Unlike most other emulators, QuickTransit translates blocks of code rather than a line at a time. In addition, it identifies and stores the most commonly executed code.
This seems to me to be saying that the emulator's got to be HUGE, rather in the fashion of the fake-o compression software that comes up every couple of years promising 1,000:1 compression. And then you find out that at each end is a store of "templates" and the compression application is literally a couple hundred GB in size. Maybe in this case a lot of standard libraries have already been ported?
And since that line is the most informative in the article, I'd be keen to hear other opinions on how this could work...
any manned mission will contaminate the planet with *our* bacteria
This is simply untrue.
If there is bacterial life on Mars, and we went there with _malice_ intent on wiping it all out, even if we shipped all the nukes we currently possess up there to do the job we would fail. Think about how deep in the rock bacteria is on earth. Think of all the hostile earth environments where bacteria survives. Is Martian bacteria likely to be unusually sickly? Not half. In that environment, bacteria is likely to be very sturdy.
Likewise, if there is _no life_ then we can't "contaminate" it more than it already has been. Look at the figures for how much Earth material falls onto Mars every year and vice versa from past collisions. And we know for certain that bacteria can survive that journey.
Even if we wanted to do what you are suggesting, we couldn't.
Your points about boosters are well taken, up to a point. Why assemble in space, using technology we haven't developed yet (en-orbit QA, anyone?) when we are perfectly capable of very complex assembly here in the old gravity well? If it comes to the point where 20 launches of your reusable rocket is _significantly_ cheaper than 1 launch of my big, dumb booster, then absolutely, let's think about developing those en-orbit engineering skills. But for now...
Sure you're not falling for the old megahertz trap there?
Higher quality because, in independant double-blind tests, people could hear the difference? Or higher quality because this-here number is bigger'n that one?
C'mon people, this is/. not cnet. I thought after watching Intel & AMD play the numbers game for years we'd be wise to this stuff. Seems not. Seems all Microsoft has to do is publish a bigger number, and we're all ready to slap "higher quality" on it without even a cursory look at file sizes, compression standards, or those pesky things like some kind of semi-objective test.
And building it over and over again because there's not a reusable bolt in there.
Which would be the best possible outcome, because once you got some kind of mass production going on the stack, then the costs come way, way down. This argument has been demonstrated here among other places.
... a big booster is not required for space exploration
If you're talking about robots, perhaps not. But here's a research task for you: look up what an actual rock hound does searching for actual microfossils on earth, and design a robot capable of doing it. That should keep you and the rest of the "send robots" crowd busy until, oh, I don't know, the rest of us get tired of waiting and simply send a human to do a human job...
This launch signals more than simply the end of that particular series of rocket.
It also signals the end of NASA's two-decade old "Shuttle + Small Rocket" schema. Hooray.
To put it another way, about *$#&#*$ time!
The "Shuttle + Small Rocket" paradigm has kept us firmly in Earth orbit for a generation, and is actually (always was) a step back from the 100-useful-tonnes-to-L.E.O. capabilites of the Apollo-era Saturn V.
This move is a move back to heavy boosters, and can't come soon enough for those of us who are keen on "seeing what's out there".
In weight terms, with 60's technology (ie the Saturn V) we could have lifted the whole ISS in two shots. With the Shuttle (ie the Winnebago of Space exploration) that has had to be stretched out over a decade, cost far more than it had to, and prevented any other human space-flight programs from going ahead.
Sending up 100 tonnes, and bringing 90 tonnes back (the Shuttle model) was always a dumb idea. If you go to the trouble of sending 100 tonnes to orbit, you should get more bang for your buck than a measley 10%.
In my admittedly limited experience, having been a "web manager" for half a dozen websites or so in my time, this sort of stuff was seasonal (highs in summer and winter when the script kiddies were indoors) and never used to particularly bother me.
I had confidence in my setup, and no server I had control over was, to my knowledge, ever compromised.
We never had any sensitive data outside the firewall, anyway.
On two occasions it got serious (if an easily beaten DOS attack can be called serious) and even then it was only for 20 minutes or so. Our ISP (being a large telecom) was champing at the bit to go after people we had even a small scrap of evidence against, so on those two occasions we simply handed what information we'd gleaned to them, and they let out the dogs.
At some stage, you've got to stop worrying and learn how to love the internet!
Back in the day (actually, 1989) I had a great little business fixing Mac Pluses and SEs for folk.
This was before Norton Speed Disk, and one of my tricks for heavily over-used and very full drives was to copy everything to my external 80 MB drive (which cost me USD600!!) format the internal, and then copy everything back. Worked like a charm.
Years later (1996) the old workhorse 80 (it was a Quantum) finally stopped. The dreaded "stiction" had set in.
I had contacts at a company with a cleanroom, and so organised to open the case to see if there was anything I could do.
There was nothing I could "clean" - but I did manage to get the drive spun up again by putting a big screwdriver into the central spindle and giving it a good old twist on power-up.
Flush with success, I organised to bring my computer in the next day. Plugged everything in, powered on, and TWIST... and of course the screwdriver skittered out of my grip annd left a huge scratch across the top platter. Bugger!
The drive still booted the o/s, I was able to see each file, but almost all the data had "fatal errors" when I tried to copy it off.
You are quite entitled to take your money anywhere you like - but to expand from your ONE bad experience to slander a whole company is just silly.
I've got three generations of XPC boxes running different applications around the place, and I've convinced a lot of my friends to buy them, too.
None of us have ever had anything that even LOOKED like a hardware error. Which, frankly, is a miracle considering that these are BAREBONES machines and require you to stick your hands inside them just minutes after you take them out of the box.
Ever thought that it might have been something that _you_ did that fritzed the drive controller? Of course not - you're far too busy jumping to illogical conclusions from single data points.
Surely I'm not being overly tinfoil-hattish to observe that soldiers getting regular police powers seems like a really bad idea.
But if that doesn't scare you, what about the prospect of a United States getting what is effectively yet another intelligence agency in the middle of a war between the existing two?
I dismissed this article, about the author of this book as a little overstretched last week - but the more I look around the more real it seems.
Describe a situation recently where you delegated responsibility completely and were happy with the result. Why?
Describe a situation recently where you delegated responsibility unsucessfully and were unhappy with the result. Why?
In your last management position, how many people did you start with in your department? How many did you have at the end? Those that moved on, why?
Describe a situation where you've saved the day.
Describe a situation where someone working for you saved the day, and where you were barking up the wrong tree.
What was your favourite "employee" moment before you were a boss?
What's your favourite "boss" moment so far in your career?
It's all about if you could work happily with this person. If you find yourself enjoying their accounts of the above, chances are you'll enjoy working with them.
If they are the hero of every story, watch out.
If they "can't think of any screwups" and that bothers you, then you might want to think of not working at the Whitehouse.;)
So all the posters with the "you're not that smart" bullshit can just recognise that bile for the jealousy it is.
Look - there's probably no way you're going to read this because there's over 300 posts here already - if you get to see this, go to my user page and send me an email.
I know dozens like you, in fact I hire people like you constantly.
There are a few things you need to know, and I can put you in touch with people just like you to talk about it.
There'll be more of this before we're done
on
Rowing the Pond Again
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This kind of intensely personal extreme sport is a growing trend, and we're going to see a lot more of it in coming years.
I happen to think it's a fantastic thing.
There's no real "why" of why anyone would willingly climb Everest, go to Antarctica, walk across a desert, play any contact sport, play golf, walk up the stairs to the office and not take the elevator.
All of those things are more prone to injury, take longer, are a "waste" of time. But none of that is the point. All of those things are terrific fun - even walking up the stairs gives you a nice glow just before you hit the airconditioning for 8 hours.
Rowing across the Atlantic Ocean? Imagine the isolation, the memories, the weather you'd see, the sense of having conquered yourself you would feel for the rest of your life.
She's not hurting anyone or anything. And she may actually make observations worth listening to.
This is the kind of "get out there and just do it" attitude that may just get us (humans) out of Low Earth Orbit for the first time in 20 years.
These suit designers are right up there with the people doing Mars-on-Earth research (learning the skills and techniques for actual large-scale planetary surface exploration) and human-scale rover designers (building the car to do the exploration in) out there getting it done.
And like both those other lines of research, this one has payoffs right here, right now. Bravo!
I particularly appreciate those who really took the time and sketched out their experiences, as that's just gold. Key points mentioned several times above include taking note of the existing user proficiencies, client machines, and film machines. We'll defn. be taking those into account.
One word on "that sentence" in my original submission: I was in no way hinting at platform wars or stating my personal preferences. I was just reflecting what had been said to me countless times during the late 90's. Everyone who responded with more than one line got that, I think. Thanks again!
Many people above are way overthinking this problem. Here's a couple of reasons why:
The database doesn't have to have a full 3D map of each building - actually the range of possible shots of each building in a city scape is extremely limited - across the road and across the width of the building's frontage is about it.
The tendancy for people to point the camera at what look like landmarks would be very very strong.
Many cities (Paris, London being two) have interactive streetscape maps already, these could be employed
If you reduced the "street angle" of the building to a simple contast map it is a reasonably trivial thing to (slightly) rotate that and match it with another contrast map. That's all that's being proposed here.
Overthinking the problem is usually a good engineering trait, but folks here often overdo it.
This is by no means a new invention. Evaporation cooling has been in use in real products since the invention of the Coolgardie Safe, a primitive fridge invented to cope with western Australia's hot, hot summer.
But, cut the guy a break. The cool thing here is that he's done it with readily available local materials which is pretty much one of the key features for a real engineer. To paraphrase the old saw:
Anyone can make you an evaporative cooler for $100; this guy's done it for $1.
we don't need to endanger humans to explore our immediate neighborhood
To paraphrase Bob Zubrin: you could fire a thousand Mars Rovers into the richest fossil beds on earth, and they'd be still looking for fossils when the next ice age came and glaciers crushed them (because, of course, at the speed they move they couldn't outrun them).
Humans are still needed, directly, at the very frontier of the search for life on Mars (and if a "second genesis" doesn't excite you scientifically then nothing can) picking up rocks, breaking them, looking for microfossils, drilling for subsurface water, and, while we're at it, expanding our data set on planetary science by a factor of two.
The science that humans can do that robots can't is real, vital, and we should be doing it NOW.
You've (typically, I must add) confused cause and effect.
Greed is the thing that drives both capitalism and innovation, not the other way around.
The reason centrally planned economies don't work is because, at the heart of it, they tell people not to be greedy. And people don't listen.
Greed is the thing that causes companies to form to make games. Greed is the thing that causes programmers (fresh off a hit game) to demand the big bucks. Greed is the thing that then drives the _people with the money_ to go elsewhere to hire the programmers.
It's their money.
Saying they can do what they like with it is capitalism. Saying they can't pad their pockets is, my friend, central planning.
So far from "proving Carl Marx right" what you're actually doing is making the case for why he is still wrong.
Actually, I was serious with the "one throw" stuff - that wasn't a throw-away line!;)
The Ares booster, which was what I was talking about with modding the STS stack, has already been essentially designed. Check out the link! It has a whacking great cargo fairing on the top, that would easily fit (comparatively) HUGE additions to the ISS inside, no en-orbit manufacture required, if that's what we wanted to do. And with 121 tonnes to LEO actual launch cap., the 100 tonnes I was talking about had that healthy margin you're talking about built in.
I, too, wish we'd at least start with the prelim. studies for a space elevator - but we can do what I'm talking about here with 70's tech. All we have to do is lose the damn shuttle!
STS is great tech - Shuttle is horrible blech
on
Shuttle Fleet Upgraded
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The Space Transportation System (STS), which is essentially the shuttle main engines + the big tank in the middle and the two solid fuel boosters on the sides, is a fantastic heavy lift vehicle which has undergone significant testing (all shuttle flights) with one failure from which much was learnt. The take-home fact:
The STS is capable of lifting over 100 tonnes to Low Earth Orbit, or throwing 40 tonnes to Mars (with an appropriate small upper stage).
Capacity like that means humans to Mars in a decade or doubling the size of the current ISS (into something useful) in ONE THROW. Or, having an Apollo-class launcher ready for the let's-go-back-to-Luna folk.
The Shuttle, on the other hand, the Winnebago of space exploration, is a horrible hybrid device. It's essentially a portable space station, which is fine when you don't have one, but now we do. It's not a good repair vehicle (a capsule would be much better and hugely cheaper), it's not a good "escape pod" (not even the ISS uses it for that purpose), and it's not a good space transport system, because it itself weighs ninety of those precious, expensive, to-orbit tonnes.
My heart sank when I read that more space dollars were going to be spent "upgrading" this thing that has trapped us firmly in Earth's orbit for 20 years.
Come on NASA! Show some balls! Show us just a little bit of the "right stuff" you used to manufacture in bulk. Pick a destination, strip the shuttle off the stack, and GO THERE.
But you've totally mucked up the analogy. Your contingency plan is actually to use my phone. But I say you can't.
Why, you say, I'll just be a moment and I'll pay you for it?
Because, I say, it'll encourage other people who are broken down near my house to come and want to use my phone.
I presume at this point you either A. punch me for being a dick and use my phone anyway, or B. Walk away in disgust at the general cussednes of people, or if you had connections C. Get the local media on my ass about being a tightwad asshole.
Slashdot Mirror
This seems to me to be saying that the emulator's got to be HUGE, rather in the fashion of the fake-o compression software that comes up every couple of years promising 1,000:1 compression. And then you find out that at each end is a store of "templates" and the compression application is literally a couple hundred GB in size. Maybe in this case a lot of standard libraries have already been ported?
And since that line is the most informative in the article, I'd be keen to hear other opinions on how this could work...
any manned mission will contaminate the planet with *our* bacteria
This is simply untrue.
If there is bacterial life on Mars, and we went there with _malice_ intent on wiping it all out, even if we shipped all the nukes we currently possess up there to do the job we would fail. Think about how deep in the rock bacteria is on earth. Think of all the hostile earth environments where bacteria survives. Is Martian bacteria likely to be unusually sickly? Not half. In that environment, bacteria is likely to be very sturdy.
Likewise, if there is _no life_ then we can't "contaminate" it more than it already has been. Look at the figures for how much Earth material falls onto Mars every year and vice versa from past collisions. And we know for certain that bacteria can survive that journey.
Even if we wanted to do what you are suggesting, we couldn't.
Your points about boosters are well taken, up to a point. Why assemble in space, using technology we haven't developed yet (en-orbit QA, anyone?) when we are perfectly capable of very complex assembly here in the old gravity well? If it comes to the point where 20 launches of your reusable rocket is _significantly_ cheaper than 1 launch of my big, dumb booster, then absolutely, let's think about developing those en-orbit engineering skills. But for now...
Sure you're not falling for the old megahertz trap there?
Higher quality because, in independant double-blind tests, people could hear the difference? Or higher quality because this-here number is bigger'n that one?
C'mon people, this is /. not cnet. I thought after watching Intel & AMD play the numbers game for years we'd be wise to this stuff. Seems not. Seems all Microsoft has to do is publish a bigger number, and we're all ready to slap "higher quality" on it without even a cursory look at file sizes, compression standards, or those pesky things like some kind of semi-objective test.
But this one goes up to eleven....
And building it over and over again because there's not a reusable bolt in there.
... a big booster is not required for space exploration
Which would be the best possible outcome, because once you got some kind of mass production going on the stack, then the costs come way, way down. This argument has been demonstrated here among other places.
If you're talking about robots, perhaps not. But here's a research task for you: look up what an actual rock hound does searching for actual microfossils on earth, and design a robot capable of doing it. That should keep you and the rest of the "send robots" crowd busy until, oh, I don't know, the rest of us get tired of waiting and simply send a human to do a human job...
This launch signals more than simply the end of that particular series of rocket.
It also signals the end of NASA's two-decade old "Shuttle + Small Rocket" schema. Hooray.
To put it another way, about *$#&#*$ time!
The "Shuttle + Small Rocket" paradigm has kept us firmly in Earth orbit for a generation, and is actually (always was) a step back from the 100-useful-tonnes-to-L.E.O. capabilites of the Apollo-era Saturn V.
This move is a move back to heavy boosters, and can't come soon enough for those of us who are keen on "seeing what's out there".
In weight terms, with 60's technology (ie the Saturn V) we could have lifted the whole ISS in two shots. With the Shuttle (ie the Winnebago of Space exploration) that has had to be stretched out over a decade, cost far more than it had to, and prevented any other human space-flight programs from going ahead.
Sending up 100 tonnes, and bringing 90 tonnes back (the Shuttle model) was always a dumb idea. If you go to the trouble of sending 100 tonnes to orbit, you should get more bang for your buck than a measley 10%.
End of an era, well overdue.
You thought they were giving out iron knees and so you hid behind the door, right?
I had confidence in my setup, and no server I had control over was, to my knowledge, ever compromised.
We never had any sensitive data outside the firewall, anyway.
On two occasions it got serious (if an easily beaten DOS attack can be called serious) and even then it was only for 20 minutes or so. Our ISP (being a large telecom) was champing at the bit to go after people we had even a small scrap of evidence against, so on those two occasions we simply handed what information we'd gleaned to them, and they let out the dogs.
At some stage, you've got to stop worrying and learn how to love the internet!
This was before Norton Speed Disk, and one of my tricks for heavily over-used and very full drives was to copy everything to my external 80 MB drive (which cost me USD600!!) format the internal, and then copy everything back. Worked like a charm.
Years later (1996) the old workhorse 80 (it was a Quantum) finally stopped. The dreaded "stiction" had set in.
I had contacts at a company with a cleanroom, and so organised to open the case to see if there was anything I could do.
There was nothing I could "clean" - but I did manage to get the drive spun up again by putting a big screwdriver into the central spindle and giving it a good old twist on power-up.
Flush with success, I organised to bring my computer in the next day. Plugged everything in, powered on, and TWIST ... and of course the screwdriver skittered out of my grip annd left a huge scratch across the top platter. Bugger!
The drive still booted the o/s, I was able to see each file, but almost all the data had "fatal errors" when I tried to copy it off.
Damn Murphy's Law!
Sal lives at West E 1694 E West Street.
Or whatever...
Wasn't there a whole chapter of Sal's scam devoted to whether the cheque had been delivered to East East West Street or East West East Street?
I'd be utterly amazed if he's at ANY address listed ANYWHERE in the online records of this ugly transaction...
For my money (not that I put any up, thank god) he's long, long gone.
You are quite entitled to take your money anywhere you like - but to expand from your ONE bad experience to slander a whole company is just silly.
I've got three generations of XPC boxes running different applications around the place, and I've convinced a lot of my friends to buy them, too.
None of us have ever had anything that even LOOKED like a hardware error. Which, frankly, is a miracle considering that these are BAREBONES machines and require you to stick your hands inside them just minutes after you take them out of the box.
Ever thought that it might have been something that _you_ did that fritzed the drive controller? Of course not - you're far too busy jumping to illogical conclusions from single data points.
But if that doesn't scare you, what about the prospect of a United States getting what is effectively yet another intelligence agency in the middle of a war between the existing two?
I dismissed this article, about the author of this book as a little overstretched last week - but the more I look around the more real it seems.
Ok, so now I'm being hattish...
- Describe a situation recently where you delegated responsibility completely and were happy with the result. Why?
- Describe a situation recently where you delegated responsibility unsucessfully and were unhappy with the result. Why?
- In your last management position, how many people did you start with in your department? How many did you have at the end? Those that moved on, why?
- Describe a situation where you've saved the day.
- Describe a situation where someone working for you saved the day, and where you were barking up the wrong tree.
- What was your favourite "employee" moment before you were a boss?
- What's your favourite "boss" moment so far in your career?
It's all about if you could work happily with this person. If you find yourself enjoying their accounts of the above, chances are you'll enjoy working with them.If they are the hero of every story, watch out.
If they "can't think of any screwups" and that bothers you, then you might want to think of not working at the Whitehouse. ;)
So all the posters with the "you're not that smart" bullshit can just recognise that bile for the jealousy it is.
Look - there's probably no way you're going to read this because there's over 300 posts here already - if you get to see this, go to my user page and send me an email.
I know dozens like you, in fact I hire people like you constantly.
There are a few things you need to know, and I can put you in touch with people just like you to talk about it.
I happen to think it's a fantastic thing.
There's no real "why" of why anyone would willingly climb Everest, go to Antarctica, walk across a desert, play any contact sport, play golf, walk up the stairs to the office and not take the elevator.
All of those things are more prone to injury, take longer, are a "waste" of time. But none of that is the point. All of those things are terrific fun - even walking up the stairs gives you a nice glow just before you hit the airconditioning for 8 hours.
Rowing across the Atlantic Ocean? Imagine the isolation, the memories, the weather you'd see, the sense of having conquered yourself you would feel for the rest of your life.
She's not hurting anyone or anything. And she may actually make observations worth listening to.
My response? Bravo!
These suit designers are right up there with the people doing Mars-on-Earth research (learning the skills and techniques for actual large-scale planetary surface exploration) and human-scale rover designers (building the car to do the exploration in) out there getting it done.
And like both those other lines of research, this one has payoffs right here, right now. Bravo!
I particularly appreciate those who really took the time and sketched out their experiences, as that's just gold. Key points mentioned several times above include taking note of the existing user proficiencies, client machines, and film machines. We'll defn. be taking those into account.
One word on "that sentence" in my original submission: I was in no way hinting at platform wars or stating my personal preferences. I was just reflecting what had been said to me countless times during the late 90's. Everyone who responded with more than one line got that, I think. Thanks again!
... and here is the Paris visual streetscape map I mentioned above. It's awesome, and doesn't just cover Paris.
The London one is spread out over several unrelated sites.
Overthinking the problem is usually a good engineering trait, but folks here often overdo it.
But, cut the guy a break. The cool thing here is that he's done it with readily available local materials which is pretty much one of the key features for a real engineer. To paraphrase the old saw:
Anyone can make you an evaporative cooler for $100; this guy's done it for $1.
To paraphrase Bob Zubrin: you could fire a thousand Mars Rovers into the richest fossil beds on earth, and they'd be still looking for fossils when the next ice age came and glaciers crushed them (because, of course, at the speed they move they couldn't outrun them).
Humans are still needed, directly, at the very frontier of the search for life on Mars (and if a "second genesis" doesn't excite you scientifically then nothing can) picking up rocks, breaking them, looking for microfossils, drilling for subsurface water, and, while we're at it, expanding our data set on planetary science by a factor of two.
The science that humans can do that robots can't is real, vital, and we should be doing it NOW.
You've (typically, I must add) confused cause and effect.
Greed is the thing that drives both capitalism and innovation, not the other way around.
The reason centrally planned economies don't work is because, at the heart of it, they tell people not to be greedy. And people don't listen.
Greed is the thing that causes companies to form to make games. Greed is the thing that causes programmers (fresh off a hit game) to demand the big bucks. Greed is the thing that then drives the _people with the money_ to go elsewhere to hire the programmers.
It's their money.
Saying they can do what they like with it is capitalism. Saying they can't pad their pockets is, my friend, central planning.
So far from "proving Carl Marx right" what you're actually doing is making the case for why he is still wrong.
Actually, I was serious with the "one throw" stuff - that wasn't a throw-away line! ;)
The Ares booster, which was what I was talking about with modding the STS stack, has already been essentially designed. Check out the link! It has a whacking great cargo fairing on the top, that would easily fit (comparatively) HUGE additions to the ISS inside, no en-orbit manufacture required, if that's what we wanted to do. And with 121 tonnes to LEO actual launch cap., the 100 tonnes I was talking about had that healthy margin you're talking about built in.
I, too, wish we'd at least start with the prelim. studies for a space elevator - but we can do what I'm talking about here with 70's tech. All we have to do is lose the damn shuttle!
The Space Transportation System (STS), which is essentially the shuttle main engines + the big tank in the middle and the two solid fuel boosters on the sides, is a fantastic heavy lift vehicle which has undergone significant testing (all shuttle flights) with one failure from which much was learnt. The take-home fact:
The STS is capable of lifting over 100 tonnes to Low Earth Orbit, or throwing 40 tonnes to Mars (with an appropriate small upper stage).
Capacity like that means humans to Mars in a decade or doubling the size of the current ISS (into something useful) in ONE THROW. Or, having an Apollo-class launcher ready for the let's-go-back-to-Luna folk.
The Shuttle, on the other hand, the Winnebago of space exploration, is a horrible hybrid device. It's essentially a portable space station, which is fine when you don't have one, but now we do. It's not a good repair vehicle (a capsule would be much better and hugely cheaper), it's not a good "escape pod" (not even the ISS uses it for that purpose), and it's not a good space transport system, because it itself weighs ninety of those precious, expensive, to-orbit tonnes.
My heart sank when I read that more space dollars were going to be spent "upgrading" this thing that has trapped us firmly in Earth's orbit for 20 years.
Come on NASA! Show some balls! Show us just a little bit of the "right stuff" you used to manufacture in bulk. Pick a destination, strip the shuttle off the stack, and GO THERE.
Hehe! Funny!
But you've totally mucked up the analogy. Your contingency plan is actually to use my phone. But I say you can't.
Why, you say, I'll just be a moment and I'll pay you for it?
Because, I say, it'll encourage other people who are broken down near my house to come and want to use my phone.
I presume at this point you either A. punch me for being a dick and use my phone anyway, or B. Walk away in disgust at the general cussednes of people, or if you had connections C. Get the local media on my ass about being a tightwad asshole.
Looks like our pilot friend chose C.
So, he runs into some strong unexpected headwind, and is able to land at a base that's really close to another base.
And the reason he's being denied fuel is because he had "no contingency plan".
Sounds like typical government double-speak to me. The contingency plan was obviously to land near the bases if he got too much headwind.
Now, they've got enough space on their ships to transport his plane home (at his cost) but they don't have enough fuel to sell him (at his cost).
Why am I not believing anything the NZ govt. spokespersons are saying?