It's not exactly an efficient sink, is it? Your only option for heat transfer "outside" is infrared radiation, since vacuum does not exactly support conduction/convection.
If you really want liquid-He temps, then you can't really radiate heat to lose it. At 1 atm it is almost as cold as the cosmic microwave background, and probably colder than the inner solar system. If they're running below 1atm then it is probably colder than the microwave background itself. This means that your radiator will only serve to warm up the spacecraft, not cool it off.
For an IT analogy - how large a heat sink do you need to cool your PC in an oven? The only way to cool under such conditions is using active technologies, like phase change, or maybe Peltier. Since you're fighting entropy, this will ultimately require some source of energy, which will always be depleted eventually in a closed system.
Astutely observed, sir, but I would add that all of that makes a compelling case for a public utility model, wherein one (quasi-governmental) entity owns the pipe (fiber, whatever) and sells access to it on an even playing field.
That has always been my idea. For these last-mile problems have a public utility own the last mile, and ONLY the last mile.
So, either the government or some highly regulated utility owns the fiber to the home, up to the termination point in the central office. They then charge customers to use those lines, and they charge service providers for rack space. Service providers can then engage with consumers to provide them internet service, cable, or whatever. For non-shared lines like twisted pairs and fiber the utility just charges a flat monthly maintenance fee that covers their costs to fix lines/etc. For shared lines like typical cable-based networking they would charge by the byte and rate period, just like electricity. Service providers could charge whatever they want as long as they're up-front about it, and competition would control things there. Since the last mile is a solved problem, there would be quite a bit of competition - in order to provide internet service all you need is a router, a service contract with your upstream pipe, and a monthly fee for rack space in the central office (at cost).
MySQL (or MariaDB, or SkySQL) are not suitable for use in banking, but the vast majority of database applications don't have the same requirements of banks. Banks have extremely high data integrity, retention and security requirements.
Most people who don't think they don't have all those requirements simply haven't thought of what could happen in the absence of those requirements. It isn't unlike every time I see a poster asking for collections to help out victims of some apartment fire - apartment insurance is fairly cheap and yet many people don't even think about it, despite shelling out almost as much for cable TV as insurance would cost them for a year. People just don't think they need insurance until they do, and then it is too late.
Think about some database that has been collecting data for years. Now imagine that somebody does some data extraction from it and notices that some of the data looks inconsistent. You investigate and it turns out that under heavy load some records weren't getting stored by your database, or when some application error happens rarely that data is left in an inconsistent intermediate state. This has been happening for years undetected. Presumably if you're storing data for years it has some value, and now that value has been reduced. You might spend hundreds of hours coming up with ways to detect the problematic data and cleaning it up. Now, consider that if you had simply used an ACID-compliant FOSS RDBMS the problem would not have happened at all. Then when you investigate you find that using that database wouldn't have cost you anything more - the programmers simply used what they were more familiar with.
I'm sure there are cases where performance is more important than data integrity, but the latter should always be considered the priority as a default. Most people just expect computer systems to regurgitate the data that is input into them without error, and they don't think through the consequences of what could go wrong if this doesn't happen.
Right now I'm frustrated by the lack of Postgres support by FOSS projects. It is really annoying to be stuck with MySQL simply because the average college-age FOSS contributor doesn't understand the value of a database. The whole world runs on databases, and the typical CS program doesn't even talk about them. Sure, I grok the difference between CS and software engineering, but at least a theoretical treatment of the problems that databases solve would imbue graduates with a MUCH better appreciation for their importance.
It seems to me without knowing how many tickets of both were sold its pointless to compare how long they took to sell out.
The other question is WHY did Google take longer.
If it was anything like buying a Nexus phone, chances are that they'd have sold out in 30 seconds if their website didn't die under the load. Most likely if you tried to buy a ticket in the first two minutes for Google IO you'd just get an error message, and then you'd keep hitting refresh until you got the message an hour later that they're all sold out.
Or, if it was like the Nexus 4 you'd get the sold-out message after 20 minutes, and then find out that some people were able to place orders 40 minutes after that and get phones.
Google needs to figure out the whole e-commerce thing, or outsource to somebody who does.
Are you also going to fake the look and design of a bank card, including, possibly, raised numbering/lettering? Or are you just going to clone it on an old library card?
First, I have a legitimate bank card in my wallet which has no raised lettering/etc.
Second, lots of terminals let you swipe the card yourself.
Third, you could just clone it onto an old credit card.
The whole analogy breaks down when you're talking about a government.
Taxpayers aren't an AR department - they're the board of directors. If your board of directors tells you to spend less money, you spend less money. If they tell you to do it by not stocking the break room, then you don't stock the break room.
Who said anything about subsidizing them? If you are asserting that fuel taxes taken in by the US Treasury are less than the cost of ATC, prove it. My assertion is that fuel taxes already cover the operations of the necessary functions of the FAA which are specific to the plane operations, and the remainder of the money spent by the FAA is for net-goods that are consumed by everyone, including people on the ground, so there is no reason why the general tax funds should not be used in addition to the existing fuel taxes.
I'm saying that fuel taxes should be set at a level sufficient to pay for ATC. If they are, then great - and it makes no sense to shut down ATC services as a result. If they aren't then they should be raised. I do not know what the current rates are, but the fact that they were affected by the sequester tends to suggest they aren't self-funding. But, it could just be political games.
On the other hand, if the aviation community were to agree to increase fuel taxes, then the fuel tax revenues should be locked off from the general fund, or else we end up just like the Social Security "Trust Fund" - getting raided to pay for studies of monkey erections, piss-christ "art" and bridges to no-where.
Nobody is going to ask the aviation community to agree to anything. The cost of FAA services should be recovered in fuel taxes, and the aviation community has the choice to buy fuel or not. Nobody asks me whether I want to pay income taxes...
As far as the social security trust fund goes - just what do you think should be done with it? Should we have a big room full of dollar bills somewhere waiting to catch on fire? Should we be borrowing money and paying interest on it when we have money just sitting around? How many wealthy people take out loans while sitting on piles of cash (neglecting perverse incentives like tax loopholes and the like)? If you have a surplus in one area of the budget it only makes sense to use it to plug a hole in another area of the budget.
Besides - having all that money saved up in a room won't do a thing for the baby boomers when they all start collecting. If the economy is so upside-down that the government would actually be unable to pay their monthly social security checks then those checks would be worthless anyway as the demand for workers increases wages and the costs of living to the point where you wouldn't be able to live on your promised savings anyway. The only thing that makes social security work is a lot more people paying in than collecting - you can't save money for retirement on a national scale, because money has no inherent value. The people who are working are providing the services, and the only way to provide those services to people who aren't working is to tax them. Money that is stored away which later re-enters the economy on a large scale just devalues itself.
I am a pilot and I *do pay tax* every time I buy gas. We are ALREADY DOING THIS. Every time the "charge per flight, charge to take off, charge to land, charge to get a weather briefing, charge per mile, etc etc" crowd gets worked up, we (collectively through our GA lobby) point out just raising the gas tax is vastly more efficient and won't require an entirely new bunch of employees that will ALSO need to be paid out of these fees.
I know that fuel is already taxed. Raising that tax is exactly what I'm proposing - take the annual budget for all FAA services, divide it by the number of gallons of fuel sold for use in planes, and add that as a tax to fuel.
The only change vs the current state is charging more per pound of fuel. As you've pointed out it also avoids any perverse incentives to go flying into clouds without filing IFR.
If this is done, then there is no need to worry about sequesters/etc, because the FAA operations would be self-funding, and those who benefit from those operations would be paying for it.
I don't think I've seen a single SCADA system ask for a login over a serial port.
I'm not sure you'd want it to either. If you're going to use a terminal server, then put security on the terminal server (use ssh/etc).
The next thing people will be pointing out that most JTAG ports don't have any authentication either, and that it is possible to wire those up to a terminal server as well.
The problem is with administrators who interface devices on a network without any authentication. My laser printer doesn't require authentication and that isn't a problem, but I'm not going to stick it on the Internet and then wonder why I came home to a stack of black paper and an empty toner cartridge.
Google gets all the profit and only pays a token amount to purchase it?
Actually, the city basically had to pay to get Google to take it off their hands - note the bit about the $500k to figure out where all the cables were laid.
I suspect that if anybody wanted to pay for the network they would have sold it to the highest bidder. From the description it sounds like the project was mismanaged and they don't even know where the cables were placed. There might even be regulatory liabilities that anybody taking ownership would incur.
Imagine you have a house that you could sell for $500k. Then take a couple of drums of radioactive waste and dump them in the basement, and let them seep down into the soil. Suddenly you'll find that if you want to sell the house you'll actually have to pay somebody to take it off your hands.
I'm sure this situation isn't as bad, but it sounds like they've tried to make money off of it and decided that there is no way they'll be able to do so, so they might as well give somebody else a chance to make money off of it and let the citizens have another ISP.
That said, if I were in charge of this deal I'd definitely make sure that everybody's interests were looked after long-term - the city did put up the money for the infrastructure.
I'm not sure that any of this would ruin general aviation. Just charge a fuel tax. Jets burn tens of thousands of pounds of fuel, and they're 95% of the air traffic that consumes a lot of ATC services, so the tax per pound of fuel would be scaled for that kind of consumption. If you're just buzzing around VFR in your Cherokee I doubt that this will have much impact on your costs, certainly not compared to maintenance/etc.
Unless you're a pilot and happen to own a plane and don't count in the cost of that plane, flying from small town to small town is already prohibitively expensive. Most people have to get themselves to at least a minor city to catch a flight, and it won't be direct unless one of the endpoints is a major city or the route is really popular.
That is certainly a factor, but I'd also be concerned about how reliable the figures are.
I just bought a $50 LED floodlight. On paper it is going to save me a heap of money over the next 20 years. However, if the thing burns out in a year I'll have wasted a LOT of money on it. Break-even would be a few years, so I won't even know if I've broken even for quite a while.
People are going to be naturally skeptical of 20-year lifetimes on a product that came out a few years ago.
Please provide the math to back this assertion up. I'll provide three counter examples.
You basically already provided the "math" - they aren't counter-examples at all.
Currently all aviation users who purchase aviation fuels pay fuel taxes per-gallon, more flights = more gallons = more tax money. Strike one....So you want to tax aviation more than it already is? Remember the old rule, subsidize what you want more of, tax what you want less. Strike two.
I realize that aviation fuel is taxed. I do advocate that these taxes be increased so that the necessary regulatory oversight can be self-funding. I fully agree that this is likely to result in less planes in the air.
What's the problem with that? Why do we need to subsidize people flying around?
Many nations other than the US have "fee based ATC". The only way to collect these fees is to structure your entire aviation system, from airport to navigation, to pilot training, to aircraft registration around fee collection. Note, all such nations have seen a dramatic DECREASE in the number of airports, and the number of users of these systems, even commercial operators use less of the ATC system by flying larger planes less frequently in order to maximize the number of flight-miles per ATC fee. Strike three.
That is exactly how the US should operate. Again, what is wrong with having larger planes less frequently? We need empty planes flying around overhead about as much as we need empty trains driving across the country or empty busses driving around the city.
Also note - that last item is actually the reason many nations in the world sends a large number of students to the US for primary and secondary flight training - we have the most options for them to train, and the best instructors - because they are busy enough to learn the fundamentals well and get to practice them. Fee based nations experience a drought of trained pilots to enter their commercial airlines,
Great, so the US is subsidizing flight training for the world's pilots. Not sure how that helps the average US citizen.
and even the US with the most open and inviting aviation system is seeing a strain with the already high cost of flying increasing beyond the means of the average citizen...Adding more taxes and more fees will only serve to further distance aviation from access to the average American as it has done to the UK and much of europe....Your inconvenience right now due to sequester is NOT a good reason to disenfranchise an ever growing portion of the population the right to affordable transportation, whatever the means.
If you want to help poor people just give them a decent income and they'll be able to afford tickets, assuming they have anywhere to go. Using taxes to make it easier to fly a single-passenger flight to catch a football game 100 miles away isn't the most effective use of resources. I doubt the average poor person is going to be able to afford a Piper Cherokee, either - certainly not for less than the cost of an airline ticket. Just properly maintaining an aircraft will likely cost you at least a few tickets a year if you're doing half the work yourself.
Hey, I love aviation in general, and would love to have the money to get a private pilot license and instrument rating. From time to time I spend hours flying around in simulators and have entertained trying to build a half-decent one. However, that is a personal hobby, and I can't really see forcing others to pay to make this possible.
Except that's how businesses in the US generally work. Layoffs and pay cuts to the employees before the executives have to take a pay cut, and even then that's after they've failed to find a way of declaring bankruptcy and auctioning themselves off for a bonus.
That's what I get for failing to qualify every sentence.:) I did say "wise store owner," but I failed to say "well-run business."
Few businesses that have executives are well-run. Executives aren't owners - they're managing the business for their own benefit, which only loosely aligns with the interests of the owners or their customers.
??? Perhaps on a per-passenger-time-used-by-controller calculation, but if that bizjet is flying into a non-towered airport on VFR rules it is using FAR LESS ATC resources than that Southwest flight with 300 people on it.
I was of course referring to the per-passenger basis. About the only way it would use less ATC time on that basis would be if it flew VFR the entire route, and that is pretty unlikely unless they were just ferrying it between two local airports. I would imagine that most private jets would be flying IFR even into a non-towered airport.
I would rather that the poor be richer (in terms of quality of life and freedom) than they would otherwise be, and would accept income inequality if I thought that would help the poor in any way. However, I've yet to see any evidence that it would.
I do not question that the poor are better off now than they were 40 years ago, but it has nothing to do with income inequality increasing. The poor were also better off 40 years ago than they were under feudalism and certainly income inequality had also improved in that time.
You are afraid of the question because it reveals something negative about yourself.
No, I simply call out logical fallacies when I see them, and don't spend time trying to argue from false premises.
Furthermore, the way you phrased that statement indicates that you believed you knew how I would answer the question before you asked it, and furthermore consider me morally or intellectually inferior based upon the answer you assumed that I would give. If I didn't give the answer you expected no doubt you'll next suggest that my reply was disingenuous, because in your thinking the only possible reason that somebody might disagree with you is that they simply do not understand how the world works as well as you do.
And yes, that was an ad hominem, and it does not really deserve a response. Like any judgment of character from reading a few sentences in an online debate, any resemblance to the truth is likely to be purely coincidental. I bring it up only to demonstrate how it does little to resolve the issue.
Don't be, such questions are a route to further growth.
We grow far more when we realize that there are lots of people out there who are both smarter and understand an issue better than we do, and yet they disagree with us. There are also plenty of people out there who are just as intelligent and would agree with us. Human intelligence has not reached the point where we can contemplate huge social issues and consistently reason out the most ideal way to handle them. Indeed, rarely can we even agree on what the ideal outcome would look like, let alone how to achieve it.
If you have an idea or an argument to present, just present it. Certainly I'll read it, and who knows - maybe some day it might convince me.
That kind of "contract" sounds likely to be invalid due to unconscionability.
Sounds great - why don't you spend $30k on a civil suit against Amazon over access to your $5 movie? Chances are that after you've spent the first $1k they'll just mail you a check for $5 so that your damages go out the window.
So here's the question, would you rather have everyone be poorer, if it meant that there was less income inequality? Or are you ok with more income inequality, if it means the poor get richer than they were?
I would rather have less income inequality, and have everybody be richer.
Or, are you arguing that we should have more income inequality, and have everybody be poorer?
Yes, that made no sense - just like the false dichotomy you proposed. There is no reason that reducing income inequality has to make everybody poorer.
If you pay me less, I'm going to short you on certain items. I'll try to make them peripheral, but I guarantee if you stop paying my invoices I'm going to cut the flow to the high profile services first. Simple business.
That isn't how any business in a competitive industry works. They aim to deliver the services consumers want for whatever price they can get. If there is a pinch in the economy and they're forced to sell services below cost, they're going to sell the most desirable services they can for whatever they can get for them so that they're able to differentiate themselves and hopefully raise their prices later.
No business decides to punish their customers for failing to buy from them. If you storm out of a business insisting that you'll never come back again, no wise store owner will kick you out the next day if you change your mind.
Sure, companies won't deliver services if invoices aren't paid, but they usually start out by assuming it is a mistake - they just want their money. That also isn't a good comparison here, because an invoice is a bill sent AFTER a service has already been rendered - the customer is legitimately in debt at that point. In the case of government services nobody has consumed anything without paying for it - the budget changes were dictated up-front and the government should deliver the most it can for what it has.
If my boss told me that they need to cut back and thus I had to do more work for the same pay for a while, the last thing I'm going to do is tell him that I'll just have to stop doing the highest-priority work that I have. I'd be fired that day.
Sure, but there is no reason they couldn't be funded by user fees. Just charge a fee for every flight and all budget issues go away entirely. More flights = more fees, and thus more resources to handle those flights.
That's why you don't hear about companies complaining that they can't cope with so many customers and therefore they'll be closing their stores one day a week.
Most of those small airports have very little traffic. At an airport with little traffic when the tower is closed you just announce your arrival on the radio and everybody keeps an eye out for each other. Most likely there is only one plane in the air nearby at a time anyway.
Private jets have a disproportionate impact on ATC in the first place. It takes as much effort to direct a jet with 4 people on it as one with 300 people on it.
Great, so after you've already spent 40% of the budget of the project fully specifying the requirements and design, you can figure out what the last 60% of the project will cost and whether the entire project is worth doing in the first place.
You need to know what the project will cost before you spend a lot of money on it, otherwise you don't know what the ROI is, whether other projects are a better investment, or whether you'll even be able to afford it at all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not exactly an efficient sink, is it? Your only option for heat transfer "outside" is infrared radiation, since vacuum does not exactly support conduction/convection.
If you really want liquid-He temps, then you can't really radiate heat to lose it. At 1 atm it is almost as cold as the cosmic microwave background, and probably colder than the inner solar system. If they're running below 1atm then it is probably colder than the microwave background itself. This means that your radiator will only serve to warm up the spacecraft, not cool it off.
For an IT analogy - how large a heat sink do you need to cool your PC in an oven? The only way to cool under such conditions is using active technologies, like phase change, or maybe Peltier. Since you're fighting entropy, this will ultimately require some source of energy, which will always be depleted eventually in a closed system.
Astutely observed, sir, but I would add that all of that makes a compelling case for a public utility model, wherein one (quasi-governmental) entity owns the pipe (fiber, whatever) and sells access to it on an even playing field.
That has always been my idea. For these last-mile problems have a public utility own the last mile, and ONLY the last mile.
So, either the government or some highly regulated utility owns the fiber to the home, up to the termination point in the central office. They then charge customers to use those lines, and they charge service providers for rack space. Service providers can then engage with consumers to provide them internet service, cable, or whatever. For non-shared lines like twisted pairs and fiber the utility just charges a flat monthly maintenance fee that covers their costs to fix lines/etc. For shared lines like typical cable-based networking they would charge by the byte and rate period, just like electricity. Service providers could charge whatever they want as long as they're up-front about it, and competition would control things there. Since the last mile is a solved problem, there would be quite a bit of competition - in order to provide internet service all you need is a router, a service contract with your upstream pipe, and a monthly fee for rack space in the central office (at cost).
MySQL (or MariaDB, or SkySQL) are not suitable for use in banking, but the vast majority of database applications don't have the same requirements of banks. Banks have extremely high data integrity, retention and security requirements.
Most people who don't think they don't have all those requirements simply haven't thought of what could happen in the absence of those requirements. It isn't unlike every time I see a poster asking for collections to help out victims of some apartment fire - apartment insurance is fairly cheap and yet many people don't even think about it, despite shelling out almost as much for cable TV as insurance would cost them for a year. People just don't think they need insurance until they do, and then it is too late.
Think about some database that has been collecting data for years. Now imagine that somebody does some data extraction from it and notices that some of the data looks inconsistent. You investigate and it turns out that under heavy load some records weren't getting stored by your database, or when some application error happens rarely that data is left in an inconsistent intermediate state. This has been happening for years undetected. Presumably if you're storing data for years it has some value, and now that value has been reduced. You might spend hundreds of hours coming up with ways to detect the problematic data and cleaning it up. Now, consider that if you had simply used an ACID-compliant FOSS RDBMS the problem would not have happened at all. Then when you investigate you find that using that database wouldn't have cost you anything more - the programmers simply used what they were more familiar with.
I'm sure there are cases where performance is more important than data integrity, but the latter should always be considered the priority as a default. Most people just expect computer systems to regurgitate the data that is input into them without error, and they don't think through the consequences of what could go wrong if this doesn't happen.
Right now I'm frustrated by the lack of Postgres support by FOSS projects. It is really annoying to be stuck with MySQL simply because the average college-age FOSS contributor doesn't understand the value of a database. The whole world runs on databases, and the typical CS program doesn't even talk about them. Sure, I grok the difference between CS and software engineering, but at least a theoretical treatment of the problems that databases solve would imbue graduates with a MUCH better appreciation for their importance.
It seems to me without knowing how many tickets of both were sold its pointless to compare how long they took to sell out.
The other question is WHY did Google take longer.
If it was anything like buying a Nexus phone, chances are that they'd have sold out in 30 seconds if their website didn't die under the load. Most likely if you tried to buy a ticket in the first two minutes for Google IO you'd just get an error message, and then you'd keep hitting refresh until you got the message an hour later that they're all sold out.
Or, if it was like the Nexus 4 you'd get the sold-out message after 20 minutes, and then find out that some people were able to place orders 40 minutes after that and get phones.
Google needs to figure out the whole e-commerce thing, or outsource to somebody who does.
Are you also going to fake the look and design of a bank card, including, possibly, raised numbering/lettering? Or are you just going to clone it on an old library card?
First, I have a legitimate bank card in my wallet which has no raised lettering/etc.
Second, lots of terminals let you swipe the card yourself.
Third, you could just clone it onto an old credit card.
The whole analogy breaks down when you're talking about a government.
Taxpayers aren't an AR department - they're the board of directors. If your board of directors tells you to spend less money, you spend less money. If they tell you to do it by not stocking the break room, then you don't stock the break room.
Who said anything about subsidizing them? If you are asserting that fuel taxes taken in by the US Treasury are less than the cost of ATC, prove it. My assertion is that fuel taxes already cover the operations of the necessary functions of the FAA which are specific to the plane operations, and the remainder of the money spent by the FAA is for net-goods that are consumed by everyone, including people on the ground, so there is no reason why the general tax funds should not be used in addition to the existing fuel taxes.
I'm saying that fuel taxes should be set at a level sufficient to pay for ATC. If they are, then great - and it makes no sense to shut down ATC services as a result. If they aren't then they should be raised. I do not know what the current rates are, but the fact that they were affected by the sequester tends to suggest they aren't self-funding. But, it could just be political games.
On the other hand, if the aviation community were to agree to increase fuel taxes, then the fuel tax revenues should be locked off from the general fund, or else we end up just like the Social Security "Trust Fund" - getting raided to pay for studies of monkey erections, piss-christ "art" and bridges to no-where.
Nobody is going to ask the aviation community to agree to anything. The cost of FAA services should be recovered in fuel taxes, and the aviation community has the choice to buy fuel or not. Nobody asks me whether I want to pay income taxes...
As far as the social security trust fund goes - just what do you think should be done with it? Should we have a big room full of dollar bills somewhere waiting to catch on fire? Should we be borrowing money and paying interest on it when we have money just sitting around? How many wealthy people take out loans while sitting on piles of cash (neglecting perverse incentives like tax loopholes and the like)? If you have a surplus in one area of the budget it only makes sense to use it to plug a hole in another area of the budget.
Besides - having all that money saved up in a room won't do a thing for the baby boomers when they all start collecting. If the economy is so upside-down that the government would actually be unable to pay their monthly social security checks then those checks would be worthless anyway as the demand for workers increases wages and the costs of living to the point where you wouldn't be able to live on your promised savings anyway. The only thing that makes social security work is a lot more people paying in than collecting - you can't save money for retirement on a national scale, because money has no inherent value. The people who are working are providing the services, and the only way to provide those services to people who aren't working is to tax them. Money that is stored away which later re-enters the economy on a large scale just devalues itself.
I am a pilot and I *do pay tax* every time I buy gas. We are ALREADY DOING THIS. Every time the "charge per flight, charge to take off, charge to land, charge to get a weather briefing, charge per mile, etc etc" crowd gets worked up, we (collectively through our GA lobby) point out just raising the gas tax is vastly more efficient and won't require an entirely new bunch of employees that will ALSO need to be paid out of these fees.
I know that fuel is already taxed. Raising that tax is exactly what I'm proposing - take the annual budget for all FAA services, divide it by the number of gallons of fuel sold for use in planes, and add that as a tax to fuel.
The only change vs the current state is charging more per pound of fuel. As you've pointed out it also avoids any perverse incentives to go flying into clouds without filing IFR.
If this is done, then there is no need to worry about sequesters/etc, because the FAA operations would be self-funding, and those who benefit from those operations would be paying for it.
I don't think I've seen a single SCADA system ask for a login over a serial port.
I'm not sure you'd want it to either. If you're going to use a terminal server, then put security on the terminal server (use ssh/etc).
The next thing people will be pointing out that most JTAG ports don't have any authentication either, and that it is possible to wire those up to a terminal server as well.
The problem is with administrators who interface devices on a network without any authentication. My laser printer doesn't require authentication and that isn't a problem, but I'm not going to stick it on the Internet and then wonder why I came home to a stack of black paper and an empty toner cartridge.
Google gets all the profit and only pays a token amount to purchase it?
Actually, the city basically had to pay to get Google to take it off their hands - note the bit about the $500k to figure out where all the cables were laid.
I suspect that if anybody wanted to pay for the network they would have sold it to the highest bidder. From the description it sounds like the project was mismanaged and they don't even know where the cables were placed. There might even be regulatory liabilities that anybody taking ownership would incur.
Imagine you have a house that you could sell for $500k. Then take a couple of drums of radioactive waste and dump them in the basement, and let them seep down into the soil. Suddenly you'll find that if you want to sell the house you'll actually have to pay somebody to take it off your hands.
I'm sure this situation isn't as bad, but it sounds like they've tried to make money off of it and decided that there is no way they'll be able to do so, so they might as well give somebody else a chance to make money off of it and let the citizens have another ISP.
That said, if I were in charge of this deal I'd definitely make sure that everybody's interests were looked after long-term - the city did put up the money for the infrastructure.
I'm not sure that any of this would ruin general aviation. Just charge a fuel tax. Jets burn tens of thousands of pounds of fuel, and they're 95% of the air traffic that consumes a lot of ATC services, so the tax per pound of fuel would be scaled for that kind of consumption. If you're just buzzing around VFR in your Cherokee I doubt that this will have much impact on your costs, certainly not compared to maintenance/etc.
Unless you're a pilot and happen to own a plane and don't count in the cost of that plane, flying from small town to small town is already prohibitively expensive. Most people have to get themselves to at least a minor city to catch a flight, and it won't be direct unless one of the endpoints is a major city or the route is really popular.
That is certainly a factor, but I'd also be concerned about how reliable the figures are.
I just bought a $50 LED floodlight. On paper it is going to save me a heap of money over the next 20 years. However, if the thing burns out in a year I'll have wasted a LOT of money on it. Break-even would be a few years, so I won't even know if I've broken even for quite a while.
People are going to be naturally skeptical of 20-year lifetimes on a product that came out a few years ago.
Please provide the math to back this assertion up. I'll provide three counter examples.
You basically already provided the "math" - they aren't counter-examples at all.
Currently all aviation users who purchase aviation fuels pay fuel taxes per-gallon, more flights = more gallons = more tax money. Strike one....So you want to tax aviation more than it already is? Remember the old rule, subsidize what you want more of, tax what you want less. Strike two.
I realize that aviation fuel is taxed. I do advocate that these taxes be increased so that the necessary regulatory oversight can be self-funding. I fully agree that this is likely to result in less planes in the air.
What's the problem with that? Why do we need to subsidize people flying around?
Many nations other than the US have "fee based ATC". The only way to collect these fees is to structure your entire aviation system, from airport to navigation, to pilot training, to aircraft registration around fee collection. Note, all such nations have seen a dramatic DECREASE in the number of airports, and the number of users of these systems, even commercial operators use less of the ATC system by flying larger planes less frequently in order to maximize the number of flight-miles per ATC fee. Strike three.
That is exactly how the US should operate. Again, what is wrong with having larger planes less frequently? We need empty planes flying around overhead about as much as we need empty trains driving across the country or empty busses driving around the city.
Also note - that last item is actually the reason many nations in the world sends a large number of students to the US for primary and secondary flight training - we have the most options for them to train, and the best instructors - because they are busy enough to learn the fundamentals well and get to practice them. Fee based nations experience a drought of trained pilots to enter their commercial airlines,
Great, so the US is subsidizing flight training for the world's pilots. Not sure how that helps the average US citizen.
and even the US with the most open and inviting aviation system is seeing a strain with the already high cost of flying increasing beyond the means of the average citizen...Adding more taxes and more fees will only serve to further distance aviation from access to the average American as it has done to the UK and much of europe....Your inconvenience right now due to sequester is NOT a good reason to disenfranchise an ever growing portion of the population the right to affordable transportation, whatever the means.
If you want to help poor people just give them a decent income and they'll be able to afford tickets, assuming they have anywhere to go. Using taxes to make it easier to fly a single-passenger flight to catch a football game 100 miles away isn't the most effective use of resources. I doubt the average poor person is going to be able to afford a Piper Cherokee, either - certainly not for less than the cost of an airline ticket. Just properly maintaining an aircraft will likely cost you at least a few tickets a year if you're doing half the work yourself.
Hey, I love aviation in general, and would love to have the money to get a private pilot license and instrument rating. From time to time I spend hours flying around in simulators and have entertained trying to build a half-decent one. However, that is a personal hobby, and I can't really see forcing others to pay to make this possible.
Except that's how businesses in the US generally work. Layoffs and pay cuts to the employees before the executives have to take a pay cut, and even then that's after they've failed to find a way of declaring bankruptcy and auctioning themselves off for a bonus.
That's what I get for failing to qualify every sentence. :) I did say "wise store owner," but I failed to say "well-run business."
Few businesses that have executives are well-run. Executives aren't owners - they're managing the business for their own benefit, which only loosely aligns with the interests of the owners or their customers.
??? Perhaps on a per-passenger-time-used-by-controller calculation, but if that bizjet is flying into a non-towered airport on VFR rules it is using FAR LESS ATC resources than that Southwest flight with 300 people on it.
I was of course referring to the per-passenger basis. About the only way it would use less ATC time on that basis would be if it flew VFR the entire route, and that is pretty unlikely unless they were just ferrying it between two local airports. I would imagine that most private jets would be flying IFR even into a non-towered airport.
But if you had to choose, which would you choose?
I would rather that the poor be richer (in terms of quality of life and freedom) than they would otherwise be, and would accept income inequality if I thought that would help the poor in any way. However, I've yet to see any evidence that it would.
I do not question that the poor are better off now than they were 40 years ago, but it has nothing to do with income inequality increasing. The poor were also better off 40 years ago than they were under feudalism and certainly income inequality had also improved in that time.
You are afraid of the question because it reveals something negative about yourself.
No, I simply call out logical fallacies when I see them, and don't spend time trying to argue from false premises.
Furthermore, the way you phrased that statement indicates that you believed you knew how I would answer the question before you asked it, and furthermore consider me morally or intellectually inferior based upon the answer you assumed that I would give. If I didn't give the answer you expected no doubt you'll next suggest that my reply was disingenuous, because in your thinking the only possible reason that somebody might disagree with you is that they simply do not understand how the world works as well as you do.
And yes, that was an ad hominem, and it does not really deserve a response. Like any judgment of character from reading a few sentences in an online debate, any resemblance to the truth is likely to be purely coincidental. I bring it up only to demonstrate how it does little to resolve the issue.
Don't be, such questions are a route to further growth.
We grow far more when we realize that there are lots of people out there who are both smarter and understand an issue better than we do, and yet they disagree with us. There are also plenty of people out there who are just as intelligent and would agree with us. Human intelligence has not reached the point where we can contemplate huge social issues and consistently reason out the most ideal way to handle them. Indeed, rarely can we even agree on what the ideal outcome would look like, let alone how to achieve it.
If you have an idea or an argument to present, just present it. Certainly I'll read it, and who knows - maybe some day it might convince me.
Perhaps another clause is needed in GPL?
It already exists - the GNU AGPL v3 clause 13. The problem is that little FOSS uses the AGPL.
That kind of "contract" sounds likely to be invalid due to unconscionability.
Sounds great - why don't you spend $30k on a civil suit against Amazon over access to your $5 movie? Chances are that after you've spent the first $1k they'll just mail you a check for $5 so that your damages go out the window.
What the fuck is XBMC?
It stands for X-Box Media Center. It is a fairly popular media management/playing program that doesn't support the X-Box.
XBMC = Xbox Media Center, a home theater PC platform originally written for the X-Box, but now very cross-platform.
Indeed - though it might be worth mentioning that the one platform it no longer works on is the X-Box. :)
So here's the question, would you rather have everyone be poorer, if it meant that there was less income inequality? Or are you ok with more income inequality, if it means the poor get richer than they were?
I would rather have less income inequality, and have everybody be richer.
Or, are you arguing that we should have more income inequality, and have everybody be poorer?
Yes, that made no sense - just like the false dichotomy you proposed. There is no reason that reducing income inequality has to make everybody poorer.
If you pay me less, I'm going to short you on certain items. I'll try to make them peripheral, but I guarantee if you stop paying my invoices I'm going to cut the flow to the high profile services first. Simple business.
That isn't how any business in a competitive industry works. They aim to deliver the services consumers want for whatever price they can get. If there is a pinch in the economy and they're forced to sell services below cost, they're going to sell the most desirable services they can for whatever they can get for them so that they're able to differentiate themselves and hopefully raise their prices later.
No business decides to punish their customers for failing to buy from them. If you storm out of a business insisting that you'll never come back again, no wise store owner will kick you out the next day if you change your mind.
Sure, companies won't deliver services if invoices aren't paid, but they usually start out by assuming it is a mistake - they just want their money. That also isn't a good comparison here, because an invoice is a bill sent AFTER a service has already been rendered - the customer is legitimately in debt at that point. In the case of government services nobody has consumed anything without paying for it - the budget changes were dictated up-front and the government should deliver the most it can for what it has.
If my boss told me that they need to cut back and thus I had to do more work for the same pay for a while, the last thing I'm going to do is tell him that I'll just have to stop doing the highest-priority work that I have. I'd be fired that day.
Sure, but there is no reason they couldn't be funded by user fees. Just charge a fee for every flight and all budget issues go away entirely. More flights = more fees, and thus more resources to handle those flights.
That's why you don't hear about companies complaining that they can't cope with so many customers and therefore they'll be closing their stores one day a week.
Most of those small airports have very little traffic. At an airport with little traffic when the tower is closed you just announce your arrival on the radio and everybody keeps an eye out for each other. Most likely there is only one plane in the air nearby at a time anyway.
Private jets have a disproportionate impact on ATC in the first place. It takes as much effort to direct a jet with 4 people on it as one with 300 people on it.
Great, so after you've already spent 40% of the budget of the project fully specifying the requirements and design, you can figure out what the last 60% of the project will cost and whether the entire project is worth doing in the first place.
You need to know what the project will cost before you spend a lot of money on it, otherwise you don't know what the ROI is, whether other projects are a better investment, or whether you'll even be able to afford it at all.