Where can you file taxes for free with the IRS? I'm not aware of any such mechanism. The only thing they'll do is let you download some free tax software if your income is below some threshold, which basically lets you give your data to Intuit/etc to file for you.
Agree. I file my local taxes electronically. For state and federal taxes I print off forms and mail them in. The IRS doesn't allow individuals to directly file electronically - you have to go through a company like Intuit. I used to file state taxes electronically, but they dumbed down the interface so that it won't do any math/etc forcing you to basically transcribe every field, so it is easier to just print and mail the forms. No doubt they were pressured by companies like Intuit to avoid competition.
I have no interest in sending a copy of my tax data to Intuit. Also, they will only allow one free e-filing per purchase of software license.
I never get a refund, so I have no incentive to get my forms in faster, and the convenience of just printing out everything and mailing it is worth the cost of a stamp (vs transcribing every number into a dumb form for my state, which isn't even an option for Federal taxes).
Yup. Back when Gentoo's Foundation forgot to file some renewal papers there were all kinds of statements of doom and gloom. The reality is that volunteer-based FOSS organizations require fairly little in the way of money to actually operate. In Gentoo's case it was just a paperwork issue which got quickly sorted out, but something any non-profit needs to learn to do is to live on a budget. If your only expense is RAID replacements and the odd piece of hardware it is pretty hard to have a crisis. If you're accustomed to flying your developers out to conferences and maintaining full-time employees then it is real easy to burn through your cash in a dry spell.
Without seeing the numbers for 2013 I can't say what broke the bank. I think some of it might be large-organization syndrome. I've been on the board of a linux distro and just Gnome's conference spending (one of their smaller line items) was several times the annual income of the distro I worked with (which was entirely volunteer).
It really doesn't cost that much to maintain a volunteer-based FOSS project. You can easily find people willing to donate servers, or sell them at greatly reduced rates. However, once you get used to paying developers to fly out to conferences, and having staff, the bills can mount quickly. There is a lot of pressure to maintain these benefits, even if incomes shrink.
Back in the Gnome 2 days, they were by far the largest desktop environment out there (for Linux). Then Gnome 3 and Unity came along and their user-base was torn in 14 different ways. It HAD to have an effect on income. How many people actually run Gnome 3 these days?
This is why I stopped being a PC gamer in the late '90s. All I wanted was a better Tetris. What I got was a better bouncing ball demo.
There are lots of games for PC that you simply can't get anywhere else (including certainly anything remotely serious in the simulation genre). I play games on PC for the gameplay. If some people want to stare at furmark or whatever and call that entertainment, they can knock themselves out (for bonus points, watch the display on a kill-a-watt when you launch the application).
There is no need for Mode S in the age of ADS-B. It is unnecessarily complex, being first and foremost a radar transponder. It makes far more sense to use a protocol that does not interact with the ground station (it just broadcasts). And yes, I know that most airliners implement ADS-B via Mode S.
As far as cheap being faulty/bogus, that is only because of the regulatory structure. There is nothing that a position beacon must do that a cell phone doesn't do, and those are cheap (even feature phones interact with GSM towers and can broadcast their positions).
The whole point is to reform the regulatory structure and simplify it, not to simply require drones to abide by rules that evolved in the day of planes that didn't even have radios. Why have "standard radio rules" designed around humans talking to controllers when two computers can negotiate a clearance with two packets that last a few milliseconds each? Why have separation standards designed for radar (error of a mile or so) when all the aircraft broadcast their position accurate to within a few feet and can understand each others positions far better than a human controller?
We've turned airspace into an unnecessarily scarce commodity.
Router? Are you telling me that you include the cost of a router in the purchase cost of a console?
Why not include the cost of the house I use it in as well? It isn't like I would be playing games out in the rain!
The cost is certainly higher if you include all the peripherals, but my keyboard and monitor are about 15 years old, my mouse costs all of $20, headphones were $20 though I've since upgraded to something fairly high-end (which work just as well with a console, so that's a wash), and I replace things like cases and optical drives when they become completely non-functional (just a vanilla DVD-ROM dating back to the 90s in there right now, and the case isn't much newer). Sure, it would probably cost $600-700 to replace it all, but if I had a console it would plug into a TV/stereo/etc and those aren't cheap.
When I look at TCO/etc the PC makes a lot of sense. It is my only PC running Windows and I wouldn't need it but for gaming, and even so I spend very little on it.
If you were to try and force my RC aircraft to use TCAS... that requires me to ALSO carry an active radar system...
I was referring to the term TCAS to refer to the capability, not the specific implementation. I mentioned ADS-B, and if all aircraft are required to have it, then there is no need to use radar to detect aircraft in conflict. Every aircraft would be continuously broadcasting its position, so the only thing you need to detect nearby planes is a radio, a CPU, and a GPS.
It is true that TCAS historically required radar, because transponders only responded to radar. ADS-B eliminates the need for radar entirely, to the extent that all aircraft participate in the system.
The court ruled, "It is concluded that, as Complainant: has not issued an enforceable FAR regulatory rule governing model aircraft operation; has historically exempted model aircraft from the statutory FAR definitions of aircraft by relegating model aircraft operations to voluntary compliance with the guidance expressed in AC 91-57, Respondent's model, aircraft operation was not subject to FAR regulation, and enforcement,"
That is what I said, "I was curious and looked up the regulations around drones. There aren't any." You can fly model aircraft however you like generally free of Federal restriction. If you destroy an airliner with one you might be responsible for vandalism, murder, criminal negligence, and so on, because all of those things are laws or torts already, to the extent that a court decides you were at fault.
You claimed, "What they are saying is you NEED AN FAA LICENSE if you want to fly one." They're saying that, but it isn't legally binding. If you want to assert that it is, then you'll need to cite a law or regulation that says so. The fact that they issued an order to a company telling them to cease and desist and they complied does not mean that the FAA actually had the authority they claim. I can send you a letter telling you not to leave your house, and you can choose to stay inside, but that doesn't mean that it had any weight of law.
I'd question the need to spend $1200 to have a decent PC for gaming. I do most of mine on an Phenom II 4-core with 8GB DDR3-1600, and a card that cost me somewhere around $150 (basically last year's decent card). I also save by replacing components when they need it (MB+CPU+RAM every other year or so). My previous video card konked out after a number of years, and while the new one is a clear step-up, I could still run most games with fairly decent settings with the old one (which was probably the better part of $200 when I got it). I'd say I probably spend $130/yr on the system I used for gaming, though that tends to be $200 one year, nothing the next, etc).
Sure, it won't run last week's game at the absolute highest settings, but it will outperform any of the last-gen consoles for sure, and most of the games still target those.
On the other hand, I'm not really into FPS. I have no issues with the FPS/RPG blends like Skyrim/ME3/etc, though.
There is no reason that they need to be incompatible. Just require that all aircraft have a functioning ADS-B transceiver and TCAS, both manned and drones. Require drones to obey resolution advisories. That will eliminate most of the midair collision that exists today, manned or unmanned.
You just destroyed the entire R/C aircraft industry in one instant.
Not at all. You can have some kind of exception for the kinds of toys you buy for $20. For anything bigger there is no reason that some automation has to make the cost prohibitive - you can get most of this stuff for $100-200 already, minus the ADS-B/TCAS. Adding those is really just another chip, if that (they already have GPS and a radio - this is just another band, and you'd probably want WAAS if they don't already have them).
You can still have manually-piloted aircraft. They just need an autopilot on-board that takes over if a potential collision is detected. As you already mentioned, people use geofencing all the time now so that they don't lose their aircraft if they make a mistake (something that happened to somebody I know a few years ago with a fairly expensive helicopter over a field of REALLY high grass). People can have all the fun they want, but with training wheels.
The main thing preventing drone operators from using transponders is the FAA - I believe that transponders are required to be TSOed and that makes them REALLY expensive. As radio devices they can only be operated as licensed and I think that some of the rules for ADS-B transmitters basically require them to be assigned to a registered plane and permanently attached.
If regulations were relaxed or the FAA put in a bulk order for transponders there is no reason that you couldn't build them for $100, making them very practical for drones. For various reasons the FAA doesn't even require manned aircraft to have transponders (no gov'ment man gonna force me to put a battery in my cropduster!).
Commercial Drones ARE legal in the US and the FAA isn't disputing that. What they are saying is you NEED AN FAA LICENSE if you want to fly one.
And the court ruled that you don't, regardless of the FAA's claims, because the FAA never properly issued a rule.
I was curious and looked up the regulations around drones. There aren't any. They say that recreational drones have to stay under 400 ft and within line-of-sight, but the only documentation of this is an advisory circular. An advisory circular is just that - "advice." It has no legal weight at all. The US Code of Federal Regulations and the laws passed by Congress are the only rules that are legally enforceable (let's leave out executive orders and signing statements and all that stuff, which is dubious and not relevant here). If the FAA wants to actually create rules they have to publish the proposed rules, seek comments, and then make final rules using a standard process. The whole point is to give the public a say in anything that has the force of law, and if they try to do something really crazy Congress could always overrule them during the comment period. You can't just unilaterally issue some circular and force people to follow it.
There is no reason that they need to be incompatible. Just require that all aircraft have a functioning ADS-B transceiver and TCAS, both manned and drones. Require drones to obey resolution advisories. That will eliminate most of the midair collision that exists today, manned or unmanned.
They also need to find a solution to the cost problem. There is nothing in a ADS-B+TCAS which isn't in every smartphone on the planet, and yet the former costs $10k while the latter costs $400 new from Google. I'd think the government could just put out a bid for a reference model and get a bulk deal on them, shielding the manufacturer from liability as long as they conform to the spec. There is no reason you shouldn't be able to buy one for $100, making them useful for even recreational aircraft.
And yes, I know there are aircraft flying today which don't even have batteries in them. That would have to change. There is no reason that you couldn't have a combination ADS-B+TCAS+VHF for $500 that runs on batteries and having one of those in such planes would GREATLY improve safety. Indeed, many aviation procedures are inefficient and even increase risk simply to accommodate people who want to fly around in such aircraft without radios/etc.
It looks like the secret is to feed them vat fed plankton instead of similar or identical species of the wild plankton they normally eat - which was apparently much hard than that sounds. The big deal is it means a more reliable supply.
So is the vat-fed plankton as healthy as the wild stuff? Because if not, then the unhealthy part of that diet will exist in the farmed prawn. Basically take the GPP's argument "Just like food, your food itself is what it eats. " and follow that down the food chain.
Well, since nobody knows what is in it, it is hard to say. I suggest a wait-and-see approach, but testing the resulting fish does make sense.
A challenge here is we really don't have a good understanding of what foods are or aren't healthy, or what makes them that way. You can talk about Omega 3s and all that, but there isn't a lot of outcomes data on Omega 3s, when trials are done there are many different kinds of Omega 3s so it is hard to compare them to products you can actually buy, and we have no idea what the Omega 3s are actually doing (though there are theories).
Omega 3s are actually one of the better-understood dietary ingredients - for most other foods we know even less about what is good/bad for you. Oh sure, everybody has their pet theories and there are TONS of advice floating around. The problem is that you can't lock people in cages and feed them controlled diets in a blinded fashion while keeping them from drinking/smoking/etc, so it is really hard to know just what it is that makes people gain weight at some times and lose it at others, and develop diabetes.
From what I've read I think a difference is that in the US corruption really only comes up outside of normal day-to-day business. If you want to change a law, or avoid speeding tickets, and so on, then you might need to pay bribes (and a LOT of them for a long time depending on the law). However, if you just want to get your car registration renewed or import goods at the border you only pay the advertised fees which go to the government and not the agents.
In a lot of smaller/poorer countries the average person is much more likely to encounter corruption. If you're a small business and you need to import goods to sell, then either they sit at the dock for a month rotting due to paperwork delays, or you slip the agent some money and they fly through the border. Routine government operations don't happen unless you pay the person doing the work a little extra.
So, I wouldn't hold the US up as an example of moral purity. I think the main difference is that most US government workers don't get the discretion to collect tips for performing their duties.
You are of course correct. You can't really cite this as "proof" of anything. It is perhaps interesting theoretically, but you can't build an airtight argument on top of a porous foundation.
Actually, I think the limit of the analogy was that both fruit flies and fighter jets use banked turns during evasive maneuvers. A banked turn is an obvious choice for a fighter jet, but when you get down to the size of a fruit fly, the aerodynamics are different and so it's interesting that this is still a preferred turning strategy.
I wouldn't take it for granted, but it makes a lot of sense in basic physics. Normally anything that flies has to produce a lift force directed upwards to counteract gravity. If you just turn it on its side the exact same force causes it to turn. So, while the wings could move in lots of odd ways, banking is a really simple solution to the problem of turning.
The thing I get is why not just have the government run security for them in the first place?
That's what I don't get about breeder reactors. People argue that terrorists will get their hands on weapons-grade materials. So instead we plan to bury tons of waste underground if we ever find a place we can store it, at a cost of billions of dollars.
It would make a lot more sense to just stick the breeder reactors in the middle of army bases. Security isn't THAT hard of a problem since we already guard actual functional nuclear warheads. Surely if the terrorists can't get their hands on those, we can protect some fuel located in the middle of a reactor core under boiling water which is only n% weapons-grade material.
I don't think anybody really thinks the "laws of the universe changed" per se. Most would probably suspect that there is a more fundamental set of laws that work under both conditions, but we don't understand what they are. These laws would reduce to the understood laws in the conditions they are well-behaved in today, just as how Newtonian physics works the same as relativity when you're not talking about high speeds/mass/etc.
Agree for the most part. I'm all for renewables, but there are a lot of gaps. Batteries really aren't practical at all at the scale of power generation - a nuclear power plant provides hundreds or even thousands of megawatts of power continuously day or night. It is correct that they aren't good for peak demand. If you really want to do power storage most strategies involve pumping water uphill and then using hydro power. It isn't super-efficient and it isn't quite as fast on demand like a battery, but it has much higher capacity. Batteries are great for very short surges, which is why you use them on your UPS but keep a diesel generator outside.
Solar for peak power is a great idea, since it peaks when all the A/Cs are on, but it isn't perfect.
It sounds like they simply described the fly turning directly away from the predator and running, which is NOT what a fighter jet does (unless they just want to be shot down by a missile). At least, not unless they were already outside of their range (at that point, running is the best strategy).
A fighter jet would make a sharp turn TOWARDS the attacker so as to cross his path at a sharp angle, which maximizes the velocity difference between them (velocity is a vector, and they are rapidly closing at an angle). This maximizes the amount of delta-V a missile would have to apply to intercept the aircraft, and in the event of a gunshot it maximizes the amount of lead angle that would need to be used (which is very difficult to pull off). Basically you try to ruin their opportunity to fire on you, so that you can get into a dogfight and hopefully get an opportunity to fire at them.
See something bad and run away is a very intuitive strategy, and it probably makes a lot of sense in nature where predators have to make physical contact to hurt you. In a world of weapons where things like lead angles and enfilading fire come into play the optimum strategy may not be what a rabbit does when it sees a cat.
And finally, if quantum theory is suspect, anything based on it that showed the universe could spontaneously come into existence is also suspect.
We already know that quantum theory isn't the whole picture - it has no explanation of gravity. It is a great theory in the same way that Newton's laws of motion was a great theory. Ultimately it is going to need some tweaking once we figure out how to actually perform the experiments that determine how it breaks down.
And let's not forget that though QM has a lot of predictive power as a model, it is still just that, a model.
Well, it has lots of predictive power as a model for small events at relatively low energy. We already know it doesn't make sense in high-energy situations and is incompatible with our current understanding of gravity, both of which are critical for something like the big bang where the total mass-energy of the entire known universe is packed into a spot smaller than an atom.
That doesn't make this sort of exercise completely worthless, but we're a long way from saying that we're got cosmology figured out.
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You shouldn't have to go through some third party to file your Federal taxes...
Where can you file taxes for free with the IRS? I'm not aware of any such mechanism. The only thing they'll do is let you download some free tax software if your income is below some threshold, which basically lets you give your data to Intuit/etc to file for you.
Agree. I file my local taxes electronically. For state and federal taxes I print off forms and mail them in. The IRS doesn't allow individuals to directly file electronically - you have to go through a company like Intuit. I used to file state taxes electronically, but they dumbed down the interface so that it won't do any math/etc forcing you to basically transcribe every field, so it is easier to just print and mail the forms. No doubt they were pressured by companies like Intuit to avoid competition.
I have no interest in sending a copy of my tax data to Intuit. Also, they will only allow one free e-filing per purchase of software license.
I never get a refund, so I have no incentive to get my forms in faster, and the convenience of just printing out everything and mailing it is worth the cost of a stamp (vs transcribing every number into a dumb form for my state, which isn't even an option for Federal taxes).
Yup. Back when Gentoo's Foundation forgot to file some renewal papers there were all kinds of statements of doom and gloom. The reality is that volunteer-based FOSS organizations require fairly little in the way of money to actually operate. In Gentoo's case it was just a paperwork issue which got quickly sorted out, but something any non-profit needs to learn to do is to live on a budget. If your only expense is RAID replacements and the odd piece of hardware it is pretty hard to have a crisis. If you're accustomed to flying your developers out to conferences and maintaining full-time employees then it is real easy to burn through your cash in a dry spell.
Without seeing the numbers for 2013 I can't say what broke the bank. I think some of it might be large-organization syndrome. I've been on the board of a linux distro and just Gnome's conference spending (one of their smaller line items) was several times the annual income of the distro I worked with (which was entirely volunteer).
It really doesn't cost that much to maintain a volunteer-based FOSS project. You can easily find people willing to donate servers, or sell them at greatly reduced rates. However, once you get used to paying developers to fly out to conferences, and having staff, the bills can mount quickly. There is a lot of pressure to maintain these benefits, even if incomes shrink.
Back in the Gnome 2 days, they were by far the largest desktop environment out there (for Linux). Then Gnome 3 and Unity came along and their user-base was torn in 14 different ways. It HAD to have an effect on income. How many people actually run Gnome 3 these days?
This is why I stopped being a PC gamer in the late '90s. All I wanted was a better Tetris. What I got was a better bouncing ball demo.
There are lots of games for PC that you simply can't get anywhere else (including certainly anything remotely serious in the simulation genre). I play games on PC for the gameplay. If some people want to stare at furmark or whatever and call that entertainment, they can knock themselves out (for bonus points, watch the display on a kill-a-watt when you launch the application).
If I have fun, then I'm getting my money's worth.
There is no need for Mode S in the age of ADS-B. It is unnecessarily complex, being first and foremost a radar transponder. It makes far more sense to use a protocol that does not interact with the ground station (it just broadcasts). And yes, I know that most airliners implement ADS-B via Mode S.
As far as cheap being faulty/bogus, that is only because of the regulatory structure. There is nothing that a position beacon must do that a cell phone doesn't do, and those are cheap (even feature phones interact with GSM towers and can broadcast their positions).
The whole point is to reform the regulatory structure and simplify it, not to simply require drones to abide by rules that evolved in the day of planes that didn't even have radios. Why have "standard radio rules" designed around humans talking to controllers when two computers can negotiate a clearance with two packets that last a few milliseconds each? Why have separation standards designed for radar (error of a mile or so) when all the aircraft broadcast their position accurate to within a few feet and can understand each others positions far better than a human controller?
We've turned airspace into an unnecessarily scarce commodity.
Router? Are you telling me that you include the cost of a router in the purchase cost of a console?
Why not include the cost of the house I use it in as well? It isn't like I would be playing games out in the rain!
The cost is certainly higher if you include all the peripherals, but my keyboard and monitor are about 15 years old, my mouse costs all of $20, headphones were $20 though I've since upgraded to something fairly high-end (which work just as well with a console, so that's a wash), and I replace things like cases and optical drives when they become completely non-functional (just a vanilla DVD-ROM dating back to the 90s in there right now, and the case isn't much newer). Sure, it would probably cost $600-700 to replace it all, but if I had a console it would plug into a TV/stereo/etc and those aren't cheap.
When I look at TCO/etc the PC makes a lot of sense. It is my only PC running Windows and I wouldn't need it but for gaming, and even so I spend very little on it.
If you were to try and force my RC aircraft to use TCAS ... that requires me to ALSO carry an active radar system ...
I was referring to the term TCAS to refer to the capability, not the specific implementation. I mentioned ADS-B, and if all aircraft are required to have it, then there is no need to use radar to detect aircraft in conflict. Every aircraft would be continuously broadcasting its position, so the only thing you need to detect nearby planes is a radio, a CPU, and a GPS.
It is true that TCAS historically required radar, because transponders only responded to radar. ADS-B eliminates the need for radar entirely, to the extent that all aircraft participate in the system.
The court ruled, "It is concluded that, as Complainant: has not issued an enforceable FAR regulatory rule governing model aircraft operation; has historically exempted model aircraft from the statutory FAR definitions of aircraft by relegating model aircraft operations to voluntary compliance with the guidance expressed in AC 91-57, Respondent's model, aircraft operation was not subject to FAR regulation, and enforcement,"
That is what I said, "I was curious and looked up the regulations around drones. There aren't any." You can fly model aircraft however you like generally free of Federal restriction. If you destroy an airliner with one you might be responsible for vandalism, murder, criminal negligence, and so on, because all of those things are laws or torts already, to the extent that a court decides you were at fault.
You claimed, "What they are saying is you NEED AN FAA LICENSE if you want to fly one." They're saying that, but it isn't legally binding. If you want to assert that it is, then you'll need to cite a law or regulation that says so. The fact that they issued an order to a company telling them to cease and desist and they complied does not mean that the FAA actually had the authority they claim. I can send you a letter telling you not to leave your house, and you can choose to stay inside, but that doesn't mean that it had any weight of law.
I'd question the need to spend $1200 to have a decent PC for gaming. I do most of mine on an Phenom II 4-core with 8GB DDR3-1600, and a card that cost me somewhere around $150 (basically last year's decent card). I also save by replacing components when they need it (MB+CPU+RAM every other year or so). My previous video card konked out after a number of years, and while the new one is a clear step-up, I could still run most games with fairly decent settings with the old one (which was probably the better part of $200 when I got it). I'd say I probably spend $130/yr on the system I used for gaming, though that tends to be $200 one year, nothing the next, etc).
Sure, it won't run last week's game at the absolute highest settings, but it will outperform any of the last-gen consoles for sure, and most of the games still target those.
On the other hand, I'm not really into FPS. I have no issues with the FPS/RPG blends like Skyrim/ME3/etc, though.
There is no reason that they need to be incompatible. Just require that all aircraft have a functioning ADS-B transceiver and TCAS, both manned and drones. Require drones to obey resolution advisories. That will eliminate most of the midair collision that exists today, manned or unmanned.
You just destroyed the entire R/C aircraft industry in one instant.
Not at all. You can have some kind of exception for the kinds of toys you buy for $20. For anything bigger there is no reason that some automation has to make the cost prohibitive - you can get most of this stuff for $100-200 already, minus the ADS-B/TCAS. Adding those is really just another chip, if that (they already have GPS and a radio - this is just another band, and you'd probably want WAAS if they don't already have them).
You can still have manually-piloted aircraft. They just need an autopilot on-board that takes over if a potential collision is detected. As you already mentioned, people use geofencing all the time now so that they don't lose their aircraft if they make a mistake (something that happened to somebody I know a few years ago with a fairly expensive helicopter over a field of REALLY high grass). People can have all the fun they want, but with training wheels.
The main thing preventing drone operators from using transponders is the FAA - I believe that transponders are required to be TSOed and that makes them REALLY expensive. As radio devices they can only be operated as licensed and I think that some of the rules for ADS-B transmitters basically require them to be assigned to a registered plane and permanently attached.
If regulations were relaxed or the FAA put in a bulk order for transponders there is no reason that you couldn't build them for $100, making them very practical for drones. For various reasons the FAA doesn't even require manned aircraft to have transponders (no gov'ment man gonna force me to put a battery in my cropduster!).
Commercial Drones ARE legal in the US and the FAA isn't disputing that. What they are saying is you NEED AN FAA LICENSE if you want to fly one.
And the court ruled that you don't, regardless of the FAA's claims, because the FAA never properly issued a rule.
I was curious and looked up the regulations around drones. There aren't any. They say that recreational drones have to stay under 400 ft and within line-of-sight, but the only documentation of this is an advisory circular. An advisory circular is just that - "advice." It has no legal weight at all. The US Code of Federal Regulations and the laws passed by Congress are the only rules that are legally enforceable (let's leave out executive orders and signing statements and all that stuff, which is dubious and not relevant here). If the FAA wants to actually create rules they have to publish the proposed rules, seek comments, and then make final rules using a standard process. The whole point is to give the public a say in anything that has the force of law, and if they try to do something really crazy Congress could always overrule them during the comment period. You can't just unilaterally issue some circular and force people to follow it.
There is no reason that they need to be incompatible. Just require that all aircraft have a functioning ADS-B transceiver and TCAS, both manned and drones. Require drones to obey resolution advisories. That will eliminate most of the midair collision that exists today, manned or unmanned.
They also need to find a solution to the cost problem. There is nothing in a ADS-B+TCAS which isn't in every smartphone on the planet, and yet the former costs $10k while the latter costs $400 new from Google. I'd think the government could just put out a bid for a reference model and get a bulk deal on them, shielding the manufacturer from liability as long as they conform to the spec. There is no reason you shouldn't be able to buy one for $100, making them useful for even recreational aircraft.
And yes, I know there are aircraft flying today which don't even have batteries in them. That would have to change. There is no reason that you couldn't have a combination ADS-B+TCAS+VHF for $500 that runs on batteries and having one of those in such planes would GREATLY improve safety. Indeed, many aviation procedures are inefficient and even increase risk simply to accommodate people who want to fly around in such aircraft without radios/etc.
It looks like the secret is to feed them vat fed plankton instead of similar or identical species of the wild plankton they normally eat - which was apparently much hard than that sounds. The big deal is it means a more reliable supply.
So is the vat-fed plankton as healthy as the wild stuff? Because if not, then the unhealthy part of that diet will exist in the farmed prawn. Basically take the GPP's argument "Just like food, your food itself is what it eats. " and follow that down the food chain.
Well, since nobody knows what is in it, it is hard to say. I suggest a wait-and-see approach, but testing the resulting fish does make sense.
A challenge here is we really don't have a good understanding of what foods are or aren't healthy, or what makes them that way. You can talk about Omega 3s and all that, but there isn't a lot of outcomes data on Omega 3s, when trials are done there are many different kinds of Omega 3s so it is hard to compare them to products you can actually buy, and we have no idea what the Omega 3s are actually doing (though there are theories).
Omega 3s are actually one of the better-understood dietary ingredients - for most other foods we know even less about what is good/bad for you. Oh sure, everybody has their pet theories and there are TONS of advice floating around. The problem is that you can't lock people in cages and feed them controlled diets in a blinded fashion while keeping them from drinking/smoking/etc, so it is really hard to know just what it is that makes people gain weight at some times and lose it at others, and develop diabetes.
From what I've read I think a difference is that in the US corruption really only comes up outside of normal day-to-day business. If you want to change a law, or avoid speeding tickets, and so on, then you might need to pay bribes (and a LOT of them for a long time depending on the law). However, if you just want to get your car registration renewed or import goods at the border you only pay the advertised fees which go to the government and not the agents.
In a lot of smaller/poorer countries the average person is much more likely to encounter corruption. If you're a small business and you need to import goods to sell, then either they sit at the dock for a month rotting due to paperwork delays, or you slip the agent some money and they fly through the border. Routine government operations don't happen unless you pay the person doing the work a little extra.
So, I wouldn't hold the US up as an example of moral purity. I think the main difference is that most US government workers don't get the discretion to collect tips for performing their duties.
You are of course correct. You can't really cite this as "proof" of anything. It is perhaps interesting theoretically, but you can't build an airtight argument on top of a porous foundation.
Actually, I think the limit of the analogy was that both fruit flies and fighter jets use banked turns during evasive maneuvers. A banked turn is an obvious choice for a fighter jet, but when you get down to the size of a fruit fly, the aerodynamics are different and so it's interesting that this is still a preferred turning strategy.
I wouldn't take it for granted, but it makes a lot of sense in basic physics. Normally anything that flies has to produce a lift force directed upwards to counteract gravity. If you just turn it on its side the exact same force causes it to turn. So, while the wings could move in lots of odd ways, banking is a really simple solution to the problem of turning.
The thing I get is why not just have the government run security for them in the first place?
That's what I don't get about breeder reactors. People argue that terrorists will get their hands on weapons-grade materials. So instead we plan to bury tons of waste underground if we ever find a place we can store it, at a cost of billions of dollars.
It would make a lot more sense to just stick the breeder reactors in the middle of army bases. Security isn't THAT hard of a problem since we already guard actual functional nuclear warheads. Surely if the terrorists can't get their hands on those, we can protect some fuel located in the middle of a reactor core under boiling water which is only n% weapons-grade material.
I don't think anybody really thinks the "laws of the universe changed" per se. Most would probably suspect that there is a more fundamental set of laws that work under both conditions, but we don't understand what they are. These laws would reduce to the understood laws in the conditions they are well-behaved in today, just as how Newtonian physics works the same as relativity when you're not talking about high speeds/mass/etc.
Agree for the most part. I'm all for renewables, but there are a lot of gaps. Batteries really aren't practical at all at the scale of power generation - a nuclear power plant provides hundreds or even thousands of megawatts of power continuously day or night. It is correct that they aren't good for peak demand. If you really want to do power storage most strategies involve pumping water uphill and then using hydro power. It isn't super-efficient and it isn't quite as fast on demand like a battery, but it has much higher capacity. Batteries are great for very short surges, which is why you use them on your UPS but keep a diesel generator outside.
Solar for peak power is a great idea, since it peaks when all the A/Cs are on, but it isn't perfect.
It sounds like they simply described the fly turning directly away from the predator and running, which is NOT what a fighter jet does (unless they just want to be shot down by a missile). At least, not unless they were already outside of their range (at that point, running is the best strategy).
A fighter jet would make a sharp turn TOWARDS the attacker so as to cross his path at a sharp angle, which maximizes the velocity difference between them (velocity is a vector, and they are rapidly closing at an angle). This maximizes the amount of delta-V a missile would have to apply to intercept the aircraft, and in the event of a gunshot it maximizes the amount of lead angle that would need to be used (which is very difficult to pull off). Basically you try to ruin their opportunity to fire on you, so that you can get into a dogfight and hopefully get an opportunity to fire at them.
See something bad and run away is a very intuitive strategy, and it probably makes a lot of sense in nature where predators have to make physical contact to hurt you. In a world of weapons where things like lead angles and enfilading fire come into play the optimum strategy may not be what a rabbit does when it sees a cat.
And finally, if quantum theory is suspect, anything based on it that showed the universe could spontaneously come into existence is also suspect.
We already know that quantum theory isn't the whole picture - it has no explanation of gravity. It is a great theory in the same way that Newton's laws of motion was a great theory. Ultimately it is going to need some tweaking once we figure out how to actually perform the experiments that determine how it breaks down.
And let's not forget that though QM has a lot of predictive power as a model, it is still just that, a model.
Well, it has lots of predictive power as a model for small events at relatively low energy. We already know it doesn't make sense in high-energy situations and is incompatible with our current understanding of gravity, both of which are critical for something like the big bang where the total mass-energy of the entire known universe is packed into a spot smaller than an atom.
That doesn't make this sort of exercise completely worthless, but we're a long way from saying that we're got cosmology figured out.