We already have "plane police". They're called the Air Force. And they can go a lot lot faster that any GA plane. When the fighter jet waggles his wings at you, and the guy flying the jet points to the ground, you find the nearest airport, or he shoots you down.
Takes anywhere from 6-12 months to get your private license. If you've been to college, it's like a semester long course, with a lot of lab time. Apply yourself and you'll have no problem.
Flying is more risky than driving. It's a risk/reward tradeoff that you have to make. For some, it's not worth it.
INTERCAL is the only language in which you can not only program in trits, but n-digit number systems. It's an elegant and beautiful language - it's so beautiful, it will drive you mad. =)
Flight simulators have to stop somewhere short of reality, or you'd need a whole cluster of computers to do the calculations. There's no good mathematical way to calculate turbulence, for instance. Check back in another 10 years, and perhaps you'll have what you want.
But aside from the mechanics of flight is the human element of flying. Flight simulators are terrible (and I would say potentially dangerous) at simulating the real world flying environment. In the simulator, you don't have 10 different people in the traffic pattern, with a frazzled tower controller who gets confused every now and then. Or the terse language and procedures necessary for transitioning through 3 different airspaces.
But simulator time is cheap, as opposed to $50/hr for an old creaky Cessna 172. You also get what you pay for.
It's a nice language and a different way of thinking about things, and it has certain charm to it.
But you can't get down and dirty to the bare metal with it. It's hard to do bit twiddling in lisp, for instance. Or pointer arithmetic.
But for high level application development, where you don't need to access the low level, it's perfectly fine. I think the big argument you'll have againt using lisp is that few really know the language.
My personal suggestions to lisp afficionados:
1. Be more polite and less snobbish. When someone wants to learn your language, welcome them in, and forgive them their faults as they learn.
2. Put together a free win32-based lisp dev environment. For unix, it's pretty easy to get a free lisp environment, but for the microsoft world, the only real dev environment is Franz, and they want mucho $$$$$ for their package. And Franz is like killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer. Something a little lighter and more accessible would do nicely.
Tea (the green variety) is supposed to be better for you. Something about natural antibiotics or something like that.
The big problem I have aganist it, is that it takes TWO cups of tea, to get the effect of ONE cup of coffee. Frankly, my bladder isn't big enough to hold that many cups of tea.
And the caffeine in tea is chemically different - it comes on slower than the caffeine in coffee.
How many of you would step onto an airliner where the pilot hasn't had his cup of coffee?
What if he missed some radio instructions or got confused because he wasn't completely alert?
What if those instructions were to keep him from flying into the side of a mountain?
There are worse things out there than dying from a cup of coffee. In some cases, a cup of coffee might actually be good for you.
It isn't how long you live, it's what you do with your life while you got it that counts. Have you done enough stuff that if you had to die tomorrow, you could say you've lived enough? If you can't, get out there, and do enough stuff until you can. Let the neo-puritans worry about living longer in misery. Or sleepiness.
That's Part 91, which is what individual pilots fly under. The airlines and charter services fly under different Parts. Granted, I suspect the regs are substantially similar for those people as well.
I read that, and thought, gee, if I have to pay attention to that rule, I'll be doing very very well in life.
Let me put it this way - all of the "afforable" general aviation planes are well under subsonic.
A new Cessna 172 will run you about $160,000 and it has a top speed of ~160kts, and a sane speed of about ~100kts. Sonic speed is about ~400kts, depending on temp and pressure. And the prices for new ceritified planes go up from there. And no propeller plane will go supersonic (well unless you pull a powered dive). And turbine engine$ are expen$ive. If you can afford a plane that can go supersonic, you are doing so well, you should be patting yourself on the back constantly.
I agree. Flying is risky enough as it is, without giving the old wheel a big spin, like putting in a completely new instrument panel. Yes, you can do it, but should you? Especially when you're betting people's lives?
As long as there are backup mechanical instruments in the cockpit, there's nothing wrong with electronic indicators, and I don't think there's any aerospace engineer who would disagree with that. The electronic stuff can save a lot of work and time, but like everything else in aviation, you gotta know what to do if the thing fails on you. And they will.
That's the insidious thing about education. None of it pays off RIGHT NOW. The consequences of good or bad education starts showing up 20-30 year later, when the children finally enter open society.
That means, even if we were to educate our children well, we wouldn't see a DIME on any of it until 30 years from now. Same thing with bad education, the damage stays hidden for 30 years, and then it gradually begins to show up.
And the benefits are all indirect - education won't defend us from our enemies right now, but a literate educated populace might be able to find ways of PREVENTING war through cultural and economic means. At the very least it'll give us more people eligible to be put in the fighter jets - those machines require educated minds.
As far as doing something about it, there's saying that goes something like this - it's easier to change yourself than it is to change the world. Don't worry about the world, worry about your family. Previous generations made painful sacrifices to give their kids good educations - in this era the sacrifices aren't nearly as painful. Move to a good neighborhood. Enroll your kids in a private school. You can afford it if your priorities demand it.
Not only that, but I still remember how most of my classmates treated their teachers as well. Open derision and disrespect was the order of the day. Most classes were barely controlled anarchy. You couldn't pay me enough to take that kind of abuse by people who don't want to learn.
I wouldn't mind teaching at a private school, or a school full of bright kids who want to learn, but most public schools aren't even close to that.
Phew, that article was long-winded. And 5 pages later, we finally discover the argument he was building up to. File extensions are evil, windows is kludgy, and OSX sucks.
Having not played with OSX, I have no opinion about it one way or another. Criticizing windows is easy, and many many people have beaten that dead horse over the years.
Which leads us to the last point he was trying to make, which is we should all get rid of file extensions. I'd like to ask him, what glorious benefit would we get from removing file extensions in all OS's in exchange for all the disruption it would cause, just to satisfy his sense of aesthetics? I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but geez, there are bigger problems out there to solve than this. This is the equivalent of arguing over whether the turn signal stalk on the steering column should also contain a rotating knob on the end for wiper blade control.
Who cares!?
Sounds like the rantings of another Macolyte, trying to convince the rest of us that he's better than us. You might be right, but the world stopped caring long ago.
You are deeply ignorant about how helicopters behave. Taking your hand off the cyclic is fundmentally different from taking your hand off the steering wheel. Driving isn't the same as flying, and flying a chopper is not the same as flying as fixed wing plane.
No, nothing is completely safe, and for certain applications the risk of flying in a 'copter is outweighed by the benefits you get. But for day-to-day commuting, the inherent risks in flying a rotorcraft aren't worth it.
Why don't you take a few helicopter lessons and then come back and read what you wrote? At the very least, try doing what I outlined.
Have you ever seen a maple seed? When you throw it up in the air, it will fall gently to the ground, while generating lift from its rotating "wing".
Helicopters don't fall quite as gently when the power is cut, but it's entirely possible for the occupants of a helicopter to survive an autorotation when properly piloted.
Don't get me wrong, helicopters scare me, but losing power in a heli is not one of those things that keeps me away from those funny planes with the propeller on top.
Try this: Grab x-plane or FS2000, and start up a heli simulation. Take off. Are you still with me? Taking off is harder than it looks, isn't it? Pretend you're on a cross country flight, and you need to take your hand off the cyclic, and get your sectional chart out of your bag. Notice what the helicopter does when you take your hand off the cyclic. Can you recover?
Come back and tell me helicopters are perfectly safe.
Something like this is fine if you want to have a little fun on the weekend, and you don't really have a need to be anywhere.
But if the weather turns even a little nasty, you have to stay on the ground. And I really wouldn't use one of these too far from my home airport. Defintely no cross country.
But if your budget is really low, and you must get up in the air, it's not a bad way to go. There are other types of ultralights as well, all the way from hangliders with engines, to almost-planes.
Oh yes, and I forgot to mention the backside of the Wonder Wheel does vector arithmetic, although you have to be careful to use a pencil when making the dot, or you won't be able to use it again without annoying yourself.
>Important computer organisations (eg. ACM) really pressing their codes of ethics' seriously
Have you heard the old saying that "business ethics" is an oxymoron? Yeah sure the ACM can tout ethics all they want. And it will only take a few firings before everyone gets the idea of who is in charge, code of ethics or not. If you want a large corporation to act ethical, you better pass a law with enough teeth in it to make the megacorp respect it. Otherwise this "code of ethics" is not worth more that the paper its written on.
I'm not too concerned about this. They keep track of you via loyalty cards. There's nothing that says you have to use the cards to gamble. Decline the card offers and gamble with cash only. If you feel really really paranoid, pay for your room and food with cash too. They won't stop you. If they did start requiring you to swipe that stupid card every time you gambled, I would walk out of there so fast their heads would twist right off. And using those cards to "save" money is stupid anyway. Unless you're very lucky or very skilled, you're going to lose to the house anyway. Whether you lose a few dollars more really isn't going to matter.
What does have me concerned is the where movie theaters are headed. This Fandango crap really annoys me. You can still buy your ticket at the counter, but I can see that they are trying to do away with that. Until I hear that they're backing off on requiring you to register for purchasing movie tickets, I guess I won't be seeing movies in the theaters any more. But I'm a patient man, and getting the used DVD for $10 on sale is a better value anyways.
From what little I've seen of legal conflicts, each side tends to ask for way more than they are allowed to get. I guess they do it on the theory that if you don't ask you never get.
Much of what constitutes lawyering is actually haggling and negotiation.
And as far as not doing their research, not all lawyers are steely eyed competents. The slack is strong with all of us.
Phil Greenspun once said something to the effect that a good ivy league student probably does more research and thinking than the average lawyer.
Ineteresting that it happened in Germany and not here. This could be a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. In any case, I wouldn't pay the lawyers any money, or if you do, make them earn every penny of it.
I tried it 'way 'way back in '97 and if all you wanted to do was email and websurf, it was perfect. However, if you tried to push it beyond its "mission profile" it failed pretty spectacularly. I remember waiting 1 hour for a remote x-term window to pop up on my laptop. I returned the modem soon after that.
They may have fixed some of those problems since then, I don't know.
The modems themselves were somewhat inconvenient, although I think I've seen pcmcia form factor cards at Fry's - they should've had those from the start - it would've made it a lot easier to carry around.
As I recall, the ricochet modems can operate point-to-point, so it would be possible to take a few of these things and create some sort of private net with it. How useful that would be, I can't say. Especially since wireless ethernet came out recently.
The higher-ups in the military are in love with Powerpoint - seriously in love with it. If you take it away from them, who knows what might happen - there might be a revolution, maybe even a coup:)
Unless StartOffice does things that Powerpoint can only dream about, I wouldn't hold my breath over MS' demise.
Gee, I can understand the government mandating something like this - I mean, who cares if the citizens get pissed off about it, they can either take it or go off to the Ministry of Love.
But a private company? You can bet that the next time I need to rent a car, this company is now at the bottom of the list. I'm fairly sure that most other peiople would act similarly. Pissing off your customers (potential and actual) is not the way to make a profit.
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We already have "plane police". They're called the Air Force. And they can go a lot lot faster that any GA plane. When the fighter jet waggles his wings at you, and the guy flying the jet points to the ground, you find the nearest airport, or he shoots you down.
Takes anywhere from 6-12 months to get your private license. If you've been to college, it's like a semester long course, with a lot of lab time. Apply yourself and you'll have no problem.
Flying is more risky than driving. It's a risk/reward tradeoff that you have to make. For some, it's not worth it.
INTERCAL is the only language in which you can not only program in trits, but n-digit number systems. It's an elegant and beautiful language - it's so beautiful, it will drive you mad. =)
Flight simulators have to stop somewhere short of reality, or you'd need a whole cluster of computers to do the calculations. There's no good mathematical way to calculate turbulence, for instance. Check back in another 10 years, and perhaps you'll have what you want.
But aside from the mechanics of flight is the human element of flying. Flight simulators are terrible (and I would say potentially dangerous) at simulating the real world flying environment. In the simulator, you don't have 10 different people in the traffic pattern, with a frazzled tower controller who gets confused every now and then. Or the terse language and procedures necessary for transitioning through 3 different airspaces.
But simulator time is cheap, as opposed to $50/hr for an old creaky Cessna 172. You also get what you pay for.
It's a nice language and a different way of thinking about things, and it has certain charm to it.
But you can't get down and dirty to the bare metal with it. It's hard to do bit twiddling in lisp, for instance. Or pointer arithmetic.
But for high level application development, where you don't need to access the low level, it's perfectly fine. I think the big argument you'll have againt using lisp is that few really know the language.
My personal suggestions to lisp afficionados:
1. Be more polite and less snobbish. When someone wants to learn your language, welcome them in, and forgive them their faults as they learn.
2. Put together a free win32-based lisp dev environment. For unix, it's pretty easy to get a free lisp environment, but for the microsoft world, the only real dev environment is Franz, and they want mucho $$$$$ for their package. And Franz is like killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer. Something a little lighter and more accessible would do nicely.
Tea (the green variety) is supposed to be better for you. Something about natural antibiotics or something like that.
The big problem I have aganist it, is that it takes TWO cups of tea, to get the effect of ONE cup of coffee. Frankly, my bladder isn't big enough to hold that many cups of tea.
And the caffeine in tea is chemically different - it comes on slower than the caffeine in coffee.
How many of you would step onto an airliner where the pilot hasn't had his cup of coffee?
What if he missed some radio instructions or got confused because he wasn't completely alert?
What if those instructions were to keep him from flying into the side of a mountain?
There are worse things out there than dying from a cup of coffee. In some cases, a cup of coffee might actually be good for you.
It isn't how long you live, it's what you do with your life while you got it that counts. Have you done enough stuff that if you had to die tomorrow, you could say you've lived enough? If you can't, get out there, and do enough stuff until you can. Let the neo-puritans worry about living longer in misery. Or sleepiness.
That's Part 91, which is what individual pilots fly under. The airlines and charter services fly under different Parts. Granted, I suspect the regs are substantially similar for those people as well.
I read that, and thought, gee, if I have to pay attention to that rule, I'll be doing very very well in life.
Let me put it this way - all of the "afforable" general aviation planes are well under subsonic.
A new Cessna 172 will run you about $160,000 and it has a top speed of ~160kts, and a sane speed of about ~100kts. Sonic speed is about ~400kts, depending on temp and pressure. And the prices for new ceritified planes go up from there. And no propeller plane will go supersonic (well unless you pull a powered dive). And turbine engine$ are expen$ive. If you can afford a plane that can go supersonic, you are doing so well, you should be patting yourself on the back constantly.
I agree. Flying is risky enough as it is, without giving the old wheel a big spin, like putting in a completely new instrument panel. Yes, you can do it, but should you? Especially when you're betting people's lives?
As long as there are backup mechanical instruments in the cockpit, there's nothing wrong with electronic indicators, and I don't think there's any aerospace engineer who would disagree with that. The electronic stuff can save a lot of work and time, but like everything else in aviation, you gotta know what to do if the thing fails on you. And they will.
Especially mid-70s. What is it with all that
green and orange? Brings back bad memories.
Concept is good for a laugh or two, which I think was how it was meant to be taken.
I think you could get a chuckle from upper management the first time you proposed such a plan, but only the first time.
That's the insidious thing about education. None of it pays off RIGHT NOW. The consequences of good or bad education starts showing up 20-30 year later, when the children finally enter open society.
That means, even if we were to educate our children well, we wouldn't see a DIME on any of it until 30 years from now. Same thing with bad education, the damage stays hidden for 30 years, and then it gradually begins to show up.
And the benefits are all indirect - education won't defend us from our enemies right now, but a literate educated populace might be able to find ways of PREVENTING war through cultural and economic means. At the very least it'll give us more people eligible to be put in the fighter jets - those machines require educated minds.
As far as doing something about it, there's saying that goes something like this - it's easier to change yourself than it is to change the world. Don't worry about the world, worry about your family. Previous generations made painful sacrifices to give their kids good educations - in this era the sacrifices aren't nearly as painful. Move to a good neighborhood. Enroll your kids in a private school. You can afford it if your priorities demand it.
Not only that, but I still remember how most of my classmates treated their teachers as well. Open derision and disrespect was the order of the day. Most classes were barely controlled anarchy. You couldn't pay me enough to take that kind of abuse by people who don't want to learn.
I wouldn't mind teaching at a private school, or a school full of bright kids who want to learn, but most public schools aren't even close to that.
Phew, that article was long-winded. And 5 pages later, we finally discover the argument he was building up to. File extensions are evil, windows is kludgy, and OSX sucks.
Having not played with OSX, I have no opinion about it one way or another. Criticizing windows is easy, and many many people have beaten that dead horse over the years.
Which leads us to the last point he was trying to make, which is we should all get rid of file extensions. I'd like to ask him, what glorious benefit would we get from removing file extensions in all OS's in exchange for all the disruption it would cause, just to satisfy his sense of aesthetics? I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but geez, there are bigger problems out there to solve than this. This is the equivalent of arguing over whether the turn signal stalk on the steering column should also contain a rotating knob on the end for wiper blade control.
Who cares!?
Sounds like the rantings of another Macolyte, trying to convince the rest of us that he's better than us. You might be right, but the world stopped caring long ago.
Then why are car dealer ads on TV so annoying? You would think if they really weren't profiting from them, they'd quit placing them.
From what little I can tell, advertising has to be annoying, but not so annoying that you're motivated to find ways of not looking at the ad.
Sort of the same idea that there is no such thing as bad publicity.
You are deeply ignorant about how helicopters behave. Taking your hand off the cyclic is fundmentally different from taking your hand off the steering wheel. Driving isn't the same as flying, and flying a chopper is not the same as flying as fixed wing plane.
No, nothing is completely safe, and for certain applications the risk of flying in a 'copter is outweighed by the benefits you get. But for day-to-day commuting, the inherent risks in flying a rotorcraft aren't worth it.
Why don't you take a few helicopter lessons and then come back and read what you wrote? At the very least, try doing what I outlined.
Have you ever seen a maple seed? When you throw it up in the air, it will fall gently to the ground, while generating lift from its rotating "wing".
Helicopters don't fall quite as gently when the power is cut, but it's entirely possible for the occupants of a helicopter to survive an autorotation when properly piloted.
Don't get me wrong, helicopters scare me, but losing power in a heli is not one of those things that keeps me away from those funny planes with the propeller on top.
Try this: Grab x-plane or FS2000, and start up a heli simulation. Take off. Are you still with me? Taking off is harder than it looks, isn't it? Pretend you're on a cross country flight, and you need to take your hand off the cyclic, and get your sectional chart out of your bag. Notice what the helicopter does when you take your hand off the cyclic. Can you recover?
Come back and tell me helicopters are perfectly safe.
Something like this is fine if you want to have a little fun on the weekend, and you don't really have a need to be anywhere.
But if the weather turns even a little nasty, you have to stay on the ground. And I really wouldn't use one of these too far from my home airport. Defintely no cross country.
But if your budget is really low, and you must get up in the air, it's not a bad way to go. There are other types of ultralights as well, all the way from hangliders with engines, to almost-planes.
Sure. Download the Palm OS Emulator, ask Palm for a ROM file, or search on Gnutella for one, and go.
Runs on linux, runs on windows, runs on macs as well, I believe.
Oh yes, and I forgot to mention the backside of the Wonder Wheel does vector arithmetic, although you have to be careful to use a pencil when making the dot, or you won't be able to use it again without annoying yourself.
It's scary the calculations you can do using nothing but your brain and a hunk or rotating metal (or plastic, depending on your taste).
Heresy, I tell you. Heresy. Being able to do calculations without using the Holy Semiconductor!
>Important computer organisations (eg. ACM) really pressing their codes of ethics' seriously
Have you heard the old saying that "business ethics" is an oxymoron? Yeah sure the ACM can tout ethics all they want. And it will only take a few firings before everyone gets the idea of who is in charge, code of ethics or not. If you want a large corporation to act ethical, you better pass a law with enough teeth in it to make the megacorp respect it. Otherwise this "code of ethics" is not worth more that the paper its written on.
I'm not too concerned about this. They keep track of you via loyalty cards. There's nothing that says you have to use the cards to gamble. Decline the card offers and gamble with cash only. If you feel really really paranoid, pay for your room and food with cash too. They won't stop you. If they did start requiring you to swipe that stupid card every time you gambled, I would walk out of there so fast their heads would twist right off. And using those cards to "save" money is stupid anyway. Unless you're very lucky or very skilled, you're going to lose to the house anyway. Whether you lose a few dollars more really isn't going to matter.
What does have me concerned is the where movie theaters are headed. This Fandango crap really annoys me. You can still buy your ticket at the counter, but I can see that they are trying to do away with that. Until I hear that they're backing off on requiring you to register for purchasing movie tickets, I guess I won't be seeing movies in the theaters any more. But I'm a patient man, and getting the used DVD for $10 on sale is a better value anyways.
From what little I've seen of legal conflicts, each side tends to ask for way more than they are allowed to get. I guess they do it on the theory that if you don't ask you never get.
Much of what constitutes lawyering is actually haggling and negotiation.
And as far as not doing their research, not all lawyers are steely eyed competents. The slack is strong with all of us.
Phil Greenspun once said something to the effect that a good ivy league student probably does more research and thinking than the average lawyer.
Ineteresting that it happened in Germany and not here. This could be a case of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. In any case, I wouldn't pay the lawyers any money, or if you do, make them earn every penny of it.
Might want to contact the EFF.
I tried it 'way 'way back in '97 and if all you wanted to do was email and websurf, it was perfect. However, if you tried to push it beyond its "mission profile" it failed pretty spectacularly. I remember waiting 1 hour for a remote x-term window to pop up on my laptop. I returned the modem soon after that.
They may have fixed some of those problems since then, I don't know.
The modems themselves were somewhat inconvenient, although I think I've seen pcmcia form factor cards at Fry's - they should've had those from the start - it would've made it a lot easier to carry around.
As I recall, the ricochet modems can operate point-to-point, so it would be possible to take a few of these things and create some sort of private net with it. How useful that would be, I can't say. Especially since wireless ethernet came out recently.
The higher-ups in the military are in love with Powerpoint - seriously in love with it. If you take it away from them, who knows what might happen - there might be a revolution, maybe even a coup :)
Unless StartOffice does things that Powerpoint can only dream about, I wouldn't hold my breath over MS' demise.
Gee, I can understand the government mandating something like this - I mean, who cares if the citizens get pissed off about it, they can either take it or go off to the Ministry of Love.
But a private company? You can bet that the next time I need to rent a car, this company is now at the bottom of the list. I'm fairly sure that most other peiople would act similarly. Pissing off your customers (potential and actual) is not the way to make a profit.