, so if you take your boat offshore (or up to Canada), no one will have your contact info.
Thirdly, I'd like to see the addition of a second non-mayday help button... Think the onstar buttons in some vehicles. Far too many times I've been out sailing, and the distress alarm comes on, only to discover that it's someone who's run out of fuel, got scared in the dark, or who's engine has failed but isn't in immediate danger. This could be alleviated by having a pan-pan button or whatever that would alert Towboat US or whatever other equivalent operators, and not bother the rest of us.
Lastly, most radios can only have the MMSI programmed twice. After that, they need to be sent back to the manufacturer to be reset, or you need to find the fancy/secret software to do so. This is to prevent spoofing, which is laudible, but also problematic.
Anyhow, could the system be improved? absolutely, it's just a matter of how to go about it.
Precisely. "Pranksters" should get long prison sentences. This isn't something that can be solved with spam filters.
On the flip side, sometimes it's hard to tell the pranksters from those who are just incompetent. Due to ancient history, there's no licensing, training, or testing requirements for those going out on the water in many nations. In Canada we have the PCOC (Pleasure Craft Operator's Certificate), but it's a pretty low bar to cross.
Anyhow, a year ago I was sailing off the coast of southern California last summer, and this guy punches his distress button because he wrapped one of his dock lines around both propellers on his boat, and was drifting out towards San Clemente island. Big boat, quiet seas. Guy didn't know how to operate his radio, change channels, and kept giving his coordinates as somewhere on land in East Los Angeles. Turns out the coordinates he was reading off were those of where the cursor on his chart plotter was, not what his GPS was reading. The guy was a moron, and didn't want to pay the $1900 bill for sea tow to haul his ass back to port. It went on for hours, and definitely wasn't a mayday situation (yet). He was fine, the boat was in no danger of sinking, he was just disabled and was too cheap to pay for a tow, or to ahve paid for towing insurance.
There are other ways they could accomplish the same thing, not just through analyzing the audio though. The coastguard has a large network of radio receivers and transmitters to monitor their various channels. It always surprises me that they don't have directionfinding capabilities associated with that. The cutters and other larger vessels usually do, but the terrestrial network usually doesn't seem to. When someone keys up a radio and makes a call, they should be able to get a line on them pretty much instantly.
Sure most calls would be from the boats radio, but increasingly it may be from a cell phone (If in range of a tower)
No competent mariner/boater would make a distress call via a cell phone. One of the basic rules of being on the water is that, with a few exceptions, everyone is monitoring VHF 16, and all modern radios are also monitoring DSC. The water, even inshore ocean or lakes, is an unforgiving place, if you're in real trouble you want the closest person to respond, and in turn if you're the closest person, you respond. You can't do that if the distress was made over a cell phone. On two occasions, even in my 27' sailboat with a 9hp motor, I've put other boats under tow, or at least stood by, when they're in trouble.
On the other hand, while I would never condone prank/improper calls, in many situations they effectively serve as impromptu training for the coasties.
I'm a recreational keelboat sailor in the south-west coast of Canada/PNW USA, and it's both hilarious and frustrating to listen to VHF 16 on summer weekends. The number of ill-prepared people, those who don't know proper radio procedure, etc... is mind blowing. It's like what September was back in the golden era of Usenet. I much prefer sailing in the winter; the winds are better, and there are fewer idiots on the water.
Actually no, the turbines are independent of line frequency. Unless there's something modifying things, they will spin at the optimal speed to extract the maximum amount of energy out of the wind.
The trick here is that the power goes through a high voltage DC step (and in this case, I presume the transmission to shore will be done using HVDC) then back through utility-scale inverters and into the AC used on the grid. The reason why you see them all spinning at the same speed is that the ones in shot are in similar wind conditions, so will be turning at the same speed (or at their max speed, whichever is lower).
And the underscore was chosen to effectively put those records in a different namespace than A and AAAA records.
RFC 2782 talks about SRV records, which are a different beast than A or AAAA records. SRV records deliberately use the underscore character to emphasize that they should not be resolved by the normal DNS resolution libraries. As per the RFC:
An underscore (_) is prepended to the service identifier to avoid collisions with DNS labels that occur in nature.
RFC 2181 talks about other record types (MX, SOA, NS, PTR, CNAME, and so forth), and just says that the DNS server shouldn't prohibit those types of records.
Any explanation for this piece of shit problem, asshole?
Because he's technically correct, which is the best kind of correct... The DNS specification expressly prohibits the use of the underscore character in domain names. It's netflix that's at fault here, more than anything else.
Well, the most effective way of stopping the missiles is to prevent them from being built in the first place... The reduction int he strategic arsenals of the major super powers has dramatically improved world security.
To quote Dr Strangelove: "Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH? "
Keeping the existence and capabilities of your weapon systems a secret doesn't work very well to deter your enemies. By letting your enemies know you have it, you force them to spend significant resources countering your own system.
When it all comes down to it, war is kinetic economics.
I know you're joking, but the laser would just burn a hole through the mirror. Even if your mirror was 99% efficient (which most aren't), the mirror would be absorbing 300W within a few square inches, which would cause it to heat up rapidly, becoming less reflective, and very quickly you have a hole in it.
Once a warhead is into its reentry phase, your goose is pretty much cooked. You could theoretically stop them with a kinetic kill, but the probability of intercept extremely low. Warheads also tend to be extremely rugged, dense objects (given the Uranium casing and all that), and so aren't a good candidate for LASER weapons.
Where a LASER really shines (if you'll pardon the pun) is destroying the launcher during the boost phase, or in the case of what's on the USS Ponce, also dealing with cruise missiles and the like. In order to maximize their throw weight (how big of a warhead and/or how far), missiles tend to be built as lightly as possible. During the boost phase of a ballistic missile, all you need to do is weaken its structure enough that the launch forces cause it to fall apart. You don't need to burn a hole through it, you don't need to melt it, you just need to weaken it enough that it buckles under the g-forces. It's a similar thing with the cruise missiles that would be affecting a warship, you just need to compromise them structurally.
Eh, a well placed round out of a .50 rifle will stop any vehicle quite effectively, without targeting the occupants. Just put it through the engine block.
The issue is with people who use SMS as part of their 2FA, among others.
In the bank account thing, the attackers were able to breach the victim's computer to gain the initial credentials. They then used a compromise of the SS7 signalling to intercept the SMS message from the bank, obstensibly to the victim, to get the password to unlock the account. In effect, the Bank's 2FA wasn't proper, because they trusted the network to do the right thing, and didn't ensure that the password went to the account holder's device.
"correct horse battery staple" would like to disagree with you. The reality is that putting in special characters, mixed case, and numbers doesn't do nearly as much to increase password complexity compared to simply making them longer. For the network I operate, I now just have a policy of a minimum of 12 characters. I tell my users to make up a silly little rhyme or ditty that they can remember, and use that as their password. Easy to remember, hard to crack, and easy to type.
The Governor General is the viceregal in absentia. The person who holds this role is the head of state, unless the monarch is actually present.
I've been building computers for myself for close to 25 years (starting when I used to drool over 286 motherboards with 1MB of RAM!) and I've come to realize that the last computer I built (a good 6 years ago now) is probably the last one I'll ever build. It's still running, and running well, and is more than fast enough for my needs. All I've done to it over the past half decade is replace/upgrade its storage. An i7-930 with 24GiB of RAM is a pretty quick little beast for any day to day operations.
Data is biased. All the time. Be ready for it.
I think the two of you are arguing over semantics. Your argument would be better "Data contains biases" rather than "Data is biased."
Robotic exploration is absolutely the right tasks for this bit of exploration, if only due to the radiation environment around Jupiter. I don't think anyone argues that robotic missions don't have value.
As a comparison, lets look at the Curiosity rover on mars. As of Late January this year, it had driven a total of 15km on Mars in roughly 1700 days. It's done a lot of really great work, but it's slow, painstaking, and somewhat limited. If you were to put a human field geologist on Mars, with an appropriate quad-bike type vehicle, she or he would likely be able to cover the same distance within a matter of hours. Also, having that brain behind the Mk-1 eyeball, would allow them to quickly sort out and spot relevant bits of geology. In terms of pure science, putting a team of humans there with appropriate training would be orders of magnitude more efficient.
The reality, though, is that for these kinds of things, science isn't the point of the mission, it's just what you do when you get there. The United States didn't fund the Apollo mission to collect science data on the moon, they did it to beat the Russians. It was an exercise in applied politics. Once they were on the moon, of course, the thing to do was science, but the US didn't pour billions of dollars into Apollo to increase scientific knowledge.
It's the same thing with Mars. Elon Musk and his dreams notwithstanding, IMHO the only time humans will ever set foot on Mars will be when there is a political imperative to do so. Until then, we'll have to content ourselves with sending avatars, of a kind, there in our place and doing what science we can with them.
Actually it could. It's one of the things that Astronauts need to deal with as part of the preparation for a spacewalk. The ISS operates using an earth-normal gas mix and pressure (1 bar, 20% O2, 80% nitrogen). When they're spacewalking, the spacesuit is only pressurized to 1/3 bar (5psi), and runs on 100% O2. That pressure change definitely has the possibility of causing "The Bends" in the astronauts if they were to do it too quickly.
Instead, they go through a whole protocol prior to the spacewalk of exercising vigorously while breathing pure O2 and/or camping out in the airlock (also breathing pure O2) in order to shed the nitrogen that's otherwise saturated within their systems.
If the pod were to rupture, the most likely scenario would be to have the capsule come to a stop rapidly, slam bulkheads on either side of it, and vent the section of tube to the atmosphere.
Actually, modern airliners are moving away from using bleed air for pressurization and the like. The problem with bleed air is that it's hot, dry, and potentially contains atomized lubricants and other things from the engine. (Also why you occasionally get a whiff of jet exhaust as the engines start up). The equipment to process the bleed air into breathable air for the cabin adds significant weight (and thus inefficiency), and the process itself costs engine performance.
On the Dreamliner, Boeing has switched to using an electrical pressurization system. It's lighter weight than the bleed air systems, easier to maintain, and more efficient. Airbus is likely doing the same thing on their new airliners.