Although the 'article' sounds like it's designed to sell magazines more than anything else. No links to any of those forums where the users are supposedly up in arms, for example.
That's because the JPI-hosted forums in which the users complained about this change were censored. At first, topics that were attempting to discuss the issue were removed, then eventually the entire message board was shut down.
I read those topics before they were censored. Trust me: the users were definitely up in arms.
I can go the rest of my entire life without ever seeing any of my [high school] classmates again and still be happy.
How odd.....I had the exact same reaction when I attended my 10th year high school reunion. I've never bothered going to another one and probably never will.
It's a 1981 model 201, also called the "J" model. The book says it should do nearly 160 on 11 gallons an hour, in my experience it is usually closer to 155. That's knots (not mph).
Which ones go down to 8 gallons per hour?
Hmmm.....I don't know my older mooneys that well. But I'm pretty sure that many of the pre-J models (C, E, and F) can cruise at around 8 gph. But they dont go as fast, either. See here for more details.
(lusting after an M20... just don't know what letter to add after it...)
They're all great! Anything earlier than a C is probably too expensive to maintain. I love the J as it is still within an attainable price range, has a modern panel with (usually) decent avionics, and is 155+ knots.
What do you think of spoilers?
You mean the speed breaks? You shouldn't need them if you plan your descent properly. In my J I can drop the gear at 135, and I usually don't have a problem getting it down that slow.
For that matter, of all airplanes, which ones have the best speed/gph performance?
Well, obviously, I think the Mooneys do.:-) I think they're also less expensive to maintain when compared to other retracts of similar performance.
The information isn't cheap to come by because it is updated so often and used by so few, but a lot of smaller airports are public knowledge. Private pilots know where to get it.
Isn't cheap to come by? Nonsense. Sectional charts are about $8 each, and airport facility directories are about $4 each. Just visit your friendly neighborhood airport and ask where they sell charts. Or if you're too lazy to get up out of your chair, go visit the pilot shop at Sporty's. The information is easy to find for free on-line as well.
The expensive part is keeping the information up to date, because it does change regularly. Charts expire every 6 months and AF/Ds every 56 days. But if you're not a pilot you won't care about that.
How is your Mooney (Serial #24-1053) doing these days?
It's doing great! 160 knots on 11 gallons (of 100LL) an hour. It's a beautiful plane.
Keeping it in a hangar?
Nope, hangars are hard to come by at my home field unfortunately.
I hear it's a little chilly in Dunwoody, GA these days.
Not as bad as it is in the northeast these days!
Aren't you due for a currency check-flight?
What's wrong, can't you tell everything from the publically available network databases? Did you seriously think I didn't know someone could look up my plane's information from its tail number? Do you expect me to be impressed? Sorry to disappoint you.
110 octane Low Lead, 100 octane, and avgas (essentially what you put in your car)...110LL (the most comon variety for small prop planes) is blue
Sorry, but you are referring to 100LL (100 octane low-lead). There is no 110 octane. There is 80 and 100LL. 80 is green and 100LL is blue. 100LL is by far the most common, 80 is rather hard to find.
There are places that have "self serve" pumps where you pull the plane up to a pump. But most places deliver it by truck and have an employee pump it.
The second issue, which I'm not sure is still an issue, is that I've heard that the AT has a small "silence" between tracks.
I've had an audiotron for months and have never been bothered by intertrack gaps. And I can be pretty picky about such things. I do have some discs that need smooth segues and I have not noticed any sort of difficulty with them. But if it really bothers you, then rip the entire disc to a single mp3.
That kind of ice on a Cirrus would scare the dogpoop out of me...
That kind of ice on any plane that didn't have deicing equipment would scare me. I am very ice averse, and try to stay out of any clouds above the freezing layer.
But Cessnas can carry ice lots better than Mooneys can. (But then I was ice averse even before buying the Mooney).
All engine failures happen due to fuel exhaustion. (Well, not quite all...
I know a guy that is president of a flying club in the Chicago area which rents out an SR20 (and now an SR22) to its members. While he was flying the club's SR20 the engine's crankshaft failed and the engine stopped cold. Instant glider at 2000 AGL. He and his co-pilot did what they have always been trained to do: they picked a field and landed in it. He did briefly consider (for about 2 seconds) deploying the chute, then decided he had a better chance taking it in under control. The plane damage was repairable and the pilots were uninjured. So engines do spontaneously fail, but you are right that it is extremly rare. Fuel starvation I believe is still the number 1 cause of accidents in small planes.
Fuel, fuel, fuel.
By the way, the Cirrus has a FADEC system. Of course it also has those beautiful Garmin GPSs in it!
Oh, and the only practical use for an ADF these days (other than listening to AM stations) is to frustrate the life out of instrument students.
The Lancair also has modern anti-spin enhancements, yet it has a certified spin recovery procedure.
When you deploy the parachute in a Cirrus, you've essentially destroyed the plane. That seems to be a very drastic spin recovery technique.
Two people have already died when they entered an inadvertent spin while practicing stalls in a "damn near impossible to unintentionally spin" SR-22.
My partner has unintentionally spun our Mooney while practicing power on stalls. Yes, dropping a wing while stalling a Mooney will really gets one's attention. But it is demonstratably recoverable.
As for the FAA, remember that it's the same government bueraucracy that said teaching spin avoidance to students was better than teaching them spin recovery. Thus removal of the spin requirement from the private pilot PTS.
I am glad to hear that the plane did undergo spin testing before certification. That was something I was unaware of before.
Don't get me wrong: the Cirrus is a wonderful plane and has lots of things going for it. It's great to see new airplanes on the market that are using some modern designs, ideas, comfort touches, ergonomics, avionics, and such. As far as I'm concerned the only negative about the Cirrus planes (other than price) is the question surrounding spins. But in my mind that's a pretty big question.
Disclosure: I can't afford one, so I bought a used "historic" plane instead.
I highly recommend this company's aircraft to any pilot...
Well there is reason to be wary of these planes, and that reason has something to do with the parachute. Every other manufactured small plane has had to undergo a spin recovery demonstration. That is, the manufacturer has had to demonstrate in a flight test that the plane can be recovered from a spin. Not so the SR20 and SR22. Cirrus did not have to demonstrate spin recovery because their official spin recovery method is to deploy the parachute. Because they haven't had to demonstrate spin recovery, we don't really know how these planes behave in a spin. There have been a few accidents in the Cirrus that may be attributed to an unrecoverable spin condition. It's possible that by the time the pilot realized his situation he couldn't deploy the parachute.
Deploying the chute is a final act. Once you do that you have put your fate in the hands of the winds and chance. That's not something that pilots are comfortable doing -- we never want to give up flying the plane in any situation. So a pilot would want to be absolutely sure that there was no other reasonable course of action before pulling that handle. Because that will be his last act as pilot in command for that flight!
As I understand the parachute installation on the Cirrus, the plane still touches down with goodly amount of vertical speed. In other words, it is not a soft landing! It is expected that a parachute landing will damage the landing gear. "Minimal damage" is a relative term. It is probably repairable, but it wont be cheap.
In the case of the plane in Texas (a Cirrus, if anyone cares), it became disabled when an aileron partially detached from the fuselage. Without the aileron, the plane was mostly uncontrollable. It is likely that the 'chute saved that guy's life. The maintenance oversight that caused the aileron to detach in the first place is an entirely different matter!
As early as I can recall on that morning, CNN had taken down their website and replaced it with a large text link and a picture with a breif blurb. For most of the day it remained an extremely simplistic website with primarily textual content. Video clips were sparse, there were a few pictures, but no ads until mid-late afternoon. By late...the ads had returned.
Completely untrue about the ads. Ads stayed off the site for DAYS and, if I recall correctly, returned some time the following Sunday. For those interested, CNN went to a half-height page at 9:15, then down to an absolute bare minimum page at 9:45. It was restored to a "light" format at 14:55. All Eastern time. The advertisements went away when the site moved to its "bare minimum" format.
I've been watching CNN coverage since 8:40 this morning. (Hey, it's part of my job, okay?) Not a single commercial. And ads have been pulled from cnn.com as well. In place of the ads are pictures of candles. America is mourning and remembering. The media is covering it. Why is that bad?
Try landing at one of the four airports in the DC area.
It is true that IFR was not as adversely affected, but there was still a significant impact. It was about a week before they even allowed IFR flight for part 91, as I recall. IFR flight without the option of VFR is much more restrictive, especially if you frequent uncontrolled airports and even moreso airports without approaches. Maintaining or, even worse, regaining instrument currency was difficult, too.
Even when departing IFR there was a period of time when I could not drive my car on to the ramp. I had to go to the FBO, prove to them who I was, then have them take me out to my plane in one of their vehicles. Then after landing I had to call them to reverse the process. And owner maintenance during that time? Forget it! Even as recently as two months ago when my partner and I were working on the engine late at night we got questioned by the local authorities. I'm actually glad to see that, but it is another indicator that things have really changed.
Things are mostly okay these days, but we do still live under the constant threat of increased restrictions (witness all the hoopla over the part 91 restrictions for 9/11/02) and increased security with little to no warning. Not to mention the press regularly publishing reports about how "dangerous" we are, and senators saying that GA is a gaping security risk.
if you can't spot the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant from 5 miles away, I don't want you in the same airpace with me.
Ha ha! Fortunately I can (for the most part). But we still had to pad the distance to about 10 miles, in case some official somewhere decided that the center of the circle was somewhere other than the cooling tower.
I would submit that general aviation has boomed since 911.
Parts of it have, yes. Especially chartered jet operations. But the part of the industry that deals with our small planes is still suffering greatly, IME. Ive talked with maintenance shops, paint shops, and interior shops. All report that business is still down but slowly improving.
You think internet interests have been hit hard by post 9/11 legislation, trying being a private pilot these days. Despite the fact that this heinous act was conducted with big planes, its the little ones (like the Mooney I own) that are the first ones to be singled out when it comes time to hand down more restrictive measures. Three days after the attacks, the commercial airliners were back in the air. We had to wait a month, and then we were so awash in new and constantly changing regulations that it was impossible to keep up. Imagine taking off for a two hour flight and having the rules change while you're airborn. It was not unusual for a flight to be legal when you took off and illegal by the time it was over. The onslaught of new rules has been so bad that the FAA will run out of 4-digit numbers with which to label them. Yes, we are rapidly approaching federal notam (notice to airman) number 9999, at which point they will have to start numbering them at 0 again.
Remember when they announced they were restricting general aviation flights over nuclear power plants? You know what the official notice from the FAA said? The notice said we were forbidden from flying within 5 miles of a power plant, but then gave us nothing better than a vague description of where those plants were located! So we were told we had to remain clear (and if we didn't we would be intercepted by fighters and possibly shot down) but not told the locations we had to remain clear OF: just city names and vague directions, like "15 miles northwest of Anytown, IL". Even the pilot briefers we called on the phone--the very FAA representatives whose purpose in life is to tell pilots about notams--didn't understand the notices. Depending on who and when you would call you would get a different story about what was legal and what wasn't. And the ATC folks were just as confused. The tower at your departing airport would say your flight is okay, but the one at your destination would declare you in violation of some temporary flight restriction.
Many aviation related business went bankrupt and many more are teetering on the edge as a result of this. The airlines are bad off as we all know, but the small airports are in worse shape. And we are constantly under a cloud of threatened onerous increases in security for our airports: in most cases they are security measures that make no sense at all. Imagine owning property but being subject to a security check before you were allowed to go out to it.
Lots of folks just gave up flying, some temporarily and some permanently. I'm happy to sacrifice for my country, but the sacrifice should have some value. Most of what I've seen in the way of GA restrictions has been meaningless and senseless. And it's not really the restrictions themselves that bother me, but way in which they have been handled.
Since when do you, or anybody else, have the legal right to "rip" a CD, which is intellectual property
Since the Supreme Court made it legal. It's called "fair use". Format shifting ande time shifting have been done for decades, since well before mp3s and well before compact discs. It is all perfectly legal. Ripping is just another form of format shifting, or media conversion.
this will cause howls of protest from the "rip it and send it all over the world" crowd
It will also cause howls of protest from the "legally rip it to put it in a form that is more suited to the way I listen to music" crowd. I make mp3 copies of my CDs. Those copies are only used by myself and my family. They don't leave the house and they are (as far as I can tell) perfectly legal. I find it easier to search and listen to my personal and legal mp3 collection than my personal and legal CD collection.
Media conversion has always been upheld as legal, and anything that would hinder my ability to convert between media types to meet my needs will get howls of protest from me.
What is illegal about making copies of my own CD collection for my own personal use? Is it illegal for me to make cassette copies of my CDs? To make CD copies of my old vinyl records? I guess I should forget about running for congress now, huh?
The AudioTron does the same thing and is still being sold commercially, although the best price you can get on it is $269. I understand that it's a great device if you can tolerate using SMB.
So, I don't see why Neilsen couldn't just take the statistics from TiVo for every household and be done with it.
Because that would skew the sample in favor of people who own TiVos. What Nielsen was looking for here was the ability to get accurate information from people who own TiVos (since they clearly watch TV in a different way than others) if such a family happened to be randomly picked as part of the sample. Nielsen didn't want to drop the family just because they owned a TiVo, but, clearly, collecting information on what they watch has to be done a different way with such families.
You cannot ask to become a Nielsen family. If you could do that, then the data they provide would become self-selective (that's why those phone-in and on-line polls are mostly meaningless). Nielsen families are chosen randomly in such a way that the random sampling follows the distribution of the population. Demographic information is never used to select the initial round of candidates. If anyone in the initial random group refuses to participate, then Nielsen will randomly select a replacement participant with near-identical demographics. Theoretically this is supposed to keep refusals from skewing the demographic makeup of the sample group. I'm sure my explanation doesn't do justice to the entire process. But believe me when I say a great deal of thought, care, and experience goes in to selection of the random group.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the JPI-hosted forums in which the users complained about this change were censored. At first, topics that were attempting to discuss the issue were removed, then eventually the entire message board was shut down.
I read those topics before they were censored. Trust me: the users were definitely up in arms.
I can go the rest of my entire life without ever seeing any of my [high school] classmates again and still be happy.
How odd.....I had the exact same reaction when I attended my 10th year high school reunion. I've never bothered going to another one and probably never will.
11 gallons an hour? What type of mooney?
:-) I think they're also less expensive to maintain when compared to other retracts of similar performance.
It's a 1981 model 201, also called the "J" model. The book says it should do nearly 160 on 11 gallons an hour, in my experience it is usually closer to 155. That's knots (not mph).
Which ones go down to 8 gallons per hour?
Hmmm.....I don't know my older mooneys that well. But I'm pretty sure that many of the pre-J models (C, E, and F) can cruise at around 8 gph. But they dont go as fast, either. See here for more details.
(lusting after an M20... just don't know what letter to add after it...)
They're all great! Anything earlier than a C is probably too expensive to maintain. I love the J as it is still within an attainable price range, has a modern panel with (usually) decent avionics, and is 155+ knots.
What do you think of spoilers?
You mean the speed breaks? You shouldn't need them if you plan your descent properly. In my J I can drop the gear at 135, and I usually don't have a problem getting it down that slow.
For that matter, of all airplanes, which ones have the best speed/gph performance?
Well, obviously, I think the Mooneys do.
Aw crud. You'd think I would get that right. Sorry.
The information isn't cheap to come by because it is updated so often and used by so few, but a lot of smaller airports are public knowledge. Private pilots know where to get it.
Isn't cheap to come by? Nonsense. Sectional charts are about $8 each, and airport facility directories are about $4 each. Just visit your friendly neighborhood airport and ask where they sell charts. Or if you're too lazy to get up out of your chair, go visit the pilot shop at Sporty's. The information is easy to find for free on-line as well.
The expensive part is keeping the information up to date, because it does change regularly. Charts expire every 6 months and AF/Ds every 56 days. But if you're not a pilot you won't care about that.
Hello Mr Larry Scheinpflug.
Sorry, youve got the wrong guy.
How is your Mooney (Serial #24-1053) doing these days?
It's doing great! 160 knots on 11 gallons (of 100LL) an hour. It's a beautiful plane.
Keeping it in a hangar?
Nope, hangars are hard to come by at my home field unfortunately.
I hear it's a little chilly in Dunwoody, GA these days.
Not as bad as it is in the northeast these days!
Aren't you due for a currency check-flight?
What's wrong, can't you tell everything from the publically available network databases? Did you seriously think I didn't know someone could look up my plane's information from its tail number? Do you expect me to be impressed? Sorry to disappoint you.
110 octane Low Lead, 100 octane, and avgas (essentially what you put in your car)...110LL (the most comon variety for small prop planes) is blue
Sorry, but you are referring to 100LL (100 octane low-lead). There is no 110 octane. There is 80 and 100LL. 80 is green and 100LL is blue. 100LL is by far the most common, 80 is rather hard to find.
There are places that have "self serve" pumps where you pull the plane up to a pump. But most places deliver it by truck and have an employee pump it.
I've had an audiotron for months and have never been bothered by intertrack gaps. And I can be pretty picky about such things. I do have some discs that need smooth segues and I have not noticed any sort of difficulty with them. But if it really bothers you, then rip the entire disc to a single mp3.
That kind of ice on a Cirrus would scare the dogpoop out of me...
That kind of ice on any plane that didn't have deicing equipment would scare me. I am very ice averse, and try to stay out of any clouds above the freezing layer.
But Cessnas can carry ice lots better than Mooneys can. (But then I was ice averse even before buying the Mooney).
Fuel, fuel, fuel, fuel, fuel...
All engine failures happen due to fuel exhaustion. (Well, not quite all...
I know a guy that is president of a flying club in the Chicago area which rents out an SR20 (and now an SR22) to its members. While he was flying the club's SR20 the engine's crankshaft failed and the engine stopped cold. Instant glider at 2000 AGL. He and his co-pilot did what they have always been trained to do: they picked a field and landed in it. He did briefly consider (for about 2 seconds) deploying the chute, then decided he had a better chance taking it in under control. The plane damage was repairable and the pilots were uninjured. So engines do spontaneously fail, but you are right that it is extremly rare. Fuel starvation I believe is still the number 1 cause of accidents in small planes.
Fuel, fuel, fuel.
By the way, the Cirrus has a FADEC system. Of course it also has those beautiful Garmin GPSs in it!
Oh, and the only practical use for an ADF these days (other than listening to AM stations) is to frustrate the life out of instrument students.
As for the FAA, remember that it's the same government bueraucracy that said teaching spin avoidance to students was better than teaching them spin recovery. Thus removal of the spin requirement from the private pilot PTS.
I am glad to hear that the plane did undergo spin testing before certification. That was something I was unaware of before.
Don't get me wrong: the Cirrus is a wonderful plane and has lots of things going for it. It's great to see new airplanes on the market that are using some modern designs, ideas, comfort touches, ergonomics, avionics, and such. As far as I'm concerned the only negative about the Cirrus planes (other than price) is the question surrounding spins. But in my mind that's a pretty big question.
Disclosure: I can't afford one, so I bought a used "historic" plane instead.
I highly recommend this company's aircraft to any pilot...
Well there is reason to be wary of these planes, and that reason has something to do with the parachute. Every other manufactured small plane has had to undergo a spin recovery demonstration. That is, the manufacturer has had to demonstrate in a flight test that the plane can be recovered from a spin. Not so the SR20 and SR22. Cirrus did not have to demonstrate spin recovery because their official spin recovery method is to deploy the parachute. Because they haven't had to demonstrate spin recovery, we don't really know how these planes behave in a spin. There have been a few accidents in the Cirrus that may be attributed to an unrecoverable spin condition. It's possible that by the time the pilot realized his situation he couldn't deploy the parachute.
Deploying the chute is a final act. Once you do that you have put your fate in the hands of the winds and chance. That's not something that pilots are comfortable doing -- we never want to give up flying the plane in any situation. So a pilot would want to be absolutely sure that there was no other reasonable course of action before pulling that handle. Because that will be his last act as pilot in command for that flight!
As I understand the parachute installation on the Cirrus, the plane still touches down with goodly amount of vertical speed. In other words, it is not a soft landing! It is expected that a parachute landing will damage the landing gear. "Minimal damage" is a relative term. It is probably repairable, but it wont be cheap.
Disabled how?
In the case of the plane in Texas (a Cirrus, if anyone cares), it became disabled when an aileron partially detached from the fuselage. Without the aileron, the plane was mostly uncontrollable. It is likely that the 'chute saved that guy's life. The maintenance oversight that caused the aileron to detach in the first place is an entirely different matter!
Completely untrue about the ads. Ads stayed off the site for DAYS and, if I recall correctly, returned some time the following Sunday. For those interested, CNN went to a half-height page at 9:15, then down to an absolute bare minimum page at 9:45. It was restored to a "light" format at 14:55. All Eastern time. The advertisements went away when the site moved to its "bare minimum" format.
I've been watching CNN coverage since 8:40 this morning. (Hey, it's part of my job, okay?) Not a single commercial. And ads have been pulled from cnn.com as well. In place of the ads are pictures of candles. America is mourning and remembering. The media is covering it. Why is that bad?
If you fly under IFR, nothing has changed
Try landing at one of the four airports in the DC area.
It is true that IFR was not as adversely affected, but there was still a significant impact. It was about a week before they even allowed IFR flight for part 91, as I recall. IFR flight without the option of VFR is much more restrictive, especially if you frequent uncontrolled airports and even moreso airports without approaches. Maintaining or, even worse, regaining instrument currency was difficult, too.
Even when departing IFR there was a period of time when I could not drive my car on to the ramp. I had to go to the FBO, prove to them who I was, then have them take me out to my plane in one of their vehicles. Then after landing I had to call them to reverse the process. And owner maintenance during that time? Forget it! Even as recently as two months ago when my partner and I were working on the engine late at night we got questioned by the local authorities. I'm actually glad to see that, but it is another indicator that things have really changed.
Things are mostly okay these days, but we do still live under the constant threat of increased restrictions (witness all the hoopla over the part 91 restrictions for 9/11/02) and increased security with little to no warning. Not to mention the press regularly publishing reports about how "dangerous" we are, and senators saying that GA is a gaping security risk.
if you can't spot the cooling tower of a nuclear power plant from 5 miles away, I don't want you in the same airpace with me.
Ha ha! Fortunately I can (for the most part). But we still had to pad the distance to about 10 miles, in case some official somewhere decided that the center of the circle was somewhere other than the cooling tower.
I would submit that general aviation has boomed since 911.
Parts of it have, yes. Especially chartered jet operations. But the part of the industry that deals with our small planes is still suffering greatly, IME. Ive talked with maintenance shops, paint shops, and interior shops. All report that business is still down but slowly improving.
You think internet interests have been hit hard by post 9/11 legislation, trying being a private pilot these days. Despite the fact that this heinous act was conducted with big planes, its the little ones (like the Mooney I own) that are the first ones to be singled out when it comes time to hand down more restrictive measures. Three days after the attacks, the commercial airliners were back in the air. We had to wait a month, and then we were so awash in new and constantly changing regulations that it was impossible to keep up. Imagine taking off for a two hour flight and having the rules change while you're airborn. It was not unusual for a flight to be legal when you took off and illegal by the time it was over. The onslaught of new rules has been so bad that the FAA will run out of 4-digit numbers with which to label them. Yes, we are rapidly approaching federal notam (notice to airman) number 9999, at which point they will have to start numbering them at 0 again.
Remember when they announced they were restricting general aviation flights over nuclear power plants? You know what the official notice from the FAA said? The notice said we were forbidden from flying within 5 miles of a power plant, but then gave us nothing better than a vague description of where those plants were located! So we were told we had to remain clear (and if we didn't we would be intercepted by fighters and possibly shot down) but not told the locations we had to remain clear OF: just city names and vague directions, like "15 miles northwest of Anytown, IL". Even the pilot briefers we called on the phone--the very FAA representatives whose purpose in life is to tell pilots about notams--didn't understand the notices. Depending on who and when you would call you would get a different story about what was legal and what wasn't. And the ATC folks were just as confused. The tower at your departing airport would say your flight is okay, but the one at your destination would declare you in violation of some temporary flight restriction.
Many aviation related business went bankrupt and many more are teetering on the edge as a result of this. The airlines are bad off as we all know, but the small airports are in worse shape. And we are constantly under a cloud of threatened onerous increases in security for our airports: in most cases they are security measures that make no sense at all. Imagine owning property but being subject to a security check before you were allowed to go out to it.
Lots of folks just gave up flying, some temporarily and some permanently. I'm happy to sacrifice for my country, but the sacrifice should have some value. Most of what I've seen in the way of GA restrictions has been meaningless and senseless. And it's not really the restrictions themselves that bother me, but way in which they have been handled.
Since when do you, or anybody else, have the legal right to "rip" a CD, which is intellectual property
Since the Supreme Court made it legal. It's called "fair use". Format shifting ande time shifting have been done for decades, since well before mp3s and well before compact discs. It is all perfectly legal. Ripping is just another form of format shifting, or media conversion.
this will cause howls of protest from the "rip it and send it all over the world" crowd
It will also cause howls of protest from the "legally rip it to put it in a form that is more suited to the way I listen to music" crowd. I make mp3 copies of my CDs. Those copies are only used by myself and my family. They don't leave the house and they are (as far as I can tell) perfectly legal. I find it easier to search and listen to my personal and legal mp3 collection than my personal and legal CD collection.
Media conversion has always been upheld as legal, and anything that would hinder my ability to convert between media types to meet my needs will get howls of protest from me.
Was that a troll?
What is illegal about making copies of my own CD collection for my own personal use? Is it illegal for me to make cassette copies of my CDs? To make CD copies of my old vinyl records? I guess I should forget about running for congress now, huh?
The AudioTron does the same thing and is still being sold commercially, although the best price you can get on it is $269. I understand that it's a great device if you can tolerate using SMB.
hard to compete with the $4.99 price tag on this alternate solution
Processor, display, and network interface are available for an additional charge...
So, I don't see why Neilsen couldn't just take the statistics from TiVo for every household and be done with it.
Because that would skew the sample in favor of people who own TiVos. What Nielsen was looking for here was the ability to get accurate information from people who own TiVos (since they clearly watch TV in a different way than others) if such a family happened to be randomly picked as part of the sample. Nielsen didn't want to drop the family just because they owned a TiVo, but, clearly, collecting information on what they watch has to be done a different way with such families.
You cannot ask to become a Nielsen family. If you could do that, then the data they provide would become self-selective (that's why those phone-in and on-line polls are mostly meaningless). Nielsen families are chosen randomly in such a way that the random sampling follows the distribution of the population. Demographic information is never used to select the initial round of candidates. If anyone in the initial random group refuses to participate, then Nielsen will randomly select a replacement participant with near-identical demographics. Theoretically this is supposed to keep refusals from skewing the demographic makeup of the sample group. I'm sure my explanation doesn't do justice to the entire process. But believe me when I say a great deal of thought, care, and experience goes in to selection of the random group.