> Unless it's a prank call (and even then, you normally just > get a ticking-off by an irate policeman from what I've read), > when would any emergency-service make you PAY for its use ? > Isn't the whole point of an emergency service to be there > when you need it ? What the hell do you do if you can't afford > an emergency service ? > > I'm guessing the whole 'paying' idea is a USA thing, although > my apologies to the US for assuming that, if there's anywhere > else that's so screwed up that they make you pay for essential > services.
I can't say that this applies to all areas of the US, but it does match what I've observed. If you have insurance it isn't so bad. If you don't have insurance, it's really rough.
My step son had a seizure while we were in the car. It was the first seizure that we had observed. Everything with the emergency services went wrong at first.
I pulled him from the car. The back seats of my car are small, and didn't give me room to check him in. I put him in front of the car for visibility and safety. It was dark, so I needed the headlights to see him with. The car helped protect us in case of a careless driver. I made sure he was stable.
His mother held him with his head off the ground, and was watching his breathing (make sure he's still breathing. Scream for me if he isn't). I called 911 from my cell phone. We have mandatory E911 service here, which is suppose to give the dispatcher my information (coordinates, name, callback number). The call was difficult because of the noise of the traffic who weren't stopping. She kept asking where we were. I told her the highway, which side of the road, what the nearest exits were. I couldn't be precise to distance, but it was only a few miles between exits so they had a good chance of finding us. They kept asking "Where?" "What road?" Since I repeated it a dozen times, all I could hope was that they had looked at the coordinates and dispatched immediately.
We waited about 15 minutes. No one showed up to help. I wasn't watching traffic, I was keeping an eye on him. I have to assume at least one patrol car passed by, since they patrol the road frequently. No one stopped.
I loaded him back in the car, and seatbelted him him with his hands under the belts. He wasn't convulsing any more, and was breathing on his own, but he was unresponsive even though his eyes were open.
I took the next two options simultaneously. Get him to a hospital or find a cop. I'm very good at driving very fast, so with the hazard lights on, I drove as fast as I could safely drive towards the nearest hospital. I did pass a "Your speed is..." sign, which just flashed 99 at me. I had well exceeded it's max displayable speed. A few miles down the road, there was heavy traffic due to construction. I lucked out, and there was a cop who had pulled over someone for DUI on the right side, so I drove up to the shoulder to him, and he handled the calls from there. He got the paramedics on the radio. No one had been dispatched. They talked him through the same things I had done. "Is he breathing? Is he bleeding? Are there any apparent injuries? Does he seem stable?"
After we found the cop, everything went right from there, but the financial concerns showed up.
We were billed for the ambulance ride, the hospital emergency room time, cat scan, blood work, etc. We weren't billed for the police time. From what I understand, if it's a search and rescue, you pay for all of it. If they send out boats, helicopters, and searchers, that's all billed to the person or family.
Sometimes they absorb the cost. Well, my tax dollars are paying anyways, but... When he passed away several months later, we called 911, gave the street address, and a quick diagnosis while I was doing CPR. They arrived in less than 5 minutes.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. Probably their friends knew the storm drains too, so they were hoping one of them would come down and guide them out. There's a bit of embarrassment where your friends know you're lost in a storm drain. There's a lot of embarrassment when it ends up on the local TV news.
They probably didn't consider the financial side of it too. Depending on the area, emergency services will respond, but they will also bill for the resources used. In most areas that I know of, if you call for an ambulance (which I'm sure would have been dispatched too), you pay an outrageous amount. No offense to the EMT's and Paramedics. You guys do a great job. It's the company/city/state that you work for that sends the bill.
Being that a blackhole is just a superdense high gravitational area, it's generally assumed that every galaxy has one at the center. Kinda like you expect a treat at the center of every tootsie roll tootsie pop. Every one I've ever encountered had one, but it's possible that there are some that don't.:)
If "god" is a factor in random events happening in the universe, next time you buy a lottery ticket and lose, or find your home galaxy is being engulfed by another galaxy, you have someone to blame.
It's always good to have someone to blame, rather than accepting the fact that random events do happen. And yes, it was "god" that made the bird shit on your car today, just after you washed it.
Now, if I was able to take a ship to observe the collision, that would be awe inspiring, but would not make me believe in the mysterious invisible entity in the sky of your choice. And, regardless of which "god" entity you chose, you're then declaring everyone of a different belief to be wrong. That is, unless you're always right, and the universe is packed with souls that are obviously not as smart as you, unless they believe your way.
On any decent machine (2Ghz+ with 1Gb+ RAM), I haven't had any problem with full screen flash. I did a while back, when it was buggier. Most of my machines have been 64 bit (Slamd64). For a while I ran the 32 bit Firefox just to have the Flash player work, but that's been resolved for a while with no complaints.
No, no, no. No need to group the treehuggers, the illiterate, nor the morons in with ELF. ELF is a bunch of lunatics who strive to be the most notable domestic terrorists. They'll usually burn cars, buildings (every good environmentalist likes a good bon fire, right?), and I guess knock over radio antennas now.
Since it's decentralized in nature, any nut can say they're ELF. Well, just like any nut can say they're Al-Qaeda. You'd have to be a nut to say you're aligned with either one though. Well, I guess you'd have to be a nut to go around burning things just because you felt they did you wrong.
Speaking of which, I feel a cigarette has done me wrong, so I'm going to burn one rather than reading any more about Nutjubs Inc.:)
It was a dumb episode. The only folks who use Flash fullscreen are people watching online porn.:)
Well, and YouTube, so they can see their little friends ramble on about nonsensical stuff in a global environment. I still haven't figured that crap out yet. Why, oh why, do you want to post a video of you talking about your life for the rest of the world to watch. Let me give you a hint. The rest of the world called. We don't give a shit.
Sometimes there's something good on YouTube, but you really have to look for it. Your eyes will usually start to bleed before you find it though.
I totally agree. There's so much we could have done. We should have done.
There are plenty of people who say any space program is a waste of time and money. They see a small version of the current picture. We put people in orbit, they fly around for a little while, and come back down. "Big deal", they say.
If we made constant and aggressive advances in the space program the moon would be a local sight seeing stop on the way to bigger and better places. People currently say "We'll never get a person to the next habitable planet within the astronaut's lifetime.". In 1900, the land speed record was 65.79mph. Today highway speed limits are higher. By 1909 that was pushed up to 127.66mph. There are plenty of modern production vehicles that can exceed that today.
In the 1940's, it was still believed that pushing an aircraft beyond the "sound barrier" was impossible. From what I understand that's been disproven.:) The whole speed of light nonsense is still theoretical, since we haven't gotten anywhere near it yet. I'm sure as technology advances, we'll find those limits to be simply things to work around. And for those that disagree, I sure hope you aren't driving a record setting car at 70mph.:)
There are impossible things, and impractical things. We've obviously proven that human travel to the moon is possible, yet we're years behind on repeating it. Maybe the moon is an impractical place to maintain a base or colony, but so is the Antarctic.:) As long as we keep pushing the limits of what is possible, the impossible things slowly disappear.
The Mars Direct plan was great. I wish they would have done it (or something like it). But really, pretty soon we won't even have a craft to take up to the ISS. We're still living in the legacy of war. With the budget the US burnt up in the middle east, we could have had a thriving community on Mars by now. That money isn't something that's easy to recover.
A while back I had looked over a list of missions that have been sent to Mars, and the overall success rate. They weren't dumb rocks sent towards Mars. Still, quite a few missed (like, 50%). A single planet that far away is a very very small target, and it would take an awful lot of fuel to correct for a few degrees of miscalculation.
No, I'd rather be on the team receiving the message on Mars. I'd still hate to hear it though. It's like hearing Aunt Martha died. It's something none of us like hearing. I'd still rather be surviving.
I fully believe the only way humanity will continue is through expansion of the human domain throughout the universe. Stars and planets come and go. Hopefully the universe will survive for a while.:)
What was the overall success rate for getting a mission to mars? 50%? It'd suck to wait a year for a supply launch to be readied and launched, just to miss, and continue to drift off into space. There are other errors too. They could miss the landing zone by 1,000 miles. They could fail the reentry and have it burn up. And of course there's the chance of it getting stolen by aliens.:) In any situation other than getting nabbed by aliens, you've lost your supplies. 1,000 miles is an awful long way to trek with no gas stations, or roads.
Even still, they'll have to learn to be self sufficient. If they can supply themselves, it's far better than waiting for the next launch. Who knows what would happen. Eventually the mission could be scrapped, and they'd be left wondering if they'd get a new supply ship down. What if the economy finally tanks? Or if the US gets restructured (like, in a revolution). I'd hate to be on the ground there, and get the radio message "Sorry, World War 3 has broken out. By the time you get this message, there will be no survivors here. Good luck, you'll be the only surviving humans in the universe."
All that is with the assumption that everything is utopian at the landing site. Isolation from the rest of the human population can take it's toll. Consider ships at sea. A mutiny wasn't an unheard of thing, and they may have only been out for a few months at a time. Political unrest on a martian colony could be disastrous.
From what I recall, it's not particularly fast. When you have 3 guys downloading porn and movies, a couple dozen people getting Windows updates, oh and those essential mission updates, that doesn't leave much bandwidth for other things. Think of it like an office with a T1, and a few greedy users. Everyone will start complaining.
I'd suspect all movies on Mars would be pirated movies. It's not exactly like they could watch HBO, or have NetFlix deliver to them.:)
Ya, the O2 problem may make a "lifetime" trip rather short. "It's ok, you'll go, but we're only sending 6 months of oxygen with you. After that, you'll have to find your own."
I wouldn't worry too much about the FPS problem. Bring enough gear for everyone to play. The problem will be downloading updates. Pretty much, whatever you take with you is what you'll be playing for the rest of your life. But hey, if you'll only be surviving 6 months, that won't be a huge problem.
Food, drinking water, and oxygen will be the major limiting factors. That's assuming you can take along a habitat to mitigate the temperatures and dust storms. If the team lasts say 10 years, you'll run into other problems, like clothing and maintaining the shelter.
I have this firm belief that helicopters can't possibly fly, and sure as hell I wouldn't want to be in one if it lost power. I say I'll refuse to ever fly in one, but if someone offers me a ride, and an hour at the stick, I wouldn't think twice before saying yes.
Now, if someone offered to take me skydiving, unless the plane was about to explode there's no way in hell I'd jump.:) Well, even IF the plane were going to explode, I'd still think twice about jumping. With my luck, I'd have the parachute on, the plane would explode, and I'd survive the explosion just to find the chute wouldn't open. A free fall into terra firma does not sound like the best way to go.
I had an instructor like yours once. Well, he was barking commands at me for every step, so we were rolling down the runway and he started yelling "What speed do you rotate at?" We were over 80 knots, with plenty of runway left so I had no concerns. I knew we were going way too fast, since we were literally flying down the runway. The wheels were just touching, but only just. I told him "I don't know, you tell me.", and he responded "way back there!" We rotated at like 90 knots or so, and popped up off the runway like nothing at all. Ground effect is very cool, as long as you know that you're in it. It wasn't until we were in the air that I told him, if he's going to bark every command at me, he'd damned well better keep doing it, because I'm doing to do exactly what I'm being told.
I actually thought he was trying to show me something. He wasn't. He had just given up barking commands to me.
I liked the instructor who had me do spins. He was very laid back. He thought I was hilarious because after spinning, I asked if we could go do it again. Hell, it was like a roller coaster, except there was no track to save us.:) His biggest complaint was that I was watching the gauges too much. I was always dead on for requested speed, altitude and heading, and I was still aware of what was around. He didn't even complain when I almost hit a bird. Neither of us saw it til the last second, and I just rolled the plane around it. There may have been stronger words exchanged afterwords if I hit it, since it was a big bird and it would have hit his side of the windshield.:) I think the only thing he said was "ok, good."
17 with his CFI? That's a bit young, but I don't know the rules, so it's possible.
Really, if he had his tickets, you had nothing to be concerned about. That takes quite a few hours in the air to get your tickets. Sometimes if you're good, you can rush through the program. I soloed in about 7 hours. I did it in 1991, so I may be off a little, but it wasn't a lot of hours before they said "here's your plane, prove you can fly it."
I may have lucked out because the airport I learned at had a Cessna reinforced for acrobatics. They did say that if it had been any other plane, we wouldn't have been allowed to do it. It's one thing to do it. It's another to have to ground the plane for a full airframe inspection after the flight.:) My friend who didn't get to do it was flying his fathers plane. It was not too long after his dad died, so I think he was trying to learn some of the things that his dad did, including flying his own plane.
That wasn't a college football team. Her Craigslist ad said she wanted us to dress like college football players, so we did. I just said "Hey lady, whatever you want, you're the one paying. I've seen weirder fetishes before. If you want 30 guys for a week long gang bang, that's your call.":)
I never went through helicopter school, so I have to ask. I had read that the autorotation work was theory, and not applied during flight school. They were instructed in what to do, but didn't have to actually crash a perfectly good helicopter.
In my private pilot training (single engine prop), we simulated emergency landings by killing power, selecting our field, and gliding towards it. At a few hundred feet up, we restarted and resumed normal flight.
When I went through, we had to learn to stall a plane though. That is, go up to 4k feet, nose up, idle the engine, wait for the stall horns to sound and the plane to buffet badly, and then kick the rudder, so we were nose down with just about no horizontal speed. Whee, that was fun. A friend went through more recently and wasn't taught how to recover, outside of theory. Hopefully for the rest of our lives, I'll have only done it once, and he'll never have done it. It's fun when it's something planned. It could be a lot less fun to happen in real life, especially on approach.
[spooling up the GPS jammer]
[spooling up the broad spectrum RF jammer]
I don't know what you're talking about. Simple location based systems are very reliable. They're as reliable as the internet that we're us%^&*%^&*(^@&#%@)(* [NO CARRIER]
Sprawling over buildings brings it's own problems. A power failure would bring a flying car crashing down into the buildings. Then again, a layered highway would bring a flying car with a power failure crashing down into other layers of flying cars. Mmm.. Traffic accidents in 3d. A accident reconstruction nightmare.:)
Cars are fairly precision instruments. On a 2 lane road, they pass within just a couple feet of each other. They stop within inches at traffic lights.
I've been designing a hover vehicle (not a traditional hovercraft). It'll probably always be in the design phase, but it's fun. One of the things I've seen mentioned a lot is the fact that any vehicle that doesn't have physical contact with the surface (i.e., tires on the road or keel in the water) can drift. On a banked or crowned road, a GEV can tend to float downhill if it's thrust is simply down, or off the top of a turn. A strong breeze can make it drift off in unexpected ways. Heck, in a tall vehicle, you get that with road vehicles too. Take a regular passenger van out during a Florida summer thunderstorm, and you may find yourself suddenly in the wrong lane, even though you were aimed straight.
A GEV tend to not respond to immediate stops quite as well either.
I intended to computerize a substantial portion of my stability control. Use of ultrasonic sensors to determine distance from the 4 corners should keep it flat in relationship to the road. Other sensors would sense drift outside of what the controls were doing. For example, if it sensed drift to the left or right without input from the driver, that would obviously be an error, and correct for it. It may be a breeze, or sliding down a banked turn. Even still, by using directed thrust (forced air), that would significantly impact other vehicles on the road. If my vehicle detected a slip to the right, and engaged it's right side thrusters to correct, if a vehicle was to the right it would push them to the right.
I thought it would be nice to have a vehicle hop over an immediate danger (impending accident, etc). That's fine and dandy if I'm by myself on the 3d road. What happens when I'm doing 60mph and hop over an accident, but the GEV behind me doing 80mph does the same thing. Now we've added a pile on top of the existing accident.
In reality, drivers don't do so well on 2d roads. While 3d roads could reduce traffic density, it would create many new problems. Hell, I've been hit by drivers making simple lane changes because they weren't aware that my car was there. They can't look left to make a lane change to the left. What happens when you add above and below to the equation.
There's good reasons pilots go through so much extra training, and it's not all because the vehicles are complicated. And yes, I've gone through flight school and flown. At flight school, I witnessed a near miss, because a student pilot with instructor, who had called his turns perfectly and announced his intention to land was coming down to the runway. Another (non-student) pilot taxied out onto the runway in front of him. I was on my downwind. He was on his final. We both saw him taxi out, luckily. It wasn't complicated. We all used the same radio frequency (freq for the uncontrolled tower), and there was only one active runway. Even if the other pilot didn't have a radio (not required), he was required to look and make sure it was safe to taxi out. I don't know how you miss another aircraft a few hundred feet out, with his landing lights on, unless you were just oblivious. There were 3 or 4 of us in the pattern, so it wasn't difficult to figure out someone may be landing very soon.
Slashdot Mirror
> Unless it's a prank call (and even then, you normally just
> get a ticking-off by an irate policeman from what I've read),
> when would any emergency-service make you PAY for its use ?
> Isn't the whole point of an emergency service to be there
> when you need it ? What the hell do you do if you can't afford
> an emergency service ?
>
> I'm guessing the whole 'paying' idea is a USA thing, although
> my apologies to the US for assuming that, if there's anywhere
> else that's so screwed up that they make you pay for essential
> services.
I can't say that this applies to all areas of the US, but it does match what I've observed. If you have insurance it isn't so bad. If you don't have insurance, it's really rough.
My step son had a seizure while we were in the car. It was the first seizure that we had observed. Everything with the emergency services went wrong at first.
I pulled him from the car. The back seats of my car are small, and didn't give me room to check him in. I put him in front of the car for visibility and safety. It was dark, so I needed the headlights to see him with. The car helped protect us in case of a careless driver. I made sure he was stable.
His mother held him with his head off the ground, and was watching his breathing (make sure he's still breathing. Scream for me if he isn't). I called 911 from my cell phone. We have mandatory E911 service here, which is suppose to give the dispatcher my information (coordinates, name, callback number). The call was difficult because of the noise of the traffic who weren't stopping. She kept asking where we were. I told her the highway, which side of the road, what the nearest exits were. I couldn't be precise to distance, but it was only a few miles between exits so they had a good chance of finding us. They kept asking "Where?" "What road?" Since I repeated it a dozen times, all I could hope was that they had looked at the coordinates and dispatched immediately.
We waited about 15 minutes. No one showed up to help. I wasn't watching traffic, I was keeping an eye on him. I have to assume at least one patrol car passed by, since they patrol the road frequently. No one stopped.
I loaded him back in the car, and seatbelted him him with his hands under the belts. He wasn't convulsing any more, and was breathing on his own, but he was unresponsive even though his eyes were open.
I took the next two options simultaneously. Get him to a hospital or find a cop. I'm very good at driving very fast, so with the hazard lights on, I drove as fast as I could safely drive towards the nearest hospital. I did pass a "Your speed is..." sign, which just flashed 99 at me. I had well exceeded it's max displayable speed. A few miles down the road, there was heavy traffic due to construction. I lucked out, and there was a cop who had pulled over someone for DUI on the right side, so I drove up to the shoulder to him, and he handled the calls from there. He got the paramedics on the radio. No one had been dispatched. They talked him through the same things I had done. "Is he breathing? Is he bleeding? Are there any apparent injuries? Does he seem stable?"
After we found the cop, everything went right from there, but the financial concerns showed up.
We were billed for the ambulance ride, the hospital emergency room time, cat scan, blood work, etc. We weren't billed for the police time. From what I understand, if it's a search and rescue, you pay for all of it. If they send out boats, helicopters, and searchers, that's all billed to the person or family.
Sometimes they absorb the cost. Well, my tax dollars are paying anyways, but... When he passed away several months later, we called 911, gave the street address, and a quick diagnosis while I was doing CPR. They arrived in less than 5 minutes.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. Probably their friends knew the storm drains too, so they were hoping one of them would come down and guide them out. There's a bit of embarrassment where your friends know you're lost in a storm drain. There's a lot of embarrassment when it ends up on the local TV news.
They probably didn't consider the financial side of it too. Depending on the area, emergency services will respond, but they will also bill for the resources used. In most areas that I know of, if you call for an ambulance (which I'm sure would have been dispatched too), you pay an outrageous amount. No offense to the EMT's and Paramedics. You guys do a great job. It's the company/city/state that you work for that sends the bill.
Being that a blackhole is just a superdense high gravitational area, it's generally assumed that every galaxy has one at the center. Kinda like you expect a treat at the center of every tootsie roll tootsie pop. Every one I've ever encountered had one, but it's possible that there are some that don't. :)
If "god" is a factor in random events happening in the universe, next time you buy a lottery ticket and lose, or find your home galaxy is being engulfed by another galaxy, you have someone to blame.
It's always good to have someone to blame, rather than accepting the fact that random events do happen. And yes, it was "god" that made the bird shit on your car today, just after you washed it.
Now, if I was able to take a ship to observe the collision, that would be awe inspiring, but would not make me believe in the mysterious invisible entity in the sky of your choice. And, regardless of which "god" entity you chose, you're then declaring everyone of a different belief to be wrong. That is, unless you're always right, and the universe is packed with souls that are obviously not as smart as you, unless they believe your way.
On any decent machine (2Ghz+ with 1Gb+ RAM), I haven't had any problem with full screen flash. I did a while back, when it was buggier. Most of my machines have been 64 bit (Slamd64). For a while I ran the 32 bit Firefox just to have the Flash player work, but that's been resolved for a while with no complaints.
Er, that's what they make that new fangled "TV" thing for. :)
No, no, no. No need to group the treehuggers, the illiterate, nor the morons in with ELF. ELF is a bunch of lunatics who strive to be the most notable domestic terrorists. They'll usually burn cars, buildings (every good environmentalist likes a good bon fire, right?), and I guess knock over radio antennas now.
Since it's decentralized in nature, any nut can say they're ELF. Well, just like any nut can say they're Al-Qaeda. You'd have to be a nut to say you're aligned with either one though. Well, I guess you'd have to be a nut to go around burning things just because you felt they did you wrong.
Speaking of which, I feel a cigarette has done me wrong, so I'm going to burn one rather than reading any more about Nutjubs Inc. :)
It was a dumb episode. The only folks who use Flash fullscreen are people watching online porn. :)
Well, and YouTube, so they can see their little friends ramble on about nonsensical stuff in a global environment. I still haven't figured that crap out yet. Why, oh why, do you want to post a video of you talking about your life for the rest of the world to watch. Let me give you a hint. The rest of the world called. We don't give a shit.
Sometimes there's something good on YouTube, but you really have to look for it. Your eyes will usually start to bleed before you find it though.
I totally agree. There's so much we could have done. We should have done.
There are plenty of people who say any space program is a waste of time and money. They see a small version of the current picture. We put people in orbit, they fly around for a little while, and come back down. "Big deal", they say.
If we made constant and aggressive advances in the space program the moon would be a local sight seeing stop on the way to bigger and better places. People currently say "We'll never get a person to the next habitable planet within the astronaut's lifetime.". In 1900, the land speed record was 65.79mph. Today highway speed limits are higher. By 1909 that was pushed up to 127.66mph. There are plenty of modern production vehicles that can exceed that today.
In the 1940's, it was still believed that pushing an aircraft beyond the "sound barrier" was impossible. From what I understand that's been disproven. :) The whole speed of light nonsense is still theoretical, since we haven't gotten anywhere near it yet. I'm sure as technology advances, we'll find those limits to be simply things to work around. And for those that disagree, I sure hope you aren't driving a record setting car at 70mph. :)
There are impossible things, and impractical things. We've obviously proven that human travel to the moon is possible, yet we're years behind on repeating it. Maybe the moon is an impractical place to maintain a base or colony, but so is the Antarctic. :) As long as we keep pushing the limits of what is possible, the impossible things slowly disappear.
The Mars Direct plan was great. I wish they would have done it (or something like it). But really, pretty soon we won't even have a craft to take up to the ISS. We're still living in the legacy of war. With the budget the US burnt up in the middle east, we could have had a thriving community on Mars by now. That money isn't something that's easy to recover.
A while back I had looked over a list of missions that have been sent to Mars, and the overall success rate. They weren't dumb rocks sent towards Mars. Still, quite a few missed (like, 50%). A single planet that far away is a very very small target, and it would take an awful lot of fuel to correct for a few degrees of miscalculation.
No, I'd rather be on the team receiving the message on Mars. I'd still hate to hear it though. It's like hearing Aunt Martha died. It's something none of us like hearing. I'd still rather be surviving.
I fully believe the only way humanity will continue is through expansion of the human domain throughout the universe. Stars and planets come and go. Hopefully the universe will survive for a while. :)
Time to bring on the dead hooker jokes.
Q: What do you do when a hooker OD's at your house?
A: Bury her in the back yard.
Q: What do you do about the dead hooker buried in the back yard?
A: Nothing. She's quiet, so she's obviously happy. Leave her alone.
Q: What's the difference between a Corvette and a dead hooker at your house?
A: Nothing. I don't have a Corvette.
What was the overall success rate for getting a mission to mars? 50%? It'd suck to wait a year for a supply launch to be readied and launched, just to miss, and continue to drift off into space. There are other errors too. They could miss the landing zone by 1,000 miles. They could fail the reentry and have it burn up. And of course there's the chance of it getting stolen by aliens. :) In any situation other than getting nabbed by aliens, you've lost your supplies. 1,000 miles is an awful long way to trek with no gas stations, or roads.
Even still, they'll have to learn to be self sufficient. If they can supply themselves, it's far better than waiting for the next launch. Who knows what would happen. Eventually the mission could be scrapped, and they'd be left wondering if they'd get a new supply ship down. What if the economy finally tanks? Or if the US gets restructured (like, in a revolution). I'd hate to be on the ground there, and get the radio message "Sorry, World War 3 has broken out. By the time you get this message, there will be no survivors here. Good luck, you'll be the only surviving humans in the universe."
All that is with the assumption that everything is utopian at the landing site. Isolation from the rest of the human population can take it's toll. Consider ships at sea. A mutiny wasn't an unheard of thing, and they may have only been out for a few months at a time. Political unrest on a martian colony could be disastrous.
From what I recall, it's not particularly fast. When you have 3 guys downloading porn and movies, a couple dozen people getting Windows updates, oh and those essential mission updates, that doesn't leave much bandwidth for other things. Think of it like an office with a T1, and a few greedy users. Everyone will start complaining.
I'd suspect all movies on Mars would be pirated movies. It's not exactly like they could watch HBO, or have NetFlix deliver to them. :)
Ya, the O2 problem may make a "lifetime" trip rather short. "It's ok, you'll go, but we're only sending 6 months of oxygen with you. After that, you'll have to find your own."
I wouldn't worry too much about the FPS problem. Bring enough gear for everyone to play. The problem will be downloading updates. Pretty much, whatever you take with you is what you'll be playing for the rest of your life. But hey, if you'll only be surviving 6 months, that won't be a huge problem.
Food, drinking water, and oxygen will be the major limiting factors. That's assuming you can take along a habitat to mitigate the temperatures and dust storms. If the team lasts say 10 years, you'll run into other problems, like clothing and maintaining the shelter.
I have this firm belief that helicopters can't possibly fly, and sure as hell I wouldn't want to be in one if it lost power. I say I'll refuse to ever fly in one, but if someone offers me a ride, and an hour at the stick, I wouldn't think twice before saying yes.
Now, if someone offered to take me skydiving, unless the plane was about to explode there's no way in hell I'd jump. :) Well, even IF the plane were going to explode, I'd still think twice about jumping. With my luck, I'd have the parachute on, the plane would explode, and I'd survive the explosion just to find the chute wouldn't open. A free fall into terra firma does not sound like the best way to go.
I had an instructor like yours once. Well, he was barking commands at me for every step, so we were rolling down the runway and he started yelling "What speed do you rotate at?" We were over 80 knots, with plenty of runway left so I had no concerns. I knew we were going way too fast, since we were literally flying down the runway. The wheels were just touching, but only just. I told him "I don't know, you tell me.", and he responded "way back there!" We rotated at like 90 knots or so, and popped up off the runway like nothing at all. Ground effect is very cool, as long as you know that you're in it. It wasn't until we were in the air that I told him, if he's going to bark every command at me, he'd damned well better keep doing it, because I'm doing to do exactly what I'm being told.
I actually thought he was trying to show me something. He wasn't. He had just given up barking commands to me.
I liked the instructor who had me do spins. He was very laid back. He thought I was hilarious because after spinning, I asked if we could go do it again. Hell, it was like a roller coaster, except there was no track to save us. :) His biggest complaint was that I was watching the gauges too much. I was always dead on for requested speed, altitude and heading, and I was still aware of what was around. He didn't even complain when I almost hit a bird. Neither of us saw it til the last second, and I just rolled the plane around it. There may have been stronger words exchanged afterwords if I hit it, since it was a big bird and it would have hit his side of the windshield. :) I think the only thing he said was "ok, good."
17 with his CFI? That's a bit young, but I don't know the rules, so it's possible.
Really, if he had his tickets, you had nothing to be concerned about. That takes quite a few hours in the air to get your tickets. Sometimes if you're good, you can rush through the program. I soloed in about 7 hours. I did it in 1991, so I may be off a little, but it wasn't a lot of hours before they said "here's your plane, prove you can fly it."
I may have lucked out because the airport I learned at had a Cessna reinforced for acrobatics. They did say that if it had been any other plane, we wouldn't have been allowed to do it. It's one thing to do it. It's another to have to ground the plane for a full airframe inspection after the flight. :) My friend who didn't get to do it was flying his fathers plane. It was not too long after his dad died, so I think he was trying to learn some of the things that his dad did, including flying his own plane.
That wasn't a college football team. Her Craigslist ad said she wanted us to dress like college football players, so we did. I just said "Hey lady, whatever you want, you're the one paying. I've seen weirder fetishes before. If you want 30 guys for a week long gang bang, that's your call." :)
I never went through helicopter school, so I have to ask. I had read that the autorotation work was theory, and not applied during flight school. They were instructed in what to do, but didn't have to actually crash a perfectly good helicopter.
In my private pilot training (single engine prop), we simulated emergency landings by killing power, selecting our field, and gliding towards it. At a few hundred feet up, we restarted and resumed normal flight.
When I went through, we had to learn to stall a plane though. That is, go up to 4k feet, nose up, idle the engine, wait for the stall horns to sound and the plane to buffet badly, and then kick the rudder, so we were nose down with just about no horizontal speed. Whee, that was fun. A friend went through more recently and wasn't taught how to recover, outside of theory. Hopefully for the rest of our lives, I'll have only done it once, and he'll never have done it. It's fun when it's something planned. It could be a lot less fun to happen in real life, especially on approach.
Ducted thrust works wonders. You *could* stop in mid air (vertical thrust to maintain altitude, reverse thrust to kill off airspeed).
Who needs friction, when you have force. :)
I do agree though. I don't trust most drivers on the road, why would I trust these same drivers flying?
BTW, the lack of trust in other drivers is thanks to several car accidents, and pains that will be with me for the rest of my life.
[spooling up the GPS jammer]
[spooling up the broad spectrum RF jammer]
I don't know what you're talking about. Simple location based systems are very reliable. They're as reliable as the internet that we're us%^&*%^&*(^@&#%@)(*
[NO CARRIER]
Or it's a pileup created by some kid sending text messages. That's always big news to involve a somewhat new technology.
Sprawling over buildings brings it's own problems. A power failure would bring a flying car crashing down into the buildings. Then again, a layered highway would bring a flying car with a power failure crashing down into other layers of flying cars. Mmm.. Traffic accidents in 3d. A accident reconstruction nightmare. :)
Cars are fairly precision instruments. On a 2 lane road, they pass within just a couple feet of each other. They stop within inches at traffic lights.
I've been designing a hover vehicle (not a traditional hovercraft). It'll probably always be in the design phase, but it's fun. One of the things I've seen mentioned a lot is the fact that any vehicle that doesn't have physical contact with the surface (i.e., tires on the road or keel in the water) can drift. On a banked or crowned road, a GEV can tend to float downhill if it's thrust is simply down, or off the top of a turn. A strong breeze can make it drift off in unexpected ways. Heck, in a tall vehicle, you get that with road vehicles too. Take a regular passenger van out during a Florida summer thunderstorm, and you may find yourself suddenly in the wrong lane, even though you were aimed straight.
A GEV tend to not respond to immediate stops quite as well either.
I intended to computerize a substantial portion of my stability control. Use of ultrasonic sensors to determine distance from the 4 corners should keep it flat in relationship to the road. Other sensors would sense drift outside of what the controls were doing. For example, if it sensed drift to the left or right without input from the driver, that would obviously be an error, and correct for it. It may be a breeze, or sliding down a banked turn. Even still, by using directed thrust (forced air), that would significantly impact other vehicles on the road. If my vehicle detected a slip to the right, and engaged it's right side thrusters to correct, if a vehicle was to the right it would push them to the right.
I thought it would be nice to have a vehicle hop over an immediate danger (impending accident, etc). That's fine and dandy if I'm by myself on the 3d road. What happens when I'm doing 60mph and hop over an accident, but the GEV behind me doing 80mph does the same thing. Now we've added a pile on top of the existing accident.
In reality, drivers don't do so well on 2d roads. While 3d roads could reduce traffic density, it would create many new problems. Hell, I've been hit by drivers making simple lane changes because they weren't aware that my car was there. They can't look left to make a lane change to the left. What happens when you add above and below to the equation.
There's good reasons pilots go through so much extra training, and it's not all because the vehicles are complicated. And yes, I've gone through flight school and flown. At flight school, I witnessed a near miss, because a student pilot with instructor, who had called his turns perfectly and announced his intention to land was coming down to the runway. Another (non-student) pilot taxied out onto the runway in front of him. I was on my downwind. He was on his final. We both saw him taxi out, luckily. It wasn't complicated. We all used the same radio frequency (freq for the uncontrolled tower), and there was only one active runway. Even if the other pilot didn't have a radio (not required), he was required to look and make sure it was safe to taxi out. I don't know how you miss another aircraft a few hundred feet out, with his landing lights on, unless you were just oblivious. There were 3 or 4 of us in the pattern, so it wasn't difficult to figure out someone may be landing very soon.